Letter to the Editor

ASK MR. WIZARD

Dear Big Boss Man,

I would like to hear your response to these two questions -- if you dare attempt...

This country is supposed to mainly be a Christian nation. Lots of Christians!

Why are Christians so gullible and easily duped by evil manipulative spin-doctors?

Also, why are Christians so easily provoked into violence?

Christ never told us to butcher people!

Confused in Bigotville,
Michael Skeirik
Vacaville

Ed reply: The basic Christian idea is that if you live a life according to the teachings of Christ you get to move on to heaven or at least to some kind of second go-round more alluring than oblivion. It's all in the interpretation, of course, and that's where the trouble starts, as different groups of Christians argue about God's intentions and who's a Christian and who doesn't get a shot at eternity with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But the utterly false notion that America is or is even supposed to be a Christian nation is only one more piece of evidence that few of US know the basics about our fair land. As a matter of verifiable, objective fact the Founding Fathers were mostly aristocrats (or aristos by virtue of education), who wanted what we recognize as democracy only for super-educated, white, rich guys like themselves. (Tom Paine stood up for the rest of us but he got outvoted.) The FF's considered the rest of US to be too poor, too dumb, too shiftless, too religiously bamboozled, and too generally irresponsible to be trusted to participate in public affairs. (Given the results of recent presidential elections the Founding Fathers may have been right, but that's a discussion for another time.) Only a few of the Founders were Christians in any recognizable contemporary sense of the term; they certainly weren't Christians in the Billy Graham or George Bush or televangelical sense of Christian, unless you can imagine Christ in a limo or a Lear Jet. Most of the Founders were vaguely deist, I suppose it's fair to say, in that they assumed that life was more than a bizarre cosmic accident. However, their distrust of the rabble aside, the FF's specifically mandated that church and state were to be kept strictly apart; the FF's didn't want the kind of perpetual religious warfare that constantly roiled the old Europe to take root here. In other words, all this God talk out of Bush and the Bush-ites is not only un-Constitutional, it's treasonous, Constitutionally speaking.

Relatively new, too. Back in the middle 1950's fascist sectors of various churches pressured Congress into putting God in the Pledge of Allegiance; they also got God printed on our cash, thus uniting Him and Mammon in a direct in-your-facer on the both the Constitution and Jesus! Jesus didn't heave the money lenders out of the temple just for exercise, did He? And He wasn't just woofing when He said the rich had about as much chance of getting to heaven as a camel had of squeezing through the eye of a needle. The man was clearly of the political left, not that you'd know it from the behavior of his most prominent followers these days. The neo-fascist Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin was the main force behind the 1950's "Christian" effort to get God into government. McCarthy's people went around the country saying that Americans who wanted to preserve the strict separation of church and state were probably communists, or at least crypto-communists, because by not signing on to God in the government, God in the Pledge, God on our money, God in the schools, and God at the ball game, they implicitly supported the international communist conspiracy. Our legislators, then and now, being largely the kind of people who roll over for whatever seems to threaten their own limo rides, it was fairly easy for Christian fascists to get God into every area of American life; from there it was a short hop to getting many of US to assume that our country was God's own special interest.

But I don't think primitive Christians are any more gullible or violent than their fellow citizens; heck, our anti-war, anti-Bush secular public radio station here in "progressive" Mendocino County is assumed to be a bastion of unaffiliated, non-voodoo clear-headedness, but the audio reality is countless hours of mercenary chit chat about horoscopes, witches, mental telepathy, spiritual eating, and the easy over spirituality of the New Dimensions people, all of it arising from the big naked pile days of hippie full moon yesteryears. And the average peace person is, in my experience, every bit as violent as any flag person, albeit the average peace person's violence is typically of the passive-aggressive variety. But just as there are non-believers who do great good, similarly there are lots of Christians who at least try to pass their days without coveting the belongings of their neighbors or charging those same neighbors $100 for the loan of $10. Psychologically speaking, however, there's no diff other than nationality between Mr. and Mrs. Bush or Mr. and Mrs. Ayatollah Jihad or most of the rest of US, I'd say, and violence in America comes with the citizenship.

We're violent as hell because there's a built-in tension, a basic contradiction between Christianity and contemporary America's socio-political-economic assumptions. We can't be a Christian country because the whole show is built on an unChristian foundation of competitive greed. Our kind of capitalism has also grown to be dependent on our domination of other countries for their natural resources and as customers for our products. We also owe furriners a whole bunch of money because we borrow so much to pay for the ongoing spending binge, so much that if the furriners demanded it all back at once we'd have to bomb them too just to keep the SUV's and the Big Macs rolling. Contradictions are our true way of life, them and hypocrisy and, of course, violence, because our way of living creates insupportable levels of envy and desire. We're encouraged to accumulate the worldly goods that Jesus warned would make us crazier and unhappier, and sure enough look around. Official cruelty is also the basis of our justice system which, as we all know, is fed by the people Christ Himself said we were supposed to defend, not persecute or put to death in state-sponsored, midnight revenge killings. We overwhelmingly tend not to honor our mothers and fathers, Mother and Father days notwithstanding, while "the kids" we say we love so much are fatter, dumber, wackier, and more incompetent than ever because they're wildly indulged. And so we pass our profligate, self-indulgent, deluded days in a whirl of idiot entertainments, state-sanctioned sloth, global gluttony, and stark, staring fear of everything from distant countries most of US can't find on the map to the numerous nutballs in our own neighborhoods. The whole set-up is totally, violently nuts, top to bottom. The Bush-style Christians are just one more group of lunatics in a nation of them.