Election 2012: Local Anti-Transit Hatefulness Kills State and National Joy
To Transcend Despair, We Must Acknowledge How Bottomlessly Horrible Our Circumstances Truly Are

‘Ignorant of enemy and self, you are sure to be in peril’*

Temple of Salvation - CopyTemple of Salvation, 14th St., NYC, August 1969. M4 Leica, 35mm Summicron, Tri-X at 800. Photo by Loren Bliss © 1969, 2025. 

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Note: This post, originally published on 21 October 2009 (in the beginning weeks of this blog, when it was still named Outside Agitator's Notebook), was hacked to near death, undoubtedly by Christians who sought to destroy the above photograph. They damn near succeeded, contaminating it so prohibitively it took me nearly half a day to make it publishable again. I am not a Nurd, and I most assuredly cannot afford the $280-per-hour consulting fees charged by the local representatives of the Nurdly (Trumpite) Übermenschen, but I finally reasoned that -- having no way to distinguish between functional code and malicious code -- restoration of my ability to publish the photo necessitated removal of all its associated code. That plus multiple recopying of the photo from JPEG to TIFF and back finally restored it; prior to that, the best my "insert image" efforts would achieve was reproduction of its catalogue number. Meanwhile I learned to my utter vexation that resurrecting the hacked photograph forced my text to appear as a new post, which in turn necessitated (very minor) revisions in content plus my infuriating discovery three of the original four bibliographic sources have since been suppressed, undoubtedly by the ever-intensifying Christonazi censorship and/or book-burning.    Thus for the hacker(s), a special blessing: an ill death may they die.

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THIS IS A Bible story -- the kind most Christians don’t want anybody to tell. Its premise is something Jesus allegedly said -- words generally taken to mean, “by their deeds shall we know them.”

It starts with the fact that while I’d never claim Christ-like attitudes, I did witness what is being done to working-class United States citizens when it was only being done to working-class Southerners.

A half-century ago -- against my will -- I spent many of my adolescent and young adult years in the South. A New York City kid, I was bounced  between apprehensive, divorce-court mandated summers with my certified psychotic birthmother in Michigan and emotionally secure school-years with my genuinely loving father and stepmother in various parts of Dixie. But each locale included a Yin/Yang paradox.  Michigan's Au Sable River system -- in those blessed times its South Branch Country still mostly untainted wilderness --  was the beloved refuge from familial dysfunction that would  become my life-long spiritual motherland, while Dixie -- to which my Marxian father was permanently exiled by the 1947 purge --  was outside the security of our household a realm so malevolently alien I had to think like a spy merely to survive its schoolyard bullies. Later, working as a sportswriter  on a Knoxville daily -- I was married by then, and was there because it was my only post-military job offer --  I saw proven a thousand times over the truth of H.L. Mencken’s dictum that you’re better off a peasant in Brooklyn than a king in Tennessee.

While the South is many things including the surrealism of hideous poverty in beautiful landscapes, it is mostly the sociological laboratory in which the democracy-destroying cancer of Christian American theocracy was bred and perfected -- the political Petrie dish from which this malignancy metastasized throughout the nation.

I do not know if this metastasis was a clandestine part of the Republican Southern Strategy, though I strongly suspect it was.  

But I do know something of the general history of Christian depredations. I know the Christians began serial genocide against Jews, witches, unbelievers and so-called heretics in 305CE and are threatening to resume it even now. I know that to tabulate the death toll, you start with 6 million Jews and add the scholarly estimates of a million Albigensians and 9 million witches and everybody else killed in the name of “God’s Plan for Salvation,” and soon your list approaches 20 million murders in Europe alone.

I also know these numbers are hotly contested by Christianity’s defenders. But the figures become much more credible when you factor in the Christian-fostered genocide against the indigenous peoples of America.

At least one academic source (see links below) places the overall post-1492 death toll among First Nations folk at 97,500,000 (not a typo). That’s ninety-seven million, five hundred thousand murder victims.

Say it again: ninety-seven million, five hundred thousand.

Based on a guesstimated man/woman/child average height of 4.5 feet, that’s enough human corpses to ring the equator 3.4 times -- or (since we are all so in love with sports analogies) -- enough dead to fill the nation’s collegiate-size football fields endzone to endzone with 108,338 halftime displays of decomposing bodies.

Since all 97,500,000 are non-white, picture them as victims of an epic Lynching Bee, the dead displayed at one hundred and eight thousand, three hundred and thirty-eight Ku Klux Klan rallies -- 108,338 gridirons carpeted with American Aboriginal corpses as the obligatory fiery crosses burn where each of the goal posts normally stand.

Now recognize what we're seeing as an ultimate graduation ceremony for “The Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class” -- the standard southern euphemism for the Klan -- in which context the actual words attributed to Jesus make perfect sense: “by their fruits shall ye know them” (Saint Matthew 7:16).

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For Big Business executives and banksters today, there is no greater virtue than infinite greed, no greater good than absolute power. The same values motivated post-Civil-War southern aristocrats. But there was one important difference -- the southern aristocrats had just been stripped of all their slaves.

How then were they to bring about their own restoration?

As learned in history as we today are mostly ignorant of it, the aristocrats understood perfectly the success of Christian brutality:  to those conditioned to believe, there is no greater terror than eternal damnation, no greater proof of divine favor than wealth.

Such fear and desperation, the aristocrats reasoned, might prove even more effective than an overseer’s whip.

Recognizing the potential for achieving the ultimate objective of monopoly capitalism -- an all-powerful ruling class served by hopelessly disempowered workers -- the suddenly missionary-minded Good Christian Gentlemen of the South financed the spread of biblical zealotry** throughout the region and so created the most savagely ignorant, self-destructively violent yet sullenly submissive society in North America. What rights the workers wouldn’t surrender in the name of “Fear of the Lord” were forcibly extracted by the Klan. Racial segregation and the most vindictive anti-unionism ever were relentlessly enforced by pulpit-pounding and lynching.

Big Business loved it: the best (cheapest/most obedient) workforce in the U.S.

By the late 1950s -- predictably financed by Big Business, fueled by Cold War fear-mongering and anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual hatemongering -- Christian fanaticism began spreading north and west. In 1960, only about 40 percent of all U.S. Protestants were of the bible-thump persuasion. By 2008, Pew Research put the zealots at 51 percent of all Protestants -- a powerful block of voters making up about 29 percent of the total electorate: more than enough to swing an election.

It is surely no accident this growth of Christian zealotry accompanies the methodical downsizing of the economy -- the nationwide imposition of economic conditions formerly characteristic only of the South.

***

To understand why the ruling class so venomously opposes real health care reform, we have to understand how the fear and desperation generated by Christian fanaticism combines with the horrors of ever-worsening real-world poverty to drive us to ever-increasing heights of production at ever decreasing wages.

Then we see immediately how genuine health care reform would go a long way toward easing the bottomless terror that -- articulated or not -- has become the core consciousness of every worker in the nation.

Which is precisely why the ruling class won’t let it happen.

As the reliably truthful news-site AlterNet reported on 8 October,  President Obama has long been helping the Christian fanatics sabotage health care reform:

“The Rev. Jim Wallis is sitting pretty these days. He's the evangelist the media love -- so much so that Democrats kow-tow before him. He says he's progressive, and has some credentials to back up the claim: anti-poverty work and opposition to the Vietnam War. But he's opposed to legal abortion and same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, eager for an evangelical partner, President Obama named Wallis to the President's Council on Faith-Based  and Neighborhood Partnerships, giving Wallis the ideal platform from which to try to subvert the debate over health-care reform for his anti-choice cause.” 

The Wallis affair is all the more damning given Obama’s appointment of the gay-bashing, anti-abortion misogynist Rev. Rick Warren to read the invocation that opened the president's inauguration and thus officially began his administration. As I said at the time -- particularly in light of how Obama defied the stunned protest the keynoting appointment provoked -- this was the new president’s gesture of fealty to the ruling class and an uplifted finger of jeering contempt at all the rest of us.

And let us not forget Sen. Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who as majority leader will decide within the next few days whether health care reform includes a Medicare-like “public option” or merely makes us all slaves of the insurance speculators via  pay-or-prison mandatory insurance that gives these parasites a guaranteed windfall of at least $60 billion a year forever.

Reid is a Mormon, has been a Mormon elder -- a leader in a Christian sect fanatically opposed not just to reproductive freedom but to all women’s rights. Given that government insurance will give women access to birth control and gynecological services private insurors typically refuse to cover, how do you suppose Reid will rule?

“By their deeds shall we know them.”

Theocracy prevails, as toxic to liberty here as in the Muslim world.

So much for “change we can believe in.”

*********

Footnotes and relevant links:

*The headline, a Sun Tzu quote, is abridged from The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford University Press: 1971), pg. 84.

**I avoid the terms “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” because the Christians manipulate controversies over their meanings to distract from the fanaticism, misogyny and general hatefulness implicit in both labels. Likewise I use “Protestant” and “Catholic” only as required by circumstance, as in demographic data or Irish geography. Christianity is Christianity: though history includes many individuals who have risen above the Christian norm -- Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, St. Francis of Assisi -- history also proves that Christianity itself is as murderous in one form as another.

These links provide estimates of the deaths inflicted by Christianity and methodological criticism of how the numbers were derived:  

http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn2.htm

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~rjg/witches.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade

http://www.religioustolerance.org/genocide5.htm 

LB/21 October 2009

(-30-)lly update this blog every ternoon, essentially following the schedule of traditional weekly newspapers. But I will also put out a ed -- as  

 

 

Comments

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c rawlings

yo
nice picture,the old sally hq on 14th st.

In speaking to local people, all agree that not much has changed in the last year or so
I do not think people will stand for this too much longer.

CR

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