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By Carolyn Baker

Speaking Truth to Power

In early 2005 in anticipation of my sixtieth birthday, I began working on an autobiography. Certainly, I reasoned, now entering my sixth decade, I should be putting in ink my reflections on life as I officially become a senior citizen. Following the publication of three books and countless articles, it seemed that my “memoirs” was the very next step.

Little did I realize that in the fall of 2006, just a few weeks after the release of my third book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED, a bombshell breaking news story that would hit a pivotal nerve in my own personal history would compel me to integrate the almost-finished memoirs with commentary on the story, not merely from my intellect but from my personal life experience. That news item was the revelation that fundamentalist Christian icon, Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church of Colorado Springs, Colorado, ostensibly rabidly homophobic, had been involved for three years in a sexual relationship with another man.

Memoirs just lying around, serving no purpose except navel-gazing, are easily ignored and postponed for “some other day.” But when one’s autobiography so eerily parallels breaking news on CNN, one should consider taking it out, dusting it off, and disclosing to the world that human beings do not have to live a lie in order to follow the calling of their hearts in pursuit of the sacred.

Every day of Ted Haggard’s exposure in the news, I watched, listened, and read obsessively, and as the reader explores this book, he/she will soon understand why. Ted Haggard’s story is in so many ways, my story, but with one colossal difference: At the age of twenty-six, I realized that I was not willing to a live a lie for the rest of my life and came out as a lesbian to myself and to the world. Had I not made that decision, I might have perpetrated almost exactly the same excruciating deception on loved ones, colleagues, and admirers as he did.

Thus, I set to work on the completing of my new book which will be released in about two weeks, Coming out Of Fundamentalist Christianity: An Autobiography Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred. In the Appendix section of this book the reader will find my November, 2006 article “Ted Haggard And Fundamentalist Christian Soul-Murder” that was posted on a number of Internet sites, including my own. It ultimately set in motion the completion of my autobiography.

I have taken enormous risks in writing my story, as well as my opinions regarding the American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) communities. This book will strike raw nerves among homophobes and anti-gay members of the religious community, and LGBT folks may not appreciate my taking our community to task politically, but the story must be told, and for me, it cannot be told without dividing the book into two parts: 1) My story, and 2) Our World. The anguish of my coming out process was exacerbated by a childhood devoid of social, political, or economic justice, and my notions about them today, inextricably connected with my sexual orientation, have determined the paradigm by which I intend to live the rest of my life. In other words, for me, the personal and political cannot be polarized, and anyone who knows that at a cellular level, also knows the distressing path that consciously integrating the two necessitates.

Except for mine, the names of all persons in the book have been changed in order to protect the innocent and the guilty. Two of my college years were spent in a fundamentalist Christian bible college which to this day I deplore, yet without its painful evisceration of my innocence, I would not become the person I now cherish. As most fundamentalist Christian colleges are, in my opinion, it was nothing less than a hothouse for blossoming homosexuals which it delighted in confining in the closet then castigating when impetuous latency could no longer be repressed.

This book is entering print as one of the most corrupt and conservative political administrations in the history of the United States is about to leave office. For me, it has been excruciating to witness its machinations for the past seven years, mirroring to me so much of what was an inhumane upbringing and what was so emotionally and spiritually devastating in the first half of my life. Yet, it is one thing to have grown up in a household terrorized by it and quite another to watch the same dogma, hypocrisy, and neo-fascist ideology perpetrated on an entire nation.

Approximately six weeks after the resignation of Ted Haggard from New Life Church, youth leadership minister, Christopher Beard of New Life, also resigned in disgrace over “sexual misconduct” the orientation of which at this writing is unknown. On Monday, December 11, 2006, the Associated Press broke the story of the disclosure and subsequent resignation of Englewood, Colorado’s Rev. Paul Barnes, pastor of another Rocky Mountain megachurch who confessed to his congregation that he had been involved in a number of homosexual relationships and was stepping down. I winced as I heard one sentence from Barnes’ mea culpa, so reminiscent of my pre-coming out years: “I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy. … I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.”

Was 2006 just a bad year for Colorado Christian fundamentalists? A series of coincidences, perhaps?

Or maybe December, 2006 was a bad year for fundamentalists in general as the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported on the 20th that church leaders announced that Rev. Paul Williams, a Bellevue Baptist Church staffer for 34 years, had been placed on paid leave pending an investigation regarding a “moral failure”—a disgustingly vague and abbreviated description of the pastor’s alleged sexual abuse of a relative some seventeen years prior. Supposedly aware of the incident, Senior Minister, Steven Gaines, had done nothing and complicitly assumed that “the incident had been resolved.” Fundamentalists would have us believe that only in the Roman Catholic Church is sexual abuse rampant and that only there does the non-offending clergy collude with it by moving priests from one location to another, thereby protecting their dirty little secrets.

On the contrary, I have for decades believed and publicly stated that there is something inherent in Christian fundamentalism that attracts individuals who are fleeing the impact of coming to terms with their sexual orientation, dealing with their own experiences of being sexually abused, or confronting other issues regarding sexuality and that fundamentalism not only draws such individuals but fosters their hypocrisy, thereby exacerbating their suffering and the suffering of everyone close to them. While a thorough exploration of this hypothesis is yet another book in itself, my book will endeavor to shed light by offering my own experiences and reflections on them.

In my experience and that of countless others, fundamentalist Christianity is intrinsically spiritually abusive, and I have painstakingly explained why in the pages of my book. Moreover, its homophobic and bigoted agenda has so infiltrated and influenced the pillars of power in the current fascist regime that governs America that all LGBT individuals residing in the United States need to be vigilant regarding the eroding and elimination of their civil liberties as a result of that reality.

Here is yet another example of how history repeats itself. Replete with homosexual activity, the Third Reich officially condemned homosexuality and hypocritically relegated homosexuals to the same status in German society as Jews. In fact, during the height of Hitler’s reign, homosexuals were required to wear pink triangles on their clothing, just as Jews were required to wear yellow stars on theirs. As I listen to the ranting of homophobic hatemongers such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Albert Mohler, and Janet Parshall, I hear not the essence of Christ’s teachings, but the deranged blathering of ideological neo-Nazis who would delight in slapping a pink triangle on me and shipping me off to a death camp.

In terms of the civil liberties of lesbian and gay individuals in the United States, these people are not harmless, or merely over-exuberant true believers. In his brilliant article, “For The Christian Right, Gay-Hating Is Just The Start,” Harvard Divinity School graduate Chris Hedges states:

These attacks mask a sinister agenda that has nothing to do with sexuality. It has to do with power. The radical Christian right — the most dangerous mass movement in American history — has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement’s chain of command, one they insist was ordained by God.

In the Appendix of my book I have included an extraordinary article “The Psychology Of Christian Fundamentalism,” by Professor Emeritus, Walter Davis, Ohio State University, in which the author’s extraordinary insights into the emotional underpinnings of fundamentalism address that “something” in it that backfired, and in my opinion always does, on the three Colorado clerical homophobes and one Southern Baptist sex offender. “Morality for the fundamentalist,” says Davis, “is not about a life of charity or the pursuit of justice or the need to open oneself to the depth of human suffering. It’s about avoiding certain sexual sins and fixating on that dimension of life to the virtual exclusion of everything else.”

Because I am also an historian, I want to emphasize that fundamentalist Christianity as we know it today in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon in the Christian religion. From the official establishment of the Christian Church dating from the fourth century until the present time, myriad doctrines, traditions, practices, and biblical interpretations have existed in the Christian religion. Within the past two hundred years, the so-called mainstream denominations that were born in America’s Great Awakenings and some that evolved from the religious communities of European settlers—Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran—have experienced diminished membership as the evangelical or fundamentalist factions of Christianity have skyrocketed in popularity and enrollment.

In this book I use evangelical and fundamentalist interchangeably. Both adhere to clearly delineated, strict “fundamentals” resulting from a literal interpretation of the bible, and whether one identifies as an evangelical or a fundamentalist, evangelizing or attempting to recruit believers into one’s religion is pivotal in accomplishing the mission of fundamentalism/evangelism, namely, enlarging Christ’s church on earth. “Fundamentalist” is a more nineteenth-century term associated with specific “fundamentals” that conservative Christian literalists believe are the backbone of Christianity whereas “evangelical”, a twentieth-century word may have been chosen to cosmetically alter the presentation of fundamentalist teachings, thereby making them appear more contemporary and less stodgy. Not wishing to evoke images of sweaty, red-faced Victorian ranters such as William Jennings Bryan or Billy Sunday, evangelical ministers adorned with blow-dried hairstyles and Rolex watches, their sermons preceded with hip-hop rhythms, synthesizer extravaganzas, and digital light shows, may not be any less theologically pedantic than their predecessors, but they are decidedly more marketable.

Coming Out Of Fundamentalist Christianity is not merely an autobiography—one woman’s coming out journey, but is intended to facilitate confluence between the integration of sexuality and spirituality and how individuals in the LGBT community struggling with that challenge, influence the society at large and are influenced by it, endeavoring to discern our limitations, our infinite opportunities, and the difference between them. In the Appendix the reader will find in addition to my article on Ted Haggard, an extensive list of articles, books, documentaries, and websites pertaining to sexual orientation research, spirituality, and issues social, economic, political, and environmental justice.

On February 6, 2007 , our collective intelligence was profoundly insulted with Ted Haggard’s “official” pronouncement that he is “completely heterosexual.” Even graduates of repulsively-onerous, long-term “ex-gay” therapy implied that this declaration by Haggard didn’t even pass the laugh test. Not only was American fundamentalism doing damage control, but once more, Ted Haggard opted to wallow in the same lie he has lived for over five decades.

Dr. Robin Meyers, United Church Of Christ minister and author of WHY THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS WRONG: A Minister’s Manifesto For Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future, states in his chapter on homosexuality:

Religious fanaticism itself is a symptom of compensatory behavior. The most rigid, the most compulsive, the most paranoid religious devotees are often hiding their own dark secrets. They seek the rigidity of authoritarian systems in order to cope with their own feelings of shame. Their inner conflicts are turned outward, and the collateral damage is all-too apparent….In my own ministry, I have noticed an unmistakable pattern, and it is more than mere coincidence. The most homophobic people I’ve ever met do not live comfortably inside their own sexual skin.

I am well aware that despite the vast sums of money and energy spent by Christian fundamentalism to convince its followers and the rest of the world that its dogma holds all possible answers to every human predicament, there are countless women and men within its fold whose souls, like Ted Haggard’s, and mine at the age of twenty, are eviscerated with conflict between their innate sexual orientation and a religious system and attendant community that proclaims them the worst of sinners for their impulses. Some have repressed their desires, some have shoved them into unconsciousness, some live double lives as Haggard did, and some have graduated from “ex-gay” therapy programs that promise a biblical transformation into lifelong heterosexuality, only to discover that they cannot annihilate a God-given, yes I said God-given, part of themselves. Others have become alcoholics, addicts, psychotics, or suicide statistics.

It is for those individuals, as well as those who are authentically content with their orientation, that this book has been written. As a tormented fundamentalist Christian in the second decade of life, I might have found liberation, comfort, and affirmation had I had access to a book that blessed my sexual orientation as compatible with, rather than at war with, my unquenchable heart’s desire for the sacred. Inexplicable suffering and a couple of suicide attempts might have been averted. And, I might have loved myself and others more attentively had I been able to love and honor the most forbidden aspect of all in my psyche.

But there are times and places when sexual orientation does not matter—or at least, when focus on LGBT “rights” must be considered in the context of the macrocosm of planet earth’s current condition. At this moment, planet earth is headed for cataclysm unless its inhabitants very quickly address daunting issues of climate chaos, hydrocarbon energy depletion, and global economic catastrophe. (I hasten to add that I am not referring to a Rapture/Tribulation scenario.) Such issues are far more comprehensive than sexual orientation—or are they? Yes and no. Perhaps they are macrocosmic mirrors of how humans have conducted themselves in their span of years on the earth. War, greed, and patriarchy—that is, attitudes of power and control, have put earthlings on a fast track to annihilation, and persecution of diverse sexual orientations has been an integral aspect of humanity behaving badly.

In the light of these daunting realities, I do not believe that the LGBT community can afford to focus only on the dual issues of gay marriage and HIV/AIDS. I do not oppose concern with these issues, but I cannot help but be appalled that LGBT political leaders have become fixated on them with little awareness or discourse about what I continue to name as The Terminal Triangle of climate change, Peak Oil, and global economic meltdown. While I support the right of every lesbian and gay individual to conceive and birth children, I cringe at what in some instances is an obsession with doing so in the face of earth’s carrying capacity, population overshoot, and the die-off that may occur as a result of the Terminal Triangle’s devastations. In one of the chapters of my book “Tunnel Vision In The Rainbow Nation”, I state that while the LGBT community desires a “place at the table” in the American political discourse, its overall lack of understanding about the nature of that political discourse and the realities of the Terminal Triangle guarantee that its misguided focus on gay marriage and HIV/AIDS assures that it will have a place at the table, but it’s place will be “dinner” for the ruling elite.

I hold little hope for the avoidance of civilization’s collapse, and in fact, it may be the only process capable of reconstituting humanity’s priorities. Much anguish will ensue, and when humans are desperate, they tend to blame someone—anyone for their misery. I therefore expect the LGBT community to be one scapegoat, among many others. I fully anticipate that as the severity of collapse intensifies, we are likely to see pink triangles or their equivalent foisted on the LGBT community. The ruling elite’s “need” for social control will intensify and with it, increased monitoring of all who do not conform to a lifestyle sanctioned by the empire’s pseudo-Christian, fascist agenda.

But if the LGBT community is capable of transcending so-called LGBT politics and addressing issues that affect all humanity, we may decrease our vulnerability. What would happen if thousands of lesbian and gay individuals in the United States, identifying themselves as such, began organizing to prepare for collapse and reached out to the heterosexual community in doing so? What would happen if gay and lesbian families began organizing with heterosexual families on issues of debt slavery, healthcare, childcare, and myriad concerns that affect all families?

Likewise, if the heterosexual community is capable of increasingly repudiating fundamentalist Christianity’s ghastly condemnation of all forms of diversity, civilization’s collapse may facilitate the creation of small communities of individuals who are willing to move beyond mainstream society’s media-manipulated, fundamentalist-fed culture wars and experience themselves on a cellular level as one human family.

In terms of human rights and civil liberties, sexual orientation matters enormously. In terms of the perils that threaten every life form on earth, it’s no longer about “us” and “them.” The lifeboats we create must honor the diversity of every passenger whose well being depends on the well being of every other.

Coming Out Of Fundamentalist Christianity: An Autobiography Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred, is now available for order at Amazon. To order click HERE. The book will also be available very soon on this website.

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
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Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
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As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
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As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
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NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.

“In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.”

by Phil Rockstroh

6/28/07

In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent’s Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality –disappeared — by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being “scraped” from the landscape as an infestation of bloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as oversized and ugly as mindless bullies, as banal as the dreams of petty tyrants.

In the surrounding suburbs, in a similar manner as mcmansions eclipse sunlight, throwing the adjacent houses into half-light, mega-churches eclipse the light of reason, leaving their congregations in an ignorant half-light of dogma and superstition. Of course, these true believer lunatics are wrong about everything, except, perhaps, for their elliptical apprehension regarding the arrival of proliferate cataclysms in the years to come. Oddly: Although they promulgate dire warnings on the subject, they seem gleeful at the prospect of wide-spread suffering.

How could they not be? They’ve seized upon a fantasy that allows them to escape from the tyranny of their own life-suffocating belief system. Attempting to subdue the suffocating dread of their corporately circumscribed lives, they wish for the destruction of the entire planet. Hence, their escapist fantasy, by the necessity of narrative, is huge, outrageous — apocalyptic. The progenitor of their End Time tale is this: The believer’s emotional inflexibility begets a form of ontological giantism — a phenomenon that arises when one’s worldview is too small to explain the larger world. Therefore, a story must be created that contains violence and terror on such a massive scale that it’s unfolding would kill off the entire, problematic world. “That’s right world, there’s not enough room on this planet for both you and my beliefs. One of us has to go.”

Upon the nation’s roadways and interstate highways, the overgrown clown cars of the apocalypse, SUVs, Humvees, and oversized pickup trucks also evince hugeness to compensate for the feelings of those folks inside the grotesque vehicles of being crushed down by alienation and isolation — not only while on the road — but by the realities of an existence within a hapless, oil-dependent empire which is itself powerless against the changing realities of the larger world.

In the ranks of the exploiter class, the fat salaries of CEOs separate them further from the general population of the consumer state (that they take every opportunity to bamboozle) as the American public itself grows fatter and fatter in body mass, vainly attempting to sate an inner emptiness borne of their perceived helplessness before the predation of corporate culture.

Concurrently, in Baghdad, the U.S. embassy, which, when completed, will be the largest “diplomatic” compound on the planet is, in fact, an inadvertent monument to the mindless colossus the U.S.A. has become. The structure is as accurate as the art of architecture can be in its depiction of the spirit of a nation’s people. As big and bloated as our national sense of exceptionalism, it stands in the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad, shielding those who will be bunkered down within it — not only from the murderous madness unfolding outside its highly fortified walls — but from reality itself. A massive emblem of the arrogance of power, the embassy is a testament to how the noxious vapors of cultural self-deception can be made manifest in reinforced concrete, armed watchtowers and razor wire.

Through it all, like some eternally slumbering Hindu deity, we Americans dream these things into existence. Far from blameless, we continue to allow the elites to exploit us; therefore, we enable and sustain their titanic sense of entitlement. In turn, we accept their paltry bribes and, as a result, our banal, selfish dreams have conjured forth George Bush from the zeitgeist. Ergo, Bush is a man whose impenetrable narcissism is so grotesque and ringed with fortifications, that all on his own he constitutes a walking analog of the American embassy in Baghdad.

In addition, we Americans continue to believe our fables of righteous power: Big is good, goes our John Wayne jack-off fantasy. Our leaders must be large: Only Mcmansion-like men, such as Mitt Romney, are acceptable. We believe: Dennis Kucinich is too diminutive in physical stature to be president – with the length of his body being roughly the size of Romney’s head.

In turn, our national landscape is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it, gigantic islands of garish light torment the night, scouring away the stars, estranging us from imagination, empathy, and Eros, and leaving us only with the insatiable appetites of consumerism. Thus, around the clock, inside enormous, under-inspected, industrial slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, underpaid, benefit-bereft workers ply their gruesome, monstrously cruel trade, then the butchered wares are transported by way of brutal, double and triple-axle trailer, diesel trucks over stygian interstate highways to sepulchral supermarkets and charnel house restaurant chains. Insuring, we flesh-eating zombies are provided with all the water-bloated, steroid-ridden meat and industrially farmed, pesticide-lacquered vegetables and starches — The Cuisines of the Living Dead – we could ever crave … uum, uum, it’s the Thanatotic yumminess of empire’s end. Try our convenient drivethrough window. Would you like us to super-size your order of commodified death?

Hyperbolic ravings, you say. America is not a culture in love with death.

Let’s see. Drawing upon just one example: The corpses of well over half a million dead Iraqis testify otherwise. Moreover, the continuing Iraqi resistance to our occupation speaks volumes as well. Yet still, most of us cannot hear their elegy of outrage over the din created by the parade of killer clowns that we have mistaken for the pageantry of nationhood.

How does one slow this juggernaut of psychosis and curb these acts of murder/suicide being perpetrated on a global scale? Truth is, we might not be able to stop it, because this is what lies beneath our unlimited sense of entitlement and self-defeating arrogance: a death-wish that manifests itself as exceptionalism and may well destroy the nation by means of imperial overreach — which is, of course, the time-established method by which empires dispose of themselves.

Further, this state of affairs is exacerbated by the narcissistic insularity of our media elite. At the end of the day, it’s their tumescent egos that are distorting our societal discourse; their vanities and attendant self-serving pronouncements are little more than steaming cargos of horseshit, carried and delivered by one-trick-jackasses — jackasses endowed with the singular skill of being able to read a teleprompter … Fred Thompson, your agent is calling: You have an important call from Washington, DC.

Notice this: The more permeating the rot becomes within the system’s structure the more huge and pervasive the edifice of media imagery will grow and the more trivial its content will become. The closer we come to systemic collapse the more we will hear about celebrity contretemps. Cretinous heiresses and shit-wit starlets, with shoddy mechanisms of self-restraint, people the public imagination, because they carry our infantilism, embody our collective carelessness, and, in turn, suffer public humiliation, as we desperately attempt to displace, upon them, the humiliation of our own daily existence within the oppressive authoritarianism of the corporate state.

Correspondingly, there is a well-known (by those who care to look) link between fascism and corporatism. To Mussolini, the two terms were interchangeable. According to rumor, we defeated fascism, during the first half of the 20th century. Yet, at present, we spend our days sustaining a liberty-loathing, soul-enervating corporatocracy. To live under corporatism is, in ways large and small, to be a fascist-in-training. Everyday, hour by hour, the exploitive, neo-liberal concept of work devours more and more of our lives. As a consequence, the true self within is crushed to dust and what remains rises as cultural squalls of low-level fear, with its concomitant need for constant distraction. As all the while, the psyches of the well-off (financially, that is) become inflated, gaudy and ugly; in short, internally, they become human versions of mcmansions.

Freedom is a microcosm of the forces of evolution engendered by living in the midst of life — a mode of being that apprehends and is transformed by the beauty, sorrow, and wit of the world. Conversely, authoritarian societies are collectives of accomplished liars and lickspittle ciphers, where one must conceal one’s essential self at all costs and the soul falls into atrophy.

To what extent does authoritarian rule diminish both the individual and a nation? Simply, take a look around you and witness the keening wasteland our nation has become. Furthermore, our emptiness cannot be filled by any amount of wealth or power. This is the reason the obscene amounts of mammon acquired by the privileged classes is never — can never be –enough to satisfy them, for their inner abyss is boundless. In a similar vein, no amount of killing can sate a psychopath’s emptiness. Dick Cheney will scowl all the way to the boneyard, hoping he can ascend to heaven by scaling the mountainous pile of corpses he’s responsible for placing there.

In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.

The bone-grinding giants of the American corporate and political classes have shot the Golden Goose full of growth hormones, enclosed her in an industrial coop, and hoarded her voluminous output of eggs. Yet, nothing satisfies them.

Meanwhile, online, we struggle in a Jack in the Beanstalk Insurgency, hoping that from things as tiny and seemingly trivial as mere beans — our postings, exchanges and periodic meet-ups — the fall of tyrannical giants might begin.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

______________________________________________________

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
•
Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
•
As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
•
As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
•
Assisting us in our cause is as simple as clicking on the PayPal button at the top of the left hand column and exercising the power of your wallet. No matter how large or how small, we thank you in advance for your donation! If you are serious about our struggle for a new society, please don’t put it off. Let us hear from you today.
•

Jason Miller
Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

”Spirituality used to be ontology (philosophy of reality) thousands of years ago, but those days are long gone. Now spirituality is mostly entertainment, self-deception, and self-mystification, which is to say a dedication to unrealities.”

By Sankara Saranam

Meta Arts Magazine

It’s hard to dispassionately and philosophically discuss liberty with a straight face these days without becoming a journalist and describing the many ways in which our liberties have deteriorated in our declining society. I’ll try, but I don’t know how long I’ll last or the point of lasting, anyway. Am I to write something for a ’spiritual’ column that practically serves as distracting entertainment while our liberties are being suffocated? I could stop now and advise you to go to buzzflash.com to read the news; but whether you stick around or not, one thing to say about liberty is that the quickest and most pain-free way to lose it is by failing to keep abreast of current events, failing to know history, and failing to engage is a continuous social dialogue that raises self-challenging questions.

The perspective I commonly give to principles like liberty, and everything else, in my writings is the ontological one. That perspective is certainly important, as it provides a foundation for how to think about things, how to define things, and how things stand in relation to what is real. But it is half the battle. The other half is embodying that perspective in ways like the ones listed above - ways that are real, i.e. spiritual, duties.

Spirituality used to be ontology (philosophy of reality) thousands of years ago, but those days are long gone. Now spirituality is mostly entertainment, self-deception, and self-mystification, which is to say a dedication to unrealities. Of course, no one really wants to believe that, but it wouldn’t be self-deception if they did.

Continue Reading »

By Michael Goodspeed

6/12/07

“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face, one must be able to love the meanest of all creation as oneself.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

Late last week, I returned home to Portland, OR, after attending a three-day conference on the Electric Universe in Las Vegas, NV. The event brought together an impressive array of scientists, authors, and independent researchers from many different disciplines and walks of life, all unified in their quest to develop a better understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.

Throughout the event, I had the privilege of interacting with some very accomplished scholars in such seemingly disparate fields as electrical engineering, physics, plasma physics, geology, and comparative mythology. In every instance, I was very pleased to find that I was treated as an equal, even though I claim no special expertise on the topics discussed. This lack of pretension on the part of the “experts” enabled a very free and comfortable flow of ideas amongst all participants, specialists and laymen alike.

In Wallace Thornhill’s introductory presentation, he repeatedly used the word “convergence” in describing the interdisciplinary nature of much Electric Universe research. Specialists with very different areas of expertise have found themselves growing increasingly DEPENDENT on one another, and of each has been required an openness to previously unconsidered ideas, and a willingness to be proved “wrong” on many points. Continue Reading »

By Jason Miller

6/10/07

Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer.

Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.

Continue Reading »

“You say you want a revolution? Well, you know … we’re all doing what we can.”

–John Lennon

“Is This Heaven?”

by Mike Palecek

“Nope.

Iowa.”

Where brown puppies are frisky, U-Turns aren’t risky, and good girls sip their whiskey.

On the road, on my book tour, I was asked a few times, well, then, what should we do?

“I don’t know. … I just don’t know.”

Hey.

The new presidential directive says that in case of emergency George W. Bush has dictatorial powers.

The new presidential directive.

What’s that? What was the old presidential directive? Who said he gets directives?

Did you vote for that?

So. If you don’t like that, what do you do in the United States?

Vote for a Democrat?

Try to figure out whom to shoot?

Speaking of voting. Didn’t we think we did this big thing awhile back when we elected a bunch of Democrats and Nancy Pelosi was the new house mom?

And the first thing she said before she was even the leader was that impeachment was off the table, and now they support Bush.

People also asked me on the tour which candidate I liked. I would like to meet the candidate in a cafe who would pull our troops out of Iraq yesterday, start a real investigation into 911, impeach Bush, and prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, for crimes against humanity.

If these guys are not criminals, then open the gates of Attica, Leavenworth, Terre Haute, Lewisburg. There are no criminals. There is no such thing.

I did not feel great when I told the people who asked me what to do, that I did not know what to do.

One guy in Madison, Wisconsin asked me if I thought we had come to the point where a revolution was needed.

I told him I didn’t think I could ever kill anyone.

He said he was not talking about taking up the gun.

Oh. Well, maybe that actually says more about me than I wanted to reveal. Not really. I don’t have a gun to take up. Don’t want one. Too cheap to buy one. Won’t happen.

I’m not looking for that kind of commitment. Pick up a gun and you are really into this thing. You aren’t sending off some column over the computer and then going jogging.

The same thing — almost — can be said about someone who goes out and does some sort of civil disobedience and really confronts the evil. Then you get the horn. When you get into the ring with the bull. Do not make direct eye contact. The murderers don’t like that.

But, the whole violent revolution thing, non-violent revolution thing, war thing — well, how can it not be on your mind when you are living in a not-democracy during a time of war?

It’s frustrating, when you really see the need to change things.

But if your life is not really, really being affected, you kind of have a tough time garnering the fire to push up off the couch.

I have been thinking about Alex Jones, Che Guevara, the Weather Underground, Korey Rowe, Abbie Hoffman, Mindy Kleinberg, Jerry Rubin, Helen Woodson, Carl Kabat, Phil Berrigan, Dan Berrigan, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Charlie Sheen.

And how things just keep going on: 9-11, stolen elections, warships to Iran, lies from the government, poor people dying.

I suppose that’s always been going on, always will. Anybody seen the new Shrek?

Do you vote Democratic at the Legion hall, slump home, and then set yourself up on the patio with some Old Style on ice, the Cubs playing on the other side of an open window, a Big Mac warming your lap, and “War! Good God Ya’ll!” booming on the tiny white iPod speakers in your big-ass ears?

You, too? Dude, should the term cognitive dissonance mean anything to us?

After 9-11, with Kate Smith blustering all over the dial about God Bless America, I turned the radio to classical and let it blare as I drove to the gym, then over to work, to try to drown it all out and keep my life.

Massive amounts of work goes into putting hundreds of thousands in the streets in major U.S. cities and then it seems to do nothing.

Cindy Sheehan goes home because the Democrats turn out to be just rats.

A whole bunch of dedicated people work their butts off for months for a bunch of candidates who then end up voting to fund the war anyway and taking impeachment “off the table.”

There is no “one answer.”

Isn’t that the safe response?

How about a violent response? Is that on the table?

Well. What if.

What if you did kill a bunch of people and got your very special person up there waving to the masses from a high balcony of the White House. Would that be worth it?

It would be a thrill, a rush.

Boy, we really are fighters, aren’t we. We really did something. We are special, too.

But what about when you turn around and see all the dead people behind you, and their families behind that, crying, wailing.

And then what if your very special person up there doesn’t do just what you think she should? Will you kill her, too?

Or, maybe it’s just totally wrong to kill and let’s not even go there.

I heard on the radio the other day about the anniversary of a bombing at the University of Wisconsin during the Vietnam War in which someone was killed. Some people went to prison for that, and one is still on the run.

What if that were you, still hiding out from the 1960s? There is not one day that goes by that you do not think about the person you killed, or about the life you might have had.

But, you did fight the United States government and its killing of thousands and thousands. And maybe you even stopped thousands more from being killed.

We don’t seem to care if our government kills people in other countries. We vote them into power again. We still stand when they enter the room, wave at their motorcades.

Now what about the American Revolution? Those people shot and killed in order to get the kind of government they wanted. And those people are saints to us. Shout “Founding Fathers” in a crowded nursery and the newborns will struggle to stand.

And the world wars? More saints made by killing millions. We don’t call them whackos or deluded. We don’t make WW II veterans hide out in Dumpsters for forty years.

Can one person’s vote really make a difference?

How about one person with a gun?

Sirhan Sirhan or whoever, Lee Harvey Oswald or whoever, James Earl Ray or whoever, whoever killed Malcolm, whoever killed the young Black Panthers in their beds in Chicago — did those murderers make a difference? Did they change the course of history?

Could a bunch of people with guns, who go to the Appalachians, the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Sierra Nevadas, the Everglades, the Sandhills, make a difference?

What is the difference that we wish to make?

What about the argument that refusing to kill in World War I and II would not have inflicted the amount of damage on the human community as participating and slaughtering millions did?

What about the feeling you get, though, when you fight — that you are at least doing something — that you work up a sweat and it feels good.

And the other feeling you get when you feel you are being run over, just letting things happen?

But Ghandi said you could do both: work up a sweat and also not kill anyone, nuke anyone, drop napalm on anyone, sneak up in the bushes and the mud on your hands and knees with a knife in your teeth and assassinate anyone.

What about Commandante something-something in Mexico?
Castro?
George Washington
Geronimo
The French resistance
Nelson Mandela
AIM
Leonard Peltier
John Brown
Robert E. Lee

Is anyone poor enough in the United States to do that? To go to the hills?

Thou shall not kill.

Yes, Old Testament.

Jesus said pretty much the same thing. Or maybe you are not Christian or don’t believe in God.

Would there be a difference, morally, between someone who bombed a United States bomb factory — today — and someone who might oppose the U.S. on the battlefield?

Would there have been a difference between someone working to assassinate Hitler, perhaps a German citizen — and a soldier in the United States Army fighting in France?

So what do we do?

Things are pretty bad, no matter what you hear at the mall or in the park — the almost total lack of discussion or concern about this government, or how it came to power, or the wars and policies it is undertaking in our names.

Doing nothing is doing something. When tens of millions of us do nothing other than go to work and return each others cell phone calls, don’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact. It is definitely something.

Should we bomb something and kill someone and then run away, change our names, work the drive-through lane at the Ukiah McDonald’s until we are 95, hoping we will never die and have to face God if there is one?

Should we vote for a Democrat who will likely do nothing of substance in his or her lifetime?

Or do we crank up Chopin, fill every second of every day with some sort of violent rushing about, and try not to think about it?

I just don’t know.

Seeya

–Mike

This passage is from my novel “Joe Coffee’s Revolution.”

Joe Coffee is published by Badger Books of Madison, Wisconsin. I wrote it after my run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. I was the Iowa Democratic Party nominee for the Fifth District. I received about 67,000 votes in a very conservative district on an anti-military, anti-prison, pro-immigration platform. I received no support from the local, state or national levels of the Democratic Party. I wrote the book to tell my side — to present the story, the what-if, the should-be — of someone, a nobody, running for office in the United States trying to do the right thing, and what he might encounter.

During my campaign I met a lot of people. Some of the most interesting were a handful of scattered farmers — intelligent, hard-working, incredibly pissed off. They seemed willing to fight. Almost.

In this passage we sit down to coffee with a family of farmers — Ray, Sam, Karen, Herb Tinker — talking about fighting, considering revolution.

Sam Tinker: “What’s to say the next headline might say: “Land Revolution Reform in Iowa?

“It happens in El Salvador, twenty families owning most of the shit, and finally the little guys get together and say they want to revisit the issue.

“Happens in Mexico, South America, all over the world. Why would we be any different?”

“Nobody’s hurting bad enough to fight,” said Herbert.

“I think you’re wrong. Everybody knows six guys running six companies sitting in six fancy rooms in six big buildings in six big cities run almost everything.

“I go to about a dozen coffee shops around this county. Everybody’s hurting.

“What we need is a pro-democracy movement in this country, somebody to stand in front of the tanks and say that’s far enough, bud.”

Sam poked Ray’s pad with a finger.

“Tell me what you think of this. Violence to achieve human rights.”

He looked at both of them, then stared at the back of Karen’s head.

“What do you think of that?”

Karen turned around to face them.

“American Revolution,” Sam began, “Vietnam, Gulf War, Kosovo bombing, abortion bombers, John Brown, Chechen rebels.”

Sam turned to his father to gauge how far he had gone, then looked down at the middle of the table and continued to talk.

“It happens. We can’t keep going like this. My family, your family. Every family in the county … won’t be here in ten years … five years … if the rich folks have their way. And let me tell you … they could give a shit. They don’t care about your kids or my kids or if any of ‘em lives or any of ‘em dies. Never have cared about poor folks, never will.”

Karen sat up. Her jaw roiled.

“We are the campesinos of El Salvador and they are us. When you scratch the surface and get to the bone, it’s all the same,” said Sam in a calm, serious, bass voice.

“The only thing we don’t know, is if we will fight.”

Palecek books:

KGB [Killing George Bush], The Truth, Joe Coffee’s Revolution, Terror Nation, The Last Liberal Outlaw, Looking For Bigfoot, Twins, The American Dream.

Mike Palecek website: http://www.iowapeace.com

Contact Mike: mpalecek@rconnect.com

Palecek books are available through local bookstores, Amazon, or by going to cwgpress.com, howlingdogpress.com, badgerbooks.com, newleafbooks.net, essentialbooks.com, mainstaypress.com.

“While on the other side of the world the streets are ripped apart, as well as the children and the dogs….We think those ripped apart children are fine….We think we have torn the hearts and stomachs from those children for their own good.”

by Mike Palecek

5/26/07

Is this heaven?

No.

It’s Iowa.

This column is being brought to you today by Left Behind adult diapers.

Are you a questionable conservative Christian? Is there a chance the Rapture might not include you after all? Has your hand been where it should not have been? Then maybe you had better get yourself a twenty-four pack of Left Behind, available in red, white and blue, in all sizes.

Left Behind … cuz you’re not really sure, are you?

Well, you might have heard that my recent American Dream Book Tour Across The USA only made it as far as Boston.

Or, more likely, you have no idea who the fuck I am.

Well, see, I was on this book tour … and I wrote a column along the way … and someone asked if I would continue the column.

If you go to my website — www.iowapeace.com— you can find some links that will explain how I could not get into Canada and am trapped in this hell hole called America until I can find a retired Episcopal priest to smuggle me into Winnipeg in a gym bag; and you can see how I did not make it to my “event” in Providence because I was too busy puking Coors onto the front lawn of the First Congregational Church in Madison, Connecticut; and how in my big debut in New York City — nunca, nuncio, nuance, nuns, nadir, Nader, no one, nonce, nix, nadia, no-effing-body came to my reading.

And other stuff.

And so instead of shunning the John Denver songs on my iPod because they made me homesick, I cranked “Christmas For Cowboys,” did a U-Turn in the Crowded Fucking Food Store parking lot in Brockton, Massachusetts, and headed the Honda for home, hugs and handshakes.

And so I am.

Writing this column again.

Well, it’s Memorial Day weekend.

You think we have enough military holidays? Flag Day. Armed Forces Day. Loyalty Day. Love It Or Leave It To Beaver Day. Siddown, Kid Day. Dead Guatamalans Day, Dead Lakota Day, Dead Phillipino Day.

I do.

Think we have enough. One is too many. The military sucks. It takes money from the poor, from people who should get it, and goes to people who are slaughtering in the name of American business.

Eff the military.

I can see some people joining the military, thinking they are helping people, helping save the world. That’s because they are stupid. They are not stupid on purpose, but because others have made them that way on purpose. The stupid ones have believed the lies of others. I was once the poster boy for stupid. I would have gone to Vietnam, for sure, if someone had told me to. I would have done anything to make people like me, run wind sprints at six in the morning, mow the lawn at midnight, barbecue old women and babies.

Probably.

I wouldn’t go now, if I had to. I’m not that much smarter now, but a little. It doesn’t take much to get from where I was to where I am now, or to get smart enough to say no to the United States of America.

In this column I’m going to include pieces from my books.

That’s the plan.

And then people will go to my website and buy my books and there will be people at my “events” on my Spring ‘08 Tour, and then I will be popular enough not to have to write a column.

I will be able to sit in my living room, on my sofa, with a yellow and red afghan pulled over my head, a famous author.

That is true. That is the plan.

This is from “Looking For Bigfoot.” LFB is published by Howling Dog Press of Berthoud, Colorado. The publisher is Michael Annis. I have exchanged hundreds of emails with Michael over the past few years. I have never talked to him on the phone, or in person.

Bigfoot is the story of Jack Robert King, an Internet radio host who broadcasts from the farm house on The Field of Dreams movie site in eastern Iowa. Jack wants to know the truth about America. He’s tired of Frosted Flakes and he’s tired of lies.

This is Jack, talking from the microphone in front of his computer, looking out at a corn field through the window in his junky broadcast room or studio. I hate the word study, but maybe that’s what it is.

Here’s Jack.

________________________

“Nope. Iowa.

It’s Iowa, where everything good is bad.

All the good stuff about this state is sour, bitter, spoiled.

Because this state is for the war. They support the troops, the war.

They kill children and anyone else who gets in their way as they drive to Hy-Vee for the special on iceberg lettuce.

And so all the ice cream and lollipops and hayrack rides and painted ponies are for shit.

Somebody needs to bomb Iowa.

Somebody needs to send fighter planes and cruise missiles down main street — put giant craters in the outfield grass — down the perfect streets and avenues where all is faux sweetness and light. Children bouncing to and fro.

Wiener dogs yipping in rhyme.

While on the other side of the world the streets are ripped apart, as well as the children and the dogs.

We think those ripped apart children are fine.

We think we have torn the hearts and stomachs from those children for their own good.

The electronic time and temperature sign at the Iowa State Bank says ‘We Support Our Troops.”

Every other car has a yellow sticker on the back that says we support those darn troops fighting over there for our daggone freedom.

Don’t you hate those message signs in front of Iowa churches?

So trite, so patriotic.

These people are not Christians.

They have about as much awareness of who they are or where they are going as ants to a picnic.

They march to church each Sunday thinking the feast is meant for them, when they are merely pests.

Folks in Iowa will grumble all day long about a two-penny hike in the price of gas, but a $40 billion bill for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t even get a mention at coffee.

The stupidity of Iowans cannot be accurately measured with today’s technology.

If we did not use that $40 billion to kill children in Iraq and Afghanistan we could have great schools, hospitals, railroads, health insurance, candy for supper — whatever we want.

But instead we bomb kids.

Pro-life fanatical parents bombing kids so that their own children can’t have a new school … “

_________________________________

Join me next week on “Is This Heaven,” when our sponsor will be Depends, battleground undergarments for real men.

Are you going to have it blown out of you? Or you are going to blow it out of someone else?

It just depends.

It’s a crap shoot.

You can rely on Depends.

Available in camo and hunter’s orange.

Okay, then, seeya next week.

This is Iowa.

Where our only complaint is that at the end of the day our mouths hurt from smiling.

And … where all the lawns are mowed, the bank accounts are balanced, and the cars are shining brightly.

Adios, amigos.

Mike

Winning the Battle for their Souls

By Jason Miller

7/8/06

America as the beacon of human rights and dignity is but a dream yet to be realized. While the dream has lain dormant, amoral opportunists have busily unleashed their nightmare on billions of human beings. And all the while they have trumpeted the many virtues of the United States as a Christian nation.

There are many admirable aspects to our country, but these are often over-shadowed by the actions of the Machiavellian, ruthless, and avaricious individuals who have long dominated the social, economic, religious, and political institutions comprising the power structure United States of America. While a nation is an abstraction encompassing many aspects and dynamics (i.e. its people, culture, government, resources, etc.) that are in a constant state of flux, there are at least four elements of the United States which have remained relatively consistent throughout much of its history:

1. A wealthy White patriarchy has monopolized most of the power and wealth.

2. An economic system resting on the pillars of greed and self-interest has driven the United States to enslave a race of human beings, commit genocide against another, and to commit virtually innumerable crimes against humanity in the pursuit of growth and profit.

3. Disseminating powerful propagandistic messages through a corporate-owned media and a public school system designed from the top down to produce obedient consumers and workers, the ruling elite in the United States has convinced generations of citizens that their nation is a moral icon and that American Exceptionalism justifies the slaughter of millions of innocents.

4. Many in the United States assert that the United States is a Christian nation. “Christianizing” the “heathen” Native Americans and the Filipino “savages” provided a rationalization for annihilating millions of human beings.

Self-righteous hypocrisy and the banner of Christianity have been staples of the ruling elite in the United States as they have led their followers on a 200 year spree of economic and geographic expansion at the expense of those unfortunate enough to stand in their way. Exemplifying their latest crusade, in October 2003, newly appointed undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. General William Boykin emphatically proclaimed that fundamentalist Muslims hated the United States “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and roots are Judeo-Christian…and the enemy is a guy named Satan”

Given that the psyche of most Americans has been battered with the notion that our country was founded by Christians intending to form a Christian nation, and that many of those besieged psyches have acquiesced and accepted this assertion as dogmatic truth, perhaps an analysis of the founder of Christianity would be instructive.

Jesus Christ. Was he deity, man, or myth? The answer to that question depends on one’s point of view. Christians embrace him as the son of God and a member of the Holy Trinity. Followers of Islam consider him to be a prophet and holy man who performed miracles, but do not believe in his divinity. Some of us in the “pagan” realm simply view him as an inspirational moral leader. Others doubt that Christ even existed.

Whether he was god, exceptional human or legend, almost all of our knowledge about Jesus Christ is derived from the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And these three books of the Bible do reveal a story of a remarkable being.

Jesus was a radical agitator and social outcast who challenged the establishment of his day. A carpenter by trade, Christ would have been considered one of the working poor. As is common knowledge, he defied the Sanhedrin’s insistence on strict adherence to religious law to the extent that they eventually saw to his crucifixion.

In his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus was stigmatized as a bastard and shunned as the son of an adulteress. Joseph is believed to have adopted him, but that apparently did little to alleviate the situation. Jesus eventually embraced a new “family” in the sect that followed John the Baptist. Jewish leaders, whose power was largely dependent upon their Roman occupiers, came to view John as a serious threat as he preached loyalty to God over Caesar. Jesus’ equally tenacious commitment to placing the will of God above that of a political leader ultimately led him to martyrdom too. Both men represented serious threats to the social order and it was virtually inevitable that the ruling class would kill them.

Aside from the fact that he claimed to be the Messiah and seriously threatened their authority, the Pharisees feared and hated Jesus because he developed such a mass following throughout much of Galilee during his three year ministry. He won hearts and minds with his messages of redemption and compassion. Whether it was through the placebo effect, alleviation of psychosomatic illnesses, or true divine intervention, Jesus performed many miraculous cures and exorcisms. Encouraging his considerable throng of followers to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law and asserting corruption in the Temples, Jesus demonstrated that he was an anarchist capable of initiating a successful rebellion against the status quo.

Excepting his martyrdom, perhaps his crowning achievement as a spiritual leader was the Sermon on the Mount. As he spoke, he shocked his listeners with the Beatitudes in which he defined the blessed in ways that defied orthodoxy. According to Christ and his Beatitudes, the blessed and the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Heaven include mourners, the hungry, the persecuted, the merciful, the meek, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers.

Note that his criteria for blessedness did not encompass the aspects of humanity which Americans have been programmed to worship, including winning; accumulating wealth; attaining power; being thin, youthful and beautiful; succeeding; heterosexuality; regular attendance of church; being Caucasian; and patriotism.

Besides the Beatitudes, Jesus Christ gave us several other gems of moral wisdom. His “turn the other cheek” metaphor inspired the powerful non-violent spiritual leadership of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Golden Rule has acted as a cornerstone of civilized behavior. And Christ’s hyperbole concerning rich men, camels and eyes of needles has served as a largely unheeded warning about greed and the accumulation of excessive wealth.

Were Jesus Christ incarnate today and living in America, what would he think of a nation inhabited by many who claim to be followers of the spiritual movement he founded? And how would the ruling elite of the United States receive him?

Imagine this scenario:

Jesus Christ returns to Earth as he was portrayed in the Gospels at the height of his ministry. Geographically, his manifestation occurs in a blighted urban core in a large American city. Despite his humanity, he is endowed with omniscience and omnipotence. But he will not use them to change the course of humankind. He is here to act as a mortal agent of change.

Jesus’ initial reaction to the knowledge flooding his mind and the assault to his senses is a catatonic state. Horror at the rapacious and avaricious nature of the United States’ social order overwhelms his consciousness.

Shaking off the initial shock, he succumbs to a wave of uncontrollable nausea. Thoughts of institutionalized racism, the wealth chasm, and the military industrial complex evoke a burst of primal and toxic hatred. He retches violently.

Having purged his loathing, Jesus sits back and rests quietly on a soiled mattress someone had dragged into the garbage strewn alley where he finds himself.

Surrounded by broken bottles, hypodermic needles, and used prophylactics containing their repulsive spent payloads, Christ falls into a deep state of reflection which is unhindered by the scurrying sounds of rats and roaches. As he contemplates the many horrific atrocities committed in his name, a resident of the alley brushes past him in a drunken stupor, urinates in his pants and promptly passes out.

A country claiming to practice his spirituality spends $600 billion a year on its behemoth murder machine while over two million of its own people live on the street and eat from dumpsters. Rage surges through Jesus’ being. He grabs a chunk of broken brick, hurls it with abandon, and shatters what is left of a broken window. The thought that his ministry and martyrdom had spawned such inhumanity infuriated him.

Regaining his calm and composure, Jesus resumes his contemplation.

What is this abomination called Capitalism? Permeating nearly every facet of the United States (including his churches), exploiting human beings and the Earth, demanding perpetual war, and ensuring the comfort of a few through the suffering of the many, Capitalism is a cancer that reduces its blind adherents to empty, soulless shells.

Greed is good? Had his flock truly strayed so far that they enshrined selfishness, mean-spiritedness, ruthless competitive instincts, and avarice as virtues? What chance would his message of compassion and peace have competing with the clever propaganda and allure of immediate gratification purveyed by the likes of Fox, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and Rush Limbaugh?

Grief-stricken, he cries in despair for the Native Americans, Black Americans, and the tens of millions of victims of the imperialist United States foreign policy in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, and Palestine. He smiles briefly at the thought of Judea and Galilee and feels a twinge of home-sickness. Joy and nostalgia are short-lived as thoughts of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the merciless Israeli government quickly intrude on his nostalgic reminiscence.

It perplexes him that the United States has not lived up to the rich promise spawned by the American Revolution that broke the shackles of tyranny against tremendous odds. Early Americans had created a phenomenal instrument with which to govern a nation when they wrote the Constitution. They even included a mechanism to amend its inherent flaws (i.e. the legalization of slavery). But despite the valiant struggle of many poor, working class, and minority Americans, the de facto tyranny of wealthy elitists has endured.

Jesus concludes that many Americans were amongst the blessed he had enumerated in the Sermon on the Mount and that many Americans would enter his Kingdom. Yet he agonizes over those millions who had succumbed to the propaganda and sold their souls for the hollow rewards offered by the “American Way”. Torment consumes him as he realizes that conspicuous consumption, aggressive militarism, overt and covert racism, abject inhumanity, torture, theft of land and resources, corruption, “win at all cost”, survival of the fittest, and pathological self-absorption are the hallmarks of the social and political systems of the United States. Jesus marvels that so many people would fall prey to such obvious spiritual cancers.

Limping severely, a one-armed man with a very bad prosthesis, matted gray hair, and a badly tattered Army jacket flops himself onto the mattress next to Jesus. He smells of alcohol and stale urine. Vacant eyes transfixed on the alley wall before him, he mutters unintelligibly as he pulls a rancid-smelling piece of meat from his pocket and begins gingerly munching with the remaining stumps of his severely decayed teeth.

Christ feels overwhelmed with compassion and embraces the man. There is little response, but he does feel a slight shudder. This coupled with the fact that the man does not reject the embrace satisfies Jesus that at some level of his being, the hapless itinerant welcomes human contact and kindness. Jesus realizes that this man had answered America’s call to “fight for his country” in Vietnam. Abandoned by the government he had served, this lost soul had been condemned to suffer a living hell of homelessness, untreated PTSD, and substance abuse.

Suddenly Jesus had an epiphany. Despite being one of the wealthiest societies in human history, the United States has a homeless population of about two million. As a fisher of men, he would troll America’s cities, reaping a bountiful harvest of loyal followers from amongst the homeless and other disenfranchised groups. And he would start with the human derelict he had just embraced.

Jesus begins laying out his strategy to his first disciple. As Christ talks, the despondent man’s vacant expression is replaced by a crooked smile and a look of enthusiasm. He feasts upon a small loaf of fresh bread from Christ’s goatskin bag and listens to Jesus’ message of hope and redemption. Jesus talks for several hours. His willing adherent absorbs his words like a desiccated sponge.

Jesus speaks of his vision to cast out his net, gathering millions of loyal followers from amongst the homeless, poor, gays, minorities, the working class, and other people who felt powerless to stop the momentum of the corporatocracy in Washington. Reminding his disciple that the strength of his moral revolution will lie in the sheer number of participants, Jesus predicts that tens of millions will abandon working and shopping to join him in a triumphant non-violent march on Washington. Crippled by the loss of its cogs, the profit and war machine would finally grind to a halt.

Feeling mildly annoyed, Jesus pauses briefly to brush away a fly that had been persistently buzzing about his face.

Continuing his monologue, Jesus reveals that he plans to expose the true weakness of the iniquitous corporate militarists ruling the United States by awakening the millions of Americans it had psychologically enslaved. He would free those who had been deluded into giving their blood, sweat, tears, and children to expand a malevolent economic empire. He would lay the nightmare to rest and awaken the dream.

A sharp screech of tires gives Jesus and his newly anointed apostle a jolt. Two powerfully built men with close-cropped hair and serious expressions emerge from an ominous-looking black SUV with heavily tinted windows. With the quick precision of a trained assassin, one of the “men in black” snaps the disciple’s neck. The other snatches Jesus by his hair and hurls him into the back of the Escalade…

Awakening in a mental fog induced by heavy sedation, Jesus struggles to remember what had happened. Barely lucid, he slowly takes in his surroundings. He is in a small cell dimly illuminated by a lone flickering candle. It is chilly and the air is dank. Seated at a small table in front of him, a simple-looking man is glaring at him with deep contempt. Jesus notes a rotund male figure wearing a permanent snarl and a cruel looking woman with dark skin hovering nearby. He senses that wickedness and deceit are habitual with this trio.

Despite his significantly inferior intellect, it is obvious to Jesus that the two others maintain the pretense that the man at the table is their leader.

“I am George W. Bush. I am President of the United States and the leader of the free world. Our spies at the NSA were monitoring your conversation in the alley. We know of your terrorist plot to destroy freedom and democracy in America. I am declaring you an enemy combatant.”

Brimming with smug arrogance, Bush leans back in his chair and locks his fingers behind his head. He trains his gaze on Jesus with the air of one studying an insect and contemplating whether or not to squash such an inferior being.

Finally he returns his attention to the script laid before him. After several minutes of careful study, he gives Jesus, Cheney and Condoleezza a start by forcefully slamming his fist onto the rickety wooden table. Feeling triumphant because he is about to vanquish a tremendous threat to the established power structure, he begins speaking again,

“You are a threat to national security. Like that MLK bastard, your goal is to empower the poor, minorities, and the other groups we keep oppressed to protect our selfish interests. You would awaken the masses to our moral bankruptcy and to the foolish self-destructiveness of supporting us.

I cannot let that happen. My wealthy base has spent years selling Americans on the virtues of war, greed, free trade, free markets, tax cuts for the rich, cutting social programs, surrendering their rights for security, and mixing religion and government.

Millions of Americans need to remain indifferent to our wealth obtained by exploiting billions of people, the prison system we have used to replace slavery and Jim Crow, the millions we slaughter to feed the military industrial complex, and the torture of enemy combatants like you.

Many of my people believe that I have a personal relationship with you and that your Father guides me on a divine mission. They must continue believing these atrocious lies.

We learned from the mistake of the Roman and the Jewish leaders. You will not get a second chance at martyrdom. I have decided to rendition you. You will simply disappear and die anonymously in a torture dungeon in Syria.”

Wearing a confident smirk, the self-satisfied little man fires a question at Jesus,

“Well, Jesus? What do you have to say?”

Shedding tears born of profound melancholy, Jesus responds,

“In the words of the inimitable Russian novelist, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”

Jesus then sighs heavily, looks heavenward, and makes a quiet appeal,

“Father, forgive them. Despite the fact that they know what they do. And Father. I beg you to have mercy on the souls of their many wretched victims.”

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

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