Monthly Archives: October 2004

Bush, the debate and fundamentalism

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I must admit that watching the debate between Bush and Kerry confused me a bit. I was struck by both performances. The press accounts seem to concur that Kerry won and gained more from the debate because he suddenly appeared comfortable, concise and presidential. I was mesmerised, in a kind of perverse fascination by, Bush.

He appeared flustered and irritated at times, for sure, but his direct, strong, simple appeal and absolute confidence was remarkable. He shone in his “We will win” and his “I’m gonna get ’em” moments. It took me back to some remarks by Steve Almond in his KtB feature, The Gospel According to Dubya.

I understand that the events of 9/11 scared our citizens; that we need to protect ourselves, and oppose terrorism. These are, frankly, truisms. What Bush has done is to use 9/11 to mobilize our worst impulses. This was most vividly illustrated in the response of the convention crowd. At any mention of the war in Iraq, they began to boom, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! But the war in Iraq, any war, is not an occasion for celebration. It is an occasion for profound sorrow, an abject failure of humanity.

The public fear instilled by 9/11 (along with the endless terror alerts) has allowed Bush to ignore the most noble of Christ’s teachings, the pleas for mercy and tolerance, and to indulge instead in prophetic grievance. In opposing Islamic fundamentalism, Bush has relied on his own brand of fundamentalism. He has rendered the moral chaos of the world in black and white.

Many find this comforting. It spares us from having to consider why terrorists target us, and how our policies might actually foment hatred. It allows us to believe that affixing a bumper sticker to an SUV is an act of patriotism, or to feel that we are we are receiving the Good News by watching Christ’s life reduced to a slow-motion snuff film.

The crowds that were shouting their indiscriminate approval at the convention were obviously party faithful and the audience that Bush needed to pitch to in the debate had to extend beyond this group. While the faithful’s vision is channelled through Republican or Christian ideology, I suspect there is a broader secular, unaffiliated group to whom this rhetoric also plays well.

Fundamentalism and an apocalyptic viewpoint may be most prevalent amongst born-again Christians and neocon-hawks but I suspect one of the new elements in the political landscape post 9/11 is the growth of a kind of fear based secular fundamentalism.

New doco extols Bush’s faith

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Review in today’s Time’s of an extraordinary new doco about Bush’s faith. Produced by pro-Bush forces it is to be released on DVD this week to go up against the DVD version of Farenheit 9/11. As the Time’s Frank Rich notes, its narrative isn’t subtle:

“Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?” Such is the portentous question posed at the film’s conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don’t matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don’t matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president – who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a “crusade,” until protests forced the White House to backpedal – is divine. He may not hear “voices” instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie’s source texts, “The Faith of George W. Bush,” but he does act on “promptings” from God. “I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, “but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer” in the battle “between good and evil.” So why didn’t we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and “with the terrorists.”

Rich points out how the Bush brand of Christian apocalypticism ties in with other cultural products and produces a niche or base for Bush to operate from:

It’s not just Mr. Bush’s self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it’s his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn’t revive the word “crusade” idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson’s cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there’s a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as “the base.”

And this is a tactical faith, which produces very subtle strategies of inclusion and exclusion, public announcements and backdoor politics:

The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush’s genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as “leading a global crusade against terrorism.”

Great article. Frightening film.