Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/arts/03rich.html?th=&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in
this year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four
Tuesdays before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be
released along with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also
the release date of the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant,
of a new DVD documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush
mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that
gets in its own political licks at the state of the nation.
When ***** Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce
Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for
Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is
a smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in
the Morning."
Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one
must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is
being specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to
"Fahrenheit 9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican
convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem with an
invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a
Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the Bush campaign for
Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its
makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan
to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This
movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.
More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles
rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election
message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a
"fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity
of an old-fashioned biblical prophet." Its Bush is not merely a sincere
man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The
stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent
youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from "a throat full of
Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs,
the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed
in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George
comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable
anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all
after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual
come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox
machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with
retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a
flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message
isn't subtle: they were separated at birth.
"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent
research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its
talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or
sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential
confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R.
men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until
August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's
investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old
Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a
film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to
"Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success"
with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the
number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million,"
the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).
"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."
The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have,
that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from
his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his
incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is
coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality
practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton.
It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike
infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his
premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he
recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to
be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land
of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable
of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing
blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His
texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr.
Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say,
the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but
America's and, by inference, the president's own.
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."
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."
In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew,"
in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war,
one of the kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool,
but you should focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed.
Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and
it ends up with really bad results." He has a point. It's far from clear
that Mr. Bush's eschatology and his religious vanity are leading to good
results now. The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin
saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to acknowledge that
the reverse may be true. The general in charge of tracking down Osama
bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some quarters for
giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White
House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a
guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he
hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or
alive."
"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows
how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and
why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on
the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview,
faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence,
and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile
of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective,
focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists.
That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any
constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise.
To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for
the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."
Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to
acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions
battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of
God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to
the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination
room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in
the flesh. A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is
nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.
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