| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
26 Mar 2005 09:40:57 AM |
| Object: |
The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay |
The GAWD hucksters.
---
Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by the New York Times
The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
by Frank Rich
Cecil B. DeMille's epic is known for the parting of its Technicolor Red
Sea, for the religiosity of its dialogue (Anne Baxter's Nefretiri to
Charlton Heston's Moses: "You can worship any God you like as long as I
can worship you.") and for a Golden Calf scene that DeMille himself
described as "an orgy Sunday-school children can watch." But this year
the lovable old war horse has a relevance that transcends camp. At a
time when government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are
all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake
America according to its dogma, the half-forgotten show business history
of "The Ten Commandments" provides a telling back story.
As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a
half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In
partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association
of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he sponsored the
construction of several thousand Ten Commandments monuments throughout
the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh himself - that would be Yul
Brynner - participated in the gala unveiling of the Milwaukee slab.
Heston did the same in North Dakota. Bizarrely enough, all these years
later, it is another of these DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the
grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten
Commandments case that the United States Supreme Court heard this month.
We must wait for the court's ruling on whether the relics of a Hollywood
relic breach the separation of church and state. Either way, it's clear
that one principle, so firmly upheld by DeMille, has remained inviolate
no matter what the courts have to say: American moguls, snake-oil
salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or power will stop at
little if they feel it is in their interests to exploit God to achieve
those ends. While sometimes God racketeers are guilty of the relatively
minor sin of bad taste - witness the crucifixion-nail jewelry licensed
by Mel Gibson - sometimes we get the demagoguery of Father Coughlin or
the big-time cons of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's
Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest
and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed
Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on "moral values"
ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the
commercial interruptions on "The Ten Commandments" last weekend, viewers
could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping
show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such
scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo's hospital room or,
alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing
in Washington. All in the name of faith.
Like many Americans, I suspect, I tried to picture how I would have
reacted if a bunch of smarmy, camera-seeking politicians came anywhere
near a hospital room where my own relative was hooked up to life
support. I imagined summoning the Clint Eastwood of "Dirty Harry," not
"Million Dollar Baby." But before my fantasy could get very far, star
politicians with the most to gain from playing the God card started
hatching stunts whose extravagant shamelessness could upstage any humble
reverie of my own.
Senator Bill Frist, the Harvard-educated heart surgeon with presidential
aspirations, announced that watching videos of Ms. Schiavo had persuaded
him that her doctors in Florida were mistaken about her vegetative state
- a remarkable diagnosis given that he had not only failed to examine
the patient ostensibly under his care but has no expertise in the
medical specialty, neurology, relevant to her case. No less audacious
was Tom DeLay, last seen on "60 Minutes" a few weeks ago deflecting
Lesley Stahl's questions about his proximity to allegedly criminal
fund-raising by saying he would talk only about children stranded by the
tsunami. Those kids were quickly forgotten as he hitched his own
political rehabilitation to a brain-damaged patient's feeding tube.
Adopting a prayerful tone, the former exterminator from Sugar Land,
Tex., took it upon himself to instruct "millions of people praying
around the world this Palm Sunday weekend" to "not be afraid."
The president was not about to be outpreached by these saps. The same
Mr. Bush who couldn't be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the
darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," flew from his Crawford ranch
to Washington to sign Congress's Schiavo bill into law. The bill could
have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and
departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat
as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within
hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social
Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said,
wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked
the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas
death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.
These theatrics were foretold. Culture is often a more reliable prophecy
than religion of where the country is going, and our culture has been
screaming its theocratic inclinations for months now. The anti-indecency
campaign, already a roaring success, has just yielded a new chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin, who had been
endorsed by the Parents Television Council and other avatars of the
religious right. The push for the sanctity of marriage (or all marriages
except Terri and Michael Schiavo's) has led to the banishment of lesbian
moms on public television. The Armageddon-fueled worldview of the "Left
Behind" books extends its spell by the day, soon to surface in a new NBC
prime-time mini-series, "Revelations," being sold with the slogan "The
End is Near."
All this is happening while polls consistently show that at most a fifth
of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the
Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC's
"This Week," acknowledged may be considered "extremists." In that famous
Election Day exit poll, "moral values" voters amounted to only 22
percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only 27
percent of Americans thought it was "appropriate" for Congress to "get
involved" in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would want to
be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American colonists
didn't believe in witches during the Salem trials either - any more than
the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of Afghans. At a certain
point - and we seem to be at that point - fear takes over, allowing a
mob to bully the majority over the short term. (Of course, if you
believe the end is near, there is no long term.)
That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent,
leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high school
teachers to avoid mentioning "the E word," evolution, in their
classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is on
record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps
it's no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a
three-year-old "religious rights" unit in the Justice Department that
investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to
write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution
as "the central, unifying principle of biology." Cornelia Dean of The
New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters,
even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries
like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because their references
to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon
such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don't give
equal time to creationism.
James Cameron, producer of "Volcanoes" (and, more famously, the director
of "Titanic"), called this development "obviously symptomatic of our
shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science."
Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes
stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health
policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases
like AIDS.
Faith-based news is not far behind. Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old woman
who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse
killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news organization
as God's messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to surrender by
talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from Rick Warren's
best seller, "The Purpose-Driven Life." But if she's speaking for God,
what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council president arrested
in Wichita's B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God instructing Terry
Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of God who this month
murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers and two others before
killing himself at a weekly church service in Wisconsin? The religious
elements of these stories, including the role played by the end-of-times
fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann's church, are left largely unexamined by the
same news outlets that serve up Ashley Smith's tale as an inspirational
parable for profit.
Next to what's happening now, official displays of DeMille's old Ten
Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into
public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto
last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard
from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional
scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did
not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try
to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in
God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent.
Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri
Schiavo's brain.
---
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0325-31.htm
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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