From The San Francisco Gate, 3/23/05:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fgate%2Farchive%2F2005%2F03%2F23%2Fnotes032305..DTL
Why Does God Hate Caribou?
Drill for oil and screw Alaska's wildlife?
Why, sure, all part of the imminent Rapture!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
God wants oil.
This is the message.
This is the belief.
God wants more oil
and also uranium
and coal
and iron
and nuclear waste
and whatever the hell else we want to pump into or out of this
godforsaken lump of floating space rock. Word to the GOP.
In other words, God wants us, if the happily bleak and decidedly nasty
interpretation of Bible verse currently extolled by the rabid
evangelical mind-set now mauling the American political and social
landscape is to be believed,
to use up the Earth however we see fit and stomp all over this
pointless ecological blob with our macho SUVs and manly tanks and
badass army boots because it's all just one giant disposable sandbox
o' fun anyway, right?
Hey, it's all part of the Master Plan to destroy the Earth and smite
our enemies and hasten the arrival of the Rapture.
Didn't you know?
We are all merely waiting until the Big Battle happens in Israel,
the bloody clash between the True Believers and the Antichrist
Heathens, to be followed immediately by Jesus gliding down on gilded
wings made of fine Egyptian cotton and cheap American flags and
wearing kickass robes of fire and ready to suck the true believers up
to heaven through a giant Crazy Straw and wipe the whole *****
secular slate clean.
Right?
Crazy rantings, you might say.
Pseudo-religious babbling, you might titter.
I have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about, you might
blink.
You would, of course, be wrong.
Let us clarify just what the hell this means.
Let us look at one recent, juicy example of How It All Works.
Shall we?
Let us look, for example, at the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge,
because the odds are now just sickeningly good that Big Oil is going
to drill in that massive hunk of unspoiled nature,
going to stomp on in and take 10 years to build massive oil rigs and
enormous networks of pipelines and in the process destroy miles of
delicate ecosystems in order to squeeze out one precious drop of oil
into the vast bucket of America's gluttonous oil needs.
And sure you can believe the GOP lie that it's all some noble effort
to get us off foreign oil a tiny bit,
and what with oil prices so ridiculously high
and gas-sucking SUVs so obviously stupid
and BushCo's absolute refusal to enact conservation measures or to
pressure automakers to build even slightly more fuel-efficient cars,
screwing the environment and drilling for more oil is the only option
neocons give a damn about.
But it's more than that.
Because oil drilling in Alaska is merely the visible rash,
the resultant twitch from the much deeper and more disturbing disease
now plaguing 'Murka:
the evangelical nutjob belief in the Second Coming,
the big Jesus Farewell Tour, coming real soon to a sad warmongering
nation near you.
BYO Mel Gibson bobblehead.
Don't believe it?
Just follow the Line o' Sanctimony.
It goes like this:
A huge chunk of BushCo's voting bloc is evangelical or born-again
Christian.
Millions of otherwise decent and sincere Americans who actually
believe the Bible as literal world-for-word truth,
verbatim,
no questions asked,
not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set of nice,
same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by which we set our moral
compasses, but a set of actual facts told in cautionary dramedy, like
a silly locust-ridden reality-TV show.
Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition.
And by many measures, the people who believe this are the same deeply
terrified, misguided folk who tipped the electorate scale and put
BushCo back in office, along with a great many other newly spawned
power players in Washington and across the social strata,
from judges to teachers to Cabinet members to congresspersons to the
borderline insane Parents Television Council, people so terrified of
the human female nipple that it screamed loud enough so that now
uttering the word s-- on the radio will cost you $500,000.
So then.
The evangelicals are in power, having their bleak and apocalyptic
moment in the white-hot sun.
And Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their spokesman, their
crusader, smashing those damned gays and repressing them uppity women
and attacking those gul-dang Muslims
and -- here's the kicker -- doing his God-sanctioned duty to bring
about a grand holy war that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed
it, Armageddon.
And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret homosexual fantasy,
Armageddon is where it's at.
Do you see?
This means that the war in Iraq is a good thing, because war brings us
closer to the Final Conflict.
War is what God wants.
And nature, that pathetic and disposable handmaiden to humankind's
happy bloodlust, is merely the fuel, the playpen, for that happy
eventuality.
Earth is but a finite resource given by God to humanity and meant to
be all used up as fast as possible and the faster we use it all up the
sooner Jesus comes.
Just like Santa.
Only, you know, not.
Put another way:
The environment does not matter
because the Earth does not matter
because all the sinful nonbelievers do not matter
and all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ,
and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most appalling array of
environmentally abusive polices in American history?
So what if we permanently scar some silly wildlife refuge in Alaska?
So what if Dubya wants to gut the EPA
and the Clean Air Act
and clean water
and wants to log national forests
and relax all major pollution regulations on his buddies in big
industry?
It's all just a matter of time, anyway, until it's all over (most
predictions put the Second Coming somewhere between the next 12
seconds and within 40 years).
And in the meantime, while the believers wait, God will provide.
Simple!
So then.
Go ahead and look at the nasty ANWR vote as a mere power grab, vicious
and mostly pointless GOP maneuvering that will do absolutely nothing
to solve the impending oil crisis.
See it as a simple and typically heartless neocon power/money grab at
your peril.
That's just the surface.
The truth is, the ANWR vote is merely a small part of a larger and
nastier neoconservative attitude that has, at its engine, at its black
and godless core, a silly fundamentalist belief in the End Times, in
the Apocalypse.
Don't believe it?
Have yourself a nice read of famed journalist Bill Moyer's delicate,
excellent essay "Welcome to Doomsday" via the New York Review of
Books, which brings in all the numbers and data into a beautifully
articulate essay on the state of the American religious landscape.
Apparently, God really doesn't give a damn about caribou
and oceans
and air quality
and the future of humankind.
God is not, as most every enlightened mystic and poet and divine
spiritual movement throughout history has believed, a luminous and
deeply felt force to be found equally in every rock and tree and fish
and caribou on the land.
Enough of that.
This is the new message.
The Earth is, let it be known -- let us shout it from the rooftops of
the White House and Congress and every budget-ravaged school across
the land -- the Earth is no longer sacred.
Not anymore.
Not with this regime.
What, protect a hunk of land and save some stupid animals when the
Rapture is at hand?
When Jesus is about to reappear?
And when we can, until then, make heaps of cash and stomp the poor and
pollute like crazy and have all manner of self-righteous fun?
What kind of silly hell is that, you lost sodomite sinner?
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
Scientology murder: http://PerkinsTragedy.org
Improving the herd: http://www.rightard.org/
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