A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141218,00.html

It may be a myth that George Bush was reelected by Evangelical Christians energized by moral issues, but Evangelical Christian leaders such as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell are accepting that myth as gospel.

Fox News yesterday quotes Falwell as saying, “We just experienced the greatest conservative victory in American history—we have never had a victory like Nov. 2—and it’s the most dangerous time for our movement ever.” “Dangerous,” Falwell says, because it could breed complacency. Falwell says he is going to revive his Moral Majority group, and “Between now and ‘08, we are going to be putting on state ballots family initiatives and controversial initiatives to awaken our people out to the polls.”

Despite his fractured English, Falwell’s objective is pretty clear: solidify the corrupt bargain between Christianity and the Republican party, and thus solidify the political power of the moral and cultural absolutists in this country.

Falwell goes on to credit Evangelicals, and particularly Evangelical pastors and leaders, with energizing the vote for Bush. Falwell says that Evangelical “networks” helped put gay marriage initiatives on the ballots in eleven states, and these initiatives in turn got Conservative Christian voters to the polls.

Falwell is of course accepting donations for his movement over at “the new” Falwell.com website. While you’re there, you might sign up for the Liberty Home Bible Institute study course; it’s only $1250.00. And if you pay your tuition in full within ten days, you will receive as a “free” gift the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Study Bible.

Sometimes I myself feel so out of tune with my country and my countrymen, I wonder if perhaps I am the one confused after all. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, and I’ve chosen the wrong side, voted for the wrong candidate, believed the wrong things. Conservatives have a phrase they like to use about liberals being on “the wrong side of history,” as if history is partisan, too. Most recently it was used by Joe Scarborough of MSNBC to describe Bill Moyers, who has unintentionally echoed something I’ve written here. Moyers is retiring, and apparently he will use his final programs on PBS to investigate “how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee.” Scarborough goes on to quote Moyers as saying, “We have an ideological press that’s interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that’s interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don’t have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people.”

Scarborough says that Rush Limbaugh and other Conservative media types who are “targeted by Moyers don’t mind being on the wrong side of the retiring host since, unlike Moyers, they are on the right side of history.” The imagery of a “right” and a “wrong” side of history reminds me of one of President’s Bush’s pet phrases, “freedom is on the march.” Somehow the idea of “marching” freedom is incongruous, oxymoronic really, since freedom is, or ought to be, passive. Freedom simply is. It doesn’t march. Similarly, history is what it is. It doesn’t march to a beat, either.

Yet our country itself certainly seems to be in a martial, marching mood, and I feel out of step with it. Falwell is marching in time. Limbaugh is marching in time. President Bush is certainly marching in time—he leads the parade. Fox News is on the bandwagon, as is AM radio. Meanwhile, the rest of the media and the Democrats are too busy picking up the bits of candy the proud paraders throw into the crowd to bother questioning where the parade is headed.

I’ve been reading this book by Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America. I’ve been reading it for more than a month now (I’m a slow reader these days). The relevance of this book in the post-election period is pretty astonishing. As a member of a genre, it is probably the best of its kind. I would not classify it as sci-fi alternate history, though, as some have done; it is nothing like Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s more in accord with alternate histories such as Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, only it is far better than Lewis’s novel because it does not get bogged down trying to give a general, journalist’s overview of the political scene. Roth concentrates on one family, his own, and how they live in a version of America in which Franklin Roosevelt is voted out of office and replaced by a fascist sympathizer, Charles Lindbergh.

Reading this book, I continually come across quotes that seem prescient (the book was published before the election).

For example, one member of the Roth family leaves America to join the Canadian armed forces and fight the Nazis. Lindbergh kept us out of World War II, you see. When this cousin, Alvin, returns, mere months after leaving, his left leg is missing and his health destroyed.

What made Alvin smell bad was all the decay in his mouth. “You lose your teeth when you’ve got problems,” Dr. Lieberfarb explained after looking around with his little mirror and saying “Uh-oh” nineteen times, and that very afternoon he started drilling. He was going to do all that work for nothing because Alvin had volunteered to fight the fascists and because, unlike “the rich Jews” who astonished my father by imagining themselves secure in Lindbergh’s America, Lieberfarb remained undeluded about what “the many Hitlers of this world” might yet have in store for us. Nineteen gold inlays was a big deal, but that’s how he showed solidarity with my father, my mother, me, and the Democrats, as opposed to Uncle Monty, Aunt Evelyn, Sandy, and all the Republicans currently enjoying their countrymen’s love.

What struck me about that passage was how Roth seems to have perfectly captured, beforehand, the post-election feeling among liberals of estrangement from one’s own family and country. Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times a few weeks ago about her feelings being the only Democrat in a family of Conservatives.

Another quote that seems to me newly relevant:

And as Lindbergh’s election had made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

The unforeseen is frightening. We don’t know how this chapter in our history will be written. Maybe, like Reagan’s second term, Bush’s will be uneventful and without distinguishment. However, as Roth’s book makes clear, it could just as easily be otherwise.

It’s hard to imagine more war. How could Bush ever be trusted again to lead us to war after the fiasco of his rationale for going to war in Iraq? But what, or who, is to stop him? He told us during the campaign there would be no draft. Well, if we find ourselves at war with Iran, or Syria, or North Korea, a draft would become a necessity, wouldn’t it? On the domestic front, pogroms against certain segments of our population seem unimaginable as well. However, with men like Falwell “pounding the doors” of our civil establishments (to use Falwell’s words), suddenly fascism in America does not seem so unimaginable. Who would be the victims? Gays seem a likely target. Also, Middle Eastern people. On Brit Hume’s Special Report last night, he ended his show with a humorous clip from a sketch comedy show, in which three white people dressed up as stereotypical Middle Easterners (complete with tan paint on their faces) portrayed a fictional “English language” version of Al-Jazeera (the reporters conclude each segment with “Death to America!”). Watching that, I thought I had suddenly been transported back to the days of Al Jolson and the minstrel show. Hume and his three Conservative pundits, Krauthammer, Kondrake, and Barnes, got quite a chuckle out of it, though.

Are we so far from the America depicted in our wildest, dystopic fictions?