Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste.
Two weeks ago, I travelled to Philadelphia with the activist group World Can't Wait to observe (and photograph) the Christian fundamentalist youth group "Battlecry".
I subsequently wrote a diary that I republished here on the Daily Kos and it got a mostly favorable response. Now it seems that a Christian fundamentalist youth leader I had briefly conversed with at their press conference has also republished my article. The way he's framed it can teach us a lot about how the extreme right frames the secular left.
First a brief synopsis of the encounter. The most visible activist in World Can't Wait is Sunsara Taylor (who debated Battlecry's leader Ron Luce on the O'Reilly Factor).
http://www.youtube.com/...
She's quite well known among the Battlecry/Teenmania crowd and was followed by their security for most of the weekend. I, on the other hand, am relatively anonymous. My pair of Nikons and my grungy dress tend to make me look like just another slovenly freelance photojournalist and I tend not to attract a lot of notice at events like this.
Now if Sunsara Taylor is a disciple of Mao and Bob Avakian, I am a disciple of Beavis and Butthead.
Upon seeing that a Christian fundamentalist youth group was flying red flags and standing in formation I couldn't help myself.
http://rogouski.com/...
Me: Like DUDE!!! What's with the red flags, are you people communists or something?
Christian Youth Leader: No!!!
Me: Man. When I went to church if we waived a flag, it was an American flag. It was red white and blue, not red.
Christian Youth Leader: It's just the color we carry.
I pressed him for a while but he had no idea why his group waived red flags. I eventually found someone who informed me they stood "for the blood of Christ" but that took a bit of asking around.
Anyway, sarcasm, for Christian fundamentalists, seems to be akin to worshipping Satan. And so we come to the republshing of my article on a Christian fundamentalist website. To my amusement, I find a still frame snatched off a video (with me doing my best James Carville on a bad hair day impression). My article accompanies it, along with a bit of clever framing.
http://www.advancedministry.com/...
http://www.advancedministry.com/...
Note. I (like the serpent) am lurking about:
Stanley Rogouski is apparently an accomplished photographer and a left wing activist. He showed up to the May 12th prayer rally and more or less lurked about as other protesters screamed their opposition to our presence.
And, like Satan, I am the deceiver, the voice of cynicism, of intellectual vanity:
"However, also realize that when someone like Mr. Rogouski enters a convention like this, he is only looking for the negative. He is waiting for someone to say the wrong thing or make the wrong move. Instead of spending time listening to the actual message of the weekend, he took what he didn't like, demeaned it, made fun of it, acted horrified about it, and wrote a column using places, words, and symbolism that made him sound intellectually superior."
And it occurred to me how good the right is at framing arguments in this way. My article is quite literate and witty and contains none of the out and out strangeness of Mr. Cody L Mummau (a 30 year old man who seems to like lurking on the Myspace pages of teenagers).
http://www.advancedministry.com/...
"It was a Tuesday I believe when I was reading MySpace on my computer at church. The time came for a meeting so I left it up and went out. I came back quickly for a pencil and saw a barely clothed woman in lingerie on my screen. It was an advertisement on MySpace that dominated almost 30% of the screen. I was embarrassed to think of what someone may have thought if they had just glanced in my window. There is no way I could honor Christ with this soft core pornography on my screen."
Ah Cody you porn obsessed little monkey. Ever see a Renaissance painting of St. Sebastian?
But this doesn't matter. Cody's a lecherous boob but who cares. Satan is witty and deceptive and my article is framed in a way so that the better it is, the worse it is for me. Wit, sarcasm, the ability to clevely put down an opponent with a clever verbal jab or a bit of creative framing is just proof that you are indeed Satan, the tempter, the secular world to be avoided at all costs.
What Mr. Mummau (who wields the concept of sincerity as a weapon to demonize his political opponents) fails to realize is that I didn't pretend to be horrified by the Battlecry event in Philadelphia, I was horrified by it. I was horrified at the manipulative techniques used on teenage kids by Mr. Luce and Ms. Garth. I was horrified at the junk food being sold at an event supposedly designed to offer an alternative to mass culture. I was horrified by the fact that all of the exits save two at the Wachovia Center seem to have been chained, and that, had the group "Pillar's pyrotechniques resulted in anything resembling the Great White tragedy, I would have been crushed to death in a gigantic mass of Christian humanity. Mr. Mummau is so insincere himself he seems baffled that anybody could do anything more than pretend to be horrified at what most people in the United States, if they witnessed it, would be horrified at.
And so it goes in American politics. Frank Rich or James Wolcott can write article after article which (to any reader of a website like the Daily Kos) makes it obvious that Bush is a moron but that only means that Satan is using his powers of deception on the innocent American public. Bush is slow, inarticulate, vapid and Bill Clinton is an accomplished speaker and subtle thinker but that's only another reason to vote for Bush. Clinton is, quite obviously, Satan and Bush is the simple American everyman, making his way through the dark forest of the liberal media.