This is crossposted from my blog, Nothing New, and is part I of (I think) III which I meant to clean up and edit, before putting it here, but the way things are going, I think I should just toss it up here rough as it is while I work on the conclusion. Some of this people who have been here a while have already heard, but I've always been a little bit leery of admitting just
how deeply into the theocon craziness my family was, back in the 70s and early 80s. I've tried to hint at it, plus give links to the kinds of things we were subscribers to - but this time I'm just getting it all out into the open, so you will have a better idea of what you're up against.
It goes w/these earlier diaries, How They Used Roe vs. Wade To Overthrow the Constitution and How Then To Fight It.
It also works better, if you're a comarative newbie, if you read this in context of my magnum opus
A Bloody Mess and the shorter but denser expose of the connections between theocons and meocons and the plutocracy,
Neoconned!. You might want to book mark those - bearing in mind that when I started February 04, I didn't know a lot of things I subsequently discoverd.
As with A Bloody Mess, where I first started talking about the would-be theocrats and proponents of a New Reconquista, without having any idea how pervasive and successful (if nothing else, in their alliances) the cranks and bigots I grew up around had become, I'm not just talking about strange folk I read about in secular humanist propaganda, I'm writing from memories of gatherings at dinners in private homes and conservative colleges and offices where everyone read or subscribed to National Review, Columbia, First Things, Crisis, The Wanderer, The Register, New Oxford Review, CUF - and those were the mainstream publications, not going into the more-narrowly-sub-sectarian publications like Fatima Crusader and The Remnant. And where we were a little odd because we also got other things, like National Geographic and Smithsonian and Scientific American and Ranger Rick and Archeology, even if we did bear in mind that they had an anti-Christian, liberal bias, when reading them.
I didn't know John Salvi, but the culture he came from? Not as fringe as those who tried desperately to disassociate themselves from him afterwards wanted to pretend.
Eric Rudolph is in the news now and Salvi has almost been forgotten these days. Rudolph is Protestant, where Salvi was Catholic. But both typify the darker sides of American religiosity (which isn't any different from European religiosity in places like the Balkans, or a couple hundred years ago all over) and also of American populism.
Populism is a funny thing. It got sanitized in our schoolbooks, so we never heard there was a darker side to it. But while it starts out sounding like something everyone can get behind - look out for the poor and stop predation by the wealthy - what it actually translated into, historically - and this is what got whitewashed out - was finding people poorer still to blame. This is what happened to Fr. Coughlin, whose magazine was titled Social Justice and whose initial years of broadcasting focused on the victimization of working class America by those who owned corporations or inherited corporate wealth.
But - as I have said over and over again in this blog and elsewhere - it's way too hard to go up against the Machine, it's much easier and satisfiying to tell people that their poorer and/or less-protected neighbors are to blame for all their problems, and send them after the scapegoats, while a consolidating elite tightens the chokehold ever more (and thus must find more scapegoats to blame.) Thus Coughlin went from being a champion of the common man to an endorser of totalitarianism, for our own "good" - just as modern populism looks for its victims in immigrants - who make up a very small percentage of US population - and "lazy" welfare blacks and "selfish" women and the minority of non-Christians and increasingly in that other very small group, those of unconventional sexual orientation...rather than going after that even smaller minority who holds almost all of the wealth and methods of production in this country, and who happens to be mostly WASP males and their dependents whom they often put on their payrolls, as Tom DeLay has recently been discovered to have done. Why go after the dynasties of robber barons and their nouveau riche proteges, when you can beat down your fellow serfs instead?
And then, of course, not being utter idiots, the robber barons got good at exploiting this, and exploiting corrupt scholars and sages to be their bards, carrying these memes in plausible coatings out into the world, for some small monetary renumeration. And others embraced them, believed the Narratives of godly purity and noble service and believed that the ones who were preaching this actually embodied them, and gave of their time and money (our time, our money) and persuasive powers in turn to carry them on, voluntarily.
I have mentioned the disconnect and apparent obliviousness to the cognitive dissonance that goes on when prolifers talk about politics: on the one hand, we would say "we must vote for Buchanan/Keyes because they are the only truly prolife candidates," and then when they failed to get the nomination, compromise by saying "we must vote for Reagan/Bush because they are the most prolife candidates" (or local equivalents) and then when none of these "prolife" Republicans actually ever did anything, we would justify it by saying that well, they had to compromise because they couldn't get elected if they did, while at the same time agreeing with all our magazines that told us that most of America, our polls showed, was really against abortion, birth control, and promiscuity.
There is a great deal of yellow mental caution tape that must be wound around the world, when you have an inflexible ideology to protect - whether that ideology be capitalism or Americanist heresy or libertarianism or anarchism. Ham-and-eggery is the order of the day.
The more usual scapegoat, however, has been the Supreme Court, the "nine old men" who caused abortions in America. Yes, we truly believed that it was Roe vs. Wade that caused abortion, or at least we often talked as if we did. Everything was blameable on the Sexual Revolution, selfish women who wanted sex without consequences, and stupid women who were told that this is what they wanted by predatory men (there are no other sorts of women, except for saintly wives and mothers) and that overarching First Cause of everything that was wrong in America, The Sixties.
Forget that The Sixties were just the semi-mainstreaming of the Beatnik culture of the 1950s, which itself was nothing new (they want you to forget that, if you ever knew it.)
Reading It Can't Happen Here, and considering the era in which Buckley, Russell Kirk, Buchanan and the rest of the 'paleocons' were raised, it's clear that what actually is the problem is that the American plutocrats and their lackeys never got over the 1920s, when Hollywood took Broadway showgirl spectacle and watered-down Parisian Grand Guignol to Peoria, where housewives and bellboys could find ekstasia for a dime, thrilling to the lurid dramas and sexual attractions of Theda Bara and Rudolph Valentino - and read tabloids detailing their divorces and cocaine use and still more "shocking" behavior (nothing like what we in Middle America ever get up to with nothing more expensive than rotgut as stimulant), and novelists stopped wrapping reality in quite so much euphemism, and their young persons, far from blushing, started dancing to that jungle jazz and going out, not just to the back lot and a convenient haystack, as had been the tradition from at least the Middle Ages, but using these newfangled horseless carriages - remember how in Cheaper By The Dozen the high school studs have painted slogans like "The Mayflower - Many A Little Puritan Has Come Across In Her" on their Model-T Fords? - so obviously the automobile is responsible for the decline in public morality (even though foundling hospitals were as real in the 18th and 19th century as the literary cliche of the baby left on the church doorstep) and likewise the Negro musicians and the Jewish dramatists who seduced our innocent, untainted youth from the whitebread culture they would otherwise have been content with forever, never to run off to Tahitian islands or long for the wild nightlife of pool halls and contradancing and ether frolics and poetry readings (all of which are equally destructive to the soul--!)
...of course this is exactly what was happening in the 1860s when Dickens and Wilkie Collins mocked the prudery and self-deception of Victorian England, sometimes falling foul of censors as they did so. The real problem isn't that these things happen, but that we're forced to know about them. If we didn't know about them, then they wouldn't matter. Podsnappery is alive and well in the New World.
No, the constructed narrative of American history has a strangely constant pattern: the alarms are always dire and immanent and have been for the last hundred-plus years; the dangers are always from without and caused by The Other, whether it be Satan trying to bring us pure ones down, or Foreign Devils, or Hollywood, or Fifth Columnist America-Haters who don't think we should be allowed to keep on making "equality" and "justice" empty words...
It's never our fault, for all our talk of free will. But that's not news, though the pattern is important to note, and to keep in mind.
What is important right now is how this is carried out in practice, and how it has been used by the Hegemony to further its agenda of irresponsiblity, with no checks on its power.
What did the Robber Barons and their descendents hate most, starting in the 1800s? Labor laws requring them to pay fair[er] wages, not demand unpaid overtime, allow time off, allow their workers to have even a smidgen of the quality of life that they took for granted themselves as they lived in their vast mansions at the top of the hill looking down on the packed brick warrens they made their serfs who gave them that wealth live in, and be grateful for. (This is not hyperbole. I can walk across this city and in forty minutes pass from those tenements to our "Nob Hill" with its four-story gingerbread and Italianate monstrosities, going through the mills to get there.)
What did they hate next, after unions - and judges who made pro-worker rulings - in this past century? Environmental regulations, which stopped them from dumping raw sewage and oil and heavy metals and solvents and ash into the common water and ground and air, to kill and maim all those workers and everyone who happened to live downstream and couldn't afford to get away, and which forced them to pay, in some small measure, to clean up the mess and pay damages to those in the cancer hotspots or whose property value was destroyed. Too little, too late, most often, but still - it cut into their almighty god of profits, profits, profits!
Now, they couldn't say, flat out, "You need to vote for the guys who will go on letting us poison you, the guys we're paying the big lobbying and political donation bucks to go on allowing us to keep turning your river green and purple with nameless crud making it half-solid until it finally catches on fire, who are responsible for the fact that half your kids are born deformed and that no one in your area ever makes it to collect Social Security, and letting us fire you if you complain that we're making you work sixty hours in dangerous conditions with no compensation," so they had to concentrate on other areas. 'Cause not even the most gullible Invisible Hand worshipper would go along with that.
This is the theme of Franks' Kansas book. But that isn't the slice of American conservativism I come from, at all. The people I come from aren't the meme-makers, but they are the meme-distributors - infection vectors, so to speak. How the infection was passed, under what cover, and how it worked to cripple intellectual Christian counteractants, like diseases that destroy the immune system first.
There are lots and lots of things they have used, including the general discomfort people have from growing up and realizing that their parents weren't just sheltering them but in fact, by sheltering, lying to them about how the world is, and not being able to cope with the facts of sex and the routine dishonesty and incompetence of the so-called adults running the place, and hypocrisy. But the number one issue, the most successful tool in their political toolbox has been the secular exploitation of Roe vs. Wade. Which has, for the Establishment, just about nothing to do with morality, or sex, or even abortion itself.
That it isn't just or even primarily their goal to control women for the sake of controlling women, not at the top levels, but because they need to engineer society to continue to maximize their profits, and women who want to be paid equally are a threat to that, and women who aren't producing an ever-increasing number of potential workers (as they have started admitting openly is the only purpose of humanity, as Cheney did in the Vice Presidential debate) are also a threat; and in tandem with this is the racial anxiety which works well in needing a lot of white babies to counter the "browning of America," which equally serves to increase the pool of future serfs.
They will, as they have always done, be able to go to Harley Street or Mayo Clinic specialists (or send their daughters and wives and girlfriends) for "women troubles," they will never have to live to the standards of chastity and "consequences" that they insist on for everyone else, any more than they have to follow the ethic of "hard work" that they have been preaching to us peons as virtuous since forever. (And we let trust fund idiots tell us that we should not be "lazy", that we shouldn't want to live the same life of ease and luxury that they themselves enjoy for no hard work of their own!)
But they use this issue, shamelessly, to get votes for their side - and to cripple any opposition - and while I realized this years ago (which is why I didn't vote at all in 2000, still controlled by the "morality" declarations of the Church) it's only belatedly, and in tiny patches, that the Christian Taliban is starting to get a clue that they've been used.
On NPR on the day of the Inauguration, the scary "flames of freedom" speech which Michael Ledeen has been echoing every column in NRO as he plugs an Iran war for months, they interviewed some Xtian minister who was there all enthusiastic and happy that "God's candidate" had won and now we could make some progress on getting rid of Roe vs. Wade etc. The reporter had pointed out that Bush didn't say anything explict about abortion, and the minister replied that they were really good at reading between the lines, that they just understood that Bush was on the same page with them in regard to moral values.
Well, he was right in that there is this kind of coded language (q.v. the Dred Scott Decision debate reference) but back in January they hadn't yet figured out that it wasn't anything else but a kind of meaningless shout-out, something to keep them happy and contributihg the dollars and votes - and blocking anything "liberal" with screaming and jumping up and down and frenzy. Now this is starting to be realized, but the extent to which they've been had, not so much.
The ultimate point of making abortion the only moral issue, and Roe vs. Wade the only government issue, was to undercut the authority of the very idea of a government altogether. This is why the strange marriage of the Ruby Ridge/Waco/McVeigh militia types, and the GOP - "everything that rises must converge" is proving true of Conspiracists, these days. A sort of skittish match from hell to be sure, with people who hate each other's guts all in harness - but you don't think that everyone in a volunteer army agrees on everything or likes each other?
And Eric Rudolph is more typically American, in his white-trash fundamentalist Christian Identity "prolife" madness, but John Salvi is no less so. They didn't talk much, before Rudolph was caught, all those years, about his racism and bigotry, religious and ethnic combined - hating Jews and blacks with equal fervor, enough to make his normal Southern neighbors uncomfortable - but not enough to confront him about it, just to stop talking to him, according to some interviews. Nor was his anti-gay bigotry ever emphasized, as he was overwhelmingly depicted, even in the SCLM, as an anti-abortion crusader exclusively. And he also hated the government as much as Timothy McVeigh, blaming it for his father's death, because of the FDA refusing approval for the peach-pit cancer treatment. (Which doesn't work, but there are people who were messianic about it in the 80s, before tests showed it didn't work and wasn't safe.) Or that he made more money in a year than I've made in three of honest labor, selling pot that he grew on government land, in part, after washing out of the army fast.
In short, he was just another survivalist nut filled with resentment and bitterness who went from being a minor league criminal to a folk hero, because he killed designated villains, and good Christians were willing to ignore the rest of it, like the utterly irrational explosion at the Olympics, which is what he was originally famous for - even the fact that he set bombs at gay bars (even though his own brother was gay and he managed to overlook it, it's okay to kill gay strangers I guess) was somewhat downplayed, but also referred to at the time as part of his "moral values" crusade, implicit acceptance of the view that even if such things are wrong, they're also part and parcel of society's reaction to the immorality of gay behavior. Even the utterly horrific setting of a second bomb to hit the EMTs responding to the first one (how can you look at this as anything but wanton?) didn't stop people from helping him and feeling fondly towards him, because unlike the Unabomber he was a Christian "prolife" terrorist.
"But 99.9% of us aren't like that, we don't kill anybody!" the inevitable whine occurs. It happened with John Salvi, too.
Let's go back farther to Salvi, because I do understand where he's coming from better than the grassroots conspiracism of the anti-intellectual lower-middle-class; Salvi came from the fervent Marian Catholic background, with strong Northeast ties (q.v. Bayside Apparitions), where praying the rosary is an acceptable substitute for actually doing anything practical in the world that could soil you with Sin Cooties, and where people used to sit around talking about the moral obligation to resist Unjust Government, with the stated and discussed premises being that if there were a concentration camp in your town, you'd be obliged to go and try to destroy it, and that if you had a chance to shoot a guard at Auschwitz and save even one prisoner, wouldn't you be obligated to do so? and if you lived under the Nazis, would you be obliged to obey any of their rules and laws, because they would not be a legitmate government, and going from there to argue over when, exactly, a government became totally illegitimate and you didn't have to follow any of its rules, morally speaking?
And these were the sane, clean-cut, suits-and-ties, mostly well-to-do, all with college educations and some with advanced degrees, the elite among the conservative Catholic orthodoxy in this country, who form a community self-contained and without regional boundaries but only ideological ones, from California to DC to Dallas to NYC to Michigan to Massachusetts. The ones who write for Crisis magazine, and the Heritage Foundation - and are not fringe whackos and schismatics like Gibson, but have embraced Gibson wholeheartedly. (The guy who runs the online Catholic News Service used to be the editor for the Archdiocese Boston's paper, The Pilot, is a Heritage alum, for instance.)
Full disclosure: I was never part of Operation Rescue. But I did know girls who were, and I was always made to feel a coward and not really serious in my convictions, because I wasn't protesting like these millionaires' daughters, but instead scraping my way through school (and trying to get through each day without slitting my wrists, though nobody knew that). And everyone I knew, all the nice church ladies and Medugorje pilgrim women, supported them. Back in those days, Terry Randall's utter wingnuttery and sexism was carefully kept out of sight by the conservative Catholic media. See, this is something hard to believe, but it's crucial to the NeoTrads that we be able to believe that we're not really sexist, we just value the sacred and noble vocation of womanhood more than all those secularhumanistfeminists. Back in those days, the late 80s and early 90s, when ads for OR's legal defense were on full page Wanderer and Register ads, he was either tamer about his male supremacism in public, or this was piously edited out of our coverage of him, the way that other things were blown up to provoke outrage.
And we never actually did anything more violent than clinic demonstrations, either - nor even seriously dreamed of it. We were all talk. (Even if I did think about the logistics of it while in high school, and how to avoid casualties, and gave it up as unexecutable) None of us knew how to blow things up, or where to get explosives...and we never even tried to find out. We just made ourselves feel guilty for not doing it, for accepting the moral arguments of "prudence" as justification for not doing so, of competing moral obligations to our own familes - but assuaged the guilt by consistently voting against Democrats, except if there was an anti-abortion Democrat available like Harry Reid (the Scaife & Ann Coulter identification of Democrat with Enemy of the State had not then been memed out.) And we also got to look down on pro-labor, pro-civil rights, pro-environment, anti-corporatist Catholics who resolutely voted Democrat and said so, because they were so benighted as to not see that overturning Roe vs. Wade and thereby Ending the Holocaust of Abortion was the only allowable issue to consider.
Now, the odd thing is, when John Salvi after reading the constant barrage of propaganda from OR and Human Life International (remember they're the outfit whose leader, Fr. Paul Marx, relentless hatred of gays and claiming that AIDS was sent by God as a punishment helped undercut - for me at least - all the hate the sin, love the sinner" anti-gay rhetoric of the Church) and all the other "prolife" magazines who never, ever tried to figure out why their leaders and "prolife" politicians weren't actually getting anything done if the "will of the people" was really on our side, and why if their tactics were so unsuccessful despite all the money we sent them, weren't they trying to figure out what actually would work to reduce abortions, instead of telling us just to keep praying more rosaries, since it was rosaries which brought down the Berlin Wall and all.
But the purpose of it, and more importantly the trickle-down of the memes to a grassroots level, which is why Karl Rove was so pleased to work with the editors of Crisis and First Things, why Michael Novak and Deal Hudson and Fr. Neuhause are so important to the White House, legitimizing exploitation and war and undercutting the judiciary, is to consolidate all power in the hands of the "deserving rich" - and to Minitrue away the mental ability of the commons to argue against these things.
You're dealing, when you deal with zealous prolife Catholics, particularly the young ones, the Ave Maria Law School corps, the students of Dr. Janet Smith, and the people who work for HLI and the rest, with people who either have never gone outside the NeoTrad bubble, or only after being armed and defended with a shield of Invincible Ignorance. They know that the media is controlled by liberals, that all doctors and scientists are godless atheists in a grand unified conspiracy to destroy humanity and leave it to the trees and dolphins, that there are Abortion MillsTM and that all medical personnel are part of another grand unified feminist-atheist-homosexual conspiracy dedicated equally to reaping the vast profits that come from providing abortions and because they hate humanity and want to leave it to nature, that contraception causes abortion because the Pill is an abortifacient, because condoms doesn't work and even if they did, it would still cause an increase in abortions because it's part of the Culture of Death, and that when abortions are against the law they go away, and that if only everyone were Catholic there would be no promiscuity and no abortions and no unwanted children, anywhere.
Any apparent contraindications of this, by report or personal experience, can be dismissed as a) enemy propaganda, and b) meaninless exceptions.
And since abortion is a) caused by Roe vs. Wade, b) the killing of innocents, the blame properly lies upon the corrupt courts that legalized it, the government that won't step in and overturn it, and further back, the evil judges who allowed Griswold vs. CT first, making the idea of sex without consequences part of US culture. (Shut up about Victorian home remedies for "unblocking the menses" and Magdalen Homes and street gangs of abandoned children in the Good Old Days, P@L, nobody wants to hear your reality-based lies!)
And thus, so neatly, is the entire idea of the Constitutional government overthrown by people incapable of thinking past their leading-strings.
For - grant me this for the sake of argument, pro-choice readers (as I know very many already do) that abortion is at least a negative, and accept that we at least believe it is murder - still to pretend that because it is not outlawed now, and thus
availabe and legal, is to say that the government is not legit - is to say that there is and never has been a time when America had any legitimate government. Because abortion, even when outlawed has always gone on, because the stigma upon women for having babies out of wedlock has always been terrible, even if it is getting better a little, despite the efforts of the "prolife" hypocrites to keep it so. And rape has never been denounced from the pulpits, not even marital rape - which wasn't a crime and still is not considered so by many conservatives. And financial hardship still and ever fall hardest on women, not going away because they are mothers, and motherhood in a macho culture is far from easy , and pregancy and childbirth still, in this country in this day and age, can be fatally dangerous, and there have always been winked exceptions or casuistry applied ad hoc to deal with those.
BUT MORE THAN THAT - what about our own national genocides? What about slavery, for God's sake? They blat these thirty years about Dred Scott - but do you ever hear them saying that George Washington was no true president, nor Jefferson, nor the Constitution itself ever valid, because it enshrined slavery? Nor those who say that it was our right to remove Saddam because he killed some unspecified number of his own dissidents and (with our help) ethnic minorities, EVER say that America therefore had no right to exist, because of the destruction of the Indian nations? Far from it! They are the very ones who all these decades have been denying that these things were wrong or as wrong or at least couldn't be justified, if nothing by the moral relativism of the historical excuse that "they didn't know better back then."
The excuse that is no longer, for whatever reason, acceptable today to excuse the sins of those they don't approve of or identify with.
There is only the delusion born of ideological ignorance and denial of such facts as that in "Catholic" South America where both contraception and abortion are illegal, more women die of abortions and more abortions happen than in godless Old Europe, that makes it possible to think that merely overturning Roe vs. Wade will "end abortion" in the US. Is an empty gesture all they want? Sometimes I think so, have thought so ever since the prolife pundits insisted that we could not even accept a compromise with exceptions for rape/mother's life, that their all-or-nothing for moral purity showed that they didn't actually care about results, only posturing to make themselves feel good - and us who signed on with them. But only a Handmaid's Tale draconic enforcement, such as we have never seen in the west, even before Roe vs. Wade, but only in places like Ceaucescue's Romania, where mandatory increase of numbers made fertility checks and mandatory pregnancy the norm, would stop it. And - do the apple-cheeked college women and boys of Ave Maria and HLI and their eleders at Pharmaciests for Life really want that, a sort of reverse-China-one-child policy, with executions of women and doctors who are caught? They play cagy with this, because some do, when you get to the Dominionists, just as with stonings for adultery and homosexuality. But most of them just don't think it will happen.
Until someone like John Salvi starts shooting nurses, or Eric Rudolph sets IEDs, and kills people. And the world starts noticing the inflammatory tone of the prolife discussion, once it encounters some of these combustible spirits.
Then - and this was amazing to me - all those who had muttered such things or talked for years about the immorality of the judges and how we didn't need to obey them and what about Auschwitz? - just either shut up totally, or loudly tried to dissociate themselves from the crazies...who after all were only being consistent and courageous enough to do what we had castigated ourselves for being too weak to do, all those years of voting for Buchanan and Keyes and so on.
They did, after all, have the problem of equally trying to hold the Americanist Heresy of the US as God's Chosen Country against the Godless Commies.
More later. But think on this - that it's not anarchy they want at all: was it anarchy when the Roman plutocrats enjoyed spectacular luxury, and could do what ever they wanted to their slaves, or when the Russian serfs had no legal recourse, and the free townsmen only what they could buy, compared to the rights of the boyars and their enabling clerics, or is it anarchy in China where the Party officials enjoy all the protection their wealth and rank can buy, while farmers and factory workers cannot get a hearing?
The only thing that stands between the rule of oligarchy over peasants unprotected from either the oligarchs or each other, is that thicket of laws - dispassionate, often flawed, sometimes unjust and evil, planted by flawed, unjust, even evil people - and even more so, the mental structures that are now being eroded (have been eroded) that accept that a flawed, lawful society is better than a society where knaves and thieves sit in judgment on everyone else, and no one has the power to restrain them...
Thus, the falsification of history into this Narrative, is critical to how we got where we are today, where an elected government official of the GOP can stand up there and approvingly quote Stalin (Stalin!) on assassinating dissidents in reference to the judiciary of this country. And not instantly be thrown out of his own party.
(Next part, the confessions of an ex-Natalist, or why Bobo Brooks is yes, evil and dangerous and even more so than the slavering Orcs like Limbutt and Kim du Toit) ...and the clash between "free speech",
responsible speech, and trying to be a martyr/hero without suffering any consequences...)