The triumph of William Jennings Bryan.
The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something—by a narrow margin, but still safely.
—“To Expose a Fool,” H.L. Mencken’s celebrated obituary
of William Jennings Bryan
We escaped it then, but we forgot our history, and now we’re doomed to repeat it: a farce that never was very funny, a Punch and Judy show that just won’t stop beating the shit out of us. “Atsawaytodoit!” —But unlike a lot of us plying our boats about the Islets of Bloggerhans, I’m not reading this recent Village Voice article as an instance of Pastor Simpson gumming up the works in the Blue Room:
It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
But now we know.
“Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.
Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that “the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.”
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
As the incomparable Slacktivist points out, if read carefully, this logic is at best post hoc ergo propter hoc: what’s described isn’t a highrolling geopolitical summit with apocalyptic fanatics, but instead a slick bit of fanservice for the rubes, a huckster’s shill to puff them up, make them think they’re playas, and part them from their votes and money.
The group sent “45 ministers including wives” to the White House, where they sat in a room as a series of second- and third-tier staffers came through to assure them that the president appreciates their concerns and is counting on their support. At the end of the day, they were allowed outside to wave as the president departed in a helicopter. It was their only glimpse of him. (Robert G. Upton, the AC’s leader, described this as a “heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.”)
The White House shores up support in a fragment of its base, and Upton gets to return to his office and crank out fund-raising letters assuring his deluded followers that he has insider access with “key leaders” in the Bush administration.
The author himself chimes in: a rather critical paragraph was, apparently, cut. This particular instance isn’t an example of consulting eschaton immanentizers on foreign policy decisions that affect us all. The Golden Text isn’t written on any White House walls, and if any one of those 45 ministers prayed for rain, no one in the administration took it seriously.
They are, after all, one fuck of a lot scarier.
In 1999, candidate Bush gave a speech to the little-known Council on National Policy.
His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign “strict constructionist” phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn’t).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush’s presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
Now, this might be more post hoc ergo propter hoc. But there are very real questions as to how, exactly, Bush rose to the top of the Republican lists. And even if you don’t want to believe that an interlocking directorate of Christian political organizations and prominent Republican politicians could kingmake a failed businessman and one-term governor with a market-tested family name (“CNP will forever be nothing more than a ‘comfortable place’ for like-minded folks to brainstorm, one member said,” or so goes the ABC article that’s still the best one-stop shop on the CNP. “‘What they decided at one point was that people will simply feel more at ease,’ said another member, Balint Vazsonyi, who joined the group in 1997. ‘It’s certainly not for a political reason. The views discussed here are among those you see on the television or when you open a newspaper’”), what you have to ask yourself is why so many prominent Republicans see no political difficulties in associating themselves with individuals and organizations that explicitly call for overthrowing American democracy in favor of a Christian theocracy. And you can still write this off as fanservice if you want, glandhanding the rubes while picking their pockets, like the absurdly messianic coronation of Sun Myung Moon attended by hordes of money-hungry Republican movers, shakers, and congressfolk. But then you have to go back a year or so to Jeffrey Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing,” his “undercover” account of hanging with up-and-coming Christian(ist) power brokers:
“King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”
The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”
“No, Beau. I wouldn’t. Because I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing.”
“Jesus ?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ’s parable of the wineskins. “You can’t pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus , you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus , you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.
Maybe it’s fanservice. Maybe it’s skinning the rubes. But it’s getting awfully damned hard to tell who the rubes are, anymore. These Christianist red-state jes’-plain-folks rubes own electronic voting machine companies, after all, and spent eight years hounding a president, almost running him out of office. And if those voting machines don’t assure their candidate’s victory come November, they’ll gear up for another bruising snipe hunt—no matter at all what we the people might want. (And even if we do win, and survive, we’re all still stuck half-in, half-out of that vast empire of theirs, whose capital has just been named: Camp Redemption, ladies and gentlemen. Dop, dop, dop.)
Is the Bush administration then the triumph of William Jennings Bryan? —Not to speak too well of the Great Commoner, but he at least had some convictions to lend him courage. For all its rank rabble-rousery, his populism was ultimately rooted in the idea of trying to do some good for the people, and some little good was done. Bryan used fervent religion and crackpot economics to build a powerful coalition of people who’d had little to no power before. He was trying an end-run around the vested interests to do what he thought had to be done.
Bush is speaking to the vested interests.
That’s what’s making all the difference.
I've seen a lot of blogs during this strange 15 minutes of mine, but yours is definitealy the most visually stylish. The words aren't bad either.
But there's no logical fallacy. That's a projection. Three weeks later Bush announced a new Mideast policy; the point isn't that these Apostolics helped direct the policy, but that he told them, not us, first.
Anyway.
Forgive me for taking advantage of a one-time rift in the time-space continuum--my happening upon a story, about the George Bush's romance with apocalyptic Christians, linked by every blog in the world--to do some self promotion.
My book on the rise of the conservative movement, BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS, has been very well received.
The reviewer in The Nation wrote: "I've read Before the Storm twice and intend to go on reading it, as my opiate, as long as Bush is in the White House.... Before the Storm is the story of such a fascinating era and Perlstein is such a great storyteller--one of the most enjoyable historians I've read--that I guarantee for a while you will simply forget the dreariness of today's politics."
In the Village Voice: ". Daring, virtuosic writing, and encyclopedic mastery make the book's title and its Goldwater focus inadequate to all Perlstein accomplishes. This is an exciting volume, an outstanding debut. It goes beyond conservatism. It ups the ante on what popular history can, and should, do."
OK. Enough. I'm blushing. If you liked "The Jesus Landing Pad: Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move," you'll, um, love BEFORE THE STORM.
Warm personal regards,
Rick Perlstein
Sorry, Mr. Perlstein: my antecedent wasn't clear. "This logic" which is at best post hoc etc. wasn't referring to your article, but the reading of it (encouraged, perhaps, by the Voice's snip) spread throughout the sinister side of the Islets of Bloggerhans: that Bush made the decision he did because of the meeting Elliott Abrams took with the Apostolic Congress. That's what's post hoc ergo propter hoc.
That Bush et al are leaking important policy decisions as fanservice, as you report, is just plain shameful.
But thanks for stopping by! Keep your arms and hands inside the car at all times, and enjoy your strange fifteen minutes.
Shortly after I read "Jesus Plus Nothing", I found evidence (I'd seen some of those documents mentioned in the article on my boss's desk) at the company I was working for that they were affiliated with the Family. I just didn't know how deeply. I contacted Jeff Sharlet (did you know he went to Hampshire?) and he wrote back that he wanted to talk to me immediately, on the phone. I called him back with the number he left, left my own number, but he never got back to me. A few days later I was fired. All subsequent attempts to reach Mr. Sharlet failed. The whole thing was very suspicious.