That Old Time Religion

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That Old Time Religion

According to a recent report in Britain’s The Guardian, that old time religion is alive and well in the Justice Department of John Ashcroft. Evidently daily prayer meetings are held by Ashcroft for his staff, and while attendance, one presumes, is not mandatory, there is the nagging stigma of “unpatriotic” that adheres to those who choose not to participate in the General’s daily appeal to the divinity.

Even worse is the fact that Ashcroft pens patriotic songs, which he forces his underlings to sing at these meetings. And that’s where some department lawyers draw the line. In fact, one brave soul actually had the temerity to come out and say that Ashcroft’s “Let the Mighty Eagle Soar,”as she put it, “really sucks.”

It has also been reported that each time he has been sworn into office, Ashcroft had himself anointed with cooking oil, in the manner of King David. Ashcroft’s father, a pentecostal minister who specializes in speaking in tongues, did it for him when he was inducted into the Senate, and Clarence Thomas, the high priest of the Neocons, did the honors when Ashcroft became Attorney General.

Where all this is leading is hard to say, though one thing is clear. The Bush administration and the Vatican have much in common. While they both constantly appeal to religious salvation and seek divine answers to difficult issues, they tend to overlook those discrepancies that becloud their Manichean world of black and white. Ashcroft is just as comfortable with illegally detaining American citizens without charges as the Vatican is with shoveling priestly pedophiles off to different dioceses, or, in an earlier time, maintaining a code of silence while Jews, homosexuals and gypsies were being gassed at Auschwitz.

Yet the appeal to religion is gaining ground, and not just among the hardcore Washingtonians in the Justice Department. Indeed, when a ninth circuit judge recently ruled that the pledge of allegiance violated the constitution because of its inclusion of the words “under God,” the whole House of Representatives disgorged, and, like lemmings, marched out to the Capitol steps to recite the God blessed pledge. As expected, Democrats in the Senate found the ruling “ludicrous.”

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, the Rehnquist coalition ruled that it’s perfectly legal to use public funds to send kids to parochial schools. As the New York Times noted in its June 28^th editorial, the amount which Cleveland is ready to hand over to parents who wish to flee the public schools is far less than required to send their children to secular private schools. Rather it’s just the amount needed to satisfy the financial requirements of the parochial schools. It is, then, with public money that students will be sent to schools which foster religious training, require attendance at Mass and will now use public money to buy Bibles, prayer books, crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia. As such, says the Times, the ruling does as much damage to education as it does to the First Amendment.

Then, of course, there’s the resurrection, or renaissance, of our so-called national motto, “In God We Trust.” Not content to let our coins and bills carry this religious message, several state legislatures, including the one in Virginia, have issued decrees that the “motto” be plastered all over the walls of our public buildings, including schools, courtrooms and libraries.

As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent to the court’s decision relative to vouchers, the wall of separation between church and state is being dismantled brick by brick. Indeed, of late all too many bricks have disappeared.

Yet, for all their religiosity, Bush and the right wing which supports him seem not to be reaping great rewards from the divinities they propitiate so intensely. Plagued first by a recession and then by the events of September 11, the fate and movement of the administration seems to be more toward an Oedipal-like destruction than hope and prosperity.

Embarrassed by their cronies at Enron and now by a similar bunch at WorldCom, the administration is constantly fighting a rear-guard action to develop at least a similitude of morality where big business is concerned. Hiding behind a curtain of shame not unlike that which Ashcroft used to cover up those contentiously lewd statues, the Bushies find themselves in a constant morass of economic and foreign policy woes.

While the economy chugs slowly along and the stock market reaches new lows, the administration proudly announces a new bureaucracy which will be shrouded in secrecy and turns askance at a $200 billion debt in the making.

And while the Israelis and Palestinians continue to murder each other at will, our president, who was appointed by the Supreme Court, righteously proclaims that the answer is to oust Yasser Arafat, who was democratically elected by his own people.

Indeed, the foreign policy of this administration is just as bankrupt as its internal economic policy. In fact, they’re just now waking up to the fact that we’re about to lose our national passenger railroad system. And one has to wonder: If they can’t keep a railroad running, what on earth can they keep running?

Yet the approval rating for President Bush remains near 70%. Why?

Are the American people so totally asleep at the switch that they haven’t noticed that the trains aren’t running anymore? Or that they’ve all taken the wrong spur and have jumped the tracks?

Evidently they are. Terrified by all shades of terrorist alerts, they’ve been suckered into believing that we have to sacrifice everything, including our constitutional rights and our economy, for the sake of protecting ourselves from some illusive enemy. And they’ve been equally suckered into believing, because of all this insane religious posturing, that we have morality and God on our side.

So, let the eagle soar and find his prey where he might. How totally sad it is that today’s prey is the mind and soul of the American people.

June 29, 2002