September 5, 2009AD
They used to call it the New Age section, now it's labelled General Metaphysics but I've always known it as Kook Books. That aisle of the bookstore that profits from nonexistent conspiracies and false hopes; funhouse mirror history and post-Christian mythology.
Van Jones, author of GREEN COLLAR JOBS and the president's green advisor, preaches a new age political activism. Like all activism today it is founded on fear. In his talks he always warns that -- after the cheap laughs about oil and natural gas and energy that actually works -- "there is a Crisis coming." This is standard rhetoric gamesmanship for leftists who never let a "crisis go to waste." In law school speakers would use that ploy -- one began his talk announcing that "there is an EMERGENCY." Crises, emergencies, Greenland's massive ice sheet melting by 2030 (that one from Greenpeace). And babyboomers thought their nuclear childhoods were dark and fearful. Who knows what we're doing to our children now?
Hitler had his Jews; Stalin had his Jews; Pat Buchanan has his Jews... Is it any wonder that President Obama's approval rating in Israel is 6% after snubbing their prime minister and embracing islamic dictatorships time after time. Global warming; nuclear winter; the end of warmth and light; Jews, right-wing religious nuts...
In the end, fear always turns to bigotry. That there are new agey elements of anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism in this administration should surprise no one. Wayne Dyer whose goulash of eastern mysticism, post-Christian Jesus-as-Wayne-ism, mood swings into angry tent rivival mode when discussing secondhand smoke or Ford F-150s. The president lectures us on how to sneeze and wash our hands and the "late night eunuchs," as a friend calls television comedians, see nothing to ridicule.
Kooks always swerve into loopy specificity. Cigars, french fries, SUVs, Christian Rock, the President-and-Commander-in-Chief as county healthcare official. Yet Conan O'Brian continues to make Bush jokes... (would someone tell him who won the election).
The Church warns against promiscuity for many reasons. But at least one is worthy of the attention of the real Surgeon General. In the smoky ruins of the sixties (a deathhaunted ruin even when its promoters had hair and waistlines) a group called the Ultimate Spinach (when's their digitally-remastered box set coming out?) had a song called Speed Kills. Speed of course didn't kill, taking speed killed. In 1980s San Francisco and New York, AIDs didn't kill, promiscuity killed. They understand that now in Uganda but not in first-world South Africa. They understand that at the Shrine of the Little Flower on 12 Mile and Woodward, but not at Ferndale City Hall on 9 Mile.
There is little science on the left. Only fear and magic wishes. The President's green man always ends his talks proposing a civilization of Reverence and Diversity. Reverence of what? Of whom? Not vulnerable human life at its beginning. Not children in Detroit or Chicago who dodge bullets on the way to school. Not old men and women, mostly black, who defend themselves against superpredators whom the police can't find. As for Van Jones' green urban paradise. Most cities are smeared with garbarge, empty ruins, littered streets, broken glass, unpainted houses and wheeless hulks from the 1970s. Like New Orleans after Katrina, a demoralized and dehumanized populace waits for someone, anyone, from the government to care. The government isn't in the caring business. Federal culture isn't city hall or the local parish. Legislators in state capitols and the nation's capitol are paid to listen to those who pay. And tax dollars aren't lobbyist dollars. (Which means, by the way, that it is even more crucial for ordinary people to organize and, when necessary, shout at the top of their lungs on those rare opportunites when a congressperson deigns to grant them an audience.)
Secular messiahs get the disciples they deserve. The only Messiah I recognize (being man and God) wasn't surprised by betrayal. Grieved yes, but we all grieve even with advanced warning of its inevitability. Peter betrayed Christ. The other Apostles abandoned him. Because they were weak and eventually gained the self-awareness of that weakness and the humility that must always accompany knowledge of it. President Obama's disciples have no self-awareness nor the admission of their human weaknesses. It is bravado and more bravado right up to the point when they are thrown casually somewhere in the vicinity of the bus's wheels like a cigarette butt in the Rose Garden. Paradoxically, the president himself has no such self-knowledge. He is certainly getting no lectures is hubris or humility at St. John's Episcopal Church across the street.
Van Jones' civilization of reverence and diversity is the predictable vision of a mass global movement. Beyond religion and philosophy and the tragedy of history. The only personal accountability that matters redounds to the mpg of your car and the greeness of your laundry detergent (again the loony specifics). There is no hell because there is no accountability when you're following your bliss with involves either power or sex (and a fat publishing advance and speaking fees). Jones' environmentalism is the worship of a creation that has no Creator. Whether you cheat on your wife or taxes is of no consequence when living by this cosmic code that worships the cool and souless. It is no accident that the President speaks of everything -- healthcare, abortion, euthanasia, education, war, terrorism, natural catastrophes -- in the same calm, unvarying and confident tones of someone unable to notice the rising water at his chin.
Jones is the ego child of Oprah and Obama. The illusion of Inner Light provided by Hollywood technicians. Received-but-not-digested wisdom courtesy of Oprah and Frey and Zinn and Chomsky and Dyson and Williamson and Walsh and Wright and Dyer and Gore. We've reached a point where this president's association with kooks begs the obvious conclusion. That he is a kook himself.
The late Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore once told his daughter Honore that "Jesus was bit of nut, wasn't he." Moore cut a swath of unhappiness and misery in the wake of his pursuit of bliss and Changing the World. So will the president. As have so many other evangelizers of Human-ism before him. According to his biographer, James Joyce once said that he wasn't religious but that he was superstitious. He certainly obsessessed about the color of his book jackets and the date of publication as omens for success. Only yesterday morning, one of Obama's most vocal supporters at work asked me about symbolism. A cricket or grasshopper had landed on her windshield and she wondered what it meant. (That most superstitious of people, the Chinese, are great believers in these signs and omens -- although it doesn't vitiate their work ethic as it seems to do ours.) Despite the fall victory people still flock to that dark corner of the bookstore that substitutes conspiracies for our fallen nature. This coworker told me she was at a crossroads in her life. We often are. (And I recalled guiltily that admonition to see God in others.) Superstition finds these moments a shock. Religion tells us that when we come to that cross in the road, we should, as Yogi Berra might say, take it. Instead, we look for person or persons unnamed, for conspiracies emphatically named, for Jews or Right Wing Christians. For anything and anyone but ourselves and who we are. Who we all are. What our country has become.
Superstition and conspiracy; creation worship and magic; and the cult of the Person may also explain why we know longer recognize evil when we see it and are surprised by its works as if seeing them for the first time.
Sam Macomb
