[Mb-civic] Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush

[Ginger Baker]

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From: <cstern at nyct.net>
To: <jabaka at futurenet.co.za>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 10:54 PM
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush


> The article below from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by cstern at nyct.net.
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> This is s-c-a-r-y.
>
> Our fundementalists versus their fundamentalists.
>
> Swell.
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> Check?
>
> cstern at nyct.net
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>
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> Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush
>
> October 3, 2004
>
>
>
>
>
> You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the
> perfect storm in this year's culture wars. It's on that
> strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays before the
> election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be
> released along with not one but two new Michael Moore
> books. It's also the release date of the equally
> self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD
> documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush
> mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the
> Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the state of
> the nation.
>
> When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that
> night, Bruce Springsteen will be barnstorming in another
> swing state, as the Vote for Change tour hits St. Paul. All
> that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown
> between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in
> the Morning."
>
> Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day,
> though, the one must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the
> White House," a DVD that is being specifically marketed in
> "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11."
> This documentary first surfaced at the Republican
> convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem
> with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith
> and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree
> thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives.
> Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the
> right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to
> distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no
> wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush,"
> and it succeeds.
>
> More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the
> hard-knuckles rationale of the president's
> vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It
> transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a
> "fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the
> "moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet." Its
> Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's
> essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations
> of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the
> misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from
> "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday
> hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with
> Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden
> light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George
> comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a
> parable anticipating the future president's miraculous
> ability to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush
> impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual come-on from a
> fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox
> machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again
> savior with retroactive chastity. As for the actual
> president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a
> split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle:
> they were separated at birth.
>
> "Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of
> "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney
> campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or
> unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They
> include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant
> Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent
> P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney
> campaign until August, when he resigned following The
> National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations
> that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in
> the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a film
> positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative"
> to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early
> business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust
> for most of its investors) or the number of children he's
> had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie
> claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).
>
>
> "Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle
> against the forces of evil that threaten our very
> existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the
> film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious
> broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her
> ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her
> radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in
> the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course,
> is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter.
> Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't
> matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president -
> who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade,"
> until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is
> divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy,
> testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the
> movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he
> does act on "promptings" from God. "I think we went into
> Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass
> destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but
> because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an
> evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why
> didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of
> evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such
> questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."
>
> The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as
> others have, that the president's invocation of religion in
> the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his
> favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant
> invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything
> is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic
> spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the
> founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents
> have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility.
> Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his
> premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in
> error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you
> believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed
> to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern
> Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of
> making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition
> committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the
> power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal
> evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of
> rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the
> light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light
> but America's and, by inference, the president's own.
>
> It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates
> him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen
> fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the
> word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith
> as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out
> in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the
> violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by
> Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic
> bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not
> agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big
> market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of
> Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To
> Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known
> as "the base."
>
> The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless
> administration policies, starting with its antipathy to
> stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention
> and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's
> genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo
> away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the
> most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious
> program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that
> the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a
> pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of
> eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election
> juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters
> of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites
> like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and
> Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but
> not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what
> they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived
> out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the
> Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail
> fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as
> "leading a global crusade against terrorism."
>
> In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion
> of the Jew," in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the
> community into a religious war, one of the kids concludes:
> "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should
> focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed.
> Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the
> Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results." He has
> a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology
> and his religious vanity are leading to good results now.
> The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin
> saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to
> acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in
> charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin,
> has earned cheers in some quarters for giving speeches at
> churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White House
> because God put him there" to lead the "army of God"
> against "a guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't
> get his day job done; he hasn't snared the guy named Osama
> he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."
>
> "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen
> because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay
> in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely
> entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an
> abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview,
> faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than
> competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a
> simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than
> the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle
> against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That
> no one in this documentary, including its hero,
> acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church
> and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a
> "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the
> fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."
>
> Far more startling is the inability of a president or his
> acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate
> Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of
> evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level
> of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the
> imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the
> imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century
> crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary
> conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if
> not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish
> sequel.
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/arts/03rich.html?ex=1097833241&ei=1&en=7d1
b9c7261ad29ed
>
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