Archives for March 2004

If you’re not reading Riverbend, do yourself a favor and start. Anyhow, today she talks about life in Baghdad on the first anniversary of the start of Gulf W. War (as we’ve taken to calling it around our house):

And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspectionsÂ… journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.

But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening othersÂ… no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.

The war on terror is a jokeÂ… Madrid was proof of that last weekÂ… Iraq is proof of that everyday.

I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

I drove Darin to work the other day and ended up listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross as a result. She was interviewing Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the apparently unreadable Left Behind series, which has reportedly sold 58 million copies. (Slacktivist is a better person than I, subjecting himself to those books.)

You have got to listen to this interview; it is unreal.

If LaHaye and Co.—and their millions of readers—actually believe this stuff…I am aghast. I really didn’t know this kind of nonsense was out there. In the interview, LaHaye spouts what can only be generously termed “garbage” about Christianity and the Apocalypse and the End of Days. And this is, I am sure, the sanitized version, suitable to share with the “unbelievers” on NPR.

These guys want the world to end. They want us all to die. Of course, they’ll be fine, having been saved in the Rapture.

Other than the obvious warm fuzzies of superiority, what do these people get out of believing this shit? And that’s what it is: shit designed to turn off the critical thinking, to turn believers into bleating, fleeceable sheep who pray for death—not theirs, of course, but the evil ones, like Catholics and Jews.

Gross had on another author after LaHaye, Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. What Gorenberg had to say about the Left Behind series, along with Fundamentalism in general, made me immediately sign up to get his book at the library. I’ll report back after I’ve read it.