delusional no longer marginal/bill moyers (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

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Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:16:16 -0600
From: Lawrence Sawyer <milkmag at COMCAST.NET>
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU>
To: POETICS at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU
Subject: Re: delusional no longer marginal/bill moyers

please forward this to everyone you know....
_______________________


"The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal,"
Bill Moyers, upon receiving the Harvard School of Medicine's Global
Environmental Citizen Award, December 10, 2004

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you 
never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain 
citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental change 
affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores 
of other people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's 
wisdom. We tell their stories. The journalist who truly deserves this award is 
my friend, Bill McKibben. He enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own 
pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the 
environment. His bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's 
Silent Spring left off.

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we 
journalists routinely cover-conventional, manageable programs like budget 
shortfalls and pollution--may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, 
unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be the 
accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge 
momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the melt of the Arctic to 
release so much fresh water into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is 
growing alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt and 
overwhelming changes--the kind of changes that could radically alter 
civilizations.

  That's one challenge we journalists face—how to tell such a story without 
coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to 
understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear. As 
difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative 
for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even 
harder challenge--to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. 
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is 
no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power 
in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology 
and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts 
propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world 
view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When 
ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are 
always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious 
to the facts.

  Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My 
favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us 
recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural 
resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In 
public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come 
back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking 
about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the 
country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true--1/3 of 
the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past 
election, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing 
in the rapture index. That's right-the rapture index. Google it and you will 
find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the 
"Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious 
right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical 
theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who 
took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has 
captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot 
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding 
to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical 
lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown 
in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are 
burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted 
out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right 
hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer 
plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of 
tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported 
on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are 
sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring 
the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have 
declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their 
support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a 
warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are 
bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of 
man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but 
welcomed--an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I 
Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144--just one point below the critical 
threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the 
righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to 
read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer. Read it 
and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that 
environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually 
welcomed--even hastened--as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist makes 
clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are 
beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent 
election—231 legislators in total, more since the election—are backed by the 
religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress 
earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential 
Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill 
Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick 
Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis 
Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt.

The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. 
Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on 
the Senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a 
famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 
percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of 
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible 
predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to 
the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 
250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And 
you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent 
prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the 
environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and 
pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold 
in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be 
rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when 
the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a 
few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will 
provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's 
providential history. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist 
has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie...that needs to 
be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian knows that 
the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in 
god's earth......while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, 
Christians know that god has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of 
resources to accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around 
the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He 
turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have 
made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

I can see in the looks on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist to 
report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal 
level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a 
confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it 
about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on 
Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm 
optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: 
"Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian and the Center 
for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural 
environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health 
and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want 
to believe that--it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has 
declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for 
an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act 
and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and 
their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires 
the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources. 
This for an administration:

  * That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe 
inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles and 
diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

  * That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep 
certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

  * That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting 
coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal 
companies.

  * That wants to open the artic wildlife refuge to drilling and increase 
drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped 
barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection 
Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars--$2 million of it from the 
administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council-to pay poor families 
to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked 
to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their 
use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 
each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs 
for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends 
at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and 
others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is 'a myth,' 
sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are 
'an embarrassment.'

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill 
passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a 
clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language 
prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental 
review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to 
weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and looked up at the pictures on my desk, next to the 
computer-pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of 
Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at 
me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know now what 
we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do 
know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. 
Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? 
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain 
indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination? On the heath, Lear asks Gloucester: 
"'How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it 
feelingly." I see it feelingly.

  The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist 
I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that 
sets us free-not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will 
to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to 
those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need 
to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 
'hocma' --the science of the heart.....the capacity to see....to feel....and 
then to act...as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.