Why Does God Hate Caribou? Drill for oil and screw Alaska's wildlife? Why, sure, all part of the imminent Rapture!
Source > http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/03/23/notes032305.DTL&nl=fix By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, March 23, 2005 * Printable Version * Email This Article Mark Morford Archives Subscribe to Notes & Errata Subscribe to RSS Feed Who is this guy? Why Does God Hate Caribou? - Drill for oil and screw Alaska's wi... 03/23/2005 Gay Marriage Saves California - Could a landmark decision re-emp... 03/18/2005 Who Will Free Fiona Apple? - Suddenly on the Internet: A flood o... 03/16/2005 Dead People Smoke Camels - Quit smoking the EZ way! Pop this new... 03/11/2005 And Now For Some *Real* Radio - Last week: The death of corporat... 03/09/2005 God wants oil. This is the message. This is the belief. God wants more oil and also uranium and coal and iron and nuclear waste and whatever the hell else we want to pump into or out of this godforsaken lump of floating space rock. Word to the GOP. In other words, God wants us, if the happily bleak and decidedly nasty interpretation of Bible verse currently extolled by the rabid evangelical mind-set now mauling the American political and social landscape is to be believed, to use up the Earth however we see fit and stomp all over this pointless ecological blob with our macho SUVs and manly tanks and badass army boots because it's all just one giant disposable sandbox o' fun anyway, right? Hey, it's all part of the Master Plan to destroy the Earth and smite our enemies and hasten the arrival of the Rapture. Didn't you know? We are all merely waiting until the Big Battle happens in Israel, the bloody clash between the True Believers and the Antichrist Heathens, to be followed immediately by Jesus gliding down on gilded wings made of fine Egyptian cotton and cheap American flags and wearing kickass robes of fire and ready to suck the true believers up to heaven through a giant Crazy Straw and wipe the whole goddamn secular slate clean. Right? Crazy rantings, you might say. Pseudo-religious babbling, you might titter. I have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about, you might blink. You would, of course, be wrong. Let us clarify just what the hell this means. Let us look at one recent, juicy example of How It All Works. Shall we? Let us look, for example, at the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, because the odds are now just sickeningly good that Big Oil is going to drill in that massive hunk of unspoiled nature, going to stomp on in and take 10 years to build massive oil rigs and enormous networks of pipelines and in the process destroy miles of delicate ecosystems in order to squeeze out one precious drop of oil into the vast bucket of America's gluttonous oil needs. And sure you can believe the GOP lie that it's all some noble effort to get us off foreign oil a tiny bit, and what with oil prices so ridiculously high and gas-sucking SUVs so obviously stupid and BushCo's absolute refusal to enact conservation measures or to pressure automakers to build even slightly more fuel-efficient cars, screwing the environment and drilling for more oil is the only option neocons give a damn about. But it's more than that. Because oil drilling in Alaska is merely the visible rash, the resultant twitch from the much deeper and more disturbing disease now plaguing 'Murka: the evangelical nutjob belief in the Second Coming, the big Jesus Farewell Tour, coming real soon to a sad warmongering nation near you. BYO Mel Gibson bobblehead. Don't believe it? Just follow the Line o' Sanctimony. It goes like this: A huge chunk of BushCo's voting bloc is evangelical or born-again Christian. Millions of otherwise decent and sincere Americans who actually believe the Bible as literal world-for-word truth, verbatim, no questions asked, not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set of nice, same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by which we set our moral compasses, but a set of actual facts told in cautionary dramedy, like a silly locust-ridden reality-TV show. Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition. And by many measures, the people who believe this are the same deeply terrified, misguided folk who tipped the electorate scale and put BushCo back in office, along with a great many other newly spawned power players in Washington and across the social strata, from judges to teachers to Cabinet members to congresspersons to the borderline insane Parents Television Council, people so terrified of the human female nipple that it screamed loud enough so that now uttering the word s-- on the radio will cost you $500,000. So then. The evangelicals are in power, having their bleak and apocalyptic moment in the white-hot sun. And Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their spokesman, their crusader, smashing those damned gays and repressing them uppity women and attacking those gul-dang Muslims and -- here's the kicker -- doing his God-sanctioned duty to bring about a grand holy war that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed it, Armageddon. And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret homosexual fantasy, Armageddon is where it's at. Do you see? This means that the war in Iraq is a good thing, because war brings us closer to the Final Conflict. War is what God wants. And nature, that pathetic and disposable handmaiden to humankind's happy bloodlust, is merely the fuel, the playpen, for that happy eventuality. Earth is but a finite resource given by God to humanity and meant to be all used up as fast as possible and the faster we use it all up the sooner Jesus comes. Just like Santa. Only, you know, not. Put another way: The environment does not matter because the Earth does not matter because all the sinful nonbelievers do not matter and all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ, and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most appalling array of environmentally abusive polices in American history? So what if we permanently scar some silly wildlife refuge in Alaska? So what if Dubya wants to gut the EPA and the Clean Air Act and clean water and wants to log national forests and relax all major pollution regulations on his buddies in big industry? It's all just a matter of time, anyway, until it's all over (most predictions put the Second Coming somewhere between the next 12 seconds and within 40 years). And in the meantime, while the believers wait, God will provide. Simple! So then. Go ahead and look at the nasty ANWR vote as a mere power grab, vicious and mostly pointless GOP maneuvering that will do absolutely nothing to solve the impending oil crisis. See it as a simple and typically heartless neocon power/money grab at your peril. That's just the surface. The truth is, the ANWR vote is merely a small part of a larger and nastier neoconservative attitude that has, at its engine, at its black and godless core, a silly fundamentalist belief in the End Times, in the Apocalypse. Don't believe it? Have yourself a nice read of famed journalist Bill Moyer's delicate, excellent essay "Welcome to Doomsday" via the New York Review of Books, which brings in all the numbers and data into a beautifully articulate essay on the state of the American religious landscape. Apparently, God really doesn't give a damn about caribou and oceans and air quality and the future of humankind. God is not, as most every enlightened mystic and poet and divine spiritual movement throughout history has believed, a luminous and deeply felt force to be found equally in every rock and tree and fish and caribou on the land. Enough of that. This is the new message. The Earth is, let it be known -- let us shout it from the rooftops of the White House and Congress and every budget-ravaged school across the land -- the Earth is no longer sacred. Not anymore. Not with this regime. What, protect a hunk of land and save some stupid animals when the Rapture is at hand? When Jesus is about to reappear? And when we can, until then, make heaps of cash and stomp the poor and pollute like crazy and have all manner of self-righteous fun? What kind of silly hell is that, you lost sodomite sinner? # Thoughts for the author? E-mail him. # Mark's column archives are here # The RSS feed for Mark's column is here Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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