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the truth kills fascists

Welcome to the Moment of Truth, feeding the fever tree fever.

Oh, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in an alienating dystopian technofascist nightmare of evil, corruption, lies, violence, child rape, animal rape and planet rape. And that’s the good news.

The bad news is, this can all go on for quite a while longer and get a lot worse.

Now, I understand why it has to be this way. Back in the old days, when we were in the Garden of Eden, we disobeyed god and then acted all squirrely about it. Our misbehavior is why we must live in a world where evil is the norm. And no one knows this better than our religious leaders, our ultra-orthodox rabbis, our fundamentalist mullahs, our Hindutva mosque burners, our evangelical C-street political operators, and of course our Pope. These spiritual lights of humanity are so tapped into the will of the gods that they are helping Heaven conduct evil into the world to punish us humanity.

What greater calling can there be for a servant of God than to multiply evil in a world of sinners? God decreed we should live in pain, suffering and toil. Why would a servant of God do anything but help him fulfill his decree?

Of course if you’re really holy, you’re exempt from the fate of the rank and file. Evil and misery is fine for the masses, but yours is a higher calling. You must enjoy pleasure, riches, ease and power so that you can better serve God by making the great masses miserable.

This is clearly the theology behind the Pope’s response to evidence that he may have been responsible for concealing and facilitating the crimes of child-molesting priests. Rather than address the evidence in the way a groundling might be forced to do, he takes offense that such evidence should be considered by anyone, let alone the great Pope himself. Shouldn’t it be obvious that the Pope would never do anything anyone could ever consider wrong? And if so, shouldn’t it also follow that to bring any evidence of papal wrong-doing to the attention of the world is first and foremost an attack upon God and his church?

There is only one path a man could take to responding with such arrogance to revelations that evidence of disturbing behavior on his part has come to light. There is only one kind of thinking that would allow for such arrogance, and it is simply that the man’s office itself, his position in the church hierarchy, the very height to which he has risen in his career, and the very tall and white ceremonial hat he wears, ought to be sufficient proof that he could never do anything wrong and ought never be accused of having done anything wrong. The very accusation is an insult to the hat and by extension all Catholics everywhere. To insult the hat is to persecute Catholics. Only a man who believes his office should excuse him from dirtying himself with normal human reality could make such a claim. Only a man completely sure of his unassailable right to conduct evil into the world at the expense of anyone and everyone else could be that big of an asshole.

Dick Cheney and the Pope have a lot in common. The Bush administration and the current papal regime react to valid criticism in exactly the same way: they take offense at the very notion that they are expected to respond to such criticism as if they were merely average human beings. This is what we might call the F-U style of leadership.

F-U governance used to be called The Divine Right of Kings. But there aren’t really kings anymore per se. There’s a Pope, there are policy makers and profiteers, there are abusive law enforcement officers, there are sneaky, election-fraud-committing governments, and they don’t all declare that their power comes from God. The thing they all have in common is that they say F-U to the rest of society whenever that society attempts to hold them accountable in ways they consider beneath their station.

There are plenty of common people who live life according to the F-U principle. It’s really the combination of authority and F-U style that I’m talking about here.

Some people really respond to F-U authority. People who wouldn’t be willing to take F-U from any other source are often willing to take it from authority. Some can’t be bothered to respect any authority that isn’t F-U authority. They can be easily convinced that the F-U isn’t aimed at them but at certain “others” who actually need to be told to F-U. There are still people who believe that when Dick Cheney was saying F-U, he was only saying F-U to liberals. They are wrong. Dick Cheney said F-U to everyone. Similarly, there are some Catholics who believe the Pope is only saying F-U to heretics and infidels and hellbound miscreants. Not true. The Pope is saying F-U to everyone. The only people who don’t get this are those who would say F-U if they were in the same position as the Pope. But they are getting an F-U from the Pope as surely as is the most scarred victim of priestly child molestation covered up by a bishop.

Democracy was supposed to put a damper on F-U government. That never worked out. If voters didn’t want F-U government, democracy might have been effective in preventing it. But since so many do want F-U government, they’ll keep voting for it, and until that changes we’ll have plenty of F-U government for years to come.

There are many other factors contributing to the horrible condition the world finds itself in today. But F-U governance is particularly galling because it’s so out of place in a self-respecting society. For all its ubiquity, F-U governance feels like an anachronism. It always harkens back to an earlier time. It’s something we instinctively feel we should have got rid of by now, like the common cold or bad TV reception or belief in the devil.

I don’t think I’m alone in finding F-U governance kind of retro. Maybe it will eventually go out of fashion for a while. It would be nice if didn’t put it off for too long. When it comes to dismantling outdated, anachronistic social ills that seem more suited to a brutal past, there’s no time like the present.

This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!