A Mendacious Cult

In a blustiferous and insulting essay on what he calls the “liberal ghost dance,” Dr. Robert Godwin describes the American left as a failed cult. He may be right, at least about the "failed" part. As I wrote yesterday, if the events perpetrated by the right seem tragic, it is not good enough simply to blame the Current Occupant outright. The left – along with the sane members of the right – failed when it permitted the Christofascists to come to power. Dr. Godwin, apparently as well aware of the tragedies as the next fellow, could have used his ample powers of observation to see the world as it actually is, but instead, like the more disturbed of the neurotics he treats in his practice, he has chosen the path of self-delusion.

I am not qualified to analyze the innards of his mind. Who is? But I do feel quite capable of seeing and evaluating objective reality. I see, for instance, that the major television news media are all owned by mega-large corporations, and am able to deduce from that seeing that if the media do tend to be biased, their leaning will predictably be to the right rather than the left. It was after all, the media who carried water for the Christofascists and sold us on the war in Iraq. It is the media who still focus our attention on kidnappings in Aruba, car wrecks in New Jersey, and the devastation wrought by natural events, while remaining silent on the economic perils of the Wal-Mart business model, by which I mean, the model of the entire American non-food retail sector. It is prime-time CNN who harps night-after-night on the evils of illegal immigration, while failing – again, night-after-night – to recognize the humanity of the people involved.

Dr. Godwin seems to believe that Adam Smith, with his invisible hand, and Herbert Spenser with his social Darwinism, have invented a system so imbued with logical perfection that any deviation from its dogma would constitute social suicide. He, like the hard core right, has conflated laissez faire capitalism with pseudo-Christianity, producing a world in which western values are to be treated as the world’s values, and western Christians as the new chosen of God, the “fittest,” who are to survive in a great and gory struggle for world domination. He demagogues so-called “multiculturalism” as a major root of evil, but turns a blind eye to Reason, favoring what appears to be a fuzzy religiosity based in feelings and imaginings perceptible only to those, like him, who are the true messengers of righteousness. When asked to explain how he could be opposed to multiculturalism while holding to pure subjectivity as the criterion for truth, he chose not to answer but rather informed the questioner (me) – in quaint ad hominem terms – that he was not welcome to the club. [Actually, he did say something that may have sounded to the faithful like an explanation, to the effect that “multiculturalism” is the belief that all value systems are equal, but without explaining how we might, without reason, with only “imagination” as a criterion, separate the sheep from the goats.]

I earlier had explained to an old friend that I would refrain from asking the physician to heal himself, since it seemed, at first glance, that he might be conducting one of those “all blue-eyed people are stupid” experiments. It did not seem possible to me that a man of his education and obvious talents could have failed to see the many logical contradictions being traded as currency by him and his flock. It seemed possible that his spiel was a fraud to see how many of the faithful he could rope in. That idea was somewhat weakened when it became apparent that some of the more virulent of his victims were actually him using alter egos made possible by the magic of blog space, like a rigged voting machine, to deepen the illusion of his power. I still have not given up the notion completely that One Cosmos is an experiment, and that in a year or so, we shall see Dr. Bob on Oprah explaining how he peddled his outrageous “logic” to the gullible souls of hyperspace. If it were not so truly dangerous I would admire him for his creativity, but the possibility is still out there that the man is serious, and that those he preaches to take it all in as inspired gospel, some even managing to believe he’s preaching real Christianity.

. . . Proving once again the old adage, “Nobody ever went broke by over-estimating the gullibility of the American people.”