Bible-Thumping War Drums
by Les Payne
Published on Sunday, March 9, 2003
The moment this time rode in on a question.
The 43rd president of the United States does not like questions. He avoids them as he avoids the thesaurus. And for good reason. George W. Bush is perhaps the least articulate president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most uninformed since Gerald Ford and the most provincial since, say, Warren G. Harding.
The question that brought the moment came toward the end of the president's Thursday night press conference. The tangled question was truly welcomed, as revealed by the president's eyes, as they unbeaded momentarily then nearly teared.
"How is your faith guiding you? What should you tell America or what should America do collectively as you instructed before 9/11? Should it pray?"
The magic word "pray" snapped Bush out of a tailspin of a depressed White House conference that must have sent his most devoted handlers to their rosaries.
"I appreciate that question a lot," Bush said.
Before getting to the studied answer, the president fumbled through snatches of remembered, trite briefing notes about failed Iraq diplomacy, the Saddam Hussein menace and the lessons of 9/11. Then he got down to the part of the question that got him enraptured.
"My faith sustains me," he uttered. "Because I pray daily. I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength. If we were to commit our troops ... I would pray for their safety. And I would pray for the safety of innocent Iraqi lives as well. One thing that's really great about our country is there are thousands of people who pray for me who I'll never see - be able to thank. But it's a humbling experience to think that people I will never have met have lifted me and my family up in prayer. And for that I'm grateful.
"I pray for peace, I pray for peace."
Seldom in modern times have we had a U.S. president speak so prayerfully while done up in his war paint. It recalled those memorial services at the Dover Air Base, or Jimmy Carter on Sunday mornings, or Billy Sunday anytime. One might be moved to snicker, or even to laugh, until one recalls what President Bush 41st said of his son.
"He is a man of the spirit," the father once said, trying to allay fears of his son's finger on the nuclear trigger. At one level, the former president meant that the current one is a born-again Christian. At another, more disturbing level, the father knew that his son had substituted the Bible for the bottle. In a timely article, Newsweek magazine detailed how President Bush wasted his young years in riotous living and how, at age 40, he went dry with the aid of a Bible-thumping, fundamentalist West Texas religious group. "It was goodbye Jack Daniels, Hello Jesus," according to a friend from those early days.
The problem with middle-aged drunks turned Christian is that they can't sleep without yakking about Jesus, and they won't let anyone else sleep, either. Instead of embracing their religion as a private matter, they flaunt it as a mission to convert. They can become a terrible nuisance, especially to those born into the religion.
The drunk-gone-zealot may be reassuring to the troubled family. But it is not altogether reassuring to a modern world facing such a fanatic on the trigger of weapons of mass destruction that are capable of destroying the Earth several times over.
Is it possible that through religious zealotry Bush might make himself a nuisance when facing a non-Christian menace? Already he shows signs of violating secular doctrine in this republic that constitutionally separates government and religion.
Already the religious talk has stirred the hard Christian right to expect their man to walk the walk and enact favorable legislation. Ministers of the evangelical movement, Newsweek points out, "form the core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century."
With war approaching, Newsweek stated, "This president - this presidency - is the most resolutely 'faith-based' in modern times, an enterprise founded, supported and guided by trust in the temporal and spiritual power of God."
Sept. 11 certainly shifted American foreign policy into high gear against global terrorism. Attacking Iraq, as Bush demands, is not, for many, the most effective way to answer that challenge.
The United Nations Security Council is split on the impending war against Iraq. The Congress may well oppose it, but it doesn't matter. This legislative body, so-called, has already ceded its war-making influence to the White House. Thus, opposition to the war has been left to the people of the Western world. And, by the millions, they have taken to the boulevards of France, Germany and Rome and the streets of the United States.
"We really don't need anybody's permission" to send American planes, missiles and troops into war against Iraq, Bush said at his press conference.
This is indeed true, and it is indeed scary.
commondreams.org |
