As I sit here contemplating our world, it occurs to me that Glenn Beck's decision to host his rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's I have a dream speech is eerily similar to the debate around the "ground zero" muslim community center. The difference, though, is that this serves Beck's purpose, the other does not.
The primary objection, as I understand it, to the community center is that it is disrespectful of what ground zero means to those who were impacted by those events. Yet Beck shows no reluctance to claim not merely proximate space, but the exact space, and date, of an event crucial to the hearts of civil rights activists and those who have suffered at the hands of white racism.
All of this does nothing more than to reinforce my despair that there is no honesty, no integrity, no surrender to truth, left in our culture.
The cross is left to confront the will to power.
More stream of consciousness. The issue for me is not whether Beck has a right to do what he is doing. Bit such a right has to be universally applied.
But Beck and his kind are not real people. They are characters acting in the theater of the real. They are reality television and so many are cast against their will as props for the political and monetary gain of this theater of the real (absurd).
How has this happened? I think the media can take half the blame for being the pawns of Big Money. However, the people who follow must take the other half of it. They must be willing to be led, to believe what they are told without questioning, because what they are seeing and hearing from people like Beck backs up what they want to believe. I don't think the Beck (or the Limbaugh/Palin/O'Reilly/et alia) followers, though they scream about saving the Constitution, have ever let go of their basic xenophobia/racism. The "Christians" who follow the parts of the Bible -- especially the Old Testament -- that they think back them up in conflating God and Country are in the same group, thumping away on the Bible they would hardly recognize if they really looked at all of it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for writing on this topic. It so needs to be discussed and this amazing blindness, willful refusal to see, has got to be met. You have said it:"The cross is left to confront the will to power." It is and ever was and ever shall be so.