In Excelsis De-e-o

Has Christian conservative politics come full circle? Suddenly, it doesn’t even matter if you are a thrice-divorced, cross-dressing abortion-simp with a gay ex-roommate as long as you believe in a police state and are eager to slaughter Ay-rabs. I just love values clarification, don’t you?

I refer, of course, to the endorsement by the 700 Club’s Pat Robertson of the presidential aspirations of Rudolph Giuliani. How appropriate that it occurred a mere 48 hours after the death of Paul Tibbetts who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 and then spent the next 60 years merrily selling Enola Gay memorabilia and cackling, ‘What a good job I’ve done, mummy!’ Tibbetts recently said Islamic radicals should be nuked down to the last man, a sentiment that would surely bring a full-dentured smile to the beatific mug of Holy Pat and his 900,000 listeners.

It’s curious that amidst all the breathless talk about our safety and the scary dangers of Iran possessing a nuclear capability, one rarely hears discussion of the actual use of these weapons or even of the sorts of doomsday scenarios about the human habitat that were common currency during the Cold War.

The existence of a major blind spot in our national consciousness dawned on me gradually as a child of the post-WW2 epoch when the anniversary of the nuking of the Japanese came around each August. Two gregarious and well-liked twins lived in my midwestern town who were vets of the Pacific front; their children were my classmates. They’d be interviewed by the local newspaper, and their answer ran along the lines of, The Japs started it, and we finished it, and townspeople would respond with a ‘Yeah!’ and approving nods of the head. No one ever stopped to ask whether powerless civilians under a military dictatorship deserved to be burned to death by the tens of thousands. Our Christian lives were undisturbed by irony.

So the blood-lust of the Robertsons and his camp isn’t at all novel or particularly surprising, but the response of the rest of the movement will be fascinating to watch. Will the thin towel covering the reactionary underpinning of the Christian right wing now drop entirely to the ground, exposing its unkempt neofascist pudenda? Or will the ranks balk at the leadership’s crass jettisoning of their pet Christian family issues in favor of world conquest and the Rapture?

Who knows? I confess to being utterly and delightedly clueless about the answer as I pride myself on both my lack of understanding of these bipeds and my bottomless disinterest in them. But their reaction may well have relevance for, um, our chances of dying in our beds.