Battlefield Earth

[Guest guest]

Below is a remarkable read from Bill Moyers

 

------------------------------

" One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is

no longer marginal. "

Battlefield Earth

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet

Posted on December 4, 2004, Printed on December 4, 2004

http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/

This week the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical

School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill

Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board,

said, " Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the

forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege with

the aim of engaging citizens. " Following is the text of Bill Moyers' response to

Ms. Streep's presentation of the award.

 

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you never

see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens

whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects

our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other

people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom. We

tell their stories.

 

The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He

enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes for

his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His bestseller The End of

Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off.

 

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we journalists

routinely cover – conventional, manageable programs like budget shortfalls and

pollution – may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, unmanageable

situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be the accelerating

deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge momentum like the

greenhouse effect that is causing the melt of the artic to release so much

freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed

that a weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the

kind of changes that could radically alter civilizations.

 

That's one challenge we journalists face – how to tell such a story without

coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to

understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.

 

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative

for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even

harder challenge – to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today.

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is

no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power

in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology

and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts

propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view

despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When

ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are

always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious

to the facts.

 

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My

favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging Grist, reminded us

recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural

resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In

public testimony he said, " after the last tree is felled, Christ will come

back. "

 

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about.

But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They

are the people who believe the bible is literally true – one-third of the

American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election

several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the

rapture index. That's right – the rapture index. Google it and you will find

that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the

left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right

warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers to a fantastical

theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who

took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has

captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

 

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot

recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to

my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its " biblical

lands, " legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown

in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned,

the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of

their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of

God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of

boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that

follow.

 

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on

these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are

sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the

rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared

solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support

with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up

act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are bound in

the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war

with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed – an

essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it,

the rapture index stood at 144 – just one point below the critical threshold

when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return, the righteous will

enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to

eternal hellfire.

 

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to

read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer - 'the road

to environmental apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian

fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be

disregarded but actually welcomed – even hastened – as a sign of the coming

apocalypse.

 

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who

hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the

recent election – 231 legislators in total – more since the election – are

backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th

congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most

influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader

Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick

Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis

Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent

with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently

quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the senate floor: " the days will come,

sayeth the Lord God, that i will send a famine in the land. " he seemed to be

relishing the thought.

 

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59

percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of

Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted

the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more

than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250

Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you

will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies

cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, " to worry about the environment. Why care

about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by

ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care

about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture?

And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed

the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion

barrels of light crude with a word? "

 

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will

provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's

providential history. You'll find there these words: " the secular or socialist

has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie... that needs to

be cut up so everyone can get a piece. " However, " [t]he Christian knows that the

potential in god is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in

god's earth... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated,

Christians know that god has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of

resources to accommodate all of the people. " No wonder Karl Rove goes around the

White House whistling that militant hymn, " Onward Christian Soldiers. " He turned

out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have made

the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

 

I can see in the look on your faces just how hard it is for the journalist to

report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal

level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident

future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I

have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street

whom I once asked: " What do you think of the market? " " I'm optimistic, " he

answered. " Then why do you look so worried? " And he answered: " Because I am not

sure my optimism is justified. "

 

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian and the Center

for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural

environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health

and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to

believe that – it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:

 

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has

declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for

an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act

and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and

their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires

the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.

 

That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe

inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles and

diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

 

That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain

information about environmental problems secret from the public.

 

That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting coal-fired

power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

 

That wants to open the artic wildlife refuge to drilling and increase drilling

in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier

island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

 

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection

Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - $2 million of it from the

administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor

families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have

been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end

to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families

$970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea

pigs for the study.

 

I read all this in the news.

 

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at

the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon Mobile and others

of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is " a myth, sea

levels are not rising, " scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are " an

embarrassment. "

 

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill

passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a

clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language

prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental

review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to

weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

 

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer –

pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 7;

Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from

those photographs and I say, " Father, forgive us, for we know now what we do. "

And then I am stopped short by the thought: " That's not right. We do know what

we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling

their world. "

 

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy?

Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain

indignation at injustice?

 

What has happened to out moral imagination?

 

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: 'How do you see the world? " And Gloucester,

who is blind, answers: " I see it feelingly.' "

 

I see it feelingly.

 

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I

know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets

us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to

fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those

faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to

match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called " hocma "

– the science of the heart... the capacity to see... to feel... and then to

act... as if the future depended on you.

 

Believe me, it does.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/

 

 

 

------ End of Forwarded Message

 

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

" The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. " --

Plato

" Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing

health care to all Americans is socialism. " -- anon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Thanks so much, DitziSis, for posting this. My mother is getting fed up

with her Baptist minister here in Massachusetts, who has been repeatedly

hammering home the idea in recent months that Jesus will be returning

SOON. I will print this speech by Bill Moyers out for her and hopefully

it will help her understand why her pastor may be acting like this.

 

Cathy B.

 

*************

 

Quote from Bill Moyers speech posted by DitziSis:

 

<snip>

" They are the people who believe the bible is literally true –

one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is

accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens

went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right – the

rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books

in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series

written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior,

Timothy LaHaye. These true believers to a fantastical theology

concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who

took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative

that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

 

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George

Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to

him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the

rest of its " biblical lands, " legions of the anti-Christ will attack it,

triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who

have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the

rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and

transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they

will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of

boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation

that follow. "

<snip>