Why Does God Hate Caribou?

[Guest guest]

Why Does God Hate Caribou?

Drill for oil and screw Alaska's wildlife? Why, sure,

all part of the imminent Rapture!

 

Source >

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/03/23/notes032305.DTL & nl=fix

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

 

 

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God wants oil. This is the message. This is the

belief. God wants more oil and also uranium and coal

and iron and nuclear waste and whatever the hell else

we want to pump into or out of this godforsaken lump

of floating space rock. Word to the GOP.

 

In other words, God wants us, if the happily bleak and

decidedly nasty interpretation of Bible verse

currently extolled by the rabid evangelical mind-set

now mauling the American political and social

landscape is to be believed, to use up the Earth

however we see fit and stomp all over this pointless

ecological blob with our macho SUVs and manly tanks

and badass army boots because it's all just one giant

disposable sandbox o' fun anyway, right?

 

Hey, it's all part of the Master Plan to destroy the

Earth and smite our enemies and hasten the arrival of

the Rapture. Didn't you know?

 

We are all merely waiting until the Big Battle happens

in Israel, the bloody clash between the True Believers

and the Antichrist Heathens, to be followed

immediately by Jesus gliding down on gilded wings made

of fine Egyptian cotton and cheap American flags and

wearing kickass robes of fire and ready to suck the

true believers up to heaven through a giant Crazy

Straw and wipe the whole goddamn secular slate clean.

Right?

 

Crazy rantings, you might say. Pseudo-religious

babbling, you might titter. I have no idea what the

hell this guy is talking about, you might blink.

 

You would, of course, be wrong.

 

Let us clarify just what the hell this means. Let us

look at one recent, juicy example of How It All Works.

Shall we?

 

Let us look, for example, at the Alaska National

Wildlife Refuge, because the odds are now just

sickeningly good that Big Oil is going to drill in

that massive hunk of unspoiled nature, going to stomp

on in and take 10 years to build massive oil rigs and

enormous networks of pipelines and in the process

destroy miles of delicate ecosystems in order to

squeeze out one precious drop of oil into the vast

bucket of America's gluttonous oil needs.

 

And sure you can believe the GOP lie that it's all

some noble effort to get us off foreign oil a tiny

bit, and what with oil prices so ridiculously high and

gas-sucking SUVs so obviously stupid and BushCo's

absolute refusal to enact conservation measures or to

pressure automakers to build even slightly more

fuel-efficient cars, screwing the environment and

drilling for more oil is the only option neocons give

a damn about.

 

But it's more than that. Because oil drilling in

Alaska is merely the visible rash, the resultant

twitch from the much deeper and more disturbing

disease now plaguing 'Murka: the evangelical nutjob

belief in the Second Coming, the big Jesus Farewell

Tour, coming real soon to a sad warmongering nation

near you. BYO Mel Gibson bobblehead.

 

Don't believe it? Just follow the Line o' Sanctimony.

It goes like this:

 

A huge chunk of BushCo's voting bloc is evangelical or

born-again Christian. Millions of otherwise decent and

sincere Americans who actually believe the Bible as

literal world-for-word truth, verbatim, no questions

asked, not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set

of nice, same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by

which we set our moral compasses, but a set of actual

facts told in cautionary dramedy, like a silly

locust-ridden reality-TV show. Extreme Jesus:

Apocalypse Edition.

 

And by many measures, the people who believe this are

the same deeply terrified, misguided folk who tipped

the electorate scale and put BushCo back in office,

along with a great many other newly spawned power

players in Washington and across the social strata,

from judges to teachers to Cabinet members to

congresspersons to the borderline insane Parents

Television Council, people so terrified of the human

female nipple that it screamed loud enough so that now

uttering the word s-- on the radio will cost you

$500,000.

 

So then. The evangelicals are in power, having their

bleak and apocalyptic moment in the white-hot sun. And

Bush, by all accounts, is their leader, their

spokesman, their crusader, smashing those damned gays

and repressing them uppity women and attacking those

gul-dang Muslims and -- here's the kicker -- doing his

God-sanctioned duty to bring about a grand holy war

that will hasten the arrival of, you guessed it,

Armageddon.

 

And baby, for any evangelical worth his secret

homosexual fantasy, Armageddon is where it's at.

 

Do you see? This means that the war in Iraq is a good

thing, because war brings us closer to the Final

Conflict. War is what God wants. And nature, that

pathetic and disposable handmaiden to humankind's

happy bloodlust, is merely the fuel, the playpen, for

that happy eventuality. Earth is but a finite resource

given by God to humanity and meant to be all used up

as fast as possible and the faster we use it all up

the sooner Jesus comes. Just like Santa. Only, you

know, not.

 

Put another way: The environment does not matter

because the Earth does not matter because all the

sinful nonbelievers do not matter and all that does

matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ,

and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most

appalling array of environmentally abusive polices in

American history? So what if we permanently scar some

silly wildlife refuge in Alaska?

 

So what if Dubya wants to gut the EPA and the Clean

Air Act and clean water and wants to log national

forests and relax all major pollution regulations on

his buddies in big industry? It's all just a matter of

time, anyway, until it's all over (most predictions

put the Second Coming somewhere between the next 12

seconds and within 40 years). And in the meantime,

while the believers wait, God will provide. Simple!

 

So then. Go ahead and look at the nasty ANWR vote as a

mere power grab, vicious and mostly pointless GOP

maneuvering that will do absolutely nothing to solve

the impending oil crisis. See it as a simple and

typically heartless neocon power/money grab at your

peril. That's just the surface.

 

The truth is, the ANWR vote is merely a small part of

a larger and nastier neoconservative attitude that

has, at its engine, at its black and godless core, a

silly fundamentalist belief in the End Times, in the

Apocalypse. Don't believe it? Have yourself a nice

read of famed journalist Bill Moyer's delicate,

excellent essay " Welcome to Doomsday " via the New York

Review of Books, which brings in all the numbers and

data into a beautifully articulate essay on the state

of the American religious landscape.

 

Apparently, God really doesn't give a damn about

caribou and oceans and air quality and the future of

humankind. God is not, as most every enlightened

mystic and poet and divine spiritual movement

throughout history has believed, a luminous and deeply

felt force to be found equally in every rock and tree

and fish and caribou on the land.

 

Enough of that. This is the new message. The Earth is,

let it be known -- let us shout it from the rooftops

of the White House and Congress and every

budget-ravaged school across the land -- the Earth is

no longer sacred. Not anymore. Not with this regime.

What, protect a hunk of land and save some stupid

animals when the Rapture is at hand? When Jesus is

about to reappear? And when we can, until then, make

heaps of cash and stomp the poor and pollute like

crazy and have all manner of self-righteous fun? What

kind of silly hell is that, you lost sodomite sinner?

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