Irvin Baxter, Jr. publishes a magazine called “End Time,” has a radio show called “Politics and Religion,” and generally tries to explain the Book of Revelations to an eternally confused and fearful populace of “true believers.”
So what was he doing on the radio yesterday decrying the Bush Administration’s continued war against personal freedom?
“I admit I voted for President Bush twice and I pray each day that his administration will be wise leaders, but I cannot remain silent any longer! I know that I am going to face problems for speaking out, I can see my wife right now outside the studio looking at me in horror, but we must stand up and have the courage to speak the truth.”
Truly, Baxter is beside himself. Alberto Gonzalez has announced that henceforth all internet activities of all Americans will be captured by their ISPs, turned over to the NSA and another massive database will be built and maintained by the government in its ongoing and highly inept battle against “terror.”
“This is wrong! The national ID card is wrong! Its the Mark of the Beast! America is a land of freedom and that freedom is being taken away in the name of the “War on Terror”. But this war against our freedoms is much more serious and pervasive. Once our freedom is gone, it will never come back.”
I am not sure what to make of these endtimers. Are they for it or against it? I would say for it, but Baxter seems to believe that Bush’s policies now tilt the struggle for humanity in Satan’s favor and that it is the duty of all good Christians to openly oppose these harmful policies before it is too late.
How do we fight off this satanic evil emanating from the Whitewash House?
Buy his magazine! There are 150,000 circulated every month with an average of five readers per circulated copy. 750,000 potential Democrats right in the heart of the Bible Belt!
Amen, I say, reciting the Lords Prayer after switching off the radio and reverting my attention to the white stripe down the middle of the endless road.
I live right smack above the Florida Panhandle and I heard a radio show that was similar about two months ago. All these little tiny religious radio stations around here! Nobody has freedom the direction we are going in. The government will intrude, manipulate, and exude. Bush has used the religious right as much as anybody else they have used and finally they are all scratching their heads wondering about all of these freedoms they are throwing away and what that could mean someday having someone cram something down their throat that they might not be too excited about! FINALLY! Let Freedom Ring!
Its funny, listening to these radio outlets has made me far less convinced, not more, that the religious right are an organized conspiracy seeking to take over the nation.
Why dont we engage them instead of usingthem to further sharpen our own blog amped paranoia abouyt Dominionism and other mindrot?
I was driving down a secluded highway to Pensacola that day. They were doing a call in and I wanted to call in so badly and tell them how much I agreed with every single thing they said and here I was this stupid Democrat.
We are probably in agreement because we live among the Bible thumpers and so know them in fact not myth like the insular liberals of the NE and Cali….I fear that insularity is killing whatever chance progressives have of moving the political dynamic left, when it appears now or soon is the time best available for moving, as the neocons seem to perpetually self immolate.
I can relate well because I spend a lot of time writing about what is happening in our country from a military family perspective. Liberal progressives insist on being the “good guys” whenever force is used….and we aren’t the “good guys” in the Iraq War. Even my Aunt has worried about the left losing touch with its military and having an even larger less sane military majority align with the Republican Party trying to find some kind of approval in all this hell. So I write. I write to span the rift and I write in hopes that Americans will reweave their military into their lives and beliefs and perhaps change the destiny of the next war powerful men seek to start. When peace seeking hearts embrace the soldier, a natural opening of all peaceful avenues that that soldier can pursue in foreign hostile lands takes place. We all desire love, approval, acceptance and that includes even our soldiers. I am not sure what approach to take in bridging the religious rift. It isn’t as familiar to me, I only know that it exists and sometimes clearly displays itself before me.
I have long advocated a return of the draft as the only way to make sure the “good guys” do their duty or reject it by breaking the law.
The quality of soldiership would suffer as a bunch of wusses like me failed to scale the wall or do even a single chin up.
I know because I flunked the Marine workout they made us do in high school PE, and that was 35 years ago!
But in my army the “leaders” would always be looking behind them, as soon as we were taught how to use weapons. They wouldnt be so easily committing my enlisted ass to something so inane as toppling Sadam or saving Vietnam from communism.
I have heard expressed about the Iraq War. My husband teaches target I.D. and my husband lives for the day when friendly fire never occurs. It seems most old soldiers who teach such things aim for reaching perfection. They have huge standards for themselves. My husband displays a large assortment of video showing us(America) killing our own troops. One that took place in Iraq shows us firing on one of our own tanks, we thought they were Iraqis. One soldier manages to escape from the tank and is crawling on the ground but the soldiers firing on him are really good……on the radio they talk about needing to get that one and they do. Many of the soldiers my husband teaches have been enlisted soldiers on the ground in Iraq who have come home and put in to be a pilot and were accepted. Some of them already suffer from PTSD and don’t even know it yet and nobody in the Army is going to tell them or if they do the soldier refuses to hear it. Some soldiers now darkly joke that that video was friendly fire and fratricide, but throwing a grenade in the commanders tent is just change of command. I hear so many jokes like this…..bad bad things can only be waiting around the corner when people have been pushed so far that they joke about shit like that in the middle of a war.
Tracy, I long for the day when US troops are a force for good in the world, instead of the disposable pawns of Global business interests.
If I feel this strongly, I can’t imagine how much our soldiers want to fight AGAINST the murderers and rapists to protect victims of atrocities. We could be proud of our military if they were saving the babies in Darfur or rescuing mothers in Rawanda.
And they could be proud of themselves.
There are so many parallels to Viet Nam, the most obvious to me being our troops’ inability to identify “the enemy”. I imagine that any young soldier who expects his/her service will help Iraquis to be free, is brutally disillusioned in a few days.
This is true. Most of them are complex individuals. Some of them are so taken with hatred of their own selves or sexuality that they cannot be reached. But that is few. Most are just people trying to do right. They want to act in a way that is righteous. Some things they are told are wrong, and they respond in an emotional manner. (BAD SCARY GAY MAN). But, excluding the leaders, they also do struggle.
Their churches have been taken over. The Southern Baptist Convention has taken over churches, and asked people to leave the congregations. These are churches people have been in for generations – so the Reverend must be right? The political power of taking over a religion that is grounded in the apparatus of unquestionable power of the Roman Empire is not to be dismissed.
But it is dismissed by the idiot cultural bigots who brought us Dukakis and Kerry. People who do not realize that in their enlightened liberalism they live in a city (Boston) more segregated (in statistical reality) than any city of comparable size in the South.
Federal investment in poverty and education are the only way out of this. Investment in rural poverty is a democratic issue, even if we don’t represent “them”.
In electoral terms the northeast liberal set has to get over its bigotry and talk to people who get bad information and then make bad choices. Give them respect and information, no thinly veiled contempt. There are cultural reasons not to nominate Hillary, like Kerry or Dukakis. Southern folks find them to be as charming as you would find a drawling, back-slapping, race-loving, pro-choice, church-going, anti-poverty provincial. Which is to say, no reason except cultural ignorance and the resulting bigotry.
NOT KIDDING! I have longed to put my finger on what it is that is so different from how I grew up to how some of the people I now live with have grown up. The poverty is an enormous issue. First off, let me just say that some of these people down here have a strength and a faith that is amazing. They have eaten nails and pissed lemonade! They have been a kind of poor I have no grasp of, but they have a spiritual connection to what is really important in life that so many of us lack. Their faith though is being used against them right now and I would say that it is hard for many of them to clearly see this right now. They have so little to lose and when someone threatens that the wrath of God will be visited upon them if they don’t do this or that, and the spirituality of their faith has carried their family through so many hard hard hard damn times in the past….I don’t think they can help not shaking in their damn boots right now! Your post is beautiful and finally clarified something to me that I was experiencing but could not for the life of me “GET” at what it was!
Yes. I too lived in Boston from 1976-1984 coming directly from Cali and was shocked, shocked to discover the amount and virulence of the racism practiced by the mainly Irish and (some Italian) underclass against African Americans.
I have made this point many times, although not so eloquently as you.
A diary based on this theme might be digested like a glass of cold poison but sometimes outing the poisonous truth is more necesary than universal blogospheric acclaim for stating the same mundane cliches which no longer have much meaning.
The left surely is its own worst enemy.
Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in Heaven
And give us this day
Our daily bread
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver from evil
For thine is the kingdom
Forever
Amen