[Oe List ...] Moyers' speech

[george]

There Is No Tomorrow

  By Bill Moyers

  The Star Tribune


    Sunday 30 January 2005


  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 worldview 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 Ronald 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 12 volumes of the "Left 
Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and 
religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe 
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 antichrist 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 and 
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 Sen. 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 on 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 Nov. 2, including many who have made the 
apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.


  It is hard 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 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, which 
requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might 
damage natural resources.

	• 	 That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle 
tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, 
sport-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 plants and weaken consent decrees reached 
earlier with coal companies.

	• 	 That wants to open the Arctic [National] 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 $9 million - $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 Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that 
climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] 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. I see the future looking back 
at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we 
know not 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 our 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 is what the ancient 
Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart you.


  Believe me, it does.

Bill Moyers

George Holcombe