Print this post.PATRICE GREANVILLE
As we all know religion is sacred in America (pun intended), and religiosity, riddled with commercial parasitism, doubly so. Religion —chiefly of the Judeo-Christian sort—is indeed big business in America, a powerful and ever present censoring social force, with the aggravating circumstance that many of the faithful are also routinely enlisted in political crusades that cynically exploit their knee-jerk conservatism and parochialism to betray, in practice, every single moral teaching exemplified by the life of Jesus and the prophets.
The upshot is that although the US is by its Constitution a secular nation in which church and state are formally separate, among the native political class, from the president on down, the genuflections never seem to stop, and the trend has not lessened with modernity. Fact is, as the empire has descended further into its inevitable moral disintegration, as the last remnants of democracy vanish and criminality in high office becomes ever more serious, continuous, and blatant, a new malignant “normal” is established, but this in turn requires a new level of mind manipulation and hypocrisy to maintain the balance of legitimacy. The concomitant of this squalid process is that the US is today a shamelessly plutocratic society governed 24/7 through the filter of public relations. Even Orwell might have been shocked.
Under such circumstances, the hustlers who surround the American president—by definition the most visible de facto pontiff in the land—could not resist the allure of religion, low-hanging fruit in their search for weapons of mass persuasion. After all, in the eyes of the credulous and unthinking masses, what can be more imposing and seductive, more effective in terms of sheer manipulative shorthand, than to invest the president, nothing but an ambitious politician often involved in the selling of Nuremberg-class war crimes or some major betrayal of the public interest, with the scent of religious authority?
I’m certain that many thoughtful foreigners—and even Americans—have been struck and repulsed over the years by the sheer incongruity of watching an American president close his perorations with a sanctimonious “God bless America” incantation. Considering the high crimes that this office has come to represent around the world, the invocation is surely one of the great examples in history of callous hypocrisy writ large. (Read more on how the “God Bless America” nonsense came to be accepted as normal among American politicians in our Appendix below.)
Unusual television
Against this backdrop of official piety, a phony reverence that commercial television has done so much to perpetuate, it is truly surprising and reinvigorating to find that some shows, like Boston Legal, a product no less of network television, have occasionally managed to escape the official cathechism and stood up to rip the stifling conformity to shreds. Written by the iconoclastic David E. Kelley, and made real with a brilliant cast that included William Shatner, James Spader, Candy Bergen, Julie Bowen, Craig Bierko, Rene Auberjonois, Mark Valley, and others of similar merit, Boston Legal in its five seasons (2044-2008) provided consistently superior entertainment, deftly mixing abundant laughs with drama, frequently using the courtroom for the examination of thorny issues.
https://youtu.be/Z1nZ2u8C0HI
In this specific outing, Whose God Is It Anyway? (aired Oct. 17, 2006 on ABC), Scientology is mordantly denounced for the notorious fraud that it is, but when we look closer we see that while much of the fire and ridicule is rightfully leveled at it, Alan Shore’s presentation for the defense (James Spader) is actually a trashing of all religions. Watch closely. The “religion” segment begins at approximately 12:30. —PG
[box] Social critic Patrice Greanville is the founder and currently editor in chief of The Greanville Post. He also serves as publisher for TGP’s sister site, Cyrano’s Journal Today. [/box]
APPENDIX 1———Useful Digressions
‘God Bless America’ In Presidential Speeches Has A Little-Known, Uncomfortable Beginning
“God bless America” has become the expected way for U.S. presidents to end official speeches. But that wasn’t always the case, explain David Domke and Kevin Coe, authors of the book The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.
The first president to say it was Richard Nixon, who dropped the phrase during an attempt at damage control for the burgeoning Watergate scandal on April 30, 1973.“Tonight, I ask for your prayers to help me in everything I do throughout the days of my presidency,” he said. “God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.”
Nixon pretending to meditate, with the charlatan Billy Graham by his side.
The phrase didn’t catch on during the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter years, but Ronald Reagan’s presidency definitively ushered in the era of “God bless America.” Reagan used the line when accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1980, and made it his standard sign-off once in the White House. Since then, it’s become a standard part of the language of the American presidency.
Domke and Coe note that out of the 229 major Presidential speeches from the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 to the end of Carter’s term in 1981, Nixon’s use of “God bless America” was the only the time a president used the phrase publicly. In contrast, from the inauguration of Reagan in 1981 to the Bush administration in 2008, 49 out of 129 major presidential addresses used the line.
Are modern presidents simply more religious than their predecessors? Domke and Coe don’t think so, writing:It’s that “God bless America,” true to its presidential birth on that April evening in 1973, has grown to be politically expedient. The phrase is a simple way for Presidents and politicians of all stripes to pass the God and Country test; to sate the appetites of those in the public and press corps who want assurance that this person is a real, God-fearing American. It’s the verbal equivalent of donning an American flag lapel pin: few notice if you do it, but many notice if you don’t.
How did Barack Obama end his 2013 State of the Union? It’s not difficult to guess — “God bless you, and God bless these United States of America.”
1 comment
Excellent review of a fine tv program, unusual for US fare. I especially appreciate the fact that Greanville Post is so comprehensive in its treatment of any subject. Like here we find an addendum giving us much to think about concerning the opportunistic use of religion in routine political speeches.