Bush's Biggest Con

For several weeks now, nearly every day I get home to find a message that’s been left on my machine by a some cheesy loan company trying to do me a favor by loaning me money at some rediculous rate of interest. I don’t know how they got my number, or why they still think that there would be any chance whatsoever that I might be interested in what they have to say, but they do. It’s another example of what’s called the “hard sell”. For me it’s always an extreme turn-off, because I take it as the sure sign of a con artist attempting by sheer force of will to sell me some defective product or service, or at the very least something I don’t need or want. Though I have to think it must work on some people or they wouldn’t bother to try it out on me.

George Bush is the hard-sell president. Think of him as the salesman that’s been sent out by large corporations to shake down average Americans. Because that’s exactly what he is. What he’s selling is always some version of a con job, and never anything that most America would actually want or need. Whether it’s selling a “Clear Skies Initiative” designed to gut pollution laws and make our air dirtier, or a “No Child Left Behind” initiative that ends up leaving more and more students behind, or a "Healthy Forests Initiative" designed to allow loggers to decimate our forests - or whether it’s selling a scheme to destroy Social Security Reform as if it was a reform measure to save Social Security. Whatever hard-selling Bush is selling, the thing to keep in mind and always remember is that what he’s selling is never what he’s really selling.

As with every con artist, Bush’s goal is to get your money into his pocket (and into the pockets of all his corrupt corporate pals), any way that he can, and before you realize what it is you’ve actually bought into. He doesn’t care about terrorism or Bin Laden or American lives - all he wants is your money. To that end, he’ll use any slick and dishonest words, try out any technique, and just keep hammering away until you either slam the door in his face or give in. Though even after you slam the door – as the public did with his Social Security privatization scheme – he’s still libel to keep ringing the doorbell in an attempt to wear you down. His crooked persistance is the measure of how little respect this particular corporate con artist has for his mark, ie the American people. It was never about what most Americans want or need, and it never will be.

The thing to remember with Bush is that it’s only and always about getting our money into his pocket, into Cheney’s pocket, and into the pockets of all his corporate bosses. Why did you think the deficit had exploded? He isn’t your pal or your drinking buddy - he’s a rich man from a rich family, and what they care about is money. He doesn’t give a damn about you or how many of your kids die in Iraq. I know that’s hard to accept, but it’s also hard to believe that there are people who rob little old ladies of their life savings. Yet there are. Plenty of them.

On that note, consider war in Iraq as a good example of a con job very similar to rope-a-dope schemes perpetrated against elderly retirees in Florida. What happens is that the mark is contacted by a crooked telemarketer, and told that she has just won some sort of drawing, cash award or prize. They tell her that all they need from her is say $25 – to cover the cost of shipping, handling, taxes – whatever. Then the money or prize will be hers. So the little old lady writes the check and sends in the money.

But that’s just the beginning of the con. Now that the mark has taken the bait, it’s time to start reeling her in. Other expenses and complications arise at an escalating rate, and soon the mark is sending in thousands of dollars. Q: Why doesn’t she stop? Why doesn’t she see it’s all a con? A: Because the con artist has developed a relationship of trust with his mark, and he keeps telling her that since she’s already invested so much money, it would be a crime and a waste to let it go now, when she is on the verge of getting her prize.

In the same way Bush baited the hook with lies about weapons of mass destruction. Rather than using greed as most telemarketers do, he used another powerful emotional hook - fear - and then proceeded to lie to the American people about the connection between Iraq and terrorists, suggesting that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to our national security. This was only to get Congress and America to take the bait and set the hook by going along with the invasion of Iraq.

Afterwards, when it was discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Bush needed to change his rational for war, just like the dishonest telemarketer keeps on changing his story of why the old lady has to keep sending in money. So Bush changed his story and told the American people that freedom and democratization were now the reasons why the American people had to keep sending their children off to Iraq to die.

But now, with religious extremism and the escalating violence in Iraq verging on civil war, any real democracy seems less likely than ever. So just like the crooked telemarketer keeps reminding the old lady that she’s invested too much to give up, Bush is now telling Americans that they’ve invested too many lives in Iraq to pull out now. Stay the course – because to do any less would dishonor those who have already fallen. Same con – but on a vastly different scale.

Whether it’s throwing good money after bad or wasting more lives and money on Iraq’s bloody streets - the real reason is never what the con artist says it is. The real reason we are in Iraq is to put more money in the pockets of his crooked political and corporate allies. Your money.

Follow the money. Look at who’s benefiting from all the government contracts in Iraq. Look at how Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock options rose 3,281% last year . Then look at how a Pentagon whistleblower was demoted for pointing out the impropriety of Halliburton’s no bid contracts. Look at the Republican congressmen who just resigned his seat for taking $2.4 million in bribes from a defense contractor. (If you think he’s the only one on the take, you’re living in a dream world.) Look at an audit that found that $9 billion dollars that was to be spent on reconstructing Iraq is simply missing, and Congress doesn’t even want to investigate. Finally, look at the greedy oil executives who recently stood before Congress and lied through their teeth by saying that they had never met with Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force in 2001. Because that's where this whole con started.

Bush may have used fear to set the hook, and he may be using pride and patriotism to keep us hooked in, but the Iraq occupation con is, was and will always be all about greed and oil and money. Until we realize that, we are no wiser than the little old lady. This con is all about putting your tax dollars and their oil in the pockets of a lot of corporate and political crooks. The real reason Bush will not set a date for withdrawal is that he intends to keep us in Iraq just as long as they keep making money over there, and not a day before then - and you can take that to the bank.

The only way out for the little old lady was to hang up the phone and call the police. The only way out of Iraq is to cut off the funding, pull out the troops, and start sending all the crooks to prison. Though we may eventually need to build several more federal prisons to hold them all. : )

The thing to remember the next time Bush calls is that however persistent he is at selling and re-packaging his biggest con ever, and however good he is at manipulating our fears or evoking our patriotism, the bottom line is that America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq will never really be about anything more than how to make an oily and blood-soaked buck. That will be just as true if 20,000 Americans are killed in Iraq, as it is today with 2,110 killed.

We can’t get their lives back, anymore than the old lady will get her life savings back, or we can get back our dead grandmothers. But we can stop the bleeding and begin the healing by sending these crooks to jail. Beyond that, we can try to make sure that this won’t happen in America again. If we do that much, and only then their lives will not have been spent in vain.

The Family Values Cult

To values is defined as: “to hold in high estimation.” What we call values are those things that we esteem and hold higher than anything else. They are the things that matter the most to us, and the last things we would ever want to lose. Though we can have many values, and there are many things that we value in life, there can be only one ultimate value or ultimate concern. God is not a name but a title, and whatever we value more highly than anything else in life is our god.

There is a fundamental problem in directly associating family centered values with a Christ centered life. The problem is that it is not what Jesus taught. If anything he taught something that was much closer to the opposite of what organizations like ‘Focus on the Family’ define as Christian values. Matthew 10:35 “ For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” Luke 14:26 “And if any man comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters; yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Matthew 12:47-50 “His mother and his brothers stood outside asking to speak with him. But he replied to the man who had told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand towards his disciples he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

It was a very radical teaching, especially in Jesus' day, and so it is understandable why many in the church today choose to ignore the real implications of his words, or explain them away as if he was not really saying what he said, or even saying the exact opposite. The same people who otherwise argue for a very literal interpretation of scriptures, would here argue that Jesus is only speaking figuratively. They would argue that Jesus was speaking in hyperbole, in order to emphasize a point – that our allegiance to Christ must be first foremost in our life if we are Christians. While this interpretation is certainly true enough as far as it goes, it doesn’t go half far enough, nor does it recognize the real point that Jesus was making. If he was speaking in hyperbole it was to make sure that we didn’t miss the very point that they seem to have missed.

Certainly Jesus wasn’t instructing his disciples to hate their families. Though the Bible says that Jesus’ own family did not support what he was doing – they thought he was crazy - there is no indication that because of that he hated them. But he was making a very strong point about the critical difference between ‘family values’ and ‘Christian values’, a difference that many Christians miss entirely or gloss over today. A very definite choice has to be made about who and what is the central focus of our lives. Christianity isn’t about getting us to love our family. That’s something that comes pretty naturally, even to most atheists, as Jesus pointed out “if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others.?”

Christianity is not about conforming to some rigid cultural notion of a traditional family. Christianity is about loving God through Christ even more than we love our family, and right alongside of that and as a direct consequence of that, to love our neighbor as ourselves. If Christianity is about anything, it is a decision to re-center and expand our circle of love beyond just our family. It is about breaking down any notion of a ‘traditional family’. So that instead of our love being centered upon our own family, our love is centered upon Him. Instead of limiting the circle of our intimate concern to our own family, the traditional family has been enlarged through Christ’s love, so that it now includes our neighbors as well. Jesus was teaching directly against the kind of selfish and self-centered family values that were taught by the Pharisees, and are still being taught in many Christian churches today. Whereas they teach that love of the family is the moral foundation of society, Jesus taught that he was to be the rock and foundation upon which we should build our life.

It is not the case that just by loving your family you will learn how to love your neighbor. It is much more likely that by selfishly centering your love on just your own life and your own family, that you will eventually come to hate your neighbor whenever they seem to hinder or oppose you and yours in any way. Much as many Christians today hate homosexuals, not for anything they have done to harm them or their families, but for what they perceive to be a threat to their traditional-family-based system of values. Greed, bigotry, racism and antisemitism are also traditional values usually handed down in families. But Jesus defined his family not by people who were related by blood, but by those who have left their families to follow him.

Jesus’ teachings on the family were very similar to his teachings on money and material possessions in that he was making the point that you cannot serve two masters at the same time. You cannot center your life on just your own family, and at the same time claim that you have centered your life on Jesus. They are not the same thing. You have to choose which you are going to ultimately serve, and then relate to the other in terms of that service. Jesus’ teachings were really not aimed at strengthening the family or preserving the concept of a traditional family. They were aimed at building a Christian community, and redefining family as a community of believers.

There’s nothing wrong with loving your family. But there can be a selfish way of loving others that is directly opposed to the teachings of Jesus and the kind of values he taught. It is interesting to consider that when a single person thinks only about himself, and spends all his/her time advancing their own career, with little or no concern for people around them – we would all call that person selfish. Yet somehow if two very selfish people get together and decide to form a marriage alliance, in order to share expenses, and share a bed while continuing to spend most of their time advancing their careers - perhaps even less concerned about anyone outside their selfish little alliance - we congratulate them for finally ‘settling down’ and getting married. We rationalize that somehow these two, basically selfish people are not just as selfish and self-centered as that they were before - that the marriage license has miraculously turned what was once a vice when practiced by one, into a virtue when pursued more effectively by two. Then, if these two fundamentally selfish people manage to stay together, (and very often even if they don’t), they give into genetic ambition and sire children. At this point they will likely register Republican and vote for more tax cuts, in order to force slashing cuts in things like food, housing and medial benefits for the poor, so they can buy even more junk for their own spoiled children. They may even go to church on Sunday and wage a cultural war against their neighbors, while listening to their pastor denounce all the evil forces threatening the traditional family. This isn't Christianity. This is a family values cult.

In the early church, it was considered better for a Christian to remain single than to get married. Because as Paul wrote: “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. “ Yet both Jesus and Paul recognized that not everyone was suited to remain single. I don’t believe that remaining single is more righteous than getting married and raising a family. Nor do I agree with many Christians today that getting married is better. It’s not a standard of righteousness – it’s a matter of what gift you are best suited to receive. We will not be judged according to whether or not we were married – Jesus said that in heaven there will be no marriage. Nor will we be judged according to how much we did for our family – Jesus indicated that even the worse sinners love their own families. We will be judged according to whether we followed his teachings and loved our neighbors. It is amazing to me how so many Republicans consider themselves Christians, though their actions and attitudes demonstrate a hatred of their neighbors that is worse than most atheists.

Though a family can teach us how to love others, it also teaches many how to remain selfish, or become even more selfish, while at the same time feeling very self-righteous about it. The problem with ‘family values’, and centering your life on just your own family is that it offers many people a pretext and excuse to avoid fulfilling the much more difficult Biblical requirement to love your neighbor as yourself, and as much as your own family. This sort of selfish attitude comes to the point where many see it as their Christian duty to promote intolerance and hatred of those who seem to undermine ‘traditional family values’.

It is repeated over and over and taken for granted in some quarters that a healthy and stable society is based upon the health and stability of the traditional family. But it would be much more accurate to say that a healthy and stable society is based upon things like tolerance of others, social justice and love for your neighbor. Family values as practiced today are largely part of the problem, because they produce neither healthy families nor healthy communities. Dysfunctional family values are symptomatic of a society where shared values – things like tolerance, justice and mercy - have largely broken down in society where the gap between rich and poor keeps getting wider. Building communities has given way to churches that are little more than country clubs for spiritual elitists. Tolerance is almost a dirty word in many fundamentalist Churches today – they actually revel in the fact that they are completely intolerant of anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs, or their definition of what a family should look like.

Jesus offered us a path to immortality that is not based upon having children, but upon his love for us. There is a sense in which all Christians must decide which path they are taking – the illusion of immortality in the pride of their flesh, the one that comes through a kind of genetic immortality - or the one that exists in Christ. Because you can’t actively pursue both – that’s the point that Jesus was making. Salvation and eternal life comes by way of His blood, not our own. What Jesus was saying is that a love of family that is based upon our own selfish interests is not really very commendable; and that a love that excludes our neighbors from our circle of active concern is not very Christian.

The Image of God

The early Christian view of humanity as created in God’s image, contrasted sharply with the view prevalent in contemporary Pagan society. Whereas Christians believed all people were created equally in the image of God, this was certainly not what Pagans believed. Pagans theorized that some people were in fact much closer to the image of God than others - that some were quite literally in the bloodline of the gods, while others weren’t. The pagans had their own creation stories, believing that the gods had initially intermarried with some human beings, and that the descendents of these heavenly liaisons were what made up the social aristocracy. The Pharos were considered to be gods themselves, and in a similar manner the emperors of Rome were elevated to the status of gods. So then all people were definitely not created equal in pagan society – some were born with the blood of the gods flowing through their veins, some earned their godhood though power or conquests, while others were considered common and base and not even remotely related to the gods.

Consequently there was no such thing as equal rights in Pagan society – people had only those rights commensurate with their social class or station in life, since that was assumed to be a fair measure of their true relation to the gods. It made perfect moral sense that those born without the blood of the gods, should be enslaved to those who were much more closely related to Zeus and Hera and Poseidon. To even pretend that slaves were created equal to their aristocratic masters would have been an affront to the authority of their gods, and their own religious beliefs. It would have been to tamper with the natural and proper order of society that had been established by the gods. It was for this very reason that Christians were considered to be atheists and anti-social, since their belief that all people were created equally in the image of God, directly attacked the theological basis for contemporary Pagan society.

At bottom, this was the real affront and danger posed by Christianity: Not that Christians only believed in one God, but that unlike the Pagans, Christians held that all people are created equally in the image of that one true God.

There is that of God in every person, which alone makes every human life of equal and infinite value. Our Declaration of Independence advances the same proposition as the cornerstone of democratic values, asserting that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." It was through the belief that all people are created in the image of God, that western society came to a belief in human equality and inalienable human rights, with government serving as the necessary instrument to safeguard those God-given rights. From this we can see how important creation stories once were, and still are to this day.

What’s at stake here is not only how to interpret a creation myth that was written 3,000 years ago, but what values and beliefs we should live by today. This belief in human equality, was once the cornerstone of American political ideology. But America has never been more unequal than it is today. We seem to worship the rich as if they were gods, and treat the poor like garbage. In a real sense, a pagan mythology represented by the ideology of the corporate marketplace, has made a big comeback in the USA, and those who call themselves conservative Christians are actually some of paganism's most passionate apostles.

Many people today would object and say that the 7-days of creation story is a myth, a fable, and that apart from this Biblical fable there is little empirical evidence to suggest that people actually are, in fact, created equal. Some are born crippled, while some are much more beautiful or intelligent than others,. Some people seem naturally talented, or very driven to succeed, while others aren’t. For that matter, some children are born into homes where their talents are nourished, and others into families, foster care or onto streets where their dreams are shattered and buried. So where is the evidence that people are born equal?

If we look at the most extreme example of this apparent inequality, say a child with Down’s syndrome, or a baby born with some other ‘birth defect’, we are likely to come to the conclusion that all people are definitely not created equally in God’s image. Because some are born with crippling birth defects, while others are born whole and healthy. And yet, even in these most extreme cases, if we look beneath the surface, and if it happens to be his/her own mother looking at the child, or if it is God looking down at that same child through the eyes of infinite love – who can doubt that they recognize the existence of God’s image in that child? Is that child any less precious or valuable to its own mother, by virtue of its handicap? Is it any less precious to God? Certainly not. So then, the fault is not in the child, or in what we may term a birth defect – the defect is in the hearts of those doing the looking. The fault lies in the fact that we are prone to judge by outward appearances, rather than by the love of God..

This should teach us something: how it is not always easy for us to recognize that people are created equally in the image of God. Becuase of that, it’s likely that we do not always act upon that truth as we ought to. The reason we don't is because our sin has blinded us to the truth, and to some extent hardened our hearts. What really matters is whether or not we are looking at others with the love of God in our heart, and are able to see them just as God sees them.

The love of God in Christ is what makes the unimpeachable fact of human equality easy for us to recognize, in spite of our sin. Only through Christ's love are we able to see others as they really are, rather than as objects of our own lusts, or through eyes full of envy or pride. This sort of love is not a romantic delusion. God’s true and unconditional love, as manifested in Jesus Christ, is the sharpest clarity and the truest vision possible - a revelation through which our eyes can glimpse things as they truly are. Though our vision seems much more often clouded by hatred, bigotry, pride and fear.

If we are looking at others through greedy eyes, then of course we are likely to see that the rich were created much better off than the poor, (though the poor were chosen by God to be rich in faith). If we are looking at people with an eye of prowling sexual lust, then we’ve probably been conditioned to believe that the beautiful were created more perfect than the plain or ugly. If we look at our fellow human beings with an empty intellectual pride, inevitably we can fool ourselves into thinking that those with higher IQ’s were created somewhat superior to the simple or mentally handicapped masses. In this way we have all been conditioned to see others, as if through the dark and uneven glass of our own pride and sin. That's why it is only by loving our neighbors unconditionally, that we come to an understanding of their true value as human beings, and recognize the fact that every person was created equally and perfectly in the image of God. It is only through the love of God in Jesus, that we can finally recognize others just as God created them.

That’s also why God is not a respecter of persons – he doesn’t value the life of the rich over the poor, the beautiful over the plain, the smart over the simple, the strong over the weak, or those without handicaps over those with crippling handicaps. God has chosen those considered to be foolish, to put to shame those who think themselves wise, and he has chosen those who seem weak, to overcome those who seem to be strong. God has blessed those who seem to be nothing, in order to humble those who think they are really something. So that finally everyone would be humbled in His presence, and come to glorify God alone. All people are equal in the eyes of God. Yet every person has a special place in God’s plan for salvation, whether to their honor, or to their ultimate shame and humiliation.