Frank Rich-A Culture of Death, Not Life

[LiviaOlivia]

The New York Times
April 10, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Culture of Death, Not Life
By FRANK RICH

~snip~

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

~snip~

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp

[LostInAnomie]

1. Necrocon almost fits better anymore.

Neocon sounds too innocent for what they really are.

[indepat]

2. Rove has raised bait-and-switch shams to a never-ending art-form

[Dudley_DUright]

3. Finally Frank Rich is back where he belongs on the Op-Ed

page of the NYTimes. Necro-porn is right.

[RamboLiberal]

4. What is truly frightening is these loonie crap is going so mainstream

This column says it all of how the media and the loony theocons are pushing this frightening crap. This nation is turning as fundamentalist as the Taliban.

I've been wondering about this miniseries "Revelations" that NBC is pushing and Rich seems to confirm my fears. And as he points out it takes the timeslot of West Wing. I truly hope this bombs in the ratings.

This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a "persistent vegetative state" - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists ("devil's advocates," as they're referred to) and organ-seekers conspire to pull the plug. "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," says the show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a wealthy "religious fundamentalist." Her Julie Andrews affect notwithstanding, she is an extremist as far removed from the mainstream as Mel Gibson, whose own splinter Traditionalist Catholic sect split from Rome and disowned the reforms of Vatican II, not the least of which was the absolution of Jews for collective guilt in the death of Jesus.

It's all too fitting that "Revelations," which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of "The West Wing." Perhaps only God knows whether it will prove as big a hit as "The Passion." What is clear is that the public eventually tires of most death watches and demands new meat. The tsunami disaster, dramatized by a large supply of vivid tourist videos that the genocide in Darfur cannot muster, was so completely forgotten after three months that even a subsequent Asian earthquake barely penetrated the nation's Schiavo fixation. But the media plug was pulled on Ms. Schiavo, too, once the pope took center stage; the funeral Mass her parents conducted on Tuesday was all but shunned by the press pack that had moved on to Rome. By the night of his death days later, even John Paul had worn out his welcome. The audience that tuned in to the N.C.A.A. semifinals on CBS was roughly twice as large as that for the NBC and ABC papal specials combined. The time was drawing near for the networks to reappraise the Nielsen prospects of Prince Rainier.

[RamboLiberal]

5. I found a paragraph in Kristof's column really frightening

it mostly concerns his belief that the next pope will have to allow priests to marry for the Catholic church to survive. What frightens me is his writing that in much of the traditionally Catholic world evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is the fastest growing religion.

The upshot is that the Catholic Church is losing ground around the world to evangelical and especially Pentecostal churches. In Brazil, which has more Catholics than any other country, Pentecostals are gaining so quickly that they could overtake Catholics over the next decades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/10kristof.html?hp

I'm beginning to think the apocalypse will be a self-fulfilling prophecy brought on by self righteous theocons all over the world.

I also want to add this bit I found in the WP - truly, truly, frightening. I feel like I'm back in the Dark Ages.

But the prospect of significant change is also galvanizing traditionalists, including some who would rather see the church split in two than change its structures. To them, innovation and dissent are the cause of the priest shortage -- and more of it will only deepen the problem.

They point to such places as Alexandria, and Lincoln, Neb., and Peoria, Ill. -- places where very conservative bishops, enforcing church orthodoxy, are filling their parishes with energetic young priests. Men appear to be flocking from around the country to be trained and ordained in traditionalist dioceses.

Michael S. Rose, in his widely read book "Goodbye, Good Men," took the argument one step further. He charged that church modernists in the 1970s and 1980s deliberately dissuaded orthodox young men from entering the priesthood -- and thus created the very priest shortage they now use to justify their calls for change.

One Alabama priest, writing on an Internet bulletin board for his like-minded brothers, declared that there will be plenty of priests to minister to "faithful Roman Catholics" as soon as dissenters in the church "finally realize that they are NEVER going to get their way and . . . finally go their own way -- the way of all the other protest-ants."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40493-2005Apr9_2.html

[stevedeshazer]

6. Great, but scary piece n/t