Campaigner - Democratic Underground

H2O Man

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Wed May-16-07 07:52 AM
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Campaigner

Campaigner
(by Neil Young)

I am a lonely visitor.
I came too late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.
I hardly slept the night you wept
Our secret's safe and still well kept
Where even richard nixon has got soul.
Even richard nixon has got
Soul. ....

The podium rocks in the crowded waves.
The speaker talks of the beautiful saves
That went down long before he played this role
For the hotel queens and the magazines,
Test tube genes and slot machines
Where even richard nixon got soul.
Even richard nixon has got it,
Soul.

Hospitals have made him cry,
But there's always a free way in his eye,
Though his beach just got too crowded for his stroll.
Roads stretch out like healthy veins,
And wild gift horses strain the reins,
Where even richard nixon has got soul.
Even richard nixon has got
Soul.

I am a lonely visitor.
I came too late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.

I remember reading about an odd man named Jerry Falwell around the time that Ronald Reagan became president. Reagan was the front man for a number of groups that had formed a coalition of sorts, ranging from George H. W. Bush’s oil/intelligence group, to the Jeane Kirlpatrick necroconservatives, to Falwell’s "moral majority." It was a dark time for Americans who were not hypnotized by the red, white and blue balloons in the Reagan commercials,. And painful for those who refused the social novocaine required to numb Americans while that coalition extracted the Constitution and replaced it with an abscess of fear and hatred.

All of the groups within the Reagan front stood for things I strongly opposed. Falwell’s group posed a specific type of threat: an intolerant, hostile, aggressive, judgmental, and violent form of religious nationalism. In "American Theocracy," author Kevin Phillips notes that Falwell and Pat Robertson were peddling "a marriage between religion and American capitalism" in the 1980s. (page 249) They sought to impose, by force when necessary, a form of government that our Founding Fathers had rejected 200 years before.

Few people took the pleasure in sowing hatred as did Jerry Falwell. He knew what politicians throughout history have understood – that in order to get a group of people to forget about their own low level of being, all that was required was to make them hate a "common enemy." And Jerry Falwell loved hate. Anyone or anything that he viewed as differing from his sick interpretation of the bible was a target for his self-righteous indignation. He used the same tactics of preying on his followers ignorance, anxieties, and fears as the most notoriously anti-social hate mongers of the past century.

I used to watch him on television, and there were times I wondered if he even believed half of the sick product that he was pimping for his 30 pieces of silver. I could not see how he could be so utterly out of touch with the gentle message of love, tolerance, and forgiveness that was taught by the prophet Jesus. I remember on on program, when some Falwell-ites were viciously attacking the works of Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, until finally a lonely visitor, campaigning for truth in the midst of the hatred, said the Berrigans were the most Christ-like people in America, and that the Herods of the Reagan movement would love to crucify them in public in order to discourage those who agreed with their plowshares activities.

But what really summed up the self-righteous reverend for me was an article that I read sometime around 1981. The author was familiar with Falwell, and well-versed in his less public teachings. The author was examining Falwell’s beliefs on the issue of abortion. He wrote about Falwell’s belief that pregnancy and painful delivery were God’s punishment for women’s enjoying sex, and thus that abortion was an immoral attempt to escape that divine punishment.

I suppose that anyone who actually believes something as insane as that does not need to fake other hateful emotions and beliefs. I remember in the early 1970s, when Yoko Ono told a reporter that she believed that Adolf Hitler’s rage had similar roots; she commented that if she could have spent a week in bed with him, she could have turned him into an advocate of world peace. (In a 1980 interview, she noted it might have taken a little longer than one week.)

I try not to hate. I did not hate Jerry Falwell. But I do understand why those who were victimized directly by the hatred and intolerance he preached take pleasure in his death. It is, in many ways, the same pleasure that peasants around the globe have taken when a cruel and vicious dictator dies. He was a cruel and vicious man. While I didn’t suffer directly from his rage – I don’t feel that stick – I have witnessed the wounds he caused for others. And to our Constitutional democracy. The threat he posed will not go to the grave with him.

I’ll end with a paragraph from Phillips’ book: "Its religiosity reaches across the board – from domestic policy to foreign affairs. Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq, widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon, the republican coalition’s clash with science has seeded half a dozen controversies. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women’s rights, opposition to stem-cell research, and so on. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual twenty-first-century test is hardly assured." (page xiv)