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Today's
Stories
October 16
/ 17, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Free Speech Movement and Howard Stern
October 15,
2004
Paul Craig
Roberts
Where
Did These "Conservatives" Come From?: The Brownshirting
of America
Laura Carlsen
Wal-Mart
vs. the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
Greg Bates
Empire of Insanity: Kerry's Iraq Troop Numbers
Michael Donnelly
News from a Swing State: Does Anyone Here Have a Spine?
Katherine Lahey
The Venezuelan "Threat": Why Do Kerry and Bush Fear
Hugo Chavez?
Robert Jensen
/ Pat Youngblood
Election Day Fears
Leah Caldwell
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib: the Masterminds of Torture and Abuse
Website of
the Day
An Anti-Billionaire Policy? Why That Would Be Economic Racism
October 14,
2004
Darcy Richardson
The
Other Progressive Candidate: the Lonely Crusade of Walt Brown
Willliam A.
Cook
Turning
Myths into Truth
Laura Santina
Water, Women and War
Evelyn Pringle
Free Speech Banned by Big Pharma: What You Can't Say About Drug
Importation
Alan Farago
Lessons
from Nature
Rep. Maxine Waters
A Letter to Colin Powell on Haiti
Nicole Colson
Maimed
for Oil and Empire
October 13,
2004
Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton and Bill Quigley
Aftermath
of a Coup: The Other Disaster in Haiti
Sharon Smith
Barak
O-Bomb-a?: Democrats Target Iran
Christopher Brauchli
God and the Bush Administration
Mike Whitney
The Real Meaning of the Hamdi Case
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: a False Beacon?
Website of
the Day
Operation
Truth
October 12,
2004
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Greg Bates
The Year of Voting Dangerously: a Survey Request of Nader Voters
in Swing States
Steven Conn
Progressives as Pawns: Kerry's War on Nader
Jason Leopold
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from
UN Oil-for-Food Program
Security Scholars
for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Time for a Change of Course
Timothy J. Freeman
Dying for a Mistake
Pierre Tristam
Deconstructing Bush
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 2nd Debate: the Blurring of Act and Audience
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Israel as Sideshow
Website of the Day
John Kerry's Personal Off-Shore Tax Shelters
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
October 16 / 17, 2004
Cash and the
Mind of the South
Gimme
That Ole Time Religion
By
EVAN JONES
'Mr Harris said that wealth
creation was "absolutely" a Christian activity. "I
think perpetuating wealth is a good thing," he said. "If
you can build wealth, and you can build an environment where
you can perpetuate it and constantly give, I think it is the
most honourable thing you can do."
'Mr Harris said his vision
was to extend God's kingdom by generating billions of dollars.
Business Alpha, a Christian business network with which Mr Harris
is associated, says on its website: "Peter's Vision of Billions
of Dollars for Millions of Souls is awakening business people
everywhere to the fact that their businesses can be a channel
for God's blessing to others." Mr Harris said businesses
"should generate to (sic) a lot of money and take on a social
dimension".'
- John Garnaut, Sydney Morning
Herald, 4 October 2004, on Peter Harris, founder and chairman
of the Family First Party.
'"God is stirring the
hearts of key people across the nation," [Peter Harris]
told the [Assemblies of God] magazine Now! "He is equipping
elite forces who are positioning themselves to influence entire
communities and cities for Christ.'
'Treasurer Peter Costello,
for example, told 22,000 people at a Hillsong Conference in July:
"We need to return to faith and the values which have made
our country strong."'
- Daryl Passmore, Sunday
Mail, 12 September 2004.
'"Spot Satan's strongholds
in the areas you are living in (brothels, gambling places, bottle
shops, mosque, temples-Freemason/Buddhist/ Hindu etc, witchcraft
" He urged followers to circle the place on a map. "If
you are ready to pray against it, do so. If not, bring it to
your church and ask your intercessors, through the pastor, to
pull these strongholds down," the ["Rise up Australia"
call-to-prayer pamphlet] says.'
Ian McPhedran, Herald-Sun,
4 October 2004, on Danny Nalliah, Family First Senate candidate
in Victoria.
'Influential American evangelist
Pat Robertson said yesterday that Evangelical Christians feel
so deeply about Jerusalem that if President George W. Bush were
to "touch" the city, Evangelicals would abandon their
traditional Republican leanings and form a third party.'
Daphne Berman, Haaretz,
5 October 2004.
Like a lightning flash from God Almighty
himself, out of the firmament came the Family First Party, electrifying
the Australian political landscape in the October 9 election.
Family First has sprung fully
blown out of the simmering enclaves of the pentacostal Assemblies
of God. But the light on the hill is the Hillsong Church in outer
suburban Sydney, a full service conglomerate on the Southern
American model of preaching, beautiful people, pulsating togetherness
and commercialisation.
In the antipodes, the eye has
been on Hollywood as the commanding cultural import. Move over
Hollywood; Southern Evangelism has found root in Australia.
For illumination on the mainspring
of modern Evangelism, consider W. J. Cash, The Mind of the
South, 1941. Here follows a liberally edited text, ellipses
omitted; accuracy of transcription vouchsafed:
What our Southerner required
was [not the Anglicanism of the Virginian aristocracy, which
regarded emotion as a kind of moral small pox but] a faith as
simple and emotional as himself. A faith to draw men together
in hordes, to terrify them with Apocalyptic rhetoric, to cast
them into the pit, rescue them, and at last bring them shouting
into the fold of Grace. A faith, not of liturgy and prayer book,
but of primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice. The God demanded
was an anthropomorphic God the Jehovah of the Old Testament.
A personal God, a God for the
individualist, a God whose representatives were not silked priests
but preachers risen from the people themselves. But the spirit
of these sects was essentially Hebraic their ideal theocratic.
Thus, as the nouveaux came
to power, this spirit and this ideal came to power also, and
the evangelical ministers armored all too often in ignorance
and bitter fanaticism, virtually always in a rigid narrowness
of outlook, entered upon that long career of always growing and
generally inept sway over public affairs, over the whole mind
of the South.
The triumph of the evangelical
sects also naturally involved the establishment of the Puritan
ideal. Adherence was demanded to a code increasingly Mosaic in
its sternness. And this coincidentally with the growth of that
curious Southern hedonism which was its antithesis. Hypocrisy?
Far from it. One may say more simply and more safely that it
was all part and parcel of that naïve capacity for unreality
which was characteristic of him.
Outside of two or three exceptions,
hardly any Southerner of the master class ever even slightly
apprehended that the general shiftlessness and degradation of
the masses was a social product. Hardly one ever concerned himself
about the systematic raising of the economic and social level
of these masses. These same men would take the lead in indignantly
rejecting the Yankee idea of universal free schools maintained
at the public charge would condemn the run of Southern
whites to group in illiteracy and animal ignorance in the calm
conviction of acting entirely for the public good.
Within this [Southern] frame
of politics and rhetoric the hammer and thrust of the Yankee
did something else too: It called forth the fire-eating orator
and mob-master. There were not many non-Anglican pulpits left
in the South in 1857 which did not see the passage of Donati's
great comet as a herald of the imminent outpouring of divine
wrath.
From the pulpit the word went
forth that infidelity and a new paganism masking under the name
of science were sweeping the world. From pulpit and hustings
ran the dark suggestion that the God of the Yankee was not God
at all but Antichrist loosed at last from the pit. [H]ear the
Presbyterian Dr. J. H. Thornwell declaiming in 1850: "The
parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders
they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans,
jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated
freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground
Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress
of humanity the stake."
Everything was as it was because
He had ordained it so. Hence slavery, and, indeed, everything
that was, was His responsibility, not the South's. So far from
being evil, it was the very essence of Right.
The Reconstruction years left
their mark upon the religious pattern of the South. In New England,
the influence of the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians had
already set up a definite drift toward the general sophistication
and liberalization of the old beliefs. And in the decades from
1870 to 1900, the drift, reinforced by the rapid spread of scientific
ideas, would continually gather head. More or less complete and
open skepticism would become an increasingly common phenomenon.
And everywhere north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers piety, remaining
always a mighty force, would nevertheless grow steadily more
gentle, more vague, and at the same time more rational.
But in the South the movement
was in the opposite quarter. [T]he level of education and information
in the South fell tragically in these decades. Actual illiteracy
increased among the millions.
It fell out inevitably that
the religion of the South was brought over to the twentieth century
as simple, as completely supernatural and Apocalyptic, as it
had been in the earliest decades of the nineteenth, and far more
rigidly held, far more pugnacious and assertive, far more impervious
to change.
The final great result of Reconstruction
is that it reestablished what I have called the savage ideal
as it had not been established in any Western people since the
decay of medieval feudalism, and almost as truly as it is established
today in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia
and so paralyzed Southern culture at the root. Here, under pressure
of what was felt to be a matter of life and death, was that old
line between what was Southern and what was not, etched in fire
and carried through every department of life.
Tolerance, in sum, was pretty
well extinguished all along the line, and conformity made a nearly
universal law. Criticism, analysis, detachment, all those activities
and attitudes so necessary to the healthy development of any
civilization, every one of them took on the aspect of high and
aggravated treason.
In the years from 1880 to 1895
all the great Northern schools were completely made over. And
by 1900 the whole of Northern thinking was impregnated with the
new Verstand. By 1900 Yankeeland had definitely taken
its place in the vanguard and was already becoming a chief protagonist,
not of the machine alone, but of the modern intelligence as well.
The parsons of the South regarded the growth of this modern mind
with a terror; they saw in it simply the Faustian hell-compact,
a gigantic conspiracy to crush truth out of the world, to loose
the beast in man, and to strip them of their ancient sway. Determined
to preserve their flocks from its contamination at any cost,
they were honestly convinced that the use of any means to the
purpose was justified, and even required of them by Heaven.
It is [in the 1920s] of the
most rapid expansion of Southern industrialism, of speculation,
and of the rapid widening of the physical and special gulf between
the classes that we find such sects as the Holy Rollers and the
Church of God establishing themselves widely and solidly in the
South in the mill villages, in the poorest sections of
the towns, and even in the countryside. And is it just at this
time also that the traveling, feverish evangelists reached their
heyday.
Thus the preachers of the frenetic
sects themselves officially ascribe their great success, next
after the workings of the Holy Ghost, to the rising demand of
the people for a place where they might worship without feeling
ashamed of their clothes and manners, and a religion that would
stress and give outlet to emotion. And all the evangelists insisted
even more than the politicians on their own lowly origins, and
discoursed continually on the theme of the superior virtue and
piety of the poor as against the stiff-necked rich, and the certainty
that in heaven it would be the former who would sit at the head
of the table.
The young man returning to
his native place, particularly if he lived in the larger towns,
might now and then find a few people tolerant enough by education
or native temperament to listen to him amiably and quietly and
perhaps to encourage him in some of his notions. But the general
effect on the community, in all classes, was to produce terror
and anger in one degree or another.
The very commonest white saw
it as a menace to his interest, once it had been called to his
attention by his masters; he felt within himself that it all
constituted a danger to his conventional status as the superior
of every Negro whatever.
And in the South it was naturally
the textile mills which first began to suffer from [the 1929
Depression]. But the immediately precipitating factor in the
case was that the mills of New England, which had remained depressed
throughout the period since the war because of their inability
to meet the competition of low wages in the South, had hit upon
a device which for the moment enabled them to compete again and
so inevitably to drive down prices. I mean the use of the so-called
stretch-out system, under which, by forcing him to spend every
working moment at the peak of nervous concentration, an operative
is made to care for several times as many machines as was formerly
considered a fair assignment.
Faced with that, the masters
of the Southern mills responded in characteristic fashion
by proceeding to take the difference out of their employees in
one way or another. Wage cuts became fairly common by the spring
of 1929. And the stretch-out was introduced into Dixie, to become
the match to the powder of the slow irritation and restlessness
growing up between the surface in the whole period after the
close of the war. The wage cuts were bitterly resented. For many
families its immediate effect was a sharp and tragic reduction
in income. The result was the first genuinely serious labor revolt
the South had every known.
Indeed, the whole business
community of the region, devoted as strongly as the mill masters
to the notion that the maintenance of cheap labor and the status
quo was essential to their well-being, participated in the feeling
that the strike represented a direct and intolerable threat to
their personal interests; as did all those swarming thousands
who hoped to profit under Progress. For if the unionism and the
strikes succeed in industry, would they not in time be likely
to reach out into the country-side also? Would not [the spirit
of the strikers] come eventually to infect not only the tenants
and croppers, all white farm labor, but perhaps the very Negroes?
[U]nder the essential Calvinism
of outlook which had been fixed by slavery before the Civil War
and riveted home by the conditions of Reconstruction, it was
widely felt in all classes that the strikes constituted a sort
of defiance of the will of Heaven. God had called one man to
be rich and master, another to be poor and servant. Heaven apportions
its reward in exact relationship to the merit and goodness of
the recipient that both the mill-owners and their workmen
were already getting what they deserved.
Proud, brave, honorable by
its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act,
often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible,
in its action such was the South at its best. Violence,
intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity
for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than
from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept
of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values,
above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency
to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values,
sentimentality and a lack of realism they have been its
characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the
better, they remain its characteristic vices today.
* *
*
Thus opined Wilbur Joseph Cash
in 1941. Cash's literary executor, Joseph Morrison, describes
Cash as 'an obscure North Carolina newspaperman'. Morrison notes
that '[h]is life's experience had taught him the inifite capcity
of the South for self-deception. Cash committed suicide soon
after the publication of The Mind. He would not live to
witness the great upsurge of an 'essential Calvinism of outlook'
after 1945, and an unprecedented access to political influence
in Washington.
Evan Jones can be reached at: E.Jones@econ.usyd.edu.au
Weekend
Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
Conn Hallinan
Ashcroft and Indonesia
Lori Smith
Health Care in America: And Then I Got Sick...
Dave Zirin
Hold the Booyah!: SportsCenter Out of the Middle East
John L. Hess
Rather Will Take the Heat, As Bush's War Deteriorates
Brian J. Foley
W is for Wimp: So Why do Manly Men Love Him?
Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman and Osama bin Laden: Odd Juxtapositions
Poets' Basement
Vest, Landau & Albert
Website of the Weekend
Eye on the NYTs
/
|