WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Bush and the American Taliban. (11/28/2004)

It is time to get serious about the state of contemporary American culture. What I have to say about it will please virtually no one. Native Americans, for the most part, will reject or distance themselves from my position because they do not want to draw unnecessary scrutiny to the core beliefs that inform our world view. The issues I intend to raise tend to confirm the “truth” of the basic justifications Christians have always used to excuse themselves from accountability for their deliberate destruction of our collective culture. This is especially true at the end of the fourth year of the 21^st Century, just after Bush’s reelection. Most of “my” people would prefer that I let the dogs of war fight white battles elsewhere and draw no attention whatsoever to that other group of tribal people that white Americans have hated for the past 512 years. Christians everywhere, not just in America, will hate what I have to say about their belief system and will bring that hate against me in every way they can contrive—not that they have ever had to struggle much to accomplish that objective. Recently, they have gone after relatively innocuous “opponents” with all the fury of wild animals—God knows what they will do when someone not particularly innocent of unkind intent shows up on their radar screens. An expression of my deepest concerns about the nature of Christian ideology, and the way in which some proponents of that point-of-view perceive native American culture, can be found by clicking on the following link: Rousseau/Derrida and Post-Structural Linguistics.

One word I want to put forward at the beginning to avoid misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what I am actually saying: I have nothing against any person who is a Christian. I can honestly say that I have never known a Christian who did not seem to be a good person. The people I am talking about are ones who seem less than genuinely Christian, people who appeal to “Christianity” as a guiding principle in their lives when in fact they seem anything but that. The Methodist minister, Chivington, who led the Colorado Volunteers against the Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, for instance, causing the death of 800 unarmed native Americans in just four hours of slaughter, does not seem to me to qualify as a Christian person. Cotton Mather, who gloried in the slaughter of the Pequot nation at Fort Mystic in the 1640’s, hardly seems to qualify as a man of God. I’m more concerned here with ideology than I am with the people who profess them. That is a rather hollow statement, of course, since what matters is that the followers of ideological positions are the ones who enact them and, without those actors, the ideology itself would be meaningless as a social force. In the world today there is no shortage of willing actors to enforce the “rule of law” embraced by the American Taliban.

Though it seems unnecessary after so short a time out of the headline news, and because Bush/Kerry hardly debated the issue seriously during the campaign, I am compelled to remind people that the Taliban was a movement of ultra-repressive Islamic jihadists who gained control of Afghanistan and gave aid and comfort and support to Al Qaeda both before and after that organization attacked America on September 11, 2001. The war in Afghanistan that Bush has been half-fighting since the attack is against the Taliban since it was the ruling party of that country when America went to war, without first declaring it as the Constitution requires, when Bush retaliated against those who attacked America on NINE-ELEVEN. The Taliban are America’s worst enemies. That group of ideologues may be the worst enemies America has ever had. So, what can I be talking about when I refer to the American Taliban?

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column today, “The Afghan Miracle,” (December 10, 2004, A37), complains that American liberals do not celebrate the democratic victory of Hamid Karzai engineered by the Bush administration because Afghanistan has returned as a major source of opium since the Taliban were defeated. He ridicules the Left for this failure to appreciated Bush’s overwhelming success. He minimizes the fact that Afghanistan grows poppies and wonders if liberals actually expect Bush to dedicated 100,000 US troops to eradicate the crop. His view, of course, is that nothing on the face of the earth matters less than Afghani opium. Why would he care? He either does not know, or knows and does not care, that more Americans have died of heroin addiction since 9/11 than died on that day in New York. While I have no actual numbers to prove the point, heroin use in America has “enjoyed” a dramatic rise since Bush became President in 2000. Many behaviors that conservative deplore have become more widespread since they gained control of government in the 1980’s (Reagan, Bush I, Bush 2). Why? They talk the condemnation but do nothing to change the popularity of everything they condemn. This is a typical example: minimize the problem, primarily because it does not affect the speaker or his family directly, in order to celebrate the dubious achievement of electing an American puppet in Afghanistan who says he will address the problem if America supplies the 100,000 troops required to do so. Krauthammer has already said Bush has no intention of doing so. Bottom line: more and more heroin will become available for use by America’s underclass addicts who are, of course, mostly people of color—no friends of Bush or Krauthammer—even if both claim to have a “very good friend” (or two) who is.

“I’m building an army. . . . Our movement will be built on passion, on values, on fire-in-the-belly morals.” The person who said this is Phil Burress, an anti-gay political activist from Ohio who organized the effort to ban same-sex marriage that so defined Bush’s defeat of John Kerry there in 2004. Burress’s focus is on what he calls the “homosexual agenda” which he characterizes as an effort by them to force their lifestyle on the rest of America. If successful in establishing the credibility of their “agenda,” he believes they will begin teaching American children that homosexuality is the same as heterosexual behavior and implies that children will turn to the “lifestyle” by the thousands or millions or hundreds of millions. Ultimately, he seems to fear that heterosexuality will be outlawed in the same way that people are now attempting to outlaw homosexual unions. I guess he believes in karma. Something like: if we don’t outlaw them first, they will outlaw us. Burress seems to be a little logic-impaired but what can one actually expect from someone who pursues morality as a “fire-in-the-belly” issue. I certainly don’t expect reason or reasonableness from someone like that. What I do expect is a literal reading of the Bible as the ultimate justification for his position, including Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 13, where “God” commands his people to kill homosexuals. Why else would Burress need an army?

But that is the nature of the Taliban. The Taliban in Afghanistan supported Al Qaeda which clearly was a militaristic arm of its religious fundamentalism. Burress needs that too because there is always killing to be done when you characterize your cause as a “culture war.” People of this sort want us to believe that their intent is purely ideological, that they do not intend to harm anyone, that the language they use is metaphoric, figurative, symbolic—but that is never the way it plays out in reality. Before you know it, they have that army on the march, locked and loaded, just as Chivington did in Colorado in 1864—and another 800 defenseless people die as a result. Their most recent crusade is an effort to boycott any businesses that fail to greet their customers with a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” when the person enters or leaves their store. They object to the phrase “Happy Holidays” because that is secular and because it eliminates Christ from his own birthday celebration. They claim the choice of the latter is an active persecution of Christians and should be prevented by whatever means are necessary. I do not have the right, in other words, to choose between one thing and another if the American Taliban decides it does not like what I say to my customers.

Why would I say such a thing to my customers (if I were a retailer)? I am not Christian. I follow the traditional path of native American spiritualism in my personal belief system. I buy presents for family and friends at Christmas. I am offended when retailers wish me a “Merry Christmas.” Why does that offend me? My great-great-grandparents were at Sand Creek, Colorado, on November 28, 1864, when the Methodist minister, Chivington, began the slaughter of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who were peacefully camped there. I should celebrate that? If they had not escaped the Christian butchers that morning, I would certainly not exist today. I celebrate their survival. I do not forget who was responsible for the slaughter. I never will forget that. I do not celebrate the birth of the ideology that justifies the attempted annihilation of the native people of the Americas. I condemn it. I curse it.