alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

October 29, 2006

My Infotainment Weekend

by AltHippo @ 4:52 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

A few of us went to see “Jesus Camp” last night. The characters in the documentary walk the line between absurdity and insanity- not the good kind of insanity, like in Robin Williams’ best bits, but the kind of insanity that produces a Waco, Texas or Jonestown. The kind of insanity produced by twisted minds, focused on power, and sure that they’re in the right.

One of the inmates of the asylum, the inmate that happens to be running the asylum, is Ted Haggard. KCinDC had forwarded a link to a Harper’s magazine article that’s worth a read. An excerpt: (Harper’s)

Free-market economics is a “truth” Ted says he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he said, “constantly look back.” He went on: “And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”

So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. “My fear,” he says, “is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state.”

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. “I teach a strong ideology of the use of power,” he says, “of military might, as a public service.” He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because “the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood.”

Pastor Ted regularly advises President Bush, just so you know.

I was getting my regular Sideshow fix, when I ran across this bloggingheads debate between Bill Scher and Jonah Goldberg. It’s worth looking at for a few reasons: 1.) it’s a clever use of video with links provided alongside the video itself. 2.) Jonah has had media training. He does a number of things that folks on the left need to pick up on, such as lighting himself in a favorable way, body language that suggests he’s listening, and using simple debating points. 3.) While I object to Jonah’s use of hot-button phrases that caricature actual liberal positions, Bill should have been able to point these out. Actually, it seemed to me like he was starting to point them out, but then backed off, I’m guessing because he didn’t want to appear like he was making personal attacks.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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