Of Huddled Masses and Holy Men

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

If a homeless man walked around claiming that be believed God had called him to be president, we’d all call him crazy. But when a twice-failed oilman from a wealthy and well-connected family says the same thing, we call that “strong leadership.”

What legitimates one over the other? Is it merely that the latter has a better chance of actually succeeding? If that were the case, why the need for divine fiat, why not merely say “I’d like to be president?” Both call on heavenly providence, but it is only the disenfranchised one we call crazy. Does wealth give access to God? Does poverty prevent it? Does privilege confer the right to speak the holy will?

Perhaps it doesn’t. Consider the following case: a rich developer decides one day to build a 200 foot tall neon green penguin on some suburban property he owns. He gets all the proper permits – or simply uses his influence as a wealthy developer to get his way around the zoning ordinances. When he’s done, he puts a little flashing light on top of the penguin so airplanes don’t hit it.

When questioned by the local media about why he’d want to do such a thing, the developer responds that God called him to do it.

Well, clearly, we’d all consider him a few cans short of the proverbial six-pack.

Or take the example of John the Baptist. Here was a homeless fellow who wore weird clothes, hung around in the desert, and ate bugs. Most Christians, and even quite a few Muslims and Jews, are quick to say he was a true prophet and a holy man.

So wealth alone doesn’t convince us one has a direct line to The Big Kahuna.

So what does? Is it some attachment to a pre-existing church? David Koresh and Jim Jones both had that, though, and few would board the bus to Waco or Jonestown now.

Maybe it’s simply being in the right place at the right time. Jesus, after all, who never directly declared himself a holy man (his cryptic response to the question, “I am who you say I am,” is notable only for its ambiguity), could have just as easily been dismissed for yet another street preacher who got sideways with the officials and got himself crucified if he had been born a little earlier or a little later, miracles and resurrection notwithstanding. Those can as easily be ignored as championed; after all, revisionist history is as old as history itself. There’s always room for skepticism or belief when expedient. We generally chalk the theory of relativity and the moon landing up to good math and good engineering respectively, but who is to say they aren’t miracles too? The existence of both certainly defy the odds.

When a preacher says he speaks to God, especially if said preacher is free from affairs with church secretaries and his financial improprieties have yet to be discovered, and if he’s preaching in an established church, we’re quick to acknowledge that claim as more-or-less legit. But there’s no scriptural indication that you have to be particularly holy to be chosen, as the stellar collection of liars, shirkers, and philanderers from Jonah to David attests. Nor is it necessarily the case that the chosen don’t get royally screwed, as was the case of Job. So we run into another roadblock: how you live your life seems to bear little relationship on whether or not your God-call is the real thing.

There are few conclusions we can draw with any kind of certainty here. “Beware false prophets” is a nice idea, but how can we possibly know? If it’s mere popularity that’s at issue, Rasputin would be a saint. If it’s outcomes we look at, we’re either asked to predict the future in the case of our current batch of holy men, or we’ve got to judge Jesus and Mohammed and Gautama Buddha pretty harshly for all the mayhem that’s been done in their names over the last couple of thousand years.

“It just seems right” as a criterion also traps us. After all, the actual teachings of the three revered ones mentioned above, all that business about loving each other and being nice and giving to the poor, really threaten our way of life, and unless severely modified to justify all our killing, lying and stealing, tend to make us kind of squirm. How many people in the cabinet of the current president have ever turned the other cheek? And anyway, the homeless guy probably feels great about his call to office too.

We can maybe resort to extreme skepticism, but that’s hardly belief by most interpretations of the word. Perhaps, the next time you see that homeless mass, shuffling along behind his shopping cart and carrying on about God, you’d do well to listen.

He Said/He Said

According to the New York Times’ James Risen, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has determined that the CIA is primarily at fault for not pressing its case for Iraq’s dismantling of its WMD program. The problem, in Risen’s words, was “the existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists – and the agency’s failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers.”

Risen goes on to acknowledge that Bob Woodward, in his recent book Plan of Attack, indicated that the CIA was pressured politically by President Bush and his cabinet to produce evidence of Iraqi weapons, and that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings disagree with Woodward.

So who is correct? Which version of reality do we give more credit?

Having had a little personal experience with the chairman of the Senate committee in question, the estimable Pat Roberts of Purewater University’s own home state of Kansas, I can attest to the fact that his reputation for honesty and fair dealing and a genuine concern for the truth is wildly over-rated. I can also contest to the fact that he owes much of his power to being a loyal party member, and has a vested interest in his party, which happens to be that of the president, retaining power.

So judge for yourself: on the one hand we have Bob Woodward who, while he does have an interest in selling books, loses no power as an investigative journalist whether or not Bush wins the election; and on the other we have Pat Roberts, who retains his considerable power in the Senate if he blames the CIA and gives the president a pass.

Who would you believe?

The Terror Within

From Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland, the MossyMonkey

A shadowy organization threatens the good ol’ U.S. in these troubled times, an organization that is situated scant miles from the seat of power, the White House, and our gloried halls of Congress.

This is an organization that has brought down governments in Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. It has set up sleeper cells across the globe to gather intimate details of the goings on of friend and foe alike. It has supported Osama bin Laden, our sworn nemesis in the War on Terror beginning in the 1980s. It has given training and arms to insurgent groups, death squads, and all-’round bad dudes. It has even gone so far as to deceive our poor, trusting Commander In Chief, causing him to believe that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction and putting at risk thousands of young American lives.

That’s right, the deceptive, terroristic cadre of wickedness to which I refer goes by the cryptic acronymn of the “C.I.A.”

Its proximity to our Beloved Fearless Leader and his loyal followers in Congress behooves us to declare open war on the C.I.A. as a matter of immediate national security. Our Holy Figurehead has already gone the first step by deposing this agency’s public ruler. But with the remaining command and control structure intact, that does not go far enough.

That this organization provides intelligence to our military may cause a few problems. However, since it is staffed largely by existing agents of the federal government, we have no end of insiders willing to follow orders for the targeting systems of our glorious armed forces’ precision weapons systems.

How can we go wrong? It is, after all, a “slam dunk.”