MY BRIEF EXPOSURE TO THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

I think I was about 14 or 15. The boy becoming the man, with the zits to show for it. I was learning my politics at family gatherings, encouraged by my uncles. The usual topic, aside from the careful talk about WWII, was Vietnam. It was known at that time as a "police action" but would soon be declared a bonified war. For a very bone-headed reason. I wrote a letter to the Editor of the Oregon Statesman, there being two Salem papers of record at that time. I opined passionately on the Vietnam War and patriotism as only a fifteen year-old male with a face full of acne could. At sometime during my rant, with no attempt at subtelty, I called our two great Senator's, Wayne Morse (D) and Mark Hatfield (R), "worms in the bowels of government". They were, and still are among our great Senators. How many middle-school boys know anything about subtelty?

     

Shortly after the appearance of my Letter to the Editor, I recieved a subscription to a cheap newsprint monthly called, "THE CROSS AND THE FLAG", edited by Gerald L K Smith. Given the distant time we might imagine that Smith fancied himself in the tradition of JRR Tolkein, with those two letters following his first name.  The monster side of Tolkein. Even at my tender age I could tell that the reportage had a strongly racist orientation. And the writing was pretty looney, as untutored in writing as I was at that time. Nationalism had not yet become recognizable to me, I would not put it all together for a few years. Recently while listening to Rachel Maddow opine on her book, Prequel, she explained how deeply fascist Smith was. Fate would intervene to remove The Cross and the Flag  before my year's subscription was up. Gerald L K Smith got himself busted for child molestation. Admit it. You knew this was lurking in the shadows. It always lurks in the shadows of authoritarians.

     

The 1950s and 60s had seen the foment of rightwing nutjobs. There was the American Nazi party, led by George Lincoln Rockwell. He met a bullet on August, 25 1967 in Arlington VA. The John Birch Society was wringing their panties over fluoridation in municipal water supplies, (no less than Mark Twain reminded us that, "history does not repeat itself; but it rhymes"). The father of the Brothers Koch was allegedly a Bircher. The nuts did not fall far from the tree. Joseph McCarthy had been embarrassed in the Army-McCarthy hearings a decade earlier. He was not re-elected and drank himself to death, but the stink of McCarthyism lay heavy over the 1964 presidential run by Sen. Barry Goldwater, assisted by  a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan.  John F Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963 by a nutcase, we still aren't sure who. The investigation by the Warren Commision is still of questionable provenance and it ruined the reputation of Chief Justice Earl Warren, otherwise a stellar jurist, whom we may be assured was not subject to quid pro quo, as 2/3 of our current justices are. Robert F. Kennedy-Sr., not the embarrassing lesser RFK, would be assassinated while running for president in 1968. Again, the investigation seemed to belie the truth. Civil Rights leaders, Malcolm X, Medgar  Evers, Martin Luther King, and many Civil Rights activists and innocent bystanders were killed by various lethal means. There were no resulting deaths but, Mario Savio and the Berkley Free Speech movement, inspired the previously mentioned B-movie actor, Reagan, to become Governor of California, and later President. An act with serious repercussions. As grim as all of these things were, we never felt that our Constitution and democracy, was threatened by malign forces within our own electoral system. 

     

By the end of the 70s Vietnam soldiers were home with there families, if they had not been casualties. Richard Nixon had resigned as president, replaced by Gerald Ford, not so bad as Republicans went. He was replaced, not being elected to his own term, by Jimmy Carter.  We thought we might have some reason to relax from the political tensions of the previous decades.  But no-o-o, the Moral Majority declared President Carter insufficiently Christian and carried the banner for the twice-divorced Ronald Reagan, stop me if you've heard this before. A fellow by the name of Paul Wyrich, a Reagan adviser and lay preacher, was advising Christian audiences to avoid what he called, goo-goo politics ( good government). He went further to say that Republicans lose elections when more people vote. Later, Grover Norquist gave weekly breakfast speeches advising his listeners, "bi-partisanship is the moral equivolent of date rape". That led to the tea-party, a mediocre beverage and a lousy party, which led to Donald Trump, a mediocre intellect and lousy human, which led to our current political situation. 

I'm reminded of a scene from Godfather III, where Michael Corleone, who wished to transform his criminal organization to a strictly legitimate business, says "Just when I think we're out they pull me back in!"