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Sermons by others

AMERICA'S DARK AGE, OR A NEW DAY?
Rev. Clarke Dewey Wells
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
May 15, 2005

It's been many years since I delved into Edward Gibbons famous six-volume study of The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. But one of the conclusions of that classic study has always stayed with me, both as a warning and reminder that what happened in ancient Rome could happen in other nations as well. Gibbons says that though Rome over the years maintained the forms of Republican government, it lost the substance. On paper and theory the Republic was still there, but the actuality was gone. Representative government disappeared; its freedom became phantoms, subverted by autocratic totalitarian rule; the long glory of majestic Rome slid into dictatorship.

Put in another context, the language Jesus used, all appeared beautiful as whited sepulchers, but within it was filled with dead men's bones, and unclean, and full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

This morning, I raise the issue with you that the American Empire may be sliding like Rome, keeping the forms but losing the substance of our freedoms. To those who might say, "Well, we've never had it so good," I'm reminded of T.S. Elliott's words that the first sign that you are living in a Dark Age is that you don't know it.

A Dark Age? The Fall of the American Empire? The topic is a somber one. But out of our liberal tradition, of the Hebrew prophets, the left wing of the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, I think we're duty bound, under obligation, to meditate on these concerns.

My remarks this morning are based on a study by Dr. Lawrence Britts writing in Vol 23 No 2 of Free Inquiry Magazine brought to my attention by Dr. Davidson Lohr, our outspoken and learned minister of our church in Austin, TX to whom I am indebted for citations and stimulus. The study is about several modern totalitarian governments of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Sukarno, and Pinochet, and what they have in common.

The name for these political systems comes from the Latin word fakes, denoting a bundle of sticks tied together, the image made famous by Mussolini and his march on Rome in 1922. The image is an honorable one. It's a political image about how we combine the One and the Many. How best combine the individual and the group; the private and the public? It's the basic issue of all associational life. E pluribus unum. The many and the one. How are they to be combined? Indeed, the bundle of sticks tied together is depicted on the wall behind the speaker's podium in our House of Representatives in Washington. But for Mussolini and his fascist symbolism, the symbol is clear and unambiguous, namely, the state is more important than its parts. It is the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it. It is a negative statement opposed to egalitarianism and egalitarian movements of the 19th Century and the avowed enemy of all liberalism, freedom, and liberty. It represents the merger of government, business, and bellicose nationalism. It consists of a philosophy of Social Darwinism in its belief in the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. Its strong appeal is to our human need to worship something larger than ourselves, our wish to be sheltered by a great leader, a father figure, our pleasure in the glory and excitement of war and the show of power. William Ellery Channing said in one of his great lectures on war in the 1830's, (By the way, the first Peace Society meeting in America was held in his parsonage in Boston.) Channing said the one unbearable pain is boredom, and we will do anything to overcome that feeling, he said. So boredom is one of the springs that make us want to seek excitement in a show of power - our longing to be swept up in unity and hysteria. It appeals to our fear of unseen enemies at home and abroad and our love for simple answers that permit us in Fromm's words to "escape from freedom" because freedom isn't always all that much fun. John Paul Sartre reminds us there is a "dreadful freedom," the dreadful responsibility that freedom entails.

Britt lists 14 points that he discerns as common to these four recent fascist regimes.

1-Bellicose nationalism
2-Distain for individual rights
3-Conjuring up and scapegoating enemies
4-Supremacy of the military
5-Male dominated sexist societies
6-Control of mass media
7-Inordinate emphasis on national security
8-The co-option of religion to serve the state
9-The merging of big business with government
10-The suppression of labor unions
11-The censoring of arts and intellectuals
12-Obsession with crime and punishment
13-Cronyism and corruption
14-Chronic fraudulent elections

For many of us here, myself included in my personal life, these are halcyon days. I mean, Sarasota is as wonderful as Big Sur, CA. But I sense that societally, we are in the face of a menace and challenge unlike any that I've ever experienced in my lifetime. I've gone over this list of 14 points of fascist movements, and I am disconcerted. And I'm curious, not so much about the dangers of fascism as they were experienced in ancient Rome or Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany or Franco's Spain or Sukarno's Indonesia, or Pinochet's Chile, but of our own USA. I agree, alas, with Bob Herbert writing in The New York Times that this is a dark moment in American history. Where are we within this baleful list of 14 fangs of fascism?

Bellicose nationalism? We've already killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, maimed, orphaned, and traumatized how many hundreds of thousands more in a hideous and unnecessary war that was launched without sufficient cause. We have sullied our reputation the world over as a bully, a warmonger, disregarding the decent respect for the opinions of the world community. I talked yesterday with friends from Austria who spend some time in Sarasota every year. They told me 80% of the people they know are still in shock and anger and chagrin over the bellicose nationalism of the new America. We condemned to death untold thousand for weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, while deploying our own weapons of mass destruction that most assuredly are there. We send $35 million for tsunami relief, that's 10 minutes, that's 10 minutes of the cost of expenditure of our war in Iraq, on which we have already spent over $300 billion.

US truculence? We used to talk about Deutchland uber alles. The symbols of truculence growing and everywhere. When I was a kid, we flew the American flag on special occasions. Now it is everywhere, everyday. Patriotic mottos: Support Our Troops! God Bless America! These are code words, you know, for "To hell with the rest of the world!"

Flags are everywhere on public display, on bumper stickers, lapel buttons, podiums, draped stages, all proclaiming the nation uber alles! America uber alles! The flag has become a major religious symbol, the idolatry and the object of national worship.

Distain for individual human rights. Since the state is more important than the individual, it is OK to look the other way in the name of a larger good. So! Torture, illegal and inhuman detention, secret incarceration, assassinations; all this is permitted because it's done in the name of the state. We have just elevated to be Attorney General, the highest law position in the land, a man who helped to choreograph the American effort to evade international prohibitions against torture. Sexism, opposition to abortion abounds. Efforts against minorities, homophobia, anti-gay legislation, even trying to amend the Constitution.

Control of mass media. You know, don't you, that pictures of returning caskets of dead soldiers to the Dover Air Force Base are now prohibited? So-called Town Meetings with the President are by invitation only and phony reporters are planted and infiltrated to ask the right questions at the press conferences. Gore Vidal has written that we run the gamut in our news media all the way from Responsibly Conservative to joyously Fascist; so moderate papers like The New York Times are labeled far left and demonized. The news outlets are now mainly owned by corporations with strong ties to right-wing policies, and right-wing columnists like Maggie Gallaher, Michael McManus, Armstrong Wilams are paid with taxpayer money to support administration proposals. NPR and PBS are regularly now tamed and intimidated, fearful of criticism of government sponsored fiscal cuts and punishment. A great American professional football player, volunteered to fight. He was killed in action, and for the first few days the Army touted his great sacrifice. Then it came out that his death came about through gross negligence - through friendly fire - and that knowledge was systematically kept from us.

Crime and punishment? More of our citizens are in prison than in any other nation on this earth! People are becoming willing to overlook police abuse and civil liberties in the name of patriotism. Any discussion of the alarming growing gap between rich and poor is dismissed as the politics of envy. And those expressing concern are called to task for fomenting class warfare. It is not the envy of the poor and disappearing middleclass but the greed of the super rich that is fomenting class warfare.

Fascism stirs hatred and frenzy against imagined enemies. Socialists, liberals, communists, gypsies, any minority religious group that doesn't buy the party line expands our lust for scapegoating.

Religion used to legitimate the state? Gibbon says, all religions can be false to a philosopher but all religions are valid or useful to politicians. Religion and religious rhetoric are taken over by the state as a tool to manipulate public opinion even when the major tenets of the religion are opposed to it. Fundamentalist theocratic views are supported, and science is trumped by superstition. And so, God's name is used to invoke mass slaughter and conquest. Biblical injunctions to love your neighbor is a fundamental tenet of the faith. But call to beat swords into plowshares is gagged. And care of the poor and the downtrodden is forgotten. Private vouchers for right-wing schools are promoted. Religion becomes simply the mouthpiece of the state. More than a majority of the American people now believe that our going into Iraq was a mistake, but you would never know that by listening to the mass media.

Bellicose nationalism has won the day, along with unholy alliance between corporate power and government. Those appointed to protect the interests of the commonwealth serve the needs of private wealth in health care, drug policy, the foxes guarding the henhouse. But let me zero in on one issue: Social Security. Friends, who do you think gave $2 million to the Cato Institute paying its efforts to promote the privatization of Social Security? Answer? The American International Group Insurance, American Express, State Street Boston Corp, and Reilly Group, Inc. Who gave almost a million to Economic Security 2000 to develop grassroots support for privatization? Answer? Dupont, Morgan Stanley, and other brokers. Who were the major backers of Lady Thatcher's privatization scheme for British old age pensions? Answer? Bankers, brokers, insurance companies, the same groups who are major backers of President Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security. How much did the administrative costs reduce the value of privatized individual retirement accounts in Britain? 43% is the typical amount by which the value of an individual retirement account was reduced. But we don't get much news from England. It's too far away. Says Steven Moore of the right-wing Cato Institute, which is quoted now in the mainstream media as a responsible academic think tank. Listen to this, what its author Steven Moore said. "Social Security is the soft under belly of the welfare state. And if you can stab a spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state." It's part of the "Starve the Beast" strategy: cut taxes for the rich, go into grievous debt, then use the shortfall and the deficit as the excuse to cut the social contracts agonizingly won by the keepers of the American Dream. We see now an attempt to "improve", privatize, or modify Social Security. Do not be fooled. The purpose is to dismantle and destroy it, along with Medicare, Medicare and other cooperative commitments in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its purpose is, in the words of the Senator from Nebraska, "to hurt people and to make fat cats happy." It is an ideological war to destroy the American experiment. Allen Greenspan, one of the disciples of the ideologue Ayn Rand, who is supposed to be heading a non-partisan source of economic wisdom, has become in the words of Princeton economist Paul Krugman, "just another party hack." The right-wing ideologues raise millions now to smear even middle of the road organizations like AARP that lobbies for elders in America. We already have the highest percentage of any nation in the world, those without health insurance. And alas, there is no lie, no dirty trick that the right wing will not do to achieve their ends. Vice President Henry Wallace in NY on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan had this to say, "The really dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in a German way." The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of information. With the fascist, the problem is never to how best to present the truth to the public, but how best to use the news to deceive the public. Fascism doesn't sprout up overnight, no sudden takeover, and no coup d'etat. The long-range tools are subversion, and takeover in a creeping coup. The Big Lie. Propaganda. Media distortion. Intimidation. The 14 points that Britt lists. Meantime, the President makes speeches around the world on the Virtues of Freedom and Democracy. We'll keep the forms of the Republic but the substance is gone unless we act.

Now I know I've made some contested and controversial remarks this morning. I do believe we face grave dangers. But I'm not out to promote panic or alarm, or play, "Gee. Ain't it awful." Rather I'm calling for responsible citizenship and creative criticism. We have challenges and opportunities before us, along with some heartening signs that the majority of Americans, more and more, are coming back to their senses. Persistent communication with and participation in the political process is essential. Our money and our membership in a wide choice of voluntary associations of lobbying, witnessing, and working for national renewal are available, as are voting and a stack of postal cards ready, emails, discussion and action groups, and your representatives' phone numbers all listed in the front of your phone book. The one point I will make in conclusion, and that is not controversial, that is not contestable, is the truth of Jefferson's words, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Let us be vigilant; active; the brave who have gone before us. Let us also pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Amen.