The Problem Of Being a Media Personality Is …
You can’t break wind on-air, and you are subject to occasional bouts of verbal diarrhea which at best only embarrass you and at worse illustrate to those paying attention your real heart’s intentions. Such is the lesson again reinforced by the always-insightful Pat Robertson and his comments that Venezuelan President Chavez should be “assassinated.” Pat’s got a long history of such illuminating comments, statements that always manage to say a lot more about him than they do about his supposed belief system (Christianity, in case his recent comments have caused you to be perplexed at what the foundations of his values actually are).
Admittedly, Robertson is a trend-setter. As such, his comments have latent value because they reflect something of substance perhaps less about the idea currently at-hand (state sponsored assassination which the US does not engage in – unless you count Hussein, or Castro, or Noriega or … well, you get the point) and more an insight into his unwillingness to accommodate those who disagree with him and the reasons why Robertson sees Chavez as such a strategic threat to America. No one should make the mistake of thinking Robertson is a whack-job; his comments make enormous geo-political sense and have a certain neo-conservative symmetry when understood from the vantage point of the role Venezuelan oil production plays in the US’ need for a production site within its hemisphere, and the belief that anything potentially in the way of those inputs that feed our national economy should be eliminated, regardless of whether or not such an elimination is in other people’s best interests. Robertson belongs to the select group of people who admit they see America as being the new Israel and as such, believe anything that potentially can get in the way of American prosperity should be eliminated. As revolting as we might find Robertson’s logic, it has a deep parallel to the logic employed to invade Iraq in that both presented a risk to America and as such had to be eliminated. Those who would bifurcate between the supposed security risk Iraq posed and the economic risk Venezuela poses must justify how the exchange of “security” for “economic” makes certain methods appropriate or inappropriate.
If you parse Robertson’s various statements about homosexuals, feminists or communists (which is one of his primary problems with Chavez), one of the fascinating insights is that among the list of divinely inspired grievances they have sinned against is always their impact on capitalism. As any good American Christian knows, after God rested on the seventh day He made capitalism, called it free, and advocated laissez faire commercial activity. Robertson’s comment that feminism turns women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” is interesting if for no other reason than to see his ability to weave abortion into witchcraft and anti-capitalist sentiments. Little did the women’s suffrage movement appreciate they were engaging the slippery slope of becoming witches when they pressed for the right to vote … now becoming bitches … that they probably realized would be amongst their accusations! The mercantile side to Robertson’s ideology is unwelcome for anyone calling themselves Christians because it makes essential that which Christ never did – commercial success and an economic system with its own unique flaws (the ugly side of people obsessed with material wealth being just one of the predilections it feeds).
What to do with Robertson? Well, we shouldn’t and can’t afford to ignore him. The logic he advocates is real and has been employed before. The primacy he gives American interests over basic questions of sovereign national self-rule are disturbing and should be seen as holding in their possession the roots of tyranny. He deserves to be run out of town. Ancient Athenian democracy in the polis city-state voted every year on an individual (sometimes more than one) that was to be exiled from the city for the good of the people or because the individual’s actions were so deleterious as to be deemed damaging to the people at large. My vote goes for Robertson.
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About MysteriousFaith
“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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