Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [123]
In this scrap the Word of God’s my A-K
Pointed at your Dome
’Cause my aim is straight, hey …
You wanna be set free
Then you gotta be saved
Better do it now
Move with the quickness
Or else I’ll hit you with the
Drive by Witness.20
They may not be angels,21 these pious gospel cowboys, but they are not madmen either: they are winning local elections and helped win Congress for the Republicans in 1994, and they are continuing to push the Republican Party further and further rightward. They raised millions for Colonel Oliver North’s senatorial campaign in Virginia and nearly won. They are astute not merely in their political tactics but in their judgment on McWorld. There is much in McWorld that is sickening, much that outrages elementary justice and morals, much that demeans religion and religious belief, much that belittles both human beings and the larger spirit to which—if they are to feel human—they feel they must belong. The yearning of American suburbanites for the certainties of a literal New Testament are no less ingenuous than the yearning of Arabic martyrs for the certainties of a literal Qur’an. They both want to be born again so as to be born yesterday, born into a former epoch before Nietzsche tried to persuade us that God had died; they want martyrdom before Weber’s prophecy that rational men and bureaucratic governments will disenchant the world can come true. Some join fundamentalist collectives, others cultivate a pioneer solitude, going “off the grid” to combat the “new world order” they believe is endangering the antimodern values they cherish.22 They may break their heads against time itself, but time has not been a friend to either religion or morals in recent centuries. Even the pragmatists who are prepared to live with what history delivers may seek deliverance from the lives they are bequeathed.
Moreover, there is a new breed of American pragmatist: a fearsome pragmatist of holy war who acts out the rage he has carefully cultured from seeds of deeply felt resentment. He may be a veteran but not necessarily, and he probably belongs not just to the National Rifle Association but to a hate group like the White Aryan Resistance or the Order or one of the rapidly spreading “militias” that are forming in nearly every state in America. He is fascinated by the destructive technology of McWorld—its assault weapons and explosives—even as he identifies McWorld’s globalism with the loss of his own American style “ancient” liberty. His anger reflects a kind of studied perversion of the civil religion. To him, the constitution means the second amendment (the right to bear arms), liberty means the law stops where his property begins (federal officers are agents of totalitarianism), and government is a demon “it” fronting for communists and the United Nations against which a defensive war must be organized and waged to prevent it from taking over the country. As befits the paranoid style, his heroes are driven loners like Robert Jay Matthews, a leader of the Order who back in 1984 murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg and was himself killed in a subsequent firefight; Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in a shootout with the authorities in 1992; David Koresh, the Davidian “martyr” whose immolation in Waco in the 1993 government raid has become a call to vengeance for thousands of McWorld castoffs; and Richard Wayne Snell, a self-styled Nazi who murdered a black Arkansas state trooper and was executed on April 19, 1995.
April 19, 1995: that was the same day—exactly two years after the Waco tragedy—a handful of zealots “honoring” these predecessors blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in what was the most costly terrorist episode in American history. The authorities