47% of Households Owe No Taxes. A Misleading Figure.
There have been numerous stories lately that have touted this figure of 47%, which is supposed to correspond to the percentage of Americans who will pay no taxes this year because of tax cuts and government subsidies. I was skeptical of this figure when it first came out, but until now, I have not been able to find any information to contradict this figure. Just when I was about to give up and believe this number, the New York Times comes out with an excellent piece debunking this figure for the misleading piece of crap that it is.
Among other things, one of the main points that the article presses upon, is that fact that the wealthiest Americans have had their tax burden reduced more than any other economic class over the course of the last three decades. The article also points out that it is no coincidence that the people who portray this myth of the wealthy getting the shaft are the exact same people who would benefit the most from a tax reduction on the wealthiest among us.
As usual, the New York Times uses comprehensive facts and figures that are indisputable. This is the best explanation of how this 47% figure is incorrect that I have come across as of yet. I hope this article will clear the air as to how the wealthiest Americans are in no way getting screwed. In fact, they have benefited the most out of any other group for the last 30 years. Enjoy…
Yes, 47% of Households Owe No Taxes. Look Closer.
By David Leonhardt
NY Times – April 13th, 2010
Forty-seven percent.
That’s the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.
Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.
Given that taxes are likely to be one of the big political issues of the next few years — and maybe the biggest one — it’s worth understanding who really pays what in taxes. Once you do, you can get a sense for our country’s fiscal options. How, in other words, will we be able to close the huge looming gap between the taxes we are scheduled to pay and the services we are scheduled to receive?
The answer is that tax rates almost certainly have to rise more on the affluent than on other groups. Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.
So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was. It’s true that raising taxes on the rich alone can’t come close to solving the long-term budget problem. The deficit is simply too big. But if taxes are not increased for the wealthy, the country will be left with two options.
It will have to raise taxes even more than it otherwise would on everybody else. Or it will have to find deep cuts in Medicare, Social Security, military spending and the other large (generally popular) federal programs.
All the attention being showered on “47 percent” is ultimately a distraction from that reality.
The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.
But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and investment taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.
Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.
The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.
Focusing on the statistical middle class — the middle 20 percent of households, as ranked by income — underlines this point. Households in this group made $35,400 to $52,100 in 2006, the last year for which the Congressional Budget Office has released data. That would describe a household with one full-time worker earning about $17 to $25 an hour. Such hourly pay is typical for firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Taking into account both taxes and tax credits, the average household in this group paid a total income tax rate of just 3 percent. A good number of people, in fact, paid no net income taxes. They are among the alleged free riders.
But the picture starts to change when you look not just at income taxes but at all taxes. This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.
I realize that it’s possible to argue that payroll taxes should be excluded from the discussion because they pay for benefits — Social Security and Medicare — that people receive on the back end. But that argument doesn’t seem very persuasive.
Why? People do not receive benefits equal to the payroll taxes they paid. Those who die at age 70 will receive much less in Social Security and Medicare than they paid in taxes. Those who die at 95 will probably get much more.
The different kinds of federal taxes are really just accounting categories. At the end of the day, the government has to cover the cost of all its operations with revenue from all its taxes. We can’t wish our deficit away by saying that it’s mostly a Medicare and Social Security deficit.
If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”
State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy. As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.
There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.
So why are those radio and television talk show hosts spending so much time arguing that today’s wealthy are unfairly burdened? Well, it’s hard not to notice that the talk show hosts themselves tend to be among the very wealthy.
No doubt, like the rest of us, they don’t particularly enjoy paying taxes. They are happy with the tax cuts they have received lately. They would prefer if other people had to pick up the bill for Medicare, Social Security and the military — people like, say, firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers.
Sarah Palin Is Not A “Real American”
I denounce and reject myself for posting this because I am always harping on the media for covering stupid meaningless stories rather than real informative news, but I really dislike Sarah Palin and found this story interesting and representative of her character. This story that I found on Huffington Post, outlines demands that were found in Mrs. Palin’s speaking contract rider. I am well aware of celebrities often asking for ridiculous things in their riders, but Mrs. Palin is a politician, a politician who decrees frivolous spending, and claims to be a woman of the people, a “real American.” The demands in her rider reinforce the idea that her identity is manufactured, and her claims of being a “real America” are a farce. Mrs. Palin is just as coddled as any other Hollywood celebrity, taking advantage of her fame to get what she wants. Here is a list of required items that can be found in her rider:
- Mrs. Palin must be provided a two-way satellite broadcast. For Q&A, the questions must be collected from audience members in advance for pre-screening.
- Mrs. Palin must be flown to and from events in first class, unless she chooses to fly coach.
- In some instances, Mrs. Palin may need to fly on a private jet, in which case it must be a Lear 60 or larger for West Coast events, and a Hawker 800 or larger for East Coast events, and both are subject to Mrs. Palin’s approval.
- Mrs. Palin must have private security provided for her and her party for the duration of the engagement. She must be transported in SUV(s) from a professionally licensed car service. Black town cars may be substituted in the event that SUV(s) are not available. The cars and drives need to wait at the venue for the duration of the program.
- Unless Mrs. Palin agrees in advance, autographs are not permitted.
- Mrs. Palin reserves the right to participate in private business during her visit. This includes but is not limited to book signings or political events.
- Mrs. Palin requires a tall, wooden lectern with lip and fixed microphone in addition to a hand-held microphone. The lighting should be at a comfortable, but appropriate, production-level for Mrs. Palin to be able to see the full audience from the lectern without interference.
- Two bottles of still water, and bendable straws, placed near the wooden lectern. A representative from Mrs. Palin’s party must be allowed to open the water bottles prior to Mrs. Palin’s arrival.
- Security arrangements must be deemed satisfactory to Mrs. Palin and her party.
The point of this post is not to bash Sarah Palin because of the things she asks for, in fact, I don’t think that, comparatively speaking, the things she is asking for are all that unusual. I just wanted to point out that when she presents herself as a common person, she most certainly is not. Mrs. Palin is making upwards of $100k per speaking engagement, which in my opinion, in the only reason she relinquished her governorship in the first place. Mrs. Palin is no different than any other famous person, and she should be treated no differently than any other celebrity. Don’t try and convince us that she is just a regular person, and she is looking out for common folk. She is a typical spoiled celebrity, and a stupid one at that.
Why We Need The New York Times
Columbia University just recently announced the winners of the 94th annual Pulitzer Prizes, and once again, the New York Times finishes near the top. With the three for this year included, The New York Times, in total, has won 107 Pulitzer Prizes since its inception in 1851. This is by far the most of any other news organization. I think the newspaper with the second most Pulitzers is the Washington Post with slightly over 50.
I’m sure that there will be Conservatives who read this and will say that since the awards are given out by the "liberal elitist" Columbia University, that this somehow devalues the award. The fact of the matter is, the Pulitzer Prize is an extremely prestigious award to win, and I feel is a good method of determining which papers are doing the best investigative journalism.
There is a reason why the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are considered “newspapers of record,” and held in high regard. These newspapers are considered the “elite media,” and carry by far the most clout with decision makers in Washington D.C. According to, Political Science, An Introduction, my college political science textbook, readers of these newspapers are, “generally wealthier and better educated and have much more influence than readers of hometown papers.”
I think that most people don’t really understand exactly how newspaper organizations work. Most hometown or local newspapers do not do any type of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism can be very expensive. The newspaper has to hire better journalists, and they usually have to have many different bureaus in many different places in order to thoroughly cover the news. Most local newspapers will have their own journalists covering local events, but their national and international news generally comes from a wire service like the Associated Press. This is also why articles in the New York Times are generally two to three times longer than articles in local papers, the reporting goes much more in depth.
The lack of investigative journalism is also a major problem in television news. New stories on television often have to be covered very quickly, usually in less than five minutes. Television news stories are also selected based on catchy stories that are junk news, like Tea Party members spitting on Congressmen. While these stories are entertaining, they don’t really tell us anything about the issues. Crap sells, hence all these stupid reality shows like Rock of Love and Big Brother (both of which I am embarrassed to admit that I have watched). This is exactly why people who read the “elite” newspapers are better educated.
The purpose of this post is to point out two things. One, I think that the New York Times is a magnificent paper that everyone should try and read. Even if you are a Conservative or a Republican, the quality of news coverage in the Times is unmatched. The editorials and op-ed pages generally sway to the left (although they do have two or three Conservative op-ed writers) but the news stories try to stay as accurate to the story as they possibly can, hence all the Pulitzer Prize winnings.
The other point that I am trying to make is that those of us who enjoy good investigative journalism should be happy to support these organizations. I currently subscribe to the Times Reader. It is kind of like a virtual paper with a great user friendly layout that costs me twenty dollars a month. I would subscribe to the actual paper, but it is very expensive. I would much rather pay a monthly or a pay-per-click fee and get good investigative journalism, then have everything free and full of crap. I understand that I may very well be in a minority, but I know there are enough of us out there to keep organizations like the New York Times alive.
It is important to support the newspapers that you enjoy. If we don’t, all news is going to be attention grabbing headline crap that is going to negatively affect us as a country. Without news organizations like the New York Times, there will be no one to hold politicians accountable. Without news organizations like the New York Times, the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal may have never come out. Also keep in mind that most news sites like the Huffington Post get a significant portion of their stories from newspaper sites. Without these organizations, sites like Huffington Post will no longer be able to get their stories out to large audiences. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Liberal, or Conservative, if the “elite media” dies, good quality news will die with it.
Revisionist History of the Tea Party
On Friday, The Young Turks made a great point in regards to the Tea Party having a skewed view of history. Cenk Uygur pointed out how the Tea Party has a complete misrepresentation of the history behind the Boston Tea Party, which is where the Tea Party derives their name from.
As Mr. Uygur points out in the video, the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest about tax cuts, not a tax increase. The British government, back in the late 1700’s, was giving what we would refer to today as subsidies to the East India Company, making it very difficult for colonies to sell tea abroad. This was the premises behind the Boston Tea Party. This is highly ironic because the Tea Party runs on a platform of less government influence and less taxes. This is precisely the opposite of what the Boston Tea Party was all about.
Here is the clip from Friday’s show, proving once again that the Tea Party members are misinformed and, in many cases, highly uneducated.
Jon Stewart Exposes Lies Told By The Right
I hope that everyone is having a great weekend. To close out the week, I wanted to share with you a great clip from Friday’s Daily Show. Jon Stewart did a great job exposing Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin for the liars and manipulators that they are.
One of the big stories in the news this week was Barack Obama’s new policy concerning the use of nuclear weapons. As Mr. Stewart explains in the clip, President Obama said that the U.S would refrain from using nuclear weapons against countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if the country used biological or chemical weapons against the U.S. Keep in mind that this does not apply to North Korea or Iran because they have not signed the treaty. President Obama also said that if the U.S was attacked with biological or chemical weapons from a country that has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, then the U.S would use every other weapon available to us, with the exception of nuclear weapons, to retaliate.
As usual, the dummies on Fox News totally lie and completely mislead their audience in regards to President Obama’s intentions. Mr. Stewart, as usual, does a magnificent job at exposing these liars, and making them look ridiculous at the same time. Enjoy…
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Two Amazing Novels to Consider
I’m going to take a bit of a break from politics today to tell you about another author that I have become extremely fond of. Khaled Hosseini is an author and a physician who was born in Afghanistan and currently lives in San Jose California. Mr. Hosseini has written two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the latter of which I just finished reading. Both novels have Afghanistan as the setting, and both novels begin pre Soviet invasion. In addition to A Thousand Splendid Suns, I have also read The Kite Runner and seen the film that was adapted from it.
The Kite Runner is the story of a young boy named Amir who grows up in a privileged household in Kabul and befriends the son of his father’s servant. The novel takes us through the interesting and often time sad life of Amir. The Kite Runner is an amazing novel that spent quite a bit of time on the New York Times bestseller list, as did his second novel A Thousand Splendid Suns. In addition to The Kite Runner being a great story, it also teaches the reader a great deal about Afghanistan and the country's culture. The novel shows us the horrors of Afghanistan under Taliban and Soviet rule, and gives the reader a better sense of what life was and is like in a country that has been ravaged by years of war.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is equally as good a novel as The Kite Runner. A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and how their lives cross each other. A Thousand Splendid Suns also takes us through the history of Afghanistan, and how different peoples’ lives were affected by the Soviet invasion and then rule under the Taliban.
I really don’t want to give anything away as far as the plot line of these novels go. If you are considering reading either one of these novels and want to learn a little bit more of what they are about, you can clink the links that are imbedded in the titles found in the first paragraph of this post. If anyone has seen the film version of The Kite Runner and liked it, you will absolutely love both of these novels. The film doesn’t come close to doing the novel justice.
Both of these novels are excellent. The stories are unique, and Mr. Hosseini’s ability to tell a captivating story is tough to match. There is a reason why both of these novels have spent a significant amount of time of the New York Times bestseller list. Both novels are also listed on Amazons best books of the year, 2003 for The Kite Runner, and 2007 for A Thousand Splendid Suns. I don’t often recommend authors or books, but both of these novels are absolutely amazing. I haven’t met anyone yet who has read either one of these novels and didn’t thoroughly enjoy them. I hope you will give Khaled Hosseini a try, he is an amazing author that has made a significant splash in the literary world after only publishing two great novels.
Glenn Beck Proves He’s A Moron…Again
The Young Turks had a great segment yesterday highlighting the stupidity of Glenn Beck. On the topic of net neutrality, along with a wide array of other topics, Glenn Beck spews misinformation and complete falsehoods. Cenk Uygur did an excellent job of exposing how Mr. Beck is yet again completely wrong and deliberately misleading his audience. I liked this segment of the show a lot and decided to share it with you. Enjoy…
Debunking The Cloward-Piven Conspiracy
Lately, I have heard many conspiracy theorists talk about the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy. For those of you who stay away from Glenn Beck and all of the other right-wing crazy people, the ones who believe the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy to be true, are the same people who believe that the government orchestrated 9/11. Basically, the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy says that the government, through orchestrated crises, seek to expedite the fall of capitalism through overloaded government bureaucracy and social welfare. In reality, the Cloward-Piven Strategy as it’s called, is a political strategy outlined by two sociologists and political activists at Columbia University in the 1960’s. The definition that can be found on Wikipedia really explains it best:
Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.” They wrote:
The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.
Of course, the crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists go nuts about this strategy, they think that President Obama is a puppet put into office to carry this strategy out, it’s ridiculous. Normally I wouldn’t even take the time to sit here and point out every stupid conspiracy theory that comes around (I would have to start a separate blog for that, and right now Snpoes and FactCheck do a great job at it already) but this particular conspiracy seems to be gaining some traction. From YouTube videos to Fox News pundits, people are getting entirely too worked up about this ridiculous conspiracy.
With that being said, Richard Kim from The Nation magazine does a wonderful job completely debunking this absurd conspiracy. Mr. Kim does a much better job of describing the real facts behind this conspiracy than I could ever hope to. The Nation is a subscription based magazine/website, so Mr. Kim’s article is not as accessible as some other sort of free media. I have decided to re-post this article so that people who are not subscribers to The Nation can read it. Enjoy…
The Mad Tea Party
By Richard Kim
The Nation Magazine - April 12th, 2010
Leftists like to say that another world is possible, but I was never quite sure of that until I started reading tea party websites. There, a government of leftists is not only possible, it's on the cusp of seizing permanent power, having broken American capitalism and replaced it with a socialist state. Down that rabbit hole, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are communists, and "The Left"--which encompasses everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council to Maoist sectarians--is a disciplined and near omnipotent army marching in lockstep to a decades-old master plan for domination called the "Cloward-Piven strategy" or, as of January 20, 2009, "Cloward-Piven government."
What is this plot? According to David Horowitz, who apparently coined the expression, Cloward-Piven is "the strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis." Named after sociologists and antipoverty and voting rights activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who first elucidated it in a May 2, 1966, article for The Nation called "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," the Cloward-Piven strategy, in Horowitz's words, "seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse." Like a fun-house-mirror version of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine theory, the Cloward-Piven strategy dictates that the left will exploit that crisis to push through unpopular, socialist policies in a totalitarian manner.
Since Obama's election and the financial crash of 2008, Horowitz's description has been taken up by a clutch of tea party propagandists--from TV and radio hosts Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, National Review editor Stanley Kurtz and The Obama Nation author Jerome Corsi--to explain how both events could have happened, here, in the U-S-A. In their historical narrative, it was Cloward and Piven's article that gave ACORN the idea to start peddling subprime mortgages to poor minorities in the 1980s, knowingly laying the groundwork for a global economic meltdown nearly thirty years later. Beck calls Cloward and Piven the two people who are "fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system." It was Cloward and Piven who had the diabolical idea of registering (illegal or nonexistent) poor and minority voters through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, thus guaranteeing Obama's "fraudulent" victory. And it is the Cloward-Piven strategy that guides the Obama administration's every move to this day, as it seeks to ram through healthcare reform, economic stimulus and financial regulation (all of which, in reality, have enjoyed majority support in many polls taken during the last two years).
As proof, Beck & Co. point to what they see as a shadowy web of associations: Cloward and Piven worked in alliance with welfare rights organizer George Wiley, who mentored Wade Rathke, who went on to found ACORN, which sometimes coordinated registration drives with Project Vote (whose board of directors Piven just recently joined), a previous incarnation of which employed Obama to run a Chicago chapter in the early '90s. They also repeatedly cite Emanuel's statement, made in November 2008 after the passage of TARP but before the stimulus, that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." From The Nation's pages to the White House's brains and muscles--it took only forty-four years!
All of this, of course, is a reactionary paranoid fantasy. Rahm Emanuel is no more Frances Fox Piven's stooge than Obama is a Muslim. But the looniness of it has not stopped the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory from spreading across tea party networks. And the left's gut reaction upon hearing of it--to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery--does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact. In order to respond, alas, we have to understand, and that means going through the looking glass.
Horowitz first wrote of the Cloward-Piven strategy on his website Discoverthenetworks.org, which claims to be "a guide to the left." His description is a crude and false account of what Cloward and Piven argued. For example, the words "capital" and "capitalism" never appear in their article. The piece is about precipitating a crisis in the welfare system by legally enrolling masses of eligible recipients, which the welfare bureaucracy could not handle, thus creating a demand for more radical reforms, like a guaranteed minimum income--a proposal that Nixon, of all people, floated in 1969 and that, in fact, Democratic-majority Congresses voted down through 1972 [see Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, page 15]. Moreover, as Piven recently explained to me, although the article was written as a strategic thought experiment, in many ways it described and reacted to changes already sweeping the nation, chief among them the civil rights and welfare rights movements, which created newly politicized constituencies to which the Democratic Party had to respond. "The mainstream," Piven says, "was responsive to the idea that we could end poverty because of these movements." In short, the stresses placed on the welfare system were caused by a confluence of factors, of which an article published in The Nation, it is safe to say, was but one, and most likely a minor one at that.
Nevertheless--history and facts be damned--it is Horowitz's caricature of Cloward-Piven that is now the Rosetta stone of American politics for the tea party's self-styled intellectuals. Glenn Beck has brought up Cloward and Piven on at least twenty-eight episodes of his show over the past year. Beck is sometimes aided by a blackboard on which he has diagramed something called "The Tree of Revolution," which links Che Guevara, SEIU and ACORN's Wade Rathke to Saul Alinsky, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, Bill Ayers and, perhaps most improbably, to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. In the center of the tree's arching trunk, above SDS and Woodrow Wilson (!?) but below Barack Obama, who adorns the tree's crown, Beck has scrawled "Cloward & Piven."
Beck's tree, however, is derivative of and pales in comparison with the flow chart created by Jim Simpson, a self-described businessman and former George H.W. Bush White House budget analyst and the leading proponent of the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory. Cribbing from Horowitz, but adding his own very special embellishments, Simpson has penned an 18,000-word, six-part exposé of the "Cloward-Piven strategy," which can be found on the websites Americanthinker.com and Americandaughter.com. I have read it so you don't have to. The central innovations of this wild and woolly compilation of right-wing myths, published in installments during the summer and fall of 2008, are to attribute nearly every past, present and future crisis to Cloward and Piven and to link them to Obama's political past and agenda. Among the schemes Simpson credits to the Cloward-Piven strategy are healthcare reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, cap and trade, immigration reform, hate crimes legislation and public financing of elections. For Simpson, the Cloward-Piven strategy is vast, vast--"a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s." And beyond: somehow, Gorbachev's Crimean dacha is implicated, as are Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Most integral to Simpson's theory, however, and where his rather impressive skills as a collagist descend into the orthodoxy of Fox News, is ACORN, which he says has been "the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear" since 1970. In what is by now a familiar right-wing story line, ACORN is responsible for the global economic crisis. By using the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act--itself a conspiratorial response to the bogus crisis of housing discrimination--ACORN enrolled masses of low-income people in subprime mortgages, creating a housing bubble that caused stock markets around the world to crash, paving the way for bank nationalization and socialism via the bailout and the stimulus. Whew! There are, of course, more than a few pages missing in this whodunit--for instance, that it was ACORN that tried to warn Congress about risky and predatory lenders; that it was too-big-to-fail banks and complex financial instruments that spread the contagion across the worldwide economy; and that in fact the banks have not been nationalized. [For a debunking of this myth, see Peter Dreier and John Atlas's "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," October 22, 2008.]
If Simpson's chain of events is not particularly original, his theory of intentionality is: according to him, the left, guided by the Cloward-Piven strategy, was fully aware that subprime mortgages would produce a calamitous financial bubble; it supported subprime lending not to help minorities become homeowners but to sabotage capitalism from the inside. "The failure is deliberate," he writes repeatedly in italics.
Like others on the right, Simpson sees Obama's election itself as a machination of ACORN, which registered millions of felons, illegal aliens and dead citizens to vote through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, which Cloward and Piven championed and which Bill Clinton signed in 1993. (Voter fraud seems to be Simpson's enduring preoccupation and the subject of an early 2007 article on Cloward-Piven.) By the logic of the Cloward-Piven strategy, he suggests, voter registration efforts were aimed at corrupting democracy, not expanding it. This argument depends on the denial of several key realities: that changing demographics have altered the balance of party power, that legally increasing the voting rate of key constituencies is a common and legitimate practice of both parties, and that the Republican Party consistently fails to win over minorities because of the policies it promotes. What Simpson and Beck want to cast doubt on is that the democratic process could elect Obama, or that democratic majorities would endorse the agenda Obama has proposed. In the months before the 2008 election, Simpson wrote, "It is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone."
Beck and Simpson have played the tea party's Paul Reveres, warning the masses of the Cloward-Piven assault. But nearly the entire orbit of tea party luminaries have taken it up in some way. In October 2008 the Washington Times ran an op-ed by Robert Chandler called "The Cloward Piven Strategy," and Stanley Kurtz wrote about it in National Review Online. Mark Levin, author of the bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, has discussed it on multiple occasions on his radio program, as did Rush Limbaugh on the March 4 broadcast of his show. In a January 13 interview, Beck asked Sarah Palin if she had seen and believed in the case he had been making on Cloward and Piven. Palin replied, "I do. I do believe it.... It has to be purposeful what they are doing. Otherwise--otherwise I would say, Glenn, that there is no hope, that there are no solutions."
In February, Kyle Olson, a GOP hack who runs an ersatz education nonprofit called the Education Action Group, posed as a student and requested a videotaped interview with Piven, which she gave in her home. Olson posted a portion of the interview on BigGovernment.com, a website run by Andrew Breitbart, who released the "prostitute and pimp" undercover ACORN sting in 2009. Olson captures nothing so dramatic: Piven lucidly discusses homeowner civil disobedience during the Great Depression as a model for how foreclosed homeowners today could refuse to leave their homes and thus create pressure on banks to renegotiate mortgages--a strategy advocated by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and, yes, ACORN.
Suffice it to say, if Beck and crew believe half of this crap, they belong in an asylum in the middle of Shutter Island, where they can tend to their survival seeds and sleuth out imagined conspiracies apart from the rest of the human population. The danger, however, is that they will maroon a sizable portion of the electorate there with them. Since Obama's inauguration, references to the Cloward-Piven strategy have popped up with increasing frequency in op-eds and letters to the editor of local newspapers, including those in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Snippets of Simpson's tome or Beck's rants appear frequently in the comments section of blogs and articles; a search for the term "Cloward-Piven strategy" generated more than 255,000 Google hits.
Why does the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory hold such appeal? And what, if anything, does it accomplish? On one level it's entertainment. It allows believers to tease out the left's secrets and sinister patterns. Since none of the evidence that supposedly confirms the existence of the Cloward-Piven strategy is, in fact, secret, this proves rather easy to do, and so the puzzle is both thrilling and gratifying.
On another level, the theory is an adaptive response to the tea party's fragmentation. As Jonathan Raban pointed out in The New York Review of Books, the tea party is an uneasy conclave of Ayn Rand secular libertarians and fundamentalist Christian evangelicals; it contains birthers, Birchers, racists, xenophobes, Ron Paulites, cold warriors, Zionists, constitutionalists, vanilla Republicans looking for a high and militia-style survivalists. Because the Cloward-Piven strategy is so expansive, it allows tea party propagandists to engage any one--or all--of the pet issues that incite these various constituencies. For some, the left's "offensive to promote illegal immigration" is "Cloward-Piven on steroids." For others, it is the Cloward-Piven "advocates of social change" who "used the Fed, which was complicit in the scheme" to "engineer" the 2008 fiscal crisis. In his speech at the tea party convention in Nashville, WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah notes that Obama was just 4 when the Cloward-Piven strategy was written. "We think," Farah said. He paused dramatically before adding, "Without the birth certificate we really just don't know," as a sizable portion of the audience broke into applause.
Racial and class resentments, however, are never far from the surface, no matter which subject is slotted into the great Cloward-Piven conspiracy machine. The word "radical," for example, is almost always preceded by the word "black" when it can be (George Wiley), but nobody is ever called a "white radical" (Bill Ayers). Whenever grammatically possible--and sometimes even when it is not--Cloward and Piven are identified as "Columbia professors" and Obama as a "Harvard graduate." (Beyond just heaping Nixonian scorn on elites, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy credits the left with an almost divine intelligence.)
And as of now, the Cloward-Piven strategy is most often used to put two classes of people on the tea party's enemies list: those who work for the Obama administration and those who work to increase the political power of poor people of color. (Doing both--as was the case with Van Jones--can be fatal.) It is the latter target that is particularly appalling: here is a so-called populist movement promulgating a master narrative that holds poor people to blame for the world's woes. The precise impact of this conspiracy theory and the broader movement it incites on Obama's legislative agenda is, as of now, unclear. But the toll it has taken on organizations that advocate for poor people of color could not be more stark. On the weekend the healthcare reform bill cleared the House, tea party activists descended on Washington to decry "the end of America"; their bitter pill was soothed by front-page coverage of the end of something else--ACORN announced it was on the verge of bankruptcy, the victim of what CEO Bertha Lewis called "a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks."
Perhaps most critical, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory pushes the tea party's kettle closer to a boil. In its obsession with voter fraud and the potential illegitimacy of the 2008 election--and the democratic process itself--the conspiracy suggests a tit-for-tat strategy for victory: if the left is going to cynically manipulate the system to produce tyranny, then so will we. How? To begin, there's the tried-and-true tactic of suppressing the poor minority vote--which would next place Project Vote in the tea party's cross hairs. But why stop there? Like every good conspiracy theory, this one too is a call to arms.
Boys Beware
As much as us progressives like to complain about how slow some Americans are to become accepting of everyone, this video demonstrates how for the United States has really come over the last fifty or sixty years. The title of the video is “Boys Beware.” The video is an actual public service announcement from the 1950’s that warns young males of the perceived threat from homosexuals.
The PSA features a boy named Jimmy, who is looking for a ride home after a long day of playing baseball with friends. Jimmy decides to get home by way of hitchhiking, or as the video calls it, “thumbing a ride.” A man named Ralph decides to pick Jimmy up. In the video’s defense, Jimmy does look like a fairly creepy guy, although not nearly well enough dressed to be taken seriously as a homosexual. Although Ralph seems nice, as the video points out, he has a “sickness of the mind.”
What is the sickness you ask? According to the video, Ralph was a homosexual who “demands a relationship with a person of the same sex.” Ralph isn’t simply interested in a consensual relationship with another male, he demands it. According to this ridiculous PSA, we have to be careful around “the homosexual” because, although they may look normal, they have a “disease” which is “no less contagious than smallpox.” The video instructs us to be aware of men who act “too friendly” or “overly personal” because that nice person may be an evil homosexual. The video concludes by telling us to beware of the homosexual because they may “appear normal.”
There are so many things wrong with this video. First of all, why is hitchhiking portrayed as no big deal? Was hitching a ride a common occurrence back in the fifties? I find it odd that little Jimmy should be scared of a gay man, but hitchhiking, that is no big deal. This video really demonstrates the level of ignorance in regards to homosexuality that was common in this era. The idea that that being gay is some sort of mental illness is crazy, although I would guarantee that many people today still think this is true. The video also falsely claims that homosexuality is contagious; this is also something that I think people still believe. The notion that you can somehow catch homosexuality like it is some sort of cold is completely false, I’m sorry, but if you believe this, your level of ignorance is unfathomable.
I think that this absurd video really shows how much more progressive this country has become over the years. There are still obvious signs of bigotry and ignorance all around us on a daily basis, but as this video shows, things could be much worse. Don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt in my mind that there are a significant number of people who still think like this. But nowadays, if you spoke about homosexuality being a mental disease or being contagious, most people would think that you are an uneducated idiot.
The way that we view this video today, is the same way that I believe people will view the subject of gay marriage years from now. Up until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Most people would now condemn a person for speaking out against interracial marriage. People who argue against interracial marriage are now classified as racists, bigots, and intolerable of others. This is exactly how this generation’s children will view gay marriage in the future.
As far as the United States has come in regards to equal rights and civil liberties for people of all races and genders, we have a long way to go. Hopefully we will get closer to equality for everyone sooner rather than later.
Jesus Made Me Puke
In celebration of the Easter holiday that all my Christian friends enjoyed yesterday, I have decided to re-post one of my favorite journalistic pieces that I have ever read.
I really enjoy The Rolling Stone. In addition to their great coverage of everything music, they have some great journalists as well, Matt Taibbi is by far my favorite of these writers. Back in May of 2008, Mr. Taibbi wrote an amazing piece about his experience going undercover to a fundamentalist Christian camp, the story is absolutely amazing.
I remember the first time that I read this story. I was so fascinated with these Christian fundamentalists. I had heard stories of these camps, but I was skeptical as to how crazy these people actually are. If you are unfamiliar with these Christian fundamentalist camps, this article is a MUST READ. You will be astonished at what goes on at these camps.
In addition to the excellent job of going undercover and getting a fascinating story, Matt Taibbi has an amazing sense of humor that comes out in his writing. In Jesus Made Me Puke, Matt Taibbi tries to push these people with his ridiculous answers to their inquiries in an attempt to see how much these crazy fundamentalist will actually believe. The article is very long, it clocks in at somewhere around 7,000 words, but I promise you, it is well worth it, you will be fully entertained throughout. Enjoy...
Jesus Made Me Puke: Undercover with the Christian Right
By Matt Taibbi
The Rolling Stone - May 1st, 2008
I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I'd spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio — anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.
There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?
"Excuse me," I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. "I see everyone has blankets. I didn't bring any. Is this going to be a problem?"
The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.
"Name?" he said.
"Collins," I said. "Matthew Collins."
He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. "Don't worry, Matthew," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. "A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there."
I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.
I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone — a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country — to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country — not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.
So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don't get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there's a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won't scare the advertisers — and then there's the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director's cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn't know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.
The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and there a few people sitting together or near each other huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a great many people on the trip had come alone, like me. They were people of all sorts: younger white men in neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of military bearing.
The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic study of the Cornerstone Church population would come to would be that it's a solidly middle-class crowd. These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They're people who grew up in houses with back yards and fences, people with families. This particular journey to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban obnoxious.
I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.
"Some weather we're having, with this rain," I said.
"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today." She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip," she said. "Otherwise, I would never have made it."
"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.
This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I'd come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.
"Well," I said, "since the new year, I've just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am."
I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he'll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.
Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?"
"No, I haven't," I said.
"Me neither," she said. "I'm really excited."
"They're wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. "They really change you forever."
I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.
One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That's one of the reasons that it's so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous — they're appearing as the "after" photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.
In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual — and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don't want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning — they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.
I was very, very, very good — at everything!" shouted our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around his ruddy face. "I was a Green Beret — top of the class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team. . . ."
The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-size building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together. In his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan ("A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell," he quipped), was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation — and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wanna-be's.
It did. "I'm going to start tonight by telling y'all two stories," he began.
The first was a story from his Army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. "If you've ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean," he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.
The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior's ballgames. But from time to time he would come back home to Mom, moving back into Junior's world, turning his life upside down.
"And every time he came back," the pastor said, waving his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with tears, "it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy's world apart."
The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry — himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally — had it down to a science. "You never came to my ballgames, Dad," he'd screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the word "ballgames."
I heard sniffles coming from the audience.
Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father's abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games.
How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room. "But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots" — here he mimicked a jump shot — "and all those thousands of moves" — he ducked his head back and forth, Tim Hardaway-style — "hadn't brought me any closer to Dad."
The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."
"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"
The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.
After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy's chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry's Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren't privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.
The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they'd failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they'd been afraid to look behind the bush.
"So I'm telling you now, as you go into your groups," the pastor explained, "don't be afraid to look behind the bush."
I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.
The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call out the coach's name first, then the names of his group members.
My coach's name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez — soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache.
There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was José, a huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker's build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces.
Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.
"Well," Morgan said, "I think what we're going to do to start is this. I'm going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we're going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?"
Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?
Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan's wound was a tale that wouldn't have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life — something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men — although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women's roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.
Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.
"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"
My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real past — not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process — but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.
"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."
The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to tea-saucer size.
I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.
"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know —whap!"
I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.
It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.
So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.
Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:
I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.
Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from José at the last part — his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.
After each of these grueling exercises we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the theme of the moment (e.g., "Admit the Truth About Our Wounds") that lasted an hour or so. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional résumé ("I was the manager of the second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres. . . .") and bragging about his physical prowess ("If someone was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here"), we would go back to the group session and confess some more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of Fortenberry's hairy lessons, and then the cycle would start all over again. There were almost no breaks or interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless, muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at 7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in one day.
We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry's blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat ("Tighten your saddle, he's fixin' ta buck" was how "cowboy" Fortenberry put it), when we would experience "Victory and Deliverance." But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to "find your wounds" ("My husband hid my Saks card!") at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.
True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family — your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.
But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program's end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents' curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves — only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons — probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.
This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely fucked up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.
He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis — the sweat on Adam's brow, the pain of Eve's childbirth, etc. — the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. "How many of you women out there have had babies?" Fortenberry asked. "Can I see some hands?"
A dozen or so hands raised.
"Now, did it hurt?" he asked.
Laughter. Of course it hurt.
"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused. "There are some people out there who will tell you it's genetics. It's in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it's not genetics. It's a generational curse!"
Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. "Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles."
The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it's true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they're away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That's because they know that their audience doesn't give a shit. So long as you're telling them what they want to hear, there's no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.
A team of twenty of the world's leading scientists wouldn't be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.
Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. "Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air," Fortenberry said. "And I said to my nephew, I said, 'It isn't something they've done. It's something you've done.' "
The crowd murmured in assent.
"I told my nephew to look around the house," Fortenberry continued. "I said, 'Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?' And he said yes. And I said, 'That's your problem.' So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that."
He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry's nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.
Here I have a confession to make. It's not something that's easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?
You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.
On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. "This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face," he said. "But let me tell you something. It's already been won. It was won 2,000 years ago."
The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light during a partial eclipse.
Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.
Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.
"When the word of God is in your mouth," he said, "the demons can't come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can't have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don't pray."
The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.
And he began.
At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus. . . ."
After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.
But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly jheri curl — a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams — started wailing and clutching his head.
"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast out the demon of astrology!"
Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.
"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"
And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.
Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever watched The Houston 560 or any other gangbang porn movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.
It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!" said Fortenberry.
"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.
"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.
Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.
"Need . . . a . . . bag," I said as he came over.
He handed me a bag.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!" shouted Fortenberry.
Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.
"In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!" Fortenberry continued. "In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!"
Cough, cough!
The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.
"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. "Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!"
Philosophy?
It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata," when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he'd seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, "Was that not the most amazing thing you've ever seen, monsieur?" — well, you're too ashamed to admit that you've been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That's how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that's how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.
The whole thing — the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives' tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so — it's all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.
The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag — perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career — when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.
"Matthew!" he snapped. "Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!"
"Oh, right!" I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.
Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.
"I cast out . . . uh . . . In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect."
Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.
Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things — Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W's shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program — the modern version might very easily be this completely batshit holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.
We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to "just let it out. Just let it out and it'll come out."
He didn't come right out and say, "Just act like you're speaking in tongues." But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he'd once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him — and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.
I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:
"Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha. . . . Come on, Matthew, let it out."
American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you're holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford's heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!
But I didn't think of this at the time and just went another route.
"Let it out, Matthew," the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. "Just open your mouth."
I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song "What is Autumn?" by the Russian rock band DDT:
What is autumn? It's the sky The crying sky below your feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds. Autumn I've not been with you for so long!
It's actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.
"Hmm, very good," my coach said. "Good job, Matthew."
I kept going, on to the next verse. "What is autumn? It's a stone. . . ."
"OK, that's good," the coach said, annoyed, moving on to the next guy.
"It's important that you practice," said Pastor Fortenberry. "It sounds silly, but when you're at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You'll get used to it, and soon you'll be speaking in tongues like nobody's business!"
He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.
He held up his hands in triumph.
"Hallelujah!" he shouted.
The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.
"Hallelujah!"
He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.
We had graduated.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.
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If you enjoyed this article, I highly recommend a 2006 documentary called Jesus Camp. Jesus Camp is a film about a Pentecostal summer camp for children that is very similar to the camp portrayed in the above article. Jesus Camp was nominated for the 2006 seventy-ninth Annual Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. If you are like me, it will scare the crap out of you.
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