Artist's Statement
Readers may be surprised to see how easy I
went on the Buddhists. The truth is, I got a soft spot for the
Buddhists. It’s the only religion based on reason and insight
rather than faith. It makes sense. It’s the one that was beginning
to appeal to me back when I was a teenager and had lost interest
in Christianity but had not yet been distracted by girls and
drink. I like that they’re the only religion that can seem to
resolve a theological dispute without resorting to torture, pogroms,
or massacre. The Dalai Lama explains that if they were to find
that their metaphysical beliefs were to be contradicted by modern
physics, why, they would simply have to alter their beliefs.
Contrast this to the undignified and childish behavior of fundamentalist
Christians, who are hysterically inventing convoluted explanations
for how dinosaur eggs were stored on board the ark or bending
over backward to demonstrate that the six days of Creation in
Genesis, if you throw in the Doppler shift divided by quantum
something-or-other, actually correspond to our Earth days times
a trillion. And I will say that my personal experience with Buddhists
has been exemplary: a Buddhist friend of mine, having had occasion
to feel wronged by me, was neither reproachful nor vindictive;
he felt sorry for me. One of my favorite jokes by the late comedian
Bill Hicks was about some thuggish good old boys in Alabama who
waited for him outside the stage door after one of his stand-up
routines. "Hey, buddy, c’mere!" They yelled at him. "We
didn’t like that joke you told about Christians in there. We're
Christians!" "So…?" he said to them, in laconic challenge: "Forgive
me."
A reader wrote in to the City Paper after I
ran Part I of this series, about Christianity, to complain that
I ought not to have depicted the crucifixion. In fact I had not
depicted the crucifixion; I believe she had mistaken my pastiche
of a stained-glass representation of the Annunciation for a Crucifixion.
Later I hesitated before running Part III, Islam, and asked my
editor whether he had any concerns RE potential angry chanting,
firebombing of the paper’s offices, or internet beheadings of
editorial staff. He said that as long as I stayed away from any
depictions of You-Know-Who (blessed be his name) we should be
all right. I am therefore pleased that this week’s cartoon provided
occasion to depict both the crucifixion and Mohammed. It’s a
race: lynch mob vs. Fatwah! I await the winner.
This brings us to the conclusion of our series, "Contributions
of the World’s Religions." It was while I was drawing these
cartoons that my colleague Tom Hart and I, over weekly Belgian
Ales at Burp Castle, arrived at an unsettling insight: liberals
now have more in common with conservative Christians than we
do with swing voters. Evangelicals may be dingbats, but at least
they believe in something. Like us, they have a clear ideology
that shapes their opinions on the issues, they follow politics
with passionate interest, and they’re aggrieved because the only
party that’s even an option for them pays lip service to them
before elections and ignores them the rest of the time. I certainly
have more respect for them than I do for those myopic, selfish
suburbanites who predictably vote for the incumbent if the economy
in their area is good and for the opposition if it’s not, and
haven’t heard that habeas corpus was just rescinded.
One difference between us is that liberals
have been looking for an alternative political party for about
a decade and only vote for Democrats only out of distasteful
necessity, while it seems to have dawned on the evangelicals
only recently that they’ve been strung along and lied to by Republicans
for years. This, if I may hazard an uncharitable hypothesis,
is because fundamentalist Christians, as a group, are more inclined
to blind credulity and self-deception than liberals, whose characteristic
failings are dithering doubt and self-examination. Fundamentalists,
conditioned from early childhood to accept baseless guarantees
from authority, still feel betrayed that Justices O’Connor and
Kennedy and Souter, whom they were assured were pro-life nominees,
proved to be treacherous moderates. Now David Kuo reveals that
the Bush administration has been indifferent to funding its ballyhooed
faith-based initiative program, and privately regards evangelical
leaders the same way the rest of the world always has: as "nuts." That
Republicans do not actually care about poor people, or have any
deep respect for Christian principles, could have come as shocking
news only to people long accustomed to belief in things unseen.
Now that it all turns out to have been so much cynical electioneering,
evangelicals are as innocently outraged as a girl who’s just
beginning to fathom that the guy who’s been sleeping with her
for months may not necessarily care about her. I can commiserate.
We liberals don’t even get pandered to anymore. At least the
Republican political strategists still remember to crack down
on the gays every two years, which for conservative Christians
is the equivalent of flowers on your anniversary.
The truth is that the current Republican Party
is as awkwardly cobbled-together and untenable a construction
as Iraq. Republicans couldn’t win elections without the evangelical
bloc reliably voting in obedient lockstep, but they couldn’t
even mount campaigns without millions of dollars in donations
from their other major constituency, the obscenely wealthy. But
those donors, the "haves and the have-mores" who George
Bush once famously called his base, have almost nothing in common
with evangelicals. Their only policy goals are: 1. Tax cuts,
2.) increased tax cuts, and 3.) making the tax cuts permanent.
They don’t want abortion outlawed; they could care less about
putting prayer back in the schools or the Ten Commandments in
courthouses; they’re embarrassed to be associated with creationists
and fag-bashers.
Look, I don’t like Christian conservatives.
I don’t like them telling my female friend what they aren’t allowed
to do inside their own bodies or pushing my gay friends around
or yammering about Intelligent Design when the grownups are trying
to talk. And they would not like me either: I am a blasphemer
and a drunkard and a fornicator, and I am hardly ever repentant
for very long. But lately I feel an unwelcome kinship with them.
Like my liberal friends and me, they’ve been relegated to marginality
and irrelevance; our goals are just too far outside the political
mainstream of this country. This government isn’t going to overturn
Roe v. Wade or outlaw homosexuality or put prayer back in the
schools any sooner than it’s going to limit the legal rights
of corporations or institute national health care or ban handguns.
And it’s never going to implement real campaign finance reform,
which is the only way any of our views could ever get a fair
hearing.
Our powerlessness has made both liberals and
Christian conservatives increasingly insular, shrill, and paranoid.
Sometimes our rhetoric is indistinguishable from one another’s;
both groups are convinced that America is descending into fascism,
liberals because of illegal spying, detainment, and torture,
Christians because of abortion, gun control, and the official
sanction of sodomy. We liberals expect the jackbooted thugs to
kick down our doors any night now; evangelicals think that reading
the Bible will soon be outlawed. Our common feeling of impotent
frustration, the maddening knowledge that No One Cares What You
Think, is what drives pro-lifers to bomb abortion clinics and
liberals to vote for Nader.
We’ve both become alienated from America; we
no longer feel like this is our country. A group called ChristianExodous.org
is trying to organize a mass migration of Christians to South
Carolina, where they intend to win majorities in the state government
and restore a government founded on Christian principles. ("Our
board of directors considers the values of this state to be very
similar to the values held by our membership," explains
their website. "Additionally, South Carolina possesses a
rich history of standing up for her rights." It is
hard to read this as a reference to anything other than the bold
assault on Fort Sumter in heroic defense of slavery.) Liberals,
who have already founded their own such autonomous enclave based
on their peculiar utopian notions, called "New York," aren’t
making any overt plans for treason. But after our protests against
the invasion of Iraq were waved off as the griping of "focus
groups" and Bush was reelected on the strength of "moral
values," a lot of us, me included, quietly mentally seceded
from Red State America. Our unofficial position on Iraq is: "Good
luck with that. Let us know how it turns out." This attitude
is about as healthy for our democracy as the establishment of
a cornpone theocracy on American soil.
Perhaps worst of all, our shared disenfranchisement
has also made us misidentify each other as our greatest enemies,
instead of the moribund two-party system and the powerful corporate
lobbies that keep it propped up and paralyzed and useless. Christians
imagine themselves a besieged minority fighting a losing battle
against secularism and immorality, and liberals see the Enlightenment
guttering out in a new Dark Age of ignorance and bigotry, while
we’re both taken for granted and treated with contempt by the
people who are supposed to represent us.
Evangelicals and liberals don’t have to like
each other. We don’t have the same ends. Indeed, our respective
principles—moral absolutism vs. pluralism and tolerance--are
fundamentally incompatible. Fundamentalists long for Armageddon
and the Rapture; we just want Canada with better weather. And
who’s to say?--it may even be that the swing voters are ultimately
saner than either of us, preoccupied as they are with trivial
realities instead of beautiful abstractions like the immanence
of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth or the niceties of the Constitution.
But we should at least all have the chance to fight it out fairly,
like citizens of a free country. |