Mark Hertsgaard is interviewed on the back page of today's Vanguardia. So who's Mark Hertsgaard? He's a San Francisco journalist who has written a lot of enviro-lefty stuff and a Reagan-bashing book, and he's got an new one out called The Eagle's Shadow, about perceptions of America in the world, which I haven't read; the word on the Net is that it's wholesale anti-American crap. It's out in England but hasn't come out in America. Hertsgaard buys into and propagates the Chomskyite media conspiracy theory--it's all controlled by nefarious men for nefarious purposes. I will say one thing for him: he's decent enough to oppose Chinese Communism. The interviewer is Lluís Amiguet and the title is "This war isn't for oil, it's religious." Amiguet is in bold type, Securityguard is in italics, and yours truly is in regular type.

He roams the world to explain to the Americans how they are seen in "The Eagle's Shadow", and now he tells me how we are seen in Washington: irrelevant or annoying. And this comes form the few who see us, because only 14% of Americans has a passport, and the majority will never cross a frontier. Hertsgaard, author of a cited study of Reagan, supplies me with worrying statistics about the decisive influence of Christian extremists in the USA over the destiny of the world. I consult on the Internet the Project for the New American Century of the "new cons" (sic. Does he mean neoconservatives? Neoconservatives are defined as former liberals who moved to the right on foreign policy and defense issues because they are / were strongly anti-Communist, but they're not necessarily free-market purists--many have no problems with a mixed economy, though none could be called social democrats--and they are most emphatically not members of the Christian Right. Many--Perle, Krauthammer, the Kristols, Marty Peretz, Wolfowitz, the Podhoretzes--are of Jewish origin, in fact), signed by Jeb Bush, among others, and I become seriously frightened: Hertsgaard does not exaggerate. Suddenly I discover that the fundamentalists are not only in the Arab countries and, besides, these have nuclear missiles. (If Mr. Amiguet thinks that statement of principles is scary, he's going to have to learn to live with spine-chilling terror for the rest of his days. Top yourself now, Louie! Don't wait till everybody starts doing it!)

The USA is not starting this war to take over Iraqi oil...
Ah, no?
Of course not. Anyone who knows American politics knows that this is a religious war.
Don't scare us.
Fact: Bush owes the Presidency to this 30% of voters who, like himself, call themselves born-again Christians.

No, Bush owes the Presidency to having won the most electoral votes. Not all born-again Christians are Republicans. A disproportionate number of born-again Christians are, uh, black, which Mr. Hertsgaard does not seem to realize. The great majority of American blacks belong to socially conservative Protestant churches. 80-90% of blacks vote Democrat. Also, many born-again Christians are only conservative on social issues; they may well be liberals on international and economic issues. Jimmy Carter is an example.

Born-again Christians are generally perceived by West Coast lefty reporters as being lower-class, whether white or black. They are seen as stupid and ignorant by urban leftists. This fits in very well with Mr. Amiguet's prejudices against Americans in general. Mr. Hertsgaard apparently feels that NPR-listening Americans in San Francisco are sensitive, caring souls who are menaced by the overwhelming Great Unwashed masses who live in uncool places like Oklahoma.

You know, I'm not black, so I really don't know what it's like to feel that someone else is an "Uncle Tom", but my idea of it is that you feel sort of sick because one of your people is abasing himself to curry favor with members of another group. That's sort of how I feel when I hear Left Coast or Far East morality snobs (oh, we're all so good, we want peace and love and solidarity unlike those evil, selfish people who vote Republican, and we've got culture, too, not like those rednecks and ghetto African-Americans, and San Francisco is the most European American city and Manhattan isn't really the United States) kissing European ass about how the rest of us gringos are a bunch of hicks.

By the way, just a comment on the fact that only 14% of Americans has a passport. Americans don't need a passport to go to Canada, Mexico, or most Caribbean countries. You only need a passport to go to Europe. Going to Europe is expensive and is only accessible to people with money. Putting down people who don't have passports is just a little elitist, and if we want to stretch logic to the utmost, we could call it racist, since I bet the percentage of American passport holders in the top 1/10 income bracket is 100% and the percentage of same in the bottom 1/10 income bracket is 0%. Who's most likely to be in the bottom income bracket? It ain't nice white folks from Marin or Westchester County, dude.

What's that?
Christians who have had a moment of epiphany in their lives after a slip and who have been born again into a new life in Christ. They are the most important political force in the country. (Wait, I thought that was the oil companies or the arms companies or the international bankers or the Elders of Zion or the great media conspiracy, not a bunch of Baptist rednecks and Negroes from, like, Alabama.)
Have they all had a vision?
Don't take them as a joke. They are the great American social, ideological, and electoral movement of the end of the century. They were the 30% of the faithful upon whom Reagan constructed his hegemony and they are now those who gave victory to Bush and who support him on his crusade. These voters aren't looking for oil; they think they have a mission in the world.
It's hard to believe there are so many.
According to the last Gallup religious poll, 46% of Americans call themselves "born again Christians" and in many states...99%! Any sociologist knows what that means: 99% declare themselves faithful believers! (My guess is that a lot of people call themselves "born again" without having much idea of what it means more than being a member of a conservative Protestant church. And did he really say that 99% of people in some states are born again Christians? That's flat wrong.)

You're the expert.
I fear I'm being realistic. This evangelical 30% that got Reagan and now Bush elected is the same that destroyed the Clinton presidency over the Lewinsky case, something unheard of in another country without religious fanatics, and it's exactly the same as (the percentage) that now say in the surveys that we have to take Iraq with or without the UN. (Oh, I dunno. That French scandal with Roland Dumas and that woman who wrote the book about being the "whore of the Republic" was a pretty good one, and it will yet put Jacques Chirac's ass in the slammer--he'd be in jail right now for massive fraud and corruption going back to the Seventies if he didn't have immunity from prosecution. Do any Americans think someone ought to have immunity from prosecution just because he's president? I sure hope not.)
I see they're still influential.
Very much. The White House works only for them. (Wasn't it just a week or so ago that David Brooks got extremely angry at those who pointed out the presence of several Jews among Bush's inner circle as an unhealthy sign?) Bush pays much more attention to the Bible than the UN. (I'm a hard-line agnostic and I pay more attention to the Bible than the UN.) And it's not because he's so brilliant: we're describing a well-structured social movement with deep community and social roots that has become the key to any realistic electoral calculus in America. (Good. We're democratic, right? Everybody gets to vote, right? You want us to disqualify Bible-bangers from voting?)

So important?
They're the ones who do the thankless grassroots work, those who take over the school board, the city council, the local authorities, keys to the presidential battle. Besides Bush, who had his own experience of redemption...
He was an alcoholic. And a cokehead. (Does this count as libel?)
After a dark past, he's one of them in his heart. In the White House they pray every day before every meeting.
I suppose it's optional.
Not one adviser misses the prayer...and they're not short! Well, these fundamentalists consider themselves the Chosen people to govern the Earth and they've written The Project for the New American Century, the manifesto of the new American century. (The Project for the New American Century is not a document, it's an organization. Their Statement of Principles is pretty standard let's-make-America-strong talk.)
Which I suppose is not a hymn to equality among peoples.
For them it's the voice of God. it consists of the proclamation by divine mandate of the necessary hegemony of the United States over the Earth. It's clearly connected to the Book of Revelation and its saga, forty million copies, and I know very well what I'm talking about because I was brought up by one of those fundamentalist Christians. (Oh, OK, here's where he's coming from. I firmly believe that most people's political positions are highly unstable, first, and emotionally-based, second. I do not think that most of us get our political opinions from logic or reason, but rather from how we feel. This guy's feelings against fundamentalist Christians are old and deep.)

It all sounds like a cult.
It is. It's inspired by the Bush brothers--though their father is not a fanatic--Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Krisol (sic), Kagan, and a little group of ideologues who are convinced--and when I say convinced I'm not talking about reason, but faith, and I'm serious--that they are called to dominate the world for the good of humanity and divine inspiration. (This is getting extremely weird--I'd say Kierkegaard here is well over the line into paranoia, and I know whereof I speak. Cheney, Kagan, and Rumsfeld are not right-wing Christians, though John Ashcroft is--the only one with any power in the Bush administration. Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol are Jewish. And who are the "little group of ideologues"? Name 'em, dude, or this is prima facie a conspiracy theory.)

You're not calming me down.
I'm as terrified as you, and get ready in the European Union, because until now you were irrelevant; from now on, and I just read what Kagan wrote about the European Union for the White House. If you comply with their designs, you will be ignored; if you question them, you will be punished and disactivated and then ignored. (This is another emotional problem for Scotchgard or whatever his name is; this paranoid effluvia he's disgorging comes at least partly from his anger at being less important in real life than he is in his mind. Words that are repeated are key to people's feelings. Trust me on this one.)
And what exactly are they trying to do in Iraq?
Take that first step of the divine mandate for America in the Middle East, and in the middle of that evangelical vision is Israel. (Bingo! Didn't you just know that one was coming?)
Is that also a revelation?
It's sad, but yes, we are in the hands of these visionaries. They placed Israel at the center of their project, because if Israel wins, according to the Book of Revelation, America, the authentic Chosen People, wins.
The far right and the Jews never got along well, even in the USA.
It's a curious tactical alliance, but I'm not denouncing a conspiracy here. (Oh, no, you're not. Please. You just said that there's an alliance of the Christian Right and the Jews that controls the American government in general and American foreign policy in particular.)

I'm just reading you the surveys, which is my job as an analyst. I've been following the strategies of the "new cons" (sic), and today they dictate our foreign policy: Israel is our brother in the Bible, for now.
And do you believe Bush will win a second term this way?
Historically, the economy decides the elections in my country. But in Washington everyone's gone crazy, and journalists and politicians are rivals in putting themselves under the orders of Commander-in-Chief Bush. (Right. Like Daschle and Kennedy and Barney Frank and the Baghdad Three and Maxine Waters and the freakin' New York Times, for example. Not to mention 99% of the entertainment industry.)
A desolate panorama.
Meanwhile, the President's father himself is blaming him for breaking with Europe, and Brezinsky (Brezhinski) says that this breakup is worse than losing Iraq. And did you know all the prestigious retired generals like Scwarzkopf (Schwartzkopf) or the ex-chief of NATO, Wesley Clark, have demonstrated against the invasion? This isn't a war for oil. This is a fundamentalist crusade.

OK, let's see. This religious conspiracy theory to explain why we're going to attack Iraq is new to me. I've heard the oil conspiracy, the arms manufacturers conspiracy, the arms dealers conspiracy, the international bankers and magnates conspiracy, the Jewish conspiracy, the water conspiracy, the racist genocide conspiracy, and the electoral-reasons conspiracy theories. Gee, isn't it possible that the reasons stated by President Bush for war in Iraq--Saddam is a dangerous monster and has to go as soon as possible, by force if need be--might be the actual reasons? Naw, that'd be too easy. All you have to do is use Ockham's Razor to figure that one out. The way you get into print--or catch your opponent off guard in an argument--is by thinking up something really weird and twisted to accuse that nasty Bush and those icky Republicans of.