God-use in America - the short story

“God” – use in America : the short story. (used to define the post-Katrina theological situation)

1… first period: by advanced psychoclass, circa 1800 (matured sons of the new world colonials, “founding fathers” setting the spiritual stamp on historical group process)

Use of “God” would be centered in churches, mostly Protestant. But schools, public service organizations (police, firefighters, city/town administrators, law courts) would be ‘toned’ to religious tokens. The McGuffy readers took words to spell, ideas to ponder and passages to quote from the King James Version of the Bible. It could be said the use was strong – highly cathected – but muted: as background for shared assumptions, expectations, feeling states, ritual ceremonies. Religion would not be flaunted, nor pressed – no cultural holier-than-thous. The rejection of idols went over to recoil against regarding ANY material thing as sacred, and Roman Catholic statues, prayer beads, regalia, and Latinisms were looked down on.

America’s political discourse was the political child of Westphalia, the treaty in 1648 that settled the bloody 30 years war between Protestants and Catholics over control of Europe. It was agreed (though Catholics always signed agreements with crossed fingers, as it were, since no emissaries have the right to cancel what The Church is) to eschew confessional language for matters of state. The colonials curried this grammatical secularism, perhaps in the South even more than the North, where abolitionists began their ranting in God’s name.

2. Second period --

(by-passing oceans of river-time, slogging through the increasingly militaristic 20th century i America)… NOW, in 2000, first with, Lieberman’s pop-off use to anoint Al Gore; second, with GW Bush’s “faith” switch, after election, from “compassionate conservative” campaign bait …pre-Wesphalial confessionalism was shoved into politics and public discourse big time. 9/11, which was immediately framed as Muslim/Arab/Islamic peoples striking like cowardly terrorists at the Judeo-Christian western civilization. Bush announced the first few months that Catholics and Jews would be targeted as ’04 swing vote groups – meaning, they are the ones he would be aiming to please, to get re-elected. These are only a few ways that confessional faith-talk has become embedded in national discourse. The ’04 election ways saturated with references to “family values” (sub-text anti-gay marriage (sub-sub-text: anal sex, which God hates). It doesn’t take much of a cynic, just an observer of the scene, to judge that THIS WAS MONGERED AS AN ‘ISSUE’ PRECISELY IN ORDER TO USE THE SPIRIT OF RELIGIOUS CONDEMNATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY TO ELECT REPUBLICANS. Those who were voting AGAINST queers were also voting FOR the war. It only takes recollection of the pictures of naked bodies stacked at Abu Ghraib, plus a dash of hot salsa from Freud’s analysis of sado-maschistic “God” psychosis, always harboring a narcissistic homosexual trend, to see that DEFENSE AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY ‘AT HOME’ = (at the unconscious level) DEFENSE AGAINST ANAL RAPE = DEFENSE AGAINST (…threatened by) SADDAM HUSSEIN’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION = THE WAR PSYCHOSIS MENTALITY DRIVING REPUBLICAN’S USE OF ‘GOD’

This “God”, who is punishing America for sinfulness of “liberals”, in their group-fantasy, is, however, not the God of Love (nurturant placenta), but God of Hate (poisonous placenta, returning uncleansed, de-oxygenized blood to the drowning fetus). This is the result of the aging, hardening, coarsening of the super-ego functions. The colonials, it was noted, represented an exceptionally advanced psychoclass: fathers whose formative childhoods were matured under a new, free land. Such people do not need, shouldn’t stand for punitive God-posturing by political preachers (or preaching politicians). The affairs of state should be discussed in non-confessional state terms. We do not vote “ON”, but “UNDER” God…an elementary point that has escaped many, e.g., Justice Scalia.

Hate, Freud found, was love (libido cathexis) meeting a barrier of abuse: turned back by fists, torture, cruelty. What continues to be felt -- the more so as these are less actually severe and merely imagined -- as Love toward the Father, is tinged, to that extent, by “reaction-formation”. “NO! NO! (dismissing thoughts of hatred, urges for revenge) I DON”T HATE HIM! I LOVE HIM!” This was a major mechanism Freud showed went into compulsive “Love of Father” – even when, or sometimes because, they are abusive. For those whose “Love of Father” is a compulsive reaction-formation, repressing the urge to kill Him (as Oedipus did his), the ingression of “God” –use into public discourse set them up with a psychosemiotic bridge, from gaynxiety to war for Israel. But this gets far ahead of the story.

Situation: The original use of “God” in the ultra-liberal spirit of the colonials, empowering cooperation, growth, developing of strength through positive bonds of unity, deserving not just fear, or respect, but Love, has been implanted in politics to shape partisan issues in confessional discourse.

Republicans have done this. It is where what they have done confutes them. By trying to show now that they know what the original God was all about, they become more false: to themselves, and “Him”. Yet that is what the situational context requires them to do. Condemned and punished for their guilt by Katrina, they can only cry GOD! GOD! LOUDER .. or get someone to do it for them. The point of this writing, and of its counter-movement in tokenspace, is to hold the Sound-Mirror up in front of such talkers. “Look at yourself saying…”