A multitude of sins

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch:
The band is playing "Dixie," a man got his hand outstretched.
Could be the Fuhrer, could be the local priest.
You know sometimes, Satan, comes as a man of peace. - Bob Dylan

You'll have seen this by now - Pat Robertson on yesterday's 700 Club, describing his hope that the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, be met with extreme prejudice:

There was a popular coup that overthrew him. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

I remember watching Pat Robertson, in the mid-1980s, solicit funds and prayers for his "Brother," Rios Montt, the fundamentalist monster of Guatemala. I don't recall hearing one word of censure towards his partner in gold profiteering, the former despot of Liberia, Charles Taylor.

America, in case you haven't noticed, has become a place of strange perversity. A place in which Robertson can fantasize aloud, before an impressionable audience of millions, about smuggling a nuclear device into the US Department of State, without fear of disappearing into the gulag from which Jose Padilla may never emerge. (And what was it he did, again?)

Disaffected Goths telling each other vampire stories - that's not Satanism. And Satanists, worshipping without doing injury to innocents or the world - that's not True Evil, however delicious it is to them to pretend otherwise.

In a world gone upside-down and inside-out, we're all dancing on the ceiling now. Don't be taken in by the surface of things. You want to see True Evil? Chip away at the paint darkening the windows of America's Hosanna Churches. You want to see a Wicked Man? Look at the desolate eyes peering out from behind his Halloween mask of Jesus.

It was Sinclair Lewis, in It Can't Happen Here, who predicted "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Luciferianism, ritual abuse, child sacrifice - Hell came in a similar fashion.

"In the flash of this moment, you're the best of what we are." Bruce Cockburn wrote that 20 years ago about another place, and another people. In the flash of this moment, the best of what we are is Venezuelan. And may God damn those would kill it.