Glenn Beck’s head on a pike?

Oops!  I meant Lloyd Blankfein’s effigy of a head on a pike, not the actual, you know, *head*.  Because that would be wrong.

So, recently Glenn Beck got all hysterical and hid under the bed because a bunch of regular Americans (who probably don’t listen to Glenn Beck) decided to occupywallstreet and speak their minds.  He and his doofus side kick (who bears an uncanny resemblance to my brother) made fun of the way Zuccotti park occupiers have to repeat what their speakers say.  He didn’t bother to explain that voice amplification is not allowed in Zuccotti park or just about any other space in Manhattan because his guffawing audience might stop and think, “WTF??  You mean even Tea Partiers couldn’t amplify themselves in Zuccotti park?”  That’s right, but I encourage interested Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck fans to check it out for yourselves.  No, really, take a bullhorn to Zuccotti and see what happens.  Report back to us here, after you post bail.

Glenn says that the occupiers are a bunch of pissed off marxists who are now going to kill all the capitalists.

Beck then made the first of his dark analogies. Saying that the only thing that could control the movement would be a forceful crushing from “the top,” he added, “It will be the Night of Long Knives. It will be a purging of this country.” This was a seeming reference to the political murders carried out by the Nazis in 1934.

Beck then turned to “capitalists,” and here his warning was even starker and more graphic:

“Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you’re wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you…they’re Marxist radicals…these guys are worse than Robespierre from the French Revolution…they’ll kill everybody.”

Gosh, why did the commies wait so long?  A lot of people are losing their houses.  They’ve had three years to hatch their diabolical plan and all they can come up with is a mass movement using a democratic, open source process to work their way through the problem while using militant non-violence to assemble and protest peacefully?  Betcha Glenn couldn’t start a nationwide movement without a bullhorn, his own media and a posse of mean spirited, bullying senior citizens who deliberately refuse to evolve.  These occupiers are blood thirsty fiends with their cardboard signs and their sharpies, using the power of the word to cut through all of the right wing nastiness.

Oh, wait, Glenn is one of those nasty right wingers.  So, what we have here is a genuine uprising that is threatening the astroturfed Tea Party movement and Glenn’s moment of glory.  It’s tapping into the zeitgeist of a very dispirited and angry middle class.  It’s non-partisan, a-religious, doesn’t endorse any political candidates and doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings except the bankers (poor widdle guys).  In short, it’s anti-Beck, the little, greedy, mean, libertarian, uber conservative, anti-gay, anti-feminist Mormon man.

Oh My God!  What is happening??  Americans don’t seem to be afraid of their own mortality or intimidated by Beck and his selfish, cranky and para military fantasist  followers.  How can that be after all of the money that has been pouring into the GlennBeckian wet dream network?  It’s the end of the world.  Before you know it there will be earthquakes and floods, dogs and cats living together.  Good thing Beck has an underground fallout shelter where he can hide from the pacifist hordes who are about to force a vegan diet on him.  (Ok, the occupiers do go a little overboard on the crunchy granola. It is a little frightening.)  If this movement is not stopped, before you know it you’ll have capitalists operating under more strict regulations, unable to gamble away your retirement money at the global craps table, forced to pay taxes or pass their workers’ productivity gains back to them, working on an increasingly non-carbon based infrastructure and encouraging Americans to take mass transit and work from home.  Oh, the humanity!

Calm down, Glenn.  They’re not coming to take your head and parade it around on a pike.  They just want to shove your malicious rhetoric down your gullet – metaphorically.   You can come out from under the bed now.

Oh, and about the “acres of trash” that are supposedly accumulating in Zuccotti park?  Well, I was there last week during their third week of occupation and the only thing that I smelled were the street vendors peddling falafel and halal kebabs.  The park was spotless and the garbage cans were empty, not overflowing.

Get a life, Glenn.  Or a night light.

One more thing:  I noticed that the GBTV crew went to an occupation and found some occupiers who were definitely not your suburban soccer mom types.  But what he didn’t show his audience was who is really in the crowd down there.  So, I will.  This is a replay of the pre-march gathering at Zuccotti Park from last week.  Those radical marxists are cleverly disguising themselves as normal looking Americans of all ages and descriptions.  It’s scary.:

Malignant Christianity

Yesterday, Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured an interview with Rachel Tabachnik who recently wrote a post at Alternet about a new religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. Paul Rosenberg wrote a followup post titled “The Biggest Religious Movement You Never Heard of: Nine Things You Need to Know About Rick Perry’s Prayer Event“.  I highly recommend these pieces to those of you who are not familiar with this new cult of evangelicals who are planning to conduct spiritual warfare on an institution or religious affiliation near you.

I don’t know what effect they will have on the political system if they ever get a politician in the White House but if we give them some rope, they just might hang themselves.  I call them malignant because they really don’t care what sect of Christianity *you* believe.  There is only one truth according to them and it is the one they define.  They have absolutely no respect for your religious beliefs.  They don’t believe in tolerance.  They’re cultlike in that they have cultivated a mindset and thought stopping ideas and it is impossible to argue with them.  You can’t reason with people whose minds exist in a parallel universe.  They are end timers who put their faith only in God.  They are waiting for a critical mass of Jews to accept Christ before the end.  Unlike some evangelicals, they don’t necessarily believe in the Rapture.  They expect that they will have to go through the tribulations on earth before Jesus comes.

In many respects, they are indistinguishable from Jehovah’s Witnesses.  This is pretty surprising.  When I was a kid, Jehovah’s Witnesses were thought of as eyes-glazed-over zealots with no sense of humor and a stubborn streak of anti-intellectualism.  Now, a whole new generation of evangelicals has adopted their theology lock, stock and barrel and probably don’t even know it.

These new apostles claim they don’t belong to any church.  They belong to a movement.  Their movement is obsessed with the idea of demons everywhere, another feature of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Yep, if you are a freemason in the Midwest, you just might find a bunch of these people standing on the lawn to your temple, driving a stake in the grass and praying fervently to drive the demons out.  In most other respects, they are like the religious right.  Adamantly anti-abortion, they also think that homosexuality is perverted.  It’s not just that they think it’s immoral, the very thought of gay sex is mentally and emotionally revolting to them.  I find this aspect really weird but it does tell you something about the age of some of these participants.  Bedroom practices for gay and straight couples don’t really differ a lot these days but you don’t hear the religious right spazzing out about married heterosexuals performing oral or anal sex.  If it’s immoral to use the wrong orifice, it’s wrong for anyone who does it.  Consistency, people.  It would make you a whole lot more credible.

They also seem to think that the government has too much of a safety net and that the responsibility for helping people in need belongs to the church.  This is really strange because these people don’t belong to physical churches and they detest the mainstream religious institutions so who’s supposed to be doing this stuff for the poor?  And what do the poor have to give up in exchange?  It’s funny how these people think the unemployed are parasites after people such as myself paid more in taxes in a year than some of them made in salary.  We’re out of work but we still pay taxes on severance benefits (if we’re lucky enough to get them) and our unemployment checks.  But when the severance is gone, so are the taxes.  You’d think that the New Apostolic Reformation would be banging down the doors of Congress to get politicians to focus on unemployment but you would be wrong.  Because these new apostles don’t believe in the government of man.  They’re waiting for the end time to come.  Any effort towards solving the economic crisis would be a waste of time and besides, that would deprive them of their ability to look down on anyone not like them.

I call it malignant.  It spreads and it causes great harm to the body without providing any positive benefits.  Tabachnik says it’s gaining in popularity but I would hazard a guess that it will become a lot less popular after 2012 when the obsession with Mayan numerology takes its course and we’re all still here in January 2013. Or when Glenn Beck exhausts his good will among the survivalists.  Or when Rupert Murdoch finally has to explain himself before a Congressional committee.

But keep the malignancy aspect in the forefront of your mind.  The New Apostolic Reformation has nothing to offer this country or the world or you personally.  The politicians who pander to it probably don’t either.