[Previous entry: "Shutting down free speech in Big Sky country"] [Next entry: "Feelings, nothing more than feelings"]
05/31/2004: "Only Frank Rich could connect these dots"
Frank Rich has long been an inexplicable presence on the New York Times op-ed page: a former movie reviewer who overnight developed the skills of a political analyst. He frequently reverts to his former work, and then the lunacy really takes over. Commenting on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, his fevered imagination managed to connect those disgusting events to Mel Gibson (!):
Some of our self-appointed moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu Ghraib as another front in America's election-year culture war. Charles Colson, the Watergate felon turned celebrity preacher, told a group of pastors convened by the Family Research Council that the prison guards had been corrupted by "a steady diet of MTV and pornography." The Concerned Women for America site posted a screed by Robert Knight, of the Culture and Family Institute, calling the Abu Ghraib scandal the "'Perfect Storm' of American cultural depravity," in which porn, especially gay porn, gave soldiers "the idea to engage in sadomasochistic activity and to videotape it in voyeuristic fashion." (His chosen prophylactics to avert future Abu Ghraibs include abolishing sex education, outlawing same-sex marriage and banishing Howard Stern.) The vice president of the Heritage Foundation, Rebecca Hagelin, found a link between the prison scandal and how "our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13."
This time the point of these scolds' political strategy—and it is a political strategy, despite some of its adherents' quasireligiosity—is clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue's gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill but to clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a "few bad apples" in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or "Mean Girls," or maybe "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
The hypocrisy of those pushing this line knows few bounds. They choose to ignore the reality that the most popular images of sadomasochism in American pop culture this year have been those in "The Passion of the Christ," an R-rated "religious" movie that many Americans took their children to see, at times with clerical blessings. Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.
Rich's ignorance of the evangelical community is legendary, so I wouldn't expect him to recognize the stupidity of calling Chuck Colson a "celebrity preacher," or referring to his or Rebecca Hagelin's "quasireligiosity." And one can certainly disagree with either the diagnoses or the prescriptions offered by the folks quoted with regard to the prisoner abuse.
But the idea that The Passion is a "more exact fit" for what happened at the prison than the porn that the soldiers there were consuming suggests the workings of an unhinged thought process, or, more likely, a process in which thought was not involved at all. As Kathy Shaidle rightly asks, "Does Frank Rich even have an editor?"
