One reason I love my friend Adam Lipscomb’s blog is because of what he writes about politics — or, rather, the magical way he writes about idiots in politics and religion in America.
For example, this post. Go on, read it, it’s short, and it has Pat Robertson, rabid dung beetles, rotted Norway rads, fetid dogshit, and Pat Robertson shitting his own teeth.
It’s beautiful. A beautiful imagine for the rationalists of today.
Now, skipping to the meat, the point is that Pat Robertson claimed that “they” (them folks in Haiti) made a pact with the devil and that’s why they were hit with such a bad earthquake on Tuesday. A pact with the devil. Most insanely, he claims that the pact was in exchange for having the French removed from Haiti.
Let’s set aside the observation that, if there really were a just, holy God bent on wreaking damage upon the wicked, then any number of religious extremist conventions and meetings could have been hit by lightning, caught fire, happened to have fallen in the zone of a terrorist attack, and so on. Let’s set aside the wish that something like thatwould happen, because really, if there’s anything that would boost faith among the good people of the world, it’s to see people like Pat Robertson and the rest of his twisted kind having been hit by lightning, all at the same time, on the same day, as an “Act of God.” Hell, if that happened, even I’d cry out Halleluia!
But let’s talk aabout Haiti for a minute. Now, anyone who’s studied even a little history of Haiti knows better.
Wait, actually, anyone who lives in the real world knows better, because if the devil were open to signing pacts with people, then he’d have a 1-900 number right now. Come on, face it, I’m right. Satan wouldn’t be hiding anymore. Satan would be running a Megachurch, handing out Rolls Royces and supermodel spouses like candies, and raking in the souls of the world like there’s no tomorrow, until there really were no tomorrow.
But back to Haiti; if Toussaint de l’Overture — the slave who led the slave rebellion in San Domingo when it was still under the French, the slave rebellion that led to the expulsion of the French, the emancipation of slaves, and the freeing of San Domingo — had wanted to contact Satan, how would he have done so? Eh? Salt pentagram on the ground, magic spellbook? The man couldn’t read that magic spellbook. He was a genius tactician, but he couldn’t read a word, as far as I remember. He had letters penned for him by dictation, is what I seem to recall.)
What’s interesting is the mythic status of the slave revolt in San Domingo. After all, the “they” that Robertson must be referring to is the black slaves who revolted against the French in what was the most long-term successful slave uprising in history. It’s amazing that Robertson has the gall to suggest it was Satan who facilitated that. One imagines Satan was much happier when Haiti was a slave colony, when men and women were human chattel, being used for work and as sexual toys by the French and by mixed-blooded descendants of masters and raped slaves. Indeed, the hell of San Domingo before the uprising, a hell that Napoleon was quite interested in preserving, seems to be the place Satan would have been quite happy to keep going as long as he could. And, indeed, it’s no mistake that Robertson is revulsed by the end of the slave colony of San Domingo where Haiti now lies: the American reaction at the time was sheer panic, terror that the slaves of America might rebel and slaughter their oppressors, too.
Those naughty slaves. Those naughty, uppity slaves. How dare they fight for their freedom? How dare they succeed in winning it. Hey, wait. They’re black. And they overthrew white rule? That can’t be right. Someone else must be involved. And it can’t be God. Could it be…
Could it be SATAN? How con-veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.
(Good grief, it ought to embarrass these bastards how relevant that Dana Carvey character is after all these years.)
Of course, one doubts that Pat Robertson would have read a book like The Black Jacobins by historian C.L.R. James. He was no doubt too busy reading books spoon-feeding psychopathic-extremist-theofascistic interpretations of political events. In the article Adam links, Roberts described, after Hurricane Katrina, reading “a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood…But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?”
One cannot help but hope that Robertson’s old bloodthirsty buddy, Old-Testament-God, doesn’t show up in the sky to start dictating military policy and practice to the Pentagon, or those Guantanamo torture pics that horrified us all so much will be just the tip of the iceberg. After all, this is the same deity openly quoted, in the very same books he’s thinking of, as demanding genocide,endorsing rape, and condoning slavery. Innocence, after all, for Old-Testament-God, is equivalent to belonging to the right race, indeed the Israelite race.
As for me, I’m still waiting for lightning to strike Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the rest of those hypocritical examples of fanatical depravity. Come on, Yahweh, give us a sign. Hell, Loki? Hephaestus? Shiva? Whoever… I don’t mind which deity zaps these bastards. Just give us a hand, please. These guys are giving us a collective headache.