Bob Ellis and Steve Sibson: Deluded Tools of the Plutocracy

Blog War II? No, just pointing out the Man Behind the Curtain.

Occasionally I agree with and even feel inklings of respect for Steve Sibson. A few days ago I teased Sibby for being "predictably paranoid." He had the courtesy to forego "starting another blog war" and focused instead on our common ground in opposing No Child Left Behind. Gee, Sibby almost sounds like a reasonable politician, amenable to compromise, willing to work in a bipartisan fashion toward practical, shared goals. Thank you, Steve, for your good sense...

Oh, but wait:

I also hope that Cory understands that I am not against education, but I am against indoctrination of the far-left's anti-American one-world socialism. I would hope that those in South Dakota promoting the far-left agenda will listen to the truth and then agree that America's sovereignty is more important than their special interests. Because the difference is freedom versus tyranny [Steve Sibson, "Paranoid or Informed, Freedom or Tyranny," SibbyOnline, 2007.12.26].

To quote the closest thing to the Second Coming for Sibby's readers, "Well, there you go again."

Bob Ellis subjects us to even heavier doses of such monsters-under-the-bed rhetoric. He can read a simple reminder to recycle extra Christmas garbage and compost the Yule tree and see sinister "environmental nonsense" perpetrated by secularists out to destroy Christmas, intelligent design, and Western civilization.

More often than not, Bob Ellis and Steve Sibson are the car wrecks of South Dakota blogging: so ugly and gruesome I can't help looking.

But as I read Senator R.F. Pettigrew's Triumphant Plutocracy this very white Christmas, the spirit of South Dakota's first US Senator and patron saint of prairie radicals compels me to write the following: Ellis and Sibson are deluded tools of the plutocracy.

Ellis and Sibson preach that the gravest danger to Christian civilization is scrawny secular humanists like me pottering about our classrooms and libraries. Hogwash. Grad students like me are too busy researching and writing abstruse malarkey that only 0.002% of the population will ever see. Those sinister secular humanist teachers and professors are too busy getting their grades in and serving on committees to have time to effectively corrupt the youth. University profs in particular are in a terrible position for fomenting the Second Bolshevik Revolution: the majority of their students are at university just to get a degree and a job and aren't really listening to the occasional bits of nonsense about global warming or economic justice that their profs might slip into their lectures.

And for all our alleged efforts to destroy all that Bob holds holy, we're doing a pretty crappy job: 85 percent of Americans call themselves Christians. Compare that to Israel, which is only 77% Jewish [Bill McKibben, "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong," Harper's Magazine, Aug 2005].

Bob and Sibby aren't completely wrong. There is a vast secular, globalist threat to Christianity and family values, perpetrated by amoral agents devoted only to increasing their own power. it's called global corporate capitalism. Corporations have no God, no morality. Corporations care by design and duty for nothing but increased profits. They don't care what god you worship or what country you live in: they just want your money, your labor, and your loyalty/slavery.

Quick reality check—show of hands, please:

1. How many of you have ever been short-changed, ripped off, or outright screwed by a secular humanist?
2. O.K., now how many of you have ever been short-changed, ripped off, or outright screwed by a wealthy corporation?
   

Thank you—now back to the egghead stuff:

Being a threat to Christian civilization takes a lot of power. Senator Pettigrew back in 1921 could see it was the big money capitalists, not the secular humanists or the Reds of his day, who had that sort of power:

The economic power of the United States has been concentrated in the hands of a very few, and they are the Government. They pass the laws that in their judgment will protect and defend the property upon which their power depends; they secure the appointment of judges who will interpret and who do interpret this legislation in the interest of the wealth-owning classes; control those who execute the laws, from the presidents down—indeed, for the most part, the presidents are lawyers, and either members of the plutocracy, or else paid retainers of the plutocracy; they control all of the channels of public opinion—the press, the schools, the church; they control the labor unions through the control of their leaders and of the policy that the leaders pursue; possessors of the land on which the farmer must work, of the mines and the machines with which the laborer must work, in order to live, the plutocracy—the wealth class—in the United States is supreme over the affairs of public life [R.F. Pettigrew, Triumphant Plutocracy, New York City: Academy, 1921, pp. 130-131].

Don't tell me any secular humanists have ever had such pervasive power in this country.

Pettigrew's description of who calls the shots sounds just like South Dakota today. Think about realpolitik in your hometown. Who runs the show? Here in Madison there are no professors or teachers on the city commission, the county commission, or even the Chamber of Commerce board (Dr. Knowlton and Steve Shirley are administrators, not profs... and I doubt they are card carrying-members of the secular humanist conspiracy). If your town is like mine, you follow the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

I labor under no delusions about my importance: we secular humanists have little power. We are simply a convenient scapegoat for the ills of society. When Bob and Sibby rail against the secular humanist plots to spread godless global socialism, the real powers-that-be laugh with gratitude at their wingnut nonsense for diverting people's attention from the Man Behind the Curtain.

Bob frets about one article in the Christmas Eve RC Journal recommending recycling, but he says nothing about the ads peppering every page and filling the corporate-controlled airwaves, exhorting anti-Christian materialism and overconsumption.

Bob erects and bashes straw-man babykillers who would use abortion to promote eugenics but never speaks a word of Christian truth against the corporations who exploit women and children for cheap labor and create an economic system that requires both parents to abandon their children every day to make a living wage.

Sibby at least recognizes some of the creeping corporatocracy; he hasn't made the connection yet between global capitalism and the destruction of family and community, but I think there's hope for Sibby. Really. I do.

So hey, Sibby and Bob, if you really want to fight secular humanists, then bring it on. Here I am: a secular humanist, spouting leftist liberal madness, living with an all-too-tolerant ELCA Lutheran theologian and raising a child in what is sure to be a moral morass (once she starts asking questions instead of just referring to everything as "Baa-baa!" and "Shoo!"). If you really, really, really think that secular humanism is the biggest threat to your world, well, I've got my snowballs, and I'm ready to fight.

But if you'd like to fight the real threats to Christianity, family, and community, maybe we could recognize our common cause against the money-changers, the law-school Pharisees, and the globalizing multinational corporations who will tolerate neither the laws of man or God standing in the way of their profits.