Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010

Another piece by John Pilger. Well done, as usual. Of course, as I've said before, he's undoubtedly a sanctimonious prick, but he's _our_ sanctimonious prick.

By John Pilger

December 30, 2009 - "Information Clearing House" -- In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19^th century and the Soviets in the 20^th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

www.johnpilger.com

Stewart on Glenn Beck' The Gold Shill

John Stewart tackles Beck in this dead on Daily Show piece.

Matt Taibbi goes Obama scalp hunting

In the interest of fairness, here's Andrew Leonard's critique of Matt Taibbi's (pictured) piece on Obama's Big Sellout


The master ranter takes a break from the Goldman warpath to blast away at the president's "big sellout"
By Andrew Leonard
Originally posted in Salon.com

Matt Taibbi's latest screed, "Obama's Big Sellout," will undoubtedly be a big hit on the Web with the swelling legions of critics who believe the president is actively engaged in selling out the working man for Wall Street plutocrats. But baked into the narrative are enough misrepresentations -- all designed to make Obama look as bad as possible -- that it's hard to take it seriously as a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion about how properly to fix the U.S. economy. It's the classic Taibbi approach: vastly and sloppily overstate the case in absurd, over-the-top rhetoric while ignoring any possible counterargument.

Let's start with a minor nit, Taibbi's treatment of Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who was one of Obama's chief economic advisors during the campaign. Taibbi describes Goolsbee as a "populist" who was exiled to "Siberia" after the election. Meanwhile, Taibbi also criticizes Obama for retreating from his campaign promises to renegotiate NAFTA. Left out of the story is that Goolsbee achieved notoriety during the campaign precisely because he told Canadian government officials not to fuss about Obama's NAFTA promises -- dismissing them as just rhetoric. That's hardly the stuff of populism. It also might have been fun to ask Goolsbee what he thinks of Taibbi's overall thesis, since he's been one of the toughest and most eloquent defenders of Obama's overall strategy to date.

Next up, a much more serious point. Taibbi writes: "Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion." Here, Taibbi is doing the likes of Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who both went nuts over this number, completely proud. The fact is, the $23.7 trillion number is ridiculous. Not only did Barofsky himself note that it was overblown, but it also included the total potential cost of government programs that never even got started or have already been canceled. Furthermore it assumes a financial cataclysm that would make the Great Depression look like a kindergarten water fight. Let's outsource to the New York Times' Floyd Norris:

[The number] assumes that every home mortgage backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac goes into default, and all the homes turn out to be worthless. It assumes that every bank in America fails, with not a single asset worth even a penny. And it assumes that all of the assets held by money market mutual funds, including Treasury bills, turn out to be worthless.

It would also require the Treasury itself to default on securities purchased by the Federal Reserve system.

A responsible writer might also at least nod to the fact that a hefty percentage of TARP outlays have been or will be repaid to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which chisels away at some of the meaning of the word "giveaway," but that's not Taibbi's style.

Taibbi also ridicules a major early address by Obama on the economy, picking on one sentence: "Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money." To Taibbi, this means that Obama was simply going to encourage Americans to start binge borrowing again, and maintain the Bush status quo "of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.

This passage betrays an amazing failure to recall exactly what was happening to the U.S. economy in the months after the presidential election, and during the first quarter of 2009. The economy was in utter freefall, in large part because everyone, from the biggest banks to the the lowliest consumer, was afraid to borrow or spend. Corporations that depended on short-term loans from banks to fund daily expenses were suddenly getting shut out, forcing a chain reaction of layoffs and liquidity squeezes that threatened to drag the entire economy even further down a disastrous spiral. The great achievement of the Obama presidency in those first few months was to effectively stabilize that situation, unlock the credit crunch, and halt one of the great financial panics of our time. As Obama noted himself last week, using taxpayer money to bail out the banks was incredibly unpopular and "galling." But we'd all be a lot angrier and unhappier now, and unemployment would be a lot higher, if we'd stepped back and allowed Citigroup or Bank of America to fail.

Then there's just silly stuff, like describing Alan Greenspan as "a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters." Staggeringly incompetent he may well be, but is the latter half of that description even funny?

Naturally, there is a lot of meat to Taibbi's larger themes, such as the overrepresentation of Wall Street in Obama economic policy making -- though strangely, Taibbi never even mentions Christina Romer, one of the top three Obama economic policy advisors, albeit the one who just happens to be the least connected to the financial industry. It's also absolutely worth harping on the spectacle of how efforts at financial reform have been undermined over the course of the year, although from my vantage point, the administration has proposed plenty of good things that have then crashed against the rocks of congressional resistance and maneuvering.

But the co-optation of regulatory reform by Wall Street is an important story, and one that needs to be pressed at every point. It would be nice though, if the left could pursue that story without flaunting the same cavalier attitude toward the complexity of the economic challenges faced by the current administration that we are already so familiar with from the right.

When Did the CIA Become a Blackwater Subsidiary?

By Scott Horton

James Risen and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times continue the disclosures about Blackwater Worldwide, now called Xe Services:

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said. Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States. The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the C.I.A. has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.

Evidently it was “all in the family,” but it’s not exactly clear who was “big brother” and who was “little brother” in this relationship. Today’s Times disclosures can be seen as an extension of the claims made by Erik Prince in his curious Vanity Fair interview that he was a proud but informal operative of the CIA, notwithstanding his unsuccessful attempts to sign up through the front door. In a discussion with Jeremy Scahill at The Nation, I noted that the interview appeared to be carefully laying the foundations for a “graymail” defense for Prince, should federal prosecutors move against him. One common form of “graymail” for a figure who has a relationship with the U.S. intelligence community is to warn that, if prosecuted, he will have to spill the beans on his covert activities in order to defend himself. The tactic has proven widely effective.

The latest disclosures show Blackwater once more smack in the middle of the blackest of the CIA’s black ops. They show the incestuous relationship that had evolved between the CIA and the for-profit contractor, perhaps the result of a revolving door that moved high-ranking individuals between Blackwater and the intelligence community. And they show how extensive were the efforts to privatize some of the nation’s most sensitive national security operations for the benefit of a profitable company with tight connections to the Republican Party. When will the congressional intelligence committees wake up to these disclosures? Their inaction so far confirms suspicions that Congressional oversight of intelligence matters is an oxymoron.

Final edition:

This is a long, bittersweet piece that brings tears to my eyes.


Twilight of the American newspaper

By Richard Rodriguez

From Harper's Magazine

Richard Rodriguez is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco. His most recent essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The God of the Desert,” appeared in the January 2008 issue.

A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

Several generations of children learned to read from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glory, and one record, from which a distant female voice sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

Is it better to have or to want? My friend says her teacher knew one great thing: There was something out there. She told her class she did not expect to see even a fraction of what the world had to offer. But she hoped they might.

I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school and lived ninety miles inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from school, twenty-five cents bought me a connection with a gray maritime city at odds with the postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose column I read immediately—second section, corner left—invited me into the provincial cosmopolitanism that characterized the city’s outward regard: “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”

Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, once the Chronicle’s archrival. The Hearst Corporation has its headquarters in New York City. According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been losing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco there have been buyouts and firings of truck drivers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle has taken to publishing letters from readers who remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of the San Francisco Chronicle.

When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death—and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?—it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.

Most newspapers that are dying today were born in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post–Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann Arbor News died 2009, born 1835. It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news. Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were the Gutenberg Nation.

Nineteenth-century newspapers draped bunting about their mastheads and brandished an inflated diction and a Gothic type to name themselves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tribune, the Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage of time, the name of the city was commonly attached to the name of the newspaper, not only to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the New York Gazette but because the paper described the city and the city described the paper.

The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to the San Francisco Chronicle, was founded in 1865 by two teenage brothers on a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Charles and Michael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus, was initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with their widowed mother from St. Louis. In California, the brothers invented themselves as descendants of French aristocracy. They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men.

Karl Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was “thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yankee to the Chinese, from the Negro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European.” Oscar Wilde seconded Karl Marx: “It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco.” What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville’s Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen? There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There were Australian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts—“Sydney Ducks”—prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Historians relish the old young city’s foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fleas, mud, and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers moved about in. One was “vigilante,” from the Spanish. The other was “hoodlum”—a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threatening especially to the Chinese.

The de Young brothers named their newspaper the Daily Dramatic Chronicle because stranded young men seek entertainment. The city very early developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and reading rooms. San Francisco desperately appreciated minstrel shows and circuses and melodeons and Shakespeare. Stages were set up in gambling halls and saloons where Shakespearean actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, pointed to a ghost rising at the back of the house: Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.

An Italian who came to San Francisco to study medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a forty-niner, in early light, when he slept and then woke in an old house out by the ocean. The forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with a power of sadness about him. He did not speak. He had red hair and wore a dark shirt.

We can imagine marooned opera singers, not of the second, perhaps not even of the third rank, enunciating elaborate prayers and curses from the Italian repertoire as they stumbled among the pebbles and stones of cold running creeks on their way to perform in Gold Rush towns along the American River. It was as though the grandiose nineteenth-century musical form sought its natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Nevada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed the circuit and took David Belasco’s melodrama of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla del West.)

In 1860, San Francisco had a population of 57,000. By 1870, the population had almost tripled, to 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morning Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their early twenties. Along with theatrical and operatic listings, the Chronicle then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary number of suicides, likewise fires, for San Francisco was a wooden city, as it still is in many of its districts.

It is still possible, very occasionally, to visit the Gold Rush city when one attends a crowded theater. Audiences here, more than in any city I know, possess a wit in common and can react as one—in pleasure, but also in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being “an oasis of civilization in the California desert,” in the phrase of Addison DeWitt (in All About Eve), who, though a Hollywood figment, is about as good a rendition as I can summon of the sensibility (“New York critics”) we have courted here for one hundred and fifty years. And deplored.

The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded by vacancy—to the west, the gray court of the Pacific; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada range. Shipping and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, but they were never the consolations the city sought. The city looked, rather, to Addison DeWitt—to the eastern United States, to Europe, for approbation. If there was a pathetic sense of insecurity in living at the edge of the continent—San Francisco proclaiming itself “the Paris of the Pacific”!—the city also raised men of visionary self-interest who squinted into the distance and conceived of opening trade to Asia or cutting down redwood forests or laying track across a sea of yellow grass.

Readers in other parts of the country were fascinated by any scrap of detail about the Gold Rush city. Here is a fragment (July 9, 1866) from Bret Harte’s dispatch to readers of the Springfield Republican (from a collection of such dispatches edited by Gary Scharnhorst). The description remains accurate:

Midsummer! . . . To dwellers in Atlantic cities, what visions of heated pavements, of staring bricks, of grateful shade trees, of straw hats and white muslin, are conjured up in this word. . . . In San Francisco it means equal proportions of fog and wind. On the evening of the Fourth of July it was a pleasant and instructive sight to observe the population, in great-coats and thick shawls, warming themselves by bonfires, watching the sky-rockets lose themselves in the thick fog, and returning soberly home to their firesides and warm blankets.

From its inception, the San Francisco Chronicle borrowed a tone of merriment and swagger from the city it daily invented—on one occasion with fatal consequences: in 1879, the Chronicle ran an exposé of the Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, a recent arrival to the city (“driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper”) who had put himself up as a candidate for mayor. The Chronicle recounted Kalloch’s trial for adultery in Massachusetts (“his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple choristers”). Kalloch responded by denouncing the “bawdy house breeding” of the de Young boys, implying that Charles and Michael’s mother kept a whorehouse in St. Louis. Charles rose immediately to his mother’s defense; he shot Kalloch, who recovered and won City Hall. De Young never served jail time. A year later, in 1880, Kalloch’s son shot and killed Charles de Young in the offices of the Chronicle.

“Hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman,” Ambrose Bierce later remarked of Michael, the surviving brother. However just or unjust Bierce’s estimation, the de Young brothers lived and died according to their notion of a newspaper’s purpose—that it should entertain and incite the population.

In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.

When he died in 1925, Michael de Young bequeathed the ownership of the Chronicle to his four daughters with the stipulation that it could not be sold out of the family until the death of the last surviving daughter.

San Francisco gentility has roots as shallow and as belligerent as those of the Australian blue gum trees that were planted heedlessly throughout the city and now configure and scent our Sunday walks. In 1961, Holiday magazine came to town to devote an entire issue to San Francisco. The three living daughters of Michael de Young were photographed seated on an antique high-backed causeuse in the gallery of the old M. H. de Young Memorial Museum their father had donated to the city to house his collection of paintings and curiosities (including a scabrous old mummy beloved of generations of schoolchildren—now considered too gauche to be displayed). For the same issue, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, widow of Adolph, was photographed taking tea in her Pacific Heights mansion in what looks to be a fur-trimmed, floor-length velvet gown. The Spreckels family donated to the city a replica of the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris to house a collection of European paintings and rooms and furniture. One Spreckels and three de Youngs make four Margaret Dumonts—a San Francisco royal flush.

In 1972, the museum donated by Michael de Young merged with the museum created by the family of the man who tried to murder Michael de Young to become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Men, usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego. Newspaper publishers were accustomed to lord over cities.

William Randolph Hearst was given the San Francisco Examiner by his father, a mining millionaire and U.S. senator, who may or may not have won it in a poker game in 1880. As it happened, young Hearst was born to run a newspaper. He turned the Examiner into the largest-circulation paper in San Francisco before he moved on to New York, where, in 1895, he acquired the New York Journal. Hearst quickly engaged in a yellow-journalism rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both Hearst and Pulitzer assumed political careers. Hearst served in the Congress of the United States—served is not quite the word—as did Pulitzer, briefly.

We remember Joseph Pulitzer not as a sensationalist journalist but as the philanthropist who endowed an award for excellence in journalism and the arts. We remember William Randolph Hearst because his castle overlooking the Pacific—fifty miles of ocean frontage—is as forthright a temple to grandiosity as this nation can boast. And we remember Hearst as the original for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles portrayed Charles Foster Kane with the mix of populism and egomania audiences of the time easily recognized as Hearst. Kane the champion of the common man becomes Kane the autocrat. Kane builds an opera house for his paramour. Kane invents a war.

The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner were both losing money when, in 1965, Charles Thieriot, grandson of Michael de Young, met with William Randolph Hearst Jr. to collaborate on what they called the San Francisco Newspaper Agency. The Agency was a third entity designed to share production and administrative costs. The papers were to maintain editorial discretion and separate staffs. In addition, an incoherent Sunday edition shuffled together sections from both the Chronicle and the Examiner. The terms of the publishers’ agreement eventually favored the afternoon Hearst newspaper, for it was soon to fall behind, to become the lesser newspaper in a two-paper town. The Examiner nevertheless continued to collect half the profits of both.

In January 1988, Phyllis Tucker, the last surviving daughter of Michael de Young, died in San Francisco. Tucker’s daughter, Nan Tucker McEvoy, managed to forestall the sale of the paper for several years. But in 1999, the founding publisher’s posthumous grip was pried loose by a majority vote of family members to sell. At that time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of reclaiming the San Francisco market. Hearst paid $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San Francisco Chronicle.

To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department, the Hearst Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco Examiner to the politically connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek, the oldest and largest English-language Asian-American newspaper. The Hearst Corporation paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the Examiner. Florence Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor’s chair. Within a year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang threatened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur from Colorado who deflated William Randolph Hearst’s “Monarch of the Dailies” to a freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the street twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco municipal buses.

The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun “newspaper” is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record—papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable—fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department’s log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane progress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fishwrap,” as Herb Caen often called it.

Unwilling to forfeit any fraction of my quarter, I even studied the classifieds—-unrelieved columns laid out like city blocks: Room for rent. Marina. No pets. File clerk position. Heavy phones. Ticket agent for busy downtown box office. Must be bonded. Norman, we’re still here. Only once did I find the titillation I was looking for, a listing worthy of a barbershop magazine, an Argosy, or a Mickey Spillane: “Ex-Green Beret will do anything legal for cash.” Newspapers were sustained by classifieds, as well as by department-store ads and automobile ads. I admired the urbanity of the drawings of newspaper ads in those years, and I took from them a conception of the posture of downtown San Francisco. Despite glimpses into the classified life of the city, despite the hauteur of ad-art mannerism, the Chronicle offered some assurance (to an adolescent such as I was) it would have been difficult for me to describe. I will call it now an implied continuity. There was continuity in the comics and on the sports page, but nowhere more than in the columns.

During Scott Newhall’s tenure as executive editor, from 1952 to 1971, the Chronicle achieved something of a golden age. Newhall was flamboyant in ways that were congenial to the city. At a time when the Los Angeles Times was attracting admiration from the East Coast for its fleet of foreign bureaus, Newhall reverted to an eighteenth-century model of a newspaper as first-person observer.

For nearly two decades the city that prized its singularity was entertained by idiosyncratic voices. At the shallow end of the Chronicle’s roster (under the cipher of a coronet) appeared Count Marco, a Liberace of the typewriter who concerned himself with fashion and beauty and l’amour. At the deep end—a snug corner at Gino and Carlo’s bar in North Beach—sat “Charles McCabe, Esq.,” an erudite connoisseur of books, spirits, and failed marriages. Terrence O’Flaherty watched television. Stanton Delaplane, to my mind the best writer among them, wrote “Postcard”—a travel series with charm and humor. Art Hoppe concocted political satire. Harold Gilliam expounded on wind and tide and fog. Alfred Frankenstein was an art critic of international reputation. There was a book column by William Hogan and a society column by Frances Moffat. Allan Temko wrote architectural criticism against the grain of the city’s sensibility, a sensibility he sometimes characterized as a liberal spirit at odds with a timorous aesthetic. All the Chronicle columnists and critics had constituents, but the name above the banner was Herb Caen.

Herb Caen began writing a column for the Chronicle before the Second World War. At that time, Caen was in his twenties and probably resembled the fresh, fast-talking smarty-pants he pitched his voice to portray in print. Item. . .item. . .who’s gotta item? In 1950, he was lured over to the Examiner at a considerable hike in salary, and circulation followed at his heels. He knew all the places; he knew the maître d’s, the bartenders, the bouncers, the flower-sellers, the cops, the madams, the shopkeepers—knew them in the sense that they all knew him and knew he could be dangerous. In 1958, Caen returned to the Chronicle, and, again, circulation tilted.

Each day except Saturday, for forty years, Caen set the conversation for San Francisco. Who was in town. Who was in the hospital and would appreciate a card. Who was seen drinking champagne out of a rent boy’s tennis shoe. His last column began: “And how was your Christmas?” He persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers (crowded on buses, on the way to work) that his was the city we lived in. Monday through Friday, Caen was an omniscient table-hopping bitch. On Sunday, he dropped all that; he reverted to an ingenue—a sailor on leave, a sentimental flaneur infatuated with his dream “Baghdad-by-the-Bay.” The point of the Sunday perambulation was simple relish—fog clearing by noon; evidence that the mystical, witty, sourdough city had survived one more week.

After a time, Caen stopped writing Sunday panegyrics; he said it was not the same city anymore, and it wasn’t. He wasn’t. Los Angeles, even San Jose—two cities created by suburbanization—had become more influential in the world than the “cool grey city of love,” a George Sterling line Caen favored. The Chinese city did not figure in Caen’s novel, except atmospherically—lanterns and dragons, chorus girls at the Forbidden City, Danny Kaye taking over the kitchen at Kan’s, that sort of thing. The growing Filipino, Latin-American city did not figure at all.

In Caen’s heyday, the San Francisco Chronicle reflected the self-infatuated city. But it was not the city entire that drew the world’s attention. In the 1950s, the version of San Francisco that interested the world was Jack Kerouac’s parish—a few North Beach coffeehouses habituated by beatniks (a word Caen coined) and City Lights Bookstore. By the time I was a teenager, the path to City Lights was electrified by the marquees of topless clubs and bad wolves with flashlights beckoning passersby toward red velvet curtains. Anyway, the scene had moved by that time to the fog-shrouded Grateful Dead concerts in Golden Gate Park and to the Haight Ashbury. A decade later, the most famous neighborhood in the city was the homosexual Castro District. San Francisco never seemed to grow old the way other cities grow old.

In 1967, the Chronicle’s rock and jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason, teamed up with a renegade cherub named Jann Wenner to publish Rolling Stone magazine. What this disparate twosome intuited was that by chronicling the rising influence of rock music, they were effectively covering a revolution. In New York, writers were cultivating, in the manner of Thackeray, a self-referential point of view and calling it the “New Journalism.” In San Francisco, Rolling Stone was publishing a gospel “I” that found itself in a world without precedent: Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith, Timothy Ferris, Hunter S. Thompson. I remember sitting in an Indian tea shop in South London in 1970 (in the manner of the New Journalism) and being gripped by envy potent enough to be called homesickness as I read John Burks’s account of the Stones concert at Altamont. It was like reading a dispatch from the Gold Rush city.

One morning in the 1970s, the Chronicle began to publish Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City—adding sex and drugs and local branding to the nineteenth-century gimmick of serial fiction. At a time when American families were trending to the suburbs, Maupin’s novel insisted that San Francisco was still magnetic for single lives. In those same years, Cyra McFadden was writing satirically about the sexual eccentricities of suburban Marin County in a series (“The Serial”) for an alternative newspaper called the Pacific Sun.

In those same years, Joan Didion wrote, in The White Album, that for many people in Los Angeles “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the (Manson family) murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.” To borrow for a moment the oracular deadpan: In San Francisco, the Sixties came to an end for many people in 1977, when Jann Wenner packed up and moved Rolling Stone to New York. As he departed, the moss-covered wunderkind griped to a young reporter standing by that San Francisco was a “provincial backwater.”

What no one could have imagined in 1977, not even Jann Wenner, was that a suburban industrial region thirty miles to the south of the city contained an epic lode. Silicon Valley would, within twenty years, become the capital of Nowhere. What no one could have imagined in 1977 was that San Francisco would become a bedroom community for a suburban industrial region that lay thirty miles to the south.

Don’t kid a kidder. Herb Caen died in 1997. With the loss of that daily hectoring voice, the Chronicle seemed to lose its narrative thread, as did the city. The Chronicle began to reprint Caen columns, to the bewilderment of anyone younger than thirty.

If you die in San Francisco, unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is unlikely you will be judged notable unless your obituary has already appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, there will be no public notice taken at all. As much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline.

In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

A few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus.

In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t even notice.”

The other day I came upon a coffeehouse that resembled, as I judged from its nineteenth-century exterior, the sort of café where the de Young brothers might have distributed their paper. The café was only a couple of blocks from the lively gay ambience of upper Market Street yet far removed from the clamorous San Francisco of the nineteenth century. Several men and women sat alone at separate tables. No one spoke. The café advertised free wi-fi; all but one of the customers had laptops open before them. (The exception was playing solitaire with a real deck of cards.) The only sounds were the hissing of an espresso machine and the clattering of a few saucers. A man in his forties, sitting by the door, stared at a screen upon which a cartoon animal, perhaps a dog, loped silently.

I should mention that the café, like every coffeehouse in the city, had stacks of the Bay Guardian, S.F. Weekly, the Bay Area Reporter—free and roughly equivalent to the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of yore. I should mention that San Francisco has always been a city of stranded youth, and the city apparently continues to provide entertainments for youth:

Gosta Berling, Kid Mud, Skeletal System El Rio. 8pm, $5. Davis Jones, Eric Andersen and Tyler Stafford, Melissa McClelland Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7. Ben Kweller, Jones Street Station, Princeton Slim’s. 8:30pm, $19. Harvey Mandel and the Snake Crew Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16. Queers, Mansfields, Hot Toddies, Atom Age Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.

The colleague I am meeting for coffee tells me (occasioned by my puzzlement at the wi-fi séance) that more and more often he is finding sex on Craigslist. As you know better than I do, one goes to Craigslist to sell or to buy an old couch or a concert ticket or to look for a job. But also to arrange for sexual Lego with a body as free of narrative as possible. (Im bored 26-Oakland-east.)

Another friend, a journalist born in India, who has heard me connect newspapers with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, but neither is he troubled by it: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chicago, women go to the opera with bare shoulders.

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it.

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.

An obituary does not propose a solution.

Techno-puritanism that wars with the body must also resist the weight of paper. I remember that weight. It was the weight of the world, carried by boys.

Late in grammar school and into high school, I delivered the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper that was, in those years, published in the afternoon, Monday through Saturday, and in the morning on Sundays. My route comprised one hundred and forty subscribers—nearly every house in three square blocks.

The papers were barely dry when I got them, warm to the touch and clean—if you were caught short, you could deliver a baby on newspaper. The smell of newspapers was a slick petroleum smell of ink. I would fold each paper in triptych, then snap on a rubber band. On Thursdays, the Bee plumped with a cooking section and with supermarket ads. On Sundays, there was added the weight of comics, of real estate and automobile sections, and supplements like Parade and the television guide.

I stuffed half my load of newspapers into the canvas bag I tied onto my bicycle’s handlebars; the rest went into saddlebags on the back. I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handlebar—with dead-eye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door.

In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.

Are Liberals Pathetic?

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted December 7, 2009.

Sterile posturing and cowardice have hollowed out the liberal cause.


Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama -- as if he reads them -- asking the president to come back to his "true" self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama -- I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor -- though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

"You have a tug of war with one side pulling," Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. "The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass."

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s "Notes From Underground." They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the "conscious inertia" of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act -- designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing -- and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to "credentialize" yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these "revolutionaries" found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, "I hope we get mugged." They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire -- self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Digg!

Jesus killed Mohammed:

The crusade for a Christian military

By Jeff SharletFrom the May 2009 issue.

Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

When Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey and his squad of nine men, part of the 1/26 Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division, were assigned to a Special Forces compound in Samarra, he thought they had drawn a dream duty. “Guarding Special Forces, it was like Christmas,” he says. In fact, it was spring, 2004; and although Humphrey was a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, the men to whom he was detailed, the 10th Special Forces Group, were not interested in grunts like him. They would not say what they were doing, and they used code names. They called themselves “the Faith element.” But they did not talk religion, which was fine with Humphrey.

An evenhanded Indianan with a precise turn of mind, Humphrey considered himself a no-nonsense soldier. His first duty that Easter Sunday was to make sure the roof watch was in place: a machine gunner, a man in a mortar pit, a soldier with a SAW (an automatic rifle on a bipod), and another with a submachine gun on loan from Special Forces. Together with two Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the ground and snipers on another roof, the watch covered the perimeter of the compound, a former elementary school overlooking the Tigris River.

Early that morning, a unit from the 109th National Guard Infantry dropped off their morning chow. With it came a holiday special—a video of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and a chaplain to sing the film’s praises, a gory cinematic sermon for an Easter at war. Humphrey ducked into the chow room to check it out. “It was the part where they’re killing Jesus, which is, I guess, pretty much the whole movie. Kind of turned my stomach.” He decided he’d rather burn trash.

He was returning from his first run to the garbage pit when the 109th came barreling back. Their five-ton—a supersized armored pickup—was rolling on rims, its tires flapping and spewing greasy black flames. “Came in on two wheels,” remembers one of Humphrey’s men, a machine gunner. On the ground behind it and in retreat before a furious crowd were more men from the 109th, laying down fire with their M-4s. Humphrey raced toward the five-ton as his roof shooters opened up, their big guns thumping above him. Later, when he climbed into the vehicle, the stink was overwhelming: of iron and gunpowder, blood and bullet casings. He reached down to grab a rifle, and his hand came up wet with brain.

Humphrey had been in Samarra for a month, and until that day his stay had been a quiet respite in one of the world’s oldest cities. Not long before, though, there had been a hint of trouble: a briefing in which his squad was warned that any soldier caught desecrating Islamic sites—Samarra is considered a holy city—would fall under “extreme penalty,” a category that can include a general court-martial and prison time. “I heard some guys were vandalizing mosques,” Humphrey says. “Spray-painting ’em with crosses.”

The rest of that Easter was spent under siege. Insurgents held off Bravo Company, which was called in to rescue the men in the compound. Ammunition ran low. A helicopter tried to drop more but missed. As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script.

“What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey.

“Jesus killed Mohammed,” one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.

The Bradley, a tracked “tank killer” armed with a cannon and missiles—to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank itself—rolled out. The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, then the crackle of the bullhorn with the interpreter answering—in Arabic, then in English for the troops, insulting the prophet. Humphrey’s men loved it. “They were young guys, you know?” says Humphrey. “They were scared.” A Special Forces officer stood next to the interpreter—“a big, tall, blond, grinning type,” says Humphrey.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!”

A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say. He thought The Passion had been a sign that he would survive. The Bradley seemed to draw fire from every doorway. There couldn’t be that many insurgents in Samarra, Humphrey thought. Was this a city of terrorists? Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—each Iraqi household is allowed one gun—with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall.

Humphrey was stunned. He’d been blown off a tower in Kosovo and seen action in the drug war, but he’d never witnessed a maneuver so fundamentally stupid.

The men on the roof thought otherwise. They thought the lieutenant was a hero, a kamikaze on a suicide mission to bring Iraqis the American news:

jesus killed mohammed.

---

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps. There’s Major General Johnny A. Weida, who as commandant at the Air Force Academy made its National Day of Prayer services exclusively Christian, and also created a code for evangelical cadets: whenever Weida said, “Airpower,” they were to respond “Rock Sir!”—a reference to Matthew 7:25. (The general told them that when non-evangelical cadets asked about the mysterious call-and-response, they should share the gospel.) There’s Major General Robert Caslen—commander of the 25th Infantry Division, a.k.a. “Tropic Lightning”—who in 2007 was found by a Pentagon inspector general’s report to have violated military ethics by appearing in uniform, along with six other senior Pentagon officers, in a video for the Christian Embassy, a fundamentalist ministry to Washington elites. There’s Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, the Army chief of engineers, who has also lent his uniform to the Christian cause, both in a Trinity Broadcasting Network tribute to Christian soldiers called Red, White, and Blue Spectacular and at a 2003 Billy Graham rally—televised around the world on the Armed Forces Network—at which he declared the baptisms of 700 soldiers under his command evidence of the Lord’s plan to “raise up a godly army.”

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

As a whole, the military is actually slightly less religious than the general population: 20 percent of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel checked off a box for a 2008 Department of Defense survey that says “no religious preference,” compared with the 16.1 percent of Americans who describe themselves as “unaffiliated.” These ambivalent soldiers should not be confused with the actively irreligious, though. Only half of one percent of the military accepts the label “atheist” or “agnostic.” (Jews are even scarcer, accounting for only one servicemember in three hundred; Muslims are just one in four hundred.) Around 22 percent, meanwhile, identify themselves as affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. But that number is misleading. It leaves out those attached to the traditional mainline denominations—about 7 percent of the military—who describe themselves as evangelical; George W. Bush, for instance, is a Methodist. Among the 19 percent of military members who are Roman Catholics, meanwhile, there is a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals. And then there is the 20 percent of the military who describe themselves simply as “Christian,” a category that encompasses both those who give God little thought and the many evangelicals who reject denominational affiliation as divisive of the Body of Christ. “I don’t like ‘religion,’” a fundamentalist evangelical major told me. “That’s what put my savior on the cross. The Pharisees.”

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

But another OCF Bible study, “Mission Accomplished,” warns that victory abroad does not mean the war is won at home. “If Satan cannot succeed with threats from the outside, he will seek to destroy from within,” asserts the study, a reference to “fellow countrymen” both in biblical times and today who practice “spiritual adultery.” “Mission Accomplished” takes as its text Nehemiah 1–6, the story of the “wallbuilder” who rebuilt the fortifications around Jerusalem. An outsider might misinterpret the wall metaphor as a sign of respect for separation of church and state, but in contemporary fundamentalist thinking the story stands for just the opposite: a wall within which church and state are one. “With the wall completed the people could live an integrated life,” the study argues. “God was to be Lord of all or not Lord at all.” So it is today, “Mission Accomplished” continues, proposing that before military Christians can complete their wall, they must bring this “Lord of all” to the entire armed forces. “We will need to press ahead obediently,” the study concludes, “not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.”

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Every man and woman in the military swears an oath to defend the Constitution. To most of them, evangelicals included, that oath is as sacred as Scripture. For the fundamentalist front, though, the Constitution is itself a blueprint for a Christian nation. “The idea of separation of church and state?” an Air Force Academy senior named Bruce Hrabak says. “There’s this whole idea in America that it’s in the Constitution, but it’s not.” ¹1. That’s technically true; it’s in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

If the fundamentalist front were to have a seminary, it would be the Air Force Academy, a campus of steel and white marble wedged into the right angle formed by the Great Plains and the Rockies. In 2005, the academy became the subject of scandal because of its culture of Christian proselytization. Today, the Air Force touts the institution as a model of reform. But after the school brought in as speakers for a mandatory assembly three Christian evangelists who proclaimed that the only solution to terrorism was to “kill Islam,” I decided to see what had changed. Not much, several Christian cadets told me. “Now,” Hrabak said, “we’re underground.” Then he winked.

“There’s a spiritual world, and oftentimes what happens in the physical world is representative of what’s happening in the spiritual,” an academy senior (a “firstie,” in the school parlance) named Jon Butcher told me one night at New Life, a nearby megachurch popular with cadets.²2. See my story “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch,” May 2005. Butcher is wiry and laconic, a former ski bum from Ohio who went to the academy to be closer to the slopes. “For me, it was always like, a little bit of God, a little bit of drinking, a little bit of girls.” He prayed for admission to the academy, though, pledging to God that he’d change his ways if he got in. As far as he was concerned, God delivered; so Butcher did, too, quitting alcohol and committing himself to chastity.

But that commitment took him only so far. He was pure, but was he holy? He needed direction. He found it in Romans 13: “There is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” It was like a blessing on the academy’s hierarchical system, and Butcher took it to heart, turning his body and spirit over to the guidance of older Christian cadets. A Christian, he explained in full earnestness, “is someone who chooses to be a slave, essentially.” He took time off to be a missionary, and when he returned he realized God had already given him a mission field. “God has told me to become an infantry officer,” Butcher said, explaining his decision to transfer from the Air Force to the Army upon graduation. A pilot has only his plane to talk to; an infantry officer, said Butcher, has men to mold, Iraqis to convert. “Everything is a form of ministry for me,” Butcher said. “There is no separation. I’m doing what God has called me to do, to know Him and to make Him known.”

At the academy, Butcher made his God known by leading what one member described to me as an underground all-male prayer group. I was allowed to attend but not to take notes as around twenty-five cadets discussed lust and missionary work, the girlfriends whose touches they feared and the deceptions necessary for missionary work in China, where foreign evangelism is illegal. Butcher asked me not to disclose the group’s name; those who do believe in separation of church and state might interfere with its goal of turning the world’s most elite war college into its most holy one, a seminary with courses in carpet bombing. He couldn’t imagine military training as anything other than a mission from God. “How,” he asked, “in the midst of pulling a trigger and watching somebody die, in that instant are you going to be confident that that’s something God told you to do?” His answer was stark. “In this world, there are forces of good and evil. There’s angels and there’s demons, you know? And Satan hates what’s holy.”

Following the 2005 religion scandal at the academy, its commander, Lieutenant General John Rosa, confessed to a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League that his “whole organization” had religion problems. It “keeps me awake at night,” he said, predicting that restoring constitutional principles to the academy would take at least six years. Then he retired to become president of the Citadel. To address the problems, the Air Force brought in Lieutenant General John Regni, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a dome of hair streaked black and silver, the very picture of an officer, calm and in command. When I spoke to Regni, I began our phone conversation with what I thought was a softball, an opportunity for the general to wax constitutional about First Amendment freedoms. “How do you see the balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who has sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”

Sometime early this summer, a general named Mike Gould will succeed Regni as head of the academy. A former football player there, Gould granted himself the nickname “Coach” after a brief stint in that capacity early in his career. Coach Gould enjoys public speaking, and he’s famous for his “3-F” mantra: “Faith, Family, Fitness.” At the Pentagon, a former senior officer who served under Gould told me, the general was so impressed by a presentation Pastor Rick Warren gave to senior officers that he sent an email to his 104 subordinates in which he advised them to read and live by Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life.³3. Warren’s bestseller sometimes displaces Scripture itself among military evangelicals. In March 2008, a chaplain at Lakenheath, a U.S. Air Force–operated base in England, used a mandatory suicide-prevention assembly under Lieutenant General Rod Bishop as an opportunity to promote the principles of The Purpose-Driven Life to roughly 1,000 airmen. In a PowerPoint diagram depicting two family trees, the chaplain contrasted the likely future of a non-religious family, characterized by “Hopelessness” and “Death,” and that of a religious one. The secular family will, according to the diagram, spawn 300 convicts, 190 prostitutes, and 680 alcoholics. Purpose-driven breeding, meanwhile, will result in at least 430 ministers, seven congressmen, and one vice-president. “People thought it was weird,” recalls the former officer, a defense contractor who requested anonymity for fear of losing government business. “But no one wants to show their ass to the general.”

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Christian fundamentalism, like all fundamentalisms, is a narcissistic faith, concerned most of all with the wrongs suffered by the righteous and the purification of their ranks. “Under the rubric of free speech and the twisted idea of separation of church and state,” reads a promotion for a book called Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, by Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy, “there has evolved more and more an anti-Christian bias in this country.” In Under Orders, McCoy seeks to counter that alleged bias by making the case for the necessity of religion—preferably Christian—for a properly functioning military unit. Lack of belief or the wrong beliefs, he writes, will “bring havoc to what needs cohesion and team confidence.”

McCoy’s manifesto comes with an impressive endorsement: “_Under Orders _should be in every rucksack for those moments when Soldiers need spiritual energy,” reads a blurb from General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq until last September, after which he moved to the top spot at U.S. Central Command, in which position he now runs U.S. operations from Egypt to Pakistan. When the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) demanded an investigation of Petraeus’s endorsement—an apparent violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not to mention the Bill of Rights— Petraeus claimed that his recommendation was supposed to be private, a communication from one Christian officer to another.

“He doesn’t deny that he wrote it,” says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, president of MRFF. “It’s just, ‘Oops, I didn’t mean for the public to find out.’ And what about our enemies? He’s promoting this unconstitutional Christian exceptionalism at precisely the same time we’re fighting Islamic fundamentalists who are telling their soldiers that America is waging a modern-day crusade. That _is _a crusade.”

Petraeus’s most vigorous defense came last August from the recently retired three-star general William “Jerry” Boykin—a founding member of the Army’s Delta Force and an ordained minister—during an event held at Fort Bragg to promote his own book, Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom. “Here comes a guy named Mikey Weinstein trashing Petraeus,” he told a crowd of 150 at the base’s Airborne and Special Forces Museum, “because he endorsed a book that’s just trying to help soldiers. And this makes clear what [Weinstein’s] real agenda is, which is not to help this country win a war on terror.”

“It’s satanic,” called out a member of the audience.

“Yes,” agreed Boykin. “It’s demonic.”⁴4. 4 After 9/11, Boykin went on the prayer-breakfast circuit to boast, in uniform, that his God was “bigger” than the Islamic divine of Somali warlord Osman Atto, whom Boykin had hunted. “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” he declared, displaying as evidence photographs of black clouds over Mogadishu: the “demonic spirit” his troops had been fighting. “The principality of darkness,” he went on to declare, “a guy called Satan.” Under fire from congressional Democrats, Boykin claimed he hadn’t been speaking about Islam, but in a weird non sequitur he insisted, “My references to. . . our nation as a Christian nation are historically undeniable.” These strategic insights earned Boykin promotion to deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a position in which he advised on interrogation techniques until August 2007.

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Mikey Weinstein, for his part, doesn’t mind being called demonic by officers like Boykin. “I consider him to be a traitor to the oath that he swore, which was to the United States Constitution and not to his fantastical demon-and-angel dominionism. He’s a charlatan. The fact that he refers to me as demon-possessed so he can sell more books makes me want to take a Louisville Slugger to his kneecaps, his big fat belly, and his head. He is a very, very bad man.” Mikey—nobody, not even his many enemies, calls him Weinstein—likes fighting, literally. In 1973, as a “doolie” (a freshman at the Air Force Academy) he punched an officer who accused him of fabricating anti-Semitic threats he’d received. In 2005, after the then-head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, declared that people like Mikey made it hard for him to “defend Jewish causes,” Mikey challenged the pastor to a public boxing match, with proceeds to go to charity. (Haggard didn’t take him up on it.) He relishes a rumor that he’s come to be known among some at the Pentagon as the Joker, after Heath Ledger’s nihilistic embodiment of Batman’s nemesis. But he draws a distinction: “Don’t confuse my description of chaos with advocacy of chaos.”

A 1977 graduate of the academy, Mikey served ten years’ active duty as a JAG before becoming assistant general counsel in the Reagan White House (where he helped defend the administration during the Iran-Contra scandal) and then general counsel for Ross Perot. It is a surprising background for someone who has taken on the role of constitutional conscience of the military, a man determined to force accountability on its fundamentalist front through an assault of lawsuits and media appearances. Fifty-four years old, Mikey is built like a pit bull, with short legs, big shoulders, a large, shaved head, and a crinkled brow between dark, darting eyes. He likes to say he lives at “Mikey speed,” an endless succession of eighteen-hour days, both on the road and at the foundation’s headquarters—that is, his sprawling adobe ranch house, set on a hill outside Albuquerque and guarded by two oversized German shepherds and a five-foot-six former Marine bodyguard called Shorty. MRFF draws on a network of lawyers, publicists, and fund-raisers, but its core is just Mikey, plus a determined researcher named Chris Rodda, author of an unfinished multivolume debunking of Christian-right historical claims entitled Liars for Jesus.

Mikey has won some victories, such as when he forced the Department of Defense to investigate the Christian Embassy video, and intimidated the Air Force Academy into adopting classes in religious diversity, and harassed any number of base commanders into reining in subordinates who view their authority as a license to proselytize. Every time he wins a battle or takes to the television to plead his cause, more troops learn about his foundation and seek its help. He keeps his cell phone on vibrate while he’s exercising on his elliptical machine; he likes to boast that he’ll interrupt sex to take a call from any one of the 11,400 active-duty military members he describes as the foundation’s “clients.”⁵5. A spokeswoman for the Pentagon says the military has dealt with fewer than fifty reports of religion-related problems during the period since Mikey founded MRFF. But an abundance of evidence suggests that the Pentagon is ignoring the problem. I spoke to dozens of Mikey’s clients: soldiers, sailors, and airmen who spoke of forced Christian prayer in Iraq and at home; combat deaths made occasions for evangelical sermons by senior officers; Christian apocalypse video games distributed to the troops; mandatory briefings on the correlation of the war to the Book of Revelation; exorcisms designed to drive out “unclean spirits” from military property; beatings of atheist troops that are winked at by the chain of command. He hires lawyers for them, pulls strings, bullies their commanders, tells them they’re heroes. He offered to let one G.I., facing threats of violence because of his atheism, move in with his family.

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But as Mikey’s client base grows, so too do the ranks of his enemies. The picture window in his living room has been shot out twice, and last summer he woke to find a swastika and a cross scrawled on his door. Since he launched MRFF four years ago, he has accumulated an impressive collection of hate mail. Some of it is earnest: “You are costing lives by dividing military personnel and undermining troops,” reads one missive. “Their blood is on your hands.” Much of it is juvenile: “you little bald-headed fag,” reads an email Mikey received after an appearance on CNN, “what the fuck are you doing with an organization of this title when the purpose of your group is not to encourage religious freedom, but to DENY religious freedom?” Quite a bit of it is anti-Semitic: “Once again, the Oy Vey! crowd whines. This jew used to be an Air Force lawyer and got the email”—a solicitation by Air Force General Jack Catton for campaign donations to put “more Christian men” in Congress, which Mikey made public—“just one more example of why filthy, hook-nosed jews should be purged from our society.”

The abuse has become a regular feature of Mikey’s routine in public appearances. There’s a sense in which Mikey likes it—not the threats, but the evidence. “We’ve had dead animals on the porch. Beer bottles, feces thrown at the house. I don’t even think about it. I view it as if I was Barry Bonds about to go to bat in Dodger Stadium and people are booing. You want a piece of me? Get in line, buddy. Pack a lunch.” Mikey sees things in terms of enemies, and he likes to know he’s rattling his.

Central to Mikey’s worldview are two beatings he suffered as an eighteen-year-old doolie at the academy, retaliations for notifying his superiors about a series of anti-Semitic notes he’d received. Both beatings left him unconscious. Mikey put them behind him, graduating with honors; but his anger reignited in 2004, when his son Curtis, then a doolie himself, told Mikey he planned to beat the shit out of the next cadet—or officer—who called him a “fucking Jew.” In 2005, when he created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he ornamented its board with a galaxy of retired generals, the stars on their shoulders meant to make clear that the foundation’s enemy is not the military. His enemy, he says, is “weaponized Christianity,” and his foundation is a weapon too: “We will lay down withering fire and open sucking chest wounds. This country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the religious rights of our armed forces members,” he says. He calls this “soul rape.”

It’s a strong term that at first sounds like typical over-the-top Mikey, but his struggle goes to the very heart of America’s First Amendment freedoms, dating back to the seventeenth century and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Williams was a devout Christian, but based on his encounters with Native American leaders, whom he deemed honest men, and his dealings with the leaders of the Massachusetts colony, who sent him into exile, he concluded that outward religion—the piety of the Puritans—was no guarantee of inner virtue. What mattered most, he thought, was the ability to seek the good. So if the state restricted that search (through mandatory prayer, for instance, or discrimination against minority faiths), it violated the most basic freedom, that of individual conscience. Without the freedom to choose one’s own beliefs, Williams believed, no other freedom is really possible. Freedom of religion is thus bound to freedom from religion.

“In the military,” Mikey told me one night in Albuquerque, “many constitutional rights that we as civilians enjoy are severely abridged in order to serve a higher goal: provide good order and discipline in order to protect the whole panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us.” One of those rights is free speech: a soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—no one wants men with guns telling them whom to vote for—and for the military itself. An officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe; conscience is its own order.

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The evangelical transformation of the military began during the Cold War, in a new American “Great Awakening” that has only accelerated across the decades, making the United States one of the most religious nations in the world. We are also among the most religiously diverse, but as the number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of hundreds of other traditions has grown, American evangelicalism has entrenched, tightening its hold on the institutions that conservative evangelicals consider most American—that is, Christian.

“It was Vietnam which really turned the tide,” writes Anne C. Loveland, author of the only book-length study of the evangelical wave within the armed forces, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942–1993. Until the Vietnam War, it was the traditionally moderate mainline Protestant denominations (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians), together with the Catholic Church, that dominated the religious life of the military. But as leading clergymen in these denominations spoke out against the war, evangelicals who saw the struggle in Vietnam as God’s work rushed in. In 1967, the Assemblies of God, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the world, formally dropped its long-standing commitment to pacifism, embracing worldly war as a counterpart to spiritual struggle. Other fundamentalists took from Vietnam the lessons of guerrilla combat and applied them to the spiritual fight through a tactic they called infiltration, filling the ranks of secular institutions with undercover missionaries.

“Evangelicals looked at the military and said, ‘This is a mission field,’” explains Captain MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran pastor and former missile-launch commander who until 2005 was a staff chaplain at the Air Force Academy and has since studied and written about the chaplaincy. “They wanted to send their missionaries to the military, and for the military itself to become missionaries to the world.”

The next turning point occurred in the waning days of the Reagan Administration, when regulatory revisions helped create the fundamentalist stronghold in today’s military. A long-standing rule had apportioned chaplains according to the religious demographics of the military as a whole (i.e., if surveys showed that 10 percent of soldiers were Presbyterian, then 10 percent of the chaplains would be Presbyterian) but required that all chaplains be trained to minister to troops of any faith. Starting in 1987, however, Protestant denominations were lumped together simply as “Protestant”; moreover, the Pentagon began accrediting hundreds of evangelical and Pentecostal “endorsing agencies,” allowing graduates of fundamentalist Bible colleges—which often train clergy to view those from other faiths as enemies of Christ—to fill up nearly the entire allotment for Protestant chaplains. Today, more than two thirds of the military’s 2,900 active-duty chaplains are affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. “In my experience,” Morton says, “eighty percent of the Protestant chaplaincy self-identifies as conservative and/or evangelical.”

The most zealous among the new generation of fundamentalist chaplains didn’t join to serve the military; they came to save its soul. One of these zealots is Lieutenant Colonel Gary Hensley, division chaplain for the 101st Airborne and, until recently, the chief Army chaplain for all of Afghanistan. Last year, a filmmaker named Brian Hughes met Hensley when he traveled to Bagram Air Field to make a documentary about chaplains, a tribute of sorts to the chaplain who had counseled him—without regard for religion—when Hughes was a frightened young airman during the Gulf War. Military personnel forfeit their rights to legal and medical privacy; chaplains are the only people they can turn to with problems too sensitive to take up the chain of command, anything from corruption to a crisis of courage. When Hughes went to Bagram, he was looking for chaplains like the one who’d helped him get through his war. Instead, he found Hensley.

In the raw footage Hughes shot, Hensley strips down to a white t-shirt beneath his uniform to preach an afternoon service in Bagram’s main chapel. On the t-shirt’s breast is a logo for an evangelical military ministry called Chapel NeXt, the “t” in which is an oversized cross slashing down over a map of Afghanistan. “Got your seat belts on?” Hensley hollers. He’s a lean man with thinning, slicked-back gray hair who carries a small paunch like a package, the size and shape of a turtle’s shell. “The Word will not fail!” he shouts. “Now is the time! In the fullness of time”— Hensley leans forward, two fingers on his glasses, his voice dipping to a growl—“God. Sent. His. Son. Whoo!” Then, as if addressing 33 million Muslim Afghans and their belief that Muhammad was a prophet as Jesus before him, he shouts, “There is no one else to come! There is no new revelation! There is no new religion! Jesus is it!” Amen, says the crowd. “If He ain’t it, let’s all go home!”

Hensley brings it back down. “I’m from the Jesus Movement,” he says, presenting himself as a prophet born of American history: “Haight-Ashbury. Watergate. Woodstock. And out of that mess? Came Hensley, glory to God!” He goes on to quote (without attribution) the British theologian C. H. Dodd: “By virtue of the resurrection,” he says, “Jesus was exalted to the right hand of the Father and is the messianic head of the New Israel.” Dodd was no fundamentalist; his ideas are still used by some liberal Christians to combat the apocalyptic fervor of fundamentalism. Not so with Hensley, who takes Dodd’s uncredited words as a battle cry. “That’s us!” he cries. “We are Israel. We are the New Israel!”

At this point, says Hughes, the Army media liaison sitting next to him put his head in his hands.

“There will come a day when there will be no more Holy Spirit!” Hensley shouts, hopping up and down on the stage, his speech no longer directed toward the pews but as if to some greater audience. “When the church shall be raptured up in the skyyy! And we shall be with Hiiim! And all of us shall be with Him!” He slows to an emphatic whisper like a warning: “Glory to God, that’s our message!” A little bit louder now. “The messianic Jesus is comin’ back!” Louder still. “And I expect him to come back before we go to the mess hall, you know that?” And the soldiers say, Amen.

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I found Lieutenant Colonel Bob Young after MRFF reported on an evangelical reality program, shown on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, that included tape of Colonel Young telling two wandering missionaries about his plan to pray for rain in Afghanistan. I reached him at home in Georgia late one evening. He said he was going to sit on his porch and look at the moon. In the background, I heard dogs barking. He talked for three hours, much of it about what he’d seen in the combat hospital under his command at Kandahar Air Base.

“Kids getting burned,” he recalled. “Bad guys floating in on helicopters. You wouldn’t know who they were.” The base hospital treated 7,000 Afghans that year, and Young, commander of the Army’s 325th Forward Support Battalion, lingered there, watching the bodies. “I want to tell you this. Triage area, guy strapped into gurney, Afghan guy. No shirt, skinny as a rail, sinewy muscle. Restraints on his ankles, his feet, dude is strapped into a wheelchair. He’s got a plastic shield in front of his face because he’s spitting.” A doctor wants to sedate him. “I say, ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with him. The guy has demons.’” Young decides to pray over him. “Couple minutes later the general’s son-in-law—the Afghan general’s son-in-law, our translator—comes in. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ He says, ‘How do you say in English? He has spirits.’ I say, ‘Doc, there’s your second opinion!’”

On the phone, Young laughed, a harsh “Ha!” Then his voice broke. “I’m telling you, it’s real. Evil is real.”

In the Christian reality show, Young extended that thought to the weather. “Interestingly,” he says, “the drought has been in effect since the Taliban took over.” Young has a high mouth and a low brow, his features concentrated between big ears. “People of America,” he tells the camera, “pray that God sends the rain to Kandahar, and they’ll know that our God answers prayers.”

I asked Young if he wanted to contextualize these remarks, since they seemed, on the surface, to radically transcend his mission as a soldier. “Okay!” he said. “Are you ready?” I said I was.

He told me to Google Kandahar, rain, January 2005. The result he was looking for was an article in Stars and Stripes entitled “Rainfall May Signal Beginning of the End to Three-Year Drought in Afghanistan.” Three and a quarter inches in just two days.

“That’s some real rain,” I admitted.

“That’s what I’m saying, brother!”

I asked him about an allegation made to MRFF by a captain who served under Young: that Young had made remarks that led him to be relieved of his command. It was true that he had been relieved of command, he admitted, but he had appealed and won. And the remarks? “All that was, I was speaking in reference to inner-city problems and whatnot. I said that the irony is that it would be better for a black to be a slave in America—I’m thinking now historically—and know Christ, than to be free now and not know Christ.”

With that cleared up, I then asked Young about another of the captain’s allegations: that he had given a presentation on Christianity to some Afghan warlords. Absolutely not, he said. It was a PowerPoint about America. He emailed it to me as we spoke, and then asked me to open it so he could share with me the same presentation he had given “Gulalli” and “Shirzai.” Since it had been President’s Day, Young had begun with a picture of George Washington, who, he explained, had been protected by God; his evidence was that, following a battle in the French and Indian War, when thirty-two bullet holes were found in Washington’s cloak, the general himself escaped unscathed. Young wanted to show the Afghans that nation-building was a long and difficult journey. “I did stress the fact that in America we believe our rights come from God, not from government. Truth is truth, and there’s no benefit in lying about it.”

There were slides about the Wright brothers, the moon landing, and NASCAR—Jeff Gordon, “a Christian, by the way,” had just won the Daytona 500. And then, the culmination of American history: the twin towers, blooming orange the morning of September 11, 2001. Embedded in the slide show was a video Young titled “Forgiveness,” a collage of stills, people running and bodies falling. Swelling behind the images was Celine Dion’s hit ballad from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On.” Following the video was a slide of the Bush family, beneath the words: “I believe that God has inspired in every heart the desire for freedom.”

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At the heart of Young’s religion is suffering: his own. Before his battalion deployed for Afghanistan, he tried to armor them with prayer. To do so, he offered up his own testimony, the text that is in truth at the heart of his religion. He told them there were two kinds of phone calls a soldier in a combat zone was likely to encounter. One was from his wife, calling to say she was raising him up in prayer. The other was also from his wife, calling to say she was leaving him. Young had experienced both calls. In 1993, he was a Ranger, a member of the Army’s most elite special forces, away on deployment to Korea. He asked his best friend, the best man at his wedding, to watch over his wife and his two toddlers. And when that worst of all calls came—his wife, telling him the car was packed, that she, his kids, and his friend were leaving—that was when Young found the Lord.

First, he tried to respond like an officer. “Military course of action development,” he lectured himself. “Course of action one: kill him. Two: kill them both. Three: kill myself.” Somebody, he decided, had to die. In the end, somebody did: Young, to the flesh. Raised nominally Catholic, he had never read Scripture. Now, every page seemed to speak to him. I can’t go on, he thought. He opened his Bible and found Matthew 6:34. Do not worry about tomorrow. An eye for an eye, Young thought, then flipped the pages: Love your enemies. I have nothing to go home to, he thought, and then he came to Mark. _Let us go over to the other side. _They did, in a ship, and “a great windstorm arose,” Young read, the murder in his mind subsiding as the story overcame him. “And then Jesus said, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.”

There is a modesty inherent in evangelicalism’s preference for personal stories, for every soul’s version of “I was lost, but now I’m found.” In a Protestant church without rank or reward, that story is democratic, radically so; my testimony is as important as yours, the poor man’s tale just as powerful as that of the rich man. But the marriage of evangelicalism to the military ethos turns public confession into projection, the creation of what the military calls a command climate. It is one thing for your neighbor in the pews to tell you that he was blind and now he sees; it is another for such vision to be described by your commanding officer.

Young has been a Christian soldier ever since that terrible phone call. The tension between war and faith does not disturb him. “We are to live with anticipation and expectation of His imminent return,” he told me. Look at the signs, said Young: nuclear Iran, economic collapse, President Obama’s decision to “unleash science” upon helpless embryos. He seemed to feel that the military was now the only safe place to be. “In the military, homosexuality is illegal. I don’t want to get into all the particulars of ‘Don’t ask,’ but you can’t act on homosexual feelings. And adultery is illegal. Really, arguably, the military is the last American institution that tries to uphold Christian values. It’s the easiest place in America to be a Christian.”

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In the weeks following Obama’s election, Mikey says, he almost went to Washington. He met with campaign staffers, submitted plans, gathered endorsements from powerful insiders. His dream was a post at the Pentagon from which he could prosecute the most egregious offenders. It didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. He could have been pitched as another gesture of bipartisanship, since Mikey is a lifelong Republican who probably would have voted for John McCain if, back in 2004, his sons hadn’t run afoul of the Air Force Academy’s burgeoning spirit of evangelism—a culture that McCain, hardly a friend to fundamentalism, showed no interest in challenging this time around.

Another veteran serving in the Senate, who asked that he not be named so as not to compromise his close connections to today’s top officers, offers a variation on Captain Morton’s analysis of the military’s turn toward religion. Although the military was integrated before much of the United States, he points out, it almost split along racial lines, particularly in the last days of Vietnam. If the military was to rebuild itself, the Southern white men at the heart of its warrior culture had to come to an understanding of themselves based on something other than skin color. Many, says the senator, turned toward religion, particularly fundamentalist evangelical Christianity—a tradition that, despite its particularly potent legacy of racism, reoriented itself during the post–civil rights era as a religion of “reconciliation” between the races, a faith that would come to define itself in the early 1990s with the image of white men hugging black men, tears all around, at Promise Keeper rallies. “They replaced race with religion,” says the senator. “The principle remains the same—an identity built on being separate from a society viewed as weak and corrupt.”

For decades, the military built a sense of solidarity out of a singular purpose, the Cold War struggle between free markets and state-planned economies—the shining city on a hill versus the evil empire. In that fight, pluralism, racial or religious, was ultimately on our side; and it meshed neatly with ideologies that might otherwise be challengers, easily subsuming both nationalism and fundamentalism, with Communism presented as the dark alternative should we fail to unite. Fundamentalism thrived not so much in opposition to the liberal state as in tandem with it, a neat, black-and-white theological correlate to a foreign policy—a vision of America’s place in the world, our purpose, you might say—embraced more or less across the mainstream political spectrum.

The end of the Cold War deprived militant evangelicals of that clarity. Absent a clear purpose, a common foe, pluralism itself began to look to some like the enemy. The emergence of “radical Islam” as the object of a new Cold War only complicated the matter. Rather than revealing a new enemy for us all to share, the idea of a monolithic radical Islam fractured pluralism from left to right. Many liberals abandoned even their rhetorical commitments to liberty of conscience, while the very conservatives who had favored arming militant Islamists since the Eisenhower Administration concluded that their universal embrace of religion in the abstract may have been naive. Perhaps pluralism—or at least the Cold War variety that sustained the rise of American empire in the second half of the twentieth century—was nothing but propaganda after all.

Today, fundamentalism, based as it is on a vigorous assertion of narrow and exclusive claims to truth, can no longer justify common cause with secularism. In its principal battle, the front lines are not in Iraq or Afghanistan but right here, where evangelical militants must wage spiritual war against their own countrymen. In a lecture for OCF titled “Fighting the War on Spiritual Terrorism,” Army Lieutenant Colonel Greg E. Metz gar explained that Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks, because every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of “spiritual terrorism.” Even secularists with the best intentions may be part of this fifth column, Air Force Brigadier General Donald C. Wurster told a 2007 assembly of chaplains, noting that “the unsaved have no realization of their unfortunate alliance with evil.” What is the nature of this evil? Some conservative evangelicals call it “postmodernism.” What they mean is the very idea of diversity, its egalitarianism—the conviction that my beliefs have as much right to speak in the public square as do yours; that truth, in a democracy, is a mediated affair.

Evangelicalism, the more zealous the better, is an ingenious solution, a mirror image of pluralism that comes with a built-in purpose. It is available to everybody. Its basic rules are easily learned. It merges militancy with love, celebrating the ferocity of spirit necessary for a warrior and the mild amiability required to stay sane within a rigid hierarchy. It’s a populist religion—anyone can talk to the top man—on a vertical axis, an implicit rank system of “spiritual maturity” that runs from “Baby Christians” of all ages straight up to the ultimate commander in chief.

Mikey Weinstein did not get his Pentagon job. In fact, the generals whom Mikey thought would face a reckoning under a Democratic administration remain in place or in line for promotion. Not only did Obama keep on Robert Gates as defense secretary; he retained the secretary of the Army, Pete Geren—another star of the Christian Embassy video, who also, in commencement remarks at West Point last year, characterized America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as struggles for religious freedom against the “darkness and oppression” of radical Islam—and also appointed as his national security adviser the retired Marine general James Jones, a regular on the prayer breakfast circuit. Nobody believes the new president shares Bush’s religious sentiments, but clearly he is willing to shave constitutional protections in exchange for evangelical peace. The new president appears to have adopted a hands-off approach not just to religion in the military but to the very relationship between church and state.

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The Air Force Academy chapel is the most popular man-made tourist attraction in Colorado, seventeen silver daggers rising above campus, veined with stained glass that suffuses the space inside with a violet and orange glow. But when one of the academy’s public-relations officers takes me on a tour, it’s empty. Very few cadets worship there anymore. Instead, they meet in classrooms and dorm rooms, at mountain retreats, and at the numerous megachurches that surround the academy.

One of the most popular services, called The Mill, takes place on Friday nights at New Life, in a giant, permanent tent that not long after academy dinnertime fills with fake fog and power chords and more than a thousand men and women ranging in age from their teens to their early twenties. I attended one Friday night in the company of Bruce Hrabak, the cadet who’d told me there was no separation of church and state in the Constitution. Broad-shouldered and broad-smiled, with color in his cheeks and excitable dusk-blue eyes, Hrabak says he’s at the academy both of his own free will and according to the strict Christian doctrine of “predestination,” that is, destiny chosen by God. It is this paradoxical mix, he explains, that allows him to serve both as an officer and as a missionary for the “Great Commission,” the evangelical belief that Christians must spread the Gospel to all nations. The academy, he explains, is a step on his spiritual journey.

The sermon at The Mill was painful—the pastor’s wife had recently delivered a stillborn baby, and he spoke in raw, awful terms about suffering and theodicy, the age-old question of why a loving God permits bad things to happen to good people. It is one of the central dilemmas of the Christian faith, and its persistence, its resistance to easy answers, is what has made Christianity the forge of so much of the world’s great art and philosophy. By the end of this hour-long service, though, everything turned out for the best; even the dead baby had been shoehorned into God’s inscrutable plan.

That cheered Hrabak up. Over dinner afterward, he told me he believed that all suffering, that which he endures and that which he inflicts, has a purpose. He felt this truth was of special solace for soldiers. I asked what he meant. “Well, you’re pulling a trigger, you know?” He thought about that a lot. Not the shot fired or the bomb dropped, but the bodies, the souls at the other end of his actions. In his classes, he watched videos of air strikes. At night, he pictured the dead. He was not as afraid of dying as he was of killing unjustly. He was afraid of sin. His double identity—as a spiritual warrior and as an officer of the deadliest force in the history of the world—was his redemption.

What would he do if he ever received an order that contradicted his faith?

Hrabak looked shocked. He giggled, then composed himself and took a big bite of pizza, speaking confidently through his food. “Impossible, dude. I mean, I guess it could happen. But I highly doubt it.”

What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way?

He shook his head. “Who are you to question why God builds up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?” A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if Hrabak wasn’t a man committed to being in earnest at all times. What he’d just said—a paraphrase from Romans—might be something like a Word of Knowledge, a gift of wisdom from God. It blew his mind so much he had to repeat it, his voice picking up a speed and enthusiasm that bordered on joy. “He”—the Lord—“builds up an entire nation”—Iraq or Vietnam, Afghanistan or Pakistan, who are you to question why?—“just to destroy them! To show somebody else”—America, a young man guided to college by God, distrustful of his own choices—“that they’re in grace.”

Grace, of course, means you’re favored by God, no questions asked, a blessing that you can neither earn nor deserve. To fundamentalists, it’s worth more than freedom, and they’re willing to sacrifice their freedom—and yours—for that glorious feeling. That’s a paradox, a box trap the fundamentalists have built for themselves. The first casualties of the military’s fundamentalist front are not the Iraqis and Afghans on the wrong side of an American F-16. They’re the spiritual warriors themselves, men and women persuaded that the only God worth believing in is one who demands that they break—in spirit and in fact—the oath to the Constitution they swear to uphold on their lives. “You’re laying down your life for others,” Hrabak says. “Well, there has to be some true truth to put yourself in harm’s way for.” True truth; truth that requires an amplifier. For the God soldiers, democracy is not enough.