Is This a New Dark Age? Schiavo-Red Lake-Falluja-Bush Evangelicals

Is This A New Dark Age?
Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak tunnel. Is there any light?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it's right next to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness like a wave.

And alongside that is the morbid and insipid case of poor Terri Schiavo and the equally insipid Bush evangelicals who trumpet the backward morality of maintaining her vegetative brain-dead state and the sad, tormented parents who can't face reality and the insidious GOP that has zero shame in using her decrepit body as a political football and that kowtows to its pseudo-religious contingency by making humiliating and rather illegal congressional maneuvers to try and keep a feeding tube in place and you just go, oh my God just stop already.

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Because something in you knows. Something in you senses there is more at play right now in the world than mere depressing coincidence, that all the war and disease and brutality has more surrounding it than mere chance or fluke. Do you think? Do you feel it?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/03/25/notes032505.DTL

And we can expect that a new Inquisition will begin soon. Let us hope that this one doesn't last 800 years like the previous did.

I'm vary scared for the future and at the rate we're going I don't know if the pendulum will have a chance to swing back. I do know what he is talking about though: the new dark age is upon us. I just hope it stays in America and doesn't spread to the rest of the world.

What is the last piece of good news we had? The possibility that the republican party would splinter over a brain damaged women in florida? Now that is scary.

I think the author of this article is letting himself get carried away by his own rhetoric. To begin with, while the country was economically and globally far better off under the Clinton administration, we have to remember that the neoconservative movement was (unfortunately) spawned under Clinton and managed to grow and prosper while Clinton was president (going from Gingrich's "Republican revolution" to Clinton's own impeachment, for example). Also, corporations consolidated their power while we were having our eight years of peace and prosperity. So you could say that this new "dark age" we're living in has been coming for a long time. (Not to mention the fact that, in the general scheme of things, Clinton's presidency was more like a blissful oasis in the march of Republican dominance beginning with Reagan.)

Second, this author seems to have lost all perspective on world history. Just focusing on Clinton vs. Bush II ignores hundreds of years of history in which religious extremists rear their ugly heads and cause enormous problems. If we only confine ourselves to the Western world, there were at least two major moments of milennial fever, when religious zealots were positive that the end of the world was near: namely, right before the English Civil War and before and during the French Revolution, which was especially bloody and unprecidented and traumatic even for countries like England who were basically on the sidelines watching France explode. Of course, there was also the first and second world wars of the 20th century, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, and on and on and on.

So I guess my point is, yes, things are really really sucky right now, but history has shown that these sucky periods seem to pop up on a regular basis. It's not gonna be fun, and it might be long, but these bleak years will likely go away eventually. We just have to be patient and willing to fight when necessary. Waiting also sucks, but there you go. We can't expect world history to be perpetually rosy just because we want it to.

Please do not intrude facts into jeremiads of this sort. Don't you know that modern America is the WORSTEST! DICTATORSHIP! EVER! Well, except that we're the second NAZI GERMANY, of course, as everyone knows; but other than that we're the worstest dictatorship ever.

(This of course is sarcasm. I applaud and admire your wise, reasoned, intelligent, thoughtful, and eloquent post, and I hope you will post more often.)

About 4 years ago, I asked my husband (as we were driving around), does the world look a bit "grey" to you? He didn't know what I meant by "grey". I explained that the world just felt wrong. Our world felt scared. I had felt that people had lost hope.

Very few people I know talk about hope or dreams anymore. As a mom of twins... I find it disturbing that other moms around me have little "nonsense" to share about computer camps, piano teachers or ballet. Most of the elective programs in preschool have been dropped because of lack of participation. No chit chat about junior's talents or pulling out calendars to check on play date availability.

My business... downhill. Checking around our local small businesses... the same. No real excitement or growth or events. And no lack of homeless in the back street waiting for a handout as you get in your car. They are there in greater numbers. What's especially telling is that they are getting younger and younger.

Poverty and helpnessness are abundant. Criminals are plentiful... masquerading as politicians. They are sucking the life out of middle America and sending us envelopes asking for donations so they could keep the "good" work. Corporations answer only to shareholders, yet wall street is full of executioners preying on these same investors. No one represents us anymore. At best, they pop a generic form letter in the mail when we contact them with our concerns. Why would they represent us when the big money comes from corporations?

Who here can point to one thing that brings us pride as humans and Americans?

Government sponsored torture? A criminal, an illegal war that has broken the hearts of hundreds of thousands of mothers who only wanted for their children what I want for mine?

Maybe these rabid facsist theocons who want to dismantle this democracy and spill the blood of anyone who disagrees with their point of view are a source of our pride? The infusion of hate speech in the media under the cover of free speech. Not responsible speech... just free, hateful, racist BS. How, in this day & age can anyone want to deny homosexuals their Constitutional Rights in EVERY sense... marriage, child rearing, love. And why? It boggles my mind. What is so hard about understanding the wisdom of separating church & state? Where is our exalted democratic party when it's past time to say "YOU HAVE LOST YOUR TAX-EXEMPT STATUS" to these charlatans?

Nothing is made in America anymore and young adults living with their parents after college because they can't find jobs? 10 years ago... I never heard of such a thing and now 3 very close friends are in that position.

Maybe we should take exceptional pride in the fact that we have children on prozac driven by chemical imbalances (I believe it's drug initiated) to despair... and kill. Keep popping those pills folks! Trust your government to curb a child's thirst for life and all it's wonders with prozac or whatever other wonder drug pharmaceutical companies need guinea pig for. Have the government test your kids for mental "problems" and put them on government sponsored medication. Where's the outrage for prescribing mind/mood altering drugs to children?

There is no doubt in my mind that the government will bleed this country and it's people dry. They stole our identity and individualism when they granted corporations "personhood". They will take every dime in taxes and fees from 95% of Americans and leave the country to waste. They will ride off into the sunset with their corporate multinational jobs in india or china laughing all the way to the bank.

Yeah. This columnist hit the nail on the head.

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"So, you do what you have to do. You focus inward and work on the self and radiate as much love and open-hearted support as possible, grit your karmic teeth and hope you survive this dark house of mirrors without cancers or tumors or bloodshed or getting stabbed in the garden by a vicious teenage girl as you ignore the fact that in all of North America, from Mexico to Canada's Prince Edward Island, there exists only one state, province or territory that does not yet have a McDonald's. (Nunavut, in northern Canada, inhabited by the Inuits at a density of one person per 3,300 square miles). Small solace, indeed."
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I'm seriously considering moving to Nunavut.

been on earth. Read 'The Way We Never Were' by Stephanie Coontz for a good look at the 'good old days'. Humans used to be so bad that they would skin people alive - and remember burning at the stake? Not to mention the Inquisition.

What is new is fundies taking over America. That is newer, and BAD.