Right Wingers Don’t Cry

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/9/01

I got my first hint that a new wrinkle in the right wing hysteria was showing up when a client turned up asking me to edit a screed he had written about Harry Potter.

I thought it would be entertaining, because I knew the guy well, and knew that he was a conspiracy buff, and held some odd religious views. Of course, I regard almost all religious views as odd, and believe the truism that "just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you," so perhaps I’m not the best person to canvass on these sorts of things. But he doesn’t fall into the category of "vile religious bigot" and isn’t given to yammering and drooling over satanic influences.

He came back a bit later, and I gave him a quizzical look. "Did the New York Times really print that JK Rowling wanted to teach children to . . ." I rustled his papers, looking for the quote, "um, ‘suck the greasy dick of Satan’?" The Times isn’t quite what it used to be. Still, that seemed out of character for them.

The client nodded, acknowledging my skepticism. "Actually, I wanted you to log on and verify that, if you have time." I had time. He pulled out a piece of paper. "The number is aitch tee tee pee..." I waited while he wound his way through the double ewes, wondering why URLs were such a profound mystery to people who don’t use computers. "...tee aitch eee oh en eye oh en dot com".

"The Onion? You got this from the Onion?"

He looked surprised. "You’ve heard of it?"

Well, yeah. It’s only one of the best parody/satire sites on the web, and probably the best known. There’s others as good, but it’s one of the oldest, and attracts millions of readers. Since I like this particular client and appreciate his business, I explained what the Onion was as tactfully as I could manage, and since he didn’t get offended, I guess I managed it better than usual.

My client looked unconvinced. "Well, it says this came from a July 17^th, 2000 interview with the Times. Could you check with the Times themselves? Do they track that sort of thing?

They did, and I could. So I called up a search engine, and put in Rowling’s name, along with NY Times. I got a hit for a June, 2000 interview. That seemed close enough, so I printed it out. Then, playing a hunch, I put in her name, the paper, and the date, July 17^th, 2000. To my surprise, I got a hit: Urbanlegends.com, another excellent and well-known website, this one devoted to debunking online myths and scams. It seems that my client wasn’t alone in taking the Onion piece seriously; the far right Christian population of the net had been in an uproar over it for some time. But there was no such interview on that date, aside from what lay in the imaginations of the people working for The Onion.

I grinned, reflecting that the folks at the Onion must be delighted. There’s nothing more fun than writing something so over the top that nobody in their right mind could possibly take it seriously – and then have people take it seriously. I remember once working for a large outfit and sending out a fake memo from the head office two months before the 1984 LA Olympics were to be held, ordering that employees had six weeks to become fluent in not less than eight foreign languages, said languages to be assigned on a random basis by management. A couple of people wanted to lynch management as a result. Management was not amused.

No matter how stupid it is, some people will take it seriously, and that’s never more the case than with crackpot religious nuttery.

Political whack jobs are a close second, and often are ALSO crackpot religious nuts. The big hoax they fell for the year before was a list of Dan Quayle quotes – extremely well known Dan Quayle quotes – that some genius edited to be "Algore" quotes, which he then sent off to the gullible webmaster of one of the bigger Rush Limbaugh fansites. That one kept showing up like a skeet through the rest of the campaign, to our enjoyment.

The following day, I took a look in the news groups, and came across a new thread entitled "Creepy Middle_Aged Weirdos Swept Up In Harry Potter Craze." I recognized the subject header as being the headline of one of The Onion’s more recent projects – in fact, I had a hard copy of that very "story" floating around my office. The poster was one calling himself "Dana" a strange right wing creature who liked to spam liberal news groups with cut and paste posts from such outrë sources as the Washington Times, Jewish World Review, American Spectator (RIP, AmSpex!) and stuff from the Birchers and other really marginal outfits.

However, Dana is quite humor-impaired. He’s on a mission from God, or Newt Gingrich, or one of those right wing deities, and there’s nothing humorous about that, no sir! He didn’t strike me as the sort who would feel at home peeling around the Onion.

But then I saw the url: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/583819/posts. Dana got it from Free Republic, the Fresno-based rightwing website. Freak Republic, as it’s known among Weasels and other rational sorts, is a rabid and gibbering right wing website, one which flirted briefly with social acceptance in the wake of the election theft, going so far as to invite Judge Sauls and Kathleen Harris to their annual Freeper’s Ball, before Republicans noticed that some of these people were seriously loony-tunes, ranging to "mebbe dangerous." Since then, they’ve returned to the online status of the crazy old bastard who offers to clean your windshield for a quarter and shares his thoughts on how aliens from various constellations are dicking around with the gravity field of earth in order to enslave our minds.

I followed the URL, and was disappointed. The Freakers didn’t blow gaskets. One actually told a pretty amusing college tale that was disparaging of another well-known form of net nuttery, Objectivism. One simply groaned, "Oh, not another Harry Potter thread!"

That last caused me to look around. The restrained reaction didn’t come from a sudden onslaught of intelligence and skepticism: it came from the fact that many of the Freakers were utterly spent after months of huge howling sessions over Harry Potter. Apparently the screams about Harry Potter were long and loud, with all kinds of forecasts of the End of Days and worse, and subsequent explosions from the various Freakers who don’t happen to be Slavering Maniacs for Jesus.

However, this was all on Free Republic, and outside of the religio-political zanies, nobody takes the site seriously any more. So none of us had noticed this ultimate battle of Good versus Evil over the harmless little English schoolboy with the zigzag scar on his forehead. Harry, having never raised chickens, probably wouldn’t know what to make of the Freakers.

With all the uproar over Harry Potter, and the unending blare of propaganda about how America is becoming more spiritual, more Christian, especially since 9/11, it’s often easy to conclude that the country is lurching into the maw of a new Cromwellian theocracy. It costs a lot of us sleep sometimes, watching the unending efforts to turn our secular institutions into a pulpit for this church or that.

However, I got mail from another worthy website, Working for Change, which alerted me to the fact that the latest American Religious Identification Survey had just been released. This is a vast undertaking done by CUNY, that involves interviews with over 50,000 people. It’s considered one of the best barometers of religious self-identification in America.

In 1990, 90% of respondents identified themselves as having some belief in a god or deity. Bible Bangers immediately took this to mean that the country was 90% Christian, but in fact, it included all faiths, including Islam, Judaism, Wiccan, and a host of others.

In this most recent survey, only 81% profess to any sort of religious belief. Seculars make up 13% of the population now, and another 6% in the survey declined to state any religious preference at all.

Additionally, Islam, Wicca, and Native beliefs all doubled, and Buddhism tripled in number over the eleven year period. While the population grew, Christianity actually lost ground during that period.

For the bible bangers, the measurements on degree of conviction have to be even more disconcerting. In 1990, 65% of self-professed Christians described themselves as "very religious" as opposed to just "somewhat religious." This time, the breakdown was 49-51 among Christians, a surprising drop.

So now, despite all the propaganda, the country isn’t veering into a realm of fanatic cross-waving mutants intent on wiping out all the infidels. In fact, it seems to be moving away from that, despite the claims from the religious right.

Best of all is the news that among Americans ages 18 to 34, only 70% self-identify as being believers of any kind.

My friends, our evil scheme to poison the hearts and minds of American youth is succeeding! Thanks to the unstinting efforts of our dark master Satan, and communists and our dupes at The Onion, we shall prevail! Feel the dark force, Luke!

Excuse me. You weren’t supposed to hear that bit about Satan and what not.

Don’t tell anyone, OK?