From an interesting piece about substituting pop-Christianity for clinical treatment of war-induced psychological disorders (via Sully):
In 2008 the RAND Corporation put a number on the problem, reporting that one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered some form of mental illness, mostly PTSD and depression.
“God doesn’t like ugly,” one political appointee told Paul Sullivan, an analyst in the VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration, in a clumsy attempt to reduce the cost of caring for psychologically traumatized veterans. “You need to make the numbers lower.”
The whole article is well-worth reading. The passage Sully quotes is good too, particularly this disturbing bit from VA Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon:
The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.”
r€nato
once again, reality trumps satire. Christ. Those are words I’ve put in the mouths of right-wingers many times, in jest.
AhabTRuler
The loudspeakers spoke up and said: “Christianity is Stupid”
Derelict
Apparently Jesus saves by scrimping on care for our veterans.
calipygian
I’m a VA beneficiary and I hate Christo-Taliban Republicans as much as the next patriotic American, but in fairness McLendon DOES deny saying that.
Although we know what kind of congenital liars Bush appointees are…
Napoleon
Rightwingers see PTSD as a moral falling and therefore unworthy of treatment as a real medical issue, like say cancer. Much of what the right wing do and say can be reduced to the fact that they see nearly everything as some kind of morality play. They live in a simple binary world.
smiley
That person needs to spend more time with his family.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
God doesn’t like war either, fucking assholes. Does the wingnut Bible take the word “not” out of the “Thou shalt not kill” Commandment or something? Does Jesus say “Blessed are the meek, for they shall be pushed off the Earth?”
Mr Furious
If “God” believed in Country, wouldn’t he just smite these terrorist fuckers for us with another flood or plague or something?
Then it wouldn’t cost a dime!
inkadu
Every once in a while stories like this crop up to highlight exactly the sort of sociopaths Republicans are.
I hate halth insurance CEOs. I know they are there to make money, but I have the feeling they know it’s wrong and work to justify the harm they do. In Republicans I have no such faith. They just are craven spiteful little monsters. They are just evil, and not in the banal way.
RedKitten
Wow. Between wishing AIDS on babies, and blaming veterans for their own PTSD, the right-wingers are REALLY bringing things to a new low, aren’t they?
JGabriel
People like McLendon should be left unarmed on a battlefield to make their way to safety.
.
bemused
This type of christian thinking (if you can call it thinking) drives me crazy. It conveniently absolves them from any personal responsibility to use the brain they were born with, that God gave them, to solve problems, fix mistakes. It’s as if they think they can just sit on their asses sucking their thumbs while human beings all around them are hurting because God/Jesus will take care of it.
El Cid
These are the same people who thought it was cute to allege that Max Cleland got 3 limbs blown off ’cause he was a dumbass and wore purple heart bandaids at the Republican National Convention in 2004 to support the notion that John Kerry was a pussy for getting shot in Vietnam while Commander Guy George W. Bush Jr. was an awesome military leader in a war footing in a time of war for serving in the Texas Air National Guard for several days during the Vietnam War.
No, this is not new. Reagan didn’t give a shit about homeless Vietnam vets, either. Their main task was to denounce liberals as being traitors for suggesting larger numbers of homeless Vietnam vets than they thought realistic. No, this is not new.
BongCrosby
Found this at a site called ZoomInfo with a 2006 date:
Whether or not he said the the quote attributed to him, he’s still got “HORSE’S ASS” written all over him.
calipygian
@JGabriel: He’s got faith in God. God wouldn’t let him die on the battlefield.
And he’d probably get through the ordeal with NO PTSD.
AMITRITE?
geg6
This has me fuming right now. I deal with veterans every day as I am the campus certifying official for VA educational benefits. Just this past week, I had a vet student who had to withdraw because he is so psychologically damaged from 7 years of active duty that he can’t adjust to civilian life and can’t concentrate well enough to get through his classes. The poor man is obviously a basket case. What good does free tuition do him in this situation? He has not been able to get treatment from the VA as they haven’t yet provided him an evaluation and he’s been on a waiting list for over six months. Our campus psychologist is not trained to deal with PTSD and, even if she was, she couldn’t devote the time and effort he needs with all her other students who need her help. We suck as a country. I am ashamed that this man can’t get help. And to have a VA official say something like this? I could just punch that asshole right in the neck.
Riggsveda
We are STILL living with the legacy of devastation Bush wrought at the VA. Why do you think they are so happy that Obama has committed $25 billion? To Bushco they were good enough to send off to die for a lie; not good enough to clean up after when they didn’t have the decency to just die, already.
General Winfield Stuck
Republicans are the gooey stink on the sole of my hiking boots, for a lot of reasons. That is all I have to say Sunday November 15, in the year of our Lard, 2009.
Jesse
I’m pretty sure god doesn’t give a shit about countries. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if you’re genuinely interested in Christianity, then you should be wary of excessive attachment to petty worldly concepts like country. (FWIW, I think some Christians do genuinely hold the concept of country at arms length, accepting it as a material necessity. It’s too bad that in the last, well, gazillion years, there have been far too many people who would bind the two concepts together and fervently believe that god is on their side.)
Shawn in ShowMe
The truly shocking thing would be to find a Bush-era appointee that didn’t blame the victim for their victimization AND was allowed to stick around. Mercy is for the weak!
Little Dreamer
@Napoleon:
But, hypocrites exist, and these people you talk about are the very same ones who are so fearful after 9/11, also.
Thadeus Horne
Really? What could these REMFs possibly know about PTSD? You actually have to experience a trauma to acquire that wonderful little syndrome.
And by trauma I mean something a little more serious than tax increases or being mean to Jeebus.
Five minutes of actual combat would have these wankers pissing and shitting down both legs. Fuckin’ pussies!
Grumpy Code Monkey
Well, that successfully spiked my blood pressure for the next few hours. I’m a little-a atheist; I don’t normally consider religion pernicious in and of itself, but stories like this make me wonder sometimes.
New Yorker
I’m trying to think of something to say to this slimebag, but words fail me. Jesus H. Christ, the right really does hate everything about this country, don’t they? They hate the founding fathers for being men of the enlightenment instead of Bible-pounding fundamentalists, they hate the Constitution for its checks and balances (activist judges!) and its defense of the rights of man (trial for Hasan? Noooooo!!!!!), they hate the fact that a black man could win a presidential election in a landslide (Real Mur’kans didn’t vote for him!), and they hate the veterans of the wars they start for becoming psychologically scarred by said wars (Chuck Norris wouldn’t have PTSD!!!!)
Little Dreamer
@Thadeus Horne:
9/11 happened, dont’cha know. Every single wingnut thanks Warrior Jesus everyday that the terrorists didn’t get them too.
Rita
My sister called me one day and she received an email that attributed his comments to President Obama. How dishonest can these people be?
Svensker
@Jesse:
A very staunch Calvinist pastor I know in the Reformed Church will not allow state or national flags in his church. He considers it idolatry. During the height of the Iraq War hysteria the board outside his church said “God Bless the Whole World — No Exceptions”. He’s a very cool guy.
Jesse
@Svensker: Awesome.
In 2004 I went to a funeral at a church where, in the hallway outside, there were invocations to pray for our troops and other little US flags all over the place. I was incensed and almost felt like challenging the minister about it, but I declined. It didn’t seem right to get myself whipped up, and potentially involve other people at the funeral in such a conversation.
This was the height of the “Support our Troops or else, you motherfucker!” insanity. I’m sure John can relate.
inkadu
@Napoleon: Cancer is a moral failing with New Agers, who figure sufferers brought it upon themselves with their negative thoughts.
The world is scarier than people will let themselves believe.
inkadu
@Jesse: You did the right thing in not raising a ruckus. It would have only compounded the problem. And the folks in the hallway were probably the regulars.
Notorious P.A.T.
Religion is just so wonderful. It’s such a great shame that the proportion of religious Americans is steadily shrinking.
PeakVT
Shorter Repukes: Troops are heroes; veterans are losers. Just like they think fetuses are holy and children are worthless (other than their own). Or that government is evil but police never arrest the innocent. Etc.
They just don’t think like us.
tim
DougJ: I always enjoy your insidery-buddy references to Andrew Sullivan as “Sully” and the links you send his way are very special for his traffic numbers.
Why exactly do you do it?
Do you communicate with him at all behind the scenes of this blog?
Little Dreamer
@PeakVT:
This is the whole problem right here. When I saw W, I knew he was going to be a disaster right from the beginning!
;)
Brent
This is all rather simple. Republicans serve the rich. The rich sincerely believe their wealth is a sign they are blessed by God. Anyone not rich is immoral and deserves their fate, despite nitpicky things like lack of opportunity. Religion is used to get poor people to vote for the interests of billionaires and big business. It is also their opiate, since they can’t afford health care. So, even tho they have been cast off by God by virtue of their poverty, their only succor are the rituals of religion by which they too might become blessed by God, altho in a non-monetary, afterlife kinda way. They are obviously not equiped for wealth so they should shoulder adversity as a form of punishment and instruction.
This logic applied to veterans and PTSD is straightforward. If they are suffering, they did something wrong, are sinful and need to simply suck it. If they had wealth and therefore didn’t need to enlist for lack of job opportunity, then they wouldn’t be having these problems. It all runs down the blessed/non-blessed divide. They should believe in God and country, which is to say, embrace patriotism and religion as substitites for material aid. It is the right thing to do for those types of people.
As Barbara Bush would say, they were disadvantaged anyway, so this is working out rather nice and quite well for them. As for the rest of us who have not served, she would also counsel, why would we want to diry our beautiful minds with that unpleasantness? Problem solved. God is in his heaven and all is right in the world.
Morbo
Repugnant. And once again we see the principle at work of Republican governance: “Government doesn’t work; leave us in charge so we can show you.” “PS: Yay, God!”
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@tim:
Heh.
If Sullivan didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.
Annamal
God, I thought this kind of thinking went out after WW1 (look on the bright side, at least they can’t get their men shot for “cowardice” ).
That’s actually my quibble with the entire article, it acts as though the Vietnam war was the start of Shell shock/PTSD/Battle fatigue when it was literally killing people on the battle fields in World War One. Hell if you want a really harrowing example read the last part of Spike Milligan’s war stories (his CO tried to get him put back to work because “the sounds of the guns might revive him”).
Porlock Junior
Calipygian @ 4 mentions possible doubt about whether McLendon actually said that; otoh McL is a Repubican official and therefore is likely to be lying.
Further to that, I don’t think that Deputy Assistant Secretary is a civil service job. No? If the guy is still serving under General Shinseki, who seems very much to believe in his job, it could be that he’s not so bad as he looks from the disputed quote. Then again, this could be another Obama Admnistration case of We Can’t Do Anything Boo Hoo It Wouldn’t Be Bipartisan. Who can tell?
We do know that the Bush VA was a cesspool — a convenient source of supply for notorious some VA facilities. In fact, the absence of any visible change in the months Shinseki has been Secretary doesn’t look good.
Anoniminous
Here we have the entire Tea Bagging evangelical movement (TBEM) in a nutshell.
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind,” wrote Prof. Mark Noll, an evangelical, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. McLendon could have only uttered that quote if he was completely ignorant of the findings of neuroscience regarding the affects of accumulated stress on the brain. People with PTSD don’t respond to godbothering. They respond, slowly, with psycho-pharmaceuticals, counseling, and being placed in an low (read: no) stress, low stimulus, environment. The last is absolutely necessary. Once the limbic system has gone haywire any stress can invoke the PTSD cycle, reinforcing the dysfunction.
MacsenMifune
This is just the usual conflation of PTSD with cowardice, but if you were a braver man you wouldn’t get PTSD crap. These assholes never had someone else’s brains all over them.
George Carlen said PTSD should still be called shell shock, not sure that would help or not.
soonergrunt
@Napoleon:
The other issue is that modern religious conservatism is based around the prosperity gospel and the idea of The Elect–if God loves you, you are wealthy on this earth.
You are healthy and wealthy because God loves you. God does not love those who are not healthy or wealthy, regardless of what the bible says.
Therefore, you are unworthy of God’s love if you are poor or sick or hurt. The same attitude that pervades the rightwing positions on healthcare reform pervades their beliefs about veterans care.
You’ve seen examples of it here on Balloon-Juice. Makewi only became more snotty and dismissmive when she learned I was a vet. That’s why I apologized for not living under a bridge. You seen that kind of attitude all time here in
WingerstanOklahoma. Vets are absolutely revered as long as we don’t actually say or need anything.BillCinSD
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: maybe if you ignore everything he did before about 2006
ppcli
@calipygian:
True, he denies saying precisely those words. No doubt he is savvy enough to recognize that saying precisely that is catastrophic from the point of view of P.R. But then he goes on to deny that PTSD is a real disorder, when he has absolutely no psychological training or clinical experience (I assume), he describes the experts who actually have dealt with patients as “selected psychiatrists” as a way of dismissing them, he says that the diagnosis of PTSD is not based on empirical evidence, which is preposterous, and he justifies his argument by referring to work by marginal skeptics. All of this is SOP for these guys living outside the reality-based community, and it’s much worse than what he denies saying. Though admittedly, what he denies saying is a more superficially damning soundbite.
—
My wife is a VA physician, and she has told me stories of things she has seen first-hand from W’s political appointments that are even more horrifying than the ones in the linked article. I doubt there was anyone in the country happier than her to see those people voted out of power.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Come on, we all understand the real Gospel. God said, let there be comfort. Let there be satiety. Let there be ease. Let there be entertainment. Let there be good and righteous war, and let our warriors be happy with their warring.
That’s the real Gospel, the real “good news.” God created the middle class. And now that he has created it and it has been good, it is just about time to blow it all up and rapture the comfortable outta here.
Get rapture-ready, people. God loves the prepared.
kay
@soonergrunt:
This is absolutely true, in my experience, and I interact with a lot of fundmentalist religious, because they live where I live.
I find it incredibly disheartening and sad, because it seems to express itself in this nasty, mean-spirited investigation of anyone who suffers some sort of setback. They set out on a mission to lay blame, and they’ll go to ridiculous lengths to uncover evidence to make the person himself responsible. I finally realized that they have to do that, in order for the dogma to make sense. If God is rewarding the pious (them), he must be punishing sinners, so it’s just a matter of looking for the sin, no matter how attenuated, and pinning the blame, and then washing their hands of any duty or decency.
I can’t imagine anything less helpful or useful. Once we find the “culprit” any charitable interest ends. It’s amazing to watch.
Mike G
The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.”\
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
Let me guess, McLendon is now an HMO executive.
This asshole belongs on a glue trap in the sun.
DougJ
DougJ: I always enjoy your insidery-buddy references to Andrew Sullivan as “Sully” and the links you send his way are very special for his traffic numbers.
Everyone refers to him as “Sully”. I link there when I find something interesting, the same as with other blogs. There are a lot of posts on his blog, and while the average quality may not be high, it adds up to a lot of stuff I find interesting.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@BillCinSD:
I would like to ignore everything he did before, and after, 2006. I can’t stand the guy. He gives me the heebie jeebies. Every time he speaks, I feel the irrepressible urge to run away.
However, at BJ, every time he speaks, we write it down. We slice the pieces off and put them on slides and look at them under microscopes. We study them. We look for shapes, like the face of the Virgin Mary, or a mushroom cloud, or whatever.
harlana pepper
@kay: However, as the economy continues to tank, there will be less and less “fortunates” to blame the unfortunates for simply being born unfortunate. Any good the Obama admin does that has the effect of helping any of these assholes from sliding into the sink-hole of unemployment and desperation, will simply be attributed to the notion that God indeed does love them morest than us hell-bound losers.
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
God hates unpleasantness, that’s why He did not create any.
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
@RaptureReadyAndLovinIt:
Oops, I forgot about Smallpox.
Martin
Ok, fuck that guy.
My devout Catholic grandfather spent over 2 years banging around the Pacific. He volunteered as soon as he could, along with his brothers. 6 of them served all told – in the atlantic or pacific. My grandfather spent a month on Iwo Jima at the end of his tour and was sent home. My grandmother also volunteered and served as a nurse until she was injured when the ship she was on was attacked.
My grandfather suffered PTSD the rest of his life and died in the VA hospital where he resided most of the time since he would routinely take to trying to kill the family – turning on the gas, that kind of thing. Never hurt anyone, but the family was afraid that one of the times they woke up with him standing over them with a knife, he might not be able to hold the thoughts back. My grandmother, being a nurse, was expected by the family to cure him, and when she couldn’t and sent him back to the VA she was ostracized from his side of the family. Few families voluntarily put more skin in the game in WWII than mine, and we were very lucky to have everyone come home alive, though many missing a bit here or there, we’ve always been proud of that effort and sought to live up to it. I also have a great uncle who started his war effort as a medic hitting the beaches in France on D-Day. He suffered from PTSD as well, though not as destructively as my grandfather. Most of the children of that generation enlisted and went on to be fire and police – most in NYC, and many were 9/11 first responders.
And those that would question their faith, it was routine for that generation of my family to go to church daily. We still turn out priests and nuns to this day.
So seriously, fuck that guy.
Shell
Isn’t PTSD what they used to call ‘battle-fatigue?’ That was seen as a moral failure too. Patton slapping that soldier…
Romney is a horse’s ass. Still shake my head, remembering his concession speech during the ’08 campaign. It was Palin-esque.
anie
@soonergrunt: I think you are correct in your assessment of their thinking in this. They have taken an extreme fundamentalist Calvinism and applied it to everything in life. In fact I recently saw an add for a book advocating precisely this. The only connection this has to Christianity is in the minds of wingnuts. Actual Christianity advocates caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison, etc.
harlana pepper
@Shell: Before that, it was called “shell shock” (WWI)
kay
@harlana pepper:
I won’t take part in it. When they start the Inquisition, I leave. It drives me crazy. Just say you have no sympathy and you’re not willing to help nearly anyone, and we’re done. Why dress it up in this elaborate blame-laying? Really. I could give a shit if we find the culprit. I already know the answer, because if we go ’round long enough, we’ll be right back at the person asking for help, and I have no interest in handing out a sentence.
There’s about three situations where they deem the person worthy of an assist. If I were the petitioner, I would tell them to fuck off and keep their charity. Listening to them isn’t worth it.
Liberty60
@soonergrunt:
I wondered why that was; I skimmed a book a few months back, by an evangelical preacher, that was essentially a Biblical defense of unfettered capitalism, and attack on soacial welfare programs; I see this line of reasoning all the time on conservative religious blogs and the sprinkling of Jesus references in otherwise secular blogs.
The constant line of logic was that Jesus wants us to engage in tough love and tell the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Or manufacture plenty out of a couple loaves and fishes. Or something.
Brent
@kay:
My dad was a pastor so I grew up with this thinking. It’s all a simple binary flip. If you are part of the elect, the chosen few, and something bad happens, save that it is not too bad, then satan is attacking you. If you are not part of the elect and something bad happens, God is punishing you for sin. Note how when the religious get caught at anything, they are quickly forgiven. Such as Bush inadvertently murdering a million Iraqis due to “faulty intelligence.” No problem to the religious crowd. Compare with Bill Clinton’s staining of the blue dress.
rinse, repeat. It’s a magic formula simple enough even Sarah Palin can understand it.
DougJ
However, at BJ, every time he speaks, we write it down.
He didn’t even write anything here, he just put up a link and an excerpt. I liked the article he linked to, as do others here, so I linked to it and gave him a via.
What do you want?
harlana pepper
Soldiers coming home from battle maimed, emotionally devastated, and unable to assimilate into an already fucked-up society in a serisouly fucked economy. Looking back on those halcyon Mission Accomplished days, no one could have predicted this would happen!
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
@DougJ:
Right at the moment, some barbecque and slaw would be nice.
And, more references to Sully. I can never get enough of them. It’s an addiction, it’s like intellectual heroin.
kay
@Brent:
M
Thank you, that’s helpful. It took me like 20 years to figure it out. I live in a small town and I’m always shocked at how nasty this thinking is. I get to where I’m feeling like I have to protect the person who has suffered some loss or had some set-back, because the rush to look for “causes” begins immediately, and is then followed with this community verdict: unworthy, brought it on themselves. Any hint of responsibility for the set-back is like exhibit A, and they roll it out with real relish. It’s just appalling to me.
licensed to kill time
Has Michael McLendon ever actually been to war? I googled him but just got the guy with the same name who massacred his whole family. (Weird coinkydink).
Interesting how it’s too expensive to treat vets but never too expensive to go to war in the first place.
harlana pepper
Andrew Sullivan’s convictions strike me as somewhat schizoid, no offense to schizophrenics.
Liberty60
@soonergrunt:
As if by providence, I left this site and browsed to the Atlantic and found this article, describing the “prosperity Gospel” you speak of:
theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel
Its almost as if Jeebus wanted me to find it.
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
God hates ugly, but He loves this, apparently.
God also hates complainers, too.
My head hurts. No, really.
Cain
@kay:
That isn’t Christianity, that’s the fool who thinks that as long as he’s prosperous he has the golden ticket on the train to heaven. That if I recall isn’t want Christianity teaches. Prosperity is the only method that they can measure God’s grace on them since there is nothing else. It makes an odd sense I suppose.
cain
kay
@harlana pepper:
I agree. He’s completely conflicted, on nearly everything. He could save himself a lot of time and trouble by reading and researching before he makes big pronouncements on…things.
Shell
It’s an position that Charles Dickens attacked constantly in his novels. The more things change….
Brachiator
Why is this man still working for the government?
His bio, from a 2005 White House Conference on Aging, suggests that he is just another crony appointment with dubious professional credentials.
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
The thread can’t go another inch without this.
Sing it and be happy!
calipygian
I wonder if the rise of the prosperity gospel parallels the rise of the management consulting craze of “metrics”.
Little Dreamer
@Cain:
It’s so Orwellian, make it stop, PLEASE!
Nutella
@kay:
That attitude is common in other contexts. In “The Right Stuff”, every time something bad happened to an astronaut in training flights the others would insist that the reason the bad thing happened was NEVER bad luck or equipment failure, it was always that the victim of the bad luck or equipment failure didn’t have the right stuff. It must have been his own fault.
It’s a way to keep up your own morale by blaming the victim. Since you will never be as stupid/incompetent/immoral as the victim you will never be a victim yourself. Bad luck cannot exist because if it did, it might come after you.
I was so offended by the attitude I could never finish “The Right Stuff”.
kay
@Cain:
I had a friend who lost a child, and he was given this book over and over : “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People”.
He got like 20 copies. He finally read the thing, and hated it. He had never dreamed that his son’s death was any sort of judgment on him, and he was insulted and angry that other people were thinking that, and they were, if this book was to be believed.
He had never applied this to other people. He just assumed that bad things happened to good people, because not assuming that leads you to the other assumption: bad things happen only to bad people. He had never concluded that, in any way, about other people. He was always much more generous than that. He was shocked.
Little Dreamer
@calipygian:
They are still trying to figure out how to pass through the eye of the needle.
kay
@Nutella:
Once you recognize it, you can’t miss it, don’t you think?
I see it on television news. There’s the tragedy, and then there’s the finger-wagging lesson behind the tragedy. The fire is never just a fire. It’s the parents were asleep and probably drunk, and this would never, ever happen to good parents. I understand the need for social sanction, all that, but it gets taken to ridiculous ends. No sooner do we clean up the wreckage of the traffic accident than we’re looking for proper seat belt usage.
Little Dreamer
@Liberty60:
That story about the feeding of the 5,000 was just wrong. There is no way they could have served that many without all the utensils and fixtures of a restaurant. What the bible was actually saying was that Jesus was opening up a new establishment, a fish market, and his grand opening was very successful. In fact, if that story in the bible was to be believed, it was prosperous as all hell!
Leelee for Obama
@Nutella: I was just a kid during the Mercury days, and my favorite astronaut, for reasons I cannot explain, was Gus Grissom. I think it might have been because he was an ordinary guy, just like my family was peopled with ordinary guys. Anyhoo, they began to lose me when they castigated him for screwing the pooch at landing and supposedly blowing the hatch and losing the capsule. Even dying years later, never quite erased that “sin”. Decades later, he was exonerated by the Discovery Channel, and I took such pleasure in that.
This attitude, basically, the Protestant Ethic, has hurt this Nation and its Citizens for far too long, and it is past time for us to sweep it up and toss it in the dustbin of History. Those who think they are stronger, have been fortunate, or flat-out lucky, and those who suffer mental anguish need help and understanding. We are a cold-hearted nation sometimes, and curing that disease would make us a better place.
RaptureReadyAndLovinIt
@Little Dreamer:
Ah, Jesus’ Seafood Company(tm). I like it. It has entrepreneurship, prosperity, salvation, and it’s low fat. High in Omega-3 oils. Heart healthy.
It really is The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Get healthy, get rich, get raptured. Perfect. Uplifiting, and I mean that literally!
Nutella
@kay:
There was a fatal accident at a rural railroad crossing in Illinois a few years ago. It was fascinating to see the press casting around for someone or something to blame for an accident where no one was at fault. It was just bad luck that the driver of the car (a sober and respectable person, as they were undoubtedly disappointed to find out) happened to approach the crossing just as the scheduled train was approaching and just as the setting sun shone right in his eyes. The disappointment of having no one to blame came through very clearly in the newspaper stories.
licensed to kill time
@kay:
This is part of a sort of magical thinking, that it would never happen to me/my kids because I would never do A or B or C (insert “cause” here). It’s the mental equivalent of warding off the Evil Eye by wearing a blue stone around your neck or a hand gesture to scare off the Devil.
AhabTRuler
The same thing happened with the Washington Metro accident in June. First, the NTSB savaged Metro for failing to replace the 1000 series cars without acknowledging that Metro has been desperate to replace them, but hasn’t had the money because of local politics. Even worse, the first speculation (and it was speculation) that it was drivers fault for not paying attention or perhaps texting. It was only after they removed the several tons of wreckage from what was left of the poor woman that it was discovered that she had indeed actuated the emergency brakes as soon as she was aware of the danger, but it was too late.
We love to blame people for their own misfortunes, because otherwise we might have to look to our own, and society’s shortcomings.
Chad N Freude
Re the Gosperity believers: What part of Matthew 19:24 do they not understand?
Jay in Oregon
@kay:
“I used to think that life was unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
–Marcus Cole, “A Late Delivery From Avalon” (Babylon 5)
kay
@licensed to kill time:
It’s funny, because it works the opposite “magic” with me. I’m reluctant to jump in there because I’m always assuming I might be on the other side, and be dealt with in a similarly harsh and unforgiving manner. I’m warding off my own evil eye.
The Washington Post did this absolutely fascinating piece on those poor, poor parents who forget their (sleeping) kid is in the babyseat and he/she dies of heat prostration, while they are parked at work. It’s now happened in every state. The stories were heartbreaking. One father struggled with the officer who responded to the emergency call because the distraught father was trying to get the officer’s gun so he could shoot himself. I was bawling reading it.
There are two kinds of human responses to those tragedies, and it’s half and half. One half blame the parent, and push for prosecution. We’re the other half.
Brachiator
@Leelee for Obama:
Sorry, it’s more complex than that. Aspects of the Protestant Ethic got us here, to a place of almost unbounded creativity and prosperity. And Americans are among the most charitable people anywhere (not claiming we’re Number 1, cause that’s just stupid).
And there was a study a while back that suggested that the religious (and not just those in organized religion) were on average more charitable than the non-religious, particularly lower income groups.
What has happened is that a crabbed, selfish vision makes more noise and gets more publicity. And it was just weird to see Bush and many of his supporters grow about his being born again and yet push such a stunted and ugly Christianity.
On the other hand, I recall that terrible shooting in Amish country. One of the most remarkable, but typical, responses to the tragedy was how many people around the community, law enforcement, doctors and nurses, counsellors, ordinary volunteers, not only rushed in to help, but also made sure that the tragedy was not exploited by the media, who typically try to turn these events into an exploitation fest.
And then there was the reaction of ordinary people to Hurricane Katrina. I know folks whose churches organized efforts to take people into their homes. And Katrina, I think, was one of the key moments when a lot of people began to reject the Bush Administration’s coldness and incompetence.
Leelee for Obama
@Brachiator: To me, the Protestant Ethic isn’t really about religion, but politics. That’s my starting point. It uses religious thinking, that God blesses the good and punishes the bad, but then, it branches that idea out into economics, family life and government in ways that excuse those who consider themselves good from being in any way responsible for the misery of their fellows. If it’s God’s will, that’s it.
Charity and compassion may be more obvious in religious people, I’m not sure that’s true, though I’ve seen the studies. But those qualities are blatantly lacking as a driving force for improving the lives of our fellows, and the Ethic gives the ones who want one an out that they feel is inarguable.
licensed to kill time
@kay:
My immediate gut response to these tragedies is sympathy for the parent and a realization that it could so easily happen to any one of us. Who hasn’t lost track of their kid for a heartstopping moment or had a lapse in judgment that could have ended tragically? It’s the very commonality of these experiences that makes people want to ward off the possibility of it happening to them so fiercely. The condemnation/punishment reaction is a lack of empathy and a surfeit of denial.
When that reaction carried to the extreme, as seems to have happened in the case of the father in Texas who was put to death for a probable accidental fire that killed his children, it just sickens me. I can’t begin to imagine the psychic pain of losing your children and then being put on trial for murder and getting the death penalty . I lack the capacity to imagine that personal scenario.
Nellcote
@Porlock Junior:
It’s well known that Bush turned as many of his political appointments into civil service jobs as he could. There are also over 200 nominations to various government positions, including department heads, being held up by republicans in the senate. Blaming all lack of progress on Prez. Obama is just
ignorantunhelpful.kay
@licensed to kill time:
In the story, they profiled two prosecutors, in two different counties in VA. One had taken your view, and treated this as an accidental death. The other charged the (mother, in this case) with a variant of negligent homicide. The Post reporter asked the prosecutor who made the call to charge if this could possibly ever happen to him (he had children) and he said,”no. I’m a conscientious father”.
Such certainty! I’m almost envious. He never, ever screws up.
Brachiator
@Leelee for Obama:
Many versions of Protestantism, and much has been perverted. Aspects of the Protestant movement was a reaction to the perception that Catholicism had degenerated into a corrupt system in which people were encouraged to believe that they could buy salvation through prayer and monetary indulgences. The key belief of many Protestants was that you could never be certain that being good was going to guarantee you a place in Heaven. This is the exact opposite of the belief that God works on an auto-pilot which unthinkingly rewards the good and punishes the bad.
I don’t think you can just blame some of these attitudes on the Protestant Work ethic. Something else is at play here. Conservatives used to claim that private charity could do the work of government social programs. But somehow, and relatively recently, a new noxious view has sprung up which rejects the idea of charity or a social safety net, and instead holds that people who are poor or in need are failures. This is expressed in the nonsense fantasy that because capitalism means that everyone can become prosperous, those who fail to achieve wealth and security are somehow both failures and un-American.
ellaesther
Please tell me that after his opinions have been given a public airing, Mr. McLendon will be looking for a new job.
Please.
RedKitten
The problem with right-wingers and evangelicals is that they cannot bear to have an unanswered “Why?” It freaks them right out, because they cannot bear to think that the world can be a completely random place, with some “good” people having awful shit happening to them while some “bad” people live happy, prosperous lives. It’s akin to a four-year-old shouting “It’s not fair!” while the grown-up says “Nobody said life was fair, you know.”
And if they start to accept that sometimes bad shit happens to good people, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, then they might have to question what they’ve always believed.
And there’s no way they’re going to do that. It’s too damn scary to start turning your worldview upside-down, and to start questioning everything you’ve ever believed. It’s much more comfortable to desperately grasp an answer to “why?” by a) blaming the victim or b) saying that Goddidit, and it was all part of His Greater Plan(tm). That way, by having an explanation, by having an answer, no matter how weak it is, they can assure themselves that the bad stuff will never happen to THEM.
hra
“The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.”
Evidently, this person does not know of what he speaks. Those of us who have lost a loved one to this disease know it all too well. The family network passes on those little messages – “He’s being well taken care off” “It will take longer than expected” “He’s been released and coming home” “He has a job in a community organization, his own apartment and he’s functioning very well”
Then one day last year in the summer he decided to walk out into the traffic of a busy highway just as a semi was coming.
He was my great nephew. He was what one girl described at his memorial as “looks that took your breath away with a personality that cared deeply for whoever he met.”
Chuck Butcher
Before going to my point, I espouse no religion whatever.
Over half of the active members of the Baker County Democrats / Democratic Party of Oregon attend the local Presbyterian Church where we rent meeting space. These folks are pretty leftish. I know that half of the remainder attend a church and are similarly leftish.
I make no representation that this means anything in particular.
Cain
@kay:
This is why they hate liberalism. What they don’t understand is that liberalism is pretty much what people learn from religion (or from society).
So what happens when tehy have a natural disaster and the whole neighborhood is blown up due to a hurricane/tornado/earthquake? I guess it means that it’s the fault of teh ghey then!
cain
OriGuy
I don’t think McLendon is still at Dept. VA. The current Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy and Planning is Julie M. Anderson. Do Assistant Secretaries have to be confirmed by the Senate? Maybe she’s one of the ones with a hold by an anonymous Republican.
Mike G
And it was just weird to see Bush and many of his supporters crow about his being born again and yet push such a stunted and ugly Christianity.
The people who crow loudest about the inherent superiority of someone because they are ‘born again’ usually practice the most stunted and ugliest forms of religion. They think they are inherently good, not because of their actions, but because they are members of the right tribe. You wind up with dirtbags who lie and cheat and steal, breezily self-assured all the while that everything they do is sanctioned by Jeebus so by definition can’t be bad.
Beware of those in whom the will to punish is strong — Nietzsche
I think because their lives are so fearful, they have a high orientation toward control and need religion to provide a ‘reason’ for everything and a magic shield against bad events. Their religion is proof to them of their ‘goodness’, and will ward off anything bad happening to them. If something bad happens to someone, then the person must have been bad, unlike their saintly selves.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Fix’t.
Cheryl from Maryland
This attitude influences so much of the right. Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book, Bright-sided discusses how too many Americans believe if your life, including your health, isn’t good, you have no one to blame but yourself. Conversely, if your life is good, you must be a good person. Q.E.D.
mary
@Porlock Junior: Probably no one will read this far down into the comments, but McLendon is apparently no longer in his position – a quick run through the Google found this article, which states that he left in 2006 as part of the scandal over the VA security failures that let millions of vets’ personal information be stolen.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
That person needs to spend more time with his family.
That person needs to be dropped into the middle of Iraq or Afghan with a pea-shooter and told that if he doesn’t make it home alive or sane, it is because he doesn’t love God or his country enough.