Bush's "Big Picture" and Baby Poop

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Bush's "Big Picture" and Baby Poop

By Dr. Gerry Lower
Sep 10, 2004, 18:30

George W. Bush has often requested the American people to acknowledge the "big picture," the implication being that his administration's values, ideologies and policies would be better understood if only the people would "see the world as I see it." Organized human effort, of course, always requires that the people make effort to see with the same eyes so that they can sing from the same sheet of music.

Toward this end, ABC TV is airing a series entitled, "The Big Picture: With God On Our Side," a two-part series that explores the rise of America's conservative evangelicals (a.k.a. - the religious right) and presents a "religious biography" of George W. Bush (ABC TV, Wednesday, 8 September, 2004).

From the conservative Republican viewpoint, seeing the "big picture" requires little more than opening the mind to embrace the values, attitudes and prophecies of Old Testament Roman religion, the ashes from which American democracy was birthed. In other words, seeing Bush's "big picture" only requires looking at the world through eyes that have never had much interest in human rights because of a preoccupation with religion-based political violence in the name of occupation and dominion (e.g. the European colonial conquest of North/Native America).

Since Constantine's Roman perversion of nascent Christian values in the early 4th century, the values of religious chosenness and self-righteousness have been used to accomplish the impossible, i.e., conquer the western world in the name of Christian compassion. The religious Roman program has always been to preach Christian compassion and to be a defender of Christianity so as to justify forgetting Christian values in self-righteous conquest and control.

The chosenness and self-righteousness that goes with along with being a "Christian soldier" has justified and implemented western conquest from Roman imperialism to European colonialism to post-World War II American capitalism. Under this influence, the human population has moved from tribal to national to global levels of organization. That would be religion's primary role in western cultural evolution, i.e., human unification at the tip of a double-edged sword. As the need for further economic unification diminishes (in a global program nearly complete), the need for political unification increases. That is where Bush's "big picture" comes into the picture.

To be sure, one's "picture" of the world does not get bigger by embracing vengeance, self-righteousness and supernaturalism. One's picture actually gets smaller because so much of what one claims to know about the world must be taken on faith alone. More importantly, there are truly "big pictures" based on human knowledge to consider in human efforts to run the world.

Natural Philosophy's Big Picture


American democracy was birthed from natural philosophy, and natural philosophy provides a picture so big as to make religion a matter of choice and not a matter of imposed obedience and blind loyalty. It was the religious freedom guaranteed by the separation of church and state that made real miracles happen in America, a land where religious rivalries were meted out on Sunday afternoon softball fields instead of religion's killing fields.

The natural philosophy of Jefferson's day, for example, transcended religion, seeing it as an early effort to define the world in ways that turned out to be wrong. Defining how the world actually worked had fallen to Isaac Newton. Natural philosophy saw nascent Christian ethics (before Constantine's Rome) as the source of western human rights and it saw Old Testament Roman religion as the source of self-righteous conquest, despotism and "tyranny over the mind of man."

America's Deist fathers made a clear and clean distinction between the values of nascent Christianity (compassion and human rights) and Old Testament religion (vengeance and law), seeing these value systems as being mutually-exclusive and not belonging together in the same book. The rewriting of western scriptures resulted in "Jefferson's Bible," intentionally devoid of religious superstition and supernaturalism, in honor of nascent Christian human rights.

The dialectic values of democracy are neither liberal or conservative, they are human and they transcend the values of western religious systems and eastern ethical systems. That is precisely why these values have acquired human respect on a global basis, as Jefferson knew they would. Dialectic human values are part of a world picture at least twice the size of the Bush administration's "big picture."

With Bush's "big picture" in political dominion, the people in America will have no option but to ride out western religion's blind descent into apocalypse, as religious capitalism makes its deathbed grasp for dominion of the global economy that it has helped create. One way or another, religious capitalism will retain power to its own prophetic end. Bush and the religious right wing leave no other option.

Under the Bush administration, America has crossed too many lines (e.g., the separation of church and state, the separation of civilian and military authority) that are critical to the success of our father's democracy. Returning to the values of democracy will require a return to the natural philosophy (updated, of course) that birthed American democracy in the first place. Because capitalism has survived at the expense of family and community economies, the re-instatement of democracy in America will require, as it did the first time, socioeconomic change of revolutionary proportions.

Making that return to natural philosophy and dialectic human values will require that religious capitalism continue to discredit itself on moral ground, in the name of the American people and in the eyes of the world. That end has been largely accomplished with Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq, a war immoral in compassion-based Christian eyes (do not hit first, do not hit back) and unjustifiable even in vengeance-based religious eyes (do not hit first, do hit back). The world has long since left behind the criminal "morality" of barbarianism (do hit first, do hit back).

Pre-emption is the product of the Bush administration's religious capitalism, and the educated world sees it as a moral failure, no matter how big the Bush administration's picture of the world might be. America's inability to recognize this egregious departure from the values of nascent Christianity and democracy is part and parcel of what is meant by the "dumbing down" of America. All honest and intelligent thought begins with the values of human knowledge (science and natural philosophy), nascent Christianity and democracy, not at all with the values of religion and capitalism.

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Reality's Big Picture

Because of America's wealth, military power and political power in the world, the Bush administration assumes a God-given right to be right, to be the world's policeman, judge, jury and executioner, to do whatever it takes to remain in fiscal and political dominion. Accordingly, many Americans have thrived on the notion that America is the greatest nation in the world. That, of course, was only true when America still honored the values of democracy.
Since World War II and the political dominion of corporate America via an "influence for a fee" government, the US has emphasized the pursuit of profits while the European democracies have continued to honor "the people" and the values of democracy. As a result, the US is the only western democracy that does not guarantee medical care for its people, the only democracy abandoning Hippocratean ethics to practice an exclusionary medicine based on money. This is not a characteristic of a "great" nation.

Today, 25 nations in Europe, representing 455 million people, have united to create a "United States" of Europe, the European Union. Its $10.5 trillion GDP is now larger than the US GDP, making it the world's largest economy. The EU has taken over as the world's leading exporter and the world's largest internal market. EU members also tend to have a longer life expectancy, a lower infant mortality and a more equitable distribution of wealth than do American citizens (Jeremy Rifkin, Daring to Dream," Guardian UK, September 1, 2004). In spite of American strength in the world, America has been failing for decades, caught up in cultural extremism.

All of this is related to America's own internal culture war between capitalism and democracy. Europeans see that Americans "live to work" while Europeans prefer to "work to live." The difference is an average paid vacation time of 6 weeks in Europe and 2 weeks in the U.S. The difference is going to European pubs to philosophize and pontificate and going to American bars to escape. Under capitalism, Americans find freedom in autonomy and the nuclear family. The more wealth one secures in America, the more independence and freedom under capitalism. Under democracy, Europeans find their freedom not in autonomy but in community. "It's about belonging, not belongings." (Rifkin, Daring to Dream).

The value of a Euro now eclipses the value of a US Dollar by a third. If the Euro were to become the sole oil transaction currency in the Middle East, the US will be paying more and getting less. Control of that market so vital to the "American way," virtually requires physical control of Middle Eastern oil fields. The underlying desperation and operational rationales for the Bush administration's unilateralism, its intimidation of the European democracies and its unprovoked attack on Iraq begin to emerge. Democracies that take care of their people are a threat to the dominion of religious capitalism in America.

Additional acts of belligerence by the Bush administration on the global stage (and they are coming, one can be sure) will not be taken lightly by those yet honoring the values of democracy. The response of the world, primarily the European Union, will be to discredit religious capitalism by arranging for its fiscal bankruptcy and ouster from the global political arena. With the failure of vengeance-based religion and crony capitalism, the doors will be open to natural philosophy and the redefinition of democracy in human rights terms to include the workplace and the marketplace, the doors will be open to nourishing democracy on a global basis,
For what the Bush administration spends in Iraq and Afghanistan in three months, America could feed the unfed world and, in league with Britain and the European Union, establish compassionate and knowledgeable approaches to world peace in our lifetimes. This cannot happen within the confines of Bush's "big picture," literally the religious world view which natural philosophy and democracy rejected two centuries ago.

The real "big picture" is that the people on this earth are currently embedded in a cultural evolutionary program that is playing itself out, largely without their conscious awareness. We fail to see the "bigger picture," in which the Bush administration is a ideologically-corrupt pawn in a cultural program that was written millennia ago, a self-terminating program to be replaced by democracy's self-correcting program.

The moral and fiscal bankruptcy of religious capitalism will bring to a close an era of human unification, much of which was at the point of a double-edged western sword. This end is not only prophetic in coming, it is required out of evolutionary necessity if the people and the land are to survive. The people and the land, of course, will not only survive but they will thrive in a human world released from political and spiritual dualism and the despotism and violent death it has nourished.

As we stand on the edge of the western religious abyss, we stand on the threshold of an American dream, the real "American dream" of fairness and equality for the people. The amount of bloodshed in between will be determined by the people of America and the world and how long it takes them to recognize and stand up against cultural extremism, how long it takes them to opt for Jefferson's human way out of religion-based political violence by re-establishing democracy with a basis in nascent Christian human rights. That would be the "end of time" for religious despotism and the "second coming" for Christian human rights, would it not?
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Author's note: As alluded to in the above paragraph, the imagery of Old Testament religion typically has a counterpart in the real world. Consider, for example, the concept of heavenly "angels," as representatives of and messengers from God. In the real world of natural philosophy, there is an exact equivalent of angels, and they are ubiquitous and easily recognized. All real angels arrive on this earth with one characteristic in common, i.e., they poop their pants.