Saturday, October 13, 2012

Christian Fundamentalism and The Western

Just a standard "Saddle-Up Saturday" at insp's cable
christiancable channel.  This particular one was
Oct. 13th, 2012, complete with "High Chaparral",
"Bonanza" and "The Virginian".  That's a lot of
settler-colonial propaganda for the christian
right-eous,what with even more western
fare during the rest of the week AND plenty
more saturdays to go around.
 Whilst scanning the basic cable channels for my joyous journey in daily VHS research captures, I ambled past "insp"1, once called the Inspiration Channel if I remember correctly.  They were announcing their "Saddle Up Saturday" promotional teaser and it got my spurs a-jinglin' about the general settler-colonial love of the western movie/tv show (OK, do we really have to ruminate too deeply over that one?!) and how tremendously attractive these shows seem to be even in our highly-enlightened, "post-modern"2 society.  With all the old, but oft-repetitive shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Big Valley and Bat Masterson still crappin'...um....gracin' up our screens large and small, you'd think we were still wallowing....or pillaging...in the late 1800's, clearly an idyllic time in the history of the United States of America and in the lives of the indigenous Turtle Islanders and Africans who obviously had no substantive need to be jealous of anyone's freedoms what with the USAmerica being the land of the free(dmen) and the home of the brave(s).

Thank goodness they found a european guy to give
the pre-Wolves Dancer performance of a lifetime...
yeah, the buckskinned hottie that had to play red-
(or pink-)face to be able to get all kissy-kissy with
Jane Seymour.  Ya gotta admit, it would have been
unconscionable to have Iron Eyes Cody getting busy
with Doctor Quinn.....right?  Right?!?
What really burnt my kerosene lantern wick was the lovely mixture of insp's christian fundie televangelical programming and this passel of cowboys and pseudo-Indians (oh, and a sweet variety of slavish Africanishes...gotta love their nod to cultural diversity.....heart succinctly warmed).  In my mind of minds, it was no question that there was a direct connection between the settler-colonial extinctionist/ tokenist/dismissivist western fantasies dripping with a gentle holocaust sauce and the pop-media-cultural ministrations of the religiously right christian legacy of some of television's best performers known to man-, submit-to-your-husband-woman!- and deity-kind: Morris and David Cerullo, Todd Coontz (too good to be believed...but you will - BELIEVE!), Perry Stone (check out his stage design) and Dr. Mike Murdock amongst others.

 
(swooning....just like Bonanza, Big Valley pulls no
punches about its aristocratic lead character family,
but loves to play the we-see-it-and-will-spare-no-
sappy-liberalisms-when-we-pimp-the-issue-
of-race card.  Who doesn't love a fine family of
cattle-culture-capitalists who have a heart, a semi-
spunky blonde-hottie daughter and -what the hell! -
Lee freakin' Majors?!  

 I mean it's not like there is any direct connection between christian evangelism and missiology and settler-colonial machinations like Manifest Destiny or "the Ponderosa", right?  What would bibles and crosses have to do with cowboys and Indians...or, well, a serious lack of Indians?  Yeah, that settler-colonialism thingy keeps coming to mind.  Just can't get it out of my head, that thing about genocide, holocaust, oppression, small pox blankets, scalping (no, the French supposedly "invented" that), reservations, oh, and those pesky massacres of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.  Yeah, that stuff keeps coming to mind even though christianity and christians in general, especially the roamin catholic church, seem to want to divest themselves from the sticky annals of imperialism's history - even though the christian and more specifically the roamin catholic cartel was directly responsible for giving the Judas kiss to the Tainos and Arawaks, that whole reduce-the-pagans-to-servitude-and-take-their-lands thingy.  The Taino and Arawaks were/are native people, too.  I know it's hard to believe; they didn't ride horses or throw tomahawks and say "ugh" (unless they were being kidnapped and had to eat the lovely Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria-esque cuisine).

OK, so I'm having a hard time figuring why a guy
with a gun who has never had sex before is an
interesting premise for a western television series...
What? What do you mean?  You mean - ...
OOOOOOOOOOH, the "VirginIAN"!!!! (blush)
 So, yes, there I was thinkin' again (dang me!), wondering why insp with its decidely christian righteous programming (ya know, sometimes that word just makes TOO much sense) would just come right out in the open and admit its undying love to the Destinal Manifestations of the western genre narrative.  It's just that I've heard them try so hard, even as they dog paganism, the New Age and, generally, any indigenous cultural element or spiritual tradition to high heaven...or low hell...to divest themselves from that unseemly period of history when indigenous peoples from Turtle Island and Africa were displaced, terrorized, slaughtered, enslaved, raped, pillaged, whipped, flogged, flayed, drawn and quartered, starved, disemboweled - and other cool stuff - for the greater glory of the only settler-colonial and wonderfully patriarchal nation to have ever done it right - the good ol' U.S. of Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! (yeah, they play "Happy Days", too - shweet - no settler sentimentality or "greatest generation" nostalgia there.....noooooooo).

OK, not a "western", but surely western and settler-
nostalgic for sure.  Goodnight, Crazy Horse....we'll
be mining in the Black Hills and you just gotta move
that teepee....John Boy's got a date and needs to park
the ol' Model T on top of Mount Rushmore - yeah, I
know, not historically sound, but you get the point.
So maybe I really don't have to work too hard to make the point, maybe it's been made for me by the wonderful programmers at insp, the Inspiration Network.  Maybe it's already clear to everyone that watches this scintillating channel full of televangelists exhorting us to "sow our breakthrough seed" (not a request for masturbatory semen, but for money, believe it or not....though one with a critical mind might clearly think just watching insp is an exercise in screwing oneself).

OK, so we can easily make the connection between colonial oppression and christian evangelism.  Criminal Columbus put the first nail in that coffin and the roamin catholic church, John Hagee, Mitch Pacwa and a hunk o' heapin' helpin' of all the rest of the Daystar, EWTN and insp televangelists and producers are filling in the rest of the hardware.  It just needs to be said and said clearly.  The legacy of anti-indigenous, anti-Native American and anti-African settler-colonial ideology and oppression is alive and well in current christian narratives, programming and...well...programming.  Manifest Destiny never ended and the christian context is still on the hunt for previously independent souls and still deeply invested in the redux of the original imperialistic dalliance a la "a good Indian is a dead Indian" or at least a stereotypically televisual one, dominated by the idea that capitalist Europeans, in control of land and natural resources and "Other" cultures, hold the only viable context for the future.

What?!  All this late 1800's and early 1900's
programming and they call it a "new" day?!?
What the hell?!  "NEW"?!  It seems like they
want to return to say....the Victorian era...

Talk to the Lakota, the Hopi, the Maori, the Huichol, the Kogi, the Zapatistas or the San and they may tell you something completely - COMPLETELY - different.

A little too easy to say that insp is not only evidence of that "smoking gun", but they seem to broadcast those smoking guns as often as they can.  Thanks insp.  You just made it a lot easier to make a point that sorely needs to be made and understood.

OK, insult to injury, insp gets the
"seal of approval" by an
organization that says they give a hot
damn about what children
see or don't see on tv....
Settler-colonial narratives and oppression
rationalizations must be really healthy
for growing children.
1 - insp seems to have gone the way of "TLC" and "syfy" that changed their names/logos in the face of a monetary need to diversify and massify and stupidify their programming content.

2 - Once challenged to define my relationship to "post-modernism' on a scholarly level, I looked it up on wikipedia and, ok, in other resources and realized it was a fantasy, a confusion of ideas that no one could really agree on, an arrogant and adolescent projection of thought and behavior that would assume that the dominant populace was beyond the narrow-mind of colonial reality and capitalist ideological manifestations.  We aren't that advanced.  "Post-modernism" is as much a backward colonial AND modern fantasy as the western movie narrative.