onward (and outward) xian soldiers

Music: Cetu Javu: Southern Lands

NBC Affiliates were reporting today that a valedictorian's microphone was cut off during a graduation ceremony last week because the young woman began proselytizing. After reviewing her proposed speech school officials (including an attorney) edited many parts of the speech that began to stray toward a more fundamentalist hard-line. Officials told Ms. Brittany McComb that her audio feed would be cut off if she began to preach during the graduation ceremony, which officials noted may offend the faithful who did not subscribe to her particular understanding of Christianity, and which crosses the line between the separation of church and state. During an interview this morning with McComb and her parents on the Today Show, McComb said that she and her family discussed the bait-and-switch maneuver. Her mother said they thought the censorship was "just a scare tactic," and was surprised that her daughter's remarks were silenced because they in no way suggested that they were condoned by the school district. The young woman's father said that he intended to sue the school district for violating his daughter's first amendment rights.

In a related story, Jim Aune of The Blogora reports that Bush's main speechwriter for over six years, Michael Gerson, has left the building. As a story in The New Republic details, Gerson was responsible for Bush's uncanny sense of eloquence since Nine-eleven. The article's author says that Gerson's departure was in part a consequence of the mis-match of the president's word and deed over the past couple of years; the article seems to suggest that Gerson's impact on the presidency was merely stylistic. That kind of thinking is stupid (that thinking that reduces the power of rhetoric to "mereness"). Gerson's double-speak prose of spiritual warfare was in a large part responsible for garnering widespread support for Bush's agenda of warmongering binarism. I've made the case here and elsewhere for the incendiary effects of Gerson's righteous Christian prose, so I won't detail further except to say this: that this silenced senior and her family feel righteous about their right to assert their faith in a state-sponsored event is unquestionably a consequence of the tenor of presidential rhetoric over the past six years. In this charged, polarized environment of righteousness, in my mind unquestionably catalyzed by the "good and evil" binarisms of Gerson's born-again tongue(s) on the presidential teleprompter, evangelical Christians feel more emboldened than ever (except, perhaps, during the early years of this country's settling, oh, and maybe the first and second great awakenings, and . . . um, the 1970s post-hippy recovery, and I guess probably the Reagan years, oh, and um . . . . ).

Gerson may have left the building, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are taking to the public forum to spout off about the saving grace of a Jesus who will return soon to smite the unbelieving; Al Gore's inconvenient truth is just that, cause Jesus is coming, and he ain't a happy camper.