It was with great interest that, during a typical CNN post-mortem on a, well, prominent recently departed American, I saw the face of Christopher Hitchens. I knew that this would be outrageous – a smackdown of Jerry Falwell before his body was even cold, much less the mud on the mourners’ boots dry. You can find the video of this posted over at Newsbloggers. It is definitely a Must See, with Hitchens waxing truly poetic on the Falwellian nightmare, calling him “odious”. “small”, and a “toad”. Thank you, thank you, Anderson Cooper for having Hitchens on! It was brilliant.
Putting aside for the moment Falwell’s bigotry, homophobia, and his blaming of the troops in Iraq for failure there (and the gays for 9/11), let’s not forget that lately he had been particularly alarmed that the evangelicals in this country were beginning to ally with the environmentalists on the global warming issue. His sermon from Feb. 25 typifies his anti-science stance, which we saw earlier in his statements on creationism, where he brands leading researchers in these areas as “pseudo-scientists.” Yeesh.
In the end, though, it occurred to me that we’ll miss Jerry, in a way. Now we need some other buffoon to bring out into the open the ignorance and anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of true religious fundamentalism. Any nominations from the floor?
May 16th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Nice! Especially the quote “I do not think he could read a book that long” (referring to the Bible).
May 16th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Pat Robertson is alive and well.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
At times I wonder whether Jerry Falwell actually genuinely believed any of the things he said on the record, or whether he was just pandering to the party line of the folks he was beholden to and/or trying to curry favor with.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
You need look no farther then our President.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Maybe God is trying to tell the conservatives to
back off and stop using His name when it pleases
them by bumping off Fallwell.
Nice to see at least a few people with guts out
there to call a spade a spade.
If we don’t fight such ignorance, it will only
grow and spread.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Fred Phelps is angling for the job. He thinks Fallwell was a was a tool of the radical gay agenda.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Sorry to put a link in your comment section but I liked this take -
http://what-sucks.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-suckswriting-jerry-falwells-obit.html
May 16th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
“People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup” was a good line from Hitch. (Who is a drunken lout, but can occasionally rise to levels of rhetorical interest.)
May 16th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Larry Flynt was very gracious about him (There’s a strange combination of words). But perhaps the most important tribute is from a TV star who owes everything to Falwell…
May 16th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Hitch: “I doubt he could read actually any long book … at all.”
May 16th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
You guys got it all wrong. Falwell didn’t die, he was raptured up into heaven prior to the apocalypse. Apparently, the rest of us aren’t worthy, so we’re stuck here.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
[...] to John at Cosmicvariance. Stops something short of hagiography, shall we [...]
May 16th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
I was just listening to Chip Berlet’s “Apocalypse Now” lecture on NPR, which was very interesting. There’s a lot more variety in fundamentalism and evangelism than is represented by Falwell and Robertson, though; they’re not all vindictive anti-science nutcases, which Falwell definitely was.
Sean #7: I don’t think that being a drunken lout has impaired Hitchens on the whole, although it has certainly harmed his eloquence on occasions. He’s no Dylan Thomas, but he probably drinks less than Thomas did, too.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Hey, John. Are you missing “a crazy old aunt telling lies and stirring up all sorts of mischif, but still who was once beautiful”, as a bit softened Steven Weinberg said recently? Hahaha.
May 17th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Jerry was old news anyway. Ann Coulter left him in the dust a long time ago. That harpy is far more obnoxious, anti-science, fascist, vicious, and VOCAL.
She is everywhere.
I’d rather have Falwell around, to tell you the truth, as everybody but the lunatic fringe KNEW he was nuts and ignored him. Your average guy takes one look at Coulter in a short skirt, and his brain turns off. A lot of people read her tripe–and believe it.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Is there something particularly scientific about bashing recently dead people before they are even buried? Even CNN could show some dignity in their treatment of Richard Nixon. I wondered at the time if they didn’t exhaust all of their civility quota and that we’d be seeing no more of that in the future.
Still I guess I had to wonder at the treatment of the facts of JF by Reuters in the UK for instance. My blog with a link to this and others is here if interested. It is fine if you want to say you loathe someone, but a bit of fairness might give ones case more gravitas. Joseph Loconte in National Review Online had a decent yet clearly not so flattering critique that I found rather tasteful here.
Somehow name calling even of one who one believes to be a name caller, doesn’t seem all that scientific to me.
The suggestion of Fred Phelps is probably the best one I read above. Sadly and unfairly I believe JF was treated as if he were Fred. This again sadly has had the unintended effect of elevating Fred imho. Perhaps such is persuasive emotive rhetoric while ones nemisis is alive and able to respond but not so delicious when we ask for whom the bell ultimately tolls.
May 17th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Fred Phelps is an utter nobody. His highest profile is probably abroad where he is sometimes inaccurately imagined to have any more than a few handfuls of supporters and is thus considered representative of any significant group of American christians.
Falwell was a significant man. For many conservatives (including me, although we’re not in the majority, perhaps) he was part of a movement that did enormous harm to the Republican party in the US, harm which is yet far from redressed. As for waiting for him to be buried, it seems to me that he sought and enjoyed the profile he had and he’s fair game; it’s not as if he didn’t, himself, use all those dead people from the WTC to make his own political points (which didn’t outrage me, incidentally, dead people being, you know, dead; the only issue is the upset you cause to the survivors that care about them and maybe the ability to advance your cause with topical coverage exceeds the harm you believe that you cause).
May 17th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Thank God, the Hitch is back! He’s on a second yet powerful wave, no doubt!
May 17th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Come to think of it, this Hitch clip is potent enough that might bring a smile back to Gore Vidal’s face!
May 17th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
The Moral Majority movement infiltrated the Republican party and gained political power. As a result, we now see Bush#2 installed himself as a neo-god on a holy mission, answerable to an authority higher than the Constitution. Falwell sees his biggest achievement – the integration of church and state in the USA and laugh all the way to hell. Not only did he helped screw up the Israel-Palestine peace movement he, with Bush#2 as his proxy, now engaged America in wars with the Islamic fundamentalists that may well last for decades. While JF partner in ideology, a certain OBL, triggered a holy attack on America, it is JF who sow the seeds for an era of Christian-Islamic religious wars that will help bring great destruction to both.
Since its inception as the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity is all about wars. Continuous, bloody all-out wars as history amply confirms. America was founded on the principle of separation of church & state in a brave attempt to end religions gaining state power. Because the founders, having saw what happened to Europe after the 200 Year War of the Catholics-Protestants, knew all too well that the moment a religion, especially the Christians gain the powers of government there will be wars. So now we have war of religious ideology, not of security or economics. That is the achievement of Jerry Falwell and his kinds.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Two Words: James Dobson
May 17th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
drunk,
How would the (damaged) notion of separation of church and state work in the future, if America becomes majority Muslim? If the separation of church and state is effectively null and void, then could something like Islamic Sharia Law become the law of the land in America?
May 17th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
The separation of church and state is not effectively null and void. It has been subverted by the elite, and successfully brain-washed into the public using modern techniques of mass media psychology. It can be restored by determined actions of the public who refuse to be brain-washed by neo-religious extremism and nonsense of faith, the kind we witnessed in the political arena and corporate-controlled mass media of the past decade. Americans have a choice – continue with current path leading to government of theocracy, by religious evangelical fundamentalists, for big corporate business – a new American fascism. Or return to a state with Lincoln’s ideals – of the people, by the people, for the people. Look across the pond and we see Europeans have made their choice – strongly entrenched governments of secularism and very much (some say too much) for the people, after centuries of religious conflicts and the madness of the 20th century.
May 17th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Is there something particularly scientific about bashing recently dead people before they are even buried?
1. Is there something particularly unscientific about it?
2. Is there something requiring Cosmic Variance to discuss nothing but science?
3. Was there anything scientific about Jerry Falwell?
Sadly and unfairly I believe JF was treated as if he were Fred.
Falwell was vastly more powerful than Phelps is ever likely to be. A crazy, bad man whose influence is limited to shouting at funerals is less worthy of derision than a crazy, bad man with millions of dollars and millions of disciples.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I don’t know – perhaps a bit of civility was in order. “When you kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.” (Winston Churchill)
May 17th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
“When you kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
I wasn’t given the opportunity to kill Falwell personally. Spitting on his grave is all I get.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Good Lord. I wish Christopher Hitchens wouldn’t mince words, and tell us what he really thinks.
I argued that Falwell will burn in Hell. That, and i’m a Lutheran, who believes that it isn’t up to me to decide these things. But burn he does. Another contribution to Global Warming.
May 20th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Jerry Falwell sometimes seemed a bit negative, closed-minded, and perhaps intolerant. But he was nothing compared to some of the the venom-spitters in this group.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:52 am
Jim, while I don’t agree with taking the road of venom-spitting, Falwell’s actions have indelibly marked his legacy. He supported racial segregation. He supported denying gay people rights. He attacked one’s right to be an atheist, to have secular schools, to embrace humanism. He thought there should be no public education – only government sponsored private education. He supported Apartheid. He created a video making wild accusations about Clinton – one he himself was unable to claim was true. He openly lied about things he said, as proven in a court of law. And, finally, he blamed the 9-11 attacks not on a handful of extremist terrorists, but on gays, abortionists, pagans – anyone not in his religious camp.
This man said and did a lot of abhorrent things. Things that people have the right to get mad about. At the very least it is hypocritical to say that he can spit so many years of this venom, of this hatred and self-serving thinking and declare that though he may have been a ‘bit’ negative, and ‘perhaps’ intolerant, those people who disagree with him are the ones in the wrong for pointing back at him and saying, “This man was despicable, I will not honor him even in death.”