I watched "I'm Not There" yesterday, a film about the many sides and lives of Bob Dylan, played by 6 actors (it's art). It isn't a biopic, it's an abstract Dylan. Childhood Dylan is a small black child who tells everyone his name is Woody Guthrie and sings songs about unions and racism but in 1959. He's Dylan the faker. Outlaw Dylan is Richard Gere playing Billy the Kid. Rock and Role Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett in a stunning performance.
The origin story of Cate Blanchett Dylan is Dylan going electric. It is explained by the notion that Dylan turned jaded and skeptical on protest, it is useless to try to change things because you can't change things.
I think Cate Blanchett Dylan has a point.
In the early 19th century, it was Catholics instead of Muslims who were going to force Papal rule on us rather than Sharia law. An influx of Irish, Italian and German Catholics changed the demographics in Protestant America and Protestant America didn't like it. The role of the Pope is being played by Hilary Clinton eating babies at a DC pizza joint.
We've always lived in Qanon's America.
"Conspiracy theories tend to emerge in times of rapid cultural or demographic change; many of them reflect unease with that change, suggesting that it is not just the result of evolving values or newly emergent communities—the messy progression of democracy—but instead the work of a hidden network of nefarious actors whose ultimate goal is the destruction of America itself. And they often portray the American nuclear family, particularly its women and its children, as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection."
Sam Houston favored a 21 year naturalization period before you got to vote. Time enough to squeeze the Catholic out of you. “Are not their doctrines opposed to republican institutions? . . . There is no freedom where the Catholic Church predominates.”
That's how, on August 11, 1834, the people of Boston torched an Ursuline convent just outside town. It was the tail end of a raging conspiracy theory triggered by the sudden influx of Catholics. Liberals are OK with change because change makes it possible to make things better. Conservatives are suspicious about change because it is important to preserve things that are good. That makes it difficult to agree on what is good and what is not, fear of mistakes.
The trouble comes when suspicion tips over into paranoia. The Ursuline convent, people were convinced, was a place where priests and nuns committed acts of sexual debauchery. When the inevitable babies emerged, they were murdered and buried in the basement. The women there needed to be liberated.
So on August 11, 1834, that's what they did. They were described as "amiable ruffians," as they escorted the women and girls from the building and then turned it upside down looking for the dead babies. When that didn't pan out, they overturned coffins in the crypt and desecrated the remains. They seemed as if they truly believed they were helping the women. They generously torched the place, to keep them safe.
Anti Catholicism quickly went mainstream. "Nunnery Committees" were established to investigate rumors of sexual abuse in convents. The only thing that brought it to a close was the rise of slavery as a point of contention, the North becoming far more interested in the slavocracy and not so much in the Vatican.
"Part of the reason these moral panics resurface so frequently is that they’re so easily forgotten. The same script gets recycled again and again, only to be memory-holed as soon as the fervor subsides. What happened in Boston in 1834 would resurface in 1920s, with the Ku Klux Klan’s willingness to use violence to defend against fictitious assaults on Protestant women’s “purity” by Catholics and Jews, and again in the ’80s during the Satanic panic, when children were coerced into accusing day-care employees and even their own parents of ritualistic abuse and murder. Contemporary conspiracy theories about Clinton’s murderous sex cabal may sound outlandish, but it’s only the latest page in a playbook that is more than 200 years old."
Protest really is useless. You can't change things. Everything old is new again. Donald Trump is the new Sam Houston. Religion is the author of the most extreme behavior. Why does Newspeak have it that good is evil? Evil is good, that is what puts your mind in the right frame.
If you live long enough, you become a total cynic.
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