Crimes Against Nature Read Free Page B

triumph of this last trend. Under George W. Bush, American government is dominated by corporate power to an extent unprecedented since the Gilded Age, when the sugar, oil, steel, and railroad trusts owned government officials and traded them like commodities.
    While claiming to embrace its values, the Bush administration has stolen the soul of the Republican Party. The president and his cronies have taken the conserve out of conservative. Instead of rugged individualism, they’ve created a clubhouse that dispenses no-bid contracts to Halliburton. They talk about law and order while encouraging corporate polluters to violate the law. They proclaim free markets while advocating corporate welfare. They claim to love democracy while undermining open government. They applaud state rights and local control, but they are the first to tear up local zoning laws and bully states into lowering environmental standards to make way for corporate profit taking. They exalt property rights, but only when it’s the right of a property owner to use his property to pollute or destroy someone else’s. Where are these property rights advocates when big coal is demolishing homes in Appalachia, when coal-bed methane barons are destroying Wyoming ranches, when the hog barons are defiling property in North Carolina?
    While condemning environmentalists as “radicals,” they promote the radical notion that clean water, clean air, and healthy loved ones are luxuries we can’t afford.
    They invoke Christianity to justify the rape of the land, violating manifold Christian precepts that require us to be careful stewards. Rather than elevating the human spirit, their interpretation of Scripture emphasizes the grimmest vision of the human condition. They embrace intolerance, selfishness, pride, arrogance toward creation, and irresponsibility to the community and future generations.
    The easiest thing for a political leader to do is appeal to our fear, our hatred, our greed, our prejudices. My most poignant memory of my father came in the days after he died. I was 14 at the time. After his wake at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, we took him on the train to Washington, D.C. I will never forget the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the tracks — blacks, whites, priests, nuns, rabbis, hippies, men in uniform — many with tears running down their faces, many waving American flags or carrying signs bidding “Good-bye Bobby.” From Union Station in Washington we rode in a convoy past the Mall, where thousands of homeless men were encamped in shanties left from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign, and they came to the edge of street and stood with their heads bowed as we passed, crossing the Potomac and heading up the hill at Arlington to bury my father under a simple stone next to his brother.
    The faces I saw that day were a cross section of America, the faces of the American community. And yet four years later, I learned from polling data that many of the white people who had supported my father in the 1968 Maryland primary, and had then waved to us from beside that railway track, had voted not for George McGovern in the 1972 primary, but for George Wallace, a man whose philosophies were diametrically opposed to everything my father stood for. It struck me then — and my observations have confirmed this many times since — that every nation, and every individual, has a dark side and a light side. And the simplest strategy for a politician is to exploit our baser instincts.
    Our greatest politicians have accepted the tougher task of appealing to our sense of community, asking Americans to transcend their own self-interest. Throughout our history they have persuaded us to find the hero in ourselves, and to make sacrifices on behalf of future generations — and for the principles that underpin America’s unique mission. John Winthrop, the Moses of the Puritan migration, said that mission was to build a “city on a hill” — an