THE PASSION OF THE BUSH

First off, let me set the ground rules for these observations, lest I be condemned for heretical parallelism:

George W. Bush is not Jesus Christ. Michael Moore is not Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. The vilification of George Bush is not the Passion on the Cross. The disparagement of Michael Moore is not a sign of the impending apocalypse.

One story is sacred, the other mundane, understood?

The Passion and 9/11 may be of two different places, times and sanctified magnitudes, but their recent retellings – one by Gibson, the other by Moore – bear a remarkable symmetry. We might even go so far as to say that thoughtful Christian fundamentalists might now better understand the angst that some non-Christians felt over the anticipated impact of The Passion of the Christ.

Did not many of us assume - erroneously, the fundamentalists repeatedly assured us - that Gibson’s movie would galvanize a new wave of anti-Semitism, aggressive conversionary efforts, even a neo-Crusader zeal? Tables turned now, how can fundamentalist Christian conservatives not interpret the box office success of Moore’s maybe documentary, maybe not, as a further radicalization of the already radicalized Left?

Is Gibson advocating Christian love or anti-Semitism? Is Moore espousing America’s capacity for self-correction or bald-faced anti-Americanism? One cannot walk the razor’s edge with one without calling the other into question.

Would Gibson have been more dramatically effective in retelling the magnificent story of Jesus’s life, death and redemptive power by letting the Gospels speak for themselves? Would authenticity have enhanced the pathos more than skewing the story to Gibson’s theological and historical bias? Would allegiance to the text, historical sources and the Church’s interpretive tradition told the story more compellingly than playing sloppily with the truth?

Likewise Moore: The truth itself told a compelling, dramatic, condemning story. George W. Bush did plenty that was wrong, even perniciously so. So too the men and women who were at his beck and call. Some of it was inexcusable lack of preparedness in a pre-9/11 world where terrorism was already a palpable reality. Some of it was sloth and stupidity, a country with a vapid pretty-boy at the helm. And some of was certainly greed on behalf of friends on both sides of the world, many of whom were swathed in the garb of Arabian nobility. Does anyone else out there wonder why Saudi Arabia is not a member of the Axis of Evil?

Why, then, did Moore, like Gibson, have to deliberately play fast-and-loose with the truth? Why did he have to proffer falsehood as fact? Why could he not let a story that was already sufficiently damnable simply tell itself?

Herein lies the ultimate symmetry: Gibson is not a spokesman for Biblical authenticity. Nor when all is said and done is he a Christian idealist. Moore is not a credible documentarian. Nor when all is said and done is he an advocate for a better America than George W. Bush has provided us.

Gibson and Moore are sensationalists. They molded and shaped, twisted and turned the truth to garner audiences. I will stop short of saying that they did it for the money. But this I know: They did it for the hoo-hah. They did it for the attention. They did it to make an angry, unjustifiable statement. They did it for self-vindication. And they did it not to feed on the American hoi polloi’s thirst for truth, but for its lust for sensationalism and its sheer gullibility.

The good news for my coreligionist doomsayers is that The Passion of the Christ has had little, perhaps none, of the cataclysmic effect that they had anticipated. The predictable good news for the Right is that they can expect the same from Fahrenheit 9/11. These are movies, folks. The American public is so fickle, thank God, that Gibson’s masterpiece was knocked from first place by Starsky and Hutch and Moore’s magnum opus was dethroned by Spider-Man 2.