When Faith Turns Deadly

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 5, 2008.

That's what the last election was about: Reality v. Myth. It was a great moment, because at the last moment reality struck hard -- the market crashed, the banks and economy not far behind -- and kicked myth in the teeth so hard that when people walked into the voting booth, they either had to vote for a, a … you know who … or the Great Depression. By a slim, but more than sufficient, margin they voted against the Great Depression.

That's Carl's journey, in a way. He has his theology, which gives a structure to his life, which is necessary, and then he meets situations where the theology doesn't fit the reality. He has to come to terms with that. So do several other people in the book. They do so in different ways. Several deny the reality and insist on the theology. Which many people do in real life (George Bush keeps raving on about free markets after having asked for a trillion dollars to bail them out -- astonishing, but true).

JH: At the end of The Librarian, you tell the reader that some of the events in the book mirrored real life, and you do that again in Salvation Boulevard. Can you get into that a bit without giving up too much of the plot? I'm interested in privatization -- of the creation of publicly funded honeypots ripe for the taking by private interests.

LB: Reality is so much fun. It's so full of outrageous stories. I would refer readers to Fog Facts to see a bunch of them straight up, as they are, not repackaged in fiction.

Bush and Cheney's economic adventures in real life, both in and out of government, are wonderful -- or would be if they were fiction -- gigantic, multimillion- and then multibillion-dollar capers, which are quite appalling in reality. Both claim to have been free-market true believers. In reality, they both got personally rich the same way: Using government to take money from ordinary people to give it to very rich people. Then, when they got in power, using government to make other rich people very rich.

One of these incidents -- back when Bush was governor of Texas -- forms the basis for part of the plot. The real story is in an afterword at the back of the book. It involved transferring $7 billion in public funds to a private party who helped make Bush rich in a separate deal and went on to become one of his biggest supporters (and why wouldn't he?).

Privatization is a real threat to our well being. It, too, got a kick in the teeth from reality. I don't think there is anyone looking forward to retirement who isn't totally relieved that Bush didn't get to privatize Social Security and make it stock-market-based.

That being said, there is a huge job to be done in explaining and justifying the utility of public ownership, public endeavor, and working for the common good. Think Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine -- the idea that disaster is a time to rush through radical change. She describes how the Right uses disasters to do that. We now have a disaster, a set of disasters, produced by the Right. It is our opportunity to rush in with alternative ideas while there is the panicked will to implement them.

JH: Let me change gears here for a moment. In his new book, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, Hooman Majd writes, "It strikes me often when I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Muhammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation and God's will, and a Christian republic is born." A provocative argument, but one I've always felt to be true intuitively. What's your reaction, having written Salvation Boulevard and travelled to Iran this year?

LB: I think of Iran as America's dark mirror. Iran is an Islamic republic. Its government is elected. Really, in real elections. But in order to run, you have to go through a Council of Guardians, who evaluate if you are religiously correct enough to run. In America, the government is elected. Certainly, in presidential elections, you have to go on TV and explain that you are religious enough to be president. In order to run for any other federal office, you have to raise at least a million dollars, often more. In order to do so, you have to have appear before an amorphous social order of corporate money and millionaires. If you can't get past them, you can't -- with rare, rare exceptions -- get elected.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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