Leftist Christians, like Lamott, are supposed to be "tolerant", which means, I suppose, that they aren't supposed to offend "anti-choice" Christians with the intensity of their principles. But in my experience, what pro-choice women are supposed to "tolerate" is the proclaimed right of anti-choice Christians to tell them what to do with their reproductive lives, their bodies, their families, and their birth control choices. Where does "tolerance" enter in here? Tolerance is about agreeing to disagree. Anti-choice and anti-abortion activism is not about agreeing to disagree, it is about social control.
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When Christians talk about secular Americans being "tolerant" of Christian beliefs, they are misusing the word. What conservative Christians want is not toleration, but social control. Toleration takes place between two people who know one another, and is a feature of personal relationships. Social control is about who gets the power to dictate policy and law. Christians like Mark Joseph sometimes play the "tolerance" card as a way to present themselves as a disempowered group, but what it is about them that is disempowered is their ability to tell the rest of us what to do. And most of the rules they want us to follow are abstract--rules about how men and women should relate, rules about what families should look like, rules about what people should learn. The program, for Christian conservatives, is not essentially about faith or morality--those are elements in a larger program. The larger program is enforcing conformity. What's the real goal? Well, no doubt it is money and power--have you seen how wealthy the Pope is? Of Pat Robertson? Or the pastors of some of those other mega-churches?Secularists are sometimes called "fundamentalist" because they hold their beliefs--say pro-choice, separation of church and state--quite passionately. They vehemently do not want to be dictated to by religious groups, and they do not want their children to be forced to go to religious schools (school where creationism is taught as science). They are alleged to be "intolerant" of Christians. But the secularists are rarely if ever saying "Do as I do", they are saying "Leave me alone". The Christians quite often are not only saying, "Do as I do", but also "My right is to make you live by my beliefs, and if you resist me, then you are 'intolerant'."
Attention all theocrats. Here's the deal. I tolerate you. You tolerate me. You believe what you want. You leave me alone. It's all good.
Everyone settled into their seats and as the lights dimmed, I recalled how Pauline Kael would sigh at screenings as the room darkened, "Let us pray...," her way of hoping for the best. I don’t know what she would have made of the movie, but when it was over I knew it was the movie our post 9-11 minds craved and unconsciously had been working towards, a movie that conjured the fear of terrorism and repression and didn’t just tell us how we got into the Orwellian predicament we’re in (terrain already attacked by Fahrenheit 9-11, Syriana, Why We Fight), but made the imaginative leap that would lift us out of the news, out of the political present, and stand up to that fear—face it with fury and compassion. The irony is that to face the fear, a mask was required, a mask with a mocking grin.Right after I see Why We Fight.“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments…governments should be afraid of their people.”
V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed “controversial” (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth.
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And make no mistake V for Vendetta is fun, dangerous fun, percussive with brutality and laced with ironic ambiguity and satirical slapstick (a Benny Hill homage, no less!). But gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousness that drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That’s what I didn’t expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist. Off come the masks, and the faces are revealed.
