You may have heard the phrase “Dagenham East” as in “He’s completely Dagenham East”. Dagenham East is four stops past Barking on the London Underground’s District Line.
But if you stay on the train to Upminster, then change to the parallel London Tilbury and Southend line, you can travel all the way to the seaside resort of Shoeburyness.
But even that’s not quite the end of the line. The tracks continue past the station into the military depot at Pigs Bay. If you go any further you’ll end up in the North Sea.
Pigs Bay is therefore as mad as you can possibly get.
It’s an apt description of the lunatic fringe of America’s religious right. These are sort the people who preach that you will go to Hell if you vote for Barack Obama. They’re also claiming Kenyan witches are casting spells on John McCain to make him look stupid, and ensure the election of Obama, who although he claims to be a Christian, is really a Muslim and therefore a Satanist. You couldn’t make this stuff up. The stuff about so-called ‘spiritual warfare’ has always rather scared me.
As Teresa Niesen-Hayden says in the first linked article
“Spiritual warfare†is a sort of folk thaumaturgy with ambitions to theurgy. If it worked, it would be a branch of black magic. There are “spiritual warfare†adherents out there who publicly take credit for the death of Mother Teresa.
So we have a what amounts to a syncretism of fundamentalism and folk magic which reminds me of a Protestant version of Voodoun, plus a big dollop of conspiracy theory and an unthinking adherence to authoritarian right-wing politics. It makes me think of Baby Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes.
I’d love to think they’re a tiny lunatic fringe, but Sarah Palin seems to be deeply immersed in this subculture. While there’s little chance of McPalin being elected unless the poll is rigged massively, the fact that politicians think they’re a significant enough voting block to have to pander to them is rather frightening.