From TomDispatch.com :
Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll, American Fundamentalisms
He's a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned antiwar activist in the Vietnam era, he also wrote movingly in a memoir of his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll essentially grew up in that five-sided monument to American imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was "the largest playhouse in the world" and he can still remembering sliding down its ramps in his stocking feet, as he's written in the introduction to his recent, magisterial history of the Pentagon, House of War.
As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when George W. Bush referred to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the country to warn against the consequences of launching a "war" on Afghanistan in response to those attacks, now just another of the President's missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print. ("The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?") His stirring columns on the first years of our presidential attempts to bring "freedom" to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful, moral voice from -- to use a very American phrase -- the (media) wilderness until much of our American world finally caught up to him.
He has most recently completed a stirring documentary film, also named Constantine's Sword, in which he explores the roots of religiously inspired violence in our present world. He submitted to a Tomdispatch interview back in August 2005 and when, this summer, I suggested that we try again, he agreed to discuss "American fundamentalisms," a subject that receives remarkably less coverage and consideration than the other fundamentalisms in our world.
We met on a warm day, just after a rare downpour in a dry summer, in the study of his house in Massachusetts. His many books dot the bookshelves. Out the window is a piney landscape, not quite the one the Puritans first saw when they arrived early in the seventeenth century to begin it all, but beautiful nonetheless. Carroll, his hair graying, has not so much a worn, as a well inhabited face. You can see him thinking as he speaks -- not so common a trait as you might imagine. As he warms up to the subject of American fundamentalisms, his voice gains the quiet, yet powerful passion that any reader of his columns has come to expect, a passion that nonetheless leaves room for reason and criticism, for further thought.
I put my two small tape recorders on a modest coffee table, turn them on, ask my first question, and discover that this is an interview in name only. It's more like being back in the most riveting classroom of my life. A single lecture, an hour's genuine education, stretching from our first Puritan moments to George Bush's Iraq, with hardly an interpolation needed on my part. So join me, kick back, and learn something about what's fundamental to us.
American Exceptionalism Meets Team Jesus
A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll
Tomdispatch: I recently heard this joke: How many neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: Neocons don't believe in light bulbs, they declare war on evil and set the house on fire.
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http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/post/174837/tomdispatch_interview_james_carroll_american_fundamentalisms
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