Kirk Cameron and the politics of self-hatred.

It's a Wednesday, and I'm at Six Flags Darien Lake, your typical vast concrete amusement paradise in the middle of nowhere, this particular nowhere being a spot in Western New York not far-geographically or spiritually-from Attica. I'm there attending a special event: a Christian youth rally called "Kingdom Bound."

The vast park grounds are teeming with pale, pear-shaped Believers, people in ketchup-stained 4XL t-shirts that say things like "Jesus: the original blood donor" and "Satan is a nerd." Trying to keep a low profile, I'm sitting on the ground in a place designated on the park map as the "Worship Tent."

The speaker looming above me on the podium is Kirk Cameron, the former teen star of Growing Pains. Wide-eyed and dressed like a Gap model, he is talking in the cheery voice of his sitcom alter ego, Mike Seaver, about Hell and eternal conflagration.

Cameron is a hardcore fire-and-brimstone type, only with the delivery of Tony Robbins. Ecumenically, he makes Chuck Colson look like Mr. Rogers. His pet idea is that evangelicals in the past hundred years have concentrated too much on trying to convince people that turning to God will improve their lives, give them peace of mind, etc. He believes that the fear-of-eternal-torment aspect is the much more fruitful strategy. Thus he is inclined to metaphors like: God as a parachute that one wears not to improve one's flight, but because?

"You might fall 25,000 feet to the Earth at any moment, and PERISH!!!" he shrieked, his eyes filled with what looked like real human fear at the idea.

As he spoke, a giant screen behind him lit up. The apocalyptic message read, in fat white letters against a neon blue background:

THERE IS A GREEN SAAB NEW YORK LICENSE 64B 322 WITH ITS LIGHTS ON On drugs, I would not have been able to handle this scene. It would have been tough on a cup of coffee. There is something deeply disturbing about crowds of half-zombies pouring into a tent to seek absolution from a washed-up, third-rate sitcom star-and then, immediately afterward, paying money to jump into giant machines that travel in a circle. One could almost imagine the last stage of the experience being a big pit where people would dive in to be voluntarily ground into sausage.

Speaking of spiritual matters, I'm currently in week four of a personal epiphany. Nearly a month ago, I saw my own personal angel Gabriel. His name is George Bush. Since I no longer watch television, he was forced to ride into my bedroom on a donkey. He was facing the wrong way, but the donkey figured it out. Anyway, pointing a finger, he imparted to me a sacred message:

"Matt," he said, "I was?talking about purpose, Vice President said, condemning, we're talking about distraction here, I think I've been clear?"

"Out with it," I said, snapping my fingers.

"I was put on this earth to drive you insane," he said, recovering himself. "And to distract you from the business of living. Ignore me and life shall be returned to ye."

And with that, the donkey turned around and walked him out again.

As soon as he left, it hit me. He's right. What a weird paradox it is when there are so many people out there who want to reject our culture and our politics, but do so by scrupulously following it and criticizing it. We eat up the newspapers and surf the net for obscure factoids about pipeline construction and the board of Bechtel. Our lives are haunted by sound-bite visions of the infuriating morons who run our lives.

After enough of this, all our vitality is wrapped up in the very thing we despise. And that condition is perpetuated by the ubiquity of the horrifying images around us: the headlines about Ashcroft's decision to monitor lenient judges, the Bush press conference where the leader blames the poor economy on TV's "March to War" promos, the Iraq mess, an so forth.

These are all provocations, and it has occurred to me lately that they are intentional; we are meant to be frustrated, angry, desperate to oppose, because that keeps us on the farm, with our attention focused in the right direction. It doesn't matter if we hate them, so long as we're reacting to them. Because as for any aggressor, as for an abusive spouse, the one thing that the Bushes, the Bechtels, the Disneys of the world truly fear is that we will tune them out, recover our dignity and figure out a better way to live without their input.

That's not to say one should be apolitical, that one shouldn't stay informed and participate. But how many times in the day and in how many ways does one need to be convinced not to vote for Bush in the next election or to join an environmental group?

Christians sure know who they're going to vote for. What people on the so-called left have never figured out is that the strength of the Christian movement is that its people have had enough sense to openly reject the popular culture.

They're just too stupid to do it effectively. They drop out, but they drop out into shopping malls and, in the case of Darien Lake, amusement park concert venues run by Clear Channel. Then they let a bunch of shysters preach self-annihilation and obedience to them before they are let loose with their debit cards into the Six Flags gift shops. What a joke: You see these people walking around with $17 glitter wigs, stuffing their faces with Coke and Tostitos, and they actually think their G.A.P. shirts (God Answers Prayers) identify them, not as suckers, but as cultural rebels.

The false priests of the Christian right have even figured out a way to imitate, doctrinally, the isolated, lonely, selfish character of consumer/careerist culture. At a seminar on abstinence-held in a giant pavilion on the Six Flags periphery and attended by what looked to be many thousands of people-a piggish monster of a woman named Pam Stenzel described the path to heaven as a kind of supernatural rat race. "I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SINS!" shouted the giant-assed author of Sex Has a Price Tag. "I'm not responsible for you, and you're not responsible for me. People are only responsible for their own transgressions, and if they get to heaven, they get there themselves!"

Stenzel's outburst came during a story she was telling about her 17-year-old daughter. Mom's point was that, being secure in her own salvation, she was perfectly happy to let her offspring roast in hell if she chose. Screaming, she rhetorically addressed her daughter for the crowd:

"I HAVE MY OWN FRIENDS! I DON'T NEED YOU!"

Holy shit, I thought, as I watched this woman. Exactly how much do you need to hate yourself to be attracted by a message like that? How crippled do you have to be as a person to feel soothed by that kind of emotional ass-whipping?

Answer: exactly as crippled as you need to be to voluntarily fill your head with the news every goddamn day. Life is just too short. There has to be better air to breathe.