Pat Robertson Is An Asshole--What Else Is New?

Pat Robertson has managed to get the Twitter-sphere all abuzz, making himself temporarily relevant again. If you haven't seen the video, you can find it here. In it, on national television, Pat Robertson says that Tuesday's devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti--the estimated death toll of which is in the hundreds of thousands--was the result of a Haitian pact with the devil to overthrow the French.

Classy.

Not surprisingly, the response has been varying degrees of outrage. People can't believe that he would say something so insensitive and are hurling invectives his way. And this, frankly, befuddles me. I mean, it's Pat Robertson. What were you expecting? If Glen Beck went on television and compared Britney Spears to Hitler, would that be news? Of course not, it's what he does. Similarly, there's no reason to be all up-in-arms over Pat Robertson being an asshole regarding Haiti--it's pretty much what he does for a living.

Let's take a deeper look, yes?

Robertson is a television evangelist. His job is to deprive the well-meaning from their money and get them to spend it on a TV show. It's not like he's convincing them to feed the hungry or donate to AIDS research. He gets people to squander their charitable feelings on him and his TV program and whatever "ministries" they happen to be supporting. There's sort of a rogue dickish-ness already built into the profit model--and Robertson knows this.

He knows it so well that he once felt justified in threatening to sue NBC News for having the gall to call him a "television evangelist" based solely on the evidence that he a) is an evangelist and b) is on television. This was in the wake of the Swaggart/Bakker scandals, when he was gearing up for a presidential bid.

And what a platform he was promoting back in 1987! He wanted to ban pornography, dissolve the Department of Energy, and force the US to operate with a balanced budget. Banning porn is at worst laughably unrealistic, but you can't say the same for his other ideas because they are also frighteningly stupid. Enforcing a balanced budget? Even the ultra-conservative Reagan--the namesake of "Reaganomics" was a self-proclaimed Keynesian (for those of you playing along at home, Keynes first posited the need for deficit spending during the Great Depression). Get rid of the Department of Energy? Really?

Keep in mind that all of this was after the world didn't end in 1982, as he predicted it would back in 1976. Maybe he thought he could hasten the world to its end through mismanagement, but I doubt it's anything that nefarious. I get the impression that he is a simpleton who wishes to drop his uneducated world-view on the rest of the planet. It's a small wonder, then, that he also favored eliminating the Department of Education.

But he's not just stupid, he's also mean-spirited. He got in trouble in 1999 for calling Scotland a "dark land overrun by homosexuals", and by "got in trouble" I mean that it put a halt on the venture he'd entered into with the Bank of Scotland. More recently, he publicly called for Hugo Chavez's assassination and called Ariel Sharon's failing health an Act of God.

Dick-moves.

And here's a bizarre caveat to it all. Before the Greek salvation religions (which is where Christianity first emerged), theology basically came down to this: if you're a good person God will reward you, and if you're a bad person God will punish you. One of the developments of Christianity that separated it from other religions (like, say, pre-Christian Judaism) was that it an afterlife. This meant that bad things can happen to good people--troubles in this life were meaningless because there would be infinite reward in the next. What does this have to do with Haiti?

The Earthquake in Haiti happened because sometimes shit happens. Christian doctrine allows for this--and that was a major advancement over what came before it. That simple fact, so central to Christian faith, seems to elude Pat Robertson. According to Christianity, if bad things happen, it doesn't matter because the faithful will be rewarded in paradise. According to Robertson, if bad things happen to Haitians, obviously it's because they made a pact with the Devil. And that's sad really--that someone can be so ignorant and mean-spirited and shallow in the name of a religion that he doesn't seem to understand. In the industry, we call that sort of thing "irony".

So don't be mad at Pat. He can't help being an idiot, and nothing in his life history gives any indication that he has a conscience or even an ounce of good sense--you might as well be mad at your dog for eating his own droppings. All you can do is clean him up, pat him on the head, and give him a treat to keep the shit off his breath.

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