When Toto pulled aside the curtain to reveal The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends discovered that The Wizard was in fact a little man. Amplified voice, impressive title, diminutive man. But Oz was an uncomplicated world. Unmasking the wizard did not call into question who built Emerald City. It may well have been the Oompa-Loompas or the Weebles, but under whose leadership?
 
I’ve been getting a behind-the-green-curtain feeling these days. Let me tell you it began with another paid male escort, Jeff Gannon Guckert.

What a cheesy scenario. Fake journalist Jeff Gannon makes lots of overnight visits to the White House. Whose boyfriend was he? Wouldn’t a high ranking administration official rate a better class of hooker? Really how sordid. Who in the White House was attracted or bemused by this slow-witted bald man?

Of the same feather, evangelist Ted Haggard has been commuting to trysts with a Denver sex worker who knew him as “Art.” Ted even solicited Mike Jones for drugs when he couldn’t bring his own. We have been told that Ted Haggard was one of the most powerful religious leaders in the world. I’m having trouble seeing any kind of powerful man having to drive to Denver for blow jobs and methamphetamine.

I don’t doubt that Haggard pulls down a large salary, and that he commands the attention of tons of congregants, but his power is looking to me to have been a fabrication. America may be full of backward, bigoted hicks, but who was suggesting that Ted Haggard had a rein on them? Behind the green curtain and booming voice of apparent prestige and influence, we’ve found a little man who can’t even score Meth.

Behind the same curtain that holds Haggard up as leader of an army of God-fearers, I’m thinking is the bigger illusion, the looming Silent Majority of believers themselves. Bullshit. Haggard is a prostitute’s john, and Haggard’s flock are individual lonely tales of waylaid sheep. Adding up to nothing.

Media pollsters can convince us that Dubya won an election with the help of a Fundamentalist Right Wing. Even the motive to take war to the Holy Land, however insane, would get begrudging partial credit for being religiously motivated. It’s more palatable than the reality, that maintaining imperial imbalance of global resources is driven by pure greed. Immoral, inhuman, elitist greed. There’s not a spiritual drop of blood in any of the Neocon veins. Any pseudo religious platform is smoke and mirrors.