It is a matter of great regret that none of you knew George Knickerbocker, my pre-World War II St. Louis colleague at AT&T.
George insisted in pronouncing every letter of every word in spoken English. For example, miscellaneous on George’s tongue came out as MIS-KEL-AN-EOUS. Old George did not stop there at all. As in the case of the title of this piece, George would invest in intrusive letters where none previously existed and so PESSIMIST became PES-TI-MIST. George must have made a profound impression upon my young mind in that his speaking quirks have been remembered for 63 years.
George’s thought about pestimism comes to mind as we are to consider the nomination of Harriet Miers to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court. We have been assured by no less than the Ultimate Commander in Chief of the Whole World that Ms. Miers is the single most qualified candidate out of nearly 300,000,000 Americans. Because she stands alone at the top of the heap, our Ultimate Leader, after reviewing the dossiers of nearly every American, 1) picked his own personal attorney who comes from, 2) you won’t believe this – from Texas, and 3) belongs to a church that believes every word in the King James Bible is the inerrant word of God, including such miracles as Joshua stopping the sun as it rotates around the earth. Galileo has been in the eternal torments of hell for several hundred years now because of his silly insistence to the Inquisition of the Catholic Church that it was the earth rotating, not the sun. That’s what you get for challenging an infallible belief of God’s vicars on earth. Same for birth control and the morning after pill.
All of this turmoil has caused me to think first about Lillie Carr, my mother, as the first part of a Tinkers to Evers to Chance triple play. The second put out by Johnny Evers at second base involves fundamentalist or primitive churches. The third put out involves Ms. Miers’s ability to write sentences that educated people are capable of understanding.
Lillie always belonged to fundamentalist or primitive churches. She believed what the illiterate preachers sermonized about. Obviously, it was in the financial and ecclesiastic interests of the preachers to paint a picture of gloom and disaster with the thought that only Jesus or the Holy Ghost could offer refuge. These preachers viewed themselves as Christian soldiers fighting against the sinfulness of the multitudes. To hear their sermons, the sinners always seemed to be winning.
Actually, to protect their own investments in the ministry, they were to use George Knickerbocker’s words, the voices of pes-ti-mism. They were determined to keep imminent disaster in the forefront of the minds of the worshipers and to frighten them every Sunday.
In the past ten months, the earth has withstood a tsunami, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the violent earthquake in Pakistan. Lillie was an avid reader of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. After reading of these disasters, she would have proclaimed to everyone within listening distance that the world was coming to an end because of its sinfulness. Franklin Graham, Billy’s goofy son, said recently that God himself had taken revenge on New Orleans because of – you guessed it – its sinfulness. And so Lillie and the dreadful Franklin Graham and others of that ilk are our league leading Christian pes-ti-mists. They thrive on disaster and gloom.
When the Post Dispatch raised its price from two cents to three cents, Lillie incorrectly assumed the end of the world was at hand. But she was not alone. If you were to undergo simulated water torture treatment by listening to extemporaneous testimony in such primitive churches, you would find that the end of the world was a pre-occupying thought in most minds.
And all that brings us to the Valley View Christian Church of Dallas. In the year 2005, or the year 5766 as the Hebrews count, one might imagine that human intelligence would progress in some degree. But not at Valley View Christian Church, an organization that seems to desire to return at least to 2000 years ago when Biblical characters produced dragons with multiple heads and large numbers of horns. Ms. Miers and her erstwhile boyfriend, Nathan Hecht, are prominent members of Valley View.
The website of Valley View Christian Church is a tour de force in regressive thinking. The website lists ten bedrock beliefs which seem to be binding on all its members including the Ultimate Commander of Everything’s personal lawyer and her unmarried male friend who is a judge in the Texas Superior Court.
The first belief of the Valley Viewers is that the King James Bible is the only infallible, inspired, and authorized Word of God. It is the final authority on all matters of faith and Christian practice. Another “We believe” holds that Jesus “came to the world to die for our sins and was bodily raised from the dead,” presumably to some sort of heaven.
Now here are two more “we beliefs” that shut out all other faiths from frolicking in the green pastures of heaven. “We believe that full immersion under water is the prescribed mode of baptism….” And the final “We believe” says righteous people who attend Valley View “will spend eternity with God in heaven and those not forgiven will be eternally separated from God in hell.”
According to the creed at Valley View, every person who has not undergone full immersion baptism, for one example, is headed for the eternal tortures of hell. My guess is that perhaps 98% of the human race will not qualify for heaven under the code of Valley View. Jews, Catholics, Lutherans and other Protestant faiths, Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, et al. are headed to hell. Non-believers will be first in line at the gaudy gates of hell. One consolation would be that hell would permit more free thinking than an eternity at Valley View. Why would any bright person want to spend an eternity with the dullards of Valley View?
Of course, no person in his right mind would believe all this sacred garbage. But there is at least one person who calls George Bush the “most brilliant person I ever met” who wallows around in this ecclesiastical dump every week. That, of course, is Harriet Miers.
Can you imagine her ruling on litigants appearing before the Supreme Court who are Catholics or Jews or Moslems or Anglicans or – banish the thought – non-believers in any religion? Her Valley View beliefs would require Justice Miers to condemn them all to hell.
Bush nominated Ms. Miers to the Supreme Court as a cynical gesture to his right wing religious base – and it has backfired. It has backfired because they have seen the quality of her intellect as reflected in her writings. First, there are the adoring, mushy notes to Bush telling him he is wonderful. Then there is the unseemly use of the childish word “cool” in her love notes. Come on Harriet, grow up! You are not a teenager in bobby sox.
Then we have the collection of incoherent thoughts published by David Brooks, the designated hitter of the White House who writes for the New York Times. Try this one on as a sample of Ms. Miers’s linguistic talents:

“Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority.”

You got that? Explain that to me.
There are two Costa Ricans in this town. One does landscaping. The second cleans houses. They are dependable and likeable. They work hard and are lovely people. But in the final analysis, they are unsuited to be our mayor or our municipal judges. They are superb at what they do. At the same time, as likeable as they are, they should not be pushed to positions clearly above their heads, as in the case of Harriet Miers.
Harriet is an overachiever when it comes to proofreading and filing. Sending her to the Supreme Court would be a gross injustice to the court, to the legal profession and to all Americans.
Once again, Bush should have his head examined for putting this load on a clearly unqualified candidate. Only his arrogance can explain why he wants to see Ms. Miers undergo the meat grinder Senate confirmation hearing. In addition to his other obvious failings, perhaps Bush is now unmasked as a masochist. If George Knickerbocker is still alive, it would be of considerable interest to hear him take a stab at pronouncing masochist.
E. E. CARR
October 16, 2005
PS: To prove that this material is not made up, there is attached the beliefs of Valley View Christian Church and the David Brooks column. As a Jew, Brooks is one of those people who must be “separated from God” and spend eternity in hell. And he is a conservative Republican. There is one consolation in that Brooks is an erudite fellow who will provide sparkling conversation as we spend an eternity in hell.
~~~
That column is a winner. Pop chose a pretty charitable quote to include here; he could have done way worse.
Some other choice quotations:
“We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support.”
“More and more, the intractable problems in our society have one answer: broad-based intolerance of unacceptable conditions and a commitment by many to fix problems.”
Brooks concludes that although she writes about interesting subjects, “she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.” I am immediately reminded of one of my favorite Onion columns, “Somebody Should Do Something About All the Problems.”