The Pope Show

My cable has been out for several days so until this morning I hadn’t had the pleasure of watching “The Pope Show” on CNN for a while. In fact, I thought that it might be on hiatus since the old pope was dead and the new one had been named. Not so. The show has been renewed. Now it’s “The New Pope Show.” (They were going to call it “God’s Rottweiler” but it didn’t focus group well among dog lovers.) Episode one was today. He led a mass and had a photo op. He also plays the piano. Wadda guy.

I am not surprised that Catholics like Andrew Sullivan are worried and depressed or that conservatives would be excited and thrilled to see a re-affirmation of their authoritarianism and bigotry. These are the good old days for reactionaries, after all. But liberals needn’t fear. CNN’s Jennifer Eccleston just said that this new pope is “sending a message, saying ‘hey, guys, I’m not as conservative as you think!'”

Like, he is so totally not, like, super conservative, even! Kewl.

John Powers wrote a wonderful piece this week in the LA Weekly about death, declinism the conservative capture of the media. I urge you to read the whole thing, but I think this captures what so enraptures the conservatives and their media handmaidens — simplicity and infallibility. That’s what people like about this papal orgy and that’s why they voted for Dubya.

As often happens these days, the pope’s death and funeral took on a ghastly reactionary tinge. The right tried to hijack everything from John Paul II’s most conservative ideas — you didn’t exactly hear Fox News analysts talking up his criticisms of capitalism or the Iraq war — to his aura of unassailable rectitude. President Bush was especially eager to wrap himself in the papal robes. Whereas Bill Clinton said that John Paul II had been right about some things and wrong about others, Dubya said he couldn’t think of a case where the pontiff had been wrong. That seems reasonable to me. After all, if one infallible leader can’t spot another, who the hell can?

I had heard that the church has trouble recruiting priests these days so it would seem that every single priest in the country has appeared on CNN these last three weeks. Every day it’s someone new with more warm words for the old pope and even warmer ones for the new pope with Wolf and Darryn and the rest genuflecting and squealing like a bunch of 7th graders at an N Sync concert. One of the priests just said that Ratzinger’s election was the work of the Holy Spirit (rather than the result of keen political maneuvering.) This is America, after all, where only most superstitious interpretation of anything is deemed credible. And just now Kyra Phillips showed us how to get to the new pope’s fan club, which is totally awesome. Miles says that we are going to a papal photo-op in a couple of minutes and I’m so excited.

I would really like to hear anyone say with a straight face that the American news media are hostile to religion. To one who is not religious, it’s become an oppressive and suffocating ubiquitous topic that feels an awful lot like proselytising. Whatever. The new supah-star, meaty-cheesy Pope Benedict is saying “hey guys, I’m not so ultra-conservative!” But he is indubitably infallible, so that’s good.

.