HiddenMysteries: Jesus Loves Your Crappy Videos

Behold GodTube.com, the place where sex, humor and warm spiritual inclusiveness go to die

By Mark Morford

The Internets, they're just so chock-full of gul-dang liberals, aren't they?

This is, after all, the big conservative lament. It's like you can't hit your Gizmodo or your Fleshbot or your Savage Love without running smack into some well-read, free-thinking pseudo-hipster gleefully expounding on the joys of anal sex or a recent hilarious Jon Stewart/"Daily Show" riff or offering up a link to some dark, brilliant Polish anti-war animation. Horrible!

Or maybe it's a hot sex blogger slapping Fox News for being such an obvious bastion of hateful sexist homophobic right-wing moronism, or some hip design blog talking about the sad homogeneity of conservative fashion sense, maybe you're innocently cruising MySpace personals with your Bible and your GOP handbook and you just can't escape all the neo-pagan urban lefties who absolutely refuse to be appropriately terrified by, say, gay marriage, or foreign people, or, you know, God.

Oh, it gets worse. Hell, as any good Christian will tell you, the Net is packed like a perky Vegas whorehouse with godless heathens, too: perverts and nonbelievers and hyper-intelligent Buddhists and smart-ass Wiccans, yoga lovers and kinky reformed Catholics and delightful "spiritual cowgirls" who would no more kneel at the altar of wholesome Christian values than they'd eat a stack of greasy McDonald's Filet-O-Fishes and eight pounds of deep-fried Snickers bars and move to Alabama and get diabetes and call themselves a patriot.

But if there's one site in particular that offers the ultimate proof of godless Internet evil, the one e-joint that encapsulates all that's wrong with the perverted Net world, it is, of course, YouTube.

Oh my God, yes. See, the problem is, millions of heathen perverts like you seem to believe YT is one of the great creative wonderlands/pop culture wastelands of our time, an uber-egalitarian repository for all things trite and wonderful and cheesy and amateur and sublime and stupid and viral and interesting and boring and silly and wonderful and righteous and fascinating and delicious and kaleidoscopic and inclusive and wow. You know, just like the Internet was originally intended. Well, sort of.

Hence, many ideological culture sluts reading these very words might argue that YT is one of the Net's finest creative equalizers, the most level of multimedia playing fields, a grand sociocultural melting pot that's open like a 24-hour lube dispensary to all beliefs and talent levels and perspectives and beholden to none (well, save copyright infringement. And porn. But that's why god invented Bitorrent. And PornoTube. Praise!)

Ah, but therein lies the true proof of Satan's dark plan, right? From the Christian perspective, YouTube is, apparently, far too inclusive, far too tolerant and messy and scary and depraved and unpredictable and wonderfully, blindly all-encompassing -- and baby, if we've learned anything about God and America during this miserable pile of Bush years, it's that the God-fearing of this nation want nothing more than to instill and perpetuate a deep, abiding fear of the Other, to stigmatize, to restrict, to polarize to the point of total spiritual and intellectual paralysis.

But wait! Salvation is, apparently, finally at hand. Witness, won't you, the stillbirth of GodTube.com, the place where good, Net-fearing Christians can go to see awful Christian rap videos and grainy evangelical sermons and 101 flavors of all-American sanctimony with, quite naturally, not a hint of sex or deep humor or true spiritual exploration or religious tolerance. Praise!

Witness, in other words, the thing that modern Christianity seems to do best, and I don't mean help justify brutal unwinnable wars or slam gay people or bash women's rights or promote ignorance of stem cell research or science or music. Because oh hell yes, that's there for you, in heaps and droves and mounds. I mean the other thing: to fracture. To splinter and divide and segregate. You know, to exclude.

That's right. GodTube is billed, quite naturally, as the place where people can go to, uh, "Broadcast Him." Which is a nice mutation of YouTube's own slogan, "Broadcast Yourself." That pretty much sums it all up right there. See, it ain't about you or your creativity or your perspective or your sexuality or your happy self-defined sense of pop culture blasphemy. And it certainly isn't some deeply sacrilegious idea that you yourself might very well be the divine creative spark you seek -- that God is, in other words, right there in the mirror. Oh my heavens, no.

As GodTube will happily slap you upside your deviant head, it's all about, well, something else, something outside of you and beyond your meager ability to understand, and of course that thing is male and probably very, very angry and you can't possibly comprehend it, so please just quit asking questions and smash your Quan Yin statue and burn your yoga mat and your Philip Pullman books and watch this nice little clip of a perky blonde toddler reciting Psalm 23 like a cute robot doll and then watch GodTube founder Chris Wyatt get stroked on Fox News or Kirk Cameron lose what's left of his mind, over and over and over again. You know, just like Jesus intended.

To be fair, it's not only Christian conservatives who feel a deep need to parse the Internet for rabid special-interest subgroups. Almost every successful Web 2.0 megasite has its random spinoffs, sites that take one great idea and fracture it and partition it so as to target it more specifically (to wit: the endless array of dating subsites aimed at every oddball demographic imaginable). In fact, you could even say that this is the Net's real makeup, a mad, delirious hodgepodge of a billion little communities all holding digital hands, tentatively, awkwardly, wonderfully.

But then again, no. Joints like GodTube (and other slightly scary conservative spinoff sites like, say Conservpedia, with its implied slogan, "When Wikipedia's global liberal bias toward truth and fact and collective wisdom makes you feel all weird and confused"), these sites actually go a step further, deeper, sadder.

They appear to wish to, quite simply, restrict understanding. Limit knowledge. Prevent exploration. Discourage the egalitarian global community aspect of the Net itself in favor of, well, the same old dogma that got us into so much trouble in the first place, a sadly myopic ideology that's crippled school textbooks and smashed scientific study and drained the juice from the human sexual impulse and essentially elected the worst and most debilitating, morally dangerous president in modern American history.

But then again, maybe it's just a cute, silly collection of nutball preachers, bad Christian rock and rabid Christian youth and lots of little kids blindly reciting Bible verse. Yes, maybe that's all it is. You think?

http://sfgate.com/

Jesus Loves Your Crappy Videos

Friday, August 17 2007 @ 02:42 PM CDT