LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Slactivist checks in on those 'car fish', and one in particular:

I was reminded of driving my friend's old fish-car last fall, after putting a Joe Hoeffel for Senate sticker on my car. This again made me a self-consciously courteous driver -- I didn't want to cost Joe any votes with my driving.

But a campaign sticker is a very different thing from a fish symbol. A campaign sticker doesn't carry the same implicit assertion of my own virtue. It simply indicates, "I'm voting for Joe and I think you should too," which invites a very different response than a symbol which says, "I am a Good Person, most likely a Better Person Than You." It's that implicit claim of goodness that invites such a skeptical response to the fish symbol, triggering the selective mental cataloging of every driving blunder by fish cars. This may be why I'm more likely to have a preconceived, negative opinion about the relative driving skills of a fish-car driver than I am an opinion about someone with, say, a rainbow sticker or a sticker of Calvin peeing on something.

The popularity of the fish symbol is also related to the persecution complex we've been discussing here. The early Christians adapted the pagan fish symbol during the Roman persecution as a surreptitious way of identifying one another. It was, for them, not a flag on a marble arch, but a symbol furtively scratched in the dust, then hastily wiped away. That such a symbol is adopted and reinvented into a triumphalist emblem is further evidence of the weirdly contradictory, "persecuted hegemons" self-concept of many American evangelicals.

There's a good summary of the history of the fish symbol at religioustolerance.org, in which they trace the symbol's pre-Christian meaning.

The symbol, originally, was not a fish but rather, ahem, an image representing fertility. (The fact that it also resembled a fish was a very ancient and very, very dirty joke.) That history is strangely echoed in the "BushFish" from "BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country" (thanks, Scott, for the link).

This isn't quite "the abomination that causes desolation, standing in the holy place" -- but it's close.

Like the folks over at DailyKos, I desperately hope this is a well-crafted parody, but it doesn't seem to be.

This symbol is a staggeringly confused piece of Caesar-worship masquerading as Christianity. Where does Jesus end and George W. Bush begin? It's impossible for these people to say, the two have literally been merged into a single entity: the BushFish.

"Stand up and be counted," the site urges followers of the BushFish:

"This symbol, this site, and this car magnet have been created for the millions of Americans who support the President and his vision for a government that embraces religion, morality and family values. It shows worship to the Lord, respect for the President and hope for all."

Actually, it shows worship for the president and disrespect to the Lord. Please, please let this not be sincere.