Gestalt on Fox.

Thanks to the wonders of Facebook and You Tube even here in the UK outback we have become aware of “The Crazy Woman on Fox News”, the ever-smiling Shirley Phelps Roper. SPR and her hundred-strong unaffiliated ‘Baptist’ crew have been picketing funerals of US Marines with placards extolling, “Thank you God for Dead Soldiers”, “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for IEDs.” Understandably this behaviour brought forth copious amounts of righteous indignation from the anchorman on behalf of the nations audience. All well and good and as it should be. Now I don’t know much about Gestalt therapy but if I stand back and view SPR as an extreme stand in for Fritz Perls say, I see her as a catalyst for the complexes of the nation’s zeitgeist. Anyone who showed the slightest alignment with this woman would surely lose friends by the lorry load. But the anger, denial and mind closure of the anchorman would also be rich territory for a therapist. It’s not as if Fox News hasn’t in the recent past ‘thanked God’ for the ’shock and awe’ munitions and decimated Iraqi army. But to thank God for our soldier deaths on our soil by one of us is blasphemy. This is a dichotomy that reaches far deeper than the emotional froth of action movies, especially in a deeply ‘Christian’ country that believes in one God: And Fox News. And SPR is hitting a nerve, an un-nameable fearful conflict that requires immediate, vehement dismissal. Could our god be the god of our enemies? Must we thank god for all things, good and bad? Or is Fox News defending a god that is exclusively on ‘our side’ and only the god of good things? SPR may be as rancid and appealing as last years left out chicken soup, but the God of all things; well it works in mysterious ways.