Armistice Day 2024

 It's only words....

Kurt Vonnegut, b. November 11, 1922, d. April 11, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. 

"The sudden silence was the Voice of God."

Precisely so.

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."

"The blood swept lands and seas of red...."

Yeats was not imagining things.  We forget; we would do well to remember.

My grandfather was a bomber in World War I.  I saw an old picture of his plane on his desk at his home when I was young.  He sat well forward of the pilot, in a bi-plane with an extended fuselage, a "snout," a "cockpit" like pilots and other passengers had on such planes.  Except he literally leaned over the side of the plane and dropped bombs by hand.  I never asked him about that war; I was too young to care.  My uncle was in France in World War II, or so I remember being told once.  He never talked about the war, either.  My brother-in-law was a Captain in the Green Beret in Vietnam.  He was in Laos and Cambodia before we were in (officially, anyway), either country.  His war experiences are a sealed book, too.  Perhaps it is just as well.

O Christ, son of the living God, have mercy upon us.

Thou that sits at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us;

And deliver us for thy Name's sake.

AMEN.

O Christ, when thou didst open thine eyes on this fair earth, the angels greeted thee as the Prince of Peace and besought us to be of good will toward one another; but thy triumph is delayed and we are weary of war.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the very earth groans with pain as the feet of armed men march across thy mangled form.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, may the Church, whom thou didst love into life; not fail thee in her witness for the things for which thou didst live and die.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the people who are called by thy Name are separated from each other in thought and life; still our tumults, take away our vain imaginings, and grant to thy people at this time the courage to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness, and faithfully to maintain the ministry of reconciliation.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER

O Christ, come to us in our sore need and save us;

O God, plead thine own cause and give us help, for vain is the help of man.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ of God, by thy birth in the stable, save us and help us;

By thy toil at the carpenter's bench, save us and help us;

By thy sinless life, save us and help us;

By thy cross and passion, save us and help us.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

Prayer for Peace, the Evangelical and Reformed Church

"The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples." "He hath put down the mighty." - from the daily office in May, 1965.

If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!

--Thomas Merton

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. 

In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, (New York: HarperCollins 2004), xi. 

World War I ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, yet an irresistible current of nihilism had been set loose. Fought in the name of democracy, that war was in fact a triumph of militarism and imperialism - on all sides. It led to the punitive imposition of artificial borders in Europe, which were the immediate cause of World War II; in the Middle East, the remote cause of today's most dangerous conflicts; and in Africa, where consequent genocide has found its niche. Perhaps most damaging was the 1914 legitimizing of mass violence, with the trenches anticipating both gas chambers and the unleashed atom. Hitler and Stalin were empowered by the so-called Great War, which is why both World War II and the Cold War should always be considered in its context. To regard all three conflicts as a single War of the 20th Century obliterates any notion that categories of "just war" apply.

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope.

--James Carroll

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Armistice Day 2023

"The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples." "He hath put down the mighty." - from the daily office in May, 1965.

If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!

--Thomas Merton

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. 

In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, (New York: HarperCollins 2004), xi. 

World War I ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, yet an irresistible current of nihilism had been set loose. Fought in the name of democracy, that war was in fact a triumph of militarism and imperialism - on all sides. It led to the punitive imposition of artificial borders in Europe, which were the immediate cause of World War II; in the Middle East, the remote cause of today's most dangerous conflicts; and in Africa, where consequent genocide has found its niche. Perhaps most damaging was the 1914 legitimizing of mass violence, with the trenches anticipating both gas chambers and the unleashed atom. Hitler and Stalin were empowered by the so-called Great War, which is why both World War II and the Cold War should always be considered in its context. To regard all three conflicts as a single War of the 20th Century obliterates any notion that categories of "just war" apply.

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope.

--James Carroll

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

👴🏻

Heritage is now just another nest of kooks. And before you say "well, it was always like that" - no, it wasn't. You might not have liked the views it espoused, but it wasn't this. Over 40 years, I've agreed and disagreed with Heritage - but it's no longer a serious place. https://t.co/zJxohje0Ul

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 30, 2023

I'm old enough to remember when Andrew Bacevich was a voice in the wilderness saying this about the GOP (that they weren't "serious"), and using Reinhold Niebuhr to back it up.

That was 15 years ago. I doubt anyone would remember.  But I'm not impressed with the Lincoln Project/Resolute Square/Atlantic crowd now who want to purge their garments so that they be white as snow.  I'm not interested in hanging blame on them for the sins of their fathers, either.  But Jeebus, fellas, show a little humility and awareness of history.  15 years is a lifetime ago only to punk kids who've only been alive for 30 or less. (Yes, Nichols says he's been arguing with the Heritage Foundation for 40 years.  That only makes his argument worse.  Heritage hasn't changed its stripes.)

You can do better.  And yes, Heritage was always a nest of kooks.  Nothing's changed except, like all things and persons that age, their true nature is just more obvious.  This is the future you worked so assiduously to create when you were younger (you're all still younger than me!  Damn punk kids!).  Quit denying responsibility for it.

Bacevich didn't.  That's why he's ignored today, and still a more serious thinker than all of you combined.

In Niebuhr's view, although history may be purposeful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the story line and the dénouement remain hidden from view. The twists and turns that the plot has already taken suggest the need for a certain modesty in forecasting what is still to come. Yet as Niebuhr writes, "modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management."

Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, "as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."

Exactly.  

Now git offa mah lawn! 

Armistice Day 2022

"The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples." "He hath put down the mighty." - from the daily office in May, 1965.

If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!

--Thomas Merton

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. 

In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, (New York: HarperCollins 2004), xi. 

World War I ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, yet an irresistible current of nihilism had been set loose. Fought in the name of democracy, that war was in fact a triumph of militarism and imperialism - on all sides. It led to the punitive imposition of artificial borders in Europe, which were the immediate cause of World War II; in the Middle East, the remote cause of today's most dangerous conflicts; and in Africa, where consequent genocide has found its niche. Perhaps most damaging was the 1914 legitimizing of mass violence, with the trenches anticipating both gas chambers and the unleashed atom. Hitler and Stalin were empowered by the so-called Great War, which is why both World War II and the Cold War should always be considered in its context. To regard all three conflicts as a single War of the 20th Century obliterates any notion that categories of "just war" apply.

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope.

--James Carroll

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

"Perhaps Paradoxically"

The concept of interpretation is all here: there is no experience of truth that is not interpretative. I do not know anything that does not interest me. If it does interest me, it is evident that I do not look at it in an uninterested way.

Gianni Vattimo, "Toward a Nonreligious Christianity," After the Death of God,

 ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (Columbia University Press 2007)

It will seem like I'm nitpicking, but there is a valid argument here, and a mistaken analysis as well; and the distinction helps explain where Pete Buttigieg is (arguably) going:

A preference for chaos on the far right is connected to God in ways Democrats can barely talk about, much less comprehend, whether it’s the fundamental disconnect around evangelical support for unfettered gun rights or the right’s rejection of environmental protection or immigrants’ rights. But the more morally discordant Trump’s policies and politics are, the more he is seen as fighting for religious rights. This is not a claim that all or even most religious belief is nihilist—it is just a recognition that there is a deeply nihilist strain in some religious quarters, one that dovetails perfectly with the impulse to “blow it all up.” Part of this is simple tribalism. Tom Scocca is right that “owning the libs” is surely its own philosophy and reward. But the darker, and surely more frightening, narrative at work here is that the disruption of earthly institutions, the fomenting of chaos as the precursor to the next thing to come along, has a decidedly religious valence to it. Democrats can try to ignore it, but ignoring it does not seem to diminish its power.

The real problem with the "evangelical" thinking that connects to "unfettered gun rights" and "rejection of environmental protection or immigrants' rights" is not the nihilism.  That's a problem in Christianity at certain turns.  The history of Christian Europe contains more than a few examples of groups that were culturally as Christian as any at the time, insisting "the end" was coming, and being perfectly nihilistic in their insistence on their prophecy.  So this is nothing new today, but neither is it in connection with all the past.  The difference now is the group espousing Christian nihilism (let's call it) is ostensibly in control of the government, rather than a rogue group with no sanction from officialdom (of course in the days when Christianity was the state church, be that Catholic or Anglican, rogue groups were more clearly defined.  Especially in America the "mainstream" of Protestantism has, in the last century or so, become harder and harder to define.),  But is Christian nihilism in fact Christian?

No, it isn't.  And I don't mean that in a way that opens the "No True Scotsman" fallacy (itself a fallacy of reasoning, but let that go).  I mean the believers identified in that quote above have completely replaced the God of Abraham with a false idol of their own manufacture.*  Nothing new there, either; the stories of this happening among the children of Abraham goes back to before they were even Israelites, much less Jews.  Cecil B. DeMille made great hay of it in "The Ten Commandments."  Jesus berated the Pharisees for putting burdens on people in the name of God, rather than lifting their burdens as the law of Moses required (no, your notion of the thundering meanie of the "Old Testament" is not right; not in any sense of the word.  And don't try to tell me you've "read" the Old Testament.  If you think God is a Hairy Thunderer, you haven't even read the Hebrew Scriptures the way the Eunuch did whom Philip met in the Acts of the Apostles).  There isn't any passage of scripture that can even be vaguely used to support a "God-given right" for Americans to keep and arm bears.  Or bear arms, either.  Genesis 1 tells humanity to be stewards of the earth, not exploiters of its resources and living creatures.  And if you don't know what the prophets consistently said about the "alien" (as the KJV translates it), or immigrant in today's parlance, and how much they are echoing if not quoting the law of Moses, then you haven't read the Hebrew Scriptures at all.

Yes, this Jokeresque desire to "see the world burn" Lurhwick identifies does have "a decidedly religious valence to it."  But the heart of Christianity is not there, just some of the vocabulary, and mostly just the trappings of power the Church of Rome accrued over centuries and which Protestantism picked up and carried on for as long as it could.  Part of what's going on is simply ecclesiastical history, a continued effort to carry forward the banner of authority and power (and control) even as the culture that supported (and was created by) that authority, is now fundamentally changed.  It's a rear-guard action, in other words, a last gasp attempt to establish Gilead (although Margaret Atwood got all of that fundamentally wrong, IMHO).  Which seems to mean its power will diminish, if we just wait; but that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that Pete Buttigieg could be trying to say what Andrew Bacevich tried to say (although Bacevich never ran for public office, so who remembers him now, or cares?), that Jeremiah Wright was trying to sa, (although Obama was forced to disavow him), what Reinhold Niebuhr was saying which earned him the cover one week on Time Magazine, as "America's Theologian."  There is an alternative to Christianity as hucksterism and handmaid to power and the powerful.  The latter is the media-accepted paradigm of religion, where "American Christianity" equals "religion," and "American Christianity" equals the hucksters and liars and preeners and charlatans who claim no more authority than a TV audience and name recognition, an authority they lose the minute the best-sellers stop coming (whatever happened to Rick Warren?  Where is Pat Robertson today?).  That paradigm leads to this misunderstanding:

It all appears to be of a piece: reinserting faith values into Democratic politics, but also reclaiming, perhaps paradoxically, the very idea of religious faith as a civilizing, democratic value that can lie at the core of democratic governance.

What, exactly, is remotely paradoxical about Christian teachings as a political force in America?  Is Dr. King so quickly reduced to a plaster saint who had no more than a dream?  Who was not an ordained minister who preached and led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?  Is the abolitionist movement which finally ended slavery in America so easily divorced from the religious roots it carried until it was no longer needed?  Have we so quickly buried the story of the Amistad, where the religious beliefs of John Quincy Adams led him to defend the claims of liberty of the slaves on that ship?  Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Reinhold Niebuhr; do these names not ring a bell?  (Answer:  "No, not at all.  Did they have TV shows or write best-sellers?"  Well, to be fair, Merton did.)  "The very idea of religious faith as a civilizing, democratic value" is a paradox?  Is The City of God that old and arcane a text?  Are we really that ignorant of the past, and consider ourselves superior in our blankness?  I honestly think sometimes the difference between Donald Trump and most of the rest of us is one of degree, not kind.  He is our funhouse mirror, and we react so strongly to him because we see our reflection in our POTUS.  Is that "perhaps [paradoxical]"?  Or is that part of the reality of history we are all enmeshed in?

*I would argue the "Christian nihilists" of old also replaced God with a false idol, but my focus is the group identified by Dahlia Lithwick and Pete Buttigieg.  It still doesn't connect the two:  the past groups wanted to escape the world; the present group wants to control it.

History 101: Again

Yeah, pretty much...

There are two ways of defining the worship space in Christianity, and the difference turns on whether you have a congregation led by a priest, or by a pastor.

Generally speaking, if the church has a priest, then the worship space is the property of the church, and even the form of worship comes from the church hierarchy.  The classic example is the Roman Catholic church, but Episcopalians are not that different from the Roman liturgy, and Lutherans show a surprising similarity to the Catholic liturgy (surprising only because what most people know about Lutherans is Garrison Keillor, who ironically isn't).  A church led by a pastor lays claim to the worship space; the pastor is allowed charge of it, but within more distinct restrictions.  (A favorite short story is comprised of letters to a C of E rector about who in the congregation will get to put up what decorations when for the Christmas season, in the worship space.  We're never quite discussing absolute control here.)  I've seldom seen, for example, a Protestant worship space that didn't include an American flag near the pulpit or at least flanking the chancel.  Some churches try to balance it with a "Christian" flag, something I think flag makers invented in the '50's to sell more flags, but the intent of the national flag is clear.

When I was still in a pulpit in Houston, I was asked to host a visit from a visiting German pastor, because of the historical connections between the UCC and the German Evangelical and German Reformed churches.  The pastor was a woman, younger than me, and she asked why we had a flag beside the pulpit.  I explained I didn't like it, and she confessed she thought it disturbing, especially given the history of Nazi Germany that she, like me, didn't remember but had learned.  Her escort/driver for the day immediately launched into a defense of the flag in the church, distinguishing it from any sense of state intrusion into worship by saying the flag represented people who had died for American freedom.  He was of my father's generation, and the gap between the three of us was obvious.  Once a year in that church we celebrated "Scout Sunday," because the church sponsored a Boy Scout troop.  It required (and here, especially, is where the congregation controlled the worship space and the order of worship, at least once a year) the trooping of the colors, which meant the American flag and various Boy Scout colors were marched into the chancel from the nave, and all stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag before worship could commence.  The strongest protest I could mount was to stand silently during the pledge, my hands at my side.

I bring this up because of this:

Pastor Mack Morris wanted to take a stand. Preaching in front of his Mobile, Alabama, congregation on Sunday morning, positioned just to the left of an American flag, he declared that he was sick and tired of the way clothing brand Nike had, in his view, disrespected America and its people.

“The first pair of jogging shoes I wore were Nike jogging shoes,” he told his congregation, “That was in the early ’80s. I’ve been wearing Nike jogging shoes since 1980. I got news for you. I’ve bought my last pair of Nike shoes.” He produced two branded items — a Nike wristband and a headband. Then he cut them up right there at the pulpit.

His audience’s response? Raucous applause.

I'm not really surprised by that, but then, I remember when pastors could lose their place if they just mentioned from the pulpit that maybe the Vietnam War wasn't such a good idea after all, or that (especially in the South, where I grew up, but just as common elsewhere, I think now) Martin Luther King might have a point (he became, like all saints, a saint only in death).  Tara Isabella Burton thinks this one event is not just a protest against Colin Kaepernick or Nike, but  a "powerful symbolic act":

It reveals the virtually unprecedented degree to which white evangelical theology, and an extremely narrow (white, conservative) understanding of “patriotism,” have converged in the post-Trump age. White supremacy, evangelical identity, and a distinctively Christian form of nationalism have combined.

This "convergence" is unprecedented only if you have no knowledge whatsoever of the history of Christianity in this country.  The understanding of "patriotism" has been narrowing since at least the end of World War II.  If you watch as blithe an example as "The Best Years of Our Lives," you won't find one John Wayne-style character giving a speech about liberty and victory a la Wayne's speech by Davy Crockett "The Alamo" (a speech that makes me long for the bluntness of the real Davy Crockett, who told a crowd after he lost a political race:  "You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."  Even if it isn't true, it looks great on a coffee mug.)  There's even a scene with a dissenter against the war, after it has ended; he still holds to a conspiracy theory about why it happened and why it didn't need to.  England tries to hide the complicity and sympathies of its ruling class for Hitler; America tries to ignore that there was not, after all, complete unanimity about the "Good War."

Christianity and nationalism have been locked in an unholy marriage for as long as I can remember.  God wanted us to win World War II, and God wanted us to be prosperous (and white) after the war; God wanted us to fight the godless commies and Korea and Vietnam, and God didn't look too kindly on black preachers stirrin' up the black folk.  Ah, yes, I remember it well.

Burton recognizes this, to some degree:

John Fea, a professor of history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and author of Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, told Vox in a telephone interview on Thursday that Morris’s actions represented a combination of two elements. The first, he said, was “conservative evangelicals’ commitment to the idea that America is a Christian nation, and that somehow the American flag not only symbolizes generic nationalism but that the nation was founded by God, that it’s a nation created by God. So [people think], how dare Colin Kaepernick take a knee.”

Secondly, he said, “Christian nationalism has always been connected with whiteness. It has always been about [the idea of] America’s founding by white Christians.”

These ideas, Fea said, have existed throughout American history. But Donald Trump’s campaign and election have them to the fore. Furthermore, he said, we’re seeing an unprecedented relationship between the president and the evangelical religious establishment, in which pastors take “marching orders” from Trump’s own discourse.

Well, yes, Trump is a loose cannon on the deck of the ship of state, and everyday Raw Story runs another video about another white person have a public breakdown about their fear of a brown planet, public displays obviously (?) connected to the behavior of the President (sometimes the causal connection there is in the eye of the beholder.  And, as Andrew Bacevich points out, Trump really is a continuation of history, but a rupture with it.).  But is this "unprecedented"?  No, of course not.

And I keep thinking of the counterfactual, which no doubt exists somewhere in America:  what of a UCC congregation where the pastor preaches just the opposite of what this pastor in Alabama said, to the approval of his congregation.  Jeremiah Wright pastored a UCC church of over 8000 members, and made many a fiery statement from a more distinctly left position on the political spectrum.  Until Barack Obama ran for President, who had ever heard of Jeremiah Wright?  Why were his sermons (in full, not in the cut-and-paste versions released in the campaign of 2008) never a signifier of greater, more serious, or even more disturbing, things?  Because he was black?  Because he was UCC?  Because he was "liberal" and therefore represented nothing beyond his parishioners?

And who does Mack Morris represent, beyond Woodridge Baptist Church?*

*which seems, curiously, to have removed itself from the internet.  TIB notes the video of the sermon has been removed from Vimeo; as far as I can find, the website of the church has been removed, too.

Bending Reality Like Gravity Bends Light

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

.....This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

Bacevich is right, Trump is not governing. But Trump is also incapable of even appearing human. The best metaphor is a black hole. Trump us the personification of a black hole. He us trying to bend reality around him.

Simply put: delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality. Trump is so vain he thinks this is about him. NO IT IS NOT. pic.twitter.com/K96H5O3NKM

— Carmen Yulín Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) September 13, 2018

Reading Rainbow

Frankly, most of what I read on the intertoobs (obsessively, let us be honest) is of the quality of this:

Still, it’s disconcerting to read a Woodward book that reveals a presidency just as malignant and dysfunctional as the Nixon administration, although in different ways. I confess that I didn’t expect to see two presidents with such monumental character flaws twice in my lifetime. If I didn’t know better I would think there’s something wrong with the Republican Party that it keeps electing these people.

Of course, the Republican Party didn't elect Donald Trump to the Presidency; the American people did; or at least the ones who bothered to vote.  We don't really get very far blaming "them" for what "we" don't like, as if there is a wall between us, and we are only responsible when we approve.  "They" are always responsible for what goes wrong, whether "they" are in the opposing political party, or just don't understand the world correctly, as "we" do.

So let us all give thanks for Andrew Bacevich:

To a far greater extent than Trump’s perpetually hyperventilating critics are willing to acknowledge, the United States remains on a trajectory that does not differ appreciably from what it was prior to POTUS #45 taking office. Post-Trump America, just now beginning to come into view, is shaping up to look remarkably like pre-Trump America.

That's his thesis; on the way to establishing it, he argues that Trump has ceased to govern, if indeed he ever did:

If you spend your days watching CNN or MSNBC or reading columnists employed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, you might conclude otherwise. But those are among the institutions that, on November 8, 2016, suffered a nervous breakdown from which they have yet to recover. Nor, it now seems clear, do they wish to recover as long as Donald Trump remains president. To live in a perpetual state of high dudgeon, denouncing his latest inanity and predicting the onset of fascism, is to enjoy the equivalent of a protracted psychic orgasm, one induced by mutual masturbation.

The state of high dudgeon is not peculiar to the internet, in other words.  It exists in the "real world," which in many ways is a virtual as the one imagined to be salable by Silicon Valley or present in speculative fiction.  And it is as pointless in one place as it is in the other.  I like pausing to consider that, but Bacevich's point is this:

Yet if you look beyond the present to the fairly recent past, it becomes apparent that change on the scale that Trump was promising had actually occurred, even if well before he himself showed up on the scene. The consequences of that Big Change are going to persist long after he is gone. It’s those consequences that now demand our attention, not the ongoing Gong Show jointly orchestrated by the White House and journalists fancying themselves valiant defenders of Truth.

The change that is happening is not necessarily the change we've wanted, but it is the change we have experienced at least since the 1970's.  The U.S. economy was onward and upward until the '70's.  Post-war America built schools and universities and highways and "infrastructure," and then we sat back to enjoy it.  In the '70's inflation started changing aspirations, credit cards started turning us into the consumer society Bacevich derides in his analysis, and as the Fed raised interest rates to wring inflation out of the economy, it brought on both a recession in the '80's, but also the effective repeal of usury laws across the country (interest rates on loans as established by the Fed exceeded the statutory limits of most usury laws; something had to give, and the first real rollback of a regulation designed to protect "little people" gave way to the needs of the financial markets and, most importantly, credit card companies.).  Recessions and "bubbles" became a normal feature of the U.S. economy after that (shades of the 19th century!), and today the country is still in recovery from the Great Recession of 2008.  That's the "Big Change" Bacevich is talking about, the structural change in an industrialized economy from manufacturing to consumption, though it's hard to see how manufacturing functions with consumption on the other end.  Still, these are fundamental questions we have refused to acknowledge, much less try to answer.

But isn't Trump "dangerous" and powerful and soon to embroil us all in his chaos and ineptitude?  Nah.  Bacevich reviews Trump's more notorious actions (the ones the courts haven't shut down, most of those immigration matters), and he concludes:

The point of this informal midterm report card is not to argue that Donald Trump has somehow failed. It is rather to highlight his essential irrelevance.

Trump is not the disruptive force that anti-Trumpers accuse him of being. He is merely a noxious, venal, and ineffectual blowhard, who has assembled a team of associates who are themselves, with few exceptions, noxious, venal, or ineffectual.

And it's true.  Trump is not Uber, or Lyft, or Netflix/Amazon/Hulu convincing people to get off of cable (or even the digital revolution in broadcasting, making so many more over-the-air stations available cable is truly irrelevant even for people who don't pay for a streaming service).  And if he and his associates are noxious, venal, and ineffectual it's because, well, that's what we are as a nation. Is Trump, for example, responsible for the hurricanes of last year and this year, or the fires ravaging California?  Or is he in a long line of Presidents who basically did nothing besides, at best, pay lip service to a problem we've known about, or should have known about, for almost a century?

The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency — or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole.

Yet Americans have been obdurate in refusing to acknowledge that fact. (emphasis added)

Some will say he's dangerous because the GOP still stands behind him.  But this morning a news report mentioned, only in passing at this point, that GOP analysts are beginning to think that maybe Trump doesn't have the hold over his base that all the pundits insist he has.  Certainly if Trump can't turn out his voters in November, he won't have any supporters worth counting on in January, because that amorphous, anonymous "base" won't be calling the shots in the halls of Congress.  18 months ago the GOP was looking at the political landscape and expecting to extend its control of the Senate into a much larger majority in just two years.  Now, rather like 1974 after Nixon won by the greatest landslide in American history in 1972, they barely dare hope to keep their one-vote majority in the upper chamber.  What has Trump disrupted?  The expectations of the pundit class and the blatherskites on the internet (your humble host included).  What has changed since he took office?  Not much of anything, really; and nothing at all that won't change back in two years.

Speaking of disruption:

The cultural front opened by 9/11 keeps widening, and the terms of the struggles along those fronts, as each new technology opens them, are almost impossible to recognize immediately. In 2015, Jeff Giesea published his famous essay on memetic warfare in the NATO journal Defence Strategic Communications. Despite its immense influence—it predicted, and possibly shaped, Russian techniques of disinformation in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, and Giesea went on to run significant elements of Trump’s election campaign—the essay’s key insight has not really been dealt with seriously. Russian meme factories achieved, with minimal expense and no direct violence, their country’s deepest foreign-policy aims: a sharp decline in U.S. influence in the world, the endangerment of the post-World War II alliances of the liberal order, and the humiliation of the notion of human rights. There has been no retaliation.

Memetic warfare is only the latest element of the diathetical struggle that has been ongoing since the arrival of the internet. The cultural front is along every point of the network—television, the press, movies, songs, sermons, advertising, and social media. Everything that gives meaning is a battleground. Diathetics is the rearrangement of the enemy’s mindset by spectacle and the means of its consumption. This is a new kind of war and a deeply confusing one. Confusion is its purpose. The problems of assessment are substantial. The line between what is military and what isn’t has blurred, and the cultural front seems ridiculous, beneath the dignity of the military and totally beyond the purview of soldiers anyway. Memetic wars, wars of popular culture, are ridiculous. That does not alter their effectiveness. A reality television star with the world’s most elaborate comb-over has helped achieve Russian foreign-policy aims.

Even to look at 9/11 as a work of culture, to investigate its significance, is fraught in itself. The occasion is sacred, suitable for solemn reflection. Real people really died. But as painful and grotesque and offensive as it may seem, if you want to understand America’s current vulnerability, you have to look at 9/11 as a show. It is a war show that the United States lost and continues to lose.

This is a much more difficult article to summarize; and I won't do it the injustice.  The thesis, based on the efforts (in history) of T.E. Lawrence, is identified as the use of diathetics as a weapon of war; it is applied to the work of Osama Bin Laden, to argue, as that quote above concludes, that America lost, and continues to lose, the "war on terror."  But not because we have trampled on civil rights in the name of national security, humanity in the name of torture that "works," or even rising defense budgets in the name of might makes right makes powerful.  No, the thesis is subtler than that:

T.E. Lawrence, who turned himself into the pop culture icon Lawrence of Arabia, was the great innovator of guerrilla information war in the 20th century. His best-known platitude held that “[t]he printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.” His autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom provides the fine details of how he came to that understanding. Lawrence was sick, and in camp, in the sweltering heat of his fly-ridden tent, when it occurred to him that Carl von Clausewitz and the other great military theorists of earlier eras would have considered the war he was waging unwinnable. The Arab forces could not destroy the enemy, take the major strongholds, or break the courage of their opponents, which was how the great generals of the past had defined victory. The insight crept up on him: What if those definitions were all wrong? What if, instead of winning the war by the traditional definitions of victory, the definition of victory changed? “[A]s I pondered slowly, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war,” Lawrence writes. “I brushed off the same flies once more from my face patiently, content to know that the Hejaz War was won and finished with: won from the day we took Wejh, if we had had wit to see it.” He didn’t need to win. He just needed to decide he had won and convince the world. The struggle was to change the definition of victory, to change the meaning of the events rather than the events themselves.

The term Lawrence gave to this kind of semantic warfare was diathetics, a phrase borrowed from the Greek philosopher Xenophon. It was a battle for the stories people tell and for the public consciousness that emerges out of the stories that people tell.

"We had to arrange [our soldiers’] minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle."

Diathetics is an extension of guerrilla warfare, in the sense that it is used by the weaker force against the stronger and uses the lines of communication against those who have laid them down. The sabotage of lines of communication turns the greatest strength of the more powerful force—the ability to convey information and materiel across distance—into vulnerability everywhere along the line. Rather than sabotage the lines of communication along the periphery, diathetics sabotages the network at the center, the source of the meaning being communicated.

Osama bin Laden understood diathetics instinctively and explicitly. “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods,” he told Mullah Mohammad Omar in a letter in June 2002. “In fact, its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles.” The front is cultural, the conflict over narrative.

Think about that last sentence a moment, because the conflict Donald Trump ceaselessly tries to stir is over narrative.  He had the largest crowds at his inaugural; he has accomplished more in 18 months than any President in history; the recovery of Puerto Rico from two hurricanes in a row was an "unsung success."  And, of course, his favorite hobbyhorse:

“I can say, as it relates to the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation, that we have NO hard evidence of Collusion.” Richard Burr (R-NC) Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2018

The conflict is always over narrative, n'est pas?

As I say, I can't do it justice (and I've probably mangled Bacevich's argument, too); read the original and decide for yourself.  This is much more thoughtful and well-reasoned stuff than the froth I usually refer to, and I commend it to your careful attention.  After all, in these days perhaps more than others, we must remember the admonition Dom Crossan attributes to Jesus of Nazareth: "You have heads, use them!"

For the Time Being

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --

Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate Aristotelian city

Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry

And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly

Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be

Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment

We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;

Remembering the stable where for once in our lives

Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,

We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit

Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose

Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,

We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;

"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."

They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form

That we do not expect, and certainly with a force

More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,

Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem

From insignificance. The happy morning is over,

The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:

When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith

That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,

God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

--W.H. Auden

I opened my copy of Collected Longer Poems by W.H. Auden last night, as bed-time reading, and found myself talking to my younger self.

I have no memory of reading these poems.  Instead, I have a memory of not reading them, because they were long and I was not that interested in poetry.  My memory tells me I got interested in poetry in graduate school, in a seminar on Yeats where we read all of his lyric poems.  My memory lies.

The title page of Collected Longer Poems is covered in my handwriting:  notes about the poetry, specific notes and general notes about Auden's poetry.  I wrote a long paper on Auden, part of a special course I took in my undergraduate work.  I vaguely remember the course, don't remember at all what I wrote about.  But there I was, 40 years younger and full of ideas.  And I realized it wasn't the ideas that had left me: it was the source material.  I used to write about stuff worth knowing, if only notes to myself.  Now, what do I know?

This morning on Salon (my morning habit), I read this article:  one that promised Chomsky and Orwell, and only offered warmed-over Orwell.  Hitchens wrote more insightfully about Orwell, and Hitchens was a putz with an Oxonian accent (even in print!) which only made him sound good.  I could construct a better analysis of U.S. ideals v. reality from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, as indeed Andrew Bacevich has done.  But Bacevich doesn't get discussed on the internet, and Niebuhr is a dead white man at Salon.  They are far more interested in the nuanced thinking of Amy Schumer.

And where on the internet does one find a discussion that isn't about confirming one's prejudices and proving one's superiority to all outsiders (because every discussion forms its own clique.  That would be true here if I had more readers. As it is, my readers are a clique, but a gentle one with no real boundaries, because no one here defends any boundaries, except perhaps your gentle host.  He can be a real jerk.)?

So,  a New Year's resolution:  back to the books, and away with the screen.

Call it a mental health resolution.  I'll call it a spiritual one.

"Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous."

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

The Brits do this better than we do.  Niebuhr was thoroughly American, and thoroughly Midwestern, but American literature doesn't do moral ambiguity and the problems of power and guilt and self-awareness of the national character nearly as well as the British do.

Maybe it's that legacy of Shakespeare; sometimes I seriously think it is.  That and the legacy of power, stretching back to the Tudors and through Cromwell and the Restoration and the rise and fall of the largest empire the world has ever seen.  We embrace Roman thinking without realizing our historical debt at all; the British still understand they are an Anglo-Saxon society shaped, down to their Piccadilly Circus and their legal system, by being a far-flung outpost of Rome.

John LeCarre got at this first; the moral ambiguity of spies telling lies in order to serve a greater good.  Reality eventually outran LeCarre's moral imagination.  The Constant Gardener imagined a scandal among multi-national corporations that would erupt if it was revealed how they were treating the sick in Africa, a scandal so worrisome they would kill to keep it quiet; when in reality the truth of such malfeasance was plain for all to see; but the world simply didn't care.

Consider that we are coming up on the 34th anniversary of the deaths of Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, and Maura Clark. (Corrected per a comment below; I should have had that right the first time!)  I mention it because I heard a promo for a story about it on NPR.  Now that we are nearly 35 years away from the foul deed, it is safe to probe it and consider the outrage of it; safe because nothing can be done about it, no one prosecuted for it, no public figure called to account over it.  Not that anyone has been called to account for it in nearly 35 years, anyway.  A sign of American innocence and wielding power without guilt or self-awareness?  Or just another indication that what happens can always be overlooked, ignored, disregarded, if it suits us to do so?  Especially since, as Marlowe observed, "that was in a foreign country and, besides, the wench is dead."

We don't do moral imagination in our literature, or our TV shows.  The quintessential response to 9/11 was "24," the show that made torture not only palatable but necessary to our security.  The quintessential response of the British, a show that ran for 10 seasons (take that, "24"!), was "MI-5."

I've been binge-watching it on Netflix, running through all 10 seasons, roughly 100 episodes.  The plots are often better than Daniel Craig's "Casino Royale" (still the best Bond movie ever made, for my money), and make you wish the writers of "Skyfall" had instead hired the writers from "MI-5," at least as consultants.  "Casino Royale" made Bond deal with the human cost of being a professional spy/assassin ("licensed to kill"); "MI-5" made its characters deal with the moral cost of telling lies for a living, and manipulating people with lies.  When the wife of a villain has been killed in Bond's hotel room in "Casino," he is entirely indifferent to her fate, even though his use of her led both to Bond finding the villain, and her death.  In "MI-5" agents struggle with their willingness to use innocents as resources, and more often than not the people they "handle" wind up dead, or losing a great deal, while the spies retire to their world of government protection of their identities and government sanction of their lies and manipulations.  They do not go gentle into that good night, however.  The strain of the job makes them neurotic; or they quit; or they are forcibly retired.  The human costs are a constant theme of the show.  Indeed, in the final two season, two of the major characters are revealed to have lead mirror lives of lies and indiscretions, one set far worse than the other so that the latter is just an echo of the former.  Still, in a profession of lies and manipulation, the spies on the same side manipulate each other because sometimes three can only keep a secret if two of them are dead; or never knew there was a secret.

It's a British show, so not surprisingly the British come off better than any other nationality.  The Americans, though, come in for special condemnation.  The series started in 2001, so the CIA represents America as cowboys astride the planet backed by money and arrogance, and getting what they want through torture and extraordinary rendition (illegal and immoral acts, in other words).  More than once the operational head of MI-5 has to remind a CIA agent that the latter is on British soil, and subject to British law, that working for the American government does not make one a law unto oneself.  But the agents run contrary to their own government, a government of politicians willing to make deals or shirk promises made to "assets" (the innocents I mentioned above) as it suits them, or as they (more often than note) feel the need, like all politicians, to be liked and to avoid conflict (conflict, as in any action show, often being the best way to resolve a situation).  But the strongest theme in the show is the question of morality, of the ethics of spying and lying and manipulation for Queen and Country.

The last season is the best encapsulation:  the head of MI-5 was, in the past, in Berlin before the wall came down.  He "turned" a Russian, a woman he loved, and with whom he fathered a child.  The plot for the season, the running plot for the entire season, is convoluted and complicated, but in the end our British hero who has blamed himself for what he has done, who has sacrificed almost everything, including his own morality, for the sake of national security, finally unravels the truth.  And the truth is, the woman he loved in Germany, the Russian, was herself a spy, not for him, but for the KGB.  Her husband is a former KGB agent, her son is an FSB (successor to the KGB) agent, who has killed to protect her without knowing she was a triple agent.  It turns out she's working, not for Moscow but for a consortium of former KGB agents.  She has lied to her husband about her status (he thinks she was recruited by MI-5 as a spy; it turns out she was a KGB spy before that, pretending to spy for MI-5, but he never knew).  It is a long untangling of skeins regarding who lies to whom, for what reason, and at what cost.  Ultimately, of course, the British agent is exonerated for his decisions; but his decisions have a cost, not unlike the cost to Bond at the end of "Casino Royale."  But for Bond those costs reflect decisions and actions taken during the course of the movie; for "MI-5," the costs echo down through three decades.

"Make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life."  Not in terms of eternal cosmic punishment; but in terms of responsibility; of guilt; of regrets.  No character on "MI-5" wields power:  by lying to manipulate someone; or to protect them; or even using a gun to do either of those, even the power is wielded in the interests of national security or anti-terrorism or simply arresting criminals; without paying a price for that power.  "Power, wrote Niebuhr, 'cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest.' "  The British, at least, understand that.  It doesn't make them superior, or wiser, or more authorized to wield power; but it does make them more self-aware.

It's a trait singularly lacking in the CIA agents portrayed in the series.

On the coming 10th anniversary: A Common Place Reader; selections from past Novembers

"The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples." "He hath put down the mighty." - from the daily office in May, 1965.

If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!

--Thomas Merton

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. 

In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, (New York: HarperCollins 2004), xi. 

World War I ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, yet an irresistible current of nihilism had been set loose. Fought in the name of democracy, that war was in fact a triumph of militarism and imperialism - on all sides. It led to the punitive imposition of artificial borders in Europe, which were the immediate cause of World War II; in the Middle East, the remote cause of today's most dangerous conflicts; and in Africa, where consequent genocide has found its niche. Perhaps most damaging was the 1914 legitimizing of mass violence, with the trenches anticipating both gas chambers and the unleashed atom. Hitler and Stalin were empowered by the so-called Great War, which is why both World War II and the Cold War should always be considered in its context. To regard all three conflicts as a single War of the 20th Century obliterates any notion that categories of "just war" apply.

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope.

--James Carroll

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

The Departed

In the Martin Scorsese film, every character is chasing every other character, and lying to them, and living a life based on lies and betrayal and subterfuge. Interestingly, none of this has anything to do with anyone outside of the circle of the police officers overseen by Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen, or the thugs overseen by Jack Nicholson. Matt Damon is a police officer actually working for Nicholson, while Leonardo DiCaprio is a thug working for Nicholson who's actually a police officer working for Sheen. There are only two scenes in the movie of any importance that involve civilians, people who are not thugs or police officers, and nothing about Nicholson's activities, or the work of Sheen or Baldwin, is directed at anyone except the other group. It's cops and robbers with the robbers never really stealing anything from anyone, except each other (the one crime in the story involves Nicholson double-crossing a group of Chinese criminals, probably because, as it turns out, Nicholson is an informer for the FBI.). The one time a store owner is actually threatened by thugs seeking protection money, the store owner is more upset with DiCaprio, who beats up the two thugs and trashes the store in the process, than he is upset by the shakedown. There is a great deal of violence bandied about, a great deal of energy expended on trying to find evidence on which to convict Nicholson of his various crimes, and a number of people dead by the end of the film (including Nicholson, DiCaprio, Sheen, and Damon). But it is all violence directed at the two groups (the cops and robbers), and in the end the one "redemptive" act is itself a crime (when Mark Wahlberg murders Damon). It's an interesting question in morality and "law and order:" the police are the "good guys," the "moral agents" authorized to punish the "bad guys," but what power do they really have to protect society from evil? This is not the "thin blue line" concept of police officers, so popular in the 1970's. The evil they are fighting is a shadow self, a reflection of the police officers themselves (especially in the characters portrayed by Damon and DiCaprio). It is not an evil that threatens society at large, or even in particular. Both the cops and the robbers seem to exist only for each other. Neither is presented as a necessary concomitant to human society.

I raise this because I was traveling through the wilds of northern New Mexico this past weekend (I left my heart in Santa Fe), and heard a part of this story on Democracy Now!. (I regret not buying the Dave Eggers book earlier; as my tribute to New Orleans five years after Katrina, I'm ordering a copy this week). The story is one that presents a very Jeffersonian challenge to our current American weltanschaaung that only when government enforces laws and provides "security" can it do no wrong. "Law and order" is an old concept in American culture, one going back to at least to the mythos of dime novels about "gunslingers" and "peacemakers" (which meant a weapon, not a person). We were supposed to have learned in the jungles of Vietnam the limits of American power. But we never really shook off the atavistic assumption that might=right, that power=ability, that military=societal control.

Which leads us back to New Orleans, and Katrina, and the lessons we should learn from it. Rachel Maddow's guest, Garland Robinette, calls New Orleans (or perhaps all of Louisiana) a "rich Haiti." (I include the clip in lieu of a link).

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It's a fair assessment; one so apt I wish I'd coined it. But what New Orleans was not during Katrina was a stew of violence and anarchy, a "Lord of the Flies" situation, although everyone in authority expected it to be. As this other story Rachel presented that night illustrates, all of the violence in post-Katrina New Orleans appears to have been at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us from violence:

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In that story, not only were the two men beaten, but photographers were assaulted by police, in an attempt to keep pictures just like the two in the story, from being seen. There are stories of violence in post-Katrina New Orleans, but almost all of the verifiable ones, like the story of Zeitoun, turn out to be stories of those with authority using it to impose order where there is no disorder to begin with, except the chaos of nature against the order imposed by houses and streets and electricity and water systems. These stories have a common thread: the most persistent threat to order, indeed to personal security, came from the people who supposedly provide order by their authority, and their weaponry.

But no society functions on that kind of "order," or ever has. Indeed, the ones that do are fictional nightmares, like Orwell's world of 1984, or are what we imagine Stalinist Russia was like. That kind of order is the kind I was raised to abjure, to reject, to state proudly was not the kind of society I lived in. But especially since that demon turned out to be a figment of our imagination, a greater threat to America in our rhetoric than in any reality, we seem determined to recreate that "order" in our own world. SB 1070 in Arizona is only the most recent manifestation of this desire. It is a baseless conviction that might makes right, and authority=control. It is as anti-democratic, indeed as un-American, an idea as any I can conceive of. Yet here we are:

Despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.

Despite the presence? Why not "because of" the presence, which would be more accurate. Whence comes this benighted notion that the only answer to chaos and anarchy is more of the cause of that chaos and anarchy? Violence may be, in a very real sense, the society Afghanis have chosen from themselves, though I don't believe this. My understanding is that, prior to the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was actually a peaceful and ordered place, with many of the comforts and distractions of Western culture readily available. So if we want to start casting about blame for what is happening there now, we can start with the government Vladimir Putin once happily worked for. (His "strong man" photo ops being a bit undermined by such realizations, perhaps.) The Soviets, too, thought (still think!) might=right, and now we tangle with the tar baby they once wrestled. We insist on imposing a society on people from the barrel of a gun, and we wonder that life isn't like the dime novels about the "Old West." What we do not consider is that we cannot undo evil with even more evil. And no matter our intentions, our actions, our violence, our desires and attempts to impose order through military power, are evil.

That's the ironic lesson of "The Departed," one I have no doubt was entirely intentional on the part of Mr. Scorsese: the "good guys," the cops, are no better, morally or in action, than the "bad guys," the robbers. Indeed, they are simply mirror selves grappling with each other, engaged in a macabre game that has almost nothing to do with the citizens of Boston. The only virtue of their game is that it doesn't spill over into the society around it. The damning quality of it, is that it destroys the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, grinds him up like a virtual meat-grinder, to the point that his death at the end is more of a relief than a shame (despite the fact he has uncovered Damon's perfidy, and is about to justify his police career by turning Damon in). DiCaprio's execution at the hands of yet another police detective on Nicholson's payroll is only balanced by Wahlberg's execution of Damon, but it's eye for an eye justice, which is no kind of justice at all (Wahlberg takes great care to leave no clues behind; he knows what he's doing is criminal). Nothing is gained, and everything is lost, but it's in a microcosm, a sealed-off bubble from the world around it (not unlike the bubble universe DiCaprio lives in in his newest film, "Inception."). The movie is a subtle study in the nature and limitation of police power to impose order on society, since society seems to have no real need for the police power overseen by Baldwin and Sheen (and the FBI, who are present only to keep Nicholson in business for their own purposes. Games within games.).

No such examination of power is going on now. Andrew Bacevich comes closest to talking about it, but he is a prophet in the wilderness, at best, and no one is going out even to see a reed bending in the wind, much less to listen to him. Notice, too, that this is not a matter of "cowboy" George W. Bush or "malevolent" Dick Cheney. As Bacevich notes:

Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: “What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?” Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What’s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn’t actually work?

But I would ask: when do we finally decide it doesn't actually work? 50,000 troops remain in Iraq, and no withdrawal from Afghanistan is in the offing. Sarah Palin wrapped herself in the flag at Glenn Beck's rally, equating support for U.S. soldiers with the moral courage of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a deliberate conflation meant to repel any attempts at criticism, although of her, not of U.S. soldiers. To say our military power doesn't work, of course, is to insult our soldiers; at least, that's the conflation we've all made in our public discourse. The real problem is that to say our military power doesn't work is to question U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy since the end of World War II (when the Pentagon was supposed to be turned into an archive, not continued as a permanent military headquarters). It is to question the major premise taught to my entire generation: that only American military power kept the USSR from invading America, or taking over the world. It is to question the assumption almost everyone trades on: that only power keeps us secure in our homes, and safe in our borders. It is an assumption we have never seen to be true, but one we insist on nonetheless. It may be it is because revenge is the opposite of forgiveness, and that forgiveness takes more courage than we can muster.

I could turn this into a long rant, something very common and apparently popular in left (and right) blogistan; but that outcome bores me. I cannot turn into Professor Pangloss, however, and say this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds. So I turn, for a closing, to a theologian much admired by Andrew Bacevich and by me; a man quite familiar with the nature of power and the nature of societies, as well as with our human understanding of the nature of God. This is practically in the nature of a prayer, but that makes it even more appropriate in this context, especially as it comes from the man who made his earlier fame from arguing that individuals could afford to forgive, but nations could not. The question of limits, is another question.

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

“Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

“Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.

“Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

--Reinhold Niebuhr

Photo courtesy of Wounded Bird