It's only words

This is the problem with the thinking of David Brooks on Laudate Si:

Where Francis denounced ‘an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy,’ Wuerl talked about his gentle ‘invitation to everyone to join him in conversation.’ Where Francis demanded a a swift reduction in carbon emissions, Wuerl talked about the beginning of a long process of absorbing what he had to say. ‘He is not saying to individuals, you must do this,’ said the cardinal. ‘That doesn’t appear in the document. He is saying, here is the moral frame of reference.’

The "moral frame of reference" means the boundaries of the discussion, not the starting point of action.  Words without action are, of course, mere words.

What good is it, my friends, for someone to say he has faith when his actions do nothing to show it?  Can that faith save him?  Supposes a fellow-Christian, whether man or woman, is in rags with not enough food for the day, and one of you says, "Goodbye, keep warm, and have a good meal," but does nothing to supply their bodily needs, what good is that?  So with faith; it does not lead to action, it is by itself a lifeless thing.  James 2:14-17 (REB)

But the purpose of inaction is to remain in control, to remain wedded to power:

The real concern, says [Jon] O’Brien [head of Catholics for Choice], is that both politicial parties take the bishops seriously when they complain about religious discrimination and bend over backwards to offer exemptions that are eroding the seperation of church and state.

 “The bishops are manufacturing their own truth so they can sell it to the political establishment,” he said. The bigger question in the long run is whose truth will win out: the pope’s or the bishops?

Which is the other side of entanglement of religion and politics:  whose God is served, and how? Political power recognizes the power of the people behind it.  But as O'Brien says:

“It’s more to be pitied than to be laughed at, it’s not as if they actually have this legion of Catholics behind them,” he said. “Catholics don’t want the persecution of gay teachers at Catholic schools or women who are victims of sex trafficking to be denied emergency contraception.”

But then we're up against the question:  is it right because the people approve of it?  Or is it right because God says so?

Who, then, decides that God says so, if not the people?  If nobody goes into the wilderness to listen to John the Baptist, does John still speak for God?  But if John tells everybody what they want to hear, does John still speak for God?  "Why did you go into the wilderness?  To see a reed bending in the wind?"  The wind (pneuma) of God?  Or the wind (pneuma) of John's voice? Which is it?  And who decides?  The group?  Or only one person?

Or rather, in this case:  which group?

On the other hand, it's being noticed that American Catholics aren't flocking to follow the teachings of Pope Francis on this issue.  This, Patricia Miller argues, will be the point where conservative Catholics get their own Humanae Vitae that, like liberal Catholics, they will ignore.  However, Pope Francis' encyclical is in line with Catholic teachings, not an abrupt departure from them.  If Catholics stopped listening to the Pope, they stopped listening a long time ago.

There was never a time when Catholics were monolithic in their thought about church teachings, anymore than Christians have ever been monolithic about their Christianity.  "Catholic" means, not a church, but "universal," and it has embraced many teachings on Christianity, from the Jesuits to the Franciscans (traditionally antagonists, though no one seems to notice the Jesuit priest taking on the Franciscan name as being of any real significance).  There have been disagreements about the teachings since Peter and Paul; even the four gospels represent four distinct points of view.  And Pilate's question remains, a question, interestingly, put in John's gospel, the gospel most aware of the problem of perception and ambiguity, of understanding and misunderstanding:

"What is truth?"

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

And speaking (still) about how the shootings at Emanuel AME church were not about racism; now apparently Dylann Roof isn't even white:

"I don't know how you can sit with somebody for an hour in a church and pray with them and get up and shoot them," [Sen. Lindsay Graham] said. "That's Mideast hate. That's something I didn't think we had here but apparently we do."

Because, you know, evil like that is so unAmerican it has to be imported, right?

"A tree is best measured when it is lying down...."

The thing about a tree is, it looks tall and sturdy and enduring and immovable, until it topples over.

A windstorm can do it; or heavy rain; and suddenly the tree you thought so small against the sky is huge along the ground.  The tree you thought so powerful it was rooted to the spot, is uprooted and you can't say whether it was the force against it, or some decay you couldn't see until it toppled.  But it doesn't come down like a ruin, in bits and pieces, leaving a skeletal structure as a reminder of its former glory.  It comes down all at once, completely, catastrophically.  It falls, and on the ground you get the measure of it, even as it's now gone forever, and its decay or destruction truly begins.

Adding to what I said below, word now comes that The Citadel wants to remove it's Confederate Battle Flag (or Naval Jack, to add to the confusion about what to call it) from it's chapel.

But the South Carolina legislature will have to change state law, since the flag hangs at the Citadel for the same reason it is on permanent display on the state capitol grounds.

To put this in context, The Citadel was established close to Emanuel AME church because of the links between that church and the abolitionist movement.  It was established rather like Pilate's Palace, built to look down over the wall into the Temple at Jerusalem.  To the Romans, that Temple was a hotbed of political activity (in an age when religion and politics were not separated, and Rome exploited the combination); the Governor's Palace was both a symbol of Rome's power, and a practical reminder to the children of Abraham that Rome was watching (guards could literally look down from the Palace into the grounds of the Temple).

And now the Citadel wants to remove a symbol of why it was built in the first place.

To reiterate:  the Naval Jack returned to prominence in the South in the 1960's, a response to the civil rights movement which would shortly achieve, under a Texan president, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and which would culminate, sadly, in the death of Dr. King.  In 2000 that response was revived with the Heritage Act in South Carolina, the law that required the Naval Jack to fly on Capitol grounds (and apparently be displayed in The Citadel's chapel).

And now, 15 years later, it is being forced to disappear, even from South Carolina (though what the S.C. legislature will do remains to be seen).

When the support goes, it goes all at once.

And of course, the tree is still there, even if it's one the ground.  But that's why God gave us chainsaws.....

Unnecessary N.B.:  Josh Marshall continues to be amazed at the speed with which reverence for the "Old South" and the Naval Jack (I like that label, now) are disappearing.  But it isn't like that reverence was unbroken from 1865 to 2015.  It pretty much got started again in the 1950's, as Brown v. Board proved the power of the civil rights movement, which carried the day a decade later.  The response especially to Brown (which affected people with children in school) was a resurgence of the idea the war was about "state's rights" and "sovereignty."

The high school I attended was "Robert E. Lee."  The name hasn't changed, but with integration, the rebel flag and confederate symbols (the football team was the "Rebels") had to, and that prompted a huge interest in all things CSA for the time I was there.  Now all that remains, almost 45 years later, is the name of the school.  That could stand to change, too; it would upset some people, I'm sure, but it wouldn't bother me (actually the school's physical plant needs to be replaced.  Re-naming a new school would be an easy switch; easier than getting approval for a whole new facility).  Aside from a few of us who were around for the change, I doubt anyone much cares about that anymore (and probably the alumni don't, either).

The response to the civil rights movement that caught the rest of us up 50 years ago, that resurgence, is finally crumbling into dust.  In that context, it's hardly surprising that, 50 years later, the devotion to the Noble Cause is dissolving like a newspaper in the rain.  It was already yesterday's fish wrap, after all....

Adding:  when you can't even get a model of the "General Lee" from "The Dukes of Hazzard," you know it's lights out, America.

Because some good times don't come as slow, and old times are sometimes quickly forgotten

Racism is deeply, deeply entrenched in American culture.  And it isn't a matter of distinguishing between "true racists" and everybody else (the distinction lies, if anywhere, between racists and white supremacists), it's a matter of recognizing how tainted we all are by racism:  either as victims of it, or as beneficiaries.

Change, I thought, had come in the 90's, or maybe by the beginning of the new century.  My daughter grew up in a world where racism was not as institutionalized as it was in my childhood:  no segregated schools, bathrooms, water fountains, swimming pools, hotels, restaurants, etc.  (The basis for denying bakers the "right" to refuse to sell a cake to a same-sex couple for their wedding, is the same basis for laws denying hotel owners and restaurant owners the right to deny service to people based on their race.)  I was truly optimistic the worst of racism was behind us because generational racism was rapidly receding from the scene, thanks to the long, hard work of the Civil Rights movement of the '50's and '60's, and then to efforts of Baby Boomers to truly eradicate racism from American public life (rather than leave it at the "I just don't want my daughter to marry one" stage).

What's interesting is how sudden change can be.  Before my daughter was born I was just beginning to accept the idea that homosexuals should be treated as human beings.  I hadn't even come to the idea that they deserved the same legal protection as race and religion (two of the categories of the Civil Rights Act).  25 years later, even my parents accept that lesbian couples should be allowed to marry.  The opposition to such marriage is reduced to something of an absurdity.

And now the state of Virginia (bolstered, no doubt, by the recent Supreme Court ruling, because apparently they lost in the lower courts on the issue) is moving to rescind its license plates commemorating the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  South Carolina may finally relegate the Confederate battle flag to a museum, rather than a permanent display on the State Capitol grounds.  Mississippi may remove the flag from its state flag.

Mississippi!  Goddamn.

This is head spinningly fast.  Over the weekend GOP candidates were falling over themselves not to offend the tender sensibilities of the few rednecks and white supremacists still as wed to the battle flag as the NRA is to the 2nd Amendment.  Now they line up to praise Nikki Haley.  Already articles posted two days ago seem dated, so rapidly has support for symbols of racism melted away.  I awake to find Mitch McConnell is calling for the removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky Capitol.  Maryland, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Washington, D.C.:  all taking actions to remove the Confederate battle flag or statues of Confederate leaders from public display.  Retailers don't want to sell it.  Manufacturers don't want to make it.   Why do these things happen so quickly?

Josh Marshall thinks its generational, that the old is dying off and the new is not interested.  Where does that place Dylan Roof?  A marginal white man, is where.  Presumably he has no political power. But then where did the long defense of the flag in South Carolina, where the law practically makes it a holy object, come from?  That law is at best 25 years old.  Where the main proponents of it all in their 50's and 60's when it was passed?

I don't think it's age; I think it's a paradigm shift.  Not in the strictly Kuhnian sense, but in the sense that support for the old has been undermined for some time, and when it starts to go completely, it goes rapidly.  Support for gays, especially in marriage, turned suddenly from opposition to approval.  It practically flipped overnight.  The same has happened for the Confederate battle flag; even in the deepest of the old South (and South Carolina is truly the birthplace of the Confederacy), it has finally been flown too long.

Sometimes change happens like that:  what was seen as unimaginable is suddenly overthrown so rapidly everyone wonders why it didn't happen sooner, and who was ever in support of the old?  Especially when the old is so graphically connected to slaughter, to the deaths of innocents praying with their assailant before he pulled his gun; an assailant bent on producing a race war but who, instead, prompted a new war on racism.

There is something sadly human about this:  violence prompts us to heed the angels of our better nature.  But the violence comes in a context.  The context here goes back to Trayvon Martin, if only because that event may have radicalized Dylann Roof.  But the cumulative effect of so much violence against blacks:  Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Baltimore, the pool party in a Dallas suburb, finally the shooting in a black church of black people simply because they were black.  Dylann Roof wanted to start a race war.

He started another kind of revolution entirely.  Like most revolutions, it is an expression of culture, not a repudiation of it.  But that's alright; it's about time American culture expressed itself clearly on this racist symbol, one revived in the '60's in response to the burgeoning civil rights movement.  The times, they are still a-changin'.  Some changes are on the very long throw; and the longer you are alive, the more you realize the "long run" isn't really that long, after all.  Especially when it bends toward justice; at least of a sort.

David Brooks is going to suffer for our sins

Because at least he's honest:

Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the [papal] encyclical [Laudato Si]: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.

The pope has a section on work in the encyclical. The section’s heroes are St. Francis of Assisi and monks — emblems of selfless love who seek to return, the pope says, to a state of “original innocence.”

He is relentlessly negative, on the other hand, when describing institutions in which people compete for political power or economic gain. At one point he links self-interest with violence. He comes out against technological advances that will improve productivity by replacing human work. He specifically condemns market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems, even though these cap-and-trade programs are up and running in places like California.

Moral realists, including Catholic ones, should be able to worship and emulate a God of perfect love and still appreciate systems, like democracy and capitalism, that harness self-interest. But Francis doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world. He neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can lead to childbearing. Within a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation. Within a constitution, the desire for fame can lead to political greatness.

You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity.

Who needs God when you have the market, and human ingenuity?  And besides, is not the market a great green god, put here to save as many of us as it can?  And the ones who can't be saved?

Well, the market is cruel; but it is just.  The perfect god for a fallen world.

"Yesterday all the past...."

You know, the "thing" about fundamentalism is that it isn't medieval.  It's as modern as the "New Atheism."  It isn't a return to Gone Away or Never Was, which is a peculiarly American affliction.  We are a nation of immigrants, which means we have memorialized the "Old Country" even as we fled it because of its "history."  Charles Dickens has a wonderful passage in Martin Chuzzelwit where the eponymous hero comes to America only to be told what's wrong with Europe (England in particular) and what precisely is happening there at the very moment he's set foo in America after the sea voyage.  The Americans he encounters can't possibly know, of course, and their "view" of England is distorted by their ideology, but the contrast with "pure" America, shorn of history and its entanglements, is too compelling a mythos to set aside.  We are obsessed with it even as we denounce it to announce our superiority.

Just as we imagine America a shining city on a hill set apart from all that foofaraw that is European history (and so complicated, too!  Italy and Germany weren't countries as we know them until the 19th century!  Principalities!  Border wars!  An entire monarchy of cousins from England to Russia!  Dukes, earls, viscounts, vicomtes, regents, barons, kaisers!  Who can keep it straight?), we idealize the Europe our ancestors left behind, and preserve in amber the culture we want to remember:  cuckoo clocks and lederhosen and snails in garlic butter and Christmas trees and snow (most of Europe is north of the northernmost parts of America), and oh how happy the peasants were in their quaint cottages of yore!

We have always swaddled ourselves in nostalgia, so much so we idealize the "Founding Fathers" as men of one voice, one heart, one mind, one purity of vision and purpose.  The South has it's glorious "traditions" which were mostly nasty and brutish and best indicated by scenes in "Django Unchained" than by "Birth of a Nation."  All the traditions of the South were borrowed from some imagined England and fed on French ideals of chivalry that came to England by way of stories of King Arthur, a king England cared not a bean for until the French did.  Any lingering nostalgia for the "Old South" is for a place that never existed except in memory, but America is all about the memory of what we used to be, and will be again one day, once we recover the true vision of our "Founding Fathers," and run government (which means our lives) the way they meant for us to.

And so fundamentalism arises in the early 20th century, a reasoned response to an Age of Reason; a rational rebuttal to modern rationalism, a rationalism itself doomed to go smash in the violence of World War I, the ashes and ruins to be battered into rubble and dust and forged into a new and even more rational age in the industrial forge of World War II (the U.S. won that war with industrial might no country in the Axis could match; the Germans created the Holocaust with a nightmare use of industry no other country in the world could imagine).  Fundamentalism took modern reason as its standard, insisting interpretation was a lie, that everything was just what it said it was and was meant to be.  To this day "freedom" is as America defines it; as are the words "justice" and "Democracy" and even "Good" and "bad."  Any attempt to interpret those words according to context or culture or history, is an act of treason against the Holy American Empire.  Such talk is barely countenanced and usually roundly denounced.  Try speaking of Muslims as human beings who have the right to their own definitions of those words and see how many people react with cries of what the Koran "says" or how not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are clearly Muslims.

Muslims do not get to define themselves; we alone have the power of definition, and we will not give it up.  Definition, after all, is interpretation; and the Enlightenment has taught us there can be but one interpretation of every event, and that interpretation must be the right one.

We are all fundamentalists, now; or at least, we want to be.

If we don't like someone else's fundamentalism, we denounce them as "medieval."  But read a medieval work, like Chaucer's or Dante's.  Read "The Pearl" or "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" or  "Piers Plowman" and marvel at the complexity of the world they reflect, the subtly of understanding of the human condition.  Study the visions of Julian of Norwich, where God is father and mother, where Jesus assures Julian that sin is small rather than insurmountable, that God's mercy indeed means "all things shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well," that even sinners will be redeemed.  There is no simplicity of interpretation in these works, no "fundamentalism" that is to be taken as the final and authoritative word against which not questions can be put.  The rigid certainty of fundamentalism is modern.  It is post-Enlightenment.  It is today.

The desire to distinguish religion from reason; to denounce religion and expunge it from the earth; to drive religion into a "private" enclave from whence it can never escape and where it can bother no one?  Modern.  Post-enlightenment.  Western.  Today.

Yesterday all the past....and we still insist we can learn nothing from it.  Yet if the "Bronze Age shepherds" could walk among us now, they would wonder at how blinkered and ignorant and sad we were, for all our hooting about our "progress."  We insist we no longer have souls that need any care, but we equally insist we have "minds" which can be "downloaded," through some inexplicable process we are sure is coming, into computers, granting us immortality.  "Soul" is a chimerical medieval fantasy, but "mind" is....reasonable?  Why?

We can pile up the examples of how much more we are than they were, our imaginary time-traveling shepherds, but they would look at us and ask:  "How?"  What do we know that they didn't know, about getting through each day; about doing the job in front of us; about being a small player in a very large social order; about staying alive until it ends for you?  We have made it possible for so many of us not to do any hard labor; but so many of us still do.  And like those shepherds in their Bronze Age, or in the 1st century, our laborers are just as invisible; our society tells them they are just as unimportant.

So why is it we still remember those shepherds?  We still point at them, and laugh, and say "They knew nothing!"  How much progress is that?  They knew nothing, because they didn't know what we know.

And there is nothing more defining than that.  You can't be more certain of the boundaries of the acceptable, of the fence place around the heilige, the pure, the holy, the wall that keeps the unscathed unscathed, and the rabble out, that defines "good" and "bad," "us" instead of "them," than with a definition, than with control of the concepts and the power to be sure you maintain control of the concepts.

Indeed, it's fundamental to modern discourse.

The Angels of our Better Nature are Weeping

A staggering 59.5 million people were forcibly displaced around the world in 2014, according to the latest report from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, setting a record. That’s 8.3 million more than last year, for the largest one-year jump since the UNHCR began recording. This means that one out of every 122 people in the world is displaced. If that population were a country, would be the 24th-largest in the world. That number includes refugees, internally displaced people, and those seeking asylum.

But, you know, that's okay, because the angels of our better nature have prevailed, and violence is down worldwide from what it once was, according to linguist Stephen Pinker.

Teaching at Harvard and being a scientist (of language) means he's right.  Or something.  Anyway, I'm sure there's a way this statistic means things are just getting better and better in this best of all possible worlds.

Jon Stewart is figuring out satire won't change the world.  Voltaire could have told him that a few centuries ago.

Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time....

Because I can't draw political cartoons and it's not Photoshopped....

You can throw Ted Cruz into the mix, but here's a brief roundup of the public policy conversations going on over the weekend, conducted in the agora of the permanent Presidential political campaign. (Side note:  I've been catching up on "The West Wing" on Netflix; curiously I had no interest in it when it was broadcast, mostly because I don't like starting a TV series I have to watch once a week at a certain time for only a few weeks a year.  Anyway, in one season, just as Martin Sheen is re-elected President, the staff learns the V.P. is already lining up hard support for his campaign, four years later.  Watching this show and paying attention to what happens on the news now, I see how Pollyannaish Aaron Sorkin's show was, but now much he was trying to make us pay attention.  His version of something of a parable for the rest of us, but, of course, we don't really like parables.  Getting back to my thesis now....)

Rick Perry explained that the shooting in Charleston was an "accident" (he later had his staff explain he meant "incident."  As Charlie Pierce used to say:  "This close to English....").  But Perry also blamed the shooting on prescription drugs, which nobody tried to explain away.

Jeb! (and is anybody going to notice that's an acronym, not a name?) wants to recall he stood up for Terri Schiavo.

And if you don't remember that particular circus:

At the time Jeb (!) stepped in, the people in Ms. Schiavo's hospice were already under constant siege. A nearby elementary school had been vacated for almost a month due to bomb scares. An $10,000 bounty had been placed on the head of Michael Schiavo, and one guy already had been busted by the FBI for allegedly trying to collect it. Judges had been terrorized. Jeb (!) didn't care about any of this. (This is not to mention the fact that almost the entire country was begging people like Jeb -!- to butt out.) His dim sibling was president and he was governor of Florida and they believed there was political hay to be made out of keeping a brain-dead woman alive, and that was all that ever mattered.

It was particularly grotesque.

Lindsey Graham, Jeb!, and Rick Santorum, are all sticking to their line that the shootings in Charleston were about Christians, not about black people.

And Chuck Todd on Sunday, Father's Day, the Sunday after a brutal massacre of black Americans by a young white supremacist who stopped to reload four times, because one bullet for each victim was not enough(?), ran a video clip about black convicts and firearms in black America.  But it's okay, he asked us to watch it and remain "colorblind".  Don't assume he was trying to channel Stephen Colbert's "Stephen Colbert," because Todd's not that good. (Charlie Pierce has a better response to that "accident,"....er, incident; but the first link gives you a bit more of the story.)

There are, of course, calls for yet another "national discussion" of the topic of race in America.  And yes, it is long past time for such a discussion.  But we'll have to muzzle little Howie Kurtz, for his own safety:

“After a psychopath opened fire at a black church in Charleston, some people could not resist the urge to score political points,” Kurtz wrote, apparently oblivious to the fact that that’s exactly what he’s doing. “This is becoming a disgusting spectacle after these increasingly common mass shootings. And it is reprehensible.”

Little Howie's umbrage was over someone using the words "Dylann Roof" and "FoxNews" in the same sentence.

It's not the shootings that are the problem; it's the politics.  Let's cue up that discussion, shall we?  Chuck Todd and Howie Kurtz will moderate because, why not?  They're famous white men on TeeVee, right?  What could go wrong?

That whole withdrawal from society thing is looking better and better....

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition."

"You know the great thing about the state of Iowa is, I'm pretty sure you all define gun control the same way we do in Texas -- hitting what you aim at," Cruz said at a town hall meeting Friday in Red Oak.

Ted Cruz makes a funny.

News reports are that Dylan Roof reloaded at least four times, in order to shoot 9 people.  Where did the rest of the bullets go? Or did he want to make sure everyone he shot was "really dead"? Is this, or is this not, "gun control"?

The gun battle which ended with Tamerlan Tsarnaev being run over by his brother, lasted 8 minutes.   Tamerlan drove away from the battle. Did the police not have "gun control"?  The boat Dzokar was captured in, had "at least 108 bullet holes."  Lack of gun control?

Guns in movies don't fire bullets, and the only people "hit" are the ones the camera aims at; the people prepared with squibs and special effects explosives, and probably they "die" over and over again before the director is satisfied.  The "good guys" never get shot to death.

"Gun control," I guess.

At least when Rip Van Winkle woke up, things had improved.....

As if to prove my point:

“Back then and before, the institutions of government — police, courts, organized segregation — often worked to protect perpetrators of racially motivated violence, rather than their victims,” the editors continued. But the notion that such manifestations of systemic racism are over is patently ridiculous — even more so when you consider that this shooting happened just a few miles from where Walter Scott was gunned down by a North Charleston police officer earlier this year.

“The universal condemnation of the murders at the Emanuel AME Church” demonstrates that — Walter Scott notwithstanding — “the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King [in his response to the Birmingham bombing] no longer exists.”

And the Confederate Battle Flag which flies in Charleston and cannot even be lowered without a vote of the South Carolina Legislature, proves what about institutional racism?

Oh, you weren't through yet?

"What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity," the editorial stated. "It is no small solace that in committing such an act today, he stands alone."

It's about evil, not institutions. It's not about race, because it's never about race; especially when white people are the perpetrators rather than the victims.  They cannot be representative or corporate; they can only be individuals.

And evil can only be individual.  Individual, and white.  But the wrong kind of white; the kind whites don't acknowledge as one of their own, because being evil casts you out from the clan.  Gotta keep the clan pure; gotta keep the clan clean; gotta keep the clan holy.

It's not about race, because it's never about race.  It's about evil.  And there's nothing you can ever dow with that, except identify it.  Identify it, mark it as individual and aberrant, and expunge it from the body.  Muslims are not evil; they are terrorists.  Blacks are not evil, they are thugs.

Whites, individually, can be evil; but you can't blame other whites for that. You can't get that stuff on the rest of us.  The evil doer stands alone.  It's no small solace, so it makes the rest of us whites feel pretty good about ourselves.   After all, random individuals aren't like us; they're evil.

And that's what really matters.

Still unclear about the concept

The SBC respectfully requests that you not recognize this picture.

As Southern Baptist Christians, we are committed to Biblical faith and ethics. As a result, this body of Believers stands on the authority of Scripture and God's Truth as central to our lives.

What the Bible says about marriage is clear, definitive and unchanging. We affirm biblical, traditional, natural marriage as the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. The Scriptures' teaching on marriage is not negotiable. We stake our lives upon the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

Consequently, we will not accept, nor adhere to, any legal redefinition of marriage issued by any political or judicial body including the United States Supreme Court. We will not recognize same-sex "marriages", our churches will not host same-sex ceremonies, and we will not perform such ceremonies.

While we affirm our love for all people, including those struggling with same-sex attraction, we cannot and will not affirm the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior or any behavior that deviates from God's design for marriage. We also believe religious freedom is at stake within this critical issue – that our first duty is to love and obey God, not man.

Therefore, we strongly encourage all Southern Baptist pastors, leaders, educators, and churches to openly reject any mandated legal definition of marriage and to use their influence to affirm God's design for life and relationships. As the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination with over 16 million members, we stake our very lives and future on the Truth of God's Word.

We also join together to support those who stand for natural marriage in the corporate world, the marketplace, education, entertainment, media and elsewhere with our prayers and influence, and resources.

What does this mean?  Even the SBC isn't sure:

[Pastor Jack Graham, a former SBC President] told me Christians must be prepared for the aftermath of a court decision that legalizes gay marriage.

“Many people must be willing to count the cost on this,” he said.

So what would it look like if 16 million Southern Baptists engaged in civil disobedience?

“I hope we never live to find out what that looks like,” Graham told me. “There are many Christians today who are preparing if necessary to go to jail.”

How many bakers have been jailed for refusing to bake a cake?  Anybody?  Anybody?  Beuller?  Ferris Beuller?  What kind of protest can be mounted against same-sex marriages?  Not recognize them?  What, like we don't recognize certain governments as legitimate?  What does this look like?

I guess civil disobedience will look like this, huh?

In the 1960's, many people in different conservative Christian denominations believed that racial integration was against God's Law because it led to the "mixing of seed" -- relationships between two persons of different races that often lead to interracial marriage unless those marriages were forbidden by law. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and other fundamentalist and other evangelical denominations mounted boycotts against restaurants, hotels, and other companies serving the general public if they served people of all races equally.

On the other hand, this isn't a significant pronouncement so much as its merely silly.  In states without laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination, even a Supreme Court ruling on marriage won't suddenly force bakers and florists to cater to same-sex couples,  And in states with such laws, the penalties are civil, not criminal.  Besides:

There is literally nothing–not even opposing gay marriage–that would unify the behaviors of every single Southern Baptist pastor and church attender. They’ve been called “the Battling Baptists” for a reason. 

O come, O come, Emanuel....

I wish I knew more history on this subject, but the next time I read some crank on the internet insisting we keep "religion" our of their politics (by which they invariably mean any political idea with which they disagree), I'm going to keep this in mind:

In the wake of the suppressed rebellion, Charleston lawyer Edwin Holland specifically blamed black churches. These preachers, he accused, carried “the Sacred Volume of God in one hand” while spreading ideas “of discord and destruction, and secretly disperse among our Negro Population, the seeds of discontent and sedition” with the other. The city decided the [Emanuel] African Methodist Episcopal Church [in Charleston, South Carolina], which attracted nearly 2,000 congregants, was the problem. New draconian measures were instituted that banned religious services without a white person present. The AME Church, only built four years previously, was then burned to the ground even as the conspirators were hung from the sky.

Seven years later, the state constructed an arsenal just around the corner to house arms and ammunition. They wanted to be prepared the next time their black population conspired an insurrection. Soon, in an agreement with the War Department, this location transformed into the South Carolina Military Academy–also known as the Citadel. The crown jewel of southern militarism, then, was in part birthed as a way to protect whites from the type of racial threats the AME Church posed.

The "Sacred Volume of God" must never, of course, spread ideas "of discord and destruction" in society.  I mean, how is the Kingdom of God like that?  How are the first to remain first, and the last to remain last if ideas of discord and destruction are spread?

Amirite?

Besides, it's not about race, because it's never about race.

Fear itself

Reading about the shooting in Charleston, I realized the difference between a "lone gunman" and a "terrorist."  And yes, it has a lot to do with race.

"Terrorism" is contagious.  It was always a symptom of chaos, of the ground beneath our feet being unstable, the stability beneath our comfortable reality being unreliable.  Charlie Pierce said of the shooting in Charleston that:

There is a ferocious underground fire running through American history. It rages unseen until it flares again from the warm earth. It has raged from the death of Denmark Vesey in 1822 to the death of the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pinckney on Wednesday night.

He's right; except the shooter was a white man, so Mr. Pierce is wrong.  Violence is only terrorism when it is contagious, and it is only contagious when it involves non-whites.  All whites are "lone gun men."  All non-whites are "terrorists," if they aren't "thugs."  The latter terms are distinguishable, but the intent is much the same:  violence among brown people is contagious.  It spreads like fire in dry grass; and white people fear being burned out of their comfortable homes.  Violence by whites is just an aberration, just the act of an individual.  It's nothing to be afraid of.

So when two crackpots travel from Arizona to a Dallas suburb, they are representatives of a wider danger to white people:  "Muslim terrorists."  When a 20-something white kid walks into a Black AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, an historically black church with roots in early 19th century (pre Civil War) America, sits quietly for an hour, then calmly shoots 9 people,  reloading five times to be sure he can complete the task, and tells one survivor: "I have to do it.  You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go;" then it's the act of a lone gunman.  You'll notice in that statement that the individual must act, but the race is to blame.  Racism, of course, is reprehensible.  But a Charleston reporter no doubt thought himself reasonable when he asked a group of black men what black community leaders could do to prevent shootings like this.   Whites act individually; blacks act corporately.

And the only way to respond is to treat them as a corporate being:  one stands for the whole.  Black men outside a black church speak for a black "community," just as black members of a church are responsible for the sins of that community, as perceived by a white racist.  The white individual, however, doesn't reflect the opinions of the white community.  He is a "lone gun man."  Black men must speak for the black community.  White men are individuals.  Black men are a group entity.

When the shooter is a "lone gunman" we must aver we don't know what the motivation is, that this is an "aberration," because whites are incapable of acting corporately.   Even before the police had caught the suspect, even before the survivors had been interviewed, we knew the shooter was white.  So his acts had to be individual, and also aberrant.  White individuals can never represent whites as a whole.

Conveniently, evil is individual, too.  We can unite against the evil individual:

"I think this is one of those situations — maybe it's a good point where we don't know the motivation of the person who did it," Giuliani said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "So maybe this can unite us because whoever did this is just an evil person."

Terrorism is corporate.  White people are incapable of being corporately blamed.  Some individuals are evil, most are good.  Brown people, though:  Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, African-Americans:  they are capable of being corporately evil.  If two crazed gunman can't get past a school district police officer and a city police officer, they still represent the threat that "Muslims" across the country are about to rise up and slit our throats as we sleep.  If one young white man calmly shoots 9 people in a black church, reloading to be sure he meets his quota, he's neither a terrorist nor a thug (who always travel in groups, in conspiracies, in vast numbers of evil intent and shadowy lives), he is just "evil."

And evil happens.  What're ya gonna do about it?  You can't even properly get upset.  Catch the guy, put him in jail, problem solved.

Terrorism, on the other hand, is an "existential threat."  By which we suppose we mean a threat to our existence; but we actually mean a threat to our being, to our very ability to be.  How right we are; and yet we do not realize it.

In other news, 9 states issue license plates honoring the "Sons of Confederate Veterans."  Texas, said the Supreme Court today, does not have to be the 10th.  In one small way, we stand apart from the rest of the South.

Gotta take your good news about racism in America where you can find it.

Finding the religious connection to almost anything.....

The Kingdom of God is like this

A trader sold all his merchandise to buy a single pearl

(But how is the Kingdom of God like that?)

John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus (New York: HarperSanFranciscso, 1994, 1st ed.), p. 93

Here's the thing about this story:

The law Abbott signed calls for the creation of an electronic payments system that will allow gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium depositors to write checks against their accounts, making the depository into a bank – one that will create a metal-backed money supply intended to challenge the paper currency issued by the Federal Reserve - or "Yankee dollars" as one of the law's top supporters calls them. 

How is that going to work, exactly?  The depository will either have to issue its own currency (a la Bitcoin), or it will have to loan money (cash) to the bullion owner, against the value of the collateral (the bullion) on deposit.

Which value fluctuates, based on the market; that is, based on how much currency someone will give you for a bar of gold at any point in time.  Because the bullion only has value insofar as that value can be determined in terms of currency.  Otherwise it's just very, very, very heavy trading beads.

The only other way it works is if each check causes a gold bar to be sold and converted into cash in order to redeem the check drawn against that bullion.

So either you cash out your bullion, or you borrow against it; and the latter means the bank nee depository, is going to charge interest on every check you write.   Or the bank nee depository issues its own currency.

And who the hell is gonna take that?

Gold GTT

Because next Texas issues it's own scrip...or something.

After reading about the "bullion depository" now law in Texas (courtesy of NTodd), I went looking for more information on it.

Google "Texas bullion" and you get a lot of websites dealing in precious metals and sales of same.  Quelle surprise.

What the hard news articles don't mention (because they are very short) is this:

....Texas has no gold bars in the Federal Reserve’s New York vault. And what the state has is not worth a billion dollars. Instead some 4,200 gold bars bought in 2011 by the University of Texas’s endowment fund (the second largest in the country after Harvard’s) are stored in the basement vault of HSBC’s headquarters at 450 5th Avenue in New York City, just south of the New York Public Library. For the last four years, the endowment has paid an estimated $1 million per year to store their gold there. (If it had been at the New York Fed the cost would have totaled about $15,400 over that period). And the new depository law does not require the university’s endowment fund to relocate the gold to Texas.

Because, frankly, the Lege dare not mess with UT's endowment.

This small but important fact (that the State of Texas actually doesn't own any gold bullion)  is probably why most of the "news" on the internet about this is from sites selling precious metals as a "hedge" against....well, armageddon.

Because when world economies collapse and we're no longer going to the theaters to see "Mad Max" because we're living it, guns (which need precisely machined bullets) and precious metals (which you can't eat, or even throw) are gonna get you through.

However:  "The law allows state agencies, but also citizens, businesses, nonprofits and banks, to use the depository to hold gold and other precious metals."  So that's okay.  Soon as we build the damned thing, we can get UT to move its less than $500 million in bullion back to Texas from New Yawk Citee.  And other gold bugs can deposit their Kruggerands or what have you, because:  freedumb.

I wonder how much the state is gonna let private investors charge to store the gold in order to recoup the cost of building this depository in the first place.  Or is it gonna wind up like the toll road nobody wanted that not only didn't take any traffic off I-35 between San Antonio and Dallas, but went into default?

Yeah, this one has "genius" written all over it.

Summer time, and a young man's fancy turns to martyrdom

Which is understandable if you're stuck in Texas for the summer.  But this I don't get:

Dr. Rick Scarborough, a prominent Baptist pastor and president of the activist group Vision America tells News Radio 1200 WOAI it is a matter of whether to follow God's law or the politicians law, and he'll go with God.

"However the law is changed, I will do what I have always done," he said. "I will continue to preach that homosexuality is a sinful life style."

Scarborough says some 40,000 pastors and church leaders have signed a petition at www.defendmarriage.org. He says those who signed the petition will 'resist all government efforts to require them to accept gay marriage, and they will accept any fine and jail time to protect their religious freedom and the freedom of others.'

I have no idea what Dr. Scarborough imagines is going to happen, but organizing people to march in the streets in protest against same sex marriages doesn't really have the same appeal as the civil rights marches of Dr. King.  And I don't make that comparison myself:

"Dr. King, in the Birmingham Jail, said Christians have a 'duty to obey and respect God's law," Scarborough said, pointing out that King was willing to go to jail for his opposition to something he found evil...segregation, and he is willing to do the same.

Dr. King went to jail because laws against protest put him there.  Dr. King's letter from jail was about the gross injustice of American history.  I'm not sure what gross injustice of American history will be visited upon Dr. Scarbrough and people who believe as he does if same-sex marriages are allowed under law, but I'm sure he'll think of a way.  Probably from the comfort of his home, though.

You know, like St. Benedict:

Other evangelical Christians are also talking about what has come to be known as the 'Benedict Option,' after St. Benedict, who recommended that Christians retreat into monastical orders to maintain their faith as the Western Roman Empire fell to paganism in the late 5th Century.

The 'Benedict Option' has evangelical Christians forming into insular communities, much like Hasidic Jews in New York or the Amish in Pennsylvania, where the communities can respect, as much as possible, the religious teachings that the find important, including opposition to gay marriage. 

Don't let the doorknob hit ya.....well, that's unkind.  I'm still trying to figure out what "government efforts" will be made to make them "accept gay marriage."  Loving v. Virginia said the states could not criminalize mixed race marriages, or ban them at all, and yet no pastor has ever gone to jail for refusing to sanctify a mixed-race marriage, or a mixed-religion marriage, for that matter.  The First Amendment protects both speech and religion, so Dr. Scarbrough is free to denounce same-sex marriage as loudly and longly as he wishes; he is also free to refuse to every officiate at such a wedding.

He's even free to keep trying to drive those nails into his palms, though self-crucifixion is hard.

Then there's Mike Huckabee, constitutional skolar:

“Presidents have understood that the Supreme Court cannot make a law, they cannot make it, the legislature has to make it, the executive branch has to sign it and enforce it,” Huckabee told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “And the notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government.”

Sorry, Governor, but nobody is going to force a Constitutional crisis over this issue, especially since they have ruled on marriage laws before (Loving v. Virginia, for one).  You can ignore the ruling if you want to, but the rest of the country is not going to.

In fact, Loving is really instructive here, because there's a whole series of yahoos, including Ben Carson, Judge Roy Moore, Tom DeLay, and Texas state representative Cecil Bell, who think the Supreme Court has no business messing around with state marriage laws.  We should ask each of them if they think states should once again criminalize, or at least ban, mixed-race marriages.  And I'm still unclear what defiance will mean in this context:  Tom DeLay won't divorce his wife and marry a man?

Oddly, none of these people holds a position in government where they have to issue a marriage license or sanction a same-sex wedding.  So who do they think they're defying, and how do they expect to do it?

"Nothing will mar your mood"

So I've started this inter-blog dialogue, which is a good thing, because I crave dialogue above almost all things (well, beer and hamburgers come in ahead of dialogue, but only barely, and I went with the immediate family to a local brewery today, so I'm ready for dialogue!).

My "potshot" at Fr. McBrien was just that: springing off something he said which I was rapidly informed was an early opinion later recanted.  I remember having much the same reaction to Merton's Seven-Storey Mountain, and being told not to take all of Merton from that one, early book.  It's also a lesson seminary students are supposed to learn:  that no matter how much you think you know, you don't know all there is to know so listen and be patient:  there's more information coming, be it theological or about who gets to put up what Christmas decorations in the worship space.

Dialogue is about listening, not just about talking.

Which brings us here, and an encomium on Reinhold Niebuhr, surely the fastest way to my theological heart.  As presented by McBrien even Niebuhr provides dialogue to me, trained to see the basiliea tou theou as imminent and not quite so wholly transcendent as Niebuhr's version; although the basiliea I perceive/expect is also in constant motion, because the first have to be last, in order to be first, and so there's no triumphalism in it.  It's a way of recognizing that:

every partial realization of justice and love inevitably contains elements which stand in contradiction to both these values.

"Higher realizations of historic justice would be possible if it were more fully understood that all such realizations contain contradictions to as well as approximations of, the ideal love," he wrote. "Sanctification in the realm of social relations demands recognition of the impossibility of perfect sanctification."

Which I like to think of as a theological version of Godel's theorem of incompleteness:  no system we can even humanly imagine can fail to prompt a question it cannot answer, and so all such systems remain fundamentally incomplete on their own terms.  It is something, frankly, the law grapples with constantly.  It is good to recognize our limitations.

Which, I think, are by and large being replaced again, already, with the expectations that technology, specifically "digital technology," will provide the solutions which humankind has been waiting for.  And if not digital technology alone, then just technology as a concept.  We think this because computers have changed everything; although more fundamental changes in human life have come from much more mundane (by today's standards) things:  like vaccines (smallpox, polio, most of the "childhood diseases" we think nothing of anymore, but which terrorized my parent's generation; not so long ago, that); public sanitation (clean water, sewer systems), and antibiotics (until penicillin, doctors could really "cure" almost nothing).  Not to mention modern communications methods, engineering which has provided stable water supplies and control of rivers (Austin, Texas, where I used to live, was regularly flooded until LBJ established the Lower Colorado River Authority and, through a series of dams, controlled the river that runs through it).

Be sensible:  on that scale, computers have done nothing for us except provide access to cat pictures and to people who don't think like us, against whom we rail by joining with people who do think like us, thus producing:  well, the "bowling alone" phenomena and the increasing inability of government to be anything except a polarizing force.

But I digress; except I don't, because it is the very access to contradiction that fuels the internet now.

We don't like contradictions.  Niebuhr insisted we dwell on them.  Kierkegaard called them the highest desire of the thinker (and so we don't honor thinkers, today; we honor people who market  very expensive electric cars on the market and promise to set up quonset huts on Mars for a lucky few to die there).  On-line atheists rant about the "contradictions" in the Bible, as if proclaiming light both a wave and a particle was as commonsensical as declaring August in Texas "hot."  And then they insist that all persons who disagree with them withdraw from public life, thus making the world a better place for:  people who think like them.

And if it isn't atheists, it is people who don't like Jerry Seinfeld because of his comment about college audiences for comedy; or it's police arresting teenagers at swimming pools; or it's people declaring their right to insult other people who hold religious beliefs they think they understand, but they don't; or it's just people being damned fools in public, period, and the audacity they have to be part of the human family.

Never think my thoughts, never share my hearth, whoever does such things.

Sophocles was a bit more specific in his declaration of who was unfit for the polis.  We just react to an opinion we don't share.  We sit as judge, jury, and executioner on the life of any person who crosses our attention, and we KNOW all about that person before the story about them has stopped thundering around the virtual halls of our private marketplace of ideas, a marketplace where only outrage is sold, and that by the half-ton.  We have turned the world into our agora, and declared all others unfit to even be there, and we find a new target for our animosity and our exclusion every week.

And if it isn't the outrage du jour, it is neuro-science or sociology or just something "sciency" which will solve all the world's ills if we just recognize it for the truth it finally, FINALLY brings to us.  It is science which will stop us from being monsters.  Even though it was science which made the monstrous mass deaths of the 20th century possible, and was really the engine of the Holocaust*.  No, science will be our salvation.

This is what technology has done for us.  This is the wonder of the internet.

And the funny part is, this is what Niebuhr was talking about nearly 100 years ago.  And it is part of why the "Lost Generation" was lost.  Today's "New Atheists" are punks and quislings against what T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway went through.  They know nothing of the terrors which Jean Paul Sartre endured, they have learned nothing from C.P. Snow or the slaughterhouse Europe became in World War I, a slaughterhouse that was industrialized and trained directly on citizens in World War II.  It was science and technology which made it possible for Stalin and Pol Pot to kill so many.  It was communication technology as much as machetes which turned Rwanda into a killing field in the late 20th century, which allowed a handful of people to so brutally control so many in South Africa; in Haiti; in Uganda; El Salvador; Nicaragua; Honduras.

Europe was civilized, and then Europe went to hell, and hell had reign there for half a century, and it destroyed an entire generation of men in England alone, not to mention the slaughter in the USSR from the war, apart from Stalin's madness.  It was a hell visited on Europe as the consequence of turning as much of the world as they could get their hands on into hell, for the benefit of Europeans.  And now we forget all that, and the horrors of American history and hegemony, and declare our hearts pure because our science is magical and our technology is supreme and we can access all the world's data in the palm of our hand almost anywhere on the planet!

And all that data is not even knowledge, much less wisdom; but it seems to us to be power, and that's good enough.  That's what it's all about anyway:  who has the power.  The internet has given us the power to ignore the world and favor those of like mind, and reinforced in us the belief that those who are not with us are against us, and while we will tolerate their madness because it is not our wisdom, we will tolerate it only if it goes away and leaves us alone.  We seek the holy, the heilige, the pure, the unscathed, and we seek it in creating a community of people who think just like us.

Nothing less will do.

Because we think there is still something, SOMETHING, we can do.  There is; but it isn't that:

"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

Father, forgive us; for we still know not what we do.


*The nightmare child of eugenics and the Industrial Revolution.

Potshots

Still waiting for the Big One.  It's in the oven; it's just not done yet.  In the meantime you can see where I'm trending....

When I read a statement like this:

Our balloons were no sooner in the air, floating lazily in the reflected glow of the strobe lights, when word came forth that certain late entries in the secularity sweepstakes were to be given a respectful glance; black theology, liberation theology, feminist theology. Affirmative action, perhaps.

I think about this:

And here’s a grim footnote to this saga: in 2012, in preparation for the new charter school district, cryptically named the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy System, the emergency manager laid off every single school employee.

“We knew it was coming,” explained one of the city’s longtime elementary school teachers. She asked not to be identified, so I’ll call her Susan. “We received letters in the mail.”

Then, around one a.m. the night before the new charter school district was slated to open, she received a voicemail asking if she could teach the following morning. She agreed, arriving at Martin Luther King Elementary School for what would be the worst year in her more than two-decade career.

When we visit that school, a single-story brick building on the east side of town, the glass of the front door had been smashed and the halls were empty, save for two people removing air conditioning units. But in the fall of 2012, when Susan was summoned, Martin Luther King was still filled with students — and chaos. Schedules were in disarray. Student computers were broken. There were supply shortages of just about everything, even rolls of toilet paper. The district’s already barebones special education program had been further gutted. The “new,” non-unionized teaching staff — about 10% of whom initially did not have valid teaching certificates — were overwhelmingly young, inexperienced, and white. (Approximately 75% of the town’s residents are African American.)

“Everything was about money, I felt, and everyone else felt it, too,” Susan says.

Because that last sentence is a perfect summation of politics and governance in modern America.  Contrast it with the wholly idealistic and romanticized soap opera vision of governance reflected in "The West Wing,"  a show that looks even more Disneyfied and Pollyannaish for the fact the worst demons in it are right wing fundamentalists who don't have the bite of Jerry Falwell (who accused Hillary Clinton of murder, and yet somehow was never shamed out of polite company).  The struggles of the staff in the Bartlett White House are to horse trade for legislation in the manner of FDR or LBJ or even Harry Truman.  That show (I never watched it, but now through the graces of Netflix, I'm binging on it) is a time capsule of what truly looks, now, like a simpler age.  The pilot opens with every staff member carrying a pager, and by the third episode we're told solemnly that "The internet is here to stay."  I was reflecting on that in a restaurant yesterday where I could connect to the internet on my cell phone, and only restaurants have pagers (those little "coasters" they give you to tell you your food is ready, or your table is now available).  But the real change is that while they could worry about saying "the era of big government is over" and they could dismiss "fringe" House members and fret over right wing Christian leaders, all of those people now run the Congress.  The troublesome "fringe" politicians in "The West Wing" are senators and former vice presidential candidates and the majority of Congress insists the very jobs they worked so hard to get and keep are the problem with America today.

Except, of course, insofar as those jobs protect and serve the people with the money to put those Congresspersons and Senators in office.  Because the era of government protecting the wealthy, be i in 21st century America or first century Rome (hello, Jesus!), is never over.

The struggles in modern D.C., and more and more in states like Wisconsin and Michigan (we've been doing it in Texas so long we take it for granted), is not over horse trades for votes, but over which throats to cut, which group to disparage.  Don't make me come up with examples, it's too discouraging.

Chris Christie has decided college students have a moral obligation to go into debt, because they'll all be rich when they graduate and why should the state help them with that?  The state, of course, is only obligated to help banks, casinos, and corporations get and stay rich.  Individuals can enjoy the pleasures of indentured servitude.

And while you may admire the work of Karl Rahner and Yves Conger (Fr. McBrien betrays his bias by praising Roman Catholic theologians and disparaging Protestant ones), the work of James Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez and Jan Sorbino and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, has done more for individuals than the Church has.  (One could make the liberation theology argument that theology should not be used to buttress institutions, an argument that might raise Father McBrien's hackles, were he still here.  That, too, is another topic.).  "The West Wing" is full of people concerned with individuals, not just institutions.  It's noble and fine and good to see that on TV; it was also almost completely a fantasy, and as influential as a snowflake on a balance scale, in the grand scheme of things.

Theology is probably no more than a snowflake in the best of times.  But it should always be on the right side of the balance scales.  There are times when theology becomes just another bulwark of institutions.  At those times, if theology cannot serve the people, it must yield

Things don't matter.  Ideas don't matter. 

People matter.

The Monks are Right

I woke up this morning, as usual, full of beans and words (well, inasmuch as both are metaphors), and just as ready to release the products of both, as is often my won't.

And then I went outside and took 10 minutes to finish a landscaping project, putting the last piece into place for this phase (what a ground sounding term for such a simply effort) of the plan.

So now my mind is on better things, and I can spare the world my...efforts.

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

I'm going to find some more work to do.  Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

O Tomorrow! O Tomorrow!

So, the future, according to Elon Musk, is that we will be living on Mars.  A one-way trip, but hey!  Living on Mars!

Right?  Away from all these people, where we can do what we want!  O, Pioneers!  Right?  (although actually, much, much closer to Forster's machine, except if the machine breaks down, life really does end.)

According to Ridley Scott and Andy Weir, if anything can go wrong on Mars, it will.  But still, a resolute individual will be a shining example of survival to us all (sort of like Elon Musk, only without the electric car).  And besides, there's a basic human instinct to help people in trouble, no matter who they are.  (Which is the most laughable part of that trailer.)

And then there's the question of Christian eschatology.  Not apocalyptic eschatology, but the effort to "engage today’s realities against the horizon of an ultimate divine future."  I connect the film and Elon Musk to this question through this:

Eschatological hope...is active. It demands engagement....This is not the case for Tomorrowland’s futurological optimism. In this Disney-world there are a select few who are chosen to go to Tomorrowland as the innovators who will shape our future. Our hope is in them. Our hope is that someone else will do the work needed to right the world’s wrongs. We can go about our business, confident that someone out there is doing what needs to be done. We can feel free to ignore what is causing those problems, to avoid asking who benefits because of them, and to neglect considering what it would take to fix them.

As in the film, when something momentous occurs, it won’t be on account of us. We, like them, will simply raise our smartphones and post pics. Doing something to change the world? That’s for the elites. For the chosen. Not for me.

Of course, the writers of Tomorrowland certainly mean for us to identify with the heroine. We are supposed to understand ourselves as one of the chosen, with a contribution of our own to make. However, the trope of the Chosen One in such stories always entails the fact that there are many more who are not chosen than who are, more who stay at home than who embark on the hero’s quest.

From a futurological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Building a better world is for those with requisite aptitude and training. From an eschatological perspective, though, this is anathema. The theology of active, worldly engagement that a critical eschatology extols takes its model from Jesus’ open invitation to all to turn toward and labor on behalf of the kingdom of God. All are charged with loving God with their whole hearts and minds and with loving their neighbors as themselves, which means that all carry the responsibility of contributing to the furthering of God’s eschatological mission.


There are to be no spectators.

In stark contrast, Tomorrowland exhorts us to take comfort in the existence of an elite cadre of gifted technologists who, among themselves and apart from most of us, will “make the world a better place.” This is a false messianism that short-circuits hope.

Eschatological hope, on the other hand, causes us to question our world without ceasing because we know that no human technology or system comes without a cost to someone somewhere. It causes us to address suffering and injustice where we find it because that’s what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Unlike holding out for a hero, this hope charges us all with taking on that responsibility. The exceptionalism of American-style individualism has no place in eschatological hope, which is held in common for the common good by the common disciple.

Granted, a film like "Tomorrowland" is not a film like "The Martian," but the two aren't that far different, either.  American action films demand a singular hero who saves himself and/or saves the world.  Usually if the hero saves himself (and it's always a "he"; Ripley in "Alien" is the exception that proves the rule), he saves the audience, too, by proving grit and determination and persistence will overcome any enemy (as in "Alien;" or any other action movie).  We don't have to do anything but root for the hero.

We are merely spectators.  We identify with the hero, but we don't have to do any of the work of the hero.  Ironically, Christopher Nolan understood this in his "Batman" trilogy.  Bruce Wayne wanted to inspire Gotham City, not protect it (which is all Tony Stark can imagine doing in "Age of Ultron.").  In the final film, he finally achieves his goal, and he leaves the city to the people he has inspired to make it a place to live, rather than a place to cower.

The basiliea tou theou it isn't, but there are to be no spectators left in Gotham City.  Matt Damon's character, on the other hand, is only there to prove to us that some of us can, under extraordinary circumstances, do extraordinary things.  With the right equipment, we can "science the shit outta this!"   Damon's character won't save the world, but he does make us feel better about ourselves, without requiring us to do anything but watch.  This, too, is a false messianism that short-circuits hope.  It's Beowulf, without the death of the hero and the grim reality that now we are doomed without our hero.  Damon's hero makes us feel all that effort and technology is worthwhile if we can at least save the life of one white man (do you think they'd have made the film with Idris Alba stranded on Mars?).

I dare say there's almost nothing in that film that makes us "question our world without ceasing because we know that no human technology or system comes without a cost to someone somewhere."  Nothing about an action film "causes us to address suffering and injustice where we find it," nothing about watching a hero prevail against all odds "charges us all with taking on [the] responsibility" to address that suffering and injustice.  Matt Damon is not rescued, despite the stirring (and silly) words that open the trailer, "for the common good by the common disciple."  He's rescued because the film proves him worthy of our admiration and our effort.  If he wasn't an exemplary individual, a figure of American-style individualism, we wouldn't cheer others risking their lives to save his.

The common good is really only applicable to those we think worthy of it's protection.  Which is why Christian soteriology came up with the Rapture and various visions of the Tribulation (as I remember from my college years when I did some research on the subject, the three schools were:  Pre-millenialists, Post-millenialists, and, of course, amillenialists.  All a matter of who got to enjoy the "Millennium" and who got to suffer the Tribulation when.  Can't be givin' that grace o' God away without a price, now, can we?).  But eschatological hope that expects the arc of the universe to bend towards justice is not necessarily a hope for punishment, too.  Yes, justice is frightening to the unjust; but that's one of the core teachings of the Hebrew prophets:  not that God is anxious to smite evildoers (the hoary cliche that somehow judges Christians but never Jews, although it's false to both), but that to the unjust, justice would be a living hell.  Mostly because those who had been enjoying the fruits of injustice would lose that privilege, and those denied justice would finally bath in its waters.

Or, as Jesus put it:  the first would be last, and the last first.  Because justice as humans practice it, is never real justice.  The justice of the baseliea tou theou comes from outside humanity; it comes from God.

And there is nothing more terrifying than to fall into the hands of the living God.  It isn't terrifying because you will be punished; it is terrifying because it will be true justice; and who among us wants to be truly treated justly?

Except, of course, the Hebrew prophets always see that as a paradise: a holy mountain upon which nothing is harmed; a beacon to the nations (the people of the world, not nation-states) that will draw them as they want to live as that nation exhibiting God's justice, lives (sort of the way America inspires the world to be consumers, but with much less injustice and wanton waste).  The vision offered by America just demands you participate by buying, by consuming.

The vision offered by eschatological hope is that you participate by making it happen.