After the Future

Bishop Tobin

Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who compose it try to do more, they almost always overreach, make fools of themselves, and cause unnecessary suffering. This seems to be the case with Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin publicly announcing that he has asked Congressman Patrick Kennedy not to take communion. 

We are mistaken if we see these men in the hierarchy as anything more than house management who are not nearly as important as the song and its singers that draw people into the "house" they manage. They have been for a long time deluded into thinking that they have some kind of special spiritual authority. Except for those rare occasions when they meet in council, they just don't. They've been wrong so many times it's borderline ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with being wrong, so long as you learn from it and don't presume that you actually know more than you do. It's OK to be a hack--most of us are--but you have to recognize that's all you are, and resist the temptation to think you know and understand more than you do. It's in the over-reaching that so much avoidable damage is done.

The managers are company men, not particularly bright or insightful, nor particularly stupid, not particularly holy or good, but not particularly bad, in other words they are mere humans like the the rest of us. The best among these managers recognize a good singer when they find him or her and find ways to step aside and let her song be heard.  And every now and then a really talented singer becomes a manager, and people listen, not because of his role in the hierarchy, but because of his song, which touches the heart and changes us, opens us up to new possibility. That's where moral and spiritual authority lie, not in promulgations of infallible truths. But singer/managers are the exception, not the rule.

Beck Thinks We're Weimar (Updated)

I told you over a year ago, please read about the Weimar Republic. Read about the end of the Republic of Germany, Weimar, before it fell into the hands of the Nazis. We are facing the same kind of financial questions that they faced! It was unsustainable! And for the first time in American history we started to monetize our debt! That's when I told you, please read about Weimar, because they did it! And it ends the same way every single time it has been tried.  (Glenn Beck at a rally in Floriday Saturday)

if you actually do study the end of the Weimar Republic, you can see that the final collapse of the Republic occurred precisely because it attempted a "conservative experiment" along the lines that Beck is prescribing: From 1930 to 1932, "In line with conservative economic theory that less public spending would spur economic growth, [Chancellor Heinrich] Brüning drastically cut state expenditures, including in the social sector." This, as it turned out, only heightened the social unrest that gave the Nazis their chance.] (Dave Neiewert quote the Wikipedia article on the Weimar Republic)

What is most remarkable about the psychology of movement conservatives is their prodigious capacity for projection. Movement conservatism can conceive of itself only as a positive force in line with what is best in the American character, and therefore in line with the founders and the constitution. And at the same time it is incapable of seeing how it promotes exactly what destroys what is best in the American character. They tell us to fear the return of the Nazi plague when, in fact, if it returns, they are its carriers. They are so many typhoid Mary's visiting every house to warn of a typhoid epidemic.

Frank Rich on Palin

The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. (Frank Rich)

He thinks we should be worried, but I'm not convinced. Or let me put it this way: it's not Palin we should worry about, it's the 25% she represents becoming 45% or 55%.  If you think that's a possibility, then we should be worried, not about Palin herself but about the conditions that would cause that many Americans take leave of their senses to vote for her--an economic meltdown and a collapse of Dem credibility. Both are possible, and that worries more than whether Sarah Palin will get the GOP nomination in 2012.

Culture is, alas, politics. Palin is a celebrity-culture figure more than she is anything else. And celebrity culture is the culture of distraction, the culture of bread and circuses. She serves a political purpose insofar as she serves the interests of the Owners to keep us all distracted by the way we either love or hate her, thus dividing and keeping us conquered. This will continue to be our fate so long as we allow what are fundamentally cultural values and identity issues dominate our politics. Do I think that's going to happen? No, because the left is as stupid about it as the right. Our politics are a form of entertainment, and it's entertaining to fight about things that in the larger scheme of things don't matter.  It's dangerous to to fight about things that do, and what matters is the concentration of power and wealth with the owners.

If the Dems implode, and if Palin isn't the one to emerge to assume the mantle of "throw the bums out", someone equally as bad on the substance will. It's hard to imagine Palin doing a worse job than George Bush because it's agurably impossible; but she is, in fact, capable of doing an equally bad job. So we have nothing to fear there except a return to GOP normalcy.

But that speaks more to the diseased nature of our politics than it does anything else, and Sarah Palin is a symptom, not an agent of the illness. As I wrote last week, it's a disease that's in the body politic, but it's in remission--for now. NY 23 is a clearer indicator of its strength than Palin's book sales. Things can change--the disease could very well present more acutely in the near future.  But we should be more worried about the underlying causes than about the symptoms.

Disease in Remission

For the life of me I don't know why anybody serious is obsessing so much about Sarah Palin this week. This piece by Sullivan is simply silly.  As if the future of the nation hinges on exposing what everybody with half a brain already knows.Honestly, who cares and why feed this media frenzy with a seriousness it simply does not deserve?

Palin represents a disease in the body politic, which for now, for all the fatuous attention it's getting, is in remission. It has no real power; it functions as a distraction. We need to monitor it, and we need to be careful about not creating the conditions that might trigger more serious symptoms to present acutely, but for now, there are just more important things to worry about than this airhead from Alaska and the 25% who think she's so wonderful. This is entertainment fodder for the media, not anything worth an erg of energy beyond that.

2012 or Apocalypse Now (really)

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf     
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind     
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.    
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.     
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,     
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends     
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.     
(From T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland")

***

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8: 20-23

2012--I haven't watched the movie, and I don't intend to, but I want to think out loud a bit about our fear of, or is it our need for, or perhaps longing for, "apocalypse".

The word in Greek means 'revelation' as in uncovering something hidden, and perhaps it is such a revelation we really want while fearing that the only way we get it is with the violence. If we have any sense, we recognize that things just can't keep going this way--something has to give. It just isn't working, and given our consensus materialist assumptions, I'd argue that we simply haven't the imagination of a way out of this impasse, or if we had an idea, we haven't the will to act on it. So since radical change is something we seem incapable of choosing, it's something we want ambivalently to happen to us, to suffer passively, and we therefore fear what we long for most.

We yearn for Apocalypse, an empowering revelation, some cleaning of the slate and the arrival of a political leader, an avatar, saint, bodhisattva, or the return of Quetzacoatl, or King Arthur, or Jesus on clouds with his angels.  For they will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  But of course, it just doesn't work that way.  (Does it?)

Nevertheless, we long for and fear some breaking of the dam, so that the world can be washed clean of everything in the current normal reality that obstructs the flourishing of what is healthful and sane. This is an archetypal longing felt most intensely during periods of decay. We're mostly sick of normal reality, because it just doesn't deliver.  It provides lots and lots of stuff, but little value.  Quality, or any natural sense for it,  is drowned in this torrent of quantity and our greed for even more. We've lost our collective sense of what matters and what doesn't, and we're reduced to arguing for the sake of arguing, because at least it gives some feeble sense that we're alive.  And so, if we have any sense, we're seeing normal more clearly for its insanity--that "normal" is, in fact, consensus insanity--and deep down we'd just as soon be rid of it. But there's the comfort factor; we'd just as soon not have to deal with too much change or too much reality.

Can the Dog Wag the Tail?

I don't know what Obama is going to do in Afghanistan, but I am not particularly encouraged by this news about Eikenberry and Obama's demand for more options. I suspect it's all political kabuki, but what do I know?  Maybe there are compelling, legitimate reasons for staying in Afghanistan that I don't know about or don't appreciate fully.

But let's say for argument's sake that it's close: there are half a dozen good reasons to stay, but seven good reasons to leave. I mean real reasons, like what's good for Afghanistan and the stability of the region, what's good for the American military and the American long-term public interest, not what's good for American jingoists and defense contractors. Does anybody think it's possible for the president to decide that the seven good reasons for getting out against six for staying are enough to justify withdrawal? Does anybody think that the president really has the power to do that?

You Got a Better Explanation?

Warning: I woke up pessimistic this morning. From Hullabaloo:

. . . One of the most salient indictments of the Bush-Cheney regime was that they were stupid enough to fall for the biggest sucker bet in history, a pointless land war in the Middle East. A sane person might wonder how, with the benefit of 500 years of repetitive history to guide us, and the fall of the ancient empires to boot, even they could have been such idiots. But, as Orwell reminds us in "1984", the very purpose of war has changed, with the sole object now being to keep the elites in power perpetually:

"The primary aim of modern warfare...is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living...The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence in the long run too intelligent."

Will the President have the brains and guts to steer us away from this course of self-destruction? Even if he does - and I become lass sanguine about that every day - it's hard to believe the Owners will let him. And yet with their aversion to reform, their short-sighted greed, their celebration of their own ignorance, they are going to end up being failed parasites; because once they kill the host - we, the people - they'll end up on history's trash heap too. Reader Cleon at Hullabaloo

And of course it doesn't matter how much pointless, endless wars add to the deficit; we need to be fiscally responsible only when it benefits ordinary Americans. It's becoming clearer that the "Owners" (I like that as a stand-in word for the biggest players in the Defense and Financial sectors) let Obama become president despite his opposition to the Iraq invasion because he did an about-face on FISA and embraced the war in Afghanistan. For the Owners, one protracted war without any clear objectives or end in sight is as good as another.

Gay Marriage vs. Civil Unions (Updated)

Maine got all the attention, but It's interesting to me that Washington State voters supported a bill popularly known as the "Everything but Marriage Act" that gives gay couples all the civil rights of marriage without calling it marriage. Maybe there's a lesson in that. Maybe gay activists should let conservatives have the word 'marriage' if they want their legitimate civil rights. I think that the problem lies in that gays want more than that, though; they want cultural legitimacy, and that's not the state's to give.  Cultural legitimacy will come in time, but it can't be legislated. And I'd argue that it's a tactical mistake for gays to insist on marriage rather than civil rights from the state.

One of my basic arguments in this blog is that for us all to get along we have to separate out cultural issues from political issues as best we can. Most of my focus has been on criticizing the project of the religious right and cultural conservatives to insert Christian symbols and religiosity into the political sphere. I think the insistence by the cultural left on the use of the word 'marriage' in the effort to obtain for gay couples their civil rights is similar to the mistake that the cultural right makes. I think as a tactical matter the gay community would be far more successful in getting the substance of the civil rights they seek if it would separate out the cultural from the political, and in this case the cultural is mostly a matter of language and symbolism.

Quick Election Take

I'm pleasantly surprised by Owens taking the NY 23. The undecideds decided it, and their doing so supports the idea that there is a sane middle in the American electorate, and the ones in upstate NY, even though they lean conservative, were not going to be manipulated by the Palins, Becks, and Armeys.

It's more significant that the Virginia race was won by a Republican who distanced himself from the Palin wing of his party than that a Dem lost.

I hope the message that finger-in-the-wind "moderates" take from this is that for now, at least, the teabaggers are mostly bark with hardly any bite.

NY 23: Signs of the Times

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. Frank Rich

Seriously, it appears that the teabaggers are gaining steam. And lest we think they are just a funny joke, it would probably pay to recall instances in history when radical, paranoid right wingers got legitimate political power. The joke can easily turn into a nightmare.Digby

I'm not sure who's right here, because I think it depends on whether the economy returns to normal.  I'm not sure it will, and if it doesn't, continued economic anxiety will pull more so-called independents or moderates into alignment with the teabagger mentality.

Design Change

I've had enough complaints over the years about how hard to read the drop-out type was--I just like the idea of the word appearing out of the night, so to speak.  But when a glitch occurred with the "Kierkegaard on the Couch" post, I finally decided to just go more conventional blog readable.  So it's done.  Hope it helps.