Hosea Is Fresher Than Today's New York Times Or This Month's Nation Magazine

I remember a number of years ago listening to an interview with a very good though little known actor who talked about some passages from Timon of Athens  - he didn't specify which ones - that reminded him of the environmental catastrophe we have brought upon ourselves through global warning.  "How did he know it back then?" he asked referring to the author of the passage.  

Since Timon is one of those plays, the unevenness of which led even in the 19th century to the speculation that it had two authors, these days most often believed to have been Thomas Middleton and whoever it was who wrote most of the rest of The Plays and Poems (not the Stratford man, in any case) I don't know which author he meant but my first thought was that the author would have known because if there's one thing we are certain of it's that they would certainly have read The Bible - in this case we know it would have probably been the Geneva Bible of the Calvinist tradition in its English translation.  The King James Version not having been translated yet.   

Specifically he would have read The Prophets, most specifically, for that, that he had read Hosea the great Prophet of the consequences of immorality, disaster for the natural world as well as human societies when enough people are unfaithful to the moral obligation to do justice and to not plunder and despoil in all of the meanings of those words.  

In this great sermon delivered by Walter Brueggemann he draws the direct lines between Hosea's text and today's United States. 

I would especially draw your attention in that regard to what he says starting at this time.  He draws a very convincing parallel to our Trumpian period but which was only slightly less true of 2012, during Obama's administration, coming off of the disastrous Bush II period but which every administration of my lifetime has contributed to, even those of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson who was the last president of whom you could say he moved a liberal agenda forward.  That's more than a half a century ago, now, a half a century ago we were just beginning to see Nixon's intention of destroying egalitarian democracy if he hadn't miscalculated the extent to which Warren Berger didn't intend to go there, it would have happened a lot faster.   And if you don't think it feels funny for me to say something even mildly positive about Warren Berger, you don't know me. 

As Walter Brueggemann says at about 7:30 "I am not making this up, it's in the text. And it reads like a recipe for our tomorrow."  perhaps our 2019 being that tomorrow he was pointing to in 2012 and Hosea was so long before that.

In this most secular of ages we are repeatedly ignoring the the collected wisdom of the Prophetic tradition in favor of our wise guys, our wisdom our technology* our version of gladiatorial games and empty entertainment.  

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Speaking of empty entertainment . . .

I've been researching a post anticipating the beginning of the Mammonist-pagan depravity of the football season, starting with the NFL and its doctors and the sports industrys'  successful burying of the head trauma scandal that is endemic to the way that game is played.  The mixture of pseudo-Christian, neo-Roman-pagan mix of deadly violence, fascistic nationalism and a display of what you get when you leave literally everything that Jesus said, that Paul said, certainly that James and the rest of the writers of the Second Testament said out of a putative and pro-forma "Christianity" of the kind that has blighted the past two thousand years is very well summarized, perhaps best summarized in the United States by the depravity of football, the invention of the sons of rich men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in elite universities where they intended to train the ruling class and which still have that function in the United States.  It has its counterpart in Britain in Rugby, which was invented at a lower educational level of the same training places of the ruling elite.  If you want to contrast that, I suppose baseball, which has a far less elite origin would do to some extent, especially if you leave out the current professional levels of that game. I'm not well enough versed in the origins of real football, actually played with the feet but wouldn't be surprised if that, too, had a far different character due to it origins - though, again, when you get to the gangster business of international pro-football, you're talking about a different thing.  

I'll leave you with what John Cleese had to say about that. 

He made the point at another time that American football is so tedious, with most of the time spent talking, standing around and lining up that they need to have dancing girls on the sidelines to keep people from realizing how boring it is.   I read somewhere, alas I didn't write down the source, that said just over eleven minutes of an American football hour is spent playing the game.   I asked a friend of mine who is a fan of of football ("Its all about ass.") if he thought that was true, after thinking about it for a couple of minutes he said,  "You, know, I never thought about that before but I think it might be true".   All that money, all those recources, all of that public spending and it produces an enormous percentage of its players with serious, progressive brain damage perhaps contributing to the enormous amount of criminal behavior, especially rapes and assaults on women, a toxic pseudo-religious Mammonist-pagan fascistic culture etc.  and only eleven minutes out of sixty in actually playing the game.   And I haven't even gone into the other problems associated with the drugs, the forced feeding of players like geese tortured to produce fat soaked damaged livers, injuries to other parts of the bodies and, when I looked the last time, a life expectancy roughly twenty years lower than that of non-football playing Americans.