In the passage from The Prophetic Imagination posted here the other day it mentioned the energizing aspect of the Mosaic account of the liberation of the Children of Israel out of slavery and I am finding that true. I would recommend to anyone who is feeling unmotivated and discourage to try typing out the text of the book and to write commentaries on it because I'm finding it the most energizing thing I am doing these days.
Several of my loved ones are being forced back into classrooms to become part of that "second wave" which has every prospect of being worse than the "first wave". I will point out again that the "first wave" started from one case, the second one will start from millions of cases. I'm very concerned for their safety as well as those who I don't know at all around the country. And around the world.
People seem to have, in dangerous numbers, learned nothing but the lies spewed by the fascist media, having learned nothing from the revelations of the past four years, especially in the English speaking world. That's no shock to me anymore, considering the American left would seem to have learned little or nothing to overcome the jingles and slogans it has used to substitute ideology for even hard, repeatedly experienced truth over fifty-two years.
The criminality of the Trumpist Republican-fascists would seem to know few bounds. It is hardly clear that the openly criminal DeJoy won't screw with the first largely by-mail election and the Trump regime will be allowed to retain power through their open corruption of the only means of a government obtaining legitimacy, with the consent of a majority of The People through a legitimate vote. It is an outrage that in 2020 the means of thwarting, never mind removing the most flagrantly criminal regime in American hasn't already removed Trump from power AND INDICTED HIM AND ALL OF THE CRIMINALS IMPOSED ON US THROUGH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. Nothing proves the inadequacy of the U. S. Constitution, as written and by traditional interpretation than the fact that will the huge list of chargeable crimes Trump, Pence, Barr, Mnuchin, Dejoy, etc. etc. etc. are still there constituting the "executive" which is empowered by the Constitution and law to commit ever more outrageous crimes.
Again, the alleged opposition, the secular left is left with things like raging at the Democrats who have control of the House, and only the House, can't do the impossible, impeach the criminals and get them out of office. They do that as they refuse to acknowledge the defects in the Constitution and the culture that makes that impossible. I would give examples from the lefty media and blogs but I have been avoiding reading them as much as I did in the last election cycles but when I do look and listen, they've learned nothing in the past four years - or fifty-two - either.
My part of the country is having another terrible drought and my garden is not going to support me as it has in hard times of the past and if you don't think that's scary and discouraging for someone who lives on the economic margins during this degenerate age of Trumpism, well, think again. I am soon going to face giving up internet service in my house and will find it far harder to do this if I continue with it so I would recommend to those who find this useful to do it for yourselves. Buy the books, type out passages, read the passages of Scripture cited and referred to, think about them, comment on them, make them real in terms of our own times and events and experience. I have found it to be one of the better choices I've made in the past two months. If not this book then one of his others or someone else like Brueggemann. It's not escapism, it is engagement with what has worked instead of the ideological muddle that secularism inevitably becomes.
Update: I decided to test what I said above and started by going to In These Times magazine and saw that the masthead piece is by Joel Bleifuss ITT's publisher and editor in chief, slamming the Congress for its failure to respond to the Corona virus pandemic, equating it to the failure of the Congress to do something about the Bush II response to the disaster of hurricane Karina, citing an In These Times piece from 2005. The piece is notable for getting it obviously wrong, through that 2005 clip, NOT ONCE SINGLING OUT REPUBLICANS FOR THAT FAILURE DESPITE THE FACT THEY WERE IN TOTAL CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT, BUT SINGLING OUT DEMOCRATS WHO WERE NOT IN CONTROL OF THE CONGRESS, THE EXECUTIVE OR THE SUPREME COURT. The piece, now by Bleifuss doesn't mention Republicans by name, at all, (he once mentions the GOP and the "neo-fascist" Trump) though it's Republicans in the Senate who have blocked the hundreds of bills the House has passed as,in fact, they still did after 2007 when Democrats regained control of the House.
In the past two election cycles I have looked at In These Times and other traditional on-paper lefty magazines to document that they were slamming Democrats and doing things such as yet again supporting the spoiler third party Greens even as the alternatives were clear disasters. Something they have done in virtually every election since I have reached the age of reason and which the history of the ideological lefty, secular (anti-religious) "left" has done throughout its history.
One of the things listed as the former deeds of the racist-fascist David Horowitz when he was such an esteemed member of the secular play-left was that he was in on the founding of In These Times by the late James Weinstein. There was a time that his, not long after, supposed apostasy, taking that well traveled road from the Marxist left to the de facto fascist right into Republican-fascism might have surprised me. But it doesn't anymore because it's such a common phenomenon. What I was surprised to realize is how much of that Marxist, quasi-Marxist left has in common with the Republican fascists and how, even today, after the examples of what that left got us in Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now Trump, which they always have enabled, along with the Greens and such "lefts" as work in Hollywood and the scribbling class. I was surprised up until recently. I now know they are not really an alternative, they are just another ideological flavor of the same thing. Though it was through the publisher of The Nation and her husband and such scribblers as pooh-poohed the Putin involvement with the worst of those election cycles that I had my eyes as to their real nature forced open. You know, you see that happen as many times as I have, you can't deny what they're doing anymore.
There is no mystery in why Democrats who have to win elections to do anything in reality don't trust the secular left and why those of us who care about reality instead of ideology shouldn't either. They will never change, even as they officially cash out by joining with the fascists. I wouldn't be surprised if, as with the Greens, they aren't benefiting from doing their bidding in the guise of leftist purity, right now.
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