the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh."

The energy of Moses' doxology includes:

(a) The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception.

 

(b) A review of an unlikely history of inversion in which imperial reality is nullified. (Obviously that is not the kind of history taught in the royal court school.)

 

(c) An asking for the enactment of freedom in dance, freedom in free bodies that Pharaoh could no longer dominate (15:20). (We may ponder about the loss of freedom for our bodies and about the ideological dimensions of the current wrath about human sexuality.)

 

(d) A culmination of enthronement, the assertion of the one reality. Egypt could not permit or tolerate: "The Lord will reign for ever and ever" (Exodus 15:18) (We must learn that such doxologies are always polemical; the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh.")

It is only a poem and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.

It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in the empire. Only where there is doxology is there any emergence of compassion, for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.

I shall not now explore further the second and third Mosaic memories of sojourn and Sinai, although that is worth doing. The wilderness theme asks about immobilizing satiation; the Sinai theme speaks of God's freedom for the neighbor. Taken altogether, the Mosaic tradition affirms three things:

1. The alternative lief is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community.

2. This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality.

3. This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire.

Definition of doxology

: a usually liturgical expression of praise to God

That's the Merriam Webster online definition of "doxology" since someone asks.

So much in this summation of the first chapter of The Prophetic Imagination that I can't but touch on a few things. The importance of how things are said, what things are said, the "language of managed reality" such as rules in the United States, in which a gangster given a "reality TV show" to play a ruthless dictator has become president as a result of the lies the Newt Gingrich era Republican Party told about Hillary Clinton, carried dutifully by the free press from the sewers of the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair right up to NPR and the New York Times (one of the most persistent carriers of those lies right up through the 2016 elections disaster). And the results are the Pharaonic moral atrocity that we face as a new, managed "reality" made real. That language of managed reality is what results when mass media can lie without any restraint.

Why it should be a surprise to anyone that venues of peddling lies constructed to sell appealing to the most easily accessed and worst parts of us, lies bent to the most nefarious ends is certainly one of the most important failures of the theories of modernism that created those conditions. The truth will out but only when it's too late to prevent the worst disasters wrought with lies and unreality and advertising gimmicks and strategies market tested. I read this passage and when I got to the oh, so familiar "language of empire" , familiar from the soc-sci babble about the commercial side of the media "production and schedule and market" the truth of what Walter Brueggemann said forty-two years ago became so clear. When the Republican-fascist Henry Luce's magazine claimed that Mussolini made the trains run on time and Rome's traffic run smoothly, when Hollywood and TV and Wall Street said that what the country needed was a business executive to be president, that's what the are calling for. Well, we have one.

As important as that characterization of empire and its language is important, as important is the point about the necessity of doxology, of the praise of God in words and in dance - expressed in the concrete being of our bodies - as being deadly to the Pharaonic tendencies, the tendencies of those with earthly power to control us and enslave us and rob us and kill us, to turn into gangsters. The point about the power of doxology to cut "through the ideology that pretends to be a given" is as important as any other because, after a lifetime of falling for one after another ideology, "democratic socialism" being the last one, I have come to see that all of them carry the germ of that tendency. The past two election cycles of seeing how many Greens, how many "democratic socialists" how many "libertarians" helped install Trump - after seeing them help the Rehnquist Court install Bush II - AND SEEING IN 2020 HOW MANY OF THEM ARE WILLING TO DO IT AGAIN, I'm fed up with all of them.

I am convinced that the secular left will always have the same effect it has had all along, of enabling the empire instead of opposing it because that has been its record as opposed to the record of the non-secular left. And I think one of the most basic reasons for that is that the ideological basis of secularism in scientistic, materialistic atheism or "agnosticism" is inevitably lacking exactly the thing talked about in this passage. If you have nothing that goes beyond that with sufficient motivating force to move you to break from imperial reality AND COMPASSION AS A MORAL REQUIREMENT IS NECESSARY TO FORM THE COMMUNITY TO DO THAT IN REALITY INSTEAD OF IN THE EVER DEFERRED FUTURE is among the strongest things about that.

Note: I am experimenting with typing out these posts on a text editor that doesn't impose formatting to see what that does to get over my inability to edit HTML on the New Blogger. That might be something that works or it might be something that doesn't. My inclination is to go simpler and less expensive (Feather Pad and Leaf Pad being freeware) and using computers that other people have junked as well as the smallest Raspberry Pi rig I can put together. That part of it is kind of fun, as well as finding places I can access WiFi from without going into it.

I will be having to make radical changes in how I do things because I'm in the same boat so many millions of others who can't make a living are right now. But more about that later. 

 

Update:  I should have included the link to Exodus 15 since, starting with the Song of Moses, mentioned in the passage posted a couple of days ago,  that is what this is about.  This is the Jewish Publications Society edition of 1917.