When I decided to go through Walter Brueggemann's rightly famous study of the Prophets last August I had no idea just how intense an experience it would be. Every single time I pick it up and read it, it's as if the events of the previous few days could have been performed as an example of what Brueggemann forty-two years ago noted he found in the Scriptures from more than two thousand years ago. The next several passages are especially resonant with the spectacle of Trump's Covid infection (if that's what we really are seeing, a question made necessary from the continuing lies of even his doctor) and the Republican manipulation of his TV addled fans. This is a manifestation of a modern mass insanity display well described here:
Robert Lifton has studied attitudes concerning death in our culture beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and responses to these events.
I will break in right there and note that to study those two acts of mass bombing without taking the diminution of them by the flagrant racism and "othering" of those who died in them is to not understand the American reaction to them. I have not read Lifton on this, yet, but I think it needs to be said. That "othering" to a minimal extent is understandable, though not morally excusable, as a reaction to retaliation against "the enemy" something which is certainly not absent from the Scriptures even as it is presented in a matrix that has to lead to the consideration of its dubious justification - the very religious tradition that retains those texts also calls attention to their moral ambiguity.
The Republican-right in the United States has made such racism and "othering" one of its most potent political tools as, in fact, their predecessors among the slave-holding, land-stealing "founders" did, even as early as some of the more disgusting parts of the Declaration of Independence and the records of the First Continental Congress.
Beyond these he has considered the more general response to living in a world where death is so visible, so daily, so pervasive, and so massive, and yet so unnoticed. Lifton has concluded that we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so it is dealt with by a numbness that denies. Moreover, says Lifton, behind that frightened practice is the symbol gap in which we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced. Obviously the notion of a symbol gap about the reality of death is pertinent to our theme. The royal consciouness that lacks the symbols for full experience is the same royal consciousness that nullified the symbols in the fist place. Those symbols that will release experience and let it be redemptive bring to expression precisely those dimensions of reality which the king fears and cannot subjugate. It is the penchant of kings to nullify all symbols that reveal what is beyond royal administration. And so the power of the king to destroy symbols are reducing them makes necessary the subsequent denial of the experience symbolized.
It must be observed that religious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with such denial. We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief?
Everyone helps his neighbor,
and says to his brother, "Take courage!"
The craftsmen encourages the goldsmith,
and he who smooths and the hammer him who strikes the anvil,
saying of the soldering, "It is good"'
and they fasten it with nails so it cannot be moved. (Isa 41:6-7)
I can't help but reflect on the president of Notre Dame college, Fr. John Jenkins is among those who were infected with Covid at the roll out of Amy Coney Barrett who will certainly become just such a royal apparatchick (or at least will be when it's a Republican who is president) no doubt Jenkins congratulated himself on getting a faculty member of his university on the Court, just as the "liberal" lawyers and colleagues of Samuel Alito did even as they lied under oath that he would be an especially bad upholder of such royalism on the Court. Every one of them, as did everyone else who was listening, knew they were lying about him, his record proved that.
But everything about this passage could be a commentary on last week's news and, in fact, could not possibly be more topical since last winter when the first rumors leaked out about the earliest infections with what would be called Covid-19. The denial of that is as thick as it was as I was first beginning to read and hear foreign news sources spreading the earliest alarms about it. And the link between that and death on the other end of it, its origin, as so many other pandemic diseases, in the meat industry is an ongoing denial of even the strongest of realities thrust on us, for so many of us the death not needing a symbol because we can see the person getting sick and dying.
Writing that, I am thinking of the YouTube cooking channel on which, having had comments about the link between Covid-19 and the meat industry, the celebrity cook whined that he learned to cook meat and in early middle-age he didn't feel like he could change his habits. And those are only a few of the many habits that deny reality, as a habit, as an unconsidered part of "culture". I had a young person throw the old "cultural supremacy" stuff at me when I noted that this virus had originated in the cruel, notorious wet-markets - which, by the way, are not a peculiarly Chinese phenomenon - even as I noted others had started in the conventional meat industry in the U.S. or elsewhere. I suppose what I was being told that the reality that these pandemic diseases are intimately tied to the keeping of animals, their slaughter and eating them was to be a suppressed reality of the kind that Brueggemann notes is a royal practice. Perhaps to get the fullest meaning of that you have to consider that human beings treated by such "royal consciousness" are treated as is considered and ethical, even moral way we treat animals.
If Trump didn't look on the Secret Service members whose lives he put at risk as if their lives were his to dispose of as meat-eaters consider animals' lives to be, it's only because he probably didn't think of it at all, merely following his habits of an entitled, enabled lifetime of self-indulgence.
The experience of reading this book at this time is incredibly intense, especially this section of it.
The Scriptures in which this study by Walter Brueggemann starts are too radical to be allowed in polite quarters, certainly not without watering them down. Maybe in some theology departments or schools, certainly not allowed among the secular faculties and even not among many who teach religion.
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