The Trump Family Idea Of Classy

What the hell was the Republican-fascist playing friggin' Pavaroti's bellowing of "Nessun Dorma" at Trump's Nuremberg rally last night supposed to be about? I wondered. 

I suppose not one in a thousand of those who heard it knows that the song is the dictatorial command of a cruel, tyrannical and murderous princess (Ivanak's plans for the future, no doubt)  commanding that no one is allowed to even sleep until they reveal to her the identity of a prince who has the hots for her, from Puccini's Turandot, one of the dumbest of operas from one of the more decadent opera composers.

I'd go into the reasons it is a piece of horrible crap but if you're interested, read the libretto from the point of view of the only decent person in it, the slave girl Liu who gives up her life to protect the total asshole of a prince who is the hero of Puccini's telling of what is, in other tellings a far more complex story.

I think that it could only be decently told in the way my dear old Latin teacher analyzed Euripides' Alcestis  "You son of a bitch, getting your wife to die for you". The prince and the princess are total assholes, both of them but since they're royalty, Puccini knows the decadent opera audience of his time would know they were supposed to be heroes. The slave girl who is the best of all of them is disposable and once gone is quickly forgotten except as a bit of sentimentality.  That is the way of so much of the theatrical presentation of the lowest of the low, presenting them with nothing more than sentimentality and as disposable ephemera. 

I've heard that the BBC sports department can be blamed for the fad of everyone singing and playing Nessun Dorma because they popularized Pavaroti's bellowing of it during a World Cup series. Classy, huh? Which is I'm sure all the Trump gang took it for, like Mae West satirized in Goin' to Town when decided to prove she was classy by "throwin' an opera". Only she knew the difference, the Trump gang don't.   In looking at this I see that in 2016 the fucking Trump assholes presented it as "a song of victory". 

After Hearing Chris Christie On Stephen Colbert, I Have To Ask You Who You Would Rather Meet, Him or Them

 

Except "ptochoi," like "hapiru," meant destitute; wiped out; those with nothing.

RMJ made this excellent point on the last post:

Luke called them "ptochoi," as in "Makarioi oi ptochoi," rendered in my favorite translation of it as "Congratulations you poor!" Except "ptochoi," like "hapiru," meant destitute; wiped out; those with nothing.

It's a pretty consistent strain from Moses to Jesus, there.

Living in the times and places we do, it's hard for us to understand that the large majority of those who are addressed in the Scriptures were far poorer than middle-class and even most working class Americans, Canadians, Brits. Though many of the working poor must live something like the desperation felt by the working poor of Biblical times, the middle-class would have a somewhat harder time imagining themselves into those contexts being anxious mostly for the things they have, not their very lives, in most cases.

Most of the people who are considered our working poor were the typical residents in virtually the entire Mediterranean basin where all of the Scriptures take place. They along with the enormous class of the absolutely and nearly destitute. Other than the really rich, the people who are being told these things to were poor and in the Sermon on the Mount, their relative but still resourced poverty was contrasted to the absolutely destitute, those who lived on the point of starvation and who had every expectation of dying of starvation, of exposure to the elements, despised for the appearance, their disconnectedness, their otherness, of being outcasts in even the society of the poor. In the Scriptures, often for being ethnically the other. Being separate from the ambient population.

It is a radial message given to the same class of people who Republicans and before them the slave owners, before but especially after the end of legal slavery pitted against the lot of those they wanted to exploit as free and dirt cheap labor, both Black and Poor White. It is the equivalent of those who are being used by rich gangsters during the Republican convention, this week, to scare White working class and middle-class Americans into giving the gangsters four more years to cement the fascist dictatorship they have been working towards since 1960 with the help of the "liberal" Warren Court at the behest of "civil liberties" lawyers and legal theorists and, lest it be forgotten, the "free press" that has been an integral part of this progress into fascism.

That pitting of the poor against the outcast, the destitute, People of Color, those without fixed addresses, those whose labor could be bought or taken at lower levels than that of even very poor white people and, otherwise, could be used to scare an effective margin of poor white people with few prospects or with middle-class prosperity into working against their own interests which would be better served by raising the lot of the destitute is one of the most important things that there is for us to understand and to work with in defeating the gangsters. 

 

But unless you are willing to take the Scripture seriously and read it for what it says and what it means, our history proves merely "social action" doesn't start to get us there. In the case of where the ACLU's style of "social action" meets its service to the media and such speech as practiced by the porn industry, it is in every way counterproductive. In my favorite image, such secular "social action" such "civil liberties" people are like the little boy who sticks his finger in the hole in the dyke as he drills many more holes in it with his other hand. Such is the erudite, college-credentialed thinking of secular thought.

And that's been going on for among those who are pretty much uniformly literate and credentialed, for more than sixty years, at this point. And with the opposite of awareness due to their indoctrination into modern, secular, industrial rationalism.  Those "suburban" voters Trump may well scare into voting for him.

The Radicalness Of The Mosaic Phenomeon Cannot Be Separated From the Social Outcasts And Have-Nots, Strangers, Foreigners, etc.

 Given the social setting of most churches in America, these matters may give us serious pause. It seems probable that the radicalness of the Mosaic phenomenon cannot be separated from the social setting of the hapiru.

I'll break in here to note that "hapiru" sometimes "habiru" means a number of things, none of the top drawer, high-class, or rich. Slaves, common laborers, people who hired themselves out - such as the Children of Israel were in Egypt, or it can mean outsiders, invaders, insurgents, though it doesn't say so in the dictionary I checked the meaning with, I got the feeling it can mean "foreigner" "illegal aliens". Not your respectable white-collar kind of people who won't be used on FOX or be presented badly as NPR gives Republicans their say. Not your college educated guy who brags about trying the recipe he found in the Sunday Times.

From that it may follow that the freedom of God and the politics of justice are not so easily embraced among us, given our social setting and our derivative religious interestedness. We know enough to know that our best religion is never disinterested. Here I mean only to raise the difficult point that Mosaic, prophetic religion also is not disinterested. And, indeed, that tradition of ministry can hardly be understood or practiced without embracing the interests it serves.

All of that is by way of introduction to the emergence of a deep problem in the faith and history of Israel. The revolution, both religious and political, of Moses was able to sustain itself until the year 1000 B.C. as a viable social reality. That is no mean feat when we reflect on the difficulties of maintaining recent revolutions in our own history, for example, the American, French, Russian and Chinese. By the time of Solomon in 962 (after forty years of shrewd and ambiguous leadership from David) there was a radical shift in the foundation of Israel's life and faith. While the shift had no doubt begun and been encouraged by David, the evidence is much clearer and unambiguous with Solomon. The entire program of Solomon now appears to have been a self-serving achievement with its sole purpose the self-securing of king and dynasty. It consists in what Alberto Soggin calls a program of state-sponsored syncretism, which of course means the steady abandonment of the radicalness of the Mosaic vision. It includes:

(1) A harem, which in addition to serving as a way of political marriages likely reflects a concern for self-generated fertility. (The purpose of a harem in terms of self-securing may be understood quite in contrast to the fortunes of the midwives of the Mosaic period [Exodus 1:15-22]*.)

(2) A system of tax districts in which the displacement of clans and tribes made state control more effective. (Indeed, the deliberate eradication of the tribal perception was essential to the statism of Solomon.)

(3) An elaborate bureaucracy which, in imitation of the larger empires, served to institutionalize technical reason. (And of course technical reason is inherently conservative and nearly immune to questions of justice and compassion.)

(4) A standing army so that armaments no longer depend on public opinion and authentic national interest, not even to mention the old notion of the rush of God's spirit.

(5) A fascination with wisdom which, in addition to imitating the great regimes, represented an effort to rationalize reality, i.e., to package it in manageable portions.

All of these things in the Solomonic moment transpired under the effective umbrella of the Jerusalem temple, surely the quintessence of Canaanization in Israel. George Mendenhall has rightly characterized the Solomonic achievement as the "paganization of Israel," that is, a return to the relgious and political presuppositions of the pre-Mosaic imperial situation - which is to say that the Solmonic effort was not only abandonment of the revolution but a knowing embrace of per-prophetic reality. (It is worth noting how our perceptions move. The very developments that Mendenhall describes as "paganization" are those that in another context Gerhad von Rad and others, including myself, have termed "Enlightenment." It is worth recalling this in order to see that more than one reading of the data is possible. Indeed, my own reading of it, from the perspective of the prophetic tradition, is very different from what I have done in other circumstances from a quite different perspective.)

I suspect that as fine and skilled a writer as Walter Brueggemann noticed that his own shifting and altered perception of this event in the history of Israel, shifting in time and in context, is matched by the shifting of the character of the government of Israel and, indeed, in the modern revolutions, though those tend to go bad pretty much immediately. I would count the period in which the American and French revolutions betrayed their alleged ideals, before the revolution was achieved in the American revolution (slavery, various other gross inequalities and evils which the founders and leaders of the revolution and the colonies wanted to maintain for their benfit) to almost as fast, as the French revolutionaries, like their American counterpart, mostly aristocratic, educated modern men started vying with each other for power and started killing each other in their various factions, not to mention the terrible bloodshed of the revolution, itself, the revolutionary rationalist cruelty and Chinese revolutions which, being modern, high-speed and scientifically rational, magnified the cruelties of the late 18th century in speed, numbers murdered and ruthless efficiency.

The lessons for the United States as our own quasi-democracy decays and dies - a victim of a glut of liberties to indulge our worst weaknesses such as lying and stealing, or, rather those of the elites, not our own hapiru, which seem to be deprived of the nourishment that could be theirs if they took this lesson more seriously, itself discouraged by our own Solomonic elite, right and left and in the middle.

Each of those five listed corruptions under Solomon have their counterpart in Trump America, including, of course, the last one, the packaging of ersatz reality into manageable, easily advertised and peddled packages. Like political ads, packaging political bromides which means that power flows out of the ad budget of the two parties and the two campaigns, the others there to play spoiler, mostly for the opposition to Trump.

You thought I was going to go for the easy one, the harem. Well, in a week that began with the legacy adulterer, Don jr. and his adulterous FOX liar girlfriend banshee, it was tempting to but I thought this one was more in line with this morning's post. 

 

*  15And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of whom the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah; 16and he said: ‘When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, ye shall look upon the birthstool: if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.’ 17But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men-children alive. 18And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them: ‘Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men-children alive?’ 19And the midwives said unto Pharaoh: ‘Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwife come unto them.’ 20And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty. 21And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that He made them houses. 22And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying: ‘Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.’

 

Jewish Publications Society 1917

I retain comments only because from time to time I find one in moderation that is worth publishing. Most of them aren't. I'm not interested in sparring with college-credentialed dolts anymore. We're at a crisis, the pandemic, global warming, the police attacks on innocent People of Color and others, the real risk that we are already under fascist rule with Trump-Barr-McConnell and the fascist media from the depths of FOX to the depths of the New York Times.

No. I'm not going to reopen comments. I experimented with that at my other blog recently and the experience, while diverting for me, was debasing and unproductive.

 

I have no idea why, now, I have to paste everything from a text editor, select it and choose to have the text color be black for it to show up, though that might have been something I screwed up while fiddling with New Blogger and not the designers fault.  It does seem to have, for the most part, fixed the fonts changing on me.  I'm kind of liking writing in a text editor, so much simpler than a word processor.  More like typing used to be.

Hate Mail - Face The Fact, Bunky, Human Beings Are Incapable Of Knowing What's Real Except Through An Act Of Human Imagination

It is one of the things I've gotten out of my choice to confront the atheist fad of the 00s that it made me consider, carefully, the mockery and denigration of the human imagination and the logical conclusion that that mockery and denigration is done purely through the as arrogant as it is ignorant and superificial denial that those things the atheists claim to value the most, science, mathematics, logic, reason, are as fully dependent on the human act of imagination as every single other aspect of human culture and thought, whether for the bad or for the good. 

 

An atheist troll wants to mock the title of Walter Brueggemann's great book that I'm going through slowly, The Prophetic Imagination because it contains the word "imagination".   There was a time when I thought atheists tended to be smarter than the average person, that was before I encountered so many of them online and looked at the likes of James Randi, Richard Dawkins and Paul Kurtz and realized they tended to be, in fact, somewhat stupid. 

Every act of human abstraction happens in the human imagination, it doesn't happen anywhere else. Every concept we hold about the objects of sense is an act of human imagination. We imagine that what we see before us is the thing as it is when that's certainly not true. Even the imaginative creation of machines to see frequencies of particles bouncing off of objects proves that we don't see everything that there is to it.

EVERY SINGLE LAW OF SCIENCE, EVERY PROOF OF MATHEMATICS, EVERY FORMULATION OF LOGIC IS A PRODUCT OF HUMAN IMAGINATION. As such, every imagined, articulated law is partial and deficient and liable to expansion or refutation.

Even when the most arrogant and presumptuous of scientists claim to have or will soon have a full understanding of even the smallest - we like to believe "simplest" objects in the universe - they are contradicting some of the most widely held beliefs about science that the 20th century provided us with. It's one of my weaknesses that I can't help but allude to what might have been my greatest hit online, getting one of the most arrogant ideologues of our time, Sean Carroll to admit that as a fact after 17 days of harassing him with the question that he so obviously didn't want to answer. He'd claimed that that quixotic goal of ideology masquerading as science, cosmology,* was on the cusp of having a theory of everything when the truth is, they don't have a theory of everything about even the most "simple" of objects that have fallen under the intensive study of legitimate science, physics. I don't think any rational person has any obligation to believe on faith that cosmologists have a theory of everything - that would be everything in the universe - until they had uniform agreement that they had a theory of everything about any one thing within the universe. I mean any single subatomic particle, say an electron, first. And that faith, as almost all faith in science held by virtually all laymen as well as the priesthood of science, is an act of faith based in the imaginations of those without the capacity to fact check, to understand the math and reasoning or to read the papers, both those making the claims and those reporting the replications which confirm the results (which are often never conducted). About things outside of their area of expertise, even great scientists are inevitably dependent on their sometimes misplaced faith in their colleagues and the formal bodies and journals of science.

I think one thing that I've also come to conclude about atheist materialism, especially in light of the ubiquitious denial by atheist, scientistic materialists that free thought is impossible because a mind capable of it could not fall within the material causation that their ideology demands everything does fall within, is the enemy of human freedom, not its champion and defender. The self-designated "free thinkers" typically are in the position of denying the very thing they claim to do is impossible.

Walter Brueggemann is right, a free God is necessary as the source of human freedom, the imagined God of freedom's reality is evidenced in that God's allowance of human freedom as a freely chosen endowment of sentient beings, as is sentience, itself. I'd say that far from being a source of oppression, inslavement, conformity and ignorance, the God as imagined by Moses is the source of those possibilities in human culture but such a conception of God is not merely far from being the source of those evils, that God is definitively separate from such things.

The material gods of European paganism, of Egyptian paganism are the kinds of static gods subject to things such as the will of other gods and, either as vague suggestion or of overt declaration, subject to fate, are the gods of imperial, oppressive imaginings. Such gods are the gods of an oppressive, enslaving order. In later European culture and in the United States, we have elevated such imaginary gods substituting the names of the Jewish-Christian God and Jesus for them, much to the scandalization of those who want to believe thin those anti-Christian gods in order to deny the genuine conception of God and the documented Jesus of the Gospels and the Epistles. The gods of American-Brit Mammonism are, in fact, not the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, they are not the God who informed the imagination of Moses or the one who Jesus taught, they are an entirely different thing and those are the enemy of human freedom, dignity and the sustaining of life on Earth.

Human freedom cannot, I have come to believe, rest on anything short of the free God as perceived by Moses and Jesus, whether others in other traditions call that God by the same words or not. The static material gods of atheism, scientism, materialism or paganisms which share in such deficiently imagined gods will inevitably produce oppression. And, as Walter Brueggeman notes, the largest part of the Jewish scriptures document how hard it is to maintain that imagination of the real God who, early on in Exodus, Moses imagines as being entirely different, entirely outside of his or humanities ability to imagine. It is that dimension of the imagination of Moses which I find powerfully convincing that what he was perceiving, what he was imagining, was the real God or creation, the God who created us as free beings endowed with abilities to surpass fate (material causation) and to become free IF WE ACT ACCORDING TO THE LAW, the summation is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. To treat them as free and worthy of dignity and respect.

* I think it's well past due time that we admit that in the 20th century cosmology, conventionally considered a science, has, in fact, become a matter of ideological materialist ideology, for the most part. As, in fact, has a great deal of evolutionary biology, especially that area which was born in an attempt to disprove God by science, abiogenesis. I would include the ideological atheist Carl Sagan's "exobiology" only it's such an absurdity that I doubt most scientists would claim it as science - unless they're making grant money and getting appointments over it.

The Total Failure Of Secular Faith Is Embedded In The Civic Imagination And It As Much As Anything Is Leading Us To Ruin - Hate Mail

As good an example as exists of just how naive the common imagination of how well The Constitution protects us can be found in the famous speech that the wonderful Barbara Jordan gave on July 25th, 1974 at the Nixon Impeachment Hearings. I had and still have enormous respect for Barbara Jordan but in so many ways her assumptions about the various aspects of the Constitution, from her opening acceptance of the Constitution to her beliefs in the powers of impeachment have proven to be dangerously naive.

 

Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the preamble to the Constitution of United States. “We the people.” It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the 17th of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We the people.” I’ve felt somehow, for many years, that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We the people.”

Today, I am an inquisitor, and hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

Though Barbara Jordan's conception of the Constitution was not typical, she was a brilliant lawyer who was rightly regarded as a scholar of the document. Her famous declaration of her complete faith in the CON-STI-TU-TION,  so deceptively clipped for purposes of "civic piety" on PBS and NPR was clearly conditioned on the equality so long and with such pain and bloodshed, struggled for AGAINST THE CLEAR WORDING AND INTENT OF THAT DOCUMENT AS WRITTEN having been won and as secured.  It is impossible to believe that she would have declared such a faith before 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, so trashed by subsequent Court rulings, including, most badly, by the Roberts Court, was passed or that other law with it, the Civil Rights Act was all too briefly, the law of the land.  She not only would not have said it, she would not have been sitting as a member of Congress without those provisions being dismantled by Constitutional arguments by the Republican-fascist members of the Supreme Court.

 

It may have seemed that way, at least as a matter of federal law, in 1974 but the increasingly ideologically first Republican, now Republican-fascist Supreme Court and the corporate media, with no small help from the "journalistic ethics" of even the most august of on-paper publications, and the "anti-political correctness" (read "racist) humor of the late 70s and 80s, was soon going to start the dismantling of those rights and that equality that Barbara Jordan's faith in the document rested on. In 2020, that dismantling is open, overt and well underway.

The naivete of the speech is also seen in her belief that the Constitution was strong enough to mean what it said in regard to the impeachment of a criminal, a tyranical and a treasonous president.  

 

That the Republican-fascist Senate refused to impeach Trump for his overt presidential abuse of power, his long, long list of crimes in office, his presidential-treason against The People in his acting as Putin's agent in the oval office is proven beyond any reasonable doubt and yet the same party, in fact many of the same people who impeached Bill Clinton for stupidly lying about a sexual affair in a clear perjury trap set for him by Republicans, both in the Congress and in the judiciary and the special prosecutor chosen by some of the most notorious of Republican-fascists - an abuse of the Constitutional provisions of the impeachment of a president that is, itself, a mockery of the Constitution and the claims made for it by the "founders" makes much of the rest of the substance of Barbara Jordan's famous speech - the parts generally not used as, indeed, her prefacatory  condition on which her total faith in the Constitution rested - now ring hollow.

- We know the nature of impeachment. We’ve been talking about it a while now. It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account. It is designed to bridle the Executive if he engages in excesses. It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men. The framers confided in the Congress the power if need be to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a president swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the Executive.

The nature of impeachment, a narrowly channeled exception to the separation of powers maxim. The federal convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term maladministration. “It is to be used only for great misdemeanors,” so it was said in the North Carolina Ratification Convention, and in the Virginia Ratification Convention, “We do not trust our Liberty to a particular branch. We need one branch to check the other.”

“No one need be afraid,” the Northwest Carolina Ratification Convention, “No one need to be afraid that officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity.” “Prosecution of impeachments will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” said Hamilton in the Federalist papers number 65, “We divided the part is more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. I do not mean political parties in that sense.” The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind the impeachment, but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the Constitutional term high crime and misdemeanors.

Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that, “Nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction, but nothing else can.” Common sense would be revolted, if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons.

Well, that certainly isn't how things turned out, both in the use of impeachment against Bill Clinton for the pettiest of reasons PRODUCED BY THE PERJURY TRAP LAID BY SOME OF THE SLEAZIEST ACTORS IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY, Congressional, judicial, and, lest it be forgotten, and probably most consequentially, in the "free press" and in the fixed Senate trial of the most seriously charged president in the sordid history of the American presidency, Trump.

In looking around for material on you, I came across an article written last January on the Religion News Service site.

Consciously or not, Democrats and Republicans alike no longer seem to hold the Constitution to be as textually sacred as they used to. Among the former, complaints about the Electoral College, for example, have grown in intensity in recent years. As for the latter, their attraction to the theory of an all but all-powerful "unitary executive" is profoundly at odds with the framers' commitment to constitutional checks and balances.

Before going on, note this "balance" between Democrats, having had two elections Constitutionally stolen from the winner of the popular vote to put a terrible Republican by the Electoral College system (and the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court) and again sixteen years later deciding it's time for that slave-power enhancing provision put there explicitly for that purpose by the slave-owning founders to finally go against an overtly fascist interpretation of the power of (Republican) presidents. Some balance, huh? The thwarting of electoral democracy by the clear intent of slave owners verses the overt declaration that (Republican) presidents have uncheckable power.

During the present impeachment trial, moreover, it has been hard not to consider the arguments of Trump's defenders as anything other than expressing an unhappiness with the Constitution's impeachment provisions. Against the near-universal consensus of constitutional scholars (not to mention the Nixon articles), they have contended that impeachment for abuse of power is not allowed, and even that a president cannot be impeached if he merely believes that an act is in the public interest.

"How can you look at this and say the Republican Party isn't breaking our constitutional design and creating a massive zone of presidential corruption?" tweeted political commentator Ezra Klein.

In announcing that he would vote against the production of witnesses and documents, retiring Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., granted that the House managers had proved their case that Trump had withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into presidential rival Joe Biden but insisted that this was merely an unimpeachable "inappropriate" act.

 

The article concludes:

In the 1988 book that gave constitutional faith its name, law professor Sanford Levinson argued that this faith was central to American civil religion, and that while at times verging on idolatry, it played a critical role in enabling citizens to wrestle with the meaning of the country. A decade ago, Levinson republished the book with an afterword renouncing constitutional faith and calling for a new constitutional convention.

I believe for Levinson, who I agree with at times and profoundly disagree with at other times, the issue that leads him to call for what is, in fact, dangerous given the times as they are, a new convention, is the crisis that his fellow law professors and scholars have invented in investing the president with fascistic powers under the "unitary executive" which is a huge loop hole contained in the language of the "founders" along with their slave-power enhancing provisions such as the Electoral College, the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate and the idiotic provisions for lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court (getting rid of that is one of the things Levinson and I agree on).  

All human documents, all human institutions, all human governments are as vulnerable to the corruptions as befell the Children of Israel who lived in the period after Moses gave them the far, far more radically egalitarian, far, far more humane and far more solidly grounded Law that is the origin of the Prophetic Imagination as I've been studying through Walter Brueggemann's great study of it.  This topic, these times, the decay of American democracy under the reign of secular modern thought, instrumental reasoning, the industrial-scientific-rationalist model of reality could not possibly be more intrinsically linked.  As I have pointed out numerous times, it wasn't to the Constitution and the founders that the effective struggle for equality went for its examples and its language, it was to the book of Exodus, it was to the Jewish Prophetic tradition, Moses, Hosea, etc.

That the article bewails the loss of "faith in the Constitution" ON THE RELIGION NEWS SERVICE SITE! is as telling as its "balance" in lines with "journalistic ethics" is such a clear demonstration of what I wrote yesterday that I'm just going to let you ponder that. 

 

Note:  New Blogger seems to be setting up new traps - either it or my unfamiliar handling of it.   I am going to be surprised as you are with what goes up on screen, I suspect.

the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us

The alternative consciousness of Moses was exceedingly radical in its implications both for religion and for the social and political order.  First, the notion of God's freedom probably is more than any religious movement can sustain for very long.  As Karl Barth has seen, the dispute between revelation   and reason concerns not only other or false religions but the very "religion of Christian revelation."  Second,the notion of human justice and compassion is rarely a foremost factor in ordering a community.  Indeed, most communities find ways of treating it as the last question and never the first question about human reality.  It could well be that the possibilities emergent from the ministry of Moses are too radical for any historical community, either in terms of theological presuppositions or in terms of societal implementation.

By way of analogy, it is clear that the militance and radicalness of the early Christian community was soon compromised.  Indeed, John Gager has argued that if it had not changed to embrace culture to some extent it would have disappeared as a sectarian oddity.   Perhaps it must be concluded  that the vision emerging from Moses is viable only in an intentional community whose passionfor  faith is knowingly linked to survival in the face of a dominant, hostile culture.  That is,  such a radical vision is most appropriate to a sectarian mood which is margina in the community.  Such situations of risk do seem to call forth such radicalism.  And, conversely, situations of cultural acceptancece breed accomodating complacency. 

Thus, in our utilization of sociological insight concerning the social dimensions of knowledge, language and power,we must not be inattentive to our very own sociology and the ways in which it commandeers both our faith and our scholarship.  Perhaps the minority community of slaves and midwives was able to affirm the freedom of God just because there was no other legitimated way to stand over against static triumphal religion, for every other less-free God has already been co-opted.  Perhaps the minority community of slaves is able to affirm the politics of justice and compassion because there is no other social vision in which to stand in protest against the oppression of the situation.   As George Mendenhall has urged, the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us.  Thus a truly free God is essential to marginal people if they are to have a legitimate standing ground against the oppressive orders of the day.  But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessarily, desirable, or perhaps even possible. 

Wow!  As true today as it was when he wrote this and, I'm certain, as it will be years from now.  And such density of content.  From pointing out that making it so in human society for long periods is very difficult because the conception of God necessary to sustain it is one that everything from human inattention to the far easier way of first compromise with and then total acquiescent surrender to "the oppressive orders of the day".  This way of reading the Scriptures with eyes open to the terrible truth that while The Truth is a force that will have to be not only reckoned with but ultimately answered to, it is not the foremost focus of human attention and is so difficult, especially in resisting our inevitable weaknesses and follies and selfishness and fear and envy - the whole host of deadly sins - that we have to always expect it to give way.

For any atheists and "skeptics" who read this and scoff that such a truth is hardly worth considering because it isn't reliably accessed and guaranteed to be permanent, the same is true for every single alternative and far more quickly exactly because those all lack the central motivating and initiating origin of this vision, the free God who Moses discerned.  I think the radicalness of his prophetic imagination is one of the most convincing things about it.  As is the, I would assert, even more radical interpretation of it as found in the Gospel of Jesus.  

There is no mystery about how the most impressive social change in the United States in my lifetime happened, it was the result of the religious vision of those in the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, I would argue primarily fueled by those who acted in just this Mosaic tradition, whether in the Black Christian churches or in Malcolm X's motivation in Islam. both sharing in the heritage of this conception of the free God as declared by Moses in the Shemot, the book of Exodus. The failure of the Supreme Court to sustain the Voting Rights Act and other reforms of civil government in the subsequent period, the naked attack on that progress from that era, especially in the present Roberts Court, proves the absolute need to sustain or even start that requires a "higher court" of appeal than are found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and certainly in the moral character of the Supreme Court and the other branched of government.  Our election of a series of media supported gangsters and goons proves you even need one against We The People.   Relying on the "free press" is even more absurd.   

I would predict that we are going to see virtually every sentence of this passage come into view during the Republican-fascist convention, including, of course, the elevation of the anti-Christ who is the material and unfree God of so many of those "white-evangelicals" and "traditionalist-Catholics" and members of "Orthodox" synagogues who are funding the Trump-facist campaign and who are appealing to the gullible. Not to mention the Putin regime basking in the praise of the thoroughly compromised Moscow patriarchate of "Christian" orthodoxy.   I wonder if Timothy Cardinal Dolan will offer up a prayer.   I haven't checked the schedule to see what goons and freaks will show up.  Though I had heard that Scott Baio, child star in that 1970s nostalgia TV crap I mentioned here the other day is on it. I swear I just heard that this morning.  TV and ephemeral pop culture being the substitute of low to middle-brow secularism as science and explanations out of the social sciences (yeah, just another line of fashion) are the more intellectually up-market idols.  

 But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessarily, desirable, or perhaps even possible. 

the prophetic purpose is much more radical than social change and, second, because the issues that so concern the Mosaic tradition are much more profound than the matters we usually regard as social action

Chapter 2  The Royal Consciousness; Countering The Counter-Culture

We have tried to suggest that Moses was mainly concerned with the formation of a counter-community with a counter-consciousness.  In making that claim for Moses I have carefully avoided any primary link between prophetic imagination and social action, for I believe that Moses did not engage in anything like what we identify as social action. He was not engaged in a struggle to transform a regime;  rather his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible.  I do not deny that specific actions of a political kin dare at times mandatory according to the gospel.  But they are not inherently linked to nor the focus of prophetic ministry any more than is a hospital call or a service of worship.  Moses was also concerned not with societal betterment through the repentance of the regime but rather with totally dismantling it in order to permit a new reality to appear.  Prophetic imagination as it may be derived from Moses is concerned with matters political and social, but is as intently concerned with matters linguistic and epistemological - all of which may be to engage simply in verbal distinctions. But I stress the point for two reasons;  first, because the prophetic purpose is much more radical than social change and, second, because the issues that so concern the Mosaic tradition are much more profound than the matters we usually regard as social action.

When I read this the first time I found it somewhat shocking, maybe even, out of my traditional lefty background, even scandalous.   That was due to the shallowness of the language and methods of thinking that conventional, American secular "liberalism" of the 18th century kind had provided for me to think about these things in.   I have, witnessing not only the depravity of "Constitutional originalism, literalism"  but the actual language and epistomological basis of American producing the history of the United States but also the utter and repeated impotence of the so-called "counter-culture" of secular liberalism against what should have been policies and legal rulings favoring the rich elites that should have been easily overturned.

After I got over the shock of the language Walter Brueggemann used in this chapter, I realized that what he was saying were the very same things I had noticed in my more than a decade of trying to figure out why the American left could not seem to really make change that favored the welfare and lives of the overwhelming majority of  People but also the very basis of life on Earth. The secular "civic piety" of the idolatry of the Constitution and the piety of secular liberalism, the language of it had blinded me to, not only its inadequacies and contradictions - why so much of it benefited billionaire liars and their millionaire minions in the media, in Hollywood and entertainment AND THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS WHO SERVED THEM - as the lawyers of the ACLU said all they wanted to do was "level the playing field" ignoring the fact that on one side were the starved poor and on the other side heavily armed thugs and their lawyers and those of their lawyers elevated to the judiciary as the official and binding referees.  Somewhere along the way I noticed that the ACLU style civil libertarians and judges were often good buddies with the opposition, having gone to the same law schools and being of the same class and living in the same communities of privilege.

Long time readers of what I've written here, and I know there are a few, will know especially how I have repeatedly, from the start targeted the regime of lies and gangsters facilitated by the "free speech-press" rulings that were championed by secular liberals and lefties and the scribbling professionals, especially those who make a lot of money in hardly counter-culture media.  In virtually every way the history of the so-called "counter-culture" that, no doubt, Brueggemann was thinking of in the late 1970s, as its failure to be counter enough was leading us into Reaganism, which we have not only not overturned but which is growing ever worse, is exactly the failure of "social action" as contrasted with the radicalism of the Mosaic faith, especially as extended through the teachings of Jesus.  

I have emphasized the epistemological inadequacy and moral treachery of a scientistic, a materialistic and atheistic "liberalism" or would-be radicalism which rests on the same bases as vulgar materialistic Mammonism, even that calling itself "evangelical Christianity" or "traditionalist Catholicism" or "Orthodox Judaism"  or "Islam" and which does, in fact, reproduce in contemporary and local terms a Pharaohism or a Roman imperial rule.  When that has been practiced by 20th and 21st century "civil libertarians" who, in the name of "liberty" bring interpretations of the First Amendment that inevitably empower and favor the billionaires and millionaires, even opening up the place where civic life impinges on what might be its sole means of obtaining legitimacy, our elections, to those who lie their way to the top, domestic, certainly, but in the past two decades, even foreign dictators.   

The American "counter-culture" as officially called by mid-brow scribblers in mid-brow commercial magazines in the 1960s was nothing like a real one, it was just a different variety of consumerism and fashion.  Which is why it was so easily toppled with some of those slogans and jingles and PBS putting on Milton Friedman to counter the previous airing of John Kenneth Galbraith (and if you don't think that, how TV and pop-culture were one of the keys to explain how Reaganism was brought it, you are a dope) and TV shows promoted 50s nostalgia.  I remember the 70s, each awful year of it.   Jimmy Carter, probably our most truly idealistic president, stood no chance against that because the secular left was in no way capable of countering it.  It didn't even really want to.