Saturday Night Radio Drama - Michele Forbes - My Huckleberry Friend

 

My Huckleberry Friend 

 

My Huckleberry Friend written by Michele Forbes

Continuing our summer season of new writing, Drama on One presents My Huckleberry Friend written by Michele Forbes and starring Owen Roe

While writing the funeral eulogy for his estranged father the past blows open for Stephen.Childhood memories of his time in America, where he forged a deep and everlasting bond with his cousin Toby, come flooding back.

with special thanks to Ethan Forbes-Roe for voice recordings 

Sound Supervision by Ciarán Cullen 

Directed by Gorretti Slavin 

The series producer of Drama on One is Kevin Reynolds

I'm not having much time to listen to dramas from sources I haven't posted before, fortunately there is this continuing series of new dramas, most of them monodramas, narratives, which is not surprising considering the condition of the world in late summer 2020.   Short and bitter sweet.   The link will get you to the same, though now current Podcasts site where you can find others in this series and before.

 I'll post another one that I've posted before later, for nostalgia.   

For some reason New Blogger has another category of font size that keeps throwing me, which accounts for the smaller lettering some of these get posted in without me noticing.  Another new "normal".   If I were posting it for me they'd all be in large.   

Dusan Bogdanovic, A Little Prayer,

 A Little Prayer

 

Dusan Bogdanovic, composer and guitarist

Seeing this come up in my "favorites" sidebar, I found I needed it after reading and listening to a lot of news, none of it good at all. 

RMJ has written a fine piece that you will be glad you read

 RMJ has written a fine piece that you will be glad you read:  

 

The View From 30,000 Feet

static religion in which the God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape, in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king

(3) The economics of affluence and the politics of oppression are the most characteristic marks of the Solomonic achievement. But these by themselves could not have prospered and endured as they did had they not received theological sanction. So the third foundational element I suggest is the establishment of a controlled, static religion in which the God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape, in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king. In Jerusalem in this period there is a radical reversion in the charcter of God. Now God is fully accessible to the king who is his patron and the freedom of God is completely overcome. It is almost inconceivable that the God domiciled (sic) in Jerusalem would ever say anything substantive and abrasive. Two observations need to be made here. First, I agree with those scholars who stress the tension between the Mosaic and royal traditions. I do not believe the one is derived from the other but rather that they have different roots and foster quite different visions of reality. Second, the reasons for the disastrous religious achievement of Solomon, I believe, are sociological and not historical. That is, Solomon had this kind of shrine not because he inherited it from the Canaanites or Jebusites but because he adopted and developed it because it served his social ideology. If it had not been inhereited from the older Canaanite shrine as he might have done, he would have easily imported it as he obviously did so many things he needed for his purposes.

In responsible biblical faith the freedom of God is always in considerable tension with the accessibility of God. This tension was sharp for Moses, who tended to stress the freedom of God at the expense of his accessibility. With Solomon that tension has been completely dissolved in the interest of accessibility. Now there is no notion that God is free and that he may act apart from and even against his regime. Now God is totally and unquestionably accessible to the king and those to whom the king grants access. This new dissolution of the tension is asserted in the old poem of reliable presence:

The Lord has set the sun in the heavens,

but has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.

I have built thee an exalted house,

a place for the to dwell in forever. (1 Kings 8:12-13)

God is now "on call" and access to him is controlled by the royal court. Such an arrangement clearly serves two interlocking functions. On the one hand it assures ready sanction to every notion of the king because there can be no transcendent resistance or protest. On the other hand it gives the king a monopoly so that no marginal person may approach this God except on the king's terms. There will be no disturbing cry against the king here.

The tension between God's freedom and God's accessibility is a tricky issue that every religious person and especially ministers would do well to reflect upon. Indeed, the whole point of having relgious functionaries is to assure access. That is the sociological expectation; "Will you say a prayer, pastor?" It is a burdensome irony that the bearer of the same office is the one called to assert the freedom of God which tempers the the notion of accessibility. As it concerns Solomon this tricky issue is resolved in an undialectical fashion. This poem, commonly regarded as in fact from the dedication of the temple, has God now as a permanent resident in Jerusalem. Any abrasion on the part of this God is unthinkable and untenable.

That, I think, is an almost exact description of the "god" of much of contemporary American Christianity, the kind of "god" who can be commanded to bless America as, in fact, he can be commanded in the British Commonwealth to bless the monarch of Britain. Today for tens of millions of mainly white professed Christians he - and for them "god" is HE - is the patron of Trumpian-Republican-fascism or, to hear Trump and his toadies tell it, they're "god's" patron and protector and the only thing standing between "god" and the terrible Joe Biden. Among "traditionalist" Catholics you can substitute Pope Francis for Joe Biden though the Trump is still the same.

And, as with Solomon's use of the Temple cult, Trump's and Republican-fascism's use of "god" is as a means of obtaining power so the billionaires can get more, the poor and destitute and, especially the stranger among us can get shafted.

Anyone who thinks this is unimportant or irrelevant to our lives in the most vital way is simply unaware of the fact that this is the radical counter-culture that has a history of working to oppose what Trump is merely the most recent figurehead of. The secular alternatives have had a uniform history of either total failure here or, where it was applied, of becoming Trump's wet dream of gangster rule with a thin gloss coat of Marxist blather to gull the gullible, many of them with impressive educational credentials and some of them professorships at some of our most reknowned universitites and associations with the official "opposition". If I wasn't having trackerpad issues with this old junker I'm writing this on, I'd go look up what Stephen F. Cohen is up to these days. Not to mention the frequent guests on Putin's RT propaganda machine. 

 

Note: The earlier piece I posted this morning on the Maine Covid-19 outbreak through the "pastor" of Calvary Baptist in Sanford, Maine is certainly not unrelated.  Romans tells us that the way of sin is death and in what results from the actions of such "pastors" I would think we have a pretty good demonstration of the nature of their preaching and actions and the actions that they advocate.  It doesn't say the way of truth and virtue are death, after all.  I have since writing that talked to a member of my family who tells me that there is a family not a mile from here who goes to that "church".  He said he thinks one of the town employees does and that there are children who go to the school district with the children of my town who do.  We were relatively lucky up to this point in Maine, I think our luck is about to break.

If We Don't Face The Fact That Our Constitution Our Traditions And Our Habits Of Thought Are Getting Us Killed And The Worst Source Of That Is President

The fact is that Donald Trump can openly break the law, only among the latest way he's done that is by advocating that HIS SUPPORTERS BREAK THE LAW BY VOTING FOR HIM TWICE! and nothing is being done to remove him from office.  

The warnings I've been giving that there are fundamental dangers embedded in the United States Constitution, many of them in the letter of the document, many of them installed as an overlay by the Supreme Court, by unwise and corrupt law and by the action of bureaucrats and in one of the most dangerous of them all by a flunky lawyer at the Department of Justice.  

And in Maine we are finding out that when Trump advocates criminal irresponsibility that an asshole with ordination in a fascist sect can get hundreds of people sick and kill some of them.  

Update

Here's what that asshole is doing as his part in spreading Covid-19 in my area became known to  him and his cult:

  Others in the community also feel unsafe because of the church’s response.

Kay Rumery said that Bell and two other missionaries from the church attempted to push their way into her Sanford home in August within days of the wedding Bell officiated in Millinocket.

“They came in without masks and asked to come in even further,” Rumery said. “They asked twice if I was sure they couldn’t come into my living room. When I refused they forced a pamphlet at me.”

Rumery said she felt unsettled when Bell and church members approached her without wearing masks and invited her to church.

No More Republicans Should Head The FBI, the CIA, the DoJ, etc.

I hadn't known on Monday that Michael Schmidt was about to reveal the truth of what I said about Robert Mueller as the focus of misplaced hopes in his about to be published book, I didn't know that until I listened to this video from Rachel Maddow's Monday show where she interviewed the reporter.

 

 

 

As someone who excoriated both James Comey and Rod Rosenstein back when Rosenstein was being held up as some kind of hero and who expressed skepticism and then criticism of the savior de jour when he was that, Robert Mueller, I am going to say, I told you so. 

 

James Comey's too-late revelation that he had known that Rod Rosenstein was a careerist hack  who would do what was good for the career of Rod Rosenstein even if it meant the rule of law and the welfare of the Country were flushed down the toilet seemed kind of rich coming from Comey.  As I recall, he didn't say that until Rosenstein did his glassy-eyed pose behind Barr as Barr lied about the Mueller report.  Not that Mueller could be bothered to call out that lie by his buddy, Barr, not really even as he testified - insufficently and reluctantly - to the House committees.  

 

Now we find out that Meuller, the that simulated granite statue of heroism and public service was carrying the water of Rosenstein even as that little creep issued orders to him to not conduct the full investigation or even any into some of the most serious crimes and treasons of the Trump regime, I hope that finally, for good, pulls that rotted plaster idol down from the plinth he'd been put on. I asked how anyone could have any confidence in Mueller when he was known to be a good buddy of William Barr even as Barr's cover ups for the Bushes, both I and II were fully known. I'm not someone who would sell myself as a "law man" and I'd never stay friends with someone who did what Mueller certainly knew he was up to.

I hope if we are lucky enough to get a Biden-Harris presidency that one of the things that is put to rest, finally, is Democrats appointing Republicans to head the FBI and, or, CIA or, really any important law enforcement post. I hope that they will resist the lobbying of the DC establishment to encourage them to appoint Republicans as Democrats have been gulled into doing for several presidencies. Bill Clinton did it to his cost and the cost of the country, Barack Obama did it to the cost of Hillary Clinton Comey having used his position to directly aid in handing the election to Trump for obviously partisan and, I would strongly suspect, misogynistic reasons.*

Democrats should stop handing legitimacy to Republicans because Republicans, even those who manage to get made up as Atticus Finch, the movie version, are not to be trusted. You'd think Democrats would realize they can't trust the DC-NYC media, either. How many times do they need to get shafted before they realize they aren't to be trusted, especially in their promotion of Republicans to head the FBI and CIA. Our media will slob any Republican who ever wore a uniform or was a cop, or, really, any Republican.  Just watch if the Democrats take the presidency and Congress, or even any one of them.  Their advice on who to put in charge of the FBI is not to be trusted.

* Though Bill Clinton stupidly meeting with the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch,  on the tarmac did a lot to hand them the opportunity to screw Hillary Clinton and the country. I hope and pray that Bill Clinton's appearance on the 2020 convention is the last time he will get anywhere close to a Democratic presidency. I hope Hillary Clinton backs down and I don't have nearly the reservations about her that I do about Bill. I would not appoint Lynch to anything either.  Her meeting with Clinton was, if anything, even stupider than his seeking the meeting, though as both of them are lawyers, it was unacceptably stupid and irresponsible on both sides.

In that new consciousness on which the regime was built but which was also created by the regime, the politics of justice and compassion has completely disappeared.

(2) The Solomonic achievement was in part made possible by oppressive social policy. Indeed, this was the foundation of the regime and surely the source of the affluence just mentioned. That affluence was undoubtedly hierarchical and not democratic in its distribution. Obviously some people lived well off the efforts of others, for we are reminded that there were those "who built houses and did not live in them, who planted vineyards, and did not drink their wine." Fundamental to social policy was the practice of forced labor, in which at least to some extent citizens existed to benefit the state or the corporate economy. It is not terribly important or helpful to determine if the forced labor policy included all citizens, as suggested in 1 Kings 5:13-18, or if the people of Israel were exempted from the general levy of empire, as seems likely from 1 Kings 9:22. In any case it was unmistakably the policy of the regime to mobilize and claim the energies of people for the sake of the court and its extravagant needs.

As we know from our own recent past, such an exploitative appetite can develop insatiable momentum so that no matter how much goods or power or security is obtained it is never enough. The rebellion announced in 1 Kings 11:28 and the dispute of 1 Kings 12 concerning the nature of government and the role of people and leaders both show the struggle with a new self-understanding. In that new consciousness on which the regime was built but which was also created by the regime, the politics of justice and compassion has completely disappeared. The order of the state was the overriding agenda, and questions of justice and freedom, the main program of Moses, were necessarily and systematically subordinated. Justice and freedom are inherently promissory but this regime could not tolerate promises, for they question the present oppressive ordering and threaten the very foundations of current self-serving.

The decay of ideals is a common theme in human history, the length of time under which the Mosaic ideals is said to have held in Israel is rather remarkable, though its decay - as warned by Samuel - was all too predictable. 

 

Earliest Christianity was also seriously compromised when Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire in its final centuries. 

 

The  description of Christianity under persecution and without official power contrasts greatly with Christianity with worldly kingdoms. Such as comprises the history of scandal that is so useful to the enemies of Christianity, accurate history or elaboration or, not infrequently, fable that fits in well with that history.

 

And that is played out today in the white "evangelical" support for the vulgar Mammonist fascist, Trump, as it did throughout the American period when some of our worst actions from Puritan genocide of the natives in Massachusetts with the support of some, though not all of the clergy, to the slavery which was present, originally, North as well as South before the Revolution and after. Slavery, including wage slavery under capitalism, is exactly the same violence, the same legalized theft of peoples' labor, the product of their labor and, so, their lives. The the Mosaic Law exists as the most comprehensive preventative measures to prevent that and, no doubt old Moses finding he couldn't break people of all of their bad habits, such as enslaving people, it contained protections of the rights and lives of slaves that never existed in American slavery. And, no doubt, Moses and those who tried to hold true to his insights found out that even making laws against evil is not going to be more than somewhat effective. All government as all religion is conducted by the ever corruptible human species.

And our secular regimes are even faster to find their ideals rotting away. Under the scientistic, materialistic regimes that found modern science and technology so useful - I'd use the career as a weaponeer of Leonardo and Galileo as a useful start to that really taking off - as even the vestiges of regard for God and things such as The Law and The Gospel fell out of fashion as anything more than a conventional means of regulating other peoples' sex lives and national cultural identity, there was little to keep even professed Christians with wealth and power from totally abandoning any ideas of equality and justice.

The Churches have been a more mixed phenomenon, they being many and diverse in ways that even the fifty United States governments are not. And within churches there has certainly been diversity in the extent to which "the overriding agenda, and questions of justice and freedom, the main program of Moses, were necessarily and systematically subordinated." The radicalism of St. Francis, among the most radical of Christian attempts to take the teachings of Jesus, and so, also, too, Moses seriously was certainly not shared by the bishops and the popes with anything like uniformity. In our own time - well my time, some of you were probably not born before she died - Dorothy Day, Saint Dorothy Day, went up against Cardinal Spellman who certainly didn't like what she was doing and even less what she was saying but he is said to have been afraid to move against her for fear that she was the genuine thing, a real saint when he, at his best, could only affect a faint scent of sanctity. I doubt that the bishops and Cardinals and Catholic millionaires who work against Pope Francis as he attempts to be a Christian are as bothered by that as old Fanny Spellman was. I have my doubts that most of them have any belief in the God of Abraham, Issac, . . . Jesus and Paul being wedded to Mammon who they serve. Mammon and the Cannon Law and what they take as "tradition". And the trappings of it all. Trappings are a serious trap when it comes to churches as it is when it comes to stuff like Constitutional Law.

Note:  These are just some of my ideas in reaction to the passages I'm posting, I am certain that other people reading them would have other ideas, probably better and more informed ideas, I am not implying in any way that my ideas are Brueggemann's ideas.  I am certain that he would be among the first to note that his ideas on the texts which are the source of this are not the last and final word on them, either.  I will say that his ideas on them are the best ones I've come across in reading them.  

One thing I think is remarkable is how much of the text reminds the people it addresses of their experience as slaves in Egypt as the reason that they are to behave morally.  That is a rather early thing which I've only come to conclude in the past year or so, how enduring the collective experience of traumatic denial of equality and rights can be in a culture and in the unconscious cultural inclinations of a people.  I wonder, for example, if the reluctance for the Children of Israel to talk much about the afterlife is a reaction against the elaborate cult of the dead so much of the efforts of the common people of Egypt were harnessed to serve.  As Jessica Mitford commented to Molly Ivens when they were watching movie at the Houston Funderal Service Museum that started out talking about the Egyptian body preservation industry 

 
"Now THERE is a culture where the funeral directors REALLY got out of hand!"

Just A Technical Detail

I have really been enjoying my experiment with typing out these passages from The Prophetic Imagination and my comments on them using a simple as hell text editor.   I'm using mostly the free, Linux based Feather Pad though the even simpler Leaf Pad which I like as well is my back up.  Those come without much of any extra features, I haven't used my current word processor (LibreOffice)  even once in the past two weeks.   

Word processing made me lazy, the text editor mixes the ease of typing without the bad habits that things like instant spell check allow you to fall into.   Also without the annoyingly small vocabulary of spell check marking things that you spelled but which aren't in its word hoard.   That's especially the case while typing out the writing of theologians who seem to have a vocabulary far bigger than the average scholar's.  Being forced to re-read, not depending on flagging is a good thing.  Satiation is bad for the soul.

I wonder if I'll ever go back to using a word processor with all of the extraneous coding it imposed on the text.  If I could figure out how to type in accented characters, Greek letters,  from one I'd never have to use a word processor again.

I've never really been satisfied with any of the word processors I've used since I learned how to use one with the simple Professional Write at adult ed more than thirty years ago.   Maybe I shouldn't have bothered with them and all of the frustrations they bring.  Though I used to like macros.  Those were easy to write and use on Professional Write, I have never used them on any of the fancier ones, for profit and freeware, since then. 

I will mention again that I have not for a single second regretted dumping Windows for Linux.  I use Linux Mint and Puppy Linux for a portable, USB drive desktop.  Though I'm not doing much toting around a USB these days,  especially since being exposed to a teacher back in the classroom on a regular basis.  Back to March conditions here.

And all it takes to counter that consciousness, as kings have always known, is satiation

(1) The Solomonic achievement was one of incredible well-being and affluence:

Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea; they ate and drank and were happy. Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt; they brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life.

Solomon's provision for one day was thirty cors of fine flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, a hundred sheep, besides harts, gazelles, roebucks, and fatted fowl. (1 Kings 4:20-23)

Clearly, there is a new reality in Israel. Never before had there been enough consumer goods to remove the anxiety about survival. The counter-culture of Moses lived in a world of scarcity, whether one talks about hurriedly eating unleavened bread (Exodus 12:8-11) or the strange gift from heaven in the wilderness (Exodus 16). And all it takes to counter that consciousness, as kings have always known, is satiation. It is difficult to keep a revolution of freedom and justice under way when there is satiation. (In our own economy questions of civil rights seem remote when we are so overly fed. And when we look at the Soviet Union, how strange it is that the burning issues of freedom have become agendas for consumer goods.) That is what is going on in Solomonic Israel. The high standard of living claimed by the text is fully supported by the archaeology of the period. The  artifacts, walls, and building remains attest to a well-ordered and secure social situation.

It is nonetheless reasonable to conjecture that the affluence and prosperity so attested to is not democratically shared. The menu report of 1 Kings 4 just cited most likely represented only the eating habits and opportunities of the royal entourage, which, at best, was indifferent to the plight of the citizenry. And then or now, eating that well means food is being taken off the table of another. This notice in 1 Kings 4 suggests that the satiation had become an accessible goal for the royal society. Covenanting which takes brothers and sisters seriously had been replaced by consuming which regards brothers and sisters as products to be used. And in a consuming society an alternative consciousness is surely difficult to sustain.

Change the names and a few of the nouns and it sounds very familiar. Of course.  We should also keep in mind that it was the educated class who would have had a stake in the prosperity of the Solomonic system who recorded the abundance. As in our media, such even modest elites in the media have no problem in erasing the underclass if its to their advantage to do so. We don't have that record in the historical books, we get that in the Prophets, the protest singers against the system. Though even such protest, as we can see in our day, is always in danger of becoming part of the system, often even in the very means they choose to believe they are opposing it with.

 

 The greatest importance of the "historical books" of the Bible is not is not antiquarian, it is in what they can help us to understand about life and how to live during our times. An unjust society of affluence, unevenly distributed and dependent on the forced labor of a laboring class, the disposing of the disposable, the constant impoverishment and indebtedness of those without, the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy. Tribute from subjugated people. That is the United States, Russia, Britain, and so many other countries in the world presaged.

The criticism of "social action" earlier in this series of posts from Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination may have been confusing, so used as we are to considering the depth of the Mosaic-Christian faith with social-work, with elevating the lower through the conventions of education so they can become prosperous within the system. That, as Walter Brueggemann has not yet explicitly said merely imagines an endless and eventually universal elevation of everyone within a system which, at its core, cannot do that because it is based on exploitation of the kind which Solomon instituted, from which the Children of Israel were saved by God. The system is a pyramid scheme, in as fitting a metaphor as could be invented, in which it is impossible for there to be anything like universal justice. If it were even a remote possibility for it to do that, the existing power differential would ensure that those who already had more would rig it to their benefit. AND THAT IS ON THE ASSUMPTION NOT IN EVIDENCE THAT "MAKING THE SYSTEM REALLY WORK" WOULD EVER, POSSIBLY HAVE THAT RESULT. 

 

Social work, education that is done with the motive of training children and adults to be cogs in the machine, maybe ensuring their oiling and maintainance as long as they can stay useful to the machine is, first, not an unexpected substitute for virtue in a materialist world view, but one which is never going to be egalitarian and universal and will certainly never be capable of taking the radically transcendent view of people and living beings as individuals that can only come from other than a materialistic framing. It can certainly never really believe in nor pursue real human equality because human beings will never be of equal worth in that kind of materialistic economics. And economics,as can be seen in the official "opposition" socialism, Marxism, will ALWAYS be the transcendent goal of materialism. As I mentioned in my second post yesterday, Darwinism shares in that hermetically sealed view of reality, even to the point where a physician can give breezily optimistic views of the good that will come from hundreds of thousands and very realistically expected millions of deaths.

 

It reminds me of the old capitalist snake oil scheme that I first heard Mortimer Adler promote, in which there would be universal stock ownership, as if stock ownership was any kind of a guarantee of universal egalitarianism among those who already own it instead of it being a system of those with a leg up and more savvy making money off of the inabilities and differences in resources even among those with the means of owning stock and making investments.

And that, itself, is what the secular conception of "social action" will always devolve into. If I didn't suspect that from hearing ol' Mort's hair-brained replacement for enforced equality the essential nature of secular liberalism became clear to me when I went online and read, unfiltered, the thought, the attitudes, the snobbery of the secular lefties, not the "liberals" those who declared themselves socialists and leftists, the most lefty of the left. Cruel jests about "trailer trash," jokes about the bad teeth of the underclass (it is fucking expensive to maintain the health of teeth over a lifetime, especially with the American style diet) and a myriad of other would-be humorous efforts are as ubiquitous on the college-credentialed "left" as overt racism is in Republican-fascism.

Those are just a few of the thoughts that this passage brings to mind, no doubt they have brought more to yours. I am really finding this informal "course" in this topic, on Walter Brueggemann's book is worth doing. I would encourage you to get the book, read it in ways that I can't go into- I am not including Brueggemann's notes which,though not as plentiful as those of, say Hans Kung are no less important and vitally necessary for the fullest reading of the book. I will repeat that the depth of scholarship and thought in the areas of theology and biblical study is some of the deepest I have found over many topics. 

 

Note: I am having some kind of trouble getting the links to the Jewish Publications Society 1917 text I've been linking to for the Bible passages this morning, I will try to figure out why and put the links in, though you can probably find it elsewhere.

Atlas Skanks

If one of your loved ones dies of Covid-19, among those you can thank is Dr. Scott Atlas, a Hoover Institute hack who has the ear of Trump because he's part of the FOX fascist machine for lying us into a death toll far larger than the one we might have had.

The piece of crap, a Chicago University trained doctor, a neuroradiologist NOT an expert in public health nor an epidemiologist,  is pushing the Darwinist superstition that I mentioned Sweden followed to have one of the highest infection and death rates from Covid in Europe or Asia,  no doubt seen by that legendary land of "liberal" imagination as liberty even as it was viciously Darwinian in its determination that with widespread infection would come "herd immunity" for the survivors.  Which, of course, means that they were more than eager to have a good part of "the herd" die off.  I have pointed out the irony that America's most viciously Darwinist true believers were those who rejected evolution, though they love them some natural selection, especially in the forms of eugenics and scientific racism.  

It is in keeping with the criticism of the educational and scribbling classes (the media, FOX is, under our stupid legal theory "the press") this neo-eugenicist hack of a doctor would leave the United States even more at the mercy of the virus, unlike Sweden, we don't have universal health coverage and he is one of the more influential Trump voices calling for getting rid of the little we got from the ACA - I wonder if he figures in the documents submitted to the Supreme Court on behalf of them declaring it against the Constitution.   

If people like this can be licensed to practice the profession of medicine it's even more outrageous than that some scumbag lawyer like Barr can.  That I have no doubt Dr. Atlas will keep his license to call himself a physician is not to the credit of the profession that maintains him nor of the educational institutions he and that scumbag institute named after Herbert Hoover are associated with. 

We are living what Walter Brueggemann wrote about the Solomonic regime, translated into modern terms. 

It follows, of course, that the Mosaic vision of reality nearly disappeared

We left off with five corruptions that the rule of Solomon the Wise introduced into Israel, things which directly and seriously were contrary to the Mosaic Law and in service to the power of Solomon and his dynasty and his establishment. The warnings that God told Samuel would come with a monarchy came on hard and strong with Solomon. And Walter Breuggemann notes that not only was it with the acquiescence of the Temple priesthood and authorities, they were beneficiaries of the corruption.

All these things in the Solomonic moment transpired under the effective umbrella of the Jerusalem temple, surely the quintessence of Cannaization of Israel. . .

Brueggemann notes that the opulence, not only of the material wealth of Solomon but also in the intellectual establishment has been called, even by himself, as "enlightenment." So politics, religion and the educational establishments were all part of the system which, in other places, Brueggeman notes required the grinding taxation and oppression of the laboring classes, the farmers, especially, but also those who labored in other kinds of production. It would be nice to know if that divine warning given to Samuel as the People clamored to have a king was in the scripture before Solomon's time or if it is a post-exilic reflection on the evils that came with having a strong king. If it was an afterthought it's noteworthy that our time's most fervent floggers of scripture, the "evangelicals" to a lesser extent "traditional" Catholics are the corrupted priesthood and laity who are knowingly, enthusiastically supporting our stupid and unwise monarch even as they have had more than enough time to see through things as people, quite often, credentialed with more education than even most of the better off peasantry and working class of that time. I'd say, if anything, we are more corrupt than those who were the "illiterate goat-herders" of anti-religious invective. Consider how even our self-designated drivers of the opposition can be counted on to do and say things that benefit the Trumpian grasp of power, in 2020 as much as in 2016! As much in 2016 as in 2000 and 1980 and 1968!

The sift in presuppositions wrought by Solomon can hardly be overestimated. It is likely that David, genius that he was, managed to have it both ways, and , as Stefan Haym has observed, there is a greatness in David that Solomon could only imitate and even then to poor effect. In any case it is clear that Solomon had a social vision contradictory to that of Moses. The possibility of an alternative consciousness or an alternative community was quite removed from Israel in Solomon's time. The king characteristically could countenance no such notion. It seems likely that criticism could no longer be practiced because the transcendent agent necessary to criticism was gone. And we may hypothesize that promises which could energize are now all confiscated for royal use. Solomon was able to create a situation in which everything was already given, in which no more futures could be envisioned because everything was already present a hundred-fold The tension between a criticized present and an energizing future is overcome. There is only an uncriticized and unenergized present. It follows, of course, that the Mosaic vision of reality nearly disappeared.

 

I will interject that chief among the things lost within that vision is the radical egalitarianism and the prevention of the establishment and serving of an acquisitive, ever accumulating economic elite.

In this context I want to explore three dimensions of the Solmonic achievement that are important to our general thesis. These three elements summarize the dominant culture against which the prophets are regularly a counterpoint.

I will go through these at length because Brueggemann gives more than a list of terms for them but goes into what those terms really mean and each one will require a day to go through them and we will see if I can relate them to the Trumpian moment we find ourselves in.

One thing. If Trump wins or steals the election (as did Bush II and Trump 2020 did with the help of our own priesthood, the Supreme Court, and the corruption baked into our equivalent of The Law, the Electoral College) you can fully expect the mass media, most of the so-called independent media to genuflect and declare that we have a king, even as they don't call it that. And they will find many academics and members of the scribbling class and "public intellectuals" to support him just as happens whenever a dictator takes full control. Those with something at stake in the system will support that system as "institutionalists" as "career 'public servants" as "upholders of law" (don't get me started on that great and misguided hope, Robert Mueller).

 

Typing this,  I think I know what it was that led me to to think of that obscure, difficult Bob Dylan song that was going through my head yesterday, the prophets were rebel poets who had no access to modern copyright law and contracts. Bob Dylan is, I think, someone who probably knows a thing or two about being tempted to betray a prophetic vocation and how hard it is to practice one. You've got to be careful about making your money from your prophesy, it's a tricky thing to pull off. Most likely in the future it will be a lot more dangerous to practice the prophetic job.

Hate Mail - I Can't Believe Anyone's Still Fooled By NPR And Their Like

Nope, I've got no qualms about targeting PBS and National Public Radio as enablers of Republican-fascism because they are the boutique markets for normalizing it along with such venues as the New York Times and so many of the other mistakenly believed liberal media outlets. Their sewage might not seem as raw but, as it's packaged to appeal to the more dainty of those who can be talked into going along with it, it's as toxic.

They're not liberal in the traditional American sense of the word, they are libertarian, laissez-fair, 18th century style liberals of the kind who have been among those greatest enablers of evil in our history. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, . . . The "founders" generation who made the system that produced Bush II and now Trump continues in the stuff that comes out of NPR and PBS and the New York Times, often peddled with the empty platitudes of "journalistic ethics" as they promote the lies of Trump as they did the long line of such Republicans in order to soften up the heads of their audiences who might otherwise support real change.

 

The truth will make you free and the truth isn't found by "balance" and "giving both sides."   When one side is lies that's what that practice of dishonest journalism requires   Anyone who favors them being funded is a duped chump. 

 

 

Bob Dylan - Too Much Of Nothing - Frotheringay

 

 

I have no idea why this song has been driving me crazy, having it go through my head all day.  This version of it is better than the one that was a hit for Peter Paul and Mary.  I wish I could find a recording of its author to post but this one by the tragic Sandy Denny and her post-Fairport Convention band will have to do. 

Hate Mail - The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition Is The Opposite Of Cowardly, It Requires Entirely More Courage Not Less

Huh, that old line, again. That religion is a crutch for the intellectually crippled, it's childrens' stories for people who are afraid of death, afraid of the dark. Though we have fundamentally different views on some things I liked John Lennox's answerwhen a Brit reporter asked him to respond to one of the pop atheists of the 00s saying religion is a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark, "Atheism is a fairy tale for those who are afraid of the light."

But this is an aspect of popular atheism needing to always have it both ways, "religion is people telling themselves what they want to be true" and "religion keeps people from doing what they want to do."  I'd say atheism, like bad religion is people telling themselves what they want to hear.  But, then, fundamentalism is how most atheists and many non-believers insist religion be seen as being, the boundaries they're comfortable with it fitting into.    

 

The total contradiction in the two statements never seems to occur to those who constantly need to tell themselves they are smarter than the large majority of people.  And as religious requirements become more and more a matter of requiring people to do what they don't really want to do and not doing what they want to do, that contradiction grows ever stronger.

Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination lays out the extraordinary insights of the Mosaic tradition* as both a liberation from the whole host of evils done to people - and as explicitly stated in the Scriptures, to animals and the very environment that they all depended on - but also a lot about the difficulties that liberation entailed. All through the First Testament** people are told the consequences of not following that path of liberation. The evils of the later kings of the Children of Israel and the falling away of, especially, the priestly and aristocratic class that arose after they demanded a monarchy, comprise most of the Jewish scriptures, one of the greatest collection of documents ever assembled.

People are constantly told in The Law that doing things they want to do will lead to evil. In our own time, like it or not, the very same thing is said by people like Dr. Fauci and, no surprise to anyone who studied the record of human folly in the Old Testament, an effectively disastrous number of people go with what TV and hate-talk-radio and hate-talk-internet have told them to ignore or not believe. And the results are terrible, especially in places like the United States, like in Britain, even as in that imaginary land of modern-sciency-"enlightenment" Sweden.

The rugged ("manly") pose that is encouraged in pop-culture, in modernist kew-elness, in the media, is the easy way out based in people frivolously, irresponsibly and stupidly doing what they want instead of doing what they should do.

In thinking about a family member who is about to be exposed to the very potential, rationally considered certain super-spreader event of reopened schools, I realized that for all her faults she is a good embodiment of the free generosity that is one of the ultimate requirements of courage in that tradition, the tradition of the widow who gives her last two-cents to the poor box, as contrasted to the one who lights a lamp so she can find her lost silver coin. Though both require courage to live that way, the one who has given her last cents to the poor has to have a kind of courage that those of us enslaved by the fear of being without can only consider. She has always driven me crazy with her profligacy but along with that she has always been very generous. That generosity has meant that she can't afford to take what would be her last year of retirement off, she needs the money, but she can also not stand the thought of abandoning the students. She may well die from it, I'm not entirely sure I'll volunteer to step as I normally might because if I get it, I am pretty confident I will die from it. Especially during the height of allergy season.  I have been meditating on how to face that when, not if, it comes to that.  I hope I choose to expose myself but I can't guarantee I've got that kind of courage.

It is notable that the entire career of Moses, from having to flee for his life after he killed the Egyptian who was beating a Jewish slave to the end of his life when God allowed him to look over into the promised land, he was on the run. In taking up his responsibility to lead the Children of Israel out of slavery, he became a nomad facing the same hardships in the wilderness that the Children of Israel couldn't cope with. And he was the one responsible for bringing them all there.

Likewise, Jesus, born into the lowest stratum of the Roman imperial regime, left his home to become homeless, asking his closest, named followers to leave their homes and professions and families to go with him when doing that was far more dangerous than most of us could cope with. And Jesus did so to support and extend those same teachings from Moses. Even most of his followers in the past two-thousand years have not been able to really put into practice what is required because we are too cowardly, too cautious, too self-preserving to do what we would really need to do to put those teachings into practice in the world.

None of this is cowardly, the macho posturing that is held up as courage is what is cowardly. Atheism is so much easier than this. Any chance taking in going with it is taking a chance of what is presumed can be had with the practices of materialist-scientistic atheism. Following the morality of the Jewish tradition - Christianity and Islam being part of that tradition - takes entirely more courage than that. It's what I believe Jesus meant by saying that those who belived without seeing were blessed.

* In re-reading the book and the passages in those very early writings that contain them, I have a lot more of a feeling that the teachings that are attributed to Moses are, at least originally, the insights of one person, no doubt expanded in the oral tradition by people who were taught his original insights and who took them seriously enough to both try to live them and to consider their meaning in the context of their ambient social and physical conditions.

** I prefer the term to "Old Testament" but like "BC" and "BCE" I'm not bothered enough with the traditional terms to avoid them. I sometimes use the one I figure will bother those I might like to bother the more. After the terrible events of the mid-20th century scientific dictatorships, people who take the Christian tradition seriously should consider always taking the chance to point out that in no place did Jesus say that the Mosaic Law was invalid, in fact when, in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, as Lazarus reposed in the bosom of Abraham the rich man was told that his brothers had Moses as their guide and they weren't going to get the Jacob Marley's gift of a warning of the consequences of not following it leading to the purgatory flames of hell. Jesus and Paul, certainly the author of the Letter of James considered The Law as still good advice to follow.