40% Can Rule 60% Under Our Anti-Democratic Constitution - Lies Will Dominate Under Absolute Freedom For The Corporate Mass Media

Listening to the welcomed but no where near adequate condemnation of Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, a  Republican, rigging the election through stopping the vote, really of Donald Trump's refusal to commit to leaving the White House if he loses the election, I think we are in far more danger than even those who are alarmed by Trump's ever increasing fascist moves are willing to imagine possible.  The fact that he got in - AFTER LOSING AN ELECTION BY MORE THAN THREE-MILLION VOTES - and remaining there as not only his criminality but his actual treason as a puppet of the dictator of Russia should tell such people that that danger is here and now.   The danger of having Trump there for four more years, or until he rots like so many of the successful despots of so many countries, is the same as the danger he's been here for four years with the open support of the Republicans in the Congress, in state legislatures and governorships, and in many cases, the Supreme Court and lower courts and with the unshakable devotion of his TV-hate-talk-radio-billionaire-swayed-Facebook-Twitter lied to cult. 

The way we got here is clear, he got in because of the phony CEO dictator role he played on a long running "reality" series on TV and the clown he otherwise played, all the while being sold as a business genius, despite the fact that he wasn't.   The free-press, print as well as TV and radio, created the Trump of cult devotion.  HIS CULT WERE PREPARED TO WANT A FASCIST DESPOT THROUGH ENTERTAINMENT TV.  His despotism is a creation of the First Amendment, which, in the modern interpretation of it allowing the media to lie with impunity, never should have been expected to serve an egalitarian democracy.   The idiots on the Supreme Court who voted to start that chain of rulings which has been wound round the throat of democracy had the examples of modern dictators' use of mass media to lie themselves into absolute power to show them that the Madisonian-Jeffersonian theory of "free press" was certainly proven to be wrong, that without the ability of people lied about to effectively and remedially punish the media for lying about them, that would be turned on those who were an inconvenience to the wealthiest and most powerful, those who own the mass media and who dominate it.  

The already terrible consequences of allowing that after the Sullivan Decision in 1964 was made immeasurably worse with the rise of "social media" with the internet ruled by the methods and means that most dishonest of all media has mastered, advertising, suckering people into doing what was wrong and what harmed them.   

So we have about 40% of the country, unevenly distributed in a way that makes the manipulation of the Electoral College system their tool to rule even against the will of the majority, a situation where a Trump can win while losing the election, an election where he ran against a woman the media, from the lowest of the low, the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair, to the New York Times lied about and libeled for a quarter of a century.  And I guarantee you, when Barr releases his lies about Joe Biden, they will carry his water even as they see the criminal insanity and incompetence of Trump.  I'm not at all confident that he will beat Trump, why should I be confident when Hillary Clinton beat him and still lost.

As I've been pointing out over and over again, even if Democrats win in a landslide the media will immediately start where they did in 2008, after Obama won in a landslide, they will tear at and attack and carry the Republican-fascists' water in exactly the same way.  MSNBC may not,  CNN definitely will, so will NPR, so will the New York Times.  To the extent there is a culture of the media, it is a culture that reflexively and knowingly serves the same wealthy owners and advertisers that the Republican Party serves.  Without a legal, regulatory requirement of them not slanting their coverage of the kind that that previous Hollywood-show biz president, Reagan got rid of, without the ability of Democratic politicians to sue them when they libel them without the absurd requirements of mind-reading and get effective redress to keep them from doing it again, the terrible history of the last four and forty years will just continue on into this march into fascism.   

Lies are what got us here, those lies that are called "journalism" in our degraded anti-democratic culture, those lies that are typical of show-biz at the best of times, which our time certainly is not.   The fictionalization of our history has played a huge part in this, most of that done through movies and through TV shows, not a little of that also coming from the ridiculously named "journalism" side of it.  

Until we take the prohibition of mass-distributed lies as a requirement to save democracy - AND THAT WILL TAKE GETTING OVER THE CLEARLY WRONG THEORY OF "FREEDOM OF THE PRESS" CONTAINED IN THE LITERAL READING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT - we will never be nearly safe from the manipulation of those who use the methods of lying perfected in the advertising industry in the mass media.  I started using the internet in the heady days of self-publishing when lots of us were stupid enough to believe it was going to save democracy.   Well, that turned out to have been ridiculous as the big "social media" turned out to be a deadly social disease that has given us a potentially fatal infection with Trump.  And they're getting better at manipulating our Constitutional system with every success and with every failure.  We change that or we will find every danger that regulation was asserted to have as a potential is, itself, guaranteed by such "freedom" for the corporate media. 

As for Charlie Baker, other Republicans horrified by Trump, what the hell does it take for you to get out of that fascist party?

Those Prophets Are Often Not As They're Marketed As Being

When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does.  I suspect that our own self-concept is as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim.   

Breaking in here I'll say that most of what I was led to believe about "the prophets" in the Bible is in line with this joyless and dour and arrogantly self-righteous concept of what is not at all realistic when you consider what is actually said.  Yes, the prophets deal with the terrible reality that we create when we go along with the "royal consciousness" that is permitted, and in the United States, in Britain, in many places under the secular, even the republican form of that (gangster consciousness, really), without an officially admitted monarch, that is the product of everything from academic respectability to commercial pop culture to the officially respectable "art" even poetry that remains in the prescribed limits of that consciousness.  

I'll throw in that when I re-read that just now, the first thing I thought of was John Singer Sargent's famous and admittedly beautiful frieze of The Prophets at the Boston Public Library.  

But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric.  The prophet engages in futuring fantasy.  The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for the questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined.  The imagination must come before the implementation.  Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.  The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger.   Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.  It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination,  to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

I don't think that we can be certain that even the officially deemed "poets" of opposition will speak a real, alternative that breaks out of the allowed limits and not become a troubador or some brand of gangster consciousness or other.  Recently I remembered getting into a couple of brawls over one of the official "prophets" who for a time fell into the comfortable realm that allows for even the odd top-40s sales,  the late Phil Ochs over him being very comfortable with the "rights" or pornographers - one of the most putrid of expressions of this "royal consciousness" as translated into American secular "liberalism."  A "liberalism" in which the actual lives and bodies of the prostitutes who work, occasionally, within that prostitution for viewing, the enablement, protection of which and normalization of which has been one of the greatest achievements of that secular "liberalism" as is allowed by the corporate state.   He also notably was a huge fan of Soviet Communism even as he admitted that if he lived there he would certainly have been imprisoned or killed, which he seemed to think was a joke.  He was hardly alone among the "poets" and "prophets" of the American secular left in finding that either not serious or important.   Which I think is a dead giveaway as to what is genuine in prophetic consciousness and what is merely a cheap knockoff made for easy sales and profit.   So much of what was officially, or, really the same thing, commercially was deemed prophetic in my youth was that.   The real thing was seldom mistaken for fasionable or sold on top 40 radio that might play, "Small Circle of Friends" - where I heard it.

The prophets of Israel were not categorizable in the way that LPs used to be in record stores.  They defy that kind of categorization.  Categorization is something that should signal to us that either what is being labeled is being done so for a selling con job or for some other fraudulent purpose.  I think it was always necessary for that to be done with this body of prophetic poetry, poetic literature because when taken the way Brueggemann and others take it, it is dangerous in ways that the corporate establishment and our own weakness can't tolerate. 

Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality.   The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes.  I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit.  Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness.  It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises.  

I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state.  What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community.  In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures.  When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks.  The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king.  So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," do we begin? What I propose is this:  

The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death.  It is the task of the prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death. 

Remember that the next time you hear someone making breezy comments about "herd immunity" about people dying of "preexisting conditions" as being expendable and not worth taking into consideration, about the other people whose lives are breezily wiped out of consideration in the media or in public discourse, in the kind of talk that issues so easily out of Dr. Senator Rand Paul and so many of the MD Republicans.  But it comes out of those who out of secular "liberalism" are quite willing to casually disregard the lives of the "actors" and "models" the prostitutes who are used and spit out by the porn industry or, in fact, the movie and TV industries and the commercial prostitution which good "liberals" are supposed to want to protect as some kind of freedom of expression or association or commerce.  

We Were and Are Robbed

3 PROPHETIC CRITICIZING AND THE EMBRACE OF PATHOS

We have considered as a paradigm for prophetic imagination the formation of a consciousness that is a genuine alternative to the royal consciousness. Now a question must be faced (and it is surely a contemporary question): What would such an alternative consciousness be like? Here I take only the modest step of considering some ways in which the prophets of Israel addressed this task, but behind that explicit consideration we necessarily wonder what we might do, given our situation.

We also are children of a royal consciousness. All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is How can we have enough foreedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask as Israel's prophets asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is reaslitic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.

I will give into the temptation to say that what Brueggemann says we are challenged with is whether or not we are willing to become thought criminals. That is what these alternative thoughts to what he calls the "royal consciousness" are or will be considered, called that or not.

In our modern, scientistic-industrial "enlightenment" the very name of the prerequisite of that, the act of imagination, is downgraded to mean fantasizing the unreal, the act of children and the ignorant and delusional. That doesn't mean that imagination stops, it doesn't, everything about the republican form of "royal consciousness" in our scientistic "enlightenment" requires acts of imagination, I would hold as detached from reality as any that religion is accused of - at times with justification, especially when religion engages in acts of "royal consciousness" and is as invested in it as any gangster government and society is .

Asking if the alternatives are politically practical and economically viable are, indeed to concede too much at the start because everything is set up to make that so. In the focus of so much of my consideration of this as a contemporary question, the American Constitution and, in what that actually became very fast, in practice, the system that is in so many ways fully invested in the "royal consciousness" in terms of political expediency and economic rigging of things for the aristocratic and rich and, so, empowered. To start out with that as a given is, indeed, to abort the prophetic criticism of things. That has been one of the major faults of the American left since the diminution of religion in it, specifically, in the American context, the serious consideration of exactly the civil law in terms of the Mosaic law and the intensification of that articulated by Jesus and the epistle writers.

I know that secular lefties don't like it but it is a fact that almost if not all of the major progress of the abolitionists, the women's equality movement, the extension of the abolitionist movement in the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, and even labor unions and all of the progress,hard fought, hard struggled and hard gained was done through that kind of prophetic imagination, not through the pursuit of the Marxist dialectic or some other secular, often materialistic soc-sci informed pseudo-scientific prattling. In each and every case when that secular, anti-religious, or religion indifferent faction took control, it ended in the discrediting of the left, its decimation, its impotence and its not only failure to make progress, but loss of what had been gained.

The American left lost its credibility in nothing so much as its letting the Marxists sucker us into feeling sympathetic for them because they were treated mean by their fellow gangsters in capitalism. They provided the capitalists, the gilded-age gangsters their most effective tool to fight back against the prophetic imagination, such as it was, that opposed them. And the strongest evidence that they never really belonged to any left was their support for gangsters who ruled in other lands, the Soviet Union, the countries that were progressively occupied by the crime bosses in Moscow, again in China and in other countries where Marxism produced perhaps a more efficient appearing politics and economics - those efficiencies are easier to achieve when you turn people into a raw material resource and mill and grind them up like you would rock or wood or any other commodity without regard for their status above such material objects.

And, with the encouragement of Hollywood and scribbling class tales of the passion of the commies, whether in the Palmer raids or in the red-scare of the post-WWII period, it is unsayable on the left that the American left got played for suckers and we still are, only now it's fashionable to call such suckering "socialism" using a name that has been so coopted by gangsters, Marxist or Nazi or deluded secularist anti-religious American academics that it is useless for anything but enabling Republican-fascism.

No, all of that is pathetically inadequate for mounting a real alternative no matter how much we may, occasionally gain from the methods of science, even in the collection of statistical data and analysis, unless you start and finish with something more than that,exactly the kind of prophetic imagination that we can attribute to the Mosaic tradition, the ancient Children of Israel, we're not going to have it from any other source in sufficient strength. The extent to which those habits of imagining an alternative consciousness and life are present in at least a potential form in American culture is important to us having any success at all. I have no doubt that, as it says in the Bible, that God imparts the same knowledge of right and wrong to other peoples in other places, other covenants were made through that kind of insight, but we live here, now and in the context we live in. 

 

Brueggemann says in this passage, " We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.  And he is right, we were robbed of the courage to think these thoughts, and it was not only by those with power here, it was with those who we gave power to sucker us with various forms of materialistic scientism, modernism and the coercive power of fashion, academic, in the writing publishing class and in show-biz entertainment.  They robbed us the same way they get our money through advertising.  By appealing to our strongest weaknesses.

The Minority Report Found In The Bible - The Difference Between The Science of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Scott Atlas

We are seldom aware that a minority report may be found in the Bible, the vision of some fanatics who believe that the royal portrayal of history is not accurate because it does not do justice (sic) either to God or to these brothers and sisters.

In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God Himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon. He is a God with a name of his own which cannot be uttered by anyone but him. He is not the reflection of any, for he has his own person and retains that all to himself. He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries of the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.

The God of Moses is as unwelcomed to much of, perhaps most of "organized religion" which exists only to some extent even within most organized denominations as this God is, indeed, unwelcomed, root and branch, in the modern, materialist-secular enlightenment.

That is, of course, not to say that everyone who associates themselves with that organized opposition, its institutions, its denominations are opposed to this revelation of the character of God. Dorothy Day said, explicitly that if the worldly, corrupt Cardinal Spellman ordered her to stop her radical Christian activity she would obey, no doubt she would have if Pope Pius XII had, though she was probably well aware that they would never have done that because like Herod in his reluctance to silence John the baptist, Spellman knew there would be a furious backlash from the many who saw that she was a good and just woman.  Or at least bad publicity for him and his campaign to be the first American Pope.

This Mosaic revelation of God which I believe is a genuine inspiration, definitely awkwardly expressed through the limits of human minds and cultures and not plainly and clearly understood even in the part of God we can see and live, but a definite interaction with God is something that is not like other claims about God. It is in some crucial ways not like the humanly assigned attributes of the pagan gods or even all of the articulations of God in Jewish, Christian or Islamic discourse and theology. Whenever, as it so happened in Western, especially Catholic theology, that God is turned into the kind of immanent attachment to worldly power, be it worldly monarch or worldly papacy and Vatican power structure, they recapitulate the long history of falling away from the Mosaic vision that is told in the largest part of the Jewish scriptures. They are expressing the Pharoahnic conception of god. But, as can be seen in today's "white evangelicals" Protestantism is just as humanly liable to do that as Roman Catholics are.

So this is the paradigm I suggest for the prophetic imagination. A royal consciousness committed to achievable satiation. An alternative prophetic consciousness devoted to the pathos and passion of covenanting. The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousnesses concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. It has so enthroned the present that a promised furure, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.

The royal program of achievable satiation

(a) is fed by a management mentality which believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. This, the Solomonic evidence urges, was not a time of great leadership, heroic battles, or bold initiatives. It was a time governed by the cost-accounting of a management mentality;

(b) is legitimated by an "official religion of optimism." which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring his own place in his palace;

(c) requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women.

It is mind-boggling to think that of the Mosaic novum only the prophetic word is mobilized against this compelling reality.

Again, Walter Brueggemann, in 1978 saw some of the greatest problems that lie in the heart of our secular, enlightenment, scientistic modernism through the lens of the Jewish scriptures. Everything from the tyranny of the bean counters, to the "don't worry be happy" nihilism of pop culture to that other icon of pop culture, the macho "rugged individualist" which in the anxious corruption and dissolution of the turn of the millenium and the organizing cults of every mental illness that the internet has exacerbated - not a little of it, I believe, an outgrowth of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" commercial hippy stuff of the early 70s - the batty "preppers" who hoard toilet paper and ammo for when their neighbors mount a raid on their supplies.

I don't think I've ever found another writer who combines so much spot-on criticism of our contemporary world in such concentration and I think the reason for that is that the Old Testament is so spookily, uncanny in its setting out this pattern of human folly and human weakness and human propensity for evil. It is as much a crime against the present that this record as understood in these stark, fearlessly honest critical terms has been kept from most people. Replaced by the lunatic, modern "evangelical" action comic cinematic treatment of it, on the one hand, and the outright rejection of it by the anti-religious, secular left, no doubt Jefferson would have cut it out if he'd gotten round to cutting up that part of the Bible too.

And look around us, right now, under Trump and Barr and McConnell and Murdoch, Sinclair and Putin - as intentionally permitted by the John Roberts court. Most of what is as seen on TV. Everything in those stories except the famous "wisdom" of Solomon is right here, right now. Only I think that "wisdom" isn't what Solomon really had, he was sly and crafty but a wiser person wouldn't have followed his course. In the beginnnig of his critique of the Solmonic regime Brueggemann said that he was among those who, in a different context, referred to the Solomonic regime as an "enlightenment," the same title given to the scientistic-industrial-secular habits of thought that we grow up under. But that light is dim at best and its best is not adequate. It might be to produce things we like but it is inadequate to save us from what we ourselves do to us and our world. That requires more than slyness and craftiness and our methods of getting what we want . Which is, after all, what science was invented for.  What we want so often conflicts with that product of science as amended by moral consideration of the kind Bureggemann talks of, what would be good for us in general, if we only knew it.  Which accounts for the differences between the scientific judgement of Dr. Fauci and that of Dr. Scott Atlas who serves Donald Trump and the the Pharaohs of the industrial-financial world.

We Are So Entrenched In The Royalist Consciousness That We Don't Even Realize It On The "Left"

Sorry to have left off with The Prophetic Imagination for so long. I'm tempted to go to the next chapter except this one in which the royal consciousness is what we are so steeped in with a few republican fig leaves to disguise what its real nature is. That is, you might think why this book is so important to a political blogger so eager to revive and extend the traditional American form of liberalism, informed by the past half century of its failed modernist distortion. That can be seen in the rest of this chapter.

This model of royal consciousness does not require too much interpretation to be seen as a characterization of our own cultural situation. I have no need to be too immediately "relevant" about these matters, for the careful discernment of these texts will in any case illuminate our own situation. So I offer this paradigm with the prospect that it may indeed help us understand our own situation more effectively. it takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition ---

- Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.

- Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.

- Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology.

Perhaps you are like me, so enmeshed in this reality that another way is nearly unthinkable. The dominant history of that period, like the dominant history of our own time, consists in briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems. And that is not a place where such dancing happens and no groaning is permitted.

That is, certainly, what you see in the "white evangelicals" the "traditionalist Catholics" - who yearn for every single thing which was bad in that long and varied and not infrequently compromised tradition. But it is no less true of secular liberals and even many religious liberals who are suckers for that secular distortion of liberalism.

That is much of what I can think of that makes that so called liberal secularism so counterproductive. The reduction of that into "lifestyle" choices and middle-brow culture and propriety and what boils down to club membership rights and privileges drowns out the real, effective address of "the cries of the marginal" - what Brueggemann called the instigating incident that set off the Mosaic epic, including God's part in it,  and motivated the Mosaic prophetic tradition that all of this flows out of - including modern egalitarian democracy.*  Without that, without the extra-human moral requirement to follow the great commandment of equality, the actual Golden Rule, no even well-meaning liberalism will stay on that road for long. And a lot of it isn't well-meaning, it's just club rules.

Over and over again, in the period since I first went online and read and interacted with the unfiltered thinking of what I used to believe were my fellow lefties, I've seen that their "liberalism" their "leftism" reeked of the upper-middle-class habits of those who learned the real-right way to dress and talk and eat and speak which would get them admittance into the club of college-credentialed professionals - and that even those who spouted Marxism and socialism and even anarchism were pretty well dedicated to that kind of climbing middle-brow, middle-class aspiration even as those they despise as "conservatives" are on a parallel track. Not even the matter of bigotry divided them except in who it was OK to disdain and despise.

And in that experience of seeing it on the screen in front of me, being forced to consider how much I had also adopted those postures and habits of thought and habits of feeling and just plain bad habits and to understand that that is a big part of where American liberalism went very wrong. And it was largely due to the unrealistic and overblown influence of Marxism and other forms of scientistic materialism, a form of gangsterism that in its history of grubbiness is not really different from Nazism or fascism or, as we find out in that enormous irony of American history, the Republican-fascism that is making common cause with the neo-Stalinism of Putin. And why so many voices that are mistaken for or overlap with the "left" Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Stephen F. Cohen, and those who support even those obviously under the control of Putin or run by him, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, make common cause with as he attacks our elections out of the lefty habits of Hollywood-scribbling-class- academia promoted "anti-anti-communism". 

Brueggemann's confession in this passage, "Perhaps you are like me, so enmeshed in this reality that another way is nearly unthinkable," is an indication of how hard those habits of thought, with all of their attractions to our base, materialist, insecure self-centeredness to break and get out of. I don't think anyone ever even engages in the self-criticism necessary to do that unless they do so out of an extra-human moral commandment to urge them into it. I certainly find it hard and, believe me, in 1978 when he wrote that, I was totally and completely and lefty-magazine and book saturated unawareness of even the possibility that there was something more that would work when that so obviously wasn't working.

I'm still a beginner at this. I won't live long enough to ever fully get away with it, at least I can try with what time I have left. If we sucker future generations out of reading these texts, of seeing what this great scholar of that literature sees in it, the future is doomed.

Hate Mail - It's getting to the point where anytime people claim something based in "the founders" I expect it to benefit Republican-fascists by intent

I don't give the slightest damn what slave owners and sleazy financiers who died two hundred and more years ago believed, they had absolutely no way of knowing the dangers of allowing the electronic mass media lie with impunity were for the hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and tens of millions who can be enslaved, oppressed, murdered through lies broadcast through the mass media. Nor do I think we can rely on them to have cared if those so enslaved, oppressed and murdered were not white nor male, nor of the right economic class. Not a few of them were entirely callous to the lives and rights of People of Color, some of them among our most deified of "founders."

Nor do I give any more of a damn about the lawyers, law theorists, Supreme Court "Justices" who care more about the ideas of those long ago dead white men, ideas like all humanly originated ideas that are as decayed and rotted out with time and change in reality, than they do about the clear wrongs that come from those words and their intent and whatever they can be made to mean by either short-sighted (as we all are) "Justices" or those who are as sleazy as the sleaziest of the "founders".  Those words were, in most cases, inserted intentionally by the "founders," wrongs originally meant to deprive Black People, Native People, their most basic of rights given to them by God and those emanating from their intentionally inserted anti-democratic insertions into the Constitution and the structure of the government which would protect slavery and other associated privileges of the white-elite they belonged to from a feared majority who would come to see the evils of it and elect a government that would abolish it.

Those are the mechanisms that Republican-fascistm their billiionire patrons, foreign and (with the Robert's Courts rulings) foreign, have used and harnessed for their own gain, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, and some that were probably just badly written, such as the loose language of the hastily written up and reluctantly passed Bill of Rights which is only there because Madison had to promise the Virginia legislature that he would get one in the first Congress before they would agree to ratify his Constitution.  He was hardly the champion of freedom and liberty that we were sappy enough to buy, he was a sleazy slave owner, all slave owning is sleazy, it's insane that in 2020 we mount those slave owners on a plinth like a fools golden calf for such worship, including one of the sleaziest of them all, Alexander Hamilton.

I don't give a damn about what they thought especially when today's world doesn't match their 18th century reality but I'm sure one thing they would know if they were here today, Radio, TV, movies, the internet are a different world from the hand-press world they wrote those words for and that those words were entirely inadequate to address that different world. They were immoral businessmen, they weren't in the business of being stupid. That's the job of the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry and the secular-liberal media of today.

 

If Trump got his wish and a politician could sue people who lie about them, he and the entire Republican-fascist supporting media would be sued into the flames of hell because by an enormous proportion, those lies have been told by and for the benefit of the likes of Trump and the Republican-fascists.  All the media that wants to tell the truth has to fear is that their fact checking will fail from time to time if they aren't as careful as they should have been, all along.  It's as if they don't want the responsibility of being sure they present the truth.  Which wouldn't surprise me if they don't really believe it's a sin to bear false witness.  Sin being a religious and not a secular category.  

Update:  The sense of security that can come from imagining that in the "literal interpretation" of centuries old words is exactly that, existing only in your own mind.  There is no more security in attempting that or, rather, pretending to attempt that because those words, here, now, today, are only what human minds, here, now, today use them for, the "founders" having no say, whatsoever in what people today make of those words, they have no impact on this world nor knowledge of it than what they knew when they lived.  At least none that we can know of, no, not even the stage-mediums on the Supreme Court whose claims of being able to divine the minds of the "founders" are more dishonest than even a phony stage medium.  There is no phony medium who gets to set themselves up as an arbiter of what will have a universal effect as law in the way that Supreme Court "originalists" "literalists" etc. do.  And they're all lying about really believing what they claim.

We Need A Real, Unapologetic, Strong Religious Left If We Are Going To Save Egalitarian Democracy

The United States needs a Democracy Doomsday Clock like the one the Union of Atomic Scientists maintains as to when their creations of nuclear weapons will bring about the catastrophic danger that scientists knowingly wrought - if nothing else scientists have done warrants the kind of critique of science which I engage in, that is merely one of the reasons which makes it justified and essential.

But this is about the clear and present danger that egalitarian democracy under the United States Constitution is in, an egalitarian democracy that is not the product of that Constitution but of the two hundred plus years of struggle to cash the promissory note that was contained in the Declaration of Independence, which the original Constitution did its best to renege on, quite successfully till the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were made law, as the "originalists" on the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party have very successfully done everything in their power to overturn those massive improvements to the Constitution.

I think one of the greatest things that are needed in fighting against fascism is for there to be a large, forceful, and effective RELIGIOUS LEFT organized and which is more than a counterpart of the "religious right" that the Republican Party has gulled into supporting depravity up to and including Trump. The secular left which became ascendant in the late 19th century, which included many nominally religious lefties who increasingly rejected a Christian articulation of equality, the right of the destitute and poor the means of having a decent life and the rest of a legitimate traditional American liberal agenda to what they rather naively assumed was a more "scientific" or "Constitutional" secular left which did a lot more than just avoid sectarian differences, it undermined and repudiated the very basis for the positions that the American tradition of liberalism relies on.

Science cannot support the contention of human equality, for a start.  It can be twisted to assert equality but only in terms of alleged measurement of things like intelligence or, perhaps with slightly less fraudulence, health. And a lot of that "measurement" is far from scientifically rigorous or valid, or, most seriously, without bias.  Often the "things" measured are nothing more than artifacts of unconsidered prejudices and unconsidered habitually assumed assumptions and social prejudices. 

 

And science cannot give a reason for even-handed treatment of anyone, those deemed "inferior" or even those deemed "equal," or "superior", that even-handed and fair treatment of others is based in morality which, by common agreement, science does not deal it nor is it capable of discerning. 

 

Fairness, equal treatment, morality are all things which fall outside of the capacity of science to treat, which leads the practitioners and devotees of scientism to claim that those are either mere social conventions* or illusions.

But that's not the basis of political and social equality which must be asserted in the face of differences in intellectual capacity - much of incapacity being a matter of choice and chance, having nothing or little or less to do with some biological differences in potential the basis of political and social equality must come from elsewhere than can be found with science or, I would argue, secular philosophy. 

 

 I am thoroughly convinced - and against long standing personal habits of thought, perhaps even personal preference - that all of those bases of egalitarian democracy, social and, especially, economic equality, fairness, decency are found no where else but in the belief in a Creator, God, and in the intent and desire of God, as summed up in the repeated assertion in Genesis that the creation was found good and that, after the creation of human beings, that it was "very good." Going on from there, it would seem to be left to human beings to find as much of that good among us as we could manage to discern and make real, trying to make that "will be done on Earth as it is in heaven." Perhaps our potential to find that being what was "very good"

The problems I can see in coming together in a Religious Left are a. the Barry Lynn kind of "separation of church and state" language will make a lot of religious people chicken out of it for fear of being tut-tutted over that, b. the real differences among religious leftists on a few issues such as the right to legal abortion and a few of the other hard issues.  But those issues, in the first one, ridiculously applying requirements of the secular government to religious individuals in their political activities and in the second, coming to grips with how to effectively reduce the avoidably high numbers of abortions in the United States (other countries have far, far fewer because there are far, far fewer unintended, unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancies)** and a few other areas of things like sexual moral assertion*** must be overcome or all will be lost.

I think one of the hardest things to overcome is the idea emanating from materialist-scientistic-secularist hegemony that we are to allow even the most depraved immoral ideas and ideologies the chances of swamping equality, fairness, decency out of some daffy concept of "even-handedness" and even some distorted, deformed thing called "fairness." As I mentioned a number of times, the insanity of that postion became obvious to me when the ACLU represented the Nazis who wanted to terrorize the community having the highest number of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside of Israel in 1977 in the infamous Skokie case.

The ACLU position on that is the classic secular-liberal-leftist position that we are to never learn anything from the hardest of history, that in each and every case we are to allow entities like the Nazis another chance to do what they did before up to and including taking control THROUGH ELECTIONS and installing themselves in power to discriminate against, to attack, to murder millions. A position which the ACLU boasts about its role in making the law of the land even as it boasts about the rulings it advocated that opened us up to Trump and his gang of thugs talking AND ACTING openly to rig elections and even annul them. That is the lunacy of this kind of amoralism as "fairness" to fascists, niceness to Nazis, etc. Which, the largely white, largely affluent, largely professionally established lawyers of the ACLU, no doubt, mostly fear nothing from. And what you can say about them you can say about the majority of those in "journalism" and academia.

No, if we are going to save American democracy, egalitarian democracy, the legitimate traditional American liberal agenda of equality and a decent life for everyone, secularism is one of the things we will have to leave behind along with the wretched record of what it has brought into being. We need a religious left that is united on at least the issues of doing to others what you would have done to you, the moral basis of egalitarian democracy, the only safe way to have that is to acknowledge that it is a morally binding requirement, a responsibility which we all share, equally, violations of that to be discouraged, serious ones punished into compliance. I see no other way to avoid the catastrophe that the debauching of Christianity in the "evangelicals" and "traditionalist-Catholics" and its debasement among the secular left has brought us to.

* The idea that fairness, equality and morality are a product of "social conventions" has to fight against the fact that even when those are asserted, they are anything like reliably practiced within even the most egalitarian and moral societies, and try to find those in human history. You'll need a very good lens to see it.

** The idea that making abortion illegal will end abortions is immoral nonsense. When abortion was illegal in all but the most dire of medical emergencies there were many, many abortions and many, many women died from them, were injured from them, were terribly exploited through them, etc. Making abortion illegal is the farthest thing from abolishing abortion, it merely makes the ones that happen more dangerous. That is something that those wishing to make abortion illegal have to answer, along with the problem of allowing the state to regulate the bodies of women. I think it should be a principle of law that the state's interest in regulating our lives ends at the skin, though it can certainly regulate matters of commerce. The only rational way to "end abortion" is by the widespread, correct, consistent use of effective contraceptives. The ridiculous "rhythm method" as pushed by Catholic conservatives is certainly none of that and in more cases than not it is an ineffective fraud that should be regulated out of the marketplace. 

 

*** As an LGBT man, I both insist on absolute equality and non-discrimination for us even as I have to say as a gay man I am the opposite of accepting of the irresponsiblity of many gay men in and around issues of sex. As an increasingly reluctant student of pornography - you have to see what's there to write about it - every depravity that is found among straight men is also present among gay men, promoted by pornography. I would, if I had the power to do so, abolish all pornography and the inevitable pathological inequality and exploitation and cruelty AND INTERNALIZED SELF-HATRED that is inevitably a part of it. It is sheer lunacy to pretend that the promotion of exploitative inequality has any right to the support of any real traditional American liberal or any religious leftist.  The widespread self-hatred taught through sex to gay me is evil, the promotion of racism, white supremacy, anti-egalitarianism, sexual inequality, misogyny, everything up to and including American Nazism (white supremacy symbolized in the American swastika, the Confederate flag) to German Nazism is rampant in gay porn.  So is child porn, something it shares in common with straight porn.  No matter how much campaigning has been done on the issue of child porn-prostitution, it abounds online where it should be abolished and prosecuted.