And Now I'm Mocked For Taking An Adult-Ed Class - Hate Mail From Some Bounder

I loved the few adult-ed classes I've taken, it makes me think that if adult-ed had been more of a paid thing around here when I was in college I'd have liked to teach math through it and I'd have taken a degree to allow that  There was no question of pursuing a math-ed degree when I was in college, though I did well enough in math.  I had no interest in being a gay high school teacher in the late 1960s or up till today.  Adult ed is a different thing.  I was out of the closet, anyway.  Now, no one would bat an eyelash around here.

If you want to announce me taking an adult ed class in writing is something giving me the cooties, maybe you're too immature to take one.   You're 12 for going on about the 62nd year, I'd estimate.   I'm taking another one next time it's offered.   Now that I know how much the teacher hates critics I'll write "The Case Of The Decrepit Critic or Weaktea Rocker."

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Siobhán Mannion - Small Bones

 Small Bones

 

For a musician in isolation, an unanticipated connection becomes central. On the night the clocks go back, a pianist prepares for another working week in lockdown. 

A monologue commissioned as part of 'Long Story Short', Drama On One’s season of new Irish writing in the time of the pandemic. 

Written by Siobhán Mannion 

Performed by Kathy Rose O’Brien 

Sound Supervision and Sound Design: Mark Dwyer 

Producer: Kevin Brew 

Series Producer: Kevin Reynolds 

Group Head, RTE Drama & Comedy: Shane Murphy 

Broadcast: RTÉ Radio 1, 8pm, 28 February 2021 

Short so I might post a longer play later.   My ears have finally cleared up enough to take up listening to radio drama again. Let's hope that continues.   

I can't get the links to work on the computer I'm posting this from, the Podcast link I've used is generally reliable.  If you have trouble hearing it, let me know.

 

More I See Of Animals The More Credible It Seems To Me That They Have A Covenant Just LIke It Says In Genesis

 

In July of 2013 a Magpie died on our front street in Saskatoon and we witnessed what we believe is a Magpie death ritual. It lasted about 10 minutes as a large number of Magpies came down and seemed to express their grief over their lost comrade. Magpie rituals have been written about by Dr. Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado.

I've seen something like this in other species but not to this extent, though that might have been due to me not observing them long enough.  

"You're a Catholic!" - Hate Mail

"I pray every day,  I doubt the Catholic Church is happy with me but too bad, they’re stuck with me.” 

Rachel Maddow

If you want to force me to define myself in terms of denomination,  I'd say it's more complex than saying "I'm a Catholic."   I would note that the biblical scholar and laicized Catholic priest,  John Dominic Crossan said it well when he noted to say he wasn't a Catholic would make about as much sense as denying he's Irish, and he's a lot more Irish than I am and I've never done anything to get into hot water with the Catholic hierarchy.  

I think of myself as Catholic +  or Catholic and because there is an enormous amount that I share in common with Protestants, Jews (ALL Christians as well as Muslims share most of the important things they believe with Jews and owe that tradition all of it), Orthodox, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. A while back  I heard a traditional Cree scholar, according to whom that tradition sounds like I could learn a lot from it.  That isn't in any way absurd, all through the Bible, from the Old Testament to Paul and beyond it stresses that God gave understanding to everyone, not based even on them being monotheistic believers in the one God who God is.  God made covenants with even the enemies or, rather, eventual enemies of Israel, God made covenants with all flesh, so with those who aren't humans.  

You contrast that universalist valuation of all people with the typical materialist devaluation of all (though materialists seldom include themselves and those they care about in that universal devaluation) and it's clear that far from making someone more parochial in their regard, a strict adherence to the Scriptures and the universal commands for justice and loving regard of even enemies, even those who you don't like leads to everything from the attempt to do that in your life and, even more difficult, your thinking leads to the opposite of what you accuse Christians and Catholics of.  

I'm only talking about those who try to do it, who really try to do what is asked in the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law and the Prophets.  Not everyone who claims the name for themselves earn it by their actions.  No more than Republicans really like democracy or the ACLU really values equal justice more than their childishly simplified understanding of free speech without limits no matter how dangerous that proves to be in real life. 

Just Posted Today, A Good Example Of How Fictionalized History Gets People Killed

Roland Bettancourt, professor at the University of California at Irvine has a disturbing and startling example of how lies about history have fueled neo-fasist, neo-Nazi violence from Russia to the United States, in this case a false and ridiculous history of Byzantium.   I have no doubt that popular fiction, movies, video-games, maybe, even, play a role in the romantic bull shit that replaces real history in the imaginations of the susceptible.  And it ends up with people getting killed by the true believers in these lies. 

For many on the far right, talk of Byzantium is cloaked in Islamophobia – both online and in tragic real-life events.

A white supremacist who killed more than 50 worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 railed against the Turks and the conquest of Constantinople in a 74-page manifesto.

“We are coming for Constantinople, and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city. The Hagia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully Christian owned once more," the shooter wrote. Throughout QAnon message boards, the reconquest of Hagia Sophia is emblematic of the destruction of Islam and the restoration of a mythic white Byzantium. One post stated: “When we free Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia, maybe we can talk."

And, of course, here, everything as malignant as it is stupid finds its way into the imagination of the AmeriKKKan right:

Despite this modern disdain for Byzantium in the West, it has recently served as an inspiration to various factions of the far right.

In September 2017, Jason Kessler, an American neo-Nazi who helped organize the “Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, inaugurated a new supremacist group called “The New Byzantium" project.

Described by Kessler as “a premier organization for pro-white advocacy in the 21st century," The New Byzantium is based on the white supremacist leader's misrepresentation of history.

His premise is that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. This isn't true. In reality the empire was made up of diverse peoples who walked the streets of its capital, coming from as far away as Nubia, Ethiopia, Syria and North Africa. Contemporaneous sources noted – at times with disdain – the racial and ethnic diversity of both Constantinople and the empire's emperors.

But Kessler's “New Byzantium" is intended to preserve white dominance after what he calls “the inevitable collapse of the American Empire." The organization has been operating under the radar since 2017 with little online footprint. 

The disdain for Byzantium, which the article dates to at least back to that massive boob, Edward Gibbons, is no more historically adequate than this action comics version of it in our much less literate milieu.

Lying about history gets people killed, it leads to people being discriminated against, enslaved and it is such a useful tool of gangsters and thugs that its alleged innocuousness is even stupider.   The idea that lies can be safely considered such, the effective claim that they are all "little white lies" is stupid, especially when, as with the ones told about American history, it's generally People of Color who end up paying for them. 

25 Of The Most Satisfying Seconds In U.S. Senate History

 

Theatrical Fiction As History Is Dangerous Not Innocuous, Put It On TV and It's Even More Dangerous

THE FACT is, that despite what that moronic rap and boogie musical teaches, Alexander Hamilton was probably the worst of those who gave us the anti-democratic atrocity which is on full display in the de-facto Republican-fascist control of the government nominally in the hands of the Democrats who a large majority of the country want to govern us.  The Constitution  that, literally, every single thing that is good and decent in the history of the United States has had to struggle against, fight against, shed blood over and even die for.   Worse than the frequently awful Madison or the putrid John Jay, worse than the hypocrite Thomas Jefferson who was probably, all of his abominable crimes against Black and Native People of Color, against the Haitian People, etc, was at least not the enemy of democracy in theory.   Aaron Burr was hardly a hero but him shooting Hamilton was probably one of the things that prevented the United States from mimicking the worst of European despotism and kept the small flame of equality, and so freedom found in the Declaration of Independence alive.  It is a shame it hadn't happened to the little creep a quarter of a century earlier.

This article, The Hamilton Hustle by Matt Stoller, from The Baffler does an excellent job of proving just what a huge and opportunistic lie Hamilton is.  If Miranda didn't intend to lie about the guy, he was a huge sucker for the corporate, neo-fascist construction of Hamilton as a hero, as big a one that Democrats and liberals who buy into his Hamilton hustle on Disney and on the stage have been.

What’s strange about all of this praise is how it presumes that Alexander Hamilton was a figure for whom social justice and democracy were key animating traits. Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice, you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton simply didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American “disease.” He fought—with military force—any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it.

To assert Hamilton disliked democracy is not controversial. The great historian Henry Adams described an evening at a New York dinner, when Hamilton replied to democratic sentiment by banging the table and saying, “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!” Hamilton’s recommendation to the Constitutional Convention, for instance, was to have a president for life, and to explicitly make that president not subject to law.

Professional historians generally avoid emphasizing Hamilton’s disdain for the people, at least when they write for the broad public. Better to steer safely clear of the freight train of publicity and money behind the modern Hamilton myth. One exception is amateur historian William Hogeland, who noted in a recent Boston Review essay that Hamilton had strong authoritarian tendencies. Hamilton, he wrote, consistently emphasized “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”

Indeed, most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.

Read the article and see the history of Hamilton's very active subversion of anything like democracy in the early years of the Republic, acting in concert with the top of the then current 1% to take power by appealing to the military to seize power and, when that failed, how he rigged the financial system as the first Treasury Secretary to do a lite version of that in ways that today's oligarchy in concert with Republican-fascists, "moderate" Democrats and the establishment out of places like Harvard, the U of Chicago and Stanford have done.   Stoller makes a good case that the rise in white supremacy can also be largely attributed to Miranda's mythical egalitarian.

There should be a commonly known fact of life that when history is told on stage, in a movie, through fiction that easily 99 times out of 100 that the result is either an ideologically constructed lie or it is some idiot creator of show biz or fiction being duped by ideologically motivated liars.   Show biz is the WORST WAY TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT REALITY THAT THERE IS.  When you have a score and lyrics and choreography you have to go outside of the realm of rational mathematics to estimate the size of the lie thus created and its damage.  

It should be needless to say that rational adults should know better but, as can be seen in Matt Stoller's list of Democratic politicians who got sucked into the Hamilton Hustle, not all of whom should have, fiction cannot serve reality in that way.   I suspect even the smartest of those, such as Hillary Clinton, are faking their historical erudition as most people do,  or they are simply buying the kind of historical erudition that simply reading The Federalist Papers on face value without reading or considering any critical opposing point of view about them, which is one of the greatest problems of a hagiographer's view of history.   He rightly ties the show and its promotion to the oligarchy enabling, protecting and financed academic,power and journalistic establishment.

The sad reality is that such show biz has enormous power to both deceive and convince through the use of non-reality and catchy tunes and exciting dance numbers.   Even some of Lin Manuel Miranda's critics praise his show in show biz terms.  I'm not willing to cut him that slack because the results of such pseudo-historical fiction have been so terrible.

 

I Friggin' Hate Hollywood Which Can't Get Anything About Anything Important Right, American History, The Actual Facts Of It's Government

DON'T GET ME STARTED ON GODDAMNED HOLLYWOOD.  IF THAT ASS FRANK CAPRA HADN'T MADE GODDAMNED MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON THE GODDAMNED FILIBUSTER WOULDN'T HAVE EVER MADE IT INTO THE TOTALLY FALSE AND FICTITIOUS LORE BELIEVED BY MOVIE-GOING IDIOTS WHO NEVER READ HISTORY AND THE GODDAMNED ANTI-DEMOCRATIC THING WOULD PROBABLY HAVE GONE INTO IT LONG AGO.  

You can see how educational the movies are by the fact that the actors in those movies were mostly right-wing Republican-fascists mostly interested in keeping their tax rates lower. 

I'm Really Tempted To Bring Up What An Idiot Lin Manuel Mirada Is Again But I'll Save That For Later

The goddamned Senate is a disgrace to democracy, it is a stumble-block to good government, it is a constant attack on We The People, our common good, our lives. 

The goddamned Republicans like their predecessors in the Dixicratic faction that joined them as soon as Democrats started serious moves towards racial equality have used the anti-democratic features embedded in the goddamned Constitution to allow them to thwart democracy, equality, the common good.   

If any Democrat thwarts the movement to get rid of the filibuster and that pro-elite anti-equality, anti-democratic atrocity the sad fact that the Republicans still control the goddamned Senate is the real reality we live under.  If that has Joe Manchin's name as a defacto Republican then that's the reality of it.  If he doesn't like that he can start acting like a Democrat who really isn't a Republican.   If he chooses to join the Republicans and throw control of the goddamned Senate to Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, he will at least make it clear that Democrats aren't to blame for the results.

 I'm old enough that I remember when Republican-fascists wanted to cancel The Lorax.   I'll bet they whined about it on Murdoch media though I'm not feeling through the cess pool to find that particular slug.

Risking Fate And Through No Virtue Of My Own

. . . I nonetheless feel like crowing.   

 

After a disastrous crash of my ancient laptop, losing not vital files and records but many I'd rather not lose,  I used Linux Mint to do something I never did successfully once with Windows or DOS, I totally recovered it all through Linux's recovery utility.   

I love Linux in a way that I never loved even Windows 98.  And it's free.

The morality Jesus preaches is . . . a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents - Not to mention many of the Christian Pharisees

HAD DECIDED to go only with the Gospel from today's Catholic lectionary, but . . . you'll see.  

Luke 16:19-31

Jesus said to the Pharisees:

“There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day.

And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps

that fell from the rich man’s table.

Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.

When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.

The rich man also died and was buried,and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

And he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me.

Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’

Abraham replied, ‘My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.

Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established

to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.’

He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them,

lest they too come to this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets.

Let them listen to them.’

He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’”

Certainly this is one of the most popular of the many parables of Jesus and it is one of the clearest in its meaning. There are so many points of interest in it, first is that it confirms that Jesus believed there was an afterlife for human beings, both the good and the bad and that there were consequences for the way we live in the afterlife. The problem for the theory that there is extermination of the soul at death, either that of those who fell short or of everyone is another one that is included as is, in fact, the belief I hold to of eventual universal salvation of all flesh. He doesn't talk about the rich man, condemned to the flames for the sin of injustice to the poor man who seems to have been saved from the very injustice done to him. I have to depend on other statements and texts to find that hope.

It's certainly not something that would have been lost to the early Christians who kept this alive that Jesus implied in it that he, the someone in "if someone should rise from the dead" wasn't going to fare any better than Moses and the prophets in persuading the rich from their sumptuous injustice.  Lazarus isn't raised from the dead in the parable , For those who told this parable in those words Jesus having risen for the dead was a central aspect of their entire thinking.

I was looking around the book Gift and Task to see what Brueggemann may have said about this parable in it and didn't find that. I'm sure it's in there but it's not indexed. Instead, way, way on in Saturday after Proper 27, I found this.

Jesus knew we could not have it both ways, God and capital. His adversaries, the Pharisees, are said in Luke [16:10-17] to be "lovers of money." James in the Epistle reading [James 2:1-13], recognizes that money stratifies society into the rich and the poor, honored and dishonored. We, of course, live in a monetized society in which money defines almost everything; we stratify education, we stratify health-care, we stratify housing and job opportunities. And the higher up we are in social stratification, the less we are able to notice, or want to notice, the process of stratification in which we participate.

In that kind of political economy, James writes of "the royal law": "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." By terming it the "royal law," James suggests it is the law of the new king, the new regime, that is, the kingdom of God. The good news is the overcoming of social stratification for the sake of neighborly solidarity in an economy of justice. It is important to recognize the depth of Jesus' contradiction of conventional monetary arrangements. Terry Eagleton, in noting Jesus' solidarity with "the scum of the earth," observes: "The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents; forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow."

The contradiction is complete. We, his would-be followers, are left to take up his imperative in concrete, bodily ways. 

 

The passage in Brueggemann's book for today deals with bodily reality as presented in the Protestant lectionary he draws from.  But this passage matched Lazarus and the rich man better.  I'm glad I found it. 

Shrewdness And Compassion - Wednesday After The Second Sunday Of Lent

IN HIS book of commentary on the lectionary, Gift and Task Walter Brueggemann goes on with the commentary from what I posted yesterday, so I'll do that too. He comments on Genesis 42: 18-28 and 1 Corinthians 5: 9-6:8. He starts with the passage of Joseph as Pharaoh's food Czar and how he recognizes and decides to teach his brothers who sold him into slavery a lesson. As a prelude to the commentary Brueggemann starts with a prayer.

Lord of the church and governor of the nations, we pray for wisdom that might include the shrewdness of Joseph and the compassion of gospel truth. In your name, Amen.

Here's the commentary:

Joseph is practicing the rough art of stagecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food. But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him.

By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instruction to the Corinthian Christian community. He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church. He urges that because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline.

The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church. On the one hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the public domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church , with its more insistent requirement of mercy and compassion. On the other hand, Stanley Hauerwas more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects ore in the public sphere.

This is an issue with which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be dispensable. Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church. In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. 

 

I think, first, it's interesting how Paul's double standard is set up as more stringent, more precisian in its demands on the church, the People of the Church, than on those outside of it. I think that's not unreasonably considered as a possible habit of thought he had from his heritage as a Pharisee, one of those zealous for The Law among Jews, their responsibility as those to who The Law had been given as an example to the nations. We know from Romans that he held even higher expectations of those to whom The Gospel had been given. 

 

As I've thought more about the discussion I had with a family member about the police and how, ideally, they should have very high standards of ethical behavior in service to the entire public. I've known a few police officers who I know took that seriously and they tried to live up to that, though it's clear not all of them do. I think that some of that failure is due to the difficulty of what the job that they are supposed to do and the means with which they are expected and, indeed, allowed to do it. It would be impossible for them to protect and serve the public if they didn't use violence on occasion to do that, the people they have to stop and arrest are often not pacifists. And they don't always have the time to make tidy analyses of the situation they have to deal with in real time, often making decisions on the spot that can be wrong. 

 

There was complaint that I said nice things about the police, yesterday, while being critical of nominal liberals. I would guarantee you that if such liberals in their own mind were afraid they would be the first to call the police, if they were scared enough they would want them to clobber whoever was making them afraid, probably matching the various "Karens" so much the focus of entirely justifiable online ire. I have to say the most satisfying of those videos were the ones where the cop who answered the call clearly knew he was dealing with a crazy person who wanted to have their own way, wanting the cops to do that for them, usually against a Person of Color.  There are lots of nut cases who call the 911 line for things like they didn't get enough cheese on their Big Mac or something, too.

 

I never considered becoming a policeman, back then gay kids would know that was not a career option safely open to them, but the issue of having to carry and be ready to use a gun or a stick were even bigger reasons I'd never have considered it. But I have had reason to call the cops, once because I was attacked as a gay man, I was grateful to the ones who came to my aid and, though they couldn't make an arrest, they told the guy to leave me alone strongly enough that it worked. AND THAT WAS BACK IN THE 1970s EVEN BEFORE THERE WERE ANY ANTI-DISCRIMINATION STATUTES THAT COVERED LGBTQ PEOPLE.  

 

We are not ever going to have a society in which the police will not be needed and policing will never be such that there are not ethical and even moral ambiguities involved in what they will have to do to provide the imperfectly administered legal protection and service to the public which will always be the best possible in policing. Defunding the police is not going to do much to erase those ambiguities and lapses and to correct those, if that were true worse financed police services would do a better job than well financed ones. I'm not convinced that is the case. 

 

I'm entirely in favor of holding the police, DEMOCRATIC politicians, public servants, teachers, etc. to high standards but not to impossible ones. I am in favor of there being real and effective EXTERNAL review of the police and all the rest of that list. But as long as we ask the impossible of them as a society which is not willing to act consistently with the highest regard for the rights, the lives, the welfare on an equal basis in society, we have no right to demand that those we ask to do hard things do them perfectly. 

 

The church that demands the impossible of other people should bring the same standard they demand for others onto themselves. I have never seen an instance where that was something the church willingly held itself to, certainly not in matters other than some piddling issues of orthodoxy to some doctrinal or dogmatic standard, some secondary or tertiary matter of theology - which will probably, eventually, be seen as antiquated and get scrapped. I certainly think that is the case in many though not all matters of sexual morality as fought over in the churches and which the churches most demanding of adherence to THEIR teaching on that which they then are found to violate, sometimes knowingly and on a regular basis, themselves. 

 

Yesterday's Gospel in the Catholic lectionary was Matthew 23:1-12.

 

 Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying,
“The scribes and the Pharisees
have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.
Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you,
but do not follow their example.
For they preach but they do not practice.
They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry
and lay them on people’s shoulders,
but they will not lift a finger to move them.
All their works are performed to be seen.
They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels.
They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues,
greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation ‘Rabbi.’
As for you, do not be called ‘Rabbi.’
You have but one teacher, and you are all brothers.
Call no one on earth your father;
you have but one Father in heaven.
Do not be called ‘Master’;
you have but one master, the Christ.
The greatest among you must be your servant.
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

 

Of course the churches should think about that and how they don't come close to honoring that, I have to say I wonder what Paul the self-described Pharisee would have made of it. But I think liberals should consider it too, not only about themselves but, especially at the end of it, in regard to public servants who take up pubic service as a life work, including those who announce their purpose is "to protect and to serve." 

Paul On Sins Of Sex In A Wider Context or

Giving the Devil His Due

 

HAD A FEW minutes and if the damned power doesn't go off in this wind storm we're having, I decided to let Walter Brueggemann comment on Paul's thinking on sexual scandal among the early Christians:

Paul is confronted by a case of sexual misconduct about which the perpetrator brags. Paul has a vision of the gospel community as a fellowship that has purged from its midst such exploitative practices. Such misconduct is never an isolated act; it comes with a cluster of self-indulgent practices that are rooted in anxious greed that characteristically culminates in violence, These are the "desires of the flesh" to which Paul contrasts "the fruit of the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16-26) . The arrogance about the affront makes clear that the community has compromised the norm that Paul champions and has arrived at a capacity for shamelessness in imitation of a larger society that traffics in shamelessness.

For the nature of the community, Paul utilizes the image of leaven. By this usage he recalls that it was unleavened bread that ancient Israel ate in its hasty departure from Egyptian slavery. The mention of the "paschal lamb" and the "festival" attest that the early church has departed the shameless habits of greed and exploitation that mark the empire of Egypt and belatedly the empire of Rome. The imagery is a reminder that the community gathered around Jesus is indeed an alternative community in which the conduct of its members matters for its testimony to the world. Clearly compromised conduct, when visible in the church, undermines the claim that the news that the church intends to perform for the world to see.

Given this exodus allusion, we may note the somewhat remote connection that the sons of Jacob must return and submit to Egyptian authority for the sake of food. Such bread, with old leaven, is seductive and may talk the community out of its vocation of holiness. 

 

See what I mean about a beginner like me needing to read commentaries by people who know what they're talking about?  I think Paul was a great and subtle theologian (he was a Pharisee, after all ) and what you get on first superficial reading is so inadequate that even if it matches the common sense meaning of it, that's no where near enough to know just what he's really saying. 

Lent - Who Falls In And Who Out Of The Economic and Social Safety Net

I AM HAVING a sort of lapsing Lent this year, a combination of wifi trouble, financial trouble, etc. For which I apologize, I'd expected to be full back into The Prophetic Imagination at this point in the year.

Today's the Tuesday after the Second Sunday in Lent, the Catholic lectionary starts with Isaiah

Hear the word of the LORD,

princes of Sodom!

Listen to the instruction of our God,

people of Gomorrah!

Wash yourselves clean!

Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes;

cease doing evil; learn to do good.

Make justice your aim: redress the wronged,

hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.

 

Which identifies the sin of Sodom as injustice to the destitute, the impoverished, those without the financial and personal security of having an adult male to protect them in ancient Mediterranean life. It's ironic, in a way, considering in the story of Sodom that Lott had offered his daughters to the crowd of men who came to attack his house guests, but let's pass that by as a problem I'm not equipped to address.

 

Walter Brueggeman's excellent Gift and Task, for this day, using a Protestant lectionary, includes 1 Corinthians 5:1-8 which is Paul dealing with the rumor of a man in the Corinthian Church who is sleeping with his step-mother, for once it's not LGBTQ people on the spot, and advising them to confront him and if he won't cut it out to get shut of him - while looking it up I got a pretty vernacular translation I'd never heard of that isn't far removed from that language. He uses poetic language about handing the guy over to Satan so he can have his body destroyed to save his soul, which has all kinds of interesting theological implications. Paul tends to get a lot more worked up over sexual shenanigans than Jesus did in the Gospels. A lot of the trouble for me and my fellow LGBTQs comes from Paul's attitude on that. Interestingly enough, when it comes to Jesus saying something of that sort, on the rare occasions he did, it was straight people getting divorced and remarried that was the issue. The implications of that being more in line with the passage from Isaiah about people made vulnerable by the social-economic system through abandonment by a spouse so he can take up with a new wife or the other woman having the same effect in the husband's new relationship. At least that's what I get from it.

This is relevant to me because I know a man, a fellow musician, an LGBTQ person who got too old to marry when that right became available to him and through a number of circumstances never could have married someone with a stable enough income to pay into Social Security, etc. getting coverage due to marriage.  And who now finds himself outside of the social safety net with increasing illness and financial need, on the verge of destitution. A position I could easily have been in, myself, and which I'm sure many others are. The assumptions of normal things for straight people, people not afflicted with the functional disability that having a life in the arts easily becomes - someday I'd like to write an article about the state of most professional musicians teeth - are no help at all to many people who are still outside of the social norm. I think that's a condition that has grown instead of diminished since the 1970s, even with the ACA, even with Medicare and Medicaid.

I don't have any answers for him, I wish I could provide him with a marriage that would secure those things for him by the mere artifice of signing a wedding certificate. But that's not possible, either.   And I'm sure Paul would be scandalized though I'm willing to bet Jesus would get it.   I don't mean to be too hard on Paul, he's a lot better than I used to think of him, before I really read him with some good commentaries to explain things I was too ignorant to notice.  But some of the stuff he said has really hurt a lot of us. 

Encouraging The Police To Live The Liberalism That Lots Of Liberals Only Talk

BEING of the blue collar class, still living in it. I've got relatives who are cops, or, the ones I'm in touch with who were cops. The ones presently working the job are in the next generation. I remember that once in an online disagreement I surprised people by saying I had an uncle and a cousin who were cops, it wouldn't seem many college-credentialed people who spend their time online actually know any as family members.   Oh, yeah, did I mention I'm Irish from New England?

I had a discussion with one of my relatives over the weekend and said I thought it was strange, considering that a lot of the cops I'd known were in it to help people that more cops don't self-identify as liberal. I think a lot of them live their lives with more real, traditional American style liberalism than some white-collar, self-identified liberals do.   I'd guess more cops live their lives with at least expecting to perform acts in line with traditional liberalism than most of the libertarian-liberals more in line with the "enlightenment" 18th century atrocity which also goes by the word "liberalism."

I've known lots of white-collar "liberals" who might give money to causes and might vote the right way but who have probably never put themselves in the slightest risk to ever help anyone. I've read about even cops who are not people I'd generally admire but who have done that, even for people they probably didn't like. Thinking about that recently I thought maybe it was a distinction between liberalism of words and money and liberalism as lived in life. If forced to choose between those who say it and those who live it, I'll take those who live it. If they don't do it consistently, I'd talk up having them do it consistently. I wonder if a lot of those cops aren't really more liberal than they'd think they'd like to think they are. 

 

Of course, I'd rather they voted it too, maybe if the better angels of their nature got more praise they'd do that more.   I have known cops who did vote the right way. 

The left has a gift for coming up with slogans that are justifiable, make sense, are warranted but which are easily turned back on them by rotten people. One of those is "defund the police" which is all of those things. Like so many short-hand designations for complex ideas that one is so dangerously in need of explanation that destroys any advantage that it was supposed to gain through pithiness.

What the police need is to have their work load reduced by having social service agencies or other workers deal with a lot of the stuff that falls to their lot to handle BECAUSE POLITICIANS HAVE DEFUNDED SOCIAL SERVICES, SCHOOLS AND OTHER PUBLIC GOODS KNOWING THAT THEY CAN ALWAYS RELY ON THE POLICE AND THE PRISON SYSTEM. And Hollywood hasn't helped in that through its ginning up public paranoia to make the worst possible solution the one a public terrified by what they see on the TV screen will support.

I think TV has hurt the culture of policing too, by popularizing Hollywood cop-fascism since the advent of the movie industry. A lot of cop movies and TV shows have the same effect on the culture of cops that Birth of a Nation did on the white population, reviving one of our worst domestic terrorist movements. There are lots of cops with bad attitudes but I've known some who I know wish it was not that way.

What the left should have done is to drop the "defund" talk and talk up the decertification of cop unions, one of the worst forces in producing the mess with the profession today. Of course the left would have to be aware enough of its own romantic ideas about unions to get to that point. I'm not sure that doesn't play a part in this.

DeNazifying the police is what needs to be done. Respecting their better intentions and actions is probably more effective than coming up with slogans that don't work to do what they're supposed to.  Allowing them to imagine themselves as people whose work is helping people, protecting people without the Hollywood-FOX kind of fascist adulteration might do more to actually change the reality of policing in the United States than an ephemeral slogan that will need to be abandoned as it is rendered a liability.   

Note:  I am reaching the limits of my ability to keep doing this on a daily basis as my financial situation tightens.  In two months it will reach the end.  I hope to perhaps weekly or occasionally post  new pieces here if the worst happens.   Well, I suppose if the actual worst happens I won't be posting at all.

 

Looking at that ridiculous Trump golden-moon-calf statue from the fascist-absurd CPAC, it looks to me like Micky Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice screwed a Harry Potter house elf and the kid ran afoul of Auric Goldfinger. 

If I were clever with graphics I'd have made a rebus, this is the best I can do with what I can do. 

Update:  And about that CPAC stage

 

 

 

More With The "You Can't Write" And The Stupid Assumption That If You Don't Like Something That Means You MUST Like Something Else You Don't Like

OH, NO. I had written short stories before, I've written lots of stuff, I like writing stuff but I'm not stupid enough to believe that what I enjoy writing is going to be what other people enjoy reading. That's the difference between us, maybe. I hadn't ever subjected a writing teacher to the junk I scribbled before and he said it was from OK to promising. I'm sure if I'd had word processing technology available to me when I was in school that my teachers might have liked reading my expository writing better. Up till now it's about the only stuff I've ever shown anyone

I think the melodramatic angst of the tortured writer is one of the more ridiculous poses of literary life. It couldn't be that bad or no one would choose to do it. They should try a really bad job that they have to do. I think most tortured writers are people who mistake their obsessive self analysis for art when it's just them splashing their personality flaws on paper. Some of them get other sick people who want to read that stuff and a publishing industry that peddles that kind of crap to them. It's like the movies, sex and violence, especially violent sex and hate. Modernism as literature. I got past that a long, long time ago when I had to write a couple of papers in 20th Century French Lit class. One about Charles Peguy the other about Cocteau. It was the Cocteau, focusing on his Oedipus that pretty much did in my opinion of modern lit. I had read a lot of fiction before that and no where near as much after that.  Most of it I'd never liked before, especially the English and French 20th century stuff.

 

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Oh, dear, you are mistaking ephemeral current fashion for modernism. Depending on context when I say it I mean everything from modern physics and secular liberalism to the origin of the latter in so-called "enlightenment" writing and practice. Another major piece to fall out of modernism for me was taking a more critical look at those enormous events in the history of modernism, the revolutions, the Russian, the various 19th century European ones, the French and American revolutions for what they really produced in life instead of in superficial, ideological assertion. When I realized the American revolution was an attempt by aristocrats to get poor farmers to fight a revolution for their financial benefit and that the Constitution was their protection of their financial privilage, especially the slave-holders, and that literally everything admirable in American history and culture has had to fight against that, the romantic myth that was on full display in the fascist insurrection of January 6th shattered. The one for the French Revolution - most Americans know as much about that as they saw during the singing of the Marseillaise in Casablanca - is even more ridiculous and destructive. 

 

I said that any attempt to recreate any past is not only doomed to failure, it is morally wrong. The assumption that I am not going to deny that the French Revolution and the French Republican tradition that came from it has been a moral atrocity doesn't in any way negate the evils of the old regime it replaced, I think many, most of the appalling features of post-revolutionary France are a recapitulation of the evils that preceded the Revolution as all of those after the American Revolution and Russian, Chinese, etc. revolutions have replaced as bad if not worse. In that the American experience has been, perhaps, somewhat better since the Declaration of Independence was a promissory note that informed the future imaginations of those who had been promised what the "Founders" had no intention of giving them. The French revolutionaries talked a good game too but they were even less honorable in honoring "liberty, equality and fraternity" as the bros formed rival gangs, threw their rivals in prison and chopped off their heads as they imposed a murderous reign of terror on France, only to have that give away to an even bloodier military regime and a series of rising and falling bloody disasters. Of course, the Americans continuing blood shed was mainly white people murdering and enslaving Black People and other People of Color as well as the genocide of the indigenous People of Color during the same period.  The modern would-be scientific regimes that came in after revolutions have been even bloodier, using modern science and technology even more deadly than the emblematic modernist symbol of revolution, the guillotine.  

 

I remember way back, I think it was when Reagan was funding what would become the war lords of Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion, someone who was saying the US should keep out of that mess pointed out that the Afghanis weren't going to fall in love with us anymore than they did the Soviets, pointing out that they don't have to choose one of us or the other that they could hate us both. 

 

YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE ONE SIDE OR ANOTHER SIDE IF YOU REJECT THEM BOTH. The idea you have to choose sides, the often unconsidered insistence that you choose "which side are you on" leaves out that choice. I don't have to choose the per-revolutionary France to reject the revolution and what came after it. I can reject those both and say we have to move on into the future. The idea that you can choose one or the other is an illusion, worse, it's delusional. The choice was that of the people of that time to make, they've all been dead a long, long time. And people who came later didn't choose either of them, they moved on. The delusion that we can chose a part of the past and make it our own is exactly that, a delusion, one which is encouraged by dishonest people who promote "originalism, fundamentalism, etc." The past they promote is likely a current myth, a construct that never existed in reality, as stupid as that stupid woman who carried the "don't tread on me" flag right before her comrades tread her to death to save their own asses. I have a hard time feeling sorry for her except as a chump for show-biz promoted "patriotism" based on the manipulation of emotions by using symbols instead of reality. I am not stupid enough to think that's a habit of thought that is limited to the American right, it's ubiquitous.  

Personal Commentary

IT IS a bad day, an anniversary in my family history with alcoholism today.  It doesn't usually impact me like it has this year.  Maybe it's the pandemic.  

I've had a number of family members, friends, acquaintances, co-workers who have had their lives destroyed by alcohol.  In the past I'd have said "by alcoholism" but after reading the excellent book by Harold Johnson,  Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People and Yours that distinction is dangerously inadequate.  Many people have their lives ruined and ended by people who use alcohol who in no way approach the category of alcoholics so I don't make that distinction anymore.  

I've mentioned here before how, in my ongoing education in why we have to leave modernism behind as it has aged, been implemented and has proven to be as flawed as every other ism of every other past which we should never try to revive," I was stunned to find out that alcohol and drinking it is a sacred cow of secular liberalism.  I was on what was then a popular lefty blog and in a discussion of Ken Burns show about Prohibition, I said that the biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work, that it didn't stop people from drinking and that it was too bad that it didn't have the effect of preventing the drinking of alcohol.  You'd have thought I had said something against the common good, getting angry denunciations that I'd dissed a substance that has no nutritive value which caused enormous numbers of deaths every year, deaths from alcoholism, from diseases associated with drinking - which DON'T require even that the person drink to excess frequently - birth defects, accidents, violent assaults by and to drinkers, especially those to the wives and children of drunken men, fathers, mothers, etc. That rendered the drinker more in danger of being taken advantage of, raped, robbed, beaten up. . . I mean, what's not to find positive about that?

I think the position that drinking and drug taking have in the requisite thinking of secular liberalism is a good symptom that there is a lot wrong with it.  The idea that "rights" "freedoms" "liberties" to do things that have such destructive effects on the lives of those who indulge in them and those the kill, maim and otherwise damage are in any way good or worthy of uncritical support is utterly stupid.  Yet such stupidity is a huge part of secular modernism.  It is an ideological fraud which has, unfortunately, become part of the habitual thinking and so pseudo-morality of many a more genuine liberal.  I'm not calling for prohibition, that didn't work, as I noted to the outraged play-lefties mentioned above, I am calling for the end of the insouciant, non-critical acceptance of alcohol which more than matches the previous attitude as it was practiced in regard to tobacco smoking everywhere.  If a total elimination of drinking would be a huge benefit to the world, any percentage increase in those who practice total abstinence would have a proportional benefit.  The benefits of halving, reductions of more than that in the number of people drinking and, so, producing the harms of alcohol in society, in family life, in personal relations, in the reduction of accidents, violence, expense to those not related to drinkers would have to count as a major advance of the type that universal healthcare would be, that universal free college or apprenticeship training would.  

It's amazing that anyone could object to any of that obvious truth.  Especially those pseudo-liberals and lefties who love to believe themselves to be the keepers of the flame of reason.  Hint on that belief, nuh, uh.  A hint that their position is wrong is that it is shared by innumerable right wingers. 

The argument included the atheist-materialist-scientistic denunciation of Alcoholics Anonymous, an article of faith in the religion that denies it is one, of course based on the slogan that such folk have given alcoholics as an excuse for not trying "I don't accept that there is a higher power,"  which allowed me to point out that alcoholics had accepted a higher power which was more enslaving, more dominating, more exacting, more demanding, one which impoverished them and destroyed them, the ethyl alcohol molecule.  I pointed out, considering the discussion and the history of the denigration of AA that along with that stupid "atom" symbol for atheism that an icon of the ethyl alcohol molecule should be the emblem of the "secular alternative" to AA, an "alternative" which existed in a couple of major cities but which, unlike AA was not even available as more than a Potemkin false front anywhere else.

*  The idea that it is possible to revive any past is one of the dumber characteristics of modernism, perhaps most obvious in various neo-classical, neo-primitive, etc. movements, most of them associated with fascism in various forms.  Fascism is a manifestation of modernism as is religious fundamentalism, ironically, fundamentalism being based in an anachronistic modern approach to reading texts.  All of them claiming to revive a past which is nothing more than a modern myth of those pasts which, in turn, all turned out to be inadequate and in need of scrapping.   Modernism is about as up to date as Edwardian thought, as up to date as the Regency period.  It's time for it to end.   We are meant to move on to the future, not the past.