Meet Judith Thompson

JUDITH THOMPSON is a really interesting writer who writes about really hard stuff who has developed and changed, she talks about some of her work that she can't watch anymore and it's not to do with embarrassment over the quality of earlier work but the violence and topics she's dealt with.  This interview she did with the very intelligent, very insightful Canadian actor R. H. Thompson is some of the most interesting talk about writing and theater and acting I've heard in a long time. 

I'll give you a link to the linked Youtubes starting with what she has to say about "the muscle of denial." 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Judith Thompson - The Quickening - from The Vanishing Point

 

The Quickening 

Laura and Peter are the perfect couple; everyone tells them so. But after an evening of rising tensions among their upwardly mobile crowd, their relationship suddenly takes an irreversible turn. The results are both absurd and shocking in this powerful first venture into radio by Judith Thompson, the author of the stage plays The Crackwalker and White Biting Dog

 

Just when you figure your relationships are messed up. Makes you wonder how anyone sustains one, or it's a commentary on people too concerned about how they feel and make themselves miserable.  I think it's the legacy of psychology.  

Not enough time to type out the credits, they give them at the end.  Judith Thompson is one of Canada's most well respected playwrights.

On The Death Of A Significant Author

THE WORLD LOST one of the most significant authors of the 20th century the other day when Beverly Cleary died at 104.  It certainly can't be considered a shock when someone that age dies but it's certainly a loss to the world.

It's kind of wild, being an old man when an author you first read before you were 10 dies, I only read Henry Huggins and Ribsy as a child.  I had to wait to be come a baby-sitting uncle to be introduced to more of her books, the wonderful Romona and Beezus books, the really great Dear Mr. Henshaw (I'll have to go back and read the sequel to that one, Strider, now).  I especially liked that one and Ramona and Her Father.  I liked how Cleary presented the failures and weaknesses of otherwise good adults as much as she did the children she created.  I once heard an interview with her when she said she didn't want to write books about children who learn their lesson and reform, that she didn't like that in the children's books she read as a child.  So she was true to life in that.  Takes more than one book or even a series to make someone reform.

I hope her family are comforted by the knowledge that probably as much as any author she is responsible for doing good things for millions of people at a time they needed it badly.  It makes you wonder how you could ever even come to an understanding of how much good her work could have done, though I can't believe any of her books did anything to make the world a worse place.  Lots of the "great authors" you can't make the same claim for.  And she did it without being sanctimonious and prissy. 

Strunkian Brevity As The Generator Of Unintended Evil

THE YEAR of the lectionary cycle that relies heavily on the Gospel according to John always carries  with it the disturbing use of the phrase "the Jews," without much in the way of modification.  That means that while the accusation that antisemitism "was introduced" into Christianity by the author of John is certainly not without some justification, in order to make that use of the book forces you must choose to ignore many of the uses of the word, with or without the definite article, because John explicitly notes not only the followers of Jesus as well as his enemies were Jews, but that Jesus, himself, and all of his closest followers were also Jews.   When taking up the study of Greek last year, I found out that the language used in John was the simplest of the four Gospels, I wish the author had introduced more nuance in his writing - he was a sophisticated Greek speaking intellectual capable of that - it may have prevented some of the worst parts of Christian history if he had used a few more words to make those distinctions.  

That problem is seen in today's Gospel, John 11:45-56

Many of the Jews who had come to Mary

and seen what Jesus had done began to believe in him.

But some of them went to the Pharisees

and told them what Jesus had done.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees

convened the Sanhedrin and said,

“What are we going to do?

This man is performing many signs.

If we leave him alone, all will believe in him,

and the Romans will come

and take away both our land and our nation.”

But one of them, Caiaphas,

who was high priest that year, said to them,

“You know nothing,

nor do you consider that it is better for you

that one man should die instead of the people,

so that the whole nation may not perish.”

He did not say this on his own,

but since he was high priest for that year,

he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,

and not only for the nation,

but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.

So from that day on they planned to kill him.

So Jesus no longer walked about in public among the Jews,

but he left for the region near the desert,

to a town called Ephraim,

and there he remained with his disciples.

Now the Passover of the Jews was near,

and many went up from the country to Jerusalem

before Passover to purify themselves.

They looked for Jesus and said to one another

as they were in the temple area, “What do you think?

That he will not come to the feast?”

 

What a complex passage. It starts right after the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead at the behest of his two sisters, the Mary at the beginning of the passage, I strongly suspect meaning Mary who was also the first witness to the risen Jesus later in John. It notes that many of "the Jews" saw the raising of Lazarus, presumably friends to Mary and others in the town and became disciples of Jesus. Mary was certainly a Jew as would her sister and brother have been and there is no more faithful follower of Jesus than she. That the ones who came to believe, the ones who told the Pharisees were Jews is explicit and the central issue for the Sanhedrin when they're told about it because they're afraid if too many Jews become supporters of Jesus the Romans will do what they did later in that century, destroy the Jewish nation as a political-religious entity. That is the central contention in the claim that Caiaphas, the high priest that year, proposed that instead of that happening, it was good for Jesus to die. 

 

I'll stop there by pointing out that even in this most troubling telling of the story, "the Jews" meaning the chief authorities among them, were motivated by a fear of the Romans doing what they certainly knew the Romans were always ready to do, they had certainly known of enough mass crucifixions and slaughters for them to doubt the danger that the Children of Israel were in from the Romans as before they were from other foreign invaders and occupiers. The evil that they're presented as contemplating was forced on them, not that I remember reading many pre-20th century commentaries pointing that out. 

 

Another group of Jews are mentioned at the very end, those who went up to Jerusalem to get ready for the Passover who wanted to see this Jesus who they had either seen before or heard of, expecting that he would be there though he was not making public appearances, knowing of the talk of sacrificing him for the good of the nation as a whole. They expected he would observe the Passover, they seem to think it was impossible that he wouldn't, so they certainly believed Jesus to be one of them as, in fact, did the Romans who called him that in a mocking sign they put on the cross with him. 

 

This shows that a superficial, literal, "common sense" reading of the Scriptures is bound to get a lot of people in trouble, it shows one of the defects of language that a word used without modification to narrow or broaden it in context is an extremely dangerous thing. It's impossible to know why the author of John would have done that, perhaps he was taught by an ancient Greek Strunk-White style phony or maybe he did it to save paper.* Whatever it was, it's had some really bad results. This is one case when I think the best translation of these passages would insert modifiers to make those distinctions clearer. Though that damage has been done in the culture and it will take many generations to wash it out. It won't just happen, it has to be the intended effort of generations to make it clear. 

 

I would be very surprised if the author of John wasn't Jewish, himself, though one who might be beginning to discern a parting of the ways.   One which I think it took many generations to happen.  I would bet he included himself in some of his uses of the term.  As I've said here, I am certain that the earliest followers of Jesus believed they were born and died Jews, including Peter who Catholics consider the first pope and probably the fifth Pope St. Evaristis who was certainly born to Jewish parents, one of the things about him that tradition seems to hold solidly about him.  I'll bet he believed himself a Jew as late as 105, the traditional date of his purported martyrdom.  Some sources believe that he was the Pope when John the Apostle was traditionally believed to have died, for what that's worth, almost all of the dating of such things being based on tradition without any real documentation as such.  

 

* My dear old Latin teacher said he thought that was the origin of the ablative absolute when paper was scarce, the ablative absolute being one of the things students traditionally find to be hard when studying Latin. I don't know, he was the expert, not me.  I didn't think it was that hard to get the hang of once he explained it to me.  Maybe he was just better at explaining stuff than most were.

Sorry Charlie, Jemmy Was A Stinking Liar

IN HIS "EVENING JEMMY" post of May 15, 2014, the generally estimable Charles Pierce gave what was for a professional scribbler this rather self-serving gem of Madison's wisdom:

 

Hence, in the United States the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative as well as against executive ambition. They are secured, not by laws paramount to prerogative, but by constitutions paramount to laws.

This security of the freedom of the press requires that it should be exempt not only from previous restraint by the Executive, as in Great Britain, but from legislative restraint also; and this exemption, to be effectual, must be an exemption not only from the previous inspection of licensers, but from the subsequent penalty of laws.

James Madison, Report On The Virginia Resolutions, 1800.

Consider, first, that by Madison's own design and plot, "the great and essential rights of the people" were not secured by either the law or constitution.  By his own design the rights of all Black People were not protected by either and he certainly had no intention that they should be, ever.  Something that the odious  Chief Justice Taney used a half century later in the infamous Dred Scott decision.   That attack on the rights of Black People is, by conscious intention and planning embedded so deep within the Constitution that it's effective, still today. So Madison was not only lying, he was transparently lying, something which may have not occurred to propertied, white men not in on the plot in1800 but which no one today has any right to ignore or excuse or even excuse by coming up with an explanation of why he was such a hypocrite.

You can't claim that Madison and his fellow aristocratic framers were ignorant of those issues.  For him and I dare say most of those delegates to the Convention, those issues were the overwhelming center of contention and concern, the very issues that motivated the blackmail of the slave interests - South and North to install inequalities and injustices into the Constitution what, as Madison said, was "paramount to laws" laws, which would far more easily be made and unmade as their evil or mere lack of wisdom became apparent than the Constitution could be changed. So they proved by their concern they were fully aware of those who pointed out the injustice or evil of the inequality that he took for granted because in the wheeling and dealing he and the other "founders" engaged in during the Constitutional Convention, the insistence of the slave owner to rig things so that even a majority of voting propertied white men could not get rid of slavery or even vote for restrictions of it for twenty years after the blasted thing was adopted and not even then if they chose not to exercise the power otherwise given to control commerce.

That out of the way the subsequent history of the country, ESPECIALLY THE INNOVATION OF SUPREME COURT REVIEW OF LAWS MADE BY CONGRESS, proves that the Constitution as a guarantor of rights was more often than not nothing of the sort, the Constitution which held no such right belonged to the Court did nothing to protect the country from that extra-Constitutional "law" which no legislature passed, no executive signed onto.

We are in a period when Republicans are doing what even some of the Northern states have done since shortly after the Constitution came into being, making laws preventing Black People from voting, of rigging elections through making it hard for people to vote, to restrict voting in ways designed to fix elections and congressional districts - something which the Constitution has not only not prevented but permitted, aside from a brief period when a law, the Voting Rights Act was in effect, UNTIL IT WAS OVERTURNED BY REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS ON THE SUPREME COURT THE CONSTITUTION BEING THE EXCUSE THEY HAVE USED TO DISENFRANCHISE PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OTHERS. The Constitution is dangerously vague if not totally silent on the right of a qualified citizen to vote in an election and to have their vote counted, it is dangerously vague if not totally silent on the right of all of us in the country to have an honest election that puts into office those with the support of a majority of the voters and, as important, does not impose the last choice of a majority on all of us through having one of those win with a minority of voters support, as someone who suffered under the 38% governorship of the filthy, evil Paul LePage for two terms under those conditions, our Constitution is way oversold by Madison and even today, by the far more honest, far wiser, far more informed by the lessons of the past two centuries and more, Charles Pierce.

And that is not to get to the rest of this bit of idiocy in which merely because someone has the money to own an organ of the media, they are freed from the inspecificity of Madison's horribly written "Bill of Rights". A Bill of Rights that has permitted billionaires, millionaires and even foreign fascist despots to lie us into the worst presidency of our lifetimes if not for all times, one who mounted a violent insurrection against the very Congress that Madison feared might inconvenience the press,and which has allowed the gun industry to mount a shooting, killing war on us harnessing the most prone to paranoid violence to serially gun down thousands and thousands of us, even the youngest school children.

No, we have to get over "Jemmy" and Tom Jefferson, goddamned Alexander Hamilton whose death by Aaron Burr must have been widely recognized as removing one of the most dangerous anti-democrats among that crew of aristocratic haters of the very idea of universal suffrage and equality. The entire myth of "the Founders" is one of our most dangerous, matching and perhaps surpassing the myth of "the lost cause" and "the wild west" and various other regionalist lies that dupe the country into installing the criminal and the depraved into office. 

That's a hell of a huge cost to We The People so that people who scribble for magazines and newspapers and who shoot off their mouths for television and radio and online are relieved from the work of fact checking their claims to make sure they aren't slandering or libeling someone.  Something they should do out of those "professional ethics" that they claim to work under, something they should have to abide by so they don't lie us into rule by gangsters and thugs and fascists and billionaire oligarchs.  It's what they claim is important about the over rated, over touted "freedom of the press."   That's only a good thing the extent to which they tell the truth and don't lie, but it's part of their mythology that it's always a good thing and to be unexamined and tested for the truth.

 

Ideas For The Week Before Good Friday

“without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.” W. H. Auden, Vespers

 

I haven't thought about this poem at all for a long time if at all before now, though I'm pretty sure I must have read it. Reading a reference to it in an old article by Alan Jacobs lamenting the lack of Christian intellectuals such as were found before around and after WWII, this morning, I looked for the text online and found, instead, a Youtube of Auden reading it.

 

 

 

 

I listen to it and think that I wouldn't much like either of the two people, Auden or his quasi-Marxist technocratic antagonist.* Though I certainly agree with the conclusion that Auden came to, while I wouldn't say it the same way, I do believe that equality and the democracy that is its legal and political form "our dear old bag of a democracy" is founded on the content of, the central claims of  the Gospel, The Law (which Jesus said he was here to fulfill) the Prophets, even when the actual source of those Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, the witnesses to Jesus, are rejected and the teachings remain, for a time, a force, though without the source of them inevitably an ever diminishing one.  I think that the turn to fascism in America is a direct result of a. secularism rejecting that heritage, b. fundamentalism having rejected it in the vital issue of racial, gender LGBTQ etc. equality is an equally modernist endangerment of egalitarian democracy.  I have no faith in secularism to fight against it because I don't believe there is any evidence that it can sustain the necessary prerequisites to do that.

 

I have to say that that is my conclusion of a quarter of a century since taking up reading the Gospels and, after that, the rest of Scripture again, also studying history, also reading a large number of theologians, essayists . . . Marilynne Robinson, who Jacobs is very critical was especially important to me.   It was through his criticism of her that I found the article to start with.

 

I have to say that since anyone who has read a lot of what I've posted here will know she has been a huge influence on me, I don't agree with everything she's written or stands for. I agree with her that American liberalism, the liberalism of white abolitionism (though not so much the more potent Black abolitionism) was a product of the Scriptures as understood through the lens of Calvin's commentary and translation in the Geneva Bible, I think she is right about that and that that fact being forgotten, liberalism in any good sense of the word is in danger of disintegrating. I don't get her affection for Emerson who I think was one of the main figures in that disintegration, every time I look into him I dislike him more. And I have to say that I'm deeply skeptical of humanism as an intellectual project as I am all ideologies, I prefer that people be a lot more modest than to mistakenly figure they are the measure of all things, though our capacities certainly contain the limits of that which we can measure or think or talk about. 

 

I think Jacob's criticism of her - that she didn't lecture Obama about his inability to carry off the closing of the Bush II concentration camp at Guantanamo - is kind of silly. That was far more a problem of Republicans and cowardly Democrats refusing to house the inmates deemed too dangerous to release and making it impossible for Obama to do what he wanted to do. Anyone who ever forgets that politics is the art of the possible is inviting their marginalization. The right place to put that criticism would have been those Republicans, those Democrats and, especially, the whore house that the American free-press is who made it impossible. 

 

I don't know where I'm going with this, I would encourage you to listen to the poem a few times, I listened with the speed lowered and the automated captions on (it will amuse you by getting a number of the words wrong) and to read Jacob's article. The majority of it doesn't deal with Robinson or Cornel West who he holds up as someone more to his liking. I would limit any criticism on these counts to Robinson's essays and not, as some have, to her novels - one of the things I read this morning criticized her for getting the chronology of events wrong in one of those, perhaps, speculating, that it was for an artistic purpose. I think it's OK to do that to a minor extent in a novel, though I don't care for the practice. Though, considering how much falsification of history is done through fiction, these days mostly the movies and TV, perhaps I shouldn't overlook that. I have to say that every time I fact checked what she said in her essays, she was entirely accurate in her presentation of facts and her insights into them have seldom been something I could find fault with.  Given her devotion to accuracy and the truth in her expository writing, it's a minor sin in her entire work.

 

* You shouldn't think by that that I am hostile to W. H. Auden or his point of view or his poem which is a very fine piece of work and chock full of points and things worth thinking about. The idea that you have to love everything about someone and their work in order to love any of them is childish and stupid and one of the dumbest things in current, modern culture. As someone I read pointed out, modern, science worshiping secularism is as fundamentalist as fundamentalist religion and the Puritan Church in late 17th century Salem were in that. I think Calvin may have, actually, been less ready to judge in that way than those two modernist ideologies and demonstrably way more than even the Spanish Inquisition was.  

 

 

Accusations of "Early Onset" By An Eternal Adolescent

BEING DEPRIVED OF an income and the social interaction of teaching this past year has left me appreciating how associations had through those can keep us focused on the more mundane aspects of normal life such as which week it is.  And my mistake wasn't as bad as forgetting which day of the week it is - a common enough thing in the prime of life.  The church calendar that I got confused about for a couple of days last week surrounds both moveable and unmovable dates, that of Christmas is fixed, though the beginning of advent is tied to the date on which a Sunday four weeks before that falls, that of Easter is dependent on the day of the Passover, related to the date of the full moon and the vernal equinox.  Since I doubt you could have articulated the previous information in this paragraph, no, I don't think the confusion was a sign of "early onset dementia."   For a start, at my age there would be nothing "early onset" about it. 

I really am unimpressed with scientistic, materialistic, atheism as an intellectual phenomenon, that's one of the largest effects that the atheism fad of the 00's left me with.  I had been going in that direction because starting with CSICOP, such pop atheists as Paul Kurtz and Carl Sagan and, for Pete's sake, the even lower levels of James Randi and Michael Shermer and Penn Jillette and a whole shitload of Brit poseurs being its public face and wildly popular among college credentialed, uneducated members of the English Speaking Peoples, they're a bunch of fakes and phonies replacing derision and dismissal and, in a few such as Sagan and Kurtz, badly sourced and researched intellectual folklore for honest research and presentation of information.   

It's no wonder that one of those so-credentialed people would mistake what is said on serious topics for bullshit because their entire experience of intellectualism comprises such bullshit, largely out of the world of ersatz pop-intellectualism and the ill informed common received wisdom of TV era kulcha or the smart aleck wise-cracking which is an emblem of the slacker whose pretense replaces any level of honest investigation.   The kind of people who think Stephen Fry is a brilliant intellectual, who so often represented James Randi as a figure of science to me.

Thursday After Lent 5

TODAY'S LECTIONARY readings in the Catholic church are dominated by it being The Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which are worth going into, especially as the Old Testament readings Isaiah 7:10-14; 8:10 and Psalm 40 and the Epistle reading Hebrews 10:4-10 emphasize what I have found is one of the most helpful of objects of meditation, the idea of us doing the will of God.

 

But I'm going to go back to Walter Brueggemann's extremely useful book, Gift and Task for this day which deals with Exodus 7:25-8:19, in which Pharaoh's magicians - his science-technology staff - were able to reproduce the effects that Moses and Aaron could but when he got to the third plague of the swarm of gnats, they were powerless, the head magician telling Pharaoh that "the finger of God" was in what Moses did. Exodus records that, like Trump and the Republican-fascists of today, Pharaoh didn't like the expert advice his own experts gave him so he chose to ignore it.

In the contest between God, the emancipator and Pharaoh, the lord of bondage, the first two episodes have ended in a draw. Matters are different in the third episode, concerning gnats. The Egyptian technicians, in the service of Pharaoh, "could not" match the performance of Moses and Aaron in the production of gnats. Pharaoh could not match the power of God. The predatory empire of Pharaoh, with all its technology had reached the limit of its capacity.

The news of that limit, whenever it is recognized, is a stumbling declaration, because it signifies that Pharaoh, symbol of every predatory power, does not need to be feared, does not need to be trusted, and so does not need to be obeyed.

The reading from the Gospel for that day is Mark 10:17-31

In a very different mode, Jesus' encounter with the man with "many possessions" makes a like point. The man presents a winning combination of qualities to Jesus. He is both obedient to the commandments and successful in the real world of economics, a most compelling dossier! Jesus' word to him, however, is that the combination of obedience and success is no passport to abiding well-being, because these points of merit have only limited currency.

We live in a world that pays endless tribute to the impressive combination of money, power, technical competence, and worldly wisdom . . . all important qualities. In both of these narratives, however, there is the uncompromising recognition that such capacities are limited. They cannot deliver well-being. They cannot prevent emancipation., We have a chance, with these stories, to sort out our proper commitments from our illusions about what or whom to trust.

I'm finding as I increasingly face the fact that every day is one day closer to death that what I've wanted in life isn't what would bring me real security. I've never much trusted in owning stuff, even having a home and work that pays (this Covid year has shown me how close to destitution that gets you) so it wasn't that issue with me. With me it was the desire to have a secure relationship with a man I could rely on. I found out how fragile that can be even with a very good partner a few years ago and he was probably as good as I'm ever going to have in this life.  It hardly seems worth trying again.  I have a niece who very suddenly and unexpectedly lost her husband this year, thirty years younger than I was when something similar happened to me. I've got a brother who lost his wonderful wife to cancer, a diagnosis that was made only two years into their marriage. Human relationships, what are close to the center of any healthy, worthwhile life are not the ultimate thing you can rely on, the most intensely personal of those relationships among the most fragile - look at the divorce rate.

The only really durable relationship is our relationship to God and it is one of the most difficult to find and think about. I wonder if that's what the long and difficult relationship between God and Moses is meant to point out. And Moses wasn't the only prophet who found it a difficult relationship, Jonah did and when Jesus was at the point of death he expressed a profound feeling of abandonment even by The Father who he constantly mentioned and expressed his relation to. I don't have any real answers as to how to get there, only that you shouldn't expect it to be easy. I have to constantly try to keep focused on it, I have no advice on that except to recommend trying and trying more than one thing, doing the will of God, being good to others, including our enemies one of the more important ways to do that and make it real in the world. 

 

I would recommend Gift and Task as a means of not reading the entire Bible but a very large part of it as contained in the year 2 Episcopal lectionary that Brueggemann bases his book on.  With his extremely fine meditations on some of the texts and his always useful prayer at the top to the page, it'll do more for you than any "read the Bible in a year" program I've looked at.  

The Big Lie Of Milton Friedman And The Role It Plays In The United States Being The Worst Developed Country In The Covid-19 Emergency

I GOT THE FIRST DOSE of one of the two-part Covid-19 vaccines yesterday and haven't had any ill effects, yet.  I understand that it's the second one that people have issues with, mostly, which apparently indicates that the first one was effective.  If that's the case I'm looking forward to having a sore arm in three weeks.

The volunteers and professionals involved in the location I got the inoculation in were very nice and very helpful, though the things I had to fill out could have been in larger type, that would have been helpful.  One of the things I had trouble seeing, I had to ask for help.  The young person (probably in their thirties) started treating me like I wasn't understanding what it meant to which I said, "I'm blind, not demented."  The one who warned me against the possible discomforts reported to be associated with the vaccine I got chuckled when I said,  So you're telling me it's like being (my age) every day of my life.

I feel guardedly optimistic about it, though I wish it was easier to get the vaccine.  I'm hoping that among other things the Biden administration can do is make it easier for them to set up emergency vaccination programs like were mounted in after the Salk and Sabine polio vaccines came out.  Maybe I'll try to research how those went in the first year, maybe it was as disorganized at first as it has been now.  One thing that I'm sure helped was that Eisenhower may have been a Republican but he was also an Army general who must have valued efficency and had a sense of public service.  Something no Republican has valued much since 1968.   

The role that the University of Chicago and other elite, alleged educational institutions, Milton Friedman and his ilk played in destroying the public health infrastructure in the United States should be seen as an act of war against the People of the United States.   The rich and their hired whores in academia and the legal profession, most of those who are called "journalists" have waged war against the common welfare of The People.   While I'm sure there would be hyped up rage against that being looked at as seriously as it needs to be looked at, it really does need to be looked at.  The half-million dead and counting are directly attributable to the attack on public services, government in service to The People and the absurd lie that the "private sector" is going to do a better job.  It doesn't, it never have, it never will.  Remember that the next time Chuck Todd and Stephanopolis and the rest feature this bullshit on the Sunday Morning lie shows.  When NPR or CNN or C-Span puts them on to "balance" their content.  "Balance" means presenting proven lies as if it were the truth because some Republican liar wants people to get duped.  That's your "free press" in action, after it was relived of any public service requirement and other things that free speechy types have a horror for.

Since I Was Wrong About This Being Holy Week And This Is Important - You Know What This Is

FROM THAT Wikipedia article you cite, when we're talking "earliest manuscripts" of the Gospels you're not talking about a. a huge number of complete or nearly complete texts, you might be talking as few as four or fewer, which gets us to b. you're not talking about undisputed or even nearly undisputed assignment of age to those manuscripts, c. you're talking about manuscripts, the unknown provenance of their origin, the sources they copied, the possible presence of other lines of transmission which may have included the story of the Woman Found In Adultery, etc. 

While much of history, especially more recent history, much of antiquities can produce a level of reliability and certainty that even the exact sciences have a hard time matching there are enormous ranges of things about the past that can never be known or which can only be known in frustratingly fragmented form.  

Apparently you have not read the article in full, voluntarily fragmenting even the, um, "authority" you cite, because it points out that even some of those who believe the story was inserted into the Gospel of John at a later date believe the story may have described an actual event in the life of Jesus, or, at least, was part of the oral tradition that informed the original author of John. 

I have to say that atheists and haters of Christianity insisting that this, certainly one of the finest claims of mercy found in the literature of one of the most influential and potential forces for good is a fraud leads me to question just how dedicated they are to mercy and the finer aspects of the monotheistic religion, those things which IF THOSE WHO CLAIMED TO BE CHRISTIANS PUT INTO NORMAL AND REGULAR PRACTICE WOULD MAKE CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE MOST RESPECTED AND BELOVED OF HUMAN CATEGORIES.   Why, you'd almost think that seeing the establishment of such mercy, such generosity, such egalitarianism is as nothing to those who, instead of encouraging those who profess Christianity to demonstrate what they claim to believe as compared to their interest in denying the truth of such virtues and mercies.   I do, by the way, have to say that that suspicion never arose in me until I got a load of that from what the loudmouth atheists of the 00's said.  That so many of them were Darwinists, the holders of a pseudo-scientific ideology that holds that anything that impedes the merciless struggle of the survival of the fittest is a terrible thing (DARWIN HIMSELF SAID THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT BY "NATURAL SELECTION") it's no wonder they'd have such contempt for that particular story.  And if they're not full blown Darwinists they hold some other equally depraved ideology. 

The Answer To Rachel Maddow's Question Of Last Night

BECAUSE ESQUIRE has put his online column behind a subscription requirement that I can't afford to breech, I don't read the estimable Charles Pierce as often as I used to. I generally like Pierce's pieces and I almost always agree with him but one of the things that he does that drives me up the friggin' wall is his adoration of James Madison. "Jemmy" Madison, in Pierce's frequent affectionate mentions of him is one of the things in American mythology that we are going to have to face realistically or we will never, ever save egalitarian democracy, BOTH OF WHICH "JEMMY" HATED OR AT LEAST DIDN'T TRUST.

That an aristocratic, well educated, slave-holder and protector of the institution that made him and a majority of his fellow Constitution and Bill of Rights writing aristocrats rich had a deep suspicion of the wisdom and morality of common people is hardly to be unexpected, look at the snobbery that pervades the merely middle-class, college-credentialed blog rats on allegedly lefty, allegedly egalitarian, blogs to get a milder version of what the "Jemmy" I imagine was like.  That is what I imagine him after doing what so few ever get around to doing, looking more deeply into his writing and primary documentation. The whole "founders" thin needs to be junked or at least subjected to deep and skeptical scrutiny.  That that look into, especially, Thomas Jefferson,  Madison's very uneven letter writing fellow genius among the Founders,  leads me to suspect he was an alcoholic who was frequently drunk as a skunk when he wrote.  Looking into not only the primary record but their contemporary critics  really has opened my eyes and informed my thinking of just how intentionally anti-democratic the government they framed is and just who it was intended to benefit from the beginning. We have been fighting tooth and nail, actual oceans of blood, against it since it was adopted, especially shed by People of Color and the also wage slaves.

Think about that this week as we hear journalists like the genuinely and equally estimable Rachel Maddow rightly rail against Senator Joe Manchin who has already announced that he will continue as being the person who puts guns into the hands of mass shooters - THAT ANY TWO REPUBLICAN SENATORS COULD MAKE THAT STAND MOOT SHOULD BE MENTIONED BUT MANCHIN HAS CHOSEN TO BE THE FOCAL POINT OF THIS SO HE OWNS IT. 

 

Think about that because the Senate was sold to skeptics of that anti-democratically constituted body as the saucer to cool hot tea passed by the actually more democratically constituted House to prevent things happening. That is what your "Evening Jemmy" not only planned but stated was his intention and, no doubt, that of his aristocratic colleagues who were afraid that largely Northern popular opinion would turn against slavery and the Southern economic system and free the people whose violent incarceration on their plantations made him and his fellow aristocrats AND THEIR NORTHERN MONEY MEN COLLEAGUES rich.

The Senate only cools things that are good, I'm having a hard time remembering much of anything bad that they prevented passing into law, and even a lot of the good that was made law in the past is destroyed by the Supreme Court which the Founders ensured would be staffed by people such as the anti-democratically constituted Senate would allow to get on it.

If the Senate is broken, and it always has been, the fault will not be corrected until we get over the goddamend founders fetish that is the irrational and stupid and totally ahistorical mythology of the college-credentialed class.

A popular mythological "Founders" and especially James Madison are wildly popular among journalists because of his reluctant paternity of the First Amendment, he had to promise the Virginia Legislature that in the First Congress he would push through a bill of rights and what he pushed through has bedeviled us in so many ways today. The professional interests of the paid media - who have benefited from the modern interpretation of the "free speech-press" provisions as certainly as the gun industry has benefited from the slave-patrol benefiting Second Amendment, will never face the fact that its interpretation allowing lies is why the goddamned Senate is even more broken than it might have been. Their profession, their lying colleagues whose rights to lie they would never want to see abridged lest they might get sued for their sloppiness, are as much to blame as a Joe Manchin who would probably be a lot less depraved if he didn't have to worry about a lie campaign against him in West Virginia. Or, I dare say, at least two of the Republican Senators who might be less depraved if Madison and his colleagues had bothered to note that allowing a right to lie would destroy not only democracy but any hope for any kind of decency.

That the First Amendment created an artificial right for an artificial, human enterprise, publishing, and unwisely made it legally equivalent to rights that are held by living beings is a defect.  It also ignores the fact that "the press" what is now "the media" are a means of exercising vastly more influence and, among those many of us susceptible to the media's methods, power and so permitting lies the impunity our idiot Supreme Court has granted to them is dangerous for exactly the same reason that that right was used by the gun industry and its lobby to get the same "rights" for that industry, the reason a Joe Manchin is acting the role he is

As things developed under the Constitution, the answer to Rachel Maddow's question of why a Joe Manchin OR ANY OTHERWISE NOT INSANE REPUBLICAN would do the bidding of the gun industry and the idiot 10% they have propagandized is obvious.  They can lie a Senator out of office.  You won't change anything about that until you remove the idiocies embedded into the Constitution by James Madison and his sleazier colleagues, yes, Alexander Hamilton among them. 

For Want Of A Cell Phone You Can Die

ACCORDING to some of the things I've seen, Maine is not at the bottom of the list for its response to Covid-19, I thank God and the voters of my state that we have Janet Mills as governor, one of the accomplished Mills family of public servants (her sister Dr. Dora Mills was the head of Maine's CDC for years and years).  If we still had Paul LePage due to the idiocy of easy ballot access by never-will-win 3rd party spoilers that put that human lump of dung into the Blain House for eight years, we'd be vying with South Dakota for most benighted state in the country.

I finally got my appointment for my first shot of vaccine, it took me weeks of trying by phone and online, I almost didn't get an appointment because the last screen requiring my personal information HAD A MOBILE PHONE NUMBER AS A REQUIRED FIELD!  Luckily, I had my sister's cell phone number which worked WHAT THE HELL WOULD THE MANY, MANY PEOPLE WHO DO NOT HAVE MOBILE PHONES DO?  

For fucksake, this kind of thing proves that among other things, things are set up to screw people too poor to have cell phones or too old to have one or who just don't.  I have to think it's proof of the either willful or ignorant cluelessness of those who make such systems.  Only in something like this it can mean life or death so no one should be able to do it either stupidly or intentionally.  

Will Susan Collins Have Her Concerns?

AS REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS come up with every lie they can to try to thwart statehood for the District of Columbia - and they will and all of them will have their most potent weapon against egalitarian democracy behind it, racism - it's good to remember such incidents in our past, starting with the admission of my state as a state in 1820. For those who don't know, until then Maine was a colony of Massachusetts, on the basis of which it became a part of the country with full representation in Congress, which is certainly not the case for the far larger concentration of American citizens who live in the District of Columbia. The issue for opponents of Maine becoming a state, in its own right was, of course, the damned Senate.

Heather Cox Richardson recently told it pretty well.

By the time most of you will read this it will be March 15, which is too important a day to ignore. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”

He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.

Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit slavery—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state, lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.

They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.

But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—Senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.

The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.

I will leave it to you to read the rest of her interesting account of how Mainers, bitter at the slave-power trying to make that use of them went West and helped seed the upper mid-west with with abolitionism. My only qualms about it aren't due to Richardson's telling of the story, it is the general tendency of white people to act as if the primary force behind the abolition of slavery was not from people violently held in slavery, those who became free on their own initiative - by escaping North or those who became free through crossing the even more treacherous waters than those of the Ohio river. Hollywood loves to reinforce the idea that emancipation was a gift of benevolent white people when what it was was a mere down payment for, by then, already centuries of violently enforced, uncompensated servitude, destruction of families, rape and murder.

I would expect that Susan Collins will have her patented concerns about DC statehood - concerns that never furrow her brow or lead to her learning anything - I doubt anything any of her constituents say to her will keep her from doing exactly what she figures will be best for Susan Collins, but, who knows, maybe somewhere back in the vestiges of her family history that strain might have some effect on her. Though she'll probably do what she does, if she can do the decent thing, the right thing, the just thing, her calculation will be if her doing right will make a difference or not and if it won't make a difference, she'll do the right thing.

The Way Of All Flesh - Quarantine Has Had More Of An Impact On Me Than I'd Thought

SOMEONE KINDLY or maybe not so kindly pointed out that I've spent the last couple of days thinking it was next week.  I've got to get back into the habit of looking at the calendar in the morning, again.  I could shave a bit more often too, while I'm at it.  I'm still brushing my teeth, such as I've got left, if that makes you feel any better.

The Ending Of The Story Is True, Even If It Didn't Happen

SHOULD HAVE waited till I looked at the NCR today because the estimable Pat Marrin, in his Pencil Preaching column gives an interesting speculation as to why the early Christians might have told and inserted such a story into the Gospel of John.  

 

Commentaries speculate that if the adulterous woman story were an actual incident, it could have occurred during the feast of Tabernacles, when people lived in tents to commemorate the hut Jonah lived in while awaiting the destruction of Nineveh. The surprise exposure of a couple in the act by the religious officials and the capture of the woman but not the man strongly suggests a set-up designed to confront Jesus. His refusal to judge the woman but to make the accusers judge themselves is a brilliant response. The crowd disperses in shame. Jesus preserves justice by telling the woman to sin no more, but he also exhibits mercy by saving her life and refusing to condemn her.

Presenting these stories the week before Palm Sunday and Holy Week increases our sense of the growing hostility against Jesus and the extent to which his enemies are willing to go to find cause to condemn him. They attack him for being merciful, putting compassion before legalism, reaching out to untouchables and eating with sinners. Each charge only enhances Jesus’ stature and makes his crucifixion all the more inexplicable. This may be the reason the story was inserted into the fourth Gospel.

Today’s media concentration and public interest in sexual abuse and harassment of women highlights both an important social issue and the level of attention on personal information and private details sexual issues attract. This mirrors the blood lust mentality of the incident Jesus was drawn into. His response proclaimed human dignity and gender equality in a way that brings mercy and justice together in the Gospel for all time, every place and generation.

 

While I don't actually hold a position as to whether or not the story is an account of an actual event, I don't really see any reason to assume that it being missing from some of the early manuscripts we have, all of them from well after the John Gospel was composed,was an indication that it was missing from the "original". It's as easy to assert that it was cut out from an early one that others copied from as it is to claim that its presence in another one proves that it was a later insertion. I don't think that's relevant to the issue of whether or not what it says is true or not. True and as radical as the entirety of what Jesus said about the requirement to forgive those who wrong us directly. The story doesn't mention the woman's husband as being among her accusers. The justice of Jesus was as radical as the economic justice of Jesus. That's what it means.  

Kind Of Messy Monday In Holy Week - The Progress From Justice To Mercy

HAVING MISSPENT my youth and earlier adulthood on lesser things I am left in my old age as a beginner in understanding of the Scriptures and the wider meaning which it concerns.  In that I would think I'd join most of those who did spend their lives in a more concentrated study of them, the size of just the scriptures alone, their poetic inspecificity in many things, their confusing and not always agreeing multiplicity of voices - some of them clearly representing what Brueggemann refers to as the Solomonic-Temple establishment who weren't the most reliable representatives of the Mosaic religion and, I'd point out, that kind of thing is present in the Second Testament too, the Synoptic Gospels and Paul don't always agree and even more so the "Johannine" tradition that some scholars assert is quite a different take on things, well, obviously.  The "Johannine community" for or by whom the John Gospel and Epistles and the Book of Revelation are asserted to have been produced is certainly not taken as demonstrated and is disputed by other scholars.  But the difference between that Gospel, which is heavily featured in this year's cycle of the Catholic lectionary readings and the other three are real.  

I'm going to jump out of this years cycle and go to what Walter Brueggemann said for the Monday after Lent 5 based on the Year 2 readings of Exodus 4:10-31, I Corinthians 14:1-19;  Mark 9:30-41.

The Bible is a talking tradition.  Its many voices attest that utterance spoken out loud is an effective force that actually does something in the world.  In the case of Moses, being able to talk well matters on two counts.  Moses must effectively bear witness to his fellow slaves that God can be relied on to see them to liberty.  Moses also must witness effectively to Pharaoh that the power of God in the service of emancipation is real power that Pharaoh dare not dismiss.  On both  counts Moses' speech is effective, eventuating in Miraims dance of freedom.

The matter is very different in the church in Corinth.  The capacity to "speak in tongues" was an exhibit of enormous freedom of speech addressed directly to God and propelled by God's own Spirit.  Paul, moreover, boasts that he, "more than all of you," speaks in tongues.  

I'll break in here to say what Susannah Heschel once asked, who could have stood to live with Paul who had the annoying character trait of always having to outdo everyone else - which I think accounts for some of his less realistic demands for personal behavior and, also, why he was so susceptible to a surprising vulnerability in regard to the appearance of impropriety in things like women speaking to the Church. Paul never claimed he was perfect, he didn't claim that for even Jesus except in so far as Jesus was perfect in being free from sin.  

Such speech, however much it witnesses to unfettered freedom, by itself does not build up the body of the church.  For that, interpretation is essential.  Thus Paul prefers to speak "five words with my mind,"  that is, five words of meaningful interpretation. 

These two texts invite us to reflect on the practice of speech in our social context, about the power of speech and the restraint of speech, about who is permitted to speak and who is regularly reduced to silence, about how dangerous speech may become if it is left uninterpreted, and about who has the authority to interpret.  Or more personally we may reflect on the chances we have to bear witness to God's freedom outside the socioeconomic pharaonic restraints of our society or the chances we have to speak in the presence of pharaonic forces that enslave the vulnerable.  Five words that make sense might be,  "Let my people go free."  

I should mention that today's Catholic lectionary on the Monday of Holy Week, leading to Good Friday is all about injustice and doing justice to the innocent, of Susanna and the Elders and the young boy Daniel issuing his first judgement proving the filthy old goats framed her, sending them to their deaths for trying to get her killed when she wouldn't have sex with them.  That's a widely used and often abused story of justice for the innocent.

The Gospel is the story that people love to claim is a later insertion that wasn't in the original text of John's Gospel, of Jesus and the woman who was brought to him after she'd been found in an act of adultery.  The similarities are obvious as are the differences,  Daniel asserts Susanna was innocent, the woman in the story from John was presented as having been caught in the act.  Under The Law, she was guilty and the legal punishment for that was a brutal death (interesting that they didn't seem fit to nab the guy she was said to have been found with, maybe we're to assume he got away).  Jesus in the story certainly extended justice as found in the letter of the law into a requirement that those who wanted to kill her had to be without sin themselves.  I don't know if the "Johannine community" shared Paul's view of the nature of Jesus which would have made him unique in the history of human kind as being the only one eligible to kill the woman but there is certainly a strong implication in the story that he might have been.  He, however, says explicitly in the story "Neither do I condemn you."   You have to wonder first that if people made up that story about Jesus their understanding of him and his Gospel was consistent with it.  You also have to wonder at how, as soon as Christianity gained worldly power and the ability to enforce laws, that this story was immediately pushed to the back as effectively as all other lines of mercy for the clearly less radical and crueler "justice" that it clearly replaced.   I don't think people who would have heard that story any number of times in church if not having read it on their own could have been totally unaware of the discrepancy between it and the laws they made and enforced.   

I'm tempted to go into how you have to make that leap in generosity to get to egalitarian democracy but will just stop at mentioning that I think it is an important point in making secular governance less than depraved.  "Justice" goes to hell without it.