"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Something came up and I didn't get around to posting something before, figure these two are worth repeating. They're two episodes of Bailey's Way from the CBC Radio's Mystery Project. Alas, the CBC doesn't do radio drama anymore. They give pretty good credits at the end of these.
"That wasn't equating them." Uh, yes it was. Explicitly. One of these days you really need to figure out how words work.
That was me saying I wasn't interested in either of them so I knew little to nothing about them EXCEPT THAT I DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THEM OR THEIR MUSIC. Words are capable of doing a lot more work than Stupy realizes they can, which is an interesting thought. I think that not understanding language is typical of, uh, "journalists." I had an article thrown at me with a load of anti-Irish invective due to Van Morrison's late in life Covid-skeptic whining that he couldn't make money with mega concerts for a year and the accusations that his most recent record WHICH I HAD NOT EVEN HEARD OF AND HAVE NO INTENTION OF HEARING was a "typical Irish antisemtism." Well, looking him up, he isn't really Irish, at least not as used by the idiot who provoked me to look into him.
I don't care if you go listen to Brown-Eyed Girl if you puke, I don't care about it at all. Just as I don't care about any other figure in white-boy rock.
I don't know it was Simps who sent the original - he's got more sock puppets than Burr Tillstrom, Shari Lewis and Jim Henson combined so I don't know which troll scat is his and which might not be. But that above is his. I knew he'd have a hissy fit if I dissed rock, it's so predictable. At his age and with his diet (the "brain trust" is mighty fixated on what they're having for supper) I don't want to be responsible for giving him the probable heart attack or stroke. Now I've had my fun and that's all done.
THAT PIECE ABOUT the separation of church and state was kind of raw and quickly written. As the fine actress Martha Burns said of TV acting, blog writing is "quick and dirty." Of course I didn't mean "church" as in organized denominations, I meant religion in general.
It's one of the interesting things about the religious demand for the separation of the church from politics that that is, with a very few exceptions, not an honest or sincere demand. The very same people who complain about "the church" or religion or their particular denomination being infected with politics is muchly due to the affluent hating it when a preacher or priest or lay person brings up the central pillars of the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition of radical economic justice and the most effective means of putting that in place through the government, the expression of the collective power and resources of all of the People, in general.
Such people mostly have little problem when it comes to using the government to do other things on the basis of religion, regulating the bodies and sexual behavior of those they disapprove of or wish to control, depriving devoted same-sex couples of the protection of marriage. I would argue that all of the laws that keep the poor from taking the hoarded, plundered and stolen wealth of the rich, the reason they are rich, and leveling them to a general level of equality are the affluent using government to enforce the religious commandment against stealing - totally ignoring the very same scriptures that do that forbid the levels of economic inequality that has made the rich, rich in the first place and command a whole host of laws which would, if put in place, prevent that inequality and poverty to start with. I have yet to hear any religious conservative of any kind demand that, for example, the radical egalitarian and prudent economics of Deuteronomy 15 be followed even as they will insist that far more private and intimate areas of life, such as those they enjoy, not atypically breaking commandments as strong, be regulated by government in strict adherence to their most precision interpretation of scripture.
But they have their counterpart on, especially, the secular left who will demand that every part of government from the three branches of the federal government, to the states and local, down to the individual class rooms be strictly, not only religion free but free from all assertions that could be regarded as religious.
I will note that that all came together for me one afternoon on what was then one of the up and coming lefty blogs when there was a discussion of how tiresome talk about morality was and how they resented it when people talked about morality in government AS IF THE LACK OF IT IN AREAS THEY PREFERRED DIDN'T CONSTITUTE THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THE REASON FOR A LEFT TO EXIST, TO START WITH! It was part of the atheist fad of the, now thankfully over, 00's which will always remind me of the time when one of the CFI blogs raised a stink among the more ideological of atheists by proposing the idea that atheists should involve themselves with [whisper] charity. A number of the atheists boasted about some piddling recent efforts, I couldn't help but point out that these geniuses had discovered something that religion had been doing since before Jesus was born and was a central aspect of the reason for religion to exist. That and pointing out what a bunch of self-centered jerks the ones who whined that charity talk had no place in atheism and it was an imposition on their right to not be bothered with such quasi-religious junk. I don't think that the Malthusianism of the X Club members, a bunch of first-generation Darwinists whose main purpose was to kick god-heads out of science and society was unrelated to that last issue more recently. There was a big row between Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer over that that really made for some unpleasantness at their customary hotel table as they exercised enormous control over science and elsewhere in late Victorian Britain. Nor do I think the worst part of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.'s Supreme Court rulings is unrelated, he being an enormous fan of theirs.
The peril of having religion involved with politics is real, it's as real as any peril we risk from ANY area of life being involved with politics as it is inescapable that other areas of life will inevitably be involved with politics. It is enormously dangerous for women, for LGBTQ people, that "white evangelicals" are swept away with a form of fascism and almost as dangerous that such fascists are a majority of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, who can't have their resignations accepted or die off fast enough to change that. It is enormously dangerous to us when greedy mega-church hallelujah peddlers and bishops demand that they be allowed to have dangerous concentrations of people together for in-person worship when that is dangerous. But it's no more dangerous than when the people who demand such evil of government and the fascists on the Supreme Court allow them what they want and ban what they don't like. There are anti-religious libertarians who want part of that same program and entirely secular non-religious Constitutionalist articulations of the same things.
The particular danger ascribed to religion in such stuff is a result of two things that I can see, one of them quite correct, the use of religion to give a reason for some of the terrible violence of such things as the Thirty-Years Wars, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition - all of which had as much as if not more to do with the quite secular motives of those who had the power to wage such wars and abominations. As I've pointed out recently, it was Ferdinand and Isabella who insisted that the Inquisition in Spain be put under their control so they could solidify their rule and remove what they saw as dangers to it. There was certainly little if anything they did in that which accords with any rational reading of the New Testament and certainly not the old one - though I'm reading Joshua right now and it's clear a lot of the same kind of thing used God as an excuse in solidifying the control of what would become Israel.
It's something that is seldom pointed out that the primary motives in doing evil through government are the rich or those in a majority or those with power rigging economics for their own benefit, using such ignorant or marginally rational people as can be swayed using arguments of religion, but no more than using arguments of nationalism or patriotism or biological imperatives or historical inevitability or the more modern replacements for doing evil that took the place of religious sectarianism after the "enlightenment."
I have shocked a lot of people by my attacks on the liberal, lefty god of "free speech - free press" which is the primary vehicle that has brought us to the place we are today. When I have said that without regulations AND LAWS that distinguish between lies and the truth, taking the privilege given by the courts and modern life to lies from it, democracy is doomed. "But that's dangerous because if they can silence liars and haters and facists they can silence us too." Well, as I've also pointed out, if democracy goes we will be the ones silenced, as we have been largely disappeared from the "free press" the corporate media that has promulgated the lies and hate talk as they gave us Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and their creation, Trump.
Yes, it is dangerous to have laws, it is dangerous because you can't trust judges and "justices" and lawyers and legal cess pools and law faculties that make and belong to them to want equal justice, to want economic justice, to want equality and the thing that depends on all of that to be anything like a possibility, a real democracy which is the result only of people with adequate knowledge to make good choices AND WITH THE GOOD WILL, THE SENSE OF MORALITY THAT IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN ADEQUATE INFORMATION.
It is dangerous to silence liars and haters and bigots, its even more dangerous not to and it's impossible to find the articulation of why you should do that from secularism, from materialism, from science or pure reason. For that you have no alternative but to rely on a particular kind of religion. It is not religion that is exclusively found in the three so-called "monotheistic" faiths, it exists in a number of others, though none of those has a sufficiently large population base or a sufficiently strong and unambiguous articulation of that to be effective on more than an individual or small community basis. I have recently thought that it is one of the characteristics of monotheism that if you believe in the One Creator God, that it is far more reasonable to believe in the equality of all of the People created by God - I'd go so far as noting that it gives all of creation a value that materialism cannot help but diminish. I have come to respect a number of religious called "polytheistic" by that most idiotic of pseudo-scientific cults, anthropology, many of which turn out, when you hear someone who knows those traditions from the inside, to be far more monotheistic the idiot anthropologists mistaking what are more like a Catholic conception of saints as "gods". I don't think the potential for egalitarian democracy is exclusive to Christianity, I would welcome any such strong articulation of it as would suffice to move it forward from any and all religious communities which have that potential. Like the great Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I believe God must favor religious diversity as much as biological diversity. That's something that is clear from the Scriptures at an early period in which God instructs Moses and Joshua that there are other People with whom God has a Covenant and even earlier when he tells Noah he has one with animals ("all flesh").
So, no. I'm not a "Christian imperialist". Not at all.
Also: That link you sent me about "Freki" going on a really hate-filled, dishonest anti-Irish tirade isn't any surprise to me. I used to engage with her until I found out what a lying bigot she was. As well as being a typical brit-style anti-religionist, she's a typical brit-style hater of the Irish and Irish Catholics, most of all. That she's now located in Canada doesn't change that, you can take the bigot out or Britland but you can't take the Britland out of the bigot.
I watched the film clip she used. Where in the film clip does it identify the little street punks who attacked those girls as a. Irish, b. Catholic, c. Catholics who are following Catholic teaching. Where does it identify the cop she slams for not having the extra-sensory ability to read the intentions of the punks so as to prevent it as any of the above? For all she knew they were as anti-religious as she is - I've encountered violent street punks, I've been attacked by them. Typically their language alone gives them away as not being particularly pious and observers of Christian morality. For all she knew they weren't Irish, maybe they originated in those the Brits brought to Ireland to try to swamp the local population as led to such enduring problems in Northern Ireland.
No, what she said tells us nothing about the street punks, nor, I'll point out the girls who may have been devout Irish Catholics for all Freki knows. What she said tells us everything about her in that regard.
It was the strangest thing, as if the wooden umbrella feeling the rain had tried to forsake its substance and take on the nature of its form, and was struggling slowly, slowly, much too late to unfold.
Katherine Anne Porter: The Wooden Umbrella
TROLL SAYS:
"NEVER HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST in anything Van Morrison did any more than I did Ted Nugent's crap." The fact that you can equate Van Morrison (who by the way had never evidenced his lunatic anti-semitism in any of his work previous to this year) with a no-talent like Ted Nugent is conclusive proof that you are both a moron and deaf.
That wasn't equating them, it was saying I NEVER HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST IN EITHER OF THEM. I never had the slightest interest in a lot of things and, as such, I neither know anything about them nor do I, as was accused, hold such in any kind of esteem. Which is what I said but apparently he couldn't read and comprehend.
I said something to one of my siblings who was surprised I didn't remember Van Morrison's greatest American hit "Brown-Eyed Girl". When they sang a couple of lines it sounded a bit familiar but even back in the later 1960s I didn't spend a lot of time listening to rock music, having already found the genre boring and stupid as opposed to what it devolved from, the blues. And there was the jazz that was being made at the time and the contemporary classical music of then, too. Something had to get a lot of air-play on radios that other people were playing for me to notice a rock song or other pop crap. Maybe the reason I can remember Bacharach and David is because Bacharach used harmony and rhythm more creatively than rock did. I don't know, I don't want to spend time thinking about it.
Rock is what's left over when white boys took everything that is interesting in the blues out of it. Now aren't you happy that I've said it and you can risk having a heart attack or stroke raging about that?
I'm going back to ignoring you, it's for your own good. I'd suggest that you at long last grow up like that wooden umbrella unfolding and fulfilling the purpose of a real umbrella. But, like Gertrude Stein in her brief period after the liberation of France and facing reality, for the first time in her long, self-centered, self-indulgent and stupid life, that's unlikely to happen. And like KAP, I've got more important things to write about.
GOT THIS OLD JUNKER going better again, thanks to the huge Linux community, there has, so far, always been a distribution of Linux that works on it. In this case I just updated to Linux Mint 20 from 19 (Mate) and it's running better than it did most of the years I've used it. One feels so grateful when something is working again, felt like mentioning it.
Also, using Puppy Linux, one meant to be used as a live boot from a USB or CD (it's so small you don't need a DVD). It's useful for testing to see if it's a hardware issue without getting into the mess and bother of testing on a more complex operating system. I'll mention again that if you use it from a CD or DVD that isn't re-writable it's useful for doing online banking, ordering and other transactions that might involve the use of a credit card which could be vulnerable to malware on your computer's hard drive. Puppy Linux has its limitations and it is slightly annoying to have to reboot from a CD every time you use it and type in pass words and reconnect with WiFi (though it will force you to remember your password for that) and reinstall extensions to the browser - which you should also update every time. But if you get into a routine with that it takes about five minutes - how long do you spend cursing Windows as it's doing updates on its schedule and not yours?
I've found I can use most of the Windows software, some of it quite old now, that was important to me under the Wine extension of Linux, which simulates a Windows environment. I haven't tried doing that with Puppy but it works pretty nicely with Mint. I'm thinking of installing MX Linux on another of my old junkers, after I have a little experience with it I'll tell you how it works. So many distros it's a shame I don't have time to use more than a few.
It's always fun to tell the telephone crooks who say they're calling "about your Mac or Windows computer" that your computer isn't one of those. If there's one thing you'll never suspect using Linux it is that someone from a company will be calling you about anything because its almost all a volunteer effort. I'd like to use an even more obscure operating system, one with such a small user base that it's almost a guarantee no one is going to bother writing viruses to attack it. If I could get them to work with WiFi I might do that for going online. Maybe I should just go back to plugging it into the wall. That works, as I told my brother as he was tearing his hair out trying to get his computer to talk to his printer. If I do I might have more to say on that someday, too.
Andrew Hill, piano, composer
Charles Tolliver, trumpet
Greg Tardy, Tenor Saxophone, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet
John Herbert, Bass (vocal)
Eric McPherson, drums
I know it's ten days early but I thought of this piece today and wanted to listen to it. Why Andrew Hill wasn't more known than he was is something I'll never understand. He was a genius.
NEVER HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST in anything Van Morrison did any more than I did Ted Nugent's crap. When you tried to post that I had to look up to see if I had heard any of his music before and I'm not certain there was a single song listed I can remember.
It never surprises me to find out a rocker is a raging asshole bigot and - surprise surprise - misogynist. That genre appeals to the lowest common denominator at its best and the next lowest values beneath that too. I don't dig rock and roll music with a few exceptions here and there. Oddly, all of those have unexpected content better than the typical.
It deeply offends me to hear anyone equate things Celtic with fascism, it disgusts me that the "celtic" fad of the 90's and 00's got melded into fascist, misogynistic, white supremacy along with "Americanism." It wouldn't surprise me to find that it was an old rocker from the Orange side of N. Ireland that took to that, though there are plenty of Catholic Irish Americans who are as stupid and rotten. Pop kulcha corrupts everything in its ignorant stupidity. I'm over that pretense that pop kulcha is in any way higher than it is. It's not. It's as easily Nazified as a show biz figure of 1930s Germany might be. I will never forget watching the news in the early 1970's seeing a racist anti-busing rally (white supremacist, really) in Southie where a very Irish looking trio performed "This Land Is Your Land," having not the slightest clue as to why that was fatally ironic.
Update: Well, I never accused the self-identified "brain trust" (almost as stupid a self-designation as "Brights") of knowing what they were talking about. The fact is one of the early American supporters of vaccination was none other than Cotton Mather, who was generally no one I would admire but he got that one right.
In so far as the Catholic bashing over the Covid vaccine, Pope Francis has said that it was immoral to not get the vaccine and risk the lives of other people, though some of the Republican-fascist bishops, cardinals and a few nut-bar priests have said otherwise. It's one case when I wish Francis would relax his synodality campaign and crack down on them.
Interestingly, when Popes ruled over other people in the Papal States, they mandated and provided incentives for people to be vaccinated two centuries ago.
Vatican News recounted how, as a smallpox epidemic swept central Italy at the end of the 1700s and beginning of the 1800s, Pope Pius VII threw the full weight of his temporal power behind a vaccination campaign.
The text of a law promulgated June 20, 1822, by Pope Pius' secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, described the new smallpox vaccine as a gift "put in place by divine providence" as a sign of God's "paternal love to save his children."
But the text noted that not everyone saw the vaccine as a gift, and it denounced appearances that "a deep-rooted prejudice was stronger in some parents than the love of their offspring."
"The legislation specified that to obtain subsidies, benefits or premiums, it was necessary to provide the 'certificate showing that the applicant, being the father of a family, has had the vaccination,'" said the Vatican News report May 7.
Refusing the vaccine was defined as "reprehensible conduct" punishable by a loss of benefits.
The pope set up committees to oversee the vaccination campaign and tied the licensing of physicians to their willingness to vaccinate patients, the report said.
But two years later, Pope Leo XII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1823, removed the vaccination obligation.
And his efforts drew the praise of one of Rome's most famous poets, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who wrote a sonnet extolling the virtues of the new pope who "liberated" his people from an invention of "the Freemasons" and restored the possibility that God alone would decide when it was time for someone to die.
Pope Gregory XVI, elected in 1831, restarted the vaccination campaign and extended it to all prisoners as well. Pope Pius IX, the last of the popes with temporal power, continued the campaign and designated a financial reward of "two paoli" — 20 cents of a scudo — for those who returned eight days after being vaccinated to have its efficacy checked, the Vatican News report said.
I have noted before that going online and reading lots and lots of atheists and agnostics, unedited, in their spontaneous outpouring cured me of the delusion that atheism is associated with superior intellect. That place as much as any corrected that mistaken impression.
IT IS ONE OF MY DEEPEST REGRETS that it was not until I was old that I first read and heard Walter Brueggemann, the great scholar of the Old Testament and not too bad a one of the New one, either. Starting with a book I have probably recommended as much as I have any other, the self-study guide The Bible Makes Sense and continuing with a few other of his huge number of books, following up on a few of his generously and rigorously cited sources from many sources, religious and some atheists, he, a Protestant, has probably had a more profound effect on my habitual Irish Catholic concept of things than almost anyone else, now.
It's why when someone asks me if I'm a Catholic the answer is I'm sort of Catholic-plus. And what is as true of his writing is at least as true of his sermons and lectures, a wonderful number of which are available to be listened to online.
In no other thing has that impact been stronger than the understanding that the stories of the Bible, the human interpretation of the divine presence in human lives which become human history are as fresh as the news of the day. His repeated point that in the earliest encounters in the first two books of the Bible between religious figures and governments, the stories of Joseph and Moses in Egypt, that, especially in the Exodus story, we don't know what the name of Pharaoh is while the names of people like the two Egyptian midwives are known, Shifra and Puah. He says that's because "if you've seen one Pharaoh you've seen them all." And that is true.
It is true throughout the entire history of humanity on every continent and in every age, right up to today. The same motives, the same evils, the same injustices, the same need for opposition is true in each and every age and, since it is people who are doing both the oppressing and the opposing, all of it will be far from a clean and easy thing. That's another thing I have come to appreciate through reading the scholarship of Brueggemann, the Bible is a humanly made document inspired by human experience of God in human lives and human history. It is as mixed a bag, a collection of writings, pieced together, edited, miscopied, sometimes slanted, sometimes like a knife cutting directly to the truth, sometimes clearly more inspired by a harder experience of God than at other times.
And some of it of inspiration that I don't find at all convincing of much other than an expression of the elites among the Children of Israel, the gawdy instructions for fitting out the priests and temple, the claims surrounding the House of David, extending into the treatment of Jesus in some of the Gospels. Some of the Laws an expression of the likes and dislikes of those who set them down, perhaps of the scribes who copied them. Though none of that is easily discerned by study and the people who do spend their time doing the heavy lifting of trying to discern the meaning of the text are not at all uniform in their conclusions. I will say that one of my guiding lights in that has been the teaching of Jesus about how to figure out things, "By their fruits you will know them" especially when matched by the commandment from Leviticus as expanded by him, "Do to others what you would have them do to you." Those two things are truths that I have always found reliable in trying to discern whose interpretation of scripture is right, always keeping an eye on the principle of equal treatment in results and, now, what we can learn from such human studies as modern history and science.
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This is all a long way round to pointing out that anyone who claims religion has no place in human politics on the basis of it being a violation of the purity of religion that is to be above such stuff ignore the fact that from those earliest encounters with Pharaoh, all though the stories and narratives of the Children of Israel, especially when, against the advice of God, they established their own kingdoms, EVERYTHING ABOUT THE BOOKS ARE ABOUT THE UNWILLINGNESS OF EARTHLY GOVERNMENTS TO DO JUSTICE TO THE POOR, THE WIDOW, THE ORPHAN, THE ILLEGAL ALIEN AMONG US. It is a protest against governments not only doing injustice BUT THEM NOT DOING JUSTICE. That passage from Jeremiah that I gave a couple of weeks ago is part of a political tract that condemned the king fo
22 1 The Lord told me to go to the palace of the king of Judah, the descendant of David, and there tell the king, his officials, and the people of Jerusalem to listen to what the Lord had said: 3 “I, the Lord, command you to do what is just and right. Protect the person who is being cheated from the one who is cheating him. Do not mistreat or oppress aliens, orphans, or widows; and do not kill innocent people in this holy place. 4 If you really do as I have commanded, then David's descendants will continue to be kings. And they, together with their officials and their people, will continue to pass through the gates of this palace in chariots and on horses. 5 But if you do not obey my commands, then I swear to you that this palace will fall into ruins. I, the Lord, have spoken.
6 “To me, Judah's royal palace is as beautiful as the land of Gilead and as the Lebanon Mountains; but I will make it a desolate place where no one lives. 7 I am sending men to destroy it. They will all bring their axes, cut down its beautiful cedar pillars, and throw them into the fire.
8 “Afterward many foreigners will pass by and ask one another why I, the Lord, have done such a thing to this great city. 9 Then they will answer that it is because you have abandoned your covenant with me, your God, and have worshiped and served other gods.”
The "other gods" that were served were well described by Paul in Romans 23
18 God's anger is revealed from heaven against all the sin and evil of the people whose evil ways prevent the truth from being known. 19 God punishes them, because what can be known about God is plain to them, for God himself made it plain. 20 Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. So those people have no excuse at all! 21 They know God, but they do not give him the honor that belongs to him, nor do they thank him. Instead, their thoughts have become complete nonsense, and their empty minds are filled with darkness. 22 They say they are wise, but they are fools; 23 instead of worshiping the immortal God, they worship images made to look like mortals or birds or animals or reptiles.
24 And so God has given those people over to do the filthy things their hearts desire, and they do shameful things with each other. 25 They exchange the truth about God for a lie; they worship and serve what God has created instead of the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever! Amen.*
Good News Translation
Certainly the gods Paul referred to included the gods of the political-religious cult of Egypt, he was an expert in the law, by his own identification one of those Pharisees that Jesus was always warning about their presumptions. And of the other religions around him and where he traveled to. It would certainly include the worship of gold and silver and other minerals and other sources of wealth, which are always the preeminent gods that human beings make up and do evil around. You don't have to believe in god to worship those kinds of idols, nor is that cult unknown among those who may also believe in something like God, or at least have heard some of this. I could name you dozens of Popes and Protestant and Orthodox hierarchs who are fully devoted to such idols off the top of my head. Such have been presented as almost exclusively representing "Christianity" in the media since the 1970s.
Brueggemann points out in his lectures and sermons that you can contrast the two figures of Moses and Joseph as two different approaches for dealing with political power. Moses, one of the most radical egalitarians in human history, opposed Pharaoh on the basis of his understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (or Israel) as being someone totally different from the gods of Egypt who supported the rulers and their inequality. And he freed the Children of Israel and began their subsequent history as a people. Joseph, on the other hand, became one of Pharaoh's ministers, his "food czar" who, as Brueggemann pointed out began by taking their money the first year, ending up with taking their cattle and land and, finally, reducing them to the slavery where future Pharaohs would try to manage them as a herd of slave animals to be culled so as not to be a problem to their rule, where the story of Moses starts out.
So the Bible, from the end of the first and the entire rest of the collection is a deep and through commentary on governments, their injustices, their rarer acts of justice, even some who tried to do justice, economic justice being understood by anyone who bothers to think about it AND AS EXPLICITLY LAID OUT IN THE ACTUAL TEXTS. And it lays out the humanly observed and, I would say. divinely inspired insight that economic injustice, injustice due to ethnic or gender or family status will eventually engulf not only the minorities or powerless lower class peons but also the contented majority and even the peons who are quite happy with that unjust regime or who are under the control of a corrupt political and, or religious establishment.
It was one of the things that I was impressed by even before reading Brueggemann, that the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New one are extremely hard on the religious authorities of the tradition they are a part of, especially those in the priestly class and those who succeeded them in the religious elite among the Children of Israel. THAT ACT OF SELF-CRITICISM STRIKES ME AS BEING SOME OF THE MOST CONVINCING THINGS ABOUT THE ENTIRE TRADITION, JEWISH AS WELL AS CHRISTIAN. It is something that even Jeremiah warned his fellow protest singers (another insight from Brueggemann) about themselves in the next chapter of that book. To which I can only say, wow! Talk about a deep, deep and humble experience of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and Jesus, and Paul and Mary Magdalene, Lydia, Junia . . . and what incredible courage it takes to put that kind of intense self-criticism directly into the Scripture.
You're never going to find anything like that in the scribblings of legal scholars and jurists and Supreme Court "justices" Or Constitutional scholars or the civil liberties industry. The more perfumed servants of Mammon are nothing if not gentlemen, to each other, at least. One of the reasons I have become entirely skeptical of the idea that secularism can save us from the kind of injustice we see and experience around us. It is an even greater folly for secularists to demand the separation of religion and state because religion will, somehow, sully the secular (most of them mean or hope for anti-religious) purity of secular government. They might hope for that if they want to see a continuation of injustice, as do so many of those who want to make a pantomime of "Christianity" the de facto state religion, but, as the great civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s proved, they are rejecting the driving force that propelled that movement to change things, even as progress sputtered out as anti-religious figures pushed their way forward and grabbed the mic. That is another of my pole stars in this, the role that religion played in making that possible, just as I hope that Joe Biden's religious conviction restarts that where it left off in the mid-1960s.
* Experienced readers will note that that passage comes right before one that has been used to do a lot of injustice to my kind, LGBTQ People. For which Christianity has taken a lot of flack. I'll write about that later.
Update: Rereading this to see what corrections are needed - I haven't gotten to those yet - it strikes me as ironic that a Catholic would need a Protestant minister to inform him that the Bible is a fallible, human document, Protestantism tending to be far more bibliolatrous as opposed to Catholics' fixation on the Magisterium. Goes to show, you shouldn't get so fixated on being one thing or another, you miss a lot.
For some reason, listening to this again this morning reminds me of the long series of condemnation of the religious elite in Matthew 23, in which Jesus condemns them for laying heavy burdens on the People which they, themselves don't intend to take up, themselves. That's certainly something our own time's scribes and pharisees do.
I'd trust this more than what comes out of the mouths of those with credentials and titles and honors, buildings and money. I'm wondering if the ones in Mississippi condemn the latest attack on poor people in that consistently benighted state by the degenerate governor, Tate Reeves. I doubt many of them will.
William Prince is someone I'd never heard of before he was interviewed about his album of gospel songs from the Interlake region of Manitoba. This is a good reason to look farther. Here's a haunting video of one of the other songs on the album.
Being in one more family with alcoholics and opiate addicts like he sings about, it's closer than I had expected. I wonder if it's what Charlie Parker meant when his fellow jazz musicians wondered why he played one after another country western song on a juke box one night, "Listen to the stories."
SINCE SKEPTICISM HAS BEEN RAISED that the comment yesterday's post on the actual evil that has come from the movies and show biz and the media, in general was based on was made. I have temporarily posted it on the post it was made on, here. The ban on Simp's comments was one I put into place for my own edification and because he mocked my father, it is one I can relax if I think it is necessary to make a point worth making. So, since yesterday's post established the inspiration of the movie Birth of a Nation, I'll expand on the topic of that post commented on and the connection between the media depiction of police influencing the criminals who do their crime while being cops and members of the terrorist gang, the KKK.
William J. Simmons, a former minister and promoter of fraternal societies, founded the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1915. His organization grew slowly, but by the 1920s, Simmons began coordinating with a public relations firm, in part to chip away at the (accurate) perception that the Klan was an outlaw group involved in extralegal violence. Membership in the Klan exploded over the next few years. As part of this PR campaign, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal newspaper in January 1921. While explicitly advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group’s commitment to law and order, promoted their enforcement of Prohibition, and even boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization, and that the local sheriff was often one of the first to join when the Klan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that “[t]he sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get 200 members of the Klan at a moment’s call to suppress anything in the way of lawlessness.”
Across the country, the Ku Klux Klan sometimes claimed it was protecting the public when the police could not. However, its leaders also often sought to legitimize the organization by working in cooperation with police—a strategy that has echoes in the Watchmen series. Writing on the early 1900s revival of the Klan, historian Linda Gordon recounts numerous collaborations between police and the Klan in the 1920s. In Portland, Oregon, the Klan formally allied itself with the police department, and city’s mayor augmented the 150-man police force with a vigilante auxiliary selected by the Klan, giving them police powers and guns but keeping their names secret. In Anaheim, California, the Klan-dominated city council allowed police officers who held membership to patrol in full Ku Klux Klan regalia. And in Indiana, the Klan exploited a decades-old legal loophole to gain a legitimacy that only a badge could bring.
And that relationship certainly didn't end in the 1920s, the problem of KKK infiltration of police departments and forces has been an ongoing problem well into the period when sound came to the movies and when it was Clint Eastwood, Hollywood "liberal" Don Siegel and a handful of writers, including the uncredited self-proclaimed "Zen-fascist" John Milius were giving criminal cops new role models whose lines filled the mouth of our first Hollywood president, Ronald Reagan. Hollywood has promoted racism and fascism and violence, presenting them as sexy, especially when they can put some improbably buff looking guy in a tight fitting outfit and give him a badge and a gun. And as they do exactly what I pointed out they deny they have the power to do, to influence behavior. My point didn't rest solely on any one movie or TV show, though Dirty Harry certainly had an influence on many more movies and TV shows and in other crap kulcha.
Pauline Kael, a much better film critic than the sainted Roger Ebert did a far more insightful review of the first Dirty Harry movie, including the motives of those who made the thing and the incredible level of manipulation of the audience they achieved. I've read others who note that the racism of the Dirty Harry movies, as well as its misogyny were more evident in later films. I know I watched the original and one other - I've always had a very low tolerance for Clint - and it all sort of melds together in memory. So I wasn't the only one who noticed the manipulation of the audience. She more or less points to the behavior that the producers, writers and actors wanted the most to influence, their decision to buy tickets and see more of it, thus the Hollywood addiction to sequels. I'm a lot more interested in the behavior of the police who see it more than once and its sequels and the myriad of other movie and TV copy cat shows.
People love their stories, they love to be titillated by sexy men and women on the screen, they love excitement and violence put into a form where they can pretend that it's all an expression of virtue. That's been show-biz forever, the movies even more so, probably most of all with one of those technical achievments credited to D. W. Griffeth in Birth of a Nation, the close up. They just hate it when someone like me points out that there are real consequences suffered by real people in the process of that manipulation, especially those whose targeting and stereotyping can be counted on to be popular with the larger customer base for show biz. That's been show-biz forever too. We live in a world where people don't go to the movies once a week or the theater once a month, we live in a world where show biz, Hollywood, scumbag cabloid hate mongers fill the time and so minds of a large majority of people. Pretending that the most manipulative media ever invented is blameless of the effects it has on its audience, on their behavior, is one of the most dangerous and stupid superstitions of alleged liberalism in the 20th century. Those who "liberals" especially secular "liberals" claim to champion are among the most frequent victims of the media whose freedom to promote fascist, racist violence they also value. It's clear that secular "liberalism" values the media's right to promote fascist, racist violence more than it does the lives of Black People and others who are going to take the most of that violence. Certainly women, even white women are the ones who experience that, too. The levels of violence against women is and always has been at an epidemic level.
Update: I had a minute so I looked it up, the other Dirty Harry movie I watched was The Enforcer, the only reason I could is because Tyne Daly was in it. If she hadn't been in it I don't think I could have picked it out. Actors have to be in a lot of crap, one of the reasons I'm glad I never tried to be one.
Joshua Redman, Saxophone
Kurt Rosenwinkle, guitar
Brad Mehldau, piano
Larry Grenadier, Bass
Ali Jackson, drums
Kurt Rosenwinkle typically uses a microphone he sings into that gets mixed into his guitar playing when he plays. It's practically his signature sound.
THAT WOULD BE NEWS to the man who reignited the foremost terrorist group in United States history, William Joseph Simmons on November 25, 1915 was the leader of a group he'd called together while he was reading about the success of the movie as it was opening across the country.
“There was good reason, as I have said, for making Thanksgiving Day the occasion for burning the fiery cross. Something was going to happen in town (Atlanta) the next week that would give the new order a tremendous popular boost.”
That thing was the opening of Birth of a Nation on December 6th, ten days after he lit the blasphemous cross on Stone Mountain. According to what I've read but have not researched to my usual satisfaction is the dead giveaway that the movie and the play it's based on was the introduction of cross burning into the KKK, as it is something that never happened in the original Reconstruction era terrorist group.
"an incredibly foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings"
Rabbi Stephen Wise on the movie Birth of a NationApparently among those who don't know as much about this as the idiot who trolls me are a number of eminent historians and scholars all of whom he believes are "idiots". As the great Black historian, the late John Hope Franklin said in his 1977 paper "Birth of a Nation" Propaganda As History:
In the same year, 1915, "Birth of a Nation" was showing to millions across the United States, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. When the film opened in Atlanta that fall, William J. Simmons, who had considered a Klan revival for several years, sprang into action. He gathered together nearly two score men, including two members of the original Klan of 1866 and the speaker of the Georgia legislature. They agreed to found the order, and Simmons picked Thanksgiving eve for the formal ceremonies. As the film opened in Atlanta, a local paper carried Simmons' announcement next to the advertisement of the movie. It was an announcement of the found of "The World's greatest Secret, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order." With an assist from "Birth of a Nation" the new Ku Klux Klan, a "High Class order of men of Intelligence and Order" was launched. It would spread all across the South and into the North and West in the 1920's and spread terror among Jews and Catholics as well as among blacks. And in the fall and winter of 1915-1916, thousands of Southerners thrilled to the stirring scenes of Birth of a Nation. "Men who once wore gray uniforms, white sheets and red shirts wept, yelled, whooped, cheered - - and on one occasion even shot up the screen in a valiant effort to save Flora Cameron from her black pursuer." They were ripe for enlistment in the new Ku Klux Klan. Thus, "Birth of a Nation" was the midwife in the rebirth of the most vicious terrorist organization in the history of the United States.
In the paper Franklin noted the exemption that was given to the movie for the effect it had due to its technical innovations and its place in the history of that most dangerous of alleged art forms, the feature length film. Or, rather, the most dangerous before TV and the internet. The idiots who spend their lives watching screens and get paid for saying stupid things about what they see and who don't develop into an adult sense of morality who don't care the role that the movie, for example, played in the development of the KKK in Oklahoma in the lead up to the worst terror attack before those of the 1990s and 2000s, the Tulsa Massacre in which white racists waged full war on the Black Community of a major American city.
Maybe it's because I have lived a life doing art that I'm not willing to divorce its real life effect from the work, itself. But, then, I've been more interested in doing it than in opining about it. Art and even what gets called that while being nothing of the sort should never be given a benefit of the doubt that you wouldn't give to a person who got people killed, maimed, terrorized and oppressed. If every copy of that film had been destroyed by October 1915, the world would likely have been a better place in the intervening century and six years.
Update: I should give you the source in which that quote from Rabbi Wise is taken, "Fighting A Vicious Film".