Saturday Night Radio Drama - A.L. Kennedy - Confessions Of A Medium

 

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Thomson     Bill Nighy
Parker     Robert Glenister
Morton     Jonathan Keeble
Mr Gordon     Jonathan Keeble
Gentleman     Jonathan Keeble
Wilson     Jonathan Keeble
Waiter     Jonathan Keeble
Mills     Andrew Westfield
Butler     Andrew Westfield
Miss Foster     Fiona Clarke
Mrs Gordon     Fiona Clarke
Lady No.1     Fiona Clarke
Miss Blackstone     Daryl Fishwick
Woman     Daryl Fishwick
Pianist     Daniel Browell
Writer     AL Kennedy
Director     Pauline Harris
Producer     Pauline Harris

I'm not especially either an enthusiastic believer nor opponent of mediumship, though I think it should be regulated to keep too much money from changing hands since we know some of it is a fraud. The kind of "physical mediumship" that this concerns is almost certainly almost all a total fraud.  I've never been to a real medium, it takes a lot to get me to part with money but I have talked to people who report remarkable experiences.  

This is very well written, I will be looking for more of the A. L. Kennedy's work, a significant amount of it for my favorite non-text medium, radio. 

It's posted as an early Halloween piece.  It is a bit scary.

John Jenkins - Kenny Burrell - From This Moment On

 

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Alto  Saxophone: John Jenkins
Bass  Guitar: Paul Chambers
Drums: Dannie Richmond
Guitar: Kenny Burrell
Piano: Sonny Clark

Everything I Have Is Yours 

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You Really Don't Need To Sharpen Occam's Old Razor To See The Simplest Explaination Of Sinema

APPARENTLY, THOUGH I HAVEN'T FOUND OUT where it is, someone has been whining about my questioning whether or not Krysten Sinema's treachery,  self-serving hypocrisy and, as some speculate, nest feathering is not something that makes a lot more sense in someone who is an atheist-materialist true believer in scientism than the identical behavior in someone who professes their belief in Christianity.   Anyone who can point me to where the whine is, I'd like to link to it.

That kind of treachery in atheists on the alleged left, where Sinema first appeared in American politics as a Green party fixture, is a long standing phenomenon such as from those who started out as true believing commies, actual members of Communist parties, sometimes holding positions of relative power in those pathetic counter-productive futilities (which are not any different than the Greens in actual effect) but who ended up as everything from ex-Trot neo-cons to extremely rabid John Birch, and even neo-Nazi friendly Republicans.   Most of the first generation neo-cons have that as a feature in their biographies, there were others Max Eastman was one,  Whittaker Chambers one of the most famous.   The number of turn-coat commies is impressive for something that is such total flop of never a very large size.  And all of those commies could be expected to have been atheist-materialists and largely a fan of "science" though sometimes "science" in Marxism was more of an ideology in service to their overarching ideology than it was actual science.  

Since the religion of professed Christians is used when they do terrible things EVEN THOUGH THOSE THINGS ARE CONTRARY TO THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS, PAUL, JAMES, ETC.  not to mention The Law and the prophets,  is something I would not at all be surprised if the CFI-honored atheist Sinema would likely have either brought up or noddingly agreed to when one of her fellow atheists did it, I don't see why the amorality she exhibits now, something that is not in contradiction or violation of anything in atheism, materialism or scientism,  is unfair in attempting to explain why she's betraying the people who thought she was a woman of her word when she pretended to be a progressive Democrat in order to get elected. 

The behavior of the professed Catholic Manchin is impossible to square with the radically egalitarian social justice teachings of even the most conservative Catholic popes of the last century and a half.  Not to mention the far more radical economic justice teachings of the best of recent Popes.  But he's hardly alone in that, there is no one in the Republican caucus of the Senate who professes Christianity whose actions are at all compatible with the teachings of Jesus, Paul, . . . Moses, even back to the initial act that led to the covenant between Abraham and God, his hospitality to the stranger.  But the majority of the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops couldn't square their actions with that, either.   They act a lot more like I may have predicted Sinema to act, if I'd had reason to believe she was not a person of good will and of her word,  than someone who takes Catholic social teaching seriously. 

See, I have no problem with calling out Christians who do evil stuff which can't be squared with the Gospel, why should I have more of a problem when what Sinema does is far easier to explain?   There was a time it wouldn't have occurred to me to bring that up, as recently as the first year or two when I started blogging.  I'm sadder but perhaps wiser on that count, now.  People like her are why.

Atanas Ourkouzounov - 3 Figures fractales

 

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Jérémy Jouve, guitarist 

Been too long since I posted something by Atanas Ourkouzounov, one of the interesting composers in the ongoing renaissance of composing for the guitar.  I'd put him in the same class as Leo Brouwer and Dusan Bogdanovic.

With Further Comment

IN REGARD TO THE post-truth, moral relativism that refuses to do that first and most consequential act of moral behavior, choosing the clearly right side, practicing the most morally atrocious and repulsive of both-siderism, "teaching the controversy," etc.   This is exactly the kind of thing I warned was bound to happen fifteen years ago, a consequence of the witnesses to one of the most clear cut of genocides dying. 

Elliot FriedlandOctober 19, 2021

In the fallout from NBC News’ revelations that teachers in Texas were told to teach “opposing perspectives” about the Holocaust, many people are asking what teaching “opposing perspectives” of the Holocaust looks like. I know from personal experience, since I attended a Holocaust class that invited us to consider the Nazi perspective in middle school. The school was our local public school in Oxford, and the class in question occurred when I was in Year 6 (the equivalent of 5th grade) in the U.K.

The experience was enraging and humiliating.

The teacher started with raw video footage of the concentration camps. We sat on the floor cross-legged and watched a bulldozer shovel piles of naked, emaciated Jewish corpses into a pit, the way they dispose of trash at landfills.

The hopelessly age-inappropriate film without context was bad enough. But our teacher decided, for reasons I will never understand, to explore industrial genocide through the medium of interpretative dance.

We could play the role of either a Jew getting murdered or a Nazi guard doing the murdering. Our choice.

After explaining to us how Jews were rounded up on trains and herded into gas chambers, our teacher invited us to consider the perspective of the Nazi guards overseeing the operation.

After all, there was a war going on at the time, she explained. They had probably signed up to defend their country, just like British troops. Nazism was a totalitarian one-party state. Nazi soldiers had families and lives too. It would have been really dangerous to stick their necks out and defend the Jews. Sure, they sealed the doors and pressed the gas button, but might they not have done so as just a cog in a system much bigger than themselves?

Were they not just following orders?

She asked us to consider these emotions and express them when performing our individual dances.

Each child performed their dance individually. Around half the class chose to be Jews, and the other half chose to be Nazis.

I chose to be a Jew (obviously). When it was my turn, I mime-danced being shoved into a gas chamber, terrified. I pounded my fists against the doors slamming shut, trying to get out, and then dramatized choking to death on Zyklon B. Acting out the horrible fate of two-thirds of European Jewry impressed on me the reality of the Holocaust. I felt profoundly sad that so many Jews had died in this awful way, murdered simply for the crime of existing. I felt deeply uncomfortable, and yet totally unable to object to performing.

After being forced by my teacher to portray my own execution at the hands of the Third Reich in front of all my peers, I then had to sit respectfully, and watch them take their turn to be Nazis. Through dance.

The first thing that is troubling about this is that I have no problem believing it happened within the past sixty years.  It should be unbelievable to the extent where you'd have to have proof it happened to believe it.  Such is the result of free-speech absolutism in its fullest manifestation. 

There is no articulation of "free speech,"  "free-expression," "academic freedom," "even-handedness (yes, even even handedness between murderers and their victims) that would keep me from saying that idiot of a "teacher" should have been fired and banned from ever being part of the profession of influencing the minds of the young, along with any administrators or others who kept them on and enabled this to happen.   

I should probably have included  the ridiculous judicial extension of "speech" to include stripping in that list of absurdly created and asserted "rights."  No doubt it would have contributed to the "right" of this teacher to create such a dance in that school and the idiotic sense of virtue that defending such an atrocity would led to the "liberals" who supported the right of a teacher to do that without getting their ass fired.  Dance is about the stupidest of the art forms.  At least opera singers have to sing words that contain some level of denotative meaning.  I can think of nothing less likely to teach a child anything than to have them dance it. 

I wonder why they wouldn't insist that school children do the "both sides" thing on 9-11, Pearl Harbor, the Mexican war against the Americans bent on stealing Texas, etc.   One wonders how that would play with those who weren't bothered by this. 

The Problem With The Superficial Invention Of And Assertion Of Ersatz "Rights" Is Clearly One That Will Have To Be Fixed Or Real Rights Will Die

CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES of people believing in lies for society and for individuals living in society, for the country, etc.  it seems to me that the idea that believing what isn't true is an inalienable "right" is a major folly with extremely dangerous results in that folly.  In the case of Covid-19, so far, that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, the illness and injury of many thousands - I don't know, perhaps even more people - the damage to others who are unable to get hospital care and who die or suffer permanent damage and everything down to the economic damage that results from those lies and the belief in them.  Lies, especially lies told in and by the "free press" the media,  have killed more than a hundred times more Americans than who died in terrorist attacks on 9-11, 2001.  Lies are, by any rational definition, our most deadly enemy right now.  More than all of our opponents in most if not all of our declared and undeclared wars.  Republicans in office, by a stupendous majority, are the fifth-column that is killing us on the side of lies and pandemic disease, right now, the media, too.  

To believe that there is a "right to lie" as, in fact, the Supreme Court has ruled without honestly admitting that is what it has held, and that the mental disability that believing dangerous lies also constitutes a "right" seems to me to be among our most serious and basic dangers right now.  Covid-19 has the feeling of a final warning of danger, so does the attempted January 6 putsch, the ongoing war of Republicans against democracy, the packing of the courts, etc.  All of those are results of people believing or pretending to believe in lies they were told by FOX, other billionaire owned and run sources of lies, hate-talk media, the social-disease media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube are allowed to get away with being on the basis of "rights" to carry lies and distribute them with algorithms designed to make those most susceptible to believing them having the lies promoted to them.  

This isn't something that can be continued to be allowed due to the sloppy, inspecific language of "The First Amendment" as if that was a divinely given and perfect commandment of universal and absolute law.   Deifying the very flawed, very fallible, in some areas extremely dodgy United States Constitution was always dangerous and as lawyers and scholars of the law, many of them under the patronage of the filthy rich and the anti-democratically corrupt came up with ways to game the document and the legal apparatus that has been glued onto the thing, those original dangers have become not only incompatible with egalitarian, electoral democracy but with the continuation of life, itself. 

In coming to this realization at the insanity of the creation of "rights" for things which are as dangerous as "rights" to lie, to be lied to and to be deluded, not to mention the lie of pretending you believe that vaccination requirements are an evil thing as you work fully-vaccinated in the vaccine-passport mandated and, so, safer offices and studios of FOX news, I think I have come to another of the fundamental reasons that not only the vulgar-materialist, 18th century, style of ACLU secular "liberalism" is a total flop, along with the ideological "left," but why those who should be of better will and more wisdom flop along with them.   If there is a human future, a future for reformed and protected egalitarian democracy, the ACLU with its fetish for the First Amendment language regardless of the results deserves to have its name permanently attached to what went so wrong in the period when those kinds of "rights" were exercised in all of their secular, amoral, regardless-of-the-results folly. 

"An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

LOOKING AT THE NRC, I saw that one of my favorite religious journalists, Sean Michael Winters also wrote about Pope Francis's address.  The passage I took as the title of this post is worth the price of admission to all of this.

Pope Francis delivered another remarkable address last weekend when he spoke to the fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements. The gatherings of community organizers are like a meeting of theologians, only the theology is done with one's hands rather than with one's words. They seem to invite Francis to show the world that side of him that was previously known only to those he visited in the barrios of Buenos Aires.

The worldwide gatherings have occasioned some of the pope's strongest social teaching as witnessed in 2015 when he spoke at the second such gathering in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. There he said, "And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea, one of the church's first theologians, called 'the dung of the devil.' An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

Those words should be emblazoned over the entryway of every business school at a Catholic university, but they aren't.

This weekend, the pope's comments about the protests after the murder of George Floyd rightly captured the headlines. The pope said that he thought of those protests when he thinks about the good Samaritan.

"It is clear that this type of reaction against social, racial or macho injustice can be manipulated or exploited by political machinations or whatever, but the main thing is that, in that protest against this death, there was the collective Samaritan who is no fool! This movement did not pass by on the other side of the road when it saw the injury to human dignity caused by an abuse of power."

Call me an ultramontanist, but I am always impressed that this 84-year old Argentinian, who has never spent much time in this country, can identify and name an inflection point in U.S. culture that so many U.S. Catholics failed to even grapple with.

one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil

RECENTLY THE LAWYER-JOURNALIST Ari Melber was talking about the Covid denialists, both those who spread lies and their dupes and he talked about a "right to be wrong, the right to believe things that are not even true", and, though he didn't go that far as I recall, even in his even-handed, too generous articulation of the problem there would be a "right to lie" behind that. 

Let me say for the record, I like Ari Melber and I do respect him, my reservations about him and his program are generally things I discern are a result of his legal education and his acculturation into the thought habits of educated, modern westerners. 

 The things that he declared a "right to" in his educated thinking on this were things that those who were wrong and believed things that aren't even true believe were put there by FOX, by Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and the Republican-fascist lie machine.   Apparently there is a right to be lied to behind that assertion that being wrong and deluded are matters of rights.   I will note, up front, that here, Ari Melber notes that the United States with our fetish of "free speech-press" absolutism that is the closest thing there is to an absolute and all-overriding "right" to, no matter what is said within the exercise of those absolute rights, is a world epicenter of this oppressive regime of lies and liars that is getting hundreds of thousands of us killed.   Those "rights" he counts in this are certainly, in practice, put in a superior position to the right of people to not be infected needlessly, the right of people to not be injured, hospitalized, intubated, ventilated and to die.   That the legal and judicial professions can put all of that difficult, unpleasant and deadly consequence of their assertions and decisions off on the first-responders, the medical profession, the hospitals and other institutions, not to mention an industry they have been quite deferential to, the insurance industry is certainly one of the reasons they are so willing to put those malignant "rights" in the position they have. 

It reminded me of a time when one of those short lived Lesbian-gay newspapers (it was before LGBTQ) of the mid to late 70s around here asserted, as a rote-off-hand remark,  there was a "right to be stupid."  And that brings up all kinds of other assertions of things which are conventionally called "rights" but which any level of rational thought applied, it would be clear that to call those "rights" would be to seriously diminish the value of the whole idea that there are rights and that such "rights" would be a thing which would promise good to the human and wider population and not be what such carelessly enumerated "rights" are so often in reality, an assertion of selfishness that does everything from infringe on genuine and beneficial rights held by others to fatal to individuals to fatal to the entire planet.

Off the top of my head, here are just a few of the things that have been designated as "rights" by courts.

- A right to lie (the requirement of those lied about to  divine the mental state of the liar being the fig-leaf the courts have put on that permission to lie.)

- A right to lie about history, the Holocaust, American apartheid, genocides, ongoing violence.  Certainly that it is the same political side who lies about Covid-19, vaccines, masking, etc. is not unrelated to that. 

- A right to lie about a whole host of other things.

- A right to broadcast lies and the permission of the cabloid and other media to lie with effective impunity.   This enormously magnifies the power of the lies to such an extent that it is really nothing like the "right" an individual has to lie by word of mouth or even by letter, assuming the letter isn't reproduced and spread like a viral Tweet.

- A right to hire prostitutes and have them crush and torture guinea pigs, gerbils, etc. in "crush porn" videos.  Generally the right to promote all of the evils you can see promoted by pornography. 

- A right to spread even the most dangerous lies about health and snake oil medicines.  Actually, the Congress, and especially the Senate had a big hand in that at the behest of the snake oil industry.

And speaking of that:

- A right of the billionaires and millionaires to lie us out of democracy and into gangster governance.   That "right" in Buckely v. Valeo was peddled on the careless and sloppy "rights" language so successfully that even the Justice who should have known better than any other how devastating a right to lie  and slander for the profit of the wealthy could be for an entire race of people in the entire history of the Court, Thurgood Marshall bought into it.  That, among other things that have resulted, is the destruction of the Voting Rights Act makes his concurrence in that case one of the most tragic in the history of the Court.  That it had the name of one of the premier voice American fascist oligarchs attached to it is no accident.

Lawyer that he is, Ari Melber really should consider just what this whole "rights" business is and that, given that framing,  there must be a real distinction between "good rights" and "bad rights" and that there is no moral obligation on the part of anyone to permit the exercise of really "bad rights," and, in fact, a moral obligation to prevent such "rights" being exercised.   The moral obligation would be to stop the lies and, so, the evils that flow from them.

This whole "rights" business, considering how much of our political, social and moral discourse are caught up in it really should be considered at least well enough so that lying, being duped by liars, willingly believing in lies or asserting to believe in them (I don't for a second believe that all of the people who lie and spread the lies believe what they're saying) is not misnamed a "right" especially for legal purposes and political purposes and other exercises of power which can compel people to do things or restrain them from doing things. 

No rational person should be allowed to habitually believe that such things as lying, intentionally lying, lying about things you don't believe to be true yourself (as FOX as a corporation does), believing those lies, buying into them, pretending to believe them for political and ideological purposes are within the realm of genuine human rights.  

Yet that is the entirely unconsidered default position of a large percentage of, perhaps most college-credentialed citizens of the United States.  They certainly have not up to now had to confront a strong logical and reality based case that a huge number of things called "rights"  by the Supreme Court and other courts, asserted to be "rights" by law professors and scholars and paid-lawyers on the make and by the hardly objective and not financially uninterested "press" and journalists are really rights.  

There is no right to lie, there is no right to believe lies, believing lies sold in the media is a violation of the right to be told the truth and to the benefits of individuals a majority of voters in a democracy believing in the truth and voting accordingly. 

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I have not had time to go far into it but Pope Francis gave a remarkable address to The Fourth Meeting of Popular Movements:

In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

In the name of God, I ask the telecommunications giants to ease access to educational material and connectivity for teachers via the internet so that poor children can be educated even under quarantine.

In the name of God, I ask the media to stop the logic of post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and the unhealthy attraction to dirt and scandal, and to contribute to human fraternity and empathy with those who are most deeply damaged.

In the name of God, I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.

This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time.

Earlier in the address he laid out how the pandemic relates to other looming disasters in one of the best articulations of it I've ever seen:

You felt that the current situation merited a new meeting. I felt the same. Although we have never lost contact, it is already five years, I think, since the general meeting, isn’t it? A lot has happened in that time; a lot has changed. These changes mark points of no return, turning points, crossroads at which humanity must make choices. And new moments of encounter, discernment and joint action are needed. Every person, every organisation, every country, and the whole world, needs to look for moments to reflect, discern and choose, because returning to the previous mindsets would be truly suicidal and, if I may press the point a little, ecocidal and genocidal.

In these months, many things you’ve long been denouncing have become totally obvious. The pandemic has laid bare the social inequalities that afflict our peoples. Seeking neither permission nor forgiveness, it has exposed the heart-breaking situation of so many brothers and sisters, the situation that so many post-truth mechanisms have been unable to conceal.

Many things we used to take for granted have collapsed like a house of cards. We have experienced how our way of life can drastically change from one day to the next, preventing us, for example, from seeing our relatives, colleagues and friends. In many countries, governments reacted. They listened to the science and were able to impose limits to ensure the common good, and so they managed at least for a while to put the brakes on this “gigantic machine” that works almost automatically, in which peoples and persons are simply cogs.

The whole thing rests on those "rights" that so many, including Ari Melber, I believe unthinkingly, in the rote expression of a "cog" in the mechanistic apparatus of the law and American journalism declared to be "rights."   I don't think he would make that mistake again if he really considered that one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil.  There is no right that can produce an evil result and lies, especially in the mass media produce some of the greatest evil there is.

The Purposes And Uses Of The Corrupt Legal System That Enables Gangsters And Fascists Like Trump

SO TRUMP DID WHAT anyone would have known he would do, he turned to the courts to act as his roadblock to the release of documents related to the attempted putsch of January 6th.   

We will now see if the Courts, judges, and "justices" will do what Trump has every reason to expect them to do for him, protect him from the consequences of one of the most serious crimes against democracy ever committed by someone holding the office of the presidency.

There is every reason to believe that judges and "justices" will do that for him because he is a. rich, b. white, c. male, d. a Republican-fascist.  

It is a shame that the panel President Biden appointed to look into the blatantly political (Republican-fascist) and oligarchic Supreme Court and how to make it less corrupt and oligarchy enabling  was doomed to failure by it being composed largely if not wholly of connected and elite lawyers.  What is needed isn't their kind of common received wisdom, that kind of passed on legalistic lore is borne of and gives birth to the very same corruption that is on such blatant display.   There is every reason for someone like Trump to believe they will protect him BECAUSE THAT'S HIS LIFE LONG EXPERIENCE WITH THE COURTS AND HOW RICH PEOPLE CAN USE THEM  AS THEIR TOOL AND THEIR SHIELD FROM THE LAW, THE BETTER TO ENABLE THEIR CRIMES. 

The corruption of the American legal system is embedded in it, some from the Constitution, itself, some from the privileges granted to the Supreme Court by their own fiat.   I am certain that the work habits of judges and "justices" the leisure they grant themselves, the work avoidance of them, the profitable pace of work and billing among lawyers has been a boon to the rich and criminal, like Trump.   The legal profession is, top to bottom, founded on genteel graft and grift, including the Supreme Court, the rare revelations of who the "justices" socialize with, hob-knob with, get benefits from, including those who have had or can be expected to have business before the Court should be a scandal as big as any of the real or ginned up scandals of the House of Representatives - or, rather, those which used to be splashed tabloid style across the "news" when Democrats had solid control of the Congress.  And, as the great Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has exposed, a lot of the benefits and pay-offs to the members of the Supreme Court on the conservative side come before any of them are confirmed to that court, being put on the court with the help of billionaire money is the first guarantee of a bought and corrupt court. 

The courts, from lower to Supreme Court will act as a road block as Trump tries to run out the clock on this Congress in hopes that a Republican House will do what the Senate in Republican-fascist hands will, protect him and his gang of fascist thugs.   They will do it knowingly, even the ones who might not be expected to side with Trump because that is the practice of the legal and the judicial professions.  They protect the rich, the white, the male and the political gangster class.  They are part of it and know its customs and ruses and they know that's how you get ahead.  There was every reason to believe that a presidential commission for its reform would flop if it was comprised of such people. 

Stephen Breyer, joining the Republican-fascists on the Court in trying to head off any reform of the corrupt Court he sits on as a "liberal" and as he is preparing to join the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg as enabling another fascist to be appointed by dying on the bench should represent the last illusion of the cloying public relations presentation of that Court.   Its history, from the power grab of John Marshall, through his and the other slave-holding "justices" repeated protection of and profit enhancement of that evil institution right up to John Roberts' destroying the Voting Rights Act is among the vilest in the annals of governmental corruption in the United States.  Its members should not be treated with the courtly reverence that they routinely and customarily are.  For him to deny that that court is already thoroughly political and the enabler of gangsters as he is counted as one of its three remaining "liberals" is among the more disgusting spectacles of this year.  Finding out that the legendary RBG was good buddies with one of the worst of the "justices," as he was doing everything he could to enable gangsters and fascists, to kill people who were innocent, chuckling about painful execution methods, . . . was the last shattering of that illusion for me.   It left me disappointed in her but hardly crushed because reading the real history of that court had prepared me for it.  Breyer is earning himself a place in history, one he might not want to have, assuming he cares about posterity at all, which he doesn't seem to.

Does This Mean I've Arrived? - It's Not Everyday That I Get Trad-Catholic Hate Mail

THE OFFICIAL CATHOLIC teaching on contraception and that thing which something like that official teaching on contraception is bound to cause, abortion, is exactly the kind of thing you can expect from what is guaranteed to be an incomplete and approximate system of thought being presented as complete and rigidly true.   In fact the two taken together is an excellent example of what that leads to, consequences and the hypocritical denial that one causes the other AND ESPECIALLY IN THIS CASE BECAUSE ALL OF IT IS A RESULT OF THE ASSERTIONS OF MEN WHO ARE NEVER PREGNANT AND CELIBATE MEN WHO BY AND LARGE DO NOT RUN ANY RISK FROM ANY OF IT.   It is an abstract application of patriarchal medieval theology formulated by previous generations of men who didn't marry and who didn't have to worry about the real life consequences of their ideological declarations being imposed on Women and couples who have real lives far more complex and problematic which are anything but abstract archetypes.   

If the United States had had fifty years of encouraging people who are sexually active to be responsible in their use of contraception, the abortion rate, both in the period when it was legal and when it was illegal, would have been far, far lower than it has been.  If men had been encouraged to be responsible in the use of condoms, the STD rate, including those which are life threatening, would have been far lower along with the pregnancy and abortion rates. The part played in that by the Catholic hierarchy and conservatives who used that official teaching to suppress the information and encouragement that would have led to far fewer unwanted pregnancies is not calculable but I'm sure it was a huge part of the reason for the high abortion rate in the United States.   It joins movies, TV, the porn industry, pop kulcha and other venues for encouraging irresponsible sex in having produced that result and the courts, the Supreme Court, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry in producing that result, also, in the case of the courts and the "civil libertarians" out of a totalistic  ideological system which, as in most lawyerage, was no skin off of the judges and "justices" and well-paid lawyers' noses. 

Paul VI would not have wanted to face the fact of what his resort to a citation of Aquinas, a celibate male monk who believed women were biologically and intellectually inferior to men was absurd in 1966 :

With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person. (9)

The citation's footnote says:  (9) See St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, art. 2.  

If you look at all of the citations given by Paul VI to support his ban on effective, modern contraception you will look in vain for the thinking of anyone who was not a celibate male.  With the possible exception of the authors of two of the Gospels who are not known to have been but may have been married men.  Of course there are no women cited.  The Aquinas citation is all about the uniformity of "natural law" apparently not even bothering to wonder if maybe Women who could become pregnant when it might be anything from unwanted to life threatening might have had a valid viewpoint that all of those men wouldn't have twigged onto.   When Aquinas and, it would seem, Paul VI talked about "natural law" they only meant "natural law" as conceived by well less than half of the human population.  They weren't alone in that, the US. Constitution as originally written has the same character.  No doubt it still seems novel for someone to bring that fact up.

There was a clearly political cannonization by JPII of a woman who chose to die as a result of a pregnancy instead of having an abortion to save her life and to be there to raise her already born children.  While it was her choice, I don't see how that was responsible parenthood.  Apparently her husband didn't think that being sterilized so as not to endanger his wife would be responsible parenthood on his part, it so seldom seems to enter into the picture, men taking responsibility.  As written up, her story is all presented as happy endings, though I'm sure for one that can be written up like that there are hundreds where the death of the mother led to anything but happy endings.  Thus the need for women having control of their own bodies.  

There have been nuns who got into hot water for helping women whose lives would be put in danger from another pregnancy obtain birth control or to be voluntarily sterilized so the women could live and take care of their children.  I strongly suspect that, being women, those nuns could imagine the lives of the mothers and their living children better than men sitting in the Vatican or in bishop's palaces and residences and sitting in monasteries could. 

Paul VI was far from the worst of the Popes of my lifetime, he was, in many ways, a good Pope, though not the best of them.  He may not have realized what would result from his chickening out from taking the advice of the committee he put together to advise him on the issues of artificial contraception - not to mention the stupidity of the fraudulent "rhythm method" - but no one in 2021 has the right to an assumption of such innocence.  You have to ignore going on sixty years of not only disastrous consequences but the rejection of his ruling by even the large majority of Catholics, most of whom, at some point, use birth control to exert some responsibility when they have sex.   I only wish it happened more often.  There would be a lot less preventable trouble from people having sex.  Which they will no matter who tells them they shouldn't.   The Catholic hierarchy has hardly been able to keep men vowed to celibacy from having sex, always, in that case, outside of marriage and generally irresponsibly and in not a few cases, criminally.   

I am increasingly finding that I'm taking what Women have to say about everything far more seriously because if you look only at what men say, you're bound to have a seriously deficient view of reality and of life and of the truth.  Added to that, the same is true if you exclude the thinking of People of Color, of non-academic, non-elite people.  Our institutions generally only or almost exclusively take what a tiny fraction of people think seriously.  And they believe they can come up with all encompassing systems out of that tiny slice of experience and observation.  It's not a march of folly, they arrived and stopped at folly centuries ago.

Roger Sessions: Symphony No 1

 

Direct link to the video

New York Philharmonic Orchestra

Neeme Jarvi, conductor 

It's been a while since I listened to any of Roger Sessions music.  Too long.  Maybe I'll post his Symphonies as a series over a couple of months.  It's music you have to listen to more than once, he wrote that kind of music. 

He wrote the best harmony textbook I ever used.  Also not something you breeze through.

The Idolatry Of Totalism And The Damage It Does

GETTING READY FOR a new church year, getting ready for the year of reading and thinking about what Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, I've been listening to his lectures - unfortunately most of them very low-fi - and his interviews and what other people who knew him or studied his books said about him.  One of the most credible of those is his daughter, the wonderful scholar of not only Judaism but also Christianity, Susannah Heschel.   I learned a lot more about the crisis of 20th century Christianity from her than I did from most Christian writers.

During a sleepless night I was thinking about what she said about how, when he came to work in the United States that he was among a faculty of highly systematic scholars who didn't take him seriously because he wrote in long, flowing sentences that didn't necessarily follow in a clear, straight path as modern scholarship does.  My first reaction was that considering the importance of the Prophets to his scholarship, the topic of his Doctoral dissertation and one of his most important books, it's fitting that he might use a more poetic and less academic form of discourse.  I don't remember if it was she or another one who commented on that who pointed out that today he's the one who gets read as the more academically prim and respectable scholars of his time, not so much.   

That has matched my attempts at reading theology,  systematic theology is both unrewarding to me and the most problematic of all because it is folly from the start.  The idea to encapsulate God into a system guarantees several things.  

First, the failure to do so because God cannot possibly be captured in any human being's OR ALL HUMAN BEINGS' thoughts and imaginings.  If God or even one aspect of God's thought is the subject matter of any theological program, the intention to encapsulate it in "a whole" and exhaustive system is certain to fail.  The same thing for physicists claiming to be able to find a "theory of everything" and all of the various totalistic ideologies, materialism being one of the worst of those.

Second, any description of God arrived at will not be God, it will be an idol.  The non-physical idol will be worse than a graven image because while few would be foolish enough to take an object as God, many more will pretend that they've got God nailed down.  That anyone who takes the Scriptures seriously would make that attempt is remarkable because if there's something made clear in those that cannot be done.

Third, real life will be mostly squeezed out of consideration because real life cannot be contained in any system, no matter how complete it is imagined to be.  Poetry doesn't cover it all, in its meandering, insinuating methods of expression which academic totalism cannot begin to match in its inclusiveness.  The academic method inevitably ignores or puts aside things that can't fit into its schemes or which is beside the point of the one using it.  There are good reasons that memorable prophesy is written in poetry and that's one of the bigger ones.  This problem is far from a merely academic one, it damages real lives of real People and it discredits those who attempt it.  One glaring example is the Catholic hierarchy's attempt to straight-jacket peoples' sex lives and reproductive lives into a misguided attempt to apply patriarchal, sexist classical Greek philosophical systematic beliefs, distorting the Scripture to fit it, resulting in a very large majority of Catholics ignoring what those celibate males declare about it.   Something which will, increasingly, be forced by the Supreme Court and Republican-fascists on to the rest of the country.  Something which I hope will prove their downfall once and for all.

Fourth, the claims of that theology, if adopted by a church or a large number of people, the system, itself will gain far more importance than the lives of people and the experience of real life.  The system becomes an idol.  That is and has long been one of the idolatries of the Catholic Church but not only the Catholic Church.   The same thing happens in secular, "civic religion" and certainly in legal systems.  And people die as a result. That's especially the case in the moralistic monotheistic religions.  It would be good to know how many people died for some unimportant aspect of medieval theology that is contradicted by the Gospel of Jesus, the apostolic letters, etc. That there are a number of those which could be counted proves what a bad idea it all was.

I will say that I am glad to be going with Heschel this year instead of the other philosophical theologian I'd first considered,  systematic theology seems to me to be generally misguided.  The useful content of it is too often sacrificed to the overall systematic scheme.   I should have realized that when I first looked at Aquinas, there's good stuff in some of it, some pretty bad stuff, too, much of that inspired by pagan Greek philosophy, but the good stuff gets distorted if you take his scheme into account.  It reportedly took a profound mystical experience to show Aquinas the folly of his ways, that all of his previous work was mere "straw."  Didn't keep the post-reformation Council from making that pile of straw into the hard and fast law of the Catholic Church.  And now several members of the Supreme Court belong to a pseudo-religio-political cult that wants to impose an oligarchy enabling form of it to be the civil law of the United States.  At least I strongly suspect that might figure into the excuses they give to do evil unto others.   It will have nothing to do with The Law, the Prophets, the Gospel or the Epistles.