Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Victor and Jackson Gillis - Christmas Letter - Let George Do It

 Christmas Letter

Finding decently written Christmas radio drama is hard, believe me, I tried.  This one has the virtue of not being A Christmas Carol or The Gift of the Magi.  It's depressing how many times those were resorted to. 

This one is an old-time tough-guy detective story with a lot of fun twists and turns.   People ask me why I don't post more "golden age of radio" stuff, maybe I should dip into those archives more.

I had never heard of the writers before and was interested to find out that at least Jackson Gillis is someone whose work I certainly saw before, he wrote scads of stuff for TV, some shows I certainly saw, some I didn't.  I don't know if he and maybe his co-writer got away with many of the the things on TV they got away with on radio where they can do anything for the cost of a sound effect. 

Let Me Not Fall Into Temptation

I CONFESS THAT hearing about the terrible tornadoes in Kentucky my first thought was that it was the price they paid for letting the coal barons govern and to prevent us from addressing climate change for the past forty years.  The price for them inflicting Mitch McConnell on us.  And I don't think that that is an unreasonable thought to have. 

But, then, my state provided Mitch McConnell and Republican-fascism the power to do what Kentucky did, as well, with the Republicans, both arguably pre-fascist and present day Republican-fascists such as Susan Collins and the retired Olympia Snowe.   The "moderate"-Republicans of Maine and elsewhere are as in on it as Kentucky's delegates to the Senate and House so if they got clobbered as justice for what they've done, I'm expecting terrible consequences for us too.

No state in the United States is innocent, none of us are.  The whirlwind that was sowed was sowed by us all.  Now that is is come, we have an obligation to those it hurt.  Our consequences are coming, soon.

Anyone Who Believes There Will Be Any Integrity Or Evenhandedness Out Of The Supreme Court Today Is A Chump

ONE THING THAT IS OVERLOOKED in the appalled response to the appalling Supreme Court ruling of yesterday, letting the clearly Roe v Wade defying Texas abortion ban stand, in which Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett explicitly gave Republican-fascist state legislatures the power to nullify civil rights is the idea that those "justices" and their like have any intention of practicing integrity in following the "principle" they have now made the federal law by the fiat of five out of nine members of that Court acting as a super-legislature instead of the Supreme Court. 

I have absolutely no doubt that those five and, at times, joined in by Roberts on concurrence, would have no problem with nullifying any laws passed by Democratically controlled state legislatures, even far more modest in their infringement on personal freedom and even control by an individual on their on bodies.  I have no doubt that they would have different rules based on whether or not they or their ideological colleagues or the billionaires they serve liked or disliked them.

The Republican-fascists have no sense of justice, they have no intentions of producing equal justice under law, theirs is an exercise in raw power without any but the most ephemeral nod towards impartiality.   I have no doubt that Coney Barrett will be as scrupulous in the protection of her families' financial interests as Thomas is on settling scores and damaging the lives of People of Color and LGBTQ people and Kavanaugh to do whatever he figures will further the one-party state he has served his entire and sordid life.  Alito is capable of doing all of that and worse based on his snooty imperious conceit.  Roberts, with some regard for the actual reputation and repute of his term as Chief Justice may at times oppose them but his agenda and theirs will mesh more often than not.  He will not use this ruling as a citation in writing dissents against the five when they act to nullify state laws which he might not want to see go into effect but which are as on shaky grounds as the abominable Texas abortion ban is.  

There is no right for any non-lying, non-invested person to pretend that this Supreme Court has any integrity at all with this ruling, we are finding out just what a bad idea it is to have nine unelected, lifetime-appointed group of people in black, sometimes, most of the time in that Courts history of very dubious integrity and devotion to equal justice acting as a legislative body of nine, carrying all of the malignancies of the anti-democratic Senate and adding infinitely more, as many as those lifetime holding hacks can get away with without even having to worry about facing the voters.  

It's time to brush off Louis Bodin's book Government By Judiciary, which warned of this and contained some ideas of how to deal with an out-of control Supreme Court.  A term limit of ten years would be where I'd start, retiring most of the present court soon.  Since they have taken it on themselves to be able to nullify federal law passed by both the House and Senate, I'd give the House equal say in their appointments as the Senate.  It would be a terrific mess but no more of one than we've got and have had for a long time.  I would put a lifetime ban on former and sitting members of the Court for ever hearing a case in which they, their families or patrons have a financial interest - the extreme corruption of this court is intimately tied in with financial self-interest, something which has been a feature of the Supreme Court as its members regularly decided cases in matters of slavery which, they being slave holders, benefited them directly.  John Marshall, the man who gave the Court the power to nullify federal laws was one of those, a power which was next used by the slavery loving Roger Tawny in the most infamous of cases, the Dred Scott case.  The use of that power has gotten entirely out of hand, it was long ago time to reign it in if not end it.

Update:  You can download Louis Boudin's book at archive.org but I will warn you if you try to download the pdf it will take forever and likely make your computer crash.  If you download the text it takes a few seconds.  It comes form the Public Library of India, which might explain that.  Volume 1 and

Volume 2

The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.

The ancient city was in a moral default that could not be sustained.  It is no wonder that the poets, given how late it was wondered if it was too late or only very late.

So here in eight phrasings - I'm going to say the same thing eight different ways - is my thought about these two triads of:

- might, wisdom, and wealth

and

-steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, "they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy" [Jeremiah 5:28]. And the same poet says, "if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . ." (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation). [Jeremiah 7:5- ]

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently.

The increasingly forgotten, once most popularly known of American economists, John Kenneth Galbraith once pointed out that in his field of economics, the most abstracting of economists, the mathematical economists,  were at the top in repute in the profession and as the sub-specialties in that field increasingly dealt with real things, real lives, the economics of bodily needs of real People, the academic repute of the people doing that decreased, to the point where agronomists, those who dealt with the production of food and clothing and building materials, were held in the least esteem.  

The same can be said in one field after another.   I have recently pointed out the absurdity of that in the most reputable of all academic fields, theoretical physics and its bastard twin, cosmology, in which the things dealt with are held to no longer even need to actually be things but merely abstract arguments, science fiction written in equations, things which have no knowable reality and which may be no more than the imaginings of atheist physicists who want to make God go away and, so, they give their equations the powers of God as described in the first verses of Genesis, the much more evidenced theory of the Big Bang angrily rejected* because it is too close to doing the same thing they want the privilege of doing on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all. 

The repute which "theory" has in modern academics and, so among those it trains is undeniable, as well as the demotion of the material necessities of People without the necessities of life.  That has not ever been untrue of those who old power and those they sponsor have always had a strong tendency to play along because if there's one thing that even the most abstracting, wooly-headed academic can be counted on to know it's which side his bread is buttered on and where to get fun from.  The scientific, political and other elites who were Jeffrey Epstein's fan boys and passengers on his pedophile express is just another of the exhibits in support of what Walter Brueggemann says here.  

In that last list of the collaborators in the triad of control, I would have included the civil law, lawyers, judges, . . . and, more so, journalism and the scribbling professions.  While those may contain some of those who are, in fact, fighting against the controllers on behalf of fidelity for those who are poor and oppressed, the large majority of them are entirely in with the servants of power and wealth through the wisdom they were said to have had by those in the universities and colleges with the power to grant them their credentials and their fellow elite grad who run the news outlets.   The servants of the servants of Mammon are as in on it as their bosses who they would certainly like to join at the top. 

I should mention, since, no doubt, you noticed how close the word "materiality" is to the ideology of materialism which you can count on me to deplore at least three times a day, that the materiality of the Prophets, the Law, the Gospels and Epistles is nothing like the ideological materialism that is at the heart of so much of our moral and intellectual decadence, now.  One sees material needs and the material that could meet those needs OF THOSE WHO NEED THEM as being the point of material existence, the other sees the ideology of materialism as the ultimate wisdom with which they will dispose of God and the moral obligations to provide the needs of the poor even at a cost to themselves, a cost which they resent if paid out of the top of their mountain of personal surplus at no felt cost to themselves or their descendants, should their line feed off of it for a hundred generations.  

You can contrast that to the story of the widow who puts her last two cents into the poor box Luke 21:1–4 Mark 12:41-44.   The materiality of the prophets is, in fact, the opposite of the ideology of materialism.  It is the sanctification of material existence whereas the ideology of materialism is the debasement of human minds and lives so snobs can convince themselves there is no God.

* I think that's a fair characterization of those who held out for the steady-state model even after even more confirmation of the Big Bang was found in the 1960s, especially the 1990s rantings of the editor of the most esteemed of all science magazines, Nature, John Maddox.  Him especially.

Stupid Snark Mail

HAVING LIVED ON A FARM, if I were giving or had recently given birth I'd rather have the shepherds around than those astrologers.  The shepherds would likely have aided sheep who had a hard time birthing, the astrologers, not so much, I'm guessing.   

In the second chapter of Matthew, it doesn't say that they were ever at the place Jesus was born, only that the star showed them where he was.  It could have been months or up to a couple of years after he was born.  And it doesn't say how many of them there were.  I've read that in the Orthodox tradition they sometimes present it as twelve kings, though I'd imagine it would make the costuming and role giving at the Christmas pageant more complicated.   Dressing up Shepherds is easy.  Especially if you don't use live sheep. 

It Seems Like It's Finally Time For Me To Post The Magnificat In c minor by George Dyson

 

Direct link to video 

Sung by the Choristers of Lichfield Cathedral.

Score  

The Real Basis Of Democracy Is Found No Where Else In Sufficent Quantity Or Power To Save Democracy

MAYBE LISTENING TO THE SPEECHES, watching and reading the available content of the Biden Administrations Summit for Democracy would make me feel less depressed and pessimistic.   It is one of the things that turned me from a Biden skeptic into as close to a true believer as I have been in a continuing American presidency since I was a young, callow and naive semi-believer in the Kennedy administration.  Finding out what it really was, later, was a major disappointment.  Only with Biden I'm grown up and have passed through cynicism and would-be sophistication and the stupidity of believing that belief was an involuntary response to external stimuli instead of an active choice made.   I choose to believe in the Biden administration with open eyes, eyes open to its mistakes and limits as well as its promise.

I should and might focus on it more, as I take the chance to listen and read and think about what's said but one thing I know to the point of absolute conviction that a democracy that is merely an expression of the "will of the majority" with the "civil liberties of the minority protected" is no where near enough.  No idea of a "level playing field" of "objective consideration and decision" is going to be what is needed.  As I have pointed out to some controversy, the original conception of democracy in classical Athens was an appalling thing, a traditional, local establishment of old families whose votes were taken and allowed to matter, none of their many slaves, resident foreigners, those not in the ruling class or women mattering much or allowed a decision.   

The original American Constitutional system was similar in structure, white-property-owning men who met certain criteria were the only ones allowed a voice in the adoption of the Constitution - a Constitution made by a narrower group of rich white men, almost to a man slave owners, many of them engaged in genocide and land thefts to the West and written very intentionally, openly and specifically to enhance their privileges - everything good about subsequent American history, abolition, the various civil rights movements, the labor movement, the enfranchisement of Women the enfranchisement of racial and ethnic minorities and others, the environmental movement has been mounted in opposition to that Constitution and the Bill or Rights - now one of the most potent tools of those who attack those two centuries and more of progress to return us to a slave-owning-oligarchic-apartheid system has been far, far more than expression of the will of those who are allowed to vote and to have their votes count, in line with our appalling anti-democratic Senatorial system and the corrupt, evil, anti-democratic Electoral College.

What fueled all of those demands for equality, for justice that are the best thing about us, probably the only good thing about us, when we manage to do better, is not merely self-government where the majority rule, it is when that majority that can take effective control intentionally chooses equal justice, equal rights, the just distribution of economic goods, on the basis of good will.  And that is found no where else in sufficient quantity in any place I'm aware of except by the religious choice of those who make it.  It is not necessarily a choice of Christians to follow Christianity or Jews to follow The Law or Muslims to follow the Scriptures they recognized or engaged Buddhism, as I learn more about other and "minority religions" I find that they also contain the content to move things in that direction. If the "Summit for Democracy" avoids that necessity of finding a sufficently potent motivation for acting out of that kind of good will, you can have all of the voting and vote counting and tabulating and swearing in you want and it won't do it.  The Republican-fascists in the Senate who uniformly are driving us into gangster rule were almost certainly put there by the majority of the voters in their states, though those in the House may or may not be there due to the rigging of things by Republican-fascists in control of the state governments they control, something done immediately after the Constitution was adopted, one of the framers of that document giving his name to the practice from one of those states who love the mythology that they had some kind of moral superiority to those with more overt oligarchic habits. 

Without good will being actively promoted by the Government, as the true foundation of electoral democracy in its supposed modern meaning, not that of an Athenian style pact among ruling gang families, things will devolve as they have here, as they never really escaped in places such as Britain and only sometimes do in all of the would-be democracies everywhere.  When that good will, in all of its unfashionable corniness and seemingly naive stupidity for suckers, is not actively promoted as the moral basis of democracy, it is doomed.  And our Constsitution, our First Amendment has been interpreted in a way that has knocked the knees out from propagating it.  By the Supreme Court at the behest of the "civil liberties" industry.  They have helped more in the destruction of democracy than any other institution than the media, the "free press" that glories in its cynical embrace of the kind of wisdom that Walter Brueggemann points out.  Jeremiah saw through that a long, long time ago.  We are still suckers for what he saw was the problem then.

The Rose Garden Party As Our Balthazar's Feast, Saying It With Covid

The university sits in a society where it is very late. The university sits in a society that is in large committed to the triad of might, wisdom and wealth. And in some measure the university, like the church, has colluded in that triad to its great benefit. The lateness of the hour invites the university, like the wayward son in a foreign country to come to its senses, to remember its home and its belonging and its vocation to live alertly and knowingly in a very late moment amid these competing triads of control and fidelity, knowing that both are powerful and both are compelling and both are indispensable.

But because the triad of control has carried the day in our society without much critical reflection it may be the great tilt of the university to give priority to the triad of fidelity that has nearly disappeared from the public face of our society as it did from the public face of Jerusalem.

It will be my purpose here to line out in as many was as I can think of, of the interface of these two triads that concerned the poet and it might usefully concern our society where it is very late.  With our conference theme of Wisdom we engage two competing notions of wisdom.  The wisdom of enlightenment control on the one hand and the other ancient wisdom that is rooted in the fear of the Lord.  Two wisdoms that will yield two very different worlds.  The wisdom of control we may call "fast wisdom" that assumes we are free to manage and shape and administer and master the world, and the wisdom of fidelity that I call "slow wisdom" that waits and watches and receives and yields and hopes.

Fast wisdom, now paced by electronic urgency, concerns knowing and having and possessing and controlling. Slow wisdom is about serious, engaged relatedness that will not be hurried. It matters decisively if the world is imagined by fast paced control that breeds greed and resentment or by slow paced wisdom that hosts complexity and refuses sound bites.

The task of the university, I suggest, is to mediate and adjudicate between these triads and by such mediation and adjudication to expose the risks and the hazards of the triad of control that has brought our society to the brink of default that is not only financial but moral. 

Typing this out, the first thing that came to mind was the hastily done confirmation of the Notre Dame Law School, Federalist Society, trad-Catholic  apparatchik Amy Coney Barrett, so as to put her on the court in record speed before Trump lost the election to the most Catholic President in our history, the president of that abominable and reputable institution, known among Catholics as a sort of "our Harvard" but mostly for its football program, the fungal bloom of the enlightenment triad of might, wisdom and wealth with its fast wisdom and fast and loose morals.   The infamous super-spreader event of the vandalized Rose Garden in which Trump and others infected others, including the president of Notre Dame might serve as our Balthazar's feast, the hand having recorded its message in Scripture not choosing to repeat itself but saying it with Covid-19. 

It is hard to see the common ground between the vulgar materialism of Trumpian, corporate, trad-Catholic and white evangelical promoted piety and the supposed high-brow variety of it but only because of the Victorian false fronting of the high-brow stuff, something they specialize at in the universities, the scribbling profession and the commercial arts - including the kind of high art that makes records at the big auction houses.  But they really are the same thing.  That is why the uniformly college-credentialed journalism we have has made such an easy pivot to going from being appalled at the antics of the Trump crime gang to giving far more negative coverage of President Joe Biden who is, if anything, too eager to do things the right way and, so, risk the dangers of letting the Trump mob get away with it only to try again next year.  The Supreme Court on which Coney Barrett sits as one of its more unprepared members (her question in the Maine case yesterday is breathtakingly stupid) will do its part to destroy the vestiges of American electoral democracy on behalf of the party of vulgar materialism and will do it in the most authorized of university taught language.   I will be surprised if much of any of those in academia who were in on the crimes of the Trump era will suffer much in the way of lost jobs or even damaging disrepute, many of the worst criminals of the George W. Bush regime went right from giving criminal advice to them on torture to some of our most esteemed universities.  John Yoo, even the man General Tommy Franks said was "the dummest fucking guy on the planet," Douglas Feith was not sufficiently stupid AND DISASTEROUSLY WRONG so as to immediately have positions at the Jesuit university, Georgetown and Stanford, though, to the credit of their faculties, not without enormous controversy that exposed the corruption of the administrations of both schools and the heads of the various hiring branches of them.  Then he went into the guess-pools, the "think tank" feed lots of the contented wise men of enlightenment control.  I believe John Yoo, more intellectually respectable, though perhaps even more morally atrocious and dangerous, still has his job as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.  Where they don't seem to mind the stench.

Walter Brueggemann often makes a point of the great Jewish Prophets, that they were all uncredentialed, in many cases blue collar types if not lower on the socio-economic scale.  None were lower than Jesus who we are about to commemorate as having been born in extremely unhygienic conditions of a barn - however you want to imagine what is described in Luke.  His birth attended, not by kings, but by shepherds.  Matthew has the kings in it and they don't get there till January 6th.   It's not surprising that the most valuable insights into their society came from those with the least at stake in its upper crust.  Those at the top might tell you lots of things, some of it might be somewhat honest but the chances are it'll be wisdom so calculated as to get them a piece of that might and power.

Let Us Not Be Put To The Test

RMJ DOES THE BEST ADVENT posts,  I recommend reading them instead of what I was thinking of writing today. 

Since he takes a passage about the last days and hours of Thomas Merton's life as a passage for today, I'll add something he said that goes through my head a lot, these confusing, hard days and hope it's true of us and me. 

A Prayer of Unknowing By Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

OK, I'll add that in meditating on the petitions contained in the Lord's Prayer, the troubling one that is most often translated, "and lead us not into temptation," but which I prefer to say, "let us not fall into temptation," is, in some translations, in English but more often in some other languages, translated as "let us not be put to the test."   These days it seems like we're being put to a test and I feel like I didn't do my homework for pretty much the whole semester.   Out of that, this Advent is being made.

It May Be Too Late In The West To Try The Counter-Triad Of Jesus But We're Not Going To Get Anywhere Unless Some People Do

Overlapping with where I left off on the second segments of Walter Bruggemann's Slow Wisdom As A Subversion Of Reality

But I will not linger over that counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand.

Instead I will consider the counter-triad that Jeremiah and his poetry lines out.  It has a kind of available realism that is lacking in Jesus of Nazareth, a realism that permits people like us to take it seriously.  Jeremiah says, "but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me that I am the Lord that I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the Earth, for in these things I delight says the Lord.  

This counter-triad is rooted in the reality of the Lord the God of Israel who is celebrated as the great deliverer from slavery and the Creator of heaven and Earth. And, says the poet, even in the midst of greedy corruption and external threat, some know.  They are the ones who boast my stuff, they know Me, they have entered into covenant with Me, they have acknowledged my will and purpose, and they understand me, they can factor out the implications of who I am and what I will, and that is what makes the tradition endlessly compelling. They were the ones who gave Jeremiah trouble through the night and buoyancy through the day.  What they know and understand is that I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness, I delight in those things. And because I delight in those things, this People and this city are under mandate to live them out, out of the deep covenantal tradition of Israel Jeremiah offers a triad of fidelity that stands counter to the triad of control that was destroying Israel.

It is very late in Jerusalem but nobody knows if it is too late. Sometimes the poets like Jeremiah said it was too late, too late for the Ethiopian to change his skin, too late for the leopard to change its spots, too late for the Solomonic regime to repent, too late because of internal corruption.  And other times these same poets thought it was late but not too late. That the urgent task was to move the body politic with its marching armies and its blessing priests and its cunning scribes away from the triad of control toward the triad of covenantal  fidelity and when that move is made then a new historical possibility might yet be available because it is very late.  

You must see the similarities with us, in the United States, our electoral democracy on the ropes, our system based on an idealistic false-front put on our own embrace of the triad of control, our better natures straddling the possibilities we imagine in the triad of control, what those will get us and the false-front which is certainly not in the triad that Jesus embodies but is in an insincere and false personal-national profession of something vaguely reminiscent of the triad of Jeremiah, though more like what the Temple priests and the more pious of the scribes might have articulated - their version of cable-TV religion and corporate media. 

I will note for anyone who finds Breuggemann's knowing use of the passage about the Ethiopian disturbing, that what is offensive about it is right there in the text of Jeremiah 13:23 for anyone who wants to engage with it to face and deal with.  So I'll deal with it.

Can Ethiopians change their skin
    or leopards their spots?
Then also you can do good
    who are accustomed to do evil.

In today's language, is the propensity to do evil a biological attribute like the coloration of our covering?   Clearly no one can change their coloration while Jeremiah is, in fact, telling the People of the Jerusalem establishment and the entire nation that they CAN change from doing evil to doing good.  The inherent racism of thinking an Ethiopian, an African, would somehow improve themselves by changing their race is a dangerous metaphor now, though not necessarily then, not in that context.  It should bring us up short, not because of Jeremiah and the People he was talking to but because of OUR racist heritage, in culture, in commerce, in our Constitution, which might be a triad for us to consider in the same way this discussion does.

Being somewhat taken up with such questions, I will note that the modernist, Darwinist-genetic belief from as soon as Darwin published On The Origin of Species answers the questions, including whether or not we can choose good over evil in the negative because all of them are presented as the results of physical causation that is not changeable, from the earliest development of the theory of natural selection,  that claim of fixed personality was used both to advocate the killing of or sterilization of criminals AND RACIAL MINORITES (eugenics) and as an excuse for why doing the very same things that the criminals did in a limited context for entire societies and nations to do because it was a "law of nature" for them to commit genocide and steal the land and resources controlled by other people IS AN EXPRESSION OF BIOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY AND, THEREFORE GOOD!   And if you want to argue that I'll give you the quotes, the citations and the links to back that up but don't whine at me that I'm going over it again when you do.  If you don't like the metaphor as used in the Bible, the Darwinists and their like don't mean it as a metaphor but as scientific racist truth and scientific racist law.  But you're not allowed to point that out.

I do want to say that I very much appreciate what Brueggemann is saying here, knowing that a world so steeped in ever more intense versions of the triad of control is not going to soon or is even in the foreseeable future going to take the triad of Jesus as an alternative. He advocates for the possibility of something more like the triad Jeremiah articulates in carrying out his career as a prophet.  We do, after all, claim to believe in something closer to that now, the cover-story on our firm embrace of the triad of control.  I do, though, think it is not enough, no where near enough.  Some people have to hold out for what Jesus lived and advocated, if for nothing better than to pressure things past the triad of control.

I don't have the time to go into it but I think this article by one of her friends and colleagues, protesting the advancement of the canonization of the woman who didn't want to be canonized and turned into a harmless cartoon, Dorothy Day, pointing out how her image and name are being used to falsify her life and mind and work by bishops and others strikes me as a good example of someone who tried to live closer to the triad of Jesus and what happens when someone does try to follow Jesus.  St. Francis is used the same way. 

Also, this article about the consequences of racism in the church.
 

If We Have A Future It Won't Be Anything Like Any Past, Including Now - Why I Am Not A Modernist

THINKING ABOUT THE CIA using the content free abstract expressionism of the 1950s and 60s*, supposedly a direct expression of the true, inner subconscious of the artists freed from thinking, reliant on alleged raw sensory experience and muscle movements without the pollution of thought,  it is no surprise that the dopes who produced that movement in making saleable items were of such use to a CIA that not only had quite different goals, based in instrumental reasoning and calculation aimed at goals quite different from the painters and constructors of the pieces the Museum of Modern Art bought, sometimes with the money of wealthy oligarchs with direct or indirect ties to the CIA and its associated institutions, none of it is at all surprising.  Of course the pretenses of the "artistic movement" are based in now antique scientific theory, which the now junked psychology that the artistes picked up through their reading was explained through.  The idea that the "subconscious" was where the truth of someone's mind lay is absurd.  That they thought that something that by-passed thought (as if anything we do can) to directly access raw sensation was where you could find a truth that would surpass articulated reason only adds to the absurdity of it and exposes the decadence of an intellectual milieu that was taken for such dupes by the CIA.  Of course, the more famous of them were well paid for it, which is funny considering how many of them figured they were rebelling against commerce and the capitalist system for something purer and truer. 

Modernism has, since the construction of its chief jewel, scientific method, increasingly eschewed moral consideration and moral restraint.   That might do if you are describing the movement of objects in space and time, the identification and combination of elements and the nature of their smallest units.   Though what is done with those in application is allowed to remain divorced from moral restraint at the greatest risks to life and, especially the attempt to provide a decent life for all.   Modernism, especially in the 20th century, has had an increasingly destructive and malignant effect.  The extent to which that has been aided and abetted with things like psychology, the theory of natural selection, the naive and, in many of its conclusions, quite inaccurate reduction of genes into something that is the real and enduring thing about us (the wedding of those two in evo-psy in the 1970s).   I don't think either of those has much to tell us that will help us survive as a species and certainly are a danger to the attempt to have equal justice and economic justice.  The record of both is that they are more likely to help drive us into moral disaster.   That the ideologies favored by such of the abstract expressionists were also deadly to equal justice and economic justice, anarchism, quasi-marxism, as much as what they opposed, capitalism is a good indication of the consequences of the amorality of modernism, of which, all three are expressions.  Though many of them hardly had any real ideology, as someone once asked why were they supposed to care about the inner minds of violent, misogynistic drunks like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning? 

The idea that you have to embrace modernism or you are a reactionary wanting to return to an oppressive, terrible past is clearly absurd.  Wanting to relive the past is never about the real past, it's about a ridiculous cleaned up, make believe in which all of the evils of the past are papered over.  It is immoral to want to do it.  Oddly, those who sometimes think they see those evils of the past most clearly are as willing to overlook the evils of the present right in front of them.   

The list of modernist artists and writers and those who have been fixtures of the intellectual structure of modernism who embraced the terrible dictators of the 20th century or the entire idiocy of anarchism which would certainly lead to the gangsters taking control, as they do in any place where civil authority breaks down, is a long one.  If you are honest and include capitalism as one of the older and earlier ideologies of modernism, as it is, it is true of just about all of it.  

The word, itself, is used in ways that really don't work very well.  It certainly doesn't work very well in music where about the only thing that comes close is the sterile and meaningless idiocy of the post-war indeterminacy of John Cage and his acolytes and camp followers.  They certainly, looking for a way to get notice and fame, latched onto the similar PR angle that abstract expressionism and absurdist lit were profiting from. Though some of it was also a product of Western exoticism about things like Zen, as seen by American romanticism.

I saw through that when I was taking a course in 20th century American music in the early 70s and stupidly chose to announce my choice to write a paper about Christian Wolff, one of those "composers" associated with Cage.  Wolff was known as a lefty composer and I was a lefty, though I was never that kind of one.  The teacher approved of the subject,  I looked at his scores, I listened to some recordings, I read what had been written about him and his work, I read a little of what he said and had to tell my teacher that I couldn't write a paper about it because there was absolutely nothing to write about.  The "chance composers" hadn't actually made compositional choices of any but the most banal kind, sometimes associated with getting paid for commissions by people with money.   Odd, how those who pose as the purest artists go for the big bucks the fastest.   I wouldn't just repeat the crap I'd read about it and thought even that was pretending to find something there that wasn't there.   My teacher (who was also my advisor) was pissed off that I wouldn't play along with the then fashion but he knew I could be stubborn.   I managed to pass off a paper I'd written for another class that, luckily, he didn't know I'd used in another class.   If he'd challenged me I think I could have made a good case that I'd learned a lot more by doing the research for the paper and really thinking about what was said and the experience of listening to the recordings and going over the scores.  In fact, it taught me more than I learned about a lot of the other things in the course.   Trying to escape a choice, trying to escape a moral decision is to accept evil, either of a banality that the CIA can use you with or worse, such as that arch modernist Gertrude Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize in the late 1930s. Or to actively support Mao even as he's murdering tens of millions and oppressing hundreds of millions.

*  See the comments here.

Note:  The idea that our sensory and kinetic senses can be removed from or isolated from our minds' actions of articulate thought or reasoning or making decisions is silly.  The choices made might result in an imprecise result, one that doesn't follow a predetermined plan or form but those choices, the thinking involved in those, the influence of past experience and habits are there.  Why removing reason and moral consideration from the process as if those were the source of all evil was pretty silly.   Maybe it was something they thought of while they were sloshed.  Alcohol and drugs seem to go with modernism like an affection for violent dictators does.

An Early Christmas Presnt For Any Piano Players Or Listeners

LOOKING TO FIND sung versions of the Romanian Christmas Carols that Bela Bartok used to make the set I posted the other day I found these, instead, the actual field recordings Bartok made from which he composed his arrangments of the Romanian Folk Dances, some of his most often played pieces.  It is hard to hear in the primitive, scratchy recordings of live performances made in the most primitive of conditions on acoustically recorded wax but if you're familiar with the pieces as Bartok wrote them down, it's incredible how close to the originals he stuck.  It leaves me with a renewed respect for his musical integrity and fidelity as well as his creative and superb settings of the melodies. 

Direct link to video

Here is Bartok playing them.

 Direct link to video

 

Score  

 

While I wish I could find the recordings Bartok based the Romanian Christmas Carols on it's wonderful that musicians and music students have such easy access to these materials that my generation would never have had access to.  I hope they're using them.

Mary The First Priest Of Christianity

As a supporter of the order of Roman Catholic Women Priests,  I'll let Bridget Mary Meehan have her say.  Note, the HTML problem is due to my incompetence, you should look at the entire post at her blog.

Today, Dec. 8, 2021, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Revised Code of Canon Law 1379- placing the ordination of women priests in the same category of grave crimes against the Church as sexual abuse- goes into effect. 

This penalty  of excommunication is a grave injustice not only against women called to serve God's people in a renewed priestly ministry but,  is also an outrageous offense against the Church's teaching that women's bodies are holy and all persons are equal images of God.   

It is ironic that the Vatican hierarchy chose this feast day of Mary for this misogynist law to be codified into a modern-day witch-hunt of a prophetic movement for the full equality of women in the Church. 

So, I suggest that we declare this day as the feast of the priesthood of Mary and of all women and genders as equal images of the Divine in Persona Christi!

 The idea of Mary as Priest seems to have been around since the 4th century and is wonderfully illustrated in striking mages of Mary dressed in priest’s vestments – some dating from as early as the 6th century. Here is a brief taster…

 The image to the left from 6th century Croatia, shows Mary visiting Elizabeth during their pregnancies. Both women are wearing what look to be chasubles with the pallium visibe beneath, denoting the highest priestly honour, worn only by the Pope or Bishop as a privilege.  It has been said that Mary baptised and confirmed John the Baptist in the womb of Elizabeth.  Jean-Jacques Olier, contemporary of St Vincent de Paul in the 17th Century, says of the Visitation to Elizabeth, “The Blessed Virgin, as Bishop in the Church, sanctified the son of the high priest Zachariah. She sanctified St. John and through the imposition of her power, using her right as Mother of God and spouse of the Father, she imprinted the Holy Spirit on St. John”.

Cyrus Chestnut- Christmas series

 

Direct link to video 

Only time I ever heard Cyrus Chestnut play in person it was when Betty Carter performed in Portsmouth NH.  Embarrassingly small audience but she sang and they played like it was to thousands.  One of my fondest memories. 

Trump Appoints "judge" 'judge" Has Trump's Back

 "judge" CARL J. NICHOLS, Federalist Society fascist, a Trump appointee is showing how the House Committee on the January 6th putsch was wrong to place their faith in the legal process in forcing people like Steve Bannon to testify.  First it was the Department of Justice dragging its foot in the process, a matter of weeks in what was an obvious case of guilt, now it's a Republican-fascist, Trump judge delaying it until the middle of next year.  Somehow I have a feeling he's planning on trying the case in a way that might make the infamous judge Bruce Schroeder look like a hanging judge, by comparison.   Even if he doesn't, this is part of a long pattern of judges and lawyers and the legal system allowing itself to be the vehicle of denying the public the justice it deserves by the tactic of delay.

The House Committee had better stop fooling around with the designed delays of the law and legal process if they want to do something to discourage the destruction of democracy because the law is not an ass, it's in on the fix for the insurrectionists, even when not by intent, by habit and exploitable custom. The law is a serially offending ass.

The House should start arresting those who defy their subpoenas and imprison them, as is their legal right under the Constitution.  They should hold Trumpian fascists under the same conditions Trump held babies in on the border and in concentration camps elsewhere.  Give Jeffrey Clark a hard floor and a mylar blanket, give Steve Bannon access to a lawyer on the basis that "judges" regularly do even the youngest of minor children.  

There is no justice system in the United States, there is no justice where there is no equality, where the rich, the white the connected to Republican-fascism and the privileges of oligarchy get treatment better than the least among us, there is no justice.  The courts have been packed with thugs and mob lawyers.   It's time that the Democratic members of the Congress stopped pretending there is anything like a functioning justice system that can be depended on to prevent further crimes against government of, by and for The People.

The Biggest Security Risk The United States Faces Is The DC Insider Media and The Republican Establishment (James f****** Comey!) Who Had Trump In Office

THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST FRONTING media, especially the DC media are going full mean girl in their campaign to Hillaryize Kamala Harris.  It's time for us to attack them, starting with what Wonkette pointed out, that Politico's Alex Thompson and two other skanks are going after her for, among other things, being careful with secure communications.  THE VERY REASON THE  SKANKS WENT AFTER HILLARY CLINTON, THE SKANKS INCLUDING TRUMP AND JAMES COMEY CNN, FOX AND THE FUCKING NEW YORK TIMES!  IN ORDER TO PUT THE BIGGEST NATIONAL SECURITY DISASTER IN OUR LIFETIMES IN THE PRESIDENCY.

First Kamala Harris had a fake French accent. Then she bought a $375 pot. Now, she’s accused of wearing old-fashioned headphones. The vice presidential scandals never end.

Politico broke the gripping story about Harris’s headphone preferences. The headline blared: “Kamala Harris Is Bluetooth-Phobic,” as though Harris is prejudiced against technology.

    While a growing number of consumers are going wireless, the vice president is sticking with the classics. She has long felt that Bluetooth headphones are a security risk. As a result, Harris insists on using wired headphones, three former campaign aides told West Wing Playbook.

    That caution has continued since the election.

We’re treated to examples of Harris using wired headphones in public and during televised appearances. And this is absurd: "After casting the tie-breaking Senate vote on the American Rescue Plan in March, reporters captured Harris with wired headphones in hand. And during the campaign, she filmed campaign videos with the retro coils falling from her ears.”

And Thompson continued his mean girl act:

Politico’s Alex Thompson, who should feel bad, tweeted more details Monday afternoon:

    NEW: Kamala Harris has long felt that Bluetooth headphones are a security risk. So, she insists on using wired ones, 3 fmr campaign aides told @rubycramer and me. That Bluetooth phobia remains (if you look closely, you'll see the clump of wires in hand)

Not to horn in on Dok’s rhetoric beat, but the word choice here reveals a clear bias. Harris doesn’t just prefer to use wired headphones, she “insists” upon them, like a pop star diva who demands that her dressing room be kept at exactly 68 degrees before a performance. Politico keeps using the word “phobia,” implying an irrational fear or obsession, rather than a logical precaution.

First, if any Democrat, especially those who have worked on campaigns or been close to high-level Democratic politicians are talking to the skanks of the DC media, they should be identified and receive a life-time ban on ever getting close to someone on the level of Kamala Harris because they are a security risk to not only the Democratic Party BUT TO THE COUNTRY THAT THE REPUBLICANS AND THEIR KEPT MEDIA COMPROMISED SO DANGEROUSLY DURING THE TRUMP YEARS.   

It's time to stop defending the media and to attack it for each and every incident of this kind.  Alex Thompson and his fellow skanks on this make believe scandal

Bela Bartok - Romanian Christmas Carols

 

Direct link to video 

Béla Bartók - Romanian Christmas Carols, Sz.57 Played by Zoltan Kocsis, 2/11/1994 on Hungarian Television 

Romanian Christmas Carols, Sz, 57, BB 67 (Hungarian: Román kolindadallamok) is a set of little colinde, typical Christmas songs from Romanian villages, habitually sung by small groups of children, adapted in 1915 by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók to be played on the piano after hearing them sung in the below villages.

You can access information about where Barok collected the originals on his folk music collecting field trips at the direct link. 

The recording isn't as crisp as a studio recording would have been but it's got energy that makes up for any roughness.  I've played these and I'm impressed with how Zoltan Kocsis played some of the rhythmic distinctions that usually get blurred in performance such as the 32nd notes and rests in the third one.  Most people lay two 16th notes there.   I miss teaching.  Wish I were teaching these to someone.  

No, This Is The Real Reason For The Season If It Wasn't There Wouldn't Be Any Reason To Notice It

But what then?  Well. If we take the antithesis of might, wealth and wisdom, we might come up with a triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty. And, of course, that's what we get in Jesus of Nazareth. For God chose foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.  First, you know the gracious act of our Lord, Jesus Christ who though he was though rich, yet for our sake became poor so by his poverty he might make ready rich.

It turns out that the life of the Crucified One exhibits the counterpoint to the great seduction of Jerusalem. He is the embodiment of weakness as he stood vulnerable before imperial authority.  He is the embodiment of foolishness.  Terry Eagleton describes him this way:

 "Unlike most responsible American citizens, Jesus appears to do no work, is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.  He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear his vote for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful, The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over the top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents. Forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow."

So far Eagleton.

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

But I will not linger over that counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand. 

Last week,  one of the daily readings was from a section of Psalm 19 and one particular verse of that struck me as an especially outrageous claim of both the potency of the Mosaic Law and the possibility of extra-biological, extra-sociological wisdom so radical that it could even overcome stupidity.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
    making wise the simple;

That's a scandal and a stumbling block to our entire intellectual establishment, everything that values being a wise guy, savvy, sophisticated, in-the know, informed.  Especially the Darwinian-genetic view of intelligence and the benefits that brings being intrinsically and exclusively attached to the biological inheritance of rich-well-connected families and others so blessed by chance and the actions of natural selection, white supremacy and things like the British class system, the original entirely artificial code of laws that is the origin of that delusion as biological science. 

Thinking about it this past week, I think it's true.  If you did follow The Law, especially as codified by Jesus and, with a slightly different spin by Hillel, from Leviticus, to do to others as you would have done unto you AND ALL OF THOSE OTHER THINGS LISTED BY TERRY EAGLETON,  the benefit of your life to those around you and to other living beings would be more than the equivalent in worldly wisdom.  The worldly-wise being so prone to be respectable crooks, cheaters and hoarders.   

I have mentioned before, thinking of those wise men such as are lauded in the media, by people like Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas, that I realized that I could name hundreds of such smart people the world would be better off without (in my estimation) but I couldn't think of a single good person the world would be better off without (by the evaluation of anyone of honesty and good will).   I could name you a score of sharp lawyers and businessmen and shop keepers in my area who are a blight on everything from their neighbors to the watershed and the ground water,  I could name you some who are nearly as no-account as Jesus is listed above who I would imagine would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.

the precepts of the Lord are right,
    rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear,
    enlightening the eyes;

the fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
    and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold,
    even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
    and drippings of the honeycomb.

I prove the continuation of that Psalm because I think, getting that much right, it's a good idea to consider the rest of it seriously. 

Given that catalog of the teachings of Jesus it is certainly no wonder that he and Christianity are so on the outs with today's intellectual leaders, the wise guys in universities, literary establishments, churches, the mass media and how the most vulgar of vulgar materialism, what might, wealth and wisdom are used to extract from life for those who have those resources, is perfectly in line with it.  It is no less surprising that the establishment, the Churches, the political right, all have to present an alternative Jesus who is all about might and wealth and a slyness and shrewdness and calculation that can well go by the name of "wisdom" if the term "wise guy" means the same thing as in the Hollywood presentation of American organized crime.   That is why you can have a Senator from Kentucky posing with automatic weapons with his rich, connected, wise-guy family in front of a Christmas tree and so many who profess Christianity will accept that as morally coherent. 

The fact is that most of the most "traditional" of Christians are thoroughly invested in the neo-pagan system of what Jeremiah identified as the source of the impending disaster in Jerusalem and Judea.  Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, secularists, atheists, slacker indifferent agnostics, a large number of them are fully invested in that imperial triad and its ersatz equivalents that can be made to work like the real thing under our corrupt judicial and legal and political systems.  Is it any wonder that is the case when slavery and genocide and the theft of a continent are the basis for its legal foundation?   I wonder if you could tease out the outrageousness of Jesus in some of the remaining verses of the Jewish prophetic verses and in those that might have been suppressed as too outrageous and too remote from any rescue effort because they were too counter-cultural, too foolish?   Maybe Jesus knew something of those verses or decided to provide them, himself. 

Link to the first in this series. 
 

Note:  I am transcribing these as I hear them at the video of Walter Brueggemann's talk Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version Of Reality.  Any faults in the text, its presentation and its punctuation are entirely my fault.   I will try to remember to post links to the video at the point my transcription begins so you can hear what he said, for yourself.  Please let me know any errors you notice.  I will continue this unless I get a request from the author not to.

Kendrick Scott - Speak Like A Child

 

Direct link to video 

Kendrick Scott

Walter Smith 

Mike Moreno 

Gerald Clayton

Derrick Hodge

In the Catholic lectionary there's lots of Isaiah during Advent, eventually, probably, to the passage about a little child leading them.   For some reason this piece seemed to me to be Christmassy.   I don't know if Herbie Hancock had that idea when he wrote it or not.  I love this version, which, given the news, I needed to hear.

Update:  Well, it's nice to get corrected on me typing "Lent" when I meant "Advent" if for no other reason than it's nice someone notices. 

I'm Asked For A Prediction

THE FATAL DEFECTS in American democracy are defects put in place by the authors of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic nature of the Senate, giving that anti-democratic entity the power to stack the Supreme Court and other courts with Republican-fascists as they used to stack them with judges and "justices" either already friendly to or with a direct financial interest in slave holding or those who could be talked into it by legalistic, Constitutional arguments.   Then there are two of the most dangerous to us, the absurd "rights" granted to the artificial entity "the press" and the related empowerment of lies and those ready to murder us with guns, the idols of the First and Second amendments in the so-called "Bill of Rights". 

The question I was asked was what do I think it would take to really make American democracy secure and, at bottom, without those tools handed to the gangsters, the billionaires foreign and domestic and their paid and associated goons and thugs, honed and sharpened by amoral lawyers, judges and "justices" being removed, the actual words changed in light of the experience of the evils they have wrought for the entire period they were in place - especially against People of Color, the Native inhabitants of North America, other minorities - will not ever stop being a danger to equality, economic and social justice and government by a free People of good will.  

And I don't see any or much evidence that even witness to what those have brought us in the Trump disaster in the ongoing danger to American democracy by the very same forces who gave us Trump and who profited from that rule by gangsters I don't see any evidence that Americans in the media or out of it are willing to face the ultimate sources of that danger, the manipulation of the words of the Constitution and the traditions of the American legal establishment that shaped and formed the real life presence of those words and the absolute necessity to take the weapons so made away from those who would impose oligarchic gangsterism on us. 

I think it's going to take a terrible experience as proved to happen in ancient Judea in the talk by Walter Breuggemann which I started transcribing yesterday.  I think it's going to be far worse, I wouldn't be surprised if a level of mass murder of Hitlerian or Maoist proportions might be involved, I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear weapons weren't used in the near future.   

The stubbornness of habits of idolatry, those in individuals and, even more so, those embedded in self-interested establishments and the habits of educated thought are difficult to overcome.  Look how enduring the habits of European and Near-Eastern and Asian paganism have been after two-thousand years of professed belief in The Gospel of Jesus and the Epistles that form most of the New Testament.  Little to none of the actions of those governments and within those societies seem to have been influenced except in the most general of trends by the teachings of Jesus.  Which, I agree with Jurgen Habermass is the actual source, along with the Jewish Law which Jesus extended, of literally everything that can be considered good in modern egalitarian democratic life.  We, especially white Americans, some of those who have benefitted the most from that religious extension into the moral basis of government are the readiest to give it up as the demand to extend it universally is pressed.  

The habits gained from received wisdom, a conventional American education and the knowledge that if you've seen through the pious lies of America's "civil religion" (one of the most putrid of phrases to come from one of our least honest "justices") you wouldn't dare to say it because so many others won't have seen through them or dare to admit the problem.  Lying won't get you fired from most media companies in the United States, telling the awful truth about this is an almost certain guarantee of it.   But no one's paying me and I can say what I think.   Perhaps that's one slight comfort, the destitute have freedom of thought and no vested interest in maintaining pious lies.

No, I'm not optimistic about the near term or even the extended future, assuming there is to be one.  And the United States Constitution as the idol of American civic religion is one of the bigger obstacles that face us, apart from the mass electronic media that gulls and lies and incites and kills.  American fascism, Republican-fascism is a true polytheistic cult of materialism, most of it vulgar as can be, some of it more abstract, none of it spiritual.   It is matched by a neutered, denatured "liberalism" and "leftism" which have hankered after even more abstract material gods,  Krysten Sinema is, actually, a good example of what comes of that, as is the Green Party and the various lunatic Marxists and anarchists before them and even today.

Since I'm asked to predict what's going to happen, I'm not going to lie about what I think is coming.   If I was going to do that I wouldn't have answered the question.

Guess Who Said This. I'll Give You 1/2 A Chance*

 . . . conclusive proof that you’re a classic example of a Puritan shithead…somebody obsessed with the idea that somebody, somewhere, is having fun. 

The twit doesn't even know he's quoting the racist, fascist loving, overrated, antisemite H. L. Mencken, which puts him in the same mindset as Ronald Reagan who also quoted it to whine about those who wanted equality and social justice and tax fairness.

But that wouldn't have been a good reason to post this, what makes me do that is this passage that I just happened to read about one of my favorite American artists Hyman Bloom  yesterday.  From Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism

Yet the stern orthodoxy of their religious practice, which seemed to isolate recent Jewish immigrants from the rest of the city, was closer than they might have thought to the Puritan orthodoxy that had defined the spiritual orientation of the Boston community from its inception.  Years later, noting that "the old Puritan and Jewish beliefs are really quite similar," Bloom appreciated the commonality of these two faiths anchored in the Hebrew Bible and the ascetic spirituality, which became sources of his inspiration.  These synagogue visits left an indelible impression on the child that would draw him back. 

The authentic American liberal tradition of economic justice, social equality, etc. flows from the John Calvin commentary on the Old Testament as was far more widely read in New England than the King James Version back in the formative years of American egalitarian justice liberalism.  Of course Mencken and Reagan and the pop-kulcha addled idiots informed by nothing better than greed and TV would disdain it.  I always have preferred the "Boston School" of Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine to the CIA financed moral nihilism of abstract expressionism and brain-dead Pop Art BS.  I was aware that Jack Levine and I shared a good deal of political and other thought, I had not thought that dear old Hyman Bloom might, as well.  

I, of course, am no Calvinist but I will acknowledge the positive contribution to the American tradition of liberalism as opposed to the 18th century "enlightenment" "liberalism" which is more akin to today's oligarchic "classical liberalism" and the "Neo-liberalism" that was akin to what Walter Breuggemann discusses below.

*  Because he's a half-wit.

But, then, Wisdom -

FROM SLOW WISDOM AS A SUB-VERSION OF REALITY by Walter Brueggemann

It was very late in the 7th century BCE in the ancient city of Jerusalem.  It was late, only a few years before the destruction of the city when its walls were breached the Temple destroyed, the king deported and the political state of Judah ended. It was very late for the ancient city of Jerusalem because the city was being devoured by greedy corruption of which the poet Jeremiah could say from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain, they have treated the wound of my People carelessly, saying "peace, peace" when there is no peace.  

It was very late for the ancient city of Jerusalem because the city was under threat at the hands of the aggressive Babylonian armies of which the poet Jeremiah had God say, "I am about to bring against you a nation far away.  It is an enduring nation, it is an ancient nation, it is a nation whose language you do not know."  Now, this is only poetry and the poet does not even name the coming enemy evoked by the will of God. The description of a language that you do not know that will eat you up sounds like Al Qaeda. But it is likely, in context, Babylon. More than greedy corruption and external threat the poetic tradition of Jeremiah dares to connect the two. Because of greedy corruption, therefore enemy threat.

The God who presides over the historical process in poetic imagination connects and enacts what we would analyze differently.   The outcome of such an odd reasoning is that internal anti-neighborliness yields external risk and danger.

It was very late in Jerusalem according to prophetic anticipation and if one were such a poet, if one were Jeremiah, what would one say about poetry about greedy exloitation and after poetry of external threat dispatched by holy resolve?   Well, this is what the poet Jeremiah says in the midst of that lateness.  "Do not let the wise" - here's our theme - "boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth."

The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.

Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources.  Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.

But, then, wisdom.  We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks?  But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom. And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time.  And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.

Perhaps inevitably the great universities have signed on with that wisdom, have entered into compacts of wisdom that has bought the universities the wealth of research grants and the power of connectedness. And now we are sobered as we are in this consultation, needing to take a deep breath concerning the way of wisdom-enlightenment-knowledge to which we have been pledged. That wisdom has led us to imense power and wealth.

But it has also led us to the sad picture of Lyndon Johnson in his last days concerning Vietnam with his head in his hands completely exasperated with ineffective power.  It has led to the verdict of the brothers Bundy, McGeorge and William, architects of that war who wrote at the end of their book, "We were good but we were not as good as we thought we were."  It has led to the departure of the wise men from the White House after conferring with the president about Vietnam and without a clue of what to do next.

It has led to the oil spills and to the Japanese nuclear crisis and to the widespread suspicion that our technology has outrun our capacity to think clearly. And it has left us with deep anxiety that seeks scapegoats along with the zeal to dispose of the others if necessary by violence.

And the poet says, "Do not boast about your might, do not boast about your wisdom, do not boast about your wealth." 

In regard to my previous posts today, Bob Dole never to my knowledge departed from his role as Nixon's attack dog against the critics of America's war in Vietnam and its illegal and genocidal expansion by Nixon and his resident genius, war monger, degenerate and weapon merchant to terrorists and dictators (hint: dictators are all terrorists) Henry Kissinger.  I have no doubt that if we hadn't left Dole would have been in favor of bouncing the rubble of South East Asia many times over for the past forty five years. 

I have been thinking of transcribing a lot of this talk for a long time, today I decided to start and see how far I get. 

 

Even As I Typed This I Heard Someone Mention That Goddamned Movie!

BOB DOLE WAS A MALIGNANT partisan without much of any sense of moral discernment.   He was a protegee of the origin of today's Republican-fascism, Richard Nixon, frequently his hatchet man and defender.  He was a partisan hack who had few, if any, real principles or morals.  His one and only area of something more than that was based entirely in him being a disabled veteran of WWII, so he championed the issues of some disabled veterans.  All areas outside of his own, personal experience and identity, he was one of the worst. 

He is being presented as some kind of hero, some kind of saint by the commercial, billionaire owned, controlled and benefiting media, Republican-fascist - look at how they are treating Joe Biden in all of his competent decency as opposed to George W. Bush and even the worst president in our history, Trump. 

I will not mince words, I despised Bob Dole and his wife who I may live to condemn someday.    The only thing that keeps me from using the term "banality of evil" in regard to him is because he was more like evil with competence and complete knowledge.  I'm sure I'll be reminded of the myth of mid-western goodness and levelheadedness that is that vile movie, It's A Wonderful Life, though I long ago swore off of Jimmy Stewart because his Iowa accent reminds me too much of that current example of a more banal and stupid evil, Chuck Grassley and the states that sent them to the Senate.  

I have no hesitation to speak the truth about the dead, especially those whose lives were so evil to such evil effect, leading to the misery, oppression and death of thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of others.  Bob Dole was such a person.  If I owe someone something on the occasion of his death it is those who were the victims of his life, his work and his career.   Remembering what he did makes me regret that I don't believe in eternal damnation so maybe I should stop right now before I regress to Augustinian theologizing.

If Three Republicans Weren't As Bad As Krysten Sinema, her Vileness Wouldn't Rule The Senate And No One Would Much Care

IT IS THAT SHE CALLS HERSELF A DEMOCRAT that makes it necessary to point out that the only admitted atheist in the Senate, Krysten Sinema is exactly what you'd expect from someone who doesn't believe there is such a thing as sin, there are no moral absolutes - something that inevitably comes when you deny the only source of those possible which People have identified, who People generally identify as God -  and so figures that anything they can get away with and work for themselves is OK.  

She is notable for sort-of admitting that she is the only atheist in the Senate but I am certain to within the realm of certainty that she is far from the only one.  And you can know them by how they act. 

I would point out that that is not exclusive to her, though she is exactly the kind of two-faced, blatant hypocrite such as Mehdi Hasan exposed her as being on his show,  Joe Manchin is another one,  who is only exceptional in that because he, as well as Sinema pretends he's a Democrat while being a de facto Republican on so many things that matter, including protecting the elections system from Republican theft.

Of course the Republicans, those who profess their belief in religions that, if followed, would prevent their entire political careers from being conducted by them, are typical of the kind of hypocrisy that you would justifiably suspect might come from someone who has Krysten Sinema's ideological identity because that's exactly how they behave.

I think one of the realities that the United States forces us to see in 2021 is that a very, very large percentage of those who profess a belief in God, in the Bible, the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel, etc. act as if they didn't believe a single thing about it.   We have, in fact, a 52 vote majority who conduct their public life as if they didn't believe in even the requirement to tell the truth, to not lie, to not bear false witness, to do for the least among us as we would do for God, etc. That is the truth of it.  In fact I don't think the United States Senate is alone in that, I think the judiciary and even many of the largest Churches in the United States have the same character - by their fruits you will know them.  Business and the legal profession and, without any doubt, most of the media are also bereft of morals on behalf of profits, self-enrichment, hoarding of billions in personal assets, etc.   

Krysten Sinema's self-serving, self-enriching ways are the ways of the media, the legal profession and the Republican-fascist party.   I won't fault Mehdi Hasan for not taking notice that ALL OF THE REPUBLICANS and just about all of the legal system and all of the media are as corrupt as she is with varying degrees of the kind of hypocrisy that he, finally, is able to present from her since she gave a rare interview in which she lied her pearly white teeth off about keeping her word and promises she made to the voters who put her in office and the supporters she lied to, as well.  

We live in an age as corrupt as the most corrupt epochs of the medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical and robber baron eras.  We are going into a period when, due to such discrediting of Christianity and religion as is bought by the hypocrisy of those who profess it the loudest has reached past the tipping point.  There's a reason that Catholics are bailing on the official Church as the hypocrisies and corruptions of the past two papacies, especially, have driven out people of sincere belief.  The U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops as those two bad popes left it is at least as hypocritical as Krysten Sinema and the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Senate and the House.  

I feel it necessary to point out this is no apology on behalf of or vindication of Sinema, she is vile.  It is to point out that the only reason her vileness matters is that every single Republican-fascist in the Congress is as vile so her vileness makes theirs the effective controllers of the Senate.  Hers and that of the Catholic Joe Manchin.