to sustain the way we're living, the way some of us are living

THE LAST SENTENCE in Walter Brueggemann's short lecture on Pharaoh's economy as it is today is:

It could well be we are the fourth repreformance of a neighborly economy in the face of predation.  

His first answer to a question lays out the evidence for that being the truth.  I'll remind you some of the questions are not audible on the recording, part of the first one wasn't on my computer.


Questioner:  How are we as individuals participating in that [the predatory economy]?  

Brueggemann:  I think that the consumer economy is our participation in an unsustainable standard of living.  And the reason that we have to have such an incredibly strong military is to protect an unsustainable standard of living.  If we didn't have to be managing and manipulating the world economy through globalism, which we have to do to sustain the way we're living, the way some of us are living, we wouldn't need to spend ourselves into oblivion for the military.  

Does that make sense?  That's what I think.

And I think our moral capacity to live that way is grounded in the theological notion of American exceptionalism.  "We are, in fact, God's chosen People so we are entitled to live this way at the expense of many other People."  

That's what I think.  And that's what makes it so hard.  Who wants not to do that "when it's so terrific?"  That's what I think.  We wouldn't have had that scary article about inequality if we were not propelled by greed that is grounded in our fear of running out and being scarce.  So it's an endless proposition in which most of us continue to go through the motions.  And the longer that we participate in this unsustainable scheme the less we stay in touch with the humanity of our neighbors.  Because all of our neighbors turn into rivals and competitors and threats.  So Donald Trump, for example,   has this long list of neighbors who he perceives as threats.  And it turns out that's a winning way to label People and then you don't have to be neighborly. 

 
One of the things which has been remarked on about those who have been arrested and convicted of Trump's attempted putsch on January 6th, 2023 is that most of them were affluent.  They are either solidly middle class or noticeably above middle class.  Certainly almost all of the leaders of the effort, from Trump down to his indictable lawyers and those scheming in the Willard Hotel were quite rich.   Most of them had the leisure time and wealth to travel to DC and stay in hotels there - working class and poor people don't generally have the means to do that, no matter how The Apprentice and FOX Lies addled they may have been.  Just as those who participated in the successful 2000 "Brooks Bros." putsch  begun by Jeb Bush and Bush cousin John Ellis on FOX Lies to put their brother and cousin in the presidency - with the collusion of a bare 5 to 4 vote of the usurping Supreme Court - were stinkin' rich.   No one should for a second believe that the attempted putsch of 2020 is unrelated to the successful one in 2000. 

The corruption of the United States is the corruption of the super-rich and the rich and those who aspire to be rich in the 1780s rigging the system to prevent rule by the large majority who are not rich and have nothing but a deluded notion that they are going to be rich.  The Electoral College that both the Bush family and billionaires foreign as well as domestic used to put Bush II Trump in power was one of the longest lasting successes of those super-rich framers of the Constitution and it worked just as they, no doubt, hoped it would to thwart the will of a majority of voters who are not rich and who may sense the system is rigged against them.  And it's corruption is so endemic to the United States that we will be hard pressed to get rid of the thing, so many of the smallest population states being so thoroughly in the hands of white supremacists and others propagandized by phony civics, a bit from school but most of that absorbed through the lying media, the entertainment division the most potently corrupting of that.  

That we are seriously in a position to have to worry about a Trump or a DeSantis or any other Republican-fascist regaining the white house and controlling the judiciary and the Congress and the military and police AFTER THE DISASTER THAT TRUMP HAS BEEN is all the evidence any rational person would need to show just how bad off we are.

The extent to which that is a product of the media corruption of the minds of the American People cannot be overestimated because with the rise of electronic mass media that is the most influential force in the United States.  More than education, more than old-fashioned off-line Churches, more than the residuum of common decency that the popular culture has done its best to swamp.  The consumer culture that Walter Brueggemann correctly points to in his answer is the major force in corrupting even those who still have some of that fading remnant of something like The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel in their unconscious memory.  It is seductive in attracting us to want things, things we need, things we think we need, things that anyone with any maturity and sense would know they not only don't need but have no use for, advertising as well as what's allegedly not advertising in the entertainment programming is all a part of that.  It is, for worse and even worse than that, what has constructed the American culture which now is in the process of losing egalitarian notions and even majority-wins electoral democracy because an effective minority of the voters in enough states can swamp the majority no matter how much the majority wins the general vote by.  

Pretending that the slave-holding, land-stealing, shady-financiers who drafted the Constitution and adopted the Bill of Rights were importantly ready to live by majority rule and that American history is a history of those who wanted equal rights of struggle against the Constitution and the Supreme Court which has, in fact, been the most persistent force for thwarting equality and effective democracy is our national myth just as the tales of Solomon  as presented in a children's "Bible" or some Hollywood "Bible" epic might construct the uninformed imagination of another of the reenactments of the Pharaonic system as presented in the story of Joseph in Egypt and in Exodus.  I think it is not at all irrelevant that among the models of the American government most intentionally studied by those who wrote the Constitution was the Roman republic which was plenty unjust and immoral and violently oppressive even before it naturally devolved into the hellishness of the Roman empire.   I will point out what God told Samuel to tell the Children of Israel when they asked him to anoint a king for them just like all the big countries surrounding them had.  It got them a Saul.  

And we are so TV, internet and movie addled that those of us who want one will settle for the As Seen on TV glory of Donald Trump, with his morbid obesity, his drug use, his diapered incontinence and his absurd clown makeup and hair extensions.   

That is the cost of white privileged faux affluence for an effective minority of the voters under the influence of the freest media in the history of the world.  That is the cost of our consumer economy.  That is the old story that goes back to before the Exodus.  

One of the hardest of the several hard truths about how to get out of this we have to face is the extent to which those of merely comparative privilege due to their whiteness and temporary good fortune AND THOSE WHO ARE DECLARED TO BE OPPOSED TO ALL OF THIS are seduced and habituated into the basis of the corrupt system and how some of its worst features have been sold to us as "civic virtue,"  that replacing the actual morality of the Scriptures.  No doubt something like that along with the distracting purity policing,  also found in the scriptures,  permitted even many in the underclass to get seduced into the Solomonic regime, the colonial system under Persia and in Palestine during the Roman occupation.  It should never be forgotten the extent of French collaboration and merely passive acceptance of Nazi occupation in France and those occupied by some of the worst regimes in modern history.   Among the things we will have to do is to tell the truth about American history, including the Constitution and the sanctified idol of the Bill or Rights.    None of this is going to be easy,  none of it will happen on the grounds of secularism, it doesn't have what is needed to even face the truth.