the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh."

The energy of Moses' doxology includes:

(a) The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception.

 

(b) A review of an unlikely history of inversion in which imperial reality is nullified. (Obviously that is not the kind of history taught in the royal court school.)

 

(c) An asking for the enactment of freedom in dance, freedom in free bodies that Pharaoh could no longer dominate (15:20). (We may ponder about the loss of freedom for our bodies and about the ideological dimensions of the current wrath about human sexuality.)

 

(d) A culmination of enthronement, the assertion of the one reality. Egypt could not permit or tolerate: "The Lord will reign for ever and ever" (Exodus 15:18) (We must learn that such doxologies are always polemical; the unstated counter theme, only whispered, is always "and not Pharaoh.")

It is only a poem and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.

It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in the empire. Only where there is doxology is there any emergence of compassion, for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.

I shall not now explore further the second and third Mosaic memories of sojourn and Sinai, although that is worth doing. The wilderness theme asks about immobilizing satiation; the Sinai theme speaks of God's freedom for the neighbor. Taken altogether, the Mosaic tradition affirms three things:

1. The alternative lief is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community.

2. This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality.

3. This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire.

Definition of doxology

: a usually liturgical expression of praise to God

That's the Merriam Webster online definition of "doxology" since someone asks.

So much in this summation of the first chapter of The Prophetic Imagination that I can't but touch on a few things. The importance of how things are said, what things are said, the "language of managed reality" such as rules in the United States, in which a gangster given a "reality TV show" to play a ruthless dictator has become president as a result of the lies the Newt Gingrich era Republican Party told about Hillary Clinton, carried dutifully by the free press from the sewers of the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair right up to NPR and the New York Times (one of the most persistent carriers of those lies right up through the 2016 elections disaster). And the results are the Pharaonic moral atrocity that we face as a new, managed "reality" made real. That language of managed reality is what results when mass media can lie without any restraint.

Why it should be a surprise to anyone that venues of peddling lies constructed to sell appealing to the most easily accessed and worst parts of us, lies bent to the most nefarious ends is certainly one of the most important failures of the theories of modernism that created those conditions. The truth will out but only when it's too late to prevent the worst disasters wrought with lies and unreality and advertising gimmicks and strategies market tested. I read this passage and when I got to the oh, so familiar "language of empire" , familiar from the soc-sci babble about the commercial side of the media "production and schedule and market" the truth of what Walter Brueggemann said forty-two years ago became so clear. When the Republican-fascist Henry Luce's magazine claimed that Mussolini made the trains run on time and Rome's traffic run smoothly, when Hollywood and TV and Wall Street said that what the country needed was a business executive to be president, that's what the are calling for. Well, we have one.

As important as that characterization of empire and its language is important, as important is the point about the necessity of doxology, of the praise of God in words and in dance - expressed in the concrete being of our bodies - as being deadly to the Pharaonic tendencies, the tendencies of those with earthly power to control us and enslave us and rob us and kill us, to turn into gangsters. The point about the power of doxology to cut "through the ideology that pretends to be a given" is as important as any other because, after a lifetime of falling for one after another ideology, "democratic socialism" being the last one, I have come to see that all of them carry the germ of that tendency. The past two election cycles of seeing how many Greens, how many "democratic socialists" how many "libertarians" helped install Trump - after seeing them help the Rehnquist Court install Bush II - AND SEEING IN 2020 HOW MANY OF THEM ARE WILLING TO DO IT AGAIN, I'm fed up with all of them.

I am convinced that the secular left will always have the same effect it has had all along, of enabling the empire instead of opposing it because that has been its record as opposed to the record of the non-secular left. And I think one of the most basic reasons for that is that the ideological basis of secularism in scientistic, materialistic atheism or "agnosticism" is inevitably lacking exactly the thing talked about in this passage. If you have nothing that goes beyond that with sufficient motivating force to move you to break from imperial reality AND COMPASSION AS A MORAL REQUIREMENT IS NECESSARY TO FORM THE COMMUNITY TO DO THAT IN REALITY INSTEAD OF IN THE EVER DEFERRED FUTURE is among the strongest things about that.

Note: I am experimenting with typing out these posts on a text editor that doesn't impose formatting to see what that does to get over my inability to edit HTML on the New Blogger. That might be something that works or it might be something that doesn't. My inclination is to go simpler and less expensive (Feather Pad and Leaf Pad being freeware) and using computers that other people have junked as well as the smallest Raspberry Pi rig I can put together. That part of it is kind of fun, as well as finding places I can access WiFi from without going into it.

I will be having to make radical changes in how I do things because I'm in the same boat so many millions of others who can't make a living are right now. But more about that later. 

 

Update:  I should have included the link to Exodus 15 since, starting with the Song of Moses, mentioned in the passage posted a couple of days ago,  that is what this is about.  This is the Jewish Publications Society edition of 1917. 

where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion

Third, the great song of Moses is the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated song in Israel.  The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free One and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom.  In his recent typology David Noel Freedman places this song at the head of the period of militant Mosaic Yahwism.  By a study of divine names he observes the repeated use of the name,  the very name of freedom which Egypt couldn’t tolerate and the freedom of slaves could not anticipate.  The speaking of the name already provides a place in which an alternative community can live.  So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what his name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken, and by whom it might be spoken.  There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom.  Egypt is wont to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers,  but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for that.  

Prophesy cannot be separated very long from doxology or it will either wither or become ideology.  Abraham Heschel has seen most wonderously how doxology is the last full act of human freedom and justice.  The prophetic community might ponder what the preconditions of doxology are and what happens when doxologies that address this One are replaced by television jingles that find us singing consumerism ideology to ourselves and to each other.  In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.  

This section of the book is long and complex and I decided to post the entire thing because it serves as an indispensable introduction to the rest of the book.  It continues on, which I hope to get to tomorrow, but this point, in 2020 when the Mammonist Trump and his goon Barr and the rest of the crooks and gangsters of his regime, joined in by "Reverends" sons of "reverends," bishops and cardinals, are doing exactly what Walter Brueggemann talks about here,  they talk about someone they call “God” but it is not more than a “jingle” a slogan, a button to push to trigger a particular hate-filled, resentful, fearful demographic who like their god domesticated and in service to the stable order they like, one which the Republican party and the media that has served it and, now, the Roberts court in order to do exactly what is said will inevitably be the result “In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.”  The very same people who stole babies from their parents and put them in cages with plastic blankets and who UNSURPRISINGLY, CONSIDERING THAT RECORD,  insist on policies that have gotten more than one and a half thousand Americans YET  killed in a pandemic they are making worse and are about to make catastrophically worse in school openings so Trump can save face - which he won't - are reciting those slogans to rope in some reliable suckers - they hope.  And, based on the insights of the Hebrew Prophets,  Walter Brueggemann anticipated that happening more than forty years ago.

That is so potent and timely a point that I’m not going to comment more on it just now.   

"news just for this moment and just for this community"

Continuing on with The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann:

Second, in 11:7 there is a wondrous statement of a new reality that surely must energize: "But against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast,  not a dog shall growl; that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel."  In our scholarly ways we may miss the power here.  It is too terrible to be contained in "a doctrine of election."  It occurs not in a doctrine but in a narrative and an unproven memory that we must let stand in all its audaciousness.  It is not reflective theology but news just for this moment and just for this community.  The God who will decide is not the comfortable god of the empire, so fat and well fed as to be neutral and inattentive.  Rather, it is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests.  It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and by being tolerant to cast eternal votes for the way things are.  

We may pause here to note the kind of theological reflection in which this primal prophetic narrative engages.  There is not much here for the systematic theologian.  No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity.  It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.  Empires prefer systematic theologians who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the pubic good.  But what an energizing statement!  It is like Andrew Young, who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking.  The affirmation whispered in the barracks is that he is "up front" about his commitments and Pharaoh is not going to like it. 

Since at a distance, this bald statement is high theology.  It is the gospel;  God is for us.  In an empire no god is for anyone.  They are old gods who don't care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues.  For Moses and Israel energizing comes not out of sociological strategy  or hunches about social dynamic but out of the freedom of God.  And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points of human community. 

I had to remind myself of what Andrew Young was doing during this period.  He was a former Congressman and a long time civil rights lawyer and activist who was a mayor of Atlanta after the book was published in 1978.   At the time this was written, was Jimmy Carter's media establishment designated "controversial" Ambassador to the UN who took a number of, indeed, controversial stands and made some controversial statements, some spot on right, some very wrong, in retrospect though the ones I was reminded of wouldn't have seemed so at the time.  I doubt Walter Brueggemann would have predicted how apt his choice to mention him in this context was, due to the stands he took that seemed right to him at the time.  For example, he supported the disastrously misjudged Robert Mugabe in a disputed election which was a disaster for Zimbabwe as Mugabe morphed into a terrible despot.  The issue in supporting him was the still hot one of "anticolonialism" which is somewhat understandable, no one knew he would turn so bad, though that should no longer bet so surprising in a general turned politician in the world context. With some exceptions, generals, colonels, etc. along with CEOs usually lack any inclination to value democracy and respect for the common People. 

What is apt in this context is that for all its mistakes, many of which he could not have foreseen, Andrew Young's Ambassadorship is an example of the kind of prophetic imagination that is, after all, all too human in its scope of vision, its particular references and its inability to guess the future.  He embodied what Brueggemann said about that, [A prophet is someone] "who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking."  If Breuggemann's idea to use Young as an example was prophetic, I'd love to be able to ask him.  

It is one of the things that William Blake so frustratingly mimicked from the Bible Prophets, that his articulation in poetry was at times so obscure and confusing that even some Blake scholars say the "prophetic" poems are incomprehensible.  And sometimes when you think you can apprehend some of what he is getting at, sometimes it seems rather wrong.  I used to think his view of "enlightenment" erudition in the form of Voltaire and Rousseau, that Blake's use of "The atoms of Democritus and Newton's particles of light," was kind of naive.   Now I think it shows what a genius he was in assigning a higher place to this exact revelation. 

One of the things that hasn't been brought up about those who practiced prophetic imagination is the courage it takes, the willingness to, in the kind of contingency Breuggemann so brilliantly describes here, the willingness to speak and decide before all the data are in and to risk being mocked, dismissed, or even killed for being wrong is a big part of it.  It doesn't seem to be much of a career path for careful people, people who make their way in the empires of the world.  

One thing I am convinced of, the vocation of a Christian now and for a long time will be to condemn the kind of "christianity" that is not only totally at ease within the empires of the world, but who have substituted its gods for not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses, but the one of Jesus as well.   And they've kidnapped Jesus and are holding him hostage.   I don't think it's time to forego any religious fights among those who take religion seriously.  Andrew Young's example is exactly the right one to look at, for all its problems.  I wish I had the time to look up to see what Jimmy Carter, also embattled and with the responsibility to prevent the disaster he, alas, could not, even as the media, corporate and "leftist" were attacking him over everything he did.  That's something we will see if Biden becomes president, though, in his case, I don't think he's going to be worried about his own reelection.  

-----------------------------

I'm tempted to go into the annoyingly cute Hollywood, Broadway view of God and the angels, etc. as bureaucrats and their CEO, though, considering how God had been marked as an accountant keeping records of sins (not so much mentioning merits, in that accounting) and coming up with the tally of whether we go to heaven or hell, maybe that's a deeper issue the misconceptions about God.  We would seem determined to make him more like Pharaoh than the Bible should lead us to expect.  In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, Jesus had a pretty radical point to make about God's freedom to be generous quite at odds with the common human conceptions of the human virtue of fairness.  It was certainly at odds with accounting and the bottom line.  Maybe that's what we need to understand,  even the virtue of fairness is a human makeshift that God exceeds, in general, perhaps, quite possibly, quite likely "at the breaking points of human community," where things have already gone dangerously out of that context.  The contingency of prophetic imagination and its risks are in answer to that.  It even risks getting it wrong because we'll never have all the data in.  The realm prophetic imagination is relevant to doesn't have the luxury to pretend that will ever be true in human affairs. 

Sunday Compensation Radio Drama - Rod Serling - O'Toole From Moscow

 

O'Toole From Moscow 

91.7 WVXU and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music joined forces, led by our Media Beat blogger John Kiesewetter, to coproduce and present the radio adaptation of O'Toole From Moscow, a Rod Serling comedy about confusion between Russians and the Cincinnati Reds at the height of the "Red Scare."

CCM students recorded the radio play, which was directed by Richard Hess, CCM professor of acting and directing, in Cincinnati Public Radio's Corbett Studio. Rod Serling’s daughter, Anne Serling, came to town and serves as the play’s narrator. [There is also an interesting interview with her at the link.]

ABOUT THE SHOW

Rod Serling's "O'Toole From Moscow" aired only once, in a live one-hour television broadcast on "NBC Matinee Theatre" at 3 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12, 1955. It was not filmed or recorded. Chuck Connors – best known as TV's "The Rifleman" (1958-63) after a brief career with the Chicago Cubs (1951) – starred as the Russian security officer who ended up playing outfield for the Cincinnati Reds. The cast also included John Banner (later known as Sergeant Schultz on "Hogan's Heroes") and Baseball Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher as the Reds manager.

Serling knew a lot about Cincinnati and the Reds. He started his career at Cincinnati's WLW TV/Radio in 1950, after graduating from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He lived in Cincinnati until fall of 1954, the year Reds slugger Ted Kluszewski led the Major Leagues with 49 home runs and 141 runs batted in.

THE PLOT

In Serling's script, a Russian consulate staffer named Mushnick is being sent back from New York to Moscow for re-education because of his high absenteeism due to attending Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field. So Mushnick and a muscular naive Russian security officer named Joseph Bishofsky hop a train and go west as far as their money will take them – to Cincinnati.

Bishofsky panics in Cincinnati and goes to the Reds office and turns himself in to a bewildered general manager. Mushnick bursts in to explain that Joseph – whom he calls "Joseph O'Toole" – is an outfielder wanting a tryout. The Reds give O'Toole a shot, and he ends up being a better slugger than Kluszewski – until the Russians find him.

CREDITS

"O'Toole From Moscow" is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

PERFORMERS

Matt Fox

Jack Steiner

Lucas Prizant

Chandler Bates

Frankie Chuter

Cameron Nalley

Dustin Parsons

Austin James Cleri

Narrator: Anne Serling

Director: Richard Hess

Dialect and Vocal Coach: Sammi Grant

Executive Producer: Richard Eiswerth

Producer: John Kiesewetter, who also adapted the script for radio.

Recording Engineer: Josh Elstro

Special Thanks to Reds organist John Schutte.

It's interesting to hear a Rod Serling comedy, not exactly what he's famous for.  It's a period piece from the world I knew as a young child, lots has gone on from then.  I do think the script shows the difference between a drama written with visuals assumed and one in which the writer doesn't have those to depend on.  Serling was noted as a very experienced radio drama writer before he got involved with TV, a medium he often seems to have longed to return to and which he did, briefly, revive again in the United States after it was considered quite moribund.   He has said that he liked the freedom he had as a radio drama writer, the cheap cost of production and the exigency to have ever newer material meant management would let stuff on that they wouldn't if the production costs were higher.   His famous Twilight Zone TV shows, the early ones, reflected some of the opportunities he'd come to expect with a minimal overhead, reportedly not so much as it became more popular.  I'm not a huge sports fan so some of it went right past me but it reminded me of being there while my father and grandfather listened to ball games on the radio on hot summer days.  Not so many night games in the 50s, as I recall.  

We Face The Hardness Of Heart We See Now And Overthrow It Or We Will Face Even Harder Hardness And Very Soon - The Plague Cycle Is As Timely As Could Be

It is precisely the prophet who speaks against such managed data and who can energize toward futures that are genuinely new and not derived. I suggest three energizing dimensions to this narrative that are important for prophetic imagination.

First, energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness. That darkness which is frightening in its authority appears here in the hardness of heart. That motif pervades this strange text. At every turn, it is affirmed not that Pharaoh’s heart is hard but that Yahweh hardens it. It is Yahweh’s peculiar way of bringing the empire to an end. It is Yahweh’s odd way to present the possibility of historical freedom. There is more here than can be understood, but whatever else it means it begins in the conviction that God works on both sides of the street. The despairing ones do not see how a newness can come, how evil can be overcome, or how futures can arise from the totalitarian present. This awesome programmatic statement affirms that something is “on the move” in the darkness that even the lord of the darkness does not discern. It is strange that neither Egypt nor Israel understands the movement in the darkness! Israel is no more privy to God’s freedom than Egypt is. And when Israel yearns to know too much about that freedom, Israel easily plays the role of Egypt. In any case, this narrative knows that the darkness may be trusted to him as it surely cannot be trusted to Pharaoh. That is energizing because the alternative community dares to affirm how it will turn out. It knows that Pharaoh does not know. It knows, but it does not understand. It knows because it has submitted, and that submission began when the cry was cried toward the free one. There is new energy in finding one who can be trusted with the darkness and who can be trusted to be more powerful than the one who ostensibly rules the light.

It is one of the things that I remember wondering about, why God kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart, leading to ever greater plagues against, not only Pharaoh but also the People of Egypt in general. That’s true in the Prophetic tradition that hardness of heart is a recurring accusation against the Children of Isreal, too, and in the period in which they had their own nation only to give it up in the face of dangers and temptations. Brueggemann’s analysis of this difficult issue is one that makes sense in human experience, putting your faith in a static seeming security that you hope you can depend on is comforting but it leads nowhere. We in the United States are still not over those conventional, comforting and totally failing institutions and idols and largely mythological national myths but those have led us to favor ignorance and corruption and a lying promise of secure prosperity.

It isn’t as if we haven’t been warned by our own prophets, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Cone, as I pointed out last week, John Oliver when he was speaking prophetically, even as the anti-prophetic voices that dominate the mass media and the Pharaonic entertainment regime that brought us Reagan and then Trump, and encouraged the moral and intellectual corruption that has led us into hell has ignored and led away from those warnings. That is not a surprise, as I have always needed to point out, truth is often hard to take and it cannot be made palatable and icky sweet in ways that lies can because the substrate of a lie is not in hard realism but in malleable, ductile, shapable, deceptive opportunism. That is something that the judges and justices have either not realized or they have intentionally used, that fact makes lies more powerful than the truth until the truth prevails and its hard lessons cannot be put off any longer, but by then the crooks, gangsters, sadists and their minions in the legal profession and in judging and “justice”ing are retired or dead.

Anyone who wants to see hardness of heart that we will have to get past to get onto a future can look at the Supreme Court that recently ruled that there is no obligation to provide prisoners with ways to avoid the deadly plague we are going through. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas are little pharaohs with hearts as hard as osmium, what we do with that hardness of heart is up to us. We can use it to energize us to dump them or we can live with the even harder hardness that will come without us doing that.

 

The Great Big Little Word That Starts With "Y" And What Has To Be Done To Cut It Down To Size - And Now The Worst Yet

That thing I thought was going to hit on Friday hit yesterday so I didn't get anything posted.   I'll try to make up for that today.   If things go as planned I'll post a radio drama for tonight.   

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.  And that's the optimistic way to see things.   We are having first hand experience of the danger we have gotten into by allowing some idiot creep in the Department of Justice effectively put presidents above the rule of law while they're in office and, of course, after they leave if they and their partners in crime were investigated and prosecuted the Republican enabling media would declare it "vindictive" or other such words to allow the criminals the media helped into office escape consequences.

 If we are lucky our experience with a made and criminally insane king will lead to a real American revolution that will prevent this happening again but it's not going to be easy to make that happen, we have to overcome a bunch of national mythologies about our distant and recent past

One of the earliest pieces I posted online said that Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon was one of the worst things an American president had done in the past fifty years.  I slammed the Kennedys who gave Ford a medal for doing it in the piece, which got some notice, not all of it positive.  Our establishment, even the "opposition" to the likes of Nixon likes the pretense that let Ford pardon the man who made him president, single handedly.    Which if it wasn't a blatant quid pro quo was suspected to be one with complete justification. But its effects on subsequent history could not any more obviously fostered even more corruption and law breaking among the party that produced and nurtured both Nixon and Ford.    If he had not pardoned Nixon and Nixon's crimes had been fully investigated and Nixon and more of his criminal associates had been prosecuted, convicted and punished the massive criminal regime that Reagan, Bush I and II and now the worst yet, Trump have run would likely have not happened.  

And note the adverb "yet" the criminality of  Bush II-Cheney had not yet become as blatantly, proudly, intentionally and self announcing as Trump's.    He and his criminal cohorts - De Joy is the current featured blatant criminal - have been flagrantly breaking the law to subvert the only thing that gives a government any legitimacy, the election and they are getting away with it because the Republicans in the Congress in the courts and, most of all, in the inaptly named "Department of Justice" are all  criminals too.

If Trump wins OR IF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, THE COURTS, THE CONGRESS AND, MOST OF ALL THE MEDIA LETS THE TRUMP CRIME FAMILY AND ITS ASSOCIATES OFF WITHOUT THE MOST SEVERE PENALTIES, ESPECIALLY IN THE CONFISCATION OF WHAT THEY STOLE AND THE JAILING OF THE CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES, we should expect that "yet" to become operative.  It will prove, in the not at all distant future to be the most operative word in this whole thing. 

Now When Trump Does The Birther Number He's Breaking His Oath of Office.

I am not a great fan of the lawyer Neal Katyal who I find rather intentionally naive about his fellow lawyers in so many instances.*  But he did make a good point about Trump going the birther lie way about Kamala Harris, who is clearly, by legal definition and any common sense, non-racist one a natural born citizen of the United States.   Trump doing that as a lying media racist and candidate for president is one thing, but he had not taken an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of which the articles and amendments that support Kamala Harris's citizenship and eligibility to be  Vice President are a part makes him doing the racist flaming Newsweek thing a violation of his oath of office and, in an honest Senate, would be grounds for his conviction and removal from office.  Of course we don't have one of those so he's not going to be removed. 

This is exactly why a politician such as Kamala Harris should be able to sue toilet paper like Newsweek (as it is now) and a pro-racist  like Eastman for libel and slander.  This happening is a direct result of the Supreme Court making it absurdly permissible for them to lie like the North Korean media with total impunity.  And it's a permission that has been mastered by the American-fascist party, the Republicans in the way that even an intelligently decided decision made in good faith will be.   When it is as stupid as the line of "free speech-press" decisions that are being used to destroy democracy the court did most of that work for them.  Including the "liberal" Warren Court that started it.  

*  I'm not giving a link but the "point-counterpoint" style BS "other side" posted as further ass cover by Newsweek, by a UCLA law prof refuting the clear lies of his "friend" who set off birther 2.0 is a good example of the type, pretending the good faith of what was a blatantly dishonest and hypocritical act to sabotage Kamala Harris based in an appeal to racism.  Lawyers who have the backs of their worst colleagues are pretty useless when all of the points are considered. 

I don't trust lawyers who are "good friends" with the fascists among them.  They're like the "liberal" lawyers and judges who assued us that Alito was going to be a fair and impartial judge of the law and the merits of the case, a lie that everyone in the friggin' audience knew was a lie and those legal-liars lied it anyway.   Most of the contempt I've developed for lawyers, with some exceptions, is a result of that kind of collegial hypocrisy and professional mutual self-interest.  

The Fascists In The Media Are Pulling The Same Stuff On Harris They Did On Obama And It's Clear Why They're Doing It

Here's the profile of the Newsweek opinion editor who published the racist, birther lies of right-wing hack John Eastman against Kamala Harris and then co-wrote a blatantly dishonest ass cover piece at same,  TAKEN FROM THE FEDERALIST (fascist) SOCIETY WEBSITE:

Josh Hammer

Opinion Editor at Newsweek; Of Counsel at First Liberty Institute; syndicated columnist

Josh Hammer is opinion editor of Newsweek, of counsel at First Liberty Institute, a podcast contributor with BlazeTV and a syndicated columnist through Creators. A frequent pundit on political, legal and cultural issues, Josh is a constitutional attorney by training.

An outspoken conservative, Josh opines on conservative intellectual trends, contemporary domestic and foreign policy debates, constitutional and legal issues, and the intersection of law, politics and culture. He has been published by many other leading outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, National Review, First Things, the Daily Wire, Fortune magazine, Fox Business, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Jewish Journal and the American Mind, the Claremont Institute’s online journal of conservative thought. Josh previously served as the editor-at-large of the Daily Wire. His first piece of legal scholarship, on the topic of judicial supremacy, was published in 2020 by the University of St. Thomas Law Journal.

Josh is a college campus speaker through Young America's Foundation and a law school campus speaker through the Federalist Society. Prior to joining the Daily Wire, Josh worked at a large law firm and clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Josh has also served as a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute and as a law clerk for Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

Josh graduated from Duke University, where he majored in economics, and from the University of Chicago Law School. He lives in Dallas and is an active member of the State Bar of Texas.

It wasn't that long ago I warned here that you should be on the lookout for fascism when someone starts talking "liberty".  This guy's CV is all you need to know about the credibility of "Newsweek".  Though there are plenty more of his ilk all through the "respectable" media.

The Lack Of Faith Or Bad Faith Of So Many Make The Secular Left Impotent To Change Anything

The alternative consciousness wrought by Moses also provides a model for energizing.  Moses and this narrative create the sense of new realities that can be trusted and relied upon just  when the old realities had left us hopeless.  It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order.  Energizing is closely linked to hope.  We are energized not by that which we already possess but by that which is promised and about to given.  It is the tendency of liberals to rail and polemicize, but in the lack of faith or bad faith of so many it is not believed that something is about to be given.  Egypt was without energy precisely because it did not believe anything was promised and about to be given.  Egypt like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed.  If there is any point at which most of us are marginally co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns. 

"The alternative consciousness wrought by Moses also provides a model for energizing. . . . We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns."  

It's hard to say which things Walter Brueggemann says are the most important ones, he doesn’t tend to make insignificant points, but this seems to me to be among the most important things he has to say in this entire book.   

I happened to go look at one of the moderately popular lefty websites this morning to see if my predictions about how they would be taking Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential choice was coming true,  before typing out this post, and it was doom and gloom and nihilism and hopelessness and thoroughly steeped in the long, doomy-gloomy, nihilistic and hopeless culture of aging,college-credentialed, scientistic, modernist, materialist, atheist “leftism”.  Anyone who expects any change to come out of such people is risking only one thing, perpetual disappointment and following that dismal line to nowhere and nothing which the secular left has been on for a long time.  Of course, that might be better than when such people thought they were going to follow the bouncing dialect into Stalinism or Maoism and then onto an anarchist paradise before the sun went red giant and our constituent molecules would disperse and prove it had all been for nothing.   

Atheism is exactly like that as it even lacks the appeal of degenerate Mammonism, the motivator of Trump and Republican-fascism and, in fact, all such gangster regimes, including those of Stalin and Mao that those dead and dying off “idealists” of the secular past held up as a model to the West which considered them out of their minds. 

If you want change, don’t look for it being led by any of the above.  As I’ve never stopped pointing out, they’ve had the American left in the wilderness for much longer than Moses had the Children of Israel in one.

Strange Mood Or Summer Heat?

 I have had the oddest yen to find the piano score of Slaughter on 10th Avenue to play through it.  I don't know why, I've never had the inclination to play anything by Richard Rogers before in my life.   I know it mostly from the movie where the wonderful Eddie Albert (one of the most unjustly persecuted of those on the Hollywood blacklist) and Vera Zorina* did it to choreography by George Balanchine (Zorina was married to him).  I loved Eddie Albert, great work for a non-dancer.  

*  She remarried a few times, I think, after she and Balanchine divorced, her son with one of them was the fine composer the late Peter Lieberson. 

The empire is left to grieve over its days of not caring and its gods of order and its politics of injustice

 I am going to finish this section today because something seems to be developing that may keep me from posting tomorrow, we will see. 

Curiously, the criticism of cry is intensified as the narrative develops.  In the report of 11:6 and 12: 30 the mighty empire cries out:

And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt as there has never been, nor ever shall be again.  (11:6)

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians;  and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where one was not dead. (12:30)

Both times the cry concerns the killing of the firstborn, the ones born to rule.  That is highly ironic for now the self-sufficient and impervious regime is reduced to the role of a helpless suppliant.  The cry of Israel becomes an empowering cry; the cry of Egypt is one of dismantling helplessness.  But is too late.  History has begun and the initiative has been taken up by the new God for the new community.  The empire is left to grieve over its days of not caring and its gods of order and its politics of injustice, which are all now ended.  Criticism has reached its goal.

You hope that we won’t need to get to the last of the curses before history restarts on us but we will see.  I think it is more than somewhat believable that the United States, as it has developed in the past fifty years could well l come to a simliar denouement.  

I am reminded in all of this citation of consequences of injustice to note that Paul in Romans talks about the reality of God being shown in the order of how things work, of how life, reality, the universe makes morality and immorality obvious even to the gentiles who never knew the real God and who did not discern God from that reality they witnessed.   I can only think he meant this kind of thing,the central narrative of the Law for which he counted himself of one of the party of zealot, the Pharisees.  In Brueggemann's reading of these central texts, it is incredible how he picks up on details and threads that I never noticed in a lifetime of knowing the narrative superficially.   Or what I now know is a superficial manner of knowing them. 

 

Someone Wants To Know How To Dump Windows

Someone asks how I changed from Windows to Linux.  This is just how it happened for me.  People who know more about it probably could give you a more linear description.  I'm assuming you're going  to be trying to revive a computer you haven't been using for a while before you try it on your main computer.  If you bother to do that.

First by a lot of nervous reading and watching how-to videos to get over my phobia about making changes to my computers. In my case I was driven by frustration into getting over that, it was a computer that I bought used and "refurbished" by the manufacturer with the putrid Windows 8, which I opted to replace with the free Windows 10 in its original version when that was offered, Windows 8 being a universally hated flop.   I never knew why there was no Windows 9, now I don't care. 

Then when I was getting sick and tired of the interminable Windows 10 involuntary updates which culminated in a widespread disaster a couple of springs back (everyone in my family who was using Windows 10 had their computer crash that night) I was ready to tell Windows to jump out of one. 

I went through the baroque complexity of trying to download and officially verify the soundness of several Linux distros (there seem to be hundreds which are free and downloadable online) but opted when I couldn't figure out the complex verification to buy some super cheap discs that had the OS on them,  I got Linux Mint Mate (pronounced "maté"),  a version of Puppy Linux* and the aforementioned Tiny Core.  Of those Mint was the one I chose to use as a replacement for Windows and I have never once been sorry I did. I could have bought a whole stack of discs of different Linux distros to try and still paid less than Windows costs.  Not to mention the costs of the vitally needed malware protection which, so far as I've read, is not much of an issue with Linux.  I haven't run across any problem with malware while using it but, then, I'm very careful about what I click on.  I never open attachments.  Well, I did once when an author I sent a fan letter to kindly sent me two plays he'd written as attachments.  I wish I could post them as radio plays. 

After writing that piece yesterday  I found there is at least one other place who will sell inexpensive OS discs and USBs online, Linux Distros on CD  but haven't yet bought anything from them so I don't know how their service is.  I doubt anyone would do this kind of business for nefarious reasons, though I could be wrong.  That's a disclaimer.  Maybe I'll try one of theirs and do an update.  I love to promote tiny businesses that stick it to the giants. 

I have gotten less nervous about downloading distros and figure if the file size is the same as it's supposed to be, it's probably not going to be a problem, though it could be.  That's another disclaimer.

I first copied anything I thought I still wanted on the old computer to a thumb drive.  Then I put the disc with Linux on it into the disc drawer and rebooted the computer catching the option to boot from a CD/DVD before it booted from the hard disc, which on my computer was F12.  It was tricky, it goes by fast in the corner of the screen,  I had to do it a few times before I caught it.  Then I followed the onscreen instructions for booting into Linux, which you might want to look at that way before you choose to install it, unless you go for a dual boot with a partition (Search "dual boot Linux Windows" to find scads of instructions, I've never done it) and keep part of your hard drive a Windows machine.  

Installing it without creating a separate partition for Windows will wipe out everything on the disc and replace it with a clean version of Linux. 

As I said the first time I did it I didn't click on the option to install 3rd party drivers etc. which was a mistake as it kept me from being able to use the WiFi.  Other than that, I don't really have any advice on how to do it.  There are myriads of suggestions from Linux users online, some are better than others, many are full of incomprehensible jargon and expectations that you understand more than you might care to learn.  A lot of them figure you know how to code in Python computer language.  It's not a very hard language to figure out but if you don't know it it's not advisable to try on your own.  Though, if you crash it, just reinstall it and try again.  As I said, I'm assuming you're going  to be trying to revive a computer you haven't been using for a while before you try it on your main computer.  If you bother to do that.

* I got Puppy Linux because it's so small you can easily fit it on a thumb drive and, reportedly, you can use it on computers at places like libraries and to test used computers you might think of buying.  Though with the pandemic I've yet to use it for those.  I have used it uninstalled on some of my computers to test it and sometimes I can get the WiFi to work on it, sometimes not, and I can't tell you what's different from attempt to attempt. 

I've also done the same with the Haiku OS which is not a Linux system, though I didn't manage to get the internet going with it. Maybe I'll try it again.  It's nice to break out of the Windows-Mac OS hegemony.   

ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place

Beginning with the whole paragraph I ended with last time from The Prophetic Imagination:

That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the no-gods of Egypt. In 5:8 

[And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.  JPS 1917]*

and 15 

[Then the officers of the children of Israel came and cried unto Pharaoh, saying: ‘Wherefore dealest thou thus with thy servants?  JPS 1917]

there is still a cry to the Pharaoh, still a looking to the empire for help and relief. “Therefore they cry, let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.  Then the foreman of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh.  . . .

By the middle of the plague cycle Israel has disengaged from the empire,  cries no more to it, expects nothing of it, acknowledges it  in no way, knows it cannot keep its promises, and knows that nothing is either owed it or expected of it.  That is the ultimate criticism which leads to dismantling.  

In the narrative criticism moves and builds.  The grieving cry learns to turn away from false listeners and turn toward the one who can help.  Prophetic criticism, as Dorothee Soell has suggested, consists in mobilizing people to their real restless grief and in nurturing them away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in response.  Surely history consists primarily in speaking and being answered, in crying and being heard.  If that is true it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered.  And if the task of prophesy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place. 

The radicalism of this passage, its depth of reading of the text to find things in it I certainly never noticed or read anyone else pointing out is  

astonishing and, for me at least, inspiring.  In the last several years of re-engagement with the Jewish-Christian Scriptures I am constantly struck at the depth of understanding of human consciousness, human society, human history and the nature of human evil and what has worked to overcome it.   Compared to this the most radical of secular articulation of the world is pathetically partial, incomplete and inadequate, even when it goes somewhat deeper than the typical discourse on these things.

Of course, my purpose in advocating the reading of Brueggemann’s great work and the texts and scholars he cites is to address our own oppression under the cartoon Pharaoh-Herod-Nero who is piddling as the world burns and his like in the world in the age of Billionaires and how to end it.  I am a political blogger who knows through long experience and study of the failure of secular politics that politics isn’t enough.  Not nearly enough. 

What the American left, other lefts, need to do is not only to stop expecting that capitalism, markets, the economic and other elites will ever address our vital needs and legitimate grievances, in the forms those are most explicitly manifested and most commonly conceived, we must also face the fact that the other no-gods of our idolatry, the Constitution, the “enlightenment”, Marxism, socialism, the social sciences, economic theory, “theory”, the unnamed meta-god of ideology the ism-ism is not going do it either because they and academia and the media are, in fact, largely the agents of the same power that has produced the series of gangsters and their goons for the past century and a half who we are oppressed by.

The radicalism of the Mosaic accounts is beyond all of that. It is well for a contemporary leftist to consider that that definitively failed no-god of Marxism.  The radicalism of the book of Exodus is, I have come to believe, is a more radical departure from the capitalistic-industrial-modernist Pharaoh than the  academically-journalistically led, secular, materialistic, scientistic left can imagine because it is, in fact, not in radical opposition to the “right” it opposes but which it is just the other face of the Janus of never-ending sameness that goes on year, after year, after year.  In the meantime, people live and die lives of misery, here, and slavery and terror under the "alternative". 

* I have decided to set the imposition of some of the cited passages not included in Walter Brueggemann’s text in this way from an online edition of the 1917 Jewish Publications Society version.  That may change as this continues, obviously any future New Testament passages won’t be found in that source.  I’m not sure which version Brueggemann used in the passages he included in his text.  Just to be clear what I’m doing here as opposed to how he did it. 

De Facto Rank Choice For The VP In My Case

Didn't get my first choice for VP who was also my first choice for president, Elizabeth Warren but Kamala Harris was my second choice.   Now watch her get attacked in the pages of The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, on the Young Turks, Majority Report, etc.  as well as by the fascists. 

I am hoping that one of the things that happens this fall is that Biden and Harris win big enough so they will be able to ignore the play-left and then they pass a progressive agenda which will shut them up forever.  The disaster wrought by the Republicans in all three branches of the government, in governorships and legislatures is big enough so this election could give us the opportunity to make huge changes that will benefit us more than all of the absurd posturing of the play-left over my entire lifetime. The greatest advances in the lives of real people made in the past were not the ones the play-lefties of those periods achieved because they never had the power to make change.   

I also hope that the win is big enough that we can say to the Never Trump Republicans that it was their party and their ideas and claims which created yet another disaster, after the disasters of Reagan-Bush I and Bush II before this one.  That is a serial pattern now, it is the discrediting of the entire thing, especially the romantic ideas about businessmen and their efficiency and wisdom and the private sector and markets.  Trump as Bush II before him should have buried that absurd fantasy once and for ever. 

I hope there is a fast and hard push to expand the Supreme Court and other courts to destroy the stranglehold of Federalist Society fascism in the law.   I would announce right off, after the election that more justices will be appointed and that they will have to have an educational record of understanding mathematics and science to an extent which is pretty much entirely missing on a court whose cases often hinge - or should hinge - on mathematics and science none of them are able to fathom.   I would require any judges or justices to reject the Federalist Society and unitary executive forms of fascism that are a clear and present danger to egalitarian democracy.   I would start out with a requirement that they reject the doctrine that corporations are "persons" with rights enumerated in the Constitution and that money equals speech. 

Overdue One Year Report On Switching To Linux

It's been well over a year since I made the switch from Windows to Linux and can report that I have had absolutely no regrets about having done so.   Unfortunately the great company that I found through the wonderful Distribution Watch which sent me several discs of OS systems  and an enormous repository of applications went out of business shortly after I gave them some free plugs here.   I don't know if there is another such company but if there were I'd expect they would be as generous as the man who ran that one was,  I've really enjoyed the generosity of the Linux world, so different from the Windows-Mac corporations.  

Just in case anyone is curious,  if you've got an old Windows laptop that sort of still works, I'd recommend installing  something like Linux Mint on it to see if you like it.  Make sure you opt to install 3rd party software when it asks you if you want to.   First time I didn't do that and I couldn't get the WiFi to work, second time, no problem.  I also learned my lesson that after more than 30 years of picking clever, hard to guess passwords, no one in the world friggin' cares about what is on my computer so I just used a single character.  No one who wanted to break into my computer is going to have the patience to go through every available one to find out which one it is.  I don't do anything that would reward that kind of obsession, anyway. 

I've revived three ancient computers to useful condition with various distributions of Linux, though I have not yet tried to revive my, alas, once beloved tower that I couldn't part with.  I am not enough of a geek to try to get Tiny Core on it - I'd have to get it onto a floppy.  I'd ask a young'un to help me but I don't want to risk the exposure that might require. 

The Rejection of Resignation Is Only The Beginning

But I think what happens in the Exodus is the primal scream that permits the beginning of history. In the verb “cry out” (za’ak) there is a bit of ambiguity because on the one hand it is a cry of misery wretchedness with some self-pity, while it functions for the official filing of a legal complaint. The mournful one of the plaintiff. As Erhardt Gartenberger has observed, it is characteristic of Israel to complain rather than lament; that is Israel does not voice resignation but instead expresses a militant sense of being wronged with the powerful expectation that it will be heard and answered. Thus the history of Israel begins in the day when its people no longer address the Egyptian gods who will not listen and cannot answer. The life of freedom and justice comes when they risk the freedom of the free God against the regime.

The grieving of Israel, perhaps the and surely complaint self-pity but never resignation, is the beginning of criticism. It is made clear that things are not as they should be, not as they are not as they were promised and not as they must be and will be. Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power:

"I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their suffering, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians."  (Exod. 3:7-8)

"And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come tome, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians  oppress them. Come, I will send you . . . ."  (Exod. 3:9-10)

That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the non-gods of Egypt. . . .

I would expect that for a lot of you as for me, when I read that the first thing that comes to mind is the great Black Lives Matter protests and the other demonstrations against the oppression meted out to our own people who are in an analogous position to the Children of Israel in the Exodus account, who reject resignation. Which is very good but it is only the beginning.

 That is a kind of rejection of resignation and an appearance of genuine grievance that is mimicked by the supporters of the American regime in the anti-mask, anti-social-distancing and pro-Trumpian fascist entity and the cabloidized media will certainly cover as being the equivalent if Biden become president and they do to him what they did to Obama, the first Black president and Hillary Clinton, the first woman to ever win the vote in a presidential election. That mimicking of legitimate protest by their oppressors is the equivalent of what Pharaoh’s magicians did in the Exodus account of them producing the first two effects that Aaron did in bringing the first two of the seven plagues as a way of blunting their effectiveness. I don’t know if the intention was to contrast the difference between the genuine religion of Moses to that which could, by artifice produce some of the same appearances but whose power would not suffice to free the Children of Israel (as those first two plagues did not) but I take in that the warning that the secular means of the secular left will not do that either. They have certainly not worked very well in the period after the assassination of Martin Luther King jr. And, in that vein, it should be remembered that the next four which Pharoah’s establishment experts could not imiatate didn’t do it either. It was the most extreme of the plagues that forced Pharaoh to let the Chilren of Israel go and almost as soon as they left he went after them in the way that American slave power successfully did during the period of legal slavery AND IN THE RE-IMPOSITION OF OPPRESSIVE SERVITUDE AND TERROR IN THE JIM CROW ERA when one of the Founders’ safety nets for slavery, the Electoral College, got their collaborator, Rutherford Hayes in office.

And, as it also got first Bush II and then Trump into it.

I could go on and on about the deceptive power of secularism, mere legal wrangling about the "right way" to apply the imperial law, the Constitution,  as a means of the present day left making progress, in which it won’t no matter what temporary gains are made which our recent history, especially under that other boon to slavery, the Supreme Courts self-granted power of nullification of duly adopted laws, are easily lost. Especially through the corruption of that other boon to slavery, the anti-democratically constituted Senate brings.

Where Has This Been All These Years? Hiding In The Light?

Being officially a low-vision person who has to blow things up to large size to see them on the screen,  I have been led to using dark mode, white letters on a dark background, more and more.  I just installed the Dark Reader extension on FireFox and it's great.  It might extend the time I'm able to use a computer,  if things get much worse.   Wish I'd found it years ago.  Now to see if I can get it on other browsers. 

And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism

But the criticism has another dimension.  Plastaras has seen that the narrative of liberation began with the grieving complaint of Israel in Exodus 2:23-25:

And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage and cried out for help,  and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant. . . . And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition.”

I will urge later that the real criticism began in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things all all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room.  And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.  

As it happened, yesterday’s New York Times had an example as reported by Elizabeth Dias, a religion reporter, of what happens to those who have bought onto that imperial pretense for an imaginary imperial past AS CHRISTIANITY! which never was as they imagine it AND NEVER WAS MUCH IN LINE WITH THE GOSPEL OR THE PROPHETIC TRADITION and which in the Republican-fascist period meets head on with the reaction to the empire of our racist, inequality, especially as embodied in a Black president and a Woman candidate for the presidency, in reaction to those who have been moving the items genuine grievances of the imperial past and today.  In which the white evangelicals in a very large majority in and around Sioux City, Iowa signed onto the program of probably the closest thing we've had to an de facto pagan president, Donald Trump who went there to announce, 

“Christianity will have power, If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

Or,  “Trump is your shepherd, you shall not want.”  a promise as bad as the character of the as-seen-on-TV huckster and New York City real-estate gangster who made that promise of a worldly kingdom to them in exchange for their souls.  Though it is certain that that real estate will be as "not as advertised" as everything else Trump has ever peddled.  Yet the imperial imagination of the self-righteous “christians” in the article lap it up.   

Though, and this needs to be always remembered,  not so much in the evangelicals of color nor, as should also be pointed out, not even among even all white evangelicals. 

The whole article is as good an example of these people articulating their reason for supporting so enthusiastically a combination modern day Pharaoh, Herod, and Nero in exactly the triumphalist “Christianity” that arose after Constantine began that earliest domestication of the ultra-radical Gospel of Jesus and the long period of corruption through power set in.   In one of her essays about the modernist and earlier Christian denigration of the Mosaic tradition Marilynne Robinson asked the apt question of what the New Testament would have been like if it had included the violence, evil and oppression of official Christianity in a comparably long period as the Old Testament covers.  The entire collection of writing is a warning that even when you briefly manage to attain what the prophetic imagination offers, you are always in danger of giving it away or being seduced into abandoning it.  Looking at how the largely literate American people have been so seduced by such a vulgar, crass, absurd, bronzer painted and blonde dyed Trump should allow us to humbly understand how easy it was for those in the illiterate, impoverished, anxious past to give up their chance for a decent life under their own versions of Trump.  And that's not an exaggeration, accredited universities and colleges, WHICH SELL THEMSELVES AS "CHRISTIAN" IN CHARACTER  figure into the spectacle of Trumpian degenerate imperial rule. He made that self-deifying statement at one.   Many of his worst and most publicly sycophantic promoters are products of the most elite of our secular institutions of higher learning.  

We should always be humbled by our own unwillingness to live a decent life with all of our advantages when looking on the sins of our ancestors in that very same regard.   Instead of looking down on "bronze age goat herders" we should look down on ourselves who are doing far worse things than they did,even as asses out of Harvard like Pinker soothe us with idiotic ahistorical nonsense about this being a golden age.

And the kind of domesticated god of “christianity” which Bruggemann has already talked about in a more general context is not the sole property of evangelical Protestantism, I’m very familiar with something perhaps earlier and more poisonous in the kind of Catholicism that now despises Pope Francis but which, I assure you, despised good Pope St. John XXIII and Vatican II before Francis. The same kind of thing on display among the reactionary Dutch Reformed Trump supporters in their embrace of anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic violently nationalistic and, lest it be forgotten, racist self-consecrated god,  Donald Trump, a man who has not only lived a life of sacrilege and scandal  but, as is always more important to such people, when he has explicitly said it in public and as captured on tape, is fully on display in not only the millionaire-billionaire financed neo-integralism as funded by the like of Tim Bush, but is lavishly on display in the Catholic hierarchy in such figures as Cardinals Raymond Burke,  Timothy Dolan, and a number of others, especially as appointed by JPII and Benedict XVI and internationally by the likes of Bishop Carlo Maria Vigano and Cardinal Robert Sarah.   

Don't Let The Changes of Names, Faces And Details Of The Narrative Blind You To The Repetition Of This Story Here and Now

To try to avoid the HTML oddities of New Blogger, I am trying going back to something I’d done in the past but gave up out of laziness, typing posts into my word processor instead of Blogger’s to see if I can’t avoid the HTML and other font problems that I’m having with this “New Blogger” which seems to be messing up things in ways I can’t figure out how to fix. It might be slower than typing directly into Blogger but we’ll see if it’s worth the effort.

Before going on with Walter Brueggemann’s numbered points about the nature of the alternative way of thinking and living Moses presented I’ll point out that if you want to consider this a kind of eccentric and narrow commentary on what Bureggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination, I began with going through the text, proper of the book on August 1, with a post about the front material of the book on July 17^th. I would recommend you either borrow or get the book and read it for yourself, I will certainly be leaving some of it out of this if for no other reason than I suspect typing the entire book into these posts would violate fair use – though with Brueggemann writing at this level every paragraph is worth consideration. I had thought of recommending this for you what I’m considering it for myself, a sort of autodidactic self-given course in the book to the extent that can be done without taking the bus to the state university library to look up the citations that I am not familiar with or have at my home. But saying that sounded kind of pretentious, “eccentric and narrow commentary” is less embarrassing as well as more apt.

(2) The alternative consciousness wrought through Moses is characterized by criticizing and energizing. I will pursue this in more detail later, but these comments are in order now. The narrative of the Exodus is designed to show the radical criticism and radical dismantling of the Egyptian empire. At the beginning (Exod. 5:7-11) the Egyptians are in full flower and full power. They “wheel and deal” and are subject to none:

"Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to ying words. So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people when out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh. . . . "

Notice how the language is shaped to evoke anger and bring to expression the deep resentment at this whole system. But the story moves. At the end, these same masters, taskmasers, and foremen are vanquished, humiliated, and bahished from history:

"The Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again." (14:13)

"Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore" (14:30).

From beginning to end the narrative shows, with no rush to conclude, how the religious claims of Egypitian gods are nullified by this Lord of freedom. The narrative shows, with delighted lingering, how the politics of oppression is overcome by the practice of justice and compassion. And between the beginning and the end the moment of dismantling is the plague cycle, a narrative that cannot be told too often, for it testifies to what cannot be explained, surely not by the reason of the empire. It happens in this way; In the first two plagues, concerning the turn of the Nile and the frogs, the powerful work of Moses and Aaron is matched by is Egyptian techne. Two plagues into the scene nothing is changed and the power of Egypt is no t challenge. The empire knows how to play “anything you can do, I can do better.” But then comes the third plague.

"Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and struck the dust of the earth, and there came gnats on man and beast;; all the dust of the earth became gnats throughout all the land of Egypt. The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not!" (Exod.8:17-18)

The Egyptian empire could not! The gods of Egypt could not! The scientists of the regime could not! The imperial religion was dead! The politics of oppression had failed ! That is the ultimate criticism, that the assured and alleged power of the dominant culture is now shown to be fraudulent. Criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their promises, which they cold not in the face of the free God. It is only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore.

If you don’t hear history rhyming with this, in the United States, in Britain, in Sweden and other places where the interests of Mammon have governed the response to Covid-19, I don’t know how to help you.  Money is the modernist-industrialist-scientistic god and pantheon that is, in fact, the same god as always happens in an imperial political-religious-elite state.  That is true whether it is cotton, lumber, tobacco, or retail and "financial services" that are the incarnation of Mammon - a false god of many faces.  In what seems to be happening at a number of school districts in my state and New Hampshire (and I have not the slightest doubt around the country) it would seem the exigencies and desires of the high school football industry is the Moloch to which our children, staff, teachers are even now being sacrificed to.*  The magic of PR and mass media propaganda and William Barr's abracadabra with the law playing the role of Pharaoh's magicians.  

We have yet to find a Moses in our story, if it is Biden, well, Moses said he wasn't any kind of great public speaker, just to find another rhyme with this history.  I will be on edge every time he is speaking extemporaneously until the election.   I'm not going to watch the debates, I stopped doing that several cycles ago but this time I expect it will be terrible.  I don't have any faith that the media clown "moderators" will do anything except go back to their typical habits.  

* One of the school districts one of my nieces lives in, the chair of the school board whois pushing to reopen the schools has mentioned, over and over again the needs of the sports programs - not mentioning academic concerns once.  That she also owns a restaurant which, no doubt, lost money during the all-too-brief shutdown last Spring may honestly be suspected to play a role in her need to pretend that everything is just buzzing merrily along.  That is the Trumpian line, as it was in Sweden and Britain and some other places which has made the plague here worse than in other places. What has made the USA a pariah state, leading to, oh, so ironically it being Trump's doing,  travel bans, both internationally and among the several states.