Really Clueless Hate Mail

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES that Newt Gingrich, Marjory Taylor Greene, Ron Desantis, etc. believes in a. God, b. the Gospel of Jesus, c. the difference between lies and truth, morality and immorality, right and wrong, etc.  is either too stupid to pay attention to or one of their fellow blasphemers.  And the blasphemers don't believe it, either.  It's a total con job and cons are probably among the least susceptible to their fellow con men.

The alleged conversion of Gingrich is, as he probably lyingly claims was a result of the papacy of Benedict XVI (and his third marriage to his fellow adulterer, Calixta Bisek)  should be among the scandals of that generally hypocritical papacy.   I am at a loss for why it isn't a topic brought up by right-wing Catholics when they rail against proposals for allowing even non-adulterers who divorced and remarried once to receive communion, only I'm not really surprised.   The quality of right-wing Catholic conversion is quite discreditably low.

Did you really think I thought Newt Gingrich and Mag Greene really believe what they spout?    If you believe that why don't you believe every other lie that comes out of their lying mouths? 

Arendt On The Corruption Of Culture By The Methods Of Advertising

Hannah Arendt continued:

To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

Notice that Arendt was careful to specify the innocuousness of Madison avenue with the warning that its harmlessness was merely apparent.  Advertising is expected to be a series of "little white lies" but if the path to hell can be paved with good intentions, even small lies are a far more common pavement for that superhighway. If there was ever a true domino theory, it is that small lies habituate us to accepting huge ones.

Other than, perhaps, the New York Times and Washington Post on a national level and a few other print-on-paper sources regionally or locally, the politically significant media in the United States is the electronic media, the networks, the cabloids and others. Significant, also, are Republican-fascist hate-talk radio, with influential online sources. Some of which might be called "journalism" with some accuracy but most of them are nothing like what should be called that (though many "journalists" seem to consider them that). Starting with the beginning of radio advertising and sponsorship, electronic media has always been even more a creature of the same kind as the public relations industry.  Advertising is what has financed most effective media, organs of "journalism" and, even more so, the entertainment media, print and electronic, which is also associated with supposedly informative media.  You have to have an audience and an audience has to be persuaded to read or listen or watch.  The previous passage from Hannah Arendt's brilliant essay, Lying in Politics, noted that lies can be crafted to be a far easier sell than the truth almost ever can be.  I will forego the temptation to, once again, point to the criticism of the entertainment sections of newspapers and magazines, something that the brilliant Karl Krauss fingered as dumbing down the population and polluting what most people took to be journalism in the period of WWI, thus playing a major role in producing that world-changing catastrophe.  Little did he know how bad radio and the movies and later TV and the internet which he could have known nothing about  would be in that regard.

It is essential to note in regard to the role that the media can play in this that the truth is often a. concealed by those who generate the facts that constitute truth and don't want the public to know them, b. even when not actively concealed, truths are often not given out freely but must be actively obtained to tell them when public knowledge of them is not in the interest of those who hold them, c. because of those two things, professional, paid reporters are needed to get that information and so the truth is far more expensive to the media companies and the corporations and billionaires owning them, who may share in the very same motives of concealment.  The economics of reporting as opposed to peddling opinion and that interest in manipulating "information" leads inevitably in commercial media to the dominant traffic in "opinion 'journalism'" and the overt peddling in lies that Rupert Murdoch has turned from scorned tabloid trash to mainstream "journalism."  Which is exactly what the porn merchant's American citizenship was expedited to facilitate on behalf of Republicans and the wealthy, in general.  And, as many of us predicted almost forty years ago, that was the effect of him and his journalistic presstitutes and pimps doing in the United States what he had previously done in Australia and Britain.

When the First Amendment talks about "the press" when Thomas Jefferson made his celebrated and idiotic statement about preferring newspapers to governments when he certainly knew we could have both, all of those facts about published lies were already true in the age of page-at-a-time printing presses.  They were true in the earliest ages of recorded human history.

In my recent review of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the complaints about the journalism and pamphleteer against the adoption of the Constitution among the likes of Adams, Jefferson and Madison proves the peddling of inaccurate information, or what they would have taken as lies was known to them, some of their allies participated in it, too.  Which makes the silence of the First Amendment on the difference between publishing the truth and publishing lies all the more notable.

Perhaps they took such a truth as there being no right to lie was so self-evident that they didn't need to codify the difference.  I cannot believe that the other politicians who had a hand in writing it didn't understand the serious and dangerous character of lies and the desirability, in general, of truths being known, perhaps their neglect to make certain that that distinction between "the press" publishing lies and the press publishing the truth was differentiated.  

But the framers of the Bill of Rights may not have anticipated a later development in the amoral materialist "enlightenment" they believed they favored, such as in the post-WWII period in which the highest level of the college credentialed class would decide that the plain language reading of the First Amendment meant that laws against slander and libel, which had been in place since the time of the adoption of the Constitution, were unconstitutional.*  In that period the alternative to a law suit may have been a duel to the death, as the one that ended Alexander Hamilton's political career and gave a lying Broadway musical its melodramatic and dishonest denouement.  Whatever the reasons for it, that likely innocent  neglect in making that distinction has been a serious and dangerous fact of life in the United States for the past fifty-eight years.  As Hannah Arendt's essay written during the Nixon years proves, the position of lies in our elections and the politics that are generated by those elected was already a serious danger that was responsible for the deaths of many tens and hundreds of thousands.  

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

The reign of lies has, obviously, gone to the point of the use of broadcast and cable and, especially, online distributed terror peddled to a susceptible, gullible and, in so many cases, entirely prepared audience to have that influence their actions.  The high emotional experience of terror seems to be an addictive mental state, though I don't get it at all, no more than I get slasher movies and thrillers.  That addiction is certainly a consciously used political tool, especially on the American fascist far-right, which is practically the only right we have, now.  It is certain that the wife of at least one of the Supreme Court "justices" is a true believer in such thrilling terror and, by his rulings and talk, her husband is justifiably believed to be all-in on that, or at least the use of it to his own demented ends.

It is not surprising that the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I don't believe that Hannah Arendt would have agreed with me but I think that observation made about the cynicism and nihilism of intellectuals is a direct result of the widespread adoption of materalism as the ideology of the intellectual class and the moral nihilism that is usually a part of that.  But that's, of course, a somewhat different argument because if there is one thing that is certain about American conservatism and Trump era Republican fascism, that moral nihilism is not an exclusive holding of intellectual materialism but is rampant in the vulgar materialism which so many of those among them who profess religion the loudest really hold.** Of course, that is exactly what The Gospel, the Epistles,' The Law and the Prophets' critique of religion is, so that should always have made unsurprising to those who took them seriously.  I may go back to commenting on Jeremiah soon.

Oddly enough the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States.  Because of the immensity of his job he must surround himself with advisers, the "National Security Managers" as they have recently been called by Richard J. Barnet, who "exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.  The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in the country whose range of choices can be predetermined.

I have to think of Rahm Emannuel's role in the Obama Administration when I read this and how he certainly didn't encourage Obama to take advantage of the best hand a Democratic President had been given by the Voters since 1964, though I see no evidence that Obama, likely among the five smartest men to have ever held that office, had any intention of taking bold action to create the justice and equality that his campaign publicity and image claimed he would.  I could say almost the same thing about another remarkably intelligent Democratic President, Bill Clinton and his Chiefs of Staff.  I think it is remarkable that Joe Biden has been far more aggressive in pursuing extensive building of that than the younger, more media savvy Obama and Clinton. I often have to remind myself that Biden's Congressional career started about the time this essay was published as an anti-war Congressman.  

This, of course, can happen only if the Executive branch has cut itself off from the legislative powers of Congress;  it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is both deprived of and reluctant to exercise its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs.  One of the Senate's functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision making process from the transient moods and trends of society at large, in our case, the antics of the consumer society and the public relations managers who cater to them.

As I mentioned the world of a half a century ago even as seen by one of the most acute as well as insightful intellectuals of the time can seen quaint, so far have things gone to hell.  It would be impossible to imagine a Republican-fascist Senate playing the role or being as circumspect as Hannah Arendt could still claim.  It is certain that the two Republican-fascist quislings with "D" after their names holding up Democratic legislation are still pretending something like that description still holds, the better for them to ratfuck President Biden's agenda.  Far from Republicans in the Senate and a Republican president acting as checks on each other, they go from collaboration to collusion with each other to steal the commonwealth and destroy electoral democracy to maintain themselves in power.  The Bush vs. Gore case adds the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court to that and I have no doubt that the Roberts court ratfucking of elections will continue that partisan Supreme Court corruption.  

In the Republican-fascist practice of promoting and selecting entertainment media figures as presidential candidates such as Reagan and Trump, both of them having roles not honestly held to be apart from the interests of the advertisers in their show-biz careers, the melding of the con-job that advertising is and the con-job of electing politicians dedicated to the interests of the wealthy elite to the cost of the large majority of Americans is a machine that is reaching perfection.  The alleged journalistic profession, the really politically important part of that in the largest, especially electronic media are already all-in, or virtually so, with the same interests. Only next time they will choose someone more like Bush II who is less disturbingly vulgar to those still pretending that there is something higher to what they do. Assuming they can peddle someone less cruelly demented than Desantis to the Republican-fascist base and gulled independents.

As the lying to sell the invasion of Iraq, only one of the two disastrous wars of the Bush II-Cheney administration, following on Bush I's Gulf War (perhaps incited by his ambassador, April Glaspie) proves, there were no lessons learned from the revelations of caution or morality derived from the Pentagon Papers and the disaster that the American war in Vietnam was.  Of course, there were people, especially in the Republican right whose only lesson from Vietnam was to be more ruthless in selling a disastrous war for the benefit of private interests.  The unmaking of the hard wisdom gained from the disaster of Vietnam was by and large accomplished as much through movies and TV shows lying about it, especially in the period beginning with Reagan's presidency, as it was on talk TV and radio.

I should also point out that America's war-making in Vietnam expanded into other countries, something not revealed,. as I recall, until after Arendt wrote her essay and published it.  That should stand as deadly a confirmation of her observations on the danger of political lies if not my point that to the extent possible, those lies should be discouraged and suppressed as well as refuted, refutation of lies requiring truths that have all of the more problematic features of unpleasant and surprising truth as opposed to lies lied with the art of advertising for easy sale.  

* Of the many extremely important points Hannah Arendt brought up in her essay on the role that lying played in bringing the United States into the self-made quagmire that the Vietnam war was, I would very much like to go into her brilliant analysis of the similarities and differences between the technocratic "problem solvers" of the Kennedy through Nixon administrations and the ex-communist neo-cons whose theoretical approach in replacement of reality.  I think, in an important way, the technocrats and the degenerate intellectual cold-warriors had one common point, both of them believed in an essentially materialistic ideology.  Her explanation of the foundational error of the technocrats faith in the calculability of reality was, I realized last night, something which Joseph Weizenbaum noted in the only part of her essay which I believe I had read before last week.  I will probably base another post on that issue.  

** For the entire history of Christianity, especially in the period of its political potency, the enormous record of discrediting discredit earned for "Christianity" has almost always come as a result of those who openly, obviously and flagrantly violated the moral teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc. What could be rightly considered the Mammonism that Jesus said was contradictory to the religion that he taught is almost always the unspoken faith of those who did those things.  No one who honestly and carefully followed the teachings of Jesus would have earned the same kind of discredit for Christianity.  The Republican-fascist Bible thumpers are, to a person, Mammonists, whether Southern Baptist, "evangelical" Pentacostalist or "traditionalist" Roman Catholics (and a very large percentage of the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops) are full blown worshipers of Mammon.  They are also, for the most part, habitual liars. I've seen their media, honesty is not its stock in trade.
 

lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality

I HAD NEVER READ or listened to Hannah Arendt's virtuoso essay Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers until I recently found that Youtube of her delivering it in her wonderful voice, from there finding a printed version of it as it appeared in The New York Review of Books half a century ago.  This passage shocked me because she says something I'd concluded on my own but had never read anyone else had noticed before, that the truth is at a number of disadvantages which lies are unencumbered by.  

The truth has to conform to reality no matter how unattractive or unappealing whereas lies can assume any form which will sell to a weak and gullible target for them, using the con-man's greatest weapon, the weakness of the mark, their own widely shared moral and other failings. The optimism of the absurd "enlightenment" notion that the truth will come out reliably on top in a contest with lies, something I've become entirely skeptical of is something I wish I had had the chance to discuss with Arendt because I both see it reflected in her claims and the basis for coming to my pessimistic conclusion about it is also contained in her text.  The silence of the First Amendment on the right to tell the truth and that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, because of this difference in the powers of persuasion between them, is and will always be an extreme danger embedded into the very parts of the Constitution and American civic piety which we are required to hold as having the most venerable of moral authority.  

Here is the passage taken out of the entire essay, every sentence of which is worthy of study and commenting on.  She was a spectacularly brilliant thinker. That her observations and what should have been warnings have had no impact on American, British or so many other would-be liberal democracies is, itself, an example of the fragility of the truth and the durability of lies as a political force. I will insert a few comments.  

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.  The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.  The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily lives;  it is always a danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.  Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.  For this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt - as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two makes four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so easy up to a point, and so tempting.  It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were;  lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.  He has prepared  his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared.

In short, lying uses all of the same tools as the specialized type of lying that is a con job as put over by a con man on a targeted and, so often, self-deceiving mark.  Trump's stock in trade. 

In America's winner-takes-all political system, that point is effectively surpassed over and over again, the fixed time-periods of terms of office, everything from two years for the House, four for presidents, six for senators, the from here to eternity which the founders idiotically gave to Supreme Court "justices" means that the lie only has to work to the point of getting them elected.  The myth of, for example, presidential impeachment, the impeachment of Supreme Court "justices" and the near impossibility of expelling even obviously criminal Republican Senators (Packwood being sent packing in shame seems a thing from a quaint and lost past).  The very terms set in stone on the U.S. Constitution set in stone an easily surpassed point beyond which, for the duration of the term of office gained through lies or the lifetime for a Clarence Thomas or Alito or, I'll bet you anything, a lying, perjuring Kavanaugh, makes the fact that they are known liars moot in terms of politics and the law.  That Leonard Leo and Lindsay Graham (his stage managing of Mrs. Alito's flood of tears)and the as vile as senile Chuck Grassley can get a total creep on the Court for life where they can destroy democracy through the methods of advertising* is about as serious a truth as I'll present in this post.

I would contend with her observation "that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness," because human sinfulness is a consequence of choices, not accidents apart from human agency, human choice.  What she may have more accurately have meant would be that lies believed and repeated out of ignorance and laziness have an enormous political and social effect.  Both the intended lies and those that are a product of ignorance and laziness are important.  The Trumpian era rule that he would have had to have known he was lying in order to call it lying was set up to shield the most flagrant liar to have ever held the American persidency plays around with the distinction between the two.  The civil law can't be conducted on the basis of telepathy, though the idiotic Supreme Court has made it the law of the land that to punish many of the lies told, you do have to convince a jury and then judges up to and including the most political of them on the Supreme Court that your mind-reading is accurate.  

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute;  no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer,  it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.  The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.  This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying - [And the secular liberal confidence that lies are permissible because they are innocuous] - in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment, or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology, such as unemployment in a socialist economy, simply by denying their existence;  the unemployed person becoming a non-person.

I hope that I am not right in thinking that the brilliant analysis of Hannah Arendt re the use of computers, etc. not being enough to defeat reality was premature, based on things like the state of computers and electronic media a half a century ago.  I think what she comes very close to here is the truth that, in the end, the difference between truth and lies is consequential in ways that will assert themselves, perhaps even breaking into the unreality that many, especially those most vulnerable to even low key advertising methods, live their lives in.  I got into an argument a few days ago with someone who was telling me about the Republican-fascist lunacy mill online accusing Biden and NOAA of manipulating the hurricane to hit Republican areas of Florida.  I said that I thought a lot of that was due to the amount of time Americans spend watching fantasy and sci-fi on TV and in the movies.  I think it is of consequence in accustoming people into susceptibility for such nonsense that they spend such an unprecedentedly large amount of their lives in fantasy and unreality, much of it carrying such absurd exaggerations of the ability of science and technology to do such things.  I said that I thought that even the lie machine of FOX and the rest of Republican-fascist media had less of an effect than the entertainment that a dangerous percentage of Americans and others substitute for time spent in reality. How does reality break through to those who have so little experience of it?

The most dangerous political and legal effects of lies have often accomplished their harm before reality delivers the undeniable consequences that come from the true nature of the lies the suckers bought and gave the power of their votes.  The power of such political and legal lies makes this method of correction too dangerous to rely on it to do everything up to saving the species from extinction.

I will go back to the first sentences of this quote:

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

To which I say, yes, this is absolutely in keeping with the experience of the United States in the period in which we went from lies merely flourishing to lies swamping the truth even more in the period after the Supreme Court gave the media the ability to lie about politicians and other public figures with virtual impunity in 1964.  As I will almost never neglect to point out, the media being owned by corporations and Republican-fascist interests, those lies have been told, primarily and most impactfully, against liberals and Democrats. Lies told with the protection of the Warren Court's and the ACLU's reading of the First Amendment, have basically changed the media from what it was before.  FOX "news" as it is, as it has been, could not be if the old standards allowing public figures to sue media corporations and individuals who lied about them, the argument I had with my friend would have had far different terms and the online lying about Biden controlling hurricanes would probably not have remained up long enough to gain any traction with the suckers.

I would guess that if it were possible to really quantify the "moral outrage" of the media about lying that what that analysis might show is that far from "moral outrage" being enough to quell the lies, that it would generally be followed by an habituation to and subsequent normalization of and customization to even the most repulsive and obvious lies, which, from what I gather, CNN under its new ownership may be an example of.  There is a reason that "moral outrage" such as has political and real effects are more likely to be after the lies of James O'Keefe and his ilk are aired in the very same media which expresses "moral outrage" of the currently conventional kind.  After which innocent people lied about are about the only ones to pay the price, whether it is losing their career or a public-service to the least among us group such as ACORN is driven into extinction. In the mean time the liars, with funding from multi-millionaire and billionaire Republican-fascists, go on lying and the cable and other media keep playing their part in this.  

* To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

It is not surprising tht the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I will probably have a post on this quote, soon.  I will point out that what Arendt said about intellectuals' thinking being damaged by the influence of rampant advertising is magnified by an extremely high power in the "journalism" which is financed by advertising and which so often bends and distorts its "reporting" with a mind if not an actual order from the advertisers, some of those being the very owners of the media.  Moral outrage to order is what you can expect from them without any actual moral content.   It's all advertising.  Yet Congress is to make no law ever taking that into account no matter what consequences reality eventually serves up to us.

Constitutional Failures Before Us As We Live Them

THAT TRUMP JUDGE Aileen Cannon is on the bench today proves the point but if she's still there a year or more after her conduct on the bench proves the inadequacy of the means of removing crooked judges from the Federal bench.  

Considering the serious national security issues involved, anyone who thinks this isn't dangerous is deluding themselves.

There Is No Such A Thing As A Right To Do What Is Wrong

- Everyone Should Be Encouraged To Write The Truth - Hate Mail

FIRST, I AM NOT "A WRITER" but I am a writer in that I write things and am a shameless enough writer that I publicly post my writing.  Early in my experience of online commenting I got past the mind forged manacles that keep too many people from writing their thoughts and making them public, standard spelling, and other arbitrary rules that serve the purpose of snobbery more than they do anything else. Let me break it to you, no one needs your permission to write or post it.

In the recent online course in writing I took, twice, the teacher who has published professionally said "anyone who writes is a writer," and since he is the only expert I've paid for evaluation and he's the expert, I'll go with his rule.  I think anyone who can manage to write something, read it themselves and make it clearer and better is performing the act of writing. They are as much a writer as someone who is talking is a speaker, maybe somewhat more so.  

And I think everyone should be encouraged to do that throughout their lives whether with the thought of making it public, sending it to one person or keeping it as their own record of their thinking, so as to find out what's right and what's wrong with their thinking.  Written language is far, far too good a tool for that to allow the snobs, the poseurs, the pros and other jerks to deprive we, the great unpaid, from having it as our birthright in language communities which have a written form.  I wish all language groups had writing and hope those without it gain it for themselves and their posterity.  If they do I would advise them to start out from the start making it informal and egalitarian without the ridiculous structure of rules and formalism and screwy archaeology of spelling that standard English currently has because that serves no one but the elites who want to keep it as their sole possession, the better to silence the rest of us.  Only some of us are shameless enough to refuse to go along with that the rest of our lives.  I am so shameless and shameless enough to be unashamed of that.

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

As luck would have it, your objection to me writing this stuff and posting it online is relevant to my semi-public study of The Book of Jeremiah, or can be made an example of what is warned of in Walter Brueggemann's extraordinarily helpful lecture on Jeremiah and our own power elite and its service industry in educational snobbery.  

From Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality, with my inserted comments.

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 exploitation 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."

I will start by noting that throughout his writing on the Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann notes two things about them, that the Prophets were poets and that they were "unauthorized," meaning they had no approving credentials that made everyone figure they were allowed to do what they did.  "Authorized" writers, in my experience of reading poetry and prose, often means someone whose credentials hold up their reputation only so long as they're alive or promoted enough to support the assignment of reading them and their inclusion in anthologies but whose readership immediately plummets when they drop off the twig. Obviously the uncredentialed, unauthorized (interesting word to use in the context of this post about "un-authors") prophetic poets poetry didn't suffer in the test of time due to the disapproval of the critics.  And they were really tough critics who tried to kill Jeremiah several times. I will forego making a list of just those over-praised, generally elite-university credentialed poets who were the toast of the town while they were alive but whose writing is pretty much a dead-letter now. Some of that failure was incredibly rapid.  Clearly the business of approving writing isn't much more accurate in assessing durability or quality than the least durable of the so-called social sciences.

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.

"Something happens to wisdom," could be the title of this piece because "wisdom" in this case, approved writing, in that context is divorced from truth and morality.  That is exactly what requires subversive writing that is unapproved, unauthorized, etc. to challenge it. Authorized, approved, standardized writing and thinking is impotent to challenge deeply enough the authorizing, approving, standard-setting establishment that co-opts those who seek that kind of approval, seldom without some level of payment.  

 

I think the failed secular "lefts" of the United States and the rest of the West, that failure going on well into its second century of failure, fails in no small part because its figures are not really uninvested in the system of thought that the corrupt ruling class has mastered and uses to flourish. Most of that left is university authorized, approved, etc. and their "radicalism" is no more radical than what will still get them a job.  It is not shocking to me that the leaders of the vilely counter-productive, affluent-class, ego maniacal, self-indulgent Weather Underground, those who didn't get themselves blown up or jail sentences and some of those who did, went on to teach at universities, their "radicalism" producing nothing, whatsoever, their credentialing and payment being standard for their economic-social milieu.

I am shameless enough to point out that my unapproved, unauthorized critique of the Bill of Rights - especially as interpreted by Supreme Courts from the secular-liberal Warren Court to the fascists under Rehnquist and Roberts - something which the secular left championed as a means of freely publishing their impotent propaganda, is far more anti-establishment than anything on the topic which Noam Chomsky or I. F. Stone or the entire civil-liberties industry have come up with.  And the use of their conception of the First Amendment has served Republican-fascism far better than it has that secular liberalism which is just a milder form of top-down gangsterism.  There is a reason that neo-Nazis, fascists, America's indigenous form of fascists, white supremacists (the writers of the Bill of Rights were, by and large if not entirely white supremacists) are the biggest fattest "free speech" spouting group around today, because a liberty to lie with impunity is what has gotten the United States where it is today even as protections for real, substantial rights is crumbling under that regime of thought. The secular left, those who champion "first amendment absolutism" from the alleged left, are too invested to even ask themselves how their promised regime of liberties has devolved from the height of the Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, etc. so fast into where we are now under the regime of "rights" they championed.  

In terms of "speech," of publishing, I doubt there is any more radical a stance than to note that while there is a right to tell the truth, there is no such thing as a right to lie, whether the lie is knowing or the lie is lied through ignorance.**  The difference in effect is intimately related to the moral categories the two things, the truth and lies, belong to.

There is a responsibility to try hard to discern the truth and it is wrong to lie are things that the plain language of "the First Amendment" entirely discounts. That omission is a serious deficiency in it.  There can be no right to do what is wrong, the entire concept of "rights" so badly used in the framing of the Constitution* is based on that distinction.  Our Constitution, especially the Bill of "Rights," ignores that aspect of rights.  "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free," is an entirely sounder basis for any constitutional provision concerning the right to publish than the 18th century "enlightenment" notion that the truth will naturally win out in a contest with lies, especially distributed as published lies.  If there's one thing that Scripture was never a sucker for, it was the notion that such things happened automatically for the best. It is ironic, considering the 20th century pop-Voltairian disdain for panglossian thinking, that it is the basis for so much of "enlightenment" gullibility and that the subsequent two-centuries and more of counter-evidence have not made a dent in that stupidity. From the second half of the 20th century till today, I'd say we are stupider about that than they were in the first century and a half of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I will leave the next part of Brueggemann's speech as an example of what happens when official lie and the media lies and, now, the social-diseased social-media lies with the impunity that the Supreme Court has granted liars. . .

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.

 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.

. . . Only to note that today, after Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and Trump, all with the freest of free presses in our history, we could look back on the days of LBJ as a less bad, less dishonest time.

* The fact that the framers of the Constitution didn't abolish chattel slavery in it while spouting "rights" proves that their use of the concept was blatantly dishonest and obviously wrong.  Their many anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic insertions as well.  The more I read about the framing and the push to adopt the Constitution the origins of our problems through that document become more obvious.  "Hamilton" style, authorized, approved civics class style pieties about that are bullshit that we will have to abandon if egalitarian democracy is ever to be established and not the devolution into American apartheid we are seeing "free press" and all.

** The game that pretends we cannot call Trump a liar based on the impossibility of "proving" whether or not he or his ilk knew they were lying as they lied proves the stupidity of that modern civil-libertarian conception of "free speech-press."   I wouldn't trust most judges and fewer "justices" to be honest about what they say, pretending there is a practical means of discerning when a lie can be called a lie under that rule just shows how absurd the whole thing rapidly becomes.  Though, really, I think that pretense is more a creation of the credentialed journalism racket than the law courts.  If I don't tend to trust "justices" I really don't trust "journalists" who often seem to be hired for their ability to lie persuasively and pretend shamelessly.  

Note:  You may also want to listen to Hannah Arendt on "Lying in Politics" from 1972. 

I Notice The (former?) Faithless Sinema Seems To Be Wearing A Cross As She Lies Her Damned Head Off

 What the Brian Tyler Cohen Said:

Since he doesn't go there, I will say that Sinema is as blatantly mercenary and money grubbing as Trump is, I think both of them worship the same god, Mammon.   The same god as the nihilist, lunatic, fascist Gaetz Greene, Boebert wingnut do.  And the skank with the "D" after her name is doing it for exactly the same reason.  I don't trust materialists, either the intellectual kind nor the vulgar variety because, in the end, they are all the same.   I don't trust anyone who had any association with the Green Party, they are Republican assets and they always will turn out to be that.

but you see the alternative to that is to say "My actions are irrelevant." It doesn't matter what I do, what the hell - Off Site Hate Mail

ONE OF THE THINGS that I've been using as an aid in reading the entirely topical Book of Jeremiah more deeply is the set of four lectures Walter Brueggemann gave over the course of a month at an Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, Into and Out of the Abyss.  This comment touches on a seemingly unrelated piece of hate mail I got on another site over the dispute over free will, so I'll take it up as an example of the opportunity you get for usefully thinking about and changing behavior in the Jewish tradition and how the materialist-atheist-scientistic tradition, with supreme irony, considering the motivation behind the human invention of scientific method to enhance the effectiveness of human agency, leaves so many of its most dedicated ideologues claiming that we are mindless robots whose actions carry no consequential meaning or import, that we just do what we are programmed to do by our molecules, the complicated ones we pick out of our DNA and call "genes," which, as genetics becomes more aware of the enormous complexity of those molecules and the very ambiguous nature of those "genes" which we specify, abstracted out of those enormously long and complex molecules and their frequent impossibility to read and accurately specify as to their results.  

I will also point out that I have identified "DNA" as being one of the unadmitted material gods of materialist-atheist-scientism so I think the comparison with the God of Abraham, Issac and Jesus is quite apt.  As is so often true, this is my transcription from the posted video so any problems with it should be attributed to me.

- Q. Could you comment a little bit more  about something you talked about earlier, about God changing God's mind?  Especially in response to how the People requested (?) God to change God's mind. Would you comment more on that?

- Well, what that teaches is that we have impact on our futures, what we decide matters.  God in the Old Testament never subscribed to the idea that God is immutable, unchanging and all that, so God is a character in the transaction and how we act causes God to position God's-self differently. That's how they imagined God. And so, if this is the Lord of the Covenant, this God is going to give blessings to People who obey Torah and not for those who don't. You know, that's the reasoning.

If you look in Jeremiah 18,  I mentioned this I think another time, but there's a very clear case of it. Verse 18:7 "I will pluck up and tear down and destroy, but if that nation turns from its evil I will change my mind."  But then, negatively, I will plant and build but if they do evil, then I will change my mind.  So this is a God who is engaged in the Covenental conflicts.  And, you know, in some ways that's kind of how we conduct some of our most important relationships. And so on. 

Want to come back on that?

- I think what I [honestly meant] it scares me that my actions could change God's actions.

-  Yeah, but you see the alternative to that is to say "My actions are irrelevant."  It doesn't matter what I do, what the hell. So this tradition takes human conduct very seriously.  

Over here what you tend to get is the promise that there is nothing you can do that will make me stop loving you. So they are in tension. And I think it's very useful for us to reflect on which one of these practices we were nurtured as Children on.  It's amazing how many People who grew up in ferocious homes, for whom the Good News of Marcus Borg and so on is very welcomed. I think Marcus Borg grew up in such a home.  And so on, and so on.  So we're all living out our nurture and the way we got situated before we knew we were getting situated. So, I think this stuff rings true.  It is an endless interpretive negotiation about that.

I will point out that Brueggemann does what I have never heard an ideologue of materialist-atheist-scientism do, admit that the focus of his thinking is a product of human imagination and, so, is subject to all of the conditions and vicissitudes, including being wrong, that our imagination of things outside of us, and all that is unseen within us, is exactly that, our trying to cope with our experience.  Of course science is no less a product of the same human imagination subjected to a different set of filters in order to gain a possible enhancement of accuracy on the basis of a collective narrowing of focus and testing the rather pedestrian results about what it has narrowly focused on.  

I have, since well before the internet was invented, rejected the pseudo-science that pretends to do what works on molecules and atoms quite well and with increasing difficulty subatomic particles, and with such things as planetary and stellar movement, about other aspects of human reality which cannot be subjected to that kind of filtering and the other genuine aspects of scientific method. What you can say with great confidence about some, especially non-organic, simple molecules and atoms and, to an extent, subatomic particles,  you cannot now and I doubt ever will on things of anything from a relatively small to an enormously vast order of complexity and those things which it is impossible to actually observe.  The mitigation of human imagination possible when scientific method is applied honestly and modestly becomes as open to ideological and self-interested pollution when you pretend to do science about things like human behavior, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, etc. as the disputes between Jeremiah and Hananiah when it was the experience of the People of Judea at the end of the monarchy and the period of exile.  

One of the worst things about our current political peril are the huge numbers of Americans who are unengaged, uninterested, unwilling to learn and discern reality as opposed to being entertained by the unreality of movies, TV, games and the various species of social mental disease distributed by the internet.  I think that one of the most dangerous aspects of that is the nihilistic belief that what we think and do is of no import, something which the social sciences have certainly stressed since the 1970s when Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology gained ideological dominance within those sciences which pretend to do science about their subject matter.  Since then those have dominated in all of the college programs I'm aware of and through those media babblers and scribblers brought up on that nurturing, has filtered down, often unrealized, in their babblage and scribblage.  

I think the nihilism of the post-WWII period even before that was a direct result of the rejection of the Jewish religious tradition, of consequential and real morality, both among gentiles and People who identify as culturally Jewish but who reject the religion.  Secularists, in short.  As Brueggemann points out, there is Biblical precedence for that, to some extent, in the false prophets who may have been held in favor by the political-Temple establishment and it is certainly one of the temptations of those whose lives are in despair as they, far more understandably than those reared in affluence, give up on the idea that what they think and do matters.  Not a little of that giving up on the part of the underclass cultivated by those who make money off of them in the college-credentialed media, especially in entertainment media. He points out that that temptation is not unknown to those who engage in religion talk and alleged practice.  I am never left unimpressed with the internal critique that much of religion practices but is rarely practiced to the same extent in much of science and hardly ever in secular ideology.  In the case of those like Brueggemann, even noting the part that their academic training plays in the temptation to do evil or to quietly accept it as a fee of going along to get along.

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I have consciously decided to read translations, all claimed to be made from the "original" Hebrew, from decidedly different theological-ideological traditions to see what I notice of the different interpretations and am finding the Easy To Read Version, I believe made under the right-wing Church of Christ to, none the less carry almost the same information as the Catholic liberation theology inspired Christian Community Bible (with very interesting commentary). I chose the Easy to Read version because I am very sympathetic to its stated goal to give those who are not proficient readers the chance to engage with Scripture, it having been started as an attempt to give a written text to deaf users of American Sign Language who often find it difficult to read an English text. I don't know the extent to which that original attempt worked as intended, I'd tend to think an edition in ASL would be the way to go with that, of course, it would have to be published as a video, ASL being so tied with physical gesture that is printed with difficulty.  I think in some ways it might be an edition more in keeping with what must have been, for most people, an orally transmitted text.

Having started with the Easy To Read text, finding its use of anachronistic pronouns and verb forms annoying, I started using the famous Good News version, which I suspect unskilled readers would find far easier, though they don't distinguish between the verse from the prose in the layout of the text in the online.  Considering how much stress especially Bruggemann puts on the "original" poetry of Jeremiah and the later commentary that has been inserted in the book as we have it, I'd prefer them to distinguish that in the layout of what seems to me to be a very readable text.  I'm also including one of the Revised Standard texts with another commentary, one that minimizes the use of linguistic anachronisms.  I don't have any trouble with the anachronisms, having been brought up on the antiquated English translations of the Vulgate, which brings another whole bunch of issues.
 

The fights and brawling over most of the modern translations are generally much ado about little in most cases.  I have found even the King James translations, there being a number of those, are useful but none of them are as useful on their own as reading several at a time, though it certainly goes a lot slower when you read the same chapter three or more times.  I have found having help from commentaries, a number of them, to also be indefensible.  Especially when they don't necessarily agree or come with the same agendas.  
 

America's Republican-fascists Are The Biggest And Most Blatant Collaborators With "Marxists" In Our History

IT SHOULD STRIKE anyone who has observed the Republican-fascists since the 1990s as oddly hypocritical that they should be trying to revive the 1940s through 50s red-scare accusations that there are Marxists everywhere. It was their guy, Donald Trump who conducted a public homo-erotic wooing of the most extreme Communist regime still standing in the Kim dynasty's North Korea and was an obvious and obsequious asset of the KGB gangster running Russia and its virtually occupied nations, Putin.  I still smirk when I remember it was the Archive not finding the mosh-note from Kim to Trump that clued them in on his thuggish theft of public documents.   If there is one thing that we should have learned since Nixon and Kissinger opened up relations with still Communist controlled China it is that Republicans are all in on doing business with "Marxists" when it's those kinds of Marxists who rule as dictator-gangsters in other countries.  I fully expect that we will find out that he sold them important and dangerous secrets he stole before the end of the Trump disaster is written.  As someone pointed out, when the Rosenbergs did it, they got the death penalty.

But there is a different understanding of "Marxism" which Republican-fascists most certainly don't ever intend to do business with because it is focused on the welfare of the underclass and the least among us.

This passage from a 2003 paper by the American Baptist liberation theologian Jorge Pixley has an interesting take on this different kind of "Marxism."  I'll preface this by noting, yet again, that Karl Marx, himself, disclaimed membership in the club of Marxists so it is a word that can have various and antithetical meanings.

But perhaps a word on Christian marxism (his use of the lower case for "marxism) is in order.  The official Marxism promoted by the Communist parties of Latin America has no intellectual importance.  It followed a party line dictated from Moscow, Stalin's view of the necessary five stages of historical development.  These parties were not revolutionary, with the one exception of the Salvadoran Communist party that gained its credibility when it led the peasant uprising in 1932 where the leaders, including Farbundo Marti, were murdered.  It is estimated that there were 30,000 killed by the army, 30,000 machete-baring peasants killed by the machine guns of the army.  The Communists were among them.  The likely candidate of the FMLN in the next election is Jorge Shafik Handal of the Communist Party, showing the confidence in which the other parties in this alliance hold the communists.  This is most unusual in Latin America.

The Christian reading of Marx's writings is based on Marx's critique of economics, politics and culture depends on a reading of their social effects.  In other words, there is a bourgeois economics, an economics at the service of the capitalist class.  But there can be and must be a revolutionary economics placed at the service of the proletarian class.  The same critique was applied or suggested by Marx in relation to law, literature, and philosophy.  All of these critiques, but especially the economic one to which he devoted most of his life, are indispensable today for those who believe in the need for a different society.  Marx himself did not apply the same logic to his critique of religion, which seemed to him irredeemably bourgeois.  This we take to be a failure on his part, a failure, a costly failure.  What is more consistent with Marxist thought, though Marx himself did not develop it, is the sort of critique which the prophets and Jesus applied to religion.  The Lord of Israel that Solomon used to get forced labor for building his temple is a false god as the tenth century prophet Ahijah believed.  The early Christians were denounced as atheists, and they were atheists in the sense that they did not bow down to the civic Gods of the Roman empire.  This is the Marxism which we liberation philosophers and theologians believe in.

So, according to Jorge Pixley, it is a Marxism which includes what Marx definitively rejected. "Marxism" is that divorced from Karl Marx that you can do that.  I would point out that what he defines as Marxist is certainly present, in a number of ways, in the Jewish Prophetic literature.  Marilynne Robinson has quoted a large number of the commandments of Moses and, with good reason, points out that if followed they would produce conditions that leave what she understands as liberation theology behind in terms of its tender regard and treatment of the underclass, working poor as well as destitute.  Certainly both the Law of Moses and the Gospel treat the debtor class with far more justice than secular republican government does.  It was the debtor class who the framers of the American Constitution so often disparaged in stating their intentions by drafting the Constitution, who they openly intended to harm (again, read Charles Beard, he documents it) and the hard pressed who tended to be in debt were among the foremost opponents of the adoption of the Constitution in the months it was being put forward for adoption.

Being someone who has the deepest respect for many of the varied liberation theologies around today, I think its biggest problem is that in those who have a deep and impressive history with academic philosophy and theology (the paper is called Creativity and Struggle: Process Philosophy and Liberation Theology) is that the ideas threaten to become more important than actual life does.  It is disheartening to see the extent to which academic writing about what should be a vital and real force to deliver justice seems to be devolving into academic abstraction and, inevitably, impotence.  Academic process and procedures seems to me to inevitably tame the prophetic pursuit for justice and render it everything from misguided to totally counterproductive.   I would note that unlike the Stalinist Communist Parties of most of Latin America and most of those Communists in the United States, liberation theology has always had its primary stake in the actual welfare of the least among us. That is one of the greatest differences between secular "Marxists" and Christians who believe in the Gospel, The Law and the Prophets who also make some use of Marx's critique.   A lot of other allegedly religious philosophers and theologians, you certainly couldn't honestly say that about, they have no time for the least among us.   

I think it would be more politically savvy to leave behind the talk of "Marxism" as well as that second most abused word in political-economic babble and scribbleage, "socialism."  Both words and the various political ideologies that used them have distorted the terms out of any practical usefulness, they are as discredited and that abuse of both have earned the words many negative connotations. The idiot Republican-fascists flinging them around today only know those connotations and, removed from any denotative meaning, they can mean whatever they want them to.  For anything positive, the words are now useless.  I think their continued use is counter-productive even in liberation theology, among the most positive uses of them I'm familiar with.  

Certainly the Republican and now Republican-fascist alliance with Marxists, Communists, and Stalinists like Putin who practice Stalin's kind of Marxism more profitably by not using the scary words for it, foregoing pretenses of "socialism" as the inherent gangsterism his politics shares with all anti-egalitarian-democratic regimes do, should show that the Republican-fascists, more than even the Democratic Socialist handful among elected Democrats, are all-in with "Marxism" when they can make money and gain power and advantage through it.  American capitalists sold us out to the Chinese Communists who use their own population as slave labor.  If Republican-fascists do manage to gain permanent power, I can foresee them opening up trade with North Korea as Putin has, I've read that Putin's Russian mafia using North Korean slave labor are some of the Kim gang's most lucrative sources of capital.  Trump would certainly do whatever Putin told him to, if he had won the last election and didn't face a Democratically controlled Congress, he'd probably have done that by now.  And the Republican-fascists at all levels would go along with it, just as they did Nixon's sucking up to the "Marxists" of China, all they had to do was give up pretenses of "socialism" which is one of the first things most Communist regimes have done, Lenin and Trotsky did it almost immediately as they suppressed all workers organizing to pursue their own good.  

Lies, All Lies - Have I Dissed Our Gladiatorial Cult Yet This Season? Hate Mail

ADVERTISING IS AN INDUSTRY DEDICATED TO SELLING LIES, when it's lies that will get its customers what they want and I'd be willing to bet that lying does in a clear majority of its cases.  A good short descriptions of how that works is in a piece by Charles Pierce about how the football industry is mounting a campaign of easily sold lies about head trauma peddled to the American People in ways the tobacco industry peddled its lies about the harm of using tobacco.

In December of 1953, the American tobacco industry was in deep trouble. Research into the deleterious health effects of cigarette smoking was beginning to pile up ominously all over the country. So the industry did what American industries do—it hired Hill and Knowlton, a power in the advertising industry even then, to spin itself out of trouble. H&K earned every nickel it made from this particular client. Its strategy included buying its own scientists to cast doubt on the mounting evidence. As medical historian Allan Brandt put it in his magisterial study, The Cigarette Century, “[This] strategy for ending the ‘hysteria’ was to insist that there were ‘two sides’ … This strategy would ultimately become the cornerstone of a large range of efforts to distort scientific process in the second half of the 20th century.”

“Hysteria” has been a weaponized word, useful when large industries don’t want to face up to the damage they may be doing. We saw it used with cigarettes. We’ve seen it used in regards to the public health crisis currently facing football at every level.

If there is going to be chronic denialism on this issue, it may not come from the NFL, although some of it surely will. It’s going to come from the people in the game, the fans of the game, and many members of football’s kept national press, who are unwilling or unable to change their moral calculus and who become aggravated when somebody suggests that they should. For example, in 2015, Jim Harbaugh, the coach at the University of Michigan, suggested that American football was “… the last bastion of hope in America for toughness in men, in males.” (So much, one supposes, for the SEALs.) Coach Bruce Arians of the Arizona Cardinals expressed concern that America’s mothers were refusing to let their sons play football because of the head injury issue. (Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be safeties.) Danny Kanell, then of ESPN, called attention via Twitter to the peril he perceived from the folks he called “concussion alarmists.” (Kanell also managed to work “the liberal media” into his tweet, thereby winning that week’s game of wingnut rhetorical bingo.) In support of Kanell, Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports bellowed his contempt for what he called “the media-driven concussion hysteria.” Hill and Knowlton would have been proud of that one.

To be fair, Whitlock later in the same piece admits that football is “barbaric,” which is better than other Football Under Attack pieces I’ve read. Let us be clear: I am not suggesting that we ban the game. That kind of thing never works in America and, generally, the attempts to do it end very badly for society at large. But I do find myself wondering if the shift in the moral calculus is profound enough to shake the purchase that American football has on the culture in so many different places—from high schools in Texas to the gambling floors in Las Vegas. And I think of John Urschel again, and I’m happy he was strong enough to give up something he loves in order to pursue something else that he loves. And I think of my father, who could swim for hours, when he was still who he was born to be.

Notice something about this situation, one industry hired another industry to lie about its product that was a. addictive, b. sold to new smokers through advertising, c. harmful to the health of those who believed what they were told about their addictive product.  The power of the concerted and magnified power of corporations is an intrinsic part of the problem, using that power to do essentially what the peddlers of heroin and other addictive drugs do to people.  The tobacco and alcohol industries are the most successful pushers of addictive, debilitating drugs in our history and the advertising industry whose product is ubiquitous have shaped the acceptance of both and their consequences, it is the most successful medium for peddling lies in our history. 

But while the football industry may hire outside advertising liars on its behalf, they don't really need to because every network, almost every newspaper, many other journalists are entirely ready to carry the ball for them and it's called, not advertising, but "journalism."   The corrupt part of the media in his example is as clearly built in as the movies of the 1930s through today which willingly and profitably place smoking and alcohol as paid promotion in what they produce.   Him using advertising as the main feature of his argument rather buried what I'd have made the lede.

Since I have repeatedly mocked Charles Pierce's idolization of James "Jemmy" Madison, idolized because of his role in the adoption of the dangerously aphoristic First Amendment, I'll use his piece as an example.  But, considering that idolatry on that basis, it is odd that the equally problematic and aphoristic Second one is never credited to him in the circles I travel in.  I will point out that blaming the advertising industry, as spot on as that is, lets off the "press" and the role it plays in this. Though Pierce mentioned them he didn't come out and call it what it is, lying.  The advertising industry, an industry which has no deep and notably important devotion to truth is a symbiotic entity which lives on and in collaboration with "the press" which now, thanks to ACLU elicited Supreme Court dictates, includes all electronic media, "entertainment" probably most dangerous, and all print no matter how malignant the content and how obviously death dealing and bigotry promoting it is. If you want to put it in terms of "speech" as well, you can include strippers and the epic battle to allow them to dispose of pasties and movie directors and producers putting alcohol, tobacco, etc. in their entertainment, getting paid to do that by the advertising industry.  Both, as they are in the United States in 2022 are saprophytes that live and thrive on what destroys egalitarian democracy.

Certainly the role football plays in American culture is maintained through presenting it in reverential, sappy, dishonest, sentimental presentations that cover up what is obviously a vicious, violent, pantomime of violent sex which regularly kills those who play it and whose players are entirely more like a crime gang than pillars of virtue. I'm always wishing I could ask those former players who are presented as pillars of virtue about the actual character of the game that made them famous.  The enormous amount of the media devoted to sports and sports alleged reporting has certainly contributed mightily to the bizarre attribution of virtue to what is at base a murderous, exploitative industry that feeds on the brains and bodies of the drugged up boys who are suckered into playing it, as Pierce certainly knew when he wrote that piece.  He mentions the role that sports journalists played in denying what the science was revealing about the brain damage that is ubiquitous, it happening before the public in every game they watch.   That damage was certainly entirely in evidence for the entire history of American football, the roll of those who died as a result of the game extend back to its beginning well back into the 19th century.  So do the fan riots which start in the aftermath of the first recorded inter-collegiate game in New Jersey.

Much as I admire much of his work, Pierce's personal history, what he experienced through his father and his father's family history of dementia, what he learned from that isn't strong enough to shake the purchase that America's free speech-press absolutism has on his own mind.  He buys into the 20th century myth that it is impossible to outlaw dangerous behavior or, rather, to importantly suppress it even when outright prohibition is not possible.  I think it would be quite simple in this case.  If legislation which made it possible for those whose brains are damaged or destroyed by playing football and their survivors to sue those who maintain the football industry and entice those it convinces to play it, it would disappear.  Football isn't like the making and drinking of alcohol which can be done at home or in a back-woods still or smuggled over the border, it is an organized activity.  Certainly it would disappear at its most insidious levels, in high school and younger when the boys who are injuring their brains are suckered into playing it by grown men and women, a number of them quite brain damaged from that before they become adults, I would be some before they become teenagers.

I know that mind-set, the mind-set of the typical secular liberalish, libertarian sort American of our generation nurtured on tales of the failure of Prohibition and the idiotic cult of liberal free speech absolutism.  I was as suckered by it as anyone until I realized the price that was paid was typically not paid by affluent,white males who can pass as straight.*  The price paid is paid by Women, People of Color, other minority groups, certainly LGBTQetc. the economic underclass and others who are the target of hate speech and debilitating stereotypes and social roles sold by the media.  Thought a lot of that would be impossible to regulate through laws it could succumb to widespread refusal to continue buying it, the absurd notion that we owe it to the corporations that are "the press,"  the media to tolerate them without push-back is one of those dopey post-WWII notions peddled by the media and entertainment.

But my criticism of the Sullivan Decision and its ever fouler successors,  Buckely vs. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. is that something which in our history before that was very actionable, lawsuits over libel and slander of individuals and non-profit groups, is protected by the idiocy of those rulings, starting with the landmark addicted Warren Court's 1964 permission given to the New York Times to lie about public officials with impunity. As I've been pointing out recently, anyone who, even in 1964, couldn't predict that would be used against Democrats on behalf of Republicans was too stupid to be sitting on any court. The really effective media, the electronic media, has always been owned by rich, conservative corporate gangsters who use it to enhance their own wealth and control.  It is exactly the result of that huge giant step in "freedom of the press," how creating a "right" to lie has been used for most of the past sixty years.

I wouldn't venture that the NFL and football fetishists would give up their addiction to brain destroying, self-denying subliminal sexual spectacles before the journalists face the fact that when they are bemoaning the death of democracy through lies, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone like Pierce to face that glaring reality.  It is exactly those "free press" rulings that made the careers of the FOX-fascists and the rest of the liars of Republican-fascist style media possible.  

The Warren Court could have let the ruling against the New York Times stand and required that they pay a small fine and court costs and maybe the New York Times would not have helped lie us into four years of Trump.  They might have instituted fact checking of what they carry, whether by their staff of reporters, those shifty and loosely attached to the truth "opinion journalists" or the paid ads they carried and may have produced far better journalism than they have in the era of anything goes.  That the guy they carried lies about in a paid ad about was a piece of racist shit who I'm sure those voting for the great gray rag wanted to shaft but the price the country has paid for that temporary satisfaction has been incalculable. FOX wouldn't be what FOX is without that freedom to lie and the protection of those idiotic rulings. We may never have had a Nixon without it, we may never have had a Reagan, we certainly wouldn't have had a Trump.  It is remarkable that the man who did so much to destroy the power of the truth in America's democracy was probably the greatest beneficiary of lies in the history of American politics.  And the media is still addicted to carrying his lies, even as he is entirely more discredited that Aaron Burr was, than Benedict Arnold was.   Only  as a TV star he has a cult of addled followers which, if Burr or Arnold had had, may well have changed the course of history, such is the power of, especially, the entertainment media which is seldom safely innocuous.

The great free press never learns, it's not capable of learning, it is an artificial, man made entity, made to generate profits and to peddle the most profitable political lines, an artificial entity that has no natural rights but which employs those willing to carry its profitable lies, even if they, personally see through the lies and don't especially like them. Corporations exist within the market economic system, if they don't maximize profit through doing evil, they die, almost any media which tries to tell difficult truth is attached to a church or non-profit entity, sometimes an educational institution.  There was a time I'd take something like The Nation magazine as an exception to that but I both have a far lower estimate of that publication and a knowledge that it is sustained as a hobby by wealthy people. There are a few tiny media entities that are maintained by the sincere honesty of individuals and a desperate need to try to rescue us from lies and ignorance.  They generally last as long as those individuals can keep it up, they often die with their owners.  I don't have a very high view of "journalists" since they allow liars to call themselves that.  I don't trust any of it without fact checking them, ever. It is a dangerous magnification of the power to lie that overtakes and overpowers whatever power it has to tell the truth.  Like the ad agency, like the football industry, like some sci-fi psychotic computer-robot, its prime directive has little to do with telling the truth and less to do with promoting the common good.  Jefferson and Madison's time when a man with a page-at-a-time printing press could publish the truth which, nevertheless, would have to compete with publishers of lies is gone forever.  Their naive faith in the ability of the truth to win out is exactly that, naive.  We don't have that excuse, ours is willful self-deception, journalists, self-deception in service to their own professional self-interests.  Our history of post-Sullivan freedom of the press and free speech absolutism shows us what you get with that, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, the Mitch McConnell Senate, the Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, as the Republican party, the party of the big media owners and the owners of pro-football, has become an active and explicitly fascist party who are reviving our indigenous form of fascism.

*  This area in which a number of those who are destroyed being straight-white-males is not typical of how the victimization of such libertarian lying is handed out.  Though, since a very large percentage of those victimized by football are men of color, perhaps not too much should be made of that distinction.

As to passing as straight.  Never have done that since I was liberated from high school and first went to college and I never did date girls as cover even before then.  A while back I had the experience of a younger person who is a friend of one of my nieces meeting me for the first time, having been told I was an old gay man, he expressed surprise that I'm no where near as nellie as his imagination of me was.  He was disappointed that I seemed so "straight."  I was able to point out to him that I regularly make pies.  It didn't make up for it.  I can sew patches on my clothes, too but I forgot to mention that.  

Hate Mail

IN HIS "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," the historian Charles Beard noted two totally different statements about the adoption of the Constitution given by the the most famous and influential Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the slave-holder John Marshall, two statements that make opposing claims about the character of that adoption which shows that the alleged means of it gaining authoritative legitimacy was hardly what we have all been lied into believing.  Certainly according to that mythology which is the common possession of all of us who had conventional civics educations and who took high school and university American history courses such statements coming from the likes of John Marshall must be authoritative, he was there, he was an active participant, he was an interested beneficiary of the framing of the Constitution and its further shaping, much of it directly under his hands.  Even under his own standards of judgement, the issue of the consent of The People is nothing less than the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of the "supreme law of the land."

I cannot give the two statements in running columns as Beard gives them, the better to be struck at how incompatibly they are with each other but you can still read them.  The first is from his Life of Washington, 1804-1807, the second one in his decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland.  I'll start with his comment on page 299 of his Economic Interpretation, which came after several pages in which Marshall's clear view of the economic interests in those who supported adoption of the Constitution being largely those who lent money and were owed debts and those who didn't support it who saw the economic crisis of those low down in the economic scale as requiring debt relief.  I will note that Marshall, himself, admits that in a number of the states the opponents of adoption of the Constitution were a sizable majority.  The means by which the ratification was wrangled was as sleazy as what the Court and Republican-fascist legislators are re-performing right now and largely in the same game of different sides.

4. Finally, so sharp was this division into two parties on the lines of divergent views of property rights, that the Constitution, far from proceeding from "the whole people," barely escaped defeat altogether.  So positive is this statement by the great Chief Justice and so decidedly does it contradict his juristic theory of the nature of the supreme law that the two should be studied together.  For this reason, the two views enunciated by Marshall are printed in parallel columns:

"So balanced where the parties in some of them [the states]  that even after the subject had been discussed for a considerable time, the fate of the constitution could scarcely be conjectured;  and so small in may instances, was the majority in its favor, as to afford strong ground for the opinion that, removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption.  Indeed it is scarcely to be doubted that in some of the adopting states a majority of the people were in the opposition.  In all of them, the numerous amendments which were proposed demonstrate the reluctance with which the new government was accepted;  and that a dread of dismemberment, not an approbation of the particular system under consideration,  had induced an acquiescence in it . . . North Carolina and Rhode Island did not at first accept the constitution, and New York was apparently dragged into it by a repugnance of being excluded from the Confederacy."
Life of Washington, 1804-1807


[and from his decision as Chief Justice]

"The government [of the United States] proceeds directly from the people;  it is "ordained and established' in the name of the people;  and it is declared to be ordained "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty' to themselves and to their posterity . . . .  The government of the Union the (whatever may be the influence of this fact on the case) is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people.  In form and substance it emanates from them.  Its powers are granted by them and are to be exercised directly on them and for their benefit. . . . It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all and acts for all."  
McCulloch vs. Maryland, 1818

When you put those two statements together one of them may be true but both of them cannot be true and, as Beard quite amply demonstrates in his book even in the terms of the time it was hardly what we are all to pretend it is, today.  Beard notes the difference between Marshall's discourse as an historian, in which he told an inconvenient truth and as the Chief "justice" of the Supreme Court in which he lies by characterizing the process in its adoption and, certainly, its administration in such abstracted, conventionalized pieties.  That such dishonesty comes from the most influential of all of the "justices" on that court is something that may have shocked me when I first read Beard's book when I was young, it certainly doesn't shock me anymore because I've read a good deal more about the actual history of the Supreme Court, the Constitution, especially the recent and far more rigorous historical documentation of the economic interests of the framers and the likes of John Marshall. 

More to the point, if consent of the People governed by a Constitution is how a Constitution becomes legitimate, certainly over time that consent must be actively given again and, if the terms in which, especially the Federalist party favoring the adoption of the Constitution claimed to be acting, that the informed consent to it was the actual means of gaining legitimate legitimacy, that consent in future generations has to be on the basis of accurate information, something which certainly has never happened in the history of the United States Constitution, the tacit acquiescence of a duped and ill informed public is hardly the same thing and I would challenge anyone who believes we have even had that flawed means of legitimating it.  It is notable how, once he became Chief "justice" Marshall's candor as an historian gave way to the lies of the lawyer.   The more I find out about John Marshall the lower my opinion of him goes.

I would recommend reading Beard's still extremely shocking and useful book, he is very good at documenting his generally primary documentary evidence to support his contentions.  I would contrast the precision care of the aristocratic lender class who prevailed in the Constitution and its "enlightenment" secular notion of law with the Mosaic Law which is certainly on the side of those who called for debt relief.  Since I am going deeply into the book of Jeremiah, using Brueggemann and Heschel as guides to it, I'll AGAIN give you a passage of what Brueggemann said in his Slow Wisdom lecture which touches exactly on my point that the "rights" specified in the Constitution are mostly those of abstractions of far more use to aristocrats and those who can afford lawyers (such as Trump bought for himself a few days ago) and not only say nothing about the actual rights which the economic underclass really need and do not get much (such as the partial debt relief that President Biden gave to some of those in education-debt).

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 things 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. 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 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 financier class who pushed through, without warrant, the drafting of the Constitution and who pushed its adoption, in some states such as Massachusetts and others in a rather dodgy process that stinks of the namesake of Elbridge Gerry [who is one of the sleaziest of the sleazy New England politician-financiers of the time] contempt for the poor and debtors who were pressed by the financial manipulations of the Federalist class was as rampant as contempt for the underclass is in Republican-fascism, today.   

I've been really busy with putting food away from the garden, that's the reason for the spotty posting.  A frost will come sooner or later, then more active posting will probably resume. 

A REPUBLICAN publicly destroys her OWN PARTY over abortion ban