What Did Cassidy Hutchinson Find To Love In Trump's Regime? How Can She Remain a Republican-fascist Now?

I RESPECT WHAT CASSIDY HUTCHINSON has done in exposing the criminality of Trump and his regime of fascists.  I listened to her public testimony with some gratitude.  But now that I've listened to the interview she did with Rachel Maddow and my gratitude for her exposing not just the criminality but also the degeneracy of the Republican-fascists, I can't claim I can really respect her.  Though if she clarified her own actions and motives, I might be able to.   Though I do hope that she grows past whatever it was, I think for the world in general, knowing how someone who clearly has some shred of decency to her could have participated in something so obviously evil.

When she said she used to love Trump and supported what he was doing in his presidency, at the beginning, I have to ask what was it she loved about it.  Did she love them ripping babies out of their mother's arms, separating them and putting the babies in concentration camps with Mylar blankets, sleeping on concrete floors with random nine and eleven year olds to take care of them?  Then there were the ones who were stolen from their families and given to strangers.  Something done by the Nazis, the GRD, during the Dirty War in Argentina, by Putin with Republican-fascists' support to children stolen from Ukraine.  I wonder how many of the then babies and toddlers stolen from their parents are still not with them and now many of the ones who were returned (due in no small part the Trump regime purposely not keeping records of parents and children) will never recover a normal relationship with their families because of Trump and his regime. And that's only one of the truly cruel and evil things he and is henchmen did.  Dozens, scores and hundreds of others could be described here.  

There was nothing hidden about the atrocities, the crimes against humanity that was not only his policy BUT WAS SOMETHING HE PROMISED TO DO AS HE WAS CAMPAIGNING. He said out loud what the likes of Reagan and the Bushes had to imply and symbolically declare, such as the unmistakable support of the most violent of white supremacy in Reagan's announcement of his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Bush I's Willie Horton ad.  From start to finish the Trump message was an orgy of hate, his entire life is a specimen of the power of affluent-gangster hate, and racism and a whole catechism of other sins and evil.  He is an example of what is called in the Rite of Baptismal "the glamour of evil" only in his case, a product of Hollywood, TV and the NYC media, it's just as vulgar and crass as can be.  

I'd like someone to ask during her book tour just what it was she loved about the actual acts  that were Trump's administration. Was it the huge giveaway of trillions of dollars to billionaires and millionaires racking up record deficits as he impoverished many in the working class and below, destroying lives even before his further crimes against humanity during the Covid pandemic?  Whipping up racism against Latinos, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Black People - his flagrant racism has been open knowledge AND ADJUDICATED CRIMINALITY by him and his father decades before Cassidy was born.  Him calling for the death penalty for innocent, rail-roaded Black teenagers and slandering of those tortured and murdered by the police goes back decades, too.  His membership in and courting of America's indigenous fascist group, white supremacists was no secret, it was blatant.  

As, by the way, was his treatment of Women.  Since she, rightly, held Matt Gaetz to be a sleaze, how did she overlook it in Trump?  The infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged to the young and stupid Billy Bush about digitally raping women with impunity was certainly something she heard before she chose to join his regime, his infidelity to his wives, his creepy sexualization of his own daughter, his treatment of Hillary Clinton, whipping up to his benefit that other and universal form of endemic fascism, misogyny,* in the last weeks of the 2016 campaign with the help of Republican-fascists like James Comey and the New York Times, leading to him winning through the goddamned Electoral College, not the popular vote. I have every confidence that Comey's policy breaking announcement right before the election was partly motivated by his sexism as it was certainly by the fact that he was a Republican hack.  I wouldn't be surprised if the almost simultaneous lie of an impending indictment in the NYT was inspired by the same.  I despise that paper.  It was one of the organs of media that created Trump to start with and it should never be allowed to live that down.

I'll insert here that anyone who is not working to abolish the Electoral College is colluding with the fascists, there will be another time it delivers an illegitimate regime and in this century they're coming mighty close together.   

Getting back to the question of what there was to like about the Trump regime.  Was it the revealed collusion with some of the worst dictators in the world to ratfuck American democracy?  His courting of Putin's regime during the campaign of 2016?  Soliciting their ratfucking of the American election?  His allowing them to penetrate the Oval Office during his first days in office?  His courting of the Saudi dictators?  The Xi regime in China?  THE FRIGGIN' KIM REGIME IN NORTH KOREA?  Making love to other overtly fascist, murderous dictators as he slammed our closest and most reliable allies?  As he tried to destroy NATO for Putin?  Or was it the indigenous class of traitors, the billionaires who colluded with foreign despots to ratfuck the election for Trump, no doubt anticipating the huge bonanza in making America's taxation system approach the regressivity of that of the Roman Empire.  Is that the policy she liked?  

The listing could go on in things like destruction of the environment, the infrastructure of the country, the educational system, even the Post Office, something listed as a responsibility of the Federal Government from the founding of the country.  Just what was it that a Cassidy Hutchinson found to love in a Trump regime?  How could she, as someone who is held to be a paragon of virtue now, have ever become a part of that?  And working under someone as slimy as Mark Meadows, being friendly with scum like Gaetz?  His history with teenage girls was hardly a secret. I wonder why she was surprised when he  so crudely and creepily hit on her. Perhaps she believed she was too old for him to hit on.

I have to wonder if the January 6th putsch hadn't happened if Ms. Hutchinson would have been proud of her service to the Trump regime.  That attempted putsch was certainly inspired by the successful Brooks Bros. putsch that put Bush II in office two decades earlier and I have yet to hear many Republicans regret their part in the massive and incompetent criminality that led us to two of the worst wars the US has ever been involved with and the crash of 2008.  I have to wonder if the Trump insurrection had succeeded if she would have continued to be a part of it because it's clear the majority of currently enrolled Republicans would have been OK with it.  I suspect there would not have been a major exodus from the Republican-fascist party in the second and interminable term of Trumpery, I doubt there would have been much in the way of opposition in the media or even in  that faded old drab, the New York Times.  Dowd would probably blame it on Hillary.  NPR would have just continued on business as usual.  The networks, too.

I have to wonder what it is about the increasingly fascistic Republican Party, on the trajectory to result in Trumpist style fascism since Barry Goldwater's racist warmonger run in 1964, that such Republicans as became Never Trumpers didn't see coming.  I'm hardly a sophisticated operator or member of the media or pundit class and I've seen it coming literally since I was in my puberty then, so many decades ago.  I've seen former family-tradition Republicans peel off certainly since the crimes of Nixon were revealed, I concluded about the time the likes of Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield,  Pete McCloskey either died or left the party or died that there was no such thing as a liberal Republican or even one with a shred of decency.  And I don't include Arlen Specter in that group. He, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins never had me fooled for a second.  Certainly anyone who remained after the revelation of babies in concentration camps, children dying under the abusive conditions Trump and his goons held them in could be held to have no shred of decency.  

Anyone who remained in Trump's regime has some explaining to do as to just what it was that Trump was doing that they thought they could support while retaining anything like human decency.   That he was mostly doing it visibly to People of Color and Poor People instead of affluent whites is something I suspect figures heavily in the inability of so many to see it.  That's not uncommon in the United States, the fact that white supremacy IS, in fact, and always has been our indigenous form of fascism, at times here as bad as almost anything that rose up in Europe in the 20th century, was always largely imperceptible to white People, even those of generally better will.  That misogyny is another indigenous form of fascism is even more imperceptible, and that's a shortsightedness that transcends race and ethnicity and religion.  It even transcends gender as mentioned above.

I do have to wonder how anyone in the Republican Party in 2023 can be held to not be an outright fascist when that certainly has been the absolutely clear nature of the Republican Party since Trump's takeover in 2016 and, I assert, certainly after the 2000 putsch by members of the Bush family and the five worst Republicans on the Supreme Court - remembering that two Republicans even then objected to that outrageous ratfucking by the Court.  I certainly don't trust anyone who chooses to remain in the Republican Party, certainly not after the Trump regime, even from before his attempted putsch.  I think that if we can figure out what twisted, amoral mental processes would allow a Cassidy Hutchinson to remain in the Republican Party still, we might start to understand the media that never learns a single damned thing even as they are the ones who produce the evidence that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to American democracy, equality, justice and anything good.  I think James Comey is a good specimen of how an egotistical admiration of ones own virtue can co-exist with support for and commission of the opposite of virtue.  The repugnance I feel for him has a specific smell to it, high price perfume over an overall moral rot.  Maybe there's hope for Cassidy Hutchinson if she does some serious soul searching, she's still young enough to learn something if she's honest about herself, first.

I think money has everything to do with it, from the corporate funding of NPR to the wealth of the owners and advertisers of the New York Times to the financial strategy of FOX Lies to keep their hate addicted audience coming back even when they knew they were spouting lies, even as Rupert reportedly thought Trump was insane and dangerous.  That scumbag's greed is the only epic thing about him, other than his love of money.  St. Paul certainly got that right, it is the root of evil.  Though racism is certainly a strong motive in that party, as well. I don't see how anything within the Republican Party of 2023 can be held to be anything but saturated in it.

* There are Women lynched every day in the United States and around the world for the mere fact of their being Women.  That is something massively supported by media, by institutions, by the law.  In every way misogyny is to Women what Nazism is to Jews and Slavic People (would that today's Slavic Nazis knew that) and what white supremacy is to People of Color.  It seeps in so deeply that even many if not most Women believe it's just some natural and permanent condition of human existence, the price of them being alive.  
 

It takes an old Washington hand to make the kind of change that Democrats should make.

Republican's don't need experience or even sentience to do the evil they intend. 

THE GREATEST EX-PRESIDENT in the history of the United States is, indisputably a toss-up between Jimmy Carter and John Quincy Adams.  Adams for his career in the House of Representatives, a champion of abolition, Jimmy Carter for many more years doing so much in so many ways.  I was not enthusiastic for Carter as President but there is no ex-politician whose work I admire more, now.  Of all of those who lived after their presidency, those two have done the most with the rest of their lives.  Neither of them were, notably, successful as president.  John Quincy Adams' attainment of the presidency was marred by the sleaziness that is inevitably to be had when the goddamned atrocity of the Electoral College comes into play and the opposition to Northern presidents by the united slave power.  Jimmy Carter's presidency was a victim of a number of factors, not least among those is the constant hostility to Democrats by big media and small.  The use of demeaning stereotypes of Southerners was, ironically, one of the things that especially the DC and NYC based media used against him.   Some of that certainly figured into the hostility to Bill Clinton and held over to Hillary Clinton, though she was hardly a Southerner.   I've always wondered what the Sulzbergers had it in for them over.   Probably something as petty as that. 

He, like other Governors who have not worked before in Washington, made bad choices in staffing and appointments, more in line with being ineffective.  The Washington establishment doesn't play well with outsiders and the outsiders are seldom equipped to assert themselves.  Carter was certainly a victim of the always unrealistic demands of the left of the Democratic Party and, as is so often the case since 1960, the Kennedy myth.  In the end I think what really did him in was being gamed by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller who gulled him into letting the deposed Shah of Iran into the country, which, of course, set off the hostage crisis that effectively ended any hopes of Carter winning the election of 1980, ushering in the most criminal administration by numbers convicted till to day, the Hollywood created Ronald Reagan who both the DC establishment and big media adored because he gave the rich so much as he shafted the middle-class and the poor.  There is nothing the "liberal media" adores as much as they do  someone who will redistribute wealth upward, those who aren't all in on that can be counted on to either follow the corporate line to their own advantage or to disdain anything like effective administration by a truly progressive president.  We can see both of those at work on Joe Biden, the most effective Democratic President since LBJ, though unlike LBJ he managed to pull out of a hopeless war instead of getting mired in the one his predecessors set up as destroyed the great deliverer of equality and economic justice in 1968, leading to the previously most criminal president in American history, Richard Nixon.   

I have come to truly despise the racket that journalism is, though its necessity is an admitted reality.  It was that would-be, self-promoted alternative to corporate media that did so much to open my eyes as to the reality of self-seeking and corrupt journalism, National Public Radio when I noticed the abrupt change of tone between the coverage of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the beginning of when I came to regret all those donations I'd made to "public" radio.  After that it was other "alternative" organs of the media which I saw may not have been corrupted by corporate largess, as NPR and PBS certainly were, but which were as counterproductive in their unrealism.   The more idealistic they pretend to be, the sooner they cave. 

The Progressive magazine was the first subscription I dropped largely out of a realization that it was pretty useless in terms of realistic political action.  That massive asshole, the self-righteous Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff played an enormous part in my disillusionment with the Madison Wisconsin alleged radical POV.  I knew Hentoff was an a-hole before saying Hentoff was an a-hole was cool.  When he went to work for the fascist-right it didn't surprise me, I'd already identified that as a certain feature of the, especially, Marxist "left" in the neo-conservatives.  In the years since I've been online and have looked ad depth into the archived publications of the Marxists and near-Marxist "left" and seen how many of them sold out, some of them for their profit and as a boon to their careers in journalism.  I have, as well, due to reading more of the primary material than was ever available to me before, come to believe that any determined secular, atheist, materialist ideological orientation will eventually, in more ways than one, destroy the actual left of radical redistribution of material wellbeing equally.   There was not any Communist subjected to that legendary martyrdom of red-scare blacklisting who I know of who was not all in on supporting one or another of the greatest enslavers, oppressors and mass murderers in human history.  Though there were some non-communist lefties who got unjustly sucked into that due to their unwise and naive association to actual Stalinists and Trotsyites and, later Maoists, though Hollywood legend and published myth of the passion of the commies had made such targeting more informal and less an aspect of House Committee show hearings than in the low point of HUAC.  

Other organs of the "alternative" lefty media to disillusion me similarly were The Nation magazine, especially after it was bought out by it current owner, and In These Times.  While there are certainly some good people who wrote and still write for all of those, the history of those publications and their current in-house ideologies have been a boon for the Republican-fascists.  The ideology of "free speech-press" absolutism" is one of the worst of those among those who work in the media, especially those who claim to be lefties who support equality.  Holding that someone, especially in the mass media has "a right to lie" is a certain basis for fascism to win.  Media corporations, like all corporations, will, eventually prove to be anti-egalitarian and if not explicitly so, will demand abstract principals of corporate equality and professional privilege that will redound to the benefit of those with money and, so, power.

All of this is to get to the current media campaign to destroy Joe Biden's hopes of reelections and, with that, the hopes for any kind of real democracy to survive in the United States, certainly any hope of doing what he has done more than any Democratic president since LBJ, making real progress towards economic and legal equality.

There is a lesson in the history of Democratic presidencies in the post-WWII period.  Truman was an old Washington hand and won election after his first term in the wake of FDR's death.  Kennedy was sold as young and vigorous and was killed in office.  I think with him you have to put his brother Robert Kennedy whose nepotistic appointment as Attorney General is something which has never been adequately subjected to critical evaluation but which, the more I read about it, a mixed benefit to the country.  His central set of Harvard boy advisors  is, as well, something that needs to be looked at harder and longer than the Ivy League set who has been in charge of doing that has ever given it.  Robert Kennedy's hatred and, especially, disdain for LBJ had no small hand in sandbagging LBJ's presidency in the aftermath of JFK's assassination and one of the biggest landslide victories over the racist, nuclear-war fantasist Barry Goldwater.  

LBJ was another old Washington hand and a Texas politician.  Admittedly that almost certainly  guaranteed a history of corruption (certain states are endemically corrupt, it would seem) BUT AS PRESIDENT THERE IS NO ONE ELSE APART FROM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WHO DID MORE TO PROMOTE EQUALITY UNTIL JOE BIDEN.   I will repeat that the high point of the egalitarian-democratic traditional American liberalism that is in so many ways the opposite of "classical liberalism" came in the early years of the Johnson presidency when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a host of other such programs became the law of the land.  There is no other President in the post-WWII period who did more to further the promises of the Declaration of Independence than that old, crude, vulgar Texan.  Though the involvement in Vietnam is believed to have done in his presidency, RFJ having gone from an anti-communist member of Joe McCarthy's red-hunting staff to the AG in his brother's anti-communist presidency which entangled the country into the war in Vietnam, suddenly discovered he was really a peace-dove and an anti-war campaigner - once Senator Eugene McCarthy showed how vulnerable Lyndon Johnson was by almost winning the New Hampshire primary.  Gene McCarthy's post-senatorial career as an enemy of the Democratic Party is another example of how the "left" has been anything but an effective and reliable force in fighting against our indigenous American fascism which in the same period became the bulwark of the Republican, now Republican-fascist party.  

After that there were the presidencies of three young Democrats, all of them promoting their candidacies on the basis of their inexperience in Washington, Carter and Bill Clinton and in Barack Obama's case his youth and vigor, all of them in some ways trying to go for a repeat of the "Camelot" Kennedy cultism that was the basis of John Kennedy's candidacy and administration.  Clinton and Obama managed to get reelected in no small part due to their opponents being rather ineffective.  I remember someone saying it was his luck that Republicans nominated Bob Dole, someone that no one outside of Kansas liked.  Clinton made some of the same mistakes Carter did in bringing his staff and friends from his Governorship with him, where they were ineffective and at times embarrassing, though none of the many more embarrassing than Clinton who, as the late Molly Ivins said, we had a right to expect he'd keep his fly zipped.  His ineffectiveness as a Democratic President and an inept politician was on full display as Republicans and the mass media attacked him and his staff and made him a far less effective president than he could have been.  I used to say he was probably the smartest man to have been president till that time but one of the least wise.  His idiotic behavior during Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 certainly had a hand in her Electoral College loss to the worst man to have ever been elected president, Trump.  I will never forgive his meeting with the Attorney General as Hillary was under investigation, an investigation that about ran out before he pulled that grotesquely irresponsible stunt.  I blame the AG as much as I blame him for it, she should have known better.    I could go into other problems such as his appointment of the beyond her abilities Janet Reno as Attorney General and others.

Barack Obama's two years in the Senate were an even slimmer Washington experience than John Kennedy's and it showed.  No Democrat since Johnson in 1964 had a better hand dealt to them by the voters and no Democrat has wasted more of what he was given than Obama.  His one big accomplishment, The American Healthcare Act was in every way more an achievement of Nancy Pelosi who, when Obama and Harry Reid were ready to throw in the towel, insisted on it being passed.  Obama idiotically traded things away on the insanely stupid hopes of being crowned "a bipartisan" president by the national media to lying Republican frauds like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, he did that often enough that I came to believe it was an excuse for him not delivering what his own supporters wanted.  Democrats and the country paid a huge amount for Obama's futile attempt to get the love and respect of the people he obviously valued most, Republicans.   Many of his appointments were good but some of them were extremely bad, the corporate "Democrat" Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff one of the worst.  A lot of the good he achieved was through his choice of Joe Biden as Vice President, providing him with the long years of Washington experience that he didn't have and Hillary Clinton who, by that time, had put in the years of learning the ropes that neither Obama or Bill Clinton had.  

Joe Biden is under attack for the thing which has made him a more effective president in his first term than either Clinton or Obama was in their two terms or Jimmy Carter was in his one.   Just as Lyndon Johnson was a far more effective president, especially early in his presidency than JFK was early in his.  I will note that one thing about them, unlike Kennedy, Clinton and Obama, neither of them were a product of the Ivy League level of academic credentialing, the Ivy League level universities and colleges seeming to more often than not be factories for producing anti-democratic gangsters than public servants.  

But most of all I think the success of Biden and Johnson WAS A PRODUCT OF THEIR LONG EXPERIENCE, EXPERIENCE WHICH DOES NOT COME WITHOUT AGE.  The fetish of youthful presidencies, the Kennedy mystique and all that rot has certainly not worked to produce good Democratic presidencies.  When your motives are as corrupt as those of a Reagan (not a Washington insider) George H.W. Bush (a corrupt DC insider and corporate gangster) his son the youngish Supreme Court appointed BUSH II and, like Reagan a governor without much work in DC, you don't need the experience because they weren't working against the corrupt machinery of both the mass media, corporate criminal operations, the political corruption that is endemic at all levels of our politics and, especially, as elevated to ersatz sanctity by that most corrupt organ of our federal government, the Supreme Court.  

To promote equality, justice, ECONOMIC JUSTICE MOST OF ALL, you need a real Democrat who has long years of experience working among the gangsters and crooks and who know how to work things.  That won't come without blemishes and scars, Lord knows I used to be critical of Joe Biden for what he did in the Senate at times and I was very skeptical of his ability to win the election and do things.  But, as I pointed out, the Black Women of South Carolina knew better than I did.  He has won me over as his presidency has gone on, not lost me like the others did.  He got us out of the hopeless, unwinnable quagmire of Afghanistan that Bush II got us into and which neither Obama nor Trump got us out of. I will not forget that Biden first went to Washington as an opponent of the War in Vietnam, I think the lessons he'd learned by the time he got to that seat of corruption bore fruit as he refused to go back on Trump's irresponsibly set deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, though he certainly knew he would take a hit for how it happened and he bravely pulled out of that hopeless mess.  He did what Johnson was gulled by the Harvard Boys into not doing.   And don't believe for a second that any mainstream organ of journalism would slam Trump for the even worse consequences of holding to his deadline, that's something they only do when it's a Democrat. 

I will never again be supporting a "youthful" Democrat of little Washington experience.  I don't ever want another Democratic governor to figure they can do what they might have done in their state to the country because unless it's some kind of Republican corruption, such as Reagan and Bush II committed there and expanded in DC, it won't happen.  It takes an old Washington hand to make the kind of change that Democrats need and so many others hope for.  It won't be someone who is endorsed by the lefty magazines or sites because they're too busy preening in their lifetime extension of the collegiate experience or trying to relive the romance of the hopeless cause of the Marxists or imagining themselves as extras in some red-scare era movie or show.  I'm done with all of that, they were never really in it for real equality or real economic justice or anything real.  I looked at their sites recently and found out their heads are still stuck up the same asses they were in 1968 and, reading the archives online, the left has had its head stuck up since Victor Berger was being disdained as a "sewer socialist".  

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GIVEN THAT IT IS STILL THE RELIABLE ENGINE OF FASCIST MANIPULATION and attaining illegitimate power, that the Electoral College is not being attacked with full force in order to abolish it has to be a conclusive symptom of our own failure to protect democracy and its benefits.  Every voice that is not constantly raised against it, pointing out how Trump and Trumpist Republican-fascism, the Bush II crime spree and Republican-fascism in general openly relies on gaming it with the help of billionaire gangsters domestic and among foreign dictators is a voice that is selling out democracy by default.  

Any political commentator who is not attacking that slave-power imposed atrocity on our political system is a traitor to egalitarian democracy, the cannot even be held to be a supporter of what we traditionally consider to be American democracy.  The Electoral College is among the central corruptions of our system, that along with the anti-democratically structured Senate and the massive corruption inherent in the way the Supreme Court is structured are things that no real supporter of egalitarian democracy could possibly ignore as clear and present dangers.  That it will be hard to get rid of it is no excuse to attack it now and constantly until it is either made ineffective by state laws that respect the national majority vote or by its abolition in favor of direct election of the president.  The Trump scheme worked out by "constitutional scholars," no doubt an off-shoot of such Ivy League fascist schemes as the "unitary executive," could never have been tried if the  Electoral College was not there as an opportunity of corruption.  It has worked twice since 2000 to impose Bush II and Trump, it was the basis of the scheme to steal the 2020 election.  Its got to be destroyed or American democracy will fail and real, egalitarian democracy will not ever happen here.

Against The Pale Facsimile Of Christian Morality and So Slavery to Sin, For Real Freedom

I'VE DECIDED TO GO THROUGH at least some of the lecture For Freedom Christ Has Freed You: The Paradoxical Character Of Christian Liberty by Luke Timothy Johnson.  Not because I agree completely with what he says in it, though I agree with most of it,  but because I think it's one of the most dangerous things in American culture that what he talks about in his first paragraph (at least in my somewhat casual transcription) is so widely and wrongly believed.  And he talks only of the positive aspect of America's "civic religion"  That putrid O'Connor - Rehnquist name for that ersatz substitute for piety and religion, proper.  And because so many Americans profess to be Christians, it is important to explore the relationship between morality and notions of liberty and the real moral restraints that are necessary for any real freedom, as opposed to unequal privileges,  to exist at all and to be a moral benefit instead of a dissipating evil.  Today much, perhaps most of Americans and many Europeans notions of "liberty and freedom" is an amoral and evil practice of dissipation.  The neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and other evil political movements are based in such dissipation.

I will note before what has to say by pointing out Luke Timothy Johnson doesn't seem to much make of a distinction that I think is important, the difference between notions of "liberty" and a responsible, realistic conception of freedom.  That's somewhat idiosyncratic to me and not because of the denotation of the words but what I perceive is the cultural and habitual use of the terms "freedom" and "liberty."  There are things about the ideas that need to be specified and always separated.  I think "liberty" as it is more often used in talk and thinking is tied to an amoral notion of people being able to do whatever they want to regardless of the effects on other People and living beings, the environment, etc.  That "liberty" is inherently anti-egalitarian and inevitably destructive.  Freedom, if it is to be a virtue and not mere amoral license,  has to be restrained by the damage doing what you want to do causes to People, to animals, to living organisms, to the environment AND TO THE GENERAL CULTURAL CONTEXT IN WHICH SUCH FREEDOM IS PRACTICED.  It is, inevitably, limited by the rights of People and the needs of animals and organisms and the environment, it has to be exercised in a context which propagates the common well-being of People and other living beings and, so cannot be unimpeded and unlimited.  Any good society has to set limits on freedom, all freedoms, including those idolized by American ideology, most of all freedom of speech and, I would say the far lesser items of "freedom of the press" and, yes, "freedom of religion."   I don't think any moral or even rational egalitarian democracy can refuse to suppress ideologies and, yes, even religions of demonstrated danger to the lives and rights and the decent living of People and other living beings.   I think it is one of the things we are living with that the "new left" the commercial "counter-culture" and the Warren Court rather stupidly gave such libertarian notions free of what were traditionally considered conventional restraints and THE LANGUAGE OF SUCH LIBERTY to the traditional form of American fascists, the white supremacists and the self-seekers of selfish "liberty" the rich and those who were to become rich in their silly imaginings.  I think that is a huge part of how America got from the advances in equality from the late 1960s to the 1970s to where we are today.

I will assert that in the context of the Americas and Europe, at least, such a notion as responsible moral freedom is inevitably tied to the egalitarian morality of the Jewish religious tradition, Christianity being a further development of the radicalism of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel.  Most certainly the letters of Paul who, it should never be forgotten, considered himself a Jew till his dying day.  It is obvious in the use of the story of the Exodus among the "founders" such as Benjamin Franklin and even Thomas Jefferson in the proposed iconography of the new nation that they also saw the Jewish Bible as a fount of American freedoms.  I'm less familiar with that in the context of European countries or other countries in the Americas.  

I am seriously skeptical that within the sweep of history in which notions of such freedom and "liberty" rose to become in any way a part of political and legal reality can be divorced from its prerequisite religious holdings of morality.  One of the best things about the United States, especially within the context of the modern Democratic Party is that you don't have to be Jewish or Christian to fully and, in many cases, more impressively declare AND LIVE OUT out an allegiance to that radical equality and justice.  I have also said I think it has been present in other religious traditions as well, though  it would be dishonest to ignore that even within Christianity and Judaism its opposites have also been present.  I hold it is self-evident that when that has been true it has happened in oppositions to the radicalism of the Golden Rule and other central commandments of that religious tradition.  I think it is one of the glories of the Old Testament that it so impressively confesses the sins of the rulers and priests and rich people of Israel and Judea.   The conventional history of the United States, when it isn't hagiographic lies, has a lot of catching up to do and Florida and other Republican-fascist ruled states and the American media can be counted on to suppress any such introspective that might lead to moral correctives.  I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future they don't saw in half such prophetic critics as the kings did to the Prophets.  Currently its best recognized face is in the Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court and Republican-fascist controlled state houses.

If you want to skip over the introductory material and listen ahead, the lecture starts at about 5:00 here.  

Certain truths of our faith are so fundamental and yet so difficult to maintain with integrity that they must be repeated over and over again to check our tendency to slip and slide away from them into some kind of pale facsimile. Such is the truth of Christian freedom or liberty which is found expressed most explicitly in the Letter of the Apostle Paul. Our contemporary speech that's so dominated, even wrapped in and corrupted by political discourse, even within theology, that believes may be tempted to believe that when they talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness their speech is consonant with the Good News. Or that when they espouse some form of Liberation Theology they are advancing the mission of Jesus. But they are not.  The paradox of Christian liberty is not about political problem solving that seeks to adjust the furniture within social arrangements, it is rather about the mystery of God's presence and power within human existence.  And to grasp the paradox of Christian liberty, then,  we must be willing to relinquish our default mode of political speech and enter into Paul's properly religious discourse.  

The entire Republican-fasicst, "Christian nationalist," largely mid-20th century Hollywood bullshit presentation of Christianity, which is a totally denatured merely symbol waving secularized Protestantism,* mixed up with white-supremacist notions of Americanism, is, of course, not Christianity any more than it is actual American history.  It is what is on display every single time any Republican speaks about Christianity in a political context.  That such notions as "liberty" and "freedom" are tied so intimately into that dysfunctional dystopian mythology is, of course nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus either in Paul's presentation of it or in the Gospels and the other letters of the New Testament.   

As a strong supporter of liberation theology I can agree with what LTJ says in so far as even an authentic Christian theology of liberation has to be understood as something which is juggling fire.  But given the context of The Gospel and Epistles in the context of the Hebrew Biblical tradition, which centers around the liberation of The Children of Israel and the Prophetic critique of the political economy among the Children of Israel, any attempt to remove the Gospel from political and economic life is, I think, wrong.  But any political entanglement with Christianity is fraught with potentials for serious moral corruption THOUGH TO IGNORE THE MORAL NECESSITY OF POLITICAL ENTANGLEMENT IS A GUARANTEE OF MORALLY CORRUPT AMORAL GOVERNMENT.  Talk about being innocent as doves while being as cunning as adders.  It is such a difficult line to tread between political necessity and moral exigency that it's probably safest to admit right up front that constant reflection to prevent evil must be part of the process.  Only by constantly checking for moral adherence can such a thing hold together.  Look at the present situation in that tragic land, Nicaragua for a good example of the potential moral corruption that springs from any political program of "liberation"  so claimed by those seeking to rule.   I've gone over the reality of "liberty, equality and fraternity" in the French Revolution and, relevant to the next section of LTJ's talk, the slave-compact which is the American Constitution, the vehicle in which political liberty (in the mandatory imagination of Americans) drives through our history to the Trump dominated America of today.  The talk goes over something that could not be more relevant to our situation now.  It should never be forgotten that slavery and genocide were the law of the land for most of the time that the Bill of Rights has been part of the Constitution.   Indeed, neither of those has passed into the past.  

But let's start with some social realities.  Paul's language about slavery and freedom should be startling to us precisely because it was forged within a political context in which slavery was not only real but was omnipresent.  The Roman Empire inherited the practice of slavery from the Greeks and through military conquest massively expanded the number of slaves throughout the empire. And though ancient slavery had no racial dimension, and although it was at least theoretically possible for slaves to win manumission the actual experience of slavery was, nevertheless, demeaning, arduous and dangerous.  Some highly educated Greek slaves, to be sure,  served in households as scribes and tutors and poets  and musicians, such as was the great first century philosopher, Epictetus.  Countless others were worked to death in mines and mills.  And most significant is that all slaves were, under law, property rather than persons.  And they could be ill-treated, sexually exploited,  tortured and even killed at the whim of a master.  There were millions of slaves in the first century Mediterranean world, they constituted approximately ten percent of the population.  Across the entire empire and up to forty percent of the population within Italy about two to three million people.

That Paul would understand  the hardship of being under the power of another is clear from the extended period of time, between four to six years that he, himself, spent in local and imperial captivity, writing at least five of his letters from prison.  He could wear the self-designation of "slave of the Lord" and "a prisoner in chains" in more than a metaphorical sense.  

And that Paul's readers were intimately acquainted with real slavery is clear from the presence of slaves within his community.  The scribe Tertius who took Paul's dictation when he wrote to the Romans bore a slave name, "the third,"  number three.  The runaway slave [Onesimus] of Philemon  had become a co-worker in Paul's mission.  And Paul exhorts household slaves and masters concerning their respective responsibilities.   So when Paul speaks of slavery and freedom in religious terms he does not speak as some kind of Olympian remove from the harsh realities of social existence.

I think one of the most common misunderstandings in Christianity is that Paul urged slave-owners to stop treating those they held in slavery as slaves but as " beloved brothers".  If Paul, within the milieu in which he had to operate, was forced to treat the general ubiquity of brutal chattel slavery as a given and something which many of those he converted to an approximation of Christianity would be very familiar with and likely were bound up in, that's no reason we can't go beyond that.  As certainly as he struggled with his own imperfect practice of his conception of Christian virtue against his own unconverted personal life, he would have had to deal with social conventions and customs and habits even among those who had become converts to his Christianity.  Paul's confessed weakness about doing what he wanted to even when he knew it wasn't compatible with the Gospel is one of the rare things that is actually endearing about him.  I think it is a common misreading of Paul that so much of what he presents as personal confession and religio-social critique is mistaken as commandments of normative conduct and law making.  It is shocking how much of the reading of Paul totally misses his deeply subtle reasoning and persuasion.  

I have, also, discussed the attraction of the slave-ridden Roman Republic among the so-called "founding fathers," the slave-owning, almost to a man slavery-friendly group of rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the form of anti-democratic government we are saddled with.  It is clear that they were not in any way friends of general freedom, not only within the milieu in which they operated but going on into the future, they set many a booby-trap that would go off if any great move towards equal freedom, equal justice and, especially, economic justice were seriously pursued by even a majority of voters.  I would go so far as to say the discourse of the Gospels and the letters, even with their accommodation to the slavery within the culture they were written tends towards equality and freedom whereas the secular discourse of the American Constitution and the Supreme Court rulings have an actual, demonstrated effect of always acting as a roadblock for that equality and, so freedom.  I think the structure of court rulings and the legal system make any reform of things far harder in secular government than changes in religious thinking.   Though a lot of that is due to the usurpation of powers by the Supreme Court which our written Constitution has done nothing whatsoever to overturn and correct.  What gets corrected is the rare instance in which the Court uses that usurped power to promote equality under the law.  The Roberts Court is destroying all of that and all of the legislation to that effect.  The "traditional-Catholics" on the Supreme Court are as bad as the first Catholic on that blasted Court, Roger Taney.  Confession of evil is the first step in overcoming evil.

*  The understanding of the Republican-fascist, Protestant "Christian nationalist" alliance with Republican-fascist "traditional-Catholicism" is a product of the decision of racist TV "ministering" money and power seekers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to try to harness the independent force of the Catholic anti-choice movement, changing their traditional being OK with abortion in order to make common cause with them to dominate American politics.  It is, of course, ironic because much of that Protestant cultural milieu was viciously anti-Catholic, though among such people a little irony to get lots of power and, so, cash is a price they're very willing to pay.  Of course, none of it has anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus or the Letters of Paul.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama Posted Late Due To Computer Problems - Dianah McCorry - Dark Matter

Dark Matter

Kevin Corrigan
Chet Siegel
Ed Herbstman
Dennis Pacheco
Alexis Lambright
Anna Sale  RADIO HOST
Rob Webber JANITOR
 

Written by Diana McCorry
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
This story was inspired by listener Christopher Tunnell

This is such a short play that I am going to post a provocative Youtube featuring Pavel Kroupa, an eminent scientist who believes "dark matter" is a myth.  

It's always interesting to find out that so many things that have been presented as certain knowledge are far from certain.   It makes you wonder how much of the "popular understanding of science" is a bunch of ideological or professional assertion that is just waiting to be destroyed.  I've mentioned before how much of the biology I was taught as reliable science has been either greatly modified or entirely overturned.   I think that scientists should be more modest in their claims, the credibility of science would probably benefit greatly if they'd start doing that.

I will say that though I hadn't looked at the site for a while before going back to post this, one of the best new audio drama sources, The Truth, has suspended production.  Considering the number of excellent dramas still available for hearing at their site, please go give them a try.  I assume the extended sponsorship commercials at the start of the videos are still paying and it might encourage them to resume.  

The Passing Of Another Species

THIS HAS BEEN one of the worst years of my life.  First the terrible decline and death of a close family member who I shared in the care of, my own health problems - right now it's just seasonal allergies, I hope.   The alcoholism of some of my closest younger relatives has brought back the alcohol caused deaths of even closer relatives.  

As bad as any of that, the terrible maple decline has hit my area all of a sudden, after a normal looking spring all of the large number of sugar maples around where I live, where I grew up are dying.  I would be surprised if there are any alive in five years.   It's impossible for me to imagine life without the trees I've seen almost every day my entire life and sugar maples being taken out of the forest canopy that I've lived with.  

During my lifetime I've seen the elms die, the chestnuts, hemlocks, beech trees, and ashes, now the sugar maples.  I doubt that the local extinction of tree species is over.  The cost of global warming and the fetish of free trade is destroying the New England forests, the incalculable mere economic loss through the idiocy of economic ideology and political and, especially, legal corruption is enormous.  We don't consider that cost to all of us for the profits of the millionaires and, more so, billionaires.  They and their academic and lawyerly prostitutes, and more so, those in the goddamned "free press" have cost us too much to allow all of this to continue.  They'll strip the Earth and it still won't be enough for them and the liars of the free press.  

The spiritual cost is as real as it is indefinable.

That's why I more or less took this past week off.  I've been in mourning but I think it's immoral for me to wallow in that, I'd rather fight and die doing that than give in.   I hope Milton Friedman is rotting in hell, and I'm a universalist.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Prelude and Toccata

 

 

Pierre Willimann, guitar

Mynah / The Eleventh Hour · Orrin Evans · Bill Stewart · Mulgrew Miller

 

Music For A Sad Anniversary - Doc Watson - Honey Baby Blues

 

Ben Shapiro vs. Barbie: The Movie, Part 2 with John Fugelsang

 

Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum - More Confessions

I REMEMBERED that I'd called Rufus Jones "Rufus Fox" right after I went home from posting one of my recent pieces and then forgot to fix it when I got around to posting again.  I seem to do that a lot, one of the few down-sides I've found to not having internet in the home, anymore.  I was going to have it put in again but I'm getting so much more done offline than I did when I had it right there.   I guess embarrassment is the price I pay to not waste time online.  I hadn't even heard about the Peruvian aliens until my sister told me about them, though I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it even now that I've seen the smudgy looking pictures of them now that I have. 

I'd thought I'd gotten another name wrong after leaving the place I go to go online and couldn't check it but that one was OK as posted.   I don't want to get too casual about it but don't want to get obsessive either. 

Those "aliens" I'll believe it when they're shown to have a different physiology than earthly beings.  I'll be a real hard sell if they've got DNA, for example.    Absent a conclusive conclusion that aliens with DNA are proof of God's design of life,  it would be too stupendously improbable for that to have evolved earth-like in two places in the universe independently. 

From The Confessions Of A Thought Criminal - Peter Brown On Wealth, Work and the Holy Poor: Early Christian Monasticism between Syria and Egypt

I HAD NOT paid enough attention to the great late-classical historian Peter Brown because I'd been turned off to him by a review I read of one of his books from around the turn of the millennium.  I'd gotten the wrong idea from reading the review in one of the lefty publications that Brown was the kind of dismissive disciple of the "enlightenment" who rejected Christianity in that most modern of intellectual follies, believing that anti-Christians from some suburb of the all encompassing megalopolis, "modernism," could see Jesus and his followers and the later development of early Christianity better than those who lived it.  That review couldn't have been more wrong about that.  

It was lazy and stupid of me to not go to the bother of reading Peter Brown's scholarship because I'd been given an entirely wrong idea about him and his work not even second-hand but through the ideological filter of an enemy of Christianity.  I've recently started on Brown's work through listening to his lectures and will soon go to the books as I have access to them and have found that that secondary level view of his work is a complete distortion of him.  That's a good example of what's wrong with the typical modern scholastic view of early Christianity and the times and, so, world it arose in.  If I could get a seriously wrong view of a scholar who lives at the same time I and the reviewer does, who lives in roughly the same world from the filtering of a typically modernistic, as I recall academic scribbler, how much more wrong will they get texts and the People who wrote them or spoke them from two thousand years ago?  

That's not to say that modern scholars aren't at a considerable advantage from those of that decisive period in the development of the "enlightenment," as Peter Brown points out in the lecture I'm posting here, today's scholars have an enormously larger corpus of primary source material than even the greatest scholars of the past had available to them.  He specifically mentions the iconic "enlightenment" interpreter of late Classical history, Edmund Gibbons.  Not only is his still influential writing obviously deficient through his lack of knowledge of the   enormous troves of previously unpublished manuscripts discovered preserved in desert sands and in ancient monastic libraries but also in having more direct access to enormous amounts of material that have been published.  The scope of his knowledge was severely limited by the scope of his focus and it's blindingly obvious that his scholarship was led by his prejudices and biases.  

It's bizarre that so much 18th and even 19th century scholarship is still the basis of the common received non-wisdom about things like that.   I think it was Luke Timothy Johnson who pointed out that a student right now, with access to the internet has available to them enormously greater amounts of published materials, primary documents, not only printed and published but also legible imaging of manuscripts which only those with access to the greatest libraries of the early 20th century might have had.  And I'd doubt that any library of ink on paper before the internet could have competed with what's available for free, now. I will point out that what's less available is the published scholarship of the recent past which is generally behind pay-walls.  Unless you have access to the largest of university libraries, most of that is sealed off of any would be scholar or student without the ability to access it.   I would add to that the enormously useful tools of word search and immediate access to a text on the screen that it would have taken many minutes if not hours of time to track down in the stacks, in the series, in the individual volumes, even when those were well indexed that you can find in seconds.  Those hours and minutes and seconds really add up fast when you're doing research - I still remember the days I spent pouring through PDFs of a Victorian Anthropological journal only to find out that Darwin had lied about what another scientist had said.  I wish all old journals, at least, were fully digitized. 
 

Unfortunately, I can't provide a free link to a printed version of this lecture which is behind a pay wall.    But the lecture itself is a revelation about the differing relationship to real work in Egyptian and Western monasticism and the rejection of labor for monks in Eastern Christian and other monasticism.  It's really astonishing how much of Christianity is sealed off from most of the minds of most Christians and, far more so, those who think they know something about Christianity from the outside of it.  It's a temptation to try to transcribe it but I'm not ready to do that yet.  The questions and answers are almost as important as the lecture, itself.  

I have found that Peter Brown is a far better and far more honest a  scholar than the reviews had led me to believe and one with a really welcomed sense of humor.  I will point out that several times in the lecture his severe stammer comes out but it's more than worth it to wait for him to continue.  I'm glad he had the courage to give lectures despite that.   This is one of the best historical lectures and one of the best lectures on early Christianity and late antiquity that I've yet heard.  He is a great historian and a great scholar and I suspect a real Christian.   

Catholic Women Preach - September 10, 2023

 

 Jacobs, MSW, Ph.D.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Several years before my aunt died, she spoke of the need for family healing. She was the matriarch who carried family secrets and negotiated disputes. I remember her saying she was tired of this mediator role and that before she died, we needed to find ways to dialogue and to forgive one another, not just once but every time there was a need.

I asked a friend whose background was in family counseling and spiritual direction to facilitate a family meeting. Her opening prayer invited the Holy Spirit to be present in our time together. The session was one of compassionate listening and reconciliation. My aunt was at peace with the outcome and reminded us until the day she died of the importance of family prayer and dialogue.

Years later as I thought about the African philosophy of Ubuntu, I am because we are, I remember the coming together of my family who represented different religious traditions in the spirit of oneness of family and all of humanity held together by the Holy Spirit’s presence.

There is a healing power for those gathered in prayer who trust that God is in the midst of them. While we may share hope for a specific outcome, we must remember that line of the Lord’s prayer where we ask for God’s will to be done. Trusting in God, frees us to hear the Holy Spirit’s guidance, not just our own desired outcome, for in the midst of the community and in our hearts as we become open to new ways of hearing the other, we realize that whatever the outcome may be, we are not alone on our journey. We are in the family and community where God calls us.

In Pope Francis’ catechesis on discernment, he said that the Bible reminds us that God’s voice is one of peace. Be silent, witness what your heart is feeling. At that moment, the Lord’s voice comes to us individually and collectively.  Nothing can hinder the love that comes from being in contact with the Lord. The Holy Spirit who is present in us makes the Word of God come alive, suggests new meanings, opens doors that seem closed, indicates lifegiving paths where the road seems to be dark and, filled with loss and confusion.

Discernment is the process of listening to God during our journey. A praying community is important for the journey. We find that we are blessed with the joys and sorrows of family, community, and our world. While we may not have received the companions we want, we will always receive the companions we need.

Blessings coming during the sorrows of the covid pandemic may have resulted in being drawn to companions in new ways as zoom communities developed for prayer and sharing. They may have meant expanding networks in local communities for food deliveries and wellness checks. We were invited to create new ways and include others as family as we found creative ways to gather in God’s name. As the restrictions of Covid pass, we may choose to continue those gatherings virtually or in person to acknowledge the gifts of those who have now become members of our extended family and to discern how God is calling us to be in community and to serve one another.

Being at peace with God’s presence in our life allows us to be open to other ways of serving. To remember that each day when we hear His voice, our heart is not to be hardened from past experiences, for God invites us to come to the present moment with forgiveness, thanksgiving, love, and joy.

The challenges of our church and our world are invitations to continuous discernment of how to dialogue, to forgive, and to be obedient to the urgings of the Spirit. We live in a time when we need to step out and invite others to prayer, dialogue, and action. We need to trust the Holy Spirit to guide us. For the challenges invite us to become open to our personal and collective vulnerabilities in creating and nurturing communities of faith that are inclusive. To remember that we are not alone, that we are because others exist in the world surrounding us.   We trust that whatever challenging circumstances or people we meet on our journeys, we are called to listen for God’s voice as we gather in groups of two or more and hold in our hearts the love of our neighbors as ourselves.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alf Silver - Waltzing With Hilda

 Waltzing With Hilda

 

This play is the one with Mennonites in it, I won't go into more about the plot because what I'd want to say about it would be a plot spoiler.   

I'll give you another one since it's only a half an hour.

Play Mystery For Me 

 

It's too bad that the CBC stopped producing radio dramas, it was one of my favorite sources for it, listening to these going in and out of tune on short-wave when this was broadcast.

I'm posting this quickly so I don't have time to type out the credits.  I'll try to update later.   

What I Did During Summer Vacation

IN GOING OVER some of the series I posted radio dramas from, I listened to one that I'll try to post soon in which Mennonites play a major role, not Old Order Mennonites or even very conservative Mennonites, which are another matter entirely.  Though not entirely unconnected.  By chance listening to it soon meshed with my reading Studies in Mystical Religion by Rufus Jones.  The Anabaptists play a large role in the book,  leading up to both the present day Mennonites and Amish but also the Baptists (English Anabaptists) and Quakers. I hadn't understood the connection before.  Jones also ties them in with much earlier movements like the Lollards though he admitted there weren't documentary links to prove that. Once there is a literary paper-trail, the links are more secure.  

It's certainly a different kind of Christianity than I'm used to, having been originally a Catholic and now a Catholic+ accepting whatever I find in other kinds of Christianity, Judaism, etc. which seems to be on the right way to me.  I've read and listened to a number of things, not by Old Order or the kinds of conservative Mennonites or Anabaptists who don't use that kind of technology.  It seems wise to limit exposure to that kind of media if you have impressionable adults or children around, it's what's made so many Americans into amoral idiots.  Some use of technology by some Mennonites might give some hints for using it while not being corrupted by it.  

Many of the Mennonites, even some quite conservative ones who I am reading and hearing are remarkably reasonable about their religion and those who don't follow it.  Some of them are downright liberal in some things as even some of the conservative ones are quite radical by current American secular Mammonist standards.  Of course they don't tend to be libertarian liberals because they have a moral center and motive in what they do, they take the New Testament quite seriously, which would lead someone in most cases to be radical if you take equality and justice and economic justice as seriously as that would tend to make you.  I can't really take to things like the fixed notion of gender roles in much of it and most of the various denominations are far from welcoming to LBGTQ+ People.   

In giving up ideas of an ordained priesthood, the ideas of the Sacraments that are held by Orthodox, Catholic, many Protestants, they certainly give up some things valued in those traditions but they also gain other things, a remarkable flexibility in the creation, implosions and rearrangements of local congregations and larger groupings.  They base much of their religion on the local congregations, some of which split voluntarily if the members feel those are getting too large.  There's a lot to be said for that.  As well as splitting due to what seems to outsiders as minor or major theological disagreements, details of discipline or interpretation of the Bible.  There is a great deal of that and there has been from the very beginning of the movement.  

It's a bit ironic that most of the public consciousness of Anabaptists is based on the rigid holding to ways of life and conduct that were passed by in the general culture in the 19th, 18th or even 16th century, minor things like buttons and lengths of shirt sleeves have been enough to split up over.  If those seem minor to me, well, I'm not in the groups so I don't have any way to know what it means to those who are.  

I have a problem with the limits of education some of the groups impose because if the children choose to leave, are kicked out or otherwise lose the support of their family and community, they can be left in a serious state of distress.  I've never thought that a religious choice made out of ignorance of the wider world is a real choice or a safe means of finding solid belief.  But the same thing can be said of children who go to other private or even many public schools.  I doubt that a child whose education was, in reality, replaced by TV, the internet or mindless entertainment so common in secular, a-religious America is much better off.  I know of a 19 year old who graduated from high school last year who is as up the creek as anyone who was never educated past an 8th grade level in antique Plat-Deutsch.   

I am most interested in what would probably be called "liberal Mennonites" some groups of which have stopped calling themselves Mennonites while staying identified as Anabaptists.  One of the things I've listened to were the presentations of the Mennonite Writers Conference held at Goshen College in 2022, the keynote address was given by Casey Platt, a Mennonite trans-woman whose writing I'm planning on reading when I can get around to finding them.  The others who spoke were as interesting.  It gave me an insight into a world that I never knew existed before.  It's a different kind of "evangelical" Christianity than you're going to get from the American media.  It's certainly more centered in the radicalism of the Gospel, Acts and Epistles than 95% of what you'll hear called "evangelical Christianity" in the media.

Christianity is changing, that's certainly the case, just as it always has. Reading Gregory of Nyssa and some others, I'm convinced it's supposed to change as the universe and our life in it is always changing. I believe in The Living God and the Living Christ, there is no past that we can ever recover or long preserve.  I would bet that even the most reactionary of Mennonites or Amish congregations really live in the past of their families and groups.  The trad-Catholic cult may be able to continue to make believe it's still 1952 for quite a while with the billionaires trying to harness Catholicism to push capitalist-fascism in politics - though I'm hoping Francis and his successor can suppress that heresy.   "Mainline churches" in Protestantism seem to have problems similar to Mennonites only translated to their own vocabularies.  I don't consider many of the Baptists to be Christians anymore, they having gone over to Mammon worship like the trad-Catholics have, and from what I gather from listening to critics in American Orthodoxy they feel Orthodoxy has undergone the same kind of hostile takeover that Catholicism in America has.  

Reading in Rufus Joneses book how 17th century English Protestantism devolved into the Ranters looks remarkably familiar in the general outlines of the majority of "white evangelicals" in America.  Only those People were more marginal with less money and generally didn't have automatic weapons and memberships in fascists and Nazi organizations.  They weren't getting billionaire money or its equivalent.  The "white evangelical" and "trad-Catholics" of the Republican Party are if anything more ga-ga than the Ranters were.  And I'd include a number of the members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops in that, Strickland in Tyler, Texas is certainly in their number as is the putrid Raymond Burke.  I'd put Barron among them, too, though he has more media savvy. 

Maybe the future of Christianity is in small independent churches, probably a lot of them house churches supported by their local congregation and householders.  I have a friend who is working on writing and compiling a small hymnal for such a small congregation.  Believe me, he never thought he'd be doing that fifty years after we were in college together. But I'd never have thought I'd be writing something like this.   Maybe the future of Christianity is going to be a lot like the ferment of the early Reformation in which old forms and ways are going to have to give way to newer ones, Women's roles, LGBTQ+ issues, different cultural and regional ways found where old forms and ways have failed.  I don't think that big churches and even many small church buildings are going to play much of a role in it. And there is also the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement.   Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, to start with, building big churches. Earliest Christianity was pretty much a home-church affair, that's what the Protestants imagined they were restoring, though that's not possible or, perhaps, even what we're supposed to be doing.  

I would recommend Rufus Foxes book readable from the link above, though there is some of it I don't agree with.  He has slight regard for the great Orthodox tradition in favor of the later Western, Latin tradition.  I find St. Gregory of Nyssa quite a bit better than St. Augustine who I think led Western Christianity down a terrible path which it still is far from recovering from.  I think his analysis of the early corruption of Protestantism through Luther's and Zwingli's dependence on secular powers and, so, allowed their reforms to conform with what secular powers were comfortable with.  The enormous and deadly attempt to suppress and summarily murder to get rid of  Anabaptism was, I think, a combination of the attempt to protect the power of both the state and the established churches - I do agree with Jones that the persecution and mass murder of Anabaptists is one of the darkest episodes in Christianity, not that there were not other such mortal sins committed by the Churches as soon as those allied themselves to secular power in the early centuries of Christianity.   

I would also recommend reading and listening to the Mennonites and other Anabaptists, even if things like Women covering their hair or the rejection of LGBTQ+ People by some of them might make you angry.  

One thing I did like is that so many of them have such a robust practice of congregational singing.  I'd heard how impressive it can be to hear how Mennonites who come together from different places can sing in 4-part harmony at the drop of a hymn title.  While some of it has the limits of mediocre 19th century Protestant hymnody, some of it is quite a bit better than that.  One of the articles I read about churches splitting over being welcoming to LGBTQ+ People ended with a minister saying, well, we can still sing together.  

Let Me Say It So You Hear It - THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A RIGHT TO DO WHAT'S WRONG!

WHILE LISTENING TO some lawyers commenting on the obvious truth that Mark Meadows twisted his legitimate role as Chief of Staff to criminally participating in the planning of the January 6th insurrection into a proper function of a federal official it occurred to me that his claim has some of the same thinking behind it as the even more dangerous idea that someone has a "right" to lie.  In fact, that his lawyer would ever leave him unaware of the obvious nature of the lie he has told in court that what he did was a legitimate function of a presidential chief-of-staff is a fine example of how the legal profession has digested that slogan and it makes them unable to appreciate that there is not only a difference between the truth and lies but that the difference is often of the greatest possible consequence. I hope he is successfully tried and convicted of perjury, though I hope even more that lawyers will stop reciting the terrible lie that someone "has a right to lie."  It would seem that the rule of thumb under current notions of such things is that a lie is as good as the truth if you can work it the way you want it to.  Such thinking would seem to be endemic to our legal system,  yet people wonder at how Trump has managed to avoid conviction his entire privileged, rich-straight-white-male life.

I still keep hearing media lawyers like Maya Wiley use the pat phrase "has a right to lie," which it is so far beneath her to say, and many who are not usually at tall above saying such an untrue thing.    It is insane that this many years into the deadly examples of why there is no "right to lie," Trump, Bush II (never forget how the Bush II regime lied us into what is still the biggest military-political disaster the United States ever entered into), Reagan's lies that fomented terrorist fascist movements in Central America leading to consequences that we are still dealing with, etc.  That is well after the media itself, maybe the greatest source of that kind of criminally insane thinking, has finally noticed that lies are destructive of decent government and the greatest friend that fascism has had apart from armed violence.  

Someone, someday, should make a real study of the price that American democracy has paid for the permission of the media to lie given to it by the Warren Court and expanded enormously by every subsequent arrangement of the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court accelerating the empowerment of lies like no other.  It's probably at least as great as the enormous cost to American democracy and American decency that our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and racism has cost us.  Which is not to underestimate the cost of male supremacy, the universal form of fascism that keeps half of the human population under the inhibitions of a reign of terror so ubiquitous that many Women think it's some kind of natural order that they have been gulled into rather liking.  American racism is the evil fruit of lies.  

There is no right to do something that is wrong.

That is a moral truth that should fall far more easily from the lips of civil rights lawyers, other lawyers, anyone who is entrusted to teach lawyers in any law school, it should be required to be posted in the front of every classroom in the country and preached from every pulpit.  I would say that any school that wouldn't post it should be disqualified from presenting itself as a school, any denomination that wouldn't agree with it and so act should be defined as a pseudo-religious cult that shouldn't be allowed to pass itself off as a religion.  

I've been having this argument long enough to know the moves of those who defend lying and the liars who lie.

What about lying to save the life of someone you know is in hiding from someone who will harm or kill them.   The "is it wrong to lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are hiding" ruse.

Of course that is not a often encountered moral dilemma so easily 99% of the lying shouldn't be allowed to pass on that extreme exception.  You could make up any possible hypothetical to demolish any possible assertion of morality.  There are certainly times when it is morally responsible to kill someone, that doesn't make murder wrong, it's generally the wrong that makes killing a killer the right thing to do.  It's the reason it's morally responsible to lie to a Nazi.  Of course it's right to lie to the Nazis under such a circumstance BUT THAT IS A CONSEQUENCE OF THEIR FAR MORE CONSEQUENTIAL EVIL.  I would point out that while it would be the right thing to do to lie to the Nazis like that IT'S A FAR DIFFERENT THING THAN CONSIDERING DOING THAT A "RIGHT".  That the English language uses the same word for two quite different and far from equivalent ideas shouldn't lead us to pretend that the moral necessity of protecting would-be victims from their killers is the same thing as that the killers had a right to lie in order to whip up violence against those victims.  Lying through the limits of our languages is a common form of lying to defraud us of the truth.   Failing to navigate such features of language make us idiots such as so many base their professional lives on pretending to be.

It's a rather obvious truth that the empowerment of the Nazis was enormously facilitated by lies permitted to be told, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL OF THOSE TOLD IN THE MASS MEDIA and by journalists, lawyers, and, it should never be forgotten, academics, including respected scientists of of the time.  It's as true that empowering American white supremacy from lies such as the pseudo-history of Gone With The Wind and other fiction and, more obviously dangerous, lies told as "news" was given "First Amendment" protection in ways that the very lives of the victims of lives never has been protected under the U.S. Constitution.  We are idiots if we don't understand the malignant effect that lies spread in novels, plays, movies and other entertainment has in enslavement, oppression, murder and genocide.  Though suppressing lies as "news" or "information" is and always has been a pressing issue.

What about people who tell lies because they believe they're true?   Well, IF there is little consequence to such internalized lies there might not be any good in attaching criminal or administrative consequences to lies like that which are harmless in their effects.  But it is certainly a moral good and it should be a legal duty to tell them the truth when those lies are spread casually.  When they're spread by the mass media, sold to millions or even many thousands who are so gulled into believing lies are truth, the dangers of lies are enormous - Trump rose on such lies, Bush II sold the illegal invasion of Iraq which has to date resulted in hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths on such lies CARRIED WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY BY THE FREEST PRESS IN OUR HISTORY.  To allow lies such as Trump pretends to believe in the belief that he will get off by that ruse - as it's clear his hireling lawyers are telling those stupid enough to take their word for it to tell lies like "I don't recall," is stupid and absurd.  Yet you'll hear lawyers in the media pushing that line, too.

Lies told during the Covid pandemic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not a few people died because of lies told by Trump, by Republican governors such as those in South Dakota, Florida, Texas, etc. by media figures, by members of Congress and by those in the media and countless lying preachers on the make.  One of those two towns over got People in his cult and out of it killed.  They were sold by MDs and scientists and pseudo-scientists such as "Darwinian economists."  I doubt there were many of those who ever lost their professional credentials or even faculty positions as a consequence of the most consequential lies they told on FOX Lies, CNN, etc.   No doubt the media lawyers, even the supposed liberal ones would call that a "right to lie."  

Getting back to the "lying to the Nazis" ruse above, the idea that such homicidal liars "have a right to lie" has killed a hell of a lot of People, so it has a demonstrated effect of doing exactly what the Nazis do.  It is an enormous irony of the 18th century "enlightenment" pseudo-virtue that there is a moral duty to "defend to the death" a right to tell such malicious lies has the same effect as Nazism or any other oppressive dictatorial regime.  It should never be forgotten that that great event of the "enlightenment" the French Revolution immediately turned into a reign of terror by serially elevated homicidal gangster factions of intellectuals who lied about each other and immediately sent their political rivals to the guillotine.  I think the reign of terror is a short quick trip into what will come when such idiotic ideas such as that there is a right to tell lies gain hold.   It was and still is a regular feature of "Marxist" regimes and, now, it would seem it's being proposed for whenever Republican-fascists (white supremacists) here take control. 

I have pointed out that my opinion of lawyers fell enormously during the House Judiciary and Intelligence committee hearings in which it was the diplomats and the military officers testifying at professional and even personal risk to expose Trump's crimes and it was the lawyers who covered their asses.  I believe such professional ass-covering is a large part of most legal educations.  Like taking professional advantages and going for the deep pockets.  During and after the Trump regime, hearing lawyers saying that someone "has a right to lie" has done nothing to revive my once better opinion of the profession.  

Don't bother asking about my opinion of the alleged profession of journalism.  It was listening to and reading the lies carried by the mass media, especially such allegedly august organs of it as NPR, PBS, the New York Times, etc. on the "people are saying" and "both-sides" excuses and tracing those back to the Sullivan Decision of the Supreme Court that opened my eyes to the basic dishonesty of our culture under "free speech-press" absolutism.  The idea that you can long allow the publication of lies and not suffer enormous consequences is best illustrated to be a meta-lie by how white supremacy has flourished in the United States before and after the adoption of the Bill of Rights.  There could never have been the oppressive violence against Black People, against Native Americans and others without the regime of lies that supported it.  Subjugated populations, slaves then de facto slaves under Jim Crow - even after legal emancipation and the adoption of the Civil War Amendments* - would never have faced oppression without a tidal wave of lies.  Lies fed the terrorism of the slave patrols (as promoted and protected by the 2nd Amendment), of lynch mobs, the KKK and all American fascist groups and gangs.  Lies are the power behind Trumpism and Republican-fascism.   

The pretenses of the legal profession and, especially, the courts are among the most consequential of lies.  It is from such lawyers and judges and "justices" that the idea that someone can "have a right to lie" comes.  It was a consequence of the idiotically truncated writing of the golden calf of American liberalism, The First Amendment, drafted by some of the most respected lawyers of the time.  That it does not specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie is its major and glaring flaw.  Another is that there is no such thing as a "right" which does not inhere to a living being, the "press" has no rights because "the press" is an artificial human construct.  So is a religion.  There may be a right for a person to believe what they choose to or to associate with others but that does not give their shared belief or an organization they want to associate in anything like a right to do something like discriminate when operating a public accommodation.  I am inclined to suspect that some of the language of the Bill of Rights was inserted to thwart the rights of those who were enslaved by James Madison and the others who adopted the wording of them but I think much else was put in because they didn't really give it much thought.  I don't think it's possible to hold other People as slaves without it totally corrupting the slaver.  And some of the founders were quite OK with genocide, as well. I don't think there is any such thing as a racist or genocidalist who is safe for a democracy to enable and nurture.  Or any whose moral or even political authority is safely held up as sacrosanct and above the strongest critical analysis. 

Some of it was probably the casual adoption of slogans of "liberty" or "freedom" that didn't have much thought put into them, I don't remember ever hearing those associated with the less audience pleasing feature of responsibility.   Such conventional slogans are used with little thought, certainly less thought than Supreme Court "justices" have put into twisting them in directions it's clear no one ever intended in the 1790s  or even till 1964 and under which no sane person could still consider them as virtues.  Such legalistic lying is certainly consequential.  As consequential as that huge whopper put into American legal lore and practices that corporations enjoy "rights" such as the Roberts Court has put over the rights of natural human beings in their "religious liberties" codification of bigotry.  Such lies make it clear that it's time for those of us targeted by the Supreme Court regime of lies, think seriously about these issues because it's clear, they're coming for us.  Black People and their rights to full citizenship, Native Americans or even their lives, other targeted minorities, Women who are being denied the most basic of rights to determine what happens within their own skin, LGBTQ+ People.   The old "civil liberties" lawyers and their slogans and come-ons are no help to us in the end, they have put the "right to lie"  AND EVEN TO OWN AUTOMATIC WEAPONS of white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and others ahead of our very lives.  They peddle as virtue their enablement of Nazis and the KKK and corporations to get us addicted to alcohol and opiates, etc.  And addled by such slogans as I am critical of above, even sober American liberals suck it up like "free press" fentanyl.  Even as it leads to the election of Republican-fascists who lose elections.

That old lie that there is a right to lie has had its trial in history and its results are obviously catastrophic.  Whatever dangers that can be imagined-up by an acknowledgement that there is no right to lie are conjectural, the dangers of lies allowed is a clear and present danger.  We can't live with a First Amendment that permits lying, especially in the mass media.  Democracy can't survive it.  Equality certainly can't, it has been the continual first casualty in the liars lies against the Truth and it has been the entire time the First Amendment in its present flawed form has been the law of the land.

* Which the Supreme Court has twisted out of any semblance of their obvious meaning and original intent, especially the 14th Amendment.  That's one of the reasons I am skeptical that the corrupt Roberts Court will apply the obviously intended disqualification of the insurrectionist-president Trump when the case gets to it.  There has been no branch of the government more addicted to lying than the Supreme Court, and it doesn't even have to run for the offices they hold.  That goes back to John Marshall and Joseph Story in their white supremacist slavery decisions, which, by the way, fundamentally and enormously enriched the legendary John Marshall whose enormous wealth was founded in slavery.  That such self-enrichment by Supreme Court "justices" has been permitted since the start is another important flaw of the U.S. Constitution, one which we are required to lie about but I'm a bit of a thought criminal, after all.  I will go so far as to say the Constitution as it is written has become an impediment to us learning from even the most severe lessons in the hard school of experience, the First Amendment as it is written, among the greatest inhibitions of that national lesson learning.

Phyllis Zagano Preaches for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Today, September 3, is midway through Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada. Labor Day is a day to celebrate workers, for all to rest from labor. It marks the ending of Summer, as the Northern Hemisphere moves toward Autumn. The weather will be getting cooler, even cold. Our dear neighbors in the Southern Hemisphere are looking forward to the first sight of Spring, as they shed the dark and cold of Winter. No matter the season, travel can be difficult.

Do you ever wonder how the traveling people are doing when you hear about a hurricane or flood? Where were they going? Why? Who was with them? Who even knew they went away?

Today, for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary time, the Church gives us three readings about our journeys. When called, we went. On arrival, we got instructions. On settling in, we learned what it was all about.

Today the Church also remembers two saints, one ancient, one medieval. Each spent a good deal of time “on the road.”

Saint Phoebe, Deacon of the Church at Cenchreae, lived in the first century near the Greek port of Corinth. She, as you may know, brought Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. We know very little else about her, except that she made the trip—it would be some 750 miles by sea and over land, even farther only by boat.

Saint Gregory the Great came along later. In the sixth-century, Gregory was classically educated in the liberal arts and in law. He was religious—his great-great grandfather was Pope Felix III—and he left his position as prefect of Rome to become a Benedictine monk. Soon, Pope Pelagius II called Gregory to become a deacon of Rome but sent him off to Constantinople (perhaps 750 miles away) as his legate. By the time the Deacon Gregory was fifty he was elected bishop of Rome, and pope.

What were they thinking? Phoebe, sent off to the small Christian community in Rome, Gregory to negotiate peace terms in Constantinople? Did the words of Jeremiah echo in their minds: “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped.” They were called by God to be Christians. They accepted the call and went where they were asked. Did a ship they sailed on leak? Was the weather hot, or freezing cold? Did their traveling companions, once they found out where they were going, avoid them, snickering in the background about their stupidity, getting involved in the Christian story? Did Jeremiah’s words haunt them? “…the word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the day.” How many times did they want to quit? Did they say aloud, or hear the voice in their sleepless nights, “I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more.”?

They got where they were going. Gregory had Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the one Phoebe carried five centuries before. The words they brought were their own instructions, too. Can you hear Phoebe preach? “Brothers and sisters, Paul sends greetings and instructions. ‘Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is pleasing and perfect.’ This is from the 12th chapter of the letter he sends you.” Will you imagine Gregory, turning these words over and over in his mind? He would have preferred to stay in his monastery, you know.

No doubt at some point they each learned what it is all about. Today’s reading from Matthew recalls Jesus explaining things to his apostles. Jesus told them things would get rough, very rough. He would be tortured and killed, but “raised on the third day.” Peter, as Matthew writes, was having nothing of it. But Jesus insisted, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” At what point did Phoebe and Gregory accept, fully accept their crosses? Was it when some Roman man made a snide comment to Phoebe? Did he ask why she was in Rome? Did he threaten her, even screaming that no woman should be teaching? And what about Gregory? Were there comments often, maybe always, made behind his back? Was there jealousy of his family, of their land holdings in Rome and Sicily? Did someone mutter, “he’s not so smart, he’s only well-connected”?

No doubt they heard the comments. People are only too happy to let you know when you, your work, your very life has been discredited. Slander is a favorite indoor sport of too many people, even some who claim to be religious.

How has your journey been? How many times have you quit, or at least threatened to?  How many times have you thought it is just too hard, too far, too dangerous, to be and to do what God calls you to be and to do? How many times have you tried to ignore the truth of the Cross of Christ, the reality of what it means to be a Christian?

Nobody said it would be easy. Surely Phoebe and Gregory had deep joy and welcomed rest when they were with their own communities. No doubt there were more people who listened to them than who turned away. The people who ignored them did not really bother them because they knew, you see, it was not about them. They were, at heart, both deacons, and their hearts contained the Good News, the message of the Gospels.

When called, they went, and when they got where they were going, they knew (somehow) what they had to do and to say. As days turned into weeks, then months, they understood more deeply what it was all about.

It is the same with each of us. At some point we brush away the doubts and fears and understand that where we are is most probably where we ought to be. Then we can rest. We can rest from our labors in the shadow of the Cross.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Patrick Fogarty - The Last High King of Ireland

 The Last High King of Ireland 

The play took 1st place in the 2022 PJ O'Connor Radio Drama Awards.

The Last, High King of Ireland tells the story of a day in the life of a hard-drinking man who has bestowed upon himself the title The Last, High King of Ireland. We follow the 'High King’ or ‘Tapper’ as he is better known to the locals, on his daily travels from morning to night in the fictional town of Molinheer.

The High King’s world is full of myth, mirth, and magic. The play is a snippet of the life of a forgotten man on the fringes of society, and those who he encounters.

Pat Kinevane Plays Tapper (The Last, High King of Ireland)
Joe Taylor played the part of Maloney
John D Ruddy was McCann
Sharon Mannion was Lisa of the Tithe.
The Tailor was played by Enda Oates
Dawn Bradfield was Lady of the Spuds
Bab the Barwoman was Noni Stapleton
Ellie Brosnan - Corkery played the child
All other parts were played by the company

Harpist Geraldine Doherty arranged and performed the music

Sound design and sound supervision was by Damian Chennells

The Last, High King of Ireland by Patrick Fogarty was directed by Gorretti Slavin

If you've been affected by any of the issue raised in the play, help is available at www.rte.ie/helplines

In the United States or elsewhere, Alcoholics Anonymous is a good place to start.  

When I listened to this the main character was really annoying, but people in trouble often can be.   It annoys me a lot less than the way show biz usually treats this condition.