But A New Creation, The Complex Meaning Of Freedom - A long and unrefined post

Note the footnote about our "new creation" and how it wasn't, really created new.

I HAVE DECIDED to continue on with the disrupted series I'd planned on Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture on the Christian conception of freedom.  

You might remember in the first two postings, LTJ discussed Paul's use of common identity markers of female-male, slave-free, Jew-gentile, relativizing them in the lives of those who lived under those markers.  LTJ pointed out  how identity markers of ethnicity, gender and class were both used and subverted by Paul, demoting those to secondary or lower status, pointing out that in Christ those didn't matter to the converted.  

Twice, also, Paul uses the identity marker of ethnicity to make the same point.  In 1st Corinthians 7:19, he states flatly, circumcision is nothing, lack of circumcision is nothing, what counts is keeping the Commandments of God.

Similarly in Galatians 6:15, he declares, quote, "Neither circumcision or lack of circumcision, but a new creation."  

To appreciate just how radical such statements are we can remember that a pious Jewish scholar would include among his morning prayers, quote,"I thank you God that I am a man and not a woman, a Jew and not a gentile, a free man and not a slave."

Note that in Christ differences in gender, status and ethnicity do not disappear but they are made relative by a new and higher form of unity.  Indeed, for Paul such identity markers can serve not to divide humans but to demonstrate how unity in Christ is not a uniformity but a unity in diversity.  And such diverse unity is the ideal in the new creation.

I will break in here to say this reminds me of Abraham Joshua Heschel's conclusion that God favors religious pluralism, something I'm sure Paul would have rejected but something which I think is probably true even as I say that in the broader society no religion that doesn't allow freedom to everyone, including in terms of religious thinking, needs to be treated on an equal basis to that religion that does recognize that freedom.*

It's clear from Paul's discussion of spiritual gifts within the one body of Christ.  It is the gift of the spirit that empowers diverse roles and functions within the community and Paul makes clear that the point of persons being diversely gifted is the enrichment of the common life of the community.  The gifts are to be used to build up the community rather than the self.  As he says in Ephesians 4:12, The Spirit bestows gifts, quote, "to equip the saints for the work of service to build up the Body of Christ."

Just as for Paul cultural practices concerning diet are not of fundamental importance they are what philosophers called "adiraphia" [spelling?] things that don't matter so are these more obvious identity markers.  Paul tells the faithful in Rome who would make judgements on the food habits of other Christians, quote, "The Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."  And he tells the Corinthians, "Food does not establish us with God, we are not less if we do not eat and we are no greater if we do eat."  Thus, although Paul claims the right to be able to eat meat offered to idols, if his behavior becomes a stumbling block to a brother or sister he declares, quote, "I will never eat flesh again in order that I not offend my brother or sister."  I'll return to this passage later.  But for Paul what really counts are not societal placements or societal customs but moral dispositions and actions.  Paul goes on to employ all three identity markers of antiquity in his long discussion of marriage.

I have come to think that Paul's extreme change from a zealous Jewish persecutor of the followers of Jesus to being among the most active converter to the Jesus movement as described in his letters and in Acts and the source of much of the most profound intellectual foundation of Christianity was due to a profoundly powerful near death experience when he was stricken on the road to Damascus and encountered the Risen Jesus.  That's something that is reported in careful collections of Peoples' accounts of their own reported near death experiences, now,.  They often report experiences that differ in their details that they come away from convinced that things that were central to their own identities, as central as the most basic cultural practices of devout Judaism, seemed to them to be beside the point or even of no importance at all.  AND THOSE EXPERIENCES HAVE THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THEIR LIVES RADICALLY.   I think that is central in coming to a coherent understanding of Paul in the context of our only source material about him and his theological writing in the New Testament.  

Of course academics writing in the post-"enlightenment" period couldn't base an acceptable academic paper or lecture on seriously discussing that possibility, at least that I've ever come across, so if my conjecture is right it would not become widely accepted in academia or in more popular culture.  In academia even considering the Risen Jesus as possibly real would make much if not virtually all of it dismissive.  Which, considering some of the "historical Jesus" production is pretty outlandish and unsupportable on the available evidence, is tellingly remarkable.  But if I'm right that that's what Paul's experience was then I don't think you're able to come up with a coherent understanding of Paul, his ideas and what they really mean.  Without that assumption I doubt you can come to anything like a close understanding of him or his writing or, as Luke Timothy Johnson seems to understand it, the writings of his close circle.*  

In terms of Paul's uneasiness with new practices that would upset the ambient cultural contexts in which he and his followers and those who could be influenced by him were living out their lives, things that would upset believers in their faith in what he understands to be the meaning of Jesus and his teachings or cause them problems that would damage or destroy the communities of believers, I think you have to read him with a complete understanding. His letters were always written with those purposes.  You have to follow the long arcs of arguments he makes especially noticing where his warnings against feelings and expressions of self-righteousness in opposing the ideas and even practices of those who don't see eye-to-eye. What are sometimes taken as his pithy statements are merely parts of those arguments. I think his mistake in expecting an imminent world-wide coming of the overt Kingdom of God, a return of Jesus, plays a big part in his advice to retain many of the customs, habits, practices of the world while being transformed by the experience of conversion to belief and, so, changing the way in which those practices are performed.  His advice to a slave holder to stop treating his slave as a slave would, effectively, end slavery.  

His advice to those who those who found the sexual practices of unbelievers abhorrent not to ignore their own questionable practices is more subtle and more difficult to discern in his argument.  If there's one thing I've found out, there is no topic quite like sex about which to make a reasoned point with and being entirely misunderstood.  Christianity has been distracted by Paul's use of sex in arguments in a major way for close to two thousand years.  

We know from his own writing that far from restricting Women to a diminished role in the ministry of Christianity that has been taken as a rigid gender identity marker, he, himself, recommended Women as leaders of Churches, his fellow missionaries and messengers.  It's notable that in the centuries after Paul his own writing was used to leave Women to a lesser role, denying them of authority or independence from oppressive male authority and it still is.  Though a deeper, closer, broader focus on his writings, noticing things that you will entirely miss if you take a "proof texting" strategy of finding what you want to find instead of what he actually said, you will find he frequently meant the opposite.  One of the things which I hold is that you cannot understand Paul or any part of the New Testament without subjecting what was said to the test of measuring it against the Commandments of Jesus, to do to others what you would have them do to you as you are, with the diverse identities that you have, that don't hurt them or degrade them or seduce them into destructive acts or a context in which they will suffer violence, displacement or destitution.  I haven't read any comparison of the knowable cultural differences that Paul may have taken into account when he wrote on such things to different communities, it would be good to know if he tailored his words to take things like that into account.

I think it should always be considered that one thing Paul would have been deeply and importantly aware of would be that the fledgling churches and new Christians he wrote his letters to would always be in danger of destruction THROUGH EXACTLY THE KIND OF THING HE DID TO FOLLOWERS OF JESUS BEFORE HIS CONVERSION.  They'd have been in mortal danger from those who were like him before his conversion and probably even more at risk from the ambient, ubiquitous pagan cultures in which those new Churches and individual believers lived.   He'd certainly have been concerned for their physical well-being and their own missionary efforts to be carried out safely and effectively while  not being drawn away from the practices that were central to their identities as followers of Jesus.  

I think there is no greater example of that risk today than the "christian nationalists" especially those who live in places where Republican-fascism, white supremacy is common and in control of things.  That's why easily most of the "Christianity" that is spouted on the floor of Congress, in most statehouses, out of the most overt public shouting out of "Christianity" is done by people whose actions and statements are thoroughly Mammonist and entirely out of keeping with the words of Jesus and the un-proof-texted-entirety of Paul and the rest of the New Testament.  

I think Paul might have had an inkling of such minds and lives, though coming well before Christianity became a mere identity marker based on a corrupt cultural milieu, I doubt even he could have foreseen how bad it could get.   He certainly had the warning of Hebrew Scripture in which the early and frequent falling away from the vision of Moses, the heart of The Law constitutes the large majority of the texts within it.  The difficulty in keeping the Law seems to have been one of the major obsessions with those who wrote scripture and an often unstated knowledge that to not keep to the heart of The Law was to abandon what created The Children of Israel as an identifiable People.  It was certainly the understanding of the Prophetic literature out of which Jesus taught.  It would have certainly been something that Jews living in diaspora communities would have constantly been aware of, something that is common to those who live as a minority among large populations sometimes at odds with what identified them as belonging to their own identity group.  I think Paul's conservatism in regard to social convention and custom has to be read in light of that reality.  He would have constantly been trying to discern what such Christians would need to do to live among sometimes dangerous "others" while not letting that extinguish what was central to the teachings of Jesus.   Walter Brueggemann and Terry Eagleton have both commented on how extremely impractical and radically different the teachings of Jesus were, how profound a change from the ambient culture of then, now and any time between them those would have made someone who tried to follow them faithfully.  Even those trying to live within the narrow margins of Paul's "conservative" orthodox behavior were at risk of being persecuted and destroyed.   The current "christian nationalism" set in Republican-fascist Mammonism is a reenactment in which they are so "christian" that they have totally abandoned The Gospel and the rest of the New Testament for some lesser comic book version of it.  You can be certain that one of the things they would abolish was Christianity which actually tried to follow the teachings of Jesus and who wanted American law and policy to do so as well.  The history of Christianity is full of the vigorous and murderous suppression of efforts to do so, even within churches, the Catholic Church was certainly guilty of that in the past, the last two papacies practiced that as well, the "traditional Catholic" billionaire AstroTurf effort against Pope Francis is just such an effort.

I will also point out that that is what I have come to believe is the basis for the hostility to the Jewish People from Greek antiquity, through the middle ages till today, that the still radical egalitarianism of The Law was already unwelcome by those who wanted to live lives of self-centered selfishness even before something that was radically more so in the teachings of Jesus.  It was certainly what made Nazism and before then the newly conventionalized antisemitism of a Wilhelm Marr target Judaism.  What, ironically in the context of subsequent history, made Marr and the central faction of Nazism, oppose Christianity.  What led Marr to condemn Christianity as the "New Judaism" that he considered to be the vehicle by which "Judaism" "infects" traditional German culture which was romantically considered a warrior ruled golden age but which, like all warrior rule would have been more a gang dominated horror.  No doubt being heavily influenced by Nietzsche in that.  Nietzsche was an insane (perhaps syphilitic) but brilliant and educated man, Marr and the Nazis were more vulgar and Trumpian in their depravity.*  Of course, being a brilliant promoter of such stuff is no less dangerous than being a vulgarian bigot is.  The Ivy Leaguers of modern American Republican-fascism, those already indicted and those who have yet to be, prove that.  It should never be forgotten that Nazism had its scientific, university educated wing just as the Prussian military establishment did, the kind who would explain Nazism as "applied biology."  The history of elite American antisemitism and racism, within elite institutions needs more focus because I think that has always had a far stronger effect in law and policy than has ever been admitted.  

The young LGBTQ+ writer and thinker Matthew Vines is, I'd guess,  half my age or less but he has come to some of the same conclusions I did much later in life.  Central to any coherent understanding of Scripture is the advice of Jesus to judge teachings and ideas by the results that come of them.  "By their fruits you will know them," something which I started out this year by saying was a crucial saying in my judgement of things.   Matthew Vines started out as an evangelical and, no doubt, was far more of a reader of Scripture than I spent most of my life being even as we share the same experience of being gay men in different settings, him growing up in Kansas, me in New England decades earlier.  He grew up in a world in which LGBTQ+ rights were a far more developed and widely spread context.  When I was his age "gay liberation" was hampered by the idiocy of mid-20th century play-lefty bullshit.  While there is still plenty of that around, there seems to me to be more real-life informed thinking as well.  Even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he says his profound experience of admitting to himself that he was gay*** happened, would hardly have been as overtly and casually accepting of being LGBTQ+ when I was his age.  An enormous difference in a cultural setting in a relatively short time in any one location can come about very rapidly in terms of even one human life.  When you throw in the differences in even a small distance in location, the differences can be quite profound.  I would bet that you wouldn't have to travel very far outside of the neighborhood of Harvard in Cambridge Massachusetts or some areas of New York City or San Francisco, even neighborhoods within the city limits to find profound differences right now.  The differences in how you can openly live your lives even if you appear to blend in with the ambient appearances, people who don't stand out as different can be decisive in how safe or comfortable you can live your life.  Certainly there is nothing in Jesus that is consistent with using violence or intimidation to enforce conformity, though that has been done in the name of Jesus from pretty early in the movement of is followers, especially when some of them started getting worldly power for themselves.

*  Luke Timothy Johnson has said that he holds a far wider range of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul to be more a product of Paul's inner circle.  He has used the model of speech writers for the Presidents, in which things like the State of the Union message is a product of a number of other hands but that the president delivers them as "his" State of the Union message.  He thinks that accounts for some of the ambiguously attributed denials of his authorship that are so current in contemporary scholarship.  

David Bentley Hart has said in the "Scientific Postscript" p. 469-470, of his translation of the New Testament that in him translating the Greek texts into modern English, he has become convinced that two of those letters widely held to be spurious, Ephesians and Colossians were not so legitimately denied to be "authentic" Pauline texts.  He notes that in especially Colossians the denial of Pauline attribution was due to the Protestant denial that "works" were redemptive as compared to "faith."  He makes a good case that that is an example of late Classical distortion through, who else,  but Augustine was enormously magnified by Luther and the other early Protestants when a reading of the original Greek of the Scriptures doesn't support that.  "Paul was not a Lutheran or Calvinist or even an Augustinian.  And, so, when Paul of the authentic letters is freed from the Paul of theological myth, it turns out that Colossians not only says nothing different on these matters at all, but does not even sound any distinctly different intonations."  

It was in dealing with an entirely different question of provenance of texts that led me into being quite skeptical of the alleged science of textual analysis that is practiced nowadays and, especially, the cutting of corners in making alleged scientific claims on the basis of a small body of examples from which to make such proclamations in academic publications.  DBH does note that the author of Ephesians seems to not share Paul's belief that the return of Christ was imminent, though it's quite possible for the same author to change their mind about even things so central to their belief.  I've certainly changed some of my ideas in the seventeen years I've been writing stuff and posting it online, often in light of new information about old things and watching how some of my previous beliefs have born fruit since 2006.   I originally intended never to bring up religion in trying to find out how the American left had gone so seriously off as to be permanently disempowered by its own refusal to change its ideas.  See where looking hard at things brought me in those years.  

** I also hold that there was a crucial difference in "antisemtisms," certainly there is one in regard to those who held Jewish identity was a biological matter as the Nazis did.  The Jewish Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Jean Lustiger, attributed the origin of antismeitism to Voltaire (with some real and legitimate justification), though the idea was also true of anti-conversos elites in 16th century Spain - especially those bishops and others who resented the rise to power of those of Jewish heritage within the Catholic hierarchy.  I think in the most legitimate use of the term "antisemitism" it is in its worst phase a phenomenon of modernism.  I think something like a claim of depravity as a biological attribute also was present in what became influential with his popularization, especially in Germany, in Tacitus.  But I think the central catastrophe of that in the 20th century Shoah was, on the other hand, far more a direct result of the adoption of natural selection within science and, so, secular culture.  I doubt that Voltaire, Tacitus or, especially, a fringe group of Spanish bishops who never gained much traction or influence in the wider Catholic hierarchy could have had such power, even combined as those never were.   That is the crucial aspect of the murders of six million Jews during the Nazi period, which has never been addressed or even much admitted though the overt part that played in the Holocaust, is as plain as can be in the primary documentation left by those who committed those murders.  I don't think the current denial of it having happened is at all unrelated to that denial of reality.   I don't think natural selection can ever be made a safe ideology and its retention in science and human culture is a guarantee of that history repeating itself as long as such an idea is mixed with human notions of biological identity, themselves deeply counterfactual in any but the most tangential matters, is retained and influential in actions.   Paul, the self-identified Jew as a Christian certainly saw Christianity as surpassing such notions, though he would also know that even conversion to Christianity would not guarantee that such evil assignment and use of identity markers was no guarantee against them or evil perpetrated through them.  I think that's part of what was missed by the misuse of Paul.  Paul might note identity markers or even that some of them had some kind of basis but he certainly held that those were no excuse for committing evil.  Not in thought, certainly not in deed.  He never advocated violence and oppression of even those he held were engaged in immorality.  Jesus certainly didn't.  He even advised against resisting evil, which, of course, you have to be a saint to do, especially when it's evil done to those you love.  The Republican-fascists are no more followers of Jesus than those who colluded with the Nazis were.

NOTE:  I wrote this more than two weeks ago and am just posting it today after recovering it.  Even I am surprised how long it got as I worked on it.  In the meantime someone who read some of the posts I did on Darwinism has whined and complained about my many posts laying out how Nazism and the Shoah were a product of the belief in natural selection, mixed with German romantic (post-Christian, "enlightenment") notions of linguistics and nationality.  I should organize and edit those many posts because they lay out the evidence pretty extensively, though hardly exhaustively.  Among the key findings proving that link were the statements of Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and last-surviving child who, in April, 1939 months before the start of WWII and the direct implementation of Nazi genocides credited his father's invention of natural selection as being the foundation of German eugenics and even at that late date, after Kristallnacht, after two decades of Nazis targeting Jews, Slavs and others for suppression, oppression and elimination, credited the Nazis as changing German law and policy for what he termed was the better.  

As I pointed out many years ago, in 1939, with a quite ample demonstration of just what Nazi eugenics was and where it intended to go, Leonard Darwin, perhaps the last person alive who could have made such an attribution from such intimate knowledge of Charles Darwin tied his father and his science to Nazi "racial hygene" (eugenics) which was overtly eliminative well before then.  That wasn't an outlandish idea, Darwin's claim to fame, natural selection,  was universally acknowledged to be the entire reason that eugenics, including German eugenics existed.  I have yet to find a single authoritative or less-than-authoritative voice from before WWII who denied that.  Certainly no one with the status and credibility of Leonard Darwin did.  No one in the post-war period had the credibility and authority for separating Darwinism from Nazism which Leonard Darwin had in connecting them so late in time.  He'd been doing so in terms of English language eugenics for decades in the most explicit terms and he was among those who encouraged the development AND IMPLEMENTATION of eugenics in Germany.  No one at the time he did that who could be held to have had his level of authority to do so to contradict him.  I have yet to find anyone who did, either.  No one else had known Charles Darwin as intimately as he had, if they had tried to contradict him he would not only have his own authority to make that link, he would have the writings of German scientists and social thinkers and a line of English language scientists extending back to the publication of On The Origin of species which he could have cited, as well.  HE COULD HAVE CITED WHAT HIS FATHER WROTE IN THE DESCENT OF MAN, DOING THAT.  I have given only some of those on this blog, including such major figures in English language science as Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, and many figures considered minor now but who were prominent and often among the most eminent scientists of their time.  Even the American biologist and a complete Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg to his horror found that pre-Nazi German military officers regarded their role in World War I in overtly Darwinist terms.  Many of them likely those who joined and formed the Nazi party.  I never thought that would become a major focus of this when I started doing it but, especially after finding out about the existence of "Darwinian economics" which, among other things, encouraged a higher death count during the Covid-pandemic, I think it's inescapable because it is both the intellectual and sub-intellectual foundation of current day eugenics which dare not speak its name.  And it's just as overtly homicidal as it was starting with Thomas Huxley in 1865 gleefully anticipating the genocide of American Black People after emancipation due to what he believed would be the loss of an economic incentive with the ending of slavery for the "superior" white people to keep them alive.  He did that well before Nazism focused natural selection on a different list of those to kill.   I wonder if Huxley ever commented on the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow era American apartheid and de facto slavery.  But I don't have the time or resources to look to see if he left a record of that.  

*** I have said before that I don't recall a time when I didn't realize I had a physical attraction to adult males, though never when I was even a young adult, those of my own age.  I remember when I realized that attraction was a sexual attraction in my early adolesence but it was always there.  I don't remember ever feeling ashamed of it, though I never remember a time when I didn't realize it was among those of my feelings that it would be dangerous to express in the context of where I lived.  Today that last thing is among the things that have changed, somewhat.  My LGBTQ+ nieces and nephews don't have those issues but the ambient culture has given them other dangers to face, the encouragement of promiscuity probably among the most dangerous of those.  Sexual freedom doesn't change biological fact, promiscuity is inherently dangerous and, therefore, morally perilous.   Though my understanding of those moral perils are resonant with what Paul said, I have come to believe, as L.T. Johnson has said, the traditional often officially theological understanding of that as "Christian morality" is less than securely Pauline and, in light of our own experiences of the consequences of actions far from morally secure.  
 

  Seeing the clearly unequal, unjust and extremely dangerous liberties that even judges who have put Trump under restrictions for his dangerous speech mete out - as someone said, no obscure Black Person who has faced a court and acted even once like Trump does every day has ever escaped immediate imprisonment, even before trial - I think the deeply imbedded inequalities that are embedded into judicial practices need to be studied, listed and campaigned against.  I think some of that comes from the structure of the legal profession in which the "best" lawyers are those who serve those with enormous wealth, hired to find ways for the rich and merely affluent to get a million and one privileges for them, everything from the most petty of considerations up to and including getting lots of people killed without those doing them paying any price.  That is something that is as deeply embedded into the culture of lawyering, from there into the judging profession and, especially, the racket that being a "justice" so often is.  That is deeply embedded into the rules and practices of courts and Supreme Courts, embedded into laws written by and passed by those who even if not completely enculturated lawyers are familiar with the rackets and schemes of the law.

That Attorney General Merrick Garland has proven to everyone what an impotent coward "the law" is in the face of Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist attempts to overturn the landslide election in one of the most decisive votes the United States has ever taken doesn't surprise me now.  In my reading about the history of the Supreme Court and how corrupt that most august American institution has always been, with few periods of ethical behavior, approximately two short but often most unwise ones, I've come to think that those inbred corruptions - under our system having no possibility of correction by The People's vote - are some of the biggest obstacles for and dangers to egalitarian democracy.  In the disgusting tale of Joseph Story, originally called "an abolitionist justice" issuing what was rightly considered the most outrageously pro-slavery decision in Prigg v Pennsylvania, even rightly seen as a proto-Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court based on his smug and self-satisfied scholarship of the long history of property rights under English common law, I came to my first real appreciation of how deeply entrenched that kind of casual, accepted, moral atrocity is in that secular, hierarchical priesthood that the Supreme Court is.  And from them on down to the lowest courts.  I understand he also extended the practice of higher courts reducing awards in lawsuits, such as protects many an outrageous properited maimer and killer today.  

Why the United States should ever have thought it was required to take on the entire apparatus of the injustice of English law when it produced and in turned was produced by the very thing the "founders" had broken away from. the British monarchy,  is probably due to the large number of well trained, aristocratic, rich lawyers among them.  They certainly knew how such ancient legal lore had served their own financial interest, the interest of their families and friends - just as "justice" Coney-Barrett and the others can be counted on to rule in a way that serves her own families' wealth, today.  The "founders" also would have found an entirely new legal system founded on the propositions contained in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, equality and with the endowment of rights by God rather inconvenient in that they'd have to junk so much of what they'd been taught and learned to become lawyers.  It would certainly have thrown up in the air much of what "settled law" already protected the wealth of the wealthy and given the plebs some notion that they had rights that would be very costly to the wealthy who the "founders" were.  Perhaps now that the Roberts Court, their lying under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee has shown what a lie "settled law" is, it is high time to unsettle much of that "settled law."  Of course, first on my list to unsettle is exactly the one that Coney-Barrett testified was never to change, Marbury v Madison.  As I've pointed out, if they can overturn the supreme authority, from which all of the government, including the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy, The People's Vote, then overturning them is a little thing in comparison.  

That the American Constitution and the legal aparatus that grew up under it is so cumbersome and incapable of protecting even the formal, far from real democracy that we've got now is proof that it has to be drastically changed or we are doomed to a future of autocracy, the kind of autocracy that Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People, generally Poor People have lived under under the U.S. Constitution and "the rule of law" such inequality and non-democracy this court is, once again, reviving as the Court did in the wake of the Civil War Amendments.   Sometimes the praise for "the rule of law" "Equal Justice Under Law" (ha) needs to be looked at for the kinds of results it gets, WHO PAYS FOR IT AND WHO BENEFITS FROM IT AT THE COST OF THOSE WITHOUT WEALTH to measure those against the pretenses of those pious fictions.  Anyone who thinks, after the Supreme Court, Jeb Bush Florida, John Ellis-Fox Lies putsch of 2000, the Electoral College imposition of Trump in 2016 and his attempted putsch of 2020 - we now know getting the Supreme Court involved was intrinsic to the insurrectionists planning and there is no intelligent bet as to how they'd have ruled - anyone who thinks we are safe under "the law" as it is in reality is delusional.  Though I suspect saying that on MSNBC will result in it being the last time you are asked to come on - it would probably never get you onto NPR or in the NYT.  I doubt even the "radical lawyers" of podcasts and Youtube channels would be entirely uncomfortable with such ideas being discussed.  If the law were made truly egalitarian and democratic, they'd have to do a hell of a lot of reading and learning new legal lore.  It would render a huge amount of "Constitutional Scholarship" moot.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Dick Riley - Middleman Out

 Middleman Out 

This was one of the first radio plays I posted and it's still one of the best. 

I'm always hoping to get back to posting every Saturday again but life is complicated.

So you are without defense, O man - everyone who judges - An Answer To What Do You Mean By "Long Argument"

IT MIGHT BE BEST to start with a short argument, or a short part of a much longer argument Romans 1:25-2:3

1:25 They who exchanged God's truth for a lie and adored and worshiped the creation rather than the Creator who is blessed unto the ages; amen.  Thus God delivered them to the passions of disgrace;  for even their females exchanged natural use for what is contrary to nature,  And the males also, in the same way, abandoning natural use with the female, burned in their longing for one another, males performing shameful acts upon males,  and receiving in turn within themselves the requital befitting their deviancy.  And as they did not deem it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God surrendered them to a reprobate mind, to do indecent things, Having been filled with every injustice, wickedness, avarice, vice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, boorishness; whisperers, Slanderers, haters of God, licentious, overweening, braggarts, contrivers of evils, defiant of parents;  Witless, faithless, ruthless, merciless - Though knowing God's decree that those who do such things are deserving of death, they do not only do them, but give approval for those engaging in the same practices.

2 So you are without defense, O man - everyone who judges - for in that you judge another you condemn yourself; because you who judge engage in the same practices.  But we know that God's judgement on those doing such tings is in accord with truth.  And do you, O man - you who judge those doing such things while also doing them - reckon that you will escape God's judgement?

As an LGBTQ+ man who has heard a very small part of that passage used for my entire life to condemn gay men and Lesbians, two verses out of the entire complex describing universal behaviors, most of that catalog aimed directly at LGBTQ+ People by straight People, the directly following universalization of sin by Paul WHO IS PRESUMABLY ADDRESSING WHAT WOULD NOW BE CALLED HETEROSEXUALS when he says they're no less implicated in sin than those they condemn.  And he, himself was doing in that passage exactly what he condemned as indefensible, judging others.  Also, as some LGBTQ+ affirming scripture scholars and theologians point out, the reference to what Paul is accusing Women of doing is entirely ambiguous and the males he is accusing of "abandoning natural use with the female" has little to nothing to do with those of us who never had sex with a Woman, or were married to a Woman and who don't practice promiscuity or what would be called "unsafe sex" with another man in a committed, monogamous partnership.  

I would say they are guilty of what Paul says leads to depravity, exchanging God's truth for a lie.  As I have been pointing out, lying is rampant in the United States, especially on the right, in no group more so than the so-called "evangelical" and "trad-Catholic" cults, and as Paul more than  hinted at, you can expect those resulting sins to be found flourishing among them.  And you do.  There are no bigger liars in my country than those who share in hatred against LGBTQ+ People and who advocate discrimination and , yes, violence against us, up to and including murdering us.  

The Pauline literature is full of just such passages in which a line or sentence is dishonestly plucked out of a larger point to slander someone or some group while ignoring the point of the argument.  Or to distort the Gospels and the New Testament.  I accuse Martin Luther of doing that on his "faith alone" distortion and Augustine on predestination and eternal damnation.  The history of Christianity has frequently turned into a horror show because of those.  In each of those cases, by the fruit of their actions and statements you will know them.  

One of the things you can bet on with those who do that, they have absolutely no intention of applying what Paul said to their lives and are even less interested in applying what Jesus said to themselves.  The "white evangelicals" the "traditional-Catholics" what the American media has distorted Christianity into meaning are Olympic level practitioners of that kind of hypocrisy, that's not unusual.  

Lest it be lost on anyone PAUL WAS ADDRESSING THE SAME THING AMONG THOSE DEPUTED TO BE CHRISTIANS IN HIS LETTERS.  What is different now is that LGBTQ+ People are pointing out that our sexual orientation doesn't remove us from the possibility of doing better than the heterosexuals who Paul was addressing while being true to who we are.  Just as Women who insist on going beyond what Paul could imagine or, as I'd put it, what he could imagine would ever be acceptable or those who were and are held in slavery do the same thing, the substance of Paul's whole point is not only good but essential.  

Paul certainly didn't claim to be infallible, he didn't claim that his understanding in this life was perfect.  When he was wrong about something or somewhat wrong, the results are far short of what he intended.  When he was right he was right and it makes no sense to abandon everything he said for the few things in which he wasn't able to imagine something better and more broad than his own radical mind could encompass given that he, like all of us, had his limits.  When Paul is read in church some might say "The Word of God," but Paul didn't say that was what he was writing, at least I don't recall it without going through the entire corpus to check that point.  

Carla Bley - Life Goes On

 

Carla Bley

Andy Shepherd 

Steve Swallow

Being mostly offline these days I hadn't heard that one of the greatest composers of my lifetime, Carla Bley, had died at the age of 87.   Thinking about what to post, this seemed right.  

I wish her eternal happiness, she gave me so much in this life.

I Am A Really And Definitively Never Again American Liberal American - Hate Mail

I HAVE NO COMMON GROUND with any "liberalism" or leftism which does not have as its explicit goal an egalitarian democracy in which ALL People get a good chance to  live out a natural, decent life, not on one more dedicated to some notion of "free speech" "free press" in which such proven dangers to humanity as Nazism, Communism, fascism and our own indigenous form of that, white supremacy are to always and forever have "a right" to try to get so many oppressed, enslaved and murdered again.  

In the context of my country, I am against anything and everything which carries a rationally cognizable danger of turning us again to that which we know can happen here, not only from our history, BUT OUR,TODAY, HERE AND NOW of apartheid, genocide, inequality, discrimination, impune violence and oppression of People of Color, of Women, of LGBTQ+ people who are not trying to oppress anyone or trying to advocate for the oppression, discrimination against or, yes, genocide against anyone else.  

That is the distinct difference between those whose who have real and important rights of truth telling and advocacy for equality and democracy.   I am entirely in favor of protecting the real rights to tell the truth and advocate the good.  Those who lie us into inequality and that traditional "American democracy" which has been not only compatible with but consonant with American apartheid, the subjugation of Women, the oppression of numerous other inequalities and oppression and, lest anyone forget, the genocide committed under and with explicit intention by the very American government set up by the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights practiced for the majority of our history under the Constitution and, yes, today.  I am certainly against those who want to lie in their promotion of foreign imports of Nazism or European forms of fascism or their own innovations in such things as the official "civil libertarians" are always ready to put other Peoples' lives on the line over as they have armed them not only with mass-media lying but, also, automatic weapons.  I include the various Marxisms only for clarity and not because those have or ever had any chance of taking real power in the United States. I count the "Second Amendment" libertarian fascism promoters with the ACLU and other "civil libertarians".  Indeed, sometimes they file similar briefs to the Supreme Court.   They are all libertarians.

I should make it clear that in 2023 even the "Communists" don't want Marxism as they turn to a particularly amoral and ruthless form of gangster capitalism in virtually every place where Communists hold onto power.  The idiot American and European Communists, those in politics - if there's anywhere they really are in politics - but mostly consist of academic nut-bags and sub-professional scribblers and babblers, are best considered in the same category as flat-earthers only flat-earthers are more likely to gain actual power here.

I have absolutely no common ground with People who put "principles" over the lives and the right to a decent life, up to and including the Supreme Court rulings that do that.  I have no common ground with any "liberalism" or "leftism" which does not hold that the lives and welfare and rights of People and the environment is always to be supported over any abstract "principle."  Obviously Communism, Marxism, has no such holding, many so-called socialism don't, the lunacy of anarchism doesn't - it will always inevitably devolve into rule by the most ruthless and stronger over those with less strength and some sense of morality.  It doesn't include the 18th century, laissez-faire crooks who stole the word "liberalism" or its even more terrible-two-year-old expression, "libertarians"  but who are only a somewhat more evolved a long the way towards gangster  rule such as dominates and has always dominated mainstream American politics and, even more so, its legal lore.  

The accusations made because I disavowed the old ACLU slogans and, in fact, the ACLU, itself, that I must somehow support what I explicitly reject as Republican-fascism, the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy, the patriarchalism of misogyny and LGBTQ+ hatred couldn't be more absurd or ironic.  My rejection of those was made explicit in one of the first things I ever posted and got roasted over, I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis.  The very first thing I ever posted as a blog post indicated that direction as I rejected the then high priest(in his own scribbling) of that position, the late and always annoying Nat Hentoff.

Contrary to the accusation that I've "turned my back" on the American left, I've become far more radical than that left because, as even a Noam Chomsky has said, "the Gospel is radical."  The Law of Moses, stripped of some of its patriarchal appendages (that I'm not convinced are authentic) is more radical in its economic justice commandments than anything in current Anglo-American law and far more racial than anything any Marxist government has ever practiced.  In my reviews of the programs of The Left Forum, I've never seen anything listed as more radical than The Gospel or even nearly as radical as The Law.  Marxism is a wrong-headed, pale imitation that has worked out to be as nightmarish as Nazism in practice.  Any "left" that has not faced that in 2023 is as denying of history as Holocaust deniers and the dangerous percentage of American idiots who have fallen for that organized Nazi front that uses our wide-open, "First Amendment" media in their increasingly successful moves to get another chance to do it again.  I've faced the truth about Marxism as it really is and the secular left that is its sucker.  

To hold that such anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideas and their supporting lies "have a right to free expression" is a form of insanity encouraged by the popular lore of, in order of descending importance, popular media, "journalism," lawyers and judges and academia.  To hold that those who want to not only abolish the rights of people to tell the truth, of media to tell the truth, to promote equality and democracy retain some "right" to lie them out of power and themselves into it is sheer lunacy that, in the United States flows directly from the truncated, careless language of the First Amendment.  That language was perhaps issued out of the knowledge that in the ambient culture among those with power in the new United States, in the disempowered status of those who favored equality and democracy to prevail, though I doubt that considering who could vote with any power to elect someone to office, propertied, white males with some access to a polling place on the one day of polling, my conclusion is that it was just them feeling poetic and general instead of specific.  

To always give white supremacy another chance IS TO ENSURE THAT THEIR HISTORY WILL BE REPEATED BY FASCISTS, NAZIS AND OTHERS.  Communism in the United States, there is absolutely no chance of that happening now or ever, the greatest danger that communism and Communists have been to any Americans it is to those who favor egalitarian democracy as they have attached themselves to us like poisoned limpets.  The American left, largely in the hands of academics and others like them, have cared far more for the "rights" of Communists to impotently push their own brand of gangster governance than they ever did for the rights of racial and other minorities and the rights of people who actually work for a living because they, the ACLU among the worst of them, have knowingly made common cause with anti-democrats which damaged the real struggle for economic justice and equality on the most absurdly abstract of "principles".   That the ACLU and others like them champion the rights of Nazis, white supremacists, other flavors of fascism even as those are resurgent and empowered in so many places on the same "principles" proves how treacherous they are, unreliable except in the fact that you can rely on them and their "principles" to work to destroy what they claim to promote as they preen in their "principled" purity.  I went from a financial supporter of the ACLU to despising it on that basis.  

If there is one thing any real American style liberals or any realistic, egalitarian democratic left can count on, it is that without seriously addressing and changing our ideas and actions on the basis of what the long history of liberal and leftist disempowerment shows us about the folly of previous holdings and actions, there is no prospect for the United States to become a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy in which economic justice, environmental protection and even basic rights and freedoms ever happening.  The American left, American style liberalism, among just a few of us is beginning to understand how deep that change has to be.  The First Amendment as written and as understood by us today, has to be among those things which are clarified to exclude a "right to lie" a "right to express racism, antisemitism, misogyny, hatred of LGBTQ+, and other tools of traditional American fascism.  And that has to be explicit, as explicit as the laws in Germany banning Holocaust denial and the promotion of Nazism.  As explicit, perhaps more so, than the anti-hate speech laws in Canada.  Lying in the mass media certainly has to be banned or at the very least made actionable, even by those who hold political office.  We got Trump through the media lies told about Hillary Clinton, we got Bush II by the lies told about Al Gore and the Supreme Court putsch that colluded with Jeb Bush's Florida and FOX Lies.  That putsch was a bigger success than Hitler's first try.  Th at American democracy permits they to try again is a guarantee that future insurrections will succeed, anyone who doesn't admit that is wasting our time with whatever they say or pretend to stand for.  

The ACLU is one of the most effective tools to disempower the struggle for equality, economics and democracy as they preen in their "objective" "even-handedness."  In an "even-handed" consideration between the struggle for equality and inequality, even one win by those who favor inequality is too much of a price - for those who pay that price, that is, it's not going to be the lawyers or judges or "justices" who do.   They have suckered us far too long, I'd like the thing to face a real egalitarian democratic rivalry and for it to be crushed by people who believe real lives of real people are more important than abstract "principles."  The lawyers in that organization certainly don't believe that.

I certainly have nothing much in common with any Republican, though all of them now, in the wake of the Trump insurrection attempt and the Republican-fascist Congressional delegations are rightly called what they are, Republican-fascists.  

I have nothing to do with that monument of poison and depravity, Clarence Thomas.  His fantasy of what overturning the Sullivan Decision would lead to is truly hilarious due to the fact that that power given by the Warren Court has primarily been used to thwart not only Democrats but liberal Democrats.  The ones who, unlike the play left, have the ability to accomplish something.  If he had his way among the first and biggest losers would be FOX Lies, the other lying right-wing and Republican-fascist media, and the likes of Donald Trump, who would have long ago been ruined if those he had lied about and slandered, including the very paid-for ads carried by the New York Times that the Sullivan Decision allowed to be published with total impunity, could have sued him.  If Hillary Clinton could sue the media and people like Trump for the decades of lies told about her, she'd be enormously rich and they would be ruined.   That Clarence Thomas doesn't get that doesn't surprise me, he was never very smart and he's always been rather clueless about reality.   As willfully stupid as many an ACLU lawyer is.  I loathe them as much as I do him.

Arthur Berger - Partita (1947) for piano

 

Geoffrey Burleson, piano 

I love Arthur Berger's music so much, still.

Use Opportunities Handed To You

If the Republican-fascists want to go with another sex-abuser scented wrestling coach for speaker, we should take full advantage of that.  No Democrat should ever talk about him on TV again or the Republican-fascists in Congress without mentioning the multiple accusations against him.   They should make that what the Republicans and the media did for White Water and Benghazi and everything else combined for Hillary Clinton.   Hell, she even got blamed for being the wife Bill cheated on, right up through and after the 2016 election.   It's a crime for a Democrat to be the victim according to them while Republican-fascists get a free pass on being the criminals.

By the way, being told by a former professional scribbler for a recording industry ad-flyer, city boy, blog rat that I've got no "work ethic" is somewhat amusing.   I'd just got done stacking a cord of fire wood when I opened up the ol' laptop and read that.   Put up my writing production against his and Duncan's put together and one of my short posts is more than they write in a month. 

Answer To Simps By Something Like Popular Request

Not a single word in the above about movies, TV and rock music being responsible for all the ills of contemporary society? Man, Sparky -- you're slipping. Seriously -- you used to have a work ethic.  Simps

WHEN I FIRST started doing this, writing things and posting them, first on comment threads then on my own blogs, I was often surprised at things that got a strong negative reaction.  Not so much the big controversial issues on which I knew I was not hewing to secular-lefty convention but the merely ephemeral and things not central to an effective liberal or lefty agenda.  One of those was the night I innocently observed that the worst thing about America's experiment with prohibition was that it didn't work.  That it didn't produce a sober society and nation.  And that's all I said, at first.  It got an immediate and impassioned reaction on what was then one of the major lefty blogs. A blog which had reached its high point around the 2004 election and had already started on its long and continuing decline.  It featuring a link for "Drinking Liberally" on the side panel perhaps had a bit to do with that decline.  One guy who I knew was a professional journalist angrily said that I'd deprive working men of being able to unwind with some drinks after a hard day at work.  To which I said if they didn't drink they could probably be in better shape to organize to make their work less arduous and more satisfying. As the brawl developed, I listed the glaringly obvious benefits of having a society or even a country where no one drank alcohol.

No alcoholism, no accident caused car and other accidents, no alcohol related violence up to and including murders, no drunks rolled and robbed sometimes killed, no alcoholics having to resort to prostituting themselves (no pimps using alcohol to gull young idiots into it), no women or children gotten drunk and talked into sex they wouldn't have otherwise,  none of the large number of unmentioned diseases that even moderate alcohol consumption causes and exacerbates,* no drunken husbands beating their wives while drunk, no drunken parents neglecting or abusing children, no children getting started on addiction in their early teens or earlier, etc.   

Other than food and housing assistance and medical care and perhaps, arguably, the chance at an education, I doubt there is a single social or governmental program ever dreamed up by a social worker or lefty scribbler that would produce as much good in the lives of the community and the nation than would have come with an actual abolition of the consumption of alcohol, if that had proven to be possible.  When people wonder why those who adopted the prohibition amendment to the Constitution could have done it, they could certainly see many if not all of those benefits, women who were regularly beaten and abused and raped and neglected by drunken men, who saw their children being abused and neglected due to alcohol could see those possibilities, those weren't things to be shunned and despised.  Unfortunately, due to the corruption of those who would have had to enforce it, the organized crime who immediately took advantage of the national appetite for alcohol and the pop culture which romanticized and made fashionable drinking and getting drunk, those good, even wise and well meaning intentions were quickly turned into a crime wave.  That wasn't the fault of those who wanted to end the nightmarish reality of life in pre-prohibition times, especially as electronic media and the newly mass media popularized drinking and getting sloshed.  It was the fault of those who profited from subverting their intentions.   You would think the ease with which the ease with which those things enslave People, causing them to destroy their lives and the lives of others would make those exactly the opposite of what an American style liberal or a real lefty dedicated to making lives longer and better would favor.

I have noted here before how bizarre it was for the secular-play-left to champion alcohol use and, later, drug use, things that are guaranteed to enslave a large percentage of those who used them far worse than wage slavery could - the part alcohol played in that kind of voluntary, duped and induced enslavement doesn't seem to figure at all in the huge amount of lefty lore I ever saw or read.  I think the opposite is true as I found out that night and subsequently.  No amount of reasoning could cut through that pile of bullshit or maybe the rip-roarin', bar room atheists who were always ready for a fight (a virtual fight, that is, not one that risked a black eye among that genteel college-credentialed crowd) were too afraid of being shunned out of the clique that sits on the high school stairs.  One of the things I learned from frequenting the lefty blogs of the 20OO's and beyond, reading the quick and unfiltered thinking or what counts as thinking among them,  is just what a bunch of soft-handed, scaredy cat cowards and slaves to conventional thinking they are.   I wrote here once how I came to understand how, for example, those legendary and great heroes of such a left, The Weavers, could present a song glorifying those involved in illegal liquor production as some kind of good, only once I looked more deeply into the actual history of them and their predecessors, The Almanac Singers, they always had feet of clay.   

And, as I mentioned, what was true of the place of alcohol in such pop-secular-play-lefty bullshit was as true about drugs.  What drinking and drug use ever had being mistaken for a legitimate issue for a genuine American style liberalism or its actually daffy and impractical and often deranged wing of secular-leftism has been of enormous use in coming to understand how the American left got sidetracked and distracted and deeply damaged into destroying their effectiveness.  

The real lesson of prohibition was that whatever sweeping attempt at changing such a deeply entrenched habit which carries its own falsely-positive reinforcement on a personal level is extremely hard.  Making that habit into some kind of stupidly adopted cause celebre of any liberalism or genuine leftism is not only not helpful, it's guaranteed to make things worse.

At the very least, the left could admit that alcohol and drugs are not only bad for People, they are intrinsic to their enslavement, disempowerment and misery here as they have been in in Czarist, Communist and now Putin-fascist Russia.  And every Supreme Court, ACLU promoted permitted liquor ad on TV, every product placement in movies (don't get me started on Nick and Nora) and on TV, every song that promotes alcohol use contributes to that as much as a methyl-tainted bootlegger or 1920s gangster did.  Think of that the next time you hear ol' Pete and Ronnie and the gang beltin' out  Darlin' Corey.  

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

I could mention things like prostitution and other sex industries, the promotion of irresponsible sex, especially at very young ages as Hollywood, TV and pop music has done, reckless driving, the "anti-political-correctness" fad that began with the promotion of what I called fascist chic during the late 1970s and into the Reagan years - what Bill Maher, among the least funny comedians of all times still lives off of as he tries to catch the same cresting wave as the more overt Republican-fascists do.  In my attempt over the past seventeen years to find out why "the left" has failed so abysmally in the United States, in Britain and Canada I have found that the actual left that can be depended on to even pursue things that might work is much smaller than I had thought.  The play-lefts here and elsewhere are actually far bigger and far less interested in actually doing something that will work to produce real and lasting change.  And, as I have been railing about for quite a long time, we are up against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic features intentionally embedded into the body of the Constitution by the friggin' founders and those baked into the Bill of Rights, likely by sheer stupidity by the First Congress through their inferior 18th century poetics than intention.  The corrupt Supreme Court more than they did, though, used their terse wording and tacit explicitness to make those much worse.  That's another thing you're never supposed to mention as an American liberal or lefty, the actual corruption of that document, including the idolized First Amendment.  I would note that the history of the distortion of the much better written 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court, which is not only continuing today but is reaching new depths of intentional dishonesty and evil brings into focus some of the other prohibited truth telling among the self-declared free-speech-press absolutists.  

I have to say it's my experience that I've been told I can't say those things by civil libertarians even more often than I was ever told I couldn't advocate LGBTQ+ equality, even back before Stonewall.  I think the prohibition on telling the plain truth about such things, supported by enormous confirming evidence is at least as strong on the play-left as it is in the commercial media or even on much of the less drunken, less violent right.  

* In my looking into the consequences of alcohol use, I'm convinced that the health and other damage caused by "moderate" alcohol use is probably even a worse public health issue than that caused by the minority who become alcoholics.  Yet I have never, once, heard any discussion of that in the media or among my fellow lefties and American liberals.  It's as bad as the decades of cover-up and silence of the health consequences of tobacco use.
 

Is There Hope For Feminism After Trump?

I've got a large body of unfinished - well as unfinished as my writing usually gets - writing to post.  The problem with being forced to take a week off due to computer problems is that the world goes on.   Instead of that I'm going to post a conversation between Rebecca Traister and my beloved Harry Litman titled Is There Hope For Feminism After Trump because they bring up several things that I think are important innovations that I hadn't realized had been articulated as publicly.  

One is something I've thought was stunningly obvious but seemed to be entirely lost on most of the People I've heard babbling and read scribbling about these things THAT THE POST-CIVIL WAR RECONSTRUCTION IS REMARKABLY LIKE WHAT WE'RE LIVING THROUGH NOW.  I would go a lot farther than I think either of them would in that I think it's the absolute proof of the danger of the anti-democratic dangers built into the Constitution and the form of government in the United States.  The ease with which America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, restored de facto slavery in many places and America's peculiar form of apartheid and the manipulation of racism as a means of oligarchic control through the Senate, through the Electoral College (the mechanism with which the slave-holders and their agents ended Reconstruction) and the media promoting racism as the tool of abolishing any move toward egalitarian democracy with the full and aggressive support of the Supreme Court, the third and most anti-democratic branch of the federal government.

Lots of what Traister and Litman say is a lot like what I've been writing since I started this only they don't go as far as I think is warranted by the facts and justified by the danger we are in.   They sound something like I probably did around 2002. 

I don't think we're ever going to be safe from what we've now seen overturn the major movements for egalitarian democracy in the United States SUCCEED TWICE.   And the mechanisms for doing that are the anti-democratic features of the Constitution and the license given for the mass media to promote and generate lies with impunity.  I doubt that is something that a professional journalist is going to have the courage to admit and write about, certainly not in the New York Times which, on the anniversary of the Sullivan Decision covered itself with kisses for having gotten the right with which, in the final weeks of the 2016 election, published even more lies about Hillary Clinton which probably got Trump over the line to lose the election in a way that would give him the presidency.  It was just part of the decades long lie campaign and campaign of mean girl vilification of her that the Great Gray Drab published about her with its Sullivan Decision "rights" to publish lies about Democratic politicians.  People are such suckers for that rag.  

Hate Mail - Continued

IT IS IMPORTANT to go back to something I'd planned on being what I posted this week instead of what I have, continuing with Luke Timothy Johnson's fine lecture on the paradoxical nature of Christian freedom, focused on the letters of Paul.  I think his short conclusion to his lecture says pretty much everything, especially noting what he said we should be shocked at.   Remember this is my transcription of the video, so it is probably not exactly as he would have written it out.

I have a very short conclusion.  

Catching even a glimpse of the paradoxical character of Christian freedom should cause us, today, to consider our conformity or our lack of conformity to the sort of discourse that many of us have allowed to dominate our lives, unaccustomed as we are to seek our true identity not in political or social allegiance but to the truth of the Gospel.

We have reason to pause over our casual ascription of sin to social systems without acknowledging the deeply resistant power of the flesh and sin within each of us as individuals.

We have reason to be shocked at the premise that human freedom comes from the writing of laws, even constitutions rather than the presence and power of God's Holy Spirit.

We have reason to be stunned at the way The Good News recognizes rights but regards them as secondary and relative.  

Above all we have reason to be stimulated to think hard about the ways in which freedom for which God has freed us might be of service to others and their interests rather than our own.

Where I would part company with Luke Timothy Johnson is in the assertion that rights are secondary but only if by "secondary" you mean not to be asserted and struggled for and won, the experience of human beings is that asserting that will inevitably lead through centuries and millennia of those rights being deferred.  

They might be considered secondary to their greatest use, which is found in his last sentence, not least of which is that the only safe and real means of being fully free politically, the context of "rights," is through those being used to secure them and their benefits universally.  Benefits experienced and lived materially, socially, legally and spiritually.  Perhaps a really egalitarian democratic United States arising, however seemingly improbably from the libertarian catastrophe we are in now will show how to make both real, finally.   Though it's well worth considering how they could be considered secondary to their greatest use because their existence is necessary to their support of their use for the good of others.   Perhaps it's better to say that they don't gain their full good until they are used to that end.

I think in that you will find a more ample and succinct foundation for a "more perfect union" than the secularizing constitution framers  did.  I have noted before that when that intellectual giant (though entirely fallible man) Thomas Jefferson was coming up with an apologetic  justification for the American colonies declaring their independence from Britain, that quasi-deistic materialist man of "enlightenment" fashion found he had no choice but to explain the existence of rights and a right to freedom as an endowment from God.  I followed Marilynne Robinson in noting that it would be hard or impossible to come up with a purely secular statement of that as found in the Declaration of Independence, issuing it as a challenge to any atheist or even conventional devotee of political secularism to give us the language of such a declaration.  No one tried.

I said and still say that it is impossible to come up with a durable and effective statement of anything like rights or freedom or, in fact, the possibility of freedom and rights without rejecting a materialistic framing of human existence because there is absolutely nothing within atheism or materialism or even namby-pamby conventional secularism that isn't, in the end, a flabby and self-destructive assertion of freedoms and rights.  I find the character of all officially atheist and materialist regimes as deadly, enslaving dictatorships to be unsurprising due to that, I find the weakness of secularized societies in maintaining egalitarian democracy, especially in the face of pressures and dangers to be most fully understandable in their rejection or ignoring what I've put in the last two sentences of Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture.  The present day secular orthodoxy of not only the legal and judicial establishment has certainly not been any more careful or attentive to the necessities or benefits of egalitarian democracy than the representatives in the Federal government or many of those in the various states.  

Of course you can point to the "white evangelicals" the "traditional-catholics" and others who voted for Trump from an allegedly Christian point of view.  I would point out that it should not miss your attention that Luke Timothy Johnson was addressing an audience at a Catholic college, introduced by faculty from that college and that his critique of the widespread mischaracterization of Christian freedom and its associated holdings is most fairly read as an internal critique.  His handling of the deeply disturbing language of Paul and even of Jesus in terms of the enslavement of human beings shows how deep that internal critique is.  If that has ever happened on as deep a level in atheist, materialist or secular handling of these issues with the result being that there is something wanting in our understanding of those as self-jepoardizing as their fundamental ground-floor holdings of belief, I'd like to see it because I never have seen those, certainly none that come away with holding that human beings are capable of freedom and that there is such a thing as inalienable rights that are universally and equally the possession of every human being.  The problem of trad-catholics and white Bible-thumpers and their ilk is that THEY GO FOR THE TRAPPINGS OF CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT EVER ENTERTAINING THAT THEY ARE "TO BE OF SERVICE TO OTHERS AND THEIR INTERESTS RATHER THAN" THEIR OWN.  That the enlightenment founders rested their efforts on something to be regulated on the basis of what was sloganized "enlightened self-interest" without the Biblical moral wisdom of egalitarian good will and charity might usefully be seen as the basis of where America as a "democratic experiment" went totally wrong.  And there is no way you'll ever get past self-interest on the basis of atheism, materialism or secularism.  Even secular expressions and explanations of acting in the public good comes down to self-interest and that's never enough to really work in the long run throughout a large society or even a small one.  The language of civil rights in even the secularists can never seem to manage without some paraphrase of Scripture or theology.  I think there's a reason that even they have to look to it to find the right words, just as Jefferson the deist had to cite God in explaining a right to freedom from royal oppression.  That's where it always has to come from, an assertion that those come from the one who made us as we are.  Show me the language if you think it doesn't.  

"Where does this come from?" - More Hate Mail

I HAVE NOT MADE a thorough study identifying the hagiographic sanctimony that grew up around the Supreme Court as embodied in the reporting of it by someone like Nina Totenberg or that made-for-TV movie about the Brown v. Board decision or movies allegedly documenting Thurgood Marshall's career (anyone who mistakes any movie for an adequate substitute for actual history and honestly told biography is a sap) to test my suspicion that at least a good part of that is motivated by those with an interest in keeping the Supreme Court as the anti-democratic force for wealth and oligarchy and, yes, white supremacy that it has been in most of the years of its existence.   And in the case of, especially, white supremacy, those scores of years far outnumber those when they didn't and the anti-democratic features of the Constitution have, as intended in the First Constitutional Convention, magnified the power of white supremacy through our history.  

Of course anyone who has benefited from the majority of Supreme Court decisions over the roughly two-hundred thirty years it has been active  has an enormous interest in keeping it from being reigned in to serve in stead of thwart equality and democracy.  The wealthy, most of all, and being made more powerful by the inherent ability of great wealth to foment great corruption on its owners behalf, are those who have had the power to erect that false front of published, filmed, broadcast sanctimony and mythology about the Court.  If the Koch brother's wet-dream of an oligarchic-controlled second Constitutional Convention came about, I am certain that the Supreme Court would not lose a bit of their power to abolish federal legislation through a fiat of a simple majority on that Court.  In the large majority of cases I've ever known of, that power has been used to support the unequal distribution of wealth and the enhancement of the wealthy to get more wealth at the expense of workers and others and, certainly at the expense of sustaining of a livable environment and their in support of the wealthy's license to enjoy what they can get with their wealth.  That's probably even more obvious in the actual record of the court than the fact that the Supreme Court has been, if anything, more supportive of white supremacy than the filibuster ruled Senate has been in its own sordid history.  It is not unremarkable that the parts of the Federal government which are, by Constitutional provision and supporting adopted laws and internally constructed rules are the most corrupting of equality and, so, of real egalitarian democracy.  I don't need to do a hell of a lot of historical and documentary research to come to that conclusion because it is the history of human kind, nothing but a real egalitarian democracy has ever not produced what was in line with governance of a neighborhood or area or state or empire by actual gangsters.  Anything in the United States Constitution, from Supreme Court  fiat or duly adopted laws that does not support equality and democracy is part of that long history of rule by gangsters, no matter how clean their hands and fingernails, no matter how credentialed by Ivy League or other elite training grounds of oligarchy, no matter how perfumed they are or are anointed by cultural or religious hierarchies or their own, internal professional establishments.

We The People have been gulled and suckered by the trappings of respectability and the phonied up history we have been taught but most of all by the theatrical, cinematic and other fictional presentation of American history.  We are coerced and suckered into believing or going along with the conventional piety given to the Supreme Court, to the "traditions of the Senate"* and by the treatment of the presidency, when it is a Republican or even Republican-fascist who has been president.  I am struck at how different the treatment of Joe Biden has been this week in regard to the attack on, not the United States BUT ON ANOTHER COUNTRY and the treatment of George W. Bush when his own administration, Condi Rice and others, ignored the warnings of the attack on 9 11 happened here.  It's especially striking considering the known fact that the Republican-fascist Trump gave information about Israeli intelligence service to the Russians that may well have led to the king of its fabled intelligence services in just the way that caught the Netanyahu government so off-guard.  That is typical of how the fabled "free-press" of the United States has acted for my entire lifetime.  I made a reference to that in the exposure of first Senator John Kennedy and then President Kennedy in the ghost-writing of Profiles in Courage.  You can compare that to the fact that virtually every book "written" by any of the Republican presidents is even more obviously ghost-written.  Look how long it took for "The Art of the Deal" to be widely noted to have had no content written by the likely functionally illiterate Donald Trump.  

It is one of the most disillusioning experiences of my life to have read the direct, unfiltered thinking of many thousands of supposedly educated Americans, from supposedly far left to far right to read how superficial their thinking on things is and how gullible they are outside of their narrow area of professional expertise.  They almost all watch the movie instead of reading the book.  They don't test ideas, they absorb them like a paper towel and the resulting belief might be persistent but it is about as strong as a wet Kleenex.  And those are the ones who are supposed to be more aware of things.  Our TV and now internet addled population are not capable of sustaining democracy, though the strongest pillar of democracy, the one which is absolutely essential to it, a sense of fairness, a notion that equality is right and that privilege is wrong is probably the most durable of all of the moral bases of democracy.  It is certainly stronger than that other essential moral truth, that those with more must share with those without or their own surplus will rot their souls.  I am certain that idea has been taught and educated out of the majority of those who have gone through a legal training, "the law," that is the secular law being quite a different thing than The Law of Moses or its equivalent in other moral traditions and, certainly, that of Jesus which is the most extravagantly egalitarian and leveling that I'm aware of.  It being so novel that hardly any Christians have really tried to follow it.   

I have relied on Louis Boudin so heavily because he did such good work over several decades assembling the evidence and the record, the citations and the rational analysis to support the radical reformation of the Supreme Court in one of its most corrupt periods.  I know it is claimed that Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt Supreme Court "justice" in its history and he certainly is among the most corrupt, he was put there by two oligarchic families, that of the Bushes, among the most corrupt in the history of the Country, and of John Danforth whose ordination to the Episcopal priesthood doesn't seem to have resulted in him having anything like an informed conscience.  But I don't think the corruption of Clarence Thomas is all that remarkable.  As I have noted the most august of all Supreme Court "justices," John Marshall was a fast holder of Black People in slavery and his Supreme Court decisions always enhanced the institution of slavery and, so, always enhanced the wealth of him, his family and his friends at the expense of Black People held in slavery, Black People who were abducted into slavery and those who opposed the enslavement of human beings.  I have no doubt that if he could Thomas would do the same if he thought it benefited him, he has been a stalwart of white supremacy during his entire sordid career in the law.  He has certainly done something very similar to Women and would love to do the same to LGBTQ+ People.   But in that he is merely typical of those who have sat on that Court, the only novelty is that he has done so while being Black just as Women who have sat on that court have ruled as they did while being female.  

I was asked what I'd change, the first thing would be to make all Supreme Court members have a term of perhaps ten or twelve years.  Lifetime appointments were stupidly assumed to guarantee that the "justices" of that Court would not be corrupted by self-interest if they had a guarantee of a lifetime job.  That was as stupid as assuming that a king for life would be untempted by money making at another job.  It is remarkable how stupid the founders and the early members of Congress were, considering they'd just overthrown being ruled by a monarch.  

Another thing I would change is making removing a member of the court much easier, automatic if they were convicted of a felony or a serious breach of ethics.  

Since they have usurped the power to nullify federal legislation I would make confirmation of any proposed "justice" be by both houses of Congress.  Giving the power of confirmation to the most undemocratic of the elected parts of the Federal Government has been a guaranteed source of corruption.  One sustained and enhanced by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts.  I would, of course, favor an amendment either abolishing the Senate and expanding the House of Representatives or to make it democratic.  I don't see any reason for there not to be Senatorial districts that surpass the boundaries of states in order to have a truly democratic Senate, if we are to retain it.  I don't see any reason for the states with one or two House Districts to have two Senators while California, New York and Texas combined have fewer Senators than myriads of much smaller states, including the one I live in.  I would, of course, also abolish that tool of corruption in the Executive, the Electoral College, used by crooks and gangsters and oligarchs (such as Jeb Bush) as well as the Republican-fascists of the Rehnquist Court to put the losers of elections in that ultimate seat of power.  It is remarkable to me how little of the coverage of the attempts of Trump to steal the 2020 election ignore that it was by the manipulation of the baroque mechanism of the Electoral College that was such a proven vulnerability of American democracy.  

I would also make it easier to impeach a president than it is now.  If The People disagreed with the impeachment of an impeached president, they could express that disagreement in the next election.  Though I think it should also be a requirement for being president that make having been duly convicted of a federal felony a certain disqualification.  That our Constitution didn't make that a requirement proves that like all human framed institutions ours is certainly at least that far from perfection.  I would change that immediately, encouraging members of the House and Senate to write an Amendment stating that to be adopted as soon as possible.  That Trump could even theoretically be president while serving a prison term as the infamous, though less corrupt, James Michael Curley could have in Massachusetts is absurd.

I would also put it in the Constitution that it is a merely human made thing and will certainly need amendment.  I would make it easier to amend the thing than the absurd super-majority of legislatures method now.  State Legislatures in many of the states are almost guaranteed to be corrupted by our indigenous fascism, white supremacy and by the less expensive corruption of state governments by great wealth in the state or doing business there.  That source of corruption is on full display in many states, North, South, East West and in the middle.  There are states I don't think have proven they are safely considered states under local control. Wisconsin, Louisiana, Texas. . . Generally those have have been the states under the strongest influence of white supremacy.  I am sorry to say many of them the most rural states.  Not finding a way of either improving that situation of insulating the national governance in a more uniformly just manner is, in the short and long run, not an option.    

By the way, to the objection of my use of the honest term "Republican-fascist," the Bush v Gore decision is answered by the necessity of using that if you want to be honest.  Two Republican members of the Court in 2000 voted to let the votes be counted, it was five of them who anointed the loser, George W. Bush.  I wouldn't feel right if I didn't make a distinction between those two and the five who corruptly voted to put Bush II in the presidency.   Considering it was his regime which committed one of the most dangerous crimes any president in our history did, under the regency of Cheney, the invasion of Iraq.  The huge numbers of dead, the regional catastrophe that has been is one of the most deadly of all American crimes, far larger in body counts and pain than the American wars in South East Asia when I was younger. Among the things that accomplished was the enhancement of the power of the theocratic gangsters in control of Iran who, in turn, sustain the gangsters who control Gaza.  The history of Republican collusion with the Iranian theocratic-gangsters goes back to Reagan and his Iran Contra financing of terrorism in Central America, if not the well supported suspicion that his campaign made a deal with the theocrats to not release the Americans they held hostage, though you're certainly not hearing much of that in our "free press" this week as they blame Joe Biden for what happened there. That the same Republicans have been solidly promoting our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy is not shocking, no more than it was under the Reagan-Bush I administrations that Clarence Thomas thrived and flourished.  Fruit of the poison tree, the poison being permitted lies told and spread by the freest of "free presses."  

And we're back to the ordure on the Court.  Of course I would favor some means of removing their ability to overturn duly adopted federal legislation by the fiat of a simple majority of the "justices" on that court on the basis of its "unconstitutionality."  RMJ suggested in a comment he made here a number of years ago making it necessary for such a conclusion to be unanimous before legislation could be nullified in that way.  Which might be a good experiment to try if the necessity of the Court nullifying plainly unconstitutional legislation is legitimate.  Though I would favor a thorough study of how other democracies which don't allow their Supreme Courts to do that to get better ideas of how to deal with that problem.  I don't think legislatures or executives are any more reliable than the majority in elections are, though they're probably less unreliable to egalitarian democracy than our unelected, lifetime-appointed, nullifying Supreme Court is.    

Anyone who has read much of what I wrote starting in the first weeks I've done this in 2006 would not remember that among other things I favor an amendment to the Bill of Rights stating that there is no such a thing as a right to lie and certainly no "right" for "the press" to lie or to spread lies.  The corruption of the Supreme Court rests on the corruption through advertising of the Presidency and the Senate, in other words through unequal wealth, under the idiotic lie enabling interpretation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Any reform of any of the government, no matter how temporarily successful will eventually fall to a regime under which lies can flourish as they have in the United States with the freest "press" and the most flagrantly lying in history.  It is a truth taught by experience that for suckering People and leading them to make decisions and mere choices against their own good, lies are the most efficacious of all things.   That our "founding fathers" and all of the generations of Supreme Court "justices" in our history have not made that a bedrock of the American government is proof of either their willful negligence or their improbable stupidity or their epic corrupt intent from the start.   In the generations under the freest press, the most massively effective and available media in the history of human beings we are seeing the TV and media generated resurgence of fascism and Nazism which was merely temporarily suppressed in some places deputed to be democracies.  We can see Russia go from Stalinism to the several iterations of decadent Marxism in its decline, bypassing a brief flirtation with something like democracy into a managed reestablishment of Stalinism as gangster fascism LARGELY THROUGH THE LIES TOLD BY MASS MEDIA.  We have seen it in places like Italy, like Hungary, in various degrees all over the place.  

"More speech" under the slogan of the ACLU type of "civil liberties" has given us that descent from the high point of American Democracy in the mid-1960s when LBJ got the Congress to adopt laws that should have been part of the Constitution, ensuring a right to vote and a protection of American democracy from white supremacist and political gerrymandering.  The entire time the country has been descending into the resurgence of our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, white-supremacy in allegiance to the multi-millionares and billionaires, the Nixon-Goldwater "Southern strategy" which was never merely to attract racists in the formerly Confederate states, under the idiotic slogan of "more speech" and it is still headed that way, if not again under Trump then certainly under someone who is more palatable to more of the Republican quasi-fascists and Republican voting suckers.

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The worst thing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg did was to remain on the Supreme Court when she could have resigned in a timely manner which would have allowed Barack Obama to nominate her replacement and have their appointment be confirmed.  I don't have to go through the reason that that was the worst thing she ever chose to do.  Her excuse that she thought whoever he appointed would be to her right is certainly not invalidated by his nomination of Merrick Garland whose timidity in dealing with the Trump crimes as Joe Biden's Attorney General is enough to give any real Democrat pause about how he would have been as a "justice" on the Court.  While I certainly liked Ginsburg and most of those rulings she participated in that I know about, as well as her dissents,  she more than any other member of that Court in my lifetime has put me off of the kind of adulation that some members of that court have had, including from me.   

I've frequently mentioned the absurd adulation of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. who the more I read about and read his record in light of his faith in the most vicious aspects of natural selection, the more disturbingly dangerous he seems to me.  I think a large part of his legendary status was due to fictitious presentations about him, a play and movie made from it in the 1930s no small part of that to those of us not initiated in legal lore, other things as fictitious or acceptable to those with a vested interest in his rulings the basis of theirs.  

I've mentioned John Marshall whose character and judicial career can not honestly be separated from his racism, his wealth, his and the basis of both on his choice to become wealthy through slavery which has resonated down the years, he being one of those "dead judges" who still rule us in so many ways while even elected, living people don't.  I think his dishonesty in inventing the Court power to nullify federal legislation as well as the dishonest characterization of the adoption of the Constitution, between his pretense in his official writing claiming it as a product of adoption by all of The People and his admission in his biography of Washington that it was a narrow thing - though he didn't note that it was hardly a result of a free and informed vote of The People - figures also into my decidedly negative view of him.  I certainly don't trust a careful, detailed noticing lawyer who lies about such important things.

Another of those who I was educated to revere and who I agreed with on many issues but who I now see as largely having feet of clay, William O. Douglas, certainly figures into my anti-romantic view of the Supreme Court.  

Even more so, of course, were the many truly awful members of that court over the centuries, so many of them being political hacks as legal hacks, many of them brought up in wealth, trained in elite universities - training grounds of oligarchy - and, as lawyers, first and foremost wanting to get along in the legal establishment while working for those with the greatest ability to pay them large fees and those billable hours.  Just as lower court judges don't want to be overruled by those on higher courts, citing precedence (the mechanism for dead judges ruling us) lawyers don't want to be considered unreliable for those within and without the judicial hierarchy.  There is always an incentive to lawyers to go along to get along, one of the things more than one ex-lawyer has expressed distaste for in why they didn't choose to travel on that particular gravy train.

The ease and comfort with which many of the "justices" I've respected in their collegial and personal friendships with those who regularly did such evil from the bench figures into it.  That the idolized RBG's reported best buddy on the Court was Scalia, they took at least one lavish vacation together that I know of, also colors my view of the legal profession and the courts, right up to the top.  To some extent I have the same opinion of them as I do gangster lawyers who make a lot of money doing the bidding of criminals and enabling their criminality.  I don't respect such people or their profession, at all.

If being unromantic about that, looking at it with a cold eye instead of taking a romantically, amber-gelled view of it makes you uneasy, how much less easy should you be about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Roe v Wade, the refusal to stay executions (O'Connor's citing of court schedules in such cases makes me anticipate her going to hell for that and Bush v Gore), any past legislation or court rulings that produced justice and equality instead of injustice and privilege, even legislation and court rulings that sustain life and the environment we live on should we be?  It's part of growing to real adulthood to abandon false romance and attractive lies.  The difficulty and unpleasantness of that is probably why the United States has been gulled into the kind of unrealism that is the entire motive of Trumpian fascism.   Even the fact that the very media that sustains that unreality has to note that his entire substance and power is the lies he and his supporters tell, gulling the susceptible with those lies has not made them face the truth of the Supreme Court freeing the very media that created the Trump most of his believers carry of him to lie with impunity. That is probably the most glaring flaw in the Constitution that there is, and yet we can't face the necessity of correcting that to protect anything good about the United States.  

* I would bet my entire life's savings that almost all American's idiotic and ahistorical idea of the Senate filibuster was formed by that stupid Jimmy Stewart performance than any part of the reality of what that has meant in our country.  Any good it has done is so far outweighed by the evil it has produced as to make that movie white-supremaicist propaganda.  Our view of the mythological impeachment as a safety valve on presidential or Supreme Court "justice" corruption is only slightly more a fantasy.  

 I'll leave it to you to decide, do I answer Simps and feel cheap or do I not answer him and feel nothing?

In The End It Has To Be More Than Meets The Eye - On My Second Viewing of Juliet Of The Spirits

AFTER FINDING A VERY GOOD quality and I'd guess entirely pirated online posting of Frederico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and watching it, I wondered how long ago it was I watched an entire feature-length movie.  It's been long enough that I don't remember.   I was never a devoted movie-watcher, either in theaters or on TV or video. Lots of movies I saw were on TV, especially whenever they were on a public TV station where you wouldn't have to watch commercials.   Don't even know if they do that anymore now, having given up TV entirely when they made the switch to HD. 

I watched most of Fellini's movies as I could see them and saw Juliet of the Spirits once, as I recall with subtitles a few years after it was made.   The one I saw online last weekend us far better quality than the copy I watched and didn't have subtitles so I understood very little of the sound track except for a little in French and a tiny bit in English.  My knowledge of Italian isn't very good, at all.  But I was struck at how little I needed to understand of what was being said to understand what was going on.  A lot of that was because of the very fine silent acting of Giulietta Masina (Fellini was her husband)  whose expressions expressed that she was always looking past what was being said and done around her.  It confirmed what I concluded, the characters in the movie were either spouting useless nonsense or lies (her husband the biggest liar in the movie) that demonstrated the banal futility of their lives.   Watching it with such hazy memories of the text was something like my experience of trying to learn to understand spoken, vernacular Spanish by watching telenovellas only on a far higher level.   I didn't need to understand much about who the bad girls and guys were, you'd have to be a stupid as a Republican to not get it from the costumes and makeup.   The central story of Juliet becoming aware of her husband's infidelity and her reaction to that and getting past that isn't that much different and it's almost incidental to the substance of the movie, so little is actually made of it.   It was an interesting choice that in the last scenes of the movie, it was her own mother who tried to stop her from making that break. 

Watching it made me remember something I'd concluded from watching his other movies, that they are mostly a documentary and commentary on the vapid materialism and emptiness of post-WWII mainstream materialism.  Unlike the reaction to the corruption of church and government in the Reformation, the materialist reformation of the 20th century didn't try for anything that would be better, it was more of a surrender to what made institutions secular and church objectionable to start with.  I can't say that I find there's any positive recommendation for living a better life in any of it.  I find that's true of most of the literature and, especially, theatrical presentation I've seen in my lifetime.  Most of it from the 20th century.  

I wouldn't deny that Fellini's movie making is artistic, if sometimes wanting of substance.  The use of color in the movie is rightly famous, it is fascinating to watch as is the use of bizarre imagery in the supernatural, perhaps merely fantasy experiences of Juliet, but I kept thinking of what a waste of potential it amounted to.  But that's true of almost every movie I've ever watched, even those with an underlying or overt attempt at presenting edifying content.   It reminded me, in the end of the weekend I spent reading through a large collection of the music of Eric Satie which I came away from with an abiding and life long revulsion for him and his music, apart from a few of his pieces - no, probably not the ones you'd expect, if I hear those Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies again I might go off of music completely.  

I don't know if I could watch my favorite of his movies, Amarcord again, I'm sure I don't have to see Satyricon again any more than I need to watch Salo again.  Maybe 8 1/2  or La Dolca Vita but I don't think I need to watch most of the movies I saw again.  Maybe any movie.  I'm really off of them.  For the most part I think it is the most lavishly expensive medium for producing the most minimal amount of actual substance.  Opera is practically a poor cousin to it, though a lot of the same criticism could be made of easily 98% of that. 

 Update:  I would contrast this least conventional operatic but most effective production of Schoenberg's Moses Und Aron 

 

Bochumer Symphoniker
Conductor: Michael Boder

Moses - Dale Duesing
Aron - Andreas Conrad
Ein junges Mädchen - Ilse Eerens
Eine Kranke - Karolina Gumos
Ein junger Mann - Finnur Bjarnason
Der nackte Jüngling - Michael Smallwood
Ein anderer Mann/Ephraimit - Boris Grappe
Ein Priester - Renatus Meszar
Vier nackte Jungfrauen - Ilse Eerens, Hanna Herfurtner, Karolina Gumos - Constance Heller

Answers To Hate Mail . . . did not suggest revelation exists to achieve some degree of self-satisfaction among the doctors of the law

AS I'VE MENTIONED HERE BEFORE, one of the worst things the Supreme Court ever did in its long and sordid history, apart from declaring that Black People were not covered by the Constitution and that they, in effect, had no rights that white people were bound to respect was to declare that corporations are "persons."*   That wasn't something that was first said in a ruling by the Supreme Court "justices" themselves but was inserted into a footnote by a Court clerk who later went on to have a career as a corporate lawyer.   That ruling, of course, totally distorts the meaning of "rights" because it allows for a whole long series of rulings favoring corporations over obvious and necessary rights of People, workers and others.   

That is something that was rather less explicitly but more naively and stupidly inserted into the Constitution by the First Amendment and, I'd say, the Second Amendment, though not usefully distinguished as such.  The First Amendment "gives rights" to "the press,"  it grants "freedom" to "the press".  A press is no more a person than a corporation or "the press" as a corporation, it is a human made thing, it cannot have rights.  Rights inhere only to living beings, only People can be "persons."  The license the Warren Court so naively and stupidly gave to the New York Times to publish lies with impunity, something which has been an intrinsic and basic fact in our fall from the high point of American democracy, the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights and other things that made the United States a potentially egalitarian democracy for the first time in our history to today when we are in real and present danger of losing even the shell of democracy that was set up under the Constitution.  When you put that together with the more bizarre and complex manipulations of Republican-fascists on the Court and off of the disastrous language of the Second Amendment, in which a "right" to bear arms, explicitly as part of a "well regulated" militia was made into a personal right to maintain automatic weapons of a kind that the naive amateurs of the First Congress could not imagine anymore than they could modern printing presses, radio, TV, the internet when they so stupidly adopted their trite and short slogans in the First Amendment.  That those lied to by the media, those whose worst inclinations are encouraged by cabloid TV, hate-talk radio, the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi media, in the United States hold such enormous fire-power given to it by the Rehnquist and Robert's Courts that if their eagerly anticipated civil war happens, it will be hard for any "well regulated militia" to suppress it.  Indeed, when a lone gunman is murdering school students now, it is a suicide mission for a well-trained, well-regulated police team to stop them.  

The objection to what I've been writing here for the last few posts was interestingly reflected in an article on Pope Francis' response to some insincerely and dishonestly posed to him by five far-right, neo-integralist Cardinals to try to steer the sessions of the Synod that is taking place right now more to their liking.  Or to embarrass Pope Francis if they failed to.  I'll give you this from the article on it in the National Catholic Reporter:

There is something else going on here. The dubious cardinals seem to forget, and Francis reminds them, that the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, did not suggest revelation exists to achieve some degree of self-satisfaction among the doctors of the law. Revelation is given "for the salvation of all nations" (Dei Verbum, Paragraph 7). The dubious cardinals think conversion happens before one gets to the church door, once and for all. Francis, a pastor, knows that conversion never ends, that those who have crossed the threshold and those far from the doors of the church, are all in need of conversion. Christ died once and for all. Our conversion to the divine will is ongoing.

What is most striking about the responses is the difference in approach from that found in the original dubia. "The complex issues that the 'Dubia Cardinals' raise can only be answered with the pastoral type of response that Pope Francis gave," Sacred Heart University professor Michelle Loris told me in an email. "His method of response resonates with the way Jesus often responded to those who would try to trick and trap him — challenging his accusers to go more deeply into their heart and faith."

Boston College professor Cathleen Kaveny had a different take on pope's responses to the dubia. She suggested that rather than giving a different answer to the issue of same-sex relationships, Pope Francis is changing the question. Kaveny drew an analogy from the mid-20th century debate about religious liberty. "The traditional question was, 'How can we endorse religious liberty for false religions, since the Church has always taught that error has no rights?' But Jesuit Fr. John Courtney Murray and others framed the question differently," Kaveny told me. "Those advocating for change said, 'We are not endorsing false religions. We are saying that rights are inherent in persons not propositions, so the proper question is what we need to do to respect the dignity of the human person as a being who has the duty to search for the truth.' "

"I think Pope Francis is saying: 'The proper question is not whether we are endorsing sexual activity between persons of the same sex. It is what do we need to do to respect the dignity of LGBTQ persons, many of whom seek to live lives of love and responsibility in and through their partnerships?' " Kaveny is going a step further than the pope did, but her framing could help the debate get past the often "my way or the highway" approach to neuralgic issues our fraught, culture war zeitgeist makes most prominent.

Of course it is the short statement of truth I'm focused on here, "rights are inherent in persons not propositions, so the proper question is what we need to do to respect the dignity of the human person as a being who has the duty to search for the truth."    This reminds me of another quote that I've also cited here a number of times, from the great radio engineer Edwin Armstrong, weary from his long and futile struggles to obtain his right to the ownership of his own inventions as opposed to the stealing of them by Sarnoff and his corporation, RCA (he proved that Sarnoff couldn't begin to understand the mathematics and science behind his inventions as the courts gave ownership of them to the multi-millionaire)  He was certainly talking about lawyers and courts when he told a meeting of his fellow engineers, "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words."   


The Law isn't so much an ass as it is an a-hole, a thing manipulated by lawyers and judges and "justices" to make it do what they prefer, at least in many if not most cases and "the law" allows theme to do that, especially in our system in which the Court and the laws organizing the judiciary allow them to get away with.  I do think if we studied the cases from before Louis Boudin and after he wrote, in which the Supreme Court overturned duly adopted laws on both the state and federal levels and previous Supreme Court rulings we would find a distinct patter of them favoring the rich, the powerful, the economically, racially, male-gendered, ethnically white or not Black or Native American or Latino, and straight AND THE WEALTHY CORPORATIONS over and over again.  As the brilliant recent work of Paul Finkleman and his colleagues are showing, as Louis Boudin showed in is discussion of Court cases, that started at least with the many rulings against slaves AND FREE BLACK PEOPLE ABDUCTED INTO SLAVERY written by that most august of them  all, John Marshall.  It was done by the "anti-slavery" "justice" Joseph Story in a ruling which Paul Finkleman rightly said if it were not for the Dred Scott decision it would be THE most outrageous of the slave-power favoring rulings by the putrid Supreme Court.  Only he is more temperate in his language than I am, he is a lawyer and a law scholar as well as a lawyer, I am merely what I am.   Among the rights that I hold to be mine by divine endowment is to truthfully tell the truth about those who we are gulled, bribed and coerced into giving respect that I certainly lost as soon as I found out what they really did and really said, they only having a right to me telling the truth about them and not bearing false witness.  If Marshall, Story, Taney,  Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and the rest of the Republican-fascist thugs who dominate the court and have for years now did the same they'd never have earned my regard of them that seems to scare some so much.

What the hell does everyone worry about the danger in the  possibility of changing the Court to make it responsible for the evil it does amount to?   That a rational attempt to reform it will be worse than the course it's on now?  It's plenty evil now and through its entire history to make changing it now necessary to maintain even a vestige of equal justice and egalitarian democracy.    They're getting hundreds and thousands of American children murdered in their own schools and neighborhoods now.   They are arming the Trump criminal gangsters and the nut cases with assault weapons.  They are enabling the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy and the spreading of white supremacist and other fascist and Nazi propaganda to those who are made by TV and movies and the internet stupid enough and morally debased enough to adopt AND ACT ON IT.   They have corrupted our elections with their own "more speech" through Buckley V. Valeo, Citizens United and other "free speech" rulings.   IN THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF "RIGHTS" IN THE HISTORY OF THE DISHONEST LEGALISTIC AND JUDICIAL BLATHER ABOUT RIGHTS THEY HAVE MADE MONEY "SPEECH" WHICH MEANS A BILLIONAIRE HAS BILLIONS OF TIMES MORE "SPEECH" THAN A POOR OR DESTITUTE PERSON.   And if you think all the pro-bono lawyers and judges and "justices" which the legal industry will generate in its entire existence will make up that difference, I've got a hideous building designed and erected under that "puzzle-wit" Taft to sell you.

Rights inhere only to natural living beings, they don't inhere to corporations or organizations, no, not even religions as that observation in the passage above notes.  What are "religions" except for a long series of propositions and a corporate construction for embodying them in an organization?   None of them has gained universal recognition as a divine creation, for any denomination which has claimed that for itself, and the Catholic Church is one of the foremost in that group, there are many who make a good case that that claim is bogus.  I know a lot of those who are skeptical of that about Catholicism are cradle Catholics, especially those who have studied the history of Catholicism and have taken an honestly critical regard to those claims.  They were what was at the heart of John Paul II's and Benedict XVIs attacks on the eminent Catholic theologian Hans Kung.  

Though I have not had the time to follow up and look into what John Courtney Murray and those others mentioned above were responding to and exactly what they said but I suspect it was exactly the context of the American Catholic experience of life in a diverse and aspiring democracy as opposed to the long tradition and experience of Europe.  It is interesting to note what might seem to be a nuance of noting that ideas don't have rights, that rights inhere to living beings is not a nuance, it is an absolutely basic aspect of the theory that something called "rights" actually is real instead of merely a matter of human invention.  I've been over and over the consequences of asserting that rights are merely something that is the creation of a societal or group or, yes, corporate agreement, a mere convention for, among others, the many atheists who I've argued that with.  In a country where a majority are religious they would be within their rights to declare that atheism had no right, an extension of the late medieval Catholic claim that "error has no rights"  which was necessarily overturned to assert there was a freedom of belief for People.  I don't think that's in any way a difficult idea to navigate through.

The naive and stupid and widely held idea that "The Constitution gives us a right to . . . " is ridiculous.  The Constitution didn't create any right and we are stupid if we mistake what it did create as constituting "rights".   The Constitution explicitly "gave rights" to those who held People in slavery to violate rights of Black People that "it gave" those who enslaved them.   If that is your view of rights and the United States Constitution, you are inevitably going to have to maintain that Taney and his concurring "justices" who issued the Dred Scott decision were right, that the Constitution applied to those Black People who had been held in slavery, and through Supreme Court precedents from Marshall, Storey and others, to Black People abducted into slavery not as a guarantor of rights but as the administration document of a slave based Republic.  Without a superior source of rights than the one that conventional Constitutional lore recognizes, the stupid language about not recognizing religion, will admit to, you are powerless to demand or even petition for rights not explicitly mentioned in that document.  It makes rights and their possession subject to the whim of a majority or even a majority of those who cast votes on their mere opinion.  

I have pointed out that under the legalistic thinking of those who criticized the Nuremberg Trials on the basis that what the Nazi mass murderers and war criminals did was legal under the laws of Nazi Germany and the places they invaded and held such as William Howard Taft's son, Robert Taft, someone the Harvard Trained John Kennedy held up as a "profile in courage," that is if it wasn't Ted Sorensen who wrote that deeply flawed book, as the somewhat supportable but denied rumor had it.   I mention that only to point out that lying about Democrats has never much mattered as a question of "journalistic ethics" anymore than lawyers lying on behalf of clients has troubled the professional and annoying insouciant self-permission of lawyers to promote crimes and enormous harm on behalf of those who they get paid to do that for.   Lawyers for the worst among us getting judges to let their clients do evil doesn't seem to much bother the profession.  Have I mentioned that my opinion of the legal profession isn't what it once was?  

I think it is an extremely dangerous thing to hold that rights belong to anyone but living beings, certainly to People and not to things invented by People, corporations, organizations, religions, ideologies, ideas, certainly among the most dangerous of those in the current American contexts, media companies and, yes, even "presses."  I think the current lore, habits and holdings of American Constitutional law are extremely dangerous because the profession of lawyers is to always find ways through, around and over adopted laws and if not that to come up with words that twist them out of their explicit language and their supporting legislative record as has been done so disastrously with the First, Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.  

What we need is there to be some basic, easily expressed, CLEARLY EXPRESSED, definition of what rights are and what they are not and I don't think that we could possibly do that without some major amendments to some of the most idolatrously worshiped parts of the United States Constitution.   Removing the obvious Court imposed atrocity that there is a right to lie - when a lie can certainly be demonstrated to be a lie - and that while individuals should, at times, be given some leeway in ignorantly repeating or even initiating a lie, there is no such thing as a corporation, a newspaper, a magazine, hate-talk radio, a TV or cabloid source or an internet company to spread those lies.  We have seen the nearest achievement of American egalitarian democracy destroyed by media carried lies in the past fifty-nine years, you can measure the progress of that regime of lies from before till after the Sullivan Decision, from Nixon losing in 1960 to him winning in 1968, the first presidential election after that decision, through Reagan's previously most criminal administration, that of Bush I, that of the Supreme Court crowning of Bush II to Trump.  As I mentioned there were other "free speech-press" rulings all during that which have made things steadily worse, Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc.  And it's not stopping.  If you think Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett are not aware of the role that lies in the media have played in not only Republican-fascist success but also in their own placement in the place of supreme power in the American government, you are wrong.  They're as aware of that as they are the connection between their Second Amendment decisions and the arming of the Republican-fascist Trump cult and the myriads of American children murdered as a direct result of those decisions.  They are as bad as the worst Presidents and members of Congress and far worse because they obviously and simply don't care.  Under their conception of "rights" without moral responsibility, they're as easy with what they do as the worst figures in human history.   

And I really do mean that.
 
* As a long line of abolitionists pointed out,  even if that may have been the intention of some of the "founders" the ambient conditions in the States that adopted the Constitution proved that could not have ever been what was ratified by the States as a whole.  In several of the states Black men had voting rights, in some slavery was being abolished even at the time around the adoption of the Constitution, many others did in the years after.   The majority in the Dred Scott decision were simply lying to get the result they wanted and stupidly expected would "restore harmony" to the country.  It is bound to happen whenever that "right" by the Supreme Court to nullify longstanding, duly adopted laws which were not, since, overturned by the representatives of The People through something that might approximate a legitimate vote by The People.   The criticism of that usurpation by the Court first under Marshall but greatly and importantly expanded by Taney et al in that officially worst decision, by some of the most deified figures in our history, Jefferson, Lincoln, many of the then famous lawyers such as Thomas Hart Benton should be fully exposed now as the corruption of the Court is at another and ever worsening reality.

NOTE:  RMJ has made a valid point about something I wrote, I don't want anyone to think this is in answer to what he said.