And Chris Hayes quickly points out that that choice is, as well, about to be badly made in the Republican-fascist Senate, putting a thug on the court who wants to take healthcare away from millions as the pandemic retakes the country. Amy Coney Barrett is that amoral thug, the Court is already ruled by them.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congresswoman Katie Porter do a great job of quickly going over a small part of the most outrageous part of the small part of Donald Trump's crookedness that we now know and they are right about him being only a now public figure in the florid corruption and graft and what should be criminal gift our system is for the billionaires and millionaires and even the incompetent failed ones among them.
And they are right about the need for Democrats to change things to end the corruption but without addressing how the Supreme Court has weaponized money to prevent democratic change in the United States, through the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, making money "speech" that can't be restricted in elections, and in the even worse rulings coming after that which give corporations such "speech rights" including, lest anyone forget, foreign money, any attempt to fix things will be swamped in the media, the cabloids, hate-talk-radio, etc. and Democrats will lose on their attempt to clean up things.
We got here through the Supreme Court WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF "CIVIL LIBERTIES" GROUPS LIKE THE ACLU rigging the words of the Constitution to produce the massive corruption. They did so using the attempt of both Democrats and, unlikely as it seems now, Republicans to clean up our elections as excuses to rig things for the billionaires and millionaires, starting in 1976 with a ruling named for one of the most famous names in Republican-fascism, "Buckley". I remember years and years ago one of the things that changed my thinking from the ACLU slogans to where I am today was hearing James Buckley's more famous brother slamming the concept of equality as an infringement on his and his ilk's liberty. It was shortly after I heard him say that that the ACLU represented the Nazis in the Skokie case, winning the rights for Nazis, in the late 1970s to rally to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois. I remember hearing one of the ACLU crowd pooh-poohing the danger of "it happening here" which even then struck me as insane given our history of domestic fascism, Jim Crow, the KKK, etc. You know, the same people whose children and grand-children are showing up to incite violence in Portland and elsewhere. Funny, I don't think the ACLU lawyers who write those briefs are putting their own asses on the lines to oppose them as they go from the words encouraging the susceptible into doing what they want to do to doing them. I have to admit I rather despise the ACLU and that style of lawyer.
Without getting the role of money out of our politics that even Republicans in the immediate post-Watergate period knew was dangerous, without getting rid of not only those rulings but the ideological smokescreen that covers up the advantage of corruption that comes with that kind of "free speech" absolutism and the Supreme Court created abomination of "corporate person-hood" even the great Warren and Porter can try to change things with all their might and the billionaire gangsters money will swamp them through the Supreme Court probably with the ACLU writing amicus briefs to help the billionaires on the basis of their "civil liberties".
Democrats who have to run for office know the kind of high financed lie campaigns they will face if they really try to change things. Trying to get the kind of money that Nixon weaponized in politics out of it was prevented by the Supreme Court, and that's when its members were mostly just too stupid to understand what would come with the corruption they unsuspectingly sowed. The ones on the court now know it and they favor it and its extension and perpetuation as a means of destroying democracy and its future existence.
Trump and his posse testing positive for Covid-19 brings up just another of the terrible features of our Constitution, what would happen if one of the only people who will win the presidential election dies just before the vote, what if it is the person who the large majority of voters wants to be president instead of the only one left standing? Trump or anyone else could have given his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden Covid. Hope Hicks could have given it to Amy Coney Barrett who could have given it to who knows who who would have given it to who knows who. Who knows who around the White House might have given it to Hicks?
Our 18th century Constitution has a lot of ways that it can be a disaster, many of them rather obvious and, due to the difficulty of quickly changing it built into the thing, hard to impossible to fix.
The whole thing needs to be removed from the pillar it is placed on and the spells of protection around criticizing it removed because it really is a rather awful thing to have kept. That cult of the Constitution, the cult of the "founders" including the latest bullshit in that "Hamilton" is one of the greatest dangers in American culture because, as I've pointed out, ALL OF THE PROGRESS WE CAN BE PROUD OF, the abolition movement, the Women's' suffrage movement, the workers' rights movement, the many movements that have demanded the equality that was promised by the Declaration of Independence, all of the progress to provide a decent life in a sustainable environment, ALL OF THAT WAS A STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION THAT THE FOUNDERS WROTE. And, as I've pointed out, as long as those original corruptions and even the features put there like the impossibility of addressing the kind of disaster we could face if Trump is the last candidate alive on Voting Day, as long as those remain beyond criticism and CHANGE we should expect the disasters that we face to happen. And, lest it slip our minds THE FASCISTS TRUMP AND MCCONNEL HAVE PUT IN THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY CAN USE THE WORDING OF THE CONSTITUTION AGAINST ANY AND ALL OF THAT PROGRESS AS LONG AS THOSE WORDS ARE THERE.
I read somewhere that countries that copied the American presidential system instead of a parliamentary system of government are far more likely to quickly devolve into dictatorship. Though as we can see from Britain, when any system lets scum like Murdoch turn its media into a super amplified lie machine, even that doesn't protect democracy our system with its obscene easily rigged Electoral College, its winner-takes-all, fixed term presidency with a range of powers and a legal system under his control is even more of a patsy of that kind of effort.
There is a lot that we have seen destroyed in the Trump era, there is a lot that has been destroyed by his predecessor Republican-gangster presidents, the Bush-Cheny years, in particular. Anyone who piously mouths the habitual platitudes of civic faith without admitting that those are an enormous danger is the enabler of that danger. I figure someone has to point this stuff out.
We should have a clear means of voters rejecting a Trump as they do for voting for a Biden, without that we are one man in his seventies traveling and campaigning during a pandemic away from catastrophe.
I should have included the execrable piece of crap, The Hill, with PBS and NPR and C-Span in that list of media entities slammed here the other day. This was pretty accurate in assessing its role, such as it is, in public life. I'd go on but that will get me into talking about one of The Hill's media figures, Krystal Ball, and I don't think what I really think of her would be edifying to hear, though it might be satisfying to say.
On a slightly different topic. Listening to some, not all of but some of the always gone to October Undecideds, they sound like this kind of media narrative is what fills their minds with mush. The gal who was as upset with Biden telling "The President" to shut-up and seemed to think that saying that as Trump weaponized incivility and butting in was as bad as telling a violent. racist, misogynist, antisemitic criminal gang to "stand-by" when invited to condemn them has to be about the stupidest of them. Other October Undecided are pretty stupid but that was the stupidest excuse for not making up their minds I've heard from them. I wouldn't be surprised if they go out of their way to find phony ones to push a pro-Republican or at least Republican-friendly narrative to fill air. I'm sure there were a hell of a lot more of even the October Undies who listening to the debate thought "finally, someone says it to him" when Biden told Trump to shut-up.
Update: I don't know if it's New Blogger or something I'm doing or what that keeps reproducing paragraphs and breaking lines. But I'll try to finally break the habit of using a borrowed computer to do these posts and go back to my decision of using only the simplest text editor I can find to write them.
Now, let's see if this edited the way I wanted it to this time.
A new month and another chance to make some real progress in this study of The Prophetic Imagination. Distracted by the politics of the week, I missed how important this next passage is for us right now as Trump and his party of neo-royalist thugs tries to rig his own eternal rule over us, even against the will of the voters. The temptation to break into it and point out what must be obvious to anyone who is watching what is happening to us, right now but I won't.
In considering the Solomonic achievement I have been speaking of the fate of the royal consciousness as "numbness" even though I have not used that word. The Solomonic establishment embodies a loss of passion, which is the inability to care of suffer. One has only to compare the grief, anguish and joy of David (2 Samuel 1:19-27, 3:33-34, 12:15-we, 18:33, 19:4, 23:13-17) with the one-dimensional narrative of Solomon to realize something decisive has happened from the father to the son. Here the discussion of numbness concerns apathy, a-pathy, a-pathos, the absence of pathos, whereas in the reflective statement of Ecclesiastes the same experience is expressed as vanity:
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
then they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done';
and there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccles. 1:7-9)
In the language of R. D., Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because thy are no longer able to experience their own experience. Clearly the regime is interested not in what people experience but in their behavior, which can be managed.
More specifically, the royal consciousness is committed to numbness about death. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience the end of his favorite historical arrangements, for they have become fully identified with his own person. Indeed they are his person, as much as he is or has a person. And therefore his historical arrangements must be invested with a quality of durability if not eternity. Kings need to assign the notion of "forever" to every historical accident over which they preside. Thus it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienations. So we must practice the royal game with our marriages and all serious relations, with our bodies, our age and our health, our nerve and our commitments.
I went on my occasional though somewhat regular look around the lefty media and saw lots of the same lassitude among some of them, especially those who are more out of the world of show-biz than journalism - Sam Seder's comments after the "debate" in particular disgusted me. I will use him as an example of how the secular "left" is really not disinvested in the royal consciousness that the Republican-fascists are steeped in. On the left, that secular, hipster oriented left, nothing is ever good enough, not even the best available to be had, which reminds me of how close he has also claimed to be to the circles that spawned Gavin McInnes who, a failure in his great ambition to be a comedian, turned to a fascist variant of what some others have, such as those I've written about extensively, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Maher.
There's a reason that that kind of stuff is often considered "cool" which is what the "anti-political-correctness" stuff was marketed as being, edgy, "controversial" "transgressive" but cool, which traffics in the same kind of "free speech" cult that values that more than the lives of victims of hate speech and the hate-acts that it promotes.
I am hoping to step up the pace of posting on this in October.
If we are lucky enough to have a President Biden on January 22, 2021, I hope that is the day that a deportation process for Gavin McInnis and associated alien fascists and Neo-Nazis such as Sebastian Gorka starts.
They and other undesireables should be gotten out of the country and banned from coming here or being active here. Get that scumbag from the underside of the Toronto area and wherever Gorka was spawned out of the United States and keep them out.
It was good that Nancy Pelosi prepared the country for the horrific possibility under our anti-democratic Constitution that the choice of the president would be made by the House of Representatives, the only part of the federal government that is even theoretically ruled by the will of the majority of voters.
That provision of the Constitution, part of the baroque anti-democratic atrocity of the Electoral College - what to do in the event of the failure of the Electoral College to choose a president - that each state no matter what size would have one vote, the majority of each state delegation having, no doubt, the majority of its members deciding how their entire state would go. That means even if a state had an overwhelming vote for a Democrat for president but had one more Republican in its house delegation, no doubt in most cases it being the product of a typically gerrymandered House districting scheme, they could disenfranchise all of the Democratic voters in their state to choose Trump, this year, no doubt ending any more of the pretense that our system is the democracy we have all be lied into believing we had.
Not being satisfied with fucking The People with the abomination of the Electoral College, when that didn't work they made a system that was even worse to fix that.
There is no reason for a nation that falsely believes it has a democratic Constitution to put up with this 18th century slave-owner-amoral businessman anti-democratic corruption to continue. If those provisions were brought to a popular vote for renewal, a straight up or down, popular vote on whether or not to retain the Electoral College and the disgusting provision for the House to choose a president when that fails, it would certainly be rejected in favor of the direct popular vote for president and vice president.
Our Constitution is a play-thing of corrupt lawyers, manipulators, and with a list of decisions out of the the Berger, Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, bilionaires and millionaires, at first domestic and now, with full warning of what they were opening us up to, billioniare gangster dictators of other countries. It is their tool, the tool of the corrupt "justices" on the Court, all of them rigging things for their Republican-fascist party, some of them adherents to the explicit fascist theory of the unitary executive, which, as well, rests like a basilisk egg on the language of the "founders".
We have to basically change it to get rid of the booby traps preventing democracy that were consciously put there to protect slavery and corrupt business interests at the start. The fascists are getting better and better at manipulating it, the combination of a string of disastrous democracy killing Supreme Court interpretations of its language mixed with, first the use of computers that the (minimally repentant?) Republican thug Richard Viguerie pioneered and which the internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have nuclearized against the rule of an accurately informed People of good will in favor of autocracy and the most obscenely vulgar of dictators. '
Democracy in the only form in which it is better than gangster government, egalitarian democracy, was promised in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution was written to renege on that promise the extent to which the aristocrats and slaveowners who wrote the thing dared to cheat The People of it. It has been a constant struggle by Black People, Women, members of ethnic, national and religious minorities, the Native People of the lands stolen, and more recently the disabled and LGBTQ people against the system that that Constitution set up to get what was promised in the Declaration and which the Constitution certainly did not produce. Now we are in a period when Republican-fascists on the Court are, again, rolling back progress bought with blood, sacrifice, lives devoted to justice making incremental progress against the Constitution using the words of the Constitution as a weapon against democracy. Those decisions have, with the full knowledge of those "justices" as they were warned that they were opening us up to the billionaires, domestic as well as foreign, to have democracy cheated from a gullible margin of the population and so stolen from the rest of us. It is time to take those words so used against egalitarian democracy away from future judges and whatever "justices" might be given that title without scare quotes and with a capital letter. There might be as many as three of those later ones on the court, for now, some courts haven't had a single one.
If we don't get rid of the Electoral College and its baggage of such anti-democratic abominations as may well happen in December and January, they will succeed in the future as this corrupt court lays the ground for that. If we don't take those words from them they will weaponize them against democracy even more effectively with the help of billionaires, here and even among the enemies of American democracy and The People it would serve if it were a real democracy.
Note: I have no idea why this post keeps changing form, duplicating paragraphs, breaking lines, etc. after I fix those. It's a new one on me.
Back when I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places online. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimidation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to prevent the votes of People of Color, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice".
By the time the
PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly
announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided
undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same
way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS
exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it
off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same
Republican thug enabling act.
I hope one of the things done in
the next congress is the total defunding of PBS and NPR. If there is
one thing I've learned since those innocent days back when we all longed
for a BBC style public broadcasting system in the United States, a
real, independent news reporting organization that upheld standards of
journalism free from the ideological and financial interests of the
corporations and their owners, is that you can't trust anything like
that to not become what it was allegedly created to be different from.
The BBC has been as much of a disappointment in that as PBS and NPR
have been here, they have consistently used the same kinds of tactics to
shore up support for Boris Johnson, their criminal clown even as he has
been a total disaster of the Trumpian kind.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. en I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimdation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to intimdate voters of color with, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice". By the time the PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same Republican thug enabling act.
That dream is just one of many of the mostly white, secular liberal liberalism of the 1960-70s has died because it had no moral purpose, "evening the playing field" style amoral, "disinterested" stuff that immediately gives in to the side that lies and ramps up racism, etc. immediately gives them the upper hand. That was so obvious in the Woodruff et al's reaction to what they'd just heard as Trump, given the chance by a FOX figure to reject American-fascism, "white supremacy" called on the violent fascists to "stand by" and could just tisk-tisk the unpleasant-makingness of it all.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. I'd rather that whole fraud of "evenhanded" "objectivity" was dumped. It doesn't exist. Journalism that doesn't consistently choose to promote morality out of some insipid "secularism" inevitably ends up serving which ever thugs and gangsters have the more money or can say the meanest things about them. They are as cowardly as the PBS gang was last night.
Last night Donald Trump called on a violent, Neo-fascist, white-supremacist cult to stand by and, as can be read in their immediate Twitter response, they took that as a call to get ready to commit violence as he seems to be losing the election.
Get that in the front of your minds, the TV entertainment division - Electoral College - Republican-fascist provided president of the United States on live, national television, when given the opportunity to condemn white supremacy, the delicate term for Neo-Nazis and fascists in the United States, he chose, instead, to send them a barely coded message to get their guns and whatever ready to keep him in power.
Anyone who thinks that what I've written here the last couple of days is extreme or that I wasn't serious about breaking up the country if we can't get rid of the remnants of slavery empowerment in our Constitution, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, the appalling means we get a Supreme Court through the anti-democratically selected president and the even more anti-democratically comprised Senate for lifetime appointments, not to mention the easily rigged rules adopted within the Senate and the powers that appear nowhere in the Constitution but the Supreme Court has given itself, if we can't change most or all of those that those areas in the country that are constantly at the mercy of the sometimes bare majority of Republican-fascists in other states that we get out of it and write egalitarian democratic, not billionaire-milliionare gangster enabling and privileging constitutions for our new nations conceived in equal rights and rational governance, anyone who thinks I wasn't serious about that is not serious, at all.
It's already a lot later than we think, if Biden or Harris is president in two years I can guarantee you that the fascists will be resurgent, maybe not even in the majority of the country but in carefully selected parts of it so they can try to rig the Electoral College and flip the senate back to a party, one of the "moderates" of which said that if Hillary Clinton became president he would guarantee that she never got a Supreme Court appointment and who had to suppress the government record of Brett Kavanaugh to put him on there WITH THE VOTE OF "MODERATE" REPUBLICANS who lied through their teeth to cover their asses, Susan Collins I'm talking about you.
It is time for those who favor what the opening of the Declaration of Independence promised to resort to the same threats that the slave-owning "founders" and their equally corrupt allies in northern commercial interest used to get the anti-democratic, slavery protecting sections of the Constitution that we are still saddled with AND WHICH GAVE US BOTH A BUSH II AND NOW A TRUMP AND THE SUPREME COURTS THAT REGULARLY RIG THINGS AGAINST DEMOCRACY AND FOR THE BILLIONAIRE-MILLIONAIRES, TODAY'S EQUIVALENT OF THE SLAVE-POWER THAT THE ABOLITIONISTS STRUGGLED AGAINST. They even promote the same racism that the supporters of slavery did, NONE OF THAT WENT AWAY WITH THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, THE VICTORY OF THE UNION IN THE CIVIL WAR OR THE VOTING RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS THAT WERE PASSED TO END THE JIM CROW THAT WAS SUCCESSFULLY REINSTALLED LESS THAN A GENERATION AFTER THE CIVIL WAR. It was reinstalled and is being revived by the Rehnquist-Roberts Court through those parts of the Constitution that were put there by the slave owners and the corrupt commercial interests in the north that made those compromises with them.
I hope that the three states on the Pacific Coast and the North Eastern states, and others elsewhere start to seriously consider what life under the domination of Republican-fascism is for the future because under this Constitution this is bound to happen again and again and again with the full and total aid of the mass media and those electronic social diseases such as Facebook and Twitter which will not remove even violent fascists from their money-making machines to spew their hate talk and encourage each other to violence, spreading the violent calls of a Donald Trump who they helped install to start with.
This is dead serious. As serious as those dead in the Bush II-Cheney invasion of Iraq, as serious as those dead from being denied healthcare before the ACA was adopted and as the Supreme Court is removing it, as dead as those Trump got killed by his criminal incompetence and total lack of interest in the lives of people over money. It's as serious as the governor of South Dakota and the huge numbers who became infected from the motorcycle rally she encouraged against warning.
Of course I'm serious about states unwilling to remain under the thumb of the Dakotas and Wyoming, the tyranny of the anti-democratically comprised Senate and, by the way that figures into the Electoral College vote, the power to prevent Democrats naming members to the Supreme Court, etc, should leave and form new countries which adopt really egalitarian and so truly democratic constitutions.
What isn't serious is that after Bush II imposed on us twenty years ago by the Rehnquist Court and the crooked Jeb Bush government in Florida (with cousin Ellis on FOX setting it off) and then Trump being imposed on us sixteen years later by the Electoral College as he, as well, lost the election that we should remain part of a system rigged from the start to subject us to the will of an anti-democratic and not infrequently crooked minority of the vote.
I would, of course, pity the egalitarian democrats, the people of good will who remain as an unempowered and disenfranchised minority in their states, people who can vote in every single presidential election and never once have their vote counted because the Electoral College throws it out, those who may have voted for Democrats but who, as we all do, have our votes diminished by the fact that the anti-democratic voters in the Dakotas and Wyoming have enormously more representation in the federal government than even their relatively few Democratic representatives, as we can see, over and over again, the system is rigged to give the anti-democratic Senate power to thwart the democratically constituted House and is corruptly entrusted with more powers than the only really democratically chosen part of the federal government.
The claim in the original Constitution that they were "forming a more perfect union" is a lie, what they were forming was a corrupt bargain which has repeatedly thwarted real democracy, favored the wealthy and powerful, just as that original corrupt deal between the slavers and the northern money men intended. What was originally set up under that corrupt compromise to protect and perpetuate the financial interests of the slave owners is turned by Republican-fascists to protecting the billionaires and millionaires and neo-Confederate thugs over the rest of us, they are dismantling every reform, hard one AGAINST THAT ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION over the past two hundred and more years.
No, what is stupid is tolerating the perpetuation of the corrupt bargain over future generations, over our own generations, allowing the same anti-democratic corruption - now with modern technology and the power it gives those with power and the money to buy it - to continue in the form it is being brought back to.
Without getting rid of the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted and empowered form of the Senate, without getting rid of the stupidly written parts of the Constitution, including changing, especially, the first two amendments in the "Bill of Rights" and those in relation to the powers of the president which they have gamed to lie us into first Bush II and now Trump, what is absurd is continuing to be a part of that till the crack of doom. Which, by the way, Republican rule is hastening, not putting off. Some of them obviously want it, some of them pretending to be "christians".
Once again, John Oliver's show puts it together in a short form that is easy to see with very welcomed additional content.
I think one of the things that is missing from the struggle to reform the system, getting rid of the Electoral College, making the Senate stop empowering the right-wing minority against the will of the majority, reforming the Supreme Court with term limits and an expanded number of "justices" (and some of those seats should be required to go to those with enough math and science so at least some of them can understand the issues that come before them) . . . one of the things that is missing is an even more radical position and that's for states with majorities unwilling to continue under the oppression of the minority of right-wing voters to talk secession.
The original blackmail of the slave-power, concentrated in the southern states, the original and effective means of imposing the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate, the thing that as they were unable to prevent the election of Abraham Lincoln they actually did, pitching us into a terrible civil war. As (spoiler alert) John Oliver said, riffing off the vulgarian scumbag Mitch McConnell, you have to fight "mule piss with mule piss."
If the Dakotas, Wyoming, other states with tiny populations who should never have been allowed in the country as single states, entirely over-represented in the Senate and, so, in the Electoral College, block democratic reform of the Constitution, if even the states who have large populations and wretchedly anti-democratic politics do, there is no reason those of us who live on the Pacific coast, in the North East should tolerate rule by the kind of Republicans chosen by the Electoral College, by a Congress swayed by the absurd granting of enormously more power to voters in low population states and the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme and federal courts.
There is every reason not to sentence our children, our grandchildren in perpetuity to the 18th century atrocity wrought when the slave-owners and crooked aristocrats of the northern states made their original corrupt bargain, thwarting democracy, something that the selection of Bush II by the corrupt Rehnquist Court on the basis of the Electoral College and, within two decades Trump make entirely relevant today.
If the right-wing states with more representation than their numbers merit block the abolition of the Electoral College and these other reforms, it's time for the majority of us to pull out of that original corrupt deal altogether.
It's clearly not working for us even in the often awful way that it kind of did sometimes in the past. And that's not counting what the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme Court will do to us for as long as they can rig it.
That should increasingly be the position of people in the North East, on the Pacific Coast, of others in other states who favor democracy who have been continually deprived of the rational, egalitarian democracy they want. And, lest it be forgotten, many of them live in states which tend to give more to the Federal government than they get back. One of the things those low population states have done with their advantage in anti-democratic power since the start is to rob the other states.
I'm sure there are states among them that would welcome being able to have the most degenerate politics - though I think even the Republican voters there would soon miss the moderating effect that the states they love to hate have on things now. But that's definitely not working for those of us in regions of the country that have been under their thumb for long enough. A real threat to blow it up is needed. I think it's time we started talking about that option. I don't want my nieces and nephews to continue under the rule of the gangsters who govern under our current corrupt system. I don't want them to be ruled by the fiat of the fascist dominated Court who steal elections for Republican-fascists.
Update: The linking of the Senate, AND SO THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, with its unequal advantage given to states with small populations - SUCH AS MAINE WHICH I LIVE IN - is intrinsically linked to the accommodation to the slave-owners among the "founders" Madison and many of the other deified gangsters explicit in their bargaining as to what their motives were. That has been known since the 1840s since the publication of Madison's papers as the abolitionists already knew. In this quotation from Senator Charles Sumner given in Wendell Phillips landmark book, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact, he laid it out as part of that corrupt bargain that still works in much the same way the original slave-owners and corrupt northern business interests intended, to thwart the danger that rule of, by and for The People was to their privilege.
There was a compromise between the small and large States, by which equality was secured to all the States in the Senate. There was another compromise finally carried under threats from the south, on the motion of a New England member, by which the slave states were allowed representatives according to the whole number of free persons, and the "three fifths of all other persons,' thus securing political power on account of their slaves, in consideration that direct taxes should be apportioned in the same way. Direct taxes have been imposed only four brief intervals. The political power has been constant, and at this moment, sends twenty-one members to the other House.
There is a third compromise which cannot be mentioned without shame. It is the hateful bargain by which Congress was restrained until 1801 from the prohibition of the foreign slave trade, thus securing down to that period, toleration for crime. This was pertinaciously pressed by the South even to the extent of an absolute restraint on Congress. . . the effrontery of the slave masters was matched by the sordidness of the Eastern members [from the the Northern states] who yielded again. Luther Martin, the eminent member of the Convention, in his contemporary address to the Legislature of Maryland, has describe the compromise "I found," he says, "that the Eastern members, notwithstanding their aversion to slavery, were very willing to indulge the Southern States at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave trade,provided the Southern States would in turn gratify them by laying no restriction on navigation acts." The bargain was struck, and at this price the Southern States gained the detestable indulgence. At a subsequent day, by solemn legislative act, adjudged this compromise to be felonious and wicked.
Such are the three chief original compromises of the Constitution and the essential condition of the union.
Read that and listen to the part of John Oliver's piece that points out under the apportionment of power in the Senate, TODAY, Black citizens are represented at about three-fifths and Latino citizens at about one half in the Senate AND THEREFORE ARE ONLY PROPORTIONALLY REPRESENTED IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.
Brad Parscale's meltdown with guns is proof of one thing, the Republican-fascist policy that has saturated the country with guns is dangerous to them. One of the biggest dangers of having the Roberts Court rulings doing that is from an increase in suicide by gun, which is something they were warned about even as they made that the Court ordered law of the land.
Another thing it proves, in the libel of Democrats by the Trump press operation is that these people are shameless and weaponize media carried lies without the slightest regard for the truth or morality or even shame.
I suspect a third thing that it will prove is that the media will carry the Trump crime mob's water for them, over and over and over again as they did for previous Republicans, Bush II, Bush I, Reagan, I would say even Nixon until they couldn't ignore his crimes, crimes which, with the Trump crime spree are probably puzzling to younger people, so used to Republican criminality as we've become.
Parscale's incident looks more like a cry for help to me than a suicide attempt - I've seen one of those up-close and this isn't what one looks like. Macho guys can't just come out and say it, they act it out. Like all such inarticulate cries, when a gun is involved, that turns it into something other than what it is. I think it's very possible that he is as much a victim of some code of manhood that prevents admitting you're sinking as anything. The more typical means of self-destruction in that is alcohol, often with violence. I'm seeing it in someone I am close to right now. One of the first things his brother did was talk him into selling him his guns so just such an incident or worse wouldn't happen. If he doesn't get the help to get out of the death cult he is a paid member of, chances are it will consume him. Maybe he should look at what James and, especially, Sarah Brady did with their experience of gun violence and work for laws that inhibit the free flow of guns - which even as greatly weakened by our idiot thug dominated Supreme Court is reported to have led to "reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or
older" but, probably due in no small part to how the Court gutted it,
"not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide
rates."
If Parscale wants to save his soul, he should do that instead of becoming a tool for the side that got him in the trouble he's in. No doubt Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's Notre Dame Law gal on the court would vote to enhance suicide the way the Court did under Rehnquist in 1997. And she'd call it consistent with Catholicism, think about that as you hear them try to game her religion to shore up Republican "Catholic votes" in a way not unsimilar to the way they're already using Parscale's emotional crisis. I think it's time for Notre Dame to dump its pretense of being any more than an elite monstrosity of the same kind that the Ivys are. The last straw for me was when they provided William Barr with the platform they gave him to lie his fat head off.
Mavor Moore, Nero Wolfe
Don Francks, Archie Goodwin
With: Cec Linder, Frank Perry, Alfie Scott
Special Guest Stars: Dixie Settle, Terry Tweed, Michael Christy
Music by: Don Gillis
I don't think this is one I've posted before from this too short and excellent series of adaptations, the ones that are from the novels I've read remain close to them. As I've mentioned before, the entire series probably cost less than any one of the excellent series that starred the great Maury Chakin and Timothy Hutton with a company of very, very fine actors. I'd love to have heard even more of them with either company.
Sorry about not posting a radio play last night, I just didn't feel up to it. I'm getting more depressed over the election and the head long pitch into the abyss the world is taking. I'll post something later today. I'd feel less despairing if it would start raining, all over the place where rain is needed and stop raining where they don't need any more.
Yesterday was the feast day of the North American Martyrs, who include St. Charles Garnier who was called "rainmaker" by the inhabitants around Lake Ontario because his arrival coincided with the end of a devastating drought. I wonder if it was as bad as the one this year. We've had fog the last two mornings, that's something that hasn't happened here in a while. It's not enough. I head a loud bang about ten o'clock last night and at first was afraid some idiot was setting off fireworks which would certainly lead to a wildfire. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well, waiting for what didn't come, this time. The damned Republicans legalized them during the LePage regime, it will be hard getting that back into the box. Maybe it will take an enormously expensive fire to do it. Loss of wildlife won't move our politics as amoral and degraded as those are.
Walter Brueggemann is a wonder in another way, he keeps writing books, well-well into his 80s, he's got at least two this year, one about the Covid pandemic Virus As A Summons To Faith and another with the intreguing title - especially for an anti-materialist such as myself - Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements For Moral Action In The Real World. I assume by "materiality" he doesn't mean the ideological position of materialism which cannot, no matter how you twist it, produce any elements of any morality, though I'd have to read the book to find out.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't written more books this year. Unlike other famously or infamously fecund authors, generally of pop-science, science-fiction, crime-fiction, I have yet to read so much as a paragraph of anything he has written which is not fully worth reading. That would be because he is founded, securely, in the very real as he pointed out the Prophets were, as, in fact, he has pointed out the entirety of the Jewish scriptures are. Listening to the interview above motivated by the publication of Materiality As Resistance, I've thought about how a century ago the secure 19th century materialism of so many scientists and philosophers was beginning to dissolve from assumptions about the materiality of atoms and, as they were theorized, subatomic particles to what either Eddington or Bertrand Russell called "points on a dial" or, rather, vague shadows cast by statistical analysis.
That crisis for the common and even scientific understanding of physics, of matter, of the material universe has been put off the farther down the line from the place in science where the exigencies and vicissitudes of the discoveries of physics can be tabled for future business, that future to be put off indefinitely, perhaps longer than the human species has. I don't feel much of an inclination to ignore those questions, the probabilities of random chance producing this or that result and the enormous powers of ten to one needed to express their impressive improbabilities isn't something I think is worth ignoring, especially in attacking the ideological materialism of the atheists, the anti-monotheistic campaigners who so stupidly bandy about the numbers (real, speculated and entirely made up) to claim those support their case when they far more easily support the opposite.
The consideration of the improbabilities of the theorized "first organism" from which all life after was descended, of its assembly, the incredibly improbable happenstance of all of it just having happened inside an effective and working containing membrane, of its commencing metabolism and the regulation of life, its entirely improbable first and totally successful act of reproduction, all point to it being vanishingly unlikely that it could have happened without it being an act of willful creation. I think a rigorous examination of the problems involved, unless you are impeded by a refusal to consider the possibility that it was an act of conscious creation, will lead most rational people to conclude that it is improbable that it could have just happened by any known physical phenomena within the remarkably limited time-frame that modern physics gives it to have happened. The popular atheist belief that it must have happened more than once in our only known universe makes the improbabilities expand with each time it happened, as far as I can see, the improbabilities of it happening once multiplied by two or three or a jillion times with each subsequent improbable event - either that or the entire edifice of physics which yields both that gargantuan improbability and the atheist-materialist arrogance is just plain wrong to start with. The improbabilities are the creation of our physics, perhaps best considered a demonstration of them and not an entity of pure mathematical reasoning that stands independent of the variables provided.
I was thinking about the loose talk about "random chance mutation" and wondered the extent to which the rates of even temporary viability or immediate death those produce in the organisms built on the basis of those mutations is confidently known. I wonder how that figures into the success of those first acts of reproduction in the Early Earth with whatever producers of molecular mutation that they were subject to and the probabilities of the success of the line of life on Earth. I wonder what rate of fatal mutation they were subject to while having no confidence that what we know about DNA and RNA tells us about that. I wonder how much the very success both of the original form of life and its gradual mutations producing successful lines of mutant life would be expressed in terms of the probability of mutations producing viable organisms with the capacity of successful reproduction and continuation, how many wildly successful lines of life could be matched with the improbabilities calculated on the basis of fatal mutations arising in that random-chance scenario.
I don't know the answer to that and I wouldn't be confident that a non-ideological calculation of that could be made - to start with, we have absolutely no evidence of the mechanism it would operate under in "earliest life" and that evidence will almost certainly never be had. Which has certainly never impeded the ideological claims of scientists and mathematicians and philosophers of science, or which rarely has.
That's what I've been thinking about as the world burns and egalitarian democracy gives way to vulgar materialist gangsterism.
* Which I believe are probably a product of a long period of evolution, I doubt either of them are relevant to the biology of those first organisms. If DNA or RNA were present and working in that first organism, which would have had to have been present on the pre-biotic Earth to get into it, it would have to enormously increase the improbability of that first organism evolving and I think would lead even more rational people to believe it could have never happened without divine intent. If they evolved within that first organism, the improbability of it happening before that first act of reproduction would only more point to it as being a product of intelligent design, the logical speculation, not the ideological industry that goes by the same name.
Listening to the welcomed but no where near adequate condemnation of Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, rigging the election through stopping the vote, really of Donald Trump's refusal to commit to leaving the White House if he loses the election, I think we are in far more danger than even those who are alarmed by Trump's ever increasing fascist moves are willing to imagine possible. The fact that he got in - AFTER LOSING AN ELECTION BY MORE THAN THREE-MILLION VOTES - and remaining there as not only his criminality but his actual treason as a puppet of the dictator of Russia should tell such people that that danger is here and now. The danger of having Trump there for four more years, or until he rots like so many of the successful despots of so many countries, is the same as the danger he's been here for four years with the open support of the Republicans in the Congress, in state legislatures and governorships, and in many cases, the Supreme Court and lower courts and with the unshakable devotion of his TV-hate-talk-radio-billionaire-swayed-Facebook-Twitter lied to cult.
The way we got here is clear, he got in because of the phony CEO dictator role he played on a long running "reality" series on TV and the clown he otherwise played, all the while being sold as a business genius, despite the fact that he wasn't. The free-press, print as well as TV and radio, created the Trump of cult devotion. HIS CULT WERE PREPARED TO WANT A FASCIST DESPOT THROUGH ENTERTAINMENT TV. His despotism is a creation of the First Amendment, which, in the modern interpretation of it allowing the media to lie with impunity, never should have been expected to serve an egalitarian democracy. The idiots on the Supreme Court who voted to start that chain of rulings which has been wound round the throat of democracy had the examples of modern dictators' use of mass media to lie themselves into absolute power to show them that the Madisonian-Jeffersonian theory of "free press" was certainly proven to be wrong, that without the ability of people lied about to effectively and remedially punish the media for lying about them, that would be turned on those who were an inconvenience to the wealthiest and most powerful, those who own the mass media and who dominate it.
The already terrible consequences of allowing that after the Sullivan Decision in 1964 was made immeasurably worse with the rise of "social media" with the internet ruled by the methods and means that most dishonest of all media has mastered, advertising, suckering people into doing what was wrong and what harmed them.
So we have about 40% of the country, unevenly distributed in a way that makes the manipulation of the Electoral College system their tool to rule even against the will of the majority, a situation where a Trump can win while losing the election, an election where he ran against a woman the media, from the lowest of the low, the tabloids, the cabloids, FOX, Sinclair, to the New York Times lied about and libeled for a quarter of a century. And I guarantee you, when Barr releases his lies about Joe Biden, they will carry his water even as they see the criminal insanity and incompetence of Trump. I'm not at all confident that he will beat Trump, why should I be confident when Hillary Clinton beat him and still lost.
As I've been pointing out over and over again, even if Democrats win in a landslide the media will immediately start where they did in 2008, after Obama won in a landslide, they will tear at and attack and carry the Republican-fascists' water in exactly the same way. MSNBC may not, CNN definitely will, so will NPR, so will the New York Times. To the extent there is a culture of the media, it is a culture that reflexively and knowingly serves the same wealthy owners and advertisers that the Republican Party serves. Without a legal, regulatory requirement of them not slanting their coverage of the kind that that previous Hollywood-show biz president, Reagan got rid of, without the ability of Democratic politicians to sue them when they libel them without the absurd requirements of mind-reading and get effective redress to keep them from doing it again, the terrible history of the last four and forty years will just continue on into this march into fascism.
Lies are what got us here, those lies that are called "journalism" in our degraded anti-democratic culture, those lies that are typical of show-biz at the best of times, which our time certainly is not. The fictionalization of our history has played a huge part in this, most of that done through movies and through TV shows, not a little of that also coming from the ridiculously named "journalism" side of it.
Until we take the prohibition of mass-distributed lies as a requirement to save democracy - AND THAT WILL TAKE GETTING OVER THE CLEARLY WRONG THEORY OF "FREEDOM OF THE PRESS" CONTAINED IN THE LITERAL READING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT - we will never be nearly safe from the manipulation of those who use the methods of lying perfected in the advertising industry in the mass media. I started using the internet in the heady days of self-publishing when lots of us were stupid enough to believe it was going to save democracy. Well, that turned out to have been ridiculous as the big "social media" turned out to be a deadly social disease that has given us a potentially fatal infection with Trump. And they're getting better at manipulating our Constitutional system with every success and with every failure. We change that or we will find every danger that regulation was asserted to have as a potential is, itself, guaranteed by such "freedom" for the corporate media.
As for Charlie Baker, other Republicans horrified by Trump, what the hell does it take for you to get out of that fascist party?
When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I suspect that our own self-concept is as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim.
Breaking in here I'll say that most of what I was led to believe about "the prophets" in the Bible is in line with this joyless and dour and arrogantly self-righteous concept of what is not at all realistic when you consider what is actually said. Yes, the prophets deal with the terrible reality that we create when we go along with the "royal consciousness" that is permitted, and in the United States, in Britain, in many places under the secular, even the republican form of that (gangster consciousness, really), without an officially admitted monarch, that is the product of everything from academic respectability to commercial pop culture to the officially respectable "art" even poetry that remains in the prescribed limits of that consciousness.
I'll throw in that when I re-read that just now, the first thing I thought of was John Singer Sargent's famous and admittedly beautiful frieze of The Prophets at the Boston Public Library.
But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for the questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
I don't think that we can be certain that even the officially deemed "poets" of opposition will speak a real, alternative that breaks out of the allowed limits and not become a troubador or some brand of gangster consciousness or other. Recently I remembered getting into a couple of brawls over one of the official "prophets" who for a time fell into the comfortable realm that allows for even the odd top-40s sales, the late Phil Ochs over him being very comfortable with the "rights" or pornographers - one of the most putrid of expressions of this "royal consciousness" as translated into American secular "liberalism." A "liberalism" in which the actual lives and bodies of the prostitutes who work, occasionally, within that prostitution for viewing, the enablement, protection of which and normalization of which has been one of the greatest achievements of that secular "liberalism" as is allowed by the corporate state. He also notably was a huge fan of Soviet Communism even as he admitted that if he lived there he would certainly have been imprisoned or killed, which he seemed to think was a joke. He was hardly alone among the "poets" and "prophets" of the American secular left in finding that either not serious or important. Which I think is a dead giveaway as to what is genuine in prophetic consciousness and what is merely a cheap knockoff made for easy sales and profit. So much of what was officially, or, really the same thing, commercially was deemed prophetic in my youth was that. The real thing was seldom mistaken for fasionable or sold on top 40 radio that might play, "Small Circle of Friends" - where I heard it.
The prophets of Israel were not categorizable in the way that LPs used to be in record stores. They defy that kind of categorization. Categorization is something that should signal to us that either what is being labeled is being done so for a selling con job or for some other fraudulent purpose. I think it was always necessary for that to be done with this body of prophetic poetry, poetic literature because when taken the way Brueggemann and others take it, it is dangerous in ways that the corporate establishment and our own weakness can't tolerate.
Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. The dominant reality is necessarily in prose, but to create such poetry and lyrical thought requires more than skill in making rhymes. I am concerned not with the formal aspects of poetry but with the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises.
I am not talking about local pastors spouting poetry that is an assault on the corporate state. What I mean is that the same realities are at work in every family and every marriage and every community. In our achieved satiation we have neither the wits nor the energy nor the courage to think freely about imagined alternative futures. When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," do we begin? What I propose is this:
The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of the prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.
Remember that the next time you hear someone making breezy comments about "herd immunity" about people dying of "preexisting conditions" as being expendable and not worth taking into consideration, about the other people whose lives are breezily wiped out of consideration in the media or in public discourse, in the kind of talk that issues so easily out of Dr. Senator Rand Paul and so many of the MD Republicans. But it comes out of those who out of secular "liberalism" are quite willing to casually disregard the lives of the "actors" and "models" the prostitutes who are used and spit out by the porn industry or, in fact, the movie and TV industries and the commercial prostitution which good "liberals" are supposed to want to protect as some kind of freedom of expression or association or commerce.
3 PROPHETIC CRITICIZING AND THE EMBRACE OF PATHOS
We have considered as a paradigm for prophetic imagination the formation of a consciousness that is a genuine alternative to the royal consciousness. Now a question must be faced (and it is surely a contemporary question): What would such an alternative consciousness be like? Here I take only the modest step of considering some ways in which the prophets of Israel addressed this task, but behind that explicit consideration we necessarily wonder what we might do, given our situation.
We also are children of a royal consciousness. All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is How can we have enough foreedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask as Israel's prophets asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is reaslitic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
I will give into the temptation to say that what Brueggemann says we are challenged with is whether or not we are willing to become thought criminals. That is what these alternative thoughts to what he calls the "royal consciousness" are or will be considered, called that or not.
In our modern, scientistic-industrial "enlightenment" the very name of the prerequisite of that, the act of imagination, is downgraded to mean fantasizing the unreal, the act of children and the ignorant and delusional. That doesn't mean that imagination stops, it doesn't, everything about the republican form of "royal consciousness" in our scientistic "enlightenment" requires acts of imagination, I would hold as detached from reality as any that religion is accused of - at times with justification, especially when religion engages in acts of "royal consciousness" and is as invested in it as any gangster government and society is .
Asking if the alternatives are politically practical and economically viable are, indeed to concede too much at the start because everything is set up to make that so. In the focus of so much of my consideration of this as a contemporary question, the American Constitution and, in what that actually became very fast, in practice, the system that is in so many ways fully invested in the "royal consciousness" in terms of political expediency and economic rigging of things for the aristocratic and rich and, so, empowered. To start out with that as a given is, indeed, to abort the prophetic criticism of things. That has been one of the major faults of the American left since the diminution of religion in it, specifically, in the American context, the serious consideration of exactly the civil law in terms of the Mosaic law and the intensification of that articulated by Jesus and the epistle writers.
I know that secular lefties don't like it but it is a fact that almost if not all of the major progress of the abolitionists, the women's equality movement, the extension of the abolitionist movement in the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, and even labor unions and all of the progress,hard fought, hard struggled and hard gained was done through that kind of prophetic imagination, not through the pursuit of the Marxist dialectic or some other secular, often materialistic soc-sci informed pseudo-scientific prattling. In each and every case when that secular, anti-religious, or religion indifferent faction took control, it ended in the discrediting of the left, its decimation, its impotence and its not only failure to make progress, but loss of what had been gained.
The American left lost its credibility in nothing so much as its letting the Marxists sucker us into feeling sympathetic for them because they were treated mean by their fellow gangsters in capitalism. They provided the capitalists, the gilded-age gangsters their most effective tool to fight back against the prophetic imagination, such as it was, that opposed them. And the strongest evidence that they never really belonged to any left was their support for gangsters who ruled in other lands, the Soviet Union, the countries that were progressively occupied by the crime bosses in Moscow, again in China and in other countries where Marxism produced perhaps a more efficient appearing politics and economics - those efficiencies are easier to achieve when you turn people into a raw material resource and mill and grind them up like you would rock or wood or any other commodity without regard for their status above such material objects.
And, with the encouragement of Hollywood and scribbling class tales of the passion of the commies, whether in the Palmer raids or in the red-scare of the post-WWII period, it is unsayable on the left that the American left got played for suckers and we still are, only now it's fashionable to call such suckering "socialism" using a name that has been so coopted by gangsters, Marxist or Nazi or deluded secularist anti-religious American academics that it is useless for anything but enabling Republican-fascism.
No, all of that is pathetically inadequate for mounting a real alternative no matter how much we may, occasionally gain from the methods of science, even in the collection of statistical data and analysis, unless you start and finish with something more than that,exactly the kind of prophetic imagination that we can attribute to the Mosaic tradition, the ancient Children of Israel, we're not going to have it from any other source in sufficient strength. The extent to which those habits of imagining an alternative consciousness and life are present in at least a potential form in American culture is important to us having any success at all. I have no doubt that, as it says in the Bible, that God imparts the same knowledge of right and wrong to other peoples in other places, other covenants were made through that kind of insight, but we live here, now and in the context we live in.
Brueggemann says in this passage, " We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so
assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been
robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought. And he is right, we were robbed of the courage to think these thoughts, and it was not only by those with power here, it was with those who we gave power to sucker us with various forms of materialistic scientism, modernism and the coercive power of fashion, academic, in the writing publishing class and in show-biz entertainment. They robbed us the same way they get our money through advertising. By appealing to our strongest weaknesses.
We are seldom aware that a minority report may be found in the Bible, the vision of some fanatics who believe that the royal portrayal of history is not accurate because it does not do justice (sic) either to God or to these brothers and sisters.
In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God Himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon. He is a God with a name of his own which cannot be uttered by anyone but him. He is not the reflection of any, for he has his own person and retains that all to himself. He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries of the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.
The God of Moses is as unwelcomed to much of, perhaps most of "organized religion" which exists only to some extent even within most organized denominations as this God is, indeed, unwelcomed, root and branch, in the modern, materialist-secular enlightenment.
That is, of course, not to say that everyone who associates themselves with that organized opposition, its institutions, its denominations are opposed to this revelation of the character of God. Dorothy Day said, explicitly that if the worldly, corrupt Cardinal Spellman ordered her to stop her radical Christian activity she would obey, no doubt she would have if Pope Pius XII had, though she was probably well aware that they would never have done that because like Herod in his reluctance to silence John the baptist, Spellman knew there would be a furious backlash from the many who saw that she was a good and just woman. Or at least bad publicity for him and his campaign to be the first American Pope.
So this is the paradigm I suggest for the prophetic imagination. A royal consciousness committed to achievable satiation. An alternative prophetic consciousness devoted to the pathos and passion of covenanting. The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousnesses concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. It has so enthroned the present that a promised furure, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.
The royal program of achievable satiation
(a) is fed by a management mentality which believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. This, the Solomonic evidence urges, was not a time of great leadership, heroic battles, or bold initiatives. It was a time governed by the cost-accounting of a management mentality;
(b) is legitimated by an "official religion of optimism." which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring his own place in his palace;
(c) requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women.
It is mind-boggling to think that of the Mosaic novum only the prophetic word is mobilized against this compelling reality.
Again, Walter Brueggemann, in 1978 saw some of the greatest problems that lie in the heart of our secular, enlightenment, scientistic modernism through the lens of the Jewish scriptures. Everything from the tyranny of the bean counters, to the "don't worry be happy" nihilism of pop culture to that other icon of pop culture, the macho "rugged individualist" which in the anxious corruption and dissolution of the turn of the millenium and the organizing cults of every mental illness that the internet has exacerbated - not a little of it, I believe, an outgrowth of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" commercial hippy stuff of the early 70s - the batty "preppers" who hoard toilet paper and ammo for when their neighbors mount a raid on their supplies.
I don't think I've ever found another writer who combines so much spot-on criticism of our contemporary world in such concentration and I think the reason for that is that the Old Testament is so spookily, uncanny in its setting out this pattern of human folly and human weakness and human propensity for evil. It is as much a crime against the present that this record as understood in these stark, fearlessly honest critical terms has been kept from most people. Replaced by the lunatic, modern "evangelical" action comic cinematic treatment of it, on the one hand, and the outright rejection of it by the anti-religious, secular left, no doubt Jefferson would have cut it out if he'd gotten round to cutting up that part of the Bible too.
And look around us, right now, under Trump and Barr and McConnell and Murdoch, Sinclair and Putin - as intentionally permitted by the John Roberts court. Most of what is as seen on TV. Everything in those stories except the famous "wisdom" of Solomon is right here, right now. Only I think that "wisdom" isn't what Solomon really had, he was sly and crafty but a wiser person wouldn't have followed his course. In the beginnnig of his critique of the Solmonic regime Brueggemann said that he was among those who, in a different context, referred to the Solomonic regime as an "enlightenment," the same title given to the scientistic-industrial-secular habits of thought that we grow up under. But that light is dim at best and its best is not adequate. It might be to produce things we like but it is inadequate to save us from what we ourselves do to us and our world. That requires more than slyness and craftiness and our methods of getting what we want . Which is, after all, what science was invented for. What we want so often conflicts with that product of science as amended by moral consideration of the kind Bureggemann talks of, what would be good for us in general, if we only knew it. Which accounts for the differences between the scientific judgement of Dr. Fauci and that of Dr. Scott Atlas who serves Donald Trump and the the Pharaohs of the industrial-financial world.
