Home From Work Blogging

I looked at Salon, HuffPo, other places, I listened to the news, read some papers and blogs.  So much stupid, so little energy to deal with it all.  I'm a little burned out from dealing with the idiocy of the pretend left and all that entails and am not feeling much to be encouraged about the state of the real left this week.  Or it's the sinus infection talking, the pain it all is is usually at the other end.  

Reading more about Dorothy Day in the aftermath of one of my posts last week, I read more about how Christian anarchism is not like political anarchism, in fact it is about as different as two things get.  It's more like how to live in exile, a Babylonian captivity, a world governed by evil.  I'm not sure I buy all of it but I do see more of a point to it than the ridiculous idea that human societies will ever work in the absence of civil government and, yes, police.   In the past decade, since I started blogging, the background reading I've done has brought down many of the heroes and heroines of my previous ignorance.  In every case it was reading more of what those people said and did that has brought them down.  I'd never thought the anarchists we were taught to revere were anything like practical people with a realistic politics, though I'd thought they were mostly romantic idealists.  Reading more of them, the idealism is rather thin as compared to their hatred of things, of course, as in the way of things, they are angriest at the weakest instead of the strongest forces, so that means religion.  If Bertrand Russell is the intellectual whose stature in my mind fell the farthest, Emma Goldman is the political theorist who fell the farthest among those who I was taught by my education and lefty scribbling to regard as great figures.   

Just what living under a modern materialist Babylon captivity means, what resistance that requires and the scant promise of success are all questions that need thinking about.  Though, I have to remind myself, it's a question that even a gay, white man has not had to face in anything like the depth that members of other minority groups, especially black people, Latinos, women have to face.  All of us are, in different ways, in different degrees exiles, held in captivity by those with power.   

In the 1980s, as the Reagan-Bush regime exerted itself, one of the things which became clear was that the corporate media had a policy of disappearing any expression of Christianity that took the Gospel of Jesus seriously, especially in its main theme of radical, egalitarian justice.  On that the Republican right, the corporate right and the atheist "left" are in total agreement.   If there is a powerful subversive force that endangers the power and so accumulation of wealth that is the goal of that establishment, it is people taking their moral obligations as taught in the Gospels seriously.  Anyone who did that could not possibly think the Republican goals for the country and the world are good.  They could not endorse the hatred of the poor, aliens, foreigners, which are what has pushed the top candidates for the Republican nomination to the top. 

It is one of the remarkable things about the old line radicals of the 19th and 20th century, how they so often reject the possibility or even the desirability of democracy in favor of some bizarre, theoretical system of swinging dialectics or anarchistic nihilism.   The dictatorship of some make believe, I'd guess presumably omniscient, proletariat, "the masses" as a force of nature, the expression of physical law is, frankly, the most insane idea that has managed to get mistaken for a real left when it is a denial of everything a real left can be made of.   How it is supposed to, in the end, differ from fascism is a question that seeing its practical application in the past century has not moved at all.  I see that as all a predictable result of their adoption of materialism, in their hatred of religion and their yearning and hankering after the repute of science.  Ironically only highlighting the limits of science and the disaster that materialism is for democracy and a decent life. 

I can't call myself a Christian, so I can't claim Christian anarchism as being something I can join into. I'd feel that it would be necessary to join Catholic Worker or some, similar, real-life application of the Gospel's requirement to do for the least among us.   Right now I'd worry more that I was being a burden to them than anything, though maybe that won't always be the case.   I curse the conditions that kept me in ignorance for so long, it took reading lots of things, many of them found online, to break through the lie the leftism I'd bought for much of my adulthood.  I curse the conditions that maintain that lie, leading other people to waste their lives on futile theories and slogans which only aid the insane corporate oligarchs in burying any real resistance.   I hope it's not too late to do something with the time that's left.