RMJ DOES THE best Advent posts I know of. His post for today is exceptionally good.
Sunday, December 19, 2021
A Rant
IF YOU HADN'T NOTICED, I am avoiding posting pieces with Latin texts because the neo-fascist, integralist, billionaire financed "traditional Catholics" have made the 1962 Latin liturgy a rallying cry in their overtly corporate fascist try at hijacking the Catholic Church like the various princes, bankers, gangsters and "Holy Roman Emperorers" of the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque did because it has great wealth and power and, since it is governed through the Cardinals, it is very open to being hijacked.
It's too bad because some of the best music of the Western tradition is based on Latin texts, little of it is based on the various vernacular languages, of course most of that is from the later Protestant musical literature. I have, over the past decade, gained an appreciation for a lot of that, even the Anglican-Episcopalian English language music, especially when the choir is trained to articulate the words as so many of the, especially, English choirs aren't. I love much of the Latin text music but till this neo-fascist romantic bull shit about the Latin liturgy subsides, I'm not doing anything that might risk encouraging them. Though I don't imagine they much read my blog.
If I were Pope, I'd commission a really good translation of the liturgy into Esperanto and tell the Latin mass lunatics - the ones who were merely lunatics and not flaming fascist materialists of the most vulgar variety - that if they wanted a universal language, it had to be that one. I'd commission them to make the texts of the entire liturgy as metrically and syllabically consonant with the old Latin as possible so the old music could just have that plugged in. I would think that the enormous flexibility of Esperanto grammar would make that far more possible than just about any national language could.* They'd certainly stand a far better chance of learning it to the extent that they'd understand what was being said, the texts being understood has long been a danger to the rich and powerful and neo-fascist, one of the reasons that at the most corrupt periods of the Catholic Church it was a capital crime to translate the Scriptures into the vernacular, the reason that they hung onto Latin as long as they did. They were afraid that if The People heard what Jesus and the Prophets said, the jig would be up for them. It's no wonder that fascists like Timothy Busch are such big fat fans of it and why that meat-headed Pope Benedict XVI tried to coax the Society of Piux X neo-Nazis back into communion with him by letting every ordained neo-medievalist-romantic** lunatic say it pretty much whenever they wanted to. As I've written recently, one of the ironies of that is that Pius X was a modest but real part of the history of the transformation of the liturgy that culminated in the reforms of Vatican II.
There, I wanted to get that rant over before Christmas really starts up.
* As an example, I'd post a video of the atrocity of the English language abomination of "Bach's Magnificat in D" as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and conducted with the full Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra by Eugene Ormandy but I can't bring myself to do it. It is one of the worst things I've ever heard done to such a great masterpiece.
** I've never encountered one of them who really knew anything about the medieval period, it's all 19th century and, especially 1930s-50s romantic cinematic nonsense with them. I think I mentioned the one who believed with all their little heart that they were hearing the mass as St. Francis heard it and, probably, St. Peter said it. I have found when I argue with those guys on things like Youtube comment threads that you can count on the most ridiculous accusations of "Free Masonry" and then the descent into the vilest of antisemitic allusions being thrown around. When I pointed out that I was against all secret societies including the odious Knights of Columbus and the Daughters of Isabella for the same reason things got really testy.
Update: Who cares what a bunch of atheist monoglot do-nothings think they think about it? You don't think about things you don't know about you just pretend you do.
Saturday, December 18, 2021
Heinrich Schutz - Deutsches Magnificat SWV 494
Collegium vocale Gent
Philippe Herreweghe, director
Double choirs, magnificent counterpoint, a masterful control of music to serve the text.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Kenneth Sweeney - Wogan's Sweet Sixteen
Winner 2nd Prize, 2020 PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Awards
Terry Wogan finds himself struggling to make his mark at the BBC against a backdrop of anti-Irish feeling at the height of the IRA bombing campaign on mainland Britain. But will BBC bosses allow him to be himself on-air, and play the Irish records which he believes will bring Ireland and England together?
TERRY WOGAN. …. Al Mc Kenna
BBC ANNOUNCER …. Michael James Ford
JOHN BRAND …. Chris McHallem
MARK WHITE …. Robert O’Mahoney
DOMINIC TROTT. LJ (Little John) Nee
JIMMY YOUNG …. Jonathan Ryan
IMELDA KENNY…. Aoibheann McCann
JIMMY GILBERT …. Joe Taylor
Other parts played by members of the Company
Produced by the series producer of Drama on One Kevin Reynolds
The Left Are Such Suckers, Falling For The War On Christmas Stuff
THERE IS ALWAYS bound to be a stupid article or video or movie or something else encouraging the left to needlessly and futilely and, so ENTIRELY STUPIDLY to antagonize large numbers of Americans about unimportant, symbolic bull shit. And an Alternet-Raw Story typist named Mia Brett is doing that, giving FOX a war on X-mas where there really isn't one.
Every year around this time we get to argue about the religious significance of Christmas symbols only to be told they’re really secular celebrations of winter holidays. Some places choose to decorate celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza while others pretend Christmas trees aren’t really Christian. Also if you make an issue of the obviously Christian decorations you’re treated as a killjoy grinch.
As a Jewish woman whose mother loves putting a Christmas tree up, I would really like to say none of this matters and just enjoy the holidays. But unfortunately, I have to be that little grinch and point out that the ubiquity of Christmas decorations, and the claim they’re really just secular, is a pretty big cause for concern. Honestly, it should violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution but, since we live in a Christian country, the Supreme Court has convinced themselves Christmas trees are totally secular and for everyone.
Who the hell needs this right now? We're on the cusp of Republican-fascists destroying electoral democracy with a Republican-fascist Supreme Court ready to cement one-fascist-party rule into place and this stupid bint wants to have a Christmas tree war? I think she and Raw Story should get some kind of award for some really stupid timing or one on promoting needlessly counter-productive futility for the losing play-left.
This kind of shit has never had any good effect on American politics, it's nothing like the great struggle for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, it's not like the great struggle for Women's rights or LGBTQ rights, it's not like the struggle to protect the environement, for food and drug safety and the great struggle for economic justice. It's the whining of a bunch of affluent white jerks who are looking for a way to get paid and a byline in a little read couple of publications that for whatever good they do are entirely willing to blow it on something like falling for the FOX bait on issues like this.
I certainly haven't wanted the government to cross the line of neutrality in religion, I don't want them sponsoring prayers or forced religious observance but, then, I don't like the ubiquitous coercion to pray to the flag either. I don't like it at all BUT IT'S NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO LOSE WHAT WE LOSE WHEN WE MAKE IT AN ISSUE. I don't like people eating meat or hunting wild animals either, I hate it and the inevitable cruelty involved in it but I know that the United States is a carnivore majority country and that to make too much of a thing about that will cost us more than it will get us BECAUSE IT NOT ONLY WILL GET US NOTHING, IT WILL PUT MORE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS INTO OFFICE AND ON THE COURTS.
Wise people pick fights and the wisest fights are the ones that you can possibly win and the ones that fighting will cost you more than you win from the fight are not on that list. Having a hissy-fit over Christmas trees in public spaces is not only one we can't win and will enable our opponents IT ISN'T IMPORTANT TO START WITH YOU STUPID ASSES.
If there is one thing that is certain from when they first sued over prayer in the schools, the praying that was done was no more a danger to anyone than saying the Pledge of Allegiance is, even with those words that hurt the feelings of those antagonistic to religion, "under God". I do find those words offensive because if there's one thing that is obvious, our country is not run like it is under God, unless that god is Mammon. But my feelings on that are totally unimportant and the offense is hardly any kind of real danger.
Grow up, lefties. That's my advice. This is the kind of issue you bring up when you have 80 votes to spare in the House and two-thirds of the Senate and at least 6 liberal votes in the Supreme Court AND IT'S STILL A STUPID ISSUE TO GO AFTER THEN. Let me know when a Christmas tree ever hurt someone from a minority religious group or some atheists, maybe then it will be worth talking about. Now it's just stupid as fuck to bring it up.
Ah, Your Wish For My Demise May Be A Dream Deferred - Hate Mail
Or Some Ways To Live Better No Cost
AS YOU SAY I'm not young but I keep in pretty good shape for someone my age. I'm thinking of writing a book "How To Become Scrawny But Wiry And Stay That Way During The Pandemic Years." I'm writing this out of the assumption that another lock-down is on its way or might soon be. I actually lost weight during the lock-down.
Getting in shape and staying there is one of those things that anyone can do for free or even at cost savings. Reduce your food to the minimum daily number of calories and nutritional requirements, or to the number of calories to maintain the weight you should be and to do exercises every day. Don't order in fast food, don't eat high calorie crap. Don't drink empty calories in fruit juice, fizzy drinks or alcohol. Having a body that doesn't hurt, being free of chronic pain is such a free luxury that poor people should be encouraged to do it. I can't think of many things that would improve someone's life that is so much in their own control, requiring no one's permission or payment. Believe me, as you get older having a pain-free morning is worth all the store-bought luxury in the world. Not having an addiction, not smoking or drinking or taking drugs is a free luxury, too. I'm working on getting past my hard core coffee addiction, I'm down to drinking tea, which I hate and which I think will be easier to cut out than coffee. Even rot-gut store brand instant was too much of a pleasure to give it up directly. I really hate tea but am not free of caffeine yet.
Reading instead of watching TV or screen can cost nothing or next to nothing, especially if you don't care about reading the newest best sellers or current books. Writing is another free entertainment, especially if you only do it to please yourself and don't intend to try to impress other people.
When I was able to teach I used to tell my music students to write the music they wanted to instead of writing the way the theory textbooks said was the right way. That they were the only ones who could write their music, that they should let other people write the music they wanted written another way. Of course, as a training exercise, I'd always encourage them to do traditional counterpoint and harmony exercises. If they liked what they produced according to the rules, good, if they didn't then it was just an exercise, it wasn't their music which they should have written in addition to their exercises.
Just some ideas on how to get through the next shut-down, if it comes. And even if one doesn't come, you might like to try it, too. I'd suggest being careful about what exercises you choose, a lot of the traditional ones are apt to cause pain and injury. While most of the advice I've seen online is absolute crap, I always look to see if the long experienced physical therapists Bob and Brad have anything to say about that. I use some of their lighter exercise programs for old people and have found that their advice seems to be spot on. These sitting exercises are a good place to start. I haven't bought any of the products they promote. I'm not against them selling things, I kind of like it when it's the video maker who does the online promotion and takes direct responsibility for what they're doing. Sometimes they're good enough to make the commercial amusing and sly. I've become very skeptical about alleged not-for-profit media, they seem to whore out a lot faster. I listened to some NPR yesterday. Big mistake.
Your assumption that my life is joyless and dreary is a product of your imagination. I'm actually quite a happy person in my personal life. I don't want any more stuff in it, that never made me happy. It's a burden.
Friday, December 17, 2021
Heinrich Schutz - Das Wort Ward Fleisch SWV 385
Dresden Chamber Chorus
Hans-Christoph Rademann
Und das Wort ward Fleisch und wohnte unter uns, und wir sahen seine Herrlichkeit, eine Herrlichkeit als des eingeborenen Sohnes vom Vater, voller Gnade und Wahrheit.
Lutherbibel
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son[a] from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14 RSV
Another Advent suggestive piece. I don't think people hear enough Schutz.
Is The Guy Who Tried To Use A Stolen Diary To Be The James Comey Of The The 2020 Election, Keeping Trump In Power, A Journalist?
IS THE SCUMBAG LIAR and Republican-fascist criminal, liar and extortionist James O'Keefe a journalist as he and his scumbag criminal associates in his media organization claim they are? A liar so dishonest that his Republican-fascist lie generating machine goes by the name "Project Veritas." Are they protected by the same Supreme Court granted permission to lie about Democrats with impunity given to the New York Times and every other corporate and mass media and, now, scumbag run social disease media entity in the Sullivan Decision? I'm guessing that there are a number of Republican-fascists in the federal judiciary who would hold they are for entirely political purposes.
I'm going to turn around that dishonest question that was aimed at me yesterday, who gets to decide he isn't a journalist with all of the rights and privileges claimed by journalists for them and theirs and even scumbags like Julian Assange who is merely a smarter, more successful, more destructive James O'Keefe as he's lauded as a hero of journalism. The one Roger Stone weaponized, the meat-head "lefty" "civil rights activist" Randy Credico very possibly acting as a go-between before Stone threatened his support dog,* That's a very real question because their attempt to extort an interview late in the 2000 campaign on the basis of their having the stolen diary of Ashley Biden is not different from what made so many of us lefties suckers for Assange who, after all, was part of an effort to groom a mentally unbalanced member of the military to steal enormous amounts of intelligence and released in as irresponsibly a way as possible.
I'm sure there are members of the media who would assert O'Keefe was a journalist entirely for the interests of the journalism industry and those who make money from it. There have been more than a few of those who supported their colleagues even as they broke the law in the past, I don't see that O'Keefe and his bunch of lying raunchy ratfuckers are different from someone like Judith Miller except that she mongered a war with NYT published lies that got hundreds of thousands killed and helped some of the worst terrorist groups in the middle-east. I checked, online references say she's a journalist, even now. Just like John Yoo is still a distinguished professor of the law.
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If there's one thing you can count on from the media as as you can from the play-left, is that they'll make common cause with the worst of the right because the thing they hate the most is a Democrat who can win office and change laws. As someone pointed out to me, you can count on them to savage Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for never doing enough even as they enable the Republican-fascists who destroy whatever such Democrats can accomplish. The secular lefties are always hatin' on Nancy Pelosi when she is the farthest real left of anyone who has risen to her position in the Federal Government in the history of the country. They'll certainly tear into Biden when Assange is brought here to face the very real and serious crimes he committed against this country, very likely getting more than a few people killed, crimes that certainly benefited Putin and other billionaire gangster-despots and the non-billionaire Trump. And yet people wonder why I don't hold the media in the high esteem they insist is their right. I'm sure they will probably give Assange some award for journalism, though they probably have. The media adore giving themselves awards and medals and prizes. They're worse than the entertainment industry for that.
I hope to someday see the footage of the cops pulling O'Keefe out of his apartment in his underwear, I hope there's footage. If there is it would be justice for it to be made public.
* Don't get me wrong, I'm on the dog's side. I'm always on the side of innocent creatures. I would ask why so many of the fanboys of Assange cared more about Randy's dog than they do the people Assange's massive dump or raw intelligence reportedly endangered. Maybe if they heard some of them had dogs who were endangered they'd feel somewhat less supportive of him.
Update: See Also RMJ's morning post about this.
That's Enough - Getting Shut Of Stuffmas Warms The Heart
THE WEATHER IS NOT conducive to thinking about Christmas as we're used to thinking about it here in Maine. It's too warm and dreary, still caught up in the decay of late autumn, if this snow they say is coming amounts to anything that lasts for a while, I'll be surprised.
Global warming is a moral and emotional crisis, it's not a tragedy, it's a crime, the shame and ultimate guilt of our species, especially the affluent of our species, modern life, the crown of 18th century and later "enlightenment" that alliance of wealth, wisdom and might without any effective moral restraints, the ultimate success of entertainment and freeing the self-satisfying cynical denial and enjoyment of evil that is what happens when you choose to believe what you want and refuse to imagine the pain of those your desires hurt.
I wasn't intending to write that last paragraph when I started writing this, I was going to say that a couple of days ago I told someone I felt uncharacteristically Christmassy this year and trying to figure out why two things seemed to explain it. Those of us who had decided to divorce Christmas from giving presents and getting them in my family are increasing, getting rid of the American holiday of Stuffmas makes room for it. Another is that I and my brother cleaned out the huge hoard of Christmas crap from the basement of another one of our siblings. Including the 14 huge Rubbermaid tubs holding the damned Christmas Village that would get put up at our mother's house by her, and not taken down until one of us got asked to finally put it away. Those things take a long time to put up, they take far longer to put away in those damned boxes with their form fitting though not obvious which way, falling-apart into little balls styrofoamy protectors. I friggin' got to hate that thing. Though that wasn't all, there's no one like a family with several elementary school teachers in it for amassing Christmas crap. There's noting like getting rid of twenty boxes of that stuff to make you feel more happy with the holiday.
I wonder how much the production and disposal of Christmas crap has added to the destruction of a white Christmas. It being such a retail event, I'll bet a lot. Just the gas burned in Amazon deliveries and returns, the disposal of those returns which aren't put back on some shelf (our economic system is biocidal) must be a significant impact.
Clement Moore was a horrible person, a slave-holding hypocrite and land raper as an elite University prof. One who slammed Jefferson for political reasons for doing exactly what he did until the damnably gradualist New York abolition of slavery in 1827 forced him to stop holding Black People in slavery, twenty-eight years after the legislature passed it. He was a slave holder while he wrote that damned poem that turned St. Nicholas into a vulgar materialists' fever dream and Christmas into Stuffmas. He is recorded as having been an opponent of the abolition of slavery, even then, two decades after his (justified) attack on Jefferson. Justified by Jefferson's hypocrisy but another hypocrite doesn't get points for pointing out someone else does what he does even longer.
I've got a small number of old family Christmas stuff, enough to fit into a shoe box, that's as much as I'd ever want or need. I don't even need to put them up, just to look at them. Though I might put together a dowel Christmas tree like the one RMJ has. I've got a broken clothes drying rack I haven't fixed in years. But if I wrote out the memories those ornaments evoke in a notebook, I wouldn't even need those. Maybe I'll give them to one of my nieces, telling her about them. Then I won't need them, either. Maybe I should fix that thing.
Getting rid of Stuffmas is a really effective way to feel cheerier about Christmas, though maybe you had to have spent several hours several times putting away a commercially made, cloyingly cute, appallingly expensive Currier and Ives 3d Christmas Village to get that feeling from getting rid of it.
I might eat a couple of pieces of chocolate money, though I'd rather have a tangerine. That's enough.
Update: Oh, I remember getting Hanukkah gelt in my Christmas stocking as a kid, it's the kind of thing our mother would have enjoyed doing, she was very universalist. Probably where I got it from.
Thursday, December 16, 2021
William Mathias - Magnificat
Jesus College Service, Op. 53: I. Magnificat
Christ Church Cathedral Choir
Simon Lawford · William Mathias · Stephen Darlington
J.S. Bach - BWV 650 - Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter
Are you coming now, Jesus! from heaven down on earth?
Shall heaven and earth now be united?
I don't think this is exactly meant as an Advent chorale either but the text is appropriate to the season. It's not one of the more often played Schubler Chorales, which is too bad because all of them should be.
"Who gets to decide what's true?" - There will be no freedom to tell the truth under what "free speech" absolutism is bringing us to - Hate Mail
WELL, PEOPLE DO. Who else is there to do it? If the assertion is that discerning the truth from a lie isn't always easy the rational conclusion to that isn't to give up and just let professional liars lie with all the rights and privileges claimed by professional liars within the profession of journalism in the mass media, peddling those lies with the deceptive tactics of the PR and advertising industries. ITS TO PUT THE RESPONSIBILITY TO FACT CHECK ON THE ONES WHO WANT TO SAY THINGS ON THE MASS MEDIA, TO MAKE MONEY FROM WHAT THEY SAY AND GET PAID TO DO IT.
People don't drive perfectly or responsibly all the time, there are car accidents, people get killed, people get injured, for life sometimes. You don't deal with that by doing away with all laws and regulations to prevent car accidents, you have laws putting the responsibility for driving safely on the driver. AND YOU MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THOSE THEY INJURE TO SUE NEGLIGENT OR IRRESPONSIBLE DRIVERS. If there is a court case to decide guilt or responsibility, people make that decision. There's nothing odd or unusual about it. If it's OK to do it in this case, to trust the legal system in that, why isn't it OK when it's an often more obvious case of someone lying? That judges, "justices" and lawyers suddenly want to claim that courts and juries and judges are too stupid to tell the difference between a lie and the truth impeaches their entire profession and their reason for getting paid.
It used to be possible for public figures to sue liars in the media for some personal injuries caused by the lies they spread but the idiocy of the First Amendment stupidly asserts that there are to be no laws made to punish those who lie in the most dangerous way, potentially harming individuals or even entire groups of people. And the line of "free speech-free press" Supreme Court rulings from the past century till today have made what was previously bad far worse. Those who the "liberals" on the Supreme Court freed to lie with impunity naturally chose to tell their most profitable lies against Democrats. That those who were most effective at lying were wealthy owners of media and their advertisers, that was something only a stunned idiot without a clue about real life wouldn't have seen would be the result. Such as the members of the Supreme Court so often are.
This has reached crisis stage in which the lies spread by the entire range of media from the gutter-tabloid-cabloid-FOX level right to those held in most esteem like the New York Times and NPR are driving us into fascism. We either take the low risks of injustices against those who may make an ambiguous statement and get punished for what might not technically be called a lie or we have a government by gangsters such as the one Nixon tried to set up and which all of the Republican-fascists with the fewest of exceptions still are in on. There will be no freedom to tell the truth under what "free speech" absolutism is bringing us to. You won't get to tell the hardest truths in the venues where it matters most, in the mass media.
And I make those exceptions without really seeing how anyone who stays in that party after Trump and his crimes and the insurrection WHICH A MAJORITY OF REPUBLICANS SUPPORTS TODAY can be said to be innocent of it. If Liz Cheney really meant what she says she would leave that party, so would the others who voted to hold Trump responsible for the insurrection and those who speak against him. If that's their view, it's really not ever going to be their kind of Republican Party ever again and they shouldn't prop it up at all.
The wonder of this triad is that God acts in solidarity with the slaves
Fourth. The triad of fidelity attests to pain whereas the triad of control specializes in numbness. So, the Book of Lamentations, "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by. Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought on me which The Lord has inflicted on the day of His fierce anger" [Lamentations 1:12] The city voices its grief and loss and then notices that the other nations who pass by do not notice. Is it nothing to you? The triad of control, like the priest or the Levite on the way to Jericho [Luke 10:25-37] in numbness do not notice, they pass by on the other side, they have faster errands to run, they have reduced pain to a statistic and suffering to the cost of doing business. The practice of abusive power, exploitative economics, devastating militarism and the disturbance of the vulnerable of the Earth must continue, even if the pain therein produced requires denial. The denial is based on the race to domination and we cannot afford to linger very long in the hurt.
When such denial is pushed far enough it becomes numbness, what Robert Lifton calls "psychic numbing." The alternative (to) such numbing is to hear and touch and honor the pain that arises, what Lifton calls atrocity producing polices, systems and attitude. It is pain that lives beneath the surface of might, wisdom and wealth. And the triad of fidelity beginning with the Exodus narrative has the slaves cry out and then the narrative says God heard and God remembered and God looked and God took notice and God came down. The wonder of this triad is that God acts in solidarity. And the story of faith is the story of divine solidarity with human suffering and alliance beyond the drama of control. God bends God's-self toward the suffering of Israel and toward the suffering of the world.
But, of course, this triad of fidelity does not remain at a religious level, we can trace the cry and the holy response as it traverses the world of might and wealth. So right after the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 22, Moses comments on that psychic numbness, even though he had not read Lifton, and says you shall not oppress the immigrant. You shall not abuse the widow or the orphan because if you do and they cry out I will hear them. And if you lend money to my poor People you shall not deal with them as a creditor, you shall not exact interest and if you take your neighbor's cloak in pawn you shall restore it before the sun goes down. Imagine doing that with a 30-year loan every night.
These two laws in Exodus 22 focus on the vulnerable who are our primary candidates for pain, always the protection of immigrants and widows and orphans and poor people.
The university runs the risk of alliance with the interests of might, wisdom and wealth, knowledge from above that treats the cry as a necessary inconvenience.
It is possible, however, that the university may be a venue in which the long history of the subversive cry is hosted so that the long literature of truth and hurt is received and honored as a contemporary script. Preoccupation with the cry is natural in the humanities but it is no less urgent in the social sciences, in economics, in the Earth sciences, where the Earth itself cries out about the abuse.
The question that might haunt the university as it may haunt all of is is it, is it nothing to you, all of you who pass by?
The Prophet Amos chronicles this narcoticized self-indulgence, "Alas for all those who lie on beds of ivory and eat lambs from the flock who sing idle songs and drink bowls of wine and anoint themselves with finest oil but are not aware that Joseph is going to hell in a hand basket . . . So much is lost in translation. And that poem ends by saying, "They shall be the first ones to go into exile."
Those who do not notice will be displaced because the cry pulses and the numbing will not prevail.
The parable of the Good Samaritan from the link to Luke above is, as Marilynne Robinson pointed out, a refutation of the charge made in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins that the morality taught by Jesus and the Hebrew tradition called only for justice for the members of their ethnic group, he and the scientific racists Kevin MacDonald and John Hartung assert that is an expression of evolutionary psychology, gene selfishness, an evidence of natural selection at work.
But that's not at all true, it is a widespread lie told against Jews and the entire tradition, including, at times Jesus the Jew. The universalism that is made explicit in the Christian teachings of Paul are not absent from the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus reflects and extends that. That is right there to be read or ignored and lied about.
Jesus holds up, against two members of the most respected classes among the Children of Israel, a member of the widely disdained group, the Samaritans as the true neighbor to the presumably Jewish man who was mugged, robbed, stripped and left for dead. Robinson also points out, as W.B. does that in The Law, the Torah that extension to the immigrant, the stranger living among them, was already made. It already contained what would be called among late 20th century and contemporary liberation theologians "a preference of the poor," for the least among us.
Walter Brueggemann contrasts that with the dominant secular articulation that has no time for all of that in its pursuit of power and control and wealth, none of which is any surprise though it would be to those who he's talking about. In that triad greed is good, explicitly or under the surface of it.
He doesn't but, of course, I would contrast that with the paradigm of biological progress in the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of the origin of species. I've commented on that long and at enormous length but, since a theme of his talk is the role of academia in the triad of control I can't resist pointing out something that occurred to me recently.
I wonder about the great question of how species arose out of other species, the original species having been said to go extinct in time. But there is a huge difference between a species which changes into another species (perhaps under a somewhat superficial and short-sighted human conception of species) and the cutting off of a species through human extinction through hunting or destruction of habitat as the human paradigm of control does like no other species ever has. If a species gave rise to other species, is that really the same thing as that species being wiped out without them leaving a persisting line of offspring, no matter how different they look from their great-great-great. . . grandparents?
I'm unaware of anyone explaining how that is consistent with the claims of Darwinism, natural selection. Especially now when other mechanisms of biological change are known to happen and the actual evidence of natural selection is so weak that it might all not be there at all. I think natural selection is a delusion, the product of scientists pretending to explain something that can't be observed or quantified so they substitute a theory and pretend that is sufficient. I would call into question whether or not the entire troublesome history of Darwinism-eugenics-scientific racism might be on a short-sighted framing of the actual framing of the question of how species change over time. Apparently the great-great-great, . . . grandparents of different species were sufficiently "fit" so as to leave a persisting line of very different looking offspring, going back far enough, individual species, of course, leaving a number of different species in time. "Flaws" and all which made the original species "go extinct" when what really happened is it just changed. I think it calls into question the entire structure of natural selection which may well be a human delusion with its genocidal legacy and its continuing legacy in "Bell Curve" scientific racism as political policy promoting economic injustice. I've noted a few of the new atheists of the 00s have explicitly supported that.
Natural selection is certainly the misidentification of the British class system as a natural entity a fit model of nature when it is founded on an entirely artificial, man made law created and enforced means of squeezing the life out of the English poor and tying them down to a parish that was reluctantly responsible for those the Law of Moses commanded be treated much better. A more malignant serfdom with minimal obligations from the affluent and more easily disposed of poor People, the poor houses a model for 20th century death camps. I think the academic character of how Darwinism and, in fact, all of modern biology arose in the industrial system of the 19th and 20th centuries cannot help but present a distorted picture of the evolution of species that is a product of the prejudices, the expectations, the habits of thought and the self-interests of those affluent men who first adopted it and made allegiance to it mandatory within that profession and it persists as an unconsidered habit.
And so much of that results in our modernistic form of the triad of control, especially in regard to the attitude of racial, class and gender inferiority and superiority, replacing the Brit class system model of immutable and unequal value of People for the Christian egalitarian model of the Gospel, one hardly overly practiced in professed Christianity even before then but certainly there in the scriptures for rare individuals and rarer groups to read and take seriously enough to try to put its radical egalitarianism and provision for the poor, "deserving" and "undeserving" into effect. Some even to the extent where they tried to imitate Jesus, who goes farther than Jeremiah does. However, I think it is worth thinking about how prominent Jewish People have been, for their relatively small numbers in the great progressive movements of social equality and provision to the least among us, something that is used against them by those professed Christians who are all in on the triad of control, gun-toting Christmas cards, "herd immunity" anti-"Critical Race Theory" and all. It certainly shows what a lie the scientific antisemitism mentioned above is. The universalism shows up a lot earlier in the Bible, it never shows up in Darwinism which denies and tries to refute it. That is, except through an ass-covering afterthought of "mutual aid" which cannot coherently be made compatible with natural selection. It would have been no help to the slaves held in America at all, certainly not compared to the Hebrew Scriptures.
The more I go through this exercise the better I think Walter Brueggemann's method of considering the contrast between the two triads many different ways in this lecture is. It's a way to go deep into it. No doubt in this one there would be many more ways to look at it. I'd like to read some from different perspectives.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
in which the Okies observe that whenever a man with a clipboard writes something down you own less - Continuing With Walter Brueggemann's Slow Wisdom
Third. The triad of fidelity is deeply situated in the tradition, whereas the triad of control traffics in syllogisms and memos. Syllogisms reflect controlling reason that yields a kind of thin certitude about which there is no argument. And memos are unambiguous notes of power. As David's memo to Joab about the death sentence of Uriah [2 Samuel 11:14-15] or Jezebel's memo that was a death sentence for Naboth [1 Kings 21:8-10]. Such writing as control is reflected in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, in which the Okies observe that whenever a man with a clipboard writes something down you own less. And, of course, that process of writing memos continues in our time. Notices from the bank, all of whose writers would like to be neighborly but the rules preclude it.
Since the 17th century such reasoning has declared war on tradition. And now the assault on tradition continues in the reduction of reality to sound bites, the reduction of hymns to praise hymns, and the delete button that can erase into innocent amnesia.
But communities of steadfast, justice and righteousness have long memories and deep hopes and do not believe that instantaneous satisfaction is an adequate displacement for remembering and anticipating. Jeremiah calls that tradition The Way. "Let me go to the rich and speak to them, surely they know The Way of The Lord, the Torah of our God. And, then, if they will diligently learn the Ways of my People and say as The Lord lives then they shall be built up." [Jeremiah 5:5]
Broadly construed The Way refers to The Torah of The Lord, not only the commandments but the instruction and the lore. So the Psalter begins "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or walk in the path of sinners but their delight is in The Torah of The Lord, they meditate on it day and night." The Torah is the entire legacy of being bound in convenantal fidelity and covenantal obedience. And this order provides that personal practice and public policy will cohere with the transcendent purposes of God.
The force of Torah aims to resist autonomy wherein one imagines unfettered freedom without responsibility. Freedom to seize what belongs to another because of more power or freedom to exploit the vulnerable neighbor.
In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice,. that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction.
The triad of fidelity excuse the seduction of the reasoning of autonomy, it fends off the counter temptation of absolutism. It refuses absolutism through the ongoing disputatious practice of interpretation. So that the old Torah cannot just be read. And there can be no recourse to the original intention or what we call originalism, which is to misconstrue the tradition. Because it is the great work of the university to nurture competent hermeneutists who refuse the easy relativism of popular culture and who refuse the temptation to absolutism whether of God or sect or country. The tradition requires interpretive agility that knows that the memory is the beginning point but never the conclusion. The tradition is always being reformulated in radical contemporaneity with deep rootage that is not deleted by interpretation.
Don't know what the banks he uses is like but around here, if you want even the desire to be neighborly, you go to a credit union. And even some of those the neighborliness is thin on the ground, thinner than a banker manager's smile. Though I'm sure even some of those who work at the bank would like to be nicer, they know their job is at stake if they try it.
In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good.
It would be hard to find a more brief or complete opposition to virtually all of the modernistic, enlightnement, scientistic, materialistic, atheistic assertion of what is real, what is rational, what is scientifically demonstrated (but only if you ignore the methods of science) and what any wise guy of any sophistication would believe than this passage. Any commercial expression of it like in a made-for-TV movie would make it cloyingly impotent in its palpable insincerity, in sincerity demonstrated as soon as the commercial break comes if the expensive costumes, cars and settings didn't clue you into that from the start. If there is anything that is more of a repugnant overturning of Christianity than a Christmas Movie, it is the treatment of the Torah in Hollywood "Bible" epics, then and more recently.
Sorry but I've been reminded repeatedly why I hate the movies and TV so much recently.
I may just present some of the rest of this without much of my commentary because I'm running out of time before Christmas and I'm kind of busy with non-Christmas things, too.
Lowell Mason - Watchman Tell Us Of The Night
William Appling Singers
conductor: William Appling (1932-2008)
I read that this piece that might be best known to us non-Protestants of a certain age as the hymn tune Charles Ives chose for the first movement of his enormous Fourth Symphony was sometimes used as a Christmas hymn in 19th century America. I think the text is especially timely during the end of Advent.
1 Watchman, tell us of the night,
what its signs of promise are.
Traveler, what a wondrous sight:
see that glory-beaming star.
Watchman, does its beauteous ray
news of joy or hope foretell?
Traveler, yes; it brings the day,
promised day of Israel.
2 Watchman, tell us of the night;
higher yet that star ascends.
Traveler, blessedness and light,
peace and truth its course portends.
Watchman, will its beams alone
gild the spot that gave them birth?
Traveler, ages are its own;
see, it bursts o’er all the earth.
3 Watchman, tell us of the night,
for the morning seems to dawn.
Traveler, shadows take their flight;
doubt and terror are withdrawn.
Watchman, you may go your way;
hasten to your quiet home.
Traveler, we rejoice today,
for Emmanuel has come!
William Bolcom - Free Fantasia On O Zion Haste And How Firm A Foundation
Not sure if it worked, I linked to the piece from after the long introduction and the tuning of the ensemble, I'll test them after I post them. I think it will work in the Direct link if it doesn't in the picture link.
This isn't meant as an Advent piece but for some reason when I found this transcription of it for saxophone ensemble - definitely made with the composer's approval and in honor of his 80th birthday, I had that idea. Some of it is clearer in this transcription than it is in a lot of those videos played on organ. I sort of wish the O Zion Haste portion was longer.
1 O Zion, haste, your mission high fulfilling,
to tell to all the world that God is light;
that he who made all nations is not willing
one soul should perish, lost in shades of night.
Refrain:
Publish glad tidings, tidings of peace;
tidings of Jesus, redemption, and release.
bound in the darksome prison-house of sin,
with none to tell them of the Savior's dying,
or of the life he died for them to win. [Refrain]
Mary Ann Thomson
More Hate Mail - How Dare You Call Into Question The Constitution!
IT IS ONE OF the less quoted statements made at the Constitutional Convention by, perhaps, the most democratic and, in my opinion, wisest of that group of slave holders and financiers, Benjamin Franklin, who, after a paragraph in which he gave his very conditional agreement to the Constitutional system that was set up - he was especially suspicious of having a single chief executive, he favored a committee of three, a triumvirate as being some measure of protection against a dictatorship. His agreement to the Constitution was certainly not that he expected it was perfect or even safe, his agreement was expressed, not without some appeal to the bigotry of the majority of the Founders but in a modesty that I don't think was necessary. He could have just said, you're going to pass this thing whether or not I like it but I know Pennsylvania is likely to reject it if I don't acquiesce to it.
The second paragraph in his final speech to the Constitutional Convention identified the only real force that was a protection against despotism, The People and how he expected the Constitution would, with time, in fact fail.
In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
His capitalization of "People" is something I would gather he did in writing because it is not orthodox. As the only legitimization of any government comes by the consent of those governed, The People, it should always be capitalized in the honorary way that is always done when it is those dangerous servants of them, the president, the congress and, especially the supreme court.
We are in the kind of time he foresaw, right now, our having had the second Hollywood presidency of the fake, phony, corrupt, casino Nero Trump proves that.
I think that he did, in fact, identify the way in which a republic can be moved to devolve into a dictatorship, the corruption of The People, exactly the kind of corruption that the mass media brings, through lies, through addling an effective margin of voters through dishonest, propagandistic entertainment, through the cheapening of human and other life, the environment the encouragement of every vice from pride and vanity and envy and greed and racism and sexism such as has increased enormously since Hollywood and other entertainment fueled a backlash against the push for equality in the 1950s through the very early 1970s. The media, freed by the first Hollywood President, Ronald Reagan, was freed from every responsibility to give even a marginal proof of public service and the dive to the bottom of the cesspool was taken. Only there is no bottom to that cesspool that has been discovered, yet.
Those in the mass media who didn't do it because they consciously understood the relationship between the corruption of The People and that their interests in an anti-democracy was the same as those of Putin and other foreign dictator-gangsters, that it was in their financial self-interest to destroy democracy, those who didn't go through that thought process did it because pandering to the worst in us is very profitable. Money is the ultimate value in commercial media and, in fact, as NPR and PBS show, among the "non commercial" media. They sold out as fast as the for profit media sector did. Let's see if you find the irony in me saying that.
Franklin's, to some of us, startling statement, "when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other," is and should be disturbing, it is the idea that a dictatorship is preferable to no government at all. I would put it differently, I don't think it's preferable, I think it's inevitable. When legitimate civil authority, authority of, by and for The People, based in the equal service to all The People on the basis of good will is absent the gangsters will move in and they will rule. The pipe dreams of the idiot anarchists and the wet dream of libertarians (right and play left) is a delusion that never happens. They, often in their snobbery (play left) and selfish bigotry (real right), imagine that they can have it all, the benefits of a regime of good will beneficial to them and an absence of any responsibility on their part to the general welfare and good, but that's not how life goes. We take the chance on an egalitarian democracy with our responsibilities to it or we get gangsterism like we will likely get when the Republican fascists game the system to destroy equality, to destroy common good, to destroy representative government through their rigging of the system Franklin was so skeptical of even as he acquiesced to its adoption. Will we learn anything from the experience such as we have not learned from George W. Bush's regime or that of Trump? Our "best and brightest" don't seem to have learned much.
Update: What's really ironic is that since I abandoned secularism I became far, far more radical than I was even eighteen years ago when I was already going too far for some of my fellow lefties at Media Whores Online and Eschaton and the other lefty blogs I commented on. I'm considerably to the left of the Marxists as they all favor gangster government while I favor making progress towards The Beloved Community and beyond that.
I respect what Liz Cheney is doing on the January 6th committee, I would guess that she is the designated truth teller about her Republican-fascist colleagues because the Democrats on the committee know that if they exposed them they would be widely dismissed by journalists, by the free press BECAUSE THEY ALWAYS DO DISMISS TRUTH TELLING BY DEMOCRATS. That is how that piece of shit Elon Musk will get away with calling the great Senator Elizabeth Warren "Karen" because she has the gall to want billionaires like him to pay their taxes. I'd go much farther than she will go and call for the abolition of all billionaires and millionaires by taxing them into a size that is not dangerous for egalitarian government of, by and FOR THE PEOPLE.
I respect what Liz Cheney is doing even as I am sure we disagree about pretty much everything else and I think her father was a war criminal who should have spent the rest of his life in prison.
The Gospel of Jesus is, as Walter Brueggemann pointed out, so radical that we can't make that jump into the "Kingdom" of "Thy will be done." That's not a passive construction because any will being done here and now will only be done by us doing it. Show me where any secularist out does that for a statement of radical aspirations.
Hate Mail
HERE'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T HEAR MUCH, if we didn't have the Electoral College and the insanely baroque system of enacting that anti-democratic atrocity, the ratfucking of the 2000 election incited by the actions of George W. Bush's brother, Jeb Bush in Florida and their cousin John Ellis at FOX, continued through the Brooks Bros. putsch and five Republicans on the Supreme Court and the even more extreme version of that in 2020 would never have happened.
What Trump and his crime mobs did would not have happened, neither would the various ratfucking attempts in various states by Republican-fascist state legislators have happened except that the fatheaded, slave-owning and financial class Founders didn't think their financial interests were safe with something like democracy so they did everything they could to welsh on their democracy talk they used to get the plebs to fight their revolution while appearing to honor it.
Now that the corrupt lawyers and liars are not being held accountable for what they did, as long as the members of the Trump crime family and their gang and the billionaires and millionaires who funded it are not being punished to prevent a retry, as the corrupt and cowardly journalists are trying to minimize what happened we can count on one thing, they'll use the Electoral College, the corruption in Republican-fascist run states to make sure that they can repeat what was done in 2000 to put the loser of an election into power as, in fact, happened in 2016, as well - Hillary Clinton getting more votes than Trump did - because the Electoral College is nothing if not eminently suited for preventing the winner of the election from gaining the presidency. It's what it was designed to do.
If anyone wonders why I rail against the sacred Constitution, the deified Founders, against the idiocy of such ahistorical razzle dazzle show biz shit like Hamilton, it is because the founders fetish is and has always been a vehicle to prevent equality, economic justice and a real, legitimate, egalitarian self-government of The People, by The People and FOR THE PEOPLE from happening and becoming the normal way which the United States was governed. Alexander Hamilton was one of the chief enemies of democracy among that assembly of slave owners and financiers who wrote things like the Electoral College into law though he was hardly the only one. James Madison was far from anyone we should trust on that count, either.
It is the enduring superstition of the American civic religion that we are morally bound by the thinking of people who died 185 years and longer ago. As if the collective experiences and knowledge gained of the millions of people since then counts for nothing, AS IF THE COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCES AND KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR SLAVES, THE WAGE SLAVES, WOMEN, THE NATIVE INHABITANTS OF NORTH AMERICA AND SO MANY OTHERS counts for nothing as opposed to the thinking of a small, hardly democratically chosen group of rich, white men whose motives were as shifty as any such assembly of rich, privileged men can be counted on to be.
So, you wonder why I bring that up so often, it is because it is and remains one of the greatest dangers we face and almost no one is willing to talk about it in the terms it must be faced in for it to stop being a danger to us. The Electoral College like the anti-democratically composed Senate, the various corruptions inherent in the way the Supreme Court is staffed, those are all booby traps set by the founders to prevent self-governance by an accurately informed People of good will because such government would have been as unprofitable to them as it is to today's billionaires, millionaires and other gangsters foreign and domestic, such as all conspired to put Trump in the presidency. Those opportunities, thanks to the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court - based on that sacred First Amendment - have been extended to even those foreign gangster dictators such as Putin, those in the middle-east, China, etc. That is something that the Founders really did seem to want to avoid but thanks to their duplicity, we've got it, today.
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
It Will Come With A Large Serving Of Alito's Ass. . . uh, Salad Dressing - Anyone Who Is Expecting Equal Justice Under Law From This Court Is Out Of Touch With Reality
IN SOMETHING RELEVANT to my post on the abysmal Supreme Court action to let the Texas abortion law stand even while it's in direct violation of standing Supreme Court precedents:
CNN reports that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California intends to introduce legislation modeled after Texas' law inviting vigilante enforcement of an abortion ban but will apply it to gun ownership. Admittedly, watching the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court eventually hoist on their own petard will bring about some schadenfreude, but the Newsom approach is still not good for the country. The old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," has all the marks of defining deviancy down in this moment of history.
Michael Sean Winter's warning would make sense if you expected there would be any consistency or even much of a desire to mount an appearance of applying equal justice under law (that lie that appears above the door of that temple of mendacity) by the Robert's court majority with its six-Republican-fascist majority but I predict that instead of his "defining deviancy down" they're already there, they will have no trouble at all coming up with their predetermined outcomes, calling balls and strikes even before the game begins, it's what got those liars on the court. They'll come up with some pretty words to cover their lies but, as Alito's salad-bar prose of late has shown, they won't even much bother to make that seem to cohere for anyone who can read.
The only good thing that will come of it is that it will force more people to face the sordid history of a frequently sordid branch of government and its certainly sordid present under the successfully rigged rules of the Constitution, lifetime-appointments of "justices," their ability to make law from the bench overturning laws, even those adopted by Congress and accepted by the Executive of the Federal government, a super-legislature in which five votes by unelected liars in robes rules now. Along with that we should face the fact that now that they've figured out how to rig things, as long as the anti-democratically constituted Senate is given the sole authority to confirm members of that court, along with the rigging of the electoral college, the placement of the losers of presidential elections into the presidency - which the Supreme Court has collaborated in within our lifetime- putting two Republcian-fascists on the court, etc. as long as those things remain unchanged and at the disposal of the Republican-fascists, the status-quo ante is as dangerous now as it has ever been in our history.
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