Simps Said:

 

Dec 16, 2023

Even shorter Sparky: If it hadn't been for Charles Darwin, nobody's Jewish relatives would have been killed by the Nazis.

 

That's quite plausible because Nazism's eugenics which included its genocidal programs are a direct result of the belief in natural selection.  As I've noted here in the past, in direct response to such derisive snark we know that the German officer class and others who started the Nazi party were thinking in Darwinian terms during the First World War, as documented by the American biologist and quite conventional Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg.  We know that as Hitler was dictating Mein Kampf that he had been provided with the thoroughly Darwinist and eugenics textbook by Baur, Fischer and Lenz - not improbably the only biology book he ever may have read - that Nazi literature noted the influence of American eugenics - which was, by its own proclamation an outgrowth of Darwinism, that is, the theory of natural selection.   We furthermore have the definition of Nazism, "National Socialism" as being nothing but applied biology from Rudolf Hess.  To top that off we have the discussion at the infamous Wannsee Conference in which the theory of natural selection was given by at least one of the participants as the reason to murder all of the Jews because any that survived the brutal culling they were planning were believed by the Nazi participants in that incomparably brutal intellectual-technocratic meeting to be biologically superior and so would generate a population of Jews who would be an even greater "threat" to the imaginary Aryan German "master race," they fully believed, on the basis off Darwinism, to be creating.  In that they were merely the logical conclusion of things said by Darwin in On the Origin of Species and, especially, in the Descent of Man.  

 

If they would have come up with other excuses in the absence of Darwinism can't, of course, be known but how they thought of what they planned and did can be known and it is fully documented in, not only the secret literature that became apparent after WWII but in their public pronouncements and their propaganda.   There is absolutely no possible contradiction of that short of lying, as the conventional college-credentialed mainstream has been lying about it since the exposure of the atrocities of the Nazis.

 

And, as I have documented through his own words at the beginning of WWII, by that time probably the greatest living authority on the thinking of Charles Darwin to survive into the years of WWII, Leonard Darwin, repeatedly, over decades said that his own eugenics work was carrying on his father's work.  In April of 1939 he published an article in which he said German eugenics, that would be NAZI EUGENICS, had moved German legal and social policy in the right direction.  The article also noted that German Eugenics, begun by men like Wilhelm Schallmayer, was a direct result of their reading of On the Origin of Species.  No doubt they also read the far worse, Descent of Man in which, among other claims of beneficial murder,  Darwin repeatedly asserts that the deaths of those who he considered inferior were a boon to their survivors, even in cases such as the Tasmanian genocide, when it was done through such evil acts. 

 

If natural selection had never been invented by Darwin and Wallace, it's quite probable that there would have been no Nazi party.   

Update:  I don't care what the eejits of E-ton believe they know about something they don't know anything about.

I Should Have Written This Post About Four And A Half Years Ago - Thoughts On The Epstein Document Dump And The Names Not Listed

OF COURSE among those named in the Jeffery Epstein papers released yesterday was William Jefferson Clinton who, of course, denied he had anything to do with the sexual abuse of young women and girls and, of course, that denial is widely disbelieved.  While there may sometimes be reason to not disbelieve such a denial, in the case of Bill Clinton the only one he has to blame for the extent of that disbelief is him and his known behavior with a young woman, though legally an adult, less than half his age while he was president.  If his denial is true it may be too bad that he will be disbelieved but he's got no one to blame but himself.

I glanced through the list of names I saw in the news this morning and most of them I wouldn't know from Adam or Eve (I was expecting fewer Women's' names, I suspect they listed victims as well as possible victimizers) and was surprised by there being so few names I recognized of those in the sciences.  We know that Epstein cultivated some of the big names and many of the not so big names in science and is known to have flown them around on his boy-joy jet and entertained them at his notorious properties.  I wonder if there is another batch of names coming out that will have more of them on it.

My surprise at that can be contrasted with that which the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed a few years back about the connection between scientists (and so science) and the notorious human trafficker and sex criminal.   I used to always read Pollitt's column when I was a subscriber and generally liked her take on things.  But I've increasingly come to see there are problems in the foundations on which those ideas are laid.  They need far firmer foundations than she would accept for them.  I hope others give them those.   

 

In 2019 she said, quite naively:

Epstein’s stay at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and his death on Saturday will breed multiple versions of the truth, and conflicting interpretations of scientific evidence. That, too, is fitting: Epstein, as it turned out, had been cultivating conflicting understandings of science for a long time through his donations to research institutions and the lasting friendships he formed with legitimate, renowned scientists.

And that’s what gets to me: the scientists. I can live with the idea that the 1 percenters who hung out with the financier Jeffrey Epstein are frivolous, heartless people who either don’t care if he sexually abused underage and barely of-age girls or spent decades living in a cave. I can be bewildered by Ghislaine Maxwell, who apparently had nothing better to do with her money and her fancy Oxford degree than to act as Epstein’s majordomo, social secretary, and procuress. I’ve read my Evelyn Waugh and my Edward St. Aubyn, and I get it: The British upper crust is famously depraved. As for the politicians, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and Epstein went way back. Two masters of the universe with mansions in Palm Beach and a taste for very young women—why wouldn’t they like each other?

She also said:

What I can’t get over is how Epstein successfully weaseled his way into science at the highest level by cultivating major figures in the field socially and spreading his wealth around. Science! The very temple of the pursuit of truth. Call me insufficiently jaded, but am I wrong to expect more of those we rely on to combat all of the nonsense swirling around us?

The list of scientists whom Epstein wined and dined is like a Nobel Prize dinner table in Stockholm. Besides Stephen Hawking, there was Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the existence of quarks; the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky; the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; and many more (Virginia Guiffre, one of Epstein’s teenage victims, alleges that he forced her to have sex with Minsky, among other well-known people including Dershowitz.) “As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds,” cooed a 2002 profile of Epstein by Landon Thomas Jr. in New York magazine. Beautiful young women were said to always be in attendance—but, as Daniel Engber observed in Slate, almost all the beautiful minds were male.

And what did the beautiful minds think of Epstein’s conviction? “I never actually believed this underage thing,” computer scientist Roger Schank told Slate. “They might have been in their early 20s or late teens, but when I talked to them…they were always in college or had just graduated college or something like that. They were not high school girls.” And Schank was not the only Epstein science crony to pooh-pooh the idea that Epstein’s girls were underage. “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people,” said Krauss—who, for his part, chose to retire from Arizona State University in 2018 after accusations of sexual harassment spanning a decade and a university investigation that found he had grabbed a woman’s breast.

The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has vociferously denied having been part of the Epstein circle. “I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance,” he told BuzzFeed News. As far as I know, as of this writing, the only scientist to apologize for his closeness to Epstein is the biologist George Church, who also teaches at Harvard. “There should have been more conversations about, should we be doing this, should we be helping this guy?” he told the health news website Stat. “There was just a lot of nerd tunnel vision.”

The most grotesque aspect of this high-IQ sausagefest, of course, was Epstein’s fantasy of transhumanism: improving the human race scientifically, in his case by inseminating women—perhaps 20 at a time—with his own sperm on his ranch in New Mexico. This sounds about as smart as his other idea, which was to have his head and penis cryogenically stored after his death for resuscitation in the future. This was the guy some of the most brilliant (male) minds of our era took seriously?

Well, maybe they just took the Dom Pérignon and lavish conferences on his private island seriously, to say nothing of the $6.5 million grant to help found Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (which the university has no intention of giving back). Maybe they tolerated him only in the hope of obtaining funding for their own projects. Or maybe they just worship the rich on general principles, as so many people do.

As sad as that is, I hope that’s the case. Because it’s even more painful to think they privately sympathize with eugenics and couldn’t even see what a crackpot idea this particular version of it was.

To which I can honestly be astounded that someone who went to college and grad school like Pollitt did could have maintained such a wacky rose-colored glasses view of scientists and, so, the science in whose minds is found the only place in the universe in which science is known to exist!  They are the gate keepers of what is officially to be considered and called "science" they are the ones who are the gatekeepers of who is let into that fraternity (science still largely being one) and whose ideas are allowed to be published as science and which ideas are forbidden to be science.  

Pollitt as a humanities grad (Philosophy and Writing) may had avoided knowing as many majors and instructors and professors in the sciences as I have but my education was in the humanities too.  I knew Women who went into science and heard more than one of them talk about having to put up with the boys club that science is, being the target of puerile, often sexual hazing and harassment, the casual sexism of male faculty on who their future in their chosen field depends.  When I first heard about the connection between Epstein and Maxwell to prominent departments of science at big name universities and celebrity scientists I don't think it gave me a 64th note length worth of pause.  I've known more than one ex-wife of a scientist who thought her ex was a total pig, including wives who were scientists, too.  

More unsurprising in Pollitt's surprise was her cultivated stupidity about the not uncommon acceptance and assumption of and the thoroughly scientific nature of eugenics.   But that's unsurprising only because the actual history of the fact that eugenics began with some of the most lauded and praised scientists of the 19th century,  Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, etc.  and had an uninterrupted history as university department level science among the most eminent scientists of the early 20th century - having only a short underground period after the liberation of the German eugenics centers, the death camps and the horror of what such science had wrought - to reemerge among many of the most eminent scientists (such as Watson and Crick) beginning in the 1960s and establishing essentially neo-eugenics within the wildly popular scientific schools of neo-Darwinism, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology.   Only someone as willfully stupid as a conventional secular-liberal college grad of my generation could have missed that happening, even as there were minority viewpoints in science that called it what it was beginning in the mid-1970s.   Only someone as dishonest and willfully blind about the actual substance of the biological, social-pseudo (psychology, sociology, etc)  and trash sciences (such as "Darwinian economics") could have been surprised at the kind of scientists who Epstein would have been attracted to and cultivated not being much bothered by eugenics.  Not to mention some non-scientist sci-groupies like the ultra-Darwinist fundamentalist, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The fact is that as long as Darwinism, natural selection, is an established part of what is accepted as biology, eugenics, mild to genocidal, will arise within scientists and within the common holdings of science.  Within the framing of materialist, atheist, scientism, there is no countering moral absolute to prevent that happening and the naive conception of science give it enough force to even overcome the countering moral absolutes of revealed religion in far too many naive and gullible semi-believers.  As Pollitt is a feminist scholar, of sorts, I'd recommend the relevant writings of the great and undervalued 19th century radical feminist Frances Cobbe in that regard.  She was truly one of the more clear-eyed critics of natural selection in its long and not infrequently rotten history.

Which brings me to another thing about Pollitt in regard to this, her even more naive conception of morals and morality, though I'd guess she'd turn up her nose at anything in that line other than "ethics."   Pollitt was a signatory of the third iteration of the Humanist Manifesto - what I think of as the slacker-edition of it.  

In its version of the origin of morals or "ethics" it holds, as all secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic views of those must, that they are merely the product of some kind of social consensus,* there being no other source for those available.  As such there is no such a thing as a hard and fast morality that is not dependent on that consesus.  Which is rather a hard thing to find Katha Pollitt's (and my) holding that grooming, exploiting, seducing and raping teenage girls to be the sex toys of men with celebrity or power, money, in short, within the secularist, materialist, atheist, scientistic conception of "ethics".  Or, for that matter, coming to a "final solution" to eliminate any ethnic or other group which a majority in any society would want to eliminate.  Just as eugenics will always follow wherever natural selection is taken as a force of nature, so will such ideas follow when morality is considered to be merely the product of social convention or that mythological "consensus" that that idea is usually peddled in.

While there is a rather fluid and hardly universal social consensus among some at the moment that such a thing as sexually using children for sex is wrong - at least in the milieu in which Pollitt practices her profession, it's clear that there is a parallel social consensus that holds that if you can do it and get away with it, it's OK.  And, as Trump himself believes, if you're a celebrity, you can get away with a lot.  Look at the results of the 2008 judicial process against Epstein and how he was allowed to walk away with little to no cost.   The sexualization of young children in the media is not only permitted, it can make you billions on streaming services, other online and off-line venues for selling that.  If you want an example of what happens when you slam that, look up the word "Tumblr" in my archive.   Such is the milieu in which Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess Ghislaine Maxwell and the many men who availed themselves of the girls and young women they groomed, seduced, isolated, threatened and coerced into being, in effect, raped by celebrities, millionaires, maybe billionaires, and, yes, scientists, is just as much a social consensus as the one that Pollitt and Me-Too hold as a social consensus.  While I'm sure there are many who participated and supported #Me-Too who have a more stable and less fluid structuring of morals or "ethics" if you reject that there is such a thing as a moral absolute you're up "Skepticism" creek without a paddle just wen you need it most.

I looked into that Humanist Manifesto that Pollitt signed and, just as I expected to see, I saw the name of the late Paul Kurtz circle sexologist Vern Bullough's name.  Vern Bullough was an atheist, social (arguably) scientist, who, I expect, held a similar view of the origin and conditions under which morality or "ethics" exists.  He clearly comes from approximately the same milieu in which Pollitt navigates and, before it became inconvenient to be open about such things, he was a supporter and editor of Paidika, a child sex abuse promoting and practicing entity which called for the elimination of laws setting a minum age of consent for a child to agree to have sex with an adult.  Such ideas were not uncommonly found among those circles in the 1970s and even into the 80s and participating in that or merely holding that as a desirable thing wouldn't get you black-balled from within those circles."   If anything, being a vigorous critic of that, such as Andrea Dworkin was, would be more likely to get you black balled.   And, as I've noted, it's long been a part of mainstream commercial culture, pop culture, movies, pop music, even those old relics, books.

Among the things I've learned since starting to address the culture of atheism, especially the "new atheists" how little room there is between such "ethics" as they might advocate and those of the vulgar materialists of the facist-Nazi-white supremacists.   I'd hold up someone she slammed in that article, Dershowitz, as a typical specimen of what that leads to.   I'd also remind her that that now moribund then hot-bed of the new atheism, the Science Blogs, were funded by Epstein and Maxwell.  

If nothing else there is something about science that has been obvious from the time that its founders started working for princes and kings and governments, scientists are always on the make for money.  Always.  I once was told by a particularly successful biologist that she felt like a shill because of the time she spent writing grants instead of doing her work.   That thirst for funding doesn't go down as the size of the science goes up.   That scientists are susceptible to the deep pockets of a morally corrupt pieces of scum like Epstein and Maxwell is about as unsurprising as them taking money from big business and the military.   

I'm frankly shocked that someone could reach Pollitt's age and not understand that much about one of the foremost forces in contemporary human culture.   Or notice the connection between that and such holdings that there is no such thing as any moral absolute.  And the convenience of having no such a thing as a moral absolute not interfering with it.  I'm kind of surprised that there aren't a lot more compromised sci-guys than there are on that list.  

*  Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.    

There is certainly enough of a gaping chasm of a loophole in that pablum which, clearly, could contain advocacy for the legalization of adults raping children or, I also assert,  eugenics, everything from passively discouraging groups from having children up to and including active programs of genocide.   Eugenicists, almost to a person, saw what they did as being "consonant with responsibility" including their ranking of human beings on scales of economic (though not called that) value. 

"man transforms himself by conquering his liberty"

 More from the introduction to A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez


A reflection on the theological meaning of the process of the liberation of man throughout history demands methodologically that we define our terms.  The first part of this book is devoted to  purpose.  This will enable us to indicate why we pay special attention in this work to the critical function of theology with respect to the presence and activity of man in history.  The most important instance of this presence in our times, especially in underdeveloped and oppressed countries, is the struggle to construct a just and fraternal society, where people can live with dignity and be the agents of their own destiny.  It is our opinion that the term "development" does not well express these profound aspirations.  "Liberation," on the other hand, seems to express them better. Moreover, in another way the notion of liberation is more exact and all-embracing;  it emphasizes that man transforms himself by conquering his liberty throughout his existence and his history...

This is a fascinating concept so totally at odds with the "enlightenment" conception of humanity and which demonstrates how radically different liberation theologies view of human beings is from that of the inadequate and failed 18th century conception of "liberty."  That People would need not only to obtain liberty but to "CONQUER HIS LIBERTY THROUGHOUT HIS EXISTENCE AND IN HIS HISTORY" is the definition of a fully adult conception of freedom, not only from unjust external opposition but in opposition to the self-enslaving and blighting aspects of our own desires and personalities.  That is an entirely different view of "liberty" of freedom which is exactly NOT in line with the pop-culture or even the elite culture's view of human existence but which, in addition to "be agents of their own destiny," makes them responsible within such freedom to reject choices that would thwart or hamper or attack "a just and fraternal society," indeed, even those choices that would prevent or deconstruct such a society.  That is not only in line with the New Testament and the testimony about the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc. but the description of the earliest Jewish Christian communities.  It is certainly informed by the long prophetic testimonies and declarations about the corruption of the Davidic-Solomonic regime as it forgot the Sinai-Deuteronomic elucidation of reality.

The modern concept of "development" takes as a given that "a rising tide raises all boats" as JFK put it, it doesn't notice that it's the pirate boats that prosper in such a tide of history.  It doesn't really care about that.  I mentioned a while back being dismayed when I heard the retired Representative Barney Frank speaking in favor of economic inequality as an engine of progress, clearly he was someone who bought into that conception of "development."  One which results in a world in which billionaires are a ruling class unto themselves, eating entire countries, even those which are supposed to have the strongest democratic institutions.  Some of those billionaires leading some of the strongest gangster-capitalist countries in the world, such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, using the American First Amendment as interpreted by Supreme Courts starting in the 1960s to attack and destroy America's merely liberal democracy.  Liberal democracy in this period exposed as doomed by such assumptions as that there is a right for the media to lie and that money is speech, thus giving billionaires billions of times more of that than those with nothing possess.  The very bases of 18th-19th and 20th century liberal democracy carries the poisons fatal to it.  We are not that far removed from Latin American in the 1970s under the yoke of American and European capitalism, we are all colonial subjects of the world-wide billionaire class and their owned and controlled media.

As pointed out in many posts here, Scripture presents a different and radically more effective idea of how to change things.

. . . The Bible presents liberation - salvation - in Christ as the total gift, which, by taking on the levels we indicate, gives the whole process of liberation its deepest meaning and its complete and unforeseeable fulfillment.  Liberation can thus be approached as a single salvific process.  This viewpoint, therefore, premits us to consider the unity, without confusion, of man's various dimensions, that is, his relationship with other men and with the Lord,  which theology has been attempting to establish for some time;  this approach will provide the framework for our reflection.

It is fitting, secondly, to show that the problem which the theology of liberation poses is simultaneously traditional and new.  This twofold characteristic will be more evident if we analyze the different ways in which theology has historically responded to this problem.  This will lead us to conclude that because the traditional approaches have been exhausted, new areas of theological reflection are being sought.  Our exclamation should help us remove the obstacles from our path and move ahead more quickly.  The second part of this work deals with that matter.  

The preceding analysis leads us to consider the "practice" of the Church in today's world.  The situation in Latin America, the only continent among the exploited and oppressed peoples where Christians are in the majority, is especially interesting.  An attempt to describe and interpret the forms under which the Latin American Church is present in the process of liberation - especially among the most committed Christian groups- will allow us to establish the questions for an authentic theological reflection.  These will be the first effots along these lines, the third part of this treatise is devoted to this atempt.

The previous remarks make it clear that the question regarding the theological meaning of liberation is, in truth, a question about the very meaning of Christianity and about the mission of the Church.  There was a time when the church responded to any problem by calmly appealing to is doctrinal and vital resources.  Today the seriousness and scope of the process which we call liberation is such that Christian faith and the Church are radically challenged.  They are being asked to show what significance they have for a human task which has reached adulthood.  The greater part of our study is concerned with this aspect.  We approach the subject within the framework of the unity and, at the same time, the complexity of the process of liberation centered in the salvific work of Christ.  We are aware, however, that we can only sketch these considerations, or more precisely, outline the new questions - without claiming to give conclusive answers.  

So much that could be commented on.

Last year I read an article about the billionaire financed "traditional-Catholic" fashion which, among other things, wanted to go back to using the old and awful Baltimore Catechism for instructing Catholics, both children and adults.  The article noted how such a notion was a call for the infantilization of Catholics.  I'm old enough to remember when the Baltimore Catechism was in use, how insulting and degrading it was due exactly to that infantlizing approach to catechesis.  The entire program of such "traditional-Catholicism" is  to move away from any intellectual engagement with the important questions of life into a "pray-pay-obey" regime favored by the right-wing Catholic hierarchy, so many of whom had little to no direct pastoral relationship to Catholics who lived lives under various yokes of oppression.  I remember some of my mother's cousins who watched the most effective conjurer of that stuff, the late Mother Angelica and her EWTN cultic TV network.  They longed for a return to the Church they knew from their time in Catholic schools in the 1930s, with masses in a language they didn't know, sermons about nothing much and the rote praying of the rosary.  They were old and childless and lived a life pretty much within the confines of other such people, resenting the influx of Latino people into their city, even though they were as Catholic as they were.  

I think in many ways the same problems that face the Catholic Church, a question of mature and active adult thinking and adult taking of moral responsibility is the same problem that is destroying American democracy.  Infantilization, whether through the old and lifeless forms of pre-Vatican II Catholicism or through the never really reformed aspects of our corrupt Constitution and the white supremacy that it was structured to protect and promote, it is an encouragement towards puerility and infantilizaiton, a seduction into that and the discouragement of adult facing of reality and moral responsibility.  I think the reality that that has been primarily discouraged through the libertarian wet-dream of the "free press" as defined by the American Supreme Court, the corrupt and morally depraved popular media whether in English, Italian, Spanish, etc. as it peddles fantasy and unreality and, yes, resentment, envy, hate, packaged for the easiest and most seductive sale is among those things which we will face and end as adults or watch the aspiration of egalitarian democracy melt and run through our hands no matter how hard we try to grasp it.  

Broadway Stevey Simps Says

 "The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part. Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds."

You're so right, Sparky. The fact that "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" were the two biggest movies of 2023 proves how evil movies are, and why people should boycott them as a protest against facism.

First, since you are always getting into your meter maid of orthography costume and commenting on my copy,  that's "f-a-S-c-i-s-m. 

If you think that the majority of Americans who imbibe entertainment for many more hours a day than they do imbibing accurate information aren't affected negatively by it you must be at a total loss for how Trump ever rose so improbably from being a fascistic fictional character in a "reality" TV show to becoming the greatest single danger that America's liberal democracy has faced since the Confederacy.   He rose on the power of entertainment TV, Andrew Dice Clay style shock jock style radio and the demotion of TV and radio "news" to a high end of Joe and Mika (he was a regular call-in feature on their "morning news" show) and the feuilleton sections of print rags like the New York Post and New York Times.  

And I could make similar points about the political career of the previous record-holder for criminality in a modern American presidential administration, Ronald Reagan.  

There are only so many hours in a life, hours spent on entertainment are not hours spent on the serious and more difficult pursuit of learning about what is really happening in the world. While a daily diet of fiction, taken as fiction, isn't exactly a diet of lies, if it is mistaken as reality or a close approximation of that - as I learned even PhD holders in disturbingly large numbers do from the years I spent reading the comment threads at the baby blue blog - it may as well be a diet of lies.  The "noble cause of the Confederacy" as pushed by Hollywood from the 1910s and in pop culture from well back into the 19th century is an enduring lie that blights the lives of People of Color as the lies of "the old way-est" has so much to do along the same line in the Republican-fascist promotion of arming their suckered white supremacist invisible army that any thinking person realizes is a real threat to us all.  

You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out.  It's not any great stretch to imagine the same thing among someone who wasn't acculturated into the ambient mid-brow, college-credentialed milieu in which you've lived your life.  Considering the fact of New York City politics and the politics of New York during your lifetime, figures like Giuliani, Pataki, D'amato and the other Republicans and, then, Republican fascists who regularly gain office WITHOUT THE VOTES OF PEOPLE IN YOUR MILIEU, I'd have thought you'd have learned something over the decades that's been going on.   But people who spend their lives in entertainment and fiction don't learn much and don't think much.  

 Update:  Simps says further: 

"You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out. "

You mean successful, loved and capable of joy? Yeah, I turned out awful. Get back to me when you can make a similar claim, you pathetic prig.

When I am as delusional about my life as you are, in other words?   I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.  

Update 2:  As The Days Grow Longer The Simps Grows Wronger

 "When I am as delusional about my life as you are,"

Gee, I don't know Sparky -- after all, you're the one who claimed Guy Lombardo's band was better and more important than the Beatles.

Looking in my archive, I find that I've corrected him on this point before:

Moron says what?

I think the only things I ever said about Guy Lumbardo was that he was one of Louis Armstrong's favorite musicians and that he had more musical competence than a lot of rock musicians.  Or rock critics, though I don't think I said that.  You can tell when Dopey is lying because his lips or fingers are moving.   Louis Armstrong, by the way, is one of the greatest geniuses in musical history, Dopey isn't.   Who would you suspect is more credible? 

He got pissed off when I said that  hearing some talent deficient adenoidal post-teen intone "Imagine" did what I thought was impossible, making me yearn for yet another of Guy Lumbardo's gooey renditions of Auld Lang Syne, though not so much as going to bed early and missing the new years ball drop entirely.  He's never gotten over it and, like everything processed in the TV trained mind of Simpy Sales, it's become self-serving fiction.  Like I said, Trump or Hyacinth, take your pic. 

I'll end by saying it, mop heads.  

Update 3:  Longer And Wronger

:"I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.:

DEFINITION OF IRONY: A provincial hick nitwit snob criticizing me for having watched too much TV and television by comparing me to an obscure character from a crappy British TV show.

I haven't had a TV since HD was made mandatory and I know who who that is.  I'll bet easily 90% of casual PBS viewers would know who that was, not to mention anyone else.  Hell, Simps, even you know who she is.  You pretending not to realize that seems so very Hyacinth to me.  

Orrin Evans Quartet featuring Ralph Bowen

 

 

Orrin Evans - Piano
Ralph Bowen- tenor
Ugonna Okwego - bass
Donald Edwards- drums

"Why didn't you post about Simps during the week between Chrismas and New Years like you said you would."

As the late Alfred Lunt is reputed to say when complimented on he and his partner, Lynn Fontanne,  sticking to the stage instead of going on the movies, "Oh, we can be bought but we can't be bored."

It's essentially making bricks with the straw that comes out of his head,  I can do it but the results aren't generally worth it.   Maybe I should go back to answering him in limericks again.   My rule was that I wouldn't post it if it took me more than five minutes to come up with one.  Usually it took a lot less than that. 

Or in the form of Burma Shave signs.  I remember the tail end of the advertising campaign, there used to be a set on the highway into a town two towns away from here that stayed up a long, long time after they stopped producing them.  Shows you how old I am.  

A Post For The New Year

Our purpose is not to elaborate an ideology to justify postures already taken, nor to undertake a feverish search for security in the face of the radical challenges which confront the faith, nor to fashion a theology from which political action is "deduced."  It is rather to let ourselves be judged by the Word of the Lord, to think through our faith, to strengthen our love, and to give reason for our hope from within a commitment which seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious.  It is to reconsider the great themes of the Christian life within this radically changed perspective and with regard to the new question posed by this commitment.  This is the goal of the so-called theology of liberation.

Many significant efforts along these lines are being made in Latin America.  Insofar as we know about them, they have been kept in mind and have contributed to this study.  We wish to avoid, however, the kind of reflection which - legitimately concerned with the prevention of the mechanical transfer of an approach foreign to our historical and social coordinates- neglects the contribution of the universal Christian community.  It seems better, moreover, to acknowledge explicitly this contribution than to introduce surreptitiously and uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context which can only be fruitful among us if they undergo a healthy and frank scrutiny.  

From the introduction of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez  

I can't but think that most people on reading that would think "Marxism" though I think in the context of Latin American in 1971 capitalism was as much on the mind of Gustavo Gutierrez.  It was a period marked by the double-speaking, two-edged sword of the Kennedy-Johnson administration Alliance for Progress and the even more soured handling of American policy towards Latin America by the Nixon administration.  I think too many Americans who read the Latin American literature would have done well to read, re-read and really think about these two paragraphs.  It would also have been best if they really considered the warning against introducing "uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context," whatever good to be had from those available only through "a healthy and frank scrutiny."

Since the publication of this book, probably the most influential work in theology of the past half century, numerous other schools of "so-called theologies of liberation" have risen up and, in many cases, flourished, if nowhere else than among those living in the contexts which those theologies address.  By this time James Cone, the pioneer of Black Liberation Theology was already writing out of the context of Black People living under white supremacy.  Women were writing a related but different and distinct kind of theology based on their living with male supremacy.  At times they addressed and criticized even liberation theologies being written my male writers and, in many cases, the male theologians heard them and took them seriously, consequently taking those voices into account.  Certainly LGBTQ+ People have been writing a different theology that addressed their own lives and experiences of oppression in light of the experience of God as addressed in Scripture.  That's no surprise, the past month's short peek into Walter Brueggemann's take on the Hebrew Scriptures prove that that began in the expression of those experiences in the particular context of The Children of Israel, their experiences of life and their experience of a need of liberation.  If any Christian wants to slam "liberation theology" they'd better think twice because if that were to be eliminated from Christianity, pretty much all of Scripture would have to go because the very heart of it is a repeated sounding of theologies of liberation, starting with Exodus, certainly, and very arguably even before that in the book.  

I think among the most needed theologies of liberation are those who address the American and other "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" in the bondage the sin of white supremacy and the cargo cultism of Republican-fascism.   Today, in the United States, the large majority of time you hear the word "Christian" that's the heresy that is meant by it.   

Anywhere there has been a rise of racist, bigoted excluding nationalism, there is a need of a countering theology of liberation.  I think there is a need of liberation from TV and other hegemonic, life eating media.  In a Latin American context, from the likes of Univision which regurgitates the seduction catering to our weakness and is in the process of harnessing People to their own oppression.  The same can be said of English language TV and media, up to and including such supposedly respectable venues as PBS, NPR and the deeply corrupt BBC.  Wherever there is inequality, wherever there is bigotry or gender based oppression there is a need of a theology of liberation, wherever there is privilege and the an elite, wherever there are those seduced by materialism and acquisitive mental illness there is a need of a theology of liberation to overcome those.  That was what was needed on the American left for the past century and a quarter or more, not Marxism or anarchism or some pseudo-scientific, bound to be rejected, bound to fail secular program.  In the past month I have become convinced that that nonsense, indeed, started with the generations of Descartes and Spinoza and the early period of scientism and its increasing adoption as the house ideology of Western and now world academia.  Brueggemann repeatedly notes that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures were uncredentialed poets who spoke out of their artistic inspiration and out of the Sinai tradition of Hebrew prophecy.  Jesus was certainly uncredentialed, in a commonly held modern fable of him, he, as Paul and others are presumed to be illiterate.  In the anachronistic slogan of the recent and fading new-atheism, they were "illiterate bronze-age goat-herders."  

Even as I have rejected the prescriptive aspects of Marxism, which has had among the most disastrous and evil series of trials in real life of any ideology ever developed by human beings except monarchy, I have acknowledged that his critique of capitalism has a lot in it to learn from.  Capitalism is another system which has had a disastrous and evil trial in human history, the example of the large majority of People living under it, especially in such places as Latin America, Asia, Africa, etc. proves that it is sheer evil.  The worst thing that Marxism produced was the stupid and facile mounting of a dualism in which we were required to choose "which side are you on."  That there were other alternatives which rejected both is one of the most stupidly unconsidered aspects of modern culture.  That one of the aspects of that alternative existed in the Hebrew scriptural tradition in the rejection of lending money at ruinous rates without having state ownership of everything only goes to show how corrupted religion has been in the modern period, as corrupted as it was under feudalism in the middle-ages.  I don't think there is such a thing as a durable Marxist regime, they seem to always go into a post-Marxism that is not only indistinguishable from capitalism, they are among the most brutal expressions of capitalism.  

I think in the theologies of liberation may be producing practical and concrete, instead of merely theoretical ways around all of that through their addressing the lives of those who are afflicted by capitalism and in their experience of Marxism.  Nicaragua under the Ortega gang is just another example of how Marxism eventually gives way to gangster capitalist rule, as are Russia and the post-Soviet states as well as Communist China which is the preeminent state-capitalism under Communist rule.  That the present junta in Nicaragua is in the process of suppressing the Catholic church if, for now, somewhat less violently than the junta that they overthrew about four decades ago only shows that Christianity which addresses liberation, justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. will be as opposed by Marxism and post-Marxism as it is, in fact, by capitalism.  The American experience of billionaire and millionaire financed opposition to Pope Francis and the practice of Christianity is pretty much the same thing.  I have ever confidence that the coming years will see a billionaire-millionaire financed American schism, probably led by Raymond Burke or another of the reactionary bishops or cardinals.   If the next Pope is even close in their intentions to Francis and his attempt to make the Catholic church Christian, that's going to come.  In the mean time such movements as the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement will probably slowly grow, identifying as Catholic even as they are officially rejected by the hierarchy.   I wouldn't be surprised if it started while Francis is still alive or soon after the next Pope is elected.   And, as always with American media, they will be presented as the face of "real Catholicism" just as the cargo-cultist, white supremacists are presented as "Christianity."   The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part.  Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds.

What About My Secretary of State! - The Pride And The Shame

I'M SELDOM PROUD of being from the state that I am but I'm so proud of Shenna Bellows for taking the honest and courageous measure to bar the criminal insurrectionist Trump from the Maine ballot in line with the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.   We're not big on vainglory and overweening pride in Maine but there are times you just don't want to avoid it.

On the other hand, Susan Collins has already called for that decision to be overturned, that would be Susan the cowardly hypocrite and liar Susan Collins who has the support of the Republican, now Republican-fascist electronic media in Maine and, because of that,  has a majority of Maine voters duped.   If there's something about my state to be proud of, it ain't our media.   She is the shame of my state, one who knows no shame and who knows she'll never be shamed by the media here no matter how beneath contempt she gets.

Vox in Rama - Mikołaj Zieleński - Chór Insieme

 

Chór Insieme
Monika Bachowska - director

Hate Mail - Boredom Is The Curse Of The Shirking Class And Its Habit

OK, I did what you dared and looked at the baby blue blog again and saw it's pretty much the same names saying the same things they have been saying over and over and over again since the very early 2000s and not much else.   I didn't see anyone I recall as being an interesting comment writer or much of anyone I thought was likeable.  As to it being a "brain trust" (they really believe it is one of those) they seem to believe Simps without verifying what he says so they're pretty gullible though lazy is probably more apt.  Though inept is spot on.  It's Harry Hope's Bar without even that much ambition or range of difference.   They couldn't have written a play about it because its pathos is mired in laziness and conventional expressions rotely recited instead of thought.   I  can't care enough about it to care about it more than that.   I doubt I'll look at it in 2024. 

In The Great Tide Of Human Sin Plagiarism Just Don't Much Impress Me As Evil - Hate Mail

and I'm not convinced what she did amounts to much of it.   If you want a good example of the twisted notions of morality that rule in academia and the goddamned media, the reaction to an accusation of stealing words as opposed to, oh, mass killing, waging unprovoked invasions and wars, economic policy that knowingly causes death and maiming, etc.  AND BALD FACED LYING IN THE MASS MEDIA TO DAMAGE PEOPLES' LIVES AND DEMOCRACY is the shame of the free press, the flower of a twisted interpretation of the First Amendment.  

I wrote about that in one of the early pieces I wrote for my first blog.

Monday, May 15, 2006
 
Feet of Clay Words of Steel

You could be forgiven for getting it wrong. I certainly did. Some of us thought that the self evident crisis in journalism today were the cumulative repeated, uncorrected errors in fact, the inventions of quotations, the verbatim stenography and similar violations of the ever adjustable Code of Journalistic Ethics -- "Gore claims to invent internet, " being the poster example. We assumed that the overarching crisis was that the corporate consolidation of the media had rendered our journalism a tawdry pose fit only to fill up spaces on the cable band so the best in rerun sit-coms could go premium. But we were wrong.

The great crisis facing this foundation of democracy, itself, is that someone has been at the cooky jar, someone's been stealing their snickerdoodles. The great flood of plagiarism is the real danger that faces the nation, with front page stories and network news segments presenting in indepth report on the rolling crime wave. A rather flashy and enterprising Harvard co-ed (having read some of 'her' words I think she has earned the title) has borrowed from an even more eminent auteur of her genre. An executive at Raytheon has taken time off from producing engines of mass death to pilfer the wisdom of one of the ancients of his tribe. And now, we are told that a nameless intra-network jegg has broken into the word hoard of the fictitious President Bartlett of "The West Wing" applying the stolen phrases to the real life news story of an heroic horse trainer. This may be the first instance in history of words written for a fictitious president to say, we assume written by fictitious ghost writers, being applied to what passes as news on our major networks. Though that might be too much to hope at this stage of our politics.
Given that the typical West Wing script is full of references to numerous works other than the script writers' the big deal on this one escapes some of us. A point made online before it was also made on a certain Boston TV program the other night.

Um, hum.

Understand this, though. The press has seen enough. It will act.

So while the Cheney and Bush crime syndicates steal everything in sight, waging wars of conquest abroad, stealing elections and the U.S. Treasury here. As they hand out patronage money and the public schools to any hallelujah peddler with an R after their name. As they dismantle the national parks and turn them into franchise operations for extraction industries we can rest easy. Even as the free press watches the Republican Party donate the internet to the telecom industry, the media can be counted on to provide protection. For their words. Their intellectual property at so-many-cents apiece, down to the most putrid swill issuing from the conservative nepotism newslets, will be made safe from those who would borrow them without attribution and compensation.

Note: Officially, Al Gore pointing out, correctly, that he had a hand in founding the internet is over the top, the Republicans stealing it for their campaign contributors is just swell. Just for those who like to keep track of current ethics. Also note: Since on one gets killed, no one loses their pension and no wildlife habitat is destroyed in the act, plagiarism is a moderately naughty thing to do and at times actionable. This piece is not an invitation to commit crimes or violate the rights of authors to just compensation for their work. Since a "journalist" may read this I should point out that it is an invitation to the press to do their jobs.

The Real Word Criminals, Liars and Racists, Have Making Harvard Rich White And Male Again An Obsession

WHO IN THE ridiculously optimistic early 1970s would have predicted that a half century hence the American establishment would be so obsessed with making Harvard lily white again?   From the big media to the Republican-fascist media, from Congress to hate talk radio, from them to the august organs of the media the pursuit of Claudine Gay, the Black Woman who is the president of Harvard,  is definitive proof that John Roberts' excuse for destroying the Voting Rights Act, that American's traditional form of fascism, white supremacy was over is certainly a big fat whopping lie from one of the major vehicles of promoting that traditional form of fascism.   I can't help but wonder how, in his tiny little heart of hearts, he feels about having a Black Woman as president of the institution which gave him his credentials.   I'd like to see someone look hard at his academic or professional writings to see how pure his use of citation and quoting was.

I have little to no use for much of anything about Harvard and I am entirely skeptical of her areas of academic credentialing as a policy.   That there would be many problems found if anyone looked into any academic paper in the areas of economics and political "science"  wouldn't surprise me.  I'd think there's a rich opportunity to test that in the same way that led to the replicability crisis in the real sciences and other pseudo-social sciences.   I think they'd find lots of corners cut.  That anyone may have innocently had a slight lapse in citation in that area of academic scibbleage would not surprise me in the least.   I would bet that if there was the kind of in depth investigation of dissertations by a randomly chosen sample of those who were credentialed in the social sciences, such practices would be found to be widespread if not virtually universal.  AND I WOULD INCLUDE THE WRITINGS OF THE ECONOMIST LARRY SUMMERS WHO SEEMS TO HAVE PUSHED THE ISSUE.   Larry Summers has a history of issues with both Women and Black People, especially those on the Ivy League level, him having a problem with her is no surprise. 

I'd like to live in a world where there are not elite universities and other universities, I would like to live in a world where there is leveling to the condition of real equality,  I would like to see Harvard and Princeton and the rest of the Ivys have their endowments taxed to provide funds for educational institutions that serve the least among us and the working class and the working middle-class, I would like to see them and the elite preps taxed to provide money for the public schools, I'd like to see all kinds of things happen that won't in my lifetime.

I wonder if anyone went over Larry Summers or the rest of the white supremacy gang who are ganging up on what they could find, or pretend to find. 

Considering the fact that almost all of those going after Claudine Gay are huge promoters of the real crime of lying in the mass media, a crime that academics are so OK with, I think the large majority of real People in the real world should see this for what it is, racists calling out the dogs on a Woman who has committed the offense against white supremacy of gaining the presidency of one of the elite institutions that so recently belonged exclusively to rich white men.  They want it to be again and, in the meantime, the Republican-fascist, white supremacist press will use this to target Black professionals and everyone else who isn't lily white and Republican-fascist. 

Daquin Noël X

 

The organ in Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (Var), was built by Jean-Esprit Isnard, and his nephew Joseph Isnard in 1772, and is probably the finest classical French organ still preserved. Here it's played by the legendary Pierre Bardon, titulaire émérite.

La Bolduc - Voilà Le Père Noël

 

C'est aux petits enfants que je m'adresse maintenant
Si vous voulez des présents, tâchez d'être obéissants.

Paroles Voilà Le Père Noël Qui Nous Arrive
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

On s'en va au magasin pour s'acheter un beau sapin
Et aussi des p'tites bébelles pour garnir l'arbre de Noël.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Il faut bien se préparer pour r'cevoir la parenté
Des beaux beignes et pis des tartes pis un bon ragoût de pattes.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Quand ça vient le Temps des Fêtes, on sait pas où s'mettre la tête,
D'la visite ici et là, faut se coucher su'l'grabat.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Après la Messe de Minuit, les parents pis les amis
La table est préparée, y s'en viennent réveillonner.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Après qu'on a bien mangé, tout l'monde commence à chanter
D'autres y dansent des cotillons qui fait branler la maison.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Après ça Noël est passé, on voudrait se reposer
Les enfants avec leurs bébelles qui nous crient dans les oreilles.
Voilà l'Père Noël qui nous arrive
Tam ti-la-li, ti-la-di de-li-de-lam,
Avec ses rennes pis ses étrennes
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.
Pour qu'y soit de bonne humeur,
Tâchez d'vous coucher d'bonne heure.

Not my transcription, slightly different from how it's sung as far as they get on the original record,  but pretty good. 

My Last Cranky Christmas Piece 2023

I DIDN'T POST my favorite cranky Christmas piece by Garrison Keillor in which he mentions the Unitarians around Cambridge who rewrote  Silent Night so as to make it more about silence and night and leaving God out of it.  No doubt to save the embarrassment of having to consider God and, you know, Jesus Christ had something to do with Christmas.  And as Mary McGlone's piece I borrowed yesterday shows, there is plenty in the original song about sleeping in heavenly peace that misses the point, making one of the most fraught and difficult as well as most welcomed good news of the Nativity story disappear in dangerous sentimentality.  So I've linked to it now in this, another of my own cranky Christmas pieces.  

American Christmas specializes in burying the real meaning of the story in cargo and boozy jollity.  It buries the story, perhaps reportage of the event, the birth of Jesus Christ, the original war on Christmas that FOX Lies carries on on the side of the real holiday here, stuffmas.  The Incarnation story in Luke, which has been so much the focus of debunking, were probably the story of scoffing well before Luke used the stories he had collected to write his account. A pregnant virgin is bound to lead to that, which leads me to believe no one would have made it up as a story they wanted anyone to believe.  That is unless they were convinced of it, sufficiently, themselves.  But within the story is the profound claim of God's relationship with the world and universe which we know so fragmentarily through our experience and through the extension of that in science, that the Creation is in the most intimate and complete way, part of God, that God permeates all of it, most of all, for us, our own selves and lives.  The Incarnation whether it is report or fable is a claim of that in the person of Jesus but the meaning of it is universal.  Certainly, Luke makes that clear and the cast of his account.  Nobodies, a young teenage girl betrothed to a manual laborer (not like a union carpenter today, then they had one of the lowest statuses in that society) pregnant before she was married, someone so far down that she and her husband had to lodge with the animals instead of in the main house, she being very pregnant.  Laying her baby in a feeding trough surrounded by shit and, no doubt, flies and other insects.  And the first people to get the good news were, as McGlone pointed out, very low on the social scale, shepherds.  No kings, no gold, no insense or sweet smelling resins to cover up the smell.  It couldn't possibly be less royal, less priestly, less elite and yet it is hijacked by the worst of those today to put it to the worst of all uses.  

I've slammed Unitarians, myself, living out my entire life in New England I've known more than a few and been more than a bit irritated by some of them.  Especially around college towns.  Some are nice people, some almost as serious on living out the Gospel (if they'd excuse me saying that) as some of the better members of the United Church of Christ or Quakers or radical Catholics but a lot of them are as bad as some of the high church Anglicans and trad-Catholics, just not tending towards Republican-fascism - which is no small distinction, in itself.  I think that their demotion of Christianity through their unitarianism, through their emphasis and then abandonment of something as unfashionable as God does, really, matter.  Even when it stays on the better side from the thoroughly depraved and TV induced cargo-cult Christmas which is merry and meaningless.  And it's such a cheat, even if you got the whole Christmas list from Eartha Kitt's vulgar materialist song to Santa Baby,* it wouldn't be a drop of spit next to the real thing, the news that God cares about you, that God cares about us all, that God cares about the animals and plants and ecosystem and the solar system, that God cares so much about the human experience of the world that he came to share our experience with all of its pain and suffering and even our better days.  And to tell us we had to care about all of that, for all of us, too.   

I have said a number of times I don't believe Creation is supposed to have settled for any past period of human experience, not the worst of times, certainly, but not our rose-tinted memories and imaginings of past times or our present.  I don't think what Brueggemann calls "classical Christianity" was supposed to stand for all times - it couldn't anymore than any other human created system of explanation - or that anything we come up with in this life will stand, either.  Classicism in any area, the absurd and ahistorical elevation of a particular, imaginary past, political, social or religious, is bound to rot into an oppressive system.  The role that classicism played in the fascist and Nazi regimes of the past century is certainly worth considering as an example of that as is, I assert, the Renaissance and classical imagination of the Greek and Roman classical periods.  I don't see the Renaissance as that imaginary improvement on the medieval period which we are all taught to consider it and I certainly don't think the "enlightenment" that still plagues us with its sins is either.   Nor do I think that other tendency in gangster governance that concentrates on an imaginary future, imagined out of Romantic era philosophy and an absurd futurism as "science," Marxism is any better.  All of those and the modern culture of materialist-atheist-scientism are, if anything, more imaginary than Luke's infancy narrative might be and none of them carries the potential to correct the worst aspects of any other framing of reality.  Luke doesn't promise an Earthly utopia, it certainly doesn't hearken back to an idealized and romantically imagined past, it deals far to heavily in honesty and reality to do that.  It does hold up the example of a young pregnant, unmarried girl and her hapless fiance, riding out the storm of Roman occupation and the corrupt period of Judean-Israelite history well into the decay of the Hasmonean era with its corrupt Temple priesthood and more corrupt traditional rulers.  It holds up the by-the-skin-of-their-teeth Shepherds as those deemed by the Angels of God to be those fitting to first know the best news that humanity would ever get, that God had chosen to be born among us to someone on their own social level, living with animals - as they did- living among shit and flies and filth, coping as best they could.  And it was the messengers of God who was telling them that, that they counted enough to have been told that and told it before anyone else had been.  It might have been the first validation of their existence they'd experienced, it was certainly the greatest validation of their lives they could possibly ever have on this side of death.  And they'd have been very familiar with death, babies died in the best of circumstances and those weren't the best of circumstances.  

How does a Christmas tree and presents and American Christmas outshine that?  That it does might hold a clue as to why it was done among those with next to nothing, likely illiterate, certainly uneducated, certainly poor or likely destitute.  They might have been the only ones who could see it.  Writing this reminds me of something I once read about the lives of young street walking prostitutes and the surprise of the author of the article how religious so many of them were.  One said she knew whenever she had to get into a car that God got in the car with her.  I can't imagine what that is like, though I can begin to understand it and understand why I can't see it.  Maybe someday I will understand it better.  Maybe someday I'll know that God is there in the abyss with me, the abyss I can well imagine is coming.  Could there be any better news than that?

* It's too bad that so many younger People know Eartha Kitt only through that kind of thing, she was a lot more than that.   She died on Christmas day, maybe someone should light a candle for her.  Maybe I will.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Timothy X Atack - The Morpeth Carol

 The Morpeth Carol

Nine-year-old Harry lives on the edge of a housing estate in an un-named Northern town, a serious and intelligent lad with a troubled mum and dad. Late on Christmas Eve he escapes his rowing parents and ventures out into the night. and on a snow-covered precinct in between high-rises he finds what looks like a crashed sled, burning presents scattered in its wake, and mortally wounded reindeer all around. There's also a very scary looking man, gaunt, unshaven and hooded, who skulks around the crash site, finishing off the dying animals with a shotgun..

Harry - Paul Copley
Young Harry - Ellis Hollins
The Man - Alun Raglan
Yvonne - Rachel Davies
Mum - Philippa Stanton
Dad - Paul Stonehouse
Policeman 1 - Matthew Watson
Policeman 2 - David Seddon

Directed by Marc Beeby

I posted this last year but I think it deserves a second hearing.   

we'll miss the evangelical message of Christmas if we allow ourselves to sleep in heavenly peace, satiated by Hallmark

I started copying parts of this piece by Mary McGlone and apart from the first short paragraph, I couldn't not include any of it.  I hope you go to the original but here is most of it.  It's one of the best pieces on Christmas I've read in a long time.

Isaiah aptly portrayed his own and Jesus' times by describing people walking in darkness and dwelling in a land of gloom, people who suffered under the rod of an overseer: treated like yoked oxen, valued for their labor and taxes, people whose personhood had ceased to matter. There was little of prosperity or joy stirring while Mary and Joseph trudged along for the 90 miles that separated Nazareth from Bethlehem.

The census that put them on the road, whether historically verifiable or not, symbolized the people's subjugation to a pagan empire. (Israel had been taught that a census of her own was sacrilegious because it demonstrated that the king would rely on his brute power — armies and taxes — rather than God's providence.)

In Luke's infancy narrative, which includes the Annunciation and Visitation, the journey to Bethlehem and lack of room at the inn are the story version of the poetic prologue of John's Gospel, which speaks of the eternal Word becoming flesh and being rejected by his own.

It seems that every epoch, every century of human history, must lament its share of what Isaiah described as boots that trample in battle and cloaks soaked with blood. But those are not nice to think about.

At this time of year, we would prefer that TV show us less of the wars and more of Macy's Parade. Nevertheless, we'll miss the evangelical message of Christmas if we allow ourselves to sleep in heavenly peace, satiated by Hallmark.

Jesus was born in desperate circumstances. His parents, like the 100 million people forced to be on the move today, had no insurance policies, no AAA roadside help and no credit cards to buy their way in somewhere. With no insulation from ever-present difficulties and danger, they were dependent, hopeful for the kindness of strangers.

In this, Mary and Joseph were icons of God and the child they were about to receive into the world. The Creator did not exercise power and might, but set the universe on a course of evolution in which divine love would one day take on flesh and need to rely on the goodwill of people with generous, open hearts.

We must remember that God did not do this to shame the comfortable, but to bring joy to the needy. In Luke's version of the story, neither religious leaders nor the wealthy represented by the Magi noticed the signs of their times.

Who did notice? The shepherds, people of shady reputation, unwashed and unable to observe religious laws — they took the angels' message to heart. These were the ones who, in spite of their fear, left their 99 (more or less) and hastened to Bethlehem to see "what the Lord has made known to us." Then the shepherds became the first evangelists, "glorifying God and making known the message."

For Christians, the Incarnation is the high point of creation. All of the universe exists from God; God is present somehow in everything as a result of divine love. Now we can understand the Incarnation as the essence, the most concrete expression of the revelation of divine love and our clearest image of what God is like. And with this, the story gets more challenging.

When angels appeared to shepherds, they said, "You will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes."

This very ordinary scene turns out to be a scandalous theophany; God's greatest self-revelation is of divinity in diapers. Traditional Byzantine icons of the Nativity depict this by showing the swaddled infant in a manger that could also represent a coffin, his wrapping cloths like those used in burial.

In theologian St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's words, the Incarnation "enacts the kind of divine love that ... enters empathetically into [human] experience, self-identifying with the glory and agony of human life from within, befriending even the godless and the godforsaken."

The evangelical message of Christmas is just that. God longs to be with us, God loves us profoundly and respectfully enough to share our mortal life. From such love, God has become vulnerable to us, never imposing but inviting us into a union possible only when God enters into human life.

The babe wrapped in swaddling clothes is a sign that God exercises power as faithful, loving committed accompaniment in vulnerability. And all of this, to invite us to become like the God who dwells among us, seeking to find a home in us.

We Face Greater Dangers From Vulgar Materialism Than We Do About Religious Disagreements - Last Advent Post From The Unsettling God

 Classical Christianity's Tilt toward Closure

A second vision of reality against which the Old Testament may play is the articulation of classical Christianity.  Here I will deal more briefly with the interface and the tension between construals, for on the whole, classical Christianity shares claims with Israel's testimony against Enlightenment liberalism.  That is, classical Christianity, like ancient Israel, affirms generosity over scarcity, brokenness in the face of denial, and hope instead of despair.  I want to assert only one point that is sharply at issue between these narrative offers.  I have repeatedly stressed that Israel deals with ain incommensurate God who is endlessly at risk in mutuality.  That is, YHWH is seen by Israel to be genuinely dialectical, always on one end of a disputatious transaction that may effect change in YHWH as well as in UHWH's partners. We have seen this profound unresolved already in Exodus 34:6-7.  We have seen it regularly in the noun-metaphors used for YHWH.  Most largely, we have seen this dialectical quality in the juxtaposition of what I have called core testimony and countertestimony.  Israel's transactions with YHWH are indeed characteristically open and unsettled.

It appears to me, granting the enormous difference made by a christological center in Christian faith, that the real issue that concerns us in Old Testament theology is this;  Classical Christianity is tilted in a transcendental direction which gives closure to YHWH and to YHWH's relationships with the partners.  There may be many reasons for such a closure;  perhaps not least is the need of a derivative tradition (Christianity) to substantiate its claim against the precursive tradition (Judaism).  For whatever reason, this tendency to transcendental closure compromises the genuinely dialectical quality of Jewish testimony.  That compromise, however is of crucial importance for what is possible and what is precluded in our discernment of God, world and self.

I do not imagine that Christianity in its classical forms will yield much, soon, on this score.  But there are hints that as Christianity in the West is increasingly disestablished, and so may distance itself from its Hellenistic-Constantinian propensity, it may move in the direction of its Jewish dimension of genuine unsettlement between YHWH and YHWH's partners.  There is no doubt that this drama of brokenness and restoration is shared by Judaism and Christianity.  In Judaism it is a drama of:

exile and homecoming,
death and resurrection,
Pit and rescue, and
Chaos and creation.

To the set categories of discernment, Christianity adds (decisively for its identity) crucifixion and resurrection.  That of course is a specific move the Old Testament (and Judaism) do not make.  The differential on this point is very great.

What strikes me more however, is that these traditions are, in the main, agreed.  That agreement is the basis for a genuine alternative to the nihilism of the modern world, a nihilism contained in the elimination of this incommensurate, mutual One in the interest of autonomy and self-sufficiency.  This testimony of Israel, echoed by Christianity, not only gives different answers - it insists on different questions, wherein the answers offered are perforce thin and tenuous, but not for that reason unuttered.  The intramural quarrels in the church, and the ancient alienations between Christians and Jews are unconscionable, in my judgement, when this lean, resilient tradition stands as a fragile alternative to the embrace of the Nihil.

If Christianity could avoid a view of things that results in closure, given that at the center of Christianity is the figure of Jesus, his life and his Gospel, his death and Resurrection, might be asked.   I don't think that's the same as figuring that human interaction with God and our evolving relationship is once and for all settled.  I do think that the clearly wrong idea that the return of Jesus Christ was about to happen during Paul's time and the continuation of history may have played an over-large part in any declaration or notion that that relationship had been settled could account for that rupture in the Hebrew tradition.   Though I would point out that the earliest history of Christianity, especially, the very one in which that thinking came about was, almost exclusively at the start and even in a majority for at least the first few generations very much a part of the Hebrew Scriptural informed world.  As everyone always seems to have to be reminded Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, James was, likely the author of Mark was, perhaps the writer of Matthew, maybe even John, as well.  But the entire New Testament is steeped in the same tradition that the Hebrew Bible is based in - if in the Jewish scholarly translations into Greek starting some centuries earlier.*   I don't know how you can find a bright line that definitively separates Christianity as decisively "un-Jewish" if by that you mean what was around at the times and in the places relevant to this discussion in the First Century.  The history of the world, certainly of Europe and the Middle East would have been entirely different if the kind of comity Brueggemann hopes for was practiced.   I think there is a great opportunity for unsettlement for Christians if we are always, constantly reminded of the perceived tensions between Christianity and the Old Testament Scriptures which we must take as authoritative if not, necessarily, normative in mandating our actions.

I don't think Christianity, in its best sense, needs to apologize for being Christian but in its best sense it would never have done the things that so much of Christian history records.  I do think that the person of Jesus, the teachings he taught, the faith in his Resurrection and his ministry is decisively different from what is recorded in the Old Testament but I don't think Jesus would have ever wanted anyone following him to forget that he was a Jew, he is recorded as quoting the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, etc. extensively, of making recourse to Abraham and, reportedly, was advised by Moses and Elijah in the Transfiguration.   If there is a problem with Christianity, it's that it forgot all of that, certainly in the West, certainly even in much of Protestantism, even such branches of that as Lutheranism and Calvinism and, most remarkably, in much of the Anabaptist divergence from that Protestantism.   Especially by American Baptists. 

But I don't think Christianity needs to feel so secure in its relationship with God as if Jesus made all of the enormous trial of being a human being in the physical universe disappear, as if the whatever reason we are created as we are where we are hasn't continued on even with his death and Resurrection.  Paul's extremely subtle and complex theology dealing with that made things that were going to be hard, anyway, just as hard even as they articulated so much.  And Paul, himself, declared himself to not only be a Jew but a Pharisee, even as he was preaching his own experience of the Risen Christ.  

I do think that Walter Brueggemann is right, in the face of a far more destructive rupture in the Hebrew experience and knowledge of God, that of modernism, of "enlightenment" liberalism - which certainly includes what Americans and Brits, etc. call "conservatism" and which certainly includes much that is nominally Christian - and the materialist seduction of the world, both the tradition faithful to only the Old Testament and that which includes the New Testament have to struggle in common against that.  It is probably, if anything, worse at this most vulgarly materialistic time of year than it often is.  The institutional enemies of the God who commands justice, who commands equality, who commands charity to widows, orphans, illegal aliens, and even the just treatment of slaves and animals are rampant.  They have never been anything but strong but they are stronger now than ever since the classical period.  I don't think Christians giving up Christianity would help - it is no small issue that the largest, by far, population who take the Hebrew Scriptures seriously are Christians with Muslims in second place.   What is needed is a different focus that takes the Old Testament much more seriously than it has been taken.  One step in that direction was made at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s when, especially in reaction to the crimes of the Nazis and WWII in general, it was mandated that texts from the Hebrew Bible would take a far greater role in the Catholic lectionary and far more of a role in Catholic teaching and scholarship.  I think that Walter Brueggemann has become the great scholar of the Old Testament that he is, as an ordained Christian minister, is certainly a part of the same trend in Christianity.  That is one that has to continue or Christianity will become just another part of the materialist-atheist-scientistic blob that is enveloping the human species and destroying the world.  

* I have come to really question the idea that the Septuagint Old Testament is knowably less valid than the Hebrew Masoretic text is.  The present day text is, itself, unknown to have existed until well into the Common Era.  The evidence is that there were many variant texts of the Old Testament around in the first century of the Common Era.  The text we have today is as much a matter of long periods of editing and the influence of external events - the destruction of Jerusalem is thought to have greatly reduced the diversity of texts.   I think the present Hebrew text is no less a matter of shaping than the Septuagint was.  And there are still variants current in Israel, itself, the Samaritans keeping a different version of it as authoritative.

Callie Crossley's Annual Show With Mike Wilkins' Merry Christmas Mix

LOOK FORWARD to this every year.   I prefer listening to the host and guest talking about most of them to listening to the whole thing, though he regularly finds some gems that you'd almost certainly never find.

Mr. Mike's Merry Mix

The Next To Last Advent Post From An Unsettled God

Israelite Hope versus Enlightenment Despair

At the culmination of Israel's portrayal of reality is a certitude and a vision of newness, a full restoration to well-being that runs beyond any old well-being.  
This culmination in well-being, assured by the resolve of YHWH, is articulated in the conclusion of most psalms of complaint and in prophetic promises that eventuate in messianic and apocalyptic expectations.  Israel's speech witnesses to profound hope, based in the promise-maker and promise-keeper for whom all things are possible.

Israel refuses to accept that any context of nullity - exile, death, chaos - is a permanent conclusion to reality.  Israel, in such circumstance, articulated hope rooted not in any discernible signs in the circumstance, but in the character of YHWH (based on old experience),  who was not a prisoner of circumstance but was able to override circumstance in order to implement promises.  This hope is not incidental in Israel's life;  it is a bedrock, identity-giving conviction, nurtured in nullity, that YHWH's good intentions have not and will not be defeated. As a consequence, complainers anticipate well-being and praise. Israel awaits home-coming, the dead look to new life, creation expects reordering.

All of this requires confidence in an agent outside of the system of defeat.  Enlightenment liberalism, which sets the liberated, self-sufficient human agent at the center of reality, can entertain or credit no such agent outside the system.  Without such an agent who exists in and through Israel's core testimony, there are no new gifts to be given and no new possibilities to be received.  Thus, put simply, the alternative to Israelite hope is Enlightenment despair.  In such a metanarrative, when human capacity is exhausted, all is exhausted.  Ultimate trust is placed in human capacity, human ingenuity, and human technology.  It is self-evident that such a trust cannot deliver, and so ends in despair, for self-sufficiency is only a whisker away from despair.  Such a reading of reality engenders fear and hate, self-hate, and brutality, But Israel, inside its peculiar testimony, refuses such a reading. 

This reminds me of how addicted we are to declarations that nothing is to be done on the basis of nothing but an ambiguously or imperiously issued fiat.  In the most common context for someone living in the United States, we await the ambiguous and imperiously issued fiat of a five-four or larger declaration of the Supreme Court, whether or not American democracy has a future.  They issue such fiats regularly to the effect that nothing is to be done about the epidemic of mass gun murder in American schools, destroying the lives of children, even very young ones.  That fiat is based on the often make-believe secular law of the Constitution, and because of that unholy scripture, noting is to be done even though anyone with a working mind knows what can be done.  That previous courts held otherwise, as well doesn't matter.  That such overturning of Supreme Court precedent negates the authority of that court to do anything and be taken as authoritative is not to matter, by fiat of the Supreme Court.

Similar fiats are regularly issued in many modern academic and intellectual categories, in science, no less than anything other.  I especially like the arbitrary and authoritative fiat that phenomena which are very well established, established by rigorous experimental science which its critics cannot find any flaw with or any flaw in the quantitative analysis of the data resulting from those experiments cannot be right "BECAUSE" that because never as well defined or demonstrated as the experimental results that are rejected.  I'm speaking of what is probably the most rigorously conducted of all science, these days, the scientific investigation of parapsychology.   Of course, mentioning that is forbidden by arbitrary, authoritative fiat enforced by coercive disapproval and shunning.   

Such nullification is rampant under the "enlightenment" materialist-atheist-scientistic culture which the Hebrew religious tradition is in conflict with.

I state the contrast as boldly and sweepingly as I know how.  The drama of brokenness and restoration, which has YHWH as its key agent, features generosity, candor in brokenness and resilient hope, the markings of a viable life.  The primary alternative now available to us features scarcity, denial and despair, surely the ingredients of nihilism. 

I have continually found that the general culture of the "enlightened" enemies of faith is a rather sad and pathetic thing.   The despair and denial and nihilism is generally never far from the surface of merriment and soporific distraction, which is certainly part of the popular, common received culture of the United States, much of Europe and elsewhere.  That the circuses of electronic entertainment is the primary formation of most peoples active minds instead of learning seems relevant to this, to me.  The amount of drinking, taking drugs (especially, perhaps those prescribed by doctors) and wallowing in hate, given how long the West has been wallowing in "enlightenment" might give us reason to doubt the claims of that hegemony that rules us and our institutions.   It is remarkable that the association of active religious belief with better health and more happiness and less addiction, etc. and its opposite, the uninvolvement with and rejection of religion are associated with more negative results, on the basis of many studies more rigorous than most sociology is doesn't gain any traction.

To be sure, for all its venturesome witness, Israel did not always choose cleanly.  Israel accommodated and compromised,  In practiced scarcity as much as it trusted generosity.  It engaged occasionally in denial, for all its embrace of brokenness.  It lived close to despair, for all its resources of hope.  The amazing thing, in my judgement, is not that Israel compromised;  it is that Israel kept its testimony as sustained as it did amid the pressures and demands of its circumstance.  It kept its testimony enough of a coherent assertion that it was able to say, in the voice of YHWH, to itself, to its own children, and to any others who would listen:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.  If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.  But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish;  you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess..  I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him;  for that means life to you and strength of days so that you may live in the land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:15-20)

This Deuteronomic assertion, derivative from the vision of Moses, proved durable enough for Israel that in its season of rehabilitation, Ezra could still affirm: "Nevertheless, in our great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God" (Nehemiah 9:31).  The choosing between construals of reality is something Israel always had to do again.  And the choosing is not yet finished.  

I can believe that.