I don't care.
Update: Nope, not about that either.
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
At All Of Those Holding Up Passage of Build Back Better - Warren Wolf - You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch
Warren Wolf – vibraphone, piano, Logic Pro X Timpani
Jeff Reed – acoustic bass
Carroll “CV” Dashiell III – drums
Micah Smith – vocals
Second Draft In An Ice Storm - The Idea The Mean Old Christians Stole the Yule From Those Nice Nature Loving Vikings May Be Even More Crap Than I'd Thought Before
I JUST LOST the long post I was writing updating my semi-annual poke at the accusation that those mean old Christians stole Yule from those poor, gentle, nature-loving folk, the pagans of Northern Europe. You know, the ones who practiced human, especially, female slave sacrifice as documented in at least one eye-witness account and in excavations of chieftain burials. I lost it in the electricity flickering during the awful ice storm we're having - thank you global warming - so I'll keep this short.
Looking for new material to add to the picture of that Osburg tapestry showing a pagan ceremonial sacrifice, including humans and animals, I found a fascinating paper by Eirik Storesund, a scholar of Old Norse and its litereature that says that the modern myth that the Norse Yule had anything to do with the winter solstice is totally unsupported in the Saga and other literature and so the whole modern conception of it - a conception shared with those big fat lovers of Norse paganism, the Nazis - is a big fat lie.
Take a moment to take a long, hard stare at the sun (proverbially of course). Is it not radiant? The tempting assumption that the solstices (and equinoxes) formed the basis of pre-Christian Scandinavian religious feasts, is prevalent not only in modern Heathenry and Ásatrú, but is also reproduced in countless popular media articles on the ancient origins (no pun intended) of Yule in Northern Europe. This view was also widely held by scholars of the field up until the turn of the last century, and though fewer think so today, it has somehow stuck. Even if many have changed their opinion in recent years, this has hardly seeped into the public consciousness.
It doesn't seem too idiotic at face value: The Nordic area can be a dang cold and harsh place. It's not exactly the fertile crescent. We'll take all the sunshine we can have. The old idea that Viking Age Scandinavians celebrated jól on the winter solstice as a sort of solar adoration, is among the most prevalent yuletide claims you'll see presented on the internet (or wherever) this year. It would seem intuitive that Viking Age Scandinavians greatly missed the sun at winter, and if jól was celebrated around the solstice, close to Christmas, it seems to explain how Christianity could simply just walk into Scandinavia and appropriate the heck out of our gluttonous solar feast.
As you must have guessed by now, it's quite more complicated than that, and it rests on a massive jump to conclusions with no direct support in any of the primary sources. And it’s not as if Old Norse texts never said anything about exactly when the yuletide sacrifices should commence, because they totally do, and it coincides with the astronomical winter solstice in exactly no source whatsoever. But that’s good news, because if you are like me, that’s a good excuse to celebrate the season not one or two, but three times properly.
None the less, you will find no shortage people who insist that the opposite is true, refusing to let the evidence speak for itself. To paraphrase the Swedish archaeologist Andreas Nordberg (cf. 2006: 102): Those who insist on refering to jól as the solstice, must be more interested in the solstice itself, than they are in sources for Norse religion.
Do go read it and look at the higher resolution picture of the sacrifice tapestry than I've had access to post in the past. I might write more about this later if the electricity doesn't go again. Modern life has a lot to answer for, too.
Everybody's Talking 'Bout Heaven Ain't Going To Heaven - Really Stupid Anti-Christian Hate Mail
IF MY MEMORY IS CORRECT when I heard an interview with the biologist Rupert Sheldrake a few years back, I transcribed this passage from it because it struck me as so relevant to my experience of conversion to the Hebrew based monotheistic tradition.
I then took a job in India,. In 1974 I became the principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute in Hyderabad in India.
So, I lived in India for about seven years, partly because I was so intrigued by oriental philosophy, and the last thing I expected was being drawn back towards a Christian path, I thought I’d left that far behind me. But the longer I was in India, the more I realized that a great deal about my own nature and being was shaped by my Christian background.
For example, I had a conversation with one of my Hindu colleagues, this was in the evening after work and he said, “Why do you do what you do?” and I said, “Well, I want to help poor farmers and I want to help poor people lead a better life by improving cropping systems and breeding better crops,” and I said, “What about you?” He said, “For me it’s a job, it’s a good job.” I said, “But what about helping people?” He said, “If people are poor, that is their problem, it is their karma, that is from their previous life. That is not your problem. Your problem is to look after your own spiritual development,” he said.
Then, I realized so much of Southern Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism and Hinduism is about following your spiritual path that basically leads to vertical takeoff for those who follow it. The rest of the world is a hopeless place with waves of reincarnation and samsara and karmic bondage, things are basically getting worse, according to their world view and will continue to do so, and the only thing an individual can do is get off.
Then, I realized that in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, there’s a very different dimension, it’s much more about community, about, we’re in this together, and this very strong sense of interlinking with a community, rather than just an individual quest. It made me realize I was much deeper in the Christian tradition than I’d thought.
For me it was arguing for the reality of justice with some online Buddhists early in my online life. I said justice was not only real it was one of the most central moral realities with the most obviously real consequences which real People experience and can understand in real life. They said it was a mere illusion to be left behind on their quest for personal enlightenment. I bet them that if they were victims of serious injustice in their lives, instead of being affluent and comfortable, they would have no problem understanding injustice made very real in their own, personal experience instead of impersonal theory.
While there is much in Buddhism I respect, various moral positions, non-harming, telling the truth, etc. their very useful and impressive study of meditation,* that lack of a teaching of the consequential moral commandment to do justice and its extension into universal love which is active and not passive, not theoretical but actively required within the teachings of the Buddha seems to me to be a seriously fatal defect. There are Buddhists who do those things but the extent to which they have to leave the body of the doctrines of Buddhism to do it would be interesting to hear from them.
Buddhism American Style, the kind that can contain the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg, myriads of TV hucksters and online gurus, the kind that can contain the pedophile Alan Ginsberg and the scads of degenerate cult leaders in this or that North American Buddhist money making racket is as much of a scandal as the allegedly Christian, Jewish and Islamic criminal cults and gangster operations that the rest of it gets tarred with. What you bring up.
That's, to a large extent, just another of the manifestations of the grotesquely stupid way that the slave-owner - financiers who wrote the Constitution saddled us with things like the enforced stupidity of judges and "justices" and prosecutors pretending that they couldn't tell the difference between someone trying to practice the charity to the poorest among us morally required by The Law, The Prophets, The Gospels and Epistles and, I understand, The Qu'ran and a bunch of obvious hucksters on the make. No doubt our experience of life under the Constitution without that absurd requirement to pretend to not be able to see the difference between what saints do and what con-men and gangsters do in the name of religion would be far different than what we've got with it but I can't help but thinking it would be worth seeing what kind of injustices not playing pretend that way produces instead of the clear injustices that playing pretend like the judges and "justices" do produces.
The Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul, James, etc. are always there with the warning of what happens if you don't feed the hungry, clothe the naked, treat the sick, treat the prisoner with loving regard instead of brutal indifference and violence, hoarding money while a poor person dies of poverty right in front of you, etc.
Joe Manchin, if he really wants to be a Christian instead of merely professing to be one would not be able to have said the things about the poor people of his state that he did, though that kind of thing is so endemic to Christianity, especially in the most conservative regions of the United States, that it is explainable how it has gotten such a bad reputation. Though if he is not just lying about being a Catholic, being a Christian, he has certainly heard all of that when the Gospel is read during mass. You could say exactly the same thing about every, single member of the Republican Party who profess Christianity and, The Law containing the same teachings, those who profess Judaism.
Krysten Sinema, as an atheist, her hypocrisy and duplicity, her grifting as she tells the poor of her state and the nation to fuck off, that's not inconsistent with atheism which rejects any metaphysical basis of morality.
There are members of the Democratic Caucus in the Congress, House and Senate, who either profess Buddhism or who do not specify any religious belief who are better at following the Gospel of Jesus in their political careers and, I would bet, personal lives than the large majority of those who profess Christianity. Where they get it from, I don't know but I see the presence of it in how they vote, what they do, what they say, the passion with which some of them say it and I have no doubt that they deserve to have whatever their ideological basis for it respected.
* I have found combining some of the Buddhist method with the substance of the monotheistic tradition was better than the typically presented practice of concentrating on some banal physical experience. I found that as futile as merely reciting the rosary without any real thought, something I figured out when nasty old Jansenist Fr. D gave me some enormous penance for the kind of naughtiness I got up to as a young kid.
I never say the rosary, the command to say it given by alleged Marian apparitions is one of the things that makes my sense of a fake go up. That and her obsession with things like the lengths of girl's skirts instead of feeding the starving and clothing and housing those without those things, the kinds of things that she sang in the Magnificat.
Considering It More
ACTUALLY, I PREFER the dynamic equivalent translation I heard in a production of Happy End sometime in the 70s or 80s, "Knockin' over a bank's no crime compared to ownin' one." Like Raymond Chandler, I'll give this much to Brecht, he could write a really great line that was true, even if the total effect of his work is anything from nonsense to the equivalent of Springtime For Hitler.
It's one of the tragedies of Marx and Marxism that they didn't stick to the part of it that was spot on accurate, his critique of capitalism and leave the really horrible part of it, his prescriptions for an alternative that he claimed was scientifically inevitable in the garbage can of history. Marx the critic was a great man, Marx the constructor of the future was the author of something that was from as bad to far worse.
Update: You know, I'm kind of disappointed that no one pointed out I mixed up the name of the somewhat obscure and forgotten American composer Theodore Chandler with the over-rated gumshoe novelist, the master of the snappy one liner and not really a master of much else, Raymond Chandler while typing. It was the later who I would have compared to Brecht had I not made that mistake after a largely sleepless night.
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians
IT PISSES ME OFF to find someone scamming low income and even fairly successful artists, appropriating their work through a scam and getting away with it. I'll point out looking up the NYT reporter Ian Urbina, yep, he's a prep-Ivy product, in his case the ultra prestigious vehicle for getting rich boys into Ivy league schools and right into the upper levels of the establishment, St. Albans and then to the first or second most prestigious Jesuit school in the country, Georgetown, where you can get credentials that will fulfill the purpose of St. Albans, putting you into the 1% or their higher level hirelings but your chances of coming out a decent person of high morals are probably far less than average. Prep-ivy probably puts out a higher percentage of crooks, swindlers, cheats and murderers than the juvenile prisons in the country do. Only they're in a position to get away with it because our "justice system" is staffed by the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and cousins and buddies of the crooks. They are really good at making their crimes unillegal.
Here, listen to this.
Magnificat (Znamenny Chant)
St. Symeon Orthodox Church Choir, Birmingham, Alabama
Aside from the surprise to me that shouldn't be surprising at all, is this choir from this Orthodox Church from Birmingham, Alabama. I don't know why it should be anymore surprising to me to find out there are Orthodox Christians in Alabama anymore than it is to find them in New England.
I looked at their website and especially liked this answer in their F.A.Q.s page
The Orthodox Church in America, or OCA, is the successor of the first mission to North America begun by St. Herman and other Russian monks in Alaska in 1794. The Church has been in America since that time and was granted autocephalous (self-governing) status by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. At the time we took the name “Orthodox Church in America,” because our mission is to be a Church for all peoples in America, and not to any particular ethnic group. We are in full communion with the Greek Orthodox Church and the other Orthodox Churches throughout the whole world.
I like catholicity in Christian Churches. It's so much friendlier than nationalism. Come to think of it, I like it in governments, too.
Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was but imaginative education reads toward unthought possibility, irrefutable surging of newness that is inherent in God's ordering of Creation
Sixth. The triad of fidelity majors in imagination whereas the triad of control specializes in explanation. Of course we need both as we learn from Humboldt and Diltaie (?) [I am unfamiliar with this name, if someone thinks they know who the far more erudite than I WB means, please tell me]. But in a world of technological reductionism, positive reason explanation comes to contain everything and education consists of mastering the rules and procedures for linear clarity in order to get ahead in the current system. Explanation is a strategy for accumulation of what the system offers.
And imagination is the contrast, is the capacity to host a contrast world. So, in my discipline of Old Testament Studies historical criticism has been a long-term German enterprise to fit The Bible to the present age. But now we are being led to this post-critical move to discover that the text is so subversive in its imagination. It turns out, as Michael Walzer has shown that the Exodus narrative is not a report on some ancient happening and it does not really matter if Pharaoh is Ramses or Merneptah, as we bicker about, because Pharaoh is whoever sits on top of the pyramid. It turns out that the Exodus event was a divine stirring in South Africa with Egyptian names like Nelson and Desmond.
It turns out that the script of steadfast love justice and righteousness eventuates in freedom, dignity and equity and continues its transformative work. It turns out that the manna story is not simply an ancient story about bread in the wilderness but it is an act of recognition that all bread is not the property of the cartel who own the granaries and the bakeries.
Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was but imaginative education reads toward unthought possibility, irrefutable surging of newness that is inherent in God's ordering of Creation.
So our contemporary marching, as they did in Exodus has run from the Freedom Rides to the Velvet Revolution to Yeltsin on top of the tank to the march in Selma to hope-filled Cairo and now to the 99 Percent, we are marching, we are marching we are marching in the light of God. And the narrative is not only performed in the streets, it is performed wherever decision makers gather.
But what a vocation for the university to be a school of imagination. To nurture imagination out beyond the blueprints and the programs to new ways of being in the world together.
In the past two decades, since I went online a lot, several things have changed drastically about the way I think. One of those I can directly attribute to reading the 4th century theologian Gregory of Nyssa and, through him, a deeper reading of scripture in regard to The Creation and how time and history work, that God created the Creation to change and never to go back, to move toward whatever God's future is to be, taking us and our contrary and evil actions and the results of those into that future but always having the upper hand, God's results not deterred by us though the history before that future culmination or culminations are to be.
Nostalgia as a plan, as well as being futile because the remembered or imagined past cannot be brought back in our future, it is wrong, both in its imperfect and incomplete memory and in its total effect. We can't know the past comprehensively, we can only imagine that we do.
If, as Brueggeman probably correctly says, "Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was . . . " unless it is admitted that the how it was is only a model and not how it really was, that education produces a lying fiction and not accurate information that is any kind of a reliable means of planning the future. Though he concentrates on the kind of explanatory education that is provided by universities, colleges, high schools, etc. the most potent and powerful and dangerous explanatory education is provided by movies and TV and Broadway rap and boogy shows and "historical" novels and on down.
Those account for the difference between the education that produces Black Lives Matter and the program of marching, marching, marching Walter Brueggemann cites and the opposing movements of the billionaire AstroTurf Tea Party, white supremacist, Republican-fascist, Trump rally, Gadsden Flag carrying, anti-mask-anti-vaxx alternative which is rather completely a product of the explanations of Hollywood, Broadway, TV, Facebook, etc. The entertainment media is our most ubiquitous educational institution swamping the universities on down. It inevitably educates in the explanatory mode that Brueggmann warns of, even it's ersatz imagination is planned to have an effect to support the program of the triad of control.
The use of the term "imagination" in the excellent way Walter Brueggemann does here is imperfect because every single thing we do with our minds is totally, entirely, always dependent on our imagining the things we think about, the images we have in even rigorous scientific imagination, those we depend on to produce the most accurate information we can have is entirely dependent on our acts of imagination. That is another thing I have learned, especially from my brawls with "skeptics" and materialists and atheists who, their explanatory educations being so total, can't imagine that what they do is a product of their imaginations.
In our idiotically psychology and positivist imaginings, the act of imagination is generally relegated to the willful delusion of whoever we want to designate as deluded and so to dismiss. That is probably what any scientistic atheist materialist who heard this passage from Brueggemann's talk would have as their first resort to make the God talk go away. But the idea that they have access to information of complete reliability about anything, that their planning and modeling is totally objective and an act of rigorous objective science and mathematics is only their denial of what they are doing. It is one of the most common acts of imagination by those with university and college granted credentialed that they have achieved some kind of independence from the basic methods of babies and toddlers and children understanding their raw experience and their remembered experience of the days or months or few years they have to build on and explain their experience.
They may as well imagine that their most sophisticated acts of science, technology, engineering and mathematics is free of the first five numbers they learned to count on their fingers because those had to be imagined to be relevant to anything, the abstraction of counting and set making as much an act of imagination as the imagined jillions of universes that some of the most arrogant and ideological of scientists do along with the merely imagined mechanisms of natural selection in the life sciences in their colleagues in another department of their school, as well.
Especially timely to right now, it is true of those economists and MDs who imagine that masks are not necessary and horse wormer is a miracle cure and even As Seen On TV MDs asserting it would be acceptable for 2 or 3 percent of children in our public schools are a reasonable price to pay for pretending that Covid-19 isn't a world changing event on the basis of their imaginary "herd immunity" which doesn't seem to be in evidence as omicron takes hold.
My imagination tells me this is a permanent thing and experience of it tells me worse than even this is possible unless we change human culture, politics, the law, drastically and fast. Freedom that doesn't face that reality isn't freeing, it's homicidal fantasy with college credentials.
Monday, December 20, 2021
Read RMJ's Latest Advent Post, It's A Really Fine One
RMJ's post today is a (Long) Meditation For The Fourth Week Of Advent. Here's just a little of it from his section on the Luke narrative.
We hasten Mary's pregnancy the better to heighten the narrative tension
and prove the world a cruel and harsh place, inimical to the savior; and
ignore our role in making the world that way. It doesn't happen that
Mary is forced to a stable to give birth while animals look on, and it
doesn't happen that she is in labor even as Joseph tries in vain to find
a place to stay. We invented that part to make their plight worse than
even Luke says it is, to overlook the power of the government in
forcing the family on this journey, to overlook a system that makes Mary
and Joseph poor ("Carpenter" meant one step up from beggar, not a
journeyman tradesman with a union card. Jesus' father is no better off
than the fishermen he will recruit later; he recruits them because he's
one of them, he grew up as poor as they live.). We want the story to be
a bit crueler so we can tell ourselves we'd have taken better care of
them if we'd been there; but we don't now. Brueghel and Auden
are our corrective. An anonymous poet is our corrective. Luke sets up
the obstacles to our comfort; over the centuries we've done our best to
flatten them out.
Joseph appears for the first time in this narrative, and he has no role
in it except "husband." His role here is social: to make Mary and
Jesus legitimate. Mary still takes center stage; where she is silent in
Matthew's telling, she is the actor in Luke's. More reversals, because
the angels never speak to Joseph, but they go out to the hills where
the shepherds are awake (!) and sing to them.
The thing about shepherds is, they aren't the pale and idyllic figures of later Romantic literature (some 1800 years later!). They are outlaws, bikers, people on the fringe of a society that has a very large and broad fringe (imagine a funnel with a point at the top for the Emperor, a very attenuated reach up to the Emperor, and a very, very broad base out of all proportion to the peak. It's a system of patronage, where wealth concentrates at the top and trickles down to the bottom, a bottom where the majority live, and where very little wealth trickles down. On the far edge of that bottom, you find the shepherds.). They stink, and they steal. You can't brand sheep, and if a few more come home with you than you left with, that's to your benefit. They live outside town, they aren't welcome among polite company, they have their own rules of behavior and they scare most people, the way working class workers do to this day. If such a thing were known then, they would be migrant immigrant labor. This is who the angels sing to; this is who comes to see Mary's baby. The people we want doing our lawns, building our buildings, cleaning our offices; but never, ever crossing our border. . .
You should read the whole thing, I've read it twice so far.
They are powered by a holy resolve that is incessantly subversive
Getting back to Slow Wisdom As A Subversion of Reality by Walter Brueggemann
Fifth. The triad of fidelity specializes in dreams that are not held back by circumstance whereas the triad of control takes life as a present possession to be kept the way it is to perpetuity. The totalizing system of those who make the rules, manage the money and administer the power and mobilize their wisdom is every day everywhere evident among us. That totalizing system aims to maintain advantage. The capacity to control and own to perpetuity is evident through deregulation and the stacking of cards by law and by predatory management that finally ends in a society that is short on social possibility.
So Pharaoh, in his totalizing sovereignty could finally state in his illusion about himself, "The Nile is my own, I made it." He forgot that the Nile was a gift.
And so Jezebel can say to her pouting, husband king, "Do you not now govern? Get up and be cheerful and I will give you his vinyard. Are you not a king, are you not entitled, do you not possess the leverage to have what you want?" She imagines that the land is hers to give Ahab. And when she has done her nefarious manipulation, she says to her wimpish husband-king, "Go take possession of the vinyard of Naboth for he is not alive but dead." And the narrator says as soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead he went and took possession. It's all about realized eschatology, that what we have is permanent, to be secured and protected through entitlement.
And from below comes the cadence of the dream. Dream is always subversive of present arrangement, the dream always intruded into the sleep of Pharaoh who thought he had everything. And then he dreamed seven lean cows and seven blighted shocks of wheat.
And Nebuchadnezzar, who had it all dreamed of a tree being cut down, driven from his power to insanity. The Prophets or voices of God's dream, they say, all the time, "In that day, in that day, the days are coming, the day to come, is a day of disarmament when swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, the day is coming when the Lord will act against all heapers," - this is the text I was reading in class on 9-11, Isaiah 2 "For the Lord has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that's lifted up against all the cedars of Lebanon and against all the oaks of Bashan, against all the high mountains, against the lofty places, against every high hill, against every fortified wall. The days are coming and they cannot be stopped."
They are powered by a holy resolve that is incessantly subversive.
And if we trace the dream of subversion we can follow it from Martin at the Lincoln Monument where he said repeatedly, "I have a dream." And the reason we follow his cadences is that we know that is dream is the dream of our society writ deep. It is the dream of God for justice, righteousness and steadfast love. And like all such dreamers, Martin had no clue about how to get from here to there. He only knew that the dream had substance and force and could not be stopped. The trajectory of the poets imagined that the dream is still underway, still overcoming apartheid, still working dignity for the weak, still demanding equity for the poor, still ensuring an end to the of the systemic violence that we choose to call "policy."
The university is always deciding how it will serve the forces of possession. In the real world it must be so but it must also do other than that and more than that because the world is not closed into present power arrangements. The world does not stand still simply because we arrive at our preferred arrangements. And so the dreamers finally were able to say, "Go tell John that the blind see and the lame walk or the lepers are cleansed or the deaf hear and the dead are raised and the poor have good news because the world is always breaking open beyond possession to dream. And the dream continually bites us.
Who do you imagine is more likely to work for equality, economic justice, all of the things that The Reverend MLK jr. abbreviated into that Beloved Community I mentioned the other day, someone who believes we are material objects or someone who believes what Walter Brueggemann presents as the alternative to the triad of control?
I think, in the end, the failure of the secularist, materialist mind even retaining those minimal habits of feeling good will that can be found among them to actually achieve anything is the force that MLK thought bent the arc of the universe toward justice, the kind that might show up better in a dream than in any scientific measurement because science isn't made to measure that kind of thing. It is measured in considered, shared, observed and lived human experience and human history.
The dream certainly bites those big and little would be Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars among us, the investors, the fund managers, the billionaires and millionaires but it bits us would be alternative in another way, we have to be the conscious, actual producers of that dream in life. It is one of the tragedies of MLK that that one speech was coopted and distorted into a pantomime to be delivered once a year on a Monday holiday of depleted meaning. It might have gotten more to the point if he'd said, "I have a demand," or "I have a warning" though it probably wouldn't have gotten as far as it did if he put it in those terms. You've got to be really careful what words you choose and often even then they'll steal it and use it against your intentions. The holy resolve that is incessantly subversive is what the dream really is and the belief that it is possible and will come but only if we make it come.
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 - More On The Manchin Betrayal And The Secular Left Likely Making Things Worse
IN THE PART of Walter Brueggemann's Slow Wisdom As A Sub-version of Reality I posted the other day, there is this passage which I put a paragraph break in for some reason I don't recall:
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.
Consider the second part of that. The Torah, The Law, The Mishpat asserts that social existence has a covenantal shape, that our socieities are based on mutually agreed to promises and obligations to each other welfare, not on rugged individualism and illusions of independent, autonomous units of self-interest.
Consider even more how Breuggemann, rightly and, given his life's work of studying Torah, identifies what freedom apart from those mutually agreed to promises and obligations to each other's welfare leads to, those with more power getting the freedom for themselves to exploit the vulnerable Neighbor. That is what happens, that is like a capsule history of the political history of humanity and our economics in easily almost all of it. And the results are nothing that the largest majority of People have any stake in pretending it's going to come out with them being the ones on top.
It is why the Jewish tradition, the tradition that starts with the story of slaves held in bondage, facing genocide through Pharaoh's fiat that all of the boys born to the Hebrews should be killed,* extending through their long journey to the promised land and their further trials and blessings, falling back, failing and trying again comes to make the most audacious claims in the history of human politics and economics, 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.
That is more radical than any secular social reform movement has ever asserted, it is more radical than what loves to consider itself the leftiest of the lefty left. Those anti-democratic systems fail to even start to get there for similar and opposite reasons that the anarchists (who love to believe they are the quintessence of leftiness) do. Anarchists are too focused on autonomy and unfettered freedom and are generally hostile to the possibility that laws higher than human choice are at all important in any of this. They imagine that things are just going to happen for the better as if there is anything in human history or the natural world that would lead someone to rationally believe that that is going to happen without human planning and intention on the basis of good will and a kind of disinterested universal love that is most certainly not what I've read expressed in much, if any political anarchist literature. Other than, maybe Tolstoy and Dorothy Day, anarchists lean far more to the love of violence and dependence on anger and hatred and, in the case of that poster-icon saint, Emma Goldman, the violent elitist gansterism that her hero, the proto-Nazi Nietzsche favored. When I see the black block anarchists of the Pacific North West, I certainly don't see anything that will ever be anything else except what they will mostly be, a tool of Republican-fascism. The most ineffective worker at a Catholic Worker house of hospitality is more radical than they are.
Human intention, human thought, human empathy, sympathy and love are certainly part of the Creation just as much as physical forces and those pretty pictures that the space telescopes catch. But it only happens, it only becomes real as it is chosen to happen by human intent. That is our place in the progress of Creation and it exists due to our choice to make it happen. Anyone who believes that conscious, free choice is an illusion will wait and wait and wait for it to happen, like some theorized rare event of physical causation and it will never happen. Which is one of the reasons that secular leftism can so much be counted on to be not only ineffective but counter-productive. If you expect it to happen as an external natural event of unthinking causation, you're better off waiting for pie in the sky.
* Which would be genocide in a patriarchal society, I wonder if that's got something to do with Jewish identity being dependent on matrilineal heritage. I think there is probably a somewhat more modestly sized truth behind the Exodus narrative, they couldn't have gotten so much right by imagination alone, it had to have grown out of a real human experience of real human events. It was the literary style of the ancient and classical world to exaggerate to make a point, but the point would never have occurred to them except as a product of their lived experience.
On Manchin's Impending Walk Across The Asile
MANCHIN IS GOING TO CROSS THE AISLE and make official what's been obvious for a while. The Senate is not actually in Democratic control and it hasn't really been in Democratic control since the first two years of Obama's first term. Even if he doesn't take the walk, he's already there.
Where we go from here I don't know. If what Jen Psaki said is accurate, and I trust her as I don't trust him, the man is a bald-faced liar who knows he's in the Senate for the rest of his term and his state being what it is, probably as long as he wants to hold it. And our political system and, especially, the law of the land since the Supreme Court orders that the corruption endemic to it continues till all hell breaks loose and a Democratic tide sweeps through change - if that change is ever to come - happens. The "Democratic tide" that swept Obama into office had nominal control of a filibuster proof majority. It also had the decided disability of having an Ivy-League-golden-boy of the the establishment in Obama who wasn't really going to change anything. He wouldn't even put pressure on the then scumbag traitor Joe Lieberman or right-wing Democrats in the House to pass a really great Affordable Care Act, he gave away huge opportunities to have a really great stimulus bill to get over the Bush II economic crisis on the deluded dream of getting Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could claim he was a hero of bi-partisanship. And he never really stopped that bullshit even after the Queens of Maine disappointed his dream over and over again.
Joe Biden and the the large majority of Democrats who would have given us a great revival of egalitarian democracy will, of course, take the hit, in the media, among the voters when it was ALL OF THE REPUBLICANS AND TWO REPUBLICANS WHO RAN AS DEMOCRATS WHO DENIED THEM THAT DESPERATELY NEEDED REVIVAL OF IT.
The Supreme Court which is the actual author of today's political corruption, such as Manchin, Sinema and every Republican practice with their "free speech" "money equals speech" rulings will not take their share of the blame. Which is too bad because if those campaign financing laws that were genuine bi-partisan responses to the crimes of Richard Nixon and his ilk had stood, we probably wouldn't be here today. Things certainly didn't get more free and democratic with those expansions of "free speech" now, did they. That corruption started even before the Court was in control of the far right, even before Louis Powell wrote his roadmap for millionaire and billionaire control of the government by anti-democratic means, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry had a lot to do with it too.
That campaign money is given for the purposes of buying ad time and mail outs and advisors and operatives to lie crooks and criminals into office. That is the "free speech" the Supreme Court privilege given to lies over the truth which is what "free speech" has come to mean under the corrupt wisdom of the Supreme Court and the most highly regarded legal minds of our time.
But such a corrupt political system relies on corrupt individuals and in that Joe Manchin, Krysten Sinema AND EVERY REPUBLICAN INCLUDING LIZ CHENEY are the actual kind of governing majority that such a system can depend on. The voters duped and made cynical by the media are the source of this, in the end, though as Republicans corrupt the machinery of elections, even when they are not so duped and cynical, it won't matter.
We have probably lost our chance to save American democracy. If Joe Biden and the real Democrats in the House and Senate can save this it will take a miracle. I'm not expecting one to come to us anymore than it came to the kingdom of Judea. I think the Brueggemann lecture which I will keep posting makes it clear that Jeremiah is more relevant than what you're going to get on NPR or CNN, maybe even MSNBC during the liberal ghetto hours.
I am thinking that if I were in my twenties or thrities, even in my forties, I'd start pushing for secession of the Democratic states because as Louis Powell advocated, the corporate gangsters have successfully found out how to game the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to put them in permanent control and under the corruptions intentionally built into it, the very mechanisms Powell advocated using to produce a corrupt government, the corrupting of the Court, the Senate, through their gutting of campaign finance controls, controlling money going to politicians and buying seats, and those he didn't include in his blue print for billionaire rule, the Electoral College, there is no hope of regaining even the patched up approximation of egalitarian democracy Lyndon Johnson achieved. I don't want my nieces and nephews, their children to have to live under the rule of gangsters and thugs, fascists and neo-Nazis. I care more about that than I do the United States staying together under gangster rule. It is insane to not consider it in face of that. The whole thing is going to go rotten, as rotten as Joe Manchin's following his dirty coal wealth and his families financial interest from boosting the price of epi-pens instead of what all of the least among us would have gotten from the Build Back Better Act. As rotten as Kyrsten Sinema and EVERY REPUBLICAN IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE.
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.
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