Have you ever noticed that whenever America makes war, a war declared in the media and not in Congress, a war against a word, an idea, a state of mind, a condition, or a category of nebulously defined behaviors, substances, or political entities, instead of a war declared and waged against a nation or nations, that these Wars On are conflicts which America never wins, or at least is never the clear victor? That, in fact, these Wars On never really end, though such wars may subside and flare up, are occasionally discretely abandoned by their sponsors, or else we declare victory and withdraw.
There was/is the War on Crime. In America, the main victors in this war are politicians who are “tough on crime” during their election campaigns. Often the criminals join the politicians creating in a “win/win situation.”
There was the War on Poverty, and America certainly did not win that war. Today, under various dog-whistle rubrics such No Child Left Behind, and Welfare Reform America wages an undeclared War on the Poor.
There was/is the War on Drugs; did America win that war? We just say no to the drug-du-jour, and when next year’s model hits the streets it always seems to be more noxious, more addictive, and more destructive to society than the last drug “scourge.” However, this crusade, like the War on Crime, is a perennial winner for politicians and for the drug businessman too, on the whole.
For a long time, America fought a War on Communism, aka the Cold War; to my mind better called the Hot-and-Cold War. Some say we won that war, around the time the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. But both North Korea and Vietnam, “Communist” states to which we served up piping-hot war in the midst of the Cold War, still have “Communist” governments run by the same basic set of people that were in charge when we were making war on them.
We went to the brink of the hottest of hot wars during the episode known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and since maintained a simmering enmity against the “Communist” regime of Fidel Castro. Yet nearly a half century later we are still waiting for Fidel to just fall down and not get up. The most populous nation on Earth, China, has a “Communist” government run by the same ruling class for almost 70 years. China and its present day ruling class are more powerful than the Imperial dynasties of old. Even in most of the territories of the former Soviet Union, the same ruling class, more or less, is in charge, where there is anybody is in charge; the rich are richer, the poor poorer. Did America really win the so-called Cold War?
For the past few years now, America has waged the War on Terror. How terrified do we, the people, have to be, before our own ruling class can call it a win? How many of our freedoms will we give up before we will surrender the least of our comforts, or give up the strangely comforting fear itself? How many countries must be laid waste, how far must “Democracy” be spread, before the “Terrorist” bogeyman can be retired? How many people have to die before the President the United States of America can declare final victory?
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Saturday, August 19, 2006
To “Sir” With Something Other Than Love
Open Letter to George W. Bush: Just Shut Up
Sir:
I take strong exception to your remarks on the recent court decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that declared your warrantless wiretap program illegal and unconstitutional. I take particularly strong exception, sir, to your opinion that people who oppose your abuse of the office of President in this (or any other matter)
“…do not understand the nature of the world in which we live."
I think that the people that oppose your regime most avidly understand quite well the nature of the world we live in, and your large and regrettable part in making that world much worse that what it could be. You, sir, understand nothing; you are a liar; a thief; a murderer; and a tyrant, and in all your endeavors ultimately a failure and an incompetent. The truth is not in you, sir. God does not speak to you; or if he does, you’re not listening.
You, sir, have embroiled the United States of America in an undeclared, illegal, and apparently endless war, spent the treasure and the reputation our country, the lives of our soldiers, and the lives of countless innocent civilians on the basis of constantly mutating justifications and in pursuit of ever-shifting goals that recede like the flickering waters of a desert mirage. Virtually every decision you and your advisors have made in prosecuting this war against “ter-rism” has not only been wrong, but wrong-headed and self-deluded as well. You, sir, have condoned, encouraged, incited, and on numerous occasions ordered the commission of war crimes. You, sir, though you have never dirtied yourself with the blood of an enemy—make that “enemy combantant”—are a war criminal, and I dare say, if you were not the President of the United States, you would by now be facing charges in the dock at the Hague.
In the course of waging this so-called “War on Terror,” which is better named the “War to Terrify,” you, sir, have converted the constitutional democracy of which you are the chief steward into a proto-fascist state. For the sake of your war games, you, sir, have mortgaged the future of our children, and bid fair to wreck our country, and perhaps accelerate a world wide collapse of human and natural systems in a planetary disaster.
You, sir, are the one who does not understand the nature of the world we live in.
You, sir, in the words of Sha Zukang, the Chinese Ambassador to the U.N. at Geneva, should “shut up.” Shut up and be quiet.
It is better for you to shut up and keep quiet. It's much, much better.
Sir:
I take strong exception to your remarks on the recent court decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that declared your warrantless wiretap program illegal and unconstitutional. I take particularly strong exception, sir, to your opinion that people who oppose your abuse of the office of President in this (or any other matter)
“…do not understand the nature of the world in which we live."
I think that the people that oppose your regime most avidly understand quite well the nature of the world we live in, and your large and regrettable part in making that world much worse that what it could be. You, sir, understand nothing; you are a liar; a thief; a murderer; and a tyrant, and in all your endeavors ultimately a failure and an incompetent. The truth is not in you, sir. God does not speak to you; or if he does, you’re not listening.
You, sir, have embroiled the United States of America in an undeclared, illegal, and apparently endless war, spent the treasure and the reputation our country, the lives of our soldiers, and the lives of countless innocent civilians on the basis of constantly mutating justifications and in pursuit of ever-shifting goals that recede like the flickering waters of a desert mirage. Virtually every decision you and your advisors have made in prosecuting this war against “ter-rism” has not only been wrong, but wrong-headed and self-deluded as well. You, sir, have condoned, encouraged, incited, and on numerous occasions ordered the commission of war crimes. You, sir, though you have never dirtied yourself with the blood of an enemy—make that “enemy combantant”—are a war criminal, and I dare say, if you were not the President of the United States, you would by now be facing charges in the dock at the Hague.
In the course of waging this so-called “War on Terror,” which is better named the “War to Terrify,” you, sir, have converted the constitutional democracy of which you are the chief steward into a proto-fascist state. For the sake of your war games, you, sir, have mortgaged the future of our children, and bid fair to wreck our country, and perhaps accelerate a world wide collapse of human and natural systems in a planetary disaster.
You, sir, are the one who does not understand the nature of the world we live in.
You, sir, in the words of Sha Zukang, the Chinese Ambassador to the U.N. at Geneva, should “shut up.” Shut up and be quiet.
It is better for you to shut up and keep quiet. It's much, much better.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Grendel's Lost Sock: Quote for Today
"In a world full of excrable excresences, there is always a fetid coprostatis of an idea to make your own."
Ned Seeman
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Liquid Terror and the Scent of Fear
In light of the roll out of “Liquid Terror” and its effect on the airlines and airports of the world, Dr. Omed has a suggestion as to how to simplify and improve airport security. Check all baggage. Instead of the current security checkpoints, airline passengers should be checked onto the airport concourse in the same way that prisoners are checked into a county jail.
In dressing rooms under the supervision of security guards, passengers would strip, submit to a cavity search, and their clothes, wallets, purses, ids, pocket change, and what-not would be bagged, tagged, examined for contraband, and checked for transshipment.
Passengers would be issued color-coded jumpsuits or hospital scrub type pajamas, and flip-flops or slip-on tennis shoes. At some county jails, prisoners charged with misdemeanors get an orange jump-suit, and felons get white. Or vice versa. First class passengers get, say, purple, and every one else gets orange. Every passenger would get a coded wristband like a patient gets at the hospital or an inmate gets at the jail, that can’t be removed without scissors or a knife.
The passenger section of the plane would be behind a locked gate, like the prison bus, with an armed steward or stewardess on the other side of it, keeping an eye on everyone with the help of surveillance cams. Passengers seatbelts can be locked by remote control, but you could slip on the complementary handcuffs, if you’re into that. And in each and every barf bag, there would a complementary stale baloney sandwich, just like you get at a city jail. Beats a bag of peanuts, don’t it?
Air travel in the Age of Fear is already replete with restraints and indiginities. Think how glad you’ll be to get off that plane, when you are arrive at your destination, to get your own clothes and personal items back, to have that wristband snipped off, to step out into the open and take a big breath of fresh air. You’ll feel so free. For a moment, anyway. Just don’t make any suspicious moves, until you’re out of range of the cameras and the sniper towers.
In dressing rooms under the supervision of security guards, passengers would strip, submit to a cavity search, and their clothes, wallets, purses, ids, pocket change, and what-not would be bagged, tagged, examined for contraband, and checked for transshipment.
Passengers would be issued color-coded jumpsuits or hospital scrub type pajamas, and flip-flops or slip-on tennis shoes. At some county jails, prisoners charged with misdemeanors get an orange jump-suit, and felons get white. Or vice versa. First class passengers get, say, purple, and every one else gets orange. Every passenger would get a coded wristband like a patient gets at the hospital or an inmate gets at the jail, that can’t be removed without scissors or a knife.
The passenger section of the plane would be behind a locked gate, like the prison bus, with an armed steward or stewardess on the other side of it, keeping an eye on everyone with the help of surveillance cams. Passengers seatbelts can be locked by remote control, but you could slip on the complementary handcuffs, if you’re into that. And in each and every barf bag, there would a complementary stale baloney sandwich, just like you get at a city jail. Beats a bag of peanuts, don’t it?
Air travel in the Age of Fear is already replete with restraints and indiginities. Think how glad you’ll be to get off that plane, when you are arrive at your destination, to get your own clothes and personal items back, to have that wristband snipped off, to step out into the open and take a big breath of fresh air. You’ll feel so free. For a moment, anyway. Just don’t make any suspicious moves, until you’re out of range of the cameras and the sniper towers.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
FLARF POEM COMPOSED ON A GOOGLE OF “FOG OF WAR”
The fog of war
conceals much more
than can be seen.
In the fog of war,
chips can fall
in different ways.
Why not
have surrogates
do the fighting and dying?
The fog of war,
of course,
is thick.
Clausewitz, and probably
every military theorist since,
has spoken of the fog of war—
The difficultly of telling
what’s happening
when you’re in the field.
The war happened,
and then what happened
happened, and the timing was just right…
Tragic mistakes happen
In the “fog of war.”
Soldiers have since time immemorial died
from friendly fire
and other lethal errors.
In war, stuff happens.
It is devilishly difficult to follow
the ricochets
amid the incendiary fog of war.
But I suppose
we shall have
to try
not to see it as a failure,
attribute the negative outcome
to the fog of war.
On the positive side…
defined goals have melted
into the fog of wars gone by.
Other consequences
of the invasion
are still shrouded
in the fog of peace.
conceals much more
than can be seen.
In the fog of war,
chips can fall
in different ways.
Why not
have surrogates
do the fighting and dying?
The fog of war,
of course,
is thick.
Clausewitz, and probably
every military theorist since,
has spoken of the fog of war—
The difficultly of telling
what’s happening
when you’re in the field.
The war happened,
and then what happened
happened, and the timing was just right…
Tragic mistakes happen
In the “fog of war.”
Soldiers have since time immemorial died
from friendly fire
and other lethal errors.
In war, stuff happens.
It is devilishly difficult to follow
the ricochets
amid the incendiary fog of war.
But I suppose
we shall have
to try
not to see it as a failure,
attribute the negative outcome
to the fog of war.
On the positive side…
defined goals have melted
into the fog of wars gone by.
Other consequences
of the invasion
are still shrouded
in the fog of peace.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Thursday, August 03, 2006
GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY
Human beings are not moved by facts. This is the closest thing to a true fact that you will ever encounter in your human existence. The facts, ma’am, just the facts are just too boring, too inconvenient, too depressing, too…factual—or as Mr. Colbert may already have said (Dr. Omed doesn’t have cable)—too facty.
We, as a people, as an allegedly sentient species, don’t want too much factiness. We do not want to be told the facts; we want to be told a story, a story with a happy ending; or at least a story with a good moral. I don’t blame us; the facts are hard. We want some factric softener added to the wash, so our thoughts will come out fuzzy and warm. “God” is our favorite brand of softener when it comes to the really hard facts. God comes in many brands, and each brand claims unique and exclusive features and offers periodic enhancements to keep the devotion of its customers, but mostly what we want to make those cold, hard facts fuzzy and warm.
Fuzziness is next to Goddiness. Is that so bad? There is a phrase that is invoked by journalists and commentators when a modern army is not performing as advertised, usually against a foe less well-equipped with the latest death technology: in wise tones the words "Fog of War" are uttered. Battles are lost or won in the Fog of War. On the battleground of Gott-Mit-Uns-Kulturkreig we must navigate the Fuzz of God. The hard facts are still there; you just can't see 'em.
We, as a people, as an allegedly sentient species, don’t want too much factiness. We do not want to be told the facts; we want to be told a story, a story with a happy ending; or at least a story with a good moral. I don’t blame us; the facts are hard. We want some factric softener added to the wash, so our thoughts will come out fuzzy and warm. “God” is our favorite brand of softener when it comes to the really hard facts. God comes in many brands, and each brand claims unique and exclusive features and offers periodic enhancements to keep the devotion of its customers, but mostly what we want to make those cold, hard facts fuzzy and warm.
Fuzziness is next to Goddiness. Is that so bad? There is a phrase that is invoked by journalists and commentators when a modern army is not performing as advertised, usually against a foe less well-equipped with the latest death technology: in wise tones the words "Fog of War" are uttered. Battles are lost or won in the Fog of War. On the battleground of Gott-Mit-Uns-Kulturkreig we must navigate the Fuzz of God. The hard facts are still there; you just can't see 'em.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Breakfast at Lammas
Upon the fortieth day
under the enemy sun,
Yeshua,
if you are
bar abbas,
son of the father:
Tell
this
stone
to become bread.
It shall be written, Diabolos
By bread alone
may we ask for a stone.
A stone to move,
a veil to rent,
a trump to play,
women to weep,
dead saints to rise and walk,
choirs of angels to sing,
orisons to remember all our sins,
and the blood
of the lamb
to wash in the stain.
Enough to feed the multitudes
and seven baskets
of broken promises
left over.
Take this bread, Yeshua
but do not eat.
Instead, speak into it
as if it were the ear of God.
She will hear you.
Put it quickly in the coals
of the cooking fire
as if the crust were brimful
of your words.
She will answer you.
I am so hungry,
I am a bone gnawed by God.
Take, speak.
Dana Pattillo
Note: Lammas, or Lughnassad, occurs in late July and early August. It is marks the middle of Summer and the beginning of the harvest. It is the first of three harvest festivals and is usually associated with ripening grain. It heralds the coming of Autumn.
under the enemy sun,
Yeshua,
if you are
bar abbas,
son of the father:
Tell
this
stone
to become bread.
It shall be written, Diabolos
By bread alone
may we ask for a stone.
A stone to move,
a veil to rent,
a trump to play,
women to weep,
dead saints to rise and walk,
choirs of angels to sing,
orisons to remember all our sins,
and the blood
of the lamb
to wash in the stain.
Enough to feed the multitudes
and seven baskets
of broken promises
left over.
Take this bread, Yeshua
but do not eat.
Instead, speak into it
as if it were the ear of God.
She will hear you.
Put it quickly in the coals
of the cooking fire
as if the crust were brimful
of your words.
She will answer you.
I am so hungry,
I am a bone gnawed by God.
Take, speak.
Dana Pattillo
Note: Lammas, or Lughnassad, occurs in late July and early August. It is marks the middle of Summer and the beginning of the harvest. It is the first of three harvest festivals and is usually associated with ripening grain. It heralds the coming of Autumn.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Monday, July 17, 2006
THIS IS FUN
The red indicates how much of Florida will be underwater if sea level rises 6 meters.Create your own maps of sea level rise courtesy of the University of Arizona Enviromental Studies Laboratory:
Sunday, July 16, 2006
DR. OMED SEES AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Yes, pilgrims and seekers, Dr. Omed hied himself to the megamulticineplex to see the movie starring the ex-next President of the United States, An Inconvenient Truth. I gave it to myself as a treat after a long, hot, tiring work day. When I left the workplace at 5:15pm the outside temperature was 103 degrees feloniously Fahrenheit. The A/C in my windowless cubicle in Hell is supposed to keep the temperature pegged at 72 degrees, but when all the equipment is running and the summer sun is blazing down on the flat roof of the building, it just can’t keep up. The idea of sitting in a dark, cool movie theater suddenly became very appealing when I got into my un-airconditioned car, and I yielded to the whim.
I arrived just in time to catch the 5:30 showing, paid eight dollars for the movie, and four bucks for a large diet coke, and was in my seat just in time to catch the last half of the last preview (for Who Killed the Electric Car), the kill-your-babies-and-turn-off-your-cell-phones-you-morons courtesy message, and then the film rolled. I think there were about 8-10 other people in the auditorium, all of them adults (by which I mean I think they were all 40 or above) and not one made a noise through the entire film.
Gore is a very bright man, and deploys his facts (and a light sprinkling of Micheal-Moore-ish factoids) very effectively, eloquently, and with passionate élan. This movie is not a partisan fuckyoumentary in the Moore style, tho’ Gore gets in a few jabs at the hunka hunka burning Bush et alia. It is a substantive and powerful presentation of Al Gore’s crusade, his quest to save his honor, American democracy, and human civilization itself, from itself, with his “slide show.” Gore is a modern Don Quixote with an Apple laptop instead of a lance, but Gore’s windmills really are giants.
The images, graphs, and graphics of this…ultimate hyper-PowerPoint presentation…have a visceral impact, even tho’ I knew most of the information contained in them. At the end of the film, Gore winds up and makes his pitch; he says (I paraphrase here since my verbal memory is one with the snows of yesteryear, like all those glaciers) that we—we, the American people, the greatest environmental sinners in the global passion play—already have everything we need, every tool, every resource, save the will, the political will, to do the job of reversing global warming. Gore says we can do it, we can summon the political will to save ourselves from ourselves in this “era of consequences” and he says it like he believes it.
But as the credits rolled and the soundtrack segued into a Melissa Etheridge song, I sat in the dark with tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes, not because of the sobering message passionately conveyed, but because I didn’t believe him.
I don’t believe we will save ourselves. I don’t think the American people can summon the political will to force the necessary changes on our government and our elites; I don’t think we have time if we could. Fred won’t let me believe it. The movie soundtrack playing in my head was “Man of La Mancha.”
I arrived just in time to catch the 5:30 showing, paid eight dollars for the movie, and four bucks for a large diet coke, and was in my seat just in time to catch the last half of the last preview (for Who Killed the Electric Car), the kill-your-babies-and-turn-off-your-cell-phones-you-morons courtesy message, and then the film rolled. I think there were about 8-10 other people in the auditorium, all of them adults (by which I mean I think they were all 40 or above) and not one made a noise through the entire film.
Gore is a very bright man, and deploys his facts (and a light sprinkling of Micheal-Moore-ish factoids) very effectively, eloquently, and with passionate élan. This movie is not a partisan fuckyoumentary in the Moore style, tho’ Gore gets in a few jabs at the hunka hunka burning Bush et alia. It is a substantive and powerful presentation of Al Gore’s crusade, his quest to save his honor, American democracy, and human civilization itself, from itself, with his “slide show.” Gore is a modern Don Quixote with an Apple laptop instead of a lance, but Gore’s windmills really are giants.
The images, graphs, and graphics of this…ultimate hyper-PowerPoint presentation…have a visceral impact, even tho’ I knew most of the information contained in them. At the end of the film, Gore winds up and makes his pitch; he says (I paraphrase here since my verbal memory is one with the snows of yesteryear, like all those glaciers) that we—we, the American people, the greatest environmental sinners in the global passion play—already have everything we need, every tool, every resource, save the will, the political will, to do the job of reversing global warming. Gore says we can do it, we can summon the political will to save ourselves from ourselves in this “era of consequences” and he says it like he believes it.
But as the credits rolled and the soundtrack segued into a Melissa Etheridge song, I sat in the dark with tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes, not because of the sobering message passionately conveyed, but because I didn’t believe him.
I don’t believe we will save ourselves. I don’t think the American people can summon the political will to force the necessary changes on our government and our elites; I don’t think we have time if we could. Fred won’t let me believe it. The movie soundtrack playing in my head was “Man of La Mancha.”
Friday, July 14, 2006
LET THEM EAT CAKE
On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille Prison, where the enemies of the regime of King Louis XVI were held incognito and without trial.
GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY
It's only the middle of July, and it's beginning to feel a lot like August, 1914. Kaiser Willehm and Der Dubya are beginning to look like bookends. "The Gods have abandoned us like migrating birds; unburied bodies melt like rendered fat in sun," a Babylonian scribe wrote, once upon a time, 3000 years ago. Happy Bastille Day.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY
The best liars are those people who think themselves honest and above board; indeed the best way to lie is by telling the truth, in the same way that the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone, including yourself.
Friday, June 16, 2006
DR. OMED’S VIRTUAL 24-7 SUNDAY SCHOOL:
THEODICY 101: IF GOD IS GOD
Does God get personal?
Do you have a personal God?
Do you see your personal God often, or do you have to make an appointment?
Is there a waiting list to see God?
Do you have a personal relationship with God?
Or is God someone you read about in a book?
Do you consider your relationship with God deep and meaningful, or as a casual, whenever you drop by sort of thing?
How personal?—Live and in person, God Incarnate (in the flesh)?
How long has it been since you took your meds?
Or do you communicate with God by long distance, so to speak—by prayer?
Is that like calling a 1-900 line?
Does God whisper sweet nothings in your ear?
Does God charge by the minute?
Or is praying to God more like visiting a chat room, only more spiritual?
If praying to God is like visiting a chat room, how do you know He’s really God? He could be some sort of God-wanna-be, a rogue demiurge, or a registered soul corrupter…
If you asked God to do you a favor, would He do it?
If God (the really real God) asked you to do Him a favor, would you do it?
Would you do it no matter what it was (rape, murder, whatever)—after all, this is God talking—or would you tell Him I’ll have to get back to you on that?
Does God get personal?
Do you have a personal God?
Do you see your personal God often, or do you have to make an appointment?
Is there a waiting list to see God?
Do you have a personal relationship with God?
Or is God someone you read about in a book?
Do you consider your relationship with God deep and meaningful, or as a casual, whenever you drop by sort of thing?
How personal?—Live and in person, God Incarnate (in the flesh)?
How long has it been since you took your meds?
Or do you communicate with God by long distance, so to speak—by prayer?
Is that like calling a 1-900 line?
Does God whisper sweet nothings in your ear?
Does God charge by the minute?
Or is praying to God more like visiting a chat room, only more spiritual?
If praying to God is like visiting a chat room, how do you know He’s really God? He could be some sort of God-wanna-be, a rogue demiurge, or a registered soul corrupter…
If you asked God to do you a favor, would He do it?
If God (the really real God) asked you to do Him a favor, would you do it?
Would you do it no matter what it was (rape, murder, whatever)—after all, this is God talking—or would you tell Him I’ll have to get back to you on that?
Sunday, June 11, 2006
DR. OMED’S SUNDAY SERMON:
GAY MARRIAGE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
I can almost hear the members of my e-congregation chorus as one: “Wait-one-gosh-darn-minute, Dr. Omed, there ain’t no gay marriage in the Bible!” Au contraire, pilgrims and seekers. Shall we examine the text of 1 Samuel 18? Young David has just slain Goliath in battle with the Philistines. He has just met King Saul and his son Jonathan for the first time:
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house. (Like a new bride?)
Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.
And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.
1 Samuel 18:1-4
If you don’t want to call the covenant between Jonathan and David marriage, call it a civil union. However, later in the chapter Saul gives his daughter Michal in marriage to David, and makes a curious remark:
Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son-in-law a second time.
1 Samuel 18:21
The only child of King Saul’s other than Michal with which David has a contracted relationship—is Jonathan. Saul’s words certainly imply that he regarded David as already married to Jonathan.
Later, when Saul and Jonathan are killed, David sings a lament:
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.
It seem that at least one instance of same sex… civil covenant between two of the Lord’s Anointed was condoned and even approved by no less an authority than the King of Israel.
Fundy Facts TM
Did you know:
Of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, only Issac(Gen 25-28)had just one wife reported, with no concubines mentioned. Abraham(Gen 25:6) was fairly conservative, limiting himself to one wife and several concubines. Jacob(Gen 30) had 2 wives and 2 concubines. King David(1 Chr 24:3) had 6 or more wives and 10 or more concubines (Not to mention his husband, Jonathan). Rehoboam(2 Chr 11:21) had 18 wives plus 60 concubines. Studly King Solomon (2 Kings 11:3) had 700 wives plus 300 concubines. King Solomon also flouted the ban on intermarriage, and "loved many strange women" including at least one Egyptian, several Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. (1 Kings 11:1;14:21)
I can almost hear the members of my e-congregation chorus as one: “Wait-one-gosh-darn-minute, Dr. Omed, there ain’t no gay marriage in the Bible!” Au contraire, pilgrims and seekers. Shall we examine the text of 1 Samuel 18? Young David has just slain Goliath in battle with the Philistines. He has just met King Saul and his son Jonathan for the first time:
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house. (Like a new bride?)
Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.
And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.
1 Samuel 18:1-4
If you don’t want to call the covenant between Jonathan and David marriage, call it a civil union. However, later in the chapter Saul gives his daughter Michal in marriage to David, and makes a curious remark:
Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son-in-law a second time.
1 Samuel 18:21
The only child of King Saul’s other than Michal with which David has a contracted relationship—is Jonathan. Saul’s words certainly imply that he regarded David as already married to Jonathan.
Later, when Saul and Jonathan are killed, David sings a lament:
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.
It seem that at least one instance of same sex… civil covenant between two of the Lord’s Anointed was condoned and even approved by no less an authority than the King of Israel.
Fundy Facts TM
Did you know:
Of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, only Issac(Gen 25-28)had just one wife reported, with no concubines mentioned. Abraham(Gen 25:6) was fairly conservative, limiting himself to one wife and several concubines. Jacob(Gen 30) had 2 wives and 2 concubines. King David(1 Chr 24:3) had 6 or more wives and 10 or more concubines (Not to mention his husband, Jonathan). Rehoboam(2 Chr 11:21) had 18 wives plus 60 concubines. Studly King Solomon (2 Kings 11:3) had 700 wives plus 300 concubines. King Solomon also flouted the ban on intermarriage, and "loved many strange women" including at least one Egyptian, several Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. (1 Kings 11:1;14:21)
Thursday, June 08, 2006
VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS:
Thursday, June 8, 2006 · Last updated 5:11 a.m. PT
Army officer refuses to deploy to Iraq
By MELANTHIA MITCHELL ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
TACOMA, Wash. -- An Army lieutenant who refuses to deploy to Iraq with his Fort Lewis Stryker brigade said he's prepared to face the consequences, including a possible prison term.
1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who joined the Army in March 2003, said he researched the reasons behind the U.S. involvement in Iraq and concluded the war is illegal and immoral.
"We have violated American law," Watada said. "We can't break laws in order to fight terrorism."
Watada said he would be willing to serve in Afghanistan or elsewhere, but he said he believes intelligence on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was manipulated "to fit a policy that was already implemented prior to 9-11," and he cited "mistreatment of the Iraqi people," saying it was "a contradiction to the Army's own Law of Land Warfare."
Army officials said Watada's decision to publicly declare his intent to disobey orders "is a serious matter and could subject him to adverse action."
His unit - the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division - is scheduled to begin leaving later this month for a mission in Iraq.
Watada sent a letter to his command in January, saying he had reservations about the Iraq war and felt he could not participate, his lawyer Eric A. Seitz said. Months later, he resubmitted his request to resign, Seitz said.
The Hawaii native was told last month his request had been denied. The Army said it was because Watada's unit is in a stop-loss category, and he has not fulfilled his service obligation. His commission requires that he serve as an active-duty Army officer for three years ending Dec. 3, his lawyer said.
Watada said he would submit another request to resign but added, "I feel it is inevitable ... I will be charged and I will be punished." He said he could face prison time for failing to deploy.
Peace activists, veterans and clergy have come out in support of Watada, whose commanders barred him from attending a news conference Wednesday because it occurred during his duty hours.
Watada did not apply for conscientious objector status, defined by Army regulations as a "firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, because of religious training and belief." He said he objected only to the war in Iraq.
An Army fact sheet dated Sept. 21, 2005, the most recent available, said 87 conscientious objector applications had been approved and 101 denied since January 2003.
"I know that my case has brought a lot of attention and scrutiny on me by my superiors," Watada said. "I'm probably very unpopular, if not the most unpopular person on Fort Lewis. But I know out there are people who believe in what I'm saying."
Army officer refuses to deploy to Iraq
By MELANTHIA MITCHELL ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
TACOMA, Wash. -- An Army lieutenant who refuses to deploy to Iraq with his Fort Lewis Stryker brigade said he's prepared to face the consequences, including a possible prison term.
1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who joined the Army in March 2003, said he researched the reasons behind the U.S. involvement in Iraq and concluded the war is illegal and immoral.
"We have violated American law," Watada said. "We can't break laws in order to fight terrorism."
Watada said he would be willing to serve in Afghanistan or elsewhere, but he said he believes intelligence on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was manipulated "to fit a policy that was already implemented prior to 9-11," and he cited "mistreatment of the Iraqi people," saying it was "a contradiction to the Army's own Law of Land Warfare."
Army officials said Watada's decision to publicly declare his intent to disobey orders "is a serious matter and could subject him to adverse action."
His unit - the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division - is scheduled to begin leaving later this month for a mission in Iraq.
Watada sent a letter to his command in January, saying he had reservations about the Iraq war and felt he could not participate, his lawyer Eric A. Seitz said. Months later, he resubmitted his request to resign, Seitz said.
The Hawaii native was told last month his request had been denied. The Army said it was because Watada's unit is in a stop-loss category, and he has not fulfilled his service obligation. His commission requires that he serve as an active-duty Army officer for three years ending Dec. 3, his lawyer said.
Watada said he would submit another request to resign but added, "I feel it is inevitable ... I will be charged and I will be punished." He said he could face prison time for failing to deploy.
Peace activists, veterans and clergy have come out in support of Watada, whose commanders barred him from attending a news conference Wednesday because it occurred during his duty hours.
Watada did not apply for conscientious objector status, defined by Army regulations as a "firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, because of religious training and belief." He said he objected only to the war in Iraq.
An Army fact sheet dated Sept. 21, 2005, the most recent available, said 87 conscientious objector applications had been approved and 101 denied since January 2003.
"I know that my case has brought a lot of attention and scrutiny on me by my superiors," Watada said. "I'm probably very unpopular, if not the most unpopular person on Fort Lewis. But I know out there are people who believe in what I'm saying."
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
DR. OMED’S VIRTUAL 24-7 SUNDAY SCHOOL
THEODICY 101
It has been suggested that Evil exists because God loved us so much He gave the gift of choice (i.e., Free Will) which necessarily includes the freedom to make bad choices (do Evil).
Did God have a choice about giving us a choice—apropos of the anthropic principle— does God have Free Will?
If God’s greatest gift to humankind is our individual freedom of choice, wouldn’t restricting or limiting the free choice of any human being in any way, such as, say, by passing laws against abortion or gay marriage, be in direct conflict with God’s Will (presuming He has One)?
It has also been suggested that God gave us Free Will not only because He loves us because he wants to be loved back, and the endless adoration of little robots who can’t not love You back would be kind of meaningless and pathetic, as well as boring, after an Eternity or two. Did God create Evil because He was bored?
Does Shit Happen because God is Love?
Is Evil God’s version of Tough Love?
It has been suggested that Evil exists because God loved us so much He gave the gift of choice (i.e., Free Will) which necessarily includes the freedom to make bad choices (do Evil).
Did God have a choice about giving us a choice—apropos of the anthropic principle— does God have Free Will?
If God’s greatest gift to humankind is our individual freedom of choice, wouldn’t restricting or limiting the free choice of any human being in any way, such as, say, by passing laws against abortion or gay marriage, be in direct conflict with God’s Will (presuming He has One)?
It has also been suggested that God gave us Free Will not only because He loves us because he wants to be loved back, and the endless adoration of little robots who can’t not love You back would be kind of meaningless and pathetic, as well as boring, after an Eternity or two. Did God create Evil because He was bored?
Does Shit Happen because God is Love?
Is Evil God’s version of Tough Love?
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Thursday, June 01, 2006
GRENDEL’S LAUNDRY LIST: CASSANDRA READINGS
THE FOUR FUNDAMENTALISMS
"I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me."
James Koplin
We lefties—trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events— (are) missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11 "changed everything,"
The so-called "war on terror," has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S. planners, that "world" includes not only the land and seas—and, of course, the resources beneath them—but space above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of our "blessed lifestyle." Other nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by them.
This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Simply read the National Security Strategy document released in 2002 and the 2006 update and review post-World War II U.S. history. Read and review, but only if you don't mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear.
Opposing the war-of-the-moment—and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial project—is important. But also important is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.
One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the United States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious, national, economic, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on the planet. Each needs separate analysis and strategies for resistance.
Fundamentalism. I use it to describe any intellectual /political /theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.
The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based worldview," an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don't know. When properly understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional /indigenous systems and also the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.
Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe in their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system to another. For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often express amazement, though to me it always seemed easy to understand—he went from one fundamentalism to another. What matters is not so much the content but the shape of the belief system. Such systems should worry us.
The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious. In the United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive to some significant portion of populations, either spread across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both.
But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has been done in the world in the name of religion, especially the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future. But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems posed by national fundamentalism.Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern us in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in the hands of the most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress internal criticism and leave many unable to hear critique from outside.
Patriotism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Because a nation-state is an abstraction (lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object), assertions of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a nation-state) raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love and loyalty? How is that abstraction made real?
I conclude that all the possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment to arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been the vehicle for such barbarism and brutality.
That critique applies across the board, but because of our power and peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial in the United States. The dominant conception of that history is captured in the phrase "the city upon a hill," the notion that the United States came into the world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world. In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had the capacity to project its power around the world, the United States claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These are particularly odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to one of the most successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and resource base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States into the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid system—once formal and now informal—that arose from it. And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America's behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower and made central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.
While all the empires that have committed great crimes—the British, French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets—have justified their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it brought to the people being exploited, there is no power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component of the U.S. public—and virtually the entire elite—accept this national fundamentalism, the world is at risk.
Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.
In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor for money wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by markets. In contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism, it's assumed that most extensive use of markets possible will unleash maximal competition, resulting in the greatest good—and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results. The reigning ideology of so-called "free trade" seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.
A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that the government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious reason that it is the government that establishes the rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and decides whether the wealth accumulated under previous sets of rules should be allowed to remain in the hands of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral, illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind every great fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed. To argue that government should stay out of the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that without the government—that is, without rules established through some kind of collective action—there would be no economy. The government can't stay out because it's in from the ground floor, and assertions that government intervention into markets is inherently illegitimate are just silly.
Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail them out when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan and auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then there's the reality of how some government programs -- most notably the military and space departments -- act as conduits for the transfer of public money to private corporations under the guise of "national defense" and the "exploration of space." And then there's the problem of market failure -- the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists are well aware.
In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates -- leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.
TGIF. Everyone in the United States knows what that means: "Thank God it's Friday." The majority of Americans don't just know what TGIF stands for, they feel it in their bones. That's a way of saying that a majority of Americans do work they generally do not like and do not believe is really worth doing. That's a way of saying that we have an economy in which most people spend at least a third of their lives doing things they don't want to do and don't believe are valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy that is natural.
Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought—or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off"—that are at the core of much of the organized violence in the world today. They are systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom and justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that those fundamentalisms are child's play compared with U.S. society's technological fundamentalism.
Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be "anti-technology," which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether it's stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated on the basis of its effects—predictable and unpredictable—on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.
Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear.
This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson's call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed—out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night's sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for some time, most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century.
The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe—such as fossil fuels and, eventually, heavy metal uranium—is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene—the foundational material of life—takes us to places we have no way to understand.
We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naive return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.
We have to learn to live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything—except meaning. The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own alienation. This "blessed lifestyle"—a term Bush's spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president's view of U.S. affluence—perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.
A world that steps back from high-energy /high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such "solutions" can help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships and the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards.
Articulating this is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss the way in which turning from the high-energy /high-technology can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists, such as this writer in the Wired magazine:
"Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best."
Naive, perhaps, but not as naive as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely. Let's ignore our experience and throw the dice. Let's take naiveté to new heights. Let's forget all we should have learned.
The problem goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems. If there is to be a livable future, religion as we know it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways of understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We still have to find ways to struggle with the mystery of the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves politically; produce and distribute goods and services; and create the tools we need to do all these things. But the existing systems have proven inadequate to the task. On each front, we need major conceptual revolutions.
I don't pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are at the beginning of a long process of redefining what it means to be human in relation to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but we could just as well see it as a time that opens incredible opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled times—especially times in which it's not difficult to imagine life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable—is both frightening and exhilarating.
What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to make.
Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.
Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development based on meeting human needs.
Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the national interest—code words for serving the goals of the powerful—and focus on people's interests in being secure in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.
Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to know God is always a failed project.
Most of the world is complex beyond our ability to comprehend. It's not that there's nothing we can know through our rational faculties, but that it's essential we recognize the limits of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our political affiliation.
We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace our limits—our ignorance—in the hopes that we can stop being so stupid.
When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals we are, in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace of our limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part, more glorious than most of us ever experience.
When we do that—if we can find our way clear to do that—I think we make possible love in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief that is inevitable.
It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.
There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is enormous struggle that can't be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it, we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond description, as well as potential for transcending that suffering.
There is grief and joy.
And there is nothing to do but face it.
Robert Jensen
Note: I have freely edited the text above. Read it all at: http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen05302006.html
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
"I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me."
James Koplin
We lefties—trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events— (are) missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11 "changed everything,"
The so-called "war on terror," has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S. planners, that "world" includes not only the land and seas—and, of course, the resources beneath them—but space above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of our "blessed lifestyle." Other nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by them.
This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Simply read the National Security Strategy document released in 2002 and the 2006 update and review post-World War II U.S. history. Read and review, but only if you don't mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear.
Opposing the war-of-the-moment—and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial project—is important. But also important is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.
One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the United States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious, national, economic, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on the planet. Each needs separate analysis and strategies for resistance.
Fundamentalism. I use it to describe any intellectual /political /theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.
The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based worldview," an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don't know. When properly understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional /indigenous systems and also the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.
Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe in their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system to another. For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often express amazement, though to me it always seemed easy to understand—he went from one fundamentalism to another. What matters is not so much the content but the shape of the belief system. Such systems should worry us.
The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious. In the United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive to some significant portion of populations, either spread across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both.
But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has been done in the world in the name of religion, especially the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future. But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems posed by national fundamentalism.Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern us in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in the hands of the most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress internal criticism and leave many unable to hear critique from outside.
Patriotism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Because a nation-state is an abstraction (lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object), assertions of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a nation-state) raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love and loyalty? How is that abstraction made real?
I conclude that all the possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment to arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been the vehicle for such barbarism and brutality.
That critique applies across the board, but because of our power and peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial in the United States. The dominant conception of that history is captured in the phrase "the city upon a hill," the notion that the United States came into the world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world. In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had the capacity to project its power around the world, the United States claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These are particularly odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to one of the most successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and resource base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States into the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid system—once formal and now informal—that arose from it. And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America's behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower and made central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.
While all the empires that have committed great crimes—the British, French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets—have justified their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it brought to the people being exploited, there is no power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component of the U.S. public—and virtually the entire elite—accept this national fundamentalism, the world is at risk.
Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.
In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor for money wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by markets. In contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism, it's assumed that most extensive use of markets possible will unleash maximal competition, resulting in the greatest good—and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results. The reigning ideology of so-called "free trade" seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.
A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that the government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious reason that it is the government that establishes the rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and decides whether the wealth accumulated under previous sets of rules should be allowed to remain in the hands of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral, illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind every great fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed. To argue that government should stay out of the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that without the government—that is, without rules established through some kind of collective action—there would be no economy. The government can't stay out because it's in from the ground floor, and assertions that government intervention into markets is inherently illegitimate are just silly.
Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail them out when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan and auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then there's the reality of how some government programs -- most notably the military and space departments -- act as conduits for the transfer of public money to private corporations under the guise of "national defense" and the "exploration of space." And then there's the problem of market failure -- the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists are well aware.
In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates -- leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.
TGIF. Everyone in the United States knows what that means: "Thank God it's Friday." The majority of Americans don't just know what TGIF stands for, they feel it in their bones. That's a way of saying that a majority of Americans do work they generally do not like and do not believe is really worth doing. That's a way of saying that we have an economy in which most people spend at least a third of their lives doing things they don't want to do and don't believe are valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy that is natural.
Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought—or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off"—that are at the core of much of the organized violence in the world today. They are systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom and justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that those fundamentalisms are child's play compared with U.S. society's technological fundamentalism.
Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be "anti-technology," which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether it's stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated on the basis of its effects—predictable and unpredictable—on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.
Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear.
This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson's call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed—out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night's sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for some time, most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century.
The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe—such as fossil fuels and, eventually, heavy metal uranium—is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene—the foundational material of life—takes us to places we have no way to understand.
We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naive return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.
We have to learn to live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything—except meaning. The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own alienation. This "blessed lifestyle"—a term Bush's spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president's view of U.S. affluence—perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.
A world that steps back from high-energy /high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such "solutions" can help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships and the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards.
Articulating this is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss the way in which turning from the high-energy /high-technology can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists, such as this writer in the Wired magazine:
"Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best."
Naive, perhaps, but not as naive as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely. Let's ignore our experience and throw the dice. Let's take naiveté to new heights. Let's forget all we should have learned.
The problem goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems. If there is to be a livable future, religion as we know it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways of understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We still have to find ways to struggle with the mystery of the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves politically; produce and distribute goods and services; and create the tools we need to do all these things. But the existing systems have proven inadequate to the task. On each front, we need major conceptual revolutions.
I don't pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are at the beginning of a long process of redefining what it means to be human in relation to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but we could just as well see it as a time that opens incredible opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled times—especially times in which it's not difficult to imagine life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable—is both frightening and exhilarating.
What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to make.
Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.
Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development based on meeting human needs.
Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the national interest—code words for serving the goals of the powerful—and focus on people's interests in being secure in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.
Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to know God is always a failed project.
Most of the world is complex beyond our ability to comprehend. It's not that there's nothing we can know through our rational faculties, but that it's essential we recognize the limits of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our political affiliation.
We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace our limits—our ignorance—in the hopes that we can stop being so stupid.
When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals we are, in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace of our limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part, more glorious than most of us ever experience.
When we do that—if we can find our way clear to do that—I think we make possible love in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief that is inevitable.
It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.
There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is enormous struggle that can't be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it, we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond description, as well as potential for transcending that suffering.
There is grief and joy.
And there is nothing to do but face it.
Robert Jensen
Note: I have freely edited the text above. Read it all at: http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen05302006.html
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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