Category Archives: America

Glaring Omissions and “Something Else”

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The Washington Post-ABC News Poll published September 9, 2014 is as interesting for what it ignores as for what it reveals.

Question #13 asks registered voters which of the following will be “the single most important issue in your vote for Congress” – the economy and jobs, international conflicts, health care, the way things are working in Washington, immigration or something else? Eleven percent said “Something Else”.

The omissions of climate change, wealth disparity, and Citizens United (campaign finance reform) are curious and glaring. The poll assumes what the public cares about. By ignoring these matters that reach beyond partisan divides the poll demonstrates one of two things, Either the Washington Post-ABC New Poll is out of touch with those who live on Main Street or their bread is buttered by the Wall Street and the one percent.

Polling and news institutions not only measure public opinion; they shape public discussion by the choices they make about which questions to ask.

The American public is often smarter than given credit for. But its intelligence and its opinions on public policy issues are informed and shaped by the information we receive from the “Fourth Estate” which – in theory, if not always in practice – is independent from the three government branches of the U.S. Constitution. The “free press” is the people’s watchdog, monitoring the actions and decisions of the three constitutional estates and their complex bureaucracies and institutions. We look to the free press to do for its readers what the individual cannot do: investigate the way things are – who’s making the deals and why, who’s stacking the deck, and who’s dealing from the bottom of the deck.

As the ownership of newspapers, radio stations and television cable and satellite dish companies has shrunk to the size of the one percent who live on Wall Street, the press, like the the three constitutional estates, is not so free. While Republicans and Democrats argue about whether climate change is real and while congress fails to act, it falls to the Fourth Estate to exercise whatever freedom it may still have to raise the flag of the single most important issue facing not only the planet itself. The same is true with the moral issue of the wealth disparity and the Supreme Court’s decision that turns the American electoral system over to the highest bidder

The detail of those who answered “Something Else” shows t 14 percent of “white non-evangelical protestants” in response to Question 13. Among this subset – the “traditional” protestant churches (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, United Methodist, Congregationalist United Church of Christ, Unitarian-Universalist) – much attention has been paid from pulpits and from church position statements to the alarming growth in wealth disparity and the environmental degradation that has led us to the brink of “climate departure” when there will be no way back.

Nothing on the list of “single most important” issues is as long-lasting as climate change. It is the darkening global cloud under which all other issues exist. Framing the public discussion as a choice between the economy and jobs, international conflicts, health care, the way things are working in Washington, or immigration continues the myopic gridlock that keeps our eyes too low to the ground. It makes little difference whether one proclaims or denies that the changes in weather patterns are evidence of global climate change that call for action now to reduce carbon and methane emissions. We all know that something is happening here on the North American continent and around the “pale blue dot” (Carl Sagan) that is changing the planet as we have known it.

Enter Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) who answered “something else!” on “Meet the Press.” Congratulations to Meet the Press host Chuck Todd for widening the discussion.

9/11 Anniversary Reflection

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“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” [Bhagavad Gita XI.32]

We live under the reign of death – under the threat of death, the fact of death, the fear of death, the practice of death, the way of death. We are reminded of it on the 13th anniversary of 9/11, the day after President Obama’s speech about ISIS.

One might suppose J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ World War II program to develop the first nuclear weapons, thought he and his colleagues were taking humanity higher up the ladder of human progress. Whatever he may have thought at the beginning, he sensed a fall into the arms of the destroyer of worlds while watching the first nuclear explosion in 1945.

Twenty years later, during a visit to Japan, Oppenheimer reflected on his immediate reaction watching the Trinity explosion at Alamogordo that unleashed the genie of atomic power on the world, knowing it could never be put back in the bottle.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” he said. His eyes were sullen, like someone who was remembering a great horror, his voice quiet, his speech slow, pensive, sorrowful. Maybe even penitential. The way some people talk who suffer post traumatic stress syndrome.

“A few people laughed, a few people cried . . . most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Oppenheimer is long gone. So is Edward R. Murrow, the courageous journalist who stood up to the right wing’s insidious attacks on J. Robert Oppenheimer and others using the verbal weaponry to which we have become accustomed: innuendo, guilt by association, sentences taken out of context, and the imputation of scurrilous motives, character assassinations the destroy the reputations of thoughtful people deemed by the dutiful to be less than dutiful patriots.

Today, the 13th Anniversary of the horror of 9/11, we pause to remember. We do so in the post-nuclear world of mass destruction first observed by Oppenheimer at Alamogordo where Death has become the destroyer of worlds, where ISIL beheads journalists and President Obama commits to destroying ISIL from the face of the earth. We all hold our breath at the sight of the multi-armed, ever-changing form of the power of Death and its summons to duty.

In America the arms industry stands alone as exempt from consumer protection laws, beyond congressional review. The guns at the gun shows, the military vehicles that patrolled the streets of Ferguson, the arms and other military equipment our government supplies to regimes around the world, the bombs dropped from drones, and the drones themselves constitute an unaccountable cabal of money and power like no other in the American economy. Ours has become a war economy, an economy that profits from death.

“A few people laughed,” said Oppenheimer with deep sadness. “Most people were silent.”

Once the destroyer of worlds is loosed, the genie can never be put back in the bottle. But those who have witnessed the explosions, or heard of them, here at home in Ferguson, and abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, or Syria have a responsibility to honor the likes of J. Robert Oppenheimer and other brave men and women who refused to remain silent about the tragic climb up the ladder toward divine power that always leads to the fall into a hell of our own making.

The Pale Blue Dot

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Some people believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, the only rule of faith and life, as illustrated by the website of a popular a mega-church:

We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, verbally and fully inspired and without error in the original manuscripts and that it has supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and life.

The “original manuscripts” is the way out of trouble when the Bible we have seems off kilter from what they think it must have really said when God first verbally and fully inspired it. It’s a way around the horror of so much of it, like David, God’s chosen, beheading the opposing army’s giant, Goliath the Philistine, after slaying him with a stone from his slingshot. Then, as if winning were not enough, David parades into town with Goliath’s head on a stick.

“Don’t mess with me!” was the message of David, as it is today with ISIL, but it’s okay, one thinks, in David’s case because he was God’s anointed. Or, perhaps, it really wasn’t in the original manuscripts.

The questions of morality and ethics in these ancient, presumably less civilized times are brushed aside. David was God’s favored warrior and king who authored the Book of Psalms. He had human failings, for sure, arranging the murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, to take his lovely wife for his his own pleasure, which made God kinda mad, but, what is God to do with a man’s man like David?

They also proclaim a literal, physical return of Jesus, and “believe in the bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust, the everlasting joy of the saved and the everlasting conscious punishment of the lost.”

That’s the part that’s most disturbing. In a variant of the mega-church’s statement is the statement on the website of the General Association of General Baptist Churches, to which many of the Midwest mega-churches that strategically advertise themselves as “non-denominational” belong, the position on eternal punishment is stated as the difference between “the righteous” and “the wicked”.

We believe in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, the eternal felicity of the righteous, and the endless suffering of the wicked.

Theology matters.

Is this view of 21st Century fundamentalist churches all that different from the culture that produced David and Goliath, and the deaths of Uriah the Hittite, Ish-bosheth, and the vengeful response to Ish-bosheth’s two beheaders?

We divide the human race between the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, just as I did as a child in my back yard playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians…until I learned the real story about the genocide committed by the righteous European “settlers” who assured themselves that they, the ones who knew Christ, were the righteous. the city set upon a hill of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Watch out for righteousness, argued Jesus. It’ll get you every time, and the log remains in the eye of the righteous. Come, Holy Spirit, come! Before we behead each other and destroy the life of the pale blue dot itself.

Losing Our Heads

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Lewis Carroll knew nothing about ISIS when he wrote Alice in Wonderland, but he knew about the insanity of power in the high places of his own culture.

In the screenplay of Alice, the Queen of Hearts asks “Who’s been painting my roses red? WHO’S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED? /Who dares to taint / With vulgar paint / The royal flower bed? / For painting my roses red / Someone will lose his head.”

The Card Painter responds “Oh no, Your Majesty, please! It’s all ‘his’ fault!” The Ace blames the Deuce. The Deuce blames the three. The Queen explodes.

“That’s enough! Off with their heads! I warn you, child… if I lose my temper, you lose your head! Understand?”

The very thought of beheadings chills us to the bone. It would be hard to imagine a more horrifying spectacle than what we have recently seen of American journalists losing their heads in the Middle East. The fact that British and American citizens have joined ISIS is nearly as chilling as the killings themselves; we ask why one of us would dare “to taint with vulgar paint the royal flower bed.”

There is no excuse for a beheading. It makes no difference if it’s at the hands of ISIS or David, as in the beheading of Goliath the giant Philistine, or those who sought to demonstrate their zealous support for David, sneaking into the bedroom of Ish-bosheth, the son of Saul, beheading Ish-bosheth and presenting his head to David at Hebron. (Second Samuel 4:9-13)

To their great surprise, David, who had beheaded Goliath, is not pleased. “‘[W]hen wicked men have killed a righteous man in his own house on his bed, shall I not now require his blood at your hand and destroy you from the earth?’ And David commanded his young men, and they killed them and cut off their hands and feet and hanged them beside the pool at Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-bosheth and buried it in the tomb of Abner at Hebron.” (II Samuel 4: 5-12).

We don’t hear reading like this in church. But you will hear such Scriptures read daily in a Benedictine abbey, as I did while visiting Saint John’s Abbey to get my own head and heart straight in anticipation of the death of my stepdaughter. The reading I’m remembering was just as ghastly as the beheadings of Goliath and Ish-bosheth and of David’s response cutting off the killers’ hands and feet on the public square for all to see.

“Why,” I asked my Benedictine spiritual guide, “do you read those readings? They’re horrible!”

The answer, he said, would take too long really explain, but, in essence, such stories are lifted up in the Benedictine daily worship because that sordid history – that capacity for violence and brutality is a part of us still. We must never forget.

The pictures and stories of the ISIS beheadings are meant to terrorize ISIS’s opposition in places like Iraq and Syria, and here at home in the U.S.A. But there is evidence that they also produce a widespread determination to stop ISIS before it’s too late.

“That’s enough! Off with their heads! I warn you, ISIS… if I lose my temper, you lose your head! Understand?”

Moral outrage is in order. Yet a friend asked a question I didn’t want to hear and could not answer “As grizzly as the beheadings are,” he asked, “what’s the difference between that and blowing people’s heads off – enemies and children who are ‘collateral damage’ – with bombs dropped by a drone?”

President Obama has his hands full on this one. Some argue that he’s been too cautious. But before we go much farther down the road of exercising American power in ways that have produced hatred in the past and that will undercut whatever consensus of moral outrage is developing toward ISIS, we do well to remember the brutal response of David, whose cruelty at Hebron equalled and exceeded the wrongful beheading of Ish-bosheth.

Like the Benedictine brother said, we must not forget our history. Otherwise we paint the roses red and we all lose our heads.

Burners

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Verse – Burning Man (A Negative Acrostic)

Burners all must have real money,
Unless they will win the draw.
Rich folks flock to wear the funny
Nighttime costumes, whites will all
Imitate the best black dance moves,
Not that many blacks are there…
Get the best rental motor homes,

Make plans, we have time to spare
Art’s in our homes, our museums:
Narcissistic, not a care…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 31, 2014

Steve attended Burning Man 2014 in Nevada this past week. Steve’s 71, had the money to go, but shared a tent.  He wrote by email “I did accapella singing, heard great jazz, rode on an art car (see the burningman.com web site). I would only go back in an RV… For the quiet, AC, & clean toilet & shower.”

Elect Gil Fulbright

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Elect Honest Gil takes its lead from the satire of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Ads like this are now up and running in Kentucky. Elect Gil Fulbright, the Honest Politician.

For the past month my inbox has been filled with political party requests for money. Those requesting my $5 have gotten frustrated. Today was the clincher. The message? ”FINAL NOTICE!”

“This is the FINAL NOTICE of your member status before tonight’s fundraising deadline.”

Funny thing. I’ve never been a member of their club, but I have shouted up to their tree house with email responses asking them to stop the hyperbole and sensationalism and to stop using words of war like “eliminate” – “annihilate” – “obliterate” – “destroy” – the opposition.

RepresentUs is going to get my money this year. So, of course, will candidates who agree with RepresentUs and are willing to actively support the bills that have been introduced in the U.S House and U.S. Senate that will overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

 

 

Midwives in the Time of Collective Terror

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Bernie Sanders’ Agenda for America

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Please leave your comments.

Plunging into Life: William Stringfellow

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Jacket of "My People Is the Enemy"

Jacket of “An Ethic For Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land”

As I look at the structural violence symbolized by today’s funeral for Michael Brown in Ferguson and consider the Blackhawk helicopters from Fort Campbell, KY that turned Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN into an Army urban training ground last week, I’m remembering William Stringfellow with thanksgiving.

Bill Stringfellow was a thorn in the side of both church and state, a predictably  unpredictable, lovable, hatable, tenacious, brilliant street lawyer, constitutional lawyer, and Episcopal lay theologian. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth observed, during a speaking tour across the United States, that Stringfellow was the person who most captured his attention. If he were an American, he would listen to Bill.  My copy of his most poignant work on the subject of what he called “principalities and powers” – An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land – was water-logged and mildewed because of a flood in the church basement, but his earliest book, My People Is the Enemy, sits prominently on my book shelf.  He wrote the following from the one room, rat- and cockroach-infested tenement apartment in East Harlem where he had chosen to live and work among the poorest of the poor instead of accepting one of the New York law firm offers following graduation from Harvard Law School.

 To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a “better” world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor fondness for “moral and spiritual values” (whatever that may mean), nor self- serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for [humanity] in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of [humanity], and in that event he has broken the power of death once and for all.

 

That is the event which Christians confess and celebrate and witness in their daily work and worship for the sake of all [humanity].
To become to be a Christian is, therefore, to have the extraordinary freedom to share the burdens of the daily, common, ambiguous, transient, perishing existence of [humans beings], even to the point of actually taking the place of another [person], whether he be powerful or weak, in health or in sickness, clothed or naked, educated or illiterate, secure or persecuted, complacent or despondent, proud or forgotten, housed or homeless, fed or hungry, at liberty or in prison, young or old, white or [black], rich or poor.
For a Christian to be poor and to work among the poor is not a conventional charity, but a use of the freedom for which Christ has set [humanity] free.
~ William Stringfellow – 1964,  My People is the Enemy [Anchor Book edition, p. 32.]

 

Thank you, Bill, for your wisdom, courage, and witness. We need it now as much as when you wrote it. “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis” (“May everlasting light shine upon them, O Lord, with thy saints in eternity, for thou art merciful. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them.)”

 

“Homeland” Militarization

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Thanks to MinnPost for publishing Views fro the Edge‘s submission this morning.

Click Homeland militarization — tanks in Ferguson, Blackhawks in Minneapolis — must be stopped to read, like, or comment on MinnPost’s site.

One of the more informed responses to this piece came in a personal email rather than through the MinnPost site. It’s worth sharing here.

“About 15 years ago, there were articles in the NYT about new, non-lethal, technologies for subduing criminals and quelling riots. They were clever, stuff like a slime-cannon that basically lobbed a ball of K-Y jelly into a crowd, making it impossible to walk, run, or even get up off the ground. Or sticky webs that wrap around the target with tenacity enough to immobilize an All-Star wrestler. But why mess with all that when you can really send a message?

“The six shots that murdered Michael Brown were an act of terror; and so is all the police combat drag, including the assault rifles and armored personnel carriers. H.L. Mencken once said about a Baltimore cop, with a wink, “He loved a long, hard chase almost as much as a quick, brisk, clubbing.” These are different times. They still love clubbings, and a little pepper spray in the face while your hands are zip-tied, but the number of police killings using insanely unnecessary levels of force these days broadcasts notice that, no matter what they’re doing to you at this moment, anything less than complete submission could cost you your life. Everybody should know by now that you could cross a cop in your birthday suit and have your birthday taken away by six rounds from a 9-millimeter.

“Do you know much about the 1967 riots on Plymouth Avenue in Minneapolis? I don’t really know what set it all off. Stores were burned and looted, and yet it all hardly drew mention in the national press, overshadowed, maybe, by the really angry riots in Watts and Detroit and on the East Coast. There was a war on then, too, but it’s said the National Guardsmen who were called in carried rifles with empty magazines.

“Today, everybody who complains that Americans never had to give up their domestic comforts during more than a decade of war should get some grim satisfaction out of the black helicopters and armored personnel carriers in the cops’ garages. Isn’t it ironic, when we remember how everybody likes to praise the warriors who fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘to keep us free’?”