I've been thinking about my anger.
Until a few years ago, I wasn't even aware that I was angry. It wasn't even an emotion, most of the time. It was more a psychic state, where I'd spun out. A mix of alienation and fury, death by 10,000 judgments consumed by cognitive and spiritual dissonance.
It began back in the 1990's when I began to read Church history, taken up in a rapture of re-conversion, convicted and in search of the perfect apologetic. I want to write about this (re)search in detail, but in small increments. I'm not going to start tonight. This coming week I'll start, by first getting to the nub of things in less than 1,000 words. After that, I may have a dozen brief essays about ecclesiology, epistemology and authority in me.
I'll just note that the "problems" proliferate pretty quickly, but that no one is unscathed when it comes to them. Everyone's running around naked pretending to be clothed.
Anyway, this perceived crisis in authority is at the root of, and is the backdrop to, my anger.
The two main axes of my identity - the things I had the most of my sense of self invested in, namely my identity as an American and a Catholic, were both called into profound question. Things I had never imagined could be true, clearly were.
I felt betrayed, lied to and manipulated. Victim of multiple trahisons des clercs.
First, there was the bald treason of our bishops. I do not think that Catholic priests abuse minors at a much greater rate than say teachers do. That's not to say we do not have major issues pertaining to gender and sexuality within the Church or priesthood and religious life. We clearly do. But none of that is the main issue: the fundamental betrayal in my eyes is not in all that.
It's that the bishops conspired to protect the very worst abusers, over and over again.
That the Church is not unique in this sort of corruption, and has been subjected to a scrutiny that should (but is unlikely to) be also applied to other institutions, religious and otherwise, in our society, is also beside the point.
It's that they systematically lied about the violation of innocence, over and over and over again. And that they did it everywhere, in a way that makes it pretty clear that the "strategy" of obfuscation and denial of truth goes to the very top.
The pope himself, the curia. Back decades, centuries.
I am going to write more about this, in personal terms, succinctly, yet in also in a bit of detail. Suffice to say for now that when I started reading about it (in books like Leon Podles' Sacrilege) it destroyed me.
The worst about those I had considered the best was true.
At the same time, my country, that I had also put on a pedestal, was attacked in an inconceivably graphic way.
Like most of us, I was traumatized by it. Unlike most, though, our national response did not make any sense to me. I mean, I understood it on an emotional level. Fear of nuclear terror. Strike back in revenge. Got it.
It was the entire Axis of Evil Shtick that I didn't get.
I have no interest in defending the Ba'athists or Mullahs.
What I resent is being fed obviously fraudulent propaganda lines. I resent turning them into cartoon villains, caricaturing them in ways that are obviously false, that lead us to misunderstand them.
It was very clear from the beginning that we were being propagandized and manipulated according to an agenda that had little or nothing to do with the one publicly professed by our leaders.
It was disinformation and lies on the scale similar to that practiced by Goebbels and Stalin, along with a rationale for violence ripped from the Nazi playbook.
Preemptive war is never just. Iraq, Iran and Korea were not allies and were in no way ever equivalent in any way to Germany, Italy and Japan in 1939. None of them was nor is in any way a real threat to the United Sates, nuclear weapons or no.
The Ba'ath party is not a admirable organization, but let's be clear here: the sorts of things they are guilty of are not that extraordinary. Everyone from China to half of Africa and many of our Arab allies and the Israelis commit similar sorts of torture and violence as the Ba'athists in Syria and Iraq have, all the time.
It offends me when our press and leadership pretends otherwise, and then uses such pretension as a pretext to war.
In fact, we have now done most of the things to Iraqis that we accused Saddam of: tortured with impunity, used despicable weapons such as depleted uranium that will have centuries of devastating consequences for the Iraqi people, and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis imposing our will on their country.
Anyway, I hate being lied to, and I hate gross liars. I also intensely dislike violence, and when we all went on an ecstatic orgiastic binge of it, "shock n' awe" and all that inexcusable cruelty that we inflicted on the Iraqi people..
Well, I'll be honest. My childhood love for my country died in 2003.
I feel like I've been betrayed, and don't really know how to deal with the emotional and psychic consequences of that.
This is merely an wordy explanation for why I've boiled over here these last few days.
I see lies everywhere now, and suspect the very worst is possible.
Because they are, and it is.
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