De-Crypting Jonas's Sign: Semaphore From the Belly Of Leviathan

As I say, I am head over heels for the new pope so far based on what little I have heard or seen. My gut is telling me that he's the bees knees.  I'm really very pleased.

But..

There have been a few discordant notes that I have marked.  The most important is a comment Cardinal Bergoglio made in what is an otherwise inspiring interview, that can be found here.

I'll excerpt it, because it is very interesting, and worth a read and meditation.  The interviewer's questions and interjections are bold face, he begins by asking Cardinal Bergoglio what he would have said to a recent consistory of Latin American bishops he has just missed if he had had the chance.  Cardinal Bergoglio had been called to Rome and then become sick while there, forcing him to miss the consistory where Benedict XVI had addressed the bishops. This is his response:

BERGOGLIO: I would have spoken about these three key points. 

Nothing else? 

BERGOGLIO: Nothing else… No, perhaps I would have mentioned two things of which there is need in this moment, there is more need: mercy, mercy and apostolic courage. 

What do they mean to you? 

BERGOGLIO: To me apostolic courage is disseminating. Disseminating the Word. Giving it to that man and to that woman for whom it was bestowed. Giving them the beauty of the Gospel, the amazement of the encounter with Jesus… and leaving it to the Holy Spirit to do the rest. It is the Lord, says the Gospel, who makes the seed spring and bear fruit. 

In short, it is the Holy Spirit who performs the mission. 

BERGOGLIO: The early theologians said: the soul is a kind of sailing boat, the Holy Spirit is the wind that blows in the sail, to send it on its way, the impulses and the force of the wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Without His drive, without His grace, we don’t go ahead. The Holy Spirit lets us enter the mystery of God and saves us from the danger of a gnostic Church and from the danger of a self-referential Church, leading us to the mission. 

That means also overthrowing all your functionalist solutions, your consolidated plans and pastoral systems …

BERGOGLIO: I didn’t say that pastoral systems are useless. On the contrary. In itself everything that leads by the paths of God is good. I have told my priests: «Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers, take your responsibilities and then leave the door open». Our sociologists of religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish and the next. So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

This is valid also for lay people… 

BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah? 

I don’t remember it. Tell us. 

BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward Tarsis. 

Running away from a difficult mission… 

BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his pre-ordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that God leads His people with the heart of a Father. 

A great many of us can identify with Jonah. 

BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the closed world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their identity threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be still more self-concerned and self-referential. 

What should one do? 

BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and recipes but with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest with the words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of interest. The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who has loved us from the beginning. 

For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church? 

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others». 


So,  on one hand this may perhaps be the best exegesis of the book of Jonah I have ever read.  I really  like the story, and have always thought it amusing that God's chosen prophet is an angry pill.  I've commented on this before, here on the blog.

Cardinal Bergoglio- our new pope -  helps us here to really inhabit Jonah's perspective, and explore his motivation:  Jonah is not slothful.  He's not afraid. I used to read the book superficially thinking that Jonah is like me, in that sloth and fear are most often my motivations for avoiding what I believe God wants me to do, and projecting my sins onto him.  I'd rather not inconvenience myself, I'm afraid of criticism and failure.

I don't often consciously find myself wanting to actively frustrate what I think God wants..

But that is precisely what Jonah wants to do.  He doesn't want to preach mercy to Ninevah, because he hates the Ninevites.  He doesn't want them to be saved.  (I always found that amusing, and odd.. ) I've always thought that "the sign of Jonas" was a sign meant for the sinners in Ninevah, ignoring the irony that what the story may be signifying is that the really great sinner here is Jonah himself.   He flees to frustrate God's desire to show mercy to those he hates.

(Aside: I do not want to imply that my sloth and fear are less sinful than Jonah's hatred - hatred, even if sinful, is at least not lukewarm, and in Jonah's case is rooted in Jonah's righteousness - I think he hates the Ninevites because they truly are evil; not merely because they are from Iraq, inscrutable proto-muslims, and different than him.. )

The sign of Jonas is therefore perhaps also a sign to Jonah himself, maybe in the essential sense.  It's a sign unto the pharisees,  of whom Jonah is the prophetic forerunner.

Cardinal Bergoglio says the scripture is warning us not to let our pride; our sense of propriety, orthodoxy, our need to control things, judge things, to sit in Moses' seat over others; keep us from loving our brothers, and so keep us from loving God.

That's spot on, I think, and beautiful.  Judge not least you be judged.  Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.  Love, and you shall be loved. For to love is to have God. We are meant therefore to love everyone, especially our enemies and those we are tempted to hate.. For God is love. That's the gospel in it's purity.


But, on the other hand..  Two things he says give me pause:

So I then told the priests: «If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God. 

I've also read Cardinal Bergoglio calling priests who refuse to baptize babies born to unmarried mothers  pharisees, as well.  It's the same theoretical principle.

But the two things strike me to be in practice different.  Baptizing an illegitimate child seems to me to potentially have strong pastoral justifications; to be a legitimate ekonomia, an act of gratuitous mercy.  While giving the eucharist to a person who is not actively trying to live a life of normal Christian virtue - the baseline of which is going to mass on Sunday - seems a very different thing.  Paul warns that if you receive unworthily you receive unto your own destruction.  I think that means at least a modicum eucharistic discipline is called for?  People should be encouraged to examine their lives and aspire to holiness - meaning living a life of some discipline in prayer and virtue - before receiving?


Then, and even more puzzlingly, he says "and to think that baptism alone could suffice." implying I think that ministerial priesthood is unnecessary, and conducive in any case to sinful clericalism.

That is another apparent radical denigration of traditional eucharistic theology.  Moreover, the ministerial priesthood is what makes the Apostolic churches.  Renouncing it is the existential hallmark of protestantism.  This is hugely problematic to me.


What the Holy Father says about "spiritual worldliness" - which is turning religion into essentially a mere ideology, a means of social control, a spiritual fetish that one uses to primp the ego and marginalize others who fail to meet our standards - is I think true and wise.  Well worth praying over.

But here's the thing: dogma and liturgy and tradition are not incidental. They are critical.  While it is clearly true that without charity - love - it is all dross, and that many people I think have fixated on tradition and liturgy and dogma in distorted spiritually destructive ways - I was, and perhaps still am one of them - it remains that the normative way that truth is expressed is through dogma, and that tradition and liturgy are organic realities that must be respected and nurtured as the rich soil in which the culture of our faith is renewed.  These things with charity are salvific, and without these things charity is endangered.

To value, and to seek to protect and promote them is not pharisaical. It's essential to being Catholic.


Asking people to come to mass, and encouraging them to fully participate in the life of their parish - which means things like asking them to make an annual confession, and not to miss mass without a serious reason - should be the norm.

The idea that someone unwilling come regularly to mass, who is not homebound or in some other serious way  prevented from coming regularly to mass, should be allowed to receive communion anyway while in an objective state of serious sin..  Well, that's scandalous.  I don't know what to say.

Maybe I do not understand all that the Holy Father meant there.  Maybe.  But if he meant what it seems he meant, I have some serious questions and reservations.


Look, I watch him talk in a clip like this,

And my heart melts.  I love him.  I do.


But.  But.   He receives the unconditional endorsement of the likes of Fr. Leonard Boff and Roger Cardinal Mahoney, and then does odd little things like quote an unnamed "German poet"

("es ist ruhig, das alter, und fromm.." It is peaceful, old age, and religious.. See his March 15th audience, 2nd to last paragraph for the context - again, I love this old man)

In one of his addresses, who turns out to be Fredrich Holderin.. Well, this as I say is a quibble, but old Friedrich is an early 19th century romantic poet and political radical; a supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the German peer of Byron, Keats, Shelley; who went nuts and died painfully after having a insane affair with his patron's wife.  He had strong influences on the likes of Nietzsche and Hegel, and then later thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Heiddeger..

Not a big thing at all, in itself really, but it strikes me as slightly odd, that citation being made publicly by the pope..


It all still makes me perk up a little bit and wonder if I should be concerned.


The people over at Rorate Caeli are going a little jigga-boo over all of this sort of stuff, and while I think it's beyond premature to get really upset, I still get why they are worried.


Because there is a popular apocalyptic backdrop to this election.

There's the entire Peter Roman and St. Malachi prophecy of the popes thing, most famously..

Then there's the controversy over the supposed suppression of the entirety of the 3rd Secret of Fatima gig, where the speculation is that Tarcisio (anagram of "Iscariot") Cardinal Bertone is hiding the part of the secret that prophesies apostasy in the curia and hierarchy..

And then there are the many other Marian apparitions prophesizing imminent tribulation, the most important being the apparitions at Medjugorje and Garabandal.

Google all that at your own risk.


All of that is way too lurid for me to spend much time on.  I used to be much more absorbed by such things.. In fact, Lourdes and Fatima are really two profound childhood influences that really incited my interest and faith, back then..

But to lend all of that too much attention and energy now, would be a mistake I think.  I'm just mentioning it here because it's there, and I think it bears some consideration.

We'll know soon enough if there really is anything to be actually concerned about.  In the meantime, I'm praying for our dear Holy Father.  I hope he's truly the mensch he seems to be.

Otherwise, things are going to really suck.



---

Martha, Mary, Magdelena..

I wrote a post last night that got partly swallowed by Blogsy, an ipad app I like, but that has its issues.  I gave up re-writing because it was past midnight and I was meant to be up at 7 this morning to dive.  When I got up this morning they told me that because I was the only one who'd booked diving, they were postponing 'til tomorrow.

I went out and walked about Santa Marta instead.  The hostel is at the city center, just off the beach.  There's a central square surrounded by a dozen banks, and a few casinos (and hardly anything else, scum collects) with a great equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America, who died here at 47 in 1830.

The Liberator

There's a container port with one of those great hoist cranes to lift the containers off the boats on the waterfront, and a beach that verges into a breakwater.

Port lights at night

The water seems relatively clean, and there were urchins diving and swimming all along the waterfront, looking for coins and seafood.

I was propositioned by this very talkative and friendly woman who wanted to give me a massage.  Twenty five bucks, my choice of creams.  Much more subtle come on than usual from the prostitutes down here, who usually are quite aggressive.. She left me the pretension that we could have been talking about shiatsu, which we in fact could have been, but I'm pretty sure weren't.  I was grateful for this, because I can't stand aggressive whores.  I listened to her, as she told me about her life and all about the coast about the city.

I left my camera in the room, so this evening after eating a forth time at the superb Mexican place that is owned by the hostel, I decided to go out and walk about getting pictures, including the two prior.

This time, I ran into a whole clutch of whores.  Just as I was taking that picture of Bolivar, there.  Four or five of them, a couple I think were transvestites.  Now, to be honest, there's something venal about the Caribbean, that I dislike intensely.  One of the reasons La Cieba, Honduras got so much on my nerves, and was so depressing was that you couldn't walk the waterfront in the evening without being harassed by streetwalkers.  I've never noticed this type of aggressive pandering stateside.  Granted, I never go where you'd probably encounter it.  But the center of a city?  Right next to city hall?

This is why I detest libertarianism.  Like this crap is supposed to be legal?  Leave me the f**K alone, please. Where are the cops? If you think prostitution should be legal, think about having our public spaces invaded like this. This type of thing makes me appreciate what it must be like for girls to be hit on and leered at.  Not cool.

Still, there is in fact a certain nasty charm in being propositioned so blatantly.  They're actually kind of funny, the things that they say, like "¡Que rrrr-ico!" (how yummy!) "¡Ay, papi!" - other stuff like that.  Until they get down to groping (no respect for personal space, they try to feel you up) and flashing you (the girl - I think she's a girl - in the picture below actually has quite a nice ass, I know because she showed it to me several times) and asking to fellate you.  I flatter myself, I think a few of them would have done it for free..

They wanted me to take photos of them, I obliged:

Que rico.

Yeah.  So that's Santa Marta by night.

I then headed back to the hostel, which is quite happening.  There's a bar upstairs where they blare the tunes until two-ish every night.  Not so loud that it disturbs my sleep, so I don't mind.  As I mentioned, there's a really, really good Mexican place in the same building, and the downstairs has a groovy swimming pool in the center courtyard, with a movie room where they have probably a few hundred films tevo'd and on constant rotation.  The crowd is twenty-ish and international, but largely anglophone.

The hostel too, has an air of decadence about it.  This picture is on the wall in the stairway to the bar area.  It's pornographic and sacrilegious, so don't study this image too closely if you don't want to be offended:

That's just how we roll these days, eh.  Penis jokes never get old, especially when they're blasphemous, right?

Creepy.

There's also a ram's skull on the wall of the barroom, which reminds me of this.


All of which leaves me ambivalent, in that while this town and hostel are once beautiful, they are also charged with a souspeçon of corruption.  I've been of paranoid mind these past few years.. I've been getting over it lately, throwing myself more fully back into an emphatic life of prayer where I'm trying to avoid analyzing things and becoming judgmental (ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.. that in my case by grace alone, because I'm too much the fool to manage it by my own) and thereby jacking up my inner life with the idea that I understand anything or anyone, or that I am actually in control of anything or anyone beyond my own mind and heart, and even that is touch and go, most the time...

Anyhow, as I came back to catch some sleep before diving tommorow, I noticed that the hostel is right next door to this:

eis qui sine peccado..

Which made me smile.  We're also right around the corner from another Paroquia de San Francisco here, as well.  I took a couple crummy shots of the church, it's a humble little colonial structure, I like it quite a lot.  I hope I can assist at mass there sometime before I leave here these next couple days..

He's always popping up, wherever I happen to go..

Tonight is the eve of our little brother's feast.  Saint Francis, pray for us.  I pray tonight especially for my little whores, may they come to no harm in the resurrection..

Oracion Simple

Senor, haz de mi un instremento de tu paz, 

Que alla donde hay odio, yo pongo el amor. 

Que alla donde hay ofensa, yo pongo el perdon.

Que alla donde hay discordia, yo pongo la union.

Que alla donde hay error, yo pongo la verdad.

Que alla donde hay duda, yo pongo la Fe.

Que alla donde hay desperacion, yo pongo la esperenza.

Que alla donde hay tiniebas,  yo pongo luz.

Que alla donde hay tristessa, yo pongo alegria.

Oh Senor, que yo no busque tanto
Ser consolado, cuanto consolar.

Ser comprendido, cuanto comprendar.

Ser amado, cuanto amar.

Porque es dandose, como se recibe. 
Es olvidanose de si mismo, como uno se encuentra a si mismo.

Es perdonando, como se es perdonado.

Es muriendo, como se resucita a la vida eterna.

Amen + 

I think that's all I got for you guys tonight.  Blessings on your heads.  Sleep tight.



---

Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

Glossarium: Thoughts On the Humility of Truth

As I'm driving about and finishing my grand tour of the peninsula, I've been thinking about this here blog, and all the things I've created it to say.   I've said virtually none of it yet, because of the overweening aspect of it all.    


Throw my thoughts upon the void impassive..  Strew my pearls..  


It needs to be said well, if at all.   


So far I've been coy.  I've been amusing myself that way, but also unsure of how - or even whether - to begin being explicit.   I want to start gently, and give my testimony in a way that the dozen or so people that  I want to hear it (and if they are so moved, respond somehow to it) to hear it well.  


Today, I realized that I feel ready to start saying it.   No time like the present, no moment like now.  So I will say what I've been holding to my heart all these years..  The secret work of my heart all this time, that has made my live the seared blessing that it has become.


First, I need to explain a few terms.  If you notice, I've been tagging my posts here.   I want to explain what I mean by a few of them, so that if you care to follow this blog and really understand what I am trying to say, you will. 


This afternoon I was listening to NPR and Neil Conan was interviewing this fellow about "apocalyptic" movies.   They were joking that the segment had nothing to do with the previous ones in which we learnt that London is burning, world markets collapsing, tanks are rolling the streets of Damascus, and the recession deepening.   They rattled on for a while, and talked about a bunch of movies in which the human race is almost or entirely annihilated by one thing or another, usually some combination of our own hubris and stupidity or alien invasion or natural holocaust.    


As listened I realized that they weren't going to talk about the origins of the term, about what the word "apocalypse" means.   Let me do it for you here.   This the etymology my dictionary gives the word:


ORIGIN Old English, via Old French andecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘uncover, reveal,’ from apo- ‘un-’+ kaluptein ‘to cover.’


This word entered our lexicon by way of the Bible, of course.  It is used as a title of the last book of the New Testament, which is (if you did not know) written in Greek.   That book is the account of a prophetic dream attributed to the Apostle (Greek for "messenger") John, the only one of the 14 apostles (I include Judas, Matthais and Paul) to die a natural death.   Judas killed himself, and all the others were all martyred (Greek "to witness") for their faith in Christ.  


John, not incidentally, is the only one of the twelve who did not run away from the Crucifixion, and remained at the foot of the Cross.  


Wikipedia says that the name John derives via Latin Iōhannēs and Greek Ἰωάννης from the Hebrew name יוחנן (Yôḥanan, also transliterated Yochanan), a short form of the long name יְהוֹחָנָן Yehochanan, meaning "Yaweh is merciful".  


Now, why am I telling you all this?   If you notice, I've tagged a lot of the posts here with that word, apocalypse.   And when I do it, I am usually not (usually most often emphatically not) referring you to the end of the world, or to tribulations like those that Neil Conan and his guest were calling "apocalyptic" in those films.   Like I say, not normally..  


Instead, what I mean is that I think that whatever I am writing about is revelation of the hidden truth, the true nature of things, of veiled unappreciated goodness, veiled (often widely accepted) evil.  The way we, and things, truly are.  The beauty deep down things, or else the tricks that wicked bastards are doing in the shadows..  Things that people aren't noticing or being honest about, the subtle things that admit transcendence, the wickedness that we do to benefit ourselves and that harms others.


You know, all that which is "occult"  (from Latin occultare ‘secrete,’ frequentative of occulere‘conceal,’ based on celare ‘to hide’; the adjective and noun from occult- ‘covered over,’ from the verb occulere ).


Those things "seen through the glass darkly.."


These things are not usually "occult" in the sensational sense.  But evil things are always in the end diabolical, and the most evil people ultimately become satanic, in that they consciously revolt against the good and begin to worship their own wills which are evil.  And that is inevitably demonic and then spiritually uncouth in all the ways that people normally think "occult."


When I use "occult" as a tag on this here blog, I mean that I'm usually talking about something malevolent or diseased that is disguised, subtle or hidden.   Or, something beautiful that is gentle and unappreciated.


Which brings me to the issue of knowledge.  Gnosis, science, wisdom.   Love.   


Knowledge of good and evil.


Which is of course tantamount with knowing the truth.  The truth that shall set us free.


My ultimate message here, the thing that I want finally  to tell you, is that that truth exists.


Because what is is true, and that is inescapable.


We can either accept truth, witness and worship it, or else reject it and lie.  We either see that we serve the truth, and are subject to it, or else seek to escape it and deny it.


If we acknowledge our dependence upon the truth, our need for it.. If we see that we cannot control the truth or destroy it..


And that the truth will necessarily humiliate us, make us see ourselves and others as we really are..


That the truth is not in the end of the intellect, but rather of the heart..


That the truth, like everything good and real, is personal..  is indeed, a person.


This is my faith.  My testimony.   My heart knows it is so.




---

Thoughts on Luke 6:24

[concerning this blog's heading]


So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .

Two notes on this:  first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters.   They served them then, and they serve them now.

Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt.  This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest.  The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)

Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.


I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..


Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places.   I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties.  They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country.   They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..

The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..

 I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..

My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore.  Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.


That extremity scarred me.  I came home radicalized.


It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition.   A very highly tuned one.

We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system.   Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.


They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.


Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.


That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.

To include myself.


Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.

Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block.  Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular.   There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line.  It's been subverted.  They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.

They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies.   The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy.  Courts, perhaps prisons.  Police, armies, maybe.  They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law.   And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.

Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up.  I'm not babbling crazy.   They've come out and said it very clearly.  Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics.  These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone.  What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them.  And that "them" is a very small number of people.

They do not care about anyone except themselves.  They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe.  They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.  

I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.


Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:

One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.

Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.

To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..

Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man.   Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.


Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.



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Gnostic Propaganda & The Hive Mind: You Are a Zombie, But No Worries: Everything Tastes Like Chicken When Raw.

I've refrained from commenting on the charade taking place in Washington these last few weeks..

Or rather decades..

Because it's all too depressing, and I almost don't care about what I think about it, so why should I share it with you?  

Expect you to care, when I barely do?  

All pruny bathing in cynicism, here.    You are stupid.  You are stupid.  You are stupid.

Well, you know, whatever, right? 


All the discourse coming out of D.C. about default and all that is pure bullshit, cynical even for Washington and our "opinion making" elite.   Ever since the Iraq invasion I've been marking their lies and propaganda.   At first  I was shocked and incredulous, then for a while I was paranoid.

Now, I'm bemused verging into indifferent.   Still, I'll shake myself free of torpor to see if anyone cares to have a conversation.    I'll just make a few quick salient points to the void.   If anyone cares, you have my email address, or can leave a comment or whatever else may please you.


Study these two images:

This debt that the government creates is mostly held by Americans.   Some 70% - that's seventy  percent - of the debt is held by federal social security, military or civil pension funds, and our own investor class.  That's to say that the interest on the public debt for the most part enriches American citizens and corporations.


This means that the tax revenues being used to service the debt goes to major capitalists,  to private investors.  A default preventing the service of this debt would mean Daddy War Bucks might lose his free money stream.  Not gonna happen, as in not ever.  The warmachine and the banksters will get their lucre.  There will be no default that keeps their bloody paws from grubbing in the public till, believe me you.


There may come a point where there is a default that reorganizes the debt that could screw foreign interests, but barring war or some other major catastrophe I doubt even that. 


That's right.  Think about the scam, now.  Seriously.   You're stupid, but still.  Think about it:  TARP "bails out" the banks and major investment funds and insurance companies who deliberately created a bubble to run our economy into the ground.

Then, they demand that the government create public debt to "save the economy."   That public debt is then bought by the same private investor class who created the crisis.

They simultaneously demand that taxes on their investment and corporate income be abolished, thereby guaranteeing a sophisticated genus of debt bondage for the idiotic American public.

The wars feed the corporate contractors and the public debt simultaneously, as well.   Money goes from the public to the rich. 


The debt - no matter whether accrued by war or bailout - always constitutes a massive transfer of wealth toward our investor class, the wealthy, and the currently retired.


The very people who own and watch FOX News and read The National Review and profess to hate that house servant Obama.

The very people who say they hate the government are using it to rape the middle class.  Especially the future middle class, which will eventually be subsumed into the global working class (aka "proletariat") when it becomes feasible to pay the average American what they pay the sweat shop workers in Asia or immigrant labor here.   That day is coming, and even though most Americans are stupid they still feel it looming, which is why they are so mindlessly restive.  

The middle class being for the most part  catatonic, in a trance state where they blame the government for the mess,  not seeing that the government is the only agency that they have any real direct influence over, and is the only means of breaking the critical mass that monopolistic capital left alone always ultimately achieves, in which it draws all wealth to itself through interest on debt, and then enslaves all labor at a subsistence wage.

The zombies do not see that we have allowed our government and public discourse to be co- opted and utterly corrupted by the adepts of the rich.    


That's right.  I said it.


Enjoy your chicken.



---

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent Made Glorious Summer..

We, determined to prove villainous and hate the idle pleasures of these days, plots have laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, set in deadly hate one against the other: subtle, false and treacherous.


All I can say is to repeat what I've already said: we deserve what we are going to get.




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Further Thoughts Forth

Since I just let tear that last post, and the void remains impassive, let me kick it up another notch:

Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.

Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.

Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.

In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..

In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.

Because for as much as I like them..

Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.

Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.

In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.

What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.

Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.

If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.


How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.

Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.

The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.

As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.


In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.

For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.


And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.


Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.


Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.


You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.


Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.


That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?


Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.



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This is My Lucky Day. [revised]

The lunatic ... doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum **


On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV the Fair had all the Knights Templar headquartered in France simultaneously arrested, interrogated and in many cases executed.

Why did he do this?

The rumor is that they were fabulously rich due to their having become international bankers funding the Crusades, and Philip wanted their lucre.. They were also rumored to have become rank heretics through their contacts with the Mussulman and other exotic and even more esoteric creeds in the East. They furthermore were reputed and charged with practicing unnatural vices..

The further rumor is that the Templars introduced Masonry and other forms of practical gnosticism like Catharism to the West..


I for one do not care.*** I am going to write about Philip the Fair at least once more on this blog in relation to his conflict with Boniface VIII and the bull Unam Sanctam.


I only mention the Templars here for one reason: the fact that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day is often associated with their suppression on this date. I used to buy into it a little, myself..

Until I began thinking about it.. Sodomitical bankers practicing black arts..


Fire up the pyre, I say. Line the usurers, counterfeiters and moneychangers up. I'll stoke while they form their queue..


For Christ plus the twelve made for 13, didn't they?

Yeah. I think they did. Judas was subtracted, Christ ascended, then Paul and Matthias were later added. Still 13 in all.

Tolkien's caving aside (Bilbo was the lucky 14th? Why did the dwarves take 13 to be unlucky?) I now declare ..


13 to be my very most lucky number. And this day shall now until forevermore be a holiday to me.


That's right! Burn, baby burn! Screw the Templars!


Or, uh, not.


Seinfeld holds an auto, auto-da-fé.. Burns himself eating soup, solipsistically,




Or something..


[**I found that quote on Wikipedia's article on the Templars while verifying the content of this post. It made me laugh. This is the only time you will hear of the Templars on this here blog.. Still. They did come up..]

[*** Nous nous en foutons. Fecondez-vous. ]



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On Distrust & Anger

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.



---

On the Utility of Occam's Razor

So, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one, aye?

I was just watching the Zaphruder film of JFK's assassination:

(this is graphic, and is appropriately enough preceded by a *Target* commercial)


JFK Kennedy Assassination - Zapruder film - high... by virveli

It's really amusing stuff, actually, because it's very clear that the bullet that kills him by blowing his skull open is definitely coming from his front. The vicinity of the "grassy knoll" and the overpass in front of the car, in other words. The Texas Schoolbook "Suppository" where Oswald supposedly is shooting from is behind the vehicle.

It's simple physics. A body hit by a bullet doesn't blow toward the bullet, but away from it. Kennedy was blown toward Oswald's putative location, and away from the knoll and the overpass. The exit wound on Kennedy's head is in the back, not the front of his head.

The fact that the Keystone cops of the Dallas PD and FBI (who along with the Secret Service so scandalously failed to protect the President that day) immediately get Oswald's description, then arrest him, is also amusing. That Oswald - whose curriculum vitae screams CIA plant - claims to be a patsy to his dying breath, and is immediately off'ed by a mob hitman claiming to be acting from motives of vigilante patriotism, just seals the case.

Who benefits from Kennedy's death? LBJ and his Texas cronies, the mob, the cold warriors who want to escalate the war in Vietnam and action against Cuba.

Kennedy apparently was undergoing a change of heart on all of that stuff, and wanted to undo the CIA, and ratchet down the Cold War, or so rumor has it. Bobby Kennedy was also an activist against the mob, and was becoming a heretic on the Cold War, too. The Boston Irish Brahmin, not a great friend to the Southern establishment Texas oilmen..


That this is some sort of scandalous "conspiracy theory" frowned upon by the powers that be (the lone nut gunman did it! it's always the lone nut who's to blame..) is simply hilarious. Sure, dudes. It was Oswald acting alone. Sure.


I'll note that George H. W. Bush is an Eastern Banking Brahmin, but of old English and Dutch Yalie stock, who gets in bed deep with the Tejas oilmen.

He is serendipitously appointed head of the CIA "out of nowhere" in 1976. Just a Texas congressman who lucked out, see.

I say that the simpler explanation is that he had been involved in the intelligence community since his days in navy intelligence photography as a pilot during WW II. Yale, George's alma mater, has been at the forefront of providing leadership in the intelligence community since before WW I.

I'll also note that George was apparently in Fort Worth the day of the JFK assassination.

Odd fact, that. Well, everyone who was anyone in Texas politics was in the vicinity that day, right?


Anyway, I say that the assassination fits easily into the larger Machiavellian drama, in which Texas is at the epicenter of power in which oil, weapons and cheap labor as well as drugs like cocaine and heroine are the essential commodities.


Illegal immigration of cheap labor, sex trafficking, drugs and weapons. And oil.


Texas. Mexico. Columbia and Venezuela. Oil, drugs, weapons. Money laundering.


The mob and cartels meld into our intelligence community and "legitimate" business in banking, oil and weapons.


Our foreign policy can only be understood in terms of all that money.

Confused as to why we are going to remain in Afghanistan even now that Osama and "al-Qaeda" are gone? That we are going to stay in Iraq, even now that the place is stable and we've "restored democracy" there?


One thing explains our presence in Iraq: one forth of the world's remaining proven petroleum reserves are there.

Two things explain our presence in Central Asia: Afghan heroin and oil in the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.


Heroin, you say? But we're squeaky clean, we don't have anything to do with that.

Yeah. Okeedokee. In 2000 the Taliban put a ban on production of opium poppies, causing world production of heroin to drop 95%.

The very next year, we've taken them out, and have planted an army there. Opium production soars back up to pre- Taliban ban levels.

This, like every nefarious thing we do, is just an "accident." We can't stop it, see?


I'll spell it out, and paint a quick picture for you:

The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.

(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).

Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).


Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. It is well and amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles.

The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.


The Great Game is always on, and having that chit on the central Asian land mass, against the Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians is the key.


As for the death of Osama, I say that the evidence says he never ceased being an ISI asset.


I also say that the CIA is allied with the ISI, and that our intelligence community and political elite are engaged in a huge Machiavellian game involving money, drugs, oil, weapons and cheap labor.

Guns and money, drugs and oil. (I'm repeating myself for effect. Chant it like a mantra, throw sex in there once in a while for added zest and frisson..)


They hop gladly into bed with anyone who will give them power over these things.


The Saudis, the Paki ruling class.


The average American, who gets all riled up over religion and patriotism and stuff like gender issues (them dang femanazis!) is a chump.

They keep their Praetorians obsessed with Kim Kardashian's boob job, flush with just enough porn, corn syrup and cash to keep us dumb and happy.


God bless America!


And with that, I need to go make more tea.



---

Say, Who's the Enemy? [edited]

Not that Bradley Manning isn't a jackass and a twerp who deserves to be dishonorably discharged if proven guilty, and not that virtually all the information he is alleged to have released isn't of little interest and value, from what I've read it's mostly ho-hum we already guessed that that's what they were saying..

It's that the National Security aparatus has become a state within the state, and their penchant for overweening secrecy has no remaining legitimate purpose to continue now that the Cold War is over. None.


Compare Manning's story with that of Daniel Ellsberg, whose revelations of the Pentagon Papers did matter, and went a long way toward ending another cruel useless war in Asia, one that cost the lives of thousands of Americans (58,267 KIA, 1,711 MIA, over 300,000 WIA) and killed hundreds of thousands of locals.

Ellsberg's case went to trial, but was undone by the furor of Watergate and the government's inability to muster proper evidence.

Kissinger, that mass-murderer and assassin, had the gall to call him "the Most Dangerous Man in America:"



Note that the material Ellsberg released is still classified, despite having now been public knowledge for over forty years.


Ellsberg never served a day in prison, and neither should Manning.


All this violence, death and lying, all this secrecy, all this vicious stupidity for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Vietnam was ultimately meaningless, just as is our continued occupation of random valleys in Afghanistan.


Mr. Obama, what's the purpose? Why are our troops still in harms way?


The executive branch and its putative subordinate the Pentagon are out of control, all of this militarism and secrecy needs to end. Now.


This from Antiwar.com:


Having held Private First Class Bradley Manning prisoner for nine months, under conditions tantamount to torture and beyond doubt intended to break his will, the US Army recombobulated its allegations against him on Wednesday, adding 22 counts to an already lengthy charge sheet.

As a practical matter, these changes probably don’t make a lot of difference to Manning. He’s faced a likely life sentence for nearly a year now. Since the Army’s prosecutors claim they won’t seek the death penalty provided for in one of the new counts, the consequences for him, if convicted, remain pretty much the same.

That new count – "aiding the enemy" per Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — is really directed not at Manning, but at an assortment of other persons and parties: Wikileaks, Julian Assange, every foreign government and individual on earth … and you. And the act of filing that charge is, oddly enough, tantamount to insurrection against the United States itself.

Let’s unpack this "enemy" thing.

The power to declare war — and thereby to legally categorize a group of persons (historically on, but not necessarily constrained to, the basis of their allegiance to a particular state) as "the enemy" — is exclusively reserved, per the US Constitution, to Congress. Congress hasn’t exercised that power since 1941, and the wars it declared then have long since ended. The United States is not, legally speaking, at war. Thus the US has, legally speaking, no "enemy" to aid.

By charging Manning with "aiding the enemy," the US Army is, in effect, attempting a coup d’etat. It is usurping Congress’s authority and claiming that authority for itself. Since the President of the United States is also Commander in Chief of the US armed forces, the Army is presumably merely the President’s instrument in this matter.

[...]

Who is the "enemy?" Certainly not the (now long-deposed) regime of Saddam’s Iraq, nor the Taliban who ran (and mostly still run) Afghanistan. We can exclude these two as the designated "enemies" for two reasons.

First, not only did Congress (to the extent that the executive branch bothers even formally acknowledging that institution’s authority these days) not declare war on either of them, it specifically declared that it was not declaring war on them. If you don’t believe me, look at the "authorizations for use of force" yourself and read the "war powers reservations" sections. Recall that bills were introduced to declare war on both, and rejected.

Secondly, no one has said, with a straight face at least, that Manning intended his alleged releases of information for the eyes and ears of the Taliban, or of al-Qaeda, or of whatever ragged remnant of the Ba’ath Party persists in Iraq.

On the contrary: The intended recipients seem to have been an Iceland-hosted web site, an Australian transparency activist, and the world (including the American) media and public. They (You! Me!) are the "enemy" to whom Manning allegedly disclosed the state’s embarrassing secrets.

QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.



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Side note: Not that the entire Watergate and Ellsberg story doesn't deserve critical scrutiny in it's own right. I think that Nixon did have powerful enemies within the elite that wanted to destroy him, and that there were things going on behind the scenes within the power elite from the Kennedy assassination to the rise of Reagan that were very fishy. Ellsberg may have gotten off the hook because he was meant to.. That's a conjecture, but I think an utterly obvious one. He certainly had very powerful allies the likes of which Pfc. Manning does not.



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