The Masons & Me: Moloch, Mammon & American Gnostic Messianism

Arturo Vasquez, whose blog I admire, yesterday posted this video:



Commenting that he "found this guy’s approach oddly refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Hey, other people are thinking it, this guy just says it's allowed.."


I responded in the comments. I share the thread as is now stands, because I want to broach these themes sooner than later. I've been being chary, uncertain of how to begin. There's a lot to be said, and I want to say it as level and eloquently as I can.


No more hesitation, then. I'm just going to jump:


[The comments are ordered by time-stamp over the last 18 or so hours. The timestamps on Arturo's blog are 3 hours behind EST, so my initial post was 11 pm/2300 last night, and my last about a half hour ago, about 5pm/1700 EST. I've made a few small corrections here to mine and my interlocutors' prose. Click through to visit Arturo's site if you want to follow the discussion, assuming it continues..]



Charles Curtis (02:07:40) :

“I was head of the CIA’s Latin American Bureau and I had major role in overthrowing what’s his name.” British interviewer dude: “Salvadore Allende? That’s his name.”

Love it. God Bless America.

Just like I love it when the liberal (to clarify, nearly all of us are liberals, the libertarian capitalist is the arch-liberal) runs up against the scandalous reality that the state does in fact sacralize violence. That’s its entire raison d’etre. All the sanctimonious handwringing over abortion, war, capital punishment – all of it is effete decadent childishness. The Catholic Church has never shrunk from that reality, and that’s one of the reasons I am and will remain a Catholic. God has allowed it, it is thus. And he will finally judge babylon, not us.

Christ said give unto Ceasar, and then went willingly to Jerusalem to face judgment by the Sanhedrin, Herod and the Emperor’s duly appointed governor. Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas – not to mention our pope and all the current hierarchy, the Senhedrin’s heirs in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple cult – have all approved his act.

Christ’s submission in this, and rejection of satan’s offer of power after his fast, only highlight the fact that the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.

Tomas de Torquemada, pray for us.

Deus vult. QED.

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James O'Malley (04:31:12) :

“the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.”

IMHO, that’s a pretty creepy (as well as false) statement. Even the Roman Catechism’s statement on capital punishment doesn’t say the government can kill whomever it pleases.

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Charles Curtis (04:44:17) :

Hyperbolic excess. I’m amusing myself. Arturo always provokes me. Whatever I say is his fault.

It’s like when Cardinal Newman said it would be better for the whole universe to be destroyed than the least venial sin committed. Or when Luther said sin boldly.

Who’s right? God is. He let all this happen, and governments do indeed kill who they will. The bishops say abortion is homicide. Then we drop bombs on little brown people, salute the flag of a masonic republic, assassinate foreign heads of state, and then go back to our coffee.

It’s funny, is all I’m saying. Rock on.

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The Singular Observer (20:06:13) :

Context:

Luther’s famous “sin boldly” quote is rarely given within context. The context was in a letter to Melanchthon, who was “hand wringing” over the question whether he’d be doing the wrong thing if he got married. So Luther advised him to “sin boldly”, i.e. make a decision and do it, and stop obsessing if it is sinful or not. Melanchthon was worried over the vow-breaking that marriage would entail.

Just thought I’d mention it.
Here’s the full quote:
“If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says [2 Pet 3:13], we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner.

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Charles Curtis (20:28:25) :

Which is to say that Luther resorted to hyperbole, to make a point.

Just as what I wrote is ad absurdum, from a rational point of view. Even if the gist of what Christ did is pretty clear. What he said was clear, too: “My Kingdom is not of this world,” He also uses a lot of Semitic hyperbole, to get people’s attention. That’s one of the reasons scripture is so challenging, and we need tradition’s context to understand it.

I’ll put my own take unambiguously: we tend to warp our pieties together, and turn patriotism into a religion. “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and all that nonsense. The god on the dollar bill is not Jesus. It’s mammon, and that’s anti-christ. I’m sick of this imbecilic self-satisfied tribalism, especially when it leads to these howling inconsistent standards when it comes to killing. 60 years ago people demonized Jews, even normal Catholics and Americans. Now, we’re doing it to Muslims, and that’s leading us to act in hideous ways. Why don’t we put images of all the children in Afghanistan and Iraq that we’ve blown to viscera up next to those obscene photos of abortion effluent? Why not? I’ll tell you: Because those shredded children condemn us all. Everyone one. Not just the fags and abortionists.

You howl when Obama speaks at Notre Dame, but stay silent when that masonic clown (“Jesus is my favorite philosopher”) Bush pretends to be “one of us” and “pro-life?” I’m nauseous. What a joke.

One of the reasons I love Arturo, is that all his intellectual pretensions aside, he knows how to write good satire, and for that I thank him. Thus spake Vasquez. Skewer away, Arturo. Keep slapping us in our bovine mugs.

Christ said something about reading the signs of the times. Feel the way the wind is blowing? Notice how the gnostics have overrun the culture, and even our bishops have fallen oddly silent?

Arturo isn’t half scathing enough.



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The American Cargo Cult: The Preordained March of the Elect Nation & Prosperity Gospel

No worries. John Frum shall return, with yet more cargo.




"Cargo cult" is an anthropologists' coinage of the early 1950s, describing South Pacific religious beliefs that place extraordinary faith in mysteriously arriving commodities. The mid-century anthropologists who first documented cargo cults date their beginnings prior to WWII, meaning that by the early 1900s these cults were touting a doctrine that bizarrely foresaw events of the 1940s. Scholarship agrees that the chronology is correct—cargo predictions predated the arrival of the American military—but it offers no logical explanation for the coincidental timing. What is clear is that when the military arrived, cargo cult predictions were literally realized. This made fertile ground for wildly successful sects; it also thrust America into the heart of cult dogma. Postwar religious practices were largely based on the activities of the US military. Cultists built loading docks according to the logic that cargo would arrive when docks were built, just as it apparently had during the American occupation. Believers routinely had visions of "Jake Navy," the corporate logo from an American brand of cigarettes; captains and lieutenants were appointed and exercised together daily. Village layouts were reorganized and genders segregated; airstrips, roads, and barrack-like housing were constructed; observances ranging from English lessons to self-imposed sexual continence were instituted—all intended to bring about the return of American wealth by simulating the conditions of an American military base.

The best known of the archipelago cults was the John Frum movement, centered on an island called Tanna (from which the Americans culled laborers for Efate). This faction followed a prophet named John Frum, who may or may not have been an actual person; a series of men seem to have assumed his guise as leader. Dressed in a red jacket with brass buttons, a tall black hat, and veil, Frum urged a return to kastom, the traditional ways of the Tannese. He advocated communal living and kava drinking, and rejected the well-established authority of the English Presbyterian missionaries. For a time in the late 1940s, a man named Isaac served as Frum's mouthpiece, prophesying with a magic bag of stones; at other times, Frum took on characteristics of the Biblical Noah. On Espírito Santo, the corollary to Tanna's Frummists were the Santo Naked Cult, which arose in the early 1920s under the command of a man named Runovoro. The early phase of the Naked movement culminated in the murder of a British planter in 1923; six cult leaders were executed. Runovoro wrote in a secret language, predicted that savior ancestors "would arrive after a Deluge in a great white ship loaded with Cargo," and prophesied the end of white Europeans on the island. Cultists on Vanuatu began to talk of a "King of America" named Rusefel (Roosevelt) who was alternately John Frum's father, brother, or Frum himself. In 1941, John Frum claimed that "he would send his son to America to bring back the King"; months later, American fleets began arriving en masse on Vanuatu.

Evolving as creative hybrids of anti-colonial sentiment, American xenophilia, reclaimed tribal traditions, and traces of Presbyterianism, the cults rapidly gained a popularity that predictably concerned the Condominium. By their order, American generals publicly declared that they were not gods incarnate. Religious connections persisted, however, and the Condominium responded with forcible suppression; in 1943, two men were executed for impersonating John Frum. (In the following fifteen years, 140 more men were arrested for their religious activity.) Part of the government's concern arose from the fact that the American presence was destabilizing colonial hierarchies of race. The ni-Vanuatu were both terrified and entranced by African-American troops stationed on the islands and the appearance, at least, of racial equality. A pre-war cult goal—the expulsion of all Caucasians—was revised, and the colors black and white gained symbolic importance. The sons of John Frum, expected soon, were suddenly described as half white and half black; Frum commanded that all clothing and decoration on the island be white or black, instead of the traditional red and yellow. This particular understanding of color as a marker of Americanness was no doubt strengthened by the dozens of black and white road signs, "exactly like the familiar US highway markers of the homeland, but neatly labeled 'Efate, U.S. No. 1.," that homesick American boys had erected around the island.

In the same vein, all kinds of material objects and symbols of the American presence—from red wood crosses modeled on the Red Cross to marine hats—were adopted as religious paraphernalia, invested with meaning that seemed strangely independent of, yet intimately connected to, their original purposes. At sunup and sundown, cult members raised and lowered an American flag, salvaged from a military dump, and assigned a color guard to watch over it during the day. Lamont Lindstrom observed that:

US military uniforms and insignia ... are prized possessions. A few men were lucky enough to secretly retain the numbered dog tags issued to them during tours of labor for the US military. Others still recall the songs they learned from American servicemen and are pleased to sing creditable rendering of "God Bless America" and "The Marine's Hymn." ... Every 15 February, a military drill team marches with bamboo rifles and the logo USA painted in red across the marcher's chests and backs. The team is commanded by a sergeant, "with stripes," who calls out still recognizable commands (which are, however, unintelligible to the Tannese) such as "to the right!"

To the Western observer, cult doctrine and practice appears shockingly Amero-centric. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that America was not a static object of cult worship. "America," and all things American, were put to use as vehicles for challenging colonial authority. Emulating military procedures, adopting military lingo, and folding America into local religious history had the psychological effect of aligning the disenfranchised ni-Vanuatu with the all-powerful Americans; performance of American military ritual invoked power by mimicking the powerful.

The departure of troops reified faith in American salvation insofar as it meshed well with the doctrine of Christ's second coming as taught by the missionaries. Cultists immediately began to prepare for the Americans' return. Frum believers cleared a plateau on northern Tanna for an airstrip that would receive John Frum's American sons, just like the airstrip that had been built a year earlier on Efate. The airstrip was also expected to receive American goods, and Frum said that people who did not help to build would be bombed by planes. About the same time, members of the Naked cult built a dock on Santo in anticipation of American cargo, and cleared roads to transport it to the villages.

Not only did cultists prepare for the arrival of new cargo, however; they also began to actively demolish what they had. Ni-Vanuatu started collectively dumping their British currency in the water, and raids on colonially owned trade stores were organized to gather extra currency to throw away. Not only money was destroyed, but livestock and indigenous crafts. Since so many cult practices mimicked American behavior, one wonders if the dumping wasn't also a reenactment of witnessed events, such as the strange "construction" of Million Dollar Point. The spectacular dump has never been explicitly linked to cult activity, but the connection seems plausible; the ni-Vanuatu regarded the American military's conspicuous excess as a direct function of their power. Again, in the absence of oral histories from Vanuatu itself, other regional testimony may be instructive. An Enewetak chief of the Marshall Islands noted that the gifts the islanders gave to American GIs were later seen on the beach, discarded, and he explained why: "All kinds [of things], they throw out, for they add nothing. Such is their strength, they do not need them." Quite likely, the ni-Vanuatu aimed to evoke this godlike strength by casting their things away. So outside the perimeters of recognizable human activity, the military's expenditure was deemed the behavior of divinities: large-scale destruction of usable goods and a cavalier attitude toward disposability were inscribed in cargo cult religious practice. Million Dollar Point thus unfolds as a prescient symbol functioning in two directions: showcasing American capitalism's disposal imperative, it also speaks to the immaterial dimensions of material caught in cross-cultural exchange. One country's waste betokens another's independence.



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Odds, Ends, A Few Personal Notes.. And Lastly, An Invitation.

When I was down in Florida a couple weeks ago, I had no less than four people (3 family members, 1 friend) go "so what happened to your blog? I was enjoying that, and it just suddenly stopped!" I mentioned Edith (LPMF) to my friend in an aside (J-dawg, who I know for sure was reading the last blog at least occasionally, because he posted comments there, and emailed me about things I'd written a dozen or more times) and he was like "Edith? Who's Edith?"

So, that's how much you pay attention to me, now? I thought I'd spilled my guts in technicolor there, all viscose steamy and pink, for your collective amusement, for titillation of the teeming anonymous masses? And now it seems even my friends and family weren't paying attention when I cut my own heart out and threw it throbbing onto the stage..

Ah. Well. I was amused, and told them all that I had told them very clearly on the last blog what I was going to do, and that they'd not been paying attention (Ye gods! How could they not be utterly fascinated and obsessed with me?) and may not know how to set up an RSS feed.. But that I would set them straight only if they begged me..

Not paying attention, not a big deal.

The fact that I apparently lost half my regular readership when I started this new project, and am getting no where near the number of strangers that I did at the old one (where my most popular posts had been hit thousands of times) is a good thing.

I go through occasional spats of self doubt about blogging at all, actually, wondering if it's not foolish and exhibitionist to be doing this, a species of self-absorption run amuck, where I expose things best left private to the uncaring world.. Until the world becomes interested, and then perhaps in a way that may haunt me..

But I've basically put all that aside. I'm going to continue writing here, whether anyone reads it or not. I have several dozen ideas that I want to either write out, or express in other (visual) media. There will be photo essays and short documentaries that I am am going to film. This summer, J-dawg and I are going to cut some tracks and record a bunch of songs, and I think I may post some of them (that will be lyrically pertinent to themes I'm developing on the blog) here.

It'll be a folk country punk project, which I'm sure is going amuse the two of us if nobody else.. The production values will at least be marginally better than anything we've done (jammin' at a canopied picnic table out behind the officer's club at Goodfellow half in the bag or whatever have you) before..

I need to put some things down for my own sake, and they may be things that are interesting or helpful to other people.. Maybe. I'm going to write my truth, if this prejudices anyone against me, so be it.

The last couple weeks since I returned to Vermont have clarified a whole string of things:

First, I belong here. This is my home. (je resterai ici..) I am probably going to buy or perhaps build a house here. I'm feeling my way forward slowly on this, and am going to come to a final decision this summer. I'm thinking that somewhere within 30 minutes of downtown Burlington and 30 minutes from Smuggler's Notch, Bulton Valley and Stowe. There will ideally (and I will realize my vision) be a beer and root cellar, a large garden and orchard (I'm planting all sorts of things), a study and library, probably two bedrooms, a loft, a finished basement with bunks for at least eight, and probably a kennel and apiary, both these last sooner than later.. If I decide to do this, and I am more or less now decided, I aim to either buy in the coming winter or following spring, or start building next April and May.

Then, I am going to be much more deliberative, and do all the other things I've meant and am meant to do..

(Voca me cum benedictus, Domine. Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritum quasi cinis, gere curam mei finis..)


I made a list when I was in 5th grade of all the things I would do. I would lay in bed at night, saying my prayers dreaming about it all, and thinking about all those things. I'm now through about 2/3's of that list, as well as a good third to half way through the four to six score allotted a life, and a large percentage of the remainder (climbing Kilimanjaro, being a photographer for National Geographic, stuff like that) is now obsolete. I've begun a renewed list. Some of the new goals are more existential than discrete acts, and quite a few of them are extrapolations of goals on my old list.

I decided today to finally do something I've been thinking about for two decades: this summer I am going to make what I call the "Thoreau Trip."


I spent four summers working for the Boy Scouts as a Matagamon high adventure guide. We would take crews of 6 to 12 boys and adults on canoeing trips on the Penobscot and St. John's watersheds in Northern Maine. While I was doing this, I read and learnt as much as I could about the history (European and Native American), economy, and ecology of the area. One of the books I read was Henry David Thoreau's classic, The Maine Woods.


In 1857 Thoreau came to Maine.

He took the train to Greenville, and accompanied by an Indian guide named Joe Attean (Attean being the name of one of my hometown Jackman's two main lakes) canoed up Moosehead Lake, portaged onto the upper West Branch, canoed down and across the top of Chesuncook to Umbazooksas.

There, he portaged again to Mud Pond (and amazing an very aptly named place, by the way) which is linked by a stream to Chamberlain Lake, which along with its southern neighbor Telos (Greek for "the end" - those old Mainer lumberjacks were not illiterate, nor were the Algonquin Wabanaki tribes - the Abanaki, Passamaquoddy, Micmac and Penobscot Indians - whose language marks so many of the place names of Maine and the rest of New England - they could not write and read, but they had a rich symbolic and narrative culture that is still partially expressed in the place names, for those who learn their poetry..) Lake is the headwaters of the Allagash, which is a tributary of the Saint John River.

At this point he had a choice. He hadn't made up his mind beforehand. He could have either paddled north up the Allagash to the Saint John's and out to the sea at the city of Saint John in Nova Scotia.

Or, he could do what he did. Turn south, and canoe to Webster Dam, and then south to Bangor.

Now, Webster Dam and the stream that flows south from it is not a natural waterway. You'd never know looking at it today, but the stream is in fact a canal cut by the lumberjacks back in the early 19th century to take the lumber they cut off the Allagash south by river drive to Bangor, then the lumber capital of the whole world.

It joins - and this is a beautiful and amazing thing - the two watersheds, making possible to travel by canoe from Greenville to Bangor and then to the sea (something human beings have been doing for 10,000 or more years) making it much, much easier than ever before those crazy Europeans showed up and blasted and dug us all a hole in the rock that divided the Saint John from the East Branch of the Penobscot..

The Kennebec is the major watershed of southern Maine (flowing from headwaters just south of Jackman, west toward Greenville, then south to Skowhegan, Waterville, Augusta and the Sea)..

The Penobscot is a lover reaching in from the Gulf of Maine embracing the entire center of the state. She flows up from Belfast to Bangor, up to Medway then to Millinocket. There were the mills. The river splits there into two arms around Khatadin (kha ta ande "the greatest mountain" leaping a mile high stretching into the sky at the heart of my state) - the East and West branches.

The Allagash wells up from between them, and like the Nile or Yukon flows oddly and seraphically north.

This last map lacks the Allagash. Imagine it running due north from Chamberlain.


There are many mysteries in those woods.

One that I think is very charming is that two of the three chief head lakes of the Allagash are named Chamberlain and Churchill, this a hundred years or more before the two prime ministers who led the British Empire during World War II.

I'm a myth making, homo mythologicus sumus..

Another is that I lost a friend there at Mid Webster, sat by his corpse there in the night, leaving my scapular on his chest with the dawn.

(it is not the wilderness that howls, but the heart and imagination of man..)


I, small and silly though I be, will haunt them myself when I've gone.

(Libera nos de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas Tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum. Sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam. Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus..)


This afternoon on the mountain, I knew that I have to go back. I have to finally paddle it all for the first time entire, yet again.


So I called Kenny this evening and told him.


(the language of friendship is not in words but in meanings..)


I'll do it alone if I have to, but I'd rather do it with friends.


And now I tell you. This is the deal: if you want to come, we should begin the very end of June into the first week and half of July after the spring flood subsides yet while the rivers are still flush. Ten days, Greenville to Grindstone or Medway.


The precise details will be worked out over a campfire on the Bowtrip with Kenny over Memorial Day weekend.


There. Do with that what you will.



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Hillbilly Apocalypse: Us Countryfolk Can Survive.

Ol' Bocephus, he ain't worried 'bout that Rapture leavin' him 'hind.

Got no worries. Nossir..




The preacher man says its the end of time,
And the Mississippi River she's a goin' dry..
The interest is up and the stock market's down,
And you only get mugged if you go downtown..

I live back in the woods you see,
My woman, the kids, the dogs and me.
I got a shotgun, rifle and a 4-wheel drive,
And a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.

I can plow a field all day long,
I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn.
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too,
Ain't too many things these ol' boys can't do.
We grow good ol' tomatoes and homemade wine,
And a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.

Because you can't starve us out,
And you can't makes us run,
'Cause one-of- 'em old boys'll raise an ol' shotgun.
And we say grace and we say ma'am,
And if you ain't into that we don't give a damn.

We came from the West Virginia coalmines
And the Rocky Mountains and the western skies..
And we can skin a buck, we can run a trot-line,
And a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.

I had a good friend in New York City,
He never called me by my name, just "hillbilly."
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land,
And his taught him to be a businessman.
He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights,
And I'd send him some homemade wine.

But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife,
For 43 dollars my friend lost his life.
I'd love to spit some beechnut in that dude's eyes,
And shoot him with my old .45,
'Cause a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.

'Cause you can't starve us out and you can't make us run,
'Cause one-of- 'em old boys'll raise an ol' shotgun.
And we say grace and we say ma'am,
And if you ain't into that we don't give a damn.

We're from North California and south Alabam',
And little towns all across this land.
And we can skin a buck, we can run a trot-line,
And a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive..



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Three Choice Clips on Libya

This clip from a few weeks ago, struck me as interesting and amusing. It shows some books discovered in Qadaffi's rooms at a palace captured by rebels. It seems old wacky Muammar has a thing for the occult:



From right as the camera pans, there is a copy of the Talmud, a text on the Kabbala, a book entitled "Alliance of Satan." Second upper row, from left there is a book on the number 23 in Jewish esoteric tradition, another Kabbalistic text (I think) whose title I can't be bothered to translate, and lastly a book on spirits and ghosts.


Then, I offer you all this beautiful tidbit: here a former CIA analyst named Micheal Scheuer calls a spade a spade and throws the feral fembot newsdroids at CNN into a hideous tizzy:



Mr. Scheuer: "Both parties love to intervene in other peoples' business where there are no U.S. interests at stake and spend huge amounts of money at a time we are nearly bankrupt. That doesn't seem to me to be a wise practice of American statesmanship.." Fembot CNN Newsdroid: "The economy and the war are separate issues.." Scheuer: "They're not separate issues, you're just carrying water for Obama."


Then, because that's all so crazy, I thought I'd knock it up another notch on the batshit nutty scale just for laughs.. Check out this:

كلام الحكم من معمر القذافي المجنون



زنقة زنقة , شبر شبر شبر , دار دار , بيت بيت , الثورة الثورة
!!

Ah, yes. You want to know what I think about the Middle East? Given our ongoing and apparent insatiable need to fuck with and infuriate Muslims, I think anyone who is sane will keep as far away from that place as possible. Given that crazy is the new sane, I expect Americans to still keep banging the war gong while stuffing as many orifices as possible with plastic wrapped dingdongs of one form or another.

At some point they may bring back the draft, and then you'll start paying attention.

Then it'll be personal again, and probably way too fucking late.



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Dancing with the Mountain.. Skiing as Life Metaphor.

Skiing is an inherently un-American sport. That's because most of our sports stories and metaphors revolve around the idea of trying harder.. "Okay boys, go out there and really hit 'em!" Go drive harder, tackle harder, run harder, play harder.

Well, in skiing it's just the opposite. The trick is to try softer.

Work with the mountain, rather than attacking it. Adapt your movements to meet the terrain.. Ski calm and collected, with the least amount of energy possible.. Let turns happen and forces build progressively, rather than forcing them all at once. Skiing is about borrowed forces. Gravity, mediated by our own grace, propels us far faster than we could ever go under our own sole power. The role of a good skier is to dance with, and coordinate these exterior forces, to meet the mountain in her curves and move with her.

The more you are in tune and sync with your skis, the snow, winter, with your own body and the mountain, the less there is to feel aggressive about.

The French have a term for this: la glisse. Glisser avec delicatesse, is to eloquently slide. You can't force it, don't even try. Let the piste rise to meet you, then flow into her..


Adapted from Breakthrough on the New Skis, Lito Tejada Flores, pp. 274-5.



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Which Side Would You Be On?

One of my favorite thought experiments or problems is to try inhabiting different historical epochs and imaging what it would have been like to face certain choices in defining conflicts. It's of course an act of imagination, in which you impose your "current self," all your prejudices and understanding that you've acquired in living in this present material and cultural moment upon an alien context - Bill and Ted's Excellent Historical Mindtrip.. Groovy and fun, but always a bit of a farce.

One of the things that I've realized in my travels is that the "self" is very much a creature of context, and that when you change your context you become someone else. We can't see our metaphysical parts, see. We can only feel them with the mind and heart, and they are formed and conditioned by experience. So when experience changes radically and forcefully there is a moment in that frameshift in which the soul's malleable stuff reacts and becomes choppy, and you sense things in the heightened shifting contrast and texture of the moment of mutation and change.

One of the things that people who after childhood never - or rarely, and then only under duress - radically change often fail to understand is how much simple things like the weather, or more complex things like language deeply condition one's existential state. It's a type of ignorance, an inability to learn, a paucity of empathy and imagination.

Anyway, there are certain historical scenarios I like putting myself in, imagining what it would be like to face certain choices at different moments of historical crisis.

The American Civil War, for example: slavery was odious, but what about the constitutional issues? One of the primal struggles in the history of the United States is the state's rights struggle. It's with us even now. Ironically, the Republicans (the successors of the liberal Whigs and the Federalist Party) are now the anti- Federalists, and the Democrats (originally the Anti-Federalists) are now the federalists. In my twenties and early thirties I was fond of saying that while I oppose slavery wholeheartedly, I was more on the Confederacy's side on the issue of State's Rights. If the people of a state could petition and vote to join the Union, then they should be able to peaceably leave it, too. The war was really in a sense an imperial one, in which white southerners were forced by violent invasion to submit to a political regime that they had rejected. I said then that I would not have participated in such an invasion.

I'm not sure where I stand, now.

The War Nerd over at THE EXILED has no such qualms or compunction. He's for having slaughtered them all:

I’m a Union man and a serious militarist about it. Sherman was just getting warmed up as far as I’m concerned. In fact when I read about how shocked the people of Columbia, SC, were that he burned half their town I have to laugh. Americans need to get out more, especially Southerners. If they had any notion of what the province that talked all the others into a dimwitted, doomed rebellion would’ve had in store for it anywhere else in the world, they would’ve thanked Sherman’s bummers on their knees for being so lenient. Sherman’s way of making war was so mild by world standards that if a panel of military CEOs from all of history had watched him march through Georgia and the Carolinas, there’d have been some serious tsk-ing about what a wuss he was. The consensus by all those Roman, British and Mongol ghosts would have been that the North should have expelled the whole white population of the South like the Brits did the Acadians—a way more harmless bunch—or sold them into slavery in West Africa, a nice bit of poetic justice. “How much am I bid for this fine specimen of Tideland gentry, ladies and paramount chiefs?”

The US benefited just from having four years when those jerks weren’t part of American politics. That’s what most surprised me when I went over McPherson’s book: how damn generous Northern law got as soon as the damn Planters were taken out of the political system. When you hear all these neocons talking about Lincoln’s administration as evil and totalitarian, what they mean is that without having to cave to the slave-owning loonies down south, Northern law started showing this incredible respect for the working people. Seriously, the laws they were enacting then would get Rush, Sean and Glenn screaming about Communism today. Take the Internal Revenue Act of 1862; it wouldn’t have a chance of passing today, because it’s way too sympathetic to the working people and doesn’t suck up to the super rich the way we do today. It was one of those laws made by the radical Republicans, back when “radical Republican” meant you wanted ex-slaves to have land to work and the right to vote, crazy socialistic stuff like that. Here’s McPherson’s summary of the new law:

“The Internal Revenue Act…expanded the progressive aspects…by exempting the first $600, levying three percent on incomes between $600 and $10,000, and five percent on incomes over $10,000. The first $1000 of any legacy was exempt from the inheritance tax. Businesses worth less than $600 were exempt from the value-added and receipts taxes. Excise taxes fell most heavily on products purchased by the affluent. In explanation of these progressive features, Chairman Thaddeus Stevens of the House Ways and Means Committee said, ‘While the rich and the thrifty will be obliged to contribute largely from the abundance of their means…no burdens have been imposed on the industrious laborer and mechanic…The food of the poor is untaxed; and…no one will be affected by the provisions of this bill whose living depends solely on his manual labor.’”

Incredible, isn’t it? That’s a congressman from 1862 talking. He couldn’t be elected now; they’d call him a commie and he’d be lucky to stay out of jail. Why, he doesn’t even suck up to the super-rich, the freak. That’s what America was like for a little while when the crazy white South went off on its big tantrum. Just imagine what the place could have been like if they’d stayed gone. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, because Grant laid out what would have happened to the two parts of the Union with his standard cold hard sense:

“The South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. [The North] had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. [The South] was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.”

Sounds like a happy ending to me. Too bad we spent all that blood and treasure dragging them back into the family. Might as well lose an arm or a leg dragging your crazy bipolar brother-in-law back. In fact, I agree with every word Grant says there, up to the “but” in the last sentence. Good policy, probably: believe everything up to the “but.”


He's got me putting U.S. Grant's memoirs on my list of books to acquire and read. There's a bunch of other stuff from the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, to the letters of figures such as Jefferson and Hamilton, that I am resolved on (re)reading, now, too. American history.. It's amazingly fascinating stuff, really.

A few other conflicts I imagine being a party to are the American Revolution or Anglo-American War, as I've heard people educated in the English Commonwealth system call it (I'd definitely be Tory and Royalist. I'd be off to Canada in a heart beat..) to the Mexican American War (I'm with Thoreau in jail - Emerson, please come and bail my sorry idealist ass out - screw the Halls of Montezuma.. leave Tejas to Mexicans like it belongs. I'd love to give it back to them, now. As long as they'd agree to take all the nasty assed Bushes with it, too..) to the Spanish Civil War ..

That last one is a bit of a dilemma to me. It was pretty damned complicated, after all.. It's like visiting an alternate universe, putting oneself in that imaginative milieu. Every shade of ideology from monarchism through communism was represented in that fight. Spain was really the culmination of a series of wars begun in the Reformation and French Revolution (royalist there, too. With the rebels in Brittany, the Vendée and Maine. « Vive le Roi! Morte aux Maudits Patauds!») It was the last huzzah of the old order against the Enlightenment demons first come with Napoleon's troops, in many ways.. The Catholic Church was at the center of the conflict, as a major opponent to land reforms and secularism, and usually supportive of monarchy and the traditional rights of the landowner.. The small landowners of the North were largely Carlists (supporting the claims of a Catholic traditionalist Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne).. The North was the part of Spain that had never been Islamicized, and had been the base for the Reconquest, not incidentally. In the south were the ancient latifundia, that economically disenfranchising labor system of the Roman era persisted in its basic form and dynamics under Islam and into the modern era, creating a large property-less rural and urban under class, giving rise to 20th century socialist and anarchist agitation ..

I am sentimentally attracted to the traditionalist and monarchist position, but am also drawn to the Basque position, also embraced by many Catholics, in favor of regional separatism and against the unitary federal state based in Madrid. I am also, like Orwell and many others, drawn to the anarchists.

It's the totalitarians, the fascists and communists that I can do without..

I'll say a few good things about Franco: he kept Spain out of WW II (very, very wise) basically flipping Hitler a well deserved bird, not even allowing him to take Gibraltar. Hitler called Franco (who is of a converso Jewish background like so many other interesting Spaniards) a dirty little Jew. That's endorsement enough for me to like him, at least a little. Franco's boys also were (according to Stanley Paine, if I remember correctly) guilty of fewer political executions than the left, a point not often mentioned by people attacking the Nationalists.. Both sides had very bloody hands, but the Reds' hands were apparently just a bit bloodier than the Black Fist.

Like with so many things, the resolution of Spain's Civil War was not clean, the results were mixed. One the one hand, it is clear that had the Republicans won, their victory probably would have been subverted by the Soviets, and the history of WW II would have been very different..

Europe could well have burnt at both ends, as Trotsky had dreamt.. That alternative history would have been a nightmare, probably.. Hitler like Napoleon mired in Spain and Russia simultaneously, a post war Europe likely dominated by Russia.. Spain would have suffered immensely in that circumstance, I think.

The problem from my perspective with Franco is that he actually in the end basically prepped Spain for neo-liberalism, and the conquest of the bankers. Given that I have several good friends who either work for or are themselves Iberian bankers, I cannot wholly condemn that order.. But I am still not overly impressed with it.

I have another post in me about Spain, that I may write this spring. I know you can barely bare the suspense of waiting. I feel your voracious need. What ever could I have to say about Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca and the Work?


Ah, as much as it pains me to see you suffer..



---

The Pleasures of a Simple Man, Redux..

People say I'm no-good,
And crazy as a loon.
I get stoned in the morning,
I get drunk in the afternoon.
Kinda like my old blue tick hound,
I like to lay around in the shade,
An', I ain't got no money,
But I damn sure got it made.

'Cos I ain't askin' nobody for nothin',
If I can't get it on my own.
If you don't like the way I'm livin',
You just leave this long-haired country boy alone.

Preacher man talkin' on the TV,
He's a-puttin' down the rock 'n' roll.
He wants me to send a donation,'Cos he's worried about my soul.
He said: "Jesus walked on the water,"And I know that is true,
But sometimes I think that preacher man,
Would like to do a little walkin', too.

But I ain't askin' nobody for nothin',
If I can't get it on my own.
You don't like the way I'm livin',
You just leave this long-haired country boy alone.

Instrumental Break.

A poor girl wants to marry, And a rich girl wants to flirt.
A rich man goes to college,And a poor man goes to work.
A drunkard wants another drink of wine,And a politician wants a vote.
I don't want much of nothin' at all,But I will take another toke.

'Cos I ain't askin' nobody for nothin',If I can't get it on my own.
If you don't like the way I'm livin',
You just leave this long-haired country boy alone.



---

The Pleasures of a Simple Man..

Lyrics:

I ain't nothin' but a simple man,
They call me a redneck I reckon that I am.
But there's things going on
That make me mad down to the core.

I have to work like a dog to make ends meet,
There's crooked politicians and crime in the street,
And I'm madder'n hell and I ain't gonna take it no more.

We tell our kids to just say no,
Then some panty waist judge lets a drug dealer go,
Slaps him on the wrist and then he turns him back out on the town.

Now if I had my way with people sellin' dope
I'd take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope,
I'd hang 'em up high and let 'em swing 'til the sun goes down.

Well, you know what's wrong with the world today is
People done gone and put their Bibles away.
They're living by the law of the jungle not the law of the land.
The good book says it so I know it's the truth,
An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.
You better watch where you go and remember where you been,
That's the way I see it I'm a Simple Man.

Now I'm the kinda man that'd not harm a mouse,
But if I catch somebody breakin in my house
I've got twelve guage shotgun waiting on the other side.

So don't go pushing me against my will,
I don't want to have to fight you but I dern sure will.
So if you don't want trouble then you'd better just pass me on by.

As far as I'm concerned there ain't no excuse,
For the raping and the killing and the child abuse.
And I've got a way to put an end to all that mess..

Just take them rascals out in the swamp,
Put 'em on their knees and tie 'em to a stump,
Let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest.

You know what's wrong with the world today,
People done gone and put their Bibles away,
They're living by the law of the jungle not the law of the land.
The Good Book says it so I know it's the truth,
An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.
You better watch where you go and remember where you been,
That's the way I see it I'm a Simple Man..


Watch were you're goin' remember where you've been..

That's the way I see it, I'm a Simple Man.



---

Brief African Lecture on US Democracy

This one is from the War Nerd over at THE EXILED:


Africans told a great joke about our 2000 election fight: “Do you Americans expect us to believe that the election was decided in favor of the former leader’s son…in the province where his brother was governor…because the voting machines did not work and the ballots were lost? And you people are lecturing US on democracy!”



---

Don't Get Left Behind

I just discovered a truly great writer named Joe Bageant, a friend of my hero Fred Reed, who unfortunately passed away from cancer last week. Joe was a redneck from rural West Virginia, who grew up to become a cultural commentator who wrote a series of books on what we now call Red State America.

I've been reading his site these last couple days, and am compelled to share an excerpt of this essay he wrote on evangelical fundamentalist eschatology.

Enjoy:



A Whore That Sitteth on Many Waters

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

"The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series

By Joe Bageant

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses" Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

This may be some of the bloodiest hate fiction ever published, but it is also what tens of millions of Americans believe is God’s will. It is approximately what everyone in the congregation sitting around me last Sunday at my brother’s church believes. Or some version of it. How can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family and school and society, but from within a different American caste than the one in which you were raised. And from things stamped deep in childhood -- such as coming home terrified to an empty house.

One September day when I was in the third grade I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room, and then ran around the outside crying and sobbing in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that The Rapture had come and that all my family had been taken up to heaven leaving me alone on earth to face God’s terrible wrath. As it turned out they were at the neighbor’s house scarcely 300 yards down the road, and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.

Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same childhood experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been "raptured up." The Rapture -- the time when God takes up all saved Christians before he lets loose slaughter, pestilence and torture upon the earth -- is very real to people in whom its glorious and grisly promise was instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism agree its marks are permanent. We may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. There is an apocalyptic starkness that remains somewhere inside us, one that tinges all of our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to you secular humanists. I get mail from hundreds of folks like me, the different ones who fled and became lawyers and teachers and therapists and car mechanics, dope dealers and stockbrokers and waitresses. And every one of them has felt that thing we understand between us, that skulls piled clear to heaven redemption through absolute self worthlessness and you ain’t shit in the eyes of God so go bleed to death in some dark corner stab in the heart at those very moments when we should have been most proud of ourselves. Self-hate. That thing that makes us sabotage our own inner happiness when we are most free and operating as self-realizing individuals. This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood religion, that willingly gives up sons to America’s campaigns in the Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring Jesus back to Earth.

Whatever the case, tens of millions of American fundamentalists, despite their claims otherwise, read and absorb the all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophesy and fact. How could they possibly not after being conditioned all their lives to accept the End Times as the ultimate reality? We are talking about a group of Americans 20% of whose children graduate from high school identifying H2O as a cable channel. Children who, like their parents and grandparents, come from that roughly half of all Americans who can approximately read, but are dysfunctionally literate to the extent they cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic content.

Most of my family and their church friends (mainly the women) have read at least some of the Left Behind series and if pressed they will claim they understand that it is fiction. But anyone who has heard fundies around the kitchen table discussing the books knows the claim is pure bullshit. "Well, they do get an awful lot of stuff exactly right," they admit. Beyond that, most fundamentalists delight in seeing their beliefs as "persecuted Christians" become best sellers "under the guise of fiction," as the Pentecostal assistant who used to work with me put it. "They show the triumph of the righteous over those who persecute us for our faith in God." Fer cryin out loud, Christianity is scarcely a persecuted belief system in this country, or in need of a guise to protect itself. Year after year some 60% of Americans surveyed say they believe the Book of Revelations will come true and about 40% believe it will come true in their lifetimes. This from the 50% of Americans who, according to statistics, seldom if ever buy a book.

[...]

Lookie here. If you think I’m overcounting, think one more time about those Left Behind books that have sold over 65 million copies at this writing. Sold to people who do not even like or buy books. Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag never wrote anything that sold 65 million. That lead-footed prose and numbing predictability that Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye grind out in the Left Behind series might not even be called writing. But whatever it is, at least 65 million folks that our nation failed to educate find deep meaning and solace in it. LaHaye has also sold 120 million non-fiction books, which makes him the most successful Christian writer since the Bible.

Sales figures aside, it is entirely possible that the Left Behind series is as important in our time and cultural context as was, say, Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its time, wherein Lincoln called it "the little book that started the big war." The truth is that LaHaye is among the most influential religious writers America ever produced and is the most powerful fundamentalist in America today. He is the founder and first president of the eerily secretive Council for National Policy, which brings together leading evangelicals and other conservatives with right-wing billionaires willing to pay for a conservative religious revolution. He is far more influential than Billy Graham or Pat Robertson and was the man who inspired Jerry Falwell to launch the Moral Majority. He gave millions of dollars to Falwell's Liberty University. He’s the man without whom Ronald Reagan would never have become governor of California and the man who grilled George W. Bush, then wiped the cocaine off George’s nose and gave him the official Christian fundie stamp of approval. He created the American Coalition for Traditional Values that has mobilized evangelical voters, putting neo-conservative wackjobs into political offices across the nation. In short, he is the Godfather of Soul, fundie style. When the man lays it down, his peeps doo dey duty.

Scratch LaHaye and you’ll find an honest-to-god surviving John Bircher. In the 1960s when LaHaye was a young up-and-coming Baptist preacher fresh out of Bob Jones University, he lectured on behalf of Republican Robert Welch’s John Birch Society. We are talking about a man who believed Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party taking orders from his brother, Milt Eisenhower. Along the way LaHaye extended his paranoid list of villains to include secular humanists who "are Satan’s agents hiding behind the Constitution." And the only way to destroy them is to destroy their cover.

[...]

It is a world in which the Secretary General of the United Nations is the anti-Christ (Left Behind) and the "Clinton Crime Family" deals in cocaine and is linked to the Gambino family (Joshua Project, and other sources.) It is one in which abortion doctors are microwaving and eating fetuses according to testimony given by anti-abortionists before a Kansas House subcommittee (WorldNetDaily, of course) and where crowds of good folks get teary-eyed as Rev. Pat Evans, of the NASCAR "Racing for Jesus Ministries’ rumbles onto the track. Evangelical NASCAR? Yup. What ABC called America’s "unapologetically evangelical sport." I can see you dear reader, running and holding your head and screaming at the thought. Yet it’s true. At Bristol and Talladega the earth is shaking for Jaaaayzus! Now that we have Evangelical NASCAR, what, I ask you, can ever go wrong?

"To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of false piety, kitsch." - Trappist monk Thomas Merton

Forty years later Merton is still right. Like most American liberals, not to mention all of Europe and the rest of the world, I learned through education to write the U.S. born-again literature off as kitsch religion, merely bad theology in an unholy marriage to bad writing. Another product of the American Jesus industry. If we liberals can name it, assign it to some appropriately vulgar and sentimental corner of our degraded culture, and then remain tolerant of it, then we feel have dealt with the damned thing. After all, it is the comparative worldview of the teeming red state masses. But there is certain arrogance in such pop cultural erudition and thin worldliness, isn’t there? In itself, our attitude is too flip.

[...]

I am not trying to be smart-assed, but to indicate the fear of what is unfolding around me as a person living in the belly of the beast. The reality gap between fundamentalist and urban liberals is unfathomable. Liberal observers watching from a safe distance in New York or San Francisco conclude it is pure stupidity that caused millions of Americans to continue support of the Bush junta in the face of overwhelming evidence of lies, deceit and contempt for the constitution, even as the fat cats raided their retirements and picked their pockets at every turn. Others think it is just plain meanness that attracted them to Bush. And so do I sometimes, because stupidity (the Jesus stockcar entries should be proof enough) and meanness are surely part of the attraction to a certain type of conservative -- that poisonous toad Karl Rove being their chief deity of meanness for meanness sake.

There remains one nagging problem. Despite their masochistic voting patterns, fundamentalists are very ordinary and normal Americans. People who often as not go out of their way to help others and endorse most American values. So how do we reconcile the warmth and good nature of these hardworking citizens with the repressive politics, intolerance, nationalism and warmaking they support? Why do such ordinary people do such awful things? The Germans have been wrestling with that one for 60 years, and sixty more years from now they still will have not solved the riddle in any meaningful way for the rest of the world. Barring ecological and cultural collapse, historians will say America suffered under the same sort of extraordinary delusion, a national hallucination of God and empire and exceptionalism. The thing about a hallucination -- and take it from a person who has enjoyed many fine ones on various chemicals and herbs -- is that it is a convincing reality in its time. Try talking to a fundamentalist about politics and God for an hour. You will see the spell that holds sway. Let us be thankful for pro sports or we would have nothing whatsoever to talk about on those rare occasions when a fundamentalist and a liberal ever bother to speak to one another.

Allow me to get down to the nub of this and say what urban liberals cannot allow themselves to say out loud: "Christian majority or not, the readers of such apocalyptic books as the Left Behind series are some pretty damned dumb motherfuckers caught up in their own black, vindictive fantasy." There. I said it for you. Let us proceed.

[...]

These people may not be your neighbors or friends, but they are ordinary and typical Americans. If you the reader are a college educated middle class person, then folks like those above outnumber you roughly three to one in this country. If that is not reason enough to drink, then I don’t know what is. No matter what happens, in the next election, we are going to be dealing for a long time to come with millions of voters who think Left Behind is great literature, spiritual guidance and a political primer all in one. Do we really think that cartload of bloated hacks called the Democratic Party knows what to do about this? Do you really think Howard Dean has a clue about how to deal with this entire class of Americans. Hardly. And besides, even if the Dems can get elected again and restored to the impotency they have come to represent, they will have needed these people’s votes to get there. Or they simply will not get there. So let’s not expect the Democratic political elite to save us from watching the fundie takeover attempts escalate in the future (In which case, assuming my book makes some real dough, I will be watching from abroad, thank you.) Essentially it comes down to the fact that a very large portion of Americans are crazier than shithouse rats and are being led by a gang of pathological misfits, most of whom are preachers and politicians. We are not talking about simple religious faith here. There is a world of difference between having religious faith and being a born-again zealot who believes in his heart that he is thumping Darwinian demons out of classrooms and that Ted Kennedy is the anti-Christ. Trading down to the Democratic party of the pussies really will not save us. It will just buy a little time. But we have whipped the hell out of this dead horse before, haven’t we? Forgive me...



---

An Open Response to Matt, Concerning the Incoherence of Roman Catholicism as a Belief System

Last Thanksgiving my brother Matt challenged my mother and I about the Pope's then recent comments in which he told a German journalist doing a book length interview with him that he thought that male prostitutes would be wise to use condoms. This comment was an aside, not a main topic of the interview. Characteristically, when the interview was published the secular press here focused on that one comment, ignored all the stuff about Jesus which to them is inside baseball of sole interest to Catholics, and went nuts over the perceived scandal of a pope recommending condom use.

Matt was interested in getting my mother's take on that the first night we were together. I was sitting there as he asked my mother a string of questions about it and she responded, while I kept attempting to interject a few comments.. I was exhausted (long drive, too many long hot months just suffered down in Florida) and was not in the fittest emotional state. They - unusually - were completely ignoring me, and didn't let me "have the conch" to say anything. I think Matt is tired of me talking about religion (even though it's not that common a topic between us, actually, but when it does come up I tend to hold forth) and just wanted to hear what my mother thought.

I normally would have taken that situation in stride, but under the stress I had a mild melt down, and got really annoyed. Conversation immediately ended, because I got upset. Matt profusely apologized, but in a deadpan way that stuck me in the gut.

I never got to say what I was thinking, and I think Matt already thought he knew what I would have said. I'm pretty sure that he didn't though, really.. I've been thinking quite a lot about it since, and want to have my say, now.

Here's what I think:


The basic problem is that the edifice of Roman Catholic doctrine is in many ways sorely stressed and compromised.


Whether fatally so, remains to be seen. To my mind the problems are significant. The Church's grace is that the stances of everyone else - to include that of scientific secularists - are all philosophically much worse. We must have ontological justification for defending the sacredness of the human person, and the Catholic Church still has by far the best guns in town on that score. So, my own money is all on the Church. We'll see how it all shakes out..


I should start by immediately clarifying that I do not call myself a "Roman" Catholic anymore. Since my conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (a conversion which I do not completely abjure) I have fully rejected that title, which is one born of the very flawed (to my mind) Gregorian Reform and utterly misguided Protestant Reformation.

I now consider myself simply Catholic, an adherent of the Latin Rite who critically accepts the authority of the pope. I neither renounce my own full freedom of conscience, nor my right to criticize the Catholic tradition or those in authority, but I embrace both that tradition and that authority freely and submit myself to it and them without substantial spiritual reservation. Still, I think that there are major problems with the current ecclesiology advanced by both of the Vatican Councils, and I believe that ultramontagne "papiolotry" has lead to significant distortions in Catholic practice and culture. Rome needs to make her peace with the Orthodox, and that peace must be one of utter fraternal concord, not in the abject surrender of either side to the other. I think the Orthodox have a compelling case that must be heard and in many ways accepted. Nonetheless, I also believe that the Petrine charism exists and subsists in the Roman see.

I'm sure that the dissonance and contradictions that I see, exist in very small part to humiliate me. I accept that now, and am grateful for them.

So, the tradition and those in authority under it are not beyond criticism, but the Church Universal is still my mother and her hierarchy are still - and I pray forever - my lords spiritual. The resolution of the Schism must come, and I pray soon, but it is of course beyond my powers (way way beyond my wisdom and paygrade) to resolve, and so I accept my own impotence and powerlessness in the conflict, and am resolved make my way as humbly I can.


That said, let me lay out the most significant problems with the Catholic position, as I see them:


First major point: Catholicism is in its essence a pre-modern belief system made in many ways practically - that is to say pastorally - obsolete by modernity.


[Aside: Interestingly though, to my febrile little mind at least, there are many powerfully salient and fecund assonances developing between post modern thought and Catholicism and her traditional scholasticism..]


The two main practical interrelated aspects of this obsolescence are in human sexuality and economics.


Traditional Catholic teaching on these issues - against most specifically contraception and usury - are now materially obsolete, in that both contraception and renting money at interest are imperatives to full and uninhibited participation in mainstream contemporary Western life.

It really is only this last century that sexual issues have become problematic for the Church, pastorally. Until the technological advances of the 20th Century (latex and hormonal treatments, as well as safe and effective abortion techniques) the Catholic teaching on sexual reproduction wasn't problematic, because people had no practical alternative. Contraceptive technology was crude and usually unavailable. Furthermore, following the teaching was not usually economically disadvantageous. Having more children meant having more help on the farm, and the mortality rate was high. The relative costs for raising children were much lower (there were no x-boxes, orthodontics, university educations to pay for).. So having many babies was not a big problem, indeed it was often a benefit.

It was the material change, the technological change, the change in the economic system that has created the dissonance.


Both contraception and usury are seen as fundamentally exploitative of the human person from a traditional Catholic perspective. They instrumentalize and objectivize the human being, and turn him into an utilitarian object in which the end or fruit of his work or sexuality is vacated, and alienated (to echo Marx) from himself.

The two things are also fundamentally linked - bourgeois capitalism demands controlled and limited sexual productivity. As stated, a large family is a boon in a agricultural society with short life spans and high maternal and childhood mortality rates. But to live a normal contemporary middle class life, one must limit family size, and the expectation that they do that through abstinence is in most cases impracticable. This obviously sets people up for revolt and failure in terms of the traditional teaching.

Borrowing and lending money at interest (as well as participating in the economic exploitation of others in a myriad of other ways) is also unavoidable. Catholics would have to behave like the Amish to be faithful to traditional teaching againsty usury.

All of which is merely to say that contrary to what many Catholics today think, capitalism is not Catholic. It - as Marx rightly saw - in many ways "tears asunder" traditional economic relationships like the family, and subordinates and even scorns all values except creation of wealth.


A truly Catholic economic system is one where economic activity is utterly focused on the good of the human person, and fundamentally characterized by personal relationships of reciprocal need and obligation. Which is to say in practice something much like the medieval feudal and guild system. It doesn't need to be necessarily monarchical, or even formally aristocratic (though hierarchy and aristocracy of one form or another are a normal feature of any complex human society) and certainly not communist in the sense of outlawing private ownership (that is what a monastic community does, and monasticism must be freely embraced and never forcibly imposed) but its end is not the creation of wealth, but always the good of the human person.

The economy exists to serve man, not man the economy.


So, that's the problem. Technological and economic "advances" have made traditional Catholic practice and belief practically obsolete.


And that problem has been with us for a long, long while, too. The first major flowering of it was with the rise of incipient capitalism in the late Middle Ages. In my Renaissance art history class in college we studied church after church and masterpiece after masterpiece that was commissioned by a rich merchant or banker who had built the masterpiece in question as a sin offering, in propitiation for having committed the sin of usury. The life of Saint Francis and the rise of his and the other mendicant communities is in direct reaction to this.. As in some ways were the heretical Albigensian as well as the Waldensian and other proto- Protestant movements. The actual Reformation - particularly the Calvinist Reformation - on the other hand was fervently capitalist.

In any case, the original position of the Church was against usury - defined as any charging of interest at all. This situation was a major catalyst to the Reformation as I say, as well as the context in which the major Jewish banking families arose.. A situation that in part catalyzed much antisemitism.

By the 18th Century though, the Church had retreated from that strict position, and then completely collapsed on it. Now Rome requires all religious orders to keep their holdings in banks, and runs its own banking system.. One that has produced a few significant financial scandals, by the way.

So, when it comes to money, the old anti-capitalist paradigm mostly has fallen by the way or been actively suppressed..

I'm going to write more about this later, because it is important, and I think needs to be analyzed and discussed.


The magisterium of the Church has in contrast currently firmly staked its ground on maintaining the traditional teachings of the Church regarding sexuality.

This is just as counter cultural, and as doomed to fail as long as current circumstances prevail.


The traditional teaching has been most famously re-stated by Pope Paul VI's papal letter Humanae Vitae. This of course forbids any deliberate intervention in the human reproductive process that is meant to prevent conception. Thus forbidding technological means of contraception such as hormonal treatments like the Pill, or barrier methods like the condom or diaphragm. Fasting (abstention) from sexual activity during periods of fertility, or sex in situations where individuals have been made sterile by circumstances beyond their control, are of course as they have always been still permitted within the bonds of marriage.


Now, that encyclical letter was issued in 1968, right in the midst of the beginning of the Sexual Revolution sparked by the invention of the Pill that prior decade. This is also the era of deepening concern over population growth and resource depletion.

Humanae Vitae was therefore (no surprise) not well received, and along with all the cultural turmoil of they time, and the major changes wrought in world Catholic culture by Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical and other reforms incited by the council, led to massive resistance and revolt.

I don't have any statistics, but I'd bet less than 5% of Catholic couples keep the traditional teaching. This means that the vast majority of couples are - according to traditional Catholic moral thought - in an objective state of serious (mortal) sin.

The hierarchy and priesthood have reacted to this pastoral meltdown by mostly ignoring it. They've also let confession fall into wide disuse, generally only publicly encouraging confession during Lent. I also have never in 30 something years of regular mass attendance heard a sermon against contraception. Nor for that matter against divorce, fornication, premarital sex, pornography, masturbation, homosexuality or any other sexual matter. Those things get very occasionally mentioned in asides (I've heard the word contraception spoken maybe a half dozen times in maybe three sermons, I remember them all clearly), but are are hardly ever to almost never the focus of a normal Sunday homily.

Abortion is of course another thing. That, the only negative exception, gets preached against often. The theology of the human person gets preached as well, but always positively, and in ways that sexuality is explicitly related, but sexual sin is rarely if ever mentioned.

You don't even get asked about it in the confessional - I go every month or two, and I can tell you I rarely get asked any leading questions at all, and never get criticized. Scenes in movies or on television where that happens are not true to my experience.

You do see lots of writing about sexual issues, everywhere in the Catholic press and internet, of course. And the pope and an occasional bishop will broach those topics in their public discourse. But on the parish level there is silence, with maybe only the occasional poster advertising a Natural Family Planning seminar on a bulletin board in the entryway.


All this, in the middle of the sexual revolution, when all hell is breaking loose.


Basically, on the level of moral theology, they've decided to "let those with ears hear" and then not to bring it up all that often and so burden peoples' consciences.


"Jesus said to them: If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now you say: We see. Your sin remains." John 9:41


This all represents the triumph of "Molinism" - the Jesuitical approach to morality. During the Renaissance the Jesuits and their allies began developing a systematic moral casuistry for use in confession and spiritual direction most famously advanced by Molina and Suarez, their hierarchical allies Bellarmine, De Lugo and the rest of the "Company." They were vociferously opposed by the Jansenists, in a battle that has defined Catholic culture since. Vatican II represents the full triumph of the Jesuit position. The predominate post- Vatican II pastoral approach is also pretty much in keeping with the related counsel of St. Alphonsus, that on difficult issues where people are so weak it is often better not to instruct them, so that their ignorance will be a defense at the judgment.


The upshot of all this is that we have a crisis in authority, in that most Catholics (human beings) reject the Church's traditional teaching, and many as an act of conscience. The hierarchy has basically surrendered pastorally, and does not insist on compliance.

Because if they did, they wouldn't have a church left. And like Cardinal Newman cracked, they'd look kinda funny up there all decked out in dresses and funny hats like they are, without us.. Not that they aren't already pretty funny, anyway. All the people in street clothes acting all straight faced and serious just keeps it on the down-low.


So, that's the deal. The thing is that this story is not over, and things could change.

That's a prospect I will discuss further in later posts.



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