CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND EDUCATION

There is a stream of thought currently that worries about the Christian Right’s efforts to get adherents appointed to local school boards. I came across this piece in particular.

The concern is valid, but the efficacy of possible responses to it will depend on the amount of accuracy in identifying the causes that have prompted this gambit.

And in that regard, as so often, a purely ideological, Left-vs-Right, Progressive-vs-Fundamentalist template is not really sufficient to do the job and yield sufficient clarity and accuracy.

The radical and fundamentalist mindset is a problem to begin with. It indulges in all manner of lunacies: cartoonish thought-processes, ‘feelings’ rather than ‘objectivity’, demonization to create the Necessary Enemy (eerily mirroring  Soviet agitprop as well as Soviet ‘science’), emotional involvement rather than detachment, and the ‘dishonest  sleaze of knowing beforehand what the Correct conclusion is at which you will ‘logically and scientifically’ arrive  … these are all elements of that approach.

But as I have said in prior Posts, this radical and fundamentalist mindset can be (and around here is) equally characteristic of ‘secular’ radical thought as it is of ‘religious’ fundamentalistic thought (nor am I here suggesting that all religious thought is fundamentalistic).

Indeed, religiously-fundamentalist thought mirrors Soviet agitprop and ‘revolutionary science’. Think of Lysenko, for example: Correct science supports the revolution because the only truth is that which serves the revolution and all other ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ is specious and – to use Gramsci’s idea – merely serves the status-quo of dominance ,oppression, hegemony, and marginalization.

But if religiously-fundamentalist thought mirrors Soviet and revolutionary ‘science’, radical Left vanguard-elite, Correct thought deliberately and consciously adopts it. (Noted and greatly influential radical-feminist thinker Catharine MacKinnon spelled it all out in her 1989 book “Toward A Feminist Theory of the State” – about which see recent Posts on this site.)

And this has been so for several decades now, approaching almost half a century.

And while such whackulent and frakkulent ‘thinking’ has always been around, hiding behind the potted palms at the far end of the faculty dining room or brayed brassily at backwoods tent meetings, yet the Beltway pols – Democrat and Republican for their various purposes – ‘valorized’ such daffy thought-process and injected it into the national political discourse like poison into a bloodstream.

The Democrats were looking desperately for demographics to replace the New Deal coalition after 1965; their storied embrace of radical advocacies of Race and Gender (there were more moderate voices for Race and Gender, Dr. King for Race, less radical feminist voices than such as MacKinnon – but moderates were kicked to the curb in both Race and Gender for the more sassy radicals) has now served to indenture them to those ‘bases’. Those bases – especially once the radical-feminists took Marxist-Leninist thought, channeled through Gramsci and Eurocommunism – were deeply soused in the radical and revolutionary fundamentalist (though secularist and anti-religious) mindset of their roots in the alien political Universe of Soviet revolutionary thought.

This generated a counter-move, equally soused in fundamentalistic (though religiously expressed) thought-process, by the now radicalized far Right, empowered and ignited and drawn into the center of the national consciousness by the Democrats’ embrace of the far Left.

Both far radical Left and Right share the simplistic analysis, selective embrace of convenient fact and rejection of inconvenient fact, and cocksure confidence that they have the true knowledge – all of which are indicative of an ‘ideological’ frame of mind that is by its very nature intolerant of ‘deliberative democratic discourse’ that is the very core mechanism of sustaining the American Framing Vision.

This is not to say that ‘deliberative democratic discourse’ must be ‘tolerant’ of everything; there are first principles that are essential to maintaining the Republic according to the Framing Vision. But the Framers wisely and shrewdly saw that The People must be the ultimate arbiters of what shape the national life will assume.

Whereas in the fundamentlistic mindset there resides at its very core an inherent and necessary authoritarianism: if you have the knowledge, then why waste time arguing with folks who ‘just don’t get it’? Better to grasp political power and impose your true knowledge, and everybody will thank you for it later and you will be greeted as a liberator. Or not.

But if there are those who just don’t (or – ominously – won’t) get it, then they are simply obstructionist trash destined for the dustbin of history. Thus such counter-revolutionary obstructers are – truly, in this vision – trash.

Whether their punishment is the dustbin of history or an avenging God is merely a matter of modality.

This is the cartoonish, Manichean, either-or, good-or-evil fundamentalist approach to things, whether modulated through a secularist or a religious narrative frame.

I have been saying in recent Posts that I think the key issue is not the Separation of Church and State but rather should be the Separation of Ideology and State. The fundamentalist, ideological mindset - religious or secular - is by its very nature necessarily antithetical to a competent Citizenry in the American political Universe.

And if that American Framing Universe is to be rejected for another one, then that subject should be the decision of The People.

What has been happening, however, is a Long March Through the Institutions of American culture and society by the secularist far Left revolutionary radical elements. Which has prompted the aforementioned counter-fundamentalism of the far Right.

The move to the schools is Revolution 101 (second semester): get the young and indoctrinate them in your ideological mindset and the content of your agenda as if it were the only right and natural way to do things. Students thus ‘taught’ will not be competent to exercise their responsibilities as Citizens in this American political Universe.

The path to be followed here, it seems to me, is to allow the national discourse to return to its moderate and balanced center.

This path is rejected by radical revolutionary thought since everything prior to ‘the revolution’ is to be considered tainted with – to use Gramsci’s terms here – dominance, oppression, hegemony, hierarchy, and the hated ‘status quo’ as supported by tradition and culture (and the more mainstream forms of religion).

But that rejection cannot be allowed to stand as the new American normal.

Neither the far Left nor the far Right – both radical in a profoundly un-American, even anti-American way – can be allowed to dominate the schools, let alone the national discourse and consciousness.

The Framing Vision must be reclaimed. Otherwise We shall lose not only the present, but the future for the schoolchildren. Our children.

IT’S ONLY A CARTOON?

Doonesbury, the venerable but edgy comic strip, has been running a mini-series on Sarah Palin. I won’t go into the details.

Today’s episode has the Palin-esque character trumpeting a series of blasts: death panels, fine troops losing coverage plans, the IRS taking non-compliant citizens to jail.

The cartoon owl – representing something along the lines of rationality, knowledge, reasonableness, wisdom and (gasp!) Maturity generally – points out to her that “None of what you say is even remotely true”.

To which the Palin character replies: “So? Who GIVES a hoot?”

Bingo.

It doesn’t matter if what you say is true or not – since ‘truth’ isn’t the object of the exercise. What you want to do is simply whip people up and start the stampede in the direction you want it to go.

This isn’t at core a ‘conservative’ (or ‘liberal’) or ‘Republican’ (or ‘Democrat’) sorta thing.

No. At core this is nothing more than a restatement of one of the fundamental maxims of propagandistic agitprop – as practiced by the revolutionary agitators of the early Communist era, but brought to sharply honed perfection by Josef Goebbels (aka ‘The Poison Dwarf’ to his Nazi colleagues, though never to his face).

Goebbels had drawn a great deal of his thinking from his boss’s magnum opus “Mein Kampf”, but both of them had picked up a lot of ideas from Eduard Bernays, the Swiss thinker who provided much of the underpinning of early-20th century American advertising . And perhaps Bernays picked it up from watching the early Bolsheviks, and from Gustav Le Bon’s 1896 work on the emotional volatility of ‘crowds’ – you can see where ‘things’ have histories, even ‘ideas’.

So Goebby wanted not only to ‘sell’ Nazism and its agenda, but to manipulate and control his country’s public opinion into supporting the frakkulent Third Reich in all its pomps and all its works.

In his game-book: you don’t want to ‘persuade’ or ‘convince’ people; you wanted to move the whole dynamic out of their advanced ‘human’ brains and move it into their emotional ‘animal’ brains. (Which also goes to show you what so-called elite manipulators think of ordinary ‘people’ and thus of ‘Citizens’ and ‘The People’ – it’s all a useless and inefficient costume party where you have dressed up animals in the rights of masterful human beings … and the role of animals is to be saddled, herded, and if need be stampeded; and the role of the masterful ‘real’ humans is to lord it over the sub-humans … charming. Also rather anti-Constitutional, if that thought hasn’t yet occurred to you.)

This playbook was deployed – suitably ‘baptized’ by the high and good intentions of the vote-addled Dems – by the ‘revolutionary’ advocacies of the late 1960s and early 1970s here: after all, when you’re not after ‘reform’ – especially through the slow and uncertain process of public deliberation – then the best way to get people to go along with you is to do an end-run around their ability to think, and simply keep them continually whipped up emotionally.

And you do that with all the ‘Correct’ images and sound-bites and ‘stories’, and by making sure that a friendly (if not controlled) press makes sure that no un-Correct alternative information, opinion, or explanations gets out into the public arena.

This is what agitprop is all about. This is what agitprop does.

The country has been ‘scared’ since the beginning of the Cold War. Indeed, one of Truman’s advisers told him back there in the late 1940s that if Harry wanted to make the United States the focal leader of the non-Communist world, then Harry would “have to scare the hell out of the American people” – because otherwise they’d really just like to get on with their lives and not have to be going into overseas wars again.

But there was always a strong Liberal element in the country that stood against irrationality, untruth, and the repression of free speech by the Communist-addled Right. McCarthy tried the agitprop approach but it didn’t last long.

But in the late 1960s the vote-addled Dems – having pulled the rug out from under the New Deal era alliance of Southern Jim Crow and northern industrial workers and mid-West farmers – accepted the Mao-addled ‘revolutionaries’ when they insisted that agitprop could be ‘baptized’ into a ‘good’ cause.

Nobody was really ready for the wholesale introduction of agitprop over here from the Left, from the ‘Liberal’ side, under the guise of ‘liberation’ and mere ‘reform’. Yes, there had been some acute insight into the manipulative excesses of ‘advertising’ (especially when combined with ‘television’), and everybody realized that McCarthy’s ‘Red-baiting’ was somehow a scam. But those had been elements of the corporations and the Right – and you sorta expected that. And thanked God that – as had been true since 1933 – the Democrats were looking out for ‘the common man’ and ‘the little guy’.

Alas, the Dems of 1966 and certainly 1968 and subsequently, had hoped to replace their Southern losses by adding ‘women’ to ‘guys’ – only to find that the radical feminists had conceived a zero-sum game: in order to ‘get’ the ‘women’ (or the votes of as many real women as the radical feminists might actually control) the Dems would have to accept and support a zero-sum ‘war’ against ‘men’ – although politely abstracted as ‘patriarchy’. And against ‘white’ men – as a political nod to the ‘black vote’. And against ‘white working men’ – as a way of preparing the ground for a post-industrial culture that was too thoroughly built around ‘men’ to be of much use in the New Feminist Order.*

So things continued through the 1970s. The infection spread virulently: the Republicans by the later 1970s were adapting the same game-book. Their ‘moderate Eastern Establishment’ types were shunted aside in the zero-sum game to make room for a reach-out a new ‘base’, the hitherto (and not inappropriately) marginalized whackery of American Fundamentalism, a religious approach that united an emphasis on ‘feeling’ (or, more nobly, ‘spirit’) rather than ‘reason’.

AND on top of that, absent any larger organization (such as the American Catholics had in the Universal Church) upon which to rely, the Fundamentalists had the ominous tendency to ‘sacralize’ the national government (so lethally similar to Russian Orthodoxy’s theological self-submission to the Russian Throne).

The Fundamentalists anchored themselves in this world by appointing themselves the chaplainry of the national government. Which, they ‘reasoned’ or 'felt', was only right and proper since the national government was the incarnation of God’s Will on earth (not only so lethally similar to both Imperial Russian Orthodoxy and Imperial Japanese Shinto, but also so profoundly anti-Constitutional and – being hell and gone from the vision of the Founders – frankly un-American). And of course there's that curious "imperial" connection.**

Oy.

Though let Us pause for a moment to remember that great Democrat who bipartisanly combined Concern for Liberty with Jingoism, who didn’t need ‘facts’ or ‘thinking’ to justify stretching forth the nation’s arm into large-scale overseas military adventure: Woodrow Wilson, who said – contemplating a military rather than a diplomatic role in World War 1 – “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it doesn’t have to prove to the world that it is right”. Of course, he did it for ‘Liberty’, and for a while, indeed, he was greeted as a liberator. But then the consequences started to make themselves obvious.

So now both national Parties had given themselves whole-hog to the agitprop presumption that ‘feeling’ and not ‘reason’ must be the driving force of politics.

Which, not to put too fine a point on it, tied in nicely both with the feminist effort to valorize feminine ‘feeling’ and ‘intuition’ over masculine ‘rationality’ and ‘thinking’ and also with the Fundamentalist theological valorization of ‘feeling’ and ‘spirit’.

Thinking, evidence, actual facts – none of them counted for anything any longer.

And here We are.

NOTES

*Alas, the radical feminists and their Dem (and later Republican) supporters made Shylock’s Mistake: you can’t get rid of an industrial culture without getting rid of the industry itself … so today We see that Shakespeare was right and now We have no manufacturing capacity left. And how many of the Citizens are actually formed by any sense of personal ‘industry’ in the broad and classical sense … well, Industry in that sense was a Virtue, and Virtue – no matter how traditional, reasonable, and vital to human fulfillment – had to be jettisoned in the zero-sum game in order to clear a path for the New Order as well.

**Of course, things never remain static. There is now "humanitarian intervention" and "humanitarian partnering", whereby the American nation now considers itself empowered by Whatever to impose its enlightened post-1968 New Cultural Order on any resource-rich nation not able to reject such importunings. (Which 'vision' is an eerie simulacrum of the oh-so-demonized male sex-offender forcing his attentions on unwilling or less-strong women - funny how the night moves.)

WHO KNOWS?

Over on Salon Gordy Slack reports on the new Creation Museum (“Inside the Creation Museum”, www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/31/creation_museum/print.html).

It’s the stuff that We now know exists in this country; stuff that We now know was loosed upon the country when the fundamentalistic mindset – thanks to the direct efforts of Atwater and Rove, of Falwell and Robertson and many like them – was sucked up into the center of the national consciousness – thanks to the indirect efforts of Advocacies whose revolutionistic modus operandi justified the subversion of Truth in the service of a ‘higher’ or at least more tangible ‘progress’.

And not only sucked up into the center of the national consciousness, but into the workings of the national mind.

And because nothing exists in a vacuum, and because all things human are interlocked, into the national soul.

All to Our great detriment.

Here are robotic reproductions of perfectly familiar human (and white) children playing among the dinosaurs (and T-Rex to boot). This is true, the museum staff assures us, because “the recent discovery of intact blood-vessels in T-Rex tissue suggests that they are only thousands of years old, not 65 million.” It’s all very scientific, although the museum is premised on the belief that “science” is not to be trusted unless it conforms to the ‘facts’ vouchsafed to us in a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. A ‘day’ was 24 hours, a year was 365 days – the Book of Genesis written, apparently, not for previous millennia of humans in civilizations with other methods of measuring time, but for the particular fundies of 20th-and-21st century America. A charming childlike presumption that it’s all about us … somehow tainted deeply by a childish ignorance and larded thickly with self-flattering arrogance.

Says one of the co-founders of the museum: “It is clearly written that they (the dinosaurs and humans) were alive at the same time”. “It is written” … one recalls Anthony Quinn’s sheikh in “Lawrence of Arabia”, embodying the backwardness of Arab culture in contrast to modern Western civilization when, reflecting upon the explanation for a man’s death, nods sagely and opines “Ah! It was written, then.”

And in that same film, Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia declaring on behalf of Western civilization: “Nothing is written!” … the implication being that Western civilization will not accept that History is fixed and cannot be changed and that humans have no alternative but to submit. ‘Submission’ to such large unknowns is not the Western genius. Indeed, the Founders’ Constitutional Convention demonstrates that it was enough for them to ‘submit’ to the ‘written’ instrument of the Constitution once they had hammered it out.

It was more an expression of the Western genius when Paul Scofield’s Thomas More reflected in “A Man For All Seasons” that in distinction from all the other creatures, God had created man to serve Him “in the tangle of his mind”. And a long torturous climb it has been, making that journey through the tangle of the human mind.

We have been pushed back … not to ‘fundamentals’ but to a new primitivism. New to Us, anyway. A primitivism as old as humanity, but beyond which this and that civilization, the West’s not the least of them, climbed, refining mastery of the higher human abilities, making available to all humans its discoveries and achievements, contributing to the common knowledge and wisdom. Though – who can deny it? – never perfectly and never purely.

In a recent Post, it was proposed that just as the late USSR was (sagely) referred to as “Upper Volta with rockets” so too this nation must now realize that its behavior qualifies for the characterization of “the seventh-grade with rockets”. Our national mind is functioning on a level far below that necessary for a great nation (let alone for the Sole Hyperpower). We have lost a huge amount of Our national maturity.

In the quest for a return to ‘fundamentals’ this nation has merely regressed to an old primitivism. Forty percent of Us wouldn’t object to the proposition that the planet is 6000 years old, give or take. And ‘science’ is now to be overridden by the fundamentalistic criterion of compatibility with the Bible: “Evolution … makes it far too easy not to believe the Bible … and that loss of belief is at the root of modern evil”.

And – ummmm – premodern evil? For a long long long time it seemed pretty clear that it was human refusal to follow the moral precepts propounded by the prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Hosea, and by Jesus. Long before there was ‘modern science’ there was evil, and lots of it. Whether the world is six thousand or six billion years old, folks have always been trying to screw their neighbors (of whatever age), and economically even more than sexually; and nations will always be looking to wage aggressive, pre-emptive war wherever they think they can get away with it. Nobody – individual or government – paid much attention to ‘the Bible’ in all the long centuries of human history before Darwin. And even when they did – them Kathliks and that Kathlik Church, for instance – they had a tough time trying to get it right. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat … much has been spilled … and so often by the weak and the innocent.

What good is having ‘God’ if that ‘having’ does not lead to Justice? Have the Bible-belt states found it practicable to disband their police departments and their courts? It would appear that they certainly still need their divorce courts. Surely, the Bible Bhagwans and their political colleagues have found it in their personal interest to keep a lot of high-powered criminal-defense attorneys on speed-dial.

Are there no starving and disenfranchised in the Bible-belt states? Was LBJ’s Great Society in place there before it was officially proclaimed in Washington, about the time that ‘the negro’ was finally granted the civil rights guaranteed by the monstrous and profound oceans of blood shed in the Civil War a full century before?

Will espousing ‘the Bible’ over ‘Darwin’ insure that one ‘gets right with God’? He is clearly on record in the Bible as desiring a ‘pure heart’ and that humans ‘do justice’. Will paying a few bucks to get a Creation Museum tee-shirt and looking at Adam and Eve with lily pads over their genitalia mend even the smallest rip in the tortured fabric of this world? Will it ensure that those who wear the tee-shirt will escape the wrath to come?

Nor can any honest adult claim that the Bible-olatry of the primitive fundies is not equaled in debauchery to un-Truth by the perversions of ‘science’ fostered on us by the Advocacies these past forty years. That there is no such thing as Truth? That in the service of a ‘good’ political goal morality and Truth can be dispensed with? That there is no ‘morality’ nor Virtue, but only small-minded oppression that keeps you from doing what you damned well please? That human beings and their civilizations need no Archimedean point outside … Beyond ... themselves in order to maintain their ethical and moral balance?

We are hugely at risk, as individuals and as citizens and as a nation and as The People. We are sliding back into the darkness of immaturity and primitivism in mind and in heart. The political darkness of tyranny will only follow upon the truly fundamental darkness of The People’s mind and heart and – let it be said with a capital – Soul. And that slide is gathering momentum.

Nor can most of the present political and cultural ‘elite’ muster the moral vision or moxie to help Us. The fear of losing votes, the indenture to political contributions and personal remuneration, the fear of changing a generation’s worth of pandering to increasingly primitive emotional demands … We can expect no help from those precincts of the monstrous Oz ‘inside the Beltway’.

Seventh-graders are a wonderful reality, in their way and in their proper place. The seventh-grade mentality out of its proper place – in adults, say – and in adults who are responsible for exercising the responsibilities of citizens and of The People, is even more dangerous to the safety and moral fabric of the world than automatic weapons in the hands of eleventh-graders. That’s how bad it is. That’s the situation We are in now.

Turn to the Bible? Excellent idea! Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea. Job, even. Maybe Jonah to begin with, because there’s a whale out there somewhere, and how many among the current generation can handle serving time in that belly – whatever shape it will take?

We must stretch forth Our hand for there is no doubt that a just God shall stretch forth His. Even now, the axe is laid to the roots of the tree. It’s in the Bible.

ALL WELL FOR FALWELL?

Over on Salon Alan Wolfe has an article about the demise of Jerry Falwell (“The stone is cast”, www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/05/15/jerryfalwell/print/html). Enough to say that if We haven’t figured out that his treacherous antics were not Christianity and that he set the cause and quality of American Christianity back centuries, then We really have come onto the world scene bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

But Wolfe asks an excellent question: How did this man ever become a public figure in the first place? Just as the South was considered so profoundly warped that the rest of the country politely avoided it, or averted their gaze when such virulent whackjobs as Theodore Bilbo held forth, so the Fundamentalists were held at arm’s length by mainstream Christianity – if we can use the phrase.

We know that politically the virulence of the Revolutions of the Identities opened the hell-gate. They were not just figurative ‘revolutions’ in the mid-60s’ Boomer, pot-whacked, adolescent, self-flattering and self-hyping sense, their content being so ‘cool’ and ‘right’ that embracing them was a sign of vast enlightenment. Rather, they were revolutions in the sense of actual praxis ala Russe: truly Soviet-style revolutionary methods, whereby in the name of abstract ‘downtrodden masses’ and in the service of abstract Perfections, anything and everything must be done away with that would oppose or hinder the quickest possible establishment of the regime and prevent any further questioning of it. And this method is hell-and-gone from American democratic process.

We know that the Democratic Party itself was terrified that the loss of Southern voters consequent upon the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and that the impending decline of the mostly male Northeast industrial-worker demographic, would utterly undo the New Deal coalition forged by FDR 30 years before. The Party was desperate to raise up new reliable voting blocs.

We know that the media – high as a kite on the heady wine of forsaking boring and stodgy ‘objectivity’ and deploying their powerful strength ‘in a good cause’ – did not want to go back to the corral after the civil-rights struggle reached its democratic zenith in 1965.

We know that French “Theory” was looking for a home, bringing in the luggage its insistence that there was no Truth, no Objectivity, no Tradition, no Common Sense, no Virtue(s), no ‘higher’ dimension to existence, and surely no real and actual “God”: there was only Oppression and there were only Oppressor-classes or -nations, who deployed such capital-letter abstractions for the purpose of keeping the oppressed, their ‘victims’, down. And that the high-road of life was to wage a perpetual struggle against Oppression and Oppressors, including the struggle against the malicious illusion that there was any other dimension except this one or that there was any other path (or content) to human fulfillment except the achieving of sufficient political power to avoid being oppressed. (Theory never really got around to the massive irony that a nation or a group that had achieved ‘un-oppressability’ was – human nature being what it is – ripe for going over to the dark side and becoming an oppressor itself. But then, for Theory there was no such thing as ‘human nature’).

In the previous Post, “Bad Therapy” I adverted to another crucial element back there in the cauldron of the later-1960s that led to the witches’s brew that precipitated out in the 1990s: “… a ‘valorization’ of ‘victimization’ that had just recently been professionally amplified in a public relations spin blitzed over here by the newly assertive Israeli state: we’ve been most awfully and uniquely victimized and therefore we can never be doubted and to doubt us is to join the victimizers and by being thus victimized we are owed whatever we feel we need to get over it and by being victimized we can do whatever we feel we have to in order to ease our fears of it ever happening again.”

This was the lethal approach: the Outraged Victim Whose Unique Pain Permitted ‘All’ For Assuagement, for Vengeance, and for Future Protection; and the corollary that to doubt or even discuss the validity or applicability of the Victim’s demands (or in the Israeli praxis, the acts already committed to create ‘facts on the ground’) was to endorse and even collaborate with new Oppression and Victimization.

It would not take more than a moment’s reflection to realize that such a position was utterly incompatible with deliberative and democratic political process. And not only in the field of international relations but also in the realm of American domestic politics.

But in the event the nascent but richly-supported Advocacies, springing up to professionally advance the assorted Identities that were to comprise the new voting blocs the Democrats desperately sought, embraced both Theory and the Victimiste conceptual web now vigorously spun on behalf of the Israeli state.

‘Oppression’ and ‘outrages’ were duly discovered here, there, and everywhere in American society and culture, each demanding and permitting only the response of ‘outrage’ and utter and total sympathy for, and acquiescence to, the demands of Victims; a built-in bias toward emotionality and away from skeptical or even critical evaluative thought. The toxicity of this brew for the health of the American body politic cannot be fully comprehended, but conceptually it should have been clear from the earliest manifestations. And it was, but a newly deployed ‘political correctness’ prevented rational or even reasonable critical evaluation, or even deliberation and discussion.

The effort began to succeed: Trying to induce a link in the minds of the citizenry between ‘Slavery’ and the Holocaust with each new ‘outrage’ specific to each new Advocacy. And that constituted not only an embrace of substantive inaccuracy but also a symptom of increasing corrosion of the citizenry’s capacity – or even willingness – to assess, deliberate, and evaluate. The People were diminishing; ‘failing’ even.

It is a persistent – we might even say perennial – question whether any other historical phenomena can be ‘equated with’ the Holocaust, even metaphorically. That the government of a reputedly civilized nation, enjoying the plenum of power and capability accruing to a modern industrialized state, would decide to exterminate an entire group of human beings as a matter of official policy and to also cast this programme as a positive and absolute Good … has not happened more than once in history, to my knowledge. Pogroms and razzias extend back as far as can be seen, and the enslavement of militarily defeated tribes and peoples as well. But they are not the same thing.

And the ‘politics’ deduced by the Israeli state from that unique and monstrous event – as described above – are equally unique. They cannot be introduced into a democracy on the basis of a shrewdly-obfuscated and metaphorical ‘link’ that justifies such an introduction.

Indeed, one might say that the Holocaust has created an ‘anti-politics’ as one of its most lasting (and lethal) consequences.

And this lethal anti-politics, variously dressed-up as ‘revolutionary progress’, as just another New Deal coalition, vastly and deeply corroded Our polity. And when extended to foreign policy, it has led to Iraq (and perhaps to Iran).

It took less than five years for the vigorous efforts of the Advocacies to bear poisoned fruit. Having watched the Emotional and the anti-Rational and the anti-Reasonable do so much for the Democrats’ new cadres – and thus morphing into what is now called the ‘Left’, the Republicans began to embrace this apparently winning formula. But where the Democrats historic ‘far left’ had been pretty well squashed by the anti-Socialism and anti-Communism of the previous 40 years, the Republican ‘far right’ – paranoid, irrational, unreasonable, undereducated, intensely religious, and overlorded by a still-breathing Southron elitism and militarism that had survived the hard century since 1865 – was more or less ready, willing, and able.

It was Falwell and his ilk who saw the way not simply to harness modern technology such as television to raise larger wads of cash from larger ‘congregations’ but to harness the power and passion aroused in the already predisposed ‘far right’ masses in the service of politics. Falwell and his ilk shrewdly aroused the outrage of those masses at the true-enough anti-religious assertions and consequences (intended or not) now flooding into American society at the hands of the assorted ‘revolutions’ and demands of the Identities over which the Democrats had now – haplessly – lost any semblance of modulating control and in whose behalf the Democrats now – perforce – had to take their stand.

Harnessing irrationality and emotionalism on the right as the revolutionary praxis of the left had already exalted them, Falwell did not seek to improve the consciousness or souls of his followers or further the Gospel of the Christianity he overtly flaunted. Instead he raised them up as an army of pawns to counter the equally anti-rational equally anti-political ‘bra-burners’ and aborters and the ‘godless’ (fill-in-the-blank).

Having already abandoned objectivity, the media increasingly lost its way, and the egregious Rupert Murdoch simply erected that drift into a business plan, putting media in the service of the Right (as it exists now) just as the mainstream media had, starting in the late-1960s, put themselves in peonage to the Left.

It seems to me that Congress realized early on that they had created a monster. In 1976 or so they allowed Political Action Committees to make campaign contributions, as if they realized that they had so fractured the American polity that they weren’t ever going to be able to reliably raise cash any other way, including the ‘old-fashioned’ way of individual voter’s contributions. The lobbyists arrived in town shortly after, and in Reagan’s Administration the 1980s became a vampires’ feast. In 1996 Congress, by then debauched, allowed corporate mass-holding of media, although by this time there was precious little objectivity to be had in journalism, and – the citizenry having lost a lot of its civic capacity to assess, deliberate, and debate – the pols and their corporate johns saw little need for an objective media anyway. Outrage and Fear and Emotion and Non-reason already ran the show.

And if Falwell and his spawn were to believed, it was all in the name of Jeezuzzz (whose angels, it was to be inferred, wore American flag-patches on the shoulders of their robes).

If those angels wear any flag-patches at all, I’m foursquare in the conclusion that it is a patch of the Cross. This opens up a vast unexplored – or at least presently unexplicated - abyss between American and Divine praxis. If the Fundies are right about anything, they are right that such an abyss is never a good thing. But they are profoundly incapable of mustering the moral imagination to envision that God and American praxis might not e on the same sheet of music. Now them Kathliks had a lot of ideas about this sorta thing happening. But the country is not disposed to think about such ‘depressing’ stuff and the bishops have other things on their collective mind.

If We are all Americans (no exceptions: bra-burners, sex-offenders, fill-in-the-blank) then We all need to look to Our polity. The Ship of State is hugely holed and taking on water, while now engaged in a hot-lead slugging match that cannot be won. Prayer and some very wise and good works are in order. And sackcloth, and ashes – and let the dust that was Falwell return to its Creator for appropriate disposition.

IS JESUS OFFENDED?

It has fallen to Neela Banerjee to report on something that anybody with even a moiety of marbles could have predicted: trendish congregations of Christians are now bethumped by the problem of what to do with sex-offenders returning to the fold. (www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/us/10pilgrim.html?hp).

This, as noted above, is a problem whose arrival was even more ‘foretold’ than the arrival of the revered Jesus Himself. And the least of the reasons for such certainty is the increasingly-classic American societal dilemma of the Returning Prisoner: society – especially after its Twelve-Year binge on Olde Lock-em-up – is suddenly finding itself confronted with the presence of a man (almost always a ‘man’, and many many of them) who has paid his ‘debt’ (presuming he was rightly convicted in the first place) and now returns. This can be awkward.

But it is especially true of the soooo vividly highlighted subset of the Returning Prisoner: The Returning Sex Offender. Because if the sex-offense binge was fueled by the hot, volatile sorta primitive furies that feed on the sacrifice or expulsion of the Black Sheep, it was sublimely lubricated by the dark, viscous pleasures of demonizing some ‘other’, raising him (again and again) up, and therefrom deriving – pathetically and cheaply – an increased sense of one’s own self-worth and righteousness.

It was a great party. But now – who knew? – he’s back. And that’s awkward. After all, having defined him in his very essence as a demon (wasn’t that part of the thrill – triumphing over the ‘demonic’ and thus not needing to feel guilty about whatever necessary means it took to do so?) as part of the plan, how now to encounter the gentleman socially? What does one say to a demon at whom one can no longer with impunity take an immediate whack with torch or pitchfork? What does one say to a man upon whom, after sober (if very private) reflection, one might perhaps in the event have heaped rather too much retributive opprobrium?

And all of this dense complexity prescinds from a further and even more unsettling pair of variants on the Theme: The Angry Returned Prisoner or – so profound a development as to be almost intolerable to the immature believer – The Spiritually Evolved Returning Prisoner. One here approaches ‘challenges’ that reach the sublime perplexities experienced – at least for a soul-stopping moment – by those burghers who had gone home that afternoon after the events of Calvary and figured that, whether a good job or a bad, the thing was over with and life could go on … only to receive intimations of a resurgent Eternity by Monday morning.

All of which sounds like legitimate ground for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or half-a-dozen other classic authors, should anyone have the time for a night-course or an internet university adventure. But this is now – shades of 1950s television dramas and horror-flicks! – and somewhat the same situation is facing more and more ‘average Americans’ and their ‘communities’, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public and friends, blearily peering out the window at Main Street the morning after their binge.

If the situation constitutes a conundrum in fundamental civics as well as good manners and etiquette for the members of ‘his’ society, it constitutes – sadly, surprisingly – a profound challenge to fundamental beliefs for far too many of ‘his’ fellow Christians.

You wouldn’t think it would have to be like that. After all, the aforesaid Jesus of Nazareth famously placed great store in the company of sinners and – not to put too fine a point on it – apparently felt that the two great and interconnected unifiers of humanity were Grace and Sin, the former being largely occasioned by the robust persistence of the latter. The ‘saved’ and the ‘sex offenders’ are sisters (brothers, more accurately) under the skin and – if we might indulge a moment’s quaintness – ‘in the eyes of God’.

None of which would be news to them Kathliks. Ever mindful – even if sometimes absently – of the fundamental unity of humankind through Grace and Sinfulness, that Church could never and never did presume to usurp the ultimate authority to separate the sheep from the goats in this life. Such hubris was one of the abysses that the Church avoided (although she hit a hefty share of potholes on History’s road).

When the assorted Protestantisms of the Reformation broke up the orchestra and the several ‘instruments’ tried to play the Great Symphony’s entire score themselves, it was conceptually inevitable that in the urgent effort to be not-the-Roman-Church each group would select what it liked and drop what it didn’t like. It was psychologically inevitable that in so doing, each grouping would allow this or that less-evolved and primal human tendency to influence its ‘choices’. Indeed, having freed themselves from the ‘trellis’, the vines spread out every old which way. Such marvelous diversity.

What would become the ‘mainstream’ Churches under the Protestant umbrella retained a shape sufficiently similar in doctrine to the old Christendom or at least sufficiently compatible with the congregation’s host nation that some of the advantages of a ‘trellis’ remained to them. But the less mainstream – almost by definition more radical – groups became prey to oddness and extremes not only in doctrine but in emotional and psychological functioning.

Thus the tendency of these groups especially – among all the various religious subcommunities – to indulge and embody the primitive human emotions and strategies associated with defining themselves through selecting, demonizing, and warring-upon ‘others’. Indeed, looking at very recent American history, it cannot seem illogical – seems almost logically inevitable – that the Roman Catholic ‘big tent’ approach to salvation would have to be attacked as the ‘fundamentalist’ Ascendancy clawed its way to national prominence and influence. And so it came to pass, especially when an alliance of opportunity, a synergy, developed between the ‘conservative’ fundies and the ‘liberal’ secularists and – the trump! - the anti-hierarchical or anti-‘male’ elements within the Catholic community itself.

It has ever been one of the least mature and least impressive human tendencies, that our species – an uneasy, unstable, unfinished marriage of soul and body, spirit and mind and emotions and passions, presided over by a ‘self’ that has to learn Mastery and Command as best s/he may – finds it far simpler and in some deeply limbic sense actually pleasureable, to short-cut the Long Maturing and its attendant pains of uncertainty and frustration by achieving ‘identity’ defined not by what one has become but rather by what one is n-o-t: an ‘other’, a ‘sinner’, an ‘unbeliever’, an ‘enemy’, a ‘sex offender’ (or a ‘communist’, or an ‘injun’, or … fill in the blank).

Thus to some extent the sex-offense mania. And, like its nephew the Iraq War, what a ride it has been! But the binge is over, and the light of the morning-after is revealing the consequences of the night’s festivities. Thus the perplexity of many of the ‘saints’ among the Protestant fold. Having long ago cut loose from the ‘judgment’ and the guiding ‘canons’ of the Roman Catholic vision, having in compensation raised up the familiarity of a particular ‘present’ and a particular ‘way of life’ as clear evidence of salvation-achieved, having disowned their sinfulness as surely as the descendants of the robber barons in their assertion of respectability have disowned their forebears’ ferocious rapacity, having raised up this or that ‘idol’ as a rock of comfort and self-assurance against the fluid and stormy uncertainties of human life, the assorted Protestantries are baffled by the return of sex-offenders claiming a place at their spiritual table.

God’s grace was long ago taken for granted through the self-declaration of having been ‘saved’. Spiritual maturity was long ago replaced by the demanding, divisive insistence of ‘victimhood’, in favor of which the clarion and profound fact of our common creation was suppressed and abandoned.

So now, what to do? The sex-offender having pretty much been substituted for the devil, how now let him (again, and again) back into church? Does one allow ‘the Devil’ into church? Does one remonstrate with the ‘outrage’ of a sex-abuse claimant that God’s grace and the Christian responsibility to adapt to the uncontrollable wideness of God’s mercy and the common sinfulness of us all do thus utterly outweigh ‘pain’ and ‘outrage’, ‘revenge’ and ‘closure’? Worse, can one afford to admit that in simply raising such questions the spectre is raised that the congregation has debauched itself in a certain feral and this-worldly primitiveness, to the great detriment of its own integrity before God?

One such sex-offender, having served his time and now seeking to worship in a California congregation, is apparently supposed to dialogue with several members of the congregation who were abused as children. He did not commit a sex-offense against any of them, indeed was not a resident of the State or the region when they were abused. So what has he to do with the purported acts committed against them? The only answer can be that he is somehow a ‘symbol’, or a ‘group representative’ … like, say, a ‘bourgeois’ or a ‘kulak’ or an ‘imperialist running dog lackey of capitalism’. Any one of them will do for venting the people’s outrage against the whole class. This sort of thing is surely familiar, although not only un-Christian but – oh my! – un-American. This is what has happened to Us. This is how far We have fallen.

Several ministers – apparently Unitarian (UCC) and mostly female – admit themselves perplexed, but not in need of guidance. One opines that “you can’t be all things to all people”, that serving the spiritual needs of sex-offenders and ‘survivors’ of sexual abuse are “two conflicting ministries”. Apparently Jesus was not supposed to have spoken with Romans and Jews simultaneously, or perhaps He should have assigned the Romans to one of the disciples. Perhaps He was not to have eaten with sinners and tax-collectors and those sexual-service providers who were that era’s ‘sex offenders’.

“Can an offender who accepts Christ truly change?” asks the article, faithfully echoing a question posed by one of the interviewed divines. It’s a question, alright. Who can define what ‘accepting Christ’ means in the present fundamentalist bazaar? It would seem that if gays can be prayed into being straight, then sex-offenders finding a more appropriate way of finding satisfaction wouldn’t be such an impossible project. Perhaps while visiting the imprisoned is some sort of a work of mercy, a mitzvah even, actually praying with ex-prisoners is an abomination (the scriptural basis for that claim might be a stretch, but the fundamentalistic mind is nothing if not elastic).

Opine other pastoral persons: we are trying to create a “safe” church, and “people think of the church as an idyllic paradise and now we’ve lost something”. “Safe” – safer than it was when the Soviets were daily expected over major and minor US cities with their incinerating radiation? Safer than it is with the prospect of regional or world war breaking out in the Middle East even as we speak? Safe from sin? If this last, then where can one be safe and who, except a desert-island hermit, is safe from the evil that humans do?

It is an ancient Roman Catholic belief – deeply in sync with the Framers, come to think of it – that the dignity of the individual human being and his (and her) liberty requires that the community must live with a certain risk that that liberty will be misused. While the Church and the Framers may have differed as to the source of human dignity and rights, the result was much the same: the price we all pay for our common freedom and dignity is the risk that some of us will misuse it. And while we may civilly punish actions, we are not free to make determinations as to the state of any individual’s soul now or in the future, nor are we permitted to pre-emptively punish putative possible and potential malfeasance. We are not even allowed to do such things to errant human beings in order to satisfy our ‘peace of mind’ or our sense of ‘safety’ or our conception of ‘closure’ or our personal definition of ‘justice’.

Back in the day, it was assumed that one’s vibrant faith in God and God’s Grace would help ease our misgivings and spackle up our faith and our fortitude as we made our pilgrim way toward Salvation. But of course, God and Grace and faith and fortitude have taken quite a beating of late. It is not a stretch to imagine that fundamentalists and victim-advocates have made this world far more morally unsafe for believers than sex-offenders have made the world physically and emotionally unsafe for children. And any sex-offender who has harmed more children than the Deciderer has harmed Iraqi children … should certainly be behind bars at the earliest practicable moment.

The fundies and the advocate-revolutionaries cannot have it both ways: they cannot declare their this-worldly concerns, no matter how urgent or well-intentioned, either trump or are totally congruent with God's will, and at the same time claim that they are in contact with an otherworldly or superworldly 'authority' that has deputized their efforts. We are all liable for Judgment, reagardless of our presence or absence on this or that 'registry'. And we all deserve it. Pray.

MORE ABUSE

It’s been discussed several times on this site: not only is there a similarity between the assorted dynamics sustaining the sex-offense mania and those sustaining the Iraq War mania, but also that just as we are starting to see the consequences of those dynamics ripping our little war apart as it comes into contact with actual reality on the ground over there, so too we are starting to see this sex-offense mania starting to fray as it comes into contact with certain realities it had for so long avoided (including the reality of citizens now tolerating less unreality). And that in the face of that downturn, we could expect the sex-offense ‘advocates’ to behave pretty much as the Incumbency and its neocon and Fundamentalist cheerleaders have been behaving in the matter of Iraq.

While not wishing to beat a dead horse, it’s clear that the horse is not dead.

There is an article in “The Washington Post” for February 23rd (“Abuse Victims Demand More Than a Check From the Church”, by Alan Cooperman; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/23/AR2007022301814_pf.html).

Just when you think it’s safe to go back. But of course, this whole sex-offender mania – now nearing the quarter-century mark in one or another of its forms – is not simply an emotional shivering of the popular spine; American history is littered with record of such spasdic tremors that came and went, causing – like the occasional hurricane or tornado – its modicum of damage and destruction. No, this sex-offense mania is the demon-child of a truly unholy alliance: Revolutionaries representing feminist interests and advanced-level Advocacies seeking to keep themselves in a remunerative business (both supported by the vote-hungry Democrats) and an increasingly prosecutorial approach to national governance and a Fundamentalistic rage against society’s perceived utter-decadence (both supported by the Right and the Republicans as presently constituted, in support of the National Crime State).

We recall that the Roman Catholic Church was singled out early-on. In the mid-1980s, after the abducted-children scares of the late 1970’s (that gave us milk-carton photos of reportedly abducted children) and just after the child-day-care scares had begun to burn themselves out and as the violence against women phase of feminist law-twisting was still ramping up for its take-off roll, there were several publicized cases of Catholic priests (in the South, curiously enough) who had in some form or other (precision is almost always lacking in these things) become involved sexually with parishioners. The particular instances seemed to be grave in terms of the act(s) perpetrated, and applicable criminal process was administered.

In the early 1990s there was another spate, not among other denominations but once again against the Catholic Church: this time it was in New England and civil-litigation attorneys, with which the area is well-supplied, took increasing professional note. And after a couple of publicized criminal trials at least one accused went to prison, where he has subsequently died of illness and age. Later, an even older one in prison was murdered outright.

Much water flowed under the bridge in the nation, up to and including 9-11 and the beginning of the tectonic changes it stimulated in this county. But then in January 2002 “The Boston Globe”, purchased by “The New York Times” and under the tutelage of a satrap appointed by the oddly-unripe “Junior” Sulzberger, reported that there were vast numbers of unreported cases, involving children, and especially boys, and probably hundreds of priests, and a massive cover-up engineered by a secretive and powerful conspiracy of bishops here and in Rome.

Assisted by assorted civil-litigation lawyers who aimed for the reputed fabulous wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, and a media that quietly expanded and elasticized the definition of a targeted action and accepted without question the self-declaration of ‘victimhood’ by whomever came forward to tell their story … the whole thing had the distant but distinct ring of certain Fundamentalist tremors of earlier times, though suitably upgraded and fortified by fresh coalitions of willing interests.

The matter proceeded to fireball quickly, as courts shifted rules of evidence out of ‘sensitivity’, and the media refrained from any questioning of any claims out of ‘sensitivity’, and bishops began to be advised by counsel that to defend in this atmosphere would be highly imprudent. Despite the paucity of actual criminal convictions – and even of reported cases – compared to the numbers of ‘probable’ offenses asserted by assorted ‘experts’ and amplified in the media, huge amounts of money were acquired through a process which quickly came to assume iconic status: claims were made, often decades old, and attorneys who made themselves available for the purpose had in most cases only to contact the bishop’s office for discussions as to amount to begin.

The bishops showed themselves less than courageous in their dealing with the whole thing. But they hadn’t gotten where they were – most of them – by a path of aggressive and cut-throat assertion. They served a Church long used to the foibles of humankind and grew up in a hothouse clerical-culture that had not prepared them for the exertions of the legions.

Nor would the legions have been of much use in the situation as it hardened: media coverage was ‘simplified’ to parroting unquestioningly the claims that were announced and following such few ‘trials’ as actually took place, while amplifying the assertions of self-designated ‘experts’ whose ‘knowledge’ indicated a vast conspiracy of grossly-deformed but mysteriously powerful super-perp priests who fed on their flocks – especially children and especially boys – like vampires, which web of slavering perversion extended in Space throughout the world and in Time back “at least to” the 1940s and was abetted up the ranks of the hierarchy all the way to the Popes themselves.

In rare historical forays, a particularly enterprising reporter or tendentious researcher might note that even as far back as this or that medieval council in this or that long-vanished century the Church had made laws against this sort of thing, which proved invariably that the conspiracy was long-and-deep-rooted. That such historical realities might rather clearly indicate that the Church was consistently taking a clear stand against such acts and behaviors, as she had against so many of the sins that did and do beset human-kind, was oddly not a possibility – indeed a probability – that detained the minds of any of the ‘reporters’ or ‘scholars’.

It was enough – in the fine phrase of Robert Lewis Taylor – “to give any sane drinker pause”, contemplating the curiously but consistently skewed dynamics sustained by all involved in the ‘war’ against this infamy.

As always happens in this sort of thing, matters reach a point of diminishing returns. The well runs dry, or the wells: money, public interest, media attention. As the emotional frenzy subsides, however, there grows the increasing danger that more rational minds and tempers might actually start to examine the claims and the assertions, and even take stock of the damage caused by the stampede. As the neocons are discovering to their great dismay in the foreign policy area, so too we might expect the assorted sex-mania participants to fear: their binge being over, there might be consequences. This, in theory, would create among those who batten on such stampedes a distinctive self-protective reaction: further claims will have to be put forth to keep the ball rolling. If the ball stops then popular opinion slows down to a speed where it can look carefully and think about what’s going on. And it may well not be amused.

We had seen a test-balloon along these lines several months ago: the “New York Times”, in support of its subsidiary’s need for reinforcement, suddenly ran out of the blue an editorial on “rogue priests”. This was, at first glance, confusing; in our current usage “rogue” applied to nations, and very nasty and dangerous ones at that – if the Bush administration was to be believed. The editors of the “Times”, however, had expanded the meaning of “rogue”, while simultaneously borrowing its cachet as a term of fear-and-opprobrium in order to deploy against a target of their own choosing.

That target turned out to be: priests. No, not the ones a) declared by criminal process (such as it is nowadays in these matters) to be guilty; and not b) the ones whose bishops simply decided (prudently, all things considered) to pay a whole bunch of civil claims at once and not to take the astronomically expensive path of trying to defend each civil lawsuit individually (as has been noted above, criminal cases are – in light of the purported numbers of “horrific” crimes that must be out there – very very very infrequent).

No, the priests in the sights of the “Times” at this point were not formally accused. They are men who have, under the general miasmic cloud of this thing, left the active ministry – not thrown out, not defrocked, but simply resigned and taken other paths. These, bray the editors ominously, constitute a huge and unseen danger. They have ‘escaped’ supervision; that they were never found guilty or in need of it is a relevant point that is (not surprisingly) left un-raised. The clear and present danger is that these unseen monsters are loose among us now, and utterly unrestrained by the very ‘experts’ whose ‘knowledge’ assures us that they are/must be guilty of … something.

So in addition to increasingly expansive definitions of ‘sex offense’ (that now don’t even require one’s physical presence at the offending incident), and the assurance that ten or a hundred more times the number of offenses exist than are ever reported, and the fact that anyone who bothers to make a claim is automatically designated for publicity purposes as a ‘victim’, and the skewing of the justice system and the laws to make it almost impossible n-o-t to be ‘guilty’, the “Times” now seeks to increase the target-pool by going after priests who have not been discovered to have been guilty at all.

As is the case in so many of these Advocacy-gambits, you can keep yourself in business ad infinitum this way. The feminist advocacy’s demand for same-gender units in the military, by demanding a totally risk-free environment, and then placing its ‘victims’ in a situation where the very laws of nature guarantee there will not be totally risk-free environment, virtually guarantees ‘incidents’ from now until the end of Time or the human species, whichever comes first; it’s an entrepreneur’s wettest dream come true.

So too with this priest-abuse advocacy: by constantly expanding the definition of ‘abuse’ and ‘molest’, and removing the due-process and evidentiary obstructions to accusatory and inferential stampedes, and guaranteeing any claimant that no claim will be seriously examined or even questioned, and producing ‘experts’ to claim that there is a ‘silent majority’ of these crimes – vaster by quantum factors than the reported ones – that are unreported (and how indeed verify that claim?) … well, this is a cottage-industry that can take its business plan and make an IPO.

The hugely toxic and dangerous legal premise underlying this whole thing is: yeah, well just because we can’t really ‘know’ and just because we can’t really ‘prove’ it one way or the other, that doesn’t mean that we can’t criminally process and punish people for it. This stuns. The entire Constitutional praxis, and it goes back to England’s long fight against arbitrary government power, is that a citizen cannot be subjected to the police/criminal power of the government unless very clear process is carefully followed. So to say that an allegation cannot be proven one way or the other but let’s do this anyway … this renders any due process moot; it's like slathering butter and sour cream lathered onto a rotted potato.

And if such due process is applied when it is understood clearly that the gravamen of the charge cannot be reached no matter how carefully the process is applied, then such cynical and fraudulent deployment of the government power betrays the fundaments of the Republic itself and corrupts the administration and the administrators of its Law. And that is not a good thing, no matter how many shorter-term objectives might be served. And over the long haul, consequences will intensify and amplify exponentially, throughout our culture and our society and our civilization and the very structures of our government.

And it didn’t start with this priest-abuse thing. The priest-abuse mania is only a sub-mutation of the original feminist (of whichever Wave, perhaps now disowned) strategy: if we want to weaken the position of ‘men’, and open space for women, in this society, then we are in for a long haul and we need a weapon that a) can jumpstart this whole thing and also b) can last long enough so that we won’t have to worry about not having anything to beat on them with. And the winner was … sex. Who can be surprised? It was a shrewd, kinda obvious, choice. Given the undeniable male proclivity for sex – that seems clearly to be a product not of patriarchal Western culture but of Nature itself – then it can provide eternal fuel for the Cause the way atomic reactors provide eternal fuel for aircraft carriers. And so – as at Santa Anita – they were off.

Thus to this article by Mr. Cooperman. As is the practice nowadays, the article (“report” almost seems too generous) starts with a sad story, yet with an uplifting ending. A pair of parents, now long dead, were spared a great pain and allowed a great victory this month when the body of a priest that had lain only 20 feet from their own graves was dug up and moved to a cemetery 5 miles away; the priest had reportedly “serially molested” their three sons over the course of several “horrific” years back in the 1950s and it is only now that these three children – in their 50s and 60s themselves – had, as part of a three-quarter-million dollar settlement with the diocese – demanded that exhumation would be necessary for their “healing”. This, opines a law school professor, “validates that it happened and it wasn’t their fault”. So the priest, whose remains had been in the grave since his death in 1960, was dug up and trucked away. The reporter fades out with the scene of the three elderly men, with their wives, standing at the graves of their parents (Mom died in 1976, Dad in 1988) “for the first time in many years”, proclaiming that “it was a joyous occasion”. The parents had never been told and had never known.

It’s hard to know what to do with something like this. Certainly, if a priest had committed serial rape, especially of three brothers over the course of four or five years, and had hidden the matter and warned them not to talk about it because it would violate the seal of the confessional, then it is heinous sin and crime.

That the priest has been dead for half-a-century and this is only now coming to light prevents us or the criminal trial – specifically designed for the purpose – from making a determination of what actually did happen. That none of three boys told their parents (Dad was head of the parish council and great friends with the priest) at any time in the ensuing 20 or 30 years although it is cast as a happy, all-American family seems odd. That the parents never noticed anything amiss though their sons were apparently being serially raped one after the other seems odd. That these dedicated children hadn’t been to the cemetery to visit their parents’ graves in years is odd. That they just happen to do so when the reporter is there is not odd – it exudes a whiff of calculation.

That the bishop agreed to a settlement is not surprising: clearly, even the attempt to defend oneself or one’s deceased predecessors or colleagues or one’s Church is – under the present arrangements – itself an admission of guilt and even of complicity; but, far more telegenically, even the merest skepticism of a claim constitutes ‘re-victimization’ of a (self-proclaimed) victim all over again. The very fact that ‘victim’ status is available for the claiming without any effort at verification bodes ill for anyone trying to get at the truth. Nor are bishops selected for their feistiness and chutzpah these days.

That the ‘claims’ are factually impossible to verify yet emotionally impossible to deny is one of the shrewder achievements of the Advocacy in this whole now professionally-directed mania: abetted by ‘experts’ with their ‘knowledge’, any doubt as to the factuality of the claim is squelched (not answered) through the peculiar ‘mystery’ and ‘horror’ of sexual experience and ‘violation’; it is a bit of circular argument and flummery worthy of the best 19th-century American hucksterism and the most advanced totalitarian jurisprudential praxis. A horrible thing – so bad that you don’t need proof – so bad that you shouldn’t ask – so mysterious that you can’t ask anyway because you can never know – so bad that to ask about it would simply hurt the claimant all over again – so bad that to doubt the claimant would itself be almost a crime … none of this proves that a claim did or did not happen, but it sure as hell gives you pause. And it sounds sooooo very much like the same play that was run by Us as the Iraq invasion was ramping up. Remember WMD? Imminently deployable?

Of course, the fact that the money is running out, and the public is growing more skeptical of ‘claims’ that cannot-be-refuted-because-it’s-an-emergency cannot be ignored. One could make the case that in order to keep the ball rolling, the professional PR folks who constitute the advanced-level Advocacy industry have advised going for non-cash awards: it keeps the ball rolling and – now that folks aren’t so gullible – it will look better. And you can get an awful lot of mileage out of horror-stories that cannot be tested or even doubted.

Will all that help these three claimants? What actually happened decades ago and in the intervening decades in the lives of these particular claimants? What seems certain is that we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing now. And on an ominous level this sort of thing represents a toxic synergy between a for-profit advocacy industry, a media happy with less ‘reporting’ and more emoting, and a government seeking to smooth its path to increased police power through scaring and frightening people with the horrors and emergencies of ‘Crime’. On this level those elements of the feminist revolution who helped start this sex-crime mania and the many victims – actual and not – have been made into pawns, to be trotted out – as Bush trotted out a brassy-blue background of any available cops and firemen for post-9/11 photo ops – when opportune.

But I just finished reading Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style In American Politics”, and there’s even more oddness. He describes the vision and characterizations of themselves, their situation, their projects and their opponents that were common to those right-wing elements that – from the late-‘40s and to the mid-‘60s - were considered the looney fringe of the Republican Party. I’ll Post more on his political insights in the near future, but in reading this sex-offense story I couldn’t help but note some striking similarities.

Hofstadter notes that the paranoid style was primarily to be found among American Protestants, and not in the mainstream denominations of Protestantism but in the less-organized, more fundamentalistic small churches, more rurally located.

He notes that there had been a history of violent American Protestant outbursts against ‘others’ perceived to be threats, and that among these were Freemasons, immigrants, racial ‘others’ and – my, my – Catholics. Sex – in any and all imaginable combinations of illicitness – was frequently a factor in the charges they leveled against those ‘others’.

The classic scenario went like this: There is a vast and secret conspiracy / this enemy is powerful and monolithic and surrounds us and has infiltrated us and can strike at any time / it is bent upon doing evil to us / its perpetrators are horribly depraved yet very skilled and powerful and exert mysterious forces over us / we are fighting a war / it is an all-or-nothing war where we will either completely triumph or be totally destroyed / our very existence is at stake / there is not much time / one is either totally with us or is against us and with ‘them’ / there can be no middle-ground / anything less than immediate action with all our energy is treason and disloyalty / thinking and discussing and seeking ‘consensus’ is treason / doubt is a failure of faith and courage and is treason.

And of course, as it was so succinctly put by Barry Goldwater in 1964: “Moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

A couple of things jump out here: First is that this ‘paranoid’ style is easily transferable from the hyper-religious Fundamentalist to the hyper-secular revolutionary and 'advocate'. And thus in a climate a half-century after Goldwater where the ‘fundamentalist fringe’ became the Ascendant power in the Republican Party and in national politics, and where the assorted revolutions of the Identities were seeking to ram through their agendas, using this or that ‘emergency’ to justify their on-going ‘struggle’ against this or that group, it can only seem a very unsurprising coincidence that the Catholic Church has been continually put upon.

Add to this that it was the Catholic Church in the early-1980s that stood against Reagan’s nuclear policies and his support of authoritarian governments in Central and South America, and one can see why a US government bent on pre-emptive war based on false pretenses and indentured to its fundamentalist base while seeking to ground the dual blessings of the imperial and the prosecutorial state … why a government thus configured would find itself not unreconciled to the distraction and diminution of the Catholic Church’s political influence.

Add to this, as John Gray notes in his book “Heresies” that it is Christianity – far more than Theory or the revolutions or secularism or even ‘humanism’ – that has a realistic vision and praxis toward “homo rapiens”. As with the neocons and the Incumbency in their plunge into Iraq, so too with the sex-manianistas and their plunge against men: the idea that ‘they’ will ‘only understand force’ was more a sop to one’s own defects and limitations than it was an accurate assessment of the actual state of affairs, and thus the whole expedition has been undertaken on awesomely wrong and thus ineffective and thus consequence-generating premises. The neocons have not been greeted as liberators; it may well be as the facts become clear that the revolutionistas will be similarly disappointed.

Not surprisingly, as skepticism increases, efforts to push the 'agenda' become more obvious. A play recently opened entitled "Doubt". It does a masterful job of complicating the matter of deciding if a sturdy nun's suspicion's of an otherwise effective priest's activities with young males of the congregation are or are not ... y'know ... t-h-a-t. The core genius of the play (and it's a sad commentary on the times that the exposition of such a once-common insight is now not illegitimately termed 'genius') is that not only is it difficult to decide about a particular action, but that it is notoriously difficult to tote up the good and bad in a man so as to decide whether his life is or is not the current American version of a life-not-deserving-of life. It goes without saying that such decisions are almost always best left to God, for the simple reason that as humans and especially when we're particularly agitated "our power to add or detract" is - famously - "poor".

One Margery Egan, resident feminista at a tabloid in Boston, allowed as how it's a very well-made play, and even allows that it is "a very unsettling place to be", this being in-doubt. Alas how true. And at this point in time - after all that's happened, bloodshed under government auspices not excluded - it's most damned well surely an unsettling place for a mania-nista to be: we're getting to that point in the movie where, having burned the town down in their night-frenzy, the erstwhile 'saviors' of the town are looking around at the smoking wreckage at dawn in awe that gives way to shock and then apprehension.

But her closing upset, as she retreats to the 'settling' security of familiar ground, is that the play is not socially redeeming because it might induce people who have given up believing in their Church to doubt the wisdom of that gambit - and that, she is sure, is counterproductive. Which, to the revolutionary agenda, it most certainly would be. She sniffs, en fin, that the play "has no clear conclusion". Ah yes, and as such it would get no staging in Moscow or Peking or Pyongyang. The essence of Socialist Realism, as it serves the revolutionary agenda, is to lead most clearly and vividly and loudly to a clear conclusion - indeed, to the only clear conclusion.

Comrade Egan is not amused. Have she and her pals made so long a march and put so many against the nearest wall thus now to be bethumped with intimations of uncertainty and its attendant humility? Not likely. I'd say, however, that folks might want to re-visit their religious attachments, and their entire attitude toward life's complexities (of which the Church has always been notoriously patient). They might even want to approach the revolution and kick some serious tire.

Second is that this style of thinking results not in a certain type of politics but rather in an anti-politics. It is radically inimical to the American tradition and to the democratic process, and thus to The People as well as to the vision embodied in the Constitution. That this type of anti-politics – with and without its religious trappings – has been the stock-in-trade of the Left and of the Right for decades must alert us that large and grave consequences must have already taken hold in the citizenry as well as in the structures and operating dynamics of the government. The role and dedication of the media, the role and skills of The People in their capacity as the Ground of the government as well as in their lives as individual citizens and persons … all these are harmed by the toxic corrosion of ‘paranoid’ thinking, a paranoid-thinking which makes ‘wars’ and ‘emergencies’ inevitable, which makes them indispensable to the governing of the country whether they actually are justified or not.

Third, as much damage may have already been done in the name of the ‘emergencies’ of the several domestic revolutions as has been done in the waging of foreign, pre-emptive wars of choice.

Fourth, the consequences of all that will come back to bethump Us. It can be no surprise that those States that went whole-hog for incarceration starting in the anti-drug ‘war’ 20 years ago are now shocked to find themselves facing the return to society of not-really-bad folks who have been locked up in a state prison for 20 years and return to society with some decidedly mixed feelings and hugely diminished social skills. The sex-mania’s solution to its own incarcerees has been to try to intimidate them through Registration and – if at all possible – preventive confinement in mental hospitals. The expense, as California has discovered, will be insupportable. As from the cakewalk in Iraq, our own troops return to us grievously wounded, many more in spirit and maturity than those awefully broken in body.

Fifth, go to Dan Froomkin’s fine article about “How the press can prevent another Iraq”(http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00156). Wherever advice is given about dealing with a governmental entity (e.g. the Administration, the Pentagon, unofficial government sources) substitute Advocacy. So, for example: “You can’t be too skeptical of authority” becomes “You can’t be too skeptical of Advocacy”. I know: they’re only trying to help, whereas ‘government’ is baaad. Nope. Help or no help, if untruth – especially to the point of anti-truth – is being pumped into Our world, it’s got to be stopped, no matter how well-intentioned it might be. And let’s not forget that by this time there are no low-level mom&pop advocacy issues left … the little people are just fronts and pawns for professional, industrial-strength Advocacy that has an eye not on truth but on an Agenda and on the bottom-line). As this gets worse, and it all will, We will need to muster and sustain a seriousness that can be imparted to our national elected officials (currently debauched) and our government (currently addicted to the paranoid stylings of the Left and the Right).

Meanwhile, modernity staggers on, secure in the delusion that it is advancing. That this might not actually be the case is intimated by the fact that among many other habits of mind and thought that we have recently plucked from more primitive times, the sex-offense advocates have taken to digging up the dead in order to make examples of them; this charming blend of theatre and an almost pagan insistence on the merely human elements of what is a much Larger existence, was last seen when Catholics (themselves!) dug up the corpses of - among others - former Popes to try them for a heresy which the perpetrator had been adjudged to have harbored in life and for which he had 'escaped' punishment by shrewdly dying.

And it is not only the actual digging up, jaw-dropping a primitivism as it is. We have heard far too often in regard to a deceased and 'accused' priest the plaint of a claimant that the guy had now 'escaped' punishment. Which, not least among other things, bespeaks a Flatness far worse than any 'molesting' could ever inflict or maintain.

Molesters - real and manufactured - and claimants - legitimate and not - will come and go, will have their time, as so many frissons and individual lives do in this world. Flatness abides, lethal but hidden, a dark gravitational pull that chokes and deforms all that spirit seeks to make of humans and of our lives and of our world. Against that awesome, awefull plague, that veil, that fog, that miasm - we must wage the primary struggle, as individuals and as a society and as a civilization.

This is not the message of the advocacies and their flaks. To keep matters stuffed in the Flatness renders people far less capable of dealing with such experiences as they face, renders them far more dependent on the professional advocacies and - so dangerously - the gummint, and all their pomps and all their works. This is not the path of wisdom. It will bear evil fruit.

BOYOS

Just a further thought on the two Posts from yesterday dealing with the Neocons (“Chicken Hawks”) and with the Force Ministries (“Ministry of Force”).

There’s a common thread of adolescence (as in ‘not-yet-matured’) that runs throughout both of these phenomena.

It’s clearer in the story of the force-ministry to the troops. Fundamentalism (see other Posts on this site, e.g. “Crazy for God”) is a religious gambit that requires a functionally immature mindset.

Psychologically, one must function not out of one’s maturationally and humanly advanced thinking or deliberative capacities (focused largely in the prefrontal areas of the brain) but rather out of the far more primal emotional, non-thinking and non-deliberative areas of the brain (focused largely in the limbic areas).

Philosophically, one must commit to a very this-worldly field of operations in which little concern is given for understanding, but much is made of emotional reaction. And in which little attention is placed on substance, and everything is focused on appearances and effects.

Morally, one must ensure the presence of an ‘other’ and an ‘enemy’ in order to jumpstart one’s sense of identity through the far-too-easy and less-perfect modus of ‘hating’, while at the same time masking one’s primitiveness by claiming that it is not oneself but “God” who actually ‘hates’; the believer is simply ‘doing God’s (or Christ’s) will’.

Spiritually, one is committed to a God stitched together, in an almost Frankensteinian way, by selectively plucking those passages of Scripture that have to do with blood and war and vengeance, or the made-for-teens scenario of the Apocalypse, while selectively ignoring any passage that has to do with love, forgiveness, patience, humility, deliberation, or the long, staggery path to the Kingdom sustained over time and in the face of one’s own weaknesses.

And if one might look upon the matter from the point of view of the Grand Strategy of Humanity, the Fundamentalist approach requires its adherents to rely on a very poor ‘map’ of the human operating space: the Fundy conception of life is remarkably mono-dimensional, this-worldly, Horizontal and concerned only with surfaces and appearances. There is little Vertical and almost no Interior to the Fundy vision of world-and-self: one is what one is (‘saved’) and nothing more needs to be said or known about Past or Present or Future, and – being ‘saved’ – there is no need to develop a mastery of one’s own Interior, either to climb Up the ladder of one’s maturity or to keep careful watch on one’s lesser, baser, more primal tendencies. There is almost no Beyond; their vaunted, rackety and verbose religiosity is merely a this-worldly and primitive effort to force ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ into their own unripened and this-worldly preconceptions and outright wish-fantasies.

So this Force Ministry approach is an adolescent attempt to jump-start actual adolescents who are under staggeringly intense pressures of violence, boredom, disenchantment, and despair. Small wonder its primary pastoral modality is the Saturday-afternoon, halftime harangue delivered by a well-intentioned but gruff coach who seeks only to jumpstart enough raw energy to last for the next ‘x’ number of minutes until the game is over. (And thus, after all, the services of the coach can be engaged for any number of return-engagements; the hearers will neither be capable of, nor taught to develop, an Interior mastery nor achieve any consequent independence from the leash of the ‘coach’).

The thing becomes self-perpetuating, and on a very unripe level of being.

The Neocons present us with less obvious but even more unsettling examples of unripeness. It stands out not only in their comments – self-serving and in the context of the present almost delusional – but even more so in their photographs, when considered alongside their comments.

Here are a group of chronological adults who did espouse the most adolescent, macho, boyo, in-your-face, rock-on-and-damn-the-consequences military adventurism – its hard, sliced edges dulled only by the almost childishly phantasmagoric allusions to being greeted as liberators – who are now striking Karshian poses as somber, revered, ‘old school’, accomplished diplomatists like unto the statesmen of yore. It’s almost impossible to imagine one of these sober, pretentious personages – as they portray themselves in their photos – whacking each other with a hoot of ‘slam dunk!’, ‘cakewalk!’, ‘piece-of-cake!’, or any of the other macho juvenilia that – in the happy times – were vouchsafed to us slow-witted, unimaginative herbivores by preening commenters with serious access.

What’s also unsettling about these Neocons is that they are trying simultaneously to be macho, in-your-face boyos and yet also looking for acceptance and reverence as somber, sober, wise statesmen (-persons …?) They are boyos purposely dressing themselves in adult clothing. And that’s yet another level of duplicity to add to the list of their character deficiencies.

Not for them the long, hard, sober slog of diplomacy, the patience and incompletely satisfied objectives, the resolution in the face of apparent hopelessness, the quiet persistence, the ‘long twilight struggle’. Noooooo. These boyos were going to crash in and do it quick and easy, and be back in notime. (And how classic an adolescent and laddish a fantasy is that?)

Now suddenly, the ‘police’ of failure and of consequences having them surrounded, they strike poses of utmost sobriety and knowledge and wisdom and ‘connection’, while at the same time blaming their boss and then claiming that they had no access and cannot be held responsible. They’re sorry the bank was robbed, now that they’re caught. One is tempted to think that if they were now sitting fat and pretty on the luxury beach of Victory, they would be singing a very different tune. Whoo-hoo! We’re the greatest! In your face, world! … that sort of tune. Jimmy Durante’s advice here is the best: “Stop da music! Stop da music!”.

Maturity is in as short a supply as Character in Washington City. But it has to be considered: does that short supply in Washington City merely reflect a short supply of Maturity and Character more generally throughout the country?

If We The People don’t know where this awefull state of affairs comes from, how it has arisen, then how will We know how to fix it … as best it can be fixed, now, after all that’s been irretrievably done.

MINISTRY OF FORCE

Among the many dark flowers that have blossomed during the Incumbency, a lesser-known but particularly noxious one is the proliferation of mercenary chaplaincy within the military.

The Fundamentalist Ascendancy within the organized chaplain corps of the Services has already been discussed (see “Bishops Bomb”) as has the increasingly whacky but influential spread of the virulent ‘Dominionist’ strain of Fundamentalistic religiosity (see “American Shin-toe” and “Crazy for God”).

But what we are seeing now is something not quite the same. At least within the Service structures there can be a reasonable hope that when the baleful influence of this Incumbency fades, the Ascendancy – being a creature of it – will fade with it. Some restoration toward balance will almost naturally take place, organizational dynamics being what they are.

But with the spread of so-called Force Ministries we see an extra-organizational, almost extracurricular ‘chaplaincy’. A visit to the website (http://www.forceministries.com/) for the controlling (whatever that might actually mean in practice) organization is instructive. Apparently its ‘ministers’ are drawn heavily from military ranks, especially “current Navy SEALS whose lives have been touched by Force Ministries”. These operatives are organized into “sky-diving teams”; they are qualified since they “have executed an average of 2000 jumps”; and further qualified because “they are experts in the different and diverse sky-diving disciplines”. If this might seem an impressive yet scant qualification for the provision of religious ministry, we are further informed that these messengers are also proficient in “public speaking”. A photograph purports to show a huddle of uniformed troops in a desert setting, and is set alongside “A letter from an American soldier in Iraq”.

Somewhat vaguely, the site also notes that “The US has a number of military colleges and training programs (ROTC, etc.), which train our young men and women to lead our nations [sic] military. We teach the values that make for strong leadership. Once saved, these values encourage and accelerate growth in Christ.” Whether or not Force Ministries is actually engaged in conducting its operations on young people and military students in such institutions here in the United States is not clearly established.

We see here many of the characteristics of the Fundamentalistic approach to religion and religious ministry. One can become a minister simply by having been “saved” – hard to distinguish from simply declaring oneself to be so “saved”. One is able to speak in public, which apparently is considered a synonym for actual and authentic preaching. One’s credibility is further enhanced not by having any depth or grounding in theology or matters of religious significance, nor necessarily from any wider or deeper acquaintance with the Deity than the afore-mentioned experience of being – or claiming to be – “saved”, but rather by having done something kinda catchy that will jumpstart your creds with your target audience (“flock” seems not at all what they’re aiming for here). So in the military setting this will translate into skydiving and the fact of one’s SEAL-hood, since even among the military these are two achievements vouchsafed only to a very very few. There’s a heavy flavor of calculated marketing in the whole thing, but then again the only serious ‘professional’ effort apparently made by Fundamentalistics is precisely to enhance the marketability of one’s services. And did we mention that there is a ‘Donate’ button right there?

And the content of this ministry? “Leadership” is what they call it. Salvation? Redemption? Forgiveness of sins? The increased capability to ascend the Ladder of Perfection? To understand the movements of the soul? None of the above. Rather, having been “saved”, the individual (we can hardly call these initiates ‘the faithful’ or ‘the believer’) is sent forth to “lead” the un-initiated, which – given the Fundy track record, appears indistinguishable from “lording it over them”.

Not unwisely, the actual content of the ministry is left unspoken. One can imagine exhortations to wage war for “Christ” and to take increased devotion to obeying one’s superiors in the daily round of fighting the war. It is a curiously passive form of “leadership”: one follows the orders of one’s leaders, one might consider onself to be following the orders of this “Christ”. But no clear doctrinal content is discussed; wisely again, so as to avoid creating any adverse-marketing reactions in the form of disagreement with the tenets of the doctrine or doubts as to its validity. Perhaps ‘wise’ is not the term; ‘shrewd’ might be more appropriate.

Of course, it is not the role of individual soldiers to speak Truth to Power; indeed the Army is just now in the process of court-martialing one 1st Lt. Watada for taking his stand. Deciding the legitimacy of a war and of actions ordered in war is not the province of individual soldiers. Thus the military ‘judge’ in the case. That this nation precisely claimed through the person of Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg that military personnel are indeed responsible for their obedience to what may be immoral or illegal orders, that our own service-members are required to refuse orders that are “illegal” … these facts – and they are not small – escape the ‘judge’s’ notice, or fail to engage his attention.

Jackson was speaking against the military-ism (if I may) of governments aspiring to a ‘Griff nach der Weltmacht’, a grasp at world-power, the concocting of which omelette will require that one’s military be prepared – whenever so ordered – to break a hell of a lot of eggs (preferably those belonging to other people). He was also speaking for the dignity and subsequent responsibility of the American citizen-soldier, Citizen and soldier. This noble and quintessential American conception is gall-and-wormwood to an Executive desiring an ever-ready force of legionaries for deployment anywhere, anytime, to do anything that the said Executive claims is required by ‘national security’.

There always exists the danger that clergy ministering to any military will over-identify with the plans of their national government. Not even the Kathliks with their overarching, transnational (and supranational) Church were able to avoid this in the many wars of Modern Europe, where the priests of that Universal Church willingly donned uniforms either of Kaiser or King to bring their ministry to those leaders’ troops. And absent the deep keel of a comprehensive theological and ecclesial underpinning, the Protestant faiths were always more at risk for heeling hard over when identifying with their particular nation’s cause as the winds of war began to blow. But among the ‘mainstream’ religions – Catholic and Protestant – there was at least some structure and structured thought which served as a check to the unbridled collapse of religion into the vision of the State such as occurred in Japanese Shinto.

But we face a different situation here, with these Fundamentalistic ‘force’ ministries. Not only are these ministries not quality-controlled by any sort of governing body (except, apparently, jump-school instructors) but they are ungoverned even by the military chaplaincy structures. Worse, they offer no consolation or illumination beyond the Saturday football coach’s gut-stoking half-time harangue. Such feelings of ‘happiness’ or ‘joy’, whatever ‘high’ is produced by this type of exercise, is purely the adolescent and primal surge consequent upon being encouraged to act out of your most primal instincts and do your worst to ‘the other side’.

And of course, in this type of harangue, there is no meaning at all unless there very much is some ‘other side’. You can’t stroke and stoke these feelings, achieve this kind of ‘high’, get into this kind of ‘zone’ unless you are atavistically ‘stoked’ against SOMEbody. This type of ‘high’ needs an ‘other’, an ‘enemy’, because it is incapable of, is uninterested in, mastering any of the upper ranges of the interior life: the only ‘mastery’ it seeks is the ability to drown out your fears and doubts by force of raw will, stoke up your violence, and project it outward at that oh-so-necessary ‘enemy’.

That so many people can blithely mistake this kinda primitive ‘high’ for a religious experience is one of the great failures of organized religious life in this country. And into the abyss thus created, the Fundamentalistic collapsing of the Beyond into the Present, of the Vertical into the Horizontal, of the Unknown into the Known, of the Self into its primal passions has poured with an unholy frenzy in our time. And into our times.

And under the intense deforming heat and pressures generated in the cauldron of war, especially a failing yet unend-able war, our young are now in un-clarified desperation vulnerable to the type of ‘ministry’ that will simply ease their descent into a spiritual flame-out that resembles nothing so much as the final ‘blossoming’ of the young Kamikaze.

This is not to presume that all these ‘force-ministers’ (so apt) are hucksters. There may well be – very probably are – well-intentioned individuals of no small military accomplishment, who eagerly and honestly want to bring some acceptable consolation to their fellows. And one can only wonder what state the organized chaplaincies are in after a decade and more of the rootin-tootin Ascendancy.

But the price for such stoke-force ministry is going to be high. The spiritual ‘casualties’ will be enormous, returning to civilian life with a hugely limited – not to say mis-shapen – spiritual capacity. This core deficiency might not be noticeable to Fundamentalists, and is certainly not a loss to ‘lefty’ Theorists whose world-view is as collapsed into the Horizontal as the Fundamentalists. But, as the neocon war-makers are finding out, the fact that you didn’t envision a phenomenon doesn’t at all mean that said phenomenon won’t come at you, and with a vengeance.

Our troops will be – most likely are – coming back to us with deep spiritual wounds. They went ‘over there’ obedient to our word, yet with no Word except the selectively-plucked bible-phrase encouraging war and blood. How able will they be to parent families? To conduct their responsibilities as Citizens? To lead a decent and reasonably fulfilled life? To handle the stresses of ‘civilian’ life, where the overt and immediate response of overwhelming physical force, fortified by a primal ‘high’ is the answer to almost nothing?

Hard rain is going to fall. Not the gentle life-nourishing rain of some of the great Scriptural visions but a life-pounding flood that sweeps away ‘humanity’, human-ness, humane-ness.

We owe them so much more. It is Our word that sent them there. Let Us not make it so that their obedience rises up, cries out from the earth, to reproach Us, and indict Us, and condemn Us.

So many of our ‘leaders’ – politicians, war-enthusiasts and slam-dunkers, even ranking military officers – are now considering how best to salvage their own careers. As The People, it devolves upon Us – given the moral failures of those ‘leaders’ – to ensure care for those who shall have borne the battle. We must not fail them … again.