SOLDIER STRESS AND PTSD

It’s Veteran’s Day and a good time to consider the plight of Our troops – especially given what they’ve been tasked to do in the service of The Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Tara McKelvey has a readable and substantive article in ‘The Boston Review’: is religion an obstacle to therapy for PTSD?

I’ve Posted on this recently, but it’s worth approaching the subject again from this slightly different angle.

She starts with the case of an Army chaplain (!) who had to report for PTSD treatment because he had reached a spiritual abyss after his recent tour over there and could no longer stomach hearing the phrase that ‘God is watching over you’. His wife and children afforded no effective consolation to him either.

I am always a bit wary of clergy – this one appears to be some flavor of Protestant – who ‘lose their faith’ when they run into the rough waters. Clergy – especially in the military – are supposed to be sort of like a spiritual Coast Guard: they’re always ready for the rough weather and boiling waves ‘out there’, and indeed sort of imagine that being able to provide service in precisely that dangerous and roiled environment is what the Coast Guard is all about.

So when one says that after running into some really rough weather s/he has lost the faith, then I begin to wonder if the individual was really clergy-chaplain material to begin with.

But then again, especially in this country of late, a sort of happy-face ‘summer sunshine’ sort of God, a glorified concierge there to fulfill one’s every wish, has been the usual image of the Divinity, and a sort of happy-face ‘summer-sunshine sort of life has been the usual expectation about the type of world such a God would set up (sort of like the Flower Children imagining that all of life was basically a dope-and-booze-and-sex-filled summer afternoon in San Francisco or Southern California).

But as a lot of folks and a lot of traditional theology and religion could have told them: it ain’t necessarily so … not hardly.

She refers to a recent study of Vietnam vets that indicated how many of the ones who had ‘lost their faith’ in God (and apparently the war) were most liable to return to the States and seek psychiatric counseling.

But of course, if you’ve lost your faith – to use the phrase – and thus don’t believe in God or religion any longer (and perhaps not in the goodness of the nation’s policy or the military brass) then you already defined ‘God and religion’ as being no longer of any help, even though what you have (your loss of faith) is primarily a spiritual problem.

Former students of a certain age may recall being taught that there are different types of fires, and so different types of extinguishers, so that – say – if you find yourself faced with an electrical fire, it won’t do any good to be putting water on it from the trusty water-based extinguisher.

But here, in this combat-stress matter, you have an electrical fire for which – since you’ve lost your faith in chemical powder – you’re going to try to put water on, turning to the water extinguisher by default as it were. Indeed, it may be a magnesium fire, for which water is not only an ineffective extinguishing agent, but will actually aggravate the fire and make it much worse.

This is a primarily a problem in the ‘rectification of Names’, as the ancient Chinese would say. Before you come up with the solution, you’ve got to accurately classify the problem.
But this has always been the problem of the ‘stress’ diagnosis from its inception about 30 years ago.

At the moment, the VA administration is still home to many hold-overs from the days of Bush and the ‘faith-based’ approach. That approach was a neat synergy between a government that didn’t want to waste money on cleaning up the consequences of its own actions and a Fundamentalism that essentially identified the country and the military and all their pomps and works with God: if you believe in ‘God’, the Fundamentalist whackery has it, then you believe in the country and the military and the war(s) and you shouldn’t be having any ‘stress’ at all. Your discomfort, in this approach, indicates a lack of faith.

Thus many chaplains – and they are so often Fundamentalists now - will start giving lectures on the Bible or – for those who are ‘with it’ – such current popular works as ‘The Purpose-Driven Life: What you need, soldier, is simply a stronger sense of purpose, not simply your own but the one God – through the President and your chain of command – has thoughtfully provided for you. So stop whimpering and start believing.

Oy. Oy gevalt. Oy and frak.

But accurate as it is to note the obnoxious and almost looney ‘ministry’ of Fundamentalist whackery, it is insufficient to stop the analysis there.

This ‘stress’ problem is a doozey of entangled developments: cultural and medical and political as well as religious and spiritual.

The VA hierarchy notes even now that the ‘stress’ diagnosis is a dubious one, and one that has unsavory political roots. There’s something to that.

In the later 1970s the Vietnam vets organizations started to carve a small place for themselves among the wider feminist push for ‘sensitivity’ to ‘pain’ – whatever pain a person (for the radical feminists, always a woman; for the multiculturalists anybody not ‘white’ and ‘mainstream’) might say that they felt.

This was considered to be a form of ‘empowerment’: instead of being told by a doctor (so often in those days a ‘man’) what your problem was and how to make it better, you would get to be listened to, and then your wishes as well as your pain would be ‘respected’ and you would thus be ‘empowered’.

Whether you would actually get better is another question, but then again this theory worked best with stuff that you ‘felt’. Broken legs and ruptured appendixes weren’t the best type of problems for this theory to prove itself; ‘pain’, however, worked very nicely: you felt it and you could declare when you no longer felt it (which was an outcome that didn’t seem to happen very often).

So the Vietnam vets started to get involved with this, casting their board on the rising surf.

Not that they didn’t have some frightening experiences. War itself, for the combat soldier anyway, is a frightening and awful cauldron. You can suddenly wind up ‘seeing’ an awful lot: not only carnage, but the darker side of nations, militaries, soldiering, and even your buddies.

And perhaps even yourself: if ‘seeing’ awful things is certainly a pressureful experience, even more so is ‘doing’ awful things – a cause of PTSD that, especially nowadays, isn’t mentioned much. Although I, for one, wonder just how many sufferers haven’t just ‘seen’ awful stuff but are haunted by what awful stuff they themselves might have done.

(A certain stock response to that insight is that it’s really just a form of ‘blaming the victim’, but if you can’t get an accurate cause of the pain (which is itself mostly self-reported and not accessible to scientific testing) then you can’t really devise an accurate treatment. If somebody, say, reports terrifying nightmares and crippling ‘depression’, and says that it is all from what s/he has ‘seen’, but you as a therapist don’t know that the person actually ‘did’ some really upsetting stuff as well as ‘saw’ stuff, then things aren’t soon going to get put right. And if you ‘witnessed’ some awful stuff but can’t report it because you want to be ‘loyal’, yet you still need to make the pain and stress go away … well, ditto ditto. You see where these things can go.)

So there was always a certain political element to this entire ‘disease’ called PTSD. Indeed, while the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s 1980 3rd edition put down some careful parameters for the particularly awful stresses generated by the combat experience, the 4th edition in 1994 expanded and diluted those parameters (to include some stressors, especially those connected with ‘men’, that the feminists’ clients – reputedly ‘all women’ – had to put up with). And the band played on.

But then there is a host of scientific problems with the diagnosis.

First, it has to be clearly isolated and differentiated from such other problems such as micro-sized brain damage (a current injury rampant in the current combat theaters): explosions such as those caused by IEDs and mines can cause tiny bits of damage in vital elements of the brain, causing all manner of physiological and psychological consequences. These injuries can now be seen on scanning equipment.

This is not PTSD, which is a far more fuzzy problem, since it appears to be a purely psychological and emotional response – by some soldiers but not others – to experiences they have had in the combat theater. Yes, the stress-released neurochemicals can, especially if the patient is exposed over a long period of time, cause physiological damage, but the neurochemicals are released by the individual’s sense of being ‘stressed’ in the first place. And we’re back to the individual and his/her ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ of being ‘stressed’.

And then there’s the problem of self-reporting: if you can’t independently verify the existence of the ‘pain’ that the soldier is claiming, then you can’t really be sure of what you’re dealing with. The ‘solution’ to this conundrum – so popular in the victim-oriented 1980s and 1990s – was the simple and simplistic rule: believe the sufferer, since sufferers – through some metaphysical Law not previously published – do not lie or make mistakes.

This is conceptually a piss-poor professional standard of therapeutic practice. And especially in a situation where a putative patient stands to derive financial benefit – or in a military combat setting where a patient might be able to avoid ‘returning to the front’, then the possibilities for – ummmmm – mischief are huge. And of course, as victimism took hold in American culture, simply claiming the status of ‘victim’ was some sort of ‘benefit’, and to some might appear an actual achievement.

The solution precipitated out of the interaction with another development of the latter half of the 20th century: the development of numerous powerful drugs (and, it has to be said, the expansion of the drug and pharmaceutical industry). The most ‘efficient’ solution for a practitioner – and the one least likely to cost him/her a job – was to prescribe some drugs and get on to the next case of the day.

But as I said, if you’re dealing with primarily a spiritual or moral crisis – perhaps one induced by doing – rather than merely ‘witnessing’ – some awful stuff, then drugs were not really going to get to the cause of the problem. And if you’re dealing with a personality already weakened by immaturity or poor parenting and childhood experience (an increasing if disturbing probability in this country nowadays), then the introduction of drugs (and all their side effects) could only complicate an already complicated and somewhat nebulous situation.

And there is an organizational element to all of this in the military setting: a therapist is him/herself a sworn Service member, perhaps even a commissioned officer. So when the chain of command says that You will do this or You won’t do that … then your professional judgment has to take a back-seat to your orders. Unless you want to get court-martialed or be dismissed from the Service (which never looks good on a resume).

And in the current setting of combat operations the chances of ‘stress’ are very high indeed.

First, the nature of the combat: we are more or less losing, or at least involved in precisely that “long twilight struggle” that no American military commander has ever welcomed (We are a quick-and-total victory sort of nation). Worse, this is a war with no ‘front-line’: there is no in-theater ‘safe zone’ where you can be sent for a little R&R. Nor can the military afford to be shipping big bunches of troops to Europe or wherever for such R&R (it isn’t the Golden Age of 1945-1970 any longer). So the stress-inducing experiences never stop.

Second, the average American munchkin is not really conditioned to a lot of pressure. Preserved from a childhood of drinking water from garden hoses or riding bicycles without helmets, alert to the smallest official disregard of their ‘rights’ or their preferences, and wayyyy too sugared-up, there are just a whole lotta munchkins and munchkas that aren’t used to running up against a stern and implacable reality, like – oh, sayyyyy – war and combat.

And for far too long the military has catered to that cultural shift by watering-down the ‘stern and implacable’ side of training. Indeed, the feminist lobby insists that military service is primarily an ‘employment opportunity’ and since ‘it isn’t your father’s or grandfather’s (fill in the blank: Army, Navy, Air Force) any longer’, then it isn’t their type of ‘war’ either. Although if the lobby imagined that War itself – that awesome and aweful Horseman – was going to be as easily cowed as the US Congress, they were laboring under a delusion of truly world-historical proportions.

And then, coming full circle, there are now the Fundamentalists, who under the Bush Administration swelled to an Ascendancy in the military chaplaincies. They did so because they were far more government-friendly than any other faith-group, including the Catholics: in the simplistic Fundamentalist schematic, God appointed and deputized ‘the powers that be’, which is the government and the military chain of command, and so all the soldiery has to do to ‘get right with God’ is to follow orders. Ach!

Unfortunately, the same Congress that breezily pandered to ‘youth’ and other pushy lobbies over the course of decades, also signed off on a ‘war’ that bids fair to force all of the favored demographics into that “long twilight struggle” on the darkling, blood-red fields of Ares Ferox et Atrox.

Hence the possibilities for stress are legion.

And to complicate it all with one last infernal twist, the Fundamentalist chaplainry is actually making some good noises about self-discipline and responsibility that have been sorely deconstructed of late. (Which is not to say that I subscribe to any Fundamentalist vision of ‘maturity’, especially since their idea of history stops about 6,000 short years ago and their vision of the earliest hominids has those bipeds sharing turf with the dinosaurs, as was proven by that decisive historical evidence, “The Flintstones”.)

So it’s not hard to see where military therapy providers as well as service personnel are under a lot of pressure.

But the elements of the whole thing are numerous, convoluted, and present a massive and molten cauldron of complexity. And Americans have never been known to handle that type of challenge well.

If all this gives you a headache, I recommend that you don’t take an aspirin, but instead stay with the pressure and the pain and try to work through it. The more folks that get into that habit, the better the chance that somehow the country can come up with a reasonable analysis and some modestly effective solution.

Do it for the troops. God knows We owe it to them.

DESTROYING MONSTERS

Ira Chernus is a Professor of Religious Studies at U/Colorado in Boulder.

He’s got a book out entitled “Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin”.

Chernus’s schematic vision is that the neocons are steeped in a change-averse, independence-averse, weak minded ‘conservative moralism’ characteristic of the pre-‘counterculture’ days of the Sixties, and that the ideology that they have developed to console themselves and insulate themselves from the pain and challenge of newness, freshness, change, and creative personal and societal thinking and mores … that ideology (and one would almost have to say ‘pathology’, in Chernus’s schematic) requires neocons to live in a world where Good and Evil exist, where an individual and a society must constantly struggle in that battle, and where self-definition and identity as well as an overarching purpose in life are achieved by having “monsters to destroy” against whom they can constantly wage war and thus simultaneously prove themselves, reaffirm their weak identity, and repress their abiding fear of ‘change’. And, Chernus feels, the present American situation is the result of the neocons’ – since they sorta lost the culture wars here – having to go abroad in search of fresh ‘monsters’ against whom to struggle and get their pathological and addictive ‘fix’; hence their demonization and invasion of this and that people in this and that country.

Neat. Many birds with the one theoretical stone: decrying the objective moralism against which the ‘counterculture’ and ‘radicalism’ (he often uses the terms interchangeably) of the Sixties struggled and still struggle; showing how all of those who believe in objective Morality are essentially weak and pathological unripes, and all their ‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’ are fit only for psychotherapeutic intervention; explaining how the current wars in the East are all the Republicans’ fault through that Party’s embrace of the neocons (thereby absolving from war-guilt the Democratic Party, original embracer, enabler, and daddy-warbucks for the counterculture’s and the radicals’ Long March and the toxic brew of ideology that underlies the whole radical project).

And working in some of the Sixties’ trademark themes and thought-patterns: that ‘morality’ is whatever an individual chooses to believe, and does not exist outside the individual and cannot be forced upon an individual from the outside; that therefore no individual can be ‘judged’ or forced from the outside; that so much of what seems ‘real’ is actually just a matter of what you choose to believe and assume, so that if the neocons assume ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ and obsess over objective ‘morality’ then if only they would change their attitude then the world would be a better place; that there is no justification for presuming that human beings are prone to great evil, and so therefore any sustained concerns for ‘morality’ and ‘defense’ are merely symptoms of deep but self-serving pathology; and that any amount of disagreement with any of the foregoing constitutes the pathologically significant symptom of ‘denial’ and fuels what is merely ‘backlash’.

I think that there is great fruit to be gleaned from considering Chernus’s book.

First, to get a clear picture of (what Chernus sees as) the neocon development.

But to do that, a couple of definitions and clarifications:

A) I distinguish between i) the ‘countercultural’ movement of the Sixties and ii) the ‘radical’ movement. The counterculture were the Flower Children, making love – not war, usually high on pot, but beyond having ‘free love’ in or out of long-unwashed dungarees in shabby VW buses, they really did feel (it never got to the ‘thinking’ stage) that the world could work by everybody just groovin’, being nice to each other, and getting in touch with their ‘feelings’, and that – smaller being better - communes were the best form of social organization and ‘family’, preferably away from cities and structure and conformity and industry; it was a youthy, idealistic, golden sorta thing, strongly influenced by Romanticism. But hell and gone from that, the ‘radicals’ here were the youthful heirs of late 19th and early 20th century labor agitation (not a bad thing in itself, certainly), socialist and anarchist streams of thought and of the methods of revolutionary change that by the late 1960s flowed in a strong stream comprised of old Anarchism, Leninist and Maoist revolutionary praxis, and also a strain of shrewd propagandistic self-presentation and the manipulation of public opinion that derived in great part from the propaganda praxis of the Third Reich (which itself – wheeeee! – had gotten some great pointers from the early-20th century American advertising ‘genius’, Edward Bernays). Given all of this, Chernus’s failure to distinguish between ‘the counterculture’ and ‘the radicals’, is conceptually weak and improper; his subsequent lumping the two much-different phenomena together, and then declaring them ‘good’ as opposed to the ‘evil’ of the ‘conservative moralism’ of the ‘neocons’, is duplicitous.

B) When seeking to define or understand ‘liberalism’ I would divide the Sixties into two distinct halves: up to 1965 we have a ‘traditional’, and a genuine American liberalism, seeking through a democratic politics and a sustained civic engagement to fulfill Justice and Liberty for a segment of the population – the ‘Negro’ – generally acknowledged (except by Southerners) to be greatly wronged by the national social arrangements that had been in place for centuries; this ‘struggle’ not only united the bonds between black and white Americans (again, those intractable Southerners much excepted) but strengthened the essential public faith in American goals and the American vision as enunciated by Martin Luther King (with his indispensable grounding in scripture and religious faith) as well as such figures as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. After 1966 and certainly as a result of 1968, we have a ‘liberalism’ that is really a radical politics of agitprop and ruthless pressure in the service of alleviating problems about which there existed no such seasoned national consensus and which prompted vast amounts of public skepticism and hesitation and opposition – to such wide and sudden change, if not to the actual proposed goals themselves; and in response to which the radicals declared everything not fully supportive of their agendas to be benighted backlash, and proceeded to deploy every stratagem to manipulate, stampede or sidestep altogether public deliberation and discourse, choosing instead to ‘force’ government and courts to accept and then impose their agendas. And by this point, ‘liberalism’ has also undermined independent, robust reporting and coverage by ‘the press’ or the ‘media’, seducing with telegenic melodrama a mainstream ‘press’ already frightened by the declining reading capacities and habits of the American public – whence ‘political correctness’, which could never have existed without the press and the media. Consequently, as he once again performs his trademark lumping-together, Chernus confuses a genuine and traditionally American and ‘classic’ liberalism of pre-1965 with the radical and profoundly undemocratic (even anti-democratic) ‘liberalism’ of 1968 and in doing that he fails to inform and he actually veers toward purposeful manipulation.

Those ‘definitions’ being clarified, getting on with the first observation, I’d say that the ‘neocons’ went through several distinct periods. The first period, during the Sixties, was a period of often acute insight into the conceptual weaknesses and societal consequences of the counterculture and the radicals’ assorted agendas.

Chernus’s extensive quoting from Irving Kristol’s work written during this period reveals Kristol's as a literate and informed concern for the un-grounding and disconnection from the humanizing and maturing structures of objective ‘right and wrong’ and of ‘good and evil’; and from the constructive limitations that can shape a growing ‘self’, a developing individual, into a competent, responsible citizen and parent whose work contributes to the general welfare, to the common weal as well as to familial and personal enhancement.

Kristol in this phase mounts a reasonable critique of the eminently critique-able countercultural nostrums and half-truths and incomplete visions which threatened to literally fragment not American society (that would come in the Age of the Identities starting in the ‘70s) but a national societal consensus about the legitimacy and authority of moral standards, virtues, sin, and the moral and existential projects in general. This is the first phase of the ‘neocon’ presence on the American scene, and it is far from evil in its intent or its content.

Even Kristol’s reinforcement of the values of the traditional ‘religious’ and Judeo-Christian worldview, with their schematics and dynamics of envisioning oneself and one’s world as being imperfect, to some degree capable of a potential evil is well within bounds. And the resulting necessity of being watchful and cautious as to one’s own passions and thoughts as well as those of one’s neighbors and of strangers is equally valid, within the vision of that world-view.

Overall, in this first phase of neoconservatism, an intelligent and vigorous defense (more than was mounted by the churches at the time, certainly) of a matrix of beliefs that shaped and grounded and even fueled American society, was not only within bounds but – in light of Our current situation – as prescient as Solzhenitsyn’s.

In neoconservatism’s second phase, during the later ‘70s and into the ‘80s, a darker note is sounded. Reflecting the growing and intensifying public unease over the societal and ethical and moral consequences of the Democrats’ Identities and their Advocates, who preemptively sought to disable social and political opposition by claiming that there was no ‘objective’ or ‘greater’ or ‘higher’ reality that could stand in judgment upon their numerous and counter-intuitive demands and agendas, a raw political energy of great strength was now loose in the country, generated in response/reaction to the concentrated and bumptious political force honed and deployed by the Advocacies and their Democratic godparents; the Advocacies called it ‘backlash’ in order to try to cage it within a narrative advantageous to themselves, but this political energy was not so much reactionary as it was skeptical, concerned, and – ominously – tremendously anxious and disappointed: Did the Democrats really know what they were doing? Did all these new ‘ideas’ really work? Could the fundamental structures and grounds of American society and culture sustain so much ‘change’ all at once?

Neoconservatism began to trim its sails to take advantage of this tide, and one starts to sense the toxic and noxious infusions from sources such as Falwell and assorted fundamentalists, with whom the neoconservatives were now prepared to join in a political alliance as well as a conceptual affinity. From sagacious, prudent and acute comment on the moral, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual state of affairs in the country, the neocons were going to ‘take to the field’, doing what needed to be done to reach out, form alliances, and wage a public and political counter-struggle against the radical Advocacies.

Here we start to see the neocons making some far less universally acceptable assertions, and engaging in tactics that sacrifice wise sensitivity to the complexity and nuance of the human predicament in favor of unthinking ‘support’ of simplistic, least-common-denominator slogans, caricatures and by-words.

And in neoconservatism’s third phase we see a movement that now seeks to reach beyond American domestic affairs, to form alliances with the national-security Rightists and Nationalists, the imperially-minded defense contractors and industry, the equally though for a different reason ‘energy resources’ imperialists, the socially conservative and patriotic pro-military folk, and with the abiding interest of the Israeli state and its American supporters in pumping up the American protector into an aggressive, indeed preventive warrior, ready to intervene anywhere (but most especially in the Middle East) in the name of freedom and liberty (or at least under cover of same). And this is a monstrously dark – even reprehensible and corrupt - incarnation of neoconservatism indeed.

But my point is that there are different phases of neoconservatism. And that – even more to the point – that first phase was characterized by perceptive and acute and substantive critique of vast and almost wild forces loose in American society in the late 1960s, post-1968.

And it has to be remembered that a huge operative factor, not fully grasped at the time, was the Democratic Party, which in the later-60s threw its still-considerable weight and influence behind the Identities.

And therefore – willy nilly – behind the profoundly and potentially corrosive, though on its surfaces and in its intent inchoately ‘positive’, ‘deconstructionist’ theory that was purposely and deliberately devised (in France a decade and more before) precisely to undermine established structures of thought and practice in order to create conceptual confusion and thus ‘space’ for different (‘new’, ‘fresh’, creative’) combinations of social and political power among emerging post-colonial ‘minorities’ among the postwar post-empires of Europe.

That ‘deconstuctionism’ had quickly been tossed out of France as intellectuals and politicians realized that it was a ‘universal solvent’: a substance capable of eating its way through any material, so that no container could hold it, and any container that did try to hold it would be eaten away. Thus, that any society and government that embraced deconstructionism and thus tried to wield it and deploy it, would find itself societally and politically corroded, to the point of lethal weakness and even of collapse.

This was the vampire the Dems invited into Our national house, by not checking the intellectual baggage of their newly-adopted Identities. Its very essence and purpose is to confuse, to weaken, to delegitimize any established order or structure, with which it comes into contact. That’s why it was devised, by men who wanted to help the oppressed by giving them a conceptual tool to weaken the legitimacy of the ‘structures’ theoretically oppressing them.

The huge danger lay in consequences a couple-three steps down the road (and does this sound familiar, in the light of the Iraq War?): the deconstructionism that destroyed an established matrix of power so that some ‘oppressed’ group could make its way into power, would then start to undermine the legitimacy of whatever that ‘oppressed’ group tried to establish in its own favor. And therefore, either the newly-former ‘oppressed’ group would have to permit itself to be delegitimized in its own turn or else it would have to – in an act of brute political force and repression – simply declare an end to the process of ‘change’ and declare itself ‘the establishment’, the incontestable and unopposable ‘power’.

Thus, as the French sorta sensed (and the Dems didn’t), ‘deconstructionist theory’ led sooner rather than later to an anti-democratic politics, to a repressive authoritarianism and elitism. That the new authoritarian and elitist establishment is ‘saved’ by being composed of the formerly ‘oppressed’ … this point is not only irrelevant but from the point of view of democracy treacherously stupid. And – We shall soon find out – perhaps fatally so.

So Chernus’s gambit here is to bundle the ‘flower children’ of the mid-60s counterculture together with the radical and deconstructionist Identities of the late-‘60s and early-‘70s, and call the whole thing ‘liberalism’, and then oppose to that a monolithic lump of ‘neoconservatism’ that a) denies the ‘freedom’ of the individual and on the basis of deep psychopathology and moral deformity opposes positive social change and b) leads in a straight line from repressing innocent young free love and sex to perpetrating the invasive assaults of the Iraq War.

It’s too too neat. And, it seems, completely erases the Democratic Party as the source of any of the problems currently bethumping Us. Could any sober observer agree to so sweeping and convenient an analysis?

Chernus also understates the objectives of ‘the counterculture’, and leaves the reader to wonder whether he is actually so simple-minded as to believe what he is writing. “All the Sixties wanted to do was trade in traditional values for new ones – peace, love, sensuality, diversity, ecological harmony”. Once again, he’s not distinguishing between the ‘flower children’ and the ‘radicals’, conveniently (so I have to think shrewdly, too) mushing them together as “the Sixties”. The cutesy, barefoot wish-hopes of the Flower kids – which did not even rise to the status of ‘ideals’ (that would have required a serious, and therefore a limiting, commitment) – are blended with the radical, deadly earnest (however incoherent or shortsighted) revolutionary agenda of those radicals who formed the nub of the ‘70s Revolutions of the Identities and their accompanying Advocacies.

Then he minimizes the Sixties, making them cuddly and innocent: “All (they) wanted to do …” But then the mean, old neocons entered stage right and began beating on the Sixties kids to make them put their clothes on and not trust one another as if they were all just kewpie dolls on a carnival rack and to stay sober and – gack – take a shower a couple-three times a week.

Now I didn’t support the war, I didn’t appreciate being lied to every time a Pentagoon gave a briefing on the evening news, and I don’t much like conformity; and I have never ever liked to drink anybody’s Kool-Aid. But I sensed even back then that if you’re going to sail outside the normal shipping lanes, then you are not therefore free of the responsibility of being a competent navigator and sailor, but instead you have to accept responsibility for being an even better one.

Because life – like the battlefield, but also like apples hanging on trees in country gardens – is to some extent shaped by forces that both cannot be changed and that cannot prudently be imagined to not-exist. Tell yourself any ‘narrative’ you want: but if you stand under a tree then you’re going to get hit with a falling apple because apples fall because Gravity exists. The wise sailor doesn’t presume to make or choose a ‘different’ ‘narrative’ of what reality exists out there on the open ocean; rather, he/she masters him/herself and concentrates on learning what those forces are. And doing so not for the purpose of surrendering one’s humanity, liberty, freedom, uniqueness and individuality, but rather for the purposes of most efficaciously shaping and wielding one’s humanity in the service of some goal that will serve, in a large or small way, humanity. You get out there on Life’s ocean and you want to be able to understand those forces so as to use them to your advantage as best you might. And thus get to your voyage’s destination.

Which brings us to Chernus’s “traditional values”: given the tremendous presence of Judeo-Christian and classical ‘values’ in Western civilization, and thus in the America of 1968, the only way to be ‘fresh’ and ‘creative’ was to call all those values ‘old-fashioned’ (Chernus does) and come up with whatever ‘values’ you can find that are not-traditional.

So: ‘sensuality’(Chernus proposes it) … as a value? Yeah, maybe, but only after you’ve built the firm foundation of a self and a life using some rather more essential building-blocks. Don’t pick out the paint-scheme for the first-class saloon until you’ve got the hull really really figured out. ‘Sensuality’ is nice (and they do say now that masturbation can help prevent prostate cancer in males) but mostly just ‘feeling’ (in any sense of the word) does not a mature adult make.

And ‘love’ is now so confused a word that we have to distinguish between “a groovy kind of” it and the fierce burning faithful love of the Old Testament God and the unblinking and courageous respect-love of the New Testament and the almost superhuman love that stems – as the theory has it – from a love of Christ Who Himself loves all humans and then even the all-weather loving-kindness sustained throughout.

“How should we acquire our moral values,” – he asks – “through independent inquiry or by accepting some external authority?” Ah, the plaintive voice of the Sixties in the accents of grammatical precision and a certain wise authority. But the question indicates a throw-back, a regression back beyond the hard-won state-of-the-question that had already been achieved in Western culture long before the Sixties pop-eyed ‘searchers’ learned how to toddle. A human being can exercise independent inquiry in order to personally arrive at the deeply perceived and deeply felt realization that there is a Beyond, perhaps even a personal, ethical God, and with the conclusiveness of that sense of personally achieved ‘independent inquiry’ thus Ground him/herself in a Beyond that would become as a rock, thereby building the human self – and the community of human selfs – not on ever-shifting, ever-changeable ‘sand’ but on solid, sustaining ‘rock’ – as a certain image famously puts it.

To regress the question back to the either-or that was primitive even in the Sixties, to embrace a level of posing a question that was childish and immature even then … that was one of the great sleights of hand of the Sixties and its Advocates. And a double-sleight: they not only made it seem ‘fresh’ and ‘creative’; they made it seem like it was accurate. And a triple-sleight: they made it seem like a wondrously workable basis on which to ‘change’ and ‘govern’ an entire society and culture. Yah. That sure worked. Have We noticed how frakked up things have gotten since the Sixties? Since the ‘kids’ of the Sixties made their mark on national policy and government?

And can there be any doubt that this cognitively primitive ‘either-or’ is precisely the same infection that regressed the neocons and Republicans to bloody-minded chimpery after 9-11: either they’re with us or they’re against us. Oy.

Nor is it enough to say that it’s ‘creative’ for any individual to pick out whatever ‘values’ s/he thinks would be good for him/her. The sea isn’t quite that flexible.

Of course, maybe we aren’t ships, and there is no need to master any skills because life is not a sea and we aren’t captains of anything and maybe there isn’t or we don’t choose for there to be in our lives any destination and so the days and hours of our lives are not part of any ‘voyage’, let alone a ‘mission’, nor do we necessarily need to feel responsible for any cargo or for any smaller ships in company or even for how we handle our own ship.

Yeah. And thus you see the corrosiveness of deconstruction when it’s taken to the very heart of human be-ing. Even when it’s taken there for a ‘good’ purpose, for a ‘liberal’ purpose, for a ‘creative’ purpose, for a ‘liberating’ purpose. How do you shape a Self if there’s nothing ‘out there’? How do you shape a community of un-Shaped selfs? Or of selfs shaped according to no commonality beyond – say – eating and having sex?

How do you Shape a ‘self’? How can you Shape a ‘self’ if there is no acknowledged ‘shape’? If there is no acknowledgement that there are certain parameters and characteristics to which the ‘self’ has to be conformed – like a ship to the sea – in order to work at all?

How do a gaggle of un-Shaped selfs or largely under-Shaped selfs form and sustain a common weal?

For that matter, how does any group of humans so conceived and so dedicated maintain and sustain a society and a culture if any ‘commonality’ is instantly and loudly deconstructed as ‘oppressive’?

Chernus repeats the Sixties mantra that there are many rich, fresh new values ‘around’ us, waiting to be chosen or found or whatever. This is Flatness, no matter how groovy. How can mere mortals sustain their lives without some connection to an Above, a Beyond, (or in my use of the Greek term here) a Meta? How can any adult continually and faithfully haul oneself out of bed in the morning if there is no Ultimate Sustainment? And when the litheness and un-responsible day-glo days of teen-hood are gone, and when children and society and the common weal depend on one, how be ‘faithful’ if one be not Sustained?

How handle the pressures generated by Incompleteness and Imperfection and even Sin and Sinfulness if one be not Sustained? By simply living one’s life in permanent and utter ignorance and denial of what is happening to Us? By simply living in permanent and utter ‘outrage’ at whatever hyped ‘crisis’ is tossed to Us? By getting in touch with the Inner Chimp, the Inner Berserker? (That indeed is the awefull challenge facing so many of Our troops now, sent by Our inadvertence or ignorance into the maw of Fourth Generation War, saved from the inappropriate caresses of Dionysus only to be delivered proudly to the bloody, claw-like, death-grasping gauntlets of Ares Ferox et Atrox).

And “peace” wasn’t a ‘value’ in ‘traditional’ Western history? And “love”? Forget the Flower Children: does Chernus actually think this? Does he seriously think that ‘the Sixties’ were right to imagine that they were creating something totally new under the sun?

The Revolutions and the entire acid-action of ‘deconstruction’ were precisely in need of ‘change’ – lots of it, all deconstruction all the time, because the objective was to ‘deconstruct’ just about any structure of ‘power’ and ‘authority’; in effect, decapitating the target culture and society in order to take it over with one’s own head-full of visions and rules, laws and authority.

Nor did it occur to too many of the radicals that their ideas weren’t so much ‘fresh’ and ‘new’ as they were previously-rejected, by societies and cultures who saw how uncontrollable this deconstructive reaction, once initiated, could and would become. But it occurred to some; they overruled prudence. Prudence, after all, doesn’t make for successful revolutions. Ask Lenin, ask Mao. Don’t – it’s ‘unhelpful’ and ‘negative’ – ask their victims.

And ‘boundaries’ and ‘limits’ – well, they aren’t friends of any revolution, and they aren’t friends of kids – from the kids’ point of view. And the very word ‘shape’ pretty much implies limits. So it was necessary to have a limitless society; one with no boundaries (except for certain newly-hatched classes who can fully be abused); that Our society has started to lose Shape, to tend toward Shapelessness, psychologically, ethically, morally, spiritually … well, who knew? The very observation – harrumph – is ‘negative’ and probably ‘oppressive’ and definitely ‘offensive’ to … somebody. Thus We stagger on.

But of course, the Sixties (the later years, anyway) coincided with a moment in History when the Democratic Party was smarting from its failures in Vietnam, terrified that the wondrously uplifted “negroes’ of 1965 were not going to remember the Party that risked so much to pass the Civil rights and Voting Acts, and desperate to raise up new voting blocs to replace the Southern whites (male and female) who – as Southerners seem inclined from time to time to do – renounced their old allegiance and set up shop on t’other side of the river.

And as the deconstructing Identities began to multiply in the ‘70s, and the Dems found themselves trapped by the pressures of groups they themselves had raised up, and more and more sober-minded folk began to doubt the Dems’ ability to govern in the interests of the common weal, or even to stand up for any traditions or any national centrifugal forces at all, and as each Identity identified its own “monster to destroy” and the Dems set out after those thus-identified with the full force and power of the government … the Democratic Party in its deepest counsels came to figure that the only course left was to keep trying to go forward with its old plan. Sorta like Vietnam, actually.

It hadn’t worked: the new Identities didn’t simply open their newly-hatched eyes and gently select a spot on the grounds wherein to set up their tents and hearths and make sure to vote for their creators; they each had more and more demands; and when they didn’t get what they wanted then they threatened their Democratic creators with the loss of votes, even as those creators began finally to tally up the number of possible votes lost by their embracing this or that Identity in the first place. Doing the math simply agitated the addled Democrats even more.
Finally they gave up everything – honor, integrity, responsibility, the common weal – and simply tried to keep getting themselves elected, holding on – they told themselves – until that day when through the workings of time and death there would be no more to recall how it used to be, and fresh generations would have no memory nor education to realize how it used to be, and new arrivals would have no conception of whatever it was that used to be, and they could all start from scratch.

Interesting, if unimpressive, plan.

But now the Republicans, equally if differently debauched, have created such a disastrous mess that the Dems cannot but scent the possibility of a massive victory by default. And a massive victory – to a professional pol – is a great victory, nor is there any shame than being the default-party nor in being elected ‘on the rebound’, as it were.

But it’s worse even than that. Whatever the country may be in 2012, there may not be enough to keep things going until death and time and new arrivals so dilute ‘old’ visions as to make them mere phantasms. The Dems may wind up presiding, but over a nation so diminished that there will be precious little to offer as rewards to faithful voting blocs.

We are in dire straits indeed. A house divided by the Democrats and their radical and very demanding creations, a house put down as collateral by war-drunk Republicans in what looks to be a losing hand – and a doubling-down on a series of losing hands.

And far too many citizens with nothing to fall back on but the breezy wishful daydreams of the teens of a now vanished age – that Sixties when they not only had their youth in all its shallow but effervescent and perky confidence, but a country still cohesive and strong and able to provide a future for them – try to keep afloat, day by day.

This is not the spirit that built the West. This is not the spirit that sustains the West.

We have been seduced as a People, thanks to elites who knew less than they ever let on, into trading in a sturdy ocean-worthy vessel for a cutesy water-park duckie-float.

Yet still We face the sea. No elites and no fresh, new, creative ‘narrative’ can change that.

We must go down to Life’s sea – and in worthy ships. And We must do it quickly. The sea is rising.

**
AND ALSO:

I neglected to include one other very significant point in Chernus’s treatment: he accuses the neocons and the ‘conservative moralists’ of being the unique perpetrators of what the Advocates of the Identities have been doing to Us for decades now. In psychiatric terms he ‘projects’ onto the neocons and ‘conservative moralists’ precisely what his favored Dems and Identities pretty much invented as standard political tactics.

As example, on page 5 he goes after that truly jaw-dropping assertion reported by Ron Suskind and popularly presumed to be from the pudgy lips of Karl Rove himself: “We create our own reality”. But isn’t this exactly the type of thing Chernus is plumping for when he urges that humans can “choose their own values”? Aren’t – in the ‘liberal’ or the ‘progressive’ story – all humans simply browsers at a massive buffet, filling their personal plates with a scoop of this ‘value’ and a forkful of that ‘value’? Just as now – the hot ironies! – the Bushist Imperium sees the entire planet as a large buffet, with the agents of the US government simply browsing around the room, ladling this and forking that? Yoooo-hooooooo ….

Chernus continues: “Living within the safe shelter of their story, they see only the parts of reality that already fit into their story. They don’t test the truth of their stories by testing them against facts. The story comes first. … Instead of seeking out the facts, they create their own version of the facts.” No peeking now: tell me if this refers to A) the neocon imperialists or B) to the ‘liberals’ of the Sixties and their Advocacies. Or, worse by sooo far: C) both. Chernus would insist that the only answer can be (A). But I think that precisely the key point is that the answer is irrefutably (C). And that We are now in so much trouble because simply letting Bush leave office or dis-electing the Republicans is not going to put out the fire. We are at sea, on fire, and We don’t quite know just where the fire is or what kind of fire it is (Will water put it out or intensify it? Do we need sand? Chemicals? And if We need water, then We face the next problem of fire-fighting at sea: the whole idea of a ship is that you most certainly do NOT want to be putting water into it, because if you do, then … no matter what ‘story’ you have chosen, the ship is going to sink and you are going to have sunk it.

As may thus be clearly inferred: command at sea is not for the immature nor the faint of mind or heart, nor for the groovy nor for the perpetually outraged. And lest this seems like a sneaky commercial for the Republicans as that lost breed is presently and repugnantly construed: command at sea is not for those who would take a half-sinking ship and go and start unnecessary shooting-action just to prove that they can still do it.

But I’ll also say this in the interests of full disclosure: John Wayne, even on his worst day, would never have done it either. Nor Clark Gable nor Gregory Peck … well, Peck did take the Pequod on her fateful journey … so forget Peck.

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.

OFFENDED BY GOD


Let me make something clear: It has never been my intention to flog the same subject. And my first interest has always been the war and Our relation to the government. But that’s exactly how I got interested in this ongoing sex-offense mania: In trying to figure out how the hell We could have gotten bamboozled not only into Bush but into this war – and how many of Us even came to feel it was a Good Thing, I was profoundly rattled when I noticed that the same bamboozlement had been thoroughly field-tested in the sex-offense mania of a decade or so before. And, it appears, is still going on – so that the same capacity for (self-)bamboozlement that was first exercised in the sex-offense mania is still going strong, even as the war-mania which is its offspring starts to pass (which is not at all to say that the consequences of our binge while in the war-manic mode are going to pass).

It’s hard to get one’s heart around: since the fall of the USSR in 1991, sixteen years following the Moment when a massive surviving chunk of the awfulness of the 20th century suddenly melted into thin air, presenting a world-wide opportunity of almost miraculous proportions, and the United States allowed itself to become consumed in the assorted Outrageous Emergencies of the various Identities, not only thereby missing the chance to exercise a truly nation-mature role in the reformulation of the planet’s political and social being, but also so deeply deforming its own ethos and praxis that when at last a belated U.S. effort to engage the new world situation was made, it was – almost prophetically – monstrously deformed into a violent, invasive, military thrusting that even in its death throes destroys the lives and souls of all who come into any contact with it.

Meanwhile, the planet – true to History’s dynamic nature – has refused to simply play the backdrop either to the assorted Advocacies’ set-piece melodramas or to the military’s set-piece warfare. The planet’s ecology is starting to tank, and that danger is so stupendously awefull that even the warning signs of a fading U.S. economic hegemony (or even security) must accept second-place in the claim for Our attentions.

So why keep coming back to this sex-offense thing? Because it was here that Our debauchery was set in place. And almost any of Us who can read were sentient during the past 10 or so years that this thing has metastasized, AND probably thought that the sex-offense thing was a Good Thing even as We enjoyed the brief giddy thrill as matters – like a roller-coaster car starting the down-phase – began to gather speed in their race to the bottom. And perhaps, like the proverbial schmuck falling off a tall building – We won’t feel anything but exhilaration until the very last couple of stories. ‘So far, so good!’.

In which case, the last stories coming up pretty quickly in all of the various stories in which We now play a part, then a more than cursory consideration of this sex-offense stuff might help Us understand how We were debauched, are debauched, and have helped to debauch Ourselves. Thus soberly fortified, We might better take such corrective action as are still open to Us.

So, to today’s article in Salon “Churches slam doors on sex offenders” by Eilene Zimmerman (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/04/26/sexoffenders_church/), and it’s a very useful piece of reporting indeed. I’ll just tick off points as I go through.

One preacher reports that he gets calls “every day now about this”, the ‘this’ being so-called Christian congregations greatly put out by the presence of sex-offenders who want to worship. This particular preacher runs “Keeping Kids Safe Ministries” in Tennessee. And I think that’s part of the problem. First, there is only one Christian ‘Ministry’, and that is the Ministry to proclaim and live-out the Gospel. All good things flow from that or they won’t flow at all. This tendency, seen more on the Protestant rather than the Catholic side of the aisle, is a not-unnatural result of the Protestant tendency – untrellised and unfenced by strong, thick doctrinal and sacramental wood – to grow like kudzu in all sorts of directions. Which, in the American setting means ‘marketing’ of ‘services’, and ‘marketing’ means offering stuff relevant to whatever is the rage, craze, or preference of the moment.

Second, there is a queasy theological problem evinced in the thing: The Christian’s job is to be faithful to the Gospel, and then God is trusted to work things out in history – and if those results are not to the faithful’s liking, then faith still requires them to accept His will. Now this is not an either-or sort of thing: Faith does not preclude Works or actions. But it’s ever an American weakness to emphasize the Works/Actions over the Faith and to market either as effectively as possible.

The preacher goes on to say that “we train about 50 churches a week”. Something of an overstatement, surely – as is so much related to sex-offense stuff. Unless mailing out a couple-three brochures and pamphlets qualifies as ‘training’, then this ministry must be more complex than the Department of Defense. Or maybe a tad of ‘sharing’ or ‘venting’ or ‘testimony’ counts as such ‘training’. In any case, the self-attributed ‘train’ is too generous, and more than a tad misleading.

A rabbi defends his sending a legal letter to a convicted and released child molester refusing the man (as always) permission to worship: congregants had come to him, “in pain” and what else could he do? The trumpery of “pain” – the expectation and the demand that one’s feelings take precedence over any other considerations, rational or legal or moral or spiritual – is a development of recent decades that has created havoc with the very foundations of our society and culture and the very foundations of Law and Justice. Nor have any of the moral, spiritual, political, or legal guardians stood against it. Indeed, there are schools of ethical, spiritual, political and even legal thought that think ‘feelings’ should trump. Yah. We felt so bad after 9-11; naturally, we felt it was OK to launch a pre-emptive invasive war based on falsehoods. Our ‘pain’ was so great; surely the world would understand; surely nobody would have the insensitivity to complain. Surely.

“A congregation is a very big family”, the rabbi goes on. Well, no it isn’t. A family is a family. A congregation is a bunch of people – individuals come together, called together by God, on their journey through Time, in order to deepen and share their Faith and their faithfulness. Once again, the American myopia is to Flatten matters into the realm of Action and Appearance, of the Familiar: thus the congregation is a ‘family’ and the preacher/rabbi/priest is ‘Daddy’ (or – feel free – ‘Mommy’). No. If people have come into a worshipping community expecting to find a ‘family’ or having been led to believe that ‘being a family’ is the great, beating heart of Faith then the horses have already come out the wrong end of the gate. ‘Family’ is a genetic bond that unites its members on levels far far deeper than our poor power to fully comprehend; consequently it is naturally and by definition ‘exclusive’. This is not quite the case with a worshipping community that has come together because of God’s call, and not because of any secondary or tertiary or quarternary considerations: I had a bad family life myself and want to make up for it, we all drive expensive cars and have nice houses, I like the glass windows in this church.

A professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University (you remember Duke) “says that the ingtegration of sex offenders is simply not discussed in mosque communities”, but if it were he “says it’s likely it would be difficult to allay the fears of parents”. Once again, the loose and dangerously inaccurate use of terminology: a ‘sex offender’ – legally – could have committed or not-committed a vast range of acts, of which acts against children are only one possible subset. But, as noted elsewhere on this site, I think that this conflation indicates far more than sloppy mental discipline; it also reflects the awesomely unsettling fact that the sex-offender mania has fed off the same poisoned roots as the old soviet ideological lust for erecting a class of “objective enemies”, any one of whom can be made to ‘stand in for’ all the rest as an object of the ‘anger of the masses’.

Another preacher, trying to get his congregation to agree to accept a repentant and time-served “convicted sex offender”, is surprised “that so many members of his congregation had been sexually abused as children”. Hmmm. How would he know? He proposes an unconventional plan, and suddenly scads of folks raise their hands and say they had been abused … nor will any of them expect to have to prove that assertion. Is that wise? To accept these claims at face value in a situation where the sudden-revealer has something to gain? And as ever, what constitutes the ‘abuse’? Not only is the definition monstrously elastic but the diagnostic criteria in the extant self-diagnosis, self-help books are so broad – not to say universal – that almost anybody would qualify. Are you uncomfortable in the presence of hot coffee and you don’t know why? … Well, it’s because you were abused (Daddys drink coffee … See? It’s science!).

But the preacher then goes from being a victim to being part of the problem: he “estimates” that a quarter of his female congregants and a tenth of his male congregants were sexually abused as children. These sex-offense numbers always raise more questions than they purport to answer. How does one ‘estimate’? If the definition of one of the prime variables (‘sexual abuse’) is so elastic and variable itself, how can you do any extrapolation?

Of course, if this preacher were to ask any of the foregoing questions – either as to proof of or even the nature of any individual claimant’s “abuse”, or if the preacher were to put up a blackboard and start trying to crunch some numbers, that preacher would be instantly cut off as being ‘inappropriate’ and ‘insensitive’; lawsuits might well follow.

Just where the soul-searing demands of the Gospel end and congregants’ far less spiritual motivations take over, is a question crying out for answer. The inability of nominally Christian faithful to extend forgiveness to a sex-offender indicates both a besotment with soviet scape-goating and a less-than-deep appreciation for and commitment to the Gospel of Christ. Now when you think on this, you get an inkling of why some – and not a few – folks thought that Jesus being killed might not be such a bad thing. (No, I don’t mean because the crowds are Jewish; the Gospel crowds are ‘Everyman’ (or woman … to borrow a phrase.)

And, as the article wonderfully points out, the chances are excellent that the congregation already harbors numerous sex-offenders in its midst (just about equal to the number of men in the congregation, some feminists would insist); it’s just that most of the sex-offenders haven’t been caught yet (another assertion with which feminist wisdom would entirely agree). After all, even on their own report, the purportedly victimized congregants must be sharing a lot of space and time with such offenders if so large a proportion of them have been abused/molested. Either that or their town is fuller of wandering zombiefied Strangers than a 1950s sci-fi horror flick. But of course, it is always Politically Incorrect to do the math, even of the victims’ or advocacies’ own claims. When Hitler claimed that he was invading Poland because a couple-three ‘Polish soldiers’ had invaded Germany and tried to take over a radio station, no Good German was expected to pull out a map and ask how such purported Poles got there. And can We wonder how We all got diddled by the run-up to the Iraq war?

One preacher, struggling to persuade his congregation to let in a registered sex-offender, claims “After all, he’s human just like everyone else”. The shocking thing about this comment is that it needs to be made at all; are there congregants who think that he isn’t? But of course. And we can thank demonization and the soviet class-objectification for that. Such strategies, rooted in primal human darknesses, have succeeded monstrously well among Us.

And finally, as one congregant and mother of an 8-year-old girl gasps: “Evil has already touched our lives”. This declaimed upon her discovery that “this individual had been worshipping among us and we had been unaware of it”. Surely the gentleman would not leap upon somebody in the middle of a hymn? Where is the actual danger here? Or is it rather the primal pleasure in defining oneself as being not-Evil?

If so, then who among Us, especially today, can stand at that Latter Day? Or even next Sunday?

WHEN VICTIMS GO BAD

I’d like to move beyond this matter, but things keep developing, and the whole thing is important not only for itself but as a template for other and even larger national policies – foreign as well as domestic – and as a source of reflection as to how We came to be infected in the first place .

In “Commonweal” magazine, Mark Sargent has a piece entitled “When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority”, which tells us so very much more than it intended to (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1915).

Apparently there are now flying squads of members of an organization called SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests). These units have taken it upon themselves to target those “about whom the diocese [of Wilmington, Delaware] found ‘credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors”. That diocese had contributed to the tribulation by releasing the names of twenty or so former priests in that category. Most of them were ‘former’ by means of having died (thus facing a Court without SNAP input and quite possibly therefore the self-declared victimery would not accept Its findings).

At least one of the twenty was still above-ground, although he had ceased serving as a priest 20 years ago or so, and lived now in another state. Apprised of his residence within their ‘jurisdiction’, that local chapter of SNAP “went door to door in his neighborhood distributing a file of documents with the title ‘Community Notification Project: Protect your children from a credibly accused sex offender’”. This last despite the fact that the gentleman has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, a sexual-abuse crime. A similar deployment in another state resulted in a priest whom the FBI and local police had investigated and declined to charge being “hounded” into resigning his pastoral duties and leaving the state.

There’s as much to say about the magazine as there is about the SNAP-squads. But first it has to be noted that nobody who lived through the era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (the immediate progenitor of Our own unruly brood) can be surprised except by the queasy realization that “it” is most definitely happening here.

The magazine is to be commended for sticking its head up out of the media formation and actually addressing (however delicately) the heretofore sacrosanct and unask-able question of the behavior of some of these groups. Still and all, no reader aware of our modern American reality can read the article without making the necessary mental bracketing: Who has declared any member of these groups a “survivor”? On what demonstrable authority is the privilege claimed? For, after all, to ask such a question is not merely to be flint-hearted in the distribution of sympathy; these ‘victims’ apparently consider themselves above the law or beyond it – perhaps because the ‘emergency’ of priestly sexual-abuse has over-ridden the rule of law for quite a few years now.

The SNAP-pers apparently feel that ‘sexual abuse’ is such a pressing and outrageous emergency that any scruples about slander or libel are irrelevant, that concerns for ‘accuracy’ are indications of “sympathy for a devil” (to borrow a phrase), and that no DA in his/her right mind would dare to bring charges against them anyway. No doubt behind this thinking lies the old soviet presumption that members of the class of oppressors and ‘objective enemies’ by definition cannot be ‘victims’, and conversely that no class of ‘victims’ can victimize. You can’t say that the soviet system really had an appreciation of the unsleeping duality of human nature. Now the Catholic Church did and – buried beneath a few decades of smiley-faced goo-goo fluff – still does.

And of course, what is the definition of ‘sexual abuse’? This question does not represent a ploy of ‘denial’ or ‘minimization’, such as would get you a sound verbal and emotional thrashing if you raised it in group-therapy. This is the urgent and grave question of what precisely is it that is being targeted by the criminal law and its penalties, in order to assure a just and accurate conviction and a punishment proportionate to the act(s) proven to have been committed. Thoughts? Words? Deeds? What sort of deeds? How old is the ‘child’? (The ‘child’ could be a day or two from starting military recruit training).

There is a price to be paid for a lascivious use of the criminal power. For one thing, society is deprived of whatever contribution the convicted might have made or might make (especially nowadays, when having paid one’s debt to society or even having been adjudged as not having a debt to pay is no guarantee that a flying-squad of ‘victims’ will not appear to wreak a ‘service’ that in an earlier and more candid time was called ‘vigilante justice’. Further, society creates enemies for itself if it becomes lascivious in its deployment of the violence of criminal justice; and if in addition that society were to dispense with Truth, with accuracy, with Justice itself, then such Enemies thus raised up would be formidable and relentless indeed. Has that not become rather clear from Our experience on the Eastern front?

The magazine has also failed – though it is hardly alone in this – by accepting the essential premises of the Maoist script: when a bunch of Red Guards/Victims show up on its doorstep muttering and wailing, the magazine instantly adopts the submissive posture of the ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ (so to speak) counter-revolutionary or ‘revisionist’ who is respectful of his heroic discoverers and now wishes only to be allowed to apologize to ‘the people’ for his errors of (fill-in-the-blank) and will gratefully accept any re-education that the heroic vanguard of the suffering masses might choose to impose.

Or – at least – the magazine is willing to accept that ‘the priests’ are guilty and join the baying chorus. Which is not quite so courageous.

This is a trahison, no matter how thickly cloaked in ‘sensitivity’, ‘contrition’ (justified or not), and ‘open-ness’. Certainly, a priest who has been proven to have had sexual relations with a child is responsible for great criminal and moral and – let’s not mince words - supernatural consequences. But in the criminal law there is no legally usable ‘class’ of such priests whose ‘members’ are instantly and indubitably certifiable by their very nature as criminally guilty. Perhaps this is why the victimists harbor a barely-hidden resentment toward any of those keepers of the criminal law who still insist on the traditional stringencies of evidence and proof to determine guilt in each individual case.

For the victimists, the civil law is an easier nut to crack in theory and has proven hugely useful in practice. Once they permitted actions to be presented as a ‘class’ action, then the courts instantly created two ‘classes’ in the public mind: the class of ‘victims’-before-the-proof and the class of perpetrators-before-the-proof. With such a boundary crossed, the conceptual possibilities of monetary remuneration increase exponentially, and if somehow the ‘class’ can be determined to have a common and large asset, then attorneys of a certain sub-specialty will join the cause.

Once the media have joined in, responding to your PR spin of an ‘outrage’, an ‘emergency’ and ‘a hidden conspiracy unmasked among us’, and with sex thrown in on top of all that … once you’ve got those conditions going, then a good old southern California wildfire and firestorm are inevitable. Nobody who has seen those tornado funnels of dark hot fire up close rising up hundreds of feet in a spiral of ferocious destructiveness can fail to appreciate the tremendous energies unleashed by the properly nurtured combination of elements properly set alight.

If then the courts yield their ancient trust and loosen up rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, if indeed the courts or – worse – the legislators, grant an initial characterization of a claimant as a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor’ before any adjudication or verification of such a claim has taken place, then several more of society’s defensive firebreaks are overrun – abandoned, actually.

And by the time all of that is ‘going good’, then only the hardiest bishop would want to risk the monstrous and dubious expense of defending each civil claim. But each such acceptance of a ‘class settlement’, though well-advised from a purely legal point of view, reinforces the completely undemonstrable assumption that each ‘claim’ thus settled was real and accurate. And it is that intensifying public misperception which thus toxifies the atmosphere for the (relatively very few) cases that come to the probing test of a criminal trial.

Not surprisingly, numbers given out by media – based on numbers given to the media by advocates and ‘experts’ – don’t seem to add up or don’t add up to percentages that stand out from the norm. This point, of course, is countered by the dual claims that a) in a church that claims its priests are so ‘good’ then any deviation at all is ‘horrific’ and b) if we base our expectations on ‘zero tolerance’ then it’s worth it if ‘only just one’ potential victim is saved. But should we invade a foreign country because the government has declared ‘zero tolerance’ for (fill in the blank)? Should we invade a foreign country in order to ‘save only one’ victim of (fill in the blank)?

And while the Church has high expectations of its priests, the Church has never lost sight of the fact that human beings can fail to live up to their calling.

Indeed, it is precisely the Church’s patience and tolerance of weakness that have been seized upon voraciously by the victimists as proof that there is a ‘cover-up’ massive in proportion and sacralegious in nature.

The bishops have not responded well, indicating that John Paul II’s great purge of the episcopacy that brought in dozens of ‘doctrinally strong’ prelates did not bring in particularly strong men. The Maoist ballet – the performance of which requires two – was greatly abetted by the cravenness of the American episcopacy, the ecclesiatchiki who yielded their priests to the victimist furor as easily as they betrayed their pope to the war-mongering of the Bushist Imperium.

The heavy burden of the Church, that She bears through the ages and will ever continue to do so, is to bear witness to Sin and Grace, sinfulness and redemption, the crooked lines with which God writes the history of humankind. For every one bishop who ‘covered up’ a monster, there were a half-a-dozen who tried – ineptly as often as not – to maintain some decent connection to a struggling soul.

Certainly, priests who err must accept the consequences. But those consequences must be proportional to the crime that has been proven to be committed. The Church owes that to Herself – to betray that is to betray Herself and Her mission. And if it is the instant retort of the victimists that the Church has clearly betrayed Her nature and mission in these sex scandals, then the Church would be the first to admit the imperfectness of Her efforts.

But in the modern Moment in which Americans consider the failures of the Church (whatever their actual proportions), We can hardly ignore the monstrous betrayals of nature and mission, of character and of integrity, that have gut-shot the whole Iraq effort, undermined the economy, and de-centered the government’s administration of Justice and Law and its adherence to Truth and Integrity of Character. We must soon face up to the fact that enacting mass-media autos-da-fe does not build the moral strength and integrity – individually or societally – that enables Us better to People the Republic and its government. In fact, the indulgence of such sustained demonstrations may well have contributed to the massive erosion of Our seriousness and competence, Our ‘gravitas’, as a People.

In the matter of all of these accused priests I would propose the following questions? Was his guilt determined by a trial and finding by a jury? What specifically was the act with which he was charged? (‘Abuse’ or ‘molestation’, those revolutionary buzzwords, therefore are not sufficient). If he was simply lumped together in some sort of civil ‘settlement’, then I would refrain from coming to any conclusion until fact was clearly established If I saw ‘numbers’ I’d pull out a pencil and do a little math for myself.

And if I found out that my priest was indeed ‘guilty’, I’d want to know whether it was of child-rape or something else altogether. On the basis of a laudable and visceral public rejection of sex with children it seems that a lot of other things have been tossed into the net to fatten up the final figures touted to the press.

It was the old soviet ploy to recoil from the foregoing type of proposal like a vampire from holy water, effecting a pose of righteous indignance and braying that such requirements would interfere with the administration of ‘justice’ against these class enemies of the people. That ploy cannot be indulged. We cannot afford it: legally, culturally, morally.

The Catholic Church in this country, it seems to me, has been the target of a Cultural Revolution masquerading as A Hundred Flowers Blooming. Its hierarchy has not performed well, its ‘elites’ are divided and fractious, and – so American – none of those involved are able to take the Long View (‘Long’ in Catholic time, not Bush-Pentagon time). Nor for that matter – again, so American – are those involved able to take the High, the Wide, and the Deep View. And there are other forces in contemporary society that do not favor a robust Catholic presence.

And yet the world and even We are in great need of a wisdom that can sustain through times of genuine mass privation and horror. The biblical lean years are coming, and will no doubt arrive long before the far more adolescent-friendly End Times. As adults or adults-to-be, each American needs all the help s/he can get to sustain a mature and robust humanity and civic competence.

The search – relentless and squinty – for ‘purity’ is, historically, not a ‘Catholic’ obsession at all, but rather a Protestant one. Just as the Catholic Inquisition was begun as an intellectual inquiry into heresy, and it was only at the time of the Reformation that witchcraft became an overriding subject of inquiry (not improbably because the Protestant Reformers simultaneously needed to maintain a usable ‘enemy’ to bolster religious fervor while avoiding too deep a concern for ‘heresy’ since they were all, pretty much by definition, liable to that charge). The Catholic ethos became the ‘primitive’ earth-besotted, emotionally and materially besotted archaic miasm out of the darkness of which the pure and dedicated Reformers and their flocks created themselves from an act of focused will in response to a new Exodus and a refined Covenant.

The Church, though male-dominated, remained committed to and rooted in a Vision of human existence that is robustly Incarnational, respecting the blending of Spirit and Matter that reflects the human reality as Created, that is patient with the human instability that etches those myriad crooked lines – some so stunningly bloody and deep – that mark our history as a species. I will not reduce matters to the current specious conundrum of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’; the Church’s Vision seems profoundly human. The world as We know it, the world as it will or might or must become, cannot afford to lose It.

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.