27 5 / 2012
Chomsky: “Jobs aren’t coming back”
Wealth is concentrated with the 1 percent because America no longer makes things: Financiers just manipulate money
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.
I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”
You leave my historian out of this, Burgundy; Noam Chomsky is a saint, a saint!
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25 5 / 2012
"Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons."
(via fyeahnoamchomsky)
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25 5 / 2012
Veterans returning their medals at the NATO summit in Chicago. Big fan of the pro-human/anti-nationalist sentiment. The prophets, both New and Old (Testament), are always trying to turn us to a world where swords are beaten into plowshares—this is a step in that development.
24 5 / 2012
Richard Beck on Potential v. Actual Forgiveness
The question, which hinges on translations of Greek cases/prepositions, is whether Christ’s death on the cross has actually forgiven everybody, or whether it only potentially forgives people based on some conditional response. My own view is that if in Adam we all sin, then surely in Christ we are all forgiven.
19 5 / 2012
"Slave numbers rocketed at the end of the seventeenth century: blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina by the 1710s, and in Virginia the proportion of blacks to whites shot up from less than 10 per cent in 1680 to about a third in 1740. This is the context for the remarkable liturgical innovation of one South Carolina Anglican clergyman, Francis Le Jau, who added to the baptism service a requirement that slaves being baptized should repeat an oath ‘that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live.’ This reflected a clerical dilemma in a Church so dominated by the laity: when masters were putting up much resistance to converting slaves, was it better to let souls perish or to accept the norms of the society in which the Church found itself?"
Christianity: The First 3000 Years, MacCulloch (728).
The obvious sentiment is moral indignation. I assume we’re in agreement that it’s good to feel it when reading about nonsense like this. That’s not to be dismissive of it, only to say that I’m not interested in writing about the obvious.
What is interesting is a phenomenon I’ve noticed on this blog before about aesthetic distance and the Bible. What I noticed was that Christians are—and maybe I’m late to the ball on this one—selective about what parts of the Bible they take literally. This is no arbitrary selection process, though, which brings me to my next assholic inclusion of literary terms: horizon of expectations.
The term refers to the range of meaning a given audience (historically) might find in a text. So, when Christians of that period managed to read Jesus’ proclamation about his ministry (Luke 4),
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because He anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor,
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”
without taking either of the italicized phrases literally, part of the explanation lies in the fact that they wouldn’t have even considered those phrases were meant to be taken literally. Jesus, they’d have thought, was employing a metaphor. He’s using an allusion to the release of the slaves from Egypt/Babylon/etc. in anticipation of how belief in him will set free those oppressed or enslaved by sin. Literal slavery and oppression don’t enter into their/our reading.
In this particular instance the horizon of expectations is being written both by the Church and society. A Christian reading the Bible is going to assume certain manifestations of what she reads. If she reads about Jesus’ description of his ministry, she’ll naturally establish links between her experience of the church and what he says. That’s the analytical avenue of least resistance. Whereas that expectation is almost consciously created—when reading about Jesus you’ll look for passages to latch onto that affirm your own experience of Christianity—the social barrier is subconscious. If our hypothetical reader lives somewhere where there are slaves being bought and sold, where there are workers being oppressed by their conditions for laboring, then they’re unlikely to commit to a reading of scripture that leads to a rejection of society. Especially if your society is predominately Christian, you’d feel crazy for deciding that everyone else had gotten it wrong. There the two authors of the horizon of expectation, Church and society, ally against your potential sedition, convincing you that something radical couldn’t possibly be the meaning.
Christianity is slowish to change, because every time you try to change you’re insisting that god has revealed something special to you that he had, henceforth, kept disclosed from all previous theological giants and saints. Jesus was killed precisely for setting his face against the rulers and authorities of the day, why would his followers be foolish enough to pick up his cross and follow him?
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17 5 / 2012
Colonial Religion in the Americas
This is even more slapdash than my usual armchair politico-religious criticism.
When Western Europe exported Christianity in the 15th/16th centuries there are some important trends to notice. First, no one—not French, Portugese, Spanish, English, HRImperial—attempted a secular colonization. Considering all the evils of colonization in that period, it’s hard not to implicate religion. The deal, though: I think it’s obvious that the motivation behind colonization was/is not a desire to see Jesus do what he proclaims in Luke 4. The motivation is power. Power’s favorite tool, though, is often religion.
Religion’s utility in service of power is obvious; it is concerned with Right and Wrong, behavior, and authority. It’s the perfect justification for anything, especially since it was/is often assumed to be an authority super reason. Who is the greater authority, your mind or God? Once the colonizers have Right on their side, they direct you to the priest who tells you how to behave. The priest will likely tell you that the great King Phillip II, or Louis XIII, or Elizabeth is God’s instrument in the world. When the colonizer is pointing a fancy boomstick at you that seems like black magic, and the diseases he doesn’t even know he’s carrying is killing 90% of your village, well, that begins to carry some weight. Anyway, enough of the idea that religion is the cause of these things. Religion is just the vocabulary that murderers use to justify their evil.
The next trend of interest is the varied tactic of each colonial power. Portugal, for instance, set up unbelievably strict versions of catholicism in its colonies. Partly it could do this because it was always undermanned. Its influence never reached far beyond the forts it established, and within the fort you could obviously be pretty sure of enforcing ideology.
Spain allowed at least some fusion with indigenous cultures. Early churches erected in Mexico speak to how much local taste could mix with absurdly baroque sensibilities. The local nobility carved out a space for themselves as custodians of indigenous culture amid the turmoil. Since the nobility managed some of the exploitation in order to trade with the Spanish, it was helpful for both sides to keep from extinguishing local customs altogether.
The English, meanwhile, had no interest in fusion with the locals. Neither did they want to create a religious monolith. Instead, each colony had a distinctive religious bent. Sadly, this was no celebration of diversity. It was just a series of ultra-repressive fiefdoms. If you happened to be an enthusiastic member of the sect, great, if not, well, they had a stake or a noose with your name on it.
There was no single plan for how to export Christianity. Religion was the puppet of the potentates. As much as Christians should be ashamed of this and learn from it, I don’t really think the fault lies with Christianity. The difficulty now is that Christianity continues to have this repressive/colonial presence in our society. It’s an ideology interested in power and bent on curbing the behavior of the underclass. Where are the priests decrying government and corporate corruption? They’re all too breathless from shouting at teenage whores. They solemnly fold their hands as they imply that allegiance to God can only mean attendance of socially awkward Sunday morning pseudo-revivals. Instead of the hour of hate where everyone hurls abuse at Goldstein, it’s the hour of renunciation, where you sit there and cool your feet in the satisfaction that you know what’s Important in Life.
17 5 / 2012
Trade School: NA and The Feels
Ever since The New Aesthetic closed its doors, I’ve been keeping up with various assessments of it. (Quick primer for the less-nerdy: the things labeled “New Aesthetic” are primarily images that feature elements of technology merged with something decidedly real-world; for instance, a …
I need a gif that simultaneously articulates this, only I’m not really aware of where the Elysian fields of gifs are stored on the internet. I need a map.
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16 5 / 2012
"
So this playboy son of an Italian millionaire threw away his money, shouted the Christian message at birds in a graveyard, and threw the Church into a turmoil by saying that Christ was a down-and-out with no possessions….he passionately affirmed that all created things—Brother Sun, Sister Moon—were good, sharing the goodness of God’s human incarnation in Christ.
…expressing his fears that his commitment to poverty would be sidelined by the newly institutionalized ‘Franciscans’. In particular he warned against their large-scale campaign of building convents for themselves.
Francis was justified in his worries. Within little more than a decade of his death, a grand and expensive basilica had been built over his tomb in Assisi, its foundation stone laid by a pope, its great bulk jutting out like a prow to the promontory on which sprawled the town of his birth. Its magnificence was a strange comment on Francis’s life and work.
"
Christianity: The First 3000 Years, MacCulloch (403, 404)
My favorite anarchist/gay dude (IOZ) regularly laments the characteristic ability of a state—Rome, in this case—to absorb and inoculate itself against dissidence. I don’t use inoculate lightly. This incorporation of aberrant views is how hegemony persists and defends itself against sedition and change. In the Church it especially plays on the loyalty of its reformers to Christ, by insisting Jesus was the founder of the institution (ha!).
Francis willingly threw away his money. He travelled to the heart of Islam and preached Christ. He didn’t win many converts, but they respected him enough to not kill him on sight like they did other overt Christians. He was so caught up by the message of redemption that he preached to birds as they perched insouciantly on gravestones.
He knew that you cannot serve two masters (Mammon and God), yet the Church went ahead and built him a giant cathedral. What better symbol of co-opting assimilation could the pope have erected? What better way to render Francis’s legacy impotent?
16 5 / 2012
One million dead in Iraq
This is old but needs to be posted
OVER A million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.
That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.
One million is a “Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?” number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those who are not willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.”
That pretty much sums up the how the media reacted to the one million figure in 2007 when it was announced by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB). (In fact, the firm estimated 1,220,580 Iraqis had died, confirming and updating a separate study done the year before by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal.)
Take Kevin O’Brien, deputy editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Upon receiving a media advisory about the findings from ORB, whose clients include the British Conservative Party and Morgan Stanley, this was his response: “Please remove me from your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda.”
The silence is deafening.
Pax Americana
…it seems impossible that a blog can convey any adequate sincerity about this stuff. I mean, the closest I’ve come to death is a dog and three grandparents, and I only knew the dog well. I don’t so much want to scream about the Evils of America as I want to believe there’s another way. And there is, but how do you convince people? Jesus was killed by a brutal government for that very message—in his kingdom the rich wept for they had no reward, the meek inherited everything, and the peacemakers were blessed. And here…
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