TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

When language is distorted by misuse as propaganda, false advertising, social manipulation, fraudulent information,  the consequences are not only that it can leave us speechless, but the words themselves can become irretrievable, their original meaning lost.  The purpose of the supposed good news about economic recovery this month is to build enthusiasm without providing a realistic assessment.  For that realistic perspective read Noriel Roubini in Slate who describes the Eurozone  in deep recession, the Chinese economy  weakening, and the U. S. economy tightening later this year. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/project_syndicate/2012/02/austerity_china_the_housing_market_and_the_middle_east_four_reasons_to_stay_gloomy_about_the_economy_.html   

This year is the 400^th anniversary of the translation of the Greek, Latin and Hebrew scriptures into a vernacular English that became the King James Bible.  The KJ’s voice gave new language to the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, the Puritans, Jefferson, Melville and virtually all Western writers.  William Tyndale did much of the heavy lifting and told Pope Alexander VI, “I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, will know more of the scriptures than thou dost.” Opposed by prominent voices including Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas Moore, Tyndale—after the penal fashion of the times—was strangled, impaled and burned on a stake in 1636.  The language he used in the KJ had what Gandhi called Satyagraha, “Truth Power.”  Harold Bloom calls it “cognitive music.” Such Truth Power is badly needed in our present era of the ninety-nine and the one percent.  

Today these texts (including drastically worse modern translations) appear to ricochet off the walls of most churches as many congregations grow grayer.  There is only modest evidence that churches have the Tyndalian will to speak words of truth to the unjust use of power.  Prayers yes, but mostly self-concern predominates. Yet, ironically, the churches nested at the heart of American culture could make the difference in this age of financial hierarchies.  There’s precedent for Truth Power in recent history, but it means really getting to work on it.  It means building a big movement to reinstate truth.  Here’s one blue print we could all learn from.

In 1952 a small group met at Union Theological Seminary in New York to organize “Americans for South African Resistance.”  The need was to support the emerging South African Campaign to Defy Unjust Laws just launched by the African National Conference (ANC).  The same year the seminary created a teaching fellowship with cross-pollination potential appointing a South African regional ANC leader, Methodist pastor Z. K. Matthews, who was working closely with Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. 

The New York executive committee  included early civil rights and labor leaders:  Methodist George Hauser (director of CORE at that time), Socialist Norman Thomas (a former Presbyterian minister), Bayard Rustin (strategic advisor to MLK, Jr.),  A. Philip Randolph (President of the Sleeping Car Porters Union--the first African American union to win major concession from a white dominated corporation),  Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU) and Conrad Lynn, a Black civil rights lawyer and Left activist

Others joined in:   A. J. Muste, (Congregationalist pastor and founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation), NYC Unitarian Pastor, Donald Harrington, Unitarian and socialist, Homer Jack. 

Their activist records were a mix of human rights motifs and socialist ideas; most were pro-labor advocates who helped faith communities become supporters of labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis. Forty years had passed since Mohandas Gandhi led the first rebellion in South Africa  against the notorious passbook laws.  In their desperation against apartheid, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo moved away from non-violence toward guerilla warfare, subsequently receiving life prison sentences that lasted 27 years. 

In the still totally segregated U. S., civil rights for Blacks was an uphill struggle to say nothing of the struggle in  South Africa.  Nevertheless the waves from this small and diverse band spread far and wide. The composer Kurt Weill (a committed Communist party member) joined with playwright Maxwell Anderson to produce a heartbreaking Broadway musical drama, Lost in the Stars, based on Alan Paton’s equally heartrending South African novel, Cry the Beloved Country.     

Bayard Rustin became the chief strategist for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Philip Randolph chaired the planning that led to the 1964 March on Washington. George Hauser became a liaison with many decolonizing African nations.

 And Gandhi achieved the liberation of India from the British Empire. Philip Glass wrote an opera, Satyagraha, about Gandhi’s Truth Power.

In the latter 20^th century ecumenical leaders such as Tim Smith at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) documented U. S. corporate complicity actively doing business with the South African Apartheid regime. Paul Stagg, an American Baptist minister and executive director of the New Jersey Council of Churches used ICCR’s analysis of corporate America’s apartheid connection to persuade Governor Tom Kane to divest New Jersey’s large portfolio from such companies—a groundbreaking act.  Nationwide, divestment movements among the churches brought events to flood tide:   by 1990 Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress imprisoned leaders would be released and in 1992 Mandela would be elected President of the new South Africa.  

One recent evening a group of “Occupiers” gathered outside Lincoln Center to harass all the rich one percenters coming out of the opera house after a Satyagraha performance. Philip Glass, the opera’s composer crossed the picket line to join the Occupiers and using their human microphone method said

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again”  [as quoted by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, Feb. 13 and 20 edition, 2012]

It’s time for a Truth Power national movement again.

(This Blog has drawn on The New Yorker, Feb. 13 & 20 2012; on the essay “The Book From Which Our Literature Springs” by Robert Pogue Harrison in The New York Review of Books, Feb 9, 2012 and on the book by George Hauser, No One Can Stop the Rain, 1989, Pilgrim Press