Prelude to Disillusionment

      We may credit biblical literature for making magical thinking a way of life.  Whatever cannot be resolved in practical concrete terms (money, property, illness, marriage) can be moved to the magic table: a mixed realm of angels and demons that includes imagination and transcendence, delusion and hypocrisy.

       Tuesday’s election displays the magic table in one of its more demonic forms. Behind the strong vote for a Republican takeover of both congressional houses is the hope--one more time--that the world of our favorite dreams whether of wealth or a familiar peaceable kingdom will come true. 

       Illusions abound all around: Our hi-tech industry cranking out trillions of dollars of products via millions of passive workers from China to Silicon Valley; all the while the pool of the permanently unemployed grows around the world and middle class incomes remain flat over ten years. It’s all buttressed by a pantheon of angels and saints—from Moses and Muhammed to Bill Gates and Mark Zukerberg.

      

       Then there is the favorite U. S. Middle East delusion: that Israel’s massacre of 2100 Palestinians, including 500 children, is unconnected to the decline of Iraq and the rise of ISIS. Americans, passing by on the other side of the road, are asked to see no connection from Isis and Iraq’s disintegration to their forgetfulness of the vast tracts of Palestinian land stolen by Israel and now planted with 500,000 settlers.

       As illusionists, both Republicans and many Democrats leave the ominous Piketty inequality equation un-addressed. That’s the equation illustrated by Paul Krugman and others:  today a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers in the U. S. combined. “The top ten percent of wealth holders--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income.”

Economist Piketty’s equation spells out a frightening anti-democratic future. “The likely [predicted] decrease in the rate of growth of both the population and the economy,” he says, "is potentially terrifying….especially since it is occurring on a global scale.”    [see Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century—the bombshell analysis of two hundred years of estate taxes in eight countries]

       This means that contrary to the illusionists who carried the day in Tuesday’s election, an ominous prelude to disillusionment is being written. People are already frightened into becoming gun-toters and carry in their DNA the latest racist mutations (thirty-five percent of Americans are reported to still believe Obama was born in a foreign country).  We seem ill-prepared for the world of law, negotiation and compromise that are inevitable in a more just globalized economy; unprepared for a harsh truth about the new ground where the imagination for justice must find roots.

        There is this to learn about the difference between magical thinking and an ethic of justice for all. Retrospective scribes and gospel writers usually over-wrote and distorted the engagement between a prophetic Jeremiah or Jesus as they confronted the hypocrites of their day. Harsh truth-telling has been submerged in a sentimental magical glow. Now that the elections are over who will speak truth over against falsehood? To do so goes against the latest happy tide of Republican victory. It can even  even be an act of faith right out of the prophetic tradition with the scribes' glosses removed. Otherwise glowing promises, either Republican or Democratic-style, will lead to dangerous disillusionment.  It’s already happening and yes, it's very, very dangerous.