The King Years Then and Now

        In 1968 when Martin Luther King came to Memphis three years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, his support of the Sanitation Workers’ strike signaled growing awareness of evidence that the key to racial justice would have to come from more income equality. Planning for poor people’s marches was already on the drawing boards of the NAACP and the SCLC.  Dr. King plunged into the Memphis strike to bring along his own inherently conservative church folk and local unions. The day after his assassination Coretta Scott King led 40,000 people on a silent march through Memphis streets. The Mayor finally folded, granting Sanitation Workers union recognition and wage gains, literally over Dr. King’s dead body.

        The road has been mostly down-hill since then. Fifteen years after Selma the economic heart of U. S. cities with the largest African American populations was destroyed by investment banking decisions to shift assets into the more profitable global economy.  African Americans and Latinos who had migrated North for the better factory jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago and L.A. found themselves  suddenly out of work. As U. S. Steel mills, machine tool and manufacturing industries were allowed to go without modernization, most closed forever. This began today’s repeating cycles of broken families, causing a new meandering migration. Skilled workers re-trained for jobs that did not appear; or moved their families repeatedly from one temporary job to another. Divorce often overtook them or they learned to scrape by in broken families.  The Wall Street banking system made billions from its global investments, but economic opportunities vanished for tens of millions of working people. Many of the same workers were further ravaged by more recent mortgage fraud caused by the same banks. .

         During the recent Great Recession starting in 2008, new policies to support public works and regulate control of wealth by corporate capitalism did not prevail as the TARP bailout moved forward and the Obama justice department declined  to prosecute the bankers who made millions homeless. 

         This is why President Obama’s oration last Sunday in Selma is more like a bouncing ground ball through the gap between 2^nd and 3^rd base. No one scored, no runners advanced.    

        Sadly neither the President’s hopeful oratory nor the speeches of candidates to replace him from either party reach as far as today’s growing gap between rich and poor. As democratic participation by people pre-occupied with just scraping by diminishes, the wealthiest one percent owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth.  The President has preferred to appeal to the nation’s historic values rather than jailing the bankers.  

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this?” the President asked: “what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

        Words without meaning seem now more abundant in the President’ rhetoric. In our last blog we wrote about the rise of fascism in the early 1900s as a consequence of the vacuum left by religion’s loss of political power and moral credibility.  When the Great Depression of 1929 followed WW I some political leaders in the U. S. and abroad began to think that democracy was too unwieldy, too subject to corruption and petty leadership fights. The answer, they thought, would have to be militarily authoritarian governance that would permit decisive decision-making, disciplining the unruly masses, and controlling even their corporations and bankers. In Europe, despairing of either faith or a reliable democracy, Italian and German fascism and Russian Stalinism emerged to replace democratic dreams. In the U.S. after 1900 a progressive movement blossomed for decades but has now faded under the impact of global corporations.

         We appear to be at the fascist-style juncture once again, with the Republicans determined to abstain from democratic negotiation and compromise while the Democrats continue unwilling to sternly regulate banking in the public interest.  People are now in the streets being shot by Police and shooting back. Such chaos calls for credible moral leadership.  It can’t begin with Mrs. Clinton’s email files. More on this next week. 

        

GODS FOR SALE

       The gods are for sale these days in case you hadn't noticed. Employable gods became available with the death of God 300 years ago after philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Reimarus, suggested that reason could replace revelation. Since then there has been little recourse to reason but the spiritual vacuum created by dying religious authority has spawned various divine inventions such as a fascination with violence. Historian Tony Judt has written that what fired the growth of fascism among young people at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was “precisely the bloody deadly aspect of war” that came to be celebrated as “the defining moment of their youth.” We see a fresher version in the film American Sniper that glorifies the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the honor conferred by lost American blood.  

In the past half century another attraction followed the Second Vatican Council with Catholics joining the Protestants in stressing God as personal. Creeping into modern liturgies is the possessive "our God," or worse, "my God." You can have a sense of ownership. Instead of Barth's "totally other" the new version of God is just like you, just a little better.

A new age of preferences, choices and special privileges has emerged about gods writ small. Such is the case with Netanyahu’s Israel.  Bibi” began his address to the U. S. Congress this week by reminding all present that “we share the common destiny of promised lands.”  This trump card, little noted by the media, was played early in his opening hand (on page one) to remind us that the god of Israel and the god of Puritan exceptionalism have the shared trait of being in our employ.  Implicitly, a state of warfare exists permanently with all those other nations that lack such a divine promise.

        There is a narcotic effect in “promised land” theology that places employable gods in the service of profound inequality and violence.  Ethics, reason, shared development resources, an end to African and Middle East poverty, global citizenship for all are goals that recede beyond the horizon.

  

        Middle East leaders know, of course, that Israel has an arsenal of an estimated 80 nuclear warheads. They also know that the rhetoric at the joint session of congress was little more  than a plank in Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.  In the U. S. the same rhetoric of godly violence provides congressional leaders with strategies for their re-election.  It creates good deals for military contractors in their district who sell weapons-related hardware to Israel (who buy it with American money granted by the Congress) and, happily, will finance their next election campaign. 

        Israel with its nuclear arsenal is profoundly equipped to annihilate all god’s enemies, including Iran.  There is this problem however.  There are other god’s for hire who command an overweening devotion from their followers who are at work with their own blood sacrifices: inspiring vast networks of suicide bombers and endless violent Jihad.  Boston-style bombers or Paris-style assassins could be coming to your own mall soon.

   

        This melancholy theology of Israel and U. S. god-given primacy takes on different shapes and forms around the world and generates many cousins: White on Black police shootings on an almost daily basis remembers the day of legitimate, legal slavery.  Sunni superiority over Shiites in Syria revives ancient authoritarianism. Documented versus undocumented neighbors revive ideas about those who are justly “called” and those left behind.

        Courtesy of Netanyahu and Congress the bad old days are back. They threaten everyone with the whirlwind born of all the gods for sale.   The antidote is a religious (or humanitarian) spirit that insists on a God who is not for sale, and whose other name is justice.