Sickness unto Death

The pitiless assignment for the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other African American mayors over the past 50 year has been to serve as cover for the reality behind the scenes. The drill is that a minority mayor will placate the deeply disadvantaged, proving the possibility of exceptions. However, the popular understanding upon which public support for police behavior rests is the perceived reality on the ground: that the minority problem—aka the Black problem--derives from an inferior people. Like slavery, which enshrined inferiority as a moral reason for enslavement, the common understanding today supports police forces that brutalize and murder across the country. Less intentionally perhaps, it amounts to social control in the face of deepening inequality.  Yet even many deeper analyses explaning reasons for police murders in Baltimore, New York and Cleveland may miss a deeper reality: the “sickness unto death,” described by Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard as “ultimate despair.”   

Kiekegaard’s “sickness” comes from an age that struggled to find integrity in a post-biblical 18^th and 19^th century that often replaced monarchy with personal and private rapacity. It was that unregulated personal aggrandizement that created the slaves, built the factories and now flood the few with the wealth produced by the many.  The police can be said to actually kill the losers in the service of the winners, a coterie to which they are unlikely ever to belong.  In plain English the police murders and urban upheavals will continue and may worsen because in the Silicon Valleys the Porsches, Teslas and Lamborghinis crowd the streets. The “sickness unto death” is a plague alive within our blood stream because the underlying problem of inequality of income, education, and quality jobs is worsening.

Perhaps, like Ms Rawlings-Blake, the police also deserve our pity because for generations that is what they think they see: a basically flawed uneducated class of people whose growing numbers of children born out of wedlock, captured by drugs, frequently incarcerated confirms both police prejudices and a despair that invites brutality.  

What they actually see, of course, is the enduring slave economy that built an America dependant on an endless supply of very cheap labor.  Now the despair deepens because much of the available cheap labor is no longer needed by the hi-tech, global economy.  What greater despair for us all than thousands of refugees without viable livelihoods  crowding on rafts and leaking ships to escape North African terror groups, then to drown at sea?

This is now our global situation. Not enough work, no money for stability, no future.   

Nothing short of a political revolution can adequately respond to this national and global crisis. Its beginnings may be in the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, expected to announce this week; or in a re-born Hillary Clinton, or a re-translated Jeb Bush.  Elections in 2016 could prove a new beginning of an end to despair by ending the growth of inequality. Kierkegaard’s spiritual language is about the self becoming true and transparently present in the eternal power of love and justice that established it. Marx’s version is that only equity can end alienation. Until this change begins we will continue to suffer the sickness unto death. 

Truth-Telling and the New Kissinger

Distant bells are tolling as AIPAC and Netanyahu’s Israel face a descent from the strange prestige won by killing Palestinians (1767 of them last summer) and blocking their right to statehood.  Israel’s worst fears are not threats from Iran—a hugely ballyhooed bogeyman—but the end of easy living through a Congress well-bribed by pro-Israel dollars pumped into local congressional districts. Now, a few weeks after Netanjahu’s triumphal address to Congress, the reality is an Israel twisting in the wind of a chaotic, internally feuding Middle East with dueling narratives between the Saudis and Iraqis and the U. S. in alliance with Netanyahu’s devil, Iran, against ISIS.  

New days dawning ahead suggest that the U. S./Iran nuclear deal must go through because it creates the possibility of rational alliances with Iran against Arab extremists.  Lies abound all around, but Israel’s familiar devil—Iran—has been replaced by numberless others: Houthis, Al Quaeda in Yemen, Boko Haran in Nigeria, Shabab  in Somalia, Muslim factional wars in Libya and Syria. It’s a long list.

The entrance of Henry Kissinger onto the stage last week is a reminder that the exercise of power is often a dark art.  Recall, please, that during  the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (perhaps before you were born, gentle reader) it was Kissinger who persuaded then President Nixon to resupply Israel’s army as it reeled from the Egyptian surprise attack. The Arab nations retaliated with their OPEC oil price rise that wrecked vast areas of both the U. S. and world economy, forcing gasoline rationing and a huge price inflation on U.S consumers. In Bangladesh the OPEC price rise meant mass starvation because people had no fuel at the inflated OPEC price.  No act of Congress or President Nixon—not even an accounting of how the pros and cons of the Kissinger recommendations might have been carefully weighed—was ever offered.  The Kissinger twist was that it both saved Israel and over the years preserved U. S. access to vast Arab oil reserves. 

We can expect more dark room power moves in coming months, but the stakes are no longer the U.S./Iran nuclear deal as one could easily suppose, but about Republican ambitions for the 2016 elections.  Oligarchic power, not oil, is today’s new fuel of choice. The decline of Israel’s influence in the U . S. in the face of these widespread and complex struggles in the Middle East is behind the softening of Senator Corker’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee bi-partisan agreement. It signaled an Israel by-passed by actually reducing the time frame for debating the pros and cons about lifting sanctions on Iran.  Look for the return of President Obama’s veto power by mid-summer.

This arrival of Henry Kissinger into the fray with a Wall Street Journal OpEd (March 5, 2015, together with another former secretary of state, George Schulz) opposes the Administration’s nuclear deal but is actually about the art of converting a portion of the traditional Jewish democrat vote into a Republican victory in 2016.  Not Iran, not saving Israel, but the opportunity to cement rule by oligarchy in the future U. S. seems to be the latest Kissinger dream.  As this profoundly immoral evil rises over us, we may once again note with regret the clear decline of faith community courage to resist Voltaire’s Panglossian version of the world. Will faith communities resist their new assignment: to paper-over the reality of our new masters and their regime of permanent inequality and chronic poverty?  Note Dean Baker's comment on your right about the looming destruction of the Affordable Care Act. Resistance will mean this kind of truth-telling.  That’s the Godly mission.