Is the Glass Actually Half Full?

       Last  Monday's horrifying airstrikes on the large relief caravan entering Aleppo show every evidence of having been launched by Syrian and Russian aircraft, according to extensive reporting  in today's September 25th New York Times.   These Middle East tragedies miniaturize the foolish political scenes in the U. S. where endorsements of Hillary Clinton by prominent  Republican newspapers  and visible disaffection of many other Republican loyalists may carry the day for her but to what end? 

        What's not clear at all is if Hillary Clinton offers a new day for Aleppo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.  We must vote for her, but boatloads of drowning refugees and bloodied children ask the question of the relevance of our shameful politics to this horrendous theater of death and dying; as do the Charlotte and Tulsa shootings ask the dreary questions about a nation enamored for centuries with the slave-master relationship.

        Watch for Donald Trump to try to drive Hillary Clinton to the wall over the eight years of Middle East war.  Watch to see if she carries new policy proposals to fend him off.  Just as Donald Trump aligns himself with Putin when it seems useful to him in his usual strange way, as in "someone he knows knows someone else," Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with the team of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and insistently wrapped herself in their colors. Yet their eight years of war in the Middle East and continuing loyalty to Israel and its settlement expansion in the Palestinian's West Bank may no longer guarantee her election .

          Neither Putin's reported brutalities nor the long running fiasco of Israel's settlements any longer defines the staggering complexity of U. S. foreign policy challenges around the globe.   The enormous financial benefits of both the raw materials and land ownership markets are the oceans on which the nations, the regional private-sector oligarchs (from Goldman Sachs to China), and the less powerful actors sail. It's a tide made for mega investors.

           On the other hand, in the "other world" of middle class security the comfortable life prevails, but the stirrings are hopeful.  No one appears any longer to believe that public discussion amid talk television is more than a money-making enterprise.  Growing signs of peacemaking abound: the peace accords in Columbia, the breakout from traditional politics from the Brexit rebellion and in the British Labour party, the Sanders millennial explosions--all suggest that a better and more up-to-date perspective may be coming into view as a glass half full.  The large crowds debating ferociously but peacefully on university campuses, the hundreds marching over inequality and racism, the myriad citizen action groups, the revival of strength in Labor union, and a new generation of cool-headed leaders in the churches and synagogues have become a talented and growing throng of steadier hands.  

          There are connection and engagement problems to be solved, of course. The comfort cells are, well so comfortable.  Still, remarkably impressive new organizations for peacemaking abound among the millennials, who still may not know the route to engagement with the demons of Aleppo and racism.  There's evidence they're starting to get that there is a connection from the prophets to themselves. They're starting to notice that the biblical peace and justice movements happened outside, near the bombing, at the ruins caused by racism and cheap grace.  The prophets could have used more allies, more connections. To rebuild the ruins of Aleppo may be the only route to a new day. No other way, and before it's too late.      

 

The Blood On Our Own Hands

        President Obama's ambition to create a peace process in Syria was always compromised by his administration's other priorities including trying to save Iraq from the demons unlocked by the U. S. invasion of 2003.  While irrationally supporting Israel in spite of its continued settlement expansion the U. S. has tried in vain to thread the needle between theKurdish fighters supporting the war against Isis while Premier Erdogan seeks to destroy the Kurdish independence movement on his southeastern border lands. 

        This has opened the door to a new, impressive relationship for Russia in the region. Its rising star has not only forced U. S. acceptance of its expansion in Ukraine but advanced its role as leading peacemaker when U. S. dogmatics failed to stop the slaughter in Syria.

        It's worth unpacking the symmetry between the horrible Aleppo death spiral and this downward spiral of U. S.  effectiveness in its relations with Russia. Several months ago political scientist  John Mearsheim (co-author of The Israel Lobby) concluded that the U. S. "was incapable of entering into any agreement with Russia." This institutionalized dogma was visible when retired diplomat, Nicholas Burns, last week lamented on PBS not for the hundreds of thousands dying in the Syrian conflicts but that the proposed cease fire "was finally coming down to agreeing with Putin in order to forge the agreement."  

        The dimensions of this rebuff by Russia to U. S. dominance in the Middle East has many moving parts but the result described by the Council on Foreign Relation uses a Moscow journalist writing in the English language Moscow Times to give voice to glaring instability.  Vladmir Frolov underlines the

 

"gaping lack of trust between Moscow and Washington, unruly and suspicious local proxies, unhappy outside players in Iran and in the Gulf states, a hodgepodge of legal loopholes and lack of viable enforcement mechanisms...for Moscow there is so much to love in this deal that it is surprising it took three months to negotiate."

 

        Everyone knows that the bloody roots of all this lie in the centuries old battles for oil among world hegemons, re-enacted in the recent Gulf Wars and in the struggle that continues today in the flawed U. S. preference for Israel as virtually a 51st state. 

        The domestic political lock-down behind this is one of the reasons for the deepening paralysis of political life in the U. S. with its corrupt practice of buying and selling votes to please favored factions for very narrow reasons. Two weeks ago such corrupt politics was on display when the California Assembly and Senate voted 69 to 1 and 270 to 1 respectively to block any California company from doing business in California if it boycotts or divests from U. S. companies doing business in the illegally occupied West Bank Settlements. This irrational behavior may get worse with both Clinton and Trump promising to fully support the U. S. "understanding" with Israel, no questions asked.  

        That's not all that's on lock-down. The moral incapacity to see the deepening complexity and the absurd choices that Americans keep making suggests that in faith communities where ethics and morality are supposed to be taught there is a retreat underway from understanding faithfulness as a critical appraisal of the demonic. The result may be a surprise to contemporary worshipers who could discover the blood of Aleppo is also on their own hands. It may even help open the door to possible catastrophe in the form of a Trump victory. 

The Trifecta Shift: Who Will Tell the People?

        The widely shared desperation growing from fears of a Trump victory has trapped reporters and talking heads such as Rachel Maddow and David Axelrod in a continuous loop that leaves the issues after the election largely untouched.  In the equally desperate rush for ratings most people know they are being entertained more than informed.  E. J. Dionne writes this week in the Washington Post that people  "don't expect more from their political leaders than posturing, positioning and captivating media circuses."  Which continues to make Trump's chances harder to guess than pollsters may believe. 

        Mostly untouched is how the racism habit and an economically stranded middle class open flood gates to a volatile, dangerously large audience that makes the next question not just about the November election but about what comes afterward.  The deep pathos of news as entertainment disincentivises the public  from filling sand bags against the coming storms. 

        Just over the horizon when post election days finally arrive are the nation's ineradicable mentality derived from slavery; a disabled congress; and a major shift of political power from Washington to state governments.   

        Take the example of North Carolina where its Research Triangle and great universities compete with Silicon Valley, but where the federal appellate court had to intervene in the Republican's toxic war against the Democrats with their large constituency of African American slave descendents.  Last Wednesday (8/31), the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 when asked by the Republicans to reverse an Appeals Court order that was forcing them to redraw their deeply racist voting district rules.   The Court had struck down as unconstitutional "the effort to target African Americans with almost surgical precision."  

        The Supreme Court deadlock seemed like great good fortune because it left the Appeals court order in effect requiring North Carolina to redraw its gerrymandered districts and election rules. Here's the kicker: the Court placed responsibility for redrawing those rules in the hands of 100 local county election boards all controlled by Republicans. 

        How did this happen? It turns out that three years earlier the infamous Koch brothers oligarchy had financed a Republican take-over of the state house that ultimately led to a "trifecta," i.e., control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship; which is why "trifecta" is no longer about a horse race but a measure of national political power shifting away from Washington.  As of September 2016, according to Real Clear Politics, there were 7 Democratic and 23 Republican trifectas. The GOP now controls68 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers.

        The ironies are abundant.  The NY Times reported a week ago that In North Carolina's Lenoir County  where Democrats outnumber Republicans better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the new Koch-style election plan limits early voting to a single weekend day, bans voting on Sunday (They wouldn't want to desecrate the Sabbath!) and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and without cars must make long trips to cast their ballot. "Republicans, who wrote and passed the 2013 law...deny the rules reflect anything inappropriate." 

        It's not hard to see where this leads. Republicans may have a fool for presidential candidate, but their growing control of states is the answer to their dreams: trifectas in state capitals, control of elections, and oligarchic domination of public policy by means wealth. 

        Who will tell the people? Who will fill the sandbags to resist this coming flood?  Hillary?  We shall see. In faith communities the predictable pattern will be to flee complicated issues, hand out food, and keep churches as safe sanctuaries. There is of course the Pauline alternative: "put on the whole armour of God, that you may stand against the wiles of the devil,"  (Ephesians 11 again)--the better to resist what's coming down.