The Marionettes of Christmas

Now that the United States has lost its struggle with Russia in Syria our government would like us to believe in or own innocence;  that this bloody massacre lies at the feet of Vladimir Putin, the Al-Assad regime and Iran.  It’s a very tall tale to sell given the investment of the Standard Oil Company of California in Saudi Arabia’s oil a hundred years ago.  The long history of U. S. supported corporate investment in Middle East oil and frequent U.S sponsored attempts to overthrow oil nation regimes, some of them democratically elected, are well documented; as are profitable arms sales to Iraq, Iran, the Saudis, Yemen and so on--often all at the same time. These have been the bloody standard tools of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Here at home there’s a certain similarity with the post-election efforts of one-half of the U. S. population (the Democrats) trying to de-legitimize the other half.   Aside from inviting civil war at home, in both cases we're seeing the same tell-tale signs of death and denial (Bill Clinton dropping his ”Electors” ballot in the slot and blaming it all on the FBI). 

            What’s really happened? There’s been nothing like Aleppo since Hiroshima, really, or Dresden.  Nor has there ever been anything in modern time like globalization and automation destroying  tens of millions of people’s livelihoods.  So who or what did this? The disturbing answer in the interview with Henry Kissinger published this week in the current (December 2016) Atlantic monthly justifies the Vietnam and Iraq wars as expressions of  American exceptionalism. Not unlike Silicon Valley’s claim that exporting jobs is not a moral issue.  The assumption is that the powerful are inherently virtuous.

             Kissinger defines exceptionalism as constitutionalism and dedication to human rights but it’s clear that he rests it on the religious myth of a divine gift to chosen people such as  Americans and Israelis.  This pervasive myth has high utility and is visible today in the Hitlerian drift  of President-elect Trump’s tactic of discrediting the press to an economically wounded population.  Even after the election, Trump’s advisers seem sinister in intent as they send him out again and again to rally these wounded to their future purposes by strengthening  their cultural DNA fantasy of salvation by God’s messenger, Donald Trump.  

             It’s the most dangerous tactic and moment since the Civil War; a demonic absurdity that ironically counts on Christmas and Hanukkah for reinforcement.  Both the calamity at Aleppo and familiar U. S. political practitioners  count on civil society as marionettes whose strings are pulled not by powerful puppet masters but by their own religious myths.  

               It’s the task of people of faith to call these idols and demons by name and know the difference between promises, propaganda and truth. 

How it all Ended (First Draft)

         A perfect storm of congressional, corporate and constitutional crisis looms in this month’s astonishing expose of Exxon Mobile’s decades long strategy of climate change-denial (when they knew better). The corporation’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, may be nominated  as Secretary of State by President-elect Donald Trump.

        The series just published in the New York Review of Books spells-out that Exxon Mobile knew for many years that Climate research was scientifically accurate but carried on an expensive effort to say the opposite publicly. A similar strategy was pursued by big tobacco even when it knew its product was killing people. One of the biggest corporations in the world, EM now admits that climate change is real but because it owns huge fossil assets still in the ground and under the sea, a ban on fossil fuels could represent a gigantic non-recoverable asset.

       So it needs to slow down the process that could affect its bottom line by supporting a profound threat to First Amendment Rights sponsored by Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, “who has taken more money in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, than from any other industry during his congressional career.  Read More  “Smith is using his chairmanship of the House Committee on Science to deny climate change as fact and chill First Amendment Rights by applying pressure on any who would petition government, speak freely, and freely associate to advocate for responsible climate policies.

“The committee’s actions now force all organizations that would collaborate with others when taking on powerful special interests to consider that they might be ordered to reveal their strategies to any hostile member of Congress with subpoena power.”

        It costs millions to litigate such a threat. For non-profit climate change advocates this is what “chilling” means.  It gets worse. Donald Trump spent the second half of the Army-Navy game in the box of retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a graduate of Annapolis. During the Ronald Reagan administration, North was the National Security Council aide most directly involved in covertly selling arms to Iran and providing military assistance to the Contras, a group seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's left-leaning government.

        This invites an irresistible history lesson of U. S. hypocrisy that has brought us to this moment of possible civilization crash as bombs go of in the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo, and in Istanbul; as Isis is about to re-take ancient Palmyra for the second time; as Mosul has to be retaken a second time by Iraqi troops. A score card may help you to remember this tangled fossil fuels web and see how today’s lies have deep roots. 

• It was In 1953 that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran elevating the dictatorship of the Shah
• In 1980  the Reagan/Bush administrations permitted—and frequently encouraged—the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq."
• In 1985 the U. S. sold arms to Iran to finance the undermining of Nicaraguan rebels...
• And in 2003 George Bush invaded Iraq, a nation without weapons of mass destruction.

Why belabor faith communities in a season of Carols and Hanukkah lights with nasty information?  Because the music and lights are about devotion to truth, peace and justice; values whose tenure is fundamentally threatened by the nation-wide habit of mistaking power for truth.  A second draft of how it all ends could be coming sooner than we expect. It's more than time to act in the public square.

Bankruptcy Proceedings

        The emotional trauma delivered to the psyche of middle class main streamers by Donald Trump's election offers many real world lessons, but not free-of-charge. There is a price to be paid when bathroom ethics and locker room porno get more attention than the huge inequality gap or mass incarceration or fossil fuels gassing the planet.  The skewed priorities can be seen in the case of Bernie Sanders' campaign. He spoke clearly and often about exactly those issues and was cast aside on the theory of liberals and the Left that he couldn't be elected. It was a betrayal of biblical proportions to be precise and the price is that Donald Trump is President-elect.

         There were other betrayals, especially by Hillary Clinton, who spoke like a member of Netanyahu's cabinet with tones of disdain for the rights and afflictions of the Palestinians.   When the crisis of racial injustice in Police relations with the Black community came front and center in 2015 with the choke hold that killed Eric Garner on camera, and other instances---and thousands marched all over the country, and every night by the thousands in places like New York City for ten days---Hillary was silent. 

          The heart of the matter can be told in the old story about a first aid station set-up to save half-dead people found floating down a town's near-by river. The tale is that after extensive measures were taken by the town to rescue victims sighted every day floating down the river, someone thought to ask "Where are these bodies coming from?"  It serves as a Rosetta stone for translating  the meaning of the recent elections.  

          Where did this year-long havoc of expected coronation,  ribald oratory and vulgarity originate?  Please don't say with Trump. He didn't stage the primary's carnival of seventeen Republican candidates. Nor did he create Isis barbarism, nor the inordinate killing of Blacks by the Police, nor the central bankers foreclosing on the steel mills and machining industries in Youngstown and Detroit; nothing to do with the tech industry's export of millions of jobs to Asia. It's a much longer list actually. Much longer and that's the point. The problems and needs of this and many other nations lie much further upstream, in the practices of ancient theologies and our now dwindling modern democracies. 

        One of the needs is the hope that faith groups will critique the addiction to ridiculous ideas of divine exceptionalism, rampant from the USA to Israel. Another goal of faith should be to expose the popular addiction to the golden calf whose worshipers---the lower eighty percent of the nation---are more akin to the biblical downtrodden.   They elected Trump but underlying their vote is the dream of gold.  That dream needs lots of exposure and exegesis in the public space of the American democracy before it too is bankrupt.