Blind Mans' Gulf

        The first thing to know about the just completed showing of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick film on the Vietnam War is the financial support it received for production and advanced promotion; as if disparate forces like nonprofit foundations, banks and billionaires had gathered themselves in a shared hope of parting the awful waters of the war toward a new world.  The advance promotion--as is always the case with television--was over the top, tempting Burns/Novick to break new ground in self-promotion, and with a hype that suggested the prospect of something like Charlton Heston's Moses descending from Sinai.

       After eight two hour segments showing horrifying scenes of violence and death the film's final segments suggested a post-war era with scenes of good will and the struggle of veterans on all sides to come to terms with this hell they had lived through and that now plagued them with misgivings, resentment and guilt.  

        The problem is that instead of a better promised land The United States went right out and did it again with its invasions in the Middle East fifteen year later.  

      

         The Burns/Novick film's final theme is reconciliation, drawing no connection, no dotted lines to the next war in the Middle East.  Papered over by hype and film-maker hubris, seventeen hours of the Vietnam War is therefore overtaken by its propaganda function. The USA keeps on doing it: the U. S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the same empty-mindedness that characterized its invasion of Vietnam. Burns/Novick underline that after hastily succeeding the French collapse, U. S. first responders--diplomats, military officers, military advisors--arrived in Vietnam with no experience or knowledge of the country and its culture or long history.  

        In Iraq the Bush era cohort quickly demonstrated that they too knew nothing of the Middle East world they were proposing to turn into a democratic ally of the U. S.  Motivated by the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon but focused on the geo-political world of oil--not on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden who launched the WTT attack--but on their wrong-headed obsession about Weapons of Mass Destruction, this  Bush era misdirection created a war whose length (seventeen years) now stretches over almost as many years as the Vietnam War's twenty years.

        One stark factor that supported this war-making madness among both Democrat and Republican Presidents: Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Ford to Nixon to Bush I to Clinton twice to Bush II is that all of them lied, creating pretexts out of thin air (the Gulf of Tonkin, Communist Dominoes, WMD's) and they built sand castles to inspire young soldiers to patriotic sacrifice of their lives. 

        While sometimes the fabled Wolf actually does come, most modern wolves are manufactured from political or Wall Street ambitions using the accelerant of the trillion dollar media industry. Which is why, in the end, the Burns/Novick film about Vietnam becomes a cautionary tale that leaves us in the dark. 

     The story not told includes the billions made by shipping, arms, and aerospace corporations when the nation goes to war; and in the instance of the Iraq war the emergence of private mercenary forces such as Blackwater that receive hundreds of millions in DoD contracts without oversight by congress or the electorate. 

        The challenge to citizens today, to people of faith today, is to overcome our susceptibility to the screens in our pockets, on our desks, in our living rooms that, whether brilliant creations of artists or the calculated propaganda of politicians, or the machinations of Wall Street, are intended to make other people rich.

 

          Light in the present darkness. That's the task.

Faith-Based Wars

        Because the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS series on Vietnam pays scant attention to the context of a hundred years of  French colonization that preceded it the result is a certain illiteracy that bends how the film series views the twenty years of war that follow.  Perhaps the lengthy French occupation is not shown because it had a clearer more revealing purpose, one that begs us to look the other way. It was to extract the region's rich mineral and natural resources for the profit of French enterprise. This purpose was sacred, supported by Catholic missionaries teaching a version of Christianity to the Vietnamese intended to pacify them to accept their own victimization; that is, moving their natural wealth into European hands.   

        It's this colonial history that frames the political and spiritual reality of the years after the brief WW II Japanese occupation and after the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.  Irregardless of how both Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the age of colonialism in China, India and Africa were dedicated to their Christianizing purpose they also served the same simplicism:  that a higher moral purpose, God's purpose, required the servitude of native populations to build the wealth of Western nations.

        Which may be why the U. S. State Department  never showed President Truman the letters from Ho Chi Minh requesting American help setting-up a democracy in Vietnam. For Secretaries of State such as John Foster Dulles God's purpose was served by enriching the U. S. 

         So much for the ancient biblical instruction about welcoming strangers and delivering justice. 

        Just so the U. S. could not escape its metaphoric identity as successors to French colonialism.  The Burns/Novick film toils in each segment to respect the naivete, innocence, and heroic sacrifices of American soldiers in a misbegotten cause, but that does not illuminate how American leaders understood the slaughter of Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands to be worthy of the sacred purpose to defeat Communism and save Vietnam for the West.

        This role as faith-based champions against Communism makes the Burns/Novick segment incomprehensible when it shows the self-immolation of a devout Buddhist Monk protesting the American supported Diem regime in 1963.  As the flames consume the Monk, Thích Quang Duc, he is surrounded  by a large circle of followers kneeling in prayer.  What Americans see--including the ambassadors, the President, the Generals--is an  act of religious fanaticism, blind to understand this was a window into the spiritual center of Vietnamese culture.   

        This may help explain Ken Burns' illiteracy about the subsequent faith-based non-violent resistance to the war. By 1967 Jewish and Christian leaders were mobilizing their own opposition to the war and by 1968 a coalition named Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam had distributed twenty-four thousand copies of a 400 page paper-back, "In the Name of America." It was composed entirely of newspaper clippings of U. S. brutalities and indiscriminate destruction; e.g. CIA operatives interrogating captured Vietnamese then pushing them out of their helicopter. By 1969 forty thousand people of faith came to Washington to march by candlelight to Richard Nixon's White House, each carrying the name of one of the 40,000 dead U. S. soldiers at that point in the war. It marked a daily death toll of 40 U. S. soldiers per day. 

        The Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee distributed a shocking slide show about "The Electronic Battlefield" showing the use of cluster munitions with hundreds of shards of flying steel exploding above ground and shattering pigs, children and old folks working in the fields and villages. Shown repeatedly at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in some cities church volunteers bought multiple carousel projectors and slides to show the horror of the war to churches, synagogues and other groups.  The point is that this resistance by non-violent interfaith movements during the war practiced a religious tradition that, like the Monk Thích Quang Duc, was not centered in illusions of American greatness.  Strangely, leaders of the anti-war movement of the 1960's report that no one from the Burns research teams asked about their faith-based non-violent actions.

        This is important today because the old time religion of the Vietnam war--faith merged with American nationalism, especially in the age of Trump, is still in play--sometimes for cynical reasons (Lindsay Graham on the "health policy choice between socialism and democracy"), more often because it asks for no moral engagement on the frontier of policy choices about equity, justice or injustice. Trump age heroes are the people with the most money and therefore the most power.

        The irony is that the people supporting Trump are among the least advantaged by the turn to globalization that ended their jobs and who must now send their children--as a means of employment--to fight and die in Iraq or Afghanistan.  The old paradigm still teaches that all this is a religious happening because God is making America great again.  Whether people accept this today may be influenced by the lessons being taught, or not, by the Burns film about Vietnam. 

Democracy as Myth

        When the U. S.  health care system was transferred in the 1980's from the awesome authority of physicians to the power of corporate-based managed care groups--HMO's--the new equation replaced the wisdom of doctors with the techniques of corporate management. Patients would no longer be seen as a source of revenue but as a cost that would be contained and minimized by efficiency.  

        This was a 'dream of reason' wrote Paul Starr in his 1983 Pulitzer prize winning book "and did not take power into account,"

"The dream was that reason, in the form of the arts and sciences, would liberate humanity from scarcity and the caprices of nature.... not least of all, the diseases of the body and the spirit."

            

        Although more progress in health care followed, the change also cast up a new world of power that has left in its wake both growing inequality and widespread distrust of the profiteering to be had through the new corporatized health care model.  A critical analysis of this power, measured by its total impact in the U. S. must deal with both healing understood as a metaphor of faith and health care corporatism's claim to deliver the most justice for dollars spent.  The numbers are staggering and don't fit ordinary people's pockets or understanding about what's going on.

• The U. S. pharmaceutical industry is reported to be worth $446 billion. 
• Forbes Magazine cites a CDC report that the private insurance industry is worth $900 billion.  
• The Center for Responsive Politics reports 811 lobbyists in 2017 working for the insurance industry at a cost of $79 million.  
• Salon cites a Kaiser Health News analysis that thirty-eight major drug makers and trade groups will spend a total of $50.9 million this year on 1,296 lobbyists (See Opensecrets.org)

            You may be for or against Obama Care and Bernie Sanders' new single-payer proposal for Medicare-for-All, but you can be certain of one thing: No stone will be left unturned to preserve this huge health care corporate profit system.  

             Readers may also remember that they cast no votes about the rise of managed care as those major policy changes unfolded thirty-five years ago. The voting public has had to depend on the authority (the power) of other sources.  "When professionals claim to be authoritative about the nature of reality," wrote Starr,  "whether it is the structure of the atom, the ego, or the universe, we generally defer to their judgment."  A very bad dependency if democracy (rule by the people) is to be real.

       These coming weeks in Wahington citizens must weigh what it means for the future of health care if insurance company profits are subordinated to decrease inequality and pay the cost of health care for everyone.  It's a justice question and a challenge to all faith communities and other community groups to enter the public square of political life to tackle the task of critical thinking about about writing new laws and changing old laws in order to give the people equity.  

         Without that happening democracy will continue in its mythical status. And yes, it is a question that bears on the growing threat of fascism in the U. S.

"Power, at the most rudimentary personal level, originates in dependence, and the power of the professions primarily originates in dependence upon their knowledge and competence....what makes dependence on the professions so distinctive today is that their interpretations often govern our understanding of the world and our own experience. To most of us, this power seems legitimate"  [The social transformation of American Medicine: the rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry]  

Or, as Ivan Illich put it many years ago, "a professional is someone who has a stake in your not knowing what he knows." [Deschooling Society]

Labor Day’s Inequality Flood and the Roots of Authoritarianism

         The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for today’s unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism. Flooded Houston, the epi-center of a fossil fuels empire that created enormous wealth by turning land into unlimited concrete for profitable development is now the scene of immeasurable human catastrophe. As with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the disaster scenes in Houston pulls back the curtain on a city whose people live only on the margin of the empire of oil.

        Houston ranks as the 15th most unequal city among the nation's 50 largest according to the Brookings Institute. On April 7^th 2016 the Houston Chronicle reported

“The richest 5 percent of households here earn nearly 12 times more than the poorest 20 percent. About 156,000 of the city's households have an income under $18,759.

     

       The current state of public policy about this income inequality in the U. S. persistently avoids such realities.  State government in Missouri is cutting back minimum wage increases approved by St. Louis city voters. New Trump tax policies announced four days ahead of Labor Day prescribe “reforms” that primarily help the rich and add to the national debt.  The real “wall” supported by big money players is their strategic investment in primary elections that look toward the mid-terms of 2018. Their clear purpose seems not about  improving wages and working conditions but how to extend the warp of the economy in favor of their peers at the top of the income pyramid. The top 1 to 5 percent.

       A positive alternative strategy from faith communities concerned with the common good will require unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliances with secular organizations who share a high moral purpose to meet the needs of the common good.  Bonhoeffer's "saints without god."

      

       How religion—so popular in America—and  endemic inequality have come to share the same boat is not a pretty story and begins with the slave economy that built the first several hundred years of the very Christian Americas; a continent whose conquerors were  comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy. 

      

       Even at the founding of the U. S., although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton detested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived…[he]clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

       While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, there was a dominant belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made for 90 hour work weeks, child labor, and 12 hour days in sweat shops employing immigrant women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

      

       It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   

       The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

·                     The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.     

        Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

      

        Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits; leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  

          Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

      

          The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

      This tragic system of racism and religious-based classism handicaps the potential today of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to exist separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices locked denominations into a sociology of segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  

        The fateful pattern of church-based class division developed from the same inequality that now divides Houston and the rest of the U. S.  People then and now who worked mostly with their hands and backs could not be comfortable in churches where their bosses were sitting. It was reciprocated by the managers of the dominating class.  Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

      There are better angels in this history.  The 19th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   

       It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years of this Progressive Movement that reflected a coalition between religion and secular humanitarians such as Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull house.  This reform era created major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

      

       The tragedies of the 20th Century interrupted this momentum. The Soviet Communist Revolution put the Capitalist era on high alert and gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and limit the power of unions to organize.  WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s global-wide inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

      

        There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  And the younger generations care little about the segregated life of congregations, They’ve moved on and mostly outside organized religious life.

       

         In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    The new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

      

        Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief.

Labor Day and the Roots of Authoritarianism

The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for the unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism in the U. S.  Becoming part of the answer could mean a metamorphosis beyond reach in the same sense that halting the rise of autocracy could be beyond reach.  A positive answer surely means unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliance with the communities and organizations of high moral and ethical purpose.   Bonhoeffer’s “saints without god.”

How religion and inequality share the same boat is not a pretty story. A slave economy built the first several hundred years of the very religious Americas that was comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy.  At the founding of the U. S. although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton destested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived….No founder of this country more clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, more important was a belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20^th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19^th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made 90 hour work weeks, child labor and sweat shops employing poor women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.

Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits, leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

This tragic system of racism and religious-based  classism handicaps the potential of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of the Trump era authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to form separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices have locked denominations into a sociology in which they represent a normative segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  The pattern grew from people who worked mostly with their hands and backs feeling uncomfortable in churches where their bosses worshipped. Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

There are better angels in this history.  The 19^th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20^th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbush to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years, creating major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

The tragedies of the 20^th Century led to a failure of further development toward an equitable world.  The Soviet Communist Revolution gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s inglorious inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  

  In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    Because the resources are not evenly divided and the stakes so high, the new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will be the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief. 

The Twilight of the Gods

        While it's not yet known whether the President's large body of critics will finally run him to ground the other question is how the Republican leadership will make their stand on tax reform, the budget and Affordable Health Care Act amendments after the Labor Day recess.  In spite of the outpouring of rage over the President's behavior over racism in Charlottesville he is not without many allies who are content to see the status quo of missing infrastructure jobs programs and anemic education funding continue--under cover of "traditional," racist values.  

        

         The clearly uncertain future for the nation and its stability will need more than the current emphasis by progressive young people on righteous resistance. After stalwart resistance, what's the strategy on single-payer, housing for moderate and low income families in the big cities and what about international partnerships for peace, justice and the environment?       

        Famous community organizer, Saul Alinsky, used to begin speeches to faith leaders by sharing his wonderment at just how they folded up those wings on their backs to be able to lie down to sleep.  He was calling for more than vestments of good intentions.  In this summer of popular defenestration of old idols like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee the larger challenge comes from whether we even recognize the monuments not made of marble or bronze but who claim to be our fulfillment.  There is among the Silicon Valley gargantuan corporations more than a little resemblance between themselves and that old Canaanite god of biblical reference: both claim to exist for your own good!

       With progressive community organizations sponsoring programs they describe as training  for "righteous resistance" at least one lesson of history is how the good is defined, by whom and for what purpose.  Critical thinking will be required to answer that question. It's always complicated.

    

        Here's a little known example drawn from Stephen Kinzer's book: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles and their secret world war," [Henry Holt, 2013]...described by John Le Carre as "an essential allegory for our own times":

        The Cold War now in the process of re-start was born not after WW II but before it when Wall Street firms like Sullivan and Cromwell (S & C) put the financing packages together that enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler, first by freeing it from its WW I debt burden and by issuing in 1935 the bonds to re-finance the German steel, and weapons manufacturing titan, Krupp; and further enabling a chemical and rare metals cartel that included I. G. Farben, subsequent producer of the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi death camps to exterminate millions. 

       Later to be Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles was managing partner at S & C in those pre-war years and was a defender and advocate for Adolf Hitler. He saw Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against Bolshevism. The Germans with their great achievements in language, science, theology and the arts were kinfolk.  Dulles was fixated on communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular as enemies of Christianity. He never saw any difference between making money at S & C and the high purpose of Christianity.

        After the Second World War Dulles and the Allied High Command saw to it that the Nazi war record of hundreds of German scientists were wiped clean--even Werner von Braun's, who created the Nazi V-I and V-II  rockets that reigned down on London, was put to work creating the U. S. space program.  Dulles advocated for a global civilized society and interacted  in World Council of Churches meetings attended by  Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and others. But after the war he gradually developed a Devil theory of theology at about the same time that he became Dwight Eisenhower' Secretary of State.  In that role he led and enabled others such as George Kennan to launch and define a Cold War that sponsored the overthrow of democratically  elected governments such as Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and others.  It was this definition of evil that was championed by many (not all) faith leaders and led sequentially to millions of deaths in the long fight against the devil, the Soviet Union and China, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

                

        The moral of this history is that the youthful advocates of dramatic change in the current direction of the Trump White House toward an era of righteousness face the necessity for critical evaluation of complex initiative and promises; challenging every step of the way how the promises of the rich and powerful affect the common good; identifying and critiquing the interplay of their own self-interest. Constantly making sure they've not been captured by a new attractive idol

The Limits of Enthusiasm

        In the wake of Trump's presidency the Democrat's political crash in Atlanta remembers the Hindenberg; the blimp that after 60 successful Atlantic crossings crashed and burned.  Atlanta has positioned the Republicans not only to pass a regressive health care law but to break past the Mueller investigations.  Aside from likely indictments of the strange collection of Michael Flynn-Paul Manaford and a few others over their Russian connections, near universal Republican control is likely to insulate the President from either impeachment or indictment.

       The future of Democracy and any path toward overcoming the inequality gap now come to the fore with a vengeance, hanging on whether people can discover sources of political participation beyond their enthusiasm.  Both the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democracy struggle and Rev. William Barber's drive for spiritual and moral renewal draw heavily on emotional energy.  The giant Sanders rallies in New York City and around California last Summer demonstrated that mere fervor does not translate either into voters or even a political strategy. Similarly, Rev. Barber's movement rooted in minority communities--but growing strong alliances across race and class--still must deal with the task of translating a moral focus into micro-politics. 

        Both traditions have been made more passive but for different reasons.  The grim and endless string of juries who cannot convict a White policeman for killing young Black men underlines the meaning of centuries of oppression and lack of financial resources.  The White middle class workers whose world has been in crash mode for at least a generation has inherited a religious and political tradition of dependency on someone else's power, whether of God or Wall Street.

       Facing the long haul of a Republican domination that may be in place by this Fourth of July the energies of new younger generations of voters must find a way out of the traps of both political and spiritual dependency. Less inclined to hymn-singing and straightened by the new disciplines of technology; idealistic about translating a life of service to the needs of others as the power of love, their problem (our problem) is how to marry the practical and the pragmatic with the transcendent goal of universal fairness and justice. 

        Among the largest obstacles is an American culture averse for religious reasons to civic engagement and the struggles over inevitably imperfect policy solutions. The irony of ironies is how the wealth of Americans has been seen as a sign of divine blessing and the decline of wealth as a sign that it's all in divine hands even as your life and community collapses economically.  This is the savior complex that makes Trumpism so attractive.  Since the rise of an industrialized and technologically awesome world--now on a global scale--most Americans have lived within the dominion of some sort of hierarchy. While this hierarchy has been challenged and modified when workers have organized to bargain for their rights it is now infinitely more complicated in a global economy. In most workplaces it's a "stay out of trouble" passivity largely ingrained in popular practice.

      This is another reason why young generation energies must redirect their enthusiasm by giving new life to the struggle for love, power and justice.  If these three are kept together then struggles with hierarchy can become trans-class struggles that engage the whole community for the common good.  That's how to end the crash and burn era of the blimps.

The Baseball Game

        Like a wound that will not heal the Comey-Sessions Intelligence Committee hearing produced a theater of the absurd marching under the banner of the fired FBI Director's foreign policy: "It's not about Republicans or Democrats," it's that the Russians are "coming after America....That's what this is about, we remain that shining city on the hill. And they don't like it."

        It's hard to say with a straight face since the hearings have barely raised a sweat over the Russian threat. A thousand ships have not been launched. We're at Defcon V not Defcon II, and the leisurely pace of multiple investigations make clear that the Congressional fight is over control of resources among the comfortable classes not foreign policy. There's lots of money to be made under cover of the Russian threat: tens of billions in defense contracts, hundreds of billions more to fund virtuous American allies such as the Saudis, Egypt, the Arab Emirates and Israel.  It's the business transactions that move the moral tone of foreign policy idealism into the realm of the preposterous. 

        While it's clear that if President Trump falls at least in Washington the ground will not be soaked in tears, yesterday's shooting at American congressmen  and lobbyists at play exposed the rising tide of violence over inequality. The Gun Violence Achieve website (http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/last)  reports 14 other shootings the past 72 hours.  As the shaken Congressional leaders courageously announce they will go forward with their annual baseball game, they so far have un-courageously made clear they have no plans to convene in special session to adopt gun control or pass a public infrastructure program. 

        The hard question veiled by Washington theatrics is whether anything can lure American leaders to abandon the nostrum sounded by injured Texas Congressman Roger Williams last evening that "America is the greatest nation in the world."  This conceit in the face of American usual and customary racism and the rising new world powers of China and India make clear how grateful we must be for the other rising at hand: a trans-class, post-racial younger adult movement sweeping both the country and around the world.  Notable for its absence in churches, synagogues and temples, clear-eyed about all the customary theatrics of the political pros, this younger generation's spirit will need the cautionary tale of Jacob at the Jabbok River who discovered  that after wresting with God his blessing was the broken hip that would ensure his humanity.

        That's what the latest cover-ups want to cover-over.  In the midst of the current uproar about impeachment and a desperate search for solid ground the new times call all people of faith and serious purpose to write a new story about lessons learned and a common humanity embraced.  There's no time left to waste.

New Communities for the Long Haul

        President Trump's obscene $110 billion arms sale agreement with the Saudis last weekend was accompanied by the farce of his belief that his Arab customer in Riyadh represented Islam.  This leaves out another 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who are not part of the deal, and of course some are not Sunni.   

        Not only is it a long stretch from local hegemony in the Saudi Arabian peninsula to the Taliban of Afghanistan but the weekend deal seemed determined to make war a priority as Trump strangely attacked Shiite Iran at the very moment 75 percent of its citizens had just elected Hassan Rouhani--- the moderate U. S. nuclear accords partner---to be their new president. 

        A 2010 Pew Research report demonstrates the absurdity of the Trump administration world view.

The Presidential Option for Violence

         In the sinister good old days foreign governments meddled abroad at long distance as when Stalin had Trotsky beaten to death in Mexico (1940) or Chile's dictator, Pinochet, ordered the assassination of his political opponent, Orlando Letelier, by a car bomb that exploded in Washington's  Sheridan Square (1976).

       These days lethal events bear the mark of personal intimacy as Monday's suicide bombing in Manchester demonstrated, and as Trump's intimate foreign policy also demonstrated with last week's riot on Massachusetts Avenue. A jelly bean trail ran from the White House meeting of Turkey's president, Recept Erdogan, to his embassy where he watched from the comfort of his limousine while apparently ordering his personal bodyguards and embassy staff to attack demonstrators across the street who were protesting his policies.  You can watch the shocking video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4hSrnri2qg

and here:

https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/865310629934112768

        No one has been charged so far but it's to wonder if Erdogan--who has jailed 40,000 of his fellow citizens without trial this past year--was giving us a preview of how he and his American partner, Trump, are able to freely use strong-arm tactics in broad daylight to suppress dissent with impunity. 

        Here's another preview:  Last May 1st this new intimate mode of lethal diplomacy via friendship was on view following a Saudi Arabian delegation visit to the White House. The President's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, invited delegates next door to nail down the $110 billion arms sale subsequently  finalized in Riyadh by President Trump.  In front of the awed Saudis Jared is reported to have even called Lockheed's CEO, Marilyn Hewson on the spot asking for a discount on the price of a "Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)" system the Saudis wished they could afford to buy. (She said she would look into it.)

Ending the U. S. Addiction to Violence 

        Of course, there's nothing new about American inspired political violence or U. S. corrupt and bloody deeds in international affairs.  Many precedents to the Trump era today include the sorry trail of a CIA in 1953 overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whose imperious alliance with the U. S. led to the Iranian revolution of 1978, the hostage crisis, and on to the American secret arming of Saddam Hussein's Iraq during its 1980's war with Iran (revealed by Seymour Hersh's reporting), followed by the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and our currently running fourteen year Middle East wars that created the rise of the ISIS caliphate. 

        Americans face a long slog to disown this history and define a democratic route to a civilized nation that practices both justice and peace. The immediate journey ahead includes a possible two term Republican White House, domination of a Right leaning Supreme Court for many years, and little sign of serious legislative initiative to dramatically reduce inequality. 

 The Impotence of Traditional Faith Communities

         Do faith communities have the will to set aside their instituitional priorities and stand against this rising tide of chaos and violence? Recent research by the Pew Research Center suggests not.  Their April 27th 2017 survey found that Trump's support from evangelicals is strongest among those who attend church regularly. "Eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants who attend church at least once a month approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, including 67% who strongly approve of his job performance." 

       Even when Pew's polling includes the entire theological spectrum--from conservative to liberal--fifty percent of White Protestants and Catholics of all degrees of persuasion approve of Trump's job performance. An earlier March 2017 Pew survey found that "more than half the states (28) have [congressional] delegations that are composed entirely of Christians."  Measured by demographics and opinion polls faith communities seem to offer little hope that they will be the bulwark against the rise of a Trump-like autocracy.

Forming New Interfaith Coalitions of Resistance 

       On the other hand the new Pew surveys found that 83 percent of African Americans and Latinos disapprove of Trump and this does offer hope for the future of a resistance movement. Multi racial interfaith PICO and IAF coalitions across the country are creating a more reliable bulwark against the rising tide of violence and chaos than mainline faith groups seem willing to mobilize.  

        Public witness for justice and peace in the public square is beginning to create the "new being" Paul Tillich once wrote about and that Rev. William Barber's Moral Mondays movement has activated: including new ways for people to unite around their shared ultimate concerns---becoming learning and witnessing communities of resistance while making institutional life and maintenance secondary; finding new common ground in the work of social repair and rebuilding that is ranging from housing and schools advocates to emergency response teams monitoring threatened ICE deportations, to progressive "political" action groups building cross-cultural, cross-class, trans- racial communities of resistance for the long haul.  

Quicker than Lightning

         This Tuesday's FBI massacre to the contrary, the Trump regime remains well-ensconced and difficult to dislodge with the President having taken hold of the government's investigative power and busily consulted, as of this writing, Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The corrupt interior nature of politics as practiced is on display and constitutionally implemented remedies could become closeted, making the times at this moment more dangerous than perhaps any other period of history. 

 

         While  questions about the President's competency have been growing in high places (The New Yorker May 8th) they're not shared by the supporters who elected him.   Mental health professionals have been citing instances when Donald Trump seemed confused about where his Navy was sailing or hazy on details of his own health care bill. He is obviously poorly read to the point of near-illiteracy as his recent confusion of Andrew Jackson with the Civil War illustrated. What continues to be missed in this picture, however, is his supporters who consider themselves in a fight to the death because their lives, their families and children have been destroyed by globalization.  It's no small thing unless you work in Silicon Valley.

          What this economically destroyed population that elected Trump sees is that he is lightning quick in his grasp of political opportunities-such as blocking the FBI's investigative power by firing Jim Comey and thus strengthening his hand. They see his intuitive genius for skillfully incentivizing opponents with promises that may be empty. The Rose Garden celebration last week was a case in point. There had in actuality been no passage of health care legislation, no change in Obama Care, and no new jobs to speak of, but it served Trump well as political showboating that, however fraudulent, further strengthened his momentum toward his personal goal: benefiting from the profits of the Wall Street system.

         A totalitarian tyrant, Hannah Arendt observed, claims to be "more obedient...than any government ever was before....pretending to establish the reign of justice on earth... without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior." That's vintage Trump.

        Essential to his success are these people, long ignored by the Democrats, who are the victims of the nation's vast deindustrialization, off-shoring, and subsequent inequality who are desperate and in their extremis see Donald Trump as their best and only hope for economic recovery.  Yes, they see his crudeness, his compulsive lying, but since that's often been how their own lives have been destroyed they count on his brutalism to do what the democrats haven't, which is to give their lives and their children a new chance. Whether by hook or by crook, no longer matters.

       The Rose Garden charade last week also made the President's congressional confreres happy (and faithful) because it provided momentum for their ambitious plan to reform tax policy which is actually another bullet aimed at the heart of abandoned workers.   Robert Greenstein for 35 years the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote an immediate reply: 

"the President's emerging fiscal agenda...features large increases in defense funding offset by cuts in a range of significant domestic programs, substantial tax cuts mainly for people at very high income levels, losses in health care for millions of low- and moderate-income Americans, and potentially deep cuts in entitlement programs outside of Medicare and Social Security, including programs vital to tens of millions of Americans of lesser means."

       Hannah Arendt's words ring true again. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she observes that the uniqueness of totalitarianism was its capacity to "explode the very alternative on which on which all definitions of the essence of governments have been based...between  lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power."

        Lightning quick, this is where we are today. We can see a Trump hegemony expanding internationally and exercising arbitrary power as the former Exxon Mobile magnate Rex Tillerson--now Secretary of State---announces drastically cutting jobs and streamlining his State Department to better represent a firm-handed manager; one prepared to use military threats and money for purposes of guaranteeing Trump's dominion amidst the starvation and growing violence from Afghanistan to Somalia to the Korean peninsula. A global oil executive knows exactly how to do such deals.

        Meanwhile, as noted, the Democrats remain missing in action while this Trump agenda unfolds.  Aside from their new found skill at chortling and jeering Republican missteps they seem no closer today to advancing a reformed agenda than they were on the day they eliminated Bernie Sanders and his reform campaign last June. Silence reigns, as it did in the Hillary Clinton campaign, with no  serious policy reforms offered that could deliver infrastructure job-creating programs, or Medicare for all, or justice-for-all foreign policy goals in regions where inequality is vast beyond imagining.  

        "Calculation" remains the lingua franca in both political parties, meaning the Democrats bear strong resemblance to their Republican adversaries in the art of turning access to money and power into policy-making that is personally advantageous.  In winning passage for Obamacare six years ago the Democrats created a system that never laid a hand on the health care industry---which grows today at an annual inflation rate twice the rate of inflation in the Consumer Price Index.  At its passage Obamacare could not find a bi-partisan coalition for ending such profiteering in health care, which is why it is so complicated and vulnerable in the long run.

 

        The question on this post FBI day is how the accelerating momentum toward autocracy, a totalitarian autocracy, can be stemmed. Many desperate people could care less.  Likewise many comfortable people, especially in faith communities, who are buying the idea that faith is about making them safe and comfortable. That's also one of Trump's promises. Of such stuff an Orwellian world can be made.                 

Lost Horizon

        President Trump’s missing naval armada seems the perfect example of traveling in fog without instruments. It’s not his habit alone as illustrated by bundled mortgage credit default swaps, weapons of mass destruction, walls at the border with Mexico, and a growing alienated segment of the public impaled by their loss of expectation and privilege.  All compose the danger in which we now stand

      

        There are complicated questions of strategy: Can the Democrats preserve their voter base which falls mostly into the bottom 90 percent whose incomes have been mostly stagnant the past thirty years and whose children, especially, may no longer be able to earn a secure living? Or there is the shaky vision of faith communities whose interests tend to vacillate between their institutional need to raise the annual budget and disappearing immigrants (led away by ICE agents), or people of color incarcerated en masse. 

      

        Today’s conditions increasingly mirror well known historical examples of failure by communities of privilege to respond to the needs of the common good. The U. S. in the heyday of the robber barons, Great Britain’s colonial policies. Twentieth century capitalism in both the Fascist/Nazi era and during the current era of globalization.  As Trumpism illustrates, illusion can work both ways: deceiving others and deceiving ourselves.  

         Lost Horizon, a haunting tale written by James Hilton in 1931—between the two world wars—captures the tension between hope and illusion. 

A pilot hijacks a plane carrying British diplomats from Khandahar, Afghanistan. He flies toward Tibet but loses visible horizon and crashes. A rescue party leads the survivors to Shangri-la, a Lamasery high in the Himalayas----a place of peace, beauty, fields of plenty where people age very slowly. The High Llama is reported to be 250 years old.  Both diplomats fall in love with an apparently young postulant, Lo-Tsen, who speaks no English but plays the harpsichord. One diplomat wants to remain living at the Lamasery, but the other seeks his help to hire porters and return to civilization. Lo-Tsen agrees to help him find his way out of the valley. On the journey he is taken ill and she leads him to a local doctor who remembers that she was "the most old of anyone I have ever seen" and died soon thereafter.

        Lost Horizon is a critique of a British high culture, we may say modern high culture, that drives men and women to seek new horizons.  Today’s question is whether we can avoid worlds of illusion by focusing all energies on giving people around the world and in our own neighborhoods a better future.

        Economist Paul Krugman has noted that A single Hedge Fund manger earns more than all the Kindergarten teachers in the country  

        According to the World Bank Average Middle East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456.  In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s $53,960.  Blacks and Hispanics in U. S. have 60% of white income. Black incarceration rates are six times White rates.  Latino rates three times greater.

  

The Trap

Former CIA director James Wolsey---a sometime Presbyterian famous for arriving at church conferences a few hours before they might vote to divest from U. S. corporations doing business in the Israeli-occupied West Bank---has gone live on CNN today, Thursday 4/6/17, calling for air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites as a way to stop Syria. Bomb Syria at the same time, he said (mercifully omitting to mention if that would halt ISIS but might help Israel's worst leanings).  

          It's time to ask the Tet question again.  But first a brief review: 

          The Russians are busy in the region with their air campaign to help Assad, it's not always clear why.  The battle-seasoned Kurds, whom the Turks despise and fear, are helping the U. S./Iraqi battle with Isis in Holms and Mosul (not going that well). The U. S. promises to look the other way while Turkey continues mass arrests in exchange for keeping our airbase at Incerlik; and on the Arabian peninsula the U. S. and the Saudis are bombing the Shia Muslim minority "Houthis"  in Yemen while the U. S. is selling high performance fighter jets  to Quatar and Kuwait.

             Now the for the Tet question, newly applied:  during the ferocious North Vietnamese Tet offensive and U. S. counter offensive fifty years ago a reporter asked a U. S. General  "Just who's got whom surrounded here?"  As if replaying the Netflix script for "House of Cards," we cannot be surprised to realize that the stupefying killing in the Middle East is tied to the politics tolerated and practiced in the U. S. Hence the Wolsey connection, among many.  Wolsey is inviting us into the trap of a diversion to conceal the continuing U. S. debacle while other goals are pursued, especially world economic dominance.  "So It's the Iranians!" 

        There is so much to conceal.   Please look the other way as the Republicans exercise the nuclear option that condemns the U. S. political style to long-term polarization in which democratic practices are not really on the table anymore.  That's the message down below decks when the Washington Post reports that nine days before the Trump inauguration The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin. (Washington Post April 4th).  Prince is scion of a wealthy auto-parts distributor, brother of secretary of education Betsy Devos, big-dollar donor to the Trump campaign, and leader of a giant global company that trains private mercenary forces for foreign governments.

           Below decks, the Financial Times' Edward Luce reports (Feb. 26, 2017)  that "the stocks of private prison companies soared after the Department of Justice scrapped an Obama rule that ended the outsourcing of federal incarceration. They had already jumped after the announcement the Trump administration would detain illegal immigrants in federal centres rather than release them." Likewise, Luce reported that "the new head of the Federal Communications Commission purged key parts of the net neutrality rules put in place to shield consumers from discrimination. The FCC also scrapped plans to open the cable box market to competition. Expect similar field days in the for-profit higher education sector, defense industrial stocks and public housing contractors,"

           It is a matter of the highest moral purpose and an act of faithful witness to see the traps around us, expose them, and resist.