Packing for the Journey

       While serving as U. S ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson said global politics made him yearn for the simple brutalities of American politics. Today both are on display in the US/Saudi Arabian war against Yemen and in political tactics in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan. State Republicans leaders seek to make changes during lame duck sessions that strip newly elected governors of many of their constitutional powers. But the Democrats are not virgins. They have a long track record of doing business with the Saudis who have been executing dissidents for decades.

        Which raises the question of how the forty newly elected democrats-the Blue Wave- should prepare for their journey into the lions mouth. Growing disillusion abounds not only because of the age of Trump but because modern realities suggest that the present Constitution needs substantial amendment. The question is whether that can happen.

        Bloomberg News reported last August 18th that the ten most valuable corporate stakeholders who've not yet gone public to offer their shares in the open market (e.g. Elon Musk at SpaceX, Brian Chesly at Airbnb, Ben Silberman at Pinterest) have a value of $60 billion. Silicon Valley's huge wealth concentration has the weird configuration of a flashy world where no one earning less than $200,000 a year can own a home.

        French economist Thomas Piketty and UC Berkeley economists Immanuel Saez and Gabriel Zuchman report

"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."

        It's similarly true elsewhere and the reason Paris has been set on fire. 

        It's old news, but newly elected members of Congress will find themselves morally compromised even before they can get off the plane by a Pentagon that in 2017 placed total contracts worth $299 billion scattered throughout every congressional district in the country. The necessary science for the Blue Wave will be to understand who has what dog in which policy debate in their own congressional district and to estimate how much citizen support they can get if local congregations want to keep faith and politics separate.

        This is without mentioning the U. S. pharmaceutical industry with its thousands of lobbyists in DC and U. S. sales in 2016 of $333 billion [source: International Trade Administration] that keep drug prices too high for average citizens. Or that that U. S. health care spending in 2016 was $3.3 Trillion [U .S. government estimate] creating unequal access to health care for millions of citizens.

       Trump is only the symbol of big money power that has produced Trifecta state governments--one party control of both legislatures and the govenorship--with the ability to pack the courts that control gerrymandering for one party's advantage in the next election. In many states such control enables national government to appoint a Chief Justice, John Roberts, whose Supreme Court decision, Citizen United, turned free speech into a form of speech bought and paid for by the super wealthy, such as the Koch Brothers.

       This situation requires a studious Congress that will need constant refueling to digest and begin a new democratic construction in ideas and practice; one that can enable Constitutional amendment that ends Citizen United among other matters. It's an exciting time but it won't happen if faith communities fail to supply civic life with a fresh supply of moral fuel.

         The Blue Wave badly needs studious churches, synagogues and mosques that move away from "Sunday school" modes that recite, remember, and sentimentalize but stop short of anything that is "political." The connection between faith and ethics needs to be made clear from the roots of each diverse faith tradition. Since this is uniquely "religious America," the future of the Republic probably hangs on whether the religious traditions of this country connect our spirits, our life commitments to mercy, justice and the truth. Right now the truth is that religious America permits its government to kill children in Yemen by the thousands.  

Of Cabbages and Kings

 The International Rescue Committee reports that since 2015 Saudi Arabia has undertaken 18,000 airstrikes on Yemen averaging one every 99 minutes, one-third of which have hit non-military targets. "August was the most violent month of 2018 in Yemen with 500 people killed in just nine days."

        The IRC, created in 1931 by Albert Einstein, Paul Tillich and other refugees from Nazism, is currently led by David Millibrand, former British Foreign Secretary and son of parents also forced to flee the Nazis. As previously reported here the killing in Yemen is being done by U. S. made planes and bombs, refueled midair by U. S. Air Force tanker aircraft piloted by U. S. airmen.

        The intensity suggests desperation. By many accounts the Saudi ground war against the Houthi rebels (said to be Iran's surrogets) in Yemen is not going well, turned into a stale-mate on the ground. Its horrors are part of the Trump-Bibi Netanyahu-John Bolton pathological obsession with Iran as Middle East monster. Zeid bin al-Hussein, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, cites Nietzsche's observation that if you set out to fight monsters you have to be careful you do not turn into a monster yourself. Eighteen thousand bombing runs should surely qualify.

        The coalition that Saudi Arabia (a Sunni Arab nation)--plus the U. S. and Israel--has cobbled together is a wobbly fertile crescent composed of Sunni followers scattered from Lebanon through Iraq and into Afghanistan, but these demographics don't really work. In addition to Shiite Iran, Shia Muslims make up the majority of the civilian population in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan and of course irony of ironies in Syria which is 70 percent Sunni, but they're the enemy!

        Iran, on the other hand continues to conform to the inspection requirements of the nuclear accord of 2015 that Trump has now abrogated and the EU opposes the Trump/Pompeo/Netanyahu strategy against Iran.  

        There's more woe for the Trump-Pompeo strategy: including the circumspective and arms length attitude of both Turkey and Russia; while not exactly waiting in the wings there is also China-already on station in the Middle East with many lucrative development contracts. A very imperfect union indeed.

        Hence the night flight last Wednesday by Secretary of State Pompeo to Riyad to meet with King Salman and his Princely CEO, Mohammid bin Salman was not to solve the hideous murder of Jamal Kashoggi, but to prevent further damage to this Trump/Israeli inspired strategy to destroy Iran. Far more important, it was to keep the biggest military and development contracts in the world in U. S. hands. Briefly summarized by the by the New York Times today (10/20/18):

• "Saudi Arabia is pouring $20 billion into a new investment fund run by Wall Street's Blackstone Group. The French oil giant Total just inked a nine-billion-euro petrochemical deal with the kingdom. The British defense company BAE Systems is selling 48 Typhoon combat jets to Riyadh for an estimated five billion British pounds...."
• "In the last decade, Saudi Arabia was awarded $138.9 billion in potential military contracts under the United States' Foreign Military Sales rules, according to the Congressional Research Service. American companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, not to mention President Trump, are salivating over recent Saudi pledges to buy nearly $110 billion worth of arms in coming years. Much of that commitment has yet to be fulfilled....
• "And that's just spending on weaponry. Saudi Arabia has also dished out billions in fees to American and European banks for advising on business deals. The kingdom bought around $20 billion worth of American products last year, including Ford autos and Boeing jets.
• "Riyadh also sealed $15 billion in deals with General Electric for goods and services in areas like power generation, mining and health care. And the oil giants can't possibly walk away from one of the world's biggest producer. American start-ups have benefited from the largess, as Saudi Arabia became their biggest source of capital last year. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund recently invested $1 billion in Lucid, a competitor to Elon Musk's Tesla car company, and $3.5 billion in Uber.

So you see it's all about the money.

        In the meantime, half of the American religious community remains captive to the power symbols of Trumpian evangelicalism because it is so American, therefore so right with God! The other half, the liberals-with notable exceptions-continue too often deaf to the cries of hundreds of children dying in Yemen or drowning in the Mediterranean or being separated from their parents at our southern border. At two liberal congregations this writer observed in the past week not a word was spoken about the growing savagery. It is to weep.

 

The Descent

        As the Fall leaves change color and the first rains in six months fall in California the nation continues its descent. Like Dante's Inferno there is a place in hell for all of us from the Prayer Book's "things we've left undone" to Dante's indictment of any "who have perverted their human intellect and committed fraud or malice against their fellowman."

        There was a lot of that last week as the Congress despoiled public confidence in itself and in the Supreme Court, which Nicholas Kristoff reminds us now has one-third of its male members credibly accused of sexual misconduct (NY Times 10/7/18). 

        Part of this calamity can be put at the feet of the Techno-oligarchs, those supposedly friendly billionaires who lead Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. whose communication networks are changing the life forms of planet earth in a way that substitutes technological wizardry for lived human experience and feeling. Their algorithms miniaturize sensibilities so that people are unable to muster responses to their surroundings that range from the horrifying suffering of tens of thousands of immigrants to the humiliation of sexual violence.

       The path for the rise to legitimacy of the Oligarchs is now well laid out in this Republican triumph at the Supreme Court and in its control not only of the of the Senate but of two-thirds of state governorships and twenty-six state legislatures (as previously reported in this bog).

        There's much more to this "friendly fascism," as some have called it, than meets the eye. Above and beyond even the Silicon barons is the growing idea advanced by the Koch brothers, the Cato Institute and American Heritage Foundation (among others) that celebrates liberty as an entitlement of only a distinct and virtuous minority--the owners of wealth and production--whose rights are considered greater than the rights of a majority of citizens. Thus in 2010 in its Citizens United decision the Supreme Court defined wealth as a form of speech to be protected by the First Amendment. 

        This view is by no means an outlier but has been at the heart of the Republican leadership's perspective since at least 2012.

In a new book, "Democracy in Chains," Historian Nancy MacLean at Duke University describes why, in this view, Democracy must be modified to protect the owners of capital from the "tyranny of the majority." 

"Democracy is inimical to economic liberty," she reports. Protecting the liberty of the wealthy and powerful is of greater importance to the nation than the rights of the less affluent.

        MacLean's Democracy in Chains and Dark Money by Jane Mayer make clear that the direction of the Trump/Republican machine is drawing on and reintroducing the principle of chattel slavery to justify its moral legitimacy; just as slaveholders considered themselves the virtuous minority called by God to govern an unruly African slave majority, it is now intended that this rule should govern policies today such as privatization of education and the right to eliminate union power. In this light the Supreme Court is now positioned to be the Grand Inquisitor and representative for the interests of Oligarchs.

        Which is why faith communities must reconsider themselves: not as great leaders and great congregations inspiring the rest of the world, but as outliers, underground institutions; failures at entrepreneurship, losers in the universe of algorithms. The humble mission for people of the Books is to spend less time reciting their memoirs and more time taking down these reigning demons.   We can look at Isaiah, Jesus and ML King for inspiration.

         The demonic truth is that the Democrats' lead may have largely evaporated with the triumph of Trump and Kavanaugh. The Republicans will almost certainly keep control of the Senate; a Democrat sweep of the House is no longer assured. The economy is booming; Trump is ascendant again.

 

It all now hangs on the size of voter turnout.

        There is still time to redeem the time being; meaning in this very moment and over the next four weeks the time is come to prod and inspire aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents--your neighbors included--to vote in the midterm elections. Rocket science is not required to know that such efforts can bear fruit. The Pew Research Center reports only 40 percent of eligible voters turn out for midterm elections. The good news is that a full-on effort can move the needle.

        Perhaps another great outlier of history can offer inspiration: Joan of Arc, who in Jean Anhouil's play about her--named The Lark--was portrayed with her underlying innocence and confidence about life. Just so, she claimed that God had told her to resist the decades of foreign occupation and political corruption. "Saint Michael said that I had to climb this mountain of icy injustice even if I tore my hands and my face ran with blood. God wants to see action first," she cried.

       Political campaign experts say it takes seven contacts to get an infrequent voter to the polls. Climb this icy mountain toward a more just society. It's our job.

Your Time is Come!

        Last March the White House reported to Congress that the U. S. is engaged in seven wars: in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Niger. There is also the war Trump's foreign policy leaders John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, along with Israel, are avidly promoting with Iran, hopefully before the coming elections. Which is why, contrary to the talking heads of cable networks, it's not the scandals, security clearances or collusion with Russia that may determine the outcome of the November elections. The wars are a boon to military contractors and suppliers located in dozens of congressional districts across the country. War creates jobs, creates money.  

        While it all costs taxpayers trillions its appeal to voters is that it articulates the myth of American greatness and righteousness and is therefore key to the Trump and Republican machine's power to win the November elections after all.

        This two-headed myth of American innocence and American righteousness is a "religion" more than half the country follows in spite of the current wars' unspeakable tragic human realities: hundreds of thousands of non-combatants--men, women and children--have died and hundreds more are dying each passing week (more than one hundred last week by suicide bombers in Ghazni, Kabul and Nangahar). Such slaughter has nevertheless come to be thought of as part of the great battle righteous America is waging against the forces of evil.

        This false religion prevails even when it savages American soldiers implementing the strategies of Generals that in a dozen years in Afghanistan have added up to nothing. One combat brigade's nine month experience was

"sixty-five soldiers died. Four hundred seventy-seven wounded, 60 percent of those so badly they had to be medically retired for life...included thirty-three single, double or triple amputees." [Directorate S by Steve Cole]

        The first task of this Fall's vigorous young candidates for Congress seeking to unsubscribe from the nation's popular war mythology begins with confronting the sorry fact of the politically opportunistic, nearly unanimous, bi-partisan support congresspersons voted supporting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Each became graveyards of immense slaughter, and while thousands of American soldiers died, millions of Vietnamese and Iraqi people perished. This is the world our new generation of candidates have to change if elected. T. S. Elliot once wrote

Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just...

No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.  

                                                    [The Shield of Achilles]

 

        Such is the blind visage and practice of American politics that makes the second task for our new generation of candidates, and ours, indispensible: to recover the lost language of moral reflection and prophetic outcry destroyed by both political manipulation and the tepid theologies that are common parlance in today's mainstream faith communities.

        Christians, especially, are addicted to comforting doctrines of grace and the magical atonement of Jesus that undermines their own agency and responsibility to directly and personally engage now in the struggle against the nation's growing totalitarianism. De-mything American delusions of grandeur requires explicit treatment and is critical to the outcome of the November elections.

        The role of Interfaith and human rights coalitions is crucial. Having together embraced the universal rights of all humankind they can be a new and indispensible third force in the next 12 weeks. In this crisis their moment has come. Sikhs, Buddhists, Democratic Socialists, Muslims, Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics et al must help win this Fall's election contest for the new generation of democratically-oriented candidates.

        Playwright Jean Giradeau created the role of the "ragpicker" in The Madwoman of Chaillot to explain to her how in the post WW II world all human values had been reduced to selling, to pimpery. If re-written for today's immense crisis the rag picker might say "Madam, the high purpose of God is not to save your sad derriere, but to establish justice."

 

A God for All People

       For the new generation of democratic party candidates seeking to part the waters and seize the House in next November's Midterms their first trial, if elected, will be finding food and water in a political wilderness. All the issues the politics of governments around the world have been either too slow-footed to address or have considered not their responsibility will comprise the mission impossible new Congressional incumbents will face.

        The context appears immediately overwhelming and includes from day one the globalized economy of familiar giants--the US and Europe--plus the emerging giant powers India and China; not to mention the banditry of kleptocracies in Russia, the Western Pacific basin, parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. 

         Here at home, all the familiar local bullying and blackmail will be operational, that includes self-interested faith groups, a technology driven economy and rising patriotic fervor. Any spirit of one worldism will be a still small voice.

        That's why the interfaith movement has a huge role to play in blocking religious nationalism. It's been a hundred years since the leading liberal Christian theologian in Germany wrote Kaiser Wilhelm II's declaration of war speech for him, but the spirit of Adolph von Harnack lives on in today's Christian evangelicalism, Jewish Zionism and the extreme Muslim movements.

        The reform political movement reflected in rising young candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needs a god for all peoples. It also needs to know and remember a hard era in 1948 when a woman, Eleanor Roosevelt, would throw her weight behind the great Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948.

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.... Now, therefore, The General Assembly Proclaims....a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations...to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance."

        This secular statement needs fresh iteration in problem statements that define the real task facing political reformers. Political analyst John Lanchester puts it boldly this way:

"What if the governments of the developed world turned to their electorates and explicitly said this is the deal....we're living in a competitive global system, there are billions of desperately poor people in the world, and in order for their standards of living to improve, ours will have to decline in relative terms....we should accept that on moral grounds we've been rich enough for long enough to be able to share some of the proceeds of prosperity with our brothers and sisters....or we can just let divides [of inequality] widen until societies fall apart." [London Review of Books, July 5, 2018]

        We're getting close to such a civilizational demise because denominations and sects are still calcified in illusions of their righteous patriotism. This is food for the power politics President Trump is practicing at NATO this week. But it's not just Trump. The spirit of von Harnack flows ecumenically in American veins. Flags fly even as blood flows from hundreds of innocent people perishing under U. S. made weaponry in Yemen, courtesy of our non-democratic ally Saudi Arabia.

        Which is why a stern critical acuemen requires taking several big public policy reforms after the November elections. Analyst Lanchester puts the agenda for the Ocasio-Cortezes this way:

• Hidden wealth must be uncovered--economist Gabriel Zuchman, reports that the assets of the super rich hidden off-shore to avoid taxation amount to $8.7 trillion, "a significant fraction of all planetary wealth." This practice must be blocked by international agreement with the US and Europe leading the way but to the benefit of the public needs of every nation.
• The wealth of the global top ten percent of the population must be redistributed in the form of various public subsidies to enable all other peoples to have a life. Branko Milanović, author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation calls for government policies focused on education, lifelong training, and redistribution through the tax and benefits system. The absurdity of high-tech workers earning six figure incomes but unable to buy a home must be heavily re-compensated.

        The task of the new younger political leadership is to teach why enacting these reforms means a more stable life for the entire human community. The task of the interfaith community as well as the older denominations is to make it plain that this is God's work.

Trinity II

This week's immigration crisis can help us come to grips with the global migration problem at its origins. That is, grasping capitalism's twenty-first century persistent contribution to growing inequality and its corruption of both democratic and faith-based institutions.  

       

       Anecdotal evidence abounds as resentment about local migration metastasizes into growing nationalism and religious language is used in support of making America great again. It's visible in Trump's phone calls to Hungary's Viktor Orban--where helping a migrant has just been made a criminal offense-and where Trump's ally Steve Bannon has been traveling urging on Europe's swing toward Right wing parties'; or in Trump's affection for tyrants in the Philippines, Russia and Turkey. Most ominous, is the emerging White House plan to hold tens of thousands of migrants crossing the U. S. southern border to escape impoverishment and violence at camps on U. S. military bases (Concentration Camps?).  

       

         According to the the UN Global Migration Report, 2017, the largest number of international migrants (50 million) resides in the United States....and is growing.   The centrist Council on Foreign Relations on June 18th 2018 warned that

"if mismanaged, irregular and forced migrants will outnumber regular migrants, putting millions of people and democratic values in grave peril....creating mass humanitarian catastrophes, modern slavery, and human trafficking, and could contribute to the demise of the liberal international order altogether."

       

        It's already happening. Two hundred more refugees drowned in the Mediterranean this week and hundreds more have been rescued but are blocked from landing safely in Italy or elsewhere.   At the U. S. Southern border hundreds of children have been stripped from parental hands and New York City's Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo were startled to learn that dozens of these refuge children had been shipped 2500 miles from the U. S. Southern border to, of all places, New York City!

       

        The fundamentally dangerous question illuminated by the global migration crisis has to do with the diminishing usefulness of people--for thousands of years a source of chattel labor serving landed princes and plantation managers who needed their cotton or strawberries picked and their pyramids and temples built in honor of themselves. 

         While modern era migrants over the last two hundred years were bargaining chips in the struggle of corporations to meet their man/womanpower needs, this usefulness began to decline seventy years ago as automation reduced the number of workers need for manufacturing. Decline accelerated as Central Banks made decisions to abandon Chicago, Youngstown and Pittsburgh in favor of better investment opportunities around the globe; and the age of techno-capitalism dawned as Apple poured its production into the Foxconn system that created whole towns in China and Vietnam with tens of thousands of computer assemblers housed together, disregarding hundreds of thousands of jobs needed by lower middle class American workers in the U. S.

        It is all of these "left behind" who are the base for demagogues like a Hitler or a Trump. "Humans continues to demand justice and an order in which they can live," wrote the classics scholar William Arrowsmith about Athenian democracy,

"Take away hope and men and women forfeit their humanity, destroyed by the hideous gap between their illusion and intolerable reality."

        Trump's demagoguery is based in the despair of millions of workers left behind who see him as their last and only hope. His deliberate ironic effect is to feed the deep cultural isolation and resentment of working people by aping their rough-hewed resentment of their victimization, luring them to support the very policies that make their dislocation from the work force worse every day.

        Fareed Zakaria, another centrist, wrote this week in the Washington Post of June 22nd about "an era of rampant globalization [where] people want to believe that they still maintain some sense of stability and control."

Between the ascendance of science, socialism and secularism, people [have]lost their trust in the dogmas and duties of religion. But this didn't change the reality that they wanted something they could believe in, something with which they could have a deep, emotional bond."

       

        Cass Sunstein, University Professor at Harvard writes cautiously about the relevance of the Hitler similarity:

...we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s....but some depictions of Hitler's rise [focus] more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them.

This Summer's learning academies should observe how the recent mass shootings have slipped into the background and how the main line church folks are slumbering on their vacations....while we're nearing a metaphorical "Trinity," not the holy one, but the one that blew up in Alamogordo in 1945.

World Without Words

Whether the remaining fragments of our moral capacity are to be obliterated by the compulsion to build driverless cars and colonize Mars or to be drowned in the fanaticism of Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism the effect is the same, the destruction of language, the power of the word to tell about the distinction between the human and inhumane.

       The Trump era--insipid, vulgar, full of lies--is enabled by the dominant motif of our civilization, its bleak logic of political necessity, that generates wars the world around and concentrates wealth that destroys this city and creates that one. A Trumpian world brings into sharper focus what is at stake. Language as the baseline for human expression is at-risk, words as the baseline for the honesty of our experience and the power of our imagination is under threat.

       The Chronicle of Higher Education delves into the Silicon Valley necrosis in a Special Report citing the flagship campus of the University of Illinois and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., where Illinois is pairing majors in the liberal arts-for example anthropology and linguistics-with computer science; and Assumption is eliminating traditional majors in favor of ones geared to practical skills. "Goodbye art history, geography and, yes, the classics. Hello, data analytics, actuarial science and concentrations in physical therapy," writes Frank Bruni,

"The University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors; Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with "clear career pathways."   [Frank Bruni writing in "Aristotle's Wrongful Death," NY Times, May 26, 2018]

         As the tech giants take-over our vocabulary, substituting data and technocratic ingenuity for words, the capacity for moral reasoning thickens and fogs over as in the global immigration crisis.

        Take the "Windrush" scandal in Britain: Immigrants from the Caribbean were brought on a ship by that name to England legally after WW II to fill its labor shortage. They are now betrayed by PM Theresa May's strategy to make it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. Because the Home Office destroyed their landing papers, after forty years the Caribbean legal immigrants have found themselves to have become illegal. Lost in a maze of bureaucratic paperwork.... "some of the rules are so complicated, and the financial cost of navigating them so high, that people are unable to discover or prove their status conclusively, no matter how hard they try." Harrowing stories have emerged of individuals being made homeless, jobless and stateless...., after they failed to produce proof they were never given in the first place....Not only has the politics become delusional....our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry, writes William Davies in the London Rview of Books of May 10th.

When home secretaries speak of 'illegal immigrants', they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of 'borders', they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible.

       Just so, our own U. S. government's immigration ploys, implicitly supported by The Rev. Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism and his Project Blitz perfectly reflect this emerging world of language as manipulation and chicanery. 

        Project Blitz is deliberately designed to throw the legislative process in local states into chaos by clogging their agendas. Americans United for Separation of Church and State have found that more than 70 bills before state legislatures appear to be based on Project Blitz templates or have similar objectives. Some of the bills are progressing rapidly.

An Oklahoma measure...awaiting the governor's signature, allows adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate on the basis of their own religious beliefs. Others, such as a Minnesota bill that would allow public schools to post "In God We Trust" signs on their walls, have provoked hostile debates in local and national media, which is in many cases the point of the exercise. [Katherine Stewart, NY Times, May 26, 2018]

       These machinations are no side show to be ignored by those who still hold to an antique faith about God as inseperable from moral imperative. The battle to save words and the meaning of the Word is entering the late rounds. Examples abound:

       The accelerating strangulation of individual rights in the workplace with the recent Supreme Court ruling blocking class actions by employees for the relief of their grievances now forces them to seek arbitration one by one. You can find the same requirement in the small print in most contracts we sign in daily life. You'll have to have a large pocket book to afford a legal action seeking relief from Macys because not only are no class actions permitted, you even agreed to this small print when you signed-on.  Apparently meaningless words become demonic as they are turned against human rights and dignity.

        It is not to be doubted that STEM-based education and a turn to the worship of totalitarian religion has great political utility. Only the kids who know what it's like to be shot at and the communal oriented religious and labor movements remain to resist. That's a large number, of course, but only if we animate it with words that say what we mean about truth and justice.

Alzheimers in Gaza

        Only a new Rosetta Stone can exegete this week's Gaza horror. All the historical facts, all the political expediencies, all the killing and brutalities have been well know and documented for years but like Shelly's "Ozimandias" seem lost in a dessert, unremembered.  Way back in 2006, all of twelve years ago Henry Siegman, a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress told a truth few in the U. S. want to hear today:

"the problem is that....there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state, primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of allowing such a state to come into being."

         Why such historical Altzheimers? Shelly's poem aimed at a fearful British government that had suspended Habeus Corpus and could point today as well to our American civilization become dessert-like and without memory, making do in advance of murder with a foreplay of self-interests, religious escapism, and a media fog claiming everything has two sides.

          Israeli PM Netanyahu today never contests that Israel has deliberately moved 800,000 Israeli citizens into settlements all over the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem; proclaiming without apology what Siegman had described in 2006:

"No government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible."

       Ahud Barak was on PBS last week explaining, just in case everyone didn't know about Hamas and the Palestinians,"they're the bad guys." While PBS subsequently pulled the interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister from its replays website, it was a declaration ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent (the old Ivory soap ad) of Americans are sure is true.   On the contrary Siegman reported that the then Hamas leader Mohammed Ghazahad rejected the tenets of Islamic religious extremism. "The Koran is not Hamas' charter.... 

"we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions....I don't think there will be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis."It is a sentiment echoed by Hasan Yousif, the Hamas leader in the West Bank [from] an Israeli jail: "We have accepted the principle of accepting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders."

        In 2005 when Prime Minister Arial Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza as cover for his creation of large settler towns in the West Bank like Har Homa and Kiryat Arba, World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, himself a Jew, spent 11 months in Gaza as the Middle East envoy of the Quartet (United States, Russia, European Union and the United Nations). 

 In a 2017 reflection with Haartez he remembered a more hopeful moment of seeing the Gaza greenhouses with the Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas

.

"and looking at the fruits and everything, and there was a joyous atmosphere: 'Boy, we're about to get this going and we're going to have hotels by the beaches and we're going to have tourism and it's going to be fantastic...' and the Palestinians really know how to be hosts."

       The euphoria lasted only nine months. The Israelis blocked all the border crossings out of Gaza demanding lengthy terror-proofing:

"Everything was rotting because you couldn't get the fruit [to market]. And if you went to the border, as I did many times, and saw tomatoes and fruit just being dumped on the side of the road...."

       In this 2017 reflection Wolfensohn told another truth to Haaretz, that powerful forces in the U.S. administration were working behind his back.

"They [the U. S.] did not believe in the border terminals agreement that would have brought Gaza's abundance to market and wanted to undermine his status as the Quartet's emissary...."

         He shared with Haaretz that the official behind this policy was Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative who was appointed deputy national security adviser in charge of disseminating democracy in the Middle East but "every aspect of that agreement was abrogated" said Wolfenson.   Abrahms today is a close advisor to the Trump White House from his post as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. 

       Caught in a dessert of lies and lost truths the American nation and many others need a Rosetta Stone that can inform democratic discernment. Jim Wall, former editor of "The Christian Century" magazine underlines in his blog "Wallwritings" the tepid attitude of U. S. media to protect itself by reporting both sides.  In a month of slaughter with more than 2,000 Gazans killed and wounded and zero Israeli casualties there are not two sides; only the fact of the killing with more probably on the way. Gaza is a terrible outdoor prison kept in situ by U. S. foreign policy, taxpayer dollars and Israel's intention to take over all of what is left of the Palestinian West Bank.  

Regicide II

        It's now possible to foresee that the nation faces a likely Trump presidency until 2024. The script is clear enough: Just in time, a conservative Supreme Court nominee may replace a retiring or dying jurist enabling a conservative court that could block any impeachment proceedings or indictments however concocted; a perceived PR triumph in Korea or Iran, or both, will swell the Trump base. Constant warfare helps, and with the economy booming the presumed Democratic takeover of the House next November could slip away.

       It's not all bad news. With our brilliant techno-society caught in an unintended whirlpool of inequality and justice-focused faith communities struggling for reinvention a six year hiatus in the catacombs could be a gift.  Time for rethinking and learning.  

       The first stage of that learning platform will be to understand that the Age of Trump is only a placeholder for the larger tyrannies of markets and powerful elites that have always subverted democratic practice. Most people know this instinctively from their own experience with politics as manipulation. 

        Six years underwater offer opportunities to organize new waves of critical thinking latent in lived experience. Like the innovative proposals in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society--just published by Princeton University Press. Defining property as inherently monopolistic, authors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl suggest determining ownership through public auctions and distributing voting power through a system of shares. If you own six shares you can strategically distribute your preferences, instead of one person one vote. No, it's not socialism. It's a new line of thinking that deserves careful analysis. 

        Important clarifications of both faith and technology are in order during this six years living underground. The Christians are notorious for folding in the fourth quarter, at exactly the point where dreams of resurrection offer an escape from the thicket where love requires justice. For many reasons other faith communities also have trouble universalizing that connection.

       

       Then there are those other religions. Atlantic Magazine correspondent Franklin Foer challenges the dominion of Silicon Valley in World Without End: The Existential Threat of Big Tech(Penguin Press) citing the tyrannical potential of the big five technology giants (Google, Amazon, etc). The growing clamor in the tech world against hierarchy--not always as smart or as creative as claimed--especially male hierarchy, is a sign of hope; the sound perhaps of constructive revolution against life defined as data boiling up from the bottom of the pyramid.

       There are precedents. Four hundred years ago devout Puritans like poet John Milton threw themselves heedlessly into Cromwell's 1645 revolution whose goal was to end the tyranny of kings and conform daily life and governance to the purposes of God. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexcercised" Milton would write,

"that never sallies out to see her adversary, but slinks away from the race that must be run not without dust and heat. " 

        He experienced plenty of both writing book-length "pamphlets" aimed at balky Parliaments and at Charles I's acusstomed tyrannies. Supporting a New Model Army that sang hymns going into battle, the reformers pursued nothing less than "regicide," the head of the king; and while they did put him to the axe the Royalist spirit of domination by the fittest survived and still does to this day. 

       Milton ended up imprisoned and on a track that for a time threatened to use the same axe on him. In the end, for better and for worse, the Puritans changed the world spreading some good seed, but the worst part of their creation became  the global-wide systems of domination that claim to be "doing God's will" as Goldman Sach's CEO, Lloyd Blankfine, likes to put it. 

       Regicide II is a kairos time, perhaps as long as six years, when we may have opportunity to think well and deeply and faithfully toward an end to all killing. That would be time well spent. 

Almost Breaking the World

         Luis Buñuel's 1962 satirical film "The Exterminating Angel" has been refreshed this year by Thomas Ades' operatic version at a time when the plot seems pointedly allegorical.  It tells of a group of elegant guests who attend a formal dinner party then discover they cannot leave at the end of the evening. They bed down for the night but in the morning, inexplicably, they are still unable to leave. Days pass, desperation grows, one man dies, a young couple commit suicide. Near the climax a herd of white sheep and a wild bear break in. The guests are freed from their terror only after they figure out how it all began.

        This nightmare is recognizable in the Syrian, Iraq and Afghan wars. As described concerning Syria by the UN High Commissioner for refugees, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein

"we have seen every conceivable atrocity being committed by most parties to the conflict... and it started from a severe violation of human rights and the rights of children. And from there, we have a crisis that is almost breaking the world in a very real, real sense."

       There is nothing more painful than the struggle of Americans to cope with their entanglement in this nightmare, for instance in Raqqa, where ISIS was embedded and where a report from the Washington Post tells of 11,000 to 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged under U.S.-led airstrikes, where "the sentiment...is increasingly that the U.S. took part in this destruction, but is not taking responsibility for fixing it, for cleaning it up."

    

        As metaphor "The Exterminating Angel" pushes past our familiar historical landscape that documents the marriage of religion and political power, or the dominance of the wealthy one percent who define it as their godly reward. Even though millions of Americans have disabused themselves that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq made any sense the barriers to the next step seem to trap present generations, inexplicably blocking a path to find an alternative to mass destruction of the innocent.  

       This palpable pain and anxiety over the absence of a way forward has many sources that need uncovering if people are to find a way back to health: a toxic mixture of Protestant utopianism, tribal self-interest, Catholic atonement and Silicon Valley-style comfort is deeply embraced as a subconscious revealed secular religion: that the main purpose of societies is to accumulate and prosper against all others, usually understood as our enemies.

       After the guests are set free in The Exterminating Angel," they decide to attend a Te Deum in thankfulness for their freedom but find they are trapped once again inside the cathedral as chaos breaks out everywhere and finally the same flock of sheep enters the Cathedral as gunfire is heard. 

        In this surrealist drama let us say that the sheep represent the world's innocent who perish all around us; and let us say that because our pretty services and solemn assemblies are not focused on these millions in desperate need around the world, that it is not surreal at all to realize our world is breaking, and on a local and global scale. The answer is that a new mobilization never seen before is now necessary to break new paths of life and freedom for all.  That will mean a new era of consciousness-raising among us to clarify that the lies and illusions that demand our devotion must be dashed in pieces.

Bare Ruined Choirs

        As the USA's democracy project sinks further into chaos each day, the high school gun reformers are receiving a free graduate education about its fault lines. The cocktail of claimed virtue (read James Comey), received religion, imperial military power, irrepressible sex, and Wall Street influence peddling, provide a priceless learning curve. Lesson one is the gun violence issue is already off the table. Lesson two is that since no one has constructed plausible solutions to this mess young generations are going to have to build them from the ground up.

        If there's to be summer school this year it better be spent on that construction project. The ground is littered with lessons and obstacles. In Silicon Valley amidst all its riches inequality is growing. In 2014 the top 5 percent of the population earned an annual $428,729, increasing by an additional $60,686 in 2016 alone, while the earnings of the lowest 20 percent increased only $1,726. [Silicon Valley Index 2018].

        Social critic Pankaj Mishra characterizes this new reality where "the old style racial segregation has been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution." 

         Alongside this is the modern illness that confuses data with moral principles. This digital mythic obsession, with its big paydays, can be fairly described as the replacement for religion's tendency toward magical thinking. Since everyone is quoting Reinhold Niebuhr these days the irony he often pointed to is in this case the hard reality that the people shooting at young people may be the closest thing to being their allies.

        Such unfathomable truth at least provides clues J.K. Rowling could appreciate including what witchery led us to accept that economic growth would magically cure inequality. In Republican legislatures across the country this absurdity is being laid to rest as tax cuts for the rich impoverish state budgets.  

        Youthful political practitioners should note how denial often corrupts perception. We can note that the evil of Native American genocide is only cured by not remembering; that the continuing evil of racial segregation is often cured by blindness; that the deterioration of life in jobless communities cannot be cured except by Darwinian fantasies about survival of the fittest. The old fascist dream is risen again.

         Shakespeare gives proportion to the stakes in the loss of democratic practices:

That time of year...When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang....

Which by and by black night doth take away.

        As it turns out then, to get gun control requires the major revolution that the resignation of the Republican party leader Paul Ryan may foretell. Meaning new generations whose illusions have been shredded by bullets turning unabashedly to a lifetime of political engagement, fortified by the sure and certain truth that to share the next meal the whole community must decide. 

        Neither wizards, nor miracles, nor data can replace that common good. Until then the men and women here and around the world who need a share of our bread will be shooting.  

 

[Shakespeare Sonnett 73]