Epiphany Games

         The scene last Friday----the date of the traditional January 6th Feast of the Epiphany----seemed out of season when citizens were asked to view the government's secret "intelligence" leaders as truth-speakers. How can one forget their record of over throwing governments, arming Central American dictatorships and fabricating evidence of Sadam Hussein's WMDs?   The spy report appeared more like the last stand of an Ancien Régime than an expose' of Putin hacking the nation's political campaign (which was not news); and it seemed to play the dual role of trying to curb the incoming rambunctious Trump team (so the spy masters could stay in power?) while at the same time leaving the most serious issues of our era unmentioned: vast inequality, refugees, and capitalism itself.

          Everywhere except in the U. S. growing social instability is ascribed to the impact of capitalism in creating inequality and increasingly destroying the hopes and dreams of people around the world whose future in a globalized and technologized era seems ended; the stuff of which paving  stones and crowds sprayed by gunfire is made. 

           Adam Tooze at the Columbia University Department of History links the critical writing of Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Stiglitz about capitalism with Sociologist Wolfgang Streek, former head of the prestigious Max Planck institute (London Review of Books, January 5, 2017) writing that with the current direction of capitalism

We should expect ever intensifying stagnation, inequality, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and the escalating risk of major war, all of this accompanied by a pervasive erosion of social order, a generalised social entropy.

       There is another even more important foundation to capitalism's reign. These secular corruptions are matched by the corrupt role faith communities play in legitimating market forces and outcomes. This is the problem mentioned in our last blog: patriotism equated with divine purpose, power confused with justice. Most followers of the Christian tradition practice it as an other-worldly faith that excuses believers from criticism of economic and political events; the very stuff out of which Jesus' kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven" is made. 

         The corruption of this vision is a silence that lends legitimacy to the reign of capitalist economics.  Jewish and Islamic tribalism play their own corrupting role in diverting attention away from their greatest traditions that equate God with justice and truth for all peoples.  According to Professor Streeck

we have since the 1970s been living in....a 'post-social society ... a society lite'. We cope individually with conditions of increasing uncertainty, while at the macro level both society and economy become increasingly ungovernable. 'Life in a society of this kind...demands constant improvisation, forcing individuals to substitute strategy for structure, and offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age.'

        This week Donald Trump and his cabinet of capitalists will try to increase their grip on us. Senate Republicans intend to jam through the President-elect's cabinet appointments without accounting for or vetting these billionaires' financial affairs, which if left in place may compromise formation of a multitude of foreign and domestic U. S. policies. But are these not already compromised by the corrupt practice of revolving doors between government agency leaders and the comfortable Christianity of people with money in their pockets and bank accounts?   Professor Streek again:

What makes capitalism toxic is its expansiveness, its relentless colonisation of the rest of society.... It undermines the family units on which the reproduction of labour depends; it consumes nature; it commodifies money, which to function has to rest on a foundation of social trust. For its own good, capitalism needs political checks....We should be bracing ourselves for a prolonged and agonising decomposition of the entire social fabric.

         A friend, Rev. Jerry Fox, reminded me of Hannah Arendt's warning about The Origins of Totalitarianism:

"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it...In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies."

         What the Magi were looking for at their first Epiphany was a new day.  It should be the faith communities' vocation to bring about that new day, an Epiphany in the real world without games. 

The Rest of the Iceberg

        While the arrival of the age of Trump is a coup of startling proportions it’s the tip of an iceberg whose larger impact will be an even greater shock. The Trump presidency reflects the end of faith-based confidence in progress, a myth that died as the steel mills closed; but in his cabinet choices—such as Exxon Mobile’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State—it provides cover for tyrannies that if institutionalized in the U. S. can usher in an age of fascism.

 

        Our government already operates this way in Asia and Africa in league with giant U. S owned oil corporations.  The Trump election foretells a change of world historical importance because of huge first world populations paralyzed in their life journeys by technology, automation and globalization. In the under-developed world studies cited by Steve Coll in his book about the Exxon Mobile empire found that standards of living decline and infant deaths rise after the oil money flows.  New rebels born of this disaster are already producing the earth-shaking events of Isis, Brexit, the rise of far Right fascism in Europe, and the precipitous decline of social and political participation that the Democratic party and unions used to stand for in the U S.

         Take something as basic as housing:  two-thirds of the U. S. population now has a growing inability to afford housing for their families. The National Association of Realtors In August 2016 reported the median single-family price in San Jose was $1,000,000; in San Francisco, $835,400; in New York City $748,000. If necessary regulatory policies are needed they will face not only the new Trump regime and a Republican Congress but Republican control in 32 of the 48 states. Democracy advocates in the U. S. now face learning how to breathe in this new atmosphere where policy debates over issues like government regulation will be controlled by Trump and the Republicans.

        The imagined moral atmosphere in the U. S. has the strange configuration not only of southern constituencies tied to both endemic inequality and religious piety but abroad reflect extreme versions of socially acceptable private piety practiced while empowering local dictatorships. In Private Empire: Exxon Mobile and American Power, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Coll reports that the retired executive of Exxon Mobile, Lee Raymond, enlarged that company’s earnings from oil and gas investments in Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere around the world to the proportions of empire while diligently practicing his religion in the Methodist Church. His successor, Rex Tillison, a devout Roman Catholic who arranged private mass for himself and others while visiting Muslim nations and making lucrative deals with governments such as Equatorial Guinea. 

         The UN reports less than half of the population has access to clean drinking water and that 20% of children die before reaching the age of five.

Equatorial Guinea arbitrarily detains and tortures critics, disregards elections, and has faced international prosecution for using oil profits to enrich the president’s family….the director of the watchdog organization EG Justice, said that by doing business in Equatorial Guinea, Exxon Mobil was complicit in reinforcing President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo — a strongman who has held office since 1979.

The New York Times on December 13^th 2016 reported

“The country's authoritarian government has one of the worst human rights records in the world, consistently ranking among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights.^[12] Reporters Without Borders ranks President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo among its "predators" of press freedom.…"Equatorial Guinea is a source and destination for women and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking." The report rates Equatorial Guinea as a "Tier 3" country, the lowest (worst) ranking. (NY Times December 13, 2016)

What has kept all this afloat for so long in the U. S. is composed of a mixture of a vague cultural Christianity that believes in progress and the time lag of doomed expectations. That’s the hardest link to part with—that faith equals patriotism and brings the money to support a family.  In the new age now arriving only a home and a job will count for anything.  

The Marionettes of Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it all Ended (First Draft)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bankruptcy Proceedings

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

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

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

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

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

The Reckoning

        Two days after the elections the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, wrote to all of his subscribers:

 "After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?"

        Sulzberger never answers his own question (the answer is yes!) but with the Times only weeks away from downsizing its own news room-as has been previously announced-his  unusual letter seems to express the palpable fear that print media is rapidly approaching a terminal condition; threatening to bring us all to the day of a vanished democracy because citizens are increasingly informed only by Twitter-style one liners.  Such a development is as difficult to absorb as Donald Trump's election and may be more dangerous than his election.

        David Lieberman of USA Today writes about the "fear of losing all-important subscribers to its print and digital editions at a time of plummeting advertising revenue and challenges from online news venues."  There are signs all around.  Some newspapers were hit with waves of subscriber cancellations in September after they endorsed Secretary Clinton.   Lieberman reports "at least one city - possibly San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis or Cleveland - likely will soon lose its last daily newspaper.  It "could be a lot more widespread than people have been predicting," says Mike Simonton, who tracks media debt for Fitch Ratings. "It's hard to ignore that possibility as the pace of newspaper closings accelerates."

"Starting Wednesday, Hearst's 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer survives as a scaled-down online publication offering mostly commentary. That leaves The Seattle Times as the city's only major paper-and-ink daily.  Gannett...parent of USA TODAY, may shutter the 140-year-old Tucson Citizen, which competes with the Arizona Daily Star, if a buyer can't be found."   

 

        Cable TV has a different but related affliction. Its fierce pursuit of viewers led it to bet heavily on expert panels who were often demonstrably inexpert. Except for a few panelists from the Trump side, they turned out by Wednesday morning to have been dead wrong. David Axlerod, speaking among the large panels of experts on CNN when the evening was yet young on November 9th prophesied "a Trump victory is very, very unlikely."  He had been chief strategist of Barak Obama's campaigns, and Senior White Adviser. If he didn't know what was happening across the country who did? 

        So went this catastrophic failure of a long list of experts and moderators including Rachel Maddow, star of MSNBC, Amy Walter at PBS and many others. After the elections dozens of interviews in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin uncovered that local citizens had stopped listening to these commentators a long time ago. It turns out that these experts knew mostly their own mirror images. They could not see the inequality suffered by nearly two-thirds of the American people because it had moved beyond their comfortable, "expert" horizons, out of sight. 

        Therein lies a tragedy greater than a Trump victory (if you think it was tragic). It's not only the print media who are at-risk because of lost advertising and diminished circulation, so also are the TV media whose high pitched spiels require us to accept news delivered primarily to sell products by entertaining us. One imagines their budgets for hiring expert panels has dropped lots.

         Russia's Vladamir Putin, and before him Stalin and Adolph Hitler, strengthened their hold on authoritarian government by eliminating a free press. President-elect Trump need take no such steps, even if he wished to, because the chickens of our disdain have come home to roost.  Our preference for well-rehearsed PBS and cable round tables may become the thin soup of an increasingly thinned out journalism. Bad for democracy, even worse for the common good.  Paint Donald Trump ugly if you wish, but the real tragedy is what we're doing to ourselves.

 

The Times - Are They a-Changin?

       Right now the only predictable election result next week is the dangerous public disenchantment stretching from Texas to North Dakota.  After November 8th we are likely to find scattered all over the ground only the remains, the shards, of the Republican and Democratic parties regardless of who is elected to the White House.  That may turn out to be the good news.

        Also broken into pieces after next week may be the long era of U. S. civil religion since 1800 which people thought promised them exceptional treatment but now seems parallel to the empty promises of contemporary political leadership. The unproductive distance between party machine candidates (Hillary) and rebels (The Donald) resembles the lived experience of three-fourths of Americans who for twenty years and longer have suffered an income stagnation that nether Republican Bush nor Democrat Obama corrected. This while the public's money poured into the fifteen year Bush/Obama war which keeps expanding.  

        The massive slaughter of the innocents in the lands of that other denominated religion, Islam, contain the worst kind of news: It's well known, of course, but the ultimate irony must be grasped: that the boundaries of the Middle East and the weapons flowing into it (some from Russia also) were are all determined and made by the Christian West: the boundaries by the European powers after World War I; the weapons by the U. S. after World War II. Essentially they're all ours! The irony is the so-called Christian Western nations fashioned a kind of hell among the Islamic nations.

        It is a hard truth but in the possible collapse of politics as we've known it both believers and non-believers will find themselves reckoning with the end of what had seemed a liturgical guarantee for exceptional America, an everlasting springtime now come to winter.

       The end of Tom Hayden's life last week can remind us of the true vocation of the prophet--whether secular or sacred--who in Hayden's instance shouted out against the hundreds of thousands dying in the Vietnam war while most of the the American churches and synagogues, for patriotic reasons, backed away from what for Martin Luther King, Jr. was a similar cry against that war he could not stifle in himself.  

       A new way must be found amid the ruins to reclaim this prophetic vocation in spirit and in truth. The times are still trying to change, Bob Dylan, and maybe this time you'll be right, in honor of your Nobel Prize.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin

              For the times they are a-changin