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]

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]