The present rift between establishment Democrats represented by Joe Biden on the one hand and progressive insurgents led by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (A.O.C.) on the other, focuses on the Green New Deal. The debate seems to reprise a similar divide in the Black community between W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. Their issue at the turn of the 20th century was education and whether African Americans were better served by a vocational curriculum or by the liberal arts. Dubois favored the latter approach, Washington, the former. In 1969 Dudley Randall wrote a famous poem encapsulating the controversy between cautious conservatives and more revolutionary leaders. It was entitled “W.E.B. and Booker T.” Here, I borrow heavily from Mr. Randall to similarly encapsulate the current debate between the Biden and AOC forces.
“It seems to me,” said Joey B. “It shows a mighty lot of cheek “For someone young like you to speak “Of Green New Deals and rising wage “When all big donors shout with rage “At Marxist thoughts of equal share “Of voting rights and Medicare. “That’s not the way to win the vote “We’re better served to go by rote. “And simply do what we’ve done before.”
“I don’t agree,” said A.O.C. “We need new vision, words and plan “Remember our loss when Hillary ran “Saying words like yours so ‘tried and true.’ “She lost to Donald and so would you. “And besides, Mother Earth has raised her voice “To tell us all we have no choice. “Time’s running short the experts say. “My Green New Deal will save the day.”
“It seems to me,” said Joey B. “That folks like you have missed the point “Who tell us ‘Times are out of joint’ “And spend vain days and sleepless “In uproar over workers’ rights “Let’s keep mouths shut, and do not grouse, “Be content to know you’ve won the House.”
“I don’t agree,” said A.O.C. “For what can winning votes avail “If all earth’s systems drown and fail? “Unless we join to change our way, “Your grandkids and mine will surely pay “For the near-sight vision of pols like you. “But as for me I’ll choose the New. “I’ll take my chances that people know “The Green New Deal’s is the way to go
“It seems to me,” said Joey B. – “I don’t agree,” said AOC.
Readings for 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: IS 66:10-14C; PS 66: 1-7, 16, 20; GAL 6: 14-18; LK 10: 1-12, 17-20.
The theme of today’s liturgy of the word is exile and deliverance
from captivity. In its light, I can’t help thinking of all those refugees at
our southern border and of Marianne Williamson’s wise and unique response in
last week’s second Democratic Debate.
According to our readings, the immigrants and refugees our politicians want us to hate are exiles like the ancient Hebrews in Babylon. They are the victims of the rich and powerful as were the Jews in Jesus’ day, when Rome occupied his homeland aided and abetted by the Temple clergy. That is, today’s biblical selections say that the poorest and most vulnerable among us are God’s own people.
Yet incredibly, the richest and most invulnerable at the top of our contemporary social order – the very ones who crashed our economy, looted our common treasury, and escaped unscathed with the handouts we ourselves provided – somehow want us to believe that the poor exiles from their beloved homes in Central America are the cause of all our problems.
But remember: the home lands of these exiles from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are the very countries whose economies our government purposely and permanently crashed in the 1980s. Then, the Reagan and Bush I administrations used drug money to finance illegal wars that ended up killing hundreds of thousands and replacing governments and social movements whose primary beneficiaries would have been the parents of those at our borders today. The latter are victims of the drug lords we established and supported during the ‘80s and who today are doing the same things they did 40 years ago – marketing drugs while terrorizing and murdering the innocent. I’m talking about the generals and other military officers who are now the drug kingpins.
That’s the point Marianne Williamson tried to make at the first Democratic debate. But no one picked it up. None of the other candidates elaborated on Ms. Williamson’s observation that today’s immigration “crisis” amounts to our government’s reaping what it sowed. The other candidates still haven’t seconded Marianne’s point. Instead, they and their interlocutors remain stuck in the same old, same old. They mouth the standard political platitudes while ignoring the shameful history that explains today’s headlines.
It’s been that way from biblical times and before – rich foreigners oppressing poor locals. Listen to today’s readings. Or, rather, read them for yourself. Here are my “translations.”
IS 66:10-14c
These are the words Of Isaiah’s prophecy To all in captivity By Powers Foreign and domestic: “Your time of desperation Is nearly over. You will soon Return home Like starving infants To Mother-Jerusalem. With hunger satisfied And prosperity Incredible Along with joy And comfort, comfort, comfort At last!”
PS 66: 1-7, 16, 20
Our liberator From exile So kind and powerful Is the answer To the prayers Of captive people And a source of joy For the whole Human race And all of creation. No obstacle Can impede God’s destiny Of liberation Joy and freedom From oppression.
GAL 6: 14-18
Yes, our destiny Is an entirely New World! Where the world’s distinctions Are meaningless. Acting accordingly Now Will bring Everyone Compassion and peace. However, The World Crucifies us For this belief. Nonetheless, We’re called to Bear its torture And scars Gladly As Jesus did.
LK 10: 1-12, 17-20
Paul’s words Agree with Jesus Who sent Thirty-six pairs Of “advance men” And women To announce (Like Isaiah) Liberation From oppression By powers imperial. Like lambs among wolves Like monks With begging bowls, They healed and proclaimed God’s Great Cleanup Of a world Infested by demonic Imperial oppressors. And it worked! Every one of those 72 Cast out evil spirits Just like Jesus. (Despite powerful opposition And crucifixion.)
Some have ridiculed Marianne's debate performance. However, that only shows how our country thought-leaders have become tone-deaf to biblical values. They consider them ludicrous.
For me, that only signals the necessity of doubling-down on support for the only one in the crowded Democratic field who courageously insists on the values embedded in today's readings which identify the keys for solving the problems caused by "experienced" politicians. As Marianne says, those keys are love and forgiveness precisely for and of those the rich and powerful vilify.
Just for fun, here’s an interview with Marianne Williamson whose candidacy for POTUS I’ve been trying to promote. I’m doing that because I think Marianne offers the national presidential debate a refreshing, deeply spiritual dimension that it sorely needs. She makes that contribution in a way helpful to believers, non-believers, and those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” In any case, give this little interview a look and listen and see what you think.
Recently Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) stirred controversy by characterizing U.S. immigration detention facilities as concentration camps. Critics said her comparison was over the top
It was an insult, some said, to families of Holocaust
survivors. After all, none of the U.S. detention facilities is an extermination
camp like Auschwitz or Buchenwald.
In response, AOC doubled down on her charge. Along with others, she was joined by historians, and even by the editors of The National Catholic Reporter in affirming her accusation. Concentration camps, they all said, are not synonymous with extermination camps. In essence, the former are locations where prisoners are held without charge. In that sense, the U.S. indeed maintains concentration camps, but nothing like German practice. The intention in making that distinction was evidently to distance U.S. camps from the horrors and death of Hitler’s infamous hell-holes.
The argument here takes issue with that distinction. It
maintains instead that our burgeoning camps are every bit as brutal as
Hitler’s. In fact, the number of deaths connected with the U.S. system dwarf
the iconic number of six million incinerated, gassed, shot, or otherwise
executed.
To begin with, we must first of all realize that U.S. concentration camps are not a new phenomenon begun with the presidency of Donald Trump. No, they have been with us at least since the end of the Second Inter-Capitalist War in 1945.
In fact, the argument can be credibly made that our country
was explicitly founded on extermination, genocide and concentration camps. Using
rationale supplied by John Locke, our Founding Fathers wiped out 90% of North
America’s indigenous peoples, eventually confining survivors and their
descendants in concentration camps (called “reservations”). They employed the
same logic to enslave workers kidnapped from Africa imprisoning them in labor
camps (called “plantations”).
For Locke, who inspired Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence, the crucial and ironic pronouncement behind such operations was that
“All men are created equal.” But note well that in his formulation, the
statement had no liberating relevance for Native Americans, African slaves,
women or propertyless whites. Instead, its expressed intention was to establish
the right of imperialists like him and his cohorts to steal land and resources
from the continent’s indigenous inhabitants and to exterminate resisters.
Locke’s point (as explained in my book, The Magic Glasses of Critical Thinking) was that just because the “Indians” were here first, they had no special claim on the lands they called home. That is, since (in Locke’s estimation) huge tracts were not being farmed as they would be in England, they were there for the taking by the Indians’ equals from Great Britain.
Locke said that a refusal by the Indians to recognize such
equality amounted to a declaration of war against the British. So, the natives
could be slaughtered with abandon – a task our country’s great Indian Fighters
took on with enthusiasm and relish creating a holocaust that killed millions.
Adolph Hitler himself took inspiration from the examples just cited. He liked the concept of concentration and work camps. He was expressly impressed by the efficiency of U.S. extermination of our continent’s First Peoples. It inspired him and evidently the minds behind contemporary concentration camps.
With all this in mind, it is no exaggeration to say that the
camps are reincarnating today before our very eyes. Our government has set them
up world-wide. They are so ubiquitous and normalized that they remain practically
invisible. But consider their contemporary equivalents in:
The U.S. prison-industrial complex itself for
blacks, browns and poor whites transforming “Americans” into the most
imprisoned population on the planet
Guantanamo Bay for holding “terrorists” who
after years of internment and torture have yet to be charged with crime and
which Fuhrer Trump promises to fill to the brim
Black Sites (sic!) concealed throughout the
world where kidnapped Muslims and others disappear without a trace and are
tortured without mercy
Fort Bliss (sic!), a concentration camp for
immigrant children
Baby Prisons for infants as young as four months
Detention centers for refugees from U.S. wars of
aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere
Family prisons for immigrant workers from Mexico
and Central America as they await trials which can be postponed indefinitely
The Gaza Strip, the world’s largest open-air
prison for Muslim Palestinians, “the Jews’ Jews” – unconditionally endorsed by
U.S. politicians of all stripes
In such hell-holes the criminals (often the guards) commit murders, rapes and inflict torture with impunity. Nonetheless, after Hitler, it is no longer permissible for such polite company to crudely incinerate victims in ovens or to poison them in gas chambers. (That would be too “inhumane” and reminiscent of the unspeakable.) So, today’s executioners murder and incinerate Muslims (today’s “Jews”), and others on site. (It saves the trouble and expense of packing them into box cars.)
In other words, the executioners travel to the victims’ countries of origin in the Middle East and Africa and do the dirty work there – often from 10,000 feet in the air, where the screams of incinerated Muslim children cannot be heard. They cremate their victims more humanely in the targets’ own homes with napalm and white phosphorous. Alternatively, “pilots” seated comfortably in their air-conditioned “theaters” send automated Gestapo (killer drones) to decapitate those suspected of evil thoughts. In the process, the system’s butchers have massacred millions far exceeding anything imagined by that little man with the toothbrush mustache:
Already by 1978, John Stockwell, the highly decorated ex-CIA Station Chief in Angola, estimated that his agency’s “Secret Wars” had killed more than six million in its dirty wars against the world’s poor. In Stockwell’s own words, every one of those wars was illegal and “bloody and gory and beyond comprehension almost.”
Add to that
The hundreds of thousands slaughtered during the 1980s in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras
More than a million victims in the completely illegal war in Iraq
Untold fatalities in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ethiopia,
The 10,000 already killed in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East – with the numbers increasing each day from cholera and intentionally-inflicted starvation
Again, the numbers are staggering – far beyond anything
accomplished in Hitler’s death camps.
Meanwhile, at home, “Americans” are dissuaded from protest
by a militarized skin-head police force of body-builders and thugs. “Dressed to
kill” in their black or camouflaged flack suits, and anonymous under their
helmets and behind polarized face-shields, they stand ready with batons,
tasers, and AK47s – as well as employing surplus military tanks, and Humvees –
to punish anyone who dares opposition.
So, congratulations to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. She’s right again – this time about concentration camps. However, she and others are wrong to downplay the comparative horror of the U.S. system. It is every bit as horrendous as Hitler’s. To see the misery all one has to do is connect the dots. They’re there and though scattered are just waiting to be linked (exactly as they were in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power).
In fact, their presence is becoming more evident each day as is the emergence of Hitler-like fascism. We have only to open our eyes to see both phenomena, even though the camps, holocausts, and the system itself have been effectively renamed and camouflaged.
Thanks to AOC and others, the veils are beginning to fall; the issue is now before us. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s message: It’s high time for the rest of us to take note before it’s too late!
Anti-abortion extremism is in the news again. (Does it ever disappear?) As everyone knows by now, it’s because right-wing lawmakers in Alabama have advanced a law banning abortion at every stage of pregnancy – from the moment that sperm fertilizes egg. The law makes no exceptions for rape or incest.
In
terms of logic, the law can easily be debunked as literally absurd. In terms of
theology (and remember, the question of abortion has been shaped by
theology, regardless of what we might think about that fact) the law makes God himself
(sic) deserving of capital punishment. Finally, in
terms of the U.S. Constitution, criminalizing abortion contradicts the First
Amendment which explicitly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
To
clear the air of confusion and to clarify the concept of pro-life itself, let’s
consider each one of those points.
Logic
To begin with, consider the law’s logical
inconsistency. It begins by holding that abortionists are killers deserving
capital punishment. Its reasoning runs as follows: (1) Abortion is murder, (2)
But all murders are capital crimes; deserving capital punishment; (3) Therefore
abortion-providers should be punished by execution or life imprisonment.
Strangely, the woman who seeks an abortion finds no place in that logic. I
say “strangely,” because her exclusion doesn’t make sense according the
syllogism just referenced. Murder is murder. And legally speaking, employing a
hit-man to kill another person makes the employer guilty of conspiracy to
commit murder regardless of who actually pulled the trigger. Both contractor
and contractee deserve the same punishment. Since it’s the woman who employs
the murderer, why not execute her or imprison her for life, the same as the abortionist?
The answer is because doing so would be absurd. It would be
politically untenable.
Virtually no one in the electorate would support it – especially in the light of polls showing that 80% of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Seventy-one percent oppose overturning Roe v. Wade – including 52% of Republicans.
Imprisoning abortion-providers might be one thing. But imagine, if legislators proposed filling jail cells with all the soccer moms among those responsible for the at least 45.7 million abortions performed since 1973 and the passage of Roe. Hundreds of thousands of moms in prison for life wouldn’t make sense. It is patently absurd. It wouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.
But think a little further about those numbers. They are
familiar to us, because “pro-birthers” usually employ them to train focus on
the zygotes and fetuses in question. However, the numbers can also suggest
something else.
Exchange the viewpoint of zygotes and fetuses for that of our
mothers, wives, daughters and sisters who’ve undergone the procedure. If the
fundamentalists are right, the sheer numbers mean that millions of the women we
love are actually murderers. Millions of them over the last nearly 50 years
have committed murder and, according to fundamentalist logic, deserve capital
punishment – no less than the others on death row. Again, murder is murder. And
in the case of abortion, the scale of the slaughter collectively perpetrated by
the women we sleep with is beyond compare. It means that American women – women
throughout the world – women in general – cooperate in mass murderers dwarfing
the crimes of Hitler!
Logically speaking, all of that – treating abortion as
murder, punishing abortion providers as capital criminals, refusing to do the
same for the women employing them, and identifying millions of women throughout
the world as evil murderers (while saying not a word about the men who
impregnate them) – reduces to the absurd the position that abortion is murder.
In fact, it constitutes the very definition of logic’s reductio ad absurdum that proves the falsity of an argument by demonstrating that its conclusion is completely untenable. In other words, when you put words to it and draw the logical conclusions, the contentions of the pro-birthers sound absolutely crazy to almost everyone. Case closed.
Theology
And
that brings us into the field of theology.
For Catholic moralists, commonly shared perception like that just referenced is called the “sensus fidelium.” Sensus fidelium refers to ordinary people’s conclusions about matters of faith and morals (such as abortion). It refers to conclusions based on common sense rather than the arguments of the experts including theologians. Catholic doctrine regards such agreement as infallible.
But here I’m suggesting a
unique kind of sensus fidelium – one
accessible primarily to women and their special ways of knowing. After all,
male legislators cannot possibly understand women’s physiology, biological
processes, psychology, or moral sensitivities in the same way as women.
In other words, women are
a uniquely privileged reference group.However, because of the domination of
theology (and politics!) by men, the latter act as if they know better than
women. As a result, women are treated in effect as pre-rational children in
need of direction by the culture’s patriarchs. (This, perhaps, offers another
explanation of the disparate treatment of abortion-providers and women seeking
abortion. The women in question are not truly responsible moral agents.)
To correct such imbalance,
women of all faiths (and none) and not just Christian men should be in charge
of any reasoning about and regulations of abortion. At the very least, such women
deserve a decisive place at the table where theologians, ethicists and legislators
discuss the question. If that were the case, another reductio ad absurdum would soon come to light – this one
specifically theological. It would be that God Himself (sic) is the world’s
abortionist-in-chief responsible for filling sewers with aborted babies.
What I mean is that according to medical researchers spontaneous abortion is the “predominant outcome of fertilization.” At least half of fertilized eggs are simply flushed down the toilet without their “mothers” even aware of their presence. They never knew they were pregnant in the first place.
If
(as pro-birthers maintain) God is responsible for and cares about every
fertilized egg, the conclusion is inevitable. God is a wholesale abortionist.
Like all abortionists, he deserves the fate that death-of-God theologians
declared fifty years ago.
(As
a matter of fact, understanding God according to the absurdities just described
might well be responsible for the rejection of his existence by rational
adults. The fundamentalists themselves may have unwittingly but effectively
executed him!)
Constitutional Considerations
What all of
this means is that the recently passed Alabama law is unconstitutional, since imposes
on Christians and non-Christians alike a particular religious (and therefore
unproveable) theory about God’s role in the initiation of specifically personal
life.
As we’ve seen,
the particular theory arbitrarily holds that each fertilized egg is a unique
human person with an immortal soul wedded exclusively to that particular
fertilized ovum. The theory further holds that when the ovum in question dies,
the soul’s God-intended purpose is forever frustrated. The world is forever
deprived of the aborted-one’s unique gifts, which God cannot or will not supply
through another person.
The
idiosyncrasy of that position is unmistakable. As is the case with other
faiths, one could easily understand early abortion as not that important in
God’s grand scheme of things. A soul prevented from incarnating in one form
could just as easily be imagined as appearing in another – when its time is
right.
In other words,
and more specifically, the theory that life begins when sperm fertilizes egg is
not at all generally shared even across religions, much less by agnostics and
atheists. For instance, some locate the beginning
of personal life at the moment of “quickening” (when the mother first
feels her baby move), others identify it with viability outside the womb, still
others with actual emergence from the womb, or (as with some Native Americans)
with the “painting” of the emergent child to distinguish it from animals.
Given such differences, it seems clearly unconstitutional
to impose the view of one religion on an entire culture. We might expect such preference
of one religious view over others from the Taliban. But it has no place in a governed
by a constitution with the First Amendment quoted earlier in this essay.
Conclusion
The bottom line here is that in a diverse
country like our own, some form of legislation like Roe
v. Wade might be the best we can do. There it was
determined that the pregnant woman as moral agent can decide about abortion on
her own during the first trimester and in consultation with her physician
during the second. In the third trimester, however, the state asserts its
interest and can make laws restricting abortion to protect the woman’s health
and the potentiality of human life.
However,
a Roe v. Wade approach can never be sufficient for
genuine pro-life advocates. For them, abortion law must be complemented by
social programs that provide a welcoming atmosphere for all life forms. These
would provide free counselling and pre- natal care for pregnant mothers along
with post-natal services for their newborns. Job provisions would be available
for new mothers along with free daycare for their pre-school children. Programs
would also include low cost housing and (where necessary) help paying grocery
bills. All such measures are genuinely pro-life. They not only discourage
abortion; they also create a welcoming environment for new life.
However,
don’t expect Alabama politicians to endorse such measures. For them, pro-life
concern ends at birth. Afterwards, the burden must be assumed entirely by the
mothers in question.
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister has
called such typically male attempts to evade responsibility by its true name.
She wrote:
“I do not believe that just because you’re
opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many
cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not
a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think
that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not
pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the
morality of pro-life is.”
Readings for 2nd Sunday of Easter: Acts 5:12-16; Ps. 118: 2-4, 13-15, 22-24; Rev. 1: 9-11A, 12-13, 17-19; Jn. 20: 19-31.
By the time you see this, many of you will have been yet again outraged by the crude cynicism of Mike Pompeo, America’s Secretary of State and former head of the CIA. This time, I’m referring to his embarrassing throw-away line following a speech at Texas A&M last week. Secretary Pompeo said:
“. . . When I was a cadet,
what’s the first – what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie,
cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we
cheated, we stole. (Laughter.) It’s – it was like – we had entire training
courses . . . (Applause.) It reminds you of the glory of the American
experiment.”
In this election season, Pompeo’s arrogant disregard for the disastrous effects of the actions he described (in terms of governments overthrown, innocents slaughtered, and our own democracy discredited) offers an instructive foil to recommend the contrasting approach of Marianne Williamson, whose presidential campaign is based on what she terms a “politics of love.” The contrast between Pompeo and Williamson is further illumined by the familiar story of Doubting Thomas which is the focus of today’s liturgy of the word. It locates divine presence precisely in a victim of the imperial double-dealing and cruelty Pompeo finds so amusing and that Williamson finds abhorrent.
But before I get to that, please watch the secretary’s remark for yourselves:
What I found noteworthy in
what you just saw was not so much what Pompeo said. (Anyone who knows anything
about the CIA would not find that surprising.) What I found amazing was the
audience laughter and applause. Both suggested not only rejection of U.S.
ideals, but of the faith Americans commonly claim. Pompeo’s words absolutely
contradict the Jewish tradition’s Ten Commandments. The laughter and applause also suggested that
Pompeo’s audience recognized that lying, cheating, and stealing somehow have
more power than the teachings of Jesus about the primacy of love and doing to
others what we would have them do to us. (Let’s face it: that’s the underlying reservation
many have about Marianne Williamson’s candidacy as well.) Even more, the
audience’s approval cynically endorsed Pompeo’s position that such actions
constitute something glorious about Americans and their country!
I suppose the secretary would
hasten to explain that we’re living in a dangerous world, where enemies lie,
cheat, and steal all the time; so, we must do the same. But just imagine if
Vladimir Putin or Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro had uttered Pompeo’s words! We’d
never hear the end of it.
It’s principled response to such cynicism that fuels Marianne Williamson’s campaign for president. And in the light of today’s Gospel reading, which endorses miracles over “realism,” she should be taken seriously. More directly, and at a far deeper level than any of the other 20 (so far!) Democratic candidates, Williamson actually believes in a “Politics of Love,” and says so openly.
In fact, Williamson is
running on a platform that holds that there is no distinction between personal
and public morality. As she points out, the world and our country have a long
history of acknowledging that fact. Jesus himself embodied that teaching. So
did Gandhi. Abolitionists were Quakers, as were many of the suffragettes.
Martin Luther King was a Baptist preacher. The Berrigan brothers were Catholic
priests; so was Thomas Merton. None saw any distinction between the personal
and political.
However, it’s not that Ms. Williamson is any less aware of our world’s evils than Mr. Pompeo. She doesn’t claim that the Judeo-Christian tradition invites anyone to ignore immorality and violence. Quite the contrary. As she points out, the entire Jewish tradition stems from rebellion precisely against the horror of slavery (in Moses’ Egypt). And the Christian tradition is founded on the teachings of a prophet who was tortured and executed by one of history’s most brutal empires. To ignore such evils, Williamson says, is not transcendence; it’s denial.
And that thought brings us to today’s Gospel reading. It’s the familiar story of Doubting Thomas, whom in today’s context we might call “Realistic Thomas.” That’s because the story is finally about Christ’s call to recognize his own presence in the tortured victims of the kind of empire Pompeo’s audience applauded. It’s a parable told 80 years after Jesus’ death to encourage believers who, unlike Thomas, had not seen the risen Christ, yet believed anyway. The story is about the early Christian community coming to realize the truth of Jesus’ words, “Whatever is done to the least of my brethren, is done to me” (MT 25). Williamson recognizes all those truths. Evidently, Pompeo does not.
Recall the parable.
The disciples are in the Upper Room where they had so recently
broken bread with Jesus the night before he died. But Thomas is not present. Then
suddenly, the tortured one materializes there in their midst.
“Too bad Thomas is missing this,” they must have said to one
another.
Later on, Thomas arrives. Like the believers for whom the story
was written (at the end of the first century) he hasn’t met the risen Lord.
“Jesus is alive,” they tell him.
However, Thomas remains unmoved. He protests, “I simply cannot
bring myself to share your faith. Things like that don’t happen in the real
world.”
The words are hardly out of his mouth, when lightning strikes
again. Jesus suddenly materializes a second time in the same place. He tells
the realistic one to examine his wounds – to actually probe them with his
fingers. It’s then that Thomas recognizes his risen Lord. Yes, he realizes,
Jesus is present in the tortured and victims of capital punishment – in those
crucified by empire. The story invites hearers to join in Thomas prayer before
such victims, “My Lord and my God.”
And that brings me back to Marianne Williamson . . . Let’s be honest: when we heard Williamson’s phrase, “politics of love,” did any of us find ourselves rolling our eyes? If so, that probably means we’ve somehow joined Secretary Pompeo in his cynical realism – in his implicit denial of the power of today’s parable. It suggests that we too believe that lies are more powerful than truth, that cheating is more rewarding than acting justly, that might makes right, that violence represents a more effective strategy than love.
In summary, we’re in denial about the truth of Jesus’ teaching – and that of virtually all of history’s sages. Williamson asks: “How’s that been working out for you – and for the world?” It’s time for a change of heart and soul like that of “Realistic” Thomas and like that represented by the campaign of Marianne Williamson.
She needs about 10,000 more individual contributions to qualify for appearance on the debate stage with the other candidates. If you want to see her there, contribute $1.00 or more right now!
Here in Connecticut, Peggy and I are part of a Climate-Change activist group that is just getting off the ground. We’re planning on supporting the Green New Deal that I’ve written about earlier here and here and here.
In that connection, here’s the best short video I’ve come across on the topic. It’s co-written and narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the most dynamic new member of the House of Representatives. Please watch it and see if it confers understanding of the GND as it invites you to get on board with this important movement.
The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming! This time they’re here to spread socialism not by war and invasion, but by good example, economic development and cultural exchange. And in the process, they are eating our lunch. They are demonstrating that it is possible for poor and troubled economies to develop as quickly as China’s by following the latter’s example of mixing the best elements of capitalism and socialism to benefit working class people rather than primarily the rich and elite. Their efforts are showing every sign of success.
Progressives should take heart. Socialism’s specter is once
again on the prowl.
Specifically, I’m referring to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that actually looks like a Chinese version of a new Marshall Plan for countries representing 65% of the world’s population. Many of the countries involved would otherwise be unable to afford such development.
Particulars of the BRI include Chinese export of construction
materials, especially iron and steel and their use to erect a huge power grid
with wind and solar focus. The materials are being used to construct highways,
rail facilities and sea ports to the benefit of Europe, Asia, the Middle East,
and Latin America. The BRI will also include cultural exchanges and educational
assistance. It will eventually account for 40% of the world’s domestic product.
That’s the impressive swath China’s trillion-dollar infrastructure-based development strategy that has been in place for the past six years – since it was announced by the country’s president, Xi Jinping in 2013. In his words, the Belt and Road Initiative is “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future.”
However, many in the west are not buying that rosy
description. To them the BRI seems like a new form of colonialism. Since much
of it is based on loans, critics have even described it as a “debt trap” intended
to create dependency in order to reduce participating countries to the status
of vassals of an imperial Chinese state.
Ironically, such criticisms actually reflect the patterns of western colonialism and neocolonialism whose “foreign aid” has in fact intentionally continued the traditional underdevelopment of the former colonies in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. The critique also overlooks the fact that the Chinese plan is based on Marxist principles which are inherently anti-colonial and international rather than imperial and national.
In practice, all of this has yielded a system often described as state capitalism. That is, the Chinese state (like every other economy in the world!) has a mixed economy that (as I mentioned earlier) incorporates the best elements of capitalism and socialism. This gives the Chinese a huge publicly- owned sector along with a smaller, but still large private sector strictly regulated by the state. Crucially, however, and unlike our own mixed economy, the Chinese version aims at mixing its economy not in favor of the elite, but in favor of the working classes.
This is in strict accord with Marxist theory, which recognizes that capitalism is a necessary stage in the history of economic development. It cannot be skipped, because capitalism is required for the development of productive forces that are sine qua non preconditions for the transition to full-blown socialism.
Moreover, the whole world has been watching. We’ve seen China’s implementation of a worker-friendly state-capitalist form of economy as responsible for 80% of the poverty-reduction the world has experienced over the past two or three generations. That is, China has been more successful in reducing poverty than capitalism or any country subscribing to neoliberalism’s trickle-down model. The latter, of course, favors the 1% and expects 95% of the world’s population to endure austerity measures in order to pay the social costs for capitalism’s dysfunctions. None of that is lost on denizens of poor countries.
And now through the Belt and Road Initiative, those same less developed former colonies as well as the poorer countries of the EU are given opportunity to follow China’s example economically and even politically.
Regarding politics, the Chinese example and initiative are demonstrating that a one-party state like China’s might work better at least in some contexts than what we in the west understand by “democracy.” Surprisingly, for the west (where there appears to be a tacit agreement never to allow us to hear anything positive about competing systems) the Chinese version of political organization has proven to yield governance far more meritocratic, flexible and legitimate than our own.
Its meritocracy insures that no one will rise to national
leadership in China who has not come through the ranks and demonstrated outstanding
leadership capabilities at each step along the way. The whole process takes
about 30 years. This means that by Chinese standards, someone like George W.
Bush or Barrack Obama (much less Donald Trump) would not qualify to govern even
a small province in China. They simply lack the experience and resulting
knowledge that in China are prerequisite for assuming greater responsibilities.
Such leadership has made the Chinese system far more flexible in terms of reform than our own. Thus, in China the revolution began with the country following the Soviet model of development. That changed with the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) which extended the revolution’s benefits to rural populations. This in turn was followed by Deng Xiaoping’s opening to the west around 1977, by entrance into the World Trade Organization years later, and now by Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Every one of those changes was profound and quickly made. Western capitalism has proven incapable of similar flexibility even in the face of climate chaos that threatens planetary life as we know it.
Moreover, in terms of public approval the Chinese system is proving much more legitimate than western models based on periodic elections. Increasingly, those latter models are corrupted by money. As in the United States, often inexperienced politicians (even comedians and reality show personalities) are elected by pluralities below 50%. A month or so after elections, their approval ratings can sink below 40%. This is because those elected prioritize the needs of their corporate donors rather than those of the people they’ve theoretically been elected to serve. As a result, we’ve increasingly lost faith in democracy-as-we’ve-experienced-it. In many elections, only a minority of Americans even bother to vote.
Meanwhile in China, Pew polling has nearly 80% of the population satisfied with the country’s direction. An even greater majority expects their lives to get better in the near future. Those numbers are testimony to government legitimacy far beyond what we experience in the United States.
So, while western governments and their economies lionize the
past and strive to implement 18th century free-market policies,
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is offering a different option.
And it’s doing so under the principles of internationalism and anti-colonialism based on sound Marxist theory. That theory has not only taken huge strides towards lessening world poverty; it has provided the world with an example of unprecedented economic dynamism. It’s no wonder that socialism these days is getting a new lease on life. It’s no wonder that its’ specter is once again haunting the world.
Readings for 5th Sunday of Lent: Is. 43:16-21; Ps. 126:1-6; Phil. 3: 8-14; Jn. 8: 1-11.
Not long ago, Catholic journalist and historian, Gary Wills coined an insightful phrase, “The Big Crazy.” Yes, he was talking about the pedophilia scandal. But his point was more general than that. Wills was referring to the Church’s insane obsession with a long list of cringe-worthy and curious topics that for him included “masturbation, artificial insemination, contraception, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, homosexuality, gender choice, abortion, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests.”
The list is curious because today’s Gospel reading shows that Jesus didn’t share such prudish concern. And this despite the fact that the religious leaders of his day leaned in that direction – at least regarding women and adultery. Consequently, in the eyes of the priests and scribes of his day, Jesus would have been far too liberal, understanding and forgiving of sexual frailty – far too feminist. His attitude seemed to be: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Here’s what I mean: Jewish law punished adultery with death by stoning. That was a biblical requirement. However, the Jewish patriarchy applied that law differently to men and women. A man, they said, committed adultery only when he slept with a married woman. But if he slept with a single woman, a widow, a divorced woman, a prostitute or a slave, he remained innocent. A woman, on the other hand committed adultery if she slept with anyone other than her husband.
Jesus calls attention to such hypocrisy and double standards in
today’s gospel episode. All the elements of last week’s very long parable of
the Prodigal Son are here. Jesus is teaching in the temple surrounded by “the
people” – the same outcasts, we presume, that habitually hung on his every
word.
Meanwhile, the Scribes and Pharisees are standing on the crowd’s
edge wondering how to incriminate such a man?
As if ordained by heaven, an answer comes to them out of the
blue. A woman is hustled into the temple. She’s just been caught in flagrante –
in the very act of adultery. What luck for Jesus’ opponents!
“Master,” they say, “This woman has just been caught in the act
of adultery. As you know, the Bible says we should stone her. But what do you
say?” Here Jesus’ enemies suspect he will incriminate himself by recommending
disobedience of the Bible’s clear injunction. After all, he is the Compassionate
One. He is especially known for his kindness towards women – and others among
his culture’s most vulnerable. He is the friend of prostitutes and drunkards.
But instead of falling into their trap, Jesus simply preaches a
silent parable. He first scribbles on the ground. Only subsequently does he
speak — but only 18 words, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the
first to throw a stone at her.”
A wordless parable . . .
What do you suppose Jesus was scribbling on the ground? Was he
writing the names of the guilty hypocrites who had cheated on their wives? Was
he writing the laws the Scribes and Pharisees were violating? Some say he was
simply drawing figures in the dust while considering how to reply to his
opponents?
The first two possibilities seem unlikely. How would this poor
country peasant from Galilee know the names of the learned and citified Scribes
and Pharisees? It is even unlikely that Jesus knew how to write at all. That
too was the province of the Scribes. The third possibility – that Jesus was
absent-mindedly drawing figures in the dust – is probably closer to the mark.
However, it seems likely that there was more to it than that. It
seems Jesus was performing some kind of symbolic action – that mimed parable I
mentioned. By scribbling in the dust, he was wordlessly bringing his
questioners down to earth. He was reminding them of the common origin of men
and women?
Both came from the dust, Jesus seems to say without words. The
creation stories in Genesis say both men and women were created from dust and
in God’s image – equal in the eyes of God. “In God’s image God created them.
Man and woman created he them,” says the first creation account (Genesis 1:27).
By scribbling in the dust, Jesus was symbolically moving the earth under the
feet of the Scribes and Pharisees. He was asserting that they had no ground to
stand on. They were hypocrites.
Then his 18-word pronouncement offers Jesus’ own standard for
judging the guilt of others even in the fraught field of sexuality. According
to that standard, one may judge and execute only if he himself is without sin.
This, of course, means that no one may judge and execute another.
And that brings us back to Gary Will’s “Big Crazy.” Jesus’ silent rearranging of “ground” along with his 18 words seem to call into question the very foundation of the bishops’ right to authoritatively pronounce on any sexual matters. They, after all, are the guilty ones who denied, covered-up, and excused sexual deviance on the part of the clergy they were responsible for overseeing – and whose overriding (public) concern has centered on sexual purity. Does that not dictate that the bishops and their priests have no ground to stand upon in the field of sexual morality? Isn’t it time for them to silently slink away along with their Scribe and Pharisee counterparts, and to replace judgmentalism with Jesus’ relative silence, forgiveness and compassion?
Jesus’ mime also directs all of us to reconsider our double
standards and preconceptions about men and women in general. It reverses a
prayer every first century Jewish man was to recite each morning. The prayer
went, “Blessed are you, Lord, for making me a Jew and not a Gentile, for making
me free and not a slave, and for making me a man and not a woman.”
Certainly, Jesus was taught that prayer by his pious father,
Joseph. Perhaps for most of his life, Jesus recited that prayer on a daily
basis. But something must have happened to him to change his faith. We’ll never
know what that “something” or someone was.
After all, if Jesus thought like the Catholic bishops I
mentioned, he would have thrown the first stone. He alone in that group was
without sin. He would have thought, “Forgiving this woman will seem like
condoning adultery. And condoning adultery might lead to abortions of the
pregnancies that result. Not throwing the first stone will also lessen the
authority of the Bible which clearly justifies punishing women for adultery.
I’ve got to do it.”
Luckily for the woman taken in adultery (and for the rest of
us), Jesus wasn’t a fundamentalist – or a Roman Catholic bishop. He recognized
the equality of men and women. He recognized that what’s good for the goose is
good for the gander.
That proverb has incredibly wide application, doesn’t it?
With everybody finally talking about the Green New Deal,
progressives should make sure that remains in the national spotlight. They
should focus their efforts on improving and promoting the proposal which is now
in early draft mode.
However, many seem reluctant to do so. Apparently
intimidated by establishment nay-sayers, liberals have instead more often
conceded to the shop-worn tropes of climate-change deniers and neo-liberal
advocates of trickle-down economic theory. President Trump has characterized
the proposal as “socialist.” House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi dismissed it “the
green dream or whatever.”
Such dismissiveness has some progressives repeating the right-wing
canard that GND provisions like the following have no connection with fighting
climate change:
Family-sustaining wage guarantees, especially
for displaced workers
Enhanced Social Security for the elderly
Free higher education and the cancelling of
student debt
Universal health care with adequate family
medical leave
Affordable, energy-efficient housing for all
Remedies for systemic injustices among the poor,
elderly, and people of color
In dismissing those provisions as “irrelevant to climate change,”
“unrealistic” and “only aspirational,” liberals and progressives have been
apparently cowed by climate-change deniers or at least to those whose remedies
would principally benefit corporations, politicians, lawyers, and the infamous
1% instead of our country’s majority. Rather than fully commit to wind, solar,
and geo-thermal technologies, the former would prefer retaining present
economic arrangements while taxing, sequestering, and trading carbon
pollutants.
Despite such diversions, the argument here is that the GND
represents the best available response to the climate-change crisis. It
deserves the full support of progressives because:
It’s already prominently “on the table;” everyone’s talking about it.
It boldly confronts the failed neoliberal economic model at its root – capitalism-as-we-know-it – supplying a green jobs-program-with-benefits that, in the past, have normally been associated with decent employment.
Far from being off the wall, its provisions are intimately connected with the inevitable dislocations produced by adoption of a carbon-neutral economy.
It has successful historical precedent.
The funding for its implementation is readily available.
The GND Is on the
Table
I recently attended a meeting of climate change activists where some participants spoke as if we are still searching for some means of getting people to recognize and respond to the problem of climate change. Participants wondered, should we endorse the recommendations of the Sierra Club, or perhaps of 350.Org, or maybe the Environmental Defense Fund? It was suggested that we take the best recommendations from such NGOs and select the ones we’d like to endorse.
It was even proposed that our group author a “manifesto” in hopes that a celebrity like Oprah Winfrey might get behind it.
All such approaches fail to recognize that the problem of
climate change is already very much on the table and has huge popular support. It’s
there because we all know about the unprecedented multi-billion-dollar
disasters like hurricane Maria and
the uncontrollable California wildfires that have afflicted us in recent
months.
And just since the beginning of the new year, a whole series
of dispiriting reports have emerged from the scientific community to underline
the point. The studies have scientists warning us that our window for response
is closing rapidly. Current estimates are that we have no more than a dozen
years before we reach the point of no return on a run-away train headed for a
disastrous precipice. That’s the crisis staring us in the face as our train’s
engineer commands: “Full speed ahead.”
All of that has already elicited massive support for the Green New Deal proposed by Senator Markey (D-MA) and Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Unlike any alternatives, the GND now has scores of co-sponsors in Congress. Every Senate Democrat running for president has endorsed it. The easy-to-understand proposal has 80% of Americans supporting its provisions.
GND and Capitalism
Perhaps the real reason for progressives’ fears about the
Green New Deal is that its proponents dare to identify the elephant in the room
– capitalism-as-we-know-it. Understandably intimidated by McCarthyism along
with 75 years of pro-capitalist propaganda, liberals have a hard time following
suit. They shy away from any positions that might be caricatured as critical of
capitalism. They bend over backwards to assure debate-opponents that they are
not (as one member of our activist group put it) “crazy socialists.”
Progressives need to put those fears aside. We need to
follow the bold example of the youngest and most dynamic member of the House of
Representatives and that of one of our most senior senators; neither ever backs
down in the face of such epithets. In that, both AOC and Bernie Sanders are
increasingly joined by Americans under the age of 35. According to Gallup
polls, the majority of them prefer socialism over capitalism.
In any case, the Green New Deal is not socialist. Instead, it
is merely a green jobs program with the kind of benefits that used to go along
with every decent job. In fact, those benefits are what every employer and
government official demands for himself or herself – including health care,
sound retirement, and remuneration sufficient to buy a house and send their
children to college without incurring life-long debt.
Moreover, all the benefits in question are associated
with the severe dislocations associated with transition to a carbon-neutral
economy: universal health care to remediate problems caused by the fossil fuel
economy; universal post-secondary education to equip workers to participate
productively in the new high-tech culture; low-cost energy-efficient housing that
will accommodate those forced to move from old fossil-fuel-related jobs to new
green employment opportunities perhaps far from their current homes; and
reparation for the long-standing practice of locating polluting industries in
poor and minority communities.
None of that is off the wall or disassociated from
combatting climate change effectively.
New Deal Precedent
All the controversy is like what happened with Roosevelt’s
original New Deal.
Back then, with their focus fixed firmly on Wall Street, Republicans
objected to the apparent overreach of FDR’s proposals. What, they asked, do
Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and
the “alphabet soup” of programs like the WPA (Works Progress Administration)
with its FMP (Federal Music Project) and FTP (Federal Theater Project) have to
do with reviving the Stock Market? To them such enactments seemed completely
off-the-wall. They wanted top-down solutions that would focus on Wall Street – bail-outs,
tax breaks, and government subsidies.
However, for Roosevelt and his constituencies none of the
New Deal programs were far-fetched. What Republicans failed to acknowledge (but
what Roosevelt saw clearly) was that those living on Main Street needed to
believe that response to the national crisis of depression would take them into
account as well as the rich who had little need of government assistance.
Wage-earners needed jobs with benefits. They needed laws to improve their
living standards. They needed a tax code benefitting them rather than the
already wealthy. Enactment of programs based on those convictions got FDR
elected four times in a row. After Lincoln, he’s generally remembered as the
greatest American president.
Funding the GND
But how will we pay for the Green New Deal?
In short, it should be financed in the same way FDR paid for
his original program – by drastically increasing taxes on those most able to
afford them. In Roosevelt’s time (and up until the 1960s) the highest tax
bracket was 91% on incomes over $400,000. AOC has suggested a 70% tax on
incomes over $10 million.
The truth is that enactment of some version of the GND with
its transition away from carbon-based energy provides another rich
income-source as well. The Green New Deal promises to make wars-for-oil obsolete.
The elimination of such adventures will also go a long way towards eliminating
blow-back in the form of international terrorism. As a result, our government should
be able to shrink its military budget by at least 50% and to reinvest the
resulting resources in GND programs.
Conclusion
Yes, we’ve finally arrived at a point where Americans have a
proposal before them that they can both understand and whose provisions they
overwhelmingly support. It’s got the public’s attention. So, progressives should
make it their business to support its general direction and to take part in
refining its provisions. Everybody needs to get involved in that project: wage
earners, mothers, fathers, children, the unemployed and homeless, and not
merely the usual suspects, viz. politicians, lawyers, economists, and business
leaders.
Widespread citizen involvement should have progressives
pushing for hearings on the GND throughout the country and well before the
Democratic presidential debates. Then the suggestions of local meetings should
be collated and processed into a final form that the majority can get behind.
To reiterate: this is not merely or even principally the job
of professional politicians, but of our national community. After all, the
Green New Deal is by no means a finished product.
The bottom line is that progressives should not be intimidated by gas-lighting nay-sayers, technocrats, politicians and lobbyists. Remember, their precise point is to discourage as unrealistic what the world needs to effectively meet the unprecedented emergency presented by climate change.
The Green New Deal is best understood as a green jobs program with benefits. It’s what we all need; it’s what we all deserve.
About Things That Matter 