Yesterday’s posting evoked a very thoughtful response from a faithful and highly valued reader of this blog. He apparently read my remarks as endorsing the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response to attacks against that country — attacks supported and directed by the U.S.
I sincerely apologize for giving that impression.
To clarify, let me say the following:
Nuclear weapons are categorically immoral.
No human being (Not Biden, Trump, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Rob Bauer, Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jing Ping) has the right to use (or threaten the use of) nuclear weapons that will cause the end of humanity.
This means that the reigning deterrence agreement between nuclear powers involving “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) is also unquestionably immoral.
Yet unbelievably, many academicians, politicians, moralists, and military leaders praise such deterrence (coupled with disarmament agreements and pacts limiting the number and explosive force of nuclear weapons) as the most effective way of avoiding nuclear war.
As a result (and quite irrationally), MAD represents the status quo that politicians of all the world’s nuclear powers have endorsed. It embodies the tragically accepted “rules of the game.”
Shamefully, NO ONE among world “leaders” speaks (or apparently thinks) beyond the parameters of MAD.
Nor do they evidence a willingness to engage in nuclear disarmament talks or to sign pacts limiting weapons design or deployment. (In fact, the U.S. has unilaterally withdrawn from several previously signed pacts.)
This means that provocations of one nuclear power against another are completely reckless, irresponsible, and insane, since (according to the “rules” of the MAD game) such provocations can easily lead to nuclear response.
More specifically, though the present conflict in Ukraine ostensibly involves a war between Russia and Ukraine, it is clearly a proxy war between the United States and Russia.
Yet U.S. insistence on provoking the nuclear power, Russia, with missile attacks that are impossible without direct logistical, targeting, and ordnance supplied by the United States and other NATO members exposes a level of insanity that would be unprecedented
If it weren’t for the fact that the United States is the only country in the history of the world that has ever actually used nuclear weapons (twice).
In these circumstances, it is Russia led by Vladimir Putin that has shown restraint.
And it is the Biden administration that is engaged in irresponsible escalation.
It is the world’s acceptance of its MAD “leaders” that makes it all (im)possible.
I never ever thought I’d write these words. But I find myself desperately wishing for the arrival of the Donald Trump presidency. My driving force here is my love for my children and grandchildren. For their sake, Trump’s advent can’t come soon enough. I don’t want them to die in nuclear war.
As I’ve written elsewhere, my hope is not founded in admiration for Mr. Trump. Far from it. I consider the man a moron unfit for the U.S. presidency.
But he seems to be our only hope of avoiding World War III and the end of humanity – an agenda recklessly pursued by the lame duck Biden administration so recently and so decisively rejected by the American electorate.
Have you seen what that old fool is doing? Do you realize the threat his utter stupidity poses to our children and grandchildren?
He’s trying to “Trump-proof” his insane and ill-fated Project Ukraine.
After having repeatedly rejected Russian attempts to resolve the project’s underlying issues (even before Mr. Putin’s invasion), and after more than a million casualties resulting from such obstinacy, Genocide Joe is trying to transform his failed project into World War III.
His “reasoning” seems to be that such transformation would tie Donald Trump’s hands. That is, despite his repeated promises to end the Ukraine War 24 hours after assuming office, the new old fool would find himself obliged to see it through to its suicidal end, thus dooming ourselves, our children and grandchildren.
That’s the problem. The “End” of World War III will be THE END of us all!
For Ukraine!!
It’s all so insane.
To implement the insanity, the senile old man with one foot already in the grave has:
Allowed Ukraine to invade Russia’s Kursk Region
Given Zelensky “permission” to attack targets deep within Russia.
Directly involved the U.S. and its NATO allies in targeting those attacks.
Permitted U.S. military brass to speak of the possibility of direct U.S. “preemptive” strikes against Russian targets.
Allows NATO “allies” to threaten fielding “boots on the ground” in Ukraine which remains the most corrupt government in Europe.
None of this is even remotely necessary.
Imagine U.S. reaction to similar events on our border. Imagine if Russia or China struck an alliance with Mexico or Canada, poured in arms and trained their allies specifically for conflict with the United States. Would the U.S. stand by idly?
Of course it wouldn’t. Of course it didn’t during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
This is not complicated. It’s simply crazy. It represents complete insanity on the part of “leaders” who should be put in jail for even considering such hypocrisy and mass murder. I can’t wait for January 20th.
I’m not yet sure what to think about last Tuesday’s election results. Surprisingly, I find myself ambivalent and guardedly hopeful.
On the one hand, I feel strong foreboding about the Trump victory. I have nothing but painful memories of his last term. It was tough to wake up each day to the crudity, mendacity, stupidity, self-promotion, and sheer ignorance of the man. As a result, like many others, especially at the beginning, I experienced great relief returning to a kind of normalcy under Joe Biden.
But then as that “normalcy” kicked in, I found that horrifying too. Distressingly, there are those billions and billions and billions spent on a war in Ukraine whose reasons were impossible for me to understand. How was Ukraine our concern? I mean, most Americans can’t even find it on the map. Additionally, by all accounts its government is incredibly corrupt. Historically, it has been consistently associated with Nazism. Ukraine seemed far from our business, especially when we have so many problems at home.
I’m referring to huge income gaps between rich and poor, to decaying cities, roads and bridges, low minimum wage, lack of universal health care, college loan indebtedness, rampant homelessness, and incoherent immigration policy. Why did the Biden administration find it so easy to find billions for Ukraine, but not for us and our problems?
Then came the genocide in Gaza! At the very least, it revealed the hypocrisy of Democrats ostensibly concerned with women’s rights, and racism, but supplying weapons to kill mothers and their children in Gaza. Clearly the administration felt differently about Palestinian women and children than about their American or Ukrainian counterparts. Isn’t that sexism? Isn’t that racism? Isn’t it politically suicidal?
Mrs. Harris promised more of the same. During her ineffective campaign she repeatedly refused to distance herself from anything Genocide Joe continues to implement in the Middle East. Doesn’t that make her a genocider too? Of course it does!
But won’t Trump just give us more of the same as well? Probably. But maybe not.
So, to clarify my own ambivalence about Tuesday’s election results, I decided to make a list of Trump’s pros and cons. Here’s how it came out:
Trump’s Negatives
There are so many! But here’s the short list:
In general, he’s crude, superficial, and uninformed.
He’s a pathological liar, e.g., about immigrant crime rates and their eating pets.
His only true accomplishment during his first term was to give gratuitous tax breaks to the world’s richest people.
He totally mishandled the COVID 19 outbreak. As a result, more Americans died than citizens of any other developed country.
His punitive policies against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba have increased the immigration situation he decries.
More specifically, he repeatedly tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government ridiculously installing U.S. puppet Juan Guaido to replace Nicolas Maduro.
He’s a climate change denier
He’s a champion of the fossil fuel industry’s super polluters.
He exhibits no understanding of the dangers of nuclear war. (Remember his wondering “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them.”)
Like Biden and Harris, he’s anti-Palestinian and an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide.
He blames U.S. unemployment and low wages on immigrants and the Chinese rather than on the decisions of his capitalist friends to offshore American jobs.
He thinks that tariffs hurt the Chinese, when they are covert taxes on American consumers, while increasing inflation and funneling the surcharged money to Washington.
He’s disrespectful of women and has been convicted of rape by a jury of his peers
He was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
He encouraged the January 6, 2021, assault on our nation’s capital.
He’s likely to incorporate into his administration neanderthals like Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio.
Trump’s Positives
Believe it or not, there are a few. Here’s the longest list I can think of:
Trump’s disliked and vilified by the Washington establishment and the mainstream media. (Indicating that he can’t be all that bad).
His landslide election has exposed widespread discontent with the economic and political status quo.
He’s a loose cannon. He and his MAGA followers form the closest thing to the third party that America requires.
His “party” has succeeded in uniting large swaths of previously hopelessly polarized population segments who somehow realize that they have more in common with each other than what drives them apart – including women, African Americans, and Hispanics.
He promises to incorporate into his administration anti-big-pharma, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., war critic, Tulsi Gabbard, and Putin interviewer Tucker Carlson.
He’s willing to negotiate an end to the Ukrainian war.
He’s highly skeptical of NATO.
His vice-president is J.D. Vance has been described by Robert Barnes as “the most war skeptical and pro-labor Republican office holder in the last 50 years.”
Beyond that and unlike the Biden administration, he’s proven willing to dialog and “deal” with America’s designated enemies including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
He promises to open sealed government documents (and their can of worms) on the JFK assassination.
And (most importantly) his election may drive neo-con Democrats to repudiate their efforts to out-Republican Republicans and to reappropriate their identity as Roosevelt New Dealers.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it – the pros and cons of Trump’s triumph as I see it. What do you think? Am I being naïve and too optimistic? Am I whistling past the graveyard? Can you add to my lists? Do you care to refute my reasoning?
Well, it’s happened. My practice of Tarot reading has converted me into a satanist.
On the one hand Tarot has caused me to recognize that the God I was raised to worship (and to preach as a priest) is more like the devil depicted in Tarot’s 15th Major arcana card.
And on the other hand, the cards have helped me see that the devil represents a suppressed aspect of my dark side that (in the understanding of Carl Jung) contains a kind of gold I’m being called to mine. In some sense, Satan is my friend.
All of this has led me to reject the God of my youth (and to some extent of my priesthood) while embracing as a quasi-friend Satan himself.
Let me explain.
I
The Devil Card
To begin with, here’s the Devil as depicted in the Rider, Waite, Smith (RWS) Tarot Deck.
What do you see here?
Straight away, I notice that its number 15 stands for a trifecta of strife (3 X 5 – with 5 being the Tarot’s number of conflict). The card depicts conflict with (1) the world, (2) the flesh, and (3) the devil himself.
Next, I see that black is the card’s dominant color – representing one’s dark side, death, destruction, and negativity.
The main figure in the card is a satyric monster half man and half beast. His face is fear-inspiring with monstrous horns jutting from his head. His right hand is raised in a mudra which says, “what you see is what you get.”
An inverted pentagram (which in upright form represents virtue and good) forms the monster’s “halo,” but in its inverted form is just the opposite.
In the card’s depiction, the monster reigns over a naked man and an unclothed woman. The heads of both are horned – a clear connection to the horned devil’s mind. The female figure’s tail is tipped with grapes, a vineyard sign of pleasure and intoxication. The tail of her gender opposite is inflamed directly from the torch the devil holds inverted in his left hand. The man’s passions are on fire in the presence of the disrobed woman.
Both the man and the woman are chained by their necks to the pillar from which the monster presides. The chains are loose and could easily be removed. But evidently, the humans either don’t perceive this or don’t want to escape their bondage.
In summary, the card portrays the human body and sexuality as somehow problematic. Both are intimately connected with the Spirit of Evil, with enslavement, and ambiguity about the whole affair.
II
God As Enemy
Personally, the more I contemplate the card, the more I see Christianity’s traditional God rather than the devil. That God was presented as creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher.
He was fear-inspiring, wasn’t he? After all, his principal concern was understood as connected with the “sins of the flesh.” And he made us all feel guilty (or at least uncomfortable) with sexual thoughts, words, and deeds.
All of that flew in the face of common-sense recognition of sex and propagation of the species as humanity’s second most powerful drive (after self-preservation).
It was as if devilish priests and theologians had transformed an unparalleled good into an unparalled evil to keep penitents under their control, coming to confession, and paying for the indulgences that Martin Luther and others found so odious.
III
Satan As Friend
Don’t be turned off by the idea of Satan as friend. It’s quite biblical. For instance, in the book of Job, Satan is portrayed as God’s counsellor. He’s a realist who for instance (in the Book of Job) bets the Divine One that if Job comes on extremely hard times, he will abandon his virtue and show his true colors as just another fair-weather saint.
For his part, Carl Jung saw the devil as representing aspects of God. The former as well as the latter is part of the Life Force. As a psychological phenomenon the devil embodies suppressed dark forces that are part of every human personality. In Jung’s sense, he’s the “Left Hand of God.”
Think of what we’ve been taught about the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Tradition has it that they’re pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, sloth, and gluttony. None of us wants to acknowledge that such forces are inevitable parts of our personalities. So, we spend a great deal of time pretending they belong to others but not to us. We spend our life force suppressing their influence on us. Inevitably though they bubble to the surface and express themselves periodically.
Jung calls us not only to face our inner destructive forces, but to embrace them. There’s gold in our dark side, he teaches.
What did he mean by that? Yes, he acknowledges that in the extreme any one of the Seven Deadly Sins can destroy our lives. But under conscious control, they can also enrich us with the gold they contain. For instance, properly acknowledged, accepted, and controlled
Pride can be a source of self-esteem that preventing one from acquiescing to abuse by the disrespectful.
Greed under control can cause workers to organize in pursuit of higher wages and safer working conditions.
A productive amount of Envy can drive us to imitate the Christ, and saintly figures like Gandhi, King, Malcolm, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, and Mother Theresa.
Justified Anger can lead us to demonstrate against the genocide now perpetrated by Zionists and the United States in Palestine.
Lust can help us appreciate the gift of sex and the pleasure it brings.
Holy Sloth can keep us from endorsing our culture’s worship of “productivity,” the rat race, and overwork. It can drive workers to organize for more time off, longer vacations, and family leave for new parents.
Gluttony can help us become slow food cooks and appreciators of wines and spirits. It can turn us against fast food saturated with sugar and salt.
IV
Conclusion
So, the next time the devil card turns up in your Tarot reading, don’t be frightened. It can serve as a reminder that God is not primarily creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher. All of that is diabolical. Instead, the Divine One is the total of all the energy in the universe and in the universe of universes. That includes the energy of consciousness even to the extent that She is aware of each one of us and can be addressed as Thou. She wants only the fullness of life for each of us.
On the other hand (God’s Left Hand?) Satan is in some sense our brother and friend. True, he is never satisfied with temperance, harmony, and balance (Tarot’s 14th major arcana card). However, there is gold in his Seven Deadly Sins. With controlled expression, they can drive us towards healthy self-esteem, just recompense for our work, the idealism of imitating the Christ, unwillingness to endorse genocide, an appreciation of sexual pleasure, the joy of doing nothing, and appreciation of the gifts of food and drink.
The Great Gustavo Gutierrez died this week. He transitioned as a 96-year-old giant whose A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (1971) popularized and spurred the most important theological movement of the last 1700 years (i.e. since Constantine in the 4th century). In fact, liberation theology (LT) might well be described as responsible for the West’s most influential intellectual and social developments of the last 175 years (i.e. since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848). United States and Vatican fierce opposition to LT testifies to its impact.
Think about it. Without liberation theology it is impossible to account for Salvador Allende’s rise to power in 1973 or the triumph of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1979, or the power the FMLN in El Salvador had and continues to enjoy today. The Zapatista movement in Mexico is also intimately connected with liberation theology. Even more, without reference to liberation theology, it’s impossible to fully understand the rise of new left governments throughout Latin America. All of them are indebted to liberation theology and its power to motivate the grassroots.
Perhaps more surprisingly: apart from LT, one cannot fully understand the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the United States. That’s because (as we’ll see below) political support for their movement was part of the Reagan administration’s strategy to defeat liberation theology which the White House and the Pentagon termed a national security threat. Their fear of LT mirrored that of the Vatican which ended up cooperating with Washington’s war against it.
Many are convinced that Washington’s and Rome’s anti-LT war was successful. That’s because the U.S. systematically assassinated its prophets along with hundreds of thousands of its adherents in a massive conflict that Noam Chomsky called “the first religious war of the 21st century.” The sheer terrorism of the U.S. response plus an equally systematic offensive against LT within the Catholic Church itself deprived liberation theology of its best leaders, misinformed and intimidated the grassroots, and silenced many more. Nonetheless LT has changed the world. It has changed the church and Christianity in general.
But what is liberation theology? And why was it so threatening to the powers-that-be, both political and ecclesiastical? What steps were taken to defeat it? And why should believers be so grateful to theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez?
Liberation Theology Defined
Simply put, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed. More accurately, it is reflection on the following of Jesus the Christ from the viewpoint of those among the poor who are committed to their own liberation. That is, LT begins from a place of commitment – to a world with room for everyone. In itself, it represents a popular movement, a solidarity movement for social justice.
Liberation from what? In a word, from colonialism and from the neo-colonialism represented today by the forces of corporate globalization. Those forces have nearly half the world living on $2 a day or less. They’ve concentrated the world’s wealth in the hands of a sliver of 1% of the world’s population. According to UN statistics, eight billionaires own as much as 50% or humanity. As a result, at least 25,000 people including 10,000 children die of preventable starvation each day. In the eyes of liberation theology’s protagonists, that’s sinful and runs entirely contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
And what were those teachings? (This is the heart of liberation theology.) They were first of all those of a man recognized by the impoverished protagonists of liberation theology as someone like themselves. He looked like them. According to experts in the field of forensic archeology, he resembled poor mestizos everywhere in Latin America. He probably stood about 5’1’’ and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was brown. He was a laborer, not a scholar; his hands were calloused.
Ironically, Jesus also possessed characteristics that mainstream Christians often find repulsive and ungodly. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother (Mt. 118-22; Lk. 1:26-38). He was homeless at birth (Lk.2:7). If we are to believe Matthew’s account, Jesus became an immigrant in Egypt (Mt. 2:13-15). The good people of his day called him a drunkard and the companion of prostitutes. They expelled him from his synagogue because he didn’t seem to care about the 10 Commandments, especially the most important one – the Sabbath law. (For a Jew such excommunication and the shunning it entailed were like a death sentence.) The religious authorities said he was a heretic and possessed by the devil. The occupying Roman authorities identified him as a terrorist. They arrested him. And he ended up a victim of torture and of capital punishment carried out by crucifixion – a means of execution the Romans reserved specifically for insurgents. He was not the kind of person mainstream Christians usually admire. He was far too liberal to merit their approval.
Jesus was clearly a feminist. Many of his disciples were women. He spoke with them in isolated places. He actually forgave a woman caught in adultery, while implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of patriarchal law which punished women for adultery and not men. And Jesus refused to recognize his contemporaries’ taboos around segregations. He crossed boundaries not only dividing men from women, but Jew from gentile, lepers from non-lepers, and rich from poor.
He couldn’t have been more liberal. In a sense he was an anarchist. He honored no law that failed to represent the loving thing to do. His attitude towards the law is best summarized in his pronouncement about the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was instituted for human beings,” he said, “human beings weren’t made for the Sabbath.” This was pure humanism placing human beings above even God’s holiest law. Again, it was anarchistic.
Jesus’ teachings were politically radical as well. They centered on what today is called social justice. As such they infuriated his opponents but were wildly inspiring to the poor and oppressed. His proclamation was not about himself, but about what he called “The Kingdom of God.” That was the highly charged political image he used to refer to what the world would be like if God were king instead of Caesar. In that kingdom everything would be turned upside-down. The first would be last; the last would be first. The rich would be poor; the poor would be rich.
Subsequent reflection by followers of Jesus in the Book of Revelation teased all of that out and drew the conclusion that with the dawning of God’s kingdom, the Roman Empire would be destroyed and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth entirely unlike empire. There (as indicated in the Acts of the Apostles) wealth would be distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There would be room for everyone. If that sounds like communism, it’s because, as the Mexican exegete Jose Miranda points out, the idea of communism originated with Christians, not with Marx and Engels.
U.S. Opposition to LT
Those connections with Marxist analysis go a long way towards explaining resistance to LT by the U.S. government as well as within the Catholic Church.
That liberation theology dared to enter the mythological arena the right had long dominated virtually without rival astounded and infuriated the empire. Peasants throughout the subjugated world found the new explanations of God, Jesus and the gospels entirely empowering. Everywhere throughout Latin America they formed biblical circles, and those circles issued in social movements for justice.
In response, the Rockefeller Report of 1969 already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of the United States. By 1987, the Latin American Military Chiefs of Staff meeting in conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, devoted several pages of their final report to liberation theology and the threat it posed to regional stability. In between, in 1979 the first Santa Fe Document advised the incoming Reagan administration that it had to do something decisive about the threat posed by liberation theology. The administration heeded the advice, and responded both militarily and ideologically.
Reagan’s military strategy against liberation theology issued in a bloody war pitting the United States against the Catholic Church in Latin America whose bishops meeting in conference in Medellin Colombia had together dared to affirm a “preferential option for the poor” as their official position. To combat that commitment, the U.S. did exactly what Rome had done in the first three centuries of our era – and for the same reason: faithfully following Jesus who called empire into question and motivated the poor to assert their rights in this world as children of the God of life.
And both the Roman response and the U.S. response to Jesus and his followers resulted in blood baths. Many of us are well acquainted with the best-known martyrs: Camilo Torres, Archbishop Romero, the Salvadoran team of liberation theologians killed at San Salvador’s Central American University in 1989, the U.S. women religious murdered years earlier in that same country, and Che Guevara. (Yes, Che. His spirituality was secular, but it was no less spiritual or liberationist than any of the others.) And then the unending list of martyrs in this war against the Catholic Church – 200,000 in Guatemala, more than 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and literally untold killings and disappearances in Honduras.
In every case, the carnage was a response to social movements inspired by liberation theology. Again, as Chomsky points out, official U.S. military documents show that liberation theology was a major target of those wars. In fact within those same official documents, the Army boasts specifically about defeating LT.
As for Reagan’s ideological response to liberation theology . . . . On his accession to power, CIA psyops began funding conservative alternatives to liberation theology in Latin America and in the U.S. So did business concerns that saw the leftward drift of Latin America as a threat to their presence there. Domino’s Pizza and Coors Brewery were prominent among the cases in point. As a result, evangelicals throughout the region grew rapidly in number, and the recipients of those funds in the United States increasingly identified with Republicans, the “hand that fed them.”
So, the television programs of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and others were beamed into every poor barrio,población, and favela. Right wing churches sprang up everywhere feeding and expanding an already robust evangelical presence in areas once completely dominated by the Catholic Church. The reactionary message was always the same – a depoliticized version of Christianity whose central commitment involved accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior and rejecting communism including the type allegedly represented by the theology of liberation.
All this points up the extreme importance of LT. including being indirectly responsible for the rise of the religious right in the United States.
On the other hand however, and on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, the Obama presidency represented the first U.S. president directly influenced by liberation theology. For 20 years, Barack Obama was part of the congregation of Jeremiah Wright – identified by James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, as the latter’s foremost contemporary embodiment.
Nevertheless, Reagan’s two-front strategy (military and ideological) worked. Revolutionary gains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and most prominently, in Nicaragua were halted and reversed. Militarily, the “Guatemala Solution” was the template. It entailed using military and paramilitary death squads to kill everyone remotely connected with guerrilla movements. According to the Reagan strategy, that included priests, nuns, lay catechists and ministers of the word influenced by liberation theology. The theological strategy worked as well. The slogan promulgated by the Salvadoran military said it all, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.”
Our Debt to Gustavo Gutierrez
Gustavo Gutierrez was by no means the founder of liberation theology. However, he is said to have coined the term in 1968 after the bishops of Latin America adopted as their own LT’s understanding of the Christ event as expressing God’s “preferential option for the poor.” The poor are God’s chosen people, liberationists explained, as testified by the divine choice to incarnate as the poor peasant earlier described.
In a sense then, Gutierrez and the movement he popularized represents a kind of “Critical Faith Theory” comparable to contemporary academia’s “Critical Race Theory.” Like the latter in relation to race, liberation theology seeks to reverse the traditional employment of religion and the Judeo-Christian tradition as tools of oppression meant to drug, pacify, infantilize, and depoliticize their adherents.
In that sense, LT is a kind of anti-theology.
Thank you Saint Gustavo Gutierrez for your life and work.
Just this morning I received an appeal from a colleague of mine at OpEdNewswhere I’m a senior editor. He begged those on his mailing list to please vote for Kamala Harris. He said that allowing Donald Trump to be elected would be disastrous not only for the United States, but for the world. So, please, please vote for the sitting Vice President.
Believe me, I completely understand where my friend is coming from. I too dread the thought of four more years of yet another Trump presidency. For that reason, I’d never vote for him. Neither would I ever vote for a Republican. They’re just too much in the pockets of our country’s richest 1%.
However, I’ve come to realize that the same has become true for the Democrats. They too serve the interests of that same 1%. They’re just Republican Lite. With their colleagues across the aisle, they’ve formed a kind of Uni-Party.
I mean, like the Republicans, the Democrats have shown that they don’t really care about working people, except at election time. The Blues like the Reds care only about their donors.
Think about it: neither party gives a damn about what you or I think concerning Palestinians, raising the minimum wage, fairly taxing the rich and corporations, universal health care, free college tuition, homelessness, cancellation of debt for college graduates, gun legislation, nuclear arms control, closing federal lands to oil interests, a green New Deal, repairing our country’s collapsing infrastructure, high-speed rail, or solving the root problems of immigration. The list goes on. Yes, Democrats sometimes pay lip service to such issues. But that’s about as far as it goes.
Moreover, Democratic foreign policy is indistinguishable from the Republicans. There’s hardly a sliver of difference between them on Israel, Ukraine, or China. Nothing about diplomacy and its inherent need for compromise. Instead, for both parties, foreign policy has been reduced to three elements. Everyone must follow U.S. directives or face bombing, sanctions, and/or regime change. That’s it! Bombing, sanctions, and regime change.
(To give him his due however, at least Donald Trump has promised to end the Ukraine nonsense – the issue that has overridden everything else for the Biden presidency since 2022. Since that time, the U.S. has spent more than $175 billion on Ukraine. $175 billion!! That’s enough to solve all the problems listed above. But all the while Democrats have joined Republicans in claiming that there’s not enough money for addressing those issues – not even for FEMA in the wake of Helene and Milton.)
What I’m saying is America has become a failed state. Its system is not worth participating in. Bent on having our 4.5% of the world’s population controlling the entire thing, it’s completely corrupt. Moreover, completely controlled by money and the military industrial complex, it can’t be reformed. Even if Democrats wanted to address the problems listed above, the Republicans would never let them. Realizing this, instead of owning their working-class identity, the former have decided to become more like the latter. Republican Lite! The result is a completely frozen irreformable system.
And don’t tell me that we can vote ourselves out of this mess. Again, the system won’t let us. I mean, no one’s even talking about eliminating the Electoral College, are they? So, we keep getting “leaders” unsupported by the country’s majority. Seven “swing states” determine the whole thing reducing the rest of us to mere spectators. We’re left wondering which sock puppet the voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania will choose. I live in Connecticut, a solidly blue state. Why should I vote? It’s all a charade.
But here let me slow down. None of what I’ve written so far represents my decisive reason for sitting out this election. It’s simply this: I CAN’T VOTE FOR GENOCIDERS.
Can you?
For me it’s a moral issue. I just can’t do it anymore than I could have voted for that mustached man in Germany nearly a century ago.
For me, apartheid is non-negotiable. Settler colonialism is non-negotiable. But above all, GENOCIDE IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. I can’t support any government committing genocide. And that’s what a Harris presidency promises to continue. So will a Trump presidency.
End of discussion.
But who knows? Perhaps a Trump victory will at last cause Democrats to ask themselves why. It might drive them to realize that Republican Lite doesn’t cut it for working people. It might lead Democrats to unabashedly become the party of Roosevelt’s New Deal, of election reform, higher wages, universal health care, a Green New Deal, just taxation, loan forgiveness, defunding Israel’s genocide, nuclear disarmament, and enlightened immigration policy (that connects asylum seekers with failed U.S. policies such as the War on Drugs and the North American Free Trade Agreement).
Don’t hold your breath though. And buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.
Last week my wife and I spent three days in Venice. For me it was a return visit.
Fifty-two years ago, I traveled there twice with a very dear friend. So, this time round brought back a flood of happy memories.
My 2024 visit was highlighted by hours spent at the Biennale art exhibition in and near the city’s Arsenale Gardens. It’s theme was “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere).
The displayed sculptures, paintings, films, fabrics, and other objets d’art celebrated rather than lamented the planet-wide population exchanges we’re all witnessing. The displays elicited deep reflections on contemporary debate about immigrants, borders, and attempts to keep “foreigners” out of Europe and the United States.
It all made me think not only about immigration, but about colonialism and reparations.
On the one hand, across the entire world we’re witnessing seemingly irresistible waves of immigrants traveling from the global south to Europe and the United States. On the other hand, those former colonial powers are contesting such movements in the name of preserving their (predominantly white) cultures and economies from foreign invaders.
The colonial powers are worried about being “replaced” in their own countries.
Attempts at preservation evoke restrictive measures such as laws, walls and increased militarization of borders. They also involve propaganda campaigns that villainize immigrants from the former colonies as invaders, criminals, and agents of economic destruction bent on taking jobs from their working-class victims.
More specifically, the propaganda would have e.g., “Americans” believe that immigrants cause their economic problems such as unemployment, job loss, and lower wages. Such reasoning has it that in our 2024 population of 350 million people, U.S. economic problems are created by 12 million of the poorest people in the world seeking refuge across “our” sacred borders. 12 million is about 3.4% of 350 million. Economically speaking, that’s an insignificant percentage – especially when those involved have virtually zero political power.
So, the concern immigration raises is not only absurd, it also misdirects public attention from the real causes not only of our economic problems and of immigration itself. Those causes include colonialism and capitalism with its practice of offshoring the very jobs that once created a prospering middle class in Europe and the United States. In other words, current economic problems are and have always been caused by the richest people among us rather than by the poorest.
More precisely, it’s all associated with colonialism – i.e. with the centuries’ long practice of western Europeans invading and plundering the homelands of those now seen as threatening Europe and the United States.
Recall that the last 500 years have seen “westerners” migrating to the Global South (Africa, Latin America, and South Asia), stealing its land and treasures, and enslaving its peoples while often taking up residence and in the process destroying economies, cultures, indigenous art, and languages.
The further result has been the creation of “underdeveloped” countries whose purloined wealth fueled the economic development of Europeans inhabiting lands (like England) that are by comparison small, resource poor and sparsely populated.
Additionally, the industrial “development” supported by the colonial system has caused an unprecedented warming of the environment that has taken its worst toll in the Global South. There formerly productive agricultural land has been robbed of its fertility by the resultant changes in temperature and rainfall as well as by forest fires.
The very existence of entire island nations is threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming.
Likewise, invading capitalists drove peasants from their subsistence milpas and small farms through colonial practices that precisely ignored property lines and borders while often redrawing them altogether.
Additionally, “foreign aid” in the form of food giveaways and subsidies to giant agricultural firms consistently made it impossible for small indigenous farmers to compete with their invaders from the north. How can a local farmer sell her crops in the face of “foreign aid” (dumping) whose very purpose is to drive her out of business?
And when local populations tried to remedy such problems by electing governments to meet their own needs rather than those of their exploiters, the latter either initiated regime change or directly fought wars against them — all to reverse people-centered programs in the name of fighting socialism and communism.
So now the shoe’s on the other foot. Floods of people from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia are returning the favor. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re voting with their feet to demand reparations for the wealth the colonialists stole from them.
In other words, whether to give reparations for the plunder of colonialism is not up to the colonizers to decide. The exploited are at our doorstep to take back what was unjustly stolen. They are the deciders.
And there’s no stopping them. You can pass all the laws you want. You can build your walls.
You can militarize your borders.
But those we’ve wronged are still going to come. And they’ll bring their languages, clothing, foods, religions, music, art, and large families.
The Great Replacement is inevitable. The Great Replacement is just. It’s karma. The chickens are coming home to roost.
Apologies for not attending to my blog for so long.
I’ve been busy getting ready for this two-month trip as well as rehabbing from my knee operations and another unexpected surgery. I’ve also been preoccupied with Tarot readings for an increasing number of clients – not to mention readings for my immediate family.
All six of us (including my son-in-law) have birthdays in the span of a single month – from September 6th to October 5th. And this year I’ve decided to give each family member a 10-card Tarot reading. It’s been a lot of fun, but has taken time, since each reading (including visual representations of each card) runs to about a dozen pages.
With that behind me, I can now return to blogging.
So, again, greetings from the Eternal City.
Peggy and I are here visiting our son Brendan, his wife Erin, and their three children, Genevieve (4), Madeleine (2), and Sophie (8 months). We want to get to know those kids.
You may recall that Brendan works for the State Department. He operates out of the embassy in Rome and is doing quite well following previous postings in Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
You might also realize that in a sense, this visit represents my “return to the scene of the crime.” I mean, as a newly ordained priest, my first assignment was to get my doctorate in moral theology here in Rome. So, between the years 1967 and 1972, I obtained my licentiate in systematic theology at the Atheneum Anselmianum and that doctorate at the Academia Alfonsiana.
Those five years changed my life.
Having educated me for 12 years (from a callow high school freshman in Silver Creek, New York to an ordained priest in Milton, Massachusetts) the intent of the Society of St. Columban (my sponsoring organization) was for me to return from Rome and teach moral theology in its major seminary.
However, studying post-Vatican II theology and living abroad for five years radically changed my world vision and understandings of God, Jesus, church, priesthood, politics, etc. Consequently, without my knowing it, the rector of our Rome house eventually wrote to the Columbans’ Superior General that I was “too dangerous” to teach in the organization’s major seminary.
So much for that.
In any case, I’ve written about all that elsewhere in these pages behind the “personal” button in my blog’s table of contents.
I won’t bore you with repetition.
So let me do so instead by simply noting that:
We’re here.
We’ve been generously received by our hosts.
The grandkids are a lot of fun.
I’ve forgotten most of my Italian (confusing it with similar languages I’ve learned in the meantime, viz., Portuguese and Spanish).
At this very moment, Peggy and I find ourselves aboard a high-speed train heading from Rome to Turin, where we’ll attend a conference on the world’s food system.
Afterwards, we’ll spend three nights in Venice.
Then we’ll return to Rome and the adventures that await us there and elsewhere in the country.
And oh (by the way) around Thanksgiving and our planned trip home, the two of us will return to Spain’s Granada for a week. That’s where we spent about a year in 2022-23. It will be great to reconnect with friends there.
Something important and promising might well be happening in American politics. At the popular level, working class folks are expressing their deep discontent with a system run by octogenarians who serve their donors rather than the American taxpayer. The latter has come to realize that Democrats and Republicans have formed a kind of Uni-party beholden to the rich and powerful rather than to their plebian electors.
Strange to say however, both parties have shown faint signs of perhaps recognizing that truth and its devastating consequences for them at the voting booth. The Republican Party has selected a presidential candidate (Donald Trump) who talks a good game in terms of rebellion against the status quo. At the same time, the Democrats have set aside their senile superannuated “leader” (Joe Biden) in favor of a much younger black woman (Kamala Harris).
The truth is however that the policies of neither Trump nor Harris promise much difference in terms of changing the given order as far as international relations are concerned. No matter who’s elected, genocidal support for Zionism will remain a cornerstone of our country’s foreign policy. The war in Ukraine will continue it seems “to the last Ukrainian.” And America’s “diplomacy” will still prioritize war, sanctions, and regime change over peace-seeking diplomacy and dialog. All of that will continue unabated.
Nevertheless, Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her running mate and Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his offer strong indications that something new might be afoot for 2028. Both Walz and Vance are far more thoughtful than Harris or Trump. In fact, both vice-presidential candidates might be more war averse and friendly to the working class than their mentors.
Tim Walz
That’s clear to most in the case of Tim Walz. As Minnesota governor, he has distinguished himself as a progressive. Among other legislative achievements, he signed bills that:
Made access to abortion easier
Provide free breakfast and lunch to all school children
Offer free college tuition for families with incomes of $80,000 or less
Curb greenhouse gas emissions
Moved towards establishing a public healthcare option within the MinnesotaCare system
Restored voting rights to decarcerated felons
Vastly increased Minnesota’s spending on housing to prevent homelessness, expand homeownership opportunities and provide rental assistance to thousands of households.
Still, according to American lawyer and political commentator, Robert Barnes, J.D. Vance might well be “the most war-skeptical, pro-worker Republican office holder of the last 100 years.”
Barnes supports this contention by citing (among other considerations) Vance’s 2024 vote against a $95 billion Ukraine aid package. Vance was one of only 18 senators voting against it in a 79-18 tally. (Vance thinks Ukraine is Europe’s problem and not that of the United States.) Barnes also points out that the Teamsters regard Vance as an important working-class ally.
As for intellectual influences on Senator Vance, here is a list provided by Politico’s Ian Ward in his article “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.”
Catholic Social Teaching: Catholic social justice teachings (the “best kept secret of the Catholic Church”) emphasize community, workers’ rights, and environmental protection. The most famous examples of such teachings are found in the encyclicals of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum 1891), Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno 1931), John XXIII (Mater et Magistra 1961), John XXIII (Pacem in Terris 1963), Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes, 1965), and Pope Francis (Laudato Si 2015).
Sohrab Ahmari(co-editor of Compact Magazine): Also emphasizes Catholic teachings regarding social justice.
Peter Deneen(University of Notre Dame): Deneen holds that unfettered free markets with their emphasis on competition have undercut not only the American family, but communitarian values and the collective basis of our national life. Neoliberal economics need not only restraint but replacement.
Brad Wilcox (BYU): Wilcox argues that women’s entry into the workforce has been better for companies than for most women. The companies benefit from more and cheaper labor. Meanwhile many women end up hating their jobs. Too many also feel overworked because they typically retain responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and childcare when they return from the workplace.
Peter Thiel(Hedge Fund Investor): Thiel warns against a technology that has too often shackled us as opposed to liberating us and building a better society. We need to get off our phones.
Curtis Yarvin(American blogger): For Yarvin, American democracy has deteriorated into control by a corrupt oligarchy. Resolving such tendencies, he says, might entail installing a kind of dictator— a nationalist CEO who would run the country like a startup business.
Rene Girard(French historian and theologian): Girard holds that Christianity must be reinterpreted to recognize that the Judeo-Christian tradition is on the side of the poor and oppressed rather than the rich and powerful.
Conclusion
It’s discouraging that American political discourse is overwhelmingly ad hominem rather than focused on the issues suggested by the policies of Tim Walz and the intellectual influences on J.D. Vance.
“Vance is weird.” “Walz is a communist.” “Trump’s a fascist.” “Harris is the product of DEI.” “My audience crowds are bigger than yours.”
Such immature schoolyard put-downs do nothing at all to address the real concerns of voters.
Better to explore candidates’ stances on climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Why is America so beholden to Israel and cooperative with its clearly genocidal policies? And what is Ukraine to us?
What about street people and public housing? What about subsidized childcare, free post-secondary education, and debt relief for those with unrepayable student loans? Have the candidates thought about the issues of police violence and reparations to the black community? And do any of those seeking our vote recognize connections between immigration and U.S. wars, regime changes, and sanctions?
And at an even deeper level, are we primarily individuals in competition with one another or must we rediscover community and common good? Has technology become our master rather than our servant? And what are best practices for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion? What are the benefits and liabilities of universal healthcare and state-subsidized education?
Those are the issues that need addressing and serious debate. Those are the issues that require real discussion rather than the sound bites, slogans, and zingers.
And while Harris and Trump offer little hope of going there, I’m suggesting here that their selection of running mates more serious and thoughtful than either main candidate perhaps offer some hope for the future.
Walz’s policy decisions as governor of Minnesota and the influences on Vance’s thinking seem to suggest that it does.
Bread & Puppet’s rendition of El Salvador’s martyred archbishop, Oscar Romero
Readings for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: I Kgs. 19:4-8; Eph. 4:30-5:2; Jn. 6:41-51
This Sunday’s readings are about prophets and bread.
They remind me of a recent visit my wife Peggy and I made to Glover Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Museum along with two of our eight grandchildren, Eva (age 15) and Orlando (12). The Museum presented the work of true prophets, Elka and Peter Schumann who, like today’s readings consistently connected prophecy with hard-to-chew bread. (Elka died two years ago at the age of 85).
The Schumann’sProphetic Puppets
I’m sure many of you have heard of Bread and Puppet. The Schumanns founded that theater in 1963 as an act of political protest. Originally their issue was poor housing conditions in New York City. Since then, their giant puppets – some more than 20 feet high – have made spectacular appearances at protests, parades, and demonstrations everywhere.
Over the years, Bread and Puppet’s focus expanded beyond housing concerns to include the Vietnam War, climate change, Nicaragua and the Contras, El Salvador, Archbishop Romero, liberation theology, Israel’s crimes in Palestine, and the general failure of capitalism. Every summer hundreds of volunteers have participated in the theater’s elaborate outdoor pageants highlighting those issues.
As a result, touring the museum last month and seeing hundreds of the Schumanns’ puppets represented a painful review of U.S. crimes over the past half century. Despite those sad reminders, the puppets also embodied an inspiring display of insight, creativity, commitment, joy, and courage. The Schumanns’ giant puppets have provided a truly prophetic deepening our collective consciousness.
The Schumann’sNourishing Bread
However, the mammoth puppets were so stunning and arresting that it’s easy to forget the part that bread played in the Schumanns’ work. After all, the name of their company is Bread and Puppet.” (And homemade bread was served at all Theater performances.)
Elka Schumann herself made the connection in a 2001 film about her work. The documentary was produced by her daughter Tamar and DeeDee Halleck. Elka said:
“We have a grinder over there, and we grind the grain ourselves. And the bread is not at all like your supermarket bread. You really have to chew it. You really have to put some work into it. But then you get something very good for that. And when our theater is successful, we feel it’s the same way. You’ve got to think. It doesn’t like tell you everything. It’s not like Wonder Bread: It’s just like there it is, here’s the story, this is what it means. You’ve got to do some figuring yourself in the theater, in our theater. And if the play is successful, then at the end you probably feel it was worth the work.”
Elka’s words underline the essentials of good theater, good art, good religion. They don’t tell you everything. You must put in some work trying to figure out the message, to unpack it all. Good theater, good religion is not like eating white bread from Piggly Wiggly.
Jesus’ Bread
As mentioned earlier, that aspect of theater and faith is important to note this particular Sunday, since the day’s readings highlight the connections between bread, prophets, and the teachings of Yeshua, the construction worker from Nazareth who like the Schumanns’ puppets was truly larger than life.
What Jesus taught in his illustrative parables – in fact, what’s found throughout the Bible – challenges us to think and question our own lives, the values of our culture, and our too easy “understandings” of life and “God.” That’s what the Schumanns were doing too.
Think about the prodigal son, Jesus’ response to the woman about to be stoned for adultery, his dialog with Pontius Pilate about the nature of truth, and the issues raised by the fact that Jesus was executed as a rebel against Rome. Think about the prophet’s dying prayer for his enemies, his injunction to treat others as we would like to be treated, his “beatitudes'” centralizing purity of intention, poverty, gentleness, bereavement, imprisonment, mercy, peacemaking, and passion for justice. At every turn his words and deeds are challenging and (if you puzzle over them) difficult but rewarding to digest.
Understood in terms of rejecting Wonder Bread’s superficiality, all those elements in the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds should give “Americans” pause. They should call into question the very notion of patriarchy, our worship of the rich, our wars against the world’s poor, our attitudes towards empire and capital punishment, as well as our very denial of truth’s possibility (which Gandhi boldly identified with God).
That sort of hard-to-chew bread forms the backdrop implied in today’s readings. See for yourself. Here are my “translations.” You could find the originals here to tell if I got them right.
I Kings 19: 4-8
Prophets are lonely people Living on the edge of Death and despair. Elijah was no different. He even prayed for death On his way to Mt. Sinai. Instead, generous Spirits Fed him with bread and water Twice! He didn't have to eat again For the remaining 40 days Of his journey To God's holy mountain.
Psalm 34: 2-9
Elijah's miraculous bread Gave him a taste of Life's Supreme Goodness Directed especially Towards the threatened And afflicted poor. The taste of bread Replaces their shame And distress With joy and confidence In Life's protective Source.
Ephesians 4: 30-5:2
So, Elijah Should never have been sad. In fact, For those filled with God's Spirit (And bread!) There can be no room for sadness Bitterness, fury, anger, Shouting, reviling or malice. There is space only for Kindness, compassion, Forgiveness and love That mirror Life's own abundance And inherent generosity.
John 6: 42-51
John's community of faith Identified Jesus' teaching With the bread That fed Elijah. In fact, They called Jesus himself "The Bread of Heaven." Consuming his teachings Would strengthen them For "the journey without distance" (From heart to head). This still upsets outsiders Unable to overcome Fundamentalist literalism That yet confuses The Bread of Life With Wonder Bread, And fairy tales And spiritual nourishment With gross cannibalism
Conclusion
When I was a kid, I actually liked Wonder Bread. In fact, I still kind of do. Don’t you? I mean it’s a bit sweet; it’s easy to chew; it’s a nice base for peanut butter and jelly, and it goes down easy. It’s comfort food. My well-intentioned mother fed it to me and my three siblings without a second thought. I ate it the same way.
But then most of us got more conscientious about what we put into our bodies. With Elka Schumann, we realized that Wonder Bread didn’t really nourish us. So, we turned to bread that (initially at least) was less familiar and that required more chewing and changing of taste-preferences – a bit more work – maybe not as strong as Elka’s bread, but more substantial nonetheless.
For many of us who have stuck with faith as a source of meaning, it’s been the same. We outgrew the beliefs that no longer nourished. We woke up to the fact that Jesus’ teachings need adult interpretation that demands thought and decision about those issues I mentioned earlier — patriarchy, grossly unequal wealth distribution, perpetual wars precisely against the world’s poor, empire, capital punishment, and about agnosticism concerning the Truth that parallels our denial of what we know to be genuine relative to the great issues of our day.
Instead, we’ve reduced “faith” to childish fairy tales that none of us can believe. We’ve made it into Wonder Bread. And this at a time in history when acceptance of life’s essential unity – proclaimed not only by Elijah and Jesus, but by all the world’s great religious traditions – is necessary for our species’ very survival.
In the words of John, the Evangelist, I’m trying to say we need the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life now more than ever. We don’t need comfort food.
Thank you, Elka and Peter Schumann for using your puppets and bread to drive that truth home.
About Things That Matter 