Torture and the Human Image

Update 3/15/09: The NYTimes has released transcripts of interviews of those tortured at US "black sites."


The following published 06: I've meant to write about the decision by the US Congress last month to effectively legalize the torture of people. I haven't done so yet because of personal emergencies and time constraints. I've also been trying to weed through the various angles taken by the political and legal commentators on the issue. My take--strangely to me at least--always comes back to the ethico-religious perspective. ...

I say strangely because it seems to me that there are viable arguments from a pragmatic and ruthlessly mercenary perspective wherein torture can be justified. I do not agree with these, and I think they can be undermined logically, yet I think that people are rarely persuaded to act by either logical or rational arguments. That is, as I have argued before, when it comes to "skin for skin" as the Accuser in Job says, people will resort to distinctly seemingly irrational--although understandable--actions to save themselves.

Often, these avenues of saving oneself can occur against one's will. That is, biological and psychological forces take control of a person and the survival imperative becomes paramount in how one acts--and why one acts is often incommunicable, at least at the time. It is perhaps only after years of having done something that why you did what you did that the "reasons" you acted that way actually ever becomes sayable, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase in a rather superficial manner.

The Christian apostle Paul once had a chance to undergo torture for his belief in the Christian message he was hoping to spread throughout the world. Given the choice of suffering for his good news, Paul did something that his tormenters perhaps least expected. Paul invoked his Roman citizenship. Somewhat unique for a Jew of the time, Paul’s Roman citizenship brought with it a protection against the one thing that probably evoked one of the profounder fears in his contemporaries—the usual torture to elicit a confession that was normal operating procedure in the Roman provinces.

Roman citizenship brought with it the protection from mandatory torture. Besides the other economic and social privileges that came along with being a Roman citizen, this legal protection against being tortured—whether innocent or not—is perhaps the one right that stands out for us who look back over the millennia. That is, we take our protection from torture for granted, seeing it as the mark of a civilized nation.

No doubt, the Romans used the threat of torture as a coercive means of maintaining control over those who refused Roman rule. Indeed, this one right could be seen as a stick and its promise a carrot. How much subservience would a person give to the ruling powers if they’re faced with the instruments of torture?

In passing legislation that effectively legalizes torture, the US congress turned back the clock on civilization two millennia. Given the most likely fact that US citizens themselves could be tortured, this clock is set even farther back—back before the establishment of the Roman Republic, 2700 years ago.

This disturbing historical fact is further aggravated by the notion that the US has effectively set itself up as arbiter for determining who is and who is not a human being. This goes beyond a simple political dimension—it carries with it something of a metaphysical aspect that delegates to the US a power of life and death that in many religious or philosophical systems belongs to a transcendent power alone. It is this immense power over who’s determined to be human or not—who deserves the concern of human integrity—that led many early Christians in writings like the book of Revelation to characterize the Roman Empire as a Beast or demi-god that tries to usurp the power of control of the world’s maker.

The French thinker Simone Weil carried these images to their ethico-religious conclusions. Basing herself on the perception that humans turning humans into things--as they are in war or via slavery and torture—is the main feature of every evil regime throughout time, she appealed to a basic sentiment in humans that revulses from watching the suffering of others.

For Weil, the basic feature of the Beast’s method is to create an environment of illusion wherein people are alienated from their consciences. Dealing and doling out various fantasies, the Beast attempts to create in people a world free of pain and suffering or one where pain and suffering have no reality except as the cries of characters in a fantasy world without gravity of depth.

Weil’s appeal to primitive conscience is perhaps the last gasp of an unrepentant idealist. He was without a doubt a Platonist who attempted to integrate the Platonic world of ideas into political and social dialogs. For many post-modernists, this attempt already marks her work as trying to resurrect a defunct superstition of ghostly worlds where the disconnect between that world and this world creates an inherent illusion and self-deception. One places one’s will and its dispositions in that world rather than dealing with the world as it is in this world.

Be these philosophical questions be as they may, Weil’s central point about whether there’s a conscience and a human sentiment of sympathy for another’s suffering seems unreducible. Answering that question in the affirmative—whether via scientific research or based on introspective analysis—goes a long way in answering questions about why or why it’s not moral to torture others. Certainly, there are factors that come into play to undermine this basic human sentiment. In some religious contexts, it’s called original sin, in philosophy a matter of mistaking evil for the good.

Once you accept the basic notion of a human aversion to suffering of others, as well as the desire to make others suffer, then any time that such practices of condoning suffering and institutionalizing them becomes a matter of dealing a severe blow to what old-time humanists used to call the human image, and which various religious and philosophical apologists have termed the integrity of something that transcends the merely socio-biological human animal.

Related Link Against the Grain: Series on Christian Teaching and Torture: 1, 2, 3, 4 Read more!

The Dead Will Laugh George Bush to Hell: The Historian Reviews the Lie that Is Bush's Iraq

Martin van Creveld likes to tell it like it is. He said Bush's invasion of Iraq was the worst military decision in 2,000 years and now he says the US and the world can live with a nuclear Iran. As pinpointed repeatedly thruout this blog, this view only echoes expert assessments that a nuclear Iran threatening world peace is a nightmare propagated by people who want Iranian oil fields. The US Army war College itself has written extensively about this issue.

Creveld--an Israeli military historian whom some consider the greatest war historian alive--echoes these views when he writes:

Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.

General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid.

But like everything else in this environment of PR and propaganda, such informed and rational views may go unheeded until it is too late.

There's a tinge in Creveld's opposition to the Israel/US position vis a vis Iran. They come out in a statement like the following:

And behind Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stands President Bush — the same President Bush who four years ago needed no reason at all to take on Iran’s neighbor to the west and demolish it to the point where it may never rise again.

For a historian who knows the way words can deceive, such a statement is a big deal coming from such an eminent historian.

Creveld's comments should be seen as a commentary on the following description provided by journalist Nir Rosen concerning the true reality of post-Bush Iraq:

What will happen to Iraq? Think Mogadishu, small warlords controlling various neighborhoods, militias preying on those left behind, more powerful warlords controlling areas with resources, such as oil fields, ports, and lucrative pilgrimage routes and shrines. Irredentist Sunni militias will attempt to retake their lost land, but they will be pushed into the Anbar Province, Jordan, and Syria, where they may link up with local Islamist militants to destabilize Amman and Damascus. Some will look to fight elsewhere; unable to continue the jihad in Iraq they will find common cause with Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and others alienated from their societies and hateful of Shias. The new rump Shia statelet, including Baghdad and the South, will be quarantined by the Sunni states in the region and pushed inexorably into Iranian hands whether Shia Iraqis want this or not. It will be isolated and radicalized, and Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al Sadr, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, Muhamad al Yaqubi, and others will battle for power.

There is no “surge.” At best it can be called an ooze, a slow increase of American occupying forces by a mere 15 percent, consisting of few new soldiers and many whose terms of service have been merely extended. Yet the U.S. has doubled the size of its mission, announcing it will also take on the Shia militias as well as the Sunni ones. On the ground, that means American soldiers secure areas and then hand them over to Iraqi security forces who impose a reign of terror on the inhabitants. In the Iraqi civil war the army and police are not the solution; they are combatants, fighting on behalf of Shia-sectarian Islamist parties. The vaunted efforts to train Iraqi security forces have merely trained better death squads. The Americans continue to imprison thousands of Iraqis, and kill many others. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations that would normally demand that the United States comply with international law and hand over imprisoned Iraqis to the “sovereign” Iraqi government are not doing so, knowing that their treatment at the hands of the government would be far worse than anything they would endure while in American captivity. The occupation is not benign. It is profoundly painful, humiliating, and lethal.

All hail Rex Judas. All hail hell and the poor souls George Bush will hear laughing at him on his way to hell.

UpdateWar and Piece recently noted that HaAretz reports that Israeli Foreign Minister Livni writes:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

The article also reveals for the first time a document Livni prepared and sent to Olmert a few months after the Second Lebanon War proposing a new division of labor between the two. "Enclosed is a proposal for work procedures between us, with the aim of providing an answer to Israel's strategic needs and facilitating early planning and the formulation of coordinated Israeli positions ... within the framework of cooperative relations, full transparency and continuous mutual updates," wrote Livni. ...

Explain to me again why the US press does not report these things. Read more!

Antichrist Reveals Himself

A man who says he is Jesus Christ in his second incarnation is now sporting the sign 666 on his arm. Does this mean he is the Antichrist or wants to be or, as he says, that is meaningless anyway since the devil doesn't exist? (h/t NT Today). Read more!

My Views on the Apocalypse

The previous post may have left some of you scratching your heads. My thoughts about the Apocalypse--or an apocalypse--are might seem out of character. As I have written before, there are many ways to understand that wonderfully surreal book called Revelation. Without rehashing old statements, I want to add that my thoughts have turned to apocalyptic in response to articles that jodi dean is posting at her blog. In response ...

I have added the following in comments at her blog:

Without getting too bogged down in terminology, eschatology relates to anything dealing with ultimate things, such as life after death and so on. Apocalyptic is related to end times and history and the role that the divine or transcendent plays in bringing that about.

Your separation of political and religious seems unwarranted. Many of the intertestamental apocalypses have politico-religious ramifications. Seeing that the Xtian Zionists use a political message is nothing new, therefore. As I remarked to Jodi earlier, there have been politico-relious movements of apocalypsticists from those times and throughout Xtian, Jewish, and Islamic history.

Pocock, for example, notes the political ramifications of Savonarola's apocalypticism, as well as this dimension in English and American revolutionary periods. Pocock makes some interesting comments on how apcalyptic changes one's relationship to time and sees time.

For Pocock, what happened in Savonarolan Florence, for example, was that the apocalyptic message brought time down to earth--so to speak--giving the believers that they had a direct role in the outcome of history. This opposed the Augustinian conception of time and the two kingdoms, since in that framework the two worlds did not intersect except at the end of time, which God was in control of and which humans had no role to play.

I also noted there that: What is unique about the Bush Xtians is that they are using the mythology of apocalypse to support a conservative/reactionary ideology.

As many biblical scholars will tell you this has not been true in the past--apocalyptic movements and the genre itself have referred to and emanated from the socially marginalized and dispossessed.

In my recent reading projects, I have also come across this idea within British politics and American colonial politics. That is, as JGA Pocock has shown, millenarian groups were those who were at the forefront of secularization, as well as the egalitarian-oriented movement of republicanism.

The Busybody blog is doing some interesting things around questions of this sort. You might also wish to check out Mark Goodacre's blog and this posting on Paul and apocalyptic. There's also this interesting page with many good links at the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean blog. Read more!

My Life and Its Ensuing Chaos

Some of my long-time readers--all 10 or so of you--may wonder where I've got to the last few weeks. As you know, I'm somewhat reluctant to turn the blog into a dear diary for public consumption, although I have posted what some would call artistic renderings of my life.

Let's just say for now that my life has taken a turn toward the rootless, nomadic existence that I perhaps deserve since I have lived it for so long. Cut off from the land that I still dream about, that farm in the Cumberland Valley that probably graces the notes of some old timey tune I have not yet heard, I have wandered the US by foot, car, and thumb for years now.

At times, the journey has been apocalyptic. Like that time I hitchhiked east from Santa Fe. Unprepared for the days without sleep and food, I progressively entered an apocalyptic world of Arkansas boar-hunters, speed-crazed truckers, and ominous news of escaped convicts prowling the highway I was on.

That journey that became allegorical much in the way that Petrarch would've understood, but without the apocalyptic undertones ...

Perhaps it is true that apocalyptic is the song of the dispossessed and outcast. Those who have nothing left but the fear of the Lord that they hope and pray will save them from the final ignominy: living in evil and pain for all eternity.

I must admit that I am predisposed in some way to the eschatological and apocalyptic. This predisposition explains, perhaps, my early attraction to William Blake's writings and the poems I used out to the rural newspaper filled with a rudimentary symbology hacked together from Blake, Bible, and dada.

And I said I would not resort to autobiography...

With so much happening in the world, I find it easy to resort to the apocalyptic, especially in times when personal stress, despair, and uncertainty coincide with wars and rumors of wars. Yet, the personal must give way to some form of analysis that tries to make sense of such things that the simple-hearted can only find terrifying, though their heart of hearts clings to love and fear of the Lord.

I will perhaps attempt to undertake that analysis in the following days and weeks. If you're out there, drop a note ... Read more!

The Fate of the Republic Hangs on a Man's Frail Spirit

Pres. Bush is a dangerous man at this moment. While his lackeys may try to salve his pride with the idea that he's Truman, the only give em hell that George has left is the last sick gasp of a fool running from the derision of history.

Let's hope George listens to his toadies, for if he doesn't then I fear that Pat Lang is right--we are looking at a man who wants desperately to mean something in the world and to do so he just might take us all with him as he jumps off the next cliff. The drug of power may have just put the type of delusion in this man's mind that LSD used to evoke. ...

There's something sinister in looking at recent videos of George sitting next to James Baker as Baker reels off the mistakes that little George has made. You can actually see George shrinking in his skin as the living ghost of his father looms before his eyes and reprimands him for having done something stupid.

But there's even more than this, I fear, lurking in George's shriveling spirit. There's the look of nihilistic fury that a man who believes that heaven is nigh gets when his God has let him down. As that world-shattering vision fades before his eyes and the fatal brutality of the hells he has spawned in his fanatical belief in apocalypse rises up like so many hundreds of thousands of terrorized children there is truly the fear that a sucicidal mania will grip his weak mind.

God save the republic. And may those who believed in this man and brought him to power find themselves rooting around for salvation in the ruins they have made of a once great country.

[xposted as comment at Sic Semper Tyrannis Read more!

magus eye in temple bright shine on empire

reality is in the eyne of the beholder:the magus eyne is least able to gaze into lest you find oneself mesmerized like a snake before the charmer. the king it seems heard the snake charmer:mesmerized by the evil magicians whose lies and deceit have set his smallish mind adizzy with visions of empire gifts and apocalypse on the potomac.

oh the sad fate of the idiot king who walked naked to his political funeral;
danced before the fires of armageddon with jesus his purpled lord;
walked on streets of topaz and opals with the families of the dead he'd sent to their deaths;
sat before the philosopher savior whose words gassed his lungs with joy:

then he awoke to a world set ablaze with terror and horror and cries that called his name as though demons themselves spoke into his ear and talked of a sin that he must crawl on his knees to holy mother church for ten thousand years to repent.

the following is realism--maybe magical if you seek the truth--but surely more real and less deceit than you will find in the kristol wyrd stone dark:spoken by the guru's guru of those who prognosticate the fall and decline of imperial designs:

Given the result of the recent US elections, we need to think hard about the consequences of possible defeat in Iraq. To elaborate on what I said earlier, that conflict can be won only by a much more effective coalition effort, requiring a major increase in US and allied troop numbers in Iraq, substantial improvements in training and operational methods, and a much stronger civil reconstruction effort. This is not likely to happen. The probable outcomes are either a sudden descent into chaos as Coalition forces are withdrawn, or a protracted civil war, overlain with an insurgency against remaining coalition forces.

In the event of chaos, effective government in Iraq will cease for at least some years during which terrorist groups will be able to concentrate, re-build, flourish and reach out to other targets utside Iraq. Enemy forces will be heartened; recruiting will rise; funds and weapons will pour in; pressure will be exerted on regional governments friendly to the West; more young men and women who are willing to commit suicide to harm Western and Israeli interests will become available; and the oil price will rise to new heights. Defeat in Iraq will be a serious blow to the public standing of the United States and will invite other challenges to its authority...

Iran will read a message of encouragement for its intransigence in dealing with the West. It will almost certainly go ahead to produce nuclear weapons. It will exercise an overshadowing influence in Iraq, Syria, the Arab Gulf states and Israel. The lesson of US failure in Iraq will be read (perhaps wrongly) as US unwillingness to attempt regime-change in Iran. The North Koreans will probably draw similar conclusions, although with less justification than in the case of Iran because North Korea is nowhere near as strong a state. Nuclear weapons proliferation will become more difficult to control with the threat of intervention against the proliferators dismissed...

Read more!

moronic murti bing smile at the hollywood bazaar

the Iraqi dead are not happy. they seek justice that cries from the stones and sand and desert itself. happiness--as the philosopher once said--is best served cold. tho i do not seek vengeance justice demands to be cried from the roof tops.

divine love demands justice be done in the love that emanates from doing good to others and for others. when the assassin comes to your door give him a bed a meal but do not invite the dagger to strike your daughter. ...

it is only when the assassins have their hearts changed into neighbor-enemy love:that not done by human power--never ever will the gonads seek more than revelation in the tribal justice and blood land and eretz that population and culture propagate.

the moronic smile of murti bing sold at the hollywood bazaar is a cheap high and the plastic jesus hanging from the rearview mirror brings nothing but more dead more hate and vengeance-filled plates whose naked lunch few if any amurricans care to see.

methinks that divine imagination and creative poet who once walked jerusalem's alleys spoke a revolution that the moms and pops and their american pie true blue empire have muzaked into murti bing bliss pills.

happiness--what is that? is it some moronic smile that murti bing sells at the hollywood bazaar?

that holiness--that is not mine thine or any human. only the divine is holy:dare we try to share it in any way that would not offend?

am i deus ex machina? not a deus assuredly not:a machina yes but one that's more tin man and less borg. Read more!

Confessing America: The TV as Confessional

I used to think that the fascination that Americans have with popular detective shows is about a sense of justice--something related to the insecurity people feel in their lives. In my more radically social moments, I could even engage in a conversation that cop and detective shows exhibit a form of control underlying the class structure of American culture.

My attention has recently been caught in watching the various Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) spin-offs, CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. Amid the dazzling lighting, the sophisticated camera shots, the glamorization of technology, the music video touch to test tubes and microscopes, the underlying paean to the scientific method... amid all this, there's a strange sense of unease that permeates the certainty of the evidence, an unease that appears as a form of confession. …

After spending one Thanksgiving week at a monastery called Christ in the Desert, I penned the following words:

What is the guilt?
Is it that ancient
blood curse that wants
to kill the father,
marry the sister,
or have the mother?
Or is it a plastic doll
in whose cavity
I'd deposit my jism
of loneliness?

Or is it this face,
pitiful in want
and regret?
Horrible with tears,
reduced to act
and be
what others want.
Without time,
condemned to time.

The priest's witness
fills my question
with presence.
My confession
to a face
beyond the screen
of anonymity
or the social mask
stripped bare.

What is confession? Who do I confess to? If I confess must there be someone there to hear to make it legitimate? Or can I speak into the blank face of the dark night and confess my fears and despair and failings and expect some form of validity.

The German philosopher Wittgenstein once said that if someone confesses an intimate secret to you, the notion of truth or falsehood--what's known as verisimilitude--comes little into play. Instead, we talk of the truthfulness of a confession--not whether it accords in a way that you could videotape and show back to people to get a consensus on what's real, ostensibly the results of scientific study. Instead we talk about how much the person believes what they did, how they hid it from others and themselves and why—how truthful they’re being in their confession.

Wittgenstein would be the last person to endorse introducing biographical information into a grammatical discussion of the meaning of words. Hoping to transgress that peeve, I’d note that during bouts of suicidal despair he’d often seek out listeners to hear confessions of things he’d done. For Wittgenstein, confession meant telling someone—a perfect stranger perhaps—what I did and to hear my stuttered reasoning for why I did it.

In the Hebrew Testament, a seminal passage concerning confession includes the public recitation of the people’s sins by the high priest in the Temple. Part of this ritual included the transmission of those sins into the body of a scapegoat—a goat--which was then sent out into the wilderness, no doubt to be killed by predators.

And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send [him] away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:21-22)

Much sociological, theological, and ethnological literature has been written about the scapegoat. This appears to be a universal practice and is found among many cultures around the world. An excellent dramatic rendition of the ritual is seen in Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King's Horseman.

In Christianity, the notion of confession incorporates the Jewish social aspects of sinfulness but adds the further qualification of faith in God and Jesus as savior capable of taking away those sins, as well as the one whom one must acknowledge as the bearer of the meaning of God’s revelation.

Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God…

It is the social aspect of the scapegoat that perhaps provides the most promising way to understand the secularization of confession found in the cop shows I have mentioned.

The cop shows are geared to proving guilt and wrong-doing of an individual who will suffer society’s banishment (prison) for the wrongs committed by that individual. It’s perhaps important to bear in mind that the secularized version here of sin bears little resemblance to the way that some Christians would understand sin. For modern Americans, there’s not much difference between sin and moral failings.

Fixing people or getting away from sin is perhaps the most attractive part of crime shows like CSI. A clearly defined method at identifying evil and putting it under a microscope or distilling it in a test tube gives many the hope that why people do evil can also be identified and codified in some form of scientific operating procedure.

Whether these sins are simply those of the individual under investigation—showing the American notion of individuality—is questionable. For it’s during this investigation of one individual’s crimes that the confessions of the investigators themselves often make their appearance. These little confessions come in the form of bringing to light the failings or small slip-ups—the character quirks and morally ambiguous behavior that add greys to life.

No doubt, these little confessions play a dramaturgical role. They’re meant to display something of the character’s personality. Yet, within the context of the search for how and why someone committed a crime, the character defects take on the quality of confession. That is, the investigation into the crimes of a single individual serves as the context in which others face and proclaim to others their own faults (sins).

American culture thrives on confessions—whether it’s the confessions of music or film stars, wayward and corrupt politicians—an entire industry called entertainment news specializes in revealing the little secrets of people who apparently enjoy more of the American dream than we do. Carried in one direction, this fact can be understood along distinctly class lines; that is, the lower classes envying the power and status of those more fortunate. While this may form part of the phenomenon as form of of resentment, I do not think that it captures the full depth of it.

In the context in which I have been arguing, though, I think there’s a fruitful way of looking at this phenomenon as what I’ll call the de-subjectivization of America. One of the main assumptions of many is that it is a subjective process by which what’s inside us comes out for others to see. This assumption has come under increasingly critical questioning by philosophers who use scientific studies of the brain and various schools influenced by postmodern notions. For these thinkers, there is no subjectivity to be found—no inside there—and so the public confessional of the television makes as much sense in terms of the essentially social nature of human beings as anything else.

So what do Americans find worth confessing about? Even a cursory glance at the plots and themes of shows such as CSI, Law and Order, Monk, and The Closer—to mention a few—exhibit the diversity and level at which the various shows deal with America’s anxieties and despair. The fact that several of these shows draw many of their plot lines and subjects from news headlines points up the fact that they deal with America’s most pressing anxieties. The themes of these shows deal with the more sensational and spectacular cases. But, as Dostoievski knew, it is the exception that often points to the rule. If true, the source of many Americans’ anxieties revolve around sexuality, multiple murders, social ineptitude, and various forms of envy.

I am not usually a stickler for proscribed definitions of words, believing as I do that words often have meanings that verge on the meanings of other words and concepts. While it is true that many in the diminishing Judeo-Christian culture of modern America might mean by the crimes they witness in the news or see in TV as a kind of sin. Is American society’s televised confessional an occasion for displaying cultural artefacts that echo dying traditions passing into new expressions or do they perhaps reflect deeper, more durable traits that are part of what once used to be called human nature? I don’t hope to answer that question here but it is important to bear in mind while reading the following comments.

I am not usually a stickler for sticking strictly to proscribed definitions of words, believing as I do that words often have meanings that verge on the meanings of other words and concepts. While it is true that many in the diminishing Judeo-Christian culture of modern America might mean by the crimes they witness in the news or see in TV as a kind of sin, it is important to differentiate that understanding from what a Christian thinker like Kierkegaard might understand to be sin. It is important to differentiate that understanding from what a Christian thinker like Kierkegaard might understand to be sin.

As Christians like Kierkegaard understand sin, however, the notion of sinfulness is a willed desire to do evil—sometimes unconscious, often not—that characterizes the very basis of human decision-making. The ethical understanding assumed by many in post-Judeo-Christian America, though, assumes that if the reasoning can be gotten right then the sin can or proclivity to sin can be fixed.

Kierkegaard used to say that one characteristic of modern secular culture is what he called envy. By this he meant that people in modern societies continually compare themselves to what others are doing and gauge their own sense of who they are by how well they measure up to that comparison.

For Kierkegaard this is a basic feature of human nature. That is, the formation of our self is based on a continual imitation or mimicking of the actions of others. From the very earliest stages of development as children we are continually looking at those like our parents, our siblings, our friends, cultural icons and adapting ourselves to what we find that we wish we had and incorporating into our psychology.

In the ever continuing saga of televised confessional, perhaps it is this deep-seated envy and resentment that spurs the public on and on to witness its own destruction of its loss of moral and ethical clarity. Read more!

liar liar revelations of lies for liars whose lies are lies

and so the political charade creaks out its slimy pace from day to day dripping its sleaze into lives and deaths and scaring little dogs and children. gone the days when revolutions tried for justice: a tragic fate that only the deformed footed drones claim their own quoting one scripture or another or the nothingness of their own self-deceit and gurgling gonads seeking revelation. ...

read the lies and weep oh jerusalem washington seoul baghdad mecca -- thy children seek the mighty $$$$$$. rambo crashes the gates and guards the door only to lead them away in dog collar and leash: the lie that is the democratic bon mot of the day.

god lies and man lies and jacksnipe waits at the door with his wolf brigade. for the creativity of the divine comdey has become the blood-stained farce of neo-pseudo-quasi-deception that has internettized the apocalypse.

The lie plays a tremendous role in human life. The world is swallowed up in lies. And to the problem of the lie philosophers have paid too little attention. Not only do people that are by nature liars lie, but also uprightly truthful people. They lie not only consciously, but also without awareness. People live in fear, and the lie is a weapon of defense. The structure of consciousness is deformed by the function of lie, begotten by fear. There exist several types of lies, but the most interesting is that type of lie, which is conceived of not as a sin or a vice, but as a duty. ... The moral act of man is always creatively-individual and is worked for the concrete instances of life, singular and irrepeatable. But most significant is the social lie, affirmed of as a duty. The life of states and societies is full of it, it serves as a support for civilisation, this gives it pride, as being the vanguard against chaos and anarchy.

strange then that people who will make it to wield power and pay back their debts to the money-lenders it's those who voters believe lie less than other people who will get elected. Read more!

One More Reason to Attack Iran... !?

The following article by Louis J. Cantori, reprinted by Pat Lang at his blog, has to be the best three-page analysis of the present foreign policy situation of the US that's received dissemination in the blogosphere.

Finally, at least, someone puts the pretensions of the US in Imperial terms, thereby drawing the correct framework within which the US foreign policy debacle in the Mideast unfolds. If anything, should Bush et al. invade Iran, it will be to stem the flow of air from the imperial dirigible that the Bush-neocon cabal have floated over the present and near future.

According to Louis J. Cantori:

This brings us to the present day and the significance of the recent war in Lebanon. There Israel was diplomatically shielded at the UN by the US in order to give Israel as the sixth most powerful army in the world thirty days to accomplish its war aims . Israel, however, failed in near militarily humiliating terms to subjugate Hezbollah, an at most 6000 man guerilla force. Israel’s failure as an American proxy was also America’s failure. In Iraq, the coming to power of a Shiite coalition by democratic means, subtlety confirmed Iran’s ability to dominate Iraq. It has occurred with little notice except for close observers noting the presence of Iranian intelligence “station chiefs” around the country. Iran has thus peacefully imposed itself politically upon Iraq and the proxy victory of Hezbollah in Lebanon means that Iran is the big winner in the Middle East, including the achievement as a Shiite nation in garnering both Shiite and Sunni Islamic support.

As a result, the international relations of the Middle East are now being transformed from the recent one power, United States dominant system backwards to the preexisting one of a regional bipolar system of pre-1990. The regional system is now one where Iran and Syria are joined by Hezbollah and Hamas and possibly Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan plus the great powers of Russia and China arrayed against Israel and the US, plus in a more tenuous fashion, the GCC countries ,Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. The US is thus now not only relatively diplomatically isolated in the Middle East, but it is now perhaps momentarily in policy terms immobilized between the inability to exercise an overstretched military power that is strained to its outmost limits and the Bush administration’s functional incapacity for diplomacy. America can neither fight nor does it have the predisposition to negotiate.

This is a profoundly important essay that needs to make the rounds of Congress quickly, not to mention the media--if they could be trusted to read it over their lattes and sushi.

The article gives the depth to a comment made by military historian Martin Creveld that appeared briefly in the media about 8 months ago. Many of your readers will remember Creveld writing that the invasion of Iraq was "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them."

The problem now is that the debacle will perhaps make the Bush admin. crazy and out for blood, hoping via an invasion of Iran to destabilize that country in such a way that any advantage that it's gained from the US failure in Iraq will be ameliorated.

Such an invasion would be devastating to not only the Mideast but perhaps the world economy, as former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has recently written. According to Hedges, a war with Iran:

[W]ill ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

Hedges, of course, is echoing similar comments by others (like Ray McGovern) inside and outside the intelligence community.

Given these circumstances, the obly solution left to the Bush admin may be the one cited by Scott Burchill, senior lecturer in international relations at Deakin University in Australia, in 2005:

And yet the likely policy choices of a sovereign, minimally democratic Iraqi government would not be favourable to Washington. Closer political ties with Tehran, continuing hostility to Israel, oil contracts for US competitors such as France, Russia and China, and the political emancipation of Shiites across the region are not what the Bush Administration wants.

The only solution for Bush in Iraq is the traditional imperial one, as applied in the region earlier by the British, the French in North Africa, the Russians in Eastern Europe, the US in Central America, and so on: leave a client regime and a brutal army in place, with big muscle only a phone call away when the natives get too restless. This will be called "the democratisation of Iraq" and victory will be declared again, but few locals will be fooled.

Washington isn't building the world's largest embassy in Baghdad and a series of permanent military bases across the country just to abandon its most valuable strategic prize.

Many are hoping that the upcoming election will somehow forestall any such attack on Iran. That's doubtful, given the Bush admin's interpretation of the Authroization to Use Military Force passed to invade Afghanistan. In addition, Bush's imperial presidential pretensions discount the idea that he will backtrack now, given his propensity for Texan bluster and blue-blooded sense of entitltement--not to mention apocalyptic notion of destiny.

Should the Democrats win majorities in either house of Congress, the only option left would be for Congress to refuse to appropriate monies for the war effort. That indeed would bring on a constitutional crisis, one that might indeed spell the death of the republic as Bush goes further than any American president ever has in unilaterally appropriating funds for his suicidal war.

Related Links

• Iraq Death Toll Estimate Jumps

[xposted at Pat Lang's blog] Read more!

Pedophiles, Innocence, Historicality

The recent media frenzy and hilarious, if shocking, denouement of the media coverage of the purported capture of JonBenet Ramsey’s killer John Mark Karr will play itself out in various accusations against the Boulder prosecutor for overplaying or mismanaging the accusations against the man.

I must admit that I was struck by the pedophile's demeanor and aloofness. In answering the media’s questions about the murder, he was very nonchalant and obviously short on details about his complicity in the crime. Even with the minimal facts during the first few days, combined with his demeanor, it seemed to me at least (as well as others) that this man was a fantasist whose grasp of reality was questionable. ...

Those on the political left have already noted how this story generated so much press that one google produced over 10 million hits--for a story that was just more than one week old! The political Right jumped on the story as another indication of moral corruption in American society. The middle-of-the-roaders tried to keep some perspective and focused on the Ramseys and the false accusations that surrounded them for many years.

It certainly does seem to be some form of irony that a story that started with false suspicions against the family of the slain girl ended in false accusations of a man who perhaps is an opportunist seeking publicity (or a free ride back from Thailand) at best, or at worst a fantasist whose world is so wound up with the death of a young innocent whom he lusted for that he appears to actually believe he did commit the crime.

Many will criticize–rightly I believe--the press for its prurient interest and its playing into the infantilized imaginations of the American TV viewer and news consumer. That's a pretty blunt way of saying something that can probably be put in a more nuanced way, but I think that the media's overblown sense of what is news has become so tabloidized that it simply leaves one almost dumbfounded by the press’ lack of moral responsibility, not to mention the unbalanced sense of priorities which the press sees that the public needs to know.

What many political leftists and liberals have noted is that the Karr story knocked coverage of important events in Iraq and Iran not only out of the headlines but to the back pages. While the policy wonks were up to date on these issues, during the last week the average American never would have known that last month was the deadliest for civilians in the Iraq civil war, not to mention that there is a civil war in Iraq.

On top of this, very few average Americans would have guessed--if they were interested--that the Bush administration is making more than farting noises towards Iran. There's a steady drumbeat of leaks and so-called back-stories about the Iranian “threat” in the media that it's hard not to believe that war with Iran is "inevitable"--inevitable, of course, because the neocons and the Pentagon have played the media game so well that by the time many people wake up to the issue, it will be a "done deal."

I will leave for another time the issue of the culpability of the media in all of this. There's plenty in the media and the counter-media that deals with this subject. The press loves to beat this phantom all the time--the phantom that arises from a public that is immersed in not only what some have called the narcissism of American culture but deeper issues that relate to how Americans understand themselves as historical beings.

I want to look at what I’ll call the historical aspect of this story and its related non-happenings, i.e., Iraq and Iran coverage. The surface aspect of what I will call the historical void in the American consciousness is that the media themselves contribute to denying the public a historical context on everyday political and cultural events. Dwelling on the immediate, up-to-the minute story, refusing to or incapable of providing historical context, they cater to a short-attention span mentality that simply denies that there is anything beyond the NOW.

But there’s more to why the American public seems to want to know about the pedophile Karr and his fantasies. This story, ostensibly about the past, pushed the present and future concerns about Iraq further out of public consciousness. A story about a lurid past event takes the place of a story of the present lurid reality of thousands of Iraqis dying as a direct result of US actions, i.e., invasion and destruction of the socio-political structures of Iraqi civil society.

The Karr-Benet story—a small-town crime with terrible and horrific details--fills the void of our recent past. The allure of the story resides perhaps in something human that relates to sin and guilt. The psychic threat that past sins (crimes) that are unresolved or unsolved come back to haunt us. The anxiety about a child killed horribly and profanely echoes in the public consciousness because it contains elements of guilt, sex, protection of one’s children, and innocence. Individual anxieties of members of the public who cannot resolve their own separate responses to these issues come into play.

The historical aspect of this crime shows how Americans relate to the past. The unsolved crime--an unresolved act of moral outrage--is repeated over and over in various forms in American culture. The presence of fictional and documentary TV shows about "cold cases" points to this phenomenon. These recent shows follow on the footsteps of shows like Unsolved Mysteries and the X-Files. They are augmented by shows that figure into the shows the added elements of the paranormal in fictional or non-fictional form.

In these stories of crimes that go unsolved and that contain these sexual depravities, the American public looks to a past crime whose character outrages the moral and ethical balance of individual and society alike. The crimes themselves point further and further into the past, echoing in the hollow chamber of a history that is either empty of sacred presence or pointing to a realm beyond this hollow sphere where the crimes will or should find final answer.

Such notions as crime and innocence resonate in the American conscience because Americans are uniquely situated to deny their history. That history is one of revolution, which as Hannah suggests in On Revolution involves an original crime, the revolutionary act. Arendt writes:

[W]hatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime. The conviction, In the beginning was a crime–for which the phrase “state of nature” is only a theoretically purified paraphrase–has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than the first sentence of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word,” has possessed for the affairs of salvation.

We live in a society that prides itself on cutting away from history, making a new start and building our lives from zero. We pride ourselves on the notion that we need nothing but our own self-awareness and the absence of preconceptions and accretions from the past to guide us in meeting the challenges of the present and hopefully the future.

These assumptions work at the personal and social level in various guises. At the personal level, they perhaps do not work as well, since life calls forth the need to account not only for our present actions but those we have done in the past. This past is not simply our own, moreover--the things we do or have done since we were born–but they also include the actions of my parents, my family, my town, and ultimately my country. Unless and until this history is dealt with in a way that sufficiently accounts for them, the future will not be what it is but will be instead the past resurrecting itself as ghosts of past actions.

In this context of unresolved crime, we seek innocence, the innocence of our childhoods. We wish to be pure and unsullied by the past, reforming ourselves according to the present and for the future. We seek an innocence that we can never regain but only infantilize ourselves and shelter ourselves in a fantasy of reshaping the present in an ersatz innocence built from either denying the past or seeking an innocence in a time and place before history.

In his magisterial study of history and Machiavelli’s discovery and investigation of what it means for humans to live in history, in a world where humans have no recourse to supernatural realities but instead must work out their destinies and fates within time, JGA Pocock writes:

It was seen as the essence of modernity [by Rousseau, among others] that one inhabited a world of fictions in which self and other were creations of the partial encounters between humans in a world of exchanges. It may well be that we have ourselves reached a condition where the knowledge of fictiveness is unsatisfying to the point of being intolerable; in doubting whether the oligarchy of politicians who oblige us to choose between them represent us in any way worth speaking of, we doubt whether we have selves left to be represented. The global economy finds an ally in that postmodernism which informs us that self and society are alike fictitious and that our only choice is which fiction to buy next. – Pocock, p. 582

Condemned to living in history, we deny the present atrocities and crimes that occur in faraway lands by fantastically reliving and repeating the atrocity of our own innocence that is slain and profaned in the form of children whom we do not know.

We seek a solution and resolution that never comes except in further fantasy. We are captured by our inability to live in the present except by repeating the past that haunts us with these unsolved mysteries, these crimes that make us alive in their heinous violation of moral and ethical blamelessness. They seek the shock of shame because we have none and because its absence only makes us more aware of our lost innocence.

We become the spectators of our own present, hoping to watch it unfold in some apocalypse that will finally provide the key to why our innocence was lost and bring to us that purity and innocence that we lost seemingly so unfairly. So we watch--like voyeurs at the altar of history--the future come to us in the form that the past has given, atrocity on atrocity, crime on crime. We are spectators of a past that we do not want, a present we cannot accept because it is haunted by the past, and a future that will bring only more of the same haunted innocence we neither have nor will ever regain.

Helpless before the future because we have not dealt with the past, the future inevitability is left to men who have no compunction about exploiting our ghosts in the name of their own lost innocence.

It seems that at these moments, it is germane to repeat what has almost become a cliché, Santayana’s remark that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There is , no doubt much truth to his observation. Yet, as Kierkegaard would remind us, it is not so much that we remember but how we remember the past. That is, we can remember it by seeking its source in some Platonic super-real world beyond this one or we can begin to live the past in the present as prelude to the future, seeking not so much resolution as openness to the possibility for knowing not only ourselves but also those we inhabit history with.

Related links

• JonBenet: Why the Fake Confession?
  
• Satire: DA on 'Insane' Karr Arrest

{to be revised} Read more!

The Apocalypse WILL Be Televised

I got my semi-monthly visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday. Traveling in twos, the women walked up the driveway smelling the rosemary growing by the back-door porch while I put a T-shirt on. It's been so hot and humid here that I sit out the bare-chested famine.

We stood in the hot sun partly through my design, partly through my embarrassment at the house's disarray. The design part reflects my desire--after I learn that they're here to proselytize--that they not stay too long. The embarrassment reflects many things, perhaps foremost my disregard for keeping a clean house.

I've always tried to welcome these messengers of the Apocalypse. I imagine that they receive enough incivility and brusqueness as it is int heir peregrinations around the county. Besides, I imagine that if they want to convince me that the world is ending, I might as well make them comfortable so that they can hear my skepticism out without thinking I do so from fear of their message or dislike for them as people. ...

As you'd expect at this time in the world’s upheaval, they were more focused than usual on the coming end-time. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon has stoked their fears and anxieties and fortified their belief that biblical prophecies are playing out in their own day and age. For those who believe and expect to be going to heaven soon, the Israeli invasion and the so-called "war on terror" in general is tacit proof that the final battles described in Holy Writ are about to come true.

The end-time has achieved mainstream status in the MSM. Numerous TV news media outlets run everything from "panels of experts" to hour-long segments on the subject. In many cases, these news shows focus on the religious Right's interpretation of the events. In much coverage, the iconography of the Apocalypse is combined with assertions by politicians like Newt Gingrich and John McCain that the fight against Islamic exremism is WWWIII.

I've discussed in several postings on this blog about American Dispensationalism and its connection to conservative evangelicals. I've also noted that there are apocalypticists (those who believe in a coming apocalypse) now governing the major state powers who glare each other down with a finger itching for the nuclear button. Iran's president, the US president, and the Israeli prime minister appear to subscribe to various versions of the end of the world. Bush believes in the Second Coming of Christ, Ahmedinajad believes in the coming of the Mahdi, and Ehud Olmert believes in the coming of the Messiah.

What has become known as the postmodern world should probably be now known as the pre-Millennial world. After the specters of communism and fascism fade into the maelstrom of history, the threat of world nuclear annihilation seemingly is jammed back like jack in the box, peoples and nations of the world seem strangely mesmerized by this looming world battle that will bring final peace and lasting justice.

On CNN, last day authors Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the gargantuan best seller Left Behind series (along with its multi-million dollar line of Left Behind accesssories) and less well-known auhtor Joel C. Rosenberg, wove their apocalyptic rohrshach, while CNN host Kyra Phillips seemed to smile in blissful accord.

From the CNN transcript, Jenkins and Rosenberg said:

ROSENBERG: Well, this is -- this is about -- this is the prophecy that says that God is going to cause the nations of the world -- the leaders of the nation almost get drunk with the dream of recapturing Jerusalem. Now, the Bible says that Jerusalem will come back under Jewish control in the last days. That'll be one of the indicators. Well, that's where we are today. But, what are we watching? Saddam Hussein or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah leader [Hassan] Nasrallah, they're all drunk with the dream of capturing Jerusalem. That's what [Rosenberg's] The Copper Scroll novel is about, which is this battle, this intense battle to liquidate the Jewish people and liberate Jerusalem. I mean, are we seeing that happen? It's hard not to say that we are. I mean, that's why I've gotten invited over to the CIA and the White House and Capitol Hill, because people -- it's not that they necessarily believe the prophecies, but they want to understand the prophecies in the Bible in light of what's going on right now.

PHILLIPS: Do you think they're taking what you're saying and incorporating it into foreign policy?

ROSENBERG: I wouldn't go that far. But I would say -- I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It's actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that's why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim's books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events. And, in fact, one by one in The Last Jihad, my book The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, and now The Copper Scroll, have this feeling of coming true. I think that's why a million copies have sold. They're New York Times best-sellers, because they're based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.

There are so many nuggets in this comment for snarky comments and snide asides in that I find I have to restrain myself from voicing them. But such sarcasm is misplaced and beside the point. Taking such an attitude--which I am not above exhibiting--misses the very serious implications of what's happening here.

I could quote ad nauseam the learned, sociologically based, studies of the apocalyptic genre and its origins in historical and social realities related to persecution of believers. From the biblical books of Daniel, the great eschatological prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel to apocalyptic works in what are called the Pseudepigripha (religious writings from Jews living from the end of accepted Jewish prophetic activity and the Gospels) to the canonical book called Revelation–all these works emanate from momentously catastrophic times when religious Jews and Christians faced personal and group extinction.

In some ways, resorting to scholarship trivializes these writings. I don’t disparage the great work–often done from a sincere desire to get closer to a more authentic faith experience–done by scholars. Yet, I have my suspicions that what gets looked at through the lens of the historical microscope often ends up pinned and mounted in a catalog of natural history’s oddities.

Having said this, my own interpretation of an apocalyptic text like Revelation would take a liberation theology interpretation, which is indeed informed by many of these historical critical studies. Yet, what I find uniquely authentic and important about the liberation theology understanding of a apocalyptic texts is that it helps to place the words and images into the present-day faith struggles with forces and powers that transcend any one human’s power of comprehension.

Revelation itself is a wonderfully rich symbolic representation of the faithful’s interpretation of historical events from the perspective of those trying to understand God’s will in the world of social, cultural, and historical facts. Using the symbols and themes of apocalyptic, early Christian believers who were not historians or anthropologists or sociologists attempted to make sense of the impending disasters that threatened them and their small communities.

Consider the following statement from Revelation:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What [city is] like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

It does not seem to stretch the bounds of reason to say that this passage refers to a great trading capital. Symbolizing this great economic power as a whore–a licentious and wanton power that will do anything for money and financial gain–the early Christians documented their awareness that power and economic interests go hand in hand. Not only that, but this power- and money-hungry entity brings terrible suffering and desolation to the powerless and poor.

I am not conversant enough with Hal Lindsay or the Left behind authors to know how they interpret these verses in their mythology. From my own perspective, I think that the image of the Whore of Babylon could be applied to the United States as easily as it can ancient Rome or any other current politico-economic powerhouse.

Recent polls show that many Americans buy into this end-time scenario. The idea that the world is headed for flame and damnation fits into an ever-growing, deepening despair on the part of Americans. Unfulfilled with their consumer life-styles, a workplace unusually precarious for its insecurity, shadowy threats of terrorism by peoples half-way across the world... all these shades and mysterious movements bewilder a person who has no time to eviscerate the lies and deception perpetrated by their own government nor the equally fatuous and empty criticisms put up by the "loyal opposition."

As the media blitz continues, and Armageddon and its iconography begins to form an accepted backdrop for our lives--as we search the trees and rocks for tell-tale signs of the end-times--what will be lost in our understanding of world events as they apply to our lives is something more precious than innocence. This innocence that Americans pride themselves on, but which is an innocence that the writer Kierkegaard called demonic. For it is an innocence that denies the true nature of our ability to perpetrate and rationalize evil through violence and political intrigue.

It is this demonic innocence that gives birth to the pride that we Americans have in washing themselves clean of the past and making a fresh start. But no one can be born fresh from nothing–either through becoming a citizen of a nation or through the sacrifice of innocent lives. As Americans, we believe that we have shielded ourselves from the evils that beset the old world. By uprooting ourselves from that world, we think can now bring the experience born of the democratic experiment to cure those old ills and maladies.

We cannot uproot ourselves in the way many Americans believe you can. The past comes back to haunt us, whether we will or no. And this past goes back to the Eden now known as Iran and Iraq, that paradise left behind when I or you or any other decides to perpetrate the worst crime of all--making ourselves gods who believe that they can bring about their own beginning and end in wishful and demonically innocent daydreams.

-----------------
When the ladies who witness to Jehovah walked away under the sun that omens a new kingdom to come, I think of the biblical passage that I could not find during our discussion about what it means to witness for Christ. Later, I find the passage, Matthew 25:31-46:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth [his] sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed [thee]? or thirsty, and gave [thee] drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took [thee] in? or naked, and clothed [thee]? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

The world may indeed be in its last moments. Or not.

If so, I imagine that what judgements might take place will be measured by this criterion: what were you doing when the angels came?

Right now, at least, many of the religious in America are selling books wishing death and destruction on their enemies.

They fantasize about getting on the news so they can see themselves–as though that will legitimate their cause; as though their faith requires everyone to think, feel, and believe as they do. It is as though they think that having this message and these beliefs plastered on the TV screens somehow makes what they believe real.

That belief either says a lot about how much people reared on television and the news media believe that if it appears on TV then it must be real and true, or it is a pitiful commentary on how much despair lies at the heart of many of the religious right.

That is, if you require legitimacy from the multitude or demand that your beliefs become the status quo, then there’s more to you wishing your faith to be so than that it is so.

Update 1 The Rt. Rev. Riah H. Abu El-Assal, Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, writes:

In her recent article, “The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel,” American, Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst says, “The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.” She continues, “A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a thirteen year old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post (one of nearly seven hundred Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the Intifada began) is not a society with a conscience.” The “situation” as it has come to be called, has deteriorated into a war without boundaries or limitations. It is a war with deadly potential beyond the imaginations of most civilized people.

Related Links

• Hagee lends support to Israel's struggle
  
• CNN still fixated on Apocalypse predictors, still ignoring alleged invitation to White House, Capitol Hill
  
• Are These the End Times?
  
• Bush, Blair Urge Multinational Force
  
• Israel, Hezbollah Militia Clash Along Border
  
• Froomkin on Bush's Lighter Side
  
• Cease-Fire Now
  
• Condi's War
  
• Rice, Asian Leaders Huddle on Mideast
  Israelis, Hezbollah Keep Up Attacks
  
• ABC jumps on Apocalypse bandwagon: GMA host Roberts welcomes End Times authors' "insight"
  
• The upside to Hezbollah
  
• In Middle East conflict, other crises, conservative media find signs of Biblical prophecy of Armageddon
  
• Right-Wing ‘Guide to World War III’: ‘Kill ‘Em All, Let Allah Sort ‘Em Out’
  
• In Europe, Islam rises, Christianity falls
  
• Holy War
  
• Hardball, Fox & Friends hosted "Middle East analyst" whose chief experience is in "prophecy"
  
• 666 ridiculousness
  
• Expediting the end: Various religious groups are trying to play God and hasten the arrival of their messiahs
  
• The Cultural Contradictions of Christian Fundamentalism
  
• Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism
  
• Bibi: Evangelicals are Israel's best gentile friends

Read more!

Humiliation, Eye Splinters, Disproportion and Death

One of the more embarrassing moments of my childhood was the time I was at YMCA camp. In a conversation with a black cabin mate I mentioned something about welfare. I do not remember my exact words, but I do remember how angry he got and that his anger was directed at the notion that he or his family had received some type of free ride to the camp, some hand out that his family had not earned. As we discussed this, I became aware of what pride means and how others can be shamed by pity.

I think about that today as I see the images of Israel destroying Lebanon's roads, airport, business district, villages and villagers. ...

In a report on Canadian radio last night, a Lebanese relief worker described how he and his fellow workers are coping with the destruction raining down on his countrymen. Within his report, he stated that supplies were being apportioned by local leaders on a type of patronage system. That is, he said that depending on the type of influence that the leader wished to maintain and deal out, the leader gave aid to those in need.

I was certainly struck by the disparity and injustice in this story. As I am sure that it would strike many Americans, the use of relief supplies to enhance one's power and prestige is blatantly wrong; in some circumstances, I'd even consider it evil, especially those situations where life and death were at issue.

Of course, Americans--myself included--are often quick to judge others about their practices, easily forgetting similar circumstances and situations that take place on US soil. I think of the way that much funding and repair money was spent and is being doled out in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Yes, it is easy to see the splinter in another's eye...

These things circle around a central impression I've been thinking about for a few days. Since my thoughts are filled with images of Lebanon Apocalypse, much that I imagine and feel relates to that event. What strikes me as pertinent to what has been termed Israel's disproportionate response to the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah is this very idea of patronage.

Let me clarify. Many statements coming out of Israel and in the press reflect thinking that there is some form of communal punishment going on in the Israeli invasion. That is, Israel is hoping to spur Lebanese citizens to rise up against Hezbollah and kill or expel them because the Lebanese want the pain from Israeli bombs to stop.

I happen to agree with this interpretation of Israel's behavior. The aspect that I think needs to be added is that the punishment is meant not only to behaviorally elicit a response but also a plan to humiliate the Lebanese population. This humiliation comes in the form of destroying and laying waste all that the Lebanese have built and achieved since the Israelis left southern Lebanon.

This humiliation also involves patronage. That is, Israelis are driving home to the Lebanese where the true source of economic well-being and resources come from. If you take from Iran or Syria, the message goes, you will die. remember that much of the economic prosperity comes by way of the west, especially America. Destroying your country is our way of showing you that what we (and our friends) give we also can take away.

Take away unto death.

Update 1 Juan Cole quotes news reports:

' According to retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft, the goal of the campaign is to "create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters." The message to Lebanon's elite, he said, is this: "If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land." ' [my emphasis]

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Read more!

Random Thoughts on Lebanon Apocalypse

Somewhere amid the flurry of commentators on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, yesterday I heard someone say that it is somewhat hypocritical of the US or others to accuse Lebanon of failing to abide by UN resolution 1559.

By including Hezbollah in the government, the Lebanese government has gone some way in meeting the demands of the resolution. Yet, unless Lebanon courts another civil war, it does not have the manpower to disarm Hezbollah nor the leverage to do so. ...

Thanks to Bushco, Syria was knocked out of the picture--and it was Syria that policed Hezbollah and restrained its more extremist elements. Of course, the US could have done something, but it was bogged down in Iraq and is so now.

So the Bush plan to democratize the Mideast is seen to be a paper tiger--when people do democratically elect governments such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the new governments are attacked and their governing abilities severely curtailed.

There's a solution to the Mideast problem, one that would make most everybody but those in power happy. Helena Cobban writes about this today:

(1) The vast majority of the peoples of Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine all want exactly the same thing-- which is to be able to live their lives in safe and flourishing communities that are not plagued by war. Olmert's speech in the Knesset was long on expressing this with regard to the Israeli people but absolutely devoid of any recognition that this is exactly what the majority of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples also want; and

(2) The outlines of how such a peace might be drawn up are fairly well known by now: Israeli withdrawals from just about all of the lands seized by military force from their neighbors in 1967, and the establishment of full relations of normal peace between Israel and all its neighbors. If such a peace were indeed built, the support for militant irredentists in the Palestinian, Lebanese, Jewish-Israeli, and other communities of the region would go down to very low and absolutely manageable levels... Most people would be too busy celebrating and building upon the newfound regional peace.

That pre-1967 border issue alludes to the only international document that Israel has signed. But it has never abided by its signature to return behind those internationally accepted boundaries. Instead, it has steadily expanded its territory, as well as perpetrated immense harm and suffering to generally defenseless others like the Palestinians who have despairingly retaliated using the only means available, as horrendous as those are; a means, by the way, that Israel’s own founders and former Prime Minister employed to establish the state of Israel. (I speak of terrorism and Menahem Begin’s role in an act of terrorism that some consider the inception of the modern terrorist methodology for gaining political recognition).

Since we are counting UN resolutions that Lebanon has not fulfilled, how many UN resolutions has Israel simply disregarded? Let us not mention the many times that Israeli actions have gone to the Security Council but have never been condemned because of US vetoes.

-------
Hezbollah is much more than a militia. It now represents the 12er Shiite population in Lebanese government. Most Lebanese 12ers identify with Hezbollah and its agenda and goals. As a recent report on NPR showed, in fact, Nasrallah, Hezbollah's chief, has perhaps a greater following outside Lebanon as he does inside the country. If you want to eradicate Hezbollah, it is my guess you'll have most if not all of that 40 percent of the population against you.

How do you "eliminate" 40 percent of the population of Lebanon? Do you really think that there won't be others to rise in their stead? Unless you want to commit genocide, you will not get rid of the Moslems in these countries. I doubt that you will get them to heel like dogs at your feet either.

Maybe it's just the stress of battle. Maybe it's just a bit too sensitive hair-trigger. I do not think that many people want to kill innocent civilians--except perhaps out of blind rage and desire for vengeance, as Hezbollah's actions could be interpreted. That is, they wish to avenge the many, many Palestinians who've recently been killed in Gaza. It could also be the many, many civilians recently killed in Lebanon, who knows?

I do agree with Juan Cole when he says that the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Hezbollah is a war crime.

Yet, what about that Lebanese family of nine fleeing in their car that was burned alive by an Israeli bomb? They probably had a Katyusha rocket in the trunk.

Some commentators inside and outside of Israel have noted that the Israeli invasion is an attempt to inflict communal punishment--not just on Hezbollah but on the Lebanese as well. Unfrotunately, we'll have to wait to watch whether or not civilians were indeed deliberately targeted by Israel be swept under the rug.

Juan Cole reports:

If the reports coming out of Lebanon can be believed, the Israelis are only sometimes striking known Hizbullah safe houses or facilities or missile emplacements. A lot of their bombardment appears aimed at punishing civilian populations and forcing them north to Beirut. Such an approach would help explain the high number of civilian casualties. That is, there may be an element of ethnic cleansing in Israeli tactics. [my emphasis]

This invasion must stop now. It is very simple for Israel to stop the paranoia and terrorism. Sit down at the table, respect the Palestinians as human beings... that'll be a start at least. Recognize that Israel's leaders have made some very bad decisions re: the Palestinians that'd be a second step. Stop Israel's leaders from bullying everyone through excessive use of force to impose its will.

Israel must bend so it doesn't break through paranoia, become a country of paranoid schizophrenics. Jews co-existed with Arabs and Moslems for over a millennium. Why's it so hard to do so now?

Israel says that Arabs want to destroy it. Perhaps they did, but I think many have conceded the fact that Israel is here to stay and they are willing to bargain. Look at Egypt as an example. But what happens when real Israeli leaders try to make peace with arabs? They're assassinated like Rabin. You can blame Arabs and Palestinians all you want but I think internal Israeli ideologies and hatred of Arabs are more of a roadblock to Mideast peace than the Arabs are.

Israel should get its own house in order before it sets out to shame others into submission for being hate-mongers. There's more than enough of that to go around inside Israel itself.

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[xposted at Unclaimed Territory Comments] Read more!

We Can Be Heroes

The following was written many years ago; I offer it as a historical oddity. It's premise is still valid--to my mind--but I'd rework and clarify my definition of the political.

Though nothing
Will keep us together
We could steal time
Just for one day
We can be heroes
For ever and ever
What d'you say

Heroes by David Bowie

Jonesboro, Arkansas. Littleton, Colorado. The pictures of young men strolling school hallways coldly and brutally shooting classmates like targets in a video game makes the blood run cold. The senselessness make the crimes so much more alien. These weren't kids who grew up surrounded by violence and despair--at least the kind we normally associate with killers, people say, as though children who do grow up in such surroundings are somehow allowed to be able to kill.

But the crimes in Colorado, Oregon, Arkansas, Pennsylvania differ from kids killing other kids over drugs, and spring from different causes. These are even more disturbing to contemplate than so-called gang violence, although it seems horrendously callus to think of children killing children as having gradations of terror. The disturbing factor in the school-yard killings is what I will call the political dimension of the crimes. This is a controversial position I hope to maintain in the following paragraphs, as well as the circumstances and repercussions of such a view, if true.

Confession of a Coulda Been Terrorist

I admit that I do not find incomprehensible the actions of the children committing the school yard slayings. I've felt similar anger. I fed on similar scenes of carnage in my adolescence. To say this does not mean I condone what they did--never. But it does mean that I have been in a psychological place and similar circumstances where that kind of violence was a possibility for me. To confess this means I can understand it.

I grew up in a town just north of the Mason-Dixon line surrounded by factories and farmland. I helped my grandparents bring in the hay, wheat and corn every summer. My father worked in an aluminum factory while my mother worked full-time as a hospital admissions clerk.

I spent my pubescence in the throes of the civil rights marches and the anti-Vietnam War protests. For several years, my favorite films were A Clockwork Orange and If. A Clockwork Orange has a perennial aura about it. Its stylized violence and vision of the future, spans generations. My teenage son loves A Clockwork Orange.

I don't think my son's seen IF, less known than Kubrick's classic. In the context of school yard killings, it is a prophetic film. Amazingly so.

IF director Lindsay Anderson's vision of two working class boys living a series of meaningless, desolate acts in an upper class boarding school, echoes the existential nihilism of Sartre and Camus. The emptiness and grainness of the film echo the lack of values that many felt in those days. This is an aspect of the glorious years of the 60s and early 70s that the image of flower power, free love, and peaceful idealism gloss over. There were also those who were drawn down darker paths where emptiness and despair lived.

Anderson's film carries on the British literary tradition of angry young working class males striking out at a society they found empty with hypocritical optimism and the decline of British influence around the world, as reflected in plays and films like Look Back in Anger. Yet, IF is noteworthy for its almost stultifying lack of eloquence. One could watch Richard Burton declaim eloquently John Osborne's words and feel moral outrage and perhaps even sympathy. Yet, Anderson's heroes have no fine moments or climactic scenes raw with emotional power. Emptiness builds on emptiness until the final brutal and bloody scenes, where the two boys lure their schoolmates' parents at graduation ceremonies into a courtyard below and mow them down with machine guns from the rooftops.

My fascination with IF was just that--mesmerized infatuation with the notion of committing a single act that would be unfathomable and seemingly incomprehensible. It would mean nothing except the raw sense of emotion that I felt during that moment of power and liberation. My freedom in that instant would stand as a testament to its power--power beyond words and beyond understanding. The ultimate power, of course, is when we hold the key to a meaning that we believe others cannot reach.

Where's the violence in all this? Well ten years of drug and alcohol abuse, black outs, aimless wandering from job to job, long periods of complete anti-social alienation and seclusion. All this time wracked by sadistic imagery and violent feelings, mainly taken out on myself, but always there below the surface. These experiences make me keenly aware of what these young men must've felt and thought when they entered those schools, ready to kill and be killed.

Beyond Words

President Clinton's words after Jonesboro present a telling testament to today's political discourse. "We don't know now and we may never fully understand what could have driven two youths to deliberately shoot into a crowd of their classmates." The President's words intone a theodicy that only a man whose religion is politics could say. I don't say that disparagingly. I refer to a possible way of understanding religion and politics in the modern world--much as the German philosopher Hegel did.

For the President, the youth of the criminals, as well as the nature of the crimes, questions very deeply held beliefs about human nature and the boundaries that define social cohesion.

These crimes are unthinkable for children. The planning, the premeditation, the predation, all point to a threshold of unthinkability surpassing the cognitive skills or even the moral resources that children are normally expected or understood to possess. Children should not be able to formulate actions that transgress these thresholds. That they could and did formulate these actions is incomprehensible, non-thinkable.

In the President's words, supernatural boundaries are transgressed; boundaries that define a properly functioning and moral society. The president's words are the shadow of a great anxiety. To break the sacred bonds that hold society together threatens to throw us into an abyss of fear and anarchy. His words try to fill in the abyss by ruling out comprehending the boys' actions. That is, by saying the actions are somehow of a supernatural order, we cannot ever hope to lay hold of the reasoning behind their acts, since there was no reasoning.

An important notion in modern America is the idea of a child's natural-born innocence. This innocence, in normal circumstances, should protect them from the possibility of murder. William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, depicts human nature in a different light. In Golding's novel, left to their own devices children can and will perform greatly savage acts. Golding's book is perhaps as shocking a revelation to commonly accepted notions about children as was Freud's discovery that children are sexual beings. The socially constructed nature of innocence throws us back onto the seemingly terrible vision of having no basis in reality on which to formulate a positive, irrevocably and eternally transparent, basis for moral behavior.

The problem with Golding's depiction and Freud's, however, is that they appear to say that these are permanent features of human nature. But is there such a thing as human nature? Or do we perform certain acts given certain social, political, economic circumstances? What we should realize is that human nature is not solidified, and while in some circumstances children might act like the ones in Lord of the Flies, in other situations they will act differently. As the poet William Blake was keenly aware of, innocence is often a function of social injustice and status quo.

Political Nihilism

Several months after the rampage at Jonesboro, a strange web site appeared on the Internet. Filled with discussion of cannibalism, serial murders, and anarchist diatribes, the site valorized the perpetrators of the school yard killings as revolutionaries.

Of course, it is easy to dismiss this web site as an expression of simple aberrance. The youthful creators of this web site, however misguided, saw the acts at Jonesboro as politically revolutionary. Why or how could someone look at life this way? Is it the confusion of unbalanced young minds, the joking of demented pranksters?

Political acts often involve groups of individuals exhibiting organized behavior to reach recognizable goals. Terrorism is a political act if it has a political goal such as overthrowing a government. The problem with Jonesboro and Littleton is that there is no identifiable goal. This lack of a clearly defined goal comprises what I call the nihilistic or randomness and emptiness of the actions.

Nihilism as political expression acts in direct opposition to political categories simply by opposing no counter-claims of any kind. Often, the nihilist terrorist makes completely absurd statements. It is the seemingly irrational nature that is the essence of nihilism. The violence ann the irrationality testify to the validity of the action. The violent act itself--in whatever form--is a statement of political belief. Indeed, as Albert Camus showed in The Rebel, the ultimate nihilistic act is to commit an act with no goal and no reason--a defiant bloodstained hand thrown in the teeth of what the rebel perceives as an ultimately unjust existence. Nihilistic opposition to the state is an opposition to the injustice of existence as a whole.

Some of this can be seen in the utter inability of the young men at Jonesboro to defend their actions or even to begin to describe how or why they acted the way they did. The most detailed account of the inner workings of their minds was provided by Klebold at Littleton. His rambling pages espouse everything from contradictory hatreds to some form of personal superiority to other human beings, somewhat akin to Nazi eugenics theories. The nagging question that rises from these pages, however, is still Why?

Postnational Identity

I think there's much to Camus' interpretation of political nihilism. Yet, the cultural milieus of the American teenagers and what they did before they committed these acts shows some commonalties that bring into focus sociological factors that Camus does not discuss. These factors provide the possibility of better understanding these acts on a critical and existential plane.

The key similarity is that the perpetrators of these crimes grew up in communities undergoing a clash between modern technological values and older, more traditional communities. The Littleton teenagers lived in a traditionally agrarian and ranching community that had recently become the suburban homes for Denver. The older boy at Jonesboro had lived in the city for most of his life and had moved to the more traditional community. Classmates reported him as idolizing inner city gang behavior.

The term culture war is not new in American political jargon. Beyond the cant of this term, this clash is best characterized as the clash between Christian-based value system and the more fluid, less clearly defined values of modern technological society. While the former stresses stability and rootedness, the latter recognizes fast-paced change and innovation. Instead of views and opinions passed down from generation to generation, you have every value scrutinized and tested under a microscope.

The clash can be seen in the way women's roles have changed and how this change is greeted in rural America. Traditional America sees women who seek non-traditional life-styles as either transgressing sacredly ordained roles, or seeking special rights that give them a unique social or economic status or political advantage. The animosity directed at women in such enclaves of our society can be strong, bitter, and hidden.

The issue of guns is another example of the conflict between different ways of viewing what is the right way to live one's life. In rural communities guns are seen as a rite of passage. To take away a gun is in a way to take a person's identity from them. For urban dwellers, however, there are no such rites of passage. Guns are simply a symbol of violence used in murders and other crimes.

These examples point up the notion that a vacuum exists in American culture. Children exposed to this vacuum, I am arguing, find it difficult to develop a sense of self that sustains them and provides a solid base upon which to develop a strong sense of who they are. Many children are able to make the transition through this vacuum. Yet, others do not. Those who do not fit in or are marginalized in the way that the Littleton teenagers were or even the older Jonesboro boy show how explosive living in that vacuum can be.

This type of reaction is not new. The reaction against Americanism in Islamic countries exhibits is just as violent. And the religious fundamentalist response is also important to see. What we are seeing in America is a reflection of this type of fundamentalism, but with a characteristically American twist. It has many guises--from the self-styled super-men at Littleton to the wannabe gangsta at Jonesboro. We see a form of life emerging that attempts to create self-awareness from a cultural context lacking stable values while seeking some form of coherence and meaning.

In Postnational Identity, Martin Matustik analyzes the political, cultural and psychological underpinnings of modern-day ethnic strife in Eastern Europe. For Matustik, communism was an ideological system that tried to answer all existential and socio-political questions. Its failure caused immense despair individually, since the beliefs and socio-political structures that developed around the ideology were stripped away and people were left little meaning upon which to base their actions.

Seeking a valid meaning in the face of this ideological collapse, countries and individuals moved away from systems that promised universal solutions, supposedly based on certain scientific principles and facts. Nationalistic and racial mythologies took their place. Personal identity became identified with group identity. But what is someone to do? People need a meaning their acts. For many, the collapse of communism proves how the search for certainty and absolute truths in politics cannot be based on science. Instead, they must be found in a set of values that play on differences between peoples. What sets apart is certain, and what is the same as I--culturally, physically, politically--has a psychological appeal.

Matustik proposes that we develop what he calls "open identities." People exhibiting this form of individuality would not accept any social or political institution as final and absolute, realizing, however, the need for socially responsible action. This type of individual would always remain open to the possibility that any previously accepted values are open to critique and change. On the social level this means multiculturalism and democratic socialism.

On the personal identity level, it means non-dogmatic, existentialist attitudes that confront life as a continuing and open possibility for change and redefinition. Such attitudes would enable individuals to accept difference in others, while maintaining a sense of self that did not disintegrate in the face of challenges to accepted norms from various cultural, scientific, and interpersonal encounters. The emphasis is on continued ethical responsibility to the Other--"naked openness of the face to the nakedness of the other."

For Matustik, the political and individual aspects are imperative. One must live an open society that is willing to challenge previous beliefs based on new evidence and democratic debate. But to stabilize this social form, one must have individuals who withstand an ever-changing challenge to personal self-perception. For Matustik, this means accepting the existentialist notion that identity has no pre-given basis in objectivity, but is a continuous exercise of will in the face of ever-new possibilities for meaning and self-awareness.

On the Brink

America has seen the advent of modern nihilistic terrorism not only in its schools. Self-styled militias and white supremacists, acting alone, have committed terrible acts to undermine the legitimacy of the ruling powers. The narrative that underlies the motivation for these acts presents an image of identity that stresses sameness and group solidarity. The political nihilistic response is even less well defined, taking its imagery and motivation from urban culture to video games to so-called goth life-styles to Nazi romanticism.

What these phenomena share is their response to a cultural schism in America wherein traditional values are undermined by rational debate and technological regimentation. The human animal seeks meaning in the face of the failure of traditional values. When these are not found, the potential violence is great. We must foster institutions and personal life-styles that remain open to change and difference among individuals. Without this, we will see continued violence and the eventual destruction of democratic values by fascist/nihilist factions. Read more!