What’s that you say? Silence?Well, yes, it does sometimes seem preferable—to talking that is just clamor, ships hooting at each other as they pass in the fog. Yes, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, as Holy Week gets underway and what passes for discussion and debate in my nation’s political process becomes ever more clamorous hooting.
“And I say, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and find rest.’ ” That line from psalm 55 has been constantly in my mind this week, as Good Friday and Easter approach.
And then there were the stuffed peppers. No, not at all—not any kind of Easter tradition I know about. But there they were, in the Kroger bins last Saturday, bags and bags of wizened smallish bell peppers, culled out from amidst the large, heavy, unwrinkled ones, marked down to a very modest price.
Given the cost of peppers these days, how could I pass them up? What’s a kitchen without a ready supply of bell peppers—for spaghetti sauces and chilis, Spanish omelets and creole dishes, lentil soups and baked beans, pepper slaw and stuffed squash, salade Niçoise and ratatouille . . . .
Naturally, then, when Penny and Philip invited us for Easter dinner, I proposed stuffed peppers. I had the peppers, and something about stuffed peppers as a counterpoint to ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, and ambrosia seems meet and right—piquant green tang to enliven traditional pastel Easter food.
Then there were those dratted pecans, local, organic ones, no less, that have been eyeing me reproachfully from the sideboard in the dining room ever since Christmas. Anything not eaten from the Christmas dessert table inevitably stays there, from Christmas day forward. On St. Pat’s day, as I rummaged in the sideboard for a bottle of Irish whiskey to make Irish coffee, I was surprised to find two tins of those stodgy molasses cookies I made this Christmas, which no one much liked unless they were dunked in coffee.
No, no better with age. In fact, the opposite. Even drier and mustier tasting. From Christmas to Easter, I haven’t wanted to look at a nut, a spice, a bar of baking chocolate, a dried fruit. My fast—at least from certain foods—begins far earlier than Lent (and in Lent, I never fast, anyway, or at least, not from food).
So. It was time to crack those pecans or discard them, and who can throw food away with a good conscience? Hence the vegetarian stuffed peppers that will now be my contribution to Easter dinner: basmati rice mixed with grated parmesan, coarsely chopped pecans, eggs to bind the forcemeat, a few spoons of tomato paste, and a mix of finely chopped celery, onion, parsley, and garlic sautéed in olive oil with touches of cinnamon and marjoram for seasoning. All done, mixed, stuffed into the peppers, baked and stored for re-heating on Sunday morning.
And I just haven’t felt like blogging. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said to death? And more to the point: what’s there to say that will really change anything? In a political process dominated by the gotcha politics of the religious right, what really can be said? When the parameters of conversation are so constructed that one must always be answering an accusation either overt or implied, never moving towards a hope-engendered vision of social life that comprises many more options than those permitted by the status quo, words become swords. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not instruments to forge new, more humane visions of how we might live together, but swords to lop off each other’s limbs, heads, hopes.
I grow weary of such political “discourse.” I sometimes wonder if the readers of this blog from places outside the U.S.—my statistics counter tells me there are such readers—can even begin to appreciate how narrow, claustrophobic, and ultimately devoid of hope our political conversations in the U.S. have become in the past few decades, under the controlling impulse of the right, and, in particular, of the religious right.
One doesn’t have to be a majority to control a conversation, and thus the future of a relationship or of a social contract. All one has to be able to do is shout no loudly enough to keep the conversation forever stalemated—to keep hope at bay. He who says no ultimately controls any relationship.
And saying no—stopping the conversation, keeping hope at bay—has been the raison d’etre of American conservatism for a number of decades now. As one of the chief spokespersons and ideological founders of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley, once said, the quintessential neo-conservative impulse is “standing astride history, yelling ‘stop!’ ”
Neo-conservatism is not about building. It’s not about moving forward. It’s not about enlivening imagination. It’s not about spinning new ideas for better, more humane arrangements for communitarian life. It’s not about hope. It’s not even about respect for tradition and the past, since any such respect inevitably spots in previous human social arrangements ample reason for new social experiments that will carry forward the suppressed hopes of the past.
Neo-conservatism is about saying no. As Buckely himself said in response to Pope John XXIII’s brilliant encyclical of hope, Mater et magistra: Mater si, magistra no!
No, no, and no again: to change, to hope, to any social arrangement in which I and my tribe will not prevail. No to any vision of the future that will include others in a way that challenges my own dominance—as a white male, as a straight white man from the upper echelons of American society.
Neo-conservatism is about trying to stop history, because history inevitably means Something Else, and I do not want to imagine anything else, not in a world in which I am the primal link in the socio-economic chain, the pinnacle of social evolution. History is over and done with, as far as I am concerned. The most I will permit in the political and economic sphere is the kind of tinkering that keeps drastic change at bay, by balancing competing interest groups. As a neo-conservative, I am perfectly willing to work with liberals (since neo-conservatism is itself a variant of classic liberal ideology) to keep the status quo in place. If that means handing a crumb to this group here while denying the claims of that group there—all in the name of balancing interest groups and claims to justice—I’m happy to cooperate.
Just don’t expect me to entertain any nonsense about imagining other social arrangements in which conflict would be less omnipresent because more folks had access to the basic stuff of human existence. Don’t clatter on about human rights and justice. I’m not listening, not even if Jesus himself should walk through the door and announce the reign of God, or if the church claims that this was Jesus’s mission: mater si, magistra no!
A political landscape dominated by those whose only and ultimate word to history is no quickly becomes scorched earth. We in the
Declining empires always end up occupying such landscapes before their final demise, with court theologians to advise the emperor about how to negotiate the process of decline, so that he remains, as long as possible, at the top of the heap. The leaders of the religious right, churches that have not decisively distanced themselves from the religious right in this period (and few have): these are all part of the process of decay, of decline, of last-gasp imperialism, of the glozening lies of court theologians.
Insofar as our churches have implicated themselves in the social arrangements of declining imperialism—arrangements in which spying on citizens becomes routine, in which growing inequities between rich and poor become not shocking but taken for granted, in which the practice of torture of innocent people meets with shrugs, in which police and civil authorities are permitted to taser even school children, in which unjust war and carnage of despised Others is not merely justified but celebrated in our media—insofar as our churches accept these social arrangements, and never raise their voice against them, they lose the right to proclaim the gospel.
They have stopped doing so. The gospel is good news. The very center of the gospel is hope. Hope for history: the gospel is about a vision of human existence in which history is always possible, always mandated, because hope has not yet had its day. Hope has not yet been fulfilled. There is more to be done. History cannot be stopped, from a gospel-oriented standpoint, because there is more to hope for.
I have been heartsick this week as I have watched the mainstream media and many liberal Democrats participate in the pillorying of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. I am heartsick for a quite specific reason: there is a shocking, clear, undeniable double standard in how we have chosen to treat this African-American preacher of the gospel, and how we choose to treat the court theologians.
Who are everywhere, but whose influence is never acknowledged or discussed by the mainstream media. The Alternet blog today carries a posting from Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post on the double standard the media applies to Rev. Wright and to the white preachers who are the court theologians of our declining empire—see www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80253.
As Uygur notes, Rudy Giuliani’s priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of having abused children and covered over the abuse of other children, but no one has ever asked Mr. Giuliani to denounce his pastor or disavow any relationship to him. Mitch Romney belongs to a church that, into Romney’s thirties, actively discriminated against people of color. Romney never disavowed his church then or now. The media have not hounded him to make statements about the racism of his church.
John McCain has accepted the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 attacks on
Brent Childers of Faith in
As it notes,
How many talking heads are made sick when the Religious Right, day after day, condemns
Week after week, right-wing religious organizations work to shore up the Republican Party base and use America’s pulpits to condemn not only America but good, decent patriotic Americans. It’s not just religious leaders spreading a message of religion-based bigotry. Many elected officials and candidates are doing the same.
No one sought to give any context that Wright’s words were spoken from an interpretation of Holy Scripture. Poor presentation of the story, indeed. Even less context.
A nation where corporate greed holds sway over hard-working Americans? A nation that goes to war under false pretense? A nation in which political forces cater to prejudice and racial division? A nation in which gay and lesbian teenagers are being sacrificed on the alter of religion-based bigotry.
Would Wright’s God frown on such practices?
What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself is held at bay by the court theologians, by the preachers that advise (and support and excuse) the powerful of the land? What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself has become a dirty word, a taunt in the mouths of those left and right who want to stop history?
Not much, I think, until someone, somewhere, begins to expose the treachery and lies of the court theologians. Not much, until churches that really want to proclaim the good news openly, decisively repudiate the treachery and lies of the religious right.
We will, in coming weeks, see more and more treachery and lying. The ultimate intent of those engaging in these underhanded political games is to stand astride history and shout, “stop!”
The only hope to stop the games is for those with connections to faith communities to call for an end to the political games, to the treachery and lying, to the attempt to stop history by saying no rather than yes (which is God’s word to the created world). For the faith communities that claim to speak in the name of Jesus, hope lies in remembering that the crucified one was not the success all court theologians claim to be.
He was, instead, a dismal failure, hung to die upon an instrument of torture reserved for the lowest, most powerless of criminals in his society.
His resurrection is premised on his death, on his failure, on his humiliating death. The failure and death are, in fact, the precondition for the resurrection. Anyone who preaches otherwise—who preaches the bizarre "gospel of success" of which the court theologians are so enamored, who allies the Christian church with wealth and power—departs from the very warp and woof of the gospel, the good news that it is in dying that we rise.
What’s that you say? Well, you did ask. And I did tell.
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