Iraq Situation, the Media, and the "Festival of the Undead Wrong" (with Application to Recent U.S. Catholic Bishops' Meeting)

To call the following a meme among commentators looking at American news and mainstream media in the last three days would be a vast understatement (there are many similar statements I could cite, too):

10th Anniversary of Invasion of Iraq: A Poem

And, finally today, because yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the start of the unjust Iraq war, a poem I wrote when the Gulf War got underway: I'm tired of these wars . . . .

We Are in Trouble: Comments on theTheocracy Slouching to the Polls to Be Born

I remember reading years ago something German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about the Vietnam War. To be specific: what she wrote about is how those who manipulate the public’s consciousness to make war thinkable must inevitably assault the linguistic structures that enable us to see, touch, witness what is going on when we kill fellow human beings in war. They must break the link between what we know to be true with our own eyes, and what they inform us is true.

As well as I remember, Sölle points out that one of the “advances” of modern warfare is its ability to remove the killer from the killed. We now have the ability to kill millions of people in an instant, merely by touching a button. We do not have to see the faces of those we annihilate. We do not have to hear their screams. We do not have to smell the burned skin and witness the mangled bodies. We can fly over, drop the bomb, and go about our other daily business after we've taken care of that bit of business.

War as business, war as transaction, war as techne: it’s only a matter of building the killing machine, deploying it, telling someone to do his duty, and then doing that duty, if we’re the one so ordered. All in a day’s work. I can be flying one hour over the village I napalm, and the next, sitting in a beer hall joking with friends—never having seen a single face of the human beings I have just murdered.

Sölle notes that this capability not only removes the human cost—the human reality, the evil—of war from the table of public life (except, of course, for those who are killed, and for their friends and relatives). It also requires linguistic structures to get the rest of us, who might have qualms about what we understand to be done in our name and with our tax contributions, to buy into the murder.

The new “advances” of modern warfare require words that shield us from the sordid reality of those advances. So we now speak of “neutralizing” the enemy, rather than killing her, of “sanitizing” an area rather than murdering its occupants. And, when the same folks who control the manufacturing of the war materiel and who profit from this manufacture also attain the ability to spin our language outside reality-based boundaries, well, what’s left to do? What’s left to assure their total control over everything?

A next step is to chain the watchdog media insofar as they keep wanting to natter tirelessly on about reality-based inconveniences. It’s important not only that murder of innocent civilians be spoonfed to the public as a winning surge: it’s also crucially important that we never get to see the evidence of our winning surges. That is, it’s imperative that we don’t see the real-life, real-dead human bodies, mangled, splayed, leaking blood and guts, on our t.v. or internet screens. A huge mistake of the Vietnam War was the willingness of the media to flash news to the American public in which we actually saw the little Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, fire streaming from her back. From a bomb we had dropped. From a bomb we in the heartland, munching our suppers at the family dinner table, had paid for.

Seeing, touching, witnessing atrocity has the potential to lead to backlash against atrocity—and our complicity in atrocity. For those trying to sanitize our consciences when it comes to our willingness to accept our complicity in murder, it's important not to allow us to see the bodies returning home, either, the bodies of our own soldiers. These remind us that, as bombs are deployed and enemies neutralized and problem places sanitized, human beings are the ultimate price. Both them and us. Both human.

I bring all of this up today as part of a larger reflection. As the current presidential election slouches towards its final end, I’m asking myself—more than ever before, more than with any previous election I’ve tracked since I began to vote in the late 1960s—what it would take to end democracy in our nation.

That is, assuming that someone, somewhere, would like to see our democratic experiment finally ended. As I think about it, I’m more and more convinced that the final act leading to nightfall is to remove the stinger of plain truth from plain language, so that people no longer have the ability to tell a lie from truth. Or even care to distinguish lies from truth.

Assuming that someone might want to move our faltering democracy in an overtly fascist direction, what would that someone have to do to move us definitively past the tipping point? Well, after years of “sanitizing” and “neutralizing” our language so that red has come to suggest green and pro-life comprises war and the death penalty, after deploying the term “elitist” as a weapon so that anyone asking simple reality-based questions about the growing gap between truth and lies in official rhetoric is, voilà, an elitist, we simply have to sin more boldly. And as we do so, defy anyone to tell us that we are sinning.

We have to start sinning boldly by telling lies that anyone can see to be lies, and declaring them to be true. Because I said so. And God is on my side. And God is not on your side. And if any watchdog group challenges the lie, that group is elitist and I won’t even talk to them until they are chastened and willing to swallow the next lie I intend to tell as I sin boldly.

I used to claim to be great. I now declare myself to be GREAT. Who are you to question that declaration, to ask piddling questions about evidence and facts, when it is I—the GREAT ONE—who have made the declaration, I who have twisted the arms of those I terrorize to make the declaration?

A society that has moved light years beyond doublethink and newspeak to the lie boldly told by one declaring herself or himself GREAT and an emissary of God is a society in trouble.

We are in trouble.

If we let ourselves be duped and bullied in this way, if we do not fight back, we must be prepared to accept the inevitable: the definitive falling of the curtain, the demise of our democratic society. We must be prepared to see people of good will hounded from our midst, people of integrity gloriously smeared in every way possible by people of the lie, and then booted out as troublemakers.

We must be ready to endure the muzzling of poets and artists, the hemlock administered to the philosophers and theologians we have not yet succeeded in making obsolescent, those who will not conform.

We must be ready to stand and cheer as some new group of Brown Shirts burn books and order us to cheer. In the name of God, you understand. We must be prepared to watch with sneers on our faces as rabbis, imams, and pastors who have refused to bow to the new theocratic GREAT ones are publicly humiliated, forced to tape-record canned sermons in praise of the GREAT ones of the land.

I imagine the new Brown Shirts—God help me, but I do!—displaying huge pro-life banners as they do their dirty business in the name of the GREAT ones whom GOD has sent.

Not ready for this? It's coming with a vengeance, if we don't wake up. And the narcotic—of cultivated stupidity, of systemic lying, of god dispensed as right-wing commodity to those who crave a dispensable god that answers to them alone—has been administered for so long now, there is not much hope to postpone the inevitable. Or to make a difference.

Unless we awake from our slumber very soon. And do something.

Theology from Gardens and Kitchens

We write from a place. I believe that.

I have sketched the place from which I write on this blog in various ways: I’m a theologian; I’m gay; I live on the margins of church life—in truth, on the other side of a wall that runs between gay people and the church.

I also write from a physical place that, to many people, is almost non-existent: one of those fly-over cities in the middle of the U.S. A small, provincial city that is not very close, even, to some of the power-brokering cities with “brand” in our general vicinity—New Orleans, Memphis, Dallas-Ft. Worth.

I write from an even more specific place, an east-facing room in a house perched on a gently-sloping hill in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, their first eastward escarpment along the banks of the Arkansas River. The chair from which I write overlooks what would, prior to the building of this neighborhood at the turn of the 19^th century, have been a small valley between two slopes running from the river towards the coastal plains of the southern half of the state.

My chair overlooks a garden on which Steve and I have labored, with more or less (emphasis on the latter) success for almost a decade now. The garden was thriving some four years ago, with several plum trees laden with fruit one spring, when the city decided to run a sewer line through the back of the garden, uprooting the plums and two beautiful apple trees we had also planted and tended towards maturity. Though the city promised that it would preserve the garden, its contractors stuck the trees back into the ground just as summer arrived, and of course, they did not grow again. At that point, I gave up on dreaming big dreams for my little garden.

Slowly, though, we have massaged it back into some semblance of a garden, and I write these days overlooking a scene I know I will see only for a few days, since spring is fleeting, and each day brings with it new illuminations. To be specific: I am looking out these days through a trellis Steve has just built on the east side of the house, to support Carolina jasmine and roses. There is a rose we have hauled from New Orleans to North Carolina to Little Rock to Florida, leaving cuttings of it rooted in each place, where thriving specimens of this red climbing rose now bloom.

We first got the rose from an elderly neighbor of ours in New Orleans, on whose shed it grew—Mouton Bickham. We call it the Mouton Bickham rose, though it probably has some other name: we suspect Mme. Isaac Pereire. It is a beautiful, easy climber with quartered bourbon blossoms, light red shading to mauve as they open, with a delicious scent. It grows easily and rewards even the slightest care with a long season of blooms in our hot climate. Here, it is even sometimes remontant, blooming both spring and fall. Since Mr. Bickham, a wonderful, elderly African-American neighbor, died while we lived in New Orleans, the rose means a great deal to us now. Each blossom brings back memories of his cheerful greeting as he sat on his stoop each evening, trying to catch one of the rare sultry breezes New Orleans offers in summertime.

“My” trellis, as I now think of it, is a frame for what grows just beyond the eastern window, just beneath the trellis itself. These days, it’s a wonderful medley: light yellow witch hazel blooms on a bare tree, hanging like miniature Chinese lanterns with the faintest spots of green sprinkled across the yellow; beyond them, spikes of purple flag that have just burst into bloom in the past two days; beneath the witch hazel, tiny narcissus, a deeper yellow than the witch hazel blooms, which the dogs have somehow failed to trample down; and to the north and east, like a haze beyond all of this, the deep red-brown of the smoke tree opening its leaves.

I cherish the scene, because I know it will not last. It will give way soon to something else, all the roses in bloom at once, followed by the intense hot days in which the Louisiana iris, Texas star hibiscus, and pomegranate all bloom on the unshaded eastern side of the garden that gets sun all day long. Hot colors for hot days—scarlet, orange, sun-yellow, with intense greens to frame them.

Why all this garden talk? I don’t know, frankly. In part, because the news often depresses me. I read in one news account today that, as our president cantered and capered this week—this week in which news of 4000 dead soldiers arrived—at a press conference in D.C., the reporters gathered to witness this performance applauded him, gave him a standing ovation.

What kind of world do we live in? What kind of world, now? What kind of world, in which the purveyors of “knowledge” and “information” can applaud cantering and capering atop a mass grave?

Enough. Such “news” sickens me, and I turn to nature for consolation, the starling I see right now, as I type, slowly clacking across the leaves to the bird bath, moving like a ponderous Oxbridge don in academic regalia, intent on a destination only he can see in his own head.

I write about the mundane, the particular, as well, because this kind of writing is an act of defiance—defiance of the norms that tell men (and scholars, and women whose power depends on playing by men's rules) they should write about the serious and not the domestic. Again and again, in my academic career, when I have submitted academic articles in which I reference the homey as an illustration of a ponderous point, I receive the edited article back with notes that, while the “riff” on cornpone may be interesting, it is off-topic.

Not to me. My garden, what I cook in my kitchen, the pollen I washed in dull yellow layers off my front porch yesterday: these are the stuff of my daily existence. My thought arises out of this stuff. Most of the world’s inhabitants live in worlds in which their lives are made of similar stuff. It is only a minority who live and work in academic studies, in high-rise office buildings, who can write while someone else (someone almost certainly female) does the cooking, the scrubbing, the garden-tending, the food-growing, food-selecting, food-preparing.

We need a theology that reflects where people really live and move and have their being. We need a theology—a serious, academic theology—that writes from the kitchen, the garden, the porch that has to be scrubbed daily. We need a theology in which the things that those who live in such places think about are taken seriously, as food for academic discussion.

I write about these matters on my blog because I can do so. For the first time in my life, in my academic career, in my vocation as an educator, I can write about gardens and kitchens as if they matter, and matter ultimately. I can use the homey to talk about God and not have an editor in a high-rise building, for whom someone else cooks and cleans (someone almost certainly female) eviscerate the homey references from what I have written.

In blogging, I believe I am continuing my work as an academic theologian and educator. But I am doing so outside Jerusalem, so to speak, outside the norms and boundaries that dictate what an academic theologian and educator can and must say. In nurturing an alternative discourse field—a new garden—for those of us who want to talk about God, about justice, about peace, about gender, I am, I hope, making it possible for new voices, those that have traditionally not been permitted into the conversation, to sound forth.

I hope. 4000 are now dead. A president capers. Reporters applaud. My voice is tiny. People I know are seriously ill, and my heart is heavy because of this.

But I hope. And so I go on speaking.