Pope Benedict's announced resignation has triggered a lot of political speculation and some theological consternation.
From a theological perspective, the question of whether a pope can resign depends on whether he is viewed as the vicar or the image of Christ. If he is only a vicarious agent of Christ then his position is fundamentally a question of management which can be handed over at any time. If, however, he is the representational image of Christ, then following in his footsteps, a pope cannot resign from the Cross.
Pope Benedict's concise statement of resignation explicitly recognised the distinction. He began by stating that the papacy "due to its essential[ly] spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering." This was an express acknowledgement that the cardinal office of the Pope is to suffer representationally of Christ as Jesus suffered representantionally for Mankind. In short, the papacy is a spiritual sacrifice. And yet, in his next breath and repeatedly throughout the statement, Benedict referred to the papacy as a "ministry" a word laden with more Protestant notions of trusteeship and stewardship.
Pope Benedict's resignation manifested the latter perspective and was therefore fraught with revolutionary doctrinal implications.
The idea that a priest is the representational image of Christ is the springboard for both celibacy and the exclusion of women from the priesthood. As cardinal, Benedict himself put it succinctly: women could not be ordained as priests "because Jesus was a man." Jesus was also celibate, according to tradition.
There is an arguable distinction between the priesthood as such and the office of pope. One must be a priest to become a pope, so that the representational imagery of the priesthood is something that pre-exists pope-hood. It follows that the office of pope is not that which brings or bears the element of representational imagery to a person. It already inheres in the priestly office and is nothing brought by the papacy as such. On this basis, it could be argued that whereas a person, as pope, is not the image of Christ, a priest as such is. But this argument, aside from being overly clever, runs into a host of problems, not the least of which is the retirement and/or defrocking of priests.
The plain fact is that by resigning, Benedict has consigned to history the notion that a pope cannot resign because he is the image of Christ, who did not "retire" from the Cross. Once this decoupling is accepted there becomes ever less reason to insist on celibacy or to deny women the priesthood.
We, ourselves, are not convinced this was a well-advised move but we are certain Benedict was well aware of its implications.
As usual, Benedict is subtle and perhaps too subtle for a world (and Church) filled with braying dolts. Noisiest among the dolts are the liberal Catholics and secular non-Catholics (which are much the same thing) prattling about the "scandals" that beset Benedict's papacy, his undeviating attempts to turn the clock back on Vatican Two, his relentless opposition to women and homosexuals, his botched outreach to Muslims and (despite his Rottweilerian instincts) his enfeebled incapacity to control the Curia and, at last, the opportunity which his courageous (or at least welcome) resignation presents for cleansing, reform and change --- all of which simply reflects the discontent and panting of their own desires.
One wonders if anyone in this crowd ever read anything Benedict wrote and if they read it whether they had the erudition and capacity for reflection to understand it.
It has been our view, that Benedict was a tempered reformer. He was, in his professional youth, part of the so-called "liberal" wing of the Church. But within the first decade after Vatican II, Benedict saw that the process had unmoored the Church, casting it afloat on the choppy waters of personal opinion, situational relevance and, worst of all, liturgical kitsch.
But it is equally the case, that Benedict rejected the dead-end fetishism of the SSPX and those "traditionalists" who insisted on remaining precisely adherent to tried and inherited norms. He struggled to make room for their practices without surrendering to their insistences.
Benedict came to see the true nature of tradition as comprising of change within continuity and involving "tacit corrections" (his phrase) of unerring doctrine. That is not the language of what people nowadays call a "conservative."
But the idea that we each see "the right, as God gives us to see the right" is fundamentally a Protestant error which leads to alienation and disoriented extremes. "Room for all under the tent" misconceives who the all of us is.
Faith, Benedict has said on more than one occasion, is not personal and subjective but communal and performative. But this community -- the whole Body of Christ -- includes the seen and the unseen, vivos et mortuous -- now. The Church lives within an eternal present which is not eternally static but eternally ever growing larger as more and more faithful are born and added to the host of Heaven.
We cannot ignore what those who got here before us had to say. Nor can we (like modern day lawyers) mine what they said for nuggets of "precedent" and "dicta" favourable to our own aims and desires. Even less in an effort to be innovative or Reformist can we "go back" to some fantasised original state of early Christianhood because such a return can only result in a grotesque (and ultimately pathological) parody. As an astonished Mussolini once told Hitler, "(mio caro Adolfo) you can be like a pagan but it is impossible for you to be a pagan."
In practicing doctrine, we must not only "consider" by-gone theologians and philosophers as if they were the subjects of a doctrinal anthropology. We must walk and talk with them by means of imaginary dialogues in which we play both parts of the conversation. And to keep our own selves in check we must do this together with others in the here and now. This is not done by "bringing the Church up to date" or by abrupt, habit-breaking corrections under the banners of necessity and relevance and inclusion. It is a a slow, evolutionary and organic process which equally honours continuity-community-change in the ever present.
It is our belief that Benedict viewed the matter thus and was accordingly laying the patient groundwork for organic but solid and lasting change. It is a shame that he his great gifts were ignorned by hot-heads and fusspots each operating from their respective repressions, guilts and self-love. It is equally a shame that the Church's exit from her present deadlock is left to the expedient calculations, ambitious machinations and bald hypocricies of fattened eunuchs who could stand some hungering and humiliation.
We are not sanguine about it, but perhaps Benedict will be more widely appreciated once he is out of office. Perhaps too, his resignation was simply a matter of exhaustion. But even if it was, we cannot believe he was impervious to its far-reaching implications on which he managed not to shut the door.
President Obama began his second term with an address that was a resounding rehash of his commencement address in 2004. Addressing the Democratic Party in his maiden national speech, the young Senator from Illinois intoned,
"I stand here knowing... that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. ...
“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of [our power and wealth but because] "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“That is the true genius of America, a faith... a faith in simple dream"
Eight years later, the simple dream rings on.
"We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“Today we continue a never-ending journey, ..."
It is perhaps true that all nations need a binding continuity; but the advantage of monarchy is that the unity can be expressed silently in the flesh without the clanging of clichéd concepts. Alas, since the founding of the Republic, American oratory has felt obliged to make up for lost pomp with parades of hortatorical pomposity.
Apart from invocations of National Conceptual Unity, equally clichéd were Obama's policies for implementing the Idea. Back in 2004, Obama declaimed,
“People don't expect -- people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But ... with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.”
And eight years on,
“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. ... We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm.”
How is it that this most exceptional of nations is still trying to give every child a "decent shot at life" and a "basic measure of security" 80 years on from Franklin Roosevelt's call to assure economic security for all?
The basic reason is that for the past 40 years, the United States has renounced Social Justice in favor of Social Darwinism. Obama's political economy is more in tune with Calvin Coolidge than with either of the Roosevelts.
The key to Obama's "exceptionalism" is precisely the fact that he limits Government responsibility to exceptional situations in which through no fault of their own people "encounter" a sudden illness or job loss. This is simply a restatement of the Calvinist doctrine of charity for the deserving poor -- those wretched poor, who may be deemed worthy enough, having committed no fault on their own, of our more fortunate gracious charity.
Obama graduated from Harvard where he was imbued with a simple faith in the political virtues of the free market. He truly believes that the individual pursuit of private selfish interests will best insure the public common good. How the sum of zeroes produces a one is “demonstrated” with a miasma of complicated graphs and mathematical formulae, all of which fly in the face of simple reason.
But within this Millsian-Calvinist construct, the role of government is to help those “unfortunate few” -- now numbering around 40 million -- who manage to fall through the cracks, somehow, through no fault of their own. However, if the fall was not their fault, then whose? The question is not asked. Rather than focus on the systemic economic faults which produce predictable misfortune (the fetish of the commodity), attention is misdirected toward personal psychological issues (the fetish of sin).
At the bottom of Obama’s exceptionalism lies the exceptionalism of self-righteousness covering an absence of social-solidarity. To see where Obama is truly coming from, it is helpful to contrast his address with Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural in 1933.
Within the feel good wrapping of Guiding Principles, which all political oratory must inevitably invoke, FDR's inaugural was surprisingly specific.
After decrying the "mad chase of evanescent profits" and holding forth that "our true destiny" was to "minister" to our fellow men, Roosevelt descended unto a more prosaic politic, stating that national "restoration" called "not for changes in ethics alone" but "for action and action now."
Under Roosevelt's action plan the "greatest primary task is to put people to work" through "direct recruiting" by Government, if necessary. He called for a national "redistribution" of people back to government-supported family farms. He promised an end to the "tragedy" of home and farm foreclosures and stated his intent to replace uncoordinated, local half measures with "national planning" for those "utilities which have a definitely public character." Lastly he called for "a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments" and "an end to speculation with other people's money" which had been responsible for the great catastrophe in the first place."
Roosevelt's plan was at once comprehensive and specific. It was much the same economic plan as Germany's and it rested on the fundamentally fascist (sic) premise that "If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline."
Roosevelt "frankly and boldly" spoke the truth about capitalism: it does not produce commonwealth. This truth was recognized even by the most conservative Bismarck at the end of the 19th century. It is an empirical fact, not an opinion, denied only by economic "creationists" whose protestations are the product of either incalculable stupidity or cunning hypocrisy.
Given that the free market does not reliably generate collateral benefits for the greater part of the people; and given the fact that capitalism has always received a cornucopia of government licenses, privileges and protections in return for its own social and economic irresponsibility, what then is the solution?
The socialist answer was to abolish private ownership of the means of production. The “third” way alternative by whatever name it was called (fascism, state paternalism, national syndicalism, progressivism, national socialism, social democracy, Peronism, etc., etc.) was that private enterprise could be made to work if it was harnessed, regulated and controlled by government.
Being a middle ground, “fascism et al.” gets pummelled from both ends. Socialist types accuse fascism of entrenching corporate interests under a dispensary populism. Capitalist types accuse it of infringing individual rights in favor of lazy-fair collectivism. But these are ideological polemics. The functional metapolitical facts are more straightforward.
State intervention in the economy is nothing new under the sun. It has been the default condition of virtually all political systems, the sole exception being the 18th century canard of economic liberalism -- and even then the exception was frequently honored in the breach.
Of necessity, economic "intervention" entails cooperation between Government and Capital as well as a regulation of Labor. The success of the regulatory economic model, in any given instance, depends on the ability to modulate cycles of economic sowing and economic harvesting and to balance the needs of different economic sectors comprising the overall (national) economy. It is a complicated task which requires transparency to preclude corruption and an effective (not formal) democracy to insure that it continues to serve the common good as perceived by the common man.
Historically speaking and depending on their temperaments, socialists either deplored or welcomed this "third way." Those who welcomed it accepted the premise of socialist gradualism; and, in truth, Bismarck's watershed adoption of social insurance policies within the framework of capitalism (1880) was cribbed entirely from economic platform of Germany's democratic (i.e. non-revolutionary) Socialists.
Those on the Left who deplored the economic hybrid saw it as a mere contrivance of Capital. Lenin scathingly dismissed the German Socialists as "social chauvinists" whose socialism, being tied to the nation state, would die on the battle-fields of nationalism.
However, most great statesmen from Augustus to Bismarck are pragmatists. When accused by outraged National Liberals and Conservatives of being a socialist, Bismarck famously shrugged "Call it socialism or what you will, it's all the same to me."
Franklin Roosevelt was equally indifferent and pragmatic. He waved away ideological labels as unnecessarily strange and complex....
and feigned astonishment at being accused of feasting on a breakfast of
"grilled millionaire." He was, he assured his college audience, a
"devotée" of capitalism whose breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs.
A straight and pragmatic line ran from Bismarck, through Herbert Croley's "New Nationalism" and Uncle Teddy's Bull Moose Progresivism to Roosevelt's New Deal.
"Why should not the labor soldier receive a pension as much as the veteran?" asked Bismarck. Why not? answered Roosevelt, "Americans are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to [soldier-like] discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good." What Leader could have said it better?
Too many Americans have been turned into political illiterates by a propaganda which intentionally confuses geo-political issues and matters of racio-cultural policy with questions of political-economy. Although these three areas are functionally inter-related they remain analytically distinct. No one in his right mind would confuse FDR's New Deal with those policies of juridical segregation and disenfranchisement which were intentionally left in place by a political coalition that was one third Dixiecrat.
The point here is not to excuse racist policies or to rehabilitate the "fascist" brand mark but rather to get a clear and sure footing within the political spectrum so that Obama's policies may be correctly assessed.
Between the canard of liberal capitalism and the allure of pure anarcho-socialism there lies a middle ground in which government assumes levels of overall economic control in order to bring about a harmonious and equitable social result. "Call it what you will," by the middle of the last century, those policies had been adopted by almost every advanced country in the world. Astonishingly, in 1980, the United States did an about face and has since then doggedly marched back into the 19th century.
The volte face was the work of capitalist reactionaries who wanted to make money for themselves freed from the irksome restraints of social responsibility. They argued that economic regulation was counterproductive and that only "the war" brought us out of the Depression.
The argument was despicably contrived. Let us cut to the chase by assuming the truth of what is stated: only "war" got us out of the depression. The question then is, why? The answer is that "the war" got us out of the Depression because at that point the Government took near total control over the economy. It promoted productive stimulus, set the terms of exchange and regulated conditions of employment.
The "war" did not get us out of the Depression because somehow -- magically -- we started shooting and bombing. It revived the economy because what had been Roosevelt's half measures now became a full measure of stimulus and control. The neo-liberal deceptionists substitute the situational circumstance of war for the underlying economic substance of economic stimulus and regulation. It is an intentional confusion, aimed at getting people to except war as "productive of good times."
However, “regulation” alone is not a sufficient panacea. As stated, all governments at all times have regulated trade and production in some manner according to the circumstances of the times. Pure capitalism, as pure socialism, are mythical endpoints on the ideological spectrum. The real question concerns the degree of regulation and the distribution of economic product.
The virtue of mid-century fascist models -- including FDR’s “fascism lite” -- was that they aimed at a populist distribution of economic product. The defect of end century American National Capitalism is that its highly regulated economy is calibrated to protect corporate monopolies and privileges at the expense of the working class.
Put another way, the two variables at issue are degree of regulation and direction of economic flow. Regulation of itself is a two edged sword. Milton Friedman, the great prophet of Neo-Liberalism, pointed out that regulation could be used and perverted by the very corporate economic interests the regulations were intended to control. This is indeed the essential feature of National Capitalism. However, Friedman’s argument that the solution was to do away with all regulation and redirection of wealth was a return to the “pure” liberal capitalism which had been historically shown to systematically produces national poverty. Friedman’s polemic was simply “heads I win; tails you loose.”
Another polemic used by the hawkers of liberal capitalism is to push the correlation between economic and political freedom. However, this is but a shell game that switches the topic from government as economic regulator to government as social arbiter. As France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries have demonstrated economic regulation and political freedom are entirely compatible.
With these considerations in mind we are able to assess the differences between Roosevelt’s gradualist social democracy (i.e. faux, faux-socialism) and Obama’s National Capitalist Security State.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt pinpointed the failure of capitalism: "a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return."
A more trenchant summary was hardly possible. A majority of Americans faced starvation or austerity. The solution was not to provide soup kitchens for the ‘unfortunate’ while calling for ‘sacrifices’ from the rest -- an America where the great number of people were left scrambling for scraps, while avoiding the inconvenience and scandal of watching people shiver and starve on street corners.
No. His aim was to demand sacrifices from the banks and corporations so that all people could have both economic security and opportunity, including a decent education “remunerative employment,” health care, recreation and retirement.
Roosevelt's simple casting of the problem was far removed from Obama's characterization of the problem as one of "falling on hard times." What Obama simply refuses to acknowledge is that, without redistributive economic regulation, the free market system is in the business of producing hard times; i.e. a consistent, unabated decline in real wages and an existence now blithely labelled austerity.
To the extent Obama acknowledges the problem his solution is to make a pretence of ‘progressive’ solutions, either through give-aways to Big Bucks Inc., disguised as popular entitlements (the Obamacare fiasco), or by taking away with one hand what is given with the other in the name of “fairness (as in raising the taxes - a tiny bit - on ‘the rich’ while seeking to cut social security benefits - a lot - for the aged poor).
Not only did Obama's inagugural speech refuse to properly frame the problem, not only did it fail to propose nuts and bolts specifics, it fell back instead on another false substitution: the substitution of cultural validations for economic security.
As he neared the summit of his hortatorical heap, Obama intoned that “our journey” was not complete,
1) until our daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts;
2) until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law;
3) until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.
4) until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants
5) until all our children, and always safe from harm.
Imagine if Roosevelt had assumed office in 1933 vowing to protect school children and shortening waits at the ballot box.
None of Obama’s “untils” addressed what income security any of these precious cognized groups were entitled to “under the law.”
Buried within the muck of irrelevancies was Obama's true promise to "make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit." Why is the choice "hard"? Would Roosevelt have spoken of the "hard choice" to provide a "measure of social security" to the aged? Are we to assume that Big Pharma, Big Sure and Big Med are going to be hit hard by the choices "we" must make? Nonsense. This is simply WashTalk for cutting back on benefits for the old and sick.
Incredibly, the mudia pundits have palavered insipidly about Obama's Second Epiphany -- his political turn-around and his recovery of courage in a second term free from the constraints of getting elected to another.
There was nothing "progressive" about Obama's address. It was a rehash of the same old neo-liberalism assuaged by a minimalist Social Calvinism.
If Obama’s exceptionalism were nothing more than a retrograde insistence on marching back into the early 19th century, one might laugh as "The Shining Bacon on the Hill made a global ass of itself. But the neo-liberal sludge generated by places like Harvard is in fact toxic to everything natural and moral.
The real Obamagenda is the institution of a global regime of full-spectrum repression and plunder, which degrades both the environment and civil society while it debases the vast bulk of mankind into an illiterate insecure and desperate lumpen mass of de facto sub-humans. This is the Orwellian reality behind “austerity” and the “war on terrorism” and behind Obama’s inaugural double-talk.
“A decade of war is now ending,” he intoned, “An economic recovery has begun.”
I.e, A decade of war in Afghanistan is ending as we get ready to pursue new strategic initiatives in Ibero-America, Africa and Syria. Banks, investment funds and global corporations have had their chestnuts pulled from the fire and are back to reaping profits.
“We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of (take advantage of) of those who long for freedom.”
I.e we will continue to promote zones of free market capitalism in Africa and against Russia and China because that’s what we are about and we are shamelessly willing to take advantage of those who hope (that word again!) for a better life.
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” BUT “We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law.”
I.e., malgré nous, we will reluctantly and against our loftier hopes continue to pursue our interests through military means.
And lastly with a toss-away bone, to the environmen talists: “We will respond to the threat of climate change.” Although “the path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult” we must protect our “national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snow-capped peaks....”
All that was lacking was a swelling chorale to Amurrka’s Purple Mountained Majesty. But nothing Obama said can be read as an even half-hearted acknowledgement that endless capitalist “growth” and environmental sustainability are simply not reconcilable.
In so singing, Obama merely rounded the sharp edges of America’s neo-liberal strategy as postulated by Cheney and his gang of neo-cons in academe and think tanks around the world.
Among those tanks was the Project for the New American Century founded in 1997 (with money from Raytheon)whose stated aim was to polemicize “a new century favorable to American principles and interests? (PNAC charter 1997)
In its now infamous September 2000 paper (Rebuilding America’s Defenses) PNAC argued that “America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces” in order to promote “American interests and ideals.” through “U.S. power projection around the world.” (Op.cit. pp. iv & v.)
The tasks of this “American-led security order,” the PNAC argued, was “to secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace;’ to deter the rise of a new great power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war....” (Op cit. pg. 2.)
A couple of tips are needed to parse this garbage. The first concerns the use of what chipsters call the "Conjunctive Confusion” which takes place when someone speak of a dual object, as in “principles and interests” or “preserve and extend” or “communists and jews.”
Yoking two objects together as if they were one, beguiles the listener into assuming that they are in fact one and that there is no tension or contradiction between the two. The two elements become a single piece which can -- magically!! -- march in any and opposite directions. At the same time, the more sordid aspect of the conjoined elements becomes softened by the loftier.
Thus, “interests” looses it’s sharper character as the pursuit of filthy lucre at the expense of others, and acquires a feel good glowiness from the ideal of “principles.” Likewise “extend” looses it aggressive character and acquires a sub-silentio defensive justification from the word “preserve”
The second tip concerns “democracy” and "zones of democratic freedom” The latter is a geo-political term of art and refers to America’s post war policy of containment. This policy was pursued by two correlative strategies, viz: (a) the geographic and defensive cordon sanitaire around Russia and China and (b) the establishment of pro-American “outposts” in regions that were contested and up for grabs. These “outposts” -- like Pinochet’s Chile -- shared our “values” (anti-communism, most importantly) and were coupled to our “interests” (free-trade, capitalist economies, American corporate mining or farming or entertainment.) Functionally, these zones of democratic freedom were no different than “outposts” in Injun Territory or Roman colonae in Gaul.
Thus, when Obama intones that our “conscience” and “interests” require us to promote “democracy” from “Asia to Africa” and from “the Americas to the Middle East” he is simply restating the neo-con PNAC doctrine in somewhat softer, fuzzy-wuzzy terms. As we have said before, a neo con is simply a neo-liberal gone punk. But the two are minted from the same alloy.
The last tip concerns “our.” Who we? Obama’s use of a collective singular pronoun necessarily implied that, at some level and with respect to something, each of the separate all of us are one.
To be sure, in all societies, divergent classes find unity on some points or issues. In terms of economy, however, the unity does not concern cultural or racial or other “personal issue” issues but economic ones. ( One would think it was obvious.) The question, in this context, is: how are “we” an “us” with respect to commonwealth.
To recapitulate our previous summary, the strict socialist answer is that the abolition of private property makes all wealth common and to the extent the State exists it exists to protect the equality of sharing. The strict capitalist answer was just the inverse: the State exists to protect private property and common wealth is simply the sum total of privately owned wealths. The “middling” answer is that the State does both, protecting private ownership but also redistributing wealth among and down.
Thus, in the regulatory state, it is assumed that the “our” inheres in a balanced stimulative-distribution as determined by an overarching “referee” known as “government.” But in the National Capitalist state, stimulating the "economy" without accompanying distribution of wealth is regarded as a sufficient policy so that, in the end, the state becomes a mere agency of Capital, and exists to use the political, juridical, fiscal and military means at its disposal to promote the interests and maximize the profits of corporations and banks.
The difference between theoretically pure Liberalism and National Capitalism is one of maturation and degree. In the former government assumes the relatively simple role of protector of private property and constabulary of public peace. In the latter, government becomes the aggressive promoter of private wealth and the repressor of public unrest.
By way of example. Under classical liberal policy, the state will protect Mozart’s work by allowing him to maintain a private suit against Salieri for copying a symphony and peddling it as his own work. Under National Capitalism, however, “copyright” is interpreted to mean a “guaranteed lock on a market” and a legally protected entitlement to maximum profit share. The government becomes the enforcer of a future and maximum profit stream even if this entails violation national surveillance, dipolmatic interventions, and government initiated prosecution as if the private infringement were a public crime. The ambit of private and public are confused in favor of private capital. At the same time, public services are privatized so that the State’s role as as servant of public conveniences and goods becomes progressively restricted. What is left of the State as “third party referee” of overall, collective wellbeing is simply an argument that by making the wheels of private profit spin fast and furious, enough collateral grist will be kicked up to benefit the remainder.
Once parsed, Obama’s “Second Epiphany” boiled itself down to a regime of domestic austerity coupled with ongoing war abroad and “securitization” at home on behalf of corporations and financial institutions which are no longer even “American” in any meaningul sense of the word. Obama’s regime is in fact, as it always has been, nothing more than the dystopian Orwellian state, operating on behalf of corporate interests.
Unfortunately, 1984’s dramatic devices -- everpresent video screens and Winston’s mind-breaking torture -- have tended to obscure the softer, self-executing delusions of hell. Simply put, Orwell’s state could not exist if it had to torture and terrorize everyone. Rather, as the iPhone aptly illustrates, people can be happily lulled into the necessary habits and mind-set. The image of 1984, is indeed as Orwell wrote, “a boot in the face” but it is also sustained by a self-executing institutionalism feeding off its own rhetoric and bad grammar.
The structural result is a society managed by an inner circle of elite bureaucrats overseeing a relatively small outer circle of techies, technocrats and enforcement thugs living content in their illusions and secure in their zones and “supervising” a mass of lumpen work-drones and an even larger mass of “unemployed no-longer-counted”.
As at all times, society will be divided into three classes, but rather than lifting the “bottom” into the benefit-level of the middle, the upper two will be severely shrinked and controlled, whereas the lower third will be brutally repressed.
President Clinton was quite candid about it. The whole thrust of his “new economy” was to export the grunt-work to yellow, brown and black countries, leaving America to take care of the “high tech” and managerial white collar jobs. The “homeland” would become the core of the inner and outer party, while the rest of the world was consigned to the drudgeries of manual labor broken down into ever smaller, mind-numbing components.
The lie of Clinton’s new economy was that America’s blue collar workers would be “retooled” for “new, well paying jobs” in our “new economy. Refooled would be more like it. There was simply no realistic prospect of retraining a generation of industrial workers to become office managers and computer geeks.
In fact, there is no realistic prospect that anything close to a substantial majority of the so-called “middle class” could be trained and employed as office managers and silitechs. What the Clinton economy really assumed was that masses of Americans (and in fact masses of people around the world) would simply be written off as “service sector” workers or simply consigned to official oblivion as “homeless.”
Nothing in Obama’s progressive epiphany indicates the least deviation from the dystopia of these domestic and geo-political goals. Rather, it is a cautionary script, to be read more like a car-sale sticker, while ignoring the huckstering puff talk.
Alas, America was built on puff talk as was Obama’s career. In 2004, as was catapulted in the Nation’s Limelight, Obama intoned,
“We have a righteous wind at our backs ... We can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us. ... And out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come”
And Eight years on,
"America’s possibilities are limitless ... Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom."
America is beyond ridiculous. After reaching a crescendo laden with all the pomposity and hubris of Ozymandias, Obamba and Michelle, took to walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, pied a terre, like or'dnary folk.... surrounded by a triple phalanx of armed security thugs.
Orwell himself could not have described the scene as progressives tearfully, joyously lapped it up.
The budget negotiations which have taken place over the past weeks in Washington could not have arisen at a more ironically suitable time. Set against a background of Yuletide trees and Mangers, they allow us to see that the ghoulish gamesmanship taking place in the nation’s capital has pushed the country off a moral cliff.
It is typically said that, at Christmas, those Christians, who have not delivered themselves unto shopping, celebrate hope, renewal and family. While those elements are not untrue, they have been turned into a kind of sentimental kitsch and moral treacle which obscure and soften the in-your-face challenge of the Christmas story.
At the risk of being overly homiletic, I would to take a step back and contextualize the Nativity so as to bring out its more vivid colors and original impact. For what Christmas really commemorates is the birth of beauty in humility and poverty.
Each of the Gospel writers emphasize different aspects of Jesus's life according to their audience. The story of Christmas comes to us almost entirely from the Gospel of Saint Luke and it is his account which has the Son of God being born of wayfarers in a manger.
Luke's biography of Jesus was written for the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world. Not surprisingly, it followed the expected, standard-form pattern of classical biographies: noble lineage, portents at birth, prodigies in youth, career accomplishments, acts of generosity, interesting sayings, public works, portents of death and, if one happens to be an Emperor, an apotheosis, to sit among the gods on Olympus.
Luke's account is clearly structured as a parody of the expected Roman biography. But although he follows the form, he inverts the substance. The inversion first takes place in the emblematic Magnificat in which Luke has Mary announce her unexpected conception by saying,
“God has hath regarded the humility of his handmaid... He shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53)
No self-respecting Greek or Roman would have said such a thing. The Greeks worshipped excellence and the Romans worshipped success. Divinity manifested itself in the youth of noble bearing and in the magnus vir. But Luke is unrelenting.
“And while they were there, in Bethlehem, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger...” (Luke 2:6-7)
Although the Nativity Scene has benefited from the beautification of the world's most skilled painters, the naked facts are not pretty. To all appearances Mary was homeless. She is first portrayed going "with haste into the hill country" where she enters Elizabeth's house to announce her pregnancy. (Luke 1:39-40) According to St. Matthew, Joseph contemplated breaking off his engagement to Mary because she was pregnant by no known man. He changed his mind, and the couple are next seen wandering at night, in the middle of winter, 80 miles from Nazareth, while Mary is close to term. (Matt. 1:18-24)
St. Matthew adds that Mary and Joseph put up in a manger because there was no room at the “inn” making it sound to us as if it was all a question of missed reservations. (Matt 2:1-6) However, this is an inaccurate translation because, in those days, there were no inns. There were no roadside restaurants or even rest areas either. To travel was to camp out on foot, without the benefit of freeze dried scrambled eggs. You managed with what you could bargain or carry. If you were lucky, the locals might offer you hospitality -- a floor to sleep on, some shared morsels to eat.
By all accounts, Joseph and Mary weren't very lucky. They are not said to be travelling in a group. They are living out of the "back of the burro" and, just as they get to Bethlehem, Mary goes into labor and has to give birth in a cow stall. What in the world did they use for water?
Luke makes no attempt to mask the wretchedness. Instead, he astonishingly proclaims that, on cue, the Host of Heaven suddenly appeared to a bunch of shepherds to announce the birth of "a Savior, who is Christ the Lord!" The shepherds take off running toward the stables, behold the infant Jesus and return hence “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.” (Luke 2:8-14)
Two thousand years later, it is hard for us to imagine the kind of jaw-dropping astonishment with which the average, everyday, Gaius would have reacted to the story.
Luke foists his listeners on a series of contradictions. Jesus is descended of nobility; but born in a filthy cow stall a probable bastard of homeless wanderers. As the Host of Heaven sounds its trumpets a Delegation of the Most Honorable Shepherds of the District comes to proffer their good wishes and salutations. Not till Don Quixote does literature string together such a pile of absurdities.
But it is a pile of absurdities which ultimately transformed the fundamental values of western society. Luke very intentionally turned the Roman Order on its head. Wealth and Power and Success do not ascend to an Olympus of elite heroes and gods but rather the Most Powerful God of the universe is to be found descended into the womb of failure and hunger and weakness.
It is this descent which became the cornerstone of the Christian creed: “...and He came down from Heaven....” That filthy, homeless person with a cardboard sign, snivelling in the cold on the curb? There is your god.
The Romans did not want for symbols of motherhood, family and prosperity. The Augustan Ara Pacis or Altar of Peace depicts Mother Rome, nurturing her twin sons, flanked by symbols of prosperity -- sheaves of wheat, an ox, a sheep and the winds of commerce between East and West. Luke takes the symbolism and sets it in a cow-stall in one of the most insignificant towns in the entire Empire.
It is from this inversion, that the Catholic Church derives its doctrine of the Preferential Option for the Poor which states that in our thoughts and deeds God demands a preference be given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society. Saint Augustine, put it this way:
"God does not demand much of you. He asks back what he gave you, and from him you take what is enough for you. The superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess superfluities, you possess what belongs to others." (Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 147, 12).
and
"Christ who is rich in heaven chose to be hungry in the poor. Yet in your humanity you hesitate to give to your fellow human being. Don't you realize that what you give, you give to Christ, from whom you received whatever you have to give in the first place." (Commentary on Psalm 75,9)
This then is what Christmas is about. It is about recognizing Christ in poverty and giving to the poor.
And yet, at this very Christmas time, what is the spectacle that Washington presents to the world? It is the spectacle of powerful, well-stuffed, hypocrites arguing over preferential options for the rich.
House Speaker Boehner wants to limit tax increases to persons making over one million dollars a year, while the President is willing to “compromise” on incomes of $400,000. What is seldom explained is that the “increase” is not on the full $250,000, or $400,000 or $1 million but only on the excess over those amounts. In other words, a person who earns one million and ten dollars would only see a 2% increase on the ten dollars above the million.
While the Speaker and the President are haggling over how little to tax the rich and super-rich, House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, is busy telling people that her party has no problem with cutting back on so-called entitlements for the poor.
In particular, Pelosi has no problem with reducing social security adjustments for inflation, so that, over a ten year period, the average monthly social security check would be reduced by 3%-5% per year. The “chained CPI” -- as the reduction is called -- means that as a person gets older his social “security” life support shrinks. Last week Pelosi, whose net worth is estimated at 90 million dollars, stated that the chained CPI was not a “cut” in benefits. "I consider it a strengthening of Social Security,” she said.
Social Security does not contribute to the budget deficit which is the spawn of astronomical defense and war spending coupled with tax cuts for the rich. But even if Social Security contributed to the deficit, the chained CPI “savings” would only amount to $122 billion. Last year’s defense budget was $680 billion.
This Christmas we would do well to note that the face Washington presents to the world is that of a bloated, snarling, ogre.
As followers of this trail of chips might have detected, we chipsters are devotées of the Middle Ages and adamantaly reject the canards of certain vituperative Frenchmen and the propagandists of capitalism.
There is no question that history has witnessed a steady and progressive march of technological progress of which our Age is the latest beneficiary. However, the chrono-centric notion that we have advanced in our concepts of humanity is so highly dubious as to be considered false.
Equally false, in our view, is the notion indoctrinated into impressionable minds that the Middle Ages were a time of brutish, barbarism. In our view, a subtler, finer appreciation of the paradoxes of existence permeates medieval consciousness than the matter-bound modern mind set.
We recently came across another Nugget of Interest that corroborates our bias.
Laws of King Canute (995-1035)
“Merciful punishments shall be determined upon for the public good; and the handiwork of God and the purchase which He made at a great price, shall not be destroyed for trivial offences” (Leges Regis Cnuti, Inst. Leg. Secularium II. De Misericordia in Judicio Habenda, given in Thorpe's Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, (1840) pp. 528-529 [Trans. per. P.H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, (1998, 2d Ed.) ISBN-10: 0415178940, at p. 190.].)
Magna Carta (1215)
“For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. (Id, (1215) Art. 20.)
Laws of Chief Justice Rhenquist (1980)
"The length of the sentence actually imposed is purely a matter of legislative prerogative. This is not to say that a proportionality principle would not come into play ... if a legislature made overtime parking a felony punishable by life imprisonment." Rummel v. Estelle (1980) 445 U.S. 263 274 and fn 11.)
But for an unsignaled lane change? Well, in that case...
We would not be so foolish as to think that the Middle Ages were an Age of Perfection but they were a time when men had not forgotten perfection. Today's jurists thrash about in the swamp of expediencies and, like Rhenquist, consider "the purchase which He made at a great price" to be an arbitrary "subjective value" which cannot be relied upon in the brave new world of realjur.
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons
Faced with massive beggary in Europe, the New York Times met the issue head on by begging the question.
The Timesreported that, despite austerity protests, Greece and Spain were proceeding with further budget cuts.
In Greece, the government "agreed on an austerity package that includes some of the most severe cuts in public pensions ever imposed in a developed country." In Spain, the government "introduced one of the most draconian budgets in the country’s history."
"The markets need reassuring," the Times explained and the cuts were "intended to reassure international investors and demonstrate the fiscal discipline that the euro zone was demanding..."
foto per N.Y. Times
Unlike Greece which had slashed pensions 10 percent, Spain took its cuts of flesh from other parts of the body. "Politically, it is understandable that Mr. Rajoy would want to put a protective bubble around the country’s 10 million retirees at a time when people are marching in the streets," the Times sympathetically intoned before going on to warn that "the fact that Spanish public pensions are being enhanced is a reminder of one reason European debt and deficit problems have proved so difficult to resolve."
What deserves note is not that budget cuts are being made but rather that the Times simply assumes that the "deficit problems" can only be "resolved" by starving pensioners. Entitlements (i.e., people entitlements) are the problem and once pensions are cut the difficulty will be solved. Never once does the Times question whether perhaps people -- and not "markets"-- need reassuring. Never once does the Times question the Moloch that demands the sacrifice of babies.
For the past nine months or so we have been thinking about Marx's Fetish of the Commodity and have been whittling away at a chip on the subject, but the Times report -- which is simply a reflection of what the Establishment thinks -- about sums it up.
And what the New World Order demands is a Shylockian
"economy" on a ferocious scale. We are in need of a Portia or a Parsons.
A blogger we came across asks whether it is true that Americans have fostered a "culture of dependency."
The short answer is that "societas" is a compact for mutual dependence (well duh, right?), which is why Aristotle (some old greek) said that society's foundation as well as its ultimate purpose was friendship.
Constant repetition of the Robinsonnade (vid: Grundrisse, Ch. 1) has given rise to a culture of egoism which has made Americans socially stupid.
We had better things to chip at than to watch the Republican Party convention; however, short of living in a remote cabin, it is impossible to isolate one's self from the "news stream" that has become something of an Orwellian ether which is omni-present and all-permeating.
So it was we read that the media were not happy with Ryan's speech which was strewn with lies -- not seeming lies, not plausible lies, but lies which lay beyond the pale.
The candidates' speeches, intoned the New York Times, "seemed to signal the arrival of a campaign in which fact-checking concerns have largely been set aside" But, queried James Bennet of the Atlantic, "what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?” Alas, replied the Times, "blatant falsehoods like those of the Romney-Ryan campaign are only possible because Americans no longer expect to hear the truth."
No longer? Perhaps. But we would first ask of the Times - what exactly is a blatant falsehood and how does it differ from a mere falsehood? Is a blatant falsehood one that is totally unacceptable as opposed to merely unacceptable?
Totales unannehmbar! Where had we heard such phrases before? According to Viktor Klemperer, the philologist who studied the Nazi use and abuse of language (Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947) ), such hyperbolic ambiguation was among the linguistic devices employed by the regime to corrupt language and, hence, thought.
If something is unacceptable, it cannot be accepted. "Totally unacceptable" supplies a howl of emphasis that it really really cannot be accepted. But this howl of necessity implies that there could be some unacceptable things which are, at least to some extent, acceptable. But the acceptably unacceptable is nonsense, and the persistent use of such urgent and insistent hyperbole reduces speech to a din of shouts embodying latent contradictions.
To say that the Nazis "employed" such devices unduly suggests intentionality. It is perhaps more accurate to say simply that that was their usage. Conrad Heiden, a social democratic parliamentarian who fled to the United States in 1936, wrote that National Socialist leaders and administrators were drawn from a class of "intellectual brutes" -- men whose professional training and native intellegence implemented and amplified a brutish core. In other words, they barked, snarled and howled only they were "intellectual" enough to do it in words.
Howling and lying are nothing new in politics. Cleon's speeches to the Athenian assembly, Anthony's waving of Casesar's bloody toga, Innocent the Third's cry of Deus lo vult were hardly emblematic of reasoned discourse. The sorry truth is that civil society is only a whisper away from the wolf pack.
Neither is the corruption of language anything new. In a famous passage in his history of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides discusses the "revolution" in speech that accompanies, and is in fact, the precursor to civil dissolution.
The ancient Greeks understood very keenly that to be a political animal is to be a speaking animal; for it is words, says Aristotle, which enable us "to decide the expedient and the inexpedient and to distinguish the just from the unjust."
American intellectual and political life is in such a pathetic state because grammar is not taught in what used to be called Grammar School and because social scientists and sociologists run roughshod over syntax in a rush toward something called "hard facts".
The consequences of blurring distinctions is illustrated by the much-used term "potential suspect." A suspect is a person who may be guilty of some crime; thus a "potential suspect" is a person who possibly, may be guilty of something. But of course anyone is possibly guilty of something. The term renders us all all potential suspects -- or perhaps merely suspects but in all events warranting surveillance.
Even the appellate judiciary, which supposedly makes a profession of precise speech, runs roughshod over the plain meaning of words. Among other weirdnesses of speech, it has, in recent years, dredged up the oxymoronic concept of an "ongoing emergency" once so favored by despots who suspend the rule of law on an ongoing temporary basis.
In Michigan v Bryant (2011) 562 U.S. ___, Justice Sotomayor defined an "ongoing emergency" as one in which the police need to "'assess the situation, the threat to their own safety, and [the] possible danger to the potential victim'". Left undefined were the contours of a possible, possibility of harm (i.e. 'danger') to a person who might possibly be or become a victim.
If the Supreme Court can "think" this way, it is no surprise the run of the mill appellate courts are even worse. In one California case we are familiar with, the Court of Appeal rejected an argument against punishing recidivist status by stating, "appellant was not punished for his recidivist status but for being an habitual criminal."
Such blatherings are really no more than articulated howls; sounds of wrath wrapped in the tissue of words.
It is true that sophistry has a legitimate role to play in law, politics and theatre (which are all much the same thing). The maleability and ambiguity of shades of meaning is what allows language and thought to develop just as dissonance can give rise to new and engaging harmonies.
I would venture to say that the difference between Socrates and the Sophists was not that Socrates did not employ subtle tricks of logic and rhetoric (he did), but that he did so with a good faith desire to elucidate as opposed to bad faith and cunning aim to confuse.
The same applies to judicial politics. The structure of federal legislative power rests on Justice Marshall's somewhat dubious distinction between "absolutely necessary" and merely, ordinarily "necessary." (McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) 17 U.S. 316 ) One can disagree with Marshall's concept of federalism; one can call him sly, but his play on words had a constructive purpose.
Neverthless, as Aristotle would also say, moderation in all things. A persistent and pervasive misuse of language batters words into articulated mush with predictable effects on the brain.
The vast heap of slogans, labels, oxymorons, pleonasms and other grammatical mutations that comprise American social, political and judicial discourse today did not heap-up on account of some judicious play of what the French poet Valéry called sons et sens. It arose from a culture of linguistic abuse.
By chance, we were perusing our friend Alexis de Tocqueville who had some relevant things to say on the matter. A passionate materialism and insistence on equality, he wrote, rendered Americans impetuous, restless and indifferent to the dictates of reason.
"I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. ¶ To evade the bondage of system and habit,.... [is] the principal characteristic[ ] of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans.
"As to the influence which the intellect of one man may have on that of another, it must necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens, placed on an equal footing, ... are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there. ... As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. .... . This disposition of mind soon leads them to condemn forms, which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth." (Democracy in America, Book II, Sec. 1, ch. 1.)
• • •
"[T]he desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people ... And yet, "[f]rom time to time strange sects arise, which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States." ( Op. Cit., Book II, Sec. 2, ch. 12.)
Of course all this was as of 1831, before the advent of that thing known as "mass communication." The very term ought to give rise to suspicion if suspicion were not already superceded by the reality of a society and culture grounded in hucksterism and kitsch.
A daily barrage of advertising which blares spurious claims and insinuated benefits has stupefied our minds into an acquiesent inactivity which accepts without question whatever is asserted in much the way babies gurgle and coo when brightly coloured rattles are rattled before their eyes. Our heroes and myths rather than inspiring occasional remembrance and enthusiasm blunt our sentiments under a narcotic pall of vulgar, flashy concoctions all of which ultimately serve to gratify our national vanity.
"The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogy is acceptable to them, the most exalted seldom contents them; .... Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, while it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, "Ay," he replies, "there is not its equal in the world." It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it." (Op. Cit., Book II, Sec. 3, ch 16.)
And so it was that it took but a passing glance to see in the rosy, white faces of the cheering Republicans all the vainglory and aggression of which Americans are capable. Theirs were the whoops and howls of ego indulging itself and snarling at the "not me".
It will be little different in the Democratic convention which will indulge a different version of l'amour propre under a barely indistinguishable set of noisy platitudes accompanied by a noise of nonsensical cheering.
"Yet in the end the spectacle of this excited community becomes monotonous, and after having watched the moving pageant for a time, the spectator is tired of it.". (Op. cit., Bk II, sec 3, ch. 17.)
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