Bi-Losing!

While we're investigating if someone used Congressional stationary or office computers to relay saucy pix of his crotch, I'd like to also investigate those who may have sold out their Congressional office and Constitutional duty (the welfare of We the People) to the highest bidders.

But that would implicate nearly everybody, right Minority Leader Pelosi?

Our national media is a step removed from complete tabloid takeover, and the citizens of this nation, if judged by its consumerist interest, is heading toward a Tablodia, while we're being governed by Kluptocracy.

Not the kind of Kluptocracy that libertarians and Randites like to bemoan: the one that looks like a bureaucratic and fat Robin Hood that steals from the hard-working and disperses to the lazy parasites. The US Kluptocracy works for its corporate masters and delivers funds from the working class (and increasingly, the middle class) and gives to its Robber Barons.

photo © 2007 Nina Hale | more info (via: Wylio)

If we're going to talk about lies, how about the fact that the Bush tax cuts (Happy Anniversary!), rather than giving us a prolonged season of growth, cost us 2.5 trillion dollars. More than the stimulus plans combined and with nothing to show for it - at least not for the other 98%.

Let us talk about the fact that we were led to a devastating, useless, and costly war (this one coming on $800 billion) on a seismic threshold of bloody and battered lies and deceit and misleads - and that that war has led to a ramping up of our Homeland Security needs, an increase and intrusion of our military might into other countries, and countless innocent deaths (not to mention that some suspect that the true, actual cost of these wars is three times that reported).

How about the lie that the lives of Arabs and Muslims is not as important as the lives of Americans, or Israelis?

Speaking of which, and back to Weiner, how about the whoppers he told while defending APAIC? Including these murderous falsehoods:

There is no Israeli occupation of the West Bank, no Israeli military presence there

The Goldstone Report was not based on the laws of war.

Israel is at war with 20 neighbors. (Or the twin lie that the Arab countries want to push Israel out to the sea).

American progressives should support Israel limiting free speech about its character as a Jewish state.

Egypt is an "Islamic state."

And then there's the continually absurd distortion that it is the poor who are waging class war when, at most, they are pointing out the obvious: that they are being attacked and sucked out by the rich and their manipulations (many psychological, such as the constant warfare with our brains they emit through their relentless adverts).

But of course the lies that we care about here are the juicy, sexy lies. Not the ones where people die by the boatload because of lack of access - or because they happen to live in a region that's supposedly visited by known terrorists. The ones where we find out who slept with who and who owes who a big, fat, huge diamond ring to alleviate the psychological, social, and sexual sins he (usually) has committed.

And since CNN and TMZ aren't going to do their jobs - unless their jobs are telling us all about the drug-fueled sex romps of Charlie Sheen - I am of the opinion that pastors should be. That, at the least, Christian ministers should and could be the prophetic voice in the wilderness. That we should be doing what Breuggeman calls de-scripting from the dominant script of technological, therapeutic, consumerist militarism (although I must say that my problem isn't so much with technology itself but that it is largely used to advance the causes of leisure, consumerism, and militarism).

In a land that continually self-identifies as Christian, where the predominant view is that God is real and the Bible is God's word to us, shouldn't we use that context to the benefit: to declare that God hates lies. God hates hatred. God is love and life and those that counter those counter God. Those of us that declare the evangelion - the Good News - of God need to run a counter script to the murderous lies and deceptions and distractions of contemporary celebrity and militaristic jingoism.

Why is it that it tends to be Christians instead who confuse love of country's empire (and American Exceptionalism) with love of Jesus' otherworldly (and frankly, odd and anti-natural) Kingdom? Are pastors afraid - much like they were in the antebellum South and apartheid South Africa - of confronting the demons within their own churches? Could it be that they're afraid of losing parishioners, or even of losing their jobs? This is a sad state of affairs for our nation, then. But the job is left to lay ministers and professional ministers to administer God's proclamations and free the bonds of the captives. When we are free of mind and spirit, then we can lead others to freedom as well.

I leave my pastor readers and Christian ministry friends with some Walter Breuggeman from his 19 Theses:

1. Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.

2. We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3. The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4. That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5. That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6. Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

8. The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is accomplished by a steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we say can make us happy and make us safe.

9. The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and is enacted through the tradition of the Church. It is an offer of a counter-narrative, counter to the script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.

10. That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature, its key character – the God of the Bible whom we name as Father, Son, and Spirit.

11. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.

12. The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless. [I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must be taken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.

13. The ragged, disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel among themselves – liberals and conservatives – in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so to debilitate the focus of the script.

14. The entry point into the counter-script is baptism. Whereby we say in the old liturgies, “Do you renounce the dominant script?”

15. The nurture, formation, and socialization into the counter-script with this illusive, irascible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation, and socialization by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality, and neighboring of all kinds.

16. Most of us are ambiguous about the script; those with whom we minister and I dare say, those of us who minister. Most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-script. Most of us in the deep places are vacillating and mumbling in ambivalence.

17. This ambivalence between scripts is precisely the primary venue for the Spirit. So that ministry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that invokes resistance and hostility.

18. Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is equally present among liberals and conservatives in generative faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of the old script and embrace of the new script.

19. The work of ministry is crucial and pivotal and indispensable in our society precisely because there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and too manage a way through it. I think often; I see the mundane day-to-day stuff ministers have to do and I think, my God, what would happen if you took all the ministers out. The role of ministry then is as urgent as it is wondrous and difficult.