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.

The Mis-Informant rings true

I swear this is how we're brainwashed from childhood to believe the lies that hurt us and enrich the rich.

"You want to be a doctor? That's the worst possible profession ever! Because Obamacare [reads palm] is going to take choice from doctors and so they're all going to quit."

Mules to my right, Jackasses to my left.

During a Republican gubernatorial nominee debate in Arizona, incumbent (but not elected) governor and full-time liability Jan Brewer opened up her mouth, allowing more unfounded biases to pour out. She declared, "They're coming here, and they're bringing drugs. And they're doing drop houses, and they're extorting people and they're terrorizing the families."

Because the veracity of her reports needed to be further justified while simultaneously adopted by the gullible and/or racists, she did us all the pleasure of expounding the other day.

Well, we all know* that the majority of the people that are coming to Arizona and trespassing are now become drug mules. They're coming across our borders in huge numbers. The drug cartels have taken control of the immigration. …

So they are criminals. They're breaking the law when they are trespassing and they're criminals when they pack the marijuana and the drugs on their backs...

I believe today and in the circumstances that we are facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming in the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels, and they are bringing drugs in...

There's strong information to us that they come as illegal people wanting to come to work. Then they are accosted and they become subjects of the drug cartel.

1) Mules? Beasts of burden. Animals. Un-human. There's a direct, Orwellian correlation between this type of language and the type of language used to justify chattel slavery and genocide. Those who argue against immigrants ("illegal" or not) continue in the fine tradition of de-humanizing their targets in order to lift themselves up (in Brewer's case, it's a political ploy, one that she shares with the Segregationists of the middle 20th Century).

2) Brewer denied that Mexicans and other Latin-Americans are coming through the Southern border to find work, to feed their families. It's a furthering of her de-humanizing practices (and the de-humanization of non-Whites in a White Supremacy rule), and another attempt to de-familiarize. These are not people with real struggles and needs, people whose lives are on the precipice largely because of American intervention into their economy, according to this WS thinking.

3) She's actually countering the claims of a fellow Arizona Republican. That's a bit of hope badly needed in these highly politicized days.

4) In trying to once again to connect immigration to the drug trade (two things that need to be solved separately) Brewer once again shows her sympathydeep-seated racism. Latinos are only good for _______________(fill in the blank). For some people, apparently, they're only good as boogie-men. But this misses another, broader point.

Q1) Why drug-smuggling? Why is that on the table at all in discussing Latinos?

Simplified A1) Because it's a real problem in Mexico, especially near the borders. And if it's a problem in Mexico, then, ergo, forsooth it must be a Mexican problem. And if it's a Messican problem and thems is coming here, then it will also be an Amuriken problem. Unlesses we's stop them.

Q2) Why is drug-smuggling an issue in the northern border regions of Mexico?

Simplified A2) Because Amerigringos can't get enough of the sh*t. As long as we don't have to change our way of life to get it. And we don't plan on doing that anytime soon...

We're causing the drug-smuggling problems, and yet we take no ownership in that.

4) In the name of Christian love, I propose that every time Jan Brewer comes out to speak/open up a shopping center/brey, we should greet her with a familiar, familial call of "HEE-HAW! HEE-HAW!" It would make her feel at home, among the jackasses.
*Sadly, no.

Medication and Sugar-Highs

There were two interesting and somewhat interrelated articles in the Chicago Reader last week. In The Straight Dope column, Cecil Adams replied to a letter on sugar highs and their effect. In the cover story, a Freudian literature professor writes a book about over-diagnosing what used to be known simply as shyness. Both, I think, are worth a gander.

First, on sugar:

Q: I'm always hearing parents talk about the sugar rush their kids get after eating sweets: "Uh-oh, watch out! Little Ignatz just had two M&Ms!" I thought I had read somewhere that this effect is either greatly exaggerated or nonexistent. What's the story?

... your classic controlled double-blind affairs: two groups of kids, one fed a bunch of sugar, the other given a placebo (i.e., artificial sweetener), everyone kept sufficiently in the dark as to who'd gotten what, etc. The results? No discernible relationship between sugar ingested and how the kids acted. It didn't matter how old they were, how much sugar they got, what their diets were like otherwise — nothing....

... For a crucial piece of the puzzle we turn to the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and a 1994 study by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, in which they looked at 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being "behaviorally affected by sugar."

The mom-son teams were split into the customary two groups: the moms in one were told their sons would be given extra-sugary Kool-Aid, while the others were told their kids were in the control group and would get a drink sweetened with aspartame. In reality, though, the same artificially sweetened stuff was administered to both sets of kids while the women got a sheaf of surveys to fill out. Mothers and children were then videotaped playing together, after which the moms were asked how they thought things went.

What did Hoover and Milich find? You guessed it: the moms who thought they were in the sugar group said their sons acted more hyper. In addition, they tended to hover over their children more during play, offer more criticism of their behavior, etc. The mother-son pairs in the other group were judged by observers to be getting along better. What's more, those moms who, going into the experiment, most strongly believed their kids were sugar-sensitive also scored highest on a test designed to gauge cognitive rigidity....

[Ya ever heard of this thing called Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? It happens a lot. And now for the disclaimer and closing:]

I should stress we're not talking here about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is its own freestanding issue; studies have suggested there's some correlation between ADHD and diet, so maybe every so often you'll get a kid whose condition really is exacerbated by sugar. And there are plenty of other good reasons to limit children's consumption of sugar-laden food. But when a parent freaks out because a swig of soda has allegedly made his kid uncontrollable, it's quite possible he's not just seeing the behavior he expects to see, he's helping create it.

Now, on to Praxil:

[Christopher] Lane, a Victorian literature scholar and professor at Northwestern, had... published a book on misanthropes in the Victorian era, which he says “had a relatively high tolerance for eccentrics, reclusives, hermits, and scolds.” He wanted to carry his study into the 21st century. But when he began asking psychiatrists about the fate of contemporary misanthropes, the response he got was that they’d likely be medicated...

It looked to Lane like the much more common trait of shyness, which Victorians had actually valued as a sign of modesty and a contemplative mind, had been transformed into something called social anxiety disorder. People who dreaded giving speeches, or blushed when they were the center of attention, or who, like Lane himself, needed a certain amount of their own company, were popping pills that promised to turn them into breezy extroverts. How had this happened?

[Hint, check the distinctions between the DSM II and III, which was first released in 1980.]

The correlation that I understood is that these types of emotional/psychological/physiological 'maladies' are actually in the head - that in these instances (as opposed to say, clinical depression), Western (or at least American) society tells us that we need to come up with a solution for every conceivable problem - and so we make them up. The problem that is diagnosed isn't a real problem. But something else, something deeper and not really related may be the real problem, the real threat.

So, keep your eyes closed, swallow these pills, stay away from sweets, lock the doors in your car when you're going through a bad neighborhood. Medicate yourself, you'll be all right.

Batman and Gangster

1) Really, really looking forward to the Dark Knight movie. And especially since I heard this:

"Harvey Dent is a tragic figure, and his story is the backbone of this film," says [director] Christopher Nolan... "The Joker, he sort of cuts through the film -- he's got no story arc, he's just a force of nature tearing through."

The thing is, the Joker scares the crap out of me. It does somewhat remind me of the latest Spider-Man movie, where the Sandman and his dilemma was really the emotional arc of the movie and Venom was a nightmare-inducing guest. Venom gives me nightmares.

The difference though, of course, is that although Venom was around for a bit, he wasn't permanent. The Joker should last for a long time in the movies, unlike in the Jack Nicholson part. But his presence should always be felt, like a flippin' hurricane.

2) I don't care for American Gangster. I thought it was a pile of historical bullshit - as well as other bits of bullshit. And not in the not-as-right-as-it-could-have-been way that Denzel's character in the Hurricane was.

I was right. The caskets. The informing. All piles of heaping, flaming rubbish.

H/t for both to Peter Chattaway.