On a Sunday Morning Chatfest in a Parallel Universe

If this world were a just one, my friend Don Washington (aka, Mayoral Tutorial) and others like him - interested and knowledgeable about the public good, not the laughable rotting riot of clueless pundits and warmed-over politicians - would be welcomed every week on Sunday morning talking head shows, not (just) on public access tv.

Not that there's anything wrong with public access, except for the exposure. If it weren't for Public Access TV, we wouldn't have this, for instance. This being an informative and rather delightful discussion about the public good and the need for a space and a government that is specifically looking for the public good (which is not happening in our city and certainly not with our mayor). There is also a brilliant deduction by Don as to why we need to raise the minimum wage several times over: We're paying for whatever we don't fund directly anyway. But, the typical mainstream media once again shows little-to-no-regard for the lives of poor people, so they keep running to business leaders (who do not want to pay increases and so will tell you how something that is good for the working poor is automatically bad for business).

Which is why such alternative, non-commercial news is so important. Not to mention insightful and sometimes even delightful. As it is here.



If you haven't had the chance to, check out Mayoral Tutorial - as a blog and a Facebook page.

Who Teaches Math to the Red Eye?

According to a lead story in Tuesday's print Chicago Red Eye (the baby sister of the Old Man Anti-Union McCormick's anti-union Tribune), the Chicago Board of Education offered Chicago Teacher's Union members pay raises in increments of 3% the first year and 2% for the following three years. According the the Red Eye, this amounts to a total of 16% for all teachers.

Now, I was taught by those same CTU teachers, and I'm more of a humanities person myself, but I don't think that math adds up...

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.

Corporate Media's Gravy Boats

Gotta hand it to Sarah Palin for holding it all in. Say what you want about her (or don't. I'm rather tired of her. And this isn't about her), she's not as explosive in public as her private persona is known to be - or as the person who handles her Twitter and Facebook accounts is. Breitbart, on the other hand, is who he always is - a blowhard cynic and full of big, fat stupid.

It needs to be pointed out, of course, that the intent of this whole fiasco was to intimidate the pro-union protesters. The fact that the Tea Party would be shouted down isn't necessarily rude - it's protective.

And sweet, delectable, and frothy irony.

But what is particularly damning in this video is the media's take. Fox and CNN (and MSNBC and ABC and NBC and CBS and the New York Times and HuffPo and the Chicago Tribune...) are not only or even primarily concerned about providing and/or analyzing information and happenings. They certainly are not objective - no one can be - though there can be balance with multiple perspectives. The problem is that news is not about the news anymore. It is not about public interest as it was in its heyday in the middle of the twentieth century. It is a business.

The questions are no longer, "What matters? What is important?" The overriding question is "What sells?"- because the primary voice is not the public interest, but the business community. News organizations and shows rarely rock the boat, because they need to keep the boat going as long as possible to keep their shows going as popular as long as possible but also to keep their advertisers and corporate heads happy.

The narrative of Sarah Palin - as outdated and irrelevant as she may be to most voters - as a relevant iconoclast and/or lightning rod is still fascinating enough to draw in numerous viewers. Whether or not they love her is inconsequential; she attracts them and that's all she needs to do. And if they allow her to be publicly embarrassed, her star will fall faster than it has already.

And CNN/Fox and their corporate parents would instantly lose a steady (though declining) gravy boat. Instead of allowing it to ride out to its gravy-laden pasture.

Carne Asada Reporting

Regarding my post on Al Jazeera last week, my friend Ian E-bright e-wrote:

I still can't support AJ showing beheadings. I think it helps to achieve terrorist goals which is paranoia and crippling fear. It plays right into their game.

And then I says:

Me neither.

But I have to think, if I had a choice between showing ALL the effects of war, or cheerleading war, I'd have to choose the former.

And those terrorists weren't in Iraq until our warring brought them in...

However, lost lives should never be celebrated and I don't want to make it seem like I'm exploiting those lost lives for a political/ideological point...

As if to prove my point a new report asserts that over two thousand people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the Drone Wars in Pakistan over the last four years by the CIA.

The report notes that the attacks target Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas where “people usually carry guns and ammunition as a tradition. US drones will identify anyone carrying a gun as a militant and subsequently he will be killed.” Pakistan’s government, which has only a nominal presence in the region, traditionally brands anyone killed by the US a “suspect.”

And while 2,043 is a lot of people to kill in the past five years, over 75% of them were actually killed in the past two years since President Obama took office. 2009 saw over 700 people killed in the CIA drone strikes, and the report shows 929 more killed in 2010.

Some people are thinking to fight back, though they most likely would never, ever win. The title here says it all:

Pakistani Boy Files Lawsuit Against US Officials After Losing Legs in Missile Attack

photo © 2009 [BarZaN] Qtr [Boston] | more info (via: Wylio)
The article goes on to mention that the attacks are kept secret by the US government. Which isn't necessarily true. It's not that we aren't allowed to know about the bombings. It's that our media is selective about what to tell us about our own acts of aggression. Which means, they only share The Good Stuff. And they censor out the rest. Not because they're forced to. After all, we have freedom of the press here, right?

But then why?

And of all the things to get upset with Obama about (him being a secret Muslim, or terrorist-sympathizer, or a Marxist or whatever other lie dream they can lie up), hardly anyone is upset that the Obama-led US is terribly great at conquest, at murder, at assassinations, renditions, nation-building...

Horrible, right? Or not such a big deal... Again, imagine it was done on your doorstep, to your countrymen...

Of course, there have always been massive casualties of war (for example, the nukes that fell on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) even by many of our nicest presidents. But we never really get around to calling them what they are - unprovoked murder.

Carnage Reporting

With all this scrutiny of the Muslim world again come some chances for typically Christian Americans to redeem ourselves in the Arab and Muslim world - to restart a rather tenuous and falsified relationship. Broken Telegram has a great post on that here, exploring the rise of democratic revolutions in majority Muslim nations recently (and what that means for a society that tends to think of Muslims and Arab people in purely racist terms).

And then comes this startling revelation - for many of us, anyway - that perhaps the best place to get reportage on the goings-on in Egypt and Tunisia is through Al Jazeera English (which, btw, is basically censored in the US. Although you can get it via internet live feeds, it is not available on any cable networks here, unlike in say, Canada). As one Facebook friend-of-a-friend reminded me, Al Jazeera is primarily known as an anti-American, pro-terrorist network that showed beheadings of American citizens and Osama bin Laden's (postmortem?) "Death to America!" tweets.

Of course, Al Jazeera English isn't quite the same as the older station, but there is enough of an obvious linkage that the initial question, "Isn't that the station that showed Americans' head getting cut off?" needs to at least be acknowledged. My response follows:

That's a good question. I found the fact that they would do such to be abhorrent. From a Western point of view, it seemed like a snuff film, or one of those barbarous hangings/lynchings for general amusement from our recent past.

But then I think and wonder, is the focus of news to be entertainment or is it to be the truth? If it's truth, then aJ has done a shameless job in showing the devastating after-effects of the US-led war on Iraq.

While American media was shunned from even showing the caskets of returning soldiers, al Jazeera was showing the bloody streets where 'smart' bombs killed and crippled civilians.

To honestly critique aJ for showing such footage, I wonder if I can put myself in their shoes. What if it was my state, my country, my neighborhood that was being attacked, besieged, and occupied.

What if I lost my wife and daughter to such a war? Wouldn't I want tne world to know the effects that the invading country left us with? Wouldn't I want the whole world to share in my suffering?

Weekly Links We Like to Link to: OK, you can call this a comeback.

And yes, these articles are at least a month old! Got a lot of catching up to, kids.


I want me some bookshelves like these! And then maybe I can get me some readin'!

Tips on why Obama is not a socialist. "Obama properly belongs in a specific anti-socialist movement on the left, Social Democracy, which accepts a capitalist economy but demands a state strong enough to moderate its failures and excesses."

"Why newspapers can't be saved but the news can."

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Christianity had taken root in some non-European locales that we don't tend to associate with Christianity at all. Philip Jenkins (not the Left Behind guy, but an author who studies the movement of Christianity in non-Western world - lastly looking at the astronomic rise of conservative churches in the Global South) is interviewed about why these ancient churches died out. The answer may surprise you (well, maybe not. But it did take me under):

PJ: Churches die by force. They are killed.

CT: But what about the old saying, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church"?

PJ: That was said by Tertullian, who came from the church in North Africa, where the church vanished. If you were to look at the healthiest part of Christianity right around the year 400 or 500, you might well look at North Africa... It was the land of Augustine. Then the Arabs, the Muslims, arrive. They conquer Carthage in a.d. 698, and 100 years later—I don't say there were no Christians there, but there certainly was only a tiny, tiny number. That church dies.