Reading notes

[Sat 2005-01-29: Bumped back to top because it’s damned important]
[originally published Saturday, 2005-01-07 at 10:59 am]

I think the United States’ national soul is on the brink of spiritual death. Maybe it’s already dead.

Alberto Gonzales should never have been nominated for the position of U.S. attorney general, much less be on the brink of confirmation. You empower the torture and injustices he’s empowered, and you yourself may, if you’re lucky and contrite, be forgiven and rehabilitated at some point in the future, but in a just nation you have permanently disqualified yourself from any position of authority.

But we are not [being] a just nation.

Bob Herbert today captures the present situation well:

The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice, integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby, interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general …

Mr. Gonzales shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval. …

The Bush administration and Mr. Gonzales are trying to sell the fiction that they’ve seen the light. In answer to a setup question at his Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Gonzales said he is against torture. And the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last week that said “torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms.”

What took so long? Why were we ever — under any circumstances — torturing, maiming, sexually abusing and even killing prisoners? And where is the evidence that we’ve stopped?

The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. …

I see the administration’s pathological inability to accept responsibility creeping into the culture. Its “whatever I can get away with” delineation of right from wrong is leaking into attitudes everywhere I turn, seems like.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. …

I’ve just had a real live former Hitler-era Nazi — someone who turned his life around decades ago and is now the most delightful of people — tell me he’s chilled by the similarities he sees between what he fell for in 1930s Germany and what’s happening in the U.S. during the past 4 years. It’s looked similar to my intuition for a long time now; he says from first-hand experience it is similar. I’d rather us learn from the past, not repeat it, thankyouverymuch.

How any Christian sees anything godly in these people mystifies me. It’s just deception within and without. There is no “setting free the oppressed” going on, as Jesus cites as evidence of the liberating presence of the Spirit of the Lord. What we’re doing is imprisoning people, not proclaiming release to them; we’re oppressing people, not setting them free.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

“Do justice”? Love kindness? Walk humbly? By Micah’s measure, we’re already three strikes and out: Injustice, cruelty, and arrogance define us in the eyes of the world. Clearly we’re not measuring up to what Micah says “the Lord requires of us.”

[via Armando]

2005-01-21 update:
Fallenmonk reminds me of MLK’s apropos words:

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Religious ignorance is a runaway problem in the U.S.:

Citing a bizarre 1997 poll that showed only a third of Americans could name the four Gospels, while 12 percent of us identified Noah’s wife as Joan of Arc, Prothero goes on to make an important if familiar point. We live in the most religiously believing and observant advanced industrial nation, but our level of actual knowledge about religious doctrines — our own and others — is significantly lower than in religiously indifferent countries elsewhere. …

As the 1997 poll illustrates, Americans aren’t just ignorant about Muslims or Sikhs or Hindus or even Mormons — they often know little about the doctrines or history of their own faith communities. …

I don’t know the exact statistics of who knows and doesn’t know what, but ignorance of scripture and church history is the least ghastly — and possibly most forgivable — explanation I’ve seen for Christian support of U.S. policies. When the light finally dawns, when the Spirit finally breaks through en masse, thousands upon thousands of us are going to fall to our knees and onto our faces in weeping and repentance: because what some of us are now supporting, Jesus commands us — and always has — to turn away from, whatever the cost.

The rampant secularization of much of the American faith tradition in the not-so-sacred cause of cultural and political conservatism must be laid at the parsonage door of those religious leaders who have abused the prophetic function of their ministry to acquire a “seat at the table” of secular power.

If we take scripture seriously at all, the outlook is grim for these abusers. (“Millstone around neck” comes to mind.) Repentance is always an option, always the way out*, for them and for us, but it is as compatible with our prideful nationalistic ignorant warmaking as water is with oil; it’s gonna take a lot of soap (and study) to cut through this thick-clotted blood of others we’ve spilled, this oil-drunk vomit we’ve soiled ourselves with.

If people of faith don’t know their own basics, if we aren’t self-consistent, if we fall like rubes for doctrines so divorced from what we say we believe, if we cheerlead behaviors that Jesus condemns, what is our point? Why should anyone listen? Why should anyone care?

Redemption may happen, but no thanks to us.

[via eeh]

I find these words from Paul Levy to be true beyond true:

Bush has a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that’s in the soul of all of humanity.

Paul names this disease that threatens to afflict all of us “malignant egophrenia,” or ME, and I predict history will mostly confirm Paul’s extensive diagnosis. I know that historic Christian faith (as I understand it) does. Paul writes with perhaps more words than necessary, but where I have too few, of the realization that slammed into me during this past decade of study:

One of our greatest spiritual treasures [is] the act of discernment. Being a spiritual warrior embraces and includes the most extreme discernment, which is the ability to differentiate and is a function of seeing clearly. … Wielding the wisdom of discernment is an expression of having genuine compassion.

Yes, it’s one of the most jump-off-the-page characteristics of Jesus of the Gospels, I think. But many of his followers, of whom I am one, are exhibiting no discernment at all, as far as I can tell.

This disease … can manifest anywhere, through anyone and at any moment. … This awareness [of our susceptibility to fall prey to the disease] serves as an immunization that protects us from the pernicious effects of the illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to others. …

We’re all susceptible. Knowing that we are is key. Pride blocks our knowing, prevents our immunization, which is why it’s Sin #1, I think.

The [present U.S.] situation is very analogous to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn’t realize that the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia had taken possession of Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly disease to propagate itself. This was a collective psychosis, and this is what is taking place in our country right now. …

Confirming this assessment, I recently had a delightful houseguest who was, an eternity ago in his life, a Hitler youth, a Nazi who came of age in 1930s Germany, tell me he sees the sociological context in the U.S. now as too much like the 1930s German nationalism he fell into.

(One chilling line we haven’t yet crossed is, as he says, you could be — and people often were — killed for listening to or reading info from outside the Reich. State-run media, leading to a mis- and uninformed public, was the backbone of Nazi power, he says.)

I rate his observations significant because they’re from someone who was there. A lucid, bright, articulate, and keenly observant someone, I note, whose recent presence in my life enriched it and smashed a stereotype or two along the way.

Malignant egophrenia is crazy-making. It induces a very hard-to-recognize form of insanity.

We need not to be crazy-making, especially those of us called Christian. We’re called to be peace-making, which is in a sense crazy’s opposite.

While this article will sound like psychobabble to some, I recommend it because to me it echoes with remarkable precision much of what I learned during my 1990s seminary journey, my road of “faith seeking understanding.”

(Paul’s writing also accessible here.)

[via roseeriter]

I’m glad to see Apple moving to compete better in the corporate space.

I am a Mac-head, but not annoyingly so, I think; I’m nearly as happy with Debian/Gentoo/NetBSD/FreeBSD on PC hardware. It’s Windows I don’t like.

When I became a Unix-oriented (Linux/*BSD/OSX) enthusiast starting in 1998, I was sure that 7 years later various desktop Unixes would be in widespread use in my corporate environment, to everyone’s economic and security advantage. Nope.

It’s nearly unbelievable to me that any multinational corporation whose data are its lifeblood would mandate Windows on every desktop, but there you go.

To me, making a big show of “we’re commited to network- and computing security” but then mandating Microsoft products is like saying “we’re committed to containing the spread of HIV” but then forbidding safe-sex education and the use of condoms.

No one would do the latter, so … no, wait.

In either case, you can fscking kiss your credibility bye-bye all wind is lost from one’s credibility sails.

I like what commenter Spencerian writes:

Die-hard views in IT about Apple products may change, as did many ways we do things post-September 11, when (not if) a major computer security catastrophe occurs which could render many Windows operating systems inoperable. …

IT hasn’t had that wake-up call yet. History has shown that lack of diversification leads to fatal results. …

They may be a time where one of the many serious vulnerabilties found in Windows is fully and dangerously exploited, leading to failures of various sorts throughout the country and the world. Data is lost. Networks paralyzed. And all through such a time, computers running operating systems that are much more resistant or immune to these issues will aid in keeping our businesses working despite ourselves and our industry’s lack of vision.

The light will dawn, but I’d hoped it’d be before I retire.