Reading notes

This is striking imagery in the wake of Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence: these guys have found the exploit in our system of government — a previously unrecognized vulnerability through which it can be destroyed for profit — and that exploit is its dependence on shame. (That is, against men unconstrained by shame we have little protection.)

Kung Fu Monkey writes about this today:

Our representatives — and to a great degree we as a culture — are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.

Naturally I think of exploit in the context of operating systems, browsers, and other software. And I think that’s an apt analogy: these guys are malicious hackers who’ve found a hole in the system and are stealing every credit card number and password they can find, as swiftly and voraciously as possible.

This topic shame is of related anthropological/theological interest (though IANAA) insofar as it was presented to me in seminary classes as a primary hermeneutic for understanding Hebrew scripture: honor-shame culture permeates, shapes, even defines human behavior throughout the Old Testament. And beyond, of course, but it’s especially evident in most ancient cultures, where it was explicit instead of implicit as now.

[via Firedoglake]

Further, Glenn Greenwald, as usual, pierces to the heart of the matter, and brings to mind Madison’s assertion that our system was designed “to be run by devils” in not relying on good motivations to function. Oops:

It is no surprise that we have political leaders who are corrupt and abuse their power. Our whole political system is premised on the expectation that this will happen. But that expectation was accompanied by the attempt by the Founders to create as many safeguards and checks on those abuses as possible. Over the last six years, all of those safeguards have failed completely.

We have a radical and lawless government that has run rampant over the last six years precisely because the institutions designed to stop that abuse have not only stood idly by, but have actively defended and participated in it.

I’ve tried to convey this well, again and again here over the years (for example), but nobody conveys Jesus’ point of view (as revealed in scripture) better than OPOL does today, imagining what Jesus is saying at this very moment.

What ever made any of you think I was a rightwinger or would endorse or approve of anything the rightwingers do, say, or believe? …

I am not an advocate of war … not even the ‘good’ ones. If you folks would follow my most basic teachings, there’d never be another one. …

Somehow I feel like you guys are not paying attention. Despite my legion of ‘followers’ around the world, an estimated one billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five. While little children are starving in droves, you morons are blowing each other up with rockets and bombs!

The comment topics are worthy continuations on the theme, revealing (for example, on cheap grace) and bearing deep truths (for example, Bono’s quote that “God dwells in cardboard boxes”).

Thanks, OPOL and commenters.

I’m just now reading PastorDan’s sermon from YearlyKos in Las Vegas earlier this month. Yes:

Progressive faith shares with progressive politics, secular or not, the conviction that a shared life, lived with compassion, justice, moderation, responsibility, and tolerance is more than just a good life. It is the good life. …

The core of our work, whether religious or secular, whether Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Unitarian …Universalist, or really not much of anything, is not the same world reversed, with ourselves on top and our opponents cast down. It is a world transformed. …

I encourage reading the whole thing. This is so how I would preach if I could preach. As my Quaker friends say, I say of Pastor Dan, “Friend speaks for me.”

John Dean expands on how George Bush fits in political scientist James Dave Barber’s schema of presidential character and personality type, assessing that Bush is an active/negative president (like Nixon). Observing that “active/negative presidencies do not end well,” Dean writes “to look at where Bush’s may be heading.”

A funny line, of course:

This Administration goes through scandals like a compulsive eater does candy bars; the wrapper is barely off one before we’ve moved on to another.

And not so funny:

Bush’s defense of Rumsfeld was entirely substance-free. Bush simply told reporters in the Rose Garden that Rumsfeld would stay because “I’m the decider and I decide what’s best.” He sounded much like a parent telling children how things would be: “I’m the Daddy, that’s why.”

This, indeed, is how Bush sees the presidency, and it is a point of view that will cause him trouble.

A key observation:

Bush is following the classic mistaken pattern of active/negative presidents: As Barber explained, they issue order after order, without public support, until they eventually dissipate the real powers they have — until “nothing [is] left but the shell of the office.” Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all followed this pattern.

My friend L writes me in response to Dean’s column, warning that Dean does not go far enough. I’m posting here (with L’s permission) as an articulate data point that illustrates the enmity BushCo has created. L’s executive summary:

Basically everyone believes the Bushies are just more of the same inept leadership we get from time to time [that] needs to be outlived and they’ll go away and things will go back to being what they were. But I am saying no they won’t.

The American tiger is sleeping. We need to wake it up.

L in full:

I would like to point out that John Dean, like what’s left of the free press and media, and the “loyal opposition,” does not understand and fails to admit the possibility that the Bush Administration is totally changing this paradigm. This faction controlling the White House does not see themselves as only having power to persuade the people, as indicated [by Dean in his column]:

“Bush has never understood what presidential scholar Richard Neustadt discovered many years ago: In a democracy, the only real power the presidency commands is the power to persuade.”

Au contraire! They are taking the executive branch of the government from that formerly assumed position — namely, to administer the affairs of state by the people’s leave and with their permission, to act in their best interests and in support of the general public welfare — to an authoritarian state of ruling by the whim of their own power, will, and intent, regardless of what limits the Constitution puts on that power and with total disregard of the American people and what they think about it.

The Bush Administration is following the exact course prescribed by the first Caesars of Rome and Hitler in his takeover of the German government. No one wants to believe this. This is why Hitler was so successful in his day, as the German people did not want to believe this was going on until it was too late.

This is why the Bush Administration is successfully dismantling the historic function of the government agencies and replacing professional departmental leadership with unqualified, loyal party hacks and are rolling back all the gains made by society since 1929. This is why they ignore science, history, education, the Constitution, the normal rule of law, the opinions of humanity and leaders of other nations and follow actions that leave Americans shaking their heads in wonder.

They are treading our normal system of government beneath their own corinthian leather wingtip dress shoes and replacing it with one that is hand in glove with the CEO corporate interests while they remove every safeguard put in place for the average American. (By the way, that is Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism.) [Mike insert: According to the Wikipedia article on corporatism, this origin is disputed. The corporatist point remains applicable, however, as seen in the undisputed dictionary definition of fascism (“stringent socioeconomic controls”).] And they are knowingly doing this by creating economic recession, bankrupting debt, and war. 

They are doing this by plan and with full intent, and most Americans sit and shake their heads in wonder like a dog at an unknown master’s commands, still expecting a treat.

Just go read the PNAC proposal by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

This last sentence chills me:

The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in extremis. It’s not just that polar bears are drowning because they cannot reach receding ice flows or that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” will exist someday only as a Hemingway short story — we can all live with that. It’s rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past but prologue.

Then Cohen writes on what matters to me most. Yes, I’m deeply disturbed by the spiritual killing and maiming rendered by BushCo these past 5+ years as they and their supporters misrepresent the Prince of Peace as Lord of War, as the dragons that inhabit them seek to subvert the Church that was designed to stand against them. But truth is, Cohen here pinpoints what has offended and pissed me off the most:

But it is the thought that matters — the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. [His insistence on abstinence as preferred birth control] is similar to Bush’s initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol — ideology trumping science.

I want smart leaders whose fruit comes not from a corrupt tree.

If this is as true as Jim Wallis thinks, it’s one of the more encouraging things I’ve seen in a long time: that people called evangelical Christians are stopping behaving as those Jesus says “Woe unto” in the gospels and starting behaving as people intent on following Jesus’ example, caring about things he cares about.

Teaser from column: Rich Cizik, National Association of Evangelicals VP for Government Affairs, as quoted in NYT:

“I don’t think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created.”

Why, that’s actually sane.

Thinking, compassion, integrity coming back into evangelical Christianity? I sheepishly admit that even though I remember to ask for it from time to time, I had almost stopped believing it could happen.

When a dialogue begins about the extent of moral values issues and what biblically-faithful Christians should care about, the Religious Right begins to lose. The best news of all for the American church and society is this: The monologue of the Religious Right is over, and a new dialogue has just begun.

Yes! Only with thoughtful and informed dialogue can we move forward.

This would be such an about-face from the attitude I keep encountering, encapsulated in a sign I saw posted in a conservative Christian’s office, “I’m a radical Christian, which means I love Jesus more than you do” (only very slightly paraphrased). For me, that’s a hell of a dialogue-stopper. (“Uh, where does Luke 18:9-14 fit in?” I want to ask, but haven’t.)

Do let’s talk, and work together. That’d be so much better.

2007-04-25 update: Way opened for me to bring Luke 18:9-14 to the person’s attention. A few minutes later, the sign came down. Spirit moving, moves me.