Reading notes

The letters that Paul Krugman receives these days have to be picked up with tongs, and his employer pays someone to delete the death threats from his email inbox.

One of the clues to me that we’re dealing with a dangerous cancer here in U.S. leadership is its — and its proponents’ — constant willingness to threaten, advocate, and use violence.

Krugman employs Kissinger’s idea of “revolutionary power” as what’s taken over our country, a chief characteristic of which is its rejection of the system it intends to displace, a chief symptom of which is its lack of compunction to play by any existing rules. Kissinger’s thinking continues —

Nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. “Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent,” he wrote, “they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework.”

Good interview.

Editorial aside:

What Krugman calls “revolutionary power” I see as the tip of the iceberg of a spiritual force Walter Wink calls a “domination system.” Its manifestation in our thinking is known as the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the notion that violence “saves,” and to hell with what Jesus says. As such, in my assessment, this situation can’t be fought purely on the human level; it is largely a matter of spiritual warfare.

The present situation’s overwhelming irony is that many so-called Christians have effectively signed on to further the works of darkness. The darkness they should be working unto death to undo — ultimately possible only with God’s help — they are instead promoting (often with violence and extreme prejudice) as a “biblical worldview” (to use Tom DeLay’s words).