Chris Hedges has been there. A war correspondent for many years, he carries a burden of closely-observed horror for which the term PTSD pales. You can see it in the hollows around his eyes.
Chris Hedges has also been through hell with religion. Raised the son of a clergyman, he graduated from seminary. He’s not “religious” now in any conventional sense. Yet he’s not “anti-religious” either. He can’t leave the subject alone. In books and columns, he delivers impassioned oracles. One of his recent books is, “I Don’t Believe In Atheists.”
Anybody who is comfortable with their religion can benefit from hearing and reading Hedges. He now has a column on Truthdig entitled “After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzche”
Here’s just a piece of it. I’ve re-arranged the text, turning it into something between poetry, psalm and prophecy.
Here it is:
These religious institutions are in irreversible decline.
They are ruled by moral and intellectual trolls.
They have become arrogant and self-absorbed.
Their sins are many.
They protected criminals.
They pandered to the lowest common denominator and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority.
They did not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us.
They refused to denounce a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have,
for their cowardice,
been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross.
They have nothing left to say.
And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it.
But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise . . . .
I recommend you not argue with this. Meditate on it. If Hedges despises the religious right, he’s no friend of us liberals either. He points to Friedrich Nietzche as the model for what comes after religion’s decline. He predicts it, but he’s not recommending it, anymore than the prophet Jeremiah wanted his home town of Jerusalem to be destroyed. Read the rest for yourself, here; and pay attention.
This is what a prophet looks and sounds like.
It’s by Marci McDonald, a multiple award-winning Canadian journalist, and author of new book, “The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism In Canada” a new book about the rising influence of the Canadian version of the Christian Right.
Marci McDonald
From Stephen Harper’s refusal to fund abortion as part of his G8 initiative to the outcry that forced the cancellation of Ontario’s sex ed curriculum, the religious right is making its growing muscle felt on the political landscape.
[For the benefit of my clueless fellow-citizens, Stephen Harper is the conservative prime minister of Canada. There are nasty rumors about him and kittens, which will certainly not be repeated here.]
Above Harper. Below left, a kitten. Behind them, a fireplace.
McDonald wrote:
“From the moment I began this book, I was confronted by skeptics who insist that a truly influential religious right could never take root in Canada. For some, that denial seemed like an exercise in wishful thinking, a refusal to face the possibility that the idea of the country they cherish — liberal, tolerant, and not given to extremes of action or belief — might not be in sync with the changing reality. . . .
But surely Jesus wouldn’t return to Toronto before He came to Houston, or Lynchburg. That would be Un-American of Him.
“Read it and weep,” says a Canadian Friend who passed on the link, “- then do something, like prepare for the next election.”
Well, having read the piece, dry-eyed, I have a different reaction, and different advice to our northern brethren and sistren: prepare instead to build a rival infrastructure that can outlast the next election.
In the states, the longtime progressive activist obsession with “the next election” is a study in self-disempowerment. It’s rooted change that drives electoral politics, not the other way around. That’s one of the key lessons the “Christian” Right has learned here, and learned well.
The sender goes on,
“With the stroke of a budgetary pen, [Harper] has defunded agencies such as the Status of Women Canada and the Court Challenges Program, leaving both feminists and gay activists without resources to take on hostile government policies, while his cutbacks to scholarly granting bodies have helped silence environmental critics in academia and science.”
Which reinforces my point. When all or most of your progressive agencies depend on money from the government of the day, they do not really control their own destiny, and their influence on society is contingent on the goodwill of others, especially politicians. That won’t last. Build a base you control and support.
One of the major Canadian social conservatives, Joseph, ben-Ami, said it more aptly, in McDonald’s piece:
“In the real world, you measure success not so much on whether you won or lost but where the centre of gravity is,” Ben-Ami says. “And I think in this country, it has shifted somewhat to the right.”
Looks like you have some catching up to do up there, friends. We Yanks certainly did (and still do).
The Psalmist said it right: Ps 146:3 “Put not your trust in princes.”
I’m mindful today of all the moms left behind at home while US troops are in combat zones.
Many of them have their say in my 100-page collection of photographs from Camp Lejeune, MC, a big Marine base near here.
They make “Welcome Home” banners for the Marines coming home, and it’s not such a surprise that many of them relate to things maternal, or which can lead to maternity.
May 4 1886: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
The Haymarket massacre (or Haymarket riot) took place on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at the Haymarket Square in Chicago. It became the September 11 of its time. It began as a rally in support of striking workers. An unknown person threw a bomb at police as they tried to disperse the rally.
The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire from the police resulted in the deaths of seven police officers, mostly from friendly fire. An unknown but likely larger number of civilians were also killed.
In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were tried for murder. No concrete evidence linking any of them to the bombing was produced; yet amid a newspaper-driven media frenzy, all were convicted. Four were put to death, and one committed suicide in prison.
August Spies, one of anarchists who was executed, declared just before his hanging, on Nov. 11, 1887: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
The “Haymarket Martyrs” became double-edged symbols: on the one side for policemen, of the risks entailed in upholding “law and order”; on the other for the growing labor movement. Monuments to both now stand in Chicago. And the annual May Day rallies for workers right (not much in evidence in the US, but widely-observed elsewhere) trace their origins to Haymarket and its impact.
The sentencing sparked outrage from budding labor and workers movements, resulted in protests around the world and made the defendants international political celebrities and heroes within labor and radical political circles. Meanwhile the press published often sensationalized accounts and opinions about the Haymarket affair which polarized public reaction.In an article titled “Anarchy’s Red Hand”, The New York Times, described the incident as the “bloody fruit” of “the villainous teachings of the Anarchists”. The Chicago Times described the defendants as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism and murder”; to other newspapers they were “bloody brutes”, “red ruffians”, “dynamarchists”, “bloody monsters”, “cowards”, “cutthroats”, “thieves”, “assassins”, and “fiends.”
The 8-hour day — the concrete goal of the labor organizing which produced the Haymarket rally, and the wave of repression that it encountered. For too many workers, in the US and around the world, the 8 hour day is still a distant goal.
Today is Annie Dillard’s birthday. Should be a national holiday. She’s far and away the best “spiritual” writer I’ve run into. Her work makes “awesome” sound like a diminutive.
Here’s what’s said to be a photo of her as a young woman; look like a spiritual master? More like trouble. (The same thing?)
I found her accidentally. Nature writing is not my thing. But I read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1994, because it was assigned for a book group.
Knocked me out. Re-read it about ten years later.
Knocked me out again. Read a few other of her books. The way Dillard effortlessly and heedlessly showed up most “spiritual” writing for the sentimental slop it is, was breathtaking.
It was nothing personal. More like Mozart to Salieri; if the others ever notice, they’ll rend their clothes, put ashes in their hair, toss their laptops out the window, and go take up golf.
Here’s an authentic recent photo of her:
Her website says she divides her time between Hillsborough NC and Wythe County Virginia.
It also says her religion is “none.” But she’s taken an interesting and winding path to that destination; if it is a destination.
Figures. NC is God’s Other Country, and Wythe County is not far from Tinker Creek, and the site where I saw these very scenes not eight days ago:
<< What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising. >>
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to Hell?”
Priest: “Not if you did not know.”
Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
<< On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return." (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982) >>
• Why are we watching the news, reading the news keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy — possibly a necessary lie — that these are crucial times, and we are in on them.
• I have never read any theologian who claims God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“…..a few of the principles by which I live: A good gag is worth any amount of time, money and effort; never draw to fill an inside straight; always keep score in games, never in love; never say ‘Muskrat Ramble’; always keep them guessing; never listen to the same conversation twice; and (this is the hard part) listen to no one.”
“There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end…… We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. ”
“Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.”
Wow! The 2011 baseball All-Star game is currently scheduled to be played in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ stadium.
But with passage of the state’s new anti-immigrant law, there are now calls for baseball to move the game. Seems the NFL jerked its All-Star match from the state back in the 90s, when AZ was hoilding …out against the MLK holiday. Watch that space!
Took a trip to Indiana, and in SW Virginia this field suddenly appeared along I-77 & I-81. Had to swing around, find the access road, and get some shots.
OMG! OMG!Hysteria Alert — Why Am I always the last to know???
Was listening to the Cardinals game on the way home tonight, and heard that on June 24th in Busch Stadium the greatest thing since the last World Series there (maybe even greater) will happen:
It’s . . .
(Be still my heart)
It’s . . .
(OMG-OMG!)
It’s . . .
I can’t STAND it:
THE DIXIE CHICKS!!!!!!!
YES — the three most magnificent accidental heroes of the war years, The DC’s are BACK.
(Okay, so you probably guessed that from the headline. But still.)
Well, for eight tour dates, that is. The Busch Stadium gig is the last one. And they’re not headliners — the top of the bill is some other band named after a bird: the Buzzards, maybe; or the Snowy Egrets; could it be the Quaker Parrots? Blue Herons? (Can’t seem to remember.) It’s not the Cardinals; that’s baseball.
Ennyway, let’s review: the Chicks leaped into my personal pantheon in 2003 after Natalie Maines, their totally dreamy and mouthy lead singer, let fly her famous wisecrack in London about how they were ashamed that the (still un-indicted) president who pre-emptively invaded Iraq, started an official torture program and committed numerous other crimes, was from their home state of Texas.
Not that I noticed at the time, because I really hadn’t been a fan. But then came the firestorm, when much of their less-enlightened fan base went nuts and dropped them like a plate of too-hot barbecue. Then I started paying attention.
When this fat hit the shin, the Chix had EVERY REASON to buckle, fold, give in, surrender, yield, hoist the white flag, quit, succumb, submit, throw in the towel and otherwise sell out under this barrage — after all, they’re not a political band, no peaceniks, nothing but some mighty fine, sassy and sexy musicians, who at the time were running what seemed like a nonstop money machine, which none of them wanted to mess with.
But there it was, messed with BIG time. Yet when Bush — I mean push came to shove (not to mention came to radio blackouts, gig cancellations, hate mail and death threats), they didn’t turn tail or drink the kool-aid.
By god, the spirit of the Alamo lived, and The trio rose to this unexpected occasion, standing tall for their feelings and their rights as Americans. Theirs was a defiantly real and creatively patriotic spirit that could make a cynical old man cry.
This amazing story is told in the fantastofreakinfabuknockemdeadulous documentary, “Shut Up And Sing,” pieces of which you can find on YouTube, like here:
but if you haven’t seen it–
STOP, go directly to Netflix.com and rent it. Right now. Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect even 200 cents. No excuses will be accepted.
If you doubt me, first click on the link below and watch this video of their song, “Goodbye Earl,” and prepare to be astonished (as well as entertained):
I mean, come on — how do three cute country girl singers who call themselves “chicks” pull off something as subversively feminist , hilarious, irreverent, yet unquestionably All-American as this within the conventions of country music??? You just have to see it to believe it.
The upshot was that they not only survived this repressive onslaught (which despite all the media blitz and glitz was a dead-serious attempt to shut down even their brief moment of dissent), they fought back with a Number One, multiple-Grammy-winning-Album-of-the-Year stick-it-in-your-ear-George CD in 2006. Here they are in the song that says it all, with killer visuals, “Not Ready To Make Nice”:
Totally cool, but they have been quiet and offstage for more than four years since. And in the meantime, many of us stuck here in the DixieChick-less darkness have been weeping buckets and gnashing our teeth down to the gums.
Okay, as the movie shows, it turns out they all have lives (what a concept) — something like seven kids among them, and decided to live them for awhile. Meantime, that creep who started these monumental fiascoes proceeded to turn himself into a historic national disgrace and finally crept back to Houston under cover of darkness. Fair enough.
But now the page has turned, and they’re coming back. No new album yet, they say; tho a greatest hits collection is on tap; and when the crowds go totally, utterly, bonkers nuts for them in June, as they will or my name isn’t Burke Hickenlooper, can more new music be far behind??
Two of the eight gigs are in Canada, the place where true American values go to hide out til the freeze thaws, as it’s beginning to. I’d head for the Winnipeg gig myself on June 22, but alas I think it’s already sold out.
So if I don’t get to one of the live shows, there’s certain to be dozens of cell-phone videos from them online, so all of you and me too can catch up that way, screaming and blubbering in the privacy of our own computer screens, so no one will ever know about the total meltdown of our phony dignified facades. (You know who you are.)
Either way it will be a historic win-win for both their fans and All freedom-loving Americans. God save America, and God save Texas (never thought I’d say that) and if the Dixie Chicks are really BACK, there won’t be much more of those blessings left to come to pass, will there? (Okay, we still need some war crimes indictments; we’re on it).
More here, including a video interview with Natalie Maines (and dig her totally butch do):
But after all the celebrating is done, there’s still one nagging question:
Okay. it’s out-of-the-closet time.
For the past several weeks, I have been listening to — are you ready?
Opera. OPERA, for the love of pete.
On my XM satellite radio, there’s a Metropolitan Opera channel, that plays it nonstop, 24/7, no commercials.
I’ve known this for a long time, but was only recently drawn to it.
Once I turned it on, though, it just wouldn’t go off (except for spring training baseball games).
Who Else? The maestro, Verdi
I’m listening right now — Die Meistersinger.]
In making this shift (temporary or permanent, who knows?), I turned away from the progressive talk radio shows that have been my listening mainstay (not counting baseball, of course) for the past several years.
Could this mean [gasp] it’s over between me and Stephanie and Randi? How will I break it to them?
It’s been great, Steph, and I don’t know how to say this, but . . .
[No, no, honeys, it’s not you, it’s ME. — And this time, I guess it’s true.]
But whether it’s a permanent shift, it’s certainly a serious case. I’ve already sat through all four of Wagner’s Ring operas. (Well, for the sake of truth, I actually watched them on video, fourteen hours worth. And lived to tell the tale.)
The good news: they had subtitles, so I could understand the librettos.
The bad news: understanding the librettos didn’t make the stories any less ridiculous.
All that fuss for a stupid ring. Really, Tolkien did that one way better.
I don’t know; sometimes I like her the best. And sometimes Grane.
But so what? says the confirmed opera goer.
And that’s not all. I’ve gasped as Mimi died in Paris (several times); and Carmen made cigars; Papageno found his sweetheart; and Don Giovanni faced his infernal comeuppance.
I even heard Lulu, that crazy modernistic thing by Alban Berg, about a shameless ess-ell-you-tee who starts out in Germany, leaving a trail of male corpses in her deadly wake, but ends up in London getting sliced up by Jack the Ripper. Sure.
[Ooops, was this a spoiler for anybody? Sorry.]
Aida, not yet; but the anvil Chorus, totally. (They play short bits in between the full-length operas.) Cavalleria Rusticana.
The Queen of the Night. ‘Nuff said, right?
I don’t know how it happened. I don’t think it’s class; I was raised an all-American kid from Kansas. In my ancestral precincts, the only Opry allowed was the Grand Ole. And I’m no closer to the income level associated with opera now than I was a few years ago.
Besides, I went for Elvis as early as “Don’t Be Cruel,” was a stalwart for Dylan and the post-”Hard-Day’s-Night” Beatles. Saw them, the Stones, Hendrix and The Who back in the Day.
But –hmmmmm: Tommy was an opera — that’s what they said, at least — so maybe it was a straw in the wind. Quadrophenia too.
You think it could be the water in the Cape Fear river? Possibly; but none of my friends here are showing the signs yet.
Along the way I also became a classical freak. But stuck with the orchestral stuff, except for an annual Messiah. A couple Gilbert & Sullivans, but nobody dies in them, so do they really count? The Pirate King — Should G&S Be allowed in this club?
Is it a function of age? [Well, a google search doesn’t yet turn up any hits on “Opera as Alzheimer’s symptom,” so that’s a relief.]
Maybe it’s just that operas are consistently loud enough that my fading hearing can pick it all up (I think). Eh? What was that you said?
Anyway, perhaps Leonard Cohen is the villain here. He’s a certified classic if there ever was one. But I understand his words, so that’s doubtful . . . .
Well, whatever. If I do come out of this episode, relief is not far away. Only five channels down on my XM there’s “Bluesville,” presided over by another living classic, B.B. King.
Honest, B.B., it’s a kind of Blues . . . .
Now, there is a protagonist for a great American opera, if ever there was one. The story line would beat all the weirdness of Wotan any day.
I even have a title: Nobody Loves Me But My Mother — And she Could Be Jiving Too . . . All it needs is the right composer. (I wonder who would play Lucille, tho.)
Well, B.B., you could turn it into the next hot honky-tonk roadhouse . . . . Needs a bit of blue neon on the outside, tho, and a lot better barbecue inside.
For several years I’ve frequently visited Camp Lejeune, a large Marine base two hours east of where I live, on the North Carolina coast.
I go because they have a brig — a jail — and several of the GIs I have worked with as resisters to war have served time in it.
Here’s a photo of the gate there from which prisoners are released; the man just about to emerge is Clifford Cornell, a GI resister who was released in January.
Early on in these visits I noticed homemade banners hanging on a fence along the public highway to the base. They were made by families to welcome Marines back from combat deployment in Iraq.
Many of the banners were very simple: “Welcome home Corporal x, we missed you.”
But many were more than that: funny, touching, naughty, and catch-in-the-throat.
They were also ephemeral: hanging on the fence, ripped by wind and weather, til they fell off or someone took them down to put up new ones.
Soon enough, I started taking pictures of the most striking ones, to document this remarkable form of military “folk art.” That was in 2004.
Five years later, the wars are still going on, and the combat deployments for Marines have piled up. And as a result, I have dozens of these photographs.
I believe they give a very special glimpse into the impact of the wars on the American families who bear their brunt. And these expressions, at once both intimate and public, deserve a wider audience.
So I’ve made a one hundred-page book: Priceless: Welcome Home Banners For US Troops Returning From War
It’s now available at the print-on-demand site, blurb.com. The link above will take you to a sample of what’s in it; you can also see some of the banners at the Quaker House website here.
BTW there’s no “political” commentary in the book. I want to let the pictures do the communicating, and leave readers to their own reactions. For me, the banners are full of silent eloquence.
Successor to the independent monthly print newsletter, published between 1981 and 1993.NOTE: Except where otherwise noted, the views and opinions expressed here are solely my own.
