America Has Always Been at War with America

I've been dithering on whether to write about the protests of the murder of George Floyd and the retaliatory police riots spreading across the country.  There's a lot of information flooding the media, corporate and otherwise, and I can't keep up with it.

On one hand I've been seeing white hipsters cheering on the People's Violence from a safe distance.  I think they've been playing too many dystopian video games, among other fictional media: one usually sensible guy on Twitter wanted to compare real life to V for Vendetta. I like the graphic novel, but it's not reality.  I suggested that the guy look at real-life parallels, such as the successful history of protest and resistance in South Korea; and I went back to reread my own coverage of the candlelight vigils there from 2008 onward.  (Which reminded me that I was unable to interest leftish bloggers and independent media in those events at the time.  Not as exciting as V for Vendetta, I guess.)

"Let's You and Him Fight" is one of the creepiest things I see on the white left, especially when it buys into the Right's narrative that the protests are predominantly violent.  It's hard to say for sure, but it appears to be the other way around. No one has access to the opinions of all African-Americans, but I see indications that the community is not united behind burning it all down.  I'd be surprised if it were. Those whites calling for more destruction are doing so, not because they stand with black people, but because they enjoy fantasizing about it.

The mutual aid and support, the caring for each other that is turning up everywhere - sometimes looted by the police -- are to my mind much more newsworthy than the violence, wholly justified though it is, and the mutual aid is not going to get the same amount of coverage by the corporate media.  There's also the near-certainty that a lot of the violence is being incited and committed by police agents provocateurs, just as we've seen in the past.  But you can't eat violence, you can't live on bricks, and nobody on the ground or in the streets wants a permanent diet of tear gas and pepper spray.

Except the police, of course.  Even the corporate media are recognizing that, as they are targeted for harassment and violence by the police.  The spectacle of heavily armed gangs of racist goons prowling the streets, assaulting bystanders and driving their SUVs into crowds, is going to get harder and harder to frame as keeping the peace.  So now the police are unlawfully ordering reporters to stay off the streets, to hide their criminality.  I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

Closet Yourselves

The refusal of some Christian churches in the United States to forego in-person worship during the pandemic has been much in the news, not least because numerous worshipers have gotten sick and some, including some pastors, have died.  Typically, there has been an effort to cast the problem as a matter of freedom of religion.  The best reply I've seen to that is this tweet:

If you're seeing the political rhetoric surrounding "religious freedom" for groups to reopen with f2f meetings during the pandemic, keep asking WHICH religious groups are pushing for this. It's not religion vs non-religion; it's *some* religious groups, speaking for all.

The more I've thought about it, though, the more doubts I have.  The main idea is correct, since not all churches or all denominations insist on face-to-face communal worship no matter what.  Of course the Christians demanding to cram crowds of worshipers into enclosed spaces are apt to regard all outsiders as non-Christians, even anti-Christians.  In general their opponents see them the same way: "so-called Christians" and "fake Christians" are among the epithets they lob at each other.  The idea of religious freedom arose in a religious context, however: the threat came not from the secular sphere, but within religion itself: Christian persecution of Jews, and Christian persecution of other Christians.  This is still true in the US, where religious freedom has to be asserted against Christians trying to impose their doctrines and practices on other Christians, though they are happy to force themselves on Jews or Muslims or atheists too.  The nominal separation of Church and State we have in the US encourages the idea that when government stops believers from killing each other or outsiders, it's doing so as a purely secularizing effort.  This attitude is encouraged by some academics, unfortunately.

A more popular response lately, though, has been to cite Jesus' saying from Matthew 6:5-6.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I've seen these verses cited fairly often in the past year, not just in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I don't believe they have any bearing on the issue of face-to-face public worship, though.  For one thing, neither Jesus nor the early Christians seem to have had any objection to communal worship per se.  According to the gospels Jesus was baptized publicly, attended synagogue, went to the Jerusalem temple for the major feasts, preached publicly to huge crowds, celebrated Passover, instituted a communal rite, and took for granted that his followers would gather together in his name.  His disciples continued to worship in the Temple after he ascended into Heaven.  The earliest Christian writings we have, Paul's letters, also take communal face-to-face worship for granted.  Whatever Jesus had in mind by ordering believers to be closet cases of prayer, it doesn't seem to have excluded communal worship.  And of course, if anyone in his multitudes had gotten sick, he could have just healed them.

For another, Jesus spent a lot of time behaving provocatively, so as to incite controversy with other Jewish teachers.  Some scholars argue that he wasn't really flouting the commandments, but it's certainly how he was perceived.  As Graham Shaw wrote in The Cost of Authority (Fortress, 1982: 246),

the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face.

I've also seen several people invoking Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 13:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

This does seem to undermine 21st-century Christian resistance to public-health orders, but it is also contradicted by early Christian practice.  Jesus and numerous early Christian leaders, including Paul himself according to tradition, were executed by the governing authorities because they refused to be subject to them.  (Some scholars have suggested that this passage is a later addition to the text, but as far as I know there's no manuscript evidence to support the idea.)

The best that can be said, as far as I can see, is that there is no biblical mandate to worship communally, let alone during a pandemic, so whatever drives these Christians to defy today's shutdown orders, it's not scripture nor even tradition.  I'm inclined to see it as theocratically-inclined Christians who hope to clear more space for their encroachment on everyone else's lives.  According to a recent poll, two-thirds of religious Americans view coronavirus as some sort of message from their god, but few regard the illness and death of those who insisted on face-to-face worship as an indication that they were wrong.  Indeed, "Fifty-five per cent of American believers say they feel at least somewhat that God will protect them from being infected."  That must include at least some of those who believe the pandemic is a divine dope-slap, but when you have faith you don't have to make sense.  Judgment, like karma, is for the other guy.

A Revelation

A religious believer, objecting to the prohibition of religious gatherings during the epidemic, lied about the matter.  Referring to religious services, this person wrote: "They’re not essential businesses, they’re essential, period. That’s our first amendment right as Americans. Liquor stores, bars, restaurants, are considered essential but churches and other houses of worship aren’t? The left is the true enemy of the people."

Bars and restaurants are not "considered essential": they were among the first businesses to be closed, for the same reason communal worship was prohibited: because they are places where people gather in close proximity, breathing on each other and exchanging microbes, then go out and spread them to others.  I admit I was surprised to find that liquor stores were allowed to open, but they were also regulated.  The ones in my town offered only curbside pickup, and of course you could also buy alcoholic beverages at grocery stores.

Further, worship was not banned altogether.  Churches could, for example, continue to broadcast services over the radio and other media, as they've done for many years.  Communal worship is important in Christianity as in most religions, but it can be done virtually, or as Christians call it, "in the Spirit."  Public health concerns -- not just for worshipers but for outsiders whom the worshipers would put at risk -- take precedence in an epidemic.

This is not what I'd call esoteric knowledge, and this person could hardly be unaware of it, so it's fair to say they were lying.  I asked rhetorically, not for the first time, why religious believers find it necessary to lie so much.  Then I corrected myself: believers don't need to lie, they enjoy it.

And then something occurred to me.  People in general love to lie, not just religious believers.  The blogger at Fake Buddha Quotes has noticed that many people prefer inauthentic quotations from the Buddha to genuine ones, and I've observed the same on Facebook and elsewhere: many people, liberal and conservative, progressive and leftwing, are consistent in posting quotations that are not the actual words of the celebrities they quote, and only rarely do they post genuine ones.  I don't think it's a conscious decision, but they do seem to be drawn to the bogus.  I agree, then, with the Christian claim that men loved lies better than truth, but Christians are not in a position to cast the first stone. This pattern can also be seen in electoral campaigns, where it's a prominent feature, but it turns up to some extent everywhere. because human beings in general love to lie.

Revealed religion is something we humans invented in large part as a safe space for lies: a domain where lying is expected, enjoyable, and communally shared.  (I say "revealed religion" because the old gods weren't much concerned about doctrine, just proper ritual.)  Paradoxically, though, sects must then put limits on the lying, limiting it to authorized persons only, with some lies at least temporarily ruled out of order.  That still leaves a lot of wiggle room.

This problem is prominent in Christian history because of Christianity's schismatic tendencies.  Jesus taught his falsehoods "in the Spirit," attacking other Jewish teachers and sects, and promised his immediate followers that the Spirit would also speak through them. The apostle Paul, like other early teachers, took this promise and ran with it.  But it very quickly became clear that the Spirit wasn't telling all believers the same thing.  This is most visible in Paul's letter to the Galatians, but it turns up throughout the New Testament: Christian leaders accusing others of false teaching, and being accused of false teaching in turn.

To this day the mutual accusations are hurled back and forth: those so-called "Christians" over there aren't real Christians!  Thanks to the Biblical and historical illiteracy of most Christians, it almost always emerges that whatever the false Christians teach is straight out of the New Testament, though they too embroider, invent, and selectively omit biblical teachings.  It's entertaining, and luckily neither lot can do more nowadays than vilify the others, in that spirit of Christian love that they tout as the core of their faith.

A Disturbance in the Force, a Glitch in the Matrix

Today is the thirteenth anniversary of the blog.  Even though I haven't kept it as diligently as I should these past few years, I'm still proud of having kept it going so long.  To all my readers, thanks.

There and Back Again: Video Tours

My favorite videos on Youtube these days are the walking tours, in which someone carries a camera through a cityscape or landscape.  They range in length from half an hour to two hours and more.  I usually watch them on my TV through the Youtube app, which gives them extra vividness; I've caught myself thinking about buying a larger TV, but I don't have a good place to put one and 42 inches is really big enough.  They usually have no narration or musical soundtrack, so it's easy to get lost in the experience, but as often as not I just start one up and let it run as I do other things.

I first stumbled on some from Japan, starting with this one taken at night during a thunderstorm in Tokyo. The rainy soundtrack can be restful all by itself.  Youtube algorithms directed me to others.  Snowy landscapes or cityscapes are also pleasant, especially since you don't have to cope with the snow yourself.  (Here's one I found later, of snowfall in Manhattan.)  I also enjoyed these videos of Halloween in Japan.

When the quarantine started, I began sharing some of them on Facebook.  It occurred to me that these videos might alleviate feelings of confinement -- they do for me -- and when people began posting suggestions for home-schooling activities, I began looking for walking tours of other countries, in Europe or South America or the United States.  I passed along this tour of the inside of the Statue of Liberty.

Finally I found some walking tours of places in Korea.  This one, of Seoul by night, is taken from the air and is breathtaking.  I was interested in areas familiar to me, and Seoul Walker provides plenty.  Some of these videos were shot before the epidemic, but Seoul Walker has kept busy, and there are several from the past month or two.  I used to spend a lot of time in COEX Mall before it was renovated several years ago, and I don't much like the new version but it's nice to see what it looks like now.  Itaewon is not my favorite district of Seoul, but I recognized the streets and even the stores.  Here's a Saturday afternoon in Gangnam, of "Gangnam Style" fame.  Here's a student district that I visited, I believe, on my last visit to Korea in 2018.  There are a couple of videos featuring Insadong, an artsy / touristy district not far from City Hall.  I know it well partly because friends took me there on my first few visits, but it's also a good place to buy gifts for friends and family when I return to the US.  It's also adjacent to Jongro (pronounced Jongno), where I spent much of my free time on my last several visits to Korea.  Finally, here's a tour along the ocean in Yeosu, a seaside city in South Cheolla province where I visited a friend on my most recent trip in 2018.  We walked along this very route.

I find this video rather chillling: it's a residential district of private houses, probably owned by moderately (though not extremely) rich people, with no stores or street vendors; it has the same kind of emptiness as upscale housing developments in the US.  I've never been there nor am I likely to go even if I am able to return to Korea.  On the other hand, here is Nami Island, a popular tourist attraction; I have a vague memory of going there or to an island like it in 2003 or so, but in any case it reminds me of parks I've walked around since then.  And here's a video of a train ride to Seoul from Gyeongju, a southeastern city that was formerly the capital of one of the ancient Korean kingdoms.  I've been there twice, and took this ride myself a couple of years ago.

It might seem odd that I prefer the videos set in cities, where the camera passes among crowds.  For me that's a (paradoxical?) pleasure of being in a city: to be surrounded by a river of people, while still being anonymous.  (As anonymous as an old white man can be in an Asian city.)  Or look at this one, of Provence Village, a tourist attraction northwest of Seoul: I don't feel left out and isolated among these people, I feel included, contained, safe.  Once in a great while someone will single me out to talk on the street or in a subway station, which is fine.  As I've written before, subways - at least in Korea - are social places, where a lot of interaction happens between people, offering their seats to others or just striking up conversation.  At the end of the day I'm glad to go back to the friends I'm staying with for dinner and more talk, or watching TV together.  But the city is one of the great human achievements, and I always feel satisfaction being in one, especially when it's as well-run as Korean cities tend to be.  Not perfectly run, of course, no human construction will be perfect, but well-run.

I have mixed feelings about these Korean videos.  On one hand, they bring back good memories; on the other, they remind me of places I may never be able to see again.  I'm nearly 70, and who knows when it will be possible to travel to Korea again as a tourist? But for now, I'm grateful to be able to see these places again.

Whataboutism? Hehehe, Indeed!

Great Cthulhu's ghost:

Robert Reich has been, among other things, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997.  He's also good buddies, as he has asserted himself, with walking tumor Alan Simpson, a ferocious deficit hawk and would-be gutter of social programs.  Since Donald Trump became President, he's spoken out often against Trump's policies and conduct, and he turns up in my Twitter feed almost daily.  But it seems that he's more partisan than principled.  The quotation in the above tweet comes from this 2015 article, in which he declared that "if Hillary Clinton is to get the mandate she needs for America to get back on track, she will have to be clear with the American people about what is happening and why – and what must be done.  For example, she will need to admit that Wall Street is still running the economy, and still out of control."  He acknowledged the perception that Clinton is "compromised by big money – that the circle of wealthy donors she and her husband have cultivated over the years has dulled her sensitivity to the struggling middle class and poor," and cited Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as evidence that great wealth need not prevent a politician from embracing reform.

From a strictly logical point of view, Reich is correct: it is possible for a wealthy person to work for serious reform.  And no one would have predicted that FDR would have gone against the grain to become a "traitor to his class," as he did.  But logic isn't at issue; it's history and human inertia.  FDR was the exception that proves the rule; he deliberately surrounded himself with advisors like Frances Perkins, who pressured him almost daily to keep to the task he'd set himself.  As Kirstin Downey showed in The Woman Behind the New Deal, her biography of Perkins, it was an exhausting, full-time job: rather like Donald Trump, Roosevelt tended to agree with the last person who'd counseled him, and Perkins had to stay constantly on the alert, and on the run, to make sure she was that person.  Perkins was always unpopular with the Washington insiders, who finally pushed her out after FDR's death, when the Democratic party began undermining his legacy.

As a longtime Washington insider, Reich must have known that the odds didn't favor his recommendations to Clinton.  I suppose he just published them to get his position on the record, and in hopes that against all odds they might reach her.  He was far too optimistic, as liberals tend to be.  Maybe he was sincere, but that just hammers home his bad judgment.

It comes down to party loyalty, I think, and whataboutism.  As people from Martin Luther King Jr. to Noam Chomsky have argued, before you can criticize official enemies (Trump, in this case) you must criticize your own side.  In the American mainstream, "whataboutism" only refers to any criticism of one's own side.  But if Reich had criticized Clinton or Obama as they deserve, he'd be persona non grata in the Democratic Establishment.  And would he say of Donald Trump what he said in defense of Hillary Clinton?  Like so many liberal/centrist talking points, it would seem to apply to Trump no less than to Democrats.

Is Your Hate Pure?

There's an article at The Hill from yesterday about how Bernie Sanders is being "urged" to hand over his donor list to Joe Biden's campaign.  It isn't the Biden organization that is doing the urging, however: so far they're being diplomatic according to the article, praising Sanders for his cooperation and help.  They're "been pleased with how Sanders committed from an early point to rallying his supporters behind the presumptive nominee."

The complaints in the article come from not one but two unnamed pissy Democratic "strategists," too cowardly to speak on the record under their own names.  The article gives adequate space to a couple of named progressives, who

noted that the pro-Sanders super PAC Our Revolution was given access to Sanders’s 2016 email list and was only able to raise a fraction of what the campaign raised because it didn’t resonate the same way coming from a different source.

“That email list only works for Bernie Sanders and we’ve proven it,” Rocha said. “The strength of the list isn’t the list itself. It’s Bernie Sanders. If Joe Biden had four Bernie lists, he couldn’t raise much money off of it. That’s not a critique of Joe Biden. It’s just that Bernie is the reason that the list works.”

And scoffed:

“The idea that all Bernie Sanders has to do here is turn over his email list so they can pillage it and batter it until it spits out gold coins is absolutely ridiculous,” [Democracy for America strategist Neil] Sroka said.

This is true.  I'm still making donations through Sanders's list to progressive candidates for downticket races.  (I doubt that Biden, whose billionaire boosters evidently aren't coming through for him, would do as much.  He prefers to take money to support Republican candidates.)  If I started getting pleas the from the Biden campaign through Sanders's list, though, I would unsubscribe immediately, probably after sending an abusive email condemning the move.  Comments on Twitter indicate that other Sanders voters feel the same way.

I noticed, however, that a number of avowed Sanders supporters misread "urged" as "already has given Biden the list, and is cackling and rubbing his hands together gleefully."  They accused Sanders of selling out, and while one could make a case for that more generally, he evidently hasn't gone as far as they want to think.  (They must want to think it, since they chose to fantasize a falsehood.)  Malignant stupidity is not, alas, confined to Trump supporters and Democratic Party loyalists.

I would be upset, even angry, if Sanders shares his donor list to the Biden campaign, but not all that concerned.  As Sroka and Chuck Rocha, the other named Sanders associate, say, it would not do Biden much good, and might hurt him even more.  It would also hurt Sanders, who has already angered many of his supporters by declaring Biden to be a "decent" man.  Of necessity, as Nietzsche wrote, the party man becomes a liar.

But contrary to centrist delusion, most Sanders supporters are not personality cultists.  We support him because the principles and policies he stands for, and if he abandons them, we will abandon him.  He's not, contrary to the fantasies of some of his fans, the One without whom there is no hope.  And I must say, I was not pleased that he chose not to show up to vote against the new bill giving more surveillance power to the executive branch.  That's not as bad as voting for it, as ten Democrats did, but it's bad enough if you believe, as Sanders has said he does, that Trump is the most dangerous president in history.

Someone tried to counter criticism of Sanders on this matter by posting at least twice that Sanders "is over 65 and there's a pandemic going on."  I replied that he'd just described most of the Senate, so that doesn't give Sanders a pass.  I confess I hadn't fact-checked myself.  Today I did, and I found that 48 Senators are over 65 years old (as against 147 Representatives).  I am abashed, but if 47 other elderly Senators were able to brave the pandemic to vote, so could Sanders - especially since the bill only passed by one vote.

I'm not all that surprised, though.  I regard Sanders as a lesser evil.  He's good on some issues, terrible on others, especially in foreign policy.  I'll cast my vote for him in the primary next month, make the occasional donation, and continue to criticize him as seems appropriate.