Originally posted on Friends of Justice:
Theo Shaw during his college days By Alan Bean Almost five years have passed since I wrote a blog post called “Jena 6 to Law School”. Back then, Theo Shaw was ready to graduate from the Louisiana State University,…
Only a miracle saved Theo and his co-defendants . . . and there aren’t many of those in the criminal justice system.
What if God just changes his mind about gay marriage. It wouldn’t be the first time, you know.
When Ted Cruz launched his presidential campaign at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University reaction on the left was predictable. Some suggested that Liberty students were only in their seats because attendance at chapel is mandatory at Liberty. Liberals don’t like Ted and the feeling is mutual.
Libertarian response was mixed. Ted’s political career is funded by billionaire libertarians Charles and David Koch, he despises Obamacare, and he wants to abolish the IRS.
Libertarians haven’t forgotten that Cruz’s famous filibuster speech against Obamacare was studded with Ayn Rand quotations.
Who could ask for anything more?
But hard core, “objectivist” libertarians are baffled by Ted’s fervent embrace of the religious right, in general, and his staunch opposition to abortion, in particular. Why, for instance, did a lifelong admirer of Ayn Rand announce his candidacy at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University?
Ayn Rand hated philosophical compromise as much as she hated Jesus; and she hated Jesus very, very much. Consider this oft-quoted line from her novel, The Fountainhead:
The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves . . . this is the essence of altruism.
Jesus and Ayn share one quality: consistency.
Rand asserted that nothing beyond the demands of the detached and independent ego really matters. Altruism, living in response to the needs of others, was thus the worst kind of heresy. When we live in service to others, she taught, we become slaves.
Randian objectivists wish Ted would lose his religion so they wouldn’t have to qualify for their support. But everyone, even libertarians, appreciate that Ted’s career arc would plummet to earth if he trampled on the cross. In America, we are free to disagree with Jesus on every important point, so long as we’re singing “Oh How I Love Jesus”.
A cynic would assert that Ted Cruz embraces both Christ and anti-Christ because he is a pragmatic politician. But you can’t understand the Junior Senator from Texas apart from the culture that shaped him. Religious superstars from Dwight L. Moody to Billy Graham embraced Wall Street for the same reason Ted Cruz courts the Koch brothers–publicity is expensive.
The best way to impress the wealthy is to tell them how wonderful they are, and Ayn Rand made a comfortable living singing paeans to the powerful. They were the only people that mattered to her; everybody else she called ‘looters’, ‘moochers,’ and (when she was feeling kind) ‘parasites’.
Not all wealthy people enjoy praise and adulation, of course, but most of them do. Charles and David Koch love Ayn Rand and Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter because they speak rapturously of the wealthy and contemptuously of everyone else. No surprises there.
Ted Cruz grew up in a religious subculture in which Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism dovetailed neatly. Mainstream evangelical Christianity soft-pedals Jesus’ teaching on money, greed and solidarity with the poor because, while no one was watching, we became a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America. If you think this is overly-harsh, check out the Sermon on the Mount and you will see the problem.
But this marriage of Christ and anti-Christ goes deeper than political pragmatism and the lure of mammon. Ted Cruz isn’t just a conservative Southern Baptist who occasionally shows up at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas; he is also an enthusiastic Dominionist.
This stealth enterprise goes by a variety of names: the Reconstructionist Movement, Dominionism or, more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation (I have written extensively on this subject).
Dominionism is rooted in the “presuppositional” theology of Cornelius Van Til and the political-religious musings of Rousas John Rushdoony. (If you are unfamiliar with Cornelius and Rousas, this primer will come in handy.)
Think of it as the Reformed doctrine of election on steroids. Rushdoony put it like this:
“The purpose of Christ’s coming was in terms of the creation mandate… The redeemed are called to the original purpose of man, to exercise dominion under God, to be covenant-keepers, and to fulfill “the righteousness of the law” (Rom. 8:4) . . . Man is summoned to create the society God requires.”
The theological category of “election” makes the marriage of Christ and anti-Christ possible.
Both Randian objectivists and Christian dominionists contrast the glories of “us” with the depravity of “them”.
It’s an anti-Christian species of Calvinism. The wealthy and the powerful have the right to dictate to the poor and the powerless because, well, they’re so super. Dominionists associate this authority with God (from whom all blessings flow). For Randian objectivists it’s the law of the jungle: If the makers don’t rule the takers, the takers will rule the makers, and we can’t have that. Both conservative Christians and anti-Christ objectivists dream of that great day when the elect will triumph and the unworthy will get a richly-deserved comeuppance.
I am not suggesting that everyone associated with the religious right thinks this way. They don’t. But culture war logic ensures that conservative critics of this marriage of Christ and anti-Christ will be consigned to the outer darkness.
Liberals, for their part, don’t know enough about Ayn Rand or Christian Reconstructionism to discern the elephant in the room. Besides, it’s too easy to lampoon politicians like Ted Cruz if you’re working with a liberal audience. You can make jokes about Liberty University students compulsory attendance at the Cruz announcement speech in twenty quick seconds flat. Liberty students wearing Rand Paul T-shifts is a great five-second sight gag. So why do the hard work of answering hard questions that no one is asking?
Mainstream analysis, desperate to sustain the illusion of objectivity, eschews in-depth analysis of anything. Cruz kicked off his campaign at Liberty University in an attempt to court religious conservatives. End of story. The marriage of Christ and anti-Christ rarely gets a mention on CNN or CBS. It sounds mean-spirited and it smacks of liberal bias. We don’t want to lose more conservative viewers to FOX.
But our silence comes with a price. Ted Cruz holds this marriage of convenience together by pretending that neither Jesus nor Ayn Rand were serious.
They were; and they are.
John Shuck is a Presbyterian pastor in good standing who doesn’t believe a single thing you learned in Sunday school. In a recent Patheos post, Reverend Shuck issued a list of six affirmations designed to boil the blood of every right-thinking American:
- Religion is a human construct
- The symbols of faith are products of human cultural evolution
- Jesus may have been an historical figure, but most of what we know about him is in the form of legend
- God is a symbol of myth-making and not credible as a supernatural being or force
- The Bible is a human product as opposed to special revelation from a divine being
- Human consciousness is the result of natural selection, so there’s no afterlife
You may be wondering why, having jettisoned God, Jesus, the Bible and heaven, Rev. Shuck still wants to play church. What’s the point? (more…)
Across America, twenty-two veterans take their lives on an average day, a rate three times higher than in the civilian population.
By Alan Bean
The jury didn’t buy Eddie Ray Routh’s insanity defense and the legal experts weren’t surprised. To win at trial, Routh’s attorneys had to prove that the ex-marine didn’t understand that shooting Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield in the back was morally wrong.
It is difficult to know what was going on in Eddie Routh’s mind the day he gunned down two innocent men at an upscale firing range in suburban Dallas. Nicholas Schimdle’s “In the Crosshairs”, a carefully researched New Yorker piece written shortly after the murders, makes a strong case that Routh not only suffered from PTSD but was deeply depressed and delusional in the months leading up to the murders. But that wasn’t sufficient. As state witnesses repeatedly emphasized, a defendant can suffer from mental illness and still distinguish right from wrong.
It is likely, in fact, that Eddie Ray Routh killed Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield because he had taken a fancy to Kyle’s spanking new Ford F-350. Would a sane individual believe he could get away with a crime this brazen? Probably not. But even if Routh was too detached from reality to appreciate the consequences of his action, that wasn’t enough to convince the jury.
Moments after his arrest, Routh undermined an insanity defense by answering affirmatively when a state trooper asked him if he knew what he did was wrong.
Chris Kyle is widely regarded as a war hero in Stephenville, Texas and several jurors had recently seen American Sniper a Clint Eastwood biopic featured in packed theaters as the trial unfolded. Kyle’s widow attended the Academy Awards (where American Sniper lost the best-picture competition to Birdman) short days before testifying in Routh’s trial. (more…)
By Alan Bean
President Obama’s comments at the annual prayer breakfast sparked a tsunami of protest from conservative politicians and opinion leaders, but it’s not clear why. The president’s remarks were measured and carefully calibrated to the point of being banal. But two weeks after the speech, Rudy Giuliani is using Obama’s remarks as evidence that the president “doesn’t love America.”
Bobby Jindal, the increasingly cantankerous governor of Louisiana, was so thrilled with Giuliani’s tirade that he called the former New York mayor to congratulate him.
Mike Huckabee spoke for many when he claimed that Obama favors Islam over both Christianity and Judaism.
Here’s the sound bite that really bothers conservative Christians:
Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
His critics maintain that Obama was creating a moral equivalence between contemporary Christians and the ISIS thugs who burned a Jordanian pilot to death. Christians may have done some bad stuff back in the day, the argument goes, but that was before the Protestant Reformation when a lot of bad stuff was going down.
The reference to slavery and Jim Crow really got folks riled. “He also brought in Jim Crow laws,” Huckabee said, “as if it was Christians who were responsible for racism in America.”
Well, actually, Christians were responsible for just about all the evil perpetrated by American citizens over the centuries. Historically, the vast majority of American decision makers have been practicing Christians. There is a good reason why southern evangelicalism focuses so intently on personal sanctity and the afterlife while ignoring the social relevance of the gospel. The southern “gospel” was designed to make Christianity compatible with racial oppression. Once you have signed off on slavery, how much gospel have you still got?
The flimsy inaccuracy of the criticisms directed at the president’s prayer breakfast address suggest that something deeper is in the works. A simple history lesson isn’t going to satisfy these people. Either they don’t want to know their own religious, national and religious history or they know and simply don’t care. This isn’t about that.
In 1997, four years before 9-11, an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published his Theology of the Old Testament. In the opening chapters he offered a pencil sketch of “the economic-political crisis” driving contemporary scholarship. The big reality of the late twentieth century, Brueggemann said, was “the decentering of the long-established privilege of Euro-American Christendom.”
One sign of that “decentering” is “the relentless rise of Islam as a challenge to Christian domination.” The tension between a dying Christendom and a resurgent Islam created “a situation of revolutionary struggle that will not abate any time soon.”
Prophetic words, as it turns out. And it is precisely this “decentering of the long-established privilege of Euro-American Christendom” that energizes Obama’s critics. Christianity is a spent force in Western Europe, Canada and Australia, and her demise is increasingly apparent in the coastal United States. There are plenty of Christians living in these regions, of course, but, with few exceptions, they have become politically irrelevant. In the West, with few exceptions, it is axiomatic that religion and politics don’t mix.
Conservative Christians in evangelical America look out on a sea of social problems and dream of a Christian America. The last bastion of Western Christendom is in the heartland and southern states of the United States, and this is where the president’s harshest critics live.
When president Obama is chastised for “not loving America”, it is the America where Christendom is still a thing that folks are talking about. Obama wasn’t saying that Muslims are more lovable or praiseworthy than Christians and Jews; but he was arguing that all religions should enjoy an equal footing in America.
Obama also realizes that non-Muslims must be careful about commenting about inter-Muslim affairs. As Graeme Wood argues in his excellent Atlantic essay, “Non-Muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly.” The people with the best chance of undermining ISIS, Wood says, aren’t westerners who have no idea what’s happening or secularized Muslims who ignore Islamic teaching they find inconvenient. Not only does ISIS not speak for Islam, Wood says, it doesn’t even speak for the vast majority of ultra-conservative Muslims who interpret the Quran literally and dream of living in a purified Islamic state.
All three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have been shaped by warfare and tragedy. Most of the literature found in what Christians call the Old Testament was either inspired by the Babylonian catastrophe of the 6th century BCE or reworked in response to that unspeakable tragedy. This helps explain the curious mix of beauty and rage we find in the text. In Psalm 137, for instance:
By the waters of Babylon–there we sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion.
gives way to
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
The author of these lines isn’t a monster; he had simply seen too many vulnerable children die in precisely this manner.
Similarly, the seer of Revelation almost certainly lived through the destruction of Jerusalem in CE in 70 CE, a debacle that claimed over 1 million people lives. His desire to see the smoke rising from Babylon (a code name for Rome) was palpable. As a result, the beauty of Revelation is frequently engulfed by the fires of hell.
People who want to submit completely to a religious tradition in times of great upheaval will often seize on the most violent aspects of that legacy.
The young men flocking to the banner of ISIS aren’t subhuman animals; they are normal human beings who have been overshadowed, stressed and manipulated by western hegemony for so long that the desire for revenge has become all-consuming.
I cannot grasp, for the life of me, how a video depicting the immolation of a helpless man can spark dreams of glory. ISIS videos are of a piece with the postcards Southerners once distributed to commemorate the lynching (often over an open fire) of a poor Black man. Both cultural artifacts fill me with dismay and incomprehension.
Those fighting for the survival of American Christendom can’t see the ISIS fighters as human beings; instead they are regarded as pure evil, a subhuman manifestation of the demonic. The evil driving ISIS is undeniable; but it is a sadly human species of evil. In fact, it’s precisely the brand of evil that has marred the American story.
Those fighting a last ditch battle to preserve American Christendom have good reason for concern. But Western Christendom, like Babylon and Rome before it, is a doomed enterprise. The patient is on life support; the kind response is to pull the plug and let her go. Then we can start considering comes next.
A religious consensus grounded in a myopic Southern evangelicalism isn’t sustainable, nor should it deserve to be sustained. Young people are not inspired by the old, old story us old-timers took in with our mother’s milk. Millennials are asking hard questions and the guardians of American Christendom have no answers. None at all.
The only choice is to go back to the beginning. For Christians, that means returning to the majesty of Jesus and hearing him speak to us as if for the first time.
But president Obama is right to insist that neither Christianity nor any other religion should claim special privilege in America. We can still be “the last, best hope of earth,” but not by clinging to privilege. Lincoln’s “last, best hope of earth” reference dovetailed with an appeal for new dreams. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” Lincoln insisted in 1862, “are inadequate to the stormy present.”
Lincoln was right. We live in a revolutionary time. You see it in the Muslim world, and you see it in the peculiar religious politics in our America. The old verities and compromises cannot stand; the center will not hold. New light is needed.
This means that Christians, Muslims, Jews and representatives of all the great religions of the world must bring their wisdom to the table. In times of religious strife secularism looks mighty tempting. For some it may be right. We need the calm voice of reason. But excluding religious wisdom from the world of politics is neither practical nor desirable.
If we have the courage to realize that “the dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” we might still become the last, best hope of earth.
By Alan Bean
There is Kayla Mueller’s America and there is Chris Kyle’s America and we can’t identify with both. There is Kayla Mueller’s Christianity and Chris Kyle’s Christianity and the two religions have little in common. Kyle or Kayla; who’s your hero?
Kayla Mueller was taken captive by ISIS militants while working with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in a hospital dedicated to treating refugees from Syria’s civil war. This was how she lived out her faith. Earlier faith adventures took Mueller to India, Israel and Palestine.
Mueller traveled to Israel in 2010 to work with African immigrants but spent most of her time working with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement. Mueller later reflected on this experience in a blog post.
“I could tell a few stories about sleeping in front of half demolished buildings waiting for the one night when the bulldozers come to finish them off; fearing sleep because you don’t know what could wake you…. I could tell a few stories about walking children home from school because settlers next door are keen to throw stones, threaten and curse at them.”
“The smell and taste of tear gas has lodged itself in the pores of my throat and the skin around my nose, mouth and eyes. It still burns when I close them. It still hangs in the air like invisible fire burning the oxygen I breathe. When I cry tears for this land, my eyes still sting. This land that is beautiful as the poetry of the mystics. This land with the people whose hearts are more expansive than any wall that any man could ever build.”
In the eyes of many, Kayla Mueller’s sympathy for the Palestinian people defined her as anti-Israel and anti-American. Such conclusions make sense from the perspective of Chris Kyle Christianity.
I haven’t read Kyle’s book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, nor have I seen Clint Eastwood’s movie. Chris Hedges read the book and watched the film and came away horrified.
Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.
“For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.”
Chris Kyle has a point. It is unrealistic to expose young men to pro-military propaganda, send them to boot camp, hand them a rifle, tell them to kill citizens of a demonized race, and then criticize them for joking about mass murder. War does mean “violent death”. And repeated exposure to violent death destroys the spirit. This is particularly true when you are personally responsible for the violence and death.
Military veterans deal with the spiritual damage of war in different ways. Some end up on the streets. Some, like the tormented vet who gunned Kyle down at a shooting range, veer into madness. Kyle dealt with the trauma of war by creating a version of Christianity featuring a mirror image denial of everything Jesus did and taught: a bizarre blend of white, middle class, hearth-and-home sentimentality and a Manichean dualism driven by hatred of the “other” and a joyful (and uniquely American) embrace of violence, pornography, machismo, hatred and death. (If you think I’m exaggerating here, please read Hedges’ review of American Sniper, book and movie.)
Kayla Mueller’s Christianity flowed from the gospel of the kingdom that sent Jesus to his cross. The oft-quoted words from her prison cell are twenty-first century Dietrich Bonhoeffer (you can read the hand-written letter in its entirety here):
“I remember mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. I have come to a place in experience where, in every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our creator b/c literally there was no else … + by God + by your prayers I have felt tenderly cradled in freefall.”
Will Hollywood make a movie about Kayla Mueller? Don’t hold your breath. As the box office success of American Sniper shows, Chris Kyle Christianity enjoys mass appeal. By contrast, Kayla Mueller Christianity reminds us that “the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
Kayla “tenderly cradled” the victims of violence; Kyle embodied the myth of redemptive violence. Kyle and Kayla can’t both be heroes; you’ve got to choose.
According to one survey, 80% of American viewers think Brian Williams should lose his anchor seat for repeating, and gradually enhancing, a self-aggrandizing war story. Is this a case of false memory, or did Williams know what he was doing?
The same question can be asked of Hillary Clinton. Was her campaign story about scurrying across a Bosnian tarmac under sniper fire spun from whole cloth to win votes, or was that the way she actually remembered the incident? Confronted with video footage showing her striding confidently with a smile on her face and a song in her heart, Clinton immediately backed away from her dramatic account.
False memory is a genuine phenomenon. Common sense suggests that actual events lodge themselves in memory much more vividly than imagined scenarios and should therefore be retained more faithfully, but it ain’t so. In their ground-breaking The Science of False Memory, C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna demonstrate that “false-memory report can be quite stable over time, and . . . can be more stable than true-memory reports.”
Moreover, confidence in false-memory reports tends to grow over time, while confidence in true-memory accounts gradually fade.
False-memory bedevils the criminal justice system (as the growing number of DNA exonerations demonstrates) partly because, as Brainerd and Reyna explain, “memory suggestions may be accompanied by threats of punishment if interviewees do not accede to the suggestions or by promises of reward if they do.”
This element of reward and punishment helps explain the odd memory lapses experienced by Williams and Clinton, public figures who should have known their recollections would be subjected to empirical verification.
Brian Williams’ and the NBC Nightly News have been locked in a tight viewership race with ABC World News, with ABC making strong gains within the highly-prized 18-49 demographic. Anything an anchor can do to enhance his credibility and charisma will be done.
Hillary Clinton conjured mythical Bosnian snipers in the midst of a tightly contested primary race with Barack Obama. Deadly peril in Bosnia boosted her credentials as a foreign policy expert.
Neither Clinton nor Williams created false memories out of whole cloth. Both public figures have brushed up against the chaos and calamity of war; they have witnessed wounded soldiers, burned out buildings and the rattle of sniper fire. In an environment that pays big dividends for striking personal accounts of near-death experiences, public figures “remember” things that didn’t happen but which, given the circumstances, could have happened.
Once these personal accounts are shared publicly they seem much more real to the storyteller and this effect grows with each subsequent iteration. So, when Brian Williams retold, and enhanced, his helicopter-hit-by-RPG-fire story on the David Letterman show, it didn’t feel like a lie. It felt like the truth. Almost.
Only when conflicting accounts pile up does the bold facade of false-memory begin to crack. Faced with overwhelming evidence that he got it horribly wrong, Brian Williams doesn’t want to say “I lied to make myself look like a hero, and I’m sorry.” That’s not the way things feel from his perspective. Unfortunately, anything less than this kind of mea culpa sounds really lame to the viewer who doesn’t understand the dynamics of false memory.
But there is something more sinister than false-memory at work here. Brian Williams and Hillary Clinton are both cogs in the machinery of American empire. Americans disagree about everything but the need to continually stoke the military machine that protects our lives and makes the world safe for democracy. Americans don’t do much for the soldiers who return, broken and bewildered, from our military misadventures, but while they’re in the line of fire we can’t praise “our men and women in arms” too highly. Clinton and Williams wanted to associate themselves with armed conflict because Americans are unfailingly impressed by that sort of thing.
Unlike the politicians and news anchors of an earlier generations, Williams and Clinton lack actual military experience. Consider this snippet from Walter Cronkite’s Wikipedia page:
Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress part of group called the Writing 69th, and during a mission fired a machine gun at a German fighter. He also landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne in Operation Market-Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge.
How can Brian Williams, or his current competitors, compete with that? How can Hillary compete with JFK’s PT-109 hagiography? They can’t. So they make the most of what they’ve got, and when it doesn’t sound quite good enough, false-memories emerge to fill the resume gap. That’s the way the mind, and modern America, works.
Before I get too high and mighty, let me share my own painful admission. My wife and I have been working our way through six seasons of Sons of Anarchy, an over-the-top (but brilliantly produced) cable drama about a California motorcycle gang. It’s actually a morality play; a cautionary tale about living and dying with the sword. Like The Sopranos, the show forces us to love deeply flawed characters. But impressive production values and high moral purpose aren’t enough to stay ahead of the competition, so we have been exposed to oceans of sleaze and genuinely shocking violence.
The other night, when the boys were riddled by drive-by machine gun fire for the 47th time this season, I found myself laughing out loud. Verisimilitude had vanished. It was too much. But the producers obviously think that if they don’t keep the mayhem coming they can’t hold the viewers. The bar, in the world of American popular entertainment, is constantly rising.
In a similar vein, I watched Katy Perry’s half-time show at this years Superbowl. My interest was largely piqued by an idiot preacher predicting pure, unmitigated evil from the ex-Christian singer. Was Katy going to be flashing satanic signs while bathing in the blood of seven virgins?
Not so much. We didn’t even get a wardrobe malfunction. Instead, Katy rode into the stadium perched atop an enormous mechanical tiger while belting out her biggest hit, Eye of the Tiger (get it?) Somebody invested months of labor on that tiger and it probably cost several million dollars to perfect, but, one verse and the chorus later, Katy was on to the next special effect. Fans roared (why, I wasn’t quite sure) as Ms. Perry jiggled and gyrated through a series of hits backed by a cast of thousands.
And whoever headlines next year’s halftime show will have to top that.
Rarely has so much sound and fury signified so little. I wasn’t shocked by Perry’s performance, I was bored. If you have never seen fireworks, a good display can be mesmerizing. But when fireworks are a constant feature of life, they get irritating. Maybe that’s why Perry appeals to young girls who, blessedly, haven’t been jaded, and numbed, by pop culture.
Brian Williams and Hillary Clinton live with the temptations that come with a can-you-top-this world. They succumbed. We all succumb (I am still watching Sons of Anarchy after all).
This year’s Superbowl is a case in point. No one could celebrate the gritty play of the Seattle Seahawks because they passed when they should have run. One of the most spectacular, and improbable, catches in the history of NFL play was quickly forgotten because, moments later, an anonymous defense back jumped a route and wrecked the plot.
The Seahawks had to win or they were just another bunch of losers. In America, as Vince Lombardi put it, winning is the only thing.
There can be no grace in a culture shaped by competence, success and control. Subconsciously,Brian and Hillary knew that.
Nobody is allowed to critique the fundamental premise under-girding our shock-and-awe society: the notion that success, peace and prosperity demand an unending round of heroic, and unavoidably violent, exploits.
Winners rock; losers just lose.
Here’s the thing, our can-you-top-this culture is the perfect antithesis of the gospel Jesus is perpetually sponsoring in our world. It’s okay if Brian’s helicopter didn’t sustain RPG fire. It’s okay if Hillary wasn’t subjected to sniper fire. Get off the mechanical tiger, Katy, and sing us a real song from the heart. Let’s be grateful to the Seahawks and the Patriots for putting on an amazing show.
We can’t all be winners, but we can all be real, right?
Hillary, Brian, and Katy would suggest otherwise. In America, under the prevailing rules, you’ve got to fake it to make it. When losing isn’t an option, the truth is for losers. America becomes an interminable unreality show where winners are celebrated and we all lose.
Friends of Justice 