In Defense of Our Revolution

“Go out and make me do it.”

-          FDR

As a socialist, a proud constituent of Keith Ellison, a Sanders supporter in the primary, and a contributor to Our Revolution, I have been challenged by recent articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, recently included in Clippings from N. Boulder indivisible. They have caused me to think about the principles and practicalities of threatening with primary challenges Democratic incumbents who will not say they support single-payer health care now. I have also heard the views of close friends, who have dedicated their lives to public service, who share the perspective of these articles. I have the deepest respect for their views and I want to say that I think they may be right, and that I may be mistaken in what follows.

The disagreement is over strategy not principle. We all share the goal of universal, government-sponsored health care. Frankly, I like the idea of Medicaid for everybody, as advanced by Prof. Sparer [what a delightful aptonym!]. The question is how to get there.

Pressuring sitting senators and representatives sounds reckless, but is it? It wouldn’t be that hard for such people to “take the pledge” and then to negotiate a compromise. Their position would be all the stronger for their ability to point to the significant proportion of their constituents demanding real advancement toward universal health care. Negotiations could also take place with the Our Revolution wing in terms of tactics (timing, alternative proposals, practical realities).  Congressional members who took the pledge but did not perform to Our Revolution’s standards would then be primaried  two years later – or not – depending on how persuasive they could be about the practicalities.

In terms of practical realities, one remembers FDR’s famous request of A. Randolph Philips: “I agree with you completely: now go out and make me do it!“ I offer the attached article by Peter Dreier on the importance of this kind of pressure and “taking it to the streets.” [Although dated – about Obama in 2009 – it can be translated easily by reading “Democratic incumbent” for “Obama.”] The historical section about FDR in the middle of the piece is especially interesting in our moment. Here’s the conclusion.

Like any successful politician, Obama is constantly evaluating the political climate and testing the nation’s appetite for change. Like FDR, he will be bold when he thinks the political climate is ready for bold action. The unions, community organizing groups, netroots groups, environmental and gay rights groups need to create a climate that will make it easier for Obama and Congress to be bold. As FDR said, their job is to “go out and make me do it.”

Could that be precisely what Our Revolution is trying to do?

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As a postscript, I would express slight neuralgia about the tone of the Post op-ed. [I recommend to everyone an essay by Thomas Frank, which appeared just before last November’s disastrous election: “Swat Team – the media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders – and real reform”, Harpers, November 2016. The criticism is mostly based on Post coverage of the primary campaign.] That exasperated tone communicates the view that we on the left  should just shut up and go play in our sandbox while the adults figure out what to do. The prospect of our “going out and making (Congress) do it” is impertinent and wrongheaded.

But what is our alternative? I have suggested one above, but I have the feeling (and it is mostly a feeling) the centrist wing of the Party seems to want us to become back-bench centrists, and to forget about the amazing hope and sense of possibility the Sanders campaign engendered among the young. It is not at all clear to me that this is the best way forward form progressives. [In fairness to the Post it also reported that “In the 2016 campaign, Sanders won more votes among those under age 30 than the two presumptive major-party presidential nominees combined. And it wasn't close.” - “The Fix,” June, 2016.]

My problem with the “adults in the room” is that not only can their experience provide practical insight, but it can also make it difficult to imagine a fundamentally new situation. As James Russell Lowell wrote in 1845, “time makes ancient good uncouth.” On the other hand, those with political experience know that the center is not fixed: it has moved to the right significantly in our own time. It may be big mistake to imagine that the point triangulated by the New Democrat neo-liberalism 25 years ago is still the center. There is no reason to expect even sympathetic elected leaders to move left without our willingness to “go out and make them do it.”

God commends David for considering building a house for Him, but tells him to leave it to his son. So Solomon builds the Temple, the House for the Glory of God to dwell in. But God's words to David, though literally and historically fulfilled by his son, Solomon, were also a type — a pattern — for something later to be revealed.

The son of David, who would build a new house was Joachim, the father of the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Mary's body — the Temple not made with hands — became the dwelling place for the Glory of God, Jesus Christ, God With Us.

The Son of David is also  Jesus Christ, Himself, Who, in His turn, would build yet another house: the universal church, the New Israel, welcoming all humanity and all creation into the Covenant. In this extended typology, Mary is the Ark of the Covenant, hidden out of sight in the Holy of Holkies, and herself the Throne of the Presence of God.

HAMLET, INCEST, AND ELIZABETH I

[Notes on a conversation with sharif Graham]

I thought you would like this,, remembering our conversation about Hamlet. BTW, I meant to mention that it occurred to me that Hamlet's harping on "incest" was an exercise in political-correctness, since Elizabeth I's legitimacy rested on the incestuous nature of her father's first marriage. (Catherine of Aragon had previously been married to prince Arthur, who died shortly thereafter. Henry VII quickly married her off to his second son, who became Henry VIII. This would have been incestuous, according to the same ecclesiastical norm that concerned Hamlet. Catherine, however claimed that her first marriage had never been consummated, and hence was itself a nullity, so her marriage to Prince Henry was NOT invalid.) There was, of course, no way to prove her claim, but - as my professor Edward Rochie Hardy observed - "She ought to have known!" So an important part of subsequent English history is entailed in this strange canon law. I think Hamlet's insistence on the "one flesh" business (Claudius as his "mother") maybe the clue to the Church's thinking: the dominical pronouncement on marriage ("...the two become one flesh, therefore what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder") would seem to imply that your sister-in-law becomes your own sister, for purposes of consanguinity.

When centrism beconess "alternative reality"

A response to one of Rick Moody's valuable digests on resisting Trump.

I want to reiterate how much I appreciate this service. Also, to respond to a particular article about losing our mind on the left. I think it is particularly important for two reasons, tending somewhat in opposite directions:

1) it seems to me that spreading "alternative realities" serves only the adversary. It may feel good at the moment, but it helps to prepare one of the fundamental preconditions of totalitarianism, that reality is a matter of the will.

2) Another way of denying basic reality is simply to line up all the perspectives and allegations - from left to right and select only the "center" as trustworthy. In other words if an assertion is far enough out of the mainstream consensus, it must be crackpot.   Although this may usually be true, it is not always true, and it is another way of saying that reality — like faith — is a matter of the will. However rarely, it is nevertheless true that "sometimes the tin hat fits."

I am afraid that most of us who  [unlike Michael Moore] were surprised at the Trump victory fell into this trap to some extent. Habitual centrists tend to view Moore as a crackpot, don't they?  In my opinion, the arbiters of fact, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles times can be trusted in the facts that they report  [most of the time - see below about Gary Webb]. They are not quite so trustworthy and the facts they decide are not "fit to print."

My own deeper experience of this, from 30 years ago, has to do with CIA cooperation with international drug trafficking. [I am afraid this is still going on: the price of heroin continues to decline and right now it is never been cheaper. Meanwhile, truckloads of manufactured heroin roll from Afghanistan across the big, new, four-lane bridge I saw being built by the USA from Afghanistan to Tajikistan in 2006].

In the '80s,  The Times &al. did not exactly suppress this kind of news, but it did minimize it, relegating it to the back pages. In my opinion that is because it's was so explosive. Powerful interests do have a say. Even the extremely circumspect report of the Kerry subcommittee on the subject, which corroborated the outlines and many of the details of this malfeasance, was reported briefly and then forgotten. There was simply no appetite to kick this hornets' nest.

Then there is the more recent case of Gary Webb ["Dark Alliance"]. The three great newspapers pilloried him as an irresponsible crackpot. Sadly, it appears that he was unstable, and he ended up taking his own life. But that does not obviate the fact that the three major newspapers all misreported the contents of his book. "Dark Alliance" gave the details of the findings behind the Kerry Report. [I considered them rather old news, because I was involved in researching the subject in the early '90s, and most of it was right in the congressional report.] The Times &al, reported that Webb had alleged that the CIA had deliberately targeted African-American communities. That was 

not true.

These communities, themselves, said so — loudly — but Webb had never alleged that. It was a conclusion from his work drawn by the people themselves. At most, Webb documented what might be called "depraved indifference" on the part of the CIA. I believe the rather hysterical reporting of the three major newspapers arose out of their own interest in defending their previous coverage of the matter. They had dropped the ball. They never exactly lied, but they prescinded from the more explosive leads. So,Webb had to be a crackpot.

All this is a long way of saying that we would be well advised to keep a skeptical eye on the arbiters of centrist consensus. As we used to say, "just because you're paranoid does not mean They are not out to get you!"

Response in NYT blog about CIA torture (6/21/17) to a comment that we critics will miss no opportunity to "take down the USA"

It is the torturers who take down the USA, not those who understand that we must never permit it. In my opinion, those who commit these crimes - and those who defend them - do our enemies' work for them by forsaking the values that we are supposed to be defending. If anything is un-American, this is it. If we let enemies scare us into it, America is finished and Al-Qaeda or ISIL don't have to lift a finger. It would be exactly what Osama bin Laden predicted would happen, and we would have become what he said we were. Decadence and moral collapse are what he expected, and he believed he could goad us into it. The torturers hand him the victory.

Gnostic sympathy

For transparently political reasons, Pagels, Meier, &co. find gnostic literature useful. Postmodern critical methodology encourages the conclusion that the Great Church omitted gnostic literature from its account of Jesus as a result of a patriarchal tendenz.  This leaves aside any conclusions about what Jesus might actually have taught, and whose tradition is closer. Such “essentialist” considerations are fruitless, since all we can know is what various groups found congenial for their own reasons.

Many find it congenial to entertain the idea that there is a certain pattern: a sapiential teacher delivers wisdom; his/her disciples eventually and inevitably get it wrong in the transmission, somewhere down the line, and correction is needed. This is the Protestant paradigm. In the name of the original purity of teaching, the tradition must be revised. The pattern resembles the gnostic creation myths: the Demiurge (or his mother, Sophia) got it wrong and the result is the flawed world as we know it. Likewise, genuine wisdom is garbled in human institutions. Periodic revision/purification is necessary. This seems also to be the Muslim paradigm. Moses and Jesus were genuine Messengers, but their followers got it wrong.

Underlying this view is the fundamental presupposition that the human predicament is ignorance. Creation is the work of a half-wit and we are stuck in the darkness of his imperfect product. We are saved by learning the Truth. The world is not to be saved, but individual spirits, imprisoned in ignorance, are to be set free by the infusion of Wisdom. Unfortunately, just as the Demiurge wrought a defective cosmos, so saving wisdom is garbled in the transmission, so it has to be sent repeatedly. Nobody wants this to happen, but we don’t know any better. The problem is located not in our will but in our intellect. Our problem is not sin, but ignorance.

Therefore, the Cross is useless, except insofar as it may be a teaching aid. The Death and Resurrection of Christ make no change in the cosmos. In fact, for some gnostics – as for the Qur’an – Jesus Christ was not even crucified: another died in His place. Pagels attests to her own aversion for the Cross. The modern scholars of gnostic texts – especially the popularizing ones – are frank enemies of the notion that salvation is through the Cross. On the contrary,  salvation is through the teaching of wisdom.

Stalker as Spiritual guide

Star’ets in Russian means spiritual guide (literally, “elder”). In Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker is the slang term for another kind of guide. In a future dystopia, possibly post-nuclear, there is an off-limits area called the Zone. Stalker is a play on star’ets. It is possible to interpret the film as a reference to mystical ascent, through the fallen world, under the guidance of a spiritual master.

An icon well known in Russia (not so well in the West) depicts this ascent as described by St. John Climacus (John of the ladder, 7^th C., Sinai). Figures climb the ladder propped against the wall. Many fall to their doom even from the top rungs. The spiritual path is dangerous. An experienced guide is indispensable. Even the most experienced can fall. Stalker, like any Russian star’ets, is an ascetic who cares nothing for the things of this world. Comfort, reputation and wealth do not interest him: only the Zone. The Zone is this world transfigured. (Filmed in vivid color as opposed to the depressing sepia/gray of the ordinary world.) Because of his contempt for ordinary life, Stalker appears to worldly people as a misfit or a freak. One of his clients, Writer, even calls him yurodiviy, referring to a specific kind of Russian saint: the “Fool for Christ” or “Holy Fool.” Little-known in the West since the Middle Ages, this particular kind of saint appears in Russia to this day. An apparent idiot (cf.: Dostoyevsky’s great novel), the yurodiviy has gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance, and a fearless willingness to rebuke the powerful. The great church on Red Square is named for such a one: Basil the Blessed, who alone was able to subdue the syphilitic rages of Ivan the Terrible.

The ordinary preoccupations of worldly people, represented by Stalker’s clients, Writer and Professor, are of no importance to Stalker. Or rather they are obstacles to be overcome. Both of these clients are intellectuals, and both skeptics but they are men of different spiritual temperaments. Professor is a scientist, a materialist for whom only the sensible is real. The triumph of scientific reasoning will bring universal peace and happiness. Professor is the best of the Soviet system, which erected an enormous sign across the river from St. Basil’s proclaiming “Literacy + Electrification = Communism.” Science and technology will cure human misery.

Writer scoffs at Professor’s materialism as a naïve illusion. Writer has thought everything through to the end. Having begun with compassion for humanity, he has lost all hope. He is a nihilist: comfortable, but bored to death. Writer is to Professor as Ivan Karamazov is to Dimitri. The man of letters versus the man of action, the mental versus the physical side of human nature. Stalker could be compared to Alyosha Karamazov, or to the latter's star’ets, Fr. Zossima.

Professor and Writer are passionate. That is, they suffer insatiable desire. This must be purged if they are to survive the spiritual journey — climbing the Ladder of mystical ascent, up through the Zone, to its central feature, a ruined building with the proportions (though not the domes) of a pre-Mongol, Russian church. It is the task of the spiritual guide to help them shed their dangerous delusions [prelest], and to lead them on the path that will strip them of their passions. Because, if their passions do not destroy them on the way (Writer’s liquor and his gun, Professor’s preoccupation with his knapsack), they will certainly annihilate them if they reach their destination with them. Stalker himself is utterly humble, without self-regard, but fierce in his insistence on the correct path. He has reached the level Orthodox mystics call apatheia, passionlessness. Like an actual star’ets, Stalker prays for his disciples with profound compassion. They have to be purified by water and fire. He addresses his prayers to the bottom of a well.

This feminine symbol, rooted in pre-Christian religion, persists in Russian Orthodoxy. Many churches and monasteries have holy wells, adorned with icons of the Mother of God overseeing the fountain of the Water of Life. The water of these wells is drunk and carried home by the faithful. The water into which Stalker speaks his prayers reflects his own face, and beneath the surface is an icon of the Savior. When the nihilistic Writer produces a pistol, the gentle Stalker violently wrestles it out of his hands and throws it into the well. Water is a key element in Tarkovsky’s cinematic vocabulary, especially indoor rain (cf.: Nostalghia, 1983), and water sometimes catches the light in such a way as to appear to be liquid gold. (Cf.: the final shot in Sacrifice, 1986, Tarkovsky’s last film) . In iconography, gold signifies divinity — the Uncreated Light. Golden rain might be interpreted as the water of Baptism, which the Orthodox call Illumination. Water suffused with Light, water joined with fire.

Stalker’s clients must complete purification in this Water of Light before they can reach their goal, inside the House. There, a golden rain falls across the threshold of a Room, in which those who enter realize their innermost wish (cf.: Solyaris). The trouble is that one may not be aware of one’s own innermost wishes. Stalker’s own guide, whose name was “Teacher” and who Stalker says “opened my eyes”, entered the room wishing for world peace. When he returned to the sepia world, however, all he got was money, and — like the one Russians remember as the lover of money, Judas — he hanged himself. After this incident, no stalker had ever entered the Room, and Teacher was remembered as “Porcupine.”

In order to enter the Room of realization, one must pass through a rain of gold, which separates the Room from the rest of the House. Professor and Writer wonder why Stalker will not go. “I am fine as I am,” he answers. Perhaps he has no desires to realize, so there is no point in entering the Room; or maybe he remembers Porcupine and fears his own subconscious. Writer and Professor turn out to be afraid to enter the Room, too, because they have begun to sense  that they are not free of passion, and they might realize something they might not like. (A similar theme is found in Tarkovsky’s earlier film, Solyaris, 1972).

Professor’s knapsack turns out to contain a nuclear device with which to blow up the Room, and thereby to free humanity from the dangers of its innermost wishes – along with access to unseen Reality. [The materialist would destroy the numinous.] But something about the journey has changed him. Although he fends off Stalker's repeated attempts to wrestle the bomb away from him, in the end, Professor dismantles it and throws it into the golden water.

Writer, too, cynical as ever, has to admit that there is something he does not know, namely his own innermost desire. Stalker's guidance has taught him at least enough humility to make him afraid to enter the Room. He announces that he will go back to his villa and drink himself to death.

Stalker himself returns to his own miserable house, where his wife comforts him as he lies on the floor, commenting on his own exhaustion. In the last scene, his daughter sits at a table. The sepia-world regards her as defective in some way, mental or physical. The film closes as she moves a glass of wine across the table without touching it. Her superior consciousness, regarded by the world as an infirmity, actually dominates the “reality”  of material appearance. 

Meanwhile, supernatural Reality, blazes away, unseen, in the transfigured Zone. The numinous is not entirely absent from the world.  It is Forbidden, however, and the authorities of dystopian, sepia-world do everything they can to hide it and to keep people away from it.