I Am Not Going To Church This Sunday

So I hear that Donald Trump has made the following statement:

"The president just demanded places of worship reopen for in-person services and he talked about guidelines being issued for “communities of faith”. 

He wants them open “for this weekend”. Called upon governors to life quarantine restrictions relating to religious gathering places.

“If they do not do it I will override the governors,” he said.

He then turned on his heel and left the White House press briefing room without taking any questions.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany then brought up Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, to the podium for an expert briefing."

 - Quotes retrieved from the Guardian, 22 May 2020.

I've got news for him: I'm not going to church this Sunday.  I will not be celebrating Memorial Day in crowded places.  (I will not be celebrating the 4th of July at all.)  I will not be going to indoor, sit-down coffee shops (like the Starbucks near my house which opened its doors today for the first time in several weeks).  I will not go to restaurants.  I will not go to national parks.  I will not attend sporting events.  I will not join in this idiot's pretense that life is normal.  Because it's not.  Due to Donald Trump's malignancy and incompetence, we have the following situation:

• A pandemic has dealt (and continues to deal) a crippling blow to our economy.
• The people who to date have borne the brunt of the deaths resulting from that pandemic are people whom Trump and his white Republican murderers have targeted for destruction.
• There is not yet a viable, proven vaccine available for COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that a certain American biopharma manufacturer is boasting of optimistic results - but their data have not been rigorously peer-reviewed.)
• There is not yet a viable, proven antiviral drug that is effective against COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that the manufacturers of remdesivir have boasted of minor reductions in disease severity and length of hospitalization - but many doctors and scientists have questioned the methodology of the U.S. remdesivir study. (See this and this.)  And yes, I know that Donald swears by hydroxychloroquine, but I suspect that not a drop of it has passed through his lips.  How might the world look if he did really overdose on some fish tank cleaner!)
• There is not yet any kind of widespread testing available for coronavirus infection.  A Washington State-based group that had developed a free, accurate test kit that could be used in people's homes was asked this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to halt the use of their tests.  On the other hand, the FDA has granted authorization to a Texas firm to provide in-home test kits - but those who want a kit must jump through a few hoops first.  Why am I not surprised?  Donald Trump has already made it abundantly clear that he is opposed to widespread testing because of the possibility that the test results will indicate that the United States is experiencing a crisis for which the Republican Party has no answer.
• Those states and regions which have ended social distancing restrictions are now seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases.  As a result, there will be further spikes in death rates.  Again, not surprising.  Throw lit matches into a dry meadow in the middle of summer, and you will have fire.

In calling therefore for churches and other places of worship to open this Sunday (and in threatening to force them to open whether they want to or not), Trump shows not only his ignorance of the Constitution, not only also his ignorance of the Bible (Matthew 4:7, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"), but most importantly, his ignorance of the realities of trying to reopen a nation and its economy without dealing with the issues that forced it to close in the first place.  Those realities are excellently explained in an article by Jonathan V. Last titled, "We Cannot 'Reopen' America."

On another note, I've noticed that Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic is not just an isolated case of insanity.  Rather, he is typical of all of the global Far Right leaders who have come to power (many of them with the help of the Russian government) over the last several years.  Thus Boris Johnson's Britain became an outlier among those nations which consider themselves in any way European, in that Britain came to have the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any country in that part of the world.  And Russia, which has long aspired for a return to greatness, now has its wish for greatness fulfilled in a sense, in that it now has the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any nation on earth except for the United States.  (We're still No. 1 - Go, USA!  Or let's not!)  Moreover, both Putin and Trump seem to be reading from the same playbook in that their national health response to the coronavirus has been characterized by scapegoating of foreigners, political posturing, and chaos.  One way in which Putin's government differs from Trump's is that Trump merely bullies and browbeats medical experts who contradict him.  Putin, on the other hand, seems to have lost a few dissenting doctors who mysteriously fell from windows over the last few weeks.  They didn't slip on their tea, did they?

Update: I need to add another country currently being trashed - er, I mean, ruled - by a far-Right leader: Brazil.  Jair Bolsonaro has just earned the dubious distinction of leading his country to overtake Russia in COVID-19 deaths and confirmed cases.  That means that Brazil is the new global No. 2.  This confirms my hypothesis that everything the Far Right touches turns to used toilet paper.

The Psychodynamics of Losing

I have started reading the Book of Lamentations in the mornings, having spent the last month or so reading the Book of Jeremiah.  The most obvious message of these books is the spiritual - namely that the kingdom of Judah was conquered and overthrown by Babylon because the Jews had chosen to deny the truth of God by worshiping other gods, and they had chosen to deny the truth that humankind is made in the image of God by oppressing each other - including the most powerless in their midst - the alien, the orphan, and the widow.  But my reading this time has opened up for me a fascinating glimpse into the psychology and psychodynamics of the ruling classes of nations that are in decline.

One can see these psychodymanics at work in the conflict between the ruling class (and their propagandists, the false prophets) versus the prophets of God who announced that God was about to destroy the kingdom of Judah.   One might call these rulers and their false prophets the revanchists, the "nationalists" and "patriots" of their day, because they represented the hope that Judah might remain as an independent kingdom subservient to no one, and that Judah might one day regain all the lost glory of the kingdom of Solomon.  Their desire for a return of lost glory could be viewed as an expression of national narcissism, because this desire for lost glory was not accompanied by a willingness to submit to their God. 

On the other hand were the true prophets who accurately prophesied that God was about to destroy Judah.  This sentence, "God is about to destroy Judah", had three implications:

• that the nation in which the rulers and the people had invested their identity was about to be destroyed;
• that God was the One who would do the destroying;
• and that this destruction was God's commentary, His verdict on the nation, its character and practices, as captured in the following quote: "Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say 'We are delivered!' - that you may do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10)

The true prophets did not have access to the political power and concentrated wealth of the ruling classes and their "prophets", so it was easy for the privileged members of society in Judah to label the true prophets as traitors who sought to incite sedition.  Therefore some of these true prophets wound up doing jail time, and a few got assassinated.  But what is so fascinating to me is the way the ruling class and their adherents reacted when the prophecies of the true prophets began to come true, during the twenty-two and a half years between the death of King Josiah and the fall of Jerusalem.  What we see is not just the rejection of true spirituality by the king and the people of Judah, but the refusal to submit to the king of Babylon, even as the military and political realities went increasingly against Judah and Jerusalem.  The darkening regional military and political realities are described well in some of the secular histories of this region during the final days of the kingdom of Judah.  But the Bible itself notes that during these last days, Judah was invaded and humbled three times by foreign powers, and that at the last, those who held Jerusalem resisted until "...the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.  Then the city was broken into..." (2 Kings 25:3-4).  In other words, there were people in Judah who were willing to fight the inevitable, even if it meant a fight to the death.  That means that there was something they valued so much that the loss of the thing valued was to them a fate worse than death, even though they must have known that they were going to lose.

And this willingness to fight to the death to maintain a cause that is both immoral and losing made me think of other instances in history in which humans have chosen to fight for such causes.  There is the obvious case of the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, a destruction which resulted from the rebellion of Jewish ethno-nationalists against the Roman Empire.  But there is also the case of Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945, in which the Wehrmacht chose to fight to the death rather than lose an identity which had been carefully constructed for them by the rulers of their society and which made sense only within the context of that society.  (Side note: did you know that the motto of the Wehrmacht was "Gott mit uns" - that is, "God with us"?) And there is the example of the last days of both Rome and Byzantium.  The fall of the Byzantine empire is noteworthy, as the decline of Byzantium was a long time in the making.  The Byzantine emperors had focused for so long on infighting to maintain themselves as the top dogs in their empire that they had failed to notice that the world was changing around them while their empire was weakening.  Nearly a century before their final fall, one of their emperors was arrested in Venice for outstanding debts incurred by hiring Crusader mercenaries in an attempt to recapture lost territory.  (You might say that he nearly went broke trying to Make Byzantium Great Again.)  During its last years, the Byzantine empire could only watch helplessly as its enemies obtained the most advanced military technology of the day - namely, devices capable of shooting large projectiles by means of gunpowder.  These devices (cannons, to be precise) were the decisive factor in the fall of Constantinople, in which the last Byzantine emperor fought to the death.

Which brings me to the present day, in which those who cling to the hope of their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else on earth are beginning to fall on hard times.  I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and the regime he represents and of which he is a chief symptom.  Consider these facts:

• The United States has lost its place among the top ten most innovative countries in the world.  This is due to decades of underinvestment in education at all levels in this country.
• The United States has seriously begun to lose intellectual capital from this country, as smart foreign nationals (and some smart native-born Americans) are choosing either to stay away, or to relocate to other countries.  (See this and this.)  These are the results of a certain American brand of xenophobia/racism combined with longstanding cuts in funding for basic research.  Continued American racism and hostility toward anything Chinese is not helping this trend.
• Speaking of China, by most accounts, Donald Trump has lost the trade war he started.  (As an aside, for those members of the global Far Right who were hoping that Russia could return the world to where it was several decades ago, it appears that Russia has lost its recent oil price war with Saudi Arabia.  In losing that war, it has lost far more in the process.)
• Because of Trump's blunders and malignant stupidity in his response to the coronavirus threat, the office of the Presidency (and with it the entire Executive Branch of the Federal Government) is losing its relevance in shaping American national life, as governors of states team up with each other to provide leadership for the good of their citizens without consulting Trump.  (See this also.)
• Speaking again of coronavirus, the United States has decisively lost its former place as global leader and coordinator of global crisis response, as over twenty nations (including the most powerful nations of Europe) have publicly met via videoconference this past week to begin coordination of a global response to the coronavirus pandemic.  (So much, by the way, for Russian hopes of fracturing the world order for its own benefit!)  The United States was not invited to the call.  (See this also.)  Note also that these nations have thrown their full support behind the World Health Organization - counter to the wishes of Mr. Trump.  This makes it very likely that effective remedies to the coronavirus pandemic will not be produced by the United States.
• According to some reports, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose a significant portion of its value vis-a-vis other currencies over the next several months.  This is partly the result of government-mandated corporate bailouts (pushed by Trump and the Republican establishment) that have helped corporations prop up stock prices without creating any new actual value in the American economy.

Are we here in the "most powerful nation on earth" about to lose much of what we hold near and dear - especially the intangible psychic construct of ourselves?  And how do people react to the loss of an idealized grandiose self and of the belief system that props up that self?   In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance - the experience of having reality contradict deeply cherished beliefs - and the ways in which the brain of the person being contradicted tries to adapt.  One of the most perverse adaptations is to double down on the belief that has just been contradicted by reality.  Our President is succeeding in making himself and this nation irrelevant.  Will the members of Trump's base respond to the complete moral and intellectual failure of their champion by injecting themselves with bleach?

A Wolf's Fear Of The Future

As I think about this present time, I am reminded of special days which I have grown to dislike over the years.  One of those special days is, oddly enough, Christmas.  Don't get me wrong - I am all for people taking time out of the year to celebrate the birth of Christ.  What I choke on is being barraged by holiday music and holiday shopping advertisements from the day after Halloween until the day after New Year's.  Another holiday I am not too fond of is Halloween (although I make sure to dress as a grown-up every year).

But the day which I have come to despise most of all in the United States is Election Day.  Indeed, one of the most annoying aspects of life in the USA just now is the fact that we seem to be in a never-ending election season designed to produce maximal angst and fear among those who have to live through it.  A particularly vexing element of this is having to cut through the games played by wolves who want to bury their real agenda behind a bunch of non-issues.  Today's post will attempt to clarify the real issues at stake in the national elections, at least, as I see them.

Many of those who are campaigning for Donald Trump claim that a Trump presidency would bring world peace by ending American neocon attempts to expand American power throughout the world.  Some of these people seek to paint Hillary Clinton as some sort of war criminal, either because some American operatives died at Benghazi after the U.S. had overthrown the lawful government of Gaddafi, or because Ms. Clinton had a personal Gmail account while she was Secretary of State.  (If having a personal email account is a crime, you may as well throw many of us in jail, because we too have personal email accounts in addition to our work accounts.)  Indeed, there are many mouthpieces trying by every possible means to make Mr. Trump palatable enough to get enough votes to win the Presidency.  (Some of these people have actually tried to use the angle that he is "the lesser of two evils."  They forget that by saying this they are admitting that he is evil.)

But if we take Mr. Trump at face value - especially concerning the statements and speeches which won him the Republican nomination - we see the real motive behind the Trump candidacy, and behind the efforts of the American right wing over the last decades.  These efforts are coming to a head now, in 2016.  For the central issue is the survival of white supremacy and First World hegemony.  Trump and his supporters (along with the Murdoch and Breitbart media empires and American evangelical media) believe that this supremacy and hegemony are in mortal danger of being swept away, especially in the United States.  Thus the candidacy of Trump represents a last-ditch attempt to stop the clock, or better yet, to reverse the clock of world history and to bring the 1950's back as a permanent state of world and national affairs.  The 1950's hold special appeal for these people because these were the days in which white America dominated the world and Americans oppressed whomever they wanted to, without any fear of consequences or resistance.  Americans who enjoyed the privileges of the 1950's grew to believe that they would never have a need for politeness, compromise, consensus, respect of differences, or the need to work harmoniously with others.  And they even remade God into their own image (or for a while, as it seemed), as the God who "gave us this great land and promised us that we should rule the world!"

This has been the real agenda of the Right for a long time.  This is the real agenda of the Right at this present time.  This is what is at stake in the current election.  And on a certain level, this agenda is not only national, but international in scope, although on the international level, there are some differences.  (How many of you know that the far-right movements now at work in Europe are partially financed by Russia?  See this also.  And Russia is financing Trump.)  On the international level, the agenda morphs into an effort to maintain the hegemony of the First World over the rest of the earth, by attempting to arrive at a gentleman's agreement over who is allowed to exercise control over particular "spheres of influence".  The gentleman's agreement is then paid for at the expense of the nonwhite majority world, who get to enjoy continuing to be carved up by First World "spheres of influence" while being excluded from the concentrations of wealth which the nations of the First World have amassed by robbing everyone else blind.

The trouble with establishing such an agenda is that the factors which would cause such an agenda to succeed are now changing very rapidly.  As far as the United States, the most recent census data shows that by 2020, the majority of children in the United States will be nonwhite.  From 2011 onward, the majority of births in the United States each year have been nonwhite.  Moreover, many of these children are multiracial.  And they do not have the same agenda as the media outlets whose mouthpieces constantly demonize them as "terrorists," "heathen," "criminals" or "savages."  They don't care about Benghazi or emails.  They (and their parents) just want to live their lives in peace.  But because the current masters of American society continue to engage in conversations which the future majority population doesn't care about, the current masters of America risk becoming irrelevant in very short order.  This translates to a loss of power, if by power one means the power to bully, to oppress, to rob, to dominate, to impose oneself and one's culture on others.

The same trends are at work in Europe, which is why many European far-right groups have arisen to try to stop this process.  It could also be argued that this is a motivation for the Russian intervention in Syria.  Don't get me wrong - I think that the attempt by the West to overthrow yet another country should have been stopped.  However, based on things I have learned and sources I have read over the last several months, I don't believe the Russians intervened out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather, to stop the influx of people considered nonwhite into Europe (and potentially, into Russia).

Trump supporters have the misguided hope that perhaps he can reverse the loss of white supremacy in the U.S. - perhaps by a massive increase in police shootings of unarmed black Americans, or perhaps by wholesale, indiscriminate deportation of anyone who looks foreign or has a non-English last name, even if they were born in the U.S.  (Such deportations have happened before in U.S. history, by the way.)  But there is yet another trend at work which cannot be stopped by any political leader on earth.  And that trend is the continued impoverishment and decline of the global industrial economy owned and controlled by the nations of the First World.  For that decline is driven inexorably by the depletion of the resources needed to make that economy run.  Global production of all petroleum products is now past peak.  Coal production is about to peak, if it has not already.  The same is true of many other resources.  This also translates to a loss of power on the part of those who were formerly dominant.  How will the formerly powerful respond to the impending loss of their power?  Their response will show whether they have learned to become decent people or whether they are still wolves.

In closing, I will mention the church service I attended today.  It was at a Vietnamese church which shares a church building with a Hispanic congregation and a Karen (Myanmar/Thai) congregation.  This Vietnamese congregation held a joint Vacation Bible School with their Hispanic brethren this past summer.  Their youth groups have also had joint worship services together.  A couple of Christmases ago, I visited this church and heard some of the Vietnamese children singing Feliz Navidad.  I have also seen some of the Mexican members of the Hispanic church attending the Vietnamese Nativity service.  Today, the Vietnamese pastor was preaching out of Romans 12:6-8, and he was talking about how there is tremendous diversity in humanity.  He also mentioned that in the Body of Christ, that diversity is part of a unity.  (I was also able to see his sermon notes on a church member's iPad, and in his notes the pastor had alluded to the great evil of trying to persecute each other over our differences.)  The pastor and his congregation are not terrorists or criminals, but they have learned how to get along with others and how to be a blessing to others.  Why is it so hard for mainstream America to learn this lesson?  Could it be that America is infected by a terminal case of narcissism?

A June Commentary on the Flux of Election-Year Events

I noticed this week that someone posted a recent comment on my post, "The Breakup of Pathological Spaces."  I also noticed two other things: first, that my site traffic has recently gone through the roof, and second, that my commenter made a few violations of my comment policy.  The first violation was in posting anonymously.  (Normally, I don't publish anonymous comments.  Google ID or equivalent is required.)  The second was in throwing some profanity into his (her?) comment.  I only publish comments that are written in family-friendly language.  Call me old-fashioned, or a "prude", but I have my reasons, and no one has been able to talk me out of them.

However, when someone puts up a spirited disagreement with one of my posts, I am strongly tempted to give them a hearing, even if they violate my policies.  So I have decided to reproduce Mr. (Mrs.?  Ms.?) Anonymous' comment below (with some minor edits):

"A rather foolish contortion of NPD to fit your "America so evil" narrative. On another note, calling what happened in Orlando a false flag is disgraceful to us gays (yes I am gay, and a liberty-lover just the same), I really should be commenting on that post but alas its to the same end. How can you honestly imply American culture is at-large more narcissistic, more sociopathic than the self-righteous dogmatism of Islam, which could [care] less about the freedoms of women, gays, any free thinking person, of freedom of spirit and heart? Sure the power elites ripping the world to shreds are sociopathic slime, but western individualism is not simply narcissism. Collectivism is at the heart of all governmental evil in this world. Baffles me to think people are still defending muslims who hide their immorality, sadism and vitriol behind their [garbage] religion, playing the victim at every corner until they're in every corner of western civilization because of the white man's pathological on..."

(Here Blogger cut off the rest of the comment.  Anonymous, whoever you are, if you want to finish your thought, feel free to submit the rest of what you wanted to say - subject to my comment policy, of course!)

But for now, I have a few answers to the comment from Anonymous.  As to the assertion I have made that mainstream American culture is increasingly narcissistic and sociopathic, just look at how widely the ideals of selfishness are preached nowadays - through the mouths of entire political parties (Republicans and parties to the right of them); through mainstream American evangelicalism which venerates predatory capitalism, American exceptionalism and white supremacy; and  a "press" which is no longer free, but wholly owned by a handful of sick rich people (Rupert Murdoch being one of them) who want to reproduce their disease in as much of their audience as possible.  (Ever heard of Ayn Rand?)

As for the assertion that calling Orlando a false flag is disrespectful to the victims, there are people who for years have called 9/11 a false flag, yet these people meant no disrespect to those victims.  False flag operations do hurt people - that I acknowledge.  Yet the attempt to investigate the question of why a thing happened must rest on a truthful examination of facts, because it is the body of facts which determines why things happen and who the perpetrators are.  Asking "Why" is not disrespectful to the victims, nor is it disrespectful to pay careful attention to who benefits from a thing that has happened or what use (political and otherwise) is being made of that thing.  Your statement about being disgraceful is a non sequitur.

Lastly, regarding Islam, let me tell you something.  I am a Biblical Christian, and not a Muslim.  I will never convert to Islam.  However, I think that Islam has been set up as a convenient scapegoat for decades, complete with its convenient stereotype of the typical Muslim as some emotional, crazed, violent fanatic who goes around killing people solely because he "hates their freedoms!!!!!"  You are a self-professed homosexual, and yet it is ironic that you are spouting the same sort of stereotyped cliches that the American Religious Right spouted after 9/11.  (Here are two books to check out: The Blood of the Moon, and Islam Unveiled.  The latter book must have set a world speed record for being written and published within a few short months after the 9/11 attacks.  (It was published on January 1, 2002!)  Rather odd, considering that for a long time, the typical time to publish a book from the finishing of the author's manuscript was two years.)

A closer look at the reality of Islam in the world today - if you actually care to take a look - will reveal a much more diverse body of practitioners than you may have realized.  You will understand that there are divisions within Islam that are very similar in many ways to the denominations of Christianity.  You would also have discovered a host of Islamic countries where the values of community and hospitality are so deeply ingrained in the culture that Western visitors are blown away by the kindnesses they receive.  (Check out some bicycle touring blogs if you don't believe me - like "To Catch A Rainbow (Somewhere In Iran)", "Iran Alborz Mountains", and TravellingTwo.)

Anonymous, you've been living in a toxic bubble of American propaganda for too long.  Step away from the Kool-Aid, please...

For the rest of my readers, my next blog post will describe the ways in which the campaign of Donald Trump has been using the Orlando mass shooting.

The Night Terror Of A Multipolar World

8-22-2023: I have decided to pull this post.  When I wrote it back in 2015, I was still under the influence of information sources which were actually created by the Russian government for the purpose of spreading misinformation and propaganda.  As the events of the last few years have abundantly shown, Russia has turned out to be a narcissistic, imperialist, piece-of-garbage regime led by a thieving little man in a bunker.  Those Russians who truly desire to be decent people have renounced that regime and its leader.  Because in 2015 I was writing under the influence of false information, this post which I originally wrote will therefore need to be revised.  Once the revision is completed, I will re-publish the post.

An Unexpected End to Uninvited Guests?

Update - 9 March 2020: This post should be taken with a grain of salt.  I wrote it during a time in which most of the West was being flooded with propaganda from Russian sources such as The Vineyard of the Saker, Russia Today, and the blog of Dmitry Orlov, to name a few.  These sources were created as part of a larger Russian campaign of disinformation designed to fragment and fracture the West in order to bring the fractured pieces under Russian influence.  This was in accordance with the geopolitical strategy of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin.  Unfortunately I drank some of their Kool-Aid, but I have now detoxed, as can be seen in my much more recent post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance."  Everything the Putin regime has touched has turned to garbage.  One of his garbage deeds was to help install a racist, narcissistic, idiot President into the United States government in 2016.
 
Graduate school is starting again, and I am enrolled in coursework on top of working nearly full time.  Therefore, I can't really do a lot of the research and analysis which has typically gone into many of my blog posts.  I can only formulate opinions based on cursory glances at things of interest.

One thing that has caught my eye over the last four years is the Syrian "crisis", which was manufactured by the United States and its allies in order to secure and maintain American economic hegemony in the Middle East.  It had nothing to do with "human rights violations" or "democracy."  The results of the insurgency which the United States fomented and financed have been ISIS, a partially wrecked country, and a refugee crisis which has exploded into Europe.  The refugee crisis has evoked much hand-wringing in the West, along with the pointing of Western fingers at the Syrians as a nation and a people and accusing them of not being able to manage their own affairs.  This has also been accompanied by the usual round of horrified xenophobia at the thought of pure Europeans having to extend neighborly hospitality to people with dark skin and dark hair from the Middle East.  (Some of that hand-wringing and xenophobia have crossed the Atlantic to the United States.)

But now Russia is rapidly building a military presence in Syria, to the tune of thousands of troops and large amounts of tanks and warplanes.  I don't know what the Russians are planning, and they haven't volunteered to tell me.  (Only fools openly discuss their strategy.)  But what if Russia (along with China, Iran and Iraq) is about to solve the problem of "uninvited guests" in Europe by kicking uninvited "guests" out of Syria?  What if the result of such an action is the immediate cessation of the current refugee "crisis"?  (If outside interests are stopped from further tearing apart the Syrian homeland, why would Syrians choose any longer to be refugees?)  What if a further result is another huge step toward the complete loss of the legitimacy of the West, and particularly of the United States?  What if the United States begins to learn that you can't loot other people's countries and wreck other people's homelands without consequences showing up at your doorstep?

The Demise of The Right Cross

Now we come again to a theme which we have explored in previous posts on this blog, namely, the role and purpose of American civil religion in American narcissism. This week's post will compare that religion with the thing for which it is often mistaken in this country, namely Biblical Christianity. I will be quoting a fair amount of Scripture, and I'll get a bit theologically “heavy” at times, so if some of you feel like bailing out on this post, I'll not take it personally. But hey, you've come along for the ride this far, so why not ride a little more with me? (Some may wonder how my posts of the last several months are related to the original theme of this blog. I'll get around to explaining that sooner or later.)

Let me begin by quoting the New American Standard translation of 1 Peter 1:1 – “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who reside as aliens, scattered...” The King James Bible renders the verse thus: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia,...(etc)” In my opinion, the King James rendering is rather sleepy. The wording of the New American Standard translation is here more evocative: “To those who reside as aliens, scattered...” In other words, a chief characteristic of those whom Peter is addressing is that in the earthly places where these people reside, they reside as aliens – as a people apart, a culture apart. This is a chief characteristic of such people wherever on earth they reside. They are “expatriados” (Spanish, RV 1960 translation), “extranjeros” (foreign, alien) (1 Pedro 2:11), “пришельцам, рассеянным” (1-е Петра 1:1). Among the meanings of рассеянным are “dispersed,” and “broadcast” (as seed). This lines up quite nicely with the way the Lord characterizes His people as seed sown in diverse places in His parable in Matthew 13:24-43, and the way in which the lifestyle of the Lord's people is to be a declaration that they are strangers and pilgrims on earth, as stated in Hebrews 11:13-16.

Thus, those who call themselves Christians are to live as strangers in whatever society they happen to be embedded. They are to seek a Kingdom which is to come, having become citizens of a Kingdom which is not from here (from earth, that is) as it says in John 18:36. This is how the early Church conducted itself in the Roman Empire in the days from the first century until the day that Augustine conferred earthly secular political power on the Church. Note that I did not say that the Church is to have no effect on the society in which it is embedded. Rather, the Church is to have a profound effect, realized by the active doing of good in the larger society.

But according to Scripture, what the Church is not called to do is to try to build an earthly kingdom, using earthly, temporal power or laws to create a “Christian” nation. There are reasons for that, some of which I explored in a post I wrote many moons ago. I'll expand on one of those reasons in today's post.

If the Church is not called to create earthly “Christian” kingdoms by earthly, secular, temporal means, why do so many well-placed American evangelicals insist on trying to “baptize” Uncle Sam? Moreover, where did they get the notion that the United States of America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles? And are those who say they want to “bring the nation back to Christian ideals” saying that they want to take us “back” to a place where we've never been?

If you try to find the roots of the “Christian” principles on which this nation was founded, you will find that a fair number of the Founding Fathers were not orthodox fundamentalist Christians.  Thomas Jefferson is a notable example of a non-fundamentalist, and late in his life he published a book titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, in which he removed all references to the supernatural or the Divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In fact, Jefferson valued Christ only for His teachings and believed that the writers of the New Testament were ignorant and superstitious men. Jefferson was also on friendly terms with Joseph Priestly, the founder of Unitarianism.  A solid majority of the Founding Fathers were against the use of the state to impose any religious creed, dogma or observance on the citizens of the United States.  (See this and this.)  Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, and a significant minority of the generals and statesmen of early America were Freemasons.

It can thus be argued that in the early United States, there was very little effort made to cast this nation as a “Christian” nation. There are a few notable exceptions when it comes to those whom the nation wished to venerate as heroes. For instance, a number of larger-than-life stories about George Washington were the fabrications of a man named Mason Weems , whose account of Washington has been thoroughly debunked by a number of historians. It can also be argued that the United States of the 1800's was certainly “Christ-haunted” (but in a way that even Flannery O'Connor  might not have imagined), yet certainly not Christian in the main. Later in the 19th century, there were efforts by denominational leaders to make the government and tokens of the United States more explicitly “Christian.” Thus, during the Civil War, the words, “In God We Trust” were added to American currency, among other minor victories.

But a Princeton historian argues that it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that religious activists in the United States really began a concerted push to cast the United States as a “Christian” nation. In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Kevin Kruse  argues that the notion of the United States as a Christian nation founded on Christian principles was the product of an intense marketing and propaganda effort on the part of big businessmen and government figures from the 1930's onward, to produce a perception in a nation suffering the effects of the greed of these authority figures that patriotism was the same thing as godliness. They used religion as a weapon to stave off the welfare state (and to protect the wealthy from having to give up some of their riches to help the poor). In the process they enlisted prominent religious figures such as Billy Graham and prominent denominations whose de facto interest lay in maintaining a certain social and political status quo.

In the process, American fundamentalism (and the American evangelicalism into which it later evolved) became a sort of loosely organized, fractious, yet de facto state church. This state church performed (and still performs) many of the same functions historically performed by state churches in European history, namely, to bless, sanction and promulgate the imperial ambitions of the secular state that supports it. (You may not know this, but during World War 1, religious leaders in both Germany and England goaded their populations to slaughter – Germany with its “Gott strafe England!” and the Anglican Church with its calls for a “holy war.”)

As with all state churches, therefore, the current American evangelical church is called “Christian,” but does not look like 1 Peter 1:1. (If you bring me an animal that can't climb trees, but does howl at emergency vehicles, lifts its hind leg when relieving itself, barks and chases postal workers, should I believe you if you tell me it's a cat?) The American evangelical church has become merely another weapon of those who strive for secular earthly power. As a young adult, I once read a science fiction novel by Larry Niven in which one of two men in a brawl picked up a cat and attempted to use it as a weapon against the other man by swinging it at the other man's head. So Christianity and the Bible are being used today in the United States by people who want to maintain a last vestige of earthly supremacy, as they were used to build that supremacy and hegemony in the first place – sometimes by missionaries who were spies and servants of the earthly empires which sent them (see this and this and this for instance), and sometimes by missionaries who preached to conquered natives the duty of turning the other cheek and of not looking for rewards in this earthly life while the missionaries celebrated every holiday of their home countries in which their home countries refused to turn the other cheek.

To see the way in which American evangelicalism has become a dog whistle for those who seek earthly supremacy, we need look no further than the most recent evangelical scandal which has blown up like ordnance cooking off in a fire. Let me introduce you to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their nineteen children. They are a wealthy white family who are part of a couple of rather wacky “Christian” movements in the United States, one of which is the Quiverfull movement and the other of which is the “Christian Patriarchy” movement. I'll leave it to you to look up the information on these movements, but I'll summarize them as movements led by men who want to restore white male privilege and domination over family life, and ultimately over both the United States and the world – “all for Jesus, of course!” Jim Bob is also actively involved in Arkansas state politics.

One characteristic of the leaders of such movements is that they always hold themselves and their families up as models of people who have done everything right, who have followed all the rules, and who therefore have earned the right to demand that the rest of us submit to them. So Jim Bob and Michelle used their family and their religious profession as a weapon, to the point of insinuating themselves onto network television with a “reality” TV series called “19 Kids and Counting,” which began airing on 19 September 2008. The only trouble with the series (and with their perfect image) is that in 2002 and 2003, their eldest son Josh molested (or is that sexually assaulted?) a number of underage girls, and that the Duggar family covered this up with the help of the Arkansas state police. Josh also sued the Arkansas DHS in 2007 to block their investigation of these incidents. And in 2013, Josh became the executive director of the legislative action arm of the Family Research Council, a conservative “Christian” organization founded by James Dobson.

Now I don't intend to get on a soap box to denounce Josh Duggar's sin. We are all sinful. But what really makes me angry is the way in which this hypocrite and his hypocritical family continue to try to use their religion as a weapon in what is actually very much like a barroom brawl, just as the cat was used in the story I mentioned. The de facto state church of America is a hypocritical entity composed of people who use religion to try to secure earthly dominion for themselves, yet they can't keep their own rules. They love the doctrine of justification by faith when they can apply it to themselves, but they reject the need of personal repentance in the same way that children will sometimes refuse meat and vegetables in order to chow down on dessert. But they are quite willing to shove all sorts of rules and obligations down the throats of the people over whom they wish to exercise dominion – among whom are all nonwhite people and all women.

The trouble for them is that they are now in decline.  (See this and this.) Their leaders would say that this is because they haven't been effective in communicating their message, but they might want to consider that the reason is that they don't practice what the Good Book preaches. They are not the salt of the earth. They are unwilling to repent of their own greed and selfishness; therefore, they are unable to call a nation to repentance over its greed and selfishness – greed and selfishness manifested in oppression of the poor, the foreign-born, the non-white, the citizens of other nations; oppression also manifested in the endless calls to war so that the United States can “liberate” property (land and natural resources) which rightfully belongs to people other than Americans while destroying the earth with its outlandish per capita consumption. In short, American evangelicals have become distasteful people to be around. Thus their children are choosing to separate from them and their religion.

But this does not mean that the true Church is in decline or in trouble, or that Christianity is about to disappear from the United States. Rather, the immigrant church is quite strong here. And immigrant Christians, especially those from poorer countries, are much quicker than many American evangelicals to remember what it means to be a stranger and a pilgrim. Therefore, they have much to teach us. One immigrant Christian, a man named Soong-Chan Rah, wrote a book with a rather provocative title, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity.  His book caused a bit of narcissistic injury among some American evangelical leaders, but that's okay, they'll get over it.

If you are thinking of going to church tomorrow, you might therefore try out an immigrant church. Many of them have headphones and translators for English-speaking visitors. The Hispanic churches are friendly and welcoming, as are the Karen (Myanmar) churches. The Vietnamese churches can also be quite welcoming. The Ethiopian (Oromo) churches are good, although they can be very, VERY LOUD!!! (Dude, step away from the mic!) If you go to a Russian or Slavic church, they are more formal, so be sure to dress in your Sunday best, because for them, Church Is Serious. When you go, be sure to listen for the differences in worldview which exist between their preachers and the vast majority of American evangelical preachers. You'll be intrigued.

The Locus of Instability

After I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that I had completely neglected three men who comprise what is quite possibly the strongest example in recent memory of provoking national narcissistic rage. I am thinking of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. These three men were responsible for leaking (Manning and Snowden) and publishing (Assange) national secrets of the United States and Great Britain related to the efforts of those nations to rule the world. Manning blew the whistle on American war crimes committed in the name of the “War On Terror.” Assange had the temerity to publish the documents leaked by Manning. Snowden revealed the existence of the “Five Eyes” spy program by which the United States, in conjunction with the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, conducted electronic espionage and cyber-sabotage against almost every non-English-speaking government on earth.

These men did nothing worse than tell the truth about the aims, motives, and policies of the people in power in the United States and its “allies.” Yet the truth they told, combined with the response from those in power, reveals much about the pathology of those in power. In the aftermath of their revelations, these men became the targets of the sort of rage that narcissists express when they've been exposed, after their carefully constructed image of perfection and sainthood has been punctured. In this case, ad hominem attacks (“These men are traitors! Enemies of freedom! Sympathizers with terrorists!”) were combined with ad baculum attacks: “And as soon as we get our hands on these men, we will throw them IN JAIL!!! FOREVER!!!”

The truth they told also reveals the way the rest of the world is viewed by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States and its English-speaking allies. It appears that in the eyes of the “Five Eyes,” there is a “hierarchy of whiteness and privilege.” It is thus not surprising that the “Five Eyes” should watch China, Latin America (where, for instance, the NSA spied on the Brazilian oil firm Petrobras), and the Arab nations. But the “Five Eyes” were also gazing on the citizens and governments of Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Germany. What was their motivation? I believe it was to gather intelligence in order to guide U.S. attempts to open the economies of these countries (and of the European Union as a whole) to capture by American and British-owned multinational corporations in the name of free-market neoliberalism. From a business standpoint, such a goal makes sense. But what kind of pathology makes a person want to own and control all the economies of the world? The revelations of NSA spying showed the non-English European nations in yet one more way that they were not the “golden children” of the pathological family headed by the United States.  The white privilege promulgated by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States is therefore not even for all white nations. Rather, the holders of that privilege want the rest of us to regard it as the sole possession of the English-speaking white nations. 

And within the United States, the masters of white privilege are unwilling to share it even with all of the white citizens of the United States.

When one considers the expressions of the “white privilege” being pushed in this country, one can see clearly why that privilege is not intended even for all white people in this country. Consider the “patriarchy” movement now being pushed by many conservative, Republican-leaning, white male evangelical leaders. Or consider the violent underpinnings of the “men's rights movement.”  Or consider the “manosphere” which harbors such movements, and which provided inspiration to Eliot Rodger's shooting spree in 2014. (See this and this.)  The manosphere is also the source of death threats against women who have publicly objected to the portrayal of violence against women in online video games.   Consider also the effect of Republican support for gun rights on domestic violence in this country , or Republican obstructionism in drafting domestic violence legislation for the military, or the conservative talking heads and politicians who want to repeal female suffrage. I could go on and on.

In other words, it has become quite clear that the holders of white privilege in this country intend that the chief holders of that privilege be white, English-speaking men. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are very frightened and angry now at the emergence of a multipolar world in which one person or group will not be able to lord themselves over another, but in which people will have to rely on politeness in order to get on with their fellow human beings - even within their own homes. One recent expression of that anger is the Tea Party, “a reflection of enormous anger, primarily of white conservative men. They are older, better educated, and economically better off than most Americans...” Many of the outbursts of violent or threatening rage among white Americans are a reflection of “whites' fears that this country and the world are on the verge of losing its Anglo-Saxon domination.”  (Clio's Psyche, June 2011)  

The formal expressions of that rage and fear come from the wealthy and the politically connected, whereas the trashiest expressions come from people like the man whose picture adorns this week's post. Either way, the voices of that rage and fear are not only white, but overwhelmingly male. They long for the "return" of a world which never quite existed, a world in which they imagine they could act like kings without regard to the effect of that kingship on others.  Those who subscribe to the brand of white privilege I have described want the heavy costs of that privilege to be borne, not just by non-white people, or non-English speakers, but by their own women and children. This is hardly the way to construct an enduring society.  It is, however, a good way to construct a society that self-destructs.

Help for the Disheveled

Imagine with me for a few minutes. Close your eyes and picture two people who wake up in the morning and make nearly identical mistakes in the process of getting ready to leave their homes. Person X therefore traipses out of his front door with both shoes on the wrong feet and both shoelaces untied, one sock missing, his fly unzipped, his shirt inside-out and buttoned up crooked, and a smudge of ketchup on one cheek. Person Y is in nearly the same condition, except that while he managed to put on both socks, his pants are on backwards, his shirttail is hanging out and he has a smudge of peanut butter on one cheek. Now imagine that a neighbor sees each person and says to each, “Yo dude! You look funny. Go back in your house and check yourself out in a mirror.” Lastly, imagine that one of the poorly dressed people is otherwise normal and the other is a clinical narcissist. How will each person react to the ungentle yet constructive criticism delivered to them?

I think it's safe to say that neither person will particularly like being criticized. Yet the more normal of the two persons will most likely respond constructively. He will be more likely to ask, “What do you mean, I look funny?” In other words, he will seek to know the details behind his neighbor's statement. As the neighbor elaborates on the pants, the sock, the shoelaces, etc., the more healthy person will beat a hasty retreat into his house for some serious grooming. And he will appreciate the favor his neighbor did for him in pointing out that he was not quite ready to be seen in public.

As for the narcissist, he is “extremely sensitive to personal criticism and extremely critical of other people. They think that they must be seen as perfect or superior or infallible, next to god-like...or else they are worthless. There's no middle ground of ordinary humanity for narcissists...Thus, no matter how gently you suggest that they might do better to change their ways or get some help, they will react in one of two equally horrible ways: they will attack or they will withdraw.” (Ashmun, 1998-2008). Thus the clinical narcissist will likely look at the criticism as an intolerable injury to his grandiose self. If he attacks (and far too often, such people do respond by attacking), it may well be a baseless, wildly over-the-top ad hominem attack which totally disregards the factualness of his neighbor's comment. (In extreme cases, it can turn into an ad baculum attack, summarized as “I'll beat you up if you criticize me!”)

This is a real shame for the narcissist, because all constructive criticism contains valuable information. Moreover, all people and entities composed of people need evaluation and constructive criticism from time to time (indeed, on a daily basis). Both we and the social units we create are imperfect, after all. As the Good Book says, “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life...” (Proverbs 6:23) By rejecting the reproof and attacking the reprovers, narcissists miss out on the healthy correction and improvement that results from listening to valuable information.

In the last several posts, we have considered the United States as an narcissistic entity – especially the public persona projected by the leaders, the wealthy and the media of this country. It is not surprising that we should expect the signs of clinical narcissism in the way this country and its most influential spokespersons have responded to criticism over the last decade and a half.

Some of that criticism has been scholarly, fact-based, and well-researched. I am thinking now of a long paper I discovered this past week, titled, “Symposium on the Psychology of American Exceptionalism.” The paper was published in June 2011, and in the table of contents are such provocative titles as, “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Exceptionalism in Foreign Policy,” “Extreme American Exceptionalism: Narcissism and Paranoia,” “Puritan Roots of American Exceptionalism,” “American Exceptionalism is Not Benign,” and “Delusion in Foreign Policy.” The paper also examines the unwillingess of the United States to acknowledge the limits of its power, and the stresses placed on the American psyche by the beginnings of the unraveling of that power.

The organization which published that paper is Clio's Psyche, whose website states that “Our mission is to enlarge and disseminate the related paradigms of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, psychobiography, and of psychological history.” In short, they “...[apply]...psychology, in its broadest sense, or psychoanalyusis in a specific sense, to the study of the past.” The staff at Clio's Psyche are well-qualified to undertake such a study, with an editorial board consisting of several psychology PhD's and at least one person with an EdD who also have a solid grasp of history.

The paper I have cited delves the dysfunctional character of American narcissism and expounds some likely consequences of that narcissism. Yet I can guarantee you that most Americans won't read it even if they hear about it. Many of them will, however, go to the theater to watch American Sniper. This is an example of withdrawing from constructive criticism.

But what about the other narcissistic response, consisting of attack of critics? There has been an abundance of ad hominem attacks against America's critics over the last fifteen years – even though those critics had every right to criticize. However, I will consider only two critics, because they epitomize the nature of American attacks against any who criticize the U.S. The first critic is Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia. He is a member of the indigenous (non-European) Bolivian population, whose presidency instituted many policies designed to end exploitation of indigenous peoples, to prevent the privatization of Bolivian natural gas, and to more equitably distribute the country's wealth. He was also a vocal critic of U.S. policies in Latin America. As a result, the U.S. did all it could to brand him as a criminal, to manipulate Bolivian politics to expel him from power, and to cause the secession of wealthy parts of the country controlled by white Bolivians. The Bush Administration even attempted to use Peace Corps volunteers in Bolivia to spy out that nation's vulnerabilities. However, it doesn't seem that anyone in the U.S. government ever tried to evaluate the validity of Morales' criticisms.

The other example - one of the best examples of U.S. ad hominem attacks against a critic - is the example of the good Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Pastor Emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Reverend Wright preached a sermon, titled, “Confusing God and Government,” at that church on the 13th of April in 2003. That sermon was heard by a large audience on that day; yet it's safe to say that that audience was not even one thousandth of the population of the United States, most of whose citizens did not even know of this sermon until Fox News and the campaign of Hillary Clinton turned part of it into a six second sound byte containing a now-famous invocation.

Let's talk about that invocation. Before we do, I want to talk about the proper use of the word “damn.” That word is typically regarded as profanity these days (one of the lightest “cuss words” in our now long-since-tarnished lexicon). But the original meaning of the word is to consign someone to the worst possible punishment. To damn a person is therefore much worse than condemning them to earthly capital punishment. This is why polite society has taught that that word must be used carefully, only in justified cases, and not indiscriminately – just as police should be (but often are not) careful in the use of firearms – not indiscriminately shooting unarmed people of color, for instance.

Reverend Wright's invocation was an invocation of damnation. Specifically, he said, “God damn America!” Was his invocation justified? That question was never asked by the critics from the American right wing in 2008, which is not surprising, given that that right wing is now trying to impose a belief in American exceptionalism as a litmus test to determine who is a good American. Instead, Wright was characterized as a hater, a racist, whose criticisms ought to be therefore taken as invalid as a matter of course, no questions asked.

But let us examine the elements of Reverend Wright's invocation now. His invocation consists of three parts:

• God damn America for killing innocent people!
• God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human
• God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme! 

 

Has America done these things? Yes, yes, and yes! Is there a judgment for these things? Based on the things I've read, I say Yes! According to the Good Book, the ultimate judgment will be damnation. But of the final outworking of that damnation, no mortal now alive has any first-hand experiential knowledge. Therefore, I will not say much more about it. However, I would like to comment on the beginnings of damnation, namely those consequences which begin the moment a person begins to choose evil, the consequences encapsulated by such Scriptures as “The wages of sin is death,” “The soul that sins shall die,” and “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap.”

The consideration of these consequences involves much more than easy, careless, lazy moralizing. Rather, the consideration of these consequences involves the careful observation of the ways in which invisible spiritual realities begin to manifest themselves in concrete, physical daily life in much the same way that invisible ionizing radiation affects living tissue. This observation takes an observer past the surface of life as reported by American mainstream media, leading instead to dry and dusty analyses, studies and reams of data describing the deterioration of the American body politic, the consequences this nation is reaping from having chosen inflexibly to be a certain kind of people. From the data one can see trends; from the data one can also find illustrative case studies. One particular case: we are now seeing the decompensation of George Zimmerman, the Florida Neighborhood Watch vigilante who shot an unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2012. Now it is coming out that Mr. Zimmerman has had a long history of violence, starting years before his murder of Trayvon, and including incidents where he punched the father of one of his girlfriends, threatened a motorist with a weapon in a road rage incident, and threatened a girlfriend with a shotgun. Now he's going to jail. But the authorities in Florida are treating him with a surprising amount of gentleness, and his lawyer is appealing to the public (and the judiciary) to treat him with gentleness in light of all he has been through. Who knows, maybe he will get out of a conviction and have further opportunities to terrorize everyone who crosses his path. And he will also have further opportunities to destroy himself.

As long as mainstream American society continues to give itself a pass and refuses to take constructive criticism on board, its member will continue to suffer the accelerating consequences of being a dysfunctional people. Looking at the ways in which mainstream America is now suffering, I have to say I'm rather comforted. Maybe I shouldn't be. But I've been really angry over the last several months. Now it seems that my prayers are being answered. Wright isn't the only one who has said “damn” lately.

But maybe, in spite of all I have said, there are those readers who are not yet willing to receive some constructive moral criticism concerning our "great" country. Let me take you straight to the Source then, and leave you with one last quote from the Good Book, from the Old Testament book of Zechariah, which says, “The word of the Lord came to Zechariah, saying, “Thus has the Lord of Hosts spoken, saying, ‘Execute true judgment, and show kindness and compassion every man to his brother. Don’t oppress the widow, nor the fatherless, the foreigner, nor the poor; and let none of you devise evil against his brother in your heart.’ But they refused to listen, and turned their backs, and stopped their ears, that they might not hear. Yes, they made their hearts as hard as flint, lest they might hear the law, and the words which the Lord of Hosts had sent by his Spirit by the former prophets. Therefore great wrath came from the Lord of Hosts. It has come to pass that, as he called, and they refused to listen, so they will call, and I will not listen,” said the Lord of Hosts...”

Look at this passage, then examine your history and the history of this nation, lest you find yourself one day entering Eternity with your shoes untied and on the wrong feet, one sock missing, your pants on backward with the fly unzipped, your shirt inside-out and buttoned up crooked, and a smudge of shame on your face.

When The Ferris Wheel Flies Apart

“Decompensation” is what happens when a narcissistic individual or entity is no longer able to maintain the grandiose self which is its chosen identity. The Anglo-American identity which the United States has constructed for itself is just such a “grandiose self”: a “chosen nation,” a “city on a hill,” “the greatest nation on earth” because it consists of a race “predestined” to supreme greatness by “Providence.” In the name of that “Providence” it has conquered the North American continent, nearly exterminating the original inhabitants in the process, and it has managed to subjugate most of the rest of the world. In that process, moreover, the privileged among the citizens of the United States have come to believe that they deserve the special privileges they enjoy, having been predestined to these privileges; and that the nations and peoples who have been subjugated “deserve” the treatment which this country has inflicted on them, being “predestined” to that treatment. Throughout its history, there have been spokesmen for this country who have boasted that the United States is a “Christian” nation, “one nation under God.” Yet U.S. treatment of other nations – especially non-European nations – has been anything but a model of the Golden Rule, embodying instead the slogan, “Do unto others before they do unto you.” Hence the need to invoke a Calvinist predestination to justify this country's treatment of other nations and peoples.

The identity which the U.S. has constructed is inherently unsustainable. It is now being threatened by forces beyond the control of this country and its privileged members. Some of those forces were identified in last week's post. The United States has become used to economic, political and military arrangements which allow four percent of the world's population to control almost all of the economic flows on this planet, and to enjoy over 40 percent of the world's resources. The rest of the world has for a long time regarded this a rather distasteful and burdensome arrangement, and has in the last few years begun to do something about it. Weekly – sometimes daily – new challenges to U.S. hegemony are now arising as nations seek to reassert control over their own affairs. The most recent contender is Greece, where the Syriza party, described as “far-left” by Western media, holds a lead over the ruling party days before the Greek general elections on the 25th of this month.  If the Syriza party gains a decisive number of seats in the Greek parliament, a Greek exit from the Eurozone would certainly be a possibility, as Syriza have made it clear that they want a drastic revision of economic austerity conditions imposed on them by the EU and the IMF. The beginning of a breakup of the EU would have serious implications for U.S. economic hegemony. Also, a number of European nations have been making noises within the last two weeks about breaking with the U.S. over the issue of sanctions against Russia.

But there is a more compelling reason than geopolitics for the unsustainability of the current American identity. This country has exhausted its base of many natural resources, just as the industrialized world has exhausted a critical mass of its natural resource base. The current and deepening depression in the price of oil, metals, and other commodities is a symptom of an anemic economy falling down after a period of overexertion. This fainting is a sign that the exertion was itself unsustainable. The German Energy Watch Group, which published supply outlook reports for oil, coal and uranium in 2007 and 2008, also published a comprehensive update to its forecasts in 2013. That update, titled, Fossil and Nuclear Fuels - The Supply Outlook, maintains that global production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2008, and that global extraction of all non-renewable energy sources will peak right around now. Concentrated energy sources are the lifeblood of an industrial economy, so the peak and decline in extraction means the inevitable decline of the global industrial economy. This means that a lot of people who were winners will now become losers; a lot of people who were used to being in control of things will lose control.

The various nations are being affected unevenly by this contraction, depending on whether they are producer nations who still have valuable concentrations of resources or importer nations who have largely used up their resources. The U.S. is an importer nation. A loss of hegemony by the U.S. at a time of energy and resource contraction means that U.S. consumers will increasingly find themselves cut off from access to remaining stocks of raw materials which exist in distant nations and are controlled by those nations. Those nations may be temporarily hurt by the current drop in demand for their materials, yet the fact that they can still produce things of value will enhance their long-term survival prospects compared to nations which import most of their resources and finished products. Thus the long-term standard of material wealth in a nation like the United States will inevitably and irreversibly decline.

What does this mean in plain language? This nation has built its identity as a “special and chosen people” on a foundation of having lots of stuff and being able to tell lots of people what to do. That identity is about to take a huge hit. When that happens, many of us will get to watch decompensation in action.

Of this decompensation, it has been written that “The stress of aging or illness and the attendant loss of beauty, strength, or cognitive function can undermine narcissistic fantasies of invulnerability and limitless power. It may lead to an empty, depleted collapse on the one hand or a frantic search for compensatory thrill-seeking on the other, both of which are described in the classic “midlife crisis”. Later-life crises, such as one experienced on the eve of retirement, also may reflect narcissistic pathology.” (See this and this.) In other words, the loss of ability to maintain a grandiose self provokes a crisis. What does that crisis look like? I am not a psychologist, and I don't usually make predictions, but I'd like to suggest a few possibilities.

I propose that there may be two phases to decompensation. Both phases are characterized by scapegoating and projection, but the nature of that scapegoating changes from the first phase to the next. In the first phase, scapegoating takes the form of “enemy creation” in order to justify not only the exploitation of groups or individuals targeted for exploitation, but also to distract from the dysfunctional dynamics experienced by those who are in long-term association with the narcissist. The scapegoating is an ever-present feature of the narcissist's interactions, but when his grandiosity is endangered, the scapegoating may kick into overdrive as the narcissist seeks a defense from the threat he perceives. This may well explain the evolution of the U.S. “War on Terror” from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the present day. The takeaway message of the “War on Terror” is that because the United States is a “special” nation, there are enemies out there who “hate our freedom” and want to attack us. This then becomes the primary focus of our attention, and we are trained to ignore our own dysfunctional treatment not only of others, but of the marginalized members of our own society. This also plays into two of the symptoms of narcissism described in the DSM-IV: “...believes that he or she is 'special' and unique...,” and “...believes that others are envious of him or her...”

In this first stage of decompensation, scapegoating then consists of “enemy creation” the purpose of which is to promote the cohesion of the dysfunctional group led by the narcissist, to mask the pain of the dysfunction experienced in the narcissist's pathological space, and to justify the exploitation of those who have things the narcissist wants to take, or who by their very existence threaten the narcissist's identity as the “fairest one of all.” I think this is what was behind the undeserved publicity surrounding the supposed North Korean hack of the computers of Sony Pictures over its release of “The Interview” – a movie about attempting to assassinate the leader of North Korea, a movie which was so technically and artistically bad that it earned a rating of only 52 percent from Rotten Tomatoes. Other examples include the inaccurate portrayal of people of color as largely criminal in the aftermath of the shootings of unarmed Black people in the U.S. last year, as well as the inaccuracies in media coverage of Libya and Syria prior to U.S. and NATO military action against these countries. And let's not forget the granddaddy of them all, the false case for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq just before the 2003 invasion led by the United States.

The trouble with this kind of enemy creation is that over time, it stops working. Instead, an increasing number of people come to believe that each new “terror incident” or “threat incident” in the news is nothing more than a “false flag” attack designed to advance the ulterior interests of the nation which is supposedly warning us of the “threat.” (For instance, a surprising number of people believe that the recent Charlie Hebdo attack was a false flag operation designed to advance the “War on Terror” and the political prospects of far-right European nationalist political parties, as well as to dissuade member nations from leaving the EU. See this.) Think of the boy who cried “Wolf.” Nevertheless, it would not surprise me to find an increasing number of “enemies” being created by Anglo-American leaders and media in the years to come.

As the decline of our formerly grandiose nation continues, and we begin to enter the second stage of decompensation, we will begin obviously to lose the ability to affect events on the world stage. This will lead to a further decline in our material standard of wealth. At this stage I expect the scapegoating to turn to asking whom we can blame for our loss of prestige. This may take the form of infighting between powerful leaders of economic/political factions, with a little (or maybe a lot) of the old enemy creation added in the form of targeting foreign-born people and people of color within this country's borders. The point will be that someone, somewhere has to answer for the failure of this country's grandiose self, and the people who caused that failure will prove to be too brittle to take responsibility. Therefore they will project that responsibility on the most convenient target they can find. I think of a scene out of the Great Divorce where Napoleon Bonaparte is in Hell, in a well-lit mansion which can't keep out the rain, and he is endlessly pacing up and down, muttering, “It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English...” The second stage of decompensation may also take a suicidal turn, as the remaining leaders of the old order enact policies which they know to be self-destructive, as Hitler did during the waning days of the Third Reich, or as Jim Jones did on the day that he and his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid.

The task, then – for marginalized peoples in this country and for all people of principle who seek to maintain a good conscience – will be to successfully navigate perilous days for a while. For while it may be tempting to run away to another country, the reality is that most of us don't have that option. Also, there are other countries which have been poisoned to the same extent as the United States. (I think particularly of Great Britain, Canada and Australia.) Yet I don't think all areas of the United States will be equally bad. There will be a surprising number of geographical and cultural nooks and crannies where a meaningful and healthy life can be led. Finding and thriving in these niches is part of the task before us.

P.S. Please do read in their entirety the articles on narcissism which I quoted and linked from the Web of Narcissism site.   Pay special attention to the stories of decompensating individuals.  Then take a look at the folks around you.

The Birth of a "Special" People

(Before you read this, you'd better take a bathroom break, then get yourself a cup of coffee. This post is long.)

Today it's time to delve the origins of American (specifically, Anglo-American) narcissism. To me, the most obvious place to start digging is Imperial Rome in the years from the birth of Christ through the reign of Constantine. Let's look first at the psychological construct of national exceptionalism, which has existed for as long as there have been nation-states. The pre-Christian, pre-Roman Greek state of Athens is an excellent example of this. (See this and this for examples). The Greek example shows one key characteristic of national exceptionalism: namely, that it is created, invoked and promulgated by the leaders of a nation-state when those leaders want to rouse their citizens to war and other inhumane acts against the members of differing nations and states.

The Roman empire was no exception in its claims to exceptional status, as described in a Huffington Post article on the concept of the "just war."  In the name of its exceptionalism, Rome conquered many peoples who had previously considered themselves to be exceptional. It was this empire which occupied Palestine in the days of the earthly life of Christ, and which sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD. Both the Romans and the people they conquered viewed exceptionalism as a means to lay claim to an exceptional share of all the things normally valued by people in this earthly life. Yet this empire was also the birthplace of the Christian faith – an otherworldly construct, a commonwealth of strangers and pilgrims on the earth (Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 1:1; 2:11), citizens of a Kingdom not of this world (John 18:36). The citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven were called to live by values which are radically different from the values of this earthly life. The modeling of these values, moreover, was guaranteed to bring the citizens of God's Kingdom into direct conflict with the citizens of all earthly kingdoms (Luke 6:20-28; John 15:18-16:3). Thus from the death and resurrection of Christ until the beginning of the reign of Constantine the Great, becoming a Christian was not the thing to do if you wanted a comfortable, wealthy life on earth.

Constantine's reign brought some rather drastic changes to the Christian church, which had become very popular among the Roman underclass because of its message of hope to the poor of this world. In fact, the Faith had begun to exert a considerable amount of temporal influence, both economic and political. Thus Constantine found it expedient to legalize Christianity and to extend imperial protection to the Faith. In exchange, the Church began to abandon certain otherworldly values and to embrace and support the earthly, secular values of the Roman state. At the Council of Arles in 314, a number of prominent members of the early church declared that “to deny the State the right to go to war was to condemn it to extinction.” (Source: Constantinian Christianity by Yuri Koszarycz.). The council also declared “Concerning those who lay down their weapons in peacetime, be it resolved that they be excluded from fellowship.” (Source: The Canons to Sylvester from the Council of Arles). The Church abandoned the pacifism of the New Testament and began to legitimize the concept of a “just war.” Through the acts of Constantine, the first State church was born.

This State church was not the sum total of Christianity in the Roman Empire. There were many Christians who for various reasons did not choose to align themselves with the State church. Some of those reasons had to do with conscience, others to do with ambitions of the sort of earthly political and economic power which was now being enjoyed by the heads of the Roman State church. The abandonment of New Testament pacifism and the pursuit of earthly values by the State church and by some of its dissenters led inevitably to armed conflict. The funny thing about all this is that the combatants on each side claimed that God was on their side. Each side claimed a special mission from God which not only excused but vindicated their newly adopted violence and which vindicated their claim to whatever it was they were fighting for.

This should be no surprise, because if a group of people claim that they hold as holy the words of a certain Book, yet they are always refusing to obey certain key teachings of that Book in order to achieve earthly ends, they need to have some insanely awesome excuses for their refusal to obey. So national exceptionalism was retooled to provide the excuse, which now read something like this: “We have a special mission from God in these difficult and dangerous days. Therefore God calls us to fight and die on behalf of that mission. May God bless us in carrying out that mission!” The flip side of that exceptionalism was the demonization of those who were considered enemies of the exceptional State. This silenced the conscience of combatants and legitimized the horrible things they did to the soldiers and civilians who were the target of their warfare.

State churches and ecclesiastically sanctioned violence marked each of the nations who fought in the religious wars which dot the landscape of European history, including the Crusades, the Eighty Years' War, and the Cromwellian conquest of England, to name a few. Each of the combatant nations believed in its own exceptionalism, and each had its clerics who told its citizens how exceptional their cause was, and how this was due to the mission which they had “received from God.” This exceptionalism naturally led the citizens of each belligerent nation to believe that it and its citizens were superior to other nations.

This exceptionalism and superiority got a turbocharge boost in the 16th century through the writings of John Calvin. Calvin was an influential French politician, preacher and theologian who devised a number of Church doctrines which had a profound influence on the culture of England and the United States. A key doctrine of Calvin is the doctrine of predestination. He believed that certain Bible passages taught that God has predestined some people to find salvation through faith in Christ, and that He has predestined others to eternal punishment. He also taught that this predestination has occurred independently of any man's choice in the matter. This was a special case of Calvin's doctrine concerning the sovereignty of God, where he wrote that all that happens in the world is the expression of Divinely permitted and approved Providence. Naturally, since most people in Calvin's audiences wanted to go to Heaven and not Hell, they became very curious about how they might know they were of the elect whom God had chosen for salvation.

A number of sources (including Max Weber) therefore state that Calvinists looked to “success in earthly calling” as a sign of God's election – i.e., material success in one's work. This was combined with the imposition of a duty on hearers to be as successful as possible (in contrast with 1 Timothy 6:9-10, in which St. Paul warns people against wanting to be rich). Naturally, those who were successful in business liked this doctrine, since it allowed them to look down on those whose lives were marked by material struggles, because such strugglers obviously did not have the blessing of God. (An interesting side note: the Church had also historically taught that usury – the lending of money at interest – was wrong and forbidden by Scripture. But Calvin stated that some Scriptures which had seemed to forbid usury had been misinterpreted, and other Scriptures no longer applied because times had changed. (Source: "Usury and Capitalism" from the Wikipedia article on John Calvin.)

This, then, was the flavor of the nationalist exceptionalism which pervaded many European societies just prior to the colonization of the United States: first, a belief that God had endowed certain nations with a mission that condoned armed conflict in support of that mission; secondly, a belief that God had predestined certain people to eternal salvation and others to eternal damnation independent of the choice of these people, and third, a belief that material success combined with hard work was a sign of God's blessing upon the elect, and that lack of material success was a sign of the opposite.

The American colonists therefore were already primed for exceptionalism when they arrived in the New World. They preached that theirs was an exceptional mission: to found a new Israel in the New World (for instance, see John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Thomas Thacher, and Thomas Prince). Later, they preached that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to conquer the entire North American continent (see John L. O'Sullivan). This they did – and along the way, nearly exterminated the Native American peoples who had been here previously, through both overt warfare, trickery and ecological warfare (namely, the near-extermination of the buffalo). In their efforts to expand White American wealth and power, they also involuntarily “recruited” millions of dark-skinned, formerly free Africans from their homelands to assist in the expansion of White American wealth. The wealthiest of these settlers just “knew” that they were exceptional because their Calvinism had told them so. The exceptionalism of the people of the United States also gave rise to an exceptional new religion, namely Mormonism, which, in addition to being occult and arcane, is one of the most racist elitist religions on earth.

The wealthy among the new settlers used the arguments of Calvinism to justify their treatment of the dark-skinned peoples they exploited and killed, claiming that the fact that Providence had allowed the conquest of the North American continent, that conquest must necessarily have been God's manifest will. In addition, these wealthy people compared their standard of material wealth to the stark material simplicity of many Native Americans and Africans and concluded that because God had not “blessed” them, these nonwhite people could not be of the elect; therefore, they could do whatever they wanted to them. The Golden Rule did not apply to the treatment of nonwhite people. (To use clinical language, dark-skinned peoples became “objects” to be exploited.)

In the later decades of the 19th century, the American religious community came into conflict with the spread of the writings of Charles Darwin. Yet in some circles there was a truce, and certain men discovered that it was advantageous to combine allegedly Darwinian concepts with the notion of Divine predestination of certain peoples to blessing and election of others to curses. Among these men were Josiah Strong, a Congregational preacher who in 1891 wrote, “Can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest?”, and who lamented two years later that the superior Anglo-Saxon stock of the United States was deteriorating because of immigration. (Baynton, 2014) The late 1800's and early 1900's also saw the development of “muscular Christianity” in Anglo-Saxon society as a response to the perceived threat posed by non Anglo-Saxon peoples. (This “muscular Christianity” influenced the development of the YMCA and of American professional football, by the way.  For more information, see this.) These trains of thought also gave rise to the pseudoscience of eugenics, which argued that some people were endowed with specialness by nature in the same way that Calvinism had argued that some people were pre-selected by God for blessing – and which also argued that some people were cursed by nature in the same way that Calvinism claimed that these were also cursed by God. The rationalism of eugenics led to human attempts to improve the human breed, leading in turn to forced sterilizations of people deemed “unfit” by several states in the U.S. (Another side note: the British government is currently funding forced sterilizations of poor people in India, according to an article published in the Guardian in 2012, and other sources.)

The combination of religious superiority (Calvinism), the record of “Providence” (manifest destiny, social Calvinism, and a long string of seemingly unbroken successes), and botched science (social Darwinism, eugenics) has proven to be an intoxicating mix. This country has been drinking one version or another of that mix for over 200 years. This mixture is the myth taught to generations of American schoolchildren, advertised to generations of American consumers, and preached to generations of American ears in every context from movie theaters to books to political campaigns to church pulpits. (Read The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall, for an example of this.) This is the foundation of American narcissism, the belief that this nation is above all nations in that it has a special mission from God (a mission which conveniently lines up with American imperial ambitions), that Americans (specifically, white Americans) are a special, chosen people, and the belief that both Scripture, Providence and nature bear this out.

This belief in our “specialness” is so pervasive and has been taught for so long that it has become the unconscious foundation of the lives of most Americans, most of whom can no longer articulate the roots of their specialness. They are special just 'cause they are. I think of K. Anders Ericsson, who wrote that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to achieve expert performance in an endeavor. The average American has had many more than 10,000 hours of being schooled to think that he or she is “special” – a special member of a special people and a special nation. From this “specialness” has arisen a belief among many Americans that each one is more “special” than anyone else, including his or her fellow Americans. A recent paper titled, “The Cracked Mirror: Features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Children,” expounds the process of the formation of this belief. The author, Karen Kernberg Bardenstein, identified risk factors for the development of clinical narcissism in children. Among these are being the child of narcissistic parents, the child of successful parents, and the overindulged or wealthy child. Consider the vast disparity between what has become “the American way of life” and the standard of material wealth enjoyed by most of the world's population. Is it any wonder that this nation as a whole has the character of someone with a personality disorder? Other factors which contribute to the competing claims for specialness among Americans include the unhealthy glorification of competition – both economic, scholastic, and athletic. If you spend 10,000 hours in concentrated instruction, you can turn just about anyone into an entitled, selfish, first-class jerk.

We now openly compete for stages from which each of us can proclaim his or her own specialness. Think of reality TV, American Idol, and all the shows which were spawned by American Idol. I think of a recent example of “specialness,” the “balloon boy” Falcon Heene whose parents Richard and Mayumi Heene caused national panic in 2009 when they called 911 claiming that their son Falcon had been carried away by a weather balloon. It turned out that the claim was false; the boy had been hiding in the attic of his home all the time that rescuers were looking for him.  It was revealed that his parents had pulled a hoax in order to get their family on reality TV (they had already been on TV once before). His parents therefore did a bit of jail time for their trouble. A few years later, Mr. Heene was able to get himself back in the media spotlight as reporters followed up on the “balloon boy,” who is now an aspiring pre-adolescent metal rock guitarist and front man for the Heene Boyz band. Maybe the publicity has helped Falcon's career.

Later, the American evangelical world produced a religious “balloon boy”: Colton Burpo, whose parents claimed that when Colton was three years old, during an emergency appendectomy, he died and went to Heaven, then came back so he could tell his parents about the journey. Colton's story was “Providentially” discovered by Thomas Nelson Publishers who published Colton's story in the book Heaven is for Real, in 2010. Afterward, the book was “Providentially” discovered by Sony Pictures and made into a movie which was released this year, 2014. Now, I can't prove or disprove another person's religious experience. But I can't swallow Colton Burpo. Luke 16:27-31 is one big reason why. Another reason is that the whole affair smells like stage-managed narcissism to me. Colton's father pastors his own church, and he and his wife have also revealed that Colton is now a high school wrestling star and an accomplished musician who has toured with the band Read You And Me. (If you have the stomach for it, you can watch some YouTube videos of Colton singing and performing. I don't have the stomach for it.) What better opportunity for Todd Burpo to grow his own church and to start a career in Christian media for his son than a near-death experience?

And while we are talking about movies, let me mention the final frontier of hubris, namely, The Interview, a Sony Pictures semi-comedy about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the head of the government of North Korea. The movie is the incarnation of the idea of America as a special nation with a special mission that can be carried out by ordinary Americans who will succeed just because they are Americans, and as we all know, Americans are all just so crazy awesome! The publicity surrounding the movie is the embodiment of American hubris, because when the plot of the movie was announced, many American politicians brushed aside North Korean objections, claiming that these objections were the attempts of a dictator regime to stifle American First Amendment freedoms. (Whoa, dude! You mean to tell me that you can make a movie about threatening to kill someone in another country and the person you threaten can't protest because it would infringe on your First Amendment rights? We are truly a “special” nation.) The movie and its publicity are also an example of what I call “desperate narcissism,” because in the days prior to the movie's release the Obama administration claimed that North Korea had hacked Sony's computer network, and Obama himself promised retaliation. Yet a number of prominent cyber security experts expressed public doubt that North Korea had done such a thing. Sony claimed that it was considering not releasing the Interview in order not to provoke international tensions, but Obama and other politicians pushed back, saying, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” So this Christmas the movie opened in flag-draped theaters packed full of doofuses and raked in quite a bit of dough in the process. Can anybody say “publicity stunt” with me?

Desperate narcissism. To a narcissist, good attention is the best thing a body can have. But even negative attention is better than no attention. When narcissists are denied attention they get desperate. I'll talk more about the desperate phase of American narcissism in a future post.