Among the reasons I will go to my grave loathing John Edwards is not just his betrayal of his wife and children but his contamination for all time of the expression “the two Americas.” So flawed was this suspiciously grinning messenger that his important message about the two societies now coexisting uneasily within one body politic has been all but lost in popular consciousness.
But I was reminded of the two Americas last week when the US Department of Agriculture announced a huge spike in what it calls “food insecurity”: what most people would translate as hunger or malnutrition. One in seven US households experienced some degree of food insecurity last year—that’s 50 million people not getting enough to eat at some point during 2008, a large proportion of them children. It was also reported last week that the number of seriously delinquent home mortgages is also spiking. This while Ben Bernanke and other well-fed system overseers reminded us that it will be a long time before we will see an uptick in employment or earning levels on Main Street—and would we please just be patient.
So that is what life is like in Loser America: employment desperation, rising hunger, looming homelessness, untreated illness, rising rates of substance and family abuse, and soaring enlistments in the imperial military as the only remaining escape hatch from all of this misery.
In Winner America, meanwhile, things are truly looking up. Big banks are now reporting respectable earnings from trading with our tax dollars. Wall Street is on track for record profits and executive payouts this year. After reaping our taxpayer billions, the banks still have not been required to modify troubled mortgages or to start loaning to small business in any serious way: they are making their money the old-fashioned way—through usury and speculation. And they are very close to persuading a Democratic Congress to grant them even less transparency and even more opportunities for deceptive practices and the floating of future bubbles.
Other state-favored economic sectors are also thriving. Big Insurance will be getting almost everything it wants in the health industry bailout package now moving through Congress (we can no longer really call it health care reform, as it is merely now little more than a sop to the medical-industrial complex, with almost no cost-containment features or improved medical practice in view).
Big Pharma, which already spent over $110 million to lobby Congress this year, is determined to protect its staggering profits from any last-minute moves to push for cheaper generic drugs or to extract any cutbacks in Medicare Part D. Thanks to Pharma’s unprecedented clout, federal spending for prescription drugs rocketed from $13 billion/year to $81 billion/year over just the past decade. Democratic Senators daring to push for more concessions from the drug firms are actually getting calls from the Obama White House telling them to STFU.
Although FHA insurance was designed to give low-income and minority people access to housing, rich white people can now buy homes costing up to $730,000 with FHA backing. Barney Frank, a Democrat, wants to raise the allowable amount to $840,000—and make it permanent. In vulture-like fashion, members of the American overclass have also begun taking advantage of the extreme distress of Loser America—buying up the land and buildings and businesses of those who aren’t making it, imposing pay cuts and reduced hours on everyday working people, wringing concessions from local governments for each pitiful job-creating investment they are willing to make in the hinterlands.
In the more advanced iteration of the corporate state that is now emerging, we peons are supposed to be grateful for any small favors granted by the overclass. Thus, in an excerpt from his just-published book (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce) published in the October Harper’s, political economist Slavoj Zizek argues that because today’s Left has no viable alternative to offer, let alone implement, it simply will not do for progressives to protest the ongoing crimes of the overclass too loudly:
When we are transfixed by something like a bailout, we should bear in mind that since it is actually a form of blackmail we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think—to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of society makes such blackmail possible.
Okay, so we should think things through in a really radical way… but make no actual waves for the time being, lest we be punished still more for our insolence. Why does this prescription make me profoundly uneasy?
Acting Out as a Religious Imperative
While I yield to no one in my icy determination to think clearly “in a really radical way,” I do not believe that it is actually permissable for religious leaders to be content with mere thinking.
The call narratives and career trajectories of the great Hebrew prophets all contain the idea that it is the prophet’s privilege and burden to disrupt the false peace that surrounds gross injustice, to disrupt patterns of acquiescence in that injustice, to make really awkward scenes and to get up into the faces of the oppressors for as long as necessary. In this way the prophet opens up a new perceptual and psychological space—one in which the pretenses of the powerful begin to look like just that: empty pretenses.
Tags: economy, justice, prophetic vocation
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The rich have set the stage to win again. Where is Christianity? We are a Christian nation, and the religion is linked to the powers in control. Does Christianity need a course correction, or is it too far out of whack and we need to just cut it loose and start over? I guess the point is if you want to deal with the rich, you must first deal with Christendom. They also have too much invested in the status quo and will fight any real reform because their true allegiance is to the power structure that currently gives them their slice of the pie.
Start the Christian civil war. This is not the 60's where Martin Luther King had to deal with a Christianity that was on the sidelines and it was hard to get them to engage. This is the 21st century, when the world is suffering the curse of American Christianity (the superpower religion) selling out to the party of the rich, and now that it is falling apart some are rushing for rapture, and the rest have dedicated their lives to closing their eyes and pretending they are not involved. The issues are all there. Start saying things that the Christian leaders will hate. As long as they have control over their voting block, we are doomed.
We are not a Christian nation. Saying so only gives more power to those who claim that we are. We are a secular country that respects religious freedom. No Christian civil war, please. That language has to go. Have we not had enough of religious war in this world? But take away the tax exemptions for religious institutions that lobby and play the politics game and bring them under the law as much as any other lobbying group. Then, religious leaders, find your roots again, and your souls, by getting out from under the co-optation that has seduced you into silencing the prophetic voice for justice and peace.
We are a Christian nation to the extent that Christian politics are a driving force behind the direction our nation takes, especially on the conservative side. Pretending we are not only gives more power to the extreme Christians because the moderates are not resisting, and no Christian resistance to Christian extremes has recently been leading our nation into war, and support of war by others.
You say, "Then, religious leaders, find your roots again, and your souls, by getting out from under the co-optation that has seduced you into silencing the prophetic voice for justice and peace." That is Christian civil war. Not a war with guns, but a war to regain the hearts and minds of the sheep. Non-believers have no power to change Christianity, but they can change themselves.
It is not an either/or question. Culturally the US is made up of an overwhelming majority of people who self-describe themselves as Christian. Politically we are a secular nation.
That overwhelming majority of Christians are hardly a cohesive or homogeneous set of people. Baptists as a rule do not really see Catholics as Christian. Most Fundamentalists has litmus tests to determine who is a real Christian (like gifts of tongues) and those litmus test vary wildly among fundamentalists.
The word Christian has effectively been rendered meaningless. The only real commonality is that these various faiths all claim Jesus as their prophet.
It is hard to get anywhere when you have 100 maps all showing different directions to any given location.
60 minutes had a story yesterday about medicare spending 50 billion per year on the last two months of life for those terminally ill. We don't want to ration health care, but health care will be rationed one way or another, and if we don't consider what we are doing it will be rationed irrationally. This is a hard issue for congress to deal with because if anyone mentions the obvious, others will take political advantage by accusing them of setting up death panels to kill grandma. Perhaps your modern day Jeremiahs can start preaching the fact that we can't commit to spending unlimited money to keep everyone alive for the maximum possible number of days. Decisions must be made. Once their listeners start hearing that, they will be less susceptable to the death panel accusations, and it will be more possible for congress to do their job.
Once the masses start to understand this, then they could preach we can't just encourage families to all have large numbers of children as a way to grow the church because the population must be limited somehow, and if we can't do it in a sensible way the alternatives are war, famine, and plague, and this would be a good opportunity for the prophets to start helping their people understand those last 3 are really bad things and won't lead anyone to rapture. Imagine a world where preachers preach truth instead of religion, and help the world become a better place instead of more insane even if that better world doesn't favor their occupation.
"the fact that we can't commit to spending unlimited money to keep everyone alive for the maximum possible number of days"
God is not particularly concerned with governmental decisions. That said the only real choice is to pay for all as long as required or none.
When we look to the Government, which has limited power instead of God, who has unlimited power, we loose. Charity begins at home.
Great article. But religion is already responding to the second America, and that response is not what you are looking for- it is prosperity gospel.
This is, of course the natural dividend of magico-religious thinking, where wishes trump reality. It is religion that trains us to look up to power, and to wait for our just rewards, even into an after-life (or the second coming/Rapture, if we are lucky!).
The religious have only themselves to blame if a lack of critical thinking has let the very interests that are destroying our society coopt them politically over trivial issues, and reframe theology in unprecedented directions.
The Canadian Catholic Church has a long history of publishing documents supporting and calling for social justice. See: www.jpic-visitation.org/reflections social_thought.html
Our former Bishop was instrumental in developing "Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis" back in the 1980's. He taught that social justice is integral to the Gospel; it is not an option. He was "blacklisted", persecuted, and figuritively, like Jeremiah, cast into a cistern.
Until the hierarchy separates from the rich and powerful and once again finds it's place with the poor and oppressed, it cannot preach the Good News or bear witness to the Presence of God in our midst. Until then, all it seems capable of doing is ignorantly trying to control how people relate sexually, which leaves us with the idiotic situation where a person can "get to heaven" if they starve to death - as long as they don't practice birth control
Good Article particularly as it gives constructive suggestions for action.
For me I believe we should think globally and act locally. Some are called to leadership roles but most of us have lives centered on our families and personal lives.
I am reminded of the old hymn, "Brighten the Corner Where you Are". All Politics are local and I believe that is where Charity is most effective. Paul uses charity and Love interchangeably and I think we should too.
Our command is to Love your neighbor as your self. If I just follow that as I can with the Love of God, then I affect the world.
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