Sunday, June 24, 2007
Cages, Overt and Covert
Politics, at its most base, is about power, and the easiest way to exert power is to maintain control. In a democratic system, that requires controlling, and often limiting, the access that citizens have to exercising the vote. Perhaps there have been times in this country when some politicians relied on the force of ideas, on persuasion, on trying to broaden participation, but those times have been limited, and those who attempted it often fell to scandal or an assassin’s weapon.
Ward heeling, vote buying, electioneering, gerrymandering, caging ... so many names for so many tactics for one basic idea. Voters are dangerous, voters must be herded and pushed and prodded and kept under wraps. Protest and you’ll face being hurt or killed, or locked up in unsafe conditions. Maybe you’ll end up on lists that make it harder to get credit, or fly, or rent an apartment.
Most people don’t take to the streets. They have been raised to think that voting matters, that the system works, that the political pendulum always swings back. For most, the control takes other forms.
It’s gentler, often voluntary on the part of the citizenry. Join a group, give money, write a few letters. Best of all, be active in a church. Built in tendency to believe, to follow direction, to not rock the boat ... what could a money-grubbing, power-chasing politician or party want more than people pre-disposed to act in a predictable way?
Some will say, “what about MLK or the abolitionists or the Berrigan Brothers, they acted for social justice within a religious context?”
History shows that yes, good people have pursued leftist goals with the encouragement of their faith, but it’s important to remember that they were NOT encouraged to do so by the hierarchy of their organizations. Martin made other ministers nervous. The Berrigan Brothers were certainly not encouraged by the powers-that-be in Rome ... that church has been trying to kill social justice movements and liberation theology for decades now. It supports oppressive movements in this country, and the current Pope Ratzinger made it his CAREER to destroy that movement within the church:
1. Liberation theology is a phenomenon with an extraordinary number of layers. There is a whole spectrum from radically marxist positions, on the one hand, to the efforts which are being made within the framework of a correct and ecclesial theology, on the other hand, a theology which stresses the responsibility which Christians necessarily hear for the poor and oppressed, such as we see in the documents of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM) from Medellin to Puebla. In what follows, the concept of liberation theology will be understood in a narrower sense: it will refer only to those theologies which, in one way or another, have embraced the marxist fundamental option. Here too there are many individual differences, which cannot be dealt with in a general discussion of this kind. All I can do is attempt to illuminate certain trends which, notwithstanding the different nuances they exhibit, are widespread and exert a certain influence even where liberation theology in this more restricted sense does not exist.
2. An analysis of the phenomenon of liberation theology reveals that it constitutes a fundamental threat to the faith of the Church. At the same time it must be borne in mind that no error could persist unless it contained a grain of truth. Indeed, an error is all the more dangerous, the greater that grain of truth is, for then the temptation it exerts is all the greater.
Furthermore, the error concerned would not have been able to wrench that piece of the truth to its own use if that truth had been adequately lived and witnessed to in its proper place (in the faith of the Church). So, in denouncing error and pointing to dangers in liberation theology, we must always be ready to ask what truth is latent in the error and how it can be given its rightful place, how it can be released from error’s monopoly.
Don’t forget that plenty of church leaders felt that slavery was supported by the Bible, and who can argue with them, it’s in the book as an institution supported by God, regulated by God’s laws.
It is BECAUSE of that history, because religion has been used overwhelmingly to SUPPORT the powerful, not to help the powerless, that the front-running Donklephants are elbowing each other in their rush to the pulpit:
More than 10,000 members of the United Church of Christ rose to their feet at their convention in a hockey arena here on Saturday to applaud one of their own who happens to be a Democratic presidential candidate—Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Weaving biblical imagery with political promises, Obama, a member of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side, encouraged those in the audience to follow their consciences and fight for a better America.
“Doing the Lord’s work is a thread that’s run through our politics since the very beginning,” Obama told church members. “And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America—a principle we all must uphold and that I have embraced as a constitutional lawyer and most importantly as a Christian—means faith should have no role in public life."
For many, this corralling of political energy is off-putting, whether they recognize that it’s happening consciously or not. For those people, the explosion of the internet finally opened up possibilities to engage in political debate, to find other like-minded people without the filter of some big organization. It was exciting to find active and growing institutions like Daily Kos ... I know that I, your humble Madman, was thrilled, and there were so many passionate voices there, from so many political points of view.
Sadly, it’s not enough to control the vote, to control access ... it’s also important to control the debate, to control the CHANCE to debate. As the primary season for the 2004 election began to heat up, the tone changed, the push to conform, to swear loyalty oaths to the eventual fealty to the Donklephant nominee. Nader was the devil, Deaniacs needed to grow up and get with the program, or to shut your fucking pie hole if you couldn’t. Those who began to question this new direction, the bullying by posters who appeared more and more to be party operatives, were eventually banned from the “community", a community that was beginning to look more and more like one of those real-world communities where everything is controlled from how long your grass is to the color of your home.
To insist that something was amiss, that the site was serving a party moving hard to the right, was to be labeled a troublemaker or conspiracy theorist. To insist, as I and others did, that candidates like Testor and Massa and Casey were Republican trojan horses, and that several commentors and front-page posters were working for the party or for candidates was brushed off, mocked and was one more cause for banning.
So now we get this article, which includes some tidbits from one of the former insiders:
Last June, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, former soldier, one-time Reagan Republican, and proprietor of the wildly successful liberal blog Daily Kos, sent an email to an invitation-only listserv known as Townhouse. Consisting of some 300 liberal bloggers, journalists, activists, and consultants, the list was an outgrowth of weekly strategy sessions held at a D.C. bar—a forum for brainstorming on issues and tactics, and a means of creating a “unified message,” as Moulitsas later put it. Its members were bound by one main rule: Nothing from the list was to be quoted or distributed, which, this being politics, meant that a leak was bound to happen.
In the message that would end up putting Townhouse, briefly, on the outside world’s radar, Moulitsas asked list members to “ignore” a blog item by the New York Times’ Chris Suellentrop that revealed that Jerome Armstrong—founder of the popular liberal blog MyDD and a close friend and business associate of Moulitsas—had once been implicated in a stock-touting scheme. Suellentrop noted parallels between stock-hyping and bloggers’ touting of candidates such as Howard Dean, who had hired both Armstrong and Moulitsas as consultants during his 2004 presidential campaign. Moulitsas, who had recently coauthored the book Crashing the Gate with Armstrong, told Townhouse members that these revelations were “a nonstory.” “So far,” he wrote, “this story isn’t making the jump to the traditional media, and we shouldn’t do anything to help make that happen.” He urged participants to “starve it of oxygen.”
When The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle blogged about the Townhouse email, “The Kos” urged readers to cancel their subscriptions, writing, “It is now beyond clear that the dying New Republic is mortally wounded and cornered, desperate for relevance. It has lost half its circulation since the blogs arrived on the scene and they no longer (thank heavens!) have a monopoly on progressive punditry. We have hit their bottom line, we are hitting their patron saint hard (Joe Lieberman) and this is how they respond. By going after the entire movement.” Many of Moulitsas’ followers—Kossacks, they call themselves—then filled Zengerle’s inbox with all manner of invective.
Wannabe playas working toward the inside, and thus another outlet for open participation is highjacked. The cages come in many forms, sometimes overt, with water cannons and plastic handcuffs and pepper spray, and sometimes they’re lined in the warmth of “community” and snake oil, dual-purposed to control and fleece. Seduced or corrupted, joining some branded herd that will make you easier to drive, easier to fundraise from, easier to control ... you’ve got no choice, after all.
So the debate is narrowed, choices taken away. Voters who stand in the rain in Ohio to try to vote, voters usually poor or brown or black who’d votes will never be counted ... they’re attacked by one of our political parties, and abandoned by the other. The corruption is deep and wide, and the churches there to lure them back in, the bought-off unions selling them out for access and a percent or two hike in our pathetic minimum wage.
This is a recipe for continued downward spiralling, as consenus is manufactured and dissent is caged off and silenced. In this new century of perfected PR and mass media saturation, the corruption seeps in everywhere. Seduction and co-option lead rich, greed, powerful empires to destruction. Gunter Grass wrote in his latest:
Günter Grass has said elsewhere that the success of the Third Reich was in dividing and subdividing responsibility for evil to such a degree that, while most adults in the country bore some responsibility, very few felt that anything much was their fault at the time. That sense of responsibility came to them afterwards, and usually in silence.
We’re not on a pendulum so much as a descending spiral. Some of us will continue to speak our minds out here in our rusty cages, but so many avenues, even this internet avenue, have been diverted and cordoned off, that it’s hard to see any way out.