What Does Democracy Look Like? Not likely the Old Testament Thank You

I attended Occupy Denver’s forum “What Does Democracy Look Like?” this weekend to hear activist scholars of considerable repute throw in their two cents. The first day was a splendid gathering, except where a curated discussion of intentional community lapsed into theology. Yes, a distillation of mostly white reform literature (Fanon was dismissed as wayward) yielded three steps for The Way Forward: Egypt, Exodus and the Promised Land. Yep.

By which he meant: 1) Recognize your enslavement, 2) have the courage to leave all for an uncertain fate in the desert, and 3) seek/develop/discover your own promised land.

Even as metaphor it’s embarassing. Enlightened salvation from Old Testament mythology? No thank you, and for that matter, up yours! Unfortunately the language I used was less restrained, but his religious offensiveness had been compounding. He’d begun his presentation admonishing listeners that transformation begins with the self and so he’d already unmasked himself as spiritual. Worse, a monotheist.

Egypt: I’ll come back to “systems of oppression” in a moment.

The Exodus: a myth, it didn’t happen, even Hebrew scholars now agree with the historical and archeological records.

As to the Promised Land: that was a real estate scheme to backdate a deed, offered as divinely conceived proof of landlordship. The same title is being waived around to dispossess Palestinians today.

But really, isn’t the exodus-to-promised-land malarkey at the very foundation of Western Civilization’s expansion problem?! Are we really all entitled to virgin land? As if earth hasn’t been continuously and fully inhabited since before agrarian civilization, before monotheism was conceived to impose inequity, and justify slave-wages, interest and rent. The craddle of exploitation, that was Egypt.

But can we run from Egypt? The remedy staring us in the face, from which common men are deliberatly destracted, conspiring to emancipate Egypt, is to rid ourselves of the oppressor sociopaths. In practical terms understood more clearly by the better educated before us, we must strangle Egypt’s kings with the entrails of its priests.

I don’t care how academic your garb, when you tell your flock to reapply themselves to the sacred, and your “sacred” is biblical, supposing to transcend nature, you’re a priest.

Thank you WDDLL organizers but I do not go to church and I resent when devious means are employed to bring it to me. Actually those priests are the worst, they’re missionaries! If we’ve learned one thing as we discuss mankind’s break from his mille millenia of sustainable existance, resist the colonizer. Conquored peoples ourselves, we can only wish that indigenous peoples could have given Western missionaries the reception they deserved, and it’s no less true today: fire.

Alas as a result I heard a number of attendees today praise their faith. To each his own, but unhelpful. If you have to evangelize you’re a liability because nonsense is infectuous, especially as education levels recede. Can others entrust you with the battleplan while you commune with the adversary?

There’s a wonderful scene in AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, Werner Herzog’s dramatic depiction of conquistadors wreaking havoc in the Amazon. Following a coup among the greedy Spaniards, the wife of the abruptly deposed leader appeals to the mission’s priest, as her last resort to restore order. The priest, her ally only moments before, turns on her thus: “Her ladyship must know that the church always stands on the side of the strong.”

Growth Busters’ all white cast asks dark skinned people not to have kids

COLORADO SPRINGS- Local filmmaker, city council candidate, and critic of urban sprawl, Dave Gardner, screened his new doc GROWTHBUSTERS to a receptive hometown audience last night, on the heels of its world premier in Washington DC. Gardner has long defined his personal mission as questioning the wisdom of “growth”. Finally his unpopular theme is gaining traction. With GrowthBusters Gardner addresses economic growth, rampant consumption, carbon footprints and over-development, building to what he’s decided is the most elephantine challenge in the room, global population growth. Except, I’m sorry, that’s an elephant of another color. I resisted the Q & A, not wanting to pull down the evening’s celebratory curve. A giddy panel of white folk is for me as much a temptation as the easy target Gardner chose. In the privacy of the internet, we at Not My Tribe don’t have bubbles we’re too reluctant to burst.

Dave Gardner’s long unrewarded campaign against our city’s recidivist, graft-driven, and ever tragically unsustainable growth is so damn laudable, and his chopping away at the Capitalist assumptions of neoclassical economists is so urgently pertinent. But by folding both into the Inconvenient Truth of exponential global population rise, does Gardner mean the Colorado Springs audience takeaway to be we must distribute condoms to our Machiavellian land developers?

Let me first applaud Gardner’s critique of our region’s imbecilic growth. It’s ugly and residents are unhappy but powerless to depose the greedy exploitative speculators in charge. A memorable segment describes the Southern Delivery system being built to bring Pueblo water northward to serve El Paso County’s endless eastward developments. The energy to pump that water uphill will require the output of an average coal fired power plant, that much more emissions, pollution and coal ash.

Over the years Gardner has proven to be more than a gadfly battling our land barons. When he challenged Jerry Heimlicher, a pro-growth incumbent for a seat at the city council, the otherwise like-minded progressive adversary beat him, only to resign after his victory to make a sudden move out of town, leaving the position to be chosen by the usual undemocratic powers, looking suspiciously like his campaign had been a desperate measure to keep Gardner’s anti-growth voice off the council. There’s more to applaud about Gardner locally, but first–

I know this is easy to overlook in Colorado Springs, but Dave, the demographic character of the Stargazer Theater audience was what, last night, entirely white? It was, and probably not coincidentally, the dozens of experts you interviewed onscreen were also with one single exception white. Further, I’m sure we can agree the economic class represented was equally homogeneous; let’s call it comfortable. Tell us then, Dave, what does Middle America’s middle class white birthrate add to the worrisome arc of population growth?

Not that I think any socioeconomic group should address itself to out-breeding the next, but an audience with a zero or negative birthrate hardly needs to concentrate on curbing its numbers. Anticipating the challenges of exponential population growth is important, but HOW UNSEEMLY for a white community to plot counter-reproductive measures for the larger masses, specifically the darker-complected Global South, virtually all of its peoples lesser advantaged?

And let me add, how embarrassing that a Grist Magazine editor wants to brag about her lifestyle choice not to have a family, exchanged for the benefit of a “more dynamic schedule” which leaves her more easily free to join three similarly unencumbered friends for coffee.

We’re trading our biological imperative to live a Seinfeld episode?

I am not accusing anyone of deliberate racism, unlike the Sierra Club, who was certain this documentary took aim at Hispanic Americans. This was a detail we learned from the post-screening panel discussion. The local Sierra Club chairperson who sat on the panel last night told us that the national office was alarmed to learn that its Colorado Springs chapter was cosponsoring a documentary which called for curbing population growth. She assured her headquarters that she knew Dave Gardner personally and that GrowthBusters‘s thesis was above reproach. In particular, she explained, it didn’t target illegal immigration, which she presumed was their worry. To clarify, she was thinking: not birthrate but immigration rate, not global population growth but national population growth.

Population growth as it threatens America.

Once again we are reminded of the provincial brain freeze that characterizes our community. Even progressive ideals become distorted by the gravitational pull of our Tea Party tendencies. We support national reformist campaigns, but only to the limit of our stunted conservative comprehension.

Yes, discussing how to limit the birthrate of people of color is racist. It’s White Man’s Burden theology to believe that it is the privilege of the developed white world to decide for our lesser brethren whether they can procreate.

How is rushing to Dave Gardner’s defense, vouching for him that no racist insensitivity was intended, very much different from the excuse given by Congressman Doug Lamborn when he called President Obama a Tar Baby? Lamborn explained that he didn’t know black people were offended by “Tar Baby”. Would it really surprise Gardner that his call for White America to be alarmed about population growth, would threaten the of-color communities whose cultures still encourage having children?

Dave Gardner partnered with strange bedfellows when he took his anti-growth message to what he thought was the next level. The experts he interviewed are well aware their prognostications invite accusations of racism. I found it rather odd that one of them, speaking for the Club of Rome, was not introduced with his organization’s repute fully disclaimed.

If I were to guess, hitting upon the population question is where Gardner’s production finally took wing. Friends were recounting last night how he’d labored on the project for over half a decade, one scene shows Gardner lamenting the lack of financing available for a subject such as his. In the local sequences of GrowthBusters, the subject was about development and sustainability, while all the national interviews concerned population growth. When Gardner described the last year spent immersed in the project, I’m guessing that’s when underwriting for the population meme kicked in. The small cadre of usual suspects advancing today’s equivalent of eugenics theory were probably eager to add a fresh name to their roster. Yesteryear’s infamous population doomsayer Malthus was reviled because people inherently equated dire population projections with depopulation solutions. Malthus’ inheritors are accustomed to the same heat.

It is hard not to wonder if the First World’s cavalier disregard of climate change is because depopulation programs are being readied on the front burner. Peak oil, diminishing resources, declining agricultural yields and higher ecological toxicities cease to threaten human survival with the implementation of depopulation scenarios. Presentations like Gardner’s which reinforce the imperative of reducing the world population, create the popular consent with which population control compliance can be manufactured.

I’d have no problem with population growth engineering if it meant applying in the Third World, the proven method that has subdued the birthrate in the First World. Prosperity. If developed nations could share their abundance and education with the developing world, rendering the wealth of Africa’s natural resources back to Africa’s people for example, they’ll arrive at zero birthrates just like ours.

SPOILER ALERT: Redistribution of resources is not in the cards among the solutions which GrowthBusters suggests. Instead the feel good conclusion of this movie revolves around local applications of sustainability measures. Here I should confess I have a prejudice to corpulent over-eaters lecturing others on sustainability. Austerity measures are danced around, and a suggestion of cutting work hours to twenty one hours a week masks obviously a 50% cut in income.

Just as Gardner celebrates a return to hands-on farming, the oversimplified doubt he casts on the benefit of financial growth ignores the technological progress we all enjoy as its result. Gardner lampoons government planners who look to compensate for trends toward zero birthrates. They’re not “pro-growth”, they mean to fill diminishing labor pools. This is why the US invites its illegal immigrant workers. An increasingly idle population, mostly aging, needs people to service it. The benefit of growth and development was by design at least a rising tide for all.

I say we all, but who is comforted by Gardner’s thesis? How many of us have the savings to invest in a house with land to farm, install an orchard and solar panels to take ourselves off the grid, prepared to barter with our neighbors for the necessities we cannot make ourselves? Few of us live near an American dairy brave enough to defy government regulations against raw milk, I dare say that demographic has shrunk to approximate, no coincidence, the currently proverbial “one percent”. How many of us have access to community shared farms? I’ll hazard a guess you probably can’t afford to buy shares in the farms we have already, Grant Farms or Venetucci.

Let’s be honest about who’s supposed to be cutting back on having babies, and who’s in the position to weather the austere future mankind faces. One of the final scenes of Gardner’s domestic sustainable bliss depicted a model family unit belonging to one of the population growth think tanks. I’d like to think this was an oversight, but in a passing bit of the b-roll footage the audience was let to see that one of the white affluent women was pregnant.

Zionists fire another Left American university professor, Joel Kovel

Joel Kovel - Overcoming ZionismNobody in the United States is safe when they speak out the Israeli killing machine. The Israeli Zionist Machine has just succeeded in firing yet another US Left professor, Joel Kovel, from his university position, this time at Bard College. The following is taken from the STATEMENT OF JOEL KOVEL REGARDING HIS TERMINATION BY BARD COLLEGE

Irregularities in the Evaluation Process

The evaluation committee included Professor Bruce Chilton, along with Professors Mark Lambert and Kyle Gann. Professor Chilton is a member of the Social Studies division, a distinguished theologian, and the campus’ Protestant chaplain. He is also active in Zionist circles, as chair of the Episcopal–Jewish Relations Committee in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and a member of the Executive Committee of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. In this capacity he campaigns vigorously against Protestant efforts to promote divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel.

Professor Chilton is particularly antagonistic to the Palestinian liberation theology movement, Sabeel, and its leader, Rev. Naim Ateek, also an Episcopal. This places him on the other side of the divide from myself, who attended a Sabeel Conference in Birmingham, MI, in October, 2008, as an invited speaker, where I met Rev. Ateek, and expressed admiration for his position. It should also be observed that Professor Chilton was active this past January in supporting Israeli aggression in Gaza. He may be heard on a national radio program on WABC, “Religion on the Line,” (January 11, 2009) arguing from the Doctrine of Just War and claiming that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel for human rights violations—this despite the fact that large numbers of Jews have been in the forefront of protesting Israeli crimes in Gaza.

Of course, Professor Chilton has the right to his opinion as an academic and a citizen. Nonetheless, the presence of such a voice on the committee whose conclusion was instrumental in the decision to remove me from the Bard faculty is highly dubious. Most definitely, Professor Chilton should have recused himself from this position. His failure to do so, combined with the fact that the decision as a whole was made in context of adversity between myself and the Bard administration, renders the process of my termination invalid as an instance of what the College’s Faculty Handbook calls a procedure “designed to evaluate each faculty member fairly and in good faith.”

Help Overcome Zionism and its negative influence in American politics. Support Joel Kovel and buy his book, Overcoming Zionism. Bard College should be ashamed of its anti-intellectual behavior and its policies of censorship.

Israel needs a time out

Time magazine cover ISRAEL TIME TO GOISN’T IT TIME to divest ourselves of Israel, boycott their businesses, and cancel their US military subsidy? At some point we enablers have to leave the racist supremacists to make friends with their would-be neighbors in the Middle East, or they should pack up their carpet bags and come home. How many more Palestinians and Lebanese have to die before we can confirm that the Zionist theology of these white colonial overseers is rabid?

Israel-Palestine can be a democracy like anywhere else. There’s no reason an unpopular, non-Muslim theocracy need be imposed on the Middle East, especially by force and by theft of the land. The Zionist occupiers are Europeans and Americans. Let them stay as expats if they choose, but we could certainly expect them to respect the ways of their hosts. No?

Pope says, ‘Piss in the jar, Please.’

piss christNew scientific ‘advances’ are being made by God these days! The Pope has just ordered that all priest applicants must now pass psycho-illogical profiling tests! The BBC reports that wannabe Priests to face ‘sex drive tests’ What next? Peeing in the cup? Lie detector tests for archbishops of the Liberation Theology category?

If they take out all the pedophile, gay, and heterosexual masturbating men that apply (apparently there was no hair openly growing in the palms of these men’s hands making more intensive testing necessary), they will have to allow lesbian nuns into the priesthood, and that would certainly change the nature of the Catholic Church all for the better…. but still?

Plus, this move encourages the Marine Corps to start doing these tests on their ever so normal American youth recruits. Then we would only have nice young normal men torturing and shouting ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ This seriously shows the dangerous wave of communism that is moving like a tsunami towards our Atlantic Coast from Rome by way of Barack Obama. I am now more likely to vote for John McCain. Also to mention that I had a wet dream just last night about Sarah! She was whipping America!

By the way… That picture above is an art work that shows Jesus Christ crucified on a cross in a jar of urine, which I find very personally offending. See how bad these communist artists can get? John McCain is the type of leader than can bomb the beJezus out of these American communist art centers, and YES, even those abroad. He’s for real change! And I think that he could work quite well alongside The Pope to help make the universe a much safer place and help reunite the EpiscoPalin Church back with the Catholic.

Denver Columbus Day Parade wants to kick indigenous ass

DENVER- Does it look like the COLUMBUS DAY PARADE organizers are practically begging for a comeuppance? Here comes the US cavalry of the American Indian Wars to finish the job Columbus began.
Denver Columbus Day Parade

On Columbus Day, the anniversary which has now become a teaching moment about revisiting the Columbus myth, about the holocaust unleashed by the European discovery, conquest and enslavement of North America, isn’t it rather odd to CALL IN THE CALVARY?
columbus-2-cavalry-capitol

I MEAN, a celebration of Italian Americans is one thing. Is Christopher Columbus the only hero they can muster? Why not the Pope? I’m all for diverting Americans from the stereotype of the Sicilian American Sopranos legacy. But make it about pizza, not the frigging conquest of the American West. Columbus’ own diaries confess his exploitive inhumane designs in Hispaniola. White man western expansion was no less genocidal. Who should be celebrating that?

columbus-6-parade-routeThis squad looks like they’re reenacting Colonel Chivington and his raiders freshly back from the Sand Creek Massacre. Perhaps they are retracing the victory lap the soldiers rode in Denver, festooned with the body parts of their victims, women and children, they exhibited as trophies of their victorious raid on the Indian encampment at Sand Creek.

How fitting that for the modern day route, the western revelers drive Hummers. The glorification of the military is not coincidental, nor perhaps is the celebration of the uneducated. columbus-3-hummer-line
columbus-hummer-bannerDo YOU, for example, count Winston Churchill’s WWII England among your ancestors? Here is the invitation to the 2008 parade:

“On Saturday October 11, 2008, at 10:00AM, we will celebrate the American National Holiday which commemorates Columbus’ contribution to the formation of this great nation. It will also remind each one of us of the blood, sweat and tears our ancestors shed so that we might live and enjoy our lives in the land of the free.”

These are the Denver organizers’ own photos of the 2007 parade. In the next you can catch an unedited glimpse of a protester. And what other can that be but a reactionary scowl?
columbus-4-hummer-hitler

columbus-5-hummer-frown

Here’s what those opposed to the Columbus commemoration are putting together.

1. RACE, RESISTANCE AND THE COLUMBIAN LEGACY
Join nationally-known activist Glenn Spagnuolo, co-founder of Re-create 68, for a night of education and dialogue about race in America and resistance to the Columbian Legacy!
When: 5pm Thursday, October 9, 2008
Where: CU Boulder Campus, Hale Hall Room 240

2. Columbus Day Resistance March and Rally
The annual protest of the Columbus Day Holiday and the racism that it embodies will begin with a march from Four Winds that ends at the Capitol Building followed by a rally for a better future.
When: March starts at 8 am, Rally at 9am, Saturday, October 11
Where: Start of March is at Four Winds at 5th and Bannock in Denver

3. People’s Council
Following the Columbus Day resistance, people will be gathering to organize a new alliance locally that can act as a national vehicle for radicals. Bring your thoughts and cooperative energy. Please come and represent R68.
When: 1pm, Saturday, October 11
Where: The Great Hall at the Iliff School of Theology just past Evans on University Blvd, Denver.

4. Student Walk-out on Racism
Whether you are a student or not, join the students of Iliff, CU Denver, CU Boulder and DU as the educate the public about Denver’s hidden racial past on the 101st Anniversary of the Columbus Holiday. There will be a student walk-out, a short rally, followed by a march to locations with a racial history that will end at Civic Center Park.
When: 12 Noon, Monday, October 13
Where: CU Denver’s Auraria Campus, The Plaza Building Lawn

The US spreads its aggression from the Balkans to the Caucasus region

South OssetiaTskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia.
 
The attack of the Georgian military, allied with the US and NATO, against Russian supported South Ossetia has widened the US military encirclement of Russia to another level and another region. The US Antiwar Movement has slept in the years since the ex-Soviet Union fell from the blows of the Cold War and ignored the continued US belligerence towards a now capitalist Russia.

Much of this ‘Peace’ Movement consists of liberals immersed in a reactionary campaign against China, another nation that the Pentagon and US government are waging a world war against, though the fighting between these 2 countries now is mainly at the level of propaganda wars. In regards to China, the liberal ‘Peacenics’ find themselves allied more with the Pentagon than they do with their beloved abstract ‘nonviolence’ religion. And they definitely are allied with voting for the Democratic Party, a pro-war party of the corporations.

Most of the liberal US and European Left actively supported the US-NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, so they are even more poorly placed to understand the inter relationship between the previous fighting in the Balkans, and the now hot eruption of war in South Ossetia and Georgia. In short, they are in a total fog of complete ignorance about how the bipartisan US government has promoted policies of aggression towards Russia that has led up to this new fighting.

The liberals that make up the ‘Peace Community’ don’t like to come to grips with the realities of US society at all. They want to think that if they just tinker a little that the whole nation will begin to see how righteous they are. They are on Cloud Nine when it comes to understanding basic US geopolitics around the Globe, and their idea of a ‘Peace’ Rapture is totally void of reality. This is a hard fight and they are only into offering a choreographed film of ‘resistance’, not roughing it out to build an Antiwar Movement any larger than their small liberal church followings.

We can expect a surge of international propaganda pushed by the US government and its allies where they promote themselves though the media as being goodhearted and completely disinterested observers of this fighting from afar. Far from that, the US and its allies are flat smack dab in the middle of the responsibility for this Georgian attack on South Ossetia, and Russia is unlikely to back off and allow the US con game much room for maneuver.

Russia tried to warn the US and its allies that making Kosovo an independent country would provoke this sort of new fighting where their country would be directly involved and utterly resistant to being forced to surrender their own national interests before the onslaught of US aggression. But the hawks in the US government, both DP and RP hawks, would have none of it and today we are where we are now with this new war breaking out. The timing of this war’s beginning comes just several months after the US-NATO broke Kosovo off of Yugoslavia, and that is no coincidence.

This is a dangerous game the US ruling corporate class is playing with all our lives. We must build a Movement that will stop them, and that means we must expand the Antiwar Movement from being just a tiny group of religious pacifist fools, like what is currently the case. These are nice enough people alright and they have the best of intentions, it is simply that their theology is not the building block necessary to build a larger response amongst the US population to US militarism in today’s world.

The US military buildup is colossal and it must be braked and dismantled for the world to ever live in any peace.

John Paul Second, the sequel…

Catch the Easter Morning Mass ? I bet the NeoCons are real sad about this… hee hee hee…
They have been anxiously awaiting a Casus Belli and Jus ad Bellum from him, something that they never got from JP2.

Without those 2 pronouncements, basically which would make it not a sin for a Catholic to kill somebody in a war, Catholic soldiers would have to go to confession every time they do.

You know, when Hannity was babbling about Ratzinger having effectively stopped a “Marxist takeover” of the Vatican, by writing a pastoral letter denouncing Liberation Theology, he was pronouncing “a death knell for Liberalism in the Catholic Church” and all the NeoCon pundits were howling for joy because they thought (or at least said, sometimes they say things they don’t really mean in their heart of hearts) that a “Conservative” pope had been elected.

In a case of long term memory kicking in, they were crowing the same way when JP2 got elected… because JP2 was opposed to the Soviet Bloc.

Also, Liberation Theology is the way the Catholic Church justifies the existence of the United States as a Legitimate Government…

Guess there is no joy in Mudville tonight, or Crawford either.

This makes Ratzinger’s second Urbi et Orbis Easter Mass, and he shows no sign of being a “tame” Pope.
_________________
Last night, I stayed up all night wondering where the Sun had gone….
and then, suddenly, it dawned on me…

Is hell for real?

OK, first, this is not another post about Iraq or Palestine. What it is is a post about yet another crazy religious doctor like James Dobson.

Dobson is a pediatrician, and this madman Maurice Rawlings is a cardiologist. And I know that he would certainly give me a heart attack if I were to have him as my heart doctor. But I don’t. Instead I just take a baby aspirin a day, and Thank God.

Is Hell for Real? Be sure to check out the experiences folk have had in Hell that are listed here.

Want yet more info about Doctor Maurice Rawlings? Then check out what Pastor Eugene Pee Harder (real name, I swear I didn’t make it up. He did!) has to say about this man of medical science. Doctors are scary, and when they get into theology, too? Well, they are twice as scary!

Remember Dr. Frankenstein. Imagine if he had also gotten a theology degree at a Southern Baptist seminary! Scary, isn’t it? Before you get medical treatment, ask your doctor is he believes in God. If he does, then get off the stretcher and run like Hell!

Jews for Allah might be for you!

Tired of intolerant religion of the Dobson/ Haggard type? There are some alternatives out there. You might consider the Unitarians, Friends, Mennonites, or even Jews for Allah! Hey don’t laugh. I have a good friend that took a wrong turn in life and became a Jew for Jesus for a while. If so many Jews can join the Christian religion that persecuted the Jewish people for centuries, certainly some might find a yet more hospitable environment within Islam.

Funny though, that there is no Muslims for Moses organization that I know of. If there were, then all the Palestinian refugees could convert to Judaism and reenter their Homeland, Pales… uh that would then be Israel.. Seems like converting others to their faith is not the strongpoint of the Jewish religion. It’s an intolerant religion it might seem. And now that I think of it, nobody has everr accused Moses of being like Jesus, say… Can you imagine Moses turning the other cheek? I can’t.

Oh well, what do I know or understand of theology, me being a nonbeliever and all? But you of the Jewish faith, you might want to check out Jews for Allah

Seriously. Don’t tell us it’s not your tribe. Go check them out.