audaciousdeviant

What's At Stake

2011-12-04T17:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a lengthy quote from a new star troll over at Thinking Anglicans. This is so wrong-headed and wrong-hearted on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.

Marriage does not come into the sphere or ecclesiology but moral theology; the first is confined to Church order. All of the conditions defined by the Prayer Book lead to the ultimate aim of creating new life, of increaing and multiplying, of stabilising society. Homosexuality does not enter the questions. Barrenness has never been a ground for nullity; failure to consummate a marriage has. But I believe that fertile couples who want to marry without the intention of having children should question their reasons. In the Catholic Church this provides grounds for annulment.

Patriarchy does not enter homosexual relationships unless they are trying to perpetrate a parody of the norm. For illumination on the woman as chattel myth, read Ephesians which defines marriage as a state founded on equality and complementarity. What radical homosexuals of the past resented was the imposition of a social norm on a condition that was inimical to the applied model. Why, they asked, should we be pressured into adopting a heterosexual lifestyle when we are not heterosexuals? Marriage was seen, rightly I believe, as the heart of the heterosexual norm.

I am sorry that Nat has only heard of heterosexual life, rather than actually knowing it. The watershed for heterosexual physical relations was the availability of the contraceptive pill which for the first time put women on an equal basis for promiscuity as men.
This led to the present sexual turmoil. The pill does not affect homosexuals because they are incapable of creating life. But look at the results of excessive promiscuity in the 1970s, the era when the concept of gay 'marriage' was derided by many homosexuals. That lay in AIDS which has been responsible for millions of deaths on a universal scale and has spread into heterosexual life with devastating consequences. I support a charity set up to help children infected by AIDS in the womb and I have seen personally the devastation it has caused. Nat may, or may not, know that AIDS was once known as the gay plague, not least among homosexuals themselves.
Posted by: John Bowles on Sunday, 4 December 2011 at 10:25am GMT

As I said, there is so much wrong that I don't know where to begin, so I won't.

Instead, I'll take this whole argument out of the realm of abstraction with this:

Dropping Out of Church

2011-12-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

According to a report I heard on the radio, The drop out rate from Christianity, all of it from fundamentalist to liberal, among people aged 15 to 29 is 60%. That's right, sixty percent. If that was a school district, entire schools would be closing down and mayors would be declaring martial law.

There are a lot of very existential issues behind this statistic for us to ponder.

Why is this? The radio report cites a number of reasons, but the primary reason is one I've thought about for a long time. Kids live in a world dominated by radical changes in science and technology that affect all of us personally. Christianity carries with it a huge amount of supernatural content that becomes more and more of a problem, if not an outright liability, in an age where mechanical explanations for natural phenomena continue to have dramatic success.

Another big reason is cultural and social changes. The younger generations are comfortable in a much more cosmopolitan world than the rest of us older folks are. I've observed this myself. They move through a world of myriad cultural differences with an easy unselfconsciousness that I find astonishing (I was born in Civil Rights era Texas where EVERYONE was very anxiously self conscious about all kinds of differences). Teh Gay, which is tearing churches apart, is not an issue at all for most of the kids, even for those who consider themselves to be conservative (a difference I've also noted over the years teaching).

Apparently, most younger people's experience of church is one of constraint, backwardness, and superstition.

Do we think this whole Christian thing is worth keeping? Is there a distinction between the Christian faith and the Christian religion? Most churches would say "no," but are they right? I think not. I don't think what could be called Christendom, that whole spectrum of cultural and institutional identities around the Christian Evangel, has much of a future. I can foresee a near future in which the historic and not-so-historic churches will be as past as the religion of ancient Egypt. Will Christianity survive the loss of its institutions? Should it survive? Maybe, but it may continue in forms that might be hard for us to recognize as Christian or even as religious. What's worth saving and what's worth discarding? Yes, God is eternal, but we of a more universalist bent proclaim a God who is beyond any one religion, and beyond religion itself. Does God worry about Christianity surviving? Should He? Should we?

Do we Christian progressives have a future? Perhaps, but only as small mammals in a world dominated by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs. The right and the fundamentalists seem to have successfully copyrighted Christianity. It is their terms that dominate all of the public debate about the faith these days. It seems we shall have to make our way between a throwback to 19th century Positivism that's far more zealous today, or a throwback to late Medieval Christianity that's become more legalistic and crazier.

I love my Episcopal parish with its 1821 Federal style church and its high church liturgy. I love the heavy silver Victorian processional cross in the sacristy. I love our magnificent choir singing Mass settings by Palestrina and Monteverdi. I love the Book of Common Prayer. I love what all the congregations I've belonged to have done for their larger communities. I love all the remarkable and generous people I've known through the Church for decades. And yet, I cannot help but feel that our days are numbered.

I think our future will ultimately be in house-churches, and even in small lefty churches that meet in the back of a bar like this one near where I live.

So, what do you think?

EXTRA:

Speaking of small mammals in a world dominated by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs, our parish is getting threats from a far-right terrorist group (apparently it's one of those groups that murders abortion providers). We haven't exactly been singled out, but we are one of a number of gay-friendly congregations getting hate mail and threats to our staff and to some of our parishoners (not me, I get enough hate and abuse from the trolls on Thinking Anglicans and Fr. Harris' blog). The FBI has been contacted.

Economic Thoughts For The Day

2011-12-02T18:01:00.000-08:00

**Considering all the recent revelations about the 2008 bank bailout, it would have been cheaper, and more productive, just to write a $25000 check to everyone with a Social Security number, a point Atrios (among others) has been making for a long time now.

**I'm sure that Spain, Greece, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Ireland will be delighted to cede a significant portion of their sovereignty to a central European bank dominated by Germany. Why let a few really bad memories stand between them and more austerity? What could possibly go wrong?
The idea of impoverishing for prosperity makes about as much sense to me as fucking for chastity (to paraphrase an old joke from the Vietnam War).
Maybe it would be cheaper and more productive to write a check for 15000 Euros to everyone in the Eurozone with a Social Security number.

All the world seems to be ruled by a mean stingy rich uncle in the Mafia (or by the ghost of Leona Helmsley who disinherited her kids and left all her fortune to her dog).

Mahler

2011-12-02T17:38:00.000-08:00

... and very dark Mahler. Symphony #10, the Adagio

Jamiel Terry

2011-12-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

Randall Terry's adopted son Jamiel, who came out as gay about 5 years ago, died yesterday in a car crash in Georgia.

In case some of you don't remember, Terry publicly disowned his son, and said this about him to beliefnet:

For me, the issue is that there has been an unbelievable lack of honesty. For me the breach is that I cannot have him in my home while I know that at any point, he could take pictures and sell them. I'm not going to have that kind of intrusion into my home.

And here's more from the beliefnet interview with Randall Terry about his son:

You regard homosexuality not as something in a person's nature but a behavior one falls into. Is that correct?

Behaviors are a choice. I do not contend that they ask for the feelings anymore than any of us ask for feelings. Feelings are sometimes out of our control. Behavior has to do with choices.

Have your views shifted at all since you found out Jamiel is gay?

No. There are three options when you find out a family member is homosexual. One is accept them and their lifestyle as if it's normal. Two is to reject them and sever your relationship. Three is to love them unconditionally, but to tell them you do not accept their behavior as normal, and to tell them the truth. If I love my son, I can't say to him, "Hey, you're committing suicide on the installment plan. This is a great lifestyle." I have to be honest with him. Take out the word homosexuality and put in alcoholism or put in drug addiction. Would you tell a drug addict, "I accept you. This is your choice, this is your life and I will stand by you"? The average death age of a male homosexual is 42 years old because of disease, because of suicide, because of alcoholism, because of drugs, because of violence. It's just not a good world. It's a self-abusive, self-destructive sexual addiction.

As imperfect as my parents were, thank God I didn't have Randall Terry for a father, adopted or otherwise.

May Jamiel find the love his father denied him in this life.

Who Is Occupy Wall Street?

2011-12-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

Ray Kachel in Liberty Plaza/ Zuccotti Park a few weeks ago.

George Packer wrote an outstanding article in The New Yorker on a handful of the occupiers just before Liberty Plaza was cleared out by the cops. The article focuses on 53 year old Ray Kachel from Seattle, whose story before Occupy is very compelling and illustrative of what happened to a lot of highly skilled and educated professionals over the past 3 years. Mr. Kachel, a former high tech jack of all trades from Seattle, once did quite well and prospered doing odd jobs and freelance work in the once broadly tolerant culture of Seattle's tech industry. His opportunities all dried up over the last 2 years. He spent his last $250 on a bus ticket from Seattle to New York to join Occupy, and is now officially homeless on the streets of New York.

Packer concentrates on Kachel, but uses him as a means of getting to know a number of other people in and around the encampment, all of whom have their own remarkable stories. Kachel, and a number of others in the encampment, found friendship and community for the first time in their lives in Liberty Plaza.

I must admit that I had similar experiences in political activity from various gay causes to union organizing. There is that rapturous experience of discovering fellow travelers, and the pleasant surprise of finding them in unexpected places. And there is the thrilling experience of waking up from the usual dull resignation we all live in to discover that together, we might actually be able to move that huge inert tonnage called history even a fraction of an inch. These experiences could be described as "pentecostal."

I still keep in contact with friends I made during an effort to unionize a Borders Books store. That was more than 12 years ago.

What does it say about me, or about church, that I've had far more of these experiences outside of church, or even the bounds of what could be called "religious?"

Something that the article touches on is institutional failure. A defining feature of our day is the across-the-board failure of institutions to do their jobs; from governments to businesses to academies to churches. Economist Duncan Black yearns for a "well-functioning and trustworthy banking system, and not one built on a foundation of crime and fraud." I yearn for a government answerable to the people who are supposed to be its source of legitimacy. I yearn for churches that are more about binding up the wounds of a bleeding world and sewing hope and love where there are none than about enforcement of social and cultural norms. More often than not, institutions betrayed their charters, their founding principles, for the sake of self-serving and self-preservation. Small wonder Anarchism, once the common enemy of communist and capitalist , enjoys a resurgence these days.

I'm not an Anarchist. I believe in the rule of law and in the necessity of institutions to make life bearable for everyone. But I definitely have my Anarchist sympathies.

CLARIFICATION:

What I meant by "pentecostal" is the experience described in these 2 paragraphs from George Packer's article:

The sense of togetherness in the park that night was like nothing he’d ever felt. Garofalo still found the drummers annoying, and the activists who dreamed of an alternate world of pure democracy, without rules, were not for him. Still, he now felt responsible for keeping Occupy Wall Street going. He wanted others to make the pilgrimage: “If you bring someone down here for a day, they’ll attach so much emotion to being here that it will have an effect next year, even if this isn’t here the day before the election.”
A period in Garofalo’s life had ended—the period when being amusing was the highest goal because being serious felt futile. He was now ready to carry a sign on the sidewalk along Broadway. He stayed up nights trying to think of the right one: “I have a job, but I think being here is important”; “You’re cynical, lazy, and would be ashamed to tell your kids you did nothing.” Finally, one morning, he went down to Zuccotti Park with a signboard that said, in red block letters, “I Don’t Have a Lobbyist, Can I Still Have 3/5 of a Vote?” Garofalo was split, seventy-thirty, on his own sign: he thought that it was witty, but the reference to slavery was only a few steps away from invoking the Nazis. Yet he stood on the sidewalk for more than an hour and held the sign aloft while people paused to read it.

Read the article folks. It's definitely worth the time.

Thought For the Day

2011-11-28T16:48:00.000-08:00

I never imagined that the New Deal policies my parents took for granted when I was growing up would become the fringey lefty dreams of young anarchists. I never foresaw The New Deal becoming the stuff of radicalism.

A Holiday Classic

2011-11-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

A Little List

2011-11-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

This bit of fake Gilbert and Sullivan is so cranky it makes me smile.

Seth MacFarlane may or may not be a threat to civilization, but he is very funny.

Heimat Sicherheit

2011-11-26T06:48:00.000-08:00

Naomi Wolf on the coordinated crackdown on #Occupy. Someone is feeling very threatened by this. My friend David Kaplan thinks this is all perfectly obvious. The Establishment is deeply worried that this might catch on and spread. The fact that the whole movement (so far) is entirely pacifist and democratic makes them even more threatening to our rulers. Occupy would be so much easier to control and eradicate if it was a terrorist movement with a military command structure.

Ignore the numerous police informants (or use them to send misleading information). Beware the provocateurs. And don't be afraid. That's what our little union drive at Borders did 13 years ago.

*NOTE
Dan Sloan on Facebook cautions that this story of DHS coordination between police departments is still dubious with reasons for skepticism.
Dan Sloan adds:

I should add that Naomi Wolf isn't a journalist and the commentisfree section of the Guardian is open to anyone who wants to publish - no vetting or fact checking required.

The one advantage we've had over right-wingnuts is that we've had verifiable facts and truth on our side, even when they don't further our goals. But I've been seeing more Fox News style reporting and conspiracy theory spinning in liberal sources recently. I think that's going to hurt us if we don't call it out. Wolf may be right, but that article is flimsy and her sources are dubious at best.

I wonder if any real journalists (e.g. Pro Publica affiliated) might be looking into this story to see if there's any truth to it.

The whole thing seems to rest on the flimsy but tantalizing evidence of Mayor Jean Quan's admission to consulting with other mayors before her crackdown on Occupy Oakland protesters. If she meant a coordinated conference call among mayors, that's one thing. If she meant a phone call or two for advice, that's something else entirely.

Moral Christians

2011-11-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

There are days when I think not even God can stand to be around those spiteful narrow-minded kill-joys who call themselves Christians.

Could it be, Maggie, that people are giving you a hard time over this issue because you are just plain wrong about it, and that you advocate effectively stigmatizing and disenfranchising whole classes of people? Could it be that the heat you feel coming back at you is because you enable those who dehumanize and harm lgbtq folk?

Both of these are from JoeMyGod. Joe Jervis has a cast iron stomach for this sort of thing.

Rather than argue against all of this myself, I'll let someone who was much better with words than I'll ever be make my point.

If Moral Virtue was Christianity,
Christ’s Pretensions were all Vanity,
And Cai’phas & Pilate Men
Praise Worthy, & the Lion’s Den
And not the Sheepfold, Allegories
Of God & Heaven & their Glories.
The Moral Christian is the Cause
of the Unbeliever & his Laws.
The Roman Virtues, Warlike Fame,
Take Jesus’ & Jehovah’s Name;
For what is Antichrist but those
Who against Sinners Heaven close
With Iron bars, in Virtuous State,
And Rhadamanthus at the Gate?

--William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel”

EXTRA: As far as Maggie is concerned, I'm a hell-bound sodomite and a universalist antinomian heretic. Fine. If I must err (and EVERYONE errs in these matters), then I would err on the side of Love rather than Law.

Thank You Sweet Baby Jesus I Don't Work In Retail Anymore!

2011-11-25T05:37:00.000-08:00

And they're off!

Hat tip to JoeMyGod. No reports -- yet -- of any store clerks killed this year.

EXTRA:

No deaths yet, but apparently there have been some very serious injuries.

My best wishes go out to all of you retail clerks out there on the front lines dodging the shrapnel.

Oh Crap! It's Christmas!

2011-11-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

Mel Brooks once said that the entertainment industry was the creation of Jews and gay men for the consumption of heterosexual gentiles.

You could say the same thing about Christmas.

Not exactly butch Johnny Mathis sings a Christmas classic by not exactly Presbyterian Mel Torme.

Imperial Storm Troopers

2011-11-24T07:51:00.000-08:00

Thanks

2011-11-24T05:31:00.000-08:00

I'm grateful for so many things.

I'm thankful for Michael who has ended my loneliness, given me new courage, and a new home. I'm thankful for a whole new family as my old one passes away.

I'm thankful for old friends and for new ones.

I'm thankful for all the animals in my life, now and in the past.

I'm thankful for art. It's given me a reason to get up in the morning and be glad to face a new day for most of my life. It takes the random dull mess of life and fills it with wonder and meaning. It's one of those miraculous things we do despite our being mortal and fallible.

I'm thankful for my work and for all of its exceptional gratifications, for my colleagues, for my students.

I'm especially grateful for the satisfaction of knowing that after so many years of being told that I couldn't and shouldn't, I could and I did. I started out painting on canvas panels in my room when I was 10, using a pie tin for a palette, and now I'm an artist with a studio in Manhattan.

I'm thankful that I can pay my bills. A lot of people can't say that now.

I'm thankful that I have a job, and that I like it. A lot of people can't say that these days.

I'm thankful for relatively good health. I can still walk and talk. My vision is excellent for my age.

I'm thankful for the internet. It's made a profound difference in my life. I'm not sure that I'd have much of what I have now if it wasn't around.

Even though I'm always behind the curve and slow to catch up, I'm grateful for technology. The computer has made so much of my work a lot easier and more manageable. Tech continues to open up new possibilities.

I've done a little traveling, I've had some great adventures along the way, and I hope I've accomplished a few things which make life a little better for a few others.

And The Silly Season Begins!

2011-11-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Advent, Jesus has a "wardrobe malfunction." A video that has been flying around the internet.

Hat tip to Madpriest and a whole lot of other people.

And for Thanksgiving, here is an old classic. Be sure to sing along.

Here Comes Another Election Year (Yawn)

2011-11-22T14:48:00.000-08:00

Another year where we have to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and NO this is not another rant about how the political parties are both the same. This is a rant about how none of the most important issues for the future of this country will even be touched in this election cycle. All of those crucial issues about the role of money in our politics, whether we really want a democracy, or whether an oligarchy would just be easier, don't expect to hear those even mentioned. And if we formally and legally transition to oligarchy, then what about individual rights or constraints on the powerful? Does fairness mean anything to an ideology of supremacism, national or social? Does that inscription over the Supreme Court Building, "Equal Justice Under Law" still mean anything, or is it a quaint antique and it's time to retire it? Do we really want to be the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave," or do we want to be just another empire lording it over a sullen world? Those questions will be addressed, but outside the political campaigns and outside the official public forum.

I'm predicting a very boring election year. All of the "debates" will be about what amount to tweaks one way or another of the Center-Right consensus that's dominated our politics since the 1970s. The idea that the whole political process is rotten, just so much legalized corruption, will never come up. The idea that public office is nothing more than a revolving door for plutocrats and their minions who go in to make regulatory law, and then go out to profit from those regulations will never even be mentioned.

God and Jesus will be invoked repeatedly will barrels full of oily public piety. The Prince of Peace will be dragooned into blessing a society increasingly coarse, brutal, predatory, and nihilistic, a society where "even three in the morning is lit up with the glow of money going rotten," to quote the late John Updike. The God of Love will be invoked to legitimize policies that stigmatize and disenfranchise entire classes of people. The One who said that "foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head" will be drafted into blessing those who have multiple homes at the expense of those who have none. The money changers will continue to be welcome into the Temple. Caiphas and the Sanhedrin will continue to believe that they are martyrs suffering for the cause of right, when in fact they believe with all their hearts and all their minds and all their souls that might makes right.

In the end, Russell Baker said it best, "Watching a politician claim the high road is like watching a hog take a bath."

Put on your wet suits everyone.

The President's hand holding a note slipped to him by an OWS protester in New Hampshire.

Robert Reich talks about an issue that certainly won't be mentioned in any campaign. Both parties have patrons that they cannot afford to offend.

When "Serve and Protect" Becomes "Comply or Hurt"

2011-11-22T07:10:00.000-08:00

I was going to write a whole post about the militarization of the cops, and the increasingly free use of "non-lethal" weapons (never mind that some people have died from taser attacks and even pepper-spray).

But Digby beat me to it and wrote a much better essay than I could have.

EXTRA:

James Fallows quotes extensively from two people with sharply differing experiences and perspectives on the police. This is a follow up to another post he made about the militarization of local police.

St. Cecilia's Day

2011-11-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

Have a happy one all you musicians out there.

Those of us who are not musicians will always be grateful for what you do.

November 22nd

2011-11-22T05:01:00.000-08:00

If you are from Dallas and are of a certain age, this date is unforgettable.

Silent Protest

2011-11-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

This is extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this. The Chancellor of UC Davis walks out to her car and is met by a huge, but completely silent, student protest.

EXTRA:

Apparently Chancellor Katehi is taking the bureaucrats way out, the old "time to move on and put this behind us" excuse in which we sweep the whole unpleasantness under the rug and get on with our lives. This, of course, leaves her and all others responsible free from any accountability. Where have we heard this excuse before over the last ten years? I can think of several places from Washington to Beizhing.

Lift Up The People's Banner

2011-11-19T18:29:00.000-08:00

A May Day print by Walter Crane

A hymn from the Christian Socialist movement in 19th century England, a hymn no church will sing tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.

This is for all of those wounded and arrested by aggressive police crackdowns on peaceful protesters over the past few weeks.

To the Tune of We Plow The Fields and Scatter

1. You faithful saints and martyrs
Who fought for truth and right,
We ask your prayers and blessings
To aid us in our fight.
Your faith shall be our watchword,
Your cause shall be our own -
To fight against oppression
Till it be overthrown.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

2. In many a golden story,
On many a golden page,
The poets in their poems
Have sung the golden age,
The age of love and beauty,
The age of joy and peace,
When everyone lived gladly
And shared the earth's increase.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

3. Today the tyrants triumph
And bind us for their gains,
But Jesus Christ our Saviour
Will free us from our chains,
And love, the only master,
Will strive with might and greed,
Till might is right no longer,
And right is might indeed.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

4. God is the only Landlord
To whom our rents are due.
God made the earth for everyone
And not for just a few.
The four parts of creation --
Earth, water, air, and fire --
God made and ranked and stationed
For everyone's desire.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

5. God made the earth for freedom
And God alone is Lord,
And we will win our birthright
By truth's eternal sword;
And all the powers of darkness
And all the hosts of pride
Shall pass and be forgotten
For God is by our side.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

6. Christ blessed the meek and told them
That they the earth should own.
And he will lead the battle
From his eternal throne.
O have no fear, my comrades,
Cry out in holy mirth!
For God to us has promised
His Kingdom here on earth.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

Cops

2011-11-19T17:05:00.000-08:00

In some ways, I am still very bourgeois. I usually like to cut the cops some slack. It's a rotten job with rotten pay, but it's necessary. The Port Authority cops were very good friends to us underpaid bookstore clerks when we organized our union at the World Trade Center Borders many years ago.

And then I see stuff like this, and that very white middle class assumption that The Police Are Our Friends just melts away in horror and disgust. Of course, not-so-white folk have had very different experiences with the police since always. I doubt any of this would surprise them.

I can remember a time when folks used to turn over cop cars and set them on fire in response to stuff like this. What does it mean that people don't resort to that kind of thing in this video? Is it a measure of the protesters determination to be peaceful? Is it that they are afraid?

I'm wondering if there's a concerted effort between mayors out there to "make an example" of people to discourage potential protesters. The New York DA plans to press serious felony charges against protesters who refuse to take a plea deal (a lot of them). All of this force and violence is so disproportionate. It reminds me of the police over-kill during the Civil Rights protests. Someone somewhere is feeling very threatened by all of these dirty drug crazed hippies and their kooky flower power.

To me this is an extension of the crap that all of us have to live with these days: all of those penalty charges, debts, and interest piled on top of debts, threats and demands from insurance companies, that turn life into such a God awful treadmill of never enough work, never enough pay, a soul crushing chase after money money money, always just short of breaking free. The cops are the ultimate collection agency.

All of this money and manpower is being deployed against unarmed and peaceful protesters. Meanwhile, where are the raids on Citicorp? on Goldman Sachs? on Bank of America? on Chase? I thought so.

A friend of mine from Argentina made the point that middle class Americans are now getting a taste of what their government exported to all the rest of the world, especially to Latin America.

Justice in an age when EVERYTHING is for sale. You can sit in an expensive corner office suite and commit larceny on a cosmic scale, and there will be no consequences. Hell, our government will just write you a check to get you out of trouble.

But if you so much as step off a curb or bump a barricade, then God help you.

Here is a now famous picture of 84 year old Dorli Rainey in Seattle after taking a face full of pepper spray.

Because you're never too old ...

Shocking

2011-11-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

I took some students through MoMA today. It is remarkable that so many works in its collection which many people once found shocking and deeply offensive now wear the aura of "classic." It is amazing to think that the most recent work reproduced below, Johns' Flag, is more than 50 years old. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is now more than a century old.

I read somewhere a story related by Edward Mendelsohn about what people considered shocking and offensive in 1920s Paris. A woman stood up in the middle of a performance of a chamber work by Maurice Ravel (RAVEL?!!) and loudly asked if this was music suitable for war veterans or widows.

Here is a small sample of works in MoMA that once made legions of people furious.

Auguste Rodin, Balzac

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d'Avignon

Meret Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur

Kazimir Malevich, White on White Painting

Jasper Johns, Flag

The OWS "Bat Signal"

2011-11-19T07:43:00.000-08:00

Weiben and I saw this whole show from the Brooklyn Bridge during the march on November 17th. The crowd loved it and read it all aloud and loudly. Traffic slowed down on the Bridge to look at it. I don't know why, but for some reason a lot of people (including yours truly) found this to be incredibly moving. This video is entirely silent. Those are not the conditions in which I saw this. I saw this on a cold windy night full of cheering and applause, car honking, and loud chanting.

The story behind this projection is itself remarkable and incredibly moving; creativity meets resourcefulness meets courage meets generosity meets graciousness,

EXTRA:

Someone is feeling politically threatened by all those dirty drug-crazed hippies in tents, threatened enough to spend $850,000 on a publicity campaign to discredit them.

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on Occupy's Birthday

2011-11-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

Foley Square last night; the Federal Courthouse is in the center, and the Municipal Building is to the right

After attending a day full of meetings, I went to the biggest meeting of the day, the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Foley Square put on by various labor unions in support of the movement, and as a "family friendly" event for those who didn't want to go mano a mano with New York's Finest. Some people did take on the cops anyway. There were about 2 dozen arrests at this event, most near the Brooklyn Bridge where people tried to jump police barricades.

I met 2 friends there, Weiben Wang, an old hand at events like this going back to Anti-Apartheid demonstrations in the 80s, and another artist, James Middleton. I was very naughty and skipped my third meeting for the day to attend this to its finish. James left the rally early and went in my place, bless him.

Both Weiben and I brought cameras. Most of these are mine. Some are his.

Weiben's picture of me as the march across the Brooklyn Bridge gets started.

Here is dangerous incendiary Weiben Wang in a picture I took with his camera. Actually, maybe James took this picture.

Here is my picture of Weiben taken with my camera.

Here is Weiben's picture of me taking his picture. James is on the right.

Foley Square about a half hour before the rally started. People were already gathering. There was a huge police presence in the square and in the surrounding streets. The cops seemed determined to keep the whole thing penned in the middle of the square. In minutes, the crowd filled the square from wall to wall, and the barricades came down.

The rally begins.

I didn't get to move much during the rally. People were packed in tightly.

Indeed.

Fond memories of MLK and JFK who were there in spirit.

A passage from the Magnificat in Foley Square

The USA seems to be one of the few countries where it is relatively safe to bring small children to political rallies. I saw a lot at this one, and in all the anti-war rallies when the Iraq War started.

Lots of people gathered on the African American Memorial.

Signs from my union, PSC-CUNY (Professional Staff Congress, City University of New York); The SEIU, Unite!, the UAW, and other unions were heavily represented.

The march to the Brooklyn Bridge begins, and it takes forever to get these thousands of people through the bottle-neck on Centre Street in front of the Municipal Building.

Lots of Guy Fawkes masks, thank you Anonymous.

Occupy that ledge on the City Records Building!

The Woolworth Building at night with protesters.

A big reason for the bottleneck, police were determined to keep traffic moving on this street, a main artery for traffic off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Some of the unions like Unite sent parade marshals to put themselves between the marchers and the cops to prevent trouble, a tactic that seemed to work.

Finally, we're starting across the Brooklyn Bridge. My camera's battery died soon after this shot, so the rest of the pictures will be Weiben's.
The marchers crossed over the boardwalk above the traffic lanes. A lot of cars honked in solidarity with drivers waving us and giving us V signs. One woman in an apartment building on the Brooklyn side flashed her room lights and waved at us.

Someone somewhere had a Powerpoint projector and did an impromptu projection on the side of the Verizon Building where everyone could see it from the bridge. You can see it on the lower right of the building. Weiben's picture.

Here's part of that giant Powerpoint show on the Verizon building. Weiben's picture.

Weiben's picture of the crowds coming out on the other end of the Bridge. The mood of the marchers was festive, jubilant, and triumphant with vivid memories of an earlier attempt by Occupy demonstrators to cross this same bridge.

Here's a lot more of Weiben's pictures from last night.

Weiben characterized this march, and this movement, as "genteel." I'm not quite entirely sure what he meant by that. The crowd struck me as very middle class (James noted the remarkably correct spelling and grammar on so many of the signs). Even though minorities were substantially represented, the crowd remained far whiter than the proportional makeup of the city. Weiben is right about that. All ages attended, but most of the crowd was young, 20s to late 30s.

The press so far ignored last night's huge protest march in today's papers, but then they ignored the big marches against the Iraq War and at the 2004 GOP Convention that each drew around a million participants.

The press coverage since the beginning of Occupy is hostile, patronizing, or indifferent. And yet the movement continues to expand rapidly despite that hostility. I very much wonder how different press coverage would be if Occupy was a far-right movement demanding no regulations on the financial industry, and demanding further punishments on "undeserving" poor people, especially if they are black, brown, or young. I would imagine Fox News would give them prime-time live coverage praising as heroes and patriots those mostly white, elderly, and affluent people who would man such an occupation in heated prefab huts supplied by some corporate PAC (that 84 year old protester in Seattle who got a face full of pepper spray would be officially designated as either amusingly odd or senile). Fox News would write the panegyrics and the rest of the press would sing the choruses. It's not necessary to resort to conspiracy theories to explain this. It's simply a matter of "who pays the fiddler calls the tune."

As you can see from the photos, these folks are not the dirty drug crazed hippies described by Fox News and parroted by everyone else who's had little or no direct experience with the protesters. A lot of the ones around us last night were professional people. Indeed, the core of Occupy seems to be very well educated professionals who found themselves marginalized, or who voluntarily left what they saw as a corrupt mainstream (recent veterans are disproportionately represented in the Occupy movements). The creativity and resourcefulness of this whole movement continues to astonish me. Occupy emerged out of those very middle class virtues of initiative and independence to fight those very middle class vices of conformity and hypocrisy in order to take on a serious threat to democracy.

One of the very few reporters to actually talk to and get to know some of the protesters in Zuccotti Park before it was cleared was Michael Greenberg in his article in the current New York Review of Books. One of the protesters he talked to was a young documentary film maker originally from Tomball, Texas who left behind politically right wing and fundamentalist Christian parents to pursue her own path (sounds familiar). Another protester Greenberg got to know was a doctor newly minted from medical school and residency who put his career on hold to work full time for this movement. A now famous casualty of the police raid on Zuccotti Park is the Occupy Wall Street Library run by an all volunteer professional library staff complete with their own website including a complete online catalog of their titles. Until its recent destruction, this was the only public library below Canal Street. Since Borders closed, there aren't even any bookstores in the neighborhood, the fastest growing in New York, and one of the fastest growing in the USA.

It remains to be seen what the future will be. Who knows if this movement will survive the loss of their permanent settlements, or if this is really a blessing in disguise. There certainly are divisions within over the direction to go. Part of it is a reawakened left (which attracts the support of unions; for them, the kids in tents are a godsend breathing new life into a movement long on the defensive), and a middle class newly wakened from its 30 year long political slumber. Professionals woke up to find that they are now reduced to the status of wage-earners. Students woke up to the prospect of finding themselves indentured as debtors for the rest of their lives. While the movement attracts a lot of minority support, it still needs to make a more serious effort to incorporate minority populations (who also have found themselves on the defensive fighting the erosion of hard-fought gains over the last 3 decades).

My role in all this is only as a cheer-leading spectator. I'm not really a participant. I've attended a couple of "General Assemblies," but only to watch. I have no idea where all of this will ultimately lead, but I continue to have high hopes. After 30 years of bitter resignation, that in itself is a major accomplishment.

EXTRA:

Here's an interview with the folks responsible for the Verizon Building "Bat Signal." No, it wasn't Powerpoint. Thanks to Frank Episale for sending this.

EXTRA EXTRA:

Matt Taibibi's essay in Rolling Stone is the best I've read yet on OWS. Here's a sample:

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

I Will Be There In Spirit

2011-11-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

Alas, I will be in meetings all day into the night today.

Who does these posters? They are brilliant! Anyone who can remember back to 1989 should recognize the image immediately.

*Actually, there's a 5PM rally in Foley Square. If the Library Committee lets out early or on time, I could make that one before the next meeting at 7PM.

Vent

2011-11-16T04:01:00.000-08:00

I'm rotten at multitasking. All of my efforts to master it so far are ending in profound frustration and regret.

I can't wait for the semester to be over.

I can't wait for Xmas and the holiday madness to be over.

I look forward to at least a temporary break from the depression/ insomnia two-step I've been doing for weeks now.

Crassus Wins

2011-11-15T15:37:00.000-08:00

... for now.

Bloomberg Clears Out Liberty Plaza

2011-11-15T05:11:00.000-08:00

Poster by Shepard Fairey

No democracy for YOU!

--At the moment, according to the radio, protesters are marching from Foley Square to City Hall and are attempting to block off the gates to City Hall while Bloomberg holds a press conference there.

--Hundreds of people are now gathering at 6th avenue and Canal street with the intent of marching back to Liberty Plaza. Unions are now making plans to join the protesters later today.

--A judge has now ruled that the protesters may return and bring their tents. The mayor filed an immediate appeal and is keeping the park closed.

--At a press conference the mayor claims that the raid is in the name of "public safety." Occupy unofficial spoksesperson Jesse LaGreca calls the mayor a "third world dictator."

--The Transit Workers Union together with some other unions will rally at 3PM in support of the evicted protesters, on the same day that contract negotiations begin for transit workers.

This ain't over folks.

EXTRA:

Keith Olberman tells us what he really thinks of our plutocrat mayor, and pulls no punches. Thanks to Paul (A) for sending this in.

Swellegant

2011-11-14T15:49:00.000-08:00

Michael and I dressed to the teeth on Sunday for his sister Linda's wedding. She married her longtime boyfriend Evan down at Brooklyn Bridge Park on the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. The park is a popular spot for weddings and wedding photos. Lots of brides posed on the river rocks in frothy white for various photographers.

Here we are in our best. I look so much like my Dad. He looks nothing like his Dad.

Michael took this picture of us together. The hat comes in handy. I don't know how much longer the comb-over will last.

A very elegant Michael

Myself looking like Karl Malden without the nose.

Michael with the radiant bride. We both agreed that her choice of 1930s glam over standard issue Victorian bridal froth was truly inspired.

Here are the lovely young couple. They met in college 9 years ago.

The ceremony by the river. Vive l'amour! I took this picture, and I'm real proud of it.

Johnny Cash

2011-11-14T15:43:00.000-08:00

He sings a cover of a beautiful Beatles' song. I love this.

Economics As Morality

2011-11-13T04:50:00.000-08:00

sugar

Italy is now about to join Greece, becoming effectively a dependent colony of the EU governed by appointed "experts" from Brussels and from various central banks. Whatever dysfunctions peculiar to the way Italy has run its affairs over the past century, the experts will impose severe austerity measures that ultimately do nothing for Italians, but assure the banks that their losses will be minimal. The various leaders of Europe from Angela Merkel to David Cameron will trot out the usual sermons about "responsibility" and "consequences" and say nothing about the willingness of banks to lend despite their own knowledge of the risks and despite their own dubious lending practices.

In this country the suggestion that people might be poor because of the way society is so ordered is rank heresy. That people are poor because of their own fault is the conventional wisdom, and has been since the mid 19th century. And now, it's the fault of people that they are only middle class in a world where being middle class counts for less and less, where professionals are frequently reduced to the status of wage earners. This is an extremely convenient and self-serving world view if you are loaded with money and assets. It absolves you of any responsibility toward your neighbors and allows you to turn a deaf ear to their sufferings.

This point of view fails to take into account something that has always been true, and is still true. People never choose the circumstances into which they are born and that the playing field of life is never level or fair, and never was. Those who have will always tilt the tables and rig the game in their own favor and at the expense of those who have not. The very rich among us do this at the expense of all the rest of us, and we do this together at the expense of the rest of the world, and we do this without even thinking.

The real morality play in this world is not the irresponsible debtor, but that our ease and convenience always depends on someone else's misery. The sugar that I put in my tea always came at a high human cost. Modern slavery began in the 16th century in order to satisfy the insatiable sweet tooth of Europe. My insatiable sweet tooth still requires the hard brutal labor of harvesting and processing sugar cane, and the setting aside of sustenance crops for a lucrative cash crop.

What we call history, society, and even civilization is frequently nothing more than the natural struggle for survival and supremacy projected into the social realm. We should remember that the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined not by Charles Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer. Spencer coined the phrase not to describe the natural world, but the economy. Cornelius Vanderbilt described labor as a class to be sacrificed for the good of civilization. The novelists of the 19th century from Dickens to Thackery to Edith Wharton wrote about the savagery that lay just underneath the thin brittle veneer of respectability in the Victorian world. That savagery still lies at the heart of our own world, and still inspires writers to draw back the veils of our own social conventions. It seems to me that so often what we call "values" are ultimately survival skills. Our leaders drone on and on about "values" in a capitalist world that denies the very idea of "value," that anything has any intrinsic value apart from use and exchange.

Despite all of our technology and all of our political and social progress, we are still miles and miles away from the Great Good Place where we can all be happy, one and all.

Police beat a striking child garment worker in Bangladesh.

Frida Kahlo

2011-11-12T11:13:00.000-08:00

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait in Tehuana Dress (Thinking of Diego), 1943

Frida Kahlo photographed in 1931 by Imogen Cunningham

My students love Frida Kahlo. I get many papers about her every year, some of them very good, and a few are excellent. I frequently can’t tell if they love her work or if they love her. Usually, they get so caught up in the drama of her stormy life that they forget to write about her paintings. Whichever the case, Frida Kahlo seems to have struck a nerve with so many people these days, and not just women. She’s just as popular a topic with my male students. Frida Kahlo is now the object of an entire industry built on her story from calendars to a feature length movie. Her fame now eclipses that of her once very famous husband, Diego Rivera, the most well known of the great Mexican muralists of the early 20th century. Indeed, one of my male students referred to him as Frida Kahlo’s husband. Probably more than any other early 20th century figure in art or in literature, Frida Kahlo really speaks to people these days. But, how great an artist was she really?

For a long time, I never thought much of her art. I considered it to be formally slight and solipsistic, and there are still a lot of critics who feel that way. Recently, I’ve begun to take another look at her work and to rethink my former opinions. So have the critics. Not long ago, the consensus of critics saw her work as appealing to exclusively feminist tastes. Now, a new critical consensus is emerging saying that Frida Kahlo, and not her husband, was the greatest Mexican painter of that generation of artists inspired by the wave of nationalism in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of about 1910 to 1920. A lot of critics today would say that she belongs to Mexico as much as to feminism, and that her ties to specifically Mexican art and heritage are more authentic and subtle than those of Diego Rivera’s art for all its vast size and national ambition.

What a change from Frida’s own lifetime.

When she was alive, people always thought of her as Diego Rivera’s eccentric wife who just happened to paint too. Whereas her husband painted frescoes on a vast scale, Frida Kahlo always painted small easel pictures. Her work appeared dwarfed just by the sheer scale of her husband’s work, just as Diego’s immense physical size dwarfed her small and slight frame.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo, Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931

Most people thought of her as a peculiar amateur, certainly not the equal of her husband. There were some notable exceptions. Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, enthusiastically admired her work. Diego himself also admired it, and took Frida’s paintings quite seriously. There was no shortage of admiring collectors who bought her work. There was a strong current of rivalry that played a large role in their conflicted and stormy marriage.

Diego Rivera, Panorama of Mexican History in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City

Diego Rivera gave up a brilliant career as one of the best and most poetic Cubist painters in Paris, apart from Picasso and Braque themselves, to return to Mexico to help his fellow citizens rediscover their national identity through vast walls of color. He completely rejected the poetic Cubism that made him famous in Paris for a much more directly communicative art of the human figure, an art that he concocted from memories of the great Italian fresco painters of the Renaissance, and from native Mexican sources. To my eye, what Rivera came up with in the end looks more like Art Deco than like any ancient Meso-American frescoes from Bonampak or Teotihuacan. He painted vast crowded panoramas of the whole history of Mexico on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City.

W.H. Auden once wrote that “Mad Ireland” hurt WB Yeats into poetry. Frida Kahlo was quite literally hurt into painting. She took up painting to fill the time during a long recovery confined to a body cast and to bed after a horrific accident. A bus she was riding collided with a tram in 1925 breaking her spine and pelvis in several places, shattering her left leg, and impaling her through the abdomen with a guard rail. Doctors thought she might not live. Her injuries caused her pain all of her life. She went through 35 surgeries in the course of her life to fix the damage and to relieve the pain. The damage to her pelvis and from the impalement left her unable to carry a child. Her injuries forced her to terminate 3 pregnancies. Even before the accident, she was not in the best of health. She survived a childhood bout of polio that left her right leg crooked and stunted. Her lifelong pain and ill health caused her to feel profoundly isolated, as indeed she was.

Frida Kahlo’s art is primarily about her own suffering and her life. Her greatness lies in her ability to universalize upon very personal catastrophes, to cause them to resonate with people who’ve never experienced such disaster and suffering.

She chose to record the events of her life, and other events, in the form of a retablo.

A retablo from 1885 showing a father praying to the Virgin Mary to cure his daughter's madness

Retablo ex votos are a peculiarly Mexican variation on a Latin American art form, a kind of devotional picture made in thanksgiving for prayers answered, or in expectation of some kind of divine intervention. Anonymous artists with little training in large workshops made retablos. The Mexican retablo ex voto usually showed the miracle or divine intervention with an inscription recording it on the bottom. Frida Kahlo would use this format repeatedly over the course of her life.

Some of her most striking retablos are not about her, but about the misfortunes of other women. One of her most striking pictures was made on a commission from Clare Boothe Luce (of all people; I’d never imagine Frida Kahlo and Clare Boothe Luce in the same room, but apparently they were friends). Luce commissioned a memorial for her friend Dorothy Hale who died the previous year by suicide.

Frida Kahlo, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1938

Dorothy Hale married a successful society portraitist named Gardiner Hale. His death in an auto accident left her in great debt. She unsuccessfully tried her hand at acting and modeling. Finally, in despair with foreclosures and bankruptcy on the near horizon, she threw herself out of a window of the Richmond Hotel in New York.

Clare Boothe Luce was horrified when she received this picture, and had to be talked out of destroying it. She expected a kind of portrait, but got instead a retablo of her friend’s violent death. Hale appears 3 times in the picture jumping out of the hotel window and falling toward us through the clouds and haze. She lies bloodied on the bottom wearing the very same black dress and corsage that she wore when she killed herself. The inscription below, in blood red paint, records the circumstances of her death. Clare Boothe Luce obliterated the part of the inscription that noted that she commissioned the painting.

Another painting in the form of a retablo is this one, A Few Little Pricks. It is based on a lurid murder that appeared in the local newspapers.

Frida Kahlo, A Few Little Pricks, 1935

A man stabbed his wife repeatedly in a frenzy of jealous rage. He defended his act in court with the words, “But it was just a few little pricks!” Kahlo shows the murderer standing calmly in the center of the picture above the corpse of his murdered wife. The painting seems filled with blood, on the bed, on the floor, on the murderer’s cloths, even on the frame of the painting. Black and white doves hold up a banderole with the murderer’s excuse. The pathetic quality of the excuse stands in stark contrast to the cold violence of the murder scene before us.

Kahlo painted this during a very turbulent period in her marriage to Diego Rivera. Neither of them were models of faithful spouses. Both Diego and Frida had affairs and they both knew about it. Frida had affairs with men and women. Diego tolerated her affairs with women, but exploded into rage when he found out about her affairs with men. She suffered his affairs mostly in silence. Frida ended that stoic silence when she found out that Diego was involved with her younger sister Cristina. Kahlo moved out, and by 1939, the two artists were divorced.

Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous pictures shortly after Rivera divorced her. It is a painting about her profound isolation and her conflicted sense of herself.

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939

She portrays herself twice in the same picture sitting in a completely empty landscape. She sits on the right taking the hand of herself on the left to console herself. Both Fridas have exposed hearts connected by a thin artery. The Frida on the left holds another artery with a surgical clamp that continues to bleed conspicuously upon her white dress. The different dresses play a large role in this painting. They refer to Frida Kahlo’s dual ethnic heritage. She claimed that her Father, Guillermo Kahlo, was originally a Hungarian Jew. In fact, he was a German Protestant. Her mother was Amerindian with some Spanish ancestry, and was a devout Catholic. The Frida on the left wears a white very European dress. The Frida on the right wears the traditional dress of a Tehuana.
Her divorce seems to be creating a crisis of identity. The Tehuana Frida, while holding a small portrait of Diego, consoles the European Frida who slowly bleeds to death. Perhaps she feels that the intensely nationalistic Diego is rejecting that European part of her as insufficiently Mexican, and that is the part that suffers the isolation most acutely. Such a rejection must have been a very bitter blow for Frida Kahlo who identified so closely with the Mexican Revolution claiming for years that she was born with the Revolution in 1910. In fact, she was born in 1907.

The pain of her injuries only grew worse as she grew older. She went through more surgeries to try to relieve it. Her deteriorating spine forced her to wear a metal corset in order to stand up straight. She commemorated that suffering in the painting, The Broken Column.

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944

She appears again in a barren landscape to show her isolation. She rises before us baring her upper torso. The skin of the torso opens for us to reveal a classical column broken in several places. The scaffold of the metal corset appears to compensate for the crumbling column only at the cost of great pain. That pain appears in the form of nails that pierce her all over calling to mind famous religious images of suffering from the crucified Christ to St. Sebastian. The oblique religious reference may be mocking, a rejection of the facile consolations of conventional religious doctrine.

While she rejected religious belief, in the last year of her life she turned to Marxism with a religious fervor, using the language of religion in her work.

Frida Kahlo, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, 1954

She throws down her crutches like a pilgrim healed at Lourdes. Karl Marx appears in the role of God the Father strangling the Great Satan of the USA while sending his large hands of dialectical materialist compassion, complete with a watchful Eye of God (i.e. Almighty Dialectic) in the palm. The Dove of Peace plays the role of inspiring Paraclete. She devoutly hopes that what religion failed to deliver will come through political ideology. The painting is both deeply moving and profoundly sad.

Frida Kahlo died in 1954 soon after this painting was completed. Her husband Diego Rivera was devastated. He died soon after in 1957.

No other artist of the 20th century so clearly foretold the insight that is a commonplace in our century, that the personal is political and the political is personal. In our time, that once clear line between the public and private has become very blurred. As Communist ideologues of the previous century wanted to swallow up the Private in the Public, so in our day, Libertarian ideologues would see the Public annihilated by the Private. Both proposed solutions to our dilemma are abstractions that are no solutions at all. Neither of them speaks to actual experience as we all live it between the home fire and the public forum. Frida Kahlo testified so eloquently to that frequently painful place we all dwell in now where our private affairs resonate in the public realm.

A Question to Ponder for Veteran's Day: Should We Bring Back the Wartime Draft?

2011-11-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

That old anti-warhorse former Senator George McGovern thinks we should.

Is an all-volunteer professional military democratic? Is it wise, especially for a democracy, to have a largely separate military caste to fight all of its wars? Would political leaders be quite so enthusiastic about military action, especially unilateral military action, if they knew that they would have to resort to the draft? Is it right to effectively outsource our military responsibilities to a very small portion of the population and expect them to bear all the costs? What is the responsibility of a larger society that benefits from military action toward those who must actually do that action? Is it right to expect that small professional military to do multiple tours of duty just to spare us the draft? Is it healthy for a democracy to augment troop numbers with "government contractors" i.e. mercenaries?

This goes to a fundamental question at the heart of the ideological warfare tearing apart this country: what are the responsibilities and duties of citizenship? Is being a citizen the same as being a "customer" or a "member?" There are those very ancient Greek concepts of citizenship where all citizens of the polis were responsible, individually and collectively, for the maintenance and defense of their city-state. Does any of that ancient understanding of citizenship have any relevance today? What are the obligations of citizens if we transition away from equality toward a more stratified shareholder state?

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

2011-11-11T05:44:00.000-08:00

The Last Post at the Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium

Armistice Day

EXTRA:

The economist Duncan Black reminds us to remember the dead from the First World War, and to remember all the rulers, military nobles, profiteers, politicians, and nationalist fanatics who blew up the world for no good reason. Today the United States looks more like the very stratified oligarchic Europe of 1914 than the USA of 1914. Perhaps we Yanks should remember The War To End All Wars that we've long forgotten and consigned to to barely understood and crumbling war memorials.

Dvorak

2011-11-10T04:20:00.000-08:00

Reports on the Transition of the USA from Democracy to Oligarchy May Be Premature

2011-11-09T04:23:00.000-08:00

Voters in Ohio rejected efforts to curb collective bargaining rights by a big margin handing Governor Kasich a big defeat.

Voters in Mississippi said no, every sperm is not sacred by an unexpectedly wide margin.

Down Easters in Maine voted to keep their 38 year old same day voter registration law handing their Teabag governor a big defeat.

State Senator Russell Pearce, architect of Arizona's immigration law, was recalled by the voters, defeated by a Republican moderate.

It was a good night for gay kids. Lotsa gay boys and girls got elected last night. Houston voted to keep their lesbian mayor. Holyoke Massachusetts elected a 22 year old gay mayor. The Dems hung on to the Iowa State Senate defeating any chance for same sex marriage repeal this session.

No On Marriage and The Family Research Council had a very bad night at the polls, Thank God.

Plutocracy and its favorite weapon, divide et impera, had a very bad night. Good!

EXTRA:

Your Betters do not like to be contradicted:

Know your place peasants!

Prayer in Liberty Plaza, Pictures

2011-11-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

There is an interfaith prayer service down at Liberty Plaza every Sunday at 3:30. David Kaplan and I have been going regularly, and today I finally remembered my camera. As might be expected after 4 weeks, the numbers are dwindling for this service. Kaplan and I just about qualify for "hard core" for this service. In the beginning, we had everything from rabbis to Buddhist monks to Franciscans. Today, we just had a handful of clergy.

I wasn't feeling my best today. I had a bad night of insomnia the previous night. I originally planned to do church and this, but I just couldn't do both today, so I went to Liberty Plaza for church.

Flags at the Plaza

Tents, contrary to regulations and the mayor's wishes, now spring up in the park. In the foreground is the camp library.

The prayer service begins with a Methodist minister who has been there every Sunday. To the left is a Unitarian minister. The minister on the right is from the Shalom Church which I'm not familiar with.

An Episcopal priest from Brooklyn addresses the crowd.

Some people in the crowd, dirty drug crazed hippies all.

"Welcome to the Gates of Heaven!"

A gesture of solidarity from the ironworkers building WTC #4, a sign facing Liberty Plaza.

If there's anyone in the New York area, or visiting, who'd like to participate in an Occupy event, this one meets regularly on Sundays at 3:30 near the corner of Broadway and Liberty street.

And Just How Truly Representative Is Congress?

2011-11-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a chart making its way round the internets that demonstrates a point I've been making (along with other smarter more widely read people) for some time. Congress does not really represent us, especially under our current system of legalized corruption.

I stole this chart from IT.

As the "Citizens United" decision of the Supreme Court affects more elections, expect this very lopsided chart to look even more lopsided.

Here's what this crazy pot-smoking hippy idealist would like to see done about it:

--a constitutional amendment to repeal "Citizens United"

--public financing of campaigns with donations limited to a maximum $100

--Congressional redistricting taken out of the hands of state legislatures and given to independent commissions

--The size of the House of Representatives should be dramatically expanded, at least doubled, to reflect the great expansion in the US population over the last half century; The House and Senate together are about 600 people. The British House of Commons is over 600 people representing a much smaller population.

--no more privileged Congressional benefits. Representatives and Senators should live and work under the same health insurance and retirement plans as all the rest of us.

--Congressional term limits. I would limit senators to 2, maybe 3, terms, and representatives to 10, maybe 12 terms. Public office is not a lifetime sinecure. The spectacles of Strom Thurmond in office well into his 90s, and Joe Lieberman changing parties to dodge a primary result in order to keep his office are shameful.

I think there's another deeper problem underlying all this corruption and erosion of our democracy. We've forgotten what democracy really is and what it's for over the past few decades.

We're of two minds about our government.

One is a consequence of Vietnam and all the similar conflicts since. We can't trust our government anymore (and not just the federal government). This distrust is common to all points along the political spectrum ( the right has its conspiracy theories and so does the left). On a certain level, that suspicion is healthy, the necessary corrective to the decades before when government was usually seen as benign and paternal. From The New Deal to the Cold War, the father figures in public office ("I Like Ike!") would always be there for us protecting us from destitution and Communist invasion. With the Vietnam War and Watergate, we found out how ready the daddies were to sell us out.

The other is a consequence of consumer culture. We tend to see our government as a kind of hotel management. We expect it to fix everything for us since we are paying customers. We expect the military to clean up the mess we made in the Middle East because of our oil consumption, and we certainly don't expect to be handed a mop and bucket or to be billed for the extra service (especially for the medical care of those who manned the mops). We expect our streets to be cleaned and repaired; we expect to feel secure behind everything from police and fire departments to food and drug safety to military protection; we expect our trash to be picked up and our children to be educated; and we expect to get all of this at a discount with no extra payment, and certainly no participation from us. And then we expect the government to mind its own business and stay out of our business, even when our business interferes with someone else's business. We're all spoiled adolescents and we expect government to be Mom, to clean our room and make us dinner, and then to leave us the hell alone. We all want government services, and none of us wants to pay for them or to do the necessary work to provide them.

As so many from Thucydides to John Dewey pointed out, democracy is a way of life in which everyone participates and everyone assumes some measure of responsibility to maintain. Yes, we've been robbed. We've been shaken down since the 1980s (at least). Our pockets have been picked. Our nest eggs were stolen in order to line the pockets of a tiny and disproportionately powerful minority. But on a certain level, we let them do it so long as we could continue to compensate for our stagnant wages by spending on credit or borrowing against the value of our houses, and they were oh so helpful with that too. So long as we could continue to play with our toys and Those People didn't move in next to us (whatever they are, they're not Us and we don't like them), we were content to let the Big Boys run the whole show while robbing us blind.

And now, it's morning in America, and we are waking up to find our houses empty and looted, with a pink slip in our pockets, with delinquent bills in the mailbox, and with a foreclosure notice on the door. On top of that, we face a future of indenture as the debt slaves of those we thought we could trust (after all, they looked so much like Us and not like Those People).

In a democracy, the government is us. It's not King Louis XIV and his ministers Colbert and Fouquet making decrees and implementing policies in which we could not possibly have any say. We are supposed to be the ones who choose our governments and their policies. We are as sovereign in our country as King Louis was over France (in theory at least). The government is supposed to be our Lord Chancellor, our Prime Minister, implementing policies we have chosen. On a certain level, we have the government and the policies that we wanted (or thought we wanted) for the last 4 decades. Those guys who sold us that car with a cracked engine block now have the deed to our house.

It's time to wake up and to begin the hard work of reclaiming our rights and our inheritance as citizens; not as employees, or customers, or debtors, but as citizens. If it means paying extra, or getting out and actually bothering to vote, or even if it means sleeping in a tent in the winter cold and facing cops in riot gear, then so be it.

Occupy Denver in the snow recently

But What Are Your Demands? What Is Your Agenda?

2011-11-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers answers that question with great eloquence from personal experience. I too come from Texas cotton pickers. Bill's were from East Texas. Mine were from the Panhandle (from Clarendon).

EXTRA:

Paul Krugman says Amen to Bill Moyers.

Batbaby Go!

2011-11-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

Don't blame me, blame Michael, and Fred Schneider.

The Twilight franchise has a new movie out, so this might be appropriate after all.

Michelle, our own little batbaby!

...from New York, where it's ALWAYS Halloween!

The Archbishop of Canterbury Speaks

2011-11-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

Rowan Williams finally comments on the Occupy London SX camp outside St. Paul's, and on the issues driving it.

A swing and a miss.

For reasons that are mysterious to me, the same ++Rowan Williams who came out swinging at the Tory austerity program, hedges his bets on this issue above all issues.

Good For The Greeks!

2011-11-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

Tell 'em to take their austerity and shove it!

ADDENDUM:

Robert Reich on the Greeks and on the choice between democracy or financial markets.

Saint Paul's Backs Off

2011-11-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

The Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral in London suspends its legal action against the protesters. It took awhile and about 3 resignations for common sense and decency to finally prevail.

My favorite comment so far about the whole near-disaster:

"One does have to wonder if the collapse at St pauls is now completely swamping the issues raised by the campers." (Martin Reynolds)

Yes, and, at the same time, the St. Paul's debacle is one and the same with the issues raised by the campers. At the core, the issue is the challenge to the undeserved privilege of entrenched power.
Posted by: Lois Keen on Tuesday, 1 November 2011 at 9:26am GMT

All Saints

2011-11-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

Albrecht Dürer, The Landauer Altarpiece, commissioned by a wealthy Nuremberg merchant Martin Landauer (who appears in the painting introduced by a cardinal on the lower left) for the All Saints chapel attached to a hospital for indigent elderly men which he founded; Landauer would end his days in that hospital.

Here are some of my favorite saints (official and unofficial). What are yours?

St. Francis of Assisi

St. Mary Magdalene

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Oscar Romero

Julian of Norwich

Mychal Judge

Jonathan Swift

Benedict of Nursia

Mahalia Jackson

Deacon Thomas Clarkson

Frederick Denison Maurice

John Wesley

Live this life and do what ever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to achieve security, they are futile. Give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning. Quit the search for salvation, it is selfish. And come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise. -- St. Benedict

And being the Universalist heretic that I am, here are some very unofficial people, including some non-Christians, who I would consider saintly.

Albert Camus

Josephine Baker

Martin Buber

William Blake

Paul Tillich

Buddha

Michael Callen

Mohandas Gandhi

Chief Joseph

Harriet Tubman

Yitzakh Rabin

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

The ghosts of Al Bowly and Ray Noble as conjured up by Stanley Kubrick's ghost.

Democracy

2011-10-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

An Athenian relief of Democracy crowning the people of Athens

The remains of an ancient kleroterion,
a device for selecting jurors by lot in ancient Athens

I've always said that democracy is an ugly unattractive business, the plain jane of political systems. It's not about rushing off on winged feet to save civilization. It certainly isn't about messianic heroes on white horses riding in to save the day, even though that's what we think we are voting for every 4 years. Democracy is fractious committees made up of competing interests forging compromises that make no one completely happy, but that everyone can live with. Democracy is competing visions of a just society, each given a real chance of winning power, and all given a space to compete for that power without having to resort to killing each other.

From left to right, from Ron Paul libertarians to Occupy Wall Street, there is a call for some kind of "direct democracy." What exactly that's supposed to be, I'm not quite sure. What it may be is a justifiable desire to bypass a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional legislative system. OWS' most brilliant decision was perhaps to bypass that system entirely and go straight to the centers of power, which are not in Washington. In doing so, they made institutional politics beside the point. The politicians and political professional classes got pushed aside and rendered irrelevant.

I've read Thucydides and I've read Plutarch's jaundiced accounts of direct democracy in ancient Athens. I'm also a member of a minority that saw its rights put up for a vote many times. Democracy, especially without a framework of law, can become another form of tyranny, the worst according to John Adams. I seriously doubt that women's suffrage or the end of legal racial segregation would have ever happened if they were put up for a vote. History is full of crimes majorities perpetrated on minorities, and Thucydides and Plutarch are full of accounts of Athenian majorities stampeded into recklessly destructive decisions by unscrupulous demagogues.

And yet, the Athenians according to all evidence, valued their democracy greatly. They knew that there was nothing quite like it anywhere in the world at the time. Thucydides put his heartfelt praises of Athens and its people into the mouth of Pericles. Democracy gives people of all types and stations a voice, a say in determining their own destiny, and the course of their communities. Democracy turns subjects into citizens with the full dignity of sovereignty shared out among all. While democracies are notorious for their sparse public spectacles and pomp, democracy does have its splendor, its majesty.

That majesty was in peril of being lost, or turned into a cruel joke, as this country became increasingly oligarchic.

Now, something of democracy's old luster returns in the radical experiments with direct democracy of the Occupy movements. The left, once notorious for self-defeating factionalism, appears to have abandoned ideology entirely for consensus building. Lenin would be furious to see so decentralized and unstructured a movement, and to see it (so far) make some successes (interestingly, Lenin's most enthusiastic admirers these days are extremists on the right). It's greatest success thus far is redirecting the public discussion and setting the terms of the debate, something no Democrat or Democrats have been able (or willing) to do for 30 years. Occupy seized the initiative from the right and put the regressives on the defensive probably for the first time. It seized the initiative from the punditocracy and from the professional political classes. Where this goes from here remains to be seen.

Here is Occupy's most remarkable invention, the "human microphone," in action. Since this is not an officially registered protest event (there is no incorporated organization to request permission), Occupiers are forbidden to use any kind of amplification including basic megaphones. So, a single person speaks in short clauses, and the gathered crowd repeats them so that everyone can hear. An unexpected virtue of this system is that it compels people who disagree with an idea to not only hear it out, but to say it themselves. This system imposes a certain decorum on the proceedings and a measure of consideration both for speakers and for listeners. I've participated in this as part of the microphone, and it is remarkable.

Another Priest Considers Resigning From the Chapter at St. Paul's

2011-10-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

The Reverend Canon Mark Oakley may resign from his post over the chapter's decision to pursue legal action against protesters camped outside the cathedral. The cathedral and the Church of England appear to be hurtling blindly toward a major disaster. The silence from Lambeth Palace across the Thames is deafening, as usual. The PM, David Cameron wants to push legislation specifically banning protest camps through parliament.

According to this article in The Independent, a cathedral chaplain, Fraser Dyer, resigned over the chapter's response to the protesters. He follows Reverend Canon Giles Fraser who resigned days ago.

I think this is going to be major catastrophe. I wonder if the remaining members of the cathedral chapter and the City Corporation really believe that a court order and a police sweep is going to end this. I think they should take a close look at the experience of Oakland last week. That police action only made things much worse for the city, and far from ending the problem, only made the protesters more determined and angry while increasing public sympathy for them. They are kicking a hornet's nest.

Does the Church of England hierarchy want something like this playing out on the steps of Saint Paul's?

Do they actually imagine that such an action would solve anything, or even end it?

Hat tip to Thinking Anglicans.

ADDENDUM:

My friend Weiben comments on Facebook that the C of E hierarchy made complete asses out of themselves over sex and gender issues, and they're doing it again over social justice. At least they are consistent, he says.
The Sunday editorial pages in the UK appear to agree with Weiben.

Government Regulation

2011-10-29T04:49:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that the very same people who want to relieve business of the burden of regulation (and public responsibility) want to tightly regulate the rights of public assembly, free speech, and public petition. Parks and squares are public places intended for public enjoyment and public assembly (planned and spontaneous). If some people had their way, we'd all be confined to "free speech zones," areas cordoned off and surrounded by cops where we can do or say whatever we want, but only because it doesn't matter.

I'm tired of people on the left, especially liberals, falling for the old big versus small government argument perimeters set out by the right. The left is even more interested in limiting state power than the right. The right is only interested in limiting government power when it comes to property rights. In so many other areas, such as policing private morals and "security," the right is eager to expand the role and size of the state. The left wants to limit the war-making powers of the state. It wants to limit police powers, to make the state accountable before the law, and it is the left, not the right, that wants to ban the state from bedrooms and living rooms.

The Creator of the Post Modern Capitalist State, Deng Xiaopeng

2011-10-28T05:36:00.000-07:00

There is a new 876 page biography of Deng out by Ezra Vogel, but what's really remarkable is the review of that book by the famous Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi in the New York Review of Books. Fang notes how little Vogel has to say about the most notorious aspect of Deng's reign, the massacre of protesters camped out in Tiananmen Square in 1989. What he does say effectively agrees with the official Chinese government line, that the massacre was somehow necessary for the creation of the powerful and prosperous China of today. Fang takes that assertion apart, as well as claims that the regime under Deng set the stage for widespread prosperity in China. Indeed, having read Fang's critique, I wonder if what Deng really created was the prototype for the post-modern capitalist state.

Fang argues that China, long before Deng came to power, was sharply stratified between a very privileged and powerful elite of the Communist Party and everyone else (very similar to the stratification of society in late Dynastic China). Since at least the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, that elite first and foremost concentrated on staying in power. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's delusional paranoia writ large upon China, but it was also a brilliant diversion of the widespread rage over the famine that followed the failure of the Great Leap Forward, a famine that killed 40 million people, the worst in recorded history. Mao diverted public anger away from himself and onto the Party elite. One of those party elite who felt that popular wrath was Deng Xiaopeng. Deng slowly returned to power determined to see to it that nothing like that happened again.

Vogel asserts that Deng's reaction against the excesses and chaos of the Cultural Revolution created China's current economic and political power. Fang takes a more jaundiced view of Deng's accomplishments and their motivation. Fang argues that Deng's primary purpose was to put the Party elite firmly in control of China's political and legal system, and to enrich itself. Fang argues that the "Four Modernizations" slogans of the Deng era were all just empty rhetoric to sell these policies to a public that still had some residual belief that they lived in a revolutionary society. China under Deng exchanged brutal ruthless Communism for brutal ruthless capitalism so the regime could get rich. Deng's regime allowed only as much openess and freedom as was necessary for the creation of a technical and professional elite to make this arrangement work. Fang points out that despite greater access to the outside world, the regime actually tightened its grip on many other aspects of daily life such as publishing, internet access, religious belief (the state chooses Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian hierarchs, and maintains temples and monasteries as cultural institutions controlled by a government ministry), and including dress codes for women's fashions.

Fang scoffs at the claim that Deng "lifted millions out of poverty." He points out that the regime continues to exploit China's most valuable resource, its vast pool of cheap labor. Millions upon millions of poorly paid people forbidden to form unions, who have no job security, no social security, no access to regular health care, and no regulations guaranteeing their safety in the workplace are the foundation of China's current power and prosperity. As in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, the very people who were in power and prospering under communism are the same ones who are now rich and still powerful under capitalism (they were the ones who held the deeds when all the state assets were sold off). Deng even created a slogan for this new naked inequality, "Let part of the population get rich first." There it is, the old Republican Party trickle down economics with flags and slogans.

Right wing pundits in the West appear to envy and even be in love with China. China is the new "can-do" country, the paradise of cheap labor and no regulation (but a hell of protectionist prohibitions and corrupt bureaucrats all wanting their take). As Margaret Thatcher once praised Singapore as a model for the rest of the world, so right wing pundits and politicos praise China as a model for success. The city state of Singapore is not, and never was, a democracy, and China certainly isn't. There is no shortage of right wing thinkers in this country who would argue that the USA is not really a democracy either.

The China created by Deng may now well be the template for the post modern capitalist state, run by and for a powerful elite who rule a rigidly stratified society in which those at the bottom should just be grateful that they are working at all and not starving. That template may well be the future being created for the West by very powerful people determined to create an international "plutonomy."

In this new world, all revolutions will come from the top down. Those who would dare to presume to decide things for themselves and to organize accordingly must be dealt with like all upstarts who presume upon their betters.

Beizhing, 1989

Oakland, CA, 2011

The reigning Western economic policy orthodoxy of impoverishing the populace in order to bail out the banks is precisely the sort of thing Deng would have endorsed. After all, it's the people who failed, not the leaders.

ADDENDUM:

According to an article in The Atlantic, there is widespread popular interest in the Western Occupy movements in China. The article also contains a first hand account of the class struggle in contemporary China.

Not Giles Fraser

2011-10-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, our evangelical celebrities continue to shill for the corporate oligarchy that feeds them.

It's not like Reverend Pat would ever give up even part of his lucrative enterprises for the sake of any of the poor folk who listen to him and hang on his every word.

Hat tip to JoeMyGod who has an iron stomach for this kind of thing.

Cracking Down

2011-10-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

From Oakland:

From Atlanta:

Watching all of this, I think of those lines from Woody Guthrie's 1944 version of "This Land Is Your Land" that nobody likes to remember:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,
Sign was painted said, "Private Property"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing,
This land was made for you and me.

and he added these lines:

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

And so I ask the old socialist question, whose economy is it?
And I could further ask, if it's not mine, or if I have no share in it, then why should I care?

ADDENDUM:

The young man injured in the top video is Scott Olsen, 24, an Iraq War veteran. A tear gas canister hit him square in the head and he is now hospitalized in critical condition with a fractured skull.

FURTHER ADDENDUM:

Unedited tape by a teargassed protester in Oakland. Warning, unedited.

Giles Fraser Resigns

2011-10-27T04:53:00.000-07:00

Giles Fraser, contributing columnist at The Guardian and canon priest at St. Paul's Cathedral, resigns over the decision of the chapter to pursue legal action against OLSX protesters camped outside. Here's the BBC report.

audaciousdeviant

2011-10-26T23:19:00.001-07:00

hello, welcome fellow friends from around the world.

Evensong Outside St. Paul's Among the Tents

2011-10-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

A first hand account by someone who was there. Nicked from Madpriest.

2 Timothy 2:1-7
2Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.
2And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.
3Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
4No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.
5And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully.
6The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.
7Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things.

There is a regular interfaith service down at Liberty Plaza/ Zuccotti Park every Sunday at 3:30PM. It meets on the Broadway side just north of the big orange DiSuvero sculpture.

Last Sunday, we heard this quote from Hillel:

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?"

Mark di Suvero, Joie de Vivre in Liberty Plaza/ Zuccotti Park

UPDATE:

The Guardian issued an editorial sharply critical of the cathedral chapter, and by implication, the Anglican hierarchy.

Aspects of the protest camp are silly and rather squalid. But it still represents a profound and important moral revulsion which the Church of England needs to take seriously. These aren't the usual Spartist suspects. The sense that there is something outrageous, unjust and absurd about the world of modern finance has spread across the whole political and religious spectrum. Even Pope Benedict XVI has reinforced his predecessor's teaching with a demand that the markets of the world be brought under human control. The Church of England needs to be part of this discussion, for its own sake and for the sake of the country. And that is done far more effectively by theatre and by conversation than by lecturing or even preaching. It is no use having clever bishops saying clever things that no one listens to. Here at St Paul's right now, there is a chance to catch the attention of millions of people who would never listen to a bishop or recognise a Dean without a Torvill.

I can't help but agree with the editorial and feel that the Church of England is not only missing a golden opportunity to be truly prophetic and not just another faculty club, but squandering what's left of whatever good will it still enjoys with the public.

Calvinism

2011-10-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

... that corner of Christianity where camels do pass through the eyes of needles.

St. Paul's Protesters May Be Ordered, Then Forced, to Leave

2011-10-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

Thinking Anglicans reports that the cathedral chapter and the City corporation are seriously considering getting a court order to clear the protesters from the grounds and from Paternoster Square in front. That would be the first step in a forcible eviction.

Activists face intense pressure to reconsider the St Paul's camp, not least for the resonance of being seen as responsible for the closure of a national landmark for the first time since the second world war. Church officials say the closure is costing St Paul's about £20,000 a day in lost revenue.
(from The Guardian)

So that's what it all boils down to, money, the god we all REALLY believe in despite what we say we believe in.

When I think of the prospect of police armed with clubs and teargas attacking unarmed protesters outside a house of God, what comes to my mind is a Yiddish word, shanda.

St. Luke

2011-10-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

Guercino

From the 10th century Gospel Book of Otto III

Rogier Van Der Weyden

El Greco

Maerten van Heemskerck

Happy belated Feast of St. Luke, patron saint of artists and this blog.

Occupy 1932

2011-10-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

Does this look familiar?

Occupy Saint Paul's!

2011-10-22T04:16:00.000-07:00

The canons of St. Paul's Cathedral in London decided to close the cathedral indefinitely for the first time since World War II. During the height of the Blitz, the cathedral closed for only 4 days. They cite all kinds of safety concerns for visitors as well as for the protesters. I cannot help but think that this is a melodramatic over-reaction. Camped out protesters are hardly German incendiary bombs raining down out of the sky.

I think the London protesters are right to see this as a move on the part of the City to close them down. We had a similar episode in New York when a scheduled "cleaning" of LibertyPlaza/Zucotti Park was used as a transparent pretext to shut down the protest. Supporters rallying at the park at the last minute prevented a confrontation by forcing the mayor and the police to back down in the face of public opinion on the side of the protesters.

The protesters are there because the London cops would not let them anywhere near the Stock Exchange. That center of the international financial industry must be protected from ... shame and embarrassment I suppose. The campers pitched their tents on the cathedral grounds and the cops were ready to move in and clear them out. Kudos to the cathedral for asking the cops to stand down and for welcoming the protesters to camp out there (would I be right to see the hand of Giles Fraser, frequent columnist for The Guardian and resident canon priest at St. Paul's in that invitation?). It is good to see at least part of the Church of England resisting the fate of so much of American Christianity, to be co-opted into becoming another collection agent for the banks (see right wing political efforts to clobber the poor with the cudgel of Calvinism, the one corner of Christianity where camels do pass through the eyes of needles). There appears to be a measure of good will between the cathedral and the occupiers. It seems to me that some kind of agreement could be worked out, especially if the City Corporation stays out of it.

Contrast that situation with New York where there is no good will at all between the occupiers in Liberty Plaza and the Mayor. Mayor Bloomberg is definitely part of the 1% and is not exactly shy about his complete lack of sympathy for the protests. The cops are not shy at all about using clubs, pepper spray, and mass arrests on unarmed and peaceful protesters. And yet, both sides managed to work out at least a modus vivendi for the occupation of that small park. The occupation in New York continues to flourish and expand. Occupy Wall Street now has public opinion to protect it from more aggressive police tactics. It seems to me that the custodians of St. Paul's could work out safety and sanitation issues with largely peaceful protesters instead of having an attack of the vapors and passing out on the fainting couch. I see no good reason why protesters, priests, worshipers, tourists, and pigeons can't find some way to live with each other.

Occupy proclaims a message that the Church should embrace. European political leaders, like American political leaders, refuse to confront those who are really responsible for creating this global economic crisis, the high rollers in the financial industry who gambled with everyone's money and threw snake eyes at the craps table. Instead we get bromides about already hard pressed middle and working class people living beyond their means, that austerity and more austerity is the solution to debt crises. The politicians and their financial backers want to reverse the parable of Dives and Lazarus and put poor old Lazarus in the flames of hell with rich fat old Dives in the Bosom of Abraham laughing at the poor wretch.

Bastards.

ADDENDUM:

I wonder if the canons of St. Paul's would prefer the protests end like this:

FURTHER ADDENDUM:

I'm delighted that Themethatisme looks in on this blog. He sends this skewering of the Opinion of The City:

o

The Iraq War Ends

2011-10-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

American soldiers touring the ancient Ziggurat at Ur in Iraq

President Obama announced the complete withdrawal of American troops by the end of the year. Apparently, no agreement could be reached with the Iraqi government for legal immunity for American soldiers, so all of them will be withdrawn. Thus ends the biggest and deadliest boondoggle since the Vietnam War. The invasion of Iraq turned out to be as necessary as an invasion of Peru after Pearl Harbor. Despite heavy publicity and strong-armed attempts to massage meager evidence into an urgent casus belli, there was no real cause for the USA to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (he would have used them if he had them on our invading forces). There was no Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attack (though there was plenty of Saudi money involved and the Pakistani military provided the getaway and the hideout for the real perpetrators). Al Qaida had no presence in Iraq until we invaded.

The invasion and occupation cost the lives of 4,407 American soldiers. The British medical journal The Lancet, estimates an Iraqi death toll of more than 650,000. Billions of dollars were lost to corruption on the part of Iraqi officials and private contractors and still remains unaccounted for. The cost of the war was kept off of the federal books and was largely paid for by borrowed money dramatically escalating the national debt. The full cost of the war will probably end up in an economy-wrecking figure of trillions upon trillions of dollars. This was an imperial adventure paid for on a credit card.

After the lives lost, the biggest cost was to the power and moral authority of the United States. We squandered our power and influence in this invasion. The real winners of this war were the military contractors and their shareholders who made huge profits. Iran was also a big winner in this invasion. We very obligingly took out the one major check on Iranian power in the region. We alienated our sometime ally, Turkey which now has no reason or incentive to even listen to us. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains stalemated and insoluble with our capacity for influencing either side reduced to zero.

Our heavy-handed approach to prisoners of war was a gift to our enemies and an albatross around the necks of our allies. Our role as champion of human rights and democracy became a horribly ironic joke after we joined the ranks of nations who abuse and torture prisoners of war in the name of expediency. The pictures from the Abu Ghraib Prison of American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners is something we will come to regret as deeply as the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The reluctance of our leaders to resort to the draft meant that troop levels were never adequate to the task of invading and occupying a large country, so their numbers were augmented by mercenaries. They were called "contractors," but they were in fact mercenary soldiers. They were paid far more than the regular troops, and were not bound by the same military legal codes and international treaties. They could, and did, kill civilians with impunity. This was our first major conflict to make extensive use of mercenaries, the bete noir of Machiavelli who dated the decline of Roman imperial might to the beginning of its reliance on mercenary forces.

There is the cost to the moral authority of the United States at home. Our leaders clearly learned nothing from the Vietnam War and instead seemed determined to do it all over again, only this time to "do it right." The same lies (in some cases word for word) were brought back to justify and explain the invasion. The reliance on military contractors (some of them fraudulent) instead of quartermasters for the equipping, billeting, and feeding of troops caused many to question the sincerity of all the "support the troops" rhetoric coming out of Washington. The pointlessness of the invasion, the lies used to justify it, the cronyism and corruption associated with it, the abuses it created caused Americans from right to left to call into question the very legitimacy of all of their institutions, and not just the federal government. Our compliant and corrupt corporate press with its class of privileged pundits must bear a large amount of blame for cheerleading this war. Corporations, especially military contractors, profited very well off of this adventure. Academic and religious institutions played their role in creating legal and ethical fig leaves for what was essentially a giant national smash-and-grab. The authority and legitimacy of entire classes of professionals emerges from this conflict dripping in slime.

Small wonder people are taking to the streets and dissing their leaders. Our rulers, both political parties and the media, forfeited their legitimacy in this conflict and in the epic grand larceny perpetrated by the all dominant financial industry at the same time.

The rest of us are left with a shrunken and impoverished democracy, with over 4000 dead, and thousands of severely wounded veterans who will need medical care for the rest of their lives.

George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the whole Neo-Con cabal, Tom Friedman, Judith Miller, George Will, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Fox News, et al, thanks for nothing. What are you guys doing still walking around loose?

The Death of Libya's Clown King

2011-10-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

It appears that the Furies have finally caught up with Muamar Qaddafi, and that he joins Mussolini, Ceausescu, and other tyrants who died at the hands of their own people. He now suffers their scorn in death. The images posted online and televised almost immediately after his death are the internet age's version of stringing up his body by the heels before angry crowds.

I will not waste tears over him. He was a monster supported by Western oil and military interests when they found him useful, and discarded when his shelf-life expired. He came to power in a coup in 1969 overthrowing Libya's King Idris. He discarded the country's 1951 constitution and became the longest reigning ruler anywhere since 1900, and the longest in the Arab World. He substituted charisma, ideology, and dynastic rule for the rule of law. He had exiled dissidents abroad assassinated. He made war upon the Berbers and their culture. He personally presided over executions. He waged 2 now largely forgotten wars with neighboring Chad and Egypt. He had over 1000 political prisoners in Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli massacred in 1996. He almost certainly ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was Western oil and military interests eager to cut a deal with the newly cooperative dictator as well as Qaddafi's own stonewalling that prevented a full accounting for that crime.

While I shed no tears for Qaddafi, Justice was not served by his death today. He should have faced a trial, a full accounting for a long list of crimes going back 40 years. Others that we do not know about or have forgotten might have come to light. Most importantly, some small measure of the rule of law could have been planted in a land that has known only intimidation and revenge for 4 decades. Instead, he died in a crude brutal act of revenge, worthy of himself. And yet, after his brutal rule and after his very stubborn and violent resistance to the revolution that toppled him (with lots of NATO help), I don't think any end other than the one seen today was really possible.

In the end, a terrified old man hiding in a drain pipe found himself pulled out and shot by furious young men eager to visit generations of accumulated rage upon him.

Nous les 99%!

2011-10-18T04:47:00.000-07:00

On the steps of St. Paul's London

Occupy the World!

The Atlantic has pictures of Occupy protests from New York to Paris to Sydney to Seoul to Tokyo to Amman to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Mexico City to San Juan to Vancouver to Rome to London to Little Rock to Taipei, and even in Dallas. These all took place on Sunday.

Down with the Vampire Squid!

Semper Fi

2011-10-17T18:11:00.000-07:00

Sgt. Thomas of the US Marines vs. the NYPD in Times Square.

From JoeMyGod. Where does he find these things?

Prayer in Liberty Plaza

2011-10-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

Attended an interfaith prayer service down at Liberty Plaza today. Buddhist monks, rabbis, Catholic priests, and Protestant ministers participated. We had a surprisingly large crowd. I expected the campers down there not to be into the whole religion thing, but a lot of them joined in.

We opened the service with this radical anthem written by a lesbian to protest the takeover of the American landscape by banking and railroad interests.

Here it is sung by the Moron Fishingtackle Choir:

A CLARIFICATION (sorta):

To be honest, I read about the radical origins of America the Beautiful many years ago I remember not where. Perhaps someone with a little more time and scholarship can tell me what that source might have been, or if I just dreamed it sometime long ago.
Katherine Lee Bates did have a 25 year long relationship with Katherine Conan, a so-called "Boston Marriage." As to what if any sexuality was involved, the historical records remain discreet.

What I'd Like to See

2011-10-16T04:50:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street keeps its "demands" vague for a reason, to guard against being appropriated, and to give all kinds of people a forum for venting their frustrations without having to take some ideological blood test. Also, true to their anarchist and egalitarian principles, the organization remains leaderless, though not structureless. Meetings can be spontaneous, but remain orderly.

Speaking for myself, I have some specific demands.

*Bring back the Glass Steagall Act separating banking from speculation. It worked for 60 years to prevent the very economic collapse that we are living through now. Make the financial industry do what it is supposed to do, capitalizing the productive part of the economy. End the whole shareholder casino it has become. End that casino's dominance over the rest of the economy and over our political system.

*Medicare for everybody, end that huge drain on the economy and on everyone's future that is the healthcare and health insurance industries, an industry of middlemen and skimmers who don't really produce anything. Restore Medicare's negotiating power with Big Pharma. End the terrible insecurity that most people now live in, fear of financial ruin on top of a major medical catastrophe.

*I never thought I'd say this, but I think it's time for Congressional term limits. Public office is not a sinecure. New York City now has term limits (despite the Mayor). Everyone complained and panicked when the city charter was amended to limit terms of public office, but the result has been far from the catastrophe so widely predicted. If anything, it has brought a lot fresh new faces into city government, opened up public participation, and given broader representation to communities long under-represented such as the city's growing Asian population.

*There are petitions going around for Constitutional amendments to reverse the Citizens United ruling, for publicly financed campaigns, and to limit all campaign donations to $100. For a long time, I was deeply reluctant to mess with the Constitution, mostly because the people most eager to amend it for so long had less than benevolent intentions for the rest of us. But Congress is so broken that something has to be done, and there is a provision in the Constitution for the amendment process to be initiated by the states (this Congress will never fix itself).

*There are other petitions going around to end Congress' ability to vote itself pay raises, that pay increases would be pegged to the rate of inflation. Also their special medical and retirement insurance privileges would end. Congress would live under the same benefits available to all the rest of us. I support that.

*Expand Congressional representation. About 600 people now represent 300 million plus people. The whole English House of Commons is now about 600 people representing a smaller population. We could easily expand the House to a thousand or more. In addition, I'd take redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures and make some kind of independent commission responsible for that task.

*Repeal the Reagan era laws that drastically limit the rights of labor to organize and to act. Collective bargaining is a human right recognized by no less a capitalist than Adam Smith himself.

*End the Electoral College. No more 2000 elections. No more clouds of doubt hanging over the legitimacy of Presidential elections.

*End taxpayer subsidies to corporations. No more travesties like government handouts to the petroleum industry while it reports the largest profits of any industry in all of history.

*Restore progressive taxation rates. Warren Buffet should pay a higher tax rate than his secretary.

*End corporate tax breaks. General Electric and the banks should pay taxes like all the rest of us.

We are sovereign citizens of this country, and we should remain such regardless of our incomes. We are citizens at work as well as at home. We are not the hired help and we are not tenants. We are citizens.

The press wants demands, well these are some of mine.

Pictures From Times Square October 15, 2011

2011-10-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

David Kaplan, Paul Lane, and I met at the Public Library on 5th and 42nd to go to the big Occupy Wall Street rally in Times Square this evening. We saw row after row of police vans and mounted cops, and we decided to go someplace where we would not be penned in and could make a quick dash for the subway just in case the cops charged. We joined the rally up on Broadway and 49th street far away from the police phalanxes and near several subway stops.
The weather was perfect, a cool breezy autumn evening. The crowd was immense, much larger than we expected. From our vantage point, it looked like Broadway was packed all the way to 34th street. Far from pot smoking hippies, the crowd struck me as very middle class, and very diverse in terms of age and ethnicity. The mood was determined and very happy and festive. I'm a great believer in the political power of a good time had by all. We left just as the police helicopters appeared, usually a bad sign. I'm not sure, but I think that there was no parade permit. I don't know if the cops are going to forcibly clear the square and Broadway or not. We decided not to stay and find out.

Here are some of my pictures from the rally.

The Conde Nast building and part of the crowd in Times Square

A picture looking down Broadway at the crowd as far as the eye can see

Yours Truly with my very wordy sign quoting Dr. King

Dangerous radical attorney David Kaplan (aka DKNY) reads The Occupied Wall Street Journal

There were lots of small children there, a presence that we hope will keep the cops at bay.

People and signs

The Vampire Squid

A gladiator; I must admit that I don't quite know what this is about. I saw lots of zombies in the crowd too.

Where indeed.

Waving sparklers and singing "This Little Light of Mine"

A last view of the huge crowd there

One last note: tomorrow is the formal dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington DC. Of all the famous people from the last 70 years, Dr. King is probably the only one who really deserves a memorial on the Mall. And yet, as I stood there amidst the crowd in Times Square, I thought of Dr. King, and I remembered the epitaph on the tomb of Christopher Wren in St. Paul's London, "If you require a monument, look around."

Now Is The Time

2011-10-15T05:35:00.000-07:00

"Now is the time." Get the word across to everybody in power in this town that now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time to make the real promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time for city hall to take a position for that which is just and honest. Now is the time for justice to roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Now is the time.”

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Update on the Ground Zero Church

2011-10-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

Last month, I wrote a post on Saint Nicholas Church, the Greek Orthodox church by the World Trade Center destroyed by the September 11th attacks. I wrote how the agreement between the Port Authority and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese collapsed in acrimony and lawsuits, and was swept up into the ugly demagoguery surrounding the so-called Ground Zero mosque.

Today, the church and the Port Authority came to a settlement apparently satisfactory to all parties. Apparently the original proposal for a new church three times larger than the old one at a new location in the WTC site is the plan that will be built.

"Postponed"

2011-10-14T04:34:00.000-07:00

The Mayor, and Brookfield Properties which owns Zuccotti Park, postponed their planned "cleaning" of the park today. This was announced just a few minutes ago. There will be no police confrontation, at least for now. Brookfield announced plans to work with the protesters to clean the park.

(Big sigh of temporary relief)

God and Mammon

2011-10-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Skip John 3:16 and go read Mathew 6:24. As for "every one for themselves" capitalism, go read Acts 4:32 - 35. For a better world read Isaiah 65:17-25.

When Jesus met the Masters of the Universe of His day, he took out a bullwhip.

etching by Rembrandt

It should be an exciting day tomorrow. Our plutocrat Mayor will try to evict Occupy Wall Street at 7AM from Liberty Plaza.

Keeping Faith With Currency

2011-10-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Paige Baker on Facebook told how a professor of hers held up a dollar bill before his students and asked, "What do you see?" "Money, a dollar" they all replied. "No," replied the professor, "you see a piece of paper with a picture of a dead president on it."

I wonder what would happen to the very idea of currency if some vein was struck in the earth, or some rich asteroid was found that made gold as abundant as tin foil? It seems to me that all currencies are acts of faith whether they are Federal Reserve Notes or gold coins. The value we attribute to currency is ultimately arbitrary.

One of my favorite pieces of blasphemy was a very clever academic comparing a dollar bill to the Eucharistic Host. Each in and of themselves is worthless, a piece of paper, a flavorless cracker. What made each of them valuable, he said, was what they could be exchanged for; goods and services for one, salvation for the other. The dollar could be "transformed" by faith just as surely as the wafer could be turned into Jesus.

I Luv Rushbo

2011-10-13T11:29:00.000-07:00

That comment means a lot coming from a fat drug addict on his 4th marriage.

Hat tip to JoeMyGod as usual.

Frank Kameny 1925 - 2011

2011-10-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

The modern gay rights movement had several mothers and fathers, and one of the bravest and boldest was Frank Kameny who died yesterday at age 86. He was a WWII combat veteran and an astronomer employed by the government mapping office in the 1950s. He was dismissed from his job in 1957 during the purges of homosexuals. He was the only one out of thousands who challenged his dismissal. He founded the Washington DC chapter of the Mattachine Society, and made it into one of the society's most militant chapters. Together with Harry Hay in the early 1960s, he held the once very controversial view that there was nothing inherently wrong with homosexuality ("Gay is Good," a phrase he coined), a view not shared by most gay men and lesbians of the time. Kameny played a large role in what he called the "mass cure" in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of pathologies.
In later life, he played a major role in removing homosexuality as a disqualification for government service, and in 2009, received a formal government apology for his own dismissal in 1957. He was also active in the campaign to abolish DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell), the last military policy aimed at banning gay men and women from service.

Thanks for everything Frank, and rest in peace.

The 53%

2011-10-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

This new conservative counter-movement I think is testimony to the success of Occupy Wall Street. The OWS hippies are doing what the Democratic leadership (including the White House) couldn't and wouldn't do, seize the initiative and set the terms of the public debate, instead of reacting to Republican initiatives and debating on Republican terms.

The "53%" are those who pay federal income taxes as opposed to the 46% who don't. This assumes that the other 46% are simply freeloaders. My friend Doug Hayes over on Facebook points out that this is really an embarrassing admission by the right, that 46% of the population doesn't earn enough to pay federal income tax, and as we all know, that income threshold is a very low one (about $17,000 for a married couple filing jointly in 2011). That means that 46% of the population earns a pittance that does not even pay the bills.

The Dems are too inept and compromised to point this out, but I'm sure legions of others already have and will do so promptly.

The Establishment punditocracy wrings its hands over the trouble the Democratic Party leadership will have with an insurgency from its base. Good. I hope so.

The insurgencies from the right and left that both parties now face point to a major corrosive effect of concentrated money on democracy: elected representatives are no longer accountable or responsive to the people who elected them. In our system of legalized corruption, those who can donate huge sums of money to buy broadcast time and professional sales campaigns will always have the ear of elected representatives. Policy will always be shaped with the next extremely expensive election campaign in mind.

And for those of you who haven't seen it yet, Alan Grayson shuts down PJ O'Rourke and makes a clarion call:

Quote of the Day

2011-10-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man,
--Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pastorale

2011-10-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Henri Matisse, Bonheur de Vivre, 1905

Occupy The Democratic Party

2011-10-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Reich has a good cautionary essay that points out that today's Democratic Party has precious little in common with its populist progressive prior incarnations, that this President is very friendly with Wall Street.

Perhaps it is time for the Democratic Party in Washington to get with its historic constituencies or get out of the way. It seems to me that many state level Democrats are way out ahead in this respect.

If this really does turn into an influential political movement, the spearhead of a return of left populism, then I'll take back everything I ever said about Americans being passive peasants.

The lesson of the Arab Spring is that when leaders and institutions fail, people can take matters into their own hands. Some very solid and entrenched mountains got moved in the Middle East, and others are getting very shakey. I see no reason why similar oligarchies here can't be brushed aside.

And So It Spreads

2011-10-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

Occupy Boise! Protesters on the steps of the Idaho state capitol

Occupy Wall Street is now Occupy DC, Boston, LA, Tampa, Austin, Seattle, etc. Here's a great series of pictures from all of them posted at The Atlantic.

Our own Grandmere Mimi leaves Thibodaux to join the hippies in New Orleans.

And unlike the Tea Party, this is spreading without Koch brothers' money or free broadcast time from Fox News.

Damn hippies.

Occupy Wall Street spells it all out, and Keith Olbermann just reads it:

UPDATE:

I now have reliable reports of "Occupy Casper, Wyoming" and "Occupy Syracuse." I've also heard stories of Canadians wanting to get in on the act. Fine with me. Hands across the border.

FURTHER UPDATE:

The protests have indeed begun in Canada. Check out Occupy Vancouver. Thanks Janet Murray.

Photos From the Front

2011-10-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Went down to Zuccotti Park downtown today to see the hard core Occupy Wall Street contingent camped out there. I went with my friend David Kaplan to donate a pair of blankets I bought for them. The nights are starting to get cold. I stayed only briefly, but I took some photos.

Zuccotti Park viewed from Liberty Plaza. In the background is a Di Suvero sculpture. In the foreground are throngs of people, protesters, gawkers, tourists, sympathizers, and street folk.

Zuccotti Park viewed from Broadway. Despite the apparent chaos, the whole thing was well organized with donations of food, blankets, and clothing constantly coming in. In the foreground in this picture is an impromptu library. There were kitchens, and a remarkably sophisticated press office fielding interviews and managing what appeared to be internet broadcasting equipment.

Here is dangerous radical attorney David Kaplan, who volunteered his services as a legal observer.

Here I am looking like warmed over death with sinus irritation. I have a terrible cold. I had a wonderful time despite that, and I hope I didn't donate my cold with the blankets.

Some of the young campers, most of which looked very young.

The police seemed very relaxed considering all the news about police brutality at the rallies, possibly because of signs like this, possibly too because most of the violence is committed by police supervisors who tend to be resented by the rank and file cops.

Making signs.

Various signs. There were a number of spreads of signs around the park.

A favorite sign.

Another favorite sign

Meditating to wake up.

Even more people camped out in the park

And what's a protest without drummers?

The park is right next to the World Trade Center site. Here is #4 WTC from the park.

And behind #4 World Trade Center, #1 rises.

Here is a collection of hardhat union signs at the WTC site. Could the slow-motion plutocratic coup d'etat threatening our country drive those old enemies hard hats and hippies together? Could be. Unions were a big presence in the park with the hippies; SEIU, TWU the transit workers, the UAW, and the teachers' union.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court

UPDATE:

Paul Krugman sides with the hippies this morning, and why not? The Very Serious Guys in Suits have been lying or stupid for 30 years.

The Perils of Occupy Wall Street, and The Perils of Dissing Them

2011-10-06T05:36:00.000-07:00

I notice that there's been a lot of discussion in the press and the blogs about the sustainability of Occupy Wall Street (something that remains to be seen, but so far has proved remarkably durable), and its seriousness and credibility. Here is a splendid essay by Douglas Rushkoff that addresses those very issues. He suggests that the Establishment patronizes them at their own peril.

Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.

He goes further and I think hits the nail on the head:

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking's defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

Rest In Peace

Jobs in 1984

The inventor of the personal computer, a brilliant innovator and visionary who democratized technology.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ...

2011-10-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

... but it is live streamed. Live from Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan.

Alas folks, I have teaching responsibilities all day and will not be able to make the big Move On march downtown today. I will try to visit tomorrow or Friday, and I'll take my camera.

Occupy Wall Street's Statement of Demands

2011-10-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Tristan for sending this. I think this is worth more than a link.

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Is it just me, or is there a certain echo of the language of The Declaration of Independence here?

Fox Noise Meets Its Match

2011-10-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this answers my question below:

Thanks to Paul A for bringing this to my attention. While this made it no further than the cutting room floor at Fox News, those clever meddlesome kids downtown filmed the interview themselves, and it has spread like wildfire over the internet. They may be "leaderless," but they certainly seem to know what they are doing.

Very impressive.

I wonder ...

2011-10-03T17:26:00.000-07:00

Could anyone storming the Bastille in 1789, or pulling down a statue of King George III in 1775 answer satisfactorily a time traveling CNN or NPR reporter asking them, "What are your demands? What is your agenda? What do you hope to accomplish?"

Christopher Wren's St. Paul's: Resurgam

2011-10-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

Carving over the South Transept showing St. Andrew, and below, the Phoenix rising from the flames above the word Resurgam ("I will rise again").

I’ve always loved St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I’ve been a fan of Christopher Wren’s work for most of my life. Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, like Saint Peter’s in Rome, is a building that has fascinated me since childhood. Like Saint Peter’s, I only visited it once, and briefly. I visited it on the very day that I arrived in London. It was late afternoon, and I only had a couple of hours before evensong. The building would close for the day immediately after the service concluded. I arrived too late to explore the dome, which at the time was a disappointment. In retrospect, I’m not sure my acrophobia could have handled the Whispering Gallery. It was a windy day of rain and alternating sunshine, and the cathedral was brighter on the inside than I had anticipated. I had amazing good luck with scaffolding. Only a small portion of the base of the south tower was in scaffold. Part of the organ inside was under scaffolding, but the rest was scaffold free and looking much fresher and cleaner than most of the photographs I’d seen.
I toured the cathedral and the crypt on my own, and then stayed for a magnificent evensong service. I saw Nelson and Wellington in the crypt, and spent time in the artists’ mausoleum under the choir. I looked askance at the elaborate tomb slab of John Everett Millais, only to discover that the relatively plain tomb slab that I stood on belonged to JMW Turner. I saw John Donne’s very striking tomb, and older tombs still scarred from the fire of 1666. What really struck this New Yorker was how kind (beyond nice, kind) the cathedral staff was. I felt genuinely welcome to participate in evensong, even though Church of England office is not nearly as similar to Episcopal office as one would expect. The tourists who did not participate were welcome to stand and watch, and many did almost filling the nave (very different from services in Italian churches where non-participating tourists are brusquely shown the door).

I was not disappointed. The building was every bit as splendid as I expected and bigger than I imagined. I love this building, and I love Wren’s work. Londoners always had more mixed feelings about their cathedral. Saint Paul’s was always controversial, even as it rose over the city at the end of the 17th century. Wren himself had mixed feelings about the final result. I love it perhaps because I’m an American. Visitors always loved this cathedral more than the natives. What’s remarkable is how little influence Saint Paul’s had on later English architecture, and yet there are large monumental imitations of London’s cathedral in Paris (Saint Genevieve-The Pantheon by Soufflot), Saint Petersburg, Russia (Saint Isaac’s Cathedral), and in Washington DC (the dome of the US Capitol designed by Thomas U. Walter), and in state houses and court houses throughout the US, and provincial parliament buildings in Canada. The tourists always loved it, the locals less so.
Londoners seemed to start complaining about the building even before the first stone was laid. Conservative Anglican divines repeatedly obliged Wren to alter his designs. His proposals were far too “Romish” for their comfort. The poet and artist William Blake famously hated Saint Paul’s, considering it the very embodiment of that compromised institutional religion of law and rationality he always hated (never mind that his beloved Gothic was as much bound up with mathematics and measure, with the ambitions of king, bishop, and burgher, as Wren’s baroque edifice). Byron and the rest of the Romantics also hated Saint Paul’s. Byron dismissed it as just so much “commerce piled up to the sky.” The Victorians hated the building. Its baroque bulk offended Victorian religious sensibilities and English nationalism (every northern and central European nation in the 19th century claimed Gothic as their national and truly “Christian” style, only the French claim was legitimate). They added dark stained glass windows and archaizing Pre-Raphaelite mosaics to make the building into something other than what it was, to make it closer in feeling to Hagia Sophia’s mystical dark and further from Bramante’s classical light. Hitler’s Luftwaffe removed most of those Victorian accretions in World War II.

Hitler’s incendiary bombs finally persuaded Londoners to love their cathedral. Its great dome stood courageously in the fire and smoke of the assault on London, and on basic civilization and decency, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in Britain since the Anglo-Saxons invaded. St. Paul’s, especially its dome, stood for London and for all that is civilized in the face of a horrific and barbarous attack. Miraculously, the cathedral survived (though not unscathed) a series of air raids that destroyed the city center in a way not seen since the Great Fire of 1666. Saint Paul’s rose out of catastrophe a second time.

Today, Saint Paul’s great 365 feet high dome stands dwarfed by real piles of commerce in glass and steel climbing higher in the sky than Wren or Byron ever imagined as The City remakes itself as an international hub of the financial industry.

The cathedral in the midst of The City

The Cathedral dome at night with City towers

The cathedral now looks to me like some quaint oversize relic that got lost on the way to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and deposited in the middle of downtown Atlanta. The combined forces of Hitler and the FTSE completely destroyed the cathedral’s original architectural context.

The apocalyptic dread of the year 1666 seemed fulfilled from September 2nd to September 5th when the whole city center of London, everything within the ancient Roman walls, caught fire and burned to the ground. The fire threatened Westminster and only firebreaks created by demolishing sections of the city prevented the fire from spreading further. The diarist John Evelyn witnessed the cathedral’s destruction:

September 7th – I went this morning on foote from White-hall as far as London Bridge, thro' the late Fleete-streete, Ludgate Hill, by St. Paules ... At my returne I was infinitely concern'd to find that goodly Church St. Paules now a sad ruine, and that beautifull portico ... now rent in pieces, flakes of vast stone split asunder, and nothing now remaining intire but the inscription in the architrave, shewing by whom it was built, which had not one letter of it defac'd. It was astonishing to see what immense stones the heate had in a manner calcin'd, so that all the ornaments, columns, freezes, capitals, and projectures of massie Portland-stone flew off, even to the very roofe, where a sheet of lead covering a great space (no less than six akers by measure) was totally mealted; the ruines of the vaulted roofe falling broke into St. Faith's, which being fill'd with the magazines of bookes belonging to the Stationers, and carried thither for safety, they were all consum'd, burning for a weeke following. It is also observable that the lead over the altar at the East end was untouch'd, and among the divers monuments, the body of one Bishop remain'd intire. Thus lay in ashes that most venerable Church, one of the most antient pieces of early piety in the Christian world.

The death toll from the fire remains unknown. Approximately 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 houses were destroyed; 87 of the city’s medieval parish churches were destroyed. The cathedral was a burned out shell. The choir was destroyed, the central tower badly damaged. The nave at first appeared relatively undamaged, but sections began collapsing. At first there was some hope that part of the cathedral could be salvaged, but the fire apparently weakened the building’s fabric to the point where a commission created to inspect the damage declared it to be a ruin.

Map of London showing the extent of the devastation of the great fire of 1666

The ruins of Saint Paul's after the fire drawn by Thomas Wyck

The present day Saint Paul’s replaced the earlier Gothic cathedral destroyed in the fire. That cathedral was built in the 13th century, and augmented in the 14th century. It was a huge magnificent building slightly larger than the present cathedral.

A computer reconstruction of the old St. Paul's Cathedral

A 17th century engraving of the interior of the old Saint Paul's Cathedral

St. Paul's on the eve of the Fire with the columned portico and modifications by Inigo Jones

The old Gothic cathedral replaced an even earlier building begun by William the Conqueror also destroyed by fire in the 12th century. Local legend long declared that the cathedral stood on the site of an ancient Roman temple to Diana. Wren never believed that story and disproved it when he built the present cathedral, finding no Roman remains at all as the foundation and new crypt were excavated. The old Gothic cathedral was a huge building topped by a tall spire. The spire caught fire in 1561, and collapsed into the nave, and was never rebuilt. By the time the cathedral burned down in 1666, it was already crumbing from time, neglect, and Reformation era abuse.

After the fire, another legend emerged about the present cathedral. As Wren himself inspected the old cathedral’s ruins, he picked up a stone, and turned it over to see that it was a piece of an old tombstone with the word Resurgam (I shall rise again) inscribed upon it. This word and the mythical phoenix, the bird that rises anew out its own ashes, appear carved in many places on the present cathedral. Wren intended the building to be a monumental embodiment of that idea of resurrection. And indeed history seems to collaborate in that intended role. St. Paul’s great dome became a symbol of the city’s resurrection twice, after the Great Fire and after the Blitz.

St. Paul’s in London is the creation of a single architect, more than any other major cathedral in Europe. Sir Christopher Wren is completely responsible for the cathedral that we see today. He was that rarest of architects who had the great good fortune to see his greatest work completed. He would spend most of his life designing the building and directly supervising its construction.

St. Paul’s made Wren an architect, and one of the greatest architects of the 17th century. Wren had no formal training as an architect and almost no direct experience of construction when he was given the commission to rebuild the building. Wren was a mathematician and astronomer specializing in optics at Oxford and at Gresham College in London. This is not as exceptional as it seems. Architecture would not really become a full profession until the 19th century. Assigning the design of a building to a man of learning was commonplace. Usually the assigned person would delegate the work to a series of specialists, master masons, etc. In Italy, artists usually designed buildings. Wren’s personal interest and initiative in his architectural work was exceptional. Before St. Paul’s, he had limited experience designing the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford and the chapel at Pembroke College. What he knew about architecture was from books. Until 1665, he never traveled abroad and saw any of the architecture he read about. Architecture for him meant Vitruvius’ books, the only literary works by an ancient architect to survive, Sebastiano Serlio’s Treatise On Architecture, and Etienne Duperac’s architectural engravings, especially of Sangallo’s and Michelangelo’s designs for Saint Peter’s. He knew about his great contemporaries, Hardouin-Mansart and Bernini, only by reputation.

His relationship with Saint Paul’s began before the fire. He was a consultant in a project to repair and renew the cathedral. It’s spire was gone, and it was crumbling from years of abuse and neglect from the time of the Reformation through the Civil War. The last major work on Saint Paul’s was by the architect Inigo Jones under the direction of Archbishop William Laud. Laud wanted to restore something of the cathedral’s ancient sanctity. For centuries, the west entrance, the nave, aisles, and close were noisy places used by day laborers to gather waiting for employment. The city’s population began to use the west end of the cathedral as a gathering and trading place. In Europe of the day, this was not exceptional. Archbishop Laud wanted to clear all that activity out of the cathedral, and to make the building more “up to date.” So he hired the only architect in England at the time that had any real direct knowledge and understanding of classical architecture, Inigo Jones. Jones rebuilt the west front adding a large portico of Corinthian columns. He also cased the nave in an awkward overlay of classicizing form over a Gothic building, closing off the outside arcades where day laborers also gathered. This cathedral modified by Jones was the cathedral Wren knew before the Fire.

In 1665, Wren made his only trip out of England to France, officially to do some academic hobnobbing with French mathematicians, but really to see what was being built there at the time. He journeyed to Paris hoping to meet the greatest French Baroque architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the other great Parisian Baroque architect Lemercier, and the great Italian Bernini who was in Paris at the time making a design for the east front of the Louvre that King Louis XIV would ultimately reject. Wren arrived in Paris as a nobody. As far as Mansart and Bernini were concerned, he was an obscure English mathematician. Wren appears to have been a remarkably fearless man determined to meet both of these very famous and arrogant men. He refused to be deterred by their contemptuous staffs. Wren succeeded in his ambition to meet Bernini, and persuaded the great Italian to give him just a few minutes to peruse the designs for the Louvre. Many of Mansart’s and Lemercier’s great Paris churches were just completed. Lemercier’s church for the Sorbonne was almost complete. It is likely that Wren visited many of these including Mansart’s Val de Grace. Seeing a drawing of a dome design and actually experiencing walking through a great domed edifice are two completely different things. Such an experience appears to have changed Wren’s life.

When Wren returned to London, he resumed his work on Saint Paul’s. He presented a proposal to tear down the cathedral’s crumbling Gothic tower, and replace it with a great dome over the transept crossing.

Wren's pre-Fire proposal for a dome on Saint Paul's

Awkward as this seems, he did have a precedent in Gothic architecture. His uncle was the Bishop of Ely, and Wren knew Ely’s cathedral with its famous Octagon lantern tower over the transept crossing well. Wren proposed a classicizing version of Ely’s octagon with a tall dome replacing the old tower and spire as an urban centerpiece. His proposal was a success. The commission recommended it enthusiastically.

The fire of 1666 made all of those proposals obsolete. Wren was in Oxford during the fire and was summoned to return to London immediately to survey the damage to the cathedral and the city.

Wren received the enormous, and thankless, task or rebuilding the center of the city of London within the old Roman walls known still as The City, until recently the most densely inhabited and busiest part of London. Wren originally proposed to replace London’s crowded warren of narrow dark streets with broad straight boulevards modeled after Pope Sixtus V’s rebuilding of Rome, and anticipating Hausmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the late 19th century. Claims on city property canceled those plans, but Wren remained responsible for rebuilding the city’s churches destroyed in the fire. Saint Paul’s was to be the great religious centerpiece of a renewed and rebuilt, if not quite improved, London.

Mindful of public expenditures, especially when so many were looking to the government and the crown for relief after the Fire, the commission charged with rebuilding Saint Paul’s at first had something very modest in mind. They proposed to rebuild the cathedral choir and nothing more, hoping an always stingy Parliament would find the cost not too burdensome. Wren decided upon a contrary approach to the authorities. He proposed rebuilding the cathedral according to a bold and spectacular design that would make St. Paul’s into one of the foremost churches in Europe. The money, Wren calculated correctly, would eagerly follow. To rebuild St. Paul’s and the city churches, Parliament imposed a tax on “sea coal,” coal from Newcastle brought by sea and up the Thames.

Wren determined to make a fresh start on Saint Paul’s by planning a dramatic break with the design of the former cathedral.

Wren, The Greek Cross plan

His first design was for a centralized church with a Greek cross plan with four equal arms focusing on a central dome, a design probably inspired by Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s original plans for St. Peter’s.

The plan he submitted to the king and to the rebuilding commission was a modified version of the Greek cross plan. He added a domed extension to the west end creating a more traditional Latin cross plan. This is the Great Model plan, so called after the enormous wooden model Wren had made, and which still survives.

The Great Model, west entrance to the right

Interior of the Great Model looking toward the choir

Dome of the Great Model

Plan of the Great Model

Section of the Great Model plan

This design is a masterpiece, to my mind, far superior to what was actually built. It is a beautifully sculptural concept of vast counterpoints between concave and convex masses culminating in a magnificent high dome. It is as splendid inside as outside, the huge interior spaces come together in a single unified design around the central rotunda. True to classical form, Wren conceived of the building as a single entity whose parts relate to each other organically, as do the parts of our bodies; digit to finger to hand to forearm to arm to body, all belong together and nothing more can be added or taken away without mutilation. As Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s proposals for St. Peter’s were radical breaks with the traditional basilican church format, so was Wren’s proposed design for St. Paul’s.

It was too radical a departure for the Cathedral canons. The king loved Wren’s proposal, but the clergy did not, and they vetoed the whole design just as foundation excavations started. They objected that the design was too “Romish,” and not without some justification since it was inspired by proposed designs for St. Peter’s. The clergy also had religious objections. Wren’s design made the traditional processional liturgy of the Latin rite problematic. There is no clear division between choir and nave as traditional English cathedral design required. Anglican worship required separate parts of a cathedral for Daily Office (the choir) and larger public services (the nave), the legacy of the ties of English cathedrals with monastic communities required separate parts for monks (after the Reformation, for choirs and chapters) and laity. Anglican Christianity claimed continuity with the old medieval Church while embracing aspects of the Reformation. The design certainly offended the more Protestant factions of the clergy while so radical a break with the past complicated those Anglican claims of continuity dear to the more Catholic “high church” factions. Wren was sent back to the drawing board.

The next proposal Wren sent, the “Warrant” design, is not just a compromise, but to my mind, a retreat on all fronts.

The Warrant Plan, elevation and section

Despite his public magnanimity, I think Wren was deeply disappointed by the rejection of the Great Model plan, and it shows here. This plan returns St. Paul’s to something like its pre-fire Gothic form with a very medieval basilican floor plan of bays and transepts, even the old medieval idea of the building as an accumulation of added parts. The proposed dome in this design recalls the long lost spire of the old Gothic building, and more directly reminds us of the Octagon of Ely Cathedral.

The Warrant plan was accepted, and excavations on the foundation began in earnest.
Yet, this clearly isn’t the design that was built.

Despite all the planning and proposals, St. Paul’s in its present form seems to have been designed as it was built. A lot of aspects of the old Great Model plan returned, beginning with Wren’s refusal to build the cathedral in the traditional manner, starting with the choir, and then building westward in sections. He objected that construction would have to stop with each section while money was raised to build the next. The building might never be finished. He had a point. Cologne Cathedral was 4 centuries old when Wren was alive and still 2 centuries away from completion. Over the objections of conservative Anglican divines, he began construction of the whole building at the same time. He changed the plan moving the dome back to the center flanked by a 3 bay nave and a 3 bay choir. He kept the medieval concept of a nave flanked by aisles, but modified that plan in very striking ways. He replaced the old medieval cross vaults with saucer dome vaults, anticipating the dome in the center. Wren argued, with reason, that this design was more stable.

Nave of Saint Paul's showing the saucer dome vaults

He still had to rely on medieval building techniques to hold them up. St. Paul’s uses flying buttresses that are hidden behind a screen wall as high as the ground story aisles. The screen walls are more than an aesthetic expedient. They support the vaults, and more important, carry the outward stresses of the central dome to the rest of the building.

Section of the nave showing the concealed medieval plan within the classical exterior

The concealed flying buttresses of Saint Paul's

Instead of the medieval upward and inward progression of building stories, St. Paul’s exterior becomes a single enormous unified mass, another idea from the Great Model making a return. The windows on the upper floor are not windows at all, but niches above smaller real windows lighting the aisles inside. Wren doubled the exterior pilasters to express the massive forces inside holding up the vaults and the central dome.

The South wall of Saint Paul's; note the niches above on the screen wall with the smaller windows beneath

The west façade is a compromise dictated not by clergy, but by conditions at the quarries. St. Paul’s is mostly built of brick and Portland limestone from Dorset, brought to the site by ship. Wren originally proposed a monumental façade flanked by two massive pillars.

Wren's proposed west facade of Saint Paul's

The west facade as built

Columns and pillars are not posts. They are sculpted entities and must be carved out of a single piece of stone before being divided into sections for shipment. There were no flawless stones that large in the quarry for such massive columns. So Wren extended the doubled pilasters of each story of the exterior across the façade, transforming pilasters into columns.

The bell towers are probably the most successfully inventive parts of Wren’s design.

The South Bell Tower

Baroque design is used here to apply a classical building vocabulary to a Gothic building form. A very Baroque play of masses and volumes around a cylindrical core culminates in gilded Roman pinecones at the tops, emulating Gothic pinnacles. But these in the end serve as foils for the vast simplicity of the great dome.

Exactly how Wren arrived at this final design of the dome is still a matter of dispute. Many drawings and plans for it survive, but none of them are dated. In this crowning part more than any other, the old Great Model design comes back. He returns to his original idea from before the Fire to combine the High Renaissance dome with the English Gothic crossing tower to make the centerpiece of the cathedral and the city.

The dome

The dome of Saint Paul’s is in fact many domes in one. The double shell dome originates in Islamic Persia coming to the west by way of Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo and later Baroque architects in Italy and France elaborated on that original idea to create dramatic theatrical effects; for example an occulus of a dome would appear to open, not on the sky, but on the hosts of Heaven. Wren brought this idea to England and stripped it of its theater. The vast circle of the dome itself was all the drama and metaphor Wren needed. He wanted a tall dome on the outside and a vast dome on the inside. He did not want the effect of looking up through a giant chimney, as would be the case if the inner and outer domes were the same height. The lantern sits not on top of the outer dome, but upon a huge unseen brick cone that contains the inner dome. The outer dome is made from sheets of lead over a wooden framework of oak timbers (a little English ship-building expertise used in the dome).

18th century engraving showing a section of the dome revealing the inner domes and the brick cone holding up the lantern

The brick cone to the left, and the outer lead dome to the right with oaken timbers between

Interior of the dome

The "Whispering Gallery" in the dome

The dome is a vast simple form based on Bramante’s design for the Tempietto in Rome, as Wren would have seen it in the pages of Serlio. That in turn was based the ancient Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli outside Rome.
Richard Thornhill painted the inner dome of Saint Paul’s with a huge tromp l’oeil round temple with scenes from the life of Saint Paul in the arches. Wren hated this painting and said so publicly. I agree with Wren, who would have preferred simple coffering, painted or otherwise. There is more than enough drama in the huge volumes of the dome, which overwhelm Thornhill’s painted dramas into insignificance.

Richard Thornhill's paintings in the dome

The apse and choir changed with the changes in Anglican liturgy. The cathedral was finished at a time of Calvinist ascendancy that frowned on the whole idea of sacraments.

The choir of Saint Paul's at the beginning of the 18th century

St. Paul’s originally culminated in a simple Communion table with a tall pulpit in front flanked by choir stalls. Wren built a kind of bridge that divided the choir from the rest of the Cathedral. On top of that was the organ with its pipes, what Wren called “a box of whistles.” The Daily Office took place in the choir, while the nave was used for larger public ceremonies in traditional English fashion.

The nave of Saint Paul's in the 18th century showing Wren's choir screen and organ loft, the "whistle box"

The Catholic revival of the 19th century dramatically altered St. Paul’s choir. The organ and choir screen were removed in the 1860s. The organ was rebuilt on both sides using salvaged parts of the old screen. The liturgical revival was all about approach to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar more than daily prayer. Luckily, the beautiful oak choir stalls, carved by the Dutch/English master carver Grinling Gibbons survive little altered, as do the wrought iron screens made by Flemmish sculptor Jean Tijou.

The choir today with the organ rebuilt flanking the entrance

19th century mosaics in the choir vaults

The choir stalls of St. Paul's carved by Grinling Gibbons in use

The floor of the choir was raised, and in 1883, a huge pink marble altar and reredos was installed, blocking the continuity of the choir. The high church Victorians believed that mystical darkness was more suitable than clear daylight, so most of St. Paul’s windows were darkened with very dark stained glass. The domes of the nave and semidomes in the crossing were covered with Pre-Raphaelite mosaics.

St. Paul's in 1896; note how much the surrounding neighborhood has changed since then

Interior of Saint Paul's photographed in the early 20th century

The 1883 altar and reredos

World War II dramatically altered St. Paul’s again and changed the cathedral’s relationship with the rest of the city. The once despised lead dome now became the very embodiment of the city’s sufferings and resistance to the Nazi assault during the Blitz of 1940, and subsequent air raids and missile attacks. Its looming bulk over smoking ruins testified to survival and promised renewal.

Saint Paul's through fire and smoke at the height of the Blitz

Only the heroic efforts of anti-aircraft gunners and the London Fire Brigade kept Wren’s St. Paul’s from joining its Gothic predecessor. The monument did not emerge unscathed. The north transept was badly damaged. A German shell crashed through the roof and vaults of the choir to score a direct hit on the pink marble Victorian high altar smashing it to bits.

The remains of the Victorian high altar after the Blitz

Restorers used the war damage as an opportunity to return St. Paul’s to something like Wren’s original intentions. Most of the dark Victorian glass not blown out by German bombs was removed. The restorers made the inspired decision not to rebuild the Victorian altar. Instead, they built a baldachin originally designed by Wren out of carved oak over a new high altar.

The post-War oaken baldachin over the high altar

The continuity of the choir was restored and extended to the nave, as was the original brightness of the cathedral’s interior. The apse in the east end behind the high altar was turned into a memorial chapel for American war dead from bases in Britain. A magnificent hand-written and illumined book in a glass case records their names.

The American Memorial Chapel behind the high altar in the apse

The Memorial Book in the American Chapel

Most people agree that Saint Paul’s is a magnificent building. However, it is commonplace to praise its splendor and complain that it does not seem sufficiently ‘religious.” Some critics complain that Saint Paul’s might as well be a great Roman public bath like those built for Emperors Caracalla and Diocletian. I must admit that I bought that line myself as a matter of course for many years. After having visited the place and listened to evensong sung beneath that vast dome, I wonder.
Saint Paul’s is not a place of dark sacramental mystery and was never intended to be such. There is perhaps too much patriotic sentiment in the church for the comfort of Americans (monuments to English heroes everywhere, especially military heroes). Those military saints George and Michael threaten to crowd out old Paul in the cathedral’s chapels and monuments. And yet, it is hard to sit listening to the choir sing psalms while looking up into the vastness of Wren’s dome and not think of God. It may be God as imagined by a 17th century English mathematician, but it is God nonetheless complete with the mysterium tremendum.

I notice that imagery plays but a very tiny and secondary role in Saint Paul’s. Its expressive power is in its architecture, as is the case with a great Gothic cathedral. In this it is very different from Italian Baroque where great architectural expanses remain stage sets for operatic spectacles of painting and sculpture. Wren’s sense of sculpted form is as fine as any Italian architect’s, but without that Italian sense of fluid vitality or spectacle (indeed some of Borromini’s and Gaurini’s buildings seem a little unhinged next to Wren’s architecture). Saint Paul’s as a whole and in its parts almost never focuses upon paintings or sculptures. Wren’s only comments about images in his building are expressions of irritation. He hated Thornhill’s paintings, and he described the sculpted balustrade added to the top story of St. Paul’s against his wishes as just so much fashionable fringe. Works of art, even great ones, fit awkwardly into Saint Paul’s. That is true both of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World and a sculpture by Henry Moore. For all of his admiration of Italian and French buildings, Wren built Saint Paul’s to be a Protestant cathedral, for prayer and meditation upon Scripture. Wren’s was a not a sacramental sensibility. In that he was like many of his fellow Anglicans of the time. Wren intended the cathedral to speak through the abstract language of architecture, not through imagery.

Wren had the enormous good fortune to see his great work completed in 1711. He was in his mid 80s and complained bitterly about the remaining work done without his supervision. He remained a fearless man to the end. He visited the cathedral to inspect the work every Saturday. He had himself hoisted up in a basket to inspect the work high up in the vaults and the dome well into his old age. He faced hostile clerics and a mean stingy parliament that docked his pay by half in 1697, the remaining half to be paid on completion of the cathedral (and in hopes that he would die before that time). Wren happily lived to collect that back pay. He died in 1723 at age 90. For all of the disappointments Wren suffered during the cathedral’s construction, he remained self-possessed and confident. He never saw himself as a kind of artistic visionary with the cathedral as his gesammtkunstwerk. He saw himself as a public servant. If the design needed to be changed, then so be it.

Saint Paul’s will always be a one-of-a-kind monument. Its like will never be built again. But it is the first truly Anglican cathedral.

Sir Christopher Wren came to the field of fire,
And graced it with spire,
And nave and choir,
Careful column and carven tier;
That ships coming up from the sea
Should hail where the Wards of Ludgate fall,
A coronel cluster of steeples tall,
All Hallows, Barking by the Wall,
St, Bride, St. Swithin
St. Catherine Coleman
St. Margaret Pattens,
St. Mary-le-Bow,
St. Nicholas Cole Abbey,
St. Alban, Wood Street,
St. Magnus the Martyr,
St. Edmond the King
Whose names chime so sweetly call,
And high over all
The Cross and Ball,
On the Riding Redoubtable Dome of St. Paul.

-- Sir John Squire

Calling All Clergy!!

2011-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a new calling for you, corrections officers!!

Forget it Hagger. You're Church of England and not American, so you don't count as Christian in Alabama. Margaret Watson, we know you're working for the liberals and the terrorists. And Tobias Haller is a humanist intellectual in a collar, talk about a wolf in shepherd's clothing!

Besides, in Alabama all y'all ain't Christian 'cause you're Piskapalins. Lutherans and UCC ain't Christian neither. Catholics? Go tell it to Mitt Romney!

Synagogue? Mosque? Temple? Sacred Grove? Sweat Lodge? To the slammer you filthy heathens!

But if you were part of GAGCON or ACNE or the Southern Baptist Convention, this would be a dream come true! A priest with a Bible, a badge, and a gun! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, assume the position!!

For some Catholic priests, this would be a fantasy come true.

This blog is turning into an extension of JoeMyGod.

Elizabeth Warren Vindicated

2011-09-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

John Galt is publicly subsidized.

Yet another hat tip to JoeMyGod. Where does he find these things?

I Want One !!!!!!

2011-09-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to JoeMyGod.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Punching Hippies

2011-09-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Of course nothing will happen. The mayor, the police department, and the police unions have already circled the wagons to head off any meaningful investigation, but this looks very high handed to me.

This happened at last weekend's Wall Street protest.
The cops corralled a small group of protesters, and then one police supervisor very casually sprayed mace point blank into the face of a woman protester in the corral.

The general behavior of the cops was a lot more rough and brutal than was really necessary, but the security of The Casino must be preserved at all hazards, I suppose. A few punched out hippies is but a small price to pay ... for something.

This is actually true to form for NYC cops. The people who own and run the city hate disorder, especially political disorder. It threatens property values. So their agents in the city government come down hard on anyone (especially anyone who isn't loaded with money) who kicks up the dust, complains, makes noise, and looks like trouble.

Someone who has been surprisingly outraged by this and eagerly updating his material is not a usual left wing rabble-rouser (e.g. Digby), but the eminently civilized and learned Atlantic columnist James Fallows.

Indeed, I agree with Mr. Fallows that the chorus of "tsk tsk tsk" coming from the Establishment pundits over these kids who refuse to be "civil" rings hollow in the face of the Establishment's obliging countenance of far right crowds at very well funded and well covered Republican candidates' debates repeatedly baying for blood, even booing an active duty soldier in Iraq. So who's the crazy nutcase here?

ADDENDUM

The Nation's Allison Kilkenny was there and has a very different take on the event from the NYTimes' very dismissive coverage. She also points out that such events are becoming more and more difficult at a time when the Right to Peaceably Assemble is ever more tightly regulated.

Political "Eunuchs" and "Hermaphrodites"

2011-09-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

... thus Frank Rich describes all the centrist movements from "No Labels," to the Tom Friedman/Mayor Bloomberg middle-of-the-road agenda, to the "bipartisanship" and "civility" so beloved of the Washington Establishment punditocracy (Saint David Broder pray for us). Rich calls for more, and even more partisanship in his current column. Why indeed should everyone who is not a flaming right wing freak declare preemptive surrender? He points out that the extremists poised to take over Washington are beyond anything Reagan or Goldwater ever imagined (indeed Goldwater gets posthumously vilified as a "sell out" by today's far right). This generation of the far right wants to sell off every government, from the Feds to your town council, off to the highest bidder. Rich warns, rightly I think, that Perry is far from done in the debates, that he could very well win the nomination, and go on to win the Presidency. The voting population on all sides is angry and frightened in the 3rd year of the "Lesser Depression," and ready to throw everybody, every incumbent regardless of party, out. Rich points out that the Koch brothers must be laughing at how easy their nominal opponents are making their buyout of the whole political process.

As Hendrik Hertzberg pointed out years ago, "niceness is the enemy of fairness."

It's A Start

2011-09-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

Some kids staged a noisy protest on Wall Street yesterday apparently upsetting the Big Daddies. On the one hand, it appears to be the usual unfocused left wing mess, everything from Save the Polecat to Neuter Rick Perry. On the other hand, the US press coverage is entirely dismissive, as it was for the protests that turned out more than a million each here in the Big Apple at the start of the Iraq invasion. I think those crazy hippy kids may well speak for a lot more people than were actually there. Some people like me are giving them the old Texas A&M cheer, "Gig em Aggies!"

We'll see what happens next.

Pastry and the Social Hierarchy: A Sociological Symposium on the Hermeneutics of Class Conflict

2011-09-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

by Moses Harry Horowitz, Jerome Lester Horowitz, and Louis Feinberg

So sue me, it's Saturday.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

2011-09-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

oops.

Hat tip to JoeMyGod.

The Only Reason I'd Ever Watch a Republican Debate ...

2011-09-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

... is to see which one would eat a live kitten. My money would be on the ever floundering Newt, but then, I wouldn't put it past Frothy Mix or Crazy Eyes. They're desperate for attention from a crowd eager to kill anything except a fetus. Who will be the Ozzy Osbourne of right wing politics?

Newt? Frothy? Gov. Goodhair? RonPaul? Crazy Eyes? Surely not Mittens! You think?

Justice vs. Revenge

2011-09-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

In years past, I was a death penalty supporter. There were crimes so horrific and so vast that no punishment was truly commensurate. Adolph Eichmann deserved to hang at the very least for all the millions of innocent lives he cut short (Israel retains the death penalty, but Eichmann's remains the only official execution that country has ever carried out). I never supported an assembly line approach to the death penalty, as a kind of automatic and inevitable punishment for certain offenses. I always wanted to keep it in reserve for "special cases" like Eichmann's.

Over time, I changed my mind even about that.

Andrew Cohen ultimately takes a "middle position" on the death penalty, but the bulk of his argument points to the conclusions reached by Justices from William O'Douglas to John Paul Stevens to Ruth Bader Ginzburg, that it is inherently impossible to administer the death penalty in a fair and dispassionate way, that the whole process inevitably violates the letter and the spirit of the Eighth Amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment.

Death is the one penalty that cannot be undone. There's no such thing as posthumous commutation, and posthumous "pardons" are more for the living than for the deceased who is beyond all relief. A mistaken or unjust conviction remains forever done and never to be undone.

There is always the common wisdom that fair or not, the condemned got more justice than he ever showed his victims. Cohen replies to that truism thus:

That's why we outlaw lynching, why angry mobs can't storm jailhouses, and why we have judges. It's why we have a Constitution. In America, we aim to give the guilty more justice than they deserve. We do so because of how that reflects upon us, not upon how it reflects upon the guilty. And when we fail to do so it says more about us than it does about the condemned.

I think the death penalty more than any other confounds the line between justice and revenge. Victims of crimes deserve and demand redress. However, people accused of notorious crimes have the right to contest the accusations, and to have a fair review of the evidence and testimony brought against them. An impartial magistrate or jury decides if the case has been made, and if so, what sort of punishment shall be meted out.

And what is the alternative to law and due process? Vendetta. The whole point of a criminal justice system is to spare people the risks and burdens of vendetta. It's to preserve communities from coming undone from the conflicts inevitably generated by revenge. Where would you rather live? In a civil society that functions despite all of its faults and corruptions, or in the State of Nature described by Hobbes, the "war of all against all?"

All religions (yes even Islam) condemn revenge because its fire is unquenchable and destroys everything around it. Revenge distorts justice by turning victims to crime and turning deserving criminals into undeserving victims.

Cohen uses the example of Timothy McVeigh as someone whose crime truly merited the death penalty. On the contrary, I think his death is a great example of vindictive passions distorting the course of justice, and not the passions of his victims, but McVeigh's. McVeigh expressed relief upon his sentencing. He said that the one thing he dreaded was a life sentence without parole. I think it is telling that he eventually stopped all of his appeals. McVeigh wanted to go out in a blaze of glory as a martyr for white supremacy, and he got what he wanted complete with a broadcast recitation of his favorite poem, "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley. If it was up to me, he would have spent a long life in short cell, pondering upon what he did.

There are people who do evil things that should not only be punished, but should remove them permanently from society. I'm all for meting out punishment to the guilty. Lawrence Russell Brewer committed about as horrific and evil an act as anyone could imagine, chaining a man to the back of his truck and dragging him to his death for no reason except that he felt that his victim was the wrong color. The passions of revenge would demand that Russell at least suffer the same fate. Vengeance was only partially satisfied by his execution. Was justice satisfied? Brewer is now as dead as his victim James Byrd, and neither is coming back.

And what will happen if it comes out that Brewer's execution was driven by political expediency as much as by justice? The taint of racism hangs heavily over the whole Texas judiciary system. Could it be that the state decided that one homicidal racist was a small price to pay to dispel at least some of that cloud? And would justice really be served then? It's doubts like these that caused even conservative justices like Stevens to turn against the death penalty.

In 1936, Fritz Lang made a very striking movie about the shifting line between justice and revenge called Fury.

And finally, there is this from Albert Camus:

But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

I Look Forward To the Day ...

2011-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

... when all the anti-gay bigots are looking out at the world from behind the self-made walls of Idaho compounds along with the racists.

Freedom and Dignity: Forward and Back

2011-09-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

A head of state, President Obama, addresses the United Nations General Assembly about the promise of universal freedom and dignity for everyone, and for the first time by a head of state at such an occasion, explicitly mentions gays and lesbians. Realizing the universal claim of humankind on freedom and dignity is a promise that is within our means and within our grasp for the first time in history.

And here is someone who was not a head of state who had a deeply personal investment in that promise of freedom and dignity, Jamey Rodemeyer of Buffalo, New York.

He died Sunday by suicide after the bullying got worse at his school after he made this video.

There are many around the world who believe that Jamey and his family are but a small price to pay for a purer simpler world for those who claim dominion over it.

So, what kind of world do you want to live in?

Do you want a world where everyone, including people like Jamey, can lay their claim upon it and make their own lives in peace?

Or, do you want a world reshaped and purified according to some ideological or doctrinal template where only those who fit perfectly have any real claim upon the world, and others are simply expendable, others like Jamey?

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

--President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 6, 1941

audaciousdeviant

What's At Stake

Dropping Out of Church

Economic Thoughts For The Day

Mahler

Jamiel Terry

Who Is Occupy Wall Street?

Thought For the Day

A Holiday Classic

A Little List

Heimat Sicherheit

Moral Christians

Thank You Sweet Baby Jesus I Don't Work In Retail Anymore!

Oh Crap! It's Christmas!

Imperial Storm Troopers

Thanks

And The Silly Season Begins!

Here Comes Another Election Year (*Yawn*)

When "Serve and Protect" Becomes "Comply or Hurt"

St. Cecilia's Day

November 22nd

Silent Protest

Lift Up The People's Banner

Cops

Shocking

The OWS "Bat Signal"

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on Occupy's Birthday

I Will Be There In Spirit

Vent

Crassus Wins

Bloomberg Clears Out Liberty Plaza

Swellegant

Johnny Cash

Economics As Morality

Frida Kahlo

A Question to Ponder for Veteran's Day: Should We Bring Back the Wartime Draft?

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

Dvorak

Reports on the Transition of the USA from Democracy to Oligarchy May Be Premature

Prayer in Liberty Plaza, Pictures

And Just How Truly Representative Is Congress?

But What Are Your Demands? What Is Your Agenda?

Batbaby Go!

The Archbishop of Canterbury Speaks

Good For The Greeks!

Saint Paul's Backs Off

All Saints

Happy Halloween!

Democracy

Another Priest Considers Resigning From the Chapter at St. Paul's

Government Regulation

The Creator of the Post Modern Capitalist State, Deng Xiaopeng

Not Giles Fraser

Cracking Down

Giles Fraser Resigns

audaciousdeviant

Evensong Outside St. Paul's Among the Tents

Calvinism

St. Paul's Protesters May Be Ordered, Then Forced, to Leave

St. Luke

Occupy 1932

Occupy Saint Paul's!

The Iraq War Ends

The Death of Libya's Clown King

Nous les 99%!

Semper Fi

Prayer in Liberty Plaza

What I'd Like to See

Pictures From Times Square October 15, 2011

Now Is The Time

Update on the Ground Zero Church

"Postponed"

God and Mammon

Keeping Faith With Currency

I Luv Rushbo

Frank Kameny 1925 - 2011

The 53%

Quote of the Day

Pastorale

Occupy The Democratic Party

Here Comes Another Election Year (Yawn)