Tested Dreams? Idiot Faith?

How do we write about the “serious”?

Even now my inner child cries out to sabotage the word.  Quick — garnish it with a sprig of irony!  Serve with a side of conspiring winks!

But I’m being straight up here.  I’m having a hard time with this.

Last week, when I started Tested Faith, I really wanted this to be a place where I’d write only about social and ecological justice, and how faith (my own) fit in.  And looking over my first two or three months of Idiot Dreams — in which I found myself writing very rarely about these issues — I decided I needed a new venue: one that not only made room for this kind of talk, but filtered out anything but.

So far, my own squeamishness about “serious” had kept me from addressing these issues in the mix of Idiot Dreams. I worry too much about “coming across” as a didactic, stuffy, preachy, pretentious, do-goody windbag.  I fear, in fact, that if I am not that little stuffy, didactic person outright, I at least have him deep down within me, somewhere near my spleen.  All I need do is to feed him, and he’ll swell out to my epidermis.  If I’m not careful he’ll become me, through and through.  The thought is paralyzing.

On the flipside, I’m being ridiculous.  People write about issues of pressing concern all the time, and do (if not always completely) find ways to share their views (and even toss in occasional gung-ho exhortations) without all the stuffiness, preachiness, etc.  So Nate: quit with the squeamishness already!

Plus, there’s this.  Writing never quits being a form of talking to oneself, and that’s a good thing.  Even a necessary thing.  In the words at least attributed to E.M. Forester, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”  And for me, writing does seems to help with the digestion of all this half-chewed “serious” I read & swallow.  Writing helps me figure out what I believe, and even the act of finding the right vocabulary has an — okay, almost irritating — way of reminding me how little I understand.  The task of writing, in other words, helps me hone and defend my various stands and headstands in this Great Big Ethical Muddle.  And within that muddle — never beyond it — such writing helps me define myself as a person of faith.

More importantly still, writing about Hard Truths winds up either compelling me to action, or hurting like an absolute bitch.

Or both.  Such writing, in other words, tends to crank itself out in the form of a thousand little vows, which prick and prod us into (less dis-)honest living.  When I write about our staggering income inequality, there’s a hidden confession of my own “abject wealth” in world standards.  I don’t get to play the “poor” card anymore because there’s no jacuzzi on our block.  Hidden even deeper is the promise to change, which ups the ante to do so in my daily life.  If I write about poverty here in the First Ward one day, I’m that much more a hypocrite for doing nothing the next.

Tested Faith, I guess, was going to be my mode of doing all these things, by escaping to a new, I don’t know, “user name.”  A place where I would start fresh and set a new tone.

I felt like I couldn’t do that on Idiot Dreams because, frankly, I’m a wimp when it comes to bending Language to my will.  And in Idiot Dreams, Language had already set up shop, practically from the get-go.  Unless I muster great courage and do things that come quite unnaturally to me, Language owns me.  Bullies me.  And I like that on Idiot Dreams.  On Idiot Dreams, that’s the whole point.  I don’t know how many times I’ve come on planning to write about some specific “truth” on faith or cruelty, and wound up letting the first sentence slap me into submission and take me somewhere else.  Usually somewhere better.

On that note, if I AM to keep both blogs running (I’m less sure now why I should) I need to give language a little more play over here in TF.  If I don’t have that co-author (language itself), I’m clearly going to keep writing things I don’t like over here.  For God’s sake, it only took me a couple of posts before I was waxing stuffy about Derrida.

Forgive me.

So… I’m considering things.  I may try to cram both blogs back into Idiot Dreams.  Lord knows I have a hard enough time trying to be One Real Human Being without coming up with new artificial divides, purely gratis.  I’d love anybody’s thoughts on this.

scrap

When the economy starts to slip — or to plunge, as the case is now — whisky sales plummet.  Used furniture sales shoot through the roof.

And, at least here in Columbia, scrapyards make a killing.

Bill, our bushy-bearded neighbor, just alerted me today that scrap metal — his livelihood — has dropped to $80 per ton in the last several weeks.  Just mid-summer, last time I went with him to the scrapyard, the rate was nearly twice that.

“It’s slipped another fifteen bucks a ton since Monday,” Bill muttered.

“God, why?” I asked, betraying my (lower-middle class) isolation from life below the poverty line.  A life that’s an increasingly likely possibility.

Bill looked at me as if I’d just woken from a three week nap.  “Wall Street,” Bill answered.  “Drive down Ash Street.  Drive down Sanford.  See how many junk cars are left.  See how much scrap metal.  It’s gone.  Gotta pay the bills.”

And because of this new glut of supply at the scrapyards, demand is quickly waning.  For Bill, it’s harder than ever to keep his family afloat.  His daily shouting fits in the yard are louder, start earlier, go later.

The scrap-yards, of course, are reveling in it.  Nervously.  For them, for now, it’s a buyer’s world.  Desperation up, prices down.

But then, their buyers are playing the same game with them.  And desperation trickles up.  All the way up to Wall Street.

Greenspan and Koresh

Alan Greenspan and David Koresh are not the same guy.

That would be ludicrous.

And, lest you be prone to argue, here are are three easy ways to distinguish between them.

1.      David Koresh, famed cult leader, perished in 1993, consumed in flames of his own making. ||| Alan Greenspan, famed cult leader, helped kindle a fire for fifteen more years.  When it finally erupted last week, Greenspan got away without so much as singed eyebrows.

2.      When the gun-toting feds finally stormed Mount Carmel, David Koresh was there, a willing martyr. ||| When the feds finally stormed Wall Street, Greenspan was nowhere to be found. Having passed his high priest status on to Henry Paulson, Greenspan had since assumed the new role of neoliberal evangelist (via Greenspan Associates LLC).

3.      David Koresh believed he was a prophet and messiah-figure (hence the self-given name “Koresh”, Hebrew for Cyrus), and ultimately decided he was the Messiah himself. Through the sheer strength of his ardent faith and fervor, Koresh worked his way up to both high priest and “Big Papa” of the Branch Davidian sect. ||| Alan Greenspan believed he was a prophet, but certainly no messiah. If Koresh was a Jesus-figure, Greenspan was more like a tight-lipped Moses. The former was the Word of God. The latter merely transcribed the word of God – the holy writ of “free market” capitalism – to the unappreciative masses below.

One similarity, however, I will concede.  Both men, I am certain, did nothing to let the very flames themselves threaten their own looks of serene self-certainty.  Faiths unshaken by God Himself!  Or at least we have the pretense.

This, of course, was surely a more easy feat for Koresh. After all, Koresh knew he would die a martyr; he had predicted these flames would come. Greenspan, it appears, has imagined green fields and blue skies forever.  After all, aren’t such promises all there in God’s own writing, scrawled from head to arse upon the unregulated “financial markets in their [sacred] collective wisdom?”

Dwight N Hopkins (ed.), in Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, goes beyond claiming that religion and globalization are tightly intertwined. Hopkins insists, in fact, that globalization — we might say Greenspan’s globalization — is a religion. Which Hopkins so defines:

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices comprising a god (which is the object of one’s faith), a faith (which is a belief in a desired power greater than oneself), a religious leadership (which demonstrates the path of belief), religious institutions (which facilitate the ongoing organization of the religion), a theological anthropology (which defines what it means to be human), values (which set the standards to which the religion subscribes), a theology (which is the theoretical justification of the faith), and revelation (which is the diverse ways that the god manifests itself in and to the world). — “Globalization as a Religious System,” p.9, my emphasis.

In light of Hopkins’ essay, I stand corrected. Greenspan’s neoliberalism is not a cult – a branch off of something larger. It is, instead, its own full-fledged religion, and this is far more frightening still. Neoliberalism is that “something larger” itself; Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” is now God’s hand, plain and simple.

Something as deep-seated and expansive as this Old Time Religion will never go quietly into the night. It dies hard if it ever dies at all.  Are we as a nation ready to lose our religion? Are we ready for some serious regulation?  Ready for a new course of laws and enforcement based on better lives over bottom dollars?

Are enough of us ready to accept that charge of heresy?  Not me.  I’ve got bills to pay.