what to make of Obama's (and much of lefts) transition from progressive academic humanists to regressive corporate warlords- droning the world and clamping down on whistleblowers at a record rate?
a great man i grew up with gives us some clues..
“War is a last-ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast -- following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmongers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death!
They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least , as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first . Just as the beast is the ape of God; to do something successfully, you have above all to hide what you're up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God.
Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the Church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given; likewise consumerism a given, taxpaying. All the neat slots of existence into which one is to fit, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator...
....Every nation-state by supposition, tends towards the imperial ; that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better -- and correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.”
-Daniel Berrigan, Poet, Jesuit Priest

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