This from Frank Rich in the NYTimes is important for me, not as “partisan swipes” (as effective as it might be as such), but as a wake up call to the part of the American church that is wandering in the wilderness of nationalistic blindness. This guy is NOT your pope, or your chaplain. He is the spokesperson of an empire that sees only what it thinks it needs to expand, protect, and spread that disease. The church in America needs desperately to take “America” out of the church, and see that we are truly a global people. As Stanley Hauerwas has often put it, we are “catholic”. It is a bond that goes beyond and transcends national distinctions or preferences.
Falluja Floods the Superdome – New York Times
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate (“our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens”), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 “mind-set of isolation and retreat.” Yet even as Mr. Bush promised “victory” (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president’s stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of “major combat operations.”
If anything, stuff like this should all the more remind us of the utter futility of the expectation that ANYTHING will get dfone until it affects the bottom line, or the polls. The administration had to be “shamed” into increasing its aid to the Tsunami disaster. And it had to be shouted into action to address a storm that they KNEW was coming. The words of the “commander-in-chief” ring so hollow, as always.
This business of shouting at this group of profiteers and politicians is wearing on me. Like so many of my friends since last November are feeling, “Look where that got us”
If the church were rallying to this need, they could have amassed their own ecumenical relief “readiness” days before (and some may have, but as usual, they are dwarfed in size and technology and communications and media by the “mainstream” and the diverse “niche networks”). There could have been an effort and aid on the scale that could only have the effect of the “shaming” of the government to respond, lest they “slip in the polls”.
Next Sunday, 9/11 falls on Sunday for the first time since THE 9/11. I am trying to decide where to go that day. It will have to be where I know there is abhorrence of worldly worship of violence as “protecting our way of life”. OUR way of life, as people of God, as the church, is a “WAY” of which they world does not know, and refuses to know, and is KEPT from knowing.
