I just watched about 20 minutes of a Q&A with Chlamers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire. Scary stuff. He is candid when the interviewer asks him if he has much hope that this will get turned around. He says No. I read a bit of one blogger, who I happened across in the Google Hits on Chalmers Jouhnson and Sorrows of Empire:
The Agonist: Sorrows Of Empire
Johnson tells us everything we never wanted to know about our country. I almost threw the book across the room several times. “No, that’s a crock,” I found myself mumbling. Then I would go to the endnotes (yeah, I’m a nerd that way) and Johnson would be citing a DOD memo or some other unimpeachable source. ….. His four sorrows are: a state of perpetual war, a loss of democracy \”as the presidency eclipses Congress\”, truthfulness will be replaced \”with propaganda and disinformation\” and bankruptcy. Look around and ask yourself, honestly, what do you see? Look at the networks, look at the multiple scandals brewing in the executive branch and congress, scandals that would have taken Clinton down in a heartbeat. Look at the budget. And lastly look at the War on Terror. Does it have an end? Has the president ever told us what the conditions for victory are?There are other writers who scoff at Johnson’s warnings, a host of people engaging in a giant bout of American triumphalism. Wave the flag. Use patriotism as a cudgel. Curtail our civil liberties in the interest of our own safety. All of it is happening. And Johnson’s simple genius lies in the fact that he is holding up a mirror for us to look at.
Not exactly stuff that makes for happy. Of course, I’ve been reading a bit in House of War this weekend, so I’ve already been in a bit of a stupor about what we’re going to do in this country, and how much of this nonsense is passed over into the churches that seem to affirm more of the selfish, self-centered materilalism than they do the work of the church (and often CONFUSE the two, which is cuase for even more sociological and spiritual angst). We theological types who take the life of Jesus seriously have not only this state of emergency of health, education, and unbridled miliatarism and machoism, but we have the sorrow of the church accomodation to the empire, which is all the more distressing. And there seems to be no perceptible oasis; no local, living breathing community where I feel I can go and be amongst people who not only are distressed about the things I am, but also who care about how that distress eats at me. I feel powerless to do anything about it; not that I am being prevented from doing so; but that there just isn’t any place or opportunityh that I have found to sense any kind of a breaktrhough into some fresh air and comradery amongst a community of folks who seriously wish to resist the addictions of this culture. Without the personal support, without the prior commitment forthcoming to an accountability to each other, I feel I have no energy for it; for the search. But I can’t let it go, and shouldn’t, and really can’t, but how long? I don’t feel confident that whatever the blockades to finding a place in a communityu or worship and seeking of call, that I can traverse the obstacles unless I have the strength that comes from the community I seek, and not having it, I often feel as if nobody wants to know, or that I cannot express it in the rushed pace and restricted spaces that we’ve allowed ourselves for “consideration” of this God and this church that we need so desperately.