This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
For the first time in weeks dawn without mountains. The sun here rises against a wide open sky. Clouds filter the sun light. Colors galore.
The daunting mountains. Forbidding beauty. The oceans with unlimited horizons. Beauty that opens the world.
Tropical Storm Isaac – soon to be Hurricane Isaac – is on the way. It’s been raining here, overcast skies throughout the day. Winds are picking up. The ocean is roaring. The Republicans are gearing up for their convention in Tampa. I wish them the worst of luck.
One of my courtyard companions said hello to me this morning and asked me if I was living here now. He met Isaiah when he was here several months ago and has seen be around for a couple of months. He didn’t know if I was a short-time renter. We talked about the coming storm. It seems they shut the causeways down when the winds reach fifty miles an hour. He told me that he just purchased some butane so not to worry. He had enough fuel to cook for “us” if the power goes out.
How’s Isaac for a storm’s name? Binding. Being bound. Trust. Fidelity. To be honest, though, when an acquaintance mistakenly refers to Isaiah as Isaac, it scares the hell out of me. I’ve never been drawn to the Isaac story, even when Aaron, studying the Bible this summer, told me that the silences in the text were fascinating and changed our traditional meaning of the story. Being quite traditional, I can’t quite get the possibility of sacrificing a son to demonstrate a belief in anything, including God.
To 7-11 for some breakfast provisions, a banana and apple, some Greek yogurt and, lo and behold, fresh lime. 7-11 is a truly one percent healthy place that caters to the ninety-nine percent. Coffee on the run, candy, various gambling opportunities, cigarettes – the great bulk of their sales.
I have the New York Times delivered through the week. It resumed this morning with my carrier including back issues I missed on my travels. An act of random kindness.
I took my morning walk with the tourists and the regulars. I see the regulars standing outside their apartments for a smoke, walking at dawn, sleeping on the beach. After a while you separate who’s who. Even the policeman who pulled me over some years ago for riding my bike in the middle of the street at dawn – without identification, imagine that! – smiles at me knowingly when we pass in the street.
The depressing news continues to hit the news wires. The White ticket, Mormon Mitt and Gut-em Ryan, the kind of ticket that has the likes of Ken Starr and his White Christian America band salivating. The reason: it devastates the poor and those anywhere close to poverty while keeping the big bucks flowing to the wealthy. Sure, the wealthy “give back” to the community through donations for university football stadiums. Corruption is the theme here, with the “I use you, you use me” dance prominent in these endorsement transactions. Think of it as an endless ATM world. For the wealthy.
The political campaign this time around is like the political campaigns of the past. An American merry-go-round where the poor and the working class are lauded only for their upward mobility desires, as they are condemned for their real life misery. The poor and the unemployed desire to be somewhere else. They are where they are because they aren’t somewhere else.
On the Middle East, forget it; don’t think about something happening politics-wise. Even thought-wise. Not a fake peace process trial balloon on the horizon.
Have you noticed the absence of any rhetoric of the peace process front during these last years? In years past, at least Jewish progressives could ramp up their “peace is just around the corner” pamphlets from yester year, tweaking a point or two, then hitting the Facebook thumbs-up fantasy world. Where have all the Tikkun flowers gone?
So, yes, the Egyptian President has hit the delete button on some top military officials. That’s news worth thinking about. Muslim Brotherhood types seem to think Egypt is for Egyptians. Good luck with that. I hesitate to pre-judge the move, though, since there’s a lot of Egyptian blood under the bridge and, no doubt, more to come. Reporters are being arrested for opposing what’s going one. Nothing new here, I’m afraid. I leave it to the Egypt watchers to weigh in on how serious this is and what direction Egypt might be heading.
Speaking of censorship. Do you see that Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is on the firing seat? Seems like the Republicans are singling here out for her support for Obama. And here justice struggle for Palestinians. And her travel to Iran. Enough said?
Rabbi Lynn is a Renewal Rabbi – a mark against her! – but don’t compare here to the Michael Lerner or Arthur Waskow crowd. No way. She’s a pioneer and she actually reads books, something most Rabbis haven’t down in years. More on her later but first let me offer her a safe-haven at the Cape. My place is small but I have a large living room couch. Since she’s a pioneer, I might even offer my bed. I love sleeping on couches. Especially when I’m honoring a Rabbi on the run.
Rabbi Lynn may even have to turn the page. Perhaps we need to form a community of page-turners. Page-Turners Anonymous (PTA). Hmm.
Turns are interesting. They can as easily go Left as they go can Right.
Obviously the Egypt situation is an Austrian mountain climbing situation rather than a Cape Canaveral beautiful dawn sky that stretches out to infinity. Will the Islamic faith flourishing restrict the air Egyptians breathe or open Egyptian life to a world beyond Islam – and America? Surely, the Israel air Egypt rhetoric has been breathing for years has been tainted with hypocrisy. The abandonment of Palestinians has been defining. New justice air to circulate?
Without getting overly down on Islam as a cultural and political force and without restricting religion to the confines of the mosque or church or synagogue, wearing religion on one’s sleeve is a limitation. It already raises the question of how much whomever’s religion will play its game in the political sphere. The prophetic is different than religion, of course, but here we are talking about prayers and laws and everything else that regulate what cannot be regulated. Pretty soon we’re talking about women and soon after the male Promise Keepers of every denomination and faith community arrive. You see the trajectory.
Sure, I have to point out that those “free” of religion have their own hang-ups and legalisms, even if it’s freedom of everything that restricts the exercise of individual autonomy, like traveling across the globe to see the Statue of Liberty and Disneyworld as one and the same thing. The “global tourism as civilization” game is everywhere as our new freedom. It seems to dominate even my travel home on the Nazi/German jet plane.
Speaking of fascinating (un)equations, have you seen the new map of Disappearing Palestine by the French cartographer Julien Boussac? Floating in greens and blues, Boussac imagines the West Bank as an archipelago. Julian Rake who reports on the map thinks that the Palestinian map resembles the Caribbean or Indonesia – without water. Or Israel is the water that separates the Palestinian enclaves.
Boussac’s map is more or less the same as the maps that I have presented on my PowerPoint presentations since Oslo but, hey, here’s another one, and this one plays reality against the imagination.
Another attempt to map the territory. Now I challenge someone– have I already issued this challenge in writing as I have done orally for years? – to map the territory of Palestinians in Israel proper, Gaza, then the refugees camps in Lebanon and Syria for example and watch Palestinians float in leaky lifeboats surrounded by the Israeli. Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian sea. And I haven’t even touched on Palestinian life in Jordan.
Palestinians as an archipelago nation? Archipelagos, a group or chain of islands surrounded by the sea. The five largest archipelago nations – Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Unlisted – Palestine.
Reminding me of the fourth largest Jewish population in the world – residing within the borders of the Palestinian Authority.
Cape Canaveral, as you approach, surrounded by ocean, bays and rivers. So beautiful. My very own imagined archipelago.
We all need our territory mapped. It’s a way for us to view the world.
Researching archipelagos, I note they’re often created as islands. In the geological literature they are referred to as oceanic islands, continental fragments and continental islands. Oceanic islands are mainly of volcanic origin. They have separated from a continental mass due to tectonic displacement.
Sounds like a definition of Palestinian life. The continental mass has become Israel. The tectonic displacement, the Nakba.
Archipelagos, of volcanic origins, for the moment dormant. Mass expulsion oceanic islands at Israel’s doorstep.
Oh my, spelling correction. I first typed Teutonic instead of tectonic. In my jet-lag mind, the Austrian Alps are still outside my window.
Prof. Ellis,
I am not sure it’s correct to refer to “Ken Starr and his White Christian America band”. The term “White Christian America” seems to me to be an explicit ideology about ensuring white supremacy. Certainly this ideology was common in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. But I feel that southern evangelicals have developed enough that they no longer believe in this ideology, and would reject groups that use such terminology or set such policies.
I do feel that there is implicit racism among many southern evangelicals. For example, their town churches are often divided into primarily black churches and primarily white ones, even though typically they do not label themselves that way. But on the other hand, I get the feeling that some people in the “opposite” churches would feel they should be welcoming. Or to put it another way, I think there is commonly dislike of Obama that people wouldn’t have as much if he was white. But on the other hand, there are black Republicans that fit into the mold of neocons like Kenn Starr: eg. Condi Rice, and the chairperson of the RNC, Steele.
So I think that white southerners are becoming less racist, enough to reject “White Christian America” as an ideology, but enough to have this ideology to some extent in their system without it usually being open. There are southerners I am sure who fit this desription, but I highly doubt that includes national or interstate type officials like Ken Starr. My perception is that blatant racism is less commonly expressed openly among elites.
As to Starr in particular, Ken Starr’s investigation team, as noted in other places on Mondoweiss, included “Likudniks” that didn’t fit into either the “White” or “Christian” America label.
Finally, the Baptist center for Ethics questions how serious Starr’s Christian involvement is:
Regards.
RE: “The “global tourism as civilization” game is everywhere as our new freedom. It seems to dominate even my travel home on the Nazi/German jet plane.”
WTF does this mean? What is intended by it? What, the German’s giving Israel submarines equipped with nuclear bomb capacity is not enough to show their “good” intentions towards the Jews? Sorry, this guy Ellis seems to have gone off the deep end, although I admire his urge to figure out what it all means.
Allusions to Solzhenitsyn, Marc?
“It seems to dominate even my travel home on the Nazi/German jet plane.”
The good Professor is quite the ghost hunter with a possibly unique ability to find the most tenuous Nazi connection to the most mundane of circumstances.
That said, so far in this seemingly endless series he has managed to overlook a truly sinister skeleton that lies barely buried in the sands right by his doorstep.
For whilst not wishing to cast a shadow on every “Cape Canaveral beautiful dawn sky that stretches out to infinity”, I do wonder whether he is aware that the first rocket launched from the Cape bears a remarkable resemblance to this.
“Corruption is the theme here, with the “I use you, you use me” dance prominent in these endorsement transactions. Think of it as an endless ATM world. For the wealthy.”
The Federal Government and Big Banks, partners in crime through and through. Filching American tax payers in the biggest bank robbery in American history. Millions of mortgage holders and investers alike were told to, “fuck off!” even as Bankers were invited into the all-you-can-eat buffet with smiles, slaps on the back and warm handshakes of friendship.
“Don’t worry, boys, we won’t ask about what you did with the money you stole, we won’t ask about what you’ll do with the bail out money, none of you will be indicted, and, just to avoid any unpleasantness, you can go to the cash window of the Fed to get all the free money you need to ‘pay back’ the little people. Cheers!”
The crime of the century not prosecuted but celebrated in D.C. I still see no reason to believe it’s not going to get even worse. Bastards!
This obscene spectacle convinced me that radical wealth redistribution isn’t dead, it’s just dormant. There’s now a generation coming up that doesn’t remember the Red Menace and who, in the face of such rapacious capitalism, may be tempted to believe that communism got a bad rap.