Among the reasons I will go to my grave loathing John Edwards is not just his betrayal of his wife and children but his contamination for all time of the expression “the two Americas.” So flawed was this suspiciously grinning messenger that his important message about the two societies now coexisting uneasily within one body politic has been all but lost in popular consciousness.
But I was reminded of the two Americas last week when the US Department of Agriculture announced a huge spike in what it calls “food insecurity”: what most people would translate as hunger or malnutrition. One in seven US households experienced some degree of food insecurity last year—that’s 50 million people not getting enough to eat at some point during 2008, a large proportion of them children. It was also reported last week that the number of seriously delinquent home mortgages is also spiking. This while Ben Bernanke and other well-fed system overseers reminded us that it will be a long time before we will see an uptick in employment or earning levels on Main Street—and would we please just be patient.
So that is what life is like in Loser America: employment desperation, rising hunger, looming homelessness, untreated illness, rising rates of substance and family abuse, and soaring enlistments in the imperial military as the only remaining escape hatch from all of this misery.
In Winner America, meanwhile, things are truly looking up. Big banks are now reporting respectable earnings from trading with our tax dollars. Wall Street is on track for record profits and executive payouts this year. After reaping our taxpayer billions, the banks still have not been required to modify troubled mortgages or to start loaning to small business in any serious way: they are making their money the old-fashioned way—through usury and speculation. And they are very close to persuading a Democratic Congress to grant them even less transparency and even more opportunities for deceptive practices and the floating of future bubbles.
Other state-favored economic sectors are also thriving. Big Insurance will be getting almost everything it wants in the health industry bailout package now moving through Congress (we can no longer really call it health care reform, as it is merely now little more than a sop to the medical-industrial complex, with almost no cost-containment features or improved medical practice in view).
Big Pharma, which already spent over $110 million to lobby Congress this year, is determined to protect its staggering profits from any last-minute moves to push for cheaper generic drugs or to extract any cutbacks in Medicare Part D. Thanks to Pharma’s unprecedented clout, federal spending for prescription drugs rocketed from $13 billion/year to $81 billion/year over just the past decade. Democratic Senators daring to push for more concessions from the drug firms are actually getting calls from the Obama White House telling them to STFU.
Although FHA insurance was designed to give low-income and minority people access to housing, rich white people can now buy homes costing up to $730,000 with FHA backing. Barney Frank, a Democrat, wants to raise the allowable amount to $840,000—and make it permanent. In vulture-like fashion, members of the American overclass have also begun taking advantage of the extreme distress of Loser America—buying up the land and buildings and businesses of those who aren’t making it, imposing pay cuts and reduced hours on everyday working people, wringing concessions from local governments for each pitiful job-creating investment they are willing to make in the hinterlands.
In the more advanced iteration of the corporate state that is now emerging, we peons are supposed to be grateful for any small favors granted by the overclass. Thus, in an excerpt from his just-published book (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce) published in the October Harper’s, political economist Slavoj Zizek argues that because today’s Left has no viable alternative to offer, let alone implement, it simply will not do for progressives to protest the ongoing crimes of the overclass too loudly:
When we are transfixed by something like a bailout, we should bear in mind that since it is actually a form of blackmail we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think—to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of society makes such blackmail possible.
Okay, so we should think things through in a really radical way… but make no actual waves for the time being, lest we be punished still more for our insolence. Why does this prescription make me profoundly uneasy?
Acting Out as a Religious Imperative
While I yield to no one in my icy determination to think clearly “in a really radical way,” I do not believe that it is actually permissable for religious leaders to be content with mere thinking.
The call narratives and career trajectories of the great Hebrew prophets all contain the idea that it is the prophet’s privilege and burden to disrupt the false peace that surrounds gross injustice, to disrupt patterns of acquiescence in that injustice, to make really awkward scenes and to get up into the faces of the oppressors for as long as necessary. In this way the prophet opens up a new perceptual and psychological space—one in which the pretenses of the powerful begin to look like just that: empty pretenses.
Jeremiah offers perhaps the greatest example of acting out and creative disruption. He strongly resists the burden of prophecy; he then accepts that burden and makes a public display of his protests against corrupt rulers and soothing false prophets; he gets himself arrested and later tries to retire (unsuccessfully); finally, he points the way back to reconciliation and righteous community in the post-exilic period.
Is this the kind of wild ride our contemporary religious leaders are prepared to take? It seems to me that too many faith leaders much prefer the role of court prophets. Some are ensconced in Washington, suggesting small fixes here and there, spreading a thin layer of faithiness over what the politicians want to do anyway.
Their machinations usually have precious little impact, but still worse is that it’s the wrong kind of impact. I say this because it is distinctly not the prophet’s role—or the responsibility of today’s responsible religious leaders—to be tinkering on the margins of policy alternatives. The prophet’s job is to hold victims of injustice up to public view, not to let eyes of one’s neighbors be averted to unjust suffering, and (not least) to expose those who perpetrate and benefit from injustice, along with the complicit civil rulers (politicians) and the compliant priests whose connivance only adds to the injustice.
Not that a true prophet takes any pleasure from the duty of calling oppressors and their enablers to account. Knowing that such calling out will inevitably stir enmity and resentment, the prophet makes it clear that she or he has no choice but to speak out for the sake of the poor and miserable whose plight cries out to highest heaven. She or he is not acting out for ego gratification but for faithful service.
Thought Experiment on What a Transformative Religious Witness Might Look Like
Martin Buber taught us that we won’t transform the world until we can fully imagine what a righteously transformed or transforming world would look like. So let us try a little thought experiment and imagine that US religious leaders were to begin to:
Follow the money: Do the obvious and figure out how the flow of major money shapes our politics and public policy. Talk about this, preach and teach about it, bring it to the surface.
Move away from any kind of partisanship: Instead of “Red” and “Blue,” try to focus on “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Why indeed should religious leaders be shilling for Democrats who are as beholden to the money power as the Republicans are? This is moral insanity.
Pour shame on the rentier class: This is harder, but our class criminals like to be able to hide out. Religious leaders who hunger for justice should steel themselves to track them down, confront them, and let them answer for themselves. This is not about attacking wealth per se but about challenging irresponsible wealth that has no trace of neighborliness in it. Religious leaders could take some tips from the progressive side of the labor movement on how to do this effectively.
Make a clean break with neoliberalism and focus consistently on building up the real economy, including community reinvestment and investment in good-paying domestic jobs: In practical terms, this means saying very clearly that the itty-bitty stimulus program we’ve had so far is not nearly enough—especially when this administration has apparently limitless amounts to spend on propping up zombie banks and fighting imperial wars in the Middle East.
Legitimize the doubts and demands among the sheep being led to slaughter today: This is in many ways the main task. If the current silence of religious leaders concerning savage social and economic inequalities is taken to mean consent or complacency, then how can anyone expect the hoi polloi to engage in any spontaneous protest? Conversely, if religious leaders start to speak out strongly against oppression, it will surely give others permission to find their voices.
Create a new set of Values Voters instead of trolling for Values Voters whose “values” merely reflect fear, insecurity, and xenophobia: Here is where things could get interesting. The Right, including the Religious Right, has brilliantly persuaded millions of hard-pressed American workers to substitute warfare against “culture elites” for rebellion against their actual class oppressors. But we once had religious leaders who openly stoked class warfare as legitimately democratic and godly to boot. These leaders weren’t communists or socialists; they were simply following the example of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. Surely we have some such leaders, Rev. Billy aside, who are still cast in this prophetic mold.
Let me end this by saying that I am not holding my breath. I do not expect a radical religious voice to suddenly emerge in this way. The signs of near-complete religious domestication are everywhere. Yet I also believe that the Holy Spirit can descend at even the most unexpected times. And if even a small fraction of US religious leaders were to catch this particular spirit, I have no doubt that all kinds of holy hell would break loose as the walls of our man-made prison house finally start to shake and tremble.
