Reading a couple of posts by Digby (here and here) reminds me of a friend’s quip after seeing the results of some Congressional season back in the ’90s: “Hooray, the Capitalist Party won 534 seats!” The 535th, of course, was that of Bernie Sanders, the Socialist from Vermont.
If anything, it’s worse today. Sanders is still there, but these days the advocates for the Capitalist Party are more virulent than ever. Besides, we have Independents for Lieberman to contend with.
The point is that just about everybody in Washington works for The Man. Like Digby says, it’s a company town, and when she says “The Company,” she’s not talking about the feds. It’s really much easier to understand what’s going on in D.C. these days when you surrender the fond dream that there are competing ideologies mounting a battle there. There’s really only one, whose interests are flacked to greater or lesser degree. You’ve got your garden-variety corporate capitalists and your off-the-deep-end Randians, but it’s all a continuum on the same spectrum, which is why Rahm Emanuel may be an annoying little twerp, but he’s not a surprise.
At this point, however, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with religion. Just this: to paraphrase the inestimable Walter Brueggemann, the faithful are called to be the people of God, not bricklayers in Pharaoh’s court. And let’s face it, from the Washington Monument on down, our nation’s capital is looking more and more like Pharaoh’s kind of town.
Finding a way of life different from bricklaying is part and parcel of the life of faith. The capitalist ideology is just that, an ideology, and so relativized by the restless, ragged transcendence of God. If Brueggemann is right, to be an heir of the Exodus means to live in trust in God’s providence, rather than constant struggle to get it for ourselves, and with a sense of justice for all people. The price of manna is getting only just enough to satisfy our hunger. It is also making sure that everyone else has what they need, too.
Believers, I want to suggest, owe it to their fellow citizens to think outside the limits of the “debate” as it is currently structured and articulate the vision. We have an obligation to tell the Exodus story and apply it to the world we live in. Moreover, we have an obligation to model a community where the vision and the story are practiced, rather than capitulate to present realities in a fit of pique.
We’ll have to talk about how the latter objective can be achieved another time. As for the former: attempts to keep the powers-that-be honest are all well and good. But like the atheist Digby, I am starting to wonder if anyone is ever going to stop thinking about new and improved methods of baking bricks and start talking about what we owe to one another for the sake of human decency, if nothing else.
