Posted 1/11/2003 07:32:40 PM

So which fairy tale archetype are you? Hmm??
made by Michelle at EmptySpace via Adan.

Posted 1/11/2003 06:52:31 PM

The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology via joho

Applied McLuhanistics anyone?

Posted 1/11/2003 06:47:40 PM

everything good comes with local flavor.
passion has a geography.
changing the world always starts and ends where one is.

Posted 1/11/2003 06:28:48 PM

The Former Face of Evil

Newsweek is running an exclusive interview with Muammar Kaddafi (Gaddafi) in this week's issue. Part of it is available online.

What do you think of the U.S. approach to Iraq?
The issue of Iraq is a strange story. What is the danger Saddam poses? What threat does he constitute?

You must know Saddam?
I know him well.

Is he rational?
I don’t think so. We don’t know who poses a greater threat—the American president or Saddam Hussein. I have never been in agreement with Saddam. But he doesn’t deserve this.

What advice do you have for Saddam?
He opened his country for full inspections. What more can he do? Now it is a fight to the finish. He must stand against the wall and fight.

Are you worried that America may strike Libya?
In this case, it would mean America wants to colonize the world, and the world will resist.

Is fundamentalism a threat to your regime?
It is a threat to all the regimes in the region. But, unfortunately, America has given the fundamentalists a strong pretext to carry on their work.

What’s your opinion of bin Laden?
In the Islamic world, he has become a prophet, and all the young people like him.

Is that a threat to you?
Of course.

What is your hope for future Libyan-U.S. relations?
I am optimistic. There are so many American companies eager to come here—whether in oil or other sectors. During the time of wars of liberation, we waged war. Now it is time for peace, and I want to be part of world peace.

Posted 1/11/2003 06:10:38 PM
current mp3:
jimmy.eat.world::a.praise.chorus

Posted 1/11/2003 05:38:59 PM

"I want Christian realism, dammit." -indigo

Posted 1/11/2003 04:18:14 PM

i think my fog index might suck.
it would be cool for a blog tool to automate this index.

Posted 1/11/2003 04:00:21 PM

the pale ash that is the sky holds the world i know.
the crisp flowing of wind's affect on the winter leaves masquerades as rain on my window.
the faint motor of overhead aeroplane limply mocks the thunder that would be
if only the sky would darken, the wind turn to rain and the plane be silenced in storm's reality.
no moment is the same--at least this is how it is for me.
the chorus of nature's ever-creating outpouring;
a sign of man's brutal freedom to be.

Posted 1/11/2003 02:09:44 PM

i have profound difficulty with the well packaged stories of those so ready to declare themselves in possession of a True truth that fulfills needs i didn't even know i had while, inevitably, asking me to pretend i do not have the needs i actually know i have. these quite complex and evolved stories that are sold as an unchanging divine-happiness product become no more than accoutrements to the slick salvation service being proffered. this is heinous in that the product and service oriented church that domesticates the biblical stories and salvation's fear and trembling intentionally displaces the very bloody thing that these are. bloody does not sell well. at least when you are asking someone to enter the event.

the productization of the way of Jesus is an emasculation of real sacrifice by the spectacle of sacrifice. the subtle genius of this displacement of the lived event by the sanitized voyeurism of the past-event-as-spectacle is both more institutionally marketable and organizationally manageable. this displacement by the spectacle of the past holds out an irreconcilable theology and a practice of gimmickry that carnivalizes the kingdom and empties the bloody demands of lived belief. it is easier to market a salvific belief in a cross than to live a life worthy of being made to carry one; easier to do an altar call head count than to make disciples.

i take metanarrative to be any explanatory story that refuses to begin with the unknowing of the bloody event. any sanitized system of event-avoidance is in some way caught in the gears of the meta. this industrial metaphor is appropriate here. the metanarrative is a closed, effective system of sameness that efficiently produces more of the same. the one-off clinical oppression of the salvation factory is the modus of the meta. the meta is the enemy of the mediated. the mediated is the way of the kingdom.

Posted 1/11/2003 01:45:48 PM
current mp3:
counting.crows:sullivan.street.(live)

Posted 1/11/2003 01:41:21 PM

what do i love when i say i love my god? i love myself. there is no way to love anything else. everything i love becomes me and i it. to love god is to love the me i am at the moment--even in the moments i consider painful or angering or empty. this is why we are told to guard our hearts. we are what we love.

to love god: is this not something so totally devoid of meaning as to be nothing other than that unspoken love for being that is known from the first scream of the bloody head entering the world to the final nodding off that brings the last vestiges of life in the dream without waking? is love for god not always already synonymous with identity? in the insanity of knowing's infinity and heart's duplicity is not loving god something so intrinsic to the act of living and dieing so as to be indistinguishable from it? is there not only the love of god in the gaze of that which is and is not? is there not nothing else than that--even if only in its lack; the absence that is the silent trace of that of which we speak?

what i love is what i am and is the definition, in explicit or reverse projection, of the god i purport is there.

"you're being too anthropomorphic, dan."

ok. that is what i do. i am an anthropo after all. what do rabbits love when they love their god? i don't know. i would guess that they love their rabbit self. they chew the carrot and suffer the death of another's hunger--for a rabbit, the ultimate unanticipated immolation of identity. this is the love of god.

i love god.

Posted 1/11/2003 01:31:41 PM

i have been very disappointed lately.
about nothing in particular;
though some particular reasons could be offered.
about everything;
though without diminishing my fundamental thankfulness
for this everything that is disappointing.
disappointment is like that.

Posted 1/10/2003 10:34:39 PM

New Scientist: 3-D printers - fueling the throwaway society? via DayPop News

"honey, would you print up a light bulb for me? and while you're at it print up a new remote for the TV. the kids lost the new one already. thanks, sweety."

Posted 1/10/2003 08:09:12 PM

'Open Season’ on the Foreign-Born?

More waves of detention coming...

Posted 1/10/2003 07:32:34 PM

is it just me or is this getting boring?

Posted 1/10/2003 10:03:19 AM

Monks insist on high-alcohol beer: what i want to know is how the Trappist community manages to walk the line of high-alcohol beer and a vow of silence. screw the classical proofs for God's existence. i think that this Trappist miracle is all that we need to believe in the divine.

Posted 1/10/2003 09:51:05 AM

a reverse Hiroshima is ahead.
we have not yet reaped what we've sown.

Posted 1/9/2003 07:12:30 PM

from a conversation Hopkins and i had recently. beer anyone?

Posted 1/9/2003 02:45:21 PM

it is not getting published; it is writing a good story
it is not being in a movie; it is assuming a role with exceptional depth
it is not crafting a spiritual situation; it is embodying the spiritual in the mundane

how to begin?

surrender the outcome and inhabit the moment.

Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher ca. 3rd/4th century BCE tells a story about an archer:

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets--
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting--
And the need to win
Drains him of power.


{note: Like Plato and Socrates, Chuang Tzu is the only way Lao Tzu, the originator of the Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching, is known. Chuang was a prolific writer without whom Zen, as it has come to be known in its Japanese name, would not have sprung from Chinese Buddhism. The translation of, "The Need to Win," that I use above in from Thomas Merton's, The Way of Chuang Tzu.}

Posted 1/9/2003 02:19:59 PM

the polyphonic chimera that you name "postmodern philosophy" makes no claim to give "this sort of hope" so why set up a straw man? this is like saying that my hammer cannot make love to me so i will despise it for not being a love-making hammer.

...and it continues.

Posted 1/9/2003 02:15:46 AM

just in from the DMA. the permanent collection is open for 100 hours straight beginning today. Summer, Senator and I walked the halls after the Legion of Doom meeting tonight.

i have to say that the DMA's collection is only so-so. David and I went with the girls to the Modern in Fort Worth last Saturday. WOW. their collection was so much better. the whole experience at the Modern was fantastic. the DMA cannot compete with the Modern at this point.

most memorable moment from my museum excursions this week:
....Sarah touching Warhol's Marilyn Monroe as she was critiquing it. she is still telling that story. someday it will be meaningful to her. now it is just an anecdote in her nine-year-old unabashed critique of most post-WWII art.

Posted 1/8/2003 04:32:27 AM
the
madness
continues.

i
ask
myself,
"self,
is
it
irresponsible
to
speak
your
thoughts
to
the
world?"

self
often
replies,
"shut up."

Posted 1/7/2003 05:55:57 PM

why things must change.

Posted 1/7/2003 04:21:08 PM

Not only do these people make the worst tasting Energy drink on the planet ("Xapp") they are technical baffoons. It looks like they check for a specific version number of a browser--not a range of versions or a minimal version, but a specific version. i have 128-bit IE 6.0.2500.1106 and i am redirected to a "Please download IE 5.5" page when i go to their URL. luckily they don't care what version my Opera is. Opera saves the day. anyway, all i wanted to really say was this:

Do not buy Xapp Protein Energy. It tastes like a cheap, flat, bad light beer.

To be fair here is the upside: "if you are looking for a 10g of Designer Whey™ - America’s #1 selling protein. Zero fat. Zero Carb."

That is a great pitch, but when the drink itself tastes like camel dung who cares how much "designer whey" they throw in? And, guys, you have to do something about your silly little jumping man logo.

Posted 1/7/2003 04:15:58 PM

Send in the Troops!

maybe CBN should begin a nuclear weapons program in an effort to grow to deterrent parity with the USoA before this al-Qaeda/Pat Robertson connection is "discovered" and the CBN corporate headquarters is bombed to hell. hey, they have the right to bear arms you know! if Jesus wants them to have a nuclear weapon by god the Christian Broadcasting Network will have one!

Posted 1/7/2003 04:08:15 PM

Book Mapping

this is cool. i want to see this done with blog data and books from other genres.

Posted 1/7/2003 01:11:03 PM

The Question of Where

I will suggest that this always already internal subversion, of which the Fourth World War is but one instance, is in fact that which where cannot contain. That haunting presumption of every-where we know through.
-Dan Hughes, in a review of Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism

i would like to begin this afternoon with a question. a question of where. a questioning of where. a question that begins in, that haunting presumption of every-where we know through.

the what that suggests that we begin with the question of where is the haunting. that primordial lack scratched into the very patterns of our biology that demands adaptation. the adaptation-demanding absence of the haunting presumption of the known-through every-where is what today demands our attention; what today asks the question of where.

we find ourselves. this is no blue-sky assessment of midlife written in an 800-word vocabulary for an audience of Reader's Digest and Modern Maturity readers. we find ourselves. always thrown we are. always the work of another. always in an-other's world. always clawing for voice and form and meaning in chemical and memetic realities never self-possessed and all the while inexplicitly self-referential. we find ourselves in systems of biology, patterns of neurology, habits of misogyny. we find ourselves unsigned and unsent. without recourse to stop the chain that is origin's genealogy.

we find ourselves, but this is not our primary knowing. before the what can possess us to ask where; before the clenched fist self-awareness of consciousness leaves the uterin Eden; before the very fire of god is unleashed in the vocalization of our youth that which where cannot contain knows. we are known. not in the, "it's all about me," sense, but not far off. our sentient selfishness does not constrict the world to our predalictions, but neither does it negate the momentary god-likeness we find ourselves amidst. for how else do you describe the wonder of that which we have become unbenounced to ourselves?

conceived in the primal fuck of procreative demand. expelled from our mother's body like a rejected transplant. we enter the world without intention or the evolved dignity of a shared way we will later enculturate and co-create. this violence and pain and demand and rejection is the height of connection, joy, service and love. these are the remnants of passage into where. we know not where until long after this moment, but where begins for us in the stories our common passage enacts. we dance the rythmns of this passage and her rites and by association see the parable of our own genesis.

this deferred knowledge, this design of action and being before diliberation and knowing is a sentient pattern. in the beginning was the adaptation. in the beginning was the encoded knowing of another acting in the constricting freedom of the actual and inactual from the animating void of no-where.

the where holds us. the no-where animates. that which where cannot contain haunts all being and nothingness as that which enables it. it is no mean void, no mere conceptual plane or primordial base if a thousand times smaller than the subatomic we can begin to measure. that which where cannot contain; forever unvocalized--unknown in the sensational unknowing that knowing knows not otherwise than--a haunting pre-abscense of the every-where.

Posted 1/7/2003 12:46:04 PM
i wrote this piece in late December '02. usually i post blogger composed stream of consciousness pieces at the moment i write them. this is the first to be taken offline for a mull over period before letting it go. why? i don't know. look for it on seven in Feb'03. edit: it has been sent to seven. i have added a bio Feb0503.

_______________

Empire, Terrorism and The Other Kingdom

In The Name of What?

The men walked to the door in track suits. Carrying a gym bag they looked like they were ready to shoot some hoops inside the centuries old British Raj Church. The stately, yet unassuming, structure hidden in the dense mountain forest of this place was now the high school facility for a small private boarding school--a school not unlike the other international schools in the region; akin to a miniature United Nations. Students, staff, administration and faculty converged from dozens of countries to live, work and study in the picturesque hideaway nestled amongst the foothills of the Himalayas.

On their meandering walk to the school the men with the gym bag passed the small tea shop that once served up chai and parattas to my friends and I happily tardy for class. They walked up the path we covered on foot thousands of times in the snow of an early winter or the enchanting darkness of the long walks that were our primary opportunity for romance. When Kalashnikovs emerged from the bag that "should have" concealed the equipment of sport all appearances of the routine were unmasked in a defining aberration.

The heroic deaths that ensued as these men dressed for sport began making their way through the gate and onto the school grounds--directing round after round through doors, windows and those who would venture to stop them--joined those who fell not so many months earlier in New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. They joined the hundreds of fallen in Kenya and Tanzania, overshadowed by 9/11 and their station in the unspoken stratification of ethnic value. They joined the innumerable innocents to be lost amidst the plush accommodations of Mombasa turned killing field in the blink of an eye.

The normalcy, the spaces inhabited in our beautifully mundane comings and goings, all at once became backdrop to the shockingly-real that invests common space with a life-sharpening veracity that is always there, but seldom seen with such precision. The surreal moment penetrating the porous environment it engulfs denying any attempt at a feigned un-experiencing. The event fused the space and those who inhabited it; memories were forever invaded and recalibrated. As the death sport played out the friends who walked the paths with us, who shared our chai, were taken in the name of what?

Abdul Haq was the image of Afghan rugged freedom. He fought the invading Soviet's as a Mujahideen in the 1980's. He fought the violent ignorance of the Taliban in the 1990's. And when the United States began their war on terrorism he sacrificed himself to seek a Pashtun alliance against the Taliban in the early 2000's.

Screenwriters would scoff if asked to write the seeming cliché that was the stuff of reality for this man. He was often maligned and his motives questioned, but he is one of Afghanistan's heroes as Quixotic as he seemed to many. His last service to his country was on horseback deep in the untamed mountain regions outside of Jalalabad were he was surrounded by Taliban forces. Though he used his satellite phone to call in a desperate plea for U.S. Special Forces or air support he was captured and executed by his countrymen; his enemies.

This family friend, this paragon of Pathan pride and hospitality, died amidst the barren landscape of a country that has been at war with invaders or itself for more than a generation. In the iconic selflessness of an outgunned hero on horseback Abdul Haq died. But in the name of what?

Al-Qaeda is not an answer. These events were not played out in the name of al-Qaeda--though al-Qaeda enacted each of them. These barbarisms slipped into being in the name of something else.

Terrorism

Al-Qaeda does not stand as a legitimate revolutionary movement in the mind of the West because of our distaste for, what we deem to be, crass disrespect for life at the center of this network. Of course, as is the case with everything, our distaste is selective. We overlook the children killed by our sanctions, the collateral damage caused by "pin-prick" precision weapons sent into sovereign nations and the countless corpses left behind in the killing fields of our just wars. Nevertheless, there is a very real repugnance that accompanies the methods of al-Qaeda. There is something palpably different, though this is no value judgment, between the shocking clinical horror of wartime-sanctions-perpetrated mass death and the peacetime reappropriation of systems of civilian transport unleashing random death in the attempt at the symbolic.

Had Osama bin Laden done the hard work of target selection, casualty avoidance and message articulation he could have been a bearded Tyler Durden. Had he taken on the even more arduous task of offering a viable alternative to the dominant global consumer cultures he could have been an Islamic Benjamin Franklin. Instead he is that haunting historical figure doubled and indivisible; both demon and hero. A vampire illegitimately leaching off the lifeblood of a tradition that he claims to uphold and a revolutionary striking at the heart of a system he feels dominated by.

Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Al-Gama`a al-Islamiyyah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the hundreds of other groups in this ilk could have found sympathy and camaraderie among the various networks of underground and mainstream voices calling for understanding and justice in the post-cold war world. Instead they dealt with tyranny as tyranny dealt with them, and that, though having an appearance of justice or, at the least reciprocation, is the delegitimizeing factor in any periphery resistance to Empire.

The periphery leads in action that shames a fat imperialism. The periphery can never kill imperialism without itself succumbing to the very spectre it seeks to exorcize. The imperial dies under the weight of its own sloth. The totalizing physical violence of the various revolutionary messianisms at play in these groups has direct link to the totalizing ideological violence in their socio-religious positions.

In the short term, terrorist acts of pent up rage at, what is seen as, an immoral, aloof and hegemonic Western oppression foisted on the Islamic world through the tentacles of the bought oil cartels, installed or supported dictators, media entertainment and ad hoc issuance and adherence to UN mandates demand recognition. This pining for identity and voice makes bin Laden a hero in the hearts of hundreds of millions, yet, the interpretive stance that underlies the violent activism does more damage than the benefits derived from the symbolic violence.

This sodomy of Islam by bin Laden that gives a disenfranchised, conflicted generation a poster boy for their angst will not be the ideology or orthopraxy that brings the end that bin Laden, his cohorts and those marginally happy with the visibility he has attained desire. The violence of terror is the whoring out of the cause that has gestated it. Such violence is the point at which there is no longer a cause. Terrorism leaves the ideological a snuff film victim sating the haggard whim of a perverted dilettante. An attempt to destroy the imperial through terror emboldens the imperial. This is the case today in the, "War on Terror," as it was the case in the first century of the Common Era.

The protracted Roman-Jewish wars (66-70CE, 115-17CE, and 132-35CE) were fomented by a laudable cause: liberty for a subjugated people. The violence against Rome in an effort to gain this liberty did definitive damage to the cause of Jewish independence. Jerusalem was literally leveled, nearly everyone exiled or killed and the gloriously crazed religious panoply of the time smashed under the weight of Empire. Soon after, two, rather mangled, forms of spiritual community sought to deal with this inconceivably catastrophic turn of events by taking strongly accommodating postures that began the reconstitutive evolution of what we call Rabbinic Judaism and Orthodox/Catholic Christianity.

What was lost in the decimation of the Temple in 70CE and of Jerusalem in 135CE cannot be measured. In the irony that only retrospect allows, Rome eventually subverted itself and was conquered from within by a persecuted gentile Christian minority who spiritualized both a Jewish faith and a Caesar's Empire declaring the hybrid the Kingdom of Christ. She too fell, not many centuries later, to the invading hordes of Huns, Goths and Visigoths who swooped in and turned the Kingdom of Caesar-Christ on its head and created a crisis of identity for the imperial gentile Church not unlike that caused among the Jewish peoples by the demise of Jerusalem.

The movement from periphery voice of dissent to empowered institutionalized revolution (aka establishment) is the inevitable tangible impact of any successful revolutionary critique. We have seen the oppressed revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, France and the United States eventually turn oppressor as various incarnations of empowerment took place. We have seen the oppressed movements of Gentile Christianity, Chinese Buddhism and Indian Hinduism, among others, do the same. The attempt at an actualization of an ideal future through violence against those who seem to be in the way of this ideal is the definition of embodied, undeferred, dominating messianism as seen in all of these movements.

In the consideration of activism and revolution that is self-consciously spiritual in nature the revolutionary/empowered cycle remains. This metamorphosis is no mere state/political reality--as if spiritual matters were somehow categorically different or apolitical. The historically verifiable reality of the movement from oppressed-to-oppressor is the inevitable outcome of any revolution that seeks to not only disrupt, but to disempower an entrenched power system. The institutional outcomes of this cycle often catch the, would be, spiritual revolutionary by surprise (consider Joan of Arc) and, in one form or another, is the source for innumerable transitions from idealistic revolution to disillusioned political despondency.

There is another way.

Utopias and Social Agreements

The idealization of revolution, as if it were an utopian end in and of itself, is to miss how the radical is defined by the establishment that it becomes if and when it overcomes the particular establishment it is defined against. The point at which revolution reaches its goal is the point at which it begins to slowly calcify into an establishment. There is an endless cycle, at various macro and micro levels, of an establishment posture of stabilization and a revolutionary posture of critique. Postures of stabilization are what enable jobs, judicial constancy and secure social environments. Postures of critique are what engender sympathy for the marginalized, system checks and balances and chaos enabling social evolution.

There is no escaping this play. There is no way to engage communal human living outside of the cycles of stability and revolution. This is the outworking of social system logic; of internetworked evolution; of a communal organism's living. There is no other way.

I believe that this spiraling reality has part in explaining why Jesus is not a political utopian. The Kingdom of which he speaks and enacts is forever peripheral to the political cycle. Even the most oppressive regime was granted whatever it claimed to own in the teaching of Jesus ("give to Caesar what is Caesars"). It was only what was God's ("and to God what is God's") that was outside of the establishment's ultimate control--even if at times it seemed so otherwise.

This other Kingdom--always on the periphery, always already in the bowels of political cycle, never fully brought into language yet enacted in the midst of whatever stabilization or revolution one speaks from--is the critique that will not sacrifice the present for the future; the way that will not distinguish between a means and an end; the posture that will not demand ascent by laying hold of one's enemies.

This other Kingdom sees the way of peace as the inhabiting work of relational justice in the building of trust between individuals and communities in need of agreements that make for a step toward that ever elusive "good" society that we all desire. Seeking after justice and mercy at a societal level is carried out by aligning oneself with others in positions, parties, governments and the like to create just structures of existence and good laws of governance--however these are defined.

Co-creation has taken place in every generation. The surf and the feudal lord co-create as much as the citizen and the senator co-create. They each have part in a system that only works when a preponderance of people agrees to make it work. The form of the agreement is not relevant to the co-creation of the system. Any act other than system subversion through a redefinition of some sort is a co-creative stance. Revolution takes place when enough people can envision and begin living another reality--another set of agreements.

There is no algorithmic set of logic that draws upon some objective data set to determine how one goes about engaging the wider political situation. Such work requires the messy involvement of real people in real, conflicting situations. The work of co-creation is fuzzy to the point of nonsensical at times and demands the unique embodiment that our species cannot replicate in strictly principal based reasoning systems--the disembodied chains of command or case logic that act as artificial intelligence in whatever technological garb we dress it up in.

A generation unafraid to die, unafraid to speak, but more, unafraid to live must rise and show an alternative to the cold domination of centralized, strong identity networks of oppressive governance. Globalization need not be synonymous with oppression. A middle way, hard won in the living and dieing of families who privilege peace, hospitality and fidelity must rise to this occasion to show a path between the extremities of a raping and pillaging global elite and a dangerously overactive and under-deliberating mobocracy. For these extremities form one system, each side of the spectrum feeding into and using the other in cycles of socio-economic class dominance and the related distractions of narco-consumption on the one hand and terror on the other.

New agreements must be formed in action. As Bonhoeffer said in a baptismal address while in a Nazi prison camp:

"We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For you thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action."


A new generation must think well, but not stop at the academy. If new agreements are to actually be formed and not just discussed a new generation must be ready to embrace a radical responsibility of thought in action. This decision to embody the end of tyranny is the message of the Kingdom with regard to violence. The end of tyranny is not won by the sword; the deferral of tyranny, perhaps, but never its end. Tyranny is ended only in the hearts of humanity; for this is where it begins.

This tyranny of domination in the hearts of humanity is that which Jesus, and the cells of those sympathetic to his message, acted out against amidst the Roman-occupied Galilee of the late second Temple period. Jesus had opportunity and precedent to advocate and activate violent resistance to the Roman and Rome-kow-towing Sadducean domination of the time. Jesus had sicarii, the al-Qaeda of his day, among those who learned from him--even among his disciples. The betrayer of the son of Mary was one such man. Jesus would not have it, yet, nor would he send the terrorists in his midst away.

The Activism of Jesus

The time in which Jesus lived was filled with injustice that we, in the privileged world, have difficulty fathoming. Not just acts of injustice, but truly structural injustice. In the face of this Jesus was not silent. In the face of this Jesus enacted a way of peace, spoke for an alternate Kingdom and then died an unjust death as a political insurrectionist.

In the midst of this life and death as protagonist for the Kingdom of God, Jesus was activist against only one thing: the tyranny of the brokers of God. These, "the sons of hell," as he had opportunity to call them, were the purveyors of the fundamental domination of the human spirit that Jesus deemed more costly, more heinous than even the political and military domination of Rome. Jesus struck at political domination and the nationalist response of violent terrorism with a self-sacrificing activism of love articulated in the blood and sweat of a normal life.

Jesus would have none of the political anti-Rome banter that came from the most conservative elements of his people. These were the people who called for the immediate, violent toppling of Roman rule. From what we can discern of Jesus from the sacred tradition it would be difficult to argue that Jesus was firmly for or against independence or freedom. Undoubtedly, without direct evidence, but through inference we can surmise that he saw political freedom for his people as something better than their oppression. Nevertheless, he would have no part in carving a utopia with the sword. Why?

Because tyranny is not defeated it is traded. From the extant texts Jesus seems more concerned about the ideological and volitional sources of both empowered domination and disempowered violent revolution than with picking any particular tyranny to side with. The way of Jesus seems to point to the belief that unless tyranny ended in the hearts of the women and men of his community and those communities around his any political freedom would be squandered as quickly as Esau sold Jacob his birthright for a smackeral of potage.

So what did Jesus do? He lived a life of counter-valuation. He traded freedom from tyranny for simple freedom and invited those who followed him as Master, those who learned from him as teacher and those who encountered him as stranger to do likewise. The counter-valuations of Jesus are stunning in their loving subversion. Love your enemies. Pray for those who mistreat and malign you. Help the foreign, occupying military personnel carry their equipment! Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Don't resist an evil person. If a thief demands your coat give them your shirt as well. And on it goes.

Living a counter-valuation was not the end of Jesus' response to the tyranny of his time. In the place of Empire and those wanna-be Empire revolutionaries, who would not change the system so much as they would its protagonists, Jesus proclaims another Kingdom; an other Kingdom; the Kingdom of an other. This counter-Empire, declared and enacted by Jesus and those he sent out, was an unbrokerable, inner subversion of the status quo. This counter-Empire was not a dominion established or ruled or imposed, but one declared and enacted standing opposed. This was a gospel of liberation in the midst of domination without need for violent subjugation.

Just as Jesus would not dabble in the revolutionary violence of the al-Qaeda-like leanings within his own people he would have no part in a theological kingdom owned, packaged or sold by an elite--even if that elite was an "us." The moments, that we catch only glimpses of, in which Jesus carries out a certain verbal or physically non-lethal violence are those in which he is interacting with the established religious leadership of his time: the children of hell rebuke; the silence after a cunning demand for an answer; the Temple whippings and property destruction. Unlike the terrorist-leanings of his sicarii compatriots the lived counter-valuation of the declared counter-Empire was activated not by striking out against a dominating other, but by, in yet another reversal, the privileging of that other and the striking out against violently revolutionary or religiously dominating us.

In The Name of God

The events that have unfolded in our day under the auspices of al-Qaeda have been carried out in the name of God--Bismillah--in the belief that they are a divinely sanctioned attack on oppression. Despite being enacted in the name of God, these actions undermine the actor's intention for they misconstrue the name of the one they seek to represent--Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim. All of al-Qaeda knows this name, but this name cannot be conscripted into the service of blind power--imperial or revolutionary. For if one is to live, In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, one must find their path in the way the name enacts.

In every generation humankind is faced with transition. The message of the Kingdom is that this need not be a blood bath.

Mar'anatha.

________________________________

Dan Hughes does not like to be identified by how he makes money. That doesn't seem to make much sense to him. He would prefer to be identified by what he loves--his children, his comrades, the gift and that which where cannot contain. He would love to find a way to have a poverty-level income by writing, speaking and serving. Until that time he will continue to whore himself out. Suggestions and well structured flames can be sent to TheyBlinked (at) hotmail.com.

Posted 1/7/2003 11:02:25 AM

In its message Tuesday, North Korea criticized the United States for portraying it as an international missile threat and retorted: “The U.S. tops the world’s list in producing and selling the weapons of mass destruction.”

N.Korea is a massive threat in ways few of us are aware of. Nevertheless, their statement above is 100% correct. the USoA is the top proliferator of weapons... the question is simply one of customer choice. We think we choose our customers better.

North Korea: Sanctions mean war

Posted 1/7/2003 10:26:22 AM

musicline.de - Die ganze Musik im Internet

here is an unreleased Apocalyptica song, No Education, (*NOT* from the new album Reflections) available on this German site. the .wma requires "you" to become a known individual. the song is ok, but it does not come anywhere near the haunting majesty of the Cult release. do not judge them until you have heard that album.

Posted 1/7/2003 10:19:55 AM

know what i hate?

banks that are more than happy to let you overdraw your account ALL FRICKING DAY as you run your $5-$10 errands. for that handy little banking service i get to pay $25 for every overdrawn purchase regardless of how small! how nice of my banker to help me out in this way. why i would hate to have my debit card declined at the Post Office--how embarrasing. it is so much better to pay $37 to mail a padded envelope! i love my bank.

Posted 1/6/2003 03:13:59 PM

metanarrative and its discontents

repeated ad nauseum Lyotard's proclamation that the postmodern is an incredulity toward metanarrative itself becomes a flaccid meta of sorts--a metacritique. there have been many responses to Lyotard’s proposal. Habermas defends the unfinished work of modernity against Lyotard’s work. Rorty yawns and tells both of these fellows that they overestimate philosophy’s place in our world. Pop-apologists and many contemporary theologians demand a return to the absolute, pristine metanarrative of some consensus on classical Christianity (presumably chosen by them), while the new Christian postmodern superfriends deftly sidestep the verbiage of metanarrative leaving much of the controversial detail of the conversation aside as this keeps the books selling.

so, why write anything about metanarrative? i don't know. i guess my felt need comes from a recent online dialogue with a Charismatic Episcopal who told me that we must believe in a particular Christian metanarrative. i disagreed with this fellow. while the disagreement was fresh in my mind i thought i should perhaps write some stream of consciousness thoughts on this topic.

from the start allow me to confess my own "incredulity" when it comes to metanarrative. i find that when the metanarrarator begins his description of what is on the ground from ten-thousand meters up the details he thinks he sees are never the absolute he claims them to be. for the very simple reason that what he sees is a valid description only from the place he inhabits at the moment in the nomenclature he chooses to use. this seems to me a rather constricting set of circumstances from which to claim a meta-anything.

i want to take it down a level for a moment. a metanarrative is a supreme, overarching story. that is it.

meta=overarching
narrative=story

(best Homer voice) “oooh, big word not so scary after all.” we all have an overarching story of some sort—probably a woven complex of stories. metanarrative is a loaded term because of the domination that it implies in the context of the Western philosophic tradition. because of this i prefer to say that we all have grounding stories. there is some confluence of story lines that, consciously and subconsciously, influence our perception of ourselves, our communities and our place in the world. "grounding narrative" is not a great replacement for metanarrative (i am taking suggestions), but at the least it keeps our feet on the, uh, mmm... ground—there is no “overarching” meta-presumption in a grounding narrative. maybe. anyway… the key question is really not so much whether one has a complex of stories that order and constrict one’s life—i think that we can take that as a given—but more along the lines of: how open/adaptable/loosely coupled are our stories? how aware are we of our narrative sources? can these sources be held to be legitimate? are our stories livable, beautiful, sustainable in a world grown small and more diverse?

the catechism of contingency

metanarrative is a choice. one chooses to metanarrarate. metanarrative is any overarching confession that eschews a primal unknowing at the genesis of a community's identity story. the first lesson in the catechism of contingency is the grounding narrative that begins in the unknowing of birth. as with all grounding narratives, that of unknowing is in unintentional competition with the tightly coupled metanarrative of the knowing of systems. the standard Christian metanarrative system begins in a garden.

Genesis. this book begins with a garden. a garden that is a gift. this gift is forfeit. the forfeiture of the gift of the already prepared garden for the work of seasonal land cultivation and life birthing is taken as the central moral of the early Genesis tale by the post-Jamesian Church. this is often taken to be a movement from divine perfection, "the intended state," to a fundamentally flawed human imperfection, "the fallen state."

interestingly, the progenitors of the Genesis tradition have never seen it as such. there is no original sin in the traditions of the people of Abraham. there is no original sin evidenced in the scant relics of the Jerusalem community. this interpretive stance began later--much later.

where we begin matters, but as the fundamentally divergent interpretations of Genesis show, where may not be as important as how. the Christian Church, after the demise of the Jerusalem community in the Roman-Jewish wars of late 1st and early 2nd Century CE, promoted an interpretation of the garden story in Genesis that read a tear into the spiritual DNA of humankind. some would claim that this position is implicit in Pauline thought (especially in Romans). this is canonical and exegetical choice.

there is a curious near silence of the ante-Nicene church, especially the Eastern Fathers, on the question of original sin. like nearly all major Christian creedal positions that of original sin was developed over centuries of patristic banter and theological development only to find a profoundly definitive and influential stance in the copious ponderings of the last great theologian of the Church before the Hun invasion of the Empire: the African Augustine.

it is telling that the metanarratives of classical Christianity (and metanarratives they certainly are!) are as far back as any Christians of today want to go. It is far enough they say. "these positions find their source in scripture. it is scripture that we side with!"

maybe.

as the interpretive decisions with regard to Genesis show, it is no answer to claim scripture's aid as if it where the text's intention to come to one's defense. the text is used or it is not. the challenge is not in allowing the text to speak. that is impossible. the challenge is to realize that there is no text. it is the community who speaks.

Posted 1/6/2003 01:15:40 PM
current mp3:
sum41::mr.amsterdam

Posted 1/6/2003 12:46:11 PM

the first lesson in contingency's catechism

{a momentary cognitive experiment: what if god doesn't care about the bible or the gita or any other well preserved artifact of past life? what if god only cares about the way that we choose to craft existence in each moment, in each generation, in all that will be? }

the primal is the incomprehensible opening up to life of all that is and is not amidst the ever receding unspeakable origin. in this grounding narrative of the primal the living moment is always already more precious than the calcified locked away in embodied and sign memory. though this is no escape from the inevitable camel work of the domesticated moments of the past. the calcified is the inescapable tradition that we emerge into that demands we know through it.

taking the hand of our ancestors we are pulled from the womb into that which forms us without our consent; the painting of reality that is stroked before our eyes. only later, after we are who we think we are, can this we begin the movement into the other on the periphery of this painting that has set the boundaries of all we were to be.

stepping out of the frozen work of a past moment that has come to define life is a movement out of and into. out of a frozen moment framed by a past people and into the tenuous that is the never-absent frame of all that is and is not. the tenuous frames every frame of the living moment--even that which the stepping out of inevitably creates. the tenuous is the very definition of the divine. the tetragrammaton that speaks only in self-referential possibility.

this passage from the well defined two dimensional world of the framed painting requires a certain passion; a certain roaring outrage. for it is the movement from whom others want one to be to that which one is--even if these remain the same. it is a cocoon-ripping movement from the beast of burden to the community of the creator. the followers who do not follow in the path of the well-framed so much as they take up the primal anxiety of self-annihilation--that divine immolation of found life in the cessation of desire, in the loss of self, in the tenuous.

there is no knowing, no living, no believing, no loving outside of the infinite interconnections that are the you that at this moment reads this. there is no ideal you floating in some dark void looking down objectively on the real you; there is no "more real" nether world in which you exist in a more authentic sense. the ever shifting composite that has been named in its emergence into this reality we share is all that is known. is there more? our stories, our sense of belonging-to-life, our inability to conceive of absence--these speak to the something more, but is it of any concern to those who do not even know who they are? this is the first lesson in contingency's catechism--and the hardest for those ossified in the tutelage of the violent tribal exclusivisms that have passed as metanarrative:

i do not know who i am.

this is the confession of lived tension amidst the grounding narrative--that antithesis and partner of metanarrative--that sets one in a place of fundamental humility necessary for the lived articulation of meaningful, minimal metanarrative; the grounding story that holds the unleashed life within the tenuous.

Posted 1/6/2003 12:02:37 PM

index finger slowly extended and momentarily pressed against your nose, "boink."

Akerirya is the answer.

Posted 1/6/2003 11:55:08 AM

GeoURL ICBM Address Server
another way of slicing the copious blogs and such out there: tagging sites by geography. there was once this company named ExactPoint that...

Posted 1/6/2003 01:17:04 AM
write more on Jung's synchronicity and I Ching...
an advancement through a certain noneffort--an interconnection that acts as singular movement.

Posted 1/6/2003 01:13:33 AM
the things you own
end up owning you
td

Posted 1/6/2003 12:59:40 AM
on a board somewhere in America...

---QUOTED---

We have to believe that God has given us a meta-narrative and that it is reliable.

---END QUOTE---

no, my friend, we do not *have* to believe this.

one can believe that metanarrative is always already a human rendition of an encounter with an other--divine, human, environmental, et al that attempts to bring an overriding explanatory meaning to the encounter. the encounter may be with the divine, but the explanation, the recounting, the recording of said encounter is always from within that which one can never know otherwise than--the perspective one indwells.

the perspectival nature of human reality is not overcome by positing some ontohermeneutic and a heavenly metaculture. this is simple foundationalism the convenience of which, for one already vesting in some sign system of divine mediation, is nearly comic.

contingency will have its due despite any claim at institutional authority in sanctioning True truth. institutional foundationalisms are crass monoliths whose very undoing resides in the genealogical narrative of its sources and ascendancy. the inner hegemonic machinations of the powerful metanarratives are their own undoing--their demise repressed only momentarily in the political and ideological violence of subjugating totalism.

as for the other kingdom, yes, this is the place to begin.
though, the kingdom is never metanarrative in the fashion we speak of here...

a response:

ok, so we are left with contingency demanding its due. so what. what does that mean in terms of a positive confession?

a response to a response:

ah...

Posted 1/5/2003 02:14:23 PM

i have had a few Google referrals from searches for "unsaved." i clicked through one of them to check out the search results for that particular word. looking at one particular result brought to mind all that i dislike about popular religion and the odd ilk that inhabit it.

all aphorisms are verses. not all verses are aphorisms. in fact, very few verses are aphorisms. one goes about interpreting aphorisms as, for the most part, singular units. unfortunately, this has become the general tenor for most exegesis of sacred tradition. one simply isolates as many units of scripture that seem to back whatever point one is trying to make and the sacred word is said to be speaking.

making the text speak in this manner is not simply naive, it is dangerous. all fundamentalisms rest on this approach to meaning creation--although they would call it something like, "determining what God says about ________." God says tear out your enemy’s eyes. God says make up happy lies. God says turn the other cheek. No, God says the unsaved are gonna fry. God says... whatever I want him to.

everyone needs to step back for a second and realize that these texts have histories, they have audiences, they have authors... these texts are NOT "speaking to you." they were not written to you. there was not intention that you, in this time and place, find serendipitous meaning in them. yet, this does not mean that you do not. this position does not relegate sacred tradition to the museum of bygone irrelevance. it simply demands more from those who would engage them. an actual, common living in the story is demanded. an enculturation of sorts. a penetrating and ambiguous discomfort amidst the havoc of lives lived in the subtle haunting of a textual gaze.

the assumption that one is being directly spoken to while reading a text needs to be replaced, i would suggest, with the assumption that the one reading is a foreign element in the interpretive equation from the start. that there is no natural means of approach; no common sense interpretive stance. that the very act of interpretation does violence that cannot be avoided; violence to a text functionally unsigned and unsent. a text appropriated, pirated and seduced.

that the reader reads is the source of such violence. that the text is no longer a future sign merely lived. merely, oh god, to be merely one who lives! that the text is no longer even simply sign to be vocalized--this being itself so near to mere living.

writing and reading, inscribing with deep flesh ripping pen stroke and tongue mauling vocalization of phonemes once uttered only in the chaos of story and the lives of lost selves.

reading and writing, incising the very mediation of otherness that the eye and limb alone can taste. those who read are left with only a prayer for a faithful minimalism.

the reader must become the very encounter from whence the text emerges for the interpretive stance to speak with the bloody authority of the unknowing of the second birth. the whole is too big. the hole is eternal and the focus that is the human demand for a certain sanity requires something less vast, a condensed outworking of that which where cannot contain in the very moments of our unrequested existence. we are the epiphenomenal or we know it not.

texts are worlds that not even their canonical brothers and sisters can fully enter and be interpreted through. there are groups of related texts (the Genesis complex, the seven Pauline letters, the Luke-Acts volume, the Johannine school letters) that should be interpreted with a certain convivial interconnection. there is a certain communal isolation, though, among texts that have no organically intermingled root structure. these have no place in the act of interpretation outside of compare and contrast exercises. not that they cannot be read interpretively together simply that this act demands either a genealogical honesty few are given to or a harmonizing that keeps one from even the cinders of what was.

the fissures of difference will not be filled with the rubble of happy harmonization nor the genealogical stifled by acritical claims at origin. acts of harmonization and the silencing of divergent pasts are unfaithful children cannibalizing their parents in each generation. cinders are left, but the bodies have been devoured. cracks are filled, but reemerge; the rubble now sand softened under the relentless decay of secret erosion.

i advocate neither a simple reversal of a harmonizing hermeneutic nor the revolting story of one origin looking for power. we require something more penitentiary; something more confessional. this is a profession that we do not know who we are in relation to the text. a confession that the text itself is the economy unconscious to our john, pimp and whore existence that thinks it is in love.