Zoomtard

The room still nudges me with its many corners of strangeness, though one night’s sleep here has ironed a few rumples smooth. I know where the bathroom is. O, that immaculate, invisibly renewed sanitas of rented bathrooms, inviting us to strip off not merely our clothes and excrement and the particles of overspiced flank steak between our teeth but our skin with the dirt and our circumstances with the skin and then to flush every bit down the toilet the loud voracity of whole flushing action so rebukingly contrasts with the clogged langour of the toilets we have left behind at home, already full of us they can scarcely ebb!

A Month Of Sundays, by John Updike, p. 7

Your Correspondent, Has no appointments today

The couple of times I have seen the trailer for The Crazies I have been absolutel terrified and totally psyched for this zombie remake that is like World War Z in a small town scale:

While no central plot hinges seem to be given away, I do however get the impression that I know what I am in for. It is an exhilirating 150 seconds but surely when an ad is this good, the actual product is bound to be a let-down?

Your Correspondent, You can differentiate him from his replica Japanese sex doll because it’s not suffering from a vitamin deficiency.

In the form of a dialogue in the car on the way home that both illuminates the Byzantine structures of the Presbyterian Church and the absurdity of Mel Gibson’s latest pseudo-fascist violencathon.

Me: “Wife, if the Moderator tried to poison me with radioactive gases would you avenge my death?”

Wife-unit: “If I knew who was responsible, I would hunt him down.”

Martha, My Personal Chauffeur: “You could never catch the Presbyterian Church in Ireland because you’d have to go through seventeen committees before you got to Stafford.”

Your Correspondent, Does not believe the present Moderator is trying to kill him. Yet.

Eoin O’Mahony writes sensible sense about the stupid conversation regarding Roman Catholic theocracy in Ireland. By theocracy I mean the fact that the Catholic church owns and run many of the finest primary schools in the western world. International reports might rank those schools as supremely competent at teaching the foundations of an education but according to the talking heads of our land these last few weeks what they are actually doing is indoctrinating.

Tell me this, much neglected Zoomtard readers, if the Catholic primary schools of Ireland were indoctrination machines, how would we be seeing the quite serious fall off in Catholic practice of any meaningful kind in people under the age of 35?

Seems to me that if you want a totally secular state, keep teaching Christianity in church run schools!

Your Correspondent, He bit Dakota Fanning on the face

The venerable Bishop properly shows how “Creation battles” in the USA are really hooked into larger social and political disputes. Sublime communication.

Your Correspondent, A mythical man

A Trilogy Of Posts Inspired By Haiti

In my first post inspired by the Haitian earthquake I argued that the impoverished nations are the ones most capable of lifting themselves out of poverty. In my second post I argued that it is the wealthy nations that have caused the poverty, taking Haiti as an example. This subverts the standard understanding that says the poor are poor for cultural or religious reasons and due to their corruption and that the West is their only hope for salvation.

Now I want to consider where God is in this tragedy.

The Doors Of The Sea by David Bentley Hart is the best book I have ever read on theodicy, how we defend God from charges of negligence. This beautiful book was based on this article which has been republished by First Things in the aftermath of the Haitian quake.

Hart begins by pointing out that the inevitable, “where’s your God now?!” reporting is based on the depressingly ignorant idea that Christians haven’t been wrestling with questions of evil for millennia. Then he gives us a run down of some of the very bad responses Christians made to the tsunami. He then takes us through Voltaire and Dostoevsky’s considerations on this question of natural evil before turning to his own response.

I quote at length (he deserves to be heard at length):

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

A deal with Satan did not cause the earthquake. The wrath of God did not cause the earthquake. The earthquake is not a chance for God to show off his muscle. The earthquake does not disprove God. Instead, as my friend Patrick Mitchel put it this morning, we:

believe in a good, compassionate and loving God in whom there is no evil; in whose image all men and women are made and for whom Jesus came; who cares for the poor, weak and vulnerable; who is passionate about justice; who does not rejoice in suffering and death but plans to obliterate it forever in a renewed creation (as the resurrection of Jesus guarantees); who, in the interim continues to work out his purposes within this un-healed world with all its capacity for disaster, suffering and death …. if you believe in this God, then, I suggest, there is much more likely to be a response of being moved to demonstrate the love of God to people who are desperately in need by giving, praying, helping, mourning while also lamenting and asking ‘How Long O Lord?’

Your Correspondent, O spiteful one, show him who to smite and they shall be smoten!

A Trilogy Of Posts Inspired By Haiti

Contrary to the insane ramblings of Satan’s sock-puppet, Haitian independence was not a Satanic pact, but a truly universal declaration:

Only in Haiti, was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day.

- Peter Hallward, “Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment”

In his review of that book, Slavoj Zizek writes of the response to the popular slave uprising in Haiti that promised to deliver where the United Irishmen of 1798 had failed: to free a colony and make it actually free.

Denounced by Talleyrand as “a horrible spectacle for all white nations”, the “mere existence of an independent Haiti” was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path.

France forced Haiti to buy their freedom. The price, 150,000,000Francs, was equivalent to the whole annual budget of the European Superpower. It was finally repaid in 1947. It is just the most notable burden placed on this half-island in the last two centuries by the enlightened West.

The heirs of that popular uprising is the “Flood”, the Lavalas who have won every election in the past 20 years but have twice been ousted by US backed military coups. They have been demonized, almost certainly unfairly, as a fantastically dangerous militia in the international press because they represent something truly terrifying: a governmental innovation in the third world. The democracy of the Lavalas consists of directly self organised public groups, not the sort of thing that easily morphs into passive parliamentary republics that signs trade bills with Amerca and accepts military technology at low low prices from the EU. In a reaction only slightly less brazen than the French in 1804, the West has repeatedly decided that the mere existence of an independent Haiti that is not a western style democracy is unthinkable.

The poverty that existed in Haiti prior to this week’s tragedy did not develop in a vacuum. The violence around the Aristide government was not a sudden outburst. This people have a narrative that explains how they got here and at every point, it is the condescension of the rich and the tailoring of deals to suit the powerful. It is understandable then that the world only truly turns its attention to Haiti when an act of God and not men devastates the land. God can be our fallguy. We’ll save Haiti from plate tectonics through mobile phone donations and charity t-shirts.

But our band-aid solutions will serve nothing but our conscience if we do not first recognise that heavily impoverished nations are and have been held down by the West and will help themselves up, in their own innovative way, if only they were let. This would be to turn our internal superiority upside down but it would set justice the right way up again. If the West can help them through this tragedy, Haitians are capable of rebuilding their nation. But for that to happen we might have to challenge the racism inherent in our third world saviour complexes.

Your Correspondent, Paralyzed with rage… and island rhythms.

A Trilogy Of Posts Inspired By Haiti

Lots of quoting, and linking and little comment because typing is hard and exhausting.

From Vinoth Ramachandra, on corruption in the developing world:

Moreover, corruption in poor nations would not be possible without the tacit support, and often active involvement, of rich corporations, banks and governments in the North. For every bribe taken, there is a bribe offered. These bribes are stored, not in local banks, but in the banking system owned and controlled by the rich nations (including, in recent years, Dubai and Singapore). And what about the status of offshore tax havens (most of which are the playgrounds of super-rich American and European tourists)? These are major means of tax evasion and money laundering, and are homes to vast pools of speculative capital that destabilize poor economies. Billions of dollars, enough to pay for the entire primary health and education needs of the world’s developing countries, are being siphoned off through offshore companies and tax havens.

The rest of his essay on how, outside of disasters like the one in Haiti, the “poor do not need us”, is as usual, unmissable.

We too often assume nations like Haiti “need our help” and that we also must be wary of their corruption but the reality is that Haiti is impoverished because of “our help”, which took the form of “our corruption“. What developing nations need is justice and since they are in no way inherently less virtuous than we are, or intellectually capable, or administratively competent, they can actually shape their own development. Today, national sovereignty must be understood to extend beyond simply having a parliament.

Your Correspondent, Made no pact with Satan.

In its own way, I suspect this is as relevant to business and government and even leading your local soccer club as it is to the church.

… I think many of the proposals about leadership are quite perverse exactly because it gives the impression that you know what leadership is, abstracted from communities that make leadership possible.

What he teaches his students about leadership:

Don’t lie. It’s just very simple. Don’t lie to me. You may often times not know what the truth is: tell me that. Just don’t lie to me. It kills you. It kills me. And it kills the community.

Your Correspondent, Can’t lead the cavalry charge since he looks stupid on a horse

it is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something a man might be glad to believe.

- Dorothy Sayers, Creed Or Chaos? and Other Essays, p. 24

Your Correspondent, Learned the Creed young