Those were the first words from the
first reading for Mass this twenty-sixth Sunday in
Ordinary Time. Paradoxically, it's among my favorite bits of Scripture in the
Lectionary for Mass. And for "Zion," we should be hearing "Baltimore," "Chicago," "Atlanta," "Berkeley," "Dallas," and all the other places we call home.
I did a more spiritually oriented exegesis of this text over at my blog. But I want to take a more secular and political look at the matter here.
I know a lot of us here and around the lefty blogs (including me) have been wracking our brains trying to understand or rationalize how it is that apparently half of the electorate could still support the Shrubbery after all the screw-ups, the lies, and the failures they have racked up since stealing office in 2000. I think I may have found an answer (at least a partial one) this morning as I was listening to the celebrant give his homily at the
Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame (thank you, Hallmark Channel!).
He said, commenting on the reading from Amos, that "Those who are most complacent and comfortable in the present are likely to remain in it forever."
Could that not explain a great many things in American politics, and the neoconservatives' apparent ascendancy in particular? We had it so good in the '90s: a booming economy, a relatively stable world, prosperity was on the rise, more people were owning homes, and there seemed to be no end to the good times. We got lazy. We forgot about the malaise of the '70s and much of the '80s. For most of us, the Great Depression is something we may or may not have studied in school, if we've even heard about it. And most of us in America (and probably all of us here at dKos) are fortunate enough to have homes of our own where we don't have to dodge bullets every day, or step over homeless people sleeping on our doorsteps just to get to work in the morning.
We had a significant shock to our systems three years ago, but even that has mostly faded into the background of memory--since all of the deaths and the terrorist actions since then have taken place on someone else's doorstep and haven't been given a lot of play in our media, whether by accident or by design. Things are not great. Things are not the way most of us would want them to be. But nevertheless, things are pretty good. The economy isn't booming, but we're not in a recession, either (or at least not yet, and not according to the government). We're safe behind our privacy fences and the walls of our gated communities. We're insulated by the flickerings of our plasma-screen TVs.
And therefore, many of our fellow citizens fail to see the storm clouds looming on the horizons and think, "Eh, why not some more of the same?" (That's probably less true of us Kossacks, and probably too broad of a generalization for the population as a whole, but work with me here.)
In his seminal 1982 book Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians, John Fortunato wrote:
Egocentrism* is the basic philosophical stance of all Western civilization as we know it. It has become indomitable in the United States.
The basic dilemma of an egocentric world view is this: with the ego planted firmly at the center of the universe, what do we do with all of the multitudinous data of human experience that constantly remind us of our powerlessness?
...The answer is that you block it all out. Which brings us to what I call the myth. Put succinctly, the myth is the tenacious belief that we really are in control of ourselves, our destinies, each other, and the world.
*Which he had previously defined, using the language of est, as the notion that it's all about "personal power": "I can do whatever I like." "I can get whatever I want." "The only thing keeping me from getting what I want is that I don't believe enough in my self."
(Emphasis in original.)
Newton's First Law of Motion states that "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." In other words, he defines inertia: the tendency of a body in motion to remain in motion, or of a body at rest to remain at rest, until and unless acted upon by an outside force or agent. Complacency, it seems to me, is essentially philosophical, intellectual, and/or emotional inertia.
From that perspective, the prima facie asinine statements from prominent neocons and representatives of the Shrubbery in recent weeks, about how what they've been trying to do is to keep the War on Terra away from American soil, begin to make a certain amount of warped and twisted sense. These people haven't so much lost their minds as sold their souls. Keep the hounds of war away from U.S. voters' doorsteps, and they increase the likelihood that those voters' inherent tendency toward complacency will likely translate into support at the polls to keep them in office for another term.
What that means for us, I think, is that we have to take up the very unpleasant duty of playing Cassandra--though hopefully not with the same result. Every time Rumsfeld or Cheney or Wolfowitz or anybody else from the Shrubbery tries to soothe the populace with their "All manner of things will be well" rhetoric (and my apologies to Julian of Norwich for putting her words in association with people whom she would likely have gone out of her way to avoid), we have to be the ones hitting back with the hard facts and the unpleasant realities. If we do it right, we should be able to shake that complacency enough for the mask to slip and reveal the horrors that the Shrubbery would rather the electorate didn't see.
"Woe to the complacent in Zion!" Let's make that our slogan for the next 35 days as we go out and fight the good fight.