I woke up this Holy Saturday to Muskegon Critic's diary sharing his thoughts as he was considering using some of the public assistance to which he and his family are entitled. First, I'd like to thank Muskegon Critic and the many Kossacks who have been open and honest enough to tell us their stories and share their feelings as this man-made economic catastrophe strikes their families.
One of the most profound things in MC's diary was this:
Maybe I do buy into the conservative talking points about welfare a little bit. If I'm eligible for state assistance...maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not working hard enough. I'm not being productive enough.
My response to this heartfelt expression of Muskegon's doubts about his own value and worth is:
Fuck John Calvin.
More after the break.
John Calvin has been dead for almost 450 years, but his ghost still haunts America. Those conservative talking points to which Muskegon refers come from Calvin's screwed up eschatalogical ideas about predestination and its connection to one's status in this life. In short, if things aren't going so great for you on this earth, it must be because God doesn't love you and didn't elect (choose) you to go to heaven. It's nothing but crappy theology rejected by the overwhelming majority of Christians, but by some accidents of history, it's infected the way Americans, and rather peculiarly Americans, feel about themselves and how they relate to their communities.
It is pounded in us from birth by this twisted culture of ours that our socio-economic status reflects our worth as human beings. This culture--not just the Republicans, the MSM or the Christian fundies--does everything possible to shift our attention away from the economic system and its faults and corruptions and put all the blame on ourselves when we are mere pawns in the Masters' power and greed games.
That's where the guilt comes from. (And we won't even get into the whole sex thing.)
So Muskegon, tell John Calvin's ghost to go fuck himself and get what you have coming to you and your family.
Many of us will be facing strains in the coming months, maybe even years, like we have never experienced before. For those of us raised in this culture within the shadow cast by the twisted concepts of Puritanism (the American brand of Calvinism), we will feel personal shame and guilt if we're laid off, unable to send a sick child to the doctor or a promising one to college, when our clothes get shabby, or we have to walk because we've lost our car.
These hard times will be global in scope, but very few Europeans will feel guilty about being poor. Most will be angry and demanding that their politicians provide more government assistance. Here in America, however, it won't be bad enough that millions of children may be hungry and that millions more may die because of poor nutrition and rationed-by-wealth healthcare. On top of the physical hardships of poverty, we'll have to bear the emotional and spiritual burdens imposed on us by John Calvin's bullshit theology.
Fuck you, John Calvin.
What we need is a little therapy to counteract the Calvinist superego that this culture has done its best to implant in all our heads. (Please note, most DFHs don't need to worry about this any longer. Some herbs are remarkably effective in removing this particular spiritual tumor from the brain.) For starters, I'd suggest a little Joe Bageant, an author who has this culture pretty well figured out:
This financialization of our consciousness under American style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather just there.
All of us live together in this corporate fetish cult. We agree upon and consent to its reality, just as the Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl and the lost people of Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies of their remote island had significance.
Read a little more Bageant here in "Escape from the Zombie Food Court." If you're a Christian, have a blessed Easter.
And BTW, did I tell you how I feel? Fuck John Calvin.