Apparently some people have found this ad, being run by Absolut Vodka in Mexico, offensive. At a poll on La Plaza, an LA Times blog, 62% of the nearly 40,000 respondents chose “The ad is an affront to Americans. I’m going to boycott the product.” It shows the border as it was before the American Mexican War in the middle of the 19th century. To me, it looks kind of like a reversal of Manifest Destiny.
Your reaction/thoughts?
Now when he saw the crowds, he went into a megachurch. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
Cursed are the extremely poor, Read the rest of this news item »
for one billion of them will have no clean drinking water and live on less than a dollar a day.
Cursed are those who mourn,
for they will continue to be bombed by the most militarily powerful nation on earth.
Cursed are the meek,
for they will be shot at, and have no means of shooting back.
Cursed are the 30,000 children who will die of hunger and thirst today,
because hardly anyone here in the west gives a shit.
Cursed are the merciful,
for they will be shown to be sniveling weaklings compared to those of us who have guns and know how to use them.
Cursed are the pure in heart,
for their idealism will cause them to be trodden on by more realistic types.
Cursed are the UN peacemakers,
for they will not take swift military action when it is called for.
Cursed are those who persecute Americans Christians,
for we will rain down bombs, death, and destruction upon them with no regard for proportionality.
Cursed are the people who insult, persecute, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because you are an American and thus a Christian. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward here on earth, for in the same way the evil Communist Vietnamese people tried to persecute a previous generation of Americans, and we showed them by killing five million of them!
As you are no doubt aware, today is the first in the nation caucus, the beginning of the United States’ primary election cycle for the 2008 presidential election.
Here are the results from our own little poll, which has been running for a little while now over in the right sidebar:
The question: If the primary election were held today, who would you vote for?
There were a total of 28 votes. They broke down like this:
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This year at Thanksgiving I realized how radically my story about Thanksgiving has changed over the last while. The story about Thanksgiving with which I was raised is more or less summarized in this Chuck Colson commentary from last Thursday. Chuck tells this story about the “pilgrims”:
In April of 1623—three years after the first Pilgrims landed—the transplanted Englishmen and women planted corn and other crops. A good harvest was essential to their survival. But in the weeks following the planting, it became clear that a dry spell was turning into a drought.
Pilgrim father Edward Winslow recorded their distress in his diary. “It pleased God, for our further chastisement,” he wrote, “to send a great drought; insomuch as in six weeks . . . there scarce fell any rain.” The crops began to shrivel up “as though they had been scorched before the fire . . . God,” Winslow wrote, “which hitherto had been our only shield and supporter, now seemed in His anger to arm Himself against us. And who can withstand the fierceness of His wrath?”
Posted in Forgiveness, Nationalism, Poverty, Religion, United States | 6 Comments »
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Thank the Lord and Pass the Patriotism
Friday, November 23rd, 2007Obery Hendricks wrote a provocative article at Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics Blog this week. He talks about the how in the time around the Thanksgiving holiday, many American churches will be condoning and even promoting a mixture of equal parts commitment to Jesus and patriotism. He says
In many pulpits during this Thanksgiving season, love of our country and pride in our citizenship will be pronounced in the same breath - and often with the same intensity - as declarations of love for our God. But we must be careful, for patriotism can be destructive as well as constructive. Worse, it can become idolatrous.
I remember I used to be very wrapped up in this strange American Christian story. I know exactly what Obery is talking about. Growing up in a conservative Baptist church, every thanksgiving there would be declarations of our love for our country, of how great America is, of how thankful we are that God has blessed us. The story was that God protected and provided for the pilgrims, and they thanked him that first thanksgiving celebration. And because we as a nation have loved and honored God, he has made us the richest, most powerful nation on earth–so we should continue to give him thanks–thanks that we are American, thanks that we are wealthy, and thanks that we don’t have to live in fear of war and persecution on our own soil.
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Pro Israel?
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007My lovely mum posted this on her blog recently. For some context, Papaw and Mamaw were the pastor and pastor’s wife of what was basically the first ever Christian church that my family was involved with, when I was 10, 11, and 12 years old, ‘84 through ‘87.
Papaw told us an encouraging story when we visited him and Mamaw. He said that the church he fellowships with — I think it was called Cornerstone Baptist Church — began to fly not only the American flag and the Texas flag but also the Israeli flag. Since the Bible does speak a lot about Israel and the Jewish people being God’s chosen nation/people — they wanted to identify with/promote that Biblical idea. One day, though, someone burned their Israeli flag. This prompted all kinds of national and international media attention and the church was thus able to explain/expand on their position to an ever-widening circle of people. One person called and told them he would love to send them another Israeli flag, and yet another if the first one he sends gets burned.
According to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Bobby Herrel, Cornerstone Baptist began flying the Israeli flag last July to support the Israeli people during its conflict with Lebanon
How best to communicate to my lovely mum that the international community was outraged, in that particular Israel/Lebanon conflict, by Israel’s use of U.S. made cluster weapons, the use of which amounts to wide scale land mining of your enemies’ land, leading to large numbers of civilian casualties, especially of children, long after the hot conflict is over (40 years!!)? Yes, of course Hezbollah *also* failed to follow international law in that conflict. That hardly seems like a good reason to come out as pro Israel during the conflict. Most of the civilian casualties even during the hot conflict were Lebanese ~1000 dead Lebanese civilians, ~43 dead Israeli civlians. Wow this is a gruesome math. How can a Christian church be in favor of any of this? And if they must take sides, how is it that they take the side of the nation which was apparently far less careful about civilian deaths, both during and after the conflict? I’m guessing that the people in this church are … relatively normal, compassionate, people. How could they take such a position? How does the Muslim community in their town (Fort Worth, Texas) feel about them flying that Israeli flag, especially as it was in response to that particular Lebanese/Israeli conflict? I’m guessing that as a minority in a predominately white, Christian, American community, the Muslim community feels marginalized and put down in really painful ways all the time. Don’t the people of Cornerstone Baptist care about this? Do they know?
I really love my mum. And she represents some really big chunk of the American populace. Can they see this stuff? Can you see it? How to share it without automatically raising a wall? Maybe it’s impossible. Maybe I lack the social intelligence to accomplish it. Your thoughts, answers, questions, comments?
Posted in Nationalism, Racial Justice, United States, War | 6 Comments »
Quote for the day
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007Between 1979 and 1987, the Unites States armed, trained, and financially backed the military forces of the government of El Salvador, which over the same period carried out a policy of ongoing, systematic murder against the Salvadoran population. … I am speaking of the systematic murder of over seventy thousand men, women, and children who were noncombatants–journalists, priests, nuns, teachers, labor organizers, students, political figures, and others. Roughly one percent of El Salvador’s population was destroyed. Also as a direct result of United States actions, another seventy thousand civilians were similarly murdered during the same period by the military government of Guatemala. Finally, and again during the same period, the United States created a force of counterrevolutionaries (the “contras”) to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The contras … deliberately attacked defenseless civilians, including old people, women, and children.It is true that the United States did not itself carry out the systematic murder in any of these countries. Yet it put the bullets and guns in the hands of the murderers, trained the murderers how to use them, and organized them for that end. The United States might just as well have pulled the triggers of the guns itself. What concerns me is that the people of the United States, like the people of Nazi Germany, allowed their government to do such a thing.From How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central America by Douglas Porpora
Iraq body count has documented the violent deaths of 80,000 noncombatants (read: journalists, priests, nuns, teachers, labor organizers, students, political figures, and others) in Iraq during the U.S. unprovoked invasion and ongoing occupation of that nation since 2003.
So here are my questions:
Posted in Quote for the Day, United States, War, War Crimes, What can we do? | 11 Comments »
- To what extent were “normal” citizens of Nazi Germany responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews?
- To what extent were “normal” U.S. citizens responsible for the deaths of 150,000+ noncombatants in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the 1980’s.
- To what extent am I responsible for the deaths of 80,000 “normal” Iraqi’s over the last 54 months?
- Did you even *know* about the whole thing in South America in the 80’s? When did you learn about it? I was between 6 and 15 years old during the Reagan years. I’m really just learning about this now, and finding it pretty disturbing.
- Will we here in the U.S. ever even be able to stop killing people on such large scales? Or are we more or less doomed to never learn/never change? Why or why not?
"The Commons"--two world views.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007I recently finished Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s recent book Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches are mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way I found it very readable, and I wanted to share a couple fascinating quotes which she shares. They touch on something my lovely Australian wife, Meg, has said to me countless times since we moved back to the U.S. in 2001. Meg has said innumerable times “People here just don’t understand the concept of the commons.”
In 1968, the British journalist David Frost interviewed my father [Robert Kennedy] and aksed him, “What do you think we are on earth for?” My father answered,
Posted in Book Reviews, Economics, Interviews, Nationalism, United States | 9 Comments »Read the rest of this news item »
“Comfort Women”
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007In the news this week was the passage of House Resolution 121 (a non binding resolution) by the U.S. House of Representatives. The resolution describes the issue it is addresses thusly
the `comfort women’ system of forced military prostitution by the Government of Japan, considered unprecedented in its cruelty and magnitude, included gang rape, forced abortions, humiliation, and sexual violence resulting in mutilation, death, or eventual suicide in one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century;
And it accuses unnamed public officials in Japan of trying to deny the reality or magnitude of the “comfort women system”. It calls on the government of Japan to publicly, officially, and unequivocally acknowledge the crimes Japan committed with regards to this system.
Putting aside the question of the horror of forced prostitution and the crimes Japan committed during World War II, I find myself completely stymied by the audacity and arrogance of the resolution. Where has the U.S. publicly, unequivocally, and officially acknowledged it’s crimes during WWII? No, not the internment of Japanese Americans, which has been officially apologized for. How about the murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians by way of firebombing their cities and the dropping of two nuclear (note how I resisted mockingly writing “nucular” (or didn’t)) weapons?
Am I missing something? Is our government,
- whose armed forces are currently occupying a nation where 600+ civilians a week are dying under our occupation,
- which is currently denying pow’s a fair trial,
- which is apparently using torture at CIA black sites,
demanding another foreign nation to apologize for war crimes committed 60 years ago?
Posted in United States, War Crimes | 7 Comments »
Does Violence Always Beget More Violence?
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges) recently published an article in which they interviewed 50 Iraq war veterans about their experience and what things are really like over there. This stuff struck me as obvious, but I still had to force myself to wade through the 12 pages of horrifying description. It occured to me that this used to not strike me as obvious–I used to think that war actually works well and is a great idea.
In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, “a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.”
Posted in Death, United States, Violence, War | 11 Comments »
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