"Intelligence" Briefings

Our president-elect does not fail to disappoint.  The weeks preceding his inauguration have been, thus far, a multi-media sideshow worthy of the best reality TV.

And "sideshow" is the word.  Despite seeming like the random thoughts of a man with ADD and a Twitter account, the truth seems to be that Trump's strategy is to keep up a maddening stream of inane remarks designed to distract people from his team's more serious mischief.

Exhibit A is Trump's seeming war with the intelligence community.  He sits in his gaudy tower, tossing insults at the people he may most need to rely upon when he is called to make actual executive decisions, and makes a great show of ignoring the information they offer him already.  It is no surprise, then, that they have taken a swipe at the guy, releasing some information which suggests (surprise!) that the Russians have been manipulating him all along.  The problem seems to be that this information has long been in the hands of the press, which found it unverifiable and therefore useless.

But who cares, really?  Once Trump is in office, they will work for him. His chosen deputies will be in charge, and they will bring him the information he feels he can use. The relationship is off to a bad start, but it will work itself out.

Meanwhile, however, the guy is wreaking havoc with the traditions of American government. He has already taken steps to alienate China, which is -- lest we forget -- the world's other economic superpower, and with which the performance of our own economy is unalterably entwined. His proposed Cabinet is strangely heavy with generals and billionaires.  The nominees have an almost universal lack of experience with the mechanics of government, and a general contempt for the particular departments thy have been asked to administer.  Among the few people with actual governing experience is Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, a man who apparently does not believe secular thinkers have access to the truth.

His team has stage-managed confirmation process for Cabinet members intended to be so fast that no serious vetting can take place. Part of this has been allowing nominees to omit large portions of the usual vetting process, notably including ethical review.

And "ethical review" is a phrase we will hear a lot more in the days, months and years to come.  From the very beginning, Trump has made it clear that he intends to continue running his private businesses while also running the country.  On the campaign trail, he talked about a "blind trust" so glibly that reporters came to doubt that he understood the meaning of the words.  Already, foreign diplomats have been encouraged to book rooms at a Trump-owned property when they are in DC.

On top of which, earlier in the month,, Team Trump sent a shock through the Department of Energy, by asking for the names of individual scientists working on climate change -- hinting at a purge.

A spat with some spooks is serious, in its own way.  From some other president-elect, it would be a strange move that raised serious questions.  For Trump, it is a just a bit of smoke and mirrors, some showbiz puffery meant to distract us from what is really going on.  Our soon-to-be-president is putting together an administration run by ethically-challenged amateurs. He is already creating legal and diplomatic problems that will no doubt dog him, and our nation, throughout his time in office.

Rejoice ... and Repent

 Although Father Anonymous does not say much about public affairs from the pulpit, he knows that some of you may, and it seems very much to us as though St. James is having words with our president-elect.  Consider, if you like, the Epistle for Advent 3 A (Gaudete).

First, let us observe that several of Sunday's lessons offer images of a dramatic (and beautiful) change in the world.  In Isaiah 35:1-10, as a result of God's "coming," the desert blossoms, the weak are strong, the blind can see, and the wilderness becomes a safe lion-free travel zone.  A similar note is struck by Psalm 146 and the Magnificat, both of which are offered by the RCL:  the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, casts down the mighty from their thrones, and so forth.

Most of these images are what anthropologists classify as "the reversible world," a cross-cultural trope in which all our natural expectations are defied.  Think of the Roman Saturnalia, or those medieval celebrations of the Holy Innocents when a boy was chosen to serve as bishop-for-a-day.

But the particular changes envisioned by the Biblical texts are not played for comedy.  The weak, the damaged and the poor are made special objects of God's blessing.  These texts are more than a mere folkloric device; they are expressions of what liberal theology likes to call "social justice," or even "a preferential option for the poor."

Which brings us to James 5:7-10.  The passage at hand was no doubt chosen because it speaks twice of "the Coming of the Lord," parousia tou Kuriou or adventus Domini.  It also declares that the Judge is at the door.  The passage encourages Christians to wait with patience and good behavior until that Coming, a very useful message -- but also one which can be the cause of considerable mischief.  How many beaten wives have been told to stick with their abusers, to be humble and faithful and let Christ do the judging?  How many slaves have been given similar messages?  And how often have verses like these been recruited to that evil task?

The problem is that the lectionary gives us these verses in isolation. The passage just before them is quite different in tone:

1Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.5You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. [or "as in a day of feasting"] 6You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you. [NIV]

It is, in rather bald terms, a prophetic oracle against the rich. In the face of the Lord's Advent, it is they who have not waited patiently and graciously, but who have hoarded their money and defrauded their workers.  (And lived luxurious lives, which -- by the way -- Jesus seems to suggest was what Herod did, in contrast to the faithful rigor of John the Baptist, in our Gospel for the week.)  James goes so far as to accuse the wealthy of murder -- quite possibly even the murder of Jesus, if we read v. 6 as "the Innocent One."

It is a striking passage, and deserves to be held up for our congregations to hear.  The Lord's Advent is not an excuse for tolerating injustice, but a call to lives of justice and charity.

A preacher seeking examples of the rich and powerful who oppress the poor and powerless never has far to go. But we are struck by the image of "the wages you have failed to pay your workers," a phrase the NRSV, following the KJV, translates more accurately as "the wages ... which you kept back by fraud [apostereo]."  Because although cheating workers is an old custom ("I owe my soul to the company store"), there is one particular figure in our public consciousness who is notorious for this practice.

Years ago, when we consorted with artists rather more than we do now, a friend-of-a-friend was asked to apply a vast quantity of gold leaf to the entrance of a rich New Yorker's office.  This is a time-consuming and laborious process, which involves working with tremendous delicacy and uses terribly expensive materials.  Our friend himself used gold leaf often, and we watched him many nights, hunched over a small picture frame, using tweezers and feathers and whatever other exotic tools it required, to move shreds of precious metal far thinner than a piece of paper and stick them to a bit of wood.  We were both stunned by the cost and sheer labor required to gild an entire doorway.

The artist worked for months, going out of pocket for the materials.  And at the end, once the doorway was gilded, the wealthy New Yorker looked at it and said, in effect, "Nah.  Not what I wanted.  So I'm not going to pay you." The artist was not just upset; he was ruined.

Not having been there, we cannot vouch for the details of that particular story.  We do not even know the artist's name.  But the names of many other workers who have sued Donald Trump for breach of contract are matters of public record.  From drapiers and chandelier-makers to real-estate-consultant -and-reality-TV-personality Barbara Corcoran, Trump seems to have stiffed a vast range of artisans, employees, contractors and partners. Here is a Wall Street Journal article on it.  Here's one from Fox News.  And USA Today.

It seems to us that the message in our Epistle for the week only makes sense if it is read alongside the preceding verses -- and that those verses are in direct conversation with modern society, and Time's Man of the Year.  The Advent of the Lord means, specifically, that we cannot tolerate shady business dealings, especially those by which the wealthy defraud their workers.  If we are serious about Advent, we will call out this sort of behavior wherever we see it -- and if not, we should remember that the Judge is at the door.

Team Adultery Goes Big

So the president-elect, having been scared away from TV dad Mitt Romney by a public tongue-lashing from his loose-cannon campaign manager, is now considering David Petraeus for Secretary of State.

Petraeus isn't an absurd choice. Generals, even disgraced former ones, do a lot of work that is or approaches diplomacy. And to be honest, we are always a little worried by the way Secretaries of State seem hawkish by comparison to their peers at Defense; a military professional might bring a better sense of why the big stick is a dangerous negotiating tool.

But let's get back to those key words "former" and "disgraced," because they are highly relevant. Lest anyone forget, Bloomberg News reminds us that Petraeus

... left government under a cloud for sharing classified documents during an extramarital affair....

These are grave offenses, and they are not in dispute. Although Trump the campaigner made it sound as though Petraeus had done little by comparison to the putative security breaches of Secretary Clinton, a more objective conclusion is just the reverse. FBI Director James Comey, no friend to Clinton, described Petraeus as prosecutable where Clinton was not:

 Comey, who oversaw both the Petraeus and Clinton investigations [said in] a July 7 hearing, he told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Petraeus’s behavior was worse than Clinton’s, saying that he deliberately “lied” when first questioned by investigators.

“So you have obstruction of justice, you have intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information” that was highly classified, Comey said. “He admitted he knew that was the wrong thing to do. That is a perfect illustration of the kind of cases that get prosecuted.”

Well. That says a great deal. "No reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against Clinton, where Petraeus committed precisely the sort of crimes that should have been prosecuted. (Petraeus copped a plea and, as Bloomberg notes, would be the rare Cabinet member to serve the President while still on probation.)

Moreover, there is the adultery question. Like Trump and his cronies Giuliani and Gingrich, Petraeus has betrayed his marriage vows. As we pointed out at the time, this alone is a prosecutable crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and not without good reason. An adulterer makes himself (or herself) susceptible to influence and blackmail. Had the general's paramour been a foreign agent, agent, the classified information he revealed to her might well have led directly to the death of American soldiers, or a compromise of American interests.

This is not, to say the least, a stirring recommendation for a top diplomat.

Now, here is the thing. People inclined to dismiss adultery as Giuliani has -- "everybody does it," and to privatize it by saying "I confess that to my priest" -- don't see the Petraeus case as anything especially grave. That is because they fail to grasp the central point of Christian moral philosophy, which is that we do not exist merely as individuals, but as a community. One person's sin does not merely harm himself and his relationship to God, but harms all of society.  This is true even of occult sins, but more demonstrably so of gross public ones.
The early penitential tradition was far more concerned with the latter than with the former; our earliest records indicate a very public process of confession before, dismissal from, and restoration to, the Christian community.  Well into the Middle Ages (and beyond), Church leaders distinguished themselves for holding political figures accountable to the community for their moral lapses.  Think of Ambrose demanding penance from Theodosius or, with a bit more moral ambiguity but no less drama, the German king standing prayerfully in the snow at Canossa.

Let's not push the moral point too far.  Petraeus is not asking to be admitted to Holy Communion; he is asking for another government job.  The question before Mr. Trump, and the rest of us, is not whether Petraeus is repentant, but whether he is competent.  We have little doubt that Petraeus is intellectually competent -- he is by most reports brilliant.  But competence extends to more than mere intellect.  A figure who, when trusted with enormously high office, has criminally abused the public trust in ways that have exposed himself to potential blackmail and those under his command to far worse is not, by our old-fashioned way of thinking, a great candidate for still-higher office.

But that line of reasoning only makes sense if you understand just why adultery is bad, and we are not convinced that Mr. Trump, or many of those around him, do understand this.

Alas, Babylon

America is doomed.

We at the Egg know as well as anybody that this is an ancient refrain, as old as the Republic or even older.  From the very beginning of our national experiment, we Americans have worried that we were past our prime.  From the later 1600s, the "jeremiad," a lament that the present generation did not live up to the piety and goodness of its predecessors, was a distinctive style of New England sermon.

Oswald Spengler's 1918 Decline of the West was translated into English in the late 1920s, and set off a new explosion of American self-doubt.  John Lardas, in a study of Beat spirituality called The Bob Apocalypse, briefly traces Spengler's influence, and the development of what Alfred Kazin called "an aristocratic pessimism" among intellectuals.  Ezra Pound read Spengler, and famously denounced Western civilization as "an old bitch gone at the teeth."  A generation later, Kerouac and Ginsberg read him, and came to similar conclusions.

In 1987, British historian Paul Kennedy made a neo-Spenglerian argument in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, predicting that the United States would soon go the way of the British Empire. He garnered a great deal of attention (and criticism).

And of course, Donald Trump has spent much of the past two years inviting his followers to "make America great again," a proposition sensible only if we accept that America has declined from its former greatness.

So we know that this is old news.  America has been in decline, at least rhetorically, since a century before the Revolution.  America was in decline, rhetorically, when it won its freedom from Britain; in decline when it set free its slaves; in decline when it swung the course to of two world wars; in decline when it rebuilt Europe and Japan; in decline when it stared down the Soviets.

But this time it's serious.

Not because our gridlocked Congress or hobbled Supreme Court, nor of Trump and Clinton, dismal candidates as they may both be, but rather because of the forces at work around them.

The unembarrassed, all-but-overt efforts of Putin's Russia to influence the election are one problem. We do not doubt that Russia has tried to influence our elections in the past, but its role has always been shadowy, secretive, easily dismissed.  Now, between the appearances of ranking Trump advisor Michael Flynn on RT (the modern equivalent of Pravda), the Russian Bears both Fancy and Cozy who have been hacking Democratic data and providing it to Wikileaks, and the mysterious servers in Trump Tower and Moscow's Alfa Bank, the Russians are barely bothering to maintain the pretense that they are not pulling dirty tricks on behalf of their favored candidate.

Russia is, in other words, treating America much as America is accustomed to treating other nations.  And this, rather than Trump's racism, sexism, boorishness or difficulty with impulse control, is the sign of a real problem.  Another nation's security apparatus is treating us the way we treat the second- and third-rate powers of the world, a clear suggestion that we have descended to those ranks.

A second problem is the FBI. In the past week or so, it has begun to appear that director James Comey's inflammatory letter to Congress about Clinton-related emails found on a porn addict's computer was not in itself an aggression, so much as a bumbling effort to pre-empt leaks from a militantly anti-Clinton faction of the Bureau's New York field field office.  It has failed, since those leaks (and a curiously-timed reminder of the Marc Rich fiasco) continue.

But Comey's failure is not merely a matter of bumbled bureaucratic infighting.  It is a failure to control rogue elements with America's premier law-enforcement agency, and to prevent them from meddling in the outcome of an election.

Think about that.  For years, as we have waged an unsuccessful war against Central Asian jihadists, we have heard that Pakistan is an unreliable partner because, whatever good intentions its elected officials may have, they cannot control the schemers in the intelligence service.  And now our FBI, for all the professionalism it has reclaimed since the bad old Hoover years, seems little better than Pakistan's ISI. Both appear to be controlled by partisans who place their own ideology above the chain of command, or even the law.

In other words, the Russians are treating us like a third-rate power because in some ways we have become a third-rate power.  One by one, the central institutions of our government are failing.  Should this election result in another Bush v. Gore, our crippled Supreme Court will be unable to decide it.  A difficult Election Day outcome is made more likely both by one candidate's declared doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system, and by the partisan meddling of our most respected security service.

Most terrifying of all is the prospect of where this sort of dysfunction leads in a truly third-rate power.

A relatively stable second-rate nation, such as Italy, can withstand the messiness of, say, a Berlusconi administration.  It comes through the experience having lost much of its international stature and its economic security, but with most of its civic institutions intact.  But a less stable nation, one teetering into third-raterdom, will often throw all its eggs into a single basket, and rely for stability on a single trusted institution:  the military.

In Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Argentina -- as well as many other countries, to greater or lesser degrees -- the military has long been the authority of final appeal, vested both by its own self-esteem and by the esteem, however grudging, of the people with the maintenance of the state in times of extreme distress. That is to say that when the government simply can't handle its tasks, the military steps in.

How long do you think, dear reader, before the American military does likewise?  At a certain point, some generals will surely see it as their duty to to "protect" us both from enemies without (Russia, China, even ISIS) and from enemies within (political parties that prize ideological purity above actual function).  It will be hard for them to maneuver so vast and diverse an organism as the US military, so perhaps they will find a workaround.  Could they do it with just the Army?  Or just the infantry?  Surely they will find political cover from handful of desperate elected leaders.  They could even install a nominal civilian as president, "elected" in voting supervised by soldiers because the state systems have proven untrustworthy.  That pitiful figurehead might even be allowed to name a cabinet, just for old times' sake, while the generals make the trains run on time.

It is a terrifying proposition, and one that seems laughably improbable.  But so, a year or two ago, was the current state of affairs.  And if some or even any of the modern-day jeremiads are on target -- if we really are in the sort of imperial decline our intellectuals have so long prophesied and which now our most strident anti-intellectuals declare to be realized -- then a military  coup is not merely the next logical step, it is all but inevitable.

Team Adultery Fights Back

The Republican Party is having none of your pantywaist "family values" rhetoric.  Frankly, that whole "self-control" business, the old fatherly advice to "keep it in your pants" -- that stuff is just repression.  Haven't the Dems ever even heard of Sigmund Freud?

If it were not already clear, this morning's news offered proof positive that the GOP stands for a proud, masculine ethic of uninhibited and unembarrassed sexuality.  For men.  Women are still encouraged to smile demurely and pretend they don't know the naughty words.

You see, Newt Gingrich went on TV to defend the Republican nominee, and when Megyn Kelly asked him about the many recent claims of sexual harassment against Donald Trump, Gingrich accused her of being -- wait for it -- "fascinated with sex."

Savor the moment.  Here is Gingrich, a  serial adulterer, defending Trump, another serial adulterer, and accusing a reporter of being sexually compulsive.  Both men have repeatedly disregarded their vows and destroyed their marriages in pursuit of the next erotic thrill.  So has Trump's other most vocal surrogate these days, Rudolph "Divorced His Second Wife on TV" Giuliani.  All three present themselves as burly men's men, the kind who stand around in locker rooms bragging about how much women love their attention before they hit the courts (or links, or whatever).  Never mind that in reality they are fat balding senior citizens with prostate problems whose unreconstructed understanding of masculinity makes Don Draper look positively enlightened.

But Kelly is the one fascinated by sex.  because she does her job, and pursues relevant questions about the temperament, behavior and truthfulness of a presidential candidate.

Double-standard, anyone?

SIlence of the Lambs

Regular readers of the Egg -- to the extent that there ever were any -- have perhaps noticed that we post a great deal less often these days.  There are many reasons, a new and rather busy parish chief among them.  But one reason in particular stands out for its sheer darkness.

America has gone mad.

Writing with a jaundiced eye about our nation has never been difficult; HL Mencken and Sinclair Lewis made their bones by picking low-hanging fruit.  Teasing booboisie and boosterism is easy, so long as you have even the least bit of critical distance from them.  For our own part, lobbing softballs at our favorite targets -- the Bush Administration, drunken bishops, Protestant groupthink and Catholic revanchism -- has always been a pretty straightforward business as well.

Here's the thing:  the sort of armchair criticism in which we have indulged depends upon a fairly thick portfolio of shared convictions, both with our readers and with our targets.  At some level, even Dick Cheney knew that torture was wrong.  Likewise, Bruce Burnside knew that drunk driving (and texting) was stupid, the UCC knows that both tradition and Scripture actually do matter, the SSPX knows that at a certain point the Pope is the Pope and they are not.  All we have had to do is remind them of these shared convictions, and invite them to behave accordingly.

But the times they are, as always, a-changin'.

Over the past year or two, it has become evident that America's police departments are terrified of the people they nominally exist to serve and protect.  So, with government collusion, they have armed themselves like military units, and declared war on ... well, anybody who looks at them funny, especially while black.  Meanwhile, America's well-armed civilians -- the Constitutional "militia" which has so powerfully resisted all efforts to regulate it -- have risen to the challenge, procuring and using their own weapons, both against the police and against their unarmed compatriots.

At the same time, our Congressional gridlock has become so exacerbated that it has spread to the Supreme Court.  The justices, divided 4-4 on a handful of major decisions, have even begun declining to hear cases they know they cannot decide.  Two branches of the federal government are now unable to function properly.

As for the Executive Branch -- well, goodness!  As the November elections approach, the two principal political parties have both nominated candidates who are strikingly, intensely, passionately unlikeable.  This is a bold move, but also a stupid one. While Richard Nixon proved that it is possible for a person with poor social skills and a paranoid (or grandiose) personality disorder to win the nation's highest office, this remains an exception.  The rule favors candidates whom people actually like.  However much we may disagree on matters of policy with a Reagan, a G.W. Bush, or a Bill Clinton, they were all the sort of person you might enjoy eating lunch with, or taking in a ball game, or sharing a few beers at the office picnic.  They could kiss a baby without frightening the parents.

The presidential campaign, which would be comical if the apparent madness of Donald Trump did not raise the stakes quite so high, is frankly terrifying.  But it is just one symptom of our society's seeming rush to the bottom.  Racial and ethnic hatred, explosive violence, an unreliable justice system, and a national government that is unable to govern (and don't let's get started on the states):  these are just a few of the profound challenges facing America at this moment.

Worst of all, we are plagued by the sense that we no longer share a set of common values, not only with the people running for president but with many of the people preparing to vote for them.  What kind of country could create, not to say tolerate and even in some corners celebrate, Cliven Bundy and his family?  In what world is the answer to gun violence a wider dissemination of guns?  When did Joel Osteen become a public representative of the Christian tradition?  It is madness; and indeed, our Facebook news feed offers a daily glimpse into the Abyss.

It is hard to write about current events.  To make jokes seems callow, while to say what one really thinks sounds alarmist or even unhinged.  So we at the Egg have found ourselves paralyzed, unable to say what we think -- and often unwilling even to think it.  More and more we take refuge in a careful exploration of antique rubrics, or considering the best punctuation of seventeenth-century sermons (literally; these have been our chief leisure pursuits lately).  We are, in short, hiding from the world, because the world is a frightening place.