Very short words those two, I find, as I hear oil is flowing from northern Iraq again, in a complex arrangement between Kurdistan and the Iraqi government. When you have a minute, read Chris Hedges, “War is sin”.

וכשהמלאכים בוכים בעולם אחר,
אז בעולם הזה, עצוב לנו יותר.

A thought-provoking article by David Sweet in today’s *Sentinel* on the UC’s drifting away from its public nature. Quote:

Since 1990, further drastic cuts in taxpayer contributions have accelerated the flat-out privatization. Students and their families now pay, through increasing fees and interest-bearing loans, the entire real cost of an undergraduate education—a backbreaking burden for future teachers and social workers. Financial aid is scarce. The grandchildren of Californians educated for free when the university was seen as a basic good comparable to roads, parks and libraries, now graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

[….]

Until we renew the historic contract with our grandchildren, and pay the taxes required to maintain a great public university, UC will continue to lay off lecturers, cut teaching assistantships, raise tuition and fees, underpay clerical and maintenance workers, turn students away from understaffed classes, and eliminate valuable programs.

It is not only a matter of taxes, but of how and on what public money is spent at the university.

On mneh, tqel, ufarsin in Daniel 5.24-25. I would suggest that this hand appears on the wall of the reception room of the king in his heykhal like a palimpsestic hand, because the walls of this hall, like the apadana of Persepolis, are already decorated with the statuary of bas-reliefs that are made possible precisely by (and obviously disguised to a degree), the “count(ed), weigh(ed), and divide(d) or separat(ed)” (products) of the tributary economy.

To this monumental representation, whether Persian (but represented as “antiquisante”—as if it were Babylonian, when the situation was surely different), or Greek (Seleucid), or a compound of both (in memory), the author of Daniel opposes this metaplastic hand that inscribes. The inscribing of Daniel is only on parchment or papyrus, the story of a dream, a fiction of heroism, carrying with it, precisely because of the weakness of its support (when compared with the heaviness and pretentiousness of palatial reception halls) a spirit of resistance, une idée de derrière la tête, a voice or image that can be repeated or adapted, when the apadana-like structures are doomed and destined to be de-edified (but the modern shah who was re-installed by Washington on the Iranian throne will resurrect these edifices…). The voice, resistance echoed on thin scrolls of paper or parchment, this is already a long story, as Ezekiel had begun a similar process nearly four centuries before. But in the first chapters of Ezekiel it was not a hand appearing en filigrane behind impressive tributary processions… rather it was the Babylonian thrones and gates, the heavy statuary of temples and palaces, that was made to fly, volatilized. The glory of empires, their heaviness (kavod, heftiness, is glory in Hebrew), becomes an electric wheeled, crystalline throne in the air, here one moment, there the next….

The wind caresses drifting cheeks in the deserted streets. Schoolchildren are at their desks, sullen. Against gray skies where clouds lose shape and swiftness, shifting redwood screens and plum trees in bloom unleash the soul. Aloft, it glides above secret cliffs. Graph this blowing, electrify lines that the warm, humid air will fill and swell.

See this short interview by Amy Goodman (Democracy now) of Neve Gordon, chair of the Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and the author of Israel’s Occupation. A minority point of view in Israel, clearly, still an important one also. For an older and longer video analyzing (and criticizing) the way US main media present the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, see Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land. And since I’m on the subject, here is the transcript of Obama’s remarks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s Annual policy conference, last June 4, 2008. Critical passage in this obligatory speech: “And Israel can also advance the cause of peace by taking appropriate steps consistent with its security to ease the freedom of movement for Palestinians, improve economic conditions in the West Bank, and to refrain from building new settlements, as it agreed to do with the Bush administration at Annapolis” (my emphasis). Would Obama agree that “settlements”, and not only the “new ones” are an “obstacle to peace” (the traditional language used by the US until Reagan dropped it)? In that speech, he does speak of the Palestinians’ need for a state “that is contiguous and cohesive”, but also adds something that should be left open to negotiation: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided”.

I have always/already read Žižek, The puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of Christianity, p. 138:

This compels us to detach the Christian “love for one’s neighbor” radically from the Levinasian topic of the Other as the impenetrable neighbor. Insofar as the ultimate Other is God himself, I should risk the claim that it is the epochal achievement of Christianity to reduce its Otherness to Sameness.

By always, I mean that the book strikes me as a peculiar slice of the ever reconstructed Christian theological edifice. And by already I mean that it is strange, in the middle of a post-Nietzschean, psychoanalytical, and socio-political discourse in which theology is normally suspended, to come suddenly across developments on Job, Paul, Jesus on the cross, messianism, and recognize snippets of traditional theology. Do they drop their old patina and acquire a revolutionary aura synecdochally, by contact with their “post-modern” environment?

And what kind of theology, actually? that of the passage above brings up questions and comments. First of all, why not capitalize love, rather than other and otherness? I’m perfectly happy that love and neighbor are not capitalized, as I like to think of them as interstitial and not in need of mundanities, but why put capitals elsewhere, as if there is a remainder of temples on mountain tops? Especially for real and reality: does capitalization help to think? Second, is this opposition between a love of one’s neighbor (the Christian one) and the Levinasian view of the other really so radically different? The difference, it seems to me, is not as radical as opined here. Third, about God (capital again—would it hurt the reasoning to say something like “the divinity in the Christian notion”?): is God the radical Other, or aren’t we, the humans, as the Bible says repeatedly, making ourselves aliens to the divinity? Which way does the alienation go? Fourth, on the epochal achievement of Christianity: a dwelling of the other person in me, human or divine, is not the same as a “reduction of otherness to sameness”. To speak of achievement is strange: is it talking about Jesus, in which case one cannot speak of Christianity apart from Judaism (if one can speak of Christianity at all!), or is the sentence referring to the century-long shaping of [somewhat, or badly] Christianized nations and peoples? Finally, and most difficult to analyze, as one wonders what the author exactly means, is his notion of reduction of otherness to sameness. Christian texts and theology speak of the mystery of incarnation (capital?), but certainly not of reduction. The et verbum caro factum est, read even with the story of the resurrection, is stark, a reduction indeed. But there is no story of Christianity and its good Friday without paschal Sunday.

Last page of the book: no resurrection either but a final variation on Jesus’s cry on the cross, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christianity and its beholders better get round to the idea that big daddy is no more. And this is a good thing, I suppose, if one thinks of the avatars of this “big Other” in authoritarian churches and political regimes, revolutionary or not. Anti-idolatry is at the root of Judaism and Christianity. Atheisms in that sense.

Last paragraph of the book, page 171:

In what is perhaps the highest example of Hegelian Aufhebung, it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap here is irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the form, but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.

Can one redeem the core without having the institution, the magisterium, the canons, etc., that is, the tradition? Can one conceive of freedom, social justice, learning without the existence of political, social, and educational institutions, or in a pure beyond? Likewise, is it possible to have an understanding of one’s fallibility, of its destructive results across space and time, and of the possible redemption of these, without a coralreef-like institution that transmits the tradition? Or to put it another way: is it possible to imagine the grace of, say, a wide receiver turning at the right split second and get the ball in full run, without the well matched opponents, the dreary long preparations, the complex set of rules, the gigantic expenditure of energy on stadiums and transportation, etc. etc.? One graceful moment out of hours of play…. One would like a better yield of grace for toil: religion?

Watching Pelosi on CNN yesterday while I was at a care facility, I couldn’t help but think of the impotence of politicians faced with very difficult, systematic, inherited woes. Here they were preaching the virtues of restraint, industrial imagination, and green thinking, while wagging the occasional supervisory finger. Not a word on the contradiction involved in throwing an admittedly preliminary down payment of 14 billion dollars at the auto industry and calling management and unions (!) to a sort of Canossa light, while buying something like 3 trillion dollars worth of bad or dubious paper with little supervision that I can see. One would think you should get a seat or two on the boards of banks with this kind of “investment”. But no, just vague promises of self-discipline. Not a word either on the international operations of GM, Ford or Chrysler. I would like to know more about them. Is the GM group doing well in Asia for instance, and are its investors (called Cerberus and other cute-hellish things out of the past, a bit like our missile programs) able to make profits abroad while limiting their exposure nationally, thanks to their friends in the house and the senate? Will past servants (!) of the state get seats on these boards? Yes they will, for services rendered…

As for the 3 trillion dollars, I can foresee it will become securitized (!) into 300 little trillions, because that’s what it is, money creation. We’ll be saved from the king who wants to settle his accounts, but for how long?

Quick thoughts on the huge settling of accounts presently unfurling through the financial systems of our rich countries. Every weekend or so for several weeks now, decisions involving hundreds of millions of work hours are being taken by small groups of unelected officials (experts, old Wall Street hands, etc.). Congress acts as if it is looking into it. Some hands get wrung or go flailing. Huge debts by banks and other financial institutions (if one can call them that) are being forgiven, that is, are becoming part of huge money creation (new money is made by debt, once leveraged). Investment banks, commercial banks, now car companies, many come hat in hand to ask for help and forgiveness. Which reminds me of Matthew’s parable (18.23-34, nihil novi sub sole):

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, a man who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owned him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, “have patience with me, and I will pay you.” But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.

The problem with allegorizing this parable and folding it unto our situation: where is the king in our system? where is the reckoning at the center? Who is doing the debt forgiveness? A government? hardly. As in those old parables portraying distant kings in far-flung kingdoms and empires, our financial structure too is spatially and temporally stretched out. Banks offshore, complex interconnected accounts mirroring each other ad infinitum, leveraging instruments by which the real reckoning is reported to a later date and an ever further elsewhere. To be paid by whom? Blind historical causality and its occasional hiccups? But the “pay what you owe” is alive and well: credit card companies have long been charging usurious rates and are not going to stop now. Banks need this income more than ever. And Biden and other democrats helped the creditors make individual bankrupcy much more difficult (2002).

So there will be full forgiveness (no matter the public upbraidings) for those “too large to fail”, and too influential, and therefore whose prostrations are still more significant, more credible than those of the small guy owing 100 denarii (about 1/3 of a year full employment: say 15K). Because done by those used also to manipulate, since they are very experienced both in entertaining begging demands (clients) and acceding to, or refusing them. Creditors themselves, they decide how much trust to allocate, how much credit. The small creditor at the bottom of the pile or the pyramid has few on whom or against whom to turn. His family, neighbors, co-workers? He can’t fake his requests as well as those owing 10K talents (“I will pay you everything”). He can’t promise full repayment, or is too honest about it. Which is (the forced honesty) what makes him credit-worthy for others.

A parable is a nice map. But one could imagine another ending, and a different reaction of the fellow slaves. The big-time debtor would feel good to have fooled his king once more with his play for pity. On the way down from the palace, he would be surrounded by sycophants who would start right away with the urgent task of grabbing the small-time debtors. Newspaper columnists of the time would attack the profligate ways of the masses, their imprudence, their lack of foresight, etc.

For another take on all of this, see this particularly beautiful commentary on the equation: John Lennon on peace.