“Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,… They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing …” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II (1840)
“She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
–Matthew 15:27, New Revised Standard Version
My mixed-breed dog, Caesar, now lies, curled up like a furry question mark in the sunniest corner of our backyard. I can see him through a window, occasionally lifting his head with the sounds of birds and scampering squirrels. How content is my pet, or how he seems to be, without politics on his mind. And then, I think about the name our family gave him; we actually voted on it. My first choice had been Kairos, as in that Greek word for ‘the fullness of time,’ and then, the usually canine-appellations were proposed; Lucky was taken by that yellow Labrador on the television commercial, as was Sunny, and likewise, Oreo. But what about Caesar? And so, as you may have surmised, I lost the vote.
Caesar won, and the rest is dog-loving history.
Now, the reason I ruminate so (in the above paragraph) is to emphasize the dramatic difference between the label we apply to our domesticated animal and the label we now apply to the former star of The Apprentice, Donald J. Trump. In this scenario, too, approximately 59,938,290 United States citizens lost the vote, and the resulting anxiety, disillusionment and authentic horror at the prospect of what that means is just now sinking into the American psyche. Anecdotally, and from my cable-news gleanings, I hear the rumors about working-class uprising, a draining of the swamp in Washington D.C., and a profound rebuke of the wonkiest elites.
I hear these rumors, however, as if I were my dog, Caesar, perking up and barking at the mysterious noises that emanate from that Great Beyond our vinyl fence — and how I long for that carefree consciousness!
The fact is, we’ve only lost our delusion. And, as delusions come and go, this one’s been a tenacious whopper. That which has clung to us for generations, like the lint of a security-blanket, has been the ethos of exceptionalism: that just as we’ve upgraded to the I-Phone 10 and added HBO to our entertainment-portfolio’s, Americans will see through the charade of Caesar-successions and choose persons of good, moral character to lead them, and that such choices will reasonably approach something that resembles the common good. Good, has been the name we’ve voted upon… until this week Great has won the electorate.
And yet, now we know that we’ve been deluding ourselves. The vast majority have long conflated goodness with greatness, and more often than not, goodness must assume the minority position and embrace its subversive assignment.
Now we know that we’ve been paying the fencing companies to erect fences around our safe, suburban lairs – even with Robert Frost, whispering in our ears, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
And now we know that Caesar — the one who cannot really be named, the one who conjures every hegemonic association under the sun — can neither be domesticated nor enclosed for very long.
Wild things are happening now, nihilistic gambits that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted a decade or more before the Civil War. He wrote how “An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on” — which is to say, we are so brutally free, it’s actually pretty frightening!
Our haphazard choices do not always come out in the wash. They may be forgiven, with some genuine remorse over time. But history, of course, is replete with demagoguery and denial, the repercussions of which include physical, emotional, psychological, interpersonal, economic and spiritual suffering. In fact, religious traditions the world over have recognized this dynamic for millennia. Long before the mythology of Inevitable, Enlightenment Progress took hold, the likes of Jeremiah and Siddhartha Gautama had some terribly honest things to say to the good ol’ U.S.A.
“… a vision of all the women remaining in the house of the king of Judah being led out to
the officials of the king of Babylon and saying
‘Your trusted friends have seduced you
and have overcome you;
Now that your feet are stuck in the mud,
They desert you.’” [Jeremiah 38:22, NRSV].
“The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire; . . . the nose is on fire; odors are on fire; . . . the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire; . . . the body is on fire; things tangible are on fire . . . the mind is on fire; ideas are on fire; . . . mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire. “And with what are these on fire? “With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire…” [Buddha, The Fire Sermon].
Fire, of course, may be hyperbole; but when the Buddha engages in such metaphorical exaggeration, it’s usually meant to convey the sheer waste that he observes – perhaps even among contemporary residents of this Home of the Brave. That is, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that the bravest in the crowd are also those who don’t feel entirely at home – or all that settled with American Democracy. The bravest, in other words, realize that there’s a proverbial sea of flame that presently engulfs every branch of governance, and that, among other things, “hatred” and “infatuation,” are not the most enduring pillars of our most cherished ideals.
Moreover, to learn the lesson of Jeremiah’s prophetic utterance is to appreciate the virtue of a discerning spirit. Discern with me, then, over the next four-plus years the trustworthiness our choices have produced, and engage in this discernment process in that place Al Roker once called, “your (own) neck of the woods.”
At this moment, I teach at Eastern Washington University and I preach at Origin, a small, mustard seed of a church – nothing more than a pre-fabricated building on a two-acre-lot. And, you see, what I’ve discovered in these travels is the reality of an individual’s power. I do believe in the ‘powers and principalities’ as Walter Wink once defined them – as the festering, demonic residue of institutions, corporations and governments. But here’s something else Wink claims:
“We cannot affirm governments or universities or businesses as good unless at the same time we recognize that they are fallen. We cannot face their oppressiveness unless we remember that they are also a part of God’s good creation.
My sense today – two days after the Nov. 8 naming of the president elect – is that face-to-face encounters (and not mass-confrontational demonstrations) actively erode the delusion of America’s power-politics. It’s as if – in our self-congratulatory state of mind – we imagined power like osmosis, and that simply by shouting louder and longer, we could be great (again) without being good.
Goodness, I’m still hoping, is more than just a rhetorical term, a name upon which we vote or a brand that we’re marketing for our enrichment. If the goal of a person, even a non-registered resident of Spokane, is goodness — the requirements include assuming responsibility for one’s own words: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a person of unclean lips” and then assuming the responsibility for one’s own community: “… and I live among a people of unclean lips…” [Isaiah 6:5, NRSV]
And after that – even if King Uzziah dies and Trump’s elected – your true identity and your vote for an abundant life is immeasurably secure: you are, I am, the most powerful person in the free world!
