The Gospel of Amazonia; or, What We're Fighting to Defend (against those beastly Russians)

No virtue without efficiency, of course, no question - who could deny it? Ah, but just what do we mean by "efficiency"? There's the rub (to coin a phrase).

After all (as I've tried to suggest in other places*), there are some kinds of work that are so flowingly quiet, so unturbulent, both in their outflows and in their wellsprings - so Spirit-embanked the whole length of the stream, one might say - that they hardly seem to suggest the word "efficiency" at all.

*Chiefly Part IV, last three paragraphs. 

So maybe we ought to rephrase it thus:

No MODERN, mechanized, digitalized efficiency without the Bezosian virtues: without, not just ardor and intensity, but vehemence and even (a kind of) anger towards the work to be done. And mutual competitiveness among the workers (aka one-upmanship). And of course - last but never least - terror of management.

A Serious Proposal

Continue to pray - and FAST, of course. 

But not just for the peace of Europe and Russia. But in particular - as absurd, naive and unconspiracist as it sounds - for the mind, heart and soul of Vladimir Putin. And especially right now - that he find the grace and courage to re-open channels of direct communication with Ukrainean President Zelenskyy. As preface, I mean, to an extremely cautious, measured and tentative de-escalation. As improbable as such an outcome might seem. 

Because I have the mounting sense that - however justified Putin may be in his long-term fears of a militaristic, self-infatuated, over-ideologized West - he simply has no idea what volatile lunatics he is dealing with. And not just "down the road," but right at this moment. And again, not nearly so much within Ukraine as well beyond her western borders.

A Russo-American Tragedy

O the needless, senseless tragedy of it all. 

I mean, seriously: that any country - no matter how otherwise worthless and incorrigible - should be afflicted with a leadership as bad as that of present-day Russia. A set of rulers not just wholly uncomprehending of the real needs, preferences and dignity* of its own people, but so incurably ignorant and distrustful of the real motives - of the honesty, transparency and benevolence - of its so-called enemies. 

*Assuming they have any, of course.

And who are these tragically misperceived "enemies" of Russia? Who else - but precisely those same elites, here in the West, who exercise the most decisive and determinative sway, power, influence, manipulation, etc, over the lives of us common folk? In short, when we look at today's progressive Western political and business leaders, what do we see? 

Look real hard now. 

That's right: nothing less than the most talented, efficient, driven, productive, visionary and forward-looking individuals - American or otherwise - ever to have achieved success and power on this planet. I ask you plainly, then: If they can't be trusted - aye, even with our very lives! - who can?

And all that giftedness - just think of it! - not for themselves, but for our sakes: all for the most generous uplifting of us unworthy, unwashed Western masses. And we're just an appetizer.

My obvious next question is this: As kindly, patient, supportive, reassuring and re-educating as our Western elites have been with us, surely they can only prove twice as understanding of the main entree those poor benighted Russians? Or at least of that relative minority of Russians who aren't deplorably homo/trans/xeno/Islamophobic? 

The Real Point of Our Inextricable US Involvements

Wise men, we are told, have been engrossed in some rather strange hobbies over this past generation. Apparently, they like nothing better than to wrangle far into the night over the reasons for America's seemingly incurable habit of self-entrapment in foreign quagmires. 

The assumption seems to be that our foreign-policy elites, almost for no other motive than the goodness of their hearts and a love of global humanity, somehow enjoy rather an awful lot of dangerous risk-taking. (Or dangerous, at any rate, to other people's [enlisted] sons and daughters.) But in particular, they seem to enjoy the risk of wading ever deeper into the sort of overseas problems that not only admit of no clear solution, but offer no simple or easy exit. As if this, if you will, unintended instability - and sometimes even anarchy - that follows our projects in various (often strategic) parts of the world was all part of a sincere attempt, by our wise foreign-affairs experts, to promote the directly opposite result. Or, in the riveting words of Britain's good old reliable Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), "to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world." (Bottom right-hand corner of page.)

And of course what they claim may be so. Though at first glance it does strike me as a pretty complicated explanation. I mean, why is it lately - as in the past 20-odd years - that almost nothing we do abroad turns out as purportedly intended? Are we really, for all our great wealth, power, influence and vaunted "efficiency," that consistently stupid and blundering? 

And what if, as is sometimes the case, the simplest, least convoluted explanation contains the deeper truth? What if the real point, by and large, of all our deepest, messiest, inextricablest US involvements all over the world is not to ensure ongoing stability at all? But rather the reverse? Suppose, in fact, that what all our best national (in)security experts have been trying to do, in all sorts of regions across the globe, is to ensure whatever degree of local/regional instability is optimal for "our" premium economic interests.

But maybe I can illustrate better by way of a direct contrast. So I ask you to imagine a very different, if not opposite kind of globe. Show me, then, a world in which most of its regions - but in particular those that are most resource-rich (oil, gas, minerals, etc) - in which these same regions are steadily becoming more DE-frontierized. Which is to say, steadily more and more unlike our Old American Wild West. Steadily more settled and stable, and law-abiding. And thus more and more capable of their own political and economic self-direction, autonomy, prosperity. You know, rather like the way Singagore, or Japan, or even Costa Rica, has functioned over the past 60 years. (As distinct from, say, Yemen over the past 5 years, or Libya or Syria for the past ten; or for that matter, Afghanistan over the past twenty.)

Show me a world that has more and more places like Singapore, etc, busting out all over. And I will suggest to you a globe that can never, of its own accord, EVER hope to meet our (to put it mildly) exacting 21st-century US standards of open commerce. I.e, it can never be sufficiently open to, and penetrable and manipulable by, our US commercial interests. To say nothing of those of our allies . . .  plus Saudi Arabia . . . plus (and despite our present seeming estrangement) mainland China . . .

My point is not that other countries of very different posture and alignment - like, yes, Russia - aren't also engaged in fomenting various kinds of instability in sensitive parts of the globe. And often for reasons similar (if not exactly identical) to ours. My question is why so many, not just of our US but Western and other global elites, insist on singling out Moscow: why they insist on behaving - or at least talking - as if Russia (along with possibly other vile ingrates like Iran and North Korea) was just about the only major power guilty of doing these awful things?

Goose and Gander

It stands to reason: 

Ukraine is every bit as much a part of Russia as Canada and Mexico are parts of the United States. Therefore surely, in the same calm, cheerful spirit with which Washington would gladly accept the loss of both immediate neighbors to an anti-US alliance, shouldn't Moscow be prepared to accept - nay, welcome? - the NATO-dominated, EU-absorbed independence of Ukraine, Belarus, Crimea, Georgia, Chechnya, Circassia, Tatarstan, Kazakhstan, etc? (the list may be endless.)

And to think: it's all for that stupid, paranoid, barbarous Russia's own good. I mean, what else have we been trying to teach her all these years, if not the supreme wisdom of national self-abnegation and sacrifice?

Sign of the Times: A New Year's Meditation

Ever notice how nobody seems to know how to drink anymore?

Here in Righteous America, anyways, the growing trend seems to be to take a huge and highly verbal pride, either in one's regular abuse of alcohol, or in having sworn off the use of it altogether. No doubt another healthy side effect of Life in this Age of Great Conviction, in which nothing should ever be done by halves.

Still, as I believe somebody once said, a country that doesn't know how to drink properly is hardly one that will know how to make peace rationally.

All the more reason, I think, that all of us Yanks - whatever our (mostly foolish or ill-thought-out) convictions - should pray for peace, and most urgently that of the Russo-European borderlands, with all the rationality at our disposal. And humility. And fervor.

Even if we don't ever quite recover the fine art of drinking rationally. 

Out in the Open: A Christmas Reflection

We forget what an almost insanely daring, revealing revelation the Divine babe in the manger is. We forget that it is not just an event, however pivotal to our salvation, but a sacrament: one no less, in a sense, than Baptism or Holy Communion, because it is at once the ground and soil and fount of both. In other words, the Christ-child is not a wall behind which God hides before coming out into the open, but rather a point of entry - even for us! - into the Heart of His Divine Life. Which is to say, not a disguise but an unveiling; not a pretense, but a portal; not a transient phase or passage - or scaffolding to be discarded - but rather a window, into the inmost room, the inmost self, if you will, of the God who does not merely know or command or judge, but creates, and so loves us. And how better to love us most intimately, and most knowingly, than Himself to become created?

Which is, let's admit, hardly the way that perhaps most of us tend to look at God's human infancy. Indeed, the very notion - of that same infancy as integral to our understanding of who God is - may be especially hard to swallow nowadays. But in particular, I think, in a hypersophisticated Age like ours, in which the acme of human progress - or even perfection? - is measured by values and ideals rather different from those embodied in our Lord's Nativity. Measured, in short, not by some mysterious childlikeness of God, but by the increasingly smart, "cool", awesome and wholly rational (if not "big and bad") unchildlikeness of Man. 

But might it be, I wonder, hardest of all to digest in today's Neojeffersonian, messianic, "exceptionalist" America? A country in which nothing seems less important than our human origins, than where - and Whom - we came from: in which the future is constantly being reinvented, the past perpetually overturned and made obsolete, and where Everything Is Possible. Everything except, perhaps, a childlike humility, and wonder. Because, after all, who needs those - especially if you are this limitless god-in-the-making, who is constantly leaving behind, forgetting, discarding your origins?

In fact (one might argue), if the whole point of our earthly human sojourn is to explore, test and transcend the limits of our own divinity, shouldn't we be having rather less and less need for either wonder or humility? I mean, really: if we humans can't become the sort of gods who are surprised and awed by nothing - who can literally know and do it all (at least eventually?) - what on earth are we here for? And why on earth were we made in His image?

Indeed I wonder if not a few of us - mostly by default - think of God, too, as a creator rather like that. In short, as a maker rather like us. Or like what we would be, if only we had or could acquire the awesome power to create, and command, and destroy, as He does. We may find ourselves instinctively imagining God as one who, so far from creating everything from nothing, actually Himself came up from nothing. And who gradually, by working His way up, through much ambition, toil and travail, finally forged within Himself the high-handed power, the insensitivity, the callousness and ruthlessness not only to create, but more importantly to command and control - and thus terrorize? - all things. So that for, say, you or me to be most like Him would be to identify with precisely that pride, confidence, arrogance, ferocity, etc, by which He has succeeded in wrestling all things into the most abject submission. 

But suppose God is nothing like that. Suppose that the way to the Heart of God - yes, even the very heart of His power - is not to imitate that power by which He (supposedly) wrests, and wrenches, and bends and molds and sculpts all things from the outside, as it were. What if the one Way to know Him most intimately is to enter into, to trust, to feed upon, that Lowliness - that Sonship, if you will - by which He knows, loves and grows every created thing not externally, but from within its very self. Or as some have written, nearer to it than its own self. That same Sonship indeed which, precisely because of its littleness and lowliness, alone can enter the soul of, alone can guide, feed and nurse the proper growth of every creature, however lowly or "insignificant." But most essentially, and dependently, every human creature? Even to its utmost progress, and perfection?

And what if this is the very "trait" of God which, however hidden, draws us most finally and utterly to Him?

Anyhow, something tells me, if for once we could see our Maker for the sort of god He is, practically everything else would be different. Could we see Him in the full and rich distinctness of His Godhead, I more than suspect, we'd have all we could do to stop thinking about Him. If we could but see and know Him, in all that makes Him God with a difference - in all that reveals His divinity in its most proper and accurate contrast, say, to Almighty Us, and to the sort of gods and lords we're all too prone to become over our earthly spheres?* - we'd barely be able to take our eyes off Him. 

*And in particular the persecuting, harrowing effect our own human "deity" has on earth's other visible creatures.

And if we could know His deepest, yearningest power - in contrast to the barbarous noise, pride and frank ugliness of our own hollow might, and utterly conditional earthly dominion - if we could know the exquisite humility, tenderness and quiet of real power, of omnipotence and love wholly without conditions: if we could  but see that - why, I should think we'd find our God almost wholly irresistible.