You too can profit from others' misfortune!

(Sorry for the lack of posts lately - I've been crazy busy with work and personal commitments, so I haven't been home to write or read the news much. Hope all of you are well.)

A few days ago, one of my close friends wrote me the following E-mail:

I was just reading an article decrying Harper opening the door to privatizing prisons in Canada, a la US model (doesn't he get crowded being in bed with so many corporate interests???)

http://www.straight.com/article-119340/stephen-harper-opens-door-to-prison-privatization

While reading this, a thought struck me...in part, is the US judicial system run as it is, and the war on drugs continues, because it is profitable to these corporate interests to have people in prisons?!? It's a horrifying idea, but it makes an extremely sick and scary kind of sense...

Will someone PLEASE hold me?

We had some discussion among our group of friends about the "War on Drugs" and who is making money off of it - others were wondering if there's really that much lobbying power on the part of government contractors who are running U.S. prisons.

My response . . .

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What's really going on here is that the you have opportunism on the part of a relative handful of powerful people. So, I think a few business-savy people in key areas with major political influence see this a new lucrative avenue - the byproduct of a fascist state. You have to, on some level, admire the intelligence of evil people before you can hope to stop them.

It's a classic strategy: develop a large set of incomprehensible and/or broadly-worded laws, not easily appropriated by the vast majority of the population. This way, everyone becomes a de facto felon. Of course, there's a lot of social engineering that goes along with this to create the fascist system (flag waving, whipping up religious fervor, controlling the educational system, manipulating energy supplies, fearmongering, etc.) so this is only one piece of a much larger strategy of control and oppression.

This is a great time to get into the prison business! (Raytheon and Halliburton are always good bets, but diversity is a good thing. You can profit from the coming armageddon!)

We have a goverment, working in partnership with other major business interests, that needs to silence people who speak out against it. There's a massive system in place to guarantee that anyone who needs to be locked up can be locked up - and quickly - while the brainwashed and ignorant populace is distracted by celebrity gossip and TV crap.

The smart money knows what the military-industrial complex is planning, so this creates an opportunity for those in the well-connected business community (who because of their wealth and power are largely immune to draconian and capricious legal action) to make money by gaming the system in favor of prison privitization.

This should be more frightening as a leading indicator of an impending military-dictatorship takeover rather than something like a powerful industry with traditional lobbying power flexing its muscles. They already have the motivation to lock up anybody they want to - they're already going for the low-hanging fruit, as Eric has pointed out.

This doesn't mean that a powerful industry won't eventually sprout up around this. Not sure that it would rival big pharma . . . but plenty big enough. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. Maybe this is sort of like the idea some neocons had after 9-11 to set up a stock market type of system for people to invest in based on when the next terrorist attack is going to happen. Following the money can provide you with all kinds of valuable information.

I think this news out of Canada may mean there's something much sinister coming sooner rather than later. In this case, following the money doesn't lead to a pleasant outcome, even if we are more informed. (That is, unless you like to benifit off of the suffering of others, which we all do to one extent or another by living the lives we do here in America).

So ---- here's to hoping your underground bunker east of Yuma is well stocked!

Church of The Batman

I went to go see the new(?) Batman movie last Saturday with a friend, after hearing another friend tell me that it was "really, really dark".   Most of you know I'm not one of those people has ever read many comic books or graphic novels in my life, except for maybe the Archie and Jughead digest from when I was about 8.  Of course, none of that deals with any type of profound philosophical questions, other than who likes who and what the latest silly teenage drama is.

Maybe that's the root of my thing I used to have for teen dramas like 90210, and even a little Dawson's Creek (I watched it for the verbiage-filled dialogue . . . no, really, I did . . . maybe . . . well, that and Joshua Jackson = mega HAWT!)

But the point is, while I know graphic novels are more than that from my  (usually younger) friends who read them, I certainly have trouble taking the medium or anything associated with it seriously.

Of course, this movie was different, but you all already know that, and you're not reading this for my movie reviews.  For those who haven't seen it or aren't familiar with it, know that the whole movie dealt with really deep ethical questions - the kind of questions our whole society is facing now.  Will people do the right thing if easily presented with a tempting wrong?  Will others do something evil to someone they don't know if it means someone they do know will be helped?  Does it make sense to singularly stand up against evil when truly nobody else will?  

Usually the movies I see are very serious and deal with deep, often painful questions of one sort or another.  Otherwise, why see them?  I can entertain myself through other meaningless diversions.   

So, I'm not one for mindless comedies that appeal to silly teenagers or screw-off college students, and I'll pass on the shoot-'em-up movies that tend to also appeal to this demographic (and some of their possibly emotionally underdeveloped fathers?). 

Good movies sit with me for a while, and I couldn't help but think about these themes over the past few days as I'm also thinking through everyday battles in local churches versus bigger struggles happening in ever wider circles: families, workplaces, communities, cities, states, nations, and finally in diplomacy and drama being played out before us in wars cold and hot across the world.

A great deal of our lives are all about politics.  It's everywhere.  We're all politicians and diplomats in one degree or another at any given time.  Some of us have to deal with it on a daily basis and hate it.  Even fewer of us deal with it on a daily basis and love it.

I'm one of those who hates it, especially when wrong choices are made that leave big messes for others to clean up.  As I see this happening on the local level, I realize that the battles I see locally really follow the same recipe as the battles on the higher levels, although there may just be different ingredients in the mix.

The recipes seem to be archetypal battles, often of "old ways" of doing things verses "new ways".  It's far too simplistic to break all battles down into this category, since there are also deep ideologies battling for attention at any time, each with their own subtleties and nuances. 

That said, one sometimes helpful way to analyze the methods and the techniques of these situations could be to see them as old vs. new.  We may dress up the factions with positive-sounding labels to create understanding and broker peace, but we still see walking and quacking.

All of us who are players in a political system - whether large or small - have to make sure our ethics are solid.  This means we have to have thought through our system of arriving at decisions of what is good and evil, and we have to know what that system is based on and how we follow through with it.  

The church might not have been instituted by humans, but it is, of course, a human organization, led by the Spirit, as we have willingness and strength to listen to the Spirit's guidance.  Even so, I have a hard time with the idea that the Church is infallible, even from those who can argue from a biblical and Traditional perspective that it is.  In fact, this infallibility idea (and the concomitant Spirit-led quality) it's only something that can be understood theoretically, because we can't really define the boundaries of the Church (big C) and say how it can definitively arrive at an authoritative position, and therefore a correct one.

Authority and power are usually, though not always, intertwined.  When we are part of these political systems on any level, we are confronted with the dangers inherent in ever-increasing levels of power.  This means that we must legitimately and frankly ask ourselves whether power is something that corrupts in direct proportion to its allotment to any individual or group.

The Batman movie, in particular, forces us to ask if humanity's natural movement is regressive. You'll have to see the show to find out what their answer is.  Still, some may argue we are all moving to higher levels of moral disorder in a very Darwinist mindset, where we'll shoot our best friend to stay alive as we descend into a hell of chaos.  This very negative view could be consistent with what many see as the orthodox Christian view: our nature by itself tends toward evil.

Is humanity collectively entropic?  At least when it comes to morals?

As I ask that question as a Christian, I understand that in some way my asking of that is very threatening.  We're supposed to point to hope, right?  We're supposed to say "no" to that question while pointing heavenward.  

Even if we acknowledge the specificity of evil, as something contained in an isolated situation, we're supposed to, as Christians, say that God's ultimate, big-picture plan is an active redeeming of the world in a way we cannot comprehend (or, at least, cannot comprehend now), but something that will be revealed later.  The redemption may come through a supernatural event or through God's working through humanity to bring about justice and peace over the whole earth, depending on your views.  

This is pretty much my thumbnail understanding of quite a bit of mainline (liberal) Protestant pastoral teaching and preaching, and I'm not saying I disagree with it.  But, if we're going to be honest, un-fake Christians (the only type younger people will bother listening to), we cannot neglect to deal with the question of whether we are evil at our core, and only becoming more evil overall. 

The corollary to that question - and one that has been asked from the beginning of time - is about whether God's redemption is going to come about in time, and what that will consist of. And if we say we don't know, isn't that exactly like saying "hope is just around the corner"? When said eloquently, it's comforting, to be sure, but how long can we keep it up?  Is it a Ponzi scheme?

Can the church offer reasonable, compelling answers to this without them being simply pat or contrived?  I don't know the answer to that, and I wish I did, because I've almost always heard ones that were not.  If we're serious about evangelism, we better be ready to face these questions - any questions - and even tougher ones that this, at least in our increasingly secular, but still "spiritual" and non-religious American culture.

The big secret is that the Anglican church, in a lot of ways, may be best poised to answer these types of questions in a way that other Christian denominations can't.

We can answer them because we are asking ourselves right now, like Bonhoeffer did,  if we should do a relatively small evil in order to bring about a much greater good in the long term. 

That's all well and good, but do we realize we have to live with the consequences of that smaller evil and answer for it?  Even as we choose this smaller evil, we have to say yes to and accept the judgment of God for that evil, and perhaps one that doesn't allow for mitigating circumstances when it comes to sentencing.

Make no mistake, the so-called conservatives in the Anglican church face this same question as do the so-called liberals.  This means that we'll all have to face the music, and that nobody's really right in this fight.

Whether or not a moderate position between two choices is possible when we come to a crossroads such as this, even as we know a core part of our Anglican identity is to be "both/and" people and to find truth in and be okay with the dialectic of opposing views, we have to recognize that any choice we make: "liberal", "conservative", or "moderate" is still a choice.

Any choice we are making now or will make necessarily entails a commingling of good and evil. This gets personal, because we remember that politics isn't just a global, national, or statewide thing.  We have other choices, but we all face the same God.  

For us Anglicans, there's no easy way out, but we have to understand that even our treasured fuzziness has limits - and consequences.

We'd better- and not just for our good, but for the good of all God's Church.

Gays abandoned to a destroyed culture

An essay on gay newsmagazine Out's website has one of the most striking essays I've read in years on "social" internet sites' effects on gay male culture.

This article contains some frank and (frankly) very disturbing information that some of my straight friends who read my blogs might not care to know about, so be warned.

That said, I think this is a must read for anyone reading this blog, anyone who is friends with gay men (especially younger, single ones).

Here are a few excerpts:

During the 15 years since America Online men-4-men chat rooms introduced mass-market online cruising (earlier Internet cruising technologies, like IRC chat rooms, were mostly for techies), some aspects of our lives have become more visible than ever. We are ubiquitous in mainstream culture; we are out to our families, friends, and employers; we’re able to hold hands in public, in some places, without having to worry that we might get beaten up; and some states and cities now permit gay marriage or civil unions (more will inevitably follow now that California has joined Massachusetts). As this wave of enculturation advanced, AIDS treatments made the ravages of that disease less visible and dispelled the sense of crisis that strengthened our connection to each other in the 1980s. These factors, along with straight gentrification of gay neighborhoods and the growth of the long-tail economy, hastened the decline of many urban gay enclaves, and the demise of many bars, businesses, and social groups that gave structure to gay life.

“Post-gay” social life grew mixed, and the physical drive that defines us as gay -- the drive to have sex with each other -- increasingly found vent online. This aspect of our lives became more private, and even secret, than ever. In 1993, 2.3% of gay men found their first male sexual partner online. In 2003 the number was 61.2%. (These figures come from the United Kingdom, and there’s been no parallel study in the United States, but sociologists believe the findings here would be similar.)

“The implications of that trend are enormous,” says Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “It means that gay men who were once socialized in brick-and-mortar establishments, surrounded by other people, are now being socialized online.” Gay men still go out as well, but our nightlife habits are very different than they were 12 years ago. Jeffrey Parsons, professor of psychology at New York’s Hunter College, says his unpublished research confirms the common sense that “when guys go to bars, they’re going to be with their friends, not to meet new people.”

and later . . .

The seemingly endless stream of available men on Manhunt is, according to marketing director Henricks, “addictive, like a slot machine. You keep hitting next, to see another screen of profiles, thinking you’re gonna get lucky sevens.” This drive, according to Alan Downs, a psychologist and author of The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, lies at the core of the appeal of online cruising: “Variable payout schedule, which is used in slot machine designs, is the most addictive form of psychological conditioning, because you never know when you’ll get paid. It could be every 10 times you play, or every hundred.” In the same way, Downs adds, “every time you log on, you never know what you’ll find. That’s why it expands to fill a person’s time. Last night was a bust, but who knows who will be online this morning or tonight.”

and a little later

As a normative way of socializing for gay men, online cruising is a disaster. We need to recognize its effects -- including its tendency to isolate us, encourage objectification, and diminish our sense of life’s nonsexual possibilities -- as disasters. We need to recognize that too many of us, too much of the time, are cruising online because it is easier and feels safer than thinking about the love we are missing and the power we do not have. Too many of us, too much of the time, are cruising online because it’s easier and feels safer than mustering the courage, patience, discipline, and imagination required to help ourselves and each other become the men that, in our strongest moments, we want to be.

There are tons of great points in the essay. The picture is kind of bleak, and those who already have issues with gay behavior may point to what they see as outrageous and sexual public displays at gay pride festivals and then claim that while these may be disappearing, many more shocking and secretive practices are happening in the shadows.

But it is time for anyone who is involved with the online gay "community", if it can be called that, to understand what it's doing to us, and what impact our Internet culture is having on our whole society.

Part of the solution Michael Joseph Gross, the article's author, alludes to here is the necessity of defining normal social behavior and expectations for gay and lesbian people. This is something I've written about at length before on this blog.

Because gays and lesbians have not been given access to our cultural/societal methods for working through both sexual and relational ideas, and especially by the church, we've been given up to whatever moral compass (or lack thereof) we care to follow as individuals. This is why Gross can speak of sex in our community as being "the gay handshake".

Many of my friends will know the profound struggles I personally have had with trying to interface with this culture and find some type of moral standards I can live with, when this discussion isn't even on the table in the organization I look to for guidance: the Episcopal Church (or even mainline liberal Protestant thinking generally).

Now, I'm not talking about a whole list of rules here, saying one specific thing is okay and another isn't. That's dogma - and, at least to my religious way of thinking, it doesn't ultimately work.

What does work is creating an ethical framework for moving through these issues - and certainly same-sex blessings of relationships is one important step in that direction. If my faith tradition goes down that road, and I know they will in the long run, I think that will be a profoundly good thing for those of us who are gays and lesbians who really are seeking God very seriously. At the same time, do those of us theological progressives (or moderates) who care about our witness as Anglicans to the wider world really think this is worth splitting the church over?

It cuts both ways, and we have to remember that.

But when I encounter the gay community online, not just in sleazy sex sites, my own heart hurts when I know that only a very few younger gay men (say under 40), even those who come from strong religious backgrounds, identify themselves as Christians. Among those who do, only a very few of them take their faith seriously.

For those of us who do, myself included, it is an impossibly lonely place - and in our worst moments, hopelessly so - made even more sad when we see that almost all of our brothers are in a different place from us.

A place where they are abandoned by the church - and to the hell that we have created for ourselves in trying to cope with it.