And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.

Shepherding a Blessed Stock

It is a complex weave. The founding and history of this White Xtian land.

Often the only question that seems to matter to me is "why"--but I tend to disbelieve the narrative on offer if there seems an evasion of the motivating spleen.

The more I read about our Puritan heritage the more I am struck by a severe and revealing continuity of motivation evident in our current White Xtian land.

Obviously the prior post dealing with HR3 and marriage (and women) are examples.

I've also brought attention here and there to the "manufacture" and slaughter of vast numbers of "lesser" beings (i.e., those not human): I have argued that there will be no end to this practice in this White Xtian land as all things are given to us by the Lord. We are the image and the elaboration of His Will and Word and how should our own Will be aborted if we are borne of Him.

In this way all of life is property.

Now note, as I've likely said before, Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark is a revelation and it is within this text we find a founding voice: Thomas Shepard.

Consider the following in the light of a personal God, mothers, and women as property.

We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. And although we made no particular choice of Adam to stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man.

I have seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God. I have seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him. [In other words, your bright shining and terrible fancy has more truth than your reason. And it is this God I have created that I will say is goodness and wisdom itself. Note how this is not a "transferable" nor deniable knowledge. It's mine, it's from God, it's real.]

thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserved thee, that thou art still alive, & thy mother's woombe & the terrible seas have not been thy grave.

[In an autobiography Shephard says, eulogizing his wife who has died in childbirth, that she was "the eldest daughter of mr Hooker a blessed stock."]

This rhetoric of 1637--the year when Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for, primarily being a woman speaking about the familiar voice of God she heard within her, absent the mediary of male ministerial hierarchy--is not markedly different from what we hear still in our Puritanical times.

There is one God and he only speaks to White Xtian men; women are to be as chattel and their bodies managed in kind.

You can see in Shepard's claiming that God protects and saves him EVEN as from his mother's dangerous woombe that this is a rhetorical transference of parentage, from the foul physical seas of the womb to the heavenly preservation of the Word. Borne of the mind of God not of the body of woman, mother.

Peace be with you, as I've heard some among us say.

The Birth-Mark

Thomas Shepard

A Farm-Yard Conception

Found this today while looking for something else. Seems to me to be glimpse into our small-minded denizens of this world.

Yesterday I posted on FB a blog article about HR3, a bill that "is actually an attempt to shut down abortion coverage through all private insurance, including employer-provided insurance, which means that it’s beyond even the dreadful Stupak-Pitts amendment/executive order."

That article goes on to detail the clear misogyny and class warfare inherent in the Republican party (White Christian Men and their female servants).

And so this from Shaw is gentle in comparison but speaks of a "true" marriage as defined against a false institution offered by those whose conception of marriage is, as Shaw says, "a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception..."

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.

WikiQuotes-Shaw