Notes from The Kingdom of God (1.8.07)

I stopped writing essays for this web page on a regular basis several years ago for several unrelated reasons.  I began the effort here as a means of comparing European perceptions of reality to native American belief systems.  For the European side of the equation I depended on major statements of ideology drawn from major figures of the philosophical traditions of the Western world.  While I may not have brought every major figure into the discussion, I eventually ran out of relevant source material from which to draw the essential components of Western thought.  At that point I ceased writing new essays because it seemed beside the point to simply continuing writing here by expressing my own opinions about this or that issue that arose as time went on.  I suppose one could say that I finished my initial project (a review of Western philosophical and theological issues) and hence did not have anything else to say in the absence of a new pursuit.

Recently, perhaps beginning in the early Fall of 2006, it occurred to me that the general topic of the Myth of Eden, which formed a central issue in my critique of Western ideology, could and should be extended into a discussion of the Kingdom of God, again as a centralizing issue of thought in the development and articulation of American political ideology at the beginning of the 21st Century.  This seems appropriate because so many of the spokespersons, both in the government and media, are self-described as born-again Christians who adhere to a strong belief in the hope that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that this can be deduced from the signs apparent in recent events in the political arena (prevalence of war in the Middle East) and in the natural world (hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, avian flu, etc.) in the rest of human experience.  This perception is made more significant by the fact that one person who speaks from the ground of such ideas is the current President of the US, George W. Bush.

One can certainly debate how significant Bush's claims to born-again status are since he seems to have no aversion to making any claim at all that might encourage his right-wing evangelical base to maintain their support for his policy objectives.  Much of what I envision for the current round of essays swings on this issue of how precisely a belief in the Second Coming and the initiation of the Kingdom of God plays against policy decisions that are likely to appear at the heart of Bush's foreign and domestic policy.  Some of this will, of course, be "back"-dated since policies are already in place that have apparently grown out of the perception of reality informed by the President's belief system.

Whatever else might be said at this point, it is clear that Bush has had six years now to push his agenda through a largely compliant Congress with no stomach to oppose even the most outrageous proposals he has made.  The media has been equally asleep in providing any objection to his march across our civil rights in his dogged pursuit of shadowy networks of terrorist, who like the Communists of decades passed threatened us from every corner of the world.  Two weeks ago, Bush issued a "signing statement" attached to a postal service reform bill that allows him to read any first class piece of mail of any kind without benefit of a warrant from any other branch of government.  He can also imprison anyone he deems a threat to homeland security to endless imprisonment without the right of habeas corpus, which has been part of our civil liberties since the signing of the Magna Carta in the 13th Century.

A significant element of this discussion will be the role faith plays in formulating policy decisions in the Bush administration.  In trying to comprehend the over-obvious reluctance of Bush to change even the smallest part of his war policy in Iraq, for instance, which has remained rigidly static for almost four years in the face of the massive deterioration there, an easy explanation for that rigidity is that Bush is simply an incompetent fool who is living in a "state of denial" about the nature of conditions on the ground in Iraq.  Other possibilities circulate around charges that he is massively arrogant and refuses to admit mistakes when he makes them.  More forgiving views claim that he is the victim of bad advise and that his advisors lie to him about the conditions that confront the US in the Middle East.  My own considered view, and the one I intend to pursue here in subsequent evaluation, is that Bush is driven by faith at the expense of reason in dealing with day-to-day decision making.  This position has been routinely unexamined in the public discourse because it opens sensitive areas of belief that always cloud the minds of true believers and fellow-travelers who cannot examine the possibility that faith-based foreign policy is the worst possible way to run a government in a world where danger supposedly lurks around every corner of the globe.  On the eve of Bush's next (fifth or sixth by my count) "most important speech of his Presidency," his new plan to "surge and accelerate" troop levels in Iraq, which he is scheduled to announce tomorrow, will be nothing more than an attempt to redefine the rhetorical parameters of the same policy we have had in Iraq since March 19, 2003.  Bush is not in a "state of denial" about Iraq--much worse--he is in a State of Faith about his Iraq war policy.  A notable irony here, of course, is that denial is the exact opposite of faith.  Claiming the former as the cause of this catastrophe completely obscures the real reason everything has gone so badly in Iraq.