Oh yeah, all that stuff we did

[burnunit]

It's been out for about a month, but if you haven't seen Salon.com's Abu Ghraib Files (if you don't subscribe , just sit through the ads to get the daypass. it'll take no time at all) you really need to. Not because it's cool, or because you need "more fuel against the administration" or whatever, but because fuckingA, this is what we did, with you know, our money and power and taxpayer dollars and shit. This is the Americanfuckingdream all bloody and covered in excrement the whole hooded horror and smiling sanitized derangement of our ordered protectors fulfilling the mandates of their standard operating procedures. these are the tentacles of the beast. and i for one would like to know when we're going to fucking chop them off down to the roots and throw fire on the remains

In church, we understand this to be sin, you see? And that no one escapes the stain of it, the pervading shared responsibility and culpability for it? That feeling you get in the back of your throat when you look at this and go 'who let this happen? how did we let this happen? what am I supposed to do to keep this from happening? what did I DO? Is this Me, too? I didn't do this. no way, I didn't sign up for THIS shit.' That feeling that "I didn't consent to THIS shit!" is kind of what we mean by original sin, see? A lot of people think original sin=fucking and fucking is not original sin; and a lot of authorities have perpetrated this idea about women and snakes and that's not original sin either. But one of the things that binds us to each other, not by conscious choosing, is this long winding trail of things we have done and things we have left undone.

Think of it as a kind of complexity or chaos theory of sin. I do not stand up for justice and shalom here, injustice and war shall breed over here. A man fails to show humility here, another man is tortured over here. A complex and dynamic system of media, military, culture, nation states and fear throbs and pulses and in one corner of the system injustices spread like stains or corrode or leap like lightning and in time a thousand miles away there's someone arming for a race war and ten thousand miles away they're piling human bodies and around the corner they're quietly whispering lies or money's changing hands or someone says "whatever." All this stuff is our common legacy, our shared history, our noosphere. We're swimming in it, breathing it. The point isn't you or me actively engaged in raping people or torturing or even voting for people who do, the point is we're part of it and it's piling up like a bunch of naked prisoners, and we're connected to it. THAT's original sin. People who love all that crap about "personal responsibility" fricking Hate original sin. People who believe in the essential goodness of humanity hate original sin too. O and people who just generally like people and aren't too philosophical or religious about it don't like it much either! But actually, when they think about it for just a couple seconds longer than the twitching sensation in their knees, they might see it's just the word they're annoyed by. If it's the sin part you don't like, if you need some other word to assuage your needs around that, fine, I'm easy. We'll argue about words later. (You see, we can argue about the words later dammit because there's a lot of nasty fricking problems out there and maybe we should go get the problems rather than you worrying about whether I'm calling it sin or not).

It's just like with the dismantling racism stuff (this seminar I took for class). This point of view hurts to hear about because it's so ugly and renders each one vulnerable. But what Nice things are we supposed to say about racism? How exactly do I 'tone down' my feelings about racism? Well, the whole picture of injustice builds up and surrounds us (you know that old refrain, sing it, no one can be told what the matrix is) and you end up feeling helpless and stuff. But the constructs can be altered, right? You can bend this shit, can't you? There's all these new identities to be built, the ones that reject being the beneficiary of systemic injustice and instead turn traitor against the whole bullshit thing. (oh yeah, I've drifted a little further afield. for those of you keeping score who stuck around for the original sin stuff, then the Churchy Churchington, Master Theologian answer is, you know, proclamation, death and resurrection, incarnation, sacrament, eschaton. most of the details of THOSE projects will be explored eventually over at fordelives.com). Haven't we been building these islands in the net (thanks Bruce), celebrating interstices at all tomorrow's parties (thanks Bill) and inoculating ourselves against the control viruses (nods, original Bill) for decades now? and marching and organizing (Martin, Bayard) and singing and eating and declaiming (Emma) and hoping and all those things? We've got all these metacultures oozing around. Shoot, we can do this shit, eventually. But OOh if I don't get wicked mad wretched ecstatic about my diet the color of the river out there my tax dollars the smell of morning in the city and that thin rime of mud on a strangers bare skin I'll carry like a strongman's weights, in the littered circus of my memory.


"There is a place past the blues I never want to see again... I saw God's shadow on this world. I could not love the world entire. There grew a desert in my mind. I took a hammer to it all Like an insane medieval king I saw God's shadow on this world. I saw God's shadow on this world. I saw God's shadow on this world."
"you came to take us all things go, all things go to recreate us all things grow, all things grow we had our mindset
all things know, all things know you had to find it all things go, all things go if I was crying in the van, with my friend
it was for freedom from myself and from the land I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes"