Solving the Deepest Issue in America

AOL News reports today that:

the president of the Rocky Mountains chapter of Planned Parenthood, Vicki Cowart, suggested a climate of rancor surrounding abortion in the United States sets the stage for such violence.
"We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country," she said.


Abortion certainly captures the Catholic imagination, and the Church clearly teaches that abortion has no place in a lived Catholicism, which also suggests that it has no role in a lived monotheism.

What is delightful in Vicki Cowart's remarks is her identification of the great American problem: 'a climate of rancor' and a 'poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism.' In one profound statement, Cowart has marshalled all the powers of her formidable, critical mind to denounce dissent in America, and identify an American terrorism no different from what has been lately visited upon the world. With her single and incisive statement, Cowart has equated Paris, Syria, 9/11, and global terrorism with the rancorous abortion issue in the U.S.

A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist.

Though officials have not released any information about the motives of the deranged shooter who killed 3 and injured 9 others, Cowart has determined that the shooter is profoundly 'pro-life,' and therefore violent: 'rancor' transforms the embrace of life into murder and mayhem, according to this president of the Rocky Mountains chapter of Planned Parenthood. Religious terror is simply religious terror, and any distinctions are merely distinctions without differences.

Cowart places Planned Parenthood in the bistros and theatres of Paris, and in the World Trade Center, and she likens this shooter to the radicalized elements of ISIS sympathizers and actants.

Cowart's strategy succeeds grandly because the American system is a 'stage for such violence,' and I applaud her for having the courage to equate the U.S. to ISIS. American liberal democracy has had its run, and now, as Cowart would have it, another form of government must step in and change the culture that breeds 'such violence' and feeds American terrorism.

Cowart has determined once and for all that mental illness and terrorism are the same entity. She has also proven that American 'extremists,' like theirs radical Islamist extremist counterparts, are part of the same global movement. The rancor must be silenced and the war on domestic terrorism must make America safe for abortion.

Vicki Cowart should run for president of the U.S. Her visionary gleam is just what America needs. The editors of AOL News should manage her campaign.

Is Paris Burning?

It has been only a few short months since this blog discussed sacramental violence offered in the name of religion. 

Paris, again, has become the stage on which a vampiric ISIS once again slakes its thirst with the blood of innocents. This deranged version of Islam seeks to execute an ideology of blood. This ideology, feckless in the light and dancing in the dark, knows itself only through the blood of the other. Like the Germanic monster, Grendel, it recoils at joy, and its heart laughs in the broken bones and blood of misery.

The joy and laughter of ISIS at the blood burning the streets of Paris is the joy and laughter of the Zizekian pervert. This misbegotten child infatuated with its image in the mirror continues to engage in a horrific oedipal struggle for the will of the infidel.

Such an ideology, hiding behind, or living between the raindrops of religion, only wants more blood. Che vuoi? A reduplicating 'more of the same,' more lust for sameness, more gluttony for blood. Jouissance of the pervert is the fantasy that sameness is safe, and the other is malleable.

ISIS is the ideology of the blood of the other: it drinks for everlasting life as its fangs etch its signature of violence into anything human. Like all perverts seeking to become the object of desire of its big other, it ultimately seeks self-annihilation.

Footnotes to Paris: Sacramental Violence

Some of this blog's lurkers have preferred not to leave comments but have expressed some of their thoughts to me in other forms of communication. Generally, these concerns are directed at 'poetic' elements in my previous post, "Paris Reduced to Terror," and how those elements come across as 'arcane' and even 'elitist.' I appreciate this critique, and I suppose my own review of that blog entry also discovers some (perhaps unintended) cleverness and subtlety.

In my discussion of the West and Jihad, my use of the imagery of sand and ocean to house secularism and religiosity seems to obscure as much as illuminate. My thought was simply that the West's response to sectarian Islamic fundamentalism with its sense of Jihad and Sharia, is to attempt to inundate it with more radical secularism, which in turn, fuels rage and violence. I further characterized this technique as self -indulgent and nihilistic on both sides of the antagonism.

It is important to always note the sectarian nature of Islam, and one need look no further than Sunni and Shi'a Islam for a poignant demonstration. To this end, I restrict my remarks to the sect of Islam that has adopted violence as its sacramental expression. In this sacramentalism, blood, murder and destruction comprise the matter, and Jihad and Sharia, the form. In "Paris Reduced to Terror," I suggested that Christianity, in its monstrous compound of Church-State, eventually evolved (in both the Reformation and the rise of the nation-states) its self-understanding: its violence was not of its own substance, but instead adopted from the strong force of governance, of the secular. In the sectarian Islam that visits 'terror' on the West, violence derives from something inherent in Jihad: it is religious in nature, in its reading of Islam. 

The hylomorphism of Jihadist sacramentalism is deconstructed by its violence. The ritualistic murders of jounalists in the sands of the desert, complete with the sacramentals of black and orange vestments, knives, and the backdrop of the desert itself, take place upon the altar of the internet. The murders in Paris were accomplished on the altar of freedom, or the mockery of freedom, its matter the fire of automatic weapons, and its form, the words, victims' names and statements of the vindication of the Prophet.

This extreme expression of religiosity under the aegis of justice, cannot be effectively met with extreme secularism. Like the world of Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the secular world finds itself needing great whales to find its redemption. "Paris Reduced to Terror" was meant to underscore the need for a response to 'terror' and 'justice' that leads to effective engagement. Today's unprecedented march of Western solidarity in Paris is but a first step. The violence of ISIS and its continued threats against the West, promise to be a saturated phenomenon that will precipitate a political state predicated on sectarian violence and destruction from its very substance, its fermenting solution of sectarian hatred and intolerance. The next steps the West takes must seek to alter that saturated solution before something hideous crystallizes out of solution in an event of enormity.

The West needs to recover its great whales. Saturated secularism has the tendency to engender more of the same.

Paris Reduced to Terror

Though politics is one of my interests, it has not been a subject addressed in this weblog, which is dedicated to the implications of Catholicism and theology. Therefore, this comment, something of a 'public theology,' shall be interested in the events harbored in the names of justice and God, and how these events might be unfolding in the recent occurrence of devastation in Paris.

The West receives the news from Paris with horror and terror, and tends to define the killing of journalists as terrorism, and further proof  that Islam wishes to impose Sharia law wherever it pitches its tent. While terror might properly characterize the emotional response to this occurrence, terror might not be the most effective way it is finally interpreted. It seems to me that, at least from some perspective and for a moment, Sharia law was in force in Paris, enforced by 3 agents authorized by jihad to exact, for that moment, justice, a justice served by the deaths of journalists exercising the Western idea of freedom.

The West has not gained much from interpreting the enforcement of Sharia law as acts of international terror. The West's mode of response has been to take its collective head out of the sand in order to use that sand to fill up all the oceans of trouble, an act which it thinks will eradicate that trouble. But the West continues to drown and jihad continues to drink sand. The West asks 'what justice is this?' and jihad asks 'what freedom is this?' Indeed, to ask the questions is to answer them. There is no calculus satisfactory to  both Islam and the West, no equations of 'terror' with 'justice;' for in this collision of cultures, 'terror' sees itself on the one hand as 'freedom' and 'justice'; and on the other hand, 'justice' sees itself as 'freedom' and the absence of 'terror.' All meanings are lost in translation.

The events that are released by highly charged terms such as God, justice and freedom are always already troubled, if not just plain trouble. All too often, people die and the earth is scorched in the violence of the crusade, carried out in the names of God, justice and freedom. The crusade is troubled by the antagonists who both hold to acting in the names of God, justice and freedom, and Islam and the West seem quite satisfied with themselves to embark on a strategy in which the only survivors of their antagonism will be these names for whom there will be no one left to utter. The nihilism and insufferable self-indulgence of these antagonists make the same claim to truth, justice and the [choose your metanarrative] way.

Perhaps the problem is one of a poor memory. The antagonists have forgotten that a God that is not love is not God; that the only justice is the justice to come and that justice is the justice of the  God to come. And that God to come will be a God of love for whom violence is a very peculiar choice, a very odd exercise of free will.

There are short term memory deficits at work as well. All three monotheistic faiths preach that God made humans in his image and likeness. So, when the enforcer's of Sharia law looked into the faces of their own image and likeness and called out their names, they also called out the names of justice, freedom and God and shot them all in the head (witnesses to the massacre agree that the executioners called out the names of each victim before meting out the justice of Sharia). Murder in these names is the murder of the events harbored in these names. The murder of a single human being is the murder of God, which is the distancing of humanity from the event of the God to come.

What has violence to do with God? The Christian crusades ended when Christianity finally looked to the log in its own eye before removing the speck in the other before it. Christianity saw that its violence was not authentic; was not of its own substance, but a contamination from without that had entered its very fabric. It pulled out many fibers, but, apparently, Christianity is not immune to memory problems;  strands of violence wreak scandalous havoc to this day. Is this, I wonder, what we really mean by 'Christian realism?'

The calls from justice, freedom and God, the calls from the justice, freedom and God to come, are difficult to discern when the strands of violence remain in the grand tapestries of religion (and politics, too). And it is clear that the only justice, the only God we will ever get is the God and justice that visited Paris, so long as the names we give God and justice are our own names. So long as the images and likeness we see in each other are fear, hate, terror and horror, then our justice and our God will be the God and justice of fear, hate, terror and horror.

What can be the resolution to such hardness of heart? Metanoia. The tilling of the earth in the heart, its softening, its readying to receive the other, will open hearts to receive the image and likeness of God. When we look into each other's faces and call our names, we must look more deeply through the surface of the deep, into waters from which we all come. It is here that we meet the God to come in the ongoing creation of the world. We really need to begin again, and start a new story. Viens, oui, oui.

Paris reduced to terror gives us nothing new, more of the same; that story is old. The West has not visited atrocities upon Islam and Islam is not exacting justice in the face of the injustices of the past. That's the narrative gasping for air. Paris needs to be raised to the power of the infinity of God, through and despite the finitude of the human. When the crusaders of yesterday wielded swords, the world had the luxury of time to discover its engines of violence. The crusaders of today wield weapons very unlike swords. Jihad knows no borders, knows no sovereignty but Sharia, knows no limits on the force of Sharia. Time is running out: God and justice hang upon the discovery of the engines of violence conspiring to reduce God and justice to the cinders of empty names, and the rest of us to the nothing before creation.