JPBlog

The other day I came across a copy of George Monbiot's list of the top ten world-changing books, published in the Guardian a couple of years ago. Having read the top title, Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money, of which I am now preparing a book review, I decided to read the second book on the list, Soil and Soul by Alastair McIntosh.

All it took was an email to Charlie at Eudora Welty library and in a few days the book was here on interlibrary loan and ready to be picked up. It came from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, a small liberal arts college founded by Quakers. The librarians at the Lilly Library went to the trouble of packaging and sending it to Jackson, Mississippi, to someone they had never heard of, putting it in the hands of total strangers, and trusting that it will be returned.

Living as we do in a pay-for-everything society, it is a deep comfort to know that there is a network of institutions staffed by people whose entire purpose is to give something away without any expectation of profit or return on investment. No decent society can exist without the leavening of those generous souls and the institutions that nurture and shelter them.

The economy of the business world is based on acquisition: acquiring more money, more power, more stuff. The economy of the soul is just the opposite: success is how much you can give away without looking back.

The soul of a library is a very great soul indeed.

As the publisher of an Internet "newspaper," my mailbox fills up with pieces from all sorts of organizations and individuals. I receive several pieces a week from the Christian Coalition, commenting on political events and pushing the cause de jour, calculated to arose the fear of the true believers towards spectre of godless liberalism and secular humanism that is destroying this Christian nation.

Today, the primates of the Christian Coalition directed their wrath towards the Supreme Court, which handed down two cases on public display of the Ten Commandments, one prohibiting the display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, the other one allowing them to be displayed on the Texas state capitol grounds.

In McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU, the court held that a copy of the Ten Commandments, framed in gold, and posted in a high-traffic area of the county courthouse, together with the expressed intent of the county governing body to affirm the religious nature of the display, was an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and upheld the district court's preliminary injunction ordering the county to remove it.

In Orden v. Perry, however, the court ruled just the opposite. A large stone monument on the Texas capitol grounds containing the Ten Commandments together with an eye inside of a pyramid, the Star of David and the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, was "passive" and therefore not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Both cases were 5-4 with Sandra Day O'Conner as the swing justice.

Oddly enough, while the Christian Coalition bitterly condemned McCreary County, it failed to mention Orden, a classic example of seeing the glass half-empty.

Church-state jurisprudence has always been unsatisfactory. The Supreme Court over the years has found it impossible to consistently develop workable rules that can guide judges through this difficult and highly emotional litigation. Today, it failed once again to establish consistent guiding principles, stating that the issue had to be decided case by case.

My theory is that the law as we understand it has never dealt well with institutions and practices that preceded the development of the written law -- like marriage, religion and war. When the clash is unavoidable, as in a divorce case, the outcome is never completely satisfactory, as any judge can testify. A judge, in all of his or her wisdom, cannot through the law put back together family relationships that are broken or settle a church fight.

The Christian Coalition is just one example of the countless movements in our history that attempted, and often succeeded, in usurping the civil authority. When they succeeded, it was usually not for long. Probably the most brilliant of those victories was the Puritan revolution in England, which abolished the monarchy, executed the king and established the reform faith as the established church. The Puritan-dominated parliament, however, shortly dissolved into anarchy and was ended by Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England as an absolute dictator. Shortly after Cromwell died, the monarchy was revived, the Stuart kings returned, and the Puritan dream of a nation dominated by the righteous ended in failure and disappointment.

The founding fathers drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with first-hand knowledge of how the established churches had for centuries oppressed the people of Europe, and they were determined not to let it happen here. They wanted no witch-burnings or inquisitions in this new republic. When right-wing evangelicals claim that the founders did not intend state and church to be separated, they are incorrect. The founders were seeped in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, having studied such luminaries as Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bayle and Diderot. They learned from these writers a faith in human reason and a healthy skepticism towards the claims of ecclesiastical authority. Having defeated the British with their established church, they were not about to be dictated to by clergymen of any ilk.

James Madison, who can justly be called the father of the Constitution was very clear about this:

I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions & doubts on unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded agst by an entire abstinance of the Govt from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, & protecting each sect agst trespasses on its legal rights by others. -- Letter from James Madison to Reverend Adams (1832), in 9 The Writings of James Madison, 1819-1836, at 484 (Gaillard Hunt ed., 1910)

I will go even further: Religion, and particularly the Christian religion, has succeeded in this nation because of, and not in spite of, the separation of church and state. In countries with an established church, or which have a history of an established church, religion languishes. There is nothing so inimical to the flourishing of the faith than enforced observance, which invariably becomes in short order an empty exercise. The third temptation of Christ was the lure of earthly power, which he refused. The religious right appears to be pursuing earthly power with all its might. It is setting itself up for a nasty fall.

In essence, the author of the article says that the Democratic Establishment doesn't like Dr Dean because he wants to court and raise money from the Democratic base, instead of a few wealthy donors. If Dean succeeds, it will amount to a revolution in the Democratic party, and the elites of the party (including many if not most of its elected officials), see their position threatened. Read the article.

The JP has been around a long time -- a little over six years, which is an eternity on the Web. The original newspaper style edition will still carry articles, but the action will be here in the blog, which gives me the opportunity to put down some ideas that don't call for extended treatment in an essay.

Since the JP started publishing, the blog revolution has taken over the web and is exerting a powerful influence over the political world. The key to power is exclusive access to critical knowledge, and as the commercial media became more and more concentrated it was beginning to look as though the American public would be permanently cut off from knowledge of what is going on in the world and in our nation, knowledge essential to a citizen of a republic.

In no more than three years, blogs have seriously damaged the ability of the MSM to control the public agenda. While most bloggers, even political bloggers, are not journalists and don't pretend to be, the best have performed an invaluable service in both publicizing news stories that the media tried to keep buried and in subjecting the media to close scrutiny in their reporting and opinion-writing. Writing for a prestigious newspaper is no longer by itself sufficient to command the respect of the public; inaccuracies will be exposed and broadcast. Often the MSM gets its cue from the blogosphere.

The Downing Street Memo is a perfect example of this trend. Almost completely ignored by the U.S. media, liberal and progressive bloggers kept the story alive until the media could no longer ignore it. Grudgingly, the implications of the memo are seeping into the public consciousness, much like what happened after the Watergate break-in. Here are the official recollections of a meeting at the pinnacle of the British government flatly stating that the Bush administration was cooking the intelligence books in order to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein posed a clear and imminent danger to the U.S. The administration was misleading the public and the British government would do its best to mislead the British public.

Lying to the nation to justify a preemptive war against a virtually defenseless people is a high crime. Period. It is an impeachable act and it says much about both our Republican and Democratic politicians in Washington--little of it complimentary -- that impeachment proceedings have not already begun. If Bush and his cohorts are ever called to account before a tribunal, whether legislative or judicial, the liberal bloggers that refused to be intimidated and kept the story alive when the powers that be did all they could to make it go away deserve a great part of the credit. The best of the blogger breed will receive their due on the sidebar as soon as I have the time to put them there.

Until there is traffic to justify it, this blog will remain technically simple, with comments managed through Haloscan, which seems to be free of blog spam. If you want to make a post, as opposed to a comment on a post, email it to me at editor *at* jacksonprogressive.com and with **post** anywhere in the subject line. (The word "post" with two asterisks on each side allows the mail program to separate posts automatically from the rest of the mail.)

I would encourage posts dealing with Jackson metro area and Mississippi politics. There is much going on locally and statewide that affects us, and intelligent exchange is woefully rare in Mississippi. A notable exception is the Jackson Free Press, which publishes a free weekly newspaper in the Jackson area and carries blogs on their website. The JFP carries an extensive listing of local events, as well, so it's well worth reading.

We will publish any thoughtful posts submitted, as long as they are not so off-topic as to be irrelevant. Let me know what's on your mind, either in an email or as a comment.

Tom Lowe, editor