Emperor Bush II

Today I opened a conversation with the line, "So, on the drive up, I was thinking of Emperor Constantine ...," and my good friends Wes, Anitra, and Bonnie thought that was pretty damn amusing. Once they stopped laughing, I expounded upon my great insight over lunch.

President Bush, as you are most likely unaware, recently criminalized the anti-war movement by signing an Executive Order that clears the way for the seizure of your property if you interfere with the war effort. While this probably wouldn't actually be used unless, oh, say, martial law were declared, it's there, and the vice is closing.

As one analysis on the website of the Centre for Research on Globalization put it,

This latest executive order criminalizes the peace movement. It must be viewed in relation to various pieces of "anti-terrorist" legislation, the gamut of presidential and national security directives, etc., which are ultimately geared towards repealing constitutional government in the case of an impending "national emergency".

The war criminals in high office are intent upon repressing all forms of dissent which question the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. The executive order combined with the existing anti terrorist legislation is eventually intended to be used against the anti-war and civil rights movements. It can be used to seize the assets of antiwar groups in America as well as block the property and activities of non-governmental humanitarian organizations providing relief in Iraq, seizing the assets of alternative media involved in a critique of the US-led war, etc.

Which brings me to Constantine. As I grew up Catholic, I learned that Constantine was the benevolent Roman Emperor who found God, ended the regrettable practice of feeding Christians to lions, and made theirs the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire, thus paving the way for Catholicism for which we are all eternally grateful.

Jacob Burkhardt, the great classicist and historian who had the distinction of being Friedrich Nietzsche's mentor, offers a more nuanced version in his astonishing work The Age of Constantine the Great. In this, he describes a Rome coming unglued at the seams. Religious practice in 300 CE varied so widely as to be almost incomprehensible. What united them all, however, was a hatred of the Christians, who offered a convenient scapegoat for the many military setbacks that assailed the Empire.

Constantine's genius was in recognizing that a.) this negative blood lust was an unsustainable downward spiral, and b.) that the dizzying array of pagan cult practices that typified Roman religion had no center and was incapable of offering a unifying idea. Christianity, however, had this straight line of authority from God thing going on that was rather appealing, and offered numerous other points of unity as well. But only if some uniformity could be created, for there were a number of unsettled issues.

It's been said that the law is like a sausage. You really don't want to know how it's made. The same can be said of Christianity.

Among the outstanding issues was the question of whether divinity was innate, or something external and in need of mediation by a third party. There being power to be derived from the latter formulation, Constantine acted decisively, giving us the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which Catholics everywhere now treat as if it were pretty much the entire fucking Bible.

The Gnostics, on the other hand were screwed. It was Great to be a Christian under Constantine, but only a certain party-line-towing sort of Christian. For the others, the killings continued. To make things interesting, after he killed you, he would destroy your family as well by seizing all of ones property and assets. All heretical texts were to be destroyed, under penalty of death and penury for your family.

So, apparently, this is just what Empires do.

It's interesting that the property seizure tactic was pioneered against those accused of drug crimes, which few will step forward to defend, and has now been cleared for use against the rest of us.

A few months ago, I'd have argued against impeachment proceedings as being too divisive and tactically stupid. I no longer believe this. The greater evil, I think, would be to allow the legacy of this Presidency to remain unchallenged, and leave in place the considerable damage he has done to Democracy and the constitution.

ITMFA.

Paris Hilton and the Limits of Compassion

Sunday night was my classics reading group. We've been getting together at my house every month or so for about seven years now. A bookseller, a lawyer, a languages professor, a scientist, and a zoo keeper. The girls call them "daddy's five people."

This time it was Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. It doesn't matter what we read all that much anymore, because whatever it is, we'll spend about fifteen minutes talking about that and then turn to whatever else is on our minds. This sort of disregard for the text, I've come to appreciate, is the mark of a truly great book group.

Anna set the tone. "I'm sixty-two and I don't need to impress anyone: Nietzsche is OVERRATED!"

We all agreed that while the man is a twisted genius, his notion that Euripides killed tragedy, that his nineteenth century world was, at best, a decayed remnant of the Alexandrian Age, and that the best hope for civilization at that point was German culture in general and Wagner in particular, was kind of hard to take seriously. Trevor might have stood up for him, but he had a cold and wasn't there.

Wes and Anitra told me a story once about a Seattle haiku contest in which another friend named Reneene Robertson nearly got herself killed.

"Kurt Cobain," she began, "had two blue eyes." The audience, they said, was in the palm of her hand. She could have said almost anything after that, and they'd have thrown roses.

"One blew left, one blew right."

The room collectively growled. Reneene was off the stage in a flash and looking for the door.

To insult the blessed memory of Euripides, the edgy champion of the outsider, within our group is similarly risky. If Friedrich were to have the misfortune of standing there before us, we'd have gone all maenad on his overwrought German ass and ripped him limb from limb.

Except for Mary. She's a Buddhist.

Which brought us to the subject of Paris Hilton. Stephan was struggling to grasp the meaning of her cultural ascendancy. Her fame, he said, was based entirely on her status as a beautiful rich heiress who hangs out with other beautiful rich famous people. The nothingness of her celebrity was more than he could handle.

Paris Hilton apparently carries a chihuahua around with her, and insecure young women have taken to emulating this. If ever you see a teen-aged girl in six inch heels carrying a chihuahua, he said, you have Hilton to thank.

Mary offered that this was the perfect opportunity for us all to practice wise mind. This is the Buddhist idea that the ego-laden distinctions that separate us are illusory. Even Paris Hilton, she said, was united with us in the oneness of the universe, and our judgments interfered with our ability to grasp the true essence of Paris Hilton.

Stephan and I agreed that we could live with this. The chihuahua thing, so far as we were concerned, relegates her to complete Otherness, no matter what the fucking Buddha says.

Later that night, having calmed down, I found this meditation on wise mind in a book by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun.

Being compassionate is a pretty tall order. All of us are in relationships every day of our lives, but particularly if we are people who want to help others—people with cancer, people with AIDS, abused women or children, abused animals, anyone who's hurting—something we soon notice is the persons we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through that door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can't handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to help others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; we'll be confronted with ourselves.

Roshi Bernard Glassman is a Zen teacher who runs a project for the homeless in Yonkers, New York. Last time I heard him speak, he said something that struck me: he said he doesn't really do this work to help others; he does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected. ...

That, in a nutshell, is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves we'll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we'll have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at. Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal we're trying to live up to.

Pema Chodron,
When Things Fall Apart