The deeper issue is simply that none of this can provoke material change, which is the purpose of politics. Where your morals leave your head and enter the physical world is precisely where politics begins. It’s not about the feasibility of your beliefs. There are plenty of things that we want that we will never get, politically; I’m an open borders guy and will never live to see that as policy, for example. But support for open borders entails an endorsement of an actual material change in the world that could theoretical come to pass. Support for Taylor Swift as a political symbol could one day achieve… what, exactly? Making an immensely rich and influential woman richer and more influential? Doesn’t seem like left-wing progress to me. The only way the average person might engage in this pro-Swift movement is with their attention and their dollars, neither of which Swift has been lacking for. If the idea is merely that Swifts fans will vote against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement because of all of this, well, I’m skeptical that will happen and would be a little disturbed if it did. It’s much more likely that, as with championing The Wire in a way that draws more attention to yourself than to the show, all of this is just symbolic politics designed to demonstrate that you’re The Right Kind of Person. Which wouldn’t rankle me so much except for the fact that this increasingly seems to be the only form of politics we have, the politics of pure assortment, divided not by morals or ideas or acts but by types of people.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-liking-or-not-liking-taylor
Category: Excerpts
Excerpt #34: dumpster fires
Eschatologically speaking, I care very little about the fate of America. Which is why I’ve never understood Christian nationalism, its theological illiteracy, the panic and anger that exposes its spiritual immaturity, and its deep and abiding paganism and idolatry. No matter who wins or loses the coming election my deep reservoir of peace will not change. I have no real expectation that America should be anything other than a dumpster fire. All nations are. History is, as Tolkien said, a long defeat.
And here’s the wonderful thing: Christians know how to live through dumpster fires! The church has done this over and over again, as nation after nation has come unwound. We’re experts in this work.
https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/01/psalm-31.html
Excerpt #33: the real criminals
The criminals of England are not the starving poor who steal food they cannot afford, but the rich, who devise clever financial systems that siphon away food produced by laborers and sell it for a profit in the cities or abroad. Cobbett put these ideas to the test upon meeting a group of angry farmers on the road, intent on punishing an elderly man for stealing cabbages. “Would you punish a man, a poor man … and, moreover, an old man,” Cobbett asks them, “when that Holy Bible, which I dare say you profess to believe in … teaches you that the hungry man may, without committing any offense at all, go into his neighbor’s vineyard and eat his fill of grapes?” When the men insist that this fellow is a “bad man,” Cobbett reminds them that “the Bible, in both Testaments, commands us to be merciful to the poor, to feed the hungry, to have compassion on the aged; and it makes no exception as to the ‘character’ of the parties.”
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/saving-the-commons
Justin DaMetz 