The Broken Covenant

In 1992, when I received a flyer from the University of Chicago Press announcing the publication of the second edition of Robert Bellah's The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, I ordered a copy on the spot. I had never read the first edition nor anything else by Bellah at that point. In fact, I'd never heard of the book and had no idea what it was about. But I had a feeling...

The book exceeded all of my expectations and became something of a political handbook for me throughout the 1990's. Nothing Bellah wrote before or after it has had the same effect on me--in fact, I generally found his post-TBC work disappointing. It was almost as if he had embarrassed himself by writing such a stirring "jeremiad" (his word) and was determined never to repeat that mistake. Maybe I should be more charitable, because I owe him so much from this one book; nevertheless, I cannot help but think that what happened to him in its wake was nothing less than a failure of nerve.

Recent events have compelled me to pick up the book again. As I re-read it, I am stunned once more by Bellah's masterful juxtapositions of American Myth and the historical record. For my money, this is religious studies at its best: timely, insightful, self-critical. The Broken Covenant deserves to be considered a classic. If we neglect it, we do so to our shame.

"My Own Quarrel With America"

After a conversation with Henry Thoreau in October 1850, Emerson recorded in his journal: "My own quarrel with America, of course, was, that the geography is sublime, but the men are not." He then noted that those who had joined Atlantic to Pacific had done so through "selfishness, fraud, & conspiracy." Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson (1981), 545.

Nothing has changed.

Melville's Mad Biographer

Hershel Parker

Fly The Blue Flag!

A plain blue flag serves as the banner of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic: a non-state subsisting within the travesty that is the militarized corporatocracy calling itself the United States of America.

It is a declaration of difference, of The Great Refusal, of the determination not to be counted among the sublimated slaves of post-industrial civilization--those who have been enslaved "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument," reduced to the state of a thing. (see H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 32-33).

Declare your independence and your difference: on national holidays and occasions of state, on July 21 (the date of Emerson's letter to Whitman congratulating him on the first edition of Leaves of Grass), and on any date you damn well please:

Fly the blue flag and RESIST, REFUSE, RENOUNCE the violent consumerist catastrophe that now plagues the world.

Show your loyalty to the country's refounders: Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

Fly the blue flag!

The Four Horsemen

If people really understood how the justice system operates, they would know that the cop in the Michael Brown case should not have been called to testify as a material witness to the crime that the Grand Jury was investigating--since he was the prime suspect. This is NEVER done--except, of course, when you want to confuse the Grand Jury into thinking that their job is to decide on guilt or innocence instead of whether or not there is sufficient evidence for an indictment.

We should expect riots in every American city right now--only, that won't happen, because the Administrative State has the One Dimensional society under its thumb. Meanwhile, China's economic troubles might just kick off a global financial collapse in the coming year.

I hear the pounding of the hooves...

Michael Brown

All Americans must begin to make the connection between the violence we export and the violence we produce for "domestic consumption."

And all should take note that, in both cases, the victims are the poor and people of color.

And, no, I don't think it's a coincidence; I think it's a cancer.

RIP JFK