Legion: Working on telling you about my Family of Demons

I'm going to have to do this backwards. I actually prayed first, and often, before typing the initial sentences; perhaps that's the only reason you should even entertain serious engagement with what I'm about to say:

I think I know what's wrong with Democracy, or at least American Democracy: Demons.

OK, the 80% of you who didn't just click off are the ones I need, because the argument that follows is entirely Christian. It will take years to translate the ethics to humanism, and I don't have that kind of time.

I started with a thought experiment while talking with Abbey Grace, who had called in to arrange a volunteer experience for six of her bible study compatriots at UCI.

I was trying to explain normal American preoccupation versus demonic "possession" and I had begun to focus upon the energy involved, about the inhuman quality of it's intensity.

When I was slightly older than Abbey, I had styled myself the King of Sandpaper. Not surprisingly, others had as well, including the 3M Company, which makes just over half the sandpaper in the world. When I was 31, I was selling more sandpaper for a higher margin than anyone else at 3M. Even now I find it hard to get over myself.

And therein we find the problem with Demons.

A multi-billion dollar organization was lauding me for moving their most profitable product - paper with dirt glued on it! Even now I cannot help but spin the story to allude to my greatness. Knowing I'll die here wrestling with this beast - I must digress:

Starting over after revealing myself to be all too human...

I need to find some lynchpins of sanity. Something to explain why Jesus installed the legion of demons into a herd of swine and drove them into the sea.

The incarnation provides the most important guideline, and our first clue. Demons are not human, but they pretend to be. This is the blasphemy at the core of both our existence and Satan's greatest advantage in dealing with us: Familiarity breeds contempt, and there is nothing more familiar than humans. Even the name bears inspection.

Recently the S.C. Johnson Corporation has been going to great lengths to insist that it is a "family" company. Fiske Johnson tells us he's "working" on telling us what's in his bottles and boxes, while all the while hoping we don't notice the present perfect tense. "Working" on telling someone sounds like the protestations of a guilty child, or an addict. Obviously production knows exactly what's in those containers - that's how they fill them. Since Fiske Johnson is going to spend about one million times more energy telling us about how he's working on telling us than it would take to merely release the ingredient list in a press release, we now have some modern day definitions of the word used by Christ to name the demons: Legion.

In this case they represent the supernumerary quantity and quality of Fiske Johnson's obvious mis-directions; the numerous ways he strays from the straightahead truth. How like a family, Fiske. Only it's the kind of dysfunctional, meretricious family we Irish Catholic Alcoholics are all too used to.

Again, this isn't God's family, like the real Johnson's, born of flesh and blood. This is the unholy creation of Fiske Johnson, and his staff of professional liars and spinners, his risk-averse brood of corporate lawyers and risk managers, his murder of management crows all screeching about secret formulas and long-term health risks.

We've seen this play before, for much higher stakes, and the outcome, although attenuated, is predictable as hell, because there are no real human souls involved, only the shadows they cast upon the walls of our cave. Like the cigarette companies preceding him, Fiske is "working" at hiding the evidence. He might have a staff far more articulate than the poor author of the foul screed before you, but then, I'm not "working" on anything. I'm just saying that the list of what the production people put in the bottles last shift is evidence, and Fiske Johnson is hiding it.

And I can know the plain truth because I know Fiske Johnson. Now it is true that I cannot know, really know another human being, but the Fiske Johnson before us is merely a shadow. That which was born of woman and raised by our American village has been reduced to a risk averse pitchman who wishes to reveal almost nothing of himself, and certainly nothing that could help us critically assess our need for his lies. They're not going into the bottle, are they Fiske? Of course not. Having reached the far-flung edges of everything NASA science and the quest for the human genome could bring to window cleaning, Fiske's family has run out of ways to make ammonia somehow more special than it was 100 years ago. He's reduced to implying that Windex and Glade will have children that, unlike real children, will always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, just like PaterFiske and his brood, captured in disingenuous snapshots, warts and all, alongside an splay of product shots arrayed like just another family, just another commodity.

Two Demon rules thus far uncovered: They're not human, and they lie, even when they're telling the truth, because they're "working" on telling the truth. Like a broken clock, they are associated with a factually accurate display of the time twice each day, but that is far from the truth. Fiske is right in saying the truth is something we need to "work" on, but quite unlike the broken clock, waiting for the precise instant to take the snapshot we'll use to hock the wreck on Ebay is a far piece from telling the truth.

So another rule about Demons: since no other inhuman thing is more ubiquitous, it could be said that nothing could teach us more about God and humans than the actions of demons.

They have been hidden among us for a longtime, and they only reveal themselves infrequently, perhaps only twice a day, and then only for an infinitesimal Zeno's paradoxical fraction of a second. It is only when they are cast out that their span is revealed, and God shows us their broad reach, their legion.

The one they were "working" on telling us about.

How like a family.

Santa Ana, runoff, the Homeless, and you.

Years ago, Congress passed the Federal Clean Water Act, and it cleverly states "the discharge of any pollutant by any person shall be unlawful" without a permit. Then Congress further instructed the States, including Georgia, to issue such permits. Generally speaking, Georgia declined, and a fellow there was charged with pollution because rainwater coursed off his property, along with the dirt it picked up along the way, becoming runoff, and then entered a Federal waterway, becoming pollution. He fought back, saying it was impossible to get the permit, and reminded the Court that, "the law cannot depend upon the performance of an impossibility."

In response, the Supreme Court said something which used to be oxymoronic: "Congress is presumed not to have intended absurd (impossible) results."

Lacking the integrity and education of even our poor Congress, Santa's Ana City Council lies to us about the poorest among us - with tricks and sleight of hand unbecoming a circus geek.

My contention today is the opposite:

That the City Council of Santa Ana did, in law and in fact, intend absurd and impossible results. They passed a law that mimics a well-defended Federal law, which reasonably intends to ration prized spots at popular parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite. At those destinations, permits are both needed and issued - people cannot be allowed to drive halfway across the country on their children's landmark vacation, only to be turned away at the last minute by the local homeless, or ill-prepared scofflaws who would steal another's moment in the Sun.

Our foul Mayor Pulido and the City, however, intended precisely the impossible.

Knowing it is unconstitutional to make homelessness illegal, he and the Council adopted the subterfuge, and please remember here that 30% of the homeless are veterans, while another third are children, of insisting that the homeless apply for a permit, which Santa Ana has never sold, issued or even printed, rendering possession impossible. Making homelessness illegal is unconstitutional, but making a needed permit unavailable almost does the trick; the only thing left to enact this selfish sin is to prohibit a specific act to complete the vicious fiction upon which local justice is done, or rather done-for. The City requires that a person intending to camp unfurl a blanket, or untie their shoes, and these innocent acts then trigger the banal legality of Santa Ana's horrific fiction. Far fewer than one third of the council-members ever defended anything with their lives; perhaps that is why they have the temerity to tell veterans not to spoil their view. But then, it has ever been thus...

In our case, the scofflaws are Mayor Pulido and the 1993 City Council, and others of their ilk who steal from a growing part of the public their ancient right to repose upon the commons.

Better circumstances built by honest governments temporarily forged a century in which public land could be left largely for public ceremony - the groomed lawns of courthouses and council chambers lent themselves to silent (the best kind) testimony that the local burghers had the situation well in hand, that everyone was at least doing well enough under their leadership to have a hovel. Well, those times are gone for good, the 10 year plan to eliminate the homeless notwithstanding.

Our bleak future has arrived early in Santa Ana. Most of the children graduating from our public schools will never achieve a level of employment commensurate with local rents, largely because 10 years of low-income housing funds were squandered on the Jail. Emigrants, they must join the march of other failed nation-states in a quest for greener pastures. Since we can no longer hold onto our own children, why should we permit the local Council their falsehood: their crowing grassland of civic pride. There is no reason to be proud of total failure.

Once local government has failed, there is only the solace of charity. As fails man, so succeeds God. As the hubris of local despots is swept away, perhaps our murdered saviour can again become rampant over the green crowing of City crows, feeding upon the corpse of an undeserved past. Perhaps the poor can again bed down upon that which God, in his mercy, has provided for them, and which the City first squandered, and then cut, and then forbade, in a blasphemous effort to be like God.

Like all governments intended to feather the nests of a few carrion birds, they have failed.

Perhaps it is time that the homeless of Santa Ana are treated better than runoff in Georgia.

Either issue camping permits or stop ticketing the homeless for not having them.

21000

21,000 is a special, but not quite magical number this month.

Dan Akroyd lost 21,000 bottles of vodka. He released a statement to TMZ -- claiming, he is both "distressed and elated" after hearing that several hundred thousand dollars worth of his vodka was hijacked within the last few days. The statement continues, "My partners and I are sorry to lose this much vodka to theft and do not condone criminal activity in any fashion, but we are happy that some consumers will be afforded the opportunity of tasting Crystal Skull at significantly lower than retail price."

The Keystone tar sands pipeline spilled approximately 21,000 gallons of crude in North Dakota. This is its eleventh and most significant spill. Considering that Keystone has been in operation for less than a year and it was predicted to spill no more than once every seven years, this is yet another troubling indicator that U.S. safety regulations intended for pipelines moving conventional oil may not be sufficient for pipelines moving diluted bitumen.

A minor in England invited 21,000 guests to her 15^th birthday. The girl, a pupil at Sir John Lawes School, had meant to invite only 15 friends to her 15th birthday party, but within hours of appearing online the event escalated out of control as her mistake was subjected to online ridicule. At one stage, 21,000 Facebook users had clicked the RSVP button signaling they would attend the party, including fake celebrity accounts in the name of Justin Bieber, Professor Stephen Hawking, Stevie Wonder, Susan Boyle and Rick Astley.

This month also marks the beginning of the OC Partnership’s machinations to convince the voters, the Funder’s Roundtable, and assorted 2020 Plan dignitaries that 21,000, the current number of homeless, is somehow a magical number, exempt from the laws of physics, to wit:

21,000 times $100 still equals $2,100,000

21,000 times $1000 still equals $21,000,000

21,000 times $2156 still equals $45,276,000

21,000 times $12,000 still equals $252,000,000

Clearly there is some secret dividing going on; the OC Partnership cannot really believe, that we believe they are going to treat each of the OC’s 21,000 homeless people with equanimity. And they won’t. As always, the real plan is not to end homelessness, which would, of course, require dealing with every last person. No, the real plan is precisely the same as their current plan. Neither Larry Haynes nor Jim Palmer is clever enough or honest enough to have attracted their current million dollar bundles of voter and donor support without a plan. Their current plan is to help a few folks, talk about it every chance they get, and to try not to explain that neither one of them has ever, in any given year, helped anywhere near even 1000 people become less homeless, so that leaves 19,000, or pretty much everyone, homeless, and completely un-helped.

Now when I bail a swamp, my first inclination is to choose someone who has a plan for the alligators, so I have absolutely nothing but respect for the 2020 Plan committee in choosing the OC Partnership, which I’ll take the candid liberty of calling the Jim and Larry Plan. Now, Jim and Larry are both old hands at choosing which alligators can be made into purses. Given that both are still both deserving of and nearly free from nasty bites, what else could you do? This time, however, the Federal Government has committed to draining the swamp, and these two purse-snatchers know little or nothing about that.

Eliminating homelessness is going to involve considerably more than lining up new donors who are again willing to completely ignore the bottom line: Neither Jim nor Larry has any expertise at caring for homeless people for anything nearly as economical as $1000 per month. Jim has a $30,000,000 palace that houses 150 people, graduating a little over one a week, and Mercy house has a $12,000,000 palace that houses a mere 25 people, some of whom will likely die before they ever “graduate.” Taking them at their word, we’ll need just over a quarter billion dollars to get the job done the first year alone! So any talk of ending homelessness might have to be put to rest, at least with these two spenders.

I think it’s time we invite both of them to get their hands out of our purse, and admit that never once in their lives have they ever held the honest end of a shovel. Bailing the swamp will require an entirely new way of doing business.

The best first step is to fire the guys that were in charge of the old way.

After all, its how we got here.

Easter 2011

After fifteen years as a penniless Catholic Worker, I have it on good authority that we Catholics are very confused about the Nature of Easter – with me more than most. Clearly we are called to celebrate Resurrection. But are we not also called to recreate it? Let me explain, if not the answer, at least the source of my confusion.

For fifteen years I have been explaining the Catholic Worker. At first, we explained it in reference to what it was not: We’re not a shelter, not a government salve, we’re not do-gooders or bleeding-heart liberals by any measure. We don’t believe in government, and not because of any Johnny come lately tools who dislike taxes but love Corporations. No, we’re the old-fashioned kind of anti-Government people – the kind hanged by the Pinkerton’s after the Haymarket Riots. The kind they called Bolsheviks. We too have that terrible air of superiority that comes from seeing ourselves as “principled.”

So, this Easter, I thought it might be helpful, given that I’m already regarded as hopelessly arrogant, to illuminate just what the holiday meant before we festooned it with Rabbits and Easter Egg Hunts. I’d like to engage in a little bit of Resurrection by telling you what Easter means, before it’s too late.

In order to do this, I’m going to return to an exercise I invented in front of a classroom full of Catholic computer nerds: “If you were going to write a program to do Christianity,” I asked, “how would it start?” You’d have to define your terms, of course, just like you need to specify what daily means, on top of what bread means, but after all the definitions were loaded, and all the Psalms and Proverbs and the entire contents of both the Old and New Testaments were safely locked into Read Only Memory, what would the first instruction be? After a silent and conflicted pause that says volumes about the state of Catholic education, I said:

How about starting with the Greatest Commandment?

And then it occurred to me. How about it; how about starting that way in reality? These young nerds were Confirmed, and therefore fully mature Catholics. They were scarcely older than the BVM Herself when she decided to improve humanity, so why cut them, or you, any slack?

This Easter, how about starting with the Greatest Commandment?

Take some time, this year, after finally declining meat every Friday for Lent, and after doing your Easter Duty, to discover what occupied virtually every Theologian for the first 300 years of our Church: The Greatest Commandment. Discover for yourself whether it’s a suggestion, or an aside, or just maybe, a Commandment from the Lord Christ Himself. Then discover what it means. Read or better, listen to the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke, Chapter 10. And then, like the computer program imagined, define Biblically the terms used therein, especially Mercy.

Maybe even discover the Catholic definition of Mercy. It’s neither pity, nor forbearance, nor empathy, nor any emotion. It’s work. Work done on behalf of neighbors who need Mercy.

And, with Forgiveness, it is the thread that will knit the World together and Resurrect us, tearing us from the maw of Death and delivering us into the Arms of Christ. It’s Resurrection.

Let’s all start to practice it this Easter.

Wake up and Smell the Coffee, and more...

In December I got in a discussion regarding the public health aspects of serving the homeless with Ms. Carolyn McInerney, Special Projects Manager for the County CEO. As we together sought ways to better utilize the homeless serving location (moving it to Eddie West field!) in the Civic Center a primary constraint surprised us both.

It would appear the a number of simple safeguards like those explained in the food-handler class Bishop Soto made me take have been blocked by deputies of the OC Sheriff. In two public buildings they decide, on the fly and without due process, which members of the public can use the toilets therein.

I suggested that were the deputies to cease preventing the homeless from washing their hands after defecating, would could all celebrate both public health and civil rights victories!

It is not clear to me as a former SNCC volunteer, what law and guidelines currently exist to inform these deputies' instant selection of those persons worthy of the use of the public restrooms in the Supervisor's building. Perhaps some old-school Civil Rights lawyer could ask them?

I have never seen a computer queried to check for warrants or security risks, or even an enumeration of the risk individual homeless persons might present to office equipment.

While the ex-Treasurer adopted the expedient of both blocking a needed fire-exit and forcing all persons to pass muster with a deputy before using that building's non-public restrooms, the Supervisor's Building process is far more suspect. The lobby guards there apparently decide, on a case by case basis reminiscent of the segregated facilities of the 50's, which people are fit to use the restrooms therein, and which are sentenced to the lone "homeless-ready" restroom near the fighter jet.

In spite of the fact that most of the volunteer groups serve the homeless at 7:00PM, the only public restroom nearby closes at 8:00PM. When we Catholic Workers serve our 500 hot brunches each week, the Supervisor and Treasurer building bathrooms are still available, but only to those who meet the approval of the deputies stationed therein. Late nights are off the schedule completely.

Needless to say, when people who cannot wash their hands after defecating in the bush get coffee in the morning, they're still as Green as you or I! They dutifully replace two of the three hot drink lids that always come off the stack when you pry for just one with a filthy HepC feces contaminated fingernail. Same with those pesky stirrers.

We'll still be paying those deputies' pensions for their fine service long after you and I are denied coverage for the HepC we contracted from ingesting human waste with our morning java. The Sheriff will perhaps tell our relatives, by way of a cursory "serve and protect" eulogy, that HepC is always "drug related."

In the OC, it's apparently also deputy related!

Dwight Smith,
OC Catholic Worker

An Open Letter to Volunteers

We’d like to tell you the great secret of volunteering at the Catholic Worker. It’s more properly a mystery, not unlike the Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark. It wasn’t as if Jesus ever really concealed anything from anyone, it’s just that, at first, only the woman with the spikenard hair balm could see the implications of the situation clearly.

That’s what so few of us do here – see the implications of these women’s situation clearly. It’s not so much that we’re called to do anything more expensive or time-consuming than paint their nails, or condition their hair, or just break bread with them. The secret is to simultaneously realize the implications of their situation.

In order to do that we might start with listening, which is a good deal more complicated that it first appears.

Now I know very little about listening. Had I not been confronted with people who wanted to speak to me for fifteen years, I wouldn’t know squat. But since they were in my house, they were hard to avoid, so learn I did.

One of the enduring realizations I’ve gleaned from my sojourn is a startling paraphrase of a vile drug fable: “God will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no God.” While undeniably true, none of us seem to grasp the obvious implication: Poor people spend a great deal of time listening to God.

As a result, there is a chance than the poor are fairly connected up there, and, as a result there is an good chance that, were we to confine our gifts to the spiritual realm, we could be “bringing coal to Newcastle.”

Listening might well go better if we could adopt the mental posture of a student rather than of a teacher. After all, we are all hoping we never become homeless, and we are working to minimize the negative aspects of their homelessness by listening to them, so what advice do we really have to offer them about being homeless?

What then shall we students study with our newfound technique of listening?

A first guess might involve those things that are priceless, the virtues: candor, humility, charity, longsuffering, forgiveness. These are the things that often impress those who listen to the homeless. These are learned capabilities that, like most human studies, involve both book work and field study.

The bookwork is the Sunday homily, the years of developing a mental map of the person of Jesus Christ so that we can intuit how to imitate him. The fieldwork is listening to the homeless, while bearing in mind the great rejoicing in Heaven because we have become enrolled as students in the secret school of virtue earned vicariously by another’s suffering.

Understanding the implications of their situation as they imitate Christ, if we can.

Murder in the Manger, Wink, Wink

Recently we enjoyed the third episode of the Isaiah House Theater Company. The Company is our initial attempt to accomplish the first part of an enormous task – to ask everyone in Orange County to see the homeless as people, and to see all people as beloved creatures of God.

You see, even my police friends are starting to talk about “rehabilitating” the homeless. One in particular has lately become very unfamiliar to me. He sounds nothing like the tough, take-no-prisoners cop I’m used to, talking now like a Social Worker about hidden mental illness, the scourge of micro-malnutrition, and the importance of counseling for helping the homeless face their fears. He’s now thinking they’re patients in need of a program!

He’s not wrong, exactly, he’s just forty years too late.

When I was in college just four short decades ago I worked at County Mental Health in San Diego. Back then, CMH was really just a bus station for people on their way to Patton State Hospital, and even though people had different diagnoses, there was really only one main reason people were sent away: grave disability. Back then, doctors and police and social workers would actually assess whether or not a person might become homeless. Those likely to fail at supporting themselves were deemed too ill to continue in society and were bussed north to be cared for by experts. State hospitals were the experts in curing the homeless.

The problem now is that Orange County has begun to become officially “therapeutic” toward the homeless. (I mean “therapeutic” in the sense of a something really expensive which has nothing to do with either food or lodging!) Now that the state hospitals have gone the way of the dodo, it turns out they’re the one thing we really needed all along. Not having any, we can all feel much better about abandoning the poor who are really beyond our help in any case. Why start treating someone who needs something we don’t have and couldn’t begin to afford anyway?

Now this is exactly the problem our theater company is confronting, and it’s precisely why we need your help to make everything better. You are exactly the people God created to do this job, and an acting exercise we do every Sunday proves it.

Most weeks we do a lesson called “Wink Murder” and once I explain it you’ll see why it illuminates the very thing God ordered for His own gift this holiday season, and why we Catholics are just the people to give it to him.

Wink Murder is an ensemble-building task with three elements: a murderer, a detective and a crowd. The two stars of this bit are really the least important people in the whole thing, so it’s fair that they’re given very little acting to do. The crowd is where all the real work is done. It’s their job to be the ornate frame around a simple sketch, to create an atmosphere where the simplest of dramas is played out and writ large upon the heart of the audience:

A detective tries to guess the identity of a disguised criminal who kills with a stagey wink, and the crowd elevates this guessing and winking to dramatic art by being the element that creates the tension from which the drama springs forth. Winking at a person to “cue” their death scene seems like nursery school stuff, and it would be, if not for the crowd. It’s their job to make the simple act of getting winked at first, a mystery, and second, a discovery of the greatest importance.

While the behavior of the crowd transforms a wink into a nod, each homeless actor in our talented company is simultaneously living out their existential insistence that they are not helpless incurables in need of an outmoded and unavailable cure. Similarly, we Catholics are called this and every Christmas to remind everyone that we were once in exactly the same boat, and every year it’s our job to get that ship out of dry-dock and sail once more into the battle for the World.

Now that Christmas has become a soul killing celebration of buying the least objectionable gift we can afford for people who really don’t need anything so cheap, it might be time for us to help show everyone how to behave as if Christ changed everything the moment He arrived.

You see, in the days before Christ we fell before sin like undefended nursery school children in the blink of an eye. With no one to help us, to show us the way, we were defeated that quickly. And then, into the world came our tiny Savior. Bringing nothing more lasting than insight as a solution for the mystery of sin, our play began. In the light of His life, and with the help of His body, we began to discover what was wrong. And in exactly the same way that the crowd is the very most important job in the exercise of Wink Murder, we are again being offered the most important role available in the annual recreation of each Christmas. We, the crowd, have the job of making this the Christmas where we discover what is wrong and how we can heal. Especially when it seems like years since the hospital’s been open or the wrapped boxes we tear apart have been filled with anything of lasting value.

In the same way our little theater company is going to make people re-member the forgotten humanity of the homeless crowd, we Catholics must together make the world again see the possibility of regaining our own humanity through the miracle of that ancient transformation.

The Christmas story, written as it was by Christ’s disciples, necessarily focuses upon Him, and His mother and father, upon their harrowing journey and His dangerous birth in a manger and His even more dangerous identification as the intended victim of Herod’s murderous fear. This year, as in every year, those roles are filled. This year, as in every subsequent year, the only role left to us is the crowd. Thank God it’s the role we born to play, and it’s the role wherein God, in His life-giving humility, depends upon us for the meaning of the Season to become revealed.

To become detected.

A videotape of the Virgin Birth could not have shown the terrible importance of that singular, and yet ostensibly ordinary event. A baby is born to a poor family in impoverished surroundings. We wonder why God chose such humble surroundings for such an important birth. It was not just the Infant, but the entire world in that manger, born anew each Christmas by our willingness to heed it’s meaning. Our willingness to act as if the World, and every single person in it, is saved.

Neither we, nor our homeless thespians, nor their brothers and sisters in the street are beyond His reach. Through us, in our role as members of the crowd, we can re-member this Christmas those people our government has blasphemously deemed beyond saving. All we need to do is bear witness to the terrible and similar state we ourselves were in before His birth; to bear witness that no person is beyond His reach or beneath His concern. All we need is to remember that the earliest meaning of the word sin was “debt” to illuminate our ongoing need for Christ to fill the current chasm in our hearts, and for us solve the mystery of the murderers afoot in the world.

All we need to do is throw away the terrible and deadly script we’re annually given by society, and act instead as if, by being invited together to detect and display the holy hidden meaning of this, His world, we’re saved.

This Christmas, if you’d like to play a central role in the care and serving of our brothers and sisters in Christ, give us a call. It’s a killer role you’ll die for.

How Perfect is that?