George Packard, retired schoolteacher was walking. It was a beautiful Los Angeles morning. The rain had let up, and the sunshine poured through the clear, blue skies. He headed to a favorite cafe where he had a cappuccino. Ah, the delights of a cultured life! George savored the foam and the coffee beneath.

George had grown weary of writing. He would still write now and then; writing had become something of a habit. Fortuitously, the Bumba fellow seemed to actually welcome his contributions to that Bumbastories blog. The blogging world seemed to demand a constant stream of silly – and especially personal and silly – jottings and poems and other ditties. All in order to be liked. And being liked was a quantifiable commodity. Poor Bumba, thought George.

George was reading yet another layman’s book about physics. Quantum mechanics. A very excellent book by Dr. M. Y. Han titled The Probable Universe, an Owner’s Guide to Quantum Physics, which laid out the essentials of the theory with no math – a mistake, thought George.

The old dichotomy between particles and waves was carefully elucidated, which was very helpful.

Someone had asked him recently why anyone (this person in particular) needed to understand quantum mechanics/wave theory. One could live a perfectly normal and decent life without knowing these things, she argued. George was at a loss to respond.

Finally, he began: “Well, if we want to know what this world is – how it works…. then we need to know about quantum theory.”

“Because,” he continued, “the world we see is a bit of an illusion, a paradox. Matter, which is what we think we are, is also a wave: radiation that requires no medium through which to traverse the universe. So everything can be in two, maybe more, places at the same time, depending on how you measure it. And by definition there was a limit to how well you could measure anything. That’s what the world is.”

Of course it’s incomprehensible. Still, it’s good to know where you stand. Apparently no one, not even the physicists, understands how this conception of the world can be. But we know because of eighty years of careful, repeated, verified measurements – and even through practical applications of quantum mechanics like laser technology – that quantum theory is correct. It works.

“So there we are,” thought George.

George Packard returned home. The sky was now darkening.

George Packard took a seat at the back of the #20 bus. He had in his mind a story, or rather a series of little stories. He would write about his own adventures. Each day would be another adventure. True, the #20 bus was not a very auspicious start he had to admit. Not very adventuresome. Nor adventurous.

Yes, he George Packard, retired schoolteacher, would have to set out somewhere. To travel. All that “finding what you need in your own backyard stuff” was for losers. No, to have adventure, one must set out on the road!

What was that song? Yes. The Key to the Highway. The Highway, the Road, La Strada. The moving, the movement toward another place, another life. A life of adventure. The high seas perhaps…..

George Packard snapped out of his reverie just in time. He pulled the cord to request a stop. The heavy bus lunged toward the curb and jerked to a sudden stop at Crescent Drive. George stepped down from the bus and began his day.

George would go on to explain that the detection in 1965 of this faint, cold, micro-wave radiation – a remnant from a hundred thousand or so years after the Big Bang – very strongly confirms the Big Bang Theory of Cosmology. Big Bang Physicists had already predicted the existence of such a radiation. It was an interesting story of scientific research. And the kids liked the dramatic story of it’s discovery.

Even more interesting was the overall picture (in the micro-wave radiation detected) of a homogeneous dispersal of radiation – a state of homogeneity that existed in the universe at the time that this radiation had been sent out.

The Microwave Background Radiation was also isotropic. Isotrophy means that something looks the same from wherever you look. When we look out from planet earth on the surrounding universe it looks the same to us in all directions. Either we, on earth, are in a very unique position in the universe or it is that we are simply non-central. That indeed we are such a speck in the course of time and space. The universe is no longer homogeneous. Matter has formed. Since the time this micro-wave radiation was emitted, stars, galaxies, kangaroos and shopping malls have come and gone. Actually, I would say we’re not in a bad place at all.

George Packard, retired schoolteacher, continued with his Story of the P’s.

George resumed the story with a haiku:

Luxuriant and moist/The grasses of the meadow/Stretched before him

The woman, Rozina, was already far ahead, forging a path through the tall grasses of Tuolumne Meadows. She had recovered fully from her injury and walked well now. They had come down from Reno by foot, and now had passed through the crumbled old gates of Yosemite National Park. They had camped the night before just before the top of the Tioga Pass; it had been a difficult night because of the cold. But now they had descended into the glorious meadows and high grasslands of the Tuolumne….

It was in juxtaposition to his father that George was compelled to view his mother and the rest of the family. He felt, much like his father must have felt, that he would just rather not deal with them at all. And that, in actuality, they could and would manage better without him most of the time. Furthermore that – once he was apart from them – he, George Packard, seven-year-old boy or 66-year-old retiree from the public school system, could actually be happy.

In 1970, George Packard returned from the Peace Corps. Following nearly three years in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, George had already opted for a different life style. Not that he was a hippie or anything like that, but George definitely understood the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” message. In Guatemala he had lived with real families. Decent, wonderful people of all sorts. Falsehood was not so closely interwoven into their lives’ fabric as it was in the Packard home. The peasants’ first response was generally one of trust. Surely there was horrid cruelty and awful tragedy in life, especially in the world of the poor. But there was no need to seek after it, to chase it down. It was better to avoid evil. Most people knew to be good, to follow the golden rule most of the time.

However, his own family was marked and scarred by his mother’s and his grandmother’s constant scheming. Always they harbored some ulterior motive, something that they were planning. Some scheme. Something that would make them richer and elevate their precious social standing. It meant little for them to lie. The end, usually some sort of social promotion, justified the means for them. And over time nearly any means was permissible. Their goals were the usual ones. They wanted money, prestige, respect. They sought membership in the great American upper class. And, as they were thwarted by the sinking of the great Packard flagship, and consequentially thwarted by their dwindling income, they became increasingly wicked, and more desperate.

George Packard unpacked his lunch and ate it with a Starbucks in the park outside the library. Another day, another dollar. George Packard was getting used to the idea of being retired. No more need to produce, or to make money. He didn’t really need that much money any more. His pension was more than sufficient. Now that he was retired he used less than before. He had often taught his science class students about the “carbon footprint” concept. It was in the curriculum. Well, carbon-wise, George was tip-to-ing down the tulips; he was leaving barely a whisper of a trail. He rode his bicycle, he took the bus, he walked, he saved plastic bottles and bags to recycle. Perhaps he was atoning for the Packard family’s heavy contribution to the American CO² overload: their gas-guzzling sins. But simply it made no sense for human beings to be polluting the earth. So very simply George Packard tried to do as little polluting as he could. Yes, George was a bit of a Luddite, a back-to-nature boy at heart. He seemed to gravitate toward a simple life.

When he had been in San Salvador someone had once told him that making life easier for one’s self needed to be a goal in one’s life. George, the young Peace Corps volunteer, had stated that the fixing of one’s goal, and then the committed application of all one’s efforts toward the attainment of that goal was the only way he wanted to live. His friend Juan, an older man, had responded in a fatherly way, saying, “I don’t know, George, why you always want to make things so hard for yourself. Look to make things more easy for you self”.

Chapter VI

Sitting on the #20 bus, headed for the library, George Packard scouted the women on the seats in front of him. There were some very lovely young girls up front. They laughed, tossing their long hair back. Ah, but they were too young; they were not appropriate prey for George Packard the hunter. Of course George Packard realized he was an old man, but it remained a life-long habit (and pleasure) of his to “prowl” the women. So George Packard, retired school teacher, was “on the prowl” again. On the #20 bus headed for the library.

George Packard lived a life of fantasy nowadays. But he could quite easily come down from his fanciful daydreams. He could descend to the day-to-day world from his fantasy heights, and function quite adequately in the “real” world. This adeptness, this mental adroitness at switching modes, at quickly and smoothly changing gears from his fantasy world to the real world now enabled Mr. Packard to engage in fantasy thoughts quite often. Because he very rarely got caught. No one knew that he was perceiving “real life” in a very personal, “unreal” manner. He was getting away with it. Somehow, though, George Packard considered it a weakness, an indulgence.

“Better to keep your mind on things that are clean and pure”, had said his father. George Packard remembered clearly his father’s words, spoken to him while they were out in the garage. George had been six or seven years old. Dad talked while he worked: “That’s right, George. That’s right, my son. You see how sweet and clean this motor runs. Well, that’s what I mean. I mean, that’s how you want things in your life. That’s how you want to be yourself….” George’s memory of the exact words faded. But clearly his father had pointed out to him something important to him and fundamental in life, an ideal toward which to strive.

Of course, the vocabulary of machines and motors were only the words, the language in which his father, the mechanic, was comfortable. Joseph Packard was trying in his simple way to give to his son a gift, something larger. George remembered the grace of his father’s movements: the way he handled the heavy tools, the quiet, calm confident manner he assumed whenever he worked with his hands.

Joseph Packard seemed comfortable only in his great, cavernous garage – a large wooden barn from the old days. Outside the garage, his father was less graceful. In the house, at meals, at holiday gatherings, and whenever they were all together with his mother and grandmother present, father was quieter, and more reserved. Nearly detached from the rest of the family. Joseph Packard had simply never learned to be in the world of people and he was was not familiar with it the way he was familiar with the world of machinery.

George Packard remembered his father very fondly.

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez led the protesters on an impromptu trek to Times Square. (Photo: Osvaldo Ribeiro Filho)

Seventh Avenue was occupied for about an hour this weekend. Holiday traffic stopped as several hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters ran through the streets on a spontaneous Saturday night march that saw them dodging cars and cops along a 2.6 mile route from the West Village to Times Square. It was just part of a busy day for the movement that included dozens of arrests, and culminated in the short, strange occupation of the porch of an office building in the Financial District and showed off all the strengths–and weaknesses of the Occupy movement.

Protests began at noon in Juan Pablo Duarte Square, a public park at the intersection of Canal Street and Sixth Avenue across the street from an expansive, vacant lot owned by an Episcopalian Church, Trinity Wall Street. Yesterday’s protests were ostensibly held to persuade Trinity Church to allow occupiers to establish an encampment in the lot and to celebrate the third month of the movement. It was to be the beginning of “Occupation 2.0,” a new phase for the movement following its eviction from its original home in Zuccotti Park on November 15.

At the protest, we saw protesters who have kept the occupation alive by staying in squats and shelters and politicians eager to see the movement affect city policy. However, by the end of the day, the efforts to establish a second encampment were successful and the movement’s many believers and political supporters were still searching for a strategy to move forward.

At about 3:30 p.m., a group of 49 protesters scaled the chainlink fence surrounding the lot. They included Bishop George Packard and Reverend Earl Kooperkamp, pastor of St. Mary’s Church in West Harlem. Police quickly swooped in and arrested the interlopers. While the scene inside the park was orderly, on the other side of the fence police officers swarmed the crowds gathered alongside and pushed them away from the lot. As the police pushed protesters down the block, Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez shook the fence and chanted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Councilman Rodriguez, who was arrested during the Zuccotti Park raid, arrived at Duarte Square at about half past noon Saturday.

Councilman Rodriguez told The Politicker he hoped the movement would stand against any attempt by City Hall to balance the budget by cutting social programs rather than raising taxes on the wealthy.

“This is the most important peaceful movement that we have seen in the last couple of decades,” Councilman Rodriguez said. “I hope also that when, in February, Mayor Bloomberg comes to present his executive budget that will be based on a $2 billion deficit, that this movement will stand that same day letting Mayor Bloomberg know that we will not accept–that we will not balance a budget that has a deficit of $2 billion for the next fiscal year if that balance is based on cutting on the working class and the middle class.”

Councilman Rodriguez was joined in Duarte Square by Councilman Jumaane Williams who was also arrested at Occupy Wall Street two days after the raid when he participated in an act of civil disobedience with 98 other protesters.

“I’m here to support like I have been supporting from the beginning. I think this is a powerful movement,” Councilman Williams told The Politicker. “I think the message has been clear from the beginning there’s economic disparities that are unacceptable in this city and this country and I think its up to people like myself my colleague Ydanis, our illustrious mayor and governor to take that message and turn it into policies.”

For about an hour after the arrests in the lot, demonstrators remained in Duarte Square. We spotted many familiar faces from Zuccotti Park. Since the eviction, several of the protesters said they were squatting in foreclosed homes reclaimed by the movement and at churches in Newark and Park Slope that offer shelter to occupiers. A mohawked man told us he preferred the squats.

“I stay away from the churches,” he said. “People there are getting scabies.”

Shortly before 5 p.m., the protesters began marching out of Duarte Square. Councilman Rodriguez jogged up to the front of the crowd and helped carry a banner that waved over the marchers. An Occupy Wall Street organizer named Aaron Black led the way up Varick Street while communicating via cellphone with group members who manned the official Twitter and text message alert system that told protesters where to go. Mr. Black said the march was headed to Trinity Church Rector James Cooper’s house in the West Village.

A column of police scooters buzzed past the march in an attempt to keep the protesters confined to the sidewalk. Protesters ran, at times at full speed, in an effort to prevent police from setting up a blockade. When the march arrived at Rector Cooper’s block, Charlton Street, police had already sealed the street off with orange netting and a column of officers in riot gear.

Protesters began running through the streets. Slamming on the hoods of cars and screaming into the night they encircled the block twice before going North up 7th Avenue. One cartwheeled through an intersection. Gridlock reigned as the marchers migrated off the sidewalks en masse. It became clear the group didn’t know where they were headed.

“We’re going to the bank!” one shouted.

At the front of the column, Mr. Black talked with the other Occupy organizers. They wanted him to turn the march around to Zuccotti Park. Marchers jogging alongside Mr. Black advocated heading Times Square. Mr. Black wanted to stick with the originally planned destination–the lobby of an office building at 60 Wall Street that was to be the staging point for a “Plan B” action at an undisclosed second location codenamed, “Perseus.” The Times Square faction got their way.

Police managed to set up a blockade at Seventh Avenue and 29th Street. Several marchers were grabbed by officers including a bicyclist who was thrown to the ground and cuffed by a trio of angry cops. Orange kettling nets were used to trap many of the protesters in a small pen including Councilman Rodriguez, his press secretary, David Segal, and The Politicker.

Police surrounded the nets and prevented protesters from leaving the area. Mr. Segal flashed his City Council ID and asked an officer to let Councilman Rodriguez leave.

“OK, City Council, get back and shut up. How about that?” the officer said shoving Mr. Segal away from the edge of the nets.

Councilman Rodriguez eventually managed to persuade other officers to let him out. The Politicker remained kettled in with several protesters and other reporters. Evenutally, without explanation, the police took down the barriers and allowed us to proceed up the block.

After their brush with the nets, the marchers resolved to remain on the sidewalks until they reached Times Square. When they arrived, several police officers on horseback were waiting for them.

As the protesters surged into the streets of Times Square, the officers rounded them up and pulled several onto police wagons. The cops quickly managed to push protesters back onto the sidewalks where they reconvened to hold an impromptu rally on the small pedestrian plaza in the heart of the square.

According to texts and tweets, the “Plan B” operation at “Perseus” was still in effect, so we hopped on a train downtown to check out the scene at 60 Wall Street. It was bitter cold. Councilman Rodriguez pulled his hood over his head to keep warm. Mr. Black said they would stay until about 100 people arrived before departing for the, still undisclosed, second location.

After about an hour, the group had swelled to sufficient size and Mr. Black began leading them toward “Perseus.” No one in the crowd knew where they were going, only that this would be the site of a new occupation. Many carried tents.

Shortly after 10 p..m., Mr. Black stopped at a freezing concrete porch in front of One New York Plaza. He explained that the building’s regulations made it uniquely suited for an occupation.

“This is privately owned public space, it’s open 24 hours a day,” Mr. Black said to the crowd. ”We can stay here.”

Many of the marchers were dismayed. Signs on the door showed the space was owned by Brookfield Properties, the same property management group that held the deed to Zuccotti Park and asked for the police to evict the encampment. Like, Zuccotti Park, One New York Plaza permits “passive recreation.” Camping and lying down are prohibited. Some of the aspiring occupiers left, eager to avoid the bitter cold and fighting the same battle they lost in Zuccotti Park. Others got into the spirit.

“Let’s passively recreate!” one man shouted.

As the crowd of protesters at One New York Plaza dwindled, their attempted occupation of the plaza became a perfect metaphor for the issues facing the Occupy Wall Street movement as it enters its third month. Clearly, hundreds of people are willing to give many hours of their time risking arrest and bad weather to protest, however when they show up, the mission isn’t entirely clear.

Councilman Rodriguez stood by and watched. He was soon joined by Councilman Williams. The politicians observed as a staffer from the building came down and asked the crowd to leave.

“Building management does not want you here, you can’t be here,” the man said.

Councilman Rodriguez urged the protesters to wait until they received an order to leave in writing, but he didn’t stick around to see the end result.

“I would stay, but I have to get to my daughters, Councilman Rodriguez said. He had been with the protesters for nearly 12 hours.

Eventually, The Politicker, Councilman Williams and the remaining protesters left too. As the night ended, the future of the movement still remained–both literally and figuratively–unclear.

This past Saturday, December 17th, was the three-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Back in September, people began sleeping in a privately-owned public space a few blocks away from Wall Street in protest of the gross economic malfeasance the investors on Wall Street, the higher-ups at big banks, and the United States government has perpetrated against the American people, and people throughout the world. Whether or not you agree with OWS’s tactics and all of its beliefs, you can’t help but read the paper, watch the news, or look at your bank account and realize that, to quote the signage of one protester, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”

While I’m an adamant supporter of Occupy Wall Street, as anyone who has read this blog will likely know, I’ll admit that I was conflicted about the plans for D17, the anniversary celebration. OWS was going to take over a space that was not public, was fenced off, a space whose owners made it very clear that they did not want to be occupied. The owners of Duarte Square, Trinity Wall Street, have helped out OWS in the past, providing shelter and office space, food and some verbal support. This further complicated things in my mind, OWS was not quite biting the hand that feeds it, but close.

Do churches owe a movement that is committed to social equality anything? Trinity Wall Street is an Episcopal church that also happens to own about a third of the land south of Canal Street in Manhattan. They are equal parts church and corporation, like so many other mega-churches throughout the United States. A Christian church, you would think, would be committed to little more than the words of Christ himself, words like “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” or “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves” or “sell what you possess and give to the poor.” And while Trinity doesn’t owe anybody anything, you’d at least think that following Jesus’s words would be important to them.

OWS weren’t asking for money, or shelter, or anything, really. They wanted to set up tents on a piece of concrete that no one uses and is fenced off from the public. An actual presence is important to the movement, a place to meet and gather and discuss and call home. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that a church, supposedly devoted to spreading God’s message of helping the poor etc., would give up a scrap of land, of which they own billions of dollars worth, to create a home base for a movement they supposedly ideologically agree with. But that was too much to ask.

Not much happened between noon and 3pm on D17. Me and the handful of friends I was with hung out in the cold, talking, milling, and eventually Eric and I were asked to hold a sign on the side of the road, “Tune in to 99.5 FM/Follow the revolution.” 99.5 WBAI worked in conjunction with OWS, broadcasting a series of performers, including Lou Reed, from their studio. Protesters were encouraged to bring radios so that everyone could have a party in the park. This worked and didn’t, but it was done in good spirit.

At about 3pm, we headed to a Starbucks to warm up and use the bathroom. I was wearing an OWS button on my coat that someone had handed to me weeks earlier at another event. The cashier saw it, clapped her hands with glee, smiled, and didn’t charge me for my coffee. We waited nearly an hour in the immense bathroom line and when we made it back to the park, nearly everyone was gone. We thought the police had cleared them out.

From a ways down Varick Street we heard a loud but muffled “WE. ARE. THE 99%!” The protesters had gone a-marchin’. When the march returned, they took the square.

Banners held by protesters concealed two small sets of staircases. The staircases were put up against the fence, and the first to climb them was retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, followed by dozens more. I chose not to occupy the space, I didn’t want to get arrested and knew that those who did go in, would be.

But that didn’t spare me from getting roughed up by the police. As the crowd chanted “BLOOMBERG’S ARMY!” and “FROM NEW YORK TO GREECE, FUCK THE POLICE!” you could see the anger in the police growing. No one wants to feel like they’re anyone’s lackey, and it surely didn’t make them feel good to know that Bloomberg himself claimed the NYPD were his army recently. As police attempted to clear the sidewalk on Grand Street where the stairs were going up, I was pushed multiple times by an officer, a nightstick held by both his hands and pressed across my chest. Behind me was a police van that I was repeatedly pushed into. “There’s a fucking van behind me! Where am I supposed to go?” was what I had to yell, over and over, before he let me go. And minutes later, on the park side of Duarte Square, I came across a man being hassled by riot-geared cops who wouldn’t let him near the fence to the Square. “What law am I breaking?” he kept asking them. He showed identification and was an assistant to the NYC Attorney General. A whiteshirt refused to give the man a straight answer and turned his back. The man tapped the whiteshirt on the shoulder and a swarm of riot-geared foot soldiers grabbed the man and threw him, multiple times, into me. I was pushed in the process, too. A stream of obscenities flew from my mouth and a friend held me back, thank God. Not that I’d ever touch a cop, because they are untouchable as this whole scene proved, but if a cop decided that I was out of line, all of my rights would’ve dissolved with the crack of a baton.

I didn’t shoot this video of George Packard being taken to jail, because I wasn’t arrested that day, but he points out that Trinity doesn’t want to help OWS because the people who can afford to lease land that Trinity owns won’t do business with Trinity if they help OWS. It’s disgusting to know that a church even worries about doing business with anyone. I’m no Christian, so what churches do in general I find odd and strange, but in my mind, the last thing a church should ever worry about is pissing off its business partners, or even having business partners in the first place. A church shouldn’t have business partners. A church should be there to a) worship their god and b) serve the community. Why else are they given tax-exempt status, if not for being a charitable organization?

It’s really too bad that Bloomberg’s Army has also become Trinity’s army, as well as the army of all those who oppose the common man and the struggle for financial and social equality. Though I’m not a Christian, I’m reminded of the Centurions in the Bible. While the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the time, the ones who believed in strictly following Rabbinical law but also loved making a buck, called for the execution of Jesus, it was the Centurions, Rome’s army, who carried out the orders, who dragged Jesus through the streets, who tortured him, who hung him on a cross to die and then gambled for his clothes. But it was also a Centurion, Cornelius, who was the first Gentile to convert to Christianity. I wonder who the first convert from the NYPD will be? Because they’re with OWS, they’re part of the 99%, whether they like it or not. It’s only a matter of time.

Duarte Square wasn’t taken that day, and OWS still does not have a physical base that’s open and transparent and welcoming. But that’s ok, for now. The few thousand who showed up on Saturday despite the cold have shown that the movement is still alive, even though corporations, church corporations, and their minions have tried to crush it.

I’ve blogged about the relationship between Trinity and the Occupy Wall Street protestors before. Things have only gotten more tense in the last month. There was actually something of a moment of grace last week, when retired Bishop George Packer and his wife, accompanied by the Rector of Trinity and his wife, visited the OWS encampment. After conversation, many of the protestors attended services at Trinity. Read about it here.

Unfortunately, that was only a temporary break in the growing tension. On Friday, Bishop of New York Mark Sisk and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori weighed in, urging the protestors to abandon their demands that Trinity allow them use of a portion of Duarte Square for their encampment.

These events brought front page coverage in The New York Times and increasing debate among Episcopalians about the controversy. Elisabeth Drescher offers her perspective here.

Today, Bishop Packard, who has been advocating more loudly on behalf of the protestors, was arrested for entering the disputed area of Duarte Square.

As Drescher points out in her essay:

Trinity Wall Street and the Episcopal Church are, it seems, trying to maintain a delicate balance in their approach to Occupy Wall Street, and their consistent ministry to participants in the movement is laudable. Their active chaplaincy, preaching, and material support has been a powerful reminder of the moral role that churches and other religious groups continue to play even as institutional religion becomes more and more irrelevant in everyday life. Indeed, Trinity Wall Street and many other Episcopal Churchcommunities, have made clear that “being church” is much more than maintaining a building where fewer and fewer people gather to worship for an hour or so on Sundays. They have illustrated the Christian understanding of the call of the faithful to be Christ’s body in the world throughout the Occupy protests, and this has made me proud to be an Episcopalian.

Unfortunately, with the responses from Sisk and Jefforts Schori, as well as the ongoing response from Trinity, the Episcopal Church seems once again to be coming down on the side of the powers that be. For Trinity, that might not be surprising given the amount of real estate they own in the area. I also know well how difficult it is to maintain program, ministry, and perspective in the midst of ongoing protests, so I am not unsympathetic with the position Trinity’s leadership finds itself in. But I believe there ought to be some room for compromise, some creative response to the situation that would begin to shape a vision of what church might be in the twenty-first century.

I find it especially troubling that all those goes on as I prepare a sermon on Mary, and reflect on her words in the Magnificat:

he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Bishop Packard’s blog is probably well-worth following.

Mirriam-Webster Online defines Hobbism as follows:

Main Entry: Hob·bism

Pronunciation: ˈhä-ˌbi-zəm; Function: noun; Date: 1691: the philosophical system of Thomas Hobbes; especially : the Hobbesian theory that people have a fundamental right to self-preservation and to pursue selfish aims but will relinquish these rights to an absolute monarch in the interest of common safety and happiness.

This definition led me to Thomas Hobbes, British political philosopher of the 17th century and his trade mark book Leviathan, titled after the biblical Leviathan. Hobbes theorized that the state of nature (or God’s original creation) is one of war. This polemic state of nature is exemplified by the famous motto Bellum omnium contra omnes—the war of all against all—and in this state man’s condition is defined as misery, or to be true to the quotation: The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes, moreover, argues for the creation of a sovereign who has absolute power and eventually solves the problem of the state of nature. He conceived absolute monarchy as a lesser evil than chaos and civil war, which are more or less identified with the state of nature. In other words, the natural state of humans is one of perpetual anarchy and war of all against all, and the only counterbalance to this chaos is the existence of a Leviathan power with absolute authority and the necessary powers to control these anarchistic and primitive tendencies of society. Hobbes also argues that people in the interest of common safety will give up their fundamental right to self-preservation and the pursuit of individual aims to an autocrat—or, euphemistically, to a sovereign. The idea here is that the sovereign should keep his hands off his subjects as long as any man does no harm to any other. The problem with this idea is, however, that since there is no power above the sovereign, there is nothing to prevent the sovereign breaking this or any other rule.

Saddam Hussein was an unfinished business to Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Cheney’s sense of unfinished business in Iraq, however, was more about oil and less about Hobbesian ideology in the pre 9/11 world. “But September 11 confirmed Cheney in his essential instinct about the nature of the world. His speeches after the terror attacks conveyed almost a sense of relief that here finally was a global enemy on the scale of communism” says Packard in the Assassin’s Gate. Although the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is shrouded in secrecy, one can learn a great deal about what its focus is by examining who Cheney’s top aides are or have been since the Bush administration took control of the White House in 2001. Several of Cheney’s lieutenants, as well as the vice president himself, were early supporters of the neocon manifesto PNAC—Robert Kagan co-authored it—which advocated for a return to a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Moreover, Robert Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to NATO, who has served as national security adviser in the OVP. Kagan is also the author of Of Paradise and Power and of the Policy Review Power and Weakness. In both of these landmark writings, Kagan’s Hobbesian ideology becomes very clear with the emphasis of the writings on power not morality or democracy.

Bellum omnium contra omnes.

Thomas Hobbes

“We really need to get the president-elect briefed up on some things,” Cheney said, adding that he wanted a serious “discussion about Iraq and different options.” The president-elect should not be given the routine, canned, round-the-world tour normally given incoming presidents. Topic A should be Iraq. Cheney had been secretary of defense during George H. W. Bush’s presidency, which included the 1991 Gulf War, and he harbored a deep sense of unfinished business about Iraq.

This is how Bob Woodward describes in his book Plan of Attack a message that Cheney sent to William Cohen, outgoing secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, in early January 2001. In another passage, Woodward describes what Powell thought of Cheney.

Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Saddam and 9/11. It was a separate little government that was out there—Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith and Feith’s “Gestapo office,” as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was. (Plan of Attack)

From these two examples, a dark, obsessive and enigmatic personality begins to emerge. And with it, a myriad of questions about the motives and agenda that drive the person who is a heart beat away from being the president of the most powerful nation on the planet. “The administration’s great mystery was Cheney. With the possible exception of Rumsfeld, no one had a darker, more Hobbesian vision of international affairs.” When I read this in George Packard’s book The Assassins’ Gate, I was instantly curious to find out what Hobbesian meant. It was one of these detours I got accustomed taking during this journey I had decided to undertake, what now seems to be, eons ago. It had become one of the most rewarding aspects of the research as I always look for opportunities to expand the field of my knowledge. And I never know what I would find inside these mystifying structures—standing at the end of my detours—as I open the front gate and peek in. This time my detour led me from Dick Cheney to Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan, Robert Kagan and Of Paradise and Power, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and back to Dick Cheney. And what I learned was both enlightening and frightening, but not surprising at all. Another piece of the puzzle fit perfectly on the board of the ever becoming clearer mirror image.

It’s funny–the more I come to learn about World War II, the more I realize how distant it is from me. That is certainly in part due to my age, but also the sheer amount of cultural drift over sixty-five years. I can’t even really conceptualize the Japanese, or the Germans, as a potential enemy. All I think of is nifty gadgets and spending Christmas in Berlin.

I’ve been educating myself about WWII for several years now; you can’t stumble around Britain without hitting a WWI or WWII memorial, and I’ve spent plenty of time stumbling around Britain. But I can understand the political struggles, and have an academic understanding of the conflict, and still can never quite grasp the reality of the past.

Packard tackles the rapidly changing relationship between the United States and Japan. After the 1951 Treaty of Peace with Japan came into effect in 1952, Japan maintained a stable (if asymmetrical) relationship with the United States; that relationship was renegotiated into a more equitable relationship in 1960 with a newly inked treaty. That treaty has remained in effect to date, and largely the current unevenness–meaning, a reduction of US military presence in Japan–is due to unprecedented political shift from within the Diet.

One of the central themes of the Democratic Party of Japan’s rise to power was a promise to address concerns about American presence in Japan. This is a long-nurtured issue, borne of many things but certainly not helped by the rape incident on Okinawa in 1995. Prime Minister Hatoyama took office in September 2009, and nearly from the first week of the DPJ’s government he began to address the potential displacement of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.

This has been ongoing for the last six months; heck, talk about moving Futenma has been going on since 2005.

PM Hatoyama clearly saw it as a show of power to readdress Japan’s relationship with the US, particularly the part that concerns national security. But the realities of changing the terms of a sixty-year old agreement are legion, both from a foreign policy standpoint with a long-time ally and internally from the now-opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the traditional divides of the Japanese (particularly the charged relationship of Okinawans to the rest of the country). The show of power has devolved somewhat.

The thrust of Packard’s analysis suggests a more reduced influence for the US, and a paternalistic pride in Japan’s thriving democracy.

The U.S. government should respect Japan’s desire to reduce the U.S. military presence on its territory, as it has respected the same desire on the part of Germany, South Korea, and the Philippines. It should be willing to renegotiate the agreement that governs the presence of U.S. troops in Japan, which to some is redolent of nineteenth-century assertions of extraterritoriality. It should be aware that, at the end of the day, Japanese voters will determine the future course of the alliance. Above all, U.S. negotiators should start with the premise that the security treaty with Japan, important as it is, is only part of a larger partnership between two of the world’s greatest democracies and economies. Washington stands to gain far more by working with Tokyo on the environment, health issues, human rights, the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, and counterterrorism.

In return for the removal of some U.S. troops and bases from its territory, the Japanese government should make far larger contributions to mutual security and global peace. It should explicitly state that it has the right to engage in operations of collective self-defense. Tokyo would be foolish to establish a community of East Asian nations without U.S. participation. It needs to work with Washington in the six-party talks on how to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese government should also stop protecting its uncompetitive agricultural sector and join in a free-trade agreement with the United States, an idea that has been kicking around for two decades and that the DPJ endorsed in its election manifesto.

Now, I think it’s more likely that the Obama administration would take a route similar to what Packard describes, more so than previous administrations, but that cedes a lot of military authority–especially given the nascent, if uncertain, threat of Chinese action. And it seems improbable that the US would actively change current foreign policy when it’s in a clearly more favorable position. But I find intriguing the idea that Japan might take a more active role in denuclearization and regional security measures. (There’s a lot to be said regarding Japan’s economy and market practices as well, but I am not as versed in that topic.)

As of this week, PM Hatoyama has walked back his earlier statements about Futenma, which suggests the larger difficulty of balancing external pressures from the US and the internal demands of his constituency. Packard’s end scenario seems rather further away:

Finally, in a grand symbolic gesture, President Obama and Prime Minister Hatoyama should visit Hiroshima together after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Japan next fall and should issue a resounding call to end the manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons, a cause close to the hearts of both men. Then, they should visit Pearl Harbor and declare that no such attack should ever be carried out again.

It’s certainly Obama-like in its idealism; but until Japan has more leverage in its own foreign policy and military-related choices, it seems more likely that Japan will stick with 50+ years of political tradition rather than venture forward standing without intimate support.

“The outcome of the Afghan struggle is ultimately going to be determined not by our unilateral actions or geopolitical moves, but by whom the Afghan people wind up supporting, even reluctantly. Vietnam—Lesson One.”

Well, our unilateral actions and geopolitical moves will affect the outcome…but as Rufus Phillips argues, maybe not as much, and in the ways, we think.  There are those who bristle at any Vietnam comparison, because too many abuse it for their own reasons.  

Also On This Site:  From The NY Times Video: ‘A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey’…From The WSJ: Graham, Lieberman and McCain “Only Decisive Force Can Prevail In Afghanistan’…From John Richardson at Esquire: Six Signs That Afghanistan Could Be Another Vietnam…From Commonweal: Andrew Bacevich “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan And The Limits Of American Power”