Consumerism is violent. The apologists for ads and products, life styles and brought-to-you-by media are disastrously wrong. The thousands of marketing confrontations that a person must get through daily are not persuasive, clever, or normal. The 50 foot-tall actor wearing a watch and grinning at me - is not my new best buddy, Amen? This is atmospheric assholishness…
This little film shows Tuesday's simulcast between the London and New York OCCUPY communities. I flew out to the encampment at St. Paul's Cathedral, and we sang the 99% song together, across the Atlantic - what a wonderful moment! That made the whole London visit worth it - when Londoners held up a sheet to show the Stop Shopping Choir from Wall Street.
Obama compared Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party, and then called
one right and the other left. He doesn't get it. Noami Klein said the Occupy
Wall Street is not a place - that it is a state of mind. She gets it.
MoveOn made a fundraising offer to OWS, and was turned down by the
downward wiggling fingers. Jesse Jackson stood in front of the new
There's a term for the present American system: "Totalizing." That means that consumerism/militarism comes all the way across the landscape - into every nook and cranny. It kills all the smaller systems, like the neighborhood economies, the gift-economies.
Let's get up from our computer, get out of our cars, come down from whatever fundamentalism keeps our America old and violent and profit-taking - and go down to the public square that sits there covered with pigeon shit and the shadow of a soldier on a horse - and sing the 1st Amendment! Start our culture over! REVOLUJAH!
I visited the occupation of Wall Street late afternoon yesterday, after recording this Freak Storm sermon. What an unusual time we live in. Tropical storms and people storms sweep through the public squares. Climate change and national debt are Devils releasing deadly energy. Leaders in politics seem like ciphers, drained of energy.
On that impossible day when the skyline of New York City collapsed on its southern tip - I watched from a rooftop across the East River - we entered an unexpectedly peaceful eye of the storm. We all fell toward the terrible scene. We fell through tunnels, over bridges.
Believing that the Earth is our god, government, economy and culture - all wrapped into one big institution - that is simple common sense! When we draw our last breath together, all the functions of living will be mixed together in that one breath. There won't be separate powers anymore.
Alarmist? Pessimistic? Radical? … are things so bad?
The Christianized Jesus - the turning of a radical into a conservative shadow of his former self - explains our problem of establishing and celebrating freedom fighters today. It is important that our progressive heroes be given a deserved fame, an accurately reported fame. This is crucial in ways that impact our own activism.
Exorcism - the act of driving out a dark spirit that has possessed a person or a place, by commanding it to leave in the name of a more powerful power, in our case the life of the Earth - this is one of the oldest of our human rituals. However, exorcisms are also embedded in the arts of our culture like little noticed but powerful micro-climates.
At the Tate Modern in London, British Petroleum seeks to capture our imagination by hitching its BP sunflower logo to the Miro exhibit. The artistic experience is then reduced to a dangerously passive consumerism. Only the Earth itself, a kind of freak storm inside, can free us from such a damaging lie.
We tried to let all the victimized life of BP come through us on Monday.
In recent days we have challenged the devils in the Deutschbank in Dusseldorf, and the ING and UBS in Amsterdam, and HSBC in Liverpool - laying our hands on the cash machines and calling our demons. What are these exorcisms? Why these muscular hexing prayers at the ATM? Of course the big banks have their famous bad practices - redlining, foreclosures, demolitions of communities.
As The Church of Earthalujah takes off for our European tour, Reverend Billy gets a lesson in hysterical revolution from British activists and his one-year-old daughter.
What if there is a switch in our brains that Bond-like villains can flip with impunity, sending us into spasms of shopping? Horribly, this is now an American fact of life. Yes - corporate researchers have discovered a circuit in our brains that actuates our shopping.
Very few of us know how much we must change. We talk of climate change but not human change. We look through a window and envision a completely different vision of life on this Earth. And then that window actually is a door. We open it and we walk to our first task – and that might be gentle sustaining love, or a shout of horror.
Sometimes people come up to me and ask “The Church of Earthalujah...what is that? Is it a political rally? Is it a real church? Is it a comedy sketch? What is it?!”
Why do we offer Fabulous Sainthood this week at our Earthalujah! church to a hero of the housing rights movement, Ms. Marina Metalios? Aren’t housing and the environment two different issues?
Announcing our doom and damnation? That’s as American as apple pie. We tell pollsters we believe in ghosts, angels and the Second Coming. The current style of apocalypses dates from the days of Jesus’ death 2000 years ago. The rapture was supposed to be hours away.
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
