Here's to prophets
Free and Responsible Search has a great post on Cindy Sheehan.
Walter Brueggemann, Meet Cindy Sheehan
Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside President Bush's vacation home is being interpreted in many divergent ways, but I'm coming to favor this one: A prophet is confronting a king. Walter Brueggemann's Carter-era model of the prophet/king relationship applies so well that it seems ... prophetic.
The key concept in Brueggemann's model is the royal consciousness, which is perhaps the best label I can think of for the attitude that pervades the Bush administration. The royal consciousness believes -- or at least says in public -- that everything is fine. The right people are in power and they are doing the right things. Everything is on track. Everybody should be happy. No mistakes have been made.
[...]
The task of the Prophet is not to put forward a 15-point plan for reform. The Prophet does not come to replace the King and start a new administration. The job of the Prophet is simply to stop the royal consciousness in its tracks, to make it recognize that something is wrong. People are suffering. People are dying. Life out in the kingdom is not just bike rides and motorcades and helicopter flights to million-dollar fund-raising dinners.
[...]
Cindy Sheehan doesn't bring an answer, she brings a question: Why did my son die?
She has not come to us as a saint, an angel, or some other holy and transcendent being. The prophets in their own era were nobodies. They were without honor. They were poor, dirty, uneducated. Undoubtedly their families were ashamed of them.
The prophets used cheap theatrics. It's easy to imagine the frustration of King Zedekiah when Jeremiah started wandering through Jerusalem with a yoke around his neck: That's not a plan! That's not a program! It's just a stunt!
Camping out in Crawford is a stunt too. That's what prophets do. They are not planners, technocrats, diplomats, or philosophers. They channel the grief of a numbed society. And they open the door to dreams of renewal.
Walter Brueggemann, Meet Cindy Sheehan
I believe that the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. ... I have been increasingly impressed with the capacity of the prophet to use the language of lament and the symbolic creation of a death scene as a way of bringing to reality what the king must see and will not. -- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (1978)
Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside President Bush's vacation home is being interpreted in many divergent ways, but I'm coming to favor this one: A prophet is confronting a king. Walter Brueggemann's Carter-era model of the prophet/king relationship applies so well that it seems ... prophetic.
The key concept in Brueggemann's model is the royal consciousness, which is perhaps the best label I can think of for the attitude that pervades the Bush administration. The royal consciousness believes -- or at least says in public -- that everything is fine. The right people are in power and they are doing the right things. Everything is on track. Everybody should be happy. No mistakes have been made.
[...]
The task of the Prophet is not to put forward a 15-point plan for reform. The Prophet does not come to replace the King and start a new administration. The job of the Prophet is simply to stop the royal consciousness in its tracks, to make it recognize that something is wrong. People are suffering. People are dying. Life out in the kingdom is not just bike rides and motorcades and helicopter flights to million-dollar fund-raising dinners.
[...]
Cindy Sheehan doesn't bring an answer, she brings a question: Why did my son die?
She has not come to us as a saint, an angel, or some other holy and transcendent being. The prophets in their own era were nobodies. They were without honor. They were poor, dirty, uneducated. Undoubtedly their families were ashamed of them.
The prophets used cheap theatrics. It's easy to imagine the frustration of King Zedekiah when Jeremiah started wandering through Jerusalem with a yoke around his neck: That's not a plan! That's not a program! It's just a stunt!
Camping out in Crawford is a stunt too. That's what prophets do. They are not planners, technocrats, diplomats, or philosophers. They channel the grief of a numbed society. And they open the door to dreams of renewal.
posted by bda at 4:49 PM
3 Comments:
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I think the Prophet-King model is perfect here!
Would anyone listen to Cindy Sheehan if she wasn't camped out on the driveway of the Bush ranch? The prophet is the voice crying out in the wilderness, cloaked in animal skins and eating wild honey and locusts (forgive the John the Baptist rip-off here). If you don't have millions to spend on 30 second sound-bites, or have an army of supporters ready to serve as attack dogs for you (while you give them expensive doggie food), then you have to do something out of the ordinary to be noticed, to be heard.
The Royal consciousness is hubris wrapped up in self-preservation. The Bush team is doing what every adminstration does until reality can't be dismissed -- deny, deny, deny. Remember good ol' Bill Clinton saying that he never had sex with "that woman, Miss Lewinsky?" You hope that by repeating it over and over again, people will believe you.
By admitting that things aren't going well or that you've made a mistake undermines the Royal credibility. Our Sovereigns aren't supposed to make mistakes! They are chosen (some would say by God) to rule because they are Superior. A politician who admits a mistake or changes his mind on an issue is dead-meat for the opposition.
And who would have the guts to come back to the American people and say, "I'm sorry. I goofed. You know those 100s of billions we've spent on the war .... well, we made a mistake. We've wasted the money. Oh, and by the way, all those people who died ... yeah, they died for mistake. Sorry!"
Deny, deny, deny ......
Maybe the language of grief can break through .... we'll have to see if the language of the Prophet can work miracles.
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