I remember a biblical quotation at the top of the editorial page of Newsday when I was in junior high school: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). As a young, professing Christian it was both remarkable and exciting to me to see the biblical juxtaposed with the contemporary. The voice of the prophet had found a niche in journalism.
I refer to the prophet who speaks truth to power, who invokes standards of judgment higher than what society has deemed “norms.” This is not the Nostradamus kind of prophet or the Greek oracles with their dire predictions. The Old Testament prophet who warned kings and the elite of Jerusalem is different from the messianic visionaries. The traditional prophet foresaw the seeds of downfall in the moral decay of society. The theologian Walter Bruggemann says, “The prophets are imaginers, not predictors or social activists” ( Embracing the Prophets in Contemporary Culture, 2011)
In times of physical, verbal, and social discord the voices of the prophets are still invoked to gain a perspective when moral bearings are slipping. The prophet Isaiah and his contemporaries have become especially relevant in an era of “spin,” when losses are turned into victories and “threats” are turned into “favors.” How well Isaiah understood human nature when he foreshadowed our spin-masters.
Ah you who call evil good and good evil,Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,Who put bitter for sweet and sweet bitter! (5:20)
It was clear when Donald Trump asked President Zelenskiy for “a favor” that the request was a threat. The withholding of $400 million in arms was audibly juxtaposed with the “favor.” The transcript implicitly reveals this, but Donald Trump insists it was all in the name of cleaning up Ukrainian politics. The weapons were withheld for another five weeks while Mr. Trump waited for his “favor.” The funds were released in September after the Democrats threatened to withhold the entire Pentagon funding of more than $5 billion dollars until Ukraine received its arms. Clearly the “favor” Trump requested had the kind of force implied when the mafia don asks for “a favor” from trembling victims.
This past week was not the first time I have seen Lawrence Ferlinghetti cited as a prophet for our times and certainly not the first time on Facebook. Once he seemed radical to me, espousing “democratic socialism.” But this morning he seemed to be paraphrasing the Old Testament prophets in “Pity the Nation” (2017) when he said, “people are sheep/ shepherds mislead them [Ezekial 34:8] . . .sages are silenced [Jeremiah 38:4-6] . . . whose breath is money [Micah 3:11]. . . the sleep of the too well fed [Amos 6:4] . . . My country tears of thee [Hosea 4:3]” These phrases are the backbone of his poem, which comments on the USA in 2017.
Have we finally become this nation to be pitied? Is Ferlinghetti one of our contemporary prophets? Are we ignoring such voices at our peril?
We may have thought that the ideals of the nation-embodied in the Bill of Rights and conforming international treaties– could shape and restrain our leaders, but the opposite has happened. We have been formed in the image of our President. We have become more tribal, more suspicious, more divisive than we have been since the Vietnam Era. Even church leaders have despaired of democratic processes that have held our country together since 1776 and are ready to throw the gauntlet down with little provocation. Reverend Robert Jeffress foreshadowed “civil war” over the invoking of a Constitutional procedure (impeachment), betraying his remorseless antagonism for his political opponents. The “Evangelical” churches have become pitted adversaries in their own community, depending on their political orientation.
This take-it-or-leave-it discourse has come from the leadership of Donald Trump, for whom every criticism of decisions or policies is disloyalty or treason. He punishes disloyalty (criticism) ruthlessly and charges treason against those he can not punish. He has led us to the abandonment of civil discourse. “Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own.”
Encompassing this breakdown of civility is the distortion of language, so that words no longer mean what they are denoted to be. Words like “favor” substituted for “threat” or “extortion.”
As newspaper columnists proclaimed and echoed this week (October 7-11), the President operates on no principle, but what is good for himself (Dana Millbank Tuesday, Washington Post, Michael Gerson, Wednesday,Washington Post October 8-9, 2019) . On Tuesday, October 9, Jonah Goldberg, National Review: “There’s no halfway defensible ideological, intellectual or moral standard that Trump doesn’t violate, often routinely.” The search for an ideology or governing principle of this administration has continued in vain, for Trump’s Twitter-feed merely offers the most self-aggrandizing comments of the moment.
The ultimate control lies in the manipulation of language, such as “middle class tax cuts,” which primarily benefit the wealthy or the pursuit of “freedom,” which allow industrial polluters the license to foul the air and water. When newspapers expose such lies, they are blamed for “fake news.” Thus the “vision” proclaimed by the news media is dismissed by the language of victimhood, fogging the truth.
George Orwell was a modern prophet in the realm of language manipulation. In 1984 he imagined the world of “doublespeak,” where language could be perverted to mean what the Party wanted it to mean. The slogans of the Party were:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
(Orwell Reader, 398)
When I read this classic in high school I remember thinking how warped the thinking of (protagonist) Winston’s contemporaries must have been to believe such lies. In the 1960’s the practice of “spin” was less noticed. Today we can see Orwell as a prophet who recognized how language could be abused for a political agenda. And in the last three years, we have seen how language can be abused for a personal agenda–to turn light into darkness on Twitter to cast a spell on your followers and anyone else who will disconnect their critical faculties and believe.
We must not dismiss the words of the prophets as “fake news” or “socialist” or even “sexist” or “racist,” when they question our accepted ways of thinking. They may be our only way out of the murky discourse that surrounds us. We are victims of our own comfortable ways of speaking. We can trace this plight back 2500 years to Isaiah, the best known of our prophets:
Ah you who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet bitter! (5:20)
AMERICAN POET, LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (B. 1919