Awake to Glory, Children of France!

With the words of the title, today we remember the signature event of their revolution, the storming of a prison fortress 220 years ago. Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! So what is a revolution and how can we tell one has occurred?

Two centuries ago, France was organized politically, economically and socially as the private estate of a very small hereditary elite. In that France lived the fattened clergy that blessed all the king did, the merchants and bankers who greased the wheels of the nobility's carriages, the courtiers and courtesans who tried to eke a living on the leavings of the privileged few and the very, very many who were the hereditary human beasts of burden.

Today the nobility is largely gone. The merchants and bankers have supplanted them. But the very many have unions and public schools and vacations and cars. Today only 6.2 percent of the French population lives under their official poverty threshold, which is higher than that of the United States.

Less than a century ago, Russia was a vast plantation in the hands of the Romanov family and their favorites. Not counting the papacy, which was not a nation-state at the time, in 1917 the czarist regime was the last remaining absolute monarchy of Europe.

Imperial Russia's elected legislative body, the Duma, was merely an advisory body with little effective power except to complain; from 1907 on, the leftist parties, which had won significant pluralities in the first two elections elections, were almost completely suppressed as electoral law was changed to favor propertied, land-holding voters. The nation was still not industrialized and its agriculture was primitive and in the hands of newly liberated serfs who had effectively become, as in the American South, penniless sharecroppers. The educated middle class was miniscule.

Today, with all its troubles, Russia's income inequality is lower than that of the United States -- the Russian Gini coefficient index stood at 40 in 2005, compared to 46.9 in the USA, albeit both higher than for most European Union member states.

In 1776, what is today the United States was divided into a vast territory held by native tribes and secondarily a set of European colonies comprising a string of small seaboard settlements held (in order of size) by Spain, France and England. In the English colony, a relatively small elite of freeholders and wealthy merchants decided not to pay taxes used to finance their defense from neighbors tired of their predatory behavior.

Their revolt was led by a few high-minded slaveowners and by merchants and bankers who proceeded to make enormous war profits by lending and supplying materiel to the fledgling government. In the new nation's eventual compact, proclamations of freedom did not apply to natives, African slaves nor indentured English servants, who were not even counted as full human beings for the purposes of electoral apportionment. In a process of roughly two centuries, still unfinished, each one had to shed blood to gain a semblance of fairness.

Today, 12.5 percent of all U.S. inhabitants -- or about 36 million people -- live below the poverty threshhold ($10,830 for an individual; $22,050 for a family of four). That's double the proportion in France, living at a lower threshold.

"In the French Revolution, when laborers' wives were mud-splattered by a passing carriage, they yelled at the marquise studiously ignoring them in her cabin, saying "One day we will all be marquises,' " a literature professor once remarked, adding, "while in the Russian Revolution they cried, 'One day you will be a peasant just like us.' "

We in the United States like to think our people are historically like the French. But that is not quite true.

On the American carriage rode a slaveowner who called out to the rabble, "Go die for me so I can avoid paying British taxes, go till my land and work my factories and build roads for my goods, go work, work work, and God will make you rich like me!"

And as the fools followed their pied piper, the gentleman's gales of laughter were drowned out by the cobblestone clopping of his hastening horses.

The Freedom Delusion

Today is Argentina's Independence Day. On July 9, 1816, delegates from the United Provinces of the South, voted to sever political ties with the Spanish monarch. It's an odd holiday because the event was almost an afterthought: the revolt against Spanish rule began on May 25, 1810, all of which reminds me, even more oddly, of a story about Ghana's independence.

First, a little context.

For six long years Gen. José de San Martín kept demanding that the congress of provincial delegates -- similar to the U.S. Continental Congress -- declare a rupture. In 1810, news had arrived of Napoleon having marched into Spain and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII. The locals, lacking an army, deposed the viceroy and seized power in name of the imprisoned monarch.

This was a legal technicality, built on the colonial legal technicality that the territories in the American continent belonged not to Spain, but to the Spanish crown, technically equal in sovereignty to Spain. (I believe Britain held to a similar conceit as a way to deprive its colonies of a seat in Parliament.)

By 1816, with Napoleon long gone, San Martín was growing tired of the charade of claiming allegiance to the same monarch as the Spanish troops with whom he did battle.

Independence and freedom were never the same thing, as the slaves of all the colonies well knew.

Indeed, the notion was put most succinctly by a classmate of mine -- Monica G. -- in a university short story seminar in Montreal. She had written a short story set in her native Ghana. (Imagine how hard it must have been for a citizen of an African country so near the Equator to weather the blizzards of Canada!)

The protagonist was a poor old woman going home from work as a domestic on the eve of Ghana's independence. I forget what happened in the story, but I recall one of the woman's hopes for the great event of which everybody talked.

Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.

We have all shared in the disappointment of realizing that the realization of our highest, fondest and noblest hopes never quite turns out as we imagined, if it ever does. Our ideals, like our lives, turn to dust, like the soil of Ghana's deforested savannah.

Why do the heathen rage?

Taking a leaf from Chani's Sacred Life Sunday series, our text this morning is Psalm 2:1. In the words of the King James translation, it runs "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"

There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.

Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.

O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."

The thought came to me when Dubya could come to power unelected, order wiretapping on Americans, out his own country's intelligence officer and imprison people indefinitely without trial, all in defiance of his oath of office to the Constitution ... all with utter impunity.

Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.

Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.

To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.

We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.

The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.  Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.  Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

The Psalms have this thing with a king who will reign forever and "smite" anyone who even looked at us the wrong way. So? I want my smiting done right now!

Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.

Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?

How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?

Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.

Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following

But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.
Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine ears ...

This reminds me of a T-shirt I bought one summer at Rehoboth Beach. On a black background it features a silver skull engulfed in golden flames. Over the years I came to call this image the picture of my inner, raging daemon.

It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.

There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.

That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.