"NO INNOCENT VICTIM"--???

"When we are all guilty, that will be democracy." "But I am different!" said the captured French Jew to the Nazis, "I am innocent!" ( -from Camus)


Does anyone remember "The Man in the Glass Booth"? Wherein the once-captive and subsequently fabulously successful New York Jew takes on the identity of a Nazi on trial for war crimes? It's somewhat of a secular parable that takes up where Twain's "The War Prayer" left off. The audience in both cases dismissed the witness, "because what he said made no sense."

But does claiming our innocence make more sense?

Another "Messianic" Jew from NYC recently said this:

"It would be good.... if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." Guess who?

The point I am trying to make is not especially political but it does cover the political/religious nexus. We have always said that America is not a pure democracy because that would become a populist mobocracy. Perhaps we are not a democracy because we will continue to proclaim our individual and collective innocence! But in actual point of fact, "there is none righteous, no, not one." Which is why the man in the glass booth was unable to make his point, even in fiction. It's also called "denial."

This fits in with the discussion about the Sadducees, who were representatives of aristocracy and oligarchy, which would include Platonic republicanism and, as we will see later the gambits of Pharisaical populism. This is what the current battle over royalty is all about, the ages- old struggle in which Jesus did not take either side. I think it not difficult to imagine that a Divine Source would not be convinced by any human source of radicalism or radical self-righteousness.

The deficiencies of dualistic thinking, to which we are ever consigned, is foundational to the hard sayings of Jesus which most of us still reject as making no sense. Yet does it make sense, that even a hypothetical God of the universe, known and unknown, would make any sense to us? So we are left with little to say, and as Camus points out in his novels, there is really no point in proclaiming our innocence. In this sense, Camus, observationally, confirms the basic assumption of biblical Scripture which really needs little proof. The Sadducee/Pharisee codependency is certainly over-sufficient empirical evidence to put the lie to the hope that we are all, "basically good." If we were, then pure democracy would be actually possible. But as our Jewish friends mentioned or implied in the preceding statements, "You're gonna serve somebody-- it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna serve somebody" ( by that most famous Minnesota Jew) --- notice that Mr. Dylan did not mention serving, "the people." Perhaps the "servant of the people," only exists or makes sense in the Person of Jesus. This is exactly how Isaiah put it hundreds of years before the "Common Era."

But no one has more naivete than the intellectual who is left alone to think his way out of his own glass booth/castle. More on that later with an insightful comment from the latest ish of TNY. (The above quote is from Woody Allen)