More from the post-post-modern apocalypse

Seeing a picture on the cover of a recent Aspen Daily News online paper, of a couple of pasty white folks (like myself), from the “Logo Ligi African Dance Company,” dressed in their Ghanaian garb, prancing like a couple of natives on the carpeted floor of Aspen’s Pitkin County Library, reminded me of the lovely post, post-modern apocalyptic dilemma our multicultural society so enjoys these days. That’s right Aspen, I’m following you from afar, continuing to observe and report during my self-induced exile at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. I miss Aspen. Oh, how I miss Aspen. Berkeley is like living in that picture of the Ghanaian dancers, brought in all the way from Boulder (just a bit of a shorter trip than from the real Ghana), day after day, week after week. It’s a tortuous affair of cultural appropriation on a grand scale. It’s like living in a psychiatric ward of slow driving, self-consumed individualist spiritual exploration; of burnt out hippies who seem to have given up trying to save the world and become obsessed with self-applause, cloaked in the idea that they really are saving the world. No, I’m not talking about Aspen. Am I? You have never seen so many dream catchers hanging from rear view mirrors. Are people sleeping in their cars? Speaking of cultural appropriation, I did an internship this past year at the Seven Circles Foundation, so I’ve spent most of my Sundays, the past 12 months, in a sweat lodge, or the womb of Mother Earth, as Uncle Fred Wahpepah, the 81 year old Kickapoo and Sac and Fox elder who leads the lodges, calls it. This is probably to the consternation of the educators at my Seminary, who I have thus far found unconvincing in their Christian message. They would like to see me join some Christian denomination. Yet, despite my time here thus far, I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that an innocent, peace loving, love preaching man, son of God or not, had to be murdered, in order for my, or anyone else’s, sins to be forgiven. And while many of the Christian communities are just about as diverse as the predominately white Seven Circles Foundation, it’s important to remember that they are culturally appropriating a religion as well. We rarely think about it this way, but it’s true. Christianity was started by a Jew named Jesus, or Yeshua, as he would have been known; and in the beginning of Christianity you had to be Jewish to be Christian. All the disciples were, as was Paul, who, like a good corporatist, came up with a great idea for expanding the consumer base for this burgeoning community of believers, this new Church. Yes, good old Paul, or Saul as he would have been known before his conversion, came up with a clever ploy which ended up exporting the guilt man inherits in the Jewish story B'reshiyth, or Genesis, the origin story of mankind in one small region of the ancient near east, to pretty much the entire world. Woohoo! Thanks Paul. Mahalo! He invited the gentiles into the new Church. “There is neither Jew nor Greek in Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), he told us. But to make the crucified and resurrected Jesus relevant to the gentile population, he had to export the Hebrew story that made a crucified Jesus relevant in the first place, in a Hebrew context. So now we all need the innocent man to die, the sacrificial lamb on the cross, so we can then be saved by the resurrected Jesus, back from the dead, like in a grand old Horror movie. Except if I was a Greek, or some other Pagan, some Celtic or Germanic tribal human being, living alongside other Ghanaian dancers, I didn’t have a belief that I had been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I didn’t need to be saved. That was a Hebrew story, and Jesus was a Hebrew solution to that literary conflict introduced pretty early in the pages of the creation story. But that story won the game, at least thus far. Christianity is the largest religion on the planet, followed in second place by Islam, another belief system borrowed from the Jews. That good old Abrahamic bloodline, so many folks seem to want to be in the club. Well, as far as my seminary education, this is about what I have gathered, so I thought I would share it with you. The modern cultural and belief system appropriators, admittedly, many of us pasty white, who are looking for something new (or old), are often dreamers, people who care about the planet, who think we can do better as a human species. Many of us see one human race when we look at our fellow human beings, understanding our different colors, cultures, and religious belief systems as adaptations to particular contexts of particular times and places. We see our different colors as having something to do with the distances from the equator that our later ancestors lived. Some of us may have taken an anthropology class and discovered and invested our belief in the story that our entire species evolved in Africa, which in this meta-view, could actually be understood as the home continent of even the white Ghanaian dancers on the cover of the Aspen Daily news. Yet so many of us who care, who want to change the world, are falling into the same trap that the counter-cultural movement of the 1960’s did. As anyone who has recently checked out US foreign or Federal Reserve policy has noticed, the counter-culture movement failed. Capitalist, Greedhead, military industrial complex, hawkish foreign policy, advanced weapons systems, coal burning, oil drilling, fast paced modernity, is still moving along at a rapid clip. But what are the dreamers doing? Still dropping out; the very problem with Tim Leary’s advice nearly 50 years ago. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Was Leary working for the CIA? That advice is music to the hegemonic ear. Here, have a party in a nice little isolated spot like Woodstock, listen to loud music, take Acid, smoke pot. The machine keeps rolling on. Now our modern counter-cultural, self-defeating, self-important, festival of hedonism is even further away. Burning Man. Black Rock Desert. 50,000 hip, young, radicals, who couldn’t put themselves farther from anywhere they might actually make a difference, spending months of time, money, and energy planning temporary art installations which will be dismantled or burned. The status quo is laughing. How many other examples are there? Big ideas, and big parties of meditation, chanting, sex, drugs, rock and roll or techno music, in the middle of nowhere, or late into the night, so the people who actually care are asleep during the day, or skiing when the planet is still getting raped, the drones are dropping bombs in Pakistan, and Nuclear Weapons are being traded on the black market like baseball cards. The machine keeps rolling on. I don’t know what the answer is. I went to seminary. Maybe all the hippies and radicals need to join the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. We are all traveling along in the belly of the ship, having a party, and pretending that we are in control. But if we want to shift the route that we are sailing, it’s time we take the helm. Aloha Aspen, Colorado. That’s where I live, no matter where I am. I hope to make it back sometime. Peace.