Take heed and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
—Matthew 16:6
Jesus of Nazareth was as anti-establishment as it gets; a spiritual ascetic, who actually considered himself God within a sect of people weaned on the primacy of an all-powerful deity. And he took that lunacy to the streets, right into the heart of the power structure that was the religious and political fulcrums against individualism. Thus making a peasant from a fishing enclave nestled in the armpit of the Roman Empire, the most influential anti-religious and anti-systemic figure in Western thought.
But that’s not how we know this Jesus. His revolution, one of collective upheaval and a Nieitzschean sledgehammer railing against the hypocrisy of times, is reduced to religious worship and Roman blood ritual. His is less an inspirational siren for soul-saving grace as it is a cautionary tale of what power structures must do when threatened. Jesus told a religion and a republic it was not needed for spiritual attainment or cultural identity, so they strung him up and waited for the next doomed idiot to utter such insurrection.
This is why Jesus of Nazareth is my hero and I spent over a decade researching his methods and parables, or those attributed to him and his short-lived movement, and why it ended up in a monstrosity I titled Trailing Jesus. People normally read the thing and wonder what it is I was getting at, and quite frankly I’m not even sure—except for one key element: Once you have a structure of power surmised, erected, and maintained by humans, it is nearly impossible to eradicate it. Oh, you can revolt and rebuild some other thing in its place, but it will very likely be the same shit.
Or worse; presuming Christianity’s systemic machinations are more damaging than first century Judaism, which is a whole separate discussion.
Now, what we have today, say, with the IRS or the FBI in this country, is what we have endured for decades. And, as stated in this space two weeks ago, there is little we can actually do about it. Sure, whoever happens to control the legislative branch—especially if it is the opposing party of the executive branch—will rattle around like sniffing hounds and braying goats and tell us there is a pox on the house of lords, but it will just be the noise of those who only want to stick their own power monger in there to keep the ball rolling and the checks cashed.
To be more specific and less political (I’ll need 10 or so columns to dissect the tyrannical madness unleashed during the FBI’s first 105 years), I present to you the Internal Revenue Service, one of our republic’s most necessary evils. It is a massive and powerful branch of the treasury department that absorbs the flow of our money to be used for whatever the giant, bloated system sees fit; war, social programs, puppet regimes in third world countries, recovery projects for tornadoes, earthquakes or floods, torturing foreigners, propping up the welfare state, and other sundry items. This is an unchecked machine, not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000 super computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (a metaphor that never gets old for me) which only cares about one thing, as all “conscious beings,” whether mammal or machine: self-preservation.
For a democratic society, the power to tax is so absolute—a huge underlying factor to the perpetuation of the Roman Empire; the political assassins of Jesus of Nazareth—that the judicial branch of our system recently pronounced the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act as less an unconstitutional stronghold of the free market and more of the aforementioned tax. This was decided ultimately by the swing vote of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, a conservative.
Long before Roberts’ ruling, the anti-government movement called the TEA Party gained traction—mainly due to the initial passing of the PPACA. At the beginning, this group was as organically fun-loving as those who protested the 10 or so wars we had going in the first decade of this century. But then they were absorbed by the Republican Party (the ying to the yang of this systemic virus) and as a result caused a civil war within the GOP that produced many a goofy result. The most damaging of these was the completely asinine debt ceiling debate, which effectively prevented the Congress of the United States from paying its bills. What the anti-war movement, and the subsequent 2006 Democratic re-taking of Congress, failed to do, the TEA Party Republicans accomplished; temporarily sealing the purse strings of the federal government.
So, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or Jesus to figure where this was going; a direct threat to the IRS, its powerbase and its influence over one of the most sweeping pieces of federal regulation ever enacted by Congress. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the PPACA, which takes full effect in 2014, put a massive chunk of the federal budget in the hands and regulatory power of the Internal Revenue Service; meaning more branch locations and jobs and larger budgets with which to hand out apparently unchallenged payrolls.
The IRS did what any self-respecting power gorge would; it targeted its enemies and sought to defuse their influence over the electoral process. Made sense to Jesus and it makes sense to me.
Before we go this week, I offer up a potential red herring that has been rearing its ugly cranium; reports out of the Pentagon (the font of honesty and integrity for lo these many decades of power abuse) that the Chinese have been hacking into our systems to build similar death machines as that of our Air Force, etc. Little by little, I see a story here or there about it, and if Fox News wasn’t ejaculating all over the place with all these purported Obama shenanigans, then they may well have been far more into it, since it reeks of the military-industrial complex, our other fat-ass necessary evil. Floating danger tales through the media is as old as the hills and has merit in the power gorge, simply because these cutbacks the Pentagon has suffered as a result of the infamous sequester will not do, like Congress changing flight patterns to soften its collective travel plans while the rest of us slog it out.
You see, the use of the word “leaven” in the above quote from Matthew (the one Jewish author of the four canonical gospels, who knew exactly what Jesus, a Jew, was fighting against) is key here, because bread is a staple of survival, and when it leavens it expands or “swells,” not unlike systemic power that becomes its own being separate from its intended construct.
Or as Jesus may have couched it; “Woe unto you,” to which HAL 9000 might have responded, “Sorry, Dave.”
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of the Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus” and “Midnight for Cinderella”
