How Does the Empire Fall?

by Debbie Blue

Psalm Reading: Psalm 137

For Sunday, October 3, 2010: Year C—Ordinary 27

There’s a lot to be said for composure, self-control, and detachment. But somehow I’d rather hear about it from Buddhists than Scandinavian Lutherans. And though I wouldn’t mind if Miles Davis told me to be cool, if I’m at the co-op with my kids and we’re hungry and in a hurry and my son breaks a jar of pasta sauce and some white middle class urban hipster tells me to “be cool,” I’d mind it.

The Death of Cool

The jazz guys took up “cool,” as a sort of shield from, or resistance to official culture (racist, white, square). Now cool has become the official culture, the central ideology of consumer capitalism−that’s exactly how the Empire’s machine keeps working, always grinding resistance into its gears. It’s possible that ironic detachment is actually making us drones of the system (limiting our emotional range).

I am all for Terry Jones and Rush Limbaugh and maybe even Oprah learning to tamp it down, but maybe there are a lot of people who could stand to lose their cool. I don’t know. The church has often made it seem like morality requires that one be disengaged from emotions. Is that how it works?

Rant

The Psalms are not emotionally contained, restrained or detached. Reading them, you begin to sense that there’s this weepy, confused, sometimes barbaric landscape just under the surface of our apparent composure. Vile cursing, violent ranting, is juxtaposed with quiet, calm moments of reaching toward some sort of piety or comfort. If you’re not feeling Psalm 137 (the sadness and humiliation and outrage of the Israelite forced into slavery in Babylon) there’s not much there.

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