YeKengalé

The key word in law and order is ORDER. And the key question is “Whose order” should our law and ordinances maintain? The US police force may or may not have as colorful a history as our JCF whose genesis is linked historically to the suppression of the Morant Bay Insurrection, but in terms of the normative attitudes and disposition of its members, they certainly seem committed to that genetic impulse and mandate to ‘control them damn out-of-hand niggaz’.

We note the much wiser conciliatory approach of our Andrew Holeness to local situations of abuse of power by State organs as contrast to President Trump’s inflammatory proclamations, whose idea of ‘dominating the streets with compassion’ seem much more utopian than pragmatic, if taken at face value….i.e. if not summarily dismissed as a thinly veiled modern invocation of the Constantinean “In hoc signo vinces” with upraised Bible in hand for good measure.

For those intolerant voices from the Christian right who invoke the name of God, who indeed is not the author of confusion, and correctly perceive an anarchic strain in the mass protest being unleashed in their cities, the mute question of whose order is worth preserving, maintaining and fighting for is conveniently side stepped. That the Name of Christ has historically been co opted to serve the purposes of all kinds of corrupt systems of government and causes (whether European expansionism and its several daughters – British Imperialism and Plantation Slavery, or divers genocidal missionary propositions throughout the last 2 milenia) is largely ignored for the self serving reason that all beneficiaries of unjust and oppressive regimes share. Convenience.

There are already those theologians who openly dismiss the teachings of Christ as Utopian, as impractical at the level of State, and to be maintained as an unattainable ideal to be ingeniously invoked for susceptible niggers to ‘keep them in place’ when police or other State institutions slap them in the face. Using Christ to rubber stamp Capitalism may be convenient but can never catalyze ‘Thy kingdom come” . The statue has to fall for the mountain to grow.

But for those who have been slapped on both cheeks, the skins of whose backs have been lacerated, who have been lynched with genitals severed and have endured generations of shockingly inhuman cruelty with impunity, their communities will produce the occasional maverick Dessalines or Sharpe upon whom the gospel of ‘Love your enemies’ is wasted and who will vow a vow without regard for the god whose law and order may be violated by their instinctively just impulse for self preservation and human dignity.

Whose order indeed. The order of Constantine’s Jesus? The god of White Supremacy ? Of Hyper-Capitalism? Is there a Christian today who actually believes that Jesus’ kingdom has a place in human history or destiny, and is more than some posthumous theological utopia as fictive as was the Medieval Catholic doctrine of purgatory – (Whoever said that theology was some marginal discipline, unessential to the social order hasn’t a clue. Church doctrine that promotes modern ‘indulgences’ rather than demands for reparation is certainly, if nothing else, convenient.)

Divine order is embodied in Justice and Truth. Neither one of these concepts particularly concerns the Christian right in America whose current champion is both Liar extraordinaire and perverter in chief of Justice as clearly manifest from dealings with friend and foe alike. Justice is certainly not the manipulation of public perception or personal vulnerabilities, the signature of a despot not a divinely ordained servant ruler.

Trump is an imposter. American democracy is a sham. What America is, is an oligarchy on steroids. May it burn to the ground, and from the ashes rise the City of God.