I recently came across a powerful essay on the state of our country. It was not explicitly a religious or spiritual piece, so I was startled when the writer took this turn in his conclusion.

“Few would deny that there’s a palpable and growing fear and anger in our country,” Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote recently. “A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands. I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see.”

While a mirror can have practical value, it’s often something we avoid—it shows us things about ourselves we may not want to see. The magic mirror of the Evil Queen in Snow White is the classic fairy tale example of this. Yet, look in the mirror we must, Rohr is saying, if we are to have any hope of righting our national ship-of-state. It won’t be enough to identify the problems “out there” if we don’t first seek the problems within ourselves.

In 1970 for the first Earth Day, Walt Kelly wrote one of the most famous comic strips of all time. Looking over a polluted wasteland, the strip’s title character Pogo declares, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” That, essentially, is the message of “Trump and the Furies of Empire” by W. Aaron Van Diver. He begins with a stark description of our situation—one of the mirrors we may not want to look at.

Another war, and we are plunged into the latest iteration of the violent, incomprehensible chaos that seems to define our times. Bombs drop, missiles fly, innocent civilians die; markets gyrate and the prices of energy, food, and materials spike. A tenuous ceasefire holds briefly, or maybe not? Back home we stare at the unfolding madness on our little screens and argue with each other about what it all means. We post memes, share half-baked theories, and wallow in our electronic echo chambers as we pile new worries on top of widespread unease about AI, inflation, political polarization, ICE raids, environmental deterioration, chemicals in our food and water, and the flagrant erosion of social norms.

Van Diver writes from within the tradition of the Old Testament prophets. The tone is like that of the prophet Nathan’s revealing denunciation of King David: “You are the man!” These are the liturgical readings which, if we take them seriously, leave us squirming in the pew. Then, as now, Van Diver says, while we want to point fingers all around us, it is time to look to ourselves.

In considering Trump’s name for his Iran war — “Epic Fury” — we might recall that the Furies of Greek mythology were the relentless goddesses of vengeance who pursued and tormented those guilty of sins such as murder, anger, greed, and jealousy…. What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?…

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are. We like to soothe ourselves with pretty talk about “democracy,” but Trump, as he balances the world on the knife-edge of war, is compelling us — or giving us an opportunity — to grapple with an unseemly truth that has been quite obvious for a long time to anyone willing to face it: we don’t really live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchic, militaristic global empire that operates largely beyond the control of “the People” our Constitution puts in charge.

That empire, in its full global dimensions, grew out of the military-industrial complex that arose after World War Two. In the ensuing decades, the American Empire killed and ousted foreign democratic leaders around the world…. Through all that, the American people and their politicians carried on with their somnambulant, self-soothing rhetoric about democracy. We are bringing democracy and freedom to the world, the TV told us, and we nodded along. Then came the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK; Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza. Still we focused on money, cars, houses, pop culture, professional sports, consumerism — the American Dream — and lulled ourselves with fanciful stories about democracy….

The national-security state that grew up in America after World War Two is not beholden to our vaunted, world-renowned American democracy; it does not obey the will of the People; it does not bow to international laws; it does what it wants. At a whim, an imperial President sitting atop a vast global arsenal of high-tech weaponry can decide that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”…

The CIA had been established in 1947 during Truman’s term, less than six months before a confidential State Department policy planning memo written by the influential George Kennan expressly stated the overarching goal of postwar U.S. foreign policy: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” It’s no wonder, then, that the newly formed CIA engineered foreign coups, even against democratic governments, to advance the economic interests of big corporations like the United Fruit Company and U.S. oil companies operating abroad.

In the remainder of the essay, Van Diver points his piercing light on America’s economics, environmental policies, and its presumption to be a “Christian nation.” It is a long piece but very readable, if one is willing to hear its words. Through it all, however, you can be sure Van Diver knows well what the Bible says happens to prophets.

In his conclusion, in addition to Richard Rohr, Van Diver turns to another of the great modern spiritual voices, the exiled Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

For the Trump haters, and the Trump lovers, too, the beginning of wisdom would be to go into a silent room, lock the door, look in the mirror, and say the magic words: I am part of the problem.

But how hard it is to face our own true selves, our own identities as citizens of the flailing American Empire. “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

This is, of course, classic Christian teaching, which became the foundation of Martin Luther’s theology. We are all “simul justus et peccator”, Luther said, at the same justified, good by God’s grace, and sinners in our egocentric selfishness. Thus, Luther agrees that there is no dividing line between good and evil within us or within society. We get nowhere but mired in self-delusion trying to eliminate the bad people so that we the good people can set things right again.

Van Diver’s essay is no partisan screed. Rather, it is a judgement, like that of the priest in Romeo and Juliet, calling for “a plague on both your houses.” But even more than that, he wants us to understand how much we have brought this situation upon ourselves by allowing our leaders to tell us only what we want to hear and making promises humanly impossible to keep. Recognizing these truths, Van Diver says, echoing the prophets, is the only path to genuine restoration and renewal.

No one wants to destroy a piece of his own heart, but those who are feeling up to it now have an opportunity to confront unpleasant truths, the ones that were previously hidden, about the parts of ourselves that are on the wrong side of the good-evil dividing line, and maybe even try to do something about them. Trump is here to reveal these truths. The bodies we’ve buried won’t stay in the ground forever. We have to do a true accounting of ourselves. We must face who we are. The Furies of Empire demand it, and they won’t let us off the hook so easily.

 

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