From the Bench
WHO CAN YOU TRUST NOWADAYS?
I am no longer surprised by the depravity of men. I don’t
know if it comes with age, cynicism, or just plain reality.
What is making me uneasy at the moment is the saber rattling over Iraq.
Maybe it’s experience. Viet Nam. Watergate. Bill Clinton. Many of us have lived through all three, and have discovered what we perhaps already suspected. Presidents lie.
Is that anything new? No. But in each instance, for the first time we saw it up front and personal. And that was new.
The Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, Monica. Presidents came right into our living rooms, looked us in the eye….and lied.
It took us a while to catch on. Then we coined the phrase “managing the news”, as if it were something new. It wasn’t.
Two generations before TV, New York newspapers battled it out for circulation dominance in a managed news affair known as the Spanish-American War. Teddy Roosevelt took advantage of that “newspaper war”, and rode it right into the White House.
Recently, I have been studying a much older story that some consider managed news at its best. Or worst. It involves a powerful man who seduced another man’s wife, then had the man killed.
In another act of arrogance and power, he took a man’s wife by force, against the wishes of both the man and the wife. The man was left crying and pleading for her return, but to no avail.
His own son raped his half-sister and was killed by the girl’s brother. That son declared war on his own father, and was killed.
Today we would call that a “dysfunctional” family. We would, no doubt, condemn the man for his debauchery. But the story I have been reading ends up praising this individual, proclaiming him “God’s man”, and repeating a centuries-old theme that God promised the land to him and his descendents forever.
You have probably figured it out by now. The man’s name was David. You can read all about him in the second book of Samuel.
To refer to anything in the Bible as ”managed news” would make most Christians cringe, and many would shout “blasphemy”.
Millions, perhaps billions, of non-Christians, however, do not agree. To them, the fact that the Jews wrote “The Book” and gave themselves this “Promised Land” falls in the category of “managed news”.
I use this illustration not to shock anyone, but rather to add perspective to what is going on in the middle east right now.
If we believe that the State of Israel is mandated by God, the solution is simple. We must defend Israel at all costs, even to the point of invading Iraq and risking a never-ending war with the Arab world.
This is the viewpoint of many fundamentalist Christians, most Jews, much of the media, and the Bush administration. All of them are doing a superb job of “managing the news” in that direction.
On the other hand, if we believe that the State of Israel was mandated by men….a political concoction of Great Britain and the Zionist movement, with the concurrence of the U.N and the U.S.A………. then we take the religious aspect out of it and recognize it for its secular and political nature. The solution becomes even more complex when you throw oil and economics into the mix.
So when the president, or his operatives, or the media, enter your home this evening to give you the latest news, it all boils down to a matter of faith and trust. For many of us as Christians, where we place our faith is no problem
The bigger question is: Who can you trust?
What is making me uneasy at the moment is the saber rattling over Iraq.
Maybe it’s experience. Viet Nam. Watergate. Bill Clinton. Many of us have lived through all three, and have discovered what we perhaps already suspected. Presidents lie.
Is that anything new? No. But in each instance, for the first time we saw it up front and personal. And that was new.
The Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, Monica. Presidents came right into our living rooms, looked us in the eye….and lied.
It took us a while to catch on. Then we coined the phrase “managing the news”, as if it were something new. It wasn’t.
Two generations before TV, New York newspapers battled it out for circulation dominance in a managed news affair known as the Spanish-American War. Teddy Roosevelt took advantage of that “newspaper war”, and rode it right into the White House.
Recently, I have been studying a much older story that some consider managed news at its best. Or worst. It involves a powerful man who seduced another man’s wife, then had the man killed.
In another act of arrogance and power, he took a man’s wife by force, against the wishes of both the man and the wife. The man was left crying and pleading for her return, but to no avail.
His own son raped his half-sister and was killed by the girl’s brother. That son declared war on his own father, and was killed.
Today we would call that a “dysfunctional” family. We would, no doubt, condemn the man for his debauchery. But the story I have been reading ends up praising this individual, proclaiming him “God’s man”, and repeating a centuries-old theme that God promised the land to him and his descendents forever.
You have probably figured it out by now. The man’s name was David. You can read all about him in the second book of Samuel.
To refer to anything in the Bible as ”managed news” would make most Christians cringe, and many would shout “blasphemy”.
Millions, perhaps billions, of non-Christians, however, do not agree. To them, the fact that the Jews wrote “The Book” and gave themselves this “Promised Land” falls in the category of “managed news”.
I use this illustration not to shock anyone, but rather to add perspective to what is going on in the middle east right now.
If we believe that the State of Israel is mandated by God, the solution is simple. We must defend Israel at all costs, even to the point of invading Iraq and risking a never-ending war with the Arab world.
This is the viewpoint of many fundamentalist Christians, most Jews, much of the media, and the Bush administration. All of them are doing a superb job of “managing the news” in that direction.
On the other hand, if we believe that the State of Israel was mandated by men….a political concoction of Great Britain and the Zionist movement, with the concurrence of the U.N and the U.S.A………. then we take the religious aspect out of it and recognize it for its secular and political nature. The solution becomes even more complex when you throw oil and economics into the mix.
So when the president, or his operatives, or the media, enter your home this evening to give you the latest news, it all boils down to a matter of faith and trust. For many of us as Christians, where we place our faith is no problem
The bigger question is: Who can you trust?