By The Rivers of Babylon

we sat and wept...

If you're an atheist reader, you might want to skip this post.  I'm not going to evangelize, but I am going to talk a little bit about the Bible. 

Specifically, the Bible as literature and the intentions of those who wrote it.  

More specifically, the 137th Psalm.  

It's one of the biggies.  Not as famous as the 23rd, which I'm guessing most people have heard of either in the original ("The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want...")  or in Pink Floyd's Sheep (Pt 2) variation ("...He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places".) and not as famous as the ones about evildoers ("Do not be envious of evildoers, for they will fade like the grass...") but still pretty well-known.  

Bits of it show up all over the place in popular culture.  The sadness and versatility of its poetry have been harvested to title books by William Faulkner ("If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem"), poems by Elizabeth Smart ("By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept") and short stories by Arthur C. Clarke ("If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth") and Stephen Vincent Benét ("By the Waters of Babylon").

So what is a "psalm" anyway?

Well, it can be a song and/or a prayer.  There are 150 of them in the Bible, and they cover just about every human circumstance from joy to sorrow, from birth to death and from youth to growing old.  

And the Psalm 137is about a very specific kind of loss.  The loss felt by a people whose have been conquered by their enemies.  Who have lost everything.  Who are the captives of those who hate them, who mock them, and who salt their captives wounds by ordering them to play songs on their harps about how awesome Jerusalem was now that it has been destroyed.  It is an agonizing prayer about what it feels like to be forced to watch as awful people dance on the grave of everything you love.  

In modern parlance, the Edomites drink their captive's tears.

It is a furious prayer, demanding that God quit fucking around and do something about it.  Demanding that God look at what these monsters have done to us!  A prayer so boiling over with inconsolable rage that it not only demands that God set things right, but goes further and implores God to murder the children of their enemies.  

And ultimately it is a bitter and desolate prayer thrown in God's face by a people who know that God is almost certainly not coming to save them.

Here's the entire text:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

    we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

    while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

    may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

    my highest joy.

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did

    on the day Jerusalem fell.

“Tear it down,” they cried,

    “tear it down to its foundations!”

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

    happy is the one who repays you

    according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants

    and dashes them against the rocks.

This is what comes to mind when I hear people with whom I largely agree and whose anger I share issuing demands that are either practically impossible, or require that our political realities change sufficiently to make them possible.  

Because the leering faces of our enemies -- the armed fascists and lunatics who are merrily rolling back our civil rights and slicing up our democracy -- are all too real and ubiquitous.

And our enemies do, in fact, revel in our suffering.  They're proud of drinking our Liberal tears.

However, since the various crises facing us are political and legislative, and since presenting God with  ultimata is no longer in fashion, many of us end up lashing out at the most powerful people we know.  After all, we elected them to protect us from this madness, and yet the madness persists, so obviously they have abandoned us to our fate and our enemies!  Those fuckers!

I'm sure by now you're familiar with the list.

Why aren't you more angry!! 

Why aren't you loosing mighty Executive Action thunderbolts and bringing these fuckers to their knees!!  

Why don't you just declare Washington D.C. a state and have done with it?!?  

Why do you refuse to appoint three or five or, hell, 13 more LIberal Supreme Court justices?!?  

Why aren't you snapping your fingers and making Roe the law of the land.  

Why don't you cattle-prod/waterboard/bribe Manchin and Sinema and force them vote the way we want them to?

The actual answers to each of these questions is available to anyone with a computer or smartphone and access to the internet.  For example, this summary is a mere mouse-click away to anyone who is actually interested in how a new state might be admitted to the Union:

Statehood bills in Congress are considered as any other legislation. They are not privileged for floor consideration in the House or considered privileged business in the Senate. When the Washington, DC Admission Act (H.R.51) was considered in the House this year, it was brought to the floor under a special rule (H.Res.1017). Statehood measures reported from the Senate committee are placed on the Legislative Calendar, and debate would not be limited on either the motion to proceed or on the bill itself. Cloture to end debate on either would require 3/5 of the Senate under Rule XXII.

That's 60 votes in the Senate.  If you don't have that, you might as well go pitch pennies in the alley, because 60 votes is the buy-in at this table.  

Various bills to admit Puerto Rico have also been floated over the years.  And they've all died in committee because without 60 votes they're all DOA in the Senate.

Ok, but whatabout codifying Roe?  

A bill to codify abortion protections fails in the Senate

The Women's Health Protection Act, a Democrat-led bill that would effectively codify a right to an abortion, failed to pass, as expected, after it did not reach the Senate's 60-vote threshold. All Democrats voted for the legislation except Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and all Republicans opposed the bill.

In a rare occurrence, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the vote, which was 49-51...

Again, 60 votes.

I could go on, but that's really not why I'm writing this, because, as I've already said, I understand the fury of people I largely agree with and whose anger I share who blaze through social media in a white-hot rage over all of these things.  Because the atrocities the Right has inflicted on our country -- and continues to inflict -- are absolutely worthy of our anger.

But I also know better than to try to argue the point.  

Because what I hear in this firestorm of anger are not policy proposals or workable political strategies.  

What I hear are bitter prayers of a despairing people flung into the face of a flawed, circumscribed and thoroughly temporal authority that seems unable to save them.

I Am The Liberal Media