The Babylonian Shitstem: How Does the Empire Fall? Psalm Reading: Psalm 137

[struggle4progress]

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

... 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 ...

This psalm is about not singing. The prisoners of the empire were not going to take up their instruments to entertain the oppressor. They hung them in the willows, and the writer pledges never to forget what the empire has done to his people. Better to lose his playing hand and have his tongue cling to the roof of his mouth than forget, or accommodate, or detach ...

For Rastafarians, the waters are the Atlantic Sea and Zion is Africa, where their fathers were taken into captivity and shipped to the Caribbean to be made slaves of the Empire. Rastafarians like the revolutionary vocabulary, the pathos of the Psalms. Music is their political tool—they use it to “chant down” the enemy, the “Babylonian shitstem”: the corrupt machine of the West. They resist by singing revolutionary lyrics and playing that persistent reggae beat, rather than taking up arms.

The Empire makes slaves. It oppresses, limits, destroys, murders. Often its violence is met with violence. Che Guevara didn’t lay down his arms; neither did the Sandinistas, or the Italian Resistance. Humanity is still capable of smashing babies against rocks, or raping them, or flaying them with machetes. If you live in the midst of that, how do you possibly face the violent horrors of humanity without violence or without just lying down and dying? And for those of us who enjoy the privileges of Empire, how might we participate in its undoing?

http://thehardestquestion.org/yearc/ordinary27psalm/

[On the Road]

1. Psalm 137 is Pretty Unusual

I don't agree with the author's using it to make generalizations about the Psalms. I never knew, however, that the Rastafarians read the Bible as Zion = Africa and New World slavery = the Babylonian captivity. From their point of view, it probably reads pretty well that way.

[Jim__]

2. Humanity is still capable of smashing babies against rocks, or raping them, or flaying them ...

... with machetes.

Yes indeed!

The Empire makes slaves. It oppresses, limits, destroys, murders. Often its violence is met with violence. Che Guevara didn’t lay down his arms; neither did the Sandinistas, or the Italian Resistance. Humanity is still capable of smashing babies against rocks, or raping them, or flaying them with machetes. If you live in the midst of that, how do you possibly face the violent horrors of humanity without violence or without just lying down and dying? And for those of us who enjoy the privileges of Empire, how might we participate in its undoing?

The problem is that once we meet the violent horrors of humanity with violence, and we win, how do we not become the Empire?