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"A space alien captured at a UFO landing site in eastern Missouri cracked under interrogation by the CIA and admitted that an extraterrestrial army will attack Earth on November 27 with the express purpose of stripping our planet of every natural resource they can find a use for -- and making slaves of every man, woman and child in the world!"
-- The Sacerdotal Knights of National Security
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by Jeff Carter
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Dr. Jekyll created a concoction which allowed him to separate himself into two personas: the noble and respectable Dr. Jekyll and the depraved Mr. Hyde. His intent was to separate the personas so that the respectable Dr. could indulge in his secret vices without damaging his respectable reputation. Mr. Hyde, however, soon took over and threatened with dangerous violence to destroy the good doctor.
Though Stevenson wrote the story to illustrate the struggle between the good that I know and the evil that I desire anyway, ("...it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assults of temptation." ) it has some allegorical application to our country. The United States of America is both the good doctor and the depraved Hyde. It is unclear which of the two personas will emerge from the struggle as the victor.
The America we’re taught about in school – whether home or public – is the noble respectable America: founded on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Freedom for all, power from the people to the state and not the other way around. Democracy as established under the Constitution – which some have suggested came almost directly from the mouth of God. This America is a beautiful America. This America is the beautiful lady symbolized by the Statue of Liberty at Ellis Island (her full name is Liberty Enlightening the World).
The New Colossus – by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beaconed hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The un-bridged harbor that twin cities frame
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This is a beautiful noble America – open and inviting to all, a mother to the poor, a shelter to the victimized, and an aide to the oppressed. She comes to the rescue of those who are threatened and in danger. This is the America where all (and women) are created equal. Where people are free to speak, assemble, worship, and protest. This is the noble America that the Pilgrims and the Puritans set out to establish.
“Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us, soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdraw his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” - John Winthrop
It was envisioned that America would become a sort of Zion to which all the nations would stream in order to find Truth, Justice, and Righteousness – the American way. This is the America that I love. The America that strives to be a physical incarnation of the spiritual Zion. The America that is free and generous and just.
But just as Jekyll had his Hyde, Lady Liberty has a darker persona as well.
This American Woman isn’t so lovely. She has a 200+ year history of oppression and greed and lies. She’s tattooed on one arm with the words “Manifest Destiny.” Beneath her feet are the Indian nations she displaced in order to make way for her westward expansion, Japanese civilians burned and radiated by two atomic blasts, and an ever growing pile of aborted fetuses.
She wears the finest clothes: supple leather shoes, embroidered silk gowns, and rings and bracelets of gold studded with numerous precious stones. Her purse is full and bursting with cash and credit cards, but she stoops to take a few meager pennies from the starving masses surrounding her.
She carries with her a loaded M-16 rifle and is not afraid to use it. (Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan….) or to sell it to her violent death-squad lovers in El Salvador, Chile, China, Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Iran… She’s even trained many of them to be excellent marksmen in her School of the Americas. Her other arm is tattooed with the motto of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s novel 1984, “WAR IS PEACE!”
The two Americas - Jekyll and Hyde – are mutually exclusive, though not separate. They co-exist in a continual struggle for dominance. It has, however, been the strategy of the darker Hyde-esque America to Hide behind a mask of the noble America, disguising her cruelty and oppression in noble sounding rhetoric such as, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of those who threaten it!” But behind that masquerade is still the creeping American evil.
There seem to be two Americas. I love the one and detest the other. “America… Love it or Leave it!” But which one? Which America are we defending? Which one are we criticizing? Which one do we love and which one do we leave? Which persona will we allow to win the struggle?
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Jeff Carter is a columnist for PlanetPreterist.com. Jeff is an officer in the Salvation Army, working as an Administrator of the Social Services and Pastor of the Church.
View Jeff Carter archives
Note: Opinions presented on PlanetPreterist.com or by PlanetPreterist.com columnists may not necessarily reflect the position of PlanetPreterist.com, or reflect the beliefs, doctrine or theological position of all other preterists. We encourage all readers to first and foremost carefully analyze all articles in the light of God's Word.
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Re: Jekyll and Hyde Americas (Score: 1)
 by juppes on Saturday, August 21 @ 20:05:53 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Very well done and sadly to say "very true".
Which persona will we allow to win the struggle?
We will see that answer by the comment's this article will get.
Blessings Juergen |
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- by Ed on Sunday, August 22 @ 12:44:31 PDT
- by jcarter on Sunday, August 22 @ 12:53:39 PDT
- by Ed on Sunday, August 22 @ 18:38:47 PDT
- by jcarter on Sunday, August 22 @ 21:11:02 PDT
- by Ed on Monday, August 23 @ 13:45:06 PDT
- by jcarter on Tuesday, August 24 @ 15:14:26 PDT
- by JRP on Sunday, August 22 @ 14:14:55 PDT
- by juppes on Sunday, August 22 @ 15:18:00 PDT
- by JRP on Sunday, August 22 @ 16:34:57 PDT
- by Ed on Sunday, August 22 @ 18:49:00 PDT
- by juppes on Sunday, August 22 @ 19:09:03 PDT
- by chrisliv on Sunday, August 22 @ 19:29:47 PDT
Re: Jekyll and Hyde... Much Like the Body of Christ vs. Body of the State (Score: 1)
 by chrisliv on Sunday, August 22 @ 14:07:58 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Yeah, Jeff,
Nice analogy.
And, when you say:
"The two Americas - Jekyll and Hyde – are mutually exclusive, though not separate. They co-exist in a continual struggle for dominance."
I have often thought and expressed, using other terms, that the co-mingling of Jekyll and Hyde is what what allows Hyde's existence to continue.
Separation is the key.
As I'll usually mention, when we see the Body of Christ separate from the Body of the State, then we may notice that the self-destructive Bipolar Disorder in the World System will likely begin to diminish.
And, of course, a first-step in that direction would be for most of the many thousands of state-incorporated, federally-regulated, 501 (c) 3 religious organizations in North America to dis-incorporate and disolve their corporate charters and restore Christ as Head over the Church, to the exclusion of all other Heads, in particular, a State's Attorney General.
Then individual members will find it easier to dis-incorporate themselves from the Body of the State and truely be the Salt of the Earth and the Light amongst a very Dark World System.
I'm not saying to abolish the State. Some people will always prefer the Body of the State over the Body of Christ. Besides, the Church needs a jurisdiction other that itself to excommunicate certain members to, until they repent of certain sins and are accepted back into Christ's Kingdom and Fellowship.
Peace to you all,
C. Livingstone |
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- by Paige on Monday, August 23 @ 09:18:08 PDT
- by chrisliv on Monday, August 23 @ 10:47:47 PDT
- by Paige on Monday, August 23 @ 14:49:02 PDT
Re: Jekyll and Hyde Americas (Score: 1)
by Islamaphobe on Monday, August 23 @ 06:25:49 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | I shall comment about what I consider to be a truly misguided mindset exhibited by many well-meaning people, the mindset that says we should clean up our own house before criticizing what goes in the rest of the world. We are all sinners, and any nation composed of sinners is always going to exhibit numerous imperfections. But it is ridiculous, and I mean that emphatically, to focus on criticisms of the United States while ignoring the status of the rest of the world.
The America of today is a great deal more hospitable to immigrants than was the America of Emma Lazarus's day, which makes quoting her rather pointless logically. In her time, incidentally, we had plenty of anarchists running around blowing up newspaper offices and assassinating people, and we didn't have the protections for immigrants that government offers now.
Always in any free society there are people who want to find fault with that society and bring on their version of a secular utopia. They have that right, of course, but those of us who believe that the rest of the world suffers from social ills that dwarf the problems in this country have the right, no duty, to protect what we have in this country from such shortsightedness.
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- by Ed on Monday, August 23 @ 13:27:20 PDT
Re: Jekyll and Hyde Americas (Score: 1)
by chrisliv on Monday, August 23 @ 12:13:21 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | FYI,
"What is the difference between an American pilot who drops a bomb on a Baghdad market and the Iraqi terrorist, who lays a bomb in the same market? The fact that the pilot has a uniform? Or that he drops his bomb from a distance and does not see the children he is killing?" Column by Uri Avnery.
That's a little exerpt from a recent article by that great Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, Uri Avnery.
I don't know if it's on his site yet, but it was posted here:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/avnery/avnery29.html
Peace to you all,
C. Livingstone
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Re: Jekyll and Hyde Americas... NGO's Buffer the Two (To Jeff) (Score: 1)
by chrisliv on Tuesday, August 24 @ 10:02:15 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Yeah, Jeff,
CSPAN had Arundhati Roy televised from the West Coast, and she came out with a article about Empire:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=6087
It's kind of lengthly, and I don't really endorse any form of activism that legitimizes a hostile state (Right or Left), but I'm certainly for fairness for all people, and Roy has a great sense of that.
Anyway, in the middle section of the article there's an interesting bit about NGO's, which may be relevant to you position and career with the SA.
Below is a little exerpt from Roy's article.
Peace to you,
C. Livingstone
"They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.
"In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation.
"In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context." |
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Re: Jekyll and Hyde Americas... Truth About War Crimes in Indochina (Score: 1)
by chrisliv on Friday, August 27 @ 00:04:20 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Yeah,
Here too, is a recent article by a writer who personally interviewed about 2000 defenseless peasants around the time that Wash DC was carrying out secret bombing in Laos.
The writer suggests that these war crimes on defenseless peasants presents a ongoing crisis, about the truth of it all, which is still having an effect to this day.
Here's a link to the full article:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=6105
Below is a little exerpt.
Peace to you all,
C. Livingstone
"The United States dropped 6,727,084 tons of bombs on Indochina, more than triple what was dropped on all of Europe and the entire Pacific Theater in World War II. We will never know how many innocent Indochinese peasants died from these illegal bombings, but former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has estimated that 3.4 million Indochinese died during the war. Since the vast majority of these perished from U.S. firepower, estimates of the innocents who died must begin in the hundreds of thousands." |
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