A Diet of Desires

I was walking the dog on a Sunday afternoon when the anxiety hit like a thunderbolt.  Earlier that day, I'd preached on the omnipresence of marketing in American life, and how what we desire is a factor of powerful systems that manipulate our interests.  It folded in neatly with a talk about my book on prayer and our desires, and how we must learn to unwant the things that we are taught to want so very badly.

I'd cited a dollar figure on the scale of the American advertising industry, and even though I'd found it multiply attested earlier in the week, I suddenly got a bad case of the yips.  Did I get that number wrong?  Had I erred?  Maybe I'd mistyped it.  Maybe I'd misread it.

If I had, my mistake was likely not a rounding error.  Not off by two percent, not off by ten percent, but off by 100,000%.  The number was the total 2024 spending on advertising, which came in, averaging from various sources, at just a smidge over $500,000,000,000.  

America spent five hundred billion dollars on marketing in 2024, I declared publicly, while church folks shook their heads in amazement.  

Surely that was wrong.  It couldn't be right.  It's a staggering figure, a preposterous figure, one that I presented with confidence.  Had I made a mistake?

The dog did his business, and I slogged home, suddenly certain that I had catastrophically embarrassed myself.  I checked the numbers again.

There'd been no mistake.

Five hundred billion dollars, more or less, against a global total of one point one trillion.  

I didn't know whether to be relieved or re-horrified.  In context, it does make sense.  Americans see more advertising than any other culture.  It's that money that feeds Facebook, that feeds X, that feeds Google.  It's that money that fills our mailboxes with crap, that forces us to pause multiple times during a show, even if we've paid Bezos for the frickin' "privilege" of Prime.  We've been taught that ads are fun, that ads are cool and great and creative, but Jesus Mary and Joseph, that's insane.

For that price, we as a nation could have Medicare for all, and a fully funded USAID, and retool our economy to actually compete with the Chinese, and have a MoonBase, and be going to Mars.  But instead, we get...what?  We get a cotton candy nothing.  We're penned up and stuffed full of manufactured desires like foie gras geese or penned up veal calves.

None of it, not a bit of it, is necessary for the functioning of a healthy society.  Would we not remember to eat?  Would we forget that we need a roof over our heads?  Would our doctors not recommend appropriate medications?

Of course not.

Imagine an authoritarian regime that spent that much on propaganda, where that amount of energy was spent manipulating the hearts and minds of an endlessly anxious populace.

How is that not what's happening?

Why Greenland? Why Now?

Why Greenland? Why now?

It can seem, at first glance, a strange and incongruous new obsession, akin to Lex Luthor's desire for Australia.

It's entirely reasonable to suggest that there's no reason the United States needed to stop at fifty states, or to argue that adding another territory is somehow unacceptable as a topic of discussion.   That's only true, mind you, if that's a free and uncoerced choice of the inhabitants of that region.  If America economically bullies a people into submission, or...far worse...uses military force?  Then we are tyrants and monsters and morally bankrupt.  Those things need to be off the table, period, or we are no longer a nation where republican virtue matters.

But the principle of adding to the United States is not inherently invalid.  It's just, again, why Greenland?  Why now?

The geopolitical situation has changed since the Cold War.  It's not 1975.  It's 2025.

Most of the 20th century proxy struggles between the United States and those powers occurred in the Global South, but in 2025, all eyes are on the Arctic.  In 1975, the Arctic was just a desolate, inhospitable frozen waste, one where access to mineral and fossil fuel resources was immensely challenging.  The only reason to keep an eye on it was because that's where the Soviet ICBMs might be flying over on their way to pay us a visit. 

That old geopolitical reality isn't the reason for our new interest in Greenland.  In fact, the reason we pulled back from Greenland, and have fewer troops there than we did at the height of the Cold War?  It's because we're not toe-to-toe with the Soviets there anymore.  That changed.

But other things have changed.  

It's not missiles we're expecting, but ships, because Northern shipping routes are opening up.  Resources that were formerly out of reach are suddenly potentially available, particularly to American oil companies.

Greenland and the newly open waters around it are of much more interest now, economically, than they were fifty years ago.

But...why is this an emergent reality?  I mean, there's a reason.  A single, glaring, significant, obvious reason.  There's a term for that reason, but you're increasingly unlikely to find that term in the mouths of our leaders or on the recently censored websites of our government agencies.

It's climate change.  We want Greenland because of climate change.

I mean, duh.  Less ice means more shipping.  Less ice means deep sea drilling for crude and natural gas becomes a logistical possibility.

In the context of the melting of Arctic sea ice, there's a definite logic to Greenland as a focus.  It's not nuts at all.  Selfishly grasping, crassly profiteering and catastrophically short-sighted, perhaps, but there's a definitive internal logic to it.

But this is only true if anthropogenic, fossil-fuel-driven climate change is actually happening.

Which it is.  

Meaning there's a cynical and implicit acknowledgement on the part of this administration, running all the way to the top.  America's sudden hunger for Greenland exists now only because the increasing pace of climate change makes the control of that region suddenly far, far more lucrative to the oil interests who helped bankroll the current regime.

So.  How does Trump say "climate change is real" without using those words?  

"I want Greenland."  That's how he says it.

Tribes and Cultural Christianity

In the last week, there's been a spate of particularly ugly news coming out of West Africa. Meaning, it's something that most Americans are utterly unaware even happened. There's just no room for it in our brains, what with March Madness and the Oscars, so why even bother putting it on the air?

The news comes from Nigeria, a country where my folks lived for several years, and which I had the opportunity to visit on several occasions many moons ago. In and around the town of Jos, a group of Muslims attacked Christians, shooting and hacking to death several hundred people. It's a reprisal for a similar attack undertaken by bands of Christians, and part of a long cycle of interreligious violence in that region. It is, or so it might appear, yet another example of the brutality that folks inflict on one another in the name of God. Look at the bloodshed that faith causes, one might say. If there were no religions to divide people in the name of God, then the world would be a much better place, one might say.

Problem is, that's not what is at play here. The Muslims were all Fulani tribespeople. The Christians were all Berom tribespeople. The recent attacks seem to be related to the theft of some livestock a while back, which was followed by reprisals, which were followed by more reprisals. The Berom all are Christian, but they also are ethnically and linguistically separate from the Fulani, and have been so since before Jesus and Mohammed showed up in that part of sub-Saharan Africa.

The violence has to do with the thing that causes most human conflict...that tendency for groups to organize around a shared identity that differentiates them from other groups. The most elemental of those groupings is that of blood, as our bond to family becomes the most significant Us. We are the Hatfields! What was your last name again, stranger? On another level come the bonds that come from shared culture and land. We are American! We Support Our Troops (tm)! On yet another come the bonds that come from mutual interest. We are the West Burlington Knitting Society! Death to the East Burlington Knitting Society!

When faith is delimited by the particular forms and expectations of a given culture or society, then it can become yet another rationale to shore up hatreds driven by blood and material possession. That, as I've been opining of late, is one of the more radical things about what Jesus taught.

The bonds of blood and language and culture...even the bonds of religious self-identification...are things that Jesus explicitly rejected. It is the hated Samaritan who is offered as the highest model of grace. It is the Syrophonecian woman who Jesus yields to in a serious breach of gender and ethnic protocol, in front of his disciples no less. It is the pagan Roman centurion's child who is healed.

When we start viewing Christianity as functionally identical to our culture, when it becomes yet another Us that permits hatred of those who are Not Us, then we've lost our Way.