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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
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August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
Burning
Slaves at the Stake
On
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
By
THOMAS ST. JOHN
Rev. Jonathan Edwards delivered the
hellfire and brimstone "spider" sermon, "Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God" in Enfield, Connecticut on
July 8, 1741. This topical sermon is a bitter jeremiad against
the "New York Negro rebels" who were then being executed
for plotting to burn the village of New York to the ground.
From late May to August 1741,
in the public market place that later became known as "the
Five Points", thirteen slaves were burned at the stake,
sixteen were hanged, hundreds were jailed, and seventy-two were
transported to certain death in the West Indies. Contemporaries
compared these events to the Salem witch hysteria of 1692. When
Edwards preached in early July, twelve slaves had already been
burned, and nine were hanged; the minister had no way of knowing
how many more would be tortured.
The courtroom tirades of Edwards'
personal friend, the prosecuting attorney William Smith sent
many innocent slaves to their fiery deaths amid the screaming
populace. Smith's tirades echo in the nightmarish images that
build to terrifying effect in "Sinners in the Hands of An
Angry God". Jonathan Edwards met William Smith at
Yale University, and from August 1722 to May 1723 lodged with
Susanna Odell, Madam Thomas Smith, in New York City--the prosecuting
lawyer's mother. Edwards supplied the pulpit of a small Presbyterian
church on Williams Street, near the docks. Thomas Smith was a
church trustee. William's younger brother, John Smith, became
Jonathan's closest, and abiding friend both at Yale, and during
the New York days, their correspondence continuing twenty years
later.
There is a tradition that Edwards
delivered his discourse while staring fixedly at the bell-rope
that hanged directly opposite the pulpit. This uncharacteristic
preaching manner drew attention. Edwards likely stared not to
the rope, but directly beyond it to the Negroes segregated in
the gallery.
Dwelling upon the scenes of
agony in the New York colony, imagining his fellow ministers
officiating at the stake and the scaffold, exhorting the rebels
and sinners to confess, Jonathan Edwards chose his text: Deuteronomy
32 verse 35: "Their foot shall slide in due time.".
"In this verse is threatened
the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who
were God's visible people, and who lived under the means of grace;
but who, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works towards them,
remained [as verse 28] void of counsel. . .". The expression
"void of counsel" here refers to the fact that not
one lawyer in New York came forward to defend the accused slaves.
The sheriff of New York dropped
the scaffold trap so frequently that summer that Jonathan Edwards
almost naturally describes and threatens a physical fall to perdition--the
thought of him "that walks in slippery places", or
that "walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering",
and the failed rebel whose "foot shall slide in due time".
"O sinner! Consider the
fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath. .
. .You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath
flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn
it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing
to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames
of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done,
nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you one moment.".
Then there is that grotesque
and pitiless image of the slave burning at the stake, seen as
a fire- shrivelled spider:
"The God that holds you
over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome
insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked;
his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy
of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer
eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand
times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venemous
serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than
ever a stubborn rebel did his prince: and yet, it is nothing
but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every
moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not
go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to wake again
in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there
is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into
hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has
held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have
not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God,
provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending
his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be
given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into
hell.".
Edwards plays on the racial
fears of the Connecticut settlers and their memories of Indian
uprisings with two Deuteronomy verses: "I will spend mine
arrows upon them," and "I will make mine arrows drunk
with blood".
"The bow of God's wrath
is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice
bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is
nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God,
without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow
one moment from being made drunk with your blood." Enfield
is reminded that "the arrows of death fly unseen at noonday;
the sharpest sight cannot discern them".
Jonathan Edwards did not create
terrifying visions of torture in order to hurl his people into
despair. The congregation, unwilling to accept any responsibility
for slavery and its trade, needed "Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God" to ease the intolerable pangs of conscience
that were provoked by the events in New York.
The people in Enfield "yelled
and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up into
the pulpit and begged him to stop," forcing Edwards at one
point to "speak to the people and desire silence, that he
might be heard,". There was "great moaning & crying
out through ye whole House. . .ye shrieks & crys were piercing
& Amazing. . ." And yet the congregation knew its desire:
a stilled conscience. Ultimately absolved by their minister,
the jubilant people in Enfield were free; but thrilling sermons
in Connecticut could be no solace to the tortured in New York.
"Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God" is the most acute British colonial expression
of the enduring conflict between Christian sentiment, and slavery's
crimes. This conflict still suffuses and contorts Amercian social
thought:
You gave
her Pompey, a Negro slave,
and eleven children.
Yet people were spiders
in your moment of glory,
at the Great Awakening--"Alas, how many
in this very meeting house are more than likely
to remember my discourse in hell!"
--Robert Lowell
"Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts"
Thomas St. John graduated from Drew University in
Madison, New Jersey, and lived in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He is the author of "Forgotten Dreams: Ritual in American
Popular Art" (New York: The Vantage Press, 1987), a collection
of essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables,
Reverend Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God", the black history driving the films "Casablanca"
and the cartoon "The Three Little Pigs", and the Dakota
Indian territory symbols in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz".
The short book "Nathaniel
Hawthorne: Studies in the House of the Seven Gables"
is now almost complete and online. He can be reached at: seekingthephoenix@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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