Consider the gradual co-opting of religious capital by the world's power brokers:

'The religious doctrine of peace meets the power politics of state, the rules are bent for the 'just war,' and once the first few doses are administered the state becomes an addict that will tell any lie to get its narcotic.  War is simply the means.  The real narcotic is power.  As Hungarian writer Gyögy Konrád said of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, "Men can invent few libidinous fantasies more enjoyable than those of world domination."  The African-American poet Langston Hughes called the leading nations "the nymphomaniacs of power."'
Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence

If artists and other thinkers are called to speak truth to power (and I think we are), just maybe it's the artists who have the most effective voice.

Bill Moyers' recent conversation with David Simon, creator of The Wire, a TV series about inner city Baltimore, includes this:

BILL MOYERS: Can fiction tell us something about inequality that journalism can't?

DAVID SIMON: I've wondered about that, because I did a lot of journalism. I did a lot of journalism I thought was pretty good. I was very careful as a reporter. And for me, I was trying to explain... how the drug war doesn't work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the ether and be gone... And I would think, "Man, it's just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts." When you somehow tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats.

Gandhi's truth telling was more than talk.  It was satyagraha, which he described as follows:

'I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.'
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Power-speak is everywhere.  Even twelve-step programs talk of a higher power one-upping the demons of desire.  And yet, what is power in our culture if not the demon of desire wed to the fantasy of domination?  But twelve-steppers traditionally tell their stories, an ancient art form, to fuel the resistance.

As we gird our truthful loins with words of Gandhi and books of nonviolence, let Princess Leia's plea (and yes, she is a daughter of the Star Wars franchise) serve as benediction:

'Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars; now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person; but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I've placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.'

*Thursday's hearing was the first court appearance for the men who were tracked down by French commandos... in waters off Somalia, the lawless epicenter of the flourishing pirate industry off the Horn of Africa.
Katharine Houreld, Associated Press

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