Opinion

Imagine if the people of Germany's capital, Berlin, had no representation in the Bundestag. Picture the last presidential election in France resulting in Marine Le Pen defeating Emmanuel Macron while garnering millions fewer votes. Finally, suppose that Britain's parliamentary constituencies were created so that sparsely populated Scotland enjoyed vastly disproportionate representation.

Perform that thought experiment and you will understand why people in other developed countries shake their heads at the American system of government. For all the obligatory public reverence we render to our Constitution, it has served us poorly for decades. Its negative features stymie modern governance and democracy itself, while its good provisions have been perverted or are virtual dead letter. Worst of all, its very structure impedes sensible revision.

President Joe Biden just proposed a roughly US$2 trillion infrastructure plan, which he ambitiously compared to the interstate highway system and the space race. He aims to pay for it solely by taxing companies more, including the first increase in the corporate tax rate since the 1960s.

Biden said he wants to increase the rate from 21% to 28% – which would still be below the 35% level it was at before the 2017 tax cut – and strengthen the global minimum tax to discourage multinational corporations from using tax havens. Together, he estimates it would raise the necessary funds to finance his plan over 15 years.

Handwashing has gotten substantial coverage this past year during the COVID-19 pandemic, and not just for hygiene. You may have encountered some of the many accusations in both the U.S. and Canada that a politician has “washed his hands" of pandemic responsibilities.

Sometimes the reference includes a nod to the historical figure associated with this phrase: Recently in the U.S., a conservative commentator faulted President Joe Biden, saying he is “like Pontius Pilate: just washes his hands and stays quiet."

These handwashing images derive from iconic biblical scripture referring to events preceding Jesus's crucifixion.

In one of the earliest versions of these events, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea from at least 26 to 37 CE — the only man with the power to order a crucifixion — washes his hands before a crowd. In the Gospel of Matthew, he simultaneously assents to Jesus's execution and claims no personal responsibility.

Throughout the history of Christianity, representations of Pilate's handwashing have often been used to shift blame for Jesus's death to Jews, and have been part of a toxic legacy of Christian and western antisemitism.

The historical Pilate

In the first century CE, the Roman empire ruled the sub-province of Judea through military governors like Pilate, who were tasked with quashing any rebellions against Roman rule. Pilate was the only person in Judea with the authority to execute someone by crucifixion, a brutal form of capital punishment reserved for slaves and non-citizens deemed subversive.

Helen Bond, professor of Christian origins explains that “the execution of Jesus was in all probability a routine crucifixion of a messianic agitator" by a Roman governor.

Jewish sources convey that Pilate was hostile toward Jews and their customs. Philo of Alexandria even lamented Pilate's “continual murders of people untried and uncondemned."

Exonerating Pilate

Yet, the New Testament gospels offer ambivalent portraits of the man who ordered Christ's execution. There are four different accounts of Jesus's sentencing and death, but all agree Pilate was reluctant to declare Jesus guilty.

Each gospel depicts Pilate finding Jesus blameless but acquiescing to execute him, whether due to personal weakness, to appease the crowds or to legitimate his own authority and the emperor's. Instead of impugning Pilate, the gospels shift the blame for Jesus's death to Jewish authorities.

Each of these gospels was written during the decades following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans (70 CE), the climax of the First Jewish Revolt. This was a period of rampant anti-Judaism: imperialist media such as coins and monuments indiscriminately linked Jews from across the empire to the rebels in Judea and cast Jews as barbaric traitors. The empire punished all Jews, for instance, with a tax.

This created a challenge for those early followers of Jesus — both Jews and gentiles — who proclaimed that their Saviour was a Jew whom Rome executed as a criminal. The gospel authors stressed that Jesus opposed the Jewish authorities and was not found guilty by the Roman governor.

Jewish and gentile Jesus followers

How to understand depictions of “Jews" in gospels written before the self-identification “Christian" became widespread in the early second century is thus immensely complicated. The Gospel of John, for instance, emerged from a gentile community. It never uses the term “Christian" yet distinguishes followers of Christ from Jews through hostile rhetoric demonizing “the Jews" as children of the devil, as the New Testament scholar Adele Reinhartz has shown.

Matthew's gospel, however, was produced by a community of Christ-followers who more clearly fit within the spectrum of Jewish identities, yet were eager to distinguish themselves from Jewish leaders who had been involved in the revolt and post-war Jewish leaders (namely, the rabbis). In this case, rhetorical attacks against certain Jewish leaders reflect an inter-sectarian argument among Jews.

Transferring guilt

The pattern of exonerating Pilate by blaming Jewish leaders is unmistakable in Matthew's gospel. It includes a “blood curse" that is the basis of a toxic formula that Christians have used to justify centuries of Christian anti-Judaism, often resulting in reprehensible acts of violence against Jews: “So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing … he took some water and washed his hands … saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.' Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'"

Matthew also writes “the chief priests and the elders" were manipulating the crowds. He often accuses Jewish leaders of such corruption as well as hypocrisy and misunderstanding the Jewish law.

Pilate's handwashing alludes to an older account from Jewish scripture. Deuteronomy 21:1-9 prescribes a ritual through which Israel can be “absolved of bloodguilt" for a murder committed by an unknown person. Because the culprit can't be prosecuted, this ritual removes “bloodguilt," or communal liability for “innocent blood," that would otherwise remain in the midst of the people of Israel.

The rite entails the people's elders washing their hands of bloodguilt while priests break a heifer's neck. Matthew inverts Deuteronomy's ritual, and casts the priests and elders as hypocrites who invited bloodguilt onto their kinfolk.

Pilate's redemption and anti-Judaism

Through early Christian writers, Pilate became an even more positive figure by the time the Roman Empire adopted Christianity. Some considered Pilate a Christian, at least “in his conscience," as the early theologian Tertullian wrote. The Coptic Church proclaimed him a saint in the sixth century. Pilate even appears in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed, a Christian statement of faith: Jesus was “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate." Note the statement says “under" and not “by" Pilate.

Ancient Christian texts doubled down on the New Testament gospels' shifting of blame from Pilate to Jews, as professor of the New Testament Warren Carter has shown.

Christian authors deployed ambivalent and positive images of Pilate to show that Christianity was not a threat to Roman law and order. In doing so, they fanned the flames of anti-Judaism. Art historian Colum Hourihane has explored how these anti-Jewish interpretations eventually led to negative characterizations of Pilate himself as a Jew during the medieval period in Europe. At this time, Christians blamed Jews for plagues.

While the majority of Americans either intend to get the COVID-19 vaccine or have already received their shots, getting white evangelicals to vaccination sites may prove more of a challenge – especially those who identify as Christian nationalists.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February found white evangelicals to be the religious group least likely to say they'd be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Nearly half (45%) said they would not get the COVID-19 shot, compared with 30% of the general population.

The leftist Democratic Socialists of America, which helped congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get elected in 2018, looks to be a big political player again in New York City's 2021 municipal elections.

The group has not yet endorsed anyone for mayor – the top prize in New York's June 22 Democratic primaries. But all 51 city council seats are up for grabs this year, and the DSA has members running for six of them – including Queens public defender Tiffany Cabán and Brooklyn tenant activist Michael Hollingsworth.

In April 1961, just months after the young John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States, his reputation for expertise in foreign policy took a battering as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a covert action against the Cuban government that collapsed within a matter of days.

The collapse in Afghanistan that has flowed from current President Joe Biden's decision to proceed with a complete US troop withdrawal is more than likely to be seen as his own Bay of Pigs moment.

But it may be something worse, akin to the Suez crisis of 1956, which not only humiliated the British government of Sir Anthony Eden, but marked the end of the United Kingdom as a global power.

When historians look back at the shambolic US exit from Afghanistan, it may increasingly appear a critical marker of America's decline in the world, far eclipsing the flight from Saigon in 1975.

The path to disaster

How did this come to pass? Afghans, turning on themselves, are already pinning the blame on now-departed President Ashraf Ghani, and Biden's defenders are sure to join the chorus. Yet this is an oversimplification of how things unravelled.

Ghani's domineering style, poor personnel choices, and reluctance to delegate power to others all played significant roles in the current crisis.

However, the institutional and political problems that were festering long before Ghani became president are perhaps more to blame: a seriously overcentralised state; a presidential system that placed far too much formal power in Kabul; and the development of “neopatrimonial" politics, based on patronage networks that had flourished under former President Hamid Karzai, which in turn fostered electoral fraud.

On Friday and Saturday, as an average of one Kansan per hour died from COVID-19, the Kansas Legislature threw open the doors of the Old Supreme Court Room for a delusional frat party of anti-vaccine rhetoric. Like the best keggers, the hearing held by the Special Committee on Government Overreach and Impact of COVID-19 Mandates was packed with colorful characters, mind-altering substances and a shocking lack of personal responsibility.

Sure, the stated goal of the meeting was studying federal mandates meant to combat the virus. House parties have stated goals too — celebrating birthdays, holidays or the end of the week — but everyone knows those are simply pretexts.

On February 17, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the U.S. found itself in a global war, Henry Luce, in an editorial in Life magazine (which he founded along with Time and Fortune), declared the years to come "the American Century." He then urged this country's leaders to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit."

And he wasn't wrong, was he? Eight decades later, who would deny that we've lived through something like an American century? After all, in 1945, the U.S. emerged triumphant from World War II, a rare nation remarkably unravaged by that war (despite the 400,000 casualties it had suffered). With Great Britain heading for the imperial sub-basement, Washington found itself instantly the military and economic powerhouse on the planet.

Democrats can certainly try to convince themselves that the Virginia gubernatorial defeat is no big deal. All kinds of rationales are available.

For instance, the incumbent president's party has lost 11 of the last 12 gubernatorial races. Virginia, when choosing its chief executive, tends to vote against Washington's “in" party.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to attend college in Florida. Higher education is under serious threat here.

Y'all will recall that last session Gov. Ron DeSantis and his legislative minions jammed through a bunch of policies restricting the use of drop boxes, restricting voter registration drives, and making it harder for voters to get absentee ballots.

Earlier this week, astronauts onboard the International Space Station rushed to seek shelter. The near-evacuation was not caused by an unpredictable space weather event or the millions of pieces of remains of existing space objects and rocket launchers left there since the beginning of the Space Age.

The lives of astronauts were temporarily threatened by a cloud of orbital debris — space junk — created by the testing of anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities by Russia.

In about six months, women in thirty Republican-controlled states will probably lose their right to get an abortion.

The Supreme Court and the Constitution don't “grant” or “give” Americans rights: they recognize rights and define the extent to which they can be infringed upon by our government, theoretically balancing private rights against the public good.

If only I had a magic wand, I would henceforth consign all conspiracy freaks and vaccine refuseniks (78 million in number) to some distant desert isle where they could breathe free upon each other until God sorts them out. I know that sounds harsh, but I am beyond fed up. I suspect you are, too.