The Wedge Is Quiet

Seventeen programs went through this desk over the past week. Better than nine hours of tape, pulled from channels that agree with each other on almost nothing.

Two of those stories are worth setting side by side. Not because they are about the same subject. They are not. Because of what was left standing at the end of each one.

Forty Seconds, Four Times

A cable news network sat down an officer of a socialist organization and ran her through a list. Abolish the Senate. Abolish immigration enforcement. Abolish prisons. Government ownership of most large corporations. She said yes to all of it, about the group she leads. Nobody tricked her and nobody cut her words.

Forty seconds of tape.

Then the same forty seconds ran four more times that week. A midday program. An afternoon panel. A primetime hour. The evening news. Each one turned to a fresh set of guests for reaction.

By the fourth showing the panel was not talking about an organization anymore. One guest said the socialists and the Democratic Party are now the same thing. Another said this is simply where that party stands today. A third said the country will be unrecognizable if these people win.

One woman answered for one group. By the end of the week her forty seconds stood for millions of people who were never in that chair, never asked, and never told what was being said in their name.

Nothing was added to the tape. Something under the country shifted.

Where This Desk Stands

This is not written to say which side had the better case. There is no verdict here on that organization, and none on the second story either. I get carried along the same as anybody. I watch a clip and notice the conclusion has already arrived before I have weighed a thing.

Amos was shown a wall, and Yahuah standing on it with a plumbline in His hand, and the line set in the midst of the people.

“Behold, I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel.” — Amos 7:8

A plumbline does not argue. It hangs, and the wall is either true or it is not. Yahuah set that line. I only carry it, and it measures the man holding it the same as it measures anybody else.

The Other Desk

An independent host with a very large daily audience spent three days on a killing.

Rooftop footage nobody had seen. A coroner and the speed of his report. Bloodied clothing that went somewhere after the hospital. Emergency-room staff who have not been heard from. An anonymous tip out of an organization. A young officer who found the weapon.

Six exhibits, near three hours of it, across three days, and every one of them arrived through the same desk. Not one was put to a question by anybody outside that room. The audience was told to be the judge, and given only what one hand had laid on the table.

The sharpest moment of the week came out of that same chair. A widow was accused of convicting a man she had no evidence against — said plainly, from a desk that spent three days convicting a coroner, a security detail, and the leadership of an organization on evidence nobody else has handled.

The first story played one witness four times. The second story stacked six exhibits behind one voice.

Different desk, different audience, different tool. Both ended with the country further apart than it started.

Nobody Was Holding Anything

Two stories with nothing to do with each other, out of two operations that would not be caught agreeing on the weather. Set them side by side and the same play is running in both.

Neither one turns on a lie. The clip was real and the woman said what she said. The six exhibits in the second story may every one of them be sound. Whether the information is true is not what is on trial here. What is on trial is the means — one voice, carried through enough rooms until it sounds like many — and what that means had produced by Friday.

Both produced the same thing. A people standing a little further apart on Friday than they were on Monday.

The Greek word for the accuser is diabolos — dia, through or across, and ballo, to throw. Something thrown between two parties.

Read the word again and notice what it does not require. It does not require a lie. A true thing, carried far enough by one mouth, will do the work.

And he carries nothing himself. Every wedge in the Book is driven by somebody else’s mouth.

He does not need a man to hate his countryman. He needs him to repeat him.

Absalom at the Gate

A kingdom was taken apart once without a hand being raised.

Absalom rose early and stood beside the way to the gate — the gate being the courthouse, where a man brought his case. Every man who came with a grievance, he met. He told him his cause was good and right, and that the king had appointed no one to hear him.

“See, thy matters are good and right; but there is no man deputed of the king to hear thee.” — 2 Samuel 15:3

No public accusation. No call to march. He handled complaints one at a time and told each man he was alone in his.

“So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.” — 2 Samuel 15:6

By the time the kingdom split, every man in it believed he had reached that conclusion on his own.

It Does Not Happen in a Week

A tool this quiet only pays over years. Air it long enough and a people can be moved a great distance without ever being told where they are going. There is no need to persuade a man of anything if the man beside him can be made to look like the problem.

Who benefits from that is beyond what this desk can prove, and guessing would be the same sin the letter is describing. What is not in question is the arithmetic.

“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” — Matthew 12:25

A house that cannot stand does not have to be pushed. It only has to be left divided.

The Line Nobody Read

Leviticus 19 is about how a man treats his neighbour. Verse 16 says two things at once.

“Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour.” — Leviticus 19:16

Carrying a report, and standing against a neighbour’s blood. Yahuah put them in one sentence because that is how short the distance is.

The word for talebearer is rakil — the man who goes house to house with a matter. The command never asks whether the matter was true.

Proverbs 6 lists what Yahuah hates. Six things are named, and a false witness that speaketh lies is the sixth. The seventh — and the last slot in a Hebrew list is where the weight falls — is him that soweth discord among brethren.

The lie is on the list. The division is what the list was counting toward.

Every forward, every repost, every clip handed to a friend adds a mouth without adding a witness. None of it looks like an act of war. All of it leaves a seam.

Nobody in this country swung anything last week.

But a great many people were carrying a wedge.