I've been saying for years that liberal Christianity will have to up the ante on its purported self-loathing in order to promote itself as this generation's rightful owners of the White Man's Burden.

Sorry, I should have said White Person's Burden.

So Jefferts Schori wants to go to the head of her class in lamenting her own cultural history and cash in on the most recent phase of anti-Americanism among the tribal chieftains (read "gang leaders") of the Third World. Does that mean she's going to return to the land of her ancestors or at least give up her executive suite for a homeless shelter?

No, it means she is hoping to justify the fact that she now resides where the former oppressors resided. She wants to have her cultural cake and eat it too. In order to pull that off these days one has to loath one's own heritage. Note -- one does not need to renounce the fruits of that heritage, but merely to cast aspersions on those who, like red blooded human beings, dare to summon an ounce of pride in their ethnic history.

Could the Presiding Bishop name any nation on earth that now resides where its earliest ancestors did? No, of course not. In the old days such movement of cultures was called "migration," and it always presupposed one culture asserting itself upon another, taking over land and resources and assimilating local cultures, inevitably with violence. There's nothing nice about it. In nonhuman animal life this is called "evolution." Every human society that now lives has the same genetic criminal history.

Only the United States is being held to account in the present feeding frenzy of global anti-Americanism. Why is that? Is it because the righteous are indignant at the injustices of the unrighteous? Of course not. It's because the Strong Man has been bound, and now the little parasites are coming out to feed.

The real parasites are those Americans seeking to justify their own power, prestige, and privilege -- what was once the "rightful" inheritance of persons of their superior breeding. This they can only accomplish now through setting themselves against other Americans. There is an obsessive gravitation toward the dark side of one's culture, and a trained instinct for shifting the focus to that inner darkness. This obsessiveness is what proves that this it's all for show, that it's an attempt to buy off the terrors of a troubled conscience, that one hopes desperately that the old fools can still be fooled.

The Presiding Bishop is not eager to switch places with any of her listeners at the U.N. She is eager only to maintain her slice of the American pie -- even to expand it -- in good colonial fashion. She is looking to expand her own power base, and she needs these folks at the U.N. to think that their values are her values.

Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte warned his revolutionary colleagues about the tactics of the bourgeoisie to parrot the rhetoric of the proletariat and even ally with them for what would be presented as a common cause. But this was all for show, he warned. The various social democrats needed the moral legitimacy of the impoverished classes to gather political momentum that would ultimately assure the maintenance of the status quo that hitherto had favored, not the proletariat, but the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie. Once the "alliance" wins the day, he warned, the revolution is thrown overboard. Whether one agrees with Marx's overall interpretation of history, one can see that he understood the psychology of liberal politicians. Their ultimate cause (like everyone else's) is themselves.

Does the Presiding Bishop think the masses are fooled by her limousine driven lamentations? No, of course not. But this latest display is not really for them. It is for herself and her peers who must justify their own status as today's privileged class -- ironically, as the rightful successors of the colonists.

She, and they, are the true successors of the movement which began in the age of Discovery. She literally sits in the seat of yesterday's power brokers, who by her own definition are the oppressors of the global masses. She lives in the same neighborhood as they and has a resume that could be a carbon copy of theirs. More to the point (if I may paraphrase James Cone) she enjoys the same material rewards of an unjust and racist economy that disproportionately rewards persons of her demographic group and for no other discernible reason than that she comes from that demographic.

She certainly has no remarkable talent.

Katharine Jefferts Schori illustrates a dominant social trend in America -- cultural cannibalism. Like other members of the nation's self-proclaimed glitterati, the American Primate feeds on the sickest portions of a culture she despises -- her Own -- and in so doing seeks to fortify her position in that very culture through a steady diet of rancid meat. She does this in order to pacify her "inferiors" for a short span of time and, like first class passengers aboard the Titanic, to carry herself with the poise and splendor fitting a member of her station.

She knows the ship is going down. If I may switch metaphors: she is hoping for the short term that the crocodiles circling the boat will devour someone else before they notice her.

The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and an occasional contributor to VOL