It is necessary to crucify George Grant, as we must, to expunge his fetid prejudices, his obnoxious pronouncements, his rank caterwauling in the midst of our gaudy, unutterably wasteful markets. His words, too rich with rebuke, scald and irritate, gash and bite: it is better that we butcher him than let him perturb our joyous debauchery, our Mammonist capitalism, that turns even shit into soft, lemon-scented gold. His anti-capital gospel, animated by a still-potent Judaeo-Christian and Greek ethic, catalysed by a communitarian, Anglicanized Marxism, will threaten continuously to disrupt our present oligarchical equilibrium, to pour down like pentecostal fire upon the heads of the wrongfully disenfranchised and the righteously discontented, thus spurring them to protest, to action, to jihad.

All that is to say, contrary to Francis Fukuyama, that history ain't ended yet. No, once we tire of our frenetic drive for pleasure (if we can ever tire of steeping our senses in vertiginous luxury); once our Prozac fails, our hydroelectric power fails, (and especially) our economy fails, all of them, to deliver unmediated happiness; once we determine that liberal, Darwinian capitalism is only a boring stripmall (with a Disneyland attached) against whose windows are pressed the backs of mainly white riot police and the faces of mainly coloured masses; then, only then, will the twentieth century's harsh prophets-Grant, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon-find new constituencies, new congregations.

Against a vision of bourgeois exhaustion, the genial massacres of the markets, the neo-slave regimes financed by corporate lucre (Nike and Co.), the perversion of national governments into police forces that steal from workers but refuse to protect their jobs, against this terrifying era, this technology-wracked epoch, there must needs be an insurrection of faith-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Animist, whatever it takes-to transform callousness into popular compassion. Returning to the Bible, the Torah, the Qu'ran, the radical demands are ever insistent: love one another, heal the sick, tend the poor.

Ah, for them who have ears and eyes, God-I mean, struggle-is not dead. The continuing plagues of environmental degradation, plutocratic rule (and organized theft, commencing with the thievery of First Nations' lands), socially poisonous sexism/racism/homophobia, and the threat of nuclear annihilation (all of which oppress and divide us) demand, conjure up, various versions of God. By struggling for justice, we bear witness to the continued existence of God (whose other name is Love). The only impulses left for inspired action are religious.

What Grant, for all his lacunae knew, and what we want to forget, is that there is a Supreme Being who brings everything into judgement, who damns and redeems. It cannot be imagined that this Supreme Being is at peace with the world we have made, the world we are, indeed, bent on cloning. God knows that the Gang of Seven, the World Bank, the IMF, and all their tyrannous trade treaties need to be consigned to Hell.

Listening to recordings of the fierce, noble songs of African-American Civil Rights Movement sit-inners and marchers, I'm struck by the peculiar certainty of their faith that God, however conceived, would act to overturn injustice-no matter how much time (in human chronology) had first to pass. Secure in this knowledge, they put their bodies, happily, into jeopardy, willing to be injured, or imprisoned, or to die, to end American-styled apartheid. Their faith is a sign and a witness to us, for our current "pleasures" must pass.

As scripture tells us, all things must pass. But faithful, progressive action is a sculpture in history. To this end, I call for action, so that we can say with Richard Hooker (as did Grant), "Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as a dream." Amen.

A poet, George Elliott Clarke adheres to the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia, organized by the ex-slave Richard Preston in 1854.