We have written before about about how Ms. Kerry Morrison presents herself as a missionary bringing the blessings of zillionaire-table-crumbs to the homeless population of Hollywood. And, given the proper understanding of Mother Teresa, it’s true that she is an awful lot like the Caudilla of Calcutta.¹

And none of this is really a secret. For instance, here are more than 30 pages of emails from Kerry Morrison to various coreligionists extolling the virtues of Christian love for one’s City, praying for one’s City, serving one’s City as a “Christ Follower,” and whatnot. And there’s a long and vital tradition of this kind of thing in Christianity, to be sure. E.g. compare Paul’s letter to the Hebrews 11:9-10 on how Abraham’s faith led him to leave his home and live like a stranger for the sake of finding the City of God:

By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

And of course it’s well known to students of Hurricane Kerry that she lives in zillionaire enclave Windsor Square, where she brushes shoulders or whatever with zillionaire lackey and fellow resident Eric Garcetti.² And living in Windsor Square no doubt means many things to many people, but never ever ever would we ever have thought that it could be construed as an Abrahamic sojourn “like a stranger in a foreign country” for the sake of “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Newly discovered information reveals, however, that that’s precisely how Ms. Kerry Morrison sees it.

See, Kerry Morrison has a husband. And the husband has a website. And the husband writes books.³ And he works for some place called Lean Consulting. And Lean Consulting has a bio of him.⁴ And in this bio we learn that:

Mike moved into the heart of Los Angeles in support of the family’s mission to contribute and to participate in LA’s urban renewal.

So look, in the past, when we have mocked Kerry Morrison for her missionary tendencies, and her clueless, nuance-free, Kiplingesque white-woman’s-burden style, we, well, we believed it and believe it still, but we never expected to find out that Kerry Morrison herself saw herself as a literal missionary, that she moved her family to “the heart of Los Angeles”⁵ like sailing up the river to the Heart of Darkness in support of a consciously adopted mission to build the New Jerusalem right here in the green and pleasant land of Los Angeles. It explains a lot, though, doesn’t it? She’s not only like Abraham, sojourning in a freaking tent until he finds the City of God, but she’s like Isaiah, longing to heal his wounded City:

Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted,
I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise,
your foundations with lapis lazuli.

I will make your battlements of rubies,
your gates of sparkling jewels,
and all your walls of precious stones.

All your children will be taught by the Lord,
and great will be their peace.

In righteousness you will be established:
Tyranny will be far from you;
you will have nothing to fear.
Terror will be far removed;
it will not come near you.⁶

In fact, this self-narrative places Kerry Morrison⁷ right into the mainstream of ignorant ham-handed bull-in-china-shop American Caucasian missionary do-bad-by-doing-gooderism. Interestingly enough, there’s a vast literature critically analyzing American Christian missionary culture and its effect⁸ on the targets of the flaming arrows of missionaryization. Also interestingly enough, it’s very enlightening to read this literature with Kerry Morrison in mind.

First of all, it makes a lot of sense to see American missionaries as “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion.”⁹ As historian Edward Andrews describes this view:

Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.”¹⁰
And imperialism is exactly what Kerry Morrison’s missionary positioning amounts to. As we have seen repeatedly, she and her BID buddies see the (former) native residents as savages and have been overtly plotting to get rid of them for decades now, and have largely succeeded, e.g. by changing the racial demographics of the BID from more than 70% black and latino in the BID’s first decade to about 46% in 2013, a reduction of almost 35%.¹¹ Just as missionaries have always helped colonialists subdue and eliminate native populations to free up space for colonization, Kerry Morrison’s family mission is doing the same in Hollywood, clearing out the darkies to make room for whoever those people are who fill up mixed use monstrosity after mixed use monstrosity.

And second, there’s the more personal view of things, which analyzes American Caucasian missionary do-gooderism in the context of American delusions and the capacity to do vast interpersonal damage while, at the same time, being completely convinced that one is doing nothing but good. This whole aspect of American missionary culture is perfectly explained by Ivan Illich in his lecture To Hell With Good Intentions.¹² Illich gave this speech to a bunch of American volunteers in Cuernevaca in 1968. I can do no better than to close this essay with extensive quotations from this masterful, courageous analysis. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear. Wherever you see “Mexico” or “Latin America” read “Hollywood.” Wherever you see “American” read “Kerry Morrison.”

Today, the existence of organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. I wanted to make this statement in order to explain why I feel sick about it all and in order to make you aware that good intentions have not much to do with what we are discussing here. To hell with good intentions. This is a theological statement. You will not help anybody by your good intentions. There is an Irish saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this sums up the same theological insight.
…
I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class “American Way of Life,” since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it – the belief that any true American must share God’s blessings with his poorer fellow men.
…
Of course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction – except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers and consumers
…
Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or “seducing” the “underdeveloped” to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.
…
Let me explain this statement, and also let me explain why most Latin Americans with whom you might be able to communicate would disagree with me.

Suppose you went to a U.S. ghetto this summer and tried to help the poor there “help themselves.” Very soon you would be either spit upon or laughed at. People offended by your pretentiousness would hit or spit. People who understand that your own bad consciences push you to this gesture would laugh condescendingly. Soon you would be made aware of your irrelevance among the poor, of your status as middle-class college students on a summer assignment. You would be roundly rejected, no matter if your skin is white-as most of your faces here are-or brown or black, as a few exceptions who got in here somehow.

Your reports about your work in Mexico, which you so kindly sent me, exude self-complacency. Your reports on past summers prove that you are not even capable of understanding that your dogooding in a Mexican village is even less relevant than it would be in a U.S. ghetto. Not only is there a gulf between what you have and what others have which is much greater than the one existing between you and the poor in your own country, but there is also a gulf between what you feel and what the Mexican people feel that is incomparably greater. This gulf is so great that in a Mexican village you, as White Americans (or cultural white Americans) can imagine yourselves exactly the way a white preacher saw himself when he offered his life preaching to the black slaves on a plantation in Alabama. The fact that you live in huts and eat tortillas for a few weeks renders your well-intentioned group only a bit more picturesque.
…
I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the “good” which you intended to do.

I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.

Image of Mr. Kerry Morrison is deep-linked-to, so your stinking copyright nonsense don’t apply. Picture of Morrison neighbor and extra-close buddy Eric Garcetti’s Windsor Square residence is via Wikimedia and is released under their usual generous terms. Gustave Dore’s engraving of the New Jerusalem is in the public domain but, as usual, we got our copy via Wikimedia. The image of Ivan Illich is…well, we don’t understand the copyright wonkery of the Wikipedia copyright anoraks from whom we got the file. Perhaps you can figure it out. In any case, we’re going to use it until we get a DMCA takedown, and then maybe we’ll claim fair use or whatever.

1. Although, given Kerry Morrison’s recent turn to ideologically charged documentary film making in the service of a higher cause, maybe we should start comparing her to Leni Riefenstahl instead? I suppose we don’t have to choose.
2. It’s public information that Kerry Morrison lives in Windsor Square. For instance, see this bit of fluff in the Larchmont Buzz, wherein we, to our everlasting joy, learn that “Kerry Morrison, Executive Director of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance (HPOA*) and a long-time resident of Windsor Square, shared her experience of taking the LAX FlyAway from the nearby pick-up location in Hollywood to and from LAX for her Thanksgiving flights.”
3. It is against MK.Org editorial policy to use live links to Amazon.com pages for the books of our enemies, but we’re making an exception this fine Tuesday morning because 40% of the editorial staff is feeling just a tad guilty for bringing Mr. Kerry Morrison into our vendetta. They were overruled, but we’re including the link as a compromise. He could use the exposure, anyway, as the book is ranked 4,251,984 in sales. We also voted to forgo making fun of the content, either because it would be beneath us or because it would be too easy (opinions here are split as to the reason). However, also as a compromise, we are going to quote the book’s description here, which, after you read it, you will see is a back-channel way to accomplish something that we just now said we weren’t going to accomplish: Our lives – and our leadership journeys – tend to follow one of two paths: the “conventional” and the “unconventional.” The conventional path is driven by our work cultures – cultures that tend to thrive on action, activity, and results. That’s why it’s called work. So, when we are at work, we need to be doing something (anything). We also know that our lives are accelerating in terms of increasing complexity, unmanageable aspects of time, escalating expectations, and declining resources. Welcome to the age of anxiety. In the process, we are losing our sense of community and our ability to be fully present for each other when we are needed most. As a result, our work cultures are losing their capacity to create enough gravitational pull to keep the organization “whole.” It is no surprise that we are living at the outer edges. Without a connection to a unifying center, we play the smaller game, where vulnerability and anxiety rein. This is not working. The center is not holding. We need to rethink our way forward. That is the ultimate aim of this book — to bring both hope and clarity in defining that pathway forward.
4. And here is an archived version of the bio and here is a PDF printout of the bio. After all, we don’t want our evidence disappearing just because we happened to discover it.
5. In some technical geographical sense it’s reasonable to say that Windsor Square is “the heart of Los Angeles,” but it’s pretty freaking disingenuous. It’s kind of like a USC professor saying that they work in the heart of South L.A. It’s true as far as it goes in some kind of literal sense, but it certainly leaves absolutely the wrong impression, clearly on purpose.
6. We left in this bit about how there won’t be any tyranny and terror (a) for context and (b) because it’s quite beautiful. Obviously, though, this is one part of the City of God that Kerry Morrison is not really in favor of. Irrespective of what she might have to say on the matter, her actions, speaking louder than her words as they are wont to do, indict her pretty clearly of being very strongly in favor of tyranny and terror. We aren’t linking to anything in this accusation because there’s too much to choose from. Just hit the Kerry Morrison tag and read anything therein.
7. And, we guess, Mr. Kerry Morrison.
8. Not good.
9. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, quoted in Edward Andrews, Christian missions and colonial empires reconsidered: A Black evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816.
10. Again in Andrews, Christian missions and colonial empires reconsidered: A Black evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816. Note that Andrews himself is not pushing this view. In fact he’s arguing that both this view and its opposite are not sufficiently nuanced. Obviously he’s right, but going into that is beyond the scope of this blog. We will admit, since it’s come up, that the view we’re pushing of Kerry Morrison’s missionary operations is also not sufficiently nuanced. But being nuanced about such things is definitely beyond the scope of this blog.
11. Which annualizes to about a 1.8% reduction per year over the 23 years from 1990 to 2013, which is the range covered by the data linked to.
12. Here is a link to an archived version in case that one goes away.