Truth or Dare

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I once knew a man who was what can only be called a pathological liar.  I never knew when he was telling the truth.  It was a disorienting experience relating to him because, as a literalist I wanted to believe what others told me.  In this case you simply had no solid ground on which to stand.  Recently someone else who knew him (he died some time ago) asked me for some information about him.  I was at a loss to come up with anything.  Since he seemed routinely to mix fiction liberally with fact, I didn’t know where to start.  In this post-truth world we now inhabit, I fear this may become much more common.  Everyone lies from time to time, but when it is a way of life, well, even Jesus had a name for the “father of lies.”

It’s with a bipartisan sense of sadness that I lament how the Republican Party has completely backed up a man that they know is like this.  Intentionally or not, political leaders set the character of nations—just consider how often we think of Russia as Putin or North Korea as Kim Jong-un.  America has become the nation of lies.  Don’t believe me?  Maybe I’m lying.  See what I mean?  Often I tried to figure out what this man I knew was up to.  What was his endgame?  I couldn’t be sure I’d ever know, even if he told me.  Especially if he told me.  You see, I was quite young at the time, and the young often don’t have the experience to get to the truth.  And when the truth is bartered for power, well, the father of lies is lurking nearby.

Recently I finished reading M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.  This person I knew was in my mind quite a bit as I tried to sort out all the psychology being presented.  If I’m honest I know that even as a child I said this man was evil.  It was clear to me that he wanted to survive on his terms or no terms.  To do so, he believed his own lies.  Now I don’t know if he lied at work.  He had a job where many people depended upon him to carry out his tasks.  He seemed to do so conscientiously.  When not at work, however, he was back in the land where he felt the most comfortable, the land of untruth.  Recently someone again asked me about him.  I tried to recollect as much as I could, and like much of the world these days I answered, “I just don’t know.”

World Environment Day

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Do you like where you’re living?  Planet earth, I mean.  Today is World Environment Day.  It’s not enough of a holiday to score time off of work, but it is well worth observing nevertheless.  More than that, it’s vital.  Other holidays tend to be the decaying remains of religiously appointed observances or sops thrown to the Cerberus of patriotism, but World Environment Day impacts every one of us, all of the time.  Whether sleeping, waking, working, or playing, it’s in the context of the one planet we have.  Even those in space have to check in here to survive.  We might try to make World Environment Day an international holiday, but I’m sure we could never all agree to it.  Business would collapse if everyone took the same day off, all at the same time.  Instead we’re left to dream.

I recently watched The Lego Movie.  Although released in 2014 it perfectly anticipated 45 with “President Business.”  Overlooking for a moment that Legos represent big business, the film underscored the problem: the only thing hard enough to cut a diamond is another diamond.  And the only way to fight business is with business.  Perhaps there aren’t enough people to envision what life could be like without the constant stress of having to make more money.  It’s a sickness, really.  But it’s a pathology we worship.  There are some abysses, it seems, into which nobody dares peer.  Who doesn’t want to be in charge?  And those in charge care nothing for Mother Earth.

We have spent the past two-plus years watching helplessly as the Republican Party has done its level best to lay waste the planet.  Rolling back and abolishing environmental initiatives deemed detrimental to “business,” these are folks who need to feel what it’s like to lose a job or two and have to reinvent themselves.  Not that long ago, most of the humans on this planet lived on farms or supported those who did.  Daily in touch with the planet in a literal way that those who mow with industrial, sit-down lawn helicopters can never be—how can you be in touch when your feet never even meet the ground?—they knew that paying attention to the planet is crucial.  But that’ll have to wait.  It’s a work day, after all.  And a Wednesday, no less.  In the middle of the week-long worship at the altar of Mammon.  Still, I urge you to take a moment or two today to consider how to save the only planet we’ve got.  It’s worth celebrating.

When Like Rome

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Among the constant topics of discussion, both in the academy and in its publishing ancillaries, is the loss of interest in religion.  After a period of growth early in the new millennium, as measured by college majors, interest has dropped off and Nones are set to replace evangelical Christians as the largest religious group in America.  The corresponding lack of interest in religion is extremely dangerous.  I’ve often posted on the necessity of looking back to see where we might be going, and the further back we go the more we understand how essential religion is to the human psyche.  My own academic goals were to get back to the origins of religion itself—something I continue to try to do—and I discovered that they rest in the bosom of fear.  I’m not the first to notice that, nor have others been shy about using it to their advantage.

Lack of classical education, by which I mean reading the classics, has led us to an extremely tenuous place.  More interested in the Bible, I followed the track to another ancient system of thought, but as I find out more about the religion of classical Greece and Rome, the more I tremble.  You see, ancient Roman writers (especially) were extremely conscious of the fact that fear motivated people.  In order to construct a steady state, they infused it with a religion based on fear and supported by said state.  An overly simplified view would suggest that the Jews and Christians took their religion too seriously and refused to play the Roman game.  When they wouldn’t worship the emperor (who surely knew he wasn’t a god) they threatened the empire.  The response?  A good, old-fashioned dose of fear.  Crucifixion oughta cure ‘em.

See what I mean?

The thing is, our American form of government, buoyed up by an intentional courting of evangelical Christians as a voting bloc, manipulates that fear even more stealthily than the Romans did.  People ask me why I “like” horror.  I don’t so much like it as I see its role as a key.  It is a key to understanding religion and it has long turned the tumblers of the state.  Ancient societies kept religion under state control—something the Republican Party has been advocating as of late.  Why?  Religion, based on fear, ensures the continuance of power.  Those of us who watch horror are doing more than indulging in a lowbrow pastime.  We are probing the very origins of religion.  And we are bringing to light the machinations with deus.  Let those who read understand.

Sustain Chapel

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It seems that holidays come thick and fast in the spring, especially when Earth Day follows directly on the heels of Easter.  Given the hard time mother earth has been having with too many Republicans waging war on her, it’s worth taking a few minutes to consider finity.  Our planet is not infinite.  The resources with which it came loaded out of the showroom are all of limited supply.  Somehow we’ve managed to convince ourselves, at least in this hemisphere, that there’s always more where that came from.  Unless, of course, you’re referring to the degrees that contribute to global warming.  Of those, the GOP narrative goes, there really aren’t any.  No credible scientist doubts climate change, although those who are already old and who are benefitting from it will claim otherwise.  Any story depends, of course, on the teller.

Over the holiday weekend I was out of town.  Driving home a few hours I was distraught at just how much litter lines our otherwise scenic highway system.  Stuff falls off of trucks and, despite advertising against it, out of car windows.  The few trash bags piled for pickup by the earth-conscious can’t keep up with the cast-offs of a throwaway culture.  We desperately need to take the narrative back from those with the loudest, and most incoherent mouths.  We all rely on this same planet and the power we cede to the wealthy is due to our complicity in their claims of ownership.  They’ve proven themselves, should I dare to be biblical, unfaithful stewards.

The earth, it is true, is a place of immense beauty.   It’s not aesthetics alone, however, that motivate us.  We simply cannot survive without this biosphere in which animals, plants, microorganisms, and minerals coexist.  We evolved in it.  The mythical narrative of special creation unwittingly played into the hands of those who will claim it all for themselves if the rest of us don’t deny that they had indeed “earned” the right to be considered the most prestigious.  Our societal sin of rewarding bad behavior has led us to this crisis.   We pollute far beyond our needs.  We “speculate,” hoping that “development” will lead to “growth.”  The wealthiest build rockets to escape our planet, but there’s nowhere to go.  Might it not be better to invest in this gift that we already have?  To learn the lessons of nature?  To become students in the classroom of Mrs. Earth?  There have been many holidays lately, but this may indeed may be the most important of them all.

Culpability Defined

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What seems to be lacking in the United States government is any realization that actions have consequences.  While in Christchurch, New Zealand at least 49 people have been murdered only for being Muslim, Trump feels that tweeting “heartfelt” condolences somehow exculpates him from fostering an atmosphere of hatred.  Indeed, the main shooter in that travesty cited Trump as an inspiration.  The sickening lack of awareness that deeds have consequences has once again led to a body count.  Meanwhile in these states the Republican Party refuses to condemn the daily and consistent message of racism coming from an edifice that is more and more appropriately called the “White House.”  Do you have to pull the trigger to be guilty?  History will decide.  

Politics has always been a crooked game, but until 2016 most elected to the highest office—God help us, even George W. Bush—realized that the office had responsibility associated with it.  It wasn’t a place you could play loose and easy and tweet from the hip and think it was your right as “just another citizen.”  Muslims have been part of American culture from very nearly the beginning of this experiment in colonialism.  Freedom of religion was one of the pillars of democracy that Trump has been chopping down like a cherry tree while tweeting “No I didn’t.”  The GOP applauds.  Here’s how to instill one religion as the norm, not considering the consequences.  Massacres in the name of Christ don’t make you Christian.  Not cutting history class should be a requirement to run for elected office.  Or at least taking basic civics.  Instead we have a government that refuses to recognize that it can inspire murderers around the globe and then offer heartfelt condolences with no apologies.

Where is the condemnation of racism?  Where is the line between black and white?  Where is the sense of any culpability for creating and sustaining the warm, moist environment where the bacteria of hatred thrives?  When you awake to the news that yet another white supremacist has taken inspiration from an angry white man who has nothing to be angry about and has consecrated murder as patriotism how can you look the world in the eye?  Hiding behind a tweet does not bring back the dead.  How do we get the message through?  Millions of us have repeatedly marched in protest.  We flipped one house of congress and we daily sign petitions until our fingers bleed but no response comes from those who won by a mere technicality.  If there are indeed ghosts in this world there will be mass immigration and it shall be richly deserved.

Walls and Calls

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With a barely concealed chortle the man’s ebullient voice burbled on my answering machine.  For a donation right now, he gushed, Republicans would send bricks to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to show my (non-existent) support for Trump’s wall.  Our government has been shut down for a record period over a temper-tantrum by a man desperate to leave something tangible from his wasted term as president.  Apart from the clean-up of the Trumpian incontinence that has befouled this nation, his legacy as the most incompetent holder of the office is likely all that will be left behind in the swamp.  With two full years of control of both houses of congress and the White House there has been pitifully little to show.  Now the GOP has turned to pranking the citizenry to deflect once again the fact that nothing worthwhile has been done.

Read the wall

Walls, for those who know how to read, don’t work.  Republicans have forgotten how their former darling, Ronald Reagan, both gloried in his purported role in knocking down the Berlin Wall and his hatred of the Russians.  In a matter of three decades a major political party has excelled only in having outdone Watergate and completely reversing its position on everything that used to define it.  Claiming to be the party of Lincoln they nominated and elected a man who publicly supports the klan.  Branding has never smelled so cheap.  And get off my phone—I’m expecting some important calls.

What the GOP doesn’t seem to understand is that the price of a soul is far more than a long distance call.  Building a wall is mere rhetoric reified.  It would be an incredible waste of taxpayer’s money.  I’ve been paying into the system for 42 years now—others have been paying longer—and I’ve not yet met a rank and file Republican who wants a wall.  And yet our government, one of the most powerful in the world, is shut down over it.  The 2016 election itself was stolen by a game called the electoral college.  We’ve sat two years and watched democracy crumbling.  Now that a small check has been introduced we have an unbalanced man insisting on his own way over the will of the nation.   There are more important things to buy, for my money.  With my money.  Acknowledging how government works shouldn’t be a great effort for someone who aspires to be president.  If his party has to resort to sending novelty bricks, the wall has already been built.

Evangelical Angels

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Angels are everywhere at this time of year.  The Christmas stories of the gospels of Matthew and Luke have made them an indelible part of the tradition.  It’s not unusual for entirely secular individuals to be decorating with them and they are generally without controversy in public displays of holiday spirit.   A colleague once asked me why Americans were so credulous when it comes to a belief in angels—the numbers of believers are quite high, statistically.  I wonder if it’s because we need them.  Considering that the Republican Party is the Evangelical’s party, it’s no small wonder that even atheists embrace angels.  We all could use a little help from on high.  This time of year, such hope can be disguised behind tinsel and bows.

America must seem a strange country to those who immigrate (or had immigrated, when that was possible).  We wear our religiosity—and this is not the same thing as true religion—not only on our Christmas trees, but even on billboards by decidedly secular highways.  It’s as if even all the things America stands for, such as love of money, guns, and automobiles, only hold together with the saccharine glue of a sickly sweet religion.  A Bible-believing nation that has no idea what the Bible actually says and lauds a president who breaks at least a commandment a day and gains no reprimands.  We have shown our red neck to the rest of the world and yee-haw we are proud of it.  And we got the Good Book to prove it.

After all this shakes out we’ll be needing some angels, I suspect.  My colleague felt that sophisticates, big city skeptics, ought to be more willing to dismiss unenlightened beliefs such as those in spiritual beings.  The thing is, spiritual beings serve a very useful purpose.  They keep us honest—and I don’t mean in an Evangelical way; I’ve seen Evangelical honesty and it’s as corrupt as the Devil.  No, I mean that angels are important to show that we have hope.  Maybe they are secular angels—even the Bible doesn’t give any description of them at all, so how can you tell a secular from a religious angel?  That lack of pedigree doesn’t mean we don’t want them watching over us.  Belief is an important part of being human, secular or not.  The billboard space tends to go to those who want your money, and that applies to the ones that appear to be religious as well.  If this is the way the religious behave, we’d better hope there are angels everywhere.

You’re History

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A story from Inside Higher Ed discusses a study of history majors and their rapid decline.  This occurs during a sudden onset of “job related” majors and the graph accompanying the article shows how STEM has taken over higher education.  These are the fields with actual occupations awaiting them at the end of the degree, while disciplines such as history and religion (also very near the bottom) have less clear career paths.  Indeed, when I’ve been in the job market I find that a religion degree is less than useless, no matter what the department recruiters tell you.  If you’re not bound for the clergy you undertake the study at your own peril.  History, I expect, suffers from a similar dynamic, but the peril in this case is to all of civilization.

We’ve seen over the past two years how a stunning lack of knowledge of history sets a nation on the path to chaos.  Businessmen with no classical education don’t make good national leaders.  Knowing where we’ve been, as Santayana so eloquently stated, is the only thing that keeps us from repeating past failures.  History is our only safeguard in this respect.  Over the Thanksgiving break I spent a little time delving into family history.  Since I don’t come from illustrious lineage, I felt the frustration of finding out what happened to obscure people from the last couple of centuries.  Lack of history on a personal level.  On a professional level, my doctorate is really in the history of religions (ancient religions) and I’ve become keenly aware of just how little history there is to the very popular modern Fundamentalist movement.

Maybe I said that wrong.  They do have a history, but the belief system that is touted as ancient is really quite modern.  Anti-modern, in fact.  When historical knowledge is lacking, however, people can make all kinds of claims based on nothing more than wishful thinking.  History keeps us honest.  Or it used to.  When we’ve outlived the need for history we’ve started down a path unlit by any embers of past human foibles.  We’ve been living in a culture in love with technology but not so much with critical reflection of where such innovations might take us.  Doctors are beginning to complain that they spend more time on their computers than with their patients.  The time freed up by the internet has been taken up by the internet.  And when all of this comes to its natural culmination, we would be well served by historians to make a record of what went wrong.  If we could find any.

 

Goddess Lore

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From where I sit to write this blog in this particular season (when it’s too cold to sit in an unheated attic) I watch Venus rise in the eastern sky.  While it is still dark, I notice a bright yellow glow appearing over the top of a business located on the eastern side of the block.  It hovers there a moment before disappearing briefly behind various rooftop accoutrements of the building across the street, appearing again minutes later on the other side.  The planet rises rapidly before sunrise, and with the unnatural markers of human structures, it’s fairly simple to keep track of her progress with occasional glances out the window.  Venus is, as I’ve mentioned before, both the morning and evening “star” of antiquity.  We now know her identity as a planet rather than a goddess, but we’re becoming more attuned to planets’ roles as mothers, or at least we should be.

Some ancient peoples considered our own earth as a mother.  It is the womb in which we gestate as living beings.  Without the warmth she gives we could not survive, and even our forays into nearby space are possible only with the replication of her body heat through artificial means.  It may be metaphor, yes, but metaphors may be truer than bald statements of chemical compositions and mathematical formulas.  Scientist, politician, or theologian, none of us survive without our planetary nurture.  This thought is sobering in the light of government policies over the past two years, which have denied that human pillaging of nature is problematic.  The Republican Party, which collectively lacks respect for our earthly home, has followed thoughtlessly in the tracks of a man proud of his refusal to read.  And so I look to Venus.

Venus is beautiful.  We know, however, that her surface is hot enough to melt lead.  Soviet-era probes landed there and melted.  Planets, it seems, can unleash fury that mere humans can’t hope to withstand.  One of the forgotten graces of nature, it seems, is the warning sign.  Even as the rattlesnake warns before striking, our mother has been sending messages that we’ve been going too far.  Hurricanes are growing stronger and threaten to scour us off the very face of the land we disrespect and exploit.  Venus, it turns out, is too hot to handle.  Mars, whom the ancients feared for his propensity to irrational war, is too cold.  It’s difficult to imagine where politicians think we might go when our own mother turns us out.  I would invite them over to watch Venus perform her morning dance outside my window, but to see it you must first believe in goddesses.

Like One of Us

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Some envision America as a nation of—God help them!—only people like themselves.  This is Trump’s America, and therefore, the America of the Republican Party.  We can’t quite say it’s a white male America because there are many white males who simply don’t share that vision, but it is hate-filled enough to rouse bombers and shooters and Mitch McConnell.  American terrorists, in a word.  Yesterday, the Sabbath, saw a shooter in my familiar city of Pittsburgh who left 11 dead.  The response of Trump?  The synagogue should’ve had armed guards.  I propose that we ought to put walk-through metal detectors outside churches—better yet, full body scanners like they use at airports.  Might as well see everything the faithful bring with them.

Apart from the obvious tragedy of the innocent victims, another disturbing element of this horrific event is that Trump can’t see that his own rhetoric encourages it.  His mouth may say we shouldn’t hate, but his mouth says a lot of things.  Most of them lies.  His public posturing as the angry white man, the “Christian” bully, the Rambo of the Lord, has jarred people across the world.  When you rail against the media daily from the highest position in the land, you’ve got to expect sycophants (e.g. Republicans) to try to please you with their own acts of outrage.  What more cowardly way can one devise than to shoot those at worship?  Does 45 not understand that armed guards would make a very mockery of what goes on inside?  What do they teach at his church?

Coming up on two years ago, after election day, many people warned that just this sort of thing would happen.  Knowing that the Manchurian candidate they’d nominated couldn’t think for himself, the GOP decided it was a good time to polish up their hit-list.  Those who don’t belong in their white bread, white face, white male country.  This is evangelicalism gone wild, no, Rev. Graham?  Those who can think for themselves are not welcome in a party run by hatred so pure and rife that decent people feel they must take a shower after they leave its presence.  And what of the dead?  For the “party of Lincoln” they have died in vain.  They should’ve had armed guards, as if worship were some kind of dangerous, subversive activity.  The party of the NRA, formerly known as the GOP, has never watched The Witness.  It has never shed a tear for the dead.  And it most assuredly has never been to church, or synagogue.

Image credit: Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, via Wikimedia Commons

Café Américain

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What with the Republican approved method of mailing bombs to Democrats (and, interestingly, not vice-versa) I have to wonder if democracy is gone for good.  I recently watched Casablanca again with my wife.  What struck me about it this time around was how, although many of the characters clearly hated one another, they were civil—downright polite—unless safely locked out of sight by the Nazis.  It also struck me that in the 1940s Nazis were bad whereas now they are the legitimate nickname of the GOP.  It used to be calm, collected enemies playing by the rules even with their hatred intact.  Now politics has become gaming the system itself so that the other side can’t win to the point that Major Strasser looks like Colonel Klink.

I suppose what’s most distressing about all of this is that moderate Republicans have so quickly acquiesced to Trump’s agenda of hatred.  Not one speaks out against him, fearing his money.  Somehow they manage to sleep at night.  I’m guess that if they watch Casablanca they don’t see what some of us do.  There comes a point, when a game gets too serious, that most of us know to back off and do something else for a while.  When we were kids we knew it instinctively.  What began as playful rivalry started to feel like hatred.  The twelve year old knows that at this point it’s time to back away, otherwise it will come to blows and we will feel regret.  There is no regret in the Grand Old Party.  They only regret that Tricky Dicky didn’t get away with it.  Welcome to the most unfair democracy in the world.

Ah, but I digress from Rick’s.  It we come downstairs we will hear Victor Laszlo leading the band in “La Marseillaise,”a national anthem far more robust than bombs bursting in the air.  These, after all, are patriots, not panderers after personal power.  Even Major Strasser doesn’t start lobbing pipe-bombs in Rick’s Café Américain, and he orders Captain Renault to find a legal reason to shut the place down.  This is the rule of law, no matter how crooked.  In the end, however, Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund are on a plane to Lisbon, and Rick and Louis are planning their flight from the city to take on more noble pursuits.  The swamp in the desert has been left by those of any integrity, save the underground.  Casablanca, after all, translates to “white house.”

Fear Factory

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Every politician knows that fear wins elections.  Just how deep into Orwellian territory we are became clear at 2:18 p.m. on Wednesday.  A man I loath and distrust, who happens hold high office sent out a national presidential alert to cell phones everywhere.  After being awakened at odd hours a time or two over my cell phone owning years, I’d turned off my smart phone alerts.  I wasn’t out driving to spot amber alert situations in the middle of the night.  If there’s a severe thunderstorm coming, I’m already awake.  The idea that if everyone with a phone is on the lookout we’ll all be safe seems a bogus one to me.  There is, however, no way to turn off a presidential alert.  Like most Americans I was working when my phone went off.  I wasn’t afraid.  Just annoyed.

Random scary sounds are among the most frightening things people experience.  I recently started writing in the attic (if you read this blog regularly you won’t even ask why).  As I was writing this post a gust of wind blew and it sounded like the roof might collapse upon me.  Sudden load sounds make us look for comfort in a strong person.  On a national scale that means, God help us, politicians.  When my phone alert goes off, it’s telling me to vote for the party in power.  There’s psychology afoot here.  This was no accidental coincidence.  Midterm elections are just weeks away.

I know something about fear.  Not only do I write about horror films, I grew up with so many childhood phobias that my mother wondered how I would ever get along.  Those phobias may have gone underground when I became an adult, but they never truly left me.  I don’t encounter them on a daily basis, but I can draw on them for my fiction.  I don’t, however, appreciate my government using them against me.  Perhaps this sounds paranoid.  If paranoid it’s by design.  Even if 45 can’t see beyond his own proboscis, those on his team know the fear factor works.  Winston will come to love big brother.  Fear robs rationality.  We’re mere primates, after all.  Was it coincidence that there was what appeared to be an impromptu Trump rally later that afternoon?  There is a difference between paranoia and naiveté.  We’re a wired nation and the Republican Party has the phone number of each and every one of us.  If this is not a drill, you know where to find me. 

IAGY?

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Here’s how messed up “America first” is.  As we’re forced to try to protect ourselves from a drunken, sexually abusive Supreme Court nominee, Indonesia is trying to recover from an earthquake and tsunami that have killed at least 1,400 people.  Of course, it’s “America first.”  The powers that be want us to buy their narrative that we only are important, the chosen ones.  You don’t even have to be non-American to be excluded.  Just ask the people of Puerto Rico.  No, it is far more important to railroad through an anti-abortion judge so we can cause misery to countless numbers of people in America first.  Natural disasters strike even here (Florence), and we can only glance away a moment from the constant drama being roiled in that ever bubbling swamp.  I thought it was supposed to be drained by now.  They did find some slimy choices for high offices, in any case.

This new form of Manifest Destiny is as bad as the old one was.  People are suffering from a terrible tragedy and our lips are chapped from calling our senators to try to get them not to vote for someone a vast majority of normal citizens find highly objectionable.  The Republican abuse of power is only overshadowed by its abuse of women.  When even Kellyanne Conway speaks out stating that we need to listen to the victims, it’s clear something is amiss.  How slowly they awaken, these creatures of the swamp.  “America first” looked like a party game for a while, but now that its true and ugly agenda is being shown those who climbed aboard that bus aren’t quite sure how to signal that they want off.

What of Indonesia?  What of a president who can’t even point to it on a map?  It’s not here, so it’s not our problem.  Nice drunken frat boys who feel up women are the best we can offer for the highest court in the land.  Elsewhere in the world they’re trying to address the global warming that is causing more and more extreme weather.  We can charge tariffs and still call ourselves Republican.  If we can’t start actual wars we’ll start trade wars.  You can’t be great until others bow before you, even if they’re bowed in grief for a natural disaster that claimed hundreds of lives.  We’ll make America first even if we have to fall into last place to do it.

Forgotten Bible Verses

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Bible believers are basking in the headlines these days.  What with Mr. “Meet My Genitals” gunning for the Supreme Court and displacing them for a few days, they must be getting anxious for more sonburn in the limelight.  If only they didn’t have the Good Book standing in the way.  As I was reading my Bible the other day, I was reminded of this little gem, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”  Now, liberals like myself know that Paul of Tarsus didn’t write 1 Timothy, but Bible-believers know he did.  So much the worse for them.  They elected a president who stands for nothing so much as the love of money, and the swamp has become quite a root of evil.  Senate Republicans, after hearing a second credible sexual assault allegation against their boy for the black bench responded by trying to rush through a vote before the news got out.  And this reminded me of the forgotten prophets.

“What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”  Well, you see, Mr. Micah, we know we’re heading to defeat in the midterms, so we’ve got to railroad through as many of our personal agendas as we can.  Don’t you know, o Lord, that this is a lifetime appointment?  And really, what does justice have to do with it?  Sure, he gropes and demeans women, but you’re a dude, right?  I bet you did the same when you were in high school and college.  And the money thing?  We’re only trying to help the economy because, well, wealth trickles down.  Who said anything like it’s the root of all evil?  “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate.”  Now, don’t go quoting Mr. Amos to me.  Next thing I know you’ll be telling me to let justice to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Forgotten Bible verses, in the new Evangelicalism, seem to be cropping up on the black market.  You might think we should turn back to the start of the Good Book and read from the beginning.  There the GOP will find its solace until they come to the 27th verse, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”  That semicolon says a lot; they will claim.  Man is the image of God, and he had a son.  Just don’t listen too closely to what that son says, particularly when he makes remarks like “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”  Young men like to drink and grope.  When they grow old they then like to be Supreme Court justices.  What’s that?  One more short verse?  “Jesus wept.”

Hashtag MAGA

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Mental Acuity Gone, America?  When facts face a nation, naked, unobscured, and the faithful still deny them, we’re truly on hallowed ground.  Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are guilty of very serious crimes in which MAGA POTUS is implicated.  Of course, anyone with an intact medulla oblongata knew that Trump was lying from well before the election.  I just wonder if America is suffering from mass mental illness.  

A few years ago I visited Ellis Island.  This port of entry into the United States turned the hopeful—let’s call them dreamers—away for many reasons.  The room at the museum that bothered me the most was the one where mental illness was discussed.  An enormous number of would-be Americans were turned away because of what we would now recognize as mental illness.  It had many less flattering names back in the day, but the idea was that we only wanted bright, or at least competent, specimens to build up this nation.  Theirs was a misplaced and misguided fear; we specialize in home-grown.  Any rational person has difficulty explaining the election of Trump in any other way.

Who can imagine running for the highest office in the land with literally thousands of open lawsuits against him (or her)?  Who can claim to be elected when their own home state—which knows him (or her) best—roundly and soundly rejects him (or her)?  When clear evidence of Russian collusion emerges, the GOP rises up and says “We see nothing wrong with a foreign government running the country.”  And this is not mental illness?  Is our Mental Acuity Gone, America?  Have we become a nation of (hashtag) idiots?

The events of the last few days have revealed in clear light what many rational people knew from the beginning—there has been massive and willful deception from the very inception of this administration.  The simple fact that 45 would assert that Cohen wouldn’t flip on him indicates that the incumbent had done something wrong and was counting on the loyalty of comrades to keep him in the clear.  Mental illness takes many forms.  One of them is a pathological avoidance of the truth.  Now that we know truth isn’t truth and that 45’s fixer knows more than he’s said so far, we have to wonder how deep down this incompetence goes.  Yet the GOP marches along in goose-step.  Depending on your angle of view, Miss Liberty won’t even show her face.