Modern Revolution

 Differing weights are an abomination to the Lord,
And false scales are not good.

-Proverbs 20: 23 NRSV

There are many things that the Hebrew Scriptures point out as "abominations," but the sort of thing that gets that label rather more often than just about anything is economic injustice.  Whether it is scales that do not weigh truly (not by accident I wager), or the moving of a duly placed property marker, the detestable nature of trying to cheat others rises as a stench in the nostrils of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Fortunately for the financial industry and Wall Street, God appears to be currently on vacay from the whole smiting of first born children and plagues... well maybe not plagues, that one may still be on the table.  Whereas Jehovah may have been merciful to the hedge fund managers and corporate raiders, the virtual community of Reddit has decided to mete out a rather delicious form of justice, which I suspect The Lord Almighty is having a rather holy chuckle about as we speak.

    If you're not familiar with what has transpired over the past several weeks, let me give you the quick and dirty layman's explanation (the only one I can really, I'm not much of a financier).  The retail chain GameStop, has been struggling mightily, even before the pandemic.  It was a victim of the fact that people who want to buy video games mostly do so by downloading them over now ubiquitous broadband connections. GameStop was a sort of retail/thrift store for gamers, you could trade in old games and buy new or used games and equipment.  It had a brief and rather successful run in the industry before the paradigm shifted on them (O those pesky paradigm shifts, we church folk know them all too well).  Well, when GameStop's fortunes appeared grim the vultures of Wall Street sprung into action.  By the way, I may be doing a disservice to actual vultures in using that metaphor, but it is rather appropriate.  Hedge fund rich guys decided it was time to bet on GameStop going down the tubes, so they start to do their sorcery and create a downward spiral deflating GameStop stock and making it easy for them to swoop in and buy it all at a discount and then liquidate the assets.  All of the Chads on the Street know this game, and so they all sort of stand back and let it happen, survival of the fittest, cheerio!

    Well, a certain Redditor who also knew the game, decided this was a crappy way for a business who once helped him indulge his Legend of Zelda jones to go out, so he rallied the troops.  And troops there were to rally.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that an online bulletin board like Reddit is rather thick with gamers.  Gamers have been inhabiting such spaces since they were run in MS-DOS and had nothing but white text on a blue screen that would make most people today think their computer had crashed.  These gamers are also now not 14 year old boys with barely enough allowance money to buy a sandwich.  They are now a diverse group of actual adults who have jobs and income, and thanks to the pandemic, a bit of extra time.  They started buying GameStop stock, and before the Wall Street Chads knew what hit them, their little short sell scheme was shot all to hell. One hedge fund got hit so bad they needed over a billion dollar bailout from their big brother company.  That's some serious damage caused by a large group of motivated people.

    All of the sudden billionaires were crying about how unfair this is; "class warfare," they shouted.  I'm going to buy stock in the manufacturer of the world's smallest violin, except Robinhood probably prohibits that nowadays.  Oh yeah, Robinhood is a stock trading platform that many of the Redditors used to buy stock, because it's purpose is daytrading and speculative investing.  They are of course, not a rogue band of economic justice warriors as perhaps their name portends, but just a tool that was put out there by some big corporation who couldn't possibly see how allowing massive numbers of regular people to play the same games Chad and Todd have been playing on Wall Street for years could ever backfire.  Now the mask is really off though, lots of people are seeing that the game is not just rigged, but if you figure out how it's rigged and manage to work around it, they will change the rules super quick.

    It's villainous really.  You might even say an abomination.  I would for sure.  This is a dire flaw of capitalism: money makes all the rules.  The Bible actually gives the situation a name: Mammon, and let's just say it's not a term of endearment.  I have really enjoyed reading about how this little thing has played out, but I'm actually hoping that it doesn't stop with GameStop.  The great thing about "the people," is that we come up with solutions to almost any problem eventually.  I mean think about how we Americans took a gamble on this thing called democracy, at a time when the world could scarcely imagine any other way of governance other than the aristocracy and monarchy, it would be chaos, they said.  Sometimes "they" were right, there is a fair amount of chaos in democracy, the past four years are a testament to that and the past month was a serious flirtation with destructive chaos.  But if we learn from it, we will get better.

    I have suspected for years that, despite the benefits it might have, the system of unfettered capitalism might just kill us all.  We can't let the already incredibly wealthy just continue to bleed us dry, making their own rules and then turning over the game board when they get beat anyway.  Call it class warfare if you want, but the existence of billionaires when people starve to death and go without shelter is an abomination if I ever saw one.  Violence is not going to solve this for us though, they can afford their own army if they need one.  Perhaps if enough of us see through the game though, and learn to play it in a way that creates real monetary consequences for the worst of the greed-heads, we might just get things to change.  As it stands, I'm not sanguine about GameStop's chances.  Despite their now soaring market value, they're still a thing the world probably doesn't need very much.  It was never really about saving GameStop, it was about kicking a bully where it hurts, and as such it was a jolly good show.

The Centre Holding, Barely

 I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
-Robert Frost, Ten Mills, I. Precaution

It is time to think about the future.  Not just the next four or even eight years, but the future of our Republic.  A very dangerous moment has just passed, and we have inaugurated a new President.  He is not the man that radicals wanted, he is not going to shake up the order of things and create a new paradigm in our government.  Joe Biden is a centrist, that most uninspiring creature, but the sort that you really need to be in charge in a time like this.  Our norms have been chewed up and spit out, our institutions have been tested, who knows how far they were from breaking. Depends on who you talk to.  Thankfully we didn't find out.  Thankfully the sound and fury played their hour upon the stage and the idiot has shuffled off to Florida.

Personally, I am living my life backward, I was much more conservative when I was 19 than I am now.  The difference for me has mostly been the development of empathy.  I didn't have much when I was young, I have more now, and it seems to be growing.  If I'm not careful I may end up one of those extremely sentimental old folks who seem to really just love everyone.  As for right now though, I find myself very much in the center what you might call the political spectrum.  I am pulled a bit to the left because of my convictions about justice, particularly for the poor and the oppressed.  Honestly, I can't imagine myself 20 years ago embracing liberation theology quite like I do now, but I do, and I don't regret it.  Capitalism, while I still consider it superior to the alternatives, needs a heart transplant if it's going to help us advance as a species.

The thing is though, the takeover of the "conservative" movement by a populist demagogue with deep personal flaws actually made me appreciate the conservatism I used to call my home. 15 years ago I considered George W. Bush a fool at best and a war criminal at worst, Trump's administration has made me nostalgic for W, and it also makes me think, what in the actual heck is going on here?  Well, as it turns out, if you plot our recent presidents going back to WWII, most of them end up falling pretty much within spitting distance of the center.  At worst this means there isn't a drastic difference between how say Bill Clinton handled things and how W did it.  I suspect that we still would have gotten ourselves sunk into the quagmire in Afghanistan even if Gore had been President.  Iraq part deux, maybe not, but who knows.  But at best, it means there isn't a drastic difference in how the two sides would have handled things.  For instance if a conventional Republican had been President last year when COVID hit, he or she probably would have handled things very much the way the Biden administration is going to do it: tell people to wear masks, shut down what had to be shut down without making it a political football, work like hell on a vaccine and try to get it rolled out quick and smooth.  

What Trump did is try to spin this virus, that did not care about political party, from something that was making him look bad to something he could use to his advantage.  The goal should have been: keep over 400,000 Americans from dying, but instead it was: get Donald J. Trump re-elected.  I think even Tricky Dick Nixon probably rolled over in his grave.  Republicans owe it to us as a nation to not let another character like him get their nomination.  We need conservatives to operate like conservatives, not like terrorists, but that is what the far right fringe is right now.  The Proud Boys and the others like them on the right are exactly the sort of bogeymen that Fox news tries to make of Antifa.  They are willing to be violent, they believe conspiracies of all sorts, and they think that they can win.  The left has had some who think that way in their house for decades, but they have never quite let them get so close to running the show, and a Democratic president has never sent them marching to the capitol with his love and admiration.

Let me tell anyone who is afraid of the sinister elements on the Left, and I say this sympathetically, they are far too disorganized and perhaps even schizoid to be any real danger.  Antifa is not a shadowy organization seeking the overthrow of the government, they're not even hard core anarchists (which if there was a threat from the left, would probably be it).  Antifa is a shortened form of Anti fascist, which means they are against fascism, the statist manifestation of authoritarianism.  Donald, only I can fix it, Trump was the closest thing we've ever had to a fascist in the oval office.  But he wasn't completely there yet, he was sort of a half baked fascist.  I am very much against fascism, which I suppose makes me Antifa, at least as much as anything can.  I'm not out rioting in the streets, I don't even go to peaceful protests, I don't like crowds.  I write and I preach about Jesus.  Jesus was put to death by fascism, the much ballyhooed Pax Romana was a textbook example of fascism, which was probably why Mussolini had such a great time bringing it back to Italy during WWII. That being said, the Democrats shouldn't let that crowd run the party either.  Even and perhaps especially if they're trying to use the name of Jesus to do it.  There was actually a scene in the Gospel where he is offered the authority to rule all the kingdoms of the world, and it was an offer from the Devil.

So listen up America, you know when J-Lo sang This Land is Your Land, yesterday?  Did you get a little misty?  I did too, but I know that Woody Guthrie wrote that song, and he wrote it because he absolutely HATED Irving Berlin's God Bless America. And he wrote it because he was a pretty hard core socialist with the workers rights movement.  Woody lived close to the working people and he thought the Robber Barons and the Politicians were his natural enemy.  Property ownership was a bit of a sticky subject in some of the non-J-Lo friendly verses of that song, and so was the plight of people who worked their whole lives and couldn't feed their family.  That song demonstrates that you can be a leftist and be a patriot, for real, you can love this country and what it stands for, you can love the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  The patriotism of the right fringe is all about hatred and exclusion, they're not writing great songs about this land, they're chanting about killing people and storming the capitol.

You need to stand in the center to see the difference.  Hopefully, if we do what Joe asked us, if we hear him out, no matter where we stand on taxes, on healthcare and suchlike, we might gain from that center perspective and see what the real dangers to our Republic actually are. And we won't be so ready to buy that white supremacy is the only thing keeping us from communism or that smashing out the windows of a Best Buy is stopping fascism, and we won't equate being asked to speak politely and civilly with being cancelled and maybe we won't be so hot and ready to cancel people in the first place. From the center you can see that ideas might compete, but you don't always have to only pick red or blue, this isn't the Matrix (as far as I can tell). Only if we see them for what they are do we stand a chance of putting them to rest.

I Know that Voice

It's been a while since I last took to this space to bloviate about anything.  Part of that is a simple desire for self preservation.  There were many times over the past few months where I wanted to rant and rave about something, but for reasons of my own personal sanity, the desire not to try and get any more wound up about politics, or contribute to the same emotional spiral in others, I have refrained.  But here, this week, where the supposedly last step of the election is taking place, I have come to a realization that I think is important for we the people to take into consideration: we are being abused.  Some of us are being physically abused, others are being emotionally abused, we're all being controlled and told what to think.

Sometimes it's hard for the abused to admit that they have been abused.  Most people would prefer not to think of themselves as victims.  There is usually ample evidence of self-blame along the lines of: "Oh, I'm such a fool, I just should not have made them mad."  There is equivocating: "nobody else is going to treat me any different." There are excuses made: "It's only because they love me so much that they get so riled up."  I have actually been in a place where I have had to try and get abused persons to admit that they were in an abusive relationship, and it is more difficult than you think.

It is nearly impossible to get the abuser to admit the same thing, until some very dire line has been crossed. Donald Trump is the drunk spouse that comes home and slaps his wife, but he has, as of yet, failed to come to a moment of clarity where he realized that was a mistake.  He thinks she needed it.  She was hysterical and talking about trying to actually take care of the poor and welcoming immigrants and such things (wonder where this so called Christian nation got those ideas).  Plus all his buddies at the bar swear that she was flirting with some commie pinko who looks like a hippie, or maybe even a black guy.  I'm not justifying anything that he has done to us as a nation, but he's about to get the boot and maybe get to meet the sheriff.  So let's look at another shade of vile: Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley et al are the worst sort of people to have around in this sort of a situation, they are the justifiers and the opportunists that vulture around the edge of an abusive relationship.

What they are is villainous, not just ridiculous.  They are like the neighbor down the street who is rooting for the abuser to get locked up so he can go make time with the lonely wife, who they know will put up with a lot of mistreatment.  They do not have the excuse of being impaired, or being ignorant, incompetent and out of control.  They know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.  They are trying to pull a scam of epic proportions, and for the good of our republic, I really hope it fails.

Here's the logic: they want to move in on the wife (the American people), who has been abused by a malignant narcissist for several years, but who finally got up the gumption to kick him to the curb.  The problem is that all of the abuser's buddies think he's an okay guy who just runs off at the mouth a bit.  They have not really seen, or have chosen not to acknowledge the bruises that the Donald has left on this nation.  Cruz et al, know that the buddies are going to have to accept their play for her affections at some point.  But their excuses are carefully confined so as not to offend the MAGA drinking buddies:

"Yeah, abuser guy really wasn't that out of line, I mean look at the sweet microwave he done got her last time he smacked her around."

"Yeah, we know he was toxic, but you can't just rob a man of his legal rights, even if he uses them to smack his wife around a few more times on the way out the door."

"Yeah, that's a shame what he did to her, but it's just Donald being Donald."

"Now she's going to shack up with that communist. We gotta protect her from herself."

"Everyone's saying there's more than meets the eye here, we need to investigate."

But there's nothing to investigate, except for a drunk guy who punched his wife in the face.  She may not be perfect, but she doesn't deserve that sort of abuse.  And the thing is, they don't really care about the wife, they would be perfectly fine for the abuser to keep on abusing, because it improves their long term prospects of being able to move in.  See they think that if such a rotten human can get himself hooked up that way, imagine if they could be just slightly less rotten.  It would be a great way to get what they want and not really have to change much at all.  Jumping over that low bar would be super easy.

Watch, if he does decide to try and work his way back in the door in four years, the so called "dirty dozen," will be the first ones to crow about how he nearly derailed the peaceful transition of power, at least during the primary.  In the general, that commie boyfriend will suddenly make a comeback.  I'm telling you 'Murica, we are being abused by more than just that orange buffoon.

What World do you live in?

 The Word always creates.  And words always create.  
The idiot, by definition, is simply a man who has talked himself into a world all his own.

-Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about how and why people believe the things they do about the world. Watching the recent debates and the corresponding kerfuffle on the interweb it occurs to me that we are now living in a world where the different tribes actually seem to believe their own worldview.  At the dawn of this spasm of corruption and mendacity called the Trump administration, Kellyann Conway coined the phrase "Alternative facts," and we all chuckled.  But as The Smiths once said, "That joke isn't funny anymore."  Last night Mike Pence told Kamala Harris that she was entitled to her own opinion, but not to her own facts.  At which point I nearly lost my ever loving mind; it was hypocrisy of the highest order for a man representing an administration whose rejection of all kinds of facts has led to botched handling of pandemic, moving in the wrong direction with regard to climate change, the diminishment of our national standing in the world, and possibly significant erosion of our national security, not to mention the baseless accusations about election fraud throwing our very democracy out into fast moving traffic.

Now, in all humility (even though I'm not feeling particularly humble), I must admit that perhaps it is me who is the idiot who has talked himself into a world all his own.  Maybe it is Trump and his sycophants who are right about all of the things they seem so certain about.  Maybe all those pesky environmental regulations are not so much about clean air and water as they are about socialism taking our freedom away.  Maybe there is a reason other than racism to act with such callous disregard to all the black and brown people who are crying out in the street for justice.  Maybe the abortion issue really is worth sacrificing just about every other moral value in order to win what at this point will be mostly a pyrrhic victory.  I do have most of the scientific community on my side, including some parts of it that have never actually endorsed a political candidate before (Scientific American, The New England Journal of Medicine).  I have a large majority of the most reputable journalists, including some rather conservative folk, on my side.  And I have what is probably going to be a rather sizeable majority of the American voters on my side (but with the electoral vote situation there is still cause for alarm).  On the other side there is Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and a smattering of white supremacists, none of whom I particularly want to have a beer with.

Four years ago, we as a country made a choice between two worlds.  One was the politics-as-usual world that Hillary Clinton embodied.  It was pantsuits and empty promises.  Nobody loved it, some people resented it, but it still won a majority of the voting population.  Donald Trump represented a world of rich white guy power tinged by the orange fake tan of someone with boundless vanity and very little self awareness.  He also had a plan on how to exploit the narrow crack that opened in the door of the electoral college, the "blue wall" crumbled because Hillary didn't even look for the cracks.  For almost three years the experiment of Trump was annoying but not disastrous, and then nature came crashing through like the Kool-Aid man with little Corona virus stubby nubs all over him.  All of the sudden someone who had "alternative facts," wasn't just maddening, he was dangerous and deadly, to over 200,000 Americans at this point, including himself and most of his closest team.

Now we have a choice again.  Biden is boring, and Biden has been hanging around the government for pretty much his entire adult life.  Biden has some quirks, but they're normal old man quirks, not raging narcissist quirks.  Biden has been Veep, Biden has been a Senator, more importantly though, Biden has been through a crash course in humanity and compassion.  He is far from a Socialist, or even a Leftist, trust me, I know some Socialists and Leftists, they do not like him, or Clinton, or Obama, or pretty much any establishment Democrat.  The last six months should have taught us in stark detail that sometimes the boring adults need to be in charge.  It is fun to go to the zoo and watch monkeys fling poo at each other, but it is far less fun when they decide to throw it on you.

At this point the word is normal, please give us normal, enough with the novelty, enough with the constant barrage of unhinged and often blatantly false tweets, enough with the self-dealing and flexing.  I want me some boring normal Joe, and I'll take the first Black Woman VP as a little sauce on that.  Like that time when my gall bladder went bad and was making me sick, the doctor told me to go on the BRAT (bread, rice, applesauce and toast) diet until they took the stony little bugger out, we need to cool things down and all get back in the same world so that we can heal and start to live up to the standard of e pluribus unum, out of many one.

An Open (love) Letter

Dear Rural America,

I love you a lot.  I have been your son, your pastor, your biggest fan.  I have lived with you for years and been through a lot with you.  I know a lot about what makes you happy and what keeps you up at night, and that is why I love you.  But lately I have become a bit worried about you, because you seem to be buying something that is not good for you (and no I'm not talking about those deep fried twinkies at the fair).  I'm trying very hard to remember how good you are in your heart, so I'm going to start this with saying that I understand one of your greatest woes.  It is the woe that you sit at your kitchen table and lament, it is the woe that pervades your churches and your school boards.

It is quite simply the fact that your children are leaving you.  They are leaving you for the "big city," even if the "big city" isn't really big or even a city.  For the years I have spent with you I sympathized, I heard your explanation about jobs and opportunity, I listened with great empathy to the loss of a truly rural way of life that centered on growing and living things.  God knows I would want that too, if it really was the way you remember it.  I resonate with your Wendell Berry utopias where the people work the land and their labors produce all that they need.  That's straight up biblical, promise of God sort of stuff, I love that too. The fact that the sort of agrarian dream isn't really possible these days has been a long time coming.  Most farmers are far from self sufficient (except the Amish), they are perpetually in debt and rely far too much on subsidies (they don't like that one little bit either).  But look, that's not the only reason your children leave.

Your children leave because they have seen more.  Don't get me wrong, they all love the open fields and forests, the bonfires and the fairs, the animals and the natural beauty.  What they might also love though is the theater and sushi and art museums.  They might love these things because you provided a good education and some broader experiences than you had growing up.  You were good parents and gave them these things, probably not realizing that it would plant seeds in their souls that would grow like they did. On top of that, they have the internet and they see the variety of the world, and being young they don't fear it like you do.

Your children leave because your world smothers them. Some of those things they see out there in the world seem right and true and beautiful, but your churches (mea culpa) and your politics tell them that those things are wrong or evil.  They have openly gay friends who seem well adjusted and happy.  They have been taught a much healthier mode of sexuality, free from so much of the shame and guilt that has plagued such things for generations.  They consider that abortion is something that might be rendered obsolete by proper education, support and contraception rather than something to be rendered criminal by the government.  Most of them would rather save their righteous rage for things like racism and sexism rather than tax plans and fighting over the scraps left to us by the robber barons of big corporations.  They want to save that natural world that they love so much thanks to you.  The science you taught them in schools says that the ecosystem is in danger, and they're not buying all the old white guys with options in oil companies who tell them it's not.

You taught your children things about honesty and integrity, good job.  The trouble is, now they expect you to live up to those lessons.  When they see you vote for "the lesser of two evils," rather than really engage and expect leadership out of our government, they feel that you're betraying your own values.  They see hypocrisy, even in the most utilitarian sense, as a betrayal of the sort of honest straight-shooting ideals that are the best of you.  You can tell yourself it's all about jobs, lattes and avocado toast if you want, but these are your children, you know them better than that.

They won't and maybe can't tell you these things in so many words, but that's what is really going on.  I know because I talked to them and I've heard the other side of the sappy facebook posts about how great country life is.  I've heard them say they need to get out, for reasons that they can't always put into words, but I can hear it, and I have felt it, it's the desperate feeling that they don't really belong there anymore.  They want to stay for the comforts of home and family and clean air, but they can't.  And a job is usually just the excuse to get out of dodge.

I love you Rural America, but you have toxic stuff seeping out of your souls like acid mine drainage.  Your young folks know, even if they can't quite name it.  So they leave and hope they don't get cancer down the line. You don't need to be like the city folk, you don't need to adopt every lefty idea that comes down the pike, you should just actually be the people you honestly want to be.  Many of you are Christian, and if you actually listen to what Jesus said and follow him for real, you'll be on the right track.  But even for those of you who aren't particularly religious, just be honest and live with integrity.  Some practical advice would be to stop watching so much TV news and read more.  Spend less time trolling facebook and read an actual book.

But most important think about the people your children are becoming and be the home that they can be proud of, rather than the place they just want to escape.

When someone shows you who they are...

 Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!

-Jesus of Nazareth (The Gospel according to Matthew 23: 23-24)

I have to tell you that I was rooting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to hold out in her battle against pancreatic cancer as strongly as I have rooted for just about anything in recent memory.  I am not at all surprised that the Republican Party is now engaged in one of the most shocking acts of hypocrisy in recent memory (and we have had some good ones).  What does surprise me is that they didn't even wait 24 hours to do it.  I saw the headlines that RBG had passed and the headlines that Yertle the Turtle had vowed to hold confirmation hearings for Trump's nominee almost simultaneously.  I am not at all surprised that the same man who solemnly defended the franchise of the voters to deny Merrick Garland even a hearing, is now flip flopping.  I just sort of thought he might wait a day or two to proclaim his galling cynicism.

I have found myself reading and re-reading Matthew 23 quite a bit over the last several years, because of Jesus' repeated use of the formula: "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"  There are not many charges that indict our current political system with as unavoidable a stain as that of hypocrisy.  The fact that our highest court full of people we actually call "justices" will now have two people who are there because of a miscarriage of justice in the form of a blatant and cynical political maneuver (Gorsuch who should be Garland, and whoever this might be), two people (Kavannaugh and Thomas) who were credibly accused of misconduct (at least in Thomas' case the matter was fully prosecuted rather than summarily dismissed), is a rather dire summation of where we are as a culture vis a vis actual justice being done.

I understand that the skillful practice of law sometimes involves pulling the strings in the books and finding the loopholes.  I get that justice might be somehow served in convicting Al Capone of tax evasion rather than any of the myriad acts of violence he undoubtedly had on his hands.  I get that winning a not guilty verdict based on procedural missteps by police and prosecutors may put the guilty back on the street.  I know that the practice of law can be messy, but when it comes to things like the Supreme Court of the United States, the symbolism and the perception really matter much more than they do at the Charles County Circuit court.  There is a certain austerity to the proceedings of the SCOTUS that stands us all in good stead, unless of course it becomes tainted by political machinations, which it already is and which will, unavoidably, be worse however this turns out.

If we could go back in time and stop the Borking of Robert Bork, would it help?  Maybe, but ones suspects there were many off ramps on the road to this place we currently stand.  Unless a Delorean pulls up with a pair of flaming tire tracks, or a blue police box materializes, I guess we can't really know.  The fact of the matter is that right now we have yet another case where the majority of the country is hoping that four Republicans will have the spine to stand up to Yertle the Turtle King as he barks orders from the top of his stack of turtles, which is imminently in danger of collapsing and tossing him into the mud.  Our founding fathers, as white, landowning males, feared the tyranny of the majority, they did not actually want the uneducated masses who worked their plantations and dug in their mines to actually set the agenda for their nation.  However, they had this high-minded idea of democracy, which was an untested experiment in 1776, which drew them to create institutions that might rule without a tyrant, and which might stand a chance of providing liberty and justice for all.

Even if we take their flaws into account, you have to admit we're letting them down right now, when we tolerate this sort of behavior from any of our elected leaders.  Without engaging in false equivalence I can say that if I ever see a Democrat displaying the level of hypocrisy that is going on in the Republican Senate right now, I will not vote for them, not because I would necessarily disagree with the action, but because integrity matters, consistency and constancy matter.  If they could be this cynical and hypocritical, they are not trustworthy to hold power.  The poet Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."

I do, and I will not forget this.  However, I am also conscious of the fact that my anger in this moment is prone to lead me down the path of hatred, and that I will not forget either.  I will mock Yertle the Turtle, but I will not hate him.  He makes my blood boil, but I will not let him poison my soul.  I will root for his fall into the mud as much as I rooted for RBG to prolong her earthly sojourn.  I have some degree of confidence that it will come, because pride and arrogance have a way of biting their practitioners.

"Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation." (Mt 23: 36)

Sins as Scarlet

 I sometimes wonder if we will ever be able to transcend our history and become the thing our flawed yet visionary founders imagined.  The legacy that slavery has left on our society has been much talked about of late, but there is another legacy that is deep as well.  It is that peculiar form of religious and social fundamentalism we called Puritanism at the time.  On one level the Puritans are heroes of the colonial age, the bold settlers of New England who forged a new world where they could practice their deeply pietistic faith apart from the political intrigues of European religions.  On another level, they are the witch trial people.  As a student of Christian history I know that Puritans are actually rather more complex than either of the stereotypes we apply to them.  Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his fictional post mortem, The Scarlet Letter, on Puritan culture in 1850, about events that would be 200 years in the past at the time.

Cliff Notes version: Hester Prynne is an unwed mother and her baby is the child of the local minister Arthur Dimmesdale.  The townsfolk judge Prynne guilty, beyond a doubt, of adultery and impose a sentence of cultural isolation and the wearing of a large red A on her chest.  Prynne does not name the father, even though doing so would marginally improve her situation.  Dimmesdale falls ill due to his unadmitted guilt.  Anyone who read this classic work of literature in seventh grade has the sense that the real sinners in the story are not in fact Prynne and Dimmesdale, but the townsfolk who are so severe and hypocritical.  I daresay Hawthorne, along with the actual event of the Salem Witch Trials, are the primary reasons why if you call someone a Puritan or describe something as Puritanical, you are not being complimentary.

But the Puritan instinct runs deep within our DNA.  Anyone who has ever dabbled around in foreign cinema, or even watched TV commercials in Europe, knows that Americans have some more prudish attitudes about certain things than much of the developed world.  Beyond our inordinate tendency to be offended by naked human bodies, the puritan legacy has manifested itself in modern American Evangelicalism.  The high white collars and severe black clothing have been replaced by polo shirts and khakis, but the judgmental attitudes remain strong.  It is with this in mind that I almost feel bad for Jerry Falwell Jr. with emphasis on the almost.  I stop short of full sympathy for his plight because he is not a powerless victim of misguided justice like Hester Prynne.  He is a man who has used the language and the loyalty of Christianity to great and cynical advantage over the course of his life.

Background: Jerry Falwell senior was one of the primary architects of the "religious right" that profoundly aided the rise and rule of both Ronald Reagan and the Bush clan.  He was the pastor of a large and wealthy church and parlayed that along with his political influence into an empire of sorts.  To Jerry Jr. he left the reins of Liberty University, an explicitly evangelical Christian university.  We Presbyterians have been founding schools for centuries so why not?  To his other son he left the pastorate of the large congregation.  Even though the younger son is quite successful as a pastor, you probably don't know who he is (his name is Jonathan).  But you know Jerry Jr. don't you? Why?  Do you know any other President of a midsized university by name?  It's because Jerry Jr. has taken up his father's penchant for media whoredom.  He has become especially visible as an early and vocal supporter of one Caesar J Trump.  Despite not being a theologian, or a pastor, or a spiritual leader of any sort, Falwell has become one of the faces of American Evangelicalism.

Recently, Falwell posted and then promptly deleted a picture of himself with a young woman (not his wife) on a yacht, holding drinks, with their pants unbuttoned and their bellies exposed.  Far from being scandalous in the age of celebrity sex tapes, it seemed pretty mild to the casual observer and probably meant as a joke.  Assuming the audience had a sense of humor.  Assuming the audience has a sense of humor would be a mistake in the case of dealing with the likes of people who gave Hester Prynne the Scarlet Letter A.  The board of directors has asked Falwell, who for all his faults has made Liberty solvent and successful over his tenure, to step down temporarily, but one gets the sense that the temporary nature of it is only a formality.

I find this curious (and a little amusing in a schadenfreude sort of way).  First, this is the straw that broke the camel's back?  Really?  Not the pompous preening for the political crowd?  Not the obsequious behavior towards an immoral and illiberal leader?  Not the endorsement of anti-Christ behavior bent on violence and power (like brandishing a gun at a student assembly and daring any "muslims" to come get some).  Not the endorsement of policies that oppress the poor and the immigrant while rolling in mountains of personal cash and inherited wealth and status?  A picture that shows his tummy?  That's the thing huh?

An article in the Atlantic explains the dynamic at work pretty well and in some detail, but the long and short of is that the powers that be were tired of his nonsense and used this as an excuse to get rid of a burr under the saddle.  As someone who cares very little about what happens at Liberty University, I am much more interested in what this says about the state of American Christianity.  As one who appreciates Jonathan Edwards as a preacher and a theologian, I know what can be gained from the Puritans at their best. But I also know what has become of them at their worst, and I know they did not vanish from our society, they just changed their clothes.

They have always had a tendency to go hard at Hester Prynne, and let Dimmesdale languish and fester unannounced.  Falwell has been a Dimmesdale sort for years, playing the part of a righteous Pharisee and champion of well, Liberty.  He has expressed outrage of all sorts at those who would degrade our noble Christendom-like America.  All the while you sort of expect that a man who was handed so much by his father might make a mess of things.  All the while you might have expected the same sort of ribald vulgarity that engulfed Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart to lurk in the Falwell closet, or on a yacht.  Don't get me wrong, I'll take his word that it's just a joke, I'm not accusing him of adultery or even being lewd, just not funny.  So whatever sympathy I might have had is replaced by a sense that justice can be served even by imperfect mechanisms.  If it can cause the modern day puritans to stop handing our scarlet letters to every Hester Prynne that comes along, maybe it's for the good.

Unfortunately, Jerry Jr. is probably just another scapegoat for the disease that our puritanical roots have grown.  Interesting that "cancel culture" seems to operate just fine at places other than liberal bastions like Berkeley huh?

Post Script: 14 days later a story broke about a love triangle between the Jerry and Becki Falwell and a 20 year old pool boy, that's going to be harder to play off as a harmless prank. I'm not Hindu, but the whole Karma thing really does seem to be a real force of nature.  Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone," that was to protect the stone throwers as much as the target I think.