On Saturday, Trump attacked Representative Elijah Cummings on Twitter.
I'm fucking serious when I tell you this garbage reads to me like something out of 1959, not 2019.
The racist tropes are all pure old-school Southern Segregationist crap, anyway.
I have no fucking idea, to be honest. You tell me how the hell Rev. Al is relevant these days...or indeed, ever has been. Don't get me wrong, I kinda like the guy, he's pretty much that harmless old bullshitter minister that anybody with a church background will have dealt with at some point. He doesn't mean any actual harm...but he's not above using his position for his own gain a little here and there. Speaking as a former Christian, I might kinda like the guy, but I'm gonna watch his hands when he reaches in the cookie jar. Still, he's far less malevolent or even outright corrupt or political than Jerry Falwell Jr. for example. So far as I know, there's no pool boys or shady affairs or "arrangements" in Al's past and if there were, I'd more or less expect he'd be up front about it, in a "Hey, I might as well enjoy part of God's Creation" sort of way.
And speaking of bullshit artists, as Trump himself observes here, Rev. Al has associated with both Don King and himself in the past. Remember that, Trump doesn't have associates or friends, he only has people he hasn't betrayed yet.
His supporters should remember that.
The Evangelicals should remember that.
And the Republicans should remember that.
But, there's something else I would like to point out here. I think there's something going on here that is actually worse, and that I think not enough people have picked up on.
Al Sharpton is, of course, a Baptist minister.
Elijah Cummings is an active member of his church in Baltimore, New Psalmist Church, which is also Baptist.
Hey, Evangelicals, do you seriously think Trump gives a fuck about your religion? Or are you just riding the lightning until it breaks, to see what you can get out of it, until he throws you under the bus too?
I've posted about this before, but here in the snip below we have Robert Jeffress, Trump-supporting Pastor of First Baptist church in Dallas, saying that "Walls are not un-Christian because there will be a wall around heaven.
Listen, asshole, I've read the entirety of the Acid Trip of John of Patmos multiple times and I'm here to tell you that it while yes, it says there is a wall, it also says the gates are always open.
And unlike most white conservative Evangelicals, I'm pretty sure Elijah Cummings or Reverent Al would not only understand what that means, but be able to answer questions with a theological interpretation of their own without looking anything up.
I am increasingly certain that these people don't believe in the Lord, or at least, that anything Jesus did or said falls a distant third to their politics and stupid racial theories.
Not too long ago, I read a bit on the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC and the Dylan Roof shooting there. That church was burned to the ground at least once by white racists, and for some time after met in secret. The Black Church was persecuted by white racists for decades, if not centuries.
Some other Black churches that were burned down several months ago, whose rebuilding I recently contributed a little money to, included a couple of Baptist churches.
I looked it up, the most commonly reported Christian denomination in South Carolina? You guessed it, Baptists.
It's the same throughout much of the South. So, quite frequently on a historical basis we not only have Christians persecuting other Christians on the basis of race...but White Baptists persecuting Black Baptists in particular.
I spent much of my life as a Christian...and most of that as a Baptist...I'm sorry, but I have trouble squaring that up with sincere religious belief as I have known it to be. I started out as a Baptist, and I'm well aware of Baptist history and of the schism in the mid-19th century over the issue of slavery.
And as far as I'm concerned...coming as I do from the American Baptist side of the equation...there was absolutely a time when Southern Baptists believed more in slavery than they did in Jesus Christ.
Of course, if one follows current Southern Baptist Convention leaders and theologians like Albert Mohler and Russell Moore (which I do) a lot of these guys are pushing hard for racial equality and racial reconciliation within their denomination.
But I am a habitual reader of the comments on social media in general and Twitter in particular. There's a lot of the asses in the pews that are convinced that there are "Schismatics" and "SJW's" and "Socialists" trying to take over the SBC.
Whatever.
I was a Baptist, I have ample experience at dealing with Southern Baptists, hell the last Baptist church that I was a part of was part of a small association of independent Baptist churches and two out of three of the degreed no-shit theologians that we had, had received their ordinations from the SBC. The chances of that denomination being "taken over by socialists" are precisely zero.
One of those guys, Brother Larry, was the Pastor of my own Church, Victory Baptist...had fought Communists in Vietnam as a US Army soldier. Trust me, ain't no socialists taking over the SBC. They've still got people like that guy.
Like me, and for many of the same reasons, Brother Larry was pretty anti-racist too. Unlike me, he was a registered Democrat, though on the conservative end of that spectrum. I'd be willing to bet he was more conservative by any metric I'd recognize than most Trump Supporters are.
I wonder if the Trump Supporters would call him "socialist?"
And I've gone down the rabbit hole and looked at the timelines of the kind of people who say that shit, one hell of a lot of them are Trump Supporters.
These are people who call anybody to the Left of Robert Welch "Socialist" at this point, especially current and former conservatives and people with religious backgrounds who don't agree with their bullshit.
These are people who have a cult-like attachment to a man.
That man has a history of anti-religious tendencies, and said on a national news program that he didn't think he needed God's forgiveness.
I'm warning you right now, that when all this blows up and Trump gets impeached or voted out or thinks he will be and tells his followers to follow him alone, or whatever and there's bound to be at least some fighting...that when these fucking people break off a piece of America for themselves (and I am increasingly sure that's exactly how this will play out) the very first people they will persecute...whether Black, Latino, or White...are all going to be Christians.
It's not about Christianity or conservatism or immigration status or liberalism or national origin or even politics in any traditionally American sense.
It's all about race...and in particular the association of whiteness with hard-right conservatism and male-dominated patriarchy. It's about that some people basically want a caste system in a country that was designed not to have one.
Christianity is only accepted by these racists to the extent that it can be bent to that purpose.
Ultimately, racism and white supremacy co-opt or corrupt all other beliefs or ideologies a person claims.
That's why I say these people don't believe in God, only their bullshit racial theories.
And Trumpism, much like Marxism-Leninism, is a jealous god, and will tolerate no competing loyalties.
I've just worked my way through all the Tom Clancy novels that I read as a younger man, and I'm here to tell you, that these motherfuckers are acting exactly the way Tom Clancy wrote Soviet and Chinese Communist characters...only with considerably less restraint, because authors have to write believable characters to get their shit published.
There's a reason that I say I'll be surprised if we even make it to the election without Americans shooting at one another, and that there is an excellent chance that Blue and Red sides will simply have their own elections in the territories they control. That's where all this divisiveness leads to.
And here we have Trump trying to drive a stake through the heart of the diverse society that liberals, moderates and even many conservatives worked hard over generations to create.
And there was another mass shooting today.
It's already starting, and it will get worse. It's time to stop trying to have it both ways and pick a side.
Freedom, or Trumpism. Americanism, or Racism.
Hell, for Christians it will come down to being forced to choose between Jesus or Trump.
The only thing the racists are ever going to do with the Cross of Christ is set it on fire.
It really is that simple.
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
~Maya Angelou.
No comments:
Post a Comment