For as much then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.
And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:
Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. ~Acts 17:29-31
Yesterday, I took a drive to go visit a friend of mine a ways north of here and retrieve several boxes of my old gaming books that he had sitting in his basement.
About a third of the way there, I passed this sign along the highway. It looked to be handmade, was painted red, white and blue, and had only one thing on it.
#WWG1WGA
The Q-Anon Hashtag.
In an area that I know has terrible internet service because it's not too far from where another friend of mine (who was in our gaming group, but who is unfortunately no longer with us) and his family used to live. They still had dial-up when dial-up wasn't cool anymore.
But there's this sign, this real-world meat-space sign, with a hashtag on it.
I thought about it, and the more I think about it the more it makes me think of those "Jesus" signs one sees all over the South, alongside highways and roads, because some people down there just love to advertise their religiosity.
And that bothers me, not the Jesus signs in Alabama and Florida and Missouri, but the Trump sign in Michigan that seems to evoke them. The United States of America is constitutionally, legally and in practice a secular liberal democratic republic.
The President is a wholly secular leader within that system, checked by Law and tradition and the other two branches of government, for a reason.
He's not a king, and he's sure as hell not a god.
Separation of Church and State is the very first item in the very first Amendment to our Constitution, both freedom of (and at first implicitly and later explicitly) freedom from religion. Growing up as a young conservative kid, a Christian kid, attending Christian schools during the waning years of the Cold War when half the world still quaked in the shadow of the Soviet Union, which none other than Ronald Reagan called The Evil Empire...I had it pounded into my head that I had freedom of religion and like it or not, so did everybody else. I had it pounded into my head that I should be damned grateful for this, what was seen as both a legal and perversely even a spiritual truth.
You were supposed to believe because you wanted to, not because somebody made you do it. In fact I was taught that God would accept nothing less.
But it's more than that. I grew up in a world where faith, conceptually, was under real no-shit attack. When I was a kid the news was full of stories about Afghan Mujahideen bravely fighting the Soviet Army with nothing more than light weapons and their own determination and guts. Many brave men died with the words "Allah Akbar" on their lips, telling the Godless Communists who they were and resisting even unto the last breath.
In my teens and early twenties we allied with the Gulf States against Saddam, who though he parroted veneration of Stalin, perhaps thought himself a god. Israel has always been seen as our ally and friend and proxy-fighter extraordinaire. Conservatives once defended the religious freedom of Muslims from liberals in newspaper op eds in the Detroit Free Press, believe it or not.
I know, I was there. That was what we were, circa 1995 or so.
Growing up in California, and since, I knew many Vietnamese people, from neighbors to co-workers later in life, mostly Buddhists and Catholics, many of them having fought against or lived under and then escaped Communism...so they knew what America was all about and appreciated it all the more.
My later 20's were spent to a great extent working in the food service business around Jamaicans and other Afro-Caribbean folk, Pentecostals and Rastafari and strict homophobic Fundamentalists. I've spent the last decade and a half of this life working for a Native American tribe...and I know Native people who are Christians of many kinds as well as Traditional practitioners and not a few who practice both and see no conflict between two sides of themselves.
Diversity, pluralism, and respect for other cultures once had a home on the Right as well as the Left. Maybe what our preferences were didn't gel with yours, but that was Okay too. You had a right to disagree just as surely as we did.
And that's the point. Sure, we railed against moral relativism and such, and some of those of us who took what we saw as a prophetic stand against moral decay, situational ethics and the encroaching armies of the Beast are positively irate at what we see going on in America right now.
Not from the homosexuals. Not from the liberals. Not from the most Godless Atheist or Communist.
But from our own people, who seem hell-bent on worshiping Bhaal, the Lord of Murder, to "Own the Libs."
These fucking people are too cowardly to even own their own violent fantasies.
"America, the Beautiful" seems to have been replaced with a minstrel-show version of "The Camptown races."
And for these people...that seems to be the entire point. It doesn't even seem to matter if it actually happens, simply the depiction of it, the thrill of imagining it...that's the point. It doesn't even matter if Trump really does that much. If he doesn't they'll just fantasize about it online in real time, as if imagining such could will it into being.
It's like, rather than accept that they were wrong and they got conned, roughly 25% of Americans would rather allow themselves to be taught to view the other 75% as literal Soviets, despite the fact that the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union ended on Christmas day of 1991 just over two years later.
And that, my friends, is bullshit. You may not agree with your fellow citizens...but that doesn't make them Marxists.
Speaking of, please don't forget that this kind of shit, the Bots, the Trolls, the horrible attitudes, the murderous fantasies of the American Right...are in fact being enabled and funded and egged on by Vladimir Putin and his Oligarchs, many of whom were, at least at one point, doctrinaire Marxists.
It's they who seek to destroy America, not the Democratic House Majority.
But no, believing the truth is too hard for some people, apparently. And there is no just believing some of the lie, either, either it must all be believed...and not just publicly, but performatively acted upon and accepted...or you might as well accept being branded as a heretic, no matter how conservative you are or how you've voted or what you've done before. There is no history, in the Khmer Trump, every year...indeed every day...is somehow Year Zero.
It's like we somehow ended up with a generation of people who never learned that visioning sessions and the WWE were all fake bullshit. At the very least, it has imperiled our nation that this is so.
Donald Trump is not a god, he's not even a killer. He's a con-artist.
People are dying not because Trump is some kind of great warrior, but because he is a truly great incompetent who absolutely sucks at his job.
Those people, as of yet, are not Americans.
But it's going to come to that.
Faced with impeachment, with arrests, with actual facts and real data now taking over the rhetorical battlespace, and the specter of conflict and genocide in Syria that's their own fault now darkening the picture even further for them the Trump administration and its supporters have not merely doubled down, but are attempting right in front of all of our faces to raise Trump up as their god.
I was a Christian. I know the history of my former religion. Religious wars end badly.
People will have to give their lives to stop this shit. It's coming to that. And Christians of all kinds will not be exempt.
People will die, as much from bad water and lack of food or medical care as from the conflict or persecution itself.
And when they go into the afterlife, they will not be judged by Donald Trump.
Remember that.
Part 2.
Part 1
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