Fire In The Shining City (Left Behind Is A Lie, Part Six)

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~Ronald Reagan

There is a new Lincoln Project ad out, called "Mourning in America" the title a play on words recalling the "Morning in America" theme of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. The ad ends with the question "If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?"

The only answer that springs to mind is "Not if the Trump Supporters can help it. And they'll attack you with Biblical-level invective for even suggesting that anything is wrong. We have almost 70,000 dead, and what are these people complaining about, but the measures that have prevented that total from being 700,000 dead. People are dying, and Republicans will get mad at you for pointing it out, while not a few of them appear to revel in the chaos and death even as the group tries (and fails) to put on an air of sober seriousness.

A fire has broken out in the shining city, and most of the cult of the Shining City On A Hill is either actively trying to spread the flames or charging the fire department for the water.

I saw this, this morning on Facebook, my friend Rob posted it, and the words above the picture are his own.

This is not the Christianity I went to church to learn about.
This is not the Christianity I hold in my heart.
This is not the Christianity that helped lepers, sheltered the homeless, and fed the hungry.
This is not my Christianity.

And I'm getting close, REAL close to stepping away from this Christianity, Lord help me.

Lord help us all, brother.

I can feel your pain because as I have written, I was there, in 2008, when conservatism embraced racism and the howling madness of conspiracy theories out of hatred for Barack Obama and too much of white American Christianity went right along with it. Then, as now, I owed my life and much of my spirituality to Black people, It was an African-American pastor who helped me find sobriety. Something he said stuck with me. You have to love life and yourself more than your Sin if you want to stop doing it. A lot of these people just don't. It's not even that they're not sorry, or unrepentant in the classical or biblical sense of that word. It's that they see nothing wrong in the first place, because deep down on some level they believe the universe is all about them.

For myself, I cannot imagine the idea of trying to use a pandemic as just another way to try to get what you want. People are dying, ain't you got no soul?

It's a virus, it doesn't care about your shitty politics or what color your skin is or who you are, either, and it will claim you just as anonymously and insidiously as it might claim your political rivals, or take you instead of them.

You can believe it won't happen to you all you want...until it does.

But then for myself, I cannot imagine what Trump thought would happen when he embraced the optics of looking small and petty right in front of Abraham Lincoln, either. I mean, how the fuck else did Trump think he was going to look?!

The people who are left in what remains of conservatism see themselves as the protagonists of reality, they think nothing bad is going to happen to them, and they think you should have to clap and cheer at whatever they do. The fact that we're all up against this virus shit doesn't matter to these people. The visible truth that it affects them and constrains their lives along with the rest of us is, however, something that this movement of greedy bastards, mentally broken authoritarian followers and narcissists is utterly mentally unequipped to handle.

It's like they finally opened their eyes at some recent juncture and realized that Reagan's shining city on a hill had other people in it, and at that point they all decided that it wasn't a shining city on a hill anymore, and when this virus flared up like a fire in the night, they decided to start fanning the flames and making it worse.

And why not, I suppose? The nature of America, that long arc of history and morality that bends toward justice does not favor a cult of injustice and immorality and self-worship. It is for this reason that I think these people are going to try to break off a piece  of America for themselves.

In these people's code, anything that inconveniences them or their imagined status or their wealth or that requires them to pay more in taxes or even indirectly support people or things they don't approve of is "Socialism." That's why they seethe with resentment at the thought of a working person being on Unemployment, typing away at a blog post with a sleeping ferret in my lap in my own space with the scent of a citrus and sea salt candle filling the air. They would far rather than I have to dress in ragged clothing and go beg for bread in the street, just to flatter their egos and reinforce their perception of their own place in the world, because it's not about Christ or Christianity or conservatism and it never was, it's about hierarchy and power and whiteness. If they can't be top dog with no one ever allowed to speak against them and get to dole out whatever the rest of us get like Trump doles out favors in return for support, they don't want it anymore.

Basically, these fucking people think that America hasn't been America since 1964...or perhaps more appropriately 1954 and the Supreme Court's Brown Vs. Board of Education decision. America isn't America if they have to share it with black and brown people, and whatever authoritative or paternalistic language they try to polish it up with, that is in fact what these people's problem is. In their view, Ike and Tricky Dick and Gerry Ford and Ronnie and either George were nothing but traitors for not immediately driving everybody else back to the fields and the ghettos and out of the public sphere and trying to bully and browbeat the rest of the world into being our bitch.

These are people who would burn Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill to the ground just to sell the paving stones for scrap value and use the rubble from the walls for reclaimed land to build a seaside golf resort. Then they'd wall it off, put up a gate, declare it was for rich people and/or white people only, and then call that a nation and set it up as a giant tax shelter with a mercenary armed forces.

And they get a lot of lower-class people to go right along with them based on the hate and racism alone. Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery was America's original sin. It is to our misfortune that the spiritual descendants of those he defeated rose to take over the party he catapulted to national power.

But America was not built on class, race and wealth, not Constitutionally or legally anyway, and when this country was founded, the world was in fact still rife with monarchies and slave societies and it was a vast level of exception to the rules that a nation would arise where even some of the people got to determine their own destiny. That's why over time, the term "American experiment" arose in the first place, more often than not since 1776, we have been the finders and the innovators and the pioneers.

But just the same there has always been some of us that fully embraced a parochial, savage backwardness too, an a primitiveness of thought rife with superstition and fear of what they have always believed deep down to be a dark and demon-haunted world, and the embrace of a harsh, punitive religion has always been part and parcel of whatever compacts of life such people observe. I don't use the example of primitive people dancing around a fire because I think it's funny.

I use it because right here, in one of the most advanced and technological world powers that ever existed that contains multiple literal world-cities on the level of ancient Rome itself, we have half-literate, superstitious people who would be perfectly well at home growing opium poppies in the mountains of Afghanistan so long as they could beat their wives and hate the group or tribe that lived over the next hill. Government isn't supposed to help, in these people's world, it's supposed to show up once a year with guns and trucks and force some of their sons into the Army, or show up to take its cut of the Hashish and Opium harvest and disappear the people who look at it wrong. Like I said, there ain't no practical difference when it comes down to it between these Trump Supporters and the fucking Taliban. Color, culture and religion may be different, but they're the same fucking people.

And if they can't shoot or shout the rest of us down and force us to abide by their ways, they want to break America so that they can have their own little primitive banana republic in some part of what's left of it. They'd rather squat in their bunkers with their Bibles and guns and shit on their own shoes in some Apocalyptic hell than live in the world we live in now.

And the people at the top of this mess would rather spend their days rat-fucking their imagined political enemies on the slightest pretext and use the pandemic to leave the working classes broke or dead, and the middle and lower reaches of the upper classes reduced to penury and then make everybody else pay to eat out of their garbage cans.

I frankly don't know how the hell these assholes keep getting people to follow them. I don't give a goddamn if you give me somebody to hate, if I can't eat.

But we have people who build their entire lives around hate and resentment and think that they should be served by everybody else, or at least everybody that they think is less than they are. I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a more anti-Christian thought process or way of living than that.

I'm sorry, but at this point if you can't see the need to drive Trump and his supporters and Republicans from power because it's a prerequisite to fixing this mess, I can't help you and I have no particular use for you. Go sit on the couch, read the Communist Manifesto or something and get out of the way. People are dying, if that's not more important to you than scoring whatever ideological points make you feel good about yourself (or worse, securing your own wealth and power) then you're a threat to humanity and pouring gasoline on the fires of the shining city right along with Republicans whatever you may claim to be.

If you still need to be "inspired" to vote for some kind of candidate who isn't trying to kill you or starve you out or who wants everybody that you love to die of disease, I'm not sure what's wrong with your brain but you need to get it fixed. Isn't saving the lives of other people inspiring enough for you? When did "Let people die, because it inconveniences me just a little bit" become an American value?

That's not my values.
That's not what I was taught.
Nor is it what I swore to defend.
That's not my America.

If it's yours, you and me, we're gonna have problems.

Light has no fellowship with darkness.

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

That right there? What Obama said? Not to mention what Reagan said in the pull quote up above? That's my America.

And if I have to fight for it I will. Be ye warned. I grew up as a conservative and a Christian in the era when Reagan's ideals held sway. I was taught that America is a melting pot and a pluralistic country and I believed this and signed up for this set of ideals as a Republican. To keep it, I had to become a Democrat. On balance, nothing of value was lost there, if this is what Republicanism has come to.

America was once believed, by many Americans, to be the world's New Jerusalem. Republicans have turned it into a nest of vipers.

This must change, it must be changed, or millions of people are gonna die if we don't get our act together soon. To change it requires action and political engagement, not just big talk, Progressives, and yes I mean you.

If stopping mass death doesn't "inspire" you, then fuck off. You're no one's ally and we can do the mission without you. But without you, it will be harder. Politics and survival are messy. That's life. Deal with it.

Because if ya don't, well the Republicans, who have already found their new Lord and Savior, are going to be perfectly content to burn the shining city...and the world...down around all of us.

We're all going to have to step up to put this fire out.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph. ~Amos 5:14-15

Part Five.
Part Seven.