2020 September blog: “A never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.”
If only . . . sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers, and scientists are keeping society together. Rita Dove
There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity. Paul Bourget
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. Fr. Ivan Illich
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Quick, kids, send in your three box tops from Kryptonite Cereal and tell me where today’s title came from!
In our Lincoln apartment, there is no cable or dish, so our television set runs a staple series of DVD’s—mostly cowboys, combat stories of a WWII vintage, and mysteries. Part of what made such films popular was that they preached what almost all of us of their era considered to be American values.
For instance, Paul Douglas’s speech on Democracy in The Big Lift was pretty standard fair and about as good a brief on what we all thought was special about America as you could come by. Truman and Ike, Democrats and Republicans, had their quarrels but not over these values.
What’s striking in watching these movies today is the marked contrast between those wholesome values, goals, beliefs and the attitudes and behaviors that our right wing has tried to foist off on the public as somehow “conservative” or “traditional.”
They are nothing of the kind. They are, instead, eerily reminiscent of the “party line” of the Nazi/Fascist regimes of the early 20th Century. Totalitarian regimes have always relied on a small number of principal tactics: The Big Lie, the spread of fear, rule through chaos and confusion (the Bannon philosophy he learned from reading Lenin), and creating loyalty on the basis of demonizing the opposition; that is, on appearing to hate the same things its followers hate. That is just how the current administration operates.
Recent elections have often depended on America’s exaggerated expectations of what was coming to us. Notions of something better that was our due (even our birthright as Americans) were first fostered by a liberalism taken in by myths of perpetual progress, then taken over by a series of right-wing political movements (Contract with America, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, QAnon, etc.) pandering to our fears that we, the most privileged people on earth were instead the victims of persecution. A recent article in a religious journal complained: What religion is the most persecuted in the world? Why it is our religion. Why, a baker cannot even refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding without being persecuted for her bigotry!
In 1900 Willa Cather captured the people of her time trenchantly and of our time prophetically in her depiction of “all the vague yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them all, fear” (“Erik Hermannson’s Soul”).
All the specious talk about globalism was largely fear speaking loudly, mostly the voice of white, male Americans (and the women who depend on them) whining that the world was ceasing to be a place where being white and male and American meant you could do whatever you wanted, wherever you wanted, and the rest of the world had to just live with it. Funny that the rest of the world had a different idea!
The latest manifestation of this attitude in posts on Facebook is the support for a regime that routinely belittles those whose dreams it would crush. I wonder what it might feel like to Donald Trump to discover that a great deal of his support comes to this: we can barely stomach this guy but he is “God Ordained” to save “the Babies” and “your Guns”—which must be the oddest duo ever invoked. (This despite the fact that they haven’t saved a single baby and no one has ever taken away any of their guns, not even the guns used to take their children’s lives or used by their own children to take their own lives!)
I’ve recently been hearing most from the right wing in their crazed conspiracy theories that abound around us, for example that Antifa is setting all the fires ravaging the west. Even the term “antifa” is a belittling way of diverting us from the patent Fascism of the Trump presidency.
People swallow all this because this is the only way to save us from the supposed “radical left,” from Communism. Everything now branded radical left is the world view found in, well, golly, Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey, the East End Kids and who-dun-its. And, oh yes, the soldiers and foreign service officials who fought Hitler in the hot war and Stalin in the cold, the real “antifa,” now routinely belittled by our Commander in Chief. How true American soldiers and Veterans must shudder!
My old friend Fr. Tom Miles messaged me recently about his sobering experiment in prayer. Knowing the evil of this current administration, he is, as the scripture and the Book of Common Prayer demand, praying for the current occupant of the White House.
That is, he is taking evil seriously, a matter of principalities and powers beyond our manipulation, contentions which no divine umpire seems about to settle like a teacher at recess putting an end to a school yard squabble. (Take a look at the Book of Job for a similar lesson in giving up on ego trips and wish-fulfillment religion.)
My prayers are similar. I pray for the many friends I have who still support this vile regime. A conversation last week with a new friend revealed that we both knew so many people who farm and ranch or run small businesses in our state who are wonderful people, virtuous people, the salt of the other—and yet can be seen wearing MAGA caps and brandishing Trump flags and campaign posters from their porches, barns, and center pivots.
A recent Sunday’s reading from Ezekiel portrays God as calling for a spokesperson, called merely “Mortal,” to rebuke evil, lest, not raising a mortal voice means to become complicit in the evil itself. I take this to heart: the Trump supporters I know are not evil people. They are often some of the best people I know. They are, however, good people doing an evil thing, a sobering and humbling lesson in itself.
Being only Mortal, I do not expect argument or persuasion to change them, so I pray their own goodness will bring them to their senses before the distinction between evil being and evil doing gets irretrievably blurred in their own mortal soul.
In Nan C. Merrill’s Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness, Psalm 2 ends this way:
Blessed are all who have asked
for forgiveness
whose hearts radiate the Love
we all are at the core
There are a few votes I’ve had to repent of and I never mind others joining me in asking for forgiveness.
September 2020
Next blog: October, a month of surprises to be sure.
capeek 