Oedipally Wrecked

 

Charlie Kirk presumably has a biological father who molded him and his big head into whatever you would call him now, and I believe he is honestly straight married and isn't, in fact, closeted in any way. Also, he would play the mouth harp if the droopy-eyed SOB, lit from below as if telling a scary campfire story, in an angle reminiscent of his Georgia mug shot, depicted above, told him it was necessary to soothe an old man's slumbers.

(Get your mind out of the gutter--that's from the Bible, it is! )

There are big men, manly men, men who have never shed a tear in their lives, who want this apparition of bad-assedness in office, not because he is good at anything, but because of images like this. His followers can tell one another he wants vengeance and is a Bad Spanking Daddy because the "Russia Russia Russia thing" was his villain origin story, and they want him to be right. 

Like little kids who love their Daddies, they can't see he didn't need an origin story, he's just kind of generally dumb and bad. He wants to punish people for noticing what he did and "disrespecting him". 

In short, they want a motherfucker, and here he is. And this photo is looking pretty damn motherfuckerly. 

Idolatry and the Ten Commandments

 

The theocrats want to put the Ten Commandments in schools for the children's own good. The mere presence is supposed to imbue them with morality. Or would it? I think it isn't about moral instruction of young people so much as a moral win for them. Essentially--it pretty much boils down to letting the children of lesser gods know who is top dog around here. Yahweh. The Storm God of the Near East. You really don't need to venture too far from the first Commandment, or the second, depending on which tradition you follow (because different versions of the Ten commandments exist) to realize that an explicitly "Judeo-Christian" symbol is being put in schools to tell everyone the religious preferences of the dominant culture: "Put no other God before me."

We are told he is a jealous god in the Holy Bible. As a kid, this struck me as weird--who is he jealous of if he's the only game in town? (That, along with "Who the heck is he talking to at creation?" was enough to drop a pretty big silver piece about the traditions that preceded it and the hard work of scrubbing out the "other guys".) But that's not really it, is it?

We are also told humans were made in God's image--it's the other way about. God is jealous because he was made in ours. He throws tantrums--like drowning the world except for one family, or destroying whole cities--not because it is godly, but because the threat of violence is something humans understand: "Someone in power is angry--let's behave for God's sake!" 

TWGB: Trump The Bible Salesman

 

Donald Trump, who is very broke, is selling Bibles just a minute after whatever this was. This is not someone basking in the luxury of the "pump" phase of his obvious "pump and dump" stock. This is a guy realizing he needs to shore up his most bought-in peeps. The religious Right. So he is out there selling the Lord via his book.

He goes back to this well when it is convenient. Sometimes we all do. But some go back to address their faith, and he goes there to address why he thinks he was chosen, while no one in the real world would believe any such thing. 

The Terror by Night

I think about the Bible sometimes. When the Internet was cut off in Gaza, and the electricity, I thought about the "terror by night"--the nameless and wordless horrors of the obscured, when the beasts come out after sundown, and you can barely make out the face of friend from foe. The thieves and knives come out at night. 

That terror is called "pachad". It is the terror for one's life. What is also to be feared? The arrow by day. 

That arrow pierces to the quick, because the target is seen. There is nothing done under cover of night that doesn't come out in the daylight.

I worry about people who want to use the Bible about this conflict. A lot of the ancient of days stuff is just outdated, and I don't think it's right that we hear a chant of "Khaybar, Khaybar" in pro-Palestine marches, or references to Simon of Trent. 

How Small, Is All

 

The fact that this guy thinks that two loving parents is some slam dunk against Pete and Chasten says a lot about just how broken and unloved these “family values conservatives” are. pic.twitter.com/N1Q65Xze6a

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 2, 2023

This Tweet encapsulates for me so much of what is damaged and wrong with the conservatives. Tell me an American veteran became a small-town mayor, married a schoolteacher, rose to a White House cabinet-level position, and adopted beautiful twin babies, and it is absolutely a family that shows what the American dream can be. And conservatives come along, and somehow, this is bad because it is two men? 

Why? What specific thing about them being two men fucks this up for them? The haters can say religion, but why? Buttigieg is more Christian than me. What if there was a God who said "Judge not, lest ye be judged?" What if love wasn't a problem at all?  What if queer people took inspiration for their faith through love for the longest time? What if Biblical gender wasn't as clear-cut as people suppose? 

Operation Do Something

This is President Trump, with his trademark hair pancake, wearing his most serious facial expression, holding aloft, to be clear, "a Bible, not his Bible", in front of a church he did not go in, having gassed peaceful protesters to get there, to vow he'd do something. Because if he didn't do something, why! How useless he'd seem, right? 

Except he still hasn't actually performed the leadership the moment calls for, really. I mean, okay, swirl around, as multiple Twitterati have noted, a book one hasn't read, to stand in front of a building one has no use for--to declare a threat of martial law (posse comitatus, anyone?) against protesters and vandals alike, which is kind of not very Constitutionally-oriented? 

To what purpose? Did the protesters get anything from that other than the certain knowledge they have been told their point of view doesn't matter? Did he show understanding and mastery of the situation? He earlier berated governors to "dominate" the protesters so that they did not "look like jerks."

That feels like a bit of projection, really. He's yelling at them because he thinks the protests make him look bad, just like he berated governors over the COVID-19 response. He wants them to make a violent response happen because he doesn't know that this would make things worse and because he wants to feel less impotent. And he's clutching the Bible like a crutch to--

Explain why he'd play Pontius with every protester body? (Whatever you do to these, you do also to whom?) Isn't using the Bible and the church this way a mockery? Isn't urging others to act a verification that he relies on others to make himself look better?

See, I get why propagandists at Fox News (or Scott Walker, former WI Gov, because he's no better than)  might think his exiting his gopher hole in the White House to perform "in-chargeness" is an act of bravery, because I assume it's in their contract to. But when I see this image:

President Trump pumps his fist as he walks between lines of riot police in Lafayette Park across from the White House while walking to St John's Church for a photo opportunity during ongoing protests. More photos from Washington: https://t.co/latl1eCZTE 📷 @tombrennerphoto pic.twitter.com/qlkVltyXKR

— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) June 2, 2020

I see a man so insulated and protected he has no reason to fear but who lives in fear regardless, because, in a nutshell, he has bad dreams.  Anything at all disrupts his ambition--not in the least, anyone lifting up the curtain to notice he isn't great and powerful at all, at all.  And who will attribute to him the brain, the heart, the courage, to do what we need?

He should click his heels and go home already. Resign!

Disease Rules Everything Around Me

"I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go to major hospitals, sometimes they have 2 ventilators." -- Trump suggests Cuomo is exaggerating about the medical gear he needs to keep people alive pic.twitter.com/ADZb8fznOw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

My work schedule this time of year usually disrupts my posting somewhat, and in that sense, nothing has changed. The staff of the floor of the building where I work has been reduced to something like a tenth of the usual workforce. It's about the same throughout the downtown area. My usually forty-odd minute commute is a near-thirty minute breeze. But there's a pulse of low-level stress, dislocation and uncertainty. Some of the people I'm talking to in the course of my work have lost their jobs or have their money-making opportunities severely reduced. They might love to go back to work, and yet--

They don't want to be sick. They don't want the people around them to be. They can't afford to be out of work, but they also sure as hell don't need corona in their lives. I'm in the NY/PA/NJ tristate area, and there are people who don't want to be outside if they can help it. I sympathize. I feel weird about that "Everybody wants to get back to work" construction though--Trump doesn't talk to everybody, and not everybody even stopped working. I want people to stay home. I want vulnerable people to stay safe. I want people to avoid having to go to the hospital right now, because things are not, as Trump wants to believe, levelling off. I want health care workers not to be worked to death. Things won't be miraculously better by Easter, for a kind of special resurrection of our social life.

I hate posting about everything through the view of the pandemic. For me, so far, it has mostly been a bloody boring inconvenience, but tinged with the incredible sorrow that it has been a nightmare and a tragedy for others, and was nursed along at the teats of ignorance and neglect. The voices of people who think it is okay to send people back into regular contact with one another for the stimulation of the economy are something worse than fiends--they are fiendish fools. Billionaires want people to go back to work--and they are the class of people who think they can finagle their own personal ventilator, if it worst comes to worst. Imagine this line of thinking:

Dick Kovacevich, who ran Wells Fargo & Co. until 2007, wants to see healthy workers below about 55 or so to return to work late next month if the outbreak is under control. “We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, who was also the bank’s chairman until 2009. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

This "flu-like experience" of which Kovacevich speaks? Can involve death and orphaning of one's little children. Is this tough-minded capitalism pose prepared for the widows/widowers and orphans? ("Are there no prisons? Are there no work houses? If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.") Young workers, it turns out, are not invincible. It isn't that "some may even die"--some most certainly will. Without mitigating the spike in infections and hospitalizations, this supposed "stop the financial bleeding" thinking is simply wrong, though. The workers are also your customers, the consumers. The workforce itself, the lifeblood of everything, is at risk. Fuck the capital--save the people!

For those who need a religious lens to look at this, think of this as a time of jubilee. Let's put a pin in the stock market for a minute, and release the bonds of the worker and consider paid the debts of the bondman. (See also: Do not muzzle the ox that treads the grain.)

And for what it's worth, there is a spirit of judgment from a certain giddy and ignorant corner about the affliction of blue states over red states, which seems to be in the same state of mind as Trump's potential determination to withhold aid to states that don't flatter him aren't working with him acceptably. Trump has singled out Cuomo, Inslee and Whitmer as being governors that haven't directed the correct pleasant-smelling offering in the general direction of his taint. This isn't too far away from being a self-fulfilling prophecy--at first. But I wonder what exactly red states will be going through in the future as the disease continues, and whether, once things are proceeding, they have the infrastructure to save lives and hold back the human toll. And I hope they do. But they need to heed science, not Trump.

I don't think I can avoid my future posts being at least tangentially concerned with covid-19 (Hey 19-no we can't dance together--no we can't talk at all!) for the foreseeable.

But just to leave a little bad taste in your mouth, I came across one of Trump's former serious fans who might have spit him out because he was lukewarm, Pastor Wiles (anti-Semite bigot). Trump has enjoyed saying that no one knew how much covid-19 would be a wasting force in our world, but Wiles as early as January 29 viewed this as a "purge". Even though some of the people who succumb to covid-19 will be of the formerly faithful and COVID-19 denying, still some will enter out from the mouth of the crucible, and feel no heat. This is because, verily, they are numb. (But they could fucking read a book or something.)

And don't get me started on the paranoia of the president who thinks that governors could even be asking for ventilators and all just to fuck with him. Or his belief that "the media" (journalists) might cover whether things he says and does happened and/or actually helped at all, instead of what they generally tend to do, which is not helping.

Anyways, everything looks like viral content to me. How are you all doing?

Heads on a Pike, Anyone?

TONIGHT: White House impeachment defense surrogate Mark Meadows (R-NC), alongside three GOP members of Congress, tells @NorahODonnell that he believes Republican senators will face political repercussions if they break with Pres. Trump; watch more at 6:30 p.m. ET. pic.twitter.com/uke5VOCEgg

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 27, 2020

I'm reasonably sure that the artificial pearls of the GOP Senators who balked at Rep. Adam Schiff's reiteration of a CBS news story are at least durable enough to withstand this assault upon their wide-eyed cherubic vision of the benevolence of President Trump and their boundless appreciation that he has not politically poleaxed any or all of them yet, amen.

See also:

Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man. He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2020

Oh jeepers creepers, there's no vengefulness here, oh my gosh no. I mean, unless you look at everything Trump does ever including the time he denied health insurance to his dead brother's boy and the long-standing feuds he continues with people even after they have died.

The correct response to this of a co-equal branch of government might, and I am not holding out hope, just offering suggestions, be to say "Fuck you, now it's war." He's guilty. Manifestly, even self-confessedly so in some ways. Mulvaney copped to the quid pro quo, Bolton is fixing to publish it, and Sondland spilled his heart out in the House testimony that everyone was in the loop. The picture will never get better, and there are "tapes".

But here's my epistle to the Republicans:

I hate to do the Bible stuff myself as a nonbeliever, but what price the presidency (the world) if the cost is your integrity (immortal soul)? Dems might even try to forget how much Pence is entirely in the loop if you sold the MF out.

Who stands for the truth? There's no reward in it. It isn't going to save your seat. It isn't going to make you a hero. It just makes you actually good.

If there was any other reason to ever run for the Senate than to be honest and do the right thing, I am so sorry. That reason was wrong. Just give a shit about the truth. Just do the right thing. At the end of the day, not having a government of moral monsters might just mean something, and if you ever wanted civility to return, you have to start with siding, even sometimes, against madness. These fellow party-members are saying the calculus is, serve Trump or politically die. And if you go along, you are already some kind of dead. Because you went with the flow, and followed a multitude to do evil.

Feck. I don't think the GOP Senate listens to me, a D-list blogger of The Left. And the schmaltzy moral smack-downs have already been flying fast and furious to no avail.

So here's another way of looking at it--you're not locked in here with President Trump, so much as he's locked in here with you. If you found your unified voice, you could peel the bark off his support. Wrong is just wrong. There is only so much shit any reasonable person can take, let alone a party of reasonable commonsense people who have been asked one nonsense thing too far.

I am not rooting for the Republican party. The Republican party has been the party of Kissinger and Watergate and Iran-Contra and laughing at AIDS patients my whole life. The party of misrepresenting MLK while promoting Voter ID and Crosscheck, the party of Gingrich and Hastert, and the party where after 40 years of knowing what was up the reality of the October Surprise and El Mozote massacre are finally being proven history. (Vindicating many journalists and human rights activists reportage at the time.)

Look, I never wished your party well. If the US had a Liberal Democrat and a Socialist party as our main two, I'd be satisfied. The Republican party is too insular and anti-multicultural to even be competent at diplomacy. You actually had 47 should-have-known better people sign a letter against the "Obama" (multilateral) Iran nuclear deal. Tom Cotton is a life-support system for an adam's apple, not a plausible foreign policy hand, but older, wiser people signed on to effectively troll....Dems. Against an actual plausible multilateral enforceable Iran antinuclear deal. Bravo. This was how you got Trump. By watching Fox News and believing it or thinking your constituents believing it mattered instead of showing leadership and cancelling them!

Let me tell you about cancel-culture--it's great! When some fuckhead news shill or other asshole signifies assholery, you counter them with facts and say they can't exist unless they get right. That's how you dominate your party's discourse, instead of Tuna Lamprey being out there on a national news network for some reason ever. What is her expertise? Like, what?

We are different, you conservatives and me. But we live on the same landmasses. What about admitting "orange man" (we know it is tv makeup which actually makes it sorrier!) actually is bad because all the things he does looks bad, and then we move on to how we talk like human beings with sense together from here? Your heads don't have to be on a pike. We get honest. You recognize Trump is a racist obnoxious pig who isn't relevant to our shared future.


Leftists love asylum-seekers. Treat us like the sympathetic bitches we are. Ditch that zero and be the hero you want to be. We will support you. Maybe. But Trump in power means everybody will eventually get just a little fucked. Some a lot. Is that your king?

George Will Writes a Good One

I usually have deep reservations about what George Will writes, and not altogether on the sole basis of the lack of overlap between our respective ideologies. I've found him impossible on the subject of climate change and in general don't agree with him on most (but not all) economic issues. But regarding former AR Governor Mike Huckabee, I think he voices what is also my chief concern with him:

Huckabee was unsurprised when a lunatic murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” So, the slaughter was a consequence of the 1962 Supreme Court decision against government schools administering prayers? Was the 2012 massacre of 12 people at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater caused by insufficient praying at America’s cineplexes? (Gosh, that part is apt--Vixen)

Today, Huckabee says, “We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity,” and he asserts a biblical duty to pray for the Supreme Court justices pondering the matter of same-sex marriages. Politico recently reported that Huckabee told some conservative pastors that “he cringes whenever he hears people call a court decision ‘the law of the land.’ ” He added: “This is not that complicated. There are three branches of government, not one.” To radio host Hugh Hewitt, Huckabee further explained his rejection of the idea of “judicial supremacy, where if the courts make a decision” it is “the law of the land”:

When We Talk about Church/State Separation

In that popularly read Iron Age collection of Bronze Age just-so stories, there are a handful of things that will earn you a revocation of your breathing permit. Homosexual carnal knowledge is just one of them. Popping off to your folks is another. Getting raped when you are engaged to be married (actually, a handful of things relating towards not being a virgin when someone has ponied up good livestock to purchase your chattel female ass are pretty much forbidden). Blasphemy, false prophecy and magic--all pretty much in the "not suffered to live" category of things you ought not do.

I am pretty sure I've done some things the Old Testament would prescribe a good stoning for.

Some people insist that God wrote the Bible. Some would go so far as to suggest that God wrote the Constitution. But there really isn't much overlap between the laws in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and our Constitution. This country does not have a death penalty for these things we find in the Old Testament (save the whole "Thou Shalt not Kill" part). Our legal system would also view pretty harshly anyone who, say, decided to strap up and declare open season on adulterers just because their Good Book suggested this was a proper thing to do.

So, Brad Byrne is a total Bible-believing whatever.

From TPM, a little disappointment for me:

In Alabama, a state PAC recently went on the air with an ad attacking one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools and for saying that parts of the Bible aren't true.

The candidate, Bradley Byrne, responded with a lengthy press release vehemently defending his belief in creationism and the infallible truth of the Bible.

"As a Christian and as a public servant, I have never wavered in my belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God," Byrne wrote. "As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state."


He went on: "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true ... My faith is at the center of my life and my belief in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and Lord guides my every action."

Every single word--even the contradictory ones. Even the ones that are totally not based in science or even history.

So--is it because you have to be a science-denialist to be a Republican in Alabama? This sucks. I so very wanted to see someone push back against full-on religious stupidity, but apparently it has to be embraced in some markets.

And Haiti needs this, because--WHARGRBL!

So, a lot of people are donating to great organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, which are both providing useful medical and rescue help with the crisis in Haiti from the tragic earthquake. Other people are also finding ways to help, like Faith Comes By Hearing.

Let's see what they are going to do:

Leave it to Christians to take advantage of those in need. While people from all over the world are sending money and aid to the people of Haiti to help them recover from the earthquake, one Christian group seeks to take advantage of Haitian situation to teach them about Jesus.

A group called “Faith Comes From Hearing” is sending 600 solar-powered audio Bibles to be distributed to the Haitian people. Each one of the devices can play the Bible in 414 different languages to insure that no matter what poor country you live in you too will have a chance to be converted. The device is called “The Proclaim” and it is “just a taste of the technology that God is using to spread His Word throughout the world,” according to the website.

The website also states that, “This could be the generation to bow before our Lord and offer Him the inheritance of the nations.” That seems to be exactly what the people of Haiti are in need of as their lives and homes have been shattered and friends and family members are dying. Food and medical supplies might be important, but that crap is useless in the afterlife apparently.

This could be the generation that decides that people who want to take advantage of a tragedy to pimp their particular god need a swift kick in the hind-quarters. I'm not really sure that while someone is kind of homeless and hungry and recovering from probably some kind of trauma, they really need to sit and hear the Gospel in a bunch of different languages quite as much as they need to hear where their next meal is coming from, and whether they'll get enough antibiotics to make sure they totally kill the bugs their open wound might get, and maybe get communications to whatever far-flung family they might have to see if they're still alive. And if they need company. And stuff like that.

Room on whatever plane takes those digibibles is totally room not spent on antibiotics, water or food. Also filed under: Things that aren't helping.