Monthly Archives: February 2020

I was awakened this Saturday morning by noises coming from our kitchen, noises like a dishwasher being emptied by a woman disturbed. Somewhat fearful that my sleeping in might be the occasion, I tossed on my white terrycloth robe, the one that makes me look like a polar bear cub, and tip-toed into her view. She was in a rage, even tears swelling in her eyes. Through those tears her endearing greeting assured me that I was not the problem.

She had turned on MSNBC to hear again that the Vindman brothers had been fired by POTUS, our Criminal in Chief and that the Mob Boss had recalled Ambassador Sondland.

For many of us living out here in fly-over country, tear-stained rage is about our only response. Yes, we could contribute to one of the endless solicitations for money to elect a replacement for POTUS or to fund a cause that will bring sanity back to our country, but we’ve already given to our senior-pension-Social-Security limits. Any suggestions for the likes of us?

Trump is a very sophisticated sociopath-politician. He has no capacity for empathy, knows only his own stunted adolescent desires and is an expert at gaining followers from among half of our neighbors who somehow feel themselves threatened by the other half of us. Shades of  Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbles!

When I wrote that paragraph on a scrap of paper after breakfast, she said, “Post that, just reading it gives me a way to articulate my rage.”  OK, I’ve published it. Now what? Do we just wait around for a 21st century version of the Reichstag Fire? Can we expect soon to see people who have been adjudged to have opposed POTUS wearing emoji patches on their clothing identifying them as enemies of the State?

The man in the White House is either a deliberate criminal or a very high-functioning, mentally ill individual. Either way, I came into this world under FDR and I sure as hell do not want to go out under DJT!

When Shakespeare has Cassius say “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”, Cassius wanted to prevent Julius Caesar from becoming the Roman monarch. Monarchy has already been asserted in the USA and the fault is not in our fate but in ourselves.

As if it were not sufficiently ironic that a State-sponsored prayer-breakfast is held in a country founded upon principles of separation of Church and State, the President in that event mocks and defies the very fundamentals of religious tradition. As the pundits on ‘Morning Joe’ opined this morning, when half of our neighbors support this President, the soul of our nation is at risk.

I am afraid, dear Brutus, that the answer is not to attempt a revival of religion across the nation to recover that soul. It is a perversion of religion that has brought us to this moral miasma. The evangelicalism of the 18^th century colonies has been perverted from a ‘nature’s God’ equalitarianism to what at the time of the Revolution was a British-loyalist insistence upon oligarchical authoritarianism that predominated from establishment Anglican pulpits. Today’s evangelicalism has lost almost all touch with the teachings of the Jesus whom they pretend to follow. After a bit over two-hundred years Desenters have lost the war.

What needs to be recovered is not a recovery of faith but a renewal of the philosophical bases of American republicanism.