You must be shocked to hear from me. Surely knowing I’ve never believed in you.
Never asked you for anything before. Not even when I struggled to get a gal.
I’m mindful you don’t have a good track record of answering prayers. Indeed, the idea of your doing so is pretty silly, even if you existed. And as master of the world, you haven’t been great. Maybe you’re actually Satan. Anyhow, everything humanity has accomplished has been no thanks to you.
Maybe I’m not going about this in quite the best way.
But I also guess my request needn’t be spelled out, you being omniscient and all. So — just this one time — pretty please?
A recent column by Solomon Stevens was headed “Candidates are neither demons nor deities.” Following the Trump shooting, wherein many supporters saw divine intervention. For a long time, they’d been like a religious cult — now almost literally seeing him as a kind of god. That sort of thing is always crazy, but this is doubly so, given all the ways this man is, ahem, unworthy. I mean, could you find a more rotten person to deify?
This election isn’t mainly about ideology, issues, or policies. It’s truth versus lies. Democracy versus idiocracy. Decency versus depravity. Sanity versus lunacy. Recently, on a zoom with Vice President Harris, I was impressed by her down-to-earth articulate intelligence, knowledge, reasonableness, and just plain humanity. She embodies America’s goodness. She’s prosecuted felonies but never been convicted of any. Never been judicially held responsible for fraud, or sexual assault, never stolen classified documents, never tried to overthrow the government.
Trump’s whole administration will be staffed by knaves and creeps who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. And while Republicans falsely scream about rising crime, one place it actually has soared is in their own top ranks. Legions of Trump officials and hangers-on indicted or already convicted. One speaker at their convention actually boasted of his prison stint.
Stevens writes of Trump supporters transforming him into a symbol, transcending his being merely human. Calling this abandonment of critical thinking about his actual qualities (or lack thereof). Well, duh — religious belief and critical thinking are kind of antithetical.
Stevens says that Republicans, whipped up by rhetoric from Trump himself and his priesthood, increasingly see politics in apocalyptic terms. This he deems inimical to our civic togetherness. And while he holds that Trump shouldn’t be deified, nor should he be demonized.
But the one defies reason, the other is justified.
Suggested bumper sticker: Harris-Shapiro — A New Beginning.
As Stevens observes, Trumpers see this as a battle of good against evil. And they’re right. Just blind to which is which.