Category: Beating Back the St00pid

From John Pavlovitz:

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride,

The first Christians didn't call themselves Christians.

It wasn't some congratulatory self-identifier as it is today; a way of loudly trumpeting one's own supposed goodness, quickly slapped on Twitter bios and bumper stickers and t-shirts without forethought or personal cost or empirical evidence. It wasn't about a place you visited for an hour on Sunday before Cracker Barrel, either.

The term Christian was originally a designation of the community of people following Jesus, by those outside of it after his death—and it was quite likely a slur; a scarlet letter attached to a marginalized group who'd traded comfy allegiance with Caesar for dangerous devotion to an itinerant Hebrew street preacher from Nazareth.

In the Roman Empire in which it was born, Jesus' movement was fully countercultural; shunning its power and material wealth, breaking its barriers between the important and the inconsequential, fighting the stereotypes of the in and the out. It was a table builder and a wall breaker.

These "little Christs" as they were called, were derided by outsiders because the expansive, diverse, interdependent community they were creating stood in such opposition to Rome's singular trickle down might—and their presence created turbulence there.

Being called a Christian then, meant ridicule and threat and oppression from the Government and the religious leaders. It wasn't a cheap decal one adorned themselves with to declare their own righteousness; it was applied to them by powerful people who despised them.

Trump Christians wouldn't be called Christians by these people, they would be called Romans—and those following Jesus then, wouldn't recognize people supporting this President now, as their spiritual descendants.

There would be no bloodline to trace, no affinities to note, no visible family resemblance.

Christians then, destroyed social barriers between people—they didn't fortify them.
Christians then, welcomed the marginalized and vulnerable—they didn't harass them at school or in hospital rooms or on street corners.
Christians then, healed the sick and fed the hungry and clothed the naked—they didn't resent them for being lazy or making bad choices.
Christians then, pushed back against the corrupt power hoarding wealth—they didn't partner with it.
Christians then, loved their disparate neighbors as themselves—they didn't wall them off and send them away and lock them in cages.

People aligned with a Jesus who said "Let the children come to me and do not hinder them"—would have been fully sickened by families separated at borders.

People connected to a Jesus who said, "You cannot serve both God and money"—wouldn't be overlooking adultery, corruption, and bigotry just to pad their nest eggs.

People synonymous with a Jesus who fed a hillside multitude, not because they were right or saved or moral, but because they were hungry—wouldn't recognize a "pull yourself by your own bootstraps" callousness toward those in need.

People associated with a Jesus who touched lepers and healed the blind and bleeding—wouldn't be able to comprehend believers who penalized people for preexisting conditions or made staying alive a financial death sentence.

Most of all, people connected to Jesus they weren't tripping over themselves to publicly claim their Christlikeness. Other people decided that.

People currently supporting this President can label themselves any way they want.

They can imagine themselves sanctified while perpetuating something that far more resembles Caesar of Rome than Jesus of Nazareth.

They can try and retrofit Jesus' Christianity to the bloated, self-aggrandizing, malevolent Empire they're currently wallowing in.

They can try and bastardize Jesus expansive' "For God so loved the world" purpose statement, into a walled-off, gated community "America First" rally slogan.

They can even preach the angry gospel of white nationalism and contempt for outsiders—and call themselves Christian while doing so.

But no one in the time of Jesus would be calling them Christian.

Not the Romans.
Not the Christ followers.
Most of all, Jesus.

The first Christians were labeled Christians, because they emulated Christ—in all his compassionate, kind, loving, healing, welcoming, border-breaching, barrier-busting goodness.

These folks emulate someone antithetical to all of it.

Technically speaking of course, given the origins of the word, none of us should claim to be Christian—but if we're going to, we should at least seek some spiritual synergy.

They may be self-identified Christians, but from the outside the title is suspect.
They aren't "Little Christs"
They aren't "followers of the Way."
They aren't even Evangelicals.

They are "Little Trumps."

In that God of arrogance and greed and enmity, they truly trust.

From John Pavlovitz:

I think it's time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them:

We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything. We understand that there is no political scandal massive enough, no President's Tweet reckless enough, no legislation predatory enough to alter their allegiance. We understand that the past two years of viciousness and ineptitude haven't tempered their passions but inflamed them. We understand that the image of an angry white, American male God is so burned into their brains, that they see no conflict with a religion devoid of love or a world absent diversity or a theology made of malice.

We understand that infidelity, dishonesty, obscenity, and cruelty are no longer liabilities to those they would have lead them. We understand that the FoxNews poison has so fully circulated through their systems that truth is no longer necessary. We understand that [to them] white supremacists in the Cabinet and Russian infiltration in our elections and children separated from their parents are acceptable collateral damage to winning. We understand that their capacity to rationalize away human rights atrocities now borders on complete delusion.

From John Pavlovitz:

Miserable.

Every time I see them, this is the word that prevails.

Whenever I encounter a supporter of this President on social media now, or scan the crowds at his propaganda rallies, or see his surrogates bloviating on talk shows or pounding upon pulpits, I am left with the same conclusion: they are a people bereft of joy.

There is no happiness, no benevolence, nothing life-giving left there.

The emotional deficit is continually on display:

In their contorted, sneering countenance; in their so readily brandished middle finger; in their steady spit shower of verbal filth. With each angry gesture and with every slandering epithet, they reveal in high-definition detail what it looks like when someone loses the light inside them.

War does this to the human heart. These people are at war with the world.

They're against gays.
They're against immigrants.
They're against Muslims.
They're against foreigners.
They're against scientists.
They're against atheists.
They're against Liberals.
They're against the Democrats.
They're against the Media.
They're against teenage shooting survivors.
They're against athletes and entertainers.

The world in their heads is composed almost entirely of enemies and adversaries—and as a result they are perpetually disgusted. If I had that many enemies to fight, I'd be unendingly pissed off too. I'd probably pity them a lot more if I didn't have to endure them.

These are the wildest of ironies: Their President is in the White House, their politicians commandeer the House and Senate, the Supreme Court is tilted In their favor—and yet they still manage to feel themselves oppressed, still picture the world unfair, still rage against a machine they've made and are part of. So many of them claim faith in Jesus, and yet live in almost polar opposition to his example.

The only time they do smile, is to reflect the arrogant, self-satisfied sneer of their leader; almost always in the face of someone else's heartache or misfortune, almost always when someone else loses something. They only joy they seem capable of manufacturing, is in response to pain.

I try to imagine what it feels like to be so afflicted with contempt for the planet: to be forever scowling, to be so viscerally sickened by the breadth of diversity around me, to be relentlessly in a fear-birthed battle posture—but I can't.

Thank God, I can't. If you can't imagine it either, consider yourself fortunate.

I realize that this has become the difference now; the dividing line in this version of America. It is between joyful people and miserable people.

There are those who live open-handed toward the world, and those whose fists are balled tightly; those who are driven by compassion, and those fueled by anger; those who want a bigger table, and those feel the table is exclusively theirs.

As disheartening as it is to witness people this internally toxic, it's a cautionary reminder of who we do not want to become, of what we can't let the fight do to us.

We have to fight to keep goodness inside us, despite the outside badness; to never be defined by how many things we hate.

I want my default response to this life to always be hope and not derision.

May we who oppose this national malignancy, never become so devoid of lightness that we resemble those who celebrate it.

May we never applaud someone's suffering, never weaponize our religion to do harm, never grow comfortable with hearts that are only capable of anger.

May we never lose our laughter, our softness, our lightness in this life, and let a smile come easily to us.

May we never become as miserable as those who support this President.

That is when we know we've really lost.

…Trae perfectly sums up what's going on in my own head and expresses it much better than I ever could.

From Daily Kos:

In the New York Times' quest to get to the bottom of what makes every last Trump supporter in America tick, we have been treated to endless interviews, loving tributes to downtrodden towns in which nary a non-white person is ever seen, and one particular day when the op-ed pages were turned over to Trump supporters to argue for Trump's genius directly. But this is still not enough, and so Sunday's paper included a zoological analysis from a journalist who grew up among them.

It is meant to be flattering, or at least neutral, but the short version is that the people who have been bleating about "family values" for the last half-century do not actually give a flying damn about family values and never did. It was all garbage from the get-go. While people from "college" or "in New York" or "religiously conservative" or "liberal" or take-your pick all had harsh words for the crooked, lying, adulterous, misogynist trash-heap of a human being, the salt-of-the-earth Trump supporters back in Nebraska could not possibly care less about the bullshit-laden values attributed to them in fawning tributes to the heartland's common clay.

To hell with it all: Go team adulter-crook!

In contrast, almost all of the people I know in my hometown in Nebraska proudly supported him. They glossed over his infidelities and stressed that he seemed to be a good father. They were impressed by his "respectful" sons and admired the success of his daughters.

"Glossed over" is a fine phrase. "Good father" is quite the phrase itself. And this new notion of "respectful," which apparently consists of "glossing over" his sons' histories of charity fraud, public attacks on black politicians, and that whole 'met Russian agents in Trump Tower' thing, is doing quite the heavy lift.

Reading between the lines, what we have here is a group of people who practice what is known in the rest of the world as aggressive ignorance. You can't say that Trump's behavior bothers you if you drive wooden stakes into both ears and swear you didn't hear about any of it.

Read the rest here.

Photos that speak: Fuck your fountain. Fuck your tree. Fuck voter suppression. Fuck your labels. Fuck your stereotypes. Fuck your hatred. Fuck your restaurants. Fuck that dude. Fuck police brutality. Fuck white supremacy. 

Source.

Again, from John Pavlovitz:

Comedian Michelle Wolf stepped to the podium at the White House Correspondent's Dinner and verbally eviscerated everyone: The President, The Press, Mike Pence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway.

MAGA Nation, unsurprisingly lost their collective minds.

By their wild histrionics, you would have thought she murdered a crowd fully of concertgoers with an arsenal of high-powered weapons. (Actually, that probably would have been cause for less indignation.)

Trump supporters, Conservative pundits, and Evangelical preachers rushed to social media and to partisan talk shows, to lament the comedian's "cruel, mean-spirited, vicious words;" to clutch their pearls at the seemingly unprecedented nastiness, to openly weep over the supposed inappropriate nature of her personal attacks; to defend poor, defenseless people like Sarah and Kellyanne, so unfairly treated.

(If one could die of hypocrisy, these folks would all have abruptly left us this weekend.)

The idea that they could somehow be mortified by Michelle Wolf's WHCD remarks, and not by the vile, genitalia-grabbing, serial liar and his cadre of predators in the White House who are making America a global punchline, while doing irreparable damage to millions of people every day—is Olympic level cognitive dissonance.

That the satirical words of an entertainer could be a source of internal distress, while the prolific malevolence of a sitting President and his complicit surrogates merit only a giggle and a shoulder shrug, is a the reason we're in this mess.

And while Trump supporters lacking self-awareness in matters of righteous indignation are par for the course these days, what has been surprising, has been those outside of his adoring cult who've wagged their fingers and clicked the roof of their mouths, accusing the comedian of, "becoming the other side."

Can we stop with this, already? It's abject nonsense, it's irresponsible tone policing, and it's erecting a skyscraping straw man that foolishly changes the narrative.

As harsh and irreverent as Wolf's comments might have been, any effort to make these comparable with this Administration's tactics is a sinful false equivalency. Wolf saying rude things and calling out shameful behavior by our leaders—isn't her "becoming the other side." It isn't the same as being the people in power who actually create legislation that damages people.

I might not have gone where Wolf went, but it's astounding to me that people who support this President can feign offense, while he does such deeply offensive things to the people of this country and they're perfectly fine with it all. This should merit outrage. He should merit outrage.

Much has been made by Wolf's critics, of her personal attacks on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Aside from the unnecessary and unacceptable body-shaming, the comedian is perfectly within her rights to name the near criminal conduct of the White House Press Secretary; who regularly stands in front of the nation, maligning the Press, vilifying the President's political opposition, and knowingly lying through her teeth regarding matters of national policy and security. She is one of the people most responsible for attempting to normalize someone quite outside of normal, and for this she should be held accountable. And as Wolf rightly pointed out, the Press is less and less willing to take on such tasks, so the jesters will have to do it.

Wolf (even brutally) calling out Sarah Sanders for lying for a living on behalf of a monster—isn't "as bad" as Sarah Sanders lying for a living on behalf of a monster.

People have said that Michelle Wolf's razor-sharp dismantling of this Administration at the WHCD "stooped to the other side's level," but this simply isn't true. We need to let that idea go because it misses the point completely.

She didn't stoop to the other side's level with her comments—she punched up, and she punched hard. Thank God people are still willing to do that.

When Wolf uses the power of the White House to craft legislation that cripples the poor and marginalized, and assails our environmental protections, civil rights, and Free Press—she'll be stooping to Donald Trump's level.

When she daily stands before a podium representing the President and claiming the Christian faith, and repeatedly and willfully lies to the American people about issues that fundamentally and profoundly affect hundreds of millions of—she'll be stooping to Sarah Sander's level.

When she enables and supports and profits from a reckless sociopath who is disregarding our Constitution and rule of law, she's be stooping to the other side's level.

As it is, she simply spoke truth that too many Americans seem unwilling or unable to see.

There is a great deal to be outraged right now:

Russian interference,
ICE raids in hospital rooms,
Eroding LGBTQ rights,
Vanishing environmental protections,
Puerto Rico still in shambles,
Flint still without clean water,
unparalleled gun homicides,
a compromised Evangelical Church,
raising hate crimes,
the sabotaging on the Affordable Care Act.

These realities should be scandalous to us, not a few outrageous words from a button-pushing comedian.

If Michelle Wolf is your problem right now—you need bigger problems.

From John Pavlovitz:

Last week I hopped into a cab in Toronto, heading to the airport after a weekend speaking engagement.

My driver's name was Mohammed; a middle-aged man born in Afghanistan, who earned his PhD, and moved here in his twenties.

We talked about the weather, about my work; about our children, about family car trips to Disney World.

Then we got to talking about America.

As we got closer to the airport, I joked with him, that given my open critiques of the current Administration, I was unsure whether they'd let me back in, and with my feelings about the current state of thing—I wasn't all that excited to go back anyway.

Mohammed quickly grew animated.

"I just don't understand this!" he said, his voice booming, his arms forming a shrug, and his face reflecting incredulity.

"How can the worst person in the world, be given the greatest country in the world to lead? he remarked. "It's disgusting."

Before I could respond, he went on.

"The whole world is laughing at America. It's a global joke, what he's doing. It makes me so angry."

As Mohammed shared his heart with me, I was simultaneously encouraged, ashamed, and pissed off.

It was a comfort to hear a voice outside of my country express solidarity with me and the millions in America who feel like prisoners of this predatory, fraudulent Administration.

It was embarrassing to realize that for the first time in my life, I have trepidation to claim America as my own, because of all it now represents.
It angered me, that a middle-aged man from Afghanistan could be more perceptive and wise than 62 million of my countrymen—and women who've spent their lives here and have much more at stake.

It was a cab ride that I was sorry to see end.

I'm sure this President isn't technically the worst person in the world—but let's just say he's making a really strong showing in the competition.

But their was sad truth beneath his hyperbole. My new friend, Mohammed gets it all: the bigotry he's unleashed here, the hypocrisy of religious people who support him, the ineptitude that the entire world is talking about, the fractures to our national image.

He sees that the differences and the fear and the isolation that this President brokers in, are dangerous things.

Most of all he sees that this nation is being led by someone far beneath it, not worthy of it, detrimental to it.

I'm hopeful enough people in America see such things; that regardless of political affiliation, religious worldview, or nation of origin, a vast majority is as stupefied and outraged as Mohammed is these days—and ready to vote and rescue themselves.

I hope that more people in this country can see what so much of the world sees about us:

That we are a great nation.
That we are a place filled with beautiful diversity.
That we do deserve far better than this.

I said goodbye to my new friend and headed into the terminal, but the whole way home his words bounced around repeatedly in my head:

"How can the worst person in the world, be given the greatest country in the world to lead? It's disgusting."

It really is, Mohammed.

It really is.