Thy Kingdom is Coming

 I was recenty reminded of an intercultural experience I had in 2013, teaching in children's church. We were discussing how Joseph's brothers were jealous of him, and threw him in the pit and sold him as a slave. JuEun, a young Korean girl, was puzzled by the story. "Why did they do that?" she wondered. "You can always get yourself a new coat...but you can't get another brother."

Thy kingdom is coming.>

Roy Cohn's Rules for Donald Trump

 https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/the-apprentice-trailer-donald-trump-roy-cohn-1235098600/

Roy Cohn's Rules for DonOld:
1. Attack, attack, attack,
2. Admit nothing, deny everything
3 Always claim victory; never admit defeat.
4. Be willing to do anything to anyone in order to win.

DonOld's codicil:
4. Distract, deflect, distort, deceive.

 

 

Seth Meyers on the Harris-Trump Debate

 This has got to be the ne plus ultra of all the Harris-Trump presidential debate reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBKLP6RYtRQ

If pressed for time, just watch the last 2+ minutes, from 35:46-38:14. 

 

We need tools for our toolboxes

Voting for more tools in my toolbox

https://melissaflorerbixler.substack.com/p/voting-for-more-tools-in-my-toolbox

 by

Melissa Florer-Bixler

We’re in a political season where we’re once again being asked to choose between Trump and a fresher-faced Democratic presidential administration. All around me I hear rhetoric that reminds us of how people think about voting and their role in the electoral process. On one side I hear people talk about voting for “the lesser of two evils” which is often countered by “not voting for evil at all.” On the other side I’ve got folks who are very, very excited for Kamala Harris many in the vein of identity groups like “Christians for Harris” and “Evangelicals for Harris.”

I’m in a different place.

I’m preaching about hope in times of political disaster this fall, gearing up for what will likely be an intense and terrifying season in the US, either by the election of a white supremacist tyrant or his reaction to losing. I chose Isaiah as the book I’ll preach from because it captures so much of the anxiety and political instability people around me are feeling.

But it is also a text that provides an orientation towards the state:

Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
   and are accounted as dust on the scales;
   see, he takes up the isles like fine dust. (Isa 40:15)

The writer of Isaiah has little regard for the power of the nations in the scope of salvation history. “All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.” I’d bet that for Isaiah, calling nations evil is giving them too much credit. This is remarkable because this part of Isaiah is directed against Babylon, the regional superpower that pillaged and destroyed Jerusalem before sending Israel into exile.

The traditional Anabaptist application of this text is non-resistance towards governance. You don’t participate in elections because these are powers that have nothing to do with you and nothing to do with God. But I think there’s another possibility. We orient ourselves towards state power in the same we orient ourselves toward any other significant and provisional part of our lives. When I vote, I think about who offers me more leverage to shift the powers, however provisional, towards the world I want to see come into being.

That decision takes place with a particular set of cultural and historic factors. I live in a country with a government somewhat in proximity to democracy, and that affords me a particular set of tools for accountability and social change. I am afforded a certain set of rights, like right to assembly and free press. I appreciate the broadest interpretation of these rights because they give me more to work with. I am leery of candidates who want to strip those rights down either by exercising a broad presidential immunity or by installing Justices who undermine those rights. One party has a better track record than the other.

I have also lived through the nightmare of a Trump presidency and I’d prefer not to do it again.

In the second year of Trump’s presidency, I sat in the conference room of a local nonprofit learning how to document ICE stops in our community. I’d answered the call to be a part of a network of responders who drive to a location where someone reported an ICE stop. We were trained in how to record the incident while shouting resource information to the person being detained.

I can still feel the terror and despair rushing through me when I think about those days. I remember the Muslim ban and the airport actions, the people who stopped planes from taking off with migrants, the people who stood around an ICE vehicle to stop their friend from being dragged to deportation. Many of these people were arrested, jailed, and charged with federal crimes. All the people they risked for were eventually deported or refused entry. Some of these returned to their home countries and were killed by the people and forced they tried to escape.

I remember the people who spent years living in churches to stave off arrest and deportation. I remember the churches in North Carolina who spent years sheltering people as sanctuary churches, how they provided food and laundry and work and a stipend and community and how they built showers and bedrooms into their churches. I remember the people who spent years sleeping in the same building so those living in shelter were not alone at night.

I remember the vast expansion of child separation at the border under the Trump administration, the flagrant violation of the 72-hour holding rule, how, at one point, half a million traumatized children were alone in cages at the border. I remember feeling a kind of desperation overtake me, like I needed to get bolt cutters and get in my car and start driving. I wondered about what kind of person I was that I didn’t start driving the moment I saw those pictures cross my screen. I am still haunted.

The Biden administration didn’t offer the swift overhaul of the immigration system that I longed for. Biden followed in the footsteps of Obama, The Deporter in Chief, and shifted from blocking border access to vastly increasing deportations. Biden’s administration continued family separation, though not at the level of the Trump years. But other things are also true. People came out of sanctuary churches, some won their cases. Biden brought refugee resettlement up to 125,000, far less than needed, but substantially better than Trump’s historic low of 15,000. I was very glad when the Biden administration reached a settlement with the ACLU over child separation lawsuits.

I am certain that the changes we saw are the result of persistent organizing from Latine-led organizations, coalitions, and nonprofits who put immigration and refugee concerns in front of us day after day. The outrage and anger that followed, the collective work of people who refused to let this normalize held the Biden administration accountable. I am grateful for the ongoing work from these organizations and activists who wouldn’t let “at least it’s not Trump” dilute the issues facing migrant people.

In the past decade, both major US political parties have shifted their politics in response to activists. For the right, that has meant draconian, racist, anti-gay, misogynistic laws at every level of governance. On the left, Biden was also pushed away from the center (thank you, God, for Bernie Sanders). Climate agenda? Left organizing. Broad consensus around a ceasefire? Left organizing. Chuck Schumer going all in on cannabis legalization? Left organizing. Student debt cancellation? Left organizing. Infrastructure bill? Left organizing.

I like tools. And I have not yet been convinced by those who see the future of the US built in the ashes of accelerationist politics and democratic sabotage. You’re welcome to convince me by activating structures of care and communities of accountability that can hold people in safety during the decimation of the current substandard offering we have. But I’m not there yet.

At the heart of Christian belief is that the superpowers who rule over us are passing away like vapor. Until then, I’ll vote in the direction of having the most tools in my toolbox to live in these terrible times. I want politicians in place who I think can be moved. I want strikes, protests, organizing, lobbying, resistance. I want to pressure our government towards the politics I want.

I don’t have spare hope to put in our electoral politics. But I do have hope for people organizing, for people in the streets.

 

On Jacques Ellul''s Rejection of Institutions

 

From a FB exchange on Jaques Ellul, and his rejection of institutions--religious and political.  I wrote: 


Ellul is a proud nominalist and anti-realist:

At different times I myself have already declared in favor of nominalism. One can talk about humanity, but in itself it is merely a word, which is useful for the purpose of denoting the totality of people, and which serves well in reflection and communication, but which is never anything more. The millions of individuals do not constitute one real humanity. Nor is there one human nature that is always identical and immutable and that one can find in each individual. Nor is there any rational being that is the same through space

and time. For me, such things are mere names and no more.  https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/what-i-believe-jacques-ellul.pdf

Nominalists can only speak of collections, not communities, because they can have no conception of participation in anything that could be real that transcends the individual. Ellul is left with an apophatic vision of God and human beings, and thus religion and politics.

 

I do not doubt Ellul's faith; but I do disagree with his metaphysics and politics. I am not a nominalist, and I think analogous language gives us a way to avoid apophaticism.

 

Robert Reich on Project 2025

 

Reich gives chapter and verse--er, rather, page numbers, for some troubling Republican proposals. For example, "Develop a new approach that increases the level of private-sector

responsibility for the disposal of nuclear waste." (p..371)

See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-e6YM-UcUU

(Google now insists I allow them to place cookies in order to upload YouTube videos to this blog. I refuse, so you'll have to copy and paste the URL above.)

P.S. You won't find it if you google "Project 2025." Instead, google "Mandate for Leadership 2025" or "Project 2025 PDF." or go here:  https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

 

A friend wrote, "I don’t really see cognitive decline in Trump." Seriously?

<He's made brazen factual errors, such as saying Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the leader of Turkey, that Orban had called on Barack Obama to step down as president (when Obama left the presidency in 2017), describing a missile launch through sound effects, and this week, claiming he had won New Hampshire in the 2016 and 2020 general elections when he lost.>

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2024-01-26/mental-acuity-questions-catch-up-with-trump

He thinks magnets don't work underwater. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1743463970621862227

He regularly can't remember names and confuses them. He called Matt Gaetz "Rick Gaetz." When endorsing J.D. Vance for the senate, Trump referred to him as “J.D. Mandel,” When challenging Biden to a cognitive test, he forgot the name of his former White House physician and current Texas congressman Ronny Jackson. He confused Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping when he said Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people.

But then besides factual errors, he goes off on strange rants:

He thinks the civil war didn't need to happen; that Lincoln should have negotiated it away. https://x.com/atrupar/status/1743721843758936106

His weird rant about Gettysburg, and Robert E. Lee: https://x.com/atrupar/status/1743721843758936106

|Slurring his words, he claimed he'd rather be electrocuted than eaten by a shark https://x.com/atrupar/status/1743721843758936106

Of Hannibal Lector, he claimed "It is a wonderful man," and he confused the character with the actor who played him. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1789431010209182195

Finally, and most troubling, his speech seems to have changed over time:

https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/
and

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02311/full

This is particularly interesting given this observation from the Lancet:

<The linguistic variables that we identified as most relevant for predicting future onset of AD, prominently agraphia, telegraphic speech and repetitiveness (see Supplementary Table 3), have been consistently identified in the literature as associated with cognitive decline in dementia. Repetitive speech that involves repetitive questioning, repetitive stories/statements, repetitive themes have been reported in patients with dementia [32 ,33]. Studies on agraphia in dementia and in AD participants have shown that patients made more writing errors compared to controls [34]. Declines in structural complexity of utterances have been extensively investigated in people with Alzheimer's disease and dementia [35,36]. Another linguistic element that has been associated with dementia, referential specificity, was identified as having a strong weight in the survival analysis, which is supported by a large number of studies showing that semantic impairments are the earliest linguistic markers of dementia.>https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30327-8/fulltext

IMO, if we are worried about Biden, we ought to be even more worried about Trump.

CHildhood memory: The Gas Tank

 Growing up, we had a gas tank like this in our back yard! It was backed by fragrant, tall lavender lilacs.  We kids used to climb up on it, and the silver paint would rub off onto the insides of our thighs. We would pretend it was an elephant. My mother used to shudder when the truck came to fill it, because it meant a hefty bill.