Posts
Before the Reagan Bush victory of 1980, another cultish leader had also led his bleating flock to their deaths; he preferred the wilds of Guyana, and he used eternal salvation as the bait. The GOP however, preferred the guise of economic resurgence to the more ephemeral, and obviously fatal, pied piper inducements of everlasting bliss. To this end they recruited the immoral minority of Evangelical charlatans to preach their vision of glory through total dedication to greed, destroying everything of value that couldn't be monetized, and proclaiming that there was no such thing as society, simply so that they could deny any responsibility to it. It's as though artists decided they didn't need society, even as their art would not just have no audience, but would have no one to even behold it. Life began to be lived as though it were the Gospel according to the satanic verses of St. Milton Freidman. Thus did we end the decade of the eighties knowing the worth of everything and the value of nothing.
They brought into play and used as a club select verses from a bible to proclaim war on homos citing Leviticus as one justification for their jeremiad. There was no moral hazard, as they had no morals. For although one can read that passage, one can also read what an abomination is, and although it is by definition, repugnant, it is not by definition Evil. The deadly sin that the American religions decided they would elevate to their altars and worship as a god, GREED, however, now that WAS Evil. Not by my determination, of course, WTF am I? No. The exact same book of the exact same bible they use to persecute people who are not evil, but whose practices they find offensive, is the source of my information. For in that same oeuvre, it explicitly states that GREED is Evil. It is not only listed as one of the deadly sins, it is listed as the root of ALL evil: every one of the deadly sins is based on Greed. Note that it is NOT money, but the love of money, ie, Greed, that is the root of all evil.
Yet here we are more than two generations later twisting ourselves in knots over the legality of Gay Marriage and homosexual rights, simply because we find them unsavory, while every religion in the world trips over one another to extol the virtues of untrammeled greed, yet castigating queers because they're too repulsively girly. (Interestingly the most insulting charge you can ever hurl at anyone is that they have characteristics of the opposite sex. You can call a man by everyone of the deadly sins: call him greedy, or lusty, covetous or envious, lazy or gluttonous, and not one of them will have the cutting bite of "sissy"). In fact, many of them are accompanied by a sort of grudging respect ... but not being a pussy, or a woos (sp?), instead there is a special loathing reserved for any man with the audacity to heed the teachings of Christ and love their fellow man. And no, I do not mean in a carnal way. Although I don't hold your same repugnance for it, but let's put that aside for a sec. Because what I mean is the actual look of disdain one gets, from no one more so than by those expressing religious fervor, should one mention the word forgiveness, or compassion, or empathy, not as an abstract notion, but as an actual emotional response to a slight, or a sight. Such as homeless encampments.
Under the GOP leadership of GW Bush and Mitch McConnell, the US has, using Forever Wars as its catalyst, handed the entire economy over to monopolists, the most adept at using their position of domination and control to satiate their bottomless pit of greed. As displayed in the chart above, with Corporatism as a proxy for Monopolization, since it is, the state of affairs, even before Covid, is easily seen, and since the scourge of Covid, it has only gotten far far worse; such that by the end of the pandemic, the prospect of having no restaurants left except Ihop and Denny's has become as real as the dire consequences that were foreseen, and then brought into being, by giving Amazon's sales exemption from sales' tax and allowing them to use their monopoly power to offer "free" Shipping, the combination of which left local retailers to twist in the wind and wiping out, as though by accident, entire downtowns, as first every bookstore in the country, and then one retailer after the other, forced into bankruptcy leaving us with the monopolizing, technofeudalist behemoth, Amazon.
But just as taxpayers' earnings are systematically confiscated by corporations to pay for their own business expenses, such that self-proclaimed multi-billionaires can force their own personal expenses, no matter how outrageously exaggerated, such as claiming $70,000 for hair-care, yet having but little to lavish such enormous sums for (houses have been bought for less) ... for a so-called man, no matter how mamby-pamby he may be, while calling the US government's taxing agencies confiscatory when they tax their trillion-dollar company's profits, most of which are derived by underpaying their employees so that they can undercharge their customers for the actual cost of providing whatever goods and services they proffer.
Timothy was an early Christian evangelist. He was also the writer of the phrase that the love of money is the source of all evil, making modern evangelical teachings of the blessings to be gained by pursuing every avaricious fiber of your being into the Root of all Evil. That is why you never hear the term moral hazard applied to the misuse of the public's money to enrich yourself anymore, it is because the ascendancy of Evangelical preachings, which teach that the pursuit of money, and the adoption of Greed as your sole ambition in life, is a Holy thing, so naturally, is totally moral, no matter what means you need employ in order to attain those riches, will elevate you in the eyes of the Lord. A lord that has no resemblance whatsoever to the Christ of the bible, a bible whose four testaments were supposedly penned by the evangelists from whom the cult apparently takes its name, yet whose teachings they completely deride.
The truth of this can be seen in the unstinting support for the 21'st Century's most unapologetic avatar of Greed. Donald Jim Jones Trump, who even as he executes his plan to rid the country of its elderly population, his ruse of advocating herd immunity as a Covid strategy being but a thin veil he uses to barely cover his designs, has the total complicity of the Evangelicals, much as he did while separating families at the border.
But unlike Jim Jones, this Cult and its mad leader is determined to take the rest of us down with them, a result they feel justified in pursuing since, in their eyes, we have ruined the country by allowing homos to marry: it is no longer their America, so they have the right to destroy it. That is why there is no reaction from his followers as he continually institutes policies that kill them in far greater numbers than the rest of the country. The fracking debacle being front and center of the disastrous results of confiscating the savings and interest and taxes of an entire nation to fund the explosive growth of an industry to "Make AMerica Grrrreat Aggin" by the suicidal rush to extract the last dregs of fossil fuels and monetize them, thereby ensuring the death and destruction a climate amped-up on amphetamines (which is what adding heat to any closed system amounts to), and all under the disguise of Capitalism. But it has about as much to do with Capitalism as Evangelicalism have to do with the teachings of Christ. And like them, the destruction it will eventuate as a result, far from being denied, is arduously embraced.
