As If Anything Matters Anymore

Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him by Stephen Mansfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s an odd book. I appreciate Mansfield’s honesty about what Trump is, and how he accurately portrays his fellow conservative Christians. He pulls no punches, well maybe a few, but overall he doesn’t shy away from Trump’s character flaws, moral failings, and general horrible behavior.

It is odd because with no explanation he implies Trump is a good thing. Oh wait, this may take a while so let me give a condensation of his accurate presentation...

Trump is a horrible, horrible, person and the religious leaders are hypocritical horrible, horrible people too. And the one ring that binds them all is the fiery ring of anger. Everybody is really pissed and conservatives Christians revel is their anger and scream to drink in Trumps venomous rantings Really not that complicated and he convinced me. Although Mansfield might phrase it somewhat differently.

But first. THINGS I WANT TO GET OFF MY CHEST…

The guy is a little irritating in that he writes as if he is being even handed, but he ain’t.

He HATES Hillary Clinton...

With virtually no evidence, after acknowledging her religious bone fides he rates how real her Christian faith is (amazing insight he has into another human’s soul). He makes some weak arguments about a supposed seance she participated in while first lady (we have to forget about Nancy Reagan and bringing an Astrologer in regularly) . Pretty bad huh?

Except the author has never hear about snopes.com. Yeah there some screwy imaginative therapy, but no communing with the dead. Anyway he parlays this into “The truths of her Methodist upbringing were no longer enough”. Pg 120. What does that even mean? He never says, but he implies it is pretty bad.

“Her advocacy for abortion knows no bounds….the most outspoken about her faith and the least clear about the meaning of that faith. It is possible to wonder if her religion was nothing more than mystical justification for whatever she wanted to do. Did she have any ethical content? Pg 122

Jiminy Cricket, knowing what he knows about Trump, how can he criticize Hilary's religious commitment with a straight face? I haven’t even come to his accurate demonstration of Trump’s lack of religious knowledge and how he contradicts almost every conventional Christian traditions. The old ones that I remember like humility, compassion, patience, forgiveness, and even love of neighbors. Of course most Christians don’t follow these models, but the point is Trump does the exact opposite!

He should have just laid the pro-choice label on Hilary and say it is a Christian deal breaker even though otherwise the evidence shows that she is pretty damn good Christian by any objective standard. And that is really what rubs Mansfield and the rest of Conservative Christian world the wrong way, Abortion (and he gets some digs in about gay marriage). If you are pro-choice you are a relentless, leftist, socialist, and that cannot be allowed at all.

Later he makes a big deal about Hilary/Obama having a litmus test for Abortion and if you are against abortion you are somehow a "target" of Obama. But he doesn’t see that he and his world are the ones with the litmus test with the difference that if we use his test he gets to tell me how to live, but if we use my litmus test, I don’t tell anybody what to do. So who is the one imposing their will on whom? And if you are pro choice you are one big evil target.

MANSFIELD’S PROOF OF HOW TRUMP IS A HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE PERSON

“I realized then and there,” he later recalled, “ that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.” Pg 52.

TRUMP speaking... “man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat. You just can’t let people make a sucker out of you” Pg 63

In 2005...He told the audience that he “loved losers because they make me feel so good about my self” He also insisted that good business leaders should trust no one, good employees in particular. “Be parnoid,” he advised “because they are gonna try to fleece you.” Finally, he counseled, “Get even. If somebody screws you, screw ‘em back ten times over. At least you can feel good about it. Boy, do I feel good.” Pg 69

[F]or at least the first five decades of [his] life, there was little evidence of a defining Christian Faith. Instead, his religion was power, vengeance, and, notably himself. He seemed not to know that the ideal of revenge to which he devoted so much time and an entire chapter of a book was contrary to the teaching of the religion he served. He did not know or did not care that truth mattered in his faith, that his preference for "truthful hyperbole"—an"innocent form of exaggeration . . . and a very effective form of promotion"—was little more than lying and forbidden by his religion. It was the same with his sexual mores, with his language, and business ethics, and with his lack of evident concern for the will of an all-knowing God. (Pg. 70).

Colonel Theodore Dobias..spoke words he thought would ignite character and passions in Trump’s soul....Dobias also made him an unofficial basketball coach. ….[Trump] ..recalls mainly that he learned how to manipulate Dobias to get what he wanted. Pg. 52

All in all a ton of stories and they are pretty much all bad.

There was more stuff with straw men arguments about cake decorators and Hobby lobby dictating their religion on their employees (you probably know he can’t see a contradiction that he thinks it is Obama who is persecuting all of them and not the employer persecuting the employees and customers). I could buckle down and dissect his sentences to show how it is fallacious, or point out how half of his listing of Trump’s successes went on to be failures...but what is the point.

Still...he comes up with a pretty good insight...

The truth is that much of the appeal of Donald Trump is the way he speaks publicly in the same way millions of Americans do ...Crass, insulting, bullying, sometimes ill informed, always opinionated, usually prejudiced, Donald Trump is the private voice of millions of Americans. Pg 126

The evangelicals are really angry and are drawn to Sith Lord anger of Donald Trump. So he again correctly sees that Trump is horrible person and the people who like him are just like him

And somehow he inexplicably comes to this conclusion...

To the extent that the Trump presidency is built upon eternal principles and timeworn truth, it may accomplish noble things. Pg. 161

But right after that he includes this H.L. Menken quote

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. HL Mencken. Pg 162

I guess it boils down to Mansfield is a conservative Christian so he has to accept Trump as the savior of the country....Go figure.

Oh yeah, he really hates Obama also, so I would be kind of scared to see his book on Obama's faith.

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Download Kindle Book Notes

I only just now found out of a way to download all kindle highlights and notes. Previously I would open the app on my laptop, open the notes and copy them out one at a time.

this has a browser add on but really the line is the best part

https://www.norbauer.com/bookcision/

https://read.amazon.com/notebook

1.Drag the above button to your browser's bookmarks bar.
2.Log in at read.amazon.com.
3.Click on a book title.
4.When the book's page has loaded, click on the "Bookcision" link in your browser's bookmarks bar.
5.An overlay will load with just your highlights.

If you are running Chrome, you'll see an option to download your highlights in various formats. Otherwise, just copy and paste

Links to Remember

“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” Robert S. McElvaine https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/30/im-a-depression-historian-the-gop-tax-bill-is-straight-out-of-1929/?utm_term=.a7c11f7614bd

HyperNormalisation

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and built a simple "fake world" that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians. The film was released on 16 October 2016 on the BBC iPlayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

Really fascinating historical tidbits:
That when New York City had money problems in the 1970’s the Banks refused to pony up the dough for the usual bond packages until the politicians withdrew any restrictions and basically gave up their power to the financial world

Khomeini starting suicide bombers which Syria encouraged with Hezbollah in Lebanon. And finally Sunni’s took up the idea.

Vladislav Surkov managing Putin’s success by purposefully promoting not knowing what is real or fake and getting people to not care.

The manipulation of Qaddafi form villain to savior and back to villain by western interests. But of course Qaddafi purposely lied and played along for in own insane purposes. And the same with Saddam Hussein.

So yeah, this thing matches my worldview, or more generally my feeling that what somehow how the world is arranged is fundamentally wrong. I have my own reasons for thinking that and this Curtis fellow starts from a different point but ends up at a similar conclusion.

BUT, as much as I enjoy his trunk full of stories, sometimes he comes across like the Oliver Stone approach to JFK, where EVERYTHING including the kitchen sink ominously points to conspiracy and evil.

Some of it he backs up, but for large chunks of the movie he says something and then flashes up some images that implying a connection. And this dude has an obsession with 80’s workout videos which I guess he uses as a symbol of self centered superficiality as civilization is given way to the financiers. Or maybe I have bee bamboozled by the MAN to think we live a too sedentary life

Plus he makes some confident claims that are not filled out and seem flimsy to me. Like Cyberspace was prepared by LSD and that the predictions of Timothy Leary are implied to be quite wise (Leary’s prophecies stated in the movie seem woefully inaccurate, so what am I to make of that?)

Then there is other stuff that bothers me, like the absolute connection he makes with the Reagan administration deliberately promoting UFO conspiracies. I need more that some random guy saying it was all planned.

As he works his way into implying something bad about workout videos he makes some comment about socialist activists giving up and selling out. Then he has the Jane Fonda video clip. But for me the anomaly isn’t that an activist became a celebrity, but that a celebrity was ever involved with the anti war movement.

Oh there are other tiny bits that tic me off like talking about future needs while showing a download of Netscape. That is just lazy video work.

BUT, I stil think the gist is accurate, that politicians gave away their power to the financial system.

Art Critic and Living and Thinking

I watched The Mona Lisa Curse today about contemporary art collecting by Robert Hughes.

Fantastic stuff. Heavy stuff. Makes you think stuff.

Damn that guy had a way with words, and thinking.

From in The New Republic, 1987:

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.

https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/the-quotable-robert-hughes/

Unfortunately it confirms my now generally dismal view of civilization. When Art is pointless...where does that leave humankind?

Found it one line for free

https://vimeo.com/62973616

The Consequences of Lies...

Under things to remember...

Or as Arendt told a French interviewer in 1974:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is this book? I cannot describe it. Of course he writes about race and about white America, and about freedom, injustice, and pain. But how could I comment or add to that? It is a challenge for a slow witted middle aged white man to say anything much less come to any conclusions from this book by James Baldwin. But don’t worry, I have no conclusion, no pronouncements…but I am human and I will, with trepidation, offer some observations.

First off the obvious, almost too obvious, when I went to copy out parts I wanted to quote I could have just kept typing and retyped the whole book. And there is some flat out “heavy” thinking going on in here, really “deep” stuff. A

Behind what we think of the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do face when they regard a Negro: reality - the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide - indeed, to earn ones death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. Pg. 91

Like I said this is some deep stuff. His analysis from 1962 is sadly still pretty spot on.

It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by eyes of any Alabama sheriff...Pg. 83

...In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity- and in political terms anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top Pg. 87

Baldwin shakes you up, or at least he should, by not always ending up where you that he was leading you. Even if this short book I got worn out by the reminders of white oppression, but right when you feel like throwing in the towel on all of society he pulls out something close to optimism and says things like...

[talking about people overthrowing one dictator for another]...Perhaps this will always happen...But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. Pg. 91

And to see something even more relevant to our nation today.

Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. Pg. 88

That pretty much describes our political state now. What we have really does reflect the “spiritual sate of the the nation”. It is in our faces, it is real and it is us, as a nation.