In August 2017, the first year Donald Trump was in office, there was a total eclipse visible in much of the United States.
As best as I can recall, folks were pretty excited about it, and the Trump-is-Jesus crowd didn’t say anything about deep spiritual meanings like the end of the world or the rapture.
Of course now that Satan, er, Biden, is in the White House, everything is different. Steve Bannon, aka Trump’s Renfield, is actually hosting a “Christian mass” during the eclipse to fight the powers of Biden, er, Satan and save America from the Evil Eclipse.
There’s really only one explanation.
America has gotten a whole lot stupider since the last eclipse.
Every time I see a Trumpanzee interviewed, I understand why Trump said he loved the poorly educated the first time he was running in 2016. He told more than 30,000 lies of one magnitude or another during his four years in the White House, and while we can certainly argue the number, when I see someone say he loves Trump because he always tells the truth, well …
It just makes me want to scream.
People have said before — and I have said myself — that the problem is Christian Nationalism, but the more I think about it, the more I think that’s not true. First of all, evangelicals may call themselves the true Christians, but the fact is they are a minority sect among American Christians, especially when Roman Catholics are included.
Second, a huge number of Christians in the South are African-Americans, and only a small percentage of them support Trump and his agenda. And if they think they’re welcome in his movement, just think about the MAGA reaction to Black Lives Matter.
No, it isn’t Christians — evangelical or otherwise — who are what Trumpism is all about. That’s the false face for what is basically white nationalism.
To some extent, the baby boomers are a big part of the problem. We were the last generation to be born into a pre-Civil Rights America. The last boomers were born in 1964, and the Civil Rights Act passed Congress thaqt summer.
I was born in 1949 and I attended K-12 schools in Ohio and Virginia. I never attended a truly integrated school until the fall of 1966, when I was a high school senior. I don’t think I had even one class with a non-white student that last year.
I live in a state that was part of the old Confederacy. At one time or another I have lived in four — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I am thankful I have never lived in the worst of the old South, Alabama and Mississippi. Two of the four states I have called home voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and the other two have elected Africian-American men to the U.S. Senate.
Alabama may be the bottom of the proverbial barrel, electing Republicans Tommy Tuberville and Rapin’ Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate. Moore may have been a borderline pedophile, but Tuberville uses religion to mask his white supremacy.
But I diverge …
Again.
Anyway, the eclipse crossed America this afternoon and the ‘zees who were expecting the Rapture are still here. Of course the Rapture isn’t all that Biblical. It’s based loosely on a verse from Thessalonians about Jesus meeting his followers in the sky, but it was really invented by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins for the Left Behind books.
So nobody went off to heaven and no demons came up from hell to steal the white women.
Just another day in paradise.