Words and The Word

“I know words,” claimed Donald Trump.  “I have the best words.”

Does he?  His words aren’t fair or intelligent, but they are effective. 

He does “The Weave,” mixing exaggerated boasts and insults into a random collage of repeated words.  “His speeches are pitched as if to nine-year-olds at a fourth-grade level,” wrote the UK’s Guardian.   “You come away from a Trump speech with a feeling, not an argument.”

“I love the poorly educated,” he shrewdly boasted. 

His lies can work better than truths.  “A lie can travel halfway around the world,” Mark Twain joked seriously, “while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Lies work, especially on agitated, dull-witted, gullible people raised to be obedient believers.

The Washington Post detailed 30,573 lies President Trump told in his first four years as president, a whopping 21 a day!  Most of his tweets included the all-caps of shouting or ended in an exclamation point.  Lies, exaggerations, and emotions work better than reason.  

Repeat such words often enough, and that’s what people use to think with. 

Hannah Arendt explained, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is … people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

“The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs,” wrote The Guardian. “Things are “great”, “wonderful”, “amazing”, “the best”, or they’re “crooked”, “fake”, “unfair”, “failing”.  He sprinkles intensifiers liberally: “a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer…”

Wanna have fun?  Take a fast gander at his insults as published in The Atlantic’s “How to Talk Like Trump.”  Look around on the page and see if you can spot things he has said that seem familiar. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-complete-insult-list.html

(If blocked by a paywall, I’ve copied a list of his insults on just four topics.  Quickly look through the list to see the quality of his argumentation in the four years before his being banned from Twitter here.)

Or, if video is more appealing to you, take a look at this mashup of how exactly he deals with large numbers, even billions.  Watch even three minutes’ worth, from 4:15 to 7:15, or check out the Press Corp’s facial reactions to Sean Spizer, which say more than this spokesman does.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i4JxWkSYzU

A commenter on this video, Tiredlocke, parodied his words: “I’ve done more for Christians than anybody. Except maybe Jesus. The fantastic guy – kinda low energy – but a great guy. He can go up on a mount for a sermon and all of a sudden – bing bing bong – he’s feeding the masses. Oh, you know it? Great story. He’s great. Nobody loves Jesus more than me. And nobody love his people – billions and billions of them – more than me…”

His fans are used to this sort of weave.  Ideas seem to be there, but exactly which and why?  Government bad.  Attack it.  Save money.  How and how much?  We don’t exactly know. 

Everything is extreme, and nothing is exact. 

You want exact?  Sorry.  The exact savings of however many billions Elon Musk’s DOGE is finding aren’t detailed.  Antigovernment whiz-kids will deal with the numbers secretly.  Nor are any names or work records of the thousands of former loyal government employees offered. 

Feelings matter more than facts. “My opinion matters more than your facts.”

The feeling is that the government is taking our money and burdening us with vague “regulations.”  The feeling and anxious conceit is anger and being too smart to be taken advantage of by people and policies we don’t know or understand. 

It’s all based on a cynical, paranoid attitude.  Americans have made their government into a whipping boy, a sacrificial lamb.  We don’t question the rising cost of groceries, cars, insurance, housing, or health.  Instead, we ironically blame and weaken our government, the only mechanism we have to moderate such costs to us and our environment. 

The fossil fuel and social media billionaires have won utterly.  They’ve tapped into our disgruntled mood, boosted it with algorithms, and manipulated it masterfully.  

Disgust is stronger than trust. 

Americans are riled and angry; he and his can direct that as fear and hate.  Immigrants become, “Migrant criminals,” “Illegal monsters,” “Killers,” “Rapists,” and “Gang members poisoning our country” and “taking your jobs.” He called it “the largest invasion in the history of our country,” not “lots of people meeting our needs doing hard work for low wages.”  He’ll highlight a rape and use it to expel thousands of decent people doing hard work.

Is Elon Musk, perhaps the richest man in the world, being paid $5 million a day, or is it $8 million?   We don’t know.  President Trump has designated this as “presidential records,” which is out of our oversight, allowing him to skirt open records laws. 

(Musk’s $5,000,000 or $8000.000 a day is quite a bit more than the average recipient of Social Security: $65.  I’d create a chart to show a comparison, but there aren’t pages tall enough to show the two.) 

But a mere $8 Million dollars a day pay isn’t as lucrative as Musk’s increased wealth since the election, somewhere between $70 and $200 billion.  It’s hard to say.  There are no DOGE whiz kids tossing his staff out of their offices and secretly examining his holdings and contracts.  Being booted is for little people and ordinary workers, not these billionaires.   

This distresses me because I view the government as us taking care of us.  It’s a way to do collectively what we can’t do alone.  Trump and Musk view it as their enemy, out to impede them and steal from them.  Vast wealth and corporate powers don’t want to deal with “we, the [actual] People,” it wants to disrupt, expel, and exploit them, “them” being us.  To them, there is no “us.”

I had to prod ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence tool) for a comparison between how much Musk’s DOGE would save the government (which is partly intended to be returned directly to the people via universal subsidy) and how much the wealthy would save from paying fewer taxes if Trump’s policies prevail.  I wanted a chart, but it would only supply numbers:

“In summary, while DOGE’s initial savings claims were $55 billion, verified savings are approximately $2.6 billion. In contrast, the TCJA resulted in substantial tax savings for high-income individuals and corporations, with the top 1% of taxpayers receiving significant reductions and major banks saving over $32 billion in the subsequent two years.”

So, while we watch our government’s leaders, workers, and buildings get tossed out and sold out, a whopping ten times that supposed savings will go to the top 1% of “we, the People.” 

All who need it the most will be sacrificed for those who need it the least. 

A social media-informed bedazzled and befuddled electorate won’t know what they’re losing, and if they do know, what can they do?  An emptied, indebted government won’t be able to monitor our own society’s economic and environmental doings, nor those of international corporate power.  The fossil fuel petrostates U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia will pump vast stores of ancient carbon suddenly into our skies, there to add heating for hundreds of years. 

Privatized rockets will fly.

Until they explode and crash, like Musk’s lately. 

Those fiery explosions and numerous plane crashes seem to portend impending catastrophe.  Yet a third of the country still supports, even adulates, Trump/Musk.

How can this be?  How can we see our long-lasting, increasingly inclusive, progressive government and society be gleefully seized by those easily swayed by lying words and stagecraft?  Is there an old gene in us that groups around the big silverback gorilla, the confident, bossy one?  How does his flurry of weaving words work, despite being dishonest, preposterous, and unintelligent?

I lay much of the blame on our religions, particularly evangelical Christianity.

Our religions have us believing, not behaving.  Behaving doesn’t get one to heaven; believing does.  The more you believe, the better you are.  Belief trumps behavior (“trumps” being a now-compromised verb, changed from “a winning hand” to “a liar who loses.”) 

The conniving and cruel can pose as pious believers.  For Christians, believing Jesus is the Christ saves them from their sins.  They can sin all they like if they just claim to believe.  They can wink at each other as if all are secured in sin together. 

It allows inclusion in a group of similar believers who follow only those leaders who keep the ruse alive.  Those of authority claim to know the will of God by quoting the so-called Word of God.  Pick a phrase here, a snippet of a story there, and weave them together as if an argument made by God.  Trump’s weave of words is heard by those who hear the Bible woven that way.  The Word of God has become a way to use those words on us, morphing loyal belief to tricked befuddlement.

The “Word of God” isn’t a single, coherent lesson.  It’s more the words of men and women from various times, places, and situations chosen and edited by others long after it was written, tossing out various other such scriptures and then imposing a canon pushed by theologians and governments since. 

Teaching children to believe everything in the Word of God is from and for God is abusive.  It locks their minds before they look.  It tells them to believe before they think or even read.  It trips them into feeling fallen, less than the words they are to behold, especially if they are also made to feel their sins made Jesus suffer.

While looking, they miss the intelligence and conscience of the looker.  The intent of seekers is sincere, but the answers found can be slippery, even sinister. Not every word in the Word of God is God talking to us.

I can critique some Bible passages and favor others.  Some of humanity’s most sublime passages are found in these scriptures.  But “some” is not all.  Believing it is all the Word of God opens us to boredom, confusion, and atrocity.

Thomas Paine, a founder of our humanistic democracy, like many founding fathers, resisted such Christianity.  Instead, he and similar others helped found a secular society that allows various religions or no religion.  The Bible isn’t our country’s rule book. Nor are we to be ruled by kings, popes, or priests.  They don’t build our sovereignty; the Creator – Creation – does.  We have self-rule.  We have freedom of religion and freedom from it. 

We have “certain unalienable rights endowed by our Creator,” not by “Jesus” or a church.  “Creator” is the crucial word.  The Declaration of Independence does not say we were endowed by “God,” “Jesus,” or a king.  Nature itself builds us good, sovereign.  It was a Deist perspective.  The way to God is not through old compromised and imposed scriptures, it is through nature and our nature itself. 

Thomas Paine, hero of the American Revolution, was rejected for his third book, “The Age of Reason.”  He critiqued the Bible and Christianity. “Lay then the axe to the root,” he wrote, “and teach governments humanity.” 

He died lonely and broke. 

Too bad his rationality and Deism, like Thomas Jefferson’s, weren’t developed as a religious option.  Instead, Christian churches of various types populated the expanding nation.  All well and good, except that approach to reality ignores and even exploits God’s Eden and all the good men, women, and children living in it.  This world is a mere testing ground for eternal life.

When nature is a mere stepping stone to an alleged afterlife, we’re stepping on the stuff of our soul.  The goods of nature and our inner nature become irrelevant props in some other supposed story. Manifest Destiny became a way to feel self-righteous while ignoring our conscience.  The New World wasn’t a fresh Eden for us to cherish and nurture; it was a place to kill pigeons, buffalos, and natives. 

(Non-scripturalists and non-believers, stay with me here, for I’m trying to rescue us from the twisted logic of our predicament.)

I don’t see the Bible as “The Word of God” so much as the words we inherit in our Judeo-Christian culture about God, history, morality, failing, succeeding, etc., typical human concerns.  Because we read the Bible for meaning, I root a mythopoetic stance in the two opening creation stories in the Bible.  Such cosmogonic myths steer our thinking as to who we are and what we might do. 

I use the Bible back on those who use it on us.  Genesis One establishes this natural cosmos, from light to water to land to plants to animals to humans (males and females) – as created by God and called “good.”  All together on that sixth “day” of creation, God calls it “very good.”

I agree with God here.  This vast cosmos, from distant quasars to minute quarks, with life and us in between, is indeed “very good.”  Do we value it? Do we protect and further it? Do we live in the thin atmosphere of life on our blue ball planet in such ways as to enrich its beauty and abundance?  

Christianity largely rests on the second creation story in the Bible, Genesis Two and Three.  That’s where God (YHWH, a singular, masculine name) forms Adam, then Eve, and tells them they have access to all the Garden except for the “knowledge of good and evil” lest they die.  The serpent tricks Eve into eating, and she gets Adam to eat as well.  The first thing they do is cover their genitals as if they were ashamed of them.  God sees this, realizes they ate of the forbidden fruit, and expels them into a more difficult life.  They go from shame to blame to pain.  She has pain in childbirth, and they bruise their heel on the head of the snake, futilely trying to stomp out their new alienation. They don’t die; they’re just troubled.

Via Paul and Augustine, Christianity took this cosmogonic myth and morphed it into the Original Sin we all supposedly inherit.  We all will die with our sins.  All are fallen; all need redemption.  But supposedly, Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins and get us reborn into eternal life.  Believing this gets us out of sin and into heaven.  You don’t have to behave if you believe.  We don’t die; we’re reborn in heaven.  Sound familiar? 

Missing from this confusion about Original Sin are the Original Goods of Genesis One.  The first creation story is a deeper cosmogonic myth.  It tells that every stage (of a surprisingly analogous story to that of modern physics and evolutionary science) is how God (Elohim, a singular/plural, masculine/feminine name of God or Gods) not only generates light, matter, life, and humans (males and females) but also and importantly calls each and every stage of a natural creation “good.”  All together on the sixth “day,” God calls it “very good.” 

These are the most promising and overlooked words in the Bible.  This vast cosmos, this evolved ecosystem, and we humans, male and female, are all good, even very good.  Embodied intelligence and conscience are what Creation builds into us.  We’re sovereign and able, fallible sometimes, but not just obedient and gullible, prone to the shame, blame, and pain of choosing to alienate so-called goods and evils.

The goodness that we’re built of gets lost and alienated when we judge it as good and evil.  It’s not that we’re sexual, smart, and think for ourselves that’s the problem; rather, these are what God (Creation) built us to be.  Tricking us out of that goodness is the real and ongoing original sin.  We are sovereign, not stupid, moral, not morons, good, not gullible.

But claiming to know just what is good and evil is part and parcel of our inherited Western story.  Insisting on and imposing a religious set of beliefs became what religions do.  Other religions do this as well, but not to the extent that the Western theistic ones do.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim the truth in an us-and-them mindset.

The fanatic Saul became the zealot Paul.  The martyred Christians became the murderous Christians.  The Crusades imposed the Prince of Peace with swords.  The Inquisition extracted forced confessions with torture.  Wars were fought over an iota of difference (the difference between Homoousis and Homoiosis, between Jesus the Christ as “of the same substance” and “of similar substance”).  Witches were hanged and drowned by mere accusation.  The Natives were forced to adopt such beliefs rather than their own, more nature-centered beliefs.  A few thousand years ago, the self-declared “chosen” attacked the Amalekite side of their family back then and now again as Palestinians.  All of these atrocities are based on a misuse of the words of scripture.   

Us against them is an old story.  Transcultural zealotry and forceful evangelicalism are what religions and nation-states too often do.  We’re right, and you better believe it.  We’ll tell you the goods you should value.  Forget, abandon, disparage, and exploit the original goods God built.  Children are taught to believe what some say the Bible says, not what their intelligence or conscience says about it.  The original goods are forsaken when we follow the advice of these new serpents, these subtle deceivers. 

That the original goods of Nature are forgotten in the distorted teachings of the so-called “good and evils” of the Judeo-Christian Heritage is a glaring irony.  Religion can divide us from our intimate and ultimate worth.  It can alienate us from our garden. It traps God in books, ignoring the splendor of vast heavens, a reliable ecosystem, and inner connection.

Such modern misleading serpents preach from social media platforms and Evangelical pulpits.  The glorified preachers, the whiz-worded politicians, the crafty advertisers, the president himself – all these new serpents advise the wrong goods and evils, thus wronging the original goods we are.

What’s valuable is nature and our nature in it.  When we see the original and ongoing goods we’re made of, when we look into the very structure of nature rather than a mere book for our worth, wealth, and well-being, we’ll start investing in Eden rather than trashing it.  We’ll start living up to the goods that make us up and that we’re born to be.

Earth as Eden isn’t a stepping stone to an afterlife, it’s where we have our only life.  Yet some would waste it for mere beliefs, no matter how alien and alienating. Some would praise a golden-haired idol, perhaps the chosen one, come to save us, come to pose with an upside-down Bible when campaigning but not put his hand on it when being sworn in.  Some would believe him rather than the world’s scientists when he says climate change is a hoax. 

I don’t think the Bible says much about global warming, the obvious, dramatic overheating of our entire atmosphere due to the output of our modern industrial practices.  This is the difficult blunder we’ve stumbled into in the last few hundred years, drastically sped up in the last few decades.  We’re taking eons-to-accumulate carbon via photosynthesis from the sky and tossing it suddenly back into the sky via coal plants and engines.  This gradually but inexorably creates a blanket that warms us too much, wrecking our former reliable climate.  You’d think conservatives would conserve a reliable climate. 

An industrialized fossil fuel fart is let into the face of Mother Nature.  We are punished in our own Eden, divided from each other and our garden, expelled into shame, blame, and pain by shrewd sociopathic politicians and their social media magnates, profiting greatly from the weave of words that doom us.  Christian Nationalists cheer this anti-intelligent, anti-earth foolishness. 

The 500-year-old Doctrine of Discovery claims the New World was designated by God to be the Promised Land for Europeans.  These old, presumptive words are foundational for Christian Nationalists.   “This is not a pluralist vision for all of America coming together or a vision for compromise,” says Du Mez, author of “How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”  “It is a vision for seizing power and using that power to usher in a “Christian America.”

The PRRI (Public Religious Research Institute) found most Americans (about 2/3rds) don’t adhere to Christian Nationalist principles, but that leaves 1/3^rd who do, and they’re core in Trump’s circle (such as Russel Vought, Michael Flynn, William Wolfe, John Hagge, Mike Huckabee, Paula White, Betsy DeVos).  Making America great again might entail:

• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
• The US government should declare America a Christian nation.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• If the US moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• US laws should be based on Christian values.

Time Magazine, in reporting on the PRRI survey, broached the touchy topic of religious violence.  “Most ominously, Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to think about politics in apocalyptic terms and are about twice as likely as other Americans to believe political violence may be justified in our current circumstances. Nearly 4 in 10 Christian nationalist Adherents (38%) and one-third of Sympathizers (33%) agree that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 17% of Christian nationalism Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.”

A favorite ploy of the Trump team is to attack with defensiveness.  He accused the FBI and the IRS of having anti-Christian practices. His Betsy DeVos wanted to shunt education dollars from public education to private schools to restore Christian teachings.  That is now being put in place by Linda McMahon.  When asked if she is out to shut down the federal agency, she replied, “Yes, actually it is, because that was the president’s mandate, his directive to me. Clearly, it was to shut down the Department of Education…”

Trump told evangelical broadcasters, “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.” He continued: “We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.” 

Oh?  I didn’t know it was gone.  What sort of Christianity is he wanting to bring back?  Jesus chased the money changers from the temple.  What will this alliance between conservative evangelical moralists and global corporations do to us, our temple, and the earth? 

We are the incarnated generation inheriting our country’s history and our planet’s plight and possibilities.  What words have misled us, and what words might we use? 

We were beginning to understand and adapt to the global warming challenge until the fossil fuel industry financed a flurry of words against such sanity.  They paid for FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt), and it paid off.  Ads and bots flooded us with augmented cranky opinions, most of them mocking and undermining the government’s ability to fix the monumental blunder.  Amp up the cynicism.  Forget facts.  Flood the zone.  Mock the truth.  Do the weave. 

Attack the government with anger, but don’t detail any objections to regulations or any clear plans for how to change it.  Use violence to do this, but then elect the man who egged it on and have him pardon and release even the most violent.  Pay the richest man in the world eight million dollars an hour to attack our government and its workers.  Thousands of skilled managers and ordinary workers instantly suffer, while the man forcing this coup goes on podcaster Joe Rogan to blatantly say, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Jesus had empathy.  Jesus embodied original goods despite the Pharisees and Roman soldiers. Trumpian sociopaths, evangelical Christians, and the amoral corporations who empower them do not.  The original goods of kindness and intelligence are lost and ruined by these new serpents.  The human community developed because we took care of each other.  It is the sort of goodness we’re built of. 

In our bones, in our place in history, we are better than this.