Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread #104
Trump Attraction Syndrome (4 parts)
Part 4: Imitation

1/ Sometimes you’ll get to see a two-year old boy sitting next to his dad on the couch. When the dad crosses his legs, so will the kid. It’s charming.

2/ We learn by imitating. People show us something that we then discover we have inside ourselves and in this way the people we’re with call out our identity from within us. That goes on throughout our lives.

3/ But sometimes imitation is not so great. Think of how a celebrity starts a destructive fad. Our desire to be like these demi-gods can overwhelm rational thought. You think not?

4/ My parents and all their friends smoked, and I think the way Bogart and Bacall smoked had a lot to do with that. It looked glamorous and it asserted a kind of immortality. We desire to be like these larger than life characters.

5/ What? The stuff we’re imitating is harmful to us? Don’t be a sissy. You too can handle it, like they do. I smoked for 12 years, most of that time thinking I should stop, but then continuing because those things are addictive...

6/... Besides--James Dean and the cooler college boys at my school all smoked and always attracted girls, and I . . .

7/ When a fad spreads, when a way of being starts getting copied, it can become enormous. Think of the excitement about democracy during and after our revolution in the 1790’s or about the spread of fascism throughout Europe of the 1930’s.

8/ It’s what Rene Girard called mimetic contagion, and it’s what’s happening in America and indeed around the world now.

9/ What is Trump doing that his millions of followers find so irresistible? Here comes some Jeff swag (scientific wild ass guessing):

10/ Trump Attraction Syndrome is 1% about Supreme Court Justices; 1% about ending abortion; 1% about trades and tariffs; 1% about tax cuts, 6% about white dominance, and 90% about lawlessness in the pursuit of eternal wealth.

11/ Trump gets away with everything: child rape, ersatz universities, physically shoving aside prime ministers, theft, adultery, mob alliances, lying every day, insulting men, assaulting women. He’s rude, crude and lewd.

12/ And he appears to enjoy every minute of it. Trump exults in his greed, his endless appetites, his false faith, his cruelty. Always getting away with it is so much fun!

13/ Who wouldn’t want that? Only stuffy people with morals or wisdom. You know--those people who are always looking down on us real people. Screw them! Yeahhh!

14/ Trump fog is enveloping us. Imitation moves through a culture the way Dickens describes fog moving through London in the opening of Bleak House.

15/ Folks are revelling in and imitating the acquisitive Mr. Trump. They want to learn to counterpunch; to learn the ways, the fabulous ways, of mob life and it’s fabulous riches.

16/ Inside this fog, it’s fine to flush democracy itself in order to revel in this lawless life. Here’s what makes it even more fun: everyone else must either follow the law or be locked up.

17/ You’ll have all the money you ever dreamed of. Come aboard the Trump plane and he’ll fly you to “Success Heaven”.

18/ Why not? Well, for one thing, “Success Heaven”, according to Jesus’ parable “The Rich Man and Lazarus” is an eternity of pitchforks, not harps. Oops...

19/ Think of the imitators filled with desire for what Trump appears to have! Pruitt and Pence and Price and Devos and Hannity and Bannon and Kushner and Jim Jordan and Duncan Hunter and Dennis Nunez and on and on--they want the ostentation, the swagger, the lawlessness.

20/ Back to Dives and Lazarus. Jesus took a story popular in his day and reworked it to make it more pointed, more dire. Here’s a summary of their story, which you can find in Luke 16:

21/ A real rich guy, feasting everyday, lived in a mansion with a gate. Outside the gate was a beggar with nothing, a man so weak the dogs licked his sores. Both died. The beggar, Lazarus, goes to heaven. The rich guy, Dives, goes to hell.

22/ The rich guy looks up into heaven and sees Lazarus being hugged by Abraham. Dives calls out,“Hey! I’m burning up down here!

“Send the beggar down with some water...” (Note the utter cluelessness--he’s in Hell, but he still feels superior to Lazarus, who’s in heaven.)

23/ Abraham explains that since Dives had spent his life in selfish splendor, he’s already had his turn, and now Lazarus, who had nothing on earth, is having his turn.

24/ Dives next has his first thought about other people. He says, “Then send Lazarus to my family to warn them to become generous lest they wind up with me in hell.” (See how the rich, even the ruined rich, keep ordering the poor around?)

25/ Now comes the line Jesus adds to this folktale: “No. Even if someone were to return from the dead, the selfish would not listen to him.”

Quite the parable, no?

26/ Jesus returned from the dead, full of grace, and still those trapped in their greed cannot hear him.

27/ A note to my fellow white evangelicals like Rev Copeland, who are such ardent Trumpsters, insisting that God put Trump in the White House: No. You put him there. You are not God. Trump is a disgrace to the nation, the world and the most basic Christianity. And so are you.

28/ The question isn’t whether he and you are going to hell. You’re already there -- the hell of cruelty, greed, and racism. The question is whether you will ever seek the mercy of God for your betrayal of Christ.

29/ Trumpism is a contagion not to be imitated. Ever.