#RevThread #117
Minor Sources
1/ The problem isn’t that we have by far the worst person in the White House ever. Well, OK, that is pretty serious...
Minor Sources
1/ The problem isn’t that we have by far the worst person in the White House ever. Well, OK, that is pretty serious...
2/..The real bummer is this: scores of millions of citizens are giddily delighted by Trump’s racism, hypocrisy and greed, as well as his treasonous imitation of Russian autocracy.
3/ How did the entire Republican Party get this depraved this quickly? Think of the Republican Party as a once great river. It used to be filled with the clear waters of conserving constitutional order, honoring faith and family, and promoting individual freedom.
4/ The GOP has become a fetid sewer spreading over the land. Other tweeters are diligently exploring the recent infiltrations into the GOP by Russian Mafiyas. But the sewage started trickling in way before any foreigners came to mess us up. I'll discuss 2 earlier sources.
5/ Far back in the hills of the Gilded Age, a very rich man pooped into the stream. Andrew Carnegie penned a two-part article that became a book entitled “The Gospel of Wealth.”
6/ I just forced myself to read it. (Greater love has no man.) Carnegie's book is the fountainhead of the Prosperity Gospel, which in turn has convinced White Evangelicals to support, install and sustain Trump in power.
7/ This little "Gospel of Wealth" never mentions Jesus by name, and refers to him as the Christ only once. Some Gospel.
8/ Carnegie's argument is that capitalism is the correct order of humanity; that anyone who constrains a gifted entrepreneur is a socialist, anarchist, or communist; and that capitalism depends...
9/.. on the talent and genius of individual business leaders, who therefore are the exemplars of human excellence. (Nothing vain going on there.)
10/ When granted unrestrained freedom, Carnegie continues, the great white men of business produce immense fortunes for themselves and progress for lesser humans.
11/ Then comes some almost good stuff. Once having amassed their millions, the titans of enterprise, Carnegie says, should then provide modestly for their heirs --lest they be ruined by the burden of wealth...
12/.. And then the titans should begin the great work of spending their wealth on public projects that benefit the masses -- parks, universities, scientific laboratories, art museums, etc.
13/ Carnegie, to his credit, saw that great inherited fortunes were the mark of Autocracies. He argued that in a Democracy the great wealth of an individual should be returned to the community that made his wealth possible, first through benevolence & then through estate taxes.
14/ I received a full scholarship from the Clark family foundation--founders of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. I attended Hamilton College, and lived for a year in Carnegie Hall, a swell dorm indeed. So pardon me while I gnaw for a bit longer on the hand that once fed me.
15/ Carnegie’s book is filled with a breathtaking disdain for the poor. He claimed, with no evidence at all, that more than 90% of charity given to the poor is just wasted because of their laziness and dishonesty. Later he claimed it was 95%.
16/ Beneath Carnegie's high-minded benevolence is an insistent cruelty towards those who fail to rise from poverty.
17/ This last theme-the folly of alms giving-was the most popular strain of the new Gospel of Wealth. You hear it in the anxious insistence that benevolence carefully avoid duplication of effort. I guess it would be just terrible if two people might actually help the same person.
18/ Over the many decades since this dubious book appeared, the developers of the Prosperity Gospel have maintained all its cruelty as well as its adulation of the greedy, and removed all its justice, until Jesus is now proclaimed as the private pal of all who surrender to greed.
19/ It wasn’t a big jump from this thinking to a movement that elevated and now sustains a wannabe fascist in the White House.
20/ Source # 2 arose a few decades after the Gilded Age and pumped even more toxic bilge into the River of Republicanism. Ayn Rand created the fatuously named “Objectivism”.
21/ In “Atlas Shrugged” and in “The Fountainhead,” Rand propounds the notion that social justice is only possible through unfettered private power and such power will always arise from the winners of the competition for the most money.
22/ Rand's books, as art, are woebegone -- chapter after chapter of turgid pretentious prose.
23/ Rand distinguishes herself from conventional acolytes of greed by frankly despising Jesus of Nazareth -- both his ethics and his life choices.
24/ I appreciate her candor. What I don’t get are the pious Republicans like Paul Ryan who want communion with Jesus while embracing Randian opposition to Jesus.
25/ Rand teaches that untrammeled individual greed is what paradoxically yields social justice through the mystical hand of the market. Greed produces good. (I can get you the Brooklyn Bridge for a buck.)
26/ In those books, also, lurks an adoration of masculine violence. Rand endured an abusive husband for many years and so I’ve wondered if she suffered from Stockholm syndrome. She sounds like a capitalist version of Russian Propaganda.
27/ You’ll find Rand's influence widespread among the leaders of Trump’s Republican Party. Their economics is really a rationalization of unlimited private wealth....
28/..The only point of life is to get richer and richer. Now that the estate tax is done in, they think they are piling up eternal wealth.
29/Just as Rand’s writing objectifies her characters, Trump’s rhetoric objectifies all humans who don’t side with him. Once people are merely objects in my way, I can, with no pang of conscience, remove them. See how the NRA so nicely slithers into this political & economic slop?
30/ From what streams, then, shall we drink to refresh ourselves, to keep marching, and eventually to restore the clean waters of a recovered democracy?
31/ Drink from any of these:
32/..the real Gospels and Isaiah; the US foundational documents; the speeches and writings of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, & King; and the artists, writers, historians, musicians and dramatists whose compassion and wisdom help us to understand ourselves and embrace one another.
