#RevThread # 153
Apostles of Greed
1/ After FDR had spent years preparing for D-Day, he told his inner staff on June 5 that he needed to write a prayer he wanted to broadcast the next day...
Apostles of Greed
1/ After FDR had spent years preparing for D-Day, he told his inner staff on June 5 that he needed to write a prayer he wanted to broadcast the next day...
2/...They offered to help him compose it. He said, “No, boys; thanks, but some things a man has to write for himself.” Greatness.
3/ In the prayer he wrote, FDR spoke of those who had to be defeated if freedom were to survive. He asked God to help the Allies defeat “The Apostles of Greed.” That may seem like an odd way to describe Fascism, and a strange thing for a man who inherited vast wealth to say.
4/The problem was greed? Nazism was fueled by greed? Autocracy arises from greed? Dictators are driven by greed? Slavery, racial superiority, racial oppression are fueled by greed? 100%
5/ Roosevelt’s prayer explicitly connects racial and ethnic subjugation to greed. And he knew, as his struggle with Churchill demonstrates, that greed fuels imperialism as well...
6/..The Third Reich, the Soviet Union, our own absurd system of “reservations” for indigenous people, are but a few of the cruelties that the greedy have imposed on humanity.
7/ Greed produced a democracy for white propertied males.
8/ What gives greed its power? Few of us think of ourselves as greedy. It’s just that I don’t quite have enough just yet...
9/...Mr. Bezos, I’m told, has amassed an additional 30+ billion in the few weeks of the “shut down”. “B” -- Billions. 30 in a couple of months. One white guy. Meanwhile, 50% of African Americans are unemployed.
10/ Our version of Republican White-Ruled Capitalism is thoroughly f**k'd up. Sanctified Greed is the actual religion on view in the White House, and in the hallowed halls of Congress.
11/ The reason Trump can’t figure out how to handle the Bible is that God’s Word will not fold into his wallet.
12/ What in hell is greed?
13/ I know I’m over my head here. I also know that my struggle is to emerge from the delusion made so apparent here in America over the past week. Our 400-year struggle with greed-driven racism (For profit prisons, anyone?) was crystalized in the murder of George Floyd.
14/ You may think that the principle energy for oppressing non-whites comes from non-college-educated white guys. Not true. It also comes from the country clubs. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I’m telling you, lots of those folks love them some Trump....
15/...They occasionally wonder, “What more do the Blacks want?” It’s in those places – at least it was 20 years ago when I was there – that greed and racism genteelly cooperate.
16/ Once in a while, our conscience forces us to say something that gives us the clue. We say, “Enough!”. It’s not exactly the same thing as the calm, satisfied “I’ve had enough” after a good meal....
17/... This “enough” says “I’ve-had-it with-this-crap”. This “enough” is also the clue about our dis-satisfaction.
18/ Greed is the drive to keep consuming, the refusal to register enough, the constant sense of not having enough, the fear, finally, of not being enough.
19/ All week long we hear objects and experiences calling to us from the screen: “buy me, wear me, eat me, drive me, drink me . . .”. And it’s always with the promise of becoming the envied ones all wrapped up in our latest stuff.
20/ Who is the champion consumer? Whose life has been utterly engulfed in showy, endless ostentation? Who is our leader? We chose this greedy lout who revels in his wanton lifestyle. He is the product of 7 decades of cramming as much stuff as possible into his endless emptiness.
21/ Choke the African Americans; cage the Latinx children; ignore the thousands of deaths in a pandemic. But watch the Dow like a hawk.
22/ The violence and folly that greed engenders is on full display every time our fatuous President tries lamely, once again, to speak. Drivel gushes from his lips, causing the denizens of Mara Lago to swoon. “He’s so handsome! He must be smart because look how rich he is!”
23/ It’s not just the greed within Trump that is destroying our country and crucifying the natural world. It’s the greed throughout the population that empowers his evil.
24/ This is the face we are presenting to the world. Our nation has become an affront to humanity and to God. Rule by the wretched GOP adoring this wretched family is actually Sphincterocracy.
25/ Under the GOP we are hurtling to our destruction, in a moment when humans are threatening to degrade the planet’s capacity to support life.
26/ It is past time to say, “Enough!” to our greed, time to bring generosity to bear and off load our excess, time to humble ourselves so that we can live inside an enough that is far more modest and far more satisfying.
27/ Life is way prior to lifestyle. Freedom is learning to enjoy more with less.
28/ In an ancient folktale that Jesus re-worked slightly, Lazarus (the name means, “saved by God”), is a beggar who pleaded at a rich man’s gate. That rich Trumpist’s name was Dives.
29/ Inside Dives’ mansion were constant feasts; but outside, Lazarus was so exhausted dogs would lick his sores. Both men die. Lazarus is whisked to heaven; Dives plunges to the fires below.
30/ Deluded Dives, now dead, but still imagining himself superior, yells to God to send Lazarus down with a drink of water.
31/ He is informed that there is a great gulf fixed between their two places. (The same gulf Dives had created with his gates and the long drive to the mansion’s door.) God, in Jesus’ telling of this folktale, prefers the company of the poor to the pretensions of the rich.
32/ Dives, in the first impulse we see of some decency, recognizes the eternal danger facing his family of rich louts, and begs God to send Lazarus to warn them. (Note he’s still thinking he’s above Lazarus. Wealth is a stubborn curse.)
33/ God says, “They’re not going to believe him.” Dives says, “If someone returns from the dead and warns them, they’ll believe.”
34/ Jesus ends his version of this story with this laconic, devastating line: “Even if someone returns from the dead, they will not believe him.” Jesus knew that even his Resurrection would not move those who worship wealth.
35/ Trump, the “he-must-be-smart-because-he’s-rich”; Trump, the acolyte of Mammon; Trump, the icon of American imperial decadence;....
36/...Trump, the Apostle of Greed, can paw the outside of the Bible all he wants. But neither he nor his enablers have taken in a single word from Jesus of Nazareth.
