1/ I’ve had it. I’ve been watching and listening to the GOP as it invests in Donald o-my-god Trump and then in Herschel can-you-believe-this-monster Walker.
2/The Republican party has been thoroughly corrupted. Staying in it means you are willfully allowing your soul to be covered in the slime of depravity. A political party is not like a family. You’re not born into a political party...
1/ This morning,Tuesday, Sept 13, ’22, on Morning Joe. I heard several thoughtful folks having a political discussion. Often, as someone spoke about what they understood, others would listen and ask for the person to say more.
2/ Also, there was an assumption that everyone was attempting to speak accurately. I learned a bunch of new things about recent events. I changed my mind about some things. My blood pressure didn’t spike.
1/ To all my sisters who awoke this morning, feeling betrayed and insulted -- I stand with you. The court is wrong. The decision expresses a sweeping, reckless misogyny.
2/ The decision is unjust. Should it stand as Alito wrote it, it will rival Dred Scott in its infamy. Indeed it outdoes Dred Scott, for this ruling takes freedom away from the majority of the citizens of the country.
Mar 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
1/Most of us have been watching Vlad the Terrible murder the brave and innocent ordinary people of Ukraine. We are watching an evil man do genocide.
2/Last night we watched as Russia fired on a major nuclear power plant. The danger was the release of nuclear fallout -- ten times greater than the disaster at Chernobyl. Putin is an utter monster, ghoulishly spreading death.
1/ Trump in the West, Putin in the East. This is the age of Transactional Man. Our heroes compulsively deal. The more amoral the deal maker, the stronger they appear. They advertise themselves as “strong men.”
2/ The Russian tanks entering Ukraine are an object lesson in toxic masculinity. Freud would have some choice words about those cannons. Some combination of greed and unregistered self-loathing has pushed Putin to Hitlerian depths.
I listened briefly this morning to a tape of Trump in Texas Saturday night. Evil is rising. It’s contagious.
2/ As fascism spreads, evil enfolds first the surly outsiders who become the future tyrant’s goon squads, then the ignorant, then the envious, then the ordinary. It takes years. It suffers defeats and then regroups.
1/ “So authentic! So sincere! He’s not a politician! He’s for real!” That’s what 30-40% of the country has been saying about Donald John Trump for the past 6+ years.
2/ I grant that Trump does have a great destructive power. He has single-handedly detonated the moral implosion of the GOP & threatens to end our Democracy. But he is not sincere. He is, as we all can see, a compulsive liar. How then does he carry off the appearance of sincerity?
1/There’s a marvelous scene in Eric Larson’s "The Splendid and the Vile" when the great Harry Hopkins is preparing to leave England after his prolonged visit with Winston Churchill.
2/The moment was fraught. Hitler was preparing his invasion of Russia, and wanted to finish off England with even more saturation bombing. Roosevelt had promised during his third campaign not to join in the war (Japan had not yet bombed Pearl Harbor).
Oct 6, 2021 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
RevThread#1006
Old. Simple. True
1/There’s a fair amount of chaotic evil swirling around America. We can start with the insurrection of January 6th and then the copious infusion of agitating rhythms coming through Facebook to denigrate young girls...
2/ the groveling adoration of He Whose Name Would Sully Our Lips, the lock-step robotic unity in the GOP as their overlord keeps assaulting the Constitution and common decency.
1/ It’s true that Donald Trump is a liar. He lies about himself, about his wealth, about other people, about non-existent threats to the country, about his family, about what he’s done. He lies a whole lot.
2/ Donald Trump's admiration of Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Duterte and of other “strong men”, leads him to imitate those liars. He has learned from them that if you lie consistently and repetitively and if your lies flatter the prejudices of your audience,...
1/ How about a brief homily on this Sunday morning? We’ve just had quite a week of revelations to process, don’t you think?
2/ Here’s a great, disturbing text: Luke 8:17 ---“For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.”
1/ I need a 'Get Out of Hell Free' card. In the Hellscape of America that surrounds me in the year of our Lord 2021, 450,000 souls have been dispatched, gasping as they die of a mutating virus.
2/ The Lout lounges away in the gilded & garish splendor of Mara f-ing Lago. This Lout, whose gifts of self-promotion, feral rage, domination & willful blindness were on full view from the White House, continues to fascinate our media & enthrall millions of my fellow-citizens.
1/There’s a pond between our home and the cemetery. Just now it’s white, four inches of new snow sitting atop the ice. I don’t let our big collie get on the pond,...
2/.. because just below the ice is a current, and because if he broke through, I couldn’t get him out. Plus, there are good sized snapping turtles, otters, and other critters all about. Stuff lurks.
1/ So here we are on Christmas Eve -- either isolated or risking life itself to see one another. We watch the President bring down chaos on our land, block any attempt to provide help for those afflicted by a virulent pandemic...
2/...pardon his fellow criminals, threaten to close down our government, surround himself with felons and goons, ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions upon millions of sickened people this plague has caused.
1/ While we hang around waiting for the ballot counting to finish, I thought I’d speculate about what lies ahead. Of course I don’t know anything, but that has never stopped me before.
2/ Maybe, hopefully, what we just witnessed was the peak of what historians will one day call the Age of Infinite Greed. People have always been greedy, but what has marked the past 100 years or so is a silence about why greed is so toxic.
1/ This morning, as I listened to @Morning_Joe, I was moved by the pain of @DonnyDeutch as he compared Trump’s speech at the Pittsburgh rally to Hitler’s speeches in the 1930’s.
2/ When I was 19, a sophomore at Hamilton College in upstate NY, my roommate, Nelson, was the only non-white in our class. (This was 56 years ago.) A man named George Lincoln Rockwell came to Hamilton and gave a speech in our theater. ...
1/ I was already at the office of our church plant in Austin, Texas. My sister from NYC was visiting, watching the Today Show with Barbara at home.
2/ My associate, Mike, was doing a service at a local school. Barbara called and said a plane had crashed in NYC. She called again and said my sister was really upset because Tom Brokaw was saying it was an attack.
Aug 25, 2020 • 27 tweets • 3 min read
RevThread # 180
Fascism
1/ I promised myself I wouldn’t watch the Republican Convention, because I knew it would be stupid & upsetting & invite me into spasms of self-righteousness. I thought then I would just watch the first 30 min of “Morning Joe” & get the gist of the event.
2/ Holy S***!
Aug 14, 2020 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
RevThread #170
No, by God
1/ Along the rural roads near my home, I see lots of Trump signs. One that’s quite popular in Trumplandia says “Trump in 2020! No more Bulls**t!”. Sorta leaves you speechless, doesn’t it?
2/ We don’t control the world. We can’t. Off in some cave in a remote province of China, deep in a crevasse, a bat was sleeping away when suddenly, in a vein, a tiny virus molecule mutated. How tiny? 20,000 of them could sit in your throat and you would not feel them.
1/ I loved seeing John when he was, I think,77, crowd-surfing on a Stephen Colbert show. He was then a little older than I am now. Letting strangers keep you aloft just on their hands is an act of faith not just in God but in humanity.
2/ The writer, Jon Meacham, who knew Lewis up close and who knows something about history, has been saying that John was a saintly person. I second the motion.
Jun 30, 2020 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
RevThread #162
Macbeth’s Descent
1/ "Macbeth" and "Lear" make an interesting pair. "Lear" is a sprawling affair, Shakespeare’s longest play and most imaginative tragedy, dealing with an ancient, ahistorical figure the artist could shape anyway he chose.
2/ “Macbeth”, written just after “Lear”, is Shakespeare’s shortest Tragedy, the most compressed, set in nearby Scotland. Both plays explore abuse of power, violation of hospitality, and suffering imposed by terrible governance.
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