Civil Commotion

Longtime readers know that I was raised in Detroit and attended college in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, earning two engineering degrees from Michigan Tech.

When I left Tech I had the vague idea that I’d like to go back to the U.P. to live someday; it’s gorgeous up there, and exhibits a friendly, open culture you don’t find in the busy-busy-busy career centers, the big cities swarming with … Donald Trump-types.

So my first job was in the western Lower Peninsula, and when the ’82-recession hit I followed the work to Florida — where Disney was the engine sparking a lot of the building that kept civil engineers busy. There, I met and married a Florida girl, and the notion of someday moving back to the U.P. got set aside. In the event, it was 35-years between my 2^nd-graduation and a return visit to the Upper Peninsula. Not much has changed in the intervening decades, and the U.P.’s idea of a crowd is laughable to anybody familiar with the Outer Banks or — Heaven Forfend! — Cocoa.

Miserably crowded U.P. beach

Dawn and I have driven back up there 4-5 times since that first trip, and have idly talked about buying a summer retirement place on Lake Superior. This year, of course, the pandemic prevented us from traveling, and more than a few of the Web sites associated with our regular destinations are gone. The pandemic killed tourism, and the lack of tourism killed a lot of seasonal businesses. All of which gave me a grin when I got an email today from one of the U.P.’s tourist bureaus.

Oh, yeah — social distancing is definitely a U.P. thing. I wish them well.

I started a list of the things I learned in 2020, and everything on my list turned-out to be some variation of, “Wow! A lot of Americans are really idiots!”

We are 10-months into a pandemic that has killed roughly 350,000-Americans, for instance — and mask- and distancing-reminders are still needful. Donald Trump can still fill a stadium and pastors can still fill churches.

A lot of people seem not to know that asymptomatic people can spread Covid-19, that your buddy or girlfriend who feels fine can have a raging case and be spreading the virus as rapidly as your neighborhood nuisance hands-out Jack Chick tracts.

Many Americans are so stupid that they can’t understand that walking a grocery store aisle, wearing a mask and practicing distancing, is qualitatively different than attending a church service, with the result that they feel aggrieved that it’s permissible to go to Wal*Mart to buy (necessary) food but not allright to go to church and load the air with millions of virus-laden aerosol droplets by singing, responsive reading, general howling and bellowing.

Once upon a time, I thought the public interest required enforcing such strictures. Not any more: I now think Friedrich Nietzsche was right. You cannot protect morons from their own stupidity, and you shouldn’t try; it’s a waste of energy and emotionally burdensome. What you can do, and should do, is protect yourself from morons; put them out of your life and let natural selection have them.

Many Americans applaud Donald Trump’s slow-motion coup-attempt and appear to hope he prevails. This is probably the biggest surprise to me — that so many Americans are affirmatively hostile to their country’s founding ideals, that so many Americans know so little of their own country’s history, that they know so little of the history of the Twentieth Century. If they were even modestly conversant with the facts of the rise of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, they’d be frantic with worry every time Donald Trump tweets or opens his mouth.

This is not to equate Trump with Hitler, but he is plainly an authoritarian-in-waiting, an existential threat to the country, and indifferent to American ideals. Certainly, he is charmed by the Proud Boys’ loyalty and fantasizes about unleashing his very own personal Brown Shirts before Joe Biden’s inauguration — and never mind that Trump is flirting with treason.

And note this: Even after January 20^th and Trump’s departure, the sickness he has mobilized will remain. Like the Evangelical Right, these are not people who can be educated into goodwill and an appreciation of American ideals; they will have to be defeated and put out of our shared public life.

Bruce Gerencser has published excerpts from what may be the most famous sermon ever preached, Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands Of An Angry God.

So that, thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out: and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.

Well.

It bears remembrance that Christianity does not offer merely a set of ethical, or behavioral, guidelines; Christianity makes very specific claims about the nature of reality. If Edwards’ famous sermon is more graphic that what is commonly preached nowadays, it is not in fact much different than what is preached from every pulpit in the land every Sunday morning. There is no escaping that Christianity is innately, systemically, degrading, that the degradation of its followers is bound into its most fundamental premises; it cannot flourish in a healthy culture.

Because ‘the world’ is evil, et cetera, et cetera, and it’s good to be an utterly insufferable prig.

Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim is that we’re all natural-born no-damn-good scum and deserve to spend eternity on fire, and I reject that claim without equivocation or caveat; I think the idea is nuts. Because I don’t believe that, I don’t think I need a savior or that Christianity has anything on offer but the opportunity to spend my Sunday mornings with emotionally disturbed bores who believe they are b-b-b-bad to the bone.

But I’ll be holed-up with the handful of people in my ‘pod’ and enjoying Christmas — the cookies, gifts, family — and I hope y’all are, too.