Civil Commotion

President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing.

Albert Mohler

Puh-leeze. The only thing sincere about Albert Mohler is his desire to be president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and that desire is so strong that he’s willing to disgrace himself to win the rank-and-file members’ approval.

I remember the first time God used me to raise someone from the dead.

Derrick Gates

Yeah, I imagine that’s something you don’t forget.

It’s hard to believe that there are still people who can’t see Trump for what he actually is.

I’d never heard of Juneteenth, or the Tulsa riots of 1921, until the flap surrounding the First Felon’s campaign rally. So, naturally, I did what I always do when I want to learn about something: I went to the Barnes & Noble Website and began browsing books. Searching on “Tulsa 1921” called-up a list of just four reportorial-style accounts, a novel, a family memoir, and two knock-off copies of a report by an Oklahoma state commission.

Of the four reportorial-style histories, three are from academic presses and one is from a mainstream publisher. The books from academic presses are probably exhaustive accounts but poorly written in the passive voice, and the one from the mainstream publisher is probably well-written but not so exhaustively researched. The best selling of the group is from the mainstream publisher, but hundreds of places down the list; I assume, but have no way to confirm, that relevant titles are spiking just now and that all these titles ordinarily inhabit the sub-basement.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published in 1966 — more than 50-years ago — outsells all of them.

The bottom line here: Nobody — in white America, at least — cares a hoot about the murder of 300-blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, or the incineration of thousands of homes.

As I remarked a few years ago when Black Lives Matter first made an appearance:

As most longtime readers know, my first freelance pieces were true crime features for the old tabloid crime rags, and one of the very first things I learned is that features about black people killing each other are not salable. I tried. If a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a white Sunday School teacher its a story; if a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a black Sunday School teacher it’s … too bad. That’s the bald commercial fact.

If you doubt that, just visit the true crime section of your local Barnes & Noble store, or scan Ann Rule’s or Joe McGinniss’ or Gregg Olsen’s output: No black people. Check the televised true-crime shows, too; No black people.

So, make no mistake: blacks do have a legitimate grievance; white America isn’t very interested in black lives or deaths.

The outright hagiography of George Floyd is certainly misplaced and perhaps even counter-productive, but our recent, heightened attention to race issues is not misguided.

This is from Florida, where a resurgence 0f Covid-19 is underway. Human stupidity like this is why.