Looking to Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao to understand Jesus

I had another problem with Comcast and encountered more customer disservice. In the last chapter I mentioned when I called the bot had me listen to a half-minute spiel about how the company needs certain information from me. I got that spiel every time I had to call, which for that issue was several calls. Today when I went to pay my bill online it inserted a page in the process saying they don’t have that information, my phone number and alternate email address. It was set up in such a way that I could not pay the bill without providing it. I could no longer bypass their request that has turned into a demand. So I entered my phone number – which they already have. I entered my email address. The system responded saying that is already associated with an account, we need a different one. I don’t have a different one. And I’m certainly not going to create one just to make Comcast happy, because I’ll never look at it. I think what Comcast is trying to do is have ways to contact me if their email system crashes. Well, OK, you have my phone number. So I called. The answer bot did its spiel again. Then after every answer I gave it would say I could sent you a link to our chat system; you’ll get faster service. I replied “no” each time. I didn’t want to do chat on my phone and needed to talk to a real person. It tried to direct me to chat about a half dozen times (I didn’t actually count). I didn’t get connected to a human. So on my computer I tried their virtual chat, the only kind they offer. It gave me choices for its questions. I quickly got to “none of these.” When I clicked on that it started its question tree over. No humans on the other end. I tried to call the local store, the place that actually worked to solve the previous problem. But the store’s number, while a different 800 number, connected me to the bot again. I signed up to the user forum and asked the question. It showed my predicament was posed two years ago. Notably, the person responding took the discussion to direct messaging, meaning the answer was not posted on the forum. So I posed it again. The available answers to some of the info it wanted made it sure the question was misclassified. People have seen the question but no one has given an answer. Five hours later I did get a response – they had reclassified my question. About a half hour after that Xfinity support found it. And they told me to use direct messaging with Xfinity support. So I did. That looks to be like chat, but with real people. They needed 20 minutes to respond. They asked for basic information and as of this writing have taken 15 minutes to respond to that. At this hour I can’t wait for many cycles of this chat. One of my tasks tomorrow may be to go to the Xfinity store to pay my bill. I saw a news article about people filing customer service complaints against companies with the Federal Trade Commission. Perhaps I should do that with Comcast. But I’d have to be more specific about the number of times it tried to direct me to chat. And I really don’t want to call again. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that Obama, campaigning for Harris, had a few good lines.

Obama remarked that he often speaks to people about Trump, and they have remarked that the Republican presidential nominee is “kind of goofy” but that they remember better economic conditions during his presidency. “And I say, yeah it was good because it was my economy,” Obama said. “I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that the Republicans left me.” ... Obama added, “All [Trump] did was give a tax cut to people who didn’t need one, drove up the deficit in the process, now he wants to do it again. Do not fall for that okey doke, don’t be bamboozled.”

Morgan Stephens of Kos has a response for Ezra Klein’s opinion piece in the New York Times. Klein had asked, “If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? ... If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?” Stephens says Klein’s privilege is showing. Many people weren’t OK. And still aren’t. 352K people died of COVID in 2020, many through the nasty guy’s misinformation and neglect. People of color, people in poverty, and women are still feeling it. Then there’s the abortion ban he made possible in the way he stacked the Supreme Court. Klein ignored the rise of white supremacy the nasty guy normalized. There’s also the police officers killed in the Capitol attack. I’m sure Stephens could have added several other ways America is worse because of his time in the Oval Office. Stephens added she is one of those still suffering from long COVID and encountered people who scorned her use of a mask. Kos of Kos wrote about what should be the October surprise to end the nasty guy’s presidential bid, but won’t. The story comes from the book The Divider: Trump in the White House by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. The nasty guy, in talking to John Kelly, his Chief of Staff, wanted American military generals to have the same loyalty as Hitler’s generals. Kelly’s response, recorded in the book:

Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

That exchange was trumpeted in a big headline in The Atlantic: “TRUMP: ‘I NEED THE KIND OF GENERALS THAT HITLER HAD’” In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple good quotes. The first is from Heather Digby Parton of Salon who commented on high-ranking military leaders who are saying how unfit and how fascist the nasty guy is.

It's good that these former high-ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on CBS News' "60 Minutes" or cut an ad so that people who aren't reading the Atlantic and the New York Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There's no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I'm afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they simply don't want to be in the line of fire, it's a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.

A while back I wrote about the term “sanewashing,” created by Parker Malloy. Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan of LitHub in an interview with The Family author Jeff Sharlet says that term doesn’t go far enough. Sharlet talked about the nasty guy and far right preachers talking about Christian Nationalism. And the press is ignoring this as an issue. They were stuck on the idea of how could such a profane man win the votes of the religious right?

I think Parker would agree with this; It’s fascist-washing. In the book, I call it “the F-word” because in an earlier book I wrote in 2008 called The Family, I wrote about a Christian Nationalist movement that explicitly looks to Hitler as a model for understanding Jesus. And they added in Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao for their common denominator: strength and power.

Looking to Hitler and Stalin to understand Jesus? That makes the head spin. Down in the comments is a meme posted by exlrrp with a quote by Pete Buttigieg:

It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.

Posted right below it is a meme with the words, “Strange, but my idea of ‘making America great again’ always seemed to involve seeing FEWER swastikas.” Further down in the comments is a discussion by Captain Frogbert. He starts with a video of monkeys where one is rewarded with cucumber and another is rewarded with much tastier grapes and the first shows its displeasure. The test has been done with other animals and had similar results. Frogbert wrote:

Trump voters have been deceived by Wall Street oligarchs and the media into thinking the problem is that “THOSE PEOPLE” are being unfairly rewarded by LIBERAL ELITES who give MY grapes to people who haven’t EARNED THEM the way I have. Of course this is absurd. What is happening is that the right-wing elites are KEEPING THE GRAPES for themselves and telling the right-wing masses that the grapes they should be getting are being unjustly given to people they don’t like who don’t deserve them, by people they don’t like who hate the GOOD PEOPLE LIKE YOU. Even though there is no evidence of this being true. It’s just that the Trump voters, knowing only that they don’t have what they think they are entitled to, think it ought to be true. The enemy is the oligarchy. Their racism drives the foolish right to act against their own interests because the oligarchs are also racists and the right-wingers think they will be exempt from oppression once all the people they hate have been summarily removed and punished. But that’s not how fascism works. Fascism runs on hate and enemies of the state. They can never “deal” with the enemies of the state without generating new enemies of the state to drive their campaigns of hate and social dominance (and stealing). As soon as the liberals, and the trans people, and the gays, and the people of color, and all the other targets of right-wing hate are dealt with, the fascist state will designate remaining members of the non-oligarch classes to replace them. No matter who you are, and how worshipfully you embrace Big Brother Donny Dum-Dum, you will EVENTUALLY be declared an enemy of the state. It is inevitable. The jaguars WILL always eat YOUR face. Fascism does NOT solve problems, it is a parasite on the body of the nation, stealing its wealth for itself until there is nothing left.

Frogbert included some of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, then continued:

Everyone knows this quote, but few people actually understand it. Everyone empathizes with Niemöller because they want to believe they are the victim of uncontrollable and unaccountable forces arrayed against THEM PERSONALLY, and the want REVENGE for their oppression. So they cling to populist politicians who lie to them and promise that desired revenge, not understanding that it is the oligarchs who control the populist politicians who are their oppressors, not the liberals or the black/gay/trans/whatevers they have been taught to hate.

Frogbert ended with a quote from Winston Churchill: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” Frogbert added, “First or last, the crocodile WILL eat you.” HealthCarewatcher of the Kos community discussed the way Tim Walz is redefining masculinity. The author quoted an article in The American Prospect:

Trump offers young men a fantasy of manhood as an unapologetic assertion of dominance. It’s a vision that celebrates fame and power, aggression, and sex without obligations—the fantasy behind Trump’s taped Access Hollywood line, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

The author encountered that version of masculinity in high school and college as a runner. The scene was extremely homophobic, driven by coaches who wanted to be seen as manly. That culture was so hurtful the author stopped running.

A key facet of Tim Walz' biography is that he was the football coach who walked into that culture and helped students form the straight-gay alliance. He preached tolerance and inclusion and actively tore down a homophobic and bigoted culture. There are LGBTQ running clubs, soccer teams and football teams in rec leagues around the country because guys like Tim Walz tore down a bigoted culture in the mid-2000s and 2010s. When I was watching Tim Walz' interview with Kate Mackz, I realized that he's selling a version of masculinity that is extremely dangerous to Trump. Instead of blaming transgender women for the problems of young men, the way Trump does, Walz is articulating an inclusive vision of masculinity. One where everyone has their place, and using his story to sell it. Struggling to pay for college? I did too, Walz says, I joined the National Guard. Having a hard time finding a job? Become a teacher, the way I did. Having a hard time staying in shape and feeling isolated? Yeah, I did too, I picked up running and met great people Walz says. Essentially he's showing men how they can lead normal lives without being a raving lunatic like Trump, and how that leads to happiness. ...Walz' quiet redefining of masculinity to be more inclusive exposed how Trump's hate and anger leads to the isolation and loneliness that many men are feeling and frustrated with, and how Trump wants to use this hate and anger to get elected but doesn't actually want to solve the underlying problems of income inequality and social isolation.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a remarkable video. The music was “Rey’s Theme” by John Williams (from one of the last three Star Wars movies?) arranged by Williams to feature astronaut Sarah Gillis playing her violin in a Dragon Crew Capsule in space while the orchestral accompaniment was played by orchestras, string ensembles, and brass ensembles in Boston, Brazil, Sweden, Uganda, and Haiti. I think the way it worked was that Gillis’ performance was beamed from (or recorded in) space and the rest of the groups played along with her image and then the recordings of the various groups were mixed together (the sound I heard with a string orchestra in view didn’t sound any different than when the brass ensemble was on screen). However they did it the images and the sound are pretty cool! Fall color is close to its peak in southeast Michigan right now. Since today was sunny, which adds extra brilliance to the leaves, I spent a chunk of my midday walking in a park and soaking in the color.