To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies

I saw the play Beautiful Thing at the Ringwald last evening. It was, alas, not the great production like I had experienced at the Ringwald before. Part of it is the Ringwald’s new location. They gave up a space with perhaps a hundred seats and moved into a community room with 40 seats at Affirmations, the LGBTQ community center in Ferndale. I’m sure this is a big win for Affirmations. The directors of the Ringwald are a gay couple, so their types of plays fit well with Affirmations. Part of it is the Ringwald box office (a woman standing at a desk) didn’t know what to do with the cash I handed her and one saw the program by scanning a QR code with their phone (I rarely take my phone with me). And part of it is the play. The story takes place mostly in the common yard of three adjacent row houses in London. Jamie is 15 and lives in the right house with his mother Sondra and her boyfriend Tony, only a dozen years older than Jamie. In the middle house lives Leah (I think that’s her name, I don’t have a program to check) who lives with her mother, whom we never see. Leah is about the same age as Jamie and has some sort of medical condition (the show opens with Leah filling a pill reminder) that keeps her out of school. In the left house is Ste (short for Steven), also 15, who lives with his father and brother (occasionally heard, but not seen). Dysfunctional families all around. Ste’s dad is violent, so Ste frequently sleeps in Jamie’s bed. At first, sleep is the operative word. But soon they realize they’re attracted to each other. Then they, especially Ste, are terrified of their parents finding out. I think the acting was decent. But the production had me thinking it was the quality of a college production, not a professional theater. I wonder if my displeasure was because there was too much focus on Leah and her issues and that prevented a fuller exploration and resolution of the relationship between Jamie and Ste. The show plays weekends through the end of the month. I finished the book Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. This is the sequel to her book Parable of the Sower, which I wrote about back in November. In the first book Lauren, a black girl, grew up in a walled community, not because she was rich, but because the surrounding Los Angeles area was quite dangerous. While there she started developing the philosophy of Earthseed. Then disaster struck. She fled with a few survivors and walked north, gathering a community around her for protection as she went. The first book ended as they reached land in northern California owned by the man who became her husband. At the start of the second book, five years later in the year 2032, her community has established Acorn, where they live according to the ways of Earthseed. Running for president that year is Andrew Steele Jarrett, a pastor who is preaching (all his campaign speeches are really sermons) that America is in such a bad position because the country has turned its back on God. We’ve met this type in real life. In describing his campaign Lauren actually uses the phrase “Make America Great Again.” That’s a lot of foresight for a book published in 1998. Jarrett becomes president because so many people think the country needs a strongman to put things rights. Voters don’t realize he has his own view of what putting right means. Shortly after taking office Jarrett establishes the Christian American Church. A few months after that some of Jarrett’s goons invade Acorn because Earthseed is definitely not Christian, so must be heathen and residents need to be educated in proper Christian theology. That’s another way of saying the invaders are using God as a cover for inflicting their cruelty. What they do is illegal, but there is no one to stop them. Jarrett disavows connection to the goons, but doesn’t condemn them. Those that survive the invasion are enslaved and their children taken to be raised by proper Christian families. That includes Lauren’s two month old daughter. The rest of the book is about Lauren surviving slavery, trying to find her daughter, and trying to come up with a way of spreading her Earthseed philosophy. The title comes from the book of Matthew in the Bible. I’ll summarize: Just before a business man leaves on a trip he gives one servant five talents, another two, and another one. The servant given five earns five more. The one given two earns two more. The one given a single talent hides it so it isn’t stolen yet doesn’t earn even interest. When the business man returns he praises the efforts of those who now have ten and four talents. But he is quite angry with the servant who does nothing with the one talent. Scholars say the story works well both with talent referring to a unit of money and with our modern definition of a skill which a person does well. In that second meaning we each have things we are good at. We must develop them and use them for the community. In the context of the book Lauren’s talent is this philosophy she assembled and feels she must spread to the wider world. I like the Earthseed philosophy, at least the verses that are in the book. The basic idea is that change happens and one must figure out how to manage the change and perhaps direct it. At the top of her verses are: God is Change. One is changed by God and one can change God. There is also a Destiny that humanity must spread to the stars. Here’s another verse that is in the book just before Acorn is attacked. I think is quite appropriate for our election year.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Back in November I wrote about the first book:

Butler said she had taken the condition of the country in the early 1990s and projected the prevailing forces out to their logical end. She then set the story in ... 2024. As in next [now this] year. At the time it was published critics declared it to be farfetched, especially in such a short timeline. They said civilization can’t collapse that quickly. More recent critics, with the benefit of 25 years of history, said: Oh, that’s how.

Our own nasty guy isn’t a Christian (or at least is quite bad at following Christian principles). Otherwise he is quite similar to Jarrett. But the nasty guy has Christian Nationalist friends who are like Jarrett. For example... Last Tuesday Hunter of Daily Kos wrote about Russell Vought. He was budget director under the nasty guy and current president of the Center for Renewing America, pushing for the adoption of Christian Nationalism. He also has an advisory role in Project 2025 being developed by the Heritage Foundation as a guide on how the next Republican president can become dictator. Bucks County Beacon journalist Jennifer Cohn uncovered documents from CRA claiming to be a draft Statement of Christian Nationalism & the Gospel. Hunter summarized:

The self-described Christian nationalists defining the term don’t envision some ambiguous version of "religious freedoms" that need to be protected. Instead, they are demanding our nation's government be torn down and replaced with a version in which their preferred "Church" will ordain public servants who will enforce Christian theocratic law and "squelch" any Americans who engage in "disobedience" against their plan, which is written in plain English. It's a plan for violence-minded theocratic rule that’s little different from the one Iranians are victims of. It also mirrors what conservative religious extremists have long frothed about as the supposed future non-Christian Americans have been trying to bring about, simply by existing.

These are the people near the nasty guy who say, if reelected, he has full authority to shape the government in their vision. Republicans are enthusiastically endorsing it. Yeah, all that sounds like Andrew Steele Jarrett. Last Monday Mark Sumner of Kos posted what looks to be the start of a regular series of “stories to know.” One of these stories is the one by the Bucks County Beacon with the implied question of why isn’t the rest of the news media ignoring this story. It should be on page one! Another story Sumner mentioned is from Talking Points Memo and is about the Society for American Civic Renewal that is not secret in their discussion of a “national divorce” also known as a second Civil War. No surprise they have strong opinions on race and sexual orientation. And we can easily guess what those opinions are. A third story to mention is about something Liz Cheney and the nasty guy agree, amazing as that sounds. They agree that the current Republican Party belongs to the nasty guy and those he pushes out will need a new party. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community started a post with a serious question by comedian Noel Casler:

How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?

Hartmann then listed 27 thing that are worse in Republican controlled states. The list includes spousal abuse, obesity, smoking, teen pregnancy, abortion, bankruptcies and poverty, homicide, infant mortality, divorce, contaminated water, opiate addiction and deaths, unskilled workers, wealth inequality, homelessness, unemployment, and people on disability.

Is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes? It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections. Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in. We’ve seen it over and over again around the world: it’s happening today in India, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary, for example. And the GOP has spent the past 40+ years marinating itself in both.

Hartmann then gave a history, going back 60 years, back to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater refusing to support the Civil Rights Act. Then came Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Add to that using abortion as a campaign issue in the 1980s as the Republican Party began to combine with religious conservatives. Then came demonization of liberals, and attacks on science and on public education. The other big thread in this history was Reagan’s embrace of oligarchs – him giving them tax cuts, them giving him donations now called “free speech.”

The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.