No Kings, No ICE, No Trump - The Whites Only Political Jamboree Of A Small Southern Town

Bridget Pitcher fixed the last of the cucumber sandwiches, poured the unsweet tea into thermoses, and fixed her hair.  This was to be the rally of the year, an all-purpose, big tent affair where everyone from her small Mississippi town would come out to protest the antics of Donald Trump. 

Bridget had arranged protests before - the last one that made the Columbus Dispatch was Occupy Wall Street, a heady affair to protest the concentration of wealth in the New York investment banks and to proclaim a new era of redistribution. 

That event was less well attended than Bridget had hoped, for someone had brought up the fact that Morgan Stanley had invested millions in Columbus Iron and Steel - a failing business unable to keep up with the robotic age and still noisy with lathes, mechanical presses, and power drills. 

'Invest' is not quite accurate - Morgan Stanley bought up Columbus Iron and Steel, reconfigured it completely, balanced robotics with skilled labor, and under a new name, Columbus Dynamics, Inc., hired two hundred workers. 

That and the fact that workers' 301k retirement accounts were flush with cash thanks to the surging stock market, made possible by Wall Street investment, dampened enthusiasm for the protest.

'These Jewish bankers don't keep their money under the mattress', said Alden Phillips, haberdasher, civic leader, and pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of Aberdeen. 

It was not a question of antisemitism because ninety-nine percent of the town knew that Jews were responsible for the ungodly trash coming out of Hollywood, why it was difficult to get a homeowner's loan, and how Congress had been bought by George Soros, the Rothschilds, and the Jewish bankers of Florence. 

Yet here was Phillips saying that if the Jews wanted to invest their money in Columbus, the town should take it and send them flowers, not protest the 'fulcrums of productivity', one of his stock phrases spoken from the pulpit when it came to Jesus and the Baptist Church. 

One member of the committee to organize the Occupy Wall Street protests suggested, given the idea by Phillips, that the town should be protesting the international Jewish conspiracy which was at the heart of most of America's problems. 

Bridget took the floor to politely disagree.  The Jewish conspiracy angle was a good one, but what the town was protesting was Wall Street's manipulative powers, the dangers of concentration of wealth, and the cabal of trigger happy capitalists ready to make a buck - Columbus Iron and Steel notwithstanding. 

The skein of wool, however, came unraveled, and no one could agree on just what Occupy Wall Street was or what was the purpose of the protest, so although the event went on as planned, attendance was desultory at best. 

The No Kings rally that Bridget organized was far more successful.  She recruited everyone - Walmart greeters and checkout clerks, dime store cashiers, telephone linemen, and housewives, all of whom were convinced by Bridget's impassioned appeal - Donald Trump was an autocrat, a dictator in waiting, a man bound and determined to become king, establish an imperial kingdom, and destroy democracy. 

No Kings had a nice ring to it, something more palpable and immediate than the Wall Street thing, and so it was that a good crowd, still more sparse than Bridget had hoped came out on a bright May Sunday to protest. 

As the townspeople joined the procession from the four corners of the town and from nearby Westport and Aberdeen, Bridget's colleague from the local community college said, 'I see nary a black face', and in fact none had any intention of showing up.  Although the town was now over 40 percent black, few showed any interest in Bridget's politics and less in her public assemblies.  

Years after slavery and Jim Crow, black people were still yessum and no suh darktown tarpaper shack nonvoting residents, contributing nothing in the way of taxes, leadership, ownership, or responsibility; so it was no wonder that not a soul among them had any interest in wasting a Saturday afternoon baking in the sun for some white cockamamie nonsense. 

This time around - that is, for this Big Tent affair which was going to be one grand, one-size-fits-all protest against Trump and for the environment, the black man, and the transgender - Bridget made a special effort to rally the black community. 

'I don't do no faggot shit', said Pharoah Jones to which Bridget smiled and quickly made her exit.  It took quite an effort to get her out of her white neighborhood, but in the interest of solidarity and communal solidarity she made the trip.

'I'll never do that again', she confided to her colleague.  'It was awful'.  She and the Big Tent organizers had to be satisfied with a whites only crowd. 'Just like the old days', said Bridget's 100 year old grandmother who remembered the white settled time before the diversity hoopla. 

Bridget promised to wheel her to the best street corner to watch the march, and would set up her own beach umbrella and make her special sweet tea. 

The police closed Main Street between 4th and 15th to make way for the parade, refreshment stands were set up at convenient intervals, and the football field at the high school where marchers were to end up, listen to speeches, and cheer, was festooned with banners, flags, balloons, and signs. 

There was no particular order to the event - no particular corner of the field for climate, another for black rights, and another for the gender spectrum - so it was a hodge-podge of parochial protests.  Nevertheless the spirt of protest was universal and engaging.  People hugged each other, commiserated, and prayed together.

'What is the purpose of the event', Bridget was asked by a Dispatch reporter.  'What do you intend to accomplish?'.  The reporter was recently hired by the paper because of his credentials.  He had been a journalism major at Columbia but wanted to return South to his roots.  It was a Northern, Jewish question, and Bridget fumbled and scrambled until she gathered herself and said it was about America and the dangerous direction it was taking.

The reporter, despite his polite, genteel Southern upbringing had forgotten his manners during his years in New York and pursued the issue until Bridget blurted out, 'You know quite well, sonny' and walked away. 

The whole event was not about meaning or purpose but about solidarity, camaraderie, and togetherness.  Piqued and upset by the interview, she went back to her cucumber sandwiches and hand-painted signs until her anger passed. 

This event, supposed to be the jewel in the crown, was even less attended than No Kings.  It was a ragtag affair at best, only half of the sandwiches got eaten, most marchers gave up even before they got to the football field, and the speakers spoke to only a scattering of diehard believers. 

When she was approached by a progressive community organizer from Jackson to organize another event to protest the wars in Gaza and Iran, she demurred.  

She never gave up her passion for progressive causes, and wrote letters to the editor of the Dispatch on a weekly basis, but all in all she retired her public persona and tended to her husband, Irish Setter, and two grandchildren.

The Senator's Fortune - How A Canny Politician Made Millions From The Gold Mine Of Political Office

The most liberal Senators in Congress - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren among them - have three houses, a multi-million dollar bank accounts, and a quite handsome lifestyle. Some like these two have been in office for decades and in so doing have managed to acquire considerable wealth.  What they declare is a fraction of their total worth, for canny investment counselling comes with the turf.  

It is rumored that Sanders has untraceable accounts in Aruba, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Bimini.  It might not be the wealth of Croesus, but when Sanders eventually retires, he will be able to live high off the hog. 

All this might be expected from  a conservative Senator whose contributors are numbered among the top corporations in the country.  A little walkin' around money to grease the wheels of government in their favor was well worth the investment; but for a diehard socialist, a man who every day preaches taxation of the rich, redistribution of wealth, and punitive financial restrictions on Wall Street investment unlimited offshore wealth is unexpected. 

This is a story not of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but of another Senator who flew beneath the watchdog radar, who was marvelously ingenious about diversifying his sources of income, his investments, and his very unique and profitable financial instruments.  

This tale will be about how he managed to acquire vast undetected wealth.  His time may come, so adept is he at this subtle chicanery that decades may go by without federal investigation and indictment, but while he is still as free as a bird and enjoying his wealth, the story begs telling.  

Senator X - or 'Bob' as he will be called here - was from a small farm community typical of many in rural America a few decades ago but disappearing quickly as agribusiness bulldozes family farms and employs fancy robotics to till, sow, and harvest all in the corporate interest. 

Rather than be discouraged by this commercial juggernaut, he was impressed by how efficiently wealth was created.  His father had worked long, hard hours just to keep his head above water, secure the land, the farmhouse, the livestock, and his reputation; while in one fell swoop the multinational company with its bottomless resources, paid bottom dollar to family farmers, deployed their high-tech machinery, turned unprofitable wheat fields into soy and corn acreage for processing and export to China. 

Money was to be made in America, easy money, and it only took enterprise, a feel for risk and opportunity, and a silver tongue. Investments came forthwith to those with a tale of profit to tell. 

He decided early on that politics would be his path to fortune. He would benefit from the wealth of others rather than have to create it himself.  Political office was exactly the place, for the more he studied the mechanics of politics  - how to win, how to stay in power, and how to enrich yourself while doing the nation's business - the more he was convinced this was the path he would take. 

He was smart enough to earn a scholarship to a well-known private university where he majored in finance, went on to business school where he honed his financial talents and studied both the legitimate operations of high-end investment and the schemes of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, and Enron.  There was little difference between the two - only a question of which side of street you were working. 

As a promising intern for the Congressman from his district who happened to be a member of the powerful Ways and Means committee, Bob learned the intricacies of federal revenue, investment, and rate of return.  Not surprisingly the mechanisms of financial management in the private sector were the inverse of the private.  No one cared about results only the appearance of doing good, doing the right thing.  A hundred million dollars could be allocated and disbursed with good will and heady promises, and then forgotten until it was time to reallocate more funds. 

'Tricks of the trade', the Congressman shared with his ambitious intern turned aide thanks to his quickness and financial acumen.  Disbursed monies were not exactly forgotten, especially his favorite, 'block grants' made to states for a particular purpose but not tied to any particular project - i.e. none of the usual rigmarole require for specific grants. Governors knew the value of such block grants, cash cows they were for them and their retirement accounts. 

It was understood that a certain proportion of each block grant would come back to its Congressional sponsor - in this case Bob's Congressman - and everyone would be happy. 

The case of the recently unearthed Somali scandal in Minnesota was a case in point. A portion of the millions that were granted to the Somali fraudsters came from federal grants. The Democrat administration of Joe Biden was eager to put money where its mouth was, stop talking about diversity and inclusivity and invest in it.  As usual there was 'leakage' all along the way and politicians from influential Congressional committees to state and municipal authorities took a cut. 

How, Bob wondered, could he take advantage of both corporate America's wealth and influence, and the bounty of unaccountable progressive largesse?  He could become an Independent, but would be cut off from the centers of partisan power; and in these days of divisive political alignment, being a moderate anything was not in the cards; but if he played these cards carefully - for example convincing corporate interests that he would drag his feet on restrictive legislation and at the same time promising poor constituents of his passion for social reform - he could make money. 

The American electorate, as credulous and gullible any, first voted Bob to the House and then to the Senate.  He ran brilliant campaigns promising something for all.  'I am a man of the people', he said, 'all people' and went on to detail how he would work with both the private sector and local community organizations to make the state a more productive, equitable place.  It was marvelous, and people of his state were taken in hook, line, and sinker.  

Now, kickbacks - the stock in trade of any enterprise - cannot be the crude cash-in-envelopes for Senators as they are for municipal aldermen, ward council members, or mayors; but given the high-tech, sophistication of online, encrypted, coded transfers, money 'exchange' can go undetected. 

To go into politics, one has to leave moral concerns at the door.  There is no place for whining about doing the right thing. Bob's intricate schemes did no harm, were part of the cost of doing business, were pieces of the 'share and share alike' ethos of American public service and corporate enterprise - so even if he did care about ethics, which he didn't - he would be covered. 

For all of his years in office, he pleased both progressive activists and corporate investors.  He was the go-to man for all comers.  There were always accounting loopholes in federal allocation and disbursement rules, and Bob learned how to take advantage of all of them.  He continued on his way, charming and charmed, feathering his nest, and accumulating a wealth beyond the dreams of any Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. 

He was beyond suspicion and beyond reproach. If your intention when becoming a politician is to make money, just like any other American entrepreneur, then you spend your time and best efforts in so doing.  Governance is simply a matter of covering all bases. 

So when Bob retired, he was feted, honored, and praised.  There'll never be another one like him, the people of his state all said in unison.  They were surprised when he did not return home after resigning from the Senate and found his residency in the small Caribbean island of Bequia unusual; but little did they know.  A tax haven, a convenient private airport from which he could fly to the rich watering holes of Miami, Rio, St. Bart's, and St. Thomas, Bequia was the perfect place for him. 

Visitation - Why Earthlings Need Aliens, Lourdes, And Miracles

Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells his brother that Jesus Christ sold out the world when he met the Devil in the Judean desert.  'Man does not live by bread alone', he told the Devil who offered him riches beyond imagining, but in so doing he made promises which he could not keep.  Man needed bread, didn't have it, led a life misery, pain, and misfortune, and with his divine power he could have set the world straight. 

 

Miracles, mystery, and authority was what he gave, and because of it the Church - a manipulative, exploitive, authoritarian - arrogated to itself authority for all moral and ethical principle.  To maintain its power, it gave the credulous, deceived, and ignorant masses what Christ promised, but did nothing to alleviate their suffering - to ease the earthly pain which was humanity's hallmark.

And so it was that Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima was said to be seen in grottos in France and Portugal, and why saints were granted the right to heaven thanks to the miracles that they performed; and all through this magic, this vaudevillian show of immense appeal, the Church grew to a size and importance which challenged kings. 

Alyosha, Ivan's devoutly religious brother is shocked at Ivan's apostasy.  Alyosha has given his whole life to Christ, had believed completely in Christ's divine mission to offer salvation, redemption, and forgiveness of sins. 

'Ha', said Ivan, unconvinced and cynical of his brother's piety and went on to tell of the most horrendous, brutal, and inhuman treatment of children in the world - beatings, rapes, forced labor, starvation, and early death.  Christ said, 'Let the children suffer unto me', but behind this seemingly innocent and generous gesture, this expression of love and kindness, lay the most duplicitous deceit.  Christ could have eliminated suffering and yet he made it a pillar of the Church. 

To each and every one of Ivan's accusations of Christ's bribery - giving candy to childlike believers but deceiving them in his real intent by offering spiritual renewal and a place beside the Lord, Alyosha could only respond with the simplistic, superficial, patently false platitudes of the Church. 

The story of Christianity is a remarkable one - the evangelism of St. Paul who travelled from Palestine to Rome, preaching the gospel of hope and establishing churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Corinth, small household gatherings of those whose lives held nothing but penury, sickness, and death. 

These churches could not be left on their own in an age of apostasy, so priests were created, and when the churches grew in number they were given bishops, then archbishops, then cardinals and popes. A quite secular, geopolitical, authoritative institution was created. 

And still the credulous masses blessed themselves, told ordained priests their sins, believed whole-heartedly in the pagan ceremony of transubstantiation, turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ as asking believers to 'eat of it'. 

This ritual sacrifice was to evoke the suffering of Christ on the cross where he died a painful, suffocating death.  Suffering had become the mainstay of the Church - a necessary feature of life to make one worthy of admission to heaven. 

Muslims deny that this painful, torturous death on the cross never occurred.  How could the Almighty permit such barbaric treatment of one of his prophets?  How could suffering be made the central feature of human life? 

Yet this was the genius of the Catholic Church - by making suffering the cornerstone of salvation, it was not obliged to relieve it in any way, and so the credulous became even more so.  Every new infliction of pain had divine purpose. 

The Church also knew that it could not sustain its majesty without proof, and so invented the ideas of mystery and miracles.  Go to Lourdes, the Vatican said, and there witness the magnificence of the Virgin Mary come down to earth as a messenger of Our Lord and Savior, and come to Holy Mass to witness the invocation of Christ through symbols, metaphor, verse, and magic. 

Protestant fundamentalism took a page out of the Vatican's book but added a note of urgency.  If you read the Bible, believed in its inerrancy, prayed, and took Jesus as your personal savior, he might well come to you - a visitation, an invitation to glory. 

In churches all over the South, congregants became ecstatic with unbounded joy when they saw Jesus appear before them.  Heaven was real, they now knew, and their path there was assured. 

Over the centuries the spiritual authority of the Church and in fact belief in God himself waned, and the most recent statistics confirm that much of Northern Europe is agnostic, demurring when asked the question, 'Do you without reservation believe in God'; but in Mississippi and Alabama there are no such doubts and questions about divinity are considered traitorous apostasy. 

Yet modernization - what closed the door on spiritual cant in Scandinavia - will happen in Mississippi and Alabama and the thousands of churches that seem to be everywhere will disappear. 

But the Church knew something about human nature and the desire of human beings to believe in something bigger than themselves.  There is no way that human beings could have no need for divine authority, a higher intelligence, a superior force. 

Conservative critics have noted the erosion of a central Christian ethos in America - one, universally accepted credo that unified the varied and diversified population of the nation.  It was there at the heart of the Republic when created after Independence, God-given rights, the declarers of freedom said, drawing inspiration from European Enlightenment. 

Now America is a playing field of secular identities, promoted as the new ethos.  Diversity, equity, and inclusivity became the mantra of the new Left.  God is immaterial, unnecessary, supernumerary in the struggle for a utopian, secular reality. 

The Left of course - like its Communist forbears - wants the State to assume the mantel of absolute authority, and progressives have preached the gospel of statism.  There is nothing that government cannot do, and in an ironic reprise of Dostoevsky, certainly more than God can provide. 

Americans of every living generation grew up on comic books, and alien invasion was a common theme.  Creatures from outer space, fleeing their own dying planet were looking for new worlds to conquer, and earth with its verdant landscapes, abundant water, and generous climes was the perfect place.  These creatures were superior in all ways, but human beings always found ways around their dazzling intelligence and superpowers. 

Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 - A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick turned it into an iconic movie about human contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  This story was a sophisticated antithesis to the dime store fantasies of the day.  It suggested that the universe did indeed contain intelligences far more advanced and superior to our own - intelligences which had evolved far beyond physical form and space and were simply pure intelligence, existing everywhere. 

Clarke admitted that he found inspiration in Hinduism where God is simply the One, a universal, inexplicable force that suffuses the universe with its being.  Hindus despite the profusion of their many gods is a profoundly monotheistic religion.  Siva, Krishna, Vishnu, Ganesh, and all the other gods are but manifestations of the One, the understandable transformation of the unknowable into knowable form. 

These more sophisticated notions often do not find currency in Christian America.  Judeo-Christian tradition insists on palpability, knowability, approachability, fear, respect, and duty.  God and Moses talk to each other in Exodus.  God wants Moses to lead his chosen people out of Egypt, but Moses says he is not worthy.  He stutters, is just a poor man, and not a leader. 

God and Job speak.  Job wonders why he has been chosen by God to suffer so.  What have I done? he asks God, but God refuses to answer and send another pestilence to test Job. 

All of this leads to the obvious question - if all human societies, every last one has believed in religion, deities, higher powers, supreme, authoritative intelligences, can our modern one survive without it?  Can there ever be a completely atheistic, secular society that lives and breathes on its own?

The Russian Communists tried.  Marx and Engels conceived of a utopian secular society without God. God and belief in him were obstacles to progress; and American progressives are no different.  Yet religious belief persists, at least in pockets especially in the South.  What has always been a human need cannot easily be eradicated.   

 

There has been talk recently of UFOs, and the current administration has promised to open formerly secret files about them, giving at least some currency to the notion of extraterrestrial, highly intelligent life.  

And what if there were some truth to the rumors?  Given Clarke and Kubrick - and Hinduism - it seems highly unlikely that aliens of a supreme intelligence would be riding around in flying saucers. 

Nevertheless Christian fundamentalists are preparing for first contact and deciding how they would evangelize these alien visitors.  The assumption that a human god - Jesus Christ - a very accessible divinity with human and celestial origins but very much from our planet could have relevance for a evanescent, transcendent intelligence is arrogant and presumptuous at best; but that is the nature of true belief.  An absolute conviction of rightness. 

The advance of Artificial Intelligence adds a new twist to Ivan Karamazov and his cynical dismissal of Christianity.  Before long AI will become more than human.  In its self-replicability, its boundless intelligence and complete authority it will become God, perhaps not worshipped but accepted as a higher power. 

Only time will tell.  Believers insist there is a God, an all knowing, all powerful being; but have a tough time distinguishing it from a future, although not so remote artificial intelligence.  God has always been a human abstract if not a creation, so let's see what new form 'he' will take.