I really want to remain civil. I really do. I try hard. But in this age of Trump, an era when so many celebrate irrationality, it’s hard to be patient and humane.
I am on Twitter. I like tweeting but probably not as much as your average sparrow does on a typical day. I certainly don’t tweet as much as America’s douchebag president does. (By the way, that’s probably a first for me; I don’t ever remember using the word “douchebag” in anything I’ve ever written.) I do have one rule of thumb while on Twitter: I try to send out things that are not stupid or nonsensical. This puts me automatically at odds with Trump. He seemingly prefers to tweet dumb and absurd things. I recently heard Eugene Robinson, well-known columnist at The Washington Post, say that Trump is certainly venal and probably senile. That sounds about right.
Lately, I’ve gotten my back up against the evangelicals. Many claim to be supporters of an immoral and sadistic president while simultaneously (and piously) referring to themselves as “children of God” or Christians. At least they’ve got the “child” part right. Many are childish, and they see Trump as their “daddy,” the one who’s going to protect them against everything and anything that’s scary (think caravans of scary foreigners coming to America). The question is, who’s going to guard them against daddy. Being children, it’s likely they haven’t gotten that far in their thinking.
When I was a boy and going to church, I naively thought that a person was automatically good because he or she would spend a few hours each week warming a pew in some house of worship. Now that I’m a man, I realize that some of the very worst people warm pews on Sundays.
All this has been a roundabout way to mention that I recently ran across this Baptist preacher who tweets some of the most bigoted, ludicrous, and dishonest stuff you can imagine. His Twitter handle is @SamGipp. In a recent tweet he misquoted George Washington as saying, “When government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms, it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern.” I thought that sounded weird—like some kind of NRA slogan—so I looked it up and found that the authenticity of the quote had been disproved. I pointed this out to Gipp, and after doing so, even more people who’d seen his tweet began to like and retweet it.
This is just plain old weirdness of the weirdest sort. It’s odd that adults, when presented with evidence that contradicts something they believe in, would continue to cling to that which was clearly shown to be crap.
Perhaps it’s a new form of derangement, some kind of Trump Syndrome?
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