Deep breath.  Tryin’ to do better.

Frustrated that some of the Times’ columns are off limits to non-subscribers.  I’ll test the waters for education’s sake:

“In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.

I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should.”

From Frank Bruni’s opinion column in the New York Times today.

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I’m still trying to find out why George W. Bush signed into law a bill requiring the State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism and rate countries annually on their treatment of Jews, over the US State Department’s opposition, saying it was unnecessary as the department already compiles such information in its annual reports on human rights and religious freedom.  True, Bush announced this when he addressed  a crowd in the battleground state of Florida, which has the world’s largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and New York, [Rense.com] so maybe it was just to get the Jewish vote.  The rapidity with which we backed the current Israeli war made me wonder some more.  Was it oil?  A friend suggested it was due to guilt, because the U.S. had turned away a boatload of refugees from Hitler times, but I read up on that and that situation was unclear.

I’m not truly superstitious, but I used to buy books in thrift shops in order to open myself to serendipitous unread books.   Now my serendipity with books is limited to the overflow book shelves in the public library.  My last visit to the library matched me with Diane Ravitch’s 2020 Slaying Goliath (The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools)  and Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy 2006.  (I follow Ravitch’s blog but don’t reblog it ’cause I suspect she doesn’t like to be re-blogged.  (I love it!).

Re Phillips’ book, it made me wonder if our favoritism could be that “U.S. Protestant theology has now refocused itself on the  biblical holy lands as a battlefield is just another of the extraordinary transformations taking place on account of the influence of religion on American politics and war.”  Christian Nationalism sprang forth after the book was published, I figure, because it is not listed in his large Index.

Phillips writes that “many  in the Christian Right appear to have a larger purpose, perhaps related to preparation for the rapture, the tribulation, and Armageddon. Some 40 percent of Americans…believe that the antichrist is alive and already on the earth.”  He refers to Paul Boyer, who dates evangelical preoccupation with the Middle East back half a century, stirred by the creation of Israel in 1948, then by the expansion of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, all key end times signs.  “Islam’s evil role, says Boyer, is an ancient view in Christian eschatology.”

I’ve mentioned my lack of some important education in the past, and this is where I am ignorant, also.  I’m not sure how merging Christian Evangelism with the Jewish holy land go together.  If I’m missing something obvious, please tell me.

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ASHAMED….

to be an American?  I never thought I would be, but how else can I respond to the huge Republican push to re-elect such a man?  I have no words for any justification.  I won’t think further on it, but there it is.

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QUOTATION

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” —Oscar Wilde via Google