Setting half the trends we know

Setting half the trends we know April 15, 2015

• Jack Jenkins summarizes some of the many, many, many reasons it’s absurd for anti-gay white American evangelicals to fantasize about themselves as the second coming of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I’m pretty sure that deep down, they know this too. At some level, at least, they recognize that their claim to be just like Bonhoeffer is no different from someone introducing himself as a “Level 22 half-elf magic user.” It’s just a game where they invent monsters so that they can pretend to be the hero fighting them.

So the bad news for Rick Scarborough and Eric Metaxas and the rest is that their self-aggrandizing self-deception isn’t fooling anybody other than them. But the good news, I guess, is that at least they can say that Tom Hanks played them in the TV movie of their lives.

Two of these guys are still acting.
Two of these guys are still acting.

• Semi-related: Whatever happened to Chris Makepeace? IMDB and Wikipedia don’t seem to know.

Sen. Mark Kirk stepped in it. The Illinois Republican was trying to express his concern for “helping the African-American community,” but wound up instead demonstrating that he automatically thinks of that community as a Them separate from some undifferentiated white Us.

Kirk said his goal was to help “the black community” so that it would no longer be “the one we drive faster through.”

What you mean “we,” Kemosabe? For Kirk, there’s “we” Americans. And then there’s those people, over there, whose neighborhoods “we” are scared to drive through.

Kirk’s unconscious admission/othering is a version of the same thing Ben Moberg rightly complains about in a recent Time magazine cover contrasting “The Attack on Gay Rights” with “The Attack on Believers.” Two wholly distinct categories. No LGBT people are “believers” and no “believers” are LGBT.

That’s objectively inaccurate. It’s not just rude, it’s also factually untrue.

• Speaking of objective, measurable, demonstrable facts, here’s a question: Does Jordan have a nuclear arsenal?

For those who live here in reality, the answer is clearly No. Jordan does not have a nuclear arsenal.

But those who don’t much care for reality and instead prefer the World’s Worst Books and the delirious fantasies of Tim LaHaye, the Rev. Tim Johnson of Countryside Baptist Church in Parke County, Indiana, offers an alternative answer. Johnson, who has inexplicably been given a newspaper column, says that the question of Jordan’s nuclear arsenal can’t be answered by worldly methods like looking to see whether or not the country has or wants any nukes. Johnson says we should, instead, turn to the Bible — grabbing little bits of Ezekiel, Revelation, Amos and the Psalms, mincing them, shuffling them together, and then sort of squinting a bit — to conclude that, yes, in fact, Jordan is prophetically predestined to have nuclear bombs and to use them, somewhat recklessly, against the neighboring country upwind of them.

• Semi-related: The Anti-Christ Handbook: Vol. 1 is still available for just $3.99 from Amazon.

• “In the same period (actually, 2001- April, 2015) US deaths-in-action in Iraq and Afghanistan total 5374. Saddam and his army, the Taliban, ISIL and all the rest have killed, at a minimum, ~two hundred fewer Americans than our domestic police.”

Dave Lartigue looks back at 1983’s self-titled album from the Violent Femmes, which is still — to me too — an irresistible piece of adolescent pop-punk delight.

I got it from Amy, one of the more “rebellious” kids in our fundamentalist church youth group. She bought it on vinyl, but she couldn’t keep it because her parents regularly inspected her music for anything unacceptable. Their idea of unacceptable was “hard rock” like Petra or the Resurrection Band, or any post-Age to Age Amy Grant. The Femmes would’ve gotten her grounded for life.

So I made a cassette of the album for her and labeled it something like “Twila Paris: The Warrior Is a Child.” And I still have the vinyl.

(If somehow you’re reading this, Ames, thank you. And I can return the record if you want. Probably safe now.)

 


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