Sixteen tons and deeper in debt: reflections on the DJT anointing

Sixteen tons and deeper in debt: reflections on the DJT anointing January 20, 2017

The Works Progress Administration reincarnantion
The WPA reincarnation

The theological/anointing/savior themes and subtext leaped from the radio to my ears.


“I didn’t watch it. I’m still in disbelief about it all. Having a hard time accepting this.”

So my hostess said after I arrived in Austin in preparation for the Women’s March on January 21.

I didn’t watch either, but I listened. I listened to the entire thing as I drove from Dallas. Before I left, I noticed that a person on social media has indicated that today would be called “Trumpmas.”

The theological subtext

Yes, indeedy. Trump, the new savior. No need for the Christ Mass, we’ve now got the Trump Mass.

Paula White’s prayer and Franklin Graham’s comments announced the anointing. The United States is the God-ordained and planned City set on a Hill. Trump is God’s latest human incarnation, the current Jesus in the flesh. According to Graham, the rain that started immediately upon DJT’s taking the oath of office was a sign of God’s blessing.

Yep, God did this. Who can argue with that?

The “God directed this” theme scares me badly. Recently, I’ve been reading the story of Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alix. Nicholas was the last Tsar of Russia. He and Alix lived with certainty that God spoke directly to the ruling monarch. That’s a big part of what brought about the revolution that eventually led to the murder of the royal family (Nicholas, Alix and their five children). From this upheaval rose the cruel, repressive, autocratic, murderous Soviet/Russian regime.

Trump now has the surety that he, only he, really has the answers from God for the people of “America” as he called it. I always thought of myself as a citizen of the United States of America. But Trump has much bigger plans. His vision takes in all the Americas.

The theological/anointing/savior themes and subtext leaped from the radio to my ears. I noticed that the commentators I listened to didn’t seem to pick up on them. However, they do not swim in the same theology-laced, god-language world where I spent so many years.

The evangelical/right-wing world is laughing all the way to the bank and to their gold-embossed throne rooms. They have their puppet in place and their minions in seats of power. The world is theirs. They have sold their collective souls to the devil of political power in the most seductive of Faustian bargains. “Just worship me, and the world is yours.”

Sixteen tons and deeper in debt

So, will DJT make a decent president? The people who love him the most are the white males who are feeling the most displaced right now. So, for them, he will make a decent president until they figure out that he can’t bring back the kinds of manufacturing jobs that paid them good wages.

The disillusionment will set in when they discover that the jobs DJT plans to make available for them are going to be low paid, temporary infrastructure rebuilding ones, the kind we hire immigrant labor to do because most US males don’t want them. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) work was last done successfully in the 1930’s by (Democratic) President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The kinds of jobs that would be made available to an uneducated populace for an infrastructure rebuild are repetitive, sometimes dangerous and will require days/weeks/months away from home in dismal labor housing. When one project ends and nothing else is lined up, the workers will discover they have once again sold their souls to the company store.

Their families will pay the price.

And, by the way, there will not be health insurance for them. They’ll only be able to get health care if, miraculously, they have put $10,000 in a health savings account to cover their deductibles. That’s the GOP’s plan for the poor anyway.

DJT insists the past has no relevance anymore. Why? He doesn’t want that part of our history known. Don’t kid yourself. The billionaires he has surrounded himself with will leave office far, far richer. And those he says now have power: perhaps they’ll have the power to figure out how to die decently without adequate incomes or access to health care.

Yep, sixteen tons and deeper in debt. That’s what’ll happen, yet once more.

As always with these prognostications, I hope I am wrong. I hope DJT will step up to the plate with decency and wisdom, that his Cabinet members will have the larger good in mind, that we will recognize that the good of the entire world matters. But I am not optimistic.


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