NOTE: I’m away from home and away from the computer for a few days, so this post was pre-scheduled to appear several days ago. It’s always a bit tricky scheduling posts this way because there’s a chance that some big breaking news story between when this was written and when it gets posted will make the discussion below seem inappropriate or irrelevant. Like, if something tragic happens to Kevin Sorbo or J.D. Vance between now and when you read this, I may have to later apologize for goofing on them here so soon afterward. Or if there’s, like, some big natural disaster or violent horror, then everything below may come across as callous or uncaring. Hopefully, though, no such tragedies will occur during the few days I’m away and no physical harm will come to either Peanut or JV in the meantime.
• White evangelicals in America love nothing more than a persecution-complex fantasy. See, for example, the “Letter from 2012” James Dobson wrote in 2008, warning white Christians of the dire persecution they were certain to face if they did not rally to elect the white party’s candidate instead of the evil persecutor of Christians, Barack Obama. Dobson warned that if real, true white Christians did not rally to defeat Obama, the government would begin jailing pastors, closing churches, and outlawing the Bible and America in 2012 would be a dystopian hellscape.
When the real 2012 arrived, none of the predictions that Dobson had assured his donors would happen had happened. But instead of apologizing for having been so utterly, absurdly wrong, he instead doubled down, saying that if white Christians didn’t rally to prevent Obama’s re-election, then by 2016 the government would surely begin jailing pastors, closing churches, and outlawing the Bible.
For the record, Obama served another four years as president and none of Dobson’s fantasies or prophecies came true. This was horribly disappointing for both Dobson and his followers. They’d really gotten their hopes up that, at last, something exciting was going to happen that would give their lives purpose. They still resent Obama for refusing to play the role they had scripted in their fantasies in which they would all get to be outlaw evangelists on the run and, therefore, so much cooler and more heroic than what they otherwise knew themselves to be.
But even though Joe Biden also let them down by refusing to jail pastors or outlaw the Bible, these Christians are still hopeful that someday, in the not-too-distant future, some president will come through for them by, at last, persecuting them. That’s why they’re eating up the new movie Disciples in the Moonlight.
That sounds like either a Cinemax After Dark production or an alternate title for Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. But it’s a low-budget “thriller” based on Bible camp campfire stories:
In the not-too-distant future the Bible has been outlawed in the United States of America and replaced with a government approved bible. A group of seven Christians from Indiana, are asked to smuggle the true Word of God to underground churches in Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio. With Homeland Security hot on their trail, the smugglers must be willing to risk it all for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Ugh. On the plus side, though, at least Disciples in the Moonlight wasn’t produced by Epoch Studios, which is the case of the other big white evangelical persecution-complex fantasy released this year, the Kevin Sorbo vehicle Firing Squad: “Evangelicals promote Falun Gong-backed movie.”
Yes, the “Epoch” there is the same as in the “Epoch Times,” the shady, conspiracy-theorist, right-wing, eugenicist news outlet linked to Falun Gong. Oh, and Cuba Gooding Jr. and Eric Roberts are also in this thing, somehow.
These are bad movies, but they’ll both make a profit. They’re not made for an audience that’s looking for good story-telling, only for stories that flatter them. These do, so that audience will be thrilled.
• “Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban.”
Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries. …
The 13 books could be banned under House bill 29, which became effective from 1 July, because they were considered to contain “pornographic or indecent” material. The list “will likely be updated as more books begin to meet the law’s criteria,” according to PEN America. …
Implementation guidelines say that banned materials must be “legally disposed of” and “may not be sold or distributed.” PEN America Freedom to Read program director Kasey Meehan said that such “vague” guidelines will “undoubtedly result in dumpsters full of books that could otherwise be enjoyed by readers” and that while they stop short of “calling for book burning, the effect is the same: a signal that some books are too dangerous.”
So now I’m picturing another movie about a rag-tag group of underground smugglers. It’s just like Disciples in the Moonlight, except in this one they’re trying to smuggle copies of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret into the hands of middle-schoolers in Salt Lake City.
• Going with the News12NJ headline for this one on my home-town’s hero: “Dunellen’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaks her own world record, wins Olympic gold again in 400-meter.”
Biggest thing for the town I grew up in since that episode of The Honeymooners in which Jackie Gleason tried to buy the Dunellen Hotel.
• I’ve written before about Dorothy Thompson’s mordant, insightful 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?” (see “Humility Is Not Humiliation“), which is always worth re-reading. But as others have recently pointed out, Thompson’s profile of “Mr. C.” almost reads like an excerpt from Hillbilly Elegy:
Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.
• The title for this post is, again, from the Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon.” Here it is covered by Mandy Moore.
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