The Journal

Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

March 23rd

W.W.J.B.?

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

The twenty twenty election now, to most... even the Republican candidate in New Hampshire... interred in History’s grave (to some, the dirt a-rumbling still with cries and whispers of fraud and deceit) as talk rolls round to whom as God will be endorsing in inevitable go-round next (after the plague is done with and if the war don’t roast us all). Might find the answer in the merchandising and marketing. Famously responding to a question that he’s “not sure” if he’s ever asked forgiveness from God, last time out, ex-President Trump asserted: “I have a great relationship with God,” adding that the Chosen One did not regret certain previous remarks. “I have a great relationship with evangelicals. In fact, nationwide, I’m up by a lot, I’m leading everybody.” Didn’t stop him from greenlighting that Capitol necktie party for the Almighty’s beloved Mike Pence, or Reverend Hoon from stabbing Djonald in the back with his encyclical about a resurrection in 2024 and throwing his collar to Austin Tillerman if Trump wins out again… or if Joe catches a cold, leaving Kamala stretching her own neck to finish first in a neck and neck against Marianne Williamson, for Kali’s sake, or rising Republican star Tulsi Gabbard.

"Of all the bad men," Christian writer C. S. Lewis once observed, "religious bad men are the worst!"

Lewis warn't no Unitarian bed-hopper with crooked teeth, oozing sores and Fabian sympathies... he was a churchgoing Ulster Prod, bigoted to the marrow, and he wrote about bad religious people because he knew plenty of 'em, all across the board. He remains perennial, though dead more than a half a century and change (since that infamous November 22nd, 1963, in the company of JFK and the perennial philosopher Aldous Huxley, whom he despised), in that the lively trade of interpreting the word of God to the credulous hasn't diminished one decibel. In fact, it's grown, rather to the volume of that bass drum phalanx during Belfast’s marching season.

If you look to polls, these days, you'll find most everybody swearing as they're holier than thou. Some have the toll of self-professed born-agains up to seventy, eighty percent in some places... one pollster, canvassing Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and maybe South Carolina (I'm not positive on that, one of the Carolinas anyway) found ninety-eight percent answering that they believed in the inerrancy of the Old Testament; that is, word for word for word handed down without a single error, including Deuteronomy Twenty – Seventeen.) Even Atlanta, which some think of as the Devil's washbowl, has nine in ten joining Vice Pence, the maybe racist, maybe misogynistic (or both) massage parlour loser and Sara, the Drillerator, Palin in professing sex out of marriage is wrong (if not necessarily practicing so). Eight in ten believe in the Divil himself and a veto-proof majority hold that "the government should pass laws to keep it that way."

Bad news for President Joe and former Governor Cuomo, and all they did was solicit a hug or a kiss! Maybe several, in Randy Andy’s case.

Of course polls tend to bring out what pollsters are pushing to make happen, and it's not as if some would 'fess up to a stranger on the telephone that they cut the throats of chickens of a Saturday night, or pray to al-Jazreel – otherwise we’d have had Mike Huckleberry nominated and elected by acclaim back in the day as opposed to his shilling for Big Pharma and Breitbart and cheering on his daughter during her tenure as one of The Donald’s rotating press secretaries. Like Crimean voters with armed Russians lookin' over their shoulders, or American kids back in that other day, with ruler-armed teachers lookin’ over theirs as they dutifully write down and sign pledges as to how they'd never even heard of drugs or beer or sex, watched such TV as their parents told them to and thunk Perry Como was the bees' pajamas! I get over to Shavery Point Baptist and the Reverend Clowthers often as I can on account of his not castin' me out due to my little divorce problem... since, by doing that, he'd lose half his congregation (not even counting prob'ly another ten, fifteen percent as shack up on the sly, plus that wedding photographer and schoolteacher we called Roy and Siegfried a’fore the former went to that great tiger cage in the sky!)... but Lord!, how the Rev can paint a beige soul black, then scrub it white with bleach and steel wool!

Shavery's God is vengeful, but also sublimely subtle, as Deities have a propensity to be. A'fore Clowthers or Billy Graham, even, Jonathan Edwards was God's burr between sock and boot, sermonizing, in 1741, that the Lord would "not only hate you," but would "have you in the utmost Contempt; no Place shall be thought fit for you, but under his Feet, to be trodden down as Mire of the Streets."

Most People of the Book ain't rich, but their M-13¹ shepherds promulgate a politics of the comfortable down against the not. All part of the drift... or Imitation Principle, as the eggheads say... holding it just as holy, or better, to reform thy neighbor (even at gun or knifepoint) as thyself. As Herr Nietzsche put it: Paul "romanized" the followers of Jesus by concocting "a showy mystery religion" domestic partnered, if not outright married, to the corporations and gumment as more or less took over from the kings and queens and Emperors in the century subsequent. Ever since, the root issue's been Dominion - that domination, less the “at” that gumments and the corporations as suborn them should have authority to regulate believers, otherly-believers and not-believers, that God might continue to favor us, here, over the French, Egyptians and Canadians.

Because the favor of God is extended, or withdrawn, based on the collective virtue of all Americans, it becomes critical who's listening to rap-metal music, what Roy, Siegfried and the tigers do under their blankets by night and, especially, whether politicians vote the Christian Coalition party line (and whether the casino Bill Bennett casts lots in is or ain't koshered by Ralph Reed or hosted by Donald Trump Junior). God cares... and He watches! Could come down to that guy Down Under (as President Joe pointed out) or li'l Timmy, as I mentioned back when, locking the bathroom door and George Michaeling himself to pictures of Mulan when WHAM!... down comes Hillary, leading her four billion godless Chinese, Ay-rabs, Amsterdamned and Venezuelans; Hindoos, Mongols, mongoloids an' mongrels, pointy-head microbes, too... God's new chosen people.

Maybe even a few Cat’licks!

Could happen!

Speakin’ of the Whore of Chappaqua, them as prayed for a manly man of God to rise up and strike down the witch in the way that witches oughta be struck down got a rather poor selection last election out… their Four Horsemen of Apocalypse behaving like the Three Stooges…

When “Little” Marco Rubio, dare-to-dream candidate of the blue-haired set next go-round, got thrashed in his home state of Florida by The Donald and dropped out back in sixteen, he blamed God.

“And so, while it is not God's plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever, and while today my campaign is suspended, the fact that I've ever come this far is evidence of how special America truly is,” the candidate confessed. There is no evidence that he was using the word “special” in any ironic sense, although many Americans and most of the rest of the world are viewing these primaries as the rantings and tantrums of small children sorely in need of stong medication.

So, whose victory was in God’s plan back then and, sooner than we wish, in twenty-four? (Hint: it’s not anybody running stage left in that last scrum or rightwards in the twenty-sixteen.)

Not John Kasich, who won one state; modestly remarking that "I don't go out and try to win a vote by using God.. But people know I'm sort of faith—I mean, I don’t think they know that or not. But I think they pick it up." In South Carolina, however, he spoke of a "message" he received calling him to run for governor of Ohio someday (after all, the incumbent is some lousy sot monikered De Wine.)

“I am blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures,” concurred Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom God told to stop acting like an Internet troll before sending him back to Texas and down on his knees to kiss the ring of Pope Djonald.

Seen Teddy lately, since he survived that near-fatal attack of Beto flu (as we’re calling this new Texas variant) and now’s gone back into Quarantine? That beard he’s grown makes him look like the bureaucrat in the children’s correctional “hospital” as is amping up the electroshock cables for another go-round on some hapless Salvadoran tyke, but - once President Trump secured RBG’s RIP and dis-appointed Cruz to the bench in favor of… horrors!... a woman!, he’s making noise about muscling Pence off the mountain s’long as nobody whispers “can-can-canc… Cancun!”

Leaving it up to a thrice-married casino builder to ride back into the burning stable on a fire-snorting black horse in 2024 and decapitate the either the Wizard of Delaware, or Witch of New York… whose severed head bounced around a bit, then started writing books and speeching speeches and fattening the wallets of her and her increasingly sitcommish hubby – stroking the Democratic party bosses and advising President Joe to go ahead, meet the Russians and… by all means… share a cup of tea. And then, sequels being the key to which the locks on Hollywood lock boxes full of revenues turn, we’ll face a sequel, or a prequel… being that the putative candidates are so goddam old and the get out the vote polls are down to forty percent and dropping (with a little help from the plague and the Post Office),

Now the one thing as unifies Cadillac Christers and those Prius Pee-Ceisters over the last decade or so is how they’ll tell you that they're all so damn persecuted... persecuted by the homos, the Nazis, the swamp creatures, by voices of situational ethicity and/or ethnicities as flap through the air and confound their faith with French verbs. (Not exactly bein' eaten by tigers, like Roy, no... but the pain of their having to share the planet with the likes of you and I hurts – really hurts, like them arrows of discontent as pierced Saint Sebastien or them Hunger Games losers.) No wonder some Christian Identiteers used to disrecognize gumment (even when it’s their own), rationalize it as a Godly gesture to bounce checks off the neighborhood barber, grocer and the dog license bureau... as that in Nebraska as got shot up by self-styled "patriots" whose whores and mistresses (if not the trinkets of the Trump Store) were American, not like the Argentine firecracker preferred by that guy somewhere in the Carolinas (not John-Boy Edwards, nor Carlos Danger, but that other guy as ran against Djonald and got one point four percent in his own state).

After all, the upcoming Trump-indictment sparked Capitol Two riot/beatdown martyrs have, themselves, already proclaimed their predecessors to be martyrs or… in the secular vernacular… political prisoners.

They, at least, have hope... hope of the Djonaldistic Restoration, and pardons. And compensation!

Most believers, though, fend off persecution's pain by doin' what Americans do best when they hurt... shop! Starts innocently enough with books, audio and videotapes. Some commodity fetishists discovered angels, as others had found divinity in Pokemon or Beanie Babies (or, to leftish hoarders and atheists, Bernie Babies!)... angel books and ceramics, of course, but also playing cards, diet books, bobblehead Apostles and computer mousepads. Some Christian stores restocked Nirvana's old CD "In Utero" for the angel on the cover. T-shirt vendors ripped off secular advertising with slogans like "Got Jesus?" (milk), "Yer Save Yer" frogs (ABM beer) or the ubiquitous "Save Mankind" fish (instead of whales). Credit cards bulk-mailed out by moneychangers with that fish sign and 45.95% APR. And all those bumperstickers: WWJD for "What would Jesus do?" (or, recently, "drive")... I've seen yuletide cynics, and not only in Washington, drawing lines through the middle of the D to ask: "What would Jesus buy?"

Game Stop? SVB stock?

Now most Christians of my acquaintance don't have the time nor inclination to bust up gay weddings, bomb clinics or slip flyers of dead babies under the windshields of those inside at community pancake breakfasts sponsored by some rival faith. Many volunteer in hospitals, or build or repair homes for disabled veterans... some in my district eschew gloating over the funerals of dead soldiers to serve as volunteer pallbearers for those as died poor, forgotten and alone. Others help mentor welfare mothers, amputee veterans, unwanted dogs, ex-cons and mental patients, or run soup kitchens and (even in godless Vegas and Frisco), get slapped in jail for the doing.

"Find the good in life and praise it," counseled the late author of "Roots", Alex Haley. And Lincoln admonished both Confederate and Union enthusiasts at his Second Inaugural Address, just weeks before his death, thusly...

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invoked His aid against the other... The prayers of both could not be answered... The Almighty has His own purposes."

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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¹ Christers as discount most of the New Testament save Matthew 13, as promises them what has will have more, them which don't will lose what little they have. Also known as the Parable of the Talents, much beloved by right-wingers as still profess that good things of life come proportionate to one's talent, as opposed to ruthlessness an' the connections.