The Weekly Screed (#831)

The Day of the Dope
by David Benjamin

“I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”
                                                                — Donald Trump

MADISON, Wis. — Most of us who remember Albert Schweitzer regard him as a selfless healer who forsook his religious and academic vocation in Germany to care for destitute villagers in darkest Africa, a mission that he continued — winning a Nobel Peace Prize — until his death in 1965. However, part of the reason for Schweitzer’s abrupt career change from the church and the university to missionary medicine was the publication, in 1906 of a dense little book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

 For most of the 19th century, the best scholars of the Lutheran church in Germany examined the historical roots of the New Testament, parsing details, variations and contradictions in the Gospel as it had been recorded and aggregated by its 2nd-century Christian authors. Schweitzer’s 1096 book was, in essence, the culmination of that extraordinary intellectual exercise.

Unfortunately, it made him persona non grata among the very theologians who had nurtured his genius. In The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer reached a synthesis that was logical in every respect, but never before uttered — except in whispers — by his theological forebears. Schweitzer’s interpretation of the words, sermons and parables of the New Testament, placed in the historical context of 1st-century Judaism, led him to the forthright conclusion that Jesus was an eschatological Messiah.

According to Schweitzer’s analysis, Jesus believed that his death would herald the End of Days. After the Crucifixion, Judgment Day would follow, right away.

Needless to say, this conclusion was unacceptable to the stewards of a Christian faith that had grown and flourished for nigh onto 2,000 years after the Crucifixion. As a result, Schweitzer was not exactly excommunicated. But he was frozen out of the academic world that had been his refuge and sounding board. Only his boundless intellect and infinite resourcefulness saved him from the obscurity to which his colleagues preferred to banish him. That Schweitzer became a sort of secular saint, even in the jungles of Gabon, is a testament to his brilliance.

But what he had done in his book was to highlight a celestial fatalism that goes back in Judeo-Christian tradition well before the time of Jesus. Indeed, in the era of Jesus’ birth, the area we call the Holy Land hosted — not always cordially — a steady flow of “prophets,” many of whom styled themselves as the Messiah of Jewish prophecy and some of whom foresaw their death as prelude to Apocalypse.

John the Baptist, for example, was an Apocalyptic. The political climate in Palestine, where he preached knee-deep in the Jordan, was ripe for his message. He reviled the pagan Romans who ruled the land, he was contemptuous of Herod, the Romans’ Jewish puppet and he sneered at the corrupt high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem. His intemperate ravings and insults to Herod eventually got him killed. But his ideas lived on, captured for posterity in Revelations, the New Testament’s ripsnorting final chapter. The author of Revelations — probably Paul — limned the End of Days with the sort of phantasmagoric pizzazz that renders fantasy authors, even today, green with envy.

Since then, for some reason, the bleakest voices of Christianity have always been its most vivid, lurid and captivating. This is one reason why the Apocalyptic strain in Judeo-Christian belief has not merely survived ’til today. It’s enjoying an outright revival, with a weird new Messiah.

Trump.

Our irreligious hedonist in the White House has become a veritable savior to the white Christianist ultra-right by speaking in the Voice of Doom that these people regard as the harbinger of Rapture. When Trump described Mexican immigrants as rapists, when he saw America’s black neighborhoods as a lawless expanse of random killing and defiant idleness, when he depicted Brussels as a hellhole of Muslim terror, he shocked many people. But he was speaking the language of a passionate minority who hearken back to John the Baptist, who see Western civilization spiraling sinfully down toward its reckoning with an angry and pitiless God.

This vision of an Apocalyptic split between the saved and the damned has always appealed to the most ardent in the religious right. It owes its staying power — against the Enlightenment ideal of American democracy — to a tradition of artful and popular appeals to militant bigotry, notably the heroic rampage of the Ku Klux Klan in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. The current blueprint for this dark strain of American faith is a novel called The Turner Diaries, published in 1978 by a pernicious but richly fanciful racist named William Luther Pierce.

In The Turner Diaries, Pierce made clear to all white Christians that their survival as humanity’s superior breed could not be secured short of a global war that exterminates every Jewish, Muslim, black, brown, Asian, Latin, and mixed-race person, along with the “race traitors” who defend the “mud people.” One of Turner’s more vivid images is the rounding up, by an army of racial purity called The Organization, of all race traitors. These include judges, professors, lawyers, politicians, journalists, entertainers and “race-mixers.” They’re taken from their homes and on the same day everywhere, the thoughtful, the liberal, the educated and the seekers of brotherhood are lynched. Pierce calls this “The Day of the Rope.”

Trust me, Donald Trump hasn’t read The Turner Diaries. It exceeds 140 characters. But he grasps its spirit viscerally, especially the dark foreboding that the Others, not like us, can’t be stopped unless “we” — and we know who we are, don’t we? — wage war against their encroachment, in an all-out genocidal holocaust.

Donald Trump, from his first campaign speech (the Mexican rapists), has invoked a looming Apocalypse. Throughout his campaign, he seeded an epidemic of fear, warning believers that only He can crush the invaders and their race-traitor enablers. Only He could return us to the Promised Levittown. Trump has mastered the wild-eyed, hypnotic craziness of John the Baptist. Handicapped by his 70-word vocabulary, he cannot articulate the form and strategy of the Parousia he foreshadows, but he doesn’t have to.

Trump’s house theologian, Steve Bannon, has read both Revelations and The Turner Diaries. He has infused Breitbart News with their promise. He has declared hostilities already begun. “It’s war,” Bannon said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”

Bannon declares that the “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing. It’s imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous.”

This sounds scary, but Trump’s flock swoons with adulation. Having flamboyantly donned the Messiah’s mantle, Trump knows — as did a previous Savior of whose ideals he knows nothing — he can do no wrong in the eyes of his followers. He is the apotheosis of a religious and political nightmare that has long haunted the American dream.

It’s a strange phenomenon for Americans — who prefer to stand slightly aside, looking skeptically at any political overture — to “believe” in the president. We always have doubts. We quibble, we question, we rage. We know better than to fall in love.

But Trump’s people are believers — true, deep and mad — unreachable and irreparable. He is the Messiah. He will give out loaves and fishes — two each for himself, one for everyone else. They will not notice the disparity.

He’ll turn wine to water, because he doesn’t drink. He’ll turn the promise of Heaven into a discount coupon for a tour of Trump Tower. A woman will weep on his wingtips and wipe away the tears with her hair, and he — the Messiah, her Savior — will reach down his little hands and grab her by the ass… as the faithful cry out in ecstasy.

“Feel her up, feel her up, feel her up…”