Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Give me C.S. Lewis any day

I recently wrote a piece called “The sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars’: Most recent shemitah year ended Sept. 13,” which I posted Sept. 28 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/the-sycamores-are-cut-down-but-we-will-change-them-into-cedars-most-recent-shemitah-year-ended-sept-13/). Shortly before I had written about blood moons.

A shemitah year, also spelled as shmita, has ancient roots dating back 3,000 years and is grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. During a shemitah year, the land is left to lie fallow.

While shemitahs and blood moons are not common terrain for most Catholic writers to venture into, they certainly have a biblically sound scriptural basis, particularly in the Old Testament books of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and in the case of blood moons, Joel.

I tend to work across denominational lines and I find my patience tried by those of any denomination, Catholic or Protestant, or any religion, Christian or non-Christian, or for that matter the religious and non-religious, who are demonstrably uncharitable towards their fellow man. I’m happy enough to spend time with people of any faith or no faith, for that matter, if they demonstrate kindness and goodwill.

After publishing “The sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars’: Most recent shemitah year ended Sept. 13,” one of my Protestant evangelical acquaintances introduced me to John Haller, an Ohio lawyer and evangelical, who has an undergraduate degree from Grace College & Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana, and Master of Science (MSc.) and Doctor of Law (JD) graduate degrees from Indiana University in Indianapolis, and who is currently a partner at Shumaker Loop & Kendrick LLP in Columbus, Ohio, with a commercial law practice specializing in the areas of litigation matters involving restrictive covenant and theft of trade secrets, breach of contract claims, securities, finance, lender liability, professional liability and product liability. He’s also listed as a “leader” at Fellowship Bible Chapel, founded in June 2013 in Lewis Center, Ohio, about 20 miles north of Columbus.

“Along same lines as shemitah … John Haller does a weekly prophecy update,” my evangelical acquaintance wrote. I promised to take a look at the YouTube video when I got a chance, observing, “This may not be one that would have been on my normal Catholic viewing list otherwise.”

Sadly what I discovered was not so much a prophetic word, in my view, but rather a diatribe against Pope Francis and the Roman Catholic Church, trotting out the usual canards, criticizing the Catholic Church based on such differences as the preference of some (not all) Protestants for the “empty cross” versus the body of the crucified Christ depicted on the cross on Catholic crucifixes, as they argue we should not dwell on Christ’s death but his resurrection, and that an empty cross is a symbol of his resurrection. And so on. I think I understand Haller’s empty cross argument – and in terms of symbolism I don’t have any problem with the point it makes. But I think he shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both the mass and Catholicism if he thinks Catholics don’t believe the cross is sufficient.  Yes, we liturgically focus on the crucifixion on Good Friday. And then two days later, we celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead on Easter Sunday, the most important day of the year, as the very raison d’etre of all Christian claims, in the Catholic liturgical year – surpassing even Christmas – and we’re folks, remember, who like our midnight mass liturgy.

Viewing Haller’s “2015 09 27 John Haller Prophecy Update “Check the Box? / False Religion Palooza!,” the link I was sent on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=licpV7kXjIU) just reminds me how far we have to go in building bridges between peoples of different Christian faith communities, different faiths, and no faith at all. If you have any need to check that out for yourself, to see what I am talking about when it comes to Haller, Catholicism and Pope Francis, just go the 45-minute mark and keep on watching. Offensive would be something of an understatement.

C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Christian apologist, was an Anglican, but one who was distinctly untaken with Christian denominationalism and focused on the essentials of the faith in his writing, not preferential practices.

In an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lewis’s birth, evangelical writer J.I. Packer called him “our patron saint.” Christianity Today on Sept. 7, 1998 said Lewis “has come to be the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary Evangelicalism”) and added on April 23, 2001 that Lewis was “the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist.” While I myself might have exhibited just a tad bit of admittedly denominational bias and opted for the Roman Catholic convert from Anglicanism, G.K. Chesterton, for that honour, Lewis is certainly not an unreasonable claim for being the last century’s most important Christian apologist.

In the pre-publication editing process for the manuscript of what many scholars consider his most important apologetics work, Mere Christianity, published in 1952, Lewis said he tried to guard against putting forth too much his own Anglican beliefs “by sending the original script of what is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) and asking for their criticism.  The Methodist thought I had not said enough about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought I had gone rather too far about the comparative unimportance of theories in explanation of the Atonement.  Otherwise all five of us were agreed.”

Quite so.

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‘The sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars’: Most recent shemitah year ended Sept. 13

Another shemitah year has come and gone. And the world as we know it has … well, it has carried on pretty much as before. Shemitah years, also spelled as shmita, have ancient roots dating back 3,000 years and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. During a shemitah year, the land is left to lie fallow.

More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October. While we’re only halfway through that two-month period and the financial sky has yet to exactly fall, investors had a brief scare in August when China’s currency, known as the yuan or renminbi, fell in value more than it did in the previous two decades.

The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5 on Aug. 24 – erasing the last of its gains for the year in its biggest single-day loss since 2007.  The Shanghai Composite Index has plummeted nearly 40 percent since hitting a peak earlier this year.

Within minutes after the opening bell Aug. 24, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,089 points, the largest point loss ever during a trading day, surpassing the trillion-dollar “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010,  which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes, sending the Dow down 998.5 points, its biggest intra-day trading drop until Monday. The Dow closed down 588 points Aug. 24, the worst one-day for the Dow since August 2011.

Brent crude, the benchmark for oil prices worldwide, closed Aug. 24 at $42.80 a barrel, its lowest close since March 11, 2009. Oil prices tumbled more than five per cent Aug. 24, with U.S. light crude closing at $38.24 a barrel, its lowest close February 2009. The week of Aug. 16-22 marked oil prices’ longest weekly losing streak since 1986. Today, Brent Crude LCOc1, the key indicator for global crude prices, was selling for $47.34 a barrel; meaning there has been no significant recovery in price over the last month or so, nor is any expected anytime soon.

And while the Shanghai Composite Index and China have been making most of the bad-news financial headlines of late, consider this:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average all-time closing high was 18,312.39, set on May 19.  The Dow closed at 16,001.89 today, down 2,310.5 points from its peak 4½ months ago;
• British stocks are down about 16 percent from the peak of the market;
• French stocks have declined nearly 18 percent;
• Italian stocks are already down 15 percent.

Jonathan Cahn is a New Jersey-born messianic Jewish rabbi, meaning he accepts Jesus Christ as the messiah, and is best known for his book The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, in which he compares the United States and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America to the destruction of ancient Israel. He started Railroad Avenue Hope of the World Ministries in Lodi, New Jersey in 1988 as “an end-time ministry for an end-time world,” describing it as being devoted to “giving out the Word of God to all peoples – to fulfill the Biblical mandate and Great Commission of God – to bring salvation to the Jew, to the Gentile, and to all unreached peoples of every land.”

In his sequel to The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, called The Mystery of the Shemitah: The 3,000-Year-Old Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, the World’s Future, and Your Future!, Cahn argued that the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years – 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008 – all occurred in shemitah years. The book rocketed to become an instant bestseller, listed at number eight overall on Amazon.com, and number one in Amazon’s Christian prophecies section.

Cahn argued if the Shemitah was not observed by the people, it would become a curse, as described later in Leviticus Chapter 25 in the Bible’s Old Testament. That’s what happened, Cahn said in 586 B.C., a shemitah year, when the First Temple in Jerusalem fell and the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah went into captivity in Babylon for 70 years. The year following the destruction of the rebuilt Second Temple on the original site of Solomon’s Temple in 70 A.D. was the first year of the seven-year sabbatical cycle. In the Jewish calendar, counting from creation, this was year 3829. By counting sevens from then the next shemitah year will be the year 5775 after creation, which runs from Sept. 25, 2014 through Sept. 13, 2015.

Deuteronomy, another Old Testament book, says in Chapter 15, “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission of debts. “This is the manner of remission: every creditor shall release what he has loaned to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed…” Before you decide to stiff the bank on your October mortgage payment, it might well be worth noting it is not a carte blanche release apparently, as the same chapter in Deuteronomy also says, “You may collect from the alien, but if you have any claim against your brother for a debt, you must relinquish it….”

Cahn said shemitah can have several meanings. It can mean a “release” – and in ancient Israel debts were canceled and land returned to its original owners,

But it can also mean “to fall, to collapse, to shake,” he said.

Back beyond the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years in 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008, during the Great Depression, a solar eclipse took place 83 years ago on Sept. 12, 1931 – the end of a shemitah year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off further market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also heralded in the greatest month-long stock market crash calculated on a percentage basis in Wall Street history.

But Cahn was guarded and careful not to predict what would happen in the recently completed shemitah year.

“The phenomenon may manifest in one cycle and not in another and then again in the next,” he wrote. “And the focus of the message is not date-setting but the call of God to repentance and return. At the same time, something of significance could take place, and it is wise to note the times.”

Cahn also noted the fact that 2014 and 2015 are marked by a series of blood moons – a pattern that began on Passover 2014 and will conclude on the Feast of Tabernacles in 2015. There was one last night, accompanied by a full lunar eclipse.

April 15, 2014 marked the first Blood Moon of the 21st century. In astronomical terms, the total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014 was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series, a series that began on Aug. 14, 1022 and is composed of 74 lunar eclipses in the following sequence: 22 penumbral, eight partial, 28 total, seven partial, and nine penumbral eclipses. The last eclipse of the series is on Oct. 29, 2338.

Blood moon is a term of more religious than astronomical significance. In the Old Testament Book of Joel, Chapter 2, verse 31, the minor prophet says: “And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.”

In Bible prophecy, this is always first and foremost about Israel and the Middle East, and what, if anything, such portents hold. The April 2014 and April 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the Jewish Feast of Passover. The October 2014 and September 2015 total lunar eclipses aligned with the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Yori Yanover, writing in the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish Press Oct. 6, 2013 observed, “The prophecy in Joel, like most prophecies, is surreal, beautiful, and open to many interpretations.” But he also notes that two of these Blood Moons will “shine over the Passover seder” on April 15, 2014 and April 4, 2015. “Whenever this happened in the past, enormous events took place in Jewish history.”

The tetrad phenomenon of a string of four Blood Moons, partially or completely eclipsed, last occurred twice in the 20th century – and both times on the night of the Passover seder in 1949-50 and 1967-68. The first came after the establishment of the State of Israel, which resulted in Israel officially taking a seat at the United Nations on Nov. 5, 1949, while the latter occurred after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel re-captured the Old City that included the Temple Mount for the first time since 70 AD.

The last Blood Moons tetrad before the 20th century was in 1493-94 – a year after the Christian expulsion of Jews from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs.

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