Praying for Donald Trump

The question, one that pressed into my soul yesterday, was this:

How to pray for Donald J. Trump following the attempt on his life?  As a Christian, I'm duty-bound to pray for my enemies as deeply as I pray for my friends, which is enough of a challenge.  But the specifics of the prayer were a unique conundrum.

I mean, had he been seriously or critically hurt, and hospitalized, that would have been straightforward.  I'd have prayed for his recovery, and for his doctors, and for healing for the nation.  That was the simple prayer offered back when he was afflicted with COVID, and things looked touch and go for a while.  Had he died, that would also have been straightforward, prayers for the disposition of his soul and again, for the healing of the nation.

But Donald J. Trump is fine.  

He could have died, yes, but he did not.  

He was aggressive before, he was more aggressive after.  His injury, such as it was, was the sort of thing one might get in a moderate fall.  It was of less import than a sprained ankle, and far less of an impediment to his life.  Nor did his response indicate any meaningful psychological trauma, or any reaction other than unshakable defiance and an even deeper conviction of his own special place in history.  

I shared this observation during a conversation with a Trump supporter yesterday after church, and they agreed.  "He's fine," they said.  

In point of fact, he is stronger after the attempt than he was before the attempt, and he knows it.  

He is just as physically healthy, albeit with a surface wound to his ear.  He is far socially stronger, as the "iconic" images of his deeply ingrained fight response have cemented the messianic convictions of his most fervent supporters.   Their collective victim-narrative is now sealed in his own blood, so to speak.   

He will step into the Republican convention this next week as a bloodied and unbowed hero, fist raised in defiance, and be received with roars of adulation.  

He isn't in mourning, or in shock.  He's fine, and feeling fine.  He is reveling in this moment, the purest gift to a consummate showman.

That's not a partisan assessment, but the simple reality.

So my prayers were simpler.  For healing for his ear, such as it is.  For the disposition of his soul, as always.  And, particularly, for the future of this country, and a turning away from the bitter spirit of violence that so blights us all.

Sikhs and Evil Stupid People with Guns

As I walked my dog yesterday morning, I passed a neighbor.

This neighbor lives up the street, part of a family whose daughter was the Safety Patrol when my 14 year old was getting on the bus for the very first time as a kindergartener.  She's in her last year of college this year.  Man, how time flies.   Back then, I hung out a bunch with the dad from the family, a genial, hardworking guy with a warm smile and an easy laugh.

This neighboring family is Sikh.

We smiled, I said hello, and we walked on.  I found myself...yesterday morning...reflecting on how interesting that faith is.

Guru Nanak, who founded the religion, has always struck me as kind of a brother from another mother, Jesus-wise.  The faith is monotheistic, and though it springs from an utterly different culture, it has powerful spiritual resonances with the core message and ethos of Jesus of Nazareth.  Guru Nanak taught a radically egalitarian approach to social standing, which put it into strong tension with the caste system in the Hindu culture from which it sprang.   I'd been doing readings in both Christian and world mysticism for the class I taught this last week, and Sikh teachings are both potently, esoterically mystic and eminently practical and earthy.

As I read the news this morning, I thought again about my neighbor, and my heart and my prayers went out to the Sikh community.  We don't know much about this particular "shooter" yet, but from what has been gleaned, it appears the reprehensible mass murders in a Wisconsin gurudwara may have been the work of someone who mistook Sikhs for Muslims.

If they'd been Muslim, it would have been no less horrific.  There is, however, the probability that this wasn't just a massacre, but a massacre undertaken by someone too hatefully ignorant to realize he wasn't even murdering the people he thought he was murdering.  Not that he wouldn't have hated them anyway.

From what is trickling out this morning, he was apparently thrown out of the military for misconduct, which isn't surprising.

What also isn't surprising is that he had easy access to firearms.   If the criminally insane can get guns, why shouldn't evil stupid people who are an embarrassment to the uniform?

Lord, have mercy.

Tucson, America, and Mental Illness

Yesterday, as I ran errands with my youngest son, we popped briefly into a Trader Joes in an unsuccessful attempt to locate vegetarian "meatballs."  They were out, so we hoofed it out of the store and into the bitter cold.

Just past the sliding doors, we passed an older man with a long salt and pepper beard.  He was dressed in a messy melange of ragged winter clothes, and seemed to be wielding some sort of tattered banner.  "CRUCIFIED!" His shout rang out across the parking lot.  "You CRUCIFY me!  AaaHaH!  You know!  AaaaHaH!"  He grew silent, but paced and waved his arms about in an agitated way, flapping the banner, which had incoherent and smeared lettering on it.

"Was he drunk, Dad?"  asked the little guy, as we walked further into the parking lot.  "Or just mad?"

So I talked to him for a little bit about mental illness, and how our society really has no effective way of dealing with those who live with mental illness.

That reality was driven home, again, through the tragic shootings in Tucson this week.  There is, of course, much hand-wringing about how the poisonous and irresponsibly inflammatory rhetoric of the right wing could lead to violence against moderates like Congresswoman Giffords.  I do think this will...at least briefly...chasten the rabblejabberers, in much the same way that the Oklahoma City bombing shut the mouths of the Angry White Men in the mid-1990s. 

But the reality is that the young man who opened fire...or rather, the "shooter," as we call that regularly recurring character in American culture...was not motivated by the political ideology of the right.  Within twenty minutes of the shooting, as the name of the Shooter was released, I was at my computer, googling him.  Before it got taken down and before his name was seized by purveyors of malware, I checked out his YouTube videos, and read the comments he'd left on others MySpace.

Though I have no love for the Tea Party, this tragedy was not the work of a right-wing hyperpartisan.  His writings are clearly the work of a schizophrenic.  As details of his life come to light, it's strikingly familiar.  He was increasingly erratic.  He was viewed with fear by his classmates.  He was disruptive.   Everyone he came into contact with knew there was something wrong.

But our culture no longer has institutions where schizophrenics can be cared for on a long-term basis.  Back in the Reagan era, they were defunded and shut down.  Government, you remember, is always bad.  So folks in the 1980s ran with the idea that care for the mentally ill wasn't government's business and that local communities and charities should pick up the slack. 

But after the institutions closed, the next stage never happened.  The network of community group homes that were supposed to take the place of the big state mental institutions never materialized.  We didn't want to pay for them...'cause that would have meant taxes.

And for all the talk of community institutions taking the place of government, mostly what communities care about when it comes to the mentally ill is making sure that they aren't anywhere near us.  What about the children, we cry!  And our property values, we shout!

America is just not interested in providing the mentally ill with easy access to care and support.

What we provide them instead is easy access to Glock 9 MM pistols with extended 30 round clips.

We are a very strange country.

The Stories That Define Us

As the last blog post about myth and story was pinging about in my head, I encountered those troubling images from yesterday's shooting in Florida.  You've seen the images, and watched the video of Clay Duke, as he threatens school board members, shoots wildly, and then is gunned down by a security guard. 

What struck me most wasn't that this angry man seemed unable to kill those around him.  If you've got a 9mm pistol with a full magazine, and you're two yards away from your target, even I'd have trouble missing.  When a woman attempted to disarm him...utterly ineffectually...with her purse, he also didn't shoot.  It wasn't the violence that was most striking.

It was, rather, that he spraypainted the "V" from "V for Vendetta" on the wall.  That movie, with it's themes of revenge and uprising against a totalitarian society, never struck me as particularly amazing.  It was a diversion, and occasionally amusing, but too often overwrought and adolescent, particularly in the goofy "we're all wearing masks now" hoo hah doltishness of the ending.  Oops.  Spoiler.  Although really, it ain't spoiling anything special.

Honestly, I'm more of a Fight Club guy. 

Not that I'll talk about it. 

What? 

I didn't say anything.

V for Vendetta and films like it seem to be a big deal for many frustrated souls.  I've seen, for instance, lots of Guy Fawkes masks as Facebook profiles over the years.  This is a movie that expresses the inchoate, formless rage of those trapped in our frustrating, dehumanizing culture.  For folks with little other hope and purpose in life, these movies become the myths that define their existence.   This story of violent revenge, of rising up against the powers, was clearly a story that spoke into the life of this man.  It spoke his anger, spoke his frustration, and ultimately, it was part of how he ended his life.

As I re-immersed myself in Joseph Campbell yesterday, one of the things he notes is that in our era, the idea of defining story has become shallower and more immediate.  We're defined by global mass media.  Movies and television have become our storytellers.  The stories that pour into us from that big pipe articulate who we are...but they are increasingly not something we share across generations, or even necessarily with those around us.  The buffet-table myths of the modern era are as scattered and shattered as our increasingly diffuse sense of identity in a global consumer culture. 

Yet another reason that I find the great and ancient story of the Gospel so compelling.  If you want to find your ground and your purpose, the whirling chaos of this mass media era is not the place to look.

James Von Brunn, Hatred, and Subjective Morality

Having blogged about ethics, actions, and subjectivity yesterday, I find myself wishing that the day had not served up such an excellent case study. The shooting of a guard in the Holocaust Museum here in DC yesterday was the act of someone who strongly felt the world was a certain way. That blighted soul is a virulently hateful man by the name of James Von Brunn.

This being the internet era, the first thing I did on hearing the news was google him...and a few moments later, I found myself on his website, a rather clumsy festival of hatred entitled "Holy Western Empire." The site no longer exists today, having been shut down by his service provider. Remnants and fragments can still be found cached on google, and they're plenty to give you a sense of the darkness that governed this man.

Now that the site is down, it's hard to access it, but I managed to get hold of the unpublished manuscript that Von Brunn considered...and still considers, given that he ain't dead yet...his life's greatest work. The manuscript, which I found republished on a white supremacist site in Australia, is entitled "Kill The Best Gentiles."

For reasons that I myself can't quite fathom, I spent much of this morning reading it.

It is, for all of the media buzz today that Von Brunn was a brilliant, angry loner, not the work of a genius. If he got into Mensa, then Mensa must have considerably lowered their standards. The book is a clumsy, EMPHASIZE THINGS IN ALL CAPS pastiche of every racist conspiracy theory ever generated. Illuminati? He's got them. Jewish control of media and finance? It's in there. The Holocaust never happened? He'd say so. Jews aren't in fact Hebrew at all, but an Asiatic usurper race? Um...yeah...but...huh? Jews are interested in preserving their bloodlines and simultaneously obsessed with interbreeding with "white people?" Err...um...isn't that...aaah...inherently contradictory? But consistency and internal integrity of argument were apparently irrelevant. Only hate is relevant. The only reason to make arguments is to reinforce an already all consuming hatred.

What's clear is that Von Brunn deeply and passionately believed what he believed. Those beliefs...that seething, governing anger...made it possible for him to enter a place dedicated to the memory of millions of innocent dead, and to open fire, taking the life of another innocent in the process. Having forced myself to read his writing, I can confirm that he undeniably feels, down to the core of his being, that he was justified in his actions.

That feeling means nothing. That he truly felt he was defending the integrity of the Aryan race means exactly diddly. Sure, one could argue that his pattern of thinking is a form of insanity. In a way, it is. Reality means nothing to someone who exists only for their own bitterness.

But as a person of faith, I know that reality...both our intents and how we express those intents into the fabric of being...is the ultimate measure of our actions. Our time here in creation is not "unbearably light," as Milan Kundera once misdescribed it. It is infinitely heavy, and infinitely valuable. Further, I know that both the fruits of our intents and the intents themselves are the measure of how our Creator holds us to account.

Von Brunn rejects this, of course. His anger against Christians for our "false dogma" of compassion and love is woven throughout his bilious little screed. For him, it is a sign of our weakness. But I fear he misunderstands the nature of our love, and of the love that is God.

That God is love does not mean that God is weak, or that God is not just. It does mean that His justice is deeper and more terrible than we can imagine. It is unfortunate that those like Mr. Von Brunn who live for hate do not realize this.