CSotD: Crusaders Have Captured The Holiday
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The Secretary of Greasy Kid Stuff is hardly the first leader to pervert the message of Christ into a call for killing. As noted here before, while in the West the word “crusade” has come to mean pursuing a goal, in the days of the Iraq War we discovered that, in the Middle East, it still means “Christians killing Muslims for their faith.”
And if we don’t refer to our adventures in that part of the world as “Crusades” anymore, they sure smell the same.
Hegseth doesn’t go on about Muslims. He just likes to kill people and violate international rules of war to do so. It’s his boss who has made hateful comments and told outrageous lies about Muslims, but it’s his boss who hired him, and so it’s hardly surprising if our efforts in Iran seem more than a little tinged with a bigotry that both Christ and Saladin would recognize.
I’m only speaking philosophically, not religiously. Trump and Hegseth would also appall Socrates and, for that matter, Abraham Lincoln. There are all sorts of people whose beliefs and teachings clash with the Crusaders currently running the show.
My sophomore year in college, I had a cartoon from Punch on my dorm-room door that showed a military officer saying to a civilian, “I say ‘Bomb them back to the Stone Age.’ It’s the only language I understand.”
I’ve thought of it often since Trump and Hegseth began showing us the only language they understand, and I understand the contempt Kevin Necessary poured into this portrait of the two barbarians.
But I prefer Morland’s take, because he doesn’t see the threat as existing alone. Rather, he suggests, it’s part of a long-term policy of primitive, destructive, barbaric behavior, and he enumerates a goodly number of things the caveman has thoughtlessly, brutally attacked.
It’s quite a condemnation, but it’s hard to dispute, and he compliments what the US once stood for by staging this destruction in a concert hall, with a stunned audience that had been expecting a bit more artistry.
It makes me think of LBJ and how he shocked Washington society from time to time with homespun actions like making his beagles yelp by pulling their ears or continuing an interview from the toilet with the door to his bathroom open. And, as David Levine famously turned into a political cartoon, lifting his shirt to show off the scar from his surgery.
But for all his rough edges, LBJ was a decent man and was genuinely pained by the chants of “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
And if he was pragmatic to a fault — he’d learned from House Chair Sam Rayburn the dictum that “If you want to get along, you’ve got to go along” — he respected the Constitution and the foundations of our government. He was a tough sumbitch, but an honest one.
You could disagree with a man like that, and a lot of us did.
Even Dick Nixon snuck out of the White House in the night to go sit on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial and talk to anti-war demonstrators in town for the Moratorium. He was a crook, but he was not devoid of empathy.
We’re way past that. Both ethics and empathy are long gone.
The Christian Nationalists are attacking Texas Rep. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, for having progressive religious views on things like sexual orientation and identity. He may be Christian, but in their intolerant eyes, he’s the wrong kind of Christian.
And, again, it’s not religious to point out that Jesus specifically cast a Samaritan as a good man, who his listeners would have recognized as a pagan outsider, while he criticized two religious insiders who failed to help the victim of robbers.
It’s one of his most famous parables. You can only miss it on purpose.
Juxtaposition of the Day
If they do not love the Pope, whom they can see, how can they claim to love Jesus, whom they cannot see?
Again, it’s not about worshipping him. You’re not supposed to. But whether you accept Roman Catholic teachings about transubstantiation, mortal vs venial sins, and so forth, you can still accept that his calls for peace are consistent with the teachings of Christ.
Horsey shows how calls for peace conflict with Hegseth’s calls for Christian Crusades and death without mercy, but Matson touches on the refusal of conservative Catholics to accept the Pope’s teaching, not because it conflicts with their religious foundations but because he’s issuing a challenge to live up to them.
When I was of military age and war raged in Vietnam, I wrote to Pope Paul, asking him to make a statement about the war, given the number of Catholics among both the Vietnamese and the Americans. We didn’t need “pray for peace.” We needed specific guidance, so that, like Seventh Day Adventists, we could know what our religion demanded of us.
I got a letter back from a Vatican official telling me His Holiness was very concerned about war and that we should all pray for peace.
I like this Pope better, though it’s way too late to count me as a follower. The Dalai Lama issued a statement agreeing with Leo, and I like the Dalai Lama, too, as a philosopher, not a deity.
This might strike you as slightly blasphemous, and I’ve got enough religious people in my circle that I’m rarely amused by Easter Tomb jokes. They only offend me by proxy, you might say, but I’m willing to be offended by mockery of others.
If this were only a joke about how Dear Leader plasters his name on everything, I’d think it was tacky and mildly offensive. But the jaw-dropping blasphemy that took place as the White House celebrated Holy Week makes it as righteous as kicking over tables and swinging a rope’s end.
It wasn’t enough for the presiding pastor to compare Dear Leader to Jesus. Trump then stepped up and admitted that, just as Jesus was proclaimed a king by the crowd on Palm Sunday, so, too, he was a king himself.
Those folks had better hope they’re wrong about Hell being real.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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