Iconoclasm: Your Presidents Are Supposed To Be Godlike, But Your God is a Rapist, Murderer, and Slaveholder

I love being primarily an iconoclast in everything I do. 25 years and counting.

I kinda fell into it, after my formative years had been wasted on “Mother Goose.” Long story.

I was out and about today and heard a bit of Dave Davies standing in for Terry Gross on Fresh Air (a program I love far more than I hate). It was an interview of Matt Bai on his book, just released today: All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. Alright, ostensibly, its a book about how the revelations of Gary Hart’s philandering in 1988 during the Democrat presidential primary changed things in the way media covers future prospective Kings in America.

I’m completely unsure of what the whole point, moral, or conclusion of the book is about. Here’s the book description from Amazon.

In 1987, Gary Hart-articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive-seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then: rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht (Monkey Business), and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce. Matt Bai shows how the Hart affair marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media-and, by extension, politics itself-when candidates’ “character” began to draw more fixation than their political experience. Bai offers a poignant, highly original, and news-making reappraisal of Hart’s fall from grace (and overlooked political legacy) as he makes the compelling case that this was the moment when the paradigm shifted-private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became the stuff of Page Six.

Shit, I could about write a post about every sentence, but I like to do things ‘more posts, each shorter,’ nowadays.

There’s many ways you could go with this, the most obvious being that it coincided with an enormous debt build up, various bubbles, and high politics became a game you couldn’t afford to loose, so very high stakes. Or, it was the rise of the American Shiites who called themselves Baptists and Fundamentalists (my own experience).

Neither explanation is really satisfying to me as some singular thing. Do you know what is? News companies as big corporations that sell advertising to other big corporations whose customers are the Americans who buy their stuff. Faux News isn’t Shiite fascist conservative because it has owners that have deep family values. It has identified a certain market niche of fucktards. CNN and MSNBS aren’t commie liberal because they have similarly opposite, conscientious owners. They’re in it to make money for shareholders and their corporate advertising customers have their own fucktards.

Only fucktards make meaningless distinctions about all of the above.

…I can’t really help but think, given what I heard in 10 minutes of that interview, that it’s mostly about bemoaning the fact that those who reach high office aren’t the doGs we’ve always imagined them to be.

I guess they never clicked into EvilBible.com.

So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin.” Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.

The Israelite assembly sent a peace delegation to the little remnant of Benjamin who were living at the rock of Rimmon. Then the men of Benjamin returned to their homes, and the four hundred women of Jabesh-gilead who were spared were given to them as wives. But there were not enough women for all of them. The people felt sorry for Benjamin because the LORD had left this gap in the tribes of Israel. So the Israelite leaders asked, “How can we find wives for the few who remain, since all the women of the tribe of Benjamin are dead? There must be heirs for the survivors so that an entire tribe of Israel will not be lost forever. But we cannot give them our own daughters in marriage because we have sworn with a solemn oath that anyone who does this will fall under God’s curse.”

Then they thought of the annual festival of the LORD held in Shiloh, between Lebonah and Bethel, along the east side of the road that goes from Bethel to Shechem. They told the men of Benjamin who still needed wives, “Go and hide in the vineyards. When the women of Shiloh come out for their dances, rush out from the vineyards, and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife! And when their fathers and brothers come to us in protest, we will tell them, ‘Please be understanding. Let them have your daughters, for we didn’t find enough wives for them when we destroyed Jabesh-gilead. And you are not guilty of breaking the vow since you did not give your daughters in marriage to them.'” So the men of Benjamin did as they were told. They kidnapped the women who took part in the celebration and carried them off to the land of their own inheritance. Then they rebuilt their towns and lived in them. So the assembly of Israel departed by tribes and families, and they returned to their own homes.

(Judges 21:10-24 NLT)

Should I go on? I can give you a few thousand similar evil passages in your Book of Divine Grace.

…And so, I don’t think there’s a lot to worry about in terms of presidential politicians and other Nomenclatura getting their willies wet outside the White House presidential bed—nor sacred bassinets for proto-Presidents and other risers to doGhood.

By my reading of the Bible, the worst of them are all amateurs. So relax. Let your doGs have their fun. Europeans have been doing it for centuries and still manage to uphold a lot of the trappings of the general fantasy.