IF I ONLY HAD A SHOE

The president’s spasms of spite at Friday’s post-acquittal White House celebration sent my soul into spasms of its own. Hearing the president claiming that the impeachment trial’s acquittal exonerates him of all wrongdoing, calling out Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff as “evil people” on his enemies list, and belittling the conscience and religious conviction of Sen. Mitt Romney — his party’s only senator to break ranks — with the cheering peanut gallery that knows, but will not publicly recognize, the president’s sociopathic character was more than I could take. The party that swallowed a fly gave credence to the lie.

“Telling a big enough lie, and telling it often enough that people will believe it” has a history. So do spite and scapegoating. If in Germany the scapegoats were communists, Jews, gypsies, and “homosexuals”; and if in the McCarthy Era, they were leftist traitors hiding within the federal government, the entertainment industry, and the media, today in the Trump Era the scapegoats are Muslims, Central American migrants, “illegal aliens,” sanctuary cities, climate change believers, Congress, the courts, politicians, previous presidents, “the Deep State,” Democrats and … and traitors like Mitt Romney.

I couldn’t watch. I was 10 years old watching Joseph McCarthy. We paid good money for that television. I had to walk away.

A FUNDAMENTAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Donald Trump does have a fundamental psychological problem. He needs to be loved all the time, he needs to have power over everyone all the time. Once you get that idea down, the rest of his behavior and his speech makes sense…

He also doesn’t have any respect for the truth or for honesty. They don’t mean anything to him because he can’t care about them. His focus, again, is always on himself and to be — to care about being honest to people rather than lying to them means you’d have to care about your effect on them. Are you going to harm them? Are you going to mislead them? But since he has no conscience for that kind of thing, he never expresses regret.

He does terrible things to people, the children who are being detained in cages are a good example…The children, of course, really amount to a crime against humanity. If you think about it psychologically, this is what some of us once called soul murder. That’s what he’s doing to these children. His ability to do that fits perfectly with this kind of very deep sickness where other people don’t matter, and he can hurt them to whatever extent he wants.

-- Harvard Professor of Psychiatry,

“We may liken an adult’s temper tantrum to that of a ‘big baby’,” writes Garret Keizer in The Enigma of Anger, “but even a big baby does not yet know what it truly means to be angry. I say this because I define anger as an emotion of extreme frustration (something a baby knows) poised at the possibility of action (something a baby cannot know, or cannot fully know.). … Might the purpose of anger be to enable us to break loose, to struggle free, and at the most basic level to survive?”

“ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME”

Spasms do not rise to the level of anger. They indicate frustration, but they do not yet qualify as anger as Keizer defines it, or as the Gospel of John points to it in the scene of Jesus’s raid of the money-changers who were scalping the poor in the Temple. The raid in the Temple was not impulsive. It was not a spasm. Jesus first braided a whip of cords before he turned over the money-changers’ tables and drove out their merchandise.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers sitting there. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. He poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make my Father’s house a house of merchandise!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume Me.

Gospel of John 2:13-17 MEV

It was the monetary system that abuse the poor that Jesus was attacking. “He said to those who sold doves (the only sacrifice the poor could afford) that Jesus addresses his words: “Take these things (the doves) away! Don not make of my Father’s house a house of merchandise!”

The event described by John is not a temper tantrum. Jesus did not throw his shoe at the television. He paused to turn his extreme frustration into anger at the monetary system that turned a profit on the poor who could only afford a bird:–“Take these things away! Do not make my Father’s house a house of merchandise!”

STRIKING AT THE ROOT

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who strikes at the root,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. There still are, and I’m one of them. How do we strike at the root of evil?

Emotional spasms of extreme frustration (something a baby knows) are not anger until they lead the American people to make the whip to drive out the money-changers. In a constitutional republic the whip is woven from elections, or revolutions, that strike at the roots of an economy of geed, the Big Lie, and soul murder.

In the year 2020, the house desecrated by merchandise is bigger than a temple, church, mosque, or nation. The desecrated house is the planet itself.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 7, 2020