Category Archives: Quotes

American Rhinoceros

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The video of a rhinoceros killing a lion and throwing it into the air like trash called to mind Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. As I remembered it, Rhinoceros, like other works of The Theater of the Absurd, tore back the curtain of presumption that keeps us from seeing who we really are. If Rhinoceros was about anything else, it was about order and chaos, dominance and subservience, power and the wannabe herd that surrenders its power to the Rhinoceros.

A day in Brooklyn Park

My sense of the absurd grows every day. I see myself as E.E. Cummings’ “Little i” –– Who am I, “little i” among the herd of “little i’s” clamoring for dominance? I know so much less than I once knew. The sense of absurdity has shredded my confidence in the unseen hand of divine providence.

Kay and I live in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, where a police bulletin advised all residents to stay in our homes until a future advisory. Keep the doors locked while the police searched for a shooter at loose in our neighborhood. The man is armed and dangerous. Do not answer the door under any circumstances. The suspect may be dressed like a police officer. Do not answer the door for anyone until you receive a further advisory.

The next day we learned that a suspect had been arrested. He had shot and killed former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and had critically wounded MN state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.

Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives


The Army of God and the ‘unhumans’

The shooter had abandoned his van to flee on foot. The van contained a hit list of 40+ public servants. Everyone on the list was prominent member of the Democratic-Farm-Labor Party (DFL). To some, it came as a shock that the suspect identified himself as a Christian. On most Sundays, he attended worship at an evangelical megachurch. Others were not surprised. They recalled Stephanie McCummen’s article, “The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows” (The Atlantic, January 9, 2025). The far-right New Apostolic Reformation has quietly sweeps through charismatic-evangelical Churches with its message of Christian nationalism.

“Our study of history,” says a book endorsed by JD Vance, “has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they [i.e.‘unhumans’] won’t [keep].”

Earlier in American public life, residents of Brooklyn Park did not imagine that hate, heartlessness, and cruelty would define their community. Nor would they have thought of a Christian drawing up a hit list, disguising himself as a police officer driving a squad car facsimile loaded with guns, rifles, and military-style weapons used for assassinations and executions of public servants. There was, as there always is among humans anger, frustration, scapegoating, and loathing of others, but the community, for the most part, observed its own cultural commandments of do’s and don’ts.

Living with the Absurd

The ethical norms required for a healthy society have been eroded so slowly that we wonder how we got to the America of 2025 so quickly. Like buildings of brick and mortar, nations, religions, and communities need maintenance. Without it, they crumble.

While a student at a small Christian college, the Theater of the Absurd suddenly came to make more sense than the “Life-of-Brian” view of divine providence in which God’s in his heaven and nothing can go wrong. Things were not right with world. Unless God is a sadist, the world made no sense. I was 19 years-old when Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre pulled me, dragging and screaming, into the Theater of the Absurd. I had experienced the angst to which Camus’ The Plague, Sartre’s No Exit, and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros gave expression, but I did not know enough history to understand the Sitz im Leben from which they wrote.

Don’t you see?

Photograph shows South African White Rhinoceros, courtesy of Working with Wildlife, Wikimedia Commons
White Rhinoceros, courtesy of Working with Wildlife, South Africa

All these years later, I get it. Life in 2025 bears ghostly resemblance to these authors’ experience almost a century ago. In an interview published in 1983, Ionesco described the circumstances that led him to the image of a rhinoceros:

I first thought of the rhinoceros image during the war, as I watched Romanian statesmen and politicians and later French intellectuals accommodate themselves to Hitler’s way of thinking. They might say something like, “Well, of course the Nazis are terrible, terrible people, but you know, you must credit them with their good points.” And you wanted to say to them: “But don’t you see, if you start granting them a good point here, a good point there, eventually you will concede everything to them.” Which is exactly what happened. But they looked upon you as an alarmist, then a nuisance, finally an enemy to be run down. They looked like they wanted to lower their heads and charge.

Eugene Ionesco, Le Nouvel Observateur, February 1983

Conceding Everything

The statesmen, politicians, and intellectuals who today accommodate themselves to the thinking and morality of a rhinoceros are not Romanian, German, or French. They are Americans. The way of thinking is the same. The psychology is the same. Though the targets are different, the phenomena are the same. If Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals became the scapegoats that propped up the illusion of Aryan racial superiority in Germany, today in America, the enemy is leftists, socialists, communists, people of color, immigrants, and migrants poisoning the blood of our country. The scapegoat mechanism is the same. The excuses and accommodations are the same. The results are the same.

The strategy and tactics that now threaten democracy in the U.S.A. have a history. Too little has been made of the similarity of the Nazi’s failed coup d’etat –– the Beer Hall Putsch (November 8-9,1923) in Munich –– and the attempted coup d’etat in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Or of the fact that Adolf Hitler was tried and found guilty of treason and the charges in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the wake of January 6. Or that the book Hitler wrote in prison, Mein Kampf, and the Speeches of Hitler, were, according to members of the Trump family and the co-author of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, were the only books in his bedroom. Most poignant is the Nazi decision to shift from the strategy of violent revolution to a slower evolutionary road to victory. It would happen more slowly and less spectacularly, but it would succeed. They would destroy democracy from within. And they did.

“Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch,” wrote historian Christopher Browning in the February 2022 issue of The Atlantic, “was that he needed to pursue revolution through ‘the politics of legality’ rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy.”

The late Bill Moyers (RIP) described Donald Trump as a man who has an open sore where a soul should be. Eugene Ionesco saw a Rhinoceros, and a herd of wannabe rhinoceroses, tromping behind the Rhinoceros whenever a snort tells them to lower their heads and charge.

Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor, social critic, and public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 brief commentaries on faith and public life, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 9, 2025.

Oaths of Office: A Constitutional Dilemma

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Inauguration 2026
2017 Inauguration

On January 20, the Constitutional duty of administering the presidential oath of office fell again to the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Chief Justice holds his position by virtue of his own oath to the Constitution.

Supreme Court Justice Oath of Office

I, ___________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Supreme Court Justice oath of office, Curator of the Supreme Court

Question

Does a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court violate his Constitutional Oath of Office by fulfilling his constitutional duty to preside over the administration of a President-elect’s oath-taking when the Court is in possession of evidence that the oath-taking was, and again will be, disingenuous, and for purpose of evasion?

Rhetorical or Serious?

The question seems rhetorical. It’s not. It’s serious. On January 20, 2025, the former president who violated election law by silencing a porn star, burying the story in a deal with a gossip tabloid; refused to honor the Constitutional peaceful transfer of power in 2021 and rallied the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and his supporters in a violent insurrection that threatened his own Vice President‘s life; promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; mastered the five principles of effective propaganda outlined by Third Reich Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment Josef Goebbels; maneuvered the rule of law to evade trial; denounced the American justice system, courts, judges, prosecutors and court personnel as “rigged” against him; refused to surrender top secret national security documents after leaving office; and who continues to mock the juries that convicted him, and to use the powers of the presidency to exact retribution–– courts-marshal, imprisonment, or execution for treason––stood before Chief Justice John Roberts, ‘forgot’ to place his hand on two Bibles, raised the other hand, and “solemnly swore” the oath he had given no reason to trust.

Subversion by any other name is still subversion

A jury unanimously found the president-elect guilty on all 34 felony counts. Mr. Trump had already broken the presidential oath he took in 2017, but shrewd maneuvering through the state and federal court processes, Donald Trump is a convicted felon in the state of New York but has yet to be sentenced, and the more consequential federal indictments have been dropped. When Yogi Berra said “It’s not over til it’s over, “he had in mind the nine innings of a baseball game, but, like many other Yogi-isms, it describes real life beyond baseball.

If perception is nine-tenths of reality, the Supreme Court and the rule of law have lost. So has Congress. Oath-taking has become performative. The rule of law is at the point of implosion. It has been subverted by a well-heeled criminal well-practiced in using the law and judicial procedures to escape accountability under the rule of law. If there is a crack to be found, Donald Trump will find it and crawl through it unscathed.

It happened once. If we’re not careful, it can happen again.

History records moments like this. Ten years after conviction for “high treason” following the Beer Hall Putz, a failed coup attempt, Adolf Hitler rode the wave of public frustration and anger with the Weimar Republic to become Reich Chancellor and Führer. Six months after he took the oath of office, the Constitution was changed. It put Hitler where the Constitution had been. The United States Holocaust Museum tells the story.

Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it

Following the death of President von Hindenburg in August 1934, Adolf Hitler assumed power as Reich Chancellor and Führer. Shortly thereafter, on August 20, 1934, the longstanding oath taken by state officials was changed so that they no longer swore loyalty to the German constitution but rather to Hitler as head of state.

Although in retrospect this change seems to indicate another step in Hitler’s consolidation of power, at the time many would have understood it differently. By replacing “Constitution” with “Hitler,” the oath was meant to convey that Hitler’s will was the same as that of the nation and the people and that his will could not, by definition, contradict the imperative to ‘observe the law and conscientiously fulfill the duties’ of office. In this way, the oath appeared to equate Hitler’s authority with the constitution and to ensure that it would be limited by the primacy of law and duty in public office.”

Oath of Loyalty for All State Officials as of August 14, 1919: “I swear loyalty to the Constitution, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”
[Translated from Reichsgesetzblatt I, 1919, pp. 1419-1420.]

Oath of Loyalty for All State Officials as of August 20, 1934: “I swear I will be true and obedient to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, observe the law, and conscientiously fulfill the duties of my office, so help me God.”
[Translated from Reichsgesetzblatt I, 1934, p. 785.

Is one’s word one’s bond? Or is it subterfuge?

The Hierarchy:: Adolf Hitler (L), Joseph Goebbels C), Hermann Goering (R)

The Oath of Office to which President-elect Donald Trump swore for the second time was either what it appeared to be, or it wasn’t. Whether the German felon convicted of “High Treason” authentically swore to be loyal to the Constitution is a question no one can answer. Some oath-takers and their administrators are honest, but their personality disorders contort the language to equate the people’s constitution and the nation with themselves.

This commentary is not the product of the power of positive thinking, but Christ does not call me to be willfully blind. Sharing this commentary, I feel like Sir Alfred Hitchcock driving by a remote church in the Swiss Alps. Seeing a priest standing next to a little boy with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Sir Alfred rolled down the rear window of his chauffeur-driven Bentley limousine and cried out, “Run, little boy! Run for your life!!!

God help us all!

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, Presbyterian Minister (HR), author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, January 13, 2024.

Living among the gods in America: a Meditation on Psalm 82

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God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the gods.

The house we took for granted is infested with carpenter ants. The gods of power, greed, privilege, fear and favor undermine the framework of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the aspirational foundations without which the house crumbles.

I watch in horror as a deranged man of White privilege claps back at the adoring crowd and wonder why real farmers in tractor hats leave their fields to applaud a city-slicker Godfather wearing a $4k Oxxford suit, red Armani silk tie, and a red tractor hat, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood wearing sheep skin to have Grandma for lunch. If there is a God surrounded by the gods, why the trail of unjust judgments?

Then I remember Jesus’ parable of a last judgment in Matthew 25, where the Sovereign of the Universe separates the sheep and the goats, and hear the cry of the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, hanging on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And I wonder. 

Where is the thunder that will split the veil of religion and empire? Every day I awaken to the knowledge of my helplessness to help. I am a kindergartner in a bully’s world, asking for the gift of daily bread— enough to make it through another day of MAGA madness, another day with hearts turning to stone, another hour watching a sociopath twist law into pretzels. I have seen the crimes. I have gasped at the lies and heard his voice echoing in a swelling chorus of voices cheering on the gods who are not God, silencing the still small voice. 

Where is the God who convenes the council of the gods? Where is the God who judges the gods we confuse with God?

How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?

The “wicked”? Seriously? The wicked? I don’t believe in an impenetrable wall between the wicked and the righteous, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats. I have met the wickedness that lurks in me. 

Confession

“The prestige of the wicked” and the wickedness of prestige lead me to confess my exaltation of prestige. I have confused the ladder of success with Jacob’s ladder until the wind blew me off the ladder into shame. The climb to the top has been wicked. I have learned how easily the search for excellence inflates the ego and overtakes the gift of authenticity in flesh and blood mortality. Life has a way of knocking the pretense of prestige off the ladder, and, if we’re lucky, we realize that we had it wrong.

Jacob’s ladder is not a ladder for us to climb up; it’s a stairway on which the angels (divine messengers) descend to be with us.

I know the ladder of success. I have climbed it and fallen off. I have also met the divine messengers who pick me up when I’ve fallen.

 

Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

This is not a suggestion. It’s an order! — the Sovereign’s order to the assembly of gods. In the Hebrew Bible and in our own experience, the nations are gods. This word from the Most High God addresses the gods of greed, privilege and nationalism.

Saint Patrick’s Day at the Irish Pub: A Festive Celebration

It’s the day for green beer, corned beef and cabbage, and the wearing of the green. The television monitors in the pub are broadcasting a rally in Dayton, OH.  “I don’t know if you call them [i.e., migrants crossing the southern border] people,” says the man in the MAGA hat. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

“I don’t know if you can call them . . . people. In some cases, they’re not people.”

The poor and oppressed fleeing tyrannical regimes, drug cartels, and gangs in El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras are not people? The people now seeking refuge on American soil are not the Jews, gypsies, and “homosexuals” Hitler loaded into cattle cars for a one-way trip t to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald for “poisoning the blood of our country,” but they are the same: the less than human ones, the non-Aryans, animals. “Now, if I don’t get elected, . . . there’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” There will be no rescue for the weak and needy under his watch. Rescuing the weak and the needy is the work of the woke and the weak. We have to be strong.

Jesus’ rebuke: “Woe to you!”

I hear Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I am haunted by the curse of the Strong Man that has fallen over the world. I am not digging a mass grave in Ukraine. I am not homeless. I am not searching for food for my starving child in Gaza, Mariupol, or Calcutta. When will the rebuke — “Woe to you” — thunder across the world?  

The gods are neither ignorant nor uncomprehending

Ignorant and uncomprehending, they wander in darkness, while the foundations of the world are tottering. I had thought, “Are you gods, are all of you sons of the Most High?”

President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in conversation

Are the gods that troll us ignorant? Are they uncomprehending? No. They are crafty. They are willful. They are calculating. Andrei Navalny did not die of natural causes. He was murdered. The regime that poisoned him knew what it was doing. The gods of power, greed, violence, and war are neither ignorant nor uncomprehending. Aries and Mars are alive and well. They live in our heads. They tell us what to do, leaving Ukrainian and Palestinians to search through the rubble and step over the dead. Here at home a megalomaniac cut from the same cloth as Vladimir Putin threatens a bloodbath if he is not elected. The crowd chants and cheers.

Hearing Voices Inside and outside the hospital for the criminally insane

I am at the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane in Saint Peter, MN. I’ve come to see Mary, who turned to the Legal Rights Center for legal counsel. Her lawyer has asked me to visit as a pastor.

Was Mary ignorant or uncomprehending the day she stabbed her nine-year old son nearly 100 times in broad daylight on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis? Did she mean to kill her son? Or were the voices in her head responsible? 

Mary had gone off her meds the day the voices told her that her son was the Devil and that she should kill him. “Not guilty by reason of insanity” sent her to the hospital for the criminally insane. The day I am with her, she is groping in the darkness. The foundations of her world are tottering. Suicide is an option. Which is why I am here.

Driving home to Minneapolis, I hear voices like the ones Mary heard. Aries and Mars are speaking on talk radio. To one degree or another, everyone out here is insane, just a short step from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The gods are driving us to collective madness.

I had thought, “Are you gods, are all of you sons of the Most High?” No! You will die as human beings do, as one man, princes, you will fall.

The Mortality of the gods

Are you gods children of the Most High?  Or are you as mortal as we? Are you destined to fall, like princes and tyrants? Will you be thrown from the thrones that rule our hearts? Will the shouting and clapping fall silent? Without the language of the heart, only the impostor gods, the carpenter ants, remain to eat away the foundations of compassion and sanity. The impostor god of national supremacy may look different in “Mother Russia” than it does in the USA, but it is the same.

The World and the god of Nationalism

Arise, God, judge the world, for all nations belong to you.

Among the gods gathered for judgment, nationalism has no peer. “If I don’t win this election, we won’t have a country anymore.” He places his right hand over his heart. The crowd does the same. The sound system broadcasts the January 6 chorus of imprisoned “hostages” he promises to pardon singing the national anthem. I hear a still small voice in Alexander Hamilton’s prescient letter to President George Washington in 1792.

The truth unquestionably is that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security. …

When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.

Like the psalmist, I cry out, “Arise, O God!” Deliver us from the gods of criminal insanity.”

Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, July 22, 2024.

Surreptitious Illegal Activity

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The terroristic threats of Ms. Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, in Fulton County, Georgia did not come directly from Rudy Giuliani. “America’s Mayor” of 9/11 fame did not tell anyone in particular to do anything in any particular way at any particular time or place. He neither directed nor suggested the phone calls, emails, and text messages that threatened the two Georgia election workers he claimed were “surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.” They were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.”

It was, in fact, America’s Mayor who was engaged in surreptitious illegal activity. Mr. Giuliani admitted under oath that his story about the USB port was false but, moments later, speaking publicly to reporters outside the courtroom, he switched back to the old story, saying it was real. He had just shot himself in the foot, handing fresh evidence to the prosecution’s case and undermining his lawyers’ defense strategy. Rudy Giuliani seemed confused.

Perhaps it’s his age. He’s lost a step or two. Maybe dementia, maybe not. Maybe just the memory loss that comes with getting older. Whatever lay behind the switch from admission to denial, the result was the same. Under oath, he was guilty; outside the courtroom, in the court of public opinion, he claimed innocence, and said his statements were protected under the First Amendment right to free speech.

Could America’s Mayor be held accountable for the terroristic threats that sent a mother and daughter to live in fear for their lives? Appearing before the House special committee on January 6, what happened and what didn’t happen was summed up in two questions and answers. Question: “Ms. Moss, what was it that passed between you and your mother that day?” Answer: “A ginger mint.” Describing how their lives have been affected, the answer was clear. “I don’t feel safe anywhere.”

Stochastic Terrorism

There is a name for what took place in Georgia and what is happening now across the country. Stochastic terrorism, as Author David Neiwert defined it in a 2018 interview with Salon, is a form of domestic terrorism that evades being held responsible for the violence it prompts by others.

Scripted violence is where a person who has a national platform describes the kind of violence that they want to be carried out. He identifies the targets and leaves it up to the listeners to carry out this violence. It is a form of terrorism. It is an act and a social phenomenon where there is an agreement to inflict massive violence on a whole segment of society. Again, this violence is led by people in high-profile positions in the media and the government. They’re the ones who do the scripting, and it is ordinary people who carry it out.

Author David Neiwert interview with Salon, Nov. 1, 2018

“Proud Boys, if you’re listening, stay back and stand down.” The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers stayed back and stood down until the president’s tweet invited patriotic American to the Capitol January 6 to “Stop the Steal”. “Be there! It will be wild!” 

“There’s a lot of people here willing to take orders. If the orders are given, the people will rise up.” “Our president wants us here,” says a man from a livestream video standing within the Capitol building, “we wait and take orders from our president.’” “We have to have peace,” says President Trump to the January 6 marauders, “So go home, we love you, you’re very special.”

Most people storming the US Capitol on January 6 were “ordinary people” led to confuse violence with protest, insurrection with patriotism, scapegoating with allegiance to the constitution and the rule of law –- unwitting agents of a scheme of violence scripted “by people in high-profile positions in the media and government,” sometimes against others in high-profile positions. “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” “Stop the steal! Stop the Steal!” 

Within hours the noose came down; the threat of domestic terrorism did not. Indicted and scheduled for trial in Florida, New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C., the former president mocks court orders to refrain from targeting judges, prosecutors, court staff, grand jury members, witnesses, potential witnesses, and poisoning the jury pool. Four of the 19 criminal codefendants in the Georgia RICO case (Scott Hall, Kenneth Cheseboro, Sydney Powell, and Jenna Ellis) have pleaded guilty and become witnesses for the prosecution. In Washington, D.C., former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has agreed to immunity after testifying before the federal grand jury in the case prosecuted by DOJ special counsel Jack Smith regarding efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the defeated former president stays on script promoting the sham of innocence and claiming his First Amendment rights have been violated by gag orders issued to protect others from harm, while misleading “ordinary people” to confuse the right to free speech with a duty to take it upon themselves to carry out Mr. Trump’s will in whatever ways they choose to make America great again

The genius of stochastic terrorism is that it bumps up against laws re: incitement to riot but doesn’t step across the line that holds people accountable. The way stochastic terrorism talks is a bit like the serpent in the Garden of Eden story. It sows the seeds of confusion and chaos. When Michael Cohen, President Trump’s long-time fixer and lawyer, testified before congress, he said that Donald Trump doesn’t talk like other people. “Donald speaks in code,” he said. Like a Mob boss, he doesn’t speak directly. He tells you what he wants without telling you.

Stochastic terrorism does not end in a courtroom. It walks the streets. It huddles in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. It speaks of law and order while eroding public trust in the legitimacy of the courts and the rule of law. It puts the squeeze on a Speaker of the House, ensuring his failure, and turns the Speaker’s gavel over to a little-known Christian nationalist, a member of the insurrection pack who cheers for the Alpha wolf as he rides the wave of stochastic terrorism to the Oval Office.

— Gordon C. Stewart, Views from the Edge, Dec. 14, 2023

The American Future

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On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, a haughty Julius Caesar passes the seer who had warned him that harm would come to him on the Ides of March. “Well, the Ides of March are come,” says Caesar, mocking the seer. “Aye, they are come,” says the seer, “but they are not gone.”

By the end of the Ides of March in 44 BCE, Caesar’s power over the Roman Republic had come to a cruel end at the hands of the Roman Senate. Although the GOP would have us believe otherwise, Tuesday’s federal indictment of former president Donald Trump was not an assassination. It was a day of accountability under the rule of law. Caesar’s voice fell silent. Donald Trump’s has not.

Of characters without character

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all…to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Conversing with Milo

“Will you commit tonight to accepting the results of the 2024 election?” asked the CNN town hall moderator, Kaitlan Collins. “Yes, if I think it’s an honest election, absolutely, I would.” Moderator follow-up: “Will you commit to accepting the results of the election regardless of the outcome?” Answer: “Do you want me to answer it again? If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to. And, right now, we are so far ahead of both Democrat and Republican. And you know what? If I don’t win, this country is going to be in big trouble. It’s so sad to see what’s happening.”

“If I think…“

“If I think…” is not new. One expects to hear such “ifs” in the lock-down hospitals for the criminally insane, or in the fiction section of the library. Decades of serving churches and a public defense law office brought me face-to-face with the likes of Milo Minderbender. None of them had access to nuclear codes. These patients created their own worlds, but they lived within confined quarters in the real world. Aside from the nuclear codes, former daily national security briefings, command of the global spotlight, wealth, lawyers, multiple playmates, Donald Trump seems undistinguished from similar souls suffering from the worlds in their heads. He is its center. His wants, wishes, and desires —and his alone — define reality. He is, in fact, the weak man, the needy man, the sick man who puffs himself up to as a “man’s man,” the Strong Man with authority to separate truth and falsehood, good and evil. He is the star who can do whatever he wants — in a lingerie section of an upscale department store, on an airplane, or in a Moscow hotel suite— whose charm persuades masses of people that January 6 insurrectionists are patriots deserving of pardon.

“Hell rages round us” — Paul Tillich then and now

“Hell rages round us. It’s unimaginable!” wrote a young German Army chaplain in a letter to his father from the trenches of Verdun during World War I. “It’s unimaginable.” The young chaplain was Paul Tillich. During the Nazi party rise to power, Tillich served as Professor of Philosophy at University of Frankfort.

On April 13, 1933 — 10 weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor —Tillich was among the first professors ousted from their teaching positions as “enemies of the Reich.”From that time forward, Tillich made his mark on American cultural history with teaching positions at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. His descriptions of sin as hubris and as estrangement led Time magazine to feature him on its cover in 1959. Paul Tillich left the world more than a memory or a legacy. His legacy has fresh legs. It walks the streets of the estranged nation America has become.

The cuckoo’s nest: 2023 and 1933

Hell again rages around us in ways once considered unimaginable. No two historical circumstances are identical, but some moments in time bear an uncanny resemblance. The social, cultural, political, economic, spiritual estrangement is as much the challenge now as it was when a deranged Strongman turned Germany into a cuckoo’s nest where morning becomes night, the yearning for the good is twisted into evil, where the fear of death turns life into stone, reality into delusion, faith into demagoguery, courage into cowardice, capacity into carnage.

Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“When Shakespeare was writing,” said Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.” The Ides of March are come and gone. It’s June now. The Ides of June are come…but they are not gone.

Gordon C. Stewart, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 brief commentaries on faith and the news; Brooklyn Park, MN; June 15, 2023, the Ides of June.

When a critic attacks

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“What is your life?” asks the Letter of James. “You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

Letter of James 4:14b (NIV)

When a megalomaniacal public figure fears that his Echo is growing faint, and that the spotlight is fading, or turning against him, an ingrained and well-practiced defense mechanism kicks in, as surely as night follows day:

When a critic attacks, project onto your critic what you yourself are, and fear becoming.

Former Director of Homeland Security, later chosen to serve as White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, claims that his boss tried to use the FBI, the IRS, and other federal agencies as weapons against the president’s perceived enemies — former FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, among them.

Photo of Mike Pence swearing in of retired Marine Corps General John Kelley to the office of Secretary of Homeland Security.
John F. Kelly is ceremonially sworn in prior to President Trump’s speech at DHS Headquarters on January 25, 2017. Kelly was actually sworn in five days prior.

The former president’s current spokesperson refutes Kelly’s claim with the defense mechanism to which Americans have become accustomed:

"It’s total fiction created by a psycho, John Kelly, who . . . made it up just because he’s become so irrelevant.”

“You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life?” asks the Epistle of James. “You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James

A Letter to the Editor

A Letter to the Editor in today’s Star Tribune (Nov. 17, 2020) asks and answers a few vexing questions about fiction, psychos, and irrelevance.

Photocopy of Letter to the Editor, Star Tribune (Nov. 17, 2022)
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author, Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, November 17, 2022

Faith and a “Clear and Present Danger”

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I had never heard of the Faith and Freedom (F&F) Coalition before hearing Donald Trump would be the keynote speaker for F&F’s “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville, TN.

Did the Faith and Freedom organizers remember the 2016 presidential candidate’s unintended exposure of biblical ignorance when he called Second Corinthians “Two Corinthians” at Liberty University? Liberty is the Bible-believing school founded by Jerry Falwell, Sr., as a Christian counter-weight to the godless universities that were eroding America’s foundations. And, if Faith and Freedom is about freedom, why invite the president who drove a lawful peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration from Lafayette Park with tear gas — in order to pose in front of an historic Episcopal Church holding a borrowed Bible upside down?

Wisdom calls aloud in the street, 
      she raises her voice in the public squares; 
at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, 
     in the gateways of the city she makes her speech: 

“How long will you simple ones love 
    your simple ways? 
How long will mockers delight in mockery
   and fools hate knowledge?’” — Book of Proverbs 1:20-22.

What would Donald Trump say after the House Select Committee on January 6 had held its first three public hearings, providing irrefutable evidence of intense pressure on Vice President Pence? What would he say to the sworn testimony of former Attorney General Bill Barr and others that there was no evidence of fraud, that the election had not been stolen? What would he say about Ivanka’s sworn testimony that she believed the Attorney General because she trusted him. How would Mr. Trump respond to Barr’s sworn testimony that the president appeared to be “out of touch with reality”?

A clear and present danger

How would he rebut Conservative Republican retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig’s live testimony? The judge testified that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was part of a “well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American people has decided to confer upon his successor,” and that he considers Trump and his “Big Lie” legitimizers “a clear and present danger”?

The Speech for “Road to Majority”

From the podium of the Faith and Freedom convention, he practiced what Roy Cohn and Roger Stone had taught him. Always go on offense; never go to the defensive side of the line of scrimmage. “Mike Pence had a chance to be great,” he said. “He had a chance to be historic. Mike Pence did not have the courage to act!” He said nothing about his last phone call with the vice president on January 6 in which he called Pence a “wimp” and worse, according to the sworn testimony of his daughter Ivanka, the White House Attorney, and White House staff who were in the Oval Office. In his speech to the Faith and Freedom convention, Trump disparaged the vice president as a “human conveyor belt” for going forward with counting the votes that would certify results of the election. He had considered calling Pence a “robot.”

Historical Flashback by historian Heather Cox-Richardson

On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.

[Barry} Goldwater, along with House Republican Leader John Jacob Rhodes and Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott, entered the Oval Office around 5 p.m. The Arizona senator sat directly in front of Nixon’s desk, the others to the side. Goldwater told Nixon he had perhaps 16 to 18 Senate supporters left – too few to avoid ouster. Congressman Rhodes said House support was just as soft.

Rather than admit guilt, though, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

When his replacement, Gerald Ford, issued a preemptive blanket pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States, he guaranteed that Nixon would never have to account for his illegal attempt to undermine his Democratic opponent, and that those who thought like Nixon could come to think they were above the law.

“What I admire about Nixon was his resilience,” one of Nixon’s 1972 operatives told a reporter decades later, ‘It’s attack, attack, attack!’ “

That operative, who sports a tattoo of Nixon on his back, was Roger Stone, who went on to advise Donald Trump’s political career.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from and American, June 17,2022

Leave no Stone unturned

Not every resilient thing is worthy of praise. Roger Stone is resilient. Nuclear waste is resilient. Attack, attack, attack is resilient. Never defend! “Repeat, repeat, repeat. Attack, attack, attack! Never show weakness. Only show strength!

Who will remove the Stone? What congressional delegation will do for America what John Jacob Rhodes, Hugh Scott, and Barry Goldwater did when they walked into the Oval Office to tell President Richard Nixon it was time to resign? Who will go to Mar-a-Largo to tell Donald Trump that his game is over, that he can no longer lie his way out of the sand trap, that they will not pull him out to put him back on the course? When and how will the Republican National Committee (RNC) re-gain enough respect for the U.S. Constitution to tell the world that the “Big Lie” was a lie? When will Faith and Freedom become faithful to the Lord it professes? 

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, June 21, 2022.

When tyrants rage: Isaiah’s rebuke

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In Russia, Vladimir Putin denies responsibility for the death of Alexei Navalny. In the U.S.A, Donald Trump serpentine mind twists Navalny’s assassination into a fun house mirror, portraying himself as America’s Navalny — a victim of state power. When words fail me, I often turn to the Hebrew prophets. Finding Isaiah’s rebuke of Assyrian King Sennacherib in the Seventh Century BCE gives me the words. Isaiah speaks in the name of God (“I AM”) who cannot be mocked.

Isaiah’s rebuke

But I know your sitting down
and your going out and coming in,
and your raging against Me. Isaiah 37:28

ISaiah 37:28

A personal reflection

You cannot hide. You plot and scheme as though unseen, not noticed, secure in the dark places of public life. You rise. You sit. You go out among the shadows, declaring innocence and impunity. You mislead. You cheat. You lie. You bear false witness and concoct stories to assail your neighbors. You connive, conspire, and assassinate.

You poison your opponents and flood the public with fear and hate. You threaten your critics, and pay legal fees for sycophants who have placed their trust in you. You rant and rage and rouse the people with a voice that feigns righteous indignation.

Isaiah’s rebuke continued

Because you have raged against Me
    and your insolence has come to My ears,
I will put My hook in your nose
    and My bit in your mouth;
I will turn you back on the way
    by which you came.

Isaiah 37:29

A hook in the nose

photo of a hook (ring) in cow's nose illustrates the Isaiah text "I will put my hook in your nose."

Personale reflection

Uncivil, insolent, resistant, unhinged, kicking up dust on everyone around you, you mock whatever would restrict you, restrain you, expose you to the light of day, but darkness is not dark to Me. I hear you snorting, braying and bellowing. I see you bucking against the bit and bridal that will break you of your whims and schemes, your defamations and slander, your arrogance and threats, your schemes of terror, your treasonous justifications of insurrection and assassination.

I AM. You cannot hide from Me.

A call for prophets

The biblical prophets Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Ezekiel et.al. were not, as is commonly supposed, fortune tellers. They were not palm readers. Isaiah confronted Sennacherib, king of an empire, while he called his countrymen to re-claim the souls they had almost lost.

Eugene Peterson paraphrases the rebuke of Sennacherib in his masterpiece rendering of the Bible, The Message:


I know all about your pretentious poses,

  your self-important comings and goings,

 and, yes, the tantrums you throw against me.

Because of all your wild raging against me,

 your unbridled arrogance that I keep hearing of,

I’ll put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth.

I’ll show you who’s boss. I’ll turn you around

 and take you back to where you came from. 

Isaiah 37:28-29

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still!: Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), 49 brief (two to four page) reflections on faith and public madness; Brooklyn Park. MN, Feb. 22, 2024.

When the bough breaks

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Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Multiple drafts of a reflection on “Rock a reflection on the Baby” missed the mark. I was aiming at humor, but I’m no Andy Borowitz. None of them was funny. Some I ripped up. They’re on the floor of my office.

The drafts had been attempts to take “Rock a Bye Baby” as the template for a commentary on American public life in February, 2022. When the baby on the tree top is rocked by gale force winds, we hear the boughs of the old oak tree creaking. If and when the bough breaks and Baby and cradle do fall, we can only hope the chain-saw rescue crew doesn’t cut down the tree and turn it into sawdust.

The Origins of “Rock a Bye Baby”

The oldest copy of “Rock a Bye Baby” is found in “Mother Goose’s Melody” in London in 1765. One story of origins locates it in a London pub on the occasion of the birth of King George II’s son, the prince who would continue the royal line they detested. The first known copy of “Rock a Bye Baby” has a hand-written note:

The oldest copy of “Rock a Bye Baby” is found in “Mother Goose’s Melody” in London in 1765. One story of origins locates it in a London pub on the occasion of the birth of King George II’s son, the prince who would continue the royal line they detested. The first known copy of “Rock a Bye Baby” has a hand-written note:

"This may serve as a warning to the proud and ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last."

That hope feels farther away after a perplexing presidential debate and the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling interpretation of the meaning and boundaries of the U.S. Constitution’s provision of Presidential Immunity. Drip by drip, bucket after bucket, I shudder at the erosion of democracy. I scream, watching a Narcissistic entertainer move closer to the White House, and ask again whose shoulders lifted him to the tree, and why they have. Then I remember Daniel Boorstin who now seems like the Greek seers of classical Greece and the Greek.

The Reign of the Image

Daniel Boorstin’s book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1662), was a ground-breaker. Historian and Librarian of the Library of Congress. Here are a few excerpts from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image in 1962.

“We [Americans] suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.”

“Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.”

photo of Trump baby balloon over a crowd in London.

“A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services.“

“The image, more interesting than its original, has become the original. The shadow has become the substance.“

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.“

“By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.“

Thanks for coming by.

Have courage; hold to the good; refuse to return evil for evil; love your enemies,

Gordon

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, July 1, 2024. Originally published on VFTE, February 12, 2022.

The Maus That Squealed

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A crowd of students gathers on the university plaza at 11:00 p.m. for a parade to a bonfire. They walk by torch-light with drums drumming through the streets of the city, followed by a truck, on their way to the Opera House where a huge pile of wood is waiting. By the time they arrive, the crowd has grown to 30,000, eager for the match to be struck.

A voice thunders across the plaza:

The age of arrogant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end! . . . You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour — to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past. This is a great, powerful, and symbolic act. . . . Out of these ashes the phoenix will rise. . . . O Century! O Science! It is a joy to be alive!

The date was May 10 of 1933. The speaker was newly appointed Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. The event was part of “Action Against the un-German Spirit,” a program developed in April by the German Student Union’s Office of Press and Propaganda. At midnight of May 10, 1933, the sights, sounds, and scent of bonfires filled the air of every university town in Germany.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of “un-German” books on the Opernplatz in Berlin.” — United States Holocaust Museum.

The Twelve Theses

“Action against the un-German Spirit” was accompanied by another product of the Student Union leader gathering on April 8. “Twelve Theses,” 12 short statements designed to appeal to German Lutherans’ celebration of Martin Luther’s posting of 95 thesis on the Wittenburg Church door. The “Twelve Theses” were published and posted everywhere. In spirit and tone the “Twelve Theses” was the fitting companion of “Action Against the un-German Spirit.”


The students described their action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.” The following excerpts illustrate the tone.

"Language and literature have their roots in the people. It is the German people’s responsibility to assure that its language and literature are the pure and unadulterated expression of its Folk traditions.” “Purity of language is your responsibility!” “Our most dangerous enemy is the Jew and those who are his slaves…. "A Jew can only think Jewish. If he writes in German, he is lying. The German who writes in German, but thinks un-German, is a traitor!”
“We want to regard the Jew as alien… The unGerman spirit is to be eradicated from public libraries.” "At present there is a chasm between literature and German tradition. This situation is a disgrace." “We demand of German students the desire and capability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the resulting liberal decay in the German spirit.”

On the List

The list of “unclean spirit”…”un-German”… or “anti-German” literature was long. Among the 4,000 books to be purged were the works of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Hellen Keller, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Sigmund Freud, and Heinrich Heine.

Heinrich Heine was a widely-read 19th Century German poet, journalist and essayist whose prescient line in Almansor: A Tragedy, published a century before in 1823, hit too close for comfort in 1933.

“Where they have burned books, they will, in the end, burn people, too.”

–Poet Heinrich Heine, 1823

February 1, 2022, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota in the U.S.A.

At dawn I take the dog out and bring in the paper. “Campaign to ban books spreads across the U.S.” leaps from the front page, as had a report two days ago —“School Board in Tennessee Bans Teaching of Holocaust Novel ‘Maus’” NYT, Jan. 27.” The Tennessee school board had voted to remove the novel “Maus” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman because it contains swear words, according to the board minutes. The vote was unanimous.

When Art Spiegelman learned that “Maus” — his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his family’s experience during the Holocaust — had been banned by a Tennessee school board, he told the Washington Post exactly what he thought of the antisemitic decision:

“It’s part of a continuum, and just a harbinger of things to come. This is a red alert.”

Art Spiegelman to Washington post re: censorship

Book burnings, censorship and purging have a history. Most often the books are judged as unclean, not pure, unpatriotic, unChristian, un-this and anti-that, un-American and anti-American, etc. Yesterday’s NYTimes article (Jan. 31, 2022) on book-banning cites a poignant quote by Lauri Halsi Anderson, contemporary author of young adult books. 

"By attacking these books, by attacking these authors, by attacking the subject matter, what they are doing is removing the possibility for conversation. You are laying the groundwork for increasing bullying, disrespect, violence and attacks."

Letter to Benjamin Franklin, September 24, 1765

Correspondence between “Founding Fathers” Charles Thomson and Benjamin Franklin is preserved in the National Archives. Thomson’s letter to Franklin now feels as prescient in the U.S.A. as Heinrich Heine’s line was for Germany.

“The Sun of Liberty is indeed fast setting, if not down already, in the American colonies: But I much fear instead of the candles you mention being lighted, you will hear of the works of darkness.” — Charles Thomson: letter to Benjamin Franklin, September 24, 1765 .

At the time of Thompson’s letter, “the Sons of Liberty” were turning to violence and intimidation in response to the Stamp Act. Franklin was a principled Quaker committed to reason, civility and non-violence. Franklin would likely have chuckled at Thomson’s play on words, but not at the warning of the works of darkness.

Conroe, Texas, U.S.A – January 30, 2022

“If I run and if I win,” declares Donald Trump to a cheering crowd in Conroe Texas,”we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

He accuses Black prosecutors of racism. “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights from the Supreme Court or most other courts. In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you…. If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”

A little gray Maus who’d been shooed off the stage quivers and squeals to the audience, “This is a red alert!”

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of “Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness” (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, Feb. 3, 2022.