Somewhere, Somehow, the Anger Must Subside. But Then, There's the 38 Percent.

Suppose, as a miracle, that Republicans cross over and support impeachment charges that have a much better chance of coming.

That side's base would go wild. Charges of treason would cascade out of evening commentary. The person they cling to would be dismissed with an emotional outcry that would be devastating, at least to them. Victimization would swell to biblical proportions, both literally and figuratively.

Suppose now that Congressional Republicans continue to be intimidated by their minions and refuse to go along with clear and convincing evidence, out there for all to see already, that 45 has violated and completely abused whatever the Constitution has ever meant. Democrats who now seeth with contempt would ratchet up that attitude. Shouting matches, a few of which have already happened, might take over the halls of Congress. Indeed, just the other day (10/23), some House Republicans stormed a committee room in which a testimony was about to being behind closed doors, claiming a lack of access although at least 45 of them were allowed to sit in. They delayed it, but did not cancel it.

Both sides claim the corner on their anger. But we aren't getting anywhere, either. It's creating a tension that I haven't seen for at least 50 years.

God hasn't saved us, as the fundamentalists insist (see below). Rationality hasn't, either, as liberals also do. We continue to tumble down the ugly stairs. What the hell's left?

For one, I would certainly like to stop being angry at 45, but I can't. He has ruined far too much. I've already written that he must go, and not one day too soon.

Beyond that, though, there are those who stand by him regardless of what he does and why. I want to shake them and say, Who are you? How can you do this? They will remain behind when this has ended, whatever glorious day it does. They will be hung over the bar on Friday nights, bemoaning the 'deep state' or whatever chimera they believe haunts them, instead of stepping up and taking responsibility for being citizens.

Above all, they will insist on being victims. 45 plays into their mentality perfectly. It's but a single step from being victims to being vengeful, pseudo-righteous defenders of a cause they can't even articulate. A major league umpire, one who's used to enforcing the rules of a great game, just sent out a tweet saying that he's getting AR-15 (oh, goody) and raged that a 'cival (sic) war' was about to break out. And you're going to do what with that weapon, then, buddy? And do you have friends who are similarly armed (answer: of course)?

I'm not sure if we can scale people down from this. There are numbers that bother me. I saw recently that a Gallup poll found that 38% of the adult population believes that humankind has been around for less than 10,000 years--except by then, peoples had already been mobile enough to have crossed the Bering Strait into North America and had settled a significant part of it. Anthropologists have proven it long ago.

Nonetheless, it's a reaction that would confirm the literal biblical interpretation of our origins. 38% is a heck of a lot of people; over a hundred million of this country's population. It is also a reasonable measurement of 45's support base. Very few polls taken during his awful, disgusting presidency have ever put his support beneath that number.

Coincidence? I think not. Our public educational system has been sufficiently attacked and modified in recent decades so that creationism has been given a berth too wide to be ignored, even though it is directly at odds with what science has decisively discovered and re-discovered. People learn and establish as fact what they're comfortable with and nicely dispose of that which makes them uncomfortable. There have been well-ballyhooed court cases in which the secular state and science have been reinforced, but for each of those, there have been a hundred (guessing here) other situations and local decisions in which no one has brought enough resources to challenge a religiously-based theory of the world's beginning.

This is the slow, steady mission creep at work. How slow? How determined? The well-celebrated Scopes 'monkey trial' took place in 1925, over ninety years ago now. I remember teaching it. It was with an attitude of 'I don't want to tell you what to think, but we're nowhere near such a mentality now.' How silly, how naive, was that? How much in denial was I?

Has it been that the 38% number has grown from that base moment, with the religious fundamentalists staging an nine-decade comeback that now rages? Or has that number always been about that much, in a concrete basement, and the rest of us have hovered nearby in our own little worlds?

Here's the kicker question, then: Either way, can democracy work in the same geographic area for two kinds of peoples for whom these mentalities exist? William Lloyd Garrison was reviled in the 1840s for his insistence that non-slaveholders should live in a different country than that of slaveholders for largely moral reasons. Are we returning to that today? Are the fundamentalists saying as much? Does their constitution have the same far-reaching effects to include them under the same roof as the rest of us, or shall we just shake hands (not shoot each other) and dismiss the whole idea of one country from now on--the rearrangement of which would take decades?

Thing is: After thorough and incessant polling, 38% is just about the base of the base. I've seen few support polls for 45 that go lower than that line. Coincidence? I very much doubt it. It's also been well-established that the fundamentalist, evangelical base for 45 is immutable and insistent. Regardless of whatever evidence is being unearthed by dutiful Democrats in the House of Representatives, that 38% will stand by him.

When 45 is gone, regardless of whether he survives impeachment hearings, they will be left over to support the next charismatic, illogical, bullying, self-possessed rogue that comes along, as long as he/she mouths holy dog-whistles. That also means that certain churches, especially mega-churches, may become the centers of political organization, even though they aren't supposed to be since they've been given a break against paying taxes.

I don't know of many liberal mega-churches. The ones which utilize their pulpit for political reasons are nearly all supportive of 45, and threaten rumblings of the firmament should he be removed before his time. And their adherents believe in the preachers, are sucked into the vortex of politics connected to religion, can't separate themselves to be independent thinkers, and subvert the meaning of the secular state as our constitutional culture has legally developed it.

In other words, they want a theocracy in which they don't need to consider anything besides what they're being told on Sundays, allowing a small group of religious oligarchs to shape their thinking, as long as they tithe regularly. And if their children have 'textbooks' that describe the beginnings of the universe in terms of Genesis (developed by a separate, disingenuous, self-justifying pseudo-intellectual culture), well, who would they be to question it?

That this greatly graced process is being interrupted by those of us who think that religion should have little if anything to do with the determination of governmental activities (which is almost always true, by the way) is the source of their anger and exasperation because, after all, God is waiting for justice, not only them, and who are we to stand up to that? So it all justifies itself and around the roulette table we go, waiting for the ball to land in someone's Christian church.

The table's rigged, of course. No other religion could possibly be valid. No other slots are open. And the house always wins. It's not the way Christianity's supposed to work. But if Republicans can win while using it, it's fair game to them, too. Their claims of upholding sacredness are empty if the means by which they do it, to manipulate democracy, are utilized. But they don't care.

I'm a member of an organized religion. But the members of my congregation, by and large, do not subscribe to this pre-empting of developmental thought at the cost of yielding to their concept of the almighty and everlasting life. It's why I joined.

For the rest, though, this maddening firewall remains. And it's also why the most important sycophant in 45's collection of them may not be Rudy Giuliani or Mike Pompeo or Lindsay Graham or someone else not in jail yet. No, no. It's Secretary of Education Betsy DuVos, who's been pretty much assigned to round up these folks who have stopped thinking and mold them into a charter-bound political force that will be around for Election '20 when this smoke clears. Count on it.

38 percent is a big number if all of them come out to vote. Whole states can be carried with such a number if the other side gives up and lets them have it. We only count those who show up on Election Day. Please remember that. It's the only way we have to hold back bad thinking. The anger is a tougher issue; it will last far longer.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark