Philomel means lover of song. In classic literature and prose, philomel was substituted with the nightingale. William Shakespeare, for example, employed the nightingale, or even philomel, at least 33 times in his plays and sonnets as symbols of song, grief, and trauma. Its’ origins trace back to Greek and Roman mythology; of how the gods created the nightingale.
It is a tragic story, and like many Greek and Roman mythologies, is racked with violence, sexual violence in particular. This story contains such tales. There are several versions of the myth, I learned, and over the ages this story has been reinterpreted in prose and art.
The story I still thing resonates today, Greek and Roman Gods were powerful beings, they not only abused their powers to indulge their thirst for vengeance and lusts but also silence their victims. They also had soft spots and intervened at the last second in supposed acts of generosity and kindness. Today we have powerful men who use their money and office to silence victims.
The story of Philomela is one such example. Philomela was the younger sister of Pronce who was married to Tereus, the king of the Thracians. Philomela’s voice was considered beautiful, like a birds song. Tereus developed an obsession for Philomela. He raped her, and to stop her from telling his wife much less anyone else, cut out her tongue. Philomela, however, used her master weaving skills to make a purple robe or shawl with hidden messages of the rape. Through the symbols woven into the shawl or robe, Pronce learned of the rape, and in a rage killed her (Pronce’s) and Tereus’ son, cooked him, and served him to Tereus.
When Tereus found out, he raged, grabbed an axe, and chased Philomela and Ponce out of his palace, intending to murder them. He caught up with them, but, at that point, before he killed them, the Gods turned all three into birds. Ponce became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Tereus a hoopoe, a very orangey, colorful bird known for its feathered crown.
Over a week ago, news media reported that E. Jean Carroll, was being investigated by the Department of Justice for perjury. Carroll, famously sued Trump for defamation a few years ago, and won a $83.3 million settlement. The civil jury found that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in New York City. The judge called it rape. Trump has appealed the civil courts verdict, asking that the settlement be set aside. It sits before the Supreme Court today.
You can smell the corruption all the way from Illinois and the White House. Trump, as President, presides over the Department of Justice. The acting Attorney General is a former attorney for Trump. The Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Bourtos, is overseeing the investigation. As a side note he is an alumnus of UVA law school.
As the fate of the civil case and judgment against Trump rests before the Supreme Court, Trump is using the Department of Justice to ‘cut out the tongue’ of E. Jean Carroll. She is today’s Philomela. It is outrageous. It is also meant, I think, to silence victims of Epstein and his many friends from coming forward.
Trump is a vile and heinous man and thinks nothing to use the full weight of his immense presidential powers, both legal and illegal, to go after and silence his accusers. He fancies himself a deity. Congress and the Supreme Court have allowed him to be a king and deity.
He needs to be turned into a hoopoe, orange feathered crown and all. A massive turn out this November will effectively turn him into a flightless Hoopoe of sorts. The Greek and Roman gods did have a sense of humor, however. Perhaps they would turn Trump into the Dodo bird or better yet a fluffy-backed tit-babbler or a blue-footed booby.
In the late 18th century Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe completed a play loosely based on the late 16th century Italian poet Torquato Tasso. Part autobiographical, according to one scholar, Goethe explores Tasso’s real-life moments of inspired poems created in the throes of mental illness, perhaps during episodes of manic depression or schizophrenia.
At one point Tasso was confined to a ‘madhouse’ for pulling a knife on his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfons. In the play, the protagonist also was placed under house arrest for threats and pulling a knife. Goethe uses the play to explore the ‘tensions between the rational and the irrational,’ according to one academic article. From this play comes the much-quoted saying, “the coward only threatens when he is safe.”
This is a cogent observation of the human condition, even if the quote has become something of a truism. It worries me because our President seems to be threatening everyone and everything as he too shuttles between the rational and the irrational. His knife is our military and domestic paramilitary police.
Things are not going well for Trump – mentally or politically — it seems.
His war with Iran is a military, strategic, and political disaster. Iran checkmated him. Meanwhile, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and America’s main street economy tanks, Trump fiddles with childlike vanity projects.
Inflation is rising at a quick pace, all because of Trump’s disastrous tariff wars and his catastrophe of a war with Iran, a war of choice. Last week gas prices were at this country’s highest national average cost per gallon ….ever. Americans, according to a new report, are falling behind in debt payments “at the fastest pace since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.” Credit card delinquencies rose to 13 plus percent in the first quarter of 2026. Additionally, auto loan delinquencies are also at record numbers. His polls are lower than sleepy Joes ever were.
Internationally, the world is aghast at Trump’s pretenses of not only being King of America but seeking to rule the world. At every opportunity he channels the evil emperor Ming the Merciless of Flash Gordon fame. Trump’s daily mental ruptures are rattling global markets. The 10-year government bond yield is at record highs, meaning sureness in the U.S. government ability to pay off its debts is declining. Because mortgage rates are linked to the 10-year bond, not to the Fed’s rate that banks get, it means that mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, making it harder to buy a home. That’s Trump’s doing, not the Chairman of the Fed. In short, international confidence in America is in freefall.
Yet, Trump seems wholly unconcerned with the mid-terms or 2028. Just pleasing his MAGA base and ignoring the basic sensibilities of democracy and the democratic process. As if they no longer exist. He even posted an image of himself with a rifle and the carcass of a rhino. Threatening Republicans who don’t back him 100 percent.
Why? What does he have up his sleeve that makes him think he is safe from political disaster and reversal?
I can only guess he isn’t concerned about the Republicans losing the house and senate this November or the White House with a democratic incumbent in 2028. That the outcomes of the vote of 2026 and 2028 are irrelevant; that he intends, and believes, he can and will stay in power.
As Trump vacillates between the rational and irrational, he increasingly lives in the latter camp. I am deeply concerned that a mental health driven constitutional breakdown is becoming increasingly likely should neither his Cabinet or Congress intervene. Given the cowardice of his cabinet Secretaries, Vice President, Roberts, Johnson, and Thune, Trump has nothing to fear and continues his campaigns of threats.
Corrupt is a word much used nowadays to describe Trump and his administration. I even heard it in Louisa in an establishment that I would say is part of MAGA country. A few weeks ago, when my wife and I were in a store in the Louisa and Mineral area, the owner standing behind the counter, went on a tirade about Trump and his corruption. Stating that Trump and his family pocketed over $1.4 billion.
I have been to this store several times and there has been, on occasion, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-democratic party bantering and comments made by folks in the store and behind the counter. For instance, if something was free, it was a “democratic discount.” I stopped going to the store, but sometimes they were the only game in town.
That said, when I heard the owner dis Trump recently, I got a grin on my face as wide as the Grand Canyon, said nothing, paid for my stuff, and left. “Damn,” I said to my wife in the truck, adding, “holy shit that was interesting.”
Whether that anger translates at the polls to a dem vote, is to be seen. It may turn into low republican turnout, which will benefit the democrats. But who knows. Who knows whether a corrupt White House will try and cancel the November election by declaring a national emergency, or, if there is an election, whether Trump will nullify democratic wins by claiming fraud and seize ballots. That is the $1.4 billion dollar question.
Corrupt, however, is more expansive than simple bribery, self-dealing, insider trading, and all unethical things Trump is doing to enrich himself, his family, and those loyal to him. It has a much richer and broader meaning. Corruption is plush in adjectives and verbs dating back to the 14th century.
Like many words in English, it has a Latin origin. It’s root meaning corrumpere, simply means to destroy to spoil. In the English language starting in the 1300s it took on the modern sense of how we understand corruption, both physically and spiritually. Most folks nowadays think just bribery, but it has many meanings. Sadly, I think you can put a check mark by each of the words below and say, “yep, that’s Trump.”
Debased in character, unhealthy, uncouth, bribe, to break, decrepit, putrid, putrefy, spoiled, depraved morally, pervert, contaminate, impair the purity of, seduce or violate (woman or child), render impure, and finally, influence by bribe or other motive.
Not only is Trump using the office of the Presidency to corruptly enrich himself and his family, but the list of his other corrupt acts is deep, and America decays and putrefies every day he remains in power:
he demolishes the rule of law in America every opportunity he has.
he routinely perverts the course of justice;
he broke America’s social contract;
he debases America and its allies daily with wildly crazy midnight social media posts;
he orders extrajudicial killings on the high seas and starts unjust wars without cause and without the people’s consent.
he violated a woman in a department store dressing room, a civil jury found;
he was accused by a woman of raping her when she was 13, per FBI documents;
he was a longtime friend with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein;
he posts images of himself as Jesus.
And finally, he is personally uncouth, not worthy of the highest office in our great land.
So, what to do. The first order is to vote in November, make pleas to friends and family to get out and vote. That’s the easy party. If Trump cancels the election or nullifies the election or tells congress not to seat the new congress, what then? What’s the response? I think, and I believe this, it will be the beginning of the end of the union. I don’t think disenfranchised states will wait for the courts.
Civil War? I hope not, and most Americans do not want this. It would be fratricidal. Problem is Trump is an insane, corrupt nihilist who likes to play the madman, when he is in effect really a madman, surrounded by sycophantic child like nihilists like Vance, Miller, and Hegseth. The question is, what will a depraved Trump do when massive demonstrations erupt across the country and in Washington DC should he cancel or nullify the elections?
“Good Morning Chief Justice Roberts, I see you put out the new signs”
We are, I think, in a supreme mess. A vindictive Chief Justice Roberts just settled a vendetta. As a Reagan Administration lawyer, Roberts opposed strengthening the Voting Rights Act. He penned memos arguing that letting someone sue a state for a ‘discriminatory effect’ was federal overreach, and interfered in states’ rights.
Despite his opposition to the amendment to the voting rights act, Congress in 1982 passed the bill in a bipartisan vote. Forty four years later he and five other conservative justices strike down that amendment as part of ten-year set of rulings undermining the law and Congresses’ intent. In effect stealing not only the Voting Rights Act, but the 15th Amendment, from the American people.
Congress clearly and resoundingly spoke on this major question in 1982. Now, the chief proponent of the Major Questions doctrine, says not good enough. If anything, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was, and is, an example of Congress clearly stating its will, the will of the people, on a major constitutional question. That is enforcing the 15th Amendment.
This ruling highlights why we are in trouble as a nation. To the conservative super majority, It’s not about the Constitution, it’s about settling personal and political vendettas. Dangerously, the Robert’s Court is a corrupt right wing political machine, rewriting the Constitution at will. The increasing use and misuse of the shadow docket, anonymous rulings, labored arguments that collapse under their own weight, the outright fabrication of history and data, all point to a debased and crooked Court. A Court where profiteering and acceptance of bribes by some justices is brazenly open.
I think the court will overturn birthright citizenship in part. It just opened the flood gate for gerrymandering districts to favor whites (sorry, I meant I Republicans) months before the mid-terms. I also believe when Trump seizes ballots this November the Court will permit it to do so. When Trump announces his intent to run for a third unconstitutional term the Court will invent a new doctrine to permit Trump to run again. Hopefully the gentleman with the scythe will come calling first.
This corrupt court and a dysfunctional Congress are all that stand before a tyrannical Trump and one party authoritarian rule. We are, therefore, in a heap of trouble, up a constitutional creek without a paddle. Now is the time to look to the future and decide how we, as a people, will respond.
Let’s begin with a very short quiz. True or false: Up to 1926 non-citizens in many States could vote in local, state, and national elections.
If you answered True, you are ………correct.
If you carefully read the original ratified constitution, you will note that it did not explicitly define who could vote. Or, for that matter even define citizen or citizenship. In fact, and practice, voting rights in the several states at our founding tended to be based on the big three: acquired wealth, gender, and race. These three qualifications defined who could and, consequently, who could not vote. While property qualifications pretty much disappeared in the early 19th century, gender and race defined who could vote, not citizenship, for many, many decades.
Some state constitutions merely asserted “white males” could vote with no mention of citizenship. As the country expanded westward voting by aliens was encouraged, for instance in the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 “freehold aliens” could vote. Some states required aliens to take an oath that they were upstanding inhabitants and intended to become citizens. Becoming a naturalized citizenship was linked to race, however, in our early Republic.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that only “free white person of good character’ could become citizens after two years of residence, however, several following Acts raised the residency requirements first to five years, and then in 1798 the Alien and Sedition Act raised the residency requirement to 14 years. This last requirement did not last long and was in response to fears of dastardly French influences.
The Constitution of 1789, while never linking voting to citizenship, clearly stated, however, that the President, Representatives, and Senators must be citizens, and added an additional modifier for President, they must be a ‘natural born citizen.’ The absence of any express statement in the constitution linking citizenship to voting suggests that voting by non-citizens was such common practice that it was deemed a common law right, at least in the American colonies which, before the revolution, were generally governed by written charters.
Americans, it seems, before they were technically American, were better off than their fellow Englishmen in Great Britian in terms of suffrage. In Great Britian, voting in the 18th century was extremely restricted and it was not until a series of reforms in the 19th century did Great Britian enlarge the voting franchise.
For about 150 years then, many states permitted aliens, that is non-citizens, to vote. I think Scalia, were he alive, and other constitutional originalists would vomit at that thought.
Voting by non-citizens did ebb and flow over time, however. Wars resulted in contractions of voting rights by non-citizens, for instance the War of 1812 and the First World War saw pushback. The rise of nativist movements as waves of immigrants arrived provoked some pushback as well on non-citizen voting rights in the mid 19th century. This accelerated when immigrants from eastern or southern Europe — such as Greece or Italy — began arriving in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[i]
Basically, folks from an earlier list of shithole countries or representing threatening religions, you know, the ever-dangerous Catholic or Jew. Claims of intellectual, genetic, and moral inferiority abounded. They couldn’t assimilate many claimed. Does that not sound familiar?
As we have seen, voting rights in America has a peculiar history and was (and is it seems) very much tied with gender and race, not citizenship. Citizenship was a variable state by state. Women gained the right to vote 105 years ago. African American men in 1870. Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until 1952, and therefore ineligible to vote.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to enforce and federalize and nationalize the right to vote. It did much to ensure all citizens, regardless of race or origin, were given equal opportunity to vote. That is no longer the case. While the reversals of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been articulated in terms of impacts on black and brown voters, the demise of the Act will have broader impacts on other communities: Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and other diaspora communities.
Trump’s new immigration policy is designed to impact the make-up of the next generation of voters. Afrikaners over Africans, whites over others. And, with the help of the Robert’s court, making it harder for everyday Americans of color to vote in states with long histories of denying black and brown people the right to vote. The attack on the Voting Rights Act is just one part of a broader, systemic attack on who is an American, who can become an American, and therefore, who has a voice in America’s present and future.
This November we are voting for more than just neutering Trump politically, we are fighting for whose America this is, and who will inherit America from us once we are gone. This is a generational vote, a vote for our kids, our grandkids, and our generations of unborn Americans.
Post Script: The Supreme Court recently invalidated Louisiana’s congressional district voting map because districts were gerrymandered by race. A normal grace period of a month was set aside by the Court to allow immediate action by Louisiana. Voting was already underway. The Louisiana governor is currently refusing to count over 30k mail-in votes already received.
[i] Texas permitted non-citizens to vote until 1921. Indiana as well. Kansas 1918. Oregon 1914. Virginia 1818. Pennsylvania 1838. See Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States, 2006.
The Supreme Court last week gave a final, mortal blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Et tu Roberts. The Court’s majority opinion, penned by Justice Alito, argued that America has changed since the 1960s, that the racial animus predicating the denial of black and brown people from voting or having the chance to be represented in Congress, had magically evaporated.
The Louisiana congressional district map, which was at the heart of this recent case, was therefore unconstitutional, according to six of the justices. Voting districts, per the Court could be gerrymandered to reflect political favoritism toward a political party but not race. To add insult to injury, the Court then granted Louisiana the immediate ability to change the map. Normally, there is a month’s long grace period giving the losing side an opportunity to prepare arguments in lower courts before the ruling comes into effect.
The central premise that America has changed is facile and flawed and misguided. Yes, America has become a more pluralistic society, black and brown representation did increase since the late 1960s. However, in many deep south states with large black and brown populations, white’s continue to be overrepresented in state houses and the House of Representatives. It ignores repeated and continual attempts to disenfranchise black and brown voters through ostensibly race neutral laws.
On another level, the racial animus towards black and brown folks is as strong as ever. Take Trump’s words that immigrants from ‘shit hole’ countries are polluting American blood, or that Haitians eat folks’ pets, or that Somalis are low IQ, or that non-white immigrants are destroying western civilization. I don’t think these thoughts are outliers in MAGA world, or for that matter in the minds of some of the Supreme Court justices.
A week before the riots in Charlottesville in August 2017, in which Heather Heyer was murdered and dozens more were injured when a white supremacist drove his car into peaceful protestors, I posted this essay. An essay about my community here in Louisa. Given the Court’s decision last week, I believe the essay deserves a repost. I repost it in its entirety below followed by a brief postscript:
Four ladies were sitting in a pie and coffee joint. In walk a priest, a rabbi, and an Imam. Naw, in walk my wife and I. What follows, disappointingly, is a true, but sad story. As we walk in the four women were playing bridge and conversationally engaged. As I ordered coffee and tea, a slice of rhubarb pie, and a muffin, at the counter my wife selected a table cattycorner from this bridge quartet, well within earshot, especially as they spoke in upturned voices.
Given the closeness of the tables, it was impossible not to be encompassed in the conversation, even as detached, unwilling silent witnesses. Eavesdropping into the conversation mid-way found us somewhere in a conversation about church business followed quickly by a lamentation that a friend, who apparently was pictured in a Ku Klux Klan photograph, was being unfairly associated with the racism. “Guilt by association” chuckled one woman slightly. It was like walking into a Kafka soliloquy. This tête-à-tête then veered onto the hot local subject of the removal of a confederate statue from a nearby university town. All expressed bitterness, with one speaking out loud for their little group, that it was a disgrace, that you “can’t change history.”
She’s right, but apparently, she can’t fathom or acknowledge that the South’s history is more than about white heritage. Then, in a deeply submerged psychological association, the statue controversy was instantaneously linked to the public schools — think 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education declaring racial segregation unconstitutional – when one exclaimed in the next breath to mutual concord, that “We provide them with a free education” and if ‘they don’t take advantage of that, it isn’t our problem.’ Oh, that set me off. We and them. WE and THEM! That basically sums it up. At that point my wife shot me that ‘not now’ look with a little Mona Lisa smirk, part threat, part calm down. I mumbled aloud about walking into a ‘daughters of the confederacy’ meeting.
My back was to this bridge playing klavern and I was facing out the pie shop’s picture window taking in the Mayberry-like main street, named of course Main Street. Across the street was the antebellum circuit courthouse, a little red brick jail stood off to the left of the courthouse. A statue of a confederate soldier stands a silent vigil; his gaze forever fixed towards the northeast watching over the town square and all who approach. Sheriff Andy Taylor or Atticus Finch may walk by if you close your eyes for a second. This American circuit courthouse was a facilitator of slavery and racial oppression. No doubt, slaves seized from indebted planters were most likely sold just yards away. Wills that directed the selling off or gifting of slaves, breaking up families, were filed in that courthouse. I wondered too about the little jail and imagined whether slave traders, with their coffles of slaves heading down from Alexandria to Richmond, and then on to New Orleans, would bed down their walking inventory in the local jail overnight for a small fee.
I am not sure the irony of their conversation juxtaposed so close to slavery’s ghosts was apparent to these card players. Nonetheless, the carefree and unguarded manner the conversation played out in a public space underscored, I think, the impulsive racist bigotry that pervades many American towns. It is as natural as breathing it seems. The fact that they spoke in raised voices like it was 1859 or 1955 leads me to believe these women intuitively assumed, that because my wife and I are white, we automatically subscribe to their philosophy.
Shamefully, I sat mute, halfway between cowardice and rage, sipping tepid tea, but felt my anger and words would not change what has been etched in these women’s minds since before their mothers’ mothers were even born. Their banter was wide ranging and not all about race. At some point one commented about CNN “yapping on” about the “Russia thing,” “brain washing of liberals,” and what to do about North Korea. On North Korea, at least, there was disagreement. While it isn’t fair to put all the white folks in this corner of the South into a box and label it “toxic bigots, handle with care” racism’s complexities remains deep in this part of the woods and the women playing bridge no doubt have already infested their children and grandchildren with their septic views of race, supremacy, and obligation. At least the muffin was good, but the conversation left a bitter, sad after taste.
On reflection, “WE and THEM” is at the heart of America’s political divide. It always has been. At its core is the fundamental question about “whose America is this?” America belongs to the descendants of African captives forced into generational slavery, the new African citizen, the fifth generation Mexican American, the Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt, the Shia Muslim from Syria, the offspring of Puritan New Englanders, the Chinese Americans whose ancestors helped build America’s western railroads, native Americans. And yes, even the fearful daughters of the confederacy who indifferently sip the tepid tears of those lost to slavery while playing bridge, should have equal access to a piece of the American pie.
Post Script: The Supreme Court made another decision antithetical to American democracy and misjudges the residual racial animus and antipathy still much alive in this country. This decision highlights the need for every vote this November. A democratic majority in the House and Senate will put a dead stop to Trump’s rule by decree. The Senate will ensure no more supreme court justices appointed by Trump are confirmed should any retire or die during the last two years of Trump’s term.
Nature has a way of recharging and humbling you at the same time. I find it is an antidote to modernity and algorithm driven lifestyles. Mother Nature has no human designed algorithm, and I escaped to the forests of the Appalachia mountains for a brief interlude, a temporary fugitive, from the monetization of my body.
The morning was cool and the weather unsure. Clouds, hail, snow, rain, and sun raked over the ridge line and dove into the hollow. The mountain side trail down to the river and falls was well-trodden, gnarly roots and sharp stones could catch an unwary foot. It was clear from the incline the mountain was going to levy a toll on my body on the way back up. One and half miles back to the start of the trail, with an elevation gain of nearly a thousand feet.
The falls were a disappointment; the clear mountain stream on the other hand offered lichen and moss-covered rocks, gentle drops and translucent pools. The photography gods smiled upon me that morning, but the trail nymphs and spirits of the forest hiding behind oak trees and under pink and white petals of Trilliums would soon have their laughs.
A mile into the hike up the mountain side, after some 800 feet of elevation gain, my legs were spent, my lungs on fire. My body of three score and two years screamed to my brain, which thinks itself 25, “stop, please stop.” My only thought was that if I die, I hoped my body is found before a black bear fresh from its winter sleep drags it into the hollow.
My soul left my body at the last switchback and only returned when I arrived at the BBQ Exchange in Gordonsville. It appeared in the form of a pulled pork sandwich and a cold Dr. Pepper. Such was my interlude.
Gardens have been used as metaphor for ages and even has a starring role in many religions. Many early modern political commentators invoked gardens, for instance, that democracy was a garden that needed tending to thrive. And we know some gardens harbor snakes.
Tending my garden is a year’s long endeavor, but spring is my favorite time. It’s a time of renewal and growth, bumblebee queens seek the brilliant yellow dandelion flowers — a critical food source – while perennials begin to poke their heads up. Weeds start to reappear as well, like the dreaded bindweed. You must get them early, ripping them out root and all, before the flowers turn to seeds. However, as any gardener who has dealt with bindweed knows, it is a war of attrition.
A noxious bindweed has invaded our government, and Congress is an untended garden, overrun with weeds and invasive species of autocracy, blocking out America’s native species of the rule of law, equal rights, and the doctrine of coequal branches of government. It is time to weed Congress and relocate some of the slithering critters lurking in dark crevices. Voting YES to redistrict Virginia’s congressional districts is one way. Time is essential as the last day to vote is Tuesday, April 21.
I am imagining by now most registered voters in Virginian have voted in the referendum to draw new congressional district maps. Tuesday is your last day to vote, so, if you have not yet voted, do so. A YES vote is one for sanity and restoring our national social contract. Ensuring that Congress stands up to and reins in a corrupt and malevolent president. The current House of Representatives is a disaster. For those in Central Virginia’s 5thCongressional District, this November we will have the opportunity to vote out Rep. John McGuire, a Trump vassal.
If the disastrous war of choice against the Iranian people is not convincing enough, Trump’s self-appointment and deification as God’s prophet and latter-day Jesus, should get you across the finish line and vote YES.
Redistricting Virginia is not my preferred course of action, but if I am to ever have a voice in Congress again, I feel strongly, redistricting is my only option at this time. I acknowledge the paradox of gerrymandering Virginia to elect more Democrats while arguing that democracy is in trouble. I get it. Trump’s direct order to Republican governed states to redistrict crossed a line, however. Many states obeyed Trump. An eye for an eye, right? Virginia Republicans have only themselves and Trump to blame. You thought you “owned the libs.” But when you whack a hornets’ nest often enough…… You get my point. If you are angry at what the Democrats are doing in Virginia, write Trump at the White House and tell him he screwed you.
You can tell this referendum has got the MAGA folks up in arms, almost literally. Vote NO signs are more plentiful than dandelions in Louisa County. When I was up in Northern Virginia a few weeks ago, there was a small rally at the intersection of Routes 29 and 50 in Fairfax at 9 AM on a weekday. They were animated. We need to respond with similar commitment and get the YES vote out.
In addition, the Republicans on-line and streaming ad campaign is desperate. The latest version is a video that portrays Governor Spanberger as an arsonist burning down a barn; replete with sinister narration claiming the redistricting is a ruse to take away guns, impose higher taxes, and give welfare to illegal immigrants. That last claim about welfare is usually made by a “Virginia Farmer” in a dead pan pitch. That is rich, given the billions of tax dollars flowing into farmers’ pockets to offset rising costs to operate farms due to Trump’s tariffs and his war against Iran. They sense they are losing, I think.
Let’s work together and start tending the garden of democracy once again. If you have not voted yet, please do so, and vote YES.
In the year 1188 AD, both England and France imposed an income tax to help pay for the third Crusade. It was called the Saladin Tax. It was a first. It was 10 percent. Saladin was the general, the Sultan, who recaptured Jerusalem the year before, expelling Christan forces who ruled Jerusalem since the first crusade when a Christian army captured the holy city in 1099, butchering most inhabitants.
Saladin captured the imagination of the West. They even invented a European origin story for him; he was featured in western literature, to include in Dante’s inferno. In 1920 when the French General Henri-Joseph-Eugene entered Damascus after the victorious allies divided up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Mandates they called them – he visited Saladin’s tomb and allegedly said, “Mr. Sultan, we’ve returned to the Orient.”
They drew new maps and new countries. Syria and Lebanon came under French rule, Palestine and Transjordan went to the British empire. Europe certainly did return and managed through their imperial hubris, ignorance, and contempt for the peoples of the region, set the stage for over a century of regional and global conflicts and wars over this land. To include Trump’s war with Iran
God, it seems, gets the both the blame and the glory. Depending on who wins the day.
To listen to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Trump’s war with Iran is a crusade. He uses Christian imagery to portray American forces as soldiers of Christ. His prayers ask that God and Christ guide American bombs, bullets, and missiles to kill evil enemies. Onward Christian soldiers wearing God as his armor. He stated that there would be no quarter. The crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 offered no quarter. Man, woman, child, struck down by sword and axes guided by Jesus and God.
That notion of chivalry and God died on the fields of Flander, the Somme, and Ypres hundreds of years later.
Unfortunately, Hegseth is not an outlier in Trump’s world. The White House increasingly compares Trump to Jesus, betrayed, and arrested. At a recent private Easter event, Trump’s spiritual advisor Pastor Paula White-Cain compared the experiences of Christ’s crucifixion to Trump’s legal troubles, you know sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room or paying off a porn star to keep silent about an affair. Although I think she must have forgotten about these secular trials. I too see Trump and Jesus in the same thought, every time he opens his mouth or posts on Truth Social, I say, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did that idiot just say.”
It is not new in our history for American leaders to invoke God, especially after great tragedies or wars or other calamities. America’s sense of its exceptionalism is deeply rooted in God. That shiny city on a hill. It is new, however, for an American president to lay claim to divinity. The Beatles were crucified, pun intended, when they claimed they were more popular than Jesus during a radio interview.
Trump is deliberately, cynically I think, erasing the line between him and Jesus. Many of his adherents are in lock step with him, nonetheless. For Trump to claim divine rule requires not only breaking down, but utterly demolishing, the wall between state and church.
Our country has a long history of keeping religion out of state and keeping the state out of religion. For good reason as we can see by Trump’s insane comparison to Jesus. The Constitution does not mention “God.” Not even the oath of office for president mentions God. When asked why God did not appear in the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton famously quipped, “We forgot” or “We don’t need any foreign help.” Whether these were apocryphal response, I don’t know, but they have a ring of authenticity.
In 1777, while a Delegate to Virginia’s General Assembly, Thomas Jefferson submitted a statute for Religious Freedom. It was shelved given opposition from the still powerful Anglican Church members. That bill lay dormant of over a decade and was resurrected by James Madison in 1785 after Patrick Henry submitted a bill a year earlier calling for a tax to pay ministers of the Christian religion.
In response to Henry’s bill, Madison wrote a Memorial and Remonstrance against the assessment. In it he warned that the state should not support any religion. That belief in God was between a man and his creator, that the state had no business interfering with such relationship. He warned that once you support Christian ministers, what will stop a particular sect within Christianity from assuming dominance over the others. Henry’s bill did not pass.
Virginia’s Baptists supported Madison’s Remonstrance and the Religious Freedom bill. They had suffered heavily from Anglican Church violence in the 18th Century, especially during the Virginia’s Great Awakening in the 1740s. Itinerant Baptist ministers were whipped or jailed and driven out of counties. Sadly, many Baptists today who support destroying the barrier between church and state have forgotten that history.
He was right. In Texas, which provides tax dollars to both secular and religious charter schools, Islamic charter schools requesting public funding are being denied funding, claims leveled about terrorism. Bashing Muslims has become sport in Texas amongst those Republicans running for office. A proposed public school reading list contains the bible, but not the Koran.
In addition to the Remonstrance, Madison also resubmitted Jefferson’s decade old bill to Virginia’s General Assembly. It passed. Both Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s bill for Religious Freedom should be required reading. Both argue that God doesn’t need the State:
“That Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitation, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness….” Adding, “not to propagating it by coercion …but extend it by its influence on reason alone.”
What became the first amendment to the constitution, written by Madison, were born in Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom (1786). It clearly articulates that the government could not establish a state religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof. A careful balance.
In 1802, President Jefferson, in a famous letter to the ‘Danbury Baptists,’ wrote that the 1st Amendment built a “wall of separation between Church and State.” While Jefferson had no direct hand in the writing of the Constitution — he was the American Ambassador to France during the constitutional convention, and was not in Congress when the propositions were submitted by Madison which became the Bill of Rights — he and Madison regularly corresponded, explaining their thoughts and ideas of government and the constitution.
This separation of church and state, this wall, has informed the liberal American experiment that in a healthy democracy the role of religion and the role of government are better kept distant and respectful.
That arrangement worked spectacularly. Religion thrives in America because of this wall of separation. It is a paradox then that America aims to finish off a despotic theocratic state in Iran while planting the very seeds of a despotic right wing white nationalist Christian theocratic state in America.
MAGA voices like Gladden Pappin – who claims the Pope will appoint Melania as queen – and Rod Dreher want American to go back to the Middle Ages, where the church held power, where the Bible was the law of the land. They hate and despise the enlightenment and liberal ideals of democracy, human rights, and the freedom to enjoy a personal relationship with God, without government surveillance and dictate.
The conspicuous and dangerous allusions to Trump, God, and Christ in prosecuting Trump’s war against Iran are anathema to America’s founding ideals and over 250 years of history. God help us all.
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara whether Trump’s Executive Order stripping birthright citizenship from children of non-citizens was constitutional. Every lower court hearing cases regarding the Order ruled that it was unquestionably unconstitutional. The arguments before the justices of our country’s highest court should have taken on the patina of well worn rituals and procedures. However, it was far from normal.
Last year, at an initial hearing before the Court, a majority of justices kept an injunction on the order in place, staying the implementation of Trump’s Order indefinitely. The vote was 6-3. Not shocking, given a radical core of conservative justices seem hell bent on overturning everything that smacks of small “l” liberal governance. The Court could have left the appeals court in ruling in place, basically saying that the lower court’s ruling was sound. They did not. Instead, a least four justices voted to hear the case.
Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, Trump attended the oral arguments. His attendance, for all intents and purposes, was a direct attack on the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution. Trump did not stay for all of the arguments, leaving after the first hour. His message sent, I think.
Most of the justices, it seemed, were skeptical of the government’s argument that birthright citizenship should be limited. The government’s argument hinged on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and the word “domicile” in the seminal 1898 Supreme Court ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Their arguments rehashes of earlier losing arguments. This should be a slam dunk case, but it isn’t.
In a previous post, I predicted with despair that Trump and the government would prevail. I thought perhaps I was wrong, and was heartened when the justices in a 6-3 vote kept the injunction in place. That signaled the government would most likely not prevail in court. Yet, I worried that at least four justices wanted to hear the case.
This case should not be a nail biter. It has been settled law for 128 years. But with today’s Court consisting of a super majority of conservatives with a hard-core troika of ultra radical conservative justices, anything is possible.
Enter Trump. No sitting president has ever attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court. It is unseemly, and I think, an assault on the doctrine of the separation of powers. His presence was like a dog pissing on a tree, marking its territory. Trump was marking his Order and signaling to everyone, ‘do not rule against me and my Order.’ It was designed, I argue, to intimidate the justices that are on the fence, so to speak. That is Barrett and Gorsuch. Like the Godfather movie, Trump was the decapitated horse’s head laying at the foot of the bed. A warning of bloody consequences.
I would not be surprised that folks acting on Trump’s orders engage in a campaign of intimidation, influence, and ever terror against Barrett and Gorsuch in the coming weeks. He will use similar tactics that he has already used on his other perceived enemies. His no holds barred attack on the Chair of the Federal Reserve is just one very recent example. DOJ investigations, insinuations of wrongdoing, grand juries, threats of impeachment against other federal judges. This will get nasty.
Even though many of the justices seemed skeptical in whole or in part of the government’s arguments; to include the Chief Justice Roberts, the majority opinion is far from settled. The final vote is in doubt in my mind. Congress abdicated to Trump. Will the Supreme Court do so as well? Surrendering the Judicial Branch to Trump, so that he can hang its stuffed head next to all the gold and gild bling in the Oval Office. That is to be seen.
