Get yer red-hot Bibles

As if we didn't know already, the rapist/huckster presidential candidate Donald Trump has created an even deeper bottom than he's ever drilled to before.

A few days ago, Trump offered us his version of the King James Bible, complete with an addendum of the United States Constitution, all for the low, low price of $59.99. Trump calls it his "God Bless the USA" Bible. And just in time for Holy Week.

Hurry. Come get yer red-hot Bibles before they're gone. Let's make America pray again. 

You don't have to look far to see that this is just another scheme – like his recent unveiling of Trump gold lame sneakers – to raise money to help pay his mounting legal fees. 

How incredibly offensive. On several counts.

His intended audience is clearly the evangelical Christian nationalists who, by blindly following the cult of Trump, have shown themselves to be a cult of hypocrites themselves. These people once followed the teachings of Jesus Christ. Now they are following the dictates of the Antichrist. There's no other way to describe this inappropriate indignity. Selling Bibles for personal gain.

Wouldn't a true Christian – and especially a professed billionaire – donate the sales of the teachings of Jesus Christ to benefit the poor, the destitute, the hungry?

One of the first things that struck me about Trump's latest loathsome endeavor was how he shamelessly combined government with religion: the Bible and the US Constitution in one leather-bound package. It's kind of a weak but obvious ploy to declare that only Christians can be patriots.

You, too, can be a God-fearing patriot for only $59.99 (Translation: help pay for my legal fees and vote for me).

And yet, in the 235-year history of this constitutional republic, there always has been a clear separation of church and state. It was intentional – the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. There are 4,543 words in the constitution, and not a single one of them is the word "God."

The Founders were ever conscious of the persecution the pilgrims endured in their break from the Church of England, the state church.

It was not going to happen here.

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries," wrote James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution.

In the First Amendment we find two provisions about church and state: the Establishment Clause and the Exercise Clause.

The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from "establishing" a religion. The Free Exercise Clause protects a person's right to practice religion as they please.

The country was to be a democracy, not a theocracy.

Thomas Jefferson was the first to coin the phrase "separation of church and state" in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, a religious minority that feared religious persecution. In his letter, Jefferson, then the president, cited that the free exercise and establishment clauses, in unison, built "a wall of separation between church and state."

And so it has been since 1789.

But now we have a former president who is also a current presidential candidate hawking bibles overtly  and intentionally combining church and state. It's dangerous. It's divisive. It's anti-constitutional. Because of Trump, who shows no moral values whatsoever, much less Christian values (think porn star Stormy Daniels. Think Trump rape victim E.J. Carroll. Think 4,000 migrant children torn from their families; six years later, hundreds are still to be reunited), we now live in an era of rising antisemitism and attempted Muslim bans. Are these groups – and others – finding religious freedom in this country, or are they finding persecution instead? Are we becoming what we were never intended to be? In Trump's narrow vision, it would appear so.

The irony is that Trump is hawking his Bible (which he cynically claims is his favorite book while grinning his Elmer Gantry grin) with the U.S. Constitution included, when it's clear he has read neither.

The First Amendment not only guarantees us free speech, but freedom of religion as well. And hopefully, freedom from Trump.

And it's Holy Week.

GOP cultism

Back in late 1954, social psychologist Leon Festinger asked – and was permitted – to observe a cultist group in Chicago known as the Seekers.

The Seekers were led by a person named Dorothy Martin who claims she had received messages from aliens (Just to be clear, not the undocumented persons we now call aliens and who are not to be confused with supposed creatures from another planetary system) whom she called the Guardians. The Guardians, from the planet Clarion, told her that our world would end by a flood on Dec. 21, 1954, and that her followers would be rescued a few days earlier by a flying saucer that the Guardians would provide.

 Festinger had a question: What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?

You can probably see where I'm going with this. The cult of Trumpism clearly has infected and divided American politics, almost to the point where reasonable people fear for the survival of our Madisonian democracy. As we prepare for the general election in November, where the rapist Donald Trump is seeking a second term as President of the United States, his base and his cult continue to thrive on lies, misdirection and corruption.

I recently saw an example of this on a YouTube video where Trump supporters insist they will vote for Trump even though many concede that he is a rapist, a grifter, and a liar who accomplished next to nothing in his first term in office.

What kind of irresponsible voter is that, when you know the candidate is unqualified but still insist you will vote for him anyway? You become a cultist with a vote.

Back to the Seekers, who I think could be compared to today's modern MAGA movement (which to me sounds a whole lot like a bowel issue).

The Seekers gathered at Martin's house waiting for the appointed hour of their rescue. When the clock ticked down to midnight, and the flying saucer did not appear, Festinger says the group sat perfectly still for hours without saying a word.

Finally, early in the morning, Martin told the group she had gotten another Clarion call from the Guardians. Because the group was so faithful in their beliefs, she said, God had called off the destruction of the world.

Festinger put his study in a book titled When Prophecy Fails. In it, he found: "The more you invest in a set of beliefs ... the more resistant you will be to the evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down."

Sound familiar?

I think it could be illuminating if Festinger's study in 1954 found purchase in today's GOP climate of political cultism.

•   •   •

As I write this blog on Sunday morning, Trump is just hours away from failing to meet the $454 million dollar bond deadline in his fraud case or else risk having his assets seized.

He claims he doesn't have the money available, although occasionally he also claims that he does. Liar.

Trump has skated away from trouble before (he's still not in jail, after all) and I think there's still an remote chance the money he needs might come in the final hour from an outside source, like Russia, China or Jared (Kushner, his son-in-law, who somehow came away from Saudi Arabia with $2 billion for real estate investments. The fact that Kushner has yet to do so speaks volumes).

Or maybe Trump will be rescued by a flying saucer from Clarion.

Masters of the Air

I had been waiting patiently – perhaps nearly a decade – for the production of Masters of the Air to finally make the television screen. 

It finally happened eight weeks ago when AppleTV+ aired all nine hour-long episodes, based on the 2006 book of the same name by Donald Miller, a professor of history at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. The final installment came this past week, depicting the end of air war in Europe.

Masters was the third prong of the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks produced World War II trilogy. The first was the exceptional Band of Brothers, which came out in 2001 and detailed the exploits of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne. The miniseries was television at its best.

 Taking advantage of BoB's success, The Pacific was released in 2010. The 10-part series was also successful, although arguably not on the same level as Band of Brothers.

Then came Masters of the Air.

On the whole, I enjoyed the series, although I have a few nits to pick.

The United States Army Air Force had two primary heavy bomber types in World War II: the B-17 and the B-24. Thousands upon thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators were built during the war, but only a handful remain today and even fewer are airworthy. Consequently, the miniseries depends heavily on computer graphic imaging – CGI – to depict the massive 1,000-plane bomber formations that darkened the skies over Europe and the horrific missions flying through anti-aircraft fire (flak) and German fighter planes.

There seems to be a bit of overproduction when movies use CGI, almost to the point of overkill. The skies are vast and wide open, able to accommodate all manner of aircraft at once. The skies in Masters appear to be unrealistically crowded. I don't know. Maybe they were. I wasn't there. I base my assumption on actual combat footage that I've seen and there appears to be plenty of spacing between aircraft.

But if the object here is to show the absolute brutality of the bomber campaign and the toll it takes on human beings, I guess CGI is the way to go. That's where the miniseries succeeded, I think. The unimaginable horror.

The series also pulls away from too much aerial combat and occasionally drifts away to prisoner of war camps, rest and relaxation centers, and even a romantic dalliance shared by navigator Harry Crosby (who wrote his own book about his experience titled "A Wing and a Prayer"). It seemed a distraction.

What I was hoping to see were more tidbits from Miller's book. Like, for example:

1) Technical Sergeant Arizona T. Harris, who was a top turret gunner on the B-17 Sons of Fury. Harris died on Jan. 3, 1943 when his plane was shot down and ditched in the Bay of Biscay. One eyewitness account reads: "...two guns were still blazing, Harris' twin .50s. As sheets of white water rolled over the wings and the plane began to drop  out of sight, the top turret guns were still spitting flame as fast as the feeding arms would pull the shells into the guns. Arizona Harris was trying to protect the pilot and co-pilot, who were in the water and under fire from (German) FW-190s. Harris must have felt the winter water fill his turret and climb to where it cut off his breath, yet he kept firing until the sea swallowed the hot muzzles of his guns."

Unbelievable.

2) Maynard "Snuffy" Smith received the Congressional Medal of Honor when he was filling in for another man as the ball turret gunner. Smith had never flown in the turret before this mission, which was his first. On the way back from a bomb run over St. Nazaire, his plane was hit by flak and then attacked by FW-190s. Then a fire broke out near the rear of the ship, with ammunition exploding. Then another fire broke out in the radio room in front of him.

Now out of the turret, Smith got a fire extinguisher and doused the flames in the radio room. As he was doing this, he saw his wounded tail gunner crawling toward him. Smith broke out a morphine vial and applied it to the crewman despite the cold wind, fire and the crewman's heavy clothing.

Smith turned back to the fire and when the extinguisher was empty, he urinated on the fire and then tried to smother it with his hands and feet until his boots began to smolder. All this while under fighter attack.  Smith then manned a waist gun to shoot back at the German.

All this was witnessed by the crew of an accompanying bomber.

Smith, usually a total screw-up on base, almost missed his own award ceremony because he was doing KP duty for coming in late after a pass.

Why wasn't this in Masters?

3) Incredibly, on the same mission as Harris, ball turret gunner Alan Magee was blown out of his B-17, Snap, Crackle Pop, without a parachute at 22,000 feet. He fell four miles before crashing into a glass roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station. He survived but suffered lung and kidney damage, several broken bones and nearly severed his right arm. He ended up as a prisoner of war.

There are other stories to tell. My friend, Lee Jessup, interviewed his father, Dalma, who was a tail gunner on a B-17 and flew an incredible 40 missions for the 15th Air Force. His plane was down by an FW-190 and Dalma had to bail out, the first time he ever used a parachute. Lee said his father never flew again after that experience.

And Lexington's Bill Mitchell, now deceased, flew 30 missions in a B-24 as a group lead bombardier, including a perilous mission over Kassel. Mitchell invited me to his house shortly after I had written a newspaper story about my flight in a B-24 that had come to Lexington. Mitchell showed me a box that he opened that was full of jagged metal pieces. "That's shrapnel from flak," he told me. Then he pulled out another box. 

It was his Distinguished Flying Cross.

I kind of wish the Masters of the Air miniseries included stories like these.

The next Herschel Walker

Congratulations, North Carolina Republicans. You've just nominated the newest iteration of Herschel Walker in a bid to become our state's next governor.

That happened Tuesday during the state's Super Tuesday primary elections.

Mark Robinson

 Walker, you might remember, was Georgia's effort to put a MAGA Senator in Congress. But Walker turned out to be pretty much a political functional illiterate who ultimately lost his bid to Democrat Raphael Warnock in a race that was closer than it should have been.

Now, we here in North Carolina have been presented with Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor who is not only an election denier, but a Holocaust denier, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, anti-gun control, civil rights/voting rights mocker and conspiracy theorist who thinks both 9-11 and Jan. 6 were government plots and humanity really didn't put men on the moon.

He's got enough baggage here to start his own TJ Maxx franchise.

His list of offensive remarks for most people is longer than my arm, (just Google "Mark Robinson" to find out for yourself). There are several of his remarks I want to comment on.

The first is the Holocaust, which in 2018 he wrote "this foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash."

And this coming from a guy who studied to be a history teacher.

Another is his view of the LGBTQ+ community, whose people he calls "that filth." After calls for his resignation as lieutenant governor, he said that he wasn't ashamed of his remarks.

Shortly thereafter, Robinson, said straight people are superior to queer folks. Sounds a little Hitlerish there, don't you think?

Also, there's a video clip  where he pines for a time when women didn't have the vote. I have to back up here a bit. That clip is only a snippet and taken out of context. Robinson was actually presented with a question by conservative commentator Candace Owens during a Republican Women of Pitt County event in 2020.

Owns asked Robinson "Which Americas would you want to go back to? One where women couldn't vote or one where Black people were swinging from trees?"

Robinson, a Black man, took the bait and said he'd rather live in an America where women couldn't vote.

The better answer would have been to ask what the hell type of question was that to ask in 2020? And then not to answer it at all. Next question.

The fact that he did give an answer – which will now serve effectively against him in the upcoming campaign – calls into question his ability to make rational decisions for this state.

Robinson will be going against Democrat Josh Stein for the state's governorship in November, and on the surface, at least, Robinson looks to be unelectable. But, as events have shown, even extremists seem to be electable these days.

Be careful. Be informed.