"Let His Days Be Few"

DECEMBER 2009

Probably the most popular holiday movie ever made was It’s a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. The 1946 movie, released in early January of 1947, features a hardworking small businessman, George Bailey, who runs a small building and loan association which caters to disadvantaged borrowers. His nemesis is a greedy, cruel, nasty banker, Mr. Potter, who tries to run him out of business and almost succeeds. Potter enjoys throwing regular middle-class people out of their homes. Saving the day is an oddball angel named Clarence. The film is an emotional roller-coaster, with good, of course, winning out over evil. It ends beautifully.

For two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, the movie ran on almost every TV channel that existed, during the Christmas holiday season. Because of copyright issues in the 1990s, the movie no longer permeates the holiday season. But I always enjoyed it, despite the angel business. However, I won’t be watching it even if it airs this year. Why? Because this year, 2009, in the good ol’ USA, Mr. Potter has won. Decent, regular middle-class people are losing their homes and their jobs, in droves. For most Americans, life is anything but wonderful, and for many it is hellish. 

I wanted to lighten up this month and have a few giggles, but that’s a tricky business right now. Some people can’t even afford to buy presents this year. How do you explain that to a 6-year-old at Christmas?

“Sorry, Timmy, but Santa can’t bring you any toys this year because his portfolio was heavily leveraged in mortgage-backed securities. We tried re-capitalization, Timmy, but there are too many toxic assets on the balance sheets. If Santa doesn’t start laying off elves the whole workshop’s got to shut down.”

 I am staggered by what is happening in this country. And all of it is bad. They’re calling it a recession, but with over 10% unemployment (almost 20% if you consider underemployment) and those numbers still going up rapidly, I call it a Depression. They call the plan to send another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to join the 60,000 already there, a “troop augmentation to get the job done.” I call it Vietnam. It’s déja vu all over again. They call it a whopping Democratic majority in the House and Senate. I call it a continuation of the Bush administration. Bail out Wall Street and the hell with the middle class.

And, to top it all off, we have a return of the virulently racist underbelly of this country. It is a part of us that I thought was mostly fading away. I was wrong. The presidential campaigning throughout 2008 offered some warning of what might follow, but it seemed that things might settle down after the November election. They did not. They became progressively worse to the point that by August of this year I could only stare at the TV in disbelief. In 1950? Yes. That might have been the USA. But in 2009?

The Ku Klux Klan Throws a Tea Party

This past summer we witnessed insanity on a level I’ve never seen in this country. I was too young to remember the race riots of the 1950s and early 1960s, so this is new territory for me. I do know that as I look around today I realize this is not the country I grew up in. This is new, alien and awful. The so-called “tea parties” in August were supposedly “grass-roots” movements by regular Americans to protest President Barack Obama’s policies—oh, and also the fact that Obama was not born in the United States. They challenged his birth certificate. They say he was not born in America.

However, considering the average intelligence of the people I heard interviewed, and the misspelled protest signs they were carrying, it is quite possible that these people don’t realize that Hawaii is a state. After all, it’s only been a state since 1959, so maybe they haven’t heard about it yet. Here are a few examples of their signs:

“Make English America ‘s offical Language”

“GET A BRAIN! MORANS”

“WHO NEEDS OIL? I RIDE THE BUS”

“Would we have allowed NAZI GERMANY TO HOST THE OLYMPICS?”

All spelling and capitalization errors were on the posters. And I guess these people have never heard of the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where Hitler stomped out and refused to present any medals to Jesse Owens, an American black man. But what, you may ask, does all this have to do with religion? Well, with no exceptions, these 2009 people were self-proclaimed Christians. They loudly and proudly called themselves Christians. They were 100% white for the first couple of weeks; but many news analysts commented on that and ultimately there were a few blacks here and there. But only a few, and­ they looked uncomfortable. (I wonder if they were paid to be there?)

The first Ku Kux Klan, formed in 1866 to terrorize black people, slowly gave way to the second KKK, formed in 1915. This newer Klan still terrorized blacks, but now they also hated Jews, Catholics (????) and “nativists.” They called themselves Christian fundamentalists and made proud appearances in anti-civil rights parades. They still exist, but have toned down their public presence and rhetoric. That is, until the Tea Parties. This brought them out of the woodwork.

A lot of these Christians held their loud protests during town hall meetings, shouting down any real discourse between legislators and their constituents. They booed and flailed their protest signs, proudly wearing tea bags stapled to their ridiculous hats. The tea bag was supposed to represent, somehow, the original Boston Tea Party, which was an honest complaint about taxation without representation. These new protesters called themselves “teabaggers,” completely unaware of the slang meaning of that word. (Look it up in urbandictionary.com.) These so-called “tea parties” were hawked and promoted extensively by Fox News. I guess that calls for a “Duh!”

Anyway, the bogus complaints about Big Government and high taxes were Republican talking points, repeated often. But the people parroting those thoughts were too dense to realize that the Bush administration had cut taxes for the rich as soon as they were in power. And the ill-planned, illegal, immoral Iraq war did and will continue to cost billions every month. We’ve been in Afghanistan now for eight years, and accomplished nothing. All of this was done by Bush, but the hate-filled, hatemongering teabaggers were oblivious. They went on screaming about Obama’s policies as if he were responsible for the Bush Era.

Soon the posters featured drawings of swastikas and Hitler mustaches on Obama’s face. One of these uneducated idiots actually said, into a microphone, that “We don’t want a communist like Hitler!” Hello? Hitler was a communist? That’s news to anyone who knows even the barest minimum about history. Another “Duh!” The most over the top protest sign, however, was a billboard, a highway billboard, showing Obama with a bone through his nose and covered with feathers and beads. Witchdoctor, don’t you know. Some TV channels showed it once but said they never would again. But they all showed, with some misgivings, images of these protesters with guns strapped on. Loaded guns. These appeared only where Obama himself was making an appearance. Naturally, the Secret Service kept these gun-toting Americans out of the halls and banquet rooms where the president appeared. Still . . . .

These people might as well wear their white hoods. They’re no longer fooling anyone about birth certificates or anything else. This is racial hatred. And the bottom line: They simply refuse to accept a black president. Never mind that his mother was white and only his father was black. Obama looks like “one of them” and they won’t have it. I learned a shocking lesson about that, on a personal level, after all of this madness took place this past summer. I had been corresponding with a woman in North Carolina for a couple of years. She was very smart, very fun to “talk” to and we agreed, I thought, on most things. Then, when the Tea Party Lunacy hit, I mentioned my scorn and she said, quite defensively I thought, that the North has a warped vision of the South. She told me that racial prejudice was no longer more prominent in the South than anywhere else. I responded that from the time I was twelve years old my schools were fully integrated and that I had never seen a “White Only” sign in my life. I also mentioned the Ted Koppel broadcast, “The Last Lynching” which was a beautifully produced documentary about a terrible subject—a random KKK lynching of a black man that occurred in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. I was an adult in 1981 but I remembered nothing about the tragic, sickening event, and felt I should have remembered it as a news story. I also said that lynching seemed to be a southern thing, and was not as far back in history as we would like to think. I never heard back from her again. Ouch! I hadn’t accused her of anything, but I obviously said the wrong thing about her precious South.

Well, in spite of all the protest rallies, Obama’s ratings showed that he was still very popular, all across the county (in districts where people were literate for the most part) and it was then that something new showed up. It was hate on a new scale, and they used our old friend, the Bible, to display that hatred. This was beyond the pale.

“Let His Days Be Few”

Since most of these Minnie Pearl teabaggers often had biblical verses on their protest signs, they nevertheless seemed irrelevant to me. But in the past month there appeared a new verse. It suddenly showed up on posters, and the link to a product line with that verse on it flew around the Internet. News shows talked about it, nervously it seemed. Why? Well, here are the words on the posters:

Pray for Obama

Ps 109:8

You could also receive those words on aprons, coffee mugs, towels—everything you could think of. Seem innocent enough? It isn’t. Why?

Now might be a good time to remind you that until I was in my early 20s I was an ardent Christian. I was just beginning to read those forbidden books about astronomy and evolution and so on. My world began to open up for me then, but up until then I was one of them. But even I couldn’t have told you offhand what that Psalm said, so, as a good Christian, I would have look it up in my Bible. And here’s what I would have found:

8     Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

 9     Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

The lines are that close together. The lines do not wrap. There is no break in the thought. Obviously referring to some other ruler, they nevertheless convey one clear-cut idea: kill him. One of the sites offering such products, http://www.zazzle.com/ soon removed them. Someone, I don’t know who, obviously put pressure on them. But before they were removed I saw all those products, gloriously displayed, and it sickened me. Have these Christian zealots never heard of the word “impeach?” George W. Bush was the worst president this country has ever had, and if he died I wouldn’t give a rosy red rat’s rear. But I would never have called for his murder. This is KKK talk. Lynch the bastard. I can’t believe this country has devolved in this way. My husband Pat assures me, though, that we haven’t devolved at all. We were always that way and we haven’t changed. The Klan just went underground, sort of. Bye the way, Pat was born in North Carolina and most of his family still lives there, and he knows whereof he speaks. I know what he says is true. I just have trouble thinking about it.