Contending Against Stupidity

AGAINST STUPIDITY the Gods themselves contend in vain, supposedly said the ancient Greek poet Agathon. Others have said essentially the same thing since. Stupidity can be definind as a sort of mental illness in which unhappy people willingly disconnect themselves from reality, and have no interest in reentering it, or learning. Among the demonstrable idiots who serve as our supposed "leaders", among the far right religious fanatics whose actual religious beliefs have nothing in common with the teachings of Jesus, there exist, like an oasis in the midst of a vast wasteland, a few clear headed intelligent people. They may be our last hope, in a decaying, dying civilization. Among them are Swedish autistic teenager Greta Thunberg, linguist, scholar, and social activist Noam Chomksy, and journalist Chris Hedges. There are of course others, many others, but despite their numbers, their numbers are insufficient to defeat the forces of idiocy and evil arrayed against them. Donald Trump is a symptom, not a primary cause of our current societal lunacy. I often remind people that it is neither necessary nor desirable to label Trump an "idiot", or "moron", that it is better, more effective to merely encourage folks to pay close attention to what he says and does, and that his idiocy will and always does reveal itself. It is the idiocy and evil which permeates American society and culture which merits identification and explication, because pervasive societal stupidity, disconnectedness from reality, produced Trump the succsssful politician. The single greatest threat to American society, the single most pervasive form of idiocy and evil among us is the Christian right, the politically conservative evangelical Christian movement, more than eighty percent of whose members got Trump elected, and still support him, despite Trump's blatant idiocy, criminality, and traitorous actions. Decades ago the evangalical Christian movement urged its members to focus on imitating christ, on personal Christian piety, and to eschew participation in the political quagmire, just as Jesus told his followers to abandon hope of overthrowing Roman rule, to submit to Roman authority in the physical world, and to propare for a kingdom of God to come. Then, in the late seventies, it changed direction, and became not only involved in politics, but firecely determined to take control fo the political system, and to remake it into a system of evangelical Christian governance, to conquer our constitutionally ordainded secular democracy, and to replace it with a fascistic Christian dictatorship, a "Christian nation", a movement which the evangelical movement calls "dominionism". This evil movement believes that secular, humanist society must be defeated and abolished. The Ten Commandments, many of which are irrational, will become the foundation of our legal system. The education system will teach Christian reality, only, including creationsism, instead of the verified scientific reality of evolution by natural selection. Homosexuals, non christians, socialists (Jesus was a socialist), immigrants, secular humanists, Jews, Muslims, non conformists of all kinds, will be marginalized or persecuted, according to dominionism. The federal government will exist only to protect personal property, corporate capitalism, and to wage wars of foreign aggression against countries in which non Christian religions flourish. The evangelical government will regard most poor people to be vitims of their own lziness, stupidity, or un-christian behavior, and ignored or punished. Women will be subordinate to men in the Christian nation evanglelicals so dearly long for. People who embrace religions other than Christianity will be treated as second class or will be outcast. The separation of church and state, so fundamental to the founder's constitutional version of America, will be abolished. The list of irrational ideologies which conservative evangelical Christianity espouses are many, and destructive. Upwards of one hundred million Americans subscribe to all this nonsense. They elected Trump once, insanely claiming that his ascension to power was ordained by God, and they now claim that his reelection was stolen from him, which proves their disassociation from sanity and reality. Only vast, widespread opposition by the remaining rational to their Hitler-like evil can save us from their eventual control of the country.