No Bread, Just Circus

Let’s get this straight: Donald Trump says we must send 56.6 million schoolchildren back to classes, in enclosed rooms, for seven or more hours a day, plus another 19.9 million college students — 76.5 million young people in all, during a lethal pandemic — but it’s too dangerous to let Americans vote in an election he appears destined to lose.

If ever there was a doubt about the depths to which this malignant, criminally corrupt narcissist would sink, his tweet of July 30 takes the spoiled-rotten cake: “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

Remember Samson, who, according to the Old Testament, pushed down the pillars of the Temple of Dagon, killing himself along with 3,000 Philistines? (Judges 16:22-30)

There is no better parallel to our Republican Party’s King of Kings today, and what he is doing to the Philistines who stand by his leprous side, as he tries to push down the pillars of our republic. 

Let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Judges 16:1 begins with Samson spending the night with a prostitute. Nothing about paying 130,000 shekels to buy her silence, but that may be an error in transmission.

Another possible error occurs in Judges 16:21, when “the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza.”

Today, of course, the Philistines have gouged out their own eyes in support of the whoremonger, whose hair may have been shaved, like Samson’s, but we’re not sure, because he wears a wig.

Let’s postpone, for the moment, the Gaza angle. I could expatiate upon it if you like, but I don’t think you’d like it.

The parallels break down again, a bit, in Judges 16:21 and 24, though it’s too early to tell whether this prophecy will hold.

In Judges 16:21 the Philistines bind Samson in shackles, and “set him to grinding in the prison.”

Boy, if only.

In 16:24 the Philistines “praised their god, saying, ‘Our god has delivered our enemy into our hands, the one who laid waste our land and multiplied our slain.’”

Boy, talk about a Biblical prophecy, come due on Nov. 3, after 160,000 deaths, and counting.

Aside from racists, tax dodgers and Russia, Trump derives a lot of support from right-wing Christian evangelicals, who claim to believe in the Absolute Truth of the Bible and its supposed prophecies. 

I think it’s all nonsense, but I acknowledge that the seven plagues in Revelation include mortal plagues of mankind, a worldwide heat wave and plagues among cattle — all of which we have seen. 

I’m not sure I can endorse the dragon with seven heads and 10 horns, though. I mean, do the math. Do three of the dragon’s heads have two horns, and four of them only one? Or is there some other arrangement? And how is that fair? I mean, if you’re looking for fairness, you’d think you could find it in the Bible, wouldn’t you?

Or was the dragon with seven heads and 10 horns the result of reapportionment of congressional districts under Republicans?

Well, I’m not a theologian, though I have read that damn book cover to cover. Twice.

I’ve also tried to read the Quran, but I never got past page 10. Too nasty too soon.

I think both of those books should be moved out of bookstores and into bakeries, and sold as fruitcakes.

(Robert Kahn’s opinions do not represent the opinion of Courthouse News.)

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