Make Russia Great Again
How many sisters are there in the Chekhov play, ‘Three Sisters’?
In Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina, does Anna’s husband Alexi crack his knuckles?
(Yeah, ok, I don’t know, in this order.)
On what basis then does one go forward?
Thinking about the USA at the moment, I miss Buddhism in the White House! Not that there has ever been a Buddhist in the White House, but it’s about time!
However, while reading the historian Steven Hahn’s new book, Illiberal America, it’s become my firm belief that the USA has entered an era of criminalized populism. That the nation has never been the nation it once thought it might be—if it ever thought of itself that way at all, and in all likelihood never did—at best thinking of itself in John Adams words, ‘a government of laws, not men.’
The suicide mission the USA seems to be committed to at the moment shouldn’t be that puzzling to anyone paying at least a little attention; the mission has been a long time in the making. The Protestant’s Way was earmarked from the beginning of the republic. Jefferson’s ‘deism’, the one divine god with rewards for the faithful and punishment for the wicked, is the grand scheme, the controlling metaphor for the way American history is playing out, having reached it seems its penultimate zenith in the figure of the current US President, a man of the people, a kind of criminal himself with lavish and richly rewarded criminal tendencies, endorsed by the formerly Protestant and now thoroughly Christianized Evangelical wing of the Republican Party, many of whom view him as a savior.
(Yea, though we have entered the valley of the canyon on the hill of death we shall fear no evil, my substitute prayer for the USA.)
I miss Buddhism, knowing a Buddhist can be just as Baptist so to speak as the next evangelical in one’s intolerance, moral turpitude, inflexibility, judgemental nature, but nothing that I’ve witnessed in the past 50 years comes even remotely close to the force and political power of the ‘evangelical project’—and the project keeps pushing and pushing, gnawing at democratic guardrails with their pointy little teeth, consuming otherwise noble initiatives and institutions and filling up truck after truck with huge piles of sawdust and other waste products to be driven off to the nearest landfill.
Yet, it must be fun to be part of the project evangelical right now. Re-modeling the White House, then moving in, all these talented Christians with big plans to re-make the world. Industrious, committed, god-fearing, god-loving, with the Christian president at the helm. I no longer imagine things I can’t imagine, I only imagine things I never thought possible I’d imagine. Making Russia Great Again? A possibility.
Just what will the future bring? Japanese impermanence or American anxiety? The former has great appeal, at least to me.