by The Abbot
The United States has long prided itself as a great moral force. We like being “the good guys.” During the last several decades, both during WWII and immediately after, there emerged a genre of film based on the premise that America was always right. Later films too, especially in the 1980s, loved to portray America as the hero or the righteous victor. Rocky. Rambo. Iron Eagle. Top Gun. Any suggestion that the United States was anything other than the epitome of a moral example was a call for treason. These movies, and others like them, are premised on an outdated image of America as the protector of democracy and leader of the free world. Perhaps initially, during the darkest days of WWII, this may have been true. But slowly there emerged a country no longer committed to liberty, but rather to the preservation and cultivation of our brand of capitalism. This force, and not the one that millions of Americans had just struggled to protect, became the real America.
We forgot who we were and why we fought. We forgot for what we died and sacrificed. The idea of freedom is one that changes depending on who is doing that defining and when the defining is done. As we beat our breasts with the chant of liberty and freedom, we hear only a hollow echo. We live in a country where freedom and the US of A mean nothing. We know this to be true as more people today in our country are not free and do not enjoy the benefits of liberty as promised by our Founders. Currently, our country that so loves freedom and our President who loves the flag so much that he might publicly dry hump it, have begun a war against immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and a host of religious and non-religious minorities. They live in fear. They live in a perpetual shadow of the projected perfection of a nation who has not only forgotten them but has found it necessary to directly deny them their inalienable rights.
But it is much worse than the mere scapegoating of those who are different. In recent years, our wealthy country has begun a war against the poor. Yet oddly and frighteningly enough, it is the poor themselves who have ignited, and ultimately it. Instigated by the wealthy and powerful. A culture war of hyper-masculinity has taken foot. Associating oneself with a hypermasculine figure, such as Trump, or Rogan, or Bezos, or Musk is enough for any person, no matter how poor and weak they may be, to project the image of popular notions of success and power without actually having any. This is always done at the expense of others. Perhaps most dangerous though is that any challenge to this emerging culture of success by association results only in further entrenchment and violent reaction. We have seen it time and again. At every Trump Rally, and in every white supremacist protest, or in every gathering of the feeble minded on Fox News. The hypermasculine way of life is packaged and sold to people who should not be buying this…ever.
A tragic result of the new America is that the true Christ, the man made known to us through the Gospels, is now lost. Within the new hypermasculine America the Jesus of the Gospels would never be viewed as successful, or powerful or worthwhile. He would be called a loser. He hung out with some of the worst kinds of people of his day. He championed, not the wealthy, but rather the poor. Men like Trump and Musk would be the target of Christ’s harshest criticisms – not the object of his praise. When Jesus stood and fought the Roman and Jewish authorities, he was resigned to his fate and he willingly underwent arrest, abuse, torture and execution without offering even the very least resistance. The hypermasculine, Trumpland culture would find a man who behaved that way to be weak. In fact, if given just the bare narrrative of the passion, I would be surprised if any Trumper Christian would find that their Lord and Savior was anything but a big pussy.
This new culture, perpetuated by myths of what makes a man and the displays of that masculinity, only seek to create an image of what makes a man and humorously enough ignore what, in fact, makes a man. A man is not a bully. Not ever. Bullies are cowards at their very worst. A man is never concerned with material things and money over the well-being of others, especially those whom he is commanded to love. A man does not kill creatures for the sake of sport. A man does not treat women as less-than. A man can wear lipstick, or heels, or a wig, or a vintage Balenciaga or Halston gown. A man can have sex with another man and not somehow lose his “maleness.” It does not diminish a man when he engages in activities that are “not for boys.” A real man supports his spouse. He can clean up after himself. He can cook. He can do his own laundry. A man is capable of living on his own without his mommy having to come and care for him twice a week like some helpless baby.
This new crisis in our country is one of identity. It is easy to have the same values as Trump or Musk if one is no longer concerned with the American ethos of making it on one’s own. This is the profound irony of this culture war. The long held and sacred American work ethic is now discarded. It is not one’s own hard work to take as one’s entire personality, the way of life of a group of men and women who have earned very little of their wealth through actual hard work. Building your own home, breaking new soil and planting fresh crops, or traveling thousands of miles by oxcart is not the same as influencing legislation to keep more of your ill-gotten fortune by keeping your fellow Americans sick, imprisoned, destitute, and terrified. Will Americans now under the spell of this new, bizarre take on what makes America great remain so enamored with these lies? Or will they do what all of those on the right and even many on the left fear the most and think for themselves? What is the endgame?
I look to Nazi Germany- specifically at the period immediately following their defeat in WWII. For it is here that we may see what our endgame might look like. The American trance is almost the same as the German one. People have fallen in love with the devils who purport to lead this nation and with the monstrous, and thoroughly un-American ethos that they bring with them. In much the same way, a fringe group of ogres captivated the German people. It began with a strange platform predicated on scapegoating, fear and anger. Adolf Hitler’s only true genius lied in his ability to, not only communicate, but also somehow convince the German people that their problems and their situation was not the result of their own poor choices or even mere chance but rather was the fault of others- specifically Jewish people, Communists, intellectuals, the deformed and homosexuals. Hitler sold his brand of upmarket laziness to an equally lazy subset of the German people.
Trump himself is incredibly lazy. He spent much of his first term eating McDonalds and playing golf. He found that blaming people with no voice and no power was a far easier, and ultimately, winning solution rather than using whatever remains of his brain and coming up with any real result. It is easier and far more lazy to assert American energy independence with old and outdated dwindling sources of energy. It is easier to blame so-called “welfare queens” and undocumented immigrants for government waste rather than the billionaires who evade their taxes legally, through a system created and advocated by those who have never done any real hard work. Those who have attached themselves to this bandwagon are nothing more than the muck surrounding the leeches sucking America dry.
We are therefore left with a choice. We can choose to remain in the lane we are in and continue to blame the vulnerable for our own problems or get into the slow lane, riddled with bumps and potholes and maybe actually fix them along our slow progress forward. As all things in the human realm, it is a choice. We can choose the false liberty, the lie, that Trump and his kind sell wrapped up in gold foil and tied with a big fake gold bow or we can choose real human freedom and learn that this kind of fresh air may come with elements we may not all like or agree with but in the end is the true promise of the one called God by some, the Universe by others, or life by others still. We can author a profound epic or a bitter tragedy.
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