In Dad We Trust

An open letter to America's Christian Community

The President of the United States is essentially a father figure. To the legislative branch, the elder siblings, and also to the baby of the family —We the People.

It’s why the government and intelligence agencies go to such great effort to protect us from all life’s more complicated and nuanced truths, as the family attempts to blaze a clean and moral path on the trajectory of exploitation and brutality we must maintain, in order to preserve the culture of decadent excess that best conditions consumers’ participation in the perpetual expansion of the global economy —perched, though it may be, on the listing pre-Mesozoic brontosaurus of late-era Free Market Capitalism.

The current President of the United States has given me more doubts about my Atheism than almost anything I’ve experienced in life, as an adult. I mean it’s just so perfect, the way Donald Trump reflects back at us all of the stupidity and resentment, all the orphaned ire, of the America of our present era.

I’ve caught myself wondering if it wasn’t some kind of trickster god —a Loki, or a Coyote, wearing Donald Trump’s skin. He appeals to both sides of the American partisan divide, really —for one side, he embodies the things they hate about the Others, their politically conservative countrymen; for the other, he’s the perfect tool with which they can get under the skin of the Others whom they hate, the liberals.

We made him President, but before that we simply made him. We fed him, over time. We put him on television, and we watched him on television —or, if not him, some other accomplished con-man showing off his trophies to Robin Leach, on an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. The point is, Donald Trump is the achieved epitomic apex of most of America’s decisions, at least since the 1980s.

I’m 43. In my generation, most of our Daddies taught us that money was what was most important. Conceivably, we’d find people and causes in life we might someday hold more dear, but money is the foundation of life in America —you simply have to have it, to live well. I remember growing up as a kid, in the 80s , and seeing Donald Trump as a sort of impressive figure. A symbol, of aspiration and achievement. Of course, Kurt Cobain came along in the 90s and changed all of that, for most of us who were watching.

The President is a father figure. He’s our Daddy. And the way Daddy behaves in the world matters, because many of us take cues from him, on how to behave ourselves —many of us crave a submissive relationship to authority, as it releases us from the obligation to think and act on our own, in a world where facts and morality are often complicated to ascertain.

My father wasn’t the best Daddy. His dad was sort of a monster, though, so he really didn’t have much guidance. Except from, like, Leave it to Beaver and shit. I’m guessing there are a lot of you from my generation who know exactly what I’m talking about, when I say that. I often wonder what my generation looks like to the children we’ve brought up, who are now coming of age into a world of gross, bald-faced injustice; who are perpetually judged and harrassed for their antisocial addiction to screens and entertainment, when we mostly raised to be that way in the first place. We must seem so full of shit, to these kids.

It’s always seemed to me like we’re all working out the riddled wounds and curses of our ancestors, as the people of earth evolve towards (hopefully) a more balanced and humane style of living, and loving. I often think of Abraham, in the Old Testament. I try to think about what kind of a man it would be, who would cast out a son whom he’d raised from birth —just because he got a different one, from a woman he loved more. And, then, what did he do with that ‘chosen’ son?

Oh, yeah. He led him up to a hill, to sacrifice him with an axe to the voices in his head. What the fuck kind of alcoholic tweaker piece of shit was Abraham, anyway? I mean, my God!

But we speak of the ‘Abrahamic’ faiths as if there were something about this lunatic sadist child-abuser that were somehow sacred, as if this legacy were worthy of preserving. And then in the New Testament, Jesus —the prototypical Nice Guy— gets nailed up to a cross, for telling people not to hurt one another. Well, I guess it was more for saying the Priests in the Temple of the Money Lenders were hypocrites. Whatever the analysis, his message didn’t become ‘Gospel’ until it had been canonized, almost four centuries later.

And intrinsic to the narrative of Christianity is a mysterious trinity —no, not the one you immediately assumed. Not the father, the son, and the glory hole. I’m talking about Cain & Abel, Isaac & Ishmael, and Jacob & Esau. These three pairs of siblings, etched like a psychic lexicon into the brains of every child raised on the bible —or, simply, raised in a culture wherein the Christian narrative is culturally predominate— they make ambiguous in the mind of the reader these acts and gestures of brutality and indignity, rendered from the one brother to the other —although to Isaac’s credit I guess he was an infant, when Ishmael was cast out. And he was powerless, due to his blindness, to deliver judgment unto Jacob for his fraudulent acts.

I believe there’s a desensitization that happens in the mind, when a person reads these passages. I think the sustained dissonance these stories evoke, between one’s sense of right & wrong, sort of grant the mind permission to differentiate between the self and the other. At the very least, the text seems to be constructed in such a way that renders ambiguous the morality of the narrative it describes.  

The characters in the Old Testament are presented to us as the very first people, or the children or the childrens’ children of the very first people. Or, whatever. We plant these seeds, these stories, in the minds of our children —religious and secular families alike, in many cases— and we tell them don’t worry, it will make more sense as you age. Then it just sorta sinks in, over a lifelong series of weekly brainwashing sessions, wherein the monotonous verbage induces a gravitational boredom not unlike a hypnotic state, in which these platitudes and justifications are presented to us as if they were some holy foundation on which one should live.

Simply because they came before us.

I’d like to propose something crazy. I’d like to propose that, as a global civilization in the 21st century —really, still at the dawn of our ability to even ascertain the fact of whether or not we’re alone in the universe— I’d like to propose that we could imagine a better starting point from which to orient the youth of our planet; towards a future more secure, more abundant, more fertile and rewarding. And I think we could do a lot better in our management of the resources that give us so much comfort and meaning throughout our lives here, as we work up to that future in the present moment. I think these goals would be extremely rational, and doable, if we could only stop pretending that our parents were God.

So, who’s your Daddy?

What does that phrase even mean? And why in the fuck is there a sexual connotation to it? Many of us, if not most, look for a Daddy to guide us through almost every situation, in life. We look to celebrities as our Daddies, we look to Journalists as our Daddies, we look to priests, cops, and politicians as our Daddies. Pretty much anybody whose words we trust without question, is our Daddy.

It were as if there was an inherent addiction in the human psyche, to subjugation by figures of Authority.

We’re so baffled by the apparent ill will, of all these people we’ve lifted up into positions of power. Bush led us into twenty years of war, over lies, and the country said, “I’m sure Daddy knows who the bad guys are.” Obama sold us out to Wall Street, and the majority said, “I’m sure Daddy knows what’s best for the economy.” Cops are killing unarmed citizens in the streets, with a frequency that makes the act almost a Meme, and America says, “I’m sure Daddy was just being careful.” ICE starts separating spanish-speaking children from their parents, and locking them in cages —America winces, “well, Daddy says he’s trying, to get them out of those cages.”

And Trump, well, shit. I guess, in all fairness, I have to say this — “At least Daddy’s finally being honest about himself…”

I love my life, and I do endeavor to make the best of whatever place I live in —but do I feel a particular allegiance to the nation where I live, when I already pay my admission with taxes? Fuck that. Especially when I know what an Abrahamic piece of shit my country is —shitting on every global neighbor’s door, diddling their daughters; and then smiling when everybody has to come to your barbecue, because you’re the only one that can afford food.

Fuck the Daddies’ United States of America.

We can be better than this. There’s no reason we can’t divorce ourselves from what preceded us, to whatever degree we feel appropriate. At our current realization, we’re as far from heroic as a nation can be, in the impact we have on the world around us. We’ve spent the last two decades decimating the economies, infrastructures and countless innocent lives within a series of Islamic countries, on the other side of the planet.

And now there’s Daddies on both sides of the Coke-Pepsi Taste Test Challenge (the ‘Cans and ‘Crats) telling us that we need to fear Russia again, and China. But I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with the radically humanistic agendas put forth by a certain Socialist Senator from Vermont.

We started out nearly four hundred years ago, building an economy on the beautiful backs of enslaved Africans. Now we’re spending most of our time turning our heads back and forth, from one screen to another; distracting ourselves, from the knowledge that our Daddies have been slowy working to turn the entire world of brown people outside our borders into our indentured servants, to sate the Free Market’s insistent need for expansion.

It’s Beastly, I tell you.

 Jesus Christ died because he offended the corrupt priests of his day —just, like, the ones where he lived. He went into the temple and he fucked up all the money lenders’ shit, and they all got mad, and they went to the Centurions and they were like, “Fuck this guy —he’s gotta go!”

Right? That’s what Jesus died for, right?

And the Romans sanctioned it, because he was ultimately causing a riot, which the Romans saw as a treasonous disruption of their ‘Peace’. But his world, Jesus, was actually a pretty small one. Back then, the Jews were mostly in the fertile crescent (if I’m not mistaken). Sure, the Imperial power of Rome implied a great and tumultuous civilization in neighboring lands, but the estimated world population in the year 1 A.D. is between 200 and 400 million.

The world has grown drastically, since Christ’s time.

 Flash forward to now. Think of how many Trump people out there, elevating this puffed-up orange roll of privilege with their faith, holding him up as their shepherd —just think how many of those people consider themselves followers of Christ! It’s brutally absurd, and frightening in what it reveals about the concept of religious fellowship in the 21st century.

Because it’s as if these people were aware that Christ was just a story. By aligning themselves with Trump, they reveal that their faith is not so much an article of heartfelt identity as it is a form of membership dues —and their saying of the words, and their attending the rituals, bought them entry into this social order of which they wanted to be part.

But they’re so dislocated from Christ, now, there’s no point in pretending —they’re siding with the fucking Centurions, every time!

So who is your Daddy, then?

If you belong to the Christian faith, and you don’t even recognize the face of Christ, when you see it —in a leper, say, or in a prostitute or a homeless man; or a muslim child, or a parent embracing that child in an attempt to protect her, from the blast of a drone strike— if you’ve lost all respect for the Martyr, but you’re still going to church? What exactly are you doing, with your Sundays?

It’s not like it just suddenly got this way, either. Like, we haven’t just stumbled into some weird existential pothole. Hitler and the Nazis, who exterminated Jews, because they deemed them so inherently disagreeable in nature, identified as ‘Christians’. Even though, as we know, Jesus Christ was himself a Jew. The Inquisition, The Rape and Pillage of the Indigenous Americas —almost all the way down the line, in moments when brutal acts were performed by one human or group of humans against another in western history, they were done in the name of Christ. At least, from the perspectives of the perpetrators.

When you look at it all from this angle, the tradition of Christianity feels like some perverse brainwashing tool, meant to create questions in the minds of the meek, about the dubious morality often expressed in the acts of the powerful. Like a pre-wired failsafe which cripples the morally upright from action, just long enough so that the morally reprehensible may sneak through the moment undetected, and dominate reality into the shape it desires.

It’s all very, very sexy, this act of Domination —don’t you think?

It’s like all of Christianity is this long con, started by the fucking money lenders. They’re holding up crosses, now —these crosses, with little sculpted Jesuses on them; nails through his hands, and all blood and thorns and tears, reminding us that —just like Jesus— this could happen to you, too.

It’s like, codified into the larger story, is a discouragement to humans from seeking to emulate the virtuous qualities that were inherent to the acts of Jesus. It’s underlined by the story of Lucifer, the angel who sought to be as good as God —and was made into a hellish example, for his misstep.

Even if you aren’t duped into going to church every week, so that somebody else can tell you what it is to be a good person, you still have to wade through this shit, everywhere you go in this country. God presides over the beginning of every school day in every classroom that utters the Pledge of Allegiance. God is present in every cash transaction made between people in America, on our currency. How fucked up is that, if you’re Jesus? The fucking moneylenders had him crucified, and now they’re stamping their coin with his name!

Honestly, every time a Christian person allows in their heart for the blood of Christ to absolve them of their sins, I think they’re just driving more nails into the poor guy. That poor, poor man —two thousand years later, and we’re still just happily nailing him to that bloody fucking cross.

I wish people would just leave Jesus alone. He only wanted us to be good to each other, and now everyone gets together and recites his sacred words, and then they all go around doing horrible things to other people in his name! It’s like they’re smearing the face of the messiah in a pile of dogshit.

I mean, how could you?!

Really —how can a self-identifying Christian even feel okay about paying taxes, to a country that routinely bombs other countries in the name of Global Domination? We go in and facilitate coups, we assassinate cultural and political figures; we blow up entire residential blocks, full of innocents, for the sake of maybe hitting one ‘legitimate’ human target —You all know as well as I do that American foreign military policy is a dirty, dirty business. As American citizens, each of us has a direct hand in every brutal act done by our military, to every innocent soul abroad.

So many ‘Christians’ will spend their precious free time harassing and shaming unfortunate young mothers, who haven’t the means to provide for a child, for terminating their pregnancies before the life has come into the world. And then they’ll stand by and cheer as their country’s military unleashes modern warfare on a countless number of lives, in some faraway and practically third-world community —we make sure now, as policy, that they’re already completely crippled in infrastructure, before we grow the balls to actually show up anywhere in number. That’s called governmental draft-dodging.

Christians like to say that Satan is the great deceiver. Well, I’m pretty certain now he’s been deceiving Christians since the first Easter Sunday. I’m done pretending there’s room for both of us to be right. You’re fucking wrong.

And you worship a different god than you realize.