Behold: A Pale, Bespectacled Moses
Mike Johnson, who could be the reincarnation of the Wally Cox TV character, “Mr. Peeples,” inexplicitly became the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives a week before Halloween. Johnson is a pale, bespectacled back-bencher from Louisiana in his fourth term. He stumbled into the Speaker’s role after Kevin McCarthy was tossed overboard by House Republicans. When the House GOP rejected several wannabes, they turned to Johnson in an act of exhausted resignation – charmed, I’m sure, by his mousy inoffensiveness.
Johnson doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he was chosen by God. It has been said that “God works in mysterious ways.” So does a drunk. God might have a problem.
So might Johnson. He actually told a Christian gathering on December 5th that he was in active contact with God while the Speaker drama was playing out. As Rolling Stone reported, “Johnson then revealed that — in the lead up to the ‘tumult’ of Kevin McCarthy losing his gavel and the chaotic GOP process of selecting a new Speaker — he had been speaking directly to God.” He said he told God, “You’re gonna allow me to be Aaron to Moses.”
But God wasn’t having it, according to Johnson. “Ultimately 13 people ran for the post,” Johnson said. “And the Lord kept telling me to, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’” Johnson recalled. “So I waited, I waited. And then at the end … the Lord said, ‘Now step forward.’” Johnson said he was surprised to be cast as Moses. “Me?” Johnson said. “I’m supposed to be Aaron.” But that was not the message, Johnson insisted, recalling: “‘No,’ the Lord said, ‘Step forward.’”
Then the Lord snapped his backside with a towel and sent him on his way.
Johnson may be an example of a metastasizing ego. Many people become so enthralled with their magnificence they convince themselves their inner voice is really the Voice of God. They get stoned on their own vapors.
Or they are mentally ill. “For many people religion is one way that we understand the world and give meaning to our lives and certainly religion and spirituality play an important part in many people’s experiences of schizophrenia,” states the website Living with Schizophrenia.” “For some sufferers religious delusions or intense religiously-based irrational thinking may be a component of their symptoms, for instance they may believe that they have been sent by God to become a great prophet.”
As the title of a 2015 dissertation puts it, “If You Talk to God, You Are Praying; If God Talks to You, You Have Schizophrenia.”
Look at a picture of Johnson. Do you see Moses? The Old Testament said Moses was from the tribe of Levi in ancient Israel, which suggests a tough desert-dweller with a swarthy complexion. The unassuming, bespectacled Johnson is so pale he’s at risk of moonburn. A burning bush would turn him into a s’more.
What does Moses-lite see as his mission? According to Rolling Stone, he told the same gathering his mission involves “exposing the ungodly effort to undermine our culture by Leftists.” He said God wants to ban abortion and restore “traditional marriage between one man and one woman.”
In other words, he thinks God is an American culture warrior. God – if he, she, or it exists in some form – might be a tad busy running the Universe. Why care about a small planet infested by a species with an aptitude for self-destruction when there are supernovas to deal with?
God told Moses Mike to step forward and he has. The same day he declared himself the next Moses, Johnson announced that he was releasing thousands of hours of security video taken at the Capitol on January 6th as a “critical and important exercise” done in the name of “transparency.” The Speaker has a unique definition of transparency.
“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day” he told reporters, “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other concerns and problems.” Right. The Justice Department has a nasty habit of “retaliating” against felons. That’s called law enforcement. The Speaker would prosecute sexuality and health care, but give traitors a pass. How does that make sense?
Here’s how: There is a second “God” in Johnson’s pantheon. Moses Mike is also MAGA Mike. If God whispers in his right ear, Donald Trump screams in the left. That’s why Johnson blurs the faces of January 6th criminals: Trump wants him to. Johnson led a futile legal challenge to the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. He might not be Aaron to Moses, but he’s definitely Charlie McCarthy to Trump’s Edgar Bergen. It’s hard to be a man of God when you’re in league with the devil.
MAGA Mike is not the right hand of God. He’s the ex-President’s Johnson. Long may he wave.
© 2023 by Mike Tully
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“Kill Them All”
Israel, Gaza, and original sin
Years ago, something a co-worker said left me speechless. It was decades ago, but I hear the words again as I follow the ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza: “Kill them all!”
My co-worker, who was also a friend, was more of a passivist than a warrior. We shared liberal beliefs and attitudes, opposed the war in Vietnam, enjoyed the music and diversions of the times (the mid-1970s), and generally saw the world in similar ways. But when our conversation wandered into Israeli – Arab relations, I saw something else: an otherwise fair and gentle person who uttered “Kill them all,” referring to Arabs. My friend was Jewish.
Our conversation was suddenly no longer about current events. Something deeper and darker had taken over. When my co-worker’s lips moved, history spoke.
Kill them all.
I haven’t seen or spoken with my old co-worker for many years. The aging process has a way of turning down the heat, so perhaps the “Kill them all!” attitude has been supplanted with some degree of tolerance, even acceptance. If so, were the demons reawakened on October 7th?
I heard echoes of the “Kill them all!” comment when Benjamin Netanyahu invoked some of the most violent rhetoric in the Bible, comparing Hamas to Amalek, a rival of ancient Israel. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible,” he stated upon Israeli’s invasion of Gaza. “And we do remember.”
“This is what the Lord Almighty says,” according to the prophet Samuel. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Kill them all.
Hamas and Israel have made Amalekites of each other. Both sides, in their own way, have put to death men, women, children and infants, as well as domesticated animals. But there is nothing Biblical about the current slaughter. There is nothing historical about it either, although both sides wrap their killing within the cloak of historical imperative, claiming a right to the same land. There is a more fundamental cause behind the slaughter.
Hatred.
Netanyahu claims to defend the state of Israel and its way of life, but he rapidly devolved from defender to aggressor. When I see two-thousand-pound bombs fall in a dense urbanized setting, when I read that nearly half of Israel’s bombs are imprecise “dumb” bombs, I don’t see a military defense strategy; I see a primal scream with artillery.
Kill them all.
Hamas’ October 7th terrorist attack that sparked the conflagration was hate undiluted. It was a match tossed on history’s kindling, reigniting smoldering ashes that many hoped had cooled. The ancient land where Israelis and Palestinians are falling has become a volcano, spreading hatred around the planet like toxic ash. Anti-Semitism, the world’s longest smoldering ember, is aflame in Europe, on college campuses, in the defacement of Synagogues and assaults on Jews.
Kill them all.
Hatred is the language of aggression, and aggression is our original sin. The evolutionary imperative imbued an aggressive species, Homo sapiens sapiens, with a large and complex brain. But that brain, impressive as it is, straddles the duller intellect of the primitive who kept the species alive through violence and killing. It’s development did not result in a superior species. It resulted in a primitive species with a very large brain. That species, with its comingling of the savage and the intellectual, shows more aptitude for self-annihilation than self-preservation.
Kill them all.
And that is our problem as a species. We explore the heavens while dancing with death on Earth. We create symphonies, literature, and technology, yet spill blood relentlessly. Our massive brain has not yet learned to tame the savage.
Netanyahu speaks of strategy, but he is driven by hatred. That is also the case with Hamas. While the leaders of Israel and Gaza may talk of history and territoriality, they are speaking the language of aggression. The vocabulary of aggression is hate.
I spent much of my life studying and trying to prevent bullying, a common expression of human aggression. It is the most Sisyphean task I have attempted. Whether training teachers and administrators to recognize, restrain and prevent bullying in schools, or authoring a workplace bullying policy for Pima County, Arizona, I was aware that I brought a modern ethos to a primeval reality. The primitive lurks just below the surface.
I came to realize I could not eliminate bullying. But there were things I could do – that others can do – to keep the primitive at bay. The survival of our species depends on our ability to suppress the primitive until our massive, modern brain takes control once and for all. If the brain is unable to suppress the primitive, we are doomed.
Witness the horror in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. That is what doomed looks like. And this is what it sounds like:
Kill them all.
© 2023 by Mike Tully
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