Today is Easter Sunday, a day in which millions of Christians celebrate the central mystery and miracle of the faith.
It’s easy to find analogies between the events in that two thousand-year-old story and occurrences in the past year. Moments of triumph and joy. Betrayals and defeats. Deception and loss.
But that’s only because these are universal stories; themes that repeat and echo in small ways and large, in the stories of individuals and the sagas of nations. Right now, there are Christians in Syria, Russia—and very likely North Korea—who see these stories unfolding in the events around them. I can guarantee you that there are Americans who see them in the victory of Donald Trump.
And, of course, it’s not just a Christian thing, that hero’s journey. The Golden Bough. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It’s a story both older and newer than Christianity. One that’s been picked up, turned over, stretched, and turned inside out. One from which every theme and variation has seemingly been rung … until someone discovers the next.
Look there. The outcast enters. The underdog, fighting against the power and wealth and weight of the world with nothing but a new view of old ideas. First there’s scorn. Then interest. There’s a moment of celebration, a testing, and a sense that triumph is at hand. But … first treachery, then defeat. Only the defeat is itself a deception. This story … isn’t over. It never is.
Whether you do it in a pew, on a porch, or on a nice hike through the spring woods, this is a good day to ponder comebacks, second acts, and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.Then go out and make them happen. Someone has to roll those stones away. It might as well be you.
But first, let’s check in on the pundits.
Leonard Pitts responds to a reader wanting him to do more hopeful columns.
Frankly, I would love to be a “beacon of light.” But the fact of the matter is, I don’t feel particularly hopeful and I am angry. Everything that has happened since January 20th has only reinforced my pessimism.
“I worry for the future of this country in a way I never have before. With the possible exception of the 1850s — the decade preceding the Civil War — we have simply never been this divided. Frankly, I don’t know if reconciliation is possible. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even desirable.
“… I think honesty is something every writer — and in particular a writer of personal essays — owes a reader. I could conceivably write the kind of columns you’re asking for, but it would be a lie. And I’ve always believed that at some subliminal level, a reader always knows when he’s being lied to.”
These are really painful words to digest, from a writer I greatly respect.
America is a story of victory over long odds, a movie where the hero smashes through in the final reel. Our national mythology holds that the worst only happens in other countries. We are spared because we are us. So it’s understandable that some of us are sanguine, even now, that we will eventually figure out how to knit those parts back into a functioning and cohesive whole.
But the 12 weeks since January 20th have seen more scandal, international incidents, incompetence, instability, lies and jaw-dropping embarrassments than the previous 12 years combined. America is threatened as it has never been before. And it occurs to me that faith in inevitable salvation is a luxury we can no longer afford.
I don’t have to tell you: You need to go read the rest of this.
Molly Worthen on how evangelical teachings laid the groundwork for the modern “fake news” era.
Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones who think that an authority trusted by the other side is probably lying. But they believe that their own authority — the inerrant Bible — is both supernatural and scientifically sound, and this conviction gives that natural human aversion to unwelcome facts a special power on the right. This religious tradition of fact denial long predates the rise of the culture wars, social media or President Trump, but it has provoked deep conflict among evangelicals themselves.
That idea of a “biblical world view” can be used to sweep aside anything, especially because most of those employing the phrase are extremely flexible in finding ways to make “biblical” match their own beliefs.
By contrast, the worldview that has propelled mainstream Western intellectual life and made modern civilization possible is a kind of pragmatism. It is an empirical outlook that continually — if imperfectly — revises its conclusions based on evidence available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs about the supernatural. This worldview clashes with the conservative evangelical war on facts, but it is not necessarily incompatible with Christian faith.
The modern idea of the “biblical worldview” is as fake as anything on Breitbart.
Ross Douthat has apparently been rendered unable to write anything about actual politics as his party sinks slowly into madness. And yet he continues to be paid. No one knows why. But hey, he does manage to show just how big an ass someone can be when they’re taking the “moral high ground.”
Finally, a brief word to the really hardened atheists: Oh, come on. Sure, all that beauty and ecstasy and astonishing mathematical order is because we’re part of a multiverse or a simulation or something; that’s the ticket. Sure, consciousness and free will are illusions, but human rights and gender identities are totally real. Sure, your flying spaghetti monster joke makes you a lot smarter than Aquinas, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King. Sure.
Douthat, ladies and gentleman. The best recruiting agent atheism ever had.
Nicholas Kristoff interviews Douthat’s polar opposite in the person a certain ex-president.
Kristoff: What about someone like me whose faith is in the Sermon on the Mount, who aspires to follow Jesus’ teachings, but is skeptical that he was born of a virgin, walked on water, multiplied loaves and fishes or had a physical resurrection? Am I a Christian, President Carter?
Carter: I do not judge whether someone else is a Christian. Jesus said, “Judge not, …” I try to apply the teachings of Jesus in my own life, often without success. ...
Kristoff: One of my problems with evangelicalism is that it normally argues that one can be saved only through a personal relationship with Jesus, which seems to consign Gandhi to hell. Do you believe that?
Carter: I do not feel qualified to make a judgment. I am inclined to give him (or others) the benefit of any doubt.
I had the good fortune to visit Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School class many years ago. If you get the opportunity, no matter what your beliefs, don’t pass it up.
Dana Milbank on Trump’s efforts to force a healthcare crisis.
In case you missed it, this week saw the debut of Trumpcare.
There was no new legislation, and the previous health-care system, Obamacare, wasn’t repealed. It was re-accommodated, United Airlines-style: bloodied, knocked silly and heaved aside. …
President Trump this week threatened not to pay $7 billion to insurers in annual subsidies for giving discounted coverage to low-income Americans. If he follows through, it ends Obamacare as we know it. But even if he’s bluffing, the threat itself is outright sabotage and goes a long way toward dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
So insurers can offer plans … but if they do, they may be out the money that should be paid through the subsidies. It’s a trick intended to generate the failure that Trump says is already there.
“The evidence is strong that the ACA is not dying of natural causes, but with the president’s recent comments it’s clear that it could die of suspicious causes,” says Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan outfit that studies health care. In the current environment, insurers “are just not going to stick around and take big risks,” Levitt tells me. “They’ll just take their marbles and invest elsewhere. It would be a very rational decision.”
This might be a good time to invest in ear protection. The sound of all those Republicans giving a sad tsk-tsk-tsk while giggling under their breath at how they managed to kill Obamacare without ever passing a new bill, is going to be deafening. Their moaning when they find out that voters noticed what was happening will be even worse.
Ruth Marcus goes to that place every television pundit seemed to discover this week.
The question of the moment is what to make of the normalization of President Trump. Not normalization in the way used by the Trump resistance — to argue against becoming inured to unacceptable behavior. But normalization of Trump in the usual sense of the term: that Trump is, if not behaving normally, at least adopting normal positions.
Let’s see. Donald Trump still has the most extreme right position ever on the environment. The most extreme right position ever on immigration. The most extreme right position ever on education. Just wrote the most extreme right budget ever. What is it that he did that was “normal?”
Syria was not an American problem; now its behavior is America’s, and Trump’s, “responsibility,” and Bashar al-Assad is a “butcher.”
Oh. He blew up something and threatened to entangle America in another endless war. That’s what “normal” means.
Frank Bruni on how Steve Bannon crossed the Rubicon of vanity.
He was fine so long as he was a whisperer. On the campaign trail and on the Potomac, you can whisper all you want.
He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer. That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation, least of all one who stamps his name in gold on anything that stands still long enough to be stamped. Or whose debate performance included the repartee: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”
And, to be fair, there was already one arm slipping up Donald Trump’s … back. That doesn’t leave much room for another.
Trump went so far as to suggest that he was barely acquainted with Bannon before August 2016, when Bannon joined his presidential campaign. Wrong. Trump had been a guest on the radio show that Bannon used to host nine times. But his rewrite of history was telling. Bannon needed to be erased because he was taking up too much space on the page.
Paul Manafort and Carter Page are keeping a chair warm for Bannon in the discard room.
Anne Applebaum explains why Ukraine is more than just a place where Manafort skimmed money.
“Why should U.S. taxpayers be interested in Ukraine?” That was the question that Rex Tillerson, the U.S. secretary of state, was heard to ask at a meeting of the Group of Seven foreign ministers, America’s closest allies, a day before his visit to Moscow this week. We don’t know what he meant by that question, or in what context it was asked. When queried, the State Department replied that it was a “rhetorical device,” seeking neither to defend nor retract it.
I very much wish we could ask the question “Why should U.S. taxpayers be interesting in Rex Tillerson?”
Unlike everyone who has held the job for at least the past century, [Tillerson] has no experience in diplomacy, politics or the military; instead he has spent his life extracting oil and selling it for profit. At that he was successful. But no one knows whether he can change his value system to focus instead on the very different task of selling something intangible — American values — to maximize something even more intangible: American influence.
Tillerson isn’t the only one. The Trump regime makes no distinction between selling oil for profit and American values. Just ask Scott Pruitt. Or Donald Trump.
Chris Sagers on why passengers may end up with a broken nose, but United will not.
After news of the incident on Sunday broke, United’s stock took a drop Tuesday of about 5 percent, representing a shareholder loss of more than $600 million. Vindictive hashtags and consumer schadenfreude followed. But then — in what might surprise some — the stock turned around even before the day was over, and by the opening bell the next day had gained back almost all of its value. The airline seems unlikely to suffer any lasting loss over the incident.
The reason is the same for why any of our country’s other oligopolistic powerhouses can treat their fellow Americans with such crass indifference: Shareholders don’t really care about consumer opinion or even a company’s larger public image. They care about profits. If there is no competitor to whom consumers can turn, who really cares what they think?
But wait. There’s surely a solution to this. Isn’t there a regulation that can’t be removed that will make airlines nicer? How about some taxes to be cut? Those are the only two options available, so one of them better work.