For the second time in 15 months, Mike Johnson has held forth apropos of clutching the lawmakers’ gavel. This time around, his spiel concluded with what he called “a prayer for the nation” that, 4 years ago this month, the GOP’s J6 juggernaut sought to rend, wreck, and ruin.
Granted, he opened with a tribute to those slain or hurt in his home state’s Bourbon Street bloodbath. Still, let’s not forget how some members of his party now smear “immigrants” as the supposed perps. (Sad.)
From there, he went on to laud America as “the freest… nation” ever- a kudo that must be believed and promulgated, he howled, “without debate.”
Hmm. Looks like we’re not free to weigh, discuss, or dispute Johnson’s word. Edicts. Dictations. What have you. (How on Earth can that bode well? Indeed, how can it not embody a stark, despotic self-contradiction?)
With all due respect, let’s take a look. Like it or not, face it or not, “the land of the free” was long the home of the slaves. Elsewhere, not so much. By 1860, other technologically advanced nations were aptly proscribing (not to say damning) the horrors of humans owning humans.
To some degree, we progressed. Indeed, the broken chains at Lady Liberty’s feet connote that, from 1865 on, we got with the program and all was well.
If only. In this space, suffice to stress the truth limned by the title/subtitle of a 2008 Pulitzer winning masterwork. Namely, Mississippi native Doug Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
And yet Johnson’s stance boils down to ‘IF I WANT YOUR OPINION, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU!’
Fast forward to said closing prayer. Weirdly enough, Johnson abruptly tergiversates, claiming it’s not “a prayer per se,” but a prayerful “reminder” of what he purports to be Thomas Jefferson’s zealous devotion to it.
According to Johnson, our 3rd POTUS recited it daily for at least 25 years. Oops. He cites no evidence that the Monticello maestro was ever aware of one jot of it. Nor does he deign to mention the contrary evidence that Jefferson died long before it came into being.
Beyond even that, such Deist-not-Christian faith as Jefferson’s gives (literally) short shrift to traditional Scripture. Typically enough, my copy of the New International Version of the Bible runs to some 1232 pages. Jefferson’s cut-and-pasted condensation clocks in at around 85; with each of them relatively short, safe to say its word count runs roughly 1/20th that of any complete, standard version.
But all is not yet lost. To this day, the Jefferson Bible embodies (nay, epitomizes) precisely what the GOP’s ‘my way or the highway to hell’ approach strives to scourge (if not scorch). Namely, FREEDOM OF RELIGION.
Ah, history. During the past century, the plot thickened. As detailed in Yale law prof James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017), the Fuhrer used the Deep South’s legal labyrinths (of Jim Crow/penal slavery) as a template for his 1933-1945 Nazi tyranny.
Given the manifold evils inherent in divine right to rule (viz. such tyrants as George III), we now should have no trouble concurring that Almighty absolutism can never pan out well. More recently, the fundamentally evil Third Reich’s motto was “GOD [IS] WITH US.” When Johnson, JD Vance, the Rev. Mike ‘Ballots Or Bullets’ Huckabee, or any faith-wielding, God-weaponizing pol paints one set of views as pure, distilled Truth, we need to call them out loudly, quickly, and clearly.
That is, we need to fight back. (Assuming, of course, we still have power to do so.)
