Unified Patriots by Vassarbushmills
Some years ago an old friend, now passed, told me how his mother had been his religious mentor for most his life. There wasn’t a spiritual lesson that he had studied that had not been annotated by his mom.
He told me this to explain one of his crucibles later in life, for it seems that when his parents were in their late 60s, his father had undergone major surgery, but when he came home to recuperate, Mom refused to allow him to get totally well again. Possibly in some spiritual pact with God she had turned her life over to caring for him, and care for him she would, whether he wanted it or not. God had put him in her care, and she was going to keep him there.
I’ve read of such things. So in hearing this story I could imagine either a comedy or a tragedy unfolding. And tragedy it was. His parents argued about his driving the car to MacDonald’s for coffee with his buddies, or, heaven forbid, play golf. He couldn’t leave the room without telling her where or why. She even stood by the bathroom door when he had to go. He confided to his kids that every day was a combat.
After about two years of this, his dad left and lived alone the last few years of his life.
The purpose of my friend’s story was to tell me of his re-visiting his own relationship with God because of these events. Without elaborating, he said his mother did many things to blight his father’s path; sneaky things, dishonest things, even mean things. And when the children would bring those things up to her, she would alternately cry, or deflect, or invoke God in what my friend, at least, believed to be an unholy defense.
His confession to me was that everything his mother had ever told him about God, every annotation in his Bible, every underlined passage, he said he had to go back and revisit, rethink and relearn all over again, just to make sure it could stand alone. He had to learn God all over again without his mother’s fingerprints.
Something like that needs to happen in America now. More of our personal history has been annotated by the American Media than we know.
Donald Trump and the Media’s Russian Dolls; Defining History
An AP analysis only this weekend (7/15/17) stated that “the day-after-day drip-drip-drip of revelations over the past week about Donald Trump Jr.’s contact with the Russian lawyer in 2016 underscores the White House’s inability to shake off the Russia story and close the book on a narrative that casts a shadow over Trump’s presidency.” (Jonathan Lemire)
Jonathan Lemire’s function at AP, it seems, is to paint a narrative of an isolated Donald Trump, beginning when he first took office. So the drip-drip of the Russia story merely feeds into an already established profile of a man standing alone, which, if things work out, will also be a tragic figure. It’s not yet clear what part of Trump’s portraiture the Associated Press is supposed to paint, perhaps his furtive eyes, or maybe the dark office corner in which he’s crouched, or perhaps the thumb he will be sucking, but what is seeming to become clear is that various members of the Media have accepted this assignment to paint one part of Trump into an official media composite that will someday be made public…should be ever actually fall[…]
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