BALTIMORE – We continue our humble look at things very old and very new, annoying many dear readers. Many seem to think that “The Donald” really is the savior they’ve been waiting for. So we listened intently last Sunday hoping for an insight.
It was the second Sunday in Advent. The readings were full of hope. The Old Testament looked ahead to the First Coming and a New World Order.
“…with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked,” Isaiah predicted. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid… the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
John the Baptist, too, anticipated a savior. “[H]e that cometh after me is mightier than I,” he said, adding that he couldn’t hope to fill His shoes.
Finally, according to St. Paul, the birth of Jesus fulfilled “the promises made unto the fathers.”
By the time of Paul’s writing, Jesus already had been born in Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem. Paul thought the story would have a replay; he waited for a Second Coming of Christ… soon.
God Can Take a Holiday
Two thousand years later, we’re still waiting. But people haven’t given up hope. The protocol among newly elected presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush… is to ask for God’s help.
Richard Nixon put it directly in 1968: “Without God’s help and your help, we will surely fail; but with God’s help and your help, we shall surely succeed.”
In this, as in so many other things, Donald Trump breaks with tradition. He seems to need no help at all. “…I am your voice. I alone can fix it,” he promises. God can take a holiday.
Donald Trump has at least equaled John the Baptist in rhetorical flourish. The latter attacked the elite of Judea as a “generation of vipers.”
Trump might have used the same words. He has excoriated the elite of Washington enough to give hope to an electoral majority – the Forgotten People of Flyover America.
Whether by instinct or calculation (there are 95 million working-age adults without jobs… about 30 million more than he needed to win the presidency), Mr. Trump appealed to them as a metal file appeals to a man with a life sentence.
They looked to him to set them free… and to smite their enemies… Here was a bare-knuckles brawler… a man who would take an axe to the elitists’ plumy orchard so that “every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit [will be] hewn down,” and he would “burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Clintonites and Trumpites
Many people will be satisfied with this new Messiah. He will crush the vipers of the Hillary genre. He will bruise their heads with a hoe… chase them from their nests in Washington… and visit his wrath upon the heathens of Mexico and China… not to mention the flag burners, ISIS, and U.S. companies who want to better satisfy their customers by offshoring production.
That will be enough for most people. He will be a hero. He’ll replace one group of insiders with another. Out go the Democrat Pharisees. In come the Republican Sadducees.
Priorities change. Programs change. One crony gets muscled out by another one. One fat derriere gets sent home; another takes its place.
But will the lion lie down with the lamb? Here at the Diary, we were hoping for more. We wanted a messiah who would lead a real change… taking on the Deep State, the Parasitocrats, or the real Establishment elite.
Most importantly, we hoped for someone who would take on the money changers. Cronies of both groups – Clintonites and Trumpites – rely on fake money ginned up by the feds.
It is this fake money that funds them all – their wars… their bonuses… their empire… their corrupt programs…
…it was this fake money that financed the Chinese industrial boom… sucked jobs from the American heartland… lowered wages for the typical working man… enabled a transfer of wealth of trillions of dollars from the middle classes to the rich… put Donald J. Trump in the White House… and now sits in a monstrous tower of some $64 trillion in debt, ready to blow up.
We are too humble to claim to know how this will turn out. Mr. Trump could still surprise us and turn the tables on the moneylenders.
Readers are advised, however, to keep their heads down.
Regards,
Bill
Category: Economics