Names Will Never Hurt Me but Green Plums Sure as Hell Did

Or, How To Win and Still Lose

Or, Why You Should Have Your Beautiful Plan to Replace Obamcare Finished Before Winning The Election

Or, Why Calling People Names Really Only Makes You Look Bad

Or What Does Collusion Mean Anyway?

The other day my Trump-loving brother called me “Buckwheat” in a disparaging way in reply to something I said in support of regulating (taxing) the mega-churches that funnel enormous sums of money into the private coffers of mega-pastors. I’m not going to deconstruct that remark just yet but I think it carries unpleasant connotations that go beyond him thinking I’ve read a few too many books, although he plainly holds that opinion and has for years.

Therefore, he would have seen a righteous group of upstanding citizens when he saw a picture of the TV pastors touching Trump in the Oval Office, and I just as plainly saw I saw a gang of thieves wrapping their silk-shirted and expensive-suited arms around the equally vain and superficial Idiot in Chief.

Even though most of the faces were hidden in humble bows toward their enabler or something bigger yet, the garish gold rings on every hand would, to say the least, have looked out of place on Jesus, who would have pawned such trinkets in a trice and donated the proceeds to Food Not Bombs (Ploughshares not Swords was the contemporary term, of course). That is, if I know my Scripture he would have.

Maybe all these fancy gold-plated hucksters are reading a different book, like maybe one of Trump’s masterpieces, such as “How to force everyone else to Buy American while you continue to buy from Singapore,” or his literary tour de force, “Suckers!” in which he confesses that the whole presidential thing was a marketing gimmick, thank you very much.

Along with insulting me in several cliche'd and nonproductive ways in our brief exchange, my bro offered to prove that government doesn’t belong in the health care business, using the example of his church as a viable alternative, because it grants large sums of money (“more money than the government ever did”) to health care in some form or other.

I’m all for churches pitching in but I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on charity or forge social policies that rely on the generosity of churches, if the churches in turn rely on parishioners for their funding. Tithing, in scientific terms, is a tax which one takes on voluntarily as a duty to an imaginary Friend in Space, whereas taxes are a secular contract between man and state.

I know the people who give money to TV evangelists love doing it. The people who made the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh one of the richest men in the history of Oregon loved doing that as well. But it’s plainly a loophole when someone can dispense dubious philosophy (mass delusion is still delusion—come on, you’d be right there if I was directing this remark at the Other Belief System), amass a great private fortune, and be shielded from the taxes their vast properties would otherwise be liable for, on the grounds that what they are up to is sacred and\or of public benefit.

This unpleasant discrepancy between decency and economics is not completely disconnected from the way health care costs regularly wreck family legacies, turning homesteads over to banks, who swallow huge slices of grandmother’s pie without blinking.

The insurers and pharmaceutical manufacturers have us all over a Bunsen burner, demanding a ransom for every ailment and condition, charging whatever they want and telling doctors when to treat people or let them suffer and/or die. This is with good insurance from an employer, not the dubious documents proposed under Trumpcare.

Instead of going after them, which would make sense, since they have come after each of us, one at a time, we call each other names and (apparently) take sides.

I’d be surprised if my brother reads this, shocked if he comments on it, stunned if he says something constructive in reply.

I blame Donald Trump for that, but of course it was Ronald Reagan who did the damage. Just ask my old buddy Webb, another Trumpleton.

While I have much more in common with my brother and Webb than I will ever have with Trump, his business associates, or those in control of his political posturing and dissembling, Trump has landed his wide body custom jet directly between us, and declared war. As long as we are fighting over how to pay the thieves, rather than how much to pay them, he is “winning”.

#trumpcare #church #bunsenburner #foodnotbombs #ploughshares