Essays in Idleness

Several readers of the hard violent Right are disturbed to find Mr Trump so aggressive; I’ve been chatting with them on current news. Let me continue with a footnote to what I wrote yesterday.

Trumpf, but also Steve Bannon and a few lessers, are civil warmongers to be sure, and adrenaline junkies. (Bannon a former Benedictine choirboy: they’re the toughest.) My own instinct is not to provoke people gratuitously; except on a battlefield. The general wants to provoke the opposing general into doing things that are stupid, by making him very very angry. But of course he must remain cool-headed himself, to exploit the mistakes. For this the Trumpflings may need heavenly help. For they are themselves a little too easy to annoy.

Now, God works in mysterious ways, and through unlikely agents, and His grace — as theological experts have observed — is not always comfortable to those who’d prefer the quiet and luxurious life. History, too, is not always nice, and the ways in which what goes around, then comes around, can also be rather inconvenient, from what we like to think an “humane” point of view. “Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of Mercy,” is a phrase that comes to mind from my Lit classes.

And God is in this somewhere. He always is. See: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. (Here, in case you can’t find it.) The sudden conversion to, then enthusiasm for “pro-life” is striking. Perhaps God has given the thick flesh of Trumpf a specific task: such as, bring down Roe v. Wade. Reagan was a poofter on abortion; his successors were not even that; this guy seems to mean “bidnis.” (That’s a Flannery O’Connorism for what one goes about, day to day.)

Of course that could mean war, and tremendous suffering. While the defenders of “the woman’s prerogative” over the life of her unborn child are now sinking into the minority, it is the central rite or “sacrament,” around which the whole Culture of Death revolves. That is why even progressives who feel badly about abortion, defend it to partial and post-birth: because so much else depends on it. (Verily, it is the reason Southerners who felt uneasy about slavery, were willing to fight and die for an institution on which their whole culture depended.) It is hard to imagine a peaceful surrender.

One might say, that in their Civil War of 1861–65, Americans both North and South paid off their cosmic debt for half a million slaves.

I can’t imagine the debt on sixty million babies.