Prayers and Petitions To End the Presidency of Donald J. Trump

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," Hurricane Isaias Edition! Ah, 2020! Not even gonna ask if it can get worse.

Yeah, so we're in the bulls-eye for a tropical storm. Earlier this year we had a straight-line-wind event that cost me the ancient oak under which I worshiped. Weather, murder hornets, seeds from China, pandemics ... Gaia is pissed. Yep.

As anyone who has eyeballs and the ability to read the English language knows, I detest Donald Trump. I detested him in 1985 and detest him tenfold now.

What happens when citizens hate and fear their leader? They petition their Gods to dethrone the chump and send him to the landfill.

Did you see that despicable moment when the Orange Menace ordered the use of tear gas to disperse a peaceful protest in order to heft a Bible in front of a church for a photo op? I did, and I about flipped my lid. We Pagans have been experiencing "Tower Time" for a while, and this seemed to be one of those moments when the Tower lost another six feet of foundation.

(For those of you unfamiliar with Tower Time, it's an event that features the crumbling of norms and a shifting of realities, both mystically and in the apparent world.)

While watching the Menace grand-standing with his book, I took to social media and said something like, "All you Christians, your children are watching this, and they are going to be looking for a whole new religion, where shit like this doesn't happen."

I got a huffy reply from one of my closest local friends, to whit: "Not all Christians support this horrible man!"

And I replied: "Well, they might as well, when he does something like this." And it's true.

Fast forward a few fraught months of pandemic, and my local friend sent me a message that she would be in my neighborhood and would like to stop by. I am blessed with a gigantic front porch, so I fluffed the rocking chair cushion and rolled out the red carpet. She visited this week.

Of course most of what we talked about was the election. But the conversation took an interesting turn.

EXHIBIT A: INTERESTING TURN

Friend: Oh yes, I have a Christian friend, and she is very, very devout. She knows her Bible front-to-back and quotes it frequently. She goes to a prayer group every Saturday morning, and all they pray for is the defeat of Donald Trump.

Anne: What a coincidence! I know any number of Pagans who are working on the same thing, But we're not doing it in such a nice way as a prayer circle. We're howling at the moon and building bonfires and pouring libations and making freezer spells.

Friend: What's a freezer spell?

Anne: Never mind.

Friend: Well, the important thing is that good Christians are opposing Donald Trump and will be voting against him.

Of course that is important. If some Christians don't oppose Donald Trump, he'll be re-elected by a landslide. But I stand by my original social media post. Those church ladies sitting in a circle on Saturday morning and praying for Trump to be booted to the curb in November are doing a righteous thing. However, they are not doing everything they can do, or even a modicum of what they should be doing.

Trump will go, one way or another, and the "evangelical base" will remain. It's a voting bloc, and I can assure you that it would never listen to a Pagan perspective. The only people who can curb the evangelical base is other devout Christians. And they aren't doing it. They're sitting in their well-appointed cathedrals on Sunday, singing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" and listening to center/left sermons. Oh yes, they vote. But how many of them, when given the choice between a radical left wing candidate and a radical Christian zealot, will choose the r.l.w. candidate? It's a toss-up. Maybe not even.

My friend fails to see the danger for her faith going forward. Her own son is an atheist ... but would he be if he heard Other Voices in Other Rooms?

Listen, you heard it here first: When your faith group behaves in a way that brings harm to others and to the planet, you best get in there and do some in-house discipline. I don't see mainstream Christians having the spines to take this step. And when you don't take this step, when you tsk tsk and pray in a little circle of close friends, you inherit the wind. Your children will look elsewhere for spiritual guidance, or they won't look at all.

Altar Call: If you find the Christian church and its jealous God morally and spiritually bankrupt, fling Witch Annie a comment! You have choices. Can you feel them in the air? Yeah, we call that Tower Time.

Fair Baltimore, the Beautiful City... Sort Of

What do you know? For five and a half years of my life, I lived in the Seventh Congressional District, which is the one that Donald Trump called a "disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess," and "the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States." Our fearless leader added that no human being would want to live there.

I am a human being, I lived there happily.

 To intelligent people, the world is far more complicated than it is to stupid people.

When it comes to intelligent people, the Seventh Congressional District has boatloads. Both Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater) and Johns Hopkins Hospital are located in the district. Many of Johns Hopkins University's professors live in the vicinity of the university, in some decidedly posh neighborhoods.

EXHIBIT A: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY and ROLAND PARK

The Seventh District also includes Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It was kind of run down when I first moved there, but now it's a tourist trap of the first stripe. Even the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Ravens have stadiums in the Inner Harbor.

EXHIBIT B: BALTIMORE'S INNER HARBOR

This picture doesn't even do the Inner Harbor justice. It's gorgeous.

The Seventh Congressional District also houses two world-renowned art museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery. I've been to both, and they're fabulous.

But this is the stuff you've been hearing about that contradicts the fearless leader's rancid remark. I'm gonna get real here.

While a citizen of Baltimore, I had more than one memorable encounter with large rodents and many encounters with smaller ones. I left one apartment in haste due to the midnight excursions of a rat. My next apartment after that was visited by a mammal of the same species. Everyplace I lived had cockroaches and lots of them. (Daughter Fair has named them "scuttle boys," which I love.) But I'm a human being, and I didn't mind living there with these universal benchmarks of infestation. City life, you know? My kids live in Philly ... and they deal with scuttle boys, mice, and rats too.

However, it is indeed possible to find neighborhoods in the Seventh Congressional District that are dangerous and crime-ridden.

EXHIBIT C: YES, DONNIE WE ARE AWARE

I would like to behold a Congressional district that has no poverty or crime, where everyone lives a blissful, strife-free life. The Seventh Congressional District is not that district. There are neighborhoods I avoided completely where people live in desperate conditions. These citizens do not blame Congressman Cummings for their lot, however. They are proud of him. They know he is doing what he can to help them. They would not switch places with the caged immigrants at the U.S./Mexico border.

Living in Baltimore changed me completely. When I arrived there in the fall of 1977, I was a registered Republican who believed in small government and the possibility that anyone could be successful if they worked hard enough. Twelve months in Fair Baltimore convinced me that what the human race chiefly needs is a government that props up those less fortunate through sensible taxation of those who can best afford it.

Through a program in the Johns Hopkins chaplain's office, I tutored an inner city girl. She was bused to the university three times a week in the afternoons. At the end of the school year, the chaplain asked all tutors to ride the bus home with their students and meet the students' families.

My student's house had holes in the floor. The furnace didn't work. There were people passed out in the streets. My student shared her home with her mother, grandmother, and two siblings. Her father died of alcoholism at age 36. Against all of this, the child was trying to learn her multiplication tables. Her family was Caucasian. I can't tell from the map whether her South Baltimore neighborhood is in the Seventh or not. It's on the border.

Seeing how my little tutoring pupil lived caused me to ask, "Why can't something be done?" And that's when I became a liberal. Boom. Just like that.

I'm going to make one final point in today's lengthy sermon. Look at this map of the Seventh Congressional District:

EXHIBIT D: THE DISTRICT

Does something smell fishy to you? It's not the rodents or the infestation, it's the shape of this district! It looks like a dragon's head rising from a lake. This is a district that is the product of gerrymandering. Which the Supreme Court just upheld. Is there injustice in the state of Maryland? Oh yes, and it's the way the votes are clustered. Elijah Cummings can't do one damn thing about that.

To summarize in an intelligent way, Baltimore is a city with all the positives and challenges of any large city. There are pockets of lavish wealth and pockets of desperate poverty, and many many neighborhoods along a sliding scale that fit in between. There are accomplishments and struggles. Just because the sitting congressman for that district is tough on the president, that doesn't mean the city is uninhabitable. Insult by hyperbole is Trump's signature achievement as (not my) president.

Rodents? Yeah. I'll bet the White House has them too.

I Love The Bard!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," serving all bored deities who are lost to the mists of time! Modern isn't always better, you know.

Speaking of modern not being better ... is there anyone more fabulous than Shakespeare? I teach Romeo and Juliet every year, and 400 years down the line, it's still a fan favorite. My students love it.

Shakespeare has power by the hour, but he's also fine with a line. I was looking over some quotes the other day, and I found this one from Measure for Measure:

"But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep."

By all the bored gods, Willie the Shake is KING. It will probably take me two days to memorize this.