Man of the People

 

It happened to me this morning after church.  I was hanging around in the foyer waiting for my wife to signal she was ready to go to Gloria Jeans for coffee with Jess's family, something we do every after church every week.  A longtime friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, came up and we began to chat.  After a while, the topic shifted to American politics which continues to grab more and more of the world's attention, particularly since this is a Presidential election year, along with all of the seats in the House of Representatives, 1/3 of the seats in the Senate, probably about a third of the Governorships, as well as various State-level positions all the way down to county sheriff and municipal dog catcher.  Americans love their politics and, being an ex-pat Yank and dual American-Australian citizen, I dare say Americans take their politics with more fervor than your typical laid-back (some would say jaded) Aussie.  I say jaded in that Australian law requires registered voters to vote for fear of being fined otherwise.  But that is topic for another day.

Anyway (and inevitably), I was asked my views on the two Presidential (I won't bother with one or more others who might find their way onto the ballots in some of the States.  I think my friend already knew which way the political winds blew through my hair, but as I uttered the words, "I support Trump,", the reaction was and is fairly predictable.  It's the same reaction one would have in finding a dead cockroach at the bottom of their MacDonalds Happy Meal.  

We discussed the matter a bit, but in 2-3 minutes it is hardly possible to explain how an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian, which I identify as (my preferred pronouns still being me, myself and I), could possibly vote for, let alone support such an obviously awful human being, now convicted felon.  Thus does his blog post springs to life.

It is important to note from the start that I was seemingly born a Republican.  One of my very earliest memories happened in the wee hour of the night following the Presidential election in 1960 between Republican Richard M Nixon and the Democrat (a Catholic of all things!) John F Kennedy.  I was only nine years old, and I remember Dad weeping beside my bed to tell me that Nixon had lost.  I wept too, barely comprehending why.  Four years later I would proudly wear a Barry Goldwater campaign button to school even if it meant that one day, in the football locker room, a very large black teammate picked me up and slammed me against one of the lockers in rage.  Four years later, it was a Nixon badge I would wear.  Moving overseas in 1977 with my wife and infant son, I would no longer wear campaign badges but I nonetheless cheered on Ronald Reagan and, to a far less extent in that they had much more muted personalities, the Bushes Senior and Junior, then John McCain, after him Mitt Romney.  Some successfully defeated their Democrat foes, some not.

Finally came someone completely out of right field and quite off the wall--Donald J Trump who pulled the political upset of the century by defeating Hillary R Clinton.  You can and will decide if the following four years were great or disastrous as you will, in opposite fashion, the four years of the current Biden administration.  We are now less than five months from the election, and as violent and contentious as the campaign has been thus far, I don't think we have seen anything like what is yet to come.

Just this morning I finished A fascinating and lengthy biography of the mercurial genius, Elon Musk, written by Walter Isaacson, published in 2023.

The book ends on this note:

"Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he is an a__hole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person's good traits and decry the bad ones. But it is important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are 'molded out of faults'."...

"Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-taking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world."

(Isaacson, 2023:614-615)

Although their fields of endeavor are quite different, what Isaacson said about Elon Musk could be said of Donald Trump. Whether Trump was a difficult child, I do not know. He certainly is a difficult adult, and yet as a Christian, a conservative evangelical, I will be voting for him a third time, as soon as our absentee ballots arrive from Michigan. Now, if falls to me to explain how I can in all good conscience do so.