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If you drive east on Nevada Route 167 out of Las Vegas, having taken two other state routes to reach this particular one, you’ll find yourself inside of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. 1.5 million square miles of desert wilderness, and one large, man-made lake that is a symbol of the American Dream, American willpower, and Manifest Destiny all rolled into one. In 1931, construction began on Hoover Dam, which is on the far southwestern part of Lake Mead. The lake would not exist without the dam, and the dam would not serve its primary purpose without the lake. It was designed to bring water delivery to the desert to grow California, Arizona, and Nevada, while using that same water from the Colorado River to generate electricity through hydroelectric turbines.
Opening for use in 1936, Lake Mead and Hoover Dam served their purpose well for approximately fifty years. And then, like so many other things during the Reagan era, it began to fail. Drought and overbuilding caused the water level of the lake to recede year after year, with a few small spikes after a particularly wet winter season. If, after driving along Route 167, you decide to get out and head towards what should be the shoreline, you’ll instead find dry land, and the remains of the old towns that once existed alongside the Colorado River jut upwards from the cracked earth. In the last two years, victims of Mafia murders have had their corpses wash up upon the parched edges of the lake, distinctive lines can be seen along the sides of the rock where the high water mark long sat, and even old cars that plunged into the lake between the 1940s and 1960s have been unearthed.
These are the remnants of our apogee as a nation. A time where we were the arsenal of democracy, and then the cradle of the atomic bomb, the unparalleled producer of consumer goods and automobiles. We were still trusted by the majority of the world as a beacon of freedom. It was a good time, for our Boomer parents or grandparents who lived in that nation, before they got greedy and made it so the rest of us would have harder lives. Apologies to any Boomer minorities: you aren’t the ones I’m talking about.
Today, we can’t say that. We’re not trusted or beloved, not after Donald Trump’s end around into the presidency in 2016. We had four years of a short-fingered vulgarian, to borrow Graydon Carter’s memorable phrase, as our commander-in-chief, taking bribes disguised as “business” at his hotels and clubs, giving away intelligence to the Russians in the Oval Office, and tweeting away with his Big Mac and fries-stained greasy hands at all hours, guzzling his twelfth Diet Coke of the day, brought in by a steward after the push of a red button under his desk or in his bedroom. He appointed three Supreme Court justices: one competent, one partisan frat boy hack, and one religious zealot, who’ve made a show of gleefully removing our rights, one after the next, while according special privileges to those who share their particular flavor of religion. The world largely sees us now not as a place of hope, but of spoiled, gluttonous, vulgar, poorly educated religious fanatics.
And what’s stopping him from returning to power, despite his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York? It’s the well-meaning octogenarian and oldest president in American history, Joe Biden! President Biden spent two years getting all sorts of useful legislation passed, doing real things to help actual Americans, yet struggled with approval amongst our low-information, social media-brainrotted electorate. Last October, the terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel in an orgy of violence and death, and Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv to hug the odorous Benjamin Netanyahu and swear undying loyalty to keeping Israel safe. He didn’t need to go across the ocean to hug Israel’s wannabe fascist dictator, but the symbolism was important. America loves symbols. We love gestures. The gestures make us feel better about ourselves, allow us to go about as if a halo is mounted above our heads. It’s why the only thing we do after the umpteenth gun massacre in this country is to count the politicians utter the same banal phrase, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” without, I don’t know, doing something to actually fix the problem. Joe Biden flew off to hug Netanyahu, and the myause visele smiled and then worked to undercut Biden’s credibility at every turn.
The nation founded by the survivors of a genocide, governed by right-wing fanatics, used that moment as permission to openly commit their own genocide against the Palestinian people. Palestinian civilians are being killed at rates unprecedented in previous wars, while too many in this country cheer them on. Nikki Haley, Queen of Unprincipled Hacks, is a textbook definition of war crime cheerleading. She went straight from renouncing her anti-Trump stance (Donald Trump is grossly unfit to lead this country and a national security threat became Donald Trump is better than Joe Biden) to then fly to Israel herself and sign some artillery shells before they were dropped on more Palestinian children.
There’s no atrocity that some self-declared Christian in America won’t willingly sign onto because our true religion in America is violence and money. The actual teachings of the Christ they claim to worship are conveniently and repeatedly ignored when it gets in the way of things like money, earthly power, or defending white supremacy. Can’t let the creepy octogenarian televangelist go without his third private jet to whisk him away from his untaxed 100-acre estate! Can’t let those brown-skinned children take refuge in America! Where would we put them at? (Try that 100-acre estate.)
We are barely halfway through the year. The oceans are near boiling temperatures off the Florida coast, killing coral and undersea life. The tornado season has been more violent and widespread than we’ve seen in fifty years, with strikes across the country. The nominee of the Republican Party, the former president, is a convicted felon promising a dictatorship or “post-constitutional order” while the news media shrugs and bleats on about polls. College students bravely standing up for the Palestinian people are arrested and beaten by the police without provocation, but defenders of Israel attacked the students violently while the police watched. The vast majority of people are no longer behind Israel’s war, being able to see clearly through TikTok videos and other social media posts what the media steadfastly refuses to say: it is a genocide. But in Washington, they’re still sending billions of dollars of bombs to Israel so it can blow up people trapped in an open-air prison and passing legislation to outlaw criticism of Israel on college campuses. It’s so bleakly Orwellian, censoring critiques of a foreign nation, because hugging Israel tight is the only bipartisan item of agreement in our government. Those bombs we ship to Tel Aviv are launched at schools and hospitals and refugee camps, where hundreds of thousands of women and children are forced to run from their latest “safe zone” while drinking tainted water and eating insects and grass. Meanwhile, the meager aid we’re sending to Gaza while also destroying it is regularly intercepted by Israel’s religious zealots, who steal or burn it. Somehow, this has helped President Biden’s approval ratings improve. Lots of Americans clearly stan accomplices to murder.
We haven’t even gotten to the debates or election yet. Inflation is creeping back up as corporate America continues to look for every last way of squeezing more money out of us, pushing a grotesque technological bastardization they call artificial intelligence as our big saving grace, and then use it as justification to lay off thousands of skilled workers. The same workers who, by and large, got trained in computer science and coding, because the politicians and the corporate elites told us two decades ago that job retraining or college degrees would be the only way we could succeed in the modern world. Now they’re hellbent on destroying that success, while the decidedly unintelligent technology mines over existing work and steals it. AI doesn’t create art, it creates an amalgamation of what it’s internalized. AI doesn’t write a book or term paper, it scoops up what humans wrote and put it together in a way that appears to be coherent on the surface, until you discover that not a single citation it used exists, or that it treats Reddit shitposting as real advice, which is how you end up with Google’s AI recommending that you glue your cheese to the pizza crust to make it stay on, or that you should take a hot bath with a toaster to relax, or that you should use your name and birthday to make a password. That’s just some of the nonsense that Big Tech has achieved after billions of dollars, and they want to replace us with this advice that seems like it’s designed to kill us. Idiocracy and The Terminator copulated and gave us this bastardized Skynet.
Speaking of killing us off, tradwives. That’s some horribly depressing shit. Women making money off staged videos of them being the perfect housewife, making all of the food themselves, doing all of the cleaning, and accepting total submission to their husband. They’ve of course intersected with other parts of the Christian Nationalist spectrum, a large part of which is conspiracy theories. Drink raw milk. Don’t get vaccinated. Ignore “Big Pharma” and use these "essential oils” when you get cancer. It is gobsmackingly ignorant and completely on brand. The only tool they want you to have is faith. Faith helps, yes, but if faith alone is not enough to get you to Heaven in the teachings of Christianity, why would it suffice to save you from dying? These charlatans don’t answer that question worth a damn, because all they want is your money to fuel their excess. This is just a small taste below.
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A million dollars in jewelry could feed a lot of hungry kids. You know, the thing Jesus said his followers should do. Not in America, though. There’s Givenchy to wear and mansions to purchase. It’s the only place the American Dream is alive. The megachurch attendees are storming the Capitol and devote themselves to Donald Trump because they’re angry the American Dream left them behind, but their pastors are just living it up. I mean, who knew praising Jesus paid quite so well?
Paula White, senior pastor at Apopka, Florida megachurch—$5 million
Kenneth Copeland, senior pastor, Eagle Mountain International Church—$760 million, pays no taxes on his $7 million mansion because the church is the titled owner.
Ronnie Floyd, Southern Baptist pastor—$14 million
John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church—$6 million
Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition—$7 million
Robert Jeffress, senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas—$18 million
Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, senior pastor at Tampa Bay Church—unknown, has multiple shell corporations hiding his money.
Joel Osteen, senior pastor, Lakewood Church—$60 million
You know why these people demand we be a “Christian nation?” Because money isn’t enough, they want power. Power corrupts, and if Cheetolini somehow wins the Presidency a second time, all of these megachurch pastors will be drunk on power. A national ban on abortion, birth control, in-vitro fertilization (because pro-life isn’t what they are—if they were, IVF would be protected immediately), followed by a drive to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment, because these false prophets want the fictional Gilead to be a reality. Oppression is a heady drug, and from Trump on down, the Republican Party and their right-wing radical religious zealots long ago overdosed on it, and can’t stop increasing the hit they take every time. How it hasn’t killed them politically remains a mystery, because the everyday churchgoer isn’t having a good run of it. Karl Marx might well have been right when he wrote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” because if it wasn’t for televangelists deciding that Jimmy Carter was less Christian than Ronald Reagan, this might well be a much nicer country.
Twenty weeks until election day.
P.S. So, of course, this story breaks a few hours after I hit publish. Yet another pastor resigning from their megachurch for sexual abuse. I’ll let April Ajoy, exvangelical pastor’s daughter, say it for me.
A solid deconstruction. Well said.