Supping

Let me try to get this lunacy right. It reaches beyond my imagination.

When we lived in Arizona, long ago, the legacy of the long-time senator and merchandising magnate, Barry Goldwater, loomed far greater than the reps of the state's famous gunslingers. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," Goldwater preached, convincingly, when accepting the Republican party's nomination for President in July of 1964. 

But he lost. Bad. Real bad. Got creamed, in fact. 

But he stayed in the Senate and remained number one in the hearts of home-grown loyalists for years, even after his death in 1998. What some of those die-hards may not care to remember, however, was that when Nixon was stumbling drunken sailor-ish through the mess forever known as Watergate, it was Goldwater who went to the Tricky Dick late one night and let him know he was toast if he didn't resign.

Thusly, Nixon quit and torched off a note to that Republican posse the next day, telling the conservative entourage he had "nothing but contempt" for him and them.

No matter. Nixon quit. It was bad. 

Today, real-life Arizona MAGAs make the arch-conservative Goldwater look like jolly Santa Claus. Their creedal foundation is "the Big Lie." In Cochise County, east of Tucson, two of three county commissioners are now refusing to sign over the county's votes, despite the fact that Cochise County is overwhelmingly Republican and voted that way in the November elections. If I have this right, those two hard-heads are so convinced that the Maricopa County election board is crooked, that they're protesting by refusing to send in their own Cochise County tallies. 

They will, of course, because if they don't, at least two Republican winners in the recent elections will, then and there, lose, their races being so close that loss of the Cochise County tabulations would send them home. 

I wish I was making this up.

If some people believed in Jesus as deeply and faithfully as they believe in Trump--or Kari Lake, who still isn't buying her loss in the governor's race--we'd be a goodly step closer to being the kind of Christian nation they claim so passionately to desire.

Trump's MAGA minions have already rewritten the book on three words that have been part of the national vocabulary for years: patriot--you are one if you used Old Glory to push your way into the Capital on January 6, even more so if you used it to break windows or doors; evangelical, which used to mean being "born-again" but today identifies those who don red caps; and Christian--the word refers to followers of the Lord God of Orange.

I can't imagine those two MAGA superstars in Cochise County will hold the line on their heartfelt protest. Two of their own will be losers. Trump hates losers. 

I don't know if people like General Flynn would call this old proverb "Christian" or not, but I don't value what he thinks anyway. I'm wanting to haul some old-fashioned moral power into the mess by referencing one of my favorite proverbs, first put to paper in the late 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer, and referred to twice by a playwright you may have heard of--William Shakespeare. 

Here's the homily, just as good in Sioux County as it is in Cochise, just as relevant in the era of Trump as it was in 1386.