The horrors of Holy Week

In case you missed it, last week was a textbook in the great American divides. If as a nation, we're coming apart, our stretched-to-breaking seams were on proud display as huge news stories just kept on breaking.

First, the most historic. In a courtroom in Manhattan, ex-Pres Donald J. Trump, the least fit President of all time, pled "not guilty" to multiple charges of cooking the books to hide a dalliance with a porn star, keep the affair from a public who likely would have let him go anyway, as they repeatedly have done. Republicans rallied around their kingpin, claiming the charge was pure politics. Democrats loved watching a servile orange man sitting in silent humility before the law while, at the same moment, turning out fake mugshot t-shirts to sell to his dutiful minions--the Donald as his worst/best. 

Strangely enough, we have another President these days, but Trump, the most venerated of all time, was doing the work at which he's shown himself to be an expert, taking up all the oxygen in the room, racking up total news coverage, filling endless column inches in the nation's news systems.

Are we divided as a country? Sure. Two words: Donald Trump.

It looks right now as if he will run away with the Republic nomination for President, even though none but his most starry-eyed believe he can win a general election.

And then there's this. In Nashville, Tennessee, just a few days after yet another mass shooting, this one at a Christian school, this one killing three nine-year-olds and three staff, three Tennessee Democrats broke Statehouse rules by using a bullhorn and thereby igniting the hatred of white Second-amendment types, who chose to rid themselves of the thorny problem (there were hundreds, even thousands outside demanding some kind of action against guns) via nothing less than capital punishment--tossing "the Tennessee three" out of their seats. 

Except, one rep voted to let the white woman stay, which made the whole incident feel like a replay of Jim Crow. Because the "Tennessee Three" looked like martyrs, those lily-white Tennessee Republican could not have looked less medieval.

Then, in a courtroom in Texas, came the Saturday Night Massacre, when a magistrate judge ruled on a lawsuit concerning the granddaddy of all ruptures, the whole question of abortion. A sweet, thoughtful, and well-meaning federal judge in Texas, specially chosen for his life-long religious/political views, determined the FDA was dead wrong in declaring the abortion-in-a-bottle drug to be safe for use, even though tests run endlessly long ago has shown the drug's enormously healthy record through 20 years of use. 

Oddly enough, ever since the Supremes destroyed Roe v. Wade, abortion has been a hornet's nest for conservatives, who suddenly find themselves looking draconian for what seems the witless ways it is moving to deal with a societal issue that was always and forever a more complex problem than they could be forced to admit. Trump's Supremes handed over a ruling that had and still has the pro-life crowd dancing, but while they're thrilled with the new rights of the unborn, they'd still have not determined how to deal with the rights of women. 

Compounding the dilemma was yet another ruling in a federal court in Washington, where a far less conservative judge ruled that the very drug the Texas magistrate claimed was not safe, said it was--and that furthermore the states that had acted to declare the drug such should be allowed to peddle it together (or something like that). Two totally opposite rulings laid down just an hour apart--what a week.

Want to see the royal gorge that keep the nation divided? Last week it was on display in reds and blues so bright you had to look away--last week, passion week? maybe, but not Holy Week.