Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Do Not Resuscitate: Life In Trump's Great White Evangelical A-merica



It is now a cliche and the subject of some legal interpretation if tattooing "Do Not Resuscitate" on your body is enough for an ER to not treat you in America. But try and get passed the admittance desk and your lack of health insurance and the point becomes moot.

But ideas no longer come from California but these days trickle up from the poor and the ravished economy of those who don't have college degrees or are the artificial middle class based on unearned equity on their houses whose value that did not readjust downward as a result of the economic ability of America to print dollars instead of take it like a man in the stock market crash of 2008 - where a great recession occurred and not a depression - yeah right.

Ideas stopped coming out of America S.R. (since Reagan). And as a result the way we communicate these days is through the PR and or PRESS office. Whatever lie you can sell is whatever truth we sadly live with.

And in between, reality and truth and lies and PR and politics and politics mixed with religion make it impossible for a civil discourse happen in a public forum stolen by the Russians in the last election to prop up a deadbeat pimp puppet presently in the White House.

One of the extremes in America was the result of the Culture Wars based mostly on turning birth control out of the Vatican turned into Abortion at your local polling place. And the lies there worked so well that right wing Pape religion's lies got adopted by the TV revival tent crowd who sell religion and fear and hell to the ignorant and the left behind in America.

Extreme opinions and intolerance have a great tradition in America. Indeed, the intolerance toward Quakers in Massachusetts is I think the beginning of resentment toward the Crown that led to Rebellion a century later.

Boston Martyrs


The Boston martyrs is the name given in Quaker tradition[1] to the three English members of the Society of Friends, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer, and to the Friend William Leddra of Barbados, who were condemned to death and executed by public hanging for their religious beliefs under the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Several other Friends lay under sentence of death at Boston in the same period, but had their punishments commuted to that of being whipped out of the colony from town to town.
"The hanging of Mary Dyer on the Boston gallows in 1660 marked the beginning of the end of the Puritan theocracy and New England independence from English rule. In 1661 King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. In 1684 England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686, and in 1689 passed a broad Toleration act."[2][3]

That the trickle town intolerance of the I-Vee league colleges of the North these days with their PC nonsense are as stifling as the Redneck Evangelicalism of the inbred South. It does matter if you are born and or raised on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

That civility in America is dead for the moment along with a functioning town square outside of the Mob Meter of Twitter or the snoop value of Facebook and a media controlled by corps. 

That I came again upon the Boston Martyrs when I was looking at a time line of The Titus Family that started in England and at this point of research have found themselves in Long Island in the 17th century with the local authorities stealing livestock to pay tithes of the COE meal ticket priest, from a genealogical history of the Mott family, on one Edmond Titus, son of an immigrant from England in 1635, one Robert Titus.

That Robert Titus's brother was first a Parliamentarian in the English Civil War before becoming a Royal is testament that the family was certainly COE and not necessarily a dissenter when arriving and settling first briefly in Brookline and then Rehobath Mass on the Rhode Island Border. that in something like 19 years a good old COE type sold off his property in Mass. and finally settles in Hemstead Long Island. This all before William Penn founds his Quaker colony that genuinely promoted tolerance in religious beliefs to all immigrant new comers.  

 I knew of long term imprisonment of a member of a Quaker Waln clan that eventually set in motion the Walns being one of the first families to settle with Penn in Pennsylvania. That Waln spent something like two or more years in jail refusing, on conscience, to tithe taxes for the repair of a local COE church before Penn's offer of resettlement in the new land might have seemed like an offer too good to refuse.

That Waln came to America already a dissenter, a Quaker, and Titus no doubt turned off by the extreme authoritarian and totalitarian views of a church-state in Massachusetts. That when religion controls politics, best to move out of state and seek better digs elsewhere. That Titus goes from Massachusetts and converts but is then a second class citizen whose taxes are expected to subsidize leeches working for the Church of England in Long Island. Plenty to rebel about from the status quo of the 1770s.

Extremes abound in early America. Little wonder the revolution started in Boston with the crazy Puritans up there. Little wonder modern day extremist PC views emanate from the left up there.

That even the Quakers could not escape the craziness and corruption of both the old and new world. That no sooner had William Penn got to Philly he was called on to be judge in a witch trial of a member of the local Swedish community now under English control.

That about the same time as religious fanatics were murdering 20 odd witches in Salem, Penn had to bide his time in official mask to deal with a matter he did not believe in - namely witchcraft.

Margaret Mattson

That in order to keep the law, a silly English law on witchcraft, Penn gave lip service and tolerance which goes a long way in preserving the Common Civility of the community. And coaxed the jury into a "Yes she is certainly a witch but unfortunately we did not catch her in any act of witchcraft." - defense/verdict.

So it goes. Or went.