Saving Your Soul

"Combien de temps"

-REM

Exhausted this morning after the realization yesterday of another mis-calendared deadline by the former paralegal. I need to fix that today before the damage gets out of hand. Every week it's something like this, leaving me thinking maybe it's time to retire, or withdraw in all of my contested cases.

Meanwhile, Orange Julius Caesar made an appearance in Tuscaloosa yesterday for commencement at that benighted football franchise posing as a university, where they welcomed him with open arms just as they did when he showed up for a Crimson Tide game. Alabama: the state that was formed so Mississippi would feel better about itself. (that was an old line around my household as a little boy--Dad was allowed to dog the Magnolia State a little, having been born and raised there).

We're dismantling our republican democracy, shedding the armor of the rule of law, turning into, well, pagans.

Which leads me to the most interesting essay in this morning's papers, by David Brooks in the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/opinion/trump-faith-humanism.html

Hoping this doesn't end up behind a paywall.

Brooks speaks to the despair of trying to live according to the moral and ethical principles at least a few of us were raised with, in an age that worships power and physical strength and masculine "virtue" above all else. DJT is the walking, metastatic embodiment of that new social construct, a narcissist bully always looking for someone weaker to humiliate.

Brooks characterizes this new world as "pagan", reminding us that it's really the reemergence of a much older world, the human experience of the Romans and the Greeks and the Persians. He reminds us that we'd recoil in horror at the slaughter and cruelty that were part and parcel of the pre-Christian world, citing authors such as historian Tom Holland who've made that point. I read Holland's book Dominion a year or two ago, which makes the rather controversial argument in the politically correct world that Christianity, for all its faults, marks a turning point for the better in human history. Rousseau was deluding himself in longing for some pre-Christian paradise--it's no accident that his thinking led in no small part to the horrors of the French Revolution.

Anyway, I digress.

Brooks notes that it's during these low ebbs in human history, when might is worshipped and we undervalue the gift of empathy, that often something very good happens. Some turn away, whether the early Christians or the group of intellectuals whose theology that emerged from the ashes of World War II led to Niebuhr and Martin Luther King. He suggests we're already starting to see the first green shoots--after years of decline, church attendance has leveled off and is starting to climb again, although one has to acknowledge a lot of these churches in the Christian Nationalist camp are "pagan" in the sense Brooks uses the term here, worshipping brute strength (see, e.g., the popular "Jacked Jesus" images they favor, with Our Lord and Savior appearing on the edge of 'roid rage) and reviling the "other".

In the end, I suppose it comes down to finding ways to nourish one's soul in the ways communities have done for generations. Do something in the community, for your community. Seek out something more than an ideal waist size or a bigger boat. Help someone.

In the end, saving someone else may end up saving yourself and your sanity during these dark days of MAGA. And it's the most counterculture form of protest you could choose, resisting the urge to respond to their vileness with a little vileness of one's own (case in point: the latest chatter about how the Populists have discovered the "F" bomb in their dialogue. Maybe not such a good thing).

Easy to say, harder to act upon.