Rated B for Biblical

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Trying to make sense of the Golden Calf trampling the Second Commandment en route the Tower of Babel to forecast the Promised Land for his faithful and Apocalypse Now for the rest of us, I had an odd, unlikely memory.

Not long ago a commercial for a new video game began airing during football games that summed up the last four years in its last two lines:

There is no truth!  There’s only those who you choose to believe!

In a previous life, the English teacher in me would have red-penned an M to the end of “who,” but life in America today affords no such quibbling.  When you’ve already hit the iceberg, deck chairs are in the way no matter where you put them.

Like many other ads, this one was fraught with explosions, high-speed chases, rapid gunfire, punches, kicks, and a loud, breathless voiceover–all of which go quite well with football games as defined by George Will:  “sporadic violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

Could that be the driving force behind Trumpism?  Did it take a star of reality TV–the most ironic term in the history of language–to realize that an enormous swath of the American population was bored beyond reason with representative government because it seemed like endless committee meetings?

Was the solution to punctuate politics with violence?

Consider the evidence:  From “I’ll pay the legal fees” to “stand by and stand back” and from the “very fine people” in Charlottesville to the “patriots… we love” who stormed the Capitol, the threat of violence is implied if not ordered.  Campaign ads with a Republican candidate brandishing an assault rifle next to the faces of four congresswomen of color make the threat as overt as covert.  Automatic weapons hanging from background walls in Zoomed meetings state it as clearly as pious invocations of “Second Amendment remedies.”

If the word “pious” in connection to gun rights seems a stretch, you haven’t seen the “Guts, Guns, & God” signs that dot the landscape of red states and line the walls at conventions of right-wing groups.  As a variant, one of their most popular t-shirts declares them to be “Pro-Life, Pro-God, Pro-Gun.”  As a consequence, they find it perfectly acceptable for their guy to clear a street of protesters with tear-gas so that he can pose in front of a church holding a Bible over his head.

Did it matter to them that the Bible was upside down?  Or that the pastor of the church renounced him?  No more than a referee’s bad call when it favors their team.  No more than the fate of those they see voted off  “the island” or scolded, “You’re fired!”  No more than the carnage left behind by their avatars on Cold War.

“Cold War” is a timely name for a video game that proclaims “no truth.” What we call the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a character drawn to look like Ronald Reagan appears in the ad to remind us of it.  However, whether the game’s designers anticipated it or not, the game hit the shelves just when historians and journalists started using the terms “Cold Civil War” and “Domestic Cold War” to describe America’s current political climate.

And we all knew what happened to truth as soon as Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” turned Orwell’s 1984 into a best-seller 70 years after it first appeared.

Cold War is “rated M for mature.” I use quotes because I find it impossible to say that with a straight face.  Do mature people immerse themselves in make-believe violence? Do they play video games?  Someone could ask those questions about my penchant for watching football, but in football, truth is not judged by the color of the jerseys, but by the content of the play.

Cold War‘s premise is survival, its pressure non-stop, both of which give the game a proportion for which we have a word.  Jets and helicopters fall from the sky, buildings crumble, mountains erupt, people fall into pits and disintegrate. Better rate it B for Biblical.

Don’t know if the ad ran during coverage of the CPAC Convention, but it would have been a perfect match for the Biblical proportions of a Golden Calf rolling over the Second Commandment into the Tower of Babel to offer a Promised Land to his followers and damn his disbelievers to Hell. Apocalypse may not be Now, but 2022 and 2024 are not far off.

And, no, it does not matter that he holds the Bible upside down.

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The Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4-6): Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. See also Romans 1:18–32 where Paul warns of human tendencies not toward atheism but toward idolatry.

No one ever notices this anymore, but an article of clothing made to look like the American flag is a violation of the United States Flag Code. However, having it appear with, of all things, a magic wand may be the ultimate desecration–not because it’s in any way evil, but because it is flat out silly. The wand and the sandals make me wonder if the sculptor intended it as a joke–a way to make fools of everyone at the CPAC Convention. It happened four years ago at CPAC when pranksters stood before the entry and handed out postcard-sized red, white, and blue flags with The Loser’s name for everyone to wave. Attendees, not recognizing the Russian national flag, thought it a show of patriotism and waved them while in their seats awaiting the convention’s opening. The display went on over an hour before someone caught on and collected them.
A belt buckle pictured on eBay. The slogan has appeared on signs, t-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers since at least 1972 when I first drove south across the Mason-Dixon line. Often, the word “glory” is added, and in recent years it appeared in campaign version, “God, Guns, and Trump.”
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Jack Garvey (1951 - ) was born and raised in Lawrence, Mass., before attending Salem State College (now University} where his BA was delayed three semesters by The Log (the student newspaper), the anti-war movement, and other counter-culture activities. Unwilling to serve the Fort Kent, Maine, Chamber of Commerce as a reporter for the St. John Valley Times, he disappeared west of the Mississippi River, turning up as a graduate student and teacher of freshman composition at South Dakota State University, as a grant-writer for the United Tribes of North Dakota, as a vagabond on the West Coast who paused a few weeks to pick cherries and train hops in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and as a busker in Denver's historic Larimer Square. Returning to Massachusetts after about seven years--the same time that the Prodigal Son returned to a fatted calf--Garvey landed north of Boston to resume busking in the coastal tourist towns of Newburyport and Salem while teaching as an adjunct instructor at most every college within a 90-minute drive. A year later, in 1983, he began writing guest columns for the Newburyport Daily News and the weekly Newburyport Current. In 1999 he joined King Richard's Renaissance Faire in Carver, Mass., where he has performed every fall as a strolling minstrel to this day. Last fall he also performed in Cry Innocent, a re-enactment of a witch trial in Salem. He still writes for the Daily News, and he has since included Lexington, Mass., to his busking circuit. He has compiled three books: Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer's Public Life in America's Privatized Times (2014), Keep Newburyport Weird: An Atlas of Downtown Rhyme and Surfside Reason (2018), and Once Upon an Attention Span: An All-Purpose Pub for the United States of Amnesia (2024).

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