TEOTWAWKI Time for Anti-Trumpers

 

End Time Indeed
   I am spending little time reading about the U.S. election and even less of it reading about Mr. Trump. I admit, however, that a couple of articles about him attracted my attention and I will call them to yours.
   A few of us remain perplexed regarding Trump's continuing and even surging popularity and I am especially puzzled by the fact that he has been embraced by evangelicals and many others who are religious. The two articles are about that and explain the illustration above. I am not religious which puts into context the cartoons below. 

Backward Christian Soldiers
   That the righteous are lining up behind Trump is baffling and, as this article indicates, "The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions," Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times, Jan. 17, 2024. (Mr. Edsall's columns are typically very long and he usually asks the opinions of others. Read the entire article since some of the quotes I will use, may not be directly from him.)
  I did not know that "God Made Trump" which is a video on something called "Truth Social."(if you click on that link, it is about three minutes long.) It answers some of the questions, one of them being, "Why Was Trump Chosen?" 

"God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump....
God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”

God's choice does make some sense since Eric Trump said that his dad "literally saved Christianity" and there is a "growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity." 
   He is now seen by many as a "Jesus-like figure" and "The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” That is, "The multiple criminal charges against Trump serve to strengthen the belief of many evangelicals about his ties to God..." 

  That Mr. Trump is not exactly a fine fellow, doesn't matter much since,  “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role.

  Further, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible...Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse."

There is more, but thanks to God, Trump will save the Christians, and America, from the attacks of the deplorable progressives. 

   The second article is this one and it begins when the author, Tim Alberta, tells about his appearance on a television show during which the moderator asks why, 

"Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates."

 The author notes that, As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question.

   Alberta's search to find out "What's wrong with American evangelicals?" yielded answers that were not acceptable to many in his father's congregation and they did not hesitate to let him know at his father's funeral. His criticisms of Trump, were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself. By the time of his death, his father probably would have agreed:
Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country....
   What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity.

   Things have only gotten worse:

And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

From: "My Father, My Faith and Donald Trump: Here, In Our House of Worship, People Were Taunting Me About Politics as I Tried to Mourn," Tim Alberta, The Atlantic, Nov. 28, 2023.  The article was adapted from Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: America's Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Post Script:
   I thought of "Backward Christian Soldiers" for obvious reasons. I then googled the phrase and found examples of it. One of its uses is in this, perhaps prescient, book title from forty years ago: Backward, Christian Soldiers?: An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction, Gary North. [1984!!]
"But if Christians don't control the territory, they can't occupy it. They get tossed out into cultural "outer darkness," which is just exactly what the secular humanists have done to Christians in the 20th century: in education, in the arts, in entertainment, in politics, and certainly in the mainline churches and seminaries. Today, the humanists are "occupying." But they won't be for long. This book shows why." Perhaps a reprint is in order.

  An old friend from out west sent me an email reminding me of long ago and discussions over CARGO CULTS. The subject of the email - Make Melanesia Great Again. He thought the association of  cargo cults and Trump was worth pursuing in Mulcahy's Miscellany and I agreed. But, I took a quick look and the association has already been made. (e.g. "America's Latest "Cargo Cult?", John Edward Terrell, Psychology Today, Aug. 23, 2020.) Plus, undoubtedly a construct like 'cargo cults' has been examined by the neo-colonial historians and any mention of it likely to be frowned upon.

Advice for Anti-Trumpers:

   This will be a useful article as we reach the end: "50 Must-Haves for TEOTWAWKI: A Survival List for When SHTF (S*it Hits the Fan), Countryside, Aug. 31, 2021. This portion will be of interest to the readers of MM:

Books of all sorts, in print: A good library will be important for reference, but also entertainment. Long, dark winters will be a misery for those who don’t attend to a decent library. Without electricity, solar power is a good way to recharge de­vices for digital books, but once the device breaks (and you know it will) that power is useless.

The Cartoons:

These cover cartoons are all by the Canadian, Barry Blitt and are from the New Yorker. For more about Blitt see: Canadian Cartoonists. 

For another MM piece that indicates why TEOTWAWTI is a term for our times see:
"It Is Even Worse Than It Looks"

 

Subtitles

 

  By 'subtitles' I mean the ones that appear at the bottom of a screen at the theatre or on your television. They are useful if the people on the screen are speaking a language you don't understand and the subtitles appear in a language you do, or if you cannot hear. The subtitles that appear after the title on a book constitute a different subject and it is a subject about which I have amassed a considerable amount of information. That will be presented to you if I ever stop being distracted by minor topics such as this one.

   I am now old and so are my ears. My ability to hear has diminished along with many others and I have come to rely on subtitles or "closed captioning" when watching television (chyrons are somewhat different in that they offer words at the bottom of the screen directing you to something else you should be watching or worrying about.) Apparently many people, even the younger versions, are reading subtitles while watching what is on the screen. That readership is increasing among viewers is not disputed and if you search for articles about subtitles you will find many. 

  My purpose here is to direct you to an article which offers some explanations for why the subtitles are on, even if the characters speaking are not Irish. If you are older and don't know how to turn them on, call your service provider. In advance, you should turn up the volume on the phone so you can hear the reasons why you are being put on hold and, as well,  listen to the music. 

  Here is the useful part and it represents only a portion of what the author has to say. You should read the entire piece which is by Devin Gordon and it came in a newsletter from the Atlantic magazine around June 6: "Why Is Everyone Watching TV With The Subtitles On?: It's Not Just You." 

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff. It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue. “It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)

Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”

The appearance of the subtitles on your screen also varies widely by platform—the streamers control that dial too—and some of them put more effort into the task than others. But their default typefaces are all clunky and robotic and bear no connection to the content. If they can beam Severance into our homes and invent dialogue-boost features, surely they can figure out how to let us pick our own typeface, or shrink the font size, or move the words to a different spot on the screen. You know who’d really benefit from that? Deaf people! Non-English speakers. Anyone who finds that subtitles make them feel included in the culture, rather than shut out of it. And maybe the ubiquity of words at the bottom of the screen will inspire filmmakers and showrunners to craft their own subtitles as a viewing option—you can watch this Jordan Peele art-house horror series with Hulu’s charmless sans serif or with Peele’s signature typeset."

Sources: 
  As mentioned, there are many. The graphic above is from: "Survey: Why America is Obsessed With Subtitles," Matt Zajechowski, preply.com, 03/06/2023.

I see that I hinted about my larger project on print subtitles in a post about: "Titling." Perhaps I should see if I can find my notes.