Your Sunday Morning Briefing, August 16, 2020
All horror is, at base, religious horror. Everything that generations of Americans have learned in their Sunday school briefings on Absolute Evil, Satan, demons, Hell, ‘sin,’ anything as fundamentally unreal and unreasonable as a polarized universe of confronted Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, the Rapture, a punitive terrorizing Judgement Day, the Apocalypse and Armageddon, purity and pollution and damnation….The Judeo-Christian Zoroastrian meta-narrative is, itself, crazy-making, horrific, obscene and terrorizing.
Such toxic ideology is bearing obscene fruit at the current historical moment in America, with QAnon succeeding in elevating a demented Hate-monger and fabulist conspiracy theorist like Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, a construction executive, who won 57% of the vote in Georgia’s heavily-Republican 14th Congressional District, handily defeating neurosurgeon John Cowan, who had pitched himself as, “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” President Trump has congratulated Greene as a “future Republican Star” who is “strong on everything.” This is not surprising; in January 2018, Greene wrote about the right-wing conspiracy theory that claims President Donald Trump is leading a secret war against a “deep state” of ‘Satan worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles’ for QAnon.
Pious horror stories of cannibalistic pedophilic Democrats land on fertile ground among the devil-phobic Religious Right, terrorized about the reality of such horror stories from the cradle, who, as such, are themselves ‘demonic’ abuse victims — mentally, spiritually, emotionally. That’s why the QAnon stories of alien abductions, demon activity and the lizard people of the Deep State go hand in hand down the road to collective Republican insanity and fearful Evangelical delusion.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has already called for the banning of all Muslims from American government. The torches and the pitchforks are already well out, but then they’re always ready, with a vengeance, wanting the blood of the Alien, Demonic or Monstrous Other, ever since Zoroaster, at the font of the Three Main Orthodoxies of the Abrahamic Stem, split the universe into two opposing polarized forces that are constantly at war.
