Barack Requiem

no faith teaches people to massacre innocents"-- our 44th commander rhetorician

Mr. President: When I was growing up, I was a fervent and occasionally rude Roman Catholic, and though Protestant and church fathers differ on textual interpretation, and it is also well known through the midrash  that Hebraic scribes engaged in hyperbole with a fluidity equal to that of their Hellenistic competitors, monotheism nonetheless does indeed justify the slaughter of innocents, particularly when Joshua invaded Canaan to create the state of Israel. Pagans were put to the sword. Does this mean that the twelve tribes engaged in genocide? Probably not on the scale we see today, but griot  is never entirely inaccurate, transcribed even from the distance of the judges to the courts of the corrupt rulers who led Israel into the Diaspora.

In the Gospel, as well, a pair of hypocritical converts drops dead at the feet of either Christ or Peter, or Paul, for that matter, the zealous torturer who conquered Rome. I did not realize James Foley was Catholic. This pierced my eroding conscience briefly, light as a fallen feather of a falcon. There was a tenure, perhaps as briefly past as Clinton's administration, when the barbarism of ISIS would have been equivalent to the showers at Auschwitz, but what has blurred the niceties of this distinction is the inhumanity of the paradigm, couched in fealty to the procedure. A significant percentage of persons gets weighed down by this, and rather than absorbing this unspecified guilty charge like a rat on a ninja course, they become hardened, join ISIS, a militia. 

Unless an extraordinary 2016 candidate emerges, you will be the last President I voted for. Reagan was a liar, and by the time of the Iran Contra testimony, obviously in the early stages of dementia, but he was the last leader in whom decency of conviction made me happy to be an American; now I'm a fascist promising immolation to myself for a hard life in the land of Negrodelphia. I despise Eric Holder, and you, poor fellow, should have been dean of Trinity College. You disappointed everyone, acolytes and adversaries. George Will has pondered whether or not your second term approaches *Carter territory,* but I see your lame duck standing as closer to Woodrow Wilson working himself into that ineffectual stroke.