This is the second in a series of five inter-related one-page essays which resulted from my recently watching an entire Trump campaign speech on Fox News. I happened to see the speech only because I was watching Fox News, which trumpeted the fact that they would be televising a Trump rally later that evening. Otherwise no other network even mentioned the rally.

A very strange phenomenon has befallen and finally taken complete control of the Republican Party. Whatever may be the leaning of Republican voters, the vast majority of elected Republican Senators and Members of the House of Representatives have fallen into line by supporting nearly every unpredictable action or position of President Trump. Within a few months of Trump’s election, almost no congressional Republicans dared to question any decision made by the President on almost any issue. If they did, they feared they might lose in a primary contest for their office. The unflinching support for Mr. Trump is as astonishing as it is alarming.

Apparently on numerous occasions, Thomas Jefferson received scathing anonymous letters from highly dissatisfied citizens. (Jefferson kept copies of every letter he ever received or wrote.) The irate epistles he got reminded me of my days as the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Morristown, NJ, and the First Presbyterian Church on Hilton Head Island. I am sure you will find this hard to believe, but when I was the primary preacher at those two large congregations, I had a tendency to speak unusually candidly about matters theological, ecclesiastical, political, and social. In response, every now and then someone would send me a blistering letter about what I had said. On rare occasions these letters were signed, but most of the time the writer somehow forgot to affix his signature.

Hurricanes, or typhoons, or cyclones (the monikers depend on the oceans over which they originate) are, by nature, rather unpredictable. Usually they go in the direction the meteorologists say they shall go, but sometimes they behave erratically, which the meteorologists also always warn us they might do. In that respect major weather events are somewhat like people; who knows what ultimately they will do?

We are killing the planet, and many of us know it. Are we likely to stop nearly all of our personal polluting, cold turkey? Not on our lives. Few of us are willing or able to jettison our current standard of living to move to three acres of land somewhere next to nowhere and grow vegetables until we shuffle off this mortal coil from protein deficiency. It just won’t happen.

Is it true that there are more nations with more political instability now than at any time since the end of World War II, or does it only seem like it, or “feel” like it? Or does it merely appear that way to an elderly parson who likes to philosophize about more issues than may be prudent for him to address, and who may simply have lost both his objectivity and his ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff?

Let us all initially be clear about one thing. What is being discussed here is not really whether gods are little or big, but rather how people in various-sized societies perceived their gods. People in small societies believed in small gods, because their cultures were small. People in later (and thus larger) societies believed in larger gods, because the cultures which they had created were more diverse and complex.

Following a four-thousand mile journey through the Midwest, I concluded that what I had read in the newspapers about the circumstances for farmers is completely correct. When my daughter and I crossed the Mississippi River at Memphis, we saw fields which were still flooded two or three miles west of the river, even though the highest waters had receded a few weeks before. Later we saw hundreds of fields which will not be planted at all this year. Other hundreds were planted too late for the crops to produce abundantly. In northern Missouri and southern Iowa, numerous farms had been abandoned to prairie grass years before, and there were no buildings left on that land. Climate change is rendering Midwestern farming an even dicier business than it has always been.

On June 27, 2019, the US Supreme Court announced two major decisions. The first one was okay, but not great. They temporarily blocked the Census Bureau from asking a citizenship question on the 2020 census form. Such a question has never before been asked. However, the matter can still be challenged in court before the census forms are actually printed later this year, and subsequent court decisions might allow a citizenship question. That would be a brazenly partisan move which can only benefit the Republican Party, for reasons I shall not take space to explain. I trust, or at least hope, that you already understand why it is so baldly partisan.

By its very nature, every impeachment is political. The process of convicting a federal officer of criminal activity is inherently political as well as judicial. The conviction of any federal office holders, federal judges, cabinet officials, or Members of Congress is politically divisive. The impeachments of presidents is by far the most polarizing of all political issues.

The New York Times journalist Jon Gertner has just written a book called The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future. He notes that 80% of Greenland is covered with ice, some of it two miles thick. Nevertheless, 300 billion tons of that ice is melting each year, and the total is increasing annually. The northern tip of Greenland is only 400 miles from the North Pole. The daily temperature at that location in February of last year was an average of 45 degrees higher than normal for the whole month. That is simply astounding.

The greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is ill-informed, reactionary voters. The Brexit vote in Britain is Illustration No. 1 of that sad reality. Former Prime Minister David Cameron made a disastrous mistake in asking British voters to decide whether to exit or to remain in the European Union. He incorrectly assumed the electorate would certainly have the wisdom to vote to stay in the EU.

My last Old Philosopher essay was based on the sixty pages of Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant that chronicle the disastrous presidency of Andrew Johnson. This essay shall focus on a few other incidents from that sad chapter of American history, plus observations by Chernow about the eight years of Grant’s presidency which followed immediately after the impeachment of Johnson by the House of Representatives. I found many parallels between those turbulent years and the past three years of American political life.

“The wheels of justice grind slowly.” That aphorism has long been used to describe the American legal system. It implies that justice may take time, but it will eventually be administered in a far and equitable manner. That notion is currently being severely tested by the Trump administration. Congress has subpoenaed many witnesses to appear before various House or Senate committees, but the President and the Justice Department have tried to suppress those appearances. In so doing, numerous allegations of impropriety have not yet been heard in a legal setting.

Today (May 7, 2019), USA Today had a long story in its “Money” Section. That, incidentally, is an interesting placement, but that’s another story. The article is entitled Keeping the faith from the comfort of home. It explained how the ever-growing field of “virtual reality” and technological apps are influencing contemporary Christianity. In a growing number of churches, apparently, people are transported to much more captivating vistas than a mere big-box or small-box sanctuary. They strap VR headsets to their crania, which from the photo in USAT make them look like space visitors from the distant planet of Technostan. By means of their headsets, they can be in Jerusalem or Rome or the Himalayas, and their very own parson, standing in front of them, is speaking to them from those far-away exotic places.

By now I have written a hundred or so column-length essays, and I have sent several of them to various publications in hopes they would be published. None of those efforts has come to fruition. Finally, I have reluctantly resolved to give up trying.

James K. Polk was one of the most consequential American presidents in our long and checkered history. Of our first sixteen presidents, through Abraham Lincoln, six can be classified to varying degrees as expansionists of the presidential office, and two of them as expansionists of the nation. The six are Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, and Lincoln. Jefferson also oversaw the greatest acquisition of land in our nation’s history, and Polk the second-largest acquisition.

The long awaited Mueller Report, redacted, has been made public. Those who thought it would clearly indicate obstruction of justice by the President and some of the White House staff are convinced it did that. Those who thought it would do no such thing are convinced it did no such thing.

Tiger Woods was never my favorite golfer. However, except for Jack Nicklaus, he was the best golfer in the world for almost two decades of my long lifetime.

Through the years I have read essays by Charles Krauthammer in newspapers and magazines. I would have to admit that on most of those occasions, Mr. Krauthammer was anything but my political and philosophical cup of tea. I assumed that dyspeptic editors chose some of his more outrageously conservative pieces to vex readers such as myself, and almost always they succeeded in their intentions.