Far beyond tone-deaf

Is it just me, or do the members of the Trump administration have a really poor sense of timing?

At a gathering to launch Black History Month, Trump caused some serious head-scratching with his comment that Frederick Douglass "is doing an amazing job," which is doubly impressive given that Douglass died 122 years ago.  He declared April "Sexual Assault Awareness Month," and on April 4 said that conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly "should not have settled" five cases in which he was accused of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior.  (In fact, he said, "I don't think Bill did anything wrong" -- which, considering that he's said that you have to "treat women like shit" and that it's okay to "grab them by the pussy," might not be the most weighty endorsement O'Reilly could have hoped for.)

Then, the White House released an official statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day -- and never once mentioned the Jews.  This was followed up by Sean Spicer's bizarre comment two days ago that "even Hitler didn't sink to the level of using chemical weapons," ignoring the fact that chemical weapons were used to gas six million Jews.

Which statement he made in the middle of Passover.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, this goes way beyond tone-deafness.  This is beginning to look like a deliberate campaign to minimize the suffering of anyone who doesn't directly contribute to the Republican party.  These aren't "gaffes;" a "gaffe" is John Kerry describing his nuanced approach to support for the Iraq War as "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."  Okay, that was stupid and inarticulate, and he was the recipient of well-deserved ridicule for saying it.

But this?  This goes way beyond stupid and inarticulate.  In fact, even "insensitive and insulting" don't begin to cover it.

Fortunately -- if there is a "fortunately" in this situation -- the backlash against the latest crazy comment was immediate and blistering.  Here is a sampling of responses to Spicer's Hitler comment from Twitter:

This doesn't really answer the question about why doing it from a plane is worse than building gas chambers in death camps, of course. 

Sean Spicer just called concentration camps "Holocaust centers" and said Hitler didn't use chemical weapons despite Zyklon B.  Happy Passover, guys. 

A list of things that come to mind when you think of Hitler: (1) mustache; (2) gassed people. 

Hey, Sean?  "Clarify" doesn't mean "make way worse." 

Being Press Secretary for Donald Trump is hard.  But it's not as hard as he makes it look.

Then, there's my favorite one:

PEPSI: Check out this PR disaster.
UNITED: That's amateur hour.  Watch this!
SEAN SPICER: Hold my beer.

The most trenchant comment of all, however, was from Spencer Ackerman, blogger, writer, and editor of The Guardian.  Ackerman wrote: "Hitler was not 'using the gas on his own people,' says Sean Spicer, writing German Jews out of history."

Which appears to be what this is about -- marginalizing people who don't fit in with the Trumpian version of Volksgemeinschaft, or worse, pretending that they simply don't exist.  You make a statement like that once, you can pass it off as shooting from the hip, bobbling an opportunity to make an inclusive, insightful statement, having a brain fart.  Maybe even twice.

But four times?  This is beginning to look deliberate.

I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, here.  But this administration is establishing an appalling pattern of cultural and racial insensitivity.  If you needed further evidence, Trump himself went on record as saying, regarding the threats against Jewish schools, Nazi graffiti defacing Jewish community centers, and desecration of Jewish graveyards -- all of which have increased drastically since Trump's win last November -- that it might be the Jews themselves perpetrating the attacks.  It's not always anti-Semites doing these things, Trump said.  "Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad."

So tell me again how all of the other things that have come out of the mouths of Trump and his spokespeople have been simple "gaffes."

I've been trying to hold my outrage in abeyance.  I understand that it's hard to think on your feet every time you're on the spot.  People in the public eye are scrutinized, they inevitably make mistakes, and their missteps are played and replayed and analyzed and reanalyzed.  But if this administration wants to regain its credibility, it needs to give more than lip service to stopping this kind of shit.  We need more than Trump's statement that "Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your entire life.  Number two, the least racist."  These last few months have left me feeling a little dubious on that point.  I think a fitting place to end is with a quote from Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who said: "President Trump has been inexcusably silent as this trend of anti-Semitism has continued and arguably accelerated.  The president of the United States must always be a voice against hate and for the values of religious freedom and inclusion that are the nation’s highest ideals."

Demon redux

A few days ago, I posted about a fellow named Bob Larson who claims to be able to exorcise demons from the possessed via Skype.  My general feeling was that actual demons, if they're as powerful and evil as the religious claim, would have no particular reason to listen to a guy who was babbling prayers at them via a wonky internet connection from 2,000 miles away.

Not that this addresses the deeper problem that there's no evidence that demons exist in the first place.  But still.

Evidently, there are a lot of people who saw the Larson story and agree with me, on the first point at least.  One of them is a gentleman named Isaac Kramer.  Kramer, in an interview that you can watch over at Vocativ, said, "They just can't be done that way.  If a person is fully possessed, the demon inside of them will not let them sit in front of the computer screen to be exorcised.  Chances are, they’re going to throw the computer screen across the room and destroy everything."

Which sounds pretty reasonable, until you find out that Kramer is a Catholic priest who is the director of the International Catholic Association of Exorcists,  and he's apparently only saying this because he thinks he can do it better than Larson can and resents the competition.

I would like to think that belief in demons is on the decline, but if you've been following the news, there have been several recent stories where claims of possession were taken seriously by the powers-that-be.  The best publicized, just last week in Gary, Indiana, involved a house that was a "portal of hell," a nine-year-old boy who walked up a wall backwards, and various priests and chaplains and so on -- a story that got so much press that the priest who was in charge of it all, Reverend Michael Maginot, ended up being interviewed on Fox News' show The O'Reilly Factor.

Bill O'Reilly, to his credit, started out with the right approach; he asked for Maginot to keep his story fact based, and asked the priest what he knew about the little boy.  Maginot responded, not surprisingly, "Actually, I have never met any of the children.  The first time I heard about the incident was after the boy walked up the wall backwards...  I was in my parish, conducting a bible study, when I got the call, and they called me in to do an exorcism."

O'Reilly said, "Now, exorcism in the Catholic church is a serious thing... you have to jump through hoops to get it approved...  It disturbs me a little that the boy involved -- and this is according to the newspaper, and other eyewitnesses -- was doing incredible things, like walking up walls, but you yourself never talked to the boy.  Why not?"

Why not, indeed.  Maginot seemed vaguely embarrassed by the question -- as well he should have been.  "Well," he responded, " when I went to do the interview, at the home, with the mother and the grandmother, it was a four-hour interview, and the first two hours were basically getting information on all the occurrences leading up to the incident."

"The problem I'm having with this," O'Reilly countered, "is number one, you didn't see the boy.  The credibility of the Catholic church is in a tough way now, in this country.  Exorcism is a serious thing, a very serious thing.  I understand you got permission from the bishop in your diocese to do this.  But it seems to me that the story is not solid enough to go public with it.  There are a lot of people watching right now who are saying, 'this is more mumbo-jumbo from the Roman Catholic church, there's no credibility here at all.'  How would you answer that?"

More nervous, sidewise glances from Rev. Maginot.  "Well, the two boys and the girl, the one boy was put into a lockdown psychological children's ward, and the other two were taken to the Carmelite sisters who take care of foster children.  And so they were taken away from the parents, the mother and the grandmother, and so I didn't have access to them.  And the mother, I found out at the very end, was also possessed.  I put the crucifix on her forehead, and she began to convulse."

Righty-o, then, Father Maginot.  That's your evidence?  And you think that the mother, who was the one who had called in the priests, has any credibility at all?  Not mentioning, I notice, that this woman has already been exorcised four times and has a history of mental problems?  That the children need to be in foster care not because there are demons roaming around, but because their mother is a raving lunatic?

I can't say I often agree with Bill O'Reilly, but this time he nailed it, and asked all the right questions.  And it bears mention that O'Reilly himself is a practicing Catholic, who has no vested interest in making Maginot and his In The Name Of Jesus Begone act look silly. 

But that's not stopping the story from making the rounds, not as evidence that the whole practice is ridiculous, but that it somehow proves that demons exist.  As further evidence, they say, there's the photograph of the house, which shows a demon looking out a window:

To me, this more looks like E.T. the Extraterrestrial than it does like your conventional image of a demon.  And all of which goes to show that, as we've seen before, "proof" means something entirely different in the realm of religion than it does in the realm of science.

Interesting, too, that it only seems like people who were already religious get possessed, isn't it?  You'd think that a strident nonbeliever like myself would be perfect Satan bait.  But atheists never seem to need exorcisms.  Funny thing, that.

Probably the true believers would explain this by saying that we're being controlled by the Evil One, we just don't realize it.  You can't win.

Anyhow, that's our story for today.  I just want to end by stating a hope that the poor kids involved in this mess get some help and counseling, and their mother gets the help she needs, too... probably in the form of some heavy-duty medication.