Sunday, March 29, 2015

Ted Cruz as High Priest of America

There has always been an undercurrent to the Ted Cruz narrative that bothers me. I think it is my skepticism regarding religious men who mask their religiosity behind political rhetoric. Cruz does this well. I know Cruz is a religious man. His father is a pastor and often refers to his son in overtly religious terms. The most troubling is Ted Cruz as an anointed end times leader, who will transfer wealth to the righteous (Video). America does not need an apocalyptic end times religious fanatic in a position of power. We can already see the results of allowing him in the Senate. 

Cruz is a man on a mission from God, and not in a Blues Brothers kind of way. He means to push his agenda down our (and I mean everyone here) throats. We should fear him and fight him and his cause at every opportunity. 

Jarret Ruminski wrote on this in Salon

Cruz’s White House run is disturbing, and not just because it involves Ted Cruz. Rather, he embodies the modern conservative propensity toward a fundamentalist American civil religion and its attendant, overly simplistic myths.

Part of the fight involves an uncomfortable narrative. America is not the shiny city on a hill. We are a powerful nation for sure, but in may respects, we are a nation in trouble. We don’t live as long as other developed nations, we kill each other with abandon, we imprison way to many people, our education system is in trouble so our kids will find it hard to compete, plus, we live with a declining manufacturing base, which kills our middle class and pushes people into long-term service sector jobs. There is nothing moral about America. Moral nations are a myth. Cruz would feed us the theory of American exceptionalism as if it were inscribed in the bible by the hand of God. It is the path to ruin.