If you’ve ever watched soap operas, you know the points in the story when you yell at the screen: “Tell him that you’re his true daughter (mother, aunt, queen regent, etc.)! Just let out the truth and be done with this soap opera!” Or, “How could you be so greedy (stupid, lustful, jealous, etc.)! Can’t you see it’s ruining your life?” That’s how soap operas run, though: through stupidity or overwhelming passion, which is often the same thing. Like Karl Marx and his engine of class warfare, soaps have this engine of human frailty. If people were only honest and open, there would be no soap operas. There might still be war and all that other rugged stuff, but it would right there, in the open for all to understand.
Now that I am reading the Old Testament, I know where they got soap operas from. While understandably told from a Hebrew God perspective, it still tells the same tale of greed, passion and deception. You want to scream at Solomon to stop allowing his wives to worship Baal, or for Ahab to stop making golden calves and, when we shift to the New Testament, to smack Judas across the face. What the hell is wrong with you guys? You witness miracles and live success, and then you turn from the font of good fortune and do something crass and blatantly wrong, believing somehow that it will turn out all right. It can make you scream.
If we are honest with one another, however, this is often how we run our lives, and usually how we run our nations. Smoke weed before high school classes? Hello, MacDonald’s fry-a-later. Spend all your money on stupid things? Hello, poverty and broken marriages. Steal, cheat, use any means to get what you want? Hello sorry, ruined life in general.
We all do something dishonest or stupid or less-than-moral sometimes, I expect, in greater or lesser amounts which show up later in life, but these weaknesses are particularly present in societies and nation states. This is so because societies are collectives, and within each collective, there are bad (selfish, immoral, or just plain stupid) people. The more selfish often fight the hardest to gain control, and eventually in every collective, they succeed. Some nations, such as our own, limit political terms, which is a way to limit the damage done by bad people. Bad people, though, are often smart, and these usually try to rig the system to expand their power. Such it has always been.
And so it is that the bad usually end up running the show. If they do not destroy the nation or society, they might be followed by the good, as we see time and again in the Old Testament, although sometimes the damage is so great that whole nations are dissolved or conquered. Israel was exiled and destroyed for all time by the Assyrian empire, leading to the expression, “the lost tribes of Israel.” Judah, the southern half of the Jewish nation, was exiled by the Babylonians, but the conquering Persians later allowed them to return, and history took its course. But that was a miracle. Miracles happen, but we should never count on them.
So, we come to the soap opera that is our present-day nation. Who would not agree that we are in a whole world of hurt right now? The cultural bedrock is crumbling beneath us, being replaced by ad-hock maxims shouted from smoldering streets: tear down this statue, burn this building, condemn this textbook, and so on. The only rhyme or reason to all this seems to be to rip away more from the tattered social fabric. While some are pretending that it is not so, this pressure comes from the Left, who see nothing but conspiracy and evil in the founding and running of the nation. Because it has always been so foul and unfair, they say, it must be destroyed. While this view is very troubling, of greatest concern to this writer is what these paragons of virtue wish to do after they have made a vacuum of our moral, legal, and historical legacies.
No, this will not be a diatribe against Dialectical Materialism, aka, Marxism, although it could be. Rather, I wish here to compare our nation to Biblical stories and the soap operas they have inspired. Let’s go back to Solomon, son of King David (of David and Goliath fame) and Bathsheba. Bathsheba was the wife of General Uriah, who David had killed so that he could possess her, but that is marginal to the point (though a great soap opera in itself). Rather, Solomon was given the greatest wisdom in the world by God, and he used it, well, wisely. He conquered all the surrounding nations, built a huge and marvelous temple to the Lord, and ruled with a firm but fair hand. He had it made. But then he started to marry foreign wives, who he pleased by allowing them to build temples to their cultures’ gods. He did this so that they would please him back, endangering everything for the sake of some extra- good nookie. Soap opera stupidity. And so the nation split into Israel and Judah, making it possible for forces around them to pick them off, one and then the other, both weakened by a ridiculous bought of lust by the world’s wisest man.
Ah, America. It had reached the pinnacle of success and power, matched by no other. With the recent surge in the economy, the average person had also reached the greatest material wealth in its history, and the greatest of any nation of even remotely a comparable size. No one whose mind was clear starved to death or was left hopeless on the streets or was denied critical health care. Many wanted more benefits, and some argued for less, but it was good as it was, and the nation stood prosperous and peaceful, unassailable by foreign entities.
‘And then came Covid.’ This sounds more like the title of a sitcom than a soap opera, but soap opera it was and is, created not from the disease itself, but from the reaction to it, and then only tangentially. It was not the reaction itself, but rather the spacey state that the reaction left us in that allowed the actions that created our present soap crisis. In no other times of peace and prosperity would the discontented people, those who have lost their center, wield the power that they recently have. As with Solomon, it was the success of our nation that allowed these people to live from the fat of the land, having time and resources at their disposal to grab for something more to fill their emptiness. As with Solomon, they ignored what had brought them to such freedom from need and want and fear so that they could push against those very foundations. And just as we would react to Solomon, when we see this all happening on our TV screens at home, we shout, “Stop! What the hell are you doing? You’re ruining everything!”
But the power of human nature moves us on. A crevice has been opened for a restless discontent to dominate, and the bad people are taking advantage of it. Just as Solomon’s weakness allowed bad people dissolve the Jewish nation, leading eventually to dismemberment, so our own weakness – our own sense of discontent amidst prosperity – is leading to cultural, and perhaps national, dismemberment. All so unnecessary, just like the plot of a typical soap opera. If we could only be adults and speak what we know to be true, this whole mess could be avoided, but like a soap, we have “promised” to never tell the other that we are, say, its mother or rich uncle or etc., so that the soap opera may muddle on. This is to say that we cannot tell the truth about our situation to others and perhaps even to ourselves, allowing the bad – the lustful and envious and just plain mean - to enter and dominate and ruin our lives. To do so would have us labeled racists or “phobic,” meaningless cow pie lies all, but we keep the truth locked away in our hearts and allow the downward spiral that seems more and more inevitable with every turn.
Go ahead and laugh at soap operas. Go ahead and moan over the foibles of biblical kings. Now we are in the biggest flop of a giant since Goliath, every inch of decline completely unnecessary, even stupid, a classic soap opera in the making. Soap operas this big, however, are stories for the ages, for all time, biblical. Who, then, moved the hands of the authors of the Bible? And what did those writers who spoke for the divine source insist would stop such tragi-comedies from occurring? Prayer, and listening to the voice that speaks back to us. What else could stop this train wreck that we are in? Logic? Addressing the aggrieved phantasms, those products of the manipulating mobs? No, just prayer. After logic has failed, after common sense has been deconstructed to the roots, it is what we have. God made it all, after all, and he can change it or keep it exactly as he desires with the wave of a hand.
Let us pray, then, that our better wishes conform to the wisdom of God, and that we are granted his great mercy. At a time such as this, only divine mercy can calm the seas of our national tempest.
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