A culture I just don't get

Today I am packing up suitcases and boxes. Tomorrow is my last day in this good home (thank you, Bev and Greg!) before my tornado picks me up and whirls me away again. I’ll be staying with Janey for the total of three weeks I have left in Ontario. The rest of the weeks before returning to Mexico I will be in North Carolina and the British Isles. I can’t wait.

Usually I am content to ride the tornado, getting dropped in new cultures, but not always. Some cultures I prefer to ignore because they feel seamy and threatening. I’ve no desire to get intimately acquainted with casino or strip club culture. Or…

Trump rallies. Robert was reading aloud to me an article in the New York Times by Jeff Sharlet, who attended Trump rallies in Ohio and Arizona and described them in detail. I’ve not been to one myself, so I don’t really know if he’s exaggerating. He sounded credible enough. Strange thing to me was that he described Trump as a preacher building a congregation for his version of a prosperity gospel. All the religious fervor was there, the drama, the assurances of salvation from a common Enemy. There was adulation.  Even parables. Was it a fair description???

Sharlet describes the Ohio rally from when Trump’s 757, heavy with gold, filled the hangar doors, drawing oos and ahhs from the approving crowd, to when, in the after party at a local bar, a guy who’d been on the fence before the rally finally converted, yelling over his beer, “I don’t care if you’re racist…if you’ll just bring back one [expletive] steel mill!”

The journalist describes how the warm-up preacher’s shouts of “He is worthy! He is worthy!” meaning both Trump and God, led right back into the playlisted Stones’ song, “Let’s spend the night together,” but no one sensed any contradiction because to this crowd there wasn’t any.

Sharlet says that Trump makes people feel good. They are getting back something they (perhaps) lost. He persuades them that he WILL save them by his own personal power (and he has gestures to show the size of his…prowess) from the Enemies that threaten them.  Like any prosperity preacher, he assures them that if they support him, they will ride his coat-tails to wealth and dominance (“Small Vietnam. Small Japan,” he says. “We’ll take them to the shed.”) It’s all in the power of positive thinking (quoting Preacher Normal Vincent Peale).

Sharlet describes how Trump dramatizes a set of “parables” from his pulpit. There’s “The Call,” where Trump forces American companies back home with a phone call; there’s “The Snake, where he hisses, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!” And there’s “The Bullet,” where he mimes how American General Pershing supposedly smeared 50 bullets with pig guts to execute 49 Muslim terrorists, handing the last “pig-infested” bullet back to one survivor as a warning. Apparently, the crowd in the Ohio hangar liked hearing this. Apparently this “hitting back 10 times as hard” is what it means to win and prosper and make America great.

If anyone has been to a rally, did Jeff Sharlet get it wrong? Is there something about this particular culture I could actually like?