As the dust, the balloons and the glitzy confetti settled on the American presidential election, and Republican voters came to terms with the fact that the man who believes that God lives on a planet called Kolob would not be their new leader, a flood of tweets and website articles were unleashed consoling them and advising how to survive four more years under Obama.
‘The American people have decided that Barack Obama should have a second term’ lamented one on the Christian Post website. ‘And behind them, in the mystery of providence, God has decided that Barack Obama would be re-elected.’
So that’s how it works. Well, you can’t argue with God can you? We don’t have to understand the ‘mystery of providence’ to see the advantage in capitalism’s glorious future of God making all our decisions for us and people only needing to vote to rubber-stamp them. And the advantage of having an all-knowing god is that, because he is all-knowing, he’s known since the beginning of time what the result of any election will be. We may as well just ask him beforehand who our leaders should be and do away with voting altogether. Or, for example, our leaders could ask: ‘Dear God, we haven’t got enough control over the world’s oil supplies. Should we invade Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran? etc.’ Think of the bother that would save. Come to think of it, that’s more or less what Blair and Bush used to do, isn’t it?
Many of the religious right were not entirely happy with God’s choice of president though. Among comments posted at the end of the Christian Post article one warned, ‘I have received a prophecy that Obama is America’s Idi Amin.’ ‘The occult puts these people into power,’ advised another. And even before the election, a pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas announced that Obama’s re-election would lead to the reign of the antichrist. Donald Trump, too, went ballistic on Twitter. ‘We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty,’ he raged. And ‘This election is a total sham. We are not a democracy.’ Well, he got the last bit right. Even God can’t please everyone.
And in the race for Georgia’s 10th congressional district, Republican and creationist Paul Broun found he had more unofficial opposition than he had bargained for. Although he is a qualified doctor and a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, he informed his audience in a pre-election speech that the Earth was only 9,000 years old and that evolution and the big bang theory were ‘lies straight from the pit of hell’.
Although he was running unopposed, numerous write-in candidates were entered against him. They included ‘Anyone But Him’, ‘Anyone Else Living or Dead’, ‘A Bag of Rocks’, ‘Bart Simpson’, ‘A Burning Bag of Dog Shit’, ‘Jimmy Jack My Neighbours Cat’, ‘Luke Skywalker’, ‘Voldemort’ and, believe it or not, ‘Charles Darwin’.
In fact Darwin received over 4,000 write-in votes despite not being an American citizen and being dead. There’s hope for America yet. Over 4,000 people preferred a dead Darwin to a live right-wing religious fundamentalist.
NW
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