I was thinking recently about the effectiveness of cults—how cultists explain their bizarre beliefs by latching onto something positive in their cult leader and using that to dismiss everything else. "Drinking the Kool-Ade," as we like to say today, is an expression that evolved from the deaths of 909 cultists in Guyana 46 years ago.
Gary Franks' opinion piece in today's Courant (10/7/24) brought it all home. In it, he refers to JD Vance as someone who would help veto any national ban on abortion rights, and that this is the reason why women should support him. I don't think the electorate from either party is that stupid; nobody supporting JD Vance has any interest in women's rights other than to curtail them. But since Vance spent 90% of the debate not imploding (in the final ten minutes, the truth caught up with him), a cultist marks this in the win column.
There's more.
Mr. Franks claims that Trump's four years in office were devoid of wars, and now America is squandering billions on two of them. America did not start them, but if Mr. Franks believes we should stop funding our allies in the Middle East and a European democracy under siege by a rapacious autocrat, he should say so. No aid for anybody! And by the way, that four years of Trumpian peace never made it to the American people, eighty million of whom fired him in 2020. Cultists claimed a miscount.
Mr. Franks laments that the Democratic ticket failed to attend elite colleges and, therefore, should be prohibited from the executive branch. Perhaps someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene (University of Georgia) would be more suitable? Or perhaps Mr. Franks has not read her theory of how the Democrats steered Hurricane Helene into the Republican areas of the Southeast. It's quite interesting...and telling...and the kind of lunacy supported and promoted by Trump-Vance. Incidentally, George W. Bush attended Yale, an elite college. He was not an elite student. Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University—not elite enough for Mr. Franks—but earned a law degree from the University of California. Maybe being an elite student is preferable to owning an "elite diploma."
Although I, too, would like to hear more policy from Vice-president Harris, both she and her running mate are at a continuing disadvantage in the restrictions they face in trying to be truthful. All politicians embellish the truth regarding their plans for the future, but Trump-Vance has no qualms about also making up the past. The Republican pairing has a nine-to-one "advantage" in passing off lies as fact. I suppose for a cultist, that's a reasonable ratio.
Finally, and most important, Superman is a fictional character and kryptonite does not exist. Mr. Franks undoubtedly knows this, but I worry about the MAGA party continually referring to fictitious people like Hannibal Lecter as if they were real...in much the same way that they talk about January 6 as an insurgency of courageous freedom fighters instead of what it indeed was: an assault by treasonous thugs. Once again, I doubt if the electorate is that stupid.
But it's that cult thingy: January 6, assaults on women, tax evasion, vulgar campaign speeches, the advocacy of violence toward opponents—all these are minor to a cultist. And though Mr. Franks may not see himself in that light, there are few explanations for why voters who have lived their lives with honor and courage will vote for a man who espouses only dishonor and cowardice. Mr. Franks is not the first traditional Republican to accede to MAGA-ism and do themselves a disservice: the list is long but getting shorter. Whether it's short enough by November 5 is something we'll learn soon enough.
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