Lagos, NIGERIA
After praying daily and unceasingly to God for a victory of Light over Darkness, Knowledge over Ignorance, Tolerance over Hatred, Sense over Nonsense and Wisdom over Folly, God in His wisdom and in His sovereign will, did not answer my prayer exactly in the way I wished. He did not give America Hillary Rodham Clinton as its first female president, as I had desired, but instead inflicted it with Donald Trump, a man the entire Free World gazes at in alarm, antipathy and fear — and, whose impending knowledge of America’s nuclear codes should fill us all with dread.
I am now reminded of Galatians 3:1 — “You foolish Galatians! [substitute,Americans] Who put a spell on you?” What comes to mind too is 2 Timothy 3: 1-5:
“Remember that there will be difficult times in the last days. People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious; they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent and fierce; they will hate the good; they will be treacherous, reckless, and swollen with pride; they will love pleasure rather than God; THEY WILL HOLD TO THE OUTWARD FORM OF OUR RELIGION, BUT REJECT ITS REAL POWER.”
God is disciplining America by enabling it BY ITS OWN HANDS to choose a Donald Trump over a Hillary Clinton as its President. He did the same to Samson of the Old Testament Bible by permitting him to be the source of his own destruction. Regarding the deliberate demonisation of Mrs. Clinton, the only plausible explanation is that in politics the truth gets short shrift when it is convenient. This, both she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, bitterly learnt during their eight White House years of Republican hounding and paranoid investigations, which cost American taxpayers over $40 million and in the end yielded nothing.
As I see it, the only response to America’s impending disciplining is for all Americans to submit to a period of Trump’s excesses and misrule as already glimpsed in the most divisive, vindictive, hypocritical, terrifying and gruelling election campaign ever to occur in American history. For just the second time since 1929, Republicans will control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, most governorships and state houses, as well as decide who will be the next Supreme Court judge. The first occasion was 2005 – 2007, when, George W. Bush was president. In the present dispensation, both Trump and the Republican Congress will be in power possibly for at least four years. If this is not a real realignment of the planets, and Providence’s hand clearly visible, then there will be no mistake at the “accounting!”
America has to learn humility, which we all need in order to live as God’s children. Only then will America learn from this experience as the Biblical Israelites did when they foolishly preferred a Saul to the rule of the judges. The wise Greeks, who gave democracy to the world, coined this proverb: “Whom the gods must destroy, they first make mad.” America, like Britain and its Brexit, has gone “mad”. There is also something known as Karma, and it is inevitable as night follows day.
We are now in an apocalyptic age. Imperial exhaustion is also part of America’s reality today. The West is in decline! Think Brexit. Now, think Trump. Western militarism is in decay. Values and decency are all thrown away — out of the window. And a Trump victory is now underscoring that reality, with the leading nation of the Free World having as president a man most unfit and unworthy of high office. Mario Cuomo, a former mayor of New York City, warned: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose”. In Trump’s case, he campaigned with insults and will govern in hubris. Ancient Romans required that anyone wishing to hold high public office must have the following virtues: Gravitas (maturity, seriousness); Probitas (probity, honest living); and Urbanitas (good social graces).
Today the US now sends people to Congress and its White House who have no respect for law, to make law. Under a Trump presidency, America’s justice system, which is already Kafkaesque, will further ensure that the truly disadvantaged and marginalised will always be subject to legalised violence and oppression at the discretion of the privileged. Indeed, one of the real aspects of corruption in America is about ensuring that Republicans retain power through gerrymandered House districts. I am referring to the 2010 redistricting by Republican-dominated state legislatures which has made it difficult for Democrats to gain a real foothold in the House and state legislatures. Clearly, Democrats will have to win back those chambers by 2020 if they want to redraw the lines in their favour. Another anomaly is a Senate which allows Wyoming (which has roughly the same number of prairie dogs as people) to enjoy representation equal to California, which is roughly 65 times larger in population.
Yet another unjust aberration is that American presidential elections are governed by rather archaic rules, such as that, of the, electoral college. When George Bush won his first election over Al Gore merely at the level of the electoral college, and not the popular vote, as Trump has to Hillary Clinton, it did not only deliver to Americans a presidency based on butterfly ballots and a jaundiced Republican Supreme Court decision, but brought to the fore the real issue to America’s watchers worldwide, which was not the legitimacy of a victory, but the integrity of America’s democracy. The electoral college is an insanity. A popular vote election is not, one person, one vote, on an equal basis — in which every American would have the chance to participate, as is the case in other democracies and against the present system whereby four out of five people are totally ignored by both Democratic and Republican campaigns.
When one generation refuses to be responsible, it allows another generation to suffer the consequences. This is called “generational neglect”. And the great British prime minister and statesman, Winston Churchill, whose mother was American, wrote: “The one thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”
George W. Bush, a Republican president, won his first attempt at the presidency at the level of the electoral college. He went on to involve America in two major invasions and occupations, one of which unleashed an internecine war in which millions died and a nation was totally destabilised to this day. This contributed to the rise of ISIS and distorted the face of the Middle East as at present. These two irresponsible adventures were largely responsible for the US’s huge budget deficits, which Barack Obama struggled to wipe out, and for which he was never thanked.
We find the largely Republican FBI investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State, something that other government officials did, including Colin Powell, a Republicanappointed Secretary of State. Yet no Republican committee has dared to investigate the Bush presidency on the lies surrounding America’s invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Cheney appeasement of the Wahabbist Saudi Arabian kingdom by shutting down the FBI Congressional investigations of the money trail from the 9/11 hijackers when it led back to the kingdom. Other scandals are Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, George Bush’s knowledge of warrantless wiretapping, torture and extreme rendition to ensure a suspect will be duly tortured with no consequences if it turns out that he is innocent. What of the black sites, the sex and drug scandal at the Department of the Interior, the firing of US attorneys by Karl Rove for political reasons, the outing of CIA agent, Valerie Plaine, by Karl Rove and company, Bush’s connection to Enron, Dick Cheney’s secret energy meetings, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Jeff Gannon, Bush’s IRS targeting of Greenpeace and a liberal church in California, and the failure to prepare for Hurricane Katrina, and the response in its aftermath?
All I can say is, today America got what it wanted and lost what it had!