Hoodwinked by false gods

By now, Friday, March 5, 2021, the revolution will have reached its full flowering. Donald Trump was reinstated as the president of the United States, President Joe Biden is languishing in federal prison, and Hillary Clinton is waiting her turn in the electric chair. Meanwhile, the hand of God has turned aside the Jewish space laser that was ready to vaporize all our guns and Bibles.

All right, so no one really believed that stuff, except for the first three.

There are, if not a significant, then at least a countable number of people who believed Trump would be reinstated as president of the United States yesterday.

The woman who works on your car. The man who cuts your hair. A couple of guys who work selling houses. A guy driving a truck that delivers ketchup packets to restaurants. People like that, people who park a Subaru in their garage every night, and go inside to eat stuffed peppers with a husband and a couple of kids. People with a furry pet dog named "Bear." Guys you hunt with, and women who like to fish.

Some of these people are followers of QAnon, a conspiracy that combines all other conspiracies. QAnon champions the belief that Donald Trump is fighting an international cabal of child-trafficking devil worshippers who will therefore do anything to destroy Trump before he slays them with his mighty sword.

For realz. That is what may be believed by your physician assistant, or the guy who picks up your trash, or your Uber driver.

And, of course, nothing the QAnon belief system predicts ever comes true, but that, believers are told, means that the evil forces once again slipped out of the trap.

It's like those strange religions that crop up from time to time with a leader who insists that the world will end at 2:30 p.m. on the third Tuesday of March. On the appointed day, his followers gather in barns, homes, churches, pastures and parking lots. They sing songs of praise and wait for the end.

The world does not end. The McDonald's down the street keeps pumping out Filet O' Fish, and a truck drives by on the two-lane highway, making a bit of a "screech" when the diver uses the brakes coming down the hill. The leader of the cult (if he has any brains at all) announces that God spoke to him and said he will give this sinful world a five-year grace period, during which believers are urged to contribute heavily to the church.

QAnon, like that leader, is wrong all the time. Every time. And, like the leader, the throbbing mass of conspiracies promises that you have to wait just a little bit longer, just another week until we roll away the stone, and the Confederate flag flies once more over a happy nation of injustice and minstrel shows.

And it never happens.

Not ever. COVID-19 doesn't magically disappear. Mexico refuses to pay for the wall. There is no new, better health care. The mob that breaks into the Capitol doesn't "end the corruption."

And Donald Trump, golden calf of CPAC, urges you to contribute heavily and to wait just a little longer until the end of democratic days.

And us? The hoodwinked people of the grand and glorious? We fire up the Subaru and head back to work, blinded and turning like a bull in the bullring.

© 2021, Creators