Has Trump’s MAGA taken his followers and all of America into an era of madness?
Is America REALLY celebrating a beautiful Sunday in a supposedly Christian country with a human cage match on the grounds of our nation’s White House? Has America devolved to become so un-Christian, unpatriotic. and disenchanted that blood sports, celebrated on the Sabbath, will become the new norm? A small cock fight on the lawn of a county courthouse or at the First Baptist Church would be icky and unseemly, but humans fighting in a cage at the White House?
Here, the profane is not merely brought near the sacred but installed inside it, at the dead center, on the holy day. A ninety-two-foot steel structure—the promoters have nicknamed it “The Claw”—rises over the South Lawn where, by long custom, the nation performs its quiet civic rites. The cage goes up on the mythological center of American culture. The blood sport is scheduled for the Sabbath. This is the double transgression: profane content, in sacred space, at sacred time, each violation compounding the others. It is not a lapse of taste, though it is also that. It is a cultural faux pas of the kind Mary Douglas described—dirt on the table, soil in the soup.
Honesty requires that the American past and present have had a little soil in our soup. American football is played on Sundays, and on occasion, blood is involved. Roman and Greek games were played in public spaces to honor their gods. While the White House holds great patriotic symbolism, it does not stand on holy ground. After all, we all recently witnessed the world’s richest man parade his Tesla cars on the symbolic car lot of America in front of the White House. Trump routinely sells Chinese-made gold shoes, dumbphones, and other merch from the White House. To further demonstrate Trump’s profane treatment of our nation’s institutions, he routinely levels portions of the White House with demolition cranes without planning or review.
Since Trump is systematically desecrating the White House and its surrounding public spaces, maybe we should all get on his dystopian, “nothing is sacred” bandwagon? Maybe this is a call for each community across the country to take over and occupy our local government buildings and parks? Maybe we should have human cage matches in every village and hamlet on Sundays to celebrate major civic and religious holidays?
Is this America’s future? What’s next?
