John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JON BASIL UTLEY IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
'Rapture Christian Pompeo Believes US War on Iran Would Be Helping Out God
"It's a never-ending battle until... the Rapture" - Mike Pompeo'
There's no explaining human lunacy, the many forms and varieties of it.
I believe a certain percentage of people are just born with fundamental glitches in their mental apparatus, much as we see a percentage of people born with severe physical deformities. The brain is, by far, the most complex of organs, rendering it vulnerable to a great many deformities.
Pompeo certainly is afflicted with one of them.
The stuff about "the Rapture" is literally an obsession with death, nothing more, nothing less.
In theory, someone embracing that kind of belief should be disqualified automatically from holding high government office, just as you would not appoint a paranoid or drunk or drug addict to command a missile-launch facility.
The great irony of this bizarre form of American fundamentalism - and it does seem to emanate mainly from America - is how it, in many or most cases, excludes all the human virtues we used to think of and regard as "Christian," in the best sense of that word.
Kindness, generosity, peacefulness, humility, doing-unto-others, and charity - the very qualities Jesus himself valued in the stories of the New Testament.
In Mike Pompeo's case, and in a good many similar cases, we find instead lying, theft, cheating - he's actually bragged in public about those - cruelty, extreme prejudice, and readiness-to-kill.
It says a great deal about America that someone with those character traits could serve in the highest cabinet post, and at a critical and dangerous time.
I've always pretty much accepted the principle, laid down by the eminent historian Thomas Carlyle, that history is biography.
If it is indeed true, then we are in mortal peril with Pompeo and other seriously-deficient human beings, such as John Bolton, appointed to influential posts and serving a President who has demonstrated himself unmistakably as rash, impetuous, careless-of-facts, impatient, inclined to name-calling, uninformed, and possessing one of the greatest (empty) egos of any narcissist I can recall.
