I was talking with a friend of mine today about the "snow globe" phenomenon - that tendency to live in a hermetically sealed environment of shared backgrounds, preconceptions and beliefs, so that you end up completely oblivious to other ways of looking at the world.
Living in a snow globe has a lot of bad consequences, chief among them a sense of smug self-satisfaction and a consequent inability to engage with the world as it really is.
The upside of snow globe life is that it pretty drastically limits your interaction with the kind of things seen in the video below.
Rafael Cruz - Ted's father - who notably expressed his solidarity with fellow American immigrants by proclaiming he wants to send Barack Obama "back to Kenya," has some strongly held religious beliefs he wants you to know about. It's worth peering out of your globe to get a look.
Here's Papa Cruz during a 2012 appearance at a Texas mega-church during his son's campaign for senate. The really good stuff starts at 4:30.
Beyond the pure entertainment value of seeing a demented and fossilized Ricky Ricardo storm about the stage, arms flailing while yammering about "kings," "priests," the "annointed," and other wackiness, it's as good an introduction as any to something called "Christian Dominionism." For the uninitiated, that's the belief that we are approaching the end times and the righteous have to get moving on seizing wealth from the wicked and using it to fund something approximating a totalitarian Christian state. It's called the "end times transfer of wealth" - no kidding.
[Full disclosure: I have a strong suspicion that I may fall in their definition of the wicked, so I am probably not a good source for a neutral assessment of this proposal.]
What's interesting to me is that it so completely foreign to my own admittedly watered-down religious upbringing. My education emphasized poetic tales of ethical behavior, family loyalty, the importance of community, and finished with a boffo ending about compassion, forgiveness, the inherent imperfectibility of human beings, and redemption.
Instead, what you get here is a very different vision of God. God - that creator of the universe in all its mystery, the ultimate source of everything, including all that we might call divine, from Leonardo's paintings to the beauty of the creatures of the sea to an infant's laugh - is in fact a raging narcissist who loves nothing more than kicking ass and having his ass kissed and, by the way, strongly disapproves of Obamacare and the capital gains tax. The job of the righteous is to go to war on his behalf and bring back lots of booty for Him and His glory. You would think he would have better things to worry about.
This seems completely insane and it's coming from Ted Cruz's father. The equivalent would be if Rev. Jeremiah Wright was Obama's real father. (I have a copyright on that particular conspiracy theory, so don't think about stealing it.)
One wonders what the conversations must have been like in the Cruz household when Ted was a boy. Even better is thinking about the conversations in store when when he starts his run for President. "Dad, I've got some new friends and it would be great if when they're around you didn't mention all that anointing stuff around them. It's not like I'm embarrassed of you or anything. It's just ... You understand right?"
One thing about running for president is it forces you out of your snow globe and exposes your own for all the world to see.
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