Dear Philip Seymour Hoffman (#2)

A TIME FOR HEROES

Dear Philip Seymour Hoffman,

DO YOU REMEMBER this glorious scene from Being Julia, when Annette Bening’s fabulous actress character Julia Lambert is confronted by a couple who had just slung a little mud about how utterly common she was?

“Uh, please forgive us for intruding like this, Miss Lambert…My friend and I are such very great admirers…Rupert and I want you to settle an argument. I think I used to know your father. He was a doctor, wasn’t he? He used to come to our house quite often.”

“Actually, he was a vet,” says Julia, “He used to go to your house to deliver the bitches. The house was full of them.”

Boom! Julia heroically put the insulting bitch in her place, and we the viewers are delighted that moral justice has prevailed.

Oh, if real life were more like the movies. But, Dear Philip, there’s no moral justice currently in the real world. The house of the United States Government is full of bitches that are destroying it—led by President Donald Trump and his billionaire consigliere Elon Musk. In the first two weeks of shock and awe since Trump’s inauguration, we’ve been blasted with one outrage after another, creating a hurricane of chaos to destabilize our government. Bottom line: We’re watching a literal coup that apparently aims to take down our democracy and make Donald Trump a dictator.

For some time, experts have compared what’s currently happening in the United States to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. But it feels closer to watching Hitler rolling over Europe without being shut down.

Among the people currently in the cross-hairs of these villains are always the others who aren’t white, but now also other others—trans men and women, government workers, scientists, liberals, Democrats. People are enraged, but we as a nation are flailing in combatting their power grab. When the President of the United States—the Commander in Chief of our entire military—is leading the coup, how do you stop him?

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THE PLAYBOOK FOR what’s happening has been in the works for years. The radical right Heritage Foundation produced a 900-page book called Project 2025, which is no less than the blueprint today’s government overthrowers are using. Here’s what Reuters said in July of last year: Behind the scenes, the project's affiliates are drafting executive orders and agency regulations that could be used to quickly implement the policies that the project is advocating once Trump takes office.

This is exactly what has happened. And this is what the American Postal Workers Union had to say about the Heritage Foundation as far back as 2017: “It is, in fact, completely dedicated to increasing the wealth and power of its ultra-rich funders, at the expense of working people…The Heritage Foundation is packed with corporate cash and uses that money to heavily influence politicians as they consider legislation discussed and passed in Congress. Starting in the 1980s with the Reagan administration, and continuing today with the Trump administration, it provides blueprints for budgets that do nothing but gut workers’ rights, wages, benefits and pensions… Heritage Foundation’s “ultimate goal… to make the Postal Service a privately run organization… free of restrictions and mandates placed on it by Congress.”

Besides destroying our government infrastructure so everything can be privatized to make more money for rich people, the other leg of this coup is to demolish our democracy so a “Christian” (emphatically in quotation marks) nationalist government is in charge.

After Barack Obama’s election and the racist reaction to it, the uber conservative Tea Party rose up from every dark corner of this country and had their moment of fame. The success of the Tea Party brought Christian nationalism into the GOP, and finally their hostile takeover of it.

Christian nationalists aim to impose their values and religious convictions on the rest of us, and for years now they’ve been steadily and strategically convincing the working and middle class that voting against their own best interests is beneficial to them. The way they’ve done it is by shamelessly using “Jesus” as the bait.

An excellent documentary called Bad Faith will bring you up to speed on Christian nationalists. You’ve never experienced so much vociferous hostility as you see in the pulpits of those churches, where there is supposed to be pure and holy air. These real-life preachers are just as terrifying as the more complexly evil Guy Pearce as the Reverend in Brimstone, and they look like they’re about to explode with spittle flinging from their mouths as they gush their hatred. Your dastardly character Reverend Veasey in Cold Mountain was the dirtbag, greasy variety of the evil preacher.

But Christian nationalism has nothing to do with true Christianity and everything to do with political power. These preachers and their churches manipulate their members to abhor humanistic policies—policies that help people. One potent example is their rationalization that women shouldn’t be able to choose what happens to their own bodies—no abortion allowed under almost any circumstances. And then these Christian nationalists refuse to provide support for families of underprivileged babies once they arrive.

The good Reverend William Barber, who is a Protestant minister and social activist and the founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, says, “I think it’s an abdication of my Christian responsibility not to remind politicians that the budgets you pass in these legislatures is a moral document. That if you pass a budget that hurts poor people and takes healthcare from sick people, that in fact you are violating fundamental values of the Christian faith, which are love, justice, and mercy.”

But there is no love, justice, or mercy in any of the policies in this administration, and there is even less in the coup that is demolishing aid that benefits millions of needy U.S. citizens and children and families abroad. People will die because of the loss of this aid. It makes me wonder if there’s some sort of Aryan ideal at play here to get rid of the old, the sick, the weak, the disabled, the poor, the displaced, because to these “Christians”—not to mention their Broligarch co-conspirators—all these others are just parasites.

When the good in the world—and the needs of the desperately needy—are cruelly taken away as if we were barbarians, one has to face the fact that…well, we are.

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BERNIE SANDERS AND Robert Reich have been sounding the alarm about these billionaires—the new American oligarchy—and corporate greed for years. A lot of us wouldn’t listen, especially the DNC, which constantly pulls down the Democratic Party with their IOUs to certain candidates, their own power grabs, and their arrogant belief that they know better than the voters on the street—and they never do.

Let me be clear. This coup has no moral power or ethical jurisdiction. What Trump and Musk are doing in most cases is illegal. Theirs is an axis of evil—not God—that is using brute psychological force and swaggering faux authority to smash every aspect of the Federal government that we’ve built for over two centuries. And all of it for the purpose of installing Dictator Donald Trump at the top of an American Reich fueled by greed and malice.

It will take each one of us to resist. To not comply. To participate in trying to save our democracy.

“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

My dear Philip Seymour Hoffman, it is up to each one of us to decide on our personal missions, but it is up to us to save ourselves. We each must make the hero’s journey in this war against us, the American people, in whatever ways we can. I wonder what you would do if you were here.

Peace, brother,

Beth