NBN readers, meet the Bubba Bros. Iconized here to protect their identity. Bubba1 is a gregarious bear of a man with the ready smile and easy manner essential to any salesman’s skill set. He’s a Christian Conservative champion of a consumer culture he works hard to support. Bubba2 is an academic who disdains the consumer culture while fervently defending the free-market economy driving it. Ivory Towers of academia and the infallibility-cum-sanctity of the US Constitution are his religion.
Together these two joined 74 million in almost re-electing a leader determined to destroy everything NBN likes about this country. Environmental protection, welfare, civil rights have no place in US governance, as per the Bubba Bros. Endorsing distinctly different aspects of that governance, both men embrace as fail-safe a freedom first function of same. Who doesn’t like freedom?
Yet to 81 million, the Bubba Bros represent a grave danger coalescing around far-flung faiths no democracy can reconcile. Religious beliefs drive Bubba1’s conviction US government inevitably leads to moral decay a la LGBTQ, Antifa, Earth First, et al. Bubba2’s equally rigid academic disciplines mechanically equate government with socio/economic decay a la Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al.
Fraternity in Freedom
Four years of exchanging emails and social posts reasoning with the Bubba Bros seemed for naught when the country chose a different path on Nov. 4, 2020. NBN hates waste, so we’d thought a little post-humous plumbing of those posts might help the 81 million still believing in our government to understand why 74 million think it better to blow it up. So, let’s delve a little deeper into the Bubba Bros’ beliefs.
Bubba1’s faith-infused politics has him unflinchingly spouting astounding logical-impossibilities like: The 2020 election was stolen with the blessing of the nation’s entire judicial system. Far left, not far right, militias stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 despite sweeping electoral victories in favor of the former. The disruptive, often violent rise of Black Lives Matter and Antifa are solely to blame for today’s racial strife. Entrenched white entitlement embedded over centuries of slavery is inconsequential, if it even exists. The main-stream media? We don’t go there.
Ironically, NBN knows Bubba1 as a charming man through working together in the MSM. Years ago, we published together in that MSM stalwart the Boston Globe, stories of community-interest initiatives Bubba1 spear-headed. Years later we find him embracing a radical right Christian/Conservative agenda NBN dedicates a few hours each day to defeating. So, how can we still talk to, let alone like this guy?
What? Me Worry?
Bubba2 is a friend since childhood. His articulate, deliberate defense of an Alfred E. Neuman approach to pretty much every liberal cause celebre, including the Covid-19 pandemic, is much harder to dismiss. Among his beliefs: The Electoral College is a masterpiece of constitutional craftsmanship that only improves with age. Gerrymandering? Hey, everybody does it. Climate change? We’ve got better causes to champion. Gun violence? See Second Amendment. The massing political threat of religion in politics and the unholy alliance between capitalism and Christianity? It’s way overblown. The Main Stream Media? We don’t go there.
Ironically, Bubba2’s disdain for the MSM, and more recently Big Tech, stems from their increasing intolerance of something he’s worked against all his life: ignorance. Chastising both as “elites” he joins the current cancel culture outcry over growing unwillingness to indulge the conspiracy theories and alt-right “news” Bubba1 embraces. Unflinching determination to make the cat-herd of humanity conform to his decades of social science study strictures allow completely incongruous convictions to coexist unquestioned in his cranium.
Empirical evidence, not faith, form the base of Bubba2’s beliefs, according to four years’ worth of recommended reading he shoveled into NBN’s email inbox. A critical missing element in all is adequate, if any allowance for the ongoing, asymptotic digital disruption to the free markets and the 250-year-old US Constitution he swears by. Even as his Ivory Towers smother under mountains of un-parsed data, social media overwhelms the 1st Amendment and heavily armed, unregulated, head-strong/weak-minded militias far removed from what the Second Amendment endorsed have emerged promising to overturn a democracy born of a constitution they’re professing to defend. Now that’s, Faith.
No Other Hand!
Fortunately Bubba2’s defense of his “faith” pretty much stops at explaining it to anyone interested. Bubba1’s unshakable faith is considerably more unsettling as it’s increasingly held up as cause worth dying for, a la Jan. 6. Today’s Christian conservative movement-cum inquisition employs a scorched earth policy with zero-tolerance for uncertainty or infidelity. Confronted with increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories or excommunication from beliefs letting him sleep at night, Bubba1 doesn’t have a choice. Today’s Christian Conservative movement know this and is cruelly leveraging it into fidelity cum-fanaticism in millions of Americans who should know better.
Still, we can’t hate either Bubba Bro because they, like us, don’t hate anybody. One loves God and the other science. We can’t hate that. They also share a rigid sense of right and wrong which we admire and which the US government has betrayed to some degree in most all of its iterations. We feel ya, Bros. Absent a US government they can believe in, can the Bubba Bros really be blamed for wanting to tear it down?
Make America Good Again
NBN would be lost without some sense of God and our reverence of science. Yet, the Bubba Bros, and their 74 million brethren, cling ever tighter to one inevitably at the expense of the other. It’s a worrisome coalition of the disaffected given the only governance both can agree upon is less. Leaving NBN dismayed over something we once unflinchingly believed in: The ultimate sensibility of the nation’s 74 million Bubba Bros. At this time of great uncertainty, lack of doubt, excess of certainty and absence of humility seem to us to be the greatest threats to this country.
