Did the CONFEDERACY Have BETTER GENERALS?!?!?!
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Did King Solomon really order a baby cut in two? Literally? Why?
In 1 KIngs 3:24, King Solomon clearly says “Bring me a sword,” so it sure sounds like an order. While this is one of the most famous and beloved stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, it also turns out to be a pretty dark and disturbing story. Firstly, people wonder whether Solomon was bluffing when he prepared to have the baby cut in half. Nothing in the story indicates Solomon was bluffing, and as anyone who’s ever tried to bluff anyone over anything knows, a bluff is useless if people THINK the bluffer isn’t capable of following through. Everybody in the court HONESTLY BELIEVED their king was capable of murdering that baby.
Why would people think that? When we take a closer look at King Solomon, how he grew up, how he became king, and what he did after becoming king, it’s pretty clear that while he might have been considered a very wise man, that didn’t make him a good man. In fact, Solomon’s life and actions make the rulers in “Game of Thrones” look like Disney versions of kings.
Firstly, Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba, who was married to Uriah the Hittite until David saw her bathing on a rooftop and he had Uriah killed in battle. The first baby Bathsheba conceived by David died because of this sin. Then, along came Solomon.
Then, while Solomon was growing up, his oldest half-brother, Amnon, raped their half-sister Tamar, then he shut her up because she had been shamed and despoiled. In revenge for this outrage, Tamar’s brother Absalom murdered Amnon, then he launched a devastating civil war against David himself, at one point seizing the city and stealing ten of David’s concubines. David won the civil war, including killing Absalom. This is the family dynamic in which Solomon was being raised. The word “sociopathic” comes to mind.
After Absalom’s death, the heir to David’s throne and kingship was another son, Adonijah. However, Solomon, his mother Bathsheba, and the prophet Nathan had other plans. When David is dying, Adonijah is busy preparing to become king, but Solomon beats him to the punch, getting David’s blessing (and kingship) in a way eerily similar to the way Jacob snatched Esau’s birthright and Isaac’s blessing way back in Genesis 27.
Once David is dead, Solomon goes on a murderous spree that reminds me of the climactic “baptism” scene in “The Godfather,” wherein all enemies, real and potential, are ruthlessly eliminated. Solomon has Adonijah killed even after both Bathsheba and Nathan advise him not to do so. Solomon then has Joab, David’s top general killed, he has most of Saul’s descendants killed, he enslaves hundreds of thousands of people, including Israelites, to first build the Temple, and then to build his own palace, a structure to his own glory that is four times the size of the Temple he built for the glory of God. And when I say, “Solomon built,” I mean, “Solomon had the people he’d enslaved build.”
As far as the baby story goes, think of it this way. It’s a political fable Solomon told to advise any potential enemies to back off.
The baby is Israel.
The true mother (and rightful king) is Adonijah.
The false mother (the usurper) is Solomon.
Everyone is so busy applauding the true mother’s selflessness by volunteering to give up her baby (the kingdom) they ignore the threat the false mother makes to allow the baby to be murdered by the sword (civil war).
Solomon is threatening to destroy the kingdom rather than allow the true king to sit on the throne instead of him.
Finally, if there’s any question left about the nature of Solomon’s character, after he died, his oldest son Rehoboam was made king. Two groups of advisors approached Rehoboam. The older group said, “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you,” (1 Kings 12:4). The people gave Rehoboam a choice; either be a good king, or be like your father. Rehoboam’s famous response was, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions,” (v. 14). And the kingdom was forever torn asunder.
Solomon: wise? Probably. Good? Probably not. Capable of slicing a baby in half to prove a point? Hell yeah.
Trump’s Wag-the-Dog War
The president is looking for a dangerous domestic enemy to fight.
Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.
How did we get here? Well, when historians summarize the Trump team’s approach to dealing with the coronavirus, it will take only a few paragraphs:
“They talked as if they were locking down like China. They acted as if they were going for herd immunity like Sweden. They prepared for neither. And they claimed to be superior to both. In the end, they got the worst of all worlds — uncontrolled viral spread and an unemployment catastrophe.
“And then the story turned really dark.
“As the virus spread, and businesses had to shut down again and schools and universities were paralyzed as to whether to open or stay closed in the fall, Trump’s poll numbers nose-dived. Joe Biden opened up a 15-point lead in a national head-to-head survey.
“So, in a desperate effort to salvage his campaign, Trump turned to the Middle East Dictator’s Official Handbook and found just what he was looking for, the chapter titled, ‘What to Do When Your People Turn Against You?’
“Answer: Turn them against each other and then present yourself as the only source of law and order.”
America blessedly is not Syria, yet, but Trump is adopting the same broad approach that Bashar al-Assad did back in 2011, when peaceful protests broke out in the southern Syrian town of Dara’a, calling for democratic reforms; the protests then spread throughout the country.
Had al-Assad responded with even the mildest offer of more participatory politics, he would have been hailed as a savior by a majority of Syrians. One of their main chants during the demonstrations was, “Silmiya, silmiya” (“Peaceful, peaceful”).
But al-Assad did not want to share power, and so he made sure that the protests were not peaceful. He had his soldiers open fire on and arrest nonviolent demonstrators, many of them Sunni Muslims. Over time, the peaceful, secular elements of the Syrian democracy movement were sidelined, as hardened Islamists began to spearhead the fight against al-Assad. In the process, the uprising was transformed into a naked, rule-or-die sectarian civil war between al-Assad’s Alawite Shiite forces and various Sunni jihadist groups.
Al-Assad got exactly what he wanted — not a war between his dictatorship and his people peacefully asking to have their voices heard, but a war with Islamic radicals in which he could play the law-and-order president, backed by Russia and Iran. In the end, his country was destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed or forced to flee. But al-Assad stayed in power. Today, he’s the top dog on a pile of rubble.
I have zero tolerance for any American protesters who resort to violence in any U.S. city, because it damages homes and businesses already hammered by the coronavirus — many of them minority-owned — and because violence will only turn off and repel the majority needed to drive change.
But when I heard Trump suggest, as he did in the Oval Office on Monday, that he was going to send federal forces into U.S. cities, where the local mayors have not invited him, the first word that popped into my head was “Syria.”
Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”
These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
This is coming so straight from the Middle East Dictator’s Handbook, it’s chilling. In Syria, al-Assad used plainclothes, pro-regime thugs, known as the shabiha (“the apparitions”) to make protesters disappear. In Portland, Ore., we saw militarized federal forces wearing battle fatigues, but no identifiable markings, arresting people and putting them into unmarked vans. How can this happen in America?
Authoritarian populists — whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, or al-Assad — “win by dividing the people and presenting themselves as the savior of the good and ordinary citizens against the undeserving agents of subversion and ‘cultural pollution,’” explained Stanford’s Larry Diamond, author of “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.”
In the face of such a threat, the left needs to be smart. Stop calling for “defunding the police” and then saying that “defunding” doesn’t mean disbanding. If it doesn’t mean that then say what it means: “reform.” Defunding the police, calling police officers “pigs,” taking over whole neighborhoods with barricades — these are terrible messages, not to mention strategies, easily exploitable by Trump.
The scene that The Times’s Mike Baker described from Portland in the early hours of Tuesday — Day 54 of the protests there — is not good: “Some leaders in the Black community, grateful for a reckoning on race, worry that what should be a moment for racial justice could be squandered by violence. Businesses supportive of reforms have been left demoralized by the mayhem the protests have brought. … On Tuesday morning, police said another jewelry store had been looted. As federal agents appeared to try detaining one person, others in the crowd rushed to free the person.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, according to The Post, found that a “majority of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement and a record 69 percent say Black people and other minorities are not treated as equal to white people in the criminal justice system. But the public generally opposes calls to shift some police funding to social services or remove statues of Confederate generals or presidents who enslaved people.”
All of this street violence and defund-the-police rhetoric plays into the only effective Trump ad that I’ve seen on television. It goes like this: A phone rings and a recording begins: “You have reached the 911 police emergency line. Due to defunding of the police department, we’re sorry but no one is here to take your call. If you’re calling to report a rape, please press 1. To report a murder, press 2. To report a home invasion, press 3. For all other crimes, leave your name and number and someone will get back to you. Our estimated wait time is currently five days. Goodbye.”
Today’s protesters need to trump Trump by taking a page from another foreign leader — a liberal — Ekrem Imamoglu, who managed to win the 2019 election to become the mayor of Istanbul, despite the illiberal Erdogan using every dirty trick possible to steal the election. Imamoglu’s campaign strategy was called “radical love.”
Radical love meant reaching out to the more traditional and religious Erdogan supporters, listening to them, showing them respect and making clear that they were not “the enemy” — that Erdogan was the enemy, because he was the enemy of unity and mutual respect, and there could be no progress without them.
As a recent essay on Imamoglu’s strategy in The Journal of Democracy noted, he overcame Erdogan with a “message of inclusiveness, an attitude of respect toward [Erdogan] supporters, and a focus on bread-and-butter issues that could unite voters across opposing political camps. On June 23, Imamoglu was again elected mayor of Istanbul, but this time with more than 54 percent of the vote — the largest mandate obtained by an Istanbul mayor since 1984 — against 45 percent for his opponent.”
Radical love. Wow. I bet that could work in America, too. It’s the perfect answer to Trump’s politics of division — and it’s the one strategy he’ll never imitate.