The Devil’s Bargain Behind “Let’s Go Brandon”

“Let’s Go, Brandon.”  There is so much tied up in that chant.  Of course there is the obscene rebuke that has swept sporting and other events across the country, and indeed the world, of the sadly senile, intermittent occupant of the White House who the Establishment would have us believe won 81 million votes. And is now running the country.  Uh huh.  There is also the tweaking of that mendacious Establishment, especially its media, personified by NBC reporter Kelli Stavast, who so glibly and lamely repurposed the Biden castigation into a cheer for the victorious young Nascar driver Brandon Brown.  There is the fodder Ms. Stavast’s interpretation provided for that segment of their audience that eats up their spoon-fed inanities like the Russia Hoax, the Ukrainian Hoax, the January 6 “Insurrection,” and the Biden/Harris Administration.  There is the frustration of the un-woke who do not feed at that spoon (or trough).  There is the safety provided the non-profane who wish to add their voice to the protest.  Ultimately there is the primal scream for survival of those who, yearning for the government established by the Constitution of the United States, finally found an unexpected champion in Donald Trump to stand up to and push back against that voracious, gluttonous, septic, repulsive monster the aged Establishment has made of that government, only to have that champion removed from office in a grotesque mockery of the election system created to assure their valid representation.  Whether a ditzy cover-up or the oblivious misperception of one so detached from real America as to be ignorant of the national anti-Biden fad, the gloss carried a tinge of the subtlety of its ancient progenitor: “You will not die. . . .”

Well enough. I guess.

I get the fun of the inside joke and all of its potential touched upon above.  But it strikes me that there is something wrong with it.  There is something wrong with “Let’s go, Brandon.”  And what is wrong with it is what it covers for and points to.  And that is the obscenity.

I understand it.  I grew up in the Midwest in a small town surrounded by farmland, going to school with friends whose chores included shoveling manure, and they did not call it manure.  These kids’ exposure to other aspects of animal husbandry provided ample opportunity for them to further color their language if they and their households were so inclined.  Profanity spread into our peer-speak at a young age to indicate we were not wimps, were grown up, were tough, and were each “one of the guys.”  Especially in sports and later in construction work, profanity was integral to conversation to varying degrees.  Still, despite hearing them now and then, I staunchly avoided taking the Lord’s name in vain and voicing the f-bomb, as I remember the majority did too.

The Lord’s name prohibition was a no-brainer.  There was the little matter of eternal damnation for those who knowingly and willingly breached one of the Ten Commandments in this land of Catholics and Lutherans.  But then, beyond that, just basic respect demanded no less.  God is God.  That ought to be enough.  And it was.  That respect extended to our parents, teachers, principals, coaches, priests, ministers, schools, churches, and other worthy people and institutions.

The f-bomb prohibition fell within this same realm of respect.  As Fr. Ganshert told my sister’s class when he went in to address wanton profanity, the word referred to the act by which their parents had brought them into the world.  Pause on that.  The act by which their parents had brought into the world those human beings endowed with the supernatural destiny of entering into God’s very self.  That act was supposed to be beautiful, self-giving, life-giving, holy, sacramental, and private.  The f-bomb pulled that act from sublimity to plunge it into filth.

And how well the f-bomb’s degradation fits our society today.  Life-giving has been long stripped away by contraception to transform the act from one of self-gift to one of selfishness and rejection.  Once so transformed there is justification for hooking up, cohabiting, adultery, pornography, untold perversities, and the vicious silent slaughter of any human beings conceived by the act so profaned.  It continually descends from matrimony to the f-bomb.

But it is far worse than that.  It is not enough that we have so degraded this act of life and beauty.  The f-word weaponizes it, transforms it into an act of aggression with intent to do the receiver of it profound harm if not destruction.  Is it any wonder that sexual abuse and assault in all their horrific forms infect our culture, from film studios to churches?  That is not to say use of the word has done all this, though there may be a chicken-and-egg aspect to the whole thing, but that use of the word reflects the practice in the current culture of death.

What a piece of work.  Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.

Nice trick.  He gets conservatives to twist authentic justifiable outrage over the atrocities of the left–like abortion, impeachment hoaxes, violent destructive riots, rigged elections, the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe, and dangerous vaccine mandates–into an obscene perversion of the beautifully cosmic, unitive, procreative, sacramental act to pronounce their nullification of the demented man who is the face of the dehumanizing leftist Democrat machine. (And by the way, what kind of people would take a cognitively impaired elderly man, even one as corrupt as Joe Biden, and use him this way?) Why would conservatives cooperate with that? 

Ah, well, they have been long prepared through manipulation by the very totalitarians by whom, you would think, they would be loath to be manipulated.  Hollywood, to sum it up in one word, though it extends well beyond.  Hollywood let the f-bomb drop in movies in 1967, and at around the same time, brought forth the first R rating.  And then the culture was bombarded with the f-bomb and perversities that the average American had not been exposed to, at least not in anything like the quantity presented on the screen big and small.  Previously, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, and several other television programs of that era entertained and touched on subjects that mattered without the obscenity that has become so prevalent in our culture today. And they did so with real humor, not the joke and insult volleys of later shows.

On the big screen, John Wayne, Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Gary Cooper and their peers could fight wars, fall in love, engage in conflicts, evoke everything from tears to laughter and manage to do so creatively, brilliantly, even provocatively in films that would easily fit the requirements for what would eventually be a PG rating.  Even then, people might object to some of their productions on a moral basis, but they could do so without having first been subjected to the graphic assault on decency launched by so many films of the last several decades.

Long ago I recognized that entertainment held a far more insidious potential to tear down virtue than the news.  I saw the effect it had on our generation.  The manly and womanly virtue of chastity would not have withered so detrimentally had it not been so commonly run down in films featuring the handsome and gorgeous discarding it without the consequences–pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, damaged psyches–suffered by those average Americans who emulated their “sophistication.”  And then there was the whole genre of the anti-hero, outlaws and criminals pitched in high-end visually alluring productions that made us sympathetic to them and their crimes: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, anyone? 

And we just accepted it all, let it influence our behavior and culture.  Much of our generation treated these far more graphic films as their parents had treated the films of their era without due regard for their deleterious effects.  I still remember running into a friend at a video store, thirty or forty years ago, who had just rented several films, more than one of them rated R, to watch with his family, including young children, for the weekend.  Another friend told me that he did not object to sex scenes in films if they were tastefully done.  (Oh, the glamour of evil to which we are all susceptible: remember the image of Satan rubbing his hands and chuckling.)  He admitted I did have a point when I replied that he was then paying to have people (the real life human beings who were performing as actors) engage in sexual activity for his entertainment which was akin to prostitution, with all the damage done to the actors and the viewers.

Anyway, it has been the very people who trash the things that traditional Americans hold dear who have polluted our culture with all of this and, in the process, damaged all of us.  And we have allowed them to degrade our culture into common pornography, fornication, adultery, abortion, lying, cheating, and chants like the one covered over by “Let’s Go, Brandon.”  It is long past the time for conservatives to reject them and their degradation.

Let the liberals and their Democrat Party own the obscenity for which the Democrat Party has long stood in the progressive malleability of its values over time.  Let them own those things they advocated and fought for: slavery; the Trail of Tears; the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Dred Scott Decision; secession; the Confederacy; the Black Codes; the Copperheads; the Ku Klux Klan; lynching; voter disenfranchisement; Jim Crow segregation; political prisoners; the Committee on Public Information; the internment of American citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent; attack dogs and water cannons; abortion; Big Brother government; welfare enslavement; Hollywood; over-taxation; anti-American curricula; open borders with human trafficking and drug trafficking; illegal immigration; corrupt elections; defunding the police; decades-long crime and corruption in Democrat-controlled cities across the country.  Let them identify with their international counterparts: the Marxists, communists, socialists, and fascists. (For an in-depth treatment of the fascism of Democratic administrations beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s, I recommend Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.) Let them excuse away the purges, gulags, death camps, final solutions, cultural revolutions, etc. Let them own all the profanation that goes with all they stand for.  Let them have the f-bomb; it fits their culture-of-death ethic.

Instead the Republican Party, however imperfect (as all human creations are), has stood up for and fought for things noble, despite the pendular swing of popular opinion: against the expansion of slavery into the territories; for the abolition of slavery; for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; for civil rights legislation from the 1860s on; for an end to lynching; for women’s suffrage; for voting rights; for the right to life; for lower taxation; for economic prosperity for all; for law and order; for freedom.  The Republican Party had to fight for these things because it had an adversary that opposed them (and in some cases, like the right to life, still opposes them).  That adversary was the Democrat Party.  Let the Democrats and the left own their historic obscenity.  Conservatives and the Republican Party should reject it and rise up above it in seeking truth, beauty, and goodness, however many times we fall short.       

Sin is not new to our age, and I do not look to some idyllic past since Eden to find it absent.  Sin abounds as it has since its invention in every person and every culture.  But there have been times when we better recognized sin for what it was, and better stood together to give it a good fight, and were not so heavily opposed when we did so.

Conservatism is supposed to fight that good fight, to aspire to truth, beauty, and goodness.  The one party of the dominant two that is the better home for conservatives, the Republican Party, ought to, and at least in theory, does aspire to the same.  None of us, nor any of our representatives will so aspire perfectly.  We are all sinners, varying in the type and degree of our sins of commission and omission.  That reality the liberal left, the progressives whose principles and morality change to fit the circumstances, loves to play against the right.  Because conservatives aspire to virtue, the left is always there to try to delegitimize them when they fail in realizing that aspiration, as we all do in ways small and large.

Any time a conservative has a personal failing, the left is there to point out the hypocrisy.  But that must not stop our fight for the good.  We cannot wait to be sinless to stand up to evil. One thing all saints have in common is their recognition of their own sinfulness.  If Mother Teresa knew herself to be a sinner–and she did–then there is no point in fooling ourselves. The good in us is limited by the evil of our sinfulness. As Jesus so succinctly put it, “No one is good but God alone.” And it is the devil’s own trick to enervate people in their quest for the good by throwing up their sins to them as disqualifiers, as he does to exorcists.  And, of course, the devil is a liar.

On the other hand, how much easier is it to never fail for the progressive left who hold their yardstick low enough or have their rules and measures shift with the circumstances? And the extreme partisanship of the left elevates the slightest fault of their opponents to high crimes while their own high criminals walk away time after time from the just consequences of their actions. The tribalism of the left reduces right and wrong from the morality of actions to an artificial morality of membership in the prescribed group.

And when it comes to hypocrisy, who swam in it more comfortably than the left and the never-Trumpers when they turned up their noses at the 45th president because he was not pure enough for Washington?  Trump not pure enough for the cesspool these clowns have made of the nation’s capital, the milieu of the Clintons, the Bidens, Eric Swallwell, et al.  Give the average American a break!

The real threat of Donald Trump was that he was an outsider who did not know or play the Establishment’s game.  Whatever his faults, Trump proved that he meant what he said by carrying it out.  He fought against abortion, stood up for the Little Sisters of the Poor and freedom of religion, closed the border, fought human trafficking and drug trafficking, deported criminal aliens, stood up to Communist China, strengthened our military, destroyed ISIS, stifled North Korea and Iran, created the Space Force to address China’s (and Russia’s) dangerous militarization of space, realized energy independence, cut taxes, super-charged the economy, dropped unemployment to historic lows especially for minorities, added 3.5 million people to the workforce, created seven million new jobs, lifted ten million people off welfare, lifted seven million people off food stamps cutting the cost of the program by ten billion dollars, raised wages especially for disadvantaged groups, corrected decades of trade imbalances with measures like USMCA, brought back companies and jobs to the United States, challenged the deep state, cut the unelected administrative state’s rules and regulations by twenty-five percent, and supported law enforcement. 

And he did all of this and more while he and his administration were hamstrung by the need to spend countless hours and resources defending themselves against the left’s Russian, Ukrainian, and other hoaxes.  I was shocked at the end of these hoaxes to learn how clean Trump was, that after a hostile so-called Intelligence Community, along with Mueller’s band of angry Democrats, spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to find (or create, as in the fully discredited Steele Dossier) anything to use against him, they came up with absolutely nothing, for the whole world to see. And he charged forward as the offensive line (along with too few others like Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz) for most Republicans who shift about in fear of what the devious Dems and their willing accomplices in the media and the deep state might do to them. And experience indicates that they have good reason to fear. And yet Trump stood tall and took the arrows and gave the frightened Republicans cover to actually carry out some of what they promised their voters they would do.    

Given all that, let’s not be manipulated by the very people who want to destroy what we stand for, and indeed want to destroy us, as evidenced in too many instances like abortion, the left-wing riots of 2020 with their arson and mass looting, the rigged 2020 elections, the vicious and unlawful treatment of the January 6 political prisoners, the mandates of experimental vaccines, the abandonment of Americans to the hands of the Taliban, and the replacement of our population with illegal unvetted aliens.  Let’s rise above the coarseness with which they have polluted our culture.  Let’s clean it up, raise ourselves above their dehumanization of the human race.

Obscenity, vulgarity, profanity do not make us tough.  I have met, all over the United States, examples of cowboys, ranchers, farmers, truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters, athletes, and others who were plenty tough but who would not use profanity.  West Texas comes to mind where many folks take their Christianity pretty seriously, and they are tough right through, hard working with dirty jeans and calloused hands, and many folks I knew there would not let a profanity cross their lips.  It lessened their toughness not at all.  And folks like that stand out, as tough people who hold themselves to a higher standard, a standard set by the toughest man who ever lived.  That man was a Jewish carpenter who hung out with fisherman, tax collectors, prostitutes, and yet never engaged in obscenity in any form.  And should any question the degree of this perfectly decent man’s toughness, I would encourage them to meditate on a Crucifix or the Passion narratives in the gospels and keep in mind that through it all he “opened not his mouth” in complaint but only to pray, even to pray for his tormenters.  And we might ask ourselves in that meditation, who wants us to wallow in obscenity?  Whose side are we on?

And obscenity does not make us grown up, mature.  I am reminded of a conservative comedian, a brilliant fellow, I tuned in to watch one night.  He was obviously nervous and a little slow warming up, receiving low laughter from the audience sprinkled about.  But when he dropped the f-bomb, the place went nuts, laughing hysterically, clapping and roaring.  And each obscenity after that secured similar results.  I was reminded of why I do not watch comedy, and I shut off the show.  But I could not help but wonder at the response of the audience.  It was as if these were little children glorying in getting away with something naughty when their parents were looking the other way.  Can’t we do better than this? Well, we need to if we are going to make the United States the country it was created to be, with a government instituted to secure our God-given rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

So, “Let’s Go, Brandon!”  Whatever.  But “F____ Joe Biden!”  We can do better than that.  There are better chants that better reflect on the virtuous country the United States was created to be.  I don’t know, “Make America Great Again!”  “America First!” “God bless the USA!” all sounded pretty good.  And that last one, “God bless the USA.” Folks, in the very founding of the United States it was recognized that God gave us our rights, and the founders appealed to God “for the rectitude of our intentions,” and they relied on “the protection of Divine Providence.” And there are untold examples of national leaders like Washington and Lincoln who called on God and submitted to God in recognition that this country could not succeed, let alone flourish, if we did not recognize, submit to, and rely upon God. Accordingly we cannot now hope for or expect any good to come to us if we do not recognize the same. How does “F____ Joe Biden” fit in with that?

Instead, let’s continually work on trying to be those people God created us to be. And let’s pray. If we can attend sporting events and chant, how about if we attend churches and pray. Prayer worked for Washington in the dire depths of Valley Forge, for Lincoln in the dark hours of the Civil War. And they both recognized the righteous thanks owed God in their Thanksgiving proclamations. So, especially at this Thanksgiving time of year, let us be profoundly grateful in prayer to Almighty God for all the blessings we have taken for granted and which are sorely under attack today. And let’s pray for friends and enemies who do not know or love God, those who have no religion, those who do not appreciate what the United States was created to be, those who are trying to destroy the United States and anything good. And let us humble ourselves and seek to be those people God has given us the freedom to be. The possibilities are endless without descending to the level of those who would dehumanize us.  Better than chanting, let’s get out there and get involved to keep the Democrats from rigging more elections so they can tear this country down with abortion, open borders, mask mandates, vax mandates, racism, rioting, looting, burning, defunding the police, and everything else they serve up.

There is so much to do, like fighting for the rights of the unborn, working to assure election integrity, supporting borders closed to illegal immigration and its human and drug trafficking, shutting off the news and entertainment the left creates to pollute us, creating alternatives to those outlets, running for office, challenging school boards hostile to traditional American virtues, and on and on.  We do not need to cooperate in the left’s dehumanizing of us, pulling us down to the obscene, when God would have us elevated to heaven.  Let’s reach for that sublime potential for which we were created even if we know we will sometimes fall short.  And let’s raise our voices in ways worthy of that reach, and worthy of our beloved United States of America that was created to protect our right to do so.

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Dedicated to St. Joseph (foster father of Jesus, husband to Mary) in the year of St. Joseph, 2021.

© 2021 P. A. Ritzer

Sign and Photo ©P. A. Ritzer 2021