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The Trump Amnesty

Steve Russell
9 min readNov 10, 2019

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Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

Can we really handle being kind to everybody?

The uproar over Ellen DeGeneres laughing with George W. Bush in the stands during a Dallas Cowboys game raises questions much more fundamental than whether a Cowboy run for the Super Bowl is a joke. Hey, they won their first three games….before losing the next three. The loss where the lesbian and the gay-baiter caused such a stir was only the second loss in the regular season.

The Cowboys are almost as complicated as exhorting for kindness in the time of Trump. There have been two Cowboy “dynasties,” but in between they were just like the Houston teams always were. They played just well enough to break the hearts of their fans. I could never be a Cowboys fan because of the first dynasty, when Tom Landry appeared to have two goals in addition to championships: to bring back the fedora as a fashion statement and to convince sports fans that the Christian gods are interested in who wins a football game.

While I will cheerfully plead guilty to being an unconverted heathen, all I mean by rendering gods in the plural is that if you read what the various flavors of Christianity claim — rendered as theology rather than culture — there is no way the same Supernatural Creature whispered in their ears. Or, if It did, the Supernatural Creature has a Divine sense of humor. Amusing as this stuff can…

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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