A New Savior Making People Better

By Joni Halpern

We have a new savior. We saw his picture on the holy card of Truth Social.

He wasn’t exactly like the old Jesus, but the new look was brighter overall. The new savior’s hair was shiny blond and precisely coiffed, as if he had emerged from a salon only minutes before ministering to the crowd of sick people and worshipers. His white cassock looked as if it were a discard from a “Call the Midwife” scene, just before the wet, bloody baby is hauled into the world, spoiling the bleached white garment of the imperturbable midwife.

The red shawl that draped over the new savior’s shoulders was only shades darker than the ruddy red complexion of his face. In this picture, the new savior’s eyes were nothing like those in the portrait that presently adorns the walls of federal buildings. None of that glowering, sinister presence that dares his supplicants to ask for mercy.

The image of the new savior does contain some anomalies, of course: fighter jets and warriors riding the rays of the sun above a battle flag; the Statute of Liberty stuffed into a small space between the worshipful face of a soldier gazing at the new savior; an adoring nurse looking upward at the new savior’s right hand, which lies upon the forehead of a presumably sick fellow slumbering on a pillow, his head emitting rays of blinding light due to his contact with the new savior; the palm of the new savior’s left hand holding a concentrated source of light, and finally, a couple of other contented admirers whose faces and prayerful hands suggest they have finally contacted the Real Thing.

The human being who posted the image of the new savior on his own Truth Social account said he had been unaware people might equate the picture with Jesus. He thought it depicted himself as a doctor having something to do with the Red Cross and making people better.

“I make people a lot better,” he said.

The old Savior is old hat. He is a has-been, an anti-Horatio Alger who never had a red cent, never held a grudge, never stole, cheated or lied to get money, never hoarded for himself a bounty of material goods or virtue that might be shared in the service of others. A man who, unlike the heroes of American mythology, never fired a gun, never degraded others, never made his lifelong ambition the journey from rags to riches. What a loser!

With the new savior, we can finally relax. There’s a new savior in town and he has shown us the road to Paradise: Identify the strangers, the needy, the sick, the hungry, the homeless. Teach them it is their duty as god-fearing humans to fend for themselves. Tell them that if they fail, it is not the fault of choices made by the new savior or his disciples. It is simply a math problem: we cannot pay for war and still afford child care, food, and housing to help those we have purposely chosen to leave out of the game plan for economic success. Money is for making, and spending is only for those who can afford it. The days of feeding the multitudes
on a few fish and a few loaves of bread are gone. The supply chain has become too expensive.

At last, under the new savior, we can do away with the unsavory image of unjust crucifixion. It has been one of the most unattractive features of the Old Savior’s story, given that the old story involves the kind of sacrifice that cannot be contemplated in an “America First” world. No sirree. We cannot be giving our lives, bodies, souls, or material well-being to a world in desperate need of hope and compassion. After all, people get what they deserve, and they deserve what they are willing to fight for in order to benefit themselves. Does it really make sense to bypass an advantage by worrying about what we will be denying to others?

Virtue is for the poor who have nothing else to enrich them. It’s a fiction that helps them feel valuable in the face of their nothingness.

With the new savior, the concept of resurrection will be somewhat different. We can still celebrate it with colored eggs if we wish. But the only people who will have a fighting chance at life after death will be the billionaires who can afford to store their bodies cryogenically in vast frozen farms of vacuum-insulated containers over which A.I. robots will keep watch. Fortunately, the inhabitants of those containers will be very wealthy humans, bloodless before they died, so less preparation will be necessary for their storage. It remains to be seen whether A.I. will affirmatively calculate the wisdom of bringing these cryo-preserved beings back to life. Even if the billionaires remain frozen, however, the new savior and his disciples will be able to make money that can descend to their heirs by betting on what decision A.I. will eventually make.

We can all take a breath and exhale this constant battle of conscience that pits Christian nationalism against the Biblical admonition to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” We will simply edit the rule to a more concise form: “love ourselves.” We’re halfway there already, maybe even farther. We have dumped the unworthy among us into filthy, overcrowded detention camps, left great numbers of American citizens and lawfully present immigrants without food or healthcare, cast thousands of our countrymen into homelessness, and now, we are prepared to throw the lives of our young service men and women onto the funeral pyre of failed diplomacy, as the sages have described war.

You gotta admit. There’s no one else left for us to worry about except ourselves.

“America First.” It’s a lot easier to sleep at night under the mantra of the new savior.

Or is it?