The U.S. is Now Far Too Musky

You know the word musty (having a stale, moldy, or damp smell) and also perhaps the term musky (having an odor of or resembling musk). But I am writing here about Musky (referring to Elon Musk). 

Timothy Snyder is a scholar worth knowing about and taking seriously.  He is an American historian and a professor of History at Yale University. During Trump’s first year as POTUS in 2017, Snyder (b. 1969) published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Snyder’s book is a short one about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny (such as Italy did in the 1920s and Germany did in the 1930s) with a focus on modern United States politics and on what he calls "America's turn towards authoritarianism."*¹

On the first page of the Prologue, Snyder states that tyranny means “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”

Snyder now posts regularly on Substack, and “Of course it’s a coup” is the title of his February 5 post, which can be accessed here. In that post, he asserts,

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.*²

Snyder goes on to say, “President Trump … will also perform at Musk’s pleasure. There is not much he can do without the use of the federal government’s computers.”

Some are saying, correctly it seems, that Trump is a PINO (President in name only), and now U.S. executive power is really in Musk’s hands. Time magazine’s recent provocative "cover" puts Elon Musk behind Trump’s desk. 

So, this is why I am saying that the U.S. is now too Musky. While perhaps no one else is using that last word, there are a multitude of Democrats and an appallingly few Republicans who agree with my assessment.

Elon Musk needs little introduction, but there is much about him that most of us don’t know. Briefly, he was born in South Africa (in 1971) and became a citizen of Canada in 1989 and of the U.S. in 2002. He has been married and divorced twice and has fathered 12 children with three women.*³

Until recently, Musk has been best known for founding (in 2002) and being the CEO of SpaceX, for being the CEO of Tesla, Inc. (since 2008), and for being the owner of Twitter (which he bought in 2022 and changed the name to X in 2023).

Also, as is widely known, Musk is considered the wealthiest man in the world with an estimated net worth of over 40 billion US dollars. And now he has become the most powerful person in the U.S. federal government other than (or even more than?) the President.

Musk’s political power comes from his being the head of DOGE (The Department of Government Efficiency). DOGE is not a Cabinet-level department; it is, rather, a temporary contracted government organization created by President Trump’s executive order on the day he was inaugurated.

According to Wikipedia, “DOGE's stated purpose is to reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending, and eliminate excessive regulations.” Further, it was “created to ‘modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.’" 

On February 11, the President hosted reporters in the Oval Office, but as Heather Cox Richardson reported, “Elon Musk held center stage,” for the event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting DOGE in charge of the U.S. government. 

Having someone other than the President in charge of the government and dismissing the place of Congress certainly sounds like it is a coup. In a lengthy, informative piece by eminent journalist Anne Applebaum (b. 1964) in the January 14 issue of The Atlantic (see here), Musk is leading a “regime change.”

If these assertions about the U.S. now experiencing a coup or an illegal regime change are true, which I’m afraid are accurate, surely it is also accurate to say that the U.S. is now too Musky! Aren’t we going to speak out forcefully against that?! 

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 *1 That book topped The New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017 and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021. On March 12, the Vital Conversations group in Kansas City's Northland will discuss tyranny, using Snyder's book as the basis for conversation. (Those of you who live in the area are invited to attend this gathering which meets in the Antioch branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Gladstone.)

*2 The day before Snyder made his post, Joyce Vance (whose husband is no kin to VP Vance) posted Is It Really a Coup? on her Substack blog (titled Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance). On February 12 her post was titled Call it what it is, reiterating that what Musk is doing through DOGE is, indeed, a coup.

*3 Actually, he married and divorced his second wife twice. In 2020, his “romantic partner” gave birth to a boy they named X Æ A-Xii. On February 11, “Lil X” (as his father calls him) was pictured with his father and the President in the Oval Office.

Remembering John Cobb and His Transdisciplinary Theology

 Several months ago, I intended to post a blog article today titled “Happy 100^th Birthday, Dr. Cobb!” He was alive and well at that time, but sadly, he passed away about six weeks ago. Still, I am remembering him today/tomorrow and I hope you will enjoy learning a little more about him and his theological thinking. 

John Boswell Cobb Jr. was born on February 9, 1925, and passed away on the day after Christmas. He was a “missionary kid” (MK), born in Kobe, Japan, to parents who were Methodist missionaries.

Until age 15, John lived primarily in Kobe and received most of his early education in the multi-ethnic Canadian Academy in that central Japan city. (Several of the Baptist MKs I knew in Japan, including the two children of Dickson Yagi [introduced below] went to high school at Canadian Academy.)

Dr. Cobb taught theology at the Claremont School of Theology (in California) from 1958 until his retirement in 1990. In 2014 he became the first theologian elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his interdisciplinary work in ecology, economics, and biology.

At least 25 years ago, Dr. Cobb moved to Pilgrim Place, a retirement home in Claremont. Thinking Friend Dickson Yagi was a faculty colleague of mine at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan. Not long after Dickson returned to the U.S., Dr. Cobb invited him to retire at Pilgrim Place, which he did in 2002.

Last August, I wrote to Dickson regarding Dr. Cobb. Dickson responded, “John Cobb’s brain is as sharp as ever. ... He lives in the partial nursing quarters now, so I don’t see him very often. But he still speaks in public .... He is a very courteous and pleasant, intelligent man.”*¹

John Cobb has been influential in a wide range of disciplines, including biology, ecology, economics, social ethics, and theology. I find his thought and writing quite valuable because of how he sees these disciplines as being interrelated and overlapping.

As Wikipedia correctly states, “Although Cobb is most often described as a theologian, the overarching tendency of his thought has been toward the integration of many different areas of knowledge.” Indeed, this sort of integration is what theology ought to be but so often hasn’t been.

Ecological themes have been pervasive in Cobb's work since 1969 (!), when he turned his attention to the ecological crisis. He became convinced that environmental issues constituted humanity’s most pressing problem. His book Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology was published in 1971.

In 1973, Cobb and his colleague David Ray Griffin (1939~2022) co-founded the Center for Process Studies (CPS) at Claremont.*² Three years later, they published Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, a book of singular importance.

In the Foreword, the authors reject much of the traditional theistic understanding of God, according to which “God seems to be the archetype of the dominant, inflexible, emotional, completely independent (read “strong”) male. Process theology denies the existence of this God” (p. 10).*³

Cobb published Becoming a Thinking Christian in 1993. The first paragraph of the Preface states that the book is for people who are lay Christians “in one of the oldline Protestant churches.”

Cobb perceived that many intelligent people in the churches “are still operating out of a simplistic view of faith. Too many have been led to assume that faith is incompatible with intellectual challenge and integrity. … that is the problem to which this book is addressed.”

I fully agree with Cobb’s expressed purpose for that book. In fact, it was just the following year that I started writing a somewhat similar book provisionally titled “Christian Faith and Intellectual Honesty.”

Because of soon being elected to heavy administration responsibilities at the educational institution where I had taught university and seminary classes since 1968, I was, sadly, unable to make much progress on that writing project.

My strong desire, as well as Cobb’s, is for all Christians to be thinking Christians—as well as for all those who are no longer, or never were, Christians to be thinking people. Most of my blog readers are, thankfully, such people, and many of them are on my Thinking Friends mailing list.

I hope some of you will now go to a library or to Amazon.com (or elsewhere) and obtain a copy of Cobb’s book. (There are several “very good” used copies available at Amazon for less than $7.00, including postage.)

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*¹ I heard Dr. Cobb speak in Japan (in 1995) as well as in the U.S., and I visited with him personally on both occasions. In the 1980s when I taught at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Cobb attended an academic meeting there.  At the close of the meeting, I had the privilege of driving him to the Kansas City International Airport and much enjoyed the conversation we had on that occasion. I fully agree with Dickson’s closing words about him.

*² In 1974, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (b. 1933) received her Ph.D. degree at Claremont Graduate School. A few years later, she authored God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (1982, 1989). After teaching in various universities, she was a faculty member at Claremont School of Divinity from 1990 until her retirement in 2002. During that time, she was also a co-director of CPS. At an academic meeting in 2006, I had the opportunity to hear her speak and to have a private conversation with her.

*³ The paragraph on the previous page where they reject the idea of God as a “controlling power” is very similar to the fundamental idea of Thomas Jay Oord, whom I introduced in my January 10 blog post.

Note: Dr. Cobb’s last book was published in 2023, shortly after his 98^th birthday, and much of that book was written in 2022. It is titled simply Confessions and is a very personal—and timely—book. I bought the $10 Kindle version last year and carefully read the 200+ pages. I highly recommend it.