Bryon Noem, New Gods, Armageddon, symmetry. Part two.

Smart, tricky, almost perfect. But. I think Papa has it all figured out.

[editorial note: since this post went out as an email I’ve made a bunch of small edits, most of them to correct typos or clean up some sloppy syntax or punctuation. The only new content is one paragraph that elaborates on U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s bigotry and religious fanaticism.]

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 73 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on the island of Noepe, also known as Martha’s Vineyard, that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Précis

This post is a continuation of Bryon Noem, New Gods, Armageddon, symmetry. Part one: Come on, it’s time for something biblical, which concluded with these lines:

I had in my head to write a beautiful conclusion to this essay, tying together myths (comic book, Christian, patriarchal, masculinist, USIAN, many others); and patriarchy itself, and Armageddon and democracy and fascism and honor and cowardice and decency and Liza Minnelli and Kirkland College and comic books, and the wonderful symmetry of that house in Lafayette, and 24.7 other things, but I’ve run out of space and time, so I guess I’ll just declare this essay “Part One,” and end here.

In the manner of my sensei Bullwinkle J. Moose, I will now attempt to pull that rabbit out of my hat.

Armageddon postponed?

As I sat down to begin writing this piece last Tuesday evening, word came that Trump had decided to not immolate the earth for at least another two weeks.

This came as a relief, as I was entirely unsure whether I could complete an appropriate Goodby Cruel World Sundman figures it out! essay in the few hours remaining before Trump’s promised genocidal campaign to ‘wipe out an entire civilization,’ which might have ignited global thermonuclear war, conceivably resulting in my nonexistence before I had finished writing this essay.

According to available evidence, the world did not end last Tuesday night. So I proceed on the hope that that is the case and that our world will continue to exist pretty much as it is for another 10 days or so.

Stepford-Bondi Epstein-Misogyny Theology

In part one of this essay I posited that the recent salacious revelations about the bimbo fetish of Bryon Noem, the cuckolded husband of “ICE-Barbie” Kristi Noem — the recently fired Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security known for bragging about having shot her puppy, her tight-fitting clothes and pouty lips, and for her sadistic joy in the ill-treatment of men, women and children who had been kidnapped by her Gestapo and sent to distant gulags — could provide an insight into the motivations of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the senile clown Donald Trump in their waging war on Iran.

Drawing on Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s essay He Married ICE Barbie. Then He Became Her: What Bryon Noem’s secret life reveals about Christian Nationalism’s war on women’s power — and the men it leaves behind, I wrote about how the misogyny baked into distinctively American form of patriarchal Evangelical Christianity teaches men that they should expect women, by their comportment and looks, to communicate that they understand their inferior place in society. American Evangelical Christianity, espoused by Pete Hegseth and nearly all Republicans in Congress, and the MAGA movement in general, teaches that Christian men should expect their wives to be Stepford Wives. MAGA women understand what this means, and they play their parts accordingly.

That is to say that although women may be allowed to have great power in the Christian man’s world — Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, notably among them — but only if they communicate, through their appearance, tone of voice, and so forth, that they accept their subordinate place.

About that form of patriarchal Christianity — which is not incidentally all mixed up with white supremacy, a topic for another day — I related a conversation from long ago, in which my friend Richard said, of Evangelicals, ‘They don’t have a theology; they have a dress code.’

I’m not going to rehearse the entire argument of Bryon Noem, part one; this recapitulation is already too long. But if you’re interested and you haven’t read part one yet, I hope you’ll check it out.

With all that being said, there’s one word that is kind of conspicuously absent in part one, and that word is ‘Epstein.’ So here’s a brief addendum:

It’s been apparent for nearly two decades that Jeffrey Epstein was at the center of a heinous ring that trafficked in women and children, and that many powerful people — mostly, but not exclusively, men — were implicated in it.

The limited release of the so-called Epstein files has revealed a pervasive misogyny (and obviously, a hatred of children) at top levels of every kind of institution from universities to banks and multinational corporations; from businessmen to artists and scientists. These files have revealed a lot despicable behavior by members of the so-called ‘Epstein class.’

Nevertheless, by the very fact that the legally-mandated release of the complete and unredacted files has not happened, and is not going to happen so long as Republicans are in control of the federal government, it is equally clear that extremely powerful players — including the current resident of the White House — are entirely committed to preventing the public from ever seeing the full extent of the Epstein network.

Pam Bondi, an Evangelical Christian and Trump’s Attorney General until her recent defenestration, has been instrumental in (illegally) protecting Trump and other powerful men by refusing to release materials, in the possession of the Department of Justice, which implicate them. In fact Bondi’s participation in the Trump/Epstein coverup goes back to 2011, when she was Attorney General for the State of Florida.

Bluesky bio of Jess Calarco: “Sociologist. Author. Professor. Roosevelt Institute Fellow. Expert on families, schools, kids, privilege, and power. Bylines in NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, Atlantic, etc.”

The Republican congressional representatives (including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) and senators — mostly men, and overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian —are Trump’s and Bondi’s active enablers. Their professed religious convictions do not prevent them from siding with the men who raped perhaps as many as a thousand children provided to them by Epstein’s network.

You surely recall that just a few years ago, when Joe Biden was President, rumors were rampant that prominent Democrats, liberals and ‘woke’ progressives were involved in a massive pedophilia ring. At that time MAGA Republicans in Congress were loudly calling for the release of all information in government files related to Jeffery Epstein.

And now with only a few exceptions, they have made a 180-degree turn and are doing everything in their power to prevent the release those same files.

This behavior only makes sense if evangelicalism is best understood not as a religious group, but as a nationalist political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men.

Musing on Origins of Symmetry (1)

In part one of this essay I cited the song ‘Apocalypse, Please’ by the English rock band Muse (a supremely talented, but also campy and over-the-top rock band — alternative rock, progressive rock, space rock, hard rock, art rock, electronic rock, you name it — they’re the 21st century’s answer to Franz Liszt!)

This house & the reason for its inclusion in this essay are described in part one.

The title of Muse’s second, breakthrough, album is Origin of Symmetry.

Dress codes and religions without theology

Longtime readers of Sundman figures it out! may recall that I’m a fan of Karen Elizabeth Park’s substack ex voto (originally called Second Vatican). Park was for 20 years a professor of theology at a Catholic college. In ex voto she regularly writes on political and theological currents in American public life.

Here I quote at length from her most recent essay — about Trump, Hegseth, and their war on Iran — “Religion without Theology: Religious language severed from meaning and constraint in American public life.”

In this essay Park points out that language like that used by Hegseth has been addressed by Church fathers going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, and it has been declared heretical and blasphemous.

Now, listen, I know that explorations of Catholic/Christian dogma is pretty deep into the weeds. I understand that it’s unlikely to be the preferred cup of tea of your average SFIO! reader.

But I hope you’ll keep reading, because this stuff is important. It’s important because people are capable of doing scary bad things when they’re convinced that God is on their side — even if their conception of ‘God’ is shallow, childlike, and stupid.

Hegseth has a prominent tattoo of the words Deus Vult — ‘God wills it’ — which was a rallying cry of the First Crusade — and he has called the war being waged by the United States agains Iran a war of Christianity against Islam. He is virulently racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, ignorant, and stupid. He is in charge of the Armed Forces of The United States of America, the most powerful war-making apparatus in the history of humankind. AND, he is a religious fanatic. So it is important to understand what kind of religion he, like tens of millions of MAGA Americans, espouses.

Karen Elizabeth Park writes:

[There is] an urgent problem in American political discourse right now: religion emptied of theological content and used instead as dangerous symbol, gesture, and display.

As I see it, what is striking in the current moment is not only that religious language is appearing in political life in unprecedented ways, but that it is detached from the traditions that both give it meaning and limit its use. Scripture is invoked without interpretation; ritual appears without the disciplines that might once have governed it. What remains are semi-recognizable forms of religion, now emptied of the theological frameworks that used to make them intelligible.

For example, just this afternoon Pete Hegseth described the rescue of an American Air Force Pilot in terms that, throughout Christian history have been reserved for Jesus alone. He said:

You see, (he was) shot down on a Friday, Good Friday. Hidden in a cave. A crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday, flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good.

The theological discussions that decided that Hegseth’s language is full-on heresy date back to the earliest centuries of Christianity and are known as the Christological controversies. And these arguments and councils, far from being dusty old irrelevant conversations, addressed questions like “Was Jesus’ sacrificial atonement (ie his death on the cross) unique?” The answer, in the end had to be YES! (see Athanasius, Saint) because if not, then any downed fighter pilot, or any person who has been through an ordeal lasting several days, is no different from Christ. And if that’s the case, then none of it has any meaning at all.

I am aware you may or may not have any identifiable interest in historical theology. And of course that you may or may not have “faith”—but I would say that your own personal beliefs (and mine) are not at issue right now. That’s because Pete Hegseth does have faith, and so do many many of the people who support Trump and who voted for him. Without some basic historical theology, right now we are all left muttering things like “This is crazy!” or “This is unprecedented!” while what we mean is “This is really really scary and I’m not sure why or what to say about it.”

Musing on Origins of Symmetry (2)

When we think of symmetry, of course, we think of Emmy Noether, the woman who explained Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to Albert Einstein.

Wikipedia (edited by me):

Amalie Emmy Noether (23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. Noether was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl, and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

[. . .]

Noether was brought to Göttingen in 1915 by David Hilbert and Felix Klein, who wanted her expertise in invariant theory to help them in understanding general relativity, a geometrical theory of gravitation developed mainly by Albert Einstein. Hilbert had observed that the conservation of energy seemed to be violated in general relativity, because gravitational energy could itself gravitate. Noether provided the resolution of this paradox, and a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics, in a 1918 paper. This paper presented two theorems, of which the first is known as Noether's theorem. Together, these theorems not only solve the problem for general relativity, but also determine the conserved quantities for every system of physical laws that possesses some continuous symmetry.

[. . .]

Biographers suggest that she was mostly unconcerned about appearance and manners, focusing on her studies.

I wrote, in part one of this essay, that things might have turned out better for Bryon Noem if he, as a young man, had met someone like the (fictional) Pookie Adams, a character created by John Nichols in his novel The Sterile Cuckoo. (In the movie made from Nichols’s book, Pookie was sublimely portrayed by the 22 year old Liza Minnelli).

What I meant by that is that an encounter with a woman (or, preferably, women) who refused to play along with the performative femininity called for by MAGA and performative Evangelical Christianity might have opened his eyes to the simple fact that women are human persons, just like men are. This knowledge would have saved him from all the very real pain he’s now dealing with as a result of his Bimbo fetish.

Pookie is a very problematic person; that simple fact drives The Sterile Cuckoo. But she is undeniably a woman, a very intelligent & self-directed woman, and she conforms to exactly none of Bryon Noem’s ideals of femininity.

Neither did Emmy Noether, who was “mostly unconcerned about appearance and manners, focusing on her studies.”

In fact I do not think that Emmy Noether’s existence, if Bryon Noem even knows of her existence (which I very much doubt he does), could have been reconciled by him to his understanding of the nature of women, and men, and their proper relationship — as ordained by God, set forth in the Bible, and explicated by Christian teachers in the tradition in which he was raised.

But yet, to paraphrase a line from Galileo Galilei, she, Emmy Noether, existed.

[It goes without saying that if Bryon Noem’s model of genders and gender relations cannot deal with women like Emmy Noether, or even like Noem’s own wife Kristi Noem, it cannot at all accommodate the existence of people who are intersex, agender, transgender or otherwise outside the simplistic man/woman model his religion insists upon.

It’s also worth noting that Emmy Noether was Jewish, in Germany, during the early part of the 20th century. So of course she had to deal with additional shit, on top of the shit she had to deal with because she was a woman. This essay does not address this topic.]

Without some basic historical theology, right now we are all left muttering things like “This is crazy!” or “This is unprecedented!” while what we mean is “This is really really scary and I’m not sure why or what to say about it.” — Karen Elizabeth Park

Some theorems

In my essay Easy Was: Apologia pro substack sua, from February 3, 2023, I further elaborated on my goals for Sundman figures it out!, this autobiographical meditation in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, and the writing technique of interleaving of threads I planned to explore, in the spirit of what Keith Richards called, in describing the guitar technique found in so many songs by the Rolling Stones, ‘the ancient art of weaving.’

Here’s a photo I found one day in my Twitter feed (before the mediocre Nazi took over over Twitter & turned it into the hellsite it now is, causing me to dust off and nuke my account from orbit.) The photo was taken by a person with a few hundred followers —I remember their name but not their age or gender or how I came to be following them. They said they had been driving through somewhere in Iowa, as I recall, and saw this building and found it interesting enough to stop their car and snap a picture of it.

Photo taken by twitter friend @scribblenest. Used with permission.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Emmy Noether’s (first) theorem:

Noether's theorem states that every continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces has a corresponding conservation law. This is the first of two theorems published by the mathematician Emmy Noether in 1918. The action of a physical system is the integral over time of a Lagrangian function, from which the system's behavior can be determined by the principle of least action. This theorem applies to continuous and smooth symmetries of physical space. Noether's formulation is quite general and has been applied across classical mechanics, high energy physics, and recently statistical mechanics.

Here’s part of the ‘alt’ text I wrote for the ‘Easy Was’ photograph.

Top 1/2: A small, white, forlorn, symmetrical 1-story building. Two concrete steps lead from sidewalk to front door. On either side of the door, shaded by a dented corrugated awning, are matched picture windows. Centered under each window is a bench. 4 slender poles hold up the awning. Mounted above the building, centered, a white rectangular sign. Faded pink letters form 2 words: EASY WAS. Above & around the building: bright blue sky. Above the word ‘WAS,’ smaller, in faded blue letters, “Coin operated”. Below: “Lau dry”. Those words, & a leafless tree leaning from the left, are the only things that break the symmetry.

Feeling: mystery, loneliness, dashed dreams

The Origen of Origen of Symmetry

According to Wikipedia, the title of Muse’s album Origen of Symmetry derives from the 1994 book Hyperspace by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, which suggests the title The Origin of Symmetry (an allusion to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species), for a future book about the discovery of supersymmetry,

Wikipedia explains,

[Muse’s songwriter Matt] Bellamy said: "Everyone's been writing about the origin of life so now they'll start looking at the origin of symmetry; there's a certain amount of stability in the universe and to find out where it originates from would be to find out if God exists."

All figured out

“This Dietrichson business. It's murder. And murders don't come any neater. As fancy a piece of homicide as anyone ever ran into. Smart, tricky, almost perfect. But. I think Papa has it all figured out. Figured out and wrapped up in tissue paper with pink ribbons on it.” — Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity.

Now at the outset of this essay I said that I was going to attempt, in manner of my sensei Bullwinkle J. Moose, to pull a rabbit out of my hat and tie together all the threads introduced in part one of this essay — the New Gods comic book series, Bryon Noem’s Bimbification kink, Hegseth’s easy Christianity and Trump’s threatened genocide, symmetry. . .

Well, obviously I haven’t done any of that. For example, you may be wondering, among other things, what the notion of symmetry has to do with any of this other stuff — The Return of the New Gods, Bryon Noem’s Bimbo business, Hegseth’s blasphemy, Pookie’s haircut, and so forth.

So, as Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, “I will tell you. I don’t know.”

In fact if you were to ask me, “John, do you really understand Noether’s First and Second Theorems about symmetry and the conservation of forces?,” I would reply,

“Fuck no. Who do you think I am? Albert Einstein?”

But, as Karen Elizabeth Park noted, “Without some basic historical theology, right now we are all left muttering things like “This is crazy!” or “This is unprecedented!” while what we mean is “This is really really scary and I’m not sure why or what to say about it.”

Just a few days ago a lot of us were wondering whether Trump (whose religion is Trump; whose theology consists of the precept “Trump is God”) was going to drag us all into a game called ‘Global Thermonuclear War.’ And the only people who might be able to do something to prevent that — the good Christian Republicans in Congress and in Trump’s cabinet — would rather see millions of people immolated and ‘an entire civilization wiped out’ than consider stepping in.

Which I, for one, found really scary. In fact I still do find it really scary.

So, not knowing what to say about it, I sat down to write, just to see what would come out of my fingers. For reasons that are opaque to me, the symmetry stuff has been taking up a lot of space in my squirrel brain lately.

And now I share it with you.

I cribbed this photo of Karen Elizabeth Park’s theology school textbooks from her ‘ex voto’ substack.

Passing the collection plate

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