Not A Class Act

Messianic Pretenders

These days false messiahs abound.  In the Christian tradition, a messiah was someone anointed by God and called to holy office.  Priests, prophets and kings were all messiahs in their respective days of public duty.  All of these served and foreshadowed the one Messiah, the Christ, Who would come forth as the saviour of the world--both the world of the Jews and the world of the Gentiles.

As paganism has advanced in the post-Christian West, more and more petty messiahs have come forth.  They claim to be saviours of the world.  Apostatizing from Christ, the true Messiah, the West has looked for (false) messiahs everywhere.  Public figures increasingly have adopted the mien of the Chosen, the One, the Great Leader who will save the world.

No doubt the Beatles were just being stupidly flippant (and narcissistically arrogant) when they asserted that they were more significant and popular than the One true Messiah, Jesus Christ.  But it would seem they reflected accurately the coming temper of our age.  They have been followed by an endless stream of pretenders--equally vain, equally foolish, equally doomed to derision and failure.

President Obama has adopted the mien of a messiah--deliberately so, we believe.  Now he faces, even whilst limping toward the end of his time in office, a presidency characterised by serial failures and incompetencies.
  Truly, he is an apt messianic figure for our age.  He has typified the cultural dislocation and dismemberment of the West.  A fitting secularist messiah.

Columnist Doug Powers profiles another messianic pretender, Michael Bloomberg.  He has taken on the mantle of being the saviour of the planet, a man appointed to deliver the entire race from destruction.

Around 40,000 people will arrive in Paris by either bicycle, solar-powered go-cart or jet airliner for the COP21 conference that begins tomorrow. Michael Bloomberg is using the occasion to join President Obama in rebuking the real danger the world faces: Republicans like Ted Cruz:

The realities of climate change will force American deniers — or “crazies” — to accept reality, Michael Bloomberg told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.  “Even the right-wing crazies no longer say climate change isn’t real,” the billionaire former mayor of New York City declared. “They say it’s natural, it’s not business, not man-made.”

“Why do they say that? Because in every one of their towns and villages and states and counties, they now have floods where they had droughts, they have droughts where they had floods, they have storms, they have tornadoes.”

Bloomberg has made fighting climate change one of his singular initiatives since he left office in 2013 after more than a decade leading the city. “You’ve got a guy like Ted Cruz, who I think (prominent American lawyer Alan) Dershowitz said was the smartest law student he ever had, and he says some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.”  “The only explanation — the only explanation — is he doesn’t believe it, he’s just saying it. Ted Cruz is a smart guy and you can’t say what he says in an intelligent way.”

According to the New York Times in 2012, Bloomberg has eleven homes. Eleven. ELEVEN! He also has a fleet of private planes that he uses to get to and from those homes, as well as to arrive at “climate change” summit meetings in style. That’s the guy accusing others of not believing what they’re saying.

The air feels cleaner already, doesn’t it?

At the Paris climate summit, Prince Charles is expected to repeat his claims that “climate change” is the root cause of war in Syria, but the good news is that between Charles and Bloomberg they have enough floor space to house all the refugees if they so choose. After all, if huge carbon footprints caused the climate change that caused the refugee crisis, it’s the least they could do (cue crickets).

Such self-righteous, arrogant pretension  The hypocrisy reminds us of the classical Eastern guru, preaching abstention from the flesh to his followers, while he serially beds every female devotee in the commune.  Meanwhile, his followers serially bow and scrape because he is such a great and holy man.

Being a messiah, even a pretender, panders to exorbitant arrogance and self-righteousness.  We recall old Mikey gravely telling us peons that, whilst he did not believe in God, were he wrong and there were indeed a seat of judgement, he believed he would be just fine, because he has done so much good.  He was crassly boasting at the time of how much money he had donated to favourite causes. He figured the Almighty would gratefully thank him.