Psalm 34: 1-22 (links validated 7/9/24a)

In director Christopher Nolan’s first Batman film, at one point Bruce Wayne / Batman is trying to figure out what The Joker wants. He tells his friend Alfred that criminals are not complicated if you can get an angle on what they are looking to get or to achieve. Alfred has a different take on the matter: some men don’t want anything. They just want to watch the world burn. (Watch this clip here.) That is an apt description of evil and wicked people as Psalm 34 depicts them as well.

Although the final scene of the last episode of the TV series The Sopranos remains a bit of a mystery, most viewers concluded that the meaning of the last and sudden appearance of a completely black, blank, and silent screen indicated that the show’s anti-hero, Tony Soprano, had gotten shot through the head and died. Over the years of the series viewers were simultaneously drawn to Tony and repulsed by him. But in the end Tony was a violent man whose violence led to his own demise. Evil will slay the wicked. The wicked self-destruct. So if Tony did indeed die a violent death at the end of the show—and in front of his whole family at that—well, then there is a sense in which one could say “What do you expect? You cannot spend your life murdering people and forever seeking vengeance and not expect it to come back to bite you eventually.” What Tony did unto others, others finally did unto him. What you sow, you reap...

In his series of books on The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, author Robert Caro notes repeatedly that Johnson was an inveterate liar. Johnson lied constantly about matters trivial and serious, small and large and everything in between. He lied about his war record in World War II, inflating his one brief combat moment into a richly embroidered tale of harrowing heroism that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what actually took place. And Johnson told that lie so often that eventually he clearly totally believed it himself. Look at most any photo of Johnson as Senator, Vice-President, and President and you will see on his suitcoat lapel the Silver Star military award he manipulated to get for himself through his whopper of a false story. In Caro’s second volume, Means of Ascent, he zeroes in on Johnson’s 1948 campaign for the Senate. Johnson’s opponent was a popular former governor of Texas named Coke Stevenson. During the campaign Johnson told a boldfaced lie about Stevenson’s position on certain tariffs. It was an obvious falsehood but Johnson wagered that Stevenson would believe that the good people of Texas were too smart to believe it and so he would make no effort to rebut the claim. And indeed, Stevenson refused to refute what he was sure everyone knew was something not true of his actual position. But as is often true of a lie that gets repeated often enough, people did come to believe and by the time Stevenson realized he did need overtly to set the record straight it was too late and by then Johnson and his team were able to say in essence, “Oh sure, now he is changing his story!”