The Ballad of Billy Barr

Accomplished at playing the bagpipe, Attorney General William Barr plays a ballad of his own—a funeral dirge proclaiming law and order. Billy Barr has long stewed over the immorality and lawlessness of American culture. He blames mental illness, drug overdoses, opioid addiction, crime, violence and suicide squarely on the “bitter results of the new secular age.” Billy Barr supports the death penalty as strongly as he favors overturning Roe vs. Wade to bar women from having abortions. He is intent on protecting the sanctity of  human life by killing prisoners but keeping women in shackles. The liberals are spurning God, Billy insists! The liberal factions of the American government are enabling chaos to reign over the rule of law! Billy Barr wants to turn back the clock to a time when morality prevailed in America.

Let’s consider that Billy Barr is right about one thing: Morality in 1787 did not have to be spelled out by the founding fathers. The Colonists came to America to avoid religious persecution. The separation of church and state was intended to prevent religious persecution—of any one religious group attaining ascendancy and thereby repressing others. Billy Barr believes it is piety that lies at the heart of the founding fathers of our great democracy. The founders were Christians, mainly deists, and from many denominations. Morality did not need to be codified in the U.S. Constitution because it was customary – a deep and abiding social expectation for the American people to be moral, good and kind. God-fearing men governed themselves virtuously. Morality was embedded within the fabric of the American culture. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, not one founder bragged about grabbing women’s pussies and blurted, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

If Billy Barr had his way, he’d make sure that morality was spelled out in the Constitution. Above all, he wants the American people to be virtuous, and if they don’t confirm to his version of morality, then lock them up! He thinks society’s ills are the result of systemic immorality—bad people doing bad things and getting away with it. Except the bad people in jails are the working-class and poor black, brown and white who can’t afford fixers—high priced lawyers like Jay Sekulow and Michael Cohen. Billy wants to stop immoral people from freeloading—getting free room and board in prison—one more reason to bring back the death penalty. Let’s just kill them all and let God sort them out! Billy bashes progressives for throwing money at programs and initiatives to mitigate mental illness, drug overdoses, opioid addiction, crime, violence and suicide. Billy says progressives make policy their religion, not piety.

Now Billy has got a real religion—Roman Catholicism, which has deep historical roots in the precept of killing for the sake of winning holy wars. Now Billy is not an ordinary Catholic or a saint in the vein of St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa. Billy belongs to Opus Dei, the elite secret society whose members opt to do the Work of God in the world through their ordinary occupations by practicing charity, patience, humility diligence, integrity and other Christian virtues. Members of Opus Dei engage in sanctifying work, which means moving through the world as the spirit of Christ—to work competently and ethically to love and serve God. This mandate tells Billy Barr to be moral but also to be good and kind.

Oh, Billy Barr, you want the people to be good, but boys can be boys.

The Roman Catholic Church in all of its manifestations and especially Opus Dei is embedded within a rigid hierarchical, predominantly patriarchal culture, one that has long ascribed to two sets of rules: executive privilege for the top and strict morality for everyone else. One reason why the Church has failed to thrive in the Twenty-first Century is due to archaic laws that failed to meet the needs of a modern global population, inclusive of women, LGBQT and the civil rights movement. But another more significant chink in the Church’s centuries-old armor lies within its patriarchal culture that encouraged, aided and abetted the systemic practice of pedophilia, thereby maintaining the two sets of rules: freedom for the boys on top and strict morality for all the rest of us.

Billy asserts the President must during a crisis make decisions that demand speed, secrecy, utility and prudent judgement—this is exactly the way Trump has dealt with the largest health crisis to ever beset Americans! Billy cites the President’s rights to his powers under Article II of the U.S. Constitution as absolute, even if that entails unprecedented corruption and egregious abuse of power. As a sovereign power, the President cannot be held accountable by any other legal entity, including Congress or the Courts. Voting, opines Billy Barr, is the only way to remove a President.

Except under Billy’s vigilance, voting is no longer the sure-fire way to remove a president. Elections can be rigged and scorch-the-earth accusations of voter fraud can embolden Billy Barr to legally sanction how the votes are counted and who becomes the next president. Barr has already planted seeds of doubt about the integrity of the nation’s election security. He worries about foreign countries producing counterfeit mail-in ballots. “It'd be very hard to sort out what's happening,” he says.

Billy Barr wants us to be moral again, the way we were in 1787 when the founding fathers did not need to codify morality in the Constitution because good God-fearing men and women, many diverse types of people, governed themselves virtuously. Billy stands by the president as a shining example of moral authority and a paragon of virtue. Clearly Trump embodies the four cardinal virtues, which are the bedrock of a moral life. Prudence is common sense—the good judgment to lead a nation. Justice is the virtue that stands for the pursuit of fair play. Fortitude is courage, the bravery required to stand up to intimidation, especially from bullies. Temperance pays homage to self-control, tempering the appetite for sex, food, and especially money.

Any time you hear a public leader talk about morality, you can bet what they really want is power. Attorney General William Barr is the hammer for many wealthy interests group: conservative groups, the Alt-Right, the John Birch Society, libertarian organizations, and the uber rich, all of whom don’t want to pay taxes.They do favor turning the office of the American Presidency into a colossal sovereign power, and that is as close to becoming a monarchy as anyone can get. Through huge campaign contributions, wealthy interest groups paid for unlimited access to the President. They own the Office of the President—and they do not want interference from Congress or the Courts, the press or the American people.

Where Barr really takes aim is by implementing a Catholic hierarchy that is as archaic as a corrupt Pope in the dark ages who appears to be powerful but is really operating a puppet regime in accordance with whims of a conclave of ruthless cardinals. Similarly, we have a President of the United States who is owned by ruthless, reigning financial interests, both foreign and domestic.

Take the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, proposed in November of 2017. The permanent tax rate for corporations was cut from thirty-five to twenty-one percent. Modest reductions in individual tax were made to all the rest of us. The modest tax cuts are the equivalent of throwing a bare bone to a pack of wild dogs. These individual tax rates will expire in 2025. The moneyed elite who demand a limited role for government in domestic and foreign affairs do not want to pay taxes. They do, however, want all the rest of us to pay taxes to support the infrastructure that we—including them—use.

Billy Barr is killing us with his sad song.

During this time of the pandemic, the federal government has intentionally failed to implement a national plan to help ease the largest health crisis ever faced in American history. Trump slammed the CDC’s existing guidelines as “very tough” and “expensive.” Yet the pandemic rages out of control and the death toll mounts each day. In an effort to restore the economy, children need to be in school so parents can return to work. Federal pressure is placed on schoolteachers and local officials to open schools, but the Federal leadership will not use money or implement guidelines to help the schools to open safely and responsibly. People are dying and being hauled away in refrigerated trucks. The Federal leadership will not spend money to save lives but loves giving the uber-rich massive tax cuts.

After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed, an analysis conducted by the Congressional Budget Office showed it would create only 0.7 per cent economic growth and projected it would result in a $1.9 trillion increase in the federal deficit by 2028. Now with the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, the full extent of its outcome is not yet known. The Brookings Institution called the bill “the wrong thing at the wrong time,” adding “It will take resources from future generations from today’s lower and middle income households to enrich today’s well-to-do.” The prevailing argument made by the uber rich has always been: if the rich are made richer, then somehow the wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. It is the diametric opposite of  providing greater opportunities to the lower and middle classes so they can rise on their own.

There are two sets of rules, one for the top and another for all the rest of us.

People in leadership roles or money interests from behind the scenes, make the rules but they do not have to follow the rules. It is the equivalent of Trump grabbing women’s pussies, and saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”  The top wax poetically about morality for the masses, while they do whatever they want. Call it white male privilege. It is the Opus Dei Equivalent of honoring the Virgin Mary, while rich white men traffic, exploit, and exchange thirteen-year-old girls as if they are trading baseball cards. Let’s not forget that it was Billy Barr’s father, Donald Barr who gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job at the private school Dalton. The senior Barr, headmaster of the Dalton School, was alleged to have had a role in hiring the college dropout and uncredentialed Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher. And we still don’t know how Jeffrey Epstein made so much money. Do tell us, Billy Barr!

Billy Barr’s dirge about law and order is really about money and power. American Democracy has never been perfect; it’s always been messy. But it has always struggled to be fair or at least to create the perception of fairness. Many wealthy interest groups no longer even bother to create the perception that they are fair. William Barr will have us believe that quelling protests against the egregious abuse of governmental power is about maintaining law and order. Locking up bad people is the moral thing to do. But Billy’s song isn’t about morality, it’s about power. Billy wants women to respect human life, but teen girls without economic means can be heavily trafficked to wealthy men. Blacks can be moral as long as they stay in their place. Ditto Hispanics. Ditto Queers. This isn’t at all about morality, it’s about abuse of power.

There is no right or wrong at the top. There is no rule of law. There are no laws that cannot be broken. There are no social customs that should be adhered to for the sake of propriety. There is no sense of decency. And there is no shame. Instead of draining the swamp, there is our forced submersion into the hadal zone—the deepest layer of the ocean where there is no light. We are returning to the dark ages led by a corrupt puppet Pope. Just like the dark ages, we even have a plague!

Prayer for relief

We’ve established Billy Barr is accomplished at playing the bagpipe. Instead of playing Amazing Grace, he plays a ballad of his own—a funeral dirge to proclaim law and order, a bitter, twisted tune ennobling and protecting Donald Trump, in a bizarre attempt to extol him as a man who has virtue, when the entire world can see he has none. With all of this established, let us now establish our prayer for relief. A Prayer for relief is a request or prayer made to the court during a civil proceeding. It’s a request for specific damages that the pleader deems to be entitled. We, the people, pray to God that Billy Barr will soon run out of air so he can no longer play the pipes.

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