The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

“Day-O,” or, “The Banana Boat Song,” was the hit that made Calypso, Belafonte’s third album, the first LP in history to sell a million copies. 1956, the same year a White boy from Mississippi released a record called Elvis Presley. Belafonte outsold the so-called King.

But before that! In the fall of 2011, occupations sprouted in parks and public squares everywhere. One of the premises of the movement was the idea that we are still strangers to democracy, that maybe we have not yet lost for good what we have not yet achieved.

The Gospel of Thomas—the doubting one—does not, of course, reside with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the King James. But then, Trump didn’t read the Bible. He didn’t need to. Rule books are for losers. Reading is for losers. The gospel of Trump, like that of Thomas—noncanonical, antiestablishment—is Gnostic,

Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century CE, is the path Christianity did not take, most of its texts destroyed as heretical,

killings—caused by the Clintons, for reasons upon which one could only speculate—“Arkan-cide.”