The Almond Branch: A novel by Stan Rice. Part two. Special Guest Appearances

 

 

Stan Rice has recently published another novel, The Almond Branch, in the Under the Sun series. This series poses the question, what is it that God is doing in this world under the sun? The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes, which is the almost-agnostic book in the Old Testament. Rice speculates on answers to this question: in the time of Solomon (Among the Lilies); in the last days of Jerusalem (this novel); in the Middle Ages of Europe (Paraclete); and in a modern Amish community (Blue Wild Indigo).

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:

In Jerusalem, immediately before its conquest by Babylon, Jeremiah is on his way to succeeding his father as a priest. Even when they are children, Miriam loves Jeremiah, but Jeremiah is clueless about human love even when he grows up. He is borderline crazy and keeps alienating himself from his society. He thinks God speaks to him through puns. Jeremiah’s father has pagan images in addition to Jewish ones, to appease Jebusite neighbors, but Jeremiah destroys them. And it keeps getting worse, until Jeremiah has to live in a cave with the other prophets. Miriam is torn between a marriage proposal from an older but very good man, Saad, and Jeremiah’s invitation for her to join the prophets, though not as his lover.

Even after Miriam marries Saad, Jeremiah still seeks her comradeship. The king counts on Egypt’s help against Babylon, only to be disappointed. A wealthy businessman and his grim brother, modeled after Trump and Pence, cannot save Jerusalem either. While Jerusalem suffers starvation and cannibalism during the Babylonian siege, the king throws Jeremiah into a cesspit, from which he is rescued by a steward modeled after Obama and a court jester modeled after Biden. Jeremiah rejoices when the tension is broken and Jerusalem falls, and all the skilled people, including Saad, are deported. Miriam stays behind and rescues the Old Testament wisdom literature—which is still an embarrassment to conservatives—from being lost.

 

Rice uses modern politicians as models for some of the principal characters in this novel. One would have to be blind to miss them.

• One is the angry, red-headed, selfish businessman Trom-panazzer, who at first threatens Miriam’s family with bankruptcy, though their total fortune would contribute insignificantly to Trom-panazzer’s wealth. Later, he is the Babylonians’ local man-on-the-ground to tell the powerless figurehead king what to do, and advises the remnant of Judah to be merciless to the poor and to the sojourners from outside of Judah. This has to be Donald Trump. Trump’s worshipers, I mean, supporters acknowledge that Trump knows and cares little about religion but that God is using him (Him?) to advance the Kingdom of God.
• Another is the unsmiling but quiet gray-headed Pen-sanazzer, who is very religious and who instructs the remaining Jews that it is God’s will to believe and to do whatever Trom-panazzer says. This very clearly refers to the unsmiling but quiet fundamentalist Mike Pence, who gave religious support to Trump, until Trump kicked him off the team in 2022.
• Obiden-elech is the court jester who always had a big grin and waves around a puppet king. Like jesters in the days of eld, Obiden-elech is able to mock the king of Judah by having the puppet say things. He is hardly ever serious, although all of his jokes hit their target. Clearly, this is Joe Biden.
• And finally there is Obama-lech, an Ethiopian (not too different from a Kenyan) who is quiet, thoughtful, sincere, and nice. He is the one who discovers Jeremiah at the bottom of a pit. This is a real story about the Ethiopian Ebed-Melech (Jeremiah 38: 7-9). Unlike the original, Rice’s story has Obama-lech piss into the pit and that is how he discovers Jeremiah is there. The only thing that would make it clearer that this is based on Barack Obama would be a footnote, of which this novel is thankfully free. (See the endnotes, however.)

In these ways, Rice makes this novel relevant to modern political situations. Another way is that politicians like to screw with the meanings of words. The Trump and Pence analogs make it sound, in their speeches, as if the Babylonian conquest is good news for the coming prosperity of Judah. Politicians deliberately miscon-screw the meanings of words to mislead the public.

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part six. Recurring Prototypes

 

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

There are two important figures in Rice’s novel who seem to be almost the same person. They could be considered historical prototypes. One of them is King Henry VIII of England, and the other is Donald Trump. Not only do they talk and act alike, with similar delusions of total power, but they even look alike.

In another Rice novel reviewed in this blog, a third person also closely resembles Donald Trump. He is Andrew Jackson, the president who instigated the Trail of Tears. Not only in behavior and delusions, but even in appearance, Jackson and Trump (who has a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office) are nearly alike, especially in their disdain for Native Americans.

In Rice’s novel, it does not end well for either Trump or Henry.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part three. What Was Andrew Jackson Like?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As in any novel written by a Cherokee author, president Andrew Jackson will appear as an evil man. And that is because he was. Rice would have to totally alter the historical background of the novel in order to make Jackson appear even the least bit heroic

But there are a significant number of white Americans who idolize Andrew Jackson. Their spiritual leader is Donald Trump, who has a Jackson portrait prominently displayed in the White House.

I then realized something about Rice’s novel. The way he portrayed Andrew Jackson was, in fact, very much as we know Donald Trump to be. Rice was modeling Jackson after Trump, including his anger, his vanity, and his racism—even his facial expressions. Rice even put some of Trump’s words into Jackson’s mouth.

To this day, most Cherokees resent having the face of Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill. When a new series of twenty dollar bills came out a couple of decades ago, Jackson’s face was still on it, but larger. A Cherokee artist told me that this was fine with him; it just made the target a little larger for Cherokee bullets. He was joking of course, because most Cherokees are poor enough that they cannot waste a twenty dollar bill on target practice.

During the Biden Administration, the opportunity came along to have a different face on this bill. The federal government was planning to issue new currency featuring the face of Harriet Tubman, who was one of the driving forces behind the Underground Railroad. She earned her place in American history. But Donald Trump, offended by the thought of having her on American currency, canceled these plans and insisted on keeping Jackson’s face on the currency.

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

 have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have his version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship. This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.

A Modest Proposal: How Trump and Musk Can Save the World from Global Warming

A Modest Proposal: How Trump and Musk Can Save the World

The only truly effective way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is for all of us to quit producing so much of it: buying less, traveling less. This is my personal solution. But never in all of human history have a large group of people ever cut back on consumption and waste, except recently in the European Union, and then only mildly.

Big-thinking engineers have offered high-tech, expensive, and risky solutions generally called geoengineering, that is, engineering the entire Earth. Two examples are huge carbon-absorption towers and spewing reflective particles into the stratosphere.

The huge towers would collectively breathe in the entire atmosphere, sponge the excess carbon dioxide out of it (leaving only what plants need for photosynthesis), and then exhale the neutralized atmosphere. Such towers, even if there could possibly be enough energy to run them, would have to be huge and incredibly numerous. Proponents of this type of geoengineering are not too clear about what to do with the waste products of these towers. The cost of this kind of project would start in the hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The other solution would be to inject hundreds of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it would produce a suspended white haze that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. The particles could be released from a fleet of special aircraft. The everlasting gloom might be a small price to pay for release from global warming. This solution would actually not remove carbon from the atmosphere. No one is sure if the toxic particles might settle and pollute the entire planet. Once again, the cost would start at hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The Trump II administration would clearly be unwilling to spend this kind of money to solve a problem they refuse to admit exists—global warming.

Unless.

If these geoengineering schemes could be proposed by companies owned by Elon Musk, then Trump would be willing to demand a trillion dollars for them, and Congress would not dare to say no. No amount of money is too much for the federal government to give to Musk. He already owns Space-X. All he would need to do is to produce another hundred thousand aircraft to release the sulfur.

Right now, Musk’s companies are losing money, largely because of the overwhelmingly negative image of Musk Himself. There may not be anything wrong with Teslas, as cars, but when half the world starts calling them Swasticars then the company will start to fail. But Musk’s rockets keep exploding also. So it is possible that Musk’s companies would be unable to competently carry out these geoengineering projects.

But that doesn’t matter. Musk does not need to build cars or rockets that actually work. His market is Donald Trump. Donald Trump can get Musk a trillion dollars of federal money, no problem. The cars and rockets themselves do not matter.

And if one of Musk’s aircrafts explodes, it is no matter, since this too would add reflective particles to the stratosphere. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Conservative Christians already worship Donald Trump. Any arguments, in this blog or anywhere else, that addresses any other aspect of Christianity other than the Donald are a waste of time. These geoengineering projects would, moreover, demonstrate that the efforts of conservative Christians to worship Trump would prove to have been correct, for, in this way, Musk and Trump could literally save the world.

Gulf of America: Why Stop There?

It is usually scientists who have the right and responsibility to decide the scientific names of organisms, and in some cases the common names as well. For example, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Now International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants) gets to decide the rules for plant names and the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature for animal names. However, this is scientific convention, not law.

The new Trump Administration singlehandedly decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.” Trump has no legal authority to require this, although he can personally call it anything he wants. However, he has already excluded the Associated Press from press meetings because they continued to use “Gulf of Mexico”. He can, and presumably will, cancel funding for any recipient of federal funds or any government agency that uses the name Gulf of Mexico.

My upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, makes one unnecessary reference to the Gulf of Mexico. I am proofreading the final pages, and I will change this to simply “the gulf” since the meaning is clear: it is where the Mississippi pours its water. I will stand and fight some other time when it is more important.

But such a time might come sooner than later.

Consider the example of the giant sequoia tree. It is the species with the largest trees in the world, and they are trees of incomparable beauty. I have written, and continue to write, a lot about them, including in Forgotten Landscapes. After these trees were discovered in the nineteenth century, the British originally insisted the scientific name be Wellingtonia; Americans countered with Washingtonia. Finally the name that was used was Sequoiadendron giganteum, named after the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah who single-handedly invented the indigenous Cherokee writing system, which allowed the Cherokee tribe to, within decades, achieve the highest literacy rate in the world, in their own language. The common name is giant sequoia, and thus it has been known for over a century.

The Trump Administration, I do not doubt, considers Native Americans to be savages. Or, at least, to have been so in previous centuries. Would Donald Trump and Elon Musk tolerate a savage name for the biggest trees in the world? I can foresee that Trump might want the name changed to Trumpia muskii, or maybe Megalotrumpia muskii. Or maybe Musk, unabashed admirer of the old South African apartheid system, might want Apartheidia muskii. They might just let the common name be “giant redwoods” and let it go at that, because “Trump trees” sounds too silly even for them. I think.

Trump would have no authority to enforce a name change for the giant sequoia tree. But he might have at least provisional authority to require all government agencies to change the name to Megalotrumpia, and to cancel funding for any government project that refuses the name change. Any legal challenges to this would take years, and even then Trump could just ignore the court ruling.

Such a decision would profoundly affect my book, Forgotten Landscapes, not only because of its frequent references to giant sequoia trees but also because of its front-and-center defense of the non-savagery of Native Americans, who transformed the North American landscape by fire, hunting, agriculture, irrigation, and orchards. But by then the book will already be rolling off of the presses. Such a decision might even throw a spotlight on my book, which would be positive. The only people who would agree with Trump on this matter are those who do not buy or read books. But, all the same, I would prefer my book to stand on its own merits.

At the present time, this essay is written in a spirit of humor rather than alarm. But if the Oval Office proclaims that the plague bacterium, now known as Yersinia pestis, be renamed Obamabacterium bidenii, don’t be totally blind-sided.

The above essay appeared on my science blog. But this is a religion blog, and I have a few words to add to it for people who are interested in religion.

In Genesis, God told Adam to name the animals (presumably plants, also). Apparently Trump and Musk think God has given them a similar authority. To name something is to take the first step in conquering it. Gaza as an American territory? Canada as an American state? The New American Empire might be taking form as an open reality, not just as a de-facto situation.

A New English Verb: To Trump

For centuries, the verb to trump has meant, in card games, that the hand of cards that one person has prevails over the hand that another person has. The ace trumps the jack, for example. But since Donald Trump has entered the political scene, this word has been given a new meaning, not by the dictionaries and the people who watch over our language, but the way the word is used in everyday speech. I wish to propose a slight extension of the meaning.

It hasn’t just been since Trump entered the presidential campaign the first time in 2016. The image created by his behavior has been going on for decades. Back in the 1990s, news articles commonly presented Trump as an arrogant rich man, an image he cultivated in his television show. Even while he faced one bankruptcy after another, he promoted his image as a powerful man because of his wealth. See, for example, these Newsweek articles from thirty years ago:

·         March 4, 1990, about Trump’s collapsing real estate, casino, and airline empires, and others on May 14 and June 18.

·         A cartoon published on May 4, 1991 with Natives joking about Trump wanting to sell the island of Manhattan back to them.

Trump’s behavior has also given him the popular image as thinking himself unbridled in his approaches to women. Further Newsweek articles from thirty years ago include:

·         March 4, 1990, about Trump’s divorce woes;

·         December 24, 1990 with an article about Trump and Rowanne Brewer;

·         July 8, 1991with an article about Trump and Carla Bruni;

·         April 19, 1993 with a photo of Trump embracing Marla Maples.

But since being president the first time, Trump has used his power to squelch any and all criticism of himself.

Therefore, I suggest a new meaning to the verb “to trump”: it means to screw over. The reason is that Trump was convicted of financial felonies connected to sex, and has been accused of sexual harassment, and has said demeaning things about how much women love to have him grab them. Even in those cases where his negative image did not lead to a conviction, it is still part of his image.

Because of all of this, I suggest that the following uses of the verb to trump are useful figures of speech:

·         A big corporation can trump a smaller one.

·         A big country can trump a smaller one.

·         A man can trump a woman.

Language continues to evolve. Already, according to this article in The Atlantic, people who dislike Trump are avoiding the use of the verb. But maybe we can make it into a useful verb once again.

Trump you.

 

Will America Celebrate July 4, 2025?

Of course we will. But it might be a profoundly different kind of celebration.

Donald Trump consistently refuses to recognize the legitimacy of ANY election that does not go in favor of Him or His Chosen Followers. He says any election (or court case) that He loses is fraud. And His Christian devotees agree with Him totally on this point.

Whether Trump wins or loses in the November election, He will declare Himself the legitimate ruler of America. If He loses the popular and electoral votes, He will urge His devotees to take swift and decisive action against the American government, as He did in 2021. Only this time His followers can inflict much more damage. If He wins, He may not permit any more free elections. The reason is simple. If He considers all elections that do not confirm Him to be the winner to be frauds, He will have to establish a system (such as they have in places such as Russia) in which it is impossible for Him to lose. This will be, of course, against the constitution. So He will not proclaim Himself permanent president. Instead, He will proclaim Himself permanent Steward—that is, taking care of America during the time in which an election that He recognizes as legitimate can take place. This would be a temporary situation, but “temporary” could mean many years.

It is possible that on July 4, 2025, Americans will know that there is no real choice in what they will continue to call democracy. But most Americans, believing Trump to be the Chosen of God, will be just fine with it. But most other countries in the world will recognize that America will no longer be a democracy.

Meanwhile, where I live in France, many people are upset about the strong showing of the political right wing in French elections, happening this week. Mainstream and liberal French fear what will happen if Marine LePen’s National Rally party gains control. But Marine LePen would be considered a moderate Republican in America. She more closely resembles Liz Cheney or Nikki Haley than Donald Trump, in terms of policy and attitude. She resembles John McCain, whose very memory Trump detests and will not tolerate, more than she resembles Him.