Jesus Is on Your Side By Susie Moore for Red State
I’ve never been terribly into Stephen King as an author. No knock against him — he has an amazing body of work and has had an inarguable impact on the culture over the past 45+ years. I just never got drawn into his works, perhaps because, to the extent I got into horror fiction, it was Dean Koontz who captured my interest — and he has a fairly prolific bibliography, as well. (“Watchers” is still one of the best reads ever. Highly recommend it.)
I don’t follow King’s social media, though was vaguely aware that he had a presence because I’d occasionally see something he said retweeted into my timeline — usually something that was irksome and confirmed to me that he and I reside on different, political planets. Frankly, I don’t care all that much about that — it certainly wouldn’t keep me from reading his work or enjoying movies when/if time permitted, and I were so inclined. (If a piece of work is good and piques my interest, its author’s politics rarely scare me off. I can generally separate the two, and I don’t subscribe to the notion of viewing every person and every action through the lens of politics.)
Yesterday morning, as I was still wiping the sleep out of my eyes, this tweet from him rolled past:
Jesus was not on your side.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 19, 2021
Hmm. That seemed harsh (as I’m sure it was intended.) I took a couple of minutes to breeze through some of the replies. They weren’t encouraging, either consisting of verbal high-fives or apoplexy. (Such is Twitter, right?)
My instinctive reaction was indignance. But then it dawned on me how sad a statement King’s actually was — and how widely he missed the point (and his mark.) So this was my reply:
