My last post, "Batless baseball and the Japanese Eraser Dog," highlighted a photo of Elon Musk wearing what was described only as "a baseball cap." I hadn't noticed it was actually a MAGA cap until Debbie pointed it out in a comment. In her reading, the black MAGA cap represents Elon's role as "captain of this ship":
IMO, Musk has been told to wear the Dark MAGA CAP, to show ( for those who have eyes to see) who really is the CAPTAIN of this ship we currently know as America.
This reminded me that I had posted about a black MAGA hat back in 2021, several months before the #DarkMAGA hashtag first appeared and years before Elon Musk was in any way associated with MAGA. In my November 2021 post "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected," I wrote, punning on the fact that maga means "witch" in Latin:
This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat. My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red.
That post begins, though, with a discussion of a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh toy wearing a T-shirt that says "Mischievous Dog." Winnie-the-Pooh is yellow, the same color as the Doge meme, so I searched for "michievous doge" just to see what would turn up. It turns out there's a meme image with exactly that name:
Another search result I got was for a game called Doge and Bee, in which you must "protect the mischievous doge from the attack of ferocious bees."
This ties right in with my 2021 post, the title of which includes Deseret -- a Mormon word meaning "honeybee." This picture from the Doge and Bee game also confirms the link between the mischievous dog(e) and Winnie-the-Pooh:
Dogs don't climb trees, but bears do; and Pooh in particular has been known to climb trees in quest of honey.
The post goes on to talk about Christopher Columbus and St. Christopher. I wouldn't ordinarily have associated Columbus with Musk, but note how Debbie calls Musk "the captain of this ship" and says he can be identified as such by the black hat he wears.
There's also this painting of Columbus before the Doge of Venice:
The most direct Columbus-Musk link, though, comes from our friend Leo, whose February 27 post "Gray Iluvatar" tentatively identifies Musk with a figure from Book of Mormon prophecy:
I think that possibility makes Elon Musk a prime candidate for the "man among the gentiles" upon whom the spirit of god is wrought. There’s no denying Elon is a singular individual, and I once mused on a few possible explanations for his existence. He is famously obsessed with getting to Mars and has made remarkable advances in space travel to that end. It got me thinking about what elvish might reveal about him.
For Leo, the identity of the "man among the gentiles" is a mystery, but for more traditional Mormons it is not. The man among the gentiles is universally understood to be Christopher Columbus.
The 2021 post also discusses the legendary St. Christopher, who is traditionally portrayed with the head of a dog and bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain meme.
According to legend, Christopher wanted to serve the most powerful king of all. First he served the King of Canaan, but when he learned that the king feared the devil, he went and served the devil instead. Then, learning that the devil feared Christ, he became a servant of Christ. Musk has followed this same pattern, being a Democrat when the Democrats were in power and then switching to MAGA once it was clear that Trump was going to win. More specifically, Christopher's stint as a servant of the devil calls to mind the time Musk dressed up as the "Devil's Champion."
