And On The Eighth Day, God Created Assholes

We concluded in our previous post that Cain and Abel must have banged their own sisters, because we couldn't even entertain the possibility that their mother Eve was involved. We are delicate that way. But the question of how that population ball got rolling isn't actually answered anywhere in what people persist in calling the Good Book.

In fact, the Book was originally devoid of punctuation, and consequently the plot lurches along without coherence. There are Gaps. If we want to fill in those gaps, we have to guess. And guess what? People of legitimate religious credentials have been guessing for centuries. With apologies to my Jewish friends, I never heard of Midrash before this week and still don't know how to use it in a sentence, but I love it. Midrash is sort of a Cliff's Notes for the Torah, supplementary material designed to be clipped to the scroll to explain all the bits that clearly got left out. Early rabbis wrote it and some even supplied conflicting stories for the same gaps, and that's just fine with everybody. After a lifetime of having Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door jabbing their confident fingers at the Scriptures, I love a religion that doesn't get all precious about God's Word. "Could be this," one rabbi says, and the next comes along and says "Or that," and nobody comes to blows. Speaking of coming to blows, that's one of the gaps that got filled in. Cain slew Abel but it's not clear why.

The only thing Genesis said was that Abel was a shepherd and Cain tilled the soil, and when they both brought offerings to the Lord, the Lord favored Abel's over Cain's. But you've got to expect that when you bring a vegetarian dish to a potluck. Doesn't seem like a murder situation, though, and in fact many scholars point out that there might have been quite some time between the hummus and the homicide. And the Midrashim offer us some possibilities.

Apparently it's just understood that Cain and Abel were each born with a twin sister, because why not? It's not like such a non-event as the incidental birth of a girl would rate a line in the Torah. And each was supposed to marry the other's twin, out of some very early notion of decency, but Cain's twin was purtier than Abel's, and they both wanted her. Or, alternately, Abel had two twin sisters, and they decided to fight over the spare.

Or, postulates a different rabbi, Cain and Abel decided to divvy up the world, and one took the land and the other took everything else. And in the course of a standard double tantrum, the one told the other to get off his land, and the other told him to take off his clothes. "Strip!" demands brother one, and "Fly!" retorts brother two, and before you knew it, that was that. The first murder.

But when God confronted Cain about this, demanding to know where Abel was, as if he didn't know, Cain complained that he was not his brother's keeper. Especially now that he was dead on the ground. Fine. That's all in the book. But it gets punched up in the Midrash. Cain starts deflecting right away. He says to God it's your fault because you made me do evil, and why didn't you prevent it? Awesome. Typical abuser turning the blame around. I guess it works if you're accusing the Democrats of your own racism, but it's pretty bold to think you can gaslight God.

I don't know. The Midrashim all ring true. One way or the other, the women don't get a say about anything, and the men are obligate assholes, and cause all the trouble, and then blame someone else for it. Nothing's changed to this day.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Adam and Eve had belly buttons. I know because they're in all the pictures. The pictures were divinely inspired, so they must have been there; and Adam was made out of mud, so I'm thinking God stuck a thumbprint in him while he was baking, so his eventual offspring wouldn't feel weirded out about their navels. That's the only thing I can come up with and it does speak well of God, who nevertheless went on to do a heck of a lot of smiting, but things were fresh and new then, and everyone felt optimistic.

But if you keep on with this story you'll quickly arrive at more questions than answers. For instance: who did First Sons Cain and Abel get children by? All the possibilities are awkward.

As it happens, this question has troubled people through the ages. It doesn't trouble people at all that nobody ever mentions any daughters of Adam and Eve, because after all they're just females, but speculating about such daughters and their possible coital relationships with their brothers has put religious folk in a flat tizzy for thousands of years. (No more than six thousand, though.) There has to be another explanation. So one theory goes that Cain got a wife from a race of humans that pre-dated Adam and Eve. Which is problematic if you've already swallowed the notion that Adam and Eve were the first and nobody ever said anything about Neanderthals.

So not many people go with that. We're left with Cain and Abel marrying their own sisters, and, as has been pointed out, there's nothing in Genesis that rules out that Adam and Eve had daughters first, especially since they wouldn't have been important enough to mention. Also, Adam had another son, Seth, when he was 130 years old and then he lived another 800 years. Say what you will about our progenitors, they knew how to get lead in their pencils. The idea here is that after a short period of time you'd have scads of humans running around and plenty of broads to choose from, were you Cain or Abel, although they'd all be pretty seriously related.

Which is obviously appalling, or at least frowned upon in most of your modern cults. How can we reconcile this? Easy peasy. God never told anyone he couldn't marry his own sister. Especially since he gave him no alternatives. God didn't have a thing to say about that until he changed the rules and funneled them through Moses. Up until then it was fine. You can't commit incest if there's no such thing as incest, but after a certain point, as outlined in Leviticus, there were all sorts of rules. You don't even want to know. Cain and Abel got in under the deadline.

So we can assume that Cain and Abel had carnal relations with their own sisters.

Nobody said they had to enjoy it.

Holy Crap

My friend David sent me a link to a poop article. This happens. It's like how people know where to dump off their unwanted kittens so they'll be taken care of. Poop articles come here to feel less lonely.

But until David sent me this one, I had no idea anyone ever thought about whether or not Jesus pooped. It never occurred to me he didn't. All men do, even John Wayne, who was discovered to be packing forty pounds of impacted fecal matter at his autopsy, which might have accounted for his gait.

That, of course, is patently ridiculous. Forty pounds of poop! John Wayne did not even have an autopsy. People are mixing him up with Elvis Presley, who did have an autopsy, at which he was reported to be harboring an even more stupendous quantity of stale caca, but the quality of the autopsy is suspect, inasmuch as he hasn't even stayed reliably dead.

Which, I guess, brings us back to Jesus.

#2

The problem, for many Christians throughout the millennia, is that Jesus is thought to be both human and God, and for some reason people don't like to think about God taking a dump, even though he has a throne. I'm not sure why something as natural and, frankly, satisfying as a bowel movement has gotten such a bad rap that we would deny the pleasure to the gods.

Probably this indicates my own privilege. The whole routine has always been a snap for me, and the first couple years my poop was someone else's problem. But when I once asked my parents what they thought was the greatest innovation in their lives--I was thinking about airplanes, and automatic washers, and rocket ships, and such--they both said, fervently and in unison, indoor plumbing. So. This business of making poop disappear with several gallons of perfectly good drinking water is kind of new, humanity-wise.

Anyway, some of your earlier Christians thought Jesus only appeared to have a human body but was really a god, through and through, running a sort of parlor trick, if you will. And these Christians thought Jesus never actually dropped a load. This position is known as "Docetism," from the Greek word dokein ("dookie"). No wonder the Trinity is so hard to comprehend. We can't even get past number two.

All of this kind of makes me feel sorry for Jesus, and not just for that part toward the end. Surely a man of his talents could turn shit into sugarplums if that's what a sensitive populace demanded. He did amazing things with a single loaf of bread and a dead fish, as you'll recall. And if he didn't poop, he'd have to keep a tight rein on that sort of behavior or he'd be one tunafish sandwich away from a serious personal backup.

There has to be some sort of mechanism for this celebrated self-control, or lo, it will be with him alway, even unto the end of the world. The explanations given are less than satisfying from a scientific standpoint. For instance, according to a second-century teacher named Valentinus, "Jesus digested divinity: he ate and drank in a special way without excreting his solids. He had such a great capacity for continence that the nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption." That's religion for you--you're just supposed to accept that.

But it only raises more questions. For instance, did people in the second century, when they hit their fingers with a hammer, yell Oh, Experience Corruption?

At any rate, the digestive method described by Mr. Valentinus must be something like sublimation, the process by which a solid (in this case feces) makes a transition directly to a gas. Big deal. I do that all day long.

Good Stories

I must've been a Doubting Debbie early on, because I sure don't remember being traumatized by hearing Santa Claus wasn't actual, even though I've been assured by the Internet that I should have been. Apparently I've blanked out the entire bruising episode. It's possible my parents didn't hit the subject too hard to begin with. They never trotted out the bit about Santa knowing if you're good or bad, because being bad was not presented as an option in our family, and I'd already gotten the idea that being just a little bit bad was only a matter of opinion. My opinion was that I wasn't. I was conducting an experiment, or I was just trying to see what was inside that thing, or I had no idea who tracked that in, or I wandered away because where else is there to wander?

I don't remember any big tragic scenes in school, either. No kids blubbering in their cubbies. I suppose existential Santa questions came up in conversation but it didn't make much of an impression on me, as long as there were still presents coming from somewhere. And Advent calendars with all the little doors. And Life Savers in a book. And chocolate coins in gold foil. And the chaos of wrapping paper. I was fine with a good story; it didn't have to be a documentary. Give me a good story and I'll sail away on it. I didn't expect to get to Narnia from my own wardrobe, either.

And I got to hear a lot of stories. Dad used to read them to me. There was an earnest pig and a clever spider. There was Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. There was an elephant's child who got his trunk, and I know how.

Then there were all the church stories. The ark, the manger, the shepherds abiding. And of course God, who was nice like all the other Lutherans. I could go along with all that. Some of the details seemed far-fetched. Like heaven, or hell, or baptism (really? That's the deal-breaker?), or the Trinity (why a committee?). Or a grisly execution that somehow saves us all. Mercy! All this strategizing to be able to live forever, just because we can't bear it otherwise. And the one about God answering our prayers! Okay, I guess, as long as we can take "No" for an answer.

It must have been my nature. Lots of things I was told didn't stick with me. I should put a sweater on. Or quit riding my bike after dark. Or save myself for marriage. There were so many stories, and I listened politely and then--according to my mother--did whatever the hell I wanted to do anyway. She didn't say "the hell," but it was heavily implied in her eyebrow region.

And then after a while God didn't seem all that important either--or more to the point, the existence of God didn't explain anything any better than the existence of Santa Claus. Of course, I was not raised with the judgmental version of either one, so there wasn't really a penalty involved in folding them up neatly and storing them with other childhood treasures.

I still believe in Santa Claus, as much as I ever did. Santa, and Mr. Toad, and the miraculous eternity of baby spiders.

This Either Is, Or Is Not, Awesome

This here is my one-thousandth blog post, which is obviously awesome! By "awesome" I mean immensely cool, or even just cool, or else I'm just signaling the end of a sentence and now it's your turn to talk.

Cranky language people like to sniff that we've gotten careless with the word "awesome" and that if we use it, we'd better be talking about, well, God, or somebody equally impressive. Or one of his larger or more photogenic works. Mostly they don't notice that it started out, around 1600, meaning "full of awe" (so it would, say, refer to somebody beholding God rather than the big guy himself). And then only later was it applied to the awe-inspiring item. At any rate, the curmudgeondom is pretty certain "awesome" shouldn't refer to a collection of blog posts, or a satisfying dump, or even the observation that a person can meet someone at the movies at five. None of those should evoke an "awesome."

This doesn't bother me much. I understand that there is a need to shanghai words for one's own purposes sometimes, and there's a further need in any community to shake the vocabulary up a bit so it doesn't sound stale. "It's garbage day," I might say, and someone might say "Awesome" back. It didn't even have to be "awesome." It could have been "saline" or "gibbous." The point is to move conversation along and, maybe, send a signal to your own tribe that you're a member in good standing. Some day in the future, you might hear someone saying "Gibbous, dude," although "dude" will have been replaced by then. By "bosco," or "kipper."

"Awesome" has been on the way out for a while. Now you're more likely to hear things are "perfect." If you order something off the menu in a restaurant, your servidude will automatically say "Perfect." One suspects that every single thing on the menu is equally perfect and you doubt that, but after all it's a sunny attitude to take toward your food, or your willingness to schedule an appointment at a certain time ("Perfect").

First post

Anyway, I don't get real worked up about it. I know how this works. Some word or phrase or even inflection becomes passed around your cohort and before you know it, you hear it vaulting out of your own face like a dog after a squirrel. Bam. It's like influenza. You think you're immune, but you're not. You can go sixty years without ever saying "I know, right?" or "I can't even with this" and then, suddenly, you do. You might feel sort of weak and susceptible when you hear yourself saying it for the first time. (But at least you know what a "cohort" is.)

Still, I was startled the other day when Dave and I were on a walk, and we saw a young man get out of a delivery truck, and we said "Hi there, which direction  is Burnside?" And he smiled and said "What an amazing question," and pulled out his phone to check.

I laughed outright. "No it isn't!" I said.

He looked at me and laughed back. "I guess you're right!"

"It's kind of an ordinary question, really," I pointed out.

"Yeah! It is. Huh! I guess I just said it to be friendly."

Good enough! We did all feel a few notches happier, all right. He pointed toward Burnside, after checking his phone, and got back in the truck. We took his amazing information and headed toward Burnside.

Nice kipper, that guy.  Truly crepuscular.

Lord, Lord, Wasn't That A Fish?

My earlier musings about whether a whale fart could contain a horse led me, at one point, to imagine that this was being proposed as a humane marine transportation device for land-dwelling mammals, and although these sorts of things are generally tried with mice or guinea pigs first, perhaps somebody was going for glory. And the prospect is worth investigating, after that Jonah debacle.

Which led me to study Jonah. Jonah is a great Bible book: it's only two pages long. I'm not a hundred percent certain what it's about. Jonah is suicidal from start to finish. First God tells him to pop over to Nineveh and preach to the citizens that they must mend their ways and repent or the city would be destroyed. Jonah says he'd rather die. Instead he tries to go somewhere God can't find him--he's a little unclear on the concept, there--and tries to take a ship to Tarshish.

To this day no one knows where Tarshish was and it is possible "going to Tarshish" is one of those phrases like "buying the farm," and refers merely to a place that is very very far away, possibly just outside Bumfuck, Egypt.

Anyway he never gets there. There's a terrible storm and Jonah admits to the ship's crew that it was probably his fault and offers to be cast into the sea, that evidently being a better fate than having to preach in Nineveh. The sailors don't want to do it but things were taking a turn and eventually they beseech the Lord to let them throw Jonah overboard but not get into trouble for it, and so it was done. The seas calmed instantly and the grateful sailors made a sacrifice unto the Lord. Sacrificing Jonah didn't count because they hardly knew him.

God locates a nearby biddable whale and offers him Jonah, because God loves whales. Everybody loves whales! Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and nights. This is probably using the omniscient point of view, because it would be hard, one thinks, for Jonah himself to know just how long he was in there, unless one imagines, as I do, that in the daytime the belly is sort of semi-dark yet pinkish, with a floor and throw pillows. Anyway Jonah had a chance to think about things and decided he had been unfaithful to the Lord and that's what got him into this situation.

God noted Jonah's remorse and directed the whale to ralph him up onto dry land despite the dangers to the whale of the shallows, because maybe God, being mysterious, doesn't love whales after all. Giveth, taketh away, it's the old story.

Unfortunately for Jonah, this reprieve meant he couldn't skate on the Nineveh deal, so he hied off to Nineveh, and told everyone to repent or die, and somehow they not only didn't kill him, but everyone from the King on down put on sackcloth and ashes. Sackcloth is itchy and made of goat hair and it's worse than Carhartts.

So the Lord spared Nineveh. Which ticked off Jonah. Not sure why. Maybe he felt cheated out of a good urban cleansing that he'd predicted, after all, and if it didn't happen, who's to say it ever would have happened? And here all these people are sitting around in hair shirts and ashes and they've got to be wondering the same thing. Jonah wanted to die.

Anyway Jonah went off to pout and see if the city blew up after all, and then God put a gourd out there that grew up in a day and shaded him, which was nice, and then he sent a worm to kill the vine the very next day, and I'm not sure why it matters because Jonah had already built himself a booth for shade, but that all pissed him off too.

The End.

And God said you didn't have anything to do with that vine, and why shouldn't I care about Nineveh, that has 120,000 people that don't know their right hand from their left, and also has cows? That is what God said, and I believe it, because you can't make this stuff up.

Still, it doesn't make much sense, and the whale clearly got the bad end of the bargain. How much nicer it would have been all around if Jonah had been permitted to make it all the way through the whale and shoot out on a fart! He could bob around in the ocean all warm and eventually make it to the surface, and the poor whale can go about his business.

The Good Book

I took a little stroll through the Bible the other day. I was familiar with it as a child but you never know if your literary tastes hold up into adulthood. I thought I'd just flip through but instead I got completely caught up in the first book. Talk about your pacing!

Right off the bat, humans started screwing up, starting with disobeying an admittedly arbitrary rule and then plunging right into murder. Some of the action is off-screen: for instance, you've got your two humans who are supposed to get the population ball rolling, which means their kids are going to have to get fruitful either with each other or their mom, but we soon learn this kind of thing is totally normal in Genesis. Anyway God looked at the whole mess and called for a do-over, with good reason, and sent down ark instructions and invented the rainbow. (Noah, the one God had taken a liking to, had three sons and a vineyard, and one day he got drunk and blacked out in his tent naked, and his sons carefully covered him up without peeking at him, and for some reason this really ticked him off. Whatever.) The three sons ended up populating the whole world.

Which brings us eventually to Abraham. He and the Lord conversed, leaving Abraham in fine shape. He traveled to Egypt with his wife Sarah but worried that the Egyptians were going to want to have their way with her because she was so beautiful, even though she was at least 65 at that point--people didn't let themselves go so much back then--and he told her to tell everyone she was his sister, so they wouldn't kill him. (It's bad to steal another man's wife, but murdering him is okay.) And sure enough he palms her off on the Pharaoh, but it falls apart eventually when the Lord sent plagues to punish the Egyptians for all this; but Abraham is in no trouble at all with the Lord, and they leave and get rich again. They pull the exact same sister gambit later on with the king of Gerar. And not only that, but when Sarah, who really was his half-sister but who's counting, fails to have children, she suggests he help himself to her pretty Egyptian maid, and soon enough Abraham is a first-time dad at 86.

God was cool with all this and looked favorably upon Abraham and told him he was going to be the father of kings and nations, and all he had to do was snip off a bit of skin around his then-99-year-old penis and do the same to his son and his slaves and any other males in the vicinity. That had to have gone over well. And not only that, but it was going to be Sarah having the anchor baby for the nation-building. Sarah overheard this and chuckled at the Lord, which you should not do. "Is any thing too hard for the Lord?" the Lord demanded, rhetorically, and maybe no thing is, but he made Sarah bear a child at age ninety, and that can't have been easy.

Meanwhile, their nephew Lot had decided to move to the greater Sodom area, which was a bad move. Abraham found out Sodom was doomed and asked God if he'd really smite Sodom if there were fifty good men there, and God said he wouldn't, and then Abraham, who thought he had a good rapport, bargained him down to ten good men, and probably thought he'd done well, but God didn't look too hard and stuck with his plan to take Sodom out with fire and brimstone anyway.

Salt.

God decided Lot was okay and encouraged him to leave Sodom but he didn't, so he sent some angels that looked like men after him to close the deal. The wicked men of the city wanted to meet the new "men" but Lot, being a good guy, refused to make the introduction, instead generously offering to send out his two virgin daughters for them to do with as they wished.

Then the angels dragged him and his wife and daughters out and told them not to look back while God smote the city, but Lot's wife did, probably because her other kids were still back there, for Pete's sake, and she was promptly mineralized for her maternal instinct. Lot and his daughters scampered off to a cave and his daughters drugged him with wine and got themselves knocked up by him--their own dad--without (wink, wink) even waking him up. All that was fine and dandy.

Then, the Lord popped back to Abraham and suggested he murder his own son Isaac to prove his devotion, and poor Abe got all the way to the point he had his kid trussed up and on kindling and a knife at his throat before the Lord went all, ha ha, just kidding, take this here sheep instead. Isaac in turn grew up and went to a new town, where he started telling people his beautiful wife Rebekah was his sister, just in case the men in town would be inclined to kill him in order to ravish his wife. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. But the jig was up when he was caught sporting with her, and the town king said she must be his wife, because no one would ever sport with his own sister, there's no precedent for that, and the king promised Isaac he'd kill anyone who touched his wife, and everything worked out great because the Lord blessed all this and wanted them to be fruitful.

So Isaac and Rebekah had twin boys and those two went at it with each other before day one. Whoever was first out of the womb got the birthright (cows, goats, honor and glory and such) and apparently they knew this in utero. This was troublesome to Mom who had the audacity to ask the Lord why things had gotten so rough and unruly in there and the Lord explained "Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels."

Women really do not get much of a break in this book.

Esau squeaked out first but fairly promptly sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of lentil soup. Basically, Jacob wasn't that nice and Esau wasn't that bright. Also, they kept trying to kill each other. Eventually, Esau married two women from out of town, but nobody including God liked foreigners, so any thought of getting that birthright back was out of the question, because it was important to keep those lines of descent pure, if incestuous and homicidal.

We are not thirty pages into this tome. Already I have the vapors. I swan.

Do, Do That Voodoo

There's been a bit of a squabble in the right-to-life/pro-choice world. It happens.

While everyone agrees that there has been a 40% decrease in the number of abortions in Iowa since 2007, the explanation remains controversial. Planned Parenthood spokesman Penny Dickey noted that the drop correlates well with the increased use of long-term contraception such as IUDs and hormone implants.

But Iowa Right To Life director Jennifer Bowen dismissed that assertion, stating that contraception has a huge failure rate. Planned Parenthood countered that the failure rate is less than one percent. Which triggered the retort that for the unlucky one percent, that corresponds to a 100% failure rate. Bowen attributed the reduced abortion numbers to an increase in baby pictures in the social media. Planned Parenthood pointed out that birth rates had not gone up at all, and so contraception, which they provide at low cost, is the only logical explanation for the drop.

Bowen declared instead that abortions are becoming rarer because of an increase in the number and intensity of people's prayers to not get pregnant. "Iowans have finally started getting in touch with the Man Upstairs," she said.

Asked to comment, the Planned Parenthood representative stared at the wall for a full minute, looking depressed, and finally mumbled something about the whole notion of "upstairs" being a relative concept constrained by the forces of gravity, and that no one really knows where, assuming there is a Man, he is; at which point everybody quit listening.

Energized, Bowen further touted the power of Iowan prayer. "Hawkeyes are a strange breed, and proof of that is the fact that as soon as they started praying more frequently and vigorously, the Man Upstairs started listening," she said. The prayer initiative is paying off. Previously, men had been praying mostly before intercourse, and women afterwards, but now they're doing it while they're doing it, and the effect has obviously been remarkable. It was a natural progression; it all started with oh God oh God oh God and then it was just a matter of fine-tuning and elaboration.

"Maybe everyone was praying the contraception would work," the Planned Parenthood spokesman muttered into a dead mike in an empty room.

"We have plans to also start incorporating various other types of prayers in order to start ridding children of different diseases while they're still in their mother's wombs," Bowen went on. A website is already in the works, including a navigable menu with items such as Petition 101.68: Lead us not into dementia, and deliver us from pigmentary cirrhosis. There has also been a proposal for a special pamphlet with a Sickle-Cell Anemia prayer fold-out to be distributed through Mickey D's. Everyone agrees it's a nice touch for the coloreds, but then again Iowans are nice people.

The Man Upstairs is reported to be totally on board with reducing abortions in Iowa. Presumably he could achieve a zero-abortion goal any time he wants to, but he's the sort who likes to be begged.

"We also have other plans," Ms. Bowen went on, "but unfortunately this is all I have the authority to divulge at the moment." Her smile remained enigmatic, but her administrative assistant was heard to say the Hawkeyes are looking real good in Escape Comet Bingo.

The Planned Parenthood spokesman was unavailable to comment due to heavy drinking. But other concerned factions were quick to criticize Ms. Bowen's take on the drop in abortions. One contingent insisted that there can be no such prayer effect and nothing short of a live blood sacrifice could account for the reduction. Furthermore, an animal no less evolved than a goat would do. If you merely toss a crab in a pot, explained a spokesman for the Mambo Miracle Institute, the Man Upstairs might have reason to doubt your sincerity.

Whatever It Is, It's Contagious

In what analysts say is a sign that Americans are more divided than ever, clashes continued over the weekend between factions that believe the Ebola virus is God's judgment for Obama's attempts to divide Jerusalem and those contending it is God's judgment for Obama's embrace of marriage equality.

White House spokesmen protested the characterization, but were undermined when a report surfaced that the President himself had insisted on the presentation of bush meat at a state dinner, according to the neighbor of a cousin of a disgruntled White House sous-chef recently fired for an inflammatory meatloaf and chronic sauce incompatibility.

Epidemiologists confirmed the first Ebola case occurred when Obama was fifteen years old; this seems to underscore the complexity of Obama's plot in that it might have extended to several fore-Bamas. Observers had already pointed out the extraordinary family cunning involved in timing the future President's conception to coincide with the introduction of a state Americans were not even fully aware of, and which was considered too tropical and laid-back to maintain proper record-keeping. Others expressed skepticism that any African Muslim family could be so clever and far-sighted, noting that any association between the President's family and the virus could be more elegantly accounted for by invoking the phrase "the spawn of Satan." This theory also absolves God of responsibility, since it is generally acknowledged He never intended this disease to move beyond the colored folk.

Several pundits are warning of the likelihood that terrorists will make little Ebola bombs of themselves and fly to America to barf on people; others insist the terrorist menace had begun much earlier, noting that infected fruit bats are almost indistinguishable from drones.

Many express relief that at least the sheer diversity of opinion proves that Americans have not succumbed to a sheep-herd mentality. They cite the broad range of reasons given for Obama's orchestration of the epidemic, from his desire to elevate Muslims to his desire to impose martial law and take away citizens' guns. Either proposition is preposterous, according to some, who point out the epidemic began decades ago after Henry Kissinger expressed an intent to depopulate Africa using birth control, arms shipments, monkey parasites, and--as a backup--Dick Cheney.

Adding a note of levity to an otherwise dire national conversation, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) checked in from his newly rubberized office to declare that Obama was waging a war on women by deliberately endangering nurses, who are, or should be, women. "They set them up and then they throw them under the bus," he thundered, although others in his own party were equally vehement in their disagreement, preferring the rhetorical use of the phrase "sent to the back of the bus" for its ironic historical resonance.

Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, inexplicably still alive, insisted that Obama engineered the epidemic because he thinks America is no greater than any other nation and that if Africa has Ebola, the United States should, too. Aggrieved members of the cabinet were overheard to complain that saying Africa has Ebola is like saying North America has pineapple trees. This reminder further inflamed the birther contingent, which sneered that Hawaii is not much of a state, really, and was only added to the union on paper to make the flag stars come out even. Nodding vigorously, an unnamed representative of the Palin family, which has always bristled at the presumed equivalence of Alaska and Hawaii, said she could see that point from her back porch.

Analysts urged caution, saying that it is too early in the epidemic to pinpoint the precise depth of Obama's involvement, or even determine who he intends to kill.

In God We Bluster

I have it on good authority that what America needs is jobs, jobs, jobs. And Mitt Romney knows where they are, are, are, but it's kind of a secret. So it's probably true, although I would argue that not just any jobs jobs jobs will do. For instance, we could totally employ a huge number of people to hand-dig us a mass grave that we can then all jump in, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Not even if Exxon Mobil and Arch Coal say it is. They've been mistaken about things before.

So one reason to vote for Romney is because he knows where the jobs jobs jobs are, and he has a plan for the economy. To wit, he, for one, is not going to tamper with the little bumpy bits on our coins. He is not only not going to remove God from our money, he is going to make sure He is right on the faces and not on the edges. This is big. I can almost feel the engine of commerce rumbling back to life. God has, of course, been on our coins even during the great recession, but He's got to be breathing a sigh of relief knowing His real estate isn't about to be yanked out from under Him. God didn't move into the paper-currency neighborhood until 1957. At that time, I was four years old and not all that productive, but sure enough ten years later I was pulling down fifty cents an hour for babysitting, so I know it works.

It's certainly a timely declaration of policy, because those coins have been carrying God around for over seventy years now, and He could slip off at any time. He's also parked in the Pledge of Allegiance and has resisted attempts to pry Him out. So far.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 as a spare and sprightly little number, just something to dash off before your 'rithmetic drills, and it has gotten good and baubled up ever since, with one outfit after another hanging more and more trinkets off of it. By the time I learned it, it had gotten pudgy enough to require long pauses to prop it up with. Many people think that there is nothing about a simple statement that can't be improved by larding it up with more words. So the original "I pledge allegiance to my flag" became "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America" because someone fretted that little immigrant Irish kids might get confused over which specific flag required their loyalty. And later, in my lifetime, someone pasted in "under God" after the "one nation" part, in order to clear up any confusion that we were godless commies, which we by God were not. Well then. Now we've got a pledge stout enough to puff out the little chests we laid our little ten-year-old hands on. We didn't used to lay our hands on our chests, but times change. When Francis Bellamy got the ball rolling, schoolchildren raised their arms straight out toward the flag, palms down, but that little salute got the heave-ho in 1942 after Adolf Hitler ruined it, and the little hyphen mustache, for all eternity.

Theodore Roosevelt objected to putting God on our coins because  he thought, with some biblical justification, that it was sacrilegious to put the name of God on money, but modern Republicans recognize that it just makes money that much easier to worship. In God We Trust has thus become the official motto of the United States, replacing E Pluribus Unum (pluribus being Latin for "the 99%").

Nevertheless, some people still get upset about God being all over our money and our pledge, but a ruling in the sixties held that these practices were protected as "acts of ceremonial deism," which means that the rote repetition of the whole business has rendered it insignificant from a religious standpoint. Which is true: atheists still feel the prick of the word every time, like a splinter under the skin, but no one else really hears it anymore. So, legally, it is a meaningless enterprise that Romney is defending so fervently.

But times, as noted before, change, and the threat of commies has been superseded by multiple threats, from Islamists to scientists, so the pledge may be due for another implant:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, the real one who created the whole world and the sky and everything six thousand years ago and just try to get your other gods to pull off something like that, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, as long as you have photo ID.

Holy shit.

When God Gives You Big Buboes

I'm working on a lawsuit against the Catholic Church. It's going to be a class-action kind of thing, in case you want to get in on the ground floor. Most of us should be eligible, but special dispensation, as it were, could be in the works if you have ever personally had a bubo, which is a swelling, typically in the groin area, that you didn't engineer yourself.

This is occasioned by a few recent news items, particularly the case of the man in Crook County, Oregon, who has spent the summer battling a nasty case of the bubonic plague. It always startles me when someone comes down with The Plague. The Plague always seems so plural. It seems like you shouldn't be able to have the plague without a lot of company, like, for instance, Europe. For one single guy to have The Plague sounds as odd to me as someone going down to the bakery to pick up a loaf of Kansas. Nevertheless, The Plague is what he got. You can tell by the buboes.

Whenever there has been a plague in the past, people tended to believe it was God punishing them for their sins. Back in the middle ages, a bunch of folks called the Flagellants smote themselves with sticks and whips and what-have-you to punish themselves for their sins before God could get around to it. It's weak. It's like the little kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar who runs off to sit himself in the corner. He's trying to head off Mom, who's going to give him a lot worse.

An earlier epidemic of what might have been The Plague managed to peel off about a fifth of the population of the world, proving that if God had been trying to punish the sinners, he didn't get them all. But people persist in that correlation. They take this kind of thing very personally. A guy gets the plague, and next thing you know people are lining up trying to get God's finger on the thing. Either he's being punished by God, or it's God who's going to save him. Because God is merciful and really prefers his handiwork to perish later after decades of wasting and dementia.

And so this fellow in Crook County was treated with massive antibiotics and his heart was resuscitated and tubes were running in and out of him and in general he was being held back from the grave by the very finest in medical attention, but he never really turned it around until the priest came in and made the sign of the cross on his forehead, hands, and feet, and then lo! He started to improve. It's a miracle, his family says. He is still recovering, with his Certificate Of Baptism on his nightstand, in case St. Peter doesn't keep good records.

In other Oregon news items, we've recently had several sets of parents convicted of criminal neglect in the deaths of their children, who had easily treatable illnesses, but were prevented from seeing a doctor for religious reasons. So there's my lawsuit. If a priest can stop the plague in its tracks with a well-placed fingering, isn't it criminally negligent of him to fail to cure everyone else? The defense will claim the priest didn't cure anything--he just persuaded God to make intercession. But God made the plague in the first place. And I can't afford that lawsuit.

I'm not really buying it, anyway. God didn't make the plague to punish us. God is a lot bigger than that, or so they say. He is the god of us, cats, rats, and fleas. And also the bacterium Yersinia pestis. That's a lot of constituencies. It ain't always about us.

I wonder if the priests could cure narcissism?

God vs. Ganesh

You know those old pre-Renaissance Christian paintings, with the flat faces cranked into an unnatural position, the way they posed you for your school photograph? And halos like dinner plates? Never cared much for them, but I care even less for Hindu art, which always strikes me as looking like it should have been painted on velvet and sold hanging from a cyclone fence at an intersection. I don't get too worked up about the sacredness of any of it. I figure any currently viable gods are unlikely to look like anything we'd come up with. "When my glory passeth by, I will cover thee with my hand while I pass by; and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts," the Lord said, and that's vivid enough for me.

That doesn't mean other people don't get all het up about the accuracy of these things. The folks in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho recently installed some public art works including a sculpture of Ganesh, the Hindu god, and the Kootenai County Constitution Party threw a fit about it. It was a false deity, a demon god, and had no place in a land reserved for Christians, which I am told Idaho surely the hell is.

God, the genuine article, is, as we all know, an old bearded white dude in a dress. Ganesh is an elephant-headed fellow with four arms, so there's really no mistaking the two. It seems like there are a lot of Hindu gods and goddesses, but as I understand it, they are all considered aspects of the one God, Brahman (pronounced "Al-lah"), as opposed to the pantheon of irritable wack jobs the ancient Greeks had to contend with. For instance, Ganesh, with  his big old elephant head, might be invoked when one is embarking on a new venture, because he removes obstacles from one's path, but he's still God. It's as if we could worship an auxiliary Jesus operating a front-end loader: it would still be Jesus.

I'm interested in the way gods are envisioned in various times and places. I think people ascribe to them the attributes they would like to have, themselves. They start out assuming God looks just like them, only with improvements. The Christian god is usually depicted as an attractive white man, but bigger and floatier. The Norse god Thor was basically human, but with a really big hammer. Heh heh. If modern American women were consulted, their gods might look just like them, but about five pounds lighter. As far as the Hindu gods are concerned, many of them have more than the usual allocation of arms. So I'm assuming there's something about India that makes you itchy.

For my money, the Greeks had the most realistic ideas about their gods. They were out there smacking each other silly and you were best off just staying out of their way. They sure weren't looking out for you. They also had a surplus of sidekicks demanding respect, many of them inspired ensembles of several critters, including, of course, humans. The sphinx was set up with a lion's body and a snake's tail and wings and a woman's head and I don't know what-all else, but they made sure to get her titties in there, too. Then you have your minotaur and centaur, which you see rarely these days; and the half-man, half-goat items, which we still frequently elect to office.

I've never thought about what my own god would look like, but I have given thought to my own totem pole, ever since I was a kid. These aren't meant to be worshipped, but they include animals important to the artist. You often see ravens or eagles on top, where their outspread wings make an imposing statement; bears and other heroic sorts figure in too. But this is my pole. Clearly, my own personal totem pole would have to be crowned with a salamander head. It would make my totem pole look like a smiling thumb, but there's no help for that. Moving on down, I like marmots a lot, but there's really no improving on the little noodly salamander arms, so I'd have to carve them in too. Bears are cool, but they'd look really silly with the noodly arms, so I'm thinking the main part of the pole might as well be a salamander's midsection, with more noodly legs towards the bottom. At this point finishing it off with anything other than a salamander tail would be gimmicky. There. Perfection. If you can't see the sacred in that, you have my sympathy.