The End is Near, and other things you don't care to read about.

I suppose this should not bother me—I’m a big boy now, after all, and on a scale of one to ten of life’s little annoyances this should not even register as a blip—but I am not sure when Christian eschatology became an appropriate subject for men’s room graffiti. I am a firm advocate of the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and religion, but I also believe that there is a time and a place for everything, and reading that ‘THE END IS NEAR’ while I am standing in front of a urinal relieving myself is, to my mind, neither the time nor the place for such a message. At such a time, I do not want to think deep thoughts about the Day of Judgment nor do I wish to pass the time it takes to pass water contemplating my sins; I simply want to finish the business at hand and get out of the men’s room, especially the men’s room that is the star of this particular screed, which is unnecessarily noisome, even by the very low standards that most people judge rest rooms by.  If I didn’t absolutely positively no—two—ways—about—it did not need to use this rest room, I wouldn’t, but nature has its own purposes, as it is wont to do, and while I am attending to those purposes I do not wish to think about eschatology or the soteriological train of thought that inevitably arises from it.

This was not always the case, of course. In the history of Christianity, there are any number of great theologians who have thought their greatest thoughts while attending to the necessary. The great fourth century heresiarch Arius, unless he was the great fifth century heresiarch Arius—I’m not sure if I’ve got the right dates here—first thought that Jesus was not consubstantial with the Father while sitting in the men’s room, and no, I don’t have any idea what Arius was talking about, either. Understanding the details of his theology was apparently not a requirement, as Arianism became wildly popular without anyone really knowing what Arius was going on about. Arius was sort of like the Stephen Hawking of the fourth (or fifth) century; everyone bought his books but no one really read them. But fashion rules all, as someone much smarter than me once said, and back in the day everyone who was anyone wanted to be an Arian, and so Arius started spending a lot of time in the men’s room trying to think of the next big theological thing.  This was unfortunate, because one day while Arius sat doing his business and thinking deep thoughts about the nature of the Trinity, some non-Arian Christian—I have not ascertained whether this person was Orthodox, Catholic, miaphysite, or Nestorian in his theological orientation—ventilated Arius’ guts from below with a sword. Besides being an extremely painful and more than a little embarrassing way to die, one cannot help but wonder how the assassin knew which of the rumps above his head belonged to Arius. All human faces are different, but everyone’s backside looks pretty much the same. There are differences in size and shape, of course, but the basics don’t really vary that much. Butts are butts.

Martin Luther was another habitué of the theological outhouse, a man who suffered from such severe chronic constipation that he tore Western Christendom apart trying to relieve the gastrointestinal pressure on his body and soul.  Why Luther suffered from such chronic constipation is lost now to medical science: as an Augustinian friar he may have suffered from the poor monastic diet—bread, water, and wine do not a balanced diet make, no matter how positively biblical this trinity might otherwise appear—and so it is not difficult to imagine that Luther’s guts revolted when confronted with the occasional bratwurst.  Indeed, given the vehemence of Luther’s denunciations, it is not difficult to imagine that Luther found Johann Tetzel’s selling papal get out of purgatory bubble gum cards less objectionable than Tetzel’s lack of laxatives in his peddler’s sack. Getting out of purgatory is all well and good, but it is sometimes difficult to contemplate the mysteries of the divine when your guts are in a knot. Something had to give, and in 1517, something finally did; Luther posted the 95 Theses, beginning the Protestant Reformation. Whether the Reformation did anything for Luther’s need to relieve himself is unknown.

Still, the most interesting of the plumbing theologians was, to my mind, St. Edwin of Nobbish, an English saint who wanted to be a desert hermit like Simeon Stylites, an Egyptian saint who lived on top of a pillar for forty years. This posed a bit of a problem for St. Edwin, given the lack of suitable pillars, posts, and deserts in his native England, but not one to give up easily, Edwin compensated by standing on top of a chamber pot on one foot while he contemplated the nature of free will.  St. Edwin, an otherwise orthodox Catholic theologian, held the view that God must exist simultaneously at all levels of possibility, in what happened and what did not happen, reconciling, he thought, the question of free will with the omniscience of God. The Church found his theory more than vaguely heretical, but could not come out and say so without denying the omnipotence of God, which is not vaguely heretical at all; it’s the real thing. People who know about such things tell me that while St. Edwin of Nobbish’s theory may not be entirely orthodox theology, it is fairly good string theory, and that the story that he died because he turned an ankle and fell off the chamber pot he’d stood on for fifty-two years and cracked his skull is exactly that, a story. St. Edwin died in the late 1340's, yet another victim of the Black Death that killed nearly half of the population of Europe.

It also occurs to me that the graffito ‘The End is Near’—remember ‘The End is Near’, it’s what I was complaining about before I wandered off into the tangles of Christian theological history, for which digression, I must beg your pardon; I know I shouldn’t go off-topic but sometimes I can’t help myself—that this might mean that the user’s end is near the urinal, in which case they are standing in the wrong stall. They should be sitting on the commode in the stall next to the urinal. This, though, sounds as farfetched as St. Edwin of Nobbish’s theory of simultaneous ubiquity. Why would someone who knows what a urinal is for attempt to use it while facing away from it? Even a woman compelled by necessity to use the men’s room would know better than to use a urinal in this fashion. So, whose end is near and why is this end in this particular urinal? I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a reason why tradition limits the subjects on men’s room walls to scatology, obscenity, profanity, slander, and sports, and this is it. No one wants to think about ultimate things while they are attending to the necessary. We just want to go.

BEARDING, A LESSON IN NO PARTS: To begin, we must first point out that the existence of the beard is, before it is anything else, a philosophical question, at least in the West, whereas in other cultures the beard is not merely simply a matter of philosophy, but one of theology. Orthodox Jews, for example, refrain from shaving, obeying Leviticus’ command that the Children of Israel, or at least the male portion thereof, shall not mar the corners of their beards; whether the bearded ladies at the circus must comply with this commandment is a subject of debate. Devout Muslims do not shave either, but, following the example of the Prophet (peas be upon him), they will clip their mustaches away from their upper lip. Sikhs are the champions of theological hirsuteness here, however, as the tenets of that faith not only forbid the devout to cut their beards, but any other bodily hair as well, which taboo goes a long way towards explaining why there are so few photographs of devout Sikh girls in bikinis. In contrast, Christians, at least here in this our Great Republic, represent a clear-cut victory for Saint Jerome.

In the fourth century, a group of Christian theology students in Alexandria came to blows, a common enough event for Christian theology students then and for centuries afterwards, over the question of how long a beard should be in order to demonstrate the wearer’s personal sanctity. After a night of exhaustive theological and pugilistic investigation of this admittedly arcane bit of dogma, someone hit upon the bright idea of asking the great scholar and Biblical translator Jerome for a ruling on the matter. So the collected students hied themselves and their black eyes down to the great library of Alexandria to pose the question to the saint.

Our seekers after knowledge found Jerome (or Hieronymous, if you people prefer the original with all this Bosch) standing at the circulation desk arguing with one of the clerks about his overdue copy of Valley of the Dolls. The students, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm, which is always the most annoying kind, breathlessly asked their tonsorial question of Jerome, an irascible man in the best of times—he once called someone who disagreed with him an ignorant calumniator, stuffed with Irish porridge (clearly, a man who knew how to vent and to vent well)—and now a man driven to new heights of irascibility because of the clerk’s obstinate refusal to let him keep the book out a little longer so he could translate the good bits into Latin. Jerome told the students, with perhaps more heat than charity, that if sanctity depended on the length of one’s beard, nothing in the Lord’s creation would be holier than a goat. Then, driven to distraction and left there without a return ticket, the great saint hurled anathemas at the students, as well as volume I of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Aardvarkus to Aggravatedus), and the chastened students fled for their lives from the saint’s onslaught, returning to their usual haunts to discuss the theological significance of the goat. As per usual, the conversation grew heated and the neighbors then called the police to suppress the rioting. In the end, only three people were killed and 27 goats reported missing, although the police later found five of them tied up behind Jamaican restaurants on Alexandria’s west side. The owners declared that they had no idea how the goats got there.

I bring up all this aggressive hirsute shilly-shallying because I now have a beard and I am under some very substantial pressure from a number of people to get rid of the thing. My mother, for one, has never liked beards and finds the prospect of looking at mine for any prolonged length of time a prospect to horrifying to contemplate. Mom does not like anything that reminds her that she is, as she puts it, getting on a bit, although I should point out here that at 82 she is not getting on, she’s got on, and no, that is not something I would say to her face, thank you very much, and therefore having to look at her eldest son’s impression of Robert E. Lee is as grim a memento mori as you can find here in our happy little burg. The kid next door, an obnoxious munchkin as viciously noxious as she is relentlessly ob, takes my mother’s side of the argument and does so with no end of sonic gusto, usually in as close a proximity to my ears as she can manage. Scarcely a day goes by hereabouts that I do not hear that annoying little cockroach bellowing her incessant demand that I shave the ugly gray ferret off my face, and scarcely a day goes by that I do not wonder why I didn’t smother the rotten brat with a pillow when I had the chance. Ah well, it’s too late for regrets now, I suppose.

On the other hand, a good many people like the new look, something that I find very heartening. I look, depending on whom you talk to, like a professor, which is what I started out to be all those years ago, or Ernest Hemingway, a comparison I simultaneously love and loathe—I admire Hemingway the writer a great deal and I dislike Hemingway the man about as much; the type of person who could write the kind of nasty hatchet jobs that appear in A Moveable Feast is not the sort of person I would want to know personally. And, apparently, I look like Santa Claus, a resemblance that has led more than one youngster to sidle up to me and mutter, “I wanna Playstation.” I must admit that since growing the beard I am taking a good deal of pleasure in playing the Anti-Claus and telling them that they can’t have one unless they beat up their little sisters two days before Christmas, and that they may get nothing at all this year because the cookies they left out for me last year were so stale that the reindeer wouldn’t eat the damn things, and let’s face it, reindeer are neither the pickiest of eaters nor are they the brightest bulbs in the box; if the reindeer won’t eat the cookies, no one else will. I may not stop Christmas from coming this year, but I managed to take some of the shine off of the holiday, especially if you happen to be a little sister hereabouts just a couple days before Christmas, and before you start calling me names, let me reiterate my long held position that Ebenezer Scrooge was a deeply misunderstood man and that the Grinch was a equally unappreciated…well, whatever grinches are, with or without the tight shoes, they are unappreciated.

But the best opinion of all came from my brother, who agrees with my mother, thinks that the beard should go sooner rather than later, and says that the damn beard makes me look like a refugee from the ZZ Top Fan Club. This is fine by me; I’ve been a fan of the Texas rockers for years now, so if I’m going to look like I’m with the band, I might as well keep the beard. Like the boys say, every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man. Of course, ZZ Top is not the sharpest looking band around—I think they look like the miner ‘49 and his daughter, Clementine, especially the latter—but then again, they don’t have to look sharp. Unlike me, they’re actually with the band.

NEBRASKA VS. GOD (2008): You can’t, much as you may want to, sue God, something I am sure the Lord in His infinite wisdom is almighty glad to hear. This bit of Good News comes to us all courtesy of a Nebraska judge, who tossed out said bit of legal silliness filed by an Omaha legislator who wanted God to pay up for all the trouble, terror, and other not nice things done either by Him directly or by others in His name. The judge, obviously a man of Solomonic wisdom, dismissed the case with prejudice, stating that since God had no address, the court could not serve Him with the papers necessary to inform Him that someone had filed suit against Him. Friends of the legislator, who must have a very safe seat or has decided to end his political career in spectacular if very silly fashion, countered the court’s legal reasoning, calling it specious in the extreme, pointing out that as the Lord is both ubiquitous and omniscient He has no need for a fixed address and already knows about the lawsuit without needing a process server to inform Him of that fact. Nevertheless, the wheels of justice, being essentially bureaucratic in their nature, dictate that the process server must serve the defendant, whether that defendant is the dumbass who ran his car straight into your garage door after a St. Patrick’s Day party or the Supreme Being. The state, after all, is paying the process server to serve legal paper and the state expects the process server to do something for the money, unlike, for example, the state’s expectations for the people at the department of motor vehicles, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the island of lost souls and from whom nothing is expected except a prolonged case of agita,

Still, an appeal seems likely at this point as trial lawyers and insurance companies begin to square off for what promises to be the steel cage legal death match of the eternity. The financial stakes for the insurance companies could not be higher. For as long as there has been an insurance industry, there have been those events that we all know as acts of God, events so rare and so unlikely that that no one in their right mind, a classification that immediately eliminates most lawyers and all Red Sox fans, would expect an insurance company to write a policy on. Everyone understands that no insurance company has ever calculated your chances of having your pancreas ripped from your body and eaten raw by a gray-bearded schlirchher bird-fungus from the planet Grokklesnorp as you head off to your nearest Dunkin Donuts for your morning cup of coffee. This is just something that does not appear on any actuarial chart that I am aware of and, as far as the insurance company is concerned, not an event that they can assign a dollar amount to. Should this admittedly unlikely event occur to you or to someone you love, it would be one of those acts traditionally ascribed to the Almighty, like earthquakes, avalanches, and that little old lady who doesn’t bother to check for oncoming traffic as she makes a left turn onto a major highway, which I know is definitely an act of God from the way I screamed, Jesus Christ! I am sure if you are not a Christian you would have used the name of your conception of the Divine in vain as well. If God suddenly becomes liable for the acts traditionally ascribed to Him and the workings of His Divine Will, many insurance companies will go through the legal boilerplate on all of their contracts to make sure that none of these acts require them to part with so much as a red cent. Worse even than this, insurance industry lobbyists are already hard at work in Washington, trying to make sure that Congress does not pass legislation requiring the Almighty to take out some insurance if He wishes to continue going about His mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Wonders are all very well and good for your average insurance company, so long as they are not on the hook for the damages.

Trial lawyers, by contrast, regard the Lord and all His works as the biggest potential payday since the invention of asbestos, an event that any good lawyer will have no trouble connecting with the Almighty. Indeed, there will scarcely be a major or minor disaster anywhere in the world that the trial lawyers will not try to pin on the Lord. And given that the Lord is eternal, the number of billable hours a smart lawyer can generate will be truly astounding. Had the option been available to them, the wrongful death class action suit for the citizens of Pompeii killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. would still be winding its way through the courts, with the descendants of the original lawyers still getting rich off the case. Yes indeed, there’s nothing like a volcanically active planet with no written warning sign stating that living on this planet might be hazardous to your health to set any personal injury lawyer’s eyes aglow with a selfless desire to help the insulted and injured of this earth, and, of course, to make out like a bandit without any of the attendant risks.

CALIFORNIA SHAKING: I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about a whole lot of things. There are only so many hours in a day and you can only think about so many things in those so many hours before you want to stop thinking and watch television. This seems to be true everywhere; even with the advent of our new postmodern information society, which allows more people to think about more things that most people couldn’t care less about one way or the other than ever before, most people will reach a point of data overload and will start tuning out. This is as true for me as for anybody else, so on the odd occasion when something on the information superhighway comes along and manages to pique my interest, I tend to spend more than the usual amount of time mulling the subject over than most people I know. The recent earthquake in California is a case in point. We all know that there are earthquakes in California; that is not the issue here. I am simply wondering just why it is that all these earthquakes must be San Andrea’s fault and not the fault of some other deserving saint.

As far as I can tell, and I should mention here that I have done absolutely no research on this and so I am entirely ignorant about what I am talking about, the better to hold a strong opinion on the matter unsullied with mere information, San Andrea, the biblical Saint Andrew the Apostle, never, in all of his missionary travels preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the benighted lower classes of the heathenistic Hellenistic world, set foot in California, an equally heathenistic country chock full of benighted lower classes, although with better sanitation, and in all likelihood could not find California on a map of the United States, an ignorance of basic American geography that the blessed saint shares with millions of American schoolchildren. Even if he had known where California was, it would be extremely unlikely that he would ever have gone there, what with his driver’s license expiring early in the year XXI. It does not do for saints to be wandering up and down the Pacific Coast Highway with an expired license; while not a cause for scandal in the theological sense of that much abused word, it does tend to promote bad driving habits and a fundamental disrespect for both canon and traffic law. Driving without a license also jacks up your insurance premiums once the cops pull you over and discover that you can’t legally drive in the Golden State. All around, it is not a good thing to do.

In any case, not much is known about Saint Andrew the Protocletos, which means the First-Called and is not, as I first imagined it to be, the scientific name for a small and not particularly bright species of dinosaur. According to the ancient sources, Andrew was the first called primarily because he was the first person in that area of the Galilee to get a cell phone and unlimited minutes for his calling circle, something that helped keep the Apostles in touch as they wandered around ancient Israel together healing the sick and raising the deadbeats and then calling; you just know when some guys have nothing but a pair of deuces in their hand and are just trying to bluff you out of the pot. This is, in fact, one of the few things we know for certain about Saint Andrew. Most of what we do know comes from the Gospels themselves—we know from the Gospels, for example, that Saint Andrew was the brother of Saint Peter—and from some newly translated documents pulled out of the remains of an old Coptic monastery at the Nag Mefurmoni archaeological site in Egypt. In 1976, a team of archaeologists from Harvard working on a two year project for finding new ways to loot the Harvard endowment discovered, quite by accident, a treasure trove of early Christian documents and Red Sox memorabilia at Nag Mefurmoni, a small desert outpost only a hundred or so miles from Cairo. The stunned archaeologists, who’d spent most of the dig working on their tans, literally stumbled across an ancient library under the spot they were going to park their Port-O-Potty, a library that included, amongst other things, a carbon copy of a hitherto unknown Gospel according to Andrew and Andrew’s Epistle to Saint Barney the Barman, along with Barney’s reply. Barney’s reply contains one of the first complete examples of a Christian catechism ever found, as well as a request that Saint Andrew settle his tab and, in the margins, some professional tips on how to make the perfect Harvey Wallbanger. This epistle never actually reached Saint Andrew, though, as Saint Barney neglected to put a stamp on the envelope and so the epistle never left the Nag Mefurmoni post office; apparently, the post office clerks just tossed the screed into the undeliverable file, along with all those letters kids wrote every year to Santa Zeus. But in all of those documents, however, there is not one mention of California, earthquakes, kids wearing pajamas to school, or why anyone should hold Saint Andrew responsible for these phenomena.

Saint Andrew is not the only saint to have such uncanonizable faults attributed to him. Saint Vitus’ dance, for instance, is a disease in which the sufferer moves, jerks, and makes wild involuntary spastic movements reminiscent of the worst excesses of the acolytes of Isadora Duncan on speed, whereas Saint Vitus himself preferred the minuet and the occasional foxtrot to keep things interesting. Saint Elmo’s fire is not really a fire at all, a fact once explicated on by the American theologian Rob Lowe, and Saint Elmo had no more to do with the eponymous unfire than did Saint Kermit, Saint Oscar the Grouch, and Saint Demi Moore.

So why Saint Andrew? No one knows, as far as I can tell. Theories abound, of course, as they always do, and some of them are more nonsensical than others, as they always are. This is the way of the world; in the wake of any great disaster, someone will have to say that it must be somebody’s, anybody’s, fault, although it actually helps if the someone you’re trying to pin this thing on is either a Jew, a Jesuit, or a Mason. If you can get someone from all three groups and the CIA involved as well, so much the better for your theory. This has actually been going on for quite some time now. For example, the Inquisition blamed the 1755 Lisbon earthquake on the malign influence of heretics and was all gung-ho to give a few of them the permanent hot foot just as soon as they found enough of them to barbeque. The king of Portugal was having none of that, however, and told the inquisitors that he had to feed the living and bury the dead, tasks that left little or no time for pressing people as to whether or not they believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Mass executions of apostates, while an edifying and altogether wholesome spectacle for the entire family, would have to wait for another time. The inquisitors left the royal presence deeply annoyed; in every crowd, there’s always one killjoy who spoils the fun for everyone, which is something I’m pretty sure you’ve already noticed by now.

FINE DINING: We live today in an age of ever-increasing market specialization, with niche markets pullulating like so many phony tax shelters on a millionaire’s quarterly return (not to get off the subject here, but can anyone tell me why Bill Gates, a man with a personal income larger than the gross national product of any seven Third World countries you could name off the top of your head, a man who makes more in the time it takes for him to go to the bathroom than I will make in my entire life, needs $600 from the United States government in order to stimulate the economy?). Where once consumers had to take what goods and services corporate America offered them or do without, in today’s Internet driven market more and more customers can indulge whatever taste or interest they may have, content in the knowledge that someone somewhere will have what they want to buy, no matter how strange that purchase may seem. Nowhere is that more true than in the market for sex toys, and if you are interested in this sort of thing then you should stop reading right now, because this is the last mention of sex toys in this particular bit of business.

No, I am speaking today of the publishing industry, where the smaller, boutique publishers, the specialist presses that may only handle a few books every year, are challenging the industry’s giants for a share of the market. One need only go into bookstores and public libraries from one end of this our Great Republic to another to see the effect of these digital age Gutenbergs. Shelves strain today under the weight of new books, an odd phenomenon, given that vast numbers of the citizenry are now too illiterate to understand the pictures, much less the words, in what the trade nowadays refers to as graphic novels, which in another time and place were simply known as comic books. Cookbooks abound today as never before, with books on French and Italian cuisine growing more and more narrow in their focus. Where once Julia Child could produce a cookbook that contained all anyone would ever care to know about French cooking, today’s culinary scribes feel a constant pressure to come up with something new, something more cutting edge, something no one else has, the demand driving them to concentrate on smaller and smaller areas, to the more regional and village cuisines, going deeper and deeper into the countryside for their subject matter, until these harmless drudges of New Grub Street are describing in exquisite detail for the gastronomically deprived wretches of the New World just how the coq au vin of Madame Defarge differs in style, taste, and texture from the coq au vin of Madame Dubois, the grouchy old bat who lives two doors down from Madame Defarge in a Alpes de Haute-Provence village so remote the villagers spend a fair amount of time wondering what numeral the current Louis is up to. The discerning critic will note, however, even after a cursory examination of newly published cookbooks, that nowhere in this ever-expanding pile of culinary prose will he or she find a cookbook describing the best way to prepare and serve a missionary for the socially conscious savage who wants to impress their family and friends.

This dearth of cannibal cookbooks seems a more than a little ethnocentric to me, if not culturally arrogant to an extreme degree, privileging Western gastronomic concepts over those of other cultures. How else will the environmentally concerned cannibal learn that Roman Catholic missionaries should be thoroughly washed and dried before eaten, as they may contain artificial preservatives known to cause cancer in laboratory rats? Or that the intelligent host should never serve Methodists, Episcopalians, or Mormons as the antipasto, reserving these denominations for the main course? Most up to date cannibals already know better than to consume Presbyterians or Dutch Reformed missionaries raw, as Calvin’s doctrine of predestination tends to give the flesh a slightly bitter aftertaste that the cook can remove by first marinating the missionary in beer (Heineken works the best; Bud Lite the worst—even the most ignorant and benighted of savages know enough to regard the vast majority of American beers as little more than slightly insipid imitations of the real thing) for several hours before cooking, but where is the anthrophagous Jacques Pepin who will tell today’s hip, with it upwardly mobile fine young cannibal that they can whip Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, and Southern Baptists into a fine frothy lemon meringue just by mentioning how much most cannibals support sex education in the schools? Alas, here is a niche market if ever there was one and apparently one that no publisher in the Western world wants to touch with a six foot Pole (Come on, admit it, you didn’t think I had the guts to use any pun that awful, did you?)

All is not lost, though. Self-publishing has been around for a long while; Proust self-published the first volume of A la recherché du temps perdu, for example, and Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself; but over time many people, perhaps influenced by the publishing industry itself, which stood to gain financially by such an attitude, came to look down on the practice, calling those publishers that still did it the vanity presses. This, today, is an antiquated attitude; modern digital self-publishing has made the process much more available for the common person who may not have access to the centers of bookmaking power in New York, Boston, or Churchill Downs. Today’s publishing software makes it possible for any budding Rachael Ray to tell the struggling young working mother the best way to juggle the often conflicting demands of demands of work, family, and how to get and prepare the best cut of Congregationalist they can afford quickly and easily. And it will not be long before she does, I think. The possibilities created in our digital age are endless and endlessly fascinating. Bon appetit, everybody!

CHURCH AND STATE: This past week, in a shocking display of contempt for the ordinary decencies of political life, avatars of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman assassinated the deputy mayor of Dehlhi, India, accomplishing this dastardly and altogether not terribly numinous act by shoving the unfortunate pol off of his own balcony. While all right thinking people should deplore this act of divine lese—majeste; I think we can all agree that the principle of the separation of church and state cannot withstand this sort of divine intervention on a regular basis; the larger question of whether or not Hindu deities ought to play any role at all in this nation’s political life has gone largely unexamined.

In dealing with the intersection of religious faith and the body politic, most Americans still favor making the right on red and then praying no one is coming, as well as shoring up Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between the two so that it survives the occasional attempt by committed theological crash test dummies to plow right through that wall and into the City of God. This is as it should be, even if the insurance company won’t cover the damage to the car since you smashed into the wall on purpose. The church deals with issues of morals and faith, whereas the state deals with the more mundane matters of governance, and hopefully never the twain shall meet, unless the pols decide to suck up to one or another special interest group and then everyone’s umbrage starts umbraging all over the carpet without a tourniquet anywhere in sight. However, the principle of church—state separation is stood on its head if the state no longer has to deal with the church as middleman, but with the deity directly; traditionally, church—state relations are a strictly retail relationship. There is no constitutional basis in this country for dealing with the Divine on a wholesale basis.

Now, every so often you get the occasional preacher asking the Lord smite some politician hip and thew for his presumption about one thing or another; this will always make the TV news and send the liberal pundits into a tizzy about how the country is going to hell in a hand-basket, not that they actually believe in hell, you understand, but break out the smelling salts anyway, I feel the vapors coming on, and sends the reporters, most of whom have forgotten what little they ever knew about the Bible, scrambling for their dictionaries to find out what the hell a thew is, followed by a quick check with legal to find out whether the Lord can actually smite a thew in the United States without someone suing Him (He can, except in Vermont, Alaska, and for some reason, American Samoa—don’t ask me why, I just work here), but the furor usually doesn’t last very long. The Almighty, as Mr. Lincoln reminded us in his Second Inaugural, has His own purposes, and most of the time those purposes do not include smiting hips and thews on behalf of people whose hair has not moved one fraction of an inch since the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

The large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, however, has changed the theological balance of power in this country. Where once the politicians could rely on the Lord to stay out of political matters, there is no such constriction on any of the Hindu pantheon. Given the monkey god’s recent direct intervention in Indian municipal politics, can we here in this country expect that he will choose not to involve himself in American politics as well? And if he chooses to involve himself, what will prevent other Hindu deities from trying to influence the course of American political life? It is difficult at best to see how the Republicans can go on using the elephant as their party’s symbol in the face of Democratic complaints that the elephant is a blatant Republican attempt to recruit followers of the elephant god Ganesha into the Grand Old Party. It is also difficult to gauge what the reaction of many Americans would be should Ganesha, in a spirit of elephantine solidarity, choose to have something very large and heavy other than the Clintons’ collective ego fall on the Democratic presidential candidates before the New Hampshire primary.

I think, therefore, that no matter how laudable divine intervention in the political process is in the abstract, in the practical everyday world of practical politics it is not very desirable, especially if the body politic must deal with a politically active pantheon of divine beings. Most Americans, being monotheists, are just not up to the constant demands of keeping track of who is up and who is down in the divine hierarchy, and there is no show like Divinity Tonight to tell them what is going on and to get the straight skinny on what is really going on with the gods these days. Politicians, already fearful of political retribution from billionaire leftists and Internet netroot moonbats, will do even less, if such a thing is possible, if they face divine retribution for their various malfeasances and peculations, which will leave the average citizen in the grip of a divine bureaucracy, each one demanding its own special form of tribute in order to work at all, and the entire political process, if not life itself, bogs down while waiting in line at the cosmic department of motor vehicles. It is enough to drive you to atheism, if you hadn’t already smashed your car into the wall of church—state separation. That’ll teach you not to do that again, won’t it?

WHY I DO NOT DRINK: Many of you have read the first part of this screed about a year or so ago, when I posted this here in a different form. I was recently asked, however, how come I do not go to church as often as I might; that part of this screed is an attempt to answer that question, so for those of you familiar with part one may want to skip down to the part you haven't seen yet. Enjoy your holiday!


There are, I suppose, a good many reasons to avoid both drinking and churches. One might be a teetotalling atheist, for example, although the problem I have always had with atheists, whether they are teetotalling or positively blotto six days a week and twice on Sunday, is that I can find no credible proof of their actual existence. There are plenty of atheists on television these days; one can hardly turn on the TV nowadays without someone or other peddling their newest atheistical tome and proudly proclaiming their disbelief, daring the Almighty to strike them down with a well-placed thunderbolt for their blasphemy, but you only see these people on the television, and I hesitate to point out that I also see Lucy Ricardo on my television and I know that she’s not real, either. If they want me to believe in their untelevised reality then they will have to come up with some better philosophical argument than their saying that they exist. The Bible says that God exists too, and you can see how much ice that argument is cutting. The other problem with TV atheists is that all they want to talk about is God. If I wanted to talk about God as much as they do, I would just go to church and listen to an expert on the subject. I mean, really, whose medical advice do you trust, Hawkeye Pierce’s or your family doctor’s? No, the reason I avoid churches is that bad things happen to me in churches. It has always been that way; on my next birthday, I’ll turn 50, and yet for large numbers of my friends and relations, I will always be the boy at the wedding.

Now, you must understand that I do not remember this incident at all; it happened when I was three or four years old and like a lot of stuff that happens to you at that age, it has long since vanished from the conscious memory. My parents went to a wedding with two of my brothers and me; the youngest two brothers hadn’t arrived yet. The wedding was a pretty standard one, as weddings go, or so people keep telling me. It was hot that day and, in that era before the ubiquity of air conditioning, the front doors of the church were open to catch the breeze, if there were any breezes available to catch. The happy couple were up at the altar getting ready to exchange vows when the youngest brother at the time, the Navy lifer, although at this time the Navy was still a future prospect and not something he was actively seeking out, rolled his big red fire truck up the main aisle of the church. My mother was embarrassed at this behavior, as you might imagine, went up the aisle to retrieve the brother.

The brother did not wish to return to the hard pew or be quiet; small children are uniformly uncooperative in such matters; and when presented with a physical attempt to remove them from where they want to be, they squirm like grafting pols caught red-handed in mid-peculation on 60 Minutes. He also did not want to leave his fire truck in the middle of the church’s main aisle lest some grown-up decide to appropriate the toy for himself. Small children regard all adults except their own mothers as untrustworthy at best and potential felons at worst, and the brother decided that he wanted his fire-truck back before some larcenous adult made off with it. The brother squirmed for all he was worth; he did not want to leave that fire-truck; and suddenly broke free. He ran down the main aisle, with my mother in hot pursuit. He grabbed the truck, stared wide-eyed towards the back of the church, and loudly announced before God and the assembled congregation, “Look, Mommy, Akaky wee-wee.” At this stunning piece of news the congregation, the wedding party, the bride and groom, and the priest all looked to the back of the church to see just what was going on back there.

What was going on is fairly simple to describe, since people have been telling me this story for most of my life. While my mother went up to collect my brother the Navy lifer and my father talked politics with the person sitting next to us in the pew I had taken the opportunity to wander outside and was, at that very moment and purely in a spirit of theological and scientific inquiry, urinating on a statue of the Blessed Virgin and trying to see how high I could get the stream to go. I was about to inundate the Holy Mother’s knees when my mother grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me off to one side of the church so no one could see her not spare the rod on my backside.

The story lives on, of course, and if everyone who has ever told me over the years that they were in the church that day had actually been in the church, the place would have to be the size of Yankee Stadium. I don’t remember any of this at all, neither my excretory assault on the statue nor the spanking afterwards. I am told that it caused a huge sensation in the church followed by waves of hysterical laughter, so much so that the priest held the wedding up for fifteen minutes so the bride could go into the sacristy and redo her makeup. Apparently she cried so hard her mascara ran down her face and she needed to clean up so as to look presentable in the wedding pictures.

As for the not drinking, well, that happened a few years later, when I was about twelve or so and on the cusp of adolescence, an always precarious place to be. At that age you want to try new things, experience new sensations, and one of the best ways of doing both, I found, was to raid my father’s liquor cabinet when no one else was around. It was Easter Saturday when disaster finally caught up with me. My father brought the brothers and me to church so that we could go to Confession, and when we were done confessing our sins and saying our penitential prayers my father brought us all home, whereupon they all disappeared like wallets at a pickpocket convention, leaving me with the unenviable task of clearing out the gutters. I did not want to clean gutters, but my mother was going shopping and she wanted the gutters cleared by the time she got back and she made it plain that she would brook no opposition to her desire for cleared gutters. So, I went and did it. Clearing gutters is not fun at the best of times, but clearing gutters when the leaves in the gutters are wet, sticky, and both loathsome and noisome to behold is just disgusting, and I was incredibly happy when I tossed the last of that vile-smelling gunk over into our neighbor’s heavily wooded back yard. Then I went inside, where Nemesis awaited me.

At first I resisted the siren’s call; I wanted to clean myself up first, but the impulse to taste some of my father’s brandy got the better of me and so I hied me hence to the liquor cabinet, where I took a sip of his good brandy straight out of the bottle. Then I took another sip…and another…and another…and another…until I had sipped about half the bottle away. Realizing the sudden fall in the brandy level might cause some consternation should someone notice it, I immediately raised the level to its pre-binge point by pouring grape soda into the bottle, which I reasoned was, like brandy, made out of something reasonably grapish and so would cause no notice should someone decide to have a brandy that day, which was not likely. My father was not a drinker and he only opened the liquor cabinet for St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s, so I had about eight months to come up with a convincing story explaining how come his good brandy tasted like grape soda. After I covered my tracks, I went into the living room and flopped down on the couch to read the local paper. They were running a story on the dangers of teenage drug abuse, especially, as I remember it, barbiturates, and I read the story with great interest.

It was at this point that my mother came in from shopping. We said hello, and she told me later that I appeared fine to her at that point. She went into the kitchen and asked if anyone had called and I said not a soul called, not even my aunt Ellen, who telephones complete strangers at all hours of the day and night and keeps them on the phone for hours at a time while she complains about her health and how her evil guttersnipe children (they’re actually very nice, for relatives, that is; it’s just that she really is that much of a pain) were driving her to the poorhouse, and then my mother asked me to put the toilet paper in the bathroom. I said okay; I always try to be accommodating; and started into the kitchen.

The reader will have to take this next part on faith, since I don’t remember any of this at all, given the total blackout I was then operating in. I remember getting up, and then the veil descended. It appears that I staggered into the kitchen, took the toilet paper, and then staggered again into the bathroom, where I promptly fell face-first into the bathtub. My mother, frightened by this unexpected turn of events, came into the bathroom and asked if I was all right. I said I was, and then attempted to tell her what I’d just read in the paper about the dangers of barbiturates; what I actually said was Reds…reds…reds... Apparently, I was not clear in my explanation, because once my mother deduced that I was not talking about the threat from the international Communist conspiracy or the eponymous Cincinnati baseball team, which, for those of you who don’t follow such things, is the oldest professional baseball team in the United States, beginning its first season in 1876, she thought I had actually taken some barbiturates and immediately called for an ambulance. I was not happy about this and I must say now that I am glad that the only thing I hit with my Little League Louisville Slugger was the kitchen table and the living room wall and that no emergency medical technicians were injured trying to get me into the ambulance. They succeeded, of course, without too much bother; I was having gravity and balance issues at the time and so posed no real threat to anyone except myself.

Upon arrival at the hospital, the doctors pumped my stomach, something I would have preferred them not to do, as it revealed the full extent of my crime to all and sundry, including my waiting and anxious parents, who, afraid that they had a drug overdose on their hands, found to their chagrin just another drunken Irish-American roaring boy and therefore nothing to get really worried about. My brothers tell me it was incredible the way the emphasis shifted from anxiety about my health to outright anger about how much my little hospital jaunt was going to cost them. Parents can be like that, I hear.

And so the conquering debauchee returned home, draped over his father’s shoulder while this very same father announced to the entire neighborhood his son’s transgressions (Neighbor: Barney, how is the boy? Father: the little son of a bitch is drunk, that’s all; nothing wrong with him otherwise). And then I was washed in cold water like colors and then in hot like whites, none of which made any impression, and then I was parked in a chair and left to sleep it off.

The veil ascended and the fog cleared in the middle of the Mary Tyler Moor Show. I came to with a splitting headache and more than a little surprised that my hair, which had been dirty, was now clean; it’s strange the things that stick in your mind, isn’t it? The other thing that sticks in the mind is the reproachful glares of my mother and the snickering of my brothers. My response to both glare and snickers was to deny I was or had ever been drunk. It’s not much of an excuse, I know, but I didn’t know about my stomach being pumped at that time and so total denial of everything seemed a good idea until I could figure out what the hell was going on. Much of life, I’ve found since then, is just making it up as you go along and denying everything is usually a smart idea, except, of course, if you haven’t had your stomach pumped first.

The next day was Easter Sunday and I spent the first few hours of the most important day in the Christian year kneeling in peristaltic penance before the toilet, convinced that there were large groups of malicious people inside my head trying to get out and using whatever power tools were at hand to accomplish just that. It amazed me then, as it does now, that I was able to think at all, much less that there was still anything in my system to spew forth, given the pumping I’d gotten the day before, but the proof of the pumping was in the bowl. At the same time, I now reeked like the Bowery was my home address, the sour stench of alcohol exuding from every pore no matter how hard I tried to wash it off. I tried to get out of going to Easter Mass, telling my parents that I was too sick to go, but I noticed that my father was controlling his temper and I quickly backed away from what I still feel was a reasonable request. My father’s reaction, though, convinced me that this was probably not the best time to bring the subject up. My father seldom controlled his temper; displays of wrath were fairly common when I was growing up; and so we knew that when he controlled his temper it was because he was mad enough to put his fist through one of our heads. As much as I wanted the people inside my head at the time to stop banging, I didn’t want it that much.

My father’s one concession to me that day was his letting me sit in the back of the church, on a folding chair next to the table of the guy who handed out the church bulletins. That way I had a clear run at the bathroom, if I needed to use it. I remember that Easter Mass primarily as a horror of heat and the heavy scent of flowers. The church was packed with people and the closeness and the smell of the flowers and the heat made me incredibly nauseous and caused the sweat to pour off like I’d sprung a million little leaky beer taps; even with the smell of the flowers I can still remember the people standing in the back behind the pews sniffing and then looking at me strangely. After the passage of several years, during which time neither the Yankees nor the Cubs won the World Series, the destiny of man on earth was not affected in any way by the rise and fall of the price of tea in China, and tone deaf dwarves played Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen backwards using kazoos and whoopee cushions, the Mass finally arrived at Communion, which for most of the parishioners means the end of Mass, since the partaking of the Body of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was and still is, I’m told, followed by a hundred yard dash to get to the parking lot and on the road before the inevitable traffic jam begins. Religion should be inspirational, I think, and there’s nothing more inspirational than beating the traffic.

I just want to say, at this point, that going up to Communion was not my idea; my father made me do it. All I wanted to do was to get out of the church and into the fresh air as soon as possible, but the sight of my father looking at me like Abraham getting ready to sacrifice Isaac (or Ishmael, if you prefer) and not at all keen to take up the Lord’s offer of a free ram instead of the son convinced me to head up to the altar rail. I remember people looking at me oddly in my sweat-soaked blue suit and my distillery stench, and I remember Monsignor Riordan look at me even more oddly, as if he couldn’t make up his mind to give me Communion or not, but he did and moved on, casting a frown my way as he went down the altar rail. I blessed myself and stood up, and then foundered in a tsunami of nausea. I realized, to my horror, that I had no time to stand on ceremony, and so I bolted down the main aisle, almost knocking some of my classmates over as they waited on line for the Sacrament. I had to get to the bathroom, there was no denying the urge, I had to get there, I had to make it, I had to make it…

I didn’t make it—I threw up in the baptismal font in the back of the church, heaving the transubstantiated Body of Christ into the holy water as if He was in a huge hurry to get out of such a low rent personage as myself. This was an especially poor choice of receptacle, as a young couple was standing next to the font waiting to have their first-born, a boy, baptized, the mother reacting to my defiling the holy water with a loud scream. I felt the outraged young man punch me in the ribs, which knocked the breath out of me for a moment, and then he tried to pry me away from the font; I still remember him holding me by my shirt collar and my choking because he’d cut off my windpipe. Then my father, as he was wont to do in situations like this, knocked the guy on his ass and dragged me out of the church. I don’t remember how my mother and brothers got home from church that day; I was too busy getting my ass kicked from one end of the house to the other and back again. Pop wasn’t happy that day, not at all.

Since that day, then, I have avoided strong drink and churches, the first because I don’t like the feeling of not being in control of myself, and the second because embarrassing things happen to me on a regular basis in churches and I would just as soon avoid these situations whenever possible. I do resent the fact that my brothers, who have found themselves in the drink taken more than once since then, will bring this discreditable tale up whenever they need a good laugh, even though that was the last time I ever got drunk, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about this now except live with it. It happened and they’re never going to let me forget it. Having brothers can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. I did go to my father’s funeral Mass, which was in the same church as my misadventure all those years before and I managed to get through the Mass without embarrassing myself. I noticed on the way out that the baptismal font still has a big spot where my stomach acid ate away the finish on the stone. I don’t know why seeing that spot cheered me up; just a reminder of my father in the good old days, I guess. And I occasionally see that young couple whose son’s baptism I so rudely interrupted; I think they’re Presbyterians now.

DEBATE: Hi there. I haven’t been here as much as I ought to be, I know, but that was due to reasons beyond my control and I fear that this screed isn’t going to be very long, either. I found this article courtesy of the Arts & Letters Daily and thought that you might want to take a look at it, too. In the article Christopher and Peter Hitchens do rhetorical battle, with the former brother denouncing the latter’s religious faith in particular and religion in general with all the enthusiasm a passionate atheist can summon up. I have a lot of respect for both men, and I must say that I really admire Christopher Hitchens’ willingness to denounce his erstwhile comrades on the Left for their willing blindness to the evils of Islamic fanaticism and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

But in many ways, Christopher Hitchens remains a man of the Left and no more so than when he denounces religious belief. He pours scorn on his brother’s Anglicanism, but either cannot or will not see that his own longstanding Marxist views are simply religious faith in secular guise, although why anyone would want to replace Christianity with Marxism is a mystery to me. I do not understand why anyone would turn away from the soteriological benefits of religious faith, where in return for a life lived in accordance with the wishes of God, one gets to spend all eternity in the presence of the Almighty, from whom all good things come, in order to follow a discredited 19th century economic philosophy that didn’t work in any country that tried to implement it, usually at a horrific cost in human suffering. That confuses me, but then, I am easily confusable, or at least this is what people tell me.

THE LDS VERSUS THE CLAN BASHMACHKIN: Before I start, a full disclosure, as they say: this screed began life as a comment I made over at Solarvoid, a fine blog and one I commend to your attention. Rusticus, the owner and sole proprietor, does not allow pinging, so instead of doing a trackback and saving myself the time and energy of explaining my self there, I am wasting your time by explicating on the subject here, which is all for the best, I guess, since I wasn’t doing anything today anyway, except maybe trying to get this damn pine tar off of my hands. In the high winds of a few days ago, an old pine fell across my mother’s back yard and now she wanted the tree gone. So, my brothers and me, we spent the morning cutting the thing up and hauling it away, and consequently we all smell like advertisements for Lysol now. My fingers are sticking to the keyboard, too.

In any case, the first thing I should say here is that I have nothing against Mormons as people, even though I could never be a Mormon myself; that, I fear, is simply impossible, for reasons I will get to in just a minute. Mormons are some of the nicest people in this mycological breeding ground; they come in with their nice suits and their short haircuts, looking all the world like a convention of Young Republicans out to convince the world of the gospel of Adam Smith, Ronald Reagan, and Arthur Laffer, and sit down at our computers and email the folks back in Utah that all is going well for them here in the heathen confines of our happy little burg and that they expect a great harvest of souls here such as the world has never seen before, all of which will happen just as soon as they manage to wean most of the population away from their crack pipes. They are a nice bunch of kids, all in all, what with their white shirts and ties and their name tags announcing to the world that this is Sister June or Elder John of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, although if I were in charge of Mormon missionary activities in this neck of the woods I’d tell Elder John to cover the word elder with a piece of tape or a post—it note or maybe some black magic marker; Elder John doesn’t look old enough to buy a decaf Pepsi, much less a beer. I’ve got socks without holes in them that are older than this kid is, so that whole elder thing causes no end of cognitive dissonance here amongst the Gentiles.

No, my trouble with the Mormons is purely theological, especially in their theology of the family. Mormon theology in this area is a truly wondrous thing, a system of belief as detailed and refined as the Marian doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church (more full disclosure: this is the church to which I very nominally belong), a theology that contributes greatly to the moral development of the fine young men and women who come in here every day. Contrary to the hedonistic Zeitgeist of our age, these young men and women expect to marry, expect to raise children and set those children on the straight and narrow path that leads to heaven, and in the fullness of their age, pass away with their families about them, content in the knowledge that a Mormon family never really dies, that a man and a woman can seal their marriage in eternity, that a righteous life means that one may return to the bosom of one’s family forever. What in heaven and earth, you might ask, could be better than that?

Nothing at all, of course, although I suppose I am like many Americans in that I want to go to heaven, I just don’t want to die to get there, and if I do have to die to get there I would just as soon not have to see any of my relatives once I arrive, assuming, of course, I arrive at all. Even assuming that a good-sized chunk of my relatives don’t make the cut, an assumption that eliminates about 85% of the more annoying ones right off the bat, I am still left with having to spend eternity with some 15% of my nearest and dearest family members, which is, to put the matter frankly, 15% too many. Given that I already regard having to spend an afternoon with these people as the nearest thing to eternity available on our temporal plane, how much more painful will that sinking feeling in my stomach be when the eternity I have to spend with these people really is an eternity?

“There are many mansions in my Father’s house,” Jesus tells Thomas in the Gospel according to John, and I am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that all of my relatives will come over to my mansion to use the rec room. This is an excuse, as you might well imagine, and before long they will be asking me for my lawn mower/snowblower/power saw/ golf clubs/laundry baskets, etc. that they’re sure the Almighty has blessed them with, but cannot find at the moment, so can they borrow mine and they’ll bring it back tomorrow, tomorrow being a relative term in a place of perfect timelessness. Assuming I die in the 2030’s or 2040’s, they will be asking me for this stuff around May of 2753, and I will get it back, assuming I get them back at all, at about the time the Sun turns into a white dwarf some ten billion years from now. I am also assuming that the Mormon paradise I will have to share with these dolts will be one in which I have to make embarrassed excuses to St. Michael and his host of heavenly repo men at the front door of my mansion while the cousins sneak out the back door with that new plasma TV they haven’t started making payments on yet. Frankly, I am not looking forward to this at all.

To make matters worse, the Mormon theology of the family includes what librarians call retrospective conversion. For librarians, even Mormon librarians, retrospective conversion is the first step in going digital; it means entering your library’s holdings into the computer, a process that took us about a year and a half here. A theological version of this is now available to every Mormon or potential convert; not only can everyone in your family convert to the Latter Day Saints, so can all of your ancestors as well. The church maintains the largest genealogical library in the world in Utah to help people conduct their research and locate their ancestors so that they too can enter Paradise as Mormons. This, as you might imagine, raises possibilities I would just as soon not think about. If the current crop of relatives is barely tolerable, what must the earlier versions be like? I fully expect to have generation after generation of Irish peasants and Liverpool dock rats to show up at my doorstep expecting a cup of tea and a buttered scone, at the very least, and maybe a quid or two to tide them over until they sell the crop, or until payday, as the case may be; at the very least, I expect that they will drink everything alcoholic in the house, including my aftershave.

And once they are all done eating me out of house and home, we can all get down to the deep theological question of whether taking the soup after we’re dead is as bad as doing it while we are still living. They will have strong opinions on the subject; the relatives have strong opinions about everything, whether they know what the hell they are talking about or not. Preferably they would know very little about the subject of the argument; as that grand Irishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan once famously put it, the quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it. And then my brother would start fighting with his wife, and then another brother would get a call from his ex-wife, and the argument we were having up to this point disappears for the time being while we all rehash the arguments, for the umpteenth time, we made against his marrying that neurotic ditz in the first place, and Grandma pours salt all over her food and nods to everyone, smiling and happy as a clam because she’s as deaf as a post even with her hearing aids in place and she doesn’t have to hear any of this any more.

This is heaven, or so I am told, if you are a Latter Day Saint, and people wonder why Islam gains converts by leaps and bounds. In the Islamic paradise, not only don’t I have to put up with my relatives and their collection of tics, quirks, and eccentricities, I’d get to be Hugh Hefner forever and ever, and without the 55 gallon drums of Viagra brought in to my bedroom everyday. Unless, that is, the theory that the 72 virgins is a mistranslation and what the ummah actually get are 72 white raisins, which brings up the question, does the Almighty provide the milk and bran flakes, or should we bring them with us?