"The Judgment of the Nations"

Holy Roller Desperation
Everybody knows I've hexed Christianity most of my life, beginning as a youthful writer with my story of wiping my ass with pages I tore out of the bathroom family Christian bible when I ran out of toilet paper as a reckoning kid and was a mess from a massive evacuation--sitting there looking for something to wipe my ass on--you know the feeling. My mother's magazines were there, but I knew better than to touch them. I was desperate--itching--burning--nasty. I was getting panicky. Besides, the magazine pages were rough on your ass, not soft and pliable like Charmin' or Scott's with its rolls of a "thousand sheets." Ah advertising, ain't it grand--especially toilet paper advertising--"rolls of a thousand sheets"--I've been a copywriter so I can easily envision the brain-drain session that led to such a tagline in a presentation to the VPs in charge of advertising at Scott's--"rolls of a thousand shits"--I can hear the copywriters laughing their asses off over that one--and now the toilet paper ad writers have come up with the "does a bear shit in the woods?" concept--bravely advancing toilet paper advertisements forward into the real world of its use--"Mommy, this toilet paper doesn't get me clean...and it's rough to boot." "Oh, here, honey, Mommy forgot, use this roll of new The Way Angels Wipe, the heavenly bathroom tissue...tissue, hell, asswipe, sonny boy, that's what it is, asswipe." Yeah, that story--nobody would publish it--look you can make "publi-shit" out of "publish it"--see how copywriters (read: adwriters) think--anally! We all know one of Freud's inlaws, Edward Bernays, was the father of modern US advertising (Freud's wife was a Bernays), so all advertisements are appealing to the Freudian principles of hunger, sex, and pleasure. You shit because you got hungry and ate; after dinner is the sex; and the next morning comes the pleasure of a long crap--the cycle of life, fresh, eaten, digested, turned to waste. I think that's how we live our lives.

Later as an adult, I conceived and started work on a novel about an investigative journalist who accidentally discovers through using his computer the way to Heaven. A secret way into Heaven --"it's the one used by angels," was my excuse for this secret passageway. But anyway, this journalist sneaks into Heaven and what he finds is that Heaven is a huge cattle ranch in the sky--and the cattle are human monkeys (or us)--yep, it seems the constant feasting and partying in Heaven among the hoards of angels, dancing girls, angelic seconds in command, and their angel wives and angelic children--it seems they have to eat and what they crave most is human monkey meat from down on the Playpen Earth! What a novel! I got several chapters of it written, but then put it aside for some strange reason, like maybe having to stop my own writing to write ads for a living!

I loved advertising and hated it at the same time. I loved the many wonderful women and men I met in these several offices--a lot of whom became best friends, part-time lovers, cohorts in the profession--let's see, at one time I worked for a New Jersey discount department store headquartered in Manhattan; for a brief moment I wrote ads for an NYC radio station; then I worked for a direct-marketing company that was later bought by Shearston-Lehman (yep, that's the original Lehman Bros.); I worked for a medical supply company; I worked for Time-Life Films and BBC Television; I worked for CBS TV Production, later spun off by orders of the Justice Department to become Viacom, first just Viacom (we pronounced it Vee-ah-com), then Viacom International; then one short time I worked for an agency that handled the U.S. Navy. Remember, We the People are the largest advertisers on television--yep, the US Government is the biggest advertiser on television--I know that may be hard to believe, but it's true--all ads warning of AIDS, smoking, diabetes, all those public-service ads, We the People pay for them; all those Defense Department commercials--for the Gyrenes and the combat jockeys--the Marines and the US Army--they pour millions into teevee ads followed by the Navy and the Coast Guard--the Coast Guard is a branch of military service that advertises quiet a bit if you pay attention to commercials--the US Postal Service advertises quiet a bit, too, and even though they are a semiprivate agency, We the People pay for all their commercials. You do know that the US Postal Service is several billions of dollars in the hole. They're raising the postage again in May--yep, fuck 42 cents, that's not enough, they're going to 44 cents. I wonder how 2-stupid-cents is going to help alleviate their debt. You know what it costs to raise the price of a postage stamp? reprinting, rechanging computer computations; it screws up the whole system--unless you buy those stamps that fit all prices--"eternal 42 centers" they're calling them now--like that Liberty Bell stamp that only says "First Class Postage" on it, no 42 cents anywhere on it. Just wait and watch. Next year they'll have to go up on their prices again because they will still be billions in the hole. Yet, for years, the US Postal Service blew millions on the US Tour de France bicycle team led by now millionaire Lance "Cheated on His Wife" Armstrong--now married to a star headliner, I believe, right? Lance got his trophy wife--fuck the mother of his kids and the woman who stood by him while he suffered through his cancer--fuck her!

Anyway, as every one who knows me knows, too, I have certain attraction to watching certain Christian beggars ("pastors" as they like to be called) on late-night teevee; and truly, buck-hustlers is really all they are, beggars of money for themselves and their own, starting Christian fundie churches like Starbucks used to open coffee joints every thirty feet or so, packing their Mega churches then pumping them full of bullshit like, "You'd better start sowing a little more expensive seed there, Brother Wolf. Jesus tells me--even last night while I was prayin' in my special playroom-prayroom he said this to me, he said Pastor Righteous, you need to tell that Wolfie Boy he ain't plantin' the right seed in the Holy Soil--I mean, Brother Wolf, you gave 5 lousy bucks to Jesus last Sunday! Jesus thinks you should be sowing at least a thousand a Sunday." "A thousand a Sunday! Tell Jesus to go fuck himself." Raking in the trashcans full of tax-free moulah--laughing like hyennas while they and their wives and daughters and sons count the catch of the evening. "Praise the Lawdy Lawd, Pastor, there's fuckin' ten-thousand dollars in this pile here and look, we got 10 piles to go." And these hucksters claim that tax-free money goes right straight up to Hebbin' where Jesus loves US dollars and there's a big huge CitiBank up there where God keeps all his tax-free bucks.

Pastor Melissa Scott is, of course, the official The Daily Growler pastor in residence, and, yes, she's my favorite when I'm in a hazy, 'round-several-barns sort of mood, the mood you have to be in to follow the delicious looking Melissa as she wanders through her weavings of the ancient languages on her large blackboards, which are actually whiteboards--but of course, screw what Melissa teaches (Pauline doctrine), if believing on Jesus could get me into her Holy Sack for a night of Holy Rolling in the Holy Sack--and, yes, it might either be Heaven or Hell in that mad bed, but then I say, so what, let me in there, Praise the Lawdy Lawd and pass me some of those black-eyed peas and hamhocks over here, PLEEZ!

But there are other nutjob Christians I occasionally stop along the channel selector and listen to--like Michigan whackjob, Brother Jack Van Impe, the profitizer who says that Jesus is coming back in 2012--Brother Jack even gives you an exact date--so every now and then when it's late at night or early in the ho-hum and I'm wide awake but uninspired to do anything creative I'll twitter around the old teevee dial looking for Christian hustling freaks to sarcastically put down.

This morning while channel surfing for Christian fish to fry, I had an occasion for a reunion with a little Christian beggar lady I hadn't seen on teevee in quiet a while. Her name is Billie, that's really the only name I know her by, but I know her when I see her; she's usually on good ole Cracker-boy Kenneth Copeland's teevee shows. Brother Kenneth's a once-pretty-boy kid from West Texas who was Brother Oral Roberts's pilot and then got "called" by God while he was flying old Oral around in his big Jesus-given airplane to spread the word throughout the world himself, fuck Oral--I mean, hadn't Oral spread the word enough already?--or Rex Humbug (Humbard was his real name but Humbug was his game)?--or Peter Popoff?--and everybody's got to love Peter Popoff--or the little pissant Indian-Canadian who claims he was born in Jerusalem, Benny Hinn--you gotta love Benny and the Cracker preacher boys he has on his teevee shows--strange who God "calls" to spread his word--dumbass Cracker hicks who can sell dumbass Cracker hicks Jesus in a matter of sixty hell-raisin' minutes on a good Sunday morning. Big Fine Daddy Creflo Dollar is another Oral Roberts-trained gospel of Jesus hustler who has 5,000 mostly Black people in his big Mega-Church in Atlanta, Gawjah, every Holy Sunday! Black people in the South love some Creflo. You'd think Black people wouldn't believe in this White Christ and his all-White God and his all-White angels, dwelling, I would imagine, in an all-White Heaven. Will there be restrictions in Heaven? I don't see how a child of Ham could escape restrictions after what God did to his ass. According to the Torah, Ham was cursed by God until he turned black for looking at his old dumbass daddy, Noah, drunk as a lord and laying up in bed naked as a jaybird, his old twanger quite visible and erected. God can't tolerate a son looking upon his naked father, drunk or not! Naked mother? I don't remember any curses against seeing your mother naked--or drunk and naked--like, I don't remember any Bible dudes gettin' turned black for looking at their mothers naked. Anyway, Ham may be the only dude ever turned black by God--does that make, according to Christianity, Ham the father of African people! I don't think so. Ham once he was turned black by God was exiled off to Kush, which, as Dizzy Gillespie will tell you, was already by that time a great African civilization--that time being the time of the Great Flood--first mentioned in the Gilgamesh and the List of Kings in Mesopotamian legend--Noah in that earlier legend actually the Mesopotamian king who had a boat survived that flood by rowing his boat across that big pond to dry land, a flood, by the way, most historians say wasn't that big of a flood anyway. Kush was where Ethiopia and the Sudan are today. One would think that if Noah's flood wiped out every man, woman, dog, and child on earth, there would be no human life left in Kush; yet when Ham got to Kush he married a Kush woman. Was she maybe a white woman?

Moses (some Black Egyptian scholars say Moses was a Black Egyptian), too, was married to an African woman--he married her during a period when he was horny as hell--and though God told Moses, "Wait around Moses, I'll get you a hot Jew girl; don't you dare rush off and marry that woolly-booger or I'll curse you like I did Ham," Moses's sex drive was more powerful than his fear of old God the Father turning him black, so he married the African woman anyway.

So this morning early I came across this Billie woman and she was chirping away her ordinary bullshit of the power of the Holy Spirit (he's called the Holy Ghost, too--and these are all men, White men) and faith and avoiding temptation: to gamble, to fuck around, to dance, to drink, to get high, to covet thy neighbor's wife, which also includes coveting his possessions since women during Holy Bible times were considered possessions and these are Holy Men talking to Holy Men--and women still are possessions in modern times--I've been over that in discussing Thorstein Veblen's and C. Wright Mills's theories--C. Wright's The Power Elite seeming a better Bible for me than anything some ancient Jewish guys wrote down on pieces of parchment or stone or whatever they wrote on. And I ask, how did Moses, for instance, write the Pentateuch, as the Jews call the first 5 books of the Torah? And, if the dude could write at all, what language did he write in, Hebrew? Chaldean? Egyptian? Hieroglyphics? Phoenician? Sumerian? And Big Daddy God wrote the Ten Commandments (the Old Laws) on stone--but in what language?--I mean, could the Chillin' of Israel read or were they dependent on the priests who could read and write for their interpretations?

Suddenly this Billie woman looked straight into the teevee, her eyes filled with dumb revelation, and she said, "Listen to me, people, whether you are watching this broadcast and are Christians or not, you listen to me, prophecy tells me America is at a turning point--America is currently under what God calls in the Book of Revelations, 'The Judgment of the Nations.'" Aha! Billie went on to say, America is being judged by God who will decide whether to wipe America out or save it because it is the most Christian nation on earth! You see, currently, America has lost sight of God's blessings on America and they are backsliddin' faster than Jesus turned water into wine and getting so far away from God and Jesus and this Holy Ghost dude that their asses are beginning to get singed by the heat from the furnaces of Hades. "America," Sister Billie chirps on, "had better get on her knees. Prayer is our only hope we've drifted so far away from God." America, by the way, is what these dumbass Crackers call the US since they're not educated enough to realize America includes Canada, Mexico, Central America, and all of South America. Nope, Sister Billie's America is the good ole USA, and by God, God considers her America his blessed nation--and he's gonna be harder in judging us than he is say when he judges Oman, or Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon, or Iran--or even Russia! But then according to these Holy Rolling Pious Fools, Russia will join with Iran to attack Israel and thus start the big war that all Christians are on their knees praying for daily--G.W. Bush, to them, looked like the Holy Man to lead them into their precious Armageddon, as the Christians call it WWIII--but Bush couldn't get the job done--God didn't answer Georgie Porgie's babbling prayers, but then that's America's fault for not seeing how right old G.W. was.

Billie says we need a new Noah--a new Noah to save this world from this coming-soon destruction--a contradiction in the Bible by the way--its Old Testament God threatening constantly to destroy the world and everything in it while the New Testament God, the Gentile Holy end of the Torah, claims the earth will not be destroyed but will become the New Heaven, also called the New Jerusalem--what the Zionists believe, too, and the Zionists and the Christian Fundie idiots believe in the same Judaism--the Judaism that teaches that Israel has to become a state and rebuild the Temple before the true Messiah can come back and snatch them all up and take them up to Heaven where they're all gonna live forever. The Mormons believe Salt Lake City will be the New Jersusalem. There is a silly Christian cult called the British Israelites who believe London will be the New Jerusalem! How about Seoul? God knows Koreans love Jesus Christ, the Lawdy Lawd, and the whole God and Hebbin' and Eternal Life story. And like I said once, "The Devil is really just Death." Those of us who fear death most are the most faithful and obedient slaves to these invisible Masters that all religions tout as truth and the way to salvation. Salvation in the desert comes from above--from the sky--more particularly from the clouds--this is why Jesus will come back to earth to claim his kingdom through a big huge white cloud through which JC will ride on a giant white horse--because in a desert religion, like Christianity, Judiasm, and Islam, the clouds hopefully bring rain, true salvation, the real manna from the heavens. Clouds are not from outerspace! Clouds are a part of our atmosphere caused by the sun sucking up the waters of the earth and then raining them back down on us for salvation, which includes prosperity, too--your wheat and oats and barley can't survive without water--but then nor can YOU. In the desert, WATER is GOD. Read T.E. Lawrence's great book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom--or watch the movie Lawrence of Arabia (though made by a Brit about a Brit dude, and I'm a notorious AntiAnglo-Saxon-Viking (an Anglophobe), I still find it one of the best photographed, scripted, storyboarded and filmed movies to come along in my lifetime. I watched it in all its long glory one day two years ago and though it has lost a lot of its "surprises" for me, it still was just a fun movie to watch--and the acting is superb and the settings are superb and the locations are awesome--the desert--all about the desert and living in the desert and how valuable water is in the desert--the scarce wells guarded with vengeance by the tribes in whose territory a well exists--and around the wells grew up the oases.

So look out, fellow Americans (Amuricans, or Amerikans), the Big White Daddy God is judging us and, as Sister Billie added near the end of her "word of God" that this Judgment we're undergoing, President Obama is undergoing it, too. And damn if Sister Billie didn't make some I thought denigrating insinuations about how President Obama may be the...I'll whisper this...THE ANTICHRIST---oooooooooooooooooooooh! Scary, eh. Which means, maybe it means this, but Sister Billie may be saying we need to, again I whisper, GET RID OF HIM.

It looks to me like, US Holy Rolling Christians are beginning to feel the squeeze from our depressed economy, from our ruined Capitalist system. God ain't getting the bucks in by the tax-free bucketsful like he did just a year ago. Without money, even Jesus has no power. The Power Elite that rules us aren't Christians. They are White Men who have all our wealth--more wealth than God--more assets, more POWER than God--why, our Power Elite can perform more spectacular miracles than Jesus ever thought of. The Power Elite is not even afraid of CHAOS--Warren Buffett warns us all about we've overextended ourselves--in the meantime, that old crooked asshole (junk bonds made him rich) is holding onto 65 billion--he and Billy Boy and Lovely Melinda Gates combined have a billion times more money than all the world's gods put together. Maybe we should start 'worshipping' them! Maybe they'll make us their slaves! Praise the Lawdy Lawd.

theholyrollinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler