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Vatican Upgrade: Sins 8.0
Who says that gifts are only given at Christmas time? Just when I was tiring of the dizzying permutations of race and gender, ticket tops and bottoms, and those double warheads McCain and Bush, along comes Eliot Spitzer violating the Mann Act AND a Vatican update of the seven deadly sins. All in one day! It’s better than a double row of purple Easter Peeps.
I will let my secular brethren wax high-larious with their inevitable Client 9, Room 871, Emperor’s Club jokes. Let The Hooker Joke Fest begin! Okay, continue. Ho ho! Let me turn your attention to the Vatican’s recently released, upgraded list of the seven deadly sins. Turn your head from those secular hooker jokes, sinner, this is divine!
A recent Lenten Apostolic Penitentiary Seminar was a major bummer at the Vatican’t. Some of the low-lights: powerpoint presentations showed that 60% of Catholics in Italy no longer go to confession; a graph showed today’s secularized world has a decreasing sense of sin; and increasing numbers of people in the secularized West are making do-do without God.
Pope Benedict, sporting those devilish Prada pumps, addressed the Vatican body. Employing impeccable ex-cathedra logic, the Papal plan is to get people back to confession with a whole new class of upgraded sins. There are now even more ways to offend God! And sinning isn’t just for individuals anymore. Sins now have “social resonance.” Think social networking but with hell time. I know I do. It was not clear if confessionals would be renovated for higher occupancy.
To review, those seven single-words sins are: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and my personal favorite, sloth. They are now joined by multi-word sins: carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, allowing genetic manipulation which alter DNA or comprimise embryos, taking or dealing in drugs, excessive accumulation of wealth by a few, abortion and pedophilia. They’re shorter and yet scarier in the Latin.
If you don’t confess these mortal sins before death, you go to hell. You do not pass Limbo, because they got rid of that about five years ago. The Pope had laid out the plans to deal with the more venial sins of road rage, drunkenness and rudeness in an earlier address. It is unclear if he had anything to do with the new Italian law that men cannot fondle their own genitals through their clothes in public. The pope wears layers.
I confess to reading the list, looking for the sin of homosexuality. It wasn’t there! Maybe it’s understood. Is it just me, or does any other LGBT feel left out? It’s like being dropped from the big annual Papal Magazine “Sinniest Sins Alive!” double issue. For a while there, homosexuality was like coverboy Matthew Mcconaughey doing his beach workout. Nunc nihil.
The punishments for the single-word sins were simply noted in a New York Times online article:
Pride: broken on the wheel.
Envy: put in freezing water. Catholics have done waterboarding for years. We call it baptism.
Gluttony: forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes.
Lust: smothered in fire and brimstone. Poor Eliot.
Anger: dismembered alive.
Greed: put in cauldrons of boiling oil. Sloth: thrown in snake pits. Simple and strict.
Nowhere have I read about the sin of making wicked fun of the Pope and all his works. Yet. So I offer new socially resonant punishment suggestions:
Drug Pushers: forced to attend a daily DA meeting. Rush Limbaugh’s in your home group and he won’t stop cross-talking.
Obscenely Rich: you and your geeky cohorts must ring the opening and closing bell on Wall Street for the rest of your born days.
Polluters: run the Crocs Kiosk at the Atlanta airport. The one next to a loud Rosetta Stone tower of Babel kiosk.
Morally Debatable Scientific Experimenters: forced to judge all middle school science fairs.
Abortionists: forced to move to Binghamton, NY, home of Randall Terry.
Pedophiliacs: all of the above, including single-word sin punishments.
Kiss My Asterisk
How about we just put an asterisk next to any athlete who was not on Performance Enhancement Drugs or HGH and set a record?
A first baseman ends the season at 120 pounds and three months later shows up for spring training at 250 pounds, homicidal and bug-eyed with a fire hydrant for a neck. A washed up 46 year old pitcher hobbles to the mound on a walker one season and next season throws 124 mph fastballs. Wow, he must have really worked hard in the off-season. Or gone to Lourdes.
The entire sports industrial complex conspired in baseball’s version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And I have enjoyed watching pouty, teary meltdowns of sports commentators whose inner boychild is hurt, deeply hurt, by the revelation that their heroes used drugs to enhance and prolong their careers. I especially enjoy it when the commentators themselves have obviously had eye jobs, botox injections, follicular implants to enhance and prolong their careers under the unforgiving lens of HDTV.
While we’re at it, let’s put an asterisk next to George Bush’s name, because he really only ever wanted to be commissioner of baseball, not president of the United States. Of course if he had been a baseball comish dealing with drug use, he would have announced that for the good of the sport he was invading curling.
No insult to Yogi Berra, but George has the same rhetorical flair. Of course Yogi was the manager of the Yankees not head of the US of A. Who said the following: “I didn’t really say everything I said.” “If they don’t want to come, you can’t stop them.” “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
Oh heck, let’s put an asterisk next to every financial “manager” too, from the financial yogis at Bear Sterns right down to my mortgage go-for-broker at Countrywide. The first Bush presided over the Savings and Loan collapse. This Bush is presiding near the ongoing collapse of the housing and banking markets. Bush used the White House as an ATM for the rich. When the balloon mortgage burst, the middle class could no longer use their houses as ATMs. Who said: “We make too many wrong mistakes.” George didn’t. He doesn’t. When God speaks through you, you don’t make mistakes.
And by the way, if Barry Bonds goes to jail, and Roger Clemens doesn’t, I’m trading my baseball cards for race cards.
Our State of Affairs is a Great State Fair
Though I was born in Buffalo, when I was ten we moved to Syracuse, “the home of the New York State Fair!” my mother chirped excitedly like some Central New York Booster on speed. I already hated summer fairs, having been dragged through the baby goat barn at the Erie County Fair. I always dreaded summer’s end, not because school was about to start up and I hadn’t lost ten pounds, but because the State Fair was about to begin.
That meant being unable to beg off attending, by claiming I was perfecting my jack-knife at the city pool. On thee hottest day, we would sit stuck in traffic, bare backs of legs stuck to the leatherette of our Ford Fairlane, park in an open scrub field, knowing that we would never see our car again, slog with other family pods to the long lines at the arching gates into a shadeless hell.
The fairgrounds were located next to the Bristol-Meyers plant and Crucible steel mill that everyone knew was dumping into Onondaga Lake. The annual spring regatta generally had the slowest times because no life-respecting coxswain wanted to win and get tossed into the lake. Supposedly the site has been eco-vacuumed, to make room for the Carousel Mall, but friends say that if you toss a cigarette butt, the parking lot will ignite. ‘Third eye’ takes on new meaning. That vision has prompted some local developers to expand and build “Destiny” a mall bigger than the Pentagon shaped mall in Minnesota.
On humid hot fair days the yellowish chemical air carried fried dough particulate from the Midway. The festival of junk food mocked the goody-two shoes Home Ec Pavilion. Even at ten, I pitied performers, squinting and sweating on the mainstage. Loser! Your career is over! Because of early gyroscopic, inner ear damage from spinning/falling down contests with my brothers, I hate rides. If you ever see a picture of me, hair blown back, in mid-Munch scream, elbows locked, it will be me on the stationary horse on the carousel. I loved the hostility of bumper cars, but that was just me blowing off steam.
All this to perhaps explain why I loathe Iowa. The Gateway to the Rectangular States. Not even three million people. All of them farmers who’ve got nothing better to do than pout if a candidate doesn’t have a meal at their house, wear their “I Heart Huckabee” button and pretend to be undecided so they can get face time on camera, and caucus endlessly.
The harvest is in and the fields are fallow. If they farm at all. The farm subsidy pyramid scam actually pays them not to plant. They feel terrible about it. Then when they’re done deciding the fate of the nation, the Children of the Corn State put on their mesh caps, hop in their giant mobile homes, at three bucks a gallon and head on down to some trailer parks for a few months on the Gulf. Jaw with their friends in the Iowa enclave about the sorry state of the world.
Hey, they make up stories about Manhattanites all the time. They hiss we are a Ssssssssanctuary City. We are Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, and the hotel room rates are too high. I resent America held hostage to Iowa. I hate the roller coaster ride of campaigns, especially because it starts in Iowa. Where are those bumper cars when I need them?
PS – Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons just like they don’t have gay people. I have it on the best of intelligence.
Gender Card – Poke her – Old Maid – War
Coming out for Hillary Clinton in one-on-one or small group situations still reminds me of coming out as a lesbian. I’m the lesbian, not Hillary, contrary to the sledge-hammer innuendos of Ann Coulter. Though we wish the best for everyone, Hillary may not be a lesbian. And that’s okay.
And, is it just me, or does Ann look a lot like the young, recumbent and recently unwrapped King Tut?
Approaching the declaration for Hillary is like approaching that triple-solcow moment in a skating routine. Have I got the strength, the torque, the momentum, the sequins to come out to this person? Since I don’t want my inner Dick Button murmuring disappointedly, “Aw, she only did a double,” I declare my orientation for Hillary and prepare myself for the inevitable Hilla-phobia blowback.
The other night at my study group dinner, it happened again. About eight of us meet monthly to discuss some dense, progressive policy book we all claim to have read. I’m generally seated at the kid’s table. Before we got into the book discussion, we were doing our usual recap of recent political events. Several members always end up moaning and thudding their foreheads on the table in the ‘dovening for democracy’ portion of the evening.
When we got to discussing the presidential campaign, my dear partner asked everyone to go around the table and announce who they were for, and cruelly looked at me to start. I took what I knew would be my last bite of mushroom risotto for the evening and declared I was for Hillary.
A fine expectorated Chianti mist was settling from my friend’s mouth, as she bleated in horror, “Why?”
“Other than the fact that I think she would make Bill O’Really’s head blow up and that she is the most qualified for the job. . ,” I started. “WHAT has she done?” my apoplectic friend silent screamed. I continued, “I support her just so that I can get into fights with people about the appalling levels of sexism in the world,” and daubed a small bit of mushroom off my neighbor’s cuff.
Full disclosure: at the gym I’ve been listening to the audiotape of Susan Falludi’s The Terror Dream on my IPOD. Falludi reports so extensively and bloodlessly on the uses of 9.11 to restore “traditional” manhood, marriage and maternity that she has gotten hysterical, vicious reviews which prove her point exactly. The men at the gym seem genuinely unsettled by my mirrored glowering at them.
It was as if I were one of those Dixie Chicks of Bridge and had held up a hand-made sign at an awards ceremony. Talk about gender card. I started to lay them out on the table. In South Carolina, a woman, perhaps Ann Coulter’s grandmother, called Hillary a bitch and John McCain didn’t cut her off. He has, no doubt, heard or even said worse. Maureen Dowd never met a woman she liked, making her a worthy NY Times columnist. Katie Couric can’t catch a break.
My friend rebutted from east, west, north and south. Perhaps I overtricked, when I endplayed her with, “Why do you hate yourself so much?” I’m not proud of it. Let the conversation continue.