Hello my Freaky Darlings,
Today I have William Freedman, Author of the science-fiction satire Land That I Love, visiting here. I take no responsibility for anything he says. So, without any more further ado, here’s Bill.
Joan kindly offered to let me post an entry to her blog. The invitation was for 1 November, so she suggested a “kind of after Halloween thing”.That displays a certain bias on Joan’s part. I don’t mean “bias” in any negative sense. I just mean that she, as a horror writer, has an affinity for Halloween. But I’m an American political satirist. My affinity is for the U.S. elections.
Sorry, Joan, but Halloween is only pretend scary.
The election has all the elements of a deconstructed John Carpenter flick. You’ve got your blissful beginning. Then there’s the strange movement in the corner of the screen which induces anxiety. It’s revealed to be a false lead (we’ve elected a radical socialist fascist liberation-theologist-Christian secret-Muslim demonic foreigner who might just be the antichrist, or not), but that starts the ominous music which heightens your anxiety. Then your friend is hideously murdered by a deranged lunatic (or at least he loses his job). As a series of gruesome occurrences ensue (oil rigs blow up, industries other than the one you work for are having their loans guaranteed by the government, you’re being forced to buy health insurance sometime in the next five years, people you don’t know are making money off of all this), anxiety grows to dread to fear to panic. Who will be left alive by the time the sheriff knocks down the door? It’s a miracle the black guy lasted this long, that’s for sure. (I doubt this is true, but I heard that the Secret Service’s code name for Barack Obama is “Bullseye”.)
But even a John Carpenter flick is only pretend scary. The elections are real. And the teabaggers scare the precious bodily fluids out of me. If you’re living in a world where America is (still) the world’s sole hyperpower, its economic heft diminished but still dominant, its military ending its operations in one country just so it can ramp up its operations in another, you should be sleeping with one eye open as well.
Rather than bore you with political junkie speechifying (I’ll take what I just wrote in this draft and cut-and-paste it to my own blog), let me just share with you a midrash, a fable based on the Bible that explains what happened between Scriptural lines.
We’ll start with the Scripture:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
(Now the midrash)
And God said, “MOTHER McFUCK!”
And the heavenly host of angels asked as a choir, “Have we displeased you, Lord?”
“Yeah, you shoulda put a warning label on that shit. I burnt my fucking finger on it!” the Lord said, then calmed down a bit. “Sorry about the language. It is inappropriate for the Creator to address his creatures so. We do prophesy that one day We shall have a son who will grow to become a construction worker, but that is not Our concern this day.”
“What’s a ‘day’?” the angels asked.
“We’re skipping ahead,” said God. What is important now is understanding why the light burns.”
“The light does not burn, Lord,” replied the angels. “That is something we had to engineer to as a substructure for the light.”
“So We guess it’s up to Us to find a name for that part of light that burns. We’ll call it ‘heat’.”
And the heavenly host struck a chord on harps and trumpets and lutes and voices
and even invented the church organ for the occasion.
and even invented the church organ for the occasion.“Hey, We got a question about this heat,” God continued. “If We had to invent it before we invented light, then it exists independently of light, doesn’t it?”
“That would logically follow,” the angels agreed.
“Who said anything about logic? This is religion,” God responded. “But this heat — which can exist without light — can burn you. And this light — which can’t exist without heat — is useless to anyone who gets incinerated by the heat before they can benefit from its illumination. Do We have that right?”
“You’re right by definition,” the heavenly hosts intoned. “But yeah.”
“So if there should be a battle between heat and light, heat can throw everything it’s got at light, because it doesn’t need light,” God proceeded, “but light has to be very careful about attacking heat, because without heat there’s no light.”
“That’s about the size of it,” the angelic choir concurred.
“Sucks to be light,” God said with a heavy sigh. “Guess We just made Our first design flaw. Oh well, won’t be Our last. But We have a schedule to keep. Gotta push on!”
(and back to Scripture)
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
So here we are today, with more heat than light.
That’s why you should buy my book, Land That I Love.
To find out more about Bill you can have a look at his blog and if you’re looking for a brilliant and hysterically funny read get a copy of Land That I Love.
Hope you’ve all recovered from the Halloween weekend and that Bill has in some way helped in that recovery. Have a creepy day!