A Cold, Hard Week for the Fundamental Immortals...death is inevitable regardless of the machine

Marcythewhore whore says: Everyone is either agitated, excited, annoyed or moved to some kind of opinion by the Pope’s death. Me (marcy)? I’m waiting for Jerry Falwell to stop breathing into a nose tube. It was Falwell who called the Pope the Anti-Christ. That’s the way it is with the current crop of Brown Shirt Christians. They hate the Vatican as much as an abortion clinic. I’ll get excited when Falwell meets the Pontiff in the after-life and we get to see just how much forgiveness all this religion has taught both sides. This could be the biggest celestial ten-rounder between the soul of John Paul and the Brown Shirt remains of Jerry Falwell that the universe has seen since the fall in ‘Paradise Lost.’

Talking about people being affected by John Paul’s death, yesterday I noticed my Brown Shirt neighbour pacing in feverish circles in his front yard, mumbling some sort of incantations.

Concerned, I walked over to ask if I could be of any assistance. A free massage at one of my massage parlors? Whatever to calm this obviously agitated Christian.

Remember that look in your 14 year old cocker spaniel’s eyes when you took the crippled animal to the vet to be mercifully put down? That was the look in my Brown Shirt neighbor’s pool of brown eyes. He looked at me with the look of background dirge music and wailed to the heavens, “John Paul is dead and I don’t know how to serve God enough and if there is something I can do for my fellow human!!!”

I replied, “Well, my yard needs mowing.” And shrugged half in jest.

The cocker spaniel look was replaced by the face of a garage brick wall with seven gangsters lined up in front of it’s inconsequential aesthetics. My Brown Shirt neighbor’s mind just hit that brick wall. A second before he was fretting about how he could give his life to making this a better world, suddenly he was faced with the prospect of smelly gasoline in a lawnmower with wet grass all over his shoes, and he was in water fathoms above his previously lofty head.

But at least I stopped his pacing and wailing. “Don’t worry,” I said in the face of his immediate blank stare. “The Pope won’t know whether you mowed my lawn or not.” Brown Shirt looked like Jesus had just slammed shut the door on the last chance of redemption.

I turned and walked back to my house. It’s been a cold, hard week of slaps in the faces of those who have been struggling with the riddle of immortality: ‘everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.’ Which is why in Sunday school they teach children that immortality doesn’t mean your body quits, it just means that your body learns to play a harp and wear wings. Never mind the incongruity that most people live lives less appealing than a 14 year old cocker spaniel’s on its way to euthanasia, and it doesn’t make any sense to want to extend such a useless existence into eternity. At least reincarnation gives you a fifty-fifty chance of coming back as a movie star or something exciting. But people get accustomed to the boring existence and are willing to live out their lives in boredom for the expectation of continuing to live in boredom in heaven, forever and a day.

***
It’s been an especially bad week for the Brown Shirt immortal beggars who were taking Vegas odds that Terry Schiavo would be kept in a zombie state of existence for another fifteen years while machines played the part of her heart and lungs. They simply don’t have a machine that can play the part of a dead person’s liquefied brains.

Some sort of Brown Shirt poetic justice would have been served had the already far right judges continued to travel light years farther into the right field horizon to adjudicated that the baby food feeding tubes be reasserted into just above Terry’s belly button. What poetic justice that would have been for the Schindler parents to have saved for another fifteen years their bulimic daughter’s flesh from actually starting to rot.

Yes, fifteen more years of looking at a zombie hooked up to scuba gear and no more media around to have made the Schindlers feel like fifteen minutes of famous celebrity.

The Schindlers are already feeling the pangs of abandonment. The media trucks are no longer triple parked outside their front lawn. Nobody from Fox or CNN are paying attention to the Schindlers anymore.

Look at it this way, mom and pop Schindler. You had your fifteen minutes of fame. It is your destiny to return to anonymity. But your daughter is waiting in anticipation seated on a front row seat in heaven, waiting for the kickoff of the cosmic battle between Jerry Falwell and John Paul to begin.

Imagine how bad it would have been for you Schindlers had the judge said to replace the feeding tube for fifteen years, and nobody is paying attention to you while your daughter continues to mime life hooked up to mechanical devices.

You Schindlers were destined to be forgotten one way or the other. You’ve been forgotten with the death of John Paul and the impending demise of Jerry Falwell.

***
Let’s give a round of applause to the memory of Hunter Thompson, the man who couldn’t miss himself at close range with a shotgun.

Hunter, like Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain, realized with a shotgun in hand that their usefulness was over. Hunter faced like a man the question of hanging around defoliating the earth with a once vivid existence that had gone south.

John Paul, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan all never saw the enlightening light. They all hung around for far too long than was good for their legacies.

The first ten years or so of John Paul’s papacy were vibrant and alive. After that, John Paul looked silly being propped up by a circle of Cardinals wherever he went to speak in hoarse whispers.

Ronald Reagan’s last years of his presidency were marked by Alzheimer’s and a frightening realization that Reagan could have launched nuclear warheads for breakfast and by lunchtime he’d completely have forgotten the incident.

Jerry Falwell may have been the only one of the triumvirate to have extended his eventual death for a half way decent denouement. Falwell is going to get his clock cleaned by the Pontiff in heaven. That’s worth the price of admission for Terry Schiavo.

At least Hunter Thompson had the maturity of mind to pull the plug on himself the old fashioned way, with a twelve gauge shotgun. Like Hemingway and Cobain. If Vincent Van Gogh had had a shotgun instead of a pistol, Van Gogh would have gone where no resuscitation machine made could retrieve him. Hunter Thompson had the good common sense to be a man by not hanging hang around until he became a cesspool of littering the planet.

What part of it all comes down to is that the Brown Shirts have reversed the psychology of ‘Made in the image of God,’ to ‘Made in the image of man.’

While there’s a perverse, sadistic bent to those Brown Shirts who want to keep vegetative states of zombie existence going in a kingdom of perpetual suffering………marcythewhore

PS.......RIP Martin Luther King....you got whacked on this date in history and didn't bitch all that much about it.......mtw