I do feel a bit sorry for these guys
WE LIVE IN a world plagued by extinction, having tragically lost the dodo, the dinosaur, the rum baba, the wooly mammoth, the yellow-tailed pikachu, etc.
And now there’s a shocking new arrival on the endangered species list: conservatives.
Consider the evidence:
In China, communists have taken over all capitalist functions.
In Britain, the Conservative Party, once proudly out of date on every issue, is introducing gay marriage with rumors that it will be COMPULSORY for all over-18s. (Anyone planning to move, legally or illegally, to that country, start psyching yourself up now for eye-widening experiences.)
Rightwingers are even vanishing in India.
It seems only yesterday that hard-line conservatives went around that nation beating up couples for swapping Valentine’s Day cards.
But when morality cop Vasant Dhoble went around with a big stick closing down bars and nightclubs in Mumbai recently, these same conservatives (the Shiv Sena) urged him to stop and called him “Satan”.
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Speaking of the devil, his people have been in the news lately.
Reader R. Laxman sent me a cutting about members of the Church of Satan, whose VOTE SATAN flag was stolen from outside their house in the US city of Colorado.
The victims tried to get the incident classified as a religious hate crime, but police refused, as their mostly Christian neighbors were on the tolerant side. “They [the Satanists] have a right to say whatever they want to say,” one neighbor told CBS News.
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I once met a member of the Church of Satan, a rather sad group. It was founded in the 1960s to promote the idea that humans have no souls and are just animals.
Their failure to thrive was a bit of a conundrum on all sides. With science apparently firmly on their side, they thought they were on to a sure winner. But they quickly found that their worldview made them seem astonishingly shallow, like members of the Brunei royal family, boy bands, Donald Trump, etc.
In a desperate bid to make themselves interesting, members made a list of qualities favored by religious neighbors and then wrote policies to encourage the opposite.
Religions recommend “loving your enemies” so they pledged “to be unkind to people who don’t deserve kindness”. Religions recommend self-control, so they “encourage indulgence”. Religions push forgiveness, so they urge members to “wreak vengeance”. Religions recommend forbearance, so they promise to treat annoying house-guests “cruelly and without mercy”.
Most importantly, members were instructed to commit all possible sins as frequently as they could. Mwah ha ha ha ha.
Everything was fine until they got an infamous email. The Church of Satan’s principles were sorely tested in 2007 when a fan wrote to say he was planning a pretty biggish sin, i.e., to kill his grandparents.
It was the watershed moment for the California-based group.
Should they stick to their principles and promote him?
Or abandon them and call the cops?
They called the cops. And so Satanists put themselves on the endangered species list.
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Meanwhile, if you want to live in the West but don’t fancy the UK’s compulsory gay marriage, you can now get a visa to move to the US if you can show you have an “extraordinary ability”.
The curious thing is that Playboy magazine’s Miss November 2010 (right) has just had her application approved on this count.
What’s her unique skill, the extraordinary ability to fill a large brassiere?
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Back to the topic of rightwingers. Thanks to anonymous correspondent for these images:
(Above) Redneck six-pack
(Below) Redneck hearing protection – yes, he put his gun in his ear
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PS Apologies for the lateness of this post. Ended up working through lunch. Since I am MC at this conference, I have to stand by to introduce and then thank all the speakers, the whole day long—no time to sneak off to a computer!
Thanks Chris, for your impatience, expressed in a comment on the previous post – definitely made me feel loved!
