Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

A shocking act of vandalism occurred over the weekend in my own library. My personal religious icon, Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus, was pushed over on its side, possibly by an angry mob of social justice warriors.
 
Maybe this was a result of BLM activist Shaun King’s call to topple statues of “white Jesus” as symbols of racial oppression. I was cool with this, since, even though I am white, statues of Jesus had had been omnipresent during my childhood, when, despite my European-Americaness, I was regularly oppressed by ruler-wielding nuns belonging to the Order of St. Theresa the Not Even Remotely Attractive Sadist.
 
Or maybe it was a result of the Cantaloupe Dope’s threats against statue-topplers, in which he claimed that people, most notably Shaun King, were threatening to yank down statues of the Savior in which he was depicted with Caucasian features. Intimidated by Trump’s threat to imprison anyone who toppled a statue for thirty years or so, his enemies decided to start small by toppling DSCJ, because He is only about seven inches tall, base included.
 
Ironically, Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus cannot be 100% percent confirmed as white. Although His features are Caucasian, his skin color can be described as a light caramel. His knife, automatic weapon and combat boots are the same as an American soldier of any race, patrolling the parched corners of the Middle East, drawing a bead on Muslim children and keeping a wary eye out for IEDs, set to suppress any threat to American freedoms with a withering burst of small-arms fire, even while holding the Dove of Peace in His hand.
 
My head spun when I saw Him lying there. While we have a couple menorahs lying around the house and a mezuzah on our doorway because my Significant Other is Jewish, DSCJ is the only reminder of my Catholic boyhood that I keep in our home. The only other representation of the Christ that means anything to me is a huge statue of Him on a peak above the toll road to Ensenada, which I reverently refer to as Great Big Fucking Jesus (GBFJ).  A feeling of numinous joy always envelopes me at the sight of Great Big Fucking Jesus, because that means that I am halfway to that picturesque seaside town, brimming with cold, creamy cervezas, excellent restaurants, and abundant sportfishing opportunities.
 
How the angry mob got in my front door without waking me up remains a mystery, although it was a weekend night, and I am prone to spend those sampling craft brews. They even made it past my Chihuahua, Cujo, who ordinarily is whipped into a barking frenzy if the Amazon person so much as rustles a package on the doorstep. He’s getting old, though, and I might have slipped some CBD oil into his kibble for his arthritis.

Or maybe it was just an earthquake. It remains a divine mystery at this writing. I just propped Him upright again and went to make the coffee.

We Apocalypse fans are always ready for the world to end, and there’s no better time than now, what with a world-wide epidemic, depression, racial unrest and locusts, locusts, locusts all roiling merrily along. There’s no question that the human race deserves to come to a full stop. Like a deer that’s been hit by a timber truck and is lying in the road gasping to force some air into its punctured lungs, we deserve to be put out of our misery.
 
Sadly, the there has been a dearth of world-ending news at this moment we need it most. All the asteroids seem to be missing us by a million miles. Biblical prophesies predicted a plague, natch, but nobody in the Bible punched each other out over facemasks. Likewise, white supremacy is not mentioned in the Good Book, because there are no white people in the Bible. And Jesus is not coming back. Let’s face it, Jesus is the Cleveland Browns of world-ending, always rumored to be on the verge of a good season, but never fulfilling His promise. Likewise, Nibiru, the Death Planet. Fuck Nibiru.
 
There’s always global warming, but let’s face it, there will always be global warming, but right now even that’s on hold, as tons of people are still staying inside and resisting the pull of two-buck-a-gallon gas.
 
That’s why it’s so heartwarming to see the Mayans make their comeback. Sure, we left them for dead in 2012, when they predicted, in a fashion we have always deemed to be cowardly, the end of the world after their civilization had safely vanished, but now a drunk astrologer has figured out that they really meant 2020 instead of 2012, and in fact meant this week in 2020, which leaves us tingling with excitement, because it's already Thursday.

The error occurred because of the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, which means we have to add an extra eight years to the original Mayan prediction.
 
It’s very complicated, especially since the original prediction was based on neither the Julian or Gregorian calendars, but on the Mayan calendar, but here we are perfectly willing to grasp at straws. This is a world which deserves to end. The Mayans weren’t very specific about how it is supposed to happen. Probably a huge rocking worldwide earthquake which causes the Indian Ocean to slosh over the Himalayas, as depicted in the movie, will do the trick. But the Sun blowing up, or us getting all fried from a gamma-ray blast from deep space, will work as well.
 
Of course, some people are not ready for the world to end. People with lots of cheese in their 401(k)’s, for example, or kids who haven’t had their birthdays yet this year. It’s kind of unfair to black people, too, because white people just figured out black lives do matter, but black people are used to getting over unfair, and everybody being dead will only accelerate that process.
 
But most of us are just thinking, “Hot damn! Bring it on!” and will be content with whatever flavor Apocalypse we are treated to, as long as it wipes out every locust, covid and bad-tempered cop as well as the rest of us.
 
Everybody except Jesus. You just know He’s not going to show.

​The importance of coolness in a national election can never be over-estimated. The cooler of the two candidates usually wins, especially in recent years. Carter, the pious peanut farmer was cooler than Ford, who kept hitting his head on the doorway of Air Force One. Reagan the movie star was cooler than Carter. Daddy Bush coolly portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime and looking shitty in a tank, and Clinton played H W into history with his saxophone. No musical instrument is cooler than a sax.
 
Dubya was sort of cool, in a Texas preppie I’ll-give-ya-a-nickname-that-sticks kind of way. At least he was marginally cooler than the earnest Al Gore, and he only marginally won. The Dems found the least cool Senator on their roster, John Kerry, to match up with him in ’04 so they could lose.
 
Then came 2008. As was proven shortly after that election, America wasn’t really ready for a black President. We were, however, ready for a really cool President and Obama had that going on. From playing with the skins in a basketball game to telling a few jokes at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, then getting up from the table and coolly killing Bin Laden, to the tan suit, to Amazing Grace, the man could not be out-cooled. McCain never had a chance.
 
Come to 2016, and the cool pendulum swung as far as it could in the other direction. Both parties decided to go with candidates that were hideously uncool. Fox News had been painting Hillary as a cold, power-hungry bitch who didn’t even know which end of a saxophone to pick up ever since her hubby had been President. Every white guy sitting in a hunting blind in Wisconsin said to himself, “That see-you-next-Tuesday is not gonna be the boss of me,” and their votes managed to push the skeezy real-estate developer from New York over the Electoral College finish line.
 
January of 2017 was Trump’s chance to go cool, and he proved totally incapable of it. All he had to do was occasionally be noble about something. But he never has. From his inauguration crowd of that year being on the small side, to his discovering that the average age of a bloodied antifa sprawled on the sidewalk was 75, which was a few days ago, the man has never learned to let anything slide. From squawking raw insults at Democrats to intramural mud-wrestling with his fellow Republicans, the Cantaloupe Dope has shown that his one enduring quality is that he can’t take even the tiniest dis in stride.
 
Which is not cool. But the death knell came the other day, when Pat Robertson told him, speaking of Trump tear-gassing protesters so he could waltz around Lafayette Square with a Bible, “That’s not cool.”
​
Now, Pat Robertson is definitely not cool. He is the Anti-Cool, which is similar to the Anti-Christ, except instead of leading the forces of Satan, he leads the forces of Zip Up Your Pants, Join Me in Prayer and Give Me Some Money. He has been against every form of fun since his birth in 1892. He can get his sweaty, browned-out undies in a wad over just about anything, but even he noticed that Jesus never had to pepper-spray anybody to get into Jerusalem. When the leader of the Gay Cakes Mean the Apocalypse squad says you’re not cool, that’s a death sentence to your cool. You have fallen into the Well of Uncool so far even Lassie can’t get you out.
 
“Well, Joe Biden isn’t that cool,” I hear you saying, and that’s true. Uncle Joe has a spotty public record that goes back to the Korean War, and a proven penchant for sniffing anybody's niece’s hair. But here’s a picture of Obama laughing at one of his jokes.
 
That’s cool enough to beat Trump. 

Donald Trump said he hoped George Floyd was “looking down right now” as he trumpeted a surprise decline in the nation's unemployment rate, saying "this is a great day for him, this is a great day for everybody".—News Item
 
There has been criticism of Trump from some quarters for this remark, ranging from it being insensitive, tone deaf and utterly loathsome to ‘holy fuck, did he really say that? REALLY? He is such a consistent shitbird.”
 
This column doesn’t go anywhere without the facts in its pocket, however, so I promptly got out the old Ouija board and a half-bottle of whiskey and started interviewing other people suspected of being in Heaven, and surprisingly, found the cheering for Trump from the afterlife to be nearly unanimous.
 
AHMAUD ARBERY, recently arrived at the Pearlies after being shot to death by wanna-be cops in Georgia, said, “Of course, I can take a jog around Heaven any time I want to without worrying about being gunned down by some peckerhead redneck looking for any excuse to kill a black guy, but I really had to stop and applaud those unemployment numbers. It’s hard to enjoy eternal glory when you’re worried about white people being out of work.”
 
BREONNA TAYLOR, another newbie in Paradise, courtesy of a no-knock raid by the Louisville PD, replied, “You know, I was pretty surprised by being filled full of hot lead while I was lying in my bed, but not nearly as surprised as I was by those jobs coming back. How many Presidents could raise the jobless rate back from bottom of the Depression levels to barely above the bottom of the Depression levels in just a few months? That boy Trump really knows how to run an economy.”
 
ERIC GARNER, a five-year veteran of working the streets paved with gold, said, “Sales of loose cigarettes always soared when the economy rebounded, so I’d probably be selling tons of them today, thanks to Trump, if I hadn’t been choked to death by the NYPD.”
 
LORI KLAUSUTIS, who’s been hanging in eternity since 2001, when she suffered an accidental death in MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s Congressional office in Florida, and whom Trump accused of murdering her despite Scarborough being in DC at the time, said, “Initially, I was kind of get-my-name-out-of-your-mouth about Trump. But now that he’s performed this economic miracle, of getting all these poorly-paid service workers back on the job so both the economy and coronavirus can rebound, it’s hard not to forgive him for making my family suffer yet again years after my death.”
 
JOHN MCCAIN, deceased US Senator who started his term in Heaven in 2018, was the only soul in eternity that my Ouija board could locate, before I spilled my last shot of whiskey on it and had to quit, that had anything negative to convey about Trump.  All he said was, “I like Presidents that don’t hide in bunkers.” 

The Journal has recently published a sweet little essay entitled “The Science of Prayer,” during the course of which it acknowledges that there is no such thing, almost.
 
The body of evidence of prayer’s efficacy in the article is mostly provided by people who testify, “Praying makes me feel gooder.” Also, there are studies that show that people who pray have more positive self-images than people who watch porn while they are driving.
 
The psychological boost of having a nice chat with the Creator of All Things is not to be denied, despite the overwhelming evidence that if there is such a Being, He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about humanity. Maybe the transactional nature of most prayers is why He can’t be bothered with them. “Oh Lord, cure me of cancer.” “Oh God, let me win the lottery.” “Oh, Jesus, would you move this motherfucker out of the fast lane before I’m late to work again?”
 
It’s no wonder that God, instead of listening to such petitions, just turns up the radio in the Wheelhouse of the Universe and keeps on setting the quasars just precisely right.
 
But what about unselfish prayer? What about when you ask God to make you a better person? Of course, when you pray for that, the corollary question of why God didn’t make me a better person in the first place? is bound to pop into your head. Why did He make you such a bottomless pit of eating disorders and horny cravings? It was His Will in the first place that made you such an inadequate, roiling mass of conflicting emotions that you are forced to try and soothe them daily with a nearly poisonous level of substance abuse. You’re basically asking Him to acknowledge His mistake at making you such a mess from the get-go. Are you surprised when He replies, “Talk to My Hand?”
 
Having the Pope or a televangelist with his own private jet advising us to pray is one thing, but having the Journal advising us to do the same is certainly a bad sign. The WSJ has, in the past, spoken highly of junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, derivatives and Enron, some or all of which have caused Wall Street to occasionally suck up all of America’s cash, feed it into a paper shredder and blow it out of corporate windows like confetti. This has happened several times in my lifetime. Now, in this summer of depression, rioting and covid despair, the best advice that capitalism can offer to the seething masses is pray?
 
No wonder people are trying to burn the country down. And what better time? They all already had masks on, anyway.

After proclaiming churches “essential” and “ordering” governors to allow them to open up for business, Trump reverently attended a crowded Christian Sunday service during which the air conditioning was turned up to just this side of a Category 1 because of all the sweating, coughing diabetics in attendance.
 
After hugging all those in the congregation, Trump was asked by the disabled black preacher to say a few words. “God is more important than me,” Trump said, as the congregants gasped.
 
Just kidding. As the covid death toll flirted with the hundred grand mark, The Cantaloupe Dope was relaxing at home with a fresh cheeseburger served to him by a masked valet and re-tweeting a crack about vice-presidential hopeful Stacey Abrams being fat.
 
Now, the Stace is a majestic presence, but no more so than the Caucasian-in-Chief, as noted by none other than the High Grandma of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who called him “morbidly obese” the other day. CNN primly noted that at 6’3” and 243, Trump qualifies as obese, but not morbidly so, but CNN, out of all media outlets, should know fake news when it repeats it. Trump in real life appears to be about 6 even and 290, making him the fattest President since Taft. Him cracking about other people’s physical appearance is like a plump, pimply jerk who hasn’t gotten laid since the last season of the Sopranos sitting at a strip bar and sneering at a naked entertainer whose bod would give Gal Gadot’s a run for her money, “I don’t like her eyebrows.”
 
As part of his harangue about opening up church services, Trump said that America needs “more prayer, not less.” No—what we need are MORE FUCKING TESTS! The ringleader of the American circus also bad-mouthed liquor stores and abortion clinics as being less essential than gathering in large, infectious groups and exhaling viruses.
 
Here in California, liquor stores sell way more than liquor. They also sell beer, wine, chips, snack cakes, sandwiches, candy, lottery tickets and condoms. That by no means exhausts the list, but every single one of those items sounds like a quarantine essential to me. And if you need an abortion, it’s not like you can wait for the vaccine to be developed before you get one.
 
What is not essential is packing into a large structure with hundreds of your fellow deluded goobers and pleading with God for an end to the plague, when God could ignore your prayers just as effectively if you prayed at home. Just stay there. Your pastor can get a real job. And when the thousands of dedicated medical professionals who are slaving away right now, while you sniffle over being deprived of the freedom to spray your saliva all over the other faithful, finally come up with a cure or a vaccine for the virus, you’ll get to go back to church and thank the Lord for it.
 
But Trump will want credit too, so make sure you save some for him, despite the fact that if and when the pandemic ceases, he will be the only person who has done less than God to save us from it.

​GOD: (on Heavenly throne, but with PC, blotter, In-Out box in front of Him. To the side, a fax machine that nobody uses anymore) All right, you’re My two o’clock. Remind Me why you’re here again.
 
CORONAVIRUS: For the job, sir.
 
GOD: Right, right. I’ll be upfront with you. I’m going to be picky here, even though I can’t seem to keep that spot in the plague division filled. SARS, MERS, Ebola—they all came here with great resumes but they couldn’t get the job done. So, you understand My skepticism. I’m looking for a virus that can put up Black Death kind of numbers. Real wrath of Me stuff.
 
CORONAVIRUS: The bubonic plague is one of my personal heroes, sir. But it’s kind of like asking me to follow Hank Aaron in the batting order. But solid, Spanish flu type stats--those I’m confident I can achieve.
 
GOD: Well that’s realistic, I guess. (Reaches into desk, whips out a bottle of pills, throws one at the virus)
 
CORONAVIRUS: (Startled) What was that, sir?
 
GOD: Hydroxychloroquine. Just checking. Ok, what are your qualifications?
 
CORONAVIRUS: I spread out like grease on a griddle.
 
GOD: Good. Killing everybody you touch, right?
 
CORONAVIRUS: That’s not my style. Some people I don’t make sick at all, but they can give me to other people who die horribly. That means I spread like Stormy Daniels' legs. Automatically. And I’ll touch down everywhere in the world.
 
GOD: Good. I love my locusts, but it's tough to get those lazy bugs out of Africa and the Middle East. But you do kill people? All firstborn sons would be nice. Remind Me of the old days.
 
CORONAVIRUS: Yes sir. I mean, I do kill, but not necessarily in birth order. Mostly the elderly, plus diabetics and fat people. But, occasionally, healthy people. Just to keep them on their toes. Once in a while a kid, for the heartbreak value. I’m a disruptor, sir. Once I get out in it, the world will never be the same. Surely you can see that?
 
GOD: Yeah, maybe. New ways for new times. But I still have a few questions for you. Want to see if you’ll fit into the company culture. How do you feel about going to church?
 
CORONAVIRUS: I love religious ceremonies. Baptisms to funerals and every crowded service in between. I want people to go to church.
 
GOD: Well, so do I! That’s a good fit.
 
CORONAVIRUS: Circulating in the congregation. Mingling during Masses. Whether its lounging with Lutherans or mixing with Methodists, I’m right at home. I don’t mean to flatter, sir, but it will make me feel closer to You.
 
GOD: Perfect. One other thing.  I hate meatpackers. Don’t ask me why.
 
CORONAVIRUS: Gotcha covered, Boss.
 
GOD: I think we have something here. Me willing, you’re going to be one of my favorite plagues!
 
CORONAVIRUS: When do I start?
 
GOD: It’s more like where. Do you like Chinese?

The US Senate recently passed a bill to make all lynchings federal crimes. “Good deal,” many of you are thinking, and it’s tough to argue with that sentiment, even though the last reported lynching in the US was in 1981, unless you count Epstein, and the two KKK-affiliated perpetrators were convicted under regular, ho-hum homicide laws and sentenced to death and life in prison. So, there was not really a burning necessity for this statute, which is probably true of anything the Senate does unanimously. A law against chasing down joggers and dispatching them to eternity because they picked the wrong street to run down would seem to be more useful, currently.
 
However, Liberty Counsel, an evangelical group that opposes gay marriage, gay rights and gay cake, and its head honcho, Matt Staver, have stepped up efforts to have prohibitions against lynching someone because of his or her “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” removed from the bill before it passes the House.
 
I contacted Mr. Staver and he was more than happy to explain his reasoning. “You’re not a religious man,” he said, “so you don’t know how it is to be so full of the love of Jesus that you have to hang a homo.”
 
It is hard for me to imagine. A lot of people push Christianity because of its eternal niceness.
 
“Those people need to level up in their approach to faith,” Staver snorted. “Turn-the-other-cheeky Jesus isn’t going to get them into the posher neighborhoods of Heaven. The true vision of Heavenly bliss is one of gays getting all smote upon. The feds are infringing on our religious freedoms by passing laws that forbid us, when we are filled with the Spirit, from swinging gays from the nearest sturdy tree.”
 
You are aware there are laws that keep you from doing that already, right?
 
“Sadly, yes. We humble Christians would be persecuted if, in our longing for the joys of eternity, we happened to put to death any homosexuals that were standing between us and the unconditional love of God, no matter how we did it. Lynching would be good. Stoning even better.”
 
I think the word you’re looking for is ‘prosecuted.’ So, what you’re saying is you’re not going to do murder in the name of Jesus anyway. You’re just going to do regular church stuff—speak in tongues, handle snakes, and have cake and gun sales at your church. What’s the point of your lobbying against the lynch law?
 
“Everyone has their fantasies. How would you like yours to be made a Federal crime?”
 
Probably several of mine already are.
 
“I feel closest to God when I dream of lynching young men, their naked bodies swinging in the sun, their loins bursting with the fruit of youth, praying that they repented of their sins of desiring each other before the rope tightened…”
 
Jesus Christ, man, are you touching yourself?
 
“You took the name of the Lord in vain. This interview is over.”

We in the US had a National Day of Prayer a month or so ago, which did not affect the progress of the current plague one small bit. Now we have found the reason for that—while America was praying, the rest of the world was sinning away. God embraces the whole world, kind of like the virus does, and while America is His most favored nation, other nations count too, in their minor, silly ways, and foreigners needed to pray as well, and not just for Trump to let them come to America so they can buy guns.
 
So, while Americans were shouting hosannas, other countries just went right on sinning. The British continued to drink warm beer, the Scots to wear skirts and the French to eat snails, three things that are offensive in the sight of the Lord. The Chinese continued to displease Jesus by making cheap shit that doesn’t work for Walmart. You get the picture. We have to all get together and make prayer noises all at once to scare off the virus.
 
Hence the Global Day of Repentance. Organized by a bishop out of Malawi, the Day is set up so that each hour of it provides the faithful for another sin to repent of. It starts off with a bang, as Hour One is devoted to “the national sin of failing to honor the House of David, God’s global authority.” Nearly everybody is guilty of this, because they have no idea what it means. The House of David was a Jewish thing, but it’s kept its authority on the down-low for a couple thousand years. Unless they mean George Soros. Which they probably do.
 
In Hour Ten, you are supposed to repent of the “sin of fearing man instead of fearing God.” Now, men give you plenty of stuff to fear, from crime to road rage to World Wars, but when you give in to fearing scary men, like cartels, guerillas or pirates, you are forgetting that God is the Big Bushwhacker, and when you do that, He is going to line up an earthquake or a tsunami to correct your ass.
 
In Hour Sixteen, the world gets down to the repenting nitty gritty—it’s time to atone for “the national sin of approving sexual perversions.” As many American pastors have already said, it’s baking gay wedding cakes that has brought us the scourge of this virus, despite clear evidence that what the virus really enjoys is a nice crowded church service, and if there’s a good bake sale afterwards, of strictly heterosexual cakes, it’s all the better. A lot of us have grown lazy about bullying, shaming and randomly assaulting gay people, and God is angry about that, and apparently, He is angriest with the elderly and people with underlying health conditions for their continuing failure to gay-bash.
 
You might be getting tired or repenting by the time you get to Hour Twenty, and be tempted to say “Screw it, I’m stopping for lunch,” but don’t you dare, because after nineteen hours on your knees, it’s time to repent for your sins of “lukewarmness and apathy.” Thou shalt always give a flying fuck, especially about Jesus. It is the will of God.
 
At Hour Twenty-Three, we get down to real business. Start repenting for the existence of “humanism and other religions.” It’s your fault that there are three thousand or so religions, and the fact that you belong to the right one entitles you to rampage against all the other ones. God is disgusted by all those “Coexist” bumper stickers, for there is nothing the Almighty enjoys more than a good jihad, or a mighty Crusade, so after you get a little sleep, get out there and spread some religious hatred.
 
If everyone does this for a whole day, the world will be cleansed of its sins, and the coronavirus will disappear, just like Trump says it will, and it will be all a miracle from God, although Trump will doubtless take credit for it.
 
But now that I take a closer look at the website, I see that the Global Day of Repentance was last Friday and Saturday, depending on your time zone, and the virus is now prospering just as nicely in a sin-free world as it did in a sinful one.
 
Forget I said anything.