As
the death gurgles of Terry Schiavo and Pope Wojytla grew more
agitated and the media drumbeat pumped up maximum ratings for
their mutually Christian agonies, some kindred soul climbed Galeras
Mountain above Saltillo city in the great Coahuila desert and
set fire to a 50-foot fiberglass figure of Jesus Christ. The immolation
could be viewed from downtown Saltillo – only Jesus' left
arm survived the blaze. It has since become a local relic, housed
in the city's cavernous cathedral.
On
the other side of the border where the United States of North
America suffered an evangelical coup d'etat last November, no
Jesus-burnings have yet been reported despite mounting disgust
at such excesses of the Christian coup as the ugliness wafting
about the human vegetable formerly known coast to coast as Terry
Schiavo,
The
Schiavo spectacle featured withering hatred between loved ones,
demagoguery run riot, and crazed Catholic zealots, Born-Agains,
and Not-Dead-Yets holy rolling around on the Florida hospice's
manicured front lawn. The 24-7 media circus was ringmastered by
that indefatigueable exterminator Tom Delay of Sugarland, Texas
who parlayed the hysteria into an unprecedented congressional
vote that put the legislative branch on a train wreck course with
the Constitution.
Perhaps
the culminating moment of this reality freak show came when, flanked
by burley leftist bodyguard monks from St. Paul, Terry's parents
tried to get the brain dead woman to pronounce the words "I
want to live." "AHHH WAAAAAAA" was as far she got
reported the Associated Press – it is not known how the
agency determined the exact number of "h"s and "a"s.
Although Terry was not a southern gal, the "ah wahs"
have a decided downhome lilt to them and have been open to many
interpretations including "ah wahnt out of here" and
"ah wahnt to kill Tom Delay."
Whatever
she was seeking to annunciate (the medics described it as an involuntary
moan), by April Fool's Day – assuming I was not perusing
one of those joke facsimile editions of major American newspapers
(remember Not-The-New York-Times?) - Schiavo was pronounced really
dead. Her bereaved family celebrated her demise by leasing the
list of those who contributed cash to keeping her "alive"
for the past 15 years to a Christian direct mail advertiser for
$4000 a month. It is reported that receipts from every Terry Schiavo
tee shirt and coffee mug hawked outside the hospice were directed
into the legal battle aimed at wresting the malpractice moolah
from that Devil Incarnate, the evil husband Michael Schiavo.
The
death carnival was full tilt in St. Peter's Square too and the
trinket venders were cleaning up on John Paul memorabilia. In
the inner sanctums of the Vatican, most every political poltroon
on the planet passed silently by the bier of the demised pontiff,
shedding crocodile tears and stabbing each other in the back as
they cloaked their sins in Wojytla's death shroud.
With
the vaults of the Bank of the Vatican reportedly bare and the
Holy See running deeply in the red due to the diminishment of
believers in the Roman Catholic product and humungous payouts
in pederast priest scandals, the Church mavens missed a good bet
by not selling tickets to these macabre events. This is not just
a modest proposal – tickets to several of John Paul II's
last appearances were backed by coupons for Big Macs, and just
before his death, the late Pontiff blessed 7000 cell phone photos
in a last-ditch promotion to replenish emptying donation baskets.
The requiem Mass presided over by former Boston Cardinal Bernard
Law would have been a big-ticket item. Law, who was forced to
flee his archdiocese after evidence emerged that he moved up to
80 pederast priests from parish to parish to elude police detection,
was extended sanctuary in the Vatican by the late Pope.
Protestors
disrupted the mourning for John Paul to demand the ironically
named Churchman be brought back to Boston to face justice.
Leading
the U.S. delegation to this funerary fiesta (if leadership is
to be measured by how much ink one accrues) was the unavoidable
Tom Delay. The House Majority leader, who reportedly unplugged
his dear old dad, a rugged oil wildcatter, after a household accident,
utilized the Pope's sarcophagus as a pulpit to rail against "activist"
judges and their war on the Judeo-Christian Faith.
Sadly,
there are no activist judges anymore – Bruce "Cut 'Em
Loose" Wright passed away just recently - he is the only
member of the North American judiciary I would have voted to keep
artificially alive.
Representative
Delay's arrival in Rome obeyed his staunch ecumenical convictions
– the humility-challenged Republican's belief system appears
to be a heady mix of Apocalyptical Zionism, fundamental Jesusism,
and firm faith in pest control. The Holy Land for the Texas Exterminator
seems to be the launching pad for the End Times, the pathway to
the Rapture, and he is, of course, a high profile partisan of
Ariel Sharon and those to his right in their crusade to eradicate
the pesky Palestinians as if they were so many household pests.
As
the "lives" of Schiavo and Wojytla wound down, Oxfam
activists installed a large billboard clock near the World Bank
where the Masters of the Universe were in annual spring session.
Tick Tick Tick. Oxfam advised the bigwigs that every three seconds
a child dies somewhere in the world. Tick. Tick. Tick. Mostly,
they die because they do not have a life support system. Tick
Tick Tick. You know, stuff like air, water, food, housing, and
medicine. Tick Tick Tick. Entitlements that in the third world
the poor fight revolutions to obtain. Tick Tick Tick. Another
kid dead. Tick Tick Tick. Another $125,000 USD gobbled up by Citigroup,
a million dollar a minute corporation. Tick Tick Tick.
It
is not known exactly when Pope Wojytla expired. He is believed
to have been on life support for many years, pumped full of steroids
and monkey glands and dopamine to control the trembles, and injected
daily with the blood of virgins held captive in the Vatican basement.
But the machinery was always breaking down, often before millions
on television although, like the emperor and his new duds, no
one dared to mention the degradation of the Pope's mortality.
Once the Clear Channel Pope, a Great Communicator of Ronald Reagan
dimensions, he had slipped so deeply into dementia that he was
now unintelligible in the 13 languages he allegedly once spoke.
Now His Holiness was pissing all over the Popemobile and refusing
to wear diapers!
That's
when Ratzinger stepped in and had his throat slit, an "emergency
tracheotomy", arrrgghhh. What else could he do? The man was
making a mockery of the One True Church. After that, they couldn’t
even get a feeding tube down poor John Paul's guggle.
Much
as with the late Pope, it is not easy to know how many members
of the College of Cardinals are maintained on life support systems
but as Cardinal Ratzinger moved to grab power, at least 77 of
the Men In Purple proved to be brain dead. After a few half-hearted
puffs of indeterminate emissions from the famous Fumata (doesn't
the city of Rome have air pollution standards?), a member of Hitler
Youth and a foot soldier in Adolph's army who knew just where
the Nazi death camps were located, was chosen as God's representative
on earth. With Arnold in the White House and Ratzinger in the
Pope House, it looks like the Aryan Nation won the war after all.
Ratzinger's
selection settled over the world like a pall. Those who had anticipated
a pope of color - Latin America accounts for half the Roman Catholics
in this part of the galaxy – had foolishly underestimated
the racism entombed in the bosom of Holy Mother Church. As dispensation
to the disillusion, Chilean Cardinal Jose Agustin Medina was pushed
out on the balcony to sound the time-honored cry "We have
a Pope!" Cardinal Medina is (was) Augustin Pinochet's favorite
priest.
Benedictus
XVI had operated as Wojytla's ventriloquist since 1981 when he
took over the Congregation for the Defense of the Doctrine of
the Faith, formerly known as the Santa Inquisition, and began
to dismantle Vatican II, the historic accord hammered out by the
Peoples' Pope, John XXIII, that insisted upon the Church's option
for the poor. Ratzinger's promotion to the throne of Peter and
the installation of Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank are indeed
ominous tidings for the world's poor.
Exactly
how many disobedient priests were drawn and quartered or burnt
at the stake during Ratzinger's reign of terror at the Congregation
is not a matter of public record but at least 140 were silenced
or defrocked, precisely for espousing the Church's option for
the poor, amongst them the exalted theologian Hans Kung who once
gave the then-liberal Ratzinger (he now sits to the right of Opus
Dei) his first teaching job. Also bopped was the bushy-bearded
Brazilian Leonardo Boff who Ratzinger silenced and drove from
the Church. Boff bemoaned Ratzinger's elevation as the worst move
the Church fathers (there are no mothers) could have made. "Cardinal
Ratzinger is hated by the bishops, many of whom he has publicly
humiliated for years," Boff avowed in a recent El Pais
interview.
As
the keeper of the dogma, the Terminator Pope made a hobby out
of hunting down practitioners of liberation theology. Among his
trophies: the Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal who Wojytla
trampled into the tarmac at Managua International Airport in 1984,
and Don Samuel Ruiz, the beloved bishop emeritus of Chiapas.
Ratzinger
once accused the World Council of Churches of fomenting subversion
in Latin America and his orthodox convictions coincide with CIA
doctrine that miscreant liberationists threaten Washington's hegemony
in the Americas.
The
self-anointed Benedictus XVI is a kind of Teutonic John Ashcroft
who promulgates edicts barring mariachis and indigenous dancers
from performing during Mass (an instruction widely disregarded
in Mexico.) Ratzinger's persecution of Don Samuel who he accused
of preaching a Marxist version of the Gospel, led him to attack
the indigenous church that Tatik nurtured during 40 years as head
of the San Cristobal diocese as "a stalking horse for Marxism-Leninism."
In his eagerness to nail Samuel to the cross, he even sent his
inquisitors deep into the Lacandon jungle to gather evidence that
the Bishop was ordaining women deacons.
For
a quarter of a century, the new Pope has waged a personal war
against syncreticism, the Indian church, woman priests, abortion
providers, gays and lesbians, and above all, the Dread Condom.
Although his predecessor has been nominated for sainthood for
having once miraculously cured a man with terminal pain in his
brain, Wojytla's candidacy must be nullified by the millions of
AIDS deaths his condemnation of condom use incurred.
Despite
being dead from the neck down, the celibate Ratzinger feels so
full of the Lord that he never tires of damning sexual intimacies
left of the missionary position. He rails against same sex marriage,
pre-marital sex, birth control pills, and the liberation of women.
Nevertheless, the new Pope and his predecessor Wojytla failed
to notice decades of pederasty in the priesthood on their watch,
even when Father Marcial Macial, founder of the Legionnaires of
Christ, was buggering small children behind locked Vatican doors.
Some of Macial's victims reported that the good father told them
he had a papal dispensation to sodomize them.
In
response to allegations that he had purposefully ignored Father
Macial's sins for years for fear of disaffecting John Paul who
particularly favored the sodomite, Ratzinger assailed media coverage
of pederast priest scandals as "an attack on the Church."
The
265th in a long line of Machiavellian tyrants, poisoners, and
pederasts, Ratzinger is the wrong pope in the wrong time zone.
Confronted with onrushing Islam, Ratzinger lobbied the European
Union to exclude the swarthy Turks because he considered Europe
to be "a Christian continent." No wonder the Gray Wolves
took a shot at his pal Wojytla.
Pope
Ratzo insists that the Church of Rome is the only true church,
sneers at Protestant denominations as "sects", and has
written that the Jews bear the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ (although he doesn't think they should have gotten the
gas chamber for it.)
Perhaps
the only consolation for humanity in this catastrophic appointment
is that, at 78, Benedictus XVI is the oldest pontiff to be selected
since the 18th century. Like many of us old people, he sometimes
loses track of where he is at – often mixing up the 21st
century with the Middle Ages. On the eve of the Cardinals' conclave,
he stirred souls by dissing godless Communism, apparently unaware
that the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989.
The
new Pope's selective memory loss is cited by critics reviewing
Ratzinger's autobiography, which seems to omit an uncle who was
in the concentration camp business and important Nazi slaughters
of dissidents near his hometown in Bavaria. Nor does the volume
mention his ties to Bank of Vatican insider Roberto Calvi, found
dangling from London's Blackfriers r Bridge in 1984.
Although
Ratzinger was low down on the papal totem pole when John Paul
I, the last Italian pope, came to the throne in 1978, his Borgia-esque
death 30 days later propelled both Wojytla and Ratzinger into
the papacy.
It
is not known at what level of the living dead the new pope functions
– he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1991 and his health
is not robust. Moreover, stocks of virgin blood stored in the
Vatican basement have been greatly diminished by prolonged efforts
to keep John Paul II "alive." That famous Not-the-New
York Times headline after the first Pope John Paul took a dive,
may soon be revived: "POPE DIES AGAIN!"
All
of this shameless huckstering of death and dying has made drawing
up one's living will an urgent priority. To my mind, these living
wills should be transformed into political manifestoes, our final
rant to the rest of the world, and a call for direct action. Why
lay around dying at home when you can be out there dedicating
your corporeal remains to smashing the church and the state!
Here
is my living will.
"When
I, John Ross, become so debilitated by terminal illness, and the
consumption of opiate-derived drugs no longer quells the pain,
and/or when I am rendered helpless by disease, intentional violence,
or a freak accident, I ask that a guardian be appointed who will
strap dynamite to my cadaver, wheel me to the designated capitalist
target and light the fuse.
"The
burning of my body Bonze-style would be an acceptable alternative
to such sabotage but only if I am propped up in front of a recognizable
emblem of U.S. imperialist domination while I roast.
"Say
no to war and world hunger, racism, sexism, Capitalism, and all
other isms that get in the way of the peoples' struggle to control
their own destinies. There is no peace without justice. Hasta
La Victoria Siempre! Bye Bye."
John
Ross is a 2005 recipient of the Upton Sinclair "Uppie"
Award presented by the southern California chapter of the ACLU,
for his latest instant cult classic "Murdered By Capitalism:
A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left"