GETTING AFTER JESUS FOR BAD POLITICS

Statue of Saddam Hussein - one of 4 million innocents allegedly killed by the Bush administration.

On August 22 some twit named @dandunx1 tweeted this to me: @aimlessjonah Where were you while Bush killing [sic] 4 million innocent people in Iraq?Where were the Vatican&Jesus?Tea Party?

Nothing would please me more than to engage @dandunx1 in some intelligent dialog online, but his Twitter account has been suspended. No reason was given, but I suspect unrestrained personal attacks and anger management issues are at the heart of it.

I'd be especially interested to learn where @dandunx1 gets his information. What he thinks he knows is so deliciously wrong on so many levels it is comical...if dangerously so. I find it interesting that someone who takes matters like this so seriously that he feels compelled to comment online to someone he does not know, would not bother to vet the salient points of his argument.

I'll grant that there is and has been a lot of reasonable opposition to the war in Iraq. I for one supported the effort to throw down Saddam Hussein, and I continue to do so in spite of the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda. There are many however who think that I am wrong in this, and they have very good reasons for thinking so, not the least of which would be the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda.

No one with the good sense to articulate reasonable opposition however, thinks that 4 million innocent Iraqis were killed in the conflict. 4 million would represent something over 10 percent of Iraq's total population of 38 million. There is no way possible that this number of people went killed or missing without some global alarm being raised. To believe one tenth of this number would be stupid. To believe 4 million is ludicrous.

@dandunx1 seems to want to implicate the Vatican, Jesus and the Tea Party in this travesty. It's bad enough that he holds George Bush personally responsible for every alleged death. After all it took a lot of complicity to get us where we are today, and George Bush never exhibited the kind of monolithic charismatic leadership to have accomplished this kind of carnage all by himself. Blaming the Vatican, however, shows a singular disregard for historical fact.

The fact is that the Vatican, under both Pope John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, expressed repeated opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the pursuit of war there. This fact is well known and well documented. I don't know how @dandunx1 has the brass to make such an accusation without at least trying to Google it to see if he had a leg to stand on. He did not. He does not, and now he's all apoplectic about something that isn't even true.

I think it's reasonable to assume that, if the Vatican was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, so was Jesus. I know there are a lot of people who don't think that the Vatican and Jesus are in sync on every issue, but anyone who has read scripture with a critical eye to what was on Jesus' mind, has to allow that He was all about peace. Still, just what @dandunx1 expected Jesus to do about it in this particular instance is kind of a mystery. Jesus has been largely absent on the global political scene for some 2,000 years while those who profess to believe in Him and those who insist that He is a phantom of superstition work in concert to hold the world on the brink of ruin. Whatever @dandunx1 thinks happened in Iraq, Jesus didn't have anything to do with it.

Neither did the Tea Party. The Tea Party is not in sync with Jesus or the Vatican on every issue. The Tea Party is kind of an enigma, comprised as it is of angry crackpots of every stripe. There is much that is good about the Tea Party, as well as much that is completely off the wall. I don't actually know where the Tea Party stands on Iraq. I do know, however, as there was no Tea Party when the war in Iraq started, it would have been exceedingly difficult for them to come up with a cohesive platform. Hell...they can't do that now, when they actually exist.

Cruising for Righteous Babes with Jesus

Lately I've been suffering from a colossal depression. I'm not interested in anything. I can't concentrate. Every distraction is a defeat. Every setback requires a nap. Nothing seems worth doing. All this came into focus for me the other day when some guy sent me a direct message on Twitter that said he found my “...offerings to be without purpose, direction, continuity, or a sense of meaning!”

Colossal depression of the tropical variety on the left. Another one building on the right.

I looked at my most recent blog posts, and had to agree that he spoke the truth. As it turned out, the guy wasn't even talking about my blog, but I still have to own up to the fact that I haven't put anything up for weeks that resonates in any meaningful way. I've tried—sort of—but my heart's just not in it.

In fairness I think I have a lot to be depressed about. I've been without work for 28 months now. That's two and a third years. That's a long damn time—longer than anyone else I know about, longer than seems possible for a smart guy with good skills who doesn't wear a tin foil hat or twitch at inappropriate times, like whenever someone mentions unsolved serial killings.

Two years of relative idleness is not good for a man's mental health. After protracted joblessness he begins to lose faith in himself. He resorts to mind tricks or chemicals to prop up his flagging sense of worth. He starts deluding himself. He develops a rich fantasy life, which he then has difficulty separating from reality. He may become a danger to himself and others. At last, desperate to resurrect the person he used to be, grasping for any glimmering shard of hope no matter how remote and fanciful it may be, he begins to suspect that there may be something to the law of attraction after all.

This is me in my current form—broken, depressed, useless, delusional. I buy lottery tickets I can't afford. I drink martinis for dinner, persuaded that the olives constitute a salad. I fantasize that I am rich and content. I visualize the trappings of the life to which I aspire. I imagine everything in high definition and technicolor. I've even started trying to attract money--the hard part being that I think The Secret is bogus.

I have settled on a specific sum of money to attract, and that is $749 million. I'm told that it is just as easy to attract a million dollars as it is to attract hundred. If this is true there is no reason to be shy. I think I know where this number came from. Originally I was thinking of just $700 million because I dreamed once that I had somehow come into that amount. That was many years ago when it was still a princely sum. Now 371 of the 400 people on Forbe's list of the richest Americans are worth over a billion dollars. $700 million is not such a huge number anymore, so I added a little interest. Not much really...I'm not after more than I deserve. $749 million seems pretty reasonable.

Anyway, now that I'm busy wanting, visualizing, believing, deserving and otherwise attracting all this money, I've also begun to imagine where I might spend it. Travie McCoy's brilliant little song, Billionaire, featuring Bruno Mars helps. He's got some pretty good ideas about how to spend a true fortune, and the song's reggae beat makes It a nice soundtrack to the movies I'm running in my head of me in my Lamborghini, me entertaining my friends poolside at the waterfront villa, and me speeding across a mirror smooth lake in my Aquariva Super. I'm telling you I am down with the visualizing.

I've even added a new twist. Call it folly, but I think it gives me an edge. It adds weight and sincerity to my visualization process. It proves my faithfulness, and demonstrates that I am a force for good. When I fire up the Lambo in my daydreams to go cruising for chicks, I take Jesus with me.

Now I didn't come up with this idea all by myself. It had its seeds in a comment made by the wife of an audit client way back when I was in public accounting practice. The client and his wife were born again Christians. She was also a singer, or at least fancied herself one, and appeared with some regularity on the local Christian TV station as a guest witness and performer. They were doing quite well for themselves, my client and his wife, and had just bought themselves a brand new Rolls Royce Corniche. Some toady from their church had stopped by the office to visit while I was there doing field work, and asked the wife how she felt driving around town in that big old Rolls. The wife announced, a little too proudly I thought, that it felt “just like drivin' for Jesus.”

I don't have any idea what that meant to her. To me 'driving for Jesus' would connote something like using your car to deliver meals to the poor or taking homeless folk to a shelter or to a clinic for medical attention or something like that—stuff, in other words, more like what Jesus would have done had he found himself suddenly in possession of a really posh chariot. My client's wife wasn't doing anything like that. She was too busy flitting from one designer boutique to the next, decorating their new waterfront condominium.

What really driving for Jesus probably looks like.

These people made other equally obtuse statements over the course of several years that led me to believe that, although they could both quote chapter and verse of scripture, neither one of them had a very clear understanding of what it actually meant. Still, they had the wherewithal to buy a Rolls and a luxury apartment, whereas I am now ungainfully wherewithout. It just seemed natural, when I went off the deep end and started wishfully wishing for more money than Jesus would think it prudent for me to have, that I ought to borrow something of their attitude and sense of entitlement to fortify my program.

It took me a while to get this right. The first thing I had to consider is would Jesus want to go cruising for chicks? I decided that I could probably talk him into it by occasionally letting him drive. Who doesn't want to drive a Lamborghini? As the only begotten Son of God, Jesus may know everything, but He hasn't experienced the visceral thrill of dumping the clutch on 12 cylinders of screaming Italian mechanical opera. He will jump at the chance.

Pedal to the metal - Jesus uncorks all the horses of an early Italian high-performance sports machine!

Once he is in the spirit of the thing, the chicks will just be a collateral attraction. He ought to be used to this already. I mean there's that whole thing of Mary Magdalene rubbing his feet with perfumed oil and drying them with her hair. She wasn't the only one throwing herself at him either. Jesus was a chick magnet in the Bible, and there's no reason to suspect that, as a wing man, he couldn't eclipse George Clooney. The more I thought about it the more I realized this idea was a natural.

The next problem I had was how to dress him. I mean we all have this picture of Jesus in a belted tunic, cloak, and sandals. This won't do for driving around in an ultra high-performance sports car. Jesus needs some modern garb for the task. I thought about this for a long time. I figure Jesus, even in the 21^st century, probably wouldn't be very ostentatious in his dress—no designer duds or high-dollar Italian loafers for Jesus. He would be the same unassuming, modest person we know from the Bible—just updated. I see him in relaxed-fit jeans. I think he'd still wear the sandals because I wear them too, and, well, some things ought not to change. Sandals have withstood the test of time where tunics have not.

Since we're all casual in jeans and sandals, I think a t-shirt is appropriate. I figure Jesus would wear a message t-shirt. One thing about Jesus—He was always on message. If they'd known how to silk screen tunics in ancient Judea, He'd surely have had something poignant emblazoned on his chest.

Bringing His message into modern times presents a problem though. A t-shirt message has to be cool. It has to make a stand, but it also has to invite solidarity. Ideally, it ought also to be just abstract enough to elicit conversation. This is a heady mix of requirements, and it had me flummoxed for a while. It's hard to get your creative side juiced up when you are depressed, so I spent a lot of time driving around with Jesus in a plain white t-shirt. Then one day, without notice or fanfare, He just showed up in a black tee with gold letters that said simply, “WWID.” Perfect. When it comes to the message, you just gotta let Jesus be in charge.

I've shared this visualization business with my wife. I thought at first that she might be upset as she's been pretty adamant since the beginning of our marriage that she doesn't think I should date anymore. Driving around, looking for girls, didn't seem like it would be an activity she would approve of. But really it's just a technique to solidify my claim on the $749 million. She's okay with the money, so she ought to be okay with the process. How much trouble could I get myself into? After all, I'm with Jesus.