When this guy…

Starts thinking he’s this guy..


That’s when the MOAB hits the shithouse


On being “right”.

I’ve always thought Job was a good story for a lot of reasons.

First, you have the Devil and God just sorta walking around and hanging out like a young Felix Unger and Oscar Madison on Spring Break. God’s kinda fussy and anal and OCD, eternally worried that the Hospital Corners of the world aren’t turned in tight enough and at perfect 90-degree angles.

And the Devil wants to gamble.

“Betcha Job’d turn on you if you messed with him.”

“Fuck you. Job’s a righteous motherfucker. And to be clear -- since the odometer hasn’t rolled over into Jesus-mileage yet, and we’re still in Ten Commandments country – when I say “righteous” I means “Righteous”. Old School.”

“Oh you lying pussy! You had to wipe these cheese-eaters out once already, and they still can’t get their shit straight. Job’d flip on you like an IHOP flapjack. You shoulda stopped on the fifth day and gone kayaking like I told you to.”

“Fuck you twice. What, did you forget I created your slithery ass? C’mon, who’s your Almighty Daddy? I know you’re the Prince of Lies, so do your worst. Job’s a stone, standup soldier.”

“Alright then: take his family out and then see who’s crying, bitch.”

“Bring it on, bitch.”

And like that.

God – the Lord Creator of the entire 12-billion-year-old Expanding Universe – and the Prince of Darkness with so much time on their hands the can just kick around the old Neighborhood, whining about how all the good restaurants are gone, and whatever happened to Jimmy – not Jimmy with the scoliosis, but the other Jimmy, who’s Mom was so effing hot, and Bobby O. said he made out with her once when she was drunk, but everyone knows what a liar Bobby O. was -- and, shit, three bucks for a cuppa coffee?!

Second, I like Job because of what it forces the honest reader to think about what we mean when we talk about “right” and “wrong”.

In Job, God broke his own Word to Man, and Man couldn’t figure out why.

It upset the whole deal.

God promised Man that if Man would just obey the law scrupulously, everything would be Jake. God was fantastically rules-based in those days. There were hundreds of them covering every tiny detail of your life. Body modification and what you could do on what days of the week. Shellfish. How garments were to be made and worn. What sacrifices to make, and when, and what you were supposed to say before, during and after each one.

On and on, and categories of rules were more-or-less co-equal, and all wired together.
God didn’t care if it was a man handling pork or porking another man; you fuck up even a little bit and you’d better be wearing asbestos underpants and your stoning-proof hat...and the thing was, everybody but one guy fucked up.

The game was rigged, which among other things is always bad for morale.

There are some rules – such as, say, those against killing and eating other people – that I want to see rigorously enforced. No, correction: that one I want to see obsessively enforced. But a law against letting a sick or dying man or woman – your Mom or Dad – smoke some weed under the supervision of a doctor to help ease their pain or boost their appetite is both cruel and ludicrous.

Jumping a whole Testament ahead, that’s a little of what Jesus was trying to get across before the Young Republicans for Pilate decided to Gitmo his ass for the Pubic Good. (Or is pointing out that operating under the Original Patriot Act, Jesus was swept up and rendered away to a more execution-friendly jurisdiction, humiliated, tortured and murdered and that it was all Perfectly Legal a little to harsh for the Fake Christians in the House?) Jesus taught that the fetishization of The Law as something that was Holy unto itself is just another kind of Idolatry.

I used to have a poster of a dozen or so of the more famous Blue Laws that have ever been on the books. Things like no monsters are allowed in the City Limits, or that you were not allowed to shoot Indians from the streetcars. See, you can make any idiot thing you want into a Law, but enacting a statute that declares Pi = 3.00 doesn’t make it so.

This was part of the message of JC – that the spirit of the Law trumped its letter, and oftentimes in the wrong hands the Letter actually became the enemy of the Spirit – and this is the precise point at which lot of us irreversibly part company with the Wingnut Republicans. Because if laughing our asses off at “Reefer Madness” taught us nutty kids anything, it’s that when Authority gets on the wrong/bad/demonstrably-crazy side of an issue and just can’t correct itself and admit to making a mistake, things get bad in a hurry.

When Authority just keeps hammering intractably away at some idiotically dogmatic and factually absurd message like, say, one hit off a joint will make you homicidally insane, it doesn’t just fail, it fucks with your head. With the whole social order.

Earlier I wrote an essay involving a child molester and the sanctity of the Law that many of you responded to very kindly and thoughtfully.

This, for me, is the other side of the exactly same issue.

The Law is a sacred thing, but it’s not a physical object, and it only works its mediating magic and keeps us from spinning off into a very Dark Age if we believe in it. If we have confidence in it. If we can trust that it is, in fact, impartial and that no one’s meaty hand is on the scales and tipping justice against us.

And as with Nixon, once the public finds that the good-name of the Law has been pimped to provide cover for morally indefensible behavior, we lose faith in our institutions, and the consequences are ruinous.

This is another of the malevolent viruses that this Administration has turned pneumonic and is breathing into every corner of our lives. By making war on Reality itself, and by using a razor-thin (and ill-gotten, but not in a Diebold kind of way) mandate as if it were a magic wand, Bush corrodes the very meaning of “authority” itself. Perverting it from “one who knows WTF they are talking about” to “one who must be blindly obeyed whether or not he knows a damned thing and whether or not he has a malicious agenda".

It divides citizens up in a way that cripples Democracy.

One group – the weak-minded and/or the Biblical Literalists and/or the fanatically dogmatic – are prone to doing as Job did: they believe that the definition of “right” is to mechanically and unthinkingly follow every ritual that the Law or the Party of the Leader (since they all blur together) requires with perfect fidelity. As long as the contract is free is spelling errors, is properly notarized and signed and initialed, they believe they have done “right”. That they are above reproach and criticism because Authority cannot be wrong – because it’s, y’know, AUTHORITY, -- and so they can sleep the sleep of the just. And the fact that contract is with the Devil and the terms are evil is a matter of sublime indifference to them: the rituals have been followed, the sacrifices properly made and so all is right with the world.

Like Science, for the ignorant and the totalitarian, the Law is just magic. One day, torturing someone to death is Wrong and the next, hocus-POTUS, it’s as legal as sea-water.

See? Magic! And so if you can simply bundle up all of your filthy crimes and get the whole job-lot declared “legal”, you have nothing to answer to.

It’s the legislative version of being Born Again. And Again. And Again.

It’s why Bush made such a huge deal about being “within the Law” a year ago every time anyone snuck a question about torture past the minders. Even as he was saying that “Everything we did was within the Law” he had his crack Geneva Demolition team working on a way to degrade, deface and ultimately destroy any rule against torture SPECIFICALLY so that he could wear the fig-leaf of legality to cover his deliberate perversion of the very thing this country is supposed to stand for.

And it exposed yet again the Great Divide in the land.

Those who fetishize Authority and the Letter of the Law, and are dead to its spirit and intent, are rendered literally incapable of seeing anything wrong with what Bush has done.

And to those of us who cherish the law because of its spirit and recognize its primary and irreplaceable value as the thin and terribly fragile guard-rail that keeps Democracy from skidding off into oblivion, we see clearly that, of all Bush’s crimes, he could not be commit any greater atrocity against the nation than the way his Administration has systematically gutted the law of it’s moral authority.

Finally, I like Job because God frankly comes off looking like a rat bastard who fucked up and has to resort to pulling rank when He’s caught behaving badly. A rather massive prick of a deity and a helluva bad boss to work for.

In other words, highly relatable.

And to correct a common misconception, in the end, Job wasn’t patient at all. Job was, in fact, rather pissed off. In the end Job basically gets up in God’s grill and asks where God got off punishing him when he has obeyed the Letter of God’s Law scrupulously. In fact Job was singled out for having his family killed along with the rest of his torments precisely because he was the most righteous man on Earth.

It was sorta like a Press Conference, and Job got off a really good question.

And God answered, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb; when I made clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed?"...which, all things considered, is a pretty effective answer.

Not a pleasant answer, but according to the internal logic of the story God (being God) is the Creator of the Law, Job, Job’s family, the Devil and the ground on which they stand, so making the argument that He did not have to be answerable to the Law – that He transcended the Law – may suck dog water and come across as peevish and egotistical, but He has a point.

Meanwhile, in more mundane and modern circumstances, when answering a similar question from Jim Lehrer, George Bush said: “When you're the president, you don't have to explain what you do. That's the nice thing about being president.”

And when talking to Bob Woodward on the same topic, Bush said: “One of the interesting things about being President is that I don’t have to explain myself to anybody."

George Bush nonchalantly asserting the He does not need to be answerable to anyone. That he doesn’t owe any explanations of his actions – no matter how murderous or despicable – because he is Authority, and as in the Bible, His Authority is the actually the fountainhead of Law.

Like God Almighty, George W. Bush transcends the Law.

Man. too bad Bill Clinton never got that memo. That one that says that Presidents are not accountable to anyone for anything: that once elected, he can tell everyone in the Universe to fuck off. The one that would have brought down the wrath of the godly on Ken Starr’s Ahab-ing of Bill Clinton year after year as a, “War on People of Faith.”

But then again, Clinton was not chock-full of that extra special Conservative Christian Wonderfulness that makes a mere man swaggeringly Infallible on all matters.

Had Clinton followed exactly the same policies as he did, but been a Republican -– had he thrown in his lot with the Party that curries and cultivates that Arrogant Ignorance, Theological Certitude, Political Power and Economic Dominance that gave us 400 years of slavery, a century of Jim Crow and an ongoing bumper crop of Red State bigotry and diseased religious fervor year after year after year -- they would have named their first born sons after him for the next five generations and offered up their wives and daughters to him, naked, gift wrapped and slathered in pecan pie.

But he wasn’t an Infallible Fundamentalists Republican. Instead he was a deeply Christian Democrat...so they impeached him.

And now George Bush asks, “Where were you when I laid the Foundation of ‘Murrica? When I wrote the Constitution all by myself, and fought off the evil doers with my bare hands.”

And his followers kneel, believing that unswerving fealty to their Master – to ANY Master – is the only measure of a virtuous man.