American Gods.

An e-meter measuring the depth of potential mark’s pockets and gullibility.

The quote goes, “Against stupidity the Gods Themselves contend in vain.”

But who contends against Stupid Gods?

In the last few weeks, various aspects of the Fuctard Divine and their errand boys on Earth seem to have boiled out of the censer and run like armed and drunken otters hither and thither.

The big ones – places where humans are mown down like wheat by the trembling of the planet – are obvious. And ancient. And not to be taken lightly.

In Iraq, daily the Bush Family makes blood sacrifice on the Altar of Mars: one Child of God after another – soldier and civilian, young and old, man and woman – are shepherded into the abattoir and into the insatiable belly of the War God by its NeoCon High Priests.

The victims are herded down the Avenue of the Prince of Lies, named in honor of the another Old Immortal before which the Bush Family makes obeisance. After all, without a breathtaking concatenation of deception, the road to Baghdad would have been permanently barred, and Mars would have gone hungry. This way, both Mammon and Ares get Happy Meals made of manflesh, treasure and our international reputations.

And above it all, from New Orleans to the United States Supreme Court to the Oval Office, Hack-Ra -- the God of Arrogant, Privileged, Third-Rate Poltroons -- reigns across the land with his hand-maiden, Susej -- the hate-filled Anti-Jesus that is worshiped with such pinheaded fervor by the dribbling kinder of Falwell and Dobson.

But at least three of the lesser gods have been fighting to get a little press in recent weeks.

For starters, how to explain the letterboxed reference(s) to “Valerie Flame” by Queen Judy other than as her finally, publically copping to her own Basement Zoroastrianism. Her deep and abiding belief in the teachings of Zarathushtra, founder of one of the oldest religions extant, as well as being what may have been the first monotheistic religion.

This of course put on a collision course with “Scooter” Libby’s almost fanatical Druidism.

You didn’t know?

"It is fall now … Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life."

C’mon! If that’s not animism, then I don’t know my Neo-Pagan codes.

And then came this about the Tom Cruise’s Crazy Spaceship Religion from the LA Times via the Chicago Tribune.

Mock them using another name
Scientology lawyers order website devoted to ridiculing Cruise to stop using domain name scienTOMogy.info.
By Scott Martelle
Times Staff Writer

October 19, 2005

Some things just aren't funny — at least to the Church of Scientology.

A New Zealand-based website that says it is devoted to "exposing Tom Cruise's moronic behavior in his relentless crusade to promote the Church of Scientology" has been ordered by church lawyers to stop using the domain name www.scienTOMogy.info.

The reason: Web surfers might confuse it with the real thing.

The site states that it has no connection with the Church of Scientologists and offers a link to the Scientology home page. Then it post links to a series of videos of Cruise talking about Scientology, including a sci-fi video parody of the actor's infamous May television appearance on "Oprah," in which he appears to electrocute her.
...

The scienTOMogy.info website has posted an exchange with Moxon & Kobrin lawyer Ava M. Paquette, which began in September, in which Paquette warned that the Church of Scientology owns the trademark to the word Scientology.

"The fact that you have changed one letter ('m' instead of 'l') does not protect you from trademark infringement," Paquette wrote before pointing out that infringing on a trademark could lead to a $100,000 fine. Paquette then demanded that the domain name be transferred to the Church of Scientology.
...

Or to paraphrase Gypsy Rose Lee, “God Is Love...but get the Domain Name.”

And you know, I’ll take ‘em all, on one condition.

All of them.

The Latter Day Saints and their absurd angel. Buddhists. Sikhs. More kinds of “Christians” that Hines has flavors. Jews, three different ones. Agnostics. Righteous atheists. Existentialists. Muslims. The Nation of Islam. Frisbeetarians. A thousand more.

I want them all making a glorious Carnival of stupidity and morality, farce and faith. I want 200 million Americans debating ethics from every angle and I want my inalienable right to mock any one or all of them without mercy protected like a sliver of the True Cross.

And all of that only happens when the Public Square is kept Scrupulously Secular.

That’s why, until the rise of the Bush Regime, the fact that the U.S. Constitution explicitly bans religious tests for public office has been honored by one Administration after another. That’s why the meaty thumb of the Federal Government needs to stay the hell off the scales.

That’s why a fastidious and heavily-armed Neutrality is the only Gospel any true lover of democracy ever wants as a State Religion.

Why this particular ramble?

Well my favorite holiday –- Halloween –- is just around the corner. It’s our dark, tamed, national Bacchanal, but it still gets me right in the Bradbury every year. The leaves are coming down in a profusion of all the colors that we never see during Spring. The air stings on the cheek, and the white rime precursor of genuine winter and death is on the ground every morning.

Carrying groceries –- now a little heavier with taters, peas, ham-hocks and other soup fixin’s -- you suddenly notice that you can see your breath. Your heel finds a small patch of paper-thin black ice and as you stumble just a bit, you remember that you have to be careful of the ground again. The odometer in your head rolls over and suddenly Summer is far away, and gauzy memories of the groaning tables of Thanksgiving and Christmas are abruptly in front of you and frisking along in your direction decked out in Brown and Red and White.

We put on masks, get goofy and try to scare ourselves, and if we don't we wish we were. We look Death respectfully in the eye and laugh. (Which reminds me, in honor of the coming day, maybe I’ll post of a nasty, little story I wrote a few years ago. Flash fiction –- less than 500 words. A little, seasonal Trick or Treat sumthin’ from me to you.)

Halloween stirs up recollections of a hundred horror stories from the years past, one of my favorite of recent vintage being Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”. If you’ve never read it, you really should; it’s very much for adults, and perfect for this time of year. A novel that asks you to sit down and understand this country through the filter of the bloody, Old World Gods that were imported from abroad and forced to mutate and assimilated themselves into the New World.

Helluva book.

And it also led to the title of this post, and put me in a mindset to pen this strange, weaving interlude.

So the circle of life is complete...