Skip to main content

Accounting for Sister Sarah

"You just write in to the Ministry, and I will send you, at no cost to you, a free book of my detailed plan of salvation!" 

No, that is not Rush Limbaugh!  It is just about every radio evangelist you have ever heard.

It works this way:  The Reverend Glorious B. Praiseworthy publishes a book of his Sunday sermons, for which he gets a royalty.  If he does his own publishing, he gets an even bigger royalty for every book sold.  When you write in to the Ministry, the Ministry buys a book from the Rev. Glorious B. Praiseworthy, and sends it to you.  The Reverend pockets the royalty, and pretty soon you will be asked to contribute to the Ministry which, of course, does many other worthy deeds, too.  Probably.  Things such as paying the Reverend G. B. Praiseworthy a salary for his participation in the Ministry.

I don't know what brought that to mind.  It has been drifting around in my head for about sixty years.  It might have been--just possibly--an article that said that Sarah Palin's Political Action Committee (you may say "Ministry" if you prefer that)  just bought $60,000. worth of Sarah's book to send as gifts to donors to her P.A.C. 

Let me see:  how does that work, again?

Our Little Sarah is reportedly being paid $100,000. to speak at a coming Tea Party Convention, or Gathering (or "Congregation", if you prefer that).  Delegates to the Convention are paying about $600. to register for the Convention, but if you only want to attend when Sister Sarah speaks, the fee is only $300. 

And people say Sarah was a journalism major in five colleges, or something like that!  I will bet Our Little Sarah has an accounting degree. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more