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The Beauty and the Beast

I wonder if Our Belle, Michele, obedient wife of Marcus Bachmann, suffers from hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.  You all know what that refers to:  666!  The number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation!

Actually, Herman Cain started it all when he proposed a new tax code:  his mysterious 9-9-9 plan.  It is a plan to tax just about everything at 9%:  income, corporate income, and a sales tax.  Mr. Cain doesn't say much about it, but his plan also shifts supporting Social Security related plans to the states.  They have no money, of course, but an increase in property taxes, up to about the eaves, would take care of that.

None of this slipped by Michele!  She saw what was at stake immediately.  She just stood on her head and said it was nothing more or less that the Mark of the Devil--666--upside down.  "When you get the 999 plan and turn it upside down, the Devil's in the details!"

As all of you know who spend these long autumn evenings browsing through the Book of Revelation, where all the secrets of the future are revealed in stunningly obscure clarity, 666 is a number.  It is, apparently, an awful number.  I had not realized how much time Our Belle must spend thinking about it, but by her own probable admission, it is there, upside down, in Herman's goofy tax plan, and she saw it immediately!  We owe her!   I suppose it is just a coincidence that Herman Cain is black, and that Syrian Christianity once interpreted the curse of Cain as having to wear a black skin, but it all fits together, doesn't it, in the loony kind of way that befits a Congresswoman from Minnesota, where the State Bird is the common loon?

The number is everywhere, so it ought not all to be blamed on Herman Cain.  But there you have it, again:  a beast and that number!

And every UPC bar code!  Highway signs in Texas!  Right after page 665 and just before 667!  Everywhere!

I probably should not admit it, but once, in the transforming 1960s, when I turned my attention momentarily away from the distrust of government that is still dogging us, and from the possibility of being drafted to fight in another of our misguided wars, I made a trip by car from Chicago to the West Coast.  I had quite another number in mind, so I took along a few simple hand tools, determined to steal a mileage marker from the side of any highway where I could find one.

I drove all the way to California and back, and never found a single mile 69 marker.  It was then I became aware that perverse and horny behavior was nearly ubiquitous.  I was saved from arrest for stealing Federal or State property by all the thieves who stripped every mile 69 marker to the naked post before I thought to do it.

So I do not make fun of Our Belle for seeing the Mark of the Beast in Herman Cain's tax proposal.  I feel the same way about it, actually, but whereas she came to the truth by thinking about beasts and final destruction, I arrived there with something cozier in mind.


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