Skip to main content

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.


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

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a 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