CHAPTER 32

Billy Ray Barnwell here, something else Mama used to say was “Everyone’s crazy but me and thee, and even thee is a little bit crazy,” I know she didn’t mean me personally, at least I hope she didn’t mean me personally, one time she said it after Helen Poe dropped by to show us her new dachshund puppy and Mama said “Are you going to call it a good German name like Weinerschnitzel?” which if you don’t know is pronounced VEE-ner-schnitz-uhl and Helen said no, she had decided to name the puppy Cement Mixer so that when she opened the back door, Helen I mean, not the puppy, so that she could do her business in the back yard, the puppy I mean, not Helen, boy, writing clearly can be really difficult at times, she, Helen, was planning to call out “Cement Mixer, potty, potty” loud enough for all the neighbors to hear, well that will prolly strike what’s left of the World War II crowd as funny but if you weren’t around during World War II you might be a bit confused, that’s okay because most people are these days, confused I mean, what with A President Bush’s poll numbers plummeting to levels not seen since the last year of the Nixon administration and B a woman named Nancy Pelosi becoming the first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and C Hillary Clinton finally announcing that she is going to be, surprise, surprise, a candidate for president in 2008 and D the revelation that Senator Barack Hussein Obama of the great state of Illinois, darling of the mainstream media until Hillary took the spotlight away, the Senator was the darling I mean, not the great state of Illinois, received part of his education in Wahhabi Islam schools just like the terrorists did who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on nine-eleven which for all you readers in the far distant future who have forgotten your history means September 11, 2001, I hasten to add that I do not necessarily believe in guilt by association although it can certainly prove quite useful at times, and most of all E another new season of American Idol has begun on the TV and we are once again treated to the sight of Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, Simon Cowell, and of course Ryan Seacrest in the role made famous by Dick Clark enduring the most horrendous display of non-talent ever to appear on a stage in the history of the world with the possible exception of A for you fifty-somethings Mrs. Elva Miller who sucked ice and whistled on Ed Sullivan’s Toast Of The Town show or B for you forty-somethings Tiny Tim strumming his ukulele and singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” or C for you thirty-somethings Roseanne Barr desecrating the national anthem at a major league baseball game or D for you twenty-somethings the one and only William Hung about whom nothing more need be said, and E for you teeny-boppers the magnificently incomparable which is pronounced in-KOM-pra-bul Sanjaya Malakar and his hysterically sobbing thirteen-year-old fan, Ashley, so you have every right to be confused, oh and to return to our original list of reasons why you might be a bit confused let us not forget F the increasingly strange case of The Reverend and I use the term loosely Ted Haggard, president or rather former president of the National Association of Evangelicals which is called the NAE for short but not for long, ha ha, it turns out he was a regular customer of a male prostitute-masseur-drug-dealer in Denver Colorado, male masseur is definitely redundant, and by the way the word gay used to mean happy but it hasn’t meant that for a long, long time, not that Ted Haggard is gay, he has assured us himself that he is not, but what he seems to be in my opinion is very confused. I do not think the world is getting better and better as the post-millenialists would have you believe, it is getting worse and worse just like the pre-millenialists have said all along, if you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s just too complicated to explain in a few words, but pre-millenialists believe that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself is going to return in the clouds and take all true Christians out of this world in something called The Rapture just before something else called The Great Tribulation occurs which is going to last either seven years or three and one-half years after The Rapture occurs depending on whether you are pre-trib or mid-trib, all of this makes complete sense if you are super-funda-mental-istic-expi-ali-docious, Ted Haggard knows exactly what I am talking about even if I don’t, all I know is that John and Peter and Paul who wrote some of the books of the New Testament were boiled in oil, crucified upside down, and beheaded, respectively, which it might be well for all of us, pre- or post-, not to mention a-, to remember from time to time, I wonder whether John and Peter and Paul were pre-trib or mid-trib, anyways trying to imagine what some people are hoping to escape from isn’t half as scary as realizing what other people have already endured, and if you don’t believe me try reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs sometime. For the whole last half of the twentieth century, which is the only century I can speak of from actual experience, most people thought the days of such cruel and unusual punishments were long past, but suddenly just after the turn of not only the century but the millennium we here in the good old U. S. of A. have learned with a shock that although such punishment may be cruel it is not all that unusual, in fact if you have a strong enough stomach you can even watch beheadings on the internet these days, so tell me again how much progress the human race is making, I keep forgetting, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.