Thanks to the Reverend Pat and his kind, it's not so easy being God (or God's Irving)

In the wake of the Rev. Pat Robertson's latest triumph stuffing both feet in his mouth (see DWT's entry below), AOL has been running one of its famous polls, asking how seriously we take the old fraud and con man. (Okay, they may not have used those exact words.) The trick is that, in order to see the current results, you have to vote, and no sensible person wants to go on record as taking what the smarmy gasbag says seriously. True, there seems to be increasing sentiment even on the Christian Right that the old coot has really lost his marbles. Nevertheless, I still take him very seriously, because I'm not so sure that the people he's had so much influence over for so long are all that good at guessing the marble count of their would-be spiritual and intellectual leaders.

As it turned out, though, the AOL respondees were reporting overwhelmingly (in the neighborhood of 74 percent) that they don't take the old nutjob hustler seriously at all.

Which frees you to wonder how God takes each latest eruption from His far-from-humble servant. Or imagine what it must be like to be one of the staffers who has to pass on the news that he's ferchrissakes done it again!

I figure all this stuff must be funneled through a chief of staff--God's own "Irving," as it were. So now you've got this poor midlevel flunky, the guy who mans the Religious Nutjobs Desk, shuffling nervously into Irving's office. (He probably thought about trying to bury the news in an e-mail, but figured that if the shit really hit the fan, when the timeline was reconstructed the whole thing would fall on his head.)

"Chief," the flunky says, "you got a minute? You're not gonna like this, but somebody's gotta tell the Boss. It's the Rev. Pat Rob--"

"Aw, Jeez!" Irving snaps. "Not today! When He's already in such a mood. You know He's got all those effing high school pep rallies all over the U.S. praying for victory in their effing football games Friday, and then tomorrow the effing college pep ralllies kick in. What the eff do those people use for brains? I know the Big Guy gave them each one. What the eff do the SOBs expect Him to do for them? Just screw the SOBs they're playing against? Don't these SOBs realize that the other SOBs are praying just as hard?"

"Uh, chief," the flunky says nervously, sensing that Irving is drifting.

"Yeah, yeah," Irving says. "All right, what's the little shithead said this time?"

The flunky fills him in, then cringes as Irving explodes.

"Oh, for cripes' sake," Irving bellows. "The mood He's in, He's gonna have an absolute effing cow! You just know, in no time at all He's gonna be talking about smiting. I can hear it now. 'Irving,' He'll say, 'why the eff can't I just smite the little prick, like in the good old-testament days?' I'll have to remind Him about the whole working-in-mysterious-ways thing, and He'll get that look, and then pout for a while, and we'll be lucky if we get off with just an earthquake or some major flooding in some relatively unimportant part of the world."

All this time the flunky has been edging toward the door. With one hand on the handle, he says as matter-of-factly as he can, "So I can leave it with you, chief?"

"Yeah, sure," the chief says, "I guess that's what they gave me the fancy title for, and why they pay me the big bucks. But my God, it's not easy being Irving!"