What does the God of the Crap Christians have against poor defenseless little animals?

If Fido, Rex, and Rover accept Macho Jesus as their personal

two-fisted savior, can they avoid being Left Behind?

"Pets don't have souls, so they'll remain on Earth. I don't see how they can be taken with you. A lot of persons are concerned about their pets, but I don't know if they should necessarily trust atheists to take care of them."

-- raptureready.com wackjob Todd Strandberg

by Ken

We already knew that the God of the Crap Christians has divinely kinky tastes, like the way he likes his hunky Christian boys to be all nice and buff so their bodies will look supercool all bloodied and broken when they get the stuffing kicked out of them. (Crap Christianity appears to have a significant degree of S/M cult built in.) But really now, what could the Big Dominator in the Sky have against poor innocent animals?

I have to admit that I never thought about this problem until this piece was forwarded to me, and maybe it's just me insensitivity to the well-being of animals always seems to me one of the surest and most repellent signs of inherent inhumanity, which is why it's the Nazi anti-pets ordinance that horrified me most of all the ghastly details we learned with the ultimate publication of the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer (a first cousin of the great conductor Otto Klemperer, or "the musician Otto Klemperer" as Victor usually referred to him when his name came up in the diaries. Victor Klemperer, you may recall, was a romance languages professor who managed, just barely, to live through the Nazi regime in Dresden thanks to having a non-Jewish wife. As in a cheesy Hollywood melodrama, Victor and Eva were scheduled finally to be deported, presumably to a death camp, the morning after the fire-bombing of Dresden. In the chaos, they escaped the burning and melting city.

The diaries are filled with shocking documentation of the day-to-day horror of life in the Third Reich, as growing deprivations and indignities were heaped on Jews. and while lots of them, like the increasing restrictions on what Jews could own and what they could buy, growing in time into a near-total ban on Jews buying anything at any time. But none stick in my imagination as vividly as the ban that came down on Jews owning pets. Importantly, the ban wasn't limited to Jewish ownership of the little cutie pies. It was also illegal to give them away to non-Jewish owners. For animals like the Klemperers' beloved little cat, it was a death sentence. There's a special kind of sickness at work here.

So tell me, did you ever wonder about what happens to the pets of right-thinking Christians come the Rapture? The inescapable conclusion is that they're to be Left Behind with all us Jews and other heathens. Apparently the heaven of the Crap Christians is pet-free. What kind of mastering of the universe is that?

Well now, as I learned in this fascinating report that Noah passed on to me, a "Small Business feature from Business Week, an enterprising 61-year-old Christian entrepreneur in New Hampshire named Bart Centre has found a solution. It's the very solution that wasn't available to save the Klemperers' poor pussycat or any other Jewish-owned pets in Nazi Germany: placing the critters with Left Behind families.

For a fee, of course. If there's anything the God of the Crap Christians believes in, it's making a buck any way you can. Crap Christians understand that what the Macho Jesus-haters don't understand that so-called human "misery," which we always talk about as if it's a bad thing, is really an opportunity for some smart cookie to pocket some dough.

Caring for Pets Left Behind by the Rapture

For a fee, this service will place your dog or cat in the home of a caring atheist on Judgment Day

By Mike Di Paola

Many people in the U.S. -- perhaps 20 million to 40 million -- ”believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as "the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World," the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheiists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. "If you love your pets, I can't understand how you could not consider this," he says.

Centre came up with the idea while working on his book, The Atheist Camel Chronicles, written under the pseudonym Dromedary Hump. In it, he says many unkind things about the devout and confesses that "I'm trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income."

Whatever motivates Centre, he has tapped into a source of genuine unease. Todd Strandberg, who founded a biblical prophecy Web site called raptureready.com that draws 250,000 unique visitors a month, agrees that Fido and Mittens are doomed. "Pets don't have souls, so they'll remain on Earth. I don't see how they can be taken with you," he says. "A lot of persons are concerned about their pets, but I don't know if they should necessarily trust atheists to take care of them."

This paradox poses a challenge for Centre. He must reassure the Rapture crowd that his pet rescuers are wicked enough to be left behind but good enough to take proper care of the abandoned pets. Rescuers must sign an affidavit to affirm their disbelief in God -- and they must also clear a criminal background check. "We want people who have pets and are animal lovers," Centre says. They also must have the means to rescue and transport the animals in their charge. His network consists of 26 rescuers covering 22 states. "They take this very seriously," Centre says.

One of Centre's atheist recruits is Laura, a woman in her 30s who lives near the buckle of the Bible Belt in Oklahoma, and who prefers not to give her last name. She has two dogs of her own and has made a commitment to rescue four dogs and two cats when—if—the time comes. "If it it happens, my first thought will be, 'I've got work to do,'" Laura says. "The first thing I'll do is find out where I need to go exactly."

The rescuers won't know the precise location of the animals until the Rapture arrives, at which time they will contact Centre for instructions. "I've got to get to [the pets] within a maximum of 18 to 24 hours. We really don't want them to wait more than a day." A day she believes will never come.

Centre doesn't think he will ever have to follow through on the service he offers. But he believes in virtuous acts. His Web site directs about $200 a month in proceeds from Google ads to food banks in Minnesota and New Hampshire. And to pet owners, he has already delivered something of great value: peace of mind, for just 92 cents a month. "If we thought the Rapture was really going to happen," Centre says, "obviously our rate structure would be much higher."

Somebody here is nuts, and I mean just plain crackers. I think you can guess who my candidates are.

#

Can we really have a presidential election in which one side does nothing but lie? (Apparently so.)

[Click to enlarge, of course.]

"Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies."

-- German literary historian Victor Klemperer (1881-1960),
in a diary entry of August 10, 1957

by Ken

Am I the only one in a state of stupefaction over the course the presidential election has taken? Oh, we saw it coming, but now that it's here, is it any less shocking?

We have a campaign in which essentially every word out of every mouth on one side is a lie.

Oh, we've seen the the extremified Right heading this way, rejecting all obligation to, even minimal respect for, the concept of truth, instead applying the word to what Stephen Colbert has conveniently dubbed "truthiness," which can be either (a) what one thinks ought to be true or (b) what one wishes were true. These are actually very different things, but functionally they have in common that they represent an abandonment of the basic standard of truth.

It's an astonishing thing to watch, and unlike so many progressive commentators, who can tell you exactly how a battle against it should be fought, I'm for the most part struck dumb. I don't see anything the least "postpartisan" about our time, but I see all too clearly that it's "posttrue." And once the public has lost all interest in actual truth, and yet in screeching, almost murderous, hysteria proclaims its lies to be truer than truth, what is there left to discuss?

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is part of the package. In saner times, she would be dismissed by all but the hard-core delusionals as an irrelevant ignoramus, and the McCranky campaign would get the old Gong Show hook and never be heard from again, having admitted that in terms of having anything to say of any relevance to the governance of the country it is 0 for the campaign. Instead, this person of absolutely no qualifications for any public office, let alone the vice presidency of the U.S., is breaking the rule that in presidential elections people don't vote for the VP candidate. It appears that large numbers of voters are prepared to vote for McCranky the empty suit because of the appallingly ignorant Palin and her random snatches of ultra-wacko extremist ideology.

Most appallingly, the emergence of the know-nothing candidate appears to have remoralized, not just the hard-core Republican base, which has long made clear its devotion to, even worship of, ignorance, but the Republican "middle" (meaning the "merely far right" as opposed to "far, far, far, and then some right") that has taken over the GOP. In the process this means that our actual sitting president, the Tiniest George Bush, has disappeared from their consciousness. People who finally came to understand at least some of how catastrophic Tiny George's regime has been no longer have to account for either the man, or his actions -- or their votes for him.

And so another segement of the commentariat bites the dust: the sages who told us so knowingly that the political alignment set in motion by Richard Nixon, which has effectively defined our politics for the last 40 years, has ended, to be replaced by . . . well, who knows what?

This was a tack taken by several reviewers of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's monumental study of that political transformation, as reflected in the turnaround from Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972. Well enough in its way as far as it goes, those commentators sniffed, but that's so, so yesterday.

No, I think we're still living in Nixonland, only now it's Nixonland with fun-house mirrors. Thanks to the ideological warriors of the Far, Far Right, the country has been half-insanitized. Of course it's been done mostly by people who aren't at all nuts, people who expect to reap substantial profit in terms of either power or money. But once the insanity is unleashed, how do you fight it?

One of the things I've been reading while on temporary hiatus from Nixonland is the equally mammoth final volume, covering the postwar years, of the diaries of the remarkable German (and for the final decade-plus of his life specifically East German) literary historian Victor Klemperer* (1881-1960, seen here in 1945). Klemperer's story is much too complex to synopsize here, except to say that he survived the Nazi years, ever so barely (saved, in fact, by the fire-bombing of Dresden, which enabled him and his non-Jewish wife Eva to escape from deportation scheduled for the next day), only to wind up in Soviet-controlled East Germany, which he initially believed held the moral high ground over what he considered essentially a Nazi successor state in West Germany. His opinion of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) never improved, but as an unreconstructed political liberal he came to understand the basic fascism of the German Democratic Republic.

In a diary entry of August 10, 1957, Klemperer wrote:

I am so disgusted, I see the mendacity on both sides and everywhere. Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies. At the moment things are more brutal, Asiatic here than in the Adenauer state [referring to the man known as "der Alte," "the Old Man," Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), West German chancellor from 1949 to 1963]. But over there is the most blatant return to Nazism -- here to Bolshevism. De profundissimus.

I apologize for giving such an inadequate representation of the experience and thinking of this remarkable man. The final entries of his diary, with their awareness of impending death, which he both dreaded and hoped for (we're left to imagine the three and a half months between the last entry he was able to make, in October 1959, and his death in February 1960), was a more difficult and painful parting than I've had with most of the people I've lost in my actual life. But one thing I hope will nevertheless come through in this diary entry is the well-founded depth of Victor K's despair.

We can count ourselves lucky that we haven't reached that stage. But we have one political party that has now made this its actual agenda, and people like Karl Rove and Tom DeLay did everything in their power to turn the country into a one-party state. And important segments of the other party -- the crypto-Republican DLC-ers, the "insider" careerist Emanuelites -- have resisted only insofar as the Rove-DeLay agenda didn't allow for a share for them. and another that resists it only when convenient.

As of now we still have a clear electoral choice. But with half the country apparently joyfully embracing insanity, well, I think Victor K would have understood what I'm feeling.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*If you're not familiar with Victor Klemperer and wonder, as I did when I first heard the name, whether he was any relation to the great conductor Otto Klemperer, the answer is yes, they were first cousins (meaning, obviously, that their fathers were brothers), though their relationship was fairly slight. Readers of Peter Heyworth's biography of the conductor know, however, that Victor's oldest brother, Georg, a distinguished medical professor who specialized in neuroscience and wound up settling in Boston, played an important role in Otto K's life.

Victor was clearly intimidated by his famous cousin's celebrity, but there's a poignant episode in the postwar diaries when Otto K is guest-conducting in Dresden and makes a considerable effort to establish contact with his cousin. (It didn't succeed. Victor was in Berlin at the time.)

*

DO WE REALLY NEED ANOTHER EXAMPLE
OF THE MADNESS? WELL, OKAY --

Awhile ago a colleague passed on this melancholy note to a list I'm on:

When I signed in this AM at Yahoo, one of the lead stories was:

"Obama blames Wall Street woes on GOP Policies."

Five minutes later the Obama story was replaced by:

"McCain says his highest priority will be to reform Wall Street."

This is just one example of what we, and the Obama Campaign, are up against.

I suppose our new mistress of American finance Governor Who??? will tell us again -- assuming she's asked -- that the problem at Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch was all those taxpayers dollars we've been shoveling in.

Sigh.

*

UPDATE: WHEN IT COMES TO McCRANKY CAMPAIGN LIES,
YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

So it turns out that in nearly identical talking points -- or should we call them "blithering point" -- the Ticket from Hell is out there blithering about how they're going to "reform" Wall Street, ending such abusive practices as those shockingly abusive golden parachutes given to failed corporate executives to make them go away. (And even as commentators commentate that if the Lehman Bros. "problem" hadn't been resolved by this AM, the entire financial sector was set to go down the tubes, Young Johnny assures us that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. As if he would know a fundamental of the economy if it kicked him in the groin.)

There isn't a syllable or pause for breath anywhere in this that isn't a bald-faced, unmitigated lie. We've got a pair of lying ignoramuses spewing garbage that everyone with a working brain knows is a flat-out lie. Nobody is more squarely in favor of the rankest corporate abuses than these two, whose entire careers, in fact their entire lives, are paid for entirely by corporate abuses. It would be no exaggeration to say that Young Johnny McCranky and Governor Who??? literally are corporate abuses. It is the only reason that either of them exists as anything but a burden to their own families.

You can laugh or cry, but of course we all know that one of Young Johnny's chiefest economic advisers, seriously rumored to be VP timber before Governor Who??? was invented, ousted HP CEO Carly Fiorina, is one of the worst golden-parachute abusers, having walked away from her catastrophic tenure with some $42M. (And now our Carly is whining that Tina Fey's dazzling SNL impersonation of Governor Who??? was "sexist" (and Amy Poehler's portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the same sketch was what, Carly?). I suppose Carly is touch about preserving her status as one of the dumbest people on the planet, in which case she needn't worry. Not only one of the dumbest, but one of the most totally corrupt beneficiaries of the corporate malfeasance the GOP ticket-toppers lyingly claim they will reform.

But aren't they biting the corporate hands that feed them?

Now you might wonder: Aren't McCranky and Who??? asking for trouble among the very people they're most dependent on right now, the corporate lions who are finally shoveling cash into their campaign?

And you might have a point, if anybody with even minimal brain activity thought they meant a word of what they're saying. But of course every CEO with one of those golden parachutes written into his/her contract knows for a guaranteed certainty that they're kidding -- just making up stupid little stories to tell to incredibly stupid voters so gullible that they'll apparently believe anything. And of course the media will pass on all the lies without even cracking a smile, because . . . well, because that's what they believe they're paid to do.

Anytime either McCranky or Who??? opens his/her lying mouth, it should be taken for granted that he/she has simply edited out the announcement that what follows is the Lies of the Day. Really, they should begin each spiel, "Oh wait, I've got one!" and then, in Maxwell Smart mode, say, "Would you believe that . . . ?"

#