I have never really and totally trusted people who claim to have talked with God, seen mystical apparitions, witnessed crying statues and crucifixes and been in what must be in supernatural touch with one of the myriad Catholic saints on the calendar. But when you have the president of the most powerful nation in the world justifying some of his most globally unpopular decisions by insisting they were actually suggested to him through divine intervention, then one really needs to get worried.
If his God is really behind the dropping, from 50,000 feet, of the latest generation of bombs on innocent people living in such far-flung places as Iraq and Afghanistan, then I need not marvel at my frequent agnostic bouts. But somehow, something tells me He could not have been behind the massacre of innocent children, old men and women.
Of course He may not exactly stomach the likes of Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet, both of them dictators but apparently, at least according to modern-day American thinking, not both needed to be portrayed as victims of His wrath. The illegal intervention in Iraq and the subsequent removal of Saddam were, as we were expected to believe, God-inspired. As a Born Again Christian, it seems George W. Bush has an extra hotline on his White House desk. Blue with touches of little white clouds, of course. Can you imagine the scene?
“Hi, God. I’ve just been praying for the world. That’s what good guys do, no? The war against terrorism is taking most of my time, alas. The more I claim to be winning it on behalf of the free and democratic world, more of my soldiers die and the more terrorist acts occur. Even the whiff of an airline plot in the UK is costing us billions. I thought that by getting rid of Saddam, as You so kindly suggested in one of our blessed tête-à-têtes, the problems in Iraq would have subsided by now.”
“George, W, George… haven’t you forgotten something?”
“My Lord, I am confused. The same thing is happening in Afghanistan. We declared victory over the Taliban years ago. Now see what’s happening. You specifically wished I get us into it and I have obeyed. But… ”
“George, W, George… the war against terrorism cannot have one side to it.”
“You mean we should let the French play a bigger role? I don’t trust them, my Lord. Tony Blair’s OK, he says yes to everything You command me to do, but not Chirac, that froggy… gee, sorry, Lord.”
“George, W, George… what about Lebanon? Was that also carried out as per my divine inspiration?”
“I dreamt it, I dreamt it all. Forgive me if I have sinned, my Lord, by doing it by proxy courtesy of the Israelis. They are Your chosen race, after all. I believe it is said somewhere in the fundamentalist Bible that Israel is the only race to be defended by Christians anywhere, more so by those in the US.”
The American President then comes out of his trance and, as the silver aura around his body fades away, he suddenly realises what it must have meant. God had spoken to him again. America had once unceremoniously given Chile her old dictator. There is also that South American terrorist who had hijacked a Cuban (emphasis on Cuban) airliner and continues to be given refuge in the US. What war on terrorism? God can only have been hinting at these inconsistencies, and yet this time He seems to have left no lasting impression on George W.
While Bush grapples with his conscience and his end-of-second-term day approaches fast, the international media has lately been telling us about a new “order” of modern nuns who say they have chosen to remain virgins while continuing to wear normal designer clothes and shoes as they go about their business of the day.
Like talking with God, virginity has this mystique about it. But then, when you think about it, it becomes a bit more complex. How can one remain a virgin when he or she has not experienced the real thing? I can accept, if not understand, abstinence after having done it, but to deny oneself of something that has not been experienced is a mystery, at least to most of us poor mortals.
I am always buttonholed by friends over my refusal, on principle, to eat snails, horsemeat and veal as well as any additions to my food of non-liquidised garlic and onions. How can you insist you do not like them if you’ve never tasted them, they ask me bluntly? I am quick and somewhat convincing in explaining the moral background of my distaste for the poor boiled snails, the butchered innocent horses who would have dedicated a life time of racing to their ungrateful owners, and the sad little calves who are kept in exceedingly narrow boxes in which they can neither sit nor rest. However, in the simple case of the onions and garlic, I of course come a cropper.
Like these modern virgins, I refuse to taste something the rest of the world thinks is simply sublime. Now I can wear the latest fashions and still refuse to eat what I claim not to like, but these new virgin sisters confound me. Fashions, men’s and women’s, are meant to project people in a better, more attractive physical perspective.
And guess what… the purpose and intended end result of all this cockish display are, of course, that one sex attracts the other. OK, sometimes it also attracts the same one. So, what happens next? Certainly not virginity. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a Claudia Schiffer type of nun wearing the best and most fashionable clothes and shoes on the market and still giving out genuine signals of self-imposed virginity.
Which instantly brings us back to the American President who talks with God about dropping bombs and, in the holy process, killing hundreds of innocent human beings. What makes sense and what doesn’t? This morning’s piece may sound irreverent, but it is not meant to be. I am simply confused as to what God or which God would really approve of such horrendous actions and things. My own idea of God, since my Museo days at Kalkara, has always been that of a benevolent One who, conversely, inspires humanity to avoid war, bloodshed and destruction. Long gone is the idea of a vindictive, angry, white-bearded God who wants an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But then, this late in my fifties I cannot claim to be a virgin.