Fresh on the heels of the Virtual Holy Land and Jerusalem tours by homicidal millennialist wackos comes On Sacred Ground, your gateway to authentic, original Holy Land artifacts.
In addition to an In His Footsteps tour, the site offers such indulgences as Jerusalem business-card holders and Armenian ceramics. And we sprang for an international phone call in the hope that they might be interested in buying some stateside relics:
Suck: Would you be interested in a piece of Mary’s belt?
On Sacred Ground spokesman Amos Eale: Of her what?
Suck: Mary, the mother of Christ. I used to go to this Greek Orthodox Church, and they had a piece of her belt. I might be able to get it for you. Your customers would definitely be interested in this, because it’s supposed to be pretty potent. The orthodox don’t emphasize Purgatory, but there was definitely an idea that it could earn you some time off.
Eale: That sounds like something we might be interested in. Why don’t you send us a fax describing the piece, and then we could talk about a price?
Suck: I notice you have Bibles for sale on the site. I can get Gideon Bibles at a low, low price.
Eale: Well, we’re mainly interested in handicrafts.
Suck: How about a piece of the cedars of Lebanon? They were used to build King Solomon’s house. I have a branch but it’s pretty rotten. I also have a cedar key chain that says “I [heart] Lebanon.” It’s like one of those “I Love New York” bumper stickers where instead of “Love” it has a heart. Like a picture …
Eale: I understand, a picture of a heart. We may be interested in some of these things. We sell a wide variety of products.
Suck: Prince of Egypt CDs?
Eale: Excuse me?
Suck: The soundtrack to the movie. People in the United States find the music very spiritual, and I could get you CDs in almost mint condition. I think your customers would really like them.
Eale: No, we wouldn’t be interested in selling CDs.
Suck: Well the thing is, I really need some money. I mean, I’m definitely interested in selling some of this stuff because, you know, I really need cash.
Eale: I see. Well, again, why not send us a fax or an email describing what you have.
Suck: OK, thanks. It was probably just a matter of time before the JenniCam spinoff industry inseminated the national fetish for looking behind the scenes of the porn trade, producing round-the-clock, full-penetration Spy Cams. Still, the promises being made by Gay Frat House Voyeur Cam seem a little too good to be true. In addition to pix for sale, members only hardcore, and live movie feeds, the spam we received from the service promises some 12 hidden camera angles, at least three of which — “butt cam,” “dick cam,” and “tan-line cam” — would seem beyond the capabilities of even the most state-of-the-art arthroscopic technologies.
Frank Thomas, a Gay Frat House representative, acknowledges that no pledges will be forced to wear hidden cameras in their cloacal regions and blames the mixup on an overzealous marketing department. He does confirm, however, that “toilet cam” and “couch cam” will be operational in a few days, providing full coverage of a three-guy apartment “located in Southern California, where the hottest men live.” No word yet on who will have to take the unenviable Puck role and what he would have to do to get himself kicked out of the house. The most painful thing about ’80s genre novelist Jay McInerney’s main detractors being out of business is that McInerney himself is still around, inflicting his unleavened brand of sign-my-yearbook prose on periodicals great and small. In his most recent piece for The New Yorker — a memoir of his mother’s infidelity that must have really thrilled his siblings — the veteran literary stalwart comes up with some sparkling prose: a meditation on his first brie, a thrilling stance against “the bullshit of Catholicism,” and some phrases of emotion recollected in tranquility and apparently not revised afterward (“I was sick to think that she had to struggle against her own conscience as well as the disease”). But the highlight of the article is surely the following Burnsian simile: “Her love was like a decoder ring.” Now there’s the kind of poetry that inspires lesser-known hacks like us to pick up the feathered quill:
Her love was like a pile of dry sponges. Her love was like your first brie … or your first blow job behind the boathouse. Her love was like one of those dreams where you’re naked and it’s the last day of school. Her love was as durable and hard as a winter booger. Her love was like a Betty and Veronica fuck book, only better! Her love was like club-hopping while wearing something simple — black and Calvin. Her love was like an authentic Holy Land relic. Her love was like buying an imitation Rolex in Ankara … and discovering that it’s real. Her love was like Prague before the tourists ruined it. Her love was like oxygen: You get too much you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Her love was like the first exfoliation of my burgeoning young manhood. Her love was like a delicious Remy buzz that never ends. Her love was like being asked to take care of the neighbor’s house, as well as their cat, while they’re away. Her love was like a real-time feed from the butt cam. Her love was like a 1977 Chewbacca figure, still in its original package. Elsewhere in the same issue of The New Yorker we find an intriguing story by Michael Specter about the mapping of Iceland’s conveniently limited gene pool. This is just the most recent example of a spate of interest in all things Nordic, from sponsored voyages in a Viking knarr to Westworld-type dystopian potboilers to Michael Crichton’s movie The 13th Warrior, scheduled for release this fall (after a deft title change to avoid confusion with the Kirk Douglas/Tony Curtis saga The Vikings).
But we’re beginning to suspect the sustained interest in the genetics described in The New Yorker story and a recent front-pager on Viking height in The Wall Street Journal has more to do with an unwholesome fascination with the blue-eyed blond master race than with our love of Isolde horns. While we’re all fussing over the purity of Scandinavian genes, nobody has pointed out that the Crichton movie will feature Spanish loverboy Antonio Banderas in the role of an Arab — an against-type masterstroke on the order of having “Iron Eyes” Cody appear as an American Indian or Dolph Lungren play a lovable mick. As Kirk Douglas (a genetic wonder, certainly, though definitely not a Teuton) exclaims, “Odin! Augh!” President Clinton has perfected the art of the disarmingly tedious speech to the point where the only thing we have to look forward to is the inevitable Republican rebuttal, just to see what trickery the party of Lincoln employs to appear more inept than the president. Though MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman earned our affection in the post-speech wrap by comparing Clinton’s tobacco proposal to “shooting fish in a barrel,” it was Oklahoma Seahawk Steve Largent’s statement — “True liberty and freedom come from God” — that really made us yearn for the day when all televisions will come equipped with a G-chip. (Largent’s admission that he didn’t know what “GOP” stood for until after his inauguration reminded us that we have to look up “NFL” when we get a chance.)
But Representative Jennifer Dunn (R-Washington) took top counter-argument honors. Not for her tale of a constituent’s zany “I’m not dead” mixup we heard first on an episode of The Odd Couple, but for her long description of how she is, at heart, not really a politician at all, but a gardener. At last, we seem to have arrived in the land of botanical aphorisms that American politics has been inching toward for 20 years. It’s almost worth bringing Chance the Gardener out of his post-death retirement.
