What Do You Call A Two-Legged Fundamentalist Docudrama?

Dreaming is harsh. 

Especially when I dreamed I was Mike Pence, the former Vice of Donnie The Cheeto Jesus, and a Christian fundamentalist so ardent he refuses to sit in a room alone with any woman who doesn't have the "pleasure" of being his wife. You know: his woman. Not my woman. Not even my woman. His. Because he and she were blessed. By Jesus. In a ceremony. And a party.

No, I lay deep under the covers gone to the world late one night, and as I was prone in my bed alone, not with Mike's wife, I was likely a sitting duck for demons and succubi. Yet suddenly I actually was Mike, Enforcer of God and Personal Property Manager Of The Lord; Mike Pence, living the dream.

Regardless of the alarming nature of my visit with the angels in my own darkness that dark night of the soul, I was peaceful as I slept. Being asleep, I sensed something deep down--possibly the devil--and whatever it was told me that hanging out in a dreamworld was way way better than being awake in a world consumed by sin and separation from the little words in a book. Even though that little book, the demonic voice additionally intoned, expressly informs its readers that "the word killeth, but the spirit giveth life", as an unconscious and passive ally of Mike Pence, I decided, nope, that's not right, only the little words matter. This as a personal response is summarily contradictory to what I would have thought in the real world. But no matter. In near-coma, REM sleep, the lurking loom of demonology and reductionism carried its own dream logic like it was in a suitcase carried by the Fuller Brush Man or a vacuum cleaner salesman standing in the doorway to the future. Mark my words! Lemme throw some dirt on the carpet to show you how this contraption sucks!

In fact, because I fancy myself a writer and nurse the idea I have grown to have a special communication with the representational stereotypes we call words, or the word, before the vision, I'd long had trouble even comprehending how the multi-dimensional reality in which we swim could ever be reduced into two-dimensionality by the creator of that multi-dimensional reality and have it represent the ineffable and the ephemeral. But hey. That's me, I guess. In the fundamentalist world, it is a "mandate" we accept the little words as unverifiable facts, not metaphor, not symbolic, not anything more or less than absolute and literal. God has spoken through the Bible. And if we have questions or if we reason through some of the Bible's more obvious lunacies, God'll get mad at us for not liking his book and cast us into a yawning pit of fire, not for awhile, for for forever.

The offer we can't refuse.

One minute, Myself-As-Mike (as a subconscious archetype to my kid fears perhaps) slept, listening inside our seemingly shared and verily godlike unconsciousness, divine music neither he nor I had heard in years began to intone as if from high mountaintops. The dreamy air was filled with orchestral swells. A chorus humming from on high had a tragicomic tonality to it. Was this the Voice of the Lord? Was God really singing us a song? Should we raise our hands the way football players raise theirs when someone makes a touchdown? I had so many questions as I quivered in my bed. Maybe we were getting a sort of freebie movie ad for Heaven. Hey. I felt like I'd heard this before. But what song was it? What? The disembodied soul of Julie Andrews chirpily carolled “Sing A Song Of Sixpence”? Ha! My dreamworld wit had not abandoned me. Six Pence. Was this a subconscious symbol? A numerological clue to the meaning of the dream?

In the next dream-worthy instant, some hood–possibly a monk from the Dark Side, Mike's Gnostic understanding of Catholicism–smacked smacked the both of us in the head with a mosaic.  Light shifted to darkness, hurtful darkness. A darkness in a dream that had to mean something important. This is when I figured it out while I was still asleep. A mosaic. As in Mosaic Law. Whoa. Dude. An acid flashback in the middle of the night.

A Mosaic. The very tablets on which the Ten Commandments had been etched by the lightning cast by the Almighty, a ten-point Riot Act registered by the manager of the universe. Life was gonna be hard for Mike Pence and I, twinned, a two-in-one fantasy and expression while the Lord kept watch even as we slept. Sleep? No. Not together. We did not sleep together. We only dreamt together. And being conked in the head by a mosaic containing the Ten Commandments when you're in bliss and planning to remain in bliss is a rude awakening even if you don't actually awaken at all. We have sinned. And the role was about to be called Up Yonder.

Shattered pieces of tricky tablature littered the foundational mattress of our unreality as we gawked at them. Oddly illegible inscriptions covered the pieces in the dream. I couldn't read them. But my alter-ego, Mike Pence, amazingly, perhaps as a special and miraculous gift, could decipher them. In the Gospel According To Mike, apparently the monk--who so conveniently had disappeared in a cloud of sweet-smelling mist--had gotten a copy from the dreamworld and had decided to bash us with the words we two were supposed to be claiming to follow to the very letter of the law. Mike pointed at one inscription: Look, look. It's the Third Commandment! Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain!

You mean not for purposes of vanity and self-aggrandizement?

No! No! Dirty words!

You mean that if you're only using God for selfish purposes you're not taking the Lord's Name in vain?

What? Are you crazy?

No, no. Wait. What in the world is vanity anyway, Mike? Isn't vanity what happens when our purposes are meant to make us seem better than we are--or to make people do things we want them to do? Isn't politics a kind of vanity? After all, it's a worldly pursuit. . .

NO! THAT IS A LIE FROM THE PIT OF HELL!!!

Mike? Nice hair by the way. Dyed white by the Holy Spirit? At what salon? You silver-haired little devil, you. . .

It is in vain to say the name of God without really meaning it!

Only the name?

Well, I could sort of understand that for people to continue to call out the Lord's name all the time would amount to an infinite hassle for the Creator of the Universe. All those children praying for a cook tricycle for Christmas, financially desperate single mothers praying for God to help her win the lottery, drunken goofuses praying the Dallas Cowboys win the Superbowl: Vanity, right? Nine billion very human voices, all crying out to get God to just do something good for them. Pay the rent. Fix the house. Get my kids off dope. After all, for a large majority of people in America, financial constraints, to put it lightly, are turning people's lives into a resentful pandemonium that led some real losers to demand, Hang Mike Pence because the loon who mirrored their resentfulness and reactionary wantonness didn't get elected in 2020. I wasn't blaming people for being mad. People had a right to be angry. But the noise. Is there any escape from noise? Inside the dream of Mike Pence and I, I tried to explain this noise problem as a matter of vanity a little more deeply to him. Using Bible stories , as I tried with the former Vice, little stories to help an unquestioning doctrinaire believer in blind faith (not the Sixties band with Stevie Winwood and Eric Clapton); that in such cases is sometimes propitious and even helpful. But could I ever have been more mistaken in my "unwoke" condition?

Mike. What about the story where Satan and Jesus meet on the mountain? Doesn't Satan take Jesus by the arm, point into the distance and tell him that if only he, Jesus, the Son of God, will follow him, he'll have power over all the realms of the earth?

That really happened, said Mike.

That's odd to me, brother. Mainly because I'd think restricting such allegorical stories to simply the facts is one way to render them absolutely meaningless. Don't you think so? I mean, isn't the story sort of about Jesus entering his rabbinate with the realization he had a great deal of charisma and personal power to show people the Ways of God? And isn't Jesus actually tempted to use that charisma and power to gain either political control or glean for himself worldly riches and power? Isn't that about?

I'm not following you. I'm following Jesus, Mike replied. Being one who is "knowing in Christ" by the way smacks of vanity. Better than others. An elite. Blessed by Jesus. The rest of us? We can lump it on the way to Hell. Yes, Mike knows Jesus personally. Mike has "a personal relationship" with Him. He prays, God answers. Does God in this dream ever say no?

There's more. Didn't Jesus refuse an offer from Satan? Didn't he decide on the mountaintop not to make any grabs for temporal power--and instead focus on humility and peace?

You're an unbeliever. I can tell. Pence had become accusatory and reactionary, transforming me into a scapegoat right there in the spotlight of an unconscious fantasy. After all, as a religious fundamentalist, Mike is all about offers. Special offers. God makes an offer, and then you purchase the product. The door-to-door vacuum salesman is going to clean up all the messes humankind has made.

Another case of "Let The Guy Do It."

In the background, a television was babbling like a clanging bell that made no sense. This definitely wasn't St. Paul trying desperately to describe the change of heart he believed true Christians will experience once they are lifted up into the fresh air of the profound and the sublime from the floorboards of the raging automation of material sense. This had nothing to do with suddenly experiencing the proverbial scales falling from your eyes so that, suddenly, things--all things around you--are meaningful and full of life, coincidence, synchronicity and the miraculous. Nope. All I had to do was look at the cyclopean eye of the Idiot Box to see that. Peering over to see, then, what the program was, I noticed the graven image of a lovely woman in a hot pink bikini posing on the set of "Survivor", one of those fake reality TV shows where aspiring actors and actresses who look stunningly handsome and beautiful pretend to be actually surviving on an island.

The voiceover on the TV intoned: Who will be the ultimate survivor? Who will be the chosen one?

Pence? The instant he saw a woman looking like Bathsheba he headed for the other room. He couldn't even be in the same room as an image of a woman other than his wife. Mike! Mike! Come back! This show is like The Rapture! Only the chosen survive!

Pence, already the last one on the island, was having none of it. Translation of the words of "Survivor" is a complex process. After all, the host might say a thing, but I might hear another thing. Even if I hear exactly what the host says, I might interpret it differently than it was intended to be interpreted. Only those chosen by the God Of TV have a Chinaman's chance of comprehending the gibberish of surviving on an island with a camera crew, and all kinds of Day Glo objects of goof surrounding you as you try to win at all kinds of fabricated challenges. How was this any different than the contest between good and evil, the veritable Superbowl of Love?

Wow. To be that special. To have the inside track on the absolute meaning of puzzling words on TV, or in another fabrication machine called a book. Maybe, I caught myself thinking, maybe the idea of being "chosen by God" is a bid for being someone important in the eyes of God, even if the eyes of the world don't really care about that someone. Maybe being important has something to do with a status quo where one suspects one is deeply unimportant. Isn't this an undeniable bid for some power by powerless people who, more than likely, have been tread underfoot by those with a great deal of power so selfishly held? And didn't Jesus tell people to be humble, to be accepting of one's suffering? So what was the bid to become "more"? Was this the connection between current ideas surrounding capitalism and fundamentalist doctrines? The powerless will become powerful--because God is on their side. Maybe Viktor Frankel's famous classic, "Man's Search For Meaning", where he claims his research indicates that those who found meaning in their suffering in Nazi concentration camps tended to survive much more than those who lost their belief and faith comes into play here. Being all for faith, I stopped myself in mid-thought. So many of Mike Pence's flock have no faith in science, no faith in history, no faith in culture, no faith in government, no faith in higher education, no faith in Hollywood, no faith in popular music, no faith in literacy, no faith in Democrats, no faith in Liberalism, but hey: These people call themselves "people of faith"?

One can hope. Or have faith one will for once be saved from "worldly suffering". Maybe

Mike! "Survivor's chosen the winner! The winner is going to dominate! The winner has dominion over the others on the island! That's fantastic! Just like the Bible tells you! You are Mike Pence, Winner Of God On "Survivor"!

I pointed out that the winner of the TV reality game show was going to walk off the set like he was walking into Heaven, his arms and wallet loaded with all kinds of prizes, luxuries, special vacations, and most of all, a hell of a lot of money. Temporal power. Just like Satan had promised Jesus.

Right there on commercial television too.

But Mike. What about The Rapture? Did you know a British evangelist named John Nelson Darby concocted the Rapture out of a single passage from the Book of Revelation? All those years, and there you and your brethren have been, believing in a total fantasy about people being plucked off the earth by the angels and into the waiting heavens. Will all the dead people actually and bodily rise? How could that be? And what's the point? How useful is some spurious future event to you living according to what Jesus suggested you live?

Pence had no response to that other than this: Libs. They're all the same.

I was such a devil, wasn't I.

Yes, more scapegoating. Me, asleep in my dreamworld with a modern saint--self-described--and the drama was now palpable as suddenly, although he and I were twinned inside a dream; indeed, I was "a secular Liberal" or some kind of detractor sent by the mythical being known as Satan. I really couldn't tell what he was angling at--other than using a sort of personal attack as a way for him to escape any and all responsibility for not actually thinking the Rapture through. Secular liberalism. Being a humanist. Worried, I tried praying that the United States, a country founded on Reason and what is called "the liberal democratic tradition", a country that was founded on secular understandings of the world, and a country that cannot exercise freedom of religion without a government that isn't kowtowing to one or another religion.

Did the silent prayer in a dreamworld stop Mike Pence from marching like one of the pigs of a cliff in an allegory in the New Testament? Nope. Not at all. Let's all wait until we're dead to be free, right?

I've always looked into Biblical allegories for the truths they convey. Myths are conveyors of meaning that aren't tied down by fact. As a child, I was taught that taking Bible stories literally involved that clanging bell devoid of meaning St. Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians.

Look. As I snored away, deep in a hollow just above the floor of my brain-pan, I tried explaining to Mike Pence, dominionist and thus property manager of Jesus Christ, that an overweening focus on myth, fairy stories, magical events and the miraculous was one damned obvious way to miss the point. That even the Book of Revelations presents an allegory about this: MYSTERY BABYLON.

How come nobody but Noah had a boat when the floodwaters came? Wouldn't you think that if Noah literally knew how to construct a ship that other people also would know how to do that?

Pence's reply? That my ears were stopped up and that I was deluded. Of course there was a worldwide flood. God was super mad at everyone too. Maybe God miraculously made everyone but Noah forget how to build boats of their own.

It's a matter of funny business when one sees Biblidolaters making up all kinds of excuses simply to defend words in a book that was written by humans.

Everyone? You mean everyone was already guilty?

Pence began weighing in on the concept of Original Sin. We're all born in a state of sin and are thus bound for the devil the instant we come out of the chute. All those little "right to life babies" are actually little flesh-knots of sinfulness. Wipe them off, slather them with baby oil, and wait until they're around nine to save them for all eternity. We have to live in sin until the day God decides we're OK after we're dead?

Sounds like a total deal, Mike! After we're dead, we're OK! Wow. That gives me so much hope! What about this life?

I couldn't help but wonder how it was how Mike Pence came about moving into the political and legal fields in the United States where all of us are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That's backwards to what Christianity had taught him. So what was all this politicking about? Why would someone convinced we are all sinners before we're declared OK after we're dead then choose to move into the political the way he has? To save us? From what?

Ourselves. Pence was so proud. Of course, he was parroting talking points commonly assumed to be the absolute truth--that the US is moribund, sinful, and full of secular disbelievers, and that the only way to save the country is to turn us all into Jesus freaks. Of course, while it is true American's are hooked so hard by the money train that entire lives are consumed by mad races for the God Almighty Dollar that desire, not reason, seems to be leading even Christian fundamentalists around by their turned-up little noses.

Need an example? Suffering involves sitting in cushy theater-style seating inside an air-conditioned mega church with an advanced sound system, a movie screen, luxury everywhere, all to "the glory of God". Otherwise known as the moneybags of America. A pursuit of power, right under the noses of the true believers. What if...the people rolling in money are shifting the blame onto "secular liberalism" in order to avoid the justifiable accusations that it is likely they in part who are doing much of the heavy lifting that is degenerating the US before even the eyes of we secular humanists?

Never mind. Get with the program, correct? What was the question? Amnesia has its uses.

Wait a second, brother. Maybe sin has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments. Maybe sin has to do with not being completely within God's purview as a result of Him having given us free will. No, we're not perfect. And no, we don't always follow the rules. Look at your Boss. He's spitting fire at even the witnesses he's trying to intimidate before his trials. But at least in the US, all our laws are based on opinion. That's a pretty humble place to begin. Doesn't it seem truly arrogant to suggest there is absolute good versus absolute evil and that the only things saving us are some rules in a book?

As I continued in this strange, almost drug-like reverie, I couldn't help but think about that book. The Bible. Since the first books were dug up in the 200s C.E., the European world has produced nearly 5,000 different Greek translations of the New Testament alone. And they're all different. Sometimes even the contents of each of the gospels differ in one translation from another. How is all of it thus literally fact?  Mike?  Are you with us here?  

Mike! Did you know the New Testament story about the people stoning the prostitute, Mary, was something a monk inscribing a copy of the Bible scribbled into the margins? That the scribe had made it all up? Was that guy trying to perpetuate the idiocy that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute when it's fairly clear to scholars that she was a Christian priestess who led the congregation at Antioch? After all, how could Jesus have gotten married if he was God? God can't get married. God can't have sex. God can't have children. God has to be celibate, self-denying, a follower of some guys who apparently didn't like women all that well.

Maybe Mike wasn't really with us at all. Like many falsely prideful evangelicals, Mike is here to exact his dominion over us, the heathen mob. It's a brand new "civilizing mission" to convert the "native population", a.k.a. everyone but the evangelicals, into "civilization". With banned books. And no dirty movies. Except in secret. In people's basements. Or on the Internet. For 1,300 years this crazy delusion has plagued humankind: somehow, the true devotees of Jesus will set up a heaven on earth to get ready for the boss to arrive in peals of bells and trumpets and all kinds of jazzy music, angels, maybe even all the dead skaters from past editions of the Ice Capades. Throughout history, these devotees have ignored all the warnings that, like the Tower of Babel, attempting to preempt God in creating a perfect kingdom on earth have always tumbled to the ground. Why that doesn't stop them, no one really understands. Think of it: all the witch hunts and wars over doctrine. And all the doctrine replacing common sense. And all the substitutions for common sense throughout history before the Enlightenment.

History.  That’s a long time, Mike.  

Look, Mike. History, the actual fact of history, isn't always pretty. But like any account, history can be botched. It can be incorrectly interpreted, even misinterpreted for the sack of doctrine and propaganda. What happens if someone powerful doesn't happen to like those facts? What then? Are we all supposed to just sit there and let them teach lies and untruths? Think of the myth that ancient Rome was a realm of sinfulness. Romans, we've learned, were by and large quite modest and demure. They were the prudes who intoxicated themselves with using a false narrative once they embraced Christianity. While it's obvious some Romans were libertines and greedy bastards, most Romans were already Catholic without the title. What about that? The Catholic Church wanted to propagandize against any violation of old Roman prudery. And here you are, Mike, swallowing it like Linda Lovelace in "Deep Throat".

Perhaps subconsciously, I was musing over "wokeness". And Critical Race Theory and a bid to literally erase history that isn't "happy happy joy joy" about an all-good America. Of course, nobody's perfect--other than the crass, ignorant and censorious. They're perfect. Even though they're far from perfect. More power and bids to abandon any sense of powerlessness among those folks. It makes them feel really powerful to tell others what to think.

Yes, I am a thought criminal.

What the "anti-woke" seem to believe is that "Marxist agitators" who are college professors, academics and intellectuals are trying to indoctrinate children into hating the US. This is akin to the nature of fundamentalism's tendency to brush all the dirt under the carpet to create the pretense that everyone in the flock is on the up-and-up. We already know they are not on the up-and-up. Recently, Liberty University, founded by the ding-dong named Jerry Falwell (who fouled lots of stuff well), has been found brushing campus sexual assaults, muggings, robberies and other crimes away in order to create a "moral face" to the world.

Pretense. As in The Great Pretender.

At those two words, Mike almost looked up.  But was scared to look up.  If you look up, you might be blinded by the Eye of God or the sun.  Hollywood is everywhere.  Movies and movers. Reaction and action. Right in front of us. On the TV set, in the theaters, in the media, and of course, in church. React, react, react.

One of the reasons "conservatives" are upset about Critical Race Theory is because they're afraid "commie intellectuals" are going to spill the beans about capitalism's role in the Triangular Slave Trade, for one, a period where big money was to be made in human trafficking. Or that the continual land thefts of Native American land, and of Black-owned sharecropper farms in the South, or the environmental damage, and more, and even the plethora of failed wars we've engaged in over the last 75 years could be pinned on their beloved money machines. As if anyone with a head on his or her neck actually cared. We all know socialism won't work on a state socialist level. We're stuck with capitalism, like it or not, and hence we can and should continue to reform and moderate a highly dangerous tool that should not own us.

History. With a capital H. Everyone knows that's a code word.  It’s the Marxian theory of History, something the ur-socialist came up with in one interpretation of what the future of capitalism might be.  Of course, Marx cribbed a lot of that from Hegel’s idea of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis dialectic. Hegel used dialectic as a research tool.  Marx, of course, used it to propound a theory.  Apparently, a scary theory.  Why scary?  

The idea that the workers of the world might turn against “the Holy Men of the Moneychangers’ Godhead” is unfathomable to self-proclaimed saints of storefront religion. That's why. Jesus saw the moneychangers cashing in on Judaism right there in the table, lost his temper for the second time in the HISTORY of his life, and turned the table on the moneychangers, thus getting himself arrested and then executed. For vandalism. Imagine that. Tough on crime, those pagans. Right?

Exchanging the currency of faith for the currency of dollar bills, fundies?

Who cares? According to Pence and others of that ideology, everyone but those imbued with the Holy Spirit are dumber than limestone.  Yes, a type of stone perfect for inscriptions.  That do not move. That cannot really ever be changed. Perfect!

Totalitarianism 101.

Hey, Mike. I've got a story. Back in college, I dated a pretty blonde named Dot. I'd met her through the Baptist Student Union on campus. We started dating, and soon she asked me, "You wanna come to see my baptism?"

Sure, I told her. I'd never seen a Southern Baptist baptism. So, when we got into the church and the communion service and sermon had ended, the church's minister had a curtain at the bottom of the stage parted--and revealed a big tank of water we could view through a glass window. Soon, Dot appeared, looking absolutely lovely in a long, flouncy, white gown. The preacher took her by the hand and led her down the steps to the water. That's when the congregation gasped. Dot was thoroughly nude beneath her gown. I mean, whoa. Then, when Dot received her anointing with water, she returned to the pew. "What did you think" she asked.

"Can you get baptized again?"

There, the vision ended. I woke up. In a sweat. The room loomed, shadowy and a little frightening. Wind outside knocked branches against the bedroom window. I had become a believer. One who the Book of Revelations claims will see visions before the Rapture or the end days. Or maybe not.

No one knows what the future will bring. Except Mike Pence.