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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, October 28, 2009 Basic Black by Arthur Black As a martyr of fact... When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. Sinclair Lewis I read the news today, oh boy... -- The Beatles A guy could get awfully depressed reading the news these days. Joe Wilson, a peanut-brained Republican congressman from South Carolina gratuitously and publicly insults the President. Historically, this is not a career-enhancing move. Squeaky Fromme tried it on President Ford in 1975 and spent the next 34 years in the slammer. When Iraqi Muntazer al-Zaidi hurled a Hush Puppy at George Bush he went to jail too. He surfaced last month with two broken ribs and a smashed foot. Joe Wilson? Dissing Obama made him a folk hero to the Republican lunatic fringe. Donations to his campaign office went up by a million bucks in the next week alone. Oh, and he was praised as a valiant patriot from the pulpit of his church the following Sunday. We live in crazy times with crazies at home and crazies abroad. But a lot of them have one thing in common: they are very religious. Fanatically so. Zealots on the other side of the water cable-stitch explosives into their suicide cardigans and dream of being serviced in the afterlife by 72 virgins. Is that so much stranger than the zealots on this side who think Obama is the Antichrist and seriously contemplate the coming of the Rapture? The Rapture - that Disneyesque day a-comin' when the Goodly among us will spontaneously shed their clothes, their credit cards and their car keys and levitate magically upward through the elms to live for eternity above the clouds leaving the rest of us unsaved and ungodly sods to duke it out here in Hell On Earth. You want to really get depressed? Some polls say as many as 55 per cent of Americans buy into the notion of the Rapture Stephen King couldn't make this stuff up. We live in an age when access to information has never been freer and the ocean of knowledge has never been deeper; yet as near as I can tell 'way too many of us are stupider than ever. I can only see three responses to this pathetic speed bump in human development: get mad, get sad or laugh our butts off. Some people are embracing Option Three. A new website is extending a helping hand to all pet-owning Rapture believers by offering a post-Rapture pet care service. Simply put, for a mere $110 per critter, the folks at Eternal Earth-Bound Pets will look after all the dogs, cats and cockatoos that sky-bound Rapturites will be leaving behind. Naturally, there's some fine print. If the subscribers lose their faith or are not 'Raptured' within the next ten years, they are not entitled to a refund. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets members are all atheists, but as their website points out, that turns out to be a Good Thing. They're definitely going to be left behind and thus can be counted on as reliable kibble and cat chow dispensers. Facetious? Maybe -- but there's nothing tongue-incheek about the e-mail service being offered by Mark Heard. Subscribers to his service, called Youvebeenleftbehind, get to send up to 63 postRapture emails after the sender has been whisked off the Earth and transported to Heaven. The inspiration came to Heard, a Christian, after it occurred to him that he would not be able to send his wife important passwords if the Rapture should suddenly sweep him, but not her, skyward. "This gives you," says Heard, "one last chance to reach your lost family and friends for Christ." Meanwhile, on the other side of the divine divide, television station Kanal T, in Istanbul is about to air a real- ity show variation. In this version, 10 atheists will try to resist conversion by a priest, a rabbi, a Muslim imam and a Buddhist monk. The winner, if any, gets an all-expenses paid trip to the Holy Land (Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca, Tibet) of whichever faith he or she converts to. Stephen King couldn't make this up either. Still not laughing? Then let me leave you with Robin Williams take on the Al Qaeda belief that 72 virgins wait to entertain 'martyrs' when they get to the other side. "My only hope," says Williams, "is that when those terrorists get to heaven, they meet up with the kind of virgins we had in Catholic school: Sister Mike Ditka from Our Mother of Eternal Retribution." 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