New Pope, Same Old Pap-acy

White smoke billows towards the sky over St. Peter's Basilica, but no my now-giddy reader it's not because the millions of Catholics throughout the world gathered in the square, came to their collective senses and decided to get ass-drunk on the blood of Jesus and reject the lunacy that is Catholicism by reducing its seat of power into a giant bonfire. No such luck I am afraid. Instead, the greatest cult left on the face of the earth has appointed itself a new leader. "Oh, how wonderful, maybe the Church will adapt to more modern realities under new leadership" you naively query having not caught any legitimate news on the subject and relying entirely on my insight for reference. Wrong again fair reader. Just a couple of weeks after his procrastinated death, Pope John Paul II, a relative moderate, has been replaced by Pope Benedict XVI, a conservative fanatic, as the official leader of the Church of Organized Regressive Thought.

In truth, this should come as no surprise to my educated readership of one. Fanaticism is cyclical and perpetuated by conflict and strife. With the world teetering so tenuously on the brink of international chaos, this is exactly what we should have expected. I can just imagine the internal politicking going on in the Sacred College of the Cardinals of the Sacred Sanctity of Religious Freaks deciding that if the world is in fact aiming to destroy itself, the Vatican better well have a loud-ass dog in the fight. No one wants to be a spectator in a potentially civilization-ending Kulturkampf. And who better than the "Pitbull" or the "Enforcer" or the "Douchebag" or whatever the fuck he is genially referred to as when he condemns entire societies to burn in the fiery pits of hell. Only in a world this cynically anachronistic can our most visible theocratic organization appoint an orthodox clergyman nicknamed the "Enforcer" to lead a Church based primarily on the teachings of a pacifist and progressive without the slightest hint of irony. I'm am not saying that there is no room on this big planet for wishful-thinking, utopist hippies of questionable hygiene (Christ), or that there is no room for staunch, angry, former Hitler-youth fanatics (Ratzinger), there is plenty of room for both. I am just saying I would like it better if the latter couldn't co-opt the former while erasing any trace of his actual ideology.

I admit Pope John Paul II was no saint, but at least in the later years he was tempered by a healthy dose of oldman cluelessness. So, we could attribute uncomfortable truths such as John Paul's dislike for homosexuals to harmless, curmudgeon kookiness. But Ratzinger, with his black, bottomless ocular cavities, his grouted-on scowl, his raw Germanic aura of disgust for all things unCatholic, his shameless track record of separatism and hatred, we simply cannot tolerate. I mean did I miss something? When did it become acceptable to be a rightwing German again? The Catholic church has long been remarkable in its disconnect from rational thought - such as the decision that millions of innocent Africans are better off dead than with Satanic pieces of plastic touching their engorged genitals - and Ratzinger is simply another example of this.

My hope is that Ratzinger can do for organized religion what George W. Bush is so successfully doing for the republican party, illuminating the creepy fundamentalism inherent in it for those who somehow have managed not to notice. I await with great excitement for Pope Benny's first couple of speeches after inauguration to hear his ideas on the moral relativism of interracial dating, the need for increased security precautions like frisking and body cavity searches against potential terrorist alter boys and the hidden Marxist dangers of Buddhism. It should be quite a pope show.

The Trials of the Stache

There are moments, rare though they may be, when you have to be at least reluctantly impressed by this administration's giant metaphorical testicles. John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations? What the fuck, was Michael Savage busy? What about Oliver North, I hear he is looking for a decent nine-to-five gig between playing night-vision-goggled grab-ass with America's heroes overseas? Maybe I am being a little nitpicky here, but doesn't hating the underlying principle of an organization preclude you from working there? Obviously not. It's almost as if, and here is where you have to be slightly impressed, the administration tried to locate the person least appropriate on earth for the job and appointed him. I thought Negroponte was some kind of a bad joke, but now they're just fucking with us. Other than out of hypnotic deference to Bolton's mysterious and monstrous mustache, why would anyone within the international political community take him even slightly seriously? It's not that his ideological positions are remarkable for a Washington hack; it's just that they might be less appropriate in those great sissified halls of the pinko U.N. Some there might disagree a bit with some of Bolton's main arguments - i.e. that international law is for homos, that the Security Council should be four countries lighter, that all of the African countries' seats should be moved to the back row of the general assembly and that the 10 floors housing the ambassadors of the non-Israeli Middle East countries be vaporized to bring freedom to future generations of Arab ambassadors (I know, I am not sure exactly how it works either). What progress can we expect from a man that has to build relationships with those he clearly despises? I presume that is the very point - to make the U.N. the gridlocked, ineffective organization that Bolton has long claimed it to be. Can this administration do more to show how little it gives a shit about the U.N. First they bug your offices, then they send Colin Powell with some shitty pictures of mobile homes, childishly forged documents and a healthy lack of ethics to lie to your over-diversified faces and, as if that wasn't enough, they appoint the loudest, most ludicrously-mustached, critic of the fundamental premise of international multilateralism as the host ambassador. Baseod on this strategy, I shall be waiting with baited-breadth for a call from the Vatican to be the next Pope.