LAST LAUGH
HUMOR HUMOR
Earthshaking Developments Doom and gloom seem to top today’s headlines. This does not bode well for those of us who depend on the lighter side of current events for our material. That’s why I choose to accentuate the positive. How do I do that? I tell myself that the phone call from China calling in its collateral is inevitable, and with each passing day that the phone does not ring, I feel better. While a little reverse psychology goes a long way, beware of the deep self-delusion espoused by a few too many public figures. But back to all the doom and gloom: What gives with Mother Nature confusing geography with an actual real life earthquake rattling the nerves of New Jersey residents? They say trends start in California (think health food, dim-witted juries, the unsustainable debt) before spreading throughout the country, but I did not see this one coming. Apparently, there are those who think that the earthquake is a sign of apocalyptic events yet to come. Some folks see God’s hand in this event because of our country’s rotten state of affairs. The most prominent support for this biblical act is that God is tired of the idiots running Washington. Perhaps, but this suggests that God is either a procrastinator (see Congresses of 1860, 1948, and most of my lifetime) or he just started paying attention. There simply has to be an explanation for this rare phenomenon. Here’s my favorite: God is upset with our nation’s deteriorating moral values. (I don’t think God is alone on that one.) This begs the question, “When were our morals ascending?” And who is making these claims, anyway? Moral superiority syndrome, or MSS, which is not a real syndrome but rather one that I just made up, is a frightening condition that inflicts self-appointed social commentators and can only truly be cured by the disclosure of one’s own moral shortcomings. Then again, perhaps the earthquake reflects God’s disgust with folks who think that they can speak for him. Besides, if the earthquake truly was a result of the outrage over values, how in the world was Vegas spared? Enough said, let’s 170
BC The Magazine // November/December 2011
move on to another theory. Here’s one that I’ve heard a few times: the Almighty rejects gay marriage as well as gays in the military and the earthquake was his way of telling us this. Naturally, he would express his rage by shaking the East coast with an eight second earthquake. Do folks really believe that with all the war, injustice, poverty, crime and bad lending practices in the world, this is what God chooses to reject? Assuming that this was indeed a message from the heavens, why send it in the form of an earthquake? In the Dark Ages, natural disasters may have been the most efficient method to reach the masses, but not today. Today we have Twitter; surely a Tweet provides a better vehicle with which to communicate (although I’m not certain that The Ten Commandments can be condensed into 140 characters). I, for one, am leaning towards a more geological explanation. Regardless, like you, I considered traffic to be the biggest natural disaster threat of living in the tri-state area. Fortunately, other than shaking everyone up, we fared well from the brief rattling. Unlike the subsequent hurricane that devastated so many of our neighbors, the earthquake brought a shared experience with a relatively happy ending in that there was no permanent damage. It even took our mind away, albeit temporally, from the doom and gloom reported across the cable news networks. And while Washington was rattled by the quake, clearly it will take a much bigger seismic event to shake things up on Capitol Hill. It boggles my mind how some people think that they can speak for the man upstairs, as if they have a hotline to heaven. Who knows who is really at the other end of that conversation? If the caller is speaking Chinese, my advice is to hang up immediately as he is most likely calling about the collateral.
Ronald S. Bergamini shares his wry outlook on life in the BC ’burbs. He can be reached at ronb@actioncarting.com.