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SAY CHEESE!
BY PETER KURTH (published 12.01.04)
It
is with great and humble thanks to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, that I’m able to write anything this week,
having been utterly confounded, up till now, by the “moral
values” issue that’s possessed our country since the
reappointment of George W. Bush to the presidency on November 2.
“Moral
values,” you see, are the thing – things? -- that
apparently carried Bush to victory over John Kerry, by 1 to 3 per cent of
the popular vote, depending on which of the “Gosh, we don’t
really know!” polls you may consult.
I
bear no sorrow for Kerry, of course, who was a phony candidate from the
start. The Democratic Party had a
real candidate, Howard Dean, for months before Kerry got his Clinton act together.
Dean, in fact, was the only man in the field who not only could but would have hollered his indignation
at the takeover of the American government by Punk, Jr. and the Texas Sturmstaffel. And if you need to look up Sturmstaffel, that’s just what
they’re counting on.
You’ll probably confuse it with “law and order.”
But
never mind. It’s morality we’re talking about
here. Specifically, the Virgin
Mother, whose unmistakable features, miraculously impressed on a
10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich, with a bite out of one corner,
recently sold on E-bay for $35,814.79, and is now going “on
tour” across the country – well, through the South, anyway,
where these kinds of miracles are fully appreciated and understood.
True,
the $35,000 sum was paid out by a Las Vegas casino – actually, a
Canadian-owned Las Vegas casino called “GoldenPalace.com”
– after the Holy Sandwich was first posted, then withdrawn, then
posted again, then withdrawn again, then finally put back up and sold
– bang! -- on the E-bay hotwire. Evidently, some people thought it was in
bad taste to say that the Blessed Mother’s face might appear on a
grilled cheese, or, if it had, that it should be sold on E-bay like so much
Diamond Solitaire jewelry or The Fly
Fisher’s Bible.
Indeed,
for a while, there was a big question as to whether the sale would go
through at all. Frankly, the
features fried onto this particular sandwich might just as easily be those
of Catherine Zeta-Jones or Eva Perón.
I have all the press releases here, and each of them, pro or con,
carries a great weight of piety. You
have no idea what it took to get this “One-of-a-Kind Religious
Icon” off the block, and you can check that out for yourself on the
GoldenPalace.com website.
"I
would like all people to know that I do believe that this is the Virgin
Mary, Mother of God," says the sandwich’s original owner, or
griller, Diana Duyser, a “work-from-home jewelry designer” from
Hollywood, Florida.
“That is my solemn belief.” Duyser cooked the sandwich a decade ago,
according to Golden Palace, “and after taking one bite out of it,
noticed the Virgin Mary's face staring back at her. She put the sandwich in a clear plastic
box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand,” where –
even more miraculously – it has “never spouted a spore of
mold!”
“People
ask me if I have had blessings since she has been in my home,” says
Duyser, who has used the sandwich over the years to ward off everything
from emphysema and depression to Communists and warts, and whose parting
with the Sacred Snack has been more painful than she can say. “I do feel I have. I have won $70,000 on different occasions
at the casino near my house.”
Now, she wants to “share [her] gift with the world. I think [the Virgin] was meant to be
seen,” Duyser says.
“It’s time to pass Her along.” And, of course, to bank the check.
Now,
forgiving my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault, but it seems to me
that the Virgin Mary has been “shared” already, all over the
world -- “passed along,” if you will, for 2000 years -- and
that the question of actually “seeing” Her, never mind taking a
bite out of her corner, is, inevitably, a matter of doctrinal
contention.
In
fact, as a rule, the Vatican frowns on this kind of thing, because, to be
honest, Our Lady appears all over the place, all the time – on garage
doors, in cesspools, oil-slicks, grottoes, mirrors and on shiny,
fresh-washed dishes that Mom has just started to dry before shrieking,
fainting and smashing all the crockery, before the Inquisition can test its
validity.
Indeed,
the Pope in Rome has recently ordered a complete
“re-evaluation” of the Inquisition and all its works throughout
history, while also asking his theologians “to come up with a more
coherent and enlightened way” to describe Limbo – that weird
little “state or place reserved for the unbaptized dead,”
especially babies who had no choice in the matter, and “even good
people” who were unlucky enough to have been born before the coming
of Christ. I expect His Holiness
understands that Limbo must be an awfully big place. But, of course, He’d know more
about that than I do.
I’m
sorry – is that offensive?
Well, no more so that spotting God’s Mom on a slice of Wonder
Bread and a smear of Velveeta. As a
matter of fact, I looked in my wastebasket just now and saw the face of
George W. Bush staring back at me with his beady little eyes. It turned out to be nothing but a piece
of crumpled newspaper, but hey – who’s to say it wasn’t
just as nasty as the real thing?
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