Breaking the Code

So you all know why George Bush called it “No Child Left Behind,” don’t you? It’s code. It tells those rapture-obsessed members of his constituency that he savvies their Left Behind books; it’s like, we’re going to make sure all your kids get teleported into Heaven while the evolutionists and abortionists and liberals have to stay behind and eventually queue up for Hell. He also says “savvy” to remind himself to say “sabe,” which is in turn to remind all of us that he speaks Spanish. That’s code too. He doesn’t speak in sentences, just code words and phrases. 9-11. Iraqi Freedom. Axis of Evil. “I speak your language.”

Given that Bush relies so much on Millennialist support and given that so many of them are aching for an opportunity to say “we told you so” if only while looking down from on high just before passing through the Pearly Gates, when theoretically the rest of us won’t be able to hear them anyway, I am creeped out by any mention of Armageddon in the news.

OK, it wasn’t really Armageddon that was mentioned; it was Megiddo, which I believe is Hebrew for Geddon Flats, but it’s pretty much the same place. Some archaeologists think they’ve found the mosaic floor of a third century Christian church there. The Israeli Tourist Bureau or Israeli Bureau of Tourism or whatever is really excited about this because it makes Israel look like a nice place for Christians to come visit, as of 18 centuries ago.

But actually what it does is pump up the Millennialists’ dream of living to see the day when the unsaved among us can experience the End of Times as nukes fly from one end of the Middle East to the other and the whole of Existence unravels from there. That is, from Armageddon, ‘cause the Good Book says so.

What else pumps the dream up? The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

Since first saying so as part of celebrating the end of Ramadan, Mahmoud has turned the volume down a little, but the damage has already been done: he’s totally creeped me out. I didn’t mind it so much when it was 1980 and Ayatollah Khomeini said it, because back then Iran wasn’t close to putting a nuclear weapons program together. We could all laugh then, because Iran couldn’t very well march its army through Iraq to attack Israel, because our valued ally Saddam Hussein would stop them for us.

Mahmoud says Israel is a “fabricated” entity. This is a lame excuse to destroy every nation on the planet. All modern nations are fabrications.

Secretly, Mahmoud idolizes George Bush. “Axis of Evil,” “Must destroy the evildoers,” “We cannot afford to wait until they attack us,” “Then it will be too late,” “Pre-emptive strike,” “We know they have weapons of mass destruction” – snippets of future speeches by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel. George and friends have already assembled all the code; Mahmoud just has to get it translated into Farsi.

The same day that Mahmoud said Israel should be destroyed he also said that anybody that recognizes Israel “will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury.” He got that from George, too: anybody who is not with us is against us. Good thing for the folks of little Bahrain that we’re so protective of their oil and land for military bases, now that they’ve resumed trading with Israel.

If you didn’t see the similarity between Mahmoud and George before, you must have seen it when Kofi Annan expressed his displeasure with Mahmoud. Annan and I are together on this, along with all the other sane people around who would like to see the human species continue to exist for an indefinite period of time: George and Mahmoud, knock it off. We don’t want what you offer. Keep your death and destruction to yourselves and off our planet.