Dead Pharaohs

Every once and a while you find out one little thing and it sets off a cogitating avalanche. The old brain sizzles a couple minutes and all the old ideas about how things ought to happen get fried into a mushy omelet that won’t hold together anymore. It’s a brain blowout.

That happened when I was a little kid and heard what you put where to make babies at recess. Then again when I was in the army and figured out why I was sitting locked up in a tiny trailer listening on a big radio to some other army headquarters talking Russian about their latest girlfriends: so we could drop big, fat A-bombs on them and break up their little patty-cake parties.

It happened again the other day. I was hearing about old Egypt before pharaohs married their sisters and got fancy with tall, pointy pyramids. Back then, really far back B.C., everyone dead just got covered up with a couple feet of dry, hot sand. Then, if someone happened to dig them up after a hundred years or so, they looked fine, just a little wrinkled. Sand dried out those naked hot bodies like three-year-old prunes and the dead folks looked like they might just sit up and talk about the weather or what they had for dinner last night.

But you know how rich guys are never satisfied, even back then. The pharaohs started buying fancy wooden boxes covered with gold paint and cat pictures on the sides. Then when they died, they got packed in their boxes, like a fat old sardine with their wives and servants and then locked up in a old damp cellar way down under their fancy new pyramid. Down where it’s so damp even the bugs get wet feet. So what happens there? After a month or two the dead turn into a nasty box of Pharaoh mush. As smelly and smushy as road-kill rabbits rotting on the road side.

To save the day, Egyptian hot-shot scientists came in and looked up how to make pickles and Egyptian sauerkraut and tried it out on their pharaoh.

That was the little thing I learned. Mummies are just a nostalgia craze. Wanting your body to rise up after you’re dead is just an accident of geography. All history is just a bad experiment in pickling and packing the dead to save them for a rainy day in dead-guys-walking heaven. This risen dead body thing would never have happened if Egypt were down in some jungle and all our followup Western Civ religion ideas dealt with a wet and soggy afterlife.

Anyway, how come you want an old, used dead body to come back to? I’d rather return as a hot looking 55 Chevy or a T-bird spouting flames in the wheelwells and cruise a million, million miles on an empty road-race hi-way running all over heaven.

And even if I got this body back I’m not sure which parts I'd want in it. My muscles peaked about when I was 30, but the brain was not in great shape for a long time after that. And what about those parts the doctor cut out. They can stay out. They are preserved in a jar down in the basement and that’s fine with me.

My Favorite Sins

Those hot-shot Catholics in Rome just approved some new, big sins a couple of weeks back. I think that’s great. We built a bunch of really neat, super-bad things in the past couple hundred years but were still playing with old sin rules. It’s like having a skinny-butt, Victorian-age pitcher tossing up softballs to 21^st century steroid guys. We have long ball, home run Sins today that the Pope never thought of until just now. He never talked about bad cell phone behavior. Or leaving cluster bombs on playgrounds. But times are changing and Hell is opening up for new age sins. I’m glad they are finally making the big time back in Rome.

But they forgot to downgrade the sin top ten, I mean the seven big guys that just are not that deadly any more. Next to atom bombers and poison-kid factories those seven deadly sins are downright tame. Let’s look at them one by one:

First, how can you say much bad about Greed here in America? We celebrate rich folk flaunting their mansions, hi-cost cupcakes and other surgical protuberances. We all want greed; some are just better at it. And to help those without money in their genes, we have greed schools everywhere: four “Growing Greedy” cable channels, a thousand Pray-and-Get-Rich Mega-Churches, web courses on grabbing houses from the dumb and poor and, for the big league greedy, MBA’s in finance. Remember, Do greed. Do it good. How can you go to hell for that?

And you’ve got to have Envy to help that top-tier greedy sons-of-guns get rich. Without envy who is going to buy anything new. The news is we have grown way beyond envy. We don’t want what our neighbors have (that’s envy) we want something better and bigger with fancy, shiny, chrome spinner wheels, too. That’s not envy that’s consumerist competition. Our President said it’s our sacred duty, like being a dead soldier. He says “Have more, more often.” That won’t get you to hell. That gets you to the mall and saves our economy.

I thought Gluttony was making a real sin comeback. I thought we had a holy war coming with Big Mac living getting clobbered by metro-sexual new cuisine. “Too much” was wronger every day. But now I see we celebrate the virtues of all eating; both big and flashy are OK. The slim and active chow down and eat arugula, too. Food technique can get you a PhD these days. If you know the regions in Tuscany and the 93 types of dim sum, and have the sharpest knife set in your neighborhood, you are hot, not evil. If you can eat 47 hot dogs in 12 minutes you are a hero. Can you really go to Hell for powering your heavenly body and even plumping it up a bit, all in the glory of hamburgers, Cinnabuns, and pate? Praise God and pass the condiments. That sounds like heaven to me.

Four more to go.

Poor Pride. How can it go against bumper stickers praising smart-ass kids, high school pride rallies, Pick your color ethnic pride, and those banner wavers who buy Chinese-made US flags. The opposite of pride is not humility; it is neurosis, self doubt and wussiness. Pride rules.

Lust, it’s an ex-sin for sure—it’s the gas that keeps our four-stroke engines going. It’s the sticky wet glue of our society. Why else would car-hound guys hang out with clothes-happy women? And vice versa. But what about unnatural lust. Some want it to move up to the next level of Sin. Unnatural is hard to find though. Monkeys and my Mom’s chihuahua do it with anyone furry they can find, monkeys even do it with their big banana trees. And humans figured out more ways than monkeys to be super-natural. This nature stuff is what sin was supposed to save us from, but now natural, green living gets you thru those pearly gates. And who knows what really goes on up there where there is no underwear beneath the white silky robes. Let’s root for more lust not less.

Next is Lazy. It’s bad, for sure. Just laying around, doing nothing, maybe sipping on a margarita. Bad. But wait, that sounds like my last vacation. Jimmy Buffet made a business singing about this to old retirees. Lazy is good if you work for it. Lazy is a just reward, not a sin. And I can see me with my wings tucked in, laying around beside the pool, upstairs with those angels. How can heaven be a sin?

Finally we get Wrath--that’s red hot anger to most people. I know I can’t take all the anger shows on TV. Fox News is surely a sin. And talk radio is worse. But then public TV is so polite you wish Cokie Roberts would slug Bill Moyers sometime in a WWR ring. So this one is a maybe on my new sin list.

One maybe out of seven. We really need an update. Please forward your new sin list to Rome. Let them come up with more top-dog new sins, like the FBI and Most Wanted TV shows do with their crooks. We need sins that deal with tight seats in airplanes, racism, genocide, droopy pants and boogie boarding, oops, I mean water-boarding. You all go right now and text that guy with the funny hat and who drives around in the Pope-mobile.

From Wikipedia, here they are: “. . . luxuria (extravagance, later lust), gula (gluttony), avaritia (greed), acedia (sloth), ira (wrath), invidia (envy), and superbia (pride). Each of the seven deadly sins has an opposite among the corresponding seven holy virtues . . . chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.”