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Revvin’ with The Rev.

By: Reverend Trout

 Irreverent reverberations are from our bastion in the fog extended congenially to all ferocious and fear-hearted fanatics residing in range of this rant.

“Revvin’ is rarin’ to go, replete in the effete, enormous as it explores its way into issues like tissue, thoughts like polyglot and conch ‘o streamishness gone well beyond amuck.

On a weakly basis and also published once-per-week, “Revvin’” will be the vehicle – the puddle-jumping pulpit – from which this pee-brained and prurient sub-theological impersonator fulfills his mission in life – spewing.

Mental mastication leads to chewing as spewing in the mind of the middle-aged among you.  Thinking leads to winking … at the reader, crashing in on any theory that blows in with the morning wind, cashing in on your willingness to indulge overt bilge, knowing in the spillage exists a village, potentially even The Village People.

Here is this week’s emitting:

 Made in China

 Like everything else in America, this column was made in China.

The thoughts are mostly American but the content strictly Asian-influenced, molded, construed and deliberated.

Some American businessmen have become so sophisticated they might inquire as to what part of China in which it was manufactured.  For their information it was artfully constructed in all provinces of that great country, where xenophobia’s just another word for nothing left to lieu.

Like the hat on my head and the socks on your kids’ feet, this version of modern-day expressionism was pieced together by highly-paid (eight cents per year) Chinese workers who leave their rural roots for the lure of the city, of which there are many in the land where a famous mystic once said, “Man who fly upside-down airplane surely have crack up.”

Adjusting to factory life is a breeze although there are no windows in the building where most of them accept the terms of their servitude.  The main thing they need to learn to succeed is how not to have to pee for 12 hours at a time.

Wall-Mart is China, everything in your garage is either China or Formosa and, more foreboding, Chinese people virtually own the Chinese food industry and considerably more than all our formerly-secret nuclear weapon strategies, according to Clinton-haters like my dog and I.

Even high-end department stores peddle products produced in one of the world’s nastiest totalitarian countries where the concept of great wall is both physical and metaphorical.

From a strictly Chinese perspective American-based readers can breath easy.  No one here wants to take over our country, not any more than they already have that is. 

Brains evolved from all-noodle diets quickly assimilate the futility of utility. You don’t have to be a mechanical engineer to eat with thin wooden sticks although it only hurts when western culture lets slip through a paradoxical quirk such as Congressman Harley Davidson.

You’ve probably been wondering about the Chinese military apparatus being assembled by the same wonderful gentlemen who sell you your underwear now. Certainly internet users have widespread access to a surfeit of information and alleged intelligence regarding armies of a billion, rigid and obedient youth raised on not only pledging allegiance to a flag but also sewing the flag, theirs and ours, about to merge perhaps.

With Chinese submarines covertly tailing American warships it is not inappropriate to question whether sinister forces are at play here or this is instead merely some theatric exercise in which the character, Odd-job, is really a capitalistic pig with a penchant for ear-piercing.

Bottom-line: Trust us. We know what we’re doing.  Forget the communism vs. capitalism deal. We can work that out. You need Chinese merchandise and Chinese “entrepreneurs” need to provide it to you, at $3 per shirt.  Alert readers will ignore the larger questions about how the guys with red stars on their hats were able to purchase so many F-51 phantom jets on the international market. What difference does it make? It’s their fly space.

This column is being written to assure you that even though it was built in China its attitude is western influenced to the extent it dares to presume your commitment to freedom as imagined by the founding fathers is deeper than your need for a ten-cent toaster.  Knowing the cost of getting your old American-made hair-dryer is greater than the discounted price of a palate load of new Singapore inspired woks our only advice to you is to limit your vices, if not eliminate them.

If the trade deficit leads to World War III featuring China, Indonesia, Brazil versus Ireland, Egypt and Cuba “Revvin’” will simply go off-shore and publish under the guise of charity.

Until that happens, you keep happenin’, y’all hear now?

Revvin’ #2

Offing Africa 

By: Reverend Trout P. Ecclesiastes 

Everyone wants me to take a side.  I refuse to do so.

Who do I want to win, they ask, Somalia or Ethiopia?

I’m not going to let anyone pin me down on this one. I’ve made that mistake in the past and want to avoid falling into that pit again. Better to be off-putting than put off I tell them.  Plus, lacking any meaningful frame of reference choosing the morally superior position in this conflict would be nothing more than an exercise in guesswork, without any work.

Islamic zealots bent on rectifying enormous historical miscarriages of justice perceived within minds limited by lack of protein infest one faction while behemoths representing the global military industrial complex dominate the other, rendering this a battle between widgets and midgets.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council festers in the muck of greed and corruption also known as the human condition as the concept of a meaningful response becomes increasingly hideous as the cows not only come home but also decide arbitrarily to take a 15-minute break over double lattes.

Don’t get me wrong: I hate war as much as the next colonel. Too many innocent victims for one thing and not enough time for dialogue what with flares going off, grenades being launched, with an emphasis on commerce. As the man said, weapons need wars and wars need excuses.  With nation-states spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on continually evolving armaments and deliriously efficient new killing technologies, we’re hopelessly cast in an ever enlarging cycle of planetary insanity, bit players in a tawdry drama starring anthropoids as galactic dummies.

Here we are eating mangos and swiggin’ suds on what has to be the garden planet of the cosmos and what do we do?  Hate each other.  Despite the shared teachings of the prophet Jesus Christ and the mystic John Lennon we continue to screw up on the big stage of shared existence, tragically flawed victims of our own ways. 

Feuding family members and negative neighbors serve as metaphors of how badly we’ve gone astray. And rampant self loathing amid all members of Mensa indicates how far we have to go within the realm of saving the Ivory Coast not only for the offspring of the proletariat but more importantly for the Rodham-Clinton campaign.

We can’t get along because our nature urges otherwise.  Our nature directs us to take the course of least resistance, one that favors disagreement over agreement as agreement requires effort while disagreement is always a no-brainer.  Transcending self and celebrating the shared order risks breaking a sweat and most people regard the opening of ones pores to be the functional equivalent of drudgery as in having to execute three or more consecutive jumping-jack exercises after sex with any of various protozoans of the genus Amoeba.

Ignorance is the ally of intolerance. Combined the two ensure perpetual chaos among the tribes of man within the Valley of the Dolls.  Quarreling clans in Africa bode poorly for the rest of us here in Silo, America where the mere act of smiling at others has become more annoying than malaria, if only in the bereft chambers of suspended souls.

#3 Revvin’ with The Rev.

By: Reverend Trout

 Irreverent reverberations are from our bastion in the fog extended congenially to all ferocious and fear-hearted fanatics residing in range of this rant.

“Revvin’ is rarin’ to go, replete in the effete, enormous as it explores its way into issues like tissue, thoughts like polyglot and conch ‘o streamishness gone well beyond amuck.

On a weakly basis and also published once-per-week, “Revvin’” will be the vehicle – the puddle-jumping pulpit – from which this pee-brained and prurient sub-theological impersonator fulfills his mission in life – spewing.

Mental mastication leads to chewing as spewing in the mind of the middle-aged among you.  Thinking leads to winking … at the reader, crashing in on any theory that blows in with the morning wind, cashing in on your willingness to indulge overt bilge, knowing in the spillage exists a village, potentially even The Village People.

Here is this week’s emitting:

 More Revvin’ #3

 Before we get started, I am right.  Everything I say is entirely correct. I am as right as Rush Limbo and at least as correct as his unbelievable’ness.

 My so-called views are actually the truth.  That’s right, The Truth.  If I didn’t know what I am talking about I wouldn’t talk at all.  As it turns out, I am possibly the smartest among all of us.  That’s why I’m making the points and you’re reading them.  I have my shit together.

 I won’t go far as saying God speaks to me and in turn instructs me on what to say to you. I wouldn’t take it that far. I could take it that far. But that might offend a few readers. So let’s just say all forms of celestial voices intercede within my thought processes ensuring me at least that what I come up with is blessed in some deeply spiritual and actually transcendent manner.  If I don’t speak for God I do echo Jesus at certain junctures.

 Religious zealots called terrorists seek to destroy America, Israel, England and probably Spain, Belgium and Macomb County.  They believe in Allah.  They believe everything is in Allah’s hands.  How dumb is that?

 Over here, we believe in God.  If you do not believe in God you are a secularist, small “s.”  Secularists are like heathens without the burlap.  Failing to believe in God suggests to true believers like my sister Faith and I that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. We truly seek to take the “fun” out of fundamentalist and put it back in the collection plate where it belongs.

 Evolution is even more evil than secularism and science has it all wrong as far as The Bible is concerned.  Despite sharing 99.9 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees we are not monkeys.  Can I make that more clear?  We derive from God and God only. The orangutan is NOT us.

 Science seeks to screw all of this up. Science cares about as much for The Bible as I care for “American Idol.”  Science is indifferent to Moses, uncaring about Jim Bakker’s ministry and flirting with Satan when it comes to missionary responsibilities.  Science says God wasn’t there when they invented disease.  Science is so lacking in sacred disposition it goes so far as to suggest every living human being derived from fish-like ancestors, to which I can only respond, holy mackerel.

 I really appreciate your endorsement of my views as I am of course right about everything as I am every bit an American artifact, a Puritanical airhead of the lowest pedigree.  So everyone, be right yourself at all times, take on the Liberals and stay tuned to these e-mails for more instructions on how to be completely self righteous at all times.

 Rev. Trout

He Smelt

#4 Revvin’ with the Rev.

 Rev. Ernesto P. Fishjam dispatched this week’s utterances from his vacation retreat in Highland Park, Michigan, an urban motel with many vacancies.  Using dial-up technology and basing all of his insight on dreams enhanced by several consecutive days of non-stop carpet cleaner fluid intravenous injections, the noted plagiarist and wife-beater told our editors this might have been the most difficult transmission of his writing career with the possible exception of reports he and his liver, Natty Bumpo, dispatched from the laboratories in Quebec where Natty studied with the legendary Gene Krupa and Ernesto began his model cement-mixer collection.

It is with considerable angst and insufficient oxygen I share with you the following thoughts – stealing is bad and lying is easier.  May the wisdom in your mind convey to the fluidity in my thinking and bond us together forever in the salvation of true brotherhood and conditional sisterhood.

My heart is heavy and my torso worse as I share with you perceptions gained from a season of urban exposure.  Giving up the bucolic splendor of my suburban base I anchored all aesthetic operations in the grunge and despair of the inner city for an entire decade in order to imbue what others would eschew and share with you the inner view. 

I used to be fearful of what I came to embody – the forlorn stereotypical ghetto dweller, the ragged man with the leering eyes hidden beneath a ski mask in July, clutching a slightly used brown bag, drinking savagely from the vessel within, a large brown bottle wherein once resided 40-ounces of North America’s cheapest brew before said discharge did indeed cycle through the vagrant’s innards, leaving toxins galore in every corridor known to all medical-kind.   Seeing myself in the reflection of hundreds of abandoned store display windows I barely recognize the figure I see, a mean old man with unforgiving cheeks and empty eye sockets except for the pupils that remain, two opaque rectangular cavities where retinal integrity is measured in miniscule isolation.

America was once a great nation, he thought, with industrial jobs for everyone numb enough to engage in menial tasks and tow the company line long enough to get a pension or miraculously qualify for workmen’s compensation before that.  Today America is a parody of its former self, a land where yuppies in Dockers drive multi-ton behemoths to high-tech jobs for companies whose boards of directors frankly do not give a flying fig for the memory of Mickey Mantle OR Ingmar Bergmann.

Michigan was once a great state until the environmentalists got their second wind and started making all the freighter firms dump their ship ballast before completing the systematic and irrevocable despoliation of the formerly Great Lakes which really pissed off the truants hanging around the port cities.   “Damned tree-huggers,” they sighed.  “Who cares about degradation of the lakes?  Do you really think any of us are going to be here in 10,000 years?”  My torso grew heavier as the ghost of Charles Shaw came in on the afternoon express, suggesting I suspend my potato chip fast for only 10 minutes or so.

Bushed Speaks

 President Bushed spoke to the nation’s people from the rosiest garden tonight, addressing a number of important issues and making history on a number of important fronts in a number of ways, numerically speaking, before sneaking a number behind the west wing, near Sing Sing, Lansing and ding-a-ling.

Without further ‘ah do” here are the president’s remarks as interpreted by your correspondent, Highly Suh Lassie.

“Thank you for being with me tonight. I will try to be brief and to the point. I don’t expect to succeed at that. I’ll just try.

“It’s been a helluva second term so far and we still have 20 months to go before one of the two or three dozen aspirants for my office prevail in the next election, if you can really call it an election.  I got in two different times in contests so competitive the first one was a draw and the second pure robbery. Maybe next time one candidate will really dominate the other.  I like Morley Safer.

“I’m not here to make jokes, though. I’m here tonight on primetime on all major networks, including The Wrestling Channel, to set a few things straight.

“Let’s start with Iraq.  Effective ten minutes from now, all of our troops are going to be packing up their canteens over there and coming home. Our mission has been accomplished.  We found the weapons of mass destruction, also known as poppy plants, we captured and helped execute a dictator, Karl Rove, and we told the Sunni and Shitte Muslims they can live in harmony, something that hasn’t happened in many centuries but since when does anyone around here care a hoot about history?

“Our troops will be home in two months. A few platoons will stay back in Kuwait in case they need a tank or two to hold off the Haitians. Otherwise, all the National Guard and C.B. types and helicopter mechanics and mess hall orderlies are coming home as soon as possible.  We did what we set out to do: break it, fix it, see it secure itself and so on and so forth.  There is nothing left to do except pack our bags and come on home, right now y’all hear?

“We can’t afford this anymore to begin with.  Too many deaths, too many mortal injuries, too many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and demoralized, too many refugees, too much corruption, too much destruction and damage and despoliation … it is surely too much for me, my family, the nation, the world, the karma we incur.

“The terrorists I have instructed you to hate at least as much as they surely hate us, witness those hijackers, say we can expect our own American Hiroshima.  I haven’t mentioned that to you. But if you scan the internet you know of our possible internment. These suckers want to kill us, our children, our parents, our neighbors, our immigrants, our pro football players and pharmaceutical sales personnel and real estate agents.  They don’t like us because we like freedom and we love justice and we believe all people are equal, especially religious zealots.

“Tonight I am proud to announce our enemies, the terrorists, are certainly not any less stupid than we are.  In fact, and let me emphasize this, it is entirely possible all things being equal and the creek don’t run dry they are at least as incredibly smart as we are, and at the end of the day our moral equivalents. 

“Don’t get me wrong. I am not anointing them of anything like superiority. I am only suggesting we may not have anything on them in terms of divine interpretation or Pat Boone or anything like that.  I now believe that trying to understand and address their grievances makes at least as much sense as trying to beat them on the battlefield since there really isn’t any battlefield and even if there was, we couldn’t tell them from the common people any better than we could in Vietnam, as if I know anything about that.

“They contend we deserve our own Hiroshima for what we did to the indigenous people of America, not to mention the slaves we imported to perform the labor during the Agricultural Revolution and all of their ancestors, most of whom we get addicted to cocaine and crack before shipping them off to prison.  Pat Robertson isn’t going to believe this but I’ve recently concluded the terrorists are right on this one.

“From Day One we messed with the Indians, we messed with the Blacks and now we are messing with all the millions of peoples of Mexican heritage who have chosen to come live among us, almost as if they have as much right to this place as we do. Well, shoot everyone, they may be right too.  We’re going to reevaluate all prior assumptions. But first, I am here to announce tonight every American citizen and resident of native Indian blood, African-American heritage or Mexican background is hereby granted a clean slate, a new deal of sorts, an American Mandate as bold as the courage of our founding fathers whose commitment to equality and the virtues of liberty and justice was so steadfast and enduring it inspires all of us tonight and forever to rid ourselves of the shackles of racism, ignorance, intolerance and hideous celebrity worshipping.

“The American Mandate will illumine the imagination of all the people of this glorious Earth which I used to regularly check out on peyote before Laura made me quit that shit and read The Bible all the time. It will provide the resources and tools for every currently disposed minority resident of our great and wealthy country to start anew, with every opportunity White folks have traditionally had to earn their sliver of the American Dream.

“I’m going to ask Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico to work out the details on this new initiative. Bill is cool on herb and I know he’ll get his arms around this Juan and make it all work, for the good of all people.  If Dick Cheney and all the Neo-Cons don’t like it they can come down to my ranch and shoot pool or shoot their hunting companions in the face, I don’t care anymore.

“I don’t care about any of the old stuff. I’m a lame duck now. None of that phony baloney business matters anymore. This is legacy time. I’ve got to think about the historians, especially that David Brinkley feller who really isn’t as bright as most people think my kind of intellectual for sure.

“I’ve had a fundamental transformation in terms of how I see the world and the authority entrusted in me by the American people, at least the votes that made it through the high tech electoral mechanisms, controlled by my brother’s first wife’s nephew, Randy Rove.

“Before I go back to the World Bowling Association tournament on Channel 20 tonight, I’d also like to inform the American people most elected representatives are corrupt and greedy like almost everyone else in the world is, lobbyists are whores wearing wingtips and your average bureaucrat is deathly afraid of the free enterprise system where people actually have to function.  Please keep that in mind the next time you elect to sustain the status quo.

“In closing, I urge all the people of the world to pause for a few days, stop working or exploiting others or whatever you normally do and simply reflect on the fact we are riding together on a rock in space and redemption is the saving grace.  We can completely reconfigure reality if we have the will to do so.  It only takes about one-third of a bottle of good red wine, assuming that is a jumbo bottle and you already put away the car for the night.

“Anybody can be president in this context which is a good thing as the real one we have is pretty foolish and deprived of cosmic awareness, parlaying transparent comic acuity instead when hyper humanity is more consistent with the needs of the floating rock.”