The Scavenger's of Ideas - 9/19/2004

Minister Van Illen covered the television viewing space, sparking like fireworks at the prospect of the upcoming Apocalypse. It was his delivery, though, which formally executed the reality-based plan for full-throttle headers into the great beyond. As the encore to his sweat-filled, hard-lit speech about the fall of man's Grand Moral Standard into nihilistic fervor he had himself executed, staring up into the rafters of some Midwestern choir's cavern as he took the bullet from his son, Peter Acolyte Van Illen, whose duty it was to perform the miracle of re-creation with the hands of Jesus moving through him.

There was an arrest, of course, but the boy was acquitted as having been part of a fantastic cult of suicidals bent on investing the world with seeds of autonomous disparagement. Oddly, the rituals continued unabated without arrest after another year or so, soon taking to television performances live via Pay-Par-View and later syndicated across the (666) World Wide Web.

Joshua Mal Carne, the prophet of the Heaven Spring's Eternally Within Church of Reformed Sadists joined the ministry late in the third year after the elder Van Illen's death, linking hands with Peter Acolyte Van Illen in Africa and subjecting the village of dark-skinned natives to sixty-seven hours of preaching before BetaCams with satellite links and expansive broadcasting range, a record at that time for live television. This, of course, followed by the irreversible discourse whereby Peter and Joshua coerced God-Fearing villagers to suicide in order to portray to us, American at-home viewers, just how far we'd fallen from the Grace of the Almighty in reference to these heathen savages who'd only just experienced the sublime love of God.

The American Theocratic Nation, so named for it's recent jump from attempted ideologically-based society to pre-Renaissance fear-based cowering-in-the-shadow-of-our-own-iniquity nation state, took to the new phenomenon with reckless abandon, decisively swathing through foreign worlds with Crusader fury, bringing the Word and the knife in equal measure.

And then there was nobody left but themselves. The inevitable schism generated enough vehemence in the religious orders to begin civil war, world-shaking as it was after co-opting most all lands on Earth, and burned out the sinning portion of the opposition clan with nuclear fire.

And then they were gone. And all that was left was us, the scavengers of ideas. And we all lived happily ever after until there were enough of us to start over again. Then we just killed each other and raped the bodies.