Lord Have Mercy

Today, Georgia idiot I mean governor Sonny Perdue took advantage of his position as leader of the entire state to grab Georgia’s ongoing drought by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. How, you ask? Through the magic of prayer! You have probably heard about this as it’s exactly the kind of embarrassing stereotype-perpetuating news about the South that gets national media attention. To make matters worse, the sun is currently shining as brightly and strongly as it has done for several weeks now. We need rain so badly that I was willing to suspend my horror/embarrassment/cynicism and hope that Sonny’s multi-faith prayer convention would work – I even optimistically left a bucket on my roof to catch any drops that the Baby Jesus might deign to squeeze out. The rabbis who were invited probably ruined the whole thing by going on the local NPR affiliate this morning to talk about how Jewish folk believe that good stewardship of the earth is a significant part of their faith and that you can’t really ask God to make it rain when you’ve been consistently fucking up the environment with grossly unchecked development for at least as long as I have been in Georgia (since 1980), but hey, they’d show up anyway. I imagine what they really wanted to say was that they would plotz if this bullshit actually worked.

Meanwhile, Senator and professional jackass Johnny Isakson recently proposed another brilliant solution to the drought: suspend the Endangered Species Act in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. A little background: the three smartest and most sophistimacated states in the union basically share a water supply. Moonshine, sweet tea, and sausage gravy, too, but the levels of all of those are just fine, thanks! The supply consists of some specific bodies of water, such as manmade Lake Lanier, about 40 minutes north of Atlanta. Lake Lanier is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, who are responsible for doling out water to us and our marginally stupider and more backwards neighbors to the west and south. Although each state uses the shared water supply for a variety of purposes, the general consensus is that it’s used mainly by Georgia for drinking water, by Alabammy for industry, and by Florida for…drum roll…endangered species habitat protection. This is because one of the most significant sources of shared water is the Apalachicola River basin, which is located in North Florida and is one of the most important remaining relatively undisturbed wetland habitats in the United States, and home to three officially threatened species and many more that are expected to become threatened or even endangered if water levels are not protected. Senator Isaakson interprets this as putting - to quote The Muppets Take Manhattan – “pigs and chickens and things” before human beings (and Republican senators). So, the point is that Johnny would rather tell the last purple bankclimber mussel or Gulf sturgeon not to let the door hit him on the way out than work to curb the needless overdevelopment of property in Georgia by loosening the vice grip of property developers on local governments, or insist that watering of golf courses be suspended, or implement a plan to temporarily raise taxes in order to subsidize owners of business such as car washes so that they can be shuttered without the risk of going out of business until water levels are back in the black, or eradicate the inefficient septic tanks which Atlanta has more of than any other city in all of North America.

Back to the subject of prayer. The other day at work, a colleague was having a particularly bad day. Various things where going wrong on both the home and business fronts, and most of us knew about it and had commiserated. Now, we currently have a particularly stupid intern-type person working part time in our office. This woman is attending what I like to call Ronald McDonald Law School, a local degree factory which caters to morons willing to pay through the nose for a law degree which will basically ensure their future hiring at nowhere but the most ambulance-chaser-y, yellow pages-advertised of law firms. One of our more odious and self-important legal assistants recently departed our firm to attend this fine institution and has - to my considerable chagrin - been hired repeatedly since then in a part-time intern-y role, bringing with her many fellow self-important and thoroughly deluded fools who she calls classmates. The aforementioned idiot is one of these. Okay, so this idot rolls in and commences with catching up on the latest workplace drama. Shortly thereafter, I see her whisking the aforementioned highly aggrieved co-worker into the single-occupancy executive washroom that is situated directly acros from my work area. A bizarre ruccus proceeded to eminate from said washroom. At first I thought it was the idiot ranting in a self-absorbed manner about some recent drama in her own life, as is usually her practice (although usually done in a public area for all of us to hear), but I soon became aware of such phrases as "guide this child through the wilderness" and "help her to see the light in this time of struggle" and, of course, the big money word - "jesus." It seriously sounded like Jim Bakker was in the executive washroom and I seriously expected tongues to be spoken at any moment. I went and notified my most heretical co-worker and we listened outside the door with our mouths hanging open in abject horror like the satanists that we are.

In closing, lord help THIS poor child through this wilderness in which those around her seem to have gone completely fucking mad and become even more insufferably religious than they already were. Ay-men.