In Defense of Chocolate Jebus

Source: The Moderate Voice

I don’t care if it rains or freezes
‘Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through my trials and tribulations
And my travels through the nations
With my plastic Jesus I’ll go far

Back in Brooklyn from São Paulo now, I get to wake up in the morning and watch NY1, the anchor news channel on the local cable TV line-up. Oddly, newsreader Pat Kiernan now reminds me strongly of Heródoto Barbeiro of TV Cultura in São Paulo — or vice versa.

Lately, it seems, the Time-Warner channel has signed up with Forbes magazine for its business coverage.

But if that explains what “publisher Steve Forbes” — with associated political hacks and flacks — was doing with such extensive air time on the channel to promote his endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, well, that leaves me with my thumb behind my ear.

Sticking your thumb behind your ear is a Brazilian gesture of skepticism. This stinks fresh of Berluscronyism.

Speaking of Brazil, NYC is rolling out a social assistance program that is very similar to the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil, in which assistance is made conditional on such factors as school attendance by children, job training attendance, work or seeking work, stuff like that.

The gummint down there in the antipodes recently announced the noncompliance numbers — some 200,000 out of [mumble] million families that receive the aid; I need to look that up — and the number of recipients who will be cut off if they do not get back into compliance.

NY1 is calling the program “innovative” and “modeled on a simliar program in Mexico.”

I thought I had read quite explicitly that Mayor Bloomberg’s wonks were studying Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero anti-hunger program, the latter for the newly created Office of Food Policy here? I am a bit of Brazil fan — I married a Brazilian — so let me do a bit of rooting for the land that took me in as a semi-desirable alien and demand credit where credit is due.

Unlike Lula, Bloomberg donated some of his own personal cash to the program. Which I guess makes its something of an innovative public-private partnership.

The Catholic League, meanwhile, is fulminating against “My Sweet Lord,” a life-size, anatomically correct Christ crucified that will be displayed at the Roger Smith Hotel during Holy Week.

“The worst assault on Christian sensibilities ever,” say defender flacks of the faith. “Christ is depicted as a gifted male,” blurts the field reporter for NY1, in a meatheaded effort to be coy. In other words, the artist has depicted Christ’s penis as a large, low-hanging one.

The Daily News page one screamer: “Shocking!”

What? Chocolate Jebus is more of an assault on Christian sensbilities than “Piss Christ”?

The debate over iconoclasm is, after all, as old as Noah’s toes, and twice as corny. And if the critique of consumerist fetishism is an Xmas cliché of long standing, what is so surprising about extending the meme to the Passion?

A few years ago, Giuliani — speaking of — led the charge against an image of the Virgin Mary, painted using natural materials from a West African painting tradition, including elephant dung, calling for a boycott of the Brooklyn Museum.

Which I can look out my window and see, by the way. We live in the penumbra of its interlocking cultural district and BID, which we hope will add value to our investment in our apartment.

Painting someone using elephant dung, the artist explained, is not a West African insult.

Rudy had never gone to see the work.

Rudy is a greasy little canalha.

Meanwhile, it turns out Rudy’s new wife had three previous marriages, not two. A former nurse, she says if Rudy is elected, she would like to attend Cabinet meetings.

I consider myself a Christian — baptized and the whole deal — and I wish to tell you, my sensibilities are not assaulted at all.

In principio erat verbum

Contrary to popular wisdom, a thousand pictures are not worth a single word of the Word.

Among which Words I simply cannot find where the greatest moral teacher in history — pace other people’s great moral teachers, whose greatness and morality I do acknowledge — says that we should burn heretics at the stake, murder our infidel neighbors, take advice from celibates on how to manage our hormones, and tell no jokes about the godhead.

My stepfather, an ordained minister — Anglican, and yes, he has done a grip and grin with Archbishop Tutu — tells some great ones.

Jesus is in town one day teaching some of the local folks, when a rabid crowd of religious professionals push their way toward him. They thrust a woman clad only in a bed sheet before him and say “We caught this woman in the act of adultery! Should we stone her?” Jesus looks off into the distance for a moment, then stoops down and begins scratching something in the sand. Eventually he stands up and says, “Let the person here without sin cast the first stone.” All is silent, and then a rock flies in from the edge of the crowd, smacking the woman in the cheek. Jesus looks over the crowd in the direction of the rock-thrower, then cries out, “Come on, mom! Stop that!”

I recently finished reading Luis Antonio de Assis Brasil’s novel, Breviário das terras do Brasil.

Quite a gripping read. The gaúcho writer deals with a similar theme.

A Guarani sculptor, trained in the Paraguayan Jesuit missions, is captured by the Portuguese and put on trial by the Inquisition for having sculpted a Christ crucified with features similar to his own — his “almond-shaped eyes” and na tigela haircut.

Defiantly, when apprenticed to a Benedictine master as a chance to redeem his previous heterodoxy, he sculpts another Christ, this one wearing a Guarani cocar, or feathered headdress, indicating cacique rank.

There is a big trial scene in which Franciscans, Benedictines and Jesuits opine on the work and slag one another’s religious vision.

I have actually spent time as guests of all those orders in my picaresque peregrinations through life, believe it or not.

I remember once taking my girlfriend to have dinner with some Franciscan friends at the time the Mapplethorpe exhibition was showing at the UC Berkeley galleries. As a medievalist, I hung out on Holy Hill a fair bit, you see. Working on my Vulgate, my “little Latin and less Greek.”

Says she, “Do you think this dress is too provocative? What topics should we avoid?”

The very first conversational sally from the monks over the lentils and sourdough bread: “Wow, did you see those fisting photos? Holy moly!”

Headline in CartaCapital, the Brazilian newsweekly, just before I left: “The Jesuits are Back!” See also Veja Magazine: Is Nothing Sacred?

In related news, former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar gave a speech recently in Mexico characterizing indigenous peoples’ rights movements in Latin American as “enemies of Western civilization” on a par with Al Qaeda.

I’m serious. “Exterminate the brutes.” Apartheid-apologist type of shit. It’s in my translation queue.

And the caballo Zé Maria Sem Vergonha rode in on, with Rudy the Tammany Man on the garupa.

See also Spinning the World Backwards: Revolution and Counter-Revolution.