Let There be Light unto Xanadu!

When I signed up for this gig, at first I was kind of apprehensive about housing because most Malians live in mud huts that collapse every rainy season. But my mud hut is awesome! A nice Christian NGO which once operated in Sanadougou built this structure for their employees, and so I have a bedroom, a kitchen, a mud room, a walk-in closet, and a completely empty room reserved for silent meditation. It is the perfect place for me to slowly lose my marbles over the next two years.

For the first time in my life, I think I should thank Jesus.

Just as Jesus gave me a home, he also gave me a tropical fruit and vegetable garden. As I gradually integrate into this community of subsistence agriculture I am learning to take care of my own plot of millet, corn, beans, okra, sweet potatoes, hot peppers, oranges, bananas, papayas and guavas which the Son of God gave me as a house-warming present. It is my own little plot of organic paradise. God has bestowed unto me water and firmament which brings forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind. And it is good.


Nevertheless, my homeboy upstairs was quite erratic when it came to bringing forth light. Between the hours of 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon the blistering African Sun is so strong that even the Malians do not dare leave the shade of their gwa – which is an overhang made out of sticks and millet stalks and palm fronds. I presume as punishment for all of those things I said about Him not existing and all back in my bar mitzvah sermon, God has punished me by leaving my yard completely bereft of shade. So I told God to go screw Himself and I built my own gwa and I tied a hammock underneath so I can hide from the noonday sun and read the works of Nietzsche just to spite the vindictive son of a bitch.



Just as He is overly generous with the Sun’s rays when they are needed least, God is rather stingy about letting there be light when I most need it – like when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize there’s a chameleon crawling on my mattress. I was able to go for months without direct current, and I have a headlamp so it’s not so bad. But the second time my semi-naked self woke up to a chameleon which somehow got inside of my mosquito net and had to catch it under my sheets in pitch blackness I decided that enough is enough. I want electricity.

One problem: the rural Malian village of Sanadougou is not yet connected to anything resembling a power grid. Many people have televisions to watch the god-awful Brazilian soap opera which dominates all cultural life between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M., and there is an interesting system going on here where people power their televisions with car batteries. There are a total of 3 cars in a village of 4,428 persons, but everyone seems to have a car battery.

So I went to the market and bought my own car battery, some wires, alligator clips and with the help of my friend who happens to moonlight as an electrician I set up a functioning circuit for a fluorescent light bulb. And I had light to read at night for about a week. And then my battery died. I was told there were two means readily available in town to recharge it:

Option 1: I could pay someone a day’s worth of food money to rev up their gasoline generator. I ruled out this option because I am earnestly trying to divorce myself from the fossil fuel economy which is a primary cause of America’s stagnation, funding terrorism, causing the aquatic genocide of the coral atoll nations of Kiribati and the Maldives, and driving the polar bear to extinction. Also, I would prefer to eat for a day.

Option 2: I could become a member of the church which has a solar array on the roof to power their loudspeakers with which they let the congregants charge their batteries on off-days. This option is completely renewable and environmentally friendly, so I actually considered it. But as grateful as I am to Jesus for my tropical fruit garden, Hell is going to freeze over before Zac Mason becomes a member of a church.

In so many words, I was told that if I wanted to charge my car battery, I would have to accept either Jesus or Petroleum into my life. Though as much as I want electricity, I do not value a charged battery more than my spiritual independence.

This was on the back of my mind one noon as I was sitting under my millet stalk gwa perusing through the Book of Exodus and reading about the Hebrews’ construction of the Pyramids to satisfy the vanity of a single earthly man. As I pondered Pharaoh’s enslavement of my people to labor in the sweltering Sun, I remembered that even though the Egyptian potentates thought themselves to be gods among men, even they believed that there was one deity in their pantheon supreme above all: Ra, the god of the Sun. I thought that maybe if I want to take ten steps forward to spiritual freedom, maybe I have to take a step back to Bronze Age polytheism. And that is how I decided to become a Sun worshipper.

So I went to the hardware store in the big city and bought my own 50-watt photovoltaic solar panel. Never before have I possessed an electrical appliance of such spiritual and political import. Before I had a little Solio which is fine for things you might bring on an extended camping trip like a cell phone, an iPod, a GPS locator. But this 50-watt solar panel is the real thing; I can use it to charge batteries, to power up fluorescent light bulbs, to power my computer – I could even blast a fan if I so desired. There isn’t a single comfort of the Electric Age that I could realistically want that I can’t power with my solar panel. In honor of my favorite advocate of renewable energy, I call him “Al”.


Now one of the first things that this born-again heliotheist does every morning is place my buddy Al in front of the powerful, direct radiation of the early morning Sun. I kneel before Ra in supplication of his dominion over my electrical consumption and also photosynthesis for Jesus’ papaya patch. And as I go about the day I adjust its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. O Ra, bless me with sustenance! O powerful Ra, bestow unto me energy!

The next time a chameleon finds its way into my sleeping place, I can flick a switch and say “Let there be Light!” and squash it much easier. What is more, not one penny of my money ever has to line the palaces of the House of Saud ever again.

Back in the U.S.A., so-called “realistic” businesspeople tend to pooh-pooh the potential of solar energy as a silly gimmick and that the best we can hope for change in the energy market is find more oil in America. Such “realistic” individuals also told me that instead of joining the Peace Corps I should get a real job for a serious company like Lehman Brothers. Just to prove all of those naysayers wrong, from now on I am going to avoid at all costs charging my car battery, my light bulbs, my computer, my iPod or any other appliance with even a single electron released from the breakdown of fossil fuels. Even this blog is now powered with solar energy. From this point in time until the year Infinite I shall derive my electrical sustenance from the daily supplication of the Sun god Ra.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can suck on my photovoltaic generator.

The Utility Maximization of American Souls - Or, Let's Get on the Express Train to Heaven!

During the summer of 2005, the Reverend Billy Graham came to New York with a pointed message about our current place in history, in particular our proximity to the end of the world; "Jesus Christ said, as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the son of man be. When the situation in the world gets the way it was in Noah's day, you can look up and know that Jesus is close to coming."

Indeed, the world is getting to become more and more like it was in Noah's day, but the evidence which Reverend Graham put forth to back up his belief that "God is warning us" about the End times - the recent disappearance of a teenage girl in Aruba and the suffocation of three boys in the trunk of their parents' car - did not even hit the tip of the ominous iceberg. What he should have said is that with the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the melting of the polar ice caps, the oceans of our planet are soon going to rise to a level unseen since the Flood described in Genesis. In his effort to make his sermon about Noah pertinent to local concerns, Graham could have even cited the Environmental Protection Agency's 2002 study on climate change, which predicts a two to four-foot rise in sea levels around the New York metropolitan area within the century. God must be mightily wrathful about our wickedness as he will be soon be sending our offspring packing as the Atlantic Ocean submerges much of lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and some of the biggest landmarks in Queens, including parts of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park where Reverend Graham gave his sermon. But what should we Earth-dwellers do in regards to the imminent coming of the Apocalypse? Should we do as these secular scientists and international bureaucrats recommend forestalling the rise in sea-levels and instating mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions?

Hell no. Global warming is caused by humans, and humans were created by God to implement His will. Therefore the rise in sea levels and ultimate inundation of New York City and other low-lying cities is all for the best as a part of His divine plan, and to tamper with it would be a transgression of natural law. If anything, what we should do is hasten the global warming process for the betterment of both the worldly inhabitants of our civilization and especially for the ultimate denizens of the kingdom for which Billy Graham is busy securing immigration visas. When you see smokestacks, associate them not with skin cancer but with those harp lessons you have always meant to take up. consider these smokestacks to be not just releasing the products of greenhouse gas machines – think of them as steam engines powering the express train to Heaven!

Think for a moment about the semi-aquatic utopia New York could be under not four feet of salt water, but thirty-four or even forty-four! The discotheques, smut galleries, and other dens of iniquity which line the city's streets shall be totally submerged, leaving little but the spires of the financial district's capitalist cathedrals to see the light of day. Moreover, the cardboard boxes and relatively cheap, low-level apartments which lie under the new, raised sea level shall likewise be inundated, leaving the less affluent, inferior peoples who call them home to drown in a regurgitated puddle of their own sin. In this City there is a direct correlation between an individual's virtue and the number of the floor on which they live, so if we could somehow emit enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so that sea levels rise above every tenement building and middle-class hovel, the only living quarters which will be left dry shall be the opulent penthouse apartments which inhabit the most elite echelons of billionaires like Mayor Mike Bloomberg, real estate baron Donald Trump, and real estate heiress Leona Helmsley. And since only morally upright, hard-working individuals such as the aforementioned specimens of the human race can earn or inherit the massive amounts of wealth requisite to pay the rent on these 80th-floor penthouses, the only people left to live in all of New York after this dazzling display of Social Darwinism would surely be the better class of mankind.

Unless, of course, there are certain mutants among these inferior peoples who happen to have gills like Kevin Costner and can survive underneath the Atlantic Ocean, New York City would become as close to an ideal society that we will ever have on Earth after a thorough melting of the polar ice caps. But for those mutants from Flatbush who would escape God's will with their evolutionary advantages - intelligently designed, of course - the jobless and marginally-employed shall be eviscerated and only the true believers in the American free market economy will be left standing. If any such fish-men of the middling classes do indeed exist and manage to survive swimming about in their ground-level apartments, perhaps they can be put to some use and hired to ferry chief executives from their penthouse homes to the office by gondola. A reincarnation of Venetian culture on Wall Street - how splendid!

The weeding out of the lesser masses would nevertheless only be one short-run upshot of radical global warming, ozone layer depletion, and polar ice cap melting. The most worthy achievement which we could get from accelerating the end of the world would not be just the temporary betterment of what is left of worldly society, but the complete annihilation of it. Though we would like to preserve the environment and make life as pleasurable as possible for our future generations of Trumps and Helmsleys and Bloombergs, this concern is but a trifle; for as former Secretary of the Interior James Watt once testified, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." You must acknowledge that after the Apocalypse, and not now, is the time which we should really be worrying about. After all, the afterlife, in which the immortal soul is free from the chains of the body and the pollution of the material world, is in every way more important and gratifying than this life which we are now living. For this, true theophiles should rejoice for their death and tremble in anticipation of it! Some may disagree and say that death is a thing to be feared, but these corrupted souls are enjoy pleasures other than the hope of someday eating ambrosia in God's celestial breakfast nook.

Producing more greenhouse gases to kill off the human race is indeed sound public policy, for the aim of governments is to attain the greatest good for the greatest number. Let us do the utilitarian calculus; out of approximately 293,382,953 souls in the United States of America (let us not strain our own credulity and pretend as if we actually care about souls in other countries), there are approximately 224,437,959 souls who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and 68,944,994 Semites, Mahometans, Hindus and various other idolaters who have not. Therefore, if we were able to make Earth uninhabitable tomorrow, there would be 224,437,959 souls who would consequently meet their Maker and enjoy absolute bliss for pure eternity. The other 68,944,994 souls would needless to say endure the throes of Satan's lash for eternal damnation; though that is not to say that their existence would be bereft of any happiness at all, for during their average lifespan of 77.7 years these godless heathens each enjoy the serotonin produced by an average of 7,213 orgasms, 9.08 liters of alcohol and 0.8 grams of cocaine.

If you note the first utility maximization chart below, you will see just how much more happiness will be enjoyed by our 224,437,959 self-described Christian-Americans than our 68,944,994 idolaters; infinitely more happiness - even disregarding the idolaters' eternal damnation. The trump card is, of course, that our Christian brethren will be enjoying eternal bliss - which is infinite - as opposed to a finite amount of orgasms, alcohol and cocaine. Just to show you how powerful this eternal bliss factor is, let us create a hypothetical scenario in which we suppose that all Americans who portend to have accepted Jesus Christ into their lives are not quite sincere and that Billy Graham is the only one who truly has and shall ultimately wind up in Heaven. Even so, the utilitarian product of one soul times infinite is, well, infinite. And that is a lot of utility. Thus, assuming that at the very least the Reverend and some other quantity of saved souls would ascend to Heaven as a result, we must allow them to take up residence there at once by allowing our automobiles and manufacturing plants to toot their horns and spew forth enough greenhouse emissions to destroy the ozone layer and melt the polar ice caps and raise Earth's sea levels high enough so we can stamp out the existence of those living in the wilderness of sin.

























Our President George W. Bush surely understands the gravity of this situation and our unique opportunity for our souls' fate to be foreclosed with industrial activity, and that is why he has doggedly fended off the advances of the other seven world powers to impose Soviet-style command-and-control emissions caps. Of course, even though Bush has looked into Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin's eyes and seen the fundamental goodness of their souls, he is too smart to let them know his ulterior motives for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, because then the Jew-dominated liberal media would find out and they definitely would not be keen on hastening the Apocalypse in which they shall be smitten with not quite fire and brimstone but water of salt. Instead, our God-fearing President tells the G-8 conferees about the how the Lord's invisible hand intervenes in economies and that the best way to "fight" not global warming but "climate change" is to establish a carbon credit market in which our greenhouse gas producers can purchase the right to destroy the ozone layer for around the price of a set of one-sided copies at Kinko's.


We have a problem, however, for though the United States can be thanked for a full 25% of the world's greenhouse gases, 150 governments representing a full 61.6% of the world's total emissions have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol and are now in the process of slowing the process of ozone depletion. Unles these neo-pagan tree-huggers are stopped, we will have to wait even longer for Judgment Day. To do this I call on President Bush to bring the Revered Billy Graham to the next summit of global leaders to tell the story of Isaiah as he did during his first crusade to New York in 1957, where he told the city of sinners tell how Isaiah warned of impending judgment unless there is sincere repentance. Only this time Graham must fundamentally misinterpret the story, for these nations must repent their ratification of the Kyoto Protocol so that we can usher the hour of divine judgment!