...of the Gods

There will be no Judgement Day until we undertake to celebrate it. There was a why for Jews, of course: what had their people done to breach the Covenant so utterly and so reprehensibly as to deserve annihilation? There was also a why to trouble Christians unless they could forget that German Catholics and German Lutherans had murdered all those German Jews; unless they could somehow reconcile God’s bloodlust with their own thirst by viewing the Almighty’s malevolence as carte blanche to give heretics and Christ killers what they surely deserved - a punishment long in coming and therefore most acceptable. There should be a similar why put to the followers of Islam about Allah, the One and Only God, because to single out Jews to exterminate, as he obviously had, particularly Polish and German ones among countless equally deserving Spanish, Russian, or American specimens, not to mention oodles of additional infidels of all sorts, is… well… odd… Was Allah merely miming the Christian God Almighty, already an epic anti-Semite? The consequences were especially unexpected because the remnants wound up unwanted on the doorstep of the Palestinians - not, one would think, a result in Allah’s plans. No one has seemed similarly concerned that Joseph Stalin murdered many more millions than Adolf Hitler (Professor Skizzen had ample documentation stuck to flypaper in the south dormers). He had finally decided that the reason for this (apart from left-wing reluctance and unremitting Jewish propaganda) was the absence of any organised state campaign against a specific racial target. In any case, what were all these deities - G-d, Jehovah, and Allah - allegedly up to while their minions were slaying even one soul not to say massacring so many? because they were all responsible, weren’t they (those Gods, that is, that existed)? since their power and and their wisdom were such decided particularities of their nature like our height and brain size; they were the culprits, surely, weren’t they? these Notables of the Sky? if not for turning on the gas directly, at least for closing their ears to the hiss, turning their backs on the passing trains, washing their hands lest they be stained, taking a snooze through repeated beatings… yes, every one of those Gods… silent bystanders to innumerable shooting parties held till the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like potatoes, and all that human consciousness, all that awareness - in each victim the very candle of the Lord, it was always said, the very Light asked for at creation - was snuffed… ah yes… snuffed… snuffed… - so that’s what the smoke was.

[Middle C, Gass, W. H.]