While driving Oprah to her highest ratings in two years, Sarah Palin asked that we cast aside our petty sociopolitical differences and as a united country pray for the everliving soul of Levi Johnston.
Pray for Levi.
While my main gripe with Sarah Palin is her wanton disregard for the tradition of giving children sensible names, her advocacy of Levi Johnston as worthy of prayerful worship seems a negligent reading of Heavenly duties. Prayers showered upon the healthy, virile white teenager swimming in pistachio money surely fall upon deaf ears.
Perhaps she is emboldened by a reading of some more vengeful God, more of an Old Testament deity. This God surely would read our prayers as time to test the faith of young Levi and arrange a severe comeuppance full of wrath and afflictions.
This same God has infected the mind of Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, who in a long London Times interview snidely remarked that earth-shatteringly horrible banking of the last derivative decade is “God’s work.”
Pray for Levi. Pray for Lloyd, too.
Pray that we get some follow-through of good Ole’ Testament rocket sauce from these mournful missives. Lloyd and his like-minded accomplices surely do their bidding tempting the good graces of Genesis god, a holy figure always ready with a good hard smiting. Some bloodfire, maybe a few public stonings — our prayers do not ask for much.
We should keep optimism up that our prayers shall not be in vain once sent to the correct sacred source. Based on their conscienceless money grubbing, our economy got circumsized last fall with no anesthesia. Old Testament God must appreciate this surprise bris and may recognize our rightfully embattled banking sector as true believers.
Americans were certainly complicit in conjuring up the subprime bomb that inflated our net worth and our sense of ideological imperviousness, but the capitalist class raging out ahead of us deserves scorn and scrutiny for this nuclear economic winter. We fought the battles and lost much of our livelihoods, but they seem to have somehow won the war and rocketed off in a billion-dollar escape pod.
Pray for Lloyd. Don’t forget to pray for Levi, though.
I prayed for Britney back in the day, and she got through her bald tribulations relatively unscathed. Britney Spears is a hard-working girl who loved that spotlight so badly that she sacrificed a few sham marriages to the fame game. Levi may not be able to sing as of now, but even the least-accomplished fame whore knows a good vocal coach.
My own prayers for Levi are centered around his inevitable marriage to Britney Spears and the creation of a band starring his kids and Britney’s kids. Made for MTV and the accompanying decades of televised group therapy, this superband could single-handedly rewrite the scale for total awesomeness.
Levi won’t stop at just one illegitimate child, mind you — but the Partridge family wasn’t created in a day. Be patient, my fellow terrestrial transgressors, and just send your prayers out to Lloyd and Levi this Thanksgiving.
Pray for Levi.
Tommy Maple is a graduate student in international communications. His column appears on Thursdays.
