InTheFray Blogs

Only a chosen few will be taken in the Rapture. The rest of us will be left down here to suffer for eternity. And your little dogs, too.

A large number of people — way more than will actually be saved in this Rapture-thingy — think they will get to go upstairs. Believing so must give them a sense of joy, maybe even  hope. But this is tempered by a major concern — what about the beloved pets?

Well, would-be-Rapturees, it's your lucky day! For 110 dollars and 15 dollars per additional pet, rest (in everlasting peace) assured that Rover will go to a good atheist home after you've magically disappeared.

Y'all, there's a menagerie of musings in my head about this.

To begin with — apparently, this is not a joke. In fact, there's more than one site offering such a service. But it is most certainly a scam. 110 dollars? Whoever created this is a genius!

I want in on this. For 110 dollars, even 10 dollars per person (greed is a sin, you know), I'll take care of your dry-clean only clothes and furs after you've gone. You don't want the damned heathens looting your walk-in closets and tossing your silks in common washing machines, do you? Hell no!

Ok, in all fairness, one site does include the following note: "A portion of income generated from advertising on this site is contributed to community food shelves/food banks in Minnesota and New Hampshire." But just a portion, mind you. Not the whole amount to feed the living humans here and now — that would be crazy!

Next, a question about the souls of the cute and furry. If God created all creatures, why don't the animals get to go, too? One trip on the Arc all those millenia ago and that's it? Is peeing on the rug really such a terrible sin?

There are 6.7 billion people on Earth. We are all sinners, some more than others. I'm thinking this Rapture selection will be very small, very exclusive. So, how will we know when it has happened? So many people disappear everyday, and we don't even notice. How do we know the Rapture hasn't already happened?

Also, what if you just happen to be kidnapped or disappear or die naturally and lay undiscovered, Rre-rapture, but the network of atheists doesn't know? What if Snowball ends up starving in your apartment, and later on, gets taken in by devil-worshipping (e.g., liberal) neighbors or given to a kill pound by relatives? And you've paid $100 or more for nothing!

I guess a sucker is left behind everyday.

While browsing through these sites, I did have a reality-based idea and was pleased to find that others had thought of it too. Military pets. There are networks out there for soldiers who don't have anyone to take care of their pet during their overseas deployments. I love that there's an alternative for military personnel to giving up their pets for good and never seeing them again. They sacrifice so much to serve their country — it's not too much to ask to come home to a best fuzzy friend. One program even has sponsors like Pedigree and Whiskas — these are not scams, they're just awesome.

Obviously, I have not done my usual thorough research. I don't know the details about the Rapture or where the religions stand on animal souls. Nor do I want to. I have better things to do with my time. But, occasionally I like to take a break from health care, tea parties, foreclosures, and endless wars and amuse myself. So please, don't enlighten me. Don't correct me. Instead, use that energy to volunteer at an animal or human shelter and do your little part to make the world a better place. Because, honey, we're all stuck here.

 "The party in the Northeast is all but extinct; the party on the West Coast is all but extinct; the party has lost the mid-South states — Virginia, North Carolina — and the party is in deep trouble in the Rocky Mountain West, and there has to be a message and a vision that is compelling to people in order for them to come back and to give consideration to the Republican Party again."   

—Steve Schmidt, McCain campaign manager

It’s been four days now since the Republicans’ “big tent” officially imploded. Like Schmidt says, the party is basically defunct in the majority of the country. We appreciate the sentiment, Steve—always the wishful thinker. But sorry. Watching the party canibalize itself over the past four days, it's obvious to anyone without an NRA membership: The party's over. Forever.

The decimation of the Sarah Palin campaign (this election was never about John McCain) exposed a devastating reality for the GOP: all of the awful divisions born during the 1960s culture wars are, for the majority of Americans, over.

The country is certainly just as God-fearing and moral as it has ever been. But until Democrats make some outward and obvious attack on religion or gun rights, the days of riding into national office on the backs of social issues ended sometime during George W. Bush’s second term.

This reality is lost on the people who showed up en masse to Palin's rallies. For this collection of backwoods half-wits, the culture war is like the war on terror or drugs — endless and omnipresent. These are the Republican Party’s new loud and boisterous base, focused so intently on saving America from eternal damnation, they would rather vote against gay marriage than in favor of their own economic interests.

These mobs are small and shrinking in lockstep with the number of good jobs in small-town America. Yet these mobs have, throughout the Rove years, become the face of the GOP, and remained that way throughout Palin's cartoon campaign. The party's microscopic intellectual wing can gasp and choke on the stupidity of the party's base until they turn blue, but it won't help. Who else would vote for Republicans now?

At some point, one side of the party is going to lose their voice entirely. It will be wildly entertaining to see which half can suffocate the other first. Will it be the orphaned children of Reaganomics, left to flounder aimlessly after their theories on deregulation and trickle-down wealth redistribution were buried under the weight of the economic disaster they caused? Or will it be the lunatic fundamentalists, whose ugly, racially-tinged rhetoric was exactly what the party needed if it wanted to get blown out in every conceivable electoral way.

For most, I think the answer is: Who cares? Let the two halves of the GOP gut each other until they both bleed out. At this point, it looks like it might happen; the nasty and very public in-fighting over the degree of Sarah Palin’s ignorance and selfishness during the campaign might well be the first wounds of the death match. At the end of the day, it might be all for the best. The party can't and won't survive as it is, with two rotting ideological corpses as its central premises, its main talking points.

In Ana Marie Cox's terrific interview with Schmidt, he talked about moving the party to the ideological center — the home of most American voters. Again, Steve is always the optimist. The Republican base detests the center. The center is the bastion of gay marriage, of upholding Roe v. Wade, of enforcing the division of church and state. The base would flee, and if they lose the base, they lose the few remaining loyal Republican voters in America. 

Maybe Schmidt knows this and just doesn't care. They've lost everything already. Maybe he knows as well as we do that the party can't be repaired. It has to be ripped apart and reconstructed, from the ground up.