I wasn't going to do this. Then, egged on by a friend and visited in the night by an eerie but calming Kerstenesque spirit, I woke filled with these words.
I expect Brian Lambert's contest will receive some porn-a-lator-like satire, which is not funny even when Al Franken does it. But Kersten deserves a gentler touch that strives to out-Kersten her by showing her at her very best — and beyond.
Parody — I am told by voices now strangely quiet — is a truth told with more gusto, awareness and art than its true lover can muster.
Swing Low, Sweet Oblivion: The Dinosaur’s Song
Neighbors in Zimmerman were left yesterday with the sad residue of the familiar suddenly unexplained. A husband -- perhaps ensnared in the same online “swingers club” that entangled his wife with another man -- killed them both and then himself. The pleasures they sought, now turned to tragedy. Hopeful lives, now and forever a source of lurid speculation.
Little boys love dinosaurs. This passion appears suddenly and embraces the benign Barney as well as the mincing velociraptor, but none excites adolescent passion like the Tyrannosaurus Rex!
Why this inexplicable delight? Feeling an emerging sense of power? Or simply savoring strings of alien syllables on still-forming tongues? It is one of life’s deep mysteries.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, like the extinction of these leviathans themselves, the fascination disappears. Girls, it seems, rarely fall prey to such “Jurassic Fantasy” in the first place, preferring instead more practical rehearsals of domestic life.
It’s not as if all boys put away all childish things as they move toward the solemn responsibilities of finding true love, marrying, and providing the financial and spiritual sustenance a family requires for childrearing. It’s just that their journey is longer, darker, and fraught with urges that are only dimly understood.
“Scholars have long debated why dinosaurs were put on this earth, only to be extinguished,” says Dr. Philip Ownius of the Christic Institute for Evolution Studies. “They pore over the ambiguities of a broken ‘fossil record’ and theorize about meteor impacts and ‘climate change,’ but deny the obvious: The Flood.”
Some “experts” will tell you The Flood is a myth and Noah was not an historical figure -- that he was simply conjured up to quell fears of ignorant primitives whose culture was “traumatized” by melting ice caps.
Dr. Ownius knows better. The Flood was an “act of a loving God,” and the dinosaurs’ extinction intended as a warning.
Because they had been placed on earth only to be extinguished, they had no imperative to reproduce. Eat, kill and make reptilian “love,” was God’s message, and forever be banished from paradise. A lesson, of course, that our liberal “professors” would not be caught dead professing.
Further, “Islamic teachings deny The Flood and evolution,” Ownius says. “Little boys in the Judeo-Christian tradition spontaneously gravitate to dinosaurs, while Islamist children do not. This correlates with our nation’s respect for marriage and love of freedom, while the Islamic world produces loveless multiple marriages and terrorists.”
It’s an intriguing premise. One sure to draw scoffing from those who will note our high divorce rate and “imperialism.”
So how do we explain the senseless murders?
In the right hands, the computer, like sex, can be a wonderful, intimate gift. But it also leads to one of the darkest basements of the soul, where gratification is variegated and swift, and triangles beckon like the sirens’ song. Come down, they sing, come down. No one will know.
And now, no one will ever know what sang in the killer’s heart. Or how Barney turned into Rex.
