Luther at the Movies

I have been handed a letter from a Mr. JWK in Anaheim, California: “Dear Mr. Luther, I was wondering if you have seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. If not, why not? Do you intend to see it? If you have seen it, why haven’t you reviewed it yet? If you do intend to review it, assuming you have already seen it, what do you think of it? If you have thoughts on it, and you intend to review it, having already seen it—”

OH SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT! Why do they even allow you near an envelope! Tell the nurses you are to remain in heavy restraints at all times! Why can't I ever get letters from people who are not wards of the state!

I have not seen An Inconvenient Truth nor do I intend to see it, because it perpetuates a great lie, that the world did not already end February 18, 1546. During my original lifetime, the signs of the Last Day were everywhere: The Antichrist sat in Rome deceiving simple believers and evading child support, the Turk threatened Austria (the Turk in question, one Mr. Etci Mehmed, was actually quite pleasant once you got to know him, though he tended to cheat at Parcheesi), and the peasants were revolting, as peasants tend to be. So certain was I that the end of history was nigh that I stopped making payments on my ox cart and refused to pay taxes on the small income I generated ghostwriting abusive correspondence.

Then, on February 18, 1546, all grew black, and the Lord appeared and took me to Him.

And so the hysteria over global warming and the fear mongering of so-called environmentalists is so much propagandistic claptrap. How can a decaying ozone layer, melting ice caps, and dying species threaten the survival of mankind when I’M TELLING YOU THAT THE WORLD ENDED ON FEBRUARY 18, 1546! READ A NEWSPAPER! LOOK IT UP!

In order to put the lie to this supposed threat to humanity, I am calling on all Lutherans to help me expose the Al Gores of this world as agents of a satanic delusion. (I am excepting, of course, his penchant for Apple computers, which figure prominently throughout the film and on whose board Mr. Gore sits. Not that I am implying ANY CONNECTION. In fact, I use my wretched assistant's delightful but hopelessly outdated Motorola'd iMac to post my blogs ... NOW can I get a freebie MacBook Pro, Herr Jobs?)

As I was declaiming ... I want all my Lutherans to demonstrate that they have pierced the veil of this nonexistent modern history by defying all prescriptions for environmentally correct living!

Stop recycling now! I want you to go into your kitchens and mix plastics, metal, glass, paper, food scraps, bones, dead pets, radioactive waste, tufts of hair, D batteries, biological weapons, Christmas trees, aluminum foil, teeming paint cans, Oldsmobile carburetors, and digital photos of family vacations into one giant bio-undegradeable plastic bag and leave it by the curb. If you live on a farm, dump it on the porch of the nearest post office. If you live on the beach, bury it under two feet of sand. If you live in the wilderness, wandering aimlessly, asking why, why, why, then GET A JOB, YOU SLOTHFUL INCOMPETENT APE, SO YOU CAN BEGIN GENERATING DEBRIS LIKE THE REST OF US!

I want you to buy a bigger car. I want you to buy a car so big, you need to move to Mongolia just to park it. I want you to buy a car so big that the exhaust will create permanent midnight whenever you stop for a light. I want you to buy a car so big it qualifies as a multiverse.

I want you to start spraying everything with 409, herbicides, and underarm deodorant. Your home, your car, your children, your lunch—I want you to spray flowers, neighbors, zoo animals. I want hydrofluorocarbons so readily detectable on your person that you set off metal detectors in airports. I want you so chemically reeking that the ebola virus would die just from the thought of you.

Never turn anything off. Lights, TVs, air conditioners, electric heaters, radios, microwaves, computers, stereos, heart monitors, treadmills, printing presses, fax machines, underground generators, cotton gins, radar, satellites, electric trains, photocopiers, Cleveland, and hair dryers should run incessantly so that constant blackouts will call for the immediate construction of nuclear power plants even in playgrounds.

I want entire cities built out of styrofoam and polyester! And no, Orlando, Florida, does not count!

After two or three generations of such civil disobedience, we will have proved beyond shadow of doubt that the end is not near—it’s rubbish!