Saying Grace - 'What On Earth?', Said Kamala - There Is No Place In My America For Nonsense

As Kamala Harris walked past the open door of the staff cafeteria at the White House, she overheard some of her staff saying grace. 'Bless us O Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our lord, Amen'. 

 

She walked over to the table and said, 'What is this all about?'. The staff, surprised and nonplussed, looked up at the Vice President, and Sean O'Malley, formerly of Hell's Kitchen, a brawling Irishman recruited for his creative accounting and whiz-kid ways with a spread sheet, replied, 'Grace, Madam Vice President'; but the Vice President was having none of it, and laid into him. 

'That', she said, 'is exactly the sentimental fol-de-rol my administration is dedicated to wiping out, and here you are....'.  Here she spluttered, looked for the right words and felt for the right rhythm. 'Here you are on a select team of privileged Americans (by coincidence not design they were all white) dedicated to progressivism, secularism....' Again she hesitated, always befuddled by the last term, something to do with church and state but she was never sure what.  

Her mother always performed puja in the morning to Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, and prayed for rain or a good harvest, and when Kamala’s friends walked in on her mother one morning, Kamala, embarrassed as all get out, yelled at her mother to stop it, stop the chanting and weird fire shit, slammed the door and apologized to her classmates and threw a temper tantrum for the rest of the week.  

Kamala remembered the incident and wanted no trace of such pagan idolatry and retrograde appeals to some fictional fantasy god; so when she heard Sean O'Malley and his friends saying grace over mac n' cheese of all things - why would anyone thank God for that, assuming there was a God?

'Because we are thankful, Madam Vice President'

'Thankful for what exactly?', said Kamala looking down at the half-eaten mac 'n' cheese and weedy steam tray hamburgers. 

Sean, his Irish up, was about to say 'What do you think, you fucking fool', but kept his tongue, answered politely, but knew that his days were numbered.  She had grilled him about Father Murphy and his altar boy service, and this would be the last straw. 

 

Kamala went on as though hammering Sean O'Malley were good practice for the stump, and brought up Saul Alinsky, Samuel Gompers, and Noam Chomsky, three secular Jews who replaced the Holy Trinity in her mind conflating them in a mishmash of progressive jargon about the state, the people, and her own good self. 

Sean had heard this before from a woman he knew could be very venomous after he watched from the wings as she went after Brett Kavanagh like a bloodsucking succubus.  Recently she had been on a tear about those 'Christers in folding chairs', revival freaks and born-again idiots from crackerland, and once she got going there was no stopping her. 

'Let me not see this again', she said, waving her arm across the soggy buns, spilled ketchup, and crusted macaroni.  'Not the food mind you, but the whole grace thing.'

The table was set, a secular one with no hint of anything but progressive sentiments and launched into another tirade about goodness, the Democratic party, the future of Man, and the rise of women.  

Once she got her motor running, there was no stopping her; and now convinced of her electoral victory, she was even more prolix and indecipherable than before.  Her aides worked overtime to parse meaning let alone sense from her tirades, and finally learned how to trim and taper her speeches to conform to some kind logic. 

'Now, we as a pluralistic, inclusive, and diverse society - look at me, for instance, a proud black woman who stands on the threshold of greatness - have our limits.  White people may still be the demographic majority in the country but not the moral one.  White people....' And here the Presidential candidate went off on her branded tirade against country clubs, 'the refuge of the privileged'.  Lobster dinners, standing rib roasts, pearl necklaces and debutantes, whiteness personified, little white children playing croquet. 

When her father, a tenured professor at Stanford, heir to the endowed Galbraith Chair, author of The Wealth of Nations - How It Should Benefit The Poor, a redistributive treatise that got recognition from academics as far afield as Jacques Poirier, legatee of Lacan, deconstruction revivalist, and crypto Communist with a significant following in the Arab quarters of Marseilles and Lyon, applied for membership at Piping Rock, the West Coast affiliate of the Cold Spring Harbor original, the most white Anglo-Saxon club in America, he was summarily turned down. 

The black-balling document issued by the club and leaked to the liberal press said, 'While we appreciate the notable academic contribution that Professor Harris has made, we feel that he would offer no such social attribution to Piping Rock'. In other words No Colored Need Apply. Kamala never forgot that hateful rejection and it became the source of all her white animus. 

This was nothing however compared to Kamala's anti-religious screeds, fueled by the embarrassment of her friends witnessing the pagan idolatry of her mother, bowing and scraping before an elephant god.  When she heard Sean O'Malley, head bowed and eyes closed, saying grace, images of her mother's ridiculous display of totemism resurfaced, and Catholic or not, he was the incarnation of her mother and all her mother's idolatrous friends who gathered in the living room and chanted bhajans to the music of a harmonium. 

'Religion is the last refuge of fools', she said, adapting the patriotism meme to suit her purpose, and leaned in to a screed about the false gods of the Bible.  'Abraham and Isaac', she said, 'what was that all about? Ignorant obedience to a slave master, a tyrant, a bludgeoning anti-socialite...' and again her closest aides urged her to temper her speeches with a little more political savvy. 'There are a lot of Christers out there', he warned. 

 

But the Vice President was not to be deterred.  She had a message for America that had to be heard. 'God upsets the progressive applecart', she said, 'and leaves the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized to scramble for the leavings.

'We are different.  We are proud progressives who understand that the future is in the hands of community and state, and under my administration, the state will be stronger than ever and the last vestiges of religious ignorance will be removed.'

The aide again approached her, thanked her for her honesty and call for an enlightened secularism, but warned even more urgently that all Southern states would be lost if she continued in this vein.  'Nonsense', replied the Vice President. 'I will be President of this great land of ours and they will learn their lesson'. 

When the conservative press got wind of all this - Washington being a porous, leaky place - they were delighted.  A self-destructive, egomaniacal offering from this harridan that would expose her for the empty headed,  empty suit that she was.  One did not touch religion in America no matter what the political ideology. 

Yet the woman kept hammering on urging an end to the patriarchal, demeaning, disruptive influence of religion.  'There will be no grace said in the Executive Dining Room at the White House', she said. 

So be it.  Two months to go before the election and anything can happen.  Progressives are tone deaf when it comes to religious sympathies, so it is likely that Kamala will keep banging on about the need to expunge its last traces from the body politic. 'At her peril', said her aide, but that did not deter her, and only inflamed her.  She was a dervish, a St. Vitus' dance one-woman show of heretical passion.  It was worth the price of admission whatever November 5th had to offer.