A Fly In The Ointment - When Jesus Appeared To Kamala Harris On The Campaign Trail

Ordinarily when Jesus appears to someone, it is cause for rejoicing and hallelujahs, but in the case of Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, it was a matter better kept private. She was, after all, running on a secular progressive ticket, and talk of spiritual happenings, especially Christian ones, would not be well-received.  Yet Jesus was Jesus, and some attention must be paid. 

As she recounted the issue to her closest and most trusted advisor, he appeared to her as she was doing her toilette - a smoky figure in the mirror whose features slowly became more clear and distinct.  To her surprise he was a white man...well not exactly white white, swarthy would be a better description, more Arab looking than she had thought, but certainly him. 

He smiled at her in that special, loving, way of his.  His eyes were warm and happy, and there was a particularly masculine, inviting look on his face.  She started to reach out to him, but instead rubbed her eyes. He wasn't supposed to be real after all, something no more than a fictitious hope for the gullible and credulous, but there he was as she looked again.  His smile had broadened, his eyes twinkled with delight, and she knew that it was he. 

She stood there before the mirror, her makeup half on, her hair still a mess of tangles, and her nightgown looking very shabby and unpressed.  'Are you real?', she asked the image in the mirror, but she got no answer, only a broader, even more inviting smile.  A warm, colorful light - comforting and peaceful - shone in an aura around him, pinkish like cotton candy, reminding him of her days as a girl on the Venice Beach boardwalk. 

Again she rubbed her eyes and shook her head, but he was still there, but now fading like an old photograph until he was a silhouette, and then nothing, and only her face stared back at her from the mirror. 

Now, the ghost of the murdered King Duncan appeared twice to the procrastinating, pusillanimous Hamlet, and the ghost of Banquo appeared to Macbeth at the feast; but Kamala, doubting, but unable to shake the image of Jesus from her mind, hoped that he would not appear again.  A wish for such a second act would only suggest her infidelity and her disbelief when she was convinced that he had actually visited her. 

At the same time, she kept looking up into the evening clouds hoping that he would appear again, giving her a sign, some indication as to why she had been chosen and what he intended her to do.  

The clouds always seemed to float and amble into Christlike images, he with his arms held out to embrace or a hand pointing to the heavens above, or when one cirrus appeared over the evening horizon, she was sure it was his trailing Palestinian robes.

 

The fact was, second sighting or not, she now believed in him. 

Yet the old politician in her warned against the usual shows of devotion - black women jumping up from the pews, and running up the aisle towards the altar shouting, 'Je-sus...Je-sus, come to me', collapsing in a heap before the preacher who shouted praises and comforted his trembling congregants. 

No, she must keep her own counsel, act as though nothing had happened, pretend that she was the same proud black woman on her way to the White House, and be done with it.  Jesus would understand. 

But she could not keep such a thing quiet.  After all it was not like a rare bird sighting in the Shenandoah, but the living Christ; so she decided to pursue the matter indirectly, obliquely she said, and sought out LaShonda Washington, a black inner city woman on her staff who, despite Kamala's polite suggestions, spoke his name on various occasions.  

Kamala knew that such belief was not uncommon among her people, and as much as she preferred the far more austere celebrations at the Episcopal church on Lafayette Square, she knew that the black church seemed to be the most frequent place for Jesus visitations. 

LaShonda was effusive in her tale of being born again. 'There I was', she told the Vice President, 'minding my own business, when lo and behold, He appeared above the altar, walked to me, put his arms around me, and smiled. "Oh, Jesus", I said.  "Oh Jesus, you have found a lost soul", and just as quickly as he had come, he disappeared'. 

Tears were streaming down LaShonda's face as she spoke to the Vice President. 'I'm blessed', she said. 

'What did he look like', asked the Vice President. 

'He was beautiful', LaShonda said, 'so beautiful I couldn't stand it', and when pressed, she described him no differently than the man Kamala had seen in the mirror.  

Now, a more intelligent person might well have concluded that anyone seeing Jesus just as he has been portrayed for a thousand years was just doing their own personal AI - recreating yet another idealized image.  The real reincarnated, divine Jesus, if he ever really did appear, might look like Uncle Fred; but Kamala and LaShonda were not so circumspect and Doubting Thomas-like.  

The next morning, drawn and haggard from a long day on the stump and some twitchy issues with Ohio, she looked in the mirror of her boudoir, and there he was again, this time with a stern look of disapproval on his face.  Again Kamala rubbed her eyes and shook her head, but when she looked up he was still there.  If looks could kill, she remembered her mother saying, and so it was with Jesus, and in that one instant of implicit reproach, she became a believer. 

'I must tell the world', she said to herself, 'that he is real'. 

'Let us pray', Kamala said to her campaign staff gathered in the trailer outside the fairgrounds at Chillicothe where she was to speak, 'and give thanks to Our Lord, Jesus, for this day'.  She bowed her head, and began, 'O Lord, O God Almighty, forgive us our sins and shine thy light upon us, Amen'. 

When she had finished, her aides looked on in stunned silence.  This ambitious, vixenish, harridan who had no patience for anyone or anything that stood in her way; this loud, cackling harpy who was venomous and hateful of 'those dumb white crackers', who dismissed religion - any religion - as antithetical to the very ethos of progressivism and whose believers were nothing but racist fools, was now praying?  What was up?

Only LaShonda added two and two and realized exactly what the Vice President was after when she asked her about seeing Jesus in the rafters in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church of Aberdeen.  The Vice President had seen him as well. 

'What about the Jews?' asked an aide. 'The are at the core of our constituency'. 

'They have blood on their hands', the Vice President replied. 'Give us Barabbas'. 

The aides huddled and refigured the new calculus.  They might win Mississippi but lose Massachusetts, win decisively in Alabama but lose California.  That clearly would not work.  They would have to tone the Vice President down, cool her jets, and write more accommodating speeches; but they had not expected the lady's adamant response. 'This is not just some garden party', she said, ‘but Our Lord and Savior we're talking about here.  The people must know'. 

Of course her electoral defeat was sealed.  Georgia crackers didn't believe her for one instant, New York Jews felt as condemned as Shylock's compatriots of Venice, capitulating as he did to Christian demands for renunciation, young Eastern socialist claques wanted no part of this menopausal hack, and psychiatrists rushed to print about her schizophrenia. 

 

'He never helped me', Kamala said to herself after her resounding collapse in the polls, miffed and angry that such an eminence could look the other way when history was about to be made. 

She opined that perhaps the face in the mirror had been her own - the dark complexion, the tangled hair, the eyes, the lips - and that she imagined herself a savior.  That allegation was not new.  In any case, for whatever reason, she was finished as a politician and had visions of herself as a beautician like her cousin Amanda.