I write today about something first and foremost on most of our minds today. I'm talking of course, about the scourge of witchcraft. Black magic. Good old, traditional mumbo jumbo superstition.
Now I'm not calling for a witch hunt, mind you. Lord knows Africa is already boiling over with enough bloody accusations of women and children being in league with the night. The stuff going on over there would make a 17th century Salem clergyman roll his eyes. This is more along the lines of institutionalized superstition, the kind readily accepted by every Tomuko, Dicka, and Harrito in the village. My beef lies with the guy you'd occasionally buy a good luck monkey's paw from, not the poor fool a mob stones to death because they think he cursed their cabbage patch. These are the cretins stripping the forests of wing and claw so some qat-chewing yahoo with an AK can wear a charm he's told stops bullets (As such promises usually only offer money back to the original purchaser, refund rates are kept low). This is a growth industry you won't find in the annual Forbes guide.
Much of the basis for this weirdness springs from the well worn mantra that you are what you eat. By this token, since a rhino mates for two hours, it only makes sense that chewing on a hunk of its rotting horn can unleash two hours of sheet slapping. A few bites of tiger gives you, um, a powerful roar and an uncanny ability to sniff out prey. Trump swears by the stuff. Actually it's hawked to cure everything from acne to laziness. I couldn't make this stuff up, even though I've been known on occasion to do just that*. From time immemorial, the town medicine man has been pulling this rabbit from his feathered hat. Shortly before turning it into four keychains.
By and large the biggest culprit in this nutty market is China. Ah, those ever-flaccid Chinese mystics. Just name an endangered species and you can be damn sure some 70 year old Chinaman believes the ground up powder of it's pubic bone will give him heroic wood. Setting aside the mystery of why on God's green Earth a 70 year old Chinaman would need wood, this strange phenomenon brings up a pressing question. Undoubtedly Viagra, apart from actually performing, commands just one hundredth the coin of Bengal Tiger scrotum. So why hang onto such antiquated shamanic fairy tales? Is it a reverence for ancient traditions, no matter how hair-brained? What is the fascination with maintaining every ritualistic act ever to the grace this planet? Because their great grandparents did it. Strangely enough many of the same superstitious masses have gladly moved on from great granddad's bathroom practices of wiping with oak leaves. Can we do something about getting some free pill samples distributed to save a species or three?
I have a friend who tells me that the world will end on December 21, 2012. He doesn't have a particular gift for specifics, that's merely the end of the Mayan calendar. So he (and a surprising number of otherwise intelligent folk) is saving the date for his End Times party. All based on the prophetic scrawlings of a civilization that's not only been MIA for the past 12 centuries, but also held the belief that tearing a toddler's heart from its chest every few moons made the maize crop that much sweeter. Don't get me wrong, I fully plan on attending. Its a party where half the people think the world will end and the other half figure the host won't mind if something gets broken or stolen. Should be a good time. Regrettably no word on the exact hour of the Apocalypto. Nothing worse than spending the last few hours of Earth's history in the can because you were caught doing 120 in a stolen convertible loaded with underage prostitutes. These things must be timed perfectly.
Not to state the obvious, it may have been tried, but has anyone ever flipped their calendar over? Maybe there's a little stone carved with ordering instructions for getting the new one. Like you'd find on the December 1st page of Far Side one-a-days. Or is it possible they were just plain wrong, and that their timetable is due no more reverence than the faded beliefs of leeching or not swimming half an hour after lunch? My HMO hasn't covered leechings in years, at least out of network.
It's high time the witch doctors of the world (and their customers without whom none of this grand slaughter is possible) were loaded into pickups bound for reeducation camps. There they'd be taught the basics ranging from Codeine to the modern, clinically proven methods to enable you to drive nails with your engorged Johnson. Of course it's not just the medicinal skills that need a retread. Rather than place jinxes on the village misfit with pins in a rag doll and some chicken's blood, they would be taught how to start a slanderous email chain about them. We're talking about basic, marketable skills here. I understand they're looking after job security like the rest of us, but when every albino in Tanzania is afraid to stroll to market for fear his ears will end up in some sorcerer's stew pot, its time for a new job assistance program. Guess they're striving to maintain the “Dark Continent” brand.
* I had a hard time keeping a straight face the other day when someone asked where I'd heard Chinese Olympians were bound for assembly lines once they lost. Sounds like something that could happen though doesn't it? How about this for a system- if a post looks like a news article, there's a solid chance I'm mostly full of shit. Just mostly.
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