Funny Talk

Due to a collision of seemingly unrelated events, I now live in the former republic of East Germany. Were I so inclined, I could use this column to explain how this happened, but that process does not interest me and would not interest you. I suppose I could also write eleven thousand words about why the rotisserie chicken is substantially more delicious over here (!), or why everyone in Germany is convinced John McCain has no chance in the November election (?), or why the only things that ever seem to be on German television are amateur weight lifting, Sharon Stone's Sliver, Asian soccer, live rock concerts by the band Mastodon, and advertorial pornography that's marketed to the elderly. But I will not do any of that, as there is nothing less interesting than listening to someone explain why being somewhere foreign is not exactly the same as being wherever he was before.

In fact, my original intention was not to write about Germany at all, unless something profoundly significant happened while I was here (such as an uprising at a Bavarian wind farm or the political assassination of Detlef Schrempf). However, I'm going to break my own imaginary policy. I've decided to write about which Americans are (evidently) fascinating to twenty-year-old Germans, mostly because these allegedly fascinating people serve as examples of how arbitrarily the mass media represents our society to the rest of the world.

Here's what happened: I'm teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don't know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American -- not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?" The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever. For example:

• Michael Jackson had more essays written about him than anyone else, which didn't shock me. What did surprise me was how sympathetically he is viewed: The general consensus seems to be that Jackson is an eccentric, philanthropic genius whose nation has turned against him, possibly due to racist motives. However, they do assume he's a child molester. Europeans are open-minded in unorthodox ways.
• George Gershwin did unusually well in this sampling, with two votes and a tangential mention in a third. In all three cases, Gershwin was closely associated with "the American dream," which may or may not exist.
• Kurt Cobain was not selected by anyone. Dave Grohl, however, was. Cobain was also referenced -- somewhat negatively -- in a paper focused on Taylor Hanson.
  Every significant Beat writer seemed to get one vote. Hunter S. Thompson got two.
  There was a female student who selected Jared Leto. I must admit -- I did not see this one coming. He is perceived as a triple threat of acting, music, and environmental awareness (apparently, his tour bus runs on vegetable oil). Another girl selected Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20, although part of her argument may have been that Thomas was born on a German military base in 1972.
• One person wrote about the first black woman in outer space. This individual is named Mae Jemison, which was news to me.
• The only presidents referenced were Richard Nixon (three times) and Bill Clinton (once).
  Bob Dylan and James Dean both had five essays written about them (and for the usual reasons one might expect). But a stranger collection of fellows all received two votes apiece: Andy Warhol, Dennis Rodman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Jarmusch, and Ian MacKaye.
• One person wrote about the Hummer all-terrain vehicle. This is not technically a human, but I could see her point.
• Sean Penn, Rosa Parks, Francis Ford Coppola, Johnny Depp, mystery-novelist Janet Evanovich, Jon Bon Jovi, Malcolm X, Elvis Presley, and New York Cosmos founder Steve Ross were all equally represented.
• Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he's more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there's probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled "Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I'm Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs)," which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.
• Perhaps the most provocative essay argued for a tie between Ernest Hemingway and O. J. Simpson. The author's point seemed to be that Hemingway was "not the typical American," but that Simpson sort of was.

Now, I know these answers don't really prove anything, and I'm aware that ninety-six people in one city don't necessarily reflect the views of a nation of eighty-two million. I also realize that these icons were consciously selected by students who were trying to get into a class about populist mainstream culture, and some were clearly written by kids trying to predict what I might appreciate. (For example, one dude just cut and pasted James Hetfield's Wikipedia entry.) But I also think they illustrate a phenomenon that continues to make modernity more and more confusing: The proliferation of media has made it virtually impossible to tell the difference between a) what information is unilaterally interesting, and b) what information is merely available. I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong -- they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans.

Since my arrival in Leipzig, I have continually been reminded about the way many Germans view American culture. They essentially feel it does not exist. One grad student only half jokingly told me that an entire semester of American cultural studies "should probably take about twenty-five minutes." But this, of course, is crazy. Now more than ever, I feel certain that the United States is as good at manufacturing culture as the rest of the world combined, probably because we often do so accidentally. A lack of culture is not our problem. The problem is we've become too effective at distributing that culture -- at the same time, in the same way, and with the same velocity. It all ends up feeling interchangeable, which makes it all marginally irrelevant. As it turns out, my initial question was beyond impossible. There are no interesting twentieth-century Americans. There can't be, because they all are.

Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.

“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.

It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.

Parts of Mr. Coll’s narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters’ pioneering work on this subject — most notably, Peter Bergen’s two books on Mr. bin Laden, and “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s searing book about Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.

Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America.

Mr. Coll traces how Osama — who was still a boy when his father, Muhammad, was killed in an airplane accident in 1967 — found a succession of father figures in a series of radical mentors, including a high school gym teacher who involved him in an after-school Islamic study group and Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic scholar who introduced the young Osama to “the concept of transnational jihad.”

Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.

We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.

The ultimate self-made man, the family patriarch Muhammad bin Laden left an impoverished and deeply religious canyon village to seek his fortune (during an early interlude in the pilgrim city of Jeddah, he was so poor that he reportedly slept in a ditch he dug in the sand) and through a combination of skill, acumen and the assiduous cultivation of the royal family, became the king’s principal builder, overseeing renovations of sacred sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. He would bequeath to his children not just a fortune, but also what Mr. Coll calls a “transforming vision of ambition and religious faith in a borderless world.” His British-educated son, Salem, who took over the company after his death, would expand its international reach, and he would also embrace a Westernized, jet-set existence that allowed him to indulge his eccentricities to the fullest.

In fact, Salem emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”

Mr. Coll reports that Salem organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, shipped thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce back to Saudi Arabia and dreamed of marrying four women from four Western nations: his estate, he imagined, would resemble the United Nations, with four houses, one flying an American flag, one a German flag, one a French flag and one the Union Jack. Salem died in 1988 in a plane accident in Texas.

As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Coll, like Mr. Wright in “The Looming Tower,” suggests that the Qaeda founder’s turn to international war against the United States was not inevitable. Mr. Coll writes that when the Saudi royal family agreed in the summer of 1990 to the arrival of American troops in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Mr. bin Laden “offered no public dissent” at the time, but “moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse.” Although he had come to see himself as an “international Islamic guerrilla leader,” his views at the time, Mr. Coll writes, were still “nuanced, changeable and laced with contradictions.”

Increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Mr. bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis (whom he sent to places like Bosnia). “Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah.”

In June 1993, Mr. Coll reports, the family, most likely under pressure from the Saudi government, moved to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Muhammad bin Laden Company and the Saudi bin Laden Group. The following year the family publicly repudiated him, the Ministry of Interior announced that he had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and Mr. bin Laden began writing lengthy essays denouncing the royal family, which he circulated by fax.

By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, however, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 back to the harsh lands of Afghanistan.

While he careered toward violence, other members of his family moved to strengthen their ties with the West. There were family investments in enterprises ranging from Iridium, a satellite communications network, to the Hard Rock Cafe franchise in the Middle East.

In the days after 9/11 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington — who met with President Bush on the evening of September 13 — helped arrange (with F.B.I. permission) a special chartered plane flight to carry more than a dozen bin Ladens, some of whom had been living in the United States for years, back home to Saudi Arabia. Subsequent F.B.I. investigations “turned up no evidence of complicity by the bin Laden family in terrorist violence,” Mr. Coll writes, and a decision seems to have been made at the White House sometime early in 2002 that, barring the emergence of new evidence, “the U.S. government would not sanction the bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.”

One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”

Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them.

The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap. No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book if he were a well-adjusted, happy man.’ This too is not quite nonsense, but comes close to being so. What about P. G. Wodehouse, by all accounts as happy as a lark, who was able to say ‘I love writing’, even though he also said that his way of working was to ‘put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and curse a bit’.

There are writers of course who seem always to have worn a hair shirt, Conrad for instance who claimed that the sight of a pen and inkwell made him angry. His letters are full of moans about the difficulty of writing; it’s a dismal trade that is making him ill. Nevertheless it was the trade he chose and he stuck at it. Surely there was some satisfaction to be found.

It may be that many of us do indeed take to writing because we are not, as Beryl Bainbridge has said, very good at living. So we try to make sense of things on paper instead. This may be why success is so often bad for a writer; it allows him to suppose he has mastered life. Complacency sets in; he is less curious about himself and other people, and his work suffers.

There are simpler explanations. Ambition is one — the desire to be well thought of. Being a writer may not get you a better table at a restaurant, but it does make you more interesting, to some people at least. Their initial interest may well be disappointed on further acquaintance, but while it exists, it is gratifying. Orwell, despite asserting that everything he wrote was in the cause of advancing democratic socialism, was honest enough to admit that the desire to be praised and make a show in the world was one motive for writing. For anyone who lacked confidence in youth or had a thin time of it at school, writing is a form of revenge. Even the most self-effacing of writers is crying out ‘look at me’ in every book or even newspaper article.


More admirable is the simple pleasure to be had from making something, common to the practice of any art or craft. To bring into being what did not previously exist, and to present it in an agreeable shape, is deeply satisfying — even if the final result is always inevitably less than you looked to achieve. Plato was right: the ideal work of art exists only in the imagination and the reality must always disappoint. Fortunately however, in the least satisfactory work, there will usually be some pages, some scenes, some characters that delight their creator, and so persuade him to go on. This is why Eric Linklater, a couple of years before his death, was able to say that the best times in his life had been when he was working on a novel and it was going well.

Scott Fitzgerald thought it was ‘a hell of a profession’ — I prefer the word trade; also that ‘you don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say’. That’s questionable. If you have something to say, you write an article, not a novel. A novel is, for writer and reader alike, a voyage of exploration; in the writer’s case it’s a way of entering unknown territory and finding out what he thinks and feels. If he can take the reader with him all the way to the end, so much the better. But for him the journey itself is enough. Curiosity sets narrative going and the writer, like the reader, will, if all goes well, find himself surprised by much that he writes. Write because you have something to say? No: it’s a novel, not a tract or argument. The old line — how do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said? — is more to the point.

Finally it’s an addiction. Few novelists retire — and not only because they can’t afford to. Without a book to work on, we wouldn’t know how to get through the day.

To that extent, writing is an escape from boredom; also, oddly, from yourself.

On Saturday morning I had to catch the 7.40 from London to Manchester. The train was cancelled, leaving a lot of annoyed Manchester United fans swearing and threatening to headbutt the next Virgin train.

I hovered behind them while pretending to be foreign, so that if they tried to speak to me I could pretend I couldn't speak English and thus avoid becoming an accessory to their thuggery. When the next train arrived there was a mad scrum of people pushing, shoving, kicking, and trampling over each other. I was bemused: I had been under the impression we were about to board a train to Manchester, not the last space shuttle sent to whisk mankind away from Planet Earth's apocalyptic doom.

I found a seat in the corner and huddled under my coat so that no one would acknowledge or speak to me. The last thing I wanted was a conversation with a stranger at eight in the morning about his kids whom I've never met. It's fine on a ten-minute journey, but you run out of things to say after half an hour, and that is when they start showing you pictures on their mobile. I have no idea why people sit next to me on a train and then open up to me like I'm their official biographer, but I don't like it - and therefore opt for an icy demeanour, and maybe a forced smile as I thrust my way past to the buffet car.

One rowdy football supporter shouted: "I hope they bloody win. The last seven times I've been up here the silly idiots have lost." He was drinking vodka at 8am and his attitude was rather frightening, so I was amazed when his phone rang to the tune of The Sound of Music. He then said: "Yeh mate, I'm on the train, on the train yeh, she was OK, I dunno I used the garden hose on her, she loved it I'll give her a go on the lawnmower next, she wants it."

I could feel the concern rising in the carriage. It sounded like this man had tried to hose down his poor wife to death and had been unsuccessful, so was now resorting to lawn-mowering her. It's always disturbing listening to people's private lives, more so when you don't get the full picture, just a rather bizarre piece of the jigsaw.

This week we read the story of my namesake, the Biblical Tamar. I encourage you to read the story for yourself, it’s chapter 38 of Genesis, but the gist of it is that Tamar is cheated out of a marriage by her father-in-law, Judah, after she has been widowed by two of his sons. When she figures out that she’s persona non grata in Judah’s family, she takes matters into her own hands, dresses up like a hooker and waits around in a place where she knows her newly single father-in-law will be passing by. He picks her up without recognizing her, and hires her, but doesn’t have any sheep to pay her with, so he gives her some identifying materials as an IOU, and promises to send someone to pay her later. Months later, when he hears that his long widowed daughter-in-law is pregnant he condemns Tamar to death by burning. Just before she is to be burnt she sends Judah the identifying materials he had given her as payment and explains that they belong to the man that impregnated her. Duly chastened, Judah cancels her execution, and she gives birth to twins, who we later learn are ancestors of King David. It’s a bizarre and illicit story, and I love it both because of its oddities and because I think Tamar is awesome—strong and feisty, but also committed to the standards of her community, and to the family she has joined.

The sexual aspects of the story are fascinating because they’re presented so matter-of-factly. Tamar’s second husband practices coitus interruptus in order not to impregnate her. Tamar dresses like a harlot in order to seduce her father-in-law. Judah solicits a prostitute. These are all things that one would imagine should be kept private, not immortalized in a Divine work, right? I mean, what’s the good moral lesson here? Why should all this bad behavior be canonized when it could just as easily have been left out or glossed over in the narrative?

The wikipedia page on Tamar does a nice job of presenting a lot of the various theories that critics and commentators have come up with, and I think many of them are very convincing, and likely quite accurate. But I have my own interpretation.

Sexual impropriety can certainly cause all kinds of problems. Making poor relationship choices is the kind of thing that’s very likely to kick you in the ass somewhere down the road. Making bad choices about who you sleep with, and why, could have serious ramifications on the rest of your life. But these poor choices can also teach you important lessons that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. And perhaps most importantly, a person who sleeps around, or is otherwise promiscuous, may be completely competent in other areas. Judah, though obviously not the king of healthy and trusting relationships, is a good leader and an example for his brothers. King David, another guy with questionable sexual habits, is generally considered to one of the wisest men in Jewish history. His son, King Solomon, also considered a pretty smart cookie, is known for having hundreds of wives, and hundreds of concubines, and though the rabbis aren’t happy about that choice, they are pretty happy about the Temple he built, which he was able to do despite what one imagines was a fairly significant sexual distraction.

Today, especially in America, we have this sadly puritanical view of sex and sex scandals. We are appalled that our political leaders are at all sexually deviant, and we demand to know the details, to have them splashed on the front page of newspapers, and discussed ad nauseum on talk shows and blogs of every kind. I’ll be the first to say that I think much of the behavior we hear about is reprehensible, but it simply doesn’t concern me if Larry Craig wants to have sex in a bathroom stall with another man, or if Bill Clinton wants a blowjob. What I care about is health care, and human rights, and education. And if Craig can get it on in a public bathroom and then come out and balance the budget, then I support him (sadly, balancing a budget seems to be far beyond Sen. Craig’s capabilities, but go with me, just for the sake of argument). And if Clinton can get a blowjob and then negotiate the end to terrorism in Northern Ireland, then I say get the man a few more girls like Monica and send him off to Jerusalem.

At the end of the day, I don’t care what happens in anyone else’s bedroom as long as it’s consensual, and no one ends up hurt. And what’s more, I think that learning from the mistakes we make with our lovers is an important part of figuring out how to be good people. I love that the Bible includes stories of people fucking up, and then fixing whatever it is that they’ve done wrong. I wish American politics could take a page from that book.

Day No. 1:

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.



Day No. 2:

“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.

“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”

“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”

“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”

“But—brown?” Buddha asked.

“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”

“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”



Day No. 3:

“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”

“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.

“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”

“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”

“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.

“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.

“Thank you,” said the Lord God.



Day No. 4:

“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”

“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.

“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”

“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”

“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”

“Shut up,” said Buddha.

“You shut up,” said the Lord God.

“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”



Day No. 5:

“I’d like to design some creatures of the sea,” the Lord God said. “Sleek but not slick.”

“Yes, yes, and more yes—it’s a total gills moment,” said Apollo. “But what if you added wings?”

“Fussy,” whispered Buddha to Zeus. “Why not epaulets and a sash?”

“Legs,” said Allah. “Now let’s do legs.”

“Are we already doing dining-room tables?” asked the Lord God, confused.

“No, design some creatures with legs,” said Allah. So the Lord God, nodding, designed an ostrich.

“First draft,” everyone agreed, and so the Lord God designed an alligator.

“There’s gonna be a waiting list,” Zeus murmured appreciatively.

“Now do puppies!” pleaded Vishnu. “And kitties!”

“Ooooo!” all the gods cooed. Then, feeling a bit embarrassed, Zeus ventured, “Design something more practical, like a horse or a mule.”

“What about a koala?” asked the Lord God.

“Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.”



Day No. 6:

“Today I’m really going out there,” said the Lord God. “And I know it won’t be popular at first, and you’re all gonna be saying, ‘Earth to Lord God,’ but in a few million years it’s going to be timeless. I’m going to design a man.”

And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed.

“It has your eyes,” Zeus told the Lord God.

“Does it stack?” inquired Allah.

“It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe,” said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. “Been there. Evolution,” he said. “It’s called a shaved monkey.”

“I like it,” protested Buddha. “But it can’t work a strapless dress.” Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, “Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?”

“Yes,” the gods said immediately.

“Now it’s intelligent,” said Aphrodite.

“But what if I made it blond?” giggled the Lord God.

“And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?” asked Aphrodite.



Day No. 7:

“You know, I’m really feeling good about this whole intelligent-design deal,” said the Lord God. “But do you think that I could redo it, keeping the quality but making it at a price point we could all live with?”

“I’m not sure,” said Buddha. “You mean, what if you designed a really basic, no-frills planet? Like, do the man and the woman really need all those toes?”

“Hello!” said the Lord God. “Clean lines, no moving parts, functional but fun. Three bright, happy, wash ’n’ go colors.”

“Swedish meets Japanese, with maybe a Platinum Collector’s Edition for the geeks,” Buddha decided.

“Done,” said the Lord God. “Now let’s start thinking about Pluto. What if everything on Pluto was brushed aluminum?”

“You mean, let’s do Neptune again?” said Buddha.