The Hand of God

by Jim Washburn

“Am I God? Did I create all this universe stuff?”

You probably find yourself wondering that. It’s only human: You’re loving, yet prone to thunder. You’re superior, vengeful, wrathful, jealous. You make everything you possibly can, and then you make money, to buy from other man. You pretty much have the God bit down. 

But there’s only room for one, and that’s me: God. The packing peanuts tell me so.

Here I go again with the packing peanuts. Yes, I’ve written about them here before. Call it prescience. Also call it eBay: People keep sending me stuff because I keep buying it, and the stuff is smothered in packing peanuts, which I save to smother other stuff in, and the wind uses it to make merry snowdrifts in my yard.

So Thursday this washing machine sized box arrives. The contents, by volume, are a 1 to 4 ratio of guitar amp to packing peanuts. My arms are up to my armpits in the white fluff lifting the amp out, and when I extract said arms, they are covered in peanuts, like I’m the nougat in a Styrofoam Baby Ruth. I’ve kept this to myself until now: THE PEANUTS ARE ATTRACTED TO ME. Whole healthy peanuts are, but the infirm and crippled ones especially. They cling to me like I’m going to cure them.

I try flinging them from my hand—there’s a planet three feet away, mind you, 6,768,838,943,539,200,000,000 tons of it, with a pull that yanks satellites from the cold grasp of outer space—yet the peanuts aren’t pulled to the ground. Instead they do awkward curlicues in the air and come whirling back to reattach to me, the poor wretches.

I think we can all agree that packing peanuts don’t know much. They are dumber than sprinkler heads when it comes to figuring things out. So when they are certain about something, it must be a deep, universal truth. Hence, I am God.

Strange it’s the peanuts that made me see this, since, in my universe, there would be no damned packing peanuts even dreamt of in the farthest reaches of the void. I’ll have to determine if this poses a paradox, sometime when I’m not busy rolling out the future. You like the new president I created? Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Next I’m going to create a land bridge from Miami to Dakar, Senegal just to see what the traffic looks like. And then I’m ...

Hold on a second. It’s my wife. She’s telling me it’s just static cling; that static cling causes the peanuts to stick, not just to me, but to cute dogs and everybody else. Well, that knocks some wind from my sails. She also reminds that she hates when I say “hence.” Hence is for assholes, I’m told.

Let’s talk about the old God for a while, then, the one who makes John Moorlach say such nutty things. Moorlach is chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, where he has sat since ousting Ron Eloi in 2006. If you’ve seen photos of the supes, Moorlach’s the one with the sort of beard you usually see sprouting above “Libertarians Make Better Lovers” T-shirts.

Moorlach used to seem like Joe Sensible. In 1994, he was the one who warned that Orange County was headed towards the then-largest municipal bankruptcy in world history. Somewhere between then and now, Moorlach got hit with the nutty stick, and now he’s letting God decide how to educate Orange County’s children. (John, this is Me talking: Forget that. Ban packing peanuts!)

Last year, the board approved a package of grants to fund various health activities in the county; then Moorlach retroactively noticed that $291,788 of the money was going to Planned Parenthood for a program to educate county teens and women about reproductive health, including birth control, and Moorlach could not let that stand.

John Moorlach

“I personally have a problem with government funding of an organization that provides abortion services,” he said at a March 10 supervisors meeting. Though none of the $291,788 was going to fund abortions, just being an abortion provider was enough to taint Planned Parenthood in his eyes. Despite some two hours of public input being chiefly in favor of the organization, the other supervisors fell in behind Moorlach and defunded the group.

There are squirrels swimming in the pudding of their logic. For one thing, it’s been pointed out that there are several other abortion-performing organizations that the county isn’t about to defund, because they are hospitals. And hospitals perform abortions because they are a legal medical service to which a clear majority of Americans believe women should have access. And what business is that of the county? If they’re worried about taxpayer money being spent on something that some taxpayers consider morally wrong, will the supervisors also shield me from having to pay for nuclear missile systems?

Moreover, the money that was going to go to Planned Parenthood wasn’t even coming from the county’s hard-pressed taxpayers, but from tobacco company settlement money, which gets distributed to government bodies to spend on health issues. If people don’t want their money going to Planned Parenthood, they could just stop smoking.

And there’s this: The supervisors are now talking to an enthusiastically Christian, abstinence-based, antiabortion organization, Santa Ana’s Birth Choice Health Clinics, about taking over the sex education activities.

I like Jesus just fine, but he’s not my first-call guy when Windows crashes, nor would I ask him how human papillomavirus is transmitted.

I’d call Planned Parenthood. They’ve excelled at this sort of education for decades, letting people know how their bodies work so they can make informed choices instead of just shooting babies out all over the place, or resorting to abortion in lieu of birth control, which no one likes. Planned Parenthood’s education program includes abstinence and also teaches about the gross diseases that can result from casual sex. You can’t guarantee people will make good decisions, particularly when their hormones have veto power, but you can at least make sure they possess the information and options necessary for good decision-making. 

America just had an eight-year experiment (at $176 million per year) in abstinence-only education, thanks to the Bush administration, and it was a failure by all measures. It didn’t keep kids from having sex, and most certainly didn’t keep them from getting diseases or getting pregnant. It even had unintended consequences, such as teens engaging in oral or anal sex so that the girl could still get married with her tamper-proof seal intact.

not John Moorlach

The abstinence-only approach has been a cash cow for hucksters hawking “purity rings,” but otherwise has been such a failure that states have been refusing FREE FEDERAL MONEY (which required that schools abstained from teaching anything but abstinence-only) rather than continue pretending that ignorance equals innocence. Not when their kids’ lives are concerned.

Some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state are in Orange County cities, but now Moorlach wants to drag us back into the cave.

In voting with Moorlach, Supervisor Bill Campbell said that one reason why he had second thoughts about funding Planned Parenthood was, “When Orange County funds something, it’s like putting the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on that organization.”

Because, God knows, after you’ve poured $1.69 billion in county funds down a Wall Street toilet, everyone is looking to you for direction.

Just when the county was putting the bankruptcy debacle behind it; just as it was finally shaking its decades-long right-wing wacko image (Rock and roll’s a communist plot! So is fluoridation! Look out! Lesbian spear-chuckers are after us!), we get this new nugget of national attention making us look like backwoods goobers.

Planned Parenthood is not pro-abortion. No sane person is. It’s a difficult, troubling choice, and most recognize it’s a very personal choice. Planned Parenthood does treat abortion with the gravity it deserves, they just don’t tell girls they’re going to hell or rub fetuses in their hair.

Personally, I don’t care one bit more what the Bible says about abortion than I do what the Tolkien trilogy says about it. I’m pretty well versed in the latter, and the subject never comes up. Many Bible scholars say the same of their book. I’m reminded of what the late, great Reverend Gene Scott said about it on TV one night, and I quote from memory:

“People always ask me about abortion, and I tell them I’m humble on the subject, because I’ve scoured the Bible and can’t find one word about it. I will tell you this: I agree with Richard Pryor, who said that if men got pregnant, abortion would have been legal 3,000 years ago.”

The Bible is explicit that you should not wear a garment made of mixed fibers, and that, if you lay with a slave who is not your own slave, you must make an offering of a ram to the priest, but it offers no clear word on abortion or when conception begins. Yet we’re supposed to accept that God told the Pope and select others via a secret illumination of scripture that abortion is a sin. Pardon me, but you’ll find a clearer chain of command between God and David Berkowitz.

But let’s just say that there is a God up in Heaven, strummin’ on the ol’ banjo. A whale of a long time ago, he would have looked down upon the Earth and seen that men were few, beset on all sides by predators, plagues, flood, and other stuff God thought up on a mead hangover. Infants died aplenty, from stuff like germs that God, in his wisdom, didn’t tell man about in the big book. Consequently, there weren’t enough people around to tend the crops and flocks or to protect the tribe.  

God saw that man needed to be many, so he told man, “Go and be fruitful” with the numerous wives. “Spill not thy seed upon the ground,” he admonished, because that was a real problem before Kleenex.

That was the good word then. But if God were to look down through the smog now, what would he see? A planet so overrun with man and his works that even the distant polar bear is drowning from man’s actions; where there are too many people to be fed from the fields and flocks; where infants die aplenty for want of food or potable water.

Seeing that, wouldn’t God update the operating manual to include Jimmy hats and birth control patches? Wouldn’t he spread the word, “Daughter, when you’ve got your Levis off, then Levi gets on, and then Levi gets off, you are in for a mess of baby”?

But since there isn’t a Bible 2.0, we’ve got guys like Moorlach selectively divining their notion of sound government from the old one. I say selectively because I doubt he’s going to stave off our hard times with an offering of five gold mice just because it worked for the Philistines; neither do I expect him to force businesses to close on the Sabbath nor to start sacrificing rams at the county treasury. But it’s in the Bible, John! And maybe all this abortion stuff isn’t, and it’s all-too human hooey.

Generally, when people hear God talking to them, it’s just a part of themselves they don’t want to reason with.

Reproductive health is an issue that begs for reason, and let’s pray the Orange County supervisors find some, because abstinence-only birth control works about as well as packing peanuts do.

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