Idolism (34 page)

The Gospel According to Tummy – 18

Me new life with Momoko turned me into a proper housewife. Momoko was a busy woman, and her place was a mess. She usually left the house at ten in the morning and she wouldn’t get back home until eight in the evening, so she didn’t have a lot of time to wash, cook, buy groceries, do the vacuuming and ironing, or take out the trash. I, on the other hand, had lots and lots of time, because it was still the school holidays, and I wasn’t even sure if I’d go back to school next term. So when Momoko left for work in the morning, I made the bed, did the dishes and the laundry, vacuumed her flat, ironed her clothes, went out to buy groceries and cooked her dinner. I could do all these things. People thought I was a lazy and useless slob, but I wasn’t.

The soundtrack for me busy days was provided by radio and television, and I suddenly realized what had been going on in the world while I had been busy living me life as a rock star. The whole world was in turmoil, and it was getting turmoilier by the minute thanks to the oil Julian kept pouring into the fire of the global clash of cultures and beliefs. While Julian was touring the U.S. talk show circuit, the new Pope, Pius XIII, had released the New Commandments, an amendment to the original Ten Commandments that Moses had brought down from Mount Sinai.

- Thou shalt multiply and not prevent pregnancy by artificial means, for each human life is a celebration of and a tribute to the Lord thy God.

- Thou shalt unite with your brothers and sisters in faith and stand against those who do not believe.

- Thou shalt not indulge in idleness and lethargy, for work and toil are service to the Lord.

- Thou shalt not abuse the Word to denigrate, mock, or ridicule those who believe, for the Word is God.

- The Roman Catholic Church is the only way to the Lord.

Apparently the New Commandments had been given to Pius XIII directly by God himself, not written on stone tablets this time, but very conveniently on an iPad that the Pope proudly presented to an astonished public in a live press conference. As it so happened, Julian appeared on Piers Morgan’s program on CNN only six hours later, calling the Pope a silly fool. That didn’t go down too well with most Roman Catholics obviously, especially with the Italian Prime Minister who was in a meeting with the British Prime Minister when the news broke. Our PM was thrown out of the meeting and, effectively, out of the country, and when he returned to the UK he found the whole goddamned place on fire. The Catholics were outraged at Julian. Anglicans and Protestants and other Christian groups were outraged at the Pope who had insinuated that non-Catholics weren’t real Christians. Students and teachers were outraged at the school reform bill that was signed into law and made religious education mandatory in all schools. The unions were outraged at another neo-catholic law that made firing atheists, Buddhists and Hindus easier than firing Jews, Muslims or Christians. And to top it all off, MMC Sports dictated a new payment structure for professional footballers, and so the Premier League went on strike, which resulted in a weekend of riots up and down the country that left two people dead and 200 injured.

The country was slowly descending into a mix of anarchy and civil war. People took to the streets and made their voices heard. Whitehall was completely shut down for traffic between Charing Cross and Parliament Square because tens of thousands of peaceful but angry protesters blocked the road at any given time, and the police wouldn’t do anything about it, because most policemen and women were members of the police union, which sided with the protesters.

Meanwhile, Julian kept appearing on American TV, commenting on the state of the world in general and the situation back home in particular. He chatted with Jay Leno and David Letterman, he appeared on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
and on
Real Time with Bill Maher
. He hosted
Saturday Night Live
and performed a new song called
Mount Sinai Incorporate Sanyo
, which was not only a funny old pun on the Latin proverb
mens sana in corpore sano
(‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’), but also a scorching criticism of the entanglements of religion, politics and business, and of the New Commandments set forth by the Pope, and after two days it became the fastest selling song in the history of iTunes.

All the while, the British media were keeping a close eye on Julian. Every morning when I turned on the telly, the news headlines opened with ‘Julian Monk said ...,’ followed by a five-minute segment on whatever he’d said on whichever show he’d been on the night before. It was quite surreal. Just a couple of weeks ago Julian had been that quiet, shy kid who would hardly ever even open his mouth in class, and now he was making headline news every day, commenting on world events and calling the people who deserved it liars and bigots and an eclectic variety of other names. The interesting thing was how the media’s perception had changed since that school anniversary. Back then, most of the media had depicted Julian as some rude, obnoxious grouser with bad manners. But the longer this whole thing went on and the more the media reported on Julian, the more of these prejudices had to go. Soon whole TV programmes were dedicated to the Julian Monk phenomenon, and hordes of experts stood in line to refute any criticism brought against him. There were experts on psychology and education and philosophy and the natural sciences, and they all came to the conclusion that Julian was a tormented soul, and that one could argue about his way of tackling a subject or making a point, but they all agreed that he did indeed have most of the points he was trying to make, and that none of the claims he made about the world and society and human beings were actually wrong. The media that had started out by depicting Julian as some sort of freak had slowly but surely turned him into a national boy hero and role model. But in the end it was Julian himself who turned Julian Monk into a media legend.

For the final leg of his American tour, Julian was invited to appear on
The O’Reilly Factor
on the fair and balanced Fox News channel. The interview was off to a rocky start.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” Bill O’Reilly asked.

“I don’t know, Bill,” Julian said. “Why are you?”

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the interview.

“Look,” O’Reilly said, “I realize you’re young and full of hormones, and you need to be a little rebel and all that nonsense, but I think you don’t realize what’s going to happen to you and all those nonbelievers out there in the end.”

“And what’s that?”

“You and your kind will end up in hell.”

“So you believe in hell?” Julian asked. “A literal hell?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you think nonbelievers deserve to go there?”

“That is not what I said,” O’Reilly said.

“You said you believe in a literal hell, and that we will go there. Who’s going to send us there? God?”

“No,” O’Reilly said. “Not God. You are sending yourself there by not accepting Jesus Christ as your Saviour.”

“I accept Jesus Christ as a great philosopher and as a role model in many ways. Is that not enough?”

“No, it’s not. It’s not enough to just sit there and say, ‘Yeah, you know, that Jesus guy was a cool dude and I like what he said’. That is not enough. You have to accept Jesus as your personal Saviour.”

“And what is he supposed to save me from?” Julian asked.

“He is going to save you from eternal damnation. He gave his life for your sins.”

“That was very nice of him and all, but he didn’t really need to do that, because I’m really not that much of a sinner.”

“Are you aware of the concept of original sin?” O’Reilly asked.

“Our album is called
Original Sin
,” Julian said. “So yes, I’m familiar with the concept.”

“Yes, your album. I’ve listened to it.”

“Have you really?”

“Yes, I just told you so.”

“Well,” Julian said, “if you listened to it then you should know that I’m aware of the concept of original sin.”

“It was a rhetorical question. I’m running a show here, all right? Now if you’d just shut up for a moment so I can get to the point.”

“Go ahead.”

“Original sin means that we are all sinners from birth, and that we need to accept Jesus Christ as our Saviour. Do you understand that?”

“What I do understand,” Julian said, “is that if you believe in original sin, you have a terrible and appalling idea of man. You think that humans are inherently evil, and one must wonder where that dreadful belief originally came from. I think it originated from a deep-rooted feeling of guilt that the Bronze Age peasants who wrote the Bible felt needed to be alleviated.”

“And what, in your opinion, were they feeling guilty about?”

“They were feeling guilty about themselves, and about the poor state of the world that they had created. They needed to find an excuse for all the violence, greed, bigotry and hypocrisy that seemed to be a part of our nature, and, not least, for the way they treated women. So some brilliant mind came up with the concept of original sin which not only seemed to explain the dark side of human nature; it also, very conveniently, gave them an excuse to treat women the way they did, because in the end—or I should say in the beginning, really—it was all Eve’s fault. The first woman tempted the first man, and suddenly we were all doomed. We were thrown out of Eden and forced to live a life of misery. Now if you look at the third chapter of Genesis as an allegory of the dawn of the human race, I think when we ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it was not only
not
a mistake; it was the only right thing to do. It was a step forward—not back—and it was inevitable.

“Paradise, as it’s described in Genesis, is a state of ignorance. It’s a place where we didn’t have to worry about anything, because we didn’t know anything. It’s a place where we didn’t have to take responsibility for our actions, because we let only our instincts guide us. And it’s a place where we were oblivious to the fact that one day we all have to die.

“This is what we have ‘lost’ when Adam and Eve ate from the tree. You call it the fall of man? I call it the rise of man, his emancipation from a state of blissful ignorance to a state of painful wisdom. That is no reason to feel guilty. It’s a reason to be proud. It should make us all want to advance even more, rather than go back. Those who mourn this ‘paradise lost’ don’t realize that it was not an eviction. It was an escape, and if you want to go back to paradise, what you really want is to give up all our achievements that set us apart from the other animals. Because you are scared of the responsibility that comes with knowledge; you are scared of the fact that there is no divine creator who loves you, who looks after you, and who has a plan for you; you are scared of the fact that in the grand scheme of things your life is completely insignificant.”

O’Reilly raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Look, son,” he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m not scared, because I know that Jesus will save me.”

“Of course you are scared, and I don’t blame you. You are scared, I am scared, everybody’s scared.”

“I’m telling you, I’m not scared.”

“And I’m telling you, you’re scared. You’re scared that you, your life, your whole existence and everything you think you believe in ultimately amounts to nothing. You’re scared that on the grand scale of the universe you are meaningless. But you are. You are, I am, we all are meaningless. Wake up and smell the Kool Aid, Bill. You’re a deer in the headlights of enlightenment, wisdom, and reason; startled and scared. If you’re telling yourself you’re not scared, then you’re whistling in the dark.”

 “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” O’Reilly said.

Julian shrugged. “It only makes sense to sensible people, I suppose.”

There were hisses from the studio crew upon Julian’s final remark, and a vein on the side of O’Reilly’s head looked like it was ready to burst.

“Let me move on here so we can finally get somewhere,” O’Reilly said. “In the last few weeks you have—ironically—been preaching against religion in the public space. So what you’re saying is you want to see all churches and nativity scenes and Christmas trees banned, is that it?”

Julian shook his head. “I never said that or anything remotely like that. Churches and nativity scenes and Christmas trees are not religion. They’re culture, and I don’t have a problem with culture. I have a problem with things being imposed on me. Christmas displays of any kind are a trivial matter; they’re far less annoying and obtrusive than advertisements for burgers or fizzy drinks or breast enlargements. And if I don’t want to see evening mass, I don’t have to go to church. I do, however, have to go to school, and I cannot accept that my right of freedom of religion—which does include freedom
from
religion—is effectively being undermined by compulsory religious education or school prayer or the teaching of Intelligent Design, because these things are not education, they’re indoctrination. If we are serious about education, we have to tap into the wisdom of as many books as possible and question every single one of them, and not limit ourselves to one supposedly infallible book hat was written by Bronze Age peasants who didn’t know a thing about physics or chemistry or biology or ...”