Don't Miss Out!

"...find out all you want to know about today's hottest christian rock bands..."

This I honestly heard on the radio last Sunday.

Is there anything, anyone has ever wanted to know about any christian rock band, hot or not? Is today's god rock so much different from that of the 80s? 90s? Don't we all pretty much know more than we'd like, as it is? "Believe in God. Blah blah blah. Exult his name. Blah blah blah. Resist Satan and his endless, hedonistic temptations. Don't knock up your girlfriend, do drugs, or vote for socialist democrats..." We need to attend some meet-and-greet, to hear this framed in a "God is cool" Q&A?

Then there's this, on Facebook:

"Sarah Palin...Many people who like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers like her..."

What's the correlation? Are Viking types more likely to throw their inestimable political weight behind Speaker Pelosi? Does this heretofore unknown affiliation vary by sport? Canuck fans could prefer Dick Cheney, while the Cardinal faithful were staunchly in Edwards camp. Does factoring the college game affect this equation? Might Ole Miss fans might surprise, and support Kucinich in '12. And what of those who prefer individual sports, like tennis and golf? Has anyone got a handle on their political leanings?

Perhaps the point is how desperately we need to be part of something larger than ourselves? Or how we self medicate, using the healing waters of consumerism? Salesmen desperately hawk their wares. Savvy marketers plumb the darkest recesses of human frailty, endlessly searching for weak seems which, when under just the proper amount of tension, produce overwhelming feelings such as "I can't live one more solitary instant without that asymmetrical Ikea rug!" Or "I know what we'll do: let's go down to the Today show, jump up and down and wave our hands around like seizure patients, on the off chance that someone we know might—just might—see us on TV for a split second, behaving like absolute mental patients. Our friends after will, rather than rightly criticizing us for so eagerly searching for a stop-watch measure of Warhol's 15 minutes, hold us in even higher regard, impressed at our conspicuous exhibition, and unrelenting pursuit of such desire. Want to go?"