YOU THINK MAYBE...

You think maybe God ever regretted giving Moses the power to part the Red Sea? Seems like there was no living with the guy after that. Bossing everyone around, leading them on a wild goose chase for 40 years through the desert, appointing his brother and nephews to be the high priests. Not only that, he decided that the Ten Commandments that the Big Guy Himself handed him weren't good enough and proceeded the write 613 (!) more for the Israelites to have to deal with. Not another 10, not 50 more, but six friggin' hundred and thirteen! What was he thinking? Didn't he realize that people have better things to do than figuring out the fine points of his ramblings? People have wasted otherwise perfectly good lives trying to figure this dense crap out.

He called it The Law, with a capital LAW. Talk about cheek, nerve, brass ones, moxie, chutzpa! This guy had to be insufferable. And if anybody questioned him, all he had to do was pull out the I-parted-the-Red-friggin'-Sea! card and that was that. No wonder when he finally got his people to the Promised Land after taking his sweet old time about it God knocked him off before he could get there himself, maybe figuring he'd done enough damage with that colossal ego of his, no sense letting him screw up the damned Promised Land too.

Sometimes you just wonder about stuff, maybe something you took for granted all your life and then Whammo!, something you never questioned before seems pretty odd all of a sudden, like the deal with Moses. Maybe you wake up one day and say to yourself: You think maybe the Pharaoh was happy to get rid of him? Maybe he really didn't give chase and just had his engineers drain some canal so the Israelites could pass out of Egypt and out of his hair already and he could get back to building his tomb? It was a really long time ago and there weren't any cell phone cameras around, so other than Moses' word for it, what proof have we got? And the word of a guy who thinks he can improve on the work of God, commandment-wise, has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

There's lots of things in ancient and not so ancient history that don't make a lick of sense when you get right down to it. You wonder if the people at the time called Alexander The Great great? Everywhere the guy went he brought armies and chariots and siege towers and killed everyone in his path as he attempted to conquer the entire known world, country by country. Wouldn't people back then have called him Alexander The Pain In The Ass? Here's this guy from Macedonia who traveled all over the place for years on end, compiling some pretty impressive passport stamps.

Did he get to know anybody, trade with the different and exotic nations he visited, maybe pick up some perfume or rubies for the old lady and some T-shirts for the kids that say "My Daddy sacked Thrace and all I got was this lousy T-shirt?" No way, he was the last tourist any of the ancient countries wanted to see coming. He was a lousy tipper and quite the kleptomaniac, having a penchant for carrying off everything that wasn't nailed down, including the wives of the thousands and thousands of guys he killed. You think maybe calling him The Great was a joke? "Yeah, that Alexander, he's just great," and then they'd roll their eyes and make an obscene gesture.

Then there's this thing where people try to explain logically how Germany became mesmerized by that lunatic Adolph Hitler. They babble on and on about what a great speaker he was and you say, "Wait a minute, that's not ancient history like the Red Sea thing, there were cameras then! I've seen the damned films and he looks like a cross between a cartoon character and the village idiot dressed in the police chief's clothes and drunk out of his mind. He wasn't a great speaker, the guy was a fucking buffoon!"

Then they say you don't understand German or the historical forces that led the German people to buy into his message and you reply: "Bullshit! No matter what language he was speaking, the guy was a joke! And unless those historical forces involved Germany being invaded by Elmer Fudd, the army of flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz and Sponge Bob Square Pants' evil twin, there's no reason to put a guy like that in charge of anything!" You think maybe a whole nation lost their goddamned minds? Or maybe whacky Adolph put something in the water over there? There sure isn't any logical explanation for the shenanigans of The Third Reich.

And what about that Chairman Mao guy? Isn't he right up there with Hitler and Stalin in the body counts of millions and millions of his own countrymen slain? Even after he was in power for like twenty years, didn't he start another revolution, the Cultural one that killed millions more, even though nobody was threatening to kick him out of office? What, he missed the good old days? How come he gets to be honored and revered as some sort of cuddly old fart who meant well? His Little Red Book is still considered a Revolutionary Bible. Don't people remember the stuff he did, the millions he killed? It was pretty recent. This guy was a rat bastard murdering clown who couldn't run a laundromat, never mind the world's most populous nation, a place that's prospering quite well, thank you very much, now that him and his 5-Year plans sleep with the fishes.

Perhaps his biggest crime against humanity was forcing a billion Chinese people to dress in those drab grey "Mao suits" with the funny little caps for years and years like so many grubby students from some cruel boy's academy straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. "You want more? Eat leaden death, you bourgeois fuckers!" That's how he really treated the people who looked up to him like he was the second coming of Confucius. More like Confuse us. You think maybe people have the guy all wrong and he's not everybody's stern but wise and gentle uncle but one of history's true monsters? Sometimes you wonder how history gets written and why more people don't give historians two quick slaps to snap them back to reality.