Rush of the Gadarene Swine

“Write something that makes me laugh,” my wife said. “I’m sick and tired of the morbidly depressing news.” Moreover, she added, “If you don’t, I plan to stimulate things on my own by resuming shopping!”

This is serious stuff, not idle chatter. Women have reduced shopping down to an art form, and most husbands don’t take such threats lightly. No, she had my full attention now.

But some news just can’t be ignored. With the gadarene rush in passage of the “stimulus bill,” that 1,100 page government giveaway, humor is needed…as if such a massive social spending program that nobody bothered to read wasn’t a laughing matter in itself. Congress has continued its comedy act…surely there’s something mildly funny about even this.

Something deeply embedded in my traumatized brain began to stir. Something vaguely familiar, slowly emerging and taking shape, came into focus. “Yes,” I shouted, “I see the Light.” It was from my sixth grade Sunday School class where the light shone, the fog lifted, and the perfect metaphor emerged for this debacle.

In these youthful Sunday School classes kindly, well-intentioned church ladies took turns pounding into prepubescent youth the fear of the fires of hell and other disastrous fates of life. I remembered the story of Jesus exorcising a host of devils from a fellow who lived in a cemetery on the outskirts of Gadara.

Now Gadara was a small city situated upon a steep hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. In our times it would have been filled with gleaming white condos overlooking the coastline, where greedy Wall Street investment bankers and the Big Three crowd would gorge their bloated egos with the excesses of wine, food and golf, all courtesy of the American taxpayer’s “bailout” largesse. But in the old days Gadara prospered from another source … swine, animals engorged in preparation for the slaughter!

If memory serves me correctly, our Biblical Brother, Luke (Chapter 8: 26-39), recounts that Jesus showed up one day in this renegade region. He had no sooner noticed the fat pigs where the condos would someday be when he was violently accosted by a lunatic, a wild and maniacal man possessed with a host of demons. This fellow had perhaps been a politician, stockbroker or banker, seeing that he was homeless and lived among the cemetery tombs. Apparently his home had also been foreclosed some time earlier.

In those days swine meat, though tasty, was as forbidden as Apples-from-Eden in the strict kosher tradition. No self-respecting Pharisee would be caught with a fat-smoked Gadara ham, pickled pigs’ feet or slab of fatback in his lentil soup. But Gadara was not mainland Israel, just a province without scruples, where mammon and God were worshipped… in that order. As the story goes, Jesus exorcised the demons from this poor fellow and sent them flying into the nearest herd of swine. Immediately, the “Gadara swine” rushed violently down the steep slope and plunged into the sea.

This event caused a great stir in town, since their illicit cash crop was all washed up and the tax base destroyed. Apparently these Gadarenes had schemed up some nefarious black-market deal with the Meatpackers Union down in the Tenderloin District of Jerusalem…they were disguising swine meat as some kind of early-day derivatives and selling, at a premium, of course, their “bootleg bacon” to the highly respectable friends of the Bernie Madoff Tribe in Israel. (That Tribe, unfortunately has now ceased to exist, having merged with the Tribe of Ponzi, of Italian descent.)

Jesus was forced to leave and things eventually quieted down. The former lunatic moved back into town to prove he was no longer crazy. He publicly condemned the failed policies of the Democratic Party and registered as the Republican candidate for mayor of Gadara.

Soon the herds would be rebuilt and the mainland denunciations of having been swindled would fade into oblivion. Meanwhile, the “Gadarene Stimulus Bill” was enacted to avoid anarchy, doling out $13 per week to the jobless citizens. It would have to tide folks over until better times returned. As far as we know, the Gadarenes lived happily ever after, though poorly for a time.

Some now speculate that Rush Limbaugh also “saw the Light.” Reports circulate that He’s wandering wirelessly through Washington and relocating demons from washed-up politicians over to Congress. Some say. “Nah…but then maybe?”

Is there a point to this inanity? You decide, but the choices are simple: Just laugh or resume spending.


Bud Hearn
February 19, 2009