I may have spent the last few years shrugging off signs of the apocalypse–fires, floods, war, famine, the strange meanderings of Nostradamus matching up with newspaper front pages–but now that rapper Eminem has been named an honorary priest, I’m going to stop looking for signs. I do believe it’s time to start building that reinforced bunker in my back yard and renew my NRA membership.
In a press release the French-born alien cult known as the Raelians explained the priesthood was in acknowledgement of the rapper’s recent Bush-bashing single, “Mosh.” Eminem earns some bragging rights on this one: The Raelians have only bestowed this honor upon a select few. Fellow recipients include George Michael and Linda Ronstadt, for their respective Bush disses.
“Mosh,” a church spokesman wrote, showcases Eminem’s willingness to stand up for peace, “especially in this time where the Bush administration calls all anti-war comments ‘unpatriotic.’” The video for the song depicts this “standing up for peace” in the guise of the (um, unlikely) overthrow of the government by Eminem and hundreds of suburban slacker teenagers in baggy pants, as Dick Cheney clutches his chest, collapses, and dies. The concept requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. When I try to summon a realistic visual of such a revolt, I just picture Cheney and Rummy running down the steps of the Capitol with wooden paddles in their hands and smiles on their faces as a slew of pseudo-tough guy 13-year-olds running the other way, crying for their mothers.
Before the doubters out there snicker too much, it should be noted that “Mosh” is not purely an attempt to jump on the cash-laden anti-Bush bandwagon. Eminem has a long history of advocating peaceful dialogue. Consider these lines from the song, “Kill You,” on the Marshall Mathers LP, directed to the peroxide-headed rapper’s mother, just before he, um, imagines raping her, “They ain’t say I can’t rap about coke no more/Slut, you think I won’t choke no whore/Till the vocal cords don’t work in her throat no more?” Hey, man, it’s all tongue in cheek, and, anyway, like Elvis Costello said, “What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?” The pro-gay-marriage Raelians were also willing to take Eminem’s overtures to the gay community–”You faggots keep eggin me on/Til I have you at knifepoint, then you beg me to stop?”–in light of his current promise in “Mosh” to “give sight to the blind and “lead through the darkness” whereupon he and his crew will, “stomp, push, shove, mush, Bush.”
Then again, it’s important we not dismiss Eminem’s contributions to world peace over some minor exhortations to violence against women and gays. That would be like throwing the peace baby out with the sexist, homophobic bathwater.
To the average carbon-based human life form here on earth, all of this might be a bit confusing. But His Holiness RAEL, as he likes to be called, takes his orders from the aliens who created us and then tricked us into believing there was a God because our intellects were too small to understand our science-experiment creation.
Of course we wouldn’t know any of this if a French journalist named Claude Vorilhon hadn’t encountered these very aliens on December 13, 1973. According to Vorhilon, this Francophile alien, “was about four feet in height, had long dark hair, almond shaped eyes, olive skin and exuded harmony and humor.” The alien explained that he and his space kin had created all life on earth through DNA cloning technology, and that, in addition to taking the somewhat embarrassing step of changing his name to RAEL, Vorilhon was to set up the aliens’ embassy on earth.
Laugh if you like, but over 60,000 people in 90 countries have signed on with “the world’s largest atheist, non-profit UFO organization” dedicated to welcoming “people from space, destroying the myth of God, and sweeping the world with the most politically incorrect and fearlessly individualistic philosophy of non-conformism.” Oh yeah, and they also post links on their website to nude pictures of Rael’s young followers engaging in various hedonistic activities, alongside a press realease, “Yes to Nudity,” for good measure. One of the topless young women wears a skirt that reads, “There is no God,” across the backside. Apparently, one of our transitions under alien management will be to the soft-porn society, kind of a New Deal for Dirty Old Men.
The sinister side of this all-too-easy-to-laugh-at cult has reared its ugly head, however. Rael is also the founder of Clonaid, the group that gained international notoriety a few years ago by claiming to have cloned 13 human beings. “Once we can clone exact replicas of ourselves, the next step will be to transfer our memories and personalities into our newly cloned brains, which will allow us to truly live forever,” Rael writes on the Cloneaid website.
Hopefully there is about as much truth to his cloning claims as there is to his meetings with the alien. After all, can you imagine living in a world filled with endless replicants created by scientists striving to emulate the virtues of Eminem, George Michael, and Linda Ronstadt? Is this the new paradigm for life on earth? I don’t want to spend my twilight years living under the auspices of a new trinity of the depraved, the sullenly self-important, and the washed up.
But then again, what else can you expect from an alien civilization that believed the best place to make first contact with humanity was France?
–Shawn Macomber is a staff writer at The American Spectator and runs the website www.returnoftheprimitive.com.