Notes from the land whose people bitchalot

Oy gevalt!

So Rick Warren it is for Obama’s inaugural invocation. Is Warren really Falwell-Lite -- “a kinder, gentler Jerry Falwell in a Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans with better P.R.”?

If he is, then the kinder, gentler Jerry Falwell is just as much a gay-basher as the meaner, nastier Jerry Falwell who didn’t wear Hawaiian shirts and blue jeans.

I really had been hoping for a secular invocation, which may seem like an oxymoron until you realize that invocation is itself a contradictory term, meaning both a prayer asking God’s help and an incantation used in conjuring up a spirit. (I’d be for the latter if the Founding Fathers could be conjured up and we could at last get closure on some nagging Constitutional questions.)

By a secular invocation I mean someone comes out and gets the crowd settled down and focused. A warm-up act. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are too hip to risk, so I’d slot in Bob Saget or, in a desperate bid for Southern acceptance, Jeff Foxworthy.

My second choice would be for the calm and methodical Rev. Barry Lynn, Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to give the more traditional invocation. However, I don’t think he’d accept the gig, for obvious reasons.

And if Obama supporters are upset with his choice of invocateur, the prudish right is aghast -- An X-Rated Inaugural? -- at his choice for inaugural poet. FCC commissioners at the ready!

Barack Obama has also chosen a poet who will read at his oath of office. Let's just say it won't be Robert Frost musing that "the land was ours." And you may not want your children near the TV.

Do the following lines represent the best that modern American literature offers?

"Her genitalia will float inside a labeled pickling jar..."

"Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding..."

"Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private."

I’m sorry… what we talking about? Oh.

They come from "The Venus Hottentot," the most celebrated poem of Elizabeth Alexander, chosen by the president-elect to compose an original work to read at his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Again, if I were managing the Inauguration, there’d be no poetry reading either. We the People do not read poems. We the People do enjoy stand-up comedy, however. Instead of hearing a poem (with or without references to poking, prodding, or pickling), I’d much rather hear Lewis Black do a routine about Alan Greenspan’s belated realization that his long-held model of free-market capitalism has a tiny flaw and now the entire universe is in the crapper!!!