Speaking of THE BIG DICK, he's the punch line of this little ditty:
Antichrist walks among us: Boring, blonde and hung over
Mark Morford
Friday, June 1, 2007
There she is on Martha Stewart, making profiteroles and raspberry coulis, jiggling dangerously. There she is again on the cover of both the lowbrow, beer-stained frat-boy skank-fest of Maxim and also the glossy yuppie ostensibly highbrow wristwatch-gasm of GQ, pretty much for the exact same reason.
There she is, once more, allegedly snorting small mountains of cocaine in grainy smeary photos in the back of nefarious nightclubs as she giggles and speaks in short gurgled sentences and chortles about all the male celebs she's nailed. And, oh, hey look, see her yet again, slumped like a sack of 20-year-old potatoes in a friend's SUV a mere 48 hours after getting busted for a DUI in Hollywood and then announcing she's heading back into rehab, again, with a wink and sly grin and, oh my God is that a creepy blood-red flash of demonic light in her eyes? Why, yes. Yes, it is.
After much careful study, after much thoughtful analysis of the signs and the facts and the omens and the tea leaves and the gritty photos and the mysterious sticky residue I found on the bottom of my boots last week, all combined with the vague sense of perky perpetual ominous doom that permeates all things at all times everywhere, I am now convinced: Some sort of secret underworld invasion is nigh, some sort of sinister mind-control plan is upon us. And it's not what we all thought.
The prophecies are true: The Antichrist indeed walks among us, and, lo she is ... boring. She is Lindsay Lohan.
She is everywhere. She is nowhere. She has never even once appeared in a genuinely exceptional film, song, TV episode, nightmare. She has done one or two modestly tolerable movies, and she had a few memorable appearances on "Saturday Night Live," where it appeared that she was capable of decent comic timing, fast reflexes, random flashes of nubile meta-Lolita cuteness. Ah, but this was merely a false tease, bait, how the Dark One lures you in. This is how it starts.
The late, ever-quotable Rev. Jerry Falwell was kind enough to inform the world that if there are two things we know for certain about the Antichrist, it's that he will be male and he will be Jewish. I presume that many on the far right have taken this to mean that the Antichrist must be, say, Jon Stewart. After all, he's Jewish, not to mention just terribly snarky, and he makes fun of stupid people and speaks in crazy polysyllabic words most fundamentalist conservatives can barely understand and he actually reads books and appears on cable TV, which is, of course, the domain of the devil.
But no, Stewart cannot be the Antichrist. The Antichrist does not know nearly so much about domestic policy. Nor does he smile so often. Plus, Stewart has decent hair. Laughs easily. Knows things about culture, comedy, the bogus and infantile nature of political power structures. Not exactly hallmarks of the beast. What's more, Falwell was -- how to put this delicately so sensitive readers will merely sigh and adjust their glasses and not write me nasty snickering tsk-tsk letters -- ah yes: a moron.
The question pulls at the mind like a demon child yanking your nose hairs with a pipe wrench: Could Lohan truly be the Antichrist? Could the destroyer of humanity really be a loose, drunken, semi-talented, sadly overrated, hugely overexposed bubbleheaded quasi-actress who apparently has the nation in such thrall that her every move and every hairstyle and every shoulder pimple is chronicled, from the nastiest gossip blog all the way up to the New York Times and back down again, and, by the way did you know that if you have absolutely no life whatsoever you can right this minute spend hundreds of dollars to buy mangled parts of Lohan's smashed-up DUI-saturated black Mercedes SL 65 AMG on eBay? True.
Wary scholars and a few very stoned theologians might laugh, might scream, might argue that Lohan cannot possibly be the Antichrist simply because, well, Tom Cruise is the Antichrist. I mean, duh.
Others say no, that's impossible, research in a remote mountain monastery in Italy proved long ago that Cruise was actually the Antichrist from about 2002 to 2005, at which point he suddenly fell off the Antichrist call sheet because he became so unbearably annoying, leaving Antichrist watchers merely to wonder exactly how the Scientology people managed to extract all his blood and replace it with so much liquid crazy.
Besides (these monks argue), has no one suffered through even a single minute of "The View"? Hasn't anyone endured the hideous visions of bloody apocalyptic end-time that can only come from watching a gaggle of twitchy hens mutter bad jokes about Angelina Jolie and fatty foods and menopause? Then surely you know: Rosie O'Donnell is the Antichrist. Or maybe Mariah Carey. Nicole Richie. Paris Hilton. Mitt Romney.
You can see the problem. It would appear that while Lohan seems to embody all the nefarious qualities we look for in a good Antichrist, there are simply too many other potential Antichrists for one meager nation to bear. We are on Antichrist overload. It is widely rumored that Adam Sandler vied for the position of Antichrist but was rejected for actually being too whiny. Ann Coulter wanted it desperately but was rejected simply because the Antichrist would never appear looking like something that accidentally fell to the ground when you were gutting a sturgeon.
What's a tormented, hell-bound nation to do? How can we possibly choose?
Ah, but here is the big secret. Here is the deeper mystery, revealed: Perhaps all these torturous, diuretic creatures are the Antichrist, because the lord of the underworld is, well, transmutable. A shape-shifter. It's true. Of course the Dark One can jump effortlessly from vehicle to vehicle and from obnoxious celeb to obnoxious celeb like some sort of virus or awful trend in leggings or viral YouTube video. It makes perfect sense.
In other words, perhaps Lohan is merely the current incarnation, the Antichrist du jour. Perhaps this is how it works: Wherever our collective cultural attention becomes fixated at the expense of far more serious and interesting and intellectually stimulating issues, of war and global warming and health care and love and sex and death, perhaps this is our Antichrist, the thing that makes us forget we have, you know, hearts and minds, and active, curious souls.
Plus, we have but to remember one dark, vital truth: Dick Cheney has but to make one phone call, one sidelong sneer and he's right back at the top of the list, displacing Lohan with one effortless flick of his middle finger, thus restoring the proper order of (evil) things. Now, isn't that reassuring?
Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook. A version with links to related material appears on sfgate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
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