Yahoo

At the center of the Sistine ceiling, the God of Michelangelo gives life to Adam, to Man.

Caught red handed, as it were.

In any case, Mick painted a portrait of the archetypal patriarchal deity as he was known throughout western religious traditions from prehistory through Zeus to the Xian God Without a Name. His visage is the embodiment of all the white male characteristics we expect in a creator, and Mick captured the essence of a form conveying ageless wisdom, power, vitality, and hairiness. But however universal this image, it most keenly represents Yahweh, the jealous tribal god of the Hebrews. This image is the manifestation of an expectation carried deep in human consciousness and unchanged for millennia.

Well . . . mostly unchanged.

Yahweh, it seems, was the god of wandering desert nomads for more than a thousand years.

He was a god of limitless knowledge and power, vastly superior to the other gods of the times and yet the nomads who served him had no talent for conquest and eventually he found them unworthy of his ambition.

So when the Legions came, he followed them to Rome, where ambition was in abundance and in a few hundred years he became the God of the greatest empire the world had ever known. Content at last, he ruled for centuries and for a time it seemed as if there were no more worlds to conquer.

Then word came of a new one, and the old god was renewed.

He crossed the great sea in wooden ships, to a vast and virgin land of unlimited opportunity, where ambition was no longer the province of the privileged few, where any man could build a monument to greed. Here was a land to be plundered, where there could be but one virtue: Power, and one commandment: Winner Take All. And as Yahweh became the god of the American West, of capitalism, and of excess, he began to take on a new form. His long white beard was cropped short, his hair braided, topped with a broad brimmed hat pulled low on his brow. In one fist he gripped a bottle of whiskey, and in the other he brandished a six-gun. OK, so he looked like Willie Nelson, I can't help it.

Anyway, this metamorphosis cried out for a new name, and thus anointed by one John Pierre Ducept, Yahweh became Yahoo, the god of image over substance, of status over character, of success by any means. And the new god's benediction went to those who served his will, to those who took what they wanted by treachery or by force, and his wrath fell to those who sinned the only sin, to fail. The end always justified the means, any means, as long as the end was success. It became impossible to take something that didn't belong to you, because if you could take it, by God it belonged to you.

And thus is was that Man came to salvation and sanctity by Net Worth, and damnation by Not Having Stuff.

And as the technological Renaissance that accompanied the god's rebirth outstripped even the pretense of human social or psychological evolution, his gospel was carried by new forms of media to all of the new world, and then to the old world whence he came and then to the four corners of the Earth, which is an interesting concept when you think about it, and there the story ends, because that's all I can think of right now.

copyright © 2000 Dan Manthos