Captain Hooker

That crusty seaman wannabe, Mister Ed, has pumped out another column for the Weakly Standard Online.

It starts like this:

ONE CAN DRAW CONCLUSIONS about the values of society by the places of worship it builds and the gods they revere in them.

The man can't use pronouns consistently in single sentence. One can draw conclusions from that too.

Ancient Aztecs built temples to gods requiring bloody human sacrifices, while Zoroastrians largely concerned themselves with less murderous and more deeply spiritual centers of worship. Buddhists create peaceful areas for meditation; Christians and Muslims aspire to touch God in some manner through architectural means, giving places of sanctuary and prayer to their followers.

Having drained his reservior of deep thoughts on the subject of religious architecture, Mister Ed goes on to write about an incident in which some Minnesota Vikings players rented two tour boats for an evening cruise and allegedly invited some high-priced hookers to party with them. According to Ed, some of the players also were accused of harassing and/or abusing the ships' staff.

What moral does Ed derive from this tale? This one:

But what do we expect? When the main reason these multimillionaires get their communities to pay for their arena-temples is by extorting the desperation of other cities to host a team, why should the Golden Calf-like celebrations shock us?

Ed's just the man to melt down those prostitutes and make the Vikings drink them.

Apparently when our society abandoned the Lord to worship well-paid athletes, sexual decadence was the inevitable result. Ed opines that in the good old days, when NFL owners had to build their own stadiums, players never used obscenities or patronized prostitutes.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't seem to recall Ed making such a big deal about, say, the rapes at the Air Force Academy or the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib. If he ever made the connection between militarism and sexual violence, I missed it. And I don't recall Ed's column positing that the generous financing of Christian churches has caused the many sex crimes and scandals in the Catholic Church and various fundie congregations.

Ed's imagined link between secularism and moral decay is absurd; his assertion that public subsidy of sport is leading to the decline of Western civilization is even more absurd.

Although I think there was a causal connection between George Bush's Kelorific stadium landgrab and Neil Bush's obssession with third-world prostitutes.

I also like the fact that the Standard has illustrated Ed's tale of degenerates at sea with an depiction of Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes on a cruise ship. Someone over there has a sense of humor (and it's not Larry Miller).