MARY WEPT

      One of the remarkable aspects of North American cultural degeneracy is its limitless ability to reach a new nadir on a such a consistent basis. It's almost like a perversion of the capacity that Americans once possessed of reaching higher and higher standards of excellence. Whereas once, every great American innovation was followed up by a new and improved technology; today every depravity is followed up by an even lower and more vitiated debasement.

        Enter onto the American scene a new literary masterpiece titled Mary Wept. This piece de resistance of the North American literati is all the rage among the enlightened and educated among us. It was written, and illustrated, by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. Brown is an award winning and internationally recognized figure among his fellow sophisticates, having previously produced such outstanding work as Yummy Fur and Ed the Happy Clown. Now, in less cultivated ages tomes like Mary Wept were sold in brown paper wrappers at some of the less ethical newsstands. But today underground comics represent the high-water mark of Civilization and Culture.

          Essentially the theme of Mary Wept is that the Blessed Virgin Mary was a prostitute; a subject with which Brown seems to have an obsession, based on both his personal history and his other writings. He's been politically active in Canada on the subject and once received a grant from the Canada Council to write another of his epics, Paying for It.

           In an interview with the effete publication Salon, Brown gives us the benefit of his deep and profound theological insights:

           "My contention is that Jesus had a different relationship with prostitutes than we think he had. I think His Mother was a prostitute, and I think he had women around Him who were also prostitutes...and there was some sort of association there involved with religious prostitution and goddess-worship and that sort of thing."

            Brown claims to have drawn this brilliant insight---which 2,000 years of Christian scholarship presumably overlooked---from reading the Gospel of St. Matthew.

          In a separate interview with Slate, we get a good glimpse of the operative mentality behind these shocking new revelations. The interviewer poses this remarkable and insightful observation:

          "There's a lot of nudity here---male and female---and probably a lot more explicit sex than people are used to seeing in Biblical adaptations. Are you worried about the response to all of that?"

           To which, Brown replies:

        "I think that people who are most likely to be offended by that are Christians."

        Thank goodness for the American media. Without them, who would ever have guessed that turning the New Testament into a pornographic comic book might offend Christians?

          Yet it shouldn't be surprising that a culture, whose chief socio-political concern is gender-neutral public bathrooms, would hold Mary Wept as the apex of literary acumen. It fits in perfectly with the rest of America's New Normals.