The rich and powerful, however, as well as their sycophantic media, reacted with predictable derision, even though it was people from their very walk of life who were killed in those four incidents. No alternative, scientifically plausible explanations were given for the four incidents. The reporters had simply been given orders to give minimal, if any, coverage of what happened. The gods, wishing to leave them to blunder about in their error, allowed the media blackout.
One example of a conservative commentator on TV had this to say: “Have any of you heard about those four ‘neopagan’ prophets of doom? What were their names? I forget—three women and a man, the man was named Gary, and the women were…Shelly, Nina, and…Michelle, I think? Anyway, just last week, I heard them on a podcast, claiming that—remember those four freak accidents that killed a bunch of rich people: Kurt and Samantha Wells in front of their mansion, killed in the thunderstorm; those people on the Plantagenets’ yacht in the sea storm just off the coast of California; those old men in the country club golf course in Indiana; and the owner of the mine in Texas, the one who fell in and died—anyway, the four neopagans that I referred to before, do you know what…actually, who…they think was the cause of the four accidents?”
“Who?” a female guest on his show asked.
“Get this…the gods!” He shook his hands in the air for dramatic effect.
Loud laughter was heard for a dozen or so seconds after that.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, Mike!” she said.
“No, really, Vera,” Mike said. “They think these incidents were warnings that the gods are going to destroy the world if those greedy capitalists don’t stop their ecocidal war on the Earth for profit.”
More laughter from both of them.
“When are these la-di-dah liberals going to be destroyed by the gods?” Vera asked. “I’m getting really sick of their nonsense.”
“Me, too,” he said. “It’s bad enough when we get liberals trying to regulate the market, which should be free, punish the successful with high taxes, and burden us with ‘environmentally friendly’ policies. Now we have to deal with nut-cases who, not wanting to face the realities of modern life, indulge in escapism with their weird, heathen religions.”
Vera, still laughing, said, “And these liberals laugh at us for our belief in Biblical creation. They are the ones with the junk science!”
Liberal commentators were hardly kinder than the conservative ones. Other examples of ridicule, if anything ever was said in the media about the four neopagans, came from political analysts on YouTube, for example, this one:
“Look, I believe we need to tax the rich and curb global warming as much as the next guy,” he said. “But angry gods were responsible for those four freak occurrences? And what is the proof that they were the result of divine intervention? Some people claim they saw faces in the shadows of the clouds, the ocean, the grass, and the underground rock? Really? Zeus, Poseidon, the earth mother goddess, and Hades? We’re supposed to believe this nonsense? No offence, here, but somebody needs to lay off the drugs.”
On their own podcast, Michelle, Gary, Nina, and Shelly had to endure endless ridicule from people calling in. After about a half-hour of it, the four of them, in their sensitivity to harsh criticism, couldn’t take it anymore. Examples of comments made include the following:
“You guys do a lot of acid, don’t you? I’ll bet you did way too much back in the Sixties.”
“I bet someone can recommend a good therapist for the four of you.”
“You people haven’t been taking your meds in a while, have you?”
“If I accept Zeus as my personal saviour, will I be saved?”
“There’s only one God, and He ain’t Greek, you know.”
Michelle’s mother expressed her agreement with this last commenter, though for her daughter’s sake, she expressed that agreement much more gently: “I hate to say it, Michelle, but that last comment was right.”
“So, what’s gonna come after your heathen Armageddon, your Ragnarök? Communism? Did Karl Marx come to you in a drug-induced vision and tell you all this anti-American crap?”
“Did you Satanists perform a human sacrifice to appease the devils you worship? If not, maybe you should try it. Kill your local commie Democrat, and maybe you’ll save the day. In any case, you’ll be doing us real Americans a favour.”
Finally, Gary received this comment from Cam: “Gary, you’re embarrassing our family with this pagan nonsense. Please, for the love of God, stop.”
