Friday, November 20, 2009

Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest?

I love Richard Burton.

Tonight, I spilled some beer on my floor to commemorate what could have been his 84th birthday. As I was wondering why I spilled it on my own floor and not someone else’s (or perhaps out the window), I tried to figure out what my favorite Richard Burton movie is. The funny thing is, I love him more for the movies he hated doing.
Go ahead and tell me that you didn’t love him in Exorcist 2: The Heretic. Scream at me that he was awful in Alexander the Great. Sure, he was fabulous in Equus, but did you see him in his spectacular performance as John Molnar in The Medusa Touch? Of course you didn’t. Nobody did. Just me and the a-holes who made it.

Actually, I met the screenwriter way back when I was a college student. I can’t remember his name but he was lecturing about his Oscar-winning screenplay for Ghandi. From The Medusa Touch to Ghandi in five years… Only in America.
My favorite film of Burton’s was Becket. Becket told the story of Henry II (played by Peter O’Toole) and his best friend, Sir Thomas Becket (Burton). What a story…

Becket was the Lord Chancellor and Henry’s best friend. He is also said to have invented the fork… something that still confounded my maternal step-grandmother centuries later. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died, Henry II took the opportunity to install his trusted friend as the new Archbishop. Becket was agnostic. Can you see where this is going?

Becket ended up taking his new job very, very seriously. Agnostic no more, he bought himself fur underwear – underwear he never took off. That’s right… NEVER. He was self-flagellating by flatulating. Seriously, if I go more than a day without changing my 100% cotton boxers, I break out in a rash. Imagine what that was like for Becket. It was said that when he died and they removed his clothing there were all sorts of insects crawling in and out of the underwear and feeding off of his flesh. Yikes.

Anyway, while it usually takes going to prison to find Jesus, it is definitely much rarer to find Him after being appointed to the second most important position in England. Perhaps this was why Henry II was beside himself with Becket’s continual refusal to hand over control of the Church to him. He saw it as an utter and perpetual betrayal of his lifelong friendship and sponsorship. The rift widened and Henry II, a big drinker, started getting loud about it around court. One night, during a particularly angry, wine-induced tirade with a bunch of drunken knights, Henry screamed, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

A drunken warrior king, in front of a gaggle of loyal, drunk knights yells, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” It wasn’t long before knights had invaded the cathedral at Canterbury and murdered Thomas Becket on the steps to the altar. When Henry woke up the next morning to find out that he had inadvertently ordered the death of his best friend, he was heartbroken.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Bill O’Reilly said it until one of his psychotic followers shot and killed abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his church.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Psychotic Congresswoman Michele Bachmann rants about the (now) evil federal government and invents wonderful stories about FEMA concentration camps and how the Census is designed to control you. In Kentucky, an old man who worked part-time as a Census taker was taken out into the woods and murdered. Carved into his chest was a single word: FED.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage call President Obama all the names in the book, including “a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people,” a “ communist,” a “fascist” and the man who will rob them of their America. Chuck Grassley, Dick Armey and a whole host of insurance companies preach to a mob of people holding signs of the President as a monkey, or with a Hitler moustache. Hell, to a lot of people he’s not even an actual American… He hired a Puerto Rican woman to replace a white, male Supreme Court Justice. Can you believe the nerve of this guy? Weren’t there any other white men he could have hired?

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
How long do you think it will be until all of those unspoken directions are followed? When you have representatives on the Capitol steps urging thousands of angry, disillusioned people to go inside and confront representatives who support government-sponsored health insurance, do you even wonder if even one of them might physically attack someone? When you try to convince millions of people to point their fingers at one man as the reason for all of their problems, how long will it be until someone points something else at him?

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Look, think what you like of his policies, but there needs to be a concerted effort to lower the tenor of anger. It doesn’t take that much encouragement for people to feel uneasy. This type of encouragement to action is more than we’ve ever mounted against any of our country’s enemies. By the way, did we forget that we were at war?


Take it down a notch, people. We don’t need another morning after like Henry II had. Of course, this time that heartbreak won’t last so long. Beck and Limbaugh are on the air every day and they’ll probably just pin it on Pelosi.

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Jeremy said...
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