VICTORIA'S SECRET CAMPAIGN - UPDATED!
Cash Register Exorcisms suspended for now, sez the Rev:

The two year campaign by environmentalists to halt the devastation of Vicki's tsunami of junk mail has a happy conclusion. Clear-cutters for the glossy pages of Giselle and Heidi have pulled out of "sensitive forests," such as Caribou migration. We are convinced this agreement, forged between Forest Ethics environmentalists and representatives of VS owners Limited Brands, is not another Code of Corporate Behavior such as we've seen from Starbucks and the GAP.

This calls for independent certification and monitoring: transparency. The agreement will change logging facitilities throughout the world, signalling the most visible of catalogues wants recycled pulp. Click here to study the agreement.

The repeated Cash Register Exorcisms by our feisty faithful, hands-on ecstatic prayers to end the clearcutting in the hot pink center of Vicki's Secrets, seemed to have an impact. Negotiators mentioned that our religious fervor was a source of frustration at the lingerie headquarters. We're just glad that mowing down virgin forests is now officially A MORTAL SIN, PUNISHABLE BY THE LICKING FLAMES OF ETERNAL HELLFIRE!
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CALL TO ACTION TO EXPOSE VICTORIA'S DIRTY SECRET!

This is a request by the Reverend that you volunteer to do something brave on November 9th, as the supermodels strut their wares at the Lexington Avenue Armory. Contact us here through the website. There are many roles with impact but without arrest risk.

Victoria’s dirty little secret is that she sends out a million catalogues a day, 59 catalogues for every man, woman and child in the United States annually. and the glossied-up paper comes from the clear-cutting of temperate rain forests in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. Whether or not you like the celebrity tits and ass, Vicki’s parent company Limited Brands is simply another brutal transnational that is panting heavily over its quarterly profits. These clear-cuts contribute directly to global warming, as those boreal forests are the natural store-house of carbon and methane. The rising oceans and extinction spikes and enraged hurricanes don’t impress these poor souls – so we must do the impressing ourselves.

Go to ForestEthics.org for the skinny on Limited Brands and the real sin behind their semi-porn Shopathon. Change-a-lujah!


The Wave Theory of Stop Shopping
From the February Issue of The Ecologist
The Indian Ocean tsunami gives the American government something that 9/11 also gave it, but something that AIDS never did: The photo-op to fly U. S. helicopters toward HOLY NOBILITY. Boys in desert cammies (sewn for Iraq) are posing with bottles of water in the morning paper. The Christian images of patiently dispensed miracles out-gun the photo placement of the nearly identical DEMOCRACY DEVIL in Baghdad. Oh, children. The Big Wave and the Christian Gun-men. This movie, set at empire’s edge, using horror as sentimental media content — it’s something the British and Roman empires didn’t even have to deal with. Then again, they didn’t kill in the age of advertising. Do I have a witness?

Nothing in the biblical best seller Revelations, with the goats carrying candelabras flaming over our heads, is nearly as weird as the current bouquet of Apocalypses, but the Bushies are on their knees in the White House, praying their God forward. Can I say politely, with all due respect – their God is a case of MISTAKEN IDENTITY? Unfortunately, this tragedy is perfect for them, casting the Earth in the act of judgment, so they can in turn mimic their god and act out on-going horror with their Hummering Pentagon.

How fascinating, when nature anthropomorphizes itself. It is as if the Earth insists with its unforgettable Wave on being the star. THE EARTH WINS THE OSCAR FOR LEAD IN A DRAMATIC ROLE. The fact is that this one, The Tsunami, is easily converted into a media story. But however you characterize the sender of the message – despite the proud ownership of the narrative by all available public figures, celebrities, talking heads and astrologists — this is still a message from the Earth.

If you will join me in rolling the SACRED WHEEL of WHY? — it is probably likely that the Earth is preparing several messages simultaneously, and we ignore the ones that cannot be distributed as HORROR at our peril. Follow that? For instance, the magazine you are holding presents scores of Apocalypses in an average issue, and they are presented by the writers and graphic artists in all sorts of persuasive ways, but some Apocalypses, lets face it, never make the Tops of the Pops. The Earth IS speaking to us each time, though, whether the disaster is GE milk in rural Britain or damming in China or SUV’s in Michigan – the communicating is trying to come through.

The flaming stone from the sky or the Perfect Wave or the enormous Great White Shark — these nightmares that fit the movie poster are chosen over a million dead salamanders, the narrative of tectonic plates, the infinitesimal PCP’s in the mud or other expressions from our world. But ultimately, are you listening? — regardless of the hype — there is a common story line to all this. Ultimately the Earth lets us live for a while, gives us a responsibility to listen to it and co-exit with it, and then it has designed a way for us to die, and in such a way that it gives a future for those dying behind us. This is the Earth’s common sense, and its most important story-line, but it’s a hell of a sell, in the face of RAPTURE PULP FICTION. If we as a species have decided that we will not just suffer the slings and arrows of an early death, but wish to collaborate with the Earth in this life – then we are fools if we don’t listen to the less media-genic messages like AIDS.

And AIDS would be something to notice, or re-notice, even after it no longer kills as many movie stars, and cannot be put on the shelf as a plastic doll or joy-stuck to a child’s face as Playstation 3. AIDS must be re-produced in our language, in our images, and in our science. AIDS must be re-presented without a gun-man profiling against the sunset. It should come to people WITHOUT THE REQUIREMENT OF KINKIFIED FEAR, as in the Consumer angst that a horror-a-week maintains. We keeping buying when we are afraid of death – they know that.

In our church we believe fervently that if you practice less consumption, than these fears will de-media-ize. Fear won’t be a psychological state occasionally relieved by products, but a useful and ultimately sensible emotion. It won’t need to be reduced to a One Two Three storyline. If Fear is more complex, more like Life, it is a “sustainable Fear.” God knows that if we insist, despite the Earth’s advice, that our human fears must be the top religion, than we kill ourselves with AIDS and other unphotogenic waves.

Earth’s expressiveness will end our expression, then, if we insist. Until that moment, we will cure the wave within by letting the wave without really wash through us. By some mysterious and non-commercial media, the WILD ANIMALS SEEMED TO SHARE THE RIGHT STORY, and having a feeling for what the Earth had to say – they quietly moved to higher ground. Now quietly move to higher ground. WHAT A BLOCKBUSTER! Now we hear also that certain so-called “Fourth World” peoples noticed that the birds stopped singing, that the animals were moving inland, and they followed that leadership. THE WAVE WASHED THROUGH…. Amen?

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