MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

As if his whole vocation/Were endless imitation. Wordsworth

If we Readers, like the manipulative cult masters, were impiously disposed to assign a supernatural interpretation to every mundane event resulting in our favor, we'd say that last Monday's service disruption at Restoration Radio was providential. It was as if the Court of Heaven, valiantly championed by the glorious company of Apostles and the massed holy Doctors, had visited upon the network the condign punishment of silence for "Father" Uneven-Steven McFaker's appallingly incoherent "exposition" of the first part of the Summa Theologica. 

Yet Pistrina is not so rash as to attribute divine intervention to each happy chance. Especially in this case, for had a celestial host had interceded, those assembled defenders of truth would surely have disabled the point-of-purchase system of buy-now and add-to-cart! But, in their apology for the technical meltdown, the cult's media enablers triumphantly announced to their complaining audience that the money-raking features were "still correctly functioning." How typically Trad: the system's dead, but you can keep on buying. So, you see, the disruption couldn't have been the work of heavenly hands, that's for sure.

(Of course, on second thought, it's always possible that ...  just perhaps ... Ol' Scratch sneaked in to save the collection mechanism .... but nah! ... that's too much like Cult-Think and Dannie-Speak. We refuse to go there.)

Confidentially, our first reaction to the universal silencing of the streaming media players was to look for a natural cause. (No need to multiply entities, as you well know.) In fact, insofar as the network's moderator used to have a good reputation, we thought he'd decided to do the right thing and pull all the podcasts of this offensive "priest." It sounds ingenuous, we know, but the weird notion crossed our minds that there actually might be an intellectually honest soul wandering in deepest, darkest Tradistan. But then we learned it was only a technical glitch. How wonderful! All that transcendental idiocy available again -- and waiting as eagerly for exposure as a starving cur for a chicken bone!

So ... there'll be no reckoning with the rector on the long trans-Atlantic flight home. No righteously flushed Flushing-Rat's demand for the McFaker to suspend his doubtful ministry. No Big Don exhortation to humbly enter the swampland's MHT seminary to undergo, at long last, his sorely missed philosophate under the whip hand of punishment-loving Scut the Prefect and his compliant toad, Squirmin' Herman. (We bet those two marshland martinets are itchin' to humiliate this puffed-up masquerader who got "holy orders" without waiting tables or mopping the pesthouse's fetid, wailing halls.) More significantly, Phony Tony won't be challenged to administer emergency remedial education to the Stevemeister. Nor will "One-Hand Dan" call him aside on his first night back to the SW Ohio Cult Center to counsel him in Christian candor about the disgrace he's brought on the empty heads of Tradistan. He struck out in philosophy, but he'll round the bases anyway and be home free.

Why, you may ask, will there be no condemnation from the cult kingpins, either medicinal or vindictive?

The answer's easy:

Uneven-Steven is Dirtbag Dan's McMini-Me...

...which means the Stevemeister has to be Wee Dan's successor. And some day there just might be a glittering miter in it for him, as long as he doesn't cross Principal Murky Lowturdsky or get too ambitious too soon, like the previous boorish pretender to the Gertrudian faldstool.

Dannie and the Blunderer must want to escape all the problems they're facing, but they probably can't afford to cut themselves off entirely from the cult's resources. (Santa Fe ain't cheap!)  The McFaker is their "Great White Hope." Deficient as he is, he's the only one in the pipeline with a personality and a public presence that has a slight chance of keeping the Gerties paying once Li'l Dan and the Checkmeister jet off in first-class seats toward a purple, artsy, desert sunset for their jubilación santafereña. (The other two stooges would empty the place out in a year.)

Now some of you out in cyber space have taken exception to this oft-repeated prediction. One cult banshee screeched, "How do you know? Are you the Bishops (sic)  confident (sic)?" Absolutely not, Madam! We run in better social circles. What we do, however, is closely observe the signs.  Here's a very telling one that'll confirm our conjecture:

If you listen to the McFaker's sermons, you'll be impressed by just how accurately he apes Li'l Dan. Seriously, it's a very, very good job of impersonation.  Amazing, really. The McMonkey's got no head for philosophy, but he sure has an ear for "his master's voice." His pitch is perfect with respect to Dannie's rhythms, articulation, final cadences, emphases, tempo, diction, phrasing, speech patterns, and intonation. Honest to goodness, he's got the exact tones with the same contours, and even an eerily similar voice quality! What we mean in linguistic terms is: the suprasegmentals and paralinguitsic features are spot on.

Truly, it's a masterly job of mimicry, and his clear baritone outclasses Dannie's frail, nasally pitched piping. Moreover, he does a far more convincing job of sounding "cultivated" in spite of his dreadful performance with the Summa. And if ever in his preaching he repeats "im-pass-say" for impasse, the culties won't notice, just as most didn't notice when Dannie once pronounced the ch in "Chalcedon" (the Asia-Minor site of the Fourth Ecumenical Council) like the ch (/tʃ/) in cheeseball rather than the /k/ in clown.

Note carefully that the McMimic's "sermon" voice is very different from the normal tone of speech he used in his disgraceful interview on Restoration Radio or in his 2013 Rosary Sunday talk to a herd of Gerties. Like Dannie, when he sermonizes, he makes a real effort to sound ethereally artificial, with dawdling modulations, overly careful articulation of each consonant, and odd vowels. (To his credit, his risible usage of the British "prō-gress" sounds far more natural than Dan's backwater Southern evangelist "Pen-tee-cost").

To put it in a nutshell, you get the feeling that Dannie is right there with you, cooing and gurgling as he outstretches his greedy palm for a "little alms." In a year, the McMini-Me may be able to deliver a perfect re-creation of the whole Dannie pulpit experience, so authentic that the cultists just might keep on paying through the nose when "One Hand" heads to the chic Southwest with Checkie as bag boy.

But don't take our word for it. Listen yourself, first to the McSimian in his sermon Temptations Against Purity and then to Wee Dan  right here. Two peas in a podcast, if there ever were.

The only questions that remain are:

(1) Can the McMini-Me sustain the cult's syrupy fictional narrative of sticky-sweet 1950s pop Catholicism?

and, most importantly,

(2) Will the future McCorner continue to deliver the weekly weather report?

SO ... ARE YOU READY TO START THE COUNTDOWN-TO-RETIREMENT CLOCK?

E-MAIL US YOUR PREDICATED DATES!