While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became himself a jinx dogged by luck so bad that when a Stone Age cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea, the crew for safety’s sake threw him overboard and—Lo!—the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged mammal who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
The word 'ambergris' popped into my head, so I did a little research:
According to the ancients, parfumeurs and Arab royalty, the old saying might as well go: "Worth its weight in whale waste"
But don't refer to it as "whale vomit"; scientists postulate that whales do not expel ambergris through their mouths. No one has ever seen a sperm whale excrete ambergris, although sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, admits that it is assumed the voiding takes place as fecal excretion, because when first cast out, he says, "Well, it smells more like the back end than the front."
A piece o' shit, worth a lot of money, and can't get any lower because it's already at the bottom of the ocean. Yep, that's Bush all right.
Just as an afterthought, the Arabic word for whale shit, also the root of the word for the similar vegetal substance 'amber', is anbar. As in Anbar Province. Take it for what it's worth, which if it were whale shit would be a lot more than it is now.
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