Last night, however, I goaded her into discarding that whole Southern Lady shtik that she insists on cultivating for just long enough to discuss Amis. The term "swaggering shmuck" was bandied about. Martin Amis and the Swaggering Shmucks will be the name of our band, I decided.

"I'd like to meet Martin Amis," I mumbled, floating on a brown-liquor-and-klonopin cloud. "I'd ask him questions about Lucky Jim."

See, even though Kingsley Amis was a red-hater, I still like him more than his son. He's symbolic of a time when it was acceptable to be a drunk philanderer.

Come to think of it, I like Sir Kingsley more than a lot of writers in Martin Amis' generation. Specifically, the male ones, ages 45-60*. To them I say, Enough already. You get the absurd advances and win all the prizes. Why not take a break from all that and start drinking yourselves to death?

Anyhow, this post is meant to be about religion. Speaking of swaggering shmucks: Grand Rabbi Aron, the oldest son of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum obm, arrived in Williamsburg, Wednesday (April 26) and, as the new Grand Rabbi, plans to reside there. (He arrived, BTW, from Kiryas Joel, an upstate Satmar enclave known best for its illegal use of public school funds and voter fraud and intimidation.)

As you may have heard, Moses Teitelbaum, Grand Rebbe of the Satmar Hasidim, died earlier this week. His two sons are fighting like hell over who's going to assume his title. (This little battle's been going on for years.) So Aron has hired a PR flak and decided to pimp out the shabbos services to the press.

The supreme irony of all this is that Satmar Jews are a clannish, private, old-school group; they're not big on outsiders (for a fun time, drive through South Williamsburg late at night--it's like that scene in The Body Snatchers where all the pod people start pointing and shrieking) and they technically aren't supposed to own TVs or computers; now Aron Teitelbaum is literally creating a big-top atmosphere ("look for the giant tent!"), inviting the goyim media to come photograph the services. I guess that Aron Teitelbaum picks and chooses his chillul hashems.

Finally: OK, so goth vampires aren't exactly a religion as much as they are a class of beings who should be condemned to an eternity of self-inflicted atomic wedgies, but don't you think the authorities should just arrest everyone on VampireFreaks.com and get it over with?

I'll conclude this by saying that I haven't always possessed such profound religious tolerance. There once was a time when I was an evangelical atheist. (This was mostly spurred by growing up where I did; on one side, I encountered intolerance and bigotry couched in religiosity in the mainstream Christian denominations; on the other hand, as part of the upstate NY hardcore scene, I heard songs that derided said Christian dogma but lauded and embraced Krishna--a religion that denigrates women and considers homosexuality and abortion immoral.)

After I got the hell out of the northeast, I started to appreciate as something more than minstrelsy the country and old-timey music I'd been listening to all my life. Then, in an odd turn of events, I ended up writing my college thesis on religious symbolism in art. A couple years later, my mother had a breakdown and ran back to the Catholic Church (I'm just relieved she didn't end up joining the cult). And now, I have some rather devout inlaws.

I suspect that it's not so much that I've grown tolerant as I've just become too lazy to argue. But to quote Bongwater: "...it's time we find a way to cope; a way to find some hope. For some it's the Bible, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Krishna, or cheesecake, or bourbon, or the Butthole Surfers, or some Giorgio Armani or Romeo Gigli..."

Therapy, yoga, prayer--I think you're all equally deluded. And fuck you, Martin Amis.

"I Saw the Light," Roy Acuff and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

*Notable exceptions: Jim Crace and Richard Russo