Communion Bickies

Killing the Buddha (via Sullivan):

Nineteen clicks of the mouse, the electronic brandishing of a credit card, thirteen dollars of my savings. A box of communion wafers was on its way to my apartment. Five days later, it arrived: five hundred whole-wheat discs emblazoned with a cross, packed like bags of Lay’s into two puffed plastic sacks. The size of a half-dollar, an eighth of an inch thick. My roommate, a lapsed but confirmed Catholic, couldn’t get enough of them, inhaling one after the other as if to bring some junk-food jingle to life. Analogies to Styrofoam notwithstanding, they are a low-fat snack. (In Quebec, they have even been marketed that way; prior to consecration, the host is only bread.) I watched him toss the wafers back like popcorn—the unrealized body of Christ, purchased on the Internet.

For those who've never had the pleasure, think semi-dissolvable,  gummy cardboard that adheres to the roof of your mouth.

Comments

[Tom Alexander]

I'll wait for the smokehouse and vinegar & sea salt versions to come out.

[Harold G. Neuman]

Religous conservatism. We just can't get enough of it. Or is this something entirely diffident? I am reminded of a grisly sci-fi film, in which the bodies of surplus humans were processed into a nutritionally complete snack called Soylent(sp?) Green. I think it starred Charleton Heston, who later may have had his gun pried from his own cold, dead fingers.

In short, if someone tells a story, someone will have enough morbid curiosity to listen. Ain't that America? Damned right!