Applegate on Artistic Depictions of His Boss

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," a primary caregiver of sound goat maintenance and polytheistic pointers! We take every kind of insurance here, confident that the bored gods will reimburse us when they regain their praise and worship teams.

Oh, boy, is Anne working her girlish little butt off! That book she's reviewing, Mortality and Morbidity in Lactating Goat Populations: Principals and Practices of Sound Herd Management, is a tome of major proportions!

That leaves her computer open to me, The Prince of Darkness. Satan. Lucifer. Beelzebub. Azrael. Ol' Mr. Scratch. etc. etc. etc.

Gosh I get bad press.

Take it from me: You don't want to be a desperate freelancer, out of a job, acting on a tip from a galaxy far, far away that you've never seen before. I blundered into this position and have 3,994 more years on the contract. But it does serve up bennies, and I'm surrounded by the best thinkers this insufficiently-evolved species can serve up.

I wish you would call me "Mr. Applegate." It's pithy and user-friendly.

Lately there's been some flap up above about some nasty cartoons of the boss that got published in a newspaper. There's a big, big segment of the boss's praise and worship team who think it's a sin to put his face on paper.

And then there's another big, big segment of his praise and worship team who go out of their way to depict the boss and his family (and the incidents in the Bible) in the most gorgeous ways possible.

Who's right? Well, I hope I don't insult any Muslims here by saying this (they're all insufficiently evolved individuals like the rest of the human race, no better, no worse), but the Christians have done right by the boss. Not only does he have a thick skin where satire is concerned, he's often quite smitten by the artwork he inspires.

Not that he doesn't like all those beautiful mosaics in the mosques. He thinks they're swell. But he doesn't mind having his portrait painted. He told me he didn't even see why Andres Serrano got his NEA grant yanked. Now that's tolerant. A guy submerges a crucifix in ... potty stuff, and calls it art, and the boss says, "Oh, I'm not going to waste a perfectly good lightning bolt on that."

Every time the boss sends me an email he asks how Michelangelo is getting along down here. The boss does care about Mikey.

What, you mean you thought the artist who carved all those breathtaking sculptures, and lay on his back doing a chapel roof, and had to beg for his payments (we freelancers know all about that), you thought he got into heaven? Forget it. And you know why, too.

Mikey tried, he really did, when he was alive. But he had a few breakdowns in resolve, and that's all it takes.

When he first arrived here, Mikey was bummed big time. But at the dawn of the twentieth century, he found a whole new team of collaborators. Take Van Gogh, for instance. Mikey adores him. Picasso? Adores him! Edvard Munch? Mikey's softened that one up substantially. And for the last ten years, Mikey's been working with this really sweet kid, Jean-Michel Basquiat. You should see what they turn out together!

Ah, well, I guess you might ... someday.

Back to the case in point: insulting cartoons about the boss. He figures it goes with the job, and his second-in-command (and for that matter, the Prophet in the Shade), are truly heartbroken over the course of events.

If someone can't take criticism, they hardly qualify to be a god. Am I right?

So stop all this burning and rioting and pontificating (I love that word), and be at peace with one another. I'm nowhere near certain that your species will make it to the next level, no matter how many thin cell phones and IPods you create.

See You Soon,
MR. APPLEGATE