8º of latitude

We don’t have a No Junk Mail Please sign on our mailbox. They don’t work anyway, plus if they did you’d forever be short of paper to wrap potato peelings in, or the remains of the ready-roasted chicken you sometimes allow yourself as a treat.

Moreover, a lot of junk mail is more interesting than the regular stuff, though in our case we get most of our real mail by email, and store it in virtual folders where the contents remain intact, unfaded, immune from accidents with scissors or upsets with coffee cups, and which are instantly retrievable. Sounds like heaven, really.

Anyway, recently we were invited to a local Memorial of Jesus’ Death. It’s this Saturday (April 12), late in the afternoon. We won’t be going along. It’s right in the middle of our Weekend Early Start drinking program. Not that we’d use that excuse if the invitation had not simply landed in our mail box and instead had been issued to us on our doorstep by a godly door-knocker. Wouldn’t want to give ourselves a bad name.

In the old days, if Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling, I’d just bare face lie and say sorry, I’m Jewish. That used to send them away in a hurry. Though maybe these days they’d be less easy to divert from their purpose. Apparently there’s this new urgency about finding god: the one cited as the proselytiser’s first preference if possible; but if you must, a god of your choice. It seems they’re available in an almost limitless range of flavours and options.

The brochure was interesting, though. It declared itself copyright 2025 Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. And it was printed in Japan.

The supporting illustrative photo was plainly of American origin. It featured a roomful of assorted humanoids in a mix of ethnicities, a range of social classes, and proper dress that would confuse and discomfit many Australians.

But the piece de resistance was the illustration of Jesus. We know from his conversation with Buddha – who in a lovely cartoon I see now and then as it makes yet another circuit of the cyberverse, told Jesus bitterly that he wished he’d gone with a no-depiction rule like the Muslims, because he was always depicted as fat – that he isn’t happy that he’s had to spend 2025 years and counting as a blond blue-eyed bloke.

But there may be hope for him. On this year’s JW brochure, he has dark hair and hazel eyes. He looks like a cross between Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments, and J.D. Vance pitching for the simpatico vote with his inventive rags-to-riches hillbilly odyssey.

Still, it’s a start.