Let Us Pray

For an essay project when I was in high school, a teacher asked us to imagine an archeologist thousands of years from now, after everything we now know was long gone, digging up a nickle. The assignment was to write about all the things that could be learned about our society and culture from that one coin. Now suppose the guy found an Oscar statuette. It goes without saying he would assume that it was a god we worshipped. Imagine further that tonight, during the Academy Awards ceremony, an earthquake struck, the Big One, and Hollywood was buried like Pompeii. Our archeologist, discovering the ruins eons from now, would conclude that the Kodak Theatre was a temple, and he would reconstruct the strange rituals and customs of our religion, the parade on the red carpet, our high priests and priestesses decked out in elaborate costumes and jewelry, the seemingly interminable service of litany, oration, and prayer, envelopes containing the names of the chosen ones, and everywhere you look the golden effigies of the beautifully sculpted ideal man/god, naked, grasping his long sword in front of him. At the very core of our religion, the future scientist would assume, is a worship of sexuality. And in support of his theory, he would uncover at one of the feasts attended by the elite of the elite the remains of desserts, little cakes adorned with tiny chocolate replicas of the golden man/god, which get eaten to ensure sexual potency for another year.