Little Timmy has gone to heaven



by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
6/13/01



Right now, this very moment, according to the Pope and most of his predecessors, Tim McVeigh is enjoying eternal bliss. He is enjoying endless pleasure, according to the Koran, pounding his brains out rogering the houris, he’s singing with the angels, he’s joined Monty Python’s bleeding chorus. He’ll always look on the bright side of life.

He’s not just your typical dead McVeigh. He is an eternally happy McVeigh. Jesus has kissed him on the cheeks and whispered something about suffering the little children, and Peter has led him through dem’ ole pearly gates.

You see, McVeigh played his get out of jail free card. He had a priest perform Extreme Unction. For those who aren’t Catholic, Extreme Unction doesn’t involve toilet plungers, whips, masks and being tied to beds with silk undergarments; it’s Last Rites. And if you are given Last Rites and confess before you die, you are absolved of all your sins, and go straight to heaven.

Suffer the little children, indeed.

So I mentioned this to a Protestant. “Catholics!” he muttered, shaking his head.

Well, I do know that Catholics think you talk to God through a priest, whereas most Protestants are into the person-to-god-direct-call-ATT-and-getcha-deity here kind of thing, and there isn’t enough variance on that among the thousands of protestant churches for me to be able to tell them apart without lifting the tail and looking, but aside from that, didn’t McVeigh repent of his sins at the end, which means that protestants, too, figure he earned a free get-out-of-hell card?

Confessing to a priest isn’t the same thing, according to my friend. You gotta touch third base, you gotta go direct.


Doesn’t the absolution go something like, “Lord, I am most heartily sorry...” or something like that? I’m not a Catholic either.  But that would seem to satisfy the fine print on the Heaven option. 

My friend allowed that it did. By mainstream protestant theological logic, we just sent McVeigh off to eternal bliss, where he will join all those who died in a state of Grace, a state of Redemption, or even the State of Oklahoma. Whoops! My mistake.  Living and dying in Oklahoma doesn’t get you a ticket to heaven, it seems, even if it should. By logic of theologians doing their best to make sense of the Rube Goldberg philosophy of 2,000 years of Christianity, McVeigh is receiving eternal reward, while some of the kids he killed are in hell.

You just can’t pay for entertainment like that.

Now, Heaven is generally viewed as a place where angels flutter around on aerodynamically preposterous wings and the Risen plink notes out of little Greek harps that look like a cross between a horse collar and an egg slicer. 

Flutter, flutter, flutter. Plink, plink, plink. Forever.

Of course, the Moslems have a different view, involving houris and the Penis That Would Not Die. While a definite improvement over the plink and flutter heaven of frustrated nuns, doing that, and nothing else, for all eternity, would pall after the first few millennia. 

Quite a few theologians have gotten around to going hrmm over the notion that heaven, as described, could prove to be tedious, if not flat-out boring. It’s pretty hard to see Oliver Cromwell as a plink-and-flutter kind of guy. A situation where the preacher is offering an option like that, he ends up with the congregation craning their collective necks around to check out the options offered by the competition. It’s a sad fact that some true believers like good jazz, and we all know where good jazz musicians go. Louis Armstrong, no matter now nice a guy he might have been otherwise, is not doing a plink-and-flutter thing.  Liberace, maybe. But not Louis the Lip.

So theologians often describe heaven as being an endlessly malleable place where the warmest and most wonderful dreams of the saved come true. Assuming any of the following got to heaven in the first place, then Beethoven has the greatest choirs and million-piece orchestras and perfect hearing, Einstein finds out how it all fits together, Wilt Chamberlain plays a new type of basketball that has vaginas where the nets used to be. It would be disrespectful to compare such a place to Toon Town from “Who Killed Roger Rabbit”, so I won’t do so. The reader will not think of Toon Town. That is an order.

If Hitler is in Heaven (and who is to say he didn’t repent before he died?) then what would be HIS notion of heaven? I would guess that everyone, including him, has blond hair, blue eyes, square jaws, and mindless devotion to the Race.

So Timmy McVeigh is at the Pearly Gates, and St. Peter has just handed him the menu. 

“ANYTHING I want?”

“Yeah. It’s all holograms. You can’t really do any harm. It’s just entertainment. Knock yourself out.”

“Damn. If I’d known that, I would have stayed in the truck. OK. Let’s see. Um, ‘Monomaniacal self-aggrandizement’. What’s that?”

“Ah. That’s one of our most popular items. You have complete and utter control over the lives of millions. You are not responsible or accountable for anything you do. You can rape and pillage to your heart’s content, make great men bow before you, conquer the world. If you want, I can show you some excerpts from the Nixon model.”

“I dunno. I’m more the good soldier type. Taking orders, fighting for my country, dying in a good cause, that kind of thing.”

Peter stops to lick a finger and use the wet digit to mousse down a cowlick on his halo. A faint hiss and puff of steam occurs as he touches the halo, which is not flourescent. Heaven has no power shortages. He looks thoughtful. Which quadrant is Guy Fawkes in, anyway? Pete doesn’t remember.

“There’s the Rudyard Kipling model. How do you feel about wogs?”

“What are wogs?”

“Hmm. Never mind. You aren’t British, anyway. Ah!. How about the ‘Duke’ model? John Wayne. The Green Berets. Rooster Cogburn. The Last Gunslinger.”

“Oooh! That sounds interesting. I get to meet John Wayne?

“MEET him? Timmy, this is heaven! You get to SHOOT him in a fair fight!”

“Wow! Hey! Can I blow him up?”

This heavenly reward stuff is all very confusing. I like to think that if there is anything in the cosmos after we shuffle off the mortal coil, it makes some sort of moral sense. Presumptuous of me, of course, but one of the advantages of being a skeptic is that you don’t have to be presumptuous against any particular authorities.

What I would like to see is McVeigh approaching the Pearly Gates as described above, and having the same discussion, as above. Only it isn’t Saint Peter, and it isn’t heaven.

Instead, he’s led to a little puffy white cloud in the middle of nowhere, handed an object that looks like a cross between a horse collar and an egg slicer, and told to get to it.

Plink, plink, plink. Flutter, flutter, flutter. Plink, plink, plink. 

Forever.