Prayer: the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

The fact that you would ask the question, how can I pray for you, speaks volumes about the United States of America. I have been amazed by the fact that millions of Americans of all faith, all political backgrounds, pray for me and Laura. And it is unbelievably sustaining. It is comforting. It is humbling to be prayed for. Wisdom and strength, and my family, is what I'd like for you to pray for. [G. W. Bush, 2 May 2007]

I'm nominally a Christian, but I'm skeptical of the whole Resurrection thing, and I've never understood the notion of the Trinity. So in that respect, I suppose, I share Shrub's notion of a 'unitary Executive' [why is it that, at least in that context, 'unitary' always looks like some neologistic mishmash of 'sanitary,' 'unitard,' and 'urinary' {and, of course, 'unitard' there is sort of a portmanteau composed of, again, 'urinary,' and 'retard'}?], although we would disagree on which Executive is conceptually unitary, here. And one thing that has particularly perplexed me is the entire notion of intercessory prayer. I mean, what is the point? It would only matter if god didn't have a plan, in which case there's a whole lot meaningless misery going on out there. If god does have a plan, though, either it includes getting what one is praying for or it doesn't, and either way the prayer ought to be irrelevant (a third option would be that getting it depends upon praying for it, which [a.] is manifestly not how it works, and [b.] returns us to the question of the plan, if only in respect to the subject of the prayer). I'm much more sympathetic to what I understand to be the Jewish notion of intercessory prayer, which is along the lines of "don't bother, because who the hell do you think you are?" Or, to be more faithful to the spirit of the notion, one doesn't pray for one's own benefit, because that's selfish. And a lucky thing it is for you, Mr. Bush, because I'd pray for you to be run out of town on a rail, or tarred and feathered, or whatever it takes to free this nation of your tyranny. I'd pray for you to be utterly disgraced, to see it coming from miles away and be unable to do a thing to stop it. I'd pray for you to see with fiber-optical clarity the misery that you have wrought on this earth, and for you to suffer the worst of it.

But you asked for wisdom, which shows you have at least enough sense to recognize your general lack thereof. Wisdom is something we all wish you had, and I hope god does, too, for the sake of its own creation. So, OK, I'll pray for wisdom for you: the wisdom to recognize that you have ruined everything you have touched in the past five years, the wisdom to take meaningful steps to repair the damage you've caused, and the wisdom to share this with the rest of your political 'hood.

But so help me, Mr. Bush, if you remain so damned stubborn that you'd even ignore god's own wisdom rather than stray the course, I'll start praying the way I've been wanting to. And if that's sustaining, then I pray with more desperation than I know.