I don’t believe in signs. I believe in weed at breakfast and the slow, grinding death of the American intellect. But on Easter Monday, something foul blew in on the wind — the kind of stench that makes you squint at the sky and mutter, Jesus, who let the lizard-brained maniacs out again?
Let me set the scene. I’d just finished watching The Omen — the original hellfire classic with Gregory Peck wrestling with the spawn of Satan in a blazer so sharp it could slice your jugular. I was halfway through a stale churro and wondering whether I could use Damien’s haircut as a reason to cancel all future children, when my phone exploded with a New York Times alert: The Pope is dead.
Dead. On Easter Monday. That’s not symbolism — that’s a screenplay punchline written by a drunk screenwriter with a god complex and a deadline.
But wait — the devil’s in the details. And in this case, the detail had a name: J.D. Vance. Yes, the Ivy League hillbilly prince of performative populism. Turns out, he met with the Pope the day before His Holiness kicked off for that great conclave in the sky. Easter Sunday. The holiest of holy days. Vance, in all his bad-faith cosplay, shaking hands with the Vicar of Christ like he was asking for campaign indulgences.
Now I’m not saying Vance is Damien in a velvet blazer, but I’ve seen enough strange deathbed alignments to know when the bats are circling the bell tower. The GOP’s golden boy meets the Pope on Sunday. The Pope dies on Monday. The world shrugs. That’s how empires collapse — not with a bang, but with a poorly timed photo op.
Of course, the death of the Pope is not a sign. It’s a tragic inevitability. The old man ran out of runway. But in a country where people see the face of Jesus in their toast and still think Trump was sent by God to rapture the IRS, the optics are grim. They’ll build a narrative faster than you can say Ratzinger. And that narrative ends with Damien in Mar-a-Lago, blessing golf carts and eating raw steak with ketchup.