71 POLITICS/TACTICS/SMEAR CAMPAIGNS

Mr Stanley Arthur Tan was the victim of the most horrendous smear campaign in history. Stanley used to be great mates with God, but he had noticed that the Big Feller was starting to lose his grip. In the old days things could not have been better, having a knees up with the heavenly choir, eternal bliss. The Cherubim and Seraphim where blinding at Karaoke, but recently God had them continuously singing his praises and they where sorely missed down the Lamb and Flag on a Friday, ‘We Have All The Time In The World’ wouldn’t sound the same until Louis Armstrong got hold of it millennia later.
It was almost as if the Grand Fromage needed an ego boost. In the old days, he just had to say ‘Fiat Lux’ and a whole Universe would appear. Now it took him six days to create a single planet and He needed to rest after the effort. An eternal being is by definition outside of time, and shouldn’t need an arbitrary period of rotation about the axis of a random planet to gauge his progress. He was definitely struggling and the strain was beginning to show.
Stanley was also feeling guilty about persuading Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; something God had asked him to do, as He lacked the ‘common touch’. Stan thought the punishment was a bit strong for the crime: Eve and Adam and the entire human race that flowed from their loins were damned to ‘eat their bread in the sweat of their brow, to bring forth children in agony, and to suffer death’ all because she munched on a Golden Delicious. Poor Adam what had he done wrong? And Eve? Women cannot help themselves, you just have to watch them shop for shoes to realise that.
The last straw came when the Almighty repented of having created humans and proceeded to murder all but a few of them in a flood. The All-knowing, the Wholly-good was making bad mistakes and getting into genocidal rages.
As Andy Summers said to Sting and The Edge will eventually say to Bono, Stanley said unto God, ‘Listen mate, you’ve lost it. I want out before this gets worse.’
As freedom and autonomy are universal absolutes Stanley simply walked away. As a gesture of goodwill he promised to keep quiet about the Abraham killing his long awaited and only son debacle.
God was furious. He put a press release out that ‘Mr. S.A. Tan had been thrown out of Heaven’ (not even an original smear, Zeus had thrown Hephaetus to earth from the summit of Olympus only last summer). He also decreed that anything bad that happened in the world was to be blamed on Mr. Tan. Initially the campaign didn’t work. God got onto his market researchers to find out why. The reason was that the public could not believe that any man named after a shade of brown could be evil, the only exception being Taupe which isn’t really a colour but a marketing term designed to confuse men in carpet shops at weekends. They suggested merging the initials with the surname into one catchy, attention-grabbing name. Hence the idea of Satan was created. In a final fit of petulance God got an unmarried teenage girl pregnant and arranged for the resulting offspring to be tortured to death in order to create a religion which would go on to murder billions more souls in its name.
At the time of writing Stanley is residing happily in Cornwall, running a small ice cream and Karaoke business.