There Will Your Heart Be Also

Of course, one reason I haven't posted more parodies lately, is the same impulse that caused the retirement of Tom Lehrer. He used to make Mark Russell seem like a bumbling amateur, but "retired in 1973, saying that the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger had made satire redundant." On my best day, I could not have been subtle enough to imagine these mind-boggling actual words from Katherine Harris, announcing she was giving ten million dollars to her own Senate campaign in Florida:

I am willing to take this widow's mite, this pearl of great price, and put everything on the line.

Fortunately, Fred Clark, our self-sacrificing parser of the wretched Left Behind series, was not left speechless by this, and used his Biblical expertise to dissect it at length:

But the "pearl of great price" is not the thing you give up, it's the thing you give up everything for. ... That's a fairly creepy declaration of ambition. It only gets creepier if you take Harris' statement at face value and accept that she is willing to trade the "pearl of great price" itself (i.e., the kingdom of God) for a Senate seat.

The former reading sounds like Lady Macbeth. The latter sounds like Milton's Satan. However you read it, though, what you have here is a candidate for the U.S. Senate openly declaring that she will trade anything and everything for power. ...

So Harris claims she's giving everything she has, but really she's not. In other words, she isn't the widow, and she isn't the pearl merchant. She's Sapphira.