PowerPoint Ranger

In case you’ve been living under a rock or camping under Spanish moss or living in a field of poppies (I like to give people options), Microsoft PowerPoint©™®^F*CKUGOOGLE is the world’s most popular slideshow presentation program. It is used by “engineers”, corporate robber barons, financial advisors (rich people who advise themselves, under the guise of advising you), “scientists,” and self-help experts. Since I belong to a profession whose name lives inside snigger quotes, I am of course a PowerPoint expert. We call ourselves PowerPoint Rangers.

Here is a whirlwind guide on how to put together a PowerPoint.  A PowerPoint slide consists of four parts: 

1.      A killer title;
2.      Photon torpedo bullets;
3.      Pretty pictures that exceed the thousand word limit;
4.      “Take-aways”, or “bumper stickers” that tell the reader what to think.

I will draw for you an example that everyone can relate to. Suppose Matthew had available to him the Holy PowerPoint when he wrote his Gospel of Jesus? Unlike Mark, who is a delicious read and makes Jesus exciting, Matthew is a horrible writer, and I would rather put an arrow in one ear and out the other than to have to read him again. Dull, dull, dull, except in his renderings of the sayings of Jesus, which he evidently copied from the elusive Q-source. But I digress.

It could all be different if Matthew had PowerPoint. I’ll show you. The following example is the first chapter of Matthew, in which our inept Gospel-ateer establishes that the prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled.

True, the Tree of Jesse did not exist in Matthew’s time, but surely he could have come up with some eye candy. You might also object that the graphic is unreadable. Inadmissible! The gist of it will come across to the audience in what we PowerPoint Rangers call “the audio.” The presenter will hit the highlights such as David and Abraham and Solomon and the patriarchy of the Second Temple and all that good stuff. No problemo.

Note how the title generates excitement and is positively titillating. The bullets are concise, hard-hitting, and cling to the major points. Matthew’s shtick is that Jesus should be accepted by the Jews as the messiah of prophecy, as all the requirements have been fulfilled, because, well, he says so.

Finally, the bumper sticker burns it in. Jesus was born to a virgin, he is the messiah, he is King of the Jews. Isn’t that better?

Of course, what counts are the sayings of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount occupies Chapters 5 through 7. Let’s try our hand at Chapter 5.

The beguiling Jesus starts by seducing his audience with the sayings that later came to be known as the beatitudes, here neatly summarized in the language of PowerPoint. The rationale given by the Master, of course, goes in ‘the audio.’ Then “Matthew” (that is, we on his behalf) neatly summarizes the main points in power bullets. Matthew wouldn’t have had recourse to a Renaissance painting of the Sermon, but if we are the tiniest bit lucky, Matthew might have been a better sketch artist than he was a writer. Now, admittedly, a PowerPoint slide could never do justice to the lovely rhetoric of Jesus himself. The presentation could be accompanied by pamphlet handout capturing the full text of Jesus’s remarks. That would be a handier reference than a 1400 page Bible, which is almost as long as a Russian novel.

I will leave it to you to fill in the remaining 26 chapters and complete the literary salvation of Matthew.

Of course, we have adduced this New Testament exercise merely as an example of mastering PowerPoint. The lessons herein equally apply to convincing the Department of Defense to waste billions of dollars on an unfeasible weapon system; convincing the gullible to adopt a dietary fad that will cause their livers to wither away into pecans; or stealing billions from seniors. So get with it!  You too can be a PowerPoint Ranger!