Thou­sands of despon­dent New­fies, dressed in mourn­ing blue, threw them­selves into the sea yes­ter­day at the very moment their deity, Danny Williams, resigned.  Thou­sands more are reported miss­ing or failed to return text mes­sages, fuel­ing fears that other mem­bers of “The Danny Nation” have opted for more dis­creet means of self-annihilation.

Office of the Premier

“The thing about most mes­si­ahs,” said the­o­log­i­cal scholar Dun­can Kent, “is they don’t, typ­i­cally, leave office. But The Danny deity has fucked off to the golf course and the after-dinner speak­ing circuit.”

The many New­fies that wor­shipped The Danny have seen their “cos­mos destroyed and are unable to fathom how to con­tinue liv­ing,” says Kent. The New­fies believe that The Danny Deity deliv­ered them from slav­ery in Alberta by mag­i­cally dri­ving the price of oil, mined off the coast of New­found­land by Petro Multi­na­tion­als, over $100/barrel.

Con­cerns that many of the lurid, sac­cha­rin, hagio­graphic farewell pieces aired and pub­lished by New­fie media would dis­tress and panic New­fies were borne out.  Items pur­port­ing to be news that were in fact “high­light reels of the Saviour’s holy tantrums” aired by CBC Radio’s New­fie Ser­vice induced one group of three hun­dred fol­low­ers to throw them­selves off a cliff to their deaths while singing the provin­cial anthem, the Ode to Newfoundland.

Despite the ter­ri­ble price New­fies paid for their ven­er­a­tion of Father of Con­fed­er­a­tion Joey Small­wood,  hys­ter­i­cal idol­a­try is still widely prac­ticed on the iso­lated island. “Despair, despon­dency, and a sur­feit of accor­dion and fid­dle rit-n-dittery have incul­cated a deep desire to be deliv­ered,” says Kent. “New­fies want to be rap­tured up. ‘God guard thee, New­found­land,’ indeed.”

Mean­while, The Deity was work­ing on his putting game.

Mod­ern New­found­lan­ders and Labrado­ri­ans are descended from Newfies.

–with files by Paul Moth and Carl Johnson

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