1 Boring Old Man

As an early teenager, a friend and I would gather on Sunday mornings to watch Oral Roberts on the black and white television set [connected a huge antenna that brought in the signal from our nearest station some 120 miles to the south]. While we watched it as a comedy show, I always wondered what was going on with the audience. People would come with their stories of illness. Oral would grasp their heads, contort his face, gyrate a bit, and reaching a crescendo, he would yell "Heal!" At the end of the show, he would hold his outstretched hand to the camera and entreat the sick  in the t.v. audience to touch their screens for some long distance healing. He was intensely melodramatic. I just couldn’t imagine that the audience took him seriously – but they seemed enthralled. So were we, but in a different way.

Many years later, the televangelists of the 1980’s appeared [in color, in focus]. Sometimes, before going to bed, I’d catch Jimmy Bakker and Tammye Faye. On Sunday mornings, I’d occasionally see Jimmy Swaggart or Richard Tillman. They all ran on the same melodramatic fuel that I recalled from those early Oral Roberts shows [I never could abide Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson – they just didn’t have the class of the others]. And then the scandals started. Bakker, Swaggart, they went down like flies. It was great theater – sort of like what I imagined Vaudeville must’ve been like. Jimmy Swaggart’s return shows after yet another scandalous encounter with Satan in a Louisiana brothel were my all time favorites.

Now there are lots of those programs – some slick somebody entreating people to send money to "sow" – a "seed." The line is about "reaping what you sow." So, you send them money, then some miracle happens and you get a whole lot back somehow. The shows are the huckster pitch followed by testimonials from former miracle recipients. These latter day televangelists are pretty boring. I doubt I’ve ever seen one to the end. Plastic clothes and hairdos, cheesy sets, sterilized gospel music, and the monotonous sow/reap scam. They just weren’t up to Oral’s and Swaggart’s level – more in the range of just plain silly. But then came the megachurches, and the moral majority, and the religious right.  I couldn’t even watch them at all. They scared me. They still do. It wasn’t interesting, or curious, or funny. It was sick and I felt more like crying than laughing. And my occasional televangelist watching days were over.

I mention these people because every time I see a clip of Glenn Beck, I think of those televangelists. It’s the same melodrama, the same pseudo-earnestness, the same quaisi-logic that strings together stories that end up with some ludicrous point based on associative links that remind me of my years seeing paranoid patients in State Mental Hospitals. There was the one where he showed slides of the Art on the Rockefeller Plaza that he somehow connected to Stalin or Mussolini, so therefore MSNBC was communist or fascist because they were in the building. Recently, "social justice" and "democracy" were called code words for fascism and communism. They’re so hard to remember because they are so off the chart. Oh yeah, the 3 G’s – God, Guns, and Gold. I only see the absurd ones that make the blogs or the Daily Show. I expect there are many more bizarre than these. In that regard, Beck is like Pat Robertson, twisting logic like a pretzel. But his delivery – it’s got that same flair that Oral Roberts, and Jimmy Swaggart brought to the table. And Beck’s baby-face reminds me of Jimmy Bakker in his prime at Heritage USA.