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ORAL FIXATION VOL. 3
Jan. 15th, 2010 01:42 amA lot of people have been posting the video of Pat Robertson saying God sent an earthquake to Haiti because they made a deal with Satan to overthrow the French two centuries ago.
I’m not here to talk about that. Because really, why? Pat always says batshit like that. He does it every day. And frankly, compared to Glenn Beck’s tea parties, Sarah Palin’s death panels and Chuck Norris’ discovery of the Obama’s Secret Interpol Vault, Pat Robertson’s brand of batshit is relatively mild in 2010 – quaint, even.
But this does remind me that I wanted to say a few words about Oral Roberts.
He died last month, you see. And I have a policy of not speaking ill of the deceased until at least after the funeral. And there’s really no way for me to write about him and be nice about it. So I’m just now getting around to it.
So ... why bother, if I wasn’t a fan?
I suppose because I grew up in Middle Tennessee during the golden of Televangelism – Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Ernest Angely, Dr Gene Scott and of course Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts. And by the time I was in high school in the 80s, many of them were already organizing their followers into a political bloc (the Religious Right, alias the Moral Majority, alias Christian Coalition) that would latch itself like a remora onto the Great White Shark Republican machine until, by some freak of evolutionary improbability, it somehow managed to take control of the shark’s brain.
Oral wasn’t exactly part of that machine – while his beliefs dovetailed with the CC, especially when it came to family values and OMG gayz, he was never really all that openly politically active. The closest he arguably came was the Christian law school in his university that was eventually handed over to Pat Robertson’s CBN University, which became Regent University, which you may have heard of. (Hint: Michele Bachmann and most of the Dubya administration were graduates.)
That’s more of a Pat thing than an Oral thing, sure. Still, it’s fair to say Roberts was instrumental in setting the stage that enabled the Christian Right to rise to power in the first place, and American politics may never recover from it.
That said, I knew Roberts more for his being a pioneer in the field of Big-Money Showmanship and World Class Hustling that was rattling TV sets all over the mid-South around that time. And Roberts stood out from the pack somehow, and not just because he practically invented modern televangelism, taking Billy Graham’s mass-market earnestness and turning it into the Christian equivalent of pro wrestling (only in a bad way).
Everyone had their gimmicks, but Roberts’ claims of raising the dead and talking to a 900-Foot Jesus are the stuff of legend.
To say nothing of the time he told his followers, “God told me that if you don’t give me $8 million, he will kill me.”
And it WORKED.
Easy money!
You have to respect that. I mean, who else could get away with a swindle that big on national television?
Plus, it led to the transformation of Bill The Cat, lead singer of Deathtöngue, into Fundamentally Oral Bill.
Now THAT'S a legacy.
Okay, that’s all I got.
BONUS TRACK: Here’s a slightly more accurate version of how Haiti ended up where it is. It’s not pleasant.
PT Barnum was right,
This is dF
I’m not here to talk about that. Because really, why? Pat always says batshit like that. He does it every day. And frankly, compared to Glenn Beck’s tea parties, Sarah Palin’s death panels and Chuck Norris’ discovery of the Obama’s Secret Interpol Vault, Pat Robertson’s brand of batshit is relatively mild in 2010 – quaint, even.
But this does remind me that I wanted to say a few words about Oral Roberts.
He died last month, you see. And I have a policy of not speaking ill of the deceased until at least after the funeral. And there’s really no way for me to write about him and be nice about it. So I’m just now getting around to it.
So ... why bother, if I wasn’t a fan?
I suppose because I grew up in Middle Tennessee during the golden of Televangelism – Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Ernest Angely, Dr Gene Scott and of course Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts. And by the time I was in high school in the 80s, many of them were already organizing their followers into a political bloc (the Religious Right, alias the Moral Majority, alias Christian Coalition) that would latch itself like a remora onto the Great White Shark Republican machine until, by some freak of evolutionary improbability, it somehow managed to take control of the shark’s brain.
Oral wasn’t exactly part of that machine – while his beliefs dovetailed with the CC, especially when it came to family values and OMG gayz, he was never really all that openly politically active. The closest he arguably came was the Christian law school in his university that was eventually handed over to Pat Robertson’s CBN University, which became Regent University, which you may have heard of. (Hint: Michele Bachmann and most of the Dubya administration were graduates.)
That’s more of a Pat thing than an Oral thing, sure. Still, it’s fair to say Roberts was instrumental in setting the stage that enabled the Christian Right to rise to power in the first place, and American politics may never recover from it.
That said, I knew Roberts more for his being a pioneer in the field of Big-Money Showmanship and World Class Hustling that was rattling TV sets all over the mid-South around that time. And Roberts stood out from the pack somehow, and not just because he practically invented modern televangelism, taking Billy Graham’s mass-market earnestness and turning it into the Christian equivalent of pro wrestling (only in a bad way).
Everyone had their gimmicks, but Roberts’ claims of raising the dead and talking to a 900-Foot Jesus are the stuff of legend.
To say nothing of the time he told his followers, “God told me that if you don’t give me $8 million, he will kill me.”
And it WORKED.
Easy money!
You have to respect that. I mean, who else could get away with a swindle that big on national television?
Plus, it led to the transformation of Bill The Cat, lead singer of Deathtöngue, into Fundamentally Oral Bill.
Now THAT'S a legacy.
Okay, that’s all I got.
BONUS TRACK: Here’s a slightly more accurate version of how Haiti ended up where it is. It’s not pleasant.
PT Barnum was right,
This is dF
