Bachmann and Perry more come-out than their predecessor

Jerry Falwell & Ronald Reagan

With the colorful likes of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry focusing us on the present, we might forget that their superstition doesn't significantly break the mold of a particular conservative icon.
    As Christopher Hitchens reminds us on pp. 232-233 of his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22:

The Leader of the Free World was frequently photographed in the company of "end-times" Protestant fundamentalists and biblical literalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: tethered gas-balloons of greed and cynicism once written up by Martin Amis as "frauds of Chaucerian proportions." The president found time to burble with such characters about the fulfillments of ancient "prophecy" and the coming Apocalypse. He also speculated drivelingly that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution. He was married to a woman who employed a White House astrologer....

Hitchens had prefaced those pertinent remarks with some other observations on the man:

...I did not at all like Ronald Reagan, and nobody then could persuade me that I should...There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with his folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called "The Great Communicator" by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths. ("South Africa has stood beside us in every major war we have ever fought," he declared while defending a regime whose party leadership had been locked up by the British for pro-Nazi sympathies in the Second World War. "The Russian language contains no word for 'freedom'" was another stupefying pronouncement of his....Up close, at press conferences, the carapace of geniality proved to be flaky: I was once within a few feet of his lizard-like face when he was asked a question that he didn't care for—about the theft of President Carter's briefing book by Reagan campaign operatives during the 1980 elections—and found myself quite shaken by the look of senile, shifty malice that came into his eyes as he offered the excuse that the New York Times had also accepted stolen property in the case of the Pentagon Papers....

PTL xxxx

When I saw the North Carolina license plate "PTL xxxx" this morning, I thought of the club started by the televangelicals Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1970's. "PTL" stood for "Praise The Lord." The late Jerry Falwell even got involved after the club fell on hard times owing to Jim's drugging and raping a church secretary. According to Wikipedia,

The September 21, 1987 issue of Time Magazine noted that Jerry Falwell "plunged" down a 163-foot "hellish" water slide in fulfillment to "a promise made during a fund-raising drive that netted $20 million for the debt-ridden PTL."

And PTL reminded me of a placard on the wall of my sister Mary's guest room: "Praise the Lord...anyway." That is, Praise the Lord not only because something good has happened to you (you're still alive, for example), but even though someone else may have been raped, murdered, or killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq....

We silly, magic-believing humans want God to be good. And for the bad that God is probably responsible for (if He, She, or It is responsible for other stuff), we make up reasons why that's really good too. Someone's got to die to make room on the planet, for example. One animal has to be slaughtered if another is to eat. Eat meat, anyway. Humans need bad stuff to happen so that they can have "learning experiences." Nevermind if the ones who get crushed under a bus flunk the exam immediately. Stuff happens, and they get to take a make-up in the afterlife. Maybe other animals don't get that second chance, but...well, they don't really feel pain anyway, right? Et cetera, et cetera.

I actually started thinking about this before I saw the "PTL" license plate. When I woke up this morning, my book tape player had of course gone all of the way to the end after I fell asleep last night listening to David Lodge's Small World: An Academic Romance. I figured I might as well wake up by listening to a few more "pages" before I got up. (I certainly didn't feel like springing out of bed yet—not that I feel that way often anymore, alas.)

I didn't know at what spot on Side 3^* of the tape I'd fallen asleep (that is, approximately how many seconds I might need to rewind), so I tried to tune in to "my spirit self," which never sleeps and observes everything, and sense when he (or it? or she?) was telling me to stop. When I felt something, I stopped the rewind and, sure enough, I was at a spot I sort of remembered listening to not long before I fell asleep. It had worked again.

Whenever it "hadn't worked," I'd always thought that I had failed to tune in and so didn't sense when my spirit self was telling me to stop. But what I got to thinking this morning was that my expectation that my spirit self wouldn't try to trick me (that is, wouldn't lie to me) might be a false expectation. What if he let the tape run all the way back without saying anything to me at all? What if he said it almost instantly and kept saying it as I inched my way back? In fact, might this have been what was happening on certain occasions...?

And what if God plays tricks on us? He certainly seemed to play them on the other folks who didn't wake up this morning (or on those who died yesterday and didn't even get to go to sleep last night, and especially on the Iraqis and on the Americans that Bush keeps sending to Iraq for whatever his reason is this week).

Or, to "simplify" things (although I don't understand how it could possibly make things simpler), what if there isn't any spirit self, and what if God doesn't exist? What if there are other reasons or agencies—chance, neuronal activity, who knows what?

But we'd probably still believe in magic.
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* This special recording medium from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped has four sides packed at half-speed (15/16 inches per second) on each cassette tape.