Jerry Falwell Blames You
19 Sep 2001
Jerry Falwell Blames You
By Mark Morford
There has been talk of hucksters amongst the New York rubble, of scam
artists and shysters, of crazy wandering people seeking nonexistent
loved ones, of slimeball journalists angling for an inside scoop, of
fake rescue personnel seeking morbid souvenirs.
Of phony charities set up by fraudulent scum-sucking slug-people
trying to dupe the minds and drain the wallets of heartbroken
Americans, of glazed-eyed Scientologists masquerading as mental help
counselors and walking around carrying clipboards and asking
bystanders if they'd like a free "personality test" and the
opportunity to meet John Travolta in a bunker somewhere in Florida.
Then there are Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Perhaps you have heard this. Perhaps you saw the incredible story. It
winged around the Net faster than light, faster than ignorance itself.
Two aging and small-minded but somehow still influential religious
zealots. Two pasty and terminally unpleasant whitebread
televangelists, leaders of immense flocks of sadly misguided Christian
citizens, sucking in millions in donations every year to finance their
"churches" and their religious compounds and their cosmetic dental
work and their bulletproof gold-trimmed Range Rovers.
There they are, on "The 700 Club," the Christian pundit TV show, off
in some dank remote corner of the cable channel spectrum, howling and
thumping into the Void, all righteous and judgmental and somehow very,
very sad. Robertson and Falwell, sitting on really ugly couches
surrounded by fake flowers and bad lighting, openly blaming much of
the World Trade Center tragedy -- all the violence, the hatred, the
astounding brutality of it all -- blaming it on, you know, those
people.
Gays. Lesbians. Liberals. Feminists. Pro-choicers. The ACLU. Pagans,
for chrissakes. That prominent army of cultural heathens running like
rabid dogs through the moral flowerbed, who have angered the Bearded
One and riled His fur and invited His punishment of non-protection
down upon Earth because of their wanton and godless ways and gosh,
well, this is what happens when you go against the will of the
Almighty and don't call in right now to the number you see scrolling
across the bottom of your screen and pay your church dues on time and
in full, brother. "God gave us what we deserve," Falwell actually
said. And Robertson nodded.
And you can get angry at their words or you can shake your head in
disbelief, you can groan or sigh or you can even laugh a little, at
the absurdity of it all, at the rabid intolerance and the obvious
display of narrow-minded religious bile, the appalling
self-righteousness, rooted in the same acrid fundamentalist soil that
spawned the "Attack on America" in the first place.
And you can note that even the White House itself, the most right-wing
administration we've had to endure in decades, even Bush & Co. was
forced to call Falwell's comments "inappropriate" and thus impel a
rather embarrassing retraction and a mildly humble apology, not that
it matters, not that anyone believes it, but still.
But the best reaction is of course to be very, very pleased. Happy,
even. To realize it's always a good day when fundamentalist religious
bonk-jobs go way over the line in a very public way, when even an
administration like Bush's has to distance itself from the Christian
right, when even devoutly religious people who might've had some
affinity for Robertson or Falwell in the past may indeed realize how
utterly noxious is the voice of prejudice and fanaticism and excessive
use of Brylcreem.
It was, in effect, an ironically powerful misstep, one that will serve
only to further unite all us disparate savages and heathens, liberals
and conservatives and communists, gays and lesbians and heteros and
the as-yet-undecideds, vegans and meat eaters, and make us all realize
how little room there is in the world for shallow isolationism and
ignorant dogma, for hilariously mangled moral principles, for the limp
egos of unhappy men of limited intellectual acumen whose sad
ideologies simply could not be further removed from the reality we're
all saddled with, for better or worse.
And for this awkward gesture, this small but glorious backfiring, we
should all be grateful.
Thoughts for the author? Email him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate, just like a special magic bunny of love. He also
writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed daily email column and
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The televangelists, the godless heathens, and a little proper
gratitude
SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
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