PRIME TIME
The other day a letter poured in from one of my many admirers. Though a little cryptic, it was, I assume, a response to something I’ve written lately. It said, in toto: “Mr. Richard Walls: John 3:16. Thank You, A Friend.” Well, it beats a death threat but still I found it a little irritating, particularly that “a friend” took it for granted, simply because I recently had the pleasure to write unkind things about Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Stryper, that I must be a biblical illiterate.
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PRIME TIME
COMING CLEAN
Richard C. Walls
by
The other day a letter poured in from one of my many admirers. Though a little cryptic, it was, I assume, a response to something I’ve written lately. It said, in toto: “Mr. Richard Walls: John 3:16. Thank You, A Friend.” Well, it beats a death threat but still I found it a little irritating, particularly that “a friend” took it for granted, simply because I recently had the pleasure to write unkind things about Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Stryper, that I must be a biblical illiterate. In fact, going by a swift analysis of my fan’s earnest scrawl, I’d say I had John 3:16 well committed to memory, along with a ream of other Protestant chart-topping texts, long before “a friend” yyas born. Not that I’m claiming to be one of “them — the fruit of my Baptist upbringing has been a happy, and I believe healthy, agnosticism. So it bugs me when someone, in the full flush of his/her religious fervor, assumes that they know something I don’t. From where I’m sitting it looks like they’re going through a phase I grew out of long ago (which is not to say that 10 or 20 years hence, my spirit deconstructed by some personal tragedy, I won’t attempt to salvage the shards by reembracing the faith of my youth with a vengeance, and end up on street corners handing out pentacostal pamphlets.)
It’s also distressing that when I offer the opinion that Robertson (or Falwell or the execrable Swaggart) is an asshole, someone then sees that as attacking religion. Not that I have anything against criticizing religion (in any of its multitude of flavors) but I’d prefer to do it somewhere else than here—CREEM is much too fun a mag for me to want to sully its pages with such serious (and tedious) doctrinal dissent. No, my dislike of Robertson et. al. is a reaction to their cruel politics, their debased social agenda and their teeny tiny brains. The fact that they’re “religious” bothers me not—it only confirms an old lesson I first learned during the heyday of the hippie era (as Casey Kasem might say), when great claims were being made for the cosmic insights available via marijuana. True, it turned Out, if a person had a philosophical bent, the mercurial weed might lead to some interesting connections— but if a person was a big dummy, then what you ended up with was a stoned big dummy. Likewise, religion: though I believe it’s an effective behavior modifier, and I appreciate that it brings to many people the peace and order they so desperately need; still, I don’t think that religion per se will necessarily lead to wisdom—if a person is a jerk, what you often end up with is a pious jerk.
AND SPEAKING OF OPIATES: I was going to string together some pungent observations about how TV has done its share in marketing the current drug hysteria but it occurs to me that with my lead time of about two months, the whole thing will have probably blown over, or at least cooled down, by the time this appears (and before some offended ex-drug addicts start sending me their favorite quotes, I should quickly that the topic here was to have been media treatment, not drugs). So I’ll just say kudos to Dan Rather for his continuing references to the “election year” war on drugs. Hey, maybe this guy really is the subversive that the right-wingers keep saying he is. We can only hope.
ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE: Is Linda Ellerbee really all she’s cracked up to be? Having only caught her act a few times on the Today show and now on her new series Our World (APC)—which she has a hand in writing—I can’t tell.
Our World is an oddity designed by ABC to bide time while the whole universe is watching The Cosby Show. Each episode takes a particular year and runs it, with mucho footage from the archives, through the nostalgia mill—a TV show largely about how TV viewed a certain year. It’s a limited format (how many people would tune in for, say, 1947?) which, all things considered, is probably a smart move.
