FALWELL COMPLIMENTS THE DEVIL

He’s dead now, so this entrée, which has been lying around for some time, is quite old:

Anyhow… scrolling across the bottom of my news screen this morning (Date ?) came the news that Rev. Falwell is apologizing for comparing Clinton (Hillary?) to the devil. Said it was “tongue in cheek”. These public clergymen! They’re almost always doing some nonsense or other in their mouths with their tongues. Now that would be a real insult if the imaginary creature in Falwell’s brain actually existed, and comparing the devil to Hillary is a real compliment to the phantasm of the devil that religious people carry around in their heads. However, Falwell needs to be careful. He’s a con man, has been making his living conning people out of their money all his life (makes his living that way), so I believe he actually knows that what he says is nonsense much of the time, but he needs to remember that those who take him seriously are very gullible people. I mean—look at all the Biblical nonsense they take literally! An interesting sidelight is when I consider that perhaps Falwell has been peddling his nonsense so long that even he believes it. Of course, I’m told that the best con men of all are those who have convinced themselves of their own lies.

By the way, do you think their god was trying to give them a message about badmouthing the Clintons, when He took Falwell's life?


OF WILLIAM INGE AND OTHERS

Mertie and I had a brush with fame last Saturday night (Sept. 30, 2006) when we attended an Interplayers performance of William Inge’s play “Bus Stop”. I saw the 50’s movie with Marilyn Monroe and recall that I liked it. The Spokane performance featured Ellen Travolta and her husband John Bannon. It was just okay and not helped by the fact, for Mertie and me, that this man sitting directly in front of us kept coming in and leaving while the theater was still dark. I wondered aloud at intermission to Mertie about why the bastard was interrupting our enjoyment. This morning, a week later, the Spokesman reports that John Travolta was at the show to watch his sister perform. He reportedly had been ushered in and out at begining, end and intermission while the house lights were off in order not to distract from his sister and brother-in-law’s performance. I could have leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Ah, these brushes with the famous, really excites an old codger like mese’f, but what does it actually signify?

Also while on the topic of Inge—as a youth, I was truly moved by such movies as “Picnic”, “Dark At The Top Of The Stairs”, “Come Back Little Sheba”, and “Splendor In The Grass”. Specially “Picnic”. I identified with the drifter, played by William Holden, in “Picnic”, thinking myself doomed to be one myself, the perpetual outsider and “Dark… Top… Stairs” I recognized as an existential drama about a god which did not exist. I didn’t like Splendor all that much. I didn’t realize how much Inge had been a part of my thinking back in those days until I looked him up after Mertie and I returned from the play. Then all the dots connected, and I was not surprised to read that he offed himself June 10, 1973 in a deep depression. At about the same time as Inge kissed off his Earthly coil, my first marriage ended, and I set off for the deep South to work on a shrimper, a job which never came my way, so I ended up machining cylinder heads for Cessna aircraft engines down there, fishing off the shore end of the Dauphin Island bridge, south of Mobile, Alabama, learning to crab with my new friend George Wills, born and bred in New Orleans but working in Mobile, drinking Budweiser to excess, eating lots of clams, generally whoring around like the Holden drifter until I met my second wife, born and bred in Mobile. Then commenced a brief and dramatic period in my life in which I, born and bred a northern city rat, fancied myself quite the redneck. For all of six months, then my wife hit me with her hard hat, tried to strangle me and threw me out.