Let's have another look at this John Hagee fellow whose endorsement John McCain was finally forced to renounce only because of his recently revealed musings on the usefulness of Adolf Hitler. An endorsement McCain had actively sought and obtained before this latest oopsie, when Hagee had only made perfectly acceptable statements about New Orleans deserving Hurricane Katrina because some people in the city wanted to have a "homosexual parade," and about Catholicism being the "Great Whore of Revelation 17."
The following video shows a portion of one of Hagee's videotaped tumbles down the circus-tubes of madness. Take a moment to refresh your recollection of just how disturbingly well-prepared and funded was this little slice of Hagee's bizarro fancy, then see me on the other side.
This is what gets me every single time about this video. Just look at how much time and loving effort must have gone into that full-length wall mural showing God's elaborate condemnation of everything except complete psychosis. Just think, had Hagee never found his own feverish little corner of legitimized mass panic and delusion, where and what would he be today?
Perhaps he would be exactly the same, just without the nice polo shirt, the size 341 slacks, the apprentice quietly listening at a table, the adoring congregation, and the fastidious artistry required to portray his intricate dream of "systems" in such nightmarish detail. Just Crazy John, secluded in some back-alley in San Antonio, all scuffed-up and half-naked, fiercely clutching the cracked professor's pointer he found in a dumpster one day. Every day, all day, he would conduct the same "seminar" on this Great Whore and that Apostate System, pointing purposefully at the jerky scribblings he made on the walls of the alley with chalk and spray paint. Standing shirtless and barefoot in a greasy puddle, he would explain to his audience of indifferent pigeons the relationship between Hitler and God, between the CIA and his handheld AM radio. In fact, he would likely make more sense than he does today, as he does triple backflip dives into an olympic pool filled with the righteous donations of his legions of followers.
I've been reading Matt Taibbi's amazing new book, The Great Derangement, and there's a much-quoted passage about his undercover infiltration of a revivalist escape in which the attendees are told to expel the demons of incest, philosophy, and handwriting analysis (!) by violently coughing and retching into vomit bags. What strikes me most profoundly about this and the world it represents is just how normalized these sorts of rituals and beliefs have become in this supposedly enlightened, post-industrial country.
Now, by no means am I suggesting that gagging into a paper bag until the demon of "intellect" finally leaves your body is the norm among evangelical practices, and neither do I suggest the same with regard to Hagee's particular brand of lunacy. However, it does seem to me that the sort of ridiculousness that Hagee and his enormous congregation represent has somehow whistled right on past widespread, universal ridicule, and into a sort of free-fire zone that our politicians and media feel reflexively obliged to respect and even revere.
Meanwhile, this same gallery pretends with such self-satisfied certainty that Scientology, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Reverend Wright's most strident sermons are so very beyond the pale and unworthy of anything but haughty condemnation. Well pardon me, but am I the only one equally disturbed by a gigantic mural showing the intricately unfolding sequence of the apocalypse, featuring a drunken whore riding atop an otherworldly apostate monster like He-Man on Battle Cat, being explained by a man who publicly and repeatedly insists that the destruction of an entire American city was God's punishment for a parade?
Truly, only in a political and media environment as intellectually inbred as ours can a presidential candidate seek out, obtain, and for months retain the political endorsement of a lunatic like John Hagee without instantly being cast out from the race like a paranoid psychotic from the local Denny's. Only in a media that equates a fraudulent war of aggression with a candidate's lack of flag-related jewelry can the political marriage of a presidential aspirant with an end-times charlatan be seen as not only acceptable and normal, but necessary for the ideological legitimacy of that candidate.
Pardon me while I go puke out the demon of sardonic revulsion.