Channel Serfing

Anyone who knows me, realizes I have an odd interest in contemporary religious broadcasting.
From that bloated clown Paul Crouch (maximum leader of the Trinity Broadcasting Network) to Pastor John Hagee who is nothing if not the living image of Reichsmarshal Herman Goering.
These are the last great practitioners of pulpit demagoguery....in an age of cool intimate television rhetoric these money hungry yokels are still banging their fists on the podium, shouting and bugging their eyes with gusto.
In the absence of any serious revival of vaudeville they are the best show in town for the money.
and so it came to pass that I was flipping around the dial the other night and what did I behold on Boston Catholic Television?
Why the frantic punim of that money grubbing Protestant charlatan Jack Van Impe!
Purists of sacred buncombe will recall Jack's act with relish...every night Rexella (his horrible mylar blow-up doll of a wife) reads her husband the latest news, Jack then swings into a "scriptural" harangue from the same that goes heavy on endtimes nonsense.
No joke, no turd answers positively to Newton's Law that Jack can't use as an elaborate proof of the imminence of the rapture.
You wouldn't mind so much but this freak grins toothily through the whole performance like Liberace...it's like he can't frickin' wait for Civilization to disintegrate.
And not for nothin' but he's been doing this end-is-nigh act for twenty years now, his poor dim-witted contributors have gone bankrupt three times over enriching Jack and company whilst waiting for his misbegotten Götterdämmerung.
Van Impe has also be using this "apocalypse when?" twaddle to fund-raise, sell books,videos,bibles, and all the usual tchotchkes associated with a high pressure religious sales campaign.
Now WHY BCTV feels a need to give time to this jack-off I do not know.
Normally they broadcast Mother Angelica's feeble brand of blather...but she's been recuperating since a stroke in 2002.
So with the Dioceses in such dire financial straits the airtime has been sold to bangtail preachers en masse.
Of course Mother Angelica is nothing compared to Van Impe, as desperate as she was to behead the executive committee of Planned Parenthood she was always too old and too poorly funded for such charitable acts.
Not so Jack he commands millions in donations and can hustle people to the polls on election day.
BCTV with it's nice middle age monks counting the rosary and harmless chat shows is an anachronism, a vision of religious broadcasting from the 1950's wholly unaware of television's vast potential for profit and power-mongering for the modern day preacher on the make.

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally Licensed Public Airwaves
And elsewhere
8-27-03