Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Tammy Faye
I saw her on TV years ago with fellow televangelist and husband Jim Bakker, and ... I was astonished that the show actually had an audience.
Just her alone was reason to be astonished. She was like pro wrestling, or a puppet show put on by psychotics – amazing, off-the-charts unrealness. She wore makeup that looked like it was troweled on out of 55-gallon drums, and every show featured copious crying which caused her thick eye liner to cut black runnels down her face like flash floods of drain cleaner through a toxic waste dump.
If you walked into a car dealership and she came out to sell you a car, you'd think it was a joke. Twenty minutes into talking with her, no matter how seriously and earnestly she spoke, you'd still suspect you were being spoofed.
But ... people tuned in. They sent money. Because ... well, shit, I don’t know why. I always believed it was because they were damaged and afraid, and because anybody who promised them hope, even if she looked like Bozo the Clown on bad acid, sounded like a friend. My Deep South neighbors who couldn’t see past a black man’s skin could look past Tammy Faye’s layers and see something ... friendly. Comforting.
To me she was unsavory. That makeup smacked of somebody who had no self-control, and all the social awareness of a dog at a White House dinner party deciding it was time for a good lick down there.
Jim Bakker had an affair with Jessica Hahn, and I didn’t blame him. I pictured Jim going to bed with Tammy Faye and her makeup night after night, and the two of them waking up every morning looking like car crash victims.
But ... there was a scandal. People who could easily tolerate Tammy Faye’s face couldn’t tolerate actual SEX. The hypocrisy destroyed their Christian street cred, and an IRS investigation led to a prison sentence for Jim.
The one grace note in the whole thing, for me, was the detailing of their opulent lifestyle that included an air-conditioned house for their dog in their South Carolina mansion. For a guy like me who kept a dog dish full of ice water all summer, this was something I could respect.
(Little side note here – Jerry Falwell helped bring down their Christian broadcasting ministry because he wanted their cable TV audience. Christian hyenas eat other Christian hyenas.)
Talking to chat room denizens last night, the chief topic seemed to be that there was something wrong with me for not having sympathy for this poor woman dying of cancer. Several chatters recounted intimate details of their own friends and family who died of it. “It’s horrible,” they said, over and over. “Horrible.”
I had trouble getting across to them that I DO have sympathy for cancer victims. I had a good friend who died of malignant melanoma less than 6 months after being diagnosed, and I myself have had skin cancer already, two kinds.
I can’t help but imagine all the victims of Jim and Tammy Faye and their PTL ministry, which extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from people, some of whom were also dying of cancer (or suffering in ten thousand other ways), so they could live their opulent lifestyle. I can’t help but remember the stories of those who trusted the Bakkers enough to send money, even though they themselves were financially destitute, hoping that the promise of supernatural assistance, a promise that was the stock in trade of the Bakker’s ministry, would come true.
Those of us who saw the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie “The Sting” laughed at the justice of seeing rich thug Doyle Lonigan get conned out of his money by the sly pair. If Jim and Tammy Faye had conned Fidel Castro out of hundreds of millions, or Richard Nixon, I’d give them folk hero status.
But Jim and Tammy Faye preyed on the sick, the dying, the weak and the lost. They were like Big Kids hanging out at the kiddie pool to coerce money out of defenseless toddlers.
For years, they HURT people. Little people. Hopeful, trusting people. And they did it so that they could be rich.
That’s much harder to forgive.
My problem, if that’s what it is, is that I have a long memory for things like this, and until I see someone make up for what they’ve done, which Jim and Tammy Faye never did, I’m not willing to just trowel a happy face onto it.
Cancer victim Tammy Faye deserves sympathy, as do we all. But, in my opinion, religious parasite and unreformed predator-on-the-weak Tammy Faye probably doesn’t.
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the horror of it all
Tammy Faye and ex hubby Jim, were both quite horrorific by most standards of humanity. They preyed on the weak and infirm.
But in addition, it is true, Tammy Faye looked like a horror inducing clown with her caked on makeup dripping... I pitied her lack of awareness on one level, but still shuddered in response to her appearance and complete obliviousness to it all.
It boggles my mind that people sent them money. It is scary to realize that that many gullible people exist and maybe even vote.
PJ...
...O'Rourke, back when he used to be funny, did a book titled Holidays in Hell, which contained a chapter about a weekend he and his girlfriend spent at Heritage USA, the 'Christian' theme park built by Tammy Faye and hubby Jim. It was absolutely hilarious - I recommend getting a used copy of the book if you can, just for that chapter. They were completely lobotomized by the mind-numbing stupidity of the place.
Jim Downey
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Nah
Pity? I don't particularly pity her. Unlike so many other cancer victims she could afford to pay for the best doctors in the country. Unlike poor cancer victims she could afford painkillers and drugs to prolong her worthless life, and still have money to afford things like cosmetics to make herself look better (or at least look like an ugly git). There's nothing about her I would pity, except perhaps that she looks so very shallow. I pity whatever family she left behind. And I pity mister Bakker for being related to her husband.
Troubling from so many angles
Yep, Hank, gotta' agree on so many levels, because it was troubling from so many angles. As a theist, she so often made me cringe. In fact, I can hardly remember a time that she didn't. It's sad that so many people go through life following others with emotion, rather than with intellect. It grates on me that this is too often the face put forward by the "faithful". How this happens is beyond me, when some of the most erudite men & women on the planet have been and are believers. Why is it that the face of "religion" is so often what it really was never supposed to be?
Like you, I pity Tammy. Also, like you, I have a difficult time getting past it. I have a friend who is a very small town pastor, and one Christmas came to a food shower a group was putting on for them. He drove his 30 year old Pontiac station wagon with 340,000 miles on it to get there. How I wish this could be the more public view of "religion".
Having been around troubled people from time to time, I have to wonder what occured to Tammy to make her what she was. In many ways, she came across to me as someone that had been sexually abused as a child. Don't know, just connecting dots. Thus, in many ways I fault her handlers much more even than I fault her.
It's a sad ending to a very sad scene.
-Col.