American Life in the ’80s ... A man called Oral: Freud Wept, God cried, Even the Devil was Shamed . . . How Low, O Lord, How Low?
“And the Jews’ Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise.”
—John 2:13-16
The TV preachers were all over the news last week, fighting desperately with the forces of Satan and the shame of their own kind. It was a crisis for The Holy Church, they said, and also for the revenue stream. The devil himself had somehow got his hands on God’s throttle and now the boat was running out of control, aimed for the rocks at top speed. The wages of sin had taken a sudden upturn.
All the big boys went public, locking arms in a phalanx of righteousness that included almost everybody in The Business except Pat Robertson and his one-time protege, the dirty little degenerate Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy, a confessed dope addict.
That is extremely harsh language to describe the essentially minor crimes that the ill-fated Bakkers were finally accused of committing in the course of their 17-year marriage and their rise to fame and prominence as co-hosts of a nationally syndicated religious TV operation called “The Jim and Tammy Show.” It was harmless enough, on its face—not much different from “Leave it to Beaver,” except that it reported revenues of $129 million last year—and if Tammy got deep into Valium and Jim got naked and crazy with a church secretary for a one-night romp seven years ago, so what? The White House and half of the corner offices in Manhattan would be empty for the next 100 years if we held our presidents and big-business executives to standards like that. . . . Betty Ford ate so much Valium she finally had to start her own hospital, and even Richard Nixon kept a lanky Chinese woman on a houseboat up the river from San Francisco.
No. The Bakkers went down for other and darker reasons. They were guilty of crimes against nature—or at least the nature of their own kind— and in the end they were eaten for the same reasons and by the same kind of power-crazed cannibals who ate Spiro Agnew, James Watt, Wilbur Mills and who will soon eat the remains of Michael Deaver, who was once Nancy Reagan’s best friend in the White House and the closest adviser to the president.
These things happen. We are living in cheap times, and the fast lane is littered with some very expensive wrecks. Mike Deaver will go to prison, along with ex-heroes like USMC Lt. Col. Oliver North, the recently demoted Rear Adm. John Poindexter and former Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord.
The only survivors will be whores, Black Priests and mean dingbats like former Interior Secretary James Watt, who recently accepted a job on the new board of directors of the PTL Club.
The Bakkers were doomed and Robertson was laying low, as far out in the weeds as he could crawl without abandoning all hope for his 1988 presidential ambitions. . . . But now, creeping up from the smoking ruins of the once-holy PTL Club like some hair-shirt golem from a Baptist vision of Hell, was the shrewd and pious Rev. Jerry Falwell, a long-time foe of the Bakker/Roberston combine and current religious adviser to Vice President Bush, another 1988 candidate.
Lonely George had found trouble again. He has the instincts of a dung beetle. No living politician can match his talent for soiling himself in public. Bush will seek out filth wherever it lives—going without sleep for days at a time, if necessary—and when he finds a new heap he will fall down and wallow crazily in it, making snorting sounds out of his nose and rolling over on his back and kicking his legs up in the air like a wild hog coming to water.
Not everybody noticed the Bush/Falwell connection in the sordid PTL Club affair. In the White House it was seen as a welcome diversion, from the daily nightmare of the Iran/contra scandal, a kinky little gang war between big-ticket preachers that might keep the president off the front pages for a few days. Nobody could say for sure what it meant, but it was a hell of a lot better than reading about Michael Deaver’s indictment on perjury charges or Poindexter taking The Fifth, once again.
Oliver North was momentarily quiet, Fawn Hall was still refusing to pose naked for Playboy, Bobby McFarlane was secure in a drug-free environment somewhere south of Arlington, and Dutch had been sent off to polish his repartee among sixth-graders in the schoolrooms of Columbia, MO.
There was no joy in Mudville, but the great eyes of the network cameras were focused south, as it were, on the preachers, who were acting like a gang of baboons.
The newspapers called it a “holy war,” a snake’s nest of greedheads and crazy-rich preachers fighting savagely among themselves for TV rights to the Jesus market.
Oral Roberts was on TBS, live from the Prayer Tower in Tulsa and still begging for more money. His son, Richard, of the Abundant Life Prayer Group, was telling his audience to send “your one-time gift of $15 to keep PTL on the air” while continuing to hammer the faithful with reminders of his own family crisis. Just because Oral talked his flock out of the $8 million ransom price that he said God had put on his life with a deadline of midnight on April Fools’ Day didn’t mean the battle was over.
Oral still needed more. God’s price, said Richard on TV, was not just $8 million, “but $8 million above and beyond our normal operating expenses.”
In other words, God was talking net—not gross—and he wanted his eight big ones in a brown bag by the midnight hour on April Fools’ Day.
And he will get his money, there is no doubt at all about that. Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television.
March 30, 1987