by Hal Crowther
from Books & Religion, Winter 1989
Last year the "harmonic convergence" of the Mayan astronomers coincided with the 10th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, producing a tidal wave of cosmic energy and righteousness that killed Rudolf Hess and goosed the Dow Jones over 2700. There was a rumor that Ronald Reagan stirred in his sleep.
"There are people here that talk about Elvis like they talk about Christ," marveled one of the less devout of the more than 50,000 pilgrims who packed the city of Memphis to pray to the King who had fallen. All night the faithful kept a vigil by his tomb, in a bizarre parody of the myth of Easter. On mountaintops in Japan and California, on an island above Niagara Falls, the spiritual seekers waited for the same sunrise and tuned themselves for the celestial surge, or at least a few bars of "Blue Suede Shoes." But when the sun had set on the day of reckoning and the stardust cleared away, Elvis was still dead and God was still playing possum. I don't mean to sneer. There's such a thing, I believe, as an energy field where a lot of minds pulling in the same direction create a force that’s more than the sum of its parts. It was hard to get through the ‘60s without believing that. I’m not sure that a circle of spiritually charged individuals can levitate a table, say, but I suspect that they can rearrange its molecules, stir them up a little. This in spite of my own psychic shortcomings, my inability to merge with the surge. I missed Woodstock but I sat in on a few gatherings of the tie-dyed devout. On a hillside in Maine, in the rain, I once squatted squinting into the downpour with my ponytail dripping and listened to a few dozen of The People reaching out to the Oneness, imploring Him, I think, to stop the ’60s from ending, though it was 1971. I was tremendously impressed by this tribal sacrament but not, as I recall, much possessed by it. Mantras sounded and nothing moved except the rain and my left hand, which kept reaching for the beer in my cooler though my companion kept shoving it away.
There was something real there. Which may be more than you can say for this harmonic convergence, based on calculations offered by an art historian in Colorado and denounced by most scholars and astronomers as flawed and bogus beyond salvage. None of the astronomical events predicted in Jose Arguelles's The Mayan Factor came close to occurring, in part because Arguelles misread his sources and got his dates wrong. That didn't stop the mountaintop mystics from congregating by the thousands, any more than a published inventory of Elvis Presley's astonishing personal pharmacy kept his disciples from declaring him god-in-the-flesh (flash?). The blue-collar beauty of the Elvis cult is that its deity was so pathetically flawed. A high-testosterone singing voice notwithstanding, it was only the sexual power of that fat-lipped sneer (remember in the’50s when magazines would try to inflame both sexes by showing his lips side-by-side with Brigitte Bar-dot's?) that saved Elvis from earning his living as a forklift operator. No one had any reason to feel inferior to poor Elvis. The Graceland pilgrims may not look like much, but they’ve got themselves a god their own size.
About the right size, and the right spiritual hat-size, for the voodoo republic that's rising from the ashes of the one that Hamilton and Jefferson intended. By 2012, when the final cycle of Arguelles' bogus calculations ends in Judgment Day or in peace, love and UFO contacts, Elvis may be the state religion and the crosses on our steeples may be replaced with guitars.
The timing is right. A voodoo republic is characterized by belligerent nationalism, bizarre allegiances and cults of personality, the proliferation of fatuous beliefs and a general disrespect for knowledge and for reason. Religion, politics and entertainment are joined together in a trivial trinity you can bring into focus by imagining Ronald Reagan in greasepaint, Elvis sneering on a candlelit icon and Pat Robertson kissing babies on the street. Drugs are epidemic and public taste turns to weird spectacles and simulated violence. Popular music is inane or incoherent. Journalism is predominantly lurid.
If you notice any of these symptoms, be sure and call me. Foreigners who think of themselves as friends of the United States report ugly new traits emerging. Shocked by the American crowd's partisan hostility as he humbled our Davis Cup team, West Germany’s Boris Becker put the ball back in our court with something on it. He said he's never seen such nasty tennis crowds in any of the South American countries where the U.S. team has made crowd abuse one of its alibis for losing. The mood that Becker sensed spilled over into outright provocation at the Pan-American "friendship" games in Indianapolis, where morons in the crowd deliberately infuriated Cuban athletes by destroying a Cuban flag.
That isn’t the country they explained to me in seventh-grade civics. Not a country where Oliver North, a rogue soldier with a nose twice the length of Pinocchio’s, could flash his medals the way a coy stripper flashes her double-Ds and watch half the population coo and genuflect. Or where the National Enquirer, which becomes America’s Izvestia when Elvis becomes its religion, could report that its readers support this saucy North (if "Little Egypt" is taken, can we call him "Little Iran"?) l5-1 for President of the United States.
The voodoo republic is characterized by a general suspension of skepticism, almost as if by martial law. When a disoriented population hungers for direction and commitment without subjecting their sources to any scrutiny, cults spring up around dead junkies, living rodents like Jim Bakker and almost any Oriental who can cull 20 ringing platitudes from the teaching of Kahlil Gibran. Not to mention certifiable megalomaniacs who talk to God and senile movie actors who talk to no one. The most mindless theology wins the most converts and indefensible nonsense like creationism parades in public as blood kin to science. There is, I’m afraid, a connection and even a continuity between the peace-loving free spirits who bite on "harmonic convergence" and the apparent androids of the ’80s who bite on fundamentalist voodoo and its poisonous political byproducts. Many of the children of the ’60s took rationalism for a cold corporate plot, and purged it from their minds with ineffable notions and expansive chemicals. But once you’ve installed an effective filter on your brain, it will serve any purpose you turn to. I have reliable reports of ex-acidheads and flower-cultists who now embrace rightwing politics yoked to charismatic Christianity and even speaking in tongues. When your leap of faith becomes a broad jump, it can land you anywhere at all.
"America is the only country that passed from barbarism to decadence without ever experiencing civilization," sneers one European intellectual. English democracy without the deadweight of England’s monarchy and its caste system was a magnificent experiment and probably the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, but Jefferson’s brainchild has descended into voodoo as a result of at least two errors I can isolate. One is the failure of public education, a noble and critical experiment that seemed to stop dead in its tracks when TV became a universal technology. If you have any doubts about TV’s lethal effect on the quality of literacy and public discourse in this country, read Neil Postman’s polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death. History is its strong suit. Postman describes an 18th-century America with such a passion for ideas and the printed word that Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense could sell in the neighborhood of 400,000 copies to a national population of three million, equal to gross sales of 24 million today. ("The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics..." wrote Jacob Duche in 1772. "Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader.")
It’s easier to understand Thomas Jefferson’s optimism about extending the vote. Nearly a century later (1854), as Postman describes it, an audience of country people in Peoria, Illinois, sat rapt through seven hours of oratory by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, who spoke in a lofty idiom no longer considered suitable even in the college classroom.
Notions of progress are difficult to defend in 1987. Our other great error, I think, was a misreading of the principle of freedom of religion. The American colonists, many of them victims of religious persecution in England, wanted to make sure that no one in this country would ever be abused or ostracized on account of his faith. But at some point this was twisted to mean that religion was free from all legitimate scrutiny, free from fair comment, free from ridicule, from laughter. This excessive courtesy has encouraged voodoo-mongers who are shamelessly self-righteous about beliefs that would, as Philip Roth’s Portnoy observed, "shame a gorilla." Strange people should be free to worship Skye terriers as long as no one is harmed by it; but they harm everyone in the worst way when they apply the pressures that castrate the textbooks that make a farce of public education. The government can’t be in the business of grading doctrine the way they grade meat: sensible; traditional but a question of faith, not for public debate; dubious; preposterous; tainted and dangerous. They can’t, but I’d be happy to, as a public service. Or call any reputable divinity school.
As things stand now, the stage is set for Elvis to rise from his tomb and walk to the drugstore through clouds of light. When "Love Me Tender" replaces "The Star-Spangled Banner," don’t ask me to sing along. I’ll be Crying in the Chapel.
In the time between his screenwriting chores and his television criticism, Hal Crowther holds down the cultural jeremiad franchise at the Spectator, a weekly newspaper published in Raleigh, North Carolina. His brief ruminations on the nature of voodoo republics original appeared in the aforementioned newspaper which has graciously given permission for their publication in Books & Religion. No permission was given to reprint it on this web page.
The following essay is from "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee," by Honoré de Balzac, published for the first time in English in the Spring issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Balzac wrote the essay in the 1830s as part of an appendix to La Physiologie du Gout (The Physiology of Taste), by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Balzac, who wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years, died in 1850 at the age of fifty-one; according to his physician, the cause of death was "an old heart complaint" aggravated by "the use of rather the abuse of coffee, to which he had recourse in order to counteract man's natural propensity to sleep." Translated from the French by Robert Onopa.
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.
But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. It is on this last point, in particular, that I want to add my personal experience to Brillat-Savarin's observations.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts and electricity emitted by coffee when w drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects, as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while -- for a week or two at most -- you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner, one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sigh and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink -- for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender, and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mâché. There had been, on my part, a failure of observation.
When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats; finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience; one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.
Fifteen Reasons Professional Football is like Grand Opera
- It happens on a huge scale, at a glacial pace.
- It has a whole culture of its own.
- The whole concept is highly implausible (read: Oh, please!).
- It takes forever for it to finish.
- Once in awhile, something magnificent will happen that nearly makes your heart stop, but the rest of the time, it's mostly filler.
- The costumes are very expensive.
- Ditto the lights.
- The whole enterprise would fail if not for the coaching staff.
- For the uninitiated, it's about as clear as peanut butter and seems about as stupid as a bag of hammers.
- People who are really passionate about it can be incredibly tiresome.
- The people running the show are really smart. The people you see running around up there (or down there) usually aren't.
- Being grotesquely obese is not considered disadvantageous.
- There are long lines at the ladies' rooms.
- The onlookers are, quite frequently, bizarrely dressed.
- For those who fail to appreciate it, salvation may come in the form of alcohol, served at great cost during the breaks.
"Notice," by Ken Kalfus, as excerpted from the July, 1999 edition of Harper’s Magazine. The story also appeared in the April issue of Law & Politics and is included in Thirst, a collection by Kalfus published by Milkweed Editions. Kalfus's collection PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, will be published in September by Milkweed; the title story appeared in the March, 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The appearance of this document on my web page is completely unauthorized, although I did send a nice note to the author telling him of my intentions.
Copyright © 1998. All rights reserved. No part of this paragraph may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, oral, or telepathic, including photocopy, recording, transcription, tracing, hot type, cold type, mimeograph, ditto (in school, the copies, made between classes, would be handed to us while they were still warm and moist, their ink bearing a thick, intoxicating fragrance that would compel us to raise the sheets to our faces and think, so this is what blue smells like), teletype, telefax, telephone, semaphore, skywriting, whisper, seance, confession, FTD, floppy disk, hard drive, RAM, careful longhand on rare vellum, silk screen, or any information-storage-and-retrieval system without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles, reviews, profiles, commentaries, biographies, musical comedies, halftime shows, and literary-prize announcements. Requests for permission to make copies of any substantive part of this paragraph should be sent to the author (who really does have this happy memory of ditto ink’s alcoholic vapor, which, when inhaled deeply, as if we were sampling the air of a lush field, would induce a wicked giddiness, among the other exalted effects of printed matter), who, quite frankly, would be flattered to get mail of this sort and would consider such requests in a favorable light as, the above sentence notwithstanding, he seeks to have this paragraph communicated in all languages and by all technologies, not for personal or proprietary reasons but to bring another facet of the whole that exists to general awareness. Just drop me a note. My e-mail address is 72754.2514@compuserve.com. Except in cases of obvious satirical intent (an exception that applies to this entire paragraph, which resembles the device that provides copyright protection but is without that protection itself), all the characters in this paragraph are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, including the author, is purely coincidental, or at least unpredictable. Between what we describe and the truth lies a poorly marked border, and in a writer’s desperate wanderings he will occasionally cross that border and then, unawares, meander back. (I’m not quite satisfied with the above description of ditto ink. There are other details: the paper soaked up in the blue, plumping and softening the letters, as if it too were slightly intoxicated by the ink. This lightened the color of the letters, slightly empurpling them, a transformation that defied simile until I witnessed the rush of twilight one summer morning a few years later. I never saw the ditto machine but imagined it as a hand-powered, gracefully constructed device with a few large levers. The sight of thirty adolescents pressing warm inky sheets of paper against their faces as if engaged in some cultish ceremony never seemed remarkable; a girl I had known since kindergarten, traveling with her on frequently intersecting paths without ever quite having a conversation, might pull the paper away with a sigh of such explosiveness that I would be momentarily excited and a little in love, and then frightened, reminded of her inscrutability. In our suburban and earnestly innocent school we dared fate with jokes about needing our narcotic "fix" of the ink, and in April and May we crumpled tests and assignments from October and November, months that seemed like a much earlier, more promising, forever lost part of childhood. After a couple of seasons the bottom of my locker bore a faded, uninspiring scent, which was mostly a function of memory. The memory still resists full description. After such failure, of what use is a copyright?) This paragraph contains the complete text of the hardcover edition. Not one word has been omitted.
