money into the camera.
Sylvie refused to watch with us. She had a superstition of evangelicals. But she’d listen from the kitchen.
“Such crooks!” she’d cry after Jim and Tammy’s hundredth extortionate demand of their viewers. “How do they get away with it?”
“Americans will believe anything,” Gord explained.
But we watched Jim and Tammy only to feel superior. To see what lengths they’d go to — to what money-grubbing depths they would descend in His name. To laugh as Tammy Faye’s mascara turned liquid on her cheeks.
We watched Jimmy Swaggart, however, to feel awe — even though neither of us would ever admit it. We laughed at him the whole time — the shameless way he bellowed and bawled — but secretly, he amazed us. He believed, was the thing — you could smell the faith pouring out of his sweat glands. It seethed beneath his skin. Every once in a while Gord and I would forget to laugh and just get caught up. Jimmy would be howling his holy ecstasy into the microphone, his audience would have devolved into a shrieking, blubbering human tide, and Gord and I would be silently riveted. God. God? God! The way Jimmy spoke the name made you realize that this was the way it was meant to be spoken — in awe and fear and dumb, sub-literate rapture. You should be shitting yourself, Jimmy conveyed, at the idea of the Lord. You should be rolling around on the floor in convulsions — it’s only right. It is appropriate. You should be swallowing your tongue in a seizure. The Lord was awesome and terrible. He was pure power. This was the Dude who smashed the planet between his hands and pushed up mountains, exploding them like zits between His fingertips. This was the Guy who turned the earth into one boiling ocean when He was finally fed up with all our crap. Who begat dinosaurs and the bubonic plague. This Guy. Him. And what’s worse, what’s most terrifying of all? Dude loves you. He loves you like a psycho girlfriend. Endlessly, obsessively, for no good reason. Dude will stalk you to the ends of the earth.
Sylvie had an instinct — a kind of papist radar that alerted her whenever Gord and I were getting sucked in. “Stop watching!” she’d call from the kitchen if we’d been silent before Jimmy a little too long. “It’s a cult! They just want your money.”
“Oh, Mother, it’s not a cult,” Gord would say as he came to. “It’s bullshit, sure.”
“It’s witchcraft,” said Sylvie, frowning in the kitchen doorway. It seemed to me Sylvie was seeing witchcraft everywhere in those days. She had recently returned from a Catholic women’s retreat where she had been taught to identify as witchcraft pretty much everything that was a) potentially more influential than Catholicism, and/or b) something people enjoyed doing. She’d arrived home vowing to never check her horoscope again, for example, or put her feet up in front of the soaps.
“Don’t let him watch that,” Sylvie would say to Gord, referring to me, her one and only son.
“Witchcraft. You’re just as bad as the Jesus freaks with that kinda talk.”
“Look at those people, crying and rolling around. Faith-healing. It’s witchcraft.”
“There’s people who’d say the same about Catholics with their body of Christ and whathaveyou,” said Gord, putting his feet up and scratching the side of his face theosophically. “Going to some shrine and throwing away their crutches.”
A euphoric roar rose up from the television. “Don’t let him watch that,” repeated Sylvie.
This may well have been the only time I sided with Gord against Sylvie in our entire parent-child relationship. I didn’t understand why Sylvie couldn’t just ignore what the priests told her, like every other Catholic outside Vatican City, and live her life. Why wasn’t she able to just roll her eyes at the priests like she did with Gord? Hadn’t anyone ever explained to her about the implicit contract between church and flock — John Paul II hands down completely untenable directives along the lines of thou shalt not enjoy harmless kicks and the rest of us ignore them and go to confession every other week in semi-sincere repentance?
“It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “It’s just fun to watch him — he’s crazy.”
“That’s how they get you,” insisted Sylvie. “They make it fun.”
And it turned out she was sort of right.
And now, as my father and I sit in front of today’s pale Swaggart imitators — the televised Christian-industrial complex never did fully recover