Falwell la la la la la la la

The soupy obituaries in the nation’s press at the death of Jerry Falwell strain to find something significant to say. Most of the coverage is an enormous back handed compliment resembling the joke, “For a fat guy, you don’t sweat much.” What a travesty. One has come to expect that sort of dissembling from the media. “What ever happened to fair and balanced?” I ask myself. So, I decided that if fair and balanced was going to happen, I would have to do it.

In fact, the media love power, even if it's that power which corrupts absolutely. What would the truth look like about Rev. Falwell? I start with the con man, Joe “Paper Collar” Bessimer, whose bastardization of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s famous phrase reads like this, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Falwell was this generation’s P. T. Barnum, a showman. He began on television in 1956 with the Gospel of Segregation. But, you see, television concerns itself little with what people say, but with how the spokesman says it. That’s how Ronald Reagan seemed to do so well. He had mastered the “how to say it” puzzle. So did Falwell.

What one sees in the public life of a Jerry Falwell is what happens when the methods of bigotry are given their head. True, he did recant his segregationist line. But he kept on with the approach, the fear mongering, that succeeded so well. His most successful promotion, The Moral Majority, in fact, was one big media savvy complaining fear monger. Complaining about women, frightened about gays, warning of evils under every bush. . . that was his stock in trade. But it was not Gospel. It was bad news.

In all of the glitz, reality got lost. We were ushered into the grand battle of good and evil that has brought us to travesties like the Iraq war. Reality is sumberged, out of view. The Falwells of this world brought us a construction that no longer bore any relation to what actually goes on . Evolution is become a liberal bias, 9-11 has became the opening salvo in the world Muslim/Christian warfare, and a thousand complaints about the human race have won the day. No, Rev. Falwell’s meteoric rise wasn’t about the concern a pastor has for the flock. Neither was it about the search for truth. It was about the thirst a media entrepreneur has for power. Plain and simple.

There. At least somewhere, someone has tried to balance the fawning media elites. Whether it makes any difference is up to you. For me, Falwell stands as a stark warning about the price we pay when we confuse the showman with the show. There is a sucker born every minute. That may sell tickets, but it is no basis for a theology.