Word: evangelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mythic figures forever identified with the American landscape are the itinerant evangelist and the salesman on the road. Right now, John Bradshaw, 58, is both. It is a Sunday afternoon, and for the second day he stands before an enthralled crowd at Manhattan's main convention center. All of us, he tells them, had traumatic childhoods and from them spring the unresolved anxieties of adulthood. He plays the theme in masterly fashion: the faithful are spellbound...
...little later, in a semipolitical setting, television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, confessing to a sin or two here and there, employed the same strategy but different tactics, opting for all-out bawling on camera. And, just as it worked for the fictional Elmer Gantry, so, in a rare case of art imitating art, it rewarded Elmer's analogue in real life...
Rush gives great spiel. His radio persona, which is nearly identical to his genially blustering off-mike personality, mixes country lawyer with sideshow barker, tent evangelist with Spike Jones rhythm section. In the space of a single sentence, he will rattle newspapers into the microphone, impersonate Benjamin Hooks (Does the N.A.A.C.P. director really sound like Amos 'n' Andy's Kingfish?) and break into an impromptu chorus of Blue Moon. When Limbaugh gets revved up, he comes on like John Madden with a grudge...
...communism as we have known and hated it is out of the way, perhaps George Bush can now talk unabashedly to Soviet officials about such good old- fashioned values as God, truth and the sanctity of human life. Evangelist Billy Graham, who talked to Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev shortly before the botched coup, returned from the Soviet Union and passed the word to his friend Bush that both men had told him of the need for "some philosophy, some religion, an inner strength" for their society...
...there is any specimen lower than a fornicating preacher, it must be a shady scientist. The dissolute evangelist betrays his one revealed Truth, but the scientist who rushes half-cocked into print or, worse yet, falsifies the data subverts the whole idea of truth. Cold fusion in a teacup? Or, as biologists (then at M.I.T.) David Baltimore and Thereza Imanishi-Kari claimed in a controversial 1986 article that the National Institutes of Health has now judged to be fraudulent, genes from one mouse mysteriously "imitating" those from another? Sure, and parallel lines might as well meet somewhere or apples leap...