GOOD BY JERRY
Ok, it seems that everyone and his uncle is saying something about Jerry Falwell these days so I suppose that I add my four dollars as well (that was 2 cents back when I was a kid).
I first saw Jerry on television back in 1974, when one Sunday morning I made the mistake of putting on the television in my trailer in Carbondale, Illinois where I sojourned as a grad student and there was The Old Time Gospel Hour, which actually only lasted a half hour and consisted of the sermon of a preacher who, for some reason, seemed like he would go places and be dangerous in the process. I watched and said to myself "We need to watch out for this fellow." How prophetic I was! And so I was not surprised when he burst onto the political scene with his Moral Majority.
In the 1980s he wrote a book, entitled, Listen America. The only problem for the good reverend is that America did not listen and that is the point that I want to make here. Jerry Falwell, for all his political acumen, was a failure. He set out to change the culture and the culture did change, only not in the way he wanted. Rather it went just the opposite, largely due to the activities of Jerry Falwell.
You see, Falwell did not understand, any more than the Democrat party folks of that time, how much the American landscape had changed since the 1930s. While the Democrats still thought of voters in terms of marching morons with shovels, Falwell saw the culture as easily intimidated, hearkening back to the chicken-livered movie moguls who allowed themselves to be bullied into their production code in that most despised decade. What he ran into instead was a cultural elite that dug in and said, in effect, "If you don't like this, you'll hate what we're going to do next!"
"If you don't like sex, we'll give you sex until you choke on it!"
"If you don't like violence, we'll drown you in gore!"
"If you don't like gays, we'll give you nothing but gays!"
It was not that people did not care what Falwell and his followers thought. They cared very much. They cared enough that they were going to show how little they would be controlled by them. They did not run in fear from the anger of the Religious Right. They rejoiced in it because they could continually show how utterly impotent it was and is.
Because in the end, outside of the Talladega Trailer Park and Ku Klux Klan Meeting Hall, no one really cared what the neighbors thought any more. No one cared what the family thought any more. The social forces that Falwell was going to depend upon had no teeth. The irony of Jerry Falwell was that, a conservative, he was defeated by that most conservative of values, individualism.
And so let us bid farewell to Reverend Jerry Falwell, and also to the belief that people can be controlled. He made a bold effort, standing front of the speeding train and saying, "Stop!" But, in the end, the train ran him over;.