The Society of Mental Midgets; An American Experience
By Ryan Herle
Sometimes you just have to shake your head and say to yourself, "what was that guy thinking?"
Yesterday I did just that.
When I first began to read this article in the Wall Street Journal I thought it to be a lark; a late "April Fools" joke. Alas, I was horrified to discover it to be authentic; I'm still reeling from the revelation that there are still people alive today that believe that they can tempt fate by doing really dumb, dumb things, and that God will protect them.
"Hold my beer and watch this" moments are relatively common; rarely do they include the pastor of a church, his pregnant 20 year old wife, and dozens of parishioners.
I'm speaking of the idiot in Tennessee who plays with venomous snakes DURING church services.
Here is the article;
http://online.wsj.com/article/
And to demonstrate the absurdity of this fellow, I have become slightly absurd myself;
" "Teasing snakes, fire-eating, and pole dancing for donations."
This year's Easter service at the Tabernucle Church of Gawd in Le
Flechette, Tenn., will include many of the holiday's traditional
rituals, like Holy Communion and footwashing. There will also be some
startling novelties, such as an utter prohibition on the fondling of
alter boys and placing a lock on the collection box; recently it has
been raided by what are suspected to be teenagers looking for spare
change with which to buy candy bars while at school.
"It will be filled with shouting, dancing, speaking in tongues like
Messican and French, snake teasing and fire eating," said its
21-year-old pastor, Andre Hamlin, after showing us his impressive
collection of Gene Simmons collectables. "KISS is simply the most
awesome Rock Band ever; why, Gene Simmons hit song "God of Thunder" is
the reason I'm a preacher today!"
Pastor Hamlin directed us to a wall covered in photographs of Gene
Simmons' performances; "He came all the way to Tennessee just to show
me how to eat fire like he does on stage; though I wasn't able to
master the three minute deluge of blood from the mouth while singing
God of Thunder; I got really light headed and had to drink some orange
juice."
The Pastor hopes he will be more conditioned to attempt the feat again
next year. "All you've got in life is time, an inexhaustible supply of
free government cheese, and the hope that next year you'll win the
Megabucks's lottery jackpot; if that happens, well, its 'so long
suckers, I'm buying a Yacht!"
When asked about the timeline for these events at the church, Pastor
Hamlin said "We gonna start at 6AM, and we're hoping to get scnockered
before noon; so blotto that we don't even know where we are, and
that's before we even begin to drink the peyote water! We'll celebrate
the resur, ah, resura, hmmm. the resurgence of Jebus with a good old
time; liquor, pot; maybe even a stripper or two. Old Jebus, he liked a
good party; he even turned water into wine, so you can't tell me He
didn't know how to have a good time!"
When asked about the inclusion of strippers into the event, Pastor
Hamlin said "Jebus lllooovvveeedd the ladies. He was hanging around
with a hooker; you can't tell me he wasn't getting a little on the
side with that gal! And Jebus? His gospel clearly states that we
should do our best to support single mothers, one dollar bill at a
time..."
Since he opened its doors last fall, Mr. Hamlin's small Pentecostal
church, 39 miles north of Koxville, has grown to almost 50 members,
most of them in their 20s. Part of his strategy for expansion has been
to use Facebook to publicize the daredevil exploits of his
congregation. "What we got here is some freestyle BMX competition
bikes, an empty swimmin' pool for skateboarding in, and gallons of
diet Mountain Dew to hydrate with while we nourish our bodies,
consuming Dorito's and Pop Rocks by the pound; you can't tell me that
nowhere else got anything better than that!"
Best known for what they call "gifts of the unlocked meat locker,"
like sneaking out at midnight and hiding large parcels of frozen meat
in their underwear, Pastor Hamlin said "If there's one thing that
tastes better than a big hunk of barely cooked meat, its a big hunk of
STOLEN barely cooked meat."
The church is also known in the area for its members dressing in
orange robes while seeking donations at the airport. "It ain't fraud
if we don't tell em' we're Harry Krishners; if they assume that, well,
they're the dummies!"
Records show that churches such as this are popping up almost as
quickly as an erection in a boarding school for teenage boys; The
start of churches like this dates back to 1901 and has mushroomed in
recent decades to some 15 million adherents in the U.S. and 279
million world-wide, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life.
But the major Christian denominations condemn teasing snakes, though
most haven't any qualms with the rest of the practices of this young
Pastor; one Pastor, who asked not to be identified, said "Its not that
we care about the snakes, or even the people holding the snakes; its
the damn PETA and Humane Society people we don't want to deal with. I
don't understand why they get so upset, anyway; its just a snake! And
its a snake that make Eve eat the forbidden fruit, so I think we have
a pretty clear biblical authority to abuse snakes anyway we want! You
see models like Kelly Labrock wearing snakes around her neck during
lingerie modeling shoots; do you see anyone complaining that she's
abusing them snakes? Of course not! Because snakes ain't real animals
anyway - they don't got no cute face or no feet!
Pastor Hamlin's risk-taking sometimes gets the best of him. At
midnight on New Year's Eve, he was bitten on his index finger by a
yellow timber rattlesnake. He staggered and then dropped to his knees.
After a few minutes, he got up.
The pastor has yet to go to trial; the snake has been too ill to
testify about how he was sexually assaulted and then poisoned.
When we interviewed the snake, he said in halting, pained english
"....Ssssst jusssst issssn't right! There I wasssss, minding my own
businesssss, when thisss, thisss ASSSSSHOLE picked me up by my
anussssss. You'd bite too, if it happened to you! But what wasssss
worssssse wassss that he wassss covered in sssssso much telivisssssion
makeup, that I nearly died from masssscara poissssioning!"
When reflecting on the incident, the Pastor said "I felt the anointing
of God more than I'd ever felt," as he shoved a full slice of pizza
into his mouth. "I suppose it could have been snake venom, but how
then would you account for the fact that I also started to have
visions and see angels? Some might say it was the mescaline I was
taking, but I know for certain Jebus was riding the unicorn that was
talking to me."
A boyish-looking young man, Mr. Hamlin has a day job as a cashier at
the local IGA store and lives with his wife and four children in a
three-bedroom apartment. His Facebook page is full of photos of him
panhandling, picking cotton and various kinds of manual labor, most
often while carrying a sign that read "will trade mushrooms for ca$h."
Despite Tennessee's ban on the possession of psilocybin mushrooms,
Pastor Hamlin says "they're a great source of much needed additional
income; plus, like I always say "If it comes from the ground, God made
it, and its probably ok. There were a few instances when I first
started picking and selling mushrooms where I got the wrong one's,
though thankfully nobody died. One time I even mistook a big piece of
deer crap for a mushroom; you should have seen it! I tried to smoke
that for an hour before my buddy pointed out that there was corn in
it!"
Not all of his friends are pleased about his recent rise to fame. On
Facebook, a woman from his nearby hometown wrote: "You were raised
better than that!!! IDIOT!! That's tempting God, and I do believe the
Bible says U should NOT tempt God!!!"
He replied "Who you talking to, mom? Get thee back into the kitchen
before I have daddy come in there and whoop your ass!"
"Snake teasing," as he refers to it, began in 1909 near Cleveland,
Tenn., and has been practiced ever since in West Virginia, eastern
Kentucky, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and parts of
Alabama and Georgia. Practitioners say it fills them with the divine
light of being able to torture small animals that can't cry, and
nobody cares if they get caught; said one "if you pull the wings off a
fly, who cares? Nobody! If you burn ants with a magnifying glass, who
cares? Nobody. If you take a snake and pretend that you're Indiana
Jones and its your bullwhip, who cares? Nobody."
"But if you take something like a cute bunny, or a kitten or one of
the babies from the crack mother halfway house and do the same thing,
people get all angry with you."
Their right to torture small animals in enshrined in Markthew 13, 21
"[he whom is righteous] will cast out diamonds; they will speak with
new dentures; they will take up serpents and use them as toys, and if
they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them, so long as
they get to the poison control ward of the hospital in less than 30
minutes."
"The tradition of torturing snakes and small animals had been
declining until recently because of effective education on what is
considered to be an abuse of animals, as such, the practice kind of
fell by the wayside, as those churches aged and not attracting new
believers," said Rolph Houd, a psychology professor at the University
of Tennessee at Chattanooga who has written about the practice. "But
now that it's gone digital, that is going to increase its popularity."
Prof. Houd has seen an uptick of young practitioners. "When they feel
called and have the anointing, they are like rock stars," he said.
"Every one of them wants to be Gene Simmons, and when they tease
snakes for the first time and get away unbitten, they either have
'victory,' in which they get a free soft serve at the Dairy Queen, or
if bit and even killed, that demonstrates their huge, bright shiny
brass balls and will forever be remembered as being "wicked awesome
dude's."
The term "anointing" that the pastor refers to regularly, is, in his
own words, power given by Vidal Sassoon. He believes that when people
are anointed, nothing evil can hurt them, not even damp air that would
under normal circumstances cause a loss of volume and make hair look
flat and greasy; "yeah, that Vidal; he's quite THE MAN!" said Pastor
Hamlin. "I don't know where I'd be without him; for sure I wouldn't
have my rock star hair, and then what would I be, hum? I wouldn't be
no rock star, that's where! Because we all know that to be a rock star
you have to look like a rock star; women's clothing, lots of makeup;
hair that makes a 76 year old woman reminisce about the days of yore
when they were children, before the automobile, when the beehive
hairdo was considered to be more of a status symbol than owning any 10
negro slaves."
Standing in the front pew at the New Year's Eve service was a group of
young women in long skirts, long hair and no makeup. One of them was
Vagasil Powers, 21, of nearby Fat Duff, Tenn. She first handled a
snake in November: "The pastor had me come into his office, a little
confessional type arrangement; he had me put my hands through this
hole in the box, and he put the snake into my hands! It was awesome,
though it was kind of small. He kept encouraging me, he said "tug on
it harder, harder, faster, and so I did! In a few minutes the snake
put his ointment on my hands; I felt anointed, and I used that
ointment on my hair. Best ointment I ever used."
A few weeks later, her 24-year-old husband, Daniel, followed suit.
Mr. Hamlin's wife, Elspeth, 20, also embraces the practice. Although
she was 7½ months pregnant on New Year's Eve, she handled several
different snakes in the confessional that night. Mr. Hamlin said,
"I've had some awfully mean snakes that she's handled like house
cats."
The men of the congregation, while generally closed-lipped, seemed to
agree that she was an excellent handler of snakes.
Mr. Hamlin won't allow anyone under 18 to touch the reptiles; he's
concerned about child welfare laws, he says. He also said that he
wasn't allowed to be near children while alone, the result of a
terrible court order that came from the "completely false and
slanderous lies of a parishioner who was known for being a slut; when
I rebuffed HER advance to handle my snake, she called the police; what
is this world coming to when you can't trust a 6 year old?" opined the
Pastor.
Still, he guesses that there are at least 14 people under 30 who are
handling snakes in his office. One is Michelle Golden, 21, who said,
"I'd watched YouTube videos of people playing with snakes, and I used
to say 'I'm going to do that some day.'"
Michelle is preparing to audition for a spot on the most popular TV
show in Amsterdam; Hollands Top Hooker. "The pastor said I could do
anything I put my mind to, and can you believe? I'm going to Amsterdam
to prove that I give the best blo.. er, that I "play with snakes"
better than any other hooker in Holland! Take that Mr. Rogers!"
Mr. Hamlin said that he spent a year being encouraged by his father
before he took up playing with snakes when he was a child. "I love the
feeling of power, the anointing that moves on me when I play with
snakes, and I love how it feels when other people play with my snake,"
he said. "I'd rather play with snakes than eat or drink."
He learned the practice from his father, James Hamlin, 33, pastor of
the Full Guspel Tabernucle in Jebus Name in nearby Middlesboro, Ky.
"There are more younger people in it now than what it was when I got
married 21 years ago; I was kind of old to get married, everyone
figured I was a confirmed bachelor, so it took em all by surprise when
I got hitched at the ripe old age of 11; who'da thunk it?,"
The senior pastor Hamlin said that he estimates that there are some 20
churches in the area that have a room for people to play with snakes;
he said the hard part is in insuring they are all over the age of 18;
"those damn laws are put there by Satan to stop us from having joy!"
he exclaimed while discussing this topic.
As for the junior pastor Hamlin, "He has been a little antsy and
anxious, and I've had to get on him in wanting to have people play
with his snake a whole lot. I had to tell him it is not something you
have to do all the time," said his wife."
I think my version is more... likely to be true, lets just say; though, that's just my opinion.
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