Dearly Disenchanted:

I had just emerged from a liquor store in Jenkintown, PA, where I had purchased a Christmas gift for my 83-year-old landlady, Mrs. Alcorn, who had a deep affection for Bailey’s Irish Cream, a beverage she would sip during our weekly gin rummy games which lasted until she would refer to me as Cy, her long departed husband; at that point I would excuse myself and return to the small apartment I rented above her garage. Stepping from the shop onto the slushy sidewalk, I was headed to my car when I was accosted by a political pamphleteer espousing the wonders of the polymath genius Lyndon LaRouche. On this particular occasion they were heralding the wonders of a life without nuclear threat provided by LaRouche’s proposed lasers in space program that would use cosmic ray detectors mounted in satellites that could pinpoint radioactive material in nuclear warheads, blasting them out of sky and rendering them harmless. As I passed by the card table covered with copies of the Executive Intelligence Review and Fusion magazines along with several brochures hailing LaRouche as the “greatest political mind since Benjamin Franklin,” I thought to myself, “What a bunch of wack jobs!” That was December 1982.

The next time I heard anything about lasers in space was the following March when the President of the United States was proposing a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), whereby satellites tracking cosmic rays could use powerful energy beams to shoot nuclear ballistic warheads out of the sky, rendering them harmless before they reached their intended targets. I felt a certain chill run down my spine, as I had never before experienced a concept’s movement from marginal card table pamphlet to national press conference with such astounding speed.

Over the decades I encountered the occasional LaRouchie touting the decay of Western civilization due to the drug-dealing British royal family funded by Malthusian-driven oligarchs, but they remained at the margins, always with card tables and handmade signs covered with clear plastic to keep any rain from weeping the magic marker. The volunteer evangelists all had the same wild-eyed intensity as they would scream through battery-powered megaphones proclaiming a new renaissance of science, art and classical music driven to expand the population potential of the planet, decidedly NOT affected by global warming.

Democrats from Illinois would love to forget the March 1986 Lieutenant Governor primary victory of Mark Fairchild and Secretary of State candidate Janice Hart, LaRouchie candidates who heralded a grand and sweeping movement in the name of their supreme leader. Adlai Stevenson III withdrew from the general election for governor against Jim Thompson rather than sit on the same ticket as one of Lyndon’s minions. The upset primary outcome was interpreted not as a grand shift to ultra-fascists in the Land of Lincoln, but as a preference for more WASP-sounding names among downstate voters. Fairchild’s opponent in the low-turnout primary was George Sangmeister, and Janice Hart faced
Aurelia Pucinski.

I recalled all this as I was browsing Facebook today. It was if every third scroll, someone had flipped down the folding legs of a card table and parked it on my screen while shoving tracts at my nose about the evils of vaccines, the unreliability of vote counts and the benefits of obscure medications whose inventors were suppressed by powerful forces at the FDA.

With each advance in communication technology, these sorts are getting harder to avoid. In my grandfather’s time, the traveling patent medicine show could only visit one town at a time. When good old Lyndon was running for president in 1984 (something he did eight times), he had to pay $330,000 for each of his fourteen thirty-minute television spots, a strategy that garnered him an absurdly small 78,773 votes nationally. Back then, marginalized wack jobs were easier to avoid. Unfortunately, poor LaRouche was a convicted felon by the time Facebook came along, preventing him from a powerful wholesale social media campaign where $330,000 could easily sway significant representation from a paranoid and disenchanted electorate longing for a stable genius. I miss the card tables.

Recalling simpler times when news feeds had better guardrails, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor