Last month I was surfing a bit at The Blacklisted Journalist — an awkwardly designed website hosting the writings of Al Aronowitz. I was looking for his August Blues, which is a lovely thing:
August is the month when wars start. It’s when the water dries up and the spirit begins to wither. Insomniacs pull down their shades and lock themselves in their rooms in August. Lifelong friends have fist fights. People feel like they’re going to burst. Sometimes they do.
… I suppose it has to do with the sun and the heat and the planets and the stars. Brian Epstein died in August. So did Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, although their August stretched through an Indian summer. It’s no accident the Jewish New Year begins then. August sometimes lasts until the sound of the ram’s horn. People move in September. School starts. Somehow the pulse revives. People begin to think about lighting fires for winter. Finally, August lets go like the leaves from the trees. And the weirdness ends.
While browsing there I tripped across the trippy account of Aronowitz’s long friendship with Scott Ross, a talk-show host on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Ross had also been a creature of the 1960s counterculture — a rock-and-roll radio DJ married to a former member of the Ronettes. Aronowitz and Ross remained friends after Ross became a born-again, Pentecostal Christian and went to work for Robertson. (For the Dylan-obsessed Aronowitz, I suppose, everyone was entitled to their “born-again” phase.)
What struck me most in the profile was Ross’ gratitude and admiration toward his boss, including this anecdote recounted by Ross:
Back in the ’60s, I brought in a bunch of rock and rollers, vagrants who’d been in jail the night before. They were a rock and roll band. I brought them into the studio and said, “Let’s listen to a song that represents who they are.” I think they did a Dylan song. The people at the Christian Broadcasting Network were so angry, they walked out the studio. I had brought in ‘these dirty heathen’ off the street. One of the CBN women pointed out a girl in the group and said, “She doesn’t have any underwear on! She’s sitting on that brand, new couch and God’s money built this place!” I don’t know how the woman knew the girl didn’t have any underwear on, but there you are!
I came out of the studio because my TV crew had walked out on me. I’m standing out in the middle of the hallway of this brand, new building, which had been dedicated just a few weeks before. All these people are yelling and screaming and walking up and down the halls and waving their arms. and Pat comes down the stairs and says, “What’s going on here?” And they point at me and say, “He brought in these rock and rollers and that girl doesn’t have any underwear and they’re filthy people and this is God’s building dedicated to God’s purposes.” And Pat just looked at all these people and said, “The day this building becomes more important than those people, I will personally burn this building to the ground.”
That story seems so out of character compared to the person Robertson had become by the time Aronowitz was writing this (in 1996) and compared to the person Pat Robertson is today.
These days it’s very hard to imagine Robertson welcoming a bunch of hippies off the street — or declaring people like that to be more important than property. Putting people ahead of property violates the platform he ran on as a Republican candidate for president in 1988.
I suppose what’s most startling to me about Ross’ anecdote is that it’s a reminder that Robertson wasn’t always, and perhaps didn’t originally set out to become, the right-wing huckster, media mogul and political power-broker that he is today. Much of what Robertson does these days appears as cynical ploys for power and money — from the perpetual telethon of his TV programming, to his peddling of quackish dietary supplements, to his publishing books filled with John Birch nuttery and conspiracy theories plagiarized from Lyndon LaRouche.
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