Back a little more than half a century ago, when The Devil was a callow teen, he would go cruising Central Avenue in Phoenix with his buddy, Jim Giammarinaro, in Jim-Jim’s massive ’61 Chevy Impala.
Jim was practically a grown-ass man and fully licensed to drive; Yours Truly was not. We thought of Jim’s car as a really cool, powder-blue armored personnel vehicle.
Unlike the other pointless, hormonally challenged wankers on a summer evening’s Central patrol, for some perverse reason we’d crank up the AM Delco tuned to firebrand, Bible-thumping, full-bore Jesus screamer, The Right Rev. A.A. Allen beaming direct to us from Miracle Valley, Arizona.
Talk about an hour of power, Allen, an old-timey, hands-on “healer” and purveyor of “miracles,” could really stand and deliver. The guy was a roaring jet engine for Jesus H. Christ.
Neither Jim nor I was even vaguely religious. We were fans of the Rev., though, because I guess we just sort of thought of him as an entertainment resource, and of ourselves as kinda talented at being loud, weird-assholes. Hey, we were 16 and 17, OK?
The car was a hand-me-down family sedan with squishy suspension and questionable brakes. Jim kicked it up to 115 mph during one hellishly hot summer run to Saguaro Lake about 40 miles from town on what was then a two-lane blacktop. The tires were always worn and slick, and it’s a wonder we survived.
Praise Jesus!, as Allen would shout. At least that’s what I remember.
Funny how we never met any cute girls on those nocturnal Central Avenue rambles. But, man, what a set of pipes. On Allen, not the Impala. He suffered miserably from a rotten childhood and terrible alcoholism, but the son-of-a-bitch could sure as hell preach - respect, Dude.
Asa Alonzo Allen was an American Pentecostal evangelist who, on July 4, 1954, supposedly experienced a revelation about the Fall of America and its total destruction at the hands of Communist Russia.
In his vision, he foresaw Russian agents spreading poisonous nerve gas across major portions of the Midwest. He also saw Russia attack America from east and west with nuclear weapons along the coasts.
In Allen’s vision America was utterly destroyed. But his revelation has a somewhat happy ending - he foresaw Christians finding safety in “the cleft of the rock in Jesus.” Whatever the fuck that meant in the face of sizzling fallout and a planet-killing nuclear winter.
Today - Sunday, April 7, 2024 - Yours Truly remembers The Rev. Allen as America prepares for what seems like a weirdly over-hyped solar eclipse tomorrow. This utterly predictable event in Newton’s clockwork universe has ignited America’s white, Christo-Fascists’ incipient lust for the End Times.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Horseface, R-GA, reportedly tweeted of Friday’s 4.8 quake in the Northeast and the coming eclipse, “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.” She thoughtfully included a praying-hands emoji.
Don’t worry, Marge. Those insidious Jews likely invented space lasers to ward off just this type of pesky natural phenomenon.
Others of her ilk, Christo-Fascist morons on America’s Nazi-esque nutcase websites, are also into weird omen theories, like tomorrow’s eclipse path is part of a cosmic “X” across America when coupled with an earlier eclipse, signifying some sort of divine cancellation or curse upon our nation. An angry, righteous God is Xing us out, as it were. Or maybe the Big, Pre-literate Bastard is just signing His name?
Additional nincompoops have anxiously speculated the Russians will launch a nuke attack on the U.S. during the eclipse’s totality. Stupidly, they ignore the fact our missile defense systems supposedly also work in darkness. Every goddamn night.
These people are troglodytes. They’re the same morons who send money to southern-fried preachers on TV and the same blivots who vote for Donald Dipshit Dump. Nevertheless, we’d be idiots to ignore what they’re sensing - namely that we’re facing huge, ongoing threats right now, mostly by our own hands, including, but not limited to:
A European war with a dying Russia that likely won’t exist in 20 years due to a massive, unstoppable population decline in ethnic Russians.
A potential war over Taiwan with a dying China, where the main ethnic group, the Huan people, are fading so fast China is likely to lose its industrial base and break into two or three separate entities within the next 10 years.
Relentless global warming. The World Meteorological Organization says 2023 was the warmest year on record. The global average temperature is now 1.4 degrees Celsius above earth’s pre-industrial baseline and climbing, and harmful carbon emissions from 2010-2019 have already achieved sci-fi levels, putting the world on a sure path to disaster. Urgent action is needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Of course, that won’t be happening because we’re all just a bunch of stupid, fucking apes.
And we can’t forget that ugly brewing civil war within our own borders as decent Americans square off against the white racist forces of totalitarianism and Donald Shitty Diaper Pants in the 2024 election.
The onrushing incorporation of machine intelligence that is rapidly advancing to full-blown artificial intelligence and super-intelligence. It’s an unpredictable, potentially lethal power that, at the very least, is about to disrupt most office jobs, not to mention forever altering what it means to be a human being.
The potential destruction of Israel due to its recent, idiotic lethal attack on the Iranian Consulate in Syria, killing top Iranian military leaders. The Persians have promised prolific payback, and the murderous Israelis are likely to respond in kind, perhaps triggering a Middle East conflagration of Biblical proportions.
And now a few astronomers are warning the massive star, Betelgeuse, about 700 light years away, could go supernova at any second. They add it’s “unlikely” the resulting stupendous deadly radiation outburst will harm us earthlings, but nobody is offering a money-back guarantee.
The Rev. Allen died June 11, 1970, at age 59, reportedly of “alcoholic liver failure”; and, in a totally unrelated development, the teenage Devil’s Central Avenue cruising days ended about the same time.
A few years later, during The Devil’s first years of college - he was a journalism major, a sop many universities offer to “C” students to get their money in order to support real academic pursuits like science - he drove down to Miracle Valley, the site of The Rev. Allen’s holy Jesus kibbutz, or whatever.
Allen’s “world headquarters” were little more than a rambling wreck of an extended ranch house off a two-lane blacktop - Highway 92 - amid the rolling, dry grassy hills of the high Sonoran Desert. Inside the “Prayer Room,” which was much as Allen had left it, post cards, letters, and snapshots of people - all types of people - were thumb-tacked and stapled to the walls willy-nilly.
A one-time busy workroom for the Lord, one assumed, wishing to give Allen the benefit of the doubt while knowing full well it was all a scam.
The “prayer room” was small, its “decorations” haphazard, almost schizoid, making it appear highly likely the only “praying” going on within the dingy space was focused on the size of the checks Allen’s desperate radio listeners - his flock of sheeple - had sent him in exchange for his worthless “thoughts and prayers.”
In retrospect, it was the very essence of organized religion: shabby and sad.
A few years later, a rag-tag gaggle of Chicago-based Christian nitwits took over the place, internecine violence ensued, and everything went to shit in short order. You know, like any and every endeavor involving morons in groups.
Or, as Yeats said:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Can you feel it in the air, America? Can you feel the rapidly rising, violently roiling forces of destruction and change rumbling our way?
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.