Wango Tango

Someone just asked if Phil Nugent — whose blog I have promoted at Crooked Timber pretty much since arriving here — is related to Ted Nugent, the guitarist best known for “Yank Me, Crank Me (But Don’t Wake Me to Thank Me)” and other tender ballads.

I am unable to answer that question. I don’t know anything about the man, or even remember how I came to read his blog. The last reference to The Phil Nugent Experience here was picked up by Kevin Drum and briefly propagated across the netrootsosphere. It seemed as if some glorious future beckoned.

But then nothing more happened, and that was that. So, one more time…Phil Nugent is the shit:

As a sanctimonious mouthpiece for a fraudulent view of Christianity, Falwell was everything his enemies could ever have asked for, partly because the mask started slipping and melting after only a few months in the public eye, and he never did get it on quite right again. Pauline Kael once wrote that anyone who trusts a man who smiles all the time must never go to the movies, and Falwell always seemed to be wearing that patently insincere little smile, even in situations where you’d have to be out of your mind or insanely callous to smile. Often, it just made the rage coming through all the creepier. Although he remained in the public eye, thus serving as a living example–as ripe as one as Al Sharpton or Newt Gingrich or any neo-con you name–of just how hard it is to get the media, once you’ve made it onto their rolodexes, to decide that you’ve said everything remotely relevant you could have ever had to say, I think that Falwell officially wore out his welcome with about 99% of the planet on that famous occasion in 1985 when, asked his opinion of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he smiled his pig-eyed smile and said, “I think he’s a phony.” Back in the mid-1960s, before he started issuing political proclamations on everything under the sun, Falwell had denounced Martin Luther King by name and decried what he called “the Civil Wrongs movement” as the work of the devil. I don’t think that this, or the swipe at Tutu and the support for apartheid, was entirely the result of his own racism. I think a lot of it came down to ego and the anger he felt at anyone, but especially anyone else with a religious title, getting better press than he did. Falwell, on the basis of all available evidence had a mind like a dirt clod, but he probably believed that he was very clever, and he may have actually misunderstood the stakes at hand and how far behind Tutu he was in the battle of media of images; I think that he really was stupid enough to think that he could besmirch the Archishop and do damage to him instead of to himself. He made a similar mistake a couple of years later when he stepped in to try to “save” the PTL operation during Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s troubles. Whatever his true motivations, the Bakkers, who were of a separate (Pentecostal) faith than the evangelical Southern Baptist Falwell, were able to rally their remaining fans by declaring that the much-despised Falwell was trying to move in on their turf. He got used, and as a booby prize wound up with a much-republished photograph of himself going down the water chute at the Bakkers’ amusement park while fully dressed.

That is just one paragraph of his Falwell entry. It also discusses how utterly un-Southern Baptist a phrase like “Moral Majority” would have seemed, once upon a time. That squares perfectly with my own recollection of growing up fundamentalist in the 1970s. From references elsewhere, it sounds like he, too, had the experience of losing his immortal salvation in part through the subversive influence of Norman Lear’s liberal sitcoms. More of that probably happened than anyone now realizes.

It’s useless even to try excerpting anything from his Mother’s Day essay. It is a masterpiece.

I don’t know anything about Phil Nugent except that he writes the one blog I read with awe. Won’t somebody out there give the man a bigger pulpit?