My Pantheon of Losers

Today I had a good experience. I woke up and felt love for God flowing through me.

The most important commandment is not to obey God, but to love him. Jesus made this clear. After that, we are supposed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Preachers don’t push the first two commandments much. They push rules, or they tell us to give them money, or they tell us God just wants to help us do what we already want to do. Mainly, they want us to show up in great numbers and pay their bills.

I pray every day for God to help me get love flowing through me. When it happens, I drop everything and sink into it. I stayed in bed for a long time, telling God I loved him and asking for more.

Afterward, I started thinking about contemporary American culture, which is actually the counterculture. We originally used to use the word “counterculture” to describe people like beatniks, hippies, leftists, drug enthusiasts, and sexual deviants, but their culture is dominant now, so it’s silly to say “counterculture” as though we were talking about rebels. We’re talking about obedient, mainstreamed sheep. The word “counter” means “against.” “Counterculture” used to mean “the culture which is against mainstream culture.” Now it just means “the culture which is against God.”

What happens when you go to high school and college? Do they teach you the Bible is true? Do they tell you how important capitalism is? Do they reinforce proper sex roles? No. They promote the counterculture. Old, fat, pampered professors pretending to be rebels repeat the myths they were fed by their own professors. Their eyes shine when they talk about sick individuals like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, and Karl Marx.

I bought into this nonsense when I was a kid, even though I felt contempt for most of my professors. I read the diaries of Anais Nin. I read everything Henry Miller wrote. I loved Fritz Perls. I read the authors of the 1920’s Paris scene. I admired the spiritual grandchildren of the counterculture’s founders. I actually sent letters to TV networks, hoping to get jobs writing for infantile shows like Saturday Night Live. When I went to college, I used Animal House as a pattern for my behavior.

I never became a socialist, and I could never get excited about hard rock or hard bop jazz, but I wanted to be like my counterculture heroes.

Why did I want that? They were miserable people. They killed themselves because they were so miserable. They drank themselves to death. They overdosed. They made other people unhappy. Their kids were screwed up. Their marriages failed.

What did counterculture idols do for others that made me want to like them? Did Jim Morrison heal anyone? Did Gore Vidal raise the dead? These people were useless. They were completely selfish. They were narcissists, elevating themselves briefly on rotten podiums so other idiots could throw roses.

It’s amazing that I ever wanted to fit in with them.

I had a hero vacuum. My dad was no father at all, most of my best friends were creeps, I had no older brother, my older sister was a sociopath, my mother was weak, and I did not have anyone to introduce me to the Holy Spirit. Kids with hero vacuums often fill the vacuums with losers. I suppose this is why it’s so easy for gay men to get teenage boys to come live with them. My great uncle did it.

Today I looked at a couple of videos featuring William Burroughs. An heir to the Burroughs business machine fortune, Burroughs became, perhaps, the leading eminence grise of the counterculture, possibly because he was one of the few who lived long enough to fulfill the grise part.

He was an unrepentant junkie. He blew his wife’s brains out while he was under the influence, and somehow, he was never prosecuted. He spent his life pursuing fake Eastern enlightenment. He built himself an orgone box and sat in it. He dressed like a model grandfather, wearing a suit and hat and carrying a cane, and he spoke with great conviction, trying to convince impressionable young people that his sorry, disgraceful ideas were genius. Young acolytes thought he was a god.

He wrote the most disgusting book I have ever tried to read: Naked Lunch. It’s so gross, I won’t even quote from it. It’s full of stream-of-consciousness sexual depravity. I bought a copy to see what it was all about, and I threw it out because it was so sick. If you’ve ever seen a video about a joke called “the aristocrats,” you’ve seen similar material.

While watching videos, I learned that Burroughs enriched the world by dying at 83, with an adoring minion by his side, doing Tibetan meditation. You can go see a video of the minion rhapsodizing about what a great time they had. This is a big thing with counterculture people. When someone dies disgracefully, they talk like it was a birthday party or a wedding. Hunter Thompson blew his defeated brain through the back of his skull while his grandchild was in the next room, and his wife and son poured drinks and toasted his dead body. Then Johnny Depp paid several million dollars to build a cannon to shoot his ashes into the sky.

Burroughs was an apostle of self-destruction, but he and his peers are nearly worshiped in America’s universities.

My experiences this morning gave me a fresh understanding of the ugliness and evil of American culture, and they helped me understand how long it has been since our country was healthy.

I would say the counterculture really got cranking about 100 years ago. Prior to that, we weren’t all that excited by the kind of garbage people like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway pumped out. Once the floodgates opened, the flow increased exponentially. By the time I was in college, the game was over. Things didn’t look as bad as they do now, but America was already finished.

It’s easy to get the impression that the world started disintegrating in around 2000, but it’s not true. The decay has accelerated greatly since then, but the America of 2000 was already lost.

Knowing this, I feel more comfortable with the idea that the rapture could come immediately. I feel less inclined to look around and think, “It’s too early. Things aren’t that bad.” Things are that bad. The flow of bodies into hell must resemble Niagara Falls, and every body matters to the God who threw them into the flow.

I feel much better about throwing out my big CD collection. I kept some things, but I believe all of my jazz is gone. Art Tatum. Billie Holiday. John Coltrane. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Junkies, prostitutes, weed addicts, mystics…the landfill is welcome to them. I never had anything in common with them. Not at the root. They were always headed for a completely different destination.

Christians like to criticize each other for dropping secular entertainment. We criticize people who tell their kids to stay in on Halloween instead of dressing up as devils and witches. We treat people who don’t give their kids Disney DVD’s as though they were superstitious idiots. We are making a big mistake. Looking back on my experience, I am more in favor of separation from the world than ever. I wish I had thrown Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, and Lynyrd Skynyrd out way earlier. I apologize for nothing, except for being too slow.

The Bible asks what light has to do with darkness. I can see why. Most people are on a bus for hell. Why would I accompany them even part of the way? If you don’t want to finish something, don’t start it.

I’ll see every saved person who has ever lived in heaven, over and over, for eternity. Our relationships will continue forever. No saved person will ever see William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Thelonious Monk, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Sinatra, or Sylvia Plath again. Why bother becoming acquainted with them now?

If there is a library in heaven, Burroughs and Kerouac will not be in it. Neither will Sartre or Marx. There won’t be any movie theaters, and if people like Leonardo di Caprio and Meryl Streep make it to heaven, they won’t be celebrities there. If there are lines, they will have to stand in them like everyone else. No one will ever hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones in heaven. Anything evil thing you have to give up when you die shouldn’t be in your possession while you’re alive.

I feel very bad about admiring losers when I was young. I would have been better off if I had gotten to know God but lost both legs. I wish there had been someone around to teach me better. When I tried to find God, I found loser preachers like Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, who taught me the secrets of remaining poor and distant from my creator. It’s terrible that losers still have so much influence. They have more influence than ever.

I wish my past were a bellyful of vomit so I could throw it up and flush it.