Two TV shows

My God. I turned on The Beverly Hillbillies for about three seconds. Granny was berating an actor dressed as Ulysses S. Grant. She thought it was really him. She threatens to have him sent as a prisoner of war to Andersonville. Andersonville was home to the Confederacy's ghastly Nazi-like prison camp. 13,000 Union prisoners died there, up to 100 a day at times. How can they make that a joke on a sit-com? It was only a hundred years earlier. There were probably elderly children of Andersonville survivors watching.

Although, come to think of it, I saw a celebrity on a game show in the '70's who thought it was hilarious that her mother always talked about the "starving Armenians". That was only fifty years after the Armenian genocide.



I watched an old episode of Perry Mason last night. It wasn't very good--one of the bad episodes that hadn't been in syndication for years. I found it distracting that the victim's name was Kirk Cameron.

"That can't be!" I thought. "Maybe it's Kurt Cameron."

Then they showed his name his door. It was Kirk Cameron all right.

I started contemplating how dumb Kirk Cameron is. I googled him and watched a video of him smiling as he talked about a hurricane that was about to strike Florida and one that killed seventy people in Texas two weeks earlier.

"One thing we know about hurricanes and all weather is that this is not Mother Nature in a bad mood," Cameron said. "This is a spectacular display of God's immense power. When He puts his power on display, it's never without reason. There's a purpose. And we may not always understand what that purpose is, but we know it's not random and we know that weather is sent to cause us to respond to God in humility, awe and repentance."

"Hey Kirk Cameron," responded a Twitterer, "your hopes and prayers sound less than sincere when you call destruction of life a display of God's power."

But it's so easy to attack Kirk Cameron. It's completely pointless.

There was a guy I was very slightly acquainted with many years ago. He was either religious already or he was just turning religious, but he was in his mid-30's and kept hanging around a youth minister and his teenage congregants. I knew his roommate. The guy kept bringing home religious tracts intended for high school kids, telling them to obey their parents and not to date anyone they weren't going to marry.

This is what I imagine Kirk Cameron is like. He turned religious as a teenager and never upgraded to a grown-up version of Christianity. People probably thought he would mature and become less obnoxious about it, but he never did. He's pushing fifty and is as bad as ever.