Interstate 10 to Los Angeles

Following the sun out of Twentynine Palms, I flip on the radio and here’s the man of the hour:

“It’s when you connect all of them, it’s when you look at all of the different dots, that’s when you see the picture and I can see the picture that it’s making: they are building a machine and it’s something that you don’t want them to turn on. What will turn on this machine . . . is an event. I don’t know what that event is, but God help us, we must stand together. We must stand strong. We must know that an emergency will turn the machine on and once you turn the machine on, there is no turning back. You must not give them more power. You must not!”

Hard cut from Beck’s rapture into Hank Williams doing “I Saw the Light” back in ‘48 and dead drunk at 25 — worries and fears I claimed for my own, then like the blind man that God gave back his sight, praise the Lord, I saw the light . . . no more darkness, no more night —

Turn the dial to bring the religion home as a big voice booms: “Do you think Jesus never felt desire for a woman? He was tempted! But he was conscious of who he was. He resisted temptation because he did not want to lose his identity, lose his effectiveness, and lose his destiny. Temptation is everywhere you turn! You turn on the computer and —”

Punch the button and Michael Savage comes up, talking about how “there are no Bibles in North Korea. And where there used to be Bibles in hotels in America, there’s now on-demand pornography. And so we have a debased, corrupt, degenerate society. They don’t understand what freedom is. They think pornography is freedom. They think the ability to use drugs at all times of the day . . . that’s freedom.”

Back to the preacher man who’s shouting that “temptation has no respect for anybody! Temptation doesn’t like children, he doesn’t like old people, he doesn’t like men, he doesn’t like women, he doesn’t like blacks, he doesn’t like whites, he doesn’t like yellow people and he doesn’t like green people, if we have any of them on the face of the good earth. The devil, the arch-enemy of God and man, hates you. Period.”

I look into the fiery western sky and for a moment I wonder if the AM radio is right and I am absolutely wrong.

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AM Radio Scan #7 — Twentynine Palms
In case you need to hear it for yourself.

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Hank Williams – I Saw the Light
MGM Records, 1948 | buy mp3s
If you’re in the right mood, this song is sort of amazing.