The admirably weird Dr. Gene Scott is still on TV here in San Francisco, despite the fact that he died last February. During the dismal post-college year that I lived in Berkeley (my fault, not Berkeley's), I fell into the habit of watching Dr. Scott in the middle of the night, trying to grasp what on earth he was driving at. He was a maverick televangelist with a Captain Ahab beard who held forth in an inexplicably mesmerizing Idaho baritone on a bizarre variety of topics, from the minutiae of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Bible (he was evidently quite learned, and earned the "Dr.") to the secrets of the Pyramids. Sometimes he would disappear from the screen for long stretches, to be replaced by footage of racehorses or polka dancers. One evening, as he was reading aloud from the occult pop history Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I decided to make a tape composition out of his recitation of facts concerning the Spear of Destiny, and combined it with a loop of the final notes of Salome. The result was judged uniquely disturbing by the two people who heard it. Dr. Scott seemed free of the hard-heartedness that drives other pseudo-Christians on TV; he avoided hot-button social issues, although he did once advise George Bush Sr. to nuke Iraq. There were questions about the financial structure of his church, which, no doubt, the IRS is still busy sorting out. If he did engage in chicanery, he couldn't really be accused of being a hypocrite, since his religious system was so murky to begin with. He was a divine American kook of a sort they don't manufacture anymore.
