How long, O Lord? By Hunter Thompson

How long, O Lord, how long? Are these TV preachers all degenerates? Are they wallowing and whooping with harlots whenever they’re not on camera? Are they all thieves and charlatans and whoremongers?

Another of the shameless buggers got whacked last week. Jimmy Swaggart, a 52-year-old howler from Baton Rouge known in some quarters as “the Mick Jagger of TV evangelism,” got nailed in a nasty little sting operation down in New Orleans and was forced to resign his $145 million-a-year ministry for the same kind of sex crimes that his old rival Jim Bakker got busted for last year.

There were those, in fact, who said it was Swaggart himself who hatched the plot to disgrace Bakker and have him labeled for life as a brutal sodomite and a flagrant embezzler with a dope fiend for a wife and the IRS for a new partner, instead of Jesus.

Then Swaggart, crazed by hubris, tried to take out yet another of his rivals—Preacher Gorman from New Orleans—by calling him a sot, a pervert and a dangerous child molester who couldn’t help himself.

So it was Gorman who turned up, last week, in possession of a set of malicious photographs of Big Jim slinking into one of those “third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous”-style motels with a known prostitute, or at least a woman of ill repute.

It reminded a lot of people of the naked lunacy that blew Gary Hart out of the ’88 presidential race. It was a shame, they said. But you know how these people are. . . . The semen finally backs up into the brain; the eyes get too bright, and the synapses start fusing into each other. Instead of secret love-nests, they begin strutting into the Holiday Inn and going to orgies on the outskirts of town. . . .

Not much has changed with these powermongers since Caligula’s time. Sex and power have a long history of feeding on each other. In 18th-century England, the king and half his ministers were involved in a whole network of strange and violent sex clubs, whipping parlors and half-secret cults that embraced everything from Satanism and human sacrifice to flagrant white slavery and public bestiality.

In the early years of the century, there were a large number of “Rakes’ Clubs” in London, where the high point of most evenings was hitting the streets in a drunken, brainless frenzy and raping, beating and maiming every human being they could get their hands on.

Bargo Partridge in his classic History of Orgies said, “The Bucks and Gallants roamed the streets terrifying the elderly, beating up the watch [police], breaking windows, committing rape and sometimes even murder. Young girls were stood on their heads in the gutter, and elderly ladies popped into barrels and sent rolling down hills. There were clubs called the Mohawks and the Man-Killers, which tried to out-do each other in the hideous game called ‘tipping the Lion.’ This consisted in crushing the nose, and simultaneously gouging out the eyes of the victims unfortunate enough to be waylaid by them. They also carried a piece of apparatus for distending mouths and slitting ears.”

These were not lower class thugs, as in Clockwork Orange, but the sons of the aristocracy. There was no law for them. Only the rich and powerful were allowed to carry swords or ride horses—which put the poor at a certain disadvantage when gangs of rich drunkards swooped down on them in some dim-lit street after midnight. . . .

That was the Golden Age of what they used to call “gentlemen’s clubs” in London. . . . But it couldn’t last. There were too many losers wandering around with their noses crushed, their eyes gouged out and their mouths so stretched that they could take in a whole cantaloupe and still make idle conversation in a pub. Public opinion turned on the “wild boys,” and their clubs were banished.

By the second half of the century, there was a whole new focus for the gentlemen’s clubs—the worship of sex and extravagant public decadence. This was the time of the infamous Hellfire Club, which included among its inner circle the Prince of Wales, the Lord Mayor of London, Benjamin Franklin, the crazed Earl of Sandwich, the monstrous Earl of Bute, then prime minister of England.

These people didn’t fool around. They raised the orgy to an art form unknown since Caligula or even the fiendish Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, who begat a long line of rapists and treacherous sex maniacs who were said to lament the fact that the human body had so few orifices to penetrate that they were forced to create new ones with their own daggers in order that the whole clan could swarm on a victim at once.

Dilettantes like Hart, Bakker and Swaggart would have been turned away at the door of the Hellfire Club, rejected as humorless churls and cheap masturbators . . . . Their only “crimes,” after all, have involved low rumors and innuendo and being seen in public with sluts and half-naked bimbos.

The Earl of Sandwich would have taken great pride in being accused of these things. He was so constantly involved in orgies that he had little time for his duties, which included running the British Navy and entertaining the Empire on five oceans. . . . And one of his main accomplishments during that time—in addition to inventing the sandwich—was to sell off the Hawaiian Islands, which cost England control of the whole Pacific Ocean for the next 200 years.

King George III, meanwhile, was so crazed with his own warped fantasies that he had little time to deal with a nasty little colonial insurrection that would come to be called the “American Revolution.”

These were no amateur degenerates, like the ones we sneer at today. They put the whole British Empire on the road to ruin and thought nothing of it—nor cared, for that matter. . . . When the famous English navigator, Capt. Cook, sent word back to London that he had Hawaii and all of Polynesia in the palm of his hand—if only Sandwich would authorize a new mast for his crippled flagship—the earl ignored the request. A few weeks later, Capt. Cook was murdered by angry natives—but Sandwich never noticed.

So much for Empire. These boys liked their orgies, and nothing was going to interfere. These were giants. They had standards—not like these whimpering mashers who keep fouling our headlines today.

Maybe Alphonse Karr* was wrong.