I suppose if I didn’t know about it, he’s not hurting me.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t come from an especially rich background. Due to the effort of my father, I was born in Detroit and not on a crappy farm somewhere outside Moscow, Michigan. We weren’t poor white trash, in that we weren’t poor. We sure weren’t rich. I’m familiar with the demographics of a trailer park.

I don’t mention that to brag or whine, but just as prologue. Now and then in the course of any day you’re likely to encounter something that reminds you of things you saw when you were young, and as often as not it’ll be something you were just as happy to forget.

One thing I grew up familiar with was preachers on the television. I never went through a religious phase, and spent far more time listening to preachers in churches than I cared to when I was a boy, so I sure wasn’t going to spend valuable TV time on them. Still it seemed like they were always there, and as time went by and I got older I learned about some of them through sheer osmosis.

Most were innocuous enough. They weren’t hurting anybody I could see. But there were two creatures I just couldn’t stand. And they popped up with punishing frequency, like your very least favorite Jackson Five song.As far as I could tell during all the millisecond-long periods in which I watched their show, the road to salvation lay entirely in the act of sending money to Jim & Tammy Faye. And I knew people who did it. You couldn’t argue with’em. Okay, none of my business, and those people would probably throw their money away some way regardless. But these two were as shameless as they were ubiquitous. By the mid-eighties, they were a spectator sport. Which, since I couldn’t stand the sight of them, made me hate them the more.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when Jim Bakker actually went to Club Fed for many, many counts of fraud. From that time 25 years ago, I rarely if ever gave him a thought.

And that’s why I felt like a cockroach ran across me when I clicked on a link at a Codrea post this afternoon and found myself staring at Jim Bakker’s elderly and apparently non-incarcerated phiz.

Turns out (I looked it up) he got sprung after only five years. He’s been out for decades. And you’ll have to click through to see what he’s doing for a living these days – you’ll never guess.

Also, if I ever get it into my head to buy ‘survival food’ off a TV infomercial, I’m first going to examine very closely who’s selling it.