Jitterbugging for Jesus

A friend from my church in Allen, who is a seminary student at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology and in the grueling candidacy process for ordination some day, sent me a very gratifying response on my Facebook to my posting about “Miss Caleefornya.”
I loved the zinger she threw in at the bottom of all the flattery. She wrote:
Paul,
I was just reading your post about Miss CA, which I really enjoyed. There were times I just had to chuckle or shout Amen. I wish I would have read it last night while I was studying for my last exam. It would have invigorated me and allowed me to stay up later and perhaps nail down a few more Hebrew verbs, which I wish I would have had this morning. All that said, I have to ask what doing an Elvis on the TV is…
I also wanted to say how much I am looking forward to seeing your ordination in just a few weeks.
See you soon,
Julie
Well, Julie, I sometimes forget that I’m well into official geezerhood and that a lot of jitterbuggers, like yourself, are closer to my oldest daughter’s age than my own, and that you relative youngsters may not always understand historical or cultural references that other geezers would get.
So here’s the deal on why all this exposure on TV of Miss California, and all her twisted, in my opinion, horn blowing about her Christian convictions, could drive me to the sort of madness that could make me snap, if you will, and “do an Elvis on the TV.”
Way back when–when Elvis Presley was into his slow, but steady decline into certifiable madness and drug abuse–the story has been well documented that Elvis, who watched a LOT of TV, was increasingly disgusted by all the anti-authority dissent and anti-war demonstrations and all that counter-cultural protest craziness that was ripping the country apart in the late sixties and early seventies.
Remember, Elvis was such a conservative and patriot–and was so aroused to anger about all the very public, rebellious, countercultural drug use among the sixties generation kids–that he very famously was deputized by none other than Richard Nixon as an “official” drug enforcement agent.
Yes, it’s very bizarre and ironic, since he was already slowly destroying himself with drug abuse when he posed with Nixon for pictures of his “deputization” at the White House.
The story is that he was watching the TV news one time, which was showing the “long hairs” and hippies and yippies and dippies in a nasty standoff with riot police or whomever or whatever. I forget the details, but you get the picture–very conservative, anti-drug, Nixon-supporting superstar Elvis was getting himself worked up into a rabid lather about those disgusting hippies and their anti-authority stuff.
He got so worked up that he reached for the pistol that often kept him warm at night and blew away the TV he was watching!
And so, years later when the story came out from the many, many loyal Elvis insiders who had witnessed first-hand the descent into drug abuse and madness, doing “an Elvis on the TV” became a favorite line of a lot of comedians.
And then, the line sort of spread into the everyday culture for a while. It wasn’t unusual for somebody to say to somebody else who got disturbed about something they’d seen on the news or on a TV show to say, “I got so disgusted watching that stuff (or fill in a stronger word), I could have done an Elvis on the TV!”
It was a long time ago. You had to be there. And like I say, I forget that I’m at the age where I’m older than whole generations who may not get the lines I throw out and assume that everybody would get.
That’s the difference in blogging and being, say, a newspaper writer or reporter (and I was both in my pre-ministry life), where a sharp editor would have said, “Hey, Paul–lots of readers out there weren’t around during all the Elvis weirdness and won’t have a clue what this sentence means.”
Very interesting that I read a lot of bloggers of all kinds myself, and, in thinking like the former reporter and editor I used to be, I think to myself, “I wonder how many readers know what this oldtimer is talking about there?”
Hope that clarifies what I was saying, that I was beginning to get so disgusted with all the TV coverage swirling around Miss CA that I was about ready to do an Elvis on the TV.
And may yet if she doesn’t go away.
Oh well–thanks for jitterbugging and believe me when I tell you, I feel your anguish in “nailing down a few Hebrew verbs.” I’m not long out of seminary myself, as you well know.
And, look forward to you being a witness to my ordination and look forward to being a witness to yours some day.
Grace & peace,
Geezer