By now in the history of this little blog, can I assume anyone reading is familiar with Tom O’Dell and his wonderfully bizarre late-night cutlery-hawking enterprise?
If not, click the links. I’ll be here when you get back.
Caught up? Good.
One of the benefits of moving in with my mother-in-law our landlady is that we get to share her DirecTV setup. We had no cable, satellite or any kind of subscription TV service prior to the move. The transition to digital over-the-air TV had given us even fewer live viewing choices – we were left with the option of watching either Fox or PBS. The 600 channels or so of satellite TV were like an amazing new world.
The evening after our move, my buddy John stayed with us for a while, taking in the wondrous sights coming from the picture tube. We didn’t have a remote for the DirecTV receiver yet, but it was enough to stand in front of the box, pushing buttons repeatedly, surveying the vast wasteland of wonders.
It was then we saw the words glowing like a beacon of hope from the program guide. “All is not lost,” this two-word phrase whispered in our ears.
Those words? “Knife Show.”
Knowing that O’Dell’s show is called Cutlery Corner, we weren’t expecting to see our hero, and indeed, we did not. Instead, we experienced something far more unsettling. A rotund, genial-looking middle-aged man spoke while gently placing Swiss Army-style knives and “tactical folders” on a glass turntable, usually framed on both sides by tacky touristy crap – plastic Native American stereotypes, figurines depicting livestock, etc. Every few minutes, an awful country song would play as the host stepped away to let the slowly rotating knives speak for themselves. In retrospect, an entire show of this would have been preferable to what came next.
When he came back, he began peppering his sales pitches with references to God. His spiel also betrayed a growing distrust of the government. More than once he mentioned “our freedom being taken away.” What had started as a harmless bit of crap TV was transforming, before our eyes, into some kind of Branch Davidian-style militia recruitment show. Had he more time, I have no doubt our host would have been trotting out “Rockefeller was a Satanist!”-style conspiracy theories.
Next, our host held up what looked like a cylindrical hairbrush. He then proceeded to illustrate the proper way to subdue an assailant with this not-a-hairbrush. Whether the assailant was a terrorist, ACLU lawyer, or ATF agent, he did not specify.
A few weeks later, we finally caught O’Dell in his natural habitat, 1:00 AM, somewhere in the nether regions of the DirecTV schedule. All was right with the world once more. Say what you will about his hyped-up salesmanship, O’Dell has never (to my knowledge) attempted to incite violent overthrow of the government.
To this day, I wake up in cold sweats, fearing a rotund man with a gentle southern accent is about to plunge a hairbrush into my ear.
It occurs to me that it must never be so difficult as it is today to be a decent Christian. And when I say “decent,” I mean the kind that says “I love my neighbor, I am kind, even to those with whom I disagree, I don’t tell people to go to hell, I don’t call homosexuals ‘fags’ and then go tea-bagging.”
Please, observe the constitutionally-mandated separation between church and knife show.