How A Progressive Found Jesus And Was Tarred And Feathered For It

 Billy Bob Jarvis was born and raised in Tupelo, Mississippi – yes that Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis, but still home to poor whites, crackers, like him whose father worked at the sawmill and whose mother took in laundry.  They shopped on Fridays, sale days at Piggly Wiggly, ten percent off 50 lb. sacks of corn meal, and fat back only 49 cents a pound, streaky, nasty stuff but all the family could afford.

Billy Bob’s grandfather had been born in the Delta near Indianola, tenant farmed a small patch of land until he packed up his wife and five children and moved across the state in search of something other than dirt farming until he landed in Tupelo, met a distant uncle related to Elvis who owned a dry goods store who let him sweep floors, scrape the mud from the front porch, and drive the mule across the line to Alabama for lumber, nails, and buckets.

Billy Bob’s father managed to make a living cadging and hustling, taking odd jobs, errand boy, gofer, paper route, and finally an apprentice at the mill working his way up to planer and then supervisor.  The pay never matched the long hours and hard work, but enough to keep his children from the state.

Billy Bob was always a smart boy, jumped two grades, did well in high school and got a scholarship to Ole Miss where thanks to his charm, easy manner, and eagerness to please, he was accepted to one of the university’s best fraternities – not the best of course, reserved for the wealthy Delta elite, sons of the owners of thousands of acres of rich bottom land still farmed for cotton, but a good, respectable one, and one which turned out to be a base for his political ambitions.

In Senior Year he was elected President of his class and Phi Beta Kappa.  He caught the eye of his Congressman, Eldridge Parker, Sr. and was offered an internship. 

Parker was one of the few liberal politicians sent to Washington, and he repeatedly won election thanks to his popular and populist appeal.  He was a man of solidly conservative social values, but always championed the cause of his poor white and black constituents. Billy Bob – now William, given his new, important status – had no particular political leanings and would have just as readily joined a conservative in Congress had the time and opportunity been right; but with Parker he learned the progressive’s trade and in time was a partisan, a follower, and eventually a believer.

Through perseverance, loyalty, and hard work Billy Bob was offered a sinecure – a safe seat vacated by a long-serving Democrat from Meridian – which thanks to the support of his patron, he won handily.  From there, his political road was paved with gold.

Something clicked during his first term, something that went beyond simply Democratic politics, something eager and important.  The lot of the poor was not just an incidental plank on a political platform, but an issue; and given the zeitgeist of the times, this concern was conflated with the lot of the black woman and the gay man.  He became a progressive, and although he had to walk fine line in Meridian as he became more and more liberal, he was able to convince his constituents of the rightness of compassionate action and was granted another term.

He joined all the progressive caucuses in the House, and soon became known as a progressive’s progressive, a tireless advocate for the environment, the transgender community, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street. He, thanks to his generous personality and increasingly eloquent speeches, was sought after by his most influential progressive colleagues.  The fact that he was from Mississippi enhanced his reputation.  If a cracker white boy from the South could so enthusiastically embrace the progressive agenda, anything was possible.

Yet just as his star was shining most brightly and his political way clear, he found Jesus, a natural happening many said given his Southern upbringing, but still unusual and rather shocking for a committed progressive.  The secular journey was supposed to be without the unpleasant complications of religion – Biblical fundamentalists simply got in the way of liberal visions of a Promised Land here and now.  Yet here was one of progressivism’s leading young lights gone to the buggering nuisance of the Jesus Right.

In fact Billy Bob came by his religious conversion quite naturally.  No one could grow up in the rural South without preaching, covered dinners, and the Lord.  His father, no born-again zealot, was a Sunday church goer.  Somehow the sermons must have registered somewhere in his unconscious; or more likely it was the moment Anna Mae Borders in a moment of mad ecstasy tore open her blouse and stood before God, Pastor Phillips, and the congregation naked as jay bird shouting, 'Take me, Jesus, take me'. 

The young Billy Bob had longed to see the breasts all his older friends talked about - milky white, as round as ripe melons, as soft and downy as silk - and there they were for all to see and they were more marvelous than he could ever have imagined.  He watched as she shook and danced, smiling and laughing and shouting 'Jesus, Jesus', until she collapsed on the floor and was helped out of the church by four young men. 

In any case there Jesus was, all dressed in white raiment, arms extended and a broad smile on his face. Billy Bob was in the garden of his modest suburban home in Bethesda when he saw the Lord and sat with him on the porch furniture he had just bought from Walmart.  It was like an image out of a catechism or a child's hymn book all soft lighting and pastels, a floral backdrop, but it was real. 

He wore a beatific smile all that day and the next as he walked through the corridors of the Dirksen building to his office, greeted his staff, his intern, and his chief aide. 'God bless you', he said to them all, 'and have a blessed day'. 

'You're chipper this morning, boss', said the aide, to which Billy Bob replied, 'I am chipper and blessed by the Lord'.  The aide smiled quizzically gave him his briefing papers for the day. 

'I won't be needing those', Billy Bob said.  'I am in the Lord's hands now', so the prepared speech 'The Rise of the Black Man' and the treatise on the melting ice caps were handed back but the notes accompanying a poster section entitled 'The Greatness of Woman - A Secular Triumph' caught his eye. 

'No, no, no', he admonished the aide.  'Women are God's creation, vessels of his divine procreation and mothers in his service.  Where did this apostasy come from?'. 

The aide, perplexed and confused since the paper had been written by Billy Bob himself, reminded him of the upcoming session, the Gay Women's caucus which had sponsored it, and his role in it; but Billy Bob wanted no part of it.  'Tell them to stop barking up the wrong tree, and to come to Jesus'. 

And on it went until he was considered around the bend, as nutty as a fruitcake and no longer acceptable or even viable as a progressive spokesman.  He had become as batty as the rest of the bass boat crackers in Mississippi.  They had known if from the beginning and suspected that his espousal of the progressive agenda was just a ruse, a ploy, some kind of chicanery to get him bipartisan support for higher office. 

Undeterred in every public utterance until he was hooked from stage left like a bad vaudeville act, he started and finished with Jesus Christ.  It was only a matter of time that the powers that be stripped him of all his Congressional duties, committees, caucuses, and activist groups.  No Christer, no Biblical babbler could continue in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. 

So he switched parties, won reelection easily in one of the most lopsided elections in Mississippi electoral history and was poised for the Senate with universal Republican support.  Finally he had both a spiritual and political home.  There were no longer suspicious, inquisitive looks as he walked to his office prominently carrying a worn, leather-bound Bible and greeting people with a 'Jesus loves you'.

Progressives, nonplussed and irritated that he was still in the well of the House and in the Dirksen building but on the other side, sneered at his supposed born again conversion; but then again he was where he belonged - with the party of dopes, holy rollers, and ignoramuses.  God has no place in the Congress of the United States they said, but there was Bible-thumping Billy Bob, turncoat, quisling, and very symbol of the intellectual rot seeping up from the swamps of the South. 

'Quisling?', he said to a reporter who was questioning him on his volte face and return to his Southern roots, 'They are the quislings, the Judases, the heretics and apostates, and they will be cast out'.  Whether by prophecy, coincidence or the final lap of godless progressivism, all his hecklers were gone after the next election cycle. 'Either Jesus or the American people had enough of their smarmy nonsense', he said, 'and good riddance to bad rubbish.'