Although it might be said (and I would agree) that there has never been a fundamentalist Christian preacher born of woman greater than Jimmy Swaggart, it is also true that the least in the kingdom of experience is greater than he. And this is what THE OZONE SKIP is all about: the kingdom of the fundamentalists vs. the kingdom of experience, and the fact that the real kingdom, when it comes, is to be heralded by what the Bible calls "a new song."

As a child, I was naturally attracted to the Seventh-Day Adventist over the Southern Baptist material, because it had better pictures, and emphasized the symbolic over the legalistic. I was especially fond of a book called Daniel and the Revelation. In my bed at night, the walls of my room swirled and flowed around me with its great cosmic cartoon drama, featuring multi-headed, multi-horned, fire-breathing dragons, doomed to be defeated by King Jesus, coming with the clouds of heaven in the spirit of Lancelot in the Sunday funnies.

The firstborn of the new creation were arranged before him like a respectable middle-aged choir, dressed in identical white robes, fresh whitewall haircuts and tight perms, smugly singing some sort of new song, which apparently only they were officially authorized to sing.

The artist had scattered musical notes randomly above their heads in a lame attempt to represent this new song; but without staves or key signatures, who could interpret them?

I often thought, If only one might hear this new song, and at least give it a try! But both grandmothers were adamant. The new song was bound to remain obscure until the firstborn of the new creation actually came singing it, at which time those of us who were saved would get caught up with them to meet Jesus in the air.

One of my favorite things as a kid was to take Daniel and the Revelation with me under the covers late at night -- after midnight, when most local stations went off the air -- and study it by penlight listening to one of the big-city, rock-and-roll "superstations," whose signals were literally skipped (hence the title) off the underside of the low-lying clouds from such exotic and faraway places as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis and New Orleans. The same principle satellites use today made it possible to tune in the early rock stars back in the 50s, literally going over the heads of the local, usually religious censors.

The Bible says grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. But for poor, upper-middle-class white kids like myself, born by the country club pool with a silver transistor radio in one ear, hip and cool came through Elvis Presley -- the firstfruits of a punctuational evolution that began in earnest around Beale Street in Memphis, and has since poured out over the whole world like a fire that blazed up, and over which he watches to this day.

A white man was presented to black people (who represent the most ancient societies on earth), and was found acceptable. And my whole generation, it seems, saw it together on the Ed Sullivan Show.

"Hungry hearts reached out, and the river began to flow!", as Jimmy Swaggart used to say. But as Jimmy Swaggart also used to say, "You've got to get down, to get your lip under the threshold, so that the river (that flows from the throne of God) can flow in...."

It behooves us, therefore, to challenge fundamentalist Christians on a level they can't reach without getting down -- i.e. making the same "strong connotations to sexual intercourse" in their own language they are always making in rock and roll.

We must nudge the evangelical envelope towards image enough to be entertaining, without being insulting, thus granting the fundamentalist Christian an unguarded moment in which to hear the sound of "God" walking through the garden of his or her own sub-conscious in the cool of the evening -- a small, still voice within themselves suggesting that there is something erotic, perhaps even pornographic, about the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity. That there is something perverted, perhaps even perverse, about someone who worships the image of "a man nailed naked to a cross with the blood dripping down!" (Graham), but recoils in horror from the image of two people making love -- particularly if they are young, or of the same sex.

Like Joshua, who sneaked into Jericho with the aid of a prostitute, we must assumes the form of fundamentalist Christian writing, not just faithfully, but passionately, confident that the joke has become so obvious it can even be told (and I believe better) from their point of view. I call it "stealth religion."

One day not long ago I took some of my work down to the stationery store for copies....

I'd been praying for an opportunity to try it out on a real, live, unsuspecting fundamentalist Christian for quite some time, and this day my prayers were answered. The youth minister of a local fundamentalist Christian church was temping for the regular girl, who was out sick.

As I browsed around the store killing time, I noticed him picking up pages and reading them -- curiously at first, then more and more excitedly as he went on, seduced, no doubt, by the recurrence of such words as "God," "Jesus Christ," "His one true people," as well as "hippies," "peaceniks," "rock stars," and "Antichrist forces."

"This is what we're saying!" he squealed, as if having discovered a pearl of great price. Alas, his enthusiasm turned a whiter shade of pale as he began to suspect upon re-perusal what it was really saying -- that the 60s was the Second Coming; that the counterculture was the firstborn of the new creation; that rock and roll was the new song, which only they could understand and sing; that Woodstock was the wedding feast of the Lamb, where the counterculture was conceived in the womb of the young American middle-class, setting the birth pangs of the new age irrevocably into motion. And last, but not least, that the fundamentalist Christian preacher was and is the dragon -- a mythological, fire-breathing beast, who has been cast down to earth in great wrath, knowing that his time is short.