My latest research rabbit-hole entails digging up fundamentalist Christian websites from the turn of the millennium (you know, when these fine fellows were crusading against the unholy trinity of Harry Potter, Pikachu and Osama bin Laden).
One such site I’ve turned up is Steve Van Natten’s Blessed Quietness Journal, which I vaguely remember coming across in the early 2000s; I was surprised to find that it’s still onlie. It’s not as wonderfully demented as Demonbuster, but it’s still pretty eccentric.
Naturally, it has a page on Pokemon, which is illustrated with a picture of Pikachu photoshopped to make him look like some sort of shadow elemental. Steve is forthright in his condemnation:
This is a powerful Satanic thing. How could it be otherwise when simple toy cards can invoke such zeal of hate and treachery? Baseball cards have been around for over 70 years, and you never heard of this kind of response to them. This Pokemon thing has to be a matter of the demonic.
He has trouble keeping focused, though, and his page on Pokemon gets sidetracked first by he Biblical story of Saul and hen by attacks on other forms of family entertainment. These include Bewitched (“This show did much to break down the Christian home against occult powers”), Star Wars (“The hero and the villain were reverses of Jesus Christ and Satan”) and an old Donald Duck comic in which, shockingly, he uses a divining rod to find water (“The tragedy is that these funny books were never checked by Daddy and Mommy”).
The page on Harry Potter, meanwhile, has versified attack on the Boy who Lived courtesy of one Mike Ramey:
Cruised through the toy store, ’bout flipped my lid,
Shelves were stacked with a weird lookin’ kid;
Not Barney, Pokemon or Dragonball Z;
Even the Teletubbies were hard to see!
It doesn’t take long for 9/11 and the ACLU to turn up in this rhymin’ rant:
Teachers in the classroom, changing lesson plans,
Instead of Ritalin, bring in this weird young man;
Librarians, Counselors, ACLU,
Say: “Witchcraft is fun; so don’t you stew!”Pardon me folks, but lest we forget,
The Trade Center is still burning yet;
Anthrax in the mail, terrorist glide,
Congress in hiding watching jets collide.
The moral of the story? Harry Potter can’t stop Al Qaeda, only Jesus can:
Well, Wasn’t that YOU praying for America’s health,
Praying for God to bless this nation’s wealth?
Next time Osama’s boys come blasting through;
See what “Good Ole Harry” can do for you!
Phew! But if you want the real meat of the Blessed Quietness journal, you’ll need to head to the directory of articles on witchcraft:
A true time capsule from the era before cranks discovered Picard memes.
Doris V. Sutherland 