Howard Nemerov's 'boom! ' Comments

Having grown up in the Fundamentalist Christian culture of the American South, having gone to an Evangelical college on top of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee ('Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain! ' MLK's called out, the very place of my Christian education) , having peeled layers away and administered psychological high colonics to rid myself of such an education in the 'Christ-haunted landscape of the South, ' I remember the day I discovered Howard Nemerov's poem, BOOM! , just at the right time...before the evangelicals got organized and off the ground/launched as a political 'party of God, ' Nemerov saw it all growing like a vapid cancer in the Eisenhower years and wrote like an Old Testament prophet, albeit with a New Yorker martini in hand, of what he heard and saw as the growing trivialization/consumerization of American religion in an increasingly trivialized and trivializing democratic/corporation-consumer-ocracy...here is the poem! Read this with Occupy Wall Street in mind...and current wannabee presidential clowns parading plumed out in deity and Christo-sprach...ACK!

BOOM!
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