Pat "The Weatherman" Robertson

Trust me, that name works on many levels

Now that I have cable I have access to more craziness than I ever did before. To wit, yesterday Pat Robertson made an appearance on a 700 Club spinoff show called Living the Life. It's supposed to offer women's perspectives on the same issues the 700 Club covers. This means it's hosted by Pat's 700 Club, female cohost, they have a living room styled set rather than the pretend newsroom that the 700 Club has, their titles are done in a soft white script, and they do more interview style productions than "news" and analysis because women care more about relationships and don't understand hard facts. Am I right, or am I right, ladies?

So like I said, Pat Robertson was on the show. He told us how he was able to send a hurricane back where it came from. Really, he literally said he rebuked a hurricane and made it change course. (No transcript, but this gives you the gist of the show.) I guess he's actually done this a couple of times (see the link in the title). It seems irresponsible to not do it all the time, but whatever, it's still a pretty cool power. But if I got to choose, I would want Spider Man's powers. Or if I didn't have to remain in that context I would want to be able to manipulate matter at the molecular level so I could "fly," throw things threw the air, lift heavy stuff, and blow things up. For flying I would really just propel myself forward by creating a series of high and low pressure pockets around me, but still that would be cool. I would also be able to make a bad guy's gun too heavy to hold or I could create localized atomic chain reactions so I could do the Hadouken thing- stuff like that. Oh and I would be a monk or overtly religious like Nightcrawler. When I was a kid my powers would have accidentally killed my parents and siblings so I would be left in the care of Franciscans (naturally) who would have developed in my moral sense a deep affinity with nature as well as my dictum that I not kill. You know, with all that guilt about having killed my family and what not I would want to avoid it. That, and just because you have the power to do something doesn't mean you should. Those would be the words of my dead Franciscan Brother mentor. He was killed by... a police sniper. Yeah, he stepped into the line of fire trying to resolve a hostage situation without anyone dying... But why would he be involved in a hostage situation? I don't know, but I wouldn't kill. That would be my gimmick. Micro-waving bad guys' eyeballs in their skulls would be okay though. Oh maybe it was a high school shooting situation... He was a monk-teacher at a private school. But then I guess we would more likely be Jesuits. I guess we could be Franciscans at an urban mission and it was gangsta's taking hostages. No, there are Franciscan High Schools. Whatever, it's my backstory.

Oh but I was writing about Pat's Storm-like powers. So anyway he saved Virginia from a hurricane. But if you have that power why don't you make the hurricane disappear all together rather than send it off to developing nations that lack the infrastructure to handle the death and destruction you are certainly sending their way or into other states where they will certainly cause damage? Like, if I had my atomic power and you were about to be crushed by parts of a building that some bad guy's explosion sent cascading down to the street, I wouldn't just stop the huge chunks of concrete, steel, and glass and then throw them to crush a daycare center or a school bus. (I never understood why Superman gets away with that- he seems to cause as much or more damage to life and public and private property in his fights with bad guys than he's trying to prevent. Moral residue indeed.) I would stop the rubble from crushing you by atomically pulverizing it so you would just get real dirty instead of dead. Or if somehow the exothermic reaction wouldn't burn you and everything else up, I would turn it all into a gaseous or liquid state and send it away from you. Oh, and my weakness would still be bees... and people who said "nukular."

So Pat has this power over weather and he uses it to destroy the Caribbean. What a jerk. He's a supervillian. If because of nothing else, can we now agree that he's a bad guy? And like all really good bad guys, he may be morally complex but he's still bad. His moral certitude and passion are in one sense noble and admirable, but ultimately deadly and tragic because he's bent on crafting a world in his image. But people don't see that. They're attracted to the power and certainty so they get wrapped up in his evil and call it good. So he and his minions sit around a giant table, in front of an enormous view screen, in his lair housed in a volcano... in Virginia. And they plot the death of Hugo Chavez, how to introduce a blood clot into Ariel Sharon's head, or the destruction of Philadelphia and then broadcast their plots and ultimatums to the world and people send them money.

So to wrap up, Pat is a comic villain who sends hurricanes to kill poor Latin Americans or North Carolingians because he can...

Oh maybe all that's not fair. I guess another way to look at it is, if you can move the hurricane but you can't stop it you should send it to kill people you don't know, because then you're only kind of sad and can turn off the TV if you don't want to see what happened. Or, if the hurricane has to kill someone, better brown people than mostly white people. Or you can say, "Now, Latin America or North Carolina, I'm just sending a hurricane your way, but if you get hurt it's your own fault." Or maybe Bermuda deserves to be hit by a hurricane more than Virginia does. I don't know.

I do know, if I had Photoshop I would've wasted even more time today putting a Super Villain Mask on a picture of Pat Robertson.

Super Soundtrack
Jamming- Bob Marley
Sir Duke- Stevie Wonder
Silverf***- Smashing Pumpkins
I Say a Little Prayer- Burt Bacharach
Ain't It The Truth- The Briefs
Stepping Into Tomorrow- Madlib
A Night In Tunisia- Dizzy Gillespie
Light & Day/Reach for the Sun- Polyphonic Spree
Pulled Up- Talking Heads
Cancer For The Cure- The Eels
Ohio- CSN & Y