An Ordinary Fanatic

I met him as we were both checking in to the Big Bend Resort and Adventures campground.  He was coming out of dry camping in Big Bend National Park, in a small pop-up, and I was going to dip my toes into the park the next day.

He was presentable, for someone who’d been without a shower for a few days.  White beard, gray hair in need of a comb, blues eyes, nice grin, well-spoken.

No, this isn't the "real" ordinary fanatic, whose name is Eric, but you get the idea.

 Turns out he’s a retired Cal State system college professor, Ph.D in geography, now living in Colorado.  I teased him that we’d fall madly in love and run off into the West Texas sunset.

He’s a banjo picker and had tracked down a Sunday gathering at the High Sierra Saloon in the El Dorado hotel over in Terlingua Ghost Town, and later that afternoon I wandered over, sat down at the bar, ordered a Lone Star, and listened to the music. 

The next day, we met for dinner, along with Ed, a recent widower from Vermont, and that’s where the ordinary person began to ooze into another dimension.  Ed’s wife, a Pentacostal Christian, had died this past summer, and tears still came to his eyes when he spoke of her.  Without much faith himself, he began to attend his wife’s church, and returned to a Christianity which he’d probably never really left, though he did not become Pentacostal.  Faith became the focus of our dinner conversation.

The ordinary man, Eric, had had a long faith journey, born into a Unitarian family, moving into Buddhism, and now Catholicism.   And he’d come to Catholicism, he said, because, from his extensive reading, it was apparent that only the Catholic Church was able and willing to fight the attempts of the UN and the New World Order which were, at the behest of the Jews, attempting to install the religion of Satanism so the Jews could take over the world.  The ordinary guy was morphing into 

If you’re confused, so was I. 

The ordinary fanatic and I  had breakfast together the next morning, and I kept quiet as he expounded his beliefs, all of which could be reduced to the very simple notion that Jews were behind everything bad:  WWII, because Roosevelt was Jewish; the global warming hoax.  Jews use music to indoctrinate; after all Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary is Jewish; Pete Seeger was Jewish. 

As I drank my coffee and ate my eggs and toast, he became animated; his eyes shone, his teeth almost bared as his once-charming smile morphed into a smirk.  Leaning back in his chair, his chest expanded as he kept moving into the slime of hatred.  He knew, he told me, the truth, and now that he knew the truth, he knew what to do:  to talk to people, write, be on the radio…get the word out about what was really happening in the world.

A scientist, well-educated, with PhD parents and two brothers who are professors at respected universities.  A Unitarian, an environmentalist, a Buddhist.

And now…ugly, irrational, an ordinary fanatic. It was sad. 

 From ordinary guy to someone espousing evil, ugly, ugly evil.