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You may think of me as just a writer, but I am a voracious reader as well. For example, during the last election cycle, our snail mail was full of political ads. I read all of them. As soon as I read them, some seemed familiar, and I am sure they were rehashing major points the candidate was trying to make. Nevertheless, they were interesting. Now that the election is over, I first got overwhelmed with endless statistics. They were not all that interesting.

Now the commentary about both parties is interesting. Some of the opinion pieces I’m reading has set me to thinking. The winning side is too predictable. They are happy they won the election with the usual remarks ranging from happiness to tweaking the losing side’s noses with teasing remarks. The losing side is much more enjoyable to an author. In particular, opinion pieces pointing out that the “religious fervor” of public gatherings. It’s easy to see that religious fervor in news clips on television.

When I was young and staying at one of my grandmothers as I did every summer, I would listen to the tent revival meetings until I got permission to go to them. Perhaps I was strange, but parts of them were entertaining to me. People confessing their sins out loud were the best parts. I think that’s when I learned the word fornicating. I had to find a dictionary and look it up as when I asked what it meant, people looked at me disgustedly or horrified and wouldn’t say anything. I thought it was a word that us little kids should know, which made me more curious about what it meant.

What I saw when I looked around were people consumed in the excitement of the tent meeting. I was amazed when the preacher would say something, and most of the people would fall to the ground as if someone had slugged them. I would see big strong men who spent their days mining iron ore on the ground. I would see very proper women falling to the ground and exposing more leg than was appropriate. It was like they had lost contact with the real world. As an aside, I didn’t understand then why it was improper for a woman to show too much leg.

Another thing I found amazing was the time when it seemed everyone shouted out the same word. I tried to figure out how they all knew the same word at the same time. Later in life, when I saw the movie Elmer Gantry, it helped me better understand those summer tent meetings. They were much more exciting and interesting than Sunday church.

Back to the aftermath of our recent election, I am sure there will be authors who mine the “religious fervor” of the losing party. An exciting story is easy to write when people act outside ordinary bounds. Why do I say that? As a child, I would fall asleep listening to the tent revival meetings, and then the next day, when I would look around the tent and see the preacher who was holding the tent meeting, he would seem like a very ordinary man. One day I even had a chat with one of them about fishing. At the end of our discussion, I asked how he got the people so excited at night during the tent revival. He told me that you got the fish to bite by getting them excited about the bait. He went on to say that he did the same every night at the tent revivals – he used bait to get the people excited. As an author, I think the preacher is much more interesting than the tent revival audience. Sinclair Lewis must have felt the same thing back in 1926 when he wrote Elmer Gantry.