gagged and tethered to a tent pole
I have been reading Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book is about the author’s attempt to live and survive on minimum wage jobs and experience how the other half lives. She tells the story of wanting to go out and amuse herself one night after spending the day cleaning other people’s houses, the obvious and cheapest choice for amusement being the religious tent revival meeting due to start down the road:
It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth… I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.