Dr. Gene Don't Take No Guff

By Brad Bailey
Issue #111, May/June 1990

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the crazy TV preacher with whom it would be most fun to sit down with a bottle of good communion wine and just get blind stinking ENRAPTURED would be Dr. Gene Scott. One gets the strong impression that he'd go for it—and that he's gone for it before, and will go for it again.
Maybe right after the show...maybe even during the show.
You don't usually get busted capillaries like his off communion grape juice.
We could just sit there with the Doc smoking his big old nasty killer cigars with the bands still on and munch on whatever cholesterol-laden food it was that made him so fat and sassy.
Scott's a cipher. Hard to figure.
You look at the folks working his phone banks; they look relatively intelligent and financially OK. They're not like Robert Tilton's beat-down trailer parkies. They're not like Falwell's closet Luddites, xenophobes, bluenoses and racists. They're not like Oral Roberts, green-teethed Okies, or the Swagman's Protestants still fighting Catholic guilt.
Or even people who voted for George Bush.
Or liberals trying to figure out which position will make them appear to be politically correct.
Scott's phone bank folks seem to have some sense of...self...yet they let this fat old hippie abuse them. He spends probably 70 percent of his airtime just dressing them down for not giving 100 percent here in the wee hours after they've been working their real jobs all day.
There is, at first glance, no readily apparent explanation for Scott's "success." At face value, what he does is go out over the TV airwaves from LA to Kentucky to Brazil and, three or four nights out of seven, demand a particularly exorbitant amount of money to be pledged. He refuses to teach until the particularly exorbitant amount is pledged. When the correct amount is pledged and his kitty is satisfactorily fattened, he launches into some of the most wild-eyed slipped-trolley teaching to ever glue itself together and lurch drooling off to an illogical conclusion. But after a while, for some reason, the old f...f...fellow grows on you...like a fungus.
Dr. Gene is the kind of guy you'd want with you in a dark alley facing a truckload of muggers. First, he'd glare them into a state of fear, then he'd break a beer bottle and slash his way outta there. Dr. Gene is the Rambo of TV Preachers, the Ultimate Warrior of the religious airwaves. You won't find Dr. Gene's face on any Valentine cards. He won't be taking Merlin Olsen's job any time soon. He's a can do kind o' guy, and he'll tell you so.
Dr. Gene calls the tunes.
Dr. Gene don't take no guff.
MEAN? Look up "mean" in the dictionary and it'll say, "See Dr. Gene," because he's the mean machine.
How mean is he?
Well, thanks to his financial demands, and the resulting mandatory pouting period, more than half the time the entire show consists of Dr. Gene glaring into the screen between videotapes of Dr. Gene doing this, and Dr. Gene doing that.
It's like a PBS Pledge Break in Hell.
If you don't reach his goal, he don't teach. Lately Dr. Gene's goals have been running right around $300,000 a week and it has been taking the better part of each for folks to finally pony up and persuade Dr. Gene, puh-LEASE teach.
"I will not teach until we reach the goal," he glares. "This could be the day. We're more than halfway there with $167,000. That means we got $133, 000 to go. No reason we can't do that tonight and have it done in one day." And then, for the amazed folks who might've just tuned in: "If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not talking to you. This is for the people I've been teaching. We're gonna make a statement about the value of teaching. So get on the telephone." Dr. Gene appears on camera only long enough to chide viewers to "get on those phones!" Then he blows cigar smoke at the camera, gets even more swole up and pouty and cusses out his VOLUNTEER phone bank staff and then tells some harried engineer whose been working his day job before joining the Scottster to "roll the video."
The video's are basically snippets of film which show pretty clearly why Dr. Gene needs about $300,000 a week to continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed—lot's of travel, lots of nice destination. Nice cars. And fun, fun, fun. Here's this fat bearded goombah egomaniac gone a-golfing. Here he is showing off his prize-winning saddle bred horses, for which he is perhaps better known in California than he is for his ministry. Here he is catching fish off the stock pond at the horse farm.
The idea is, Dr. Gene shows tapes of himself, and the faithful send him money. It's a pretty good gig, but we digress. We were talking about mean.
Dr. Gene is so mean that one night the videos consisted almost entirely of him just walking his big butt around on his High Point horse farm with his big shotgun just shooting the snot out of little birdies. Feathers everywhere, birdies in all states of disrepair and dismemberment.

During one segment, Dr. Gene was reeling in a big bass from the stock pond when a couple of woefully misguided birdies came wheeling by. Out of nowhere—or his tackle box—Dr. Gene suddenly produced his shotgun and before they knew what hit 'em, he'd sent both of them off to see Birdie Jesus. He then casually put down the shotgun and finished reeling in the bass while one minority helper went to fetch the bird and another waited to re-bait the doctor's hook.
Did we mention Dr. Gene's big butt? We did? Dr. Gene has no ordinary big butt; he has an amazing butt, a commanding butt, a butt of DISTINCTION.
This butt seems to say, "I am Dr. Gene's butt, therefore I am. Question me not." The two little legs dangling from it seem almost added as an afterthought—two spindly little slaves there only to do the bidding of the Butt. "Carry me hither," quoth the butt, "and then yon." Viewers get their best view of The Butt when Herr Doktor lowers it and the rest of his hulking manly mass into the saddle of one of his "saddle breds" to make yet another seemingly unending video.
If you are not familiar with saddle breds, they are not like horses in the usual sense. Saddle breds are to horses what poodles are to timber wolves; same species, only with every last vestige of independence, cantankerousness, questioning or free will bred and trained right out of them. Their ears and tails are bobbed. They do not move their heads to look left or right. They priss in a ridiculous mincing light-in-their-loafers little gait, even with a Blub King like Dr. Gene up on deck. Never mind the fact it looks like a rhino trying to ride an effeminate possum: Oh YES, Dr. Gene, whatever you say, Boss.
Cut back to Dr. Gene, glowering in the studio.
Both Dr. Gene's temper and his cigar have gotten quite short. He is clamping down on the stogie and fuming up the room pretty good. "Forty-one to go," he says, whirling his finger, "come ON. Get on those telephones." There is genuine irritation in his voice. These people are not ACTING right. Perhaps their tails need a bobbing.
One suspects after watching Dr. Gene a couple of months, that on some subconscious level Dr. Gene is in some way just a tad disappointed in Jesus, too. You get the feeling that if Scott had his druthers Jesus wouldn't have spoiled the best part of the God business with all this sweetness and light and peace and love crap. Dr. Gene loves to remind his audience about "the side of Jesus most people want to forget. They love the sweet, moral-homily, lay-down-his-life side of Jesus. They don't like the Jesus that comes on a white horse with a sword to claim His Kingdom." Dr. Gene gets terribly swole up about the poor performance of those pesky apostles, asleep at the switch when the Boss needed them. Scott loves the martial metaphor and talks a lot about "wars" and "battles" and "campaign" when addressing his phone folks. You get the feeling that Dr. Gene'd much rather be factory repping for some really kick-hiney kind of God like Jehovah in the Old Testament, or even a real MAN'S god like Zeus or Thor or Mars—a god that didn't bother THREATENING folks first but just waded right in with the old broad axe and converted folks permanently right there on the spot.
Given a somewhat insipid Jesus to work with, Dr. Scott contents himself with taking his frustrations out on that darn pesky ne're-do-well, Satan. Like a great many TV preachers, Dr. Gene troubles himself to make sure that his followers understand that the Evil One is in the world solely to bedevil his ministry. If it wasn't for old Scratch, God knows how high Dr. Gene could kick that weekly financial goal. He could get himself some SERIOUS coin.
If Dr. Scott seems a little weird, well, he is. There's a lot he doesn't have in common with the rest of the TV geeks, though. There's a lot of things he does NOT do. He doesn't try to sell you a blessing. He doesn't tell you that signing up with his church will fatten up your bank account. He does not lay hands on anything but the books in front of him. He does not pretend to be the personal revelator of God's most recent musings. He doesn't even pretend that his way is the only way. He even says nice things about Jews. In fact, if it weren't for all the flamboyance and kookiness, the root message would be pretty tame. Scott makes pretty good sense when he confines himself to discussion of Jesus.
The real fun begins, however, when after his financial goals have been met, he starts to crawl out on some real creaky intellectual limb. Self-confidence comes second nature and in huge measure to Scott. Dr. Gene is so completely self-satisfied, so completely convinced of his own intellectual superiority—that you become seriously curious: What will be his next wild-eyed pronouncement??
You are not disappointed. There he goes on a tangent about the Great Pyramid and how it was actually commissioned by God in such a manner that it predicted the birth of Christ, the Industrial Revolution, and the First World War. Dr. Gene explains there are two important observations to make. First of all, inches. One inch equals one year. And, of course, whether the Pyramid is going up or down at a particular inch/year (up at the birth of Christ, down at the birth of WWI and kind of flat for the Industrial Revolution). Never mind the fact that the Egyptians didn't know nothing 'bout no inches, inches being an English convention which, moreover, had not yet been invented.
Or how about this? Dr. Scott's waving a copy of The Waters Above. The guy who wrote the book that Scott's waving all over the screen is obviously as full of bugs as a basket of Mexican fruit—a pop-eyed, vein-bulging Creationist and Biblical literalist who, instead of just sticking to his guns and going on his own faith like he is supposed to, decides to prove Satanic Modern Science wrong using Satanic Modern Science itself!!
Yeah, that's the ticket!
See, what happened, the author says, that caused the Great Flood was the fact that the atmosphere above the Earth was durn near solid water and, as one might assume it would be wont to do, if fell down.
Yeah, that's it. It fell down.
See, Noah DID have all the dinosaurs on the ark, all several hundred thousand species of them, only as babies. But, because the climate was, well, different because of the fact that there was an ocean flying around up above as well as below, well, see, Pteranodon for instance, the flying lizard with the 56-foot wingspan, well, they lived through the flood, thanks to Noah's sizable boat, but, since the winds were diminished in the climatic change, uh, the baby pteranodons couldn't fly no more and couldn't get no more fish to eat.
Yeah, that's it.
Pteranodons couldn't fly no more.
See? And, and, and, you know what else? If there was all this water over us, there was no way for radiation to get in to create the carbon 14 all these smarty-pants scientist use to find out how old things are. It's just way off kilter, so things that we THINK are 30 or 40 million years old aren't anymore than 8 to 10,000 years old, tops! Says Dr. Scott, "This guy is not some dummy. This book's got charts and formulas, and everything. Now I'm not pushing this book, but you gotta keep an open mind. We need to find out if it's still in print and get some copies in the bookstore."
There's more. This author (Dilley or whatever his name is) uses his "canopy of water" theory to prove—and prove very handily, if you stipulate his loon headed hypothesis—that, thanks to increased fermentation rates at lower atmospheric pressure that existed BEFORE all the water fell down, poor old Noah didn't even MEAN to get drunk after he stepped off the ark; he just accidentally got a holt of some grape juice that had gone bad lots faster than it used to so it wasn't a sin and it doesn't count. So there! And this SCIENTIST'S got formulas and charts of fermentation rates at various atmospheric pressures to prove it.
Chee.
To the credit of Scott's intelligence—or out of deference to ours—Scott sometimes goes a little flat-eyed and rabbity-looking on these occasions when he's obviously contradicted himself or has gone so far down the bunny trail that he's starting to grow big ears and a tail. On these occasions he will pop out some kinda bridgey little disclaimer like, "What I'm trying to show is that being a Christian don't mean you gotta park your brain." True. But being a...THINKER, Christian or otherwise, does tend to dictate that you pull your head a LOT farther out of your asinine internecine debates over how many angels can in fact dance on the head of a pin or how many pteranodons you can fit on an ark.
But the best part of the Dr. Scott show is when he latches on to something nasty. "Now," puff, smoke, "these people who so zealously seek to put you underneath their pea brains have few questions left to answer. And to that crowd, some poor little jerk's affair in a motel room seven years ago is titillating. I think I read in the paper today that BOTH evangelists had a fling with the girl. Is that what you read today? All of which she blamed on one glass of wine." The doctor can't fight an incredulous leer. "You think the whole of horny mankind has lived 2,000 years in the Christian centuries and never discovered what one glass of wine could accomplish for them? This story defies belief. If one glass of wine will do that, I'll corner the market. But based on the way that girl looks; I'D want all the wine first. We're talking THREE bags. Haw...".
Kinda hard to get back on the right page after that.
There's a kind of warmth here.
OK, arrogant and eccentric, but warm. It's an arrogance that has the unmitigated GALL to pronounce, "I am having fun because I THINK I'm having fun. You gotta accept me on my terms, none other, there ain't no negotiation how I'm gonna be. You may think I'm wrong, but that don't bother me. I don't agree."
In a fainthearted age, where we are all trying to be a cross between Alan Alda and Everett Koop and are asking ourselves important questions like "Does oat bran REALLY reduce cholesterol or WHAT?" the Doktor is actually kind of refreshing.
It beats reruns, anyway.
And as far as a big ol' slug of communion with the Scotchoidal One?
Certainly. A double, please.

Go to our video tribute to Dr. Gene Scott