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John Hagee and Cornerstone Church
One of the places I always think of when I come near San Antonio is CornerStone Church. I have never been there, but I have watched the squat, fireplug pastor, John Hagee, several times on TV. This is a 19,000 member, non-denominational charismatic church led by a rotund, dynamic, little preacher who is hell-bent on laying down a blanket of damnation over everything in sight. He has one of the most definitive preaching styles one will ever see. His sermon is made up of a series of 4-7 minute mini-sermons, or damnation vignettes, that come one right after the other with slight pauses and claps of glee in between them.
He starts out like the locomotives I used to hear in my town when I was a kid. Far in the distance, I could hear the steam engines as they pulled out of the station. There would be a series of powerful chugs as the mighty engines would initially lurch from the depot. Within about 5-7 belches of black, cumulus smoke and soot, the massive wheels would spin out on the track when they turned faster than they could drag the hundreds of thousands of tons behind them. Then the thunderous smokestack would start in again puffing billows of dark reek and steam as its connecting rods churned its great orbs. It would huff and puff out a longer and longer series of short blasts from its stack that would echo across the city like howitzers, and again the drive wheels would slip on the bare iron bars and seem to fizzle out as the pressure in the valves released on the whirling wheels. With each slippage, the engine would come back with more power and more roaring detonation than the last time, and the wheels would skid hardened steel on steel. With each of these repetitions of energy to the wheels till they slid, the engine increased in volume and speed and lugged its load further than the last time till it was really going to town and then passed out of the city from the range of hearing.
This is Hagee. He starts out his message of prophetic brimstone in a moderate but forceful voice while dragging his heavy-duty message behind him. He grabs the side of his pulpit with both hands like connecting rods to the wheels. The further he goes down the sermonic track, the more his Texas drawl begins to ascend like the gushing stacks on the massive locomotives. His face clouds with judgment. He raises his condemning index finger in warning as if pointing to the broken Law at Mount Sinai and then jabs it at members of his congregation who are sure he knows something about them that they thought was hidden from his all-knowing sight. His eyes narrow as he hones in on the defendants in the dock, the trembling congregation transfixed on their prophet of offensive abominations. His appendages soon begin slight animation like the iron arms that turn the mighty wheels. Near the three to four minute mark, Hagee starts to ramp up as if an incline in the sermon track called for more coal to the firebox. By the four minute line, fire is figuratively glowing in every orifice of Hagee's face, like the flaming skull in Ghost Rider, and steam is exhaling from his nose like Ferdinand the Bull as he mightily charges with his glistening horns pointed down and straight, aimed for an iron anvil he does not see behind a red cape in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Spit is flying from his snarling lips. His arms hatchet the air like he is stocking up a cord of oak for the winter. His right hand sledge-hammers mid air like Thor, the son of Oden. He is fully enveloped in full wrath-of-God-everybody-deserves to-go-to-hell mode.
As he crests over the mini-sermon hill top, he starts coming down the backside of the mountain like that steam engine in The Polar Express with the full weight of the train behind him now pushing the locomotive down into and upon the cringing church below, which is leaning back in their pews as if iron poles were coming out of their pants and up their backs. They sit like flint being sandblasted by the gale of Hagee's lashing tongue. When he begins to approach the first mini-sermon terminal, he roars in under full power. Hagee is sitting up in the engineer's seat hanging on the whistle, clanging the bell, pouring coal and wood into the engine furnace even as he is straining back on the brakes all at the same time. The engine screeching on the tracks and trying to come to a halt is thunderous, shaking and rattling the passenger platform and causing the ground to tremble. Clouds of steam wheeze out of every port. Like the crowds on the platforms of old, everyone cowers back at the sheer awesomeness and authority of the Hagee Hell Fire and Damnation Express. With one final blast on the cacophonous Lake of Fire Doomsday whistle, he unloads a tidal wave of indictment, guilt, and the specter of a white hot hell and the Great White Throne of judgment upon the congregation. His muscles are as taut as the high wire upon which the Karl Wallenda crossed the Tallulah Gorge. Like a major league baseball umpire calling a game-ending sliding play at home plate, he sledge-hammers home a mighty fist and screams into the ears of the congregation and all the people brave enough to tune him in, "You're Finished," with that famous punch-out gesture to close the inning.
Then there is silence.
Hagee appears to have run out of perdition steam. You can hear the valves expel the pressure with an ear-splitting hiss. But it is only the eye of the hurricane. It is a brief respite as Hagee reloads. The doomed passengers on the depot platform are allowed momentary recovery and given space to express their appreciation for his engineering skills at the throttle. The congregation peers up into the cab of the locomotive and sees him preparing to yank back on the controls again and proceed to crush any remaining bruised reeds and smoking flax that may yet smolder.
At this point, the congregation does one of the strangest things I have ever seen a church do. Before Hagee sets out again on another run of the Damnation Cannonball, the poor fools in the congregation who are now scared crapless and feel as if they had just come face to face with God Almighty burst into a resounding applause.
It doesn't make any difference if he has just hammered all the gays into Hell or lambasted the women in his congregation who are wearing pants and no bras. The entire lot of congregants who have just sat beneath his spell as he scalded the lipstick and hair off of their faces immediately affirm his every word with a spontaneous and stentorian ovation. Having been cleansed and tormented with a tidal wave of conviction, it is as if they had just heard him eloquently and precisely say exactly what they would have liked to have said themselves to a thousand people they are now thinking of if they could have said it exactly like Hagee had just said it.
Silently, a fresh blast of boiling steam for the next preaching round is rushing into Hagee's enormous belly of pistons. The resonant acclamation from the hapless congregation fades just as Hagee's 50 inch pot of steam generates enough pressure to start moving the God-powered engine and its burden forward all over again. A fresh wall of Katrina wind begins to swirl in the train's wake. The enormous wheels turn. Hagee cranks his arms as he glares into the wide open eyes of the congregation that sits before him as if locked in a stalled sedan resting on railroad tracks between the crossing gates in front of the Wabash Cannonball that is bearing down upon them, blasting on his horn, and warning of collision. Their faces are lit up with terror as if staring into the sun. You can almost hear the announcer back in the 50‘s when the TV program The Adventures of Superman first came on the air with its thrilling music and the opening line of, "Faster than a speeding bullet...More powerful than a locomotive..." The thunderous wheels are spinning and going to town as the engine rocks to and fro and sideways rolling out the wrath of God over everything in its path. It is Hagee, the damnation train, racing against lost time before something gets away.
This same sequence is repeated over and over until Hagee disappears out of sight. That is, until the program ends.
The Alamo and Davy Crockett
San Antonio, however, is probably best known for two things: the Alamo and River Walk. Those are the two reasons we went there to spend a few hours. These are the same reasons everyone else goes there too because The Alamo is now "the most popular tourist site in Texas." The Alamo is located today right in the heart of downtown San Antonio. It became famous to people who lived in the 1950's when Disney produced a miniseries on TV, based largely on myth, starring 30 year-old Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. Parker died on March 18, 2010, at age 85. Because of him, every kid in every grade school in America - and later Britain - knew a few verses of the song that made Davy Crockett famous in the middle of the 20th century. Many knew them all about a man who was:
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree,
Kiit him a b'ar when he was only three.
Fess Parker was the first to record that song. He sang a portion of it each week before and after each episode as grade-schoolers sat in front of their TVs with their shotguns and coon-skin hats perched on their heads. His voice coos hauntingly in distant memories of baby boomers of today who heard, memorized, and sang that song so often that Fess Parker balladeered in his familiar timbre. Parker's voice was baritone, mellow and southern. All other versions seem foreign compared to him. Parker sounded Tennessee soft (although he was from Fort Worth,Texas), personal, and told the STORY of a man. He sang it as a solo. Yet his rendition only reached #6 on the Billboard weekly charts and #31 for the year. Tennessee Ernie Ford came up with his own interpretation of the song. His version spent sixteen weeks on the country music charts, peaking at #4 in 1955 and #37 for the year. Ford sounded harsh, loud, and twangy. He wasn't Davy Crocket like Fess Parker. He was only a singer. But it was Bill Hayes' version that took it to #1 for one week in late March of 1955 and #7 for the year. Hayes sounded country, and he sounded as if he was just singing a song, ANY song. He was unnatural. Ford and Hayes were accompanied by male singers on the chorus. No one, in spite of the more successful results, could make it seem real like Fess Parker. The Ballad of Davy Crockett even went to #1 in France in August of 1956. Over 10 million copies of the song were sold. It all started on December 15, 1954, when the Davy Crockett miniseries was first telecast on TV. In addition to the song, 5,000 coonskin hats were sold every day in 1955. Parker's own coonskin ensemble hangs today in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The History of the Alamo
The Alamo was built in 1723 as a Spanish mission to the Indians in what was then Spanish Mexico. It was also meant to reassert Spanish dominance over Texas from the nearby French who were in Louisiana. It was not known then as The Alamo. It was named Mission San Antonio de Valero. David Crocket was born in 1786, two years before the U.S. Constitution, the law of the United States, was ratified in 1788. Spanish officials secularized Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1793 and stationed soldiers in it in the early 1800's. They called it the Alamo, meaning "cottonwood" in honor or their hometown Alamo de Parras, Coahuila and the surrounding cottonwood trees.
In the early 1800's, Americans began to immigrate into the Texas frontier, which was owned by Mexico. By 1829, the Americans outnumbered the Mexicans in the Texas territory. Animosity between the Mexican government and the Texas settlers grew as Mexican laws became more restrictive, resulting in what is called the Texas Revolution, or the Texas War of Independence. The Texans drove all the Mexican troops out of Mexican Texas, and 100 Texans were garrisoned in The Alamo, along with a man named Jim Bowie.
Jim Bowie
Bowie became famous because of a knife he produced and showcased in 1827 at a duel he attended on a sandbar outside of Natchez, Mississippi. Sixteen men were in attendance to watch and support the duelists as they attempted to kill each other. Each of the contestants fired two shots, missed, and then shook hands to end the duel. When Bowie went to meet the duelists, a brawl broke out between two of the spectators who themselves had dueled previously but had not settled their animus. One of the previous duelers shot and killed the other one. A brawl ensued. In the melee, Bowie was clubbed to the ground with a pistol and then fired upon by another as he lay on his back. The shot missed him. The assailant then drew his sword and thrust it into Bowies sternum, not plunging it into his body. Bowie reached up, pulled him to the ground, and buried his famous knife - with an 8.25 inch blade - into his attacker. With the sword protruding from his chest, Bowie was shot and stabbed again. He managed to stand and pull the sword from his chest as two more men shot at him, one hitting him in the arm. Bowie spun and sliced off part of one man's forearm. Again he was fired upon. But the shot missed him. The Battle of the Sandbar lasted more than ten minutes with two men dead and four wounded. Bowie was carried away by one of the men who shot him, and it is a wonder how he lived through it. The Great Sandbar Duel made Bowie's knife and his fighting prowess "as the most dangerous man at the duel" notorious in newspapers. Many fights and Bowie's reputation as a tough customer increased. The Mexicans themselves were about to have the unfortunate experience of meeting him at the Alamo.
The Battle of the Alamo
Leery of American attempts to buy Texas, the Mexican government under President and General (effectively a dictator) Lopez Santa Ana, self-called the Napoleon of the West, marched an army north to Texas to bring it back under Mexican control. After the arrival of another 100 or so reinforcements arrived - including David Crockett - and a 13 day siege, 6,000 Mexicans slaughtered all but two people in that famous attack of March 6, 1836, known as the The Battle of the Alamo. Bowie, because of his renown as a fierce fighter, was a co-commander along with William B. Travis at the Alamo. Twelve days before the attack, Bowie collapsed from illness and was too sick to participate in the final battle. What happened to him is disputed by eyewitness accounts, but according to historian Wallace Chariton, the "most popular, and probably the most accurate" version is that Bowie died on his cot, "back braced against the wall, and using his pistols and his famous knife."
The Texan bodies were stacked and burned. Nearly a year later, ashes from the funeral pyres were put into a simple coffin and inscribed with the names Travis, Crockett, and Bowie.
The Alamo fired a revolution. Sam Houston mounted an army and attacked Santa Ana's troops at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, descending on them with the battle cry, "Remember the Alamo!" The battle was over in 18 minutes. Mexican control of Texas ended, and the independence of the Republic of Texas was established. The Alamo is famous today for that battle, but the Alamo was overshadowed by the events of 1845-1848.
The Annexation of Mexico to the US
In 1845, Texas was annexed to the United States, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution. This precipitated the Mexican-American War from 1846-1848. The U.S. captured Mexico City, invaded New Mexico, California, and part of northern Mexico, and forced Mexico to sell all of it for $18 million. All of this was long before in mind in the early 1840's. The U.S. Had had its eyes on California for a long time, and the term "Manifest Destiny" was a popular concept and moral idea in 1845 that drove this ambition. The Democratic administration of President Polk was motivated and inspired by it. Many believed the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and spread democracy and freedom. To everyone, California was the goose that laid the golden eggs. It was the richest and most beautiful part of North America, and both England and France wanted it too. Texas was merely a stepping stone on the way to California and part of the "Manifest Destiny" plan. So taking Mexico was the first domino to fall. As soon as the U.S. obtained California in 1848, the world event and boon to the United States came in 1849 with the discovery of gold in California.
That is how the Alamo fits into both Texas and U.S. history and why I was allowed to be riding these roads from El Paso to here in the first place. Most people who hit the front door of Texas on I-10 when they come from Louisiana sink with dismay to think of the nearly 1,000 mile drag they have before them, at least two days of hard driving. Not me. I am surrounded by generals, soldiers, missionaries, settlers, pioneers, all brave men and women who made this country. I see them on all sides like mirages.
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