The latest word on the upcoming Rick Perry/American Family Association’s “The Response” prayer fest is that attendance will be far, far below the 70,000-plus seating capacity of the Houston, Texas stadium where all this religio-political fervor is scheduled to break forth. Only about 8,000 tickets have been ordered and the marathon prayer-and-fasting (one presumes the concession stand will be closed) event is on tap for this Saturday.
On the upside, one can suppose that the attendees from the pseudo-charismatic sector (those who espouse the allegedly apostolic, tongue-speaking, faith-healing antics promoted by some of the event’s “endorsers&rdquo will have plenty of personal space in which to hold up “holy hands” and wave their arms about without poking each other in the eyes. Those who might be given over to falling over backwards while being "slain in the Spirit" will not have to worry about landing atop adjacent holy rollers. The probabilities of such chance collisions are substantially reduced when human density is reduced to that of a relatively few B-B’s rolling around in a boxcar.
The ultra-ultra-rightist American Family Association, the principal sponsor of this event, has hundreds of radio stations over which they have been trying for weeks to gin up attendance, but it now seems that even with its media empire fully energized to the task, the AFA might not be able to scare up enough of its loyal devotees to fill even as much as 15 percent of the stadium capacity. This thing augurs to be a FLOP !
Perry, meanwhile, has not even committed himself to speak at this gathering, even though he is the single person who has come to be most prominently associated with “The Response.”