The Cable News Network (CNN) is an American basic cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner. It was founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner as a 24-hour cable news channel. Upon its launch, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage, and was the first all-news television channel in the United States. As of February 2015, CNN is available to about 96,289,000 cable, satellite, and telco television households (82.7% of households with at least one television set) in the United States. (More from Wikipedia)
Some years later, I saw a piece on a national news show about snake-handling churches. I was able to find the video for this story on the Internet not long ago; but now that the National Geographic Channel had a reality-TV show in a snake-handling church where someone died, and with Gary Tuchman broadcasting a story about them on CNN in 2012, I can no longer find it. Anyway, the news reporter had grown up within or at least near that religion; and he knew that, at some point, he would have to revisit his past. The story was mesmerizing to me – when the reporter took up a snake himself, he was taken by an overpowering ecstasy. At some point, the feeling left him, and he realized what he was doing and gave the snake back.
What I remember most was the music – the reporter called it a cross between gospel music and acid rock, and it is unlike anything else that I have ever heard. I spent many years without success trying to hunt up an album of snake-handling music, and I actually have a picture in my mind of an album that I came across a long time ago.
(November 2014)
