National Geographic (formerly National Geographic Channel and also commercially abbreviated and trademarked as Nat Geo) is the American digital cable and satellite television channel that is owned by National Geographic Partners, majority-owned by 21st Century Fox with the remainder owned by the National Geographic Society. The channel airs non-fiction television programs produced by National Geographic and other production companies. Like History and Discovery Channel, the channel features documentaries with factual content involving nature, science, culture, and history, plus some reality and pseudo-scientific entertainment programming. (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)
