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To the civilized nations of the world, America is the bully that eveyone wants on their team when choosing for a game of football, but no one wants their sister to marry.
-- Lenny Shirose
Elvis sees Stalin's face
2001-02-15 19:47:51
Elvis had a vision during a cross-country road trip in 1964. Driving to Hollywood from his Tennessee Graceland mansion, Elvis looked into the clouds and saw the face of Stalin.
By 1964, the pop icon had been guzzling amphetamines since his army tour in the fifties. Surrounded by an entourage accompanying him to film Harem Scarum, Elvis experienced a religious miracle which took a peculiar form, according to the recent biography Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.
Elvis suddenly gasped and cried, "Whoa!"
When I turned to him, he was slumped back in his seat, slack-jawed, staring at the horizon. Following his gaze, I saw a cloud, a single white mass floating in the sky. From the clouds emerged a clear, definite, recognizable image.
"Do you see what I see?" Elvis asked in a whisper. I looked again. "That's Joseph Stalin's face up there!"
Try as I might to see it any other way, there was no denying it was Stalin's face in the cloud.
"Why Stalin? Why Stalin?" Elvis asked, his voice breaking. "Of all people, what's he doing up there?"
Elvis gets a strange look in his face, pulls his bus of hangers-on to the side of the road, and shouts "Follow me!" as he runs into the desert. His spiritual advisor Larry Geller finally caught up with him in the desert.
"It's God!" Elvis cried. "It's God!" Tears streamed down his face as he hugged me tightly and said, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You got me here. I'll never forget, never, man. It really happened. I saw the face of Stalin and I thought to myself, Why Stalin? Is it a projection of something that's inside of me? Is God trying to show me what he thinks of me? And then it happened! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it... Oh, God. Oh, God," Elvis kept saying.Then he paused and added a peculiar aside. "Can you imagine what the fans would think if they saw me like this?"
"They'd only love you all the more," Geller said.
"Yeah," he said, "well, I hope that's true."
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