“Police are investigating a ‘bizarre’ incident in which a man claiming he was performing a religious ritual kissed a woman’s feet Monday afternoon at the Perry Wal-Mart. Perry police Capt. Heath Dykes gave the following account of the encounter: About 5 p.m. in Wal-Mart at 1109 St. Patrick’s Drive, an 80-year-old female shopper stumbled upon a man sitting in the floor of an aisle stocked with curtains. The woman apologized for stepping on the man’s fingers. The man told her he was participating in a religious ritual and asked for her help. The woman, now alarmed, complied with the man’s instructions to stand on his hands and then spit. The man began to lick the woman’s feet. Jesse James, a loss prevention officer for Wal-mart, walked up on the strange scene and recognized the man from a photo from the Americus Wal-Mart, warning about a similar incident there. James confronted the unidentified man, who repeated that he was performing a religious ritual and then fled. ‘It’s crazy … really bizarre,’ Dykes said. The woman was not harmed but ‘was really embarrassed,’ the officer said… ‘It was so bizarre that … we’re … trying to find what code section applies,’ Dykes said. ‘We’ve entitled it public indecency at this time but we haven’t had a chance to do the research on whether it would fall under any criminal act. It’s definitely bizarre.’” — Macon Telegraph (US)

To a person born in the 1920s, much of contemporary culture must seem “bizarre.” Just think of it — to an eighty-year-old woman, the birth of rock and roll and the advent of color television were radical social changes. Living in a small North Carolina town, what must a little old lady think of reality tv, net porn, piercing, gay political movements? It all must seem bizarre, and so when a guy in a Wal-Mart says, “Hey lady, I’m performing a ritual, step on my fingers,” she probably thinks to herself, “Well, this is what the world has come to…”

After all, “bizarre” as the case may seem to lawmakers, the distance between religious ritual and foot fetishism is not really all that great. Fetishes are often indulged in ritualesque ways: the fetishist, like the faithful, performs a repetitive series of actions that express a deep devotion to his object. Or to look at the matter the other way ’round, those inclined to smoke out the eroticism in Christianity will tell you that, when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, he was displaying his true sexual preference. Check out John 13, where JC takes off his clothes, dons a towel, and washes the feet of his rather shocked followers. If only Jesus had added a little tongue action to his impromptu foot bath, then you’d have a biblical precedent for this Wal-Mart “ritual.” And then the fetishist could tell his embarrassed victims, as Jesus told his undoubtedly embarrassed disciples, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

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