5 College Daze: The Satan Seller pp. 13-15

 We’re in California and Mike Warnke is a bit bored. Not actually bored because he’s going to parties, clubs, bars, cafés, and hooking up with either one girl or many girls. He, however, claims to be bored because he needs a reason to claim that he began drinking. I don’t know what the word is, but Warnke is “regret bragging.” This is when someone acts regretful about their past behavior but also touts how good they were at it. He drank so much and hooked up with so many girls he knew was wrong, but he was just so awesome at it.

Last post he was going back to visit his relatives back in the Midwest. If you’re thinking that he’s going to have a confrontation with his Protestant aunts, you are thinking just like I did, and you would be wrong. His trip back is covered in a sentence where he notices that his life in California was just so much better.

Mike, however, can’t just enjoy his life. He’s got to be a gadfly to the Catholic religion teachers that he was so enamored with two posts ago. We’re told that he would annoy them with questions like, “Why can’t we just talk to God directly?” and “where was all this money going? Why was it not used to help the kids in this family?”

(“This family” is a family with a kid afflicted with some kind of developmental disorder)

Mike is growing increasingly unhappy with confraternity classes as well, “I sat in class, listening and talking about their doctrine, the more I began to squirm. The activities they had planned for us seemed dull compared to what I had been doing in high school. Even the girls looked kind of square—you know, the Goody-Two shoes kind.”

Warnke is attempting to explain that it wasn’t that the girls weren’t interested in him, he wasn’t interested in them. Sure, Mike, I might believe you except that in our last post you explained that these were the types of girls that didn’t go for you. There’s a weird contradiction at play, either he’s hooking up all of the time or he’s not. It changes based on the story’s need.

Let’s back up: Warnke has these questions for the Catholic church. Questions he says, they can’t answer so “the Father Rector asked me to leave and not come back.”

His questions are not deep nor are they difficult to answer. I know this because I know history and this is the exact type of thing that caused the Protestant Reformation. Where is the money going? Good question, did you ask your Protestant Pastor the same question? Did you ask the Protestants why the money for the collection plate didn’t go to their congregation either? I’m not going to defend the Catholic church on this, but pots and kettles my man.

This kind of rank hypocrisy is going to be especially striking for Mike Warnke who will tour the country collecting all kinds of money from Christians based on the claims in this book. I’m sure so much of that money went to making sure the kids with developmental disorders and their families received help.

The stranger thing is the priest asking Mike to leave because he’s stumped by the questions. No. I’ve literally been there. The priests must have a seminary class that teaches them how to deal with annoying people like Mike Warnke who are just repeating tired cliché objections to the Catholic Church’s doctrine. I’m not sure if he thinks he’s being deep here or if he knows that his Evangelical audience just wants to read about he dunked on the Papists. I got pretty annoyed with the Catholic priests when I was in high school, but they knew their stuff and someone like Mike wasn’t going to stump them. Either this whole section is completely fictional or he was kicked out for being an annoying pest.

College begins and Mike leaves early to hang out with his roommate Herb Taylor who also drank a bunch. It’s interesting that we get a full name here.

Warnke then tells us everything I need to know about how much I would hate this kid if he was in my class. He hops down to the Salvation Army to get some clothes, and his description is whatever is loud and attention grabbing. We call this “peacocking” and the MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists)/Incels think that this is an effective strategy to get women; it’s not.

He tells us, “My favorite outfit was this blanket sewn up on either side.” That’s called a “poncho,” he seems to be unaware that it has a name, and I doubt it’s a very unique outfit in Southern California.

“The professors looked at me a bit strangely, probably wondering what to expect next.” No, we know exactly what to expect from this type of student. He comes in thinking he’s the smartest person in the room, which was probably true up until that point, then burns out in the first few weeks. That’s what happens every time with this kind of student.

On Freshman orientation day he gets a speech about believing in yourself and some other nonsense. Here’s a fun fact about me: I’ve never attended this first day of college. I’ve either been working, sick, or not available for some other reason.

“I was hoping to get into a philosophy course right away, but that was not open to first-term freshmen.”

I know that Warnke did attend college for a bit so this sentence does not make sense to me. Intro to Philosophy courses are available to anyone. My take on this is that he just missed enrolling in the course or that the sections were all full. To say that you couldn’t take a Phil 101 course in your first year is either a product of the time or untrue. He doesn’t explain why he wants the philosophy class either. My suspicion is that he is trying to set up some kind of philosophy versus Christianity for later. Part of his descent is falling into Plato’s Euthyphro or Nietzsche’s “God is dead.”

Moving on as fast as he does, we are told that his drinking is so bad now that he’s constantly throwing up. Luckily, he’s too much of a wit so he’s not failing classes, but he’s got to leave class every once in awhile to get something to drink.

Alright, tell me you don’t know about drinking without telling me. Alcohol addiction is a terrible thing, but Warnke is messing up his symptoms. Is he just hungover all of the time and throwing up, does he have the shakes? Why can’t he concentrate on classes while still attending them? This sounds more like someone talking about what a much older person told them about being addicted to alcohol and not a 19-year-old kid. None of this is necessary, we’re not reading a book about Mike Warnke the reformed alcoholic, we’re reading about Mike Warnke the reformed Satanic high priest.