Franklin Hergort
From JUOD
Franklin Hergort (November 20, 1867 - Present) is the founder of one of the primary sects of Mathewsonism, Joino-Mathewsonism. Hergort has embraced evangelical and media-related methods of bringing members into the Church of Mathewson. Often, however, his methods have come into conflict with Harley P. Mathewson himself because of the message of forgiveness and redemption associated with Hergort's brand of the faith.
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Biography
Before embracing Mathewson's faith, Hergort was undoubtedly the town drunk of Lenexa, Kansas. He had fathered, he said, "four different children by five different women" (an inconsistency he never explained), and "would throw down a 30 pack before lunch, eat a plate full of bacon, and then start mixing milk with Barton's and sit outside on nice days in the park, near the playground." Hergort had no job, but merely collected disability payments for an accident he sustained while working in a grain silo in his early twenties, as he had recently be fired from his job as a town priest for "un-Christ-like" behavior. Some notable critics have later claimed that Hergort was involved inappropriately with children, a criticism to which he has nonchalantly replied, "I'm into adult things, not child's play!" This has caused greater consternation at the implication that Hergort is a fan of pornography.
Once Mathewson became his center, Hergort said, his life turned around. He stopped drinking (for a time) and, in his words, "stopped whoring around the playgrounds--but that's honestly where the whores were in Lenexa. Honestly! There were no kids there. Honestly!" He began the mission and outreach of the church of Joino-Mathewson, attempted to adapt to various technological changes to aid in his ministry. (Hergort pioneered the recording of sermons on 8-Track tapes, for example.)
Later on in life, however, Hergort had a bit of a relapse into his old, drunken ways. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, he found new forms of addiction. "I had about twenty jigabits [sic] of internets [sic] porno videos on RAM" and then, in a fit of desperation, he stole a race car bunk bed from the Pottery Barn in Kansas City. He also began drinking again, this time mixing the popular drink Sunkist with Barton's vodka. Eventually, however, Hergort has learned to control his behavior, and has launched a web site to spread Joino-Mathewsonist ideas.
Hergort's age has also been the subject of much speculation. He himself has claimed to have been allowed to drink from a shard of the Holy Grail that Mathewson possessed, thus enabling him to have longer but not everlasting life. Hergort appears to be very old nonetheless, but this is most likely from his intense and prolonged drinking.
In his non-online mission outreach, Hergort drives a white conversion van with tinted windows, which he insists is essential to his mission. "That way," he explained to some bewildered parents, "the kids don't run away and think that I'm some guy with an agenda. I want to lure them into thinking I'm just an average joe guy on the playground or something, and then once they're in the van I can evangelize and tell them about the tenets of Joino-Mathewsonism." He further added that the candy and toys he used to get the kids in the van were to "make them feel at home and comfortable."
The Verities of the Verities
Hergort's main work on his translation of The Verities of Joining, titled "The Verities of the Verities of Joining, and the Why We All Should Consider Joining (I'll give you a hint: It's the Verities)" is source of much of the formative theology of the sect. Oddly enough, the work was never actually published in traditional form. Rather, Hergort used a variety of new technological ways in attempts to spread his message, never using books. His most recent, and most successful method, has been to use the Internet. Using his basic knowledge of HTML, Hergort put the work up in a single, unbelievably long web page on white text with a tiled picture of Mathewson as the background and a thirty-second MIDI background music sample. Of course, the style made it impossible to read, and the thirty second music clip (which could not be turned off) became annoying, and so any followers had to copy and paste the document into a Word document, which often took several minutes (the manuscript is about 75,000 words). Even then, as Hergort did not know how to properly use spellcheck, the document is rife with correctly spelled but wrong words (one passage: "Joining makes pure cents [sic]; a human does not naturally want to dye [sic]. In our movement, we cannot seed [sic] anything to anyone! Instead, we must adhere to the fax [sic] of joining, and that is that death does not fallow [sic]."
Using A HREF links and horizontal rule bars, Hergort divided the Verities of the Verities into five main sections:
I. Introduction: Why the Verities of the Verities of Joining Has Verities for Your Veritable Life
II. The Supreme Joiner, Mathewson and Jim Henson
III. Sunkist and Barton's: A Delicious Drink, but No Way to Live a Joinish Life
IV. Seriously, I Don't Like Kids, Except of Course How Everybody Likes Them, but Not Like Everyone Says I Like Them. I Seriously Love Them All! But Not Like They Say I Love Them. Just Like Everybody Else Loves Them and Wants to Play Hide and Seek With Them All the Time.
V. Toward An Eternity of Joining
Other Evangelizing Techniques
Hergort's work evangelizing has both made use of (somewhat) modern methods of reaching new believers, while never really keeping up with the pace of technological change. For example, Hergort invested heavily in recording portions of the Verities of the Verities onto Sony Minidiscs. He also recorded all of the possible hymns on MIDI format for services. He was quick, however, to see the possibility of the internet as a tool for evangelizing, but his web site has proved to be woefully inadequate, and has not been updated for some time. It features many animated GIFs, tiled picture backgrounds, problematic fonts, missing images, and too-small frames. Several pages require an excessive amount of horizontal scrolling.
Hergort also used some low-quality public access shows on Kansas cable networks to broadcast his message. He demanded slots of no less than two hours at a time, forcing the stations to only allow him on television during the middle of the night. These ramblings usually last for about three hours, with no real coherent structure, except to read seemingly at random from the Verities of Joining. At some points, in an attempt to generate a youth message, Hergort instituted rap battles among youth in the Kansas City area. Unfortunately for him, the rappers disregarded his joining message and instead instituted profanity-laced ad hominem attacks on one another. Additionally, Hergort's treatment of them only brought on more rumors that he was inappropriately involved with kids. Hergort again tried to deflect this criticism, but only got himself into more trouble with a comment to a reporter: "Now why would I like these little inner city kids? If I was going to go after kids, I'd pick nice, rich, pretty ones, like JonBenét Ramsey." With the Ramsey parents recently being cleared of involvement in her death, Hergort is now under investigation.
Other Investment Failures
- Hergort used approximately $5000 in donations to the church to purchase custom pogs with pictures of various non joiners and about 1000 slammers with Mathewson's face on them. He hoped this would bring a bunch of youth into the movement. Temporarily, of course, it did, but the photos of Mathewson were too easily confused with pictures of a Dracula slammer, and the pogs ended up being made of cracker, causing them to crumble every time someone slammed. Soon after, as well, the trend faded.
- Hergort recently purchased several HD-DVD players and blank HD-DVD media to record lectures. He is quoted in a Kansas newspaper as saying, "And I thought I really had it this time. I thought this was the successor to Laserdisc!" When the reporter responded by saying that Laserdisc failed miserably as well, Hergort responded: "But all the little kids used to love to come over to my house and watch Laserdisc movies in the basement. We'd turn all the lights off like it was a movie theater, and make sure everyone was real quiet and didn't say anything no matter what happens. Like in a movie theater." He then paused. "But nothing inappropriate ever happened. Honestly. We just laid around down there in the dark and...oh no, I did it again. But I didn't do it with any kids. Honestly!"
Theology
- Main article: Joino-Mathewsonism
His writings illustrate Mathewson as a Christ-like figure, with the "Supreme Joiner" as the ultimate force of joining in the universe. Contrarily, there are those aligned with Jim Henson and the forces of dying, the "evil individuality" in the world, who attempt to bring "isolation and thus death" among mankind. Mathewson, then, by joining, as well as not joining and not dying, has brought a sort of balance to those two opposed forces. Thus only through Mathewson, Hergort says, can "true joining" occur, and thus can individuals "be joined with the ultimate, the Supreme Joiner, who is purely not of Death."
Conflict with Mathewson
Since Hergort frequently emphasizes his past bouts of licentious drunkenness and the "salvation" he has found through joining and not dying, as well as forgiving those who have not yet joined, he has come into conflict with the ruthless and unforgiving Mathewson. Though Mathewson has not declared Hergort a non-joiner, many in the JUOD Movement believe this is only a matter of time. During stops on his 2008 presidential campaign reporters have asked Mathewson about Hergort. Mathewson has never unequivocally replied, usually only saying, "To err is human, to forgive feeble-minded." Hergort for his part, on his web site, has said that "If one fowls [sic] to join, then of course one will die. But not necessarily write [sic] away, fore [sic] forgiveness can play apart [sic]."
