Pat Halley Pat Halley, The Shaving Cream Pie And The Heavenly Hammer

It made the front pages of the Detroit Free Press and the News and even rated a small mention in the New York Times and an article in the New York Review of Books. It received prime attention from the local TV news shows and a series of articles in the Fifth Estate an anarchist, anti-authoritarian periodical. It even warranted a full five minute feature on Walter Cronkite's national news: God had been hit in the face with a shaving-cream pie!

Pat Halley On Tuesday, August 7th, 4pm on the 13th floor of the Detroit City-County building in a small auditorium which functions as the formal meeting place for the Detroit Common Council public sessions. Followers of Prem Rawat (Guru Maharaj Ji) had convinced embarrassingly naive councilwoman Erma Henderson to draft a key-to-the city resolution for their Perfect Master who they claimed was an emissary of peace, love and other humanitarian activities. These keys-to-the-city resolutions are rarely opposed but in this case Councilman David Eberhard, a Lutheran minister, voted against the resolution saying "I can't be part of supporting a fake." Meanwhile, a tongue-in-cheek "Demonstration Against God" sponsored by the Council for the Eruptive Anticipation of the Marvelous (CREAM) continued outside the building.

Rawat arrived in a powder blue Lincoln Continental (a car he's often talked about) with four men all dressed in expensive business suits and went up to the 13th floor where they waited while Councilman Mel Ravitz was delivering the day's first testimonial to someone who had designed a clever anti-gun media campaign. The press had been alerted that something would happen and were ready when an unkempt, bearded young man approached the Guru and his bodyguards carrying a bouquet of flowers behind which was a shaving cream-pie that he ceremoniously splatted in the face of the Guru Maharaj Ji, the 15-year-old "messiah" as a protest to puncture the pomposity and pretension of this self-proclaimed Lord of the Universe. The perpetrator was Pat Halley, an anarchist and reporter for the antiestablishment Fifth Estate magazine

"The Guru Is Just A Slick Businessman," Halley said. "I Always Wanted To Throw A Pie In God's Face

Pat Halley The iconoclastic Halley slipped out the building during the confusion and escaped into the rush-hour pedestrian traffic. "The guru is just a slick businessman," Halley said. "I always wanted to throw a pie in God's face, he said. "God represents the ultimate in authority and I represent the ultimate in disrespect for authority." The guru, Halley said, "was radiating dollar signs of peace and love."

The guru immediately retreated to an inner hallway where quietly panicked aides wiped off the cream and tried to think what to say. The aides tried to bar reporters, but the guru held an impromptu press conference where he said: "This is nothing compared to the nails driven into the hands of Jesus." Later, the guru said: "I just want to apologise to that person who did that to me. I don't want him arrested or hurt. If someone doesn't understand something, he cannot be held responsible for what he does." While this explanation strained credulity the affair would have been forgotten as a joke if there had been no repercussions.

TVTV Lord of the Universe documentary

Pat Halley: I'd taken a pizza box and got some used flowers from a funeral home which is you know speaks for itself and took the flowers and made up a corsage covering this pizza box completely, it was completely covered over and we had a hole in the bottom of the pizza box in which we could hide a pie, a paper plate with shaving cream.

TVTV Lord of the Universe documentary
TVTV Lord of the Universe documentary
 

TVTV Lord of the Universe documentary Security Guard: Guru Maharaj Ji is bound by America's love so He just comes and plays and you know it's just it's just too much you know much too much. (What does Maharaji do when he plays?) Pushes people in pools, shaving cream …

Personally, personally, if I was, listen, if I was there I would have slit his throat on the spot (slit his throat?) on the spot (on the spot for throwing a pie?) definitely (you're a dangerous element) this is how I feel (I think that's a fanatic statement - so you'd kill a man for throwing a pie?) on the spot

 
TVTV Lord of the Universe documentary
Pat Halley: We chose shaving cream because we didn't want to like if I got arrested and I figured I'd get arrested I didn't want to have to pay for this guy's suit cause I know he'd be dressed up really slick cause he's Madison Avenue right and he's got all this PR and he's a Jim Dandy guru and so I used shaving cream just to get the point across to embarrass him, didn't really want to hurt him or damage him, just to get a laugh, bring him down to street level so I walked up with the flowers to the guru like I was going to give them to him and everybody was all the gurunoids sitting there smiling they were blissed out and I was sitting there smiling with these flowers and the guru came and I walked up to him with adoration and stuff I walked up to him with these flowers, threw the flowers off and revealed this pie and whacko right in the face …

Unfortunately 55 year old Juteswar Misra, from India, and 25 year old Richard Fletcher from the USA decided, alone or in a conspiracy with other members of DLM, that this was a sacrilegious crime so unspeakable that it required capital punishment. Misra was better known as Mahatma Fakiranand, he was proclaimed a Great Soul, and he had initiated thousands of people in the USA into Rawat's "Knowledge." His accomplice was no ordinary premie either. At that time Divine Light Mission honchos considered themselves the reincarnations of famous saints. Fletcher and his twin brother John were considered the reincarnation of St. Peter. " They have the most incredible experiences on meditation - they meditate four and five days nonstop, just twenty-four hours a day," Rennie Davis told the press. "The whole house they're in just feels their vibration. Guru Maharaj Ji says they could really realize The Knowledge." Forty years later, nobody has realized The Knowledge, not Richard Fletcher and especially not Rennie Davis who is deeper into bombastic bullshit than ever.

Click Here for more information about the attempted murder of Pat Halley by "Mahatma" Fakiranand and Richard Fletcher (the "reincarnation of St Peter").


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