Elvis Presley

In a sermon “Interpreting Failures, Conserving Victories” , Ravi Zacharias quoted from a Albert Goldman article in Life Magazine about Elvis Presley.

Our society’s heroes tell us more about the society than it does about the heroes.

Presley’s daily regimen went this way. He had 3 or 4 attacks caused of drugs. At 4am, he would asked for an envelope from one of his aids and that envelope would consist of 11 different pills and 3 shots of Demerol, mainly downers and a lot of barbiturates. All of them were habit forming, increasing tolerance but not increasing the volume needed for a fatal dose. Says Goldman he risked his life everyday. That was at 4am. At 4.30am, just before it would take its effects, he will order his one main meal for the day which consists of three huge cheese burgers or six and seven banana splits.

The man’s life had become so erratic and so out of control. That was at 4.30. At 8.30am, in four hours, all those drugs would have stop taking their total effect because the tolerance was increasing. At 8.30, he would begin to stir his 250 pounds frame and then he would call for the second attack, administered by an aid. And then one and half hours at 10am , a third attack. By mid-afternoon he would be groggy and it would be time for him to wake up to get ready for some of his performances, an aid would come with cotton swaps , soaked it into liquid cocaine and plunge it into his nostrils and a handful of Desbutal to jumpstart his heart.

He needed drugs to wake him up, drugs to knock him out.

Finally, one of his friends look at him and said “Elvis, what are you doing to yourself?”

And he said this “I rather be unconscious than miserable.”

One pathologist described him as a pharmaceutical freak. In last two and a half years, he said he had 19,000 narcotics, stimulants and sedatives.

Dr Norman, the chief pathologist to compile the toxicology report said he had never seen so many drugs in one body.

When Goldman finished the article, what is a complete mystery to me is why a man whose life become so bizarre and out of control has still been such an idol to millions of people and synonymous with the urethra of the fifties and sixties as the idol winning the accolades of the millions. He said “So indestructible is Elvis that even a suicide and the details of his life are not able to destroy him,” and the article ends by saying “Even Elvis could not destroy Elvis.”

What I say to you is this: look at the heroes that we have today. Turn on your television screen and see the heroes. People in the entertainment media or leadership media whose lives in private betray standards that ought to be abort by civilisations. But somehow politicians go into great bastion of power and believe their private lives has nothing to do with their public lives.

Ladies and gentleman, how you and I live in private has everything to do with what we present ourselves in public. If it does not, it ought to. And the reason for that is there is unifying threat in reality and God say it’s spirituality. Have you ever realised that the very word universe is looking for unity, the very word university is looking for unity in diversity. And God say the unity for all diversity is spiritual strength that a person has.