Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
The various bodies of the UN like to haggle over semantics. Now it’s the Human Rights Council that wants to police worldwide discourse for any traces of association between Islam and terrorism.
What do you think the conditions of captivity are that would have British sailor Faye Turney willingly wearing that scarf on her head instead of telling her captors where they can put their scarf and also to go to hell, and also writing that letter calling for UK troops to withdraw from Iraq?
This is real bad. Now the UN won’t even agree on a statement of condemnation. Wanna know what’s up with that? Think the country that, rumor had it a few days ago was miffed at Iran, but now is apparently reaffirming how good a buddy it is to the mullahcracy. (That would be Russia.)
Yesterday I got together with one of those people, of whom there are a multitude in my life, with whom I don’t see much eye-to-eye, but who likes my music and my arts journalism and is really a good coach and cheerleader as I make my way in those realms. Much of her life’s work is concerned with the High Matters, and so our conversation often turns to same.
I told her about the stuff I’d been pondering lately – the stuff I’ve mentioned in recent posts below about some assertions I’ve encountered in the last few day regarding the main reason for going to church and the nature of heaven. (Scroll down a bit if you’re new to what I’m talking about.)
She said, “Why would that stuff bother you? If you’re centered within yourself and know what you’re up to, can’t those people say whatever they’re going to say and you just be what ever you’re being?”
My immediate response was along the lines of “Well, they seem so sure of their positions – so backed up by rigorous scholarship and deep prayer. What if, in my ignoring them, I miss some crucial truism about reality?”
No sooner had I said that, though, than I reiterated what I’ve had to say about those things here at BN – that I can’t see how heaven is a place, given how a place is, by definition, hemmed in by three dimensions and has a pinpointable geographic location, and how Frank Pastore’s reason-for-going-to-church remark seems awfully narrow and severe.
Our discussion went from there along a tack of looking at relativism and whether there are any absolutes, to which I’ll return, but for now, I want to look at what I might have said as my immediate response.
Or maybe I wouldn’t have. This friend is a true-blue lefty and we step up to the third rail often enough as it is. (She’d love nothing more, for instance, than to convert me to the view that there’s something wrong and even sinister about the Iraq war.)
But had I gone ahead with what I’ve now put together in my thought process, it would have been to say that there is – follow me on this, now – a public safety angle to this. Here’s what I mean: I generally find people who have a scripturally-base value system (to spell that out more fully, I mean conventional Christians and Jews) more caring, more trustworthy, stronger, deeper, more likely to be resourceful when it’s crunch time, more able to offer sound advice and insights, and better able to be good listeners than people who get what feels to them like spiritual nourishment from modern-day, make-it-up-as-you-go-along therapy-dressed-up-as-”transformational”-experience.
My biggest concern for our culture is that we have trivialized everything – our marriages, workplaces, our religion, our notion of the functions of sport and art, our public-policy priorities – and can no longer recognize the shining and noble and lastingly grand. This trivialization has its roots in relativism.
I’m not saying I have a hard-and-fast handle on what the absolutes are, but there is a certain kind of person (my friend?) who has a vested interest in discouraging us from looking for them.
If there are no absolutes, no supreme rights and wrongs, “nothing to kill or die for,” as John Lennon sings in that supremely harmful and disgusting 1970 song of his, then your freedom and your quest for personal excellence means nothing.
I may ponder all this some more (ya think?), but at this juncture that seems to be my response to why I can’t just ”get centered in myself” and be on my merry way.
Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker goes on Iranian radio and shows once and for all his true colors as an America-hater. What he’s done here is one of the only crimes besides murder for which the maximum allowable penalty is the forfeiture the most dear thing of all.
I’ve been on another nature-of-God tear lately.
Yesterday, Frank Pastore had a Townhall column about the moribund state of the mainline Protestant churches. One line in it that either stuck in my craw or stuck to my ribs was his assertion that “the primary reason for going to church is to be convicted of sin by the Word of God.”
That no doubt sounds like the most natural thing in the world to say to millions of evangelicals, but it really took me aback. The fact that it took me aback then took me aback. Why does it seem so severe and narrow to me?
A little about my own evolution: my parents left the Presbyterian Church when I was a teenager, at the height of the Vietnam war and the racial tension of the late 60s. It had been building for some time, but the final straw was when the PCUSA gave money to Angela Davis’s defense fund for her murder trial. (She was acquitted, but has remained an outspoken Communist, running as the party’s VP candidate a few times over the years.) Both my folks went from the lineage of John Knox and Gilbert Tennant to New Thought Christianity – in my mom’s case, Christian Science, which had been the church of her youth, and in my dad’s case, Unity, to which he’d been turned on by a Daily Word lying on the desk of the guy who serviced our family’s cars.
Me? I was just entering my long foray into bohemianism, with the Eastern-thought explorations that that pretty much always implies. When my folks toured Asia a few years later, taking in Buddhist temples in Japan and Thailand, they told me they appreciated that I had given them some background for what they were seeing.
So I spent many years with my primary model of God being something more akin to the Clear Light of the Void than a personal Father.
I do have to say that two things happened to me later in my adult life that kind of prompted me to take a fresh look at the whole thing. One was that I saw a bunch of my old hippie buddies going in for some stuff that struck me as pathetically juvenile superstition and paganism – crystals, vortex, channeling, etc. The other was that pretty much all of the tofu-and-sprouts types also went in for nonsensical doo-doo on an ideological level – “social justice,” “saving the planet,” “peace activism” and the like. I’d started boning up on what the Cold War was actually all about and, by the mid-80s, had cast my lot with Dutch. Got myself a National Review subscription and I was off and running.
Now, back to Pastore’s comment. There’s still something in me that says, “Well, now, isn’t it a human construct to call a certain portion of the spectrum of human behavior ’sin’?” And “Aren’t we all eventually going to fold back into the all-luminescent One?”
About the time I start thinking this way, though, I consider what is actually in the Bible itself and then what is in, say, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, or the writings of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, or those of Ernest Holmes (founder of Science of Mind), or, to get really ecumenical, the sermons of the Buddha or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Well, maybe to make my point clearly, I’d better stick with the American-born Christianity-based systems. If you look at what’s in those works, you can’t help but conclude that Mrs. Eddy, the Fillmores and Holmes came to their formulations by putting some extra-Biblical stuff in and leaving some Biblical stuff out.
Ah, but about the time I start pondering that, I consider how much of the Bible is a recounting of supernatural phenomena – stuff I’ve never seen happen in my own experience or had borne out for me by any science I’ve ever studied. And then I’m pretty sure I’m not a fundamentalist by any stretch.
Still, these days my main concern – in every arena of my life as a modern American and a creation of God – is the relativism that has come to permeate our culture and worldview. How far are we gonna stretch our notion of what the Bible is and the function it serves before we can no longer call it Holy Scripture?
We’ve already stretched our notion of the U.S. Constitution and our once-commonly-held standards of decency and dignity completely out of shape. Is the spiritual document that shaped Western civilization and guided the shaping of our Republic next?
The gym I go to has this daily flip-it-over-to-the-current-one-Bible-verse-and accompanying-thought thing, like a Rolodex, on the counter right inside the front door. The thought the other day was an assertion that heaven is an actual place. It went on to say, “Don’t be confused by the mystical religions.” The corresponding Bible verse was Christ’s message that his Father’s house has many mansions in it, and he’s prepared one for each of us. A place, by definition, involves three dimensions and has a geographic location that can be pinpointed. I can tell you where Witchita, Kansas is, where Jupiter is, where the Indian Ocean is. In what sense is heaven a place? I sincerely would like an answer. The last thing I want to be at this point in my life is a smart-ass skeptical agnostic, but I have to say that that Bible verse didn’t shed much light on the matter for me. It strikes me as a figurative reassurance that we are somehow embraced by our Creator for eternity, but seems short on specifics.
Spring came out of the gate this year in full stride. It’s only March 25 and the Bradford pear trees are already putting out those dazzling white blossoms. They’re stunningly beautiful, but they smell awful – like pork rinds, hog cracklins. Seriously.
I rarely use special offers from pizza places that come in the mail. I’m just not generally a one-topping guy, which is a lot of what they’re offering. Pizza ought to be a little busier than that. Plus, you can’t deviate at all. No substituting pesto for the tomato sauce, for instance. But mainly, it’s because a significant part of the deal is devoid-of-nutrients filler like sody pop and bread sticks. What the flip do I want with that jive? (I do have one from Avers sitting here on my desk that has some cool deals on deluxe pies.)
What is Britain gonna do about those sailors in Iranian custody?
With spring in full flourish, it’s time to break out the warm-weather’s-back party music. Tops on the blogmeister’s list: “All Day Music” by War, “Grazin’ In The Grass” by Hugh Masekela, “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” by Jimmy Cliff, “Milestones” by Miles Davis, “Time Is Tight” by Booker T and the MGs.
Do these people who make a living out of serving as “channels” for “non-physical entities” really believe that’s what they’re doing? If some do and some don’t, what’s the ratio?
Dean Barnett, posting at Hugh Hewitt’s blog, has some very interesting reflections on comment threads and the tone they take on and how that comes to be.
After six years of not only seeing media coverage of the American left’s deep and searing hatred of George Bush, but getting the opportunity to witness it first-hand pretty much every day, I still feel like I’m missing something about its essence – its root cause, if you will. Seasoned political observers have known since at least the beginning of his governorship of Texas that he wasn’t a movement conservative, but rather a mishmash of some conservatism and some tendencies that he saw as pragmatism but that were actually mushy statism.
I think to a considerable extent it’s the fact that, as the GOP’s standard-bearer – the closest it could come to a conservative in the campaign against Al Gore – he won by that white-knuckle squeaker that extended the 2000 race weeks beyond the customary night of electrifying suspense. It’s obvious, from the constant search by David Bois for a courtroom that would grant legitimacy to his push for hanging-chad examination and the like, that Democrats had an unprecedented emotional investment in seeing if there wasn’t some way to look more closely at this hairline numerical stack-up that would make a reversal of what the facts were official. To be fair, you can’t blame them. The course of history went one way and not another, and they knew that would be the case.
The biggie that is even more of a biggie than that, though, is, of course, Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, even a lot of Dems, in government and among the populace, were willing to see the need to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and then deny al-Qaeda haven in that country. But then this guy – this president of what, in their minds, was questionable legitimacy at best – starts harping on the Iraq situation. Saying that Saddam is making a mockery of the UN’s legitimacy. Saying that Iraq is seeking to amass a WMD stockpile, pointing out that he’d already gassed entire towns of Kurds. Reminding everyone of the invasion of Kuwait. What does that have to do with the immediate matter at hand, namely al-Qaeda, the libs asked.
And, after months of a tense final round of inspections, during which W’s administration tried to delicately and diplomatically stress to Hans Blix that it would be dangerous to treat the process like ho-hum everyday business, the moment to bust a move arrived.
The primary task – toppling the Baathist regime and making sure Saddam couldn’t menace his country or the world again – didn’t take too long. What happened, though, is that the sectarianism and tribalism bubbling below the surface of Iraqi society, and the opportunism of international terrorist gangs like al-Qaeda, made for a caldron of chaos that the US-led coalition still hasn’t been able to subdue.
What I find fascinating is the way W’s clarity and resolve about Iraq, going back to the beginning of his forst term, gets interpreted by the left as arrogant cowboy swagger and a desire to boost the profits of defense-contractor corporations. It’s that blindness to Iraq’s significance in the overall world-stage scheme of things that the left has chosen to be blind to in order to fit a preconceived scenario of Republican trigger-happy-ism.
And that’s why this is so intriguing. As I said at the outset, W really isn’t much of a conservative. He allowed the vouchers provision to be gutted from the No Child Left Behind Act, he got squarely behind the prescription-drug expansion of Medicare, and he really hasn’t even very articulate in the past few years about reminding the American public of the urgency of this current world war.
But he is such a lightning rod to the lefties that they’ll put up an 08 prez candidate who is, above all else, the Anti-W, and that will be what that candidate runs on.
Meanwhile, we’ll force whoever our candidate is to have his stance tempered in the furnace of ideas and principles and he’ll be ready for the final stretch the autumn after next.
In other words, the Dems indulge in blinding W-hatred at their own expense.
Michelle Malkin provides a good centralized venue for a roundup of what’s quickly coming to be known as Pork & Defeat. Links to reaction from Mike Pence, thoughts from Instapundit, Porkbusters, and Powerline, and an editorial from the Washington Post (which thinks it’s pretty sleazy).
It’s a good thing the surge is working. Imagine how emoldened the enemy would be by this crud otherwise.
Richard Halloran, writing at the Real Clear Politics blog, says NorKor is only “disclosing” its not-useful nuke-program assets, that the real stuff remains well-hidden. Plus, it’s up to its old tricks of upping the demands after a deal has been reached, and walking out of the six-way talks in a huff.
Ahmed Rashid, writing in the Washington Post, says Musharraf’s hold on power ain’t in such good shape, especially after he meddled in the Pak Supreme Court makeup.
Ponder these two fact: they’re already nuclear and they can’t control the Taliban.
A BN bud – not of the same ideological bent as BN, but an interesting cat nonetheless – has cited that Lancet Iraqi-civilian-death figure of 650,000 in a few places in some recent comment threads. Here’s where that assertion starts to unravel.
The MSM gleefully parades W’s basement-level poll numbers, but were you aware that the Freedom-Hater-controlled Congress, after a slight post-election bounce, is in the same shape, per not only Gallup but several other surveys as well?
It’s a little after ten on Tuesday night. I have CNN on the TV, because Fox thinks it’s the thing to do to provide this time slot to Greta Van Sustren to obsess over the residual sordid details of the Anna matter. (One wonders if she’s still in touch with all her contacts in the matter of that kid who disappeared in Aruba.)
Anyway, what Anderson Cooper is interested in is how bad it is for the W administration to fire those prosecutors. To comment on the matter, he got that penultimate beltway insider David Gergen, who enriched the discussion by saying, “This has been going on for decades. The Republicans need to let it sink in that the Democrats won majorities last November. The party in power traditionally looks into why the administration of the opposing party does things like this.” Thank you very much, Mr. Gergen.
There is a breed of person that I find within microinches of the reprehensibility level of socialist Freedom-Haters, and that is the Reasonable Gentleman Republican. This figure is not quite a RINO (Republican in Name Only), and certainly is not a “maverick” (think ego-driven Arizona senator), but the kind of public figure who thinks that his conservatism requires him to be oh-so-civil to the obvious Freedom-Haters, exchange chit-chat with them when they run into them at lunch, see where they have common ground on legislation. I’m thinking of my own Republican Senator, Richard Lugar. There are others. In fact, on the executive level, I think W has fallen prey to the Reasonable Gentleman syndrome way too often. Think his consultation of Ted Kennedy when the No Child Left Behind bill was being crafted.
The Reasonable Gentleman stance never serves us. The Freedom-Haters are human pirhannas. They smell blood at the slightest drip.
This war requires those who are serious about it to fully understand what they are up against. War implies a willingness to get ugly.
Israeli Prime Minister Olmert shows more fealty to Western principles than our own State Department. (Admittedly, that’s not a real hard task.) Norway, as embodied in the person of its deputy foreign minister, shows itself to be utterly clueless.
Dean Barnett’s post at Hugh Hewitt’s blog on what the Iraq situation is all about at this four-year juncture is the best I’ve come across.
UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens in Slate does a fine job, too.
Actually, I think my latest round of thinking about such stuff (see post below) got started last night.
One of my rock-history students made me a CD which, on several levels, is very cool. It contains about seven or eight albums- about 200 songs. About four volumes of some comprehensive series on the Brill Building hits – all those late-50s-to-mid-60s tunes written by the likes of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, etc. Classic performances by Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, The Shirelles, Little Eva, The Chiffons, The Righteous Brothers, Paul Revere & the Raiders, etc. A few volumes of some series on the British Invasion. Again, some great classic performances.
Some of that stuff is as well-crafted as the classic performances of the Great American Songbook standards. No doubt about it. But as I listened to the anthems of teen love, I thought about how the point – for the writers, performers and the guys upstairs like Don Kirschner and Phil Spector – was to market to a particular demographic that had lots of spending cash.
In fact, one can go back to the mid-1950s, when Alan Freed had moved his Moondog Rock & Roll Party radio show from Cleveland out to WABC in New York and put on those shows at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn to see that the up-and-comers in the music business had a deliberate agenda of getting adolescent Americans to feel that their youth somehow made them special.
Those early rock hits didn’t foster teenagers’ narcissism quite as overtly as modern stuff, but it’s still there in hefty doses in such tunes as “Where The Boys Are,” “He’s A Rebel,” “It’s My Party” and even the surfing-and-drag-racing anthems of Brian Wilson and Jan Berry. The whole my-parents-don’t-understand-me/I-have-a-right-to-my-gadgets-and-toys/my-steady-date-is-so-hot-this-must-be-love vibe got going in earnest in rock’s first decade.
And we continue to strengthen it in this age of MySpace and ringtones. The message is that youth is, to employ a phrase that served as a title for a mid-60s rock TV show, where the action is. Which has some merit; youth is the stage of life during which we have boundless energy and vision, when our sense of fun gets a little wacky, and when we see ways of assembling the basic elements of life that become less apparent as we take on more responsibility. But people in that stage are ill-equipped to fully address such considerations as character, courage, decency, consideration, and real love.
Somebody has to be willing to grow enough to deal with those matters.
Frequent BN visitors know that one of my stops each morning as I get the pulse of this world is Townhall.com. Sometimes it turns out that two or more columns on a given day seem to be of a piece. (I’ve sometimes wondered whether e-mail conversations create the fertile ground for great minds to think alike, or whether it’s all mere coincidence.) Anyway, today, Dennis Prager’s column on falsifying the score of a Little League baseball game and Janice Shaw Crouse’s column on General Peter Pace’s comments on homosexuality, when taken together, provoke thoughts along the lines of the soundness of our cultural foundations.
I’m casting about for an idea for my next Republic column (due by noon next Monday). There may be something in this fertile soil that can germinate for me.
This whole notion of feelings, relativity, prolonged adolescence, maiking our institutions up as we go along – I’ve pondered such things quite a bit. What Crouse and Prager have to contribute is useful indeed.
The comment thread underneath this post at Rifftides is as intelligent a discussion about the current state of jazz as I’ve seen anyplace.
What is it with Minneapolis becoming the front line in the clash between civilization and radical Islam? First, it was the airport taxi drivers refusing to pick up people with seeing-eye dogs or bottles of booze. Now it’s Target store cashiers who won’t ring up bacon or pepperoni.
