Reactionary entertainment? Forgotten ’80′s Lore: Ronin progressive rockers

By the late seventies, the mine of (English) symphonic progressive rock was played out. Bands like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Genesis fractured or went dormant. The musicians from these bands wandered about picking up whatever work they could scrounge. Many bands reassembled, dumped the progressive rock genre in favor of commercial popular music and made dumptrucks full of money. The period between high progressive rock and commercial pillaging produced some…ahh…interesting output. Almost forgotten is off-and-on Yes drummer Bill Bruford’s Gradually Going Tornado. It features bassist Jeff Berlin who is notable for being pehaps even more technically competent than Jaco Pastorius. And like Jaco, the original compositions he produced that anyone would actually want to listen to can be counted on one hand. Anyway, Jeff gets to sing on this album, which is a bit like letting Ringo sing on Beatles albums. He is on pitch mostly, but you can’t help but think that the orginal slated vocalist fell through. Anyway, it screams 1980 if you happened to grow up in this period:

What’s reactionary about it? Not much I suppose, but consider how much progressive rock was hated by the critics from the Neo-Marxist school*. That is, the Rolling Stone critics that adored the sacred cows of classic rock: The Beatles, Clapton, The Rolling Stones, etc. That is to say, ostensibly blues-based rock. While progressive rock had plenty of radicalism in it—experimental drug use, lyrics inspired by the spurious glitter of Eastern mysticism, and peace and love stuff so sentimental you needed to keep a supply of air-sickness bags on hand—they also borrowed heavily from the Western (read white) harmonic and structural tradition. Again, Mordor tolerates no deviation from its ideology of chaos, so the critics refused to make a friend of prog-rock for its many radical elements and instead made them an enemy based on the traditional. They also lashed out against heavy metal which they considered an opiate and it may be no surprise that when I talk to traditionally-minded Catholics, many of them also have an interest in another tradition-borrowing genre, power metal. Up the Irons right-wingers! \m/-_-\m/

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*For a treatment of this, read Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture by Edward Macan

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More random musings on the “It’s religion when you do it, it’s pure Jesus when I do it” video and the new translation.

According to a commentor, Jefferson bethke of the “Why I hate religion, but love Jesus” video goes to Mark Driscoll’s church…uhh…worship space…uhh…thing…anyway, Driscoll is from Western Seminary. Readers are excused for thinking this is a religion–just a very anti-liturgical/sacramental one.

Rather than try to nail the Jell-O on the wall on what the Bethke/Driscoll thing is specifically, it got me thinking about Mark Shea’s comment that everyone in America is Calvinist, including the Catholics. Here I’m going to use Calvinism in a very informal Mencius Moldbuggian sense, so please allow for, as he would put it, some semantic drift. It is quite difficult to argue with the Borg from Star Trek. They assimilate everything, and take those little bits from you that help spread itself. That is to say, the same ideological black hole that inspires one to post that the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, is the same that compels gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to say…you guessed it…religion is eeeevvvviiilll. The motives may be different–the former is garden-variety bigotry and the latter is a desperate search for a license to do perverted things with the genitalia–but the ends are the same: the satanic destruction of Faith as a supernatural virtue to be replaced with a solipsistic ideological head trip.

Catholics are not immune to this by a long shot, and while thinking of this not-religion-wink-wink video, I thought of a comment by one “Ralph Roister-Doister” who remarked that our decades old “new” Mass is an anti-liturgical blotter designed to soak up novelty. A stalwart and well-trained bishop or priest can keep a tight reign on liturgical shenanigans, giving fodder to the hollow cry, “See? The NO can be celebrated reverently!” Given a lazy, indifferent, or even well-intentioned but confrontation-phobic churchman and we get what one sees in way too many parishes: endless yakking before and after Mass, nursery-room music, people routinely dressed as if they woke up on the floor of someone else’s dorm room, and a platoon of EMHC’s holding hands behind the altar.

Now I am tempted to talk about the new translation as a sand castle built to hold off a tsunami, but I just want to mention the resistance to the the new translation as illustrative of how Mordor can’t tolerate deviating from the religion-is-evil script by so much as a millimeter. God bless the confrontation-phobic leadership at my parish. They set up roundtables to explain to the laity the reason for the changes. It was friendly, cordial, rational, and overall, correct. Yet I happened to overhear one lady exiting the discussion saying that if this keeps up, she’ll go somewhere else because, as she put it, she came to have a relationship with God, not learn a new language. New Language? The only thing our parish did that was another language was to sing the Gloria refrain in Latin. That is, sing what everyone sings at Christmas when they sing “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Phew! Better start brushing up on your declensions! But you can’t win against a malcontent and having failed to make a substantial argument against the english language, internet gripers proceeded perilously close to Jack Chick territory by disparaging Ecclesial Latin as gutter Latin.

So some guess that the language isn’t the real objection. After all, I can’t think of much that is more worldly than marketing and advertising–except perhaps marketing beer:

obviously they don’t have a problem with “chalice”, what is our problem? I suspect that the objection isn’t that the new translation is too worldly, it’s that it isn’t worldly enough. It’s elevated (even if based on gutter Latin). This gets us back to Mark Shea’s comment that all of us are Calvinist, even the Catholics. I didn’t give his context (see here), but he was talking about when a certain celebrity went on a drunken anti-Semitic tirade, asked forgiveness, and many people said his contrition was baloney. According to the world, virtue and refinement are mere false fronts for vice and evil which is where our true nature lies. This worldview has utterly swallowed all of civilization and even the best of us indulge it occasionally. Resisting the ideology of religion as vice and not virtue is difficult. Let me suggest this as the start of a regimen of innoculation.

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H/T and raised bottle of Stella Artois to Fr. Z for the chalice reference. Yep, I was too late to get in on the free chalice deal. Maybe my parish still has some illicit glass chalices lying around. Ok, naughty dig. I’ll stop now.

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Stick your fingers in your ears and repeat: “There is no slippery slope in re-defining marriage.”

From Mail Online:

Babylonia Aivaz’s love knows no bounds – that’s why she will marry a 107-year-old doomed warehouse in Seattle tomorrow.

The Seattle activist has planned the weekend ceremony because she is head over heels in love, and she also wants to make a statement against the warehouse’s slated demolition.

H/T LarryD

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Stick your fingers in your ears and repeat: “Other people’s sexual preferences don’t affect you in any way.”

From MCJ:

A 15-year-old Wisconsin boy who wrote an op-ed opposing gay adoptions was censored, threatened with suspension and called ignorant by the superintendent of the Shawano School District, according to an attorney representing the child.

Mathew Staver, the founder of the Liberty Counsel, sent a letter to Superintendent Todd Carlson demanding an apology for “Its unconstitutional and irrational censorship and humiliation” of Brandon Wegner.

Wegner, a student at Shawano High School, was asked to write an op-ed for the school newspaper about whether gays should be allowed to adopt. Wegner, who is a Christian, wrote in opposition. Another student wrote in favor of allowing gays to adopt.

Wegner used Bible passages to defend his argument, including Scripture that called homosexuality a sin

Read Johnson’s fisk here: http://themcj.com/?p=27909

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More like this one please. Bishop Sample’s letter protesting the HHS

See here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79485476/Letter-from-Bishop-Sample-on-Religious-Liberty

View this document on Scribd

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Fr. Barron responds to the “Why I hate aerodynamics, but love airplanes” video.

Here:

H/T Cleansing Fire

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Reactionary Entertainment*: Downton Abbey

Like Mona Charen, I liked Simon Schama’s “History of Britain”. For a long time, only academics paid much attention to the revision of the whig interpretation of the English Reformation by such as Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy, et al. so, it was refreshing to see it in this popular documentary.

Now apparently Schama is vexed over popular American reception of Downton Abbey for fear that Americans will start believing that maybe, just maybe, something was lost in the great modern egalitarian leveling process. Mrs. Charen notes in her article that “Downton Abbey doesn’t succumb to the modern prejudice of portraying all aristocrats as morons or monsters, the better to grind the ax about the evils of the old class system. The earl is an honorable man who tries to live up to the code of the gentleman. His mother is spoiled and willful but basically decent.” For of specific example of this “Upper class?! rawr!” portrayal, I am reminded of the dreadful Altman hairball Gosford Park. To know all you need about that movie, please take a moment and absorb this from James Bowman’s review:

For decades Hollywood lived by the philosophy that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Savage red men bit the dust in their thousands for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, so that anyone who ventured into a Western could be sure of what he would see. Why did it take people so long to get bored knowing that every Indian would be nothing but an Aunt Sally for soldiers’ or settlers’ bullets? I don’t know, but eventually they did get bored — and Hollywood promptly flip-flopped. For the last thirty-five years, you could be equally certain going into a movie that any cinematic redskins would invariably be the good guys: decent, honorable and, as sure as shooting, victimized by the white man.

And we are still not bored with it. Maybe in another 30 years we will be. In the same way, I reckon that it has been at least 40 years since an aristocrat of the silver screen has been anything but a thorough rotter and a cad. You have only to call a character Lord something- or-other and your audience knows immediately what to think of him. Why don’t we get bored with this? Once again, it is a mystery. But one possible explanation is that we need the myth of the wicked upper classes to confirm us in our taste for vulgarity and sloppiness. If we thought that manners and what they used to call “breeding” were anything but a cover for the basest kind of behavior, we might have to cultivate them ourselves once again instead of letting it all hang out.

He has it cold I dare say. Downton Abbey by contrast gives everyone a fair shake. It spends much time showing modernity creeping in like the vines in Love in the Ruins (more reactionary entertainment for you by the way), and the producers of this series, presumably not reactionaries, give the good things of modernity their due. That is, they try to split the middle. But advantage reactionaries, because we all sit in a smouldering pile of rubble that was once Western civilization, and you can’t watch this show without knowing where it all eventually leads. My only quibble based on the few episodes I’ve seen is the nagging sensation that I’m watching a version of Brideshead Revisited that has been sanitized of Catholicism so to speak, but it is still worth the time.

*Apologies to “proph” of Collapse: The Blog for my blatant aping.

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CatholicVote.com annoints Santorum Our Guy

Let the “Vote for him or the babies get it!” commentary begin! Rather than go through the merits, or lack thereof, of this Arlen Specter fanboi, I thought I would post their YouTube:

The shredding of the Constitution! The shredding of the Statue of Liberty! Oh noes! I take it a vote for Santorum is not an endorsement for making the United States officially and confessionally Catholic. At any rate, it got me thinking about religious art and how Our Lord is traditionally the center of the piece. Generally, all eyes are on Him, pointing toward Him, or He is simply the biggest thing in the picture. In the picture below, one’s eyes might be attracted to His glow, but note the center…and the index finger. And there lies much of the problem I think. Brothers and Sisters, I give you the Christian Rorschach Test (you pass if you are at least a little bit creeped out):

 

 

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Stopped clock is right

The Supreme Court case here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-553.pdf

The upshot:

Given this understanding of the Religion Clauses—and the absence of government employment regulation generally—it was some time before questions about government interference with a church’s ability to select its own ministers came before the courts. This Court touched upon the issue indirectly, however, in the context of disputes over church property. Our decisions in that area confirm that it is impermissible for the government to contradict a church’s determination of who can act as its ministers.

Everyone dust off their copies of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

Hat tip: Fr. Philip

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Circling the drain

One of the Civil War buffs I knew once remarked that the problem was that Southern nationalism didn’t really materialize until long after Appomattox. I am reminded of that when I see the recent spate of objections to the new translation of the Mass. This time, I’ll refer to a non-Catholic doing the fisk of a late malcontent, Jeff DeGraff, here: http://themcj.com/?p=27553

In short, we didn’t ask for this change to the Mass and from all indicators didn’t want it.

Jeff?  Buddy?  Catholics are exactly the same as everyone else.  If Rome gave them what they wanted, Communion wafers would be replaced by baklava, Communion wine by Jäger shots and you would not only have the right to drill your best friend’s hot wife during the liturgy, you would have the obligation.

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