Copland and Perry

The day began with one of my lefty Facebook friends raving about Rick Perry’s TV ad using Aaron Copland’s music. I hadn’t heard the ad, so I played it there as it was set out. Now I read Tom Jackson, linking the ad and noting that the music is NOT Copland. And indeed, it isn’t. Not only is it not any Copland piece that I know, but the woodwind writing doesn’t ring true; it’s too dense and solid. It’s certainly Copland-LIKE. But so is most of John Williams, just to mention the most famous miner of that lode. When you’re the Iconic American Composer, you set the style for icons. And that style has become the musical shorthand for “wide open spaces good old-time America”.

It was apparently an Alex Ross tweet that got the whole Perry/Copland meme going. Now, there’s less than no love lost between Ross and Perry; I’m a Ron Paul guy myself so I really don’t give a shit one way or another (especially as I’m not much motivated by gay issues). So yea, it was a deliberate attempt to make Perry look bad (as opposed to a passing cultural observation.) But then, the standard musical formula for love scenes in an earlier movie era was to use fake Tchaikovsky…who was of course queerer than a $3 bill. Yes, passion is passion (like “a mouth is a mouth”), but if we’re going to read things into films, based on the back story of composers who inspired film music composers, just what does that signify? If one is responsible for taking into account the sexual preferences of the inspirations on one’s media employees, then what was Perry’s team to do? I suppose that they could use fake Charles Ives, who had pretty impeccable gay-averse credentials (I don’t use the term “homophobic” because such people generally do not fear gays…though considering how many gays are  into physical culture, perhaps they should .),  but polytonality doesn’t suggest “E pluribus unum” and conservative politics to the average listener…. not to mention that Ives’ source material was diversity-deprived, being very Christian, and very WASP, and hasn’t been on the hit charts since 1898 at the latest. Which may, now that I think of it, might be an advantage to Perry.

The irony is probably lost on Perry’s target audience, who, if they noticed the music at all, probably thought it sounded like “movie music…John Williams… the score from The Patriot“, in order of specificity. I’ve never seen Brokeback Mountain, but I have to wonder now if there are Coplandisms there, and what they mean.  This friend-on-a-friend stuff is weak tea… which may be why the Internet insisted on amping it up to real Copland.

Churches: more than fried chicken.

Increasingly, I observe that there is a religion called “Catholicism”, which is based on the writings and traditions of the Apostles and has a consistent two-millennium tradition and track record, and another religion called “Catholicism” which is practiced by those born into it, which has different premises about the nature of man, of good and evil, and our responsibilities to God. I’ve had people tell me I’m getting it very wrong, but I don’t think that’s true. And I’ve had other people think I’m a saint, and I KNOW that isn’t true. All I know is that there’s a disjunct.

I recently had a pair of observant Catholics tell me almost braggingly about their year of premarital boinkery…they aren’t the first or only young people to jump the gun, and I of all people have BTDT, but…why are you telling me this? I may be wearing black because I just came from a concert, but I’m not a priest and this is not a confessional.  Likewise, I’ve been told that a priest should ignore older people living together without benefit of clergy and invite them to the Eucharist, and that to expect them to point out that sin is sin is a violation of “grace”.  Hey, forgiveness is a great thing, and I’m willing to forgive you beating me, but you have to put the baseball bat down first, because I want some evidence that you’re sorry.. Jesus is on the Cross for you, right now, so put the hammer and nails down already.

Much the same make-your-own-rules mentality surfaces in the Evangelical churches as well. “Mere Christianity” is rapidly becoming “merely a label”, or this notion that Christianity is doing what Jesus did.  Well, hey, that’s part of it, and I’d be more open to that if you weren’t so convinced that Jesus was a Palestinian Communist agitator, or if you were more open to doing what Jesus did after Palm Sunday.

The folks who want the Church to be a democracy, who think they can make their own rules, are the same people who think that their own whims are the criteria for democratic governance, and that fundamental rules can be changed by majority vote. It’s a cancer that began in the world and is now beseiging the church….which will ultimately make the church useless for fixing it in the world…absent intervention by God.

Apropos of all of this. Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s comments on the Minnesota marriage battle led me to this piece on the decay of Lutheranism, and this description of the ELCA convention of 2009, which I’d totally missed at the time, even though I’d been born Lutheran:

When debate began on the proposed sex statement affirming homosexual relationships, a rare and completely unpredicted tornado struck downtown Minneapolis where the convention was held. It ripped off part of the convention center roof, but even more amazing is what happened to Central Lutheran Church directly across the street. That church had earlier hosted the homosexual lobby’s worship services. The tornado actually knocked the cross over on their steeple. This did not deter the vote which passed the proposal reportedly by 66.6%. Many observers did not dismiss these signs as coincidences.