Saturday Night in Madison, Indiana, Sing That, John Denver

I wanted to name this blog "Window on the World" but thought that was too grandiose. (Like other people who are grandiose for no justifiable reason whatever and know it, I try to mask my grandiosity. But it's in there. It's in there.)

Karletta, my prospective stepdaughter-in-law, is sweetly loquacious and she is regaling my wife with her chatter. My wife is a good listener, having listened to her garrulous mom all her life. (Mom is especially gabby right now, on a steroid high. Mom is 89, Dad 92, and God bless them both, they are hanging on. My wife, besides being a good daughter, is also a good nurse, and takes marvelous care of them.) Karletta's prospective spouse, David, is in his woodshop out back.

What a good boy am I! My daughter, a medical doctor, agreed with me last weekend that I need to lose weight through judicious eating and get my bulky body out there walking -- and I have done just that all week! I elected not to walk one day last week when the THI was 110 (I had actually walked, all 248 lb and 66 yrs of me, the day before when the discomfort index was just as high), but otherwise I've made it out every day for 2.35 miles, according to the trip-odometer on the jalopy, walking the entire length of my street and returning.

We've had a string of fine days again, pleasantly dry such as to be cool in the shade. The eight years my kids and former wife and I lived next to the Wasatch range of Utah, this weather was commonplace. The kids would wear winter pajamas to bed in summer. But I forget. We had an unusually rainy spell that went on for what seemed like at least a year, and the stench of the Great Salt Lake (ever heard of brine shrimp?) was foul and pervaded the entire East Bench, where I was finishing up my Ph.D. I'll take the Ohio Valley, I guess, until the next tornado comes along.

I'm having fun researching movie music for a proposal I made to a radio station. It's a big undertaking and I have been told I would have amateur status only. Fair enough. I have no experience in broadcasting. And I don't know enough about music (ran away from my piano teacher) or movies. (I've seen quite a few and take delight knowing many of the obscure character actors in B movies -- ever heard of I. Stanford Jolley? Look him up on Internet Movie Data Base. And I am learning more every day about movie composers, old ones such as Roy Webb and new ones such as Rachel Portman.) I have mainly enthusiasm, and I hope a few listeners will share it.

"The Present Acrimony"

Dear Ed,

The quotation marks cite a small-town Presbyterian minister (unusually laconic, by the way, for a minister), referring to the chasm between the “religious” right and the “secular” left in the U.S.A.

I’ve noted that a divide has stood for a long time between “activists” and “pietists,” the former believing that Christ’s mission for us is to minister to the poor, sick, and unfortunate, with or without a message, in contrast to the latter, who believe that the most important thing is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, dedicate the rest of your life to getting everybody else to do the same (preferably in your church, during an altar call following a hellfire-and-damnation, come-to-Jesus sermon, but we can quibble about the details), and also spend the rest of your life not sinning (being “sanctified” as well as “saved” will help if your theology allows it), especially not committing sins having to do with sex of any kind and “taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

In What I Believe, Tony Campolo, an evangelical, tells of speaking at an evangelical Christian college. He said to the assembly, “Yesterday [some number of tens of thousands] people in the world died of starvation.” He paused. “And you don’t give a shit.” There was an audible gasp followed by hushed silence—I believe that was the way he put it. “You were more shocked that I said ‘shit’ than by the fact that [all those] people died,” he said.

I remember having a similar thought while in a Sunday school class of young adults thirty-five years ago. The teacher was a professor at a nearby university and he was talking about the what he regarded as dirty Hindus who lived on campus—he said that their food preparation was appalling to him and he implied that his interpretation of their “inferior” hygiene was caused by their “heathen” religion. I wanted to say, “You're a damned bigot.” But it was a Sunday school class, I was a visitor, the pastor was my wife's uncle, and the kids there would be scandalized (by my impure word, not by his unchristian attitude). Being more concerned with “sinful” language than with our collective sin of inhumanity to others resulting in their deaths as surely as if we had murdered them in cold blood—that's pietism.

I believe the pietists of today—the “religious right”—are afraid, as they were then. They have been cowed and bullied from their pulpits and told what they must believe to avoid hellfire. Their beliefs used to be only about end times and the Rapture and the Great Tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon and the Antichrist and the Second Coming and Life After Death and how to prepare for them by Accepting Christ and being Born Again and avoiding Sin. The pietists were “in the world but not of it.” They were poor and ignorant and had little hope in this world and someday, if they were good, they would go to a place where there would be no more crying and pain and the beasts of the wild are led by a child. And the rich and worldly would be no part of it.

When I was a little boy I was taught to fear the great calamities described in excruciating detail, imminent and inescapable. I sat in a high-ceilinged church, a captive child of eight, tortured verbally night after hot, humid summer night of revivals, tortured by the horrible, sadistic men who mopped their sweat with a white handkerchief with one hand and held an open, limp bible with the other while they shouted their threats from the pulpit, telling us it was our last chance before the Lord returned and ended it all.

I had an aunt, God rest her, who reminded me of how much a burn hurt and how it would feel like that all over my body in Eternal Hell (where the God who loved us so much would send us forever.) I was scared as much as anyone, maybe more than most, because I have always seen myself as being a terrible coward—so I tried to become a pietist too. But I could not. I just couldn’t buy fire insurance. There must be more to a loving God than that, I always reasoned.

Today, the pietists are no longer poor and ignorant. They have become rich and powerful—and it has been hell on earth ever since. Their beliefs include who to vote for and campaign and lobby for and, in the latest development, to be a political operative for, in league with the likes of Ralph Reed and Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman—in league with the devil. They are still afraid, triply so—the politicians who rule by fear and the televangelicals and fanciful novelists who enrich themselves at the pietists’ expense have joined the preachers in scaring the hell out of them.

But I say that they are still poor and ignorant. It’s just that now—as always—they have all the answers, and the television and radio “ministries” and networks to bombard all of us with those answers. They have all the money and power and a whole political party that has duped them into believing that they are storing up treasures in heaven, when in reality they are storing up treasures in the coffers of the ultra-mega-hyper-rich of this nation. And the rich and worldly—now, in a funny (that’s funny grotesque, not funny ha-ha) twist—own them as they never did.

So we have come to “the present acrimony.” Well, as I dared to say, I am a Christian too, not duped by the cobbled-together coalition of the rich and righteous, and I read the Bible too (even limp-backed ones if they’re the only ones available), and the relevant text about fear is in the First Letter of John (4:18-20):

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because He first loved us. Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love [those] whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

And Jesus said, “You have heard it said, ‘…love your neighbor and hate your enemy… For if you love [only] those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, … do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5:43 et ff.)

But we Christians, activists and pietists, seem to skip over these texts, required reading in our Sunday schools, and here we are, at the present acrimony. We won’t talk to one another except under the most strained of circumstances. When we do, the most fearful of us try to do all the talking because we have all the answers, and I am reminded of the little kid who sticks his fingers in his ears and shouts, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!” to drown out the other’s words.

What are we to do, brothers and sisters in Christ? Can we find some common ground? Some higher ground? Is there anything we might agree on? Maybe not much on beliefs—let’s get over that. But how about Jesus’ commandments? There were only two, actually, and the second has to do with the verses above, about loving our neighbors with charity (agapé, in New Testament Greek), practicing the Golden Rule, feeding, welcoming, clothing “the least of these” as if we were doing the deeds for Christ himself.

I confess that at this moment I feel like a big hypocrite because I have not done nearly my share of good works in my day, and I know pietists—a lot of pietists—who have done and are doing much more than I have and am doing.

But why don’t we do more things together? Maybe while we’re working together to do Christ’s bidding on earth, can we talk about our similarities as well as our differences? Could one group stop saying that the other does not really consist of Christians? And even if it is true that other major world religions are wrong and all the people who sincerely believe in them are damned to hell for all eternity—I don’t believe that myself but apparently there are fellow Christians who sincerely do—even if it is true, can we stop harping on it and just love these people and practice the Golden Rule and extend agapé to them the same as we purportedly do to one another? Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight. “Who is my neighbor?” Let’s end “the present acrimony.”

Music at the Movies

Dear Ed,

Saturday afternoons when I was about ten, in 1949, I'd go to the matinee at what my mother called “the lower show.” Downstream on Main Street from "the upper (picture) show," it was not as nice (or clean, by then) as the newer theater a block to the east. It had seen much better days as an honest-to-god opera house, being architecture that most thought was much better than the art-deco movie palace up the street. This town that cherishes its status as "historic" regrets it tore down the theater once known as (and aptly so) the Grand. That decision was made when the river also was a sewer and the bank along the front of our town was a dump and an eyesore.

But when I went to the lower show as a pup it was the Saturday showplace for Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Sunset Carson, Allan (Rocky) Lane, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, Johnny Mack Brown, and Lash Larue—not to exhaust the list of B-oater stars.

My favorite, for some reason, was the “Durango Kid,” played by Charles Starrett, who was always “Steve” something when he wasn’t in his disguise, and his sidekick was Smiley Burnett, who was often as not named “Frog” because of his vocal tricks while singing along with the gentleman country band, which always did a number or two. I wonder if they were the ones who did the song that had the lyrics—

Oh what a face!
It’s a disgrace
To be showing it in any public face!

I remember that good-natured musical spoof about a homely woman—who was mercifully not present. Memory does not allow me to say which movie I heard that in, and I hope ASCAP won’t get after me for “publishing” those lyrics without permission. In retrospect, Smiley certainly had more talent than Starrett. And I was embarrassed when a few years ago I saw two of the Durango Kid movies. They were awful! I recall that I liked the music in some of them. It was awful! (Except for the gentleman country acoustic band playing a sort of Texas swing, and one orchestral passage I recall even now.)

Like a lot of other blog bullroar, this isn’t going much of anywhere, I suppose, but I wanted to talk about movie music. A passage of orchestral music from a Durango Kid movie I saw 55 years ago remains in my memory—it had a cantering rhythm, for three canters, followed by and blended in with two sustained notes, the second lower than the first, then followed by four quick notes, which skipped rather than cantered, then again the two long notes, then the four quick notes again, the canter continuing all the while underneath. The composer knew counterpoint, the work of people like Dimitri Kabalevsky, perhaps Shostakovich, I would guess, I being ignorant of music as a trained person but as a music-lover with a reasonably good listener’s ear, and the music is original to me—I’ve never heard anything like it since. This passage wasn’t in the two movies I saw as an old man, sorry to say. I think it was good music. Studios used a lot of “stock music,” I learned, some by composers such as the now eminent African American composer William Grant Still, and I would like to think it was he who composed that little figure that I liked so well that I would sit through three showings just to hear it.

And which prefigured my current love of classical music--Bach, Samuel Barber, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Hindemith, Elgar, Howard Hansen, and yes, of course, the excellent movie composers--Roy Webb (The Cat People), Rachel Portman (The Legend of Bagger Vance), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood), Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) ... I can babble on, and since this is a blog not likely to be read by anybody much, probably will. Hope this is good bedtime reading for someone else besides me. Shalom.