Monday, October 27, 2014

WTF?







 I hear this song repeatedly at my fitness club as my arthritic limbs crack and rebel. They mostly play English club songs. I reflect on the fact Puritans left England for the New World because the Church was becoming too lenient. You understand? It's easy to look around and think this is the liberated x-rated world those early pilgrims were dreaming of but that's exactly 100% wrong. This club culture of date rapes and teen gang bangs is exactly what they thought England would turn out to be if the church was not so strict. The Puritans objected to celebrating Christmas. See? They were the Latter Day Saints of 1650. Puritans were zealots and extremists. Paul Revere's family were Puritans. Yes, it was an issue of religious freedom, escape from persecution, but the fundamental issue was the Puritan's opposition to what they perceived as godless hedonism. So they came to North America hoping to start fresh with clean virtuous lives. So did millions of others who didn't agree with the Puritans.

The other thing I think of is Spain's conquest of South America about 100 years earlier. While the English and then Americans nibbled away at the Indigenous people for 200 years, Spain's Catholic crusade obliterated Indian culture as fast as possible. Piles of heathen bodies were burned! The goal was a devout people, devout, loving god, obedient to god.
The popularity of this club is fading. Maybe techno beat hymns are the answer?

Then I watch this dance club video and I think, "What the fuck?" All these people would be burned as witches in 1692...which leads me to think witchcraft was a generic term for non-conformist, and conformity is the key to stability. It's the old paradox that with freedom we will destroy ourselves, and without freedom there's no point in living.

Buy War Bonds And Stamps For Victory




Musical wartime propaganda .
Comin' In On a Wing and A Prayer contains a melody that is very close to an old hymn called The Sweet Bye and Bye, which was adopted by the Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill for his song The Preacher and The Slave. You heard it here first. It's odd that I can barely remember the chords for a song seconds after playing it but I had not heard The Sweet Bye and Bye in two decades but I recognized the melody and tracked it down in my brain to a particular rainy night in Santa Cruz where a street activist who modeled himself after Joe Hill was singing on the sidewalk. "There'll be pie in the sky when you die....and that's a dirty lie." Bob, was the singer's name and he's the character in my Santa Cruz epic. He's the guy who fills balloons with urine to defend himself when the police raided the abandoned squat we were all living in. It was good times.


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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.