Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-13-17

Curioser and curioser.

Usually I cite the Bible here; often Theodore Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Today it is Alice’s turn, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And I am well aware that there are few new things under the sun, yet things surprise us every week.

The revelations of sexual advances and disgusting behavior are new… yet their existence surely is not. Few people are, or should be, shocked that Hollywood producers and powerful executives, politicians, and bosses have acted this way. In fact it is almost a cliché – one could say a stale stereotype from am unimaginative movie script – that women have had to deal with disgusting suggestions, “casting couches,” and threats of blackballed careers. An afternoon’s work for Harvey Weinstein, by reports at least.

We all knew it, not only the women under pressure. Men occasionally felt bizarre pressures, too – not always sexual, but of the “dirty little secret” varieties, for instance the soft pressure of racial bias and class preference. Homosexuals have been pressured negatively and sometimes favored, as have people of political persuasions.

Racial and sexual injustice are at the forefront these days, and the major surprise to me is that people are acting surprised. For years it was common talk – not whispers – that directors like Alfred Hitchcock were perverts who demanded favors; in politics, Bill Clinton; in sports, Jerry Sandusky… and so on.

I have been on the periphery of some of the players in the Clinton scandals. Kathleen Willey (attacked by Bill in the White House the same day her husband committed suicide) bears emotional scars. I know Lucianne Goldberg, who convinced Linda Tripp to convince Monica Lewinsky to record Pres. Clinton’s phone messages and to keep the infamous blue dress. And 21 years ago I interviewed Gennifer Flowers, who related that Bill Clinton, in pillow talk when she was his mistress, laughed about Hillary having more girl friends than he did.

Seemingly overnight, the “establishments” of Hollywood and the media regard it all as taboo, even when charges are unsubstantiated (as are, at this writing., the accusations against a US Senate candidate). The anomaly is that people are suddenly opposed to sexual predation, not that they are surprised by it. Yesterday an accepted joke, today an offense, tomorrow anathema.

If we sniff a bit of inconsistency, I do not demand that society be consistent! Sometimes we awaken to harmful things, to bad behavior, to sin. The unfortunate pattern in social mores is that what offends people one bright day… they are often inured to in days subsequent. God forbid it will be that way with sexual predators and gross insensitively of the kinds in recent headlines.

The human race has changed its attitude toward slavery, for instance – except when it hasn’t. The public attitudes might be different, but the practice around the world is still with us.

The human race has changed its attitude toward wanton slaughter of animals – except human animals. War, oppression, trafficking, ethnic cleansing, euthanasia, and abortion are rampant.

The human race has changed its attitude toward freedom of expression – largely when threatened by governments; but seemingly comfortable when “soft” censorship exists by Big Media, news monopolies, internet moguls, and dictators of Political Correctness.

I can quote Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Law of Compensation – things get better here, and worse there. Healthier in some ways; toxic in others. Maybe that is how life works.

Let us not be cynical, however. We should pray that what recent societies called Puritanical attitudes – courtesy between the sexes; probity; common respect – might not be fads but a moral palliative, a New Normal.

And while we are praying… if the grosser aspects of the Sexual Revolution might become extinct, if predators might become an endangered species, is it too much to add items to our prayer lists?

Human trafficking? The drug culture? Persecution of Christians and minorities? Child abuse, spousal abuse? Divorce?

Readers of the future will look back on this essay and know, as we cannot, whether the New Puritanism, at least as it concerns Hollywood and Celebrity sexual predators, is a tool for the self-righteous to attack others, or is the beginning of a return to civility and respect, manners and solid social standards. As Emerson might observe, while we conquer physical diseases, we are infected by moral blight. Epidemics.

Writers like H L Mencken and Ralph Barton Perry almost a century ago decried the Puritan strain in the American culture, but such manifestations as Prohibition were purged. There were no crippling effects on the onward march of society. When corrections need correction, they are corrected. When things needing correction are ignored or enjoy benign neglect – enabled, really – they fester. And we die.

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The question, ultimately, is a personal question, because we are the building-blocks of society. And it concerns our hearts, not our political affiliations or backgrounds or economic status. Bennie Tripplett of the Church of God wrote a gospel song made famous by the Blackwood Brothers:

Click: How About Your Heart

9-10-12

The political conventions are over, but I have found myself thinking of the past, not the future. Forty years ago a political convention, in a rather unconventional way, led to my career as a journalist and author. It was 1972, Nixon vs McGovern, a time and a campaign famous for “dirty tricks,” and an invitation I received to be a minor player turned a national footnote into my personal narrative.

I had been a middle-level player in college political movements during the tumultuous era of student protests and campus activism, on the right. State chairman of Young Americans for Freedom chapters (the youth movement founded by William F Buckley); employee at YAF headquarters; cartoonist for New Guard magazine; Editor of Free Campus News Service. Et cetera. A budding activist.

As the 1972 political season began, my girlfriend and I were invited to a meeting in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan by a person who went on to prominent roles in Republican politics, lobbying, and government work. He shows up as a talking head, these days, on TV news shows, and so do several of his old partners. Generically, these days, a “consultant.” His proposition that day was this: the Democrats were going to hold their convention in Miami Beach; their 1968 convention had been crippled by violent protests in the streets; and Would we be willing to travel to Miami and mix with the inevitable protesters? Not to provoke anything, of course, but to… encourage the angry, to seek out TV cameras, those sorts of benign things.

There were enough winks to know what was desired. It was an odd request, I thought, not the least because no recent grad looked LESS like a hippie than I did. My girlfriend might have blended in, but I would have looked like a pit bull at a cat show. No matter: I confess that I was interested. It was a season of dirty tricks. My friend Lucianne Goldberg pretended to be a reporter, and gained a spot on the McGovern press bus. Some goniffs visited the Watergate Hotel late one night, too…

My main interest, frankly, was what I perceived to be an expenses-paid front-row seat to history. Of course I didn’t know Lucianne yet or had a hint about Watergate. Wanting to wear a second hat, however, I had the idea to go to my local newspaper, the Press-Journal of Englewood NJ, which was so small they had trouble covering local school board meetings. But I asked the editor, Laurette Kitchen, if she would be interested in some reportage by a local guy, no charge.

She was not tempted for a moment – Laurette surely was realistic about the weekly’s modest scope in the community – but did ask if I would be interested to apply for an open position, for a local reporter. School boards. Town councils. Obituaries. Since I was floating, at the time, between grad courses and a vague idea to be a teacher, I jumped at the chance. As mentioned above, writing, cartooning, editing were already in my bag of ambitions. I took their writing test on the spot, did HORRIBLY on it (believe me), but was hired on the spot anyway. I have never looked back.

I did not go to Miami. I was a local reporter (yes, writing death notices, the ladder’s first rung, even for many literary giants); moved to a Connecticut paper where I was columnist, cartoonist, and magazine editor; I became editor at three newspaper syndicates; moved to Marvel Comics and Disney; and… 70 books later, found myself watching the political conventions this year, occasionally wondering “What if?”

One thing is certain, after 40 years. Political parties have changed more than I have. Dirty tricks? I don’t want to sound like a cynic – well, yes; I do – but the schemers we will always have with us. Franklin Roosevelt’s crew committed dirty tricks at their own convention in 1940. Afraid of tdelegates’ reluctance to crown FDR for a third term, the Administration stuffed the galleries and even the ventilation system with leather-lunged partisans who sparked “spontaneous” chants and rallies on cue. Even the hallowed Abraham Lincoln was the beneficiary of dirty tricks. The Republican convention of 1860 was held in Lincoln’s Chicago, so his handlers were able similarly to shape events… and even were on hand to bribe leaders with offers of cabinet positions. Sometimes the same office to different men. “With malice toward none, with offices for all…”

But a lot has changed in 40 years. More than 10 presidential elections have passed. Politics is different. The American culture has changed. Society has been transformed. Religion is on its head; not the Bible, but practice and standards in America. At political conventions, the only thing that has not changed, it seems to me, is funny hats.

A party whose icon, FDR, once led a nation in prayer on radio, and had a signed letter to servicemen inserted in Bibles provided during the war, this year celebrated in myriad ways homosexual marriage, unrestricted abortion, public funding of free contraception devices, and obeisance to those who identify themselves as bi-sexual and transgender.

But the dirty tricks of this convention, not well reported by all media outlets, came when someone noticed that the party’s platform had quietly removed all references to God. Even the perfunctory clichés of all past platforms – “God-given rights,” “God has blessed our nation…” “Boilerplate” language of the last platform was retained, minus the God particle, so to speak.

When this gratuitous omission was discovered, it went viral in certain circles. The party leaders must have feared a firestorm, so in the opening moments of the penultimate session, the convention chairman fast-tracked a rule change that would lead to a re-written platform. What unfolded was an astonishing lose/lose proposition.

He announced the new language and asked for a voice vote; approval requires two-thirds of delegates. But the “nays” outnumbered the “yeas”; the chairman had expected a rubber-stamp but did not receive it. In confusion he asked a second time, and the results also were mixed, to be polite, about re-inserting a mild reference to God in the platform. More delays, consultation with the parliamentarian, and enough time (as revealed in subsequent photos) for the teleprompter to display his script, straight from the bosses. After the third voice-vote, certainly inconclusive, the chairman nevertheless read, “In the opinion of the Chair, two-thirds of the delegates having voted in the affirmative …”

A good result? Good for traditionalists, Christians? Only if it is commendable for a major American political party to attempt to scrub acknowledgement, or thanks, to God, from its official document; to be hypocritical about ramming it back in because a public-relations disaster loomed; to be anti-democratic about the vote… and for the delegates, representing the rank-and-file, after all, to be enthusiastically in favor of abortion, homosexual marriage, and what history has routinely regarded as deviant lifestyles; but clearly, loudly, repeatedly against the very mention of God. Angry arm-waving, red faces.

I could almost hear a sound above the crowd noise as I watched this dirtiest of dirty tricks foisted on the body politic: “Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, Peter – this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny three times that you even know me.’”

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There is theme music to this situation. The great song by Barry McGuire, from those tumultuous days of protest, more relevant year after year after year in our once-great nation:

Click: The Eve of Destruction