Musical Conversations

The other week a colleague joked about my “out of date” taste in music.  It was five hundred years old he said.  I found this highly amusing.  I had been listening to the symphonies of Beethoven.  Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was first performed in Vienna in 1800.  His Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the fourth movement of which contains the famous choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and which set nine as the informal upper limit for symphonies for future composers, (1) was first performed in Vienna in 1824.  Each of these, in other words, dates to the century before the last rather than five centuries ago.

 

Unintentionally, however, my friend illustrated the very point that I made in answer to him.  If the difference between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is that irrelevant then the music in question cannot be tied to the era that produced it in the sense his criticism suggests. Classical music in the broad sense of the term can never be out of date because it is timeless.  This is, indeed, what the term classical implies when used of this kind of music.  This is why it persists as its label despite the potential for confusion (2) even though attempts are periodically made to find another.

 

Classical is not the only kind of music that possesses the quality of timelessness although it has a firmer title on it than any other.  There is a type of music, by contrast, that is notoriously time-bound.   That is the type of music that we usually refer to as pop.

 

Note that while pop is short for popular, pop music and popular music are not the same thing.  Popular music is the traditional complement to classical music.  It covers any kind of music that belongs to the popular or common culture through which a society’s identity is expressed, maintained, and transmitted.  Classical music belongs to the other kind of culture which rather than being inward-focused on group identity is outward-and-upward-focused on external reality and such things as Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.  Both kind of culture are necessary to have civilization and in a healthy society they have a symbiotic relationship in which each informs and draws from the other.

 

If popular music can be described as the music of the natural popular culture of a society, pop music is music that is artificially created and imposed upon the popular cultures of man societies.  While pop is sometimes thought of as one of many genres of music, like jazz, rock, and country, it is something else.  It is what you get when you apply the principles of industrialization - mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption - to music.  This is why it is dates from the moment it is created like no other kind of music is.  Everything produced and marketed for mass consumption has a shelf-life.  This is called planned obsolescence.  It is an inevitable consequence of mass production.  Unless you are producing something like food which cannot be used without also being used up, you will need to sell to the same customers over and over again, which means that you will either have be constantly redesigning and, at least in theory and the perception of your customers, improving your product or you will have to make an inferior product that wears out and needs to be replaced. The same principle by which automobile manufacturers and software companies operate applies to pop music which is why when you hear pop it you can usually tell the decade and often the very year it was recorded.

 

Timelessness on the one hand and being intentionally dated on the other are not the only ways in which classical and pop are each the antithesis of the other.  This is one of many reasons why the widespread notion that the relationship between the two is that of two different genres is utterly silly.  Neither classical nor pop is a genre, they differ from each other in kind at a far deeper level than that.  That this is so can be seen in the fact that both classical and pop each have their own genres and the nature of the genres of classical is very different from the nature of the genres of pop.

 

Since pop music is not itself a genre of music, but a category defined by how it is made and consumed, its genres are the different kinds of popular music to which the process of producing pop has been applied.  This process could in theory be applied to any kind of music, but some kinds of music are more susceptible to it than others.  Classical music is the most inoculated against it.  The closest thing to a pop version of classical would be something like a greatest hits collection of arias sung by the Three Tenors.  When a previous kind of popular music is turned into pop this creates a distinction between its traditional form and the form that is subsumed under pop as a genre.   The kind of traditional popular music that is most comparable to classical music in terms of musical depth, its extensive repertoire of strictly instrumental pieces, and how it is listened to is easily jazz which some think ought to be classified as classical rather than popular.  There is a pop version of jazz, although traditional jazz purists reject is as being real jazz, and it has a fairly wide reputation for banality. (3)

 

What I just said about traditional jazz purists is, of course, true of purists of any form of traditional popular music.  In the case of country and western music the associations that issue honours and awards have long tried to act as gatekeepers by granting minimal recognition to anyone who was come over to country from pop and shunning those who have gone the other direction in a way that would put the strictest Mennonite sects to shame. (4) These, however, are thinking of the distinction in terms of style and genre.  Although country and western has a traditional form that predates pop music in the sense we are using the expression here, its development from older forms of folk music in the American South was contemporaneous with the earliest phase in the conversion of music into a market product for mass consumption, the rise of radio.  While if you were to spend an hour or so listening to Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Claude King, et al, and then spend the same amount of time listening to whoever currently tops the charts on contemporary country radio, the difference will be obvious and the music of the second half of the experiment will likely sound like it has more in common with whatever is playing on the pop stations, albeit with a twangier sound and sung by somebody who is more likely to be wearing a cowboy outfit, than it does the music of the first half of the experiment.  That having been said, the irony is that those who would appear to us as the traditional country artists in this comparison, themselves for the most part – I think Hank Williams Sr. is the only real exception among the examples given - had their careers entirely in the period in which country music was indistinguishable from pop in terms of being a market commodity.  The C & W gatekeepers, therefore, are not so much traditionalist purists, as those interested in protecting the product of the Nashville brand of the industry from the Los Angeles brand.  

 

There are, of course, plenty of kinds of pop music that do not have traditional forms to contrast with their pop forms because they were created as pop music.  Obvious examples include any kind of music with words like “electro” or “techno” in the designation.  A more interesting case is that of rock music.  Like these later kinds, rock does not have a traditional, pre-pop form, although it has traditional roots in that as with its slightly older immediate predecessor rhythm and blues, older forms of popular music such as blues, jazz, and country were utilized like raw materials in its construction.  Unlike the types of later pop that wear their mechanical artificiality on their sleeves, rock, which when it first appeared as rock ‘n’ roll was largely coextensive with pop, has strove ever since to forge an identity that would distinguish it from pop.  Since rock’s identity both within pop and in the space it has carved for itself outside pop, is that of the voice of the rebellion of the young and ignorant, its non-pop form is not properly thought of as traditional rock but as the very antithesis of the traditional forms of other music that has been popified.

 

One thing that stands out about these different genres of pop music is that while they are quite distinguishable in style they are generally identical in form.  There are exceptions of course, but genres of pop music usually consist entirely of songs (5) which, while they vary in length, hover around a standard average length that not-coincidentally is that which is most accommodating for radio play.  Here is where the huge contrast between the genres of pop and the genres of classical is most evident.

 

Within classical music, genres are distinguished from each other in form as well as style.  Songs, although they may be incorporated into other genres such as arias in opera for example, are but one of many genres and far from the most important.  Other genres include but are far from limited to opera which consists of theatrical productions set to orchestral music in which the dialogue is entirely or almost entirely sung, oratorios such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Handel’s Messiah which are similar to operas but are not acted out, symphonies which are multi-movement (usually four) pieces composed to be performed by a full orchestra and which may or may not include singing, concertos in which either the orchestra or a smaller musical group provide accompaniment to the lead instrumentalist(s), chamber music which is itself more a genre of genres consisting of various types of pieces written to be performed by smaller instrumental ensembles such as a string quartet, ballets which as a music genre accompany the dances of the same name (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker Suite for example), and incidental music written to be the background accompaniment to an ordinary theatrical play (Mendelssohn’s wrote such music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, his famous “Wedding March” (6) comes from the second version). 

 

It is pop music’s fundamental nature as the music manufactured for mass consumption that both limits it for the most part to a single form, with multiple styles and stamps it with a sell by date.  Since pop comes off incredibly poorly in these comparisons with classical, it is important to review at this point what we are arguing for and against, lest this come across as mere pop bashing.  We began by arguing for the timelessness of classical music against my friend’s dismissal of it as “old”, which led to the observation that pop is the kind of music that is dated out of necessity.  This in turn led to the comparison of how pop genres differ from classical genres, which was made in argument against a widespread but silly idea that pop and classical are themselves two genres or styles.  One of the unfortunate consequences of this silly idea is that it misleads people into thinking that they should seek the same kind of listening experience from both.  Someone who wishes to enjoy both pop and classical, however, needs to understand that they differ at a far more fundamental level than genre and that they are not intended to be listened to in the same way.  Pop music is designed to produce immediate and easy enjoyment.  It is the music of instant gratification that offers pleasure while making no demands.  Classical music requires something of you – the commitment of time, contemplative silence, and effort to actively listen – before it yields its rewards.  Yes, here too, pop comes off poorly in comparison to classical, but remember that the point is that there is nothing preventing you from enjoying both, provided you keep the difference in mind and listen to both accordingly.  A far more devastating comparison would be between pop music and traditional popular music, since pop essentially subverts popular music from doing what it is supposed to do.

 

That however, is a comparison to be explored in depth at another time.  Here I will introduce my third and final argument, by referring to another conversation of about a half a year ago.  I was introduced by another friend to someone he knew from seminary (a different one from the one I had attended).  Somehow the topic of music came up.  I think perhaps that I had been asked what my interests were after having expressed zero interest in any of the varieties of sportsball.  My friend’s friend recounted how when he was in seminary, his professors had warned about the evils of rock music and praised classical, and had then talked him into seeing an opera.  The opera he went to, however, was filled with masonic and occult symbols and basically the sort of thing that his professors, who were there watching and applauding, had warned about in rock music.  Asked if I knew which opera he was talking about, I answered “Die Zauberflöte” and was extremely amused to get the response “No, it was ‘The Magic Flute.’”

 

I did not bother to try and mount an argument about how the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was so inspired that it could elevate the spirit even when attached to subject matter completely unworthy of it as was the case with his last opera in whatever language you render its title.  If he did not already know this from the music itself, he is highly unlikely to learn it from anything I might tell him.  This conversation did, however, provide some insights about notions concerning music that are widespread in certain Christian circles and in expounding those insights I will come around to making that argument.

 

Many evangelical Protestants think that there is this sharp divide between the lyrics that are sung to music and the music itself and that the only thing that a Christian could reasonably object to in any music is the content of the lyrics.  A Christian, according to this way of thinking, and I use that term loosely, can legitimately object to a song that glorifies extramarital sex, violence, drug abuse, rebellion against parental and other lawful authority, crime, and the like, on moral grounds, but if the words are removed, can have no objection to what remains except insofar as it may bring to mind the absent lyrics.  For some evangelicals even this is too “judgemental.” 

 

The origins of this attitude are not difficult to explain since it is obviously a specifically evangelical version of the phenomenon in the wider culture of young people dismissing any criticism of their music from older generation.  The evangelicals who hold this view are responding to what might be called the fundamentalist approach which is to issue broad sweeping condemnations of pretty much every kind of music introduced since the 1950s as the devil’s music.  In the conversation I just related, my interlocutor can be taken as representative of the evangelical attitude and his professors of the fundamentalist.  Those holding the evangelical attitude regard theirs as the more intelligent of the two and speak smugly of those who hold the fundamentalist view.  I have known this to be inevitably the case and could fill the space I have allotted to this essay entirely with examples.  The smugness, I regard as entirely unwarranted.

 

It is easy to be smug about the fundamentalist view.  Sweeping blanket condemnations are difficult to defend intelligently precisely because they avoid making the distinctions that are the mark of intelligent criticism.  The evangelical position, however, is not that the fundamentalist view is too uncritical but rather that it is too critical, too judgmental.  The idea that the lyrics of a song might be objected to on moral grounds, but that the music itself cannot ignores the fact that aesthetic judgement, which evaluates the quality of art, is itself a form of moral criticism.  We don’t often think of it that way, but the standard for traditional aesthetic judgement is beauty, which belongs to the same part of the order of reality as goodness, the basis of moral criticism, and which is arguably goodness itself applied to the area of sensual appearance. (7)  Music, of course, is art made from sound and so is experienced audibly, as opposed to painting, sculpture, and other forms of art that are made to be experienced visually.  The evangelical view requires that such considerations be swept aside entirely and comes close to embracing, at least in the realm of philosophical aesthetics, an extreme subjectivism approaching nihilism that evangelicals, in theory at least, would reject in other realism.

 

What I have dubbed here the evangelical view, although the more conservative of self-described evangelicals sometimes approach what I have called the fundamentalist view, has in a way that is both interesting and revealing, been subjected to practical testing.  The music industry, taking the idea that music that Christians might object to on the grounds of the content of the words can be rendered “Christian” by substituting Christian lyrics – in the case of the group ApologetiX there is an extra dimension of literalness to this description because they basically do what “Weird Al” Yankovic does and substitute their own lyrics to well-known tunes – began producing “Christian” versions of rock, heavy metal, rap and pretty much any other kind of pop music to sell to the niche market of Christian youth.  This is collectively called CCM – Contemporary Christian Music.

 

Note that I used the word “pop” rather than “popular.”  This is because this could only be done with industry-produced music.  It would be absurd to try and create an artificially “Christian” version of traditional popular music because within such music sacred and even Gospel themes always had a natural place integrated with more this-worldly themes.  When, in 1938, Louis Armstrong recorded his jazz orchestration of the spiritual “When the Saints Go Marching In” nobody lifted an eyebrow.  It fit in with the rest of his repertoire naturally and the song has long been a jazz staple.   Indeed, you might find it easier to list the spirituals of this sort that did not become part of the standard jazz repertoire than those that did.  Nor do these comprise the entirety of the sacred element of traditional jazz.

 

Similarly when Hank Williams Sr. wrote and recorded “I Saw the Light” in 1946, it may have conflicted with his lifestyle but certainly not his music.  Indeed, country music would be completely unrecognizable from what it actually is, had Gospel themes not been there all along beside the prison, train, literal cowboy, drinking, pick-up truck, and cheating themes. (8)  Try to imagine Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton without the religious dimension of their music.  Tennessee Ernie Ford would have been almost reduced to a one-hit wonder.  Even today, long after county became largely popified, the biggest hit to date of Blake Shelton, currently married to pop star Gwen Stefani, is his 2019 “God’s Country”, a song about farm life that is packed with references to church, piety, and other similar themes. 

 

We have seen that rock music began within the sphere of pop music as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and then sought to establish a non-pop identity after the fact.   The early rock ‘n’ rollers came from other kinds of music that had a traditional sacred side.  In the case of Elvis Presley, he had strong roots in Gospel music and was indistinguishable from the country artists mentioned in the preceding paragraph in that he continued to sing and record Gospel to the very end of his life.  While he was not absolutely alone in this, he was far from being the norm either for part of rock’s quest to establish its own identity was to jettison the sacred element of the raw materials it drew from and to emphasize the elements that were least congruent with Christian faith.   Therefore, when the first “Christian rock” was made in the late 1960s, in was in accordance with the CCM model of imposing an external Christianity on a music that had become foreign, and in many cases, hostile to Christianity. (9)  The late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:

 

Recent criticism has paid much attention to the words. These often dwell on violence, drugs, sex and rebellion in ways that lyricize the kind of conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was approved. But these criticisms do not, I think, get to the heart of the matter. Even if every pop song consisted of a setting of Christ’s beatitudes (and there are born-again groups in America - ‘16 Horsepower’ is one of them - that specialize in such things), it would make little or no difference to the effect, which is communicated through the sounds, regardless of what is sung to them. The only thing that is really wrong with the usual lyrics is what is really right about them - namely, that they successfully capture what the music means. (10)

 

What I have argued above concerning traditional popular music, that in it sacred themes traditionally and naturally have their place alongside non-sacred and so do not need to be artificially imposed on it the way it does on mass-produced pop music and on the anti-tradition of rock the way it is in the CCM model, is all the more true of classical music.  Sacred music is the very foundation on which the classical music tradition is built.  Plainsong, the unaccompanied simple melodies to which the liturgy was chanted in the Western Church of the first millennium of which the best known version is Gregorian chant, developed into organum by the addition of a harmonizing voice, which opened the door to more complex forms of polyphony which while it initially met with resistance from Church authorities due to concerns that it would place the text of the liturgy beyond comprehension eventually won acceptance.  The early history of classical music is the history of sacred music and after the Renaissance brought a renewal of interest in themes from pre-Christian antiquity and the Reformation brought about a breach in the external unity of the Western Church, the sacred remained at the heart of the classical tradition.  Mass settings written to accompany the singing of the ordinaries - the unchanging parts - of the Eucharistic liturgy (11) were written by all the major composers including the Lutheran J. S. Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Beethoven who wrote two (Mass in C Major and Missa Solemnis) despite having imbibed the rotten ideas of the so-called Enlightenment.  Oratorios, while usually written to be performed in the concert hall, were largely devoted to religious themes as in the examples already provided to which countless others such as Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives could be added.

 

Even more so than with traditional popular music, sacred music is integral to the classical music tradition so as to make the idea of “Christian classical music”, that is, a classical music upon which Christianity has been imposed from the outside, absolutely absurd.  Indeed, with classical, at least traditional as opposed to avant garde, we have the reverse of the situation with pop music and the CCM model.   I don’t know why the fundamentalist professors chose The Magic Flute as the work to introduce their students to classical music with.  BWV 1: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How Beautifully the Morning Star Shines) written for both Palm Sunday and Lady Day which coincided at its first performance or BWV 82: Ich habe genug (I am content), a setting of Dr. Luther’s translation of the Nunc Dimmitis written for Candlemas or any other of Johann Sebastian Bach’s over 200 sacred cantatas would have been a better choice for the point they were trying to make.  Nevertheless, just as Sir Roger Scruton said that it is the usual and not the “Christian” lyrics that express the meaning of pop music, so the nature of classical music, especially in the hands of a true master like Mozart, is such that story and symbolism of his final opera can hardly be said to express its true meaning.

 (1)   More accurately, Gustav Mahler set the limit by claiming the ninth symphony to be cursed to be a composer’s last (as it was in his case as with Beethoven).  Joseph Haydn under whom Beethoven studies composition, wrote 106 symphonies.  “The Jupiter”, the final symphony of Haydn’s contemporary W. A. Mozart, is his 41^st.

(2)   With the subcategory that is called Classical to distinguish it from say the Baroque or the Romantic.  Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are the names most associated with Classical proper.

(3)   Think of the kind of music that in popular stereotype  you are likely to hear when put on hold, or waiting in an elevator, or playing in the background in a large semi-fashionable department store of the type that are now mostly obsolete.

(4)  See the discussion of this in Ray Stevens’ memoir, co-written with C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr., Ray Stevens’ Nashville (2014).  Although Stevens’ roots are country (he grew up in Clarksdale, Georgia), early in his long career moved to Nashville, and ages ago earned his reputation as the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, his earliest recordings were released as pop.  He was not inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2019.

(5)   A song, as evident from the noun’s etymological relationship with the verb sing, is a short piece in which words are sung.  In a song, the instrumental accompaniment is supposed to back and support the voice.  A song can be sung without accompanying music.  This is called a capella style.  The opposite, where the instrumental part is performed and/or recorded without a voice, is also usually called a song by extension, although it does not technically fit the definition.  Karaoke, in which a machine plays the music and you sing the words yourself, is one reason why this would be done.  Sometimes an ensemble might think a song sounds better without the words and record it that way.  This is quite rare in most forms of pop music because it conflicts with the whole making an idol out of the singer which is part of its modus operandi – think of the talent search shows that conspicuously advertise this in their titles – although it is not uncommon in pop jazz.  Since this is a note and not the body of the essay, I will provide an example that is not relevant at all but which I find amusing. In 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band recorded the pop jazz “Spanish Flea” which became a bit hit. It had been written by the group’s percussionist Julius Wechter whose wife had written the lyrics.  The band, however, recorded it as an instrumental piece – at that point in time they rarely recorded any other way.  For a lot of people, their first encounter with the lyrics came in an unusual way. In an early episode of The Simpsons, “The Otto Show” which aired in 1992, Bart and Milhouse attend a concert of the parodic heavy metal band Spinal Tap that had appeared in a number of comedy venues and was featured by the late Rob Reiner in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, the voice of numerous Simpsons characters, portrays the bass player).  A riot breaks out but Homer, who had driven the kids to the concert and is waiting in the parking lot, is oblivious to what is going on even though the SWAT team descending on the rioters are visible all around him.  He is sitting in his car singing along to “Spanish Flea”.  That this song would not be likely to drown out a heavy metal concert or a SWAT-suppressed riot is the part of the joke everyone would be expected to get.  There is another part, however, in that while Homer could easily be assumed to be improvising based on the song’s title,  what he sings are the actual lyrics written by Cissy Wechter.

(6)   Mendelssohn’s is the older of the two most recognizable wedding marches.  He wrote his second orchestration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1842.  The other most famous wedding march is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin which was first performed in 1850.

(7)   For example, an argument for this point could start with the fact that beauty, goodness, and truth are categorized together as transcendentals, the properties of being.  Created being, however, ultimately points to its Creator, which is uncreated Being or God.  Uncreated Being differs from the being of His creation in several ways.  One is in created beings, essence, that which makes a created thing a certain kind of thing rather than a different kind of thing, and existence/being, which establishes a certain thing as a real example of its kind rather than merely the idea of it, are two different things.  In God, however, as our best theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have argued, existence and essence are the same thing.  Another difference is that created beings are finite, uncreated Being is infinite.  These are ultimately, however, the same difference, because infinity cannot be divided, which is the flipside to the fact that no number of finites can be added together to produce infinity.  Expressed theologically, this is the concept of divine simplicity, the indivisibility of God (He has no parts, the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct in Person but are each the whole of the same God not parts which add up to God), which requires that His properties or attributes are themselves not parts of God, but the whole of Him.  In uncreated Being, therefore, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are each the whole of Being.  While this is not the case in finite, created, being, it has long been the case in philosophy that goodness does double duty, both as the general standard by which judgements of good, bad, better or conversely bad, worse, worst are made, and as a more specific application of that general standard.

(8)  If some of these seem incongruent with the message of the Gospel, remember that in traditional country music these things are treated differently than they are in rock music.  Cheating, for example, is not glorified in country, more often it is avenged, or becomes the excuse for the drinking, which is a possible exception to my point in this note, except that country is generally honest about the self-destroying nature of such behaviour.

(9)   I will say, however, that the song that best expresses what in my opinion is the genuine Christian take on those who have started this insane and unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf that threatens to escalate into a third World War – the president of the country built on the foundation of liberalism, one of the twin evils of Modernity, the other being communism, and the prime minister of the country which many North American Christians with bad theology foolishly think they owe uncritical support to because it shares the name of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament – is one recorded decades ago by a heavy metal band that deliberately forged an opposite-of-Christian image of itself.  The song is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, the lyrics of which while credited to the entire band were mostly written by bass player “Geezer” Butler.  The final stanza is the most relevant.  “Day of mercy God is calling/on their knees the war pigs crawling/begging mercy for their sins/Satan laughing spreads his wings”.

(10)                       Sir Roger Scruton, “The Cultural Significance of Pop”, https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/31-understanding-music/175-the-cultural-significance-of-pop

(11)                       These are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

 

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY - gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

 

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

 

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

 

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

 

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

 

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads.

Songs of the Times

In this essay I shall be discussing the bands Echosmith and High Valley.  Joining the two together as a single topic will probably seem rather peculiar to anyone familiar with both groups.  The former band hails from the city of Chino, thirty miles east of Los Angeles in the state of California’s San Bernardino County in the American republic.   It specializes in the kind of music that is called “indie pop” or “alt pop.”   The latter band is from the province of Alberta here in the Dominion of Canada.   Their home community is Blumenort, which like the Blumenorts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is a small, unincorporated, farming community founded by Mennonites.   It is located in Mackenzie County in the north of the province, near the hamlet of La Crete which is also a Mennonite community.   To provide a more familiar landmark, this is about thirty miles north of Edmonton.   High Valley performs country and western music of various styles and varieties.  One might be tempted to say that in the universe of music, these bands come from completely different worlds.

 

The reason I have decided to write about the two bands together is that they have both released new songs this year.   In the case of Echosmith they released an entire album, their second studio album “Lonely Generation.”   High Valley has not released a full studio album this year yet, but they have released an EP with six tracks, including the single that shares its title “Grew Up On That” which has received a lot of playtime on country radio.    It is this single and the title song from the Echosmith album which I will be focusing on specifically.  Both songs strike me as saying something which, due to the times in which we live, is very important and relevant.   I do not mean that they are saying the same thing.  Indeed, the contrast between what the two songs are saying is possibly greater than the one drawn in the previous paragraph between the two bands. 

 

Before examining them at greater length, however, it might be interesting to note a few curious similarities between the two groups.

 

Both groups consist of siblings.   High Valley, the older of the two groups, is composed of the Rempel brothers, Brad and Curtis.   Echosmith is composed of the Sierota siblings, the brothers Noah and Graham as well as a sister Sydney who is the lead vocalist of the group.   Another similarity is that both groups saw the departure of a brother and founding member in the last few years.     In the case of High Valley it was Bryan Rempel about six years ago and in the case of Echosmith it was Jamie Sierota about two years ago.   

 

The most successful songs so far of both bands were released in 2013-2014.    Echosmith’s debut studio album came out in 2013.   The band had been formed about four years previously and they had originally performed covers of songs by other artists but this album, “Talking Dreams”, featured original songs written by the band members with their father Jeffrey David who is also their producer.   The best known song from the album was “Cool Kids”, which reached the thirteenth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.   High Valley, which as mentioned is the older of the two groups having been formed in the late 1990s, released their fourth studio album the following year, entitled “Country Line”.   It contained ten tracks, six of which charted in the top ten for Canadian country as radio singles.   One of these, “Make You Mine”, in which they were joined by Ricky Skaggs, made the top five.  Both songs grew in popularity in the years after they were originally released, and both were certified Platinum – triple Platinum in the case of “Cool Kids”.

 

Now let us come back to the present year and take a look at the songs the bands have just released.   We will start with Echosmith.

 

As mentioned Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation” album was released earlier this year.   The title song was the first track on the album.   Like the songs on their first album, and the rest of the songs on this one for that matter, it was written by the siblings with their father and producer Jeffrey David.  

 

Here is the song’s chorus:

We’re the lonely generation
A pixelated version of ourselves
Empty conversations
I’ve disconnected, now I’m by myself

 

What jumps out about these words is how they well they describe what so many people have been experiencing since March of this year – the loneliness and isolation forced upon us all by the bat flu lockdowns.   Upon hearing those words for the first time, one could easily come to the conclusion that Mr. David and his children wrote the song during lockdown to express how they feeling about the whole thing.

 

The conclusion would be wrong, however.   Unlike “The Quarantine Song”, written by C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr. and performed by legendary country and western funny man Ray Stevens, containing the excellent lines “two more weeks of quarantine/will be the death of me” this song was not written about the lockdown or even in the lockdown.   The album was released in early January.  

 

The song was actually written as a commentary on social media, computers, smartphones, etc. and the culture, if it can be called that, surrounding them.   This is the band’s own explanation of the song.  Sidney Sierota said “It came out of a really interesting conversation about social media and how addicted we are to our phones” and “Conceptually, it felt really important. We always have a message in our music. For how connected we are, we end up feeling lonelier. Our generation needs to acknowledge it’s a problem and be more intentional in daily life”.

 

What I find very interesting about the lyrics and the explanation of them is the contrast with which the same phenomenon was been portrayed since the beginning of the bat flu lockdown.  The freedom-hating Communist swine who have placed us all under house arrest and lied to us about how it is all for our own good to keep us “safe” have presented social media to us as a lifeline, a savior to keep us from the loneliness and isolation that they have forced upon us with these unjust and wicked measures.   “Stay connected” we have been told, not meaning any kind of normal human connection since all of those have been banned, but plugging ourselves into what is essentially the Matrix and becoming, in the band’s words “pixelated versions of ourselves.”   Echosmith’s depiction of social media and its effects is by far the more honest and truthful of the two.  

 

Lockdowns produce loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Social media produces loneliness, disconnect, and isolation.   Does this not tell us that suggesting that we alleviate the isolation caused by lockdowns with social media is the equivalent of suggesting that we try to douse a fire with gasoline?   Of course, the reality is that it is the lockdown that is adding fuel to the fire of loneliness, disconnect, and isolation which, as the song, coming out when it did, demonstrates, was already present prior to the lockdown.

 

What we find in the Echosmith song, therefore, is commentary on one of the important social problems of the day which has been made doubly relevant by events that transpired shortly after the song was released.

 

High Valley’s “Grew Up On That” provides us with something extremely different.   It does not discuss the social problems of the present day but rather the good life of yesteryear.   Anyone who was raised on a farm in a small rural community in the prairie provinces of Canada, or, for that matter, the states of the American Midwest, will likely find something in this song’s nostalgic lyrics that he can relate to, especially if he had any sort of Christian upbringing.  

 

The lengthy chorus depicts the rural way of life in many of its aspects, from the sacred to the mundane and from the hard work to the equally hard play.    It goes:

 

Them Main Streets, them tractor seats
We put some country miles on
Them Friday nights, wide-open skies
Back Forty, gettin' wild on
Sweet by-and-by, I saw the light
In a little white church way in the back
Grew up, grew up, grew up on that

Ricky Skaggs on the vinyl
King James on the Bible
Feet on the dash with ourselves in the back
We grew up on that

 

 

(I call all of the above the chorus because that is how it is so designated in every copy of the lyrics that I have been able to find.   Just from listening to the song I would have taken the lines prior to the mention of Ricky Skaggs to be a bridge and everything that follows to be the actual chorus.)

 

 

There are also two short four-line verses.   The first which opens the song is a recital of parental injunctions that the Rempels undoubtedly heard repeatedly while growing up, about such things as showing reverence at meal time, treating their dates with respect, fiscal responsibility and social respectability.  The second verse references various staples of rural living such as “barbed wire” and “bonfires” and “one red light blinking.”

 

 

Obviously this song is not intended to be social commentary in the same way as the Echosmith song.   It is a very personal collection of reminiscences, autobiographical in nature and sentimental in tone.   The second verse, however, ends with a line that in expressing the nostalgic spirit of the song, does convey a message of sorts.  That line is:

 

 

Had it so good, didn’t know how good we had it, oh.

 

 

These words, removed from their context, can be understood in two rather different ways.   They can be taken in the eulogistic sense of “we didn’t realize what we had until it is gone” or they can be taken in the thankful sense of “in the wisdom that comes with age we have grown to appreciate all that was given us.”    Taken in context, of course, they can only have the latter sense.   The song is one of fond reminiscence not eulogy and gratitude is clearly the song writers’ intent here.    Now, with the Echosmith song, we saw how the events that followed almost immediately after the song’s release added to the meaning the writers had originally intended.    I think that is the case here too, but as with the words themselves there are two different ways to understand the additional meaning.

 

 

One way is to see the events of this year as having switched the sense from gratitude to eulogy.

 

 

This is the year in which C. S. Lewis’ insightful remark about how “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” has been confirmed.   With a few small, local, exceptions, tyranny of this very sort has been imposed all around the world.   The public health dictators have taken everything away from us – our basic freedoms and constitutional civil rights, the entire fabric of communities and institutions intermediate to the individual and the state that we call society, for many people their jobs and businesses, and basically our entire way of life.   While far too many people seem to be okay with sacrificing all of this, not only for themselves but for all other people as well, in the name of keeping people safe from the bat flu, it is difficult to imagine that there are many left who could not empathize with the sentiment “didn’t’ know how good we had it” even looking back only so far as January and February.

 

 

While all of this is true for people whether they are rural or urban, the particular way of life portrayed in the Rempels’ song is under especially severe attack by the public health dictatorship.   It is not exactly a secret that this way of life has been disappearing for decades.   That process has been accelerated by the public health dictatorship.   Think about it.   While the costly sanitation requirements, limited capacity restrictions, and lockdowns have made things difficult for all businesses, benefiting only internet based corporations like Amazon, they have been particularly hard on small local businesses, especially restaurants.   These are the businesses that have been driven into insolvency, or very close to it, by these measures.   In small towns, small local businesses are usually the only kind to be found.     In small, rural communities the churches have remained a much larger part of the life of the community than they have in large cities.   This year they have been ordered to close for most of the year, a move that has had no precedent in what was formerly Christendom except in the parts of it that succumbed to regimes with totalitarian ideologies like Communism.   While churches in small towns are probably more likely to be able to get away with disregarding public health orders to close than urban churches, they are also far less likely to be able to survive being shut down for a lengthy period.   Their loss due to the lockdown, whether temporary or permanent, will be a much bigger blow to the rural communities.   

 

Having said all of that, I don’t think that a switch from gratitude to eulogy is the best way of understanding what the song is saying to us in the context of the unfolding events of the year.     I think that the sense of thankful appreciation for having grown up in the kind of community where Edmund Burke’s “unbought grace of life” could still be found  should be understood as having been amplified by the sharp contrast with the opposite of all that which now surrounds us. 

 

Understood that way, its message in the context of the bat flu complements that of Echosmith’s “Lonely Generation.”    The latter by shining a light on the isolation caused by the “plugged in” culture of communications technology exposes the lie of the public health dictatorship that has been holding that very culture out to us as a lifeline to keep us from drowning in the loneliness that their mad experiment in universal quarantine has produced.   High Valley’s “Grew Up On That”, however, offers the real lifeline of a connection to the sanity which preceded the madness of these dark times in the grateful, appreciative, memory of good times and good places and the faith in God which made those times and places good.

The Bogeyman

A few years ago, when the progressive commentariat was going on and on about the evils of “homophobia”, before that became old hat and they turned to the new bugbear of “transphobia”, there was a man who happened to catch the end of one of their sermonettes warning about homophobes.   Now this fellow was a little hard of hearing and he mistook the word for “homophones”.   Consequently, he began avoiding the dance hall like the plague.   He didn’t want to run in to the Boogie Man.

 

Now that you are all groaning over that exceedingly dreadful double-pun, allow me to say a few words about the Bogeyman.  

 

The Bogeyman is a figure who has appeared, under one name or another, in pretty much all of the world’s folklore, in all places and all times.   He can be regarded, in a sense, as the standard to which all other legendary spooky monsters are to be compared.  The details about his nature and appearance vary considerably, except in that they are usually quite vague, much more so than is the case with most other legendary beings.   It is the purpose he serves that is consistent.   He serves as a warning to children against bad behaviour.   Behave yourselves or the Bogeyman will get you.   In the cultural traditions in which Saint Nicholas or whoever else has been assigned the role of bringing gifts to the good children around Christmas time is accompanied by someone whose job it is to deal with the other kids, that someone – Black Pete, the Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht, whoever – is essentially a Bogeyman, certainly in function, often in description as well.

 

While frightening children into good behaviour is the primary and universal purpose of the Bogeyman, a notable secondary purpose for his legend can be found in the song “The Booger Man” which is the second track on the 1989 studio album, I Never Made a Record I Didn’t Like, by the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, Ray Stevens.   The song, co-written by Stevens and his longtime friend and song-writing collaborator, C. W. “Buddy” Kalb, the alternate spelling in the title of which reflects a Southern regional variation rather than the reference to mucus that would probably be the first thing it brings to mind for most others, involves a narrator boasting about how he is not afraid of a long list of monsters, movie and otherwise, all of whom he dismisses as nothing in comparison to the Booger Man, who “don’t need no other makeup/no fancy Hollywood name/his mangled bloody victims/are his only claim to fame.”   Towards the end of the song, it is revealed that the narrator is a young man, parked with his date in Lovers’ Lane.   “Listen, did I hear some scratchin’, outside your side of the car?”

 

There are those these days who object on moral grounds to telling children scary stories to frighten them out of misbehaving.   I am not going to pass judgment on this one way or another, and bring it up merely to note the irony that these are often the same people who buy completely into stories that are clearly designed to frighten the entire populace, adult and child alike, into obeying some set of, usually ridiculous, new rules.

 

That there is nothing sadder than an adult terrified of the Bogeyman was well illustrated by The Simpsons in an early episode.   The tenth episode of the fifth season was entitled “$pringfield (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling), in which Mr. Burns builds a casino and Marge becomes addicted to the slot machines.   Since Marge is now spending all of her time in the casino, Homer is the only one home one night, when Lisa, woken by a nightmare, wakes him up and tells him “I know its absurd, but I dreamed the Bogeyman was after me” at which she is interrupted by a screaming Homer “Aaarggh.   Bogeyman!   You nail the windows shut, I’ll get the gun.”   Homer then wakes Bart, saying “Bart, I don’t want to alarm you, but there may be a Bogeyman or Bogeymen in the house.”   When Marge finally returns home, a gun shot blows a hole in the door of the house, which, when she opens, she finds it barricaded with Homer, hiding behind a mattress with the kids, aiming his shotgun at her.  “What happened here?” she asks, to be told “Oh nothing Marge, just a little incident involving the Bogeyman.  Of course, none of this would have happened if you had been here to keep me from acting stupid.”

 

A truly pathetic number of adults have been behaving just like Homer this year.   Just last week, Donald the Orange, was asked by both his opponent in the televised popularity contest by which our American friends and neighbours foolishly choose their head of state rather than rely on the time-tested, God-honoured, tradition of royal lineage, and by debate moderator Chris Wallace, to denounce the Bogeyman.   Granted, they called the Bogeyman “white supremacism”, but actual white supremacists have not posed a real threat to law, order, civilization, rights, and freedoms, anywhere in the Western world for decades now.   White supremacism is now merely another name for the Bogeyman.  Donald the Orange did not, contrary to the lying left-wing newsmedia, refuse to make the worthless ritual denunciation.  He has, in fact, gone through with this stupid ritual many times in the past, and agreed to do so this time as well.  He asked for specific names, and all he was given was the Proud Boys, a multi-racial organization this is not, and never has been, white supremacist.   By contrast with the lies told by CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and even liberal newspapers and the Crown broadcaster up here, it was Joe Biden who refused to make a denunciation.   Except that in his case he was asked to denounce a real, present day, menace, Antifa, the well-organized groups of mask-wearing, far-left, thugs who have been going around beating people up, shutting down events and speeches they disapprove of, and terrorizing university administrators and hotel managers into giving in to their demands for years now, and this year, have been aiding and abetting Black Lives Matter, in their spree of looting, vandalism, violence, and destruction.   Indeed, rather than denounce these bastards, Biden denied their existence, saying that “Antifa is an idea not an organization.”   No, Mr. Biden, despite what you and that wretched, vile and contemptible nincompoop Christopher Wray have to say, the burning cities and toppled statues, all across the United States and the larger Western world, demonstrate Antifa to be an extremely real threat, unlike the Bogeyman of white supremacism you keep going on about.

 

Of course the biggest Bogeyman of this year has not been white supremacism but SARS-CoV-2.   This coronavirus produces mild to no symptoms in over 80% of those who come in contact with it.   It can produce the very painful and potentially fatal form of pneumonia dubbed SARS when the first coronavirus to produce it made its appearance twenty years ago, but for people who are under 65 and have no complicating chronic health problems, the survival rate is well over 99 percent.   Even for those who are at a higher risk, their chances of surviving are still pretty good, even more so now than in March and April when the virus was first making the rounds of the world, after escaping the confines of Wuhan.  Back in March, when the World Health Organization pressed the panic button, and governments around the planet took the unprecedented and insane step of shutting down their economies and ordering their entire populations, healthy or sick, into quarantine, we were seeing a rise both in the number of people testing positive for the presence of this virus, and in the number of people experiencing symptoms ranging from cough and shortness of breath to full-blown, death-dealing, SARS.   We have again this fall, seen a rise in the number of people testing positive, which, plotted on a graph, looks very similar to the one we saw in late winter-early spring.   We have not been seeing a similar rise in the number of people hospitalized and dying.   Indeed, plotted on the same kind of graph, the hospitalization/death numbers appear as a flat-to-declining line from the beginning of summer onward.

 

Sane, grown-up, people will recognize that if there is no drastic rise in people getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying, then the rise in the number of people testing positive is no cause for alarm.   Viruses have been present with us since the beginning of time and will be with us until the end of time.  To lock ourselves away in our houses, refuse all contact with other people, and worse, to demand that other people be forced to do the same, is to behave out of irrational fear, to be frightened, as it were, by the Bogeyman.  

 

The media is intentionally trying to frighten us in this way.   Note how they are constantly reporting about the “alarming” rise in the numbers of those who test positive.   As Karen Selick pointed out in The Western Standard about a week ago, this number is meaningless when it is not presented as a percentage of tests given.   The number of tests given has been going up steadily and is much higher now than it was back in March and April.    To emphasize only the number of new “cases” – or, more precisely, new “positive results”, for the tests give false positives all the time – without also emphasizing that they are out of a much larger number of tests being given, and that the number of people getting sick, requiring hospitalization, and dying of SARS has not been commensurately rising, but, indeed, has been remaining steady and even declining, is to engage in dishonest scare-mongering.

The “Wizard’s First Rule” in Terry Goodkind’s novel of that title, the first in his Sword of Truth series and the last in the same series worth reading, is “people are stupid” and we have certainly been living down to that this year.   Despite everything pointed out in the previous paragraph, we have been putting up with our governments’ responding to the rise in numbers by slapping more restrictions down on us, and even calling upon them to do so.   Here in the Province of Manitoba, we are now in the second week of a four-week period of heightened restrictions in Winnipeg and the surrounding region, that Dr. Brent Roussin, the public health officer who has given every evidence of having gone mad from the dictatorial-level powers given him during this scam of a health emergency, slapped down on us a couple of Fridays ago, to start from last Monday.   Earlier in the week in which he announced this, Roussin was publicly pressured to do this by Brian Bowman, the clown of a mayor that this city elected, and re-elected, although about the only thing that can be said in his favour is that he is a look-alike of television actor Jon Cryer, and even then I would have preferred Charlie Sheen any day.   Among the new restrictions a return to the limiting of gatherings to ten or under, and a new mandatory mask policy for all public indoor places.

 

The mask policy is especially indicative of the infantile, afraid of the Bogeyman, mentality that has infected the thinking of our adult populace.   The pores of cloth masks are 200+ times larger than the virions of SARS-CoV-2.   Anybody with an ounce of logic and who is willing to actually use it, ought to be able to deduce from this that the virus will have no difficulty passing through these masks.   Youtube videos, showing that cloth masks can lessen the spread of visible particles, hardly constitute proof to the contrary, at least to anyone aware that viruses are too small to be visible to the naked eye apart from very powerful magnifiers.   Nor do scientific research studies purporting to show that masks are effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission constitute such proof.   There is no dearth of such studies demonstrating the exact opposite, and these are more consistent with logic.   While I reject the modern consensus that logic and science trump tradition and divine revelation, I will say that between the two former, logic trumps science, and that thinking otherwise is the ultimate formula for allowing oneself to be duped.

 

The mandate to wear masks everywhere is essentially a mandate to wear a talisman, a magic symbol to ward off the Bogeyman.   It is very ironic, therefore, that in the popular culture of recent years, the Bogeyman has been the mask wearer.

 

Think back to the film that launched the plethora of serialized slasher-film franchises that glutted the cinema in the 1980s.  In 1978, John Carpenter co-wrote, directed, and composed the music for the film Halloween.   At the beginning of this film, the six-year old Michael Myers – the character’s name, not to be confused with the actor who portrayed Wayne, Shrek, and Austin Powers – wearing a Halloween costume, complete with mask, stabs his older sister to death.   The film then jumps ahead fifteen years to when Michael, who has spent the whole time in a mental hospital under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) (1), escapes and makes his way to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, stealing a bleached Captain Kirk mask on the way.   From behind that mask, he stalks teenage girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut role).   He kills a number of her friends, one of whom calls Laurie at the home where she is babysitting on Halloween night just before Michael gets her.   She, rather foolishly, heads over there and comes face-to-mask with Michael.   In the confrontation, she manages to pull his mask off, but would undoubtedly have been killed then and there, had Dr. Loomis not entered at that moment and emptied his revolver into Michael, knocking him from the hall to the bedroom, out the picture window, and over the balcony to the ground below.   Laurie turns to the psychiatrist and asks “was that the Bogeyman?”   “As a matter of fact, it was” he answers, finding confirmation when he steps out onto the balcony, looks down, and finds that Michael has disappeared.

 

To John Carpenter, the Bogeyman was the one in the mask.   Does this tell us anything about the multitude of dolts today, cowering away in fear behind their masks, hoping that they will save them from the Bogeyman?

(1)   In case this sort of thing interests anyone, Donald Pleasence is the one-person connection between Michael Myers the character and Mike Myers the actor.   Long before taking on the role of Dr. Samuel Loomis, which he would continue to portray in the Halloween franchise through several sequels, he was one of the actors to portray James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, prior to this Christopher Walz’s performance in SPECTRE and the upcoming No Time To Die, had never been portrayed by the same actor twice), and the first to portray him as anything other than a shadow, seen only from behind, stroking a cat.   Pleasence’s version of the character, from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, is the direct basis of the look of Mike Myer’s character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers trilogy.