Can't Find My Way Home

Imagine yourself, as you are now, suddenly finding yourself waking up in the mid-1970's.  Apart from all the superficial differences - gas costs what?!?! don't they sell bras for young women? - if you're a music fan, you will find yourself bewildered by the labels fixed to various music*.  There will be bands of which you might have heard, like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.  Some of the biggest acts are bands who, by the middle of the decade, are running out of ideas and starting to sound either tired or pompous and in any case boring.

If you peruse magazines covering the music industry like Rolling Stone and Creem, you will probably find yourself bewildered by the far-too-cavalier assignment of the label "heavy metal" to certain bands and music. Even more odd, those bands that you, a refugee from forty years later, are credited with creating this particular style, are upset over the label and refuse to wear it!

You turn on the radio or flip through the pages of a magazine and you'll find the label used to describe the American power trio Grand Funk Railroad.

While you might not hear it on the radio, you'll hear the label used to describe King Crimson.

In short, the label seemed tossed about without reference to much of anything other than a dedication to playing the electric guitar really loudly.  The record companies, always on the lookout for the next big thing, signed bands with reckless abandon.  The times were flush enough that they could support a pop music centered on navel-gazing singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Paul Simon, while more traditional rock bands like The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, continued to produce music, sometimes the finest of their careers, by-and-large under the radar of the mainstream.  Music dumped in various categories - progressive, heavy metal, hard rock - was treated either with disdain or adoration, depending upon whether one was a critic or fan, yet the fans, far more than the critics, were wary of such labeling, at least at the time.

In sum, by the middle of the decade, much of the creative flourish of the turn of the decade was wearing itself out, with copycats and third-tier musicians and bands filling up the space needed on radio playlists.  Heavy metal, while birthed by many and was yet to flower completely, was either dismissed as noise for noise's sake, or even (on more than one occasion) declared dead.  Yet, "dead" was far more descriptive of the creative energies that had fueled the rise of so many different bands, looking and sounding distinct.  Mass marketing, the pressure to surpass each previous recording, and the desire to keep doing something new had drained many musicians and bands to the point where moving forward seemed impossible (indeed, in 1974, Robert Fripp would break up King Crimson and retire from performing rock music for five years; the bands posthumous release, Red, was perhaps the clearest indication why that was a smart move).

The repeated declarations of the death of rock and roll, like the epitaphs for jazz or the blues, ignored the fact that while the biggest bands might be running out of new ideas, there is, as there has always been, a fresh stream of younger musicians who want to take what they've heard and apply their own imprimatur upon it.  Indeed, before the decade was out, as Britain in particular was gripped by the shooting star of punk, then post-punk, and the major record labels scrambled playing catch-up, several bands were listening to the heavy metal being played on the radio and thinking, "I can do this better."  One such group, formed in Black Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, was, like Sabbath, rooted in the blues.  Their visual style borrowed heavily from the American west, with their lead singer, Rob Halford, often appearing on stage wrapped in fringed suede and cowboy boots and the two lead guitarists, K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, wearing cowboy hats.  While Halford and Tipton were late additions to the band - it had originally formed in 1970, and Halford and Tipton would be added in 1973 and 1974 respectively - it had already been touring heavily in England and, in 1974, managed to snag a record contract after a heavy tour of Scandinavia.  Their first record, Rocka Rolla, was released to almost universal silence.  It makes sense, as there was little to distinguish the record from hundreds of other recordings flooding the market at the time.  A careful listener, however, might hear shades of something different, an attempt to take the music someplace different.

As with many other types of music, making a particular sound takes time.  It takes effort.  It takes a willingness to embrace some things while letting other things fall by the wayside.  Finally, it includes a willingness to take risks, and there is one more element from the early- to mid-1970's where "risk" was presented in huge splashes of light and theatrics, risks that would pay off for decades to come in ways that few would realize at the time.

*I think it's also important to note the role the record companies played both in insisting on labeling music using different categories.  There is also the problem of musical segregation, as well as stylistic segregation.  As a child growing up in the 1970's, I listened to and enjoyed funk and soul music, but was bewildered by the fact it just wasn't played on the radio in my little corner of rural, upstate New York.  The impact of social and economic changes is an important part of the story, and one to which I shall repair at some point, but I just wanted to note that it is in my mind even if I don't make it explicit.

Hitler. Insurrection, Conspiracies, & Other Nonsense

It would be nice to admit that I haven't been posting as regularly because I'm just so darn busy.  I really do want to continue telling the story of heavy metal in the way I'm telling it, but every time I sit down to do so, other stuff crowds it out.  The last thing I want to do, the last thing I've ever wanted, is to be just one more voice in the shrill chorus, repeating the bleatings of, well, pretty much anyone.  The gun issue, which all should have known would descend to the depths once Wayne LaPierre walked away from the microphone at his press conference a week after the Sandy Hook shooting, has become ubiquitous.  By and large, as a friend complained quite cogently and eloquently yesterday on Facebook, it has been dominated by idiocy, nonsense, lies, and a kind of spittle-flecked hysteria that doesn't make it possible to talk about what is "really" going on because far too many people are aping Matt Drudge and screeching "Hitler! Stalin!  TYRANNY!!!"

First of all, Hitler never said the things all those stupid Instagrams claim he said.  He didn't confiscate any weapons, or pass draconian gun control laws.  As for Stalin . . . I'm not even sure where to begin with that one.

Furthermore, consider the mindset here.  On one side are folks who are saying something fairly reasonable: ten to twelve thousand Americans - our fellow citizens - are killed every year by firearms.  Owning a firearm is far more likely to result in it being used to injure or kill a family member or friend - anywhere from four to twelve times, depending upon the study cited - than to defend against criminal home invasion.  What's being proposed, at least to my mind, are a series of largely cosmetic controls - limiting the number of rounds a magazine can hold; banning the future sale of "assault weapons" which, as many on the right point out correctly, is a media phrase that refers to no real thing (kind of like "partial birth abortion", but I digress) - that do not address the fundamental issue of rampant gun violence.  I also consider the matter of mental health to be a red herring; most of the people who use firearms in criminal activity are neither clinically mentally ill, or were prior to some pivotal event perhaps bringing on a severe depression or other mitigating factor that causes them to threaten or injure or kill.  Far more prevalent is the kind of rampant insecurity among American men that gets reassurance like the kind offered by Bushmaster in its add for the weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  If you're a man who needs a gun to feel like a man, you might want to put the gun away and get some help.  Like I said a while back - take off your clothes and look down.  If there's something down there, then you're a man, and you don't need a piece of metal that goes boom to demonstrate that to the world.

Then, consider the whole, "Gun control doesn't work!" nonsense.  Of course it does.  It's worked here in the United States.  It's worked fabulously well in Australia and Scotland.  It takes all of ten seconds to find this information - real information about the real world where real people live - that makes that statement a lie.  If you know it's out there and you repeat it anyway, then you're lying.  If you don't know about it, and someone tells you, and you either refuse to check it out, or don't want to, then you're either lazy, or so far inside the bubble that you can't tell reality from whatever fantasy the gun industry has created for you.

Similarly, saying, "Gun laws don't work because criminals don't follow the law," isn't an argument against gun control per se.  It's an argument against all laws, because people who break the law . . . don't care about laws.  When I'm driving down the road at ten or fifteen miles an hour over the posted speed limit - I don't care about the law!  Does that mean there shouldn't be speed limits?

While we're on the topic of ridiculous things - the Second Amendment to the Constitution has absolutely nothing to do with keeping people armed as a check against government power.  First of all, the text of the Amendment makes that a lie.  Second, the actual debates during the first Congress about the Amendment make it a lie; the Amendment is about preventing the creation of a standing army, which many of the founders considered a threat to republican-style government.  And, really, think about it.  If there were a real military coup in the United States and some yahoo somewhere started taking potshots at the soldiers enforcing some dystopian martial law, trust me when I tell you that would last for about ten seconds.  The US military has much bigger things that go boom, so put your Red Dawn fantasies back in the box.

Finally - no one is suggesting confiscating weapons.  No one.  There is no secret agenda afoot to use this as a way to force people to surrender their guns to the government so Obama can become dictator for life, or whatever the nonsense swirling around is.  Your twelve-gauge shotgun, your standard .22-caliber hunting rifle, or even a larger, say .30-.06 or .30-.30 - they're safe.  No one anywhere - not even folks who want far stricter gun control measures than are being offered (like me) - thinks such a thing would either be workable or even legal.

Really, I just wanted to get this off my chest.  I realize the frothing and shouts of "Agenda 21!  Freedom!" will continue.  I realize "reasonable" has, somehow, disappeared from our national dialogue.  Not just when it comes to guns, but anything.  I've now responded to the weeks and weeks of nonsense, and while it won't even slow it down, at the very least, I've tried to make clear that there is hysteria afoot.

It just isn't coming from folks talking about gun control. 

Something To Celebrate

It's been a lousy day, made worse by reading that AIG is so grateful to the federal government for keeping its doors open it is suing, claiming the terms of the bailout violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.  There are times I wish public flogging were still legal.

Rather than dwell on something that makes me wish pain and suffering on others, I want to celebrate something wonderful.  First, a photo:

This is Myrlie Evers-Williams.  For those who may not know, her first husband, Medgar Evers, was murdered in his driveway, shot in the back by a man named Byron De La Beckwith.  It took decades for De La Beckwith to be convicted of the crime.  We as a people are still dealing with the horrible creatures that raged unfettered upon our national life when our African-American brothers and sisters demanded they no longer be treated like non-citizens, and therefore non-persons.

Pres. Obama has invited Ms. Evers-Williams to give the invocation as his Inauguration on the 20th.  Four years ago, I was outraged that he picked con-artist Rick Warren to do the same thing.  With this pick, Mr. Obama is demonstrating his understanding of the debt he - and by extension all of us - owe to Ms. Evers-Williams and her martyred husband.

The best prayers don't come from preachers who console us, telling us that God is on our side and we can find the proof if we just find our purpose.  The best prayers come from those who cry out for justice, whose rage at our all-too-human systems of injustice, white supremacy, and state-sponsored terrorism do not settle for easy answers.  The best prayers come from those who know the road to real justice runs straight through the hell of violence and hatred and death that some are all too willing to unleash upon those who are willing to risk their lives for it.

So, thank you, Mr. President, for giving us a few moments to hear the voice of one who understands.

Three Of A Perfect Pair

Eric Clapton was admired among British rock fans for his devotion to a kind of authenticity.  He'd quit two successful bands at the peak of their success because they just weren't bluesy enough.  In the years he'd been around, he became the premiere lead guitar player, surpassing Keith Richards in popularity.  Among the musicians who admired him was drummer Ginger Baker.  Baker was older than Clapton, a Londoner whose roots lay in what the Brits called "trad jazz".  After leaving The Yardbirds, Clapton and Baker would get together and jam and talk about putting a band together.  They wanted just one more person, a bass player and singer (Clapton was still unsure about his ability to sing lead), and there was one person they agreed they did not want: Jack Bruce.

They ended up hiring Jack Bruce.  They called themselves Cream.

The tensions in the trio were heavy.  The music they played was unlike anything aimed at a mass audience; songs rooted in augmented blues harmonics, or alternately simple, repeated musical phrases or "riffs"; it was clear from the beginning that "songs" mattered far less to these three than the simple desire to play.  Live in concert, they would leave the songs behind as quickly as they could, each musician taking off without caring if the other two were following along.  The three-minute pop song was little more than a key opening a door for a kind of musical adventure.  Blues and jazz musicians understood what they were up to; to the general public, however, this was new, this was strange, this was powerful.

It was also not meant to last.  It took only a couple years for Baker and Clapton to become so disgusted with Bruce, who was more interested in popularity and success than a kind of earnest authenticity that came from playing, the band decided to toss in the towel.  Their final show was at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968, a couple years after the three of them got together (trivia point: the opening band for Cream's farewell concert was London's hottest new band, an outfit with a residency at the premiere rock club, The Marquee; they were called Yes and would go on to some success of their own).  Despite the voice over at the beginning, when Clapton introduces "Sunshine Of Your Love", you can hear his frustration at having to play that song again:

Another reason Clapton was giving up on Cream was the emergence the previous year of a young American ex-pat guitar player.  The guy had been a side man for years, playing for Little Richard among other performers.  He'd come to Britain in 1966 because he'd heard there was an audience for electric blues that didn't exist in America.  Former Animals bass player Chas Chandler heard him at a club and decided to manage him.  He went up to the young African-American Army vet and told him that, if he allowed Chandler to find two musicians to play with him, the guitar player could be a star.  They shook hands and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.

When the band debuted, there were quite a few well-known names and faces in the crowd.  Musicians had been trading pirated tapes of gigs in London for a while, and some - including Clapton and The Who's Pete Townshend - refused to believe the young man could make his guitar do the kinds of things it sounded like on the tapes.  From the first notes, however, both men fell in to deep funk, realizing they were hearing the future of guitar playing and were well behind the curve:

The lesson from these two hugely successful bands was simple: All it took to make a band were three musicians who could play more than tolerably well, and a whole lot of amplification.  One of the people who learned this lesson was the producer of Cream's second album, Disraeli Gears.  Felix Pappilardi was a bass player as well as record producer, and with Cream's demise, he started thinking of using Cream's formula for a band of his own.  He hooked up with American guitarist Leslie West and Canadian drummer Corky Laing and formed Mountain.  The results made sense when the volume was turned up:

As the 1960's sunset in to the 1970's, another lesson being learned in the vast underground was it didn't take a whole lot of musicians to make a whole lot of sound.  These groups became known as "power trios"; and none demonstrated more dedication to power defined as volume, distortion, and barely-controlled chaos more than the Bay Area band Blue Cheer.  More than each of the above, their cover of the Eddie Cochran hit "Summertime Blues" is often credited as the first true heavy metal song.

Unlike the above bands, the members of Blue Cheer weren't particularly good musicians.  In order to keep the beat, the drummer, bass player, and guitarist all had to be rhythm instruments, making sure they all knew where the beat was.  While playing in a music scene where experimenting with feedback and other noise was accepted, unlike Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jefferson Airplane, or The Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer stripped everything excessive from their music, reducing it to rhythm and volume as substitutes for a more finessed approach.

The ingredients for what would become, in ensuing decades, an enormous genre of rock music, with enough sub-genres that it makes it difficult not to believe it is its own thing, were there.  A singular dedication to making music as loud as possible.  Using that noise as a vehicle of a different kind of protest.  Taking a crowd by the throat and shaking it with the physical force of the sound.  Thinking creatively about the use of what was thought to be mistakes such as distortion.  The Beatles were gone; the Rolling Stones were losing themselves in drugs, moving in a very different musical direction.  Pop music was becoming dominated by sweet-sounding singer-songwriters whose narcissism would be the perfect soundtrack for the troubled dominant class of the next decade.  Underneath all that, however, were a small group of bands who would, over the course of a decade and a half, change everything about rock music.

Not Everyone Can Have Good Taste

Run here, my towhead granchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee.  While you still recognize me, you little maniacs.  You know the gong has tolled, it's that time again.  Now let me set my old brain a-ruminatin'; ah, what upbuilding tale from days of yore shall I relate today?

"What's all this shit about the Yardbirds?" - Lester Bangs, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, p.5. 

Several of the English psychedelic bands that followed in the wake of Sergeant Pepper drew upon specific characteristics of the band's music most closely associated with classical music, and developed these elements more single-mindedly than either the Beatles or contemporaneous West Coast psychedelic bands the exhibited certain stylistic affinities (especially the Doors and Jefferson Airplane) were wont to.  The Moody Blues, recording their influential Days of Future Passed album with the London Festival Orchestra in late 1967, almost singlehandedly established the concept of "symphonic rock."  - Edward Macan, Rocking The Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, p.21.

We can't all have good taste. - Marie (Carrie Fisher), When Harry Met Sally

Even as the Beatles and Rolling Stones dominated British rock music, at least from the outside, bands like The Yardbirds, John Mayall's Blues Breakers, and later Cream were hugely successful in their home country.  While The Moody Blues had begun as a Mercy-Beat band out of Liverpool, once original guitarist and songwriter Denny Laine left, the band's sound changed, becoming far more ambitious (Laine would be remembered by fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney and land a gig as guitarist in Wings).  1967 produced several seminal works by British rock bands that would influence everything that came after.  Obviously, The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but recorded at the same studio at the very same time was Pink Floyd's debut, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.  Finally, later in the year, the Moody Blues released Days of Future Passed, recorded with an orchestra.  Everything that emerged from British music over the next five or so years would be a product of musicians absorbing the lessons from these records.

In 1968, Richie Blackmore, Rod Evans, Jon Lord, Nick Simper, and Ian Paice got together as a backing band for Chris Curtis, the former drummer from another Liverpool band, The Searchers.  They managed to record their first record, Shades of Deep Purple, and even land a hit with a cover of Joe South's "Hush".

What jumps out at the listener is Jon Lord's organ.  Lord, along with Nice keyboard player Keith Emerson, were experimenting with the Hammond organ sound, overdriving it, then running it through the spinning Leslie amplifier.  Blackmore's guitar is less prominent in this song, playing call and response with lead singer Rod Evans while Lord carries the song along, even getting a wonderful solo that features a nice build-up of tension.  Musically, the band was being pushed further and further by Lord, whose classical training drove the band to finally record with a symphony orchestra just a year and a half later.  While the band did release some radio hits, including a cover of the Neil Diamond song "Kentucky Woman", the band had its collective eyes on bigger things.

The commercial and critical failure of Concerto for Group and Orchestra pushed Blackmore to take the reins, musically.  They released more traditional rock albums over the next couple years until 1972, when they released Machine Head, an album that included "Highway Star", "Space Truckin'", and the anthemic "Smoke On The Water".  While Lord's organ was still prominent, Blackmore's guitar was further forward in the mix.  They had replaced their bass player and singer in the intervening years, and Ian Gillain's distinct vocal style and Roger Glover's bass, doing the work a bass guitar is supposed to do, gave Deep Purple's sound something distinctive but not unique.

That big, rolling organ sound played by Deep Purple and The Nice (and later ELP), was picked up by another British band.  Unlike either the Nice or ELP, Deep Purple showed how powerful keeping both the organ and a heavily distorted and highly amplified guitar could be, provided the lead singer had the ability to cut through the noise in those days of poor amplification.  One such singer was David Byron, who along with guitarist Mick Box, formed Uriah Heep around the same Deep Purple came together.  When they added keyboardist Ken Hensley (who wrote the best liner notes I've ever read on a rock album), they sounded similar to Deep Purple, yet not quite the same.  For one thing, unlike Deep Purple, who stripped away the pretense and went for simple chord progressions, staple to the point of cliche lyrics, and both a recorded and on-stage presence that relied far more on free-wheeling blues-inspired improvisation than meticulous arranging, Uriah Heep wasn't afraid of taking musical risks, all the while keeping the beat steady, the volume turned way up, and letting the songs grow.

In 1968, some musicians living in a commune in Germany recorded a day-long jam session.  Rather than go through the hassle, they released snippets and portions over the years under the name Amon Duul.  Some of the commune members, however, expressing more ambition, started to mix their jamming with actual song-writing.  Continuing their hippy preference to keep conflict at a minimum, they called themselves Amon Duul II.  By 1972, while not making any commercial headway, they were an underground success both in their native West Germany as well as in other countries, in particular Great Britain.  While one can hear the noodling, one can also hear the fusing of ideas in the midst of very loud, very distorted guitars and bass.

While often credited as the basis for what became known through the decade of the 1970's as Krautrock, in fact both in sound and attitude Amon Duul would have a far bigger impact both on British Heavy Metal and the development of later metal styles, most especially what's been called "Stoner Metal".

In the cacophony of musical sounds that typified the end of the 1960's and beginning of the 1970's, hearing in all these disparate styles, in the midst of all the noise and distortion, the experimentation and reliance on tradition, a few bands were beginning to make a name for being very loud; for taking risks in composition and arrangement; for experimenting with timbres that might seem uncomfortable; and for taking lyrical risks by moving away from the "Boy Meets Girl" subject matter even of mid-1960's rock and explore everything from questions of life and death to letting their fancies take flight.  The only thing that seemed to link them together was a dedication to volume.  Yet, without even wanting to do so, and without their permission, it seemed pretty clear by the second or third year of the 1970's that something new was being born.

Someone called it "Heavy Metal", after a line in a Steppenwolf song referring to the roar of motorcycle engines, and the name, for better and worse, stuck.

What Is This That Stands Before Me?

It has been a long time now, and not many remember how it was in the old days, not really.  Not even those who were there to see and hear as it happened, who were pressed in the crowds beneath the dim rosy lights of the bar in the smoke-veiled room, and who shared, night after night, the mysterious spell created by the talk the laughter, grease paint, powder, perfume, sweat, alcohol and food - all blended and simmering, like a stew on the restaurant range, and brought to a sustained moment of elusive meaning by the timbres and accents of musical instruments locked in passionate recitative.  It has been too long now, some seventeen years. - Ralph Ellison, The Golden Age, Time Past, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, p.237. 

Even this cursory survey would suggest that the single label 'heavy metal' is inadequate with respect to style.  If Chambers's placing of this music in the mainstream of rock culture is correct, there are both room and cause for a great deal of research.  Two particular questions would seem worthy of further exploration.  First, to what extent do the subtle differences between difference brands of 'metal' (about which fanatics make great play) equate to difference of musical style; and second, to what extent are such differences accompanied by similar differences in the use to which the music is put, and hence its significance for the style's respective audiences? - Allan F. Moore, Rock, The Primary Text: Toward A Musicology of Rock, p. 151. 

The group performs with all the restraint and sophistication of four Cro-Magnon hunters who've stumbled upon a rock band's equipment after a bad day chasing meat. - Paul Battiste, Creem Magazine, 1971, quoted in Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate, p.228 

Writing about the past creates a host of difficulties, not least because we know what comes next.  Whether it's the French Revolution, the American space program, or the history of a musical style, how is it possible, so many years after the fact, even to attempt to capture the contingency and confusion of a moment and time, seeing what was in fact all confusion and questioning, and extract what "really" happened, rather than what we wish had happened, or what we are told, over and over again, really did happen?  For that very reason, even the best histories are false, partial tales told to create beginnings that never existed so all, both writer and reader, can reach the conclusion we all know is: the present.

It is an impossible task.  Each day, each moment of time is a seething mass of possibility, of passing away and coming to be, and no one, despite wisdom and understanding and insight, really knows which is which.  Who could really know that a bunch of kids sitting in a garage in California in the 1970's would, quite literally, change the way we human beings do everything from talk on the phone to defend ourselves from military threats to ring up purchases at the grocery store?  Had you been standing there, a silent witness to their efforts, wouldn't your real thought be, "Wow.  What a bunch of nerds"?

Despite this inherent impossibility, we are pushed to try.  So, take what follows with a grain of salt.

As 1969 faded to 1970, at least in the British music scene, there was confusion, mixed with possibility, mixed with utter chaos.  The Beatles, who for better and worse had dominated popular music for the last half of the decade, were gone.  The Rolling Stones, retreating from the horror at Altamont in December, 1969, were licking their self-inflicted wounds, all the while both sinking further in to various dissipations and on the verge of creating their greatest music ever.  The Who, arguably at a level just below these juggernauts, were trying to wrap up endless performances of Tommy, while Pete Townshend started to picture another, even more elaborate and visionary project he was calling "Lighthouse".

What had been, for a time a few years before, "Swinging London", had fractured.  There were still models and actresses mingling with musicians and artists; the biggest of each, however, had peeled off and paired up, while those left, some of them most definitely second-tier on any number of levels, struggled in the midst of the confusion, to take what had been before and turn it all around.  In the summer of 1969, before heading to America and the tour that would end so violently at a race track in California, the Rolling Stones held a free concert in London's Hyde Park.  Trying to fill out a day's worth of music, one of the bands they picked to open the show had been making a name for itself in and around Britain, including doing time at the famed Marquee Club.  King Crimson took the stage before half a million stoned and happy Londoners and offered a very different version of power that had no flowers in it at all.

At the same time, a blues band from Birmingham was having trouble gigging.  Calling themselves Earth, they didn't discover for a while they were getting bookings because there was a pop band by the same name; folks showed up to hear horn-inflected pop, and were receiving heavy doses of low-end amplified blues.  Struggling both for a name and an identity that suited the music they were trying to make, bass player Terry Butler, whose nickname "Geezer" was a cockney slang term similar to the American "dude" or "guy", thought it might be fun to use Hammer Studios as an influence.  Like many young men at the time, they loved the horror films the British movie studio was turning out.  Butler also had an interest in the occult, a British habit that struggled on despite the waning of the Empire.  He told the band a story about something that happened to him after buying a grimoire, and showed them some partial lyrics to a poem he'd written about the event.

Messing around with alternate tunings and chord changes, not least because he was still re-learning to play the guitar after losing the tips of two fingers from his right hand, Tony Iommi played three chords at odd intervals.  Three simple notes.  Singer John "Ozzy" Osbourne, a boy who had been a target of a younger, bullying Iommi's at school, toned down the blues shouting, doing more of a singing-recitative approach, staying within the alternate chord changes Iommi had come up with.

In about an hour, all but the bridge - a section in which the basic structure of the song remained, only speeded up much faster - had been worked out, and the band decided not only to use the title on the movie marquee across the street as the title to the song; they thought it would most definitely get them attention as a band, as well.

Heaviness was in the air.  The biggest band to emerge from the wreckage of so much of what had been a successful London-based British music scene in the late 1960's was led by former session guitarist Jimmy Page.  He had tried to revive the Yardbirds name, but after a couple shows it was clear the band he put together had nothing to do with the hugely popular late-60's blues-based rock band.  Pete Townshend, after hearing them live, told Page and lead singer Robert Plant the band was a failure, and would go over like a lead zeppelin.  Thus, when he needed a new name to book his band, Page tossed a middle finger at Townshend, naming the band after the insult.

On their debut LP, released in 1969, Led Zeppelin included a song, "Dazed and Confused", an unacknowledged cover of a song released two years previously by British folk-rock performer Jake Holmes.  Robert Plant changed all but the title, and the band not only slowed the song down considerably; they turned the volume on their amplifiers way up.  The result, in particular the breaks when the band switches from a mezzo-piano statement of the basic melodic/harmonic components to a fortissimo crash of distorted guitar and bass while the drummer, John Bonham, demonstrates that for the next decade he will not be known for subtlety, was both odd and electrifying.  Musically, the song seems an exercise not only in playing with guitar sounds, with Page and Plant playing call and response, but also dynamics; as the song switches between almost too soft to be heard to almost too loud to bear.  While the band was panned by critics, there is little doubt musicians and fans were listening.

In many ways, these two songs are far more similar than many (including the performers themselves).  Both bands claimed roots in American blues, although in many ways Black Sabbath would demonstrate far more fealty to basic blues harmonies than the alleged traditionalists in Led Zeppelin.  Both songs begin slowly, almost glacially.  The lyrics, at least initially, float above non-existent melodic lines, the instruments far more concerned with the chord changes, anchoring the vocal melody rather than doubling it or harmonizing with it. Finally, the bridges and breaks of both songs are both far louder and far faster than what went before.  Listening to them side by side, one can hear the similarities.

To say, however, that Black Sabbath would emerge with their first LP in March 1970 as the creators of a new style of music ignores the milieu in which they played, and from which they emerged.  The opening sound effects on "Schizoid Man" are far too similar to those on "Black Sabbath"; the song structures of "Black Sabbath" and "Dazed and Confused" are far too similar to be set to one side ex post facto.  None of this is to say the bands were ripping one another off in any way; neither is it to say there was some weird "heavy" vibe in the air the bands were tapping in to, as if by magic.  Rather, it is to suggest that the bands, posed with the singular question any group of young musicians face - how do we sound different? How do we sound like us? - were using similar tools and techniques, solving various problems of composition, arrangement, and performance, in ways that were both unique to each band, yet similar in approach.

At the time, the band most fans and critics figured would go on to fame and fortune was King Crimson; before 1969 was over, however, the band had collapsed, with guitarist Robert Fripp managing to hold on long enough to get a second LP out of the original line-up before they went their separate ways.  Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath moved down very different musical paths, each to success of a kind, yet never enjoying (at least until many years later) the kind of critical acknowledgement that, while never overriding, is still important to any performer.  For all that would follow in the years to come, 1970 offered these - along with many other heavy bands, whether the American Grand Funk Railroad and Blue Cheer or the British bands Vanilla Fudge and Jethro Tull - in a swirling mass of sound from which it was literally impossible to discern any trend other than LOUD.

Which is only to say that what happened subsequently would only be understood retrospectively.  In the beginning there may well have been "Black Sabbath" - band, song, LP - yet at the time there was so much else, distinguishing one sound in the cacophony took repeated listenings, a discerning ear, and the desire to hear more in what is offered at the present than even the performers themselves understand. 

For 2013

Since the election, watching American politics has been a mixture of the hilarious as the right comes to terms with this thing called "reality", and the absurd (also known as "The Fiscal Cliff").  Suffice it to say, rather than add more gas to the fire burning down our country, I thought it best to just sit back and watch it burn.

Now it's the new year, and I can't think of a damn thing I care about enough to write about.  I mean, honestly - there are way too many voices, most of them saying the same things, over and over and over again.  Why bother?

Thanks to my wife getting me Ken Burns' Jazz on DVD for Christmas, I've returned to some of Ralph Ellison's essays on music.  Thanks to an Amazon gift card, I purchased a six-year old documentary on Heavy Metal that is both wonderful and . . . well, the same-old, same old.

My hope for 2013, besides the occasional aside about our silly situation as a country; some thoughts on being a Christian in an age where the name has become contested; and the occasional scolding of those whose posts seem the product of some weird algorithm rather than actual human thought; beyond all that, I would like to find some folks who write intelligently and thoughtfully about hard rock and the various metal genres without reveling in cliches, or falling in to traditional traps.  For example, while the documentary does a pretty good job covering all the various genres and touches on such issues as gender, power, sex and sexuality, and even the business end of the issue, there is little to no discussion of the music qua music.  The person who produced the documentary, an anthropologist who is a life-long fan of the music, spent just a bit too much time attempting to establish both his own bona fides as well as that of the music.

It would be nice to read some reviews of music and musicians and books on music and musicians that are as intelligent, thoughtful, wise, and (most of all) knowing as Ellison is in his essays.

That's the plan, anyway.

Thirteen Hours Forty-Five Minutes

Nothing special.  Just wishing one and all a happy, blessed, safe, and contented 2013.

With more cowbell.

Sucking The Smart Out Of The Room

Back in 1995, with some help from local herders, German Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt made what may well be the most important discovery of the 20th century.  Buried beneath the sands of eastern Turkey for almost 12 millennia, Gobekli Tepe (which means "belly hill" in Turkish) is the oldest human-made structure yet discovered; at a stroke, this single site has doubled the age of the known ability of human beings to build structures.  There is a debate now as to whether the site, which Schmidt continues to insist served as a temple, a conclusion teased out from the abundance of animal carvings, their stylized attitudes, and placement, might have served as human habitation as well, for which there is also abundant evidence (which leads me, as always in cases such as these, to wonder why we should choose; people are smart, canny, and resourceful now, so there's no reason to assume people 12,000 years ago weren't also, using the space both for living and worshiping).

I first heard about this about a year and a half ago, and the most amazing part of the "discovery" for me was the fact that locals, especially sheep and goat herders, knew about the stones poking up through the sandy soil.  They didn't think it was any big deal; it was only when Schmidt, who heard the stories and decided to check them out, started digging a bit that something was "discovered".  Except, of course, how can something that the folks living in the area knew about be "discovered"?  A perennial question, especially when it comes to Westerners finding something that non-westerners knew was there all along.

In any case, it is important to think about some things before we continue.  These ruins are dated between eleven and twelve thousand years ago.  Prior to Gobekli Tepe, the earliest dated remnants of settled human communities was half as old, 6,000 years.  The discoveries at Gobekli Tepe raise all sorts of questions, not the least of them being: where are the remains for the space in between?  The record for the past six thousand years is pretty steady and clear.  The theories about the development of agriculture, about the changes in social and cultural life that made settled human habitation possible, the technological development that gave human beings tools to craft spaces for living, buying and selling, planting and harvesting crops all seemed to have coalesced at a point in time that permitted the growth and development of towns and cities.  All those theories are pretty much gone now.  The problem, however, is figuring out what happened in the intervening time.  It is certainly possible that some catastrophe occurred that destroyed not only all human habitation that existed between the building of Gobekli Tepe and the rise of other human civilizations; not only destroyed them, but any trace of their existence, as well as the accumulated knowledge and skill to create them?  That, it seems to me, is more than a little far-fetched (to say the least).

I read today that ABC is running a two-part program on "The Search for Noah's Flood".

Really?

Why not look for the Tower of Babel while you're at it?  Or Atlantis?  Maybe feature one of those Bigfoot hunter shows that have nerds running around the woods at night howling at one another?

At what point do we, as a people decide we're going to talk about things that are real, and stop pursuing nonsense like world-wide floods that never happened?  Having a major network devote time and resources to "Noah's Flood" is no different than a program dedicated to "proving" creationism; in fact, the impetus for the ongoing "search for Noah's Ark" lies within the same set of assumptions that saddle us with creationism: Biblical inerrancy.  We are missing the opportunity to learn something important, even revolutionary, about the history of the development of human social life because hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours are being wasted pretending a folk tale originally told by the Sumerians has anything to do with reality.  In the process, we as a people get hoodwinked in to thinking this is serious stuff rather than fringe pseudo-science, akin to Ancient Astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle.

Sorry, Christiane Amanpour, but you are actually working hard to make America dumber.

The Greatest Generation

Not only was he the first Japanese soldier I had ever shot at, he was the only one I had seen at close quarters.  He was a robin-fat, moon-faced, roly-poly little man with his thick, stubby, trunklike legs sheathed in faded khaki puttees and the rest of him squeezed into a uniform that was much too tight.  Unlike me, he was wearing a tin hat, dressed to kill.  But I was quite safe from him.. His Arisaka rifle was strapped on in a sniper's harness, and though he had heard me, and was trying to turn toward me, the harness sling had him trapped.  He couldn't disentangle himself from it.  His eyes were rolling in panic.  Realizing that he couldn't extricate his arms and defend himself, he was backing toward a corner with a curious, crablike motion.

My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery.  His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush.  A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor.  Mutely he looked down at it.  He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red.  His shoulders gave a little spasmodic jerk, as though someone had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died.  I kept firing, wasting government property. . . .

Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45.  Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over.  I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: "I'm sorry."  Then I threw up all over myself.  . . . At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies. . . . Then Barney burst in on me, his carbine at the ready, his face gray, as though he, not I, had just become a partner in the firm of death.  He ran over to the Nip's body, grabbed its stacking swivel - its neck - and let go, satisfied that it was a cadaver.  I marveled at his courage; I couldn't have taken a step toward that corner.  He approached me and then backed away, in revulsion, from my foul stench.  He said: "Slim, you stink."  I said nothing.  I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants.  I remember wondering dumbly: Is this what they mean by "conspicuous gallantry"? - William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness, pp. 6-7

It was autumn, 1988.  I was working at the country club in my hometown for a season, trying to figure out my life.   While taking care of a set of clubs, I overheard a conversation among a foursome, local men my father's age.  They had been talking of their experiences in the service in what I grew up calling "the War", as if it had ever been the only such thing that occurred.  One of the men, a local real estate developer of some note, was talking about his time in the Navy, serving in the Pacific in the 1944 and 1945.  After a battle in which the Japanese sent wave after wave of planes to die in the face of the steel from our ships and planes, he spoke of a young man who had been in an anti-aircraft turret on board the same ship.  "It took an hour to pry his fingers off the gun.  He didn't say anything, ever, as far as I know."

Four years before, when I had just begun my endless search about which I wrote earlier this year, I read Godfrey Hodgson's America In Our Time, one of the best analyses of post-World War II America I have ever encountered.  A few years later I would read William Manchester's The Glory and The Dream, a magesterial attempt to tell 40 years of our national life, with the question implicit in the title always out in front.  From these in particular, although there are many, many others that tell much the same tale, I learned one indispensable fact: the millions of men who served in the military in the Second World War returned from their service, put on civilian clothes, and got busy creating safe lives and worlds.  They went to college on the GI Bill.  They married and their wives starting turning out babies in much the same way the factories to which they returned were turning out refrigerators and ovens and washing machines and cars.  They moved from the cities to new suburbs, settling for what amounted to barracks housing built on the cheap, designs and yard plans dictated from above with no room for deviation.  They became, as the title of one book noted, the men in gray flannel suits.

When the children of these veterans were called upon to go to their own war, the veterans of North Africa and Italy, of France and Germany, of Burma and China, of Guadalcanal and Tarawa insisted they go, just as they had.  There were too few stories, too few words of advice, too little information other than, "Answer the call.  We did."

Of course, the great silence that cast its shadow over the intervening years needed filling.  Societies dread vacuum.  While there were some stories and memoirs that attempted an honest description of war and its madness - The Naked and The Dead, which introduced the word "fug" to the English language because the publishers were wary of printing the actual dialogue too many soldiers and Marines used; Catch-22, describing perfectly the insanity of war as Yosarian struggles to come to terms with his own fear - the vast bulk of the empty space was filled by popular culture.  Films with the Second World War as their setting were huge, telling a generation of young people what war was like, sometimes featuring actors who became heroes to a generation of young boys eager to learn what their father's refused to tell them.

Sometime in the 1990's, Life magazine published a list of "American Heroes".  Lists like this are useful only as far as we get a sense of what our elite think we should think.  Among the top ten "American Heroes" was the actor John Wayne.  It would be a few years before I learned something about Wayne's life that I have cherished in all the years since.  The man who would make a career playing soldiers and sailors, pilots and Marines, killing Germans and Japanese and even in his later years Vietnamese, was so terrified of the prospect of serving in the military after Pearl Harbor, he urged and begged his mentor and friend John Ford to intervene to keep him from military service.  While Clark Gable and James Stewart and others volunteered, spending their war years in combat (Jimmy Stewart was so hurt in his soul by his years as a bomber pilot, he almost gave up acting), Wayne had every possible string pulled for him to keep him from ever wearing a uniform or seeing combat.  When the war was over, however, he thought nothing of putting on a fake uniform and firing blanks at hordes of extras who would pretend to die so Wayne's status as an "American Hero" would be assured.

It wasn't just popular culture that grew fat on American victory in the Second World War.  Policy planners were no less susceptible to hubris.  When the first American troops landed in Korea in 1950, most were garrison troops, stationed in occupied Japan.  Few had seen combat in the Second World War, but, flush with American superiority and given the weapons their older brothers had used to defeat the two greatest military forces ever amassed, they were confident of easy victory.  As John Toland reminds readers in his In Mortal Combat,  one of the first signs of trouble was the utter uselessness of WWII-vintage anti-tank weaponry.  The North Koreans were using the latest Soviet-built tanks (and if there was one thing Soviet industry was good at producing, it was their tanks).  The charges being used by the Americans were quite literally bouncing off the thick-skinned tanks as they rolled over the American troops.  In the course of the war, American troops were nearly pushed off the peninsula completely; then, the First Marine Division suffered its worst defeat in history, having to march the length of the peninsula during a typical, brutal Korean winter while legendary Marine Col. Lewis "Chesty" Puller tried to keep up morale telling them they weren't retreating but advancing to the rear.

I got thinking about all this when I read Charles Durning's obituary in The New York Times.

Mr. Durning was also remembered for his combat service, which he avoided discussing publicly until later in life. He spoke at memorial ceremonies in Washington, and in 2008 France awarded him the National Order of the Legion of Honor.

In the Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” he said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.”

They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept.

That's just part of Durning's incredible story.  Not just of his service during the Second World War; reading his obituary, I realized what a remarkable man we have lost, a man out of time, whose whole life seems to echo "America" as I read it.

All the same, it is the whole "he avoided discussing publicly" that troubles me.  I can, I suppose, understand not wanting to talk about beating a 15-year-old kid to death, regardless of the circumstances.  Yet there is much more.  Durning survived, not once but twice, German ambushes that left much the rest of his comrades dead.  Like my oldest brother-in-law's father, Durning was in the first wave that landed in Normandy in June, 1944.  Unlike Rudy, Durning made it off the beach (my brother-in-law's father was so severely wounded,  like far too many he was left almost too long, festering in the rain among the dead; he was saved, however, and is still alive, God bless him).  The millions of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who returned from around the world need not have ripped open barely-healed wounds; they could, however, have reminded a victorious nation that victory came with a cost.  Not just the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans; the nearly 50 million dead around the globe, from the deserts of Africa and Mongolia through the jungles of the Pacific and Burma to the frozen waters off Murmansk and, of course, Flander's fields once again watered by the blood of too many young men.  We could have heard that, far from being something done with ease and without a care, William Manchester's story of his first confirmed kill in the Pacific could have reminded us the terrible moral cost that accompanies even the necessary taking of another human being's life.

Those whom Tom Brokaw mistakenly labeled The Greatest Generation, gave us war in Korea.  We sent troops to Indonesia and the Dominican Republic.  We almost blew up the world over Cuba.  Tens of thousands of American men and women died in the swamps and jungles of southeast Asia.  Ronald Reagan dragged outdated battleships out of mothballs to make the hills of Lebanon shake one last time from an American naval broadside.  Still, Americans died there, too.  Far from living the lessons taught by the acres of manicured cemeteries, The Greatest Generation thought its victory vaccinated it from failure in its plans.  Too many men and women, in too many places were forced to pay too high a price for our Greatest Generation's fundamental failure, not just of leadership, but of simple moral imagination.

Through it all, we started to hear stories that war, far from glorious, was horror beyond imagining.  We began to hear, over and over again, that only the dead are our heroes.  We began to learn that the enemy is too often viewed as a comrade, a fellow soldier doing his duty even as he lay dead at our feet.  Not someone to be hated or feared, the enemy is just another soldier, trapped in the brutality and insanity and horror of war.

We are, however, living in a different time.  We are slowly - far too slowly - emerging from over a decade of our own wars.  While our troops and veterans receive increasingly better care, we still read far too often of suicides and addiction, of domestic violence and depression, of the nightmares that bring on screaming fits and violence.  In an age when communication is almost instantaneous and our therapeutic culture demands sharing as much information as possible, we are learning from a new Greatest Generation that war is not a time and place of glory and heroes.  It is misery beyond reckoning, endless fear punctuated by seconds of sheer terror, followed by grief.  From the wounds our young men and women returning from our too-long wars of choice, we may yet learn that we should never again send our young men and women through the human meat grinder that is war; the price we pay for their sacrifices is so high, and we continually fail to make due the bill they present to us.  Perhaps now, as we begin the process of drawing down our combat forces in Afghanistan, we can listen for the stories our soldiers and sailors, our pilots and Marines tell us and give them the greatest honor any nation ever gave those who gave up so much: Vow to find a way to keep their sons and daughters from ever having to experience what they will carry with them.

Truly Deserving Of One Another

It's humbug still! - Ebeneezer Scrooge

Great video on how the existence of morality is evidence for the existence of God. - Neil Simpson

At this festive time of year, along with resurrecting the careers of Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis; putting trees in our homes; braving crowds in stores to purchase things we don't need, sometimes for people we would rather not have in our lives; eating too much; gathering with family only to be reminded why we don't gather with family too often; along with all these things, for some reason two sets of idiots square off in various cage matches, attempting to prove to the world who can be more dim.

It's the ridiculous Christians versus the ridiculous atheists.  Personally, I hope they kill one another off so the rest of us can go about our holiday festivities with some semblance of peace and good-will.

By way of example, with a tip of the holly-crown to Sadly, No!, we have Rev. Michael Bresciani at Renew America.  The author CV under his picture on the sidebar says that Bresciani's "articles are now read in every country in the world."  Which sounds impressive until you realize he publishes his "articles" online.  By that logic, my articles are read in every country in the world; at the very least they're available in every country in the world.  Anyway, aside from tidying up his writer's cred a bit, the article is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had been brought up in some other religious tradition.

Anyone who celebrates the birth of Christ is never in need of a boost from a truly mythological person called Santa, merchandising barrages, office parties or tinsel draped conifers. The words, good tidings, great joy, peace on earth and good will toward men are the phrases that we feel in our hearts because of his birth and we can never accept the fleshly substitute of making 'merry' and the practice of overspending, overindulgence, drunkenness and general partying on an unspecified holiday as a reasonable substitute. Our joy is 24/7, 365 days a year and follows us into eternity. The atheists have missed the point by a million miles.

If Christmas or Christianity was meant to produce only good feelings then we may as well dump both. Feelings may be part of the Christian experience along with celebrations that warm the heart, but it would be the saddest of all religions if it were based only on emotional responses. At the start and at the heart, real Christianity is based on a historical figure and on an actual historical event.

With a short aside to note that the parenthetical in the first paragraph might portend good news, as Rev Grasciani might well join in protests against the over-commercialization of Christmas by a capitalist class who has no need of religious celebration, but does have a need for profit, let us move on and realize what the final sentence of the second paragraph portends.  Yet, it's time for . . .  Let's prove how little we know about historical research, Christian doctrine, and the idiocy of "proof"!  If it weren't for Neil Simpson's continued presence on the internet, this guy would probably win the prize for wasting more space writing about stuff that he only wishes had something to do with being Christian.

New Testament Christianity and the Christmas story are not based on a preponderance of pure unmitigated belief; it is based on the historical record. Our faith in that record and the interaction of God's Holy Spirit with us (Which he promised) is an objective matter and does not rest on feelings, anecdotal experiences, or fellowship with others of like mind.

The atheists might want to save the unimaginable cost of buying billboard advertising on Times Square and use the money to send a contingent of their followers to Mecca or some other Muslim center of worship with the same message about myths. It is likely they would not come back alive, if at all, but we would have a little less bah-humbug for one Christmas season. Who coined the phrase, less is more? More so, just how seriously do they take their message, if it's good for the goose is it good for the 1.5 billion Muslims who haven't heard it as yet?

It's a two-fer.  You get nonsensical dribblings about "belief", with a hefty dose of anti-Muslim rhetoric (with a  bonus swipe at the Jews; since Adolf von Harnack a century ago, "New Testament Christianity" has been a code word for anti-Semitism).  God, save us from people who claim to believe in you!

Except, alas, the folks who don't believe in God are almost as stupid.  Writing at Religion Dispatches, Anthony Pinn insists that, with the massacre at Newtown, CT, we now have definitive proof that God is now dead.  To help us slower types along, he even titles the piece, "God's Obituary: A Humanist Response To Mass Murder".

I am not describing the loss of faith, but rather the limits of faith in the face of tragedy. What is so important, what is so impressive, during this tragedy is not the faithful appeals to God but rather the collective human effort to comfort the suffering and to remember the value of human life.

Trying both to resolve such tragedies and keep God on the throne actually impedes our ability to process this misery. The appeal to God’s logic offers a type of cosmic cover that is difficult to remove. Looking to God and trying to grasp the workings of the divine mind actually arrests our ability to understand the deeply human nature of these acts of violence. There is no justification; there is no larger logic—no theologically exposed silver lining. This misery is all too human—the imposition of an individual’s twisted will on others with deadly consequences. Appeal to God doesn’t fix this; it doesn’t explain it. 

At best we might suggest that God “dropped the ball”—failed to do what a loving God is suppose to do. Instead, it seems to me, as we read the stories of the victims we are also reading God’s obituary. By this I mean that such extreme human tragedy makes it impossible to talk about God in any useful way.

Really?  It's only now occurring to Anthony Pinn, after a century that has seen evil on such a massive scale that to contemplate it could drive one mad, that many of the ways we try to speak about God in the face of such human misery are miserable failures?  Not to mention all the centuries before this, in which suffering, pain, oppression and death were such a feature of the human social landscape as to be invisible; surely Pinn  is not suggesting that only now, in the aftermath of this particular event, can we finally put paid to the Christian God, over a century after Nietzsche insisted the "we" had killed God.  Except, alas, that's precisely what he's saying.

These profound moments of tragedy slowly kill God, making it so difficult, if not useless, to speak of God in response to misery. Instead we are invited to silence. Deep silence, in which we struggle for human resolve to confront human problems. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying we should say nothing, that we should do nothing. I am not suggesting that complacency is the proper response, nor am I arguing that these events should be ignored. Rather, I am proposing silence concerning God, silence concerning efforts to make things better through theological twist and turns, and through the revamping of experience to fit religious categories and religious tradition. 

A humanistic or non-theistic response to the misery like that encountered in Newtown centers the loss of life’s integrity, is deeply sensitive to the damage done to the collective fabric of life. And, it holds humans accountable without the cosmic aid that never seems to come. This is not to say that humanists have all the answers. Rather, in light of human tragedy, humanists might offer better questions during these challenging times, as well as a space for wrestling with these questions free of cosmic justifications—and a God clearly missing in action. 

I write this not to deny comfort for those who have been directly and indirectly touched by this unspeakable act of violence. Mine is an effort to acknowledge and respect grief without so quickly pushing to find some reason behind such tragedy. This loss of life is really beyond our limited human language. The loss experienced by those families, by those associated with the school, and by the collective American and human family is so intense, so absurd, so real that it calls for our full humanity beyond any talk of God.

You want to know what I find really horrible about this particular piece?  It isn't the atheism, about which I couldn't care less.  It's exploiting the pain and suffering not just of the those living in Newtown but all Americans to push an idiotic agenda that has nothing at all to do with comforting those in pain or seeking to prevent others from suffering such pain in the future.  There's nothing constructive here, even less comfort.  All there is, really, is the confident announcement that human suffering disproves the existence of the Christian God so we should all just shut up and live like Anthony Pinn.  Who reminds me of many a college sophomore who suddenly discovers the world is a cruel place and that many of the responses of people of faith and earnest intent fall far short of adequate.

So, I'll leave them to it.  Let them argue it out.  Me, I'm going to continue to keep Christmas in my own way, while simultaneously working, again in my own way, to prevent not just future Newtowns, but future Websters and future corner-of-the-streets, and future husband/boyfriend-kills-wife/girlfriend-in-jealous-rage and future child-finds-Dad's-gun-and-kills-friend/sibling/self.  As St. Thomas said of his own work, stuff like that above  is all straw.

Christmas II: It's Something New

So Lisa and I were watching the movie The Nativity Story yesterday.  Being who we are, we stopped it at several points and talked about things that occurred to us.  After Mary returns from Elizabeth's, obviously pregnant, she and her parents and Joseph are in an intense confrontation.  Mary sticks to her guns, that she has not had sex but is pregnant by Divine love.  I turned to Lisa and said, "Isn't it funny?"

"What's that?" she asked, stopping the movie.

"OK.  These people all say they believe in God, right?  And God says, 'I'm going to do stuff.'  Then, God comes along and does something and no one believes it."

"Isn't that the way it always is?" Lisa asks.

That's why she's the pastor and I'm not.

It goes all the way back to Moses, really.  Moses encounters the burning bush and, after hemming and hawing, demands a sign.  The answer from the bush is, to our later ears, a wonderful example of God getting more than a little impatient.  In essence, the answer is, "You want a sign?  I'll give you a sign.  Get busy doing what I told you to do, then come back here for more instructions."

Now, just as with Moses, so, too, with Mary and Joseph.  There aren't any details.  Mary, remember, is a single woman for whom becoming pregnant is not only a cultural and social disgrace but a crime.  As told in St. Matthew's Gospel, Joseph is well within his rights to accuse her of adultery and have her stoned, but demonstrating more character than most people then or now, decides not to do so.  He will quietly release her from the vows they shared.  Only then does an angel come in a dream and tell him the story we read in St. Luke's Gospel.  After that, he took her to his home.  In the film, Joseph comes to Mary and tells her of his dream and his decision to raise the child as his own.  Mary tells Joseph it won't endear him to the rest of Nazareth.  And, indeed, the rest of the townspeople look upon both of them with disgust.  You can almost see the thought-balloons above the women when they look at Mary: "Whore."  Joseph's friends and co-workers look at him like he's lost his mind, taking this tramp in to his house.  As they're leaving Nazareth for Bethlehem, the people in town watch with disgust as they travel together, and Joseph turns to Mary and he says, "They're going to miss us."

Like Moses, neither Joseph nor Mary get any instructions on dealing with the kinds of social opprobrium heaped upon them.  Like Moses, neither Joseph nor Mary are told how to raise this child, what kind of instruction he is to receive, or much of anything else.  In a place and time where many children died young, there aren't any guarantees he won't catch some dread illness and die.  In a place and time where children are taken from families for any number of reasons, there are no guarantees he won't be ripped from their home, sold to slavery perhaps or some other dread end.  All Mary and Joseph get is the notification the child Mary is carrying is the Son of God.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I'm no fan of the word "miracle".  I'm not even sure how anyone would define it, understand it, or recognize it if confronted by such an event.  There isn't much talk of "miracles" in the Bible.  There is, however, a whole lot of talk of God doing something new.  We are so used to the Christmas story I think it's easy to overlook the astounding new thing God is doing here.  I had an exchange with an old and dear friend yesterday.  He told me of St. Bernard's commentary upon the story in Luke, chapter 1, after the Annunciation, as we all wait for Mary's reply: "Let humility be bold!  Let modesty be confident!"

In the face of the astounding reality that she is to carry and bear the Son of God, the One promised and hoped for for centuries, St. Bernard calls for an act of faith that should be our own.  First and foremost - hear the Word from God and believe it.  It is real.  This thing that's happening, it isn't some weird or outlandish event.  A young woman is carrying a child.  How ordinary!  This young woman professes this child came to be through the power of the Spirit of God.  Let us celebrate what God is doing!

In the midst of all this ordinariness, God is doing something new.  We should be bold in our humility, confident in our humility, and even faithful in our materialism and hear the Word of God doing something new here and now in all the humdrum events of our everyday lives.  You want a sign?  You want a miracle?  Look at the pregnant lady.  Watch the folks in the stores and shopping malls.  See the crowds milling around the airports and bus terminals.  These are your signs.  Here are your miracles.  It is for this and these that Mary faced not just humiliation and rejection but death because she said, "Yes," to that most outlandish thing: God's messenger telling her she was to have a child.

A merry Christmas to all of you and each of you, your families and friends, and the whole world.

Advent IV: Hiding In Plain Sight

And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.-John 3:19-21

A great theme of our national life this past year has been the question of reality.  I realize that's hard to believe that a nation not well known for dwelling on metaphysical issues has spent quite a bit of time arguing about what is real and what is not real.  Yet, it's true.

In this election year in particular, although the discussion spread far beyond politics, we have spent almost as much time talking about what constitutes reality as we have our preference for particular policies.  In particular in the aftermath of the election, when it became clear that at least some partisans had not just bought but embraced a view of reality that was contrary to fact, we argued amongst ourselves over the whole question of fact and reality and perception and that poor, tired, overused truth.

Which is why I'm so fond of Richard Rorty.  Too often misunderstood - neo-metaphysician David Weissman once chided Rorty's claim of "anti-realism" by insisting the claim boiled down to pretending there is no snow while one is freezing to death; I have never quite known whether Weissman was being deliberately obtuse or really is that stupid - Rorty's position can be summed up in simple terms: common sense.  Why worry about the foundations of existence or the nature of how we know things or whether there's some deep connection between the way "things really are" and the way we human beings "know" them?  For Rorty, the provenance of the answers to these questions isn't philosophy, but science, a way of understanding the world that is remarkably successful in figuring out the answers to these questions in a practical way.  For Rorty, the only thing philosophy should concern itself with are questions of how we live with one another, and how to do that in a way that doesn't involve pain and suffering.

Rorty's dismissal of so much of the Western philosophical project is rooted in a kind of silly, gesturing obviousness.  Of course the things we see and hear are real.  In an age after Darwin, we have the explanation to the hoary old problem of the "correspondence" between the world around us and our perception of it.  Of course human beings are constituted in such a way that they can figure out the world; how else could we have survived as a species?

Yet we have been living through a time when claims about the world become matters of contention.  We find ourselves as a people engaged in discussions involving the constitution of the world, what reality is and in not, and whether some choose to believe it possible to live in worlds that are, to put it in shorthand, self-constructed.  And the discussion continues, sad to say.  The refusal to grasp the common sense idea that the world is, and is as it is, certainly creates fodder for hilarious and frustrating internet dialogue.

There is, however, something more sinister at work.  There are those who would deliberately create confusion about the whole question of reality.  The "debate" over global warming is a marvelous case in point.  Most global warming deniers are, I am convinced, well aware they are snake-oil salesmen, handing out patent medicines to people desperately wanting to believe it really can't be true we are in need of radical action to make the world habitable for human communities.  There are, however, millions at least here in the United States, who firmly and honestly believe the whole thing is a hoax, a sinister plot being executed for any number of reasons.  That they are being lied to is obvious; that they accept the lie is sad, to say the least.

Like the people who insist that Pres. Obama is a socialist when socialists are more critical of the President - because their criticism is rooted in fact - than any on the right, your run-of-the-mill global warming denier is the victim not just of tendentious fraud.  They are buying a lie sold to them by people who know it's a lie.  Those who lie in this way, and then lie about their lying, are like those Jesus speaks about above.  They are people who love the darkness.  They run from the light, deny the world that surrounds them, a world that proves their lie again and again.  In the darkness, they tell one another they are in control.  In the darkness, they tell one another that it is possible to create confusion about things that should be obvious; by doing so, they gain power.

These folks were dragged in to the light the night of November 6, when the silky comfort of their alternate reality came crashing around them.  Having convinced millions of Americans not only that Mitt Romney would win, but win big, when the exact opposite occurred - an event whose probability had been tracked for months in public, in ways anyone could understand - many stood around and asked, "Why?"  So, too, as we watch event after event, whether it's drought or hurricane or record heat or whole communities swallowed by a rising ocean, people are starting to wake up and demand an answer to one simple question: Why?

The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel knew the answer: For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  The light of the world, the Incarnate Son of God, is the same light, we are told in the Revelation to St. John, that will one day beam out of the new temple, filling the new heavens and new earth.  There is no hiding from this light.  I picture it as a light so all-pervasive there are not even shadows; it is everywhere, all at once, just as the God who creates and creates anew is.

Yet, we live in a time when it is still possible to hide in shadow.  If one is clever enough, one can move around, continuing to conceal oneself from the light of love that is the Son of God.  Like Adam in the garden, however, God demands to know why we are hiding.  We cannot hide forever; even less can we hide if we are pretending the world is other than the way it is.  It isn't divine intervention that brings to light the multifarious lies that do so much damage.  It's reality that dope-smacks the creators of unreality.

As we prepare ourselves for the blessed event of the Incarnation, we should remember that the light that shines from the manger of Bethlehem will one day fill all creation.  In faith, we can follow the light and see all the ways some wish to hide, refusing to come to the light because they know the things they are doing are wrong.  Let us gather together in Bethlehem knowing we too carry darkness within us.  Let us take it to the light so that the baby lying in the feeding trough can remind us that he came to this world not to condemn us, but that all of us, the whole world, would be saved through him.