Category Archives: Pop culture

Rehearsal

I just finished with a wedding rehearsal. As a minister, I think wedding rehearsals are a blast — much more fun than the actual wedding. People at a wedding rehearsal tend to be more relaxed and laid back, whereas most everyone gets at least a little bit tense at the actual wedding ceremony. Tonight’s wedding rehearsal was delightfully relaxed; I actually got time to chat with many of the people in the wedding party, and if I knew both Spanish and ASL in addition to English I would have had time to talk to most of the people in the wedding party.

Tomorrow, the actual wedding ceremony will go by in a blur; the only time I’ll get to talk with the bride and groom or anyone in the wedding party is when I tell them where to stand or what to do. Nope, wedding rehearsals are much more fun for ministers than the actual wedding.

Anti-intellectualism in the U.S.

In this blog post, Julius Lester articulates something I’ve been thinking about recently. Lester says:

There are many who wonder if a black man can be elected president. That is not my fear. I wonder if someone who as intelligent as he is can be elected president.
Emphasis mine.

The United States is an anti-intellectual country these days. Where the prejudice against intellectuals comes from I don’t know; but I know it’s there. I have many quarrels with Obama (especially his repudiation of his liberal church), but I acknowledge that he is a politician who does not feel compelled to break things down into 30 second sound bites devoid of all nuance. He does not pander to the lowest common denominator. He is willing to be intelligent in public. An intellectual politician? — this is almost inbelievable.

Julius Lester believes that Obama will get elected “if the young vote in unprecedented numbers”; otherwise, older voters who “resent his intelligence” could keep him from getting elected. Certainly, the young adults I know are more open to nuance than older generations. Certainly, United States generation who are just a little bit older than I have been notable since the 1960s for letting rigid ideology trump intelligence (as is true of George W. Bush), or worse yet for having no deeply-felt idealism to guide their intelligence (as seemed true of Bill Clinton).

But, cynic that I am, I doubt that the anti-intellectual climate of the United States is moderating in the younger generations. But what do you think? Do you sense more toleration for intellectuals in your part of the United States these days — or less?

Utah Phillips is dead

Bruce “Utah” Phillips died on on Friday. Commenter Dan Schatz tells us:

Sadly, we lost Utah on Friday. He died peacefully in his sleep next to his wife. Utah had been a founding member of his [Unitarian Universalist] fellowship in Nevada City, CA, and though he often made light of his UUism, it was extremely important to him. He was sometimes known as “U. Utah Phillips” (a take-off on the country singer T. Texas Tyler); a few weeks ago I joked with him that it stood for “Unitarian.” “Well, you figured it out,” he said.

The various benefit concerts and other projects that were planned for Utah are still going ahead, as a memorial and a way to make sure Utah’s family remains well supported. If one of the concerts is in your area, I advise you to go to it. If you see a Utah Phillips CD, pick it up — the songs will astound you with their beauty.

Thanks for letting us all know, Dan. On the the Utah Phillips Web site, his son Duncan reports:

Utah’s wish was to not be embalmed and laid to rest in a plain, hand made wooden coffin to expedite his return to the earth, which we will honor. He will be laid to rest in the cemetery down the road from his home in Nevada City.

Ecologically sensible, just as you’d expect — what a good last act of a profoundly caring life. As soon as I finish typing this, I think I’ll go find a Utah Phillips CD and listen to it. Obituaries and press notices after the jump… Continue reading →

Churches as over-55 communities

Mr. Crankypants loves Julius Lester. On his blog, he wrote this delightfully snarky post that sounds like it’s about politics, but is really about generational differences. Writing about Hillary Clinton, Lester points out that “her ideas are old.” In of itself this is not an original thought, but Lester goes on to add: “She’s 60, and she sounds like she hasn’t had a new thought in the past 40 years. I say this as someone who is 9 years older than she is, so I know an old idea when I hear it.”

Mr. Crankypants smells a new generation gap. The Baby Boom generation is so doggone big that they wind up spending most of their time talking to one another, not to younger people, and avoiding new ideas. And because they are such a big market, capitalist culture caters to their every whim to the point where they can pretty much insulate themselves from many new ideas in the world. As someone who lives at the tail end of the Baby Boom (being a few months older than Barack Obama), Mr. Crankypants knows this to be true — if he wanted to, he could spend all his time hanging out with people a few years older than himself and talking about the great music of the 1960s and the great literature of the 1960s and the great political movements of the 1960s, etc., none of which have ever been equaled, blah blah blah. (Actually, Mr. C. hates the 1960s, but you get the idea.) Baby Boomers tend to be full of old ideas, even when they think they are full of new ideas.

Not that anyone at this blog is much of a supporter of Barack Obama. It’s tough to get thrilled about a rhetorician who is further to the right than, and probably just as authoritarian as, Richard Nixon; and who doesn’t seem to understand what it means to be a member of a church to boot. But this isn’t a post about politics, this is a post that uses politics as an example of this new generation gap.

For another example of how how this new generation gap seems to work, we need look no further than racism. Julius Lester has this to say about Hillary Clinton: “Even worse, however, is her pandering to white racism has made us a far more racially divided nation than we were before her march to the White House was stopped by Barack Obama. I cannot ever forgive her for that.” But it’s not Hillary Clinton alone who tends to pander to racist tendencies — the Baby Boom generation as a whole tends to do the same thing. It seems to Mr. Crnakypants that many Baby Boomers (of all skin colors) believe that American racism got solved in the 1960s, between the Civil Rights movement (if they’re white) or the Black Power movement (if they’re black). Those old ideas tend to miss the fact that since 1980 racism has mutated and gotten more virulent, and it no longer responds to the old cures. Thus in Unitarian Universalism, Baby Boomers are still using second wave feminist techniques to try to fight racism, without seeing that second wave feminist techniques like consciousness-raising and identity groups were designed for a racism that no longer exists (nor do they see the class bias inherent in those techniques, but that’s another conversation).

And don’t assume this new generation gap (no capitals) is like the old Generation Gap of the 1960s, because they’re utterly different. The younger generations today aren’t bothering with open rebellion, as allegedly happened in the 1960s, they’re just creating new forms and ideas without bothering to talk much to the Baby Boomers.

So how is this new generation gap playing out in liberal churches? The Baby Boomers are in firm control of our local churches and our denomination, now that the GI Generation has started dying off. Baby Boomers are setting up the churches to suit their needs and their worldview, with the result that younger generations are staying away in droves. Our churches are starting to look like those over-55 communities where children and younger adults are allowed to visit but not stay for very long. This is perhaps most obviously manifested in the intensive efforts to create “young adult programming,” which sounds good on paper but in practice functions pretty much like those restrictive covenants in over-55 communities.

Mr. Crankypants is thinking about making stickers that say, “This Church Is An Over-55 Community,” the idea being that you could buy such a sticker and slap it on your church’s sign when no one is looking. Truth in advertising, don’t you know.

Overtones

On Sunday afternoon at the New England Folk Festival, I went to hear a small choral group perform. I had been looking forward to hearing them; but I had to leave after one song. They sang into microphones, even though the room was fairly small and reasonably resonant. I couldn’t pick out which person was singing which line of the music, since the sound of actual voices was completely swallowed up in the sound from the loudspeakers, and I found this disconcerting.

Worse, microphones and loudspeakers remove something from the sound of singing. The previous day, I had been in the same room to hear a six-voice a capella men’s group sing folk songs and sacred music from the Republic of Georgia. They did not use microphones. As a result, when they hit certain chords, you could hear the high overtones ringing in the room. These sounds had a physical effect on my body — you can feel such harmony in your body. Amplifiers and loudspeakers strip away most of the overtones, thus making listening to singing a more passive experience.

(All this might help explain why I dislike amplified church choirs.)

Mr. Crankypants stimulates the economy

Last month, Mr. Crankypants received a notice from the Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service. It began:

“We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this new law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,200 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.”

What a great idea this is! When our economic stimulus checks arrive, Congress and the President know that we will all go out and spend all that money on consumer goods, thus stimulating the economy right out of the recession into which we are currently descending. Now, probably Mr. Crankypants should spend his economic stimulus check as follows:

  • $278 to pay off the doctor’s visit for bronchitis back in March. (Mr. Crankypants can only afford a crummy HMO-with-deductible these days, which means every doctor’s office results in a big bill in addition to the already insanely high monthly health insurance premiums.)
  • $100 put aside as a gasoline emergency fund. (With gas prices climbing up towards $4.00 a gallon, and no end in sight, it seems like good idea to have a little reserve fund on hand in case things get really tight.)
  • The remainder put into retirement savings. (What with rising food prices and rising natural gas prices over the past few months, it has been impossible to put as much money into retirement savings as usual.)

But Mr. Crankypants knows that none of these expenditures will help stimulate the economy out of the recession. Consumer goods! That’s what we’re supposed to buy! Our economy runs on consumerism! Being a true-blue patriotic American, here’s what Mr. C. will purchase to stimulate the economy:

  • One month trip to California, to clear out the last of the bronchitis.
  • Brand-new hybrid car that gets 50 mpg, to beat those high gas prices.
  • Vacation home on Nantucket Island, to provide retirement security.

With all these great consumer purchases, Mr. C.’s economic stimulus purchases will total more than $600. Surely Congress and the President understand that they are dealing with a true patriot, and so will fund the balance of these purchases. Why, if every American spent as much money as Mr. Crankypants, the recession would be over! Hooray for Mr. Crankypants!

True confessions

As a child, I was not particularly nice. From about age 8 to about age 16, I thought practical jokes were funny. I was particularly evil on April Fool’s Day. My April Fool’s Day “jokes” included the following:

  • On the kitchen sink, taped down the handle of the spray thingie, and aimed it so that when anyone turned on the main faucet they would get sprayed.
  • At breakfast time, added blue food coloring to the milk. Just enough so that they didn’t actually notice it until they poured the milk onto their cereal, at which point they suddenly realized everything was light blue. (N.B. I have never put milk on my cereal.)
  • Put light coating of Vaseline on the toilet seat of the bathroom used primarily by my older sister. Resulting slipperiness blamed on my younger sister, who was then only two years old, who was assumed to have been playing with diaper rash ointment.

My own memories of my practical jokes fail at this point, mostly because I’d just as soon forget what a jerk I was.

So now it’s true confessions time:– What April Fool’s Day jokes, of which you now repent, have you played on others?

The Alignment Game

Hey kids! Want a fun new game that allows you to make moral judgments, while minimizing the depression caused by the presidential primary season here in the United States? “The Alignment Game” gives us a way to judge the moral and personal characteristics of any politician, and have fun at the same time!

To play this game, you place politicians in one of nine possible moral/personal alignments. There are two axes: Lawful through Neutral to Chaotic, and Good through Neutral to Evil, with the following brief definitions (which I stole from this source):

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit…. People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.

Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. Chaotic characters follow their consciences, resent being told what to do, favor new ideas over tradition, and do what they promise if they feel like it. Someone who is neutral with respect to law and chaos has a normal respect for authority and feels neither a compulsion to obey nor a compulsion to rebel. She is honest but can be tempted into lying or deceiving others.

When you put everything together, you get a grid like this (links go to the DnD Wiki definitions):

Lawful Good | Neutral Good | Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral | True Neutral | Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil | Neutral Evil | Chaotic Evil

Now it’s time to play! (1) Pick a politician, assign him or her to one of these nine alignments, and explain why you assigned them the way you did. (2) The real fun comes when someone else disagrees with you — say, you’re a Barack Obama supporter and you assign Hillary Clinton to the Lawful Neutral alignment, and a Clinton supporter says, “No way is she Neutral, she’s Good!” (3) Reveal your own alignment.

Safe Example: George W. Bush is Lawful Evil. He is clearly Evil because he is willing to take or do whatever he wants without worrying about whether or not he is hurting another human being — and he is clearly Lawful, because his actions must conform closely to his own internal code of conduct. My own alignment is Chaotic Good, thus diametrically opposed to this Lawful Evil person.

Scoring: (1) You get points for creative explanation of why you’ve assigned someone to a given alignment. (2) You also get points for riling up other people. (3) For bonus points, reveal your own alignment.

Scoring for Safe Example above: Two points for explanation (totally ripped off from the System Reference Document for DnD). Zero points for riling up another person (Rush Limbaugh is not a person). Five points for actually following the rules and revealing my own alignment (whereas if I were Lawful Good, I only would have gotten one point for following the rules).

Now it’s your turn! Play The Alignment Game at home, at work, at church, or even in the comments below! Survive the appallingly bad selection of presidential candidates by Having Fun!

Based on an idea from Charlie’s Diary.