ALAN writes:

You quoted remarks by Allan Bloom on the vile noise called “rock music.”

More than 60 years ago, Frank Sinatra said rock and roll music is “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear…..  It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.  It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics…..”

Forty years ago, Professor Dwight Murphey wrote:

        “…..the reality with regard to outdoor rock concerts is that they cater, at least in the cultural milieu of the past few years, to potential audiences that include to a significant degree an element of society that has very little respect for the rights of others, for authority, for the police, and indeed for the basic values that cement together a civilized community.”

      [Dwight D. Murphey, “No Outdoor Rock Concerts in Chisholm Creek Park.”]

All three men were right.

The most significant thing about “rock music” is not that it is vile, ugly, filthy noise, although it is; not that it represents anti-civilized values, although it does; and not that it is intended to promote degeneracy, although it is and does.  The most remarkable thing is that older generations of Americans agreed to accommodate it as easily as they did.

I can remember a time when Americans could shop in retail stores and markets, dine in restaurants, wait in doctor’s offices, do their banking, attend sporting events, and walk or ride along city streets without having the noise called “rock music” imposed on them.  That time is long past.  Nearly all such civilized settings are now shattered by the noise called “rock music.” (more…)

"[R]OCK music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire — not love ... but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored ... rock gives children, on a silver plate, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up ... Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse ... Never was there such an art form directed so exclusively to children... The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for the old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement."  -- Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, pp. 73-74 [quoted here]

THE heavy metal rock musician Jon Bon Jovi is now an academic star of the Ivy League. On Monday he was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the University of Pennsylvania, joining other famous scholars, such as Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey and Kanye West, who have all in recent years won advanced degrees from American universities or colleges. The university explains:

Since forming in 1983, Bon Jovi has sold more than 130 million albums, earning status as one of the world’s best-selling musical groups, and has performed in more than 50 countries for over 37 million fans.

Oh my! He has millions of fan. Give that man a doctorate. He deserves it.

Bon Jovi once expressed his credo:

“I wanted to rebel against anything and everything, and it happened that I was able to do it by playing rock and roll in a band.” (Metal Edge, Aug. 1987, p. 12).

What a heady message for students who have just stepped off (perhaps) the treadmill of competitive education, where for more than 15 years they have toiled and finally won the privilege of saying, “I’m a graduate of Penn” (without ever finding out what life means.) And in all those years, they never could rebel against the demanding prerogatives of relentlessly competitive education, which strangely and consistently avoids answering the interesting question of what life means aside from “working hard and playing hard.” Thanks, Bon Jovi, for rebelling for us and making us feel like rebels when we’re not. Give that man a doctorate.

The more demanding, expensive and unforgiving Higher Ed becomes the more it celebrates empty gestures of rebellion and idols of nihilism like Bon Jovi. Interesting how Penn graduates tolerate this insult to intellectual accomplishment — don’t celebrities have enough awards of their own? But then they don’t teach too much strenuous thinking at Penn. Increasingly, to be a scholar is to be a propaganda artist, a political agitator or an entertainer.

Awarding a heavy metal musician an honorary doctorate in music is like awarding Satan an honorary doctorate in theology. Here is Bon Jovi engaged in heavy scholarship. But you have probably heard his achievements playing loudly on the speakers at your local pharmacy, supermarket, mall, gym or gas station. Corporate America loves to inject this rebel’s music into your veins! Perhaps you are even one of his 37 million rebels.

“I ain’t gonna do what I don’t want to,” says Bon Jovi in his song “Have a Nice Day.” Slaves like to think that too. (more…)

PEOPLE who are married and raising children sometimes look on those who live alone with feelings of envy or superiority. The single do not have the stresses they have. Boy, things must be easy for them! They don’t have to wake in the middle of the night to feed babies or drive children to all kinds of activities or do much laundry. They don’t have certain daily irritations that come with living with others. They don’t have to work to understand a spouse. Their bills are much smaller too. Why do they need to worry much about anything?

The single life is in some ways easier, but the single person who through choice or circumstance is single for many years or for life has hardships that are not often recognized. The loneliness is recognized but not other daily burdens.

The single have the hardship of worrying about everything themselves. Their future stretches before them and they alone are responsible for it. In a way, they never have time off because they can’t say to someone else, “You take care of it for now.”

They may have close friends with whom they share their thoughts, but will those close friends be there to make them soup when they are sick? A single person may live in a small apartment, but it is still a household that has to be maintained. And he can’t pass the burden on to someone else. There’s no one else to take the car to the shop or wait for the appliance repair man to show up.

I have noticed that people who are single for a long time are often very focused on the necessities of life and it’s understandable that they are. If they lost a job, it would matter even more. Sometime their friends may expect them to have lots of extra time to do things for them, and they may have the time. But the business of survival may be too consuming for that. If you have a single friend and sense a shadow of anxiety, this may be why. The independence of modern life is especially concentrated for them. If you feel as if you have no time off because you are busy raising children, remember that your friend has no time off from his own survival.

For 29 years, my husband and I have lived next door to a man who lives by himself. (Not voluntarily; his wife left him decades ago.) He’s now getting pretty old. These last few days I have noticed that his grass is uncut and he appears to be away because there are no lights on at night. His absence has made me marvel at all the years he has cut the grass himself and cleaned the gutters and paid the bills — and just survived on his own. He has always been pleasant and uncomplaining. He has never once invited pity.

No one has been a burden to him — but he has not been a burden to anyone.

And there’s something heroic in that. (more…)

  FOR thousands of years, music and drugs have been used to induce trance-like states, mob ecstasy and demonic experiences that are seen by the initiated as forms of higher consciousness. It started with tribal drumming. It has been reborn in rock and techno. Today music and drugs are channels for controlled rebellion. The Satanic forces in this world want you to hate your own soul.

  "WHAT we call death (separation of soul & body) is something temporary, i. e., until the resurrection at the Last Judgment. The real death is the death of the soul through mortal sin, a death that has no end if we happen to depart from the present life in such a state. The reason why grave sin is called 'mortal' is because it takes away the supernatural life of the soul. The greatest evil is sin. The only evil is sin. The consequences of sin are eternal." --- Fr. Nicolas Despósito

FROM another good piece, this one on the subject of aristocracy by Michael Watson, at The Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute for the Study of Social Credit:

The dictionary description for ‘aristocracy’ means rule or leadership by the best and most virtuous. Social classes and ruling cultural elites are both a natural and necessary development in human societies and communities, even in societies that claim to be egalitarian, such as liberal democratic and communist regimes. Historic examples of this can be found in ancient Rome with the paterfamilias, in medieval Europe with knights and nobility, in ancient Japan with the samurai and daimyo classes or in the case of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, their traditional tribal chiefs and elders. In all these aristocratic hierarchies and societies, the merchant bourgeois classes whose main focus is on the accumulation of money and speculation with the same were ranked amongst the lower classes and subjected to that of the ruling aristocracy in the form of a nobility, monarchical dynasty, or warrior class, whose main goal was the fulfilling of one’s duty towards the community or family, the development of cultural values, or the maintenance of familial honour or posterity, rather than just mere accumulation of money and commercial pursuits. But with the advent of mass mania for equality and democratic levelling in the last century, the rule by the aristocratic class and its attendant values have been replaced by rule of the bourgeois merchant class and high finance masquerading as a façade of political and social freedom and equality, since no human society can function without some sort of hierarchy (whether it be for good or evil). Famous English writer C.S. Lewis elaborated this point perfectly in his 1943 “The Spectator” essay titled “Equality”: “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, atheletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison”.[ii] (more…)

SO instead of having a financial system that simply reflects, in a one-for-one correspondence, the production capacity and the flow of real wealth, we have a financial system that systematically underestimates them and that transforms money into a ‘rare commodity’ and finance into the determining factor. The symbol of our wealth, and of our ability to produce it, becomes more important than the reality of our wealth. And finance, as an institution, becomes master instead of servant, because, in order to overcome the artificial shortcomings and constraints that finance creates, we must appeal to finance on its terms and in accordance with its interests. This artificially induced dependence reverses the order that ought to exist between the financial system and the physical or real economy. In sum, the financial system is not a humble servant of the physical economy, of what we need, and of what we want to do with the physical economy. Instead, the physical economy, the real economy, is subordinated to the financial representation of the real economy. And that's the general problem with the economy.  If we were to imagine a dog representing the real economy and its tail representing the financial system, the current financial system, because it is structurally dishonest, allows the financial tail to shake the dog of the real economy. But this is a complete perversion of the due or correct order, the order required for healthy functioning. In this order, the dog…

FROM The Gatestone Institute: The bad news is that it appears to be one of many such operations in Asia dealing in the sale of women to China, where girls are a desirable commodity, due to decades of child-bearing restrictions and the apparent mass abortion of female fetuses. As Human Rights Watch reported last December: "The woman shortage is having harmful consequences in China and sometimes in neighboring countries... Traffickers prey on vulnerable women and girls, offering jobs in, and transport to, China. Then they sell them, for around $3,000 to $13,000, to Chinese families struggling to find brides for their sons. Once purchased, women and girls are typically locked in a room and raped repeatedly, with the goal of getting them pregnant quickly so they can provide a baby for the family. After giving birth, some are allowed to escape—but forced to leave their children behind. "There is evidence of similar patterns of bride migration and trafficking in Cambodia, North Korea, and Vietnam, and more may emerge from other countries bordering China. Importing women doesn't solve the shortage—it spreads it."

  WE LIVE in a world of noise. Some of it is outrageously called "music." John Playford (1623-1686) was an English music publisher and bookseller who collected the melodies and steps for many English country dances. These lovely dances continue to inspire. Here is one from his enormously popular book, The English Dancing-Master, which originally included 104 dances and tunes set to the fiddle. It went through many subsequent editions and expansions. Country dances of that time usually involved rows of couples walking or skipping energetically through maneuvers, with help from a caller. What a blast that must have been. This tune, performed by Les Witches, is a perfect May dance, and an antidote to the ugly noise you may have encountered today. Perhaps it will for a few moments erase your cares. Perhaps you will even imagine yourself dancing. Anyway, this is as close to rock and roll as you're going to get here. Here's another one if you really want to let go.  

ALAN writes:

The water is high on rivers in and around St. Louis. One day this week I walked along a path by a waterway and came upon a duck near water’s edge with eight ducklings meandering around her. I paused to watch them and stood motionless. They saw me but swam closer and then proceeded to explore the grass just a few yards from where I stood. They gave a fine show at no cost.

Several days earlier I sat on a bench in a green area with a lake and a fountain in suburban St. Louis. It was once called Audubon Park. Ducks and geese are always in evidence there. Three pairs of geese were swimming about on the lake. No doubt they were eyeing me, a solitary figure seated on that bench.

Within a few minutes they came closer and then walked up to the grass at lake’s edge. They made themselves comfortable not more than three yards from where I sat. For half an hour, they cleaned and preened themselves, sometimes balancing exquisitely on one leg.  Occasionally they talked with their companions across the lake.

They did not talk to me, nor I to them.  The only communication was telepathic. They knew I was no menace to them. We paid each other the supreme expression of respect:  We left each other alone. Then they sat down to relax. Some of them took a nap or semi-nap, resting their heads on their bodies but angled in such a way that they could keep one eye on the mysterious creature wearing a fedora and watching them quietly from his perch on that bench. Again: They put on a fine show at no cost. I have more respect for such birds than for 95 percent of the human race.

These are the kinds of things that most grown-ups ignore or dismiss as insignificant because they cannot abide activities that are not fast, loud, and flashy. Watching birds is definitely not fast, loud, or flashy. Children know better. Children find such things fascinating, and they are right.

Which leads me to the third ray of light:

Regarding the size of little children, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

           “The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels…..  When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature…..”

[The Defendant, Dodd, Mead, 1902, p. 116] (more…)

  SOME ARCHITECTS have informally submitted ideas for a new spire to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The New York Times reports: Mr. [Stephen] Barrett said “the most interesting” designs he had seen so far were those that involved opening up the roof and creating a new public space. Those included turning the structure into some kind of garden with trees, echoing the lattice of ancient timber beams that used to make up the cathedral’s attic and that were known as “the Forest.” “That process of democratizing space is something we like and have done before,” Mr. Barrett said, though he speculated that the weight of trees could be too much for the cathedral.

  SEEING that thy soul is the temple of God, in which He doth lodge, do thou keep it void of all other things for Him alone. For alone He desireth to find thee, alone without thoughts —  alone without desires — alone without thy own will. Seek not for crosses indiscreetly, without the counsel of thy ghostly father, but dispose thyself rather to suffer, for love of Him, whatsoever He may please, and how it shall please Him. Do not thy will, but let God’s Will be done in thee. Let thy will be untied on all sides, so that thou desire nothing. And if thou desire any thing, yet so desire it,  that, if it take not effect, thou be not therefore afflicted, but remain in good quiet as if thou hadst not desired it at all. Then shalt thou be free indeed. The Quiet Of The Soul, Father John de Bovilla.

FEMALE HIGH school athletes face the disturbing phenomenon of having to compete against boys. The girls don’t know what to do because it is now unacceptable to state the obvious, which is that there really is no such thing as “transgenderism.”

All this seems like a good reason to give up super-competitive, obsessive, femininity-ruining academic athletics, which make girls into pseudo-boys anyway.

It once was possible to be feminine and athletic. The best way to fight the insane superstition of “transgenderism” is to be a masculine man or a feminine woman.

(more…)