A Burning Ring Of Fire

Country music has been called the heartbeat of America. It should be called the cheatin' heart of America.

Cheaters are duplicitous two-timers and I believe that it is duplicitous to listen to and have a love of country music and be a Republican at the same time.

The Republican Party's platform is one of family values. They decry the lyrics of rap and pop music for it's treatment of women, it's glorification of sex, it's blatant promotion of drugs and alcohol.

Have you listened to country music lately?

One of the biggest sensations in country music history is Garth Brooks. He's a poster child for Middle America. Oklahoma City is his home. But take another look at his tunes and you might think he was a regular on MTV. His Greatest Hits album contains songs about "Friends in Low Places" who get drunk and crash a wedding, a trucker's obsessive crush on a teen girl in "Baton Rouge", and a high school boy who loses his virginity to a woman twice his age in "That Summer." Other songs glorify drinking such as "Two Pina Coladas", "Longneck Bottle", and "Beer Run" which also contains references to drinking and driving. Nice life lessons, Garth.

Oh, and congratulations on leaving your wife of thirteen years while on tour for Trisha Yearwood. Guess adultery's okay in your book.

Speaking of adultery, take a listen to the cross-over hit by Carrie Underwood: "He Better Think Next Time Before He Cheats." Think of country classics like "Your Cheatin' Heart", "Jolene", and "Lucille". For the sanctity-of-marriage crowd, the music doesn't seem to fit the belief system. The old joke goes that if you play country music backwards the dog comes back, the wife comes back.... If the Christian majority of red-state residents can't seem to keep their own marriages together then how can they have the audacity to claim that the only way to preserve marriage is to define it? How about practicing what ya'll preach?

Willie Nelson is one of the Kings of Country Music, famous for ditties such as "Whisky River" and "Whisky For My Men and Beer For My Horses." But here, too, is a man who is better known for getting high on the roof of the White House.

Take an hour and listen to a country-western music radio station and simply pay attention to the lyrics. You'll be surprised how equally irresponsible these songs are compared to a Top 20 station's music. So stop the "holier than thou" attitude, my red-state bible-thumpin' cowboy-hat-wearing pick-up truck-drivin' Coors Light- drinkin' friends, and just keep to the Lee Greenwood tunes. At least they're true to your cause.

I'm sorry, Jesus, you didn't make it through to the next round

Okay, I'll admit it: I watch, with unabashed enthusiasm, "So You Think You Can Dance."

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of sub-par reality/competition programs on the air. This one is different in that it puts the performances of professional dancers in the hands of professional judges. The contestants are put through paces that very few accomplished athletes could keep up with. The work is hard, artful, expressive, beautiful, and demanding. Each dancer striving to become one of the top twenty has pushed themselves beyond their limits and have had to reach deep within to find that extra push to get them over the competitive edge. They have acknowledged personal demons, friends and relatives as guideposts, tragedies that have given them second chances. A myriad of impetus has been expressed.

But I refuse to acknowledge that Jesus had anything to do with your making it to the next round.

Like many on the awards stage, a sobbing young lass, after being cut from the program, told the world that Jesus got her there.

"Excuse me, starving, beaten, homeless refugees of Darfur," says Jesus to his suffering flock. "I have to excuse myself to attend to a young attractive American girl and help her through a grueling dance competition on national television."

To think and claim that Jesus would belittle his own ministering to clear a path toward victory in a reality-TV competition is insulting to anyone who believes in Jesus in the first place.

In her acceptance speech at the 2007 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Award for Best Reality Show, Kathy Griffin, star of "My Life on the D-List", joked:

"A lot of people come up here, and they thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus...suck it, Jesus, this award is my God now!"

Crude? Yes. Truthful? Yes.

To assume that Jesus would take his attention away from real human suffering and calamity to focus his attention on one individual's drive toward self-promotion and recognition is beyond all definitions of ridiculous. If anything, these apostates are worshiping at the feet of false golden idols. If they were truly religious and believed that Jesus was the guiding force in their lives, they would not need a golden statue or a silver medal to represent their achievement. It is anathema to the teachings of Christianity and humility before God.

The reward for me, though, was knowing that Jesus was only half-heartedly interested in our young blonde friend. She didn't make it into the top twenty.

But Kathy Griffin's Life on the D List certainly made it into my top twenty...

The Prudish States of America

In order to fit in with the mindset of Americans, I have decided to start wearing big brass buckles on my shoes, you know, in the conservative fashion of the Purtians. Our country was founded by Calvinists and remains a religiously conservative nation. Proof of point: 20/20. I sat down to watch their special report on the Sistine Chapel and nearly fell off the couch at the first frames shown: "The following program features paintings containg nudity, viewer discretion advised." If ever there were an example of irony. The religious right has made such an impact on American culture that a television program about one of the holiest places on earth had to be pre-empted by a warning fueled by the prudishness of religious fanatics.

Mormons believe the larger the family, the greater chance of celestial salvation. Lots of kids comes from lots of sex. But heaven forbid we should actually show the penis on the sculpture of David, a piece of marble whose sole purpose is to exemplify the perfection of God's creation in Man. How do you build a bigger family without knowledge of sex? How can groups proclaim such a devotion to protecting the sanctity of life and the beauty of all God's creatures when they protest actually seeing the work of God in all it's glory, purely as art, and not as pornography. This was a program about an artist and his relationship with the Catholic Church. This was a program about an artist whose sole purpose in life was to wrought the beauty of the human form as tribute to God's great work, the creation of man. And now, a nation founded by pilgrims, devout of religion, have mutated into a nation ashamed of God's creation, all the while claiming to be speaking the will and intent of God. The hypocrisy of that singular warning at the beginning of the program was the single greatest example of the twisted nature of religious belief permeating this nation. It shows just how backward we as a people are. If we cannot be trusted to recognize art for what it is, then we have, indeed taken one step further toward George Orwell's vision of a Thought Police. When his book was celebrated in 1984, we laughed at how improbable his predictions were. Re-read it now, and it takes on a whole new meaning.

As a side note, I love a program like "Art With Sister Wendy", a discourse on art and art history, hosted by a NUN, showing the same pieces of work as the 20/20 special, has never received a bit of protest, but because a program on the Sistine Chapel was aired by "the liberal mainstream media", it was met with warnings and pre-emption.

The pilgrims left Europe to escape the hypocrisy of the ruling religious figures, only to have founded a new nation conceived in the same. I only hope my brass shoe buckles and big black hat won't offend. At least the Constitution allows me to carry a blunderbuss.....


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