Oswald is to Kennedy as Conspiracy Theories are to Theology

I have been reading and watching TV shows about JFK conspiracy theories. I tend to agree with those who say that Oswald definitely killed Kennedy, and he probably did it alone. He was a loner. Everything fits his acting alone as much as anything can be made to fit a conspiracy necessary to understand the act. What we struggle to accept is that a nobody could get away with killing a somebody, that someone with no power (other than what comes out of the barrel of a gun) can kill the most powerful leader in the world.  We don’t want to accept that this Oswald was a leftist, who killed Kennedy in Dallas, the center of the right wing world at the time. The FBI and the CIA did not want us to know that they were incompetent, or at least had missed something really important. We did not want to know that our politicians, the best and the brightest, were merely human and unable to protect the President, and unable to make sense of what had happened, and at a loss like the rest of us about the meaning of it all, or the lack of it. We learned not to trust politicians, media people, and experts. Fear of nuclear war, anxiety about Viet Nam and communist threats, concern about or for greater civil rights for Negroes had put us on edge. We didn’t know that the insubstantial charisma of the Kennedys was the only substance of our hope. (Then, Lyndon Johnson gave substance to both our hopes and fears.)

Believing in conspiracy theories was and is necessary for many, in order to make sense of the senseless and to force order on the essential randomness of the universe. That leads me to think of theology. Today I read in The Christian Century a creative interpretation of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians by N.T. Wright (who I think of as NT Wrong). He thinks it wonderful that Paul gave new meaning to the Schema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One”). He thinks it logical that Paul was defending monotheism by reading Jesus into the Schema as “Lord.” Sorry NT, you are making Jesus more than the revealer of God’s just reign; you are making Jesus divine. But hey, maybe that is no different than declaring him to be the unexpected expected Messiah. My point is that all theology, while it tries to put order on our thinking about what we know least about, is essentially speculation. It is reason applied to unreason and resulting mostly in continued discussion about the supernatural. Every conspiracy theory is talk about what might be. Coincidences are collected to prop it up. People will continue to believe in conspiracies as long as there are alternative ways to understand what happened, no matter how forced. People will continue to speak of deities as long as we remain in ignorance of total reality.

Auden said it well. It has yet to be said best, because he lived in a time supportive of belief as our own time is not. I understand that he disowned this poem; we cannot: September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

------ We are human, and that implies a great deal about our capabilities for good but also for ill, and it describes also our limitations. We can learn a lot about ourselves in reviewing the Kennedy assassination. We had reason to be shocked by that event, but we should not have been surprised by 911. Nor should we have responded by seeking revenge. If any of the conspiracy theories is accepted in truth, then retribution against someone or some group would be required. It would not be justified.

Easy Listening and ---- Marcus Borg!!!

The other day I searched YouTube for a recording that my Father-in-law had, and which I listened to when visiting. I was fascinated with the arrangement of this orchestral version of a pop song. Couldn’t remember the song. What I did remember was that it was a Longines Symphonette LP, a best hits of ‘68 or some year around there.

I found the album on ebay. Greatest Hits of 1969. The first track was Soulful Strut. That was it! It isn’t on YouTube (I should buy the album and upload it!), but here is Billy May from the same year with a similar performance.

I don’t think Billy May was as good as the Longines Symphonette on this number. This judgment requires some explanation, because if it was one thing I (and all my cohort) hated in the ‘60's and ‘70's was this “Easy Listening” sort of usually mushy music. Remember Mitch Miller? OMG, he played oboe on the Charlie Parker with Strings album! Remember those Readers’ Digest LP’s? And the ever present Longines Symphonette and other collections? I remember riding in cars to Presbytery meetings with old men who listened to the local “Easy Listening” radio station. (I think those are gone and I haven’t even heard a “Smooth Jazz” station for a few years.)

I searched for info on this mystery orchestra with the name of a watch company. It’s identity was not given, nor the conductor. In recent years a few music lovers have said, “Hey, this was high quality arranging, performance, and recording. What was going on?” They uncovered the secret: It was Neil Richardson and the BBC music studios.

Neil was a great arranger who wrote and produced theme music for BBC radio and TV shows. The back of the albums often told great detail about the latest electronic technology used to produce the recordings while saying nothing about Neil or the musicians, many of whom were from the London Philharmonic. BTW, we could say the same about Mantovani, also recording in London. (If it's been a while, you need to hear Charmaine, the theme for distribution of meds in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

Here is my thought about all this: Easy Listening was a way for my parents’ generation to come to terms with the new rock and roll of the ‘50's and ‘60's, and all of the cultural change they were forced to live through. This was the soft landing for them. Soulful Strut was something they didn’t want to hear, but a dynamic arrangement played by a small symphony – they could handle that. It served the grand cultural purpose of helping people through disturbing and disruptive change.

When I first went to work for The Jesus Seminar, I was asked if I knew about Marcus Borg (who was a fellow, but mostly absent from the Seminar.) I replied, “Yes, I had read three of his books.” “Well,” I was told, “He is our soft landing specialist. People who can’t handle what we are doing can read Marc and learn to accept what we are doing.” And I am sure that some people learned to like jazz through popular songs and bebop from Charlie Parker with Strings.

I am not making it well through the current musical transition. Walmart today was not playing the old elevator music (which until recently was the softened hits of the ‘80's). This was screaming soul and heavy metal. I had to get out of there. When my generation is gone, the youngsters can move on, with music and with religion.

Remembering Frankie Trumbauer, Bix, and Some Jazz Age Songs

I’m confessin’ that I got real deep into music of the ‘20's this summer. I was preparing for a musical of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1920's Style, playing tenor sax. It occurred to me that I should be playing a C Melody sax, like they did in the period. So now I’m overhauling one of those 90 year old things. The Buescher is sort of a baby tenor; the Conn is a long neck alto. But I digress. I started listening to C Melodies.

What won my heart was this recording from the ‘90's of Scott Robinson bringing to life a tune, Singin' the Blues, that Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer made in ‘27.


 Turns out Frankie made a lot of platters, and a lot of them with Bix. So I started listening to their stuff on YouTube. One that caught my ear and stuck there was No One Can Take Your Place, dated 1928. It seemed to epitomize the era.

 
It bounced around my brain for a week and I had to find out more about it. But nothin’. No sheet music. Not on any list of pop songs of any year. It was lost. Where’d it go? Prolly (a word I learned from Sinclair Lewis) lotsa songs got written and recorded, but never were published cause they didn’t catch on. First I found several newer songs with the same title, even one by Lynnerd Skynnerd, not so good. This must mean that even the title had disappeared over the decades.

Then I went back to the video where I had seen the Odeon record label. (BTW, Odeon, a German company seems to have turned out the best fidelity on those 78's. They recorded in London and New York, as well as Berlin and Paris.) The label identified the composers: lyrics by Gilbert and Melbeck and melody by Frank Signorelli. Turns out they wrote lots of tunes together, and scored with Stairway to the Stars and A Blues Serenade, later recorded by Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. What really lit me up was a different version of a 1945 song I grew up with about my home town: Sioux City Sue (1924). Can’t find the lyrics to Signorelli’s version, but it’s not much to write home about.

No One Can Take Your Place was Bix’ last recording session with Frankie in the spring of ‘29. Bix was probably sick, and the tune lacks much that would make it “jazz.” Bix does have a couple of short breaks, and the ending. Otherwise, just another pop song. And the story it tells is a little “off.” This guy is telling this doll how he still loves her even though he’s got a new gal. I don’t think anyone wanted to be singing about that scenario. But I like the melody, so I picked it out and guessed at the chords. This feels like a real contribution to the world's accumulated knowledge! It will be in the next post.

A Lost Pop Song from the '20's

This song is explained in the previous post: I have posted this on Google Drive as a public document, but I have no idea how you can copy it or open it. It is a PDF file.

What He Said - A Hymn about Jesus' Teachings

This hymn is explained in the previous post.

The Poverty of Hymns and One of My Own

Where are the hymns that tell the teachings of Jesus? I ask this because of a dispute this past month about the new Presbyterian Hymnal, Glory to God. The hymnal committee decided not to include a decade old praise song, “In Christ Alone.” This hymn actually does a good job of clearly stating a particular theology of the atonement. That was the problem. Presbyterians recognize that there are a variety of metaphors for how God reconciles the world to Godself (as some of us have said it).  Al Moeller, leading Southern Baptist and neanderthal theologian, is outraged that any Christian would deny the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement: that God sacrificed His Son on the Cross as a payment to satisfy the debt of sin that humanity had built up since we emerged from Africa. All of us collectively owed something to God for all of our wrongdoing, so God decided to pay it Himself. (He is “Father.”)

(I should state here that atonement concerns me not at all any more. Having abandoned belief in the supernatural, I see our problem as needing reconciliation with each other, period. God gets in the way of this, and often becomes the impetus for hating and annihilating each other. Jesus, I think, had other ideas.) Myths and metaphors are helpful, as long as we are clear that they are myths and metaphors, and not literally true.

The hymn controversy reminded me of why I dislike most hymns. They are about the Christ and doctrines, and rarely about the historical Jesus. As I look at the list of hymns in the new Glory to God, I do see a few newer hymns that may be about what Jesus taught. “A Woman Broke a Jar,” and “A Woman and a Coin” are two obvious examples. Different ways of singing about Jesus, other than spiritualizing and glorifying him as divine, are possible. The Disciples of Christ have a wonderful hymn speaking of Jesus as “Holy Wisdom.” That didn’t make the grade for Presbyterians, and I guess Avery and Marsh hymns or songs are verboten now in the PCUSA. (They were Presbyterian ministers in Port Jervis, NJ until not too long ago.)

About 15 years ago, a Jesus Seminar scholar wrote but did not publish a paper analyzing what the Methodist hymnal said about Jesus. I do not remember that the human Jesus did more than “call us” and “die.” Somehow the bit about his death does not connect with his teachings about power, empires, and violence. Of course there is a lot about how Jesus loves us, but that is inference, not directly found in his sayings. OK, maybe I will do an analysis of Jesus in Glory to God.

A friend on line suggested that I write a Jesus hymn, so the file that follows displays it: “What He Said.”

I had recently presented to my local Unitarian-Universalist congregation the teachings of Jesus from the Jesus Seminar. I looked at The Essential Jesus, wherein Dominic Crossan translated some of Jesus’ teachings into free verse of the simplest and direct language.

The tune had to be irregular, a necessity when working from other than metrical poetry. Maybe someone else can suggest better language and a better tune. I tried to produce a simple, singable tune, but may have failed in that. There are a couple of nice “hooks.” I would have liked a blues form, or a pentatonic melody. The chords are simple for guitar players. The chords could be enhanced. Maybe others can write in other ways about what Jesus taught. I think it’s time for another “Not Alone for Mighty Empire,” (not in Glory to God), or another hymn of the Social Gospel, or a revival of some hymns of the ‘60's. But today we are heavily into personal, individual praise and traditional, doctrinal divine man hymns. Even the topical hymns are not very realistic. So it goes.

Missing in Action

What is missing here are posts about my Yom HaShoah sermon in April, my thoughts about the Heidelberg Catechism, and lots of other deep thoughts about many other important things. This spring I joined a big band at SUNY ADK, which made 4 music groups. Kinda busy.