The Church and the Railway Station

The Church

In the course of my work duties yesterday, I watched a stupid pop video. A journalist had submitted a story about the Bishop of Brooklyn saying a Mass of Reparation and disciplining the priest (a monsignor, even) who had allowed his church to be used in the making of this video. 

In the video, a plastic-looking blonde wearing cartoonishly tiny and tasteless outfits attempts to convince viewers that multiple men might follow her down the street begging for her attention, fight each other to the death over her in the local boxing gym, and photograph her barely-clad bottom in elevators. All these men die gruesome deaths on camera. The men on the street are dispatched by an enormous speeding truck. The men in the gym spatter the singer with gore as they kill each other. The man in the elevator dies bloodily after the singer catches his tie in the doors. Blood streams down. The singer is delighted.

The scenes in the venerable Brooklyn church apparently represent the funeral of this young woman's last relationship. She drives there alone in a pink hearse. She enters the empty church wearing a sheer black veil, a black net crinoline pulled up over her chest as a "baby doll" dress, and black stockings. Several pink coffins are propped up against the altar, which is covered with pillar candles. The singer mimics prayers and squirms around in a quasi-dance before the altar and in the aisle. She goes out again and drives off in her pink hearse.  

The whole thing is so ridiculous that I'm not sure it's not all an elaborate joke. The speeding truck dispatching the three eager suitors in the street was straight out of "Bugs Bunny." In the gym, the singer shrugs over her inability to learn to punch and takes selfies of herself pouting and preening as men fight all around her. Her revealing outfits are more silly than sexy. Nevertheless, the whole thing struck me as satanic. The use of blood clinched it. 

People throw the word "satanic" around a lot, so I'll explain what I mean. I mean that the video attacks the goodness of creation and profanes the sacred. The video tells lies about what it is to be a "beautiful" woman or a woman worthy of love and suggests that men's attraction to women is evil. It suggests that men who approach women deserve violent deaths. It uses a Catholic church as cheap symbol of (here meaningless) funerary rites and as a place for the singer to move lasciviously for the enjoyment of her viewers. 

I won't link to the video, but here are the lyrics of the banal and self-contradictory song. In short, the singer feels as light as a feather because she isn't thinking about a man anymore, except that she is quite clearly thinking about him, as she's singing to him. To see how far the art has progressed, here's a pop song first published in 1612.

If today someone asked me why I organize parties for partner dancing, I would say that it is to cancel out the nightmare world of that pop video. In God's world, young women wear pretty but respectful clothes, young men ask them to dance, friendships develop, and from some friendships love. 

In this world, women wait for those men willing to sacrifice their lives to us and, having with our whole hearts accepted them, stick with them through thick and thin, prosperity, poverty, health, sickness, fertility, sterility, normalcy and oddity. We do not murder them, shrug at their deaths, or dance at their funerals.

The Railway Station 

Last night I discovered the easy way that a mob of demonstrators had occupied Edinburgh's principal railway station to express their displeasure with Israel. In doing so they inconvenienced and frightened not Israelis but Edinburghers. In fact, an 78-year-old ex-serviceman, a veteran of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, says that one protestor stepped on him, splitting his toe, and that he was punched more than once. Apparently the demonstrators were yelling against the British government, British people and Jews. 

Jim Henderson, who was in uniform, had been selling poppies for the Scottish Poppy Appeal, which is unsurprising, given that it is November and both Remembrance (Armistice) Day and the Sunday nearest Remembrance Day are sacred in the United Kingdom--or were. The First Minister for Pakistan Gaza Scotland, Humzah Yousaf, is all for pro-Palestine marchers disrupting Armistice Day in London. He seems not to mind that tens of thousands of people angry about Britain's role in the creation of the state of Israel, some of them in full sympathy with a terrorist organization, might clash with thousands of British soldiers and veterans, including Scots.  

Dear me. To think that Gaelic-speaking Kate Forbes lost the Scottish National Party leadership elections because she is, like the vast majority of Scots between 1535 and 1965, a believing evangelical Christian. The next national election cannot come fast enough. The strain of deciding whom I despise more, Humzah Yousaf or Justin Trudeau, is just too much for me. 

But to return to the railway station, in which I have often been encouraged by a recorded voice to be on the lookout for terrorists ("See it, say it, sorted."), I am appalled that in the name of a region 2,473 miles away, a presumably (but not necessarily) British mob shouted out against the British, made it very hard, if not impossible, for fellow British to travel, and knocked about a British veteran selling poppies. 

I repeat: this discommoded Israel not one whit. It hurt and frightened Scots and other people who live in or work in or travel through Edinburgh. It attacked one of the few shared traditions held as sacred by almost all British people since 1919: the poppy-seller. It was noisy, violent and rude in a country where it is considered gauche to speak loudly on the bus. My one comfort is that the demonstrators might conceivably have all been entitled-feeling foreign students. It seems unlikely, though. 

If this protest had been in the official public square--outside Bute House in Charlotte Square, for example--it would have been unobjectionable, depending on what the protestors were calling for, of course. (Yousaf Humzah, amazingly enough, is a great fan of stringent Hate Speech laws.) But it was in the railway station, a necessary and yet vulnerable locus of order, the place where we are frequently reminded of terrorist attacks because that is where terrorist attacks are likely to happen. 

I see today that the the Current National Threat Level is set at "Substantial." I would say that, in terms of neighbourliness, it's at Critical. It seems incredible to me that a Briton can claim to love the Palestinians when he hates his British neighbours. 

Well, as Orlando Gibbons sang in 1612, "More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."