Protest Music Quotes

The Monster Ball is by nature a protest: A youth church experience to speak out and celebrate against all forms of discrimination + prejudice.

The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.

The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.

Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest.

Westboro Baptist Church: STOP. Stop protesting the funerals of our soldiers who died in action because you are anti-gay. When one of you dies, I’m going to show up with a couple of gay veterans and we’re going to do a musical at your funeral.

And I do, god, how I do love playing live, it's the most primal form of energy release you can share with other people besides having sex or taking drugs. So if you see a good live show on drugs and then later that evening have sex, you're basically covered all the bases of energy release, and we all need to let off steam. It's easier and safer than protesting abortion clinics or praising God or wanting to hurt your brother; so go to a show, dance around a bit and copulate.

Songs are the soul of movement! - MLK Jr.

A small thing, but in a dissonant world, every moment of harmony counts--and if we share music, we might just shout in anger a little less and sing in unity more. Or so we can hope.

The practice of alchemizing suffering into meaningful art as well as social and political advancements has been one of African Americans’ greatest gifts to humanity. Many have followed their lead in this regard and that practice can make a lot of positive difference during this time of renewal and re-weaving.

Politicians, singers, and preachers are in the same business, using sound to move hearts and change minds.

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she protested. "No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The world's judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don't like a thing, I don't like it, that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can't follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.

CALVIN: The problem with rock'n'roll is that the generation that created it is now the establishment. Rock pretends it's still rebellious with its video posturing, but who believes it? The stars are 45-year-old zillionaires or they endorse soft drinks! The "Revolution" is a capitalist industry! Give me a break. Fortunately, I've found some protest music for TODAY'S youth! This stuff really offends Mom and Dad! HOBBES: Easy-listening Muzak? CALVIN: I play it real quiet, too. [Page 40]

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children’s plays, adult plays … I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year’s, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what’s left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that

So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.' She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.

those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world.

While in the United States and Europe "revolution" was an excuse to sell pop music, stage protests, and hold festivals, it was being played for keeps in Asia. Young people were not just challenging their elders but pushing them aside, expelling, imprisoning, and in many cases executing them, all the while extolling the young as the righteous vanguard, their very youth a badge of purity. They were, by definition, forward-thinking. And in Hue they were armed.

The members of Joy Division likely weren’t meditating on Frank Lloyd Wright when they took the stage in Manchester but those flat-fronted black cotton trousers and narrow cut shirts didn’t come from nowhere. Peter Saville, who designed all of Factory’s records, understood in perfectly well: the iconic weight of black and white balanced against the release of splendour, in this case the dark magnificence of the music itself. Which might describe the tension of Protestant affect more generally: all guardedness and restraint until the eruption of an unextirpated beauty wakes us for a moment from the dream of efficiency.

America's core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society. The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.

it’s shrewd to put new words to an old tune, especially if you’re trying to turn the familiar on its head.

Music is usually played as a protest against silence.

I am no longer willing to be who you want me to be; I’m going to write my own narrative.

Alluding to the construction, at the Tidal Basin, of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson (it was to be dedicated in 1943), Ickes linked past and present. “Genius, like justice, is blind,

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.

Social anthems and protest songs had long been part of the heritage of rock—but not like this. “Earth Song” was something more epic, dramatic, and primal. Its roots were deeper, its vision more panoramic. It was a lamentation torn from the pages of the Old Testament; a “sorrow song” in the tradition of slave spirituals; an apocalyptic prophecy with echoes of Blake, Yeats and Eliot. It conveyed musically what Picasso’s masterful painting, Guernica, conveyed in art. Inside its swirling scenes of destruction and suffering were voices—crying, pleading, shouting to be heard. (“What about us?”)

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. Disney's well–known film version of the story, released in 1937, was ostensibly based on the German tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Originally titled "Snow–drop" and published in Kinder–und Hausmarchen in 1812, the Grimms' "Snow White" is a darker, chillier story than the musical Disney cartoon, yet it too had been cleaned up for publication, edited to emphasize the good Protestant values held by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. (...) Variants of Snow White were popular around the world long before the Grimms claimed it for Germany, but their version of the story (along with Walt Disney's) is the one that most people know today. Elements from the story can be traced back to the oldest oral tales of antiquity, but the earliest known written version was published in Italy in 1634.

There's something about the transporting capacity of music, something about it's odd but undeniable ability to create a collective experience by firing our individual imaginations, that's more likely to open our minds and our hearts to competing points of view.

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.

I loved these songs and could still hear them in my head long after and into the next day. They weren't protest songs, though, they were rebel ballads... even in a simple, melodic wooing ballad there'd be rebellion waiting around the corner. You couldn't escape it. There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but in stead of rebellion showing up it would be death itself, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder. The rebel was alive and well, romantic and honorable. The Grim Reaper wasn't like that.

It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I’ll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he for one would never get mixed up, the music had its own retort at hand: ‘You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way.

I was once present at a lecture that Eugene Smith gave to some students at a school of photography. At the end, they protested because he had made no mention of photography, but had spoken the whole time about music. He calmed them by saying that what was valid for one was valid for another. —Henri Cartier-Bresson

When he was little, he kept lookout on the dining room of the Richmond Hotel. It had been closed to his race and one day it would open. He waited and waited. In the dark cell, he reconsidered his vigil. The recognition he sought went beyond brown skin—he was looking for someone who looked like him, for someone to claim as kin. For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world. They never appeared. In the dining room or anywhere else.

him." "Oh, I wish we had the old days back again," exclaimed Jem. "I'd love to be a soldier—a great, triumphant general. I'd give EVERYTHING to see a big battle." Well, Jem was to be a soldier and see a greater battle than had ever been fought in the world; but that was as yet far in the future; and the mother, whose first-born son he was, was wont to look on her boys and thank God that the "brave days of old," which Jem longed for, were gone for ever, and that never would it be necessary for the sons of Canada to ride forth to battle "for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods." The shadow of the Great Conflict had not yet made felt any forerunner of its chill. The lads who were to fight, and perhaps fall, on the fields of France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Palestine, were still roguish schoolboys with a fair life in prospect before them: the girls whose hearts were to be wrung were yet fair little maidens a-star with hopes and dreams. Slowly the banners of the sunset city gave up their crimson and gold; slowly the conqueror's pageant faded out. Twilight crept over the valley and the little group grew silent. Walter had been reading again that day in his beloved book of myths and he remembered how he had once fancied the Pied Piper coming down the valley on an evening just like this. He began to speak dreamily, partly because he wanted to thrill his companions a little, partly because something apart from him seemed to be speaking through his lips. "The Piper is coming nearer," he said, "he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around him. He pipes—he pipes—and we must follow—Jem and Carl and Jerry and I—round and round the world. Listen— listen—can't you hear his wild music?" The girls shivered. "You know you're only pretending," protested Mary Vance, "and I wish you wouldn't. You make it too real. I hate that old Piper of yours." But Jem sprang up with a gay laugh. He stood up on a little hillock, tall and splendid, with his open brow and his fearless eyes. There were thousands like him all over the land of the maple. "Let the Piper come and welcome," he cried, waving

You can get yourself all fucked up on revolutionary élan, just like you can drink alcohol or take drugs. But it warps your senses and causes you to make poor decisions. It isn’t real, and you’re going to pay for it later. If you want the feeling of mass ecstasy you should go to a music festival instead of encouraging vulnerable young people to go out and get killed.

Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that's us, I say to myself, that's us giving it a go, it's us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it's kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it's decency, and all we'll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, 'cause I don't have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song, but the rats are as loud as ever, and this is madness, I'm pouring water in the desert, hoping flowers grow, what does it even matter if a few do, we're fucked, and the music stops. Gelon's taken the aulos, and I'm too spent to protest. I feel hollowed.

I am an old man, and I here declare that I never knew them to be productive of any good in the worship of God, and have reason to believe that they are productive of much evil. Music as a science I esteem and admire, but instrumental music in the house of God I abominate and abhor. This is the abuse of music, and I here register my protest against all such corruption of the worship of the author of Christianity.

I put on my sunglasses and start to sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music. “You need someone older and wiser, telling you what to do.” I tap him on the nose for emphasis. “Hey, I’m older than you,” he objects. I run my hand along Peter’s cheek and sing, “I am seventeen going on eighteen, I-I-I’ll take care of you.” “Promise?” he says. “Sing it just once for me,” I prompt. Peter gives me a look. “Please? I love it when you sing. Your voice is so clean.” He can’t help but smile. Peter never met a compliment he didn’t smile at. “I don’t know the words,” he protests. “Yes you do.” I pretend to wave a wand in his face. “Imperio! Wait--do you know what that means?” “It’s…an unforgivable curse?” “Yes. Very impressive, Peter K. And what does it do?” “It makes you do things you don’t want to do.” “Very good, young wizard. There’s hope for you yet. Now sing!” “You little witch.” He looks around to see if anyone is listening, and then he softly sings, “I need someone older and wiser telling me what to do…You are seventeen going on eighteen…I’ll depend on you.” I clap my hands in delight. Is there anything more intoxicating than making a boy bend to your will? I roll closer to him and throw my arms around his neck. “Now you’re the one making PDAs!” he says.

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced. America has long had a great deal of soft power. Think of the impact of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in Europe at the end of World War II; of young people behind the Iron Curtain listening to American music and news on Radio Free Europe; of Chinese students symbolizing their protests in Tiananmen Square by creating a replica of the Statue of Liberty; of newly liberated Afghans in 2001 asking for a copy of the Bill of Rights; of young Iranians today surreptitiously watching banned American videos and satellite television broadcasts in the privacy of their homes. These are all examples of America’s soft power. When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive. As General Wesley Clark put it, soft power “gave us an influence far beyond the hard edge of traditional balance-of-power politics.” But attraction can turn to repulsion if we act in an arrogant manner and destroy the real message of our deeper values.

You play with great skill," he said. "Thank you." "Is that your favorite piece?" "It's my most difficult," Helen said, "but not my favorite." "What do you play when there's no one to hear?" The gentle question, spoken in that accent with vowels as broad as his shoulders, caused Helen's stomach to tighten pleasurably. Perturbed by the sensation, she was slow to reply. "I don't remember the name of it. A piano tutor taught it to me long ago. For years I've tried to find out what it is, but no one has ever recognized the melody." "Play it for me." Calling it up from memory, she played the sweetly haunting chords, her hands gentle on the keys. The mournful chords never failed to stir her, making her heart ache for things she couldn't name. At the conclusion, Helen looked up from the keys and found Winterborne staring at her as if transfixed. He masked his expression, but not before she saw a mixture of puzzlement, fascination, and a hint of something hot and unsettling. "It's Welsh," he said. Helen shook her head with a laugh of wondering disbelief. "You know it?" "'A Ei Di'r Deryn Do.' Every Welshman is born knowing it." "What is it about?" "A lover who asks a blackbird to carry a message to his sweetheart." "Why can't he go to her himself?" Helen realized they were both speaking in hushed tones, as if they were exchanging secrets. "He can't find her. He's too deep in love- it keeps him from seeing clearly." "Does the blackbird find her?" "The song doesn't say," he said with a shrug. "But I must know the ending to the story," Helen protested. Winterborne laughed. It was an irresistible sound, rough-soft and sly. When he replied, his accent had thickened. "That's what comes o' reading novels, it is. The story needs no ending. That's not what matters." "What matters, then?" she dared to ask. His dark gaze held hers. "That he loves. That he's searching. Like the rest of us poor devils, he has no way of knowing if he'll ever have his heart's desire.

Twilight crept over the valley and the little group grew silent. Walter had been reading again that day in his beloved book of myths and he remembered how he had once fancied the Pied Piper coming down the valley on an evening just like this. He began to speak dreamily, partly because he wanted to thrill his companions a little, partly because something apart from him seemed to be speaking through his lips. "The Piper is coming nearer," he said, "he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around him. He pipes—he pipes—and we must follow—Jem and Carl and Jerry and I—round and round the world. Listen— listen—can't you hear his wild music?" The girls shivered. "You know you're only pretending," protested Mary Vance, "and I wish you wouldn't. You make it too real. I hate that old Piper of yours." But Jem sprang up with a gay laugh. He stood up on a little hillock, tall and splendid, with his open brow and his fearless eyes. There were thousands like him all over the land of the maple. "Let the Piper come and welcome," he cried, waving his hand. "I'LL follow him gladly round and round the world." THE END

Oh, Lawd, I done forgot Harlem! Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street--they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There's dancing after supper in a big warm room. It's cold as hell on Lenox Avenue. All you've had all day is a cup of coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat's a ragged banner on your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just crazy about Paul Robeson! Maybe they'll like you, too, black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a lot of darkie color--free for nothing!

The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It was to be death as a confirmation of all that had preceded it, death as a last demonstration of absolute power and absolute unreason, death as the final triumph of Nazism over man and over the human spirit.

M. Vinteuil...carried politeness and consideration for others to such scrupulous lengths, always putting himself in their place, that he was afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them, but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil's house, Montjouvain, stood at the foot of a bushy hillock where I went to hide, I had found myself on a level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from its window. When the servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived, I had seen M. Vinteuil hurriedly place a sheet of music in a prominent position on the piano. But as soon as they entered the room he had snatched it away and put it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt, of letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject he had hurriedly protested: 'I can't think who put that on the piano; it's not the proper place for it at all,' and had turned the conversation aside to other topics, precisely because they were of less interest to himself.

I was inspired by their intergenerational relationships and annoyed that in the US, many of our elder Black liberals in the mainstream media condemned our music for its profane language, and young Black people too easily dismissed the messy yet rich traditions that made us possible. For many of us in the beginning, “Black Lives Matter” was a response to violence or a non-indictment; South Africa demonstrated that we deserved much more. I felt completely politically undone and inadequate. I’d been reading so much history but had not quite yet developed a political analysis connected to any tradition of organizing. I was getting smarter, not necessarily getting free.

All of the stimuli of awe and wonder, whose capacity is invested in the human mind, have been appropriated by religious faiths across centuries, in masterpieces of literature, the visual arts, music, and architecture. Three thousand years of Yahweh have wrought an aesthetic power in these creative arts second to none. There is nothing in my own experience more moving than the Roman Catholic Lucernarium, when the lumen Christi (light of Christ) is spread by Paschal candlelight into a darkened cathedral; or the choral hymns to the standing faithful and approaching procession during an evangelical Protestant altar call. These benefits require submission to God, or his Son the Redeemer, or both, or to His final chosen spokesman Muhammad. This is too easy. It is necessary only to submit, to bow down, to repeat the sacred oaths. Yet let us ask frankly, to whom is such obeisance really directed? Is it to an entity that may have no meaning within reach of the human mind—or may not even exist? Yes, perhaps it really is to God. But perhaps it is to no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter, religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.

She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR.

Then, she stepped hard on something soft. “Ouch!” exclaimed an urgent, musical voice behind her followed by another blast of that scent. That voice rang out in the night like a small bell. Damn, thought Carmen. These late-night stragglers always show up just as I am closing! “We’re closed,” she commented impatiently, not even bothering to turn around. “I can’t get you anything, my cash register is empty. And, I definitely can’t get you any gasoline. The pumps are shut down.” “You’re on my foot!” said the small, feminine voice again, protesting more loudly. “Get off!” The girl laughed. The street lights came on, as if the pressure of stepping on this person’s foot had turned them on. Carmen laughed at the synchronicity. She felt a small hand on her waist as she moved her foot off the soft place it had landed. It had been years since she had felt a woman’s touch. The feminine voice said quietly, “That hurt.” Carmen whirled around to face the girl she had stepped on, and almost lost her balance. Her eyes met the huge violet eyes of the most beautiful country girl she had ever seen standing directly behind her. Obviously, she had stepped on her. She apologized until she was speechless. Then, she coughed and indicated her truck. The girl had straight, healthy blue hair, delicately shaved over one ear and well-done light makeup with a few rhinestone studs in her ears and nose. Carmen had sucked her breath in audibly at the girl’s appearance. This diminutive girl was stunning. She was a real beauty, set in the dark country night like a diamond against the warm obsidian of the sky. And that fragrance!

Invoking John Winthrop, Reagan said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” It was a free, proud city, built on a strong foundation, full of commerce and creativity, he said, adding, “If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Whatever his faults, Ronald Reagan believed in the possibilities of a country that was forever reinventing itself. “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Reagan asked. “More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago…. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

Around the same time that Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency, the TV evangelicals Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell joined the libertarian, far-right wing of the Republican Party. They called for free markets and cited Hayek and Friedman to protest government bureaucrats, while also issuing daily denunciations of rock music, homosexuals, abortion, civil rights, and pornography. Hard-right evangelicals were among the most influential leaders of the new free-market movement. The Republican Party became an ideological mix of the mainline northeastern establishment, American Baptist puritanism, racism and bigotry, and a Friedmanesque and American Southwest individualist libertarianism and permissiveness—all held together by a near-religious reverence for the multinational conglomerate firm and the sanctity of capital-holding shareholders.

Why were hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions? Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, harmony between Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that drove the Rolling Stones into composing and performing. The war in Vietnam we escalated. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a “lone assassin.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album features a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time. By 1966, LBJ had ordered writers and critics of his commission report on the JFK murder under surveillance. That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?

This is why it would be nice to hear more about principles and less about ruffled feelings. What thoughtful person has not felt the hurt expressed by the Jews over some performances of The Merchant of Venice? A whole anthology of black writing exists in the United States, protesting with quite unfeigned horror about the teaching of Huckleberry Finn in the schools, for the good and sufficient reason that the book employs the word ‘nigger’ as natural. A mature and sensitive response to such tenderness of feeling and consciousness of historic wrong would run much like this, and could be uttered by a person of any race or religion ... We know why you feel as you do, but – too bad. Your thinness of skin, however intelligible, will not be healed by the amputation of the literary and theatrical and musical canon. You just have to live with Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Wagner, mainly because they are artistically integral but also, as it happens, because they represent certain truths about human nature. Think for a second. Would prejudice diminish with the banning of Shylock? Concern for the emotions of others cannot license a category mistake on this scale.

Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.”17 Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string. Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. “No,” said Cettie, “we will buy just one for all of them.” “But, my dear,” John protested, “tricycles do not cost much.” “That is true,” she replied. “It is not the cost. But if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”18 So the children shared a single bicycle. Amazingly enough, the four children probably grew up with a level of creature comforts not that far above what Rockefeller had known as a boy.

He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

Here, till our navy of a thousand sail Have made a breakfast to our foe by sea, Let us encamp to wait their happy speed.- Lorraine, what readiness is Edward in? How hast thou heard that he provided is Of martial furniture for this exploit? Lorraine To lay aside unnecessary soothing, And not to spend the time in circumstance, 'Tis bruited for a certainty, my lord, That he's exceeding strongly fortified; His subjects flock as willingly to war As if unto a triumph they were led. Charles England was wont to harbor malcontents, Bloodthirsty and seditious Catilines, Spendthrifts, and such as gape for nothing else But changing and alteration of the state. And is it possible that they are now So loyal in themselves? Lorraine All but the Scot, who solemnly protests, As heretofore I have informed his grace, Never to sheathe his sword or take a truce. King John Ah, that's the anch'rage of some better hope. But, on the other side, to think what friends King Edward hath retained in Netherland Among those ever-bibbing epicures -- Those frothy Dutchmen puffed with double beer, That drink and swill in every place they come -- Doth not a little aggravate mine ire; Besides we hear the emperor conjoins And stalls him in his own authority. But all the mightier that their number is, The greater glory reaps the victory. Some friends have we beside domestic power: The stern Polonian, and the warlike Dane, The King of Bohemia, and of Sicily Are all become confederates with us, And, as I think, are marching hither apace. [Drums within.] But soft, I hear the music of their drums, By which I guess that their approach is near. Enter the King of Bohemia, with Danes, and a Polonian Captain with other soldiers, some Muscovites, another way. King of Bohemia King John of France, as league and neighborhood Requires when friends are any way distressed, I come to aid thee with my country's force. Polonian Captain And from great Moscow, fearful to the Turk, And lofty Poland, nurse of hardy men, I bring these servitors to fight for thee, Who willingly will venture in thy cause. King John Welcome Bohemian King, and welcome all. This your great kindness I will not forget; Besides your plentiful rewards in crowns That from our treasury ye shall receive, There comes a hare-brained nation decked in pride, The spoil of whom will be a treble gain. And now my hope is full, my joy complete. At sea we are as puissant as the force Of Agamemnon in the haven of Troy; By land, with Xerxes we compare of strength, Whose soldiers drank up rivers in their thirst. Then Bayard-like, blind, overweening Ned, To reach at our imperial diadem Is either to be swallowed of the waves Or hacked a-pieces when thou com'st ashore.

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting.Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion . . . It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority, and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. To bring it up to date, I have added two more paragraphs: In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.

There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.

There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling. I wanted to help, but I

When the head of his cock sweeps past her sweet spot yet again, something explosive erupts out of nowhere. "Oh, fuuuuck," she whimpers. Her walls flutter around him as her whole body ignites into flames. The pleasure is all-consuming, knocking her thoughts from her mind. Alexander huffs, stunned. "Did you--- Just from me---" Eden covers her face with her hands, embarrassed. "I'm sorry. You just feel so good, I---" He chuckles, pushing her hands aside to pepper her face with kisses. "Don't be sorry, it's alright. Can I keep going?" "Yes. Yes, please. I want to make you come. Give it to me rough." "If you want it rough, you'd better hold on to me, sweetheart." She does so, circling his neck with her arms. He rolls his hips against her, pace picking up in rhythm. The slap of their skin combined with the sound of their filthy groans is music to her ears. He snaps his hips into her relentlessly, searching for more of that sweet friction. The bed creaks in protest beneath them, but they show no signs of slowing down. "Fucking God, your pussy feels so good." "Fuck, I--- Right there, oh God right there." "So nice and tight for me. Spread your legs wider--- that's it." Eden can feel herself growing tighter, hotter, brighter. She can hardly breathe, and her heart is racing a mile a minute. "I think--- Fuck, I think I'm going to come again. I'm gonna---" Alexander claims her mouth, tongue sweeping over hers as he pins both her wrists above her head against the pillow. He fucks her harder, claiming her, pushing her closer and closer toward climax. When it happens, she moans into his mouth, quaking beneath his weight. He finds release, too, his muscles tensing as he spills over.

The Comte de Chagny was right; no gala performance ever equalled this one. All the great composers of the day had conducted their own works in turns. Faure and Krauss had sung; and on that evening, Christine Daaé had revealed her true self, for the first time, to the astonished and and enthusiastic audience. Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saëns, the Danse Macabre and a Rêverie Orientale, Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle. Denise Bloch the drinking song in Lucrezia Borgia. But the real triumph was reserved for Christine Daaé, who had begun by singing a few passages from Romeo and Juliet. It was the first time that the young artist sang in this work of Gounod, which had not been transferred to the Opera and which was revived at the the old Theatre Lyrique by Mme. Carvalho. Those who heard her say that her voice, in these passages, was seraphic; but this was nothing to the superhuman notes that she gave forth in the prison scene and the final trio in Faust, which she sang in the place of La Carlotta, who was ill. No one had ever heard or seen anything like it. Daaé revealed a new Margarita that night, a Margarita of a splendor, a radiance hitherto unsuspected. The whole house went mad, rising to it its feet, shouting, cheering, clapping, while Christine sobbed and fainted in the arms of her fellow-singers and had to be carried to her dressing-room. A few subscribers, however, protested. Why had so great a treasure been kept from them all that time? Till then, Christine Daaé had played a good Siebel to Carlotta's rather too splendidly material Margarita. And it had needed Carlotta's incomprehensible and inexcusable absence from this gala night for the little Daaé, at a moment's warning, to show all that she could do in a part of the programme reserved for the Spanish diva! Well, what the subscribers wanted to know was, why had Debienne and Poligny applied to Daaé, when Carlotta was taken ill? Did they know of her hidden genius? And, if they knew of it, why had they kept it hidden? And why had she kept it hidden? Oddly enough, she was not known to have a professor of singing at that moment. She had often said she meant to practice alone for the future. The whole thing was a mystery.

Human beings are capable of extraordinary things. We can create and we can destroy, we can love or we can hate. Some people believe they have souls. While others think that there is only this. Just this. Reality. The news. Killings, wars, bombings, hate, prejudice. Death. And death? No one ever dies on television. Only the bad guys do. Not you. Just them. So death is without meaning. Happens without meaning due to media. We see but don't feel, we watch but haven't experienced. We can only sympathize. A gun doesn't fire on it's own and a fanatic doesn't just wake up one day and become a murderer. Hate doesn't have a face. Death doesn't have a face. Human beings become that face. All of us everyday. Whether you like it or not. Why? Because this is a mindset a culture a history. From the time we are children we are taught that this is right and this is wrong. This is what a man does. This is what a woman does. Children emulate the behaviors of adults. Parents, movie characters and just about everyone else. We live in a society based on ideals. We celebrate the intelligence of the human race and then we take on the guises of everything the opposite of that belief we've ever known and support violence, support war. Behaviors that any intelligent race should have abandoned many years ago. We are surrounded by violence, surrounded by what we still are and what we are not becoming. Frankly we are all still just primitives and not capable in any way shape or form of creating a complete and everlasting peace and that's the sad reality of it all and always has been. We're just human. Only human. The good, the bad and the ugly. The evil, the damaged and the sick. The rich, the poor and all the rest of us. So look at it this way. You can't change the world or make the world stop killing. You can't stop violence or hatred but you can walk away from it all. Violence is a part of being human. But so is love. So? Only fight if you have to. Live peacefully and as a peace keeper and do what you can to make the small part of your own world a better place. Whether that's thru creation, protest, teaching or just being who you are and doing what you do. You can't stop humanity from being humanity and you certainly can't stop all the horrible things that happen around the world everyday. So accept it. Light a candle, say a prayer, donate or meditate, listen to some music, write. But even if the human race isn't everything you wish it could be? Hold on to love. Hold onto friends. Hold onto hope or whatever religion or belief that guides you through the dark. Because in the end? You're just human and that's all that you can do. The best that you can do.

I had been asked to add a further three-hour rock show, but I protested that there wasn’t enough quality new music to sustain six hours a week.

Sitting in the dark window he seems to see them Now they are gathering, entering the door. They are nearly all there now And then he begins to say, ‘Now. Now,’ leaning a little forward; and then, as though it had waited for his signal, the music begins. The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume. Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.

A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it’s flying over a nation that’s not only free but fair, not only strong but just. History and reason summon us to embrace love and loyalty—to a citizenship that seeks a better world, calls on those better angels, and fights for better days. What, really, could be more patriotic than that? What, in the end, could be more American?

My tea has overbrewed: it is bitter, but still drinkable. I turn on the television and return to the present. Four plump humanoid creatures, red, yellow, green and purple, are frolicking on a grassy hill. Rabbits nibble the grass. The creatures hug each other. A periscope emerges from a knoll and tells them they must say goodbye. After a little protest, they do, jumping one by one into a hole in the ground.

If Tivo marks the beginning of the shift from the Brand Age to the Product Age, the summer of 2020 saw the Brand Age’s end. The killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests briefly displaced the pandemic in the front and center of our national consciousness, making obvious the passing of the Brand Age into history. Seemingly every brand company did what they always do when America’s sins are pulled out from the back of the closet where we try to keep them hidden: they called up their agencies and posted inspiring words, arresting images, and black rectangles. Message: We care. Only this time, it didn’t resonate. Their brand magic fizzled. First on social media, then tumbling from there onto newspapers and evening news, activists and customers started using the tools of the new age to compare these companies’ carefully crafted brand messages with the reality of their operations. “This you?” became the Twitter meme that exposed the brand wizards. Companies who posted about their “support” for black empowerment were called out when their own websites revealed the music did not match the words. The NFL claimed it celebrates protest, and the internet tweeted back, “This you?” under a picture of Colin Kaepernick kneeling. L’Oréal posted that “speaking out is worth it” and got clapped back with stories about dropping a model just three years earlier for speaking out against racism. The performative wokeness across brands felt forced and hollow. Systemic racism is a serious issue, and a 30-second spot during The Masked Singer doesn’t prove you are serious about systemic racism. That’s always been true, about ads on any issue, but social media and the ease of access to data on the internet has made it much harder for companies to pretend.

Huyck proved to be an outstanding administrator and, despite his lack of experience, quickly achieved one of the board’s top priorities. By ensuring that the teachers, curriculum, and classroom offerings met the necessary educational standards, he earned official accreditation for the school, a certification that made it eligible for federal and state financial aid.9 Along with his academic duties, he made time to coach the school’s poultry-judging team, which—as the local press proudly noted—“won over six other teams from high schools in larger towns in a recent contest.”10 At the annual meeting of the Michigan State Teachers’ Association in November 1923, Emory was chosen as a delegate to the general assembly and helped draft a resolution calling for the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act—formally known as the National Prohibition Act—“not only to prevent production and consumption of alcoholic liquors, but also to teach the children respect for the law.”11 He was also a member of both the Masons, “the most prestigious fraternal organization in Bath’s highly Protestant community,”12 and the Stockman Grange, at whose annual meeting in January 1924 he served as toastmaster and delivered a well-received talk on “The Bean Plant and Its Relation to Life.”13 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man with his military training, Huyck was something of a disciplinarian, demanding strict standards of conduct from both the pupils and staff. “At day’s end,” writes one historian, “students were required to march from the building to the tune of martial music played on the piano. During the day, students tiptoed in the halls.” When a pair of high-spirited teenaged girls “greeted their barely older teachers with a jaunty ‘Well, hello gals,’” they were immediately sent to the superintendent, who imposed a “penalty [of] individual conferences with those teachers and apologies to them.”14

The events in Vietnam and the protests against the draft, led by college students, increased the growing influence of the youth culture, who made Vonnegut their literary hero in questioning the accepted wisdom of the status quo. Kurt was as surprised as anyone and had never wanted to be a “spokesman” of the young. He was very leery of the hippie phenomenon and wrote a searing account of one of their heroes, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles and assorted movie stars (“Yes, We Have No Nirvanas,” published in Esquire and collected in his book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons). He satirized the stylish popularity of Eastern meditation, saying we had the same thing in the West—reading short stories, which also lowered your heart rate and freed your mind from other concerns. He said short stories were “Buddhist catnaps.” He thought the Maharishi was a phony but he loved the music of the Beatles, spoke up for Abbie Hoffman, and admired Allen Ginsberg. When

A sudden thought jolted me from my complacency. “Fool?” I called aloud in the darkened room. “What?” He did not open his eyes but his ready reply showed me he had not yet slipped toward sleep. “You are not the Fool anymore. What do they call you these days?” A slow smile curved his lips in profile. “What does who call me when?” He spoke in the baiting tone of the jester he had been. If I tried to sort out that question, he would tumble me in verbal acrobatics until I gave up hoping for an answer. I refused to be drawn into his game. I rephrased my question. “I should not call you Fool anymore. What do you want me to call you?” “Ah, what do I want you to call me now? I see. An entirely different question.” Mockery made music in his voice. I drew a breath and made my question as plain as possible. “What is your name, your real name?” “Ah.” His manner was suddenly grave. He took a slow breath. “My name. As in what my mother called me at my birth?” “Yes.” And then I held my breath. He spoke seldom of his childhood. I suddenly realized the immensity of what I had asked him. It was the old naming magic: if I know how you are truly named, I have power over you. If I tell you my name, I grant you that power. Like all direct questions I had ever asked the Fool, I both dreaded and longed for the answer. “And if I tell you, you would call me by that name?” His inflection told me to weigh my answer. That gave me pause. His name was his, and not for me to bandy about. But, “In private, only. And only if you wished me to,” I offered solemnly. I considered the words as binding as a vow. “Ah.” He turned to face me. His face lit with delight. “Oh, but I would,” he assured me. “Then?” I asked again. I was suddenly uneasy, certain that somehow he had vested me yet again. “The name my mother gave me, I give now to you, to call me by in private.” He took a deep breath and turned back to the fire. He closed his eyes again, but his grin grew even wider. “Beloved. She called me only ‘Beloved.’” “Fool!” I protested. He laughed, a deep rich chuckle of pure enjoyment, completely pleased with himself. “She did,” he insisted. “Fool, I’m serious.” The room had begun to revolve slowly around me. If I did not go to sleep soon, I would be sick. “And you think that I am not?” He gave a theatrical sigh. “Well, if you cannot call me ‘Beloved,’ then I suppose you should continue to call me ‘Fool.’ For I am ever the Fool to your Fitz.” “Tom Badgerlock.” “What?” “I am Tom Badgerlock now. It is how I am known.” He was silent for a time. Then, “Not by me,” he replied decisively. “If you insist we must both take different names now, then I shall call you ’Beloved.’ And whenever I call you that, you may call me ‘Fool.’” He opened his eyes and rolled his head to look at me. He simpered a lovesick smile, then heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Good night, Beloved. We have been apart far too long.” I capitulated. Conversation was hopeless when he got into these moods. “Good night, Fool.

In European music-halls scores and hundreds of women appear nude on the stage. Does it not strike you that such a public exhibition of the naked female ought to call forth some protest from the mothers, wives, and sisters of the European intellectuals? I am discussing the significance of this cynical pastime not from the ‘moral’ point of view but with an eye to biology and social hygiene. To me this vile and vulgar pastime is indisputable proof of the savagery and of the deep-going decadence of the European bourgeoisie. I am convinced that the evident and rapid growth of homosexuality and Lesbianism, which find their economic explanation in the high cost of family life, is accelerated by this disgusting public spectacle of burlesque women.

Over the next few years, in the early sixties, everyone in my world was singing Bob Dylan songs. It was as if we were in some worldwide musical stage show and Bob Dylan was writing the lyrics for the entire production. He was writing about freedom, wars, disasters, justice, betrayal, liberty, slavery, outlaws, freight trains, and women; all the usual stuff. And at some point he stopped being a folksinger and a songwriter and he became a warrior poet. For the first time in my life I saw a pen that put swords to shame.

I remember when we went into Kezar Stadium on the march (April 15, 1967, San Francisco) playing that song—I felt like I was part of some surrealistic dream. We were riding along in this truck. The band was playing. It was like a misty kind of rain. It was early in the morning. The streets were lined with people hanging out of windows and everything. And we were going up the street. I was just stoned out of my head on LSD, everything kind of like vibrating and I was looking around and you could see soldiers and people sneering and you see pictures of napalmed children and signs saying “End the War” and we were playing this joyous incredible music and people were dancing all around the truck just dancing and throwing flowers up in the air and everything and we were singing, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!” And it was like we were sort of heading off to these beautiful pastoral gas chambers, we were all going to parade ourselves into these gas chambers and then they were going to wipe us out… I mean, if you gotta go, you might as well go out dancing and singing.

These communities of radicals were not only intriguing to my young, impressionable mind but also inspiring, as life in these makeshift communes was broken down to the most basic human elements, forgoing the trappings of conventional existence (materialism, greed, and social status) for a life of protest, freedom, and the understanding that we all need each other to get by.

The protesters who had tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, with the aid of Allen Ginsberg’s chanting, had somehow lifted up the Kremlin and tipped it over instead. It wasn’t their politics; it was their blue jeans. And the music, which hadn’t died after all.

You do know you’ve been rock-hard this whole time, right?” I shook my head at her innocence. “That’s how guys wake up, Liv. You think it’s easy to have an argument with you when all the blood in my body has rushed south?” “Seems like a design flaw,” she teased. I leaned in to nip at her earlobe. “Nah, just means I’m ready to go for makeup sex.” “Oh!” Liv’s gasp was music to my ears as I gripped a fistful of the sheets, wrenching them from her body. Working my mouth down her soft skin, I growled against it. “Now, don’t go pissing me off for sport just to get a reaction.” “I would never,” he protested, moaning as I tugged a nipple between my teeth.

Lisa Fithian: The direct action element always brings the energy, attracts young people, but it is also the primary way in which we're building culture. Because all of these movements have to have culture the songs, the music, the visuals. Culture's life. And we're dealing with a culture of death in the U.S. We need to have an alternative. So, we were embodying a culture of life. [As quoted by DW Gibson.]

19. Emphasis on music and arts. Every social revolution has the arts front and center. Often driven by the energy and idealism of youth and young adults. One simply cannot imagine the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam war protests, or Black Lives Matter without the arts and youth. Hand in hand.

In fact, before the Second Great Awakening, traditional liturgies throughout all of the church in all the world—Eastern, Western, Catholic, and Protestant—followed a more or less similar pattern and structure as the Hebrews followed when they drew near in Leviticus. Our ancestors did not mindlessly follow some dead tradition of men before revivalistic evangelicalism sprang up in the 1820s and ’30s, allowing us now to have Hillsong music, smoke machines, and laser lights.

Yours has been an intrepid, mordant and flawless protest flowing freely through well-written songs. And the waves of such humane contributions towards a better world shall continue to welter and gather froths of abluent, needed to sanitize the senselessly gory pages of our common history. Thanks so much, Bob Dylan, for the beautiful music.

I remember the then election commissioner asking me, What are YOU doing here?' I replied, When I am not in dharnas and protests, I am a music lover just like you. Attending a music concert is neither connected with being an activist nor with being an election commissioner, so why single out the activist?

The notion that nature was something made for man to dominate was the first of four major elements of the American creed that the nation’s first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, would challenge. (The other three shibboleths were that America was the noble exception to all nations in its moral perfection, that Christianity was the only possible American religion, and that the Protestant work ethic and its implied worship of materialism were desirable and essential elements of any life.)

George, who are you seeing these days?” “Well, let’s see. I’ve been dating around, you might call it. There’s a visiting professor at the college I see when she’s in town. She travels quite a lot. And a neighbor lady and I like to have dinner in the city. She writes an ‘about town’ column for the paper and we enjoy some of the best restaurants, all on her tab, but that’s not the best part about her. There’s a waitress in Tacoma I like, a music teacher out on Bainbridge Island and a professor of veterinary medicine. She’s the most trouble and I think I like her best.” Noah’s eyes were round. He swallowed. “You’re seeing five women?” “Well, on and off. Each one of them is completely irresistible in her own way.” “Don’t any of them want more of you than an occasional date? Like a serious relationship?” George sighed and looked upward. “I’m not opposed to the idea of marrying again, Noah. But, as of this moment, the only woman I’m seeing I would consider is the vet, Sharon. But she’s forty-four. I think that might be a tad risky, don’t you?” Then he grinned. “Although we do jog together on Sunday mornings. She’s keeping up very well.” Noah burst out laughing. This was what he loved about George and always had—he was so unafraid to live life. He held nothing back. “They used to call men like you rogues,” Noah said. “Not men like me,” he protested. “I care very much for these ladies. They are, each one, wonderful women. I treat them with genuine affection and respect.” Noah

Well Josie,” my dad turned to me suddenly. “I think you and Samuel have earned the right to name the colt. Whaddya think?” I looked at Samuel expectantly, but he just shrugged, dipping his head in my direction as he deferred to me. “Go ahead, Josie.” “George Frederic Handel,” I said impulsively. Jacob and my dad groaned loudly in unison and hooted in laughing protest. “What the hell kind of name is that, Josie?” My brother howled. “He’s a composer!” I cried out, embarrassed and wishing I had taken a minute to think before I blurted out the first thing that came to my head. A smile played around Samuel’s lips as he joined in the fray. “He wrote the music that Josie played last night at the church service.” “I just thought the colt should have a Christmas name, and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus is synonymous with Christmas!” I defended and then cringed as Jacob and my dad burst out laughing again. My dad wiped tears of mirth from his eyes as he tried to get control of himself. “We’ll call him Handel,” he choked out. “It’s a very nice name, Josie.” He patted my shoulder, still chuckling. I felt like I was ten years old.

When he shifted a few minutes later and lifted her against his chest, she did not protest but looped her arms around his neck, and that was a kind of trust too. He carried her to her porch swing and sat at one end so her back was supported by the pillows banking the arm of the swing. He set the swing in motion and gathered her close until she drifted away into sleep. Val stayed on that swing long after the woman in his arms had fallen asleep, knowing he was stealing a pleasure from her he should not. He’d never been in her cottage, though, and was reluctant to invade her privacy. Or so he told himself. In truth, the warm, trusting weight of Ellen FitzEngle in his arms anchored him on a night when he’d been at risk of wandering off, of putting just a little more space between his body and his soul; his intellect and his emotions. Darius had delivered a telling blow when he’d characterized music, and the piano, as an imaginary friend. And it was enough, Val realized, to admit no creative art could meet the artist’s every need or fulfill every wish. Ellen FitzEngle wasn’t going to be able to do that either, of course; that wasn’t the point. The point, Val mused as he carefully lifted Ellen against his chest and made his way into her cottage, was that life yet held pleasures and mysteries and interest for him. He would get through the weekend at Belmont’s on the strength of that insight. As he tucked a sleeping Ellen into her bed and left a good-night kiss on her cheek, Val silently sent up a prayer of thanks. By trusting him with her grief, Ellen had relieved a little of his own.

In the 1960s both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants turned to popular genres of music to provide songs for Christian worship. Roman Catholic songs tended to follow the folk idiom, using acoustical instruments such as guitar and flute, whereas evangelical Protestants turned to rock music, using electronic instruments.

Once he preached a sermon on "Music at Zion Church" and sent me word that I must be sure to be there, for I would hear him make mention of my father. That is just about typical of Protestant pulpit oratory in the more "liberal" quarters. I went, dutifully, that morning, but before he got around to the part in which I was supposed to be personally interested, I got an attack of my head-spinning and went out into the air. When the sermon was being preached, I was sitting on the church steps in the sun, talking to a black-gowned verger, or whatever he was called. By the time I felt better, the sermon was over. I cannot say I went to this church very often: but the measure of my zeal may be judged by the fact that I once went even in the middle of the week. I forget what was the occasion: Ash Wednesday or Holy Thursday. There were one or two women in the place, and myself lurking in one of the back benches. We said some prayers. It was soon over. By the time it was, I had worked up courage to take the train into New York and go to Columbia for the day.

this “right to marry” argument has enormous contemporary cultural traction in the West, which requires explanation if it is indeed obviously worthless. I suspect that the felt force lies in another contemporary Western cultural assumption, that it is necessary to be sexually active to be a fulfilled, or even a properly adult, human being. We could no doubt trace the root of this assumption to Freud, but I trust it is evident once named, displayed repeatedly in our popular music, in the Hollywood assumption that the existence of a “40-Year-Old Virgin” is self-evidently hilarious, in our newspaper advice columns that prioritise sexual satisfaction as a personal need, and in countless other ways.18 The (Protestant) churches have visibly surrendered to this cultural assumption, making marriage an inevitable part of Christian maturity for much of the twentieth century. We looked askance at ministerial candidates who were not married and constructed church programmes on the basis that the only single people around were young adults preparing for marriage or widows.

When a work of painting, music or other form attains two-way communication, it is truly art. One occasionally hears an artist being criticized on the basis that his work is too 'literal' or too 'common.' But one has rarely if ever heard any definition of 'literal' or 'common.' And there are many artists simply hung up on this, protesting it. Also, some avant-garde schools go completely over the cliff in avoiding anything 'literal' or 'common'—and indeed go completely out of communication! The return flow from the person viewing a work would be contribution. True art always elicits a contribution from those who view or hear or experience it. By contribution is meant 'adding to it.’ An illustration is 'literal' in that it tells everything there is to know. Let us say the illustration is a picture of a tiger approaching a chained girl. It does not really matter how well the painting is executed, it remains an illustration and it is literal. But now let us take a small portion out of the scene and enlarge it. Let us take, say, the head of the tiger with its baleful eye and snarl. Suddenly we no longer have an illustration. It is no longer 'literal.' And the reason lies in the fact that the viewer can fit this expression into his own concepts, ideas or experience: he can supply the why of the snarl, he can compare the head to someone he knows. In short, he can CONTRIBUTE to the head. The skill with which the head is executed determines the degree of response. Because the viewer can contribute to the picture, it is art. In music, the hearer can contribute his own emotion or motion. And even if the music is only a single drum, if it elicits a contribution of emotion or motion, it is truly art.

When she whirled to protest, he picked her up and took the stairs two at a time. The giggle as she clutched at him rang like music to his ears. “You’ll wear yourself out. It’s still two more flights.” “It’s you that needs to worry about stamina,” he growled. “It’s been more than three hundred years since I’ve had a woman.” “Thanks for the warning,” she whispered in his ear. “That means I better take care of you first so you’ve got time to recover for the main event.

Logically, when Maestro Gott some years ago, after an especially cruel critic had compared him to "a zombie who causes acute depression to innocent radio listeners", decided to stop performing in protest, the situation was considered so grave that the Minister of Culture himself went to console the deeply insulted star.

It seemed like the only thing to do was to crank the volume of my tape of British music in protest. Even though I was the only one who could hear it, I felt like I was doing something important.

wrung were yet fair little maidens a-star with hopes and dreams. Slowly the banners of the sunset city gave up their crimson and gold; slowly the conqueror's pageant faded out. Twilight crept over the valley and the little group grew silent. Walter had been reading again that day in his beloved book of myths and he remembered how he had once fancied the Pied Piper coming down the valley on an evening just like this. He began to speak dreamily, partly because he wanted to thrill his companions a little, partly because something apart from him seemed to be speaking through his lips. "The Piper is coming nearer," he said, "he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around him. He pipes—he pipes—and we must follow—Jem and Carl and Jerry and I—round and round the world. Listen— listen—can't you hear his wild music?" The girls shivered. "You know you're only pretending," protested Mary Vance, "and I wish you wouldn't. You make it too real. I hate that old Piper of yours." But Jem sprang up with a gay laugh. He stood up on a little hillock, tall and splendid, with his open brow and his fearless eyes. There were thousands like him all over the land of the maple. "Let the Piper come and welcome," he cried, waving his hand. "I'LL follow him gladly round and round the world.

We Protestants have replaced some of the grander architectural embellishments with a specific use of music intended to achieve the same end. Consequently, in Protestant circles “good” worship leaders are those who can use music to evoke what other traditions use space to evoke; specifically, a soulish sense of worshipfulness.227 But this is disjointed from everyday life and is inauthentic. Jonathan Edwards rightfully pointed out that emotions are transient and cannot be used to measure one’s relationship with God.228

Sweet Jane" Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand Jack is in his corset, and Jane is in her vest, and, me I'm in a rock'n'roll band. Huh Ridin' in a Stutz-Bearcat, Jim Y'know, those were different times Oh, all the poet, they studied rules of verse And the ladies, they rolled their eyes Sweet Jane! Whoa! Sweet Jane, oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane I'll tell you something Jack, he is a banker And Jane, she is a clerk Both of them save their monies, ha And when, when they come home from work Ooh! Sittin' down by the fire, oh The radio does play The classical music there, Jim "The March of the Wooden Soldiers" All you protest kids You can hear Jack say, get ready, ah Sweet Jane! Come on baby! Sweet Jane! Oh-oh-a! Sweet Jane Some people, they like to go out dancing And other peoples, they have to work. Just watch me now And there's even some evil mothers Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt Y'know that, women, never really faint And that villains always blink their eyes, woo And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush And that, life is, just to die And, everyone who ever had a heart, oh That wouldn't turn around and break it And anyone who ever played a part, whoa And wouldn't turn around and hate it Sweet Jane! Whoa-oh-oh! Sweet Jane! Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane Sweet Jane. Sweet Jane

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills — by destroying the American way of life. Radio