The many faces of the West... and of Tom Petty.
Fresh from hearing him live, Slicer enlists some Petty songs as a soundtrack for recent thoughts and reading material, including some healthy criticism of evangelical Christianity.
The need, or otherwise, for underlying causes is something which has captivated Slicer's interest repeatedly, whether in cosmogony or in the quantum world (if these can even be considered distinct categories). Rock music is another frequently recurring theme on the blog. It supports inclinations to kick down things that are in our way, or provides a soundtrack to what turns us on. At its outset detractors criticised it (and a generation or two embraced it) on the basis of it being seen as rebellious.
There is something iconic in being a rebel, even without a cause.
Most of us want to make some kind of impact on the world or those around us, and sometimes the easiest way to get noticed is to rebel. Even academics are under constant pressure to publish something novel or different, or at least do a half-decent job of convincing others that it's new. It often isn't. An ancient writer did observe that "there's nothing new under the sun," as he lamented a lack of meaning in the daily grind (Ecclesiastes).
Punk Rock was certainly rebellious and it had a cause, if not lasting solutions to the issues it rebelled against. Here, tho', Slicer's focusing his interest on good ole Rock n Roll c/o veterans Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. The difference is not so great as you might imagine. Neil McCormick, writing in The Telegraph this week, quotes Tom: "Rock was kind of reinventing itself and we were right in the middle of it. Our sensibilities aligned with punk, we had the same picture, that rock had become stale and overblown." Petty is an interesting combination of rock gentleman and industry rebel, having taken a manipulative music industry to task over how it treats artists and their art.
When it came out Slicer reviewed the TPATH album Mojo here, and the week before last he had the privilege of hearing them play Dublin's O2 arena. It was one of the best gigs he's ever attended, and confirmed his impression of Tom's gentleman status. Petty & Campbell's songs (with/without input from Jeff Lynne) are often light-hearted, but manage to combine celebratory music with subjects close to the heart, including yearning for some better potential in the future - even if we're really naive about the whole thing...
"Eddie waited till he finished high school
He went to hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo too
The future was wide open
They moved into a place they both could afford
He found a nightclub he could work at the door
She had a guitar and she taught him some chords
The sky was the limit
Into the great wide open,
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open,
A rebel without a clue."
Into The Great Wide Open.
...or we're not sure what it is, but we're chasing something:
"I rolled on, the sky grew dark
I put the pedal down to make some time
There's something good, waitin' down this road
I'm picking up whatever is mine."
Running down a dream
Just over the hill
Somethin’ good comin’
I know it will
And I’m in for the long run
Wherever it goes
Ridin’ the river
Wherever it goes
There’s somethin’ good comin’
For you and me
Somethin’ good comin’
There has to be."
Sometimes the subject matter of their songs isn't all that light if you dig a little below the surface.
"Every now and then, I get down to the end of a day,
I’ll have to stop, ask myself, what’ve I done?
It just seems so useless to have to work so hard,
And nothin’ ever really seem to come from it."
That's straight out of Ecclesiastes, whether Tom & Mike realised it or not. Still, Ecclesiastes doesn't have a rockin' tune with a great melodic hook... The guy in the song (Here comes my girl) finds his meaning in relationship - something many of us can identify with, if the singing along to this one in Dublin was anything to go by.
Today is World Refugee Day, and Tom even has a song well-suited to the day. Have a listen how it sounded in Dublin*:
"Somewhere, somehow somebody
Must have kicked you around some
Who knows, maybe you were kidnapped
Tied up, taken away and held for ransom..."
"...you don't have to live like a refugee."
No-one should. If you want to know more what can be done to help the dispossessed, so that they don't have to, you could check out the UN Refugee Agency, or some of the local church or other charitable agencies working to the same end. Too often evangelical Christianity has been guilty of sitting on its backside waiting for a new world order, and not acting on the understanding that it's invited to help bring it in. Let's make some personal and collective impact.
It's Good to be King has more than a hint of irony at the alternative of just looking out for ourselves:
"It's good to be king and have your own way
Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day
And when your bulldog barks and your canary sings
You're out there with winners, yeah, it's good to be king."
Free-Falling describes a need to get away from the safe and predictable, the perceived 'wholesome,' to get a fresh perspective.
"She's a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too."
Some hurt is involved in the process.
Slicer recently read some Mark Noll. Noll is Prof of History at University of Notre Dame. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, he describes the history of how American evangelicalism made uncritical assumptions at various timepoints of what was good and what was 'wholesome.' There were assumptions that various cultural and political ideas/ideals & methods (eg individualism, democracy, free market) were Christian, confusing following Jesus with following the 'American Dream'/love of America - and that this led both to American evangelicalism's strong association with republicanism and with a blinkered anti-intellectual approach - with highly dodgy consequences. Slicer suggests Young Earth Creationism is an example. The challenge for Christians today is to take a step back every now and then, to question individually and collectively what are the elements of the society/culture (including in the Church) in which we engage which we assume are consistent with Christian worldview, but are not; and conversely, where should we be getting strongly behind beneficial cultural/societal trends? (Do we really think we can contain the work of the Spirit within the Church?)
To borrow from Dylan, where is God not on 'our' side individually & collectively? Or perhaps, more correctly, where are we not advancing God's desires, but yet we carry on regardless? Also, are we sometimes too quick to spring to the defence of a God who has no need of our defence (as Peter did, and attracted a rebuke)?
Slicer suggests we should do our best to make sure we're right before we set ourselves in either 'compromised' or uncompromising positions. That's likely to require engagement rather than separation or withdrawal. Let's not be rebels without a clue. And let's be rebels with the right cause. Once we've worked that out, then we could apply another element of the Petty philosophy:
"Well I won’t back down, no I won’t back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won’t back down
Gonna stand my ground, won’t be turned around
And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down
Gonna stand my ground and I won’t back down."
*audio and lyrics posted here under perceived "fair use" - for the purpose of commentary/illustration/charitable cause. No copyright breach intended. Not for profit. Will remove immediately if there is a copyright owner who requests removal.
The canker of young-earth creationism needs to be extirpated from the face of the earth. Then there will be no more tears and no more sorrow. May I suggest the erection of gas chambers for the extermination of its adherents which would include not only the evangelicals but Dylan's Hasidim friends too. (Noll has the right physiognomy for the role of an SS officer in say Schindler's List.) Bob Dylan, 1985:
This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this, where man has his way, and 1,000 years when God has His way. Just like a week. Six days work, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age.
Posted by: Michael Slippery Gray | 06/21/2012 at 04:03 PM
Thanks stopping by, and particularly for commenting. Firstly, Slicer is presuming Michael Slippery Gray is not Michael Gray of encyclopedic Dylan knowledge and writing, but would welcome clarification. Secondly, Slicer is reading this comment as wild hyperbole rather than a genuine call to something akin to genocide...
Slicer has been known to take Dylan's thoughts and output pretty seriously, but Zim too was exposed to and caught up in a very particular & questionable theological viewpoint regarding some Biblical passages at that point in his life. Slicer's impression from Dylan's subsequent output is that his own view may well have changed on some of this stuff. Whatever.
Slicer figures that YEC is unhelpful on several levels, not least wrt truth and intellectual integrity, but (a) not all evangelicals are YECs, so your proposed extirpation would take out many 'innocents,' (b) there are much worse cankers... oppression, injustice, dispossession and creation of a tidal wave of refugees all fit the bill. And there's a canker that's arguably the root of 'em all. We could call it a "supercanker" and it pollutes everything :-P ... there was even a song about it.
Posted by: The Slicer | 06/21/2012 at 10:59 PM
The Michael Slippery Gray would like to make the following theological pronouncements on The Scandal of Intellectual Schizophrenia Within Sliced Gray Matter to disembodied cyber-entities referring to themselves with grandiose delusions in the third person:
You rise up and say goodbye to no one
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Luke 11:17-19
King James Version (KJV)
17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.
18 If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub.
19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges.
Yes Dylan changed his views radically when he cavorted with some other evangelicals of a rather un-Evangelical persuasion for whom the world is still in the year 5772: which means, as Dylan said to Kurt Loder, "I think we'll have at least two hundred years".
So when the Germanically bespectacled intellectual Herr Noll sends the Evangelicals to the new gas chambers (literally or in terms of intellectual metaphor) in his SS outfit for intellectual inferiority, he'll have to, in addition to including the "innocents" which his very own sloganizing doesn't cater for, include Dylan's Lubavitch friends too. If he wants to be consistent. Which could raise eyebrows in terms of political correctness. Then again, it could be an ingenious solution to the Middle East problem.
It's definitely a slippery slope - down Niagara.
SNIP
Posted by: Michael Slippery Gray | 06/22/2012 at 03:37 PM
:-D Fair point re the indiscriminate title of the book, The Michael Slippery Jokerman Gray. Still, Noll doesn't see the evangelical mind (or minds, or bodies) as beyond redemption. In the NT there is no attempt to hide that opinion was divided on many matters from the earliest days of the Church. (The same early Church which documented the account you quote, and on whom the point won't have been lost). The Church has required correction in the past and continues to require it.
The Slicer's use of 3rd person is purely tongue-in-cheek (as explained previously on this blog) - no delusions of grandeur... and he has a body; no-one else would do the typing. Use of the definite article grants him the only title he's every likely to have apart from "Dr," and they're two-a-penny. "The" is tongue-in-cheek too, and The Slicer is flattered to see The Gray follow his example in the comment above. See here for where Slicer's coming from:
http://t-rinder.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/some-say-his-face-should-be-hewn-into-a-british-cliff-some-say-he-should-be-thrown-off-one-slicer-th.html
Arguably Noll's position is just employing another couplet from the song you quoted:
"Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within."
Get a barrel!
Posted by: The Slicer | 06/22/2012 at 05:25 PM
Herr Knoll needs to get on down the road to the Lubavitchers for some Church Correction on the identity of the Messiah. And maybe he should take the Scandalous Evangelicals with him - the whole barrel of them. In any case, the position he expounds is derived from atheists and vague deists from the 1700s onwards, who were at least consistent in their position - as consistent as Dylan, the Lubavitchers and the Scandalous Evangelicals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton
He put forward the view that "from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter." This restated the Scottish Enlightenment concept which David Hume had put in 1777 as "all inferences from experience suppose ... that the future will resemble the past", and Charles Lyell memorably rephrased in the 1830s as "the present is the key to the past".[35] Hutton's 1788 paper concludes; "The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,–no prospect of an end."
2 Peter 3
King James Version (KJV)
3 This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance:
2 That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour:
3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery grey
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response
Now Knoll is as over a (slippery) barrel there as certain experts on Dylan's use of "the Bible". It's one thing to parrot Scripture in an interlinear manner that leaves people yawning, but quite another to INTERPRET intertextually in a way that sees the bigger picture.
Enter, at a stretch, another Michael. No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Posted by: Michael Slippery Gray | 06/22/2012 at 09:44 PM
Eh?! Lotta cutting & pasting going on there, but afraid your point is lost on Slicer - at least he knows now where the "slippery" Gray comes from!
Posted by: The Slicer | 06/23/2012 at 08:26 AM