I am taking a break from not mentioning Simps because he's got all of Duncan's "Brain Trusters" (they really do call themselves that) in a swivet over a sentence in Garrison Keillor's piece and they're too stupid to understand what the snippet that Simps used means and are too lazy to come and look at the context of it. If they weren't slamming Keillor over what I'd posted, I wouldn't do it. What Simps got the tots all worked up over, I've given in blue.
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.
Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.
If you want to see the wider context of the passage you can by doing what the Eschatots didn't, reading the short piece I posted earlier today, below. If you did you would see that passage comes after several paragraphs excoriating Unitarians for various and well earned reasons - by some of them, not all of them. Some UUs are peaches, lots of them are full of themselves - he referred to two of the number of holiday songs written by Jewish pop music scribblers AND POINTED OUT THAT NO CHRISTIANS HAD EVER WRITTEN OFFENSIVE SONGS DISTORTING AND DIMINISHING ROSH HASHANAH.
Jeesh, you guys are so stupid that you couldn't see he wrote the words as an example of the kind of thing that is offensive but that gets written about Christmas by non-Christians (and some Christians and ex-Christians, Unitarians) all the time. It was an example of the kind of offensiveness of the kind he was protesting against.
For crying out loud, didn't you ever learn about analyzing literary texts for meaning by 11th grade because that's the kind of thing we were at least exposed to in my rural, primitive high school. And this isn't a Steinbeck short story* where you have to analyze the language and the structure to get the meaning.
I know Simps isn't so good with the old reading comprehension thing, he looks for stuff to take offense at so he can go get attention at Duncan' Daycare For Attention Seeking Geezers but I'd thought some of you knew how to read for meaning instead of distorting. I know Tlaz is too stupid to know how to read from the time I quoted Feynman with a citation and a link to the source and the dumb dolly thought I'd written it, saying it showed I knew nothing about science. But I guess I know how the rest of you can stand to spend time among your fellow post-literates.
It reminds me of nothing more than the time the "good Roger Ailes" a superior, former liberal-lefty blogger wrote about some bogus survey they did of bloggers eleven years back:
Twenty percent of blogs don't use text, but only ten percent don't invite comments from readers. That means 10 percent of blogs invite comments from readers without using text. How do they do it, with a friggin' rebus?
No, just stupid stuff. No pictures needed.
I will bet he wouldn't have guessed that his friend in Philly would have provided a practical example of that kind of blogging eleven years later.
Now, back to ignoring Simps.
* How well I remember Mrs. J.'s brilliant analysis of The Flight, how the style of the story, its language created the meaning of it in my 10th grade English lit. class. She said she'd taught the story for more than 20 years and was finding new points to consider in it. It was largely wasted on brats like us but it started something for some of us.
The internet is an outrage machine for people who just want to rant, the more ignorantly the better. Trolls, especially, have no better use for it.
ReplyDeleteOr is it antisemitic to critique the work of Irving Berlin?
ReplyDeleteI wonder why people like Shulamit Reinharz who is one of the smaller big names in tagging people as anti-semites isn't anti-semitic when she criticizes the work of Jewish critics of Israel as anti-semites*. When some guy wrote a book calling the composer Virgil Thomson an anti-semite, his old friend and colleague and one of my acquaintances, Arthur Burger wrote a letter to the Boston Globe refuting the accusation and noting how casually the accusation was made back then. And it's gotten worse now. Simps throws it around like his name dropping. I think the biggest danger to Jewishness in the United States isn't anti-semitism, it's disappearing through assimilation, giving up on Judaism to become just another gentile, essentially what they were constantly on guard over in the Old Testament - showing that it is as relevant as it always was, only you've got to read it for comprehension and deeper levels of meaning. The loss of that is a more general catastrophe in the age of TV and the internet. Being Jewish is "too-oo-oo haaaarrrrddd, or something. As being literate or an adult are.
Delete*Wish they'd come up with one way to write that word, every word processor I use tags at least one of the ways you can spell it and they don't all agree.
N.B. My tiresome little volunteer spell checker (why he doesn't do it for Duncan I wonder) notes that I spelled Arthur's name with a U. I tend to do what some other musicians tend to, spell by ear on first draft and to try to catch it in editing. I'm sure Arthur would overlook it, I'll have to check to see if he ever had spelling errors in the several thing he wrote to me that I still have. I don't remember.
DeleteHis musical manuscript is pretty excellent as mine used to be before I started using Finale software for everything. I haven't written out much other than sketches by hand in a long time. I always used pencil, if a teacher wanted ink I'd photocopy that, I think Steve Reich advocated that approach.
"I think the biggest danger to Jewishness in the United States isn't anti-semitism, it's disappearing through assimilation"
ReplyDeleteYour concern is noted.
Oh, I can't resist. I don't think of you as Jewish, I think of you as an asshole, I've told you that before. You are the "ass" in "assimilation".
Delete