NEVER HAD THE SLIGHTEST INTEREST in anything Van Morrison did any more than I did Ted Nugent's crap. When you tried to post that I had to look up to see if I had heard any of his music before and I'm not certain there was a single song listed I can remember.
It never surprises me to find out a rocker is a raging asshole bigot and - surprise surprise - misogynist. That genre appeals to the lowest common denominator at its best and the next lowest values beneath that too. I don't dig rock and roll music with a few exceptions here and there. Oddly, all of those have unexpected content better than the typical.
It deeply offends me to hear anyone equate things Celtic with fascism, it disgusts me that the "celtic" fad of the 90's and 00's got melded into fascist, misogynistic, white supremacy along with "Americanism." It wouldn't surprise me to find that it was an old rocker from the Orange side of N. Ireland that took to that, though there are plenty of Catholic Irish Americans who are as stupid and rotten. Pop kulcha corrupts everything in its ignorant stupidity. I'm over that pretense that pop kulcha is in any way higher than it is. It's not. It's as easily Nazified as a show biz figure of 1930s Germany might be. I will never forget watching the news in the early 1970's seeing a racist anti-busing rally (white supremacist, really) in Southie where a very Irish looking trio performed "This Land Is Your Land," having not the slightest clue as to why that was fatally ironic.
Update: Well, I never accused the self-identified "brain trust" (almost as stupid a self-designation as "Brights") of knowing what they were talking about. The fact is one of the early American supporters of vaccination was none other than Cotton Mather, who was generally no one I would admire but he got that one right.
In so far as the Catholic bashing over the Covid vaccine, Pope Francis has said that it was immoral to not get the vaccine and risk the lives of other people, though some of the Republican-fascist bishops, cardinals and a few nut-bar priests have said otherwise. It's one case when I wish Francis would relax his synodality campaign and crack down on them.
Interestingly, when Popes ruled over other people in the Papal States, they mandated and provided incentives for people to be vaccinated two centuries ago.
Vatican News recounted how, as a smallpox epidemic swept central Italy at the end of the 1700s and beginning of the 1800s, Pope Pius VII threw the full weight of his temporal power behind a vaccination campaign.
The text of a law promulgated June 20, 1822, by Pope Pius' secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, described the new smallpox vaccine as a gift "put in place by divine providence" as a sign of God's "paternal love to save his children."
But the text noted that not everyone saw the vaccine as a gift, and it denounced appearances that "a deep-rooted prejudice was stronger in some parents than the love of their offspring."
"The legislation specified that to obtain subsidies, benefits or premiums, it was necessary to provide the 'certificate showing that the applicant, being the father of a family, has had the vaccination,'" said the Vatican News report May 7.
Refusing the vaccine was defined as "reprehensible conduct" punishable by a loss of benefits.
The pope set up committees to oversee the vaccination campaign and tied the licensing of physicians to their willingness to vaccinate patients, the report said.
But two years later, Pope Leo XII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1823, removed the vaccination obligation.
And his efforts drew the praise of one of Rome's most famous poets, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who wrote a sonnet extolling the virtues of the new pope who "liberated" his people from an invention of "the Freemasons" and restored the possibility that God alone would decide when it was time for someone to die.
Pope Gregory XVI, elected in 1831, restarted the vaccination campaign and extended it to all prisoners as well. Pope Pius IX, the last of the popes with temporal power, continued the campaign and designated a financial reward of "two paoli" — 20 cents of a scudo — for those who returned eight days after being vaccinated to have its efficacy checked, the Vatican News report said.
I have noted before that going online and reading lots and lots of atheists and agnostics, unedited, in their spontaneous outpouring cured me of the delusion that atheism is associated with superior intellect. That place as much as any corrected that mistaken impression.
I, on the other hand, am a Van Morrison fan (his version of "Be Thou My Vision" is a favorite), but everyone has their preferences.
ReplyDeleteHe started off light and joyful and leaning toward a kind of Christian mysticism (all Christian mysticism is a "kind," almost all of it unique, finally, to the individual mystic). At some point he began wandering into a dark place, and he's gotten darker and darker as he goes on. Setbacks in his personal life? professional career? Both, and a little bit of neither? I can't say, but his recent anti-semitism (what I've seen reported in headlines, I don't know the details) sadden me, to say the least. Not that I know him personally, or know/care anything about his personal life; but it certainly casts a shadow over his recordings.
I dunno; I still like his stuff up to and including "Hymns To The Silence" (the double album, not just the song). After that it gets less interesting and he gets more self-pitying. It happens. Sometimes we become more of who we always were; sometimes we become someone else altogether.
Life takes its toll. Public life doubly so.
I only know what it said in the review I was sent a link to and I don't even know if that was right. Well, I did look at a few other things that said he'd gone hard right and Covid skeptic, etc.
ReplyDeleteI will certainly put more credence in what you say than in the trolls.