Culture – Page 38 – Into the Woods

Political insanity and religious insanity

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland

While the 2016 presidential election puts on full display the political insanity of much of the American population — not to mention the insanity of the Republican Party — let’s not fail to point out another insanity that is just as prevalent: religious insanity. Let’s also note how closely the two are connected.

The quote below is attributed to televangelist Kenneth Copeland, in a recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“If Christians don’t support Trump, they are risking the wrath of God. Trump has been chosen by God, and by rejecting him, they are rejecting God. They could be punished with barrenness, poverty or even having a gay child.”

And the quote below is attributed to Anne Graham Lotz, on the air with right-wing radio host Steve Deace:

“Our nation seems to be shaking its fist in God’s face and telling him to get out of our politics, get out of our schools, get out of our businesses, get out of our marketplace, get off the streets. It’s just stunning to me the way we are basically abandoning God as a culture and as a nation. … I think that’s why God allows bad things to happen. I think that’s why he would allow 9/11 to happen, or the dreadful attack in San Bernardino, or some of these other places, to show us that we need him. We’re desperate without him.”

What a nice god! Though he must be incredibly busy running the universe, he also has time to punish earthlings for not voting Republican. That god also kills people — or at least allows people to be killed — to remind us how much we need such a violent, vindictive god.

As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has pointed out, this kind of religious delusion and narcissism are prevalent among plenty of people who might see Kenneth Copeland and Anne Graham Lotz as a bit extreme. Harris has beautifully pointed out the narcissism of people who think that God is intimately involved in the details of their lives. Not only does God actually tell them what he’s thinking, it’s remarkable how much these people and their god are alike: pure nasty. While your God was finding you a parking space, Harris says, or answering your prayers for enough money to pay your credit card bill, how many children did that same God allow to die in Africa while their helpless parents watched and prayed? That’s narcissism on top of the nasty.

I’m fully on board with freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But those freedoms also mean that the rest of us are free to tell these people that they’re vile and sickening, and that their god is even worse.

Anne Graham Lotz

Road trip to Green Bank

I’ve made some fine road trips in my day, in several countries. But I believe the road trip that I just returned from was one of the best ever. The trip was mostly on back roads from Stokes County, North Carolina, through the Blue Ridge Mountains into the New River Valley, thence into West Virginia to Green Bank.

My primary mission was to see the Green Bank radio telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. To go see the telescope seemed like a no-brainer, since it’s not that far away and since I’m a space nerd and a radio nerd. Getting there was half the fun.

I am not well traveled in West Virginia. We all know that parts of West Virginia are environmental sacrifice zones, chiefly for coal but also for natural gas. This road trip took me through a very different part of West Virginia — a still-natural and well-preserved countryside, much of it in national forests.

The wildflowers! The trip would have been worthwhile for the wildflowers alone. The roadsides and pastures were dense with wildflowers at the peak of summer. I was green with envy at the rainfall the area has had and how green everything was. In between the mountains, the ridges of which tend to run north to south, are wide valleys, extremely fertile. It’s perfect pasture land. And, judging from the size of the farmhouses, that pastureland made lots of farmers rich. These are not the small subsistence farms that were much more common in the American southeast.

Morning temperatures ranged from 68 to 75 degrees F. Afternoons might have been warmer except that clouds and showers seem to descend on the area pretty much every summer day. There was hardly any traffic on the roads. I drove with the windows down, enjoying that sense of freedom (in my Smart car) that car commercials always try to give — the idea that there’s no one on the road but you. The road trip was almost freeway-free. GPS did the navigating, but when presented with alternate routes I always chose the routes that followed rivers or that avoided populated areas.

The telescope is fascinating. I have been plotting the third book of the Ursa Major series, and in book 3 Jake and Phaedrus actually will find themselves at Green Bank, having gotten there by mule, for some action scenes that require the use of the telescope, though the telescope had been idle since the calamity struck (in the first novel) that wiped out 6 billion of the earth’s population and returned the survivors to the Iron Age.

The telescope is extremely sensitive to radio interference. It’s located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, and the surrounding mountains also keep out radio interference. I lost my cellular signal 50 miles south of Green Bank. Upon arriving in Green Bank, hoping to find accommodations to spend the night there (there are no such accommodations), I stopped at the public library, hoping to use WIFI. They library staff told me that they’re not permitted to have WIFI because it would interfere with the telescope. If you visit Green Bank, try to arrive early in the day, do the tour, and then leave yourself time to head east toward Charlottesville or south toward Blacksburg, if you want something to eat or a place to sleep — or Internet access.

The tour takes an hour. You’ll start in the auditorium with an undemanding scientific briefing from your tour guide, and then a video. Then you’ll board a bus and be driven to a point near the base of the telescope. The tour guide will explain that the bus uses a diesel engine, because the spark plugs in a gas engine would create radio interference.

It’s hard from photographs to grasp the scale of the telescope. It’s 485 feet tall, 60 percent higher than the Statue of Liberty. The size of the dish is almost three acres. It weighs 8,500 tons, but it can be rotated and tilted (azimuth and elevation) with extreme precision.

There were nine people in the tour group I was in. Six of them were Dutch, two were British, and I was the only American. Why are Americans so incurious? Once again I was reminded why I have so often said that I have much more in common with the average European than with the average American. I returned to Trump country — Wytheville, Virginia, to spend the night.

Driving south toward Wytheville, about an hour from Green Bank, I got cellular service again. A text message arrived from Ken, who was holding down the fort at the abbey: “Four foot long snake has been relocated. Raccoons ate all orchard apples. Lily is well. .15 Inches rain. Hope you’re having fun.”

Wytheville was not much fun, to tell you the truth. Wytheville was once a sleepy place, but major new roads have turned it into a travel hub. Watching an ill-mannered, incredibly unhealthy bunch of Americans descend on a free Ramada Inn breakfast made me want to emigrate to Scotland as quick as I could pack my bags. I was conflicted about where to have dinner in Wytheville. The many restaurants were mostly about “family” food, or they were chain restaurants. I finally settled on the Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon. It appeared to be locally owned, and I liked the “saloon” part of the name. I confess that I had a filet mignon with garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli. It was superb. I felt as though I was having supper in a well-run Irish pub. If you ever find yourself in Wytheville, I recommend it.

Places like Fries, Virginia, are depressing. Fries is a classic example of a textile town that is now poor, culturally and otherwise. In other words, Trump country. In 1940, its population was 1,555. It’s now 469. Years ago, most of the people worked in the cotton mill, which was powered by a hydroelectric dam on the New River. The dam is still there; the old mill has been demolished. The mill closed in 1989 and put 1,700 people out of work. The roads around Fries are a classic, and depressing, example of Trump-supporter impoverishment. The housing is dilapidated, with junk in the yards and dogs on chains. The nasty little churches seem to be the few remaining businesses. One of the churches even seemed aware of the fact that it’s just a business selling heavenly comfort into the squalor. “Under same management for over 2,000 years,” said the church’s sign out front. Harrumph.

But how different the economy of West Virginia used to be! Not only were there prosperous farmers living on fertile land, there were many resorts, most having to do with springs. The grandest resort I saw was Sweet Springs, designed by Thomas Jefferson and once a hangout of the rich and famous.

Upon arriving home, I said to Ken that the road trip put me in mind of thoughts he describes in Trespassing Across America. Ken uses much more refined and nuanced language, but this road trip made me both love and hate America. Wonders such as the Green Bank Telescope are a reminder of what Americans have accomplished. Sweet Springs — not to mention those beautiful farms and the national forest — is a reminder of what America once was and promised to be. But now there are Trump signs amid the ruins of our old economy. As for the new economy in places this remote, it appears mostly to have to do with big highways and the sublimely ugly service and retail development that springs up along those highways. A brush with Europeans is a reminder of just how ignorant and culturally impoverished most Americans are.

You know what I think would make this country great again? An educated and informed population, the opposite of what Donald Trump and his political party stand for. I got the heck out of Fries and Wytheville and hurried back to the abbey, a tiny Fox-free bubble of books and imagination in the foothills.

So why will Jake and Phaedrus find themselves at Green Bank in book 3 of the Ursa Major series? A calamity threatens — an act of sabotage that would destroy an incoming ship loaded with E.T. VIP’s from the galactic federation. Unless Jake and Phaedrus can succeed in transmitting a radio signal out to the vicinity of Neptune to prevent the detonation, earth will get itself into yet another deep pickle, as earth is wont to do.

The tour guide uses a Faraday cage and a spectrum analyzer to show how even a digital camera can create radio interference.

The nicest of the many churches I passed

What else is new? Outside money is always seeking to turn what’s left of natural America into a sacrifice zone.

Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon at Wytheville

“Where to Invade Next”

It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.

In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.

For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.

In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.

Taboos, truth-telling, and an F-word

For as long as I have been politically conscious, there has been a strong taboo against using certain words in public discourse. One of those words is the H-word — Hitler. (Nice people lower their voices when they say the name.) That taboo led to what we call Godwin’s law, which posits that if any online political discussion goes on for long enough, it becomes almost a certainty that someone will use the H-word. Another one of those words is the F-word — fascism. Again, I lower my voice. These are words that nice people don’t use.

The moment one uses either of these words — I like to call them rhetorical bludgeons — he is deemed guilty of rhetorical excess and automatically loses the argument. The assumption underlying the taboo is that this is America, we’re better than that, and that American democracy could not possibly ever fall into fascism or produce a demagogue like, you know, the H-guy.

But, just as a thought experiment, what would happen if the F-word ever became the right word? Our public discourse and therefore the front line of our defenses would be paralyzed until we came to our senses.

And so I am encouraged to see the F-word increasingly finding its way into print as the Trump phenomenon grows. Andrew Sullivan used the F-word in a long article in the May issue of New York magazine. Yesterday, Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, used the F-word in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

We have always known that, if fascism ever did come to America, religion would be right in the middle of it. From the very first colonists, American religion has always had a strong stink of evil in it.

For far, far too long — decades, actually — Republican politicians and the vilest of preachers have gotten away with incendiary rhetoric. Older Republicans have been imbibing this rhetoric for almost 40 years now. Who are these people? Matthew MacWilliams, an academic who studies authoritarianism, published an article back in February that said:

“A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.

“Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior. When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.”

Yep. We all know these people, the authoritarians, pretty much synonymous with the word Republican. Preachers and Republican operatives have made sure that the authoritarians among us always feel threatened. But now the Republican Party has lost control of the machinery it created to angrify and harness authoritarians for political purposes. A rogue moved in and took over. It’s really that simple. And there’s a word for it.

Update:

The New Yorker uses the F-word, the H-word, and the A-word — fascism, Hitler, authoritarian.

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

The white working class is lost. Let’s move on.

Mark Storms, accused of killing a man in church (with a gun) over who would sit where

As a liberal and as a Democrat, I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. But I’ve just about gotten over it.

While the low-end media that serve low-information white voters carry on with the usual anger and distraction, the media followed by more-intelligent Americans is trying to grapple with a serious issue. How did Donald Trump happen? Andrew Sullivan worries that America has never been more ripe for fascism. Many intellectuals have accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the white working class. In the elite right-wing media, the problems of the white working class are attributed to moral failure — white working folks just aren’t honoring anymore the “moral” regimen that the high church and their social betters have rammed down their throats for so long.

Like many liberals, I was appalled at the right-wing media blaming white working people — blaming the victim — for global factors that are shutting them out of the economy and robbing them of their pride and dignity.

But a friend pushed back. They did bring it on themselves in many ways, he said. The more I have thought about it, the more I think my friend is right. The white working class has become mired in hatred and racism. It is proud of its ignorance. Its preferred religion — the low-church glorification of the rich, glorification of the military and war, vilification of the poor, gun worship, overt hatred of anyone who isn’t just like them, its dreams of theocracy with crushing power over the rest of us — this religion is so vile that I don’t hesitate to call it evil. Don’t miss this recent piece in the Washington Post which says that there have been 626 violent deaths in “houses of worship” since 1999. Most of those deaths occur in Baptist churches. Yet white losers are so deluded about the nature of the real world that their terror-de-jour is fear of transsexuals in bathrooms. That is moral insanity. I do believe that, as a whole, the white working class has become morally insane.

I am chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. Of course I have asked myself whether we have abandoned these white working class voters and whether there is anything we can do to win them back. But now I am pretty much persuaded that such a thing would be completely impossible. Nor is this the fault of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party thought that it could go on harnessing white resentment. Elite Republicans thought they could control white losers and inflame white losers with the right-wing propaganda system and keep on using white losers and their hatreds to win elections. But white so-called conservatives (I don’t think they’re conservatives at all — I call them right-wingers, or losers) were smart enough (though just barely) to catch on to the bait and switch. They figured out (or Donald Trump explained it to them with one-syllable and a few two-syllable words) that the Republican Party was only bilking them for votes while screwing them economically with the true agenda of the Republican Party, the billionaire agenda.

If the Republican Party couldn’t contain these people and actually is being destroyed by them, then who is crazy enough to think that the Democratic Party could do any better? White haters have simply become unfit for the modern world. They know nothing. Their skills are mostly obsolete. They lack the intelligence to adapt. They’d rather go down in angry flames and celebrate their hatreds than join the rest of us in the pluralistic modern world, with our arc toward justice.

Republicans are pretty much all alike, except that a very few of them are rich. Whereas we Democrats are a diverse coalition. Could any coalition possibly contain the white working class? No. They don’t do coalitions anymore. It took them 35 years to destroy the Republican Party. But the fragile Democratic coalition wouldn’t be able to handle these holy folks for even a single election cycle. They truly believe, from their trashed enclaves in the interior of America, that their god hates the same people they hate, that God is on their side, and that they are entitled to dominate the world, even though they and their preachers don’t know a thing about the world and the nature of the change that is destroying them.

Let’s admit it. White working people think very highly of themselves and their morals, but the truth is that they are morally degenerate and dangerous. The right-wing propaganda system, with its hate radio and fake news, which bilked them for decades to win elections by pumping up their anger and hatred, made these people far worse than they already were. Remember how nice they were during the Civil Rights era?

I don’t see a solution. We just have to hope that the United States of America can survive these people without the tyranny and fascism that Andrew Sullivan describes in the link above. We need to do everything possible to save their children from becoming just like their parents and grandparents. But all we can do now is try to contain them, anesthetize them with bread and circuses, and wait for them to die off — which they are doing at an accelerating rate, not least because of their own self-destructive behavior.

Further reading:

God tells tow truck driver to leave woman stranded on the highway because of her Bernie Sanders sticker. “The conservative Christian, 51, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, said he felt proud that he ‘finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.’ ”

Two takes on Handel’s Largo

Earlier this evening I had an email from a friend asking if I ever played the Largo from Handel’s opera Xerxes on the abbey organ. “Ha!” I replied. “I haven’t played the Largo since I was a first-year organ student.”

My friend caught my offhandedly rude dismissal of the Largo. He’s a trained musician and former music reviewer. The Largo is considered a bit of a cliché. But if you return to the Largo with fresh ears, it’s actually a stunning piece of music that deserves its eternal fame. After my friend mentioned it, I went to YouTube looking for interesting performances on the organ. I ended up — naturally — with Diane Bish.

Diane Bish is so flamboyant and Liberace-like an organist that one is prejudiced against her on sight. But after listening to some of her superb playing, one realizes that she is one of the greatest of living organists. I only wish that I could adequately point out some of the details in her playing of this well-known piece. For one, she uses the organ’s crescendo pedal, which is considered a no-no for most sorts of music, as a matter of musical taste. The crescendo pedal pours on the stops as you press down on it, all the way up to everything the organ’s got. When she looks down to her right at 1:09, she’s looking to make sure that her foot is on the crescendo pedal, because she’s about to let loose with the organ’s power (she starts pulling back on the pedal at about 1:29). At the dynamic peaks of the piece (around 2:35 and 3:40) she has arrived at ff approaching full organ courtesy of the crescendo pedal. Pulling back on the pedal, of course, permits the smooth and rapid fading. The crescendo pedal is one of the pedals that looks like the accelerator on a Mac truck.

The next thing to notice is her use of rubato. Rubato playing is a violation of strict, metronomic tempo. At 2:08, notice how she delays the notes and is a tiny fraction of a beat behind the beat on some of the key notes of the melody. Rubato playing is quite usual for later romantic-era music, such as Chopin. Or even Brahms. To play rubato for a composer who was born in 1685 is dangerously heretical. But Bish flawlessly pulls it off.

Xerxes is an early opera. The Largo, though literally about a tree and its shade, is a love song about displaced and hopeless love. It ought to be sung by a castrato male. Sometimes it is sung today by a female soprano. But probably a more historically accurate sound can be gotten by a countertenor, as in the performance below.

Ironies in the evolution of tyranny

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. By Jack Rakove, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 488 pages.

My reading at present is focused on the American colonial era, the revolution, and the development of the American Constitution. I took a lot of notes while reading this book by Jack Rakove. But one passage in particular flashes at me as though it was written in bright red neon. Rakove is talking about James Madison:

“Yet this reactionary fear of the threat to property also converged with his youthful commitment to freedom of conscience to produce one powerful insight about the protection of rights in republican America. These two concerns enabled Madison to perceive a truth that the political theory of the age did not yet properly recognize. In a republic, unlike a monarchy, the problem of rights would not be to guard the people as a whole against the arbitrary power of government, but rather to secure individuals and minorities against the legal authority of popular majorities.”

This brings us to the so-called Tea Party, the contemporary right-wing movement by angry white losers, financed by billionaires. Though the Tea Party has taken a wrecking bar to the American democracy wherever it can gerrymander itself into a stronghold, I am thinking in particular about the state of North Carolina, where the Tea Party legislature actually called a special emergency session, ostensibly to shoot down a local ordinance in Charlotte that was meant to afford transgendered people some dignity in the use of public bathrooms.

But, in truth, the bathroom issue was just a smokescreen in this legislation, called HB2. The transgender part of HB2 was meant to appeal to the fears and hatreds of mouth-breathing voters in rural North Carolina while also distracting the media. The real and even more slimy intent of HB2, as is always the case with the Republican Party, is the billionaire agenda. HB2 prevents local governments from setting a minimum wage that is higher than the minimum wage set by federal or state law. HB2 also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that grant civil rights protections. But the biggest piece of slime is that HB2 prevents workers from suing for workplace discrimination in state courts. This part of HB2 is pretty technical and has sneaked under the radar, but it was a big item on the wish list of the billionaire Republican donor class, and now the billionaires’ servants in the North Carolina legislature have checked it off their list. Here’s an article on that.

And, by the way, HB2 shows that the Republican Party doesn’t give a fig for any principle, if power is involved. HB2 also tramples on the principle of local rule and local government. North Carolina’s cities tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic. But the Republicans in Raleigh never hesitate to use state law to keep counties and municipalities from doing anything remotely liberal. Even property rights are not sacred to these radical Republicans. If your neighbors want to frack for gas but you don’t, then the state will use its power to frack you whether you want it or not. Or, if you’ve got a nice water system, as Asheville does, or a nice airport, as Charlotte does, then the state will just take it from you if it can.

This brings us back to James Madison. Madison foresaw even in the mid-1780s how kings (or even “big government”) were not the only potential tyrant under the new American Constitution. Rather, it was the tyranny of the majority that Madison was concerned about.

Not until 1868 did we get a remedy — the 14th Amendment. The Southern states were trampling on the rights of former slaves during Reconstruction, and the federal government stepped in to try to stop it. Many of the ugliest parts of American history touch on the 14th Amendment. White Southerners fought back with Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, which stood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why it took so long is a political mystery that I may never understand.

Today’s so-called Tea Party derives its methods and inspiration not from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists protested against a despotic king and a Parliament who gave them no representation in the government. Rather, the so-called Tea Party is shockingly similar in its methods with the Jim Crow racists, who with violence against blacks, the activities of “militias,” gerrymandering, and rigged elections used the government to allow the white majority to hold the black minority down.

The current era is the most shameful period in North Carolina’s history in a hundred years. We will eventually throw the right-wing radicals out of power in Raleigh — hopefully starting with the governor this year. Cleaning up the legislature will take more time. It is highly fitting that the de factor leader of this movement to restore justice in North Carolina is a black man, the Rev. William Barber of the NAACP, who started the Moral Monday movement. I may have some comments on Barber’s new book soon.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.

Patrick: the ruin of Ireland

Dingle harbor, County Kerry. The Dingle Peninsula is my favorite place in Ireland.

Today is St. Patrick’s day. I’m not celebrating. Not everyone holds the view that Patrick was the best thing that ever happened to Ireland.

A seventh-century biography of Patrick by a Christian monk, Muirchú moccu Machtheni, records a Druid prophesy about the man who will start the destruction of the native culture of Ireland:

Across the sea will come Adze-head,
crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head,
his stick bent in the head.

He will chant impiety
from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer:
‘Amen, Amen.’

The people of Ireland did not welcome Patrick and the new religion with flowers in the streets. Mostly they disliked the new religion, but they did not yet see the danger. Their tolerance weakened their resistance.

Here are some excerpts on this period in history from Early Medieval Ireland: 400-1200 by Daibhi O Croinin, published by Routledge in 1995:

There is no reason to doubt that in Ireland, as in every other country where Christianity was introduced, zealots took to the high-roads and criss-crossed the countryside smashing the symbols of the rival religion and looting its temples. ‘There is no such thing as robbery for those who truly possess Christ’. … Much of what once existed as the outward and visible expression of pre-Christian religious beliefs in Ireland has doubtless been disfigured or completely destroyed, perhaps on occasion absorbed so successfully into the triumphant religion as to be unrecognizable to us now. …

The stark reality of the new religion, with its single god who destroyed all others, given to outbursts of divine wrath and prone to vengeance and punishment, may very well have seemed impious to a people more used to a variety of deities and to the toleration of many cults.

It may well have been [their] tolerance of the new Christian religion, rather than any inherent weakness, that brought about the destruction of the pre-Christian Irish cults. Patrick, after all, reported how the brehons allowed him to carry his Christian message wherever he wished. …

There is no evidence to suggest (and no particular reason to believe) that Christianity offered a richer spiritual experience than the native cults. … Quite the contrary, the frequency with which Christian writers condemn the druids and their ways suggests that Christianity had still to establish complete control even in the seventh century and beyond. … We have no satisfactory way of knowing when Christianity became respectable; we only know that in Patrick’s time it clearly still was not.

The Brehons, by the way, were the gatekeepers of the old Irish system of law, the Brehon law, which was so popular with the people that it persisted for hundreds of years after Patrick, into the 17th Century.

As for the open-minded tolerance of the old religions vs. the violent intolerance of Rome’s religion, this is a story that we hear over and over in the history of the old cultures. Tolerant cultures appear to be extremely vulnerable to intolerant ones.

I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. I mourn.

Clara Rockmore — and a wee music lesson

Today’s Google Doodle (you know — the little piece of artwork on Google pages) honors Clara Rockmore, a Theremin artist who lived from 1911 to 1998. A Theremin, of course, is an electronic musical instrument that was invented just over a hundred years ago and that was refined in the decades that followed. Most people recognize Theremin music as providing the eerie warbling music used in early science fiction films.

Clara Rockmore was trained as a violinist. She had perfect pitch. She also had a very refined and sensitive musicality. If you haven’t listened to the YouTube performance above, do that now, and then let’s talk about her Theremin technique, which was much more highly developed than other Theremin players.

First, about the Theremin itself. If you look closely, you’ll see that Rockmore’s right hand is near a vertical metal shaft. That’s called an antenna, but actually it’s the plate of a capacitor. The nearness (or distance) of the hand from the antenna varies the pitch of the Theremin. (The circuit is an oscillator circuit, or LC circuit, in which the varying value of the capacitance against the inductance varies the rate of oscillation.) You’ll see that Rockmore’s right hand is near a horizontal metal loop. That, too, is an antenna. The nearness (or distance) of the left hand varies the volume of the Theremin. So you can see how the Theremin is played and how it is oddly analogous to playing the violin. The rapid wavering of the right hand produces vibrato, with a hand motion similar to what a violinist uses for vibrato.

We need another musical term — portamento. To play (or sing) portamento is to glide from note to note like a slide whistle. Here’s a YouTube video of a slide whistle gliding portamento down in pitch and back up again:

Not all instruments can be played portamento. A piano, obviously, moves precisely from pitch to according to which key is struck. Portamento playing is possible on the violin by just sliding the finger along the fingerboard. Singers can move portamento from note to note, but they’d better watch out, because portamento singing can be in very bad taste. As for the Theremin, most Theremin players always play portamento, because that’s the easy way to play the Theremin.

The piano accompaniment here, by the way, is playing arpeggios — chords in which the notes are not sounded all at once, but rather in a sequence.

What was remarkable about Blackmore’s playing is that she developed those complex movements of the right hand that enabled her to move precisely from pitch to pitch and note to note, the way a violinist changes notes by changing fingers rather than by sliding a single finger. She does “bend” some notes, but it’s always in good taste. I doubt that there will ever be another Theremin player like her.