The Local Color

Here are some things that happened during the last three days.

I had my last (?) shows with Big Daddy Weave as their LD, even though I wasn’t really performing that function at the time. (First show was just a PAR rig, and the second show had no lights other than front lights.) I was mostly there to just hang out. And just a bit more background: this was in Alabama. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11. At a Baptist church. A conservative Baptist church, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in Alabama.

Their attitude is pretty much what you’d expect. (Be ye fairly warned: very rough language.)

In fact, they were almost parodies of themselves. This church was doing a Bible drive, which is not altogether unexpected activity for a church to engage in, but this particular Bible drive had a specific goal in mind, and that goal was to distribute said Bibles to…Muslims. Yes, the Christians of the South, a group associated with particularly moving demonstrations of interfaith solidarity such as burning the sacred religious texts of other faiths, was rallying to distribute Bibles to Muslims.

Yup. They’ll love that.

I hate being in places like that. I always feel like my presence, even only attending in support of the band that was playing that morning, was a silence acquiescence to the hateful rhetoric of this particular branch of Christians. And “hateful” is not an exaggeration. There was a slideshow highlighting all the most violent and theocratic bits of the Quran, dire warnings about how “the Muslims” train their children to hate ‘merica and democracy and freedom. The entire service blamed, just short of directly, the attacks of 9/11 on the Islamic faith, of course ignoring the fact that the reasons were decidedly non-religious: the United States sanctions against Iraq, the presence of U.S. military in Saudi Arabia, and the support of Israel by United States. All that was missing was the entire audience waving little United States flags while singing “America the Beautiful ” after hinting that Obama is a secret Muslim who hates the United States.

Oh wait, no, that actually happened.

I think our monitor engineer Jake summed up the take-away from the service fairly succinctly: “Brown people are evil. God bless ‘merica.” And this is the most repugnant of the Religious Right’s near-universal reaction to the 9/11 attacks: the intense fear and loathing of The Other. The only thing 9/11 did for these people was to give them a specific point of reference so that they may direct their latent bigotry at those they already despise: people that are entirely different from themselves. People they have absolutely no interest in understanding. In the case of Obama and Muslims, it’s fear begot by ignorance, a precursor to flat-out racism. The most hilariously tragic and hypocritical part of this is the fact that these Christians don’t dare judge the Bible or Muslims by the standards they hold the Quran or other Christians to: religious texts get interpreted, re-interpreted, and this has been going on since the writing of the Pentateuch – but you don’t see them calling attention to the most horrific parts of the Old Testament; those are “metaphorical” or “for a different time”. They certainly don’t judge all Christians by the actions of Westboro Baptist. (Though this particular sect almost certainly agrees with their backward and regressive rhetoric.)

And this is not to say I’m sympathetic to the position of fundamental Islam: as practiced by its fundamentalist adherents, I think it’s a backward, misogynistic “religion” that does nothing to advance the state of human well-being. No one has the right to commit violence against their fellow man. But Muslims, like Christians, like any large group of people, represent the spectrum of belief and political thought and this church’s stance is not only offensive, but stupid. Like Christians, there are liberal ones and conservative ones. There are Christians who think they need to kill in the name of God, just like there are Muslims who feel the same duty. But like the Christians, these are the vast minority.

Speaking of people who generally self-describe as Christians, the current smattering of GOP candidates talking about their views on science scares the ever-loving crap out of me.

And for something completely different, I want a copy of this, because the sounds that come with Logic Pro aren’t natural enough for me, and I don’t want to keep composing without having multiple and good-sounding articulations to hear what my song (nameless right now) should actually sound like. It’s actually easier listening to the string parts with a piano patch because Logic’s strings sound so…horrible. Anybody want to get me a copy for Christmas? Please? No? Okay.

Exit, stage left.
Sparks