Another of this year's Eurovision pop songs has a Christian significance, the Bosnian song "Pokusaj" ("I'll try").
The singer Laka dances in poses that remind us of the development of man and apes, but according to his lyric, evolution isn't all that important: Man didn't come from the monkeys or out of the sea, he came from love:
The musical style is stadium pop, sort of an homage to Springsteen.
The Eurovision international song contest for 2008 was held a few weeks ago, and while many of the songs in the competition were forgettable pop numbers or lame jokes, a few stood out in an interesting way. The beautiful, impassioned entry from Portugal, while not exactly a religious song, could only have been created in a Catholic culture.
The lyrics and an English translation are available on-line.
Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel are interviewed by ZENIT on the anti-religious aspect of Philip Pullman's fiction, soon to appear in a film.
"Apocalypto [is] a stunning action epic, a gory personal indulgence, and a forthright defense of family, tradition, and local community against the decadence of urban modernity."
I don't think I ever had before tonight, when they played it for some Italian athletes (I don't remember the event they won.) Listen to it here -- it sounds like a chorus from a Rossini opera. Apparently, it was composed by a contemporary of Rossini in 1847. The fifth verse seems a little outdated; I confess that I don't know a single historical reference in the fourth verse (that is, unless "the heart
and hand of Ferruccio" refers to Ferruccio Lamborghini, the car guy.)
My vote is for Wang Manli.
It was bad enough when the pro-abortion celebrity Susan Sarandon was appointed to carry the Olympic flag in along with several other women activists from various countries. Then Peter Gabriel sang John Lennon's atheist anthem, "Imagine". What kind of appeal to peace is this, that suggests the world would be better off without God our Father who makes us brothers?
Have Europeans already forgotten that we just got through a century in which militant atheists (Mao, Stalin) and pagans (Hitler) staged the worst crimes in the history of man?
Foolishness!
One of Hank Williams Jr.'s songs is called "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down." Yet a few years later, he recorded "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight." What happened — did he get new rowdy friends? Or did his old friends get rowdy again?
Bonus random thought: Hank Jr. has recorded a lot of crappy music, but his best songs make up for that. These lines of his might be my favorite, from "Family Tradition":
Lordy, I have loved some ladies
and I have loved Jim Beam
and they both tried to kill me
in nineteen-seventy-three....
George Lucas has been drinking from the same fetid waters as the paranoid Left. His political ideas — which sound like they come from a dull 10-year-old — contributed mightily to the shambles he made of "Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones." As I recall, the former movie was about some kind of trade dispute, an interstellar NAFTA without any space-alien equivalent of Ross Perot (assuming, of course, that Ross Perot is not a space alien.)
Here's what he said to the Cannes festival:
"The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?" he said.We've discussed this issue at some length here in CL, and as I recall, the only proof anybody could provide for a nascent dictatorship is that the president claims the power to detain Americans fighting against their own government."When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn't exist... but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable."
He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals, like in the movie.
"I didn't think it was going to get this close. I hope this doesn't come true in our country."
If you think President Bush is the first president to assert that right, you're wrong. Completely, demonstrably, comprehensively wrong. That idea goes back at least to Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, who detained several hundred thousand Confederates on his own authority. In World War II, American saboteurs cooperating with German spies were executed after facing a military tribunal, not a Federal judge. The Supreme Court has agreed with this prececent (not that you'd know it from the media coverage). They merely invited the president to send the prisoners before tribunals.
George Lucas is an intellectual flyweight, so his particular words aren't terribly important. But the Left's general paranoia has a very real consequence. Someday, there very well might be a threat to our democracy. The Greeks assumed that all democracies would eventually give way to chaos and then a dictatorship of some form. But if the Left keeps screaming about "DICTATORSHIP" this and "NAZI" that, nobody will listen if indeed it does happen in the United States.
