I passed several orthodox Jews on my way to work today and it got me thinking about atonement. First of all, what is it? And second, atonement for what? I did a little research on the subject via the Internet and found out it has to do with forgiveness. It reminded me of a conversation I overheard a little while back about the "trouble" in the middle east. That's what we call it when innocent people are murdered in the streets: "trouble". Anyway this one guy said he heard on a talk show that the reason the Arabs and the Jews are unable to stop fighting each other is because they don't believe in Jesus. And since Jesus invented forgiveness, that means they don't have the concept of forgiveness in their cultures and so they just keep on hating each other. I really wanted to smack these idiots for being such narrow-minded, boneheaded bigots. But I thought, considering the circumstances, it was better to forgive them.
It is astounding to me how rampant ignorance is and how easily people will believe anything they hear on the radio, or see on TV, or read on the Internet, or in an email... On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago they did a story about how most Muslims seem to believe that the attack on the World Trade Center was engineered by Israeli intelligence and that 4000 Jews who worked there were called that morning and warned not to go into work that day. This is gospel truth to hundreds of thousands of people, many of them supposedly well-educated and intelligent. And it was apparently started by some misquoted news story that hit the Internet and spread like wildfire. Perhaps we have moved from the Information Age into the Misinformation Age.
Or more accurately the Disinformation Age.
There have been so many "leaks" to the media about our "plans" to "invade" Iraq, I'm starting to wonder if the Pentagon isn't really just a big P.R. agency. Maybe we aren't really planning to invade Iraq at all, maybe we're just trying to create a "buzz." If the word of mouth is good and the project seems to have legs, we can develop it into a concept and try and get some backing. If we can line up the foreign markets and pre-sell the distribution, we'll be sure to get greenlighted for production. And if that happens, we can always hire someone to write a battle plan. Hell, it practically writes itself. I mean it's a sequel after all, how hard can it be?
And what about this big "misunderstanding" involving the Shoney's waitress and the three middle-eastern medical students? First they were terrorists with bombs. Then it was all just a hoax. Now they're persecuted minorities accusing everyone of racial profiling. I'll tell you whose being profiled: that poor waitress at Shoney's. Don't tell me you haven't repressed a snicker yourself once or twice picturing poor old Eunice dutifully writing down the plate numbers of three alleged terrorists who were probably just messing with her head.
So what does all of this have to do with forgiveness? Apparently what one is being forgiven on the day of atonement is breaking a promise made to God. So what promise have I ever made to God? Thou shalt not kill? That's a place to start. But do you really get forgiven for that? I think there's something more basic than that. Something like what happens when your parents leave you on your own for the first time. They say "Be good." But they know that as soon as they leave we're going to go hog wild, jumping off the roof and having keg parties and what not. What they really mean is "Try not to hurt each other, and don't burn the place down."
I think that's all that God wants us to do. When he left us here, I think he made a deal with us that we could have the place to ourselves as long as we didn't hurt each other and we didn't burn the place down.
So I think it's a good idea, at least once a year, to take responsibility for your sins. And it's nice to think that if you do, you will be forgiven. Our parents forgave us when they came home one night and found the kitchen table broken in two and the backyard littered with beer cans. And I think that's because we didn't try to talk our way out of it. We admitted our sins. We didn't try to blame it on the godless next-door neighbors or the evil white-trash party-crashers. Even if it was their fault.
In the Disinformation Age, nobody takes responsibility for anything, because nothing is true. It's all a hoax or a spin or a hype or a ploy or a cover story or a red herring or a scapegoat or some other figment of the underdeveloped imagination.
So forgive me Lord, for I have sinned. I hated the bad guys and cheered the good guys. I felt relieved when bombs went off places other than here. I tried to ignore the suffering of others because it made me uncomfortable. I was glad that it didn't happen to me. And I promise to try harder this year to be good.
Peace.
Twenty five years ago, my Mom, my pal Mark Bush and I were driving in a wood-paneled Mercury Montego wagon through Pennsylvania on the way to my first semester at Wesleyan. On the car radio, we heard the news that Elvis was dead. That night we stopped at a non-descript roadside motel somewhere along route 80. We sat in the room that night and watched a special tribute on TV. It was kind of weird, because at the time, I had all but forgotten about Elvis -- he had kind of disappeared from view. The last I remember seeing him was the 1973 Aloha special from Hawaii. I remember being particularly grossed out by the fact that these women would throw their scarves (and underwear) onto the stage and Elvis would wipe his sweaty face with them and throw them back. This was right before Elvis ballooned into the super-fat Elvis of the final days, but wearing that leather-spangled karate suit and pumped up on methedrine and vitamin B, he must have been sweating like a racehorse. He put on a great show, though and that's really the way he should be remembered.
My first memories of Elvis are probably from the mid-sixties, when Elvis was holed-up in his Beverly Hills mansion making movie after movie about how cool it is to be Elvis. There was this kid named Kenny Ray Davis in my third grade class who came in one morning with his hair slicked back and singing the title song from "Girls! Girls! Girls!" which had played on TV the night before. Right then and there, Kenny Ray Davis became the coolest guy in the class. And even though I wasn't sure exactly what it was Elvis was doing with all of those girls, I knew that one day I would forswear the mama's boy bangs that hung down over my forhead and slick my hair back like Elvis. And then I would be cool like Kenny Ray Davis and I'd be surrounded by Girls! Girls! Girls!
It took several years before I worked up the courage to actually start combing my hair back. First I tried just parting it on the side and combing it over. I stuck with that for a while. Eventually I got around to combing it back, but now it makes me look more like my Dad than like Elvis. But I still think it's cool.
The next Elvis sighting was the 1968 comeback special, where Elvis proved that he still had what it takes to rock our world. He even brought back the original guys who he played with at Sun Studios and ran through a set of the songs that first made him King. My favorite of those was "One Night With You", a bluesy gospel number with a barrelhouse roll that paid homage to the likes of early R&B greats like Lloyd Price and Ray Charles.
After that, Elvis popped up only now and then, 'Suspicious Minds' and 'In the Ghetto' in 1969, 'Kentucky Rain' in 1970, 'Burning Love' in 1971, the Aloha special in '73... But he was overshadowed by the Beatles, the Stones and a whole generation of others. It wasn't until years later that I went back and listened to those great '56 and '57 recordings and watched some of the the concert films from the 70's that I truly appreciated the gift he had. True, he squandered it in every way imaginable, but at the heart of it was a real genius for recognizing the essence of a song and delivering it with incomparable style and charisma. That's why he lives on, because he found the universal truths expressed in the songs he chose and shared them with the audience in a way that made you believe that he was speaking from his own personal experience. And sometimes he was. He was essentially a storyteller and his life was a fable. Even at the end, fat and wasted and paranoid, he still had that spark of coolness that propelled him from Tupelo to Memphis to Hollywood to Vegas and on into posterity.
I prefer to remember Elvis as the guy who slicked back his hair and sang about girls and made me think that someday I could be cool too. I needed that back in Louisville all those years ago. I still need it.
Thank you, Elvis. Thank you very much.
Seems like nothing ever happens anymore without somebody videotaping it. Besides the ubiquitous news vans, security cameras, traffic cams, police cams and such, apparently everyone in America owns a handy-cam and is videotaping each other and/or themselves 24 hours a day. Especially when they're having illicit sex. I guess plain old illicit sex just doesn't cut it anymore, not when you can memorialize your indiscretions and at the same time provide incontrovertible evidence against yourself once you're indicted. And with all of the unbelievably weird and unsavory video tapes out there, it kind of makes you wonder how many there are that we don't know about.
You probably heard about the guy who videotaped the cops in Inglewood beating up that poor kid at the gas station. And when the video taper himself got arrested, there were at least three cameras rolling to capture that incident for posterity as well. It's all stirred up a lot of the unspoken racial tension that hangs ominously over our heads like thick, choking smog. We all know it's there, but we try to ignore it. Well, I was in Inglewood that night and I witnessed a totally different phenomenon. And while it did involve several video cameras and a certain amount of racial tension, the result was as refreshing as a cool ocean breeze that, for a little while, clears out all the smog and cleanses our souls a bit too.
My friend Jimmy is a singer-songwriter and we've been playing music together for about six months. Jimmy has written about a dozen or so songs that are pretty damn good and he sings them with a voice that some have described as a cross between Roy Orbison and Etta James. We've had a lot of fun playing small gigs around town, but Jimmy wants to take it to the next level. He's recorded a CD with six of his songs and it sounds amazing. I've been pushing him to send it around to record companies, but he says we need to build up our gigs and get some folks to notice us before the record companies will bother to listen.
Meanwhile I have this other friend named Erika who is interested in acting, but because of her 'sophisticated professional' look she seems to get picked a lot for host/spokesperson type gigs. Which is cool with her because she likes that kind of thing. She's also interested in music and has a law degree and is considering doing talent management. A few weeks back she auditioned for this fledgling cable TV variety show and got the gig as the host of the show. Right now they're just putting together some acts for a pilot to shop around and build up some interest. Erika asked me if Jimmy was interested. He was. So, the other night Jimmy and I drove down to Inglewood so Jimmy could tape his spot for the show.
Now, it so happens that Erika is black and the show that she is doing is mainly focusing on hip-hop, rap and R&B. They're open to all kinds of music, but being that the show is taped in Inglewood, a predominately African American community, and the people in charge are mostly black and hispanic, those are the kinds of acts they have attracted so far. Which is one reason Erika encouraged us to go down there: to try and widen the appeal of the show by including more "diversity." See, Jimmy is a white person (as am I) and his music tends more toward the Mary Chapin Carpenter side of the spectrum than the Mary J. Blige side.
So we walk into the studio, quite conspicuously the only white boys in the room. Possibly the only white boys in the entire zip code. We listened to a few acts, mostly rappers, one or two young girls singing semi-inappropriately suggestive R&B songs. Jimmy turns to me and says "What the hell am I going to sing?" We settled on a song of his called Riverdeath which he wrote about a Native American woman he met in a nursing home who dreamed alternately of her long last past and her hoped for salvation, both represented by a rushing river. It's a kind of heavy song lyrically but from listening to what the other folks were doing, there was a definite spiritual thread woven through most of the raps. Besides, Jimmy doesn't sing any suggestive R&B songs.
We felt a little out of place, despite the fact that everyone was really nice to us. You could tell people were curious about what we were doing there. At one point when Jimmy was talking to the director, the girl in front of us turned around and asked me what kind of music Jimmy did. I said, "I guess it's kind of country, kind of folkie..." She nodded politely, "uh-huh..." Jimmy was getting nervous, "what if nobody claps when I'm done?" "They have to," I said, "the director makes them." That didn't encourage him much.
The act that went on before Jimmy was outstanding. A woman named Eebony who looked and moved like a young Tina Turner, but could rap like Ice Cube, except her rhymes weren't about gangsters, rather about unity and self respect. She really knocked us out. What a tough act to follow; she electrified the place.
Then it was Jimmy's turn. As the opening Nashville-twanged guitar licks filled the studio, I thought, "boy are we in the wrong room." But then something amazing happened. I noticed people were listening to the lyrics and totally responding. And Jimmy's voice never sounded better; he sang like he meant every word. Which, in fact, he did. By the second verse people were literally cheering him on. The song ends with rousing coda and even before the playback faded, the audience broke into spontaneous heartfelt applause. Suddenly, I was the second most popular guy in the room. Everyone turned to congratulate me and tell me how great he was. Hell, all I did was drive the car. Several other performers got up to come over and compliment Jimmy. And, coolest of all, Eebony said she wanted to sing with him sometime and gave him her number.
We drove home that night filled with wonder and excitement. To go from the apprehension we'd felt when we first got there to the near-adulation we experienced at the end of the evening was an amazing transformation. I was inspired by the power of music to reach beneath the superficialities that seemed to separate us and reveal a truth and a communion that has always and will always exist. It reminded me of the beginning of Elvis's career when he was able to cross racial boundaries and reach black audiences and white audiences equally and with a similar enthusiasm and joy. What a great night.
I didn't hear about the other incident in Inglewood that night until after that weekend. Now everybody knows about it and we have all been reminded of the divisiveness and mistrust that plagues our society. But I wish everyone who saw that other tape could have seen what I saw that same Friday night in Inglewood, because then they'd know -- that isn't the whole story. Not by a long shot.
Peace,
Rich
