My wife is a medieval music historian and a few years ago one of her colleagues uncovered a large amount of evidence that European polyphonic music was actually invented by a particular small group of queer French monks.* Polyphony is the interweaving multiple melodic lines, as opposed to the monophonic music of chant or troubadour song. It’s an essential part of the classical music tradition.
When my wife’s friend gave his big paper at a conference it had the normal, boring sort of academic title. But he joked with my wife beforehand that he had toyed with the idea of getting up in front of the audience and announcing that he’d changed the name of his paper to “Buttfucking and Medieval Song”.
How did he know they were queer you might ask? Because the lyrics of these early polyphonic songs were all filthy. They all had lines like “I wear my love’s tight rosy ring upon my eager finger … .”
I’m going to have to give credit here. I was with him. It was well written, and it totally made sense, identifying an important issue. I dare anyone to find fault with him… until:
“For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?”
Say what? I didn’t know we were built upon homogeneity. When were we ever one people in this sense.
I will have to admit that it irks me when they removed the Stonewall Jackson National Holiday and replaced it with MLK day. All those old Stonewall Jackson Day traditions were just discarded.
Seriously, first off, it was Stonewall Jackson’s mapmaker who deserves the credit for SJs prowess. Second off, if there was ever a modern figure that deserves a holiday, It’s MLK. The man believed in equality and advocated passive resistance to achieve his goals. Had he lived I believe we would be in a much better country.
If one is to admire Lee or Stonewall it should be as faithful leaders and men of principle. In this sense, I have no problem pushing Lee and Stonewall aside, and doubtless Lee would take a bow and step aside with a smile on his face.
Chris Columbus? Yeah he’s got a point there. He discovered the Continent. I don’t blame him for what followed, nor do I think he was anything but a man of his times. I think it’s right to celebrate his spirit of adventure and grand achievement and I think anybody that’s got a problem with Columbus needs to get a life.
But no, his main thesis of only the unity of the homogeneity of judeo Christian values can save us from this death spiral is false.
The irony is that Mr. Pat Buchanan had he lived a century and a half earlier would be treated very similar to what he thinks of Latino and Asian immigrants. Actually I can’t see what he has against Latinos and Asians, both are socially conservative and the latter at least is upstanding and hard-working. If it weren’t for the Latinos, Pat, Prop 8 would have gone down!
Asian-Americans aren’t particularly socially conservative as a group. California has an unusually high proportion of ex-refugees, who are more socially conservative than ‘normal’ immigrants because (like Cubans) they’re staunch anticommunists.
GIGO, hunting human beings for sport is pretty reasonable. Why, Columbus probably once said “I believe this is a good thing”. And what’re you, stupid? Good things are reasonable. And look how his discovery mobilized an entire half of a continent to murder and rampage and dominate not one but many parts of three other continents? That’s obviously a great impact to have had. So Columbus was clearly pretty reasonable.
The only way Pat Buchanan will be really happy is to have himself cloned (with many millions and millions of copies), until ONLY Pat Buchanans (plural) inhabit the USA.
Then he’d be sure that the nation would share a common ancestry, faith, culture, language, etc., etc.
