Soapbox

We must rise up from the ashes of this world spun out of control:
We must not succumb to the darkness, we must not let it into our souls.
~Up From the Ashes by T. Meisky 2001

In 2001 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp inhonor of the festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan in the Muslim religion. After a month of introspection, fasting and prayer, Muslims celebrate God’s many blessings and the revealing of the Qur’an to the Prophet. It is traditional at this time to wish others “Eid Mubarak” or blessed festival.

It seems that there is an e-mail message being passed around by people of otherwise good sense and conscience entitled “Don’t Buy This” The senders are protesting this stamp, re-issued by the USPS this fall. The message lists what it calls “muslim attacks” on the US, i.e. the bombing of the USS Cole, Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, the 9/11 attacks, etc. It emphaticaly states that this stamp, (which recognizes a religious celebration, as do Haunakah and Christmas stamps) “…would be a slap in the face to all those AMERICANS who died at the hands of those whom this stamp honors.” Patriotic Americans, it says, must remember the Americans killed by these “muslim attacks” and boycott this stamp.

It’s hard to know where to begin in response to this illogical and narrow-minded diatribe. It is so full of anger and hate and blaming that when I first read it I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. They are truely fighting words for any one of an open heart and mind.

A prefacing editorial comment in the version I received, without attribution, states that ” they don’t even believe in Christ and yet they are getting a Christmas stamp, but don’t dream of putting the 10 commandments in a court house.” The holes in the logic of this statement are big enough to drive a truck through.

First of all, the Eid ul Fitr stamp is NOT a christmas stamp- it is a Ramadam stamp. It happens that this year the end of the season of daytime fasting and prayer and good works falls around the beginning of the Christmas season, but that is mere co-incidence. In other years it falls on other dates, since its timimg follows the lunar calendar. Ignoring for a moment the fact that muslims do believe in Christ- as a great and holy prophet- the Christian religion does not OWN the month of December, and any stamp issued therein does not have to pass some “Christ test.”

And the connection between this stamp and the 10 commandment monument in Alabama (See “Just a Bunch of Rocks” in this weblog) is impossible to see. To my knowledge there has been no Muslim outcry against the monument, and in fact many Christians object to the display on constitutional grounds. Plus, the muslims honor the “books of Abraham” as I understand they call the Torah and Bible, and do believe in the 10 commandments.
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OK, here’s my thing: people should have to sing a song more or less the way its written. It ought to be a law!
While I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a “songwriter” I do fool around in that medium, so perhaps I’m more sensitive on the subject than others. Whatever the reason, I have a real peeve with people who change the melody of famous songs when they sing them, in order to show off their “vocal stylings”.

It’s very popular these days to take a simple melody and do little trills and riffs all over that aren’t written in: “diva crap” I like to call it. While changing a note or two here and there to make a song better fit your voice is fine, when you go beyond that it seems like the singer is saying they are more important than the songwriter. Some songs work well with improvisation, but in others it’s just plain wrong! You start with a beautiful, simple melody and it gets cluttered up and you lose the quality of the music. It can also be annoying, when adenoidal, breathy boy-band singers flutter up and down and around a note like a whineing mosquito.

Up until now, the most egregious case of this “look at me! Aren’t I special?” syndrome I’ve heard was on the finals of the latest “American Idol” when Reuben sang “Imagine” by John Lennon. Well, those are the words he sang, anyway. Mr Studdard seemed to think he knew better than a member of one of the top song-writing duoes in history what would make a good tune!

I kept urging, “Aw, c’mon, man! He wrote a beautiful song here- why don’t you just sing it!” I imagined John Lennon at the piano at 3 AM, laboring in love to create exactly the blend of words and music to express his vision…and Reuben looking over his shoulder and saying, “Ummmm…no” It was a crying shame.

So I was thinking that there should be a code, that says that at least the first time through a melody, for the first verse, a singer should be expected to sing it as it’s written, in homage to the writer, if nothing else. Then in subsequent verses, if you want to do a “theme and variations” on the melody; well, you can have at it. Just make sure you do it well.

But I realize now that there are times when even that rule just won’t cut it.

A few weeks ago a singing duo performed at my church. They were very nice young men who batted their eyelashes and spoke sincerely about singing for Jesus and all that, but they did have good voices and did some close, tricky harmonies that were quite nice. So after the service I went over and bought one of their CD’s. I chose a Christmas one and then just stuck it on a shelf, since it was October, after all.
Yesterday I got it out and listened to it. Eeek! It is like N’Sync does Christmas to the stylings of the Muzak Orchestra! Well, too bad. It’s just not my taste in music, I thought.
But then I heard “Ave Maria”.

They did the Schubert version, which, although the lesser of the two in my mind is still hauntingly beautiful. But from the very first “A-a-ave Mari-i-a…” it was full of breathy, adenoidal “diva crap”!! This guy was hopping all around the melody line like he was on a pogo stick. He has the voice to sustain those long notes- he just didn’t. He thought his skinny little 24 year old self knew better than Franz Schubert what Franz Schubert’s classic song should sound like! I mean, Ave Maria, for God’s sake!

Enough already! That’s it! There needs to be something stronger than a code- we need a law! People who mess up perfectly good songs should be condemned to listen to their stupid selves over and over and over for a day or two until they realize what they’ve done. And people who disrespect the masters: Bach, Handel, Schubert, Lennon~ should be smacked upside the head!
There’s only so much a person can be expected to take!

I was shocked and appalled, but not terribly surprised by something I read in today’s Dispatch letters. A woman whose grand-daughter is in Iraq wrote to complain that when George Bush played dress-up back in May and landed on the aircraft carrier to declare that the war was over, her granddaughter got a paycut. The government was immediately able to reduce the pay of all the soldiers serving there, by making them no longer were eligible for combat pay. So they’ve been there all these months since then, being spat on, shot at, and blown out of the sky, thousands of miles from their friends and families- doing it for minimum wages, because George wants to pretend that the war is over.
If the President really believes his own spin, why doesn’t he go and tour Iraq? Why doesn’t he skip a few of his rich-white-guy Republican fundraiser dinners and go visit the place where we are not at war, and let the grateful Iraqis show their appreciation? Why? Because today’s paper also reported that Richard Armitage, deputy Secretary of State described Iraq as a “war zone”.
So is it a war zone, or is combat over?
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