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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 3, 2011
Atheist anthem
My sermon today is inspired by Stephen Harper, or more precisely, by the video circulated this last week of Harper accompanying the young Winnipeg YouTube sensation, Maria Aragon, age 10, on voice and Korg board, while wife Laureen looks on "adoringly."I responded to this video with revulsion. It was a more comprehensive revulsion than I expected, from my first glimpse of the cute wee thing, posed with old weasel eyes. My first thought was, this needs to be well done. I know Harper can play the piano; that little mite had better be able to sing. She can, she is all too sweet, and let me add, she is being exploited. But not in the way people usually say a child is exploited. Were it for money, one could argue money is useful; I'm sure her family could use it. I have long agreed with Doctor Johnson, that "there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money." Of course, it depends how one is getting that money. But, with less than the average objection to child labour, I would feel little distress at the sight of a fairly talented small girl, singing for her family's supper. I don't even object when children are employed to harvest crops. But it was political exploitation, to be sure. At that I am inclined to wink. Politicians have always kissed babies; even Hitler did it when he was running for public office, back in 1933. The babies usually survive the experience, and if it swings a lot of votes, we should ask ourselves about the extension of the franchise, not about the nature of politicians. To the point, it is nice to know that Stoopin' Steve can play an instrument. We use what skills we have. I'm sure Iggy Romanov and Taliban Jack use their skills to the same purpose: they look like figures in a circus act. (Harper looks more the bean-counting impresario, which is why I think he leads in the polls.) So yes, while tiny Maria Aragon was being exploited for the usual purposes, it was mutual exploitation of a kind, and she was probably getting the better of the transaction. She was using the prime minister of Canada in the same way she had been using Lady Gaga in another YouTube incident, the month before. An astute little kid. What got me instead -what filled me with a species of moral dread -was the song they were singing. It was John Lennon's Imagine, the anthem of hippiesque ideological atheism. Like the Horst Wessel Song of the Nazis, or the Communist Internationale, or possibly even La Marseillaise (forgive me, Mireille Mathieu), it uses an uplifting melody and lyrical thrust to carry unspeakable ideas past the listener's moral and intellectual defences. One is supposed to dream of a world from which all meaning has been stripped, in which yesterday and tomorrow are cancelled, and we live for the pleasure of the day with "nothing to kill or die for." Specifically, religion, with its moral certainties, is identified as the real evil in human affairs; and God is to be banned from this Utopia. Oh, Satan is glib. And that is only the position on paper. The author and original singer of this song was a creepy customer indeed. As also Lady Gaga. Through melody, and beyond melody, they, and so many other pop stars who have scouted the far reaches of narcissism, sell a "lifestyle" that inverts every tenet once received of virtue and decency. And they do this using the very tools with which our moral order was once sustained. From the age of 10, Maria Aragon is being pulled into that world, with all of its corruption. From her polite and modest demeanour now, she is obviously from what used to be called "a good home." Yet she enters from this early and impressionable age, into everything we know about contemporary stardom. And meanwhile her very innocence is displayed, as a decorative appendage to that pop culture, as she is set up to sing of monstrous things beyond her innocent understanding. The suicide, Hunter S. Thompson, made this interesting observation about Hell: that it will be "a clean, well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing." That from a man who had tasted every available concoction of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and toyed repeatedly with dementia. A tragic man, with a streak of irrepressible honesty that led him to despair; but not before he had described the horror of that pop culture accurately from within. For what he described was its emptiness. As to Harper, every "social conservative" -every voter who retains some vestige of the moral order that is under siege -must take note. He thinks Imagine a cool thing to play with a sweet little girl. A man who calculates the political cost of every micro-managing decision, proves indifferent to moral substance, every time. Truly, a weasel. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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