• Sex, drugs, and [a subculturally acceptable right-wing form of] rock and roll: “Christian musician Michael Tait accused of sexual abuse, grooming.” And the follow-up, “In wake of allegations, Christian musician Michael Tait admits to ‘double life,’” which notes that Tait “said he is now sober after spending six weeks at a treatment center in Utah.”
If Harry Thomas had known about this behavior back when he was booking DC Talk for the Creation Festival … well, he would have set aside some time to compare notes and tactics with Tait.
Tait left DC Talk to become the lead singer of the Theseus-ship band Newsboys, helping that once mostly harmless band rebrand as proto-MAGA Republican culture warriors. Hence my favorite line on this scandal, from Hemant Mehta: “More than a decade after its release, God’s Not Dead is still finding new ways to disappoint everyone.”
The Friendly Atheist also had a good post on Liberty University’s recent settlement with its former president: “Liberty University paid Jerry Falwell, Jr. $15 million to make him—and his lawsuits—disappear.”
I know, I know — but what about all of the famous Liberty alumni who are not infamous sexual predators? They probably outnumber people like Tait and Falwell Jr., so why don’t we give as much attention to them? What about some of their other famous alumni, like voice actor Vic Mignogna? OK, wait, let me start again …
• I’ve stocked and sold so many of these at the Big Box over the years that it would be irresponsible of me not to share this: Clean your hummingbird feeder.
“If you wouldn’t leave your drink sitting out in the sun for three days and then drink it, don’t do it for hummingbirds,” Furr said. “Why should a little, 3-gram hummingbird be expected to survive whatever germs are growing there?”
It felt like a lot more than three grams when one of those little guys once bonked into my head. But they are adorable and amazing and feeding them is a Good Thing — just make sure you’re feeding them from a clean feeder.
• I recently re-ran an old Left Behind post here that included this bit from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology: “But life without meaning is the torture / Of restlessness and vague desire —/ It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”
I remembered that bit again while reading Paul Campos’s still-forming thoughts on “Contemporary fascism and improving standards of living.” He starts by considering the anti-vaccine, anti-science, “MAHA” nonsense that seems to yearn for a lost Golden Age of polio, measles, and shorter life expectancy:
… the rise of neo-authoritarianism/fascism in the USA, and probably in a lot of other rich countries as well, is a product of some dynamic by which the very fact that life is getting so much richer and easier for the typical Trumpist voter is in some perverse way fueling that voter’s sense of profound dissatisfaction. …
There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, but the claim that people are getting more and more unhappy because life has gotten better in so many ways DEFINITELY has something to it. Now of course this means life must be getting worse in some other, less obviously definable ways, that have to do with various forms of social and spiritual alienation, which are very real and very devastating even though they don’t get reflected in GDP statistics or Netflix downloads. So I’m NOT saying that everything is good and people are just a bunch of whiny babies. That’s obviously not the case at all.
But there’s something about rising standards of living in contemporary life that are directly correlated to toxic political reaction, which is why the whole idea of making America great again is so utterly bizarre on multiple levels. And yes I realize that a lot of that has to do with the uppity women and blahs not knowing their place, but it goes way beyond that.
I would suggest that this “social and spiritual alienation … goes way beyond that sexist and racist backlash because it cannot get beyond that. The choice to participate in that backlash is the choice to cut oneself off from the possibility of overcoming that social and spiritual alienation, and thus the choice to condemn oneself to the restlessness and vague desire of a life without meaning.
Or, at least, to a life without meaningful meaning. There are always plenty of counterfeit sources of social and spiritual fulfillment available including, of course, the attempt to make the backlash itself your source of spiritual meaning, your religion, and your savior.
• Since I mentioned the death of Brian Wilson here, let me also mourn the passing of another great troubled musical genius, Sly Stone. His epic rendition of “Que Sera Sera” provides the title for this post.
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