Those Who Sing Well, Pray Twice - St. Augustine

Pro-life professional advertising psychology research, the bright side of otherwise nefarious “engineering of consent” industry, revealed by 1998 that the standard pro-life approach to women in crisis pregnancies has consistently continued to be largely self-defeating because it fails to account for crisis-pregnancy Mothers’ actual psychological state. Dr. Carl Landwehr, the man most single-handedly responsible for tipping the majority, if not the elites of America pro-life, speaks about “the dogma dump” — if I could just open a hatch in their heads and make them understand what I know, they would convert to my viewpoint and everything would become alright. We couldn’t afford that approach then, and as long as we are opposed by wealthy elites, we will continue to experience failure saving babies and Mothers, as the opposition continues its relentless innovations in convincing young people to the pro-abortion side.

Abortion: A Failure to Communicate by Paul F. Swope, First Things, April 1998 https://tinyurl.com/4kn2swwt

For twenty-five years the pro-life movement has stood up to defend perhaps the most crucial principle in any civilized society, namely, the sanctity and value of every human life. However, neither the profundity and scale of the cause, nor the integrity of those who work to support it, necessarily translates into effective action. Recent research on the psychology of pro-choice women offers insight into why the pro-life movement has not been as effective as it might have been in persuading women to choose life; it also offers opportunities to improve dramatically the scope and influence of the pro-life message, particularly among women of childbearing age.

Unplanned motherhood … is perceived as equivalent to a “death of self.” … the choice of abortion becomes one of self-preservation. … Adoption is seen as the most “evil” of the 3 options … as a kind of double death. … The 2^nd death is the death of the child “through abandonment.” A woman worries about the chance of her child being abused … the possibility of the child returning to intrude on her own life many years later.

This research suggests that modern American women of childbearing age do not view the abortion issue within the same moral framework as those of us who are pro-life activists. Our message is not being well-received by this audience because we have made the error of assuming that women, especially those facing the trauma of an unplanned pregnancy, will respond to principles we see as self-evident within our own moral framework, and we have presented our arguments accordingly. This is a miscalculation that has fatally handicapped the pro-life cause. While we may not agree with how women currently evaluate this issue, the importance of our mission and the imperative to be effective demand that we listen, that we understand, and that we respond to the actual concerns of women who are most likely to choose abortion.

The importance of a new approach became clear from the results of sophisticated research pioneered by the Caring Foundation, a group that presents the pro-life message to the public via television. This group has been able to tap into some of the most advanced psychological research available today, so-called “right brain” research. (The distinction between “right brain” and “left brain” activity may be physiologically oversimplified or even wrong, but it remains useful as a shorthand description of different ways of thinking.)

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The Four Levels of Happiness

Philomena (2 years old) sings in a deep voice, and when she walks, she swings her elbows like a sailor walking on a swaying ship deck. (What a character.) This key, which her makes her grandpa sound like a pirate singing, is 5 half-steps high or 7 half-steps low, from the traditional key. Only the Men’s part is offered here.

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I attended the gold or silver anniversary of a seminary and novitiate, which was a large, informal garden party attended by all the diocesan luminaries. My wife and I were photographed in the vicinity of the Bishop, though were aren’t sufficiently important for him to have anything to say to us.

During the party, a jazz piece was playing repeatedly, which took God’s name in vain. It was the 1969 Les McCann and Eddie Harris “Trying to Make It Real” (Compared to What?). At the rhythmic and dynamic climax of the piece, the singer suddenly curses God.

This piece repeated twice at the religious garden party, and yet, with the presence of all the high officials of religious institutes and offices, no one recognized the fact.

When I brought it up with the responsible official, the rector of the novitiate and seminary, who is also a commentator on a national radio show, his rationale was that “we used a jazz playlist of a streaming music service, and sadly it never even occurred to me that I would even have to worry about such language being used.”

I was confronted by an identical rationale for repeated playing in the presence of a child, of a sexually suggestive piece, Ray Charles’ “It’s Alright”. At the emotional highlight of the piece, the women backup singers make sexually suggestive moaning, in rhythm, even using the rhythmic technique “diminution”, shortening duration of  the sexual moaning in half. This is particularly unfortunate, considering the reputation that the Raelettes’ backgroup were required to sexually submit to Ray Charles as conditions of employment. (Ray Charles: Women in His Life | Entertainment Magazine)

Several comments are in order about exposing ourselves to Rhythm and Blues and Jazz music in our everyday lives. Jazz has a mixed moral history, on one hand, in its origins were religious, in one time and place, while an elaborate funeral parade was playing sad music on the way to the graveyard, on the way back, triumphal music would be played, this as one account of the origin of Jazz as a genre.

On the other hand, the etymology of Jazz in the Swahili tongue, is supposed to mean sexual arousal. (This affects the legitimacy of the annual, Memorial Day, “Jazz Mass” at Sacramento’s Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.)

The practical rearing of Jazz as a genre, occurred in clubs and roadhouses that served as de facto bordellos. It isn’t any secret, when listening to a Jazz radio station, that much of the music has a morally low tone.

It is supposed in Plato’s Republic, that certain rhythmic and melodic modes can contribute to dissolute morals.

Regardless, it is up to individuals to overcome the dulling, hypnotizing potential of music, to be alert to the morality of what is actually being conveyed.

Everyone used to sing. Today, we are in a culturally crippled condition, dependent on technologic devices to the point of debilitation. But worse, we are almost completely unaware of the problem.

In the 1960s, it resulted in an associate of Monsignor Anabele Bugnini, Dominican Arch-Abbott and later Archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the benighted Rembert Weakland, initiating the “Hootenanny Mass” movement, though he himself was highly trained both in modern art music (it can be argued, “classical” only covers one period in the range), and also Gregorian Plainchant.

The young people who were corrupted by this development, were rendered culturally defenseless by having lost their direct experience making music themselves–not necessarily as specialist, instrumentalists, but just as ordinary, casual, folk and popular music singers–the condition that two generations prior, had been the norm, stretching back into the dawn of folk-music history–in all cultures, worldwide.

We are actually worse-off than the residents of Sanliurfa, Turkey, who have the advantage unknown to us, that they can at least see a mysterious mound, Gobekli Tepe, which upon some archeological chance was revealed to be site of the oldest civilization known in human history, 9,000 B.C. The excavations are revealing a completely unknown culture, because there is apparently no reference to the site on any ancient monuments or in the Bible.

Our more ignorant condition, about our own cultural ancestry and heritage, is worse, because we lack even a view of the ruins; and yet the people who lived that culture, may perhaps have been known by name, to our grandparents. The cultural snow-blindness, of cell-phones, computers, t.v. and broadcast music, completely obliviates any understanding of a past only 100 years old.

“Everyone knew how to sing 200 songs”. – John Senior

In the video, cheap-crook Richard Widmark assumes that a bartender knows, to be able to sing extemporaneously, any random, popular song, in this case, “Camptown Races”. There was nothing exceptional about this portrayal; everyone liked music, there was no radio or talkies, everyone casually sang songs as part of their normal cultural lives. It was never remarked upon, as merely a normal part of life, and so, that cultural milieu has gone into a kind of social archeology, ruins in time as mysterious and unknown as unidentified mounds on the Anatolian plains.

In the bar scene, as Widmark insults the bartender into joining in a trio of the title song, “Camptown Races”, the movie gives corroboration of John Senior’s assertion, that everyone knew how to sing 200 songs. Widmark is able to assume that the bartender can sing Camptown Races, without any preparation; the improvisatory result is ample evidence, that people once sang.

“I was looking at one of those American classics that most of us studied in high school, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” How wonderful this is–a meter that captures a horse’s gallop. Longfellow was a good writer, telling a great story in a magical way, and he pulled this off. I bet most people assume it’s a standard poetic form of some kind. However, when I looked at it closely and counted syllables, I realized Longfellow mixed up his lines and endlessly created variations on his metrical scheme. A lesser talent, following the same rules more tightly, might make us bonkers by the 20th line. Longfellow managed to achieve a kind of beautiful roughness that is a metaphor for this country.” – Bruce Deitrick Price, The ‘Rules’ of Poetry—Says Who?

Another Longfellow poem with rhythmic complexity (departure from standard, rhythmic regularity) is the Three Kings, rendered here in an experimental format “artificially regular”.

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O Jesus, my Savior! I see You now dead on this cross. You speak no more; You breathe no more; because You have life no longer, having willed to lose it to give life to our souls. You have no longer any blood; for you have shed it all, by dint of torments, to wash away our sins. In one word, You have abandoned Yourself to death through Your love for us. He has loved us, and delivered Himself for us. – Ephesians 5:2. “Let us consider,” writes St. Francis de Sales, “this divine Savior stretched upon the cross, as upon His altar of honor, where He is dying of love for us; but a love more painful than that very death. Ah, why, then, do we not in spirit throw ourselves upon Him to die upon the cross with Him, Who has willed to die there for love of us? ‘I will hold Him’, we ought to say, ‘and will never let Him go. I will die with Him, and be burned up in the flames of His love. One and the same fire shall consume this divine Creator and His miserable creature. My Jesus is all mine, and I am all His. I will live and die upon his breast; neither death nor life shall ever separate him from me.'” – St. Alphonsus de Liguori, The Passion of Jesus Christ. 2. “The death of Jesus”.

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There was once a Living Wage, so that a family’s father could support the whole family with one job, and the family’s mother could stay home to do the most important “job”, nurturing the children.

This was until the West’s leaders (Reagan, Thatcher, West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand), met at the G-7 Economic Summit in Ottawa in 1981 to decide that the powerhouse of American manufacturing had to be dismantled and shipped off to China.

This was the historical dividing line between the human flourishing of free enterprise vs. the trans-national, Capitalist-Socialism of “Free Trade”.

In the family, it was decided that women must be taken to work outside the home.

No one tries to pretend that childcare workers do 1% of the “job” that mothers do for their own children when they’re allowed to stay at home.

But capitalist-socialism had already been at work on the family for a hundred years, conditioning kids into mindless consumers and docile employees of gigantic businesses, since 1880.

John Taylor Gatto explains how the richest Robber Barons of the late 1800s, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Astors , Vanderbilts and others, were threatened in their domination of Capital markets by American farmers, “amateur” mechanics/engineers and small entrepreneurs.

The Robber Barons imposed compulsory, universal schooling, enforced by police, as early as the 1880s, after the Civil War, when impoverished returning veterans were deprived of their farms by bankers and taxmen, and forced into the factories of the emerging American industrial revolution. (There were riots in New York as late as 1915, over parents’ discontent about the 1907 Gary Indiana Curriculum.)

This meant that kids, who had been expected to aspire to become self-employed after the few weeks it took to learn arithmetic and reading, had to be conditioned in what we now know as socialism.

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O Face, Divine of Jesus, in ages long ago, Prophets and Sages prayed that Thou, on earth its light would show. O Holy Face, I cry to Thee, Like them that I Thy beams may see, O Holy Face I cry to Thee.
O suff’ring Face of Jesus, bleeding, soiled and torn, Thy temples and Thy brow transpierced with many a cruel thorn. Most Holy Face, I cry to Thee, offer Thy wounds to God for me, Most Holy Face I cry to Thee.
O dying Face of Jesus, on that redeeming tree, Crying aloud, “ah! why My God, hast Thou abandoned Me?” Most Holy Face, I cry to Thee, plead by Thine agony for me, Most Holy Face I cry to Thee.
O Glorious Face of Jesus, if after I have died, My soul but in Thy likeness make, I shall be satisfied. Most Holy Face, I cry to thee, more like Thee ever make Thou me, Most Holy Face I cry to Thee.

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From the Holy Face Hymnal, 1891

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