The Highlight of the Grammys

I actually considered terminating this blog. For six years I’ve ranted about the pathetic and dysfunctional state of pretty much all American institutions— public education, and organized religion, and public health / medicine, and giant financial corporations, and the “traditional” heterosexual American family, and labor unions, and the United States Government together with their chief client— the Pentagon. It’s not that I’ve run out of critical things to say. It’s just that so many bright thinkers now are all saying the same thing, and for me to continue would be merely to overstate the obvious. I might as well blog every day that rich and healthy is better than poor and sick.

So now I’ve been reduced to blogging about the Grammys. Okay, going into it I knew it would consist of non-stop renditions of “I Will Always Love You.” What I didn’t foresee was that they would never once mention Dolly Parton who actually wrote the song and sang it in a film a full ten years before The Bodyguard. There I go being critical again. But let’s face it— the Grammys wasn’t about musicology. It was about idolatry, and the idol wasn’t Dolly Parton.

That’s not to say that the Grammys were a waste of my time. I got to see the most amazing and creative commercial I’ve ever seen on television. I’m referring to the animated Chipotle commercial done with a voice-over song sung by Willie Nelson. Yes— that one with the pink pigs stylized to look like piggy banks. Nothing aired during the Super Bowl this year, or any other year, was this good in my opinion. Unfortunately, I’m willing to bet that the spot will prove to be a commercial failure. It was far too intelligent and subtle to sell very many burritos.

Don't Believe In God?

Don’t believe in God? You are not alone. This is the message splashed across ten billboards in metro Denver, Colorado, just in time for Christmas. The promoters of this message probably would say “the holidays” rather than “Christmas.” The billboards, we are told, are meant to comfort nonbelievers, and to give them a voice in a world besieged with religion. Here’s my beef with atheism. In my view, it’s just another religion. It tells us something about a subject that we can’t possibly know anything about, namely God. There are five religions in the tradition of Abrahamic monotheism— Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and atheism, and the only area of agreement between these beliefs is that at sometime in the distant past there was a guy named Abraham who was willing to kill his own son because he heard a voice coming from someone he couldn’t see. Abraham was not unique. Before we closed down all the mental institutions, they were filled with modern day Abrahams, and you still find them occasionally popping up on the evening news. Sometimes the sons of these Abrahams survive, and sometimes they don’t.

The monotheistic religions believe that the first Abraham heard a real voice coming from a real but invisible entity called God. The atheists believe that Abraham was just hearing a voice. Who the hell knows? And for my part, who the hell cares? What I want to know is this— on this particular billboard which I photographed, what does the graffiti say? I have a friend who claims to be able to decipher such “hood hieroglyphics,” and he tells me that the message scrawled in black spray paint reads Focus On The Family. I have a hunch that my friend is just pulling my chain.