Today’s
message, as I heard it. “Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” He paced
the platform, took a drink of water, and said:
Mr.
Rogers may have loved you just the way you are, but the righteous God does
not. You would like to think he does,
but . . . not really. He loves what he
wants you to become. Perfect as he is
perfect. Or at least! − righteous as he
is righteous. Southern, “Baptist,” vested, armed. “Republican.” Patriotic. Morally narrow enough to steal through the
eye of a needle. For, strait is the gate
and narrow is the way. Don’t think they’re
not.
I’m
not saying he said this; I’m saying this is what I heard. It reminded me of e e cummings’ “next to of
course god america i.” So . . . draw your own conclusions. I’m not the
preacher, so you may want to turn your volume up a bit for this one.
Oskar’s
tin drum may disrupt rallies, turn every march into a waltz and some waltzes
into the Charleston; but that does not make him part of the Resistance − he admits
as much. He is rather “merely a somewhat eccentric fellow who, for private and also
aesthetic reasons of his own . . . ” does what he does. This is what he does:
"In those days [the mid-1930s]
you could get the better of people on and in front of a grandstand with a
paltry tin drum . . . . I didn’t just
drum down rallies in brown. Oskar sat
under the grandstands of Reds and Blacks, of Boy Scouts and the spinach shirts
of the PX, of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Kyllhäuser Bund, of vegetarians and
the Polish Youth Fresh Air Movement. Whatever they had to sing, to blow, to pray, to proclaim: my drum knew
better.
"Thus my task was destruction."
That’s
not my task here. Oskar's drum may know better − I have my doubts − but I don’t. Still, I admire anyone
devoted to disrupting the songs or orations or prayers [cantūs / orationēs / orarionēs]
of shirts, whatever the shirts’ colors – brown, red, black, tan, spinach green,
stuffed with bombast.[See “The
Ambiguities” for 2/18/14 – “Heraclitus’ GPS.”]*
I am imagining for myself, for this
tiny, unattended space, something much quieter than Oskar's drumming, though I am aware that you can’t
get Bill O’Reilly, or Bill Maher, to shut up by interrupting in a whisper. You can no longer − if ever you could − gain the
floor by speaking softly, not unless you have first bludgeoned all opposing idiocy
senseless with your big stick. Only then can you begin reaching in the shirts and picking out the padding.
So the quiet Antic enterprise is
doomed to failure. But, it didn’t expect
anything else . . . except, perversely, it had hoped for an audience.
Today’s
definition of antic - merry in
spite of it all.
f
*In which I defined bombast, originally the cotton or other material used to pad clothing as “pretentious pomposerosity.”
