Thursday, January 13, 2011
Blasphemy
I didn't listen to the actual Tucson ceremony. Even with the pills, I don't have enough spare blood pressure to handle that sort of thing any more. This afternoon, Savage played a brief segment and I nearly choked on blasphemy.
In the segment, Comrade Bullbitch Napolitano was reading from the same part of Isaiah that Händel had used for his main text in Messiah.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. ... And the glory of the Lord is revealed...
This passage has been sanctified by both Händel and Schütz. Hearing it in Mr Napolitano's flat dry lesbian tones was exactly like expecting to see Chartres and realizing it's been replaced by a gray cement Stalinist apartment building.
Savage caught what he believed to be an error, but he was wrong: he assumed that the female gender of Jerusalem was a feminist revision. In this case it's not. It's just one of those vestigial leftovers of grammatical gender in English. In other Euro languages every noun has a grammatical gender with no connection to its real sex; in English only a tiny handful of inanimate nouns (cities, nations, ships) still retain a female grammatical form, and none retain a masculine form.
But Mr Napolitano made a real and revealing change in the same passage. Instead of "her iniquity is pardoned", he said "her inEquity is pardoned." The religious concept of sin was utterly alien and unimaginable to the leaden mind of Comrade Napolitano, so he replaced it by a Marxist concept of sin. Anything that has not been flattened and deadened into precise indistinguishable Equity is sinful. ¶ 3:23 PM
In the segment, Comrade Bullbitch Napolitano was reading from the same part of Isaiah that Händel had used for his main text in Messiah.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. ... And the glory of the Lord is revealed...
This passage has been sanctified by both Händel and Schütz. Hearing it in Mr Napolitano's flat dry lesbian tones was exactly like expecting to see Chartres and realizing it's been replaced by a gray cement Stalinist apartment building.
Savage caught what he believed to be an error, but he was wrong: he assumed that the female gender of Jerusalem was a feminist revision. In this case it's not. It's just one of those vestigial leftovers of grammatical gender in English. In other Euro languages every noun has a grammatical gender with no connection to its real sex; in English only a tiny handful of inanimate nouns (cities, nations, ships) still retain a female grammatical form, and none retain a masculine form.
But Mr Napolitano made a real and revealing change in the same passage. Instead of "her iniquity is pardoned", he said "her inEquity is pardoned." The religious concept of sin was utterly alien and unimaginable to the leaden mind of Comrade Napolitano, so he replaced it by a Marxist concept of sin. Anything that has not been flattened and deadened into precise indistinguishable Equity is sinful. ¶ 3:23 PM
