Perfect sign
Listening to money-talk radio, noticing as always that the music on non-music radio stations is always Beatles. Popup question: Is there any music that celebrates or honors frugality, savings, thrift?

Bach did it perfectly, of course. BWV 84,THE best music. Painfully precise metaphor:

Im Schweiße meines Angesichts
will ich indes mein Brot genießen,
und wenn mein Lebenslauf,
mein Lebensabend wird beschließen,
so teilt mir Gott den Groschen aus,
da steht der Himmel drauf.
O! wenn ich diese Gabe
zu meinem Gnadenlohne habe,
so brauch ich weiter nichts.

No ZIRP in heaven.

Modern music? Can't think of any. Beatles explicitly mocked frugality with Mean Mr Mustard.

Back in the '40s there was a novelty number Stub your toe on the moon. Theme: Try for success but be proud of a more modest path after you find you're not meant to be President or Cary Grant or JP Morgan. Tolerating humility if not quite celebrating.

Literature? Emerson did it perfectly, of course. Transposed BWV 84 into prose.

Modern writing is pure Satan. A recent book had the SPECIFIC title Worst Man In The World. Why was he the worst? Because he was modest and humble and normal. Not because he was humbly concealing evil like Uriah Heep. Exactly purely completely because he was NOT A MURDEROUS PSYCHOPATH. Only psychopathic serial killers (with appropriate ethnic credentials and gender credentials and degrees, of course) are good.

You want the perfect sign of Satan's total victory? That's it.

Back in the '40s plenty of writers honored simplicity. It was the norm, not the outlier. Steinbeck and his forgotten superior competitor Kelland were all about boundaries and humility.

Cannery Row, my alltime favorite book, was explicitly about borders and subtly about frugality in various forms. Mack and Dora, the Row's social arbiters, were constantly building walls and drawing borders and defining appropriate behaviors within boundaries. Nobody had money, but everybody had unique ways of saving up labor or car parts or flog or puppies.



How about visual arts? Drama, theater, radio, TV? Pretty much zero in ALL eras. Painters in Bach's time survived by deifying the super-rich, and the habit continues. Even when evil artists are paid by governments, they still concentrate on mocking the poor and deifying the fashionable.

In the '40s, wartime posters advised us to save fats, save rubber, save gas ... but those were not promoting thrift as a permanent lifestyle. They promised postwar wealth if we could suffer through the duration. Radio and TV have always mocked thrift. Bashing the cheapskate is the easiest form of humor.

Labels: defensible spaces

  ¶ 10:47 AM