Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

Courtesy the fellows at Creative Minority Report, I’ve watched an audition tape for a 16 year old girl called Maddie Curtis. I liked Maddie so much that I thought I might try to follow this season, so I googled and got to the official website to look at start dates and what have you, and couldn’t help but click to watch Maddie’s audition again.  And from one video follows another, and now I’ve watched all the featured auditions currently available, and a couple of other auditions stood out.

All three (including Maddie) have great voices.  They also had great stories and great personalities.  They were complimented on their honest, authentic performances, which were not carbon copies of the original artists but expressed themselves.

I think a lot of that has to do with the lives these three have lived.  Many people are close to their grandmothers;  not many 16 year olds spend their free time hanging out with grandma, or are, like Katie Stevens, prepared to talk about singing for her and winning for her before she can’t remember who they are anymore.  Seventeen year olds can’t vote or smoke or drink;  and yet at that age, Jermain Sellers began taking care of his sick mother.  And while, despite the huge efforts of parents of kids with Down’s in the last 40 years to mainstream them, many struggle with the idea of having a person with Down’s in their family, Maddie Curtis is proud of her four brothers with the condition.

American Idol and shows like it are great at introducing us to people with great talent and interesting stories.  But I imagine that many other people also found these three stories particularly touching, and these three talented people endearing.  And I think it’s because these three people have close relationships with people whose lives are very different from the norm– people who, either from their very nature or from their current condition, have their “quality of life” questioned.  There are people and places who would allow or even encourage the snuffing out of these lives simply because they involve pain, or won’t be able to take care of themselves, or can’t live up to “normal” standards.  We already know that rates of Down’s in the US has fallen where statistically it should be more likely (given older motherhood)– I don’t think it’s a stretch to infer that has something to do with babies with Down’s being aborted.

And yet these three most likeable contestants all come from families where the “abnormal” was their normal.  And that’s why all three were complimented not only on their voices, which, with training, are essentially received or not received, but also on the honesty of their performances.  They’ve experienced, at a young age, life’s breadth, with includes difficult illnesses and disabilities and all the rest.

And all of this is a long-winded way of pointing out that without Jermain’s mom’s suffering, Katie’s grandmother’s slow deterioration, and Maddie’s brothers’ “abnormality” we don’t get the wonderful Jermains, Katies and Maddies whose compassion, honesty, and lack of self-absorption not only make for compelling television, but enrich our communities.  Jermain’s mother, Katie’s grandmother, and Maddie’s brothers have been good, strong influences on these people, and they have been loved:  that sounds like an excellent quality of life to me.

I don’t doubt that, while sinister influences are at work in some, many people who support abortion, euthanasia, and the rest of these “solutions,” do so out of a misguided compassion that thinks they’re keeping people from suffering.  But death isn’t an answer to suffering or difficulty;  it’s only an end to our interaction with those people.  There are places where these individuals, in pain, deteriorating, or with a perceived low quality of life can be excised from the picture– and those places are poorer for it.

It’s not compassion or love or self-sacrifice that drives “mercy” killings which are anything but.  And it won’t make us a more compassionate society.  What it will do is leave us with a future made up entirely of people who met some imaginary, ridiculous, and completely arbitrary idea of what constitutes a life worth living;  we will be a population of the most well-intentioned but least able to actually be compassionate executioners and survivors.  That’s a quality of life we can do without.  There’s a lot of talk about the value of diversity, but the diversity that’s truly dying out isn’t cultural or ethnic– it’s a diversity of experience which requires people to suborn their own interests for someone else.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to follow Idol from across the seas, but I can tell you I’ll be rooting for these three– they haven’t just got talent;  they’ve got heart.

Watch videos of Maddie Curtis, Jermain Sellers, and Katie Stevens at the American Idol Featured Auditions page.

I can’t recall if I mentioned but I am a native Bay Stater.  In fact, Ted Kennedy has been my senator for my whole life– in fact, he has been a senator almost as long as my parents have been alive.  I have had severe philosophical differences with the senator both on issues of governance (I’m a liberal in the classical sense, not in the big government sense) and moral ones (yes, red flag to a bull, the abortion issue).  I also have hated the mystical near-worship of the Kennedy clan in this area– I don’t believe fantasy of that kind is good for anyone, especially not the person (or group) being lionised.

The Catholic blogosphere, which generally crosses the political spectrum, has been ablaze with the subject of Ted Kennedy’s death.  What I have encountered has been just- neither sugarcoating his sins nor claiming to know the status of his soul.  I’ve had a lot of disparate thoughts about this subject, but I wanted to add my two cents in my own little corner of the internet.

From a Catholic perspective, there are a few things to be said about the senator.  There are rumors (many substantiated) of infidelity and alcoholism.  There is the sad story of Mary Jo Kopechne whose life was imperiled by Kennedy and whose death was caused by his failure to procure help.  And the clincher for most devout Catholics- the one thing that they really can’t get past- is his support for abortion.

And by all rights, abortion is something we should never “get past.”  There is no getting over so grave an evil.

But stories have started to trickle out that have made me look Ted Kennedy in a different light.  I don’t do well at personal malice (atleast of people I don’t know, excluding Andrew Jackson whom I despise– no room for explanation), so I never disliked Teddy K– in fact, he’s someone I imagine I would really like on a personal level.  He and his family also have my sympathy for having suffered so many tragedies.  It cannot have been easy to have been the last brother out of four when the other three all died young and tragically.

The stories have to do with prayer.  I heard someone say that the Eucharist was the center of his life.  I don’t know if that was true.  But I do know of two different people, both of whom disagreed with him politically, that they saw him praying.

The first is from Kathryn Lopez, who writes for the National Review, saw him at daily Masses in DC when she dropped in from an internship at the Heritage Foundation (a conservative thinktank).  And not just once or twice.  As she said, “[H]e probably led some people astray by his example. But our faith also teaches that we are all sinners and that there is redemption.”

The second is from a man, I don’t remember his name, who lives in the area of the basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, covered in the Boston Herald.  He described himself as a ’small goverment guy,’ and also as someone who dropped into the basilica having been taught by nuns to visit our Mother daily.  He too saw Senator Kennedy there, in the pew, deep in prayer.  This gentleman, who serves as an acolyte at noon dailies, had hoped he’d be allowed to serve, political differences aside.  Most important to me, however, is that these stories were not told while the senator lived– his prayers were not for show.

There is no escaping the fact that Kennedy’s flaws and particularly his public political support for abortion have given scandal and also have harmed the Church through tacit encouragement of the view that one can be a Catholic in good standing and support morally objectionable causes that have been expressly prohibited by the Vatican.  But there is also no escaping God, whose standard shows all of us that our “good standing” leaves quite a lot to be desired.

I will make no excuses for Senator Kennedy’s actions;  they are grave ones indeed.  But reading all these little tidbits, listening to the eulogies at the wake and the funeral (Teddy Jr.’s was especially good), I felt little tugs on my memory.  Wisps of the story wafted around my brain until I could finally grasp just whom this Ted Kennedy I was just starting to know reminded me of:  the tax collector in the temple.

Remember that parable?  Two men go to the temple to pray.  The first is a pharisee who thanks God that he follows all the laws and is better than lots of other people, including the second man.

The second man, a public sinner by virtue of being a tax collector, doesn’t even approach the front, doesn’t even look heavenward.  Instead, so conscious is he of his sin that he only stands, pleading with God, “Have mercy on me, a sinner!”

I don’t have any special knowledge of anything, let alone Ted Kennedy’s soul.  But, for all his faults, though they were grave and in some cases persistent, I just have this inkling that he clung to prayer like that second man.  The good father at the Byzantine Rite church we go to occasionally said today, in that Tradition, we say that we are the first of sinners in the Liturgy– a Liturgy which is suffused with petitions for God to be merciful.  Perhaps that is the lesson of Senator Kennedy’s life to those of us who remain- a reminder that we are all wholly dependent on the mercy of God.

And just because it’s a beautiful prayer that bears repeating, here is the prayer Byzantine Rite Catholics (in various Churchs- e.g. Ukrainian Catholic Church), say before receiving the Eucharist:

I believe, O Lord, and confess that You are indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.

Of Your mystical supper, make me a partaker this day, O Son of God, for I will not speak of Your mysteries to Your enemies, nor like Judas will I give You a kiss, but like the good thief will I confess to You.

Remember me, O Lord, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Remember me, O Master, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Remember me, O Holy One, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Not for judgment, nor for condemnation be for me the partaking of these Your Holy Mysteries O Lord, but for the healing of my body and soul.

O God be merciful to me a sinner. God, cleanse my sins and have mercy on me. Innumerably have I sinned, forgive me, O Lord.

Considering that I wasn’t born until basically all western tv shows (I’m not including Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman) were off the airwaves, it’s kind of ironic that I have such an affection for a couple of old western TV shows and a few b-movies.  Some of them were pretty cheesy, and they didn’t have the pizzazz of modern film technology, and they often didn’t have the money a lot of other films did, too (theirs was a brief heyday).  But there’s something that resonates with me, and I think it’s probably why, even when they are a bit dated, they aren’t irrelevant.  

The first thing obvious has to be the setting.  A number of westerns mirror the attitudes the arose from, a sense that man was under assault by increasing “civilisation”, not in the sense of philosophy, but real estate, that the cities sapped something out of people.  I’m not sure if I can say conclusively what it was, but it had something to do with a person feeling honest about who they were.  I happen to be a big fan of what I consider “politeness” but it can be used to shield true intent, or restrain people from being themselves.  It also could be that more people living closer together seemed claustrophobic.  But at its essence, I think westerns reflected a great love for the idea of some sort of solitude in which a person could discover who he was, and test himself against that idea, even if that solitude took place with a whole bunch of livestock.

But even more than that, the westerns reflected a sort of certainty about a few things, a certainty I think a lot of people long for (even if it’s not always a good thing to be so certain).  There was no modern sense of a flexible moral order (not on the big things anyway);  and, contrary to our modern sensibilties of feeling stifled very quickly, these were a reassurance.  So, the lone wrangler could take on the cattle baron, not in spite of his relative lack of temporal power, but because he had a sense of something more powerful than him that he could call upon, a final justice, even if it were only a whisper in his soul.  The tale of a man taking upon himself an enemy who has much greater power than he does isn’t new in any sense, but it does resonate, mostly, I think, because people more often feel themselves as Davids, not Goliaths.

My favorite thing about the westerns, though, isn’t that.  It’s that they are often little morality plays.  I think here it’s helpful to review a couple of my favorites, watched once or twice on TCM or AMC.  And surprisingly, for all the gunslinger mentality, in some of them there really is a very strong attitude of non-violence.  Two of my favorites, both starring Gregory Peck and both dealing with being haunted by violence (and doing some hunting) have striking endings.  In The Gunfighter, the main character wreaks vengeance with his dying breath, but because of the torture he has endured, it’s a very hollow, sad sort of victory.  And while there is a firm sense of “moral order” in The Bravados, it’s not unexamined.  Peck’s character pursues five criminals for killing his wife;  he manages to capture or kill four of them.  His dogged pursuit seems a righteous cause until the last few minutes, when he discovers that his certainty of guilt was misguided the whole time.  (I recommend both these films, although be aware that Bravados has an entirely useless love interest.)  

So, even though both these films seem violent and (initially) to justify the very vengeful paths of the main characters, in the end they take a much more critical approach.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that both films condemn it very strongly through showing the hollow victory and the depth of wrongdoing it can lead one into.  Now, not every western has these themes, but there are a lot of good ones.  The Searchers is a classic that addresses grief and despair poignantly but with great subtlety.  I would also consider Cheyenne Autumn, a fantastic film about governmental mistreatment of Native Americans, to be a good example of the genre.  That film challenges viewers on ideas of justice, kindness, honesty and honor, right as might versus right as doing right by others, etc.  Many other films towards the end of the sixties and into the seventies explored the difficulty of change and growing older.  Of course, there were plenty of shoot ‘em up films, too.  But I think as a genre it has a lot to offer.  Even western TV series are surprisingly full of mini-morality issues.  Though they had interludes of love interests and plenty of shoot-outs, they didn’t shy away from tough subjects.

They also didn’t shy away from the idea of conscience.  And perhaps that’s why this topic came to mind.  I have to admit, TV is a big temptation for me.  I really enjoy film and TV, and there’s something about my imagination that latches onto characters.  My mom likes to remind me that the characters in books, plays, movies and TV shows aren’t real, but I often treat them like they are (not in a disturbed way (no creepy stalker photograph walls with candles), but I really have a knack for understanding characters).  In the past year, I’ve really come to like a couple of shows I think are great.  But there’s been something bothering me, and it’s that conscience seems to have taken a big hit.

I think it’s that conscience seems to have become subjective.  So, Burn Notice, which is a great spy/action show, has a character who helps people and is generally on the “right” side.  But he doesn’t care what happens to anyone on the “wrong” side.  He has set people on the wrong side up a few times to take a pretty nasty fall, usually involving their deaths.  And not only does he seem unconcerned, but the show offers no sympathy for those characters.  I also really like NCIS, which has a great cast of characters.  But the lead, who is completely heartbroken and blaming himself for the murder of his family, seems to have no compunction about murdering their killer, or generally doing some shady dealings.  Where in a western, a character would be torturing himself over whether he’d done the right thing (or outright acknowledging that he’d done the wrong thing), these characters take it all in stride.  And so, even though I watch them faithfully, there’s a jarring disconnect between the characters I like and some actions which are more easily swallowed when done by the villain.  

What makes the cowpoke eternal?  Well, it’s not the writing oftentimes (which can get pretty canned), and it’s not the guns and horses.  I think it’s that the heroes of those films often seemed to stand outside of the society that spawned them (both as 20th century creations and characters grounded in a past reality).  There’s a timelessness because they don’t yield to the age, either age, setting or movie. The cowboy was an almost accidental splicing of surety that there was a good, and a good deal of doubt that he fit the category.  There are a lot of great films and TV shows out there these days, but sometimes I really miss the cowboy.