Globe: Rex Murphy - Yesterday's hero, today's hypocrite
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Yesterday's hero, today's hypocrite, Rex Murphy, Saturday, March 4, 2006
The sun will be a lightless cold ash and, somewhere in a galaxy other than our own, deep into the future, some descendant of a rock star will be protesting the Newfoundland seal hunt.
In ancient times (think 950s), when zealous Roman Catholic priests wanted to impress upon their parishioners something of the unspeakable notion of eternity, which, not coincidentally, was coterminous with the raging fires of hell awaiting the various slackers and ne'er-do-wells among them, they offered an eloquent and stylish parable. It was a kind of apocalyptic thought experiment.
Think of a great granite mountain, they said, and then think of a tiny bird that, once every thousand years, flies by that mountain and brushes it only one time with its wing. Next, they challenged their listeners to contemplate how many thousands upon thousands of unimaginable years it would take before the action of that tiny bird's fluttering wing would wear that enormous adamantine mountain to a heap of dust.
Once members of the congregation had collected their imaginations to the vast and horrible sweep of time thus conjured, there came the kicker: However long it took that little bird to wear away that great mountain, the priest would say, is not even one second in eternity.
I'm not sure if the church is as keen these days to impress upon its flock the infinite dimensions of the afterlife and, therefore, the high undesirability of spending that fathomless duration in the inexhaustible fires of hell, but if it should be thought necessary to update the parable, let me offer some alternate tropes upon which to build an equal sermon:
(a) the obnoxiousness of rock stars, has-been celebrities, and knighted busybodies -- this quality is both infinite and eternal;
(b) the egotism of cause-mongers and publicity-hounds -- take infinity, and stretch it; take eternity and extend it;
(c) watching Sir Paul McCartney talking to Larry King about the Newfoundland seal hunt -- the pompous in full communion with the vacuous.
A sermon on any one of these is guaranteed to give a fuller, more toxic feel, to the sheer enormousness of time than the dated fable of some chickadee with a grudge against a mountain.
A snail hauling a lead weight across the universe is a NASCAR photo finish compared to Paul and Larry exchanging sighs and solemnities on the "heartbreaking" spectacle on the ice floes.
The last time Paul McCartney did anything useful, that is anything remotely connected with what he may actually know something about, was when he hitched a ride on Michael Jackson's then-hyperstar status and recorded the eminently forgettable Say Say Say.
Other than that, and a few ventures at distressing Mozart's ghost by essaying a symphony and, heaven help us, an oratorio, he's "the former Beatle." And good for him. If the world ever wants to know even more than it does already about the biggest bubble on the froth of 20th-century pop music, the Beatles, then Paul McCartney, knight, billionaire, composer of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, is just the person to talk to.
But what he knows about the Newfoundland seal hunt would fit in a gnat's armpit, and what the rest of us should care about how he feels about it would gladden an even more rank receptacle. He's just one more in the endless file of soap-star intellects, preening starlets, sit-com revenants, small-screen action heroes and full-bore Hollywood poseurs, who, over the years, have given an ounce of their time to drop by the ice-floes, park in front of a whitecoat, do the caring press conference, and go back to whatever it is that they do when they're not saving seals.
It's quite a list. Brigitte Bardot, Pierce Brosnan, Richard Dean Anderson, Yvette Mimieux, Sean Penn (pre-Baghdad tourism), Loretta Swit and, to bring matters up to date, übertart Paris Hilton, are just a petty fraction of the names that have found the seal hunt their cause du jour. Ms. Hilton, who, in my view, has caused the world more pain than four centuries of the seal harvest, gave the full power of her T-shirt to the crusade against the hunt when she sported this slogan at the Sundance Film Festival: "Club sandwiches, not seals."
If Paris Hilton and Paul McCartney are on the same page, it has to be a picture book. Throw in every manic animal activist organization, Greenpeace, the Fund for Animal Welfare and the whole camera-mad crowd that have made careers, or sustained tendentious organizations, by publicity assaults on the few Newfoundlanders who actually work at getting a few necessary bucks from the hunt and you have a spectacle of disproportion that would make the angels weep.
Last summer, for a day, it was Make Poverty History. Sir Paul headlined the London concert with Bono for that monstrous hypocrisy.
Multimillionaires protesting world poverty, while keeping their bloated fortunes, is a dissonance that may peal through eternity.
As for Sir Paul and the seal hunt -- who cares? The night before, Larry King had on Roseanne Barr. Larry, Paul, Roseanne -- it's all so . . . yesterday.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
The sun will be a lightless cold ash and, somewhere in a galaxy other than our own, deep into the future, some descendant of a rock star will be protesting the Newfoundland seal hunt.
In ancient times (think 950s), when zealous Roman Catholic priests wanted to impress upon their parishioners something of the unspeakable notion of eternity, which, not coincidentally, was coterminous with the raging fires of hell awaiting the various slackers and ne'er-do-wells among them, they offered an eloquent and stylish parable. It was a kind of apocalyptic thought experiment.
Think of a great granite mountain, they said, and then think of a tiny bird that, once every thousand years, flies by that mountain and brushes it only one time with its wing. Next, they challenged their listeners to contemplate how many thousands upon thousands of unimaginable years it would take before the action of that tiny bird's fluttering wing would wear that enormous adamantine mountain to a heap of dust.
Once members of the congregation had collected their imaginations to the vast and horrible sweep of time thus conjured, there came the kicker: However long it took that little bird to wear away that great mountain, the priest would say, is not even one second in eternity.
I'm not sure if the church is as keen these days to impress upon its flock the infinite dimensions of the afterlife and, therefore, the high undesirability of spending that fathomless duration in the inexhaustible fires of hell, but if it should be thought necessary to update the parable, let me offer some alternate tropes upon which to build an equal sermon:
(a) the obnoxiousness of rock stars, has-been celebrities, and knighted busybodies -- this quality is both infinite and eternal;
(b) the egotism of cause-mongers and publicity-hounds -- take infinity, and stretch it; take eternity and extend it;
(c) watching Sir Paul McCartney talking to Larry King about the Newfoundland seal hunt -- the pompous in full communion with the vacuous.
A sermon on any one of these is guaranteed to give a fuller, more toxic feel, to the sheer enormousness of time than the dated fable of some chickadee with a grudge against a mountain.
A snail hauling a lead weight across the universe is a NASCAR photo finish compared to Paul and Larry exchanging sighs and solemnities on the "heartbreaking" spectacle on the ice floes.
The last time Paul McCartney did anything useful, that is anything remotely connected with what he may actually know something about, was when he hitched a ride on Michael Jackson's then-hyperstar status and recorded the eminently forgettable Say Say Say.
Other than that, and a few ventures at distressing Mozart's ghost by essaying a symphony and, heaven help us, an oratorio, he's "the former Beatle." And good for him. If the world ever wants to know even more than it does already about the biggest bubble on the froth of 20th-century pop music, the Beatles, then Paul McCartney, knight, billionaire, composer of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, is just the person to talk to.
But what he knows about the Newfoundland seal hunt would fit in a gnat's armpit, and what the rest of us should care about how he feels about it would gladden an even more rank receptacle. He's just one more in the endless file of soap-star intellects, preening starlets, sit-com revenants, small-screen action heroes and full-bore Hollywood poseurs, who, over the years, have given an ounce of their time to drop by the ice-floes, park in front of a whitecoat, do the caring press conference, and go back to whatever it is that they do when they're not saving seals.
It's quite a list. Brigitte Bardot, Pierce Brosnan, Richard Dean Anderson, Yvette Mimieux, Sean Penn (pre-Baghdad tourism), Loretta Swit and, to bring matters up to date, übertart Paris Hilton, are just a petty fraction of the names that have found the seal hunt their cause du jour. Ms. Hilton, who, in my view, has caused the world more pain than four centuries of the seal harvest, gave the full power of her T-shirt to the crusade against the hunt when she sported this slogan at the Sundance Film Festival: "Club sandwiches, not seals."
If Paris Hilton and Paul McCartney are on the same page, it has to be a picture book. Throw in every manic animal activist organization, Greenpeace, the Fund for Animal Welfare and the whole camera-mad crowd that have made careers, or sustained tendentious organizations, by publicity assaults on the few Newfoundlanders who actually work at getting a few necessary bucks from the hunt and you have a spectacle of disproportion that would make the angels weep.
Last summer, for a day, it was Make Poverty History. Sir Paul headlined the London concert with Bono for that monstrous hypocrisy.
Multimillionaires protesting world poverty, while keeping their bloated fortunes, is a dissonance that may peal through eternity.
As for Sir Paul and the seal hunt -- who cares? The night before, Larry King had on Roseanne Barr. Larry, Paul, Roseanne -- it's all so . . . yesterday.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
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