Kishkumen wrote:Very true, moksha. The sinister cast of corporate Mormonism has begun to dissipate a little.
This type of comment didn't surprise me, a foregone conclusion I came to years ago was that today's "Anti-Mormon", "Critic", and "Faithful Dissenters" are just the dying gasps of 20th century Modernism still fumigating about the immovable truth of capitalism and the confines of the middle class (often disparaged by the use of the vulgar Avignon term bourgeois).
This mild swipe at corporatism is just a symptom of a deeper hatred for the ecclesiastical structure of Christ’s church here in America. The LDS Church has come to embody and represent the true tastes and pleasures of the American middleclass without dictation from an enlightened aristocracy. We Latter Day Saints are the walking paragon of what has become an American convention of success and wealth that so many in the third world aspire to. This generation more closely resembles the Nephites at the height of their glory than any previous generation before it. This fact of course agitates those he see themselves in opposition to the church. Flouting convention and despising bourgeois tastes is the hallmark of modernity, when members of the Church exercised their rights in defending traditional marriage against radical redefinition we were vilified for merely being the safe keepers of societal health and not treated with the respect and dignity we Mormons deserve but are so often denied.
This Kishkumen fellow who holds some sort of “position” at “Cassius University” is no different in his bombastic criticisms and histrionics than the contemptible Gustave Flaubert, the author of the rather mundane and petty ‘Madame Bovary’ which reads less like novel and more like a teenage fantasy dosed in anxiety and crippled imagination. I’ve examined a few of the posts where the “minds” of “Cassius” gather to discuss Mormonism and while to me it looks like a conversation among the deaf, I can’t help but invoke the wit of Harold Rosenberg by likening “Cassius” to a “herd of independent minds”.
Modernists like Kishkumen hate today’s conventions because our “bourgeois” pleasures are the result of the consumerism borne out of the industrialization of America. When we became consumers, our act of consumption gave birth to a culture of “pleasures” and “distractions” that was dictated by market forces and not by the self appointed mandarins of taste that fellows like Kishkumen take themselves to be. I still find it ironic that these flouters of middle class convention seem barely cognizant of the fact that without a rather liberal capitalistic democracy they would not exist. Biting the hand that feeds them? I'm sure that dog doesn't hunt...
To see how pernicious the modernist cult can be I invite readers here to listen to Kishkumen’s musical ventures and experience for themselves were rebellion without merit can lead you. Listen to Space Deleta.
And what did you think? Just a Cacophony of bass and synthetic noise was it not? What is Christ’s name is this supposed to be, what it sounds like inside the head of a poor student forced to imbibe Marxist doctrines in their public school? What, if any, is the reason behind it’s composition? To help inspire a sadomasochist play date on a Friday night in Frankfurt? I contend that there is simply no way one can ever really experience this song as it is, generated no doubt from computer algorithms, a Beefhart-like nonsense of sounds spliced together by soft and hard-ware. There are no aesthetics in such incongruity I say.
Compare this with say, a classic performance of 'Battle Hymn to the Republic' by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Established harmony and a proper bridge, imagine that? The heresy of convention produces a piece of music that represents truth that can be seen, heard, and felt. This is why the Church continues to grow by leaps and bounds and why our critics, foes, and "ex-mormons" continue to dwindle into obscurity just like their silly "art" of subversion; to make the innocent into the sadistic. What better image could hope to accompany Kishkumen's composition?