This is nauseating: a grade 4 teacher "married" one of his students at the
end of the year, in a playful, mock,
playground ceremony. What kind of deviant mind would regard
this as sinister? Well, lots of them, as it turns out (thought
not a single one of the students or parents of the students).
Sometimes America seems to be in the throes of some kind of wave of
neo-puritanical zeal. This is an unholy alliance between radical
feminists, hard-right evangelical "Christians", and small-minded
middle-managers (the school principal-- maybe-- in this case).
Look at the
controversy over characters in Harry Potter consuming alcohol-- we
must protect our children from the idea that something profane could enter
their bodies-- unless it's a Big Mac and a bag of Doritos and a gallon of
coke.
Beware them all, but, Scrooge might say, beware more than anyone the
middle-managers. They have the power to do harm because they glide to
positions of power on the lubrication of risk-less conformity and perception
management, but are incapable of thinking clearly for themselves, or
deferring to those who do. They are the kind of people who believe
in consultants, appoint committees, and spend voluminous amounts of time
developing mission statements and strategic plans. They are terrified
that their fundamental incompetencies will be revealed, so they take refuge in
process and strategy and consensus and "current thinking". These are
the people who burn witches, and then, a decade later, when the consensus
changes, pay them off and apologize. And then erect monuments to
the witch-burners, to keep everyone happy.
August 2, 2009
By the late 1970's, the tradition of the father walking his daughter down the
aisle to "give her away" almost seemed to be going extinct. Well, it's
back with a vengeance. Why? Why on earth is a young woman not
offended by the very idea? I don't buy the idea that it's a
meaningless vestige of age-old traditions. I does mean something.
Can't someone post a fun
video of a church wedding without generating a storm of controversy?
For those of you who haven't seen it yet, here it is:
I like it. But I was surprised to find that some
people apparently believe the moves were spontaneous, or that the wedding
party just decided they would all dance down the aisle. I would wager
a lot of money that the entire wedding party worked with a choreographer for
quite some time to develop the sequences, the moves, and positions.
The somersault by the bridegroom, for example, required a fair bit of
precise timing and practiced coordination.
That, to me, does not diminish the pleasure of watching it one whit.
It looks to me as if there was an effort to find out what each person could
do and then work with him or her to develop the entire "dance" from start to
finish. There are tricks and flourishes that could only have come from
training and experience. The moves are too clever and
sophisticated to have come from the members of a randomly assembled group like
a wedding party-- unless that group included a choreographer.
I've seen a few comments about the dance moves
being clumsy or lacking in gracefulness. Did these viewers forget that
this was a real wedding party, not a dance troupe? Or did they just
confuse some modern Bob Fosse type moves (especially the slow-motion effect
near the end) with obtuseness? Considering the
fact that the people in the wedding party were probably chosen because they
were friends or relatives of the couple getting married, I thought they did
very well. You could tell some were more comfortable with basic
movements, and others-- like the short guy with the beard-- had some real
skills. There are also moments that seem linked to the lyrics in a
subtle, suggestive way-- as when Chris Brown promises he'll never let her
fall and the dancers go into that slow motion tableau, or when the two girls
pull each other like slingshots down the aisle.
Yet others have found fault with
the idea of doing a celebratory dance during what-- they allege-- should be
a "solemn" occasion. For heaven's sake, they are celebrating a wedding
in a church. They are happy: two individuals found lifetime partners.
Their friends are joyfully celebrating with them. Someone else smartly
quoted Mencken (I paraphrase): puritans are people who suspect that someone
somewhere is having fun. If Jesus had attended this wedding, I
think he would have gladly boogied down the aisle along with the wedding
party. The Pharisees would have stared solemnly from the side,
frowning.
