Originally published at crisis magazine
A pollster once made the statement that he had found in his work that voters were “very stupid.” A colleague tried to defuse the remark by saying the issue was that people answered opinion poll questions, “in the context of their ignorance.”
The phrase came to mind when I learned that President Carter had requested John Lennon’s “Imagine” for his funeral, which was sung by Country superstars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. The song is like an anthem for relativism, and its implications would certainly contradict some of the Bible School lessons the ex-president imparted regularly for most of his adult life. The presentation of the song by two country music stars at the end of a show funeral was kind of a reductio ad absurdum demonstration of how pop culture reveals not just intellectual inconsistency but intellectual bankruptcy. Hypocrisy would have been more decorous. It wasn’t, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”; it was advertising ideological confusion with a stellar command performance.
To sing “Amazing Grace” and “Imagine” at the same church service is to fall into latitudinarian contradiction. If the lyrics of one song means anything, the other is out of place. I am trying
