Daily Archives: October 8, 2022

On Oct. 11, the quiet but mammoth impact of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts is celebrated with the release of Charlies Good Tonight: The Life, the Times, and the Rolling Stones: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts (available here). Authorized by Watts family and featuring forewards from both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the book delves into the incredible life of a man who came from a working class background and served as the anchor and guiding light of one of the worlds greatest rock bands from the early sixties until his death in 2021. Written by journalist Paul Sexton, a Billboard contributor who has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian and Daily Telegraph, Charlies Good Tonight draws on his 30-plus years of experience writing about the Stones as well as exclusive interviews with Watts family, friends and fellow musicians who knew him best.

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Below, Billboard is running an exclusive excerpt from Sextons book which details Watts role in turning the Stones into a carefully plotted touring juggernaut with iconic visuals, which changed the live music business in the late 80s and beyond.

The 1990s began with Charlies uncredited role as design consultant with the Rolling Stones becoming more significant than ever. Now reaping the dividends of their peerless fame as they never did on their first go-round, they may have been en route to the status later disdainfully described by the New York Times as an organization with long off-seasons and unending profits. But vast sums from their empire were poured back into the business to make sure that they remained bigger, better and more spectacular than any of their largely benign competition.

Charlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, Youd be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So its to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. And thats what weve become. Its our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. Thats how weve directed what we do. Thats how the world of doing what we do has gone.

And youre in the world of following yourself, really, he went on. You get the occasional band like U2, How did they do in Denver? and you think, Blimey, wed better do as well as them. Its like friendly rivalry, in a way. And often, its just you thats been there, so its, Why arent we doing as well as last time? and a worry goes out.

Charlie and Mick worked closely on the Steel Wheels tour with the late set designer Mark Fisher and lighting director Patrick Woodroffe. It won one of trade magazine Pollstars first awards for most creative stage production, in an itinerary that went on so long, the European leg had a different name, Urban Jungle, and a look all its own.

Fisher was the founder of Stufish, the set designers whose relationship with the Stones continued all the way to 2022s SIXTY festivities. As the company prepared for the launch of that European itinerary sadly without Charlies new input modern-day chief executive Ray Winkler told the Guardian about Steel Wheels.

The tour was, at the time, the biggest in terms of sheer volume of different elements used to construct the stage. It took over 100 men to build it. The stage stretched over 300ft and was flanked by 80ft high towers on each side that Mick Jagger appeared on for Sympathy for the Devil. This is when the modern-day touring industry was born when architecture and music came together to create these rock spectaculars.

Mick Taylor, as a once and future collaborator but also as an admirer, agreed wholeheartedly. Talking to me in 2013, during his temporary reintroduction to the fold for the Stones 50th-anniversary celebrations and beyond into the 14 on Fire tour, he mused: Id say the beginning of the modern-day Stones in terms of theatre presentation was well, it was always very theatrical and musical as well, but in terms of big presentation and stage lighting, there was such a huge development between 69 and the 80s. Their really big, massive tours all started with Steel Wheels, really. I saw them in 1999, at Wembley Stadium, and they were fantastic.

Charlies daughter Seraphina glows when she talks about her fathers huge importance in those uncredited visual decisions. He was behind the creative process, that mega-touring, those stages, before U2, before any of those guys, she says. Because of his design history, he did merchandising, designing of stages. Art direction, really. He was involved with the lighting, all the behind-the-scenes stuff. They have a really fantastic team and the same people [each time], and I dont think people know quite how involved he was.

Charlie downplayed it, naturally. Thats Mick, really, and Im with im. Thats us. Then when we get on the road I tend to leave it, but hes very aware of a lot more. He works very hard. Also people go to him more. Thank goodness theyve learned not to come to me, he laughed. Grumpy old sod, dont go to him.

After a year and 115 shows, the combined Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle pageant bowed out with two more concerts in August 1990 at Wembley Stadium, for an awe-inducing total of five there. At one, I distinctly remember Ronnie playing a solo and milking the applause a little more than usual only to be told that we were cheering news of England scoring a goal in the World Cup. I went Wow, I didnt know I was playing that well, said Wood.

For all the absurdity of a man yearning to be performing in a jazz club playing to a combined total on the two legs of the tour of 5.5 million people, Charlie told me soon afterwards that doing those gigantic shows was painless. The Stones are very easy to play with. In this day and age its very easy to play, because Here came another of his unexpected pauses and changes of direction. Lets see I blame Led Zeppelin for the two-hour-long show. Now, you see, we jumped in a few years from doing 20 minutes, all the hits and off the Apollo Revue, well call it we went from doing club dates which are two sets a night, which was great fun, to doing two minutes, because you got pulled off the stage, to doing 20-minute Apollo-type shows to doing, thanks to Led Zeppelin, this two-hour long show.

If youre Jimmy Page, you can do that, and [with] Bonhams 20-minute drum solo. It wasnt about that with us, it was a different thing. I dont like doing drum solos, period. I dont hear things like that. When Zep, we call em, used to do that what are we, early 70s, I suppose that was hard work physically, because the monitors werent so good, and the volume you played at. As a drummer, Im talking about. But now the sound equipment is so sophisticated. The hardest thing with a drummer on those big stages is to be heard. Now, its done for you, virtually. The amplification is there, so I just play naturally, at the volume I feel like playing, in this little cage I live in, and they adjust the volume of it.

Chuck Leavells arrival in the Stones touring company had begun with the 1982 European tour and continued through the next two albums, so he was a no-brainer of a choice when the Steel Wheels circus hit the road. A Southern rock bastion, previously admired as a member of the Allman Brothers Band, he was another important component in the future of a group that had no intention of retreating into posterity. In time he was elevated to the role of music director of the Stones shows, with an especially vital channel of communication with Charlie.

Leavell had seen the Stones as a 14-year-old, paying his $3 to see their package show with the Beach Boys and the Righteous Brothers at Legion Field in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in 1965. He was in the crowd again for the 1969 US tour, then met Charlie for the first time when the Allmans made their debut performances in Europe, their second show being as Knebworth headliners in July 1974. Unusually, Charlie was present at the record company party, where Chuck asked him in small talk Hows it going, man? The drummers answer was as inscrutable as ever. Do you mean for me, or for the others? Leavell remembers: He was very cordial, except for the short answers.

Charlie, like all the Stones, made everything seem instinctive. But a great deal of rehearsal and symbiosis goes into mastering a two-and-a-half-hour set containing peoples cherished musical memories, and Leavell has been instrumental in that process. Charlie played on some of the most iconic records ever made, obviously, he says. But when we would go to present those things live, he couldnt always remember all the exact things he did, or where the changes would come.

Thats largely where my role as musical director came into play, to help Charlie when section B was going to come up. He would always look over to me for that, and it was very special for me to be able to give him those cues. It wasnt just Charlie, I did it for Mick sometimes hes out there trying to work the crowd and he would look at me and I could say verse or chorus. But Charlie especially, we had that kind of a bond and that was very endearing for me. It meant a lot to me to be able to do that. The Stones investiture of long-standing friend and collaborator Steve Jordan as Charlies locum and then successor brought admirable continuity, but also an inevitable change in the stage dynamics. Quite frankly on the [2021] tour [the resumption of North American No Filter dates] I missed it, because Steve Jordan has a great musical mind and he doesnt really require that.

Charlie had immense pride in the Stones dedication to their work, but knew that it was somewhat at odds with the unjust idea that their collective hedonism somehow undermined their commitment to their craft. Unbeknown to a lot of people, the Rolling Stones are theatrical and terribly professional, he said. They always have been, about whatever large or small facet of talent they have. The band has only ever not turned up once, and I only ever missed a show because I got the wrong date, he said, referring to the 1964 diary malfunction we heard about earlier. Even as young tearaways, which we never really were a lot of that was bullshit. I know people who were much more whatever the word is. Newspapers are dreadful things, bless em. I cant read them. I flick through the cricket page, and thats it.

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Charlies Good Tonight: Read an Exclusive Excerpt From the Authorized Biography of the Rolling Stones Late Drummer - Billboard

Arriving on screens tomorrow (October 9), Wreck is a TV series like no other. The premise: a serial killer dressed as a fluffy duck on the loose on a luxury cruise liner murdering people left, right and centre. The show from the mind of Ryan J. Brown is best described as Below Deck crossed meets Scream Queens, combining the hedonism of life on board a cruise ship with all the bloody gore of 90s and 2000s teen slasher movies.

BBC series Wreck follows Jamie (played by Oscar Kennedy), who teen who embarks on an undercover mission to discover his sister Pippas (Jodie Tyack) fate after she mysteriously died while working on board the luxury liner MS Sacramentum.

Assuming the identity of another crew member, Jamie makes friends with some of his fellow crew members Vivian (Thaddea Graham) and Hamish (James Phoon) as they make a terrifying discovery and more people starting to get bumped off.

Horror fan Brown wanted to create something the likes of which hadnt been seen on British television, moving away from the more po-faced and gothic horror for something more irreverent.

Brown said he was waiting for the right location when he happened upon the idea of setting Wreck on a cruise ship.

He said: A cruise ship can be endlessly scary and the industry and the cruise world is fascinating and theres so many facets of it that people dont know about.

READ MORE:Heartstopper: Why Positive onscreen representation matters

However, audiences will be surprised to know despite the central setting, Wreck wasnt filmed on a ship at all.

Brown said: We were up against from the beginning in terms of a BBC Three show, not a big-budget BBC One show and we were filming in Belfast not on a cruise ship.

I thought surely not going to film on a cruise ship is going to give us more options and more choice and control. What are we going to do? Wait until everyones gone to bed and film? Can you imagine the chaos?

Wreck marks Browns first time as showrunner, and the writer hailed the production team for creating the most incredible set in an old Michelin tyre factory.

I walked into this abandoned factory and there was this cruise ship. It was insane. I knew they didnt have very long but what a challenge and they smashed it, Brown said.

Adding: There were things we did in this show that you couldnt have done on a real cruise ship.

Actress Alice Noakes - who plays Sacramentums queen bee and archetypal mean girl Sophia - went on to share details about filming: It was minus four and we had to pretend that we were in the middle of a Caribbean cruise.

So at one point, we were in mini dresses. I had red lipstick on and it went almost mauve because I was slightly blue. That was the hardest part, I think. You could see our breath.

And when they would shout cut, we would run to little heater, said Miya Ocego, who plays crew member Rosie and also works as a Cher tribute act. Adding: The most cold months we were over there.

The shoot took place towards the end of October/November 2021 and wrapped in March this year in Belfast.

Along with being a horror-comedy, Wreck is also a celebration of queerness with both a gay lead character with a lesbian best friend who take audiences into this debauched and macabre world.

Brown described the horror genre as extremely gay because it was the rebel genre about the other dating all the way back to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein.

He said: Its super queer and it doesnt necessarily get the recognition. It took me a long time to realise why I was drawn to the genre.

Since the beginning of time, horror has been queer but coded and subtext. I was like, Lets have a go at explicit representation. Lets see how that goes.

And its worked out really well because we need more stories - stories about identity for LGBTQ+ people are really important.

We need more but also we need more stories where that isnt the primary focus.

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Season two of Wreck has now been confirmed to be in development with Brown saying he had many ideas of where the story could go next.

Brown said: Whats been amazing is Ive always had a plan, a three-series plan and everyones always been very on board with that and so with series one Ive completely written that as if there will be a second series. Theres no doubt in my mind.

While also making sure season one was satisfying, but I think when people have finished the first series, theyre going to be gagging for the second series because there are some huge things that happen in the last episode.

He teased the first outing was left open-ended to an extent with more places the show could go.

Wreck airs tomorrow on BBC Three at 10pm

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Wreck cast on huge behind-the-scenes secret on BBC series: Can you imagine the chaos? - Express

From the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s, British musicians headed to recording studios across the Channel in search of creativity and easy living.

France was considered a liberated country where musicians could be louche at their leisure while working on their next album.

Here are four classic LPs recorded in France and one song, the most licentious of the lot, that you would have thought must have been made in decadent France but wasnt.

Read more: Paris classed worlds third most musical city in new ranking

Escaping from their tax problems and in search of hedonism in the sun, the Stones holed up in Keith Richards villa on the Cte dAzur and used a mobile recording truck to work on their new album in the basement.

It has to be admitted that none of the 18 tracks is a standout work of genius no one chooses Turd on the Run as a Desert Island Disc.

It is said that some session musicians took so many drugs they couldnt remember being there.

Elton Johns seventh studio album was recorded in this 18th century chateau north of Paris.

An earlier Elton John album, Honky Chateau, was named after the building.

The Gibb Brothers (the Bee Gees) wrote Stayin Alive while staying here.

When David Bowie came here to record Low, his friends were convinced it was haunted.

Read more: Video: Elton John in surprise performance at Cannes restaurant

Read more: Bowie bassists chance collaboration with French music star next door

Her second studio album, and the only one to be recorded outside the UK, was produced at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes, a converted restaurant on the Riviera.

She was still only 20 years old.

The building is still there, but is no longer a recording studio.

Paul McCartney and Queen also recorded here.

This studio created by Jacques Loussier was chosen for Pink Floyds concept album.

Other artists who have passed through here include Judas Priest, the Cranberries and the Cure.

The chateau is now owned by Brad Pitt who plans to reopen the recording studio

Read more: Brad Pitt to revive legendary music studio based in his French chateau

The sixties may have been liberated but this steamy and scandalous song was a step of important French licentiousness to set any stiff upper lip trembling.

The British tabloids were convinced that they could hear the couple having sex next to a live microphone.

In fact, it wasnt recorded in France at all but in a mundane studio in Marble Arch, London, with each of the singers in his or her own telephone cabin.

My photos of 'Swinging Sixties' spark memories in French care homes

From poverty to glory: Life of legendary French singer Edith Piaf

Chanter comme une casserole: Our French expression of the week

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Four albums recorded in France and one song that should have been - The Connexion

Janet Jackson attends the Black Girls Rock! 2018 Red Carpet at NJPAC on August 26, 2018 in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for BET)

Editors note: The following article is an op-ed and the views expressed are the authors own. Read more opinions on theGrio

By 1997, Janet Jackson was a global superstar. The younger sister of King of Pop Michael Jackson broke out of her brothers shadow as Pops Queen after a successful run of albums like Control, Rhythm Nation 1814, and janet. She was seen as a regal figure who lived the charmed, carefree life of a celebrity.

But that was far from the truth.

Jackson was quietly dealing with bouts of depression. Her inner turmoil manifested itself in her sixth solo album, The Velvet Rope, released on Oct. 7, 1997. Not only did her internal battle reflect in her lyrics, but also in the production and the front-facing style aesthetic of the album.

A lot of it is about pain, Jackson said in a 1997 Vibe Magazine interview. I dont know if its something that we developed as a family, but I developed this way: If I was ever in any kind of pain, Id find a way to brush it aside. Eventually it caught up to me.

The album was Jacksons way of exercising demons and longtime producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis provided her with an expanded canvas of sonics that matched the mature themes she brought to the table. Gone was the exuberance of When I Think of You and Miss You Much. Even the sexual openness of the preceding album, janet., seemed tame compared with where she was in The Velvet Rope.

The new sound and the introspective lyrics resonated with fans. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, garnered two top five Billboard Hot 100 singles in Together Again and I Get Lonely. The album eventually sold three million copies.

To say that Jackson is an inspiration to female artists would be an understatement. Twenty-five years later, its evident how The Velvet Rope has influenced todays singers.

The albums impact is chiefly seen in the work of two of todays biggest stars: Beyonc and Rihanna.

The two have dominated the charts and the cultural conversation over the young 21st century. But it wasnt just the hit songs themselves, but their respective tonal transitions they took from being Black pop stars to artists. They went through rough times and used their music to showcase their hardships.

The Velvet Rope gave them the agency to do so. Without the album, its unlikely fans would have embraced Beyoncs self-titled album or Lemonade, and perhaps Rihannas Rated R, or Anti.

From the first glimpse of the album artwork, you can see how The Velvet Rope inspired both Bey and Ri. Jacksons drastic hair switch-up to curly red, her head down to hide her face, gives the viewer a visual clue about the dark vibes that are coming; it is an ironic photographic indication of a woman removing her mask.

Beyoncs Lemonade cover borrows from this very sentiment. Blond hair, cornrows, her head photographed from the side, her face down out of the cameras view. She is tired, enraged, yet empowered. Rihannas Rated R is black and white; her hand covers one eye, while the other stares angrily into the lens.

The production of The Velvet Rope was vastly different from 1993s janet. The atmosphere shifted to more foreboding, ominous, yet eclectic sounds. Got Til Its Gone and Free Xone embraced hip-hops evolving time signatures and trip-hops esoteric uses of samples.

This presented a blueprint for Beyoncs sound shift from 4 to her self-titled release. The latter was more atmospheric, ambient, and brooding evident in Drunk in Love, Mine and Superpower. Rihannas production transition from Good Girl Gone Bad to Rated R was dramatic as well. The pop smashes of Umbrella, Shut Up and Drive, Hate That I Love You and Dont Stop the Music gave way to more menacing beats like Hard, Russian Roulette and Fire Bomb.

The Velvet Rope tackled issues of Jackson fighting inner demons on You, Empty,and the title track. You expresses the bitterness of withholding your feelings of doubt and inadequacy in the face of outwardly expressing positivity for the sake of the fans and the glad-handers.

Beyonc dealt with this in her self-titled album opener, Pretty Hurts. She sings Pretty hurts/We shine the light on whatevers worst/Perfection is a disease of a nation. In Rihannas Anti opener, Consideration, she sings, I needed you to please give my reflection a break/From the face, its seeing now/Would you mind giving my reflection a break/From the pain, its feeling now?

Sexuality has played a big role in the music of Jackson, Beyonc and Rihanna at multiple phases of their careers. However, Jacksons The Velvet Rope took uninhibited sexual ownership with If, You Want This and Anytime, Anyplace and embraced kink with songs like Go Deep, Tonights the Night, My Need and Rope Burn.

Never before had Beyonc been as sexually present lyrically as she was on her self-titled album. The innuendos of explicit activities on Drunk in Love and unveiled sexual exploits on Partition were a far cry from songs like 1+1 and Suga Mama. Rihanna also experimented with kink on S&M from 2010s Loud. Rude Boy from Rated R speaks of the size of her lovers manhood.

One song on The Velvet Rope What About encapsulates so much of what Beyonc, Rihanna and many other Black female artists have sung about. Over the push and pull of a lilting acoustic guitar and finger snaps to explosive electric guitar and bass, it deals with infidelity, neglect, gaslighting as well as abuse of a verbal, physical and sexual nature.

What About alone could be an inspiration agent for nearly the entirety of Beyoncs Lemonade. Her expansive narrative of marital infidelity from suspicion to rage to indifference to reflection to forgiveness touched a nerve with fans just as Jacksons performance of What About did on her tour and the 1998 VH1 Fashion Awards.

Rihanna famously dealt with such abuse on wax with Man Down from 2010s Loud. Her tale of fatefully shooting a man who raped her is a type of murder ballad not atypical for dancehall and reggae listeners but sounds jarring and shocking to a pop audience. But she dared to not only record the song but to release it as a single that went double platinum.

Jacksons The Velvet Rope was not all doom and gloom. It was accompanied by self-acceptance and embracing ones heritage.

Her videos for Got Til Its Gone and Together Again illuminated the beauty of African culture from dandy culture to tribalism, respectively. Beyonc creating the Black is King visual album or Rihanna exploring the outward expressions of her Caribbean roots may not have been possible if not for Jacksons visuals.

One of the hardest things to do as an artist is to convey your humanity to your audience in the face of immense success. When the world sees you as a rich pop star with endless access to the material treasures, you are the envy of all who walk the earth.

Without a doubt, The Velvet Rope opened doors for Black female pop star to openly and viscerally discuss the taboos of depression, sexual hedonism and domestic violence without barriers.

Matthew Allen is an entertainment writer of music and culture for theGrio. He is an award-winning music journalist, TV producer and director based in Brooklyn, NY. Hes interviewed the likes of Quincy Jones, Jill Scott, Smokey Robinson and more for publications such as Ebony, Jet, The Root, Village Voice, Wax Poetics, Revive Music, Okayplayer, and Soulhead. His video work can be seen on PBS/All Arts, Brooklyn Free Speech TV and BRIC TV.

TheGrio is FREE on your TV via Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku and Android TV. Also, pleasedownload theGrio mobile apps today!

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Twisted elegance: Janet Jacksons The Velvet Rope is a template for Black pop stars to embrace the darkness - TheGrio

By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio - articles - email ) | Oct 07, 2022

Leaders in todays Church often claim that democracy is essential to human dignity and by far the best form of government. Of course, five hundred to a thousand years ago Catholic leaders tended to favor monarchy as the system that best reflects Gods rule. Clearly there is a lot of prejudice involved in these judgments, and perhaps the soundest position on this question is that the best form of government in each time and place is the form that, given the personnel available and the overall situation, can do the most good. The specific form has relatively little to do with it. Politics remains always the art of the possible.

Moreover, it troubles me that so many Catholic leaders constantly plump for democracy in the face of the steady deterioration of that form of government in the contemporary West. In our era, democracy is a singularly unhelpful mantra for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is the one we find built into all democratic states with large populations. As a matter of historical fact, whenever the emphasis is placed on one person, one vote, it creates the illusion that the individual person has somehow been empowered, and so it erroneously appears that there is no longer any need for strong intermediary institutions between the pool of isolated individuals and their government.

The problem is that one vote is all but meaningless in any political entity larger than an ancient Greek city state. The result of democracy in large countries has always been the disempowerment of the vast majority of people, because what democracy tends to produce is a large group of atomized individuals, each of whom is essentially powerless against the will of those who actually wield the power of the State. Thus, in practical human experience, democracy (defined essentially as universal suffrage) has been the most important building block of the modern bureaucratic State. (It does not help, of course, that populous, complex and increasingly technological urban societies rather naturally call for higher degrees of regulation than do their lightly-populated and technologically simpler agrarian counterparts.)

Taken all together, these reflections offer a fairly good understanding of why we are accustomed to more bureaucratic control by government today than in any previous period of history, even as we prattle endlessly on about our individual freedoms. The problem remains not so much the form of government as the character of those who actually wield the levers of power. But when you build massive layers of bureaucratic control in a society which has lost both its understanding of the Good and the counter-leverage of robust intermediary institutions, it is only a matter of time before the bureaucracy becomes the enemy of the people. And this is always justified in the fabled name of democracy, so much so that even Church leaders cannot stop singing its praises (that is, unless we substitute for democracywhich our elites love for its futilitythe word populismwhich our elites fear for its focus).

Democracy now

Sadly, democratic forms of government actually undermine the good of the citizenry as two things happen: First, the traditional levers of influence in strong intermediary institutions are stripped away on the theory that everyone is now individually enfranchised; and second, the elites in the society (for there are always elites) lose their traditional moral compass and fall increasingly into an unbridled secular hedonism. The elites, of course, always retain their material advantages regardless of the ever-changing regulations, for there is necessarily a revolving door between elite status and the reins of power.

More importantly, this pattern explains why the Western bureaucratic states today deliberately undermine the moral fiber of those they rule by forcibly imposing acceptance of and cooperation with the socially corrosive sexual libertinism which has always been the hallmark of paganism. Most affluent societies which reject the concept of one God devolve into a pattern of untrammeled individualistic lust, exhibiting even a ritual elevation of lust into something that closely resembles a public liturgy, as if to enshrine and promote the conception of a great good.

This argument about moral devolution is strongest in specifically Christian terms: All the aspects of Christianity which cause its adherents to praise God for their liberation from the power of sin become intolerable shackles when faith disappears. Having lost all sense of fulfillment and happiness in God, including even a genuine participation in the joy of redemptive suffering, people both justify and indulge their desire to immerse themselves in the pleasures of sin. Indeed, they become almost desperate for what we might call the temporary sense of psychic triumph and relief enjoyed through sin.

Moreover, because sexual attraction and the sex drive are typically the most powerful of the bodily and psychological urges in a physically healthy and materially comfortable personand because these lie so close to the core of our human identityit is precisely through sexual attractions that the unwary are most often ensnared, not only naturally but through the shrewd decision of Satan to inflame and distort these desires. Different people have different weak points, of course; for example, the desires for personal autonomy, power, wealth and social approval are also exploited, and neither gluttony nor drunkenness are in short supply. But the human sex drive is very strong, and very prone to be confused with both love and necessity. Even those who have little or no interpersonal opportunity to indulge their sexual fantasies with others are able to do so now through erotic media.

For these reasons, the sex drive lies at the root of much of our modern misery, just as its distortion is a featureusually, again, even a ritual featureof nearly all paganisms, whether ancient or modern. It cannot reasonably be considered surprising, then, that in the neo-decadent West, we find the abuse of human sexuality to be the weakest point in our culture, the set of evils most assiduously protected by our secular bureaucratic states, and the chief cause of the destruction of the familyand, therefore, of any healthy and cohesive social order. Given the combined power of compulsory State education and regulated mass media, it is hardly surprising that the right to an all-pervasive sexual/gender libertinismin an astonishing defiance of realityis the most common justification used today for an ever-increasing government power and control.

In other words: Bureaucratic management is the way modern cultures not only provide for but promote a general lack of awareness of, commitment to, and capacity for choosing the Good. Bureaucratic management is, to put it simply, the absolutist regimes substitute for morality, and it makes no difference whether that regime is in some distant technical sense a democracy. Finally, bureaucratic management always becomes increasingly totalitarian, because it is the social substitute for what Christianity accomplishes through the theological virtues. It is, in other words, the States mimicry of the absolute power of Godand therefore the States diabolical mimicry of Love.

True liberty

I frequently recall the generation-old and extremely esoteric socio-political slogan, Dont let THEM immanentize the eschaton. Our problem in the West today is that THEY have done exactly thatTHEY being all those who have exchanged Christian responsibility for worldly satisfaction and reveled in the power of democracy to impose this exchange. Preeminent political examples are the pseudo-Catholics Joseph Biden and Nancy Pelosi, still fted by a huge proportion even of those who claim positions of responsibility in the Catholic Church. And what are they doing? They are leveraging every power of the American bureaucracy to ensure the diabolical manipulation of human gender and the diabolical destruction of human life. Nearly forty years ago we nodded sagely over references to 1984. Now we wonder whether the bureaucratic State will have finally eliminated all coherent understanding of God by 2024under the banner of democracy and liberty: That is, under the banner of an easily-induced mass confusion.

Again, those in the Church who continue to argue that democracy justifies everything seem not to realize that, in large populations, the mantra of one man, one vote is always used to strip away intermediary institutions (which can accomplish things) in favor of an atomized population in which each individual is politically isolated and therefore powerless. This is precisely our situation today, and the result is always not only government-centric but government-comprehensive. Under all similar conditions, democracy is the harbinger of bureaucratic totalitarianism. To regard it as the height of socio-political liberty is to have exchanged the commonest of sense for just another myth.

For who can deny that the modern bureaucratic State, upraised over everything in the name of individual empowerment, is currently the chief socio-political enemy of authentic liberty and genuine human progress? Our Lord promised that God will vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night. But the parable indicates that they must askand askand ask with an extraordinarily persistent faith. Despite Gods intention to intervene in the end, Our Lord wondered out loud: Nevertheless when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?

There is no sure refuge in any particular socio-political system, especially when cowardly churchmen embrace their publicly-assigned social role and strive to be recognized as contemporary players by both praising and encouraging the State to do more whenever it can. The more fools, they! For it is the essential purpose of the modern bureaucratic Statethe greatest tool of secularism ever developedto assure everyone that all will be well, and very well, as long as the State is given ever more control.

Indeed, it is the very purpose of the modern bureaucratic State to ensure that the answer to Our Lords chilling question will be No. If the answer is to be Yes, we need stronger families, smaller political units, and robust intermediary institutions born and sustained first and foremost through a sweeping renewal of the Catholic Church. Many non-Catholics would follow. Barring a miracle on which we may not presume, our political good cannot be attained in any other way.

Note: Obviously many government employees do good work, but not counting military personnel, there is one government employee in the United States for every fifteen people, and of course a significant portion of government work is farmed out to private companies. In very broad terms, imagine how comprehensively we are managed in the modern bureaucratic state with a minimum ratio 1 to 15!

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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On the futility of modern bureaucratic states - Catholic Culture