I attended a performance yesterday of that holiday ritual. It is truly an irony that that we stand for the Hallelujah chorus in imagined imitation of the king. What you will read is that Handel was a court favorite and that he waged a campaign to stage the Messiah in opposition to the prevailing sentiment for the political satire of Gay's Beggar's Opera.
But I challenge you to put yourself back in your imagination to that time and place. Remind yourself that one of the favorite literary works was Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. This was, after all, the pre-Revolutionary period that swept up the intelligentsia worldwide.
In that light, the aim of dampening the enthusiasm for a "religious" oratorio in the city of London that had taken Dublin by storm makes perfect sense. In fine, the Messiah is a perfectly anti-Imperial tour de force.
Eratosthenes first measured the circumference of the earth from the shadows cast by the sun. Today, humanity's fitness to survive will be measured by our ability to conquer that same thermonuclear fusion that casts those shadows. Thus, Prometheus will truly be unbound.
Today's Elites
Sunday, December 07, 2014
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