Beyoncé at the rally, versus Kundera: to dream the impossible dream of circle dancing
Whose decision was it that Beyoncé appear at Harris’ Houston rally to endorse her but not to sing? Not even one little itty bitty song? After all, isn’t Beyoncé like, you know, a singer? And when singers appear at political rallies, don’t they usually like, you know, sing a song? After all, Willie Nelson – that quintessential old white guy – did some singing at the very same Houston rally where Beyoncé merely spoke.
There have been many articles mentioning the fact that Beyoncé didn’t sing and that some fans were disgruntled about it, and even booed Harris as a result. But I haven’t been able to find anything about why Beyoncé didn’t do even a bit of singing, and whose decision that was.
You may think this is an exceptionally trivial question on which to waste any time. But I think the phenomenon is emblematic of a certain general tone-deafness in Harris and her aides, although I actually think it happened because Beyoncé herself wanted to appear as a person rather than an entertainer. She said as much, although of course she wasn’t there because she was some Everywoman wife and mother. She was there because she’s a famous star. Here’s what she said, though:
“We are at the precipice of an enormous shift,” Beyoncé told the crowd. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares about the world our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we are not divided, our past or present or future.”
No, Beyoncé – you’re addressing the crowd because you are a celebrity, and a Harris supporter of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t be there.
The rest of her quote is interesting, too. We’re at the precipice? That doesn’t sound good; a precipice is a very high cliff with a sheer drop that would be calamitous if one more step forward were to be taken. And a precipice of a shift doesn’t make sense – unless the “shift” means to do a 180 and go back from whence you came. But that wouldn’t be the precipice of a shift, it would be a precipice that causes a shift in the opposite direction.
Then there’s the usual phrase about “freedom to control our bodies.” Texas still allows people to come and go as they please, get tattoos or piercings, have sex, get contraception, eat a lot or a little – well, you get the drift. Once a woman is pregnant there are two bodies involved, however. Whether you’re for or against Texas’ particularly restrictive abortion law, it’s misleading to pretend it’s only about women controlling their own bodies. But that’s the rhetoric of modern abortion, and abortion is the biggest selling point of the Democrats today by far. In fact, abortion was the theme of the Houston rally. And I believe the Dobbs ruling was why Democrats did much better than predicted in the 2022 midterms. They are counting on it in 2024 as well.
The rally was held in Houston because Texas abortion law is one of the most restrictive in the US. Abortion is not allowed starting with conception, unless pregnancy threatens the life of the mother (that was the standard in a lot of states when I was young, by the way). However, the law criminally punishes the abortionist and not the woman, and so in Texas – although abortion by pill is also illegal – a woman can actually get mail order abortion pills (which work till around week 11) as long as the provider is out-of-state. This article describes the situation, as well as this one.
Abortion is a complex topic I’ve written about many times before (see this). So all I’ll add here is that I believe that it is the Democrats’ strongest issue these days, and it especially resonates with women.
Which brings me to Beyoncé’s stated hope for “a world where we are not divided.” What does that really mean? Is there any issue on which people aren’t going to be divided? I can’t quite think of one offhand. But of one thing I’m fairly certain: that issue would not be abortion, one of the most inherently divisive issues of our time.
Whether Beyoncé wrote her own words or not, what is really being said? I think the world she’s describing is the world of Lennon’s fairy-tale “Imagine”. Or, rather, it’s the sentiment author Milan Kundera describes with great eloquence in his masterpiece The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1979:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
Kundera revisits the idea in the same book, expressing it this way:
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
And Kundera treats the theme once more in the same book:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.
Beyonce is a singer, not a songwriter. Someone writes the lyrics for her and she sings them.
So when we get tortured metaphors about precipices and shifts, I don’t think we should be all that surprised.
She probably thought it sounded good, like she had a head on her shoulders instead of just being two long legs, two swinging hips, two twerking buttocks, a pretty face and dyed blonde hair. She let Jay-Z take a look at it and he wisely said, “This is good, sweetheart,” instead of, “Don’t you think you want to go with crossroads, here?”
I have read that pre recorded Beyonce music was played on the loudspeakers before the rally.
Reproductive rites are performed for social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress. Keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, and the carbon-based “burden” of evidence sequestered in sanctuary states.
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry) is a dogmatic belief exercised with liberal license in primarily Democratic jurisdictions. #HateLovesAbortion
Political congruence (“=”) is another sample of queer theory that was used by Democrats to legalize sexual orientations (e.g. pedophilia, sadomasochism). Neighbors with “benefits”, in schools, scouts, casting couches, indeed.
The jab or your job. Karma-lic.
Circle Dancing can, and I think often does, involve the dark pleasures of cruelty to those outside the circle…see my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70696.html
It strikes me that much of the ‘female rage’ now being unleashed is basically a circle dancing ritual.
This is just my pure conjecture, but I’ll bet that Beyoncé’s entire appearance and speech was scripted. If she sang, then she becomes the star attraction. But Kamala must be the star. That could be tactically smart, or just plain narcissism.
And that verbiage about “I’m here as a mother…”? Sounds just like “I grew up in a middle class family…” Same playbook.
_______
Is there any issue on which people aren’t going to be divided? I can’t quite think of one offhand. But of one thing I’m fairly certain: that issue would not be abortion, one of the most inherently divisive issues of our time.
That is so spot on. And you know, this whole tactic is so duplicitous. It used to be that politicians would acknowledge that intelligent, honest, informed people had serious differences on abortion. But now, no! We should be unified in supporting everything up to and possibly including infanticide? BS!
“Which brings me to Beyoncé’s stated hope for “a world where we are not divided.” What does that really mean? Is there any issue on which people aren’t going to be divided?
Whatever Beyonce meant, Harris and other’s of her ilk intend for people to lose the freedom to disagree.
“The Shape of Things to Come: MAHA Ad Shows a Chilling Look at a Harris Administration”
https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2024/10/28/the-shape-of-things-to-come-maha-ad-shows-a-chilling-look-at-a-harris-administration-n4933726
“Tommy Robinson Jailed In UK For 18 Months For Contempt Of Court”
“On Friday, police confirmed that Robinson had been arrested on “one count of failing to provide the PIN to his mobile phone”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/tommy-robinson-jailed-18-months-contempt-court
“Thoughtcrime: UK Veteran Convicted for Praying SILENTLY Near Abortion Mill”
The court ‘reasoned’ that his prayer constituted “disapproval of abortion.”
https://thenewamerican.com/us/culture/thoughtcrime-uk-veteran-convicted-for-praying-silently-near-abortion-mill/
The UK has now effectively become a Police State.
Beyoncé “ …are not divided, our past or present or future.”
Kamala “ What Can Be, Unburdened By What Has Been’”
Who’s right?
The “Dodd” should be Dobbs, no? How did the Connecticut senator get roped into this?
Philip Sells:
Oops, thanks, will fix.
It still upsets* me that the party which demands “my body, my choice” about abortion is also the party of “get the vax or else you lose your job, etc.” You can’t have it both ways.
I was lucky that I am retired and my doctor agreed that I should not get any vax until the “experts” were more transparent about the possible reactions. The warnings were not to take the shot if you were allergic to anything in the shot, but did you ever try to find out what exactly was in that shot???
* comment self-censored out of respect for this group.
If people think they are getting a song, they ought to get a song. But from what I’ve seen of Beyonce, hers is a high production value act. She dances. She has back up singers and dancers. And costumes. And lighting. And hair and makeup. A band or orchestra. Maybe set designs or decorations. Maybe electronic doodling with her voice. That’s who she is. A performer, not a lone singer-songwriter with just a guitar and some words. She’s not going go out there like a moron and sing a song off-key or with the wrong notes, like Springsteen did.
I don’t know about Kundera. People do look for moments of communion or celebration with others, even with crowds. Do they really expect it to be universal or everlasting? Is it necessarily totalitarian? I would suppose that if you lived through Armistice Day or V-E Day or V-J Day it would be something you would remember, even cherish, your whole life long — even knowing that the next day and for years to come you’d still have worries and troubles.
All of the pro-abortion women should ask their mothers why their mother did not abort them?
Because it was illegal then? Because they were truly wanted and loved? Or ???
The answers probably won’t go over well in all cases.
Is the presence of [unpaid?] celebrities at campaign events (as the real attractant for attendees) a form of campaign contribution “in kind”? And should it be reported to the FEC? Or the value of which might exceed individual contribution limits?
And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies…. If you want to enslave people — if you want to degrade them — force them to tell lies, and they have they forced us to lie about everything
I thought that very Kundera-like. Evidently fro mTucker Carlson. I saw on Ann Althouse.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2024/10/why-is-donald-trump-going-to-win-people.html?m=1
R2L…”Is the presence of [unpaid?] celebrities at campaign events (as the real attractant for attendees) a form of campaign contribution “in kind”?” Of course it is–as is the one-sided or heavily skewed support of major media organizations. Indeed, the political value of these things may well exceed the political value of all paid advertising. Don’t know how you transmute in-kind contributions such as these into dollar terms, though.
I’m at the precipice of an enormous shit!
(I snort/snerked on this one!)