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 Dodd 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.