Leave it to a Newfie to bring a little bit of wisdom to our current hot button topics. Enjoy!!!!
A Pop Tart Spits Straight In Our Eye
REX MURPHY
Madonna is on tour again.
Nothing new. More of the vulgar same, that tired mix of rough raunch and glitz, laced as always with some overt and unfailing crude manipulation of Christian symbols. Madonna is as predictable as Tim Hortons, but Timmy's is at least always fresh.
This time, it's a scene of Madonna wearing a crown of thorns and being "crucified" on some massive stage cross. The jeer at Christianity by one of the world's most successful and hollow talents is blatant -- as is everything this star does -- deliberate and crude.
It comes, whether by design or by luck, on the tail of the whirlwind publicity of The Da Vinci Code film.
There is, of course, no sense or point in challenging Madonna's "artistic" efforts, and even less than none at all in trying to mount some protest over it. The over-the-hill hipsters who still find some buzz in whatever Madonna does, those who have bought the ridiculous and endlessly repeated estimate of her skill at "reinventing" herself, will only find the factitious thrill of her "transgressiveness" validated by the response of the rubes and the righteous.
I am sorry to see that the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has issued a condemnation. Not because it was wrong to do so, and not because Kabbalah's most celebrated convert doesn't deserve a condemnation, but simply because on the current understanding of religion in this predominantly secular culture it is so useless for the Catholic League, or any other church organization, to be doing so.
Every official mutter from any Christian group will merely sell another cluster of $350 tickets and give oxygen to the success of the Madonna tour machine. Take a jab at the Cross, the central icon of Christianity, accessorize with a crown of thorns, the bitter emblem of the Christian Saviour's suffering, and the cash registers will keep on ringing.
But I do hope that the serious Christians who are watching this latest instalment of free hits against their faith are measuring it against the far greater caution, deference and respect that is being shown to a religion far less common in the West, that of Islam.
Since the horrors of 9/11, we have seen from governments in the West, the media, civil agencies, school boards and political parties a conscious, elaborate and -- let me stress this -- wholly commendable effort to afford Islam and its adherents all manner of respect and sensitivity.
The turmoil over some caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed provides the most recent illustration of delicacy in the matter of a people's religion. The Danish cartoon episode was remarkable, to a degree that has still not been sufficiently acknowledged, by how many of the Western media declined, in the name of sensitivity to the religious faith of Muslims, to publish those cartoons.
But it has not escaped the attention of those who hold the Christian faith that this same sweep of deference and respect is not extended when the tenets or icons of their faith are treated as fodder and, worse, for the cultural grinder. A fading pop tart crucifying herself hardly qualifies as a genuflection.
Are Christians less sensitive than Muslims? Does Christ not occupy a centrality in Christianity more or less equivalent to the Prophet Mohammed in Islam? Is an insult to one faith any less an outrage than an insult to another?
So Madonna's Vegas-style crucifixion will serve as yet another reminder to serious Christians that a double standard of immense differential is operating on the terrain of religion. Her tour might just be the cue for those accommodating and docile religionists to start asking for at least a portion of the respect that their fellows in another faith receive as it seems by right.
I don't think one has to be religious to see the elementary justice of this. We are a society that calibrates rights to the millimetre and recoils, as from the darkest sin, at the thought of one group being "privileged" over another. And nowhere will you find a more hypersensitive social conscience than in the great altitudes of pop entertainment. Some of these deep hearts actually wear rubber bands to signal their devotion to good causes. Such sacrifice.
Madonna is a high emblem of that set. This Confessions tour of hers might just trigger a call on the massive hypocrisy of it all. If only that were so, her vulgar crown of thorns and her vulgar crucifixion, and the more vulgar crass impulse behind them both, might actually do some good.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
