Sometimes creative ideas spring from very strange sources. Back on Friday Paul Graham Raven tweeted about this odd story about a spat between the religious and Libertarian varieties of Republican extremists. We traded tweets for a while, and very quickly went from two negatives making a positive to needing to contain them in a cyclotron least the resulting energy release cause a major disaster.
At this point we both realized that we needed an animated video, but neither of us have the skills to make one. However, I had just been watching a number of fine videos that people make to go with Jonathan Coulton songs. So I figured that all we needed was the song, and the video would follow. So I wrote one.
Please note that I do not claim that this is great poetry. I leave that sort of thing to Roz. But hopefully it is catchy, which is what a song needs.
In the cyclotron of life
We go running in a ring,
All happy little particles
Doing our own thing.
Some are slow and steady,
Some are light and fast,
And some they burn so fiercely
You wonder how they last.
Fundamentalist particles,
Burning up with hate;
Fundamentalist particles
Love to annihilate.
You’ve heard of anti-matter,
It is exotic stuff.
If you meet up with your anti
The going can get rough.
But some are anti-everything
Despising all they meet
So be careful if you see them
Proselytizing in your street.
Fundamentalist particles,
Burning up with hate;
Fundamentalist particles
Love to annihilate.
We come in many flavors,
In yellow, white and brown,
There’s strange and top and bottom,
There’s also up and down.
So how are we to tell apart
The folks who’d do us harm?
Those fundamentalist particles,
They don’t have any charm.
Fundamentalist particles,
Burning up with hate;
Fundamentalist particles
Love to annihilate.
The trouble with an attitude
So predisposed to fight
Is that when they get together
They can’t decide who’s right.
They splinter and they squabble,
With sister hating brother.
Those fundamentalist particles
Annihilate each other.
Fundamentalist particles,
Burning up with hate;
Fundamentalist particles
Love to annihilate.
I’m making this available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, and if anyone wants to set it to music and perform it I’d be delighted.
Fundamentalist Particles by Cheryl Morgan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Your poetry certainly is catchy. However I think your description of the video ls not correct for a couple of reasons; basically it seems to me that the video is not about politics but about religion.
The so called “Libertarian Republicans” in the video are also all avowedly religious. So is this all really about politics? No; I think what you are seeing actually one group of Christians criticizing another group of Christians based on the principle of “do not lead someone astray”. Note that I am referring to subsets of Christians and not all. The principle of “do no lead someone astray” that was common in the small rural towns where I grew up meant that a Christian was not to do or say something which would lead another Christian to commit a sinful act or worse stray away from Christianity. Usually you never hear the phrase “do not lead someone astray” so unless someone grows up with it in the cultural environment they might not recognize it.
Let me give another example; in many small towns in the middle of the USA when I was growing up most restaurants did not serve any alcohol not even beer or wine. There were a few bars that sold alcohol. Consider if one of these bars called Joe’s developed the best French Fries for miles around. Thus someone who was really into this doctrine of “do not lead someone astray” would not speak about how tasty the Fries are at Joe’s. Why? Because if they say the Fries are good at Joe’s then someone might go in for the Fries and start drinking and thus fall away from their religion and into drunkenness.
At this point I suspect some are going WTF? I know this sounds strange but when you see it growing up it is easier to spot. And remember I am not talking about all Christians or all Republicans and just for clarification I am not in either group.
To help you understand this imagine viewing the video and having the figures identified as Prominent Christian A, Prominent Christian B and so forth and further have then discussing Rand’s theory of painting and aesthetics. The response from the American Values Network would be exactly the same. The issue is not political; it is about AVN disapproving when a Prominent Christian praises any idea held by a prominent atheist. Why? Because if you go investigating Rand’s books for her thoughts on any subject you are likely to encounter Rand’s views on religion.
So basically the video is about religion; anything in the video related to politics just came up because the people are in the public eye because they are politicians or political commentators. If these public figures were on TV as music critics and praising a famous atheist’s theories on music then AVN would have the same complaint.
So the video is not about politics but really about religion but your poetry is still catchy.
Fred: Most of what the Republican party does these days is about religion.