The Twerk That Shook the Nation

I guess it's no surprise that conservatives would freak about something like this, though their reasoning is strange. Ben Crocker writes in an article published in The Federalist:

It is the twerk that seems to evince in any crowd a manifest succumbing to the worst angels of our natures. The brainless shrieks of approval, the demented adulation for an unveiled sexuality not content with mere liberality, but further possessed of a flippant, aggressive, and unapologetically performative disposition.

And all the more to applaud you see, because James Madison – James Madison! – bore symbolic witness to the madness.

Can she really do that in the presence of the founding fathers?

Of course she can. And the prepossessed audacity to exhibit that behavior — the banality, the crudity, the do-what-I-wantity — whilst in that hallowed presence, is the whole point of the exercise.

For this is the culture that delights in the desecration of the sacred. The desecration that is sometimes unthinkingly casual, but often deliberately profane.

Desecration of the sacred?

Personally, I think it's beautiful that James Madison bore symbolic witness to a black woman's bold expression of empowerment, particularly because James was a typical slaveholder. He owned over a hundred human beings at one point, worked them from dawn to dusk, and never freed any of them.

Do-what-I-fucking-wantity indeed.

From what I briefly gather Madison wasn't particularly religious and wasn't a musician, so I assume his hallowedness is essentially founded on his being a leader of the nation. Traditionalists revere their leaders. The problem is that in modernity there are no true traditionalists. Pretty much everyone can categorize art, religion, politics, and the state. No one believes that the American presidency is somehow tied to God like a link in the great chain of being, least of all Ben Crocker who is highly critical and disrespectful of the current president of the United States. Would he care if Lizzo twerked while playing Biden's flute? No.

Lizzo was classically trained since childhood, btw. Here she is playing with the NY Philharmonic.



So what do you think, sacred or profane?