Hallowed by Your Name.  This is no exaggeration: the real name of God is so holy that Jews of antiquity (and even many today) considered it blaspheme to say it aloud.  They’d stone you to death if you did.  Only the High Priest of Israel was permitted to say the Name, and even then only once a year: inside the Holy of Holies of the Temple on Yom Kippur while asking The Lord to forgive Israel its sins.  Even then, there seems to be great confusion over just what this Holy Name is.  Allegedly it was first revealed (in Exodus 3:14) to Moses, who asked the Burning Bush by what name He was called and getting the answer back “Yahweh” (יהוה). This is no answer at all, because in Hebrew “Yahweh” means “I am what I am.”  Unfortunately, the term stuck, and people took it literally.

Your Kingdom come.  Just what this “Kingdom” is was the subject of much speculation, debate, and even a few wars among various sects in the first few centuries.   The term—and the concept behind it—is highly subjective.  Making matters worse, Jesus frequently spoke about the Kingdom, but in odd metaphorical manners such as describing it as a mustard seed [Matthew 13:31-32].  Much of the Gospel of Thomas is devoted to similar metaphors alluding to what the Kingdom is, the most interesting of which are these:

and

Interesting side note: there are several textual variants to the Lucan version of this line, dating from the eleventh century: rather than read “Your Kingdome come,” they say “Your Holy Spirit come and cleanse us.”

By the way, several cynical scholars do not at all seem surprised that this is included.  A great many of the incidents in the Gospels concerning Jesus involve food, and indeed one of the charges against him by his detractors was that he was a drunkard and a glutton (Luke 7:34)—a charge which Jesus did not actually deny.  Many people have speculated that Jesus had a weight problem; in the insidious yet amusing and insightful Ken’s Guide to the Bible, author and armchair theologian Ken Smith refers to this as the “Tubby Jesus” syndrome.  Such cynics casting their lot in this camp no doubt are not surprised that Jesus would pray for food...

Forgive our debts.  I think Luke comes closer to the intent here by using the word “sin” instead of “debt.”  I have also heard the term “trespasses” used.  The end result is all the same: we have done something—intentional or not—that has displeased God, so please forgive us.  In the list of Things Thou Shalt Not Do (ie: the Commandments), there are actually 716 verboten, and it’s almost impossible not to break one despite your best efforts.  Paul, despite his problems, was smart enough to realize this, though his commentary expounding upon this in Romans 5-6 (which ultimately led to the doctrine of Original Sin) goes into some strange tangents I find highly suspect.  Whatever the case, this part of the prayer is a nice follow-up to the preceding portion: we have just asked for short-term survival, now we ask for long-term.  

As we also have forgiven our debtors.  This is probably the most overlooked and least-followed part of the Prayer.  People frequently do wrong to us, but we are supposed to forgive them for it.  Surprisingly, this part of the prayer is not original:

The structure of the Lord’s prayer is interesting: the first half is dedicated to God, and it is only half way through that the focus shifts from the divine to the personal.

The Lord’s Prayer is almost a poetic work of art in terms of brevity: it hits the major points that one needs to hit, it is humble, and not auspicious or greedy.  Putting aside the first half, in which God is the focus, the latter half is a personal petition for provision, pardon, and protection.  It is basically a prayer for survival: short term (daily bread), long term (avoiding future sin) and eternal (forgiveness of sins we commit anyway.)  It is also a prayer of humanity and compassion: we are asked to forgive those who do wrong to us.

Prayer is a much-abused medium: Jesus seemingly made a mistake—or at least a questionable judgment call—by writing a blank cheque with Matthew 21:22’s “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”   Even more abused is Matthew 18:19 (“If two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.”)  If people stuck to the basics of the Lord’s prayer, they’d probably get better results.

...meanwhile, moving from the sublime to the absurd...

The Teutonic Plague

Richard Wagner is one of those rare composers whose personal life sparks as much debate as his musical catalogue.  Reaction to Wagner’s music is extremely polarized: some people find the Wagnerian opera to be the ultimate expression of creativity and genius, while others—such as myself—find them ponderous, pretentious, and predictable.  Much of the time, he pushed chromaticism to the brink of atonality, and I have a very low threshold for that sort of crap.  Worse, he suffered from what I call “compositional incontinence”: he’d shit out 15 notes where 1 would suffice, the end result being some of the longest pieces of music in history.

Actually, I should cut ol’ boy some slack; there are certainly worse composers out there, such as... um... uh... that guy... ... who wrote... the stuff that... sucked.   Maybe I should say there are individual pieces of music that are much more detestable than anything in Wagner’s catalogue, such as Dance of the Sugar Plum Faeries or The Pachelbel Canon.  I couldn’t write an opera like Wagner, but then again, I wouldn’t want to.  Admittedly, he did come up with some original stuff (rather than rehash or rip off others) so maybe Mark Twain was right: “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds.”  I guess I’m inclined to toss in my lot with Gioacchino Rossini: “Wagner has good moments but bad quarter hours.”

That’s not the point here.  

After all, musical taste is highly subjective, and if you think the Ring cycle is the best thing since sliced bread, then more power to ya.  By the way, might I suggest some ranch dressing to go on that slice of bread?

No, let’s look at the man behind the music.  After all, it’s just too easy to pick on a guy who liked to wear pink silk underwear(!) and who composed his last opera, Parsifal, in a heavily perfumed bath.  You see, there’s so much more to pick on if we expand beyond his catalogue and examine the man himself, and believe it or not, some of it is even relevant to World Domination.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germany.  When he was only six months old, his father died, and his mother quickly remarried longtime friend Ludwig Geyer.  Curiously, young Richard bore a suspicious resemblance to Geyer.  Wagner had a troubled childhood: he would often wake up in the middle of the night, screaming at the top of his lungs.  His nickname was “Cossack.”  He frequently played hooky from school, at one point not showing up for six months straight.

At first, he wanted to be a poet or playwright, but his first attempt at a play, written at age 14 and called Leubald, showed little promise: by the forth act he had managed to kill off all 42 characters, and then realized he would have to start bringing them back as ghosts to advance the plot.

Unfortunately, the next year, he heard Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, and after that decided he wanted to be a composer.  He enrolled in the University of Leipzig, majoring in music and minoring in juvenile delinquency.  He drank (heavily), gambled (poorly—once losing his mother’s entire pension but managing to get it back on a lucky double-or-nothing), and challenged people to duels (which, sadly, no one ever took him up on.)  Eventually he dropped out of school when he realized that he was actually expected to attend classes.

Despite this less-than-auspicious start, he managed to land a gig directing a small opera company in Magdeberg.  There he met and married one of the singers, Mina Planer.

In 1836, he was able to convince the company to premiere a performance of one of his own pieces, an opera called Das Liebesverbot which I will politely call a comedy and whose plot is by and large plagiarized from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.  The opera was not a rousing success, having only two performances.  At the first, the lead tenor forgot most of his lines.  The second show was even worse.

A failure at music and heavily in debt, Wagner and wife decided to skip town.  They resettled to England, and it is frequently believed that the stormy boat ride across the Channel served as the inspiration for Der Fliegende Holländer (aka The Flying Dutchman).  Unfortunately, England received Wagner favorably: Dutchman and another opera, Rienzi, went over well, and he was soon offered a job as kapellmeister at the Dresden Court Theatre.

In Dresden, Wagner’s writing went into overdrive, especially since he began writing non-musical essays on subjects he knew nothing about.  For example, consider this excerpt from Religion and Art:

 When Wagner wasn’t writing about the vegetarian panthers inhabiting the swamps of Canada, he was churning out tracts on politics and economics.  Thus begun the curious anarcho/anti-capitalist period of his career.  Wagner became increasingly nationalistic—indeed, he would later refer to himself as “the most German of German composers”—and became friends with leftist radicals like August Röckel and Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.  Unfortunately for him, he picked the wrong political party to side with, and when the revolution broke out—and was suppressed—in April 1849, he and Mina again skipped town, reportedly only hours before police broke down his door to arrest him for sedition. 

Wagner would spend the next twelve years in exile, and although he continued to write music, he also continued to churn out social diatribes.  For instance, Wagner was a vegetarian—though he would sneak meat when he thought no one was looking—and one essay suggests that if everyone became veggies themselves, world peace would ensue.  However, probably the most notorious piece of literature he wrote was Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) which is a scathing anti-Semitic diatribe attacking Jews in general and especially contemporary Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn, whom he called “shallow and artificial, a parroting of true music.”  Wagner called Jews “freaks of Nature” and said that the “German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior.”   He says they secretly scheme to rule the world through money: “...the Jew in truth... rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.”  Further, “with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews’ emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”  Ultimately, he concluded “Without once looking back, take your part in this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment;... only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus—Going under!” 

This idea would strike a resonant chord, so to speak, with an Austrian paperhanger named Adolph half a century later, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

 While in exile, Wagner read the works of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and it really hit home.   Schopenhauer’s works are arrogant, deeply pessimistic, and thoroughly confusing, so one can see the influence.  

Wagner finally hit paydirt in 1864, when Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm von Wittelsbach assumed the throne of Bavaria.   The new King had been a fan of Wagner’s since childhood, and decided to be his financial patron.  For those who don’t know, Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm von Wittelsbach was universally known as either Ludwig II or more commonly just as Mad King Ludwig.  

Why was he mad?  Well, he liked Wagner’s operas, for starters...

While under Ludwig’s aegis, Wagner had a cushy palace set up at Triebschen.  There, in 1869, he met and befriended a young Fredrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) was dedicated to Wagner.  However, when two egos as great as these collide, only bad can happen, and the inevitable falling out ensued.  Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with various aspects of Wagner’s thought, such as his pacifism and anti-Semitism.  Eventually, Nietzsche began a literary assault on In Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Nietzsche vs. Wagner), where he condemn Wagner as decadent and corrupt.  Indeed, he wrote “Is Wagner a human being at all?  Is he not rather a disease?”

Couldn’t have said it better m’self.

After finishing his final opera, Parsifal (written, as I have said, during extended soaks in a hot tub full of expensive perfume) he sat down to write his autobiography, Mein Leben.  He dedicated it to the illegitimate daughter of his friend and fellow composer, Franz Liszt.  This is hardly surprising: Wagner and Cosima Liszt had been having an affair for years, and had even produced a few children together.  All this, plus Wagner’s numerous other affairs, were amply bragged about in his book.  In all fairness, though, when his “real” wife Mina died, Wagner quickly married Cosima.  

Wagner died on February 13, 1883, apparently of a heart attack.  Sadly, his legacy lived on, both in music and ideology.

Even people who dislike classical music have had the misfortune of being exposed to at least a sniplet of his works: the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin is now universally known as “Here comes the Bride.”  Alas, his complete works also get airings, and occasionally they cause irrevocable damage.

Given the rabid nationalism and anti-Semitism Wagner displayed, it is only natural that he was Hitler’s favorite composer.  During his ‘washed-up artist’ days in Vienna, Adolph attended a performance of Parsifal with a friend, who reported that the opera had a profound impact on the future demagogue dictator, who apparently read intense hidden symbolism in it.  This is hardly surprising: there are numerous dissertations on the ’Net that offer extensive analysis of Parsifal as revelation of various occult secrets, as well as delving heavily into the mysteries of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

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Reader Feedback

Interesting call.  Not only is the speech similar, but some other obvious (or not) similarities: both are phuqing nuts, con artists, and have others do their killing for them.  But back to the speech thing, both also have tendencies to spew babble.  Dubya’s is well-documented; click here for some of Charlie’s delving into glossalalia.

Q:  Dear Evil,

A:  Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons: The United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan.  North Korea has claimed several times that they have just entered “the club”—as late as last year but reiterated only a few weeks ago.  They may very well have a couple, too.  Numerous other nations are also angling to either pick one up on the black market or make their own, but as of now, the above eight (not counting North Korea) are the only ones known to have an atomic arsenal.