This one could also be known as the “wherein iTunes betrays my guilty pleasures, twice” edition, but we’ll get to that in a second. Oh, so embarrassing.
The song I chose to start off this week is “Pancake” by Tori Amos. It’s sort of appropriate to the events of the week, as the Catholic front group NOM runs around crying “victim!” on a hate tour they are perpetuating against gay and lesbian families. Just a little while ago, NOM tweeted a picture of a little girl smiling with a woman who is presumably her mother, with the caption, “This is why we do what we do.” Yeah, right, Gallagher. It’s for the kids. Meanwhile, you and Brian continue to pledge your undying allegiance to a church and a worldview which is best known these days for child rape. But in a way, their caption is honest, because their only hope (and it’s a pie in the sky sort of hope) is that they can brainwash enough children into becoming hateful little brats who fundamentally don’t understand the nature of this free nation we call “America.”
In the song, “pancake” refers to the Eucharist, and it only shows up at the end, in the voice of a priest who attempts to cut off all the very honest observations the woman is making about the church. “I ordered you a pancake.” In other words, shut your mouth and eat this, woman. The charges she’s making against the church are familiar:
Seems like you and your tribe
decided you’d rewrite the law
Segregate the mind
From Body From Soul
You give me yours
I’ll give you mine
cause I can look your God
right in the eye
You give me yours
I’ll give you mine
You used to look my God
right in the eye
I believe in defending
in what we once
stood for
It seems in vogue
to be a closet
misogynist homophobe
Yes, it does.
This version of “Pancake” includes the song’s “lost verse,” which is also oh-so-poignant:
You tear through them fields of cotton
the impressionable ones
I believed in you once,
so did she, she was so young
You turn the man against the land
You turn the woman against her own
You are power, you are ambition
You like ’em blonde
On Monday, we broke the story of yet another “ex-gay” charlatan who basically uses his platform as a “counselor” to convince young guys to get naked for him, in a perverse attempt to sate his own repressed sexual desires. These stories are awful and shocking, but they’re nothing new. When the JONAH scandal broke and I wrote about it on Wonkette, one of the funniest people on the internet said to me, “You will never want for material.” Show me a mind-numbing, soul-killing patriarchal system, and you can bet you’re going to find lots of live boys and dirty secrets in the wings, waiting for THEIR stories to be told. Oh, and you better bet your sweet ass we’re going to continue to tell them.
Here’s “Pancake.” After that, more videos and evidence of the fact that, in my iTunes library, alongside thousands and thousands of amazing records, are some really, really freaking embarrassing things that, you know, I sort of like, sometimes, when I’m in that mood, SHUT UP.
You could have spared her, oh but no. Messiahs need people dying in their name…
1. New Order – “Regret”
2. How to Dress Well – “Tramodolhydroclorid”
3. Bright Eyes – “Endless Entertainment”
4. 10,000 Maniacs – “Dust Bowl”
5. Joseph Arthur – “Black Lexus”
6. Monsters of Folk – “Man Named Truth”
7. George Michael – “Freedom 90”
8. Garth Brooks & Trisha Yearwood – “In Another’s Eyes”
9. Air Supply – “I Can Wait Forever”
10. Katie Herzig – “Forevermore”
