Sympathy for the Devil, Part 2

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it conscientiously."
- Blaise Pascal

"I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing
Till they got a hold of me"
- Alice Cooper, from "No More Mr. Nice Guy"

The topic of "Wicked" got me thinking about how often I have been pleasantly surprized by people who once seemed to have no redeeming qualities. For example, I have been revolted by almost everything I've read or seen about 1930's evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She preached a hard-line fundamentalist faith that held that every syllable of the Bible was true. Her revival meetings made frequent use of faith healing, a practice that degrades both medicine and religion. And shades of Jimmy Swaggart, she was involved in a sex scandal. I had totally written off McPherson when I looked up something on the anti-lynching movement, and discovered that for all her faults, she had one strong virtue: she was a fierce opponent of racism. Her revivals preached against racism and the Klan, and often did so in the heart of Klan country. She attacked lynching at a time when most other media outlets were reluctant to admit that the practice existed.

Back when the Patriot Act was first passed, I was disappointed with how many conservatives backed it. I knew that there would be at least one major conservative leader who would denounce this law as a violation of the conservative principle of limited government, but I was really surprised that the most prominent conservative leader to denounce the Patriot Act when it was first proposed was Phyllis Schlafly. As much as I've disagreed with her in the past, I've got to give her credit: she spoke up at a time when very few were brave enough to combat the mad rush to pass this monstrosity.

The left gets a lot of flak for the political correctness movement that has significantly stifled speech, especially on college campuses. But one should keep in mind that the leading organization for promoting free speech on campuses, F.I.R.E., was founded by a liberal: Harvey A. Silverglate.

I even have an example on the cultural front. For most of his career, Pat Boone has been singing bland Gospel music, mixed with his fundamentalist rantings. Nothing he did had any great appeal for me until 1997, when he showed a side of him I've never seen before: his sense of humor. Playing against his well-known squeaky-clean image, he announced that he had developed an interest in heavy metal music. He showed off his new musical interest with the release of the album "Pat Boone in a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy", where he perform big band arrangements of the songs of Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Metalica.

Needless to say, some of Boone's old fans were horrified. Apparently, they did not get the gag, and that is a shame. Boone was parodying both heavy metal and his own public image. And as musical parodies go, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" is brilliant. His big band arrangements skewer the often forced "Strum und Drang" of metal. I'm especially fond of his cover of Ozbourne's "Crazy Train", which almost morphs into the Chattanooga Cho-Cho.