How do Larry and I go from talking about liturgical music and earworms to showering and tattoos? I’m not sure myself, but we have a great time getting there, as always. We discuss the strange sameness of modern Christian music (via Kevin Jones), and then move to Adult Tattoo Regrets as an allegory for pediatric sex-change and puberty-blocking “care.” Finally, we discuss the disintegration of public order and the social compact, and why that vacuum will be filled by tribalism — and maybe already is beginning to be. Plus … showers?
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Welcome back to our aVIP video series “Off the Beaten Path,” featuring my friend Larry O’Connor! The Townhall columnist and Salem News Channel host starts off our week by discussing stories and ideas that may fly under our radar, in culture, politics, sports, and more. Plus, Larry previews tonight’s SNC show!
Here’s just a taste of today’s highlights:
- On reaching out to youth through the Mass and Christian worship: “My twenty one year old kid is going going full Trad all of a sudden,” Larry says. “She wants to do the traditional Latin Mass …That generation has really swung the other way on wanting it to be incredible.” I reply, “The issue is inspiration … and I don’t think that people are terribly inspired by listening to music that sounds the same as the other music that they’re listening to.”
- Tattoo regrets, and why Larry doesn’t have them: “I don’t know if you remember the nineties or not,” he explains, and I barely do, but “all through the nineties, it was a trend where everybody was getting tattoos. And you’ll remember I was in the arts at the time, I worked in theater …”
- And yet, people who regret these decisions say something about the stakes involved in “pediatric gender-affirming care”: “Most states, I believe it’s in all states right now, even if a parent signs off on it, you can’t get a tattoo because it’s permanent,” Larry points out. “And so is all the gender procedures that they’re trying to do on children with very shaky science behind it. So I found that to be a really great dichotomy there.”
- The abdication of progressive politicians and prosecutors on public order is deliberate, Larry argues, and “this is the way that they allow Marxism into the, our society without actually having to bother with electing people and voting for people because they would never win that election.”
- Both of us reflect on how this is a return to the 1970s in more ways than one, and I argue that the outcome is not going to turn out well for progressives in the long run. “People are going to start taking matters into their own hands and you’re going to get back to the days of Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels,” I say. “You’re going to get back to the days where Death Wish and Dirty Harry become very popular because it expresses actually almost the opposite intent of their creators.”
Be sure to watch it all — and our firm pledge on showers! Join us in the comments below to continue the conversation.
