Thanks to Jay for this alleged Ted Nugent vignette:

Many references, I’ve never seen an attribution:

He was being interviewed by a Parisian journalist.

The journalist asked, “What do you think the last thought is in the head of a deer before you shoot it? Is it, ‘Are you my friend?’ or is it ‘Are you the one who killed my brother?’”

Nugent replied, “They aren’t capable of that kind of thinking. All they care about is, ‘What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away.”

“They are very much like you French in that way.”

And while I’m at it, belated thanks to a different Ted for emailing me the link to this story in The Times: Drugs, alcohol and sex: why the Jesuits like Tom Waits.

Barely a week after Pope Benedict XVI disclosed his dislike for the “prophets of pop” and Bob Dylan in particular, the Jesuits in Rome have embraced Waits as a Christian role model.

The latest issue of Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal, the contents of which are subject to Vatican approval, says that Waits represents “the marginalised and misunderstood”.

Father Antonio Spadaro, 40, who normally writes about literature but is emerging as a Roman Catholic authority on pop music, said that Waits had lived a youthful life of “drugs, alcohol and sex” as an outcast on the streets of California.

He therefore understood “the lower depths” of society, and was able to convey the desperation of those on the margins. His past also enabled him to express their “capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions”, Father Spadaro said.

Well, The Times is playing the story for laughs (I don’t think that Waits the man is really being embraced as a “Christian role model”) but that might be the safest course when it comes to looking at rock criticism from the clergy.

Maybe these guys should get back to saving souls. Or is that all under control now?

…

Addendum 4:48 pm: Ok, on consideration, that’s a cheap shot. Members of the clergy are as entitled to express opinions on pop-music as anyone else. However, either endorsing or rejecting particular performers while speaking from a place of perceived religious authority is, to my mind, a very ill-considered use of that authority.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• The Ted Nugent Medal
• $20,000,000 and a dream
• Thank You