A Disturbed Sunday (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday morning at nine o'clock and the day begins. For some this is the Lord’s Day. Like calves on a day trip to Calais they make their weary ways in ever-decreasing numbers to the Houses of Ignorance where they close their eyes, fall to their knees and heave the impotent sigh of the oppressed in the face of a heartless world. Having sacrificed Saturday night to the brewers' profits (“And before the Lord’s Day it was the landlord’s day ") my head was in no state for spiritual interference. But what was this? Thump! Thump! Thump! It felt like Cantona had entered my cerebral cortex for a quick round of training: my head had been invaded by the shit hitting the fan. Boing! Clash! Thud! Help—I've become trapped in a Batman movie with sound effects provided by the Ministry of Love . . .  But wait a minute, speaking of love . .

“Jesus Loves You!" The awful, invasive, torturous, untuneful thumping “music" has stopped and now a man is shouting in the street about sin, love and the Big Man beyond the clouds. Not content to wake up an entire street with his boring bawling, he then proceeds to sing (solo) about how Jesus wants us for sunbeams. He has a voice which is not quite heavenly, but certainly like nothing on earth. By now—several of us are staring out of our windows, rubbing our eyes and cursing the bassoon player who is rubbing his mouthpiece in preparation for eternal damnation, otherwise known as the next tune. The head nutter has finished his harangue and deposited a pile of War Cry newspapers into the hands of little children who run up and down the street stuffing them through letterboxes. I contemplate the parole conditions for justifiable homicide: “What are you in for, mate?” “I impulsively slaughtered an entire Salvation Army band by battering them with their own instruments.” At least the Krays only tortured their own.

There is something depressingly ugly about hymns. The men who wrote these dirges to god must have been possessed by a degree of melodic dysfunction unequalled until Bros went on their first world tour. There is nothing intrinsically bad about religious music (Mozart's Mass is the best work he composed and cantorial tenors can put Pavarotti through his paces), but hymns are relentlessly miserable in their transparent propagandist!). In the early part of this century militant American workers (known as Wobblies) were refused the right to advocate socialism from street platforms while the Salvation Army (referred to by them as the Starvation Army) were left alone by the cops. So the Wobblies took on the Army at their own game (Why should the bosses have all the bad tunes?) and Joe Hill, their greatest songsmith, wrote some of the most joyful workers’ songs ever sung. Only the barmiest socialist would favour standing in residential areas on Sunday mornings with loud wind instruments and a megaphone singing Wobbly songs. So what gives these Christian manic street preachers the right to try and drive us all mad.

And come to think of it, who needs the nauseating tintinnabulation of their wretched Sunday bells? Why must our children having morning assemblies were holy hog wash is forced upon their innocent minds? And why can’t you switch on the TV on Sundays and national holidays without choirs recruited from The Addams Family imposing their lousy liturgies upon us?

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

These thoughts were passing through my throbbing head when the rat-tap-tap of an unwelcome visitor propelled me to the cave door with a club in my hand (a rolled- up War Cry was the only weapon available in the frenzy of eagerness to settle scores with the Salvationists.)

“Do you believe in a world where there will be no more wars and everyone will live as one like brothers and sisters?" The question was posed in unison by two young women (possibly sisters, possibly from the planet Belch) who both held tracts in their hands. “Yes, I do." I said. This was not the answer for which they had been pre-programmed. They looked at each other and prayed as they panicked. "So you’re a Christian?” said the first one, divinely guided in her quick wittedness. I responded by giving them a lengthy lecture on why religion is a reflection of humanity’s former ignorance of causation, how the world we live in is unmistakably material and why my head was by now severely aching from the Salvationists’ cacophony.

"But we’re nothing to do with them " they asserted in one voice, as if they had just been invited to associate themselves with the BNP's Satanic Section. “They’re not real Christians,” they reliably informed me, "although we respect them for what they do and hope that one day they will come to see . . .” Go forth and multiply, I proposed, as the door accidcntally slammed on their noses. Let them fight their sectarian disputes in the afterlife while we of mortal flesh provide useful nourishment for worms.

I went back to my bed, but sleep eluded me. It’s hard to sleep after the brain has wakened. The thought was sobering and unintendedly inspirational. “And it came to pass that the brains of the religious did awaken and they did deliver their minds from the delusions of god. . ." Meanwhile, back in Iran, the mullahs’ torturers attach electrodes to the genitals of those who deny the faith and the evangelical fascists of the US Bible Bell plan which book to ban or burn next.

Steve Coleman