FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
By Nick DevlinThere's nothing like the smell of burning cat hair to bring out the worst in people. Even the merest mention of Satanism summons the most unlikely soldiers to the army of capital "R" right.
Sound trumpets. Enter Larry Ryckman and Alderman Ray Clark. Last week, Calgary's own Righteous Brothers launched a crusade to keep schlock-rockers Marilyn Manson from corrupting our children's souls.
When the news of Ryckman's defiant new posture broke, I couldn't help but wonder whether the whole thing was part of an ingenious scheme to boost languishing ticket sales. Clause 14(b) of a very cunning contract.
Here's the man who the Alberta Securities Commission said was so crooked that he couldn't find North with a compass re-inventing himself as the moral guardian of the community. Saint Paul-Come-Lately of Calgary.
Then again, the fact that any illegitimate devil-children conceived at next Friday's concert will be in high school before Ryckman can buy or sell stock in Alberta again, doesn't disqualify him from having a social conscience. (Long before his run-in with the Greed Police, Ryckman risked life and limb to infiltrate a white supremacist group operating in Idaho, producing a ground-breaking documentary film of their violent hatred.)
More likely, Ryckman just doesn't like Marilyn Manson. At any rate, he's bought the benefit of the doubt by exposing his much-thinned financial backside to a helluva spanking.
On the other hand, Alderman Ray Clark's opposition is hard to characterize as anything other than ignorant political opportunism. Parroting the pathetic lies about Manson's concert which various American God-squads have been spreading through their Web sites, Clark saddled up his high-horse and rose into battle against the man in black pantyhose.
Little early to be running for mayor, isn't it Ray?
I'll bet a pair of front-row tickets that neither Clark nor anyone he got his misinformation from has ever been to a Manson concert.
Equally vexing as Clark's overblown indignance is the insistent invocation of Freedom of Expression by Manson's defenders. When a pair of burly police officers with guns and badges take you by the arm and tell you to stop saying what you're saying, that's a question of freedom of expression. This isn't.
Everything Manson does on stage is within the letter of the law - vile but legal. No one is obliged to open his backyard for someone else's offensive expression. Ryckman and the Max Bell could have turned Manson away, but they didn't. Larry Ryckman and the Max Bell Centre exercised their freedom of expression when they cashed the rent cheque. Barring the doors now is a breach of contract. Let the lawyers take their pound of flesh, but leave the moralism at home.
Crediting Marilyn Manson with the moral degeneracy of modern youth is like accusing Homer Simpson of inventing the doughnut. Manson is nothing more than the latest in the genre of "artists" who crank up the volume on their vulgarity to cover for an abject lack of talent or creativity. Manson's bad-mouthing Christianity, far from original sin, is the scarlet-letter of his cowardice. Poor old Jesus is a soft target, at least in North America. On a bad day, "dissin" Christianity will get you boycotted by Baptists and booted from a small-time hockey barn.
All of which leaves Marilyn Manson's fans twisting in the wind.
These over-grown mommy's boys think they're Fighting the Power. In reality they're just putting another strand of Tiffany lace-lingerie on the naked midriff on some TicketMaster executive's mistress. Still, the cathartic value of letting these hormone-addled losers mosh themselves senseless shouldn't be underestimated. They go out, get stoned, thrust their fists in the air and think that they're B-A-D. Tired out, they go home to mommy's basement for a good night's sleep.
Maybe by the time they pry their pounding heads from under the covers, the rest of us will have come to our senses, too.
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