Augustine Was Right, Part MMCII

A couple of days ago, Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot was inspired when she saw a video clip of an Italian musician serenading his street with a trumpet version of John Lennon's "Imagine." So she enlisted a number of celebrity friends and associates to sing the song, each one taking a different part, and posted it on her Instagram feed.

For which she was summarily savaged and the project widely denounced. Typical of this display of humanity at its toilet-paper hoarding finest was Heather Schwedel's ranking of the individual performances at Slate. Schwedel ranked each celebrity's slice of the song from least worst (#24) to worst (#1) and bumped Gadot herself up to #3 for having the idea to start with. Twitter again proved itself the go-to venue for thoughts that should remain unexpressed as people jumped on the celebrities for not giving everyone else all their money.

Now ordinarily I'd be the last person to defend "Imagine," which is one of the more vacuous songs from John Lennon's significantly vacuous 1970s output. The song is a lullaby designed to make socialist kids fall asleep before they can start to ask it questions it can't answer ("Mr. Lennon, when you imagine no possessions, what happens to your room full of fur coats?") The Italian trumpeter's version is one of the better ones I've ever heard because it has none of the words. However, let the record show that if Ms. Gadot would like to sing me to sleep with this song she is entirely within her rights to do so. Given that I am roughly 20 years her senior I ought to doze off after about a verse.

Be that as it may. Ms. Gadot likes the song, finds it kind of inspirational and thought it would be a neat idea to get some other famous people with whom she's friendly to put together a sometimes serious, sometimes goofy rendition as a diversion in a time of anxiety and crisis. It's not art, it may have been a "good-hearted but not good-headed" idea. Whatever. If we can be expected to nod along to every glurgy poem and gooey reflection about all of how the viral crisis is affecting our society and every self-righteous hectoring lecture about how we're doing this for the good of those who can't help themselves, if we can be expected to remember "We Are the World" and Live Aid as awesome moments of human kindness and achievement instead of free food handouts to the warlords starving the people we wanted to help... We can put up with a couple dozen atonal warblings of one of the most shallow "important" songs ever recorded, instigated by a nice lady who wanted to do something nice for people who followed her social media.

Except that, as noted in the post title's reference to St. Augustine's doctrine of humanity's complete sinfulness apart from a relationship with its Creator, it seems we can't.