guitar and vocal: T.S. Taylor

note:
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
—Jesus (Matthew 11: 29-30)

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
—Micah 6:8

Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
—Romans 12:16

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up.
—James 4:10

I can’t recall which one of us in The Lost Dogs coined the phrase “Another crushing defeat!,” but this satirical, melodramatic reaction to any number of misfortunes we were likely to encounter while out on tour, soon became an oft-quoted entry in the unique, ever expanding lexicon of what one might call “The Road-isms Of The Lost Dogs.” Bordering on a muttered W.C. Fields-style aside, the phrase worked best when infused with a kind of world-weary resignation. Everything from the most egregious setbacks (financially indispensable product table merchandise failing to arrive in time for several days worth of gigs) to the most mundane of inconveniences (our restaurant server forgetting to bring us the ketchup), might trigger the line, delivered with all the faux-despair solemnity a 3rd rate actor is capable of mustering.
I believe I do have the distinction of being the lone Dog who managed to work “another crushing defeat” into the lyrics of a song, and may I say what a magnificent accomplishment this is! Anyway, aside from pointing out the obvious paradoxes contained in Humble Man (“rising to a new low” for instance) and the hint of euphemism contained in the line “time just mutilates me more,” there’s really not much to add by way of commentary.

Hmmmm…on second thought…
At the risk of being accused of political finger pointing, for which I plead “not guilty” (after all, it is the fringe on both political sides who are more apt to indulge in the sort of behavior I’m about to describe), let me wrap up this little commentary by saying something about humility: No doubt we are living in unprecedented times (The Coronavirus, civil unrest, political polarization etc.) and it strikes me that, with the power of the internet at our fingertips, the temptation to chastise the unenlightened by casting ourselves in the role of infallible and omniscient little gods, is particularly compelling. Once we are perched atop our social media high-horses, (or ‘thrones’ if you will), we are emboldened to issue forth holy, inconvertible edicts, wield judgement like a terrible swift sword and, if it were within our power to do so, not hesitate to send forth The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse to exact vengeance on all who have the audacity to defy our perfect little wills. In the meantime, we fail to see the irony and especially the hypocrisy inherent in our justification of vengeance and wrath, (whether verbally or physically expressed) while subsequently condemning supposedly related acts, (though admittedly on a much grander scale), perpetrated by an Old Testament deity who we are convinced is not only make-believe, vicious, and petty, but for whom we unhesitatingly declare our loathing. I am tempted to write something here about the shockingly large number of dear souls whose woefully ignorant biases regarding God’s attributes and modus operandi are about as informed and relevant as a dim-wit’s knowledge of gravitational theory; I say ‘tempted,’ but I won’t. After all, our subject here is humility and I wouldn’t want to be accused of transgressing my own premise.

Obviously there are good and bad people on both sides of the political spectrum, but unfortunately there are also, living among us, those who would love nothing better than to eternally damn all who dare to question these elitist’s moral authority and noble, pure as the driven snow, motives. Away with the Depraved into the deepest recesses of, if not a literal hell, then a living hell located right here on earth; its fire and brimstone consisting of harassment, shaming, cancellation and, (God forbid), destruction, violence, and bloody civil war; that is of course, should rant and rage fail to bludgeon the masses into submission. After all, this is a righteous cause is it not? If anything can be called a Holy War, this is it, isn't it? But wait! Where have we heard and seen something of this sort before? Ah yes, these are the same people who decry a certain brand of radical, narrow-minded, Bible-thumping Fundamentalism, cult-like brainwashing, sloganeering, and a stiff-necked, self-righteous intolerance of others regarding political, cultural, moral, and religious issues. In other words, welcome friends to modernity’s Holy House Of Worship. The sign outside identifies it as the Anti-Church Fundamentalist Church, and it is recognized around the world for its thriving and ever growing congregation of secular saints who contemplate the implementation of, among other radical ideologies, their own self-justifying version of The Crusades. Who is more honorable than they in their mission to trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored? Not only does this church not require a god (that’s probably us anyway), it’s got all the stiff-necked bigotry, intolerance, and single minded group-think we’ve all come to know and love about the very worst tendencies of American Christianity. Meet The New Evangelicals; pull up a pew and make yourself right at home in what author Flannery O’Conner called, (in her book Wise Blood), the “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.” Aside from your own echo, the very last thing you’re going to hear in this particular cathedral is a sermon extolling the virtues of humility; which is, yes, “another crushing defeat.”