MOZART WAS AN ALIEN! (PASS IT ON!)

Time to get serious. I'm here to lament the decline of religion in Western society. Even if you are a disbeliever, it can be demonstrated that this decline has had a deleterious effect on society in general, and, I believe, music in particular. It is pointless to deny that worship and religious ritual play much less an important part in society than was once the case, and one need only observe that in the world of Islam, religion and worship play a greater role in daily life than they do anywhere in Christendom, save perhaps for rural Tennessee. It has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction that the appalling state of ethics in our society is due to a lack of religious principles —after all Charles Keating was and is a devout man who battled pornography—but the waning of religion has harmed us in far more subtle and insidious ways.

During all of human existence, people have looked to the skies for their gods or God. After all, the sun is up there and so are the moon and stars. That's where life-giving rain comes from and so does fearsome lightning. It is only natural that humans have assumed that Heaven is somewhere up above us. In some traditions of Islam, the Prophet Mohammed rose up into Heaven from Jerusalem, and in Chapter 24 of the Gospel of Luke it specifies that at Bethany, Jesus was "carried up into Heaven." This was not unusual, as before that, "Elijah went up by a whirlwind into Heaven." (II Kings 2:11)

Human nature does not stop on a dime nor does it make 180-degree turns, so when it was suddenly (in the great scheme of things) discovered that the sky is only an illusion, and that there is no ceiling above us, that the mountainous clouds are mere water vapor, and that if you were to follow Jesus and rise up, up and away, you'd find nothing—a vast, cold emptiness—which is why we call it space. When the first man to do this, Yuri Gagarin (I mention his name for the benefit of Americans who all think that John Glenn or John Wayne was the first man in space), returned, reporters asked him what he saw, and he responded, "Well, I didn't see God."

This created havoc for humans who, for at least a million years, had thought of the sky as the dwelling place of whatever deity they worshiped. What are they to believe now? That Heaven and Hell exist in another dimension or a parallel universe? I make no judgment on the plausibility of that, but it certainly is unrealistic to expect all humans to immediately grasp such a thing. They've been praying to the sky for ten-thousand generations, and they've been expecting Jesus to reappear in the sky for the last two-thousand years, so in their impatience, just as the Israelites began worshiping the Golden Calf after they'd tired of waiting for the return of Moses, people today are making up their own visitors form the sky. That is the meaning of the UFO phenomenon. People want some magic to appear in the sky as was common in ancient times, so in their desperation, they imagine things. Not spiritual beings, because God and His angels have been relocated to the eleventh dimension, but the public fantasy is still forming just what these beings are. I consider myself lucky to have been alive during the birth of this new system of belief, and the specifics are still being fashioned. Just before my birth, when they made their first appearance, these otherworldly beings in the sky were called "foo fighters." By the 1950s they were "flying saucers," and actual photos reveal their appearance to be similar to a tossed Pontiac hubcap.

As autos no longer come equipped with hubcaps, the miracles appearing in the sky also have updated models. And, just as a single name was eventually settled on for Elohim, the modern marvels in the sky are now officially known as UFOs. People of faith have always made pilgrimages to holy sites, and people of the new faith flock to Roswell, New Mexico. Why? Because people continue to desire the presence of something that has appeared from the sky. In Islam, the Black Stone is revered and even kissed. In Roswell, the holy object may look like the remnants of a weather balloon, but that's of no importance. What is significant is that the holy item came from the sky above.

I don't think that this is a good thing at all, and I have far more respect for the prophets of old than I do for those who claim to have been in contact with the aliens. The people who have been abducted into a UFO and examined all seem to have rather inadequate and selective memories, and the holy prophets kept their sexual fantasies discreetly to themselves. But we can expect much more of such talk of UFOs, and details will continue to be added to the collective imagination until we have a standardized alien character that is as familiar as the modern image of Santa Claus. In H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds the invading Martians had tentacles, but by the 1950s the crews of flying saucers were all thought to have approximate human shapes—though with antennae. The modern version of the alien being now seems fixed into a streamlined human shape with almond eyes, but this is yet subject to change.

We can expect the UFO phenomenon to continue for at least a thousand years more or even as long as our species lasts, because the collective subconscious has had a fixation with miraculous things appearing in the sky for so long, and human nature changes very slowly, if at all. Take, for example, the concept of monotheism. It was introduced by Akhnaten, a pharaoh of Egypt who ruled from 1379-62 BC. During his reign it was mandated that people worship only the sun god, Aton, but in their homes people continued to worship multiple gods, and even Akhnaten's wife, Nefertiti, had prayers addressed to her. Soon after Akhnaten's death, though, everyone returned to worshiping the old gods. (There is a fine opera by Philip Glass based on the life of Akhnaten.)

When Mohammed made his triumphant return to Mecca in the sixth century (by the Gregorian calendar), pagan idols proliferated. It is said that a pantheon of some 360 statues and icons surrounded the Kaaba, and inside were the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The people of Mecca expected to be massacred by the conquering Mohammed, but he only ordered the smashing of the idols. Yet, in some Islamic circles, the Prophet's daughter, Fatima, is worshiped. (Catholics who make the pilgrimage to Portugal for the special blessings at the site of Mary's appearance, are ironically going to a shrine named after Mohammed's daughter.)

When Christianity was introduced into Europe (and the Americas), the people were allowed to keep their old customs, and so we still celebrate the pagan holiday of Yule. The people there were also used to worshiping multiple gods, and this tradition continued well into the twentieth century. In the ethnic neighborhood I was raised, each home had a statue of the Virgin Mary and a Novena candle. One would pray to God and pray to Mary, but prayers were also offered to a saint to intercede with the Almighty on your behalf. If, for example, you lost your car keys or bottle opener, you would say a prayer to St. Jude, the specialist in lost items and lost causes. Each saint had a specialty— St. Dymphna was the patron of the insane, St. Birgid was the patron of milkmaids, and of course, St. Cecilia was the patron saint of music, because "she sang to the Lord in her heart on her wedding day." After all these thousand years, and after all the efforts of Akhnaten, Luther and Mohammed, the remnants of polytheism still exist.

The Catholic Church has downplayed the power of the saints of late, and it was admitted that St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, probably never existed, but this seems to me to have weakened the religion. Instead of focusing their worship on the one true Godhead, people seem to be looking elsewhere for spiritual comfort. Modern-day ascetics would claim that people are turning to materialism, and I would not disagree, but they are mainly worshiping new idols and new saints.

In the more devout regions of the Islamic world, a youth may have the image of a famous imam or ayatollah posted over his bed. One-hundred years ago, a youth in Christendom would certainly have had a crucifix over his or her bed, and in addition to the crucifix there might also have been an effigy of a saint, perhaps the patron saint of the village. Today, of course, adolescents have their quarters decorated with a different type of idol, only they don't call them saints, they call them stars. (More evidence of a fixation with the sky. ) The new idols perform the same function, though. Whereas a young woman would look to the statue of St. Theresa for guidance as to whether she should enter a convent and take the veil, she now makes the same type of decision while meditating under the image of a modern teen role model.

Mature people and educated people also have a need to elevate figures to the status of sainthood. Classical music votaries may hold themselves to be of a serious and intellectual rank, but they cannot shake their human traits. Instead of using the term "saint," an idol is given the title "genius." I recently made the mistake of publicly suggesting that such deities as Mozart and Beethoven were men of normal intelligence, but that their intellect was sharply focused on music. The response was as if I had told a Shiite that Ali was not a worthy successor to the Prophet. I suspect that I could easily take a recording of piece by, say, Muzio Clementi (or even Roger Whittaker) and present it as being from the hand of Mozart, and not many classical music lovers could detect the difference. But the music itself is of minor importance; what serious music devotees crave instead is the idea of Mozart—a supreme genius, an immortal who once walked among us, a saint. Indeed, there has been a recent movement afoot to try and canonize J. S. Bach despite that he was a Lutheran. We still demand saints to worship, and Bach is in our pantheon of immortals, so let's make it official.

The great masters were alive during that time when God played a much more important part in daily life, and they didn't get much respect. I'm not saying that it was right to shower shabby treatment on such men of talent, but in those days, any musician was thought of as being fainéant and often of lax character. Open any biography of J. S. Bach and you can read how he suffered one indignity after another. The masterpieces he wrote for nobility were often ignored. It was only more recently, after the influence of religion began to decline, that artists were beatified, and this was only among those listeners who had stopped praying to religious saints.

It was a simple case of substitution. Whereas people would once try to cure a malady by visiting a shrine where they could touch a relic—a bit of cloth or hair or bone in a saint's tomb—or they could somehow improve their lives by purchasing and carrying around some scrap which had touched the relic of a saint, educated people today do the same thing by purchasing the "Mozart Effect" CDs and playing them over and over for their children in the belief that this relic of St. Amadeus will impart intelligence with the same juju.

There is, at all times and everywhere, a certain human need to elevate figures to a higher status, just as there is a human fascination with the sky. There is no changing such a trait, just as it would be impossible to eliminate envy or greed. My objection to such an attitude is that if we desire to hear only the masterpieces by the immortal geniuses, it leads to the neglect of perfectly fine pieces by lesser known composers—say, John Field or Franz Berwald—who are not in contention for icon status. It also leaves me feeling, I dunno, kinda creepy—as if I should be completely serious when listening to music, that enjoying it is equivalent to giggling in church. J. S. Bach was a composer of fun dance music, and I believe that it does his memory a disservice if we stop tapping our toes to one of his bourrees.

Keeping this in mind, however, I propose to combine the need to find miracles in the sky with the need worship idols, and I believe that I can do so in a non-sacrilegious way, and a way which will further the cause of great music.

Let's all agree that Mozart was not a mere mortal, but the term "genius" is too imprecise. A more modern way of popularizing Mozart is to reveal that he was an alien from an advanced civilization in another galaxy. He was sent to Earth to improve our music, and after accomplishing this, he returned to his home planet. That explains why he has no grave! At all the gatherings of UFOlogists and abductees, the music of Mozart should be played, and as the extraterrestrial mania spreads, the popularity of Mozart will also increase.

I often wonder how it is that urban legends and rumors spread so rapidly and infest my mailbox. I confess that I've tried spreading a few myself. For instance, shortly after Timothy McVeigh was executed, I tried to circulate a rumor among conspiracy-idiots that a substitute look-alike had been strapped to the table and that the real McVeigh was actually in training with an anti-Castro militia. This scheme failed because someone else had thought of it first and the rumor had already made the rounds. My next attempt (the Jon Benet Ramsey Diet) was too fantastic and no one circulated it.

Now, finally, the perfect contribution to urban folklore—Mozart was an alien. The UFO moro...er, folks will be eager to accept such a "fact," and its wide circulation will increase the popularity of Mozart. At last, I will accomplish something which will live on! These legends and myths are usually spread by women, so I call on all females reading this to go forth and spread the word.

Sing: Mozart came in a spacecraft! Shout it out, shout it out, shout it out!