Predictive Programming in Pop Culture: Christ Mass Edition

Peace on Earth? Can it Be?

On September 11, 1977, Bing Crosby recorded his last Christ mass Show Special for the tell-a-vision, which featured a guest appearance by David Bowie, in which they essentially sang two very different songs at the same time. This performance has since been considered a "classic" holiday season performance, receiving world mass media broadcasting and even some recent recreations of this highly feted event.

I used to like it a lot myself....that is before I had my eyes opened to the reality of how Pop culture in our Brave New World Order is a key weapon for the social engineers who create We the Sheeple's regularly scheduled programming. Last Christ mass season, I downloaded an audio of this song from YouTube, along with a number of other Christ mass songs I waxed nostalgic for from my youth. I listened to it a few times during the season as a part of my Christ Mass playlist with nary a thought, often singing along with it while participating in the various traditions my family and I perpetuate in celebrating the birth of the Savior of our fallen world.

This year I put the same playlist on again while we decorated our Christmas tree. When this performance came on again, I couldn't help but notice a few things about it that I previously did not pay attention to. I realized with near certainty that this performance by Crosby and Bowie on September 11, 1977, is the perfect representation of THE WAR ON CHRIST MASS and a Christian-based society that has been waged in pop culture and society in the past three decades by the controllers of our mass media.

The opening dialogue between the two followed by the performance of The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth is emblematic, symbolic, subversive, and both covert and overt, all at the same time. It perfectly represents the transition from a formerly Christian Nation to our current dystopian, Post-Christian nation.

From the scripted opening dialogue:

Crosby: Tell me, do ever listen to any of the older fellas?
Bowie: Oh yeah, sure...like, um, John Lennon! And the other one...Harry Nilsson.
Crosby: Hmmm...you go back that far, huh?
Bowie: Yeah, I'm not as young as I look.
Crosby: Heh heh, none of us does these days...

One month later, Bing Crosby passed away, before this now famous and popular duet was ever aired on tell-a-vision. While this dialogue between the two is considered ironically humorous, I have come to believe those who wrote those lines where following a particular theme of their own...

The performance itself demonstrates this theme I allude to. It starts with both the old, revered crooner of decades prior -- most famous for singing songs considered mainstream standards performed and enjoyed by multiple generations of Americans steeped in the traditions and ethos of a Christian-based society -- and a pop rock star famous for his androgynous stage persona, singing in unison.

At first, "Ziggy Stardust" starts singing in concert with the old timer....harmoniously blending in with the classic crooner in pitch and volume. But as soon as the first verse is sung, the "new age" pop star starts singing counterpoint to the old classic Christ mass song with a brand new song that had literally been penned a few hours earlier on that day, September 11, 1977.

The original plan had been for Bowie and Crosby to sing just "Little Drummer Boy." But "David came in and said: 'I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?' " Fraser said. "We didn't know quite what to do."

Fraser, Kohan and Grossman left the set and found a piano in the studios' basement. In about 75 minutes, they wrote "Peace on Earth," an original tune, and worked out an arrangement that weaved together the two songs. Bowie and Crosby nailed the performance with less than an hour of rehearsal.

As Bowie sings the new song penned by the three musical directors of the program just hours before, he overpowers Crosby's voice, relegating his lines almost incoherent, with a few legible pa ram pam pam pams standing out in between the pauses to Bowie's lines.

(Come, they told me, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
Peace on Earth, can it be?
(A newborn King to see, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
Years from now, perhaps we'll see

(Our finest gifts we bring, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
See the day of glory
(See the fine King, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam, ra-pam-pam-pam)
See the day when men of good will
(Ra-pam-pam-pam)
Live in peace, live in peace again

(So newborn king, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
Peace on Earth
Can it be?
(Can we come?)

So far it sure seems like this new song penned by Fraser, Kohan and Grossman seems to fit in with the typical themes of traditional Christ mass music... "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men!" and all that.

But then Crosby raises his volume and joins in harmonic unison with Bowie to emphasize the newly written bridge that weaves the new and the old, the classic and the modern, into a single synthesized ideal expressed in totalitarian joviality:

EVERY CHILD MUST BE MADE AWARE
EVERY CHILD MUST BE MADE TO CARE
CARE ENOUGH FOR HIS FELLOW MAN
TO GIVE ALL THE LOVE THAT HE CAN

This is the part that jarred my consciousness and awoke me from mindlessly enjoying the performance as I had done last season while decorating my "holiday tree."  What kind of PEACE ON EARTH are they both singing that EVERY child MUST be MADE aware of, and MADE to care for? It was then that I realized that whoever wrote them had a much different agenda than simply adding new lyrics to a song supposedly commemorating the birth of baby Jesus.

That's when I decided to do a little research on line and consult with Googliath to find the back story behind this coming together of old and new, classic and modern pop culture icons to perform what TV Guide listed as "...one of the 25 most memorable musical moments of 20th-century television."

Only after finding the Washington Post article I previously linked to, did I discover that Bowie's counterpoint was written by the shows producers and musical directors that same day the performance was rehearsed and recorded. 

These three composers of Bowie's parts have quite the history in both Hollywood and the New York Broadway musical scene, and have all made their marks as composers in mainstream mass media American pop culture in the years since this performance. Needless to say, it was only a few clicks on their Wiki pages to discover that two of the three composers are most decidedly not Christian. It is then that I realized that these lyrics are not written in the spirit of celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace celebrated by Christian tradition.

No, this was a counterpoint based on a much different ideal of world peace....the kind of peace discussed by The Vigilant Citizen blog that I had read a couple of years ago, analyzing Madonna's brazen 2012 Pagan Occultist performance during the halftime of the Superbowl:

Madonna’s halftime show ends in a dramatic yet very significant matter:

At the end of her performance, the floor opens underneath Madonna’s feet and she falls into oblivion. As Madonna is swept in what appears to be the “Underworld," Madonna sings: “I hear you call my name, And it feels like home”. This is another inversion of conventional religious symbolism as “home” should be in the heavens.

In Madonna’s case, she obviously didn’t go in that direction. The show ends with a message no one can disagree with.

The words “World Peace” appear on the stage, a PR-friendly slogan used by those pushing for a New World Order, lead by a one world government.

Is it this DAY OF GLORY Bowie sings about in the first verse? The same glory advocated by the brazen, pagan pop idol Jezebel and proponent of Kabbalah, in her 13 minute sermon on the biggest tell-a-vision stage in the world?
Is this what the composers of Bowie's lines pray for in the second verse of the Crosby-Bowie duet?

(Little baby, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
I pray my wish will come true
(I see the child, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
For my child and your child too

(I'll take my trumpet, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
He'll see the day of glory
(I'll play my best for Him, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam, ra-pam-pam-pam)
See the day when men of good will
(Ra-pam-pam-pam)
Live in peace, live in peace again

(And he smiled at me, pa-ram-pam-pam-pam)
Peace on Earth
(Me and my drum)
Can it be?

Let us recall the kind of World Peace described in history's most authentic forgery:  "Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of disorders—frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts—who will give us peace and quiet which we cannot find under our rulers and representatives."

The current post-Christian West has been effected by decades of regularly scheduled programming that promoted incremental gradualism in expunging any and every expression of Christianity from the culture at large, and replacing it with a much different, alien one.

The voice of cultural and religious dissent started as understated and muted, with only hints here and there manifesting in the mass media driven pop culture. These subversive influences first appeared to sing in harmony with the older traditions of Western Civilization's religious foundation and culture. But after awhile, after conditioning the masses with gradual and incremental exposure, THEY eventually took front stage and center, and overpowered the voices of tradition and morality, drowning it out with it's own modern and progressive lines of shibboleths and inverted ethos.

After some time being overpowered and dominated by this new force, the former voice of tradition and morality changes course and now joins in enthusiastically with it's own corruption and degradation...joining in with the modern and progressive demands that every child must be made aware and made to care.

Can it be?




In hindsight of my own short lifetime, I can track this transition of gradualism as it happened steadily and inexorably over the past thirty-plus years.

In 1977, I was attending a private Christian pre-school in my neighborhood. I was a participant as one of the three wise men presenting frankensense to the baby Jesus in the live Nativity Scene pageant our pre-school put on for the parents. I have vague memories of the occasion, probably only recalled due to the reinforcement from the photos my mother took that day that I've seen many times since.

In 1987, I was a member of my public school's choir, caroling Christ mass songs at my town shopping center. We sang next to the shopping centers Nativity Scene display, and the majority of the songs were all Christian themed Christ mass songs celebrating the birth of Jesus. Come All Ye Faithful, Joy to the World, Silent Night, We Three Kings, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Away in the Manger etc.

One year later, a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Jewish War Veterans that resulted in the removal of a large 65 foot high cross removed from Camp Smith, high atop the Ko'olau mountain range, overlooking the entire south side of the island of O'ahu.

I remember looking up at the Camp Smith cross whenever I was with my family driving anywhere on the south side of the island. It could be seen for miles all around.

I remember my parents being upset when they found out it was being removed due to the lawsuit.

Nine years later, On September 11, 1997, another Anti-Christian political action group in Hawaii filed a nearly identical lawsuit to have a large 62-ton steel cross that had been erected in 1962 on the Schofield Barracks Army Base to commemorate the war dead of our formerly Christian-nation during World War II. (As a footnote to history, Schofield Barracks was the first military installation attacked by the Japanese as they where flying on their way to Pearl Harbor on that day of infamy.)

One month later, citing a severe budget deficit and costs to fight the lawsuit as well as the costs necessary to maintain and display the Cross (it was lit up with large spotlights every night so that it could be seen from many miles away over the central plains of O'ahu island), the Army dismantled the cross.

I now consider November 1997 to be the official end of Hawaii as a member-state of a Christian nation.

In 2007, I was teaching music classes to children in Hawaii's Public Schooling system as a contract worker. In the middle of one of my classes in November, I was notified that the Vice Principal wanted to see me after class that day. I was told that I was not allowed to teach or perform the songs I had been teaching in preparation for the school's Winter Holiday Festival. No Christ Mass songs were allowed. I was allowed to continue with any Christ mass songs ONLY if they were to be performed solely in the Hawaiian language.  
Po La'i E was allowed, Silent Night was verboten.

We performed Rudolph that Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bell Rock, and the sole Christ Mass song allowed because it was performed solely in the Hawaiian language.

There was no Nativity Scene allowed on public school property, though we did have holiday trees, reindeers, candy canes, holiday lights and all the other trappings of the secular celebrations of the merry mass consumerist bacchanalia of winter solstice festooning the cafeteria where we performed, but nary a reference to Christ mass or Baby Jesus.

Ah well, here we are in 2014, and the separation of Church and State is nearly complete. There will be No Nativity Scene in Washington D.C. This Year:

The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a Nativity Scene at Capital Hill this Christmas season.

This isn’t for any religious reason. They simply have not been  able to find Three Wise Men in the Nation’s Capital.

The search for a Virgin continues.

There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable.

Merry Christmas!