A lost luxury ship

Pop star Lady Gaga was said to have been sued for copyright infringement for allegedly lifting her hit single "Judas" from a song written by an aspiring singer named Rebecca Francescatti.
Lady Gaga's song "Judas" was released earlier this year and featured in her latest album "Born This Way," according to the Indo Asian News Service which carried the story.
The news agency, quoting the online contactmusic.com, said Francescatti claimed that the tune of Lady Gaga's song "Judas" has a striking similarity with the piece "Juda" she composed in 1999.
In the lawsuit filed with a federal court in the US, Francescatti pointed out that her former brass player is now working for a music company that was responsible for creating 17 tracks for "Born This Way".
Her lawyer Chris Niro said that although the songs are of different styles the composition is the same and the chorus has the same melody. The bottom line of the case is that Francescatti wants "recognition of what she created".
The story stopped short of what kind of recognition she wanted but presumably it could be compensation for royalty.
The story, posted online by Yahoo!, caught my attention because it reminded me of my previous blog "Christianity must be a way of life" in which I wrote lengthily about our ego, the core of our being human.
Not that I find Francescatti driven by her ego when she filed the lawsuit. Probably it was more on the financial side - to be paid for royalty - or it could be both. Either way, she has all the rights to claim for "recognition of what she has created."
Our sense of pride makes it natural for us to make a living so that we would not be a burden to anyone. Nobody wants to be a pauper, nobody wants to lose one's self-respect. It would be different if we make unnecessary waves to attract public attention.
That brings me back to Lady Gaga, who wants to project herself as an illuminati or enlightened. Since my teenage daughter told me months ago that Lady Gaga was an illuminati, I could not help think how swift the world has changed.
Our relativist outlook seems to have muddled our sense of right and wrong. Seeing her video showing her almost naked and reading an article in which she was quoted to have said that she is a cheap date, I could not imagine how she could be an illuminati.
Some bloggers call her "illuminati puppet" with the insinuation that she is being manipulated to help project the "dark side" of the world. Without the religious undertone, I think "illuminati puppet" describes her well. I always associate enlightenment with the brain and not with the flesh, much less not with being an easy lay.
Lady Gaga is a perfect symbol of the crass materialism that has eroded our values over the past decades. Shedding off old-fashion worldview, we don't care anymore about the feelings - and the lot - of other people as long as we get financially wealthy.
It is ironic that our civilization seems to have advanced only in terms of technology but has lagged behind in the task of lifting human values. Although we are now in the digital age, our nature has not evolved far from where we came.
In the jungle of sky crappers, we are no more than cavemen playing the same game of survival of the fittest. In our neatly walled and carpeted offices, we often step on the toes of others just to get ahead in the corporate ladder. It is akin to science exploring our outer world without first conquering our inner space.
Even our sense of reasoning has become warp and weird. Logic is supposed to guide us to the path of clear thinking, but we have been using reason subjectively to justify our biases and self-interests. Most, if not all, of our lawyers are putting more premium on their fees than pursue the noble cause of justice. We condider others to be objective in their worldviews only when they cross over to our side.
This easily reminds me of the debates on religion. In a previous blog, I have pointed out that debate on religion is an endless exercise in futility. However tall is our claim to reason, we always tend to become emotional in the process. Because that's what we are. We have both the rational and emotional side of our being.
I am sure that atheists, who have held the view that we are an accident of time, will disagree that human nature, which is one of life's many mysteries, is designed - for whatever purpose, we can make an endless guess. Was the world designed to be a purifying furnish for the soul? And why? Until science finds the elusive absolute truth, the questions will be endless.
That's putting my position clear that I digress with the scientific postulate (neuroscience in particular) that the soul is a mere illusion created in our brain. Some, if not all, atheists feel some degree of spiritual yearning that they turn to other beliefs like pantheism. Well-known psychologist Susan Blackmore, who turned to Ten Zen for meditation, said in her essay "Why I have given up" parapsychology that abandoning the study "does not mean abandoning spirituality or spiritual practice".
The emotional side our lives convinces me that we could not rely on reason as the singular tool in our search for the absolute ttruth, which I believe we will discover in life after death. Reason, without spiritual compass, is a luxury ship lost in high seas.





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The world of Lady Gaga

Am back. After almost a week of absence. I had been doing an article for both the Saudi Gazette in Saudi Arabia and the Philippine Daily Inquirer in Manila. I work as an editor at the Gazette and write on the side for the Gazette's Expat Life weekly supplement and the Inquirer's Global Pinoy weekly page

Anyway, for this blog, I got the appetite to write about Lady Gaga and her ilk after my wife and I fetched our 14-year-old daughter from school this afternoon. On our way home, our child suddenly asked me if I knew the meaning of illuminati. "Do you mean illuminate?" I asked. "No, it's illuminati," she said. "Well, I don't know. It's the first time I heard the word," I said, then quipped. "Why did you ask?"
She said it's because her classmates told her that Lady Gaga, Rhiana and other singers whose names I failed to track down are illuminati. "And what does it mean?" I asked. It means, she said, that they don't believe in God. "They might have meant atheist," I said. But she insisted, "No, it's illuminati."
At home, I looked up the word illuminati in the dictionary and found it. It means "the enlightened, a name given to various religious sects, and especially to a society of German free-thinkers at the end of the 18th century." The other meaning is "people who claim to have special enlightenment."
I could think of Lady Gaga and Rhiana as free-thinkers if we take the word with reference to people who don't believe in God or give a room for doubts about His existence. If they have made any claim of being spiritually enlightened, I have no quarrel about it, either. Even nuts can make such a claim.
As I sat down to write this blog, I started to think how the meaning of words have kept on changing. In my younger days, I always associate the word enlightened with the intellectuals. Nowadays, the word seems to have been associated also with people who do not believe in God as if those who believe in religion have become morons.
I surmise that this all started from the time Copernicus disproved the Church's belief that the sun revolves around the earth. That was followed by the eras of Galileo and other great thinkers that pushed the Church against the wall and  ushered the age of enlightenment, known also as the age of reason because it was an era in which reason was advocated as the primary source of legitimacy and authority.
Let us fast-track forward the tape of time and we come to the age of Lady Gaga and her ilk. Their age, which is also ours, is a byproduct of the inventions of science that have made this world so complicated. Ours is an era of compartamentalized, hurried and harried life. If I may borrow an analogy, we have left the pan of simple living for the hell of an exhausting life.
Entertainment, which I used to think as a preoccupation of people who had nothing to do in life, has become a mainstream industry that gives people like Lady Gaga an income way beyond what most of our intellectuals get. Like religion, reason is losing ground to a new fad. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has complained that the new generation of Americans are reading less and partying more. We know the drift is not confined to the US.
I often hear the songs of Lady Gaga from the stereo of my car when I go to the office, drive home or take my family elsewhere after work. Although I could not make head and tails of her songs "Ra-ra-a-a-a ... Roma-roma-ma-ma ... Ola-la-Ola-la-la" or "Paparazzi, do you love me?" the young generation across the world loves her music.
There must be more to life than reason but must our life's journey lead us farther into the abyss of a sliding mundane drift?