Life Is A Cabaret...Old Chum
The actor Shia LaBeouf made news by being arrested after causing a disturbance at a Broadway showing of Cabaret. I remember enjoying the same play back in the early seventies at the Stephen Foster Memorial performing arts center on the Pitt campus, and I remember the extraordinary talents of Lisa Minnelli in the film of the same name but the storyline always had an unsettling effect on me. As I think back on it today it's even more unsettling, for our culture resembles a hedonist cabaret in the last days of the Weimar Republic as totalitarianism watches our antics and plans our demise.
As Lisa Minnelli's character succumbs to the death spiral of the cabaret at the end of the film she belts out the title song that I'm sure you are familiar with, some of the lyrics of which are:
Life is a cabaret,
Old chum
Come to the cabaret
Come taste the wine,
Come hear the band,
Time for a holiday
Start celebrating,
Right his way
Your table's waiting
No use permitting some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away
Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
Isn't that long a stay old
Life is a cabaret, old chum
It's only a cabaret, old chum
And I love a cabaret
"God Gave Us Barack Obama"
I chose the New American Standard Bible for this verse from Hosea 9:7... "The days of punishment have come; Let Israel know this! The prophet is a fool, The inspired man is demented, Because of the grossness of your iniquity, And because your hostility is so great."
Those faithful preachers who weep in their pulpits....who weep for America, for their children and their children's children, and who weep at what America and the American church has become, are thought of as country bumpkins, fundamentalist fools and worse. Such is the state of the American mind in this age of rampant rebellion and toxic temperance towards godlessness as our nation surrenders on every hill. Such is the hostility to anything that might interfere with plans and goals.
There is no excuse for not seeing the imminent peril our nation faces. There are reasons but not excuses. Our nation's leaders are the beginnings of our punishment. In speaking to a church congregation this past week, New York Congressman Charlie Rangel made this statement..."God gave us Barack Obama." He probably never spoke truer words.
There has never been a perfect storm as is brewing today and we are rapidly becoming a police state as it is about to hit. Yet we party on. Billy Graham has been consistent in his warnings to America. John MacArthur has been consistent also, but we don't have ears to hear, and we don't have eyes to see. We are deaf to the Approaching Hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to use the title of a 1985 book by Rev. Graham
Fervent prayer, steeped in humility and salted with our sweat is our only hope, our only defensive weapon.
