kumbaya

Is any song more derided than "Kumbaya?" At the moment, "We Built This City" can only be called a close second.

"Kumbaya" is almost never mentioned in an approving way. It's nearing a Godwin's-Law-like status in online argumentation: in any discussion that goes on long enough, the less liberal person will deploy it against the more liberal one. (And always with a message: "You don't know the real world. I do.")

But there's something odd, and important, about that derision.

Anyone who's never heard the song could be forgiven for thinking it's a hippie-happy song of naïve optimism. Bland. Denatured piety, cheap heaven stripped of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. An unrealistic hope for togetherness.

Of course, anyone who has heard the Gullah folk song, actually heard it, knows that it's very nearly the opposite of all that. It's a wail. A keening call for God to appear in the midst of a fallen, broken world.

To hear this song with such deaf ears, then ridicule it — to characterize it so wrongly only to spend 40 years sneering at it for being exactly what it isn't!

What a perfect picture of our moment.