Josip Broz Tito: Rock and Roll God.

"Just take those old records off the shelf..." - Bob Seger


I heard the phrase “Rock Star” all over the teevee and internets today. From some CBS mini-mini documentary to Steve Gilliard, conversation on the nature of the David Bowieness of the Pope and what happens to the rest of the band now that he has gone off to pursue a solo career in the Great Gig in the Sky is afoot in the land.

So let’s talk about that for a bit.

The Catholic Church in North and South America have already both made it abundantly clear for a long time that when it came to the Big Giant Head of their faith, they loved him like a milkshake. Big crowds. Lighters held aloft. Demands for encores. Seriously, they dug him: He was a celebrity and lived in a faraway land and knew many languages and was cool in a Shoes of the Fisherman kind of way in the same sense that Lou Reed is cool in an edgy poet, New York, “Walk on the Wild Side” kind of way.

However, it is equally obvious that in the U.S., for example, Catholics have consistently told the Big Giant Head to fuck off when it comes to matters of practice and personal choice.
Catholics here divorce freely, use condoms, take the Pill, screw around outside of marriage and vote for the Death Penalty in equal or slightly higher numbers than the average American.

Loved the “Papal”: Ignored the Bull...picking and choosing what they wanted from the dogma pile like a nine-year-old winnowing down his Trick-or-Treat Candy. And really without much consequence, so hey, as long as they had a charismatic, multilingual Rock Star wearing the Fisherman's Ring, it was all good. The reality of this Soft Schism, like the reality of the horrific damage done by the Bribery, Extortion and Cover-Ups sanctioned by the Church to shelter the Child Rapists in their midst, could be glossed over as long as David Bowie was the house musician at Vatican.

The problem is, when you come right down to it, rock stars come and rock stars go, but the Authoritarian impulse of the Catholic Church continues on and on, resisting modernization and fearing the encroachment into the God market of competing brands such as Islam. And a whole lot of the Catholic world has lost its taste for big parts of the quaint, 14th century horse-and-buggery (Sorry. Couldn’t help that) product that the Vatican is still trying to flog in the age of Mars probes, ubiquitous digital communication and genetic engineering.

So what happens when when your whole thing depends on the persona of Kurt Cobain, and Kurt Cobain checks out?

Cue montage. Calendar running backwards.

1945: Josip Broz Tito elected premier and minister of defense of Yugoslavia.

1948: Marshall Tito breaks many of his ties with Stalin. Remains communist in name, but tells Moscow to MYOB, and eases off on the repression. The religious and ethnic tensions that were always close to the surface in polyglot Yugoslavia are kept under control by Tito’s reputation and personal charisma (and the apparatus of the State at his command)

1980: Rock Star Marshall Tito dies. Less than a decade later Yugoslavia loses its mind, collapses in bloody internecine warfare. “Ethnic Cleansing” becomes a household word. The region tears itself apart into little pieces called Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzogovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia. You might have read about it in the papers.

Just something to think about.