A Comment On The Origins Of Jazz

[RonPrice]

CHANGING ORDERS

 

They were a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.

-Scott Fitzgerald in Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Secularization in Three Novelists--Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Henry Idema III, Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 1990, p.5.

 

An old world was dieing

all around them as they*

laid the foundation for

the new one so few knew.

 

At the Somme and

Passchendaele the

dull thunder of the guns,

the trench warfare

 

saw millions die while

He quietly penned more

Tablets** for a different

kind of war for a new Order.

 

It was just then taking its

first form as that great war

was enduing and orders were

changing directions and forms.

 

But it all happened so quietly

as noise changed the face of Europe,

as religions died on the battlefield

and people in the millions turned to

 

sex, alcohol and secular substitutes.

They roared into the twenties with

the flapper, bathtub gin, howling jazz,

silent screen movies, lavish mansions,

 

sleek automobiles, and lots of glitter

and tinsel--missing the first formative

years of an Order that would change

the face of history and exhaust the energies

 

of a young man and make him old, old

before his time; holding the world, the

new Order on his shoulders was too much

as the world went hedonistic, went for pleasure.

 

Ron Price

5 March 1996

 

* they='Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi

** Tablets= Tablets of the Divine Plan