03.23.12
Who knew Fort Bragg was loaded with sissies?
Latest mainstream news controversy, the flip side of the Gary Stein coin, a soldier who got his rock concert for atheists approved at Fort Bragg after a long battle for equal representation.
This as a personal cause, a counterbalance to Rock the Fort, a big concert Billy Graham Ministries puts on for the airborne troops.
After a sometimes painful 18 months of gestation, Sgt. Justin Griffith of Fort Bragg, N.C., exclaims, “My baby is about to be born!” His baby is Rock Beyond Belief, apparently the first major atheist event on a U.S. military base.
Griffith, 29, who has served five years in the Army, including two deployments to Iraq, has been wrestling with the overwhelmingly Christian establishment in the Army since September 2010 to get to this point.
The March 31 event is Griffith’s answer to Rock the Fort — a day-long evangelical Christian concert and festival held at Fort Bragg on Sept. 25, 2010, put on by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, with the support and blessing of the military brass. It was the fourth in a series of events sponsored by the group on various U.S. bases dating to 2009.
Among the headliners for the all-day atheist festival on the base are scientist Richard Dawkins, the rock band Aiden and singer/songwriter Roy Zimmerman.
I can consult my rock critic pals like Chuck Eddy and Metal Mike Saunders about the bill. We’d have a really good laugh at the idea.
Richard Dawkins and rock. Not in this universe. Dawkins is big with tech nerds. It’s his audience.
The XVIII Airborne Corps and the US Army Special Operations Command? And Richard Dawkins? You’ll have to pay ’em to go, and maybe even then they’d just run off with the money for some decent beer. That’s what I’d do.
Fort Bragg, not exactly the place you’d find wimpish tech geek fans of Richard Dawkins, despite the post’s tongue-in-cheek title.
Rock the Fort, the Billy Graham Ministries organized festival, doesn’t have quite as bad a bill as Rock Beyond Belief.
But it’s still total crap.
The headliner is Hawk Nelson, a Canadian band accurately described as as second or third tier sissy boy rock.
There are a lot of sweater vest and polo shirt twinky rock bands in North America. The Jonas Brothers and Disney TV guaranteed it. Hawk Nelson aren’t even close to being the best, if that’s the word to use.
The video — well, the little cheer-leading girls are nice.
Real big in the US Army’s airborne corps. Fer sure.
By the way, you can still vote for something a lot better than this dross. Unlike all the above, we do rock. Plus we’re mean and old coots, despising activist atheists and proselytizing evangelicals equally.