Pop Love

Valentine’s Day. Cupid’s archery. Roses. Rings and other Blings.

Count on the commercial interests of the world to be able to effectively package love for consumers.

Back in 1965, Jackie DeShannon sang the Burt Bacharach song, What the World Needs Now is Love.

Surprisingly, a year later another singer, Deon Jackson (not to be confused with the football player) put out the song: Love Makes the World Go Round (1966).

This is evidence that in just one year love went from being the only thing that there was just too little of, to actually being found as the cause for planetary rotation. (I won’t bore you with the equations).

Later in 1969, Jackie DeShannon came back with another hit, to advise us to implant this love power into our respective cardiac systems, which would, as a result, improve the world.

Pop Love is our idea of what would make a better world. It was part of the Flower Power movement of the sixties, juxtaposing love (good) with war (bad), resulting in the memorable slogan: “Make love, not war.”

And what began as at least a semi-serious sentiment was quickly commercialized to sell products.

The one I most clearly recall from the early seventies was Coca-Cola Company’s linkage of world harmony with drinking a carbonated sugar beverage. They flew young people from all over the world and put them on a hill in Italy holding bottles of their product and then filmed them singing a modification of The New Seekers song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”

Here are the lyrics as modified by Coca-Cola:

I'd like to build a [buy the] world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves

I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to hold it in my arms [buy the world a Coke]
And keep it company

[That’s the real thing…
Coke is
What the world wants today
Coca Cola
It’s the real thing]

Warning! This song is a huge earworm (up there with It’s a Small Small World). Listen at your own risk.

So, what have we learned about love today class?

That there is a sentimental sappy sort of love that is about a life and a world we wished (usually when we were still children) existed. This Pop Love is easily commercially exploitable and for many businesses is truly what makes the world go round.

Tomorrow, let’s see if we can come up with a better way of understanding what love actually is.

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Today’s thoughts on last year’s posting.

It’s funny (at least to me who believes that everything can be made better through editing) that I didn’t change a word (well, I did find a typo). I am still amazed at how something so pure and beautiful as Love can be commercialized. On the other hand, this is not the world’s problem. The problem rests with me. The processes of changing and improving are against the culture and the norms. Due to the dramatic changes in the world today where hidden things are being exposed and trusted institutions are being revealed to be more corrupt and hollow than first imagined, the importance of strengthening my inner world is revealed to me as even more important than I first thought. Is this true with you as well?

Seeking a still point in life, is not to escape the realities of the corruption around all of us we are now beginning to see more clearly, but to find the courage to live against those forces seeking to bring us harm. Recently, I heard a statement that I think worth pondering and it is this: There is a strong and growing faction that hates our Constitution. Why? Because it goes against their desire to control our lives. This is so hard for me to believe because my rights as a free citizen seem logical and important to living a harmonious life and improving society. Unfortunately it is the same problem as I am describing between pop love and true love. Not everyone sees a problem where I do. If you, like many of us, are frustrated and worried about societal trends and the loss of the country as we have known it, please understand, you are not alone AND, most importantly, that God’s side triumphs in the end.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash