Josephine the Songstress

Should it perhaps be that in this manner Josephine was right after all when she made her claim that she infuses new powers into us during troubled times? How else could one explain it?-Josephine's contingent of flatterers piped up in their uncritical impertinence-how else was one to explain the great rush of the public, and especially under such dire circum-stances that threatened us, a rush that, indeed, sometimes would prevent us from being able to mount a sufficient defense, that we do so in a timely manner! Now, the latter point is quite right but certainly this doesn't belong amongst Josephine's claims to fame, and most particularly not when one adds on that when her concerts were unexpectedly disrupted by an assault from our enemies and, indeed, there would be any number of casualties on our side, that many of us had to lay down our lives for the defense-and Josephine, then, she who was totally responsible and who bore the guilt, indeed it might even have been her whistling itself that attracted our enemy's attention and drew him our way, Josephine was always in the safest spot and she was also the first to disappear, whisked away hurriedly and quietly amongst her protecting contingent of admirers. But this too, everybody knows that this, fundamentally, is just the way it is and all the same this doesn't slow anyone down the next time around, whenever and wherever Josephine may get carried away and express her devotion to music, taking it into her head to rise up and give us another of her performances. From this-for this, indeed, is something that is extreme-from this one could make the deduction that Josephine's position is one that basically stands outside of the law, that she is permitted to do whatever she pleases and that everything will be forgiven. If this really were to be the case then Josephine's conten-tions would be totally understandable-yes, one could to a certain extent see in this freedom that the folk would have bestowed upon her, in such an extra-ordinary, uniquely privileged gift, this bestowal that-truth to tell-contradicts what the law requires, one could see a confirmation of the fact that, just as Josephine asserts, the folk doesn't understand anything at all of what she's about, that it stands helplessly in awe before her artistry, that it is unworthy and abashed by its incapacity and that as recompense for this 'wrong' that it has inflicted upon her, that all of these misunderstandings might be balanced out-or at least it strives to balance them out-that just as her art extends beyond their capacities of conceptualization, so too her person and her wishes are placed beyond their authority: that, in short, she is immune from the commands and from the powers of the ruling authority. Now, indeed, this isn't right-utterly and totally not; perhaps as individuals our folk is liable to capitulate to Josephine's whims all too quickly but just as our folk doesn't capitulate to anyone at all in an unconditional manner, so too it doesn't do so for her. And it's quite easy to prove this. Already for quite some time, perhaps even right off from the beginning of her self-promotion as an artiste, Josephine has fought for the privilege of being excused from doing any other work other than her singing -that she should be released from all of the cares regarding the earning of one's daily bread and, likewise, from everything else that is somehow related to our struggle for survival, and that all of this should be placed, most probably, upon the shoulders of the entire community, upon our folk as a whole. There are idealists, people who are quick to grasp at the spirit-I do believe that even yet there are a few such amongst us-who simply due to the bold extrava-gance and oddity of such an assertion, that this spirited boldness all alone would be enough to convince them of the inner justification of such a stance. Well, our folk draws its own conclusions and doesn't waste a whole lot of time in calmly speaking its mind: No way José.