Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "The Power of Love"

Mere hours after posting an intent to be less vituperative and more understanding in resolving my anger at various injustices, I received a test - and promptly failed.

I'd just come home from buying a Christmas tree - that's how full of reconciliatory cheer I was - when I got word of a friend's cousin having been ejected from a Madonna concert (of all places!) and arrested for unwarranted reasons of outright homophobia, the arena security and Denver police being all too willing accomplices. Suddenly the holiday cheer evaporated and all I wanted to do with that Christmas tree was to ram it up a certain Denver policeman's rectum.

So much for "Right Thought."

Earlier that day I'd been listening to a British Christmas-music station called Play Xmas UK: its playlist is heavy on A Very Special Christmas but with its share of novelties and oddities, and a few songs one wouldn't necessarily think of as holiday tunes. Among them: "The Power of Love" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a dramatic, sweeping ballad that followed after the nihilistic bombast of "Relax" and "Two Tribes." It's in the setlist in large part for its birth-of-Jesus video, and probably in part because it was a Christmas #1 in the U.K. But if Christmas is a time of love and forgiveness and coming together - a notion I'm distrustful of, given what I've seen of the nominal "Christians" of Middle America - I would like to think it was included as well because its message of redemption, of love transcending barriers and impediments, is just as much a part of the season. And it's made all the stronger by its delivery from a group of unapologetic homosexuals - not the easiest path to have trod in 1984. Now that's what I call reconciling.

The song's is a powerful message, however one takes it. And I hope that my friend's cousin has a chance to listen to "The Power of Love" and draw from it spirit as well as the song's equally palpable note of defiance. "Make love your goal," Jerome, and don't let the bastards get you down - if you can do this, live this power of love, you'll be a better man than I.