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, 5 : Tupac and the Fall on the Road to Calvary Page 3 of 4 side--to dominate. Jn the society that worships not God or Jesus but the free market, competition and "the sanctity of the contract,” compassion and forgiveness have been erased. When was the last time you offered a cold cup of water to the sick or visited the imprisoned? But no artist is bound entirely by the prejudices of his time. Great artists transcend our everyday pettiness. There is no excuse for the Tupac lyrics that demean other people, and in portraying violence with so much explicitness that it became for some sad souls allegedly attractive, he played a dangerous game. Great art, we have been reassured, escapes the small-minded bigotry of its tume. Maybe not always. If we looked at The Falf on the Road to Calvary the way the art of Tupac and other rap performers is usually seen, Jesus and Mary would not be the central figures. For standing just above Jesus in the picture, closer to its center and with a more directly active role in the proceedings, is a large muscular man. His , head is turned to the right, where a mounted Roman officer waves papers at him; this is surely Simon the Cyrene, the man who according to the gospels was ordered to help Jesus carry the cross after he stumbled, Simon is represented here, however, in another unmistakable way: Raphael drew this Libyan Jew, alone among the company, with a huge hooked nose, which in his time was a way of saying "Hymietown." Judged the way our society judges rap--by caricature, not context--The Fall on the Road to Calvary is antisemitic. According to Luke (23:28-31), the women looking on wept when Jesus stumbled, and he found the energy to speak to them. "Daughters of Jerusalem," Luke has him say, "weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold the days are coming in the which they shall say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shal) they begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, 'Cover us,"" If do not quite believe that we have reached those days, Tupac is one of the reasons. With all my heart, I wish that he had had the time to grow in wisdom and maturity; that he could have avoided the lethal? situations into which he continued to fali. But I have seen his video for "J Ain't Mad At Cha" and I know that he had come much further along the path than those who treat him as if he were the murderer. That video has mostly been described in terms of its sensational operiing moments, in which Tupac is shot in the chest and dies, "just like in reality"; and inevitably, in terms of the dead musical celebrities that Tupac then encounters in heaven. But those details have nothing to do with what the video is about, nor is it surprising that folks would rather talk about anything else, including trivia. Because the true topic of "I Ain't Mad At Cha” is precisely compassion and forgiveness. In the video, Tupac forgives everyone--the brothers known and unknown who could not stay the course, his partners in Thug Life, the mother about whom his music often expressed such deep but conflicted emotion but who stayed beside him (that look undoubtedly upon her face) that tong week in the hospital, those who condemned him from the start and along the way. Oct 18 1996 08:48 AM