"'Bat Out of Hell' was rejected by dozens of record companies before the album was finally released by Cleveland International, a small label.... It received tepid, even hostile reviews at first."

"But through relentless touring and a 1978 appearance on NBC’s 'Saturday Night Live,' Meat Loaf found an audience, making 'Bat Out of Hell' an enormous, if unexpected hit.... Its signature tune, 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light'... was an ornate melodrama about a teenage make-out session... more than eight minutes long and [it] even contained a long segment narrated by Hall of Fame baseball player and broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, describing a batter rounding the bases and sliding into home. (Rizzuto said he didn’t realize his description was meant to be an elaborate sexual metaphor.) His musical secret, Meat Loaf said, was that he approached every song like an actor preparing for a role. 'I can’t sing unless there’s a character... Because I don’t sing. It’s almost like being schizophrenic — I don’t sing, the character sings.' Early in his career, the long-haired, 300-pound Meat Loaf was openly mocked by critics — and even by [his collaborator Jim] Steinman, who once called him 'a grotesque, bloated creature, who stalked the stage like an animal but acted as if he were a prince.'"

From WaPo's very lengthy obituary, "Meat Loaf, whose operatic rock anthems made him an unlikely pop star, dies at 74."

This wasn't my kind of music, but I can admire his work from afar. People loved him in "The Rocky Horror Show,” and he had a very interesting role in "Fight Club." 

 

And he's got a great Donald Trump connection — "Meat Loaf, should I run for President?" 

 

Later, "You look in my eyes: I am the last person in the fucking world you EVER want to fuck with":

"I will stand in this breach."

Said President Biden, in his speech yesterday. You can encounter the line in context at the end of my previous post. 

This post is to examine the idiom. What are we talking about when we say "stand in the breach"? I think of Shakespeare's "Once more unto the breach." It's about taking up a warlike frame of mind:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood...

So "the breach" is a broken open place in some fortifying wall, and the idea is to move through that space, into battle. If they don't move forward, the argument is that they will pile up dead until their bodies fill that space — close the wall up.

But that's about using the breach as an entry point into battle, not just standing there, which seems to be a poor military tactic.

From about the same time period, there is the King James Version of the Bible (1611), Psalm 106:23:

23 Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.

There, "the breach" is the broken connection between God and human beings, and Moses was able to stand in that breach. To say "I will stand in this breach" — as Biden did — is to draw a parallel between yourself and Moses. Does Biden mean that the country is broken open with angry Trumpsters on one side and the rest of the people needing mediation that Biden, like Moses, can bring? It's a funny analogy, because not only is Biden a strange Moses, but because the nefarious insurrectionists are in the God position.

The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the phrase "to stand in the breach." One definition of "breach" is "The product of breaking... esp. 'A gap in a fortification made by a battery’ (Johnson). Hence to stand in the breach (often figurative)." The only example it gives of standing in the breach that Psalm (in the King James Version).

Searching a bit more, I see that there are some translations of the Bible that have the phrase "stand in the breach" in Ezekiel 22:30: "And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none."

Trumpsters perk up at "a man among them who should build up the wall." 

That's as far as I'll go in this blog post. I have a problem with understanding "the breach" as a break in a wall, because I don't see the effectiveness of simply standing there. I think it ought to mean a division between groups of people and serving as a mediator.