Far Too Much Credit Where No Credit Is Due

This article at First of the Month sees Glenn Beck as the logical, cultural result of the evolution (or perhaps devolution) of the radio personality from the Top 40 DJs of the 1950's who set the world on fire through the infamous Disco Record Burning that turned in to a riot at Comiskey Park in 1979 to the arrival of the shock jocks in the early 1990's.

I can't decide if this argument makes sense or is a load of cow pies.

Part of the reason I don't quite accept this entire line of argument is that the evolving nature of on-air programing on radio calcified so much in the mid-1980's that talk radio - whether of the political sort exemplified by Rush Limbaugh, or the early-morning drive talkers like Howard Stern or Indianapolis's Bob & Tom - may seem as huge audience draws; in fact, however, they merely stopped the bleeding of audience away from commercial radio. Their continued attraction belies the dearth of really creative programing by radio, any willingness to stake a position that might be taken as risky.

Of course, there are the twin, related phenomena of the Internet and Satellite radio, which, while perhaps playing to smaller, niche audiences, chip away at commercial radio's hegemony. The simple reality is that Beck, like Limbaugh and Stern and Bob & Tom, are not so much exemplars of a brave new era as the final result of the collapse of commercial radio, an evolutionary dead-end exemplified by the fact that one thing all of them have in common is a really limited audience. People who listen to Rush Limbaugh, say, aren't going to listen to Bob Dylan on XM Radio; people who sit and laugh during their morning commute with Bob and Tom aren't going to get in to the Hip-Hop program on Sirius Satellite Radio.

While it may be true that Glenn Beck is the natural result of the slide of radio in America, it is a slide downhill from importance and cultural significance to the sidelining of a media that, right now, is nearing senescence (like print). It might well be that Beck's "popularity" is attributable to the kind of demographics that give other radio gabbers Arbitron numbers necessary to stay on air. It might also be noted that these numbers really don't mean all that much precisely because they don't take in to consideration the reality that there are so many choices - not the least of them being simply switching the damn machine off and firing up the iPod.

I'd also be more impressed with this genealogy of the radio personality if it didn't take the infamous "Disco Sucks baseball riot" quite so seriously. Comparing it to a book burning is grotesque. Disco may or may not have sucked (like any musical form, it had its highlights and really low lights), but it was hardly killed off by one silly stunt, or even a kind of music-industry revulsion. Even the Bee Gees, who seemed to have difficulty during the mid-1980's getting anything like a record deal, spent most of the decade as quite successful producers of other people's material. Dance music in general never really went away; much of today's hip-hop, techno, and even house music is so similar to some of the best Disco had to offer they are virtually indistinguishable.

Furthermore, it is difficult to make people aware that the fracturing of the kind of national audience that seemed to arrive with the early rock-and-rollers in the 1950's, became a definite cultural/demographic event with the arrival of the Beatles, and seemed to ossify in the mid-1980's with the promotion of mediocrities like Journey, Loverboy, and REO Speedwagon has actually been a good thing. Even in the heyday of the swing era, the sense of generational solidarity was largely artificial, bracketed as it was by strict segregation. Tearing down the racial barriers in the 1950's helped create a large audience for a youth-oriented music; playing to the largest and wealthiest generational cohort in our nation's history certainly helped as well.

The fracturing of any sense of some kind of broad national appeal for any kind of music is actually a good thing. The arrival of talk radio should have clued in radio programmers not that something had arrived that would attract audience; rather, it should have clued them in that the emperor of a single national audience was now stripped bare for all to see. Like those Chicago southsiders who stormed the field at Comiskey Park thirty-one years ago, Glenn Beck's audience may, indeed make a lot of noise.

But in this case, Shakepeare's "tale told by an idiot" is a far more accurate description of what is happening.

Saturday Rock Show

I have a small - almost microscopic - place in my musical heart for Disturbed. Unlike Godsmack, who never rose above their own mediocrity, Disturbed has shown itself willing to become a better band over time. Plus, lead singer David Drayton just has something, like he's rock "it" guy. It's a weird combination of toughness and vulnerability that's really kind of admirable. Here's "Stricken".

The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name

On April 19, 1995, a rented truck, parked outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exploded, killing almost 190 people, including children in the day care center on one of the lower floors. Of the two men responsible, one, Timothy McVeigh, was executed; he showed no remorse for the death and destruction he caused.

In the summer of 1996, in the midst of the celebrations at the Olympic Games being held in Atlanta, a bomb smuggled in to someone's backpack exploded. The man eventually charged with that crime had already bombed a couple abortion clinics in Alabama, and had spent several years hiding out in the mountains of western North Carolina, aided and abetted by locals when he came down to town looking for free food.

Two years ago, a man steeped in right-wing rhetoric about the evil machinations of liberals wrote a long manifesto, including citing various right-wing media figures as the inspiration, entered a Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee on their Children's Sabbath Celebration and opened fire.

A doctor performing safe, legal abortions in Kansas was murdered as he served as head usher at his church.

Last year, a man convinced that Pres. Obama was about to enter all the homes of law-abiding citizens and steal their guns opened fire on police officers in Pittsburgh. He was killed in the exchange.

A couple weeks ago, a man enraged at being taxed flew his plane in to an IRS office building in Austin, TX, killing an accountant and himself.

Last spring, a white supremacist with links to the Tea Party movement walked up to the entrance of the National Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire; he fatally wounded a security guard who managed to return fire ending the spree before more could be injured or killed.

Last night, a man convinced that economic regulation was a violation of the Constitution very calmly walked up to the Pentagon and opened fire.

The current President of the United States served on the board of a community organization in Chicago with a former member of the Weather Underground years after that man had ceased to seek the violent overthrow of the United States government. There are still Americans who believe that the President "palled around with terrorists".

Some Nigerian manages to set his crotch on fire and the entire right-wing establishment loses their minds.

Is something wrong here?

Mean Kids

I am going to take a moment away from the usual. A Facebook friend, an acquaintance from high school days, was wondering why kids are so mean. I offered the opinion that kids are no more mean today. In fact, I said that we were quite cruel to one another. I also offered that I have learned from my wife that girls are actually far worse than boys in enforcing social strata during adolescence (how did I miss that?).

An interesting thing that I am constantly curious about is something called "high school hangover". There are people who escape from high school with so many scars from the teasing they received it sometimes seems their entire adulthood is a war against those who treated them so poorly. Funny thing is, if I was honest enough, I could very easily fall in to this trap. For whatever reason, up until I was, oh, a sophomore or junior in high school, I received quite a bit of ill-treatment from my peers. Nothing horrific, typical stuff - knocking books on the floor; I was once pantsed outside the junior high locker room (actually, I think that one is kind of funny, although only in retrospect); typical teasing about any kind of physical difference (in my case, red hair) - and with the advantage of hindsight, I really don't take any of it seriously. I just view it as kids being, well, kids.

Did it bother me at the time? I can't answer that question with any clarity, because, at 44, I am so far removed emotionally and in time and space from my adolescence that any honest evaluation of my emotional responses is impossible. I encounter a whole lot of people in my life, however, who have high school hangover. They burn with resentment at this or that slight, perceived or real. They carry grudges, remember their small victories, and, for the most part, run their lives as a reaction to whatever social ostracizing they received in high school.

I guess I view it all differently. For one thing, I have had a rich, full life in the quarter century since high school. I've lived in a variety of places, including fulfilling a childhood dream of living in the nation's capital. I got to know and can call friends people from all over the country, in a wide variety of occupations, with a wide variety of backgrounds, who live a wide variety of lives. I consider myself extremely blessed by my family, in particular my children, who teach me every day how safe it is to just act silly, to laugh at nonsense, to enjoy being alive. I live close enough to America's "Second City" to enjoy the benefits of that closeness without having to deal with the hassles.

Furthermore, as I have been in touch with childhood acquaintances, several of whom I first met in elementary school, I am so happy at how different our lives have turned out. Even those who have a rough road are still traveling down it, no small feat all things considered. With all the adolescent crap and baggage out of the way, with no pressure to be anyone other than ourselves, we can catch up on our lives, get to know each other's families and children. We have reached the relatively safe-harbor of early-middle-age and domesticity intact and can enjoy the fruits of life without needing to prove anything to one another.

Another thing to keep in mind; all of us, even the coolest of the cool kids, that good-looking guy who seemed so serene and self-confident, that girl whose face was clear of acne and had her pick of the best boys in school - we all were going through the same anxieties, the same fears and frustrations, suffered the same bouts of self-doubt, and even (horror of horrors!), worried what others thought of them. One thing I try to pound in to the head of my older daughter, who is just starting her journey in to adolescence, is all of us go through it together. There is a sense of solidarity, I guess, the idea that we are all in this thing together. Even the most cocksure jock, the most self-confident young cheerleader/student council President, alone in his or her room at night, lies there and wonders "Am I good enough? Who am I, anyway?"

So, while I try to avoid rose-colored contact lenses as I look back, I guess I don't worry all that much about something this or that person said or did to me back in the dim, dark days of 1979 or 1983; there was more than enough good, more than enough friends, and certainly more than enough laughter and sheer joy to make up for the occasional nincompoop who could only assert his or her social standing at the expense of another.

My older daughter is like me in many ways. Shorter than most of her classmates, she is only now, at 12, starting a serious growth spurt (I keep telling her that I didn't have mine until I was a sophomore; she has an advantage being a girl that way). She also, like me, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is easily hurt by the casual nonsense of other kids. In the fourth grade, for example, some kids were calling her "shrimp" because she was so short. She came home crying one day, and asked for advice. I told her to look those kids in the eye and say, "You know what? I may be short, but you're ugly and I'll grow!" (shameless theft from Winston Churchill). My daughter is much more kind-hearted than I am now or ever was, and said, "Dad, I can't say that!"

You know what? She's right. First of all, that's stooping to their level. For another thing, that kind of thing isn't "mean"; like a small set of girls who spent last year reminding Moriah that she is "skinny" (I keep telling her that , first off, she is thin not skinny; second, this isn't exactly an insult), it might just be jealousy. I do believe she needs to toughen up a bit, and not take those occasional slings and arrows too hard.

After all, her teen years will end, and her life will be rich and full of all sorts of things that come after. Don't brood on the silly things people say and do.

Another Open Invitation Experiment Thingy

The last one didn't go so well. Rather than surrender, I am going to march gamely on in a spirit of scientific enterprise and try again.

Ahem.

Folks on the right have issues with paying federal income taxes. They often cite the complaints of some of the founders as the source for their discontent. Yet, since part of the issue prior to the colonial revolt was not "taxes" but the violation of the British Constitution - no representation in the Parliament that was imposing the taxes - I'm curious as to how they square their opposition, particularly to income taxes, with the deeper resentment that existed in the 1770's.

Invitations to go out forthwith.

Noted In Passing

I heard a report on All Things Considered tonight (can't find it in the rundown of tonight's show posted on-line) about Sen. Joe Lieberman's legislation proposing an end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The reporter narrating used one of those turns of phrase that make me furious. He said, "Some members of the Joint Chiefs believe that repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell would harm unit cohesion" (or some such thing). On the other hand, the only actual member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff named is the chair, Admiral Mike Mullen, who favors repeal of DADT. So, who are those members of the Joint Chiefs who disagree? Why are they unwilling to go on record opposing their chief, or the possibility of repeal?

More to the point, do they even exist?

Culture, Society, Politics

While reading Dennis McNally's excellent biography of The Grateful Dead, I kept musing at how naive the members of the band were. Insisting they were "apolitical", they nevertheless played for the students striking at Columbia University; after meeting Eldridge Cleaver on an airplane ride, Garcia became a good friend of the Oakland-based Black Panthers. Even the bands surging popularity in the late-1980's was a stark counterpoint to the dullness of late-Reaganism.

I have always been fascinated by the link between culture - art, music, literature - and their social and political dimensions. Just a glance at American art - our literature, our painting, most especially our music - since the end of the Civil War, you can see how our artists struggled not only to understand what "America" was, but (far more important) what America could be. Whitman's poetry, the music of the blues, Ragtime pianists, Twain's Huckleberry Finn (which is one of the great statements about race and humanity to emerge in the English language); the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood not only wrap up previous ideas of what it means to be America. They also push us to think what America might be should we surrender to the better angels of our collective history. Especially with the rise of "Ragtime" music in the years just prior to American entry in to the First World War, and the various attempts by white cultural gate-keepers to keep the invasion of Centaurs at bay, we have a dress-rehearsal for the overwhelming, and largely on-going, fight between those artists who continue to push the boundaries, not just aesthetically, but socially and politically, and the countervailing tendencies, commercial and social and political, to contain these forces (and maybe make a buck off them, too). Why else, just as a "fer-instance", do we now have attempts to make of Norman Rockwell some kind of subversive "artist", even more subversive than, say, the abstract expressionists?*

Cultural phenomena - painting and sculpture, the novel and poetry, music and dance, even public landscaping and architecture - all have as their primary intent the desire on the part of their creator to communicate. The best artists, musicians, architects manage to communicate not just feeling, but present actual thought in a non-linguistic "set" that forces us to render it linguistically. Even the novel and the poem, the "text" apotheosized, become "non-textual" as we turn to our consideration of them, objects in their own right, ripe for study (I owe Richard Rorty's essay, "Texts and Lumps", for this particular notion).

Consider the murals of Benton. Part of Benton's mastery was a presentation, one might say an over-indulgence, of imagery that offered not just a view of America, but an opinion, a perspective on that view that challenged the viewer.

Consider Frank Lloyd Wright's reconceptualization of space.

Consider Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit".

All of these - paintings, buildings and open spaces, songs - not only summed up their moment. They pushed us, challenged us, sometimes even enraged us. They did so because the best art is "representational" (mimetic, to borrow a fancy term to which I was recently reintroduced) precisely as it repackages our received ideas, and adds a further, "But, what about this?"

Thus, it is naive of anyone to believe that a musician has no impact on society or politics. It is naive to think that politics has no impact on our culture. The "cultural politics" of the right over the past quarter century has been a dismal failure precisely because those on the right believed that Americans have always rested contentedly within the bosom of certain cultural comforts. Even a casual glance at American cultural history shows a far more dynamic interchange, including the efforts to subvert subversion (as it were) through hyper-commercialization. In other words, some business folks see an opportunity to snag the main chance. While this has produced casualties, and a few people become filthy rich at the expense of the originators of this or that particular cultural product, American culture has never rested on its laurels. It has never settled for commercial profitability, or popular appeal, as defining what makes it a success. We Americans are Romantic enough at heart to be far more satisfied that something one or another of us has done has impacted the life of one or two other persons.

Sometimes, though, a song, a painting, a park, can spark not just some happiness; sometimes, it can change the way we live our lives.

*One Saturday Evening Post cover has a young man standing and looking quizzically at a Pollock-like painting. I love it precisely because the juxtaposition of the droll illustrator actually rendering a piece of art makes this particular sketch something more. It is a rare instance of Rockwell, who enjoyed modern art, going beyond his own limitations.

Jim Bunning - Dick

That's Jon Stewart's verdict. I haven't found any reason to disagree.

Posing as a deficit-hawk - "You don't pay for it!" - is easy enough, I suppose. Except, of course, all sorts of government programs get passed, then have the money for them allocated. Bunning's "principled stand" was nothing more than political theater; lucky for America, it exposed how ludicrous the Republican Party in the Senate is.

He has rolled now that the senior members of his party's leadership in the Senate realized how bad he made them all look.

This Is One Reason Why I Believe Marx Is Such A Superb Diagnostician

Via Scott. Here's the quote from St. Karl in full.

As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

Quite apart from any question as to the intelligence or acumen of Glenn Beck (or any other current or former right-winger for whom any action on the part of American liberalism is indistinguishable from socialism), isn't it remarkable that Marx understood how liberalism would, in the end, eat itself to defend its very survival? Everything gets tossed over the side in defense of the interest of capital. We saw that during the Bush Administration as "the war on terror" became the excuse for sweeping the Constitution under the rug. Now, out of power, the right has no recourse but to screech from the rooftops that the other capitalist party is, in fact, socialist.

The Writer's Voice

I never quite know what to think when this happens. It is one thing to type this stuff in my little kitchen study and press the publish button. It is quite another to have people whose professional status I admire not only read it, but consider it worth reading and criticizing (yeah, even that long-ago link by David Frum is something I treasure).

Having said that, Scott makes an important point, one I missed completely.

Actually I don't really praise it so much as emphasize it. Or rather, to be more precise, note how Danto emphasizes it

This is a fundamental misreading of the original post. I made the mistake of saying the person who wrote the post said such-and-such, while in fact the author was actually quoting someone else. He does so for a reason, to be sure; yet, it is not his voice, and I made that fundamental error.

One would think that someone who does this whole reading-and-writing thing for a very time-consuming hobby would understand the basic difference between the writer's particular voice, and that same writer citing another for a particular point. It really is reading comprehension 101, and I goofed.

I can quote another writer here, either favorably or not, to my heart's content; yet in doing so I am usually pretty careful to make both the context of the quote in question as well as my own perspective on the quote pretty clear. This is especially necessary because of the very bad habit many folks have, say, of cherry-picking a comment or two and attributing it to the author of the post to which the comment is posted. Bill O'Reilly is well known for this particular trick.

I think this is an important point. Every writer seeks out like-minded souls to bolster an argument, or to draw out a particular point, or with which to contrast. Making the distinction clear between one's own voice and that of someone else is necessary. Understanding that distinction is also necessary, from the reader's point of view. Part of the problem on the internet, at least from my own experience, is the confusion of voice - we far too often misread something as coming from a particular voice (the writer of an article we are reading), when in fact it might very well not be that person's voice at all.

So, I take this as an object-lesson. I need to be far more careful in my reading. I need to be more careful in citing another's writing to make sure attribution is clear.

More On Religious Belief

I've asked the first question. The response, which seems to make a certain amount of sense, still begs further questions, which I think need to be articulated.

Is religion nothing more than a psychological yearning? Then, received religious norms which we give names like "Christianity", "Islam", "Buddhism", and so on are nothing more than a socialized structure given to these inchoate, personal yearnings. These latter phenomena are the groups answer to the individual question, it would seem.

If that is a fair description of the dynamics according to the understanding given, it would at the very least explain the often violent reaction many people have when their beliefs are questioned. Rather than an attack on some external, received ideas, they are understood to be a deeply personal attack on an individual's sense of herself in relation to the Universe. Questioning the very existence of God becomes a surrogate for questioning an individual's grasp of reality.

Yet, we are still confronted with certain questions that cannot be addressed by turning this issue in to an interplay of interpersonal psychodynamics. What of those individuals who insist that their belief comes not through a process of pyscho-social integration, but rather as a result of intervention from "outside" (to use an ill-defined term)? Do we insist that individual's experience is not in fact from outside their understanding, but rather from deep within their psyches? What of various religious groups attempts to regulate these experiences through what could be called (to use a very Christian term) the monastic tradition? Even loosely organized, local deities have their shamans, their holy men and women, whose understanding and experience outstrips that of others, and are given pride of place in their communities for this very reason. Are they nothing more than borderline personalities whose disorders are misconstrued by a community unfamiliar with the workings of the human mind? This question, to me, creates a host of issues, not the least of them being: Do we really understand the human mind well-enough, thoroughly enough, not only to make the assertion that religious belief is such a thing, but that others who do not do so are insufficient in their grasp of it?

Seems pretty haughty to me to tell other social groups they don't understand their own world as well as we do, who observe it from outside.

There is a functional understanding and approach to religious belief, typified by the work of, say, Henry Nelson Weiman, that would seek to understand religious belief solely through its social and psychological function, without reference to any ideological or theological content. Yet, without even an elementary grasp of that content, how can any interpretation of religious practice be anything other than guesswork? Fortunately, Wieman indeed had that grasp - even though he rejected it - and his work is an important part of any understanding of American religious belief and practice.

To stand outside any set of religious beliefs and insist that those inside are merely responding to a deeply-felt human need, given shape and substance by various historic religious practices really doesn't answer the question as to why religion has continued to play an important part in human affairs, even in the West, which pronounced over the alleged corpse of religious belief centuries ago.

I have no answer to these and more questions; particularly since, as Charles Taylor details, the process of secularization in the West has a kind of inexorable quality to it. I only ask them because I have a sense that the whole "its just a human need for transcendence" response just doesn't satisfy a basic principle of scientific inquiry - not only does it not address all the relevant phenomena, it doesn't offer opportunities for further understanding.

Music For Your Monday

Haven't mentioned them in a while, but the Japanese psychedelic band Acid Mother's Temple is too much fun to ignore for too long. This partial compilation of one of their longer (nearly an hour!) pieces shows them in fine fettle and form. "Pink Lady Lemonade"!

High And Low Really Don't Mean Anything

On 25 August 1830, at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, an uprising followed a special performance (in honor of William I's birthday) of Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici), a sentimental and patriotic opera suited to fire National Romanticism, for it was set against Masaniello's uprising against the Spanish masters of Naples in the 17th century. The duet, "Amour sacré de la patrie", (Sacred love of Fatherland) with Adolphe Nourrit in the tenor role, engendered a riot that became the spark for the Belgian Revolution. The crowd poured into the streets after the performance, shouting patriotic slogans, and swiftly took possession of government buildings. The coming days saw an explosion of the desperate and exasperated proletariat of Brussels.

This story of one of the more important opera riots in European history is offered as a case-study in how odd our current notions of "high" versus "low" art really are.

Another might just be the case of the development of jazz in the 1950's. The complications of the war years - everything from the more famous and talented musicians entering the service to a recording ban - led to an explosion of a whole new direction in the early years after the war. Even as the (white) Big Band leaders were off serving in the military, younger (black) musicians were hanging out on 52nd Street in New York, gathering at places like Minton's after hours and just playing. Among those young musicians was Dizzy Gillespie, a gifted, musically-educated trumpeter, who had all sorts of ideas as to what might be possible with the music. By the time the war was over, he had gathered a small troop of like-minded musicians - Charlie Parker, Miles Davis - and managed to record a few sides. One of them, the marvelous up-tempo, frenetic "Salt Peanuts", was a kind of template for the music that would soon overwhelm the jazz audience. Once, it was nothing more than danceable tunes. Now, it would be something more, something exciting, something that no one could dance to. By the 1960's, the club scene would be replaced, at least among the more prominent musicians, with the concert hall scene. No more America's dance music, jazz had been transformed in to a kind of performance art, its audience quiet and thoughtful, sitting and listening, rather than dancing and shouting.

The etiquette that surrounds, say, a symphonic or operatic performance is a very late idea. These were as much popular art forms as they were meant for the aristocracy; even then, the audience was far more raucous than any such performance today.

My guess is that, in forty or fifty years, my grandchildren will attend concerts where musicians, dressed in "period" clothing will play the music of the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and other rock and roll pioneers in sedate silence, quietly seated, applauding with decorum. The idea that this music was, once upon a time, the scene of uninhibited, orgy-like social passions, will seem odd and quaint.

At least with music, I find the distinctions between what is, or perhaps should be, considered "high" versus "low" art to be arbitrary. Even at its suited-up-for-the-concert-hall best, jazz is still jazz, a music born in bars and clubs in New Orleans, many of it best practitioners junkies and drunks, and even occasionally murderers. One can produce A Symphonic Tribute to The Grateful Dead, but its still just the Dead's songs.

We can reward ourselves for our refinement as we prefer, say, a Baroque symphony over a Phish concert, but these are matters of taste that have nothing to do with whether or not one or the other of these can be classed as "high" art and another as "low" or "popular" art (I cannot imagine saying the music of Phish is "popular" by some standard measure).

I write all this in response to Jennifer Bernstein's stated perference for preserving something of "high art" as opposed to eliminating that distinction altogether. At least as various tastes and forms come and go in musical forms, it seems to me these really have no meaning.