Like, Oh My God!

On the one hand, part of me just wants to say, "Ugh!" to this Matt Yglesias piece, which takes off from Miley Cyrus as a criticism of the recent Ponnuru/Lowry nonsense on American exceptionalism.

On the other hand, this is precisely what I was writing about in my previous post. Even something as droll, contrived, and artificial as a Miley Cyrus song can offer us a glimpse of ourselves if we allow ourselves the freedom to think about it.

Better cultural commentary follows, though . . .

Christianity & Culture - Some Thoughts

A couple generations ago, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote what is now considered the classic Christ and Culture. Rather than a detailed discussion of the relationship between being a Christian and living in society and participating in culture, it was a meta-narrative of various ways Christians have and do live in relation to the culture in which they find themselves. A student of the religious philosopher (he was once a theologian, but turned in later life to a more detached view) Ernst Troeltsch, Niebuhr approached the question of the relationship between being a Christian and living in society from the outside.

Rather than take such an "angel's eye view" of the issue, I much prefer to stand firmly at the intersection of my faith and the culture within which I live, and try to understand what it means to be a Christian. My various wrestlings with music, literature, art, pop culture in general, all start from the premise that, as a believer in Christ, I live my life in-between what has been - a world separated from God - and what will be - a world redeemed by and in full communion with God. I suppose I am a bit more Reformed than Arminian/Wesleyan in this way, because I take it for granted that all we do, all we strive after, our attempts to create beauty, to make our lives more livable through the aesthetic experience in all its variety take part in this "in-between" reality. On the other hand, I think I redeem my Arminian roots to the extent that I believe pursuing greater, deeper understanding through a continued pursuit of ever richer aesthetic experience is part and parcel of what John Wesley called "going on to perfection in this life."

To the extent that I am wrestling with cultural experiences in this blog, I believe that is part of my own journey of understanding. It is evident, I think, that of all the arts, music is the one closest to my own heart. At its best, music transports the listener to that place described in Revelation, where the blessed stand before the Throne and sing, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD". Those songs which speak to us most deeply, which give us greater understanding of our world, which move us to laugh and cry - they are dim echoes of this one, final song we shall all stand and sing together. This is not hyperbole or metaphor, but something I believe with my whole heart.

Yet, music is not the whole of it. Because we are a people formed by the Word, quite literally (just read Genesis, say, or the prologue to the Gospel of St. John), considering literature should also be important for Christians. We have those particularly gifted to shape whole worlds through marks on a page; we enter the lives of people who have never and will never exist, whole worlds that cannot exist, and through their experiences come to understand something of our own. We learn of love and loss, of war and peace, of struggle and triumph and failure. Through their words we might even add a word or two to our own understanding of the world, making it a little brighter, a little more hopeful.

The aesthetic experience is participation. It is not just standing (or however you wish to consider your position) and gazing. It is active, taking part, making something outside part of one's set of tools for understanding the world. Even if that understanding is only that momentary, "Ah! I always thought the world might be this beautiful!", this expands our own understanding of the world just that much. We might get a glimpse of the possibility of living a truly human life, of creating a truly human society. Even that art that presents the terrible and awful bares our darker tendencies. It can serve as a warning of the depths to which we human beings can sink.

All this is by way of introduction, as it were, to my own recent indulgence in considering issues of our received and current culture. These are not something human beings do as a sideline. They are now and have always been tools we use to come to terms with our existence. Being a Christian does not mean we forfeit our humanity to the extent that we can neglect the aesthetic experience; on the contrary, we are called to full participation with our fellow human beings in this life, and the aesthetic experience is part of being fully human. From art in its variety we can understand something of what God meant in Genesis 1 when it is said, after creation, that God said it was "very good."

The Art Of Hard Rock

So, I was thinking last night as I was driving to work, listening to Tool, wondering what Lester Bangs would think of Tool's 10,000 Days CD. Bangs advocated a particular vision of rock music - loud, nihilistic, sheer pleasure for the sake of pleasure, and never, EVER too far from its roots as an unsophisticated music for the polloi. While not ideological like Simon Firth (who argues that any popular music not rooted in African-American folks musics like jazz and the blues isn't rock), Bangs nevertheless cultivated a particular critical point of view that would write out whole genres from "rock" because they aren't "black" enough. What's interesting, to me at any rate, is these same writers who disdain British progressive rock for its references to European art music, also deplore heavy metal - surely a working-class music if there is any - precisely because it isn't sophisticated enough. Of course, the real problem is the music is seen as "escapist", rather than engaging and protesting working-class conditions. A song like "Iron Man", say, or "Spiral Architect", doesn't deal with the conditions of labor in an industrial society; the bands eponymous song relates a Vincent Price movie of the same name to a paranormal event in the life of bassist Terry "Geezer" Butler. How does this raise the consciousness of the proletariat?

In to the mix over the past couple decades swoops Tool. Dark, brooding, their songs mix elements of traditional heavy metal with a more melodic, one could even say progressive approach to song-writing, with a literate lyricism that elevates their singer, Maynard James Keenan, above the fray of mere screamer to something like a poet. They experiment with odd time-signatures, their rhythms are always slightly off-kilter, their music isn't for dancing or even raging. Rather, it is to sit, more like stoned than not, and listening. In performance, the band keeps relatively still (unlike many rock bands, who perform), even as the lead singer dons masks, wigs, even drag. Their songs deal with homoerotic themes ("Hooker With A Penis"), extreme sexual practices ("Stinkfist"), and even dabbles in what some might consider near-blasphemy ("Eulogy"). A favorite theme is hypocrisy ("The Pot", "Tick"). They even have a song detailing what may have been an encounter with a UFO, or perhaps just a psychotic episode ("Rosetta Stoned").

On Lateralus, however, they actually has some songs that were less negative, less filled with sheer rage at an uncaring universe. The opening song, "The Grudge", offers the opinion that holding a grudge can be like an anchor, dragging us down. The title track offers the view that life is an upward spiral, offering limitless possibilities. Even the equivocal "Parabol/Parabola" which might be about sex, or might be about suicide, offers the view that the one thing that might keep us linked to this life is the intimate connections we forge with other people.

So, I have to wonder, what is so wrong about this? These songs rock, without a doubt. Why can't rock, even the hardest rock, also rise above mere folk music to become something transcendent? Does it cease to be "rock and roll" because the musicians and lyricists take up themes beyond getting laid, dancing, and the general concerns of teenagers?

Furthermore, isn't it possible to be both a popular art form and still challenging to much of our received understanding of the world? Can the two-word descriptor "popular art" actually mean something, with the two words reinforcing one another?

Furthermore, the idea that an aesthetic experience is always "only" one thing - escapist, or political, or social, or what have you - is such a myopic view of any art form. Even the Dadaists in the early part of the 20th century understood the political and social ramifications of their art. At its best, rock offers a view of the world that affirms its basic solidity, the joy of existence, and the possibilities inherent in living one's life truly free. Even the most negative rock has this going for it - it protests the status quo, asking if it is possible to see in the drudgery and horror of existence some possibility for something more.

Music For Your Monday

Herbie Hancock came to public attention as a prodigy, performing on stage as a small child. Later, he rose to fame as the piano player for Miles Davis' mid-1960's quintet. He struck out on his own, and has forged a path of relentless experimentation. Even in the early 1970's, when jazz seem mired in confusion as to its identity, he refused to sit still. In the 1980's he reminded the world that he could be relevant as well as hip, with his MTV hit "Rockit", featuring his electronica and dancing robots. He is at his best, though, when he is playing with friends.

"Chameleon"



Here he is with Miles Davis Quintet, featuring Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Ron Carter on bass, and a very young Tony Williams on drums. It should be noted that their music was completely improvised.



Going back to his roots - with members of the Quintet, performing from Davis' massive Kind of Blue LP - here they are doing "So What" at a far faster pace than the original, giving it a fresh, free feeling.

Treading With Care

The New Inquiry has a syllabus for crying out loud. The first of many gems I discovered there is this piece on silence.

I wish I could remember where I read it, but I recall someone writing that putting some things in to words renders them smaller, makes of the confusion and chaos something orderly, even as one attempts to capture that chaos and confusion.

There are many things I have written about over the life of this blog (far too may, I think at times). Yet there is far more about which I shall never write, here or anywhere. Some things like love and loss, some experiences and people and emotions are far too fraught, far too complicated to untangle. Sometimes it is best to give them their integrity as confusing and tangled.

Silence not only saves us from lawsuits. It also saves us from taking that which is most precious and rendering it safe, domesticated somehow. Writing about things or people, events in our lives - already we start to pick these things out of the maelstrom of experience, isolate them in a way that is largely artificial. It may make understanding some things better; it might be important for some things to be rendered comprehensible in this way. Others, though, those perhaps closest to our hearts, those perhaps whose strings are still tied around our lives in ways even we cannot fathom - these we should pass over, as Wittgenstein urged of may such things, in silence.

Itinerancy

My wife is being appointed to a new church, starting July 1 this year. We will end six wonderful years here in Poplar Grove, and begin a new life in Plato Center, just west of Elgin. Things will get hinky with the blog over the course of the next few months as we pack up our lives and move to a new house, a new town, an entirely new church community. There have been and will be tears shed as we say goodbye to the people of Poplar Grove UMC who have become our extended family.

The mixture of emotions right now is difficult to grasp. The thing is, though, I think I summed up my own feelings best when I told Lisa that we have become too comfortable here, and maybe that's not a good thing. Being comfortable is not to be denigrated; it shouldn't be part of the life of a minister and that minister's family, though.

So, now that the cat's out of the bag, we can start the complicated process of ridding ourselves of so much stuff, packing up the essentials (like our library, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs without which . . .), and starting something fresh, new, and exciting.

Which Churches Don't Do Social Justice?

Glenn Beck has goofed. Nothing surprising there, because he's dumber than a postage stamp. His call for people to "run" from any church that preaches social and economic justice is not just stupid; it's ignorant and funny, too.

See, the thing is, any Church - be it a local congregation or denomination - that is really a Church of Jesus Christ has as part of its ministry the pursuit of social and economic justice. You see, all that stuff that Beck thinks is Marxism - liberation theology he hasn't read or understood for example - is really just good, old fashioned Christian theology rooted in the Biblical witness. It's all there, starting in the stories of the expulsion from the Garden and the story of Cain's exile, really. In those instances, we already see God's justice and mercy are one and the same, and we Christians have more stories than that - and not just stories! whole books of the Bible called "the Prophets" - helping us understand that God's love is to be extended in this world through welcoming in to community everyone. Part of the welcoming includes working to undermine and destroy the barriers we insist on building based on race, class, ethnicity, sex and gender, what have you.

Social justice is not some leftist quirk that just emerged suddenly since Karl Marx. It's at the very heart of the Christian life, it defines diakanoia, service, it can be seen in the lives of the saints, in the work of Anabaptist groups such as the Friends and Mennonites. The Methodist Social Affirmation was written . . . in the first decade of the 20th century not under the influence of Karl Marx, but John Wesley.

In other words, social justice isn't a quirk, but a necessary part of being the Church, called out by God to serve the world. Any claim otherwise is, quite literally, ignorant.

On Eric Massa

First, it seems pretty clear to me the guy is sexually confused.

Second, I think that it is far too easy to make fun of the interview on Glenn Beck's program, where Massa said something about tickle-fights. In fact, the multiple accusations about unwanted touching amount to pretty clear evidence of a pattern of behavior that should be disturbing to anyone. It doesn't have to do with being gay; it has to do with not understanding boundaries and what is, and is not, proper behavior.

The comparison to the Mark Foley affair is problematic, because Foley, it seems, had a penchant for the underage. Yet, unwanted physical contact is unwanted physical contact, regardless of age.

Finally, there does seem to be emerging some evidence that the Speaker of the House new of the accusations against Massa. Unlike Dennis Hastert in the case of Mark Foley, however, the evidence isn't clear that she either covered anything up, or urged him to continue in office and even seek another term.

Massa is leaving, and good riddance, and I hope he gets some help.

Dealing With Violence Against Women On Campus

The Center For Public Integrity released a report on sexual assault on our nation's college campuses, and the results are frustrating to anyone who believes that we might actually be making strides in taking reports of sexual violence against women seriously.

The probe reveals that students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults on campuses often face little or no punishment, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down. Many times, victims drop out of school, while students found culpable go on to graduate. Administrators believe the sanctions administered by the college judicial system are a thoughtful and effective way to hold abusive students accountable, but the Center’s investigation has discovered that “responsible” findings rarely lead to tough punishment like expulsion — even in cases involving alleged repeat offenders.

I heard about the study on a report on NPR earlier this week, and flashed back to an event from my own college days. I attended a small private University in western New York - less than 2500 students total, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral candidates - and we all heard stories of violence against women that went unreported, or were treated lightly by the Administration.

I believe it was either my junior or senior year, though, something happened that forces us all to confront the reality that these events need to be taken seriously. A young woman, living in a suite with three other women, had her door broken open by an ex-boyfriend who used a baseball bat. Not only did she go to school authorities, she went public; she refused to remain silent even though in the rare instances when reports of violence reached an official level, silence tended to be the rule.

It is still far too common for officials to treat rape as a "he-said-she-said" event for which there is little room to sort out competing narratives. Victims far too often have every bit of their sexual history revealed, while perpetrators are treated lightly. Women still face the accusation they somehow "deserved" the treatment they received, either because of a past history of sexual activity, their dress, or being in a place and time where their willingness to accept sexual advances might be implied. Yet, the report is clear that rape and sexual assault on college campuses is similar to such cases in the general population, i.e., the vast majority are the result of repeat offenders, young men who have a history of violence and sexual violence against women. Rather than focus on the the role of the victim, it seems to me that colleges and universities need to take cases of violence against women as indicative of a trend toward violence in the life of the perpetrator.

We still have a long way to go before we come to terms with the simple fact that women still face far too many threats, even on our college campuses. It would be nice that our so-called enlightened institutions of higher learning would be enlightened enough to deal with sexual assault without resorting to blaming the victim, or shielding the perpetrator (when guilt is found) from serious consequences for his actions.

Once Again - An Open Invitation

Since they write at a website called "American Descent", I'd like their views on this really good summary of the real descent of America.

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.

In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority.

The sad fact is, America is in decline not because of anything our current President and Congress have done or attempted to do. Rather, the past generation of conservative dominance has shredded the social and political fabric of this country, and we are left with the monumental task of reconfiguring it - in the face of the constant shriek that we are the ones who have destroyed or are destroying the country.

I look forward to their responses.

What Amiri Baraka Said

Pretty much, he can be summed up, "Democrats, get your heads out of your asses and get the job done." Rather than kill one another, get together and get the job done.

High Taxes, More And Stronger Unions Are Key To A Robust Economy

For some reason (probably a lack of any historical memory whatsoever), conservatives love and liberals hate the 1950's. A dynamic decade, far removed from the somnambulant decade of Eisenhowerian drift, the fifties were, in many ways, the staging ground for the upheavals of the following decade. The Civil Rights era began in the 1950's; the beats, rock and roll, the space age, Holden Caufield - all products of that time. One of the things that made that decade such a robust period in American history was the underlying economic stability made possible through the on-going New Deal regulations that some Republicans even then sought to roll back. Eisenhower, showing far more wisdom than any Republican since, refused. The main economic engine, however, was the progressive income tax and strong unions.

There are two things you can rely on contemporary Republican politicians to talk about whenever they talk about the 1950's - taxes and unions. Yet, if they actually knew anything at all about either subject, they would realize that the 1950's do not endorse any conservative approach to national economic policy, but rather endorse high taxes - during the 1950's, the marginal tax rate on those earning (in adjusted dollars) $3 million, was 91%.

Think about that for a moment.

At the moment, there are proposals to return the top marginal tax rate (which is different from the top rate altogether; since the advent of supply-side economics, discussion has always been on the marginal tax rate) to what it was during the Clinton Administration, roughly 31%, and this is seen as creeping socialism. Under Republican Presidents and a (very brief) Republican Congress fifty years ago, the top rate wasn't touched and we had robust economic growth.

Another log on the fire of economic growth, and social and cultural expansion, was robust unionism in the manufacturing sector. As the soldiers who fought in the Second World War came home and went to college on the GI Bill, they went to work in factories where the unions had won important victories during the Depression (with the help of the Fair Labor Standards Act). These men and women not only constituted what William Manchester has called "the best educated generation in American history"; they were also among the wealthiest. The booming suburbs, aided by policies that sought to attract white working and middle-class families away from cities, were helped by unionized workers being able to afford the homes and the commutes. Simply put, having a union wage drove the consumerist engine of the 1950's. With the turn away from a unionized manufacturing sector, and the rise of non-unionized service industries, that important social and economic engine stalled, then stopped completely.

When you read in various posts how the Republican Party has pretty much destroyed our infrastructure, these changes in our tax and labor policies are not just part of the equation, but at its very heart. Somehow we managed for decades to have high marginal tax rates on the very wealthy along with robust economic activity. We had a healthy organized labor movement and a strong manufacturing sector. Republicans insisted, however, that we needed to reduce taxes on the wealthy and stop unions in their tracks, and things would improve. Instead, the whole thing pretty much collapsed, and in a very short amount of time.

This argument, based on reality, rather than the fantasies of know-nothings and fake libertarians, needs to be made often and as explicitly as possible. We need higher taxes and stronger unions if we really want a healthy economy.

Old Arguments

I was attracted to this "defense" of the "Weinberger Doctrine" because I remember all too well something that is missing from the discussion of Reagan-era discussions of military policy - the Pentagon's proposal to sacrifice Europe to fight what it considered a winnable, limited nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

It may be difficult to remember the atmosphere of relentless tension between the US and the Soviets of a generation ago. It was made worse by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision by the Reagan Administration to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, against the express wishes of the people of the various countries where those missiles were put. Part of the problem complicating relations between the US and the Soviets were the interregnum between the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev there, and President Reagan's first-term rhetorical belligerence, made plain in a now-infamous 1983 speech in Miami in which he called the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world."

In the midst of the hair-trigger between the two superpowers, it was revealed that Weinberger's Defense Department was seriously studying the possibility of fighting and "winning" a limited nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Of course, it would mean limiting that exchange to the newly-deployed medium-range nuclear missiles, making of western and Central Europe a vast, unlivable wasteland for centuries to come.

When the document outlining this particular bit of craziness was revealed, Theodore Draper took to the pages of The New York Review of Books to scold then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger not only for setting aside the post-war alliance with western Europe, and stating boldly that it might be in the US national interest to allow it to die in a nuclear oven if it meant "defeating" the Soviet Union; in so doing, Draper contended that this was an explicit rejection of the policy of deterrence that, for all its faults, had managed to limit confrontation with the Soviets to the margins, rather than full-on war. Weinberger replied, and the on-going exchange opens Draper's 1983 collection Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente, and Other Controversies. I read this book in the fall of 1984, at the same time I was taking a survey class in international relations as an undergraduate, and it shaped much of my thinking on that subject.

While there are, indeed, many good things to be said about the "Weinberger Doctrine" as it is presented at Democracy Arsenal, leaving out this particular bit of craziness misses a crucial aspect of late-Cold War Defense and Foreign Policy. At least in the early years of its existence, the Reagan Administration not only accepted the idea that nuclear war could be something "fought" and "won", it actively sought to lay out scenarios in which this would be so.

Saturday Rock Show

When Dream Theater broke the radio barrier in 1992 with "Pull Me Under" - in the last days of rock radio's importance - they offered a whole generation of musicians a way to hear the tired dinosaur of progressive rock. Using not just the classic prog repertoire of Yes and Rush, but adding Metallica's own debt to prog, heard most clearly on song's like ". . . And Justice For All", and the band's early tendency toward extending thematic and melodic material, DT managed to open up all sorts of possibilities for musicians who tired of the limitations of the either/or of classic prog rules and the weight of heavy metal.

Of course, as is always the case, really good bands inspire imitators. Some early metal-prog bands were a pretty direct ripoff of Dream Theater's approach, and one can hear it pretty clearly in Symphony X, for example (although lyrically, at least, Symphony X has charted a different course, sticking with a kind of "sword-and-sorcery" material, with highlights such as their attempt to put Homer's "The Odyssey" in a 20-minute piece of music, and their last release, a concept album based on John Milton's Paradise Lost). Another band that, in many ways, was pretty much a direct descendant of DT was York, PA's Shadow Gallery. Even the name, for crying out loud, was kind of a rip off.

I tried hard to like them. I guess what they wanted their music to sound like, and what I thought it should sound like differed enough so that I never quite got to the point where I could sit and listen with my critical ear quiet. All the same they have moments, to be sure. One of their best, from the CD Legacy, is this pretty little love song, "Colors". My one complaint is the addition of a slide guitar during the bridge, but that's an arrangement decision that I might have made differently, and doesn't really rob the piece of its basic prettiness (not the same as beauty).

Do My Eyes Deceive Me?

I have stopped reading what Atrios calls "Fred Hiatt's crayon scribble page". While the news stories at The Washington Post continue to be pretty good, the editorial and op-ed pages of this once-great journalistic institution have become a sink-hole for global warming deniers, inside-beltway conventional wisdom of the most venal, trivial sort, and former Bush Administration third-tier hacks like Michael Gerson and, now, Marc Thiessen. This isn't an issue of "now it's conservative and I'm all upset." It's more a question of intellectual honesty and integrity. George Will's columns on global warming keep getting debunked and called out as fraudulent, but he still has a job; Marc Thiessen, like Bill Kirstol at the Times, can't write an honest column, yet he still gets in print, spouting the Bush Administration line that (a) the US didn't torture, but (b) if we did, the sonsabithces deserved it, so it's OK.

Today, though, something caught my eye, and I have to admit I'm impressed. Howell Raines, former executive editor of The New York Times, has a piece entitled "Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?"

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.

Sometimes you get struck by something you read, and this is one of those times. Now, in part or perhaps even as a whole, this article is directed more toward journalists (which one could guess, I suppose, from the title) than the general, non-journalistic audience. Even as Raines tosses comity and politeness out the window, the non-journalist gets the impression that some taboo has finally been shattered; the complaint against FOXNews that has heretofore been part of the narrative of the liberal internet has crossed - finally, and with the full force of a former editor of the NYT - to the mainstream in a huge way. Furthermore, he does not mice words, talk around his subject, or attempt an "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach that might mitigate some critical takes on FOXNews.

Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.

Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher's political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation's airwaves to Murdoch's cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.

--snip--

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon's campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions -- whether on health-care reform or other issues -- they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it's hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.

What is most interesting about the arrival of FOXNews and Roger Ailes is the similarity, in many respects, to situations in Italy and, now, Chile, where the rise of media moguls portended big political changes. It can be no accident that American conservative politicians have at least one eye trained on Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, and Chile's new President (inaugurated this week quite literally during a major aftershock from the horrible earthquake of a couple weeks back), Sebastian Pinera (my keyboard, alas, does not have a tilde for the "n" in his last name). While Murdoch cannot run for office, and Ailes has always enjoyed the kingmaker role (he came to prominence during the Nixon Administration), his promotion of various right-wing political candidates has that same air about it as Berlusconi's and Pinera's channel's promoting their owner's political ambitions.

I think a kind of Rubicon in discussions of journalism, public discourse, and the relationship between journalism and politics in this country has been crossed. A major figure has said what many on the internet have been saying for years - FOXNews doesn't "do" journalism, and even its news department is nothing more than a promotional vehicle for the Republican Party and its talking points. This is a good sign.

Yes, I See God At Work In Haiti

It's taken me a while to calm myself down enough to type a response to Feodor's rather haughty, belittling dismissal - without any reference to anything I actually said - during the course of a discussion at ER's blog (that site is on hiatus during Lent, and out of deference, I am not linking; I plan on highlighting the points that (a) pissed me off so much; and (b) making clear what my argument actually said, rather than Feodor's misreading of it). When I say calm down, I mean that quite literally; when I read the actual exchange, not just the first time, but many more afterward, I was not only enraged by his rather casual dismissal of the feelings of many in my family toward an untimely, accidental death; he also seemed to insist that my argument was facile. It really is the former that made me see red, but the latter also got to me, too.

I recounted the death of my cousin, Denise Shreck, in 1996, after having fallen in a river. It was an example I was citing after he expressed his outrage at God for the earthquake in Haiti, and what he perceived to be Divine absence in the stark evidence of massive human suffering there. I argued that, on the contrary, God was indeed present in the lives and services of all those who were actually in Haiti to relieve that suffering. Rather than consider the point, Feodor merely dismissed the whole idea. I kept getting the feeling that Feodor was enraged that, after all the historical suffering the people of Haiti had been forced to endure, an earthquake seemed to add insult to injury, and by so doing, demonstrated that God may perhaps have perished after all.

The point I had been making - and it seemed pretty clear to me, but I suppose it might not have been - was a longer version of that infamous bumper sticker, "Shit Happens". Earthquakes hit poor countries without the resources to assist their own people in recovery. They also hit rich countries, like Chile, and render those places not much better than impoverished ones, as communication, local services, fear, political turmoil, all engulf them.

I cited the example of my cousin as another of those "shit happens" moments in life. It is easy enough to stand around and rage at God because the world is designed in such a way that earthquakes strike places that have few resources available to cope. It is easy enough to rage at God for the loss of young woman whose life offered so much promise. Standing around and raging at God doesn't help anyone; it might satisfy an individual's sense that one has a better grasp of things than others who might offer the possibility of the divine presence even in the midst of the sufferings there.

I guess I was wrong when I said once that Feodor was a whole lot smarter than I am. I figured the point was clear enough. Instead, he took my example and tossed it aside; he insisted that the sufferings my family endured in the wake of Denise's untimely death were just not comparable to the sufferings of Haiti. Yet, in so doing, he not only missed my main point, he refused to acknowledge part of the point that I thought should be clear as day - bad stuff happens in this world, and we humans suffer in the midst of it. 'Twas ever thus; should we lose our faith in a good, loving, just God because of an earthquake, the senseless loss of a child, the seemingly infinite capacity of human beings to wreak havoc on one another? Any why Haiti? Shoot, consider the Roman mass crucifixions during the slave revolt a century before Christ was born. Crosses lined the highways for miles as men and women suffered slow, painful deaths as an object lesson for all to see. Should we so desire, we can point to any number of incidents, large and small, that seem to indicate pretty clearly that, even if God exists, taking care of creation seems be down on the list of things to do.

My point, however, is really quite simple. One can lose faith - it has happened before, and will no doubt happen again - but so what? That is as meaningless as endorsing faith, really, and is safe enough from the confines of a place and time far removed from the midst of all these tragedies. Denigrating the work of those who have gone to help in the name of the God of love and justice and compassion actually is worse than meaningless, precisely because it stems from a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that pretends to "know" more about the way the world works than those who give their time and talents and even lives to serve others. Sitting in the safe confines of northern Illinois, or Brooklyn, or wherever, and telling people they just don't get it, that God's silence is clear in the suffering the folks in Haiti are continuing to endure, doesn't really cut it for me. It's a form of intellectual and moral cowardice, to be honest.

Furthermore, human suffering and mourning in the face of loss is not a contest. My family's grief over our loss was not less than the sufferings of those who lost whole families in Haiti (or Chile, or the Holocaust, or Kampuchea). Human loss is human loss; if you want to be angry at God because we live on a planet where the crust isn't firm and occasionally shakes violently, well fine. We can all go back to Lisbon in the 18th Century if we want. Do you want to blame God because we human beings seem to enjoy inflicting death and suffering on our fellows? Well and good, but please don't demand special pleading for this or that case, because human history is bloody enough with examples. We Americans are no more or less callous or ignorant than the average citizen of any other Empire to the effects our hegemony has on the less-fortunate among other nation-states. We are fortunate, however, that we are free enough to allow those citizens moved by compassion to go to those places where suffering seems particularly acute and work to alleviate the pain caused by living in a world that just doesn't meet the standards of some who think God hit the snooze button once too often the day the earth decided to shake in Haiti.

So, yes, I affirm that God is at work in Haiti. God is at work in the midst of the many sufferings of sub-Saharan Africa. God is present in the stinking slums of Mumbai and Calcutta. God is there in the faces and voices and hands of people who are attempting, sometimes with success, sometimes without, some kind of help. Raging at God for senseless death and suffering, whether it is caused by an earthquake, a misstep on a slippery slope above a river, Complicating factors, including a history of oppression and Imperial exploitation do not mitigate the reality that, well, bad stuff happens.

A Partial Rerun With Feeling

Jennifer Bernstein and Rachel Rosenfelt are two young women who run the most amazing website, called The New Inquiry. I have been reading and commenting and interacting with them frequently over the past few weeks because they are really on to something - the intersection of culture, society, and politics, which dovetail with my own quite nicely. They had a "Conservative Thought Salon" recently that covered the gamut of social, cultural, and political concerns.

Three years ago, I wrote a post entitled "Women, Women's Sexuality, and the Right". Part of that post addresses my own view in regard to the general topic of "sex and gender" addressed at the Conservative Thought Salon.

A generation later, however, we have yet to grasp the almost elemental fear and hatred of women among many on the right. I do not mean hatred of individual persons who happen to be women; I am talking about the fear engendered by free, powerful, sexually and (relatively) economically liberated women upon men. As long as women fulfill roles defined for them, there is nothing to fear. Once women start to press the limits of "acceptable" behavior, however, one can almost hear the howls of rage.

There is nothing more terrifying for some men than a woman who does not need a man to define or complete her. There is nothing more frightening to some men than the image of a woman undressed. Those who protest the most very often are the ones who, in their heart of hearts, tremble at the thought that there are women whose lives, including their sexuality, are not in need of any man.

Of course, this doesn't deal with the wholly separate issue of queer folk. My guess, however, is that these same men who harbor so much fear toward an independent, strong woman also fear gays and lesbians precisely because they undermine our traditional ideas of gender. The inability to accept difference as human choice, but to see it as error - especially moral error - is a sign, to me, of limited imagination. Moreso, it is a far greater moral failing than the alleged viciousness of gays or strong women. Refusing to grant full humanity, including full human moral agency, to others whose life-choices are different from one's own is only slightly better than writing them out of the human species entirely. To insist that other's lives bespeak a certain moral stuntedness, they are less than fully human, is a kind of dehumanization.

The marvelous panorama of choices available to people should be a source of joy and celebration rather than censure, mockery, and violence. It is too bad there are those who harbor such fear in their hearts they cannot see others without putting labels on them.

Horrible People

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru are awful human beings.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.(italics added)

I'm not sure what else to say. Our entire history has been deformed by slavery and race. To claim anything else is not just ignorance. It is morally reprehensible.

Some Thoughts From An Invitation

From The New Inquiry's Conservative Thought Salon:

Kirkian conservatism founds its logic of a higher order on religious conviction. God provides the benchmarks of extrinsic, absolute value. What currency does conservatism have in an increasingly secular age? Can we determine extrinsic value without God?

Taking this in reverse order, for my part the last question is really quite meaningless. Nothing has "extrinsic value". I don't even know what that phrase means, to be honest. What is the "value" of a flower? Of a mosquito? Of a human being? How do we determine what the word "value" means in each of these questions? Does even granting the existence of God somehow both define and ground "value" in a way that not so granting does not?

Furthermore, if we grant the premise, what about the market? How do we constrain the market - the other deity of conservatives - in the face of counterclaims to "value" that cannot be measured in dollars and cents? Or, does the market work in some way heretofore unknown to eliminate itself from consideration in these matters? Based on the evidence, this is demonstrably untrue. Changing the definition of value from some intangible quality a thing possesses apart from our desire to measure its worth, and the market's determination of a fair trade value for any particular item, it seems to me we have reached a kind of incompatibility in conservative thought.

In actual practice, Kirk's views on religion are little different from the sociological, functional approach. Not really all that interested in the subtleties and nuances of theological argument, conservatives view religion as a necessary social and cultural glue, without which value becomes, like currency exchanges, free-floating. Yet, so viewed, religion can be easily substituted, as it has been in the US, for the rule of law as determining a minimal social and cultural standard for behavior and accepted norms and practices. Once religion becomes reduced to a social necessity in this way, we aren't that far from Eisenhower's nonsensical idea that it doesn't really matter what we believe, as long as we believe in something.

Yet, if conservatives are correct, that ideas have consequences, it seems that theological and confessional disagreements and arguments are vital to understanding the role of religion in society. In northern Ireland, in the Middle East and across the Levant, in India, in Sudan, the remnants of Somalia, even in secularized western Europe, religious disputes turn on what people believe, which informs how they live their lives. In these instances, religious belief is as fraught with peril as it is with promise. It is a force for social disintegration as much as it is for tribalistic integration. Kirk, I believe, is mistaken in the view that social cohesion comes from acceptance of religious belief; the world is far too full of religious conflict to make such a sanguine view of religious practice acceptable.

We are, by far, the most religiously observant industrialized country on the planet. Part of our strength, socially and culturally, has been the acceptance - not always given freely and very often honored in the breach - of a variety of religious practice. Kirk's views would include a kind of renewed intolerance for differences of religious opinion; if it becomes a force for social disintegration, disagreement becomes a threat to social well-being, and therefore needs to be addressed by the society at large. This is as un-American an idea I can imagine.

Finally, I would reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer's now-famous quote, that the challenge for our time continues to be how to speak of God in a religionless world come of age. The combating forces of sectarianism and secularism, part and parcel of western history for over two hundred years, have yet to reach a final conclusion, but it seems to me the question of the social role of religion, approached in a purely functional way, rests upon far too narrow and shallow a foundation to be of any help whatsoever.

Moral Decay?

A right-wing commenter recently said, in regards to the presence of pornography, that it is both evidence and cause of moral decay in our country.

I am always fascinated by the claim that the United States has experienced some kind of moral decline. Usually traced to the upheavals of the 1960's, it seems motivated, at least in part, by the social and cultural changes that fraught decade brought to the country. I am just asking, and have invited Jennifer Bernstein and Rachel Rosenfult from The New Inquiry to weigh in, what, exactly does this mean? I really don't see it, have never understood the point, and see no evidence of such a decline.

Just curious.

Is The Numinous Like Reese Witherspoon Only Chunkier?*

Ross Douthat tries his hand critiquing American religion. The results are making my eyes leak blood like a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

The "pursuit of the unnamable"? What the hell is that? Apparently, Douthat, who otherwise would be praising the market as the savior of all humanity, thinks the embourgeoisment of American religious life is a bad thing, yet if more people were real mystics it would be a better country. This column is marvelously inept, so stupidly contradictory, and blissfully ignorant of the true terrors involved in a real mystical experience that I really don't know what else to say.

Why is everyone an expert on religion and religious experiences?

*Douthat once wrote a piece in which he confessed to a liaison with a young woman who resembled, in his words, "a chunky Reese Witherspoon". The moment didn't last, so much the better for her; talk about dodging a bullet.

What The Heck

Yet another earthquake - in Turkey. Is the planet trying to tell us something? Are we, on the other hand, just a bit more sensitive to this news right now? All I know for sure is it does seem an odd cluster, doesn't it?

Music For You Monday

One of my favorite exchanges from the old television series WKRP in Cincinnati occurs between DJs Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap. After a heated exchange between Venus and news reader Les Nessman, Johnny tries to cool Venus off by asking, "Hey, Venus, let's go look at some Carly Simon album covers."

After Carole King's Tapestry LP in 1971, there was an explosion of female singer-songwriters, or (like in Simon's case), just singers. Arriving with the second wave of feminism, there reception was ambivalent (as Johnny Fever's line indicates). King had been part of the stable of songwriters at the Brill Building in the early-1960's, writing many hits with her partner Jerry Goffin. Finally getting a chance to record her songs herself, Tapestry showed a more mature song-writer, a woman whose words and music reflected a coming of age.



Cyndi Lauper, like Carly Simon, was destined to have her image overwhelm he abilities. Working with her long-time personal and music partner, the founder of the band The Hooters, she wrote and released She's So Unusual in 1984, and became a sensation in the midst of an era obsessed with visual imagery at the expense of anything else. While "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" managed to make a mark in the brief era when music videos actually meant something, her songwriting was never better than in "Time After Time".



I'm not a huge fan of Sarah McLachlan. The Canadian singer-songwriter spent far too much time trying on personae, trying to "fit", in an age when image seemed so important. Yet, some of her songs really capture me. "Possession" is a fascinating piece; the lyrics are actually quotes from letters she received, and she wrote the song because she was fascinated by the way some, certainly unbalanced, people responded to her. There is something quite scary about this song, which might be why I like it so much . . .

The Definition Of A Hate Crime

Since all the wingers seem to think the hate-crimes law is aimed at Christian preachers, I just thought I'd point out how the law really works. From this story:

After interviewing the suspects, investigators concluded the victim was targeted because the assailants thought he was gay.

Whether or not the victim actually was gay is not at issue; the suspects believed him to be; indeed, it seems they were specifically targeting gays. That one sentence is the definition of a hate crime. The sole motive for the crime is bigotry toward supposed members of a specific group of individuals (gays, blacks, latinos, women). It isn't about speech, and it isn't about making up a motive where none exists. This is a textbook case of a hate crime.

When Studies Contradict

A recent study by researchers at the University of Montreal seems to indicate that all the deleterious effects so many have claimed pornography has on interpersonal relationships just aren't present. A report in the Calgary Sun is pretty clear that (a) consumption of pornography is prevalent among men (they report they couldn't find any men in their twenties who had not viewed pornographic material, at least a little); (b) those who consume pornography are able to maintain the distinction between the fantastic world on the paper or screen and the real people with whom they are involved, are more likely to support women's equal rights, and understand, in general, that pornographic images have no relationship to their real lives.

The Washington Post asked a researcher who wrote a book claiming all sorts of deleterious effects to write an Outlook piece. She uses the space to insinuate the research at Montreal isn't as thorough as her own, and thus the conclusions aren't as reliable as hers.

Yet, all she has to offer are anecdotes from people who approach her with their own horror stories. She admits "This is hardly solid lab research." But then continues directly:

But it is one of many signs of pornography's hidden impact.

"Hidden impact". How horrible! Except, there is research that shows there is no such "hidden impact". While it might be the case there are those who are impacted negatively by pornography, it might well be their relationships had other issues. The Montreal study manages, at least, to offer some perspective on those persons and couples whose lives are not negatively impacted by pornography.

Clearly, this is an area where research needs to be constructed that satisfies more than merely ideological concerns, and focuses attention on the range of responses. While the stories Ms. Paul relates of the bad effects of porn are certainly sad, the question remains open (and she cannot admit it, with her talk of "hidden impacts"): are these "effects" statistically significant, correlated in some manner to watching pornography? Relating sad tales of couples on the rocks, and blaming porn, is not, as she admits, "solid research". Yet, that is all she has to offer - anonymous emails, stories offered with changed names.

Since there hasn't been a refereed study of the effects of pornography that shows any serious deleterious social or interpersonal effects in any statistically significant way, the Montreal study is hardly an outlier. It seems to me Ms. Paul's claims are far more questionable.

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.