"This Is Not A Game"

I think I've been immersing myself a bit too much in the alternate Universe that is the American Right.  Reading Roy Edroso's "Alicublog" and Wonkette is like entering a world where there is no sense, no facts, not even the comforting sense that time has a direction.

In the midst of the right's freak-out over America re-electing a black man President, the House busied itself today passing a non-binding resolution that President Obama set a date for a balanced budget.  Because, you know, that's really important!

Meanwhile, the real business of America gets ignored.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday $46 billion in U.S. military budget cuts would "degrade our ability to respond to a crisis."
Speaking at Georgetown University in Washington, Panetta said the impending automatic cuts, or sequestration, would result in "a serious disruption in defense programs and a sharp decline in our military readiness." . . .

"This is not a game. This is reality," Panetta said. "These steps would seriously damage a fragile American economy and they would degrade our ability to respond to a crisis precisely at a time of rising instability across the globe."

If you think he's joking, well . . .

The outgoing Pentagon chief delayed the deployment of the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier and the USS Gettysburg guided missile cruiser, which were due to leave Virginia later this week, because of uncertainty over the department's finances, Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

"Facing budget uncertainty ... the U.S. Navy made this request to the secretary and he approved," Little said in a statement. "This prudent decision enables the U.S. Navy to maintain these ships to deploy on short notice in the event they are needed to respond to national security contingencies." . . .

The decision to delay the carrier deployment came hours after Panetta warned in one of his final speeches as U.S. defense secretary that lurching from budget crisis to budget crisis was threatening U.S. national security.
He told students at Georgetown University that Congress' failure to deal with the government's financial problems put the Defense Department on the brink of having to absorb $46 billion in spending cuts over seven months.
The cuts, which are due to go into force on March 1 unless Congress acts to avert them, would require the Pentagon to put as many as 800,000 civilian employees on unpaid leave for 22 work days, reduce Navy operations in the western Pacific by up to one-third and cut Air Force flying hours, Panetta said.

"It's difficult to believe, frankly, that the Congress would simply stand aside and ... allow the defense, economy and quality of life of America to be irreparably damaged," Panetta told the students. 

Governing is not a game.  Except for the children who currently hold the purse-strings in the House of Representatives.  Remember who actually pays for things.  It isn't the President of the United States.  It isn't the Secretary of the Treasury.  It is the House of Representatives.

They love the military, and they support the troops.  They just don't want to pay for any of it, nor do they want any wealthy Americans to pay a larger portion of their income in taxes in order to pay for them.

We are governed by mindless, stupid children.

An Experiment

I'm going to test a theory.  I propose that Marshall Art will defend pretty much anything a Republican official says or writes, regardless of its merit.  The test is simple.  All he has to do is read this article at Wonkette and I guarandamntee you he will put something in comments about how this guy in question shouldn't be called a racist dick.  Because we liberals are the real racists.

The Hitler Comeback Tour

Since the election, I've been wondering when the American Right would come to some kind of unspoken agreement that, with the election returns pretty clearly demonstrating a rejection of the entire right-wing political and social agenda, they could dispense with niceties, scream, "SCREW YOU!" to America, and just push any and every crazy idea.  It would become a non-stop barrage of crazy, all the while Americans of sense would sit back and think, "Wow, these folks have really lost their shit, haven't they?"

We started to see a bit of that this past election cycle with not one but two Republican Senate candidates flaming out over the issue of rape.  It might have occurred to some folks at least that talking about rape in the way Akin and Murdock did wouldn't be a good thing; yet down in New Mexico, we have some Republican state legislators trying to restrict rape victim's access to abortion on the grounds that it would be evidence tampering.  So they're both crazy and incapable of learning.  Got it.

Since the election, the near-constant demand that the deficit be reduced by drastic alteration of our largest, non-budgetary entitlement programs has left me wondering if these folks are really that stupid, think Americans are, or couldn't care less.  Then, I breathe in and realize I don't have to choose.

Of course, there was the whole fiscal cliff nonsense that demonstrated how little these folks care about the deficit.  After all, the whole thing was an enormous deficit reduction plan just waiting for January 1 to take effect.  All that had to happen would be to let the tax increases and spending cuts take effect and, voila, the deficit would be cut!  Alas, the same folks who said that government spending did nothing to help the economy, and that cutting government spending was the only way to help it, suddenly lost their minds, claiming all those spending cuts would destroy the economy.  How these folks make it out of bed in the morning is a mystery until I realize that holding these two fundamentally opposed points-of-view simultaneously without having a nervous breakdown is a stupendous feat of emotional strength.  Walking and chewing gum must come far more easy for these people than I thought.

Then, of course, there's the general tendency to oppose pretty much anything and everything the President of the United States says and does.  Crossing from the absurd to the grotesque, National Review Online contributor Eliana Johnson wrote a short piece on Monday regarding Pres. Obama's customary statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day:

The idea that all violence is “senseless” violence is one that has taken deep root on the left; it’s also, unfortunately, one that poses a major impediment to understanding the world.  

Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.” By the early 1930's, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the “unification of all Germans,” a demand for “land and territory for the sustenance of our people,” and an assertion that “no Jew can be a member of the race.” Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded.

First of all, I thought the right was always complaining about the left's insistence that we should understand the root causes of violence, a trait usually portrayed as inherent wimpiness among so many lefties.  So that first part contradicts decades of right-wing rhetoric about the American left.

Second, as a commentor at Wonkette wrote in response to their article on the NRO's journey past the point of no-return: "You would think that even on the National Review staff it might dawn on people to think "Wait a minute, I am defending Nazis! How the fuck did I end up here?"  But I am apparently giving them too much credit."  I should add that the comments on the piece at NRO differ little from those at Wonkette, both in tone and tenor; there is shock, but also a great deal of sense, something that one rarely sees these days in comment sections on the internet.

If this Nazi apologia whet's your appetite, all one need do is click here because there's another Republican comparing something Obama has done to the Nazis.  This time, it's universal health care and the requirement that states set up health care exchanges being compared to the Holocaust.  In an alternate universe I'd be joking:

Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps” and that after the exchanges are formed, the federal government will somehow take everything over and “will pull the trigger on the insurance companies.” 

The invocations not just of Hitler and National Socialism, but also Stalin's Soviet Union, China under Chairman Mao, and other dictatorships have been rampant thanks to the gun control debate.  That any sensible person would feel the need to drag these mass murderers in to the discussion demonstrates that the qualifier I used in the subject of this sentence should be discarded.

So, I guess it hasn't taken very long at all.  Enraged at defeat, the American right no longer gives a shit.  They're just going to play monkeys in the zoo and fling not just handfuls but armfuls of poo at America, without even the pretense that it isn't what we think it is. 

The Mental Health Red Herring

The intervention of the gun lobby in the Affordable Care Act was entirely gratuitous and the provisions they inserted mostly utterly unnecessary. The only thing the NRA achieved by meddling in a health care bill was flexing its muscle to stifle one more route to maybe reducing gun violence. - Joan McCarter

If ever there were a larger nonsequitur  in a public debate as important as our current gun control debate, it is the near-constant invocation of concern for our public policy regarding mental health.  Not because I do not care about mental health issues; on the contrary, our public health policies regarding people with mental illness are a mixture of immense failure and widespread ignorance.

Labeling them potential mass murderers is the latest example of both.

This failure of compassion for our fellow Americans is compounded by the utter disregard some politicians have toward our meager mental health system.  The headline of this Think Progress story says it all:

Beyond Gun Control: Republicans Routinely Sabotage Mental Health And Police Budgets

The epigram for this post is from a Daily Kos story that references the way the gun lobby interfered with the construction of the Affordable Care Act in such a way as to make it far more difficult for mental health providers to obtain necessary information to help their patients.  Title X, Section 2716, subsection (c) is entitled, "Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights".  In a July, 2012 article in Forbes magazine, Dr. Carolyn McLanahan wrote:

In medical training, physicians are taught to screen for potential violence. It is amazing how many people will tell you if they are homicidal or suicidal–you just have to ask. As an extension, we ask about access to guns. If a suicidal or homicidal person has access to guns, they are more likely to use that implement to initiate their violent act. This is why we are trained to ask that question. [...] Unfortunately, the gun rights lobby, mostly funded by the National Rifle Association, has time and time again inserted their hand in attempting to shut down that conversation.

In other words, the crocodile tears for the mentally ill flood out of eyes of cold indifference toward the mentally ill.

Like so much else in our political life, there is such an enormous amount of disingenousness piled on top of the lies, it's difficult to tell them apart.  Which makes not having to so much easier.

Moral Fictions

So I kind of stumbled in to a re-read of Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and am finding it well worth the surprise.  Which is not to say I won't end up in high dudgeon at some point.  After all, much of the work is an attempt to revive a kind of essentialism in moral discourse.  All the same, as a diagnostician of so much of the ridiculousness of our public discourse, I find it difficult to disagree with his basic thesis.

So much of our talk rests in what MacIntyre calls "moral fictions".  Among those are rights, a concept that once upon a time rested upon a metaphysic that imagined a human being apart from any and all social attachments; said imaginary "man" was granted particular things that made him "man" qua "man".  No one accepts the underlying metaphysical anthropology anymore, except perhaps in rarefied circles of philosophy departments here and there.  What we are left with, alas, is a vocabulary detached from any underlying support.  At the end of the day, the screeching back and forth about "rights" is little more than the assertion of the primacy of untrammeled will-to-power (something Nietzsche recognized a long time ago, and of which he approved); it is the entitlement of the spoiled child, not wanting anyone or anything to interfere with his or her declaration of supreme autonomy.

Which, alas, is another fiction about which MacIntyre doesn't elaborate all that much.  For all he understands the way these concepts are socially embedded, he doesn't take the next step (at least in his rather lengthy critique of so much contemporary moral discourse) and make clear that "the individual" or "man" (and here I put quotes around the word with some bit of double irony; maleness was the norm, so those who use the terminology were being unselfconsciously misogynist in their use of the word, and the contemporary drive to replace such terminology hides the basic sense that men are the norm, women an aberration) is as much a fiction as are the rights such a thing possesses.  Of course, it's been years since I read the book, and I have forgotten how sweeping his criticism of the Enlightenment moral project really was; perhaps I've yet to stumble upon such a point.

In any event, especially with all the shrieking about "gun rights", I think it is important to repeat: "Rights" are a fiction, an invention of an age that believed there were these things called "men" who existed outside and prior to any social organization (it's there in our Declaration of Independence, a bit of business we pass over in silence, by and large, embarrassed by its historical falsity).  Any attempt by state power to interfere with these "rights" were ipso facto tyrannical acts precisely because they interfered with the way human beings qua human beings are.  That this entire formulation is fictitious from beginning to end should be clear enough given even a moment's thought.

The assertion by far too many they have a "right" to a firearm is not only a fiction; it is, in fact, morally vicious.  It is little different in kind from a child throwing a tantrum in a store because her parents won't buy her a toy.  Right has made it's final spiral to entitlement, and the assertion of rights is little more than the tantrum thrown by the privileged in the face of those who see such privilege as interfering with their equally legitimate claims to some social good with which that privilege interferes.

It is far too deep in our legal and political and social culture to eliminate the whole notion of "rights"; yet, I think it is important to make clear that even in their heyday, rights were never absolute, whether of life or property.  The idea that owning a gun is on a par with speaking out against government activity with which one disagrees, or practicing one's religion without state interference is really quite vile.  We should at the very least be clear that all the demands that our "rights" not be tampered with is little more than one large pout by people who have no idea how childish they appear.

Women In Combat

I have to admit, I'm really surprised I haven't heard a gigantic howl of rage over Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's announcement yesterday that the Department of Defense was going to lift the ban on women serving in ground combat units.  Other than reading . . . somewhere . . . a series of Tweets from a former staff member of the McCain/Palin campaign that men fight for women, and how can we expect men to fight with women when they will want to protect them, it's been relatively quiescent.

Which may mean nothing.  Or it may mean the howl is just delayed.

In any event, since women already serve in a variety of combat positions, have faced hostile fire, and, as a guest on "Talk Of The Nation" said today, the whole notion of "front line combat units" is losing meaning in contemporary forms of combat, maybe most folks are bowing to the inevitable.

Up To The Task

We ask too, almighty, that where our path seems blanketed by thorns of oppression and rippled by pains of despair, we ask for your guidance toward the light of deliverance and that the vision of those who came before us and dreamed of this day, that we recognise that their visions still inspire us. They are a great cloud of witnesses, unseen by the naked eye but all around us, thankful that their living was not in vain. - Myrlie Evers-Williams

Hearing Myrlie Evers-Williams invocation at today's inaugural ceremony, I started to wonder if it is possible that we might yet be America.  Her invocation of the image from the Letter to the Hebrews of the great cloud of witnesses, what we profess in the Creed as "the communion of the saints", made me think it is still possible that we could rise above the madness and pettiness of our current moment and really be the place that so many dreamed we could be.  That we could the land Ms. Evers-Williams' first husband died trying to achieve.  Perhaps, not only his eyes, but those of the men and women, the slaves and Chinese coolies, the Spanish-speaking peasants and Gaelic-tinged Irish immigrants, the original inhabitants of the lands, all those who trudged through the filth of American bigotry and hatred and will to violence never surrendering the belief that America could be what we always say we are - those dreams and hopes, the shattered lives and broken bodies might yet find satisfaction when America becomes.

At first glance, there seems little chance this will happen any time soon.  The forces resisting this President are powerful.  All the same, the forces resisting even the possibility of an African-American President were powerful before 2008.  Indeed, if anyone had asked me as late as 2004 if it was even possible we could have an African-American President in my lifetime, I would have said no.

Now, we celebrate his inauguration for a second term.

Without minimizing the nearly insane vitriol, the almost psychotic reaction among those who oppose the very idea a person such as Barack Obama would presume to be President, I do believe it possible to satisfy the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before us.  It will take work, and a refusal to settle for anything less than America being America.

With her words, Ms. Evers-Williams has reminded us that this time, our time, presents us not only the challenges that all historical moments offer.  We are reminded that it is not just for us and our posterity that we are to work; the debt we owe to those who have gone before can only be repaid when America tries to be America.  Let us accept the grace of Divine Providence to lead us down that narrow, thorny path.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends

When rock and roll first emerged in the mid-1950's, the excitement it engendered among its teenage fans created mass panic among older people.  It was loud, it was boisterous, it was fun, it got people dancing.  A rock and roll concert was a time out and away from the rules and omnipresent conformity of the surrounding society; a bunch of white kids could celebrate the joyous music of African-American musicians like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, giving themselves permission, for half an hour or forty-five minutes (the shows were a lot shorter back then), to set aside their inhibitions.  The power of the music, all facets of it - including  the extra-musical dimensions of race and age - was enough to turn many rock and roll shows in to what appeared to untrained eyes to be mini-riots.

When The Beatles first toured America, and the music was drowned out by the screaming of the fans, many thought there had to be something wrong, perhaps even sinister, about something as silly as electrified and sped-up twelve-bar blues songs played by four well-dressed, polite young Englishmen.  It was only when the floodgates opened and other British bands emerged that the relative tameness of The Beatles concert presence was appreciated.  The Rolling Stones, mimicking their blues heroes, strutted and postured on stage.  The Animals would wail and screech, the rolling organ, particularly in their cover of "House Of The Rising Sun", sounding a bit too much like the music of the brothel the band was singing about.  Finally, The Who arrived, and when they premiered on American TV, they ended their performance by destroying not only their instruments, but their equipment as well.

Clearly, something was happening.

Theatricality was hardly something new to pop music.  The whole minstrel tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was constructed around it.  Jazz and pop performers were adept not just at playing music, but putting on a show.  In chicken shacks and honkey-tonks across much of rural America, black and white audiences were treated to a variety of performers who added a kind of panache to their performances by dressing in odd costumes, adopting strange stage personas, adding props to their stage sets so the show became just that.

In the 1950's, the blues singer/guitarist Howlin' Wolf would sometimes begin his shows by emerging from a coffin.  When Elvis Presley swung his hips on national television, he may not have noticed the sexuality inherent in what he was doing, but millions of parents did, and they didn't like it one bit.

All performers struggle not just to play their music well, presenting it to listeners with integrity as music.  When performing, they can lose themselves in a performance, expressing the emotional content of the song through facial features, movements about the stage, and interaction with other band members as well as members of the audience.  The rigid, polite-looking way the Beatles performed may have warmed the hearts of parents across America; it was a far cry from Chuck Berry duck-walking across the stage as he played his Gibson, sometimes slinging it between his legs, pointing it at the audience in a gesture that no one would misunderstand.

By the late 1960's, the desire to present not just a musical concert, but a whole experience, goaded many performers to new heights.  In 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire and continued to play it, making Pete Townshend - who sat in the audience and fumed as he watched Hendrix not just steal The Who's act, but show how it could be done better - wish he had lost a toss of the dice, letting Hendrix go first.  The Grateful Dead employed a light show that created a visual representation of the combination of effects of the psychedelics they were taking and the music they were performing.

In 1968, a British band named The Crazy World of Arthur Brown enjoyed a brief moment of success with a psychedelically-tinged song called "Fire" (the band's drummer was a young British student of the American jazz drummer Gene Krupa; his name was Carl Palmer).  When they appeared on Top of the Pops, they showed the world what theatricality in pop music might look like:

Not just sets, but make-up, a whole stage-persona that reflected the music!  Was it possible that musicians could do this?  Was it possible to present music not just as music, but to entertain an audience by making the music an integral part of a much more lavish production?

Why, sure.

In the first half of the next decade, this trend toward theatricality spanned musical styles.  Concerts became more than just concerts.  They became events.  Whether it was Peter Gabriel of Genesis dressing up in costumes and shaving his head in a reverse-Mohawk:

Or funk master George Clinton building a space ship, landing P-Funk in cities across America and tearing it up each and every night:

The idea that a concert was more than about music gripped all sorts of musicians, bands, and performers.  There was David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust

Or the absurd extreme of KISS, for whom the concert experience became the sine qua non of the bands existence.

Finally, there was Alice Cooper.  Cooper put on a show that left nothing untried.  He hung himself.  he electrocuted himself.  He had himself guillotined.  He wore odd makeup.  There were non-musical extras, sometimes scantily-clad women.  For his performance of "I Love The Dead", he would sometimes use a blow-up doll as a prop.

As the money poured in and the good times rolled through the early and mid-1970's, the idea that a band or individual performing on stage didn't have to just stand in front of a microphone and sing, but create something larger, a whole experience that would leave the fans with the sense they were part of something larger than life, took hold.  The music was louder now; sometimes, like with the prog bands, it was intricate, which didn't prevent, for example, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer going out on tour with a stage catapult that launched a grand piano to its destruction.  Other times, if the music was simple, clear, and filled with fun, the huge performance - complete with smoke machines, flame pots, and tons of lights - made it seem more than it really was.  Not only were musicians experimenting with the music; they were experimenting with performance as well, creating a whole microcosm for the concertgoer, a tiny space-and-time away that wasn't just about the music, but the entire experience.

Even as the punk revolt in Britain seemed to put an end to the pretensions of some musicians to do anything other than stand on stage and play music, some bands held on to the idea that rock performance could be about more than just the sounds, all the while leaving the integrity of the music itself as music untouched.  Precisely because the music these underground musicians, particularly in Britain outside the London punk scene, was louder, brasher, more outrageous than anything the punks were doing (except perhaps killing people or themselves), there was this urge, this desire to make the concert experience reflect the weight of the music they were playing.

As the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was being born, it already had all sorts of touchstones from the recent past from which to derive ideas about performing.  Integrity and authenticity weren't just about the music, it seemed; integrity and authenticity could also be layered beneath all sorts of props, the adoption of stage personas, communicating with the growing number of fans the reality that the music and the musicians understood each other well enough.

A World Of Ideas

Remember the election?  It was in all the papers.  President Obama won what turned out to be an easy victory over his Republican rival.  In a year in which they were particularly vulnerable, Democratic candidates not only won enough to hold the Democratic majority in the US Senate; they actually increased their majority.  While the Republicans continue to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives, Republican candidates received one million fewer votes than Democratic candidates.  Altogether, it was a banner election year for the Democratic Party.

And the tide continues to roll on.  All major polling on attitudes toward the President, the Congress, and the American people's attitudes toward the two major parties continue to demonstrate a strong swing toward the Democratic Party.  Even as the House Majority and Senate Minority try to find ways of slowing or even stopping legislative action from the Democrats, the Republican leadership is held responsible by the American people for lack of action.

Yet, nothing seems to change, does it?  One would expect a press corps inured by 30 years of GOP dominance not to take the Democrats or liberal ideas seriously.  Still, whether it is the major figures in control of the various parts of the Executive or Legislative branches or our most highly-paid commentators upon our national life, one grows weary looking for a sign the election made any difference whatsoever.

Frustrated myself over the near-hysteria I witness daily, as people carry on about Barack Obama's tyranny, and the various threats to impeach or otherwise curtail efforts by the Executive Branch to work on solutions to our gun violence problem, I realized the answer was both obvious and sitting right in front of me.

As those crazy kids say these days: It's all about the Benjamins.

Nothing made that more clear to me than reading this piece from Rick Perlstein, published this past fall in The Baffler.  A marvelous history of the rise of Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, the grand poo-bahs of right-wing fundraising (I remember coming across their names back when I was in college; you could occasionally see Viguerie doing TV spots, voicing various right-wing verities with a practiced smile that reminded me of every con-artist I'd ever seen portrayed on television), Perlstein does a masterful job linking the insane world of the wingnut money machine, a whole network of what he identifies quite correctly as the snake-oil salesmen who sell everything from pyramid schemes to real-life snake-oil to gullible readers of right-wing literature, and the culmination of this whole history of untruth in Mitt Romney Presidential campaign.  Perlstein's conclusion is both correct and devastating: Romney's unending dishonesty wasn't a flaw in the system.  It was the fruit of a system that has relied, since the misty days after the defeat of Barry Goldwater, on dishonesty as a way to separate people from their pocket change.

We liberals tend to believe that things like good ideas that work, actual evidence from the world in which we all live, and the democratic process giving us elected officials to enact the policies or support the laws they said they would do when they campaigned; we believe these things matter.  While the fundamental anti-democratic spirit of the right is both well-known and well-documented, what Perlstein does in this article is make clear how much fundamental dishonesty in the pursuit of money, rather than any real desire to win elections, sway public opinion, or change public policy, lies at the heart of the right-wing political machine.  The argument between the left and the right in America doesn't really exist because each side is engaged in completely different activities.

When we read stories that Karl Rove just signed another multi-year contract with FOXNews, after a very public - and quite funny - on-air flame out after his months and years of mendacity caught up with him, viewers of Fox should understand just how much contempt the network has for you.  When we read stories that a recently elected Senator has set up a Political Action Committee that raised over $1.6 million, spending only $78,000 actually supporting candidates for elected office, we shouldn't be surprised.  Just after the election, having read story after story about a vaunted Romney GOTV effort that failed miserably, we read political autopsies that included quotes from leaders of this alleged vote-getting machine who were surprised that Obama's GOTV organization actually . . . got people to the polls!  They couldn't believe the Obama campaign wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme, paying people to produce good soundbites for local and national news organizations.

That's why so many liberal bloggers still get accused of secretly pocketing money from George Soros.  On the right, all sorts of entities, organizations, individuals, and even corporations pay a whole lot of money to news aggregators, blogs, and multi-media "personalities", so they just assume folks on the left are doing the same thing.  These accusations give up the game, however, demonstrating as they do the fundamental dishonesty of too many right-wing pundits.  They are honest enough that they're in it for the money; they assume folks on the left are, too.

If you see and hear claims that the President has a secret plan to confiscate all the weapons in America prior to establishing UN Agenda 21, remember: These claims are birthed not in a careful consideration of the actual evidence from the President's actions or policies.  Rather, they are lifted from fundraising letters from the NRA and Glenn Beck's Citadel, who promise either to fight the usurpation of power by a tyrant or a haven of freedom from the creeping authoritarianism.  All of it, along with miracle cures for cancer, online get-rich-quick schemes, and the promise of a better tomorrow can be yours, as long as you send these organizations - and far too many more - your money.

In a world of ideas, the idea that no one ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of the American people continues to provide more than a decent living for phony politicians, and the hucksters and snake-oil organizations of the American Conservative movement.

Bogus History

The Second Amendment was not enacted to provide a check on government tyranny; rather, it was written to assure the Southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by using its newly acquired constitutional authority over the militia to disarm the state militia and thereby destroy the South's principal instrument of slave control. In effect, the Second Amendment supplemented the slavery compromise made at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and obliquely codified in other constitutional provisions. - Carl T. Bogus

If you click the link, you will be directed to the law review article, "The Hidden History Of The Second Amendment" from the University of California at Davis Law Review 31 (1998): 309.  I won't comment on the article itself, offering it only as an antidote to so much of the nonsense out there, such as this:

 The primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that the citizenry has a fighting chance to resist tyranny

When people write this, they are exploring the deep recesses of their ass.

I will include the following detail that is left out of most history text books.

This was a no- holds-barred struggle, and the adversaries pressed every available strategic or tactical advantage. The following example gives a sense of the intensity of the struggle. The day after delegates to the Philadelphia Convention signed the proposed new Constitution, Federalists sought to have the Pennsylvania Legislature, which had been meeting upstairs at the Philadelphia State House while the Constitutional Convention was in session downstairs, vote to convene a ratifying convention in Pennsylvania two months hence.[64] Lacking the votes to defeat this proposal, the anti-Federalists sought to block the measure by failing to return after the noon recess, thereby preventing a quorum.[65] The legislative session was due to end the next day, and without a quorum there would be considerable delay before the Pennsylvania Legislature could consider the matter again.[66] The Federalists, capitalizing on the opportunity to create a sense of momentum by having Pennsylvania vote to convene a ratifying convention before the ink had dried on the proposed new Constitution, directed the sergeant of arms to fetch the missing members.[67] The sergeant located two¾ just [Page 325] the number needed to complete a quorum ¾ escorted them against their will back to their seats in the State House, and barred the doors until the assembly voted by a narrow margin to convene a state ratifying convention.

I should add that, while important, this history shouldn't drive people to insist the Amendment is either irrelevant or unnecessary. It's important only to make clear that the insistence the Federalists supported armed insurrection, while nonsensical from a logical point of view, isn't supported by the actual historical record.  How courts interpret the Amendment today, and how those interpretations impact how we regulate or do not regulate firearms in this country should rely on contemporary jurisprudence, keeping the history only as a touchstone rather than front and center.  After all, I don't want our understanding of any of the Constitutional Amendments limited to their meaning at the time of ratification.  That leaves no room for growth, change, or for the Amendments themselves to continue to live and breathe in different historical settings.

I do feel sorry for a guy named Bogus, I gotta admit.

 

 

 

Reality Vs. Fantasy

Suicides in the U.S. military surged to a record 349 last year, far exceeding American combat deaths in Afghanistan, and some private experts are predicting the dark trend will grow worse this year. (Source)

Dobbs responded by claiming that Obama is "so committed to constraining or dismissing outright our Second Amendment rights, it makes you wonder why he's not ridding the Constitution of the First Amendment as well." He later said, "You've got to wonder why the president doesn't double down in his assault on the Constitution, taking on not only the Second, but the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Fourteenth." Dobbs then suggested that the reason Obama has "begun with the Second Amendment" is because "[w]ithout our rights under the Second Amendment, removing the rest of our Bill of Rights would be a lot easier."(Source)

The Pentagon has struggled to deal with the suicides, which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and others have called an epidemic. The problem reflects severe strains on military personnel burdened with more than a decade of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, complicated by anxiety over the prospect of being forced out of a shrinking force.

“The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.” (Source)

Military suicides began rising in 2006 and soared to a then-record 310 in 2009 before leveling off for two years. It came as a surprise to many that the numbers resumed an upward climb this year, given that U.S. military involvement in Iraq is over and the Obama administration is taking steps to wind down the war in Afghanistan.

"Now that we're decreasing our troops and they're coming back home, that's when they're really in the danger zone, when they're transitioning back to their families, back to their communities and really finding a sense of purpose for themselves," said Kim Ruocco, whose husband, Marine Maj. John Ruocco, killed himself between Iraq deployments in 2005. She directs a suicide prevention program for a support group, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS.

“Postponing sequestration doesn’t prevent, it just prolongs the uncertainty for our force and for our military families,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Readiness is what’s now in jeopardy. We’re on the brink of creating a hollow force, the very thing we said we must avoid.”(Source)

“But for the rest of the force, operations, maintenance and training will be gutted. We’ll ground aircraft, return ships to port, and sharply curtail training across the force,” he said. “Within months, we’ll be less prepared. Within a year, we’ll be unprepared.”

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”(Source)

And finally, a last dose of reality: Since the Sandy Hook shootings, as of January 15, there have been 919 shooting deaths in the United States.  That's around thirty a day.(Source)

As a free people, we always have the choice not to pay attention to matters of public importance.  We have the choice to follow the siren song of those who, not having our interests or the public interests at heart, manipulate our feelings on a particular matter, creating a tempest in a piss pot (as a friend of mine wrote recently on Facebook).  All the while, matters of very real concern to all of us pass unnoticed.  Things about which we should exercise our emotions and our intellect are ignored for the illusions ginned up through fear and lies.  A day will come when we will mourn the fact that we ignored the reality in front of us for the fantasies cooked up by powerful interests to further their own purposes.  All I can say is, don't say no one told you.

Pounding On The Shell Around Bizarro-World

As I wrote yesterday, I'm still trying to come to grips with the whole matter of the suicide of Aaron Swartz.  Not because I knew him well, as I also made clear.  On the contrary, part of my own sadness is that I didn't even recognize the name, or know even one of the many contributions he made in his too-short life.

In this remembrance, economist John Quiggin mentions Swartz's role in Quiggin's own work debunking something I had no idea existed!  Apparently, for a couple decades, there was a concerted effort to create this alternate universe where DDT was a harmless chemical whose use was moving us toward a world without malaria; this near-utopia was foiled by the evil Rachel Carson and her junk science, which resulted in a worldwide ban on the use of DDT, resulting in the deaths of millions of children, particularly in poor countries.  Since we all know that liberals are the real racists, it is obvious this was her plan all along - to kill little black and brown babies through the evil machinations of her fake, alleged "science".

Apparently, there's even a web site with a "malaria death clock", with Rachel Carson's image right next to it. Some writers have said she is responsible for more deaths than Hitler (yeah, I always love it when they drag that failed Austrian artist's name into their arguments).

In 2003, Quiggin published a piece on his own website outlining the history of DDT's use and overuse, and the resultant multiple problems that arose.  It was a response to an alleged "balanced approach" that did not call out junk science as junk science.  Even ten years ago, Quiggin was clear enough that DDT was being phased out even before Carson's Silent Spring was published because its overuse had resulted in a noticeable lack of effectiveness.  The other hazards from DDT - the near-extinction of several species of raptors who fed on DDT-infected fish, resulting in weakened egg shells; it correlation with certain cancers when ingested by humans - were only beginning to come to light, and added impetus for the drive to end its use.

Now, all this is history and science, which as most folks know, are things certain quarters of the American Political Right are actively hostile toward.  In 2007, Swartz wrote a slightly longer piece, outlining much the same historical facts, as well as the rather loud and boisterous media campaign aiming to brand Rachel Carson as some kind of anti-human criminal.  Toward the end, Swartz did something very clever: he showed that he had heard Deep Throat in All The President's Men and had followed the money.

Perhaps the most vocal group spreading this story is Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). Founded in 2000 by Roger Bate, an economist at various right-wing think tanks, AFM has run a major PR campaign to push the pro-DDT story, publishing scores of op-eds and appearing in dozens of articles each year. Bate and his partner Richard Tren even published a book laying out their alternate history of DDT: When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story.

A funding pitch uncovered by blogger Eli Rabbett shows Bate's thinking when he first started the project. "The environmental movement has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been 'politically correct,'" he explained (Tobacco Archives, 09/98). What the anti-environmental movement needs is something with "the correct blend of political correctness (...oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future)." That something, Bate proposed, was DDT.

In an interview, Bate said that his motivation had changed after years of working on the issue of malaria. "I think my position has mellowed, perhaps with age," he told Extra!. "[I have] gone from being probably historically anti-environmental to being very much pro-combating malaria now." He pointed to the work he'd done making sure money to fight malaria was spent properly, including a study he co-authored in the respected medical journal the Lancet(7/15/06) on dishonest accounting at the World Bank. He insisted that he wasn't simply pro-DDT, but instead was willing to support whatever the evidence showed worked. And he flatly denied that AFM had ever received money from tobacco, pharmaceutical or chemical companies.

Still, AFM has very much followed the plan Bate laid out in his original funding pitch to corporations: First, create "the intellectual arguments to make our case," then "disseminate these arguments to people in [developing countries]" who can make convincing spokespeople, and then "promote these arguments ... in the West." The penultimate page gives another hint that stopping malaria isn't the primary goal: "Is the DDT problem still relevant?" is listed as an "intellectual issue to be resolved"--once they got funding. (When asked for comment on this, Bate became upset and changed the subject.)

 Quiggin, who is both clever and tenacious, published a piece in the Prospect  with co-author Tim Lambert the next year.  As he makes clear in his remembrance written over the weekend, it was Swartz who brought to his attention this link between the junk-science of the pro-DDT crowd and the tobacco lobby, in particular Roger Bates.

By 1990, it seemed that the public health issues surrounding DDT had been largely resolved. In developed countries, DDT had been replaced by less environmentally damaging alternatives. But soon the situation changed radically. The tobacco industry, faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places, sought to cast doubt on the science behind the mooted ban. But a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science.” Its primary vehicle was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris. . . .

Tobacco companies created a European version of TASSC, the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), led by Roger Bate, another tobacco lobbyist. In the late 1990s, Bate established “Africa Fighting Malaria,” a so-called “astroturf” organisation based in Washington DC. His aim was to drive a wedge between public health and the environment by suggesting that by banning DDT to protect birds, environmentalists were causing many people to die from malaria. Between them, Milloy’s TASSC and Bate’s Africa Fighting Malaria convinced many that DDT was a panacea for malaria, denied to the third world by the machinations of rich environmentalists. 

 Bate responded, and while Quiggin's reply was polite, his co-author pulled no punches.  The first part of Tim Lambert's reply made extensive use of the trail first laid down by Aaron Swartz the year before.

Bate implies that all he did for tobacco interests was a little consulting on “international health” and that the money did not influence his opinions because it was paid after he wrote the two articles and because Philip Morris approached him. Unfortunately for Bate, the Tobacco Documents are available online, and Bate and the ESEF feature in many of them.

What follows is an extensive citation list from the online Tobacco archive, demonstrating that Bate's role in the pro-DDT business was in fact part of a far larger public relations campaign to discredit anti-tobacco science to prevent regulation.  The whole thing is worth a look, if for no other reason than to demonstrate two things I find fascinating in our digital age: First, don't misrepresent yourself online, because it's just way too easy to find out just how disingenuous you are; second, the sheer quantity of information available online does make it difficult to find a place to land if one is trying to do research.  Lambert does an excellent job culling through the thousands of pages of documents to demonstrate just how intertwined Bate was with the tobacco companies.

Lambert's second reply deals specifically with the ways Bate has misrepresented the history of DDT.  Again - don't lie online!  It's just way too easy for someone to find it out.

Now, this little bit of internet history may seem marginal.  In fact, however, it is not.  First, and most important, it demonstrates the way nonsense can go viral on the internet.  As Swartz's 2007 piece demonstrated, the claims against Carson were getting wide play in mainstream publications, without the reporters making clear how wrong they were.  Second, it demonstrates the way the "war on science" is actually an attempt by large corporations to protect their financial interests by creating  a climate of doubt in a public that is just way too willing to pretend there might be another side to any story.  The pro-DDT campaign wasn't important for the tobacco company in and for itself; it was a way for them to test the effectiveness of a media campaign waged against public health organizations on what was thought to be long-settled public policy and well-documented science.  That there are still right-bloggers out there who push nonsense like this is irrelevant; that they have no idea how they've been used by large corporations to push an entirely different agenda is kind of sad.

Finally, Swartz's role in this whole story is important because he was central in pointing out the role large corporations were playing in our seemingly never-ending fight to remind people that science is a legitimate enterprise.  This is a big deal.  Using online sources to point people in the direction of generous contributions from corporate entities to groups doing particular lobbying and PR campaigns can be daunting; Swartz did it easily, and presented his case clearly.

Remember this.  He did this at 21.  Imagine, given support and time, rather than harassment, indictment, and suicide, what else Aaron Swartz could have helped uncover.  Cracking the shell around right-wing Crazy Town is always commendable; doing it in a way that exposes the role of corporate money in manipulating both the public and policy makers is an enormous contribution to our common life.  The guy deserved a medal instead of prosecution.

Pulling Out A Single Thread

Do you use an RSS feed?  Are you on Reddit?  Are you among those - myself included - who set to one side the legalize surrounding what is and is not permissible, downloading material from the internet without a thought or care?

If any of these things are true, then the death of Aaron Swartz yesterday should mean something to you.  Taking his own life at the very young age of 26, Swartz had already managed to invent the RSS feed, as well as get in on the ground floor of the social networking site Reddit.  At 19, he heard about independent researcher Rick Perlstein and created a website for Perlstein free of charge.

In July, Swartz was indicted by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts for allegedly illegally downloading millions of documents from the online scholarly journal archive JSTOR.  Defending himself against the charges would have exhausted what resources he had managed to accumulate in his short life.  If convicted, he faced over thirty years in federal prison.

As Charlie Pierce noted in a comment on one thread somewhere discussing Swartz's suicide, perhaps if Swartz had been laundering billions of dollars of drug and terrorist money, he would be OK.  Heck, if he had imploded his company and nearly collapsed the world economy, he could sue he US government, like AIG! Instead, Swartz, acting out of the conviction that intellectual property - in particular intellectual property that was created with public money - is not something from which anyone should derive profit, but rather the property of all people, downloaded millions of pages of documents from JSTOR.  For this, the US Attorney's office in Massachusetts unleashed the hounds on this young man.

Of course, it should also be noted that Swartz was a chronic depressive.  Rick Perlstein notes that Swartz wrote extensively of his identification with the late author David Foster Wallace after Wallace killed himself.  Perlstein, the one among the many who've written about Swartz over the past twenty-four hours who seems to have been most deeply effected by the young man's death, was blunt yesterday: He places the blame for Swartz's death squarely on the federal government for hounding this young man to death.

In response, some have noted that, as a chronic depressive, eliminating personal responsibility in such a fashion removes any agency Swartz himself should have.

Knowing little other than what I've read, I find these arguments of little value (except perhaps to reveal much about those who make them).  What I do know for certain is this: Even though I couldn't have named him before yesterday morning, what I've read in just 24 hours convinces me that all of us have lost, and lost dearly, with this young man's passing.  Whether a tragedy or a crime, his suicide has robbed us of a tremendous human being, a young man who packed more living in his short life than many twice his age.  He gave to man freely; he offered the world the fruits of his intellectual labor not for his own aggrandizement but to make the world a little bit better place.  He was a firm believer in the power of knowledge, that the world runs not on "information" but understanding, and put his tremendous resources of intellect and passion behind those persons and institutions and causes that furthered as broad a dissemination of real understanding as possible.  Reading the many, many things this young man has done made me wonder about the old metaphor about pulling a single thread, then watching the whole piece of stitching unravel.  Swartz's participation in so much of our contemporary wired intellectual life was such that, losing him, we lose a component that holds so much of it together.

We are all the less, whether we knew his name or not, for the death of Aaron Swartz.  Over the next few days, as I digest just some of the amazing things he did, I may revisit not only his accomplishments, but be a tiny part of a growing number of people trying to shine a light on what seems an over-the-top prosecution.  Did this contribute to Swartz's decision to kill himself?  Is he solely responsible for his death, perhaps mitigated by a struggle with depression?  These are questions that, absent clear evidence one way or another, I believe are probably in the realm of unanswerable.  The least service I can provide, I hope, is to make clear all Swartz has done, the good things for which he worked and fought, and the many ways he has made our lives better.

It isn't enough, I know.  But I hope it might be possible to take that thread and, if not reconstruct the whole piece of cloth, at the very least show how it fit in the larger work.

Can't Find My Way Home

Imagine yourself, as you are now, suddenly finding yourself waking up in the mid-1970's.  Apart from all the superficial differences - gas costs what?!?! don't they sell bras for young women? - if you're a music fan, you will find yourself bewildered by the labels fixed to various music*.  There will be bands of which you might have heard, like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.  Some of the biggest acts are bands who, by the middle of the decade, are running out of ideas and starting to sound either tired or pompous and in any case boring.

If you peruse magazines covering the music industry like Rolling Stone and Creem, you will probably find yourself bewildered by the far-too-cavalier assignment of the label "heavy metal" to certain bands and music. Even more odd, those bands that you, a refugee from forty years later, are credited with creating this particular style, are upset over the label and refuse to wear it!

You turn on the radio or flip through the pages of a magazine and you'll find the label used to describe the American power trio Grand Funk Railroad.

While you might not hear it on the radio, you'll hear the label used to describe King Crimson.

In short, the label seemed tossed about without reference to much of anything other than a dedication to playing the electric guitar really loudly.  The record companies, always on the lookout for the next big thing, signed bands with reckless abandon.  The times were flush enough that they could support a pop music centered on navel-gazing singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Paul Simon, while more traditional rock bands like The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, continued to produce music, sometimes the finest of their careers, by-and-large under the radar of the mainstream.  Music dumped in various categories - progressive, heavy metal, hard rock - was treated either with disdain or adoration, depending upon whether one was a critic or fan, yet the fans, far more than the critics, were wary of such labeling, at least at the time.

In sum, by the middle of the decade, much of the creative flourish of the turn of the decade was wearing itself out, with copycats and third-tier musicians and bands filling up the space needed on radio playlists.  Heavy metal, while birthed by many and was yet to flower completely, was either dismissed as noise for noise's sake, or even (on more than one occasion) declared dead.  Yet, "dead" was far more descriptive of the creative energies that had fueled the rise of so many different bands, looking and sounding distinct.  Mass marketing, the pressure to surpass each previous recording, and the desire to keep doing something new had drained many musicians and bands to the point where moving forward seemed impossible (indeed, in 1974, Robert Fripp would break up King Crimson and retire from performing rock music for five years; the bands posthumous release, Red, was perhaps the clearest indication why that was a smart move).

The repeated declarations of the death of rock and roll, like the epitaphs for jazz or the blues, ignored the fact that while the biggest bands might be running out of new ideas, there is, as there has always been, a fresh stream of younger musicians who want to take what they've heard and apply their own imprimatur upon it.  Indeed, before the decade was out, as Britain in particular was gripped by the shooting star of punk, then post-punk, and the major record labels scrambled playing catch-up, several bands were listening to the heavy metal being played on the radio and thinking, "I can do this better."  One such group, formed in Black Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, was, like Sabbath, rooted in the blues.  Their visual style borrowed heavily from the American west, with their lead singer, Rob Halford, often appearing on stage wrapped in fringed suede and cowboy boots and the two lead guitarists, K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, wearing cowboy hats.  While Halford and Tipton were late additions to the band - it had originally formed in 1970, and Halford and Tipton would be added in 1973 and 1974 respectively - it had already been touring heavily in England and, in 1974, managed to snag a record contract after a heavy tour of Scandinavia.  Their first record, Rocka Rolla, was released to almost universal silence.  It makes sense, as there was little to distinguish the record from hundreds of other recordings flooding the market at the time.  A careful listener, however, might hear shades of something different, an attempt to take the music someplace different.

As with many other types of music, making a particular sound takes time.  It takes effort.  It takes a willingness to embrace some things while letting other things fall by the wayside.  Finally, it includes a willingness to take risks, and there is one more element from the early- to mid-1970's where "risk" was presented in huge splashes of light and theatrics, risks that would pay off for decades to come in ways that few would realize at the time.

*I think it's also important to note the role the record companies played both in insisting on labeling music using different categories.  There is also the problem of musical segregation, as well as stylistic segregation.  As a child growing up in the 1970's, I listened to and enjoyed funk and soul music, but was bewildered by the fact it just wasn't played on the radio in my little corner of rural, upstate New York.  The impact of social and economic changes is an important part of the story, and one to which I shall repair at some point, but I just wanted to note that it is in my mind even if I don't make it explicit.

Hitler. Insurrection, Conspiracies, & Other Nonsense

It would be nice to admit that I haven't been posting as regularly because I'm just so darn busy.  I really do want to continue telling the story of heavy metal in the way I'm telling it, but every time I sit down to do so, other stuff crowds it out.  The last thing I want to do, the last thing I've ever wanted, is to be just one more voice in the shrill chorus, repeating the bleatings of, well, pretty much anyone.  The gun issue, which all should have known would descend to the depths once Wayne LaPierre walked away from the microphone at his press conference a week after the Sandy Hook shooting, has become ubiquitous.  By and large, as a friend complained quite cogently and eloquently yesterday on Facebook, it has been dominated by idiocy, nonsense, lies, and a kind of spittle-flecked hysteria that doesn't make it possible to talk about what is "really" going on because far too many people are aping Matt Drudge and screeching "Hitler! Stalin!  TYRANNY!!!"

First of all, Hitler never said the things all those stupid Instagrams claim he said.  He didn't confiscate any weapons, or pass draconian gun control laws.  As for Stalin . . . I'm not even sure where to begin with that one.

Furthermore, consider the mindset here.  On one side are folks who are saying something fairly reasonable: ten to twelve thousand Americans - our fellow citizens - are killed every year by firearms.  Owning a firearm is far more likely to result in it being used to injure or kill a family member or friend - anywhere from four to twelve times, depending upon the study cited - than to defend against criminal home invasion.  What's being proposed, at least to my mind, are a series of largely cosmetic controls - limiting the number of rounds a magazine can hold; banning the future sale of "assault weapons" which, as many on the right point out correctly, is a media phrase that refers to no real thing (kind of like "partial birth abortion", but I digress) - that do not address the fundamental issue of rampant gun violence.  I also consider the matter of mental health to be a red herring; most of the people who use firearms in criminal activity are neither clinically mentally ill, or were prior to some pivotal event perhaps bringing on a severe depression or other mitigating factor that causes them to threaten or injure or kill.  Far more prevalent is the kind of rampant insecurity among American men that gets reassurance like the kind offered by Bushmaster in its add for the weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  If you're a man who needs a gun to feel like a man, you might want to put the gun away and get some help.  Like I said a while back - take off your clothes and look down.  If there's something down there, then you're a man, and you don't need a piece of metal that goes boom to demonstrate that to the world.

Then, consider the whole, "Gun control doesn't work!" nonsense.  Of course it does.  It's worked here in the United States.  It's worked fabulously well in Australia and Scotland.  It takes all of ten seconds to find this information - real information about the real world where real people live - that makes that statement a lie.  If you know it's out there and you repeat it anyway, then you're lying.  If you don't know about it, and someone tells you, and you either refuse to check it out, or don't want to, then you're either lazy, or so far inside the bubble that you can't tell reality from whatever fantasy the gun industry has created for you.

Similarly, saying, "Gun laws don't work because criminals don't follow the law," isn't an argument against gun control per se.  It's an argument against all laws, because people who break the law . . . don't care about laws.  When I'm driving down the road at ten or fifteen miles an hour over the posted speed limit - I don't care about the law!  Does that mean there shouldn't be speed limits?

While we're on the topic of ridiculous things - the Second Amendment to the Constitution has absolutely nothing to do with keeping people armed as a check against government power.  First of all, the text of the Amendment makes that a lie.  Second, the actual debates during the first Congress about the Amendment make it a lie; the Amendment is about preventing the creation of a standing army, which many of the founders considered a threat to republican-style government.  And, really, think about it.  If there were a real military coup in the United States and some yahoo somewhere started taking potshots at the soldiers enforcing some dystopian martial law, trust me when I tell you that would last for about ten seconds.  The US military has much bigger things that go boom, so put your Red Dawn fantasies back in the box.

Finally - no one is suggesting confiscating weapons.  No one.  There is no secret agenda afoot to use this as a way to force people to surrender their guns to the government so Obama can become dictator for life, or whatever the nonsense swirling around is.  Your twelve-gauge shotgun, your standard .22-caliber hunting rifle, or even a larger, say .30-.06 or .30-.30 - they're safe.  No one anywhere - not even folks who want far stricter gun control measures than are being offered (like me) - thinks such a thing would either be workable or even legal.

Really, I just wanted to get this off my chest.  I realize the frothing and shouts of "Agenda 21!  Freedom!" will continue.  I realize "reasonable" has, somehow, disappeared from our national dialogue.  Not just when it comes to guns, but anything.  I've now responded to the weeks and weeks of nonsense, and while it won't even slow it down, at the very least, I've tried to make clear that there is hysteria afoot.

It just isn't coming from folks talking about gun control. 

Something To Celebrate

It's been a lousy day, made worse by reading that AIG is so grateful to the federal government for keeping its doors open it is suing, claiming the terms of the bailout violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.  There are times I wish public flogging were still legal.

Rather than dwell on something that makes me wish pain and suffering on others, I want to celebrate something wonderful.  First, a photo:

This is Myrlie Evers-Williams.  For those who may not know, her first husband, Medgar Evers, was murdered in his driveway, shot in the back by a man named Byron De La Beckwith.  It took decades for De La Beckwith to be convicted of the crime.  We as a people are still dealing with the horrible creatures that raged unfettered upon our national life when our African-American brothers and sisters demanded they no longer be treated like non-citizens, and therefore non-persons.

Pres. Obama has invited Ms. Evers-Williams to give the invocation as his Inauguration on the 20th.  Four years ago, I was outraged that he picked con-artist Rick Warren to do the same thing.  With this pick, Mr. Obama is demonstrating his understanding of the debt he - and by extension all of us - owe to Ms. Evers-Williams and her martyred husband.

The best prayers don't come from preachers who console us, telling us that God is on our side and we can find the proof if we just find our purpose.  The best prayers come from those who cry out for justice, whose rage at our all-too-human systems of injustice, white supremacy, and state-sponsored terrorism do not settle for easy answers.  The best prayers come from those who know the road to real justice runs straight through the hell of violence and hatred and death that some are all too willing to unleash upon those who are willing to risk their lives for it.

So, thank you, Mr. President, for giving us a few moments to hear the voice of one who understands.

Three Of A Perfect Pair

Eric Clapton was admired among British rock fans for his devotion to a kind of authenticity.  He'd quit two successful bands at the peak of their success because they just weren't bluesy enough.  In the years he'd been around, he became the premiere lead guitar player, surpassing Keith Richards in popularity.  Among the musicians who admired him was drummer Ginger Baker.  Baker was older than Clapton, a Londoner whose roots lay in what the Brits called "trad jazz".  After leaving The Yardbirds, Clapton and Baker would get together and jam and talk about putting a band together.  They wanted just one more person, a bass player and singer (Clapton was still unsure about his ability to sing lead), and there was one person they agreed they did not want: Jack Bruce.

They ended up hiring Jack Bruce.  They called themselves Cream.

The tensions in the trio were heavy.  The music they played was unlike anything aimed at a mass audience; songs rooted in augmented blues harmonics, or alternately simple, repeated musical phrases or "riffs"; it was clear from the beginning that "songs" mattered far less to these three than the simple desire to play.  Live in concert, they would leave the songs behind as quickly as they could, each musician taking off without caring if the other two were following along.  The three-minute pop song was little more than a key opening a door for a kind of musical adventure.  Blues and jazz musicians understood what they were up to; to the general public, however, this was new, this was strange, this was powerful.

It was also not meant to last.  It took only a couple years for Baker and Clapton to become so disgusted with Bruce, who was more interested in popularity and success than a kind of earnest authenticity that came from playing, the band decided to toss in the towel.  Their final show was at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968, a couple years after the three of them got together (trivia point: the opening band for Cream's farewell concert was London's hottest new band, an outfit with a residency at the premiere rock club, The Marquee; they were called Yes and would go on to some success of their own).  Despite the voice over at the beginning, when Clapton introduces "Sunshine Of Your Love", you can hear his frustration at having to play that song again:

Another reason Clapton was giving up on Cream was the emergence the previous year of a young American ex-pat guitar player.  The guy had been a side man for years, playing for Little Richard among other performers.  He'd come to Britain in 1966 because he'd heard there was an audience for electric blues that didn't exist in America.  Former Animals bass player Chas Chandler heard him at a club and decided to manage him.  He went up to the young African-American Army vet and told him that, if he allowed Chandler to find two musicians to play with him, the guitar player could be a star.  They shook hands and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.

When the band debuted, there were quite a few well-known names and faces in the crowd.  Musicians had been trading pirated tapes of gigs in London for a while, and some - including Clapton and The Who's Pete Townshend - refused to believe the young man could make his guitar do the kinds of things it sounded like on the tapes.  From the first notes, however, both men fell in to deep funk, realizing they were hearing the future of guitar playing and were well behind the curve:

The lesson from these two hugely successful bands was simple: All it took to make a band were three musicians who could play more than tolerably well, and a whole lot of amplification.  One of the people who learned this lesson was the producer of Cream's second album, Disraeli Gears.  Felix Pappilardi was a bass player as well as record producer, and with Cream's demise, he started thinking of using Cream's formula for a band of his own.  He hooked up with American guitarist Leslie West and Canadian drummer Corky Laing and formed Mountain.  The results made sense when the volume was turned up:

As the 1960's sunset in to the 1970's, another lesson being learned in the vast underground was it didn't take a whole lot of musicians to make a whole lot of sound.  These groups became known as "power trios"; and none demonstrated more dedication to power defined as volume, distortion, and barely-controlled chaos more than the Bay Area band Blue Cheer.  More than each of the above, their cover of the Eddie Cochran hit "Summertime Blues" is often credited as the first true heavy metal song.

Unlike the above bands, the members of Blue Cheer weren't particularly good musicians.  In order to keep the beat, the drummer, bass player, and guitarist all had to be rhythm instruments, making sure they all knew where the beat was.  While playing in a music scene where experimenting with feedback and other noise was accepted, unlike Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jefferson Airplane, or The Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer stripped everything excessive from their music, reducing it to rhythm and volume as substitutes for a more finessed approach.

The ingredients for what would become, in ensuing decades, an enormous genre of rock music, with enough sub-genres that it makes it difficult not to believe it is its own thing, were there.  A singular dedication to making music as loud as possible.  Using that noise as a vehicle of a different kind of protest.  Taking a crowd by the throat and shaking it with the physical force of the sound.  Thinking creatively about the use of what was thought to be mistakes such as distortion.  The Beatles were gone; the Rolling Stones were losing themselves in drugs, moving in a very different musical direction.  Pop music was becoming dominated by sweet-sounding singer-songwriters whose narcissism would be the perfect soundtrack for the troubled dominant class of the next decade.  Underneath all that, however, were a small group of bands who would, over the course of a decade and a half, change everything about rock music.