Bring Me The Head Of Rush Limbaugh!

For the past couple weeks, people who get paid a lot of money to talk about stuff and the people who listen to them have been carrying on about HHS Secretary Sebelius' decision to include contraception within the coverage provided under ACA rules. The Roman Catholic Church, in the persons of the Council of Catholic Bishops, objected, as artificial contraception is considered a mortal sin, thanks to Paul VI and his disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae. I say disastrous because, hot on the heels of the Second Vatican Council, just as the Church of Rome chipped away centuries of paint and lacquer and threw open the windows, the Curia and the person sitting in the chair of St. Peter decided to enter a debate that, by and large, had been decided by people without the strict guidance of any religious body. I say disastrous because it created a situation, at least across much of the industrialized west, and in particular in the United States, where Roman Catholics discovered it was OK to disobey a moral teaching of the Church and still feel like a faithful member of God's Holy Church. The ensuing years and decades have done little to restore the undermined moral authority of the teaching office of the Church, with the nearly decade-long serial revelations of predatory pederasty by the priesthood with a certain complicity after-the-fact by the hierarchy in covering it up tossing dirt in the grave of the church's moral authority.

OK, so that's the situation with regard to what Charlie Pierce calls "the clan of of the red beanie". Sebellius' decision is simple enough to understand. Under ACA rules, employers who provide health insurance as a benefit are to include coverage for the contraceptive pill as part of the package. No one, as far as I know, is requiring any woman to take the pill. All they're doing is saying, "If you need it, here it is." The Bishops cried and stamped their feet, and, at first, I was on their side.

Then, it dawned on me. The benefit is just that. It's part of a compensation package. No woman employed, say, by Catholic charities or a Catholic hospital is going to be forced to buy the pill if they don't want to. The Bishops don't see it that way, and want an exemption for Catholic institutions (I keep waiting to hear from Baptist, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and Adventist organizations on this matter; the Mother Church, it seems, has hogged the limelight).

Let's say they get it, and a woman (who, for the purposes of this supposition, is not Roman Catholic) in the employ of a Catholic hospital goes on the pill. Without the benefit, she is forced to pay out-of-pocket for the pill. That money comes from her salary and benefits package from her employer. Are the Bishops going to insist that, as a condition of her employment, she is not to use any of the money she makes to purchase the pill or, say, a diaphragm or IUD?

Do you understand, now, why I find the Bishops complaint, by and large, bogus?

The ensuing shouting match has been interesting, and at times entertaining. Coming down squarely on the side of the Roman bishops, the Republicans decided to hold a hearing, calling a group of witnesses on the pill that didn't include a single woman. This, by the rules we all know govern these things, started a whole bunch of harrumphing and, in the end, yet another hearing was called that included some women. 'Round about all the huffing and puffing about the pill, the talk descended from the quite obvious reality that contraception is health care to whether or not covering the pill was subsidizing immoral lifestyles. Some of the pills "defenders" decided it was best to play, "the pill is good for more than just contraception!" card, which is ridiculous. I mean, sure, the pill is good for more than just contraception, but that misses the point that contraception is health care. Pregnancy is a health care issue in the same way its a personal issue and a social issue. In many ways, the decision whether or not to get pregnant is, first and foremost, a question of the health of the woman. One would have thought that a matter that centers on the health of women might have been listening for women's voices on this matter, but from the beginning, the shouting heads have all been men, by and large.

One of the witnesses called to the second set of Senate hearings was a young woman, a law student from Georgetown University. At the hearings, she spoke clearly and eloquently in defense of the need for contraception as health care, and the need for health care coverage to include it as much as prophylactic antibiotic care and high blood pressure medication because of the impact contraception has on the lives adult women lead. For her troubles, Rush Limbaugh called her a slut. He also said that women who want their contraception paid for should restrict themselves to making porn films.

It didn't take long for the outrage to begin. From sitting around and claiming "shock" and "surprise" that Limbaugh would ever say such a thing, folks around the internet started sending email alerts and circling petitions, trying to force advertisers to drop Limbaugh's radio program. As of this morning, six have done so.

On the one hand, I think this is commendable. Rather than sit around and whine about Limbaugh, folks are taking the only action that can finally rid the AM airwaves of this pustule. I don't know if it will be effective; the same kind of campaign managed to get some big-name money-baggers to drop Glenn Beck, but his TV show was canceled only when ratings dropped enough that disposing of him became safe. Limbaugh is a much bigger fish, and there may well be enough advertisers willing to take a few weeks of chain emails and bad things said about them by liberals on the internet to jump in and replace those who backed away.

See, here's the thing. I don't really care whether or not Limbaugh stays on the air or not. While certainly reprehensible and offensive, I've been scratching my head for the past couple days trying to figure out how this particular incident crosses some line that Limbaugh has never crossed before. Calling then-candidate Obama "Halfrican" wasn't crossing a line? Making fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease not once, but several times, on air wasn't crossing a line? Calling a local Detroit television reporter an "info babe" isn't crossing a line? Holding up a picture of teenaged Chelsea Clinton and referring to her as a dog isn't crossing a line? Do you see where I'm going with this?

Whatever "line" Limbaugh allegedly crossed when he called this young woman a slut has never existed. All the outrage and shock I keep hearing from liberal folks on the internet is about as real as the people who were shocked when then VP Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself". Oh, the horror! Nasty words! Crossed lines!

Please.

The problem isn't Limbaugh. He's a mouth with legs, getting paid to say stuff. All this attention is part of his business model. Years, decades even, of frustration with Limbaugh's verbal antics are spilling over here, and while I applaud the effort to do something about ridding our airwaves of this running sore, I'm not going to support it. Not one single signature.

Like I said, he's not the problem. The problem is Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney and the members of the United States House and the United States Senate and the various state legislatures that are proposing various bills regarding women's health care and abortion that are invasive, that taken as a whole reveal a segment of the Republican Party that does not believe women are competent to make their own health care choices, whether its contraception or abortion. Serious, earnest liberals can't do anything about the hydra sprouting heads around the country, bills in hand mandating object rape based on the notion that a pregnant woman doesn't understand she's carrying a baby. They can't stop Rick Santorum from speaking, or Mitt Romney from insisting he would remove the contraception mandate if he's elected President. The hard work of dealing with various proposed pieces of legislation is long and tortured and, by and large, not a national matter, but one for residents of the states in question to handle. Presidential candidates can and will say pretty much anything.

Limbaugh, though, is easy pickings, at least in theory. Festering on the butt of American for over two decades now, his daily AM talk show has survived changes in Presidents and attacks by domestic and international terrorists and even the rise and fall of boy bands. Targeting his advertisers is good politics; most corporations are gun shy about "controversy", which basically means a burst of bad press. Backing off in the midst of "controversy" is good business, even if a bit cowardly, in particular in Limbaugh's case, because his show is a daily exercise in controversy.

The real villains in this whole episode aren't being targeted directly. That's what frustrates me. It's much more difficult to make a coherent case for sustained action against politicians scattered across national and state legislatures, doing whatever it takes to limit women's access to health care. So, instead, folks are going after Rush Limbaugh. If it weren't being done with so much cloth-rending and carrying on about how hurt and shocked they are about something Limbaugh said, I might be able to get behind it a little more. If Limbaugh weren't a scapegoat, because taking on the real culprits is just too difficult, I would jump in which both feet.

The whole campaign, though, is duplicitous and nonsensical, an exercise in moral outrage at the expense of any actual work to make the simple point that women are competent agents in the decisions about their own lives. Limbaugh, while certainly large, isn't the real target here.

He's just easier to hit.

None Of Anyone's Business

There are times I really wonder about people.

My daughter's fourth-grade teacher is unmarried and pregnant. Although she is a fantastic educator, kids at that age are bound to ask questions and are old enough that you cannot placate them with a simple answer. I asked her teacher what she told the children about her condition. She told me that she informed them she was pregnant (she is due in June, so this was obvious) and that was it. I asked her if she planned to keep the baby. She told me that was her business alone and she is not obligated to explain her marital status or plans with her child to me or anybody else. I feel that this woman has significant exposure and influence over my child and my questions were perfectly acceptable. Should I take this to the principal or switch classrooms? My husband thinks we should drop it, but I don't want my daughter to get the impression that single motherhood is acceptable.

Prudence's response is marvelous:

As long as you were asking, I'm surprised you didn't inquire as to her favorite sexual position. Your comments were so far over the line that the teacher's proper and measured response to you indicates just how good she must be at handling unruly children. The lesson you want to teach your daughter is that you treat everyone with respect, so you should take your husband's advice and drop this completely.

I wish people would get over themselves.

Unruly children . . .

Misunderstanding The Question

I saw this (along with, most likely, three quarters of the rest of Facebook users) yesterday, and I shared it with the caption, "I think I did this on a geometry test once." Funny stuff.

Taking a second thought round about it, though, and I realized that this funny little picture is a graphic demonstration of my own problem with Biblical literalism. It isn't so much that the answer is "wrong". Rather, the wrong answer demonstrates the question isn't understood. If the question is, "What is the Bible? What does it teach us? How is it authoritative?", an answer such as the following shows me, at least, the person didn't quite get what the questions were asking:

All Protestants agree in teaching that "the word of God, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the onl infallible rule of faith and practice." . . .

From these statements it appears that Protestants hold, (1) That the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the word of God, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and are therefore infallible, and of divine authority in all things pertaining to faith and practice, and consequently free from all error whether of doctrine, fact, or precept. (2) That they contain all the extant supernatural revelations of God designed to be a rule of faith and practice to his Church. (3) That they are sufficiently perspicuous to be understood by the people, in the use of ordinary means and by the aid of the Holy Spirit, in all things necessary to faith or practice, without the need of any infallible interpreter. . . .(Charles Hodg, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 p.151.

Charles Hodge's famous definition of Scriptural infallibility, kicking against the pricks both of what was then called "higher criticism" and the recently pronounced Roman Catholic declaration that, when speaking ex cathedra, the Pope's teachings were infallible and authoritative in matters of faith and morals, binding in matters of belief on all (Roman) Christians, certainly has timeliness on its side. All the same, it answers a question that either was never asked, or that Hodge, for all his virtues and learning, his keen mind, and dedication to his students and the life as a Christian intellectual at Princeton, just didn't understand.

It is one thing to say, "The Bible is the testimony of God's active life with and for humanity in and through the people of Israel and decisively in the full incarnation of the Divine life in Jesus Christ." It is another thing all together to say, "The Bible is the Word of God." Elsewhere, Hodge states that, under the power of the Holy Spirit, the authors of the Biblical texts were speaking for God. Yet, the Bible states the Word of God is not the Scriptural texts, but the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Son of the Father come to earth in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

What Hodge calls his doctrine of plenary of inspiration misses the point that Biblical authority doesn't rest on any intrinsic value the words of the Biblical texts may or may not have on any given topic. The Bible's authority rests upon the power of the Holy Spirit to use the text to enliven the community of believers. It is an extrinsic authority, foreign to the text itself, and superlative to the communities of faith who find within it testimony to the power and presence of the Living God with those whom God chooses.

As to the text's perspicuity (God, I love that word), I cannot imagine Hodge would believe it a matter of simple, two-dimensional reading of words. On the contrary, his argument in point three seems geared less to such a simplistic understanding than a counter-argument to the long-held Roman Catholic doctrine that Biblical interpretation is one of the charisms of the priesthood, granted to them for the good of the community. It is, in other words, a variant of Luther's understanding of the priesthood of all believers, a declaration that the Bible, being the Church's book, belongs to the community of faith. All Christians, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and in dialogue in love and forbearance to all, have the capacity to be grasped by this text, finding in it resources for faithful living through the power of the Spirit, in the Son, for the sake of the Glory of the Father.

All the same, I think Hodge's formula is far too easily elided in to a simplistic idea that the text of the Bible is transparent, accessible to any reader, its teachings and stories and ethical dictums both easily grasped and, if denounced, evidence not only of moral failing, but intellectual failing as well. Or, as an occasional commenter writes repeatedly:

If you think my understanding of Scripture is fixed beyond the ability of modern law to change, it is only because God's Will is fixed, clearly revealed, understandable and not subject to human/worldly demands, unlike yourself.

No matter how often the above formula is repeated, however, it doesn't change the fact that the Bible isn't that clear. No matter how often this person insists it to be so, God's will changes for us each and every day. No matter how many times the claim is made that Biblical teachings on matters of life, ethics, and moral practice are clear and simple, misreading them is easy to do precisely because the text is deceptively simple. This doesn't mean the Biblical writers were trying to deceive or trick readers, or that modern interpreters are trying to cloud what is actually clear.

On the contrary, with love and respect and faith and, above all, care, we respect the difference within and of the text, its place as a route for authority in the lives of our fellow believers, and its history as a really existing thing for a variety of people in different places and times. We come to the Bible with humility, understanding St. Paul was right when he said we don't even know what to pray for when we pray for the text to be open to us and for us. Most of all, speaking only for myself, I do not lean on any understanding I may have, for the Biblical text isn't mine; it speaks to me, but only as I am a part of a community of faith who come together to hear the testimony of the witnesses to God's presence in the lives of other communities, and the whole world.

Am I speaking of a way of reading the Bible that is only available to a select few? Lord knows I've been accused of that enough times. I insist not, however. As the Bible is something that reaches us only as we are part of larger communities of faith, this is something we do together in our common life. As a seminary professor of mine used to say, the canon is still open because the text of Scripture is open to us and for us to add our understandings to the many voices who have heard and believed and lived it through the centuries.

While I do not agree with those who read the Bible the way Hodge describes it. I do not, on the other hand, insist they are so in error as to provide no insight, nothing of value to our common life, our shared ways of being Christian in a world where such can be dangerous, subversive, even deadly. All of us get it wrong when we come to the Bible; that is a given. It is neither we nor the text that bridges the many gaps. Rather, God in the Person of the Holy Spirit reaches across the many barriers that can create misunderstandings and error and disillusion and disagreement to forge the communities of faith we call the Church of Jesus Christ. That is where my faith lies. That is where my hope is grounded. That is the deep well of love that never runs dry. Not the bare words of the text; in the Living Word of the Living God who is still creating, always redeeming, and moving all of us to perfection in love.

Flagrant Ad Hominem Alert - Where I Make Fun Of The Way Someone LooksT

This is Alabama state Sen. Clay Scofield, who introduced yet another object-rape bill.

Does this look like a guy who has ever found a vagina on his own time? And he's the one looking to tell women that they have to have something shoved in their hoo-hahs? Seriously? They should at least find someone who looks a little less like a poster child for abstinence to introduce legislation like this.

There's A Reason No One Else Would Print This

There's an article by Chris Hedges making the rounds on the intertubes. Posted by Christianleft.org, it's entitled The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism. Beginning with a statement from revered Christian ethicist James Luther Adams, Hedges praises Adams' perspicacity a quarter century ago identifying the rise of "American fascism" carrying a Bible.

Like the dire warnings about our Kenyan Muslim Socialist Atheist President, the article is a hodgepodge of dire warnings rooted in beautiful clouds floating in the ether above Neverland.

I'm hardly of fan of the politics of the Christian right. That doesn't mean I'm going to succumb to the panic induced by dire warnings of networks of people on the right doing what Americans do in politics: joining in coalitions to enact policies they support. This isn't conspiracy; it's working out of Federalist #10.

Hedges is a very good writer, to be sure. The piece is carefully crafted to demonstrate the accumulating power and influence various right-wing organizations use to create favorable conditions for the crafting and enacting of legislation. The list of organizations he cites is wide, their concerns dovetailing on matters of faith and private piety undergirded, in this case, by the strong arm of the state. Their goal, a kind of crypto-Protestant Republic similar in many respects to the original mandate of The Massachusetts Bay Colony, would hardly be a place in which I would enjoy living.

Except, of course, none of it's true. There is no conspiracy afoot to rob us of our basic liberties and strip away American pluralism in the name of something called Christian Fascism. While certainly extreme, the actions of the Christian right have a place in our society just as much as those of the Occupy movement. The hints and allegations Hedges uses to create the image of imminent danger are little more than everyday, normal, American politics.

To repeat: I'm no fan of the Christian right. I am also no fan of the kind of overheated rhetoric that would take the banal political and social organizing that all sorts of like-minded groups and sectors of society engage in and turn it in to some giant conspiracy against the American polity itself. It's insulting, it's as dangerous as any of the legislation being proposed, and it is also factually inaccurate.

With all due respect, Chris Hedges, you're just full of crap.

Anti-American, Anti-Family, Perverted

Via LGBTQ Nation. I do so hope one of the homophobes I know troll this place would say something like that to Dalan Wells, the Marine in the photo.

I am so thankful we live in a country where this can happen. Bless you, Brandon and Dalan.

This Isn't The Music You're Thinking About

Gate-keepers worthy of hire will certainly be those who, in Stephen Burn‘s words, talk less ‘about themselves, spinning reviews out of their charming memories or using the book under review as little more than a platform to promote themselves and their agendas’.

Jason Goroncy

So I've finished Robert Walser's Running With The Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness In Heavy Metal Music, the third of a triptych of works on the genre that I've read as part of researching my latest writing project (the band in question isn't heavy metal; reading a history, a sociology, and cultural review of the style, however, does help to remind this writer that, while fictional, my characters and their actions are supposed to exist within a recognizable historical and cultural milieu; if I screw that up, none of the rest matters).

Walser is a musicologist. He is also deeply and widely read in cultural theory. His view of music as a form of discourse is one with which I am sympathetic, stemming as it does, at least in part, from a materialist, class basis (he is not a Marxist; he does rely, however, upon a type of criticism that one can trace back to Marx). He knows music in general. He knows heavy metal from the inside out, as both a fan and guitarist. He has deep respect for the genre, the musicians and bands who perform the music, the fans who listen to it at home, in concert, used to watch it on MTV, and the record industry that understood a cash cow when it heard one, gobbling up bands left and right that might have even the slightest relationship to the style (two bands of roughly similar vintage, Poison and Faith No More, are good examples; while neither fits perfectly under the heading "heavy metal", the latter is far more so than the former, yet Walser devotes an entire analytical section to Poison's "Nothin' But A Good Time" and doesn't mention Faith No More).

In considering a book that is over twenty years old, there are limits to the utility of picking certain nits, such as the parenthetical above. Two decades in popular culture is a very long time; the music that goes by the name "heavy metal" today is vastly different than that with which Walser had to work. Using Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and Yngwe Malmsteen as paradigmatic guitar virtuosi may have served his purposes well in 1991. I think it is true that, while time may have dulled our collective memory, "Eruption" still serves as a template for a style of guitar playing that was modified, refined, extended, or perhaps considered and rejected, by the generation of guitar players that came after him. Malmsteen, on the other hand, has been relegated to the sidelines of the genre. Guitar players certainly listen to his playing; to the things he says, however, and the rise and fall of his band Rising Force, however, there is little impact (in part because, not to put too fine a point on it, Malmsteen was an asshole).

At the same time, even by the time Walser was writing his book in the late 1980's, there were other guitar players - Joe Satriani, the San Francisco guitar teacher who created a career based on his influence on his two most famous students; Kirk Hammett, of Metllica; Steve Vai, the other of Satriani's students, who played with David Lee Roth, Whitesnake, and now has a solo career; Dave Mustaine of Megadeath; Kerry King of Slayer; Scott Ian of Anthrax - who could have served as counterpoint, different paths to solving various problems in composition and playing than Van Halen/Malmsteen, and even as examples showing the dedication to craft and technique necessary to play a style of music that is both physically and intellectually demanding.

As I wrote above, Walser knows the music from the inside out. Like the authors of the other two volumes I have, Ian Christe and Diane Weinstein, he has great love for the genre and a deep respect for the fans. Writing at the time he did, his choices for examples to elucidate various points were far more limited than they might be today. He has a grasp of cultural theory that breaks through far-too-simplistic (and too often ignorant and wrong) notions that the music itself is simple; that the fans of heavy metal are, in the words of one infamous reviewer "slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, downy-mustachioed imbeciles in cheap, too-large T-shirts with pictures of comic book Armageddon ironed on the front." Mark Ames, who wrote a review of Lords of Chaos, referred to heavy metal fans as "dirtheads."

All the same, like Weinstein, who managed to pass out some flyers to fans at a Rush concert, Walser received back around 200 surveys at various concerts. Considering a typical concert at the time might have anywhere from 3,000 to over 10,000 attendees, the results of such surveys wouldn't be statistically significant even for a single show; Walser notes they came from several. Considering the well-known (at least among social scientists) notion that the folks most likely to return a survey are those who have a deeper commitment to the topic in question, it shouldn't surprise most folks that the surveys showed a deeper understanding of the music qua music, the thematic content of the lyrics, a greater attention to the subculture around heavy metal (the musical and fan magazines that cover the genre; higher attendance rates for concerts; etc.). This is not to say that the fan base of heavy metal is or is not more or less intelligent than that for any other musical style; it is, rather, to suggest that, at least at the time Walser was writing, more work should have been done to dispel the myth of the slack-jawed, alpaca-haired dirthead.

On the appeal the music has for those fans, the three themes in the subtitle - power, gender, and madness - cover a broad area, and criss-cross, intersect, and could also contradict one another. A word that Walser uses quite a bit to describe the inherent contradictions in any commercial music that also appeals to its audience beyond simple questions of acceptability is "transgressive". Walser pushes the word, however, even within the three analytic categories, in an attempt to demonstrate that the music transgresses even the notions accepted within the limited definitions of the musical style and those of its fan base. He is correct to note that heavy metal, like the rest of society, is sexist. While no more racist than, say, country-western music, heavy metal is no less so, either. Even the rare African-American band - Living Colour, Body Count, Bad Brains (actually a punk band, but influential on a variety of metal bands in the 1990's with their mix of punk and reggae) - stand out because they are so rare. While the music does deal thematically with matters of madness and death, injustice and war, even God and the occult, these are less transgressive than they are pretty traditional material for songs that reach beyond the typical "boy screws girl" of rock and roll. It is less the thematic material itself, than the timbre and volume of the genre that raises parents' hackles. There is also the fact that bands from Slayer and Mercyful Fate through the Norwegian Black Metal bands and other bands like Cradle of Filth, Deicide, and Lamb of God that are far more aggressive in their rejection of Judeo-Christianity. Finally, for all his grasp of a cultural theory rooted in a kind of neo-Marxist understanding of the many contradictions in the production of any cultural arefact, Walser does not address himself directly to the reality that, both musically and subculturally, the style is conservative to the point of reactionary.

It is here, I think, that his attempted apologia breaks down most clearly. Unlike Robert Christgau, who bemoans the technical proficiency and lyrical extravagance of heavy metal as something from which rock and roll was supposed to liberate us, by ignoring the many political signs and signifiers within the music itself, the lyrics, the fan base, and critical reception, we miss a far greater, and far more troubling, contradiction than many of the others mentioned.

From whichever perspective you consider the phenomenon - either bands or fans, the intermediaries or mediators - the genre borders on occasional violence in its vehement restrictions on what does and does not constitute a band within the genre. Many if not most of the bands the popular culture so labeled at the time Walser wrote his book (and a couple about which he writes at some length) are not now considered "heavy metal", despite certain nods in its direction (technical proficiency, in particular of the lead guitarist and lead singer; flamboyance and excitement in live performance; instrumentation, timbre, tone, and volume). George Lynch is a well-regarded lead guitar player to this day. Few, however, consider Dokken a heavy metal band. If someone were to mention Dream Theater or Rush, most heavy metal fans would violently disagree (as would the band members, although Dream Theater acknowledges inspiration from Metallica as well as Rush and Radiohead). Who is and is not an acceptable fan - dress and hairstyle; attendance at concerts and music-buying habits; gender roles, including questions of sexual orientation (although that has become muted thanks to Rob Halford of Judas Priest coming out in the mid-1990's) - is something die-hard fans guard with passion and intensity.

These matters pale in comparison to the occasional spectacle such as the one I included in a post a couple days ago - the concert clip of Metallica performing "Creeping Death", with the crowd chanting "Death!" during a break in the bridge. In an infamous passage in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom compared rock concerts to right-wing political rallies. In a drug-addled interview with Cameron Crowe in the 1970's, David Bowie called Adolf Hitler the first rock star. In many ways, these aren't inapt comparisons. As rock became bigger than life, and the bands started to have greater power and authority with their fans, concerts could become rallying points for social and political danger (this is driven home in the film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall, where the character of Pink, played by Bob Geldof, uses the authority vested in him by his fans to instigate violent attacks on a variety of minorities he names in "Against the Wall" - "That one looks Jewish/And that one's a Coon/Who let this riff-raff into the room?"). With its limits policed by both musicians and fans, and the emotional overload inherent in a concert bringing with it that much power, the temptation to abuse the power granted can be overwhelming. Recently, Dave Mustaine, leader of Megadeath, spoke favorably of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum. While many might be surprised by this, even a moment's reflection should make it clear how obvious this seems.

Throughout what I've been writing, I've tried to keep in mind the epigram at the top, while remaining true, as far as I can, to my own view of the limits of Walser's book. This is not "Geoffrey Kruse-Safford's book on heavy metal". It is Robert Walser's, written two decades ago. Walser's book delves far deeper in to the music, its existence at various nexi of social, cultural, and political life, and its role as discourse both to its fan base and to the larger society and societies (not taking for granted that "the West" is a unitary thing). For all its faults, it offers to anyone interested not only in the style under study but any musical style, a template from which to move forward social and cultural discussions of the role of music in our American society. Would that there were more such works.

Being Disagreeable

Alec MacGillis' op-ed in today's WaPo does the American people a service by reminding us all that folks disagree about stuff that matters. Whether it's birth control or energy policy or the make-up of the Supreme Court or foreign policy, these are all areas that impact a lot of people's lives. They address matters of private conduct and income and job and career opportunities or a sense of safety and security in a turbulent world and the even the life and safety of loved ones. People are passionate about these things. People disagree about how best we as a society should order our lives, and set limits upon personal and corporate behavior. These disagreements very often involve organized interests who represent collective interests with stakes in various debates.

There's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing unusual about this. In a country as physically large and diverse as ours, politics obviously is going to involve a whole lot of passionate debate and even the occasional violent altercation. This doesn't mean politics is bad. It means, rather, that the things about which we do politics matter. If they didn't matter, we wouldn't disagree about them.

The hand-wringing over ideological tribalism on the political internet misses this central facet of political life: people aren't interested in hearing or reading opposed viewpoints. This, too, isn't surprising, or even very interesting. The only reason anyone on the internet takes the time to read opposed view points can usually be reduced to making fun of them. This, too, isn't really a big deal. There aren't any points of contact between folks on the right and left; neither grants legitimacy to the premises or conclusions of the other.

The point of all this is that politics is a nasty business because the stuff of politics is stuff that matters. Different people feel it matters in different ways, or believe that there is evidence that shows the folks who find that it matters are in error. People need to lighten up about all this heavy stuff.

Santorum

My wife has a book that quickly and succinctly sums up the various major religions of the world. I knew absolutely nothing about Sikhism until this morning.

Now, I'm thinking of converting. See, Rick Santorum has taken to spouting off from the deep well of his faith, which everyone else is supposed to respect. If being ignorant, hateful, and crazy blossoms from faith, I'm definitely looking in to Sikhism now. It's monotheistic, highly ethical, plus you get to grow your hair long.

What has emanated from little Ricky's mouth now that may well have tipped me over the edge to begin reading from the Gurus?

Just this:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Thursday that President Obama wants more young adults to go to college so they can undergo "indoctrination" to a secular world view.

--snip--

On the president's efforts to boost college attendance, Santorum said, "I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely ... The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country."

Turbans. Long hair. Service to the community. Religious pluralism at the heart of their doctrine of God. Plus, they're not too different from United Methodists; after each worship service, they have a community meal.

What Are Men For?

There are so many musings on women and their sexuality, I thought it necessary to spend a few moments - having been alerted to the dangers men face from a surgical procedure that denies them their natural role as providers of the seed for procreation - to consider that role and how best to protect it from the ravages it faces in our far-too-hedonistic society.

While vasectomy frees men from the constraints of monogamy by eliminating the chance of accidentally impregnating a woman who is not his wife, the real danger isn't behavioral so much as it is anatomical. By cutting off, literally, the path to procreation, condemning millions of preborn babies from the glory of conception, the common practice of masturbation among adolescent boys and men is as dire a threat. Even a single individual poses a threat to the possibility of providing the world with as many possible partial copies of his awesomeness. Even those more likely to mourn the deaths of the several million sperm wantonly murdered are likely to indulge. It may well be the case that we need to go beyond simply passing laws; perhaps tying the hands of boys from the age of 12 or so, thus preventing the development of a habit that counters the basic physiological reality that erections aren't toys, but serve the basic biological function of procreation. It might seem harsh, but the reality is that we shouldn't allow boys in their teens, too ignorant to understand the threat they pose to the unborn, to act against nature.

While this certainly addresses one act that threatens not only the sanctity of human life, but also the natural functioning of human reproduction, I think more action is in order. Being reminded ad nauseum that males are little more than extensions of their testicles and subconscious urges it might well be necessary to sequester men away from the company of women. We men, reduced to drooling, tumescent incoherence at the mere thought of cleavage or, perhaps, even a well turned ankle should, for the sake of our own virtue, be kept away from any of those things that might prompt us to act out on those overpowering urges that rush through us from dual hearts of darkness dangling between our legs. While the small percentage of young gay men might find such cloistering to their advantage, the physical strictures mentioned earlier would already be in play.

Physically restrained from unnaturally spilling our seed, and removed from any temptation to act out the irresistible urge to copulate with any female who might present themselves - and such presentation obviously means she's aching for it; if she says, "No", she deserves what she gets, the dirty slut - I think networks of adolescent boys creating a special bond with their mothers, pledging their fealty to one another in a pact of mutual respect, with the mother taking a special interest in protecting their son's testicular wholeness would be a wonderful occasion for special celebration. We could call them Oepdipal Balls, where adolescent boys and their mothers would dress in semi-formal attire, pledge themselves to one another, with the boys refusing to dirty any female who doesn't have Mom's special allure, while Moms around the country would guard their boys' virtue, morally and physically protecting their Sack Of The Future.

We should also limit boys participation in any activity that might damage their naturally vulnerable reproductive organs. Sport and the military are obviously designed to threaten not only the life of those who participate in them. They ignore the inarguable natural reality that male's most vulnerable spot is under constant threat. Ill-suited for the rigors of combat or even a sport as seemingly benign as baseball or golf, the sanctity of the sack must be preserved. Nature, biology, and the moral demands of the unborn place a heavy burden upon men; we should surrender to the priority of the natural and sacred order that all agree - men just shouldn't be allowed to do certain things.

Once instructed and socialized with the proper attitude toward their bodies and sexuality, and safely tucked away in monogamous marriages, it is probably a good idea to keep men in the home. Once there, when women feel the need to have a child, men can be called forward to do their natural, sacred duty. Obviously, such a dirty, sinful act should bring with it feelings of physical and moral revulsion, but men should endure it for the good of the rest of society, with their eyes shut and their minds on anything other than the act itself.

We as a society seem incapable of granting both genders status as fully human persons, capable of living with and transcending the basics of anatomy and the psychological baggage with which society burdens us. I think, in fairness, rather than treating women as the weaker sex, ours would be far better to place severe restrictions upon the sexual activity of men. We have lived far too long with the delusion that we can be creatures apart from the natural order dictated by our hormones, our desires, and our physiology. It would be far better, I think, to instruct men in the simple realities with which we live.

For our own good.

For the good of the unborn whose demands upon our moral sense we need to attend.

For the good of society that needs our semen, properly placed, under the strict guidance of women who, being closer to nature than we, have an intuitive grasp of these matters.

In Praise Of Chaos

In order to round out my thinking about music as I lurch toward the end of my current work-in-progress, I ordered and received three works on heavy metal last week. Ian Christe's Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, and Robert Walser's Running With The Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music are essential for understanding a musical genre in dire need of a more respectful apologia than one normally finds in mainstream critical and academic circles.

More than the other two works, Walser is correct in noting that both musically and lyrically, heavy metal has deep roots in the African-American musical tradition that spawned the overarching framework of western popular music that, for lack of a better word, we can call rock. Whether the acoustic Delta blues of Robert Johnson or the urban, electrified blues of Muddy Waters, the tradition has more than flirted with the topics of death, evil, and even social injustice. One can criticize heavy metal for many things; somehow inventing or even praising the occult (except, perhaps, in specific subgenres like Black Metal) is not one of them. There is a straight enough line, I think between Robert Johnson's "Hell Hound On My Trail" and the eponymous "Black Sabbath":


I am not a "metal head" by any means, but I do enjoy the music. Which is perhaps a mild reaction to such an extreme musical style. All the same, I do not consider myself a "fan" of heavy metal any more than I consider myself a fan of progressive rock, of classic rock, of jazz, of Mozart, or anything else. Heavy metal fills an aesthetic need for the expression of sheer pandemonium and aggression. Just as a quiet Saturday morning feels more complete with Pat Metheny or Miles Davis playing in the background, or Sunday afternoons seem tailor-made for Mozart and Brahms, so, too, do certain moments cry out for something a bit more rousing than Bruce Springsteen.



That the style is over the top in pretty much every way imaginable goes without saying. That one could say the same about moments in western art music, from Bach through contemporary composers like Steve Reich rarely gets mentioned.



In terms both of style and approach, heavy metal has infiltrated much of popular music, from hip-hop artists sampling heavy metal songs to the really big beat and overwhelming sound of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" (a title that would not seem out of place on a heavy metal album).



As different as it may be, Porcupine Tree's "Fear Of A Blank Planet" wouldn't have been possible without the musical influence of heavy metal (something auteur Steven Wilson is honoring this year with a musical project he is finally completing with Michael Akerfeldt, leader of the Swedish death metal band Opeth).



Even the use of occult imagery exists in multiple tensions. Whether the mindlessness of the British band Venom, or the seriousness of bands like Deicide, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Mayhem, and Emperor, the best guide through the thickets may well be the San Francisco band Slayer who used the iconography from the occult as a way of creating a dialectical understanding between the rage induced by injustice and oppression and the desire for vengeance and retribution that one can find through various occult practices, without ever once falling in to a literal reading. Slayer is, without a doubt, one of the more intelligent bands out there, as well as musically gifted.



The need for catharsis extends beyond the merely emotional. In the extreme environment provided by heavy metal, many living in repressive regimes find in the volume, the speed, and the rage at the heart of heavy metal a way to stand against those political forces that seek to stifle their expression. Rammstein formed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.


I am amused by people who criticize jazz, say, or various kinds of pop without having any experience with the style. For some reason, few people feel any reason to actually listen to heavy metal before denouncing it. If they actually experienced it, letting themselves go for the length of a song at first, then perhaps an album, perhaps (if one were brave enough) going to a show, one might find, if nothing else, the exhilaration of emotional release to be satisfying.

If my imaginary band could provide even a single moment as full of the musical, emotional, social, and cultural meaning as the following performance by Metallica, I think I would have achieved something.

Seriously?

If I were to pretend I were an intellectual, and if I were to attempt to prove my intellectual credibility to my peers, I can imagine all sorts of things that would help me along that path. The last thing on my list would be to write an article with this title:

What Are Women For?

While Tbogg and Roy delve the creepy, misogynist depths of the piece, I stand aghast, attempting to understand a person who could put those words together in the order they appear, and have it mean something.

I think it's fair to say my personal response to this is easy.

James Poulos has issues.

Nothing More Natural

Christopher Lasch was many things, most prominently an intellectual curmudgeon. Twenty years ago, reading The True and Only Heaven was a bracing splash of cold water in the face. My father used to tell me, "You don't know every goddamn thing." Lasch said the same thing in several hundred pages of dense, historical prose.

I got thinking about Lasch this morning after reading this article. One of the late historian's main points early on in this work is the way progress, and its social and cultural forms, have separated us from nature to the point that, rather than see death as an integral part of life, we fear it so much we either prolong it artificially, or shunt the dying away as far as possible, very often with the excuse of protecting children from exposure to it. Lasch notes that, as late is mid-Victorian Britain, families would gather around a death bed, wishing the parting relative one final goodbye, often praying and singing hymns as the final moments ticked away.

The one flaw in this article, to my mind, is framing the discussion of death as something that occurs "naturally" only to the elderly. Death comes when it comes. As a pastor's spouse, I've been to the funerals of infants, of children and youth, of people my own age, and centenarians. One thing I've come to understand is that death, while not precisely a welcome guest at the table, nor one whose approach is always greeted with open arms, is still always there. Whether by accident - a slip down a flight of stairs, or stepping off a curb too soon - design - one's life is ended by one's own hand or that of another - or nature - from foreign invaders to our bodies betraying us through cancer to our bodies failing us; I've seen all these at every age from a few months to 102 years old.

I find it fascinating that there are so many people in the world who are terrified of death. Spiders I can understand. Even though I'm not particularly frightened of snakes, I get that, too; but death? That's like being afraid of breathing or having a bowel movement. Those are things that everyone does, too, and no one sits around and has deep discussions over the inherent meaning of defecation. Death, for some odd reason, is the one event in our lives people either refuse to discuss, or pretend has some deep significance.

You want to know what I think happens when we die?

Our bodies cease to operate.

That's it. Oh, and flies and beetles and bacteria suddenly have a place to eat. Nothing wrong with that, either. Part of me would, rather than be cremated, allow myself to feed to hordes of creatures who would use it to sustain themselves and their progeny. It isn't like, at that point, I'm using any of it.

We waste far too much time, far too many resources, and far too much emotional energy carrying on over something that is inevitable. As a seminary professor of mine said once, the death rate is the same it's always been - 100%. The least we can do is accept this, and let doctors and nurses help those they can help, while embracing our loved ones so they don't have to go down that long dark corridor alone.

Frederick Buechner On Abortion

Lisa and I were out with some friends the other night. I mentioned Frederick Buechner, and couldn't remember the title of his book, Whistling In The Dark: An ABC Theologized. I was checking it out on Amazon and came across the very first entry.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the truth that in an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions. All we can do, as Luther said, is sin bravely, which is to say (a) know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the tragic possibility of tragic consequences for everybody yet (b) yet be brave enough in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the loving grace of God.

Which is a nice way of cutting through the self-righteous self-assurance of anyone who says that have the definitive answer on this matter for everyone. Whether pro-life or pro-choice, it might be nice to be pro-human and shut the hell up and listen to people and pray with them and love them because, at the end of the day, that's what Jesus did. That's what we're supposed to do. Sin bravely, because that's all any of us can do. Trust enough in God's grace to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives.

What Moral Authority?

Last year, I caught some grief from some people when I insisted that United States had no business intervening in the Libyan Civil War. That Qaddafi ended up dead and the country is slouching toward something that resembles a more representative form of government is a good thing, but hardly proves wrong those who, like me, insisted we had no business and even less reason to get involved.

One argument that got tossed at me concerned American "moral authority" to intervene in order not only to defend the citizens under attack from elements of their own country's armed forces, but also to uphold the principal that the US will side with the people against dictators.

The argument is laughable on its face, in general. The US has no moral authority on the international stage, and every time someone in one or another US administration claims we do, the hoots of laughter are deafening. For good reason.

Prior to the uprising, the United States had enjoyed steadily improved relations with the Qaddafi regime since it had sworn off its WMD program, dealt with outstanding matters relating to the Pan Am Flight 008 bombing, and emptied out the camps it had previously left open for terrorists to use for training. It appears, however, that the rapproachment went a bit further than was on the public record.

Last month Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the operations, in which two leading Libyan dissidents were abducted and taken to Tripoli with their families, were to be the subject of a criminal investigation.

A few days later lawyers for both families began civil proceedings against Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, accusing him of complicity in their "extraordinary rendition", torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Proceedings against the government, MI6 and MI5 are to follow.

The case is based in large part upon a batch of documents discovered in an abandoned Libyan government office last September. These showed that the abductions were plotted with the help of MI6: it was all part of the rapprochement between Gaddafi and the UK and US that saw the dictator abandon his WMD programme and open oil and gas exploration opportunities to western firms.

When a researcher for Human Rights Watch stumbled upon the documents, no attempt was made to deny MI6 involvement in the rendition operations they described.

Instead, Whitehall sources immediately said the operations were part of "ministerially authorised government policy". The statement was intended as a clear signal that a secretary of state had signed off a "clause 7 authorisation" under the Intelligence Services Act.

Section 7 is entitled Authorisation of Acts outside the British Islands, and says: "If, apart from this section, a person would be liable in the United Kingdom for any act done outside the British Islands, he shall not be so liable if the act is one which is authorised to be done by virtue of an authorisation given by the secretary of state under this section."

A couple words about this. Yes, it is a case of British as opposed to American acts. As much of a lapdog as the British have been since the election of Tony Blair, however, I would hardly be surprised if it were only the British who had decided it was OK to send folks to Libya to be tortured. Concerning the Americans have been spreading the wealth around, with folks going to Egypt, eastern Europe, and some Central Asian nations, sending folks to Libya for interrogation certainly isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Furthermore, the UK is viewed abroad as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States. Their actions follow on our own, and have done so for quite a while. Where else would the British have learned of such a brilliant idea as sending Libyan dissidents back to Libya where they would be tortured, but from the US?

It is long past time to set to one side the idea that the US has anything resembling "moral authority" on pretty much anything. These latest revelations, as disgusting as they are, are not in the least surprising. As a demonstration of "Business As Usual", it shows just how hollow the sudden conversion to regime change in Libya came last year, and how ridiculous and ad hoc the military response. As Duncan writes by way of introductory commentary, they're our bastards until they aren't. In this case, the only reason they suddenly became NOT our bastards was the Arab Spring. Don't fool yourself for one minute; if there had been no uprising in Libya, the Brits and the Americans would still be shipping folks there.

Capturing The Nerd Vote

Charlie Pierce asks an important question.

When did we become so quick to mock this kind of thing? When did our national imagination wither this way? When did exploration become just another "big government" program for pipsqueaks like Willard Romney to ridicule?
I'm old enough to remember when the space program was something capable of moving the entire world to wonder and delight. It seemed like something we all got together and did as a species.

I must admit more than a little conflict on this matter. On the one hand, there is something more than a little breathtaking about the thought of human beings exploring space. On the other hand, there's the fact that our robot exploration program is up and running and doing quite well. On the one hand there's the sad fact that Pierce is correct. Too many, at least within the political class, have withered imaginations, leaving the kind of child-like awe and fascination that lay at the heart of the attraction of the space program to become childish fantasizing. On the other hand, the cold reality is there is great danger and cost in sending humans in to space. These are dangers and costs that all of us bear. We have lost three sets of astronauts: Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. While a pretty good safety record, all things considered, it still demonstrates the dangers even when we know how to do something this complex pretty well.

Then, of course, there is Imperialism. Far too much of the space program was couched in terms that reminded far too many people thinking of the French, the British, and the Americans planting flags on various distant shores and claiming them for national glory without any thought being given to the folks who lived there. While there is no evidence - yet - of any folks out there for us to ignore in our quest for glory, one would think some caution would be warranted before we as a people (whether national or as a species) started thinking about planting whatever flag we choose on the Moon or Mars or wherever.

The United States should resume our part in sending human beings to space. It is a sign of national decline that we allowed the Shuttle program to come to an end without anything to take its place. At the same time, we should pursue human space travel with care on multiple levels. It is true enough, I think, that much of the mocking of Gingrich's idea demonstrates not so much a problem on his part as it does a kind of malaise among many of our elites. That doesn't mean we should run whole hog in to the arms of folks who have visions of The Sea of Tranquility looking like an exurban strip mall, and Boeing or Northrop or some other company seeking to change the name and copyright it in order to make a buck.

More On Humility, More Cutting & Pasting

From now on, I'm just going to steal other people's stuff. That way, I don't have to think of stuff to write. In this instance, I feel a little less guilty, because I'm stealing something from someone who had stolen it from someone else.

What exactly is humility? Does it mean speaking of ourselves as unaccomplished, even when this is not the case? In truth, humility is not difficult to define (though it is hard to embody). It means not regarding ourselves as more important than other people, including those who have achieved less than we have. And it implies judging ourselves not in comparison with others, but in light of our capabilities, and the tasks we believe God has set for us on earth. This idea is conveyed in a seemingly immodest teaching of Rabbi Israel Salanter: “I know that I have the mental capacity of a thousand men, but because of that, my obligation is also that of a thousand men”. As Rabbi Salanter’s statement emphasizes, the very capabilities that can make a person most proud (“I know I have the mental capacity of a thousand men”) are also those that should be most humbling. If we have greater wisdom, then we also have a greater responsibility to bring people to understanding and wisdom. If we have wealth, then we have a greater responsibility to help those in need. If we occupy a position of power, we have greater obligation to help the oppressed. In short, the fact that we have greater abilities than another does not mean that we are greater in God’s eyes – another person, for example, might be more accomplished than we are in fulfilling the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” – but only that we have greater responsibilities. Thinking about how much we can do in comparison to what we have done also serves as a corrective against pride and arrogance.

Seems reasonable enough to me.

"Do I understand your question": Alan F. Moore's Rock: The Primary Text

It seems to me that our concern with the music includes, but does not begin from, the ways that it is used: in other words, the aesthetic question is primary, as I have suggested in the introduction. Our concern has to begin from the sounds, because until we cognize the sounds, until we have created an internal representation on the basis of their assimilation, we have no musical entity to care about, or to which to give value. Once sounds have been produced, nobody is in a position to exclusively determine how they are to be taken . . . . This does not mean that the musical text may be considered to arise ex nihilo. It is produced by groups of musicians working in social contexts, but they are not my primary concern. I am far less interested in uncovering the circumstances which produced the music than I am in exploring how listeners may respond to it.

Rock: The Primary Text, Developing a musicology of Rock, 2d edition, p. 17

In 1991, British musicologist Philip Tagg wrote, but never published, an exhaustive study of the song "Fernando" by the 70's pop group ABBA. If this seems odd, it should be noted that sociologist and rock critic Simon Frith once wrote, rather caustically, that it would be ridiculous to claim one person's enjoyment of ABBA was similar to another's enjoyment of Mozart. Such a sentiment, coming from one who admitted in his most thorough work on the sociology and history of rock and roll that he was completely ignorant when it came to studying the music itself, and never bothered to educate himself in the rudiments of such study, rang like a challenge. Tagg picked it up, examining everything from the provenance of the song, its recording and production, its popularity and critical reception, and its performance versus recorded textures. Toward the end, he wrote (in Rock: The Primary Text, p.217):

[A]ny discussion of mass culture or mass society in general will need to include analyses of musical meaning, for it is in the non-verbal forms of symbolic representation that emotional level of social, cultural, political and ideological meaning are to be found. . . . if cultural theorists, sociologists, linguists, etc. are not prepared to take music into consideration in their discussion of symbolic production in contemporary society and if musicians and musicologists are not prepared to shoulder the responsibility this lays on them to demystify their art and its hieroglyphics, we will be left with little or not viable cultural theory of our own times.

Part of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, in Rock: The Primary Text, Developing a Musicology of Rock, British musicologist Alan Moore goes one step further. With the rise of rock in Britain, from the mid-1960's through the 1990's (the first edition was published in 1993; the second edition was published in 2001), amid all the critical and social and political clamorings concerning the music, the development of various styles, millions of words by fans and journalists and sometimes even the musicians themselves, there had yet to be an attempt to analyze the music itself, to understand what "rock" was, what its variants might (or might not) be, and therefore be able to place it more fully and completely within the context of British society and culture in the last half of the 20th century.

I first heard of this book when I bought Edwin Macan's Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture in 1997. Macan says, on page 7, that Moore "attempt[s] nothing less than to create the first stylistic survey of rock from its inception to the present." While ambitious, Moore doesn't quite do that. His focus is far narrower, and the question of "style" - what it is, how it functions, whether the labels we put on various musical styles have any meaning beyond contingent groupings from what Moore calls "competent listeners" - is contested space. Indeed, the Introduction of Moore's book bothers itself quite a bit attempting to define the word "rock", as opposed, say, to rock-and-roll or pop. Nevertheless, the book is, indeed, ambitious in scope. At the same time, it is focused, one might almost call it lean. While hardly eschewing technical detail - it is, primarily, a textbook for musicologists - the work functions as a guide for piercing through much of historical, critical, and journalistic slurry that has accumulated over the decades regarding the music.

One of the chief virtues of Moore's work is the way the analysis of songs, and even bodies of work, can go a long way toward "demystifying" (to use Tagg's terminology) even an artist's understanding of his or their work. The first big rock movement in Britain next to the Beatles was the so-called "blues revival", fueled by John Mayall's Blues Breakers and The Yardbirds. Two guitarists who played in the latter group, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, are on voluminous record regarding their indebtedness to American blues. Clapton claimed he left The Yardbirds on principle; the band, he said, just wasn't bluesy enough, so he formed Cream. When The Yardbirds finally disintegrated, Page picked up some of those pieces and formed Led Zeppelin. As the revival was petering out, some of those influenced by the initial burst of energy formed bands of their own, among the first and most popular was Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. For decades, critics, journalists, fans, and the musicians themselves have simply repeated, without too much thought, that these three groups - Cream, Led Zeppelin, (the early) Fleetwood Mac - are electrified blues. Using the tools of musicological analysis, however, leads to the conclusion, as Moore states on p. 76, "the 'inspiration' which some critics suggest the blues supplied is hard to sustain."

It may be that the enrichment of techniques found among the musicians discussed here can be put down to their assumed appropriation of the blues, but in reality, this 'blues ideology' was grafted on to stylistic practices which it only partly fitted.

Only Fleetwood Mac, it seems, was a "blues" band - using simple I-IV-V, twelve bar forms. While both Led Zeppelin and Cream did cover blues songs - Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson, most notably - their own compositions bore little to no resemblance to any accepted understanding of "the blues". Without taking the primary text - the songs - as a guide, this cannot be understood clearly.

Moore also explores matters of authenticity, inspiration, and the perceived contrast - among critics, in particular, but also self-described fans as well - between what is too often considered the careful construction (and over-construction) of the songs of some British progressive rock bands, as opposed to the far less careful, far more immediate songs of other performers. While some work has already been done on the question of authenticity in popular music, Moore cuts through much of the thickets surrounding the debate on these contested matters by comparing "The Knife", a song of Genesis' Trespass album, and Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks". Without belaboring the point too much (the discussion begins on p. 93, included in a larger discussion of the rise of the concept album), criticizing any particular song as "crafted" as opposed to another that seems less so, without actually analyzing the song structure, can reveal ignorance as much as anything. Few songs, indeed whole albums, were more calculated and carefully crafted as music (and, I might add, as entertainment; Van Morrison, by creating a certain mystique both about the writing and recording of this beautiful record, as well as himself as a performer, was a marketing genius) than Astral Weeks. While certainly different in style and detail from Genesis, one cannot claim the former is somehow less "carefully crafted". One may consider Genesis' music less appealing for any number of reasons; ignoring the songs in question as songs, however, begs the question one claims to be answering.

Moore's work moves through British blues, progressive and heavy metal, to punk and the post-punk styles, in each case being clear that part of his task concerns the labels or "styles" we give to the varieties of music. While they may share certain common features, as the foregoing make clear, there are many cross-currents and much interchange among what many believe, even insist, are discrete styles. The labels, and the styles to which they refer, may well break down upon analysis of the musical texts themselves.

While I find Macan's attempt to place musical styles within a larger sociological framework (I say attempt because, by and large, I find his treatment of the initial and subsequent audiences for English Progressive Rock to be both superficial and lacking in nuance) to be a far richer way of finding the meaning of music within the larger context of social and cultural life, it bears repeating that without an attempt at analyzing music qua music, there is no way to come to terms with the meaning the music has. Relying upon historical accounts, without those accounts taking in to consideration musical detail, also fail in the end to give us as full an understanding as we might otherwise prefer. Moore's work is a good beginning in reframing our discussions of rock music by insisting on the primacy of the songs themselves.

Racism & Retrograde Politics In British Rock

We Americans tend to privilege our understanding of the birth and spread of the multi-faceted phenomenon of pop music that has come to be labeled "rock". From rock and roll and rhythm and blues in the 1950's through hip-hop over the past quarter century, since these phenomena started here, we tend to speak and think their histories in American terms, with American referents. Central to the narrative is the role these musics played in the cultural acceptance of African-American within the American mainstream, as part of the larger demand for political and social rights for African-Americans in this country.

What of other countries? The primary partner in the creation of this music has been Great Britain. In the 1950's, Bill Haley & The Comets toured Britain, playing to sell-out crowds around the country (a young Graham Nash would meet Bill Haley by the stage door in his home city of Manchester, a moment that would change his life forever). Their song, "Rock Around The Clock", became the title of a film that sparked riots among a group of youths called Teddy Boys in Britain. When independent labels, particularly Chess And Checkers Records from Chicago started exporting records by performers like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, British youths like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards snatched them up.

The history of British pop and rock, separate from the overall history of rock, would be an interesting study, to say the least. Matters of race and class being very different there than here, the interplay among these, the music, youth culture, and British politics should be studied very carefully.

Three incidents, all from the 1970's, highlight, I think, the differences between what too many commentators (I'm thinking, in particular, of Ed Ward, Simon Frith, and other historians of popular music) have glossed over as unimportant or irrelevant.

In 1976, David Bowie gave an extensive interview to Cameron Crowe. Crowe managed to publish three stories, two in Rolling Stone, and one in Playboy magazine. The last one has become infamous, for very good reasons.

I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, "Well, now, what ideas have you got?" Show them what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done. I can't stand people just hanging about. Television is the most fascist, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.

In the years since, Bowie has not only apologized, but completely renounced any affiliation with any reactionary politics. He even married African-born supermodel Iman. Fueled by massive amounts of cocaine, he may very well have just been spouting off nonsense. All the same, one cannot unfuck oneself, as the saying goes.

Also in 1976, Eric Clapton said some things that sparked a whole movement. Against what he was saying.

t was 5 August 1976 and Eric Clapton was drunk, angry and on stage at the Birmingham Odeon. 'Enoch was right,' he told the audience, 'I think we should send them all back.' Britain was, he complained, in danger of becoming 'a black colony' and a vote for controversial Tory politician Enoch Powell whom he described as a prophet was needed to 'keep Britain white'.

For those who may not know, here's an infamous speech by Powell from 1968, showing him at his "prophetic" best. Unlike Bowie, Clapton has never apologized for these remarks. While one can, perhaps, consider his subsequent life and career - including his current residency in Antigua - as mitigating any negative judgment upon the man, I would beg to differ for a number of reasons, to which I'll return in a moment.

In 1979, on tour with Bonnie Bramlett, Elvis Costello said, well, I'll just let you read it for yourself.

Bramlett stayed to chat up Costello, a volatile performer whose rising musical reputation has been accompanied by erratic behavior and hostility toward both fans and press. "Someone asked him what he thought of the old guys, like Buddy Holly," reports one eyewitness. Costello replied with an obscenity. "What about Elvis Presley?" Costello snapped another obscenity. "Then he said American people are second-class white people, compared to first-class English people."

Bramlett, a longtime paladin of rhythm-and-blues whose backup bands once included heavies like Leon Russell, Duane Allman and Rita Coolidge, kept cool until, she says, Costello "called James Brown a jive-ass nigger." Next, according to an onlooker, "Bonnie said, 'All right, you son of a bitch, what do you think of Ray Charles?' He said, 'Screw Ray Charles, he's nothing but a blind nigger.'

To be fair (a bit, anyway), Costello did apologize, insisting he was not at all a racist. Indeed, he was active in the British Rock Against Racism movement, which formed initially in response to Clapton's outburst in Birmingham, but also due to an increasing appropriation of punk among racist skinheads (not to mention Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux, among other punk performers, sporting swastikas).

The history of popular music in Britain, running on its separate path from its American counterpart, responded to different political, social, and cultural events and cues. The music itself developed along much different paths, and the musicians themselves, for all they were appropriating a music rooted in African-American life and history, came to the music largely ignorant of the subtle social and cultural cues in it. In the case of Clapton, in particular, it is difficult to unravel the many strands that connect his deep and very real love for the blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and B. B. King in particular from an outburst for which he has never provided an adequate explanation, let alone distanced himself. Personally, I believe this is because, while loving the blues and the performers who popularized it, Clapton doesn't understand the music in its original form. Instead, appropriating it from the standpoint of class rather than a mixture of race and class - something that, I believe, lies at the heart of the love for the blues among many British musicians - Clapton (and Jimmy Page and Richie Blackmore and John Mayall and Peter Green and Keith Richards and so many others) could hear the call of liberation within the music without getting it. It becomes easy, if you rip an art form like the blues out of any contextual space, to hear it as one thing, while it may be something else all together. It is one thing, indeed, to take in an art form and make it a part of your life, using it as a form of self-expression to which you believe you can relate; it is another thing altogether to do so without any understanding of all that went in to creating that art form in the first place.

Like the racist Oi! movement in Britain that combined punk and reggae and early ska, appropriating art forms without any grasp of what they are in their totality creates odd situations, to say the least.

The popular music that began in the United States in the 1950's and continues to spread around the world in all its varieties is, at its heart, a music of freedom. It always has been. Freedom from the strictures of parental control among adolescents. Freedom from the social and political barriers that oppress. When one lives out freedom, singing out for all the world to hear, "Ah wop bop a-loo-bop, a whop bam BOOM!", one has already undermined the structures that seek to keep you down.

Not understanding this basic reality, because one's own "set" - one's national and personal history; the cultural and social norms and rules within which one finds oneself - is alien in every conceivable way, one can interact with an art such as the one described above without understanding it for what it really is. In order to write a history of British pop and rock, I think it is necessary to get clear, from the outset, that at the deepest, most fundamental roots of the interchange among culture, society, and politics, the British never understood the music they were hearing. Which gave room for some seriously ugly incidents that demonstrate not only this misunderstanding, but the blemishes among otherwise talented and influential artists.

Blogging Is Easy When You Cut And Paste!

One of my favorite places to go is Ben Myers' Faith & Theology. Not only does he offer witty, insightful, provocative, challenging posts. He has a marvelous side bar filled with the best of the best from theology blogging. I've added from that list to my own roll, and will probably add more over time.

Rather than comment on what some other folks are saying, I thought I'd offer folks what people far more intelligent, insightful, learned, and literate are saying. While certainly a way to exploit my own basic laziness, I'm doing this to guide anyone interested to some really good reads.

Resident Theology is the blog of a Yale Divinity School doctoral candidate. His latest post is a quote from Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: The Works of God. The paragraph in question can be found on p. 311:

"It is the fact of God's Trinity which requires that his concluding gift to us, should he make one, must be inclusion in his own life, the gift not of something other than God but of 'all he is' [Luther]. The triune God does not and indeed cannot beneficently affect us causally; for him, causal action, with its intrinsic distancing, would mean exclusion from himself and so cursing rather than blessing. The goal of all the biblical God's ways is the glory of God. Were an otherwise biblical God -- contrary of course to possibility -- monadic, his intention of his own glory would be a sort of omnipotent egocentricity, and the reality of God would be a universal moral disaster. But God's glorification of himself is instead supreme blessing because the triune God can and does include creatures in that glory."

The Blogging Parson is from an Australian professor of theology, Michael Jensen. Today we are offered the third in a series on Martin Luther and the Devil. While certainly a topic examined in depth by Heiko Oberman (and an insightful book at that; opens up sorts of things about Luther's thought that are otherwise muddled and confused), the clarity of exposition Jensen brings to this topic, as well as the links between Luther's theology and the underlying psychological dynamics played out is really worth taking the time to read carefully, bearing much fruit in the process:

This is Martin Luther’s great difficulty, then: where can I find a gracious God? It seemed to him that the Devil and God were in cahoots. They were allies against him in his destruction. The Devil took the holiness and righteousness of God and used it to prove to Luther his due to his woeful performance as a human being, he had no hope of right-standing with God. Even as a monk, Luther could not but perennially doubt how it could be that the face of God was set firmly against him. The way he had been taught about the Christian life was that if human beings were to do whatever it was in them to do, then God would supply the remainder necessary to ensure salvation. And yet it was precisely the precondition of ‘doing what was in him’ that the meticulous Luther did not think he could meet.

What then?

Luther had impossible difficulties with the concept of iustitia Dei, the ‘righteousness of God’. As he understood it initially, it was a divine attribute – God’s impartial judgement of individuals on the basis of their merit. This was very much the Roman lawyer Cicero’s definition of righteousness as ‘rendering to each person his due’. God in his righteousness gives each individual exactly what they deserve….

…which is fine if you think human beings are capable of meriting justification. But Luther thought this was simply naïve. He understood human beings as incapable of meeting the preconditions of salvation. They are shot through with sin, bound only for death. They couldn’t even get to the start line. And so – how could ‘the righteousness of God’ be anything but bad news for the sinner? God stood frowning and tut-tutting at the end of every corridor.

Was this then the Devil’s victory? Was there no other side to the God that Luther pleaded with in the darkness and loneliness of his room?

We can chart Luther’s transformation through the written evidence of his meditations on the Bible. His lecture notes from the period stretching from 1513-1519 are available for our perusal. Whether this happened at one sudden, dramatic moment – on the toilet perhaps, who cares? – or over period of some years is debated by scholars, but it scarcely matters. What Luther came to understand was that the ‘righteousness of God’ included the mercy of God that he shows to sinners despite their sin. And where can this mercy be found? It had been under Luther’s nose all along. It in the cross of Jesus Christ. And that is the heart of the concept of ‘justification’. The individual finds himself under the judgement of God, with nowhere to turn, exposed terribly to his wrath. The only place to flee for safety from God’s wrath – is to God! And there he finds the great mercy that lies hidden under the terrible wrath. Christ the crucified one, who suffered on our behalf, became sin for us in order that his righteousness might become our righteousness. The cross symbolises (though it is also in actuality) God’s vehement hostility towards sin. If the death of the Son of God shows the extent of the wrath of God against sin, then it comes as a great surprise to realise that it also shows the extent of God’s mercy – since it is the Son of God himself who is crucified in such a way.

This insight takes faith to see it for what it is. Or, rather, to hear it for what it is. Luther wrote once, ‘the ears are the organ of the Christian’. What he meant was this: faith is simply hearing and believing the message that not only that God is good, but that God is good to me. God is good, yes; but that goodness does not spell my destruction but rather my preservation. The Devil’s testimony against us is true at a surface level, as the Devil’s words often are; but it turns out to have the reality of a lie, since it tempts us to doubt the goodness of God for us, and so despair.

The whispered lies of the Devil do not cease once one has begun to have faith. As Luther sees it, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience very often serves to contradict our faith. Feelings of guilt, for example, do not leave us automatically, however much we might believe in our own forgiveness. This tension between faith and experience was something Luther expounded somewhat later in his career when he thought that he might be martyred by the authorities who were chasing him down. Where was God in this? Has God abandoned me? Luther used the word Anfechtung – ‘temptation’, or ‘assault’ – to describe this experience. The Devil, the world and death are allied in a war against human beings. But surprisingly, this agonising assault is a work of God too, to reduce the individual to utter reliance on him and him alone. The Devil it turns out, does God’s work without meaning to, because he increases the utter dependence and humility of the believer in the work of God. The absurd, even blasphemous idea, that human beings might help God along a bit is completely thwarted.

Connexions is, as it says right up top, the blog of Richard Hall, a Methodist minister in Wales. On Thursday, he offered a small bit from a book by Peter Ochs, entitled Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews. Found on pages 254 through 255, Ochs says so beautifully and clearly what I have, on far too many occasions, said far too clumsily and with little clarity: The Authority of the Biblical Word on our lives in no way privileges that Authority precisely because it is an authority that reaches us in our creaturliness, our temporality. It is, for this very reason, a contingent authority even though it finds its roots in the transcendence of the Triune God. Ochs pulls no punches. He calls this tendency to make the mistake of imposing our temporal, finite, limited hearing and understanding of the Divine command upon all others a "sinful urge."

… I understand sacred Scripture as God’s speech to us. I understand the plain sense of Scripture to be inalterable but without clear meaning or force by itself. I understand such clarity to come to us only within our various communities of belief and practice and specific to the questions we ask of God in the context and space-time of our asking. This is the relativity of our knowledge of God’s word and will: he offers these to us with respect to his relation to us in our space-time. What we hear in response has binding authority for us, then and there: even in its own temporality, what we hear belongs to the Absolute, not merely to us. But we are not instruments for transporting what belongs to the Absolute beyond the contexts of our hearing. We may declare: We have heard directly from the One whose Word is true universally. Yes indeed. But we are not the ones to articulate the universality of this Word. Our responsibility is only to act then and there as prompted. But the next moment we turn to ask again — to ask what we have just done, or what we should do next, or what we shall say to others in other contexts — in that moment we can only ask again. Can we therefore not speak? Of course we can speak, but as human creatures, with experiences and histories and theories, even wonderful and profound and wise theories, but all of them creaturely. The urge to speak as if we spoke God’s Word — and thus spoke universally — is a sinful urge.

Obviously, I invite you to read more on these sites.