Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
I had to read this and the information about its veracity several times to be sure it wasn’t a parody. Just plain wacko. Well-timed, though, as far as I’m concerned. How about a few more of these over the next week, Global-Test?
UPDATE: And W wastes no time in folding Global Test’s lapse into a fine and fiery campaign speech.
The Jersalem Post bends over backward to put a civil spin on Javier Solana’s utter cluelessness. I’d have been force-feeding him the Hamas charter.
Another sqeaker. With six seconds to go, Adam Vinatieri kicks a 37-yard filed goal. Bunch of cool hookups throughout the nearly-constantly-changing-lead game at Mile High Stadium, most of which involed Peyton Manning and Reggie Wayne. With him and Marvin Harrison, we haven’t missed Edggerin James a bit, have we?
Now, don’t choke come playoff time, got it?
From the city that gave us Leroy Carr, Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Coe, let’s give it up for the Indianapolis Colts.
It’s also the city where the troubled yet brilliant actress Frances Farmer spent the last twelver years of her life (1958 – 1970). My nephew Charlie and his exquisitely charming wife Aimee often like to kick off their weekends by meeting after work on Fridays at the Red Key Tavern on College Avenue, just south of Broad Ripple. They find the Red Key’s manhattans a bit on the sweet side, but that’s what the establishment is known for, thanks to Ms. Farmer. It was her regular libation there, and she would always direct effusive kudos toward the bartender as she headed homeward after a visit. I dug mine when I stopped in last spring. Proportions are a matter of individual discernment, I guess.
I digress; let’s get back to the main point. In a just universe, we’d get some kind of cosmic assurance that the Colts were going to win the Super Bowl.
Alas, that’s the difference between this realm and the next.
As I said in this post below, I’m still working out the finer points of my spiritual orientation. The older I get, the more I understand the importance of taking this realm of life seriously, so I probably read more widely about it than I used to and use different criteria for coming to my mostly tentative conclusions.
I found this first post in a series of Mark Roberts’ thoughts on the recent exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Andrew Sullivan quite engaging. I look forward to his subsequent ponderings on it. I’m intrigued by this concept of the retrofitted Christian. I’ve long wondered what the spread of mix-and-match spirituality is doing to the faith thread in our cultural fabric.
The blog Reveries has an extremely thought-provoking post on Starbucks culture. Ponder, if you will, the notion of “faux alternative” and then come on back here and let’s have our own discussion about where this leads.
This piece by an observer of urban trends puts into words some things I’ve been pondering a while. Key things: his notions of the Mime Index, the Boy Scout Index, and when people around a state start referring to cities within it as “the People’s Republic of . . . “
We often think of North Korea in terms of its geostrategic significance, but this vignette from daily life there shows that it’s a county of human beings, like everyplace else, whether hellhole or normal environment.
I’ve been playing guitar since January 1968, but I’ve always been a complete klutz on the dance floor. Now The Lovely And Talented Mrs. Q and I are taking dance lessons. The first three weeks were about the waltz. Tonight our instructor got us into the tango and the rumba. I find I’m doing better at these 4/4-time dances. I can just feel them better. Really getting my promenade down, knowing when to turn and face my partner. I like that rocking on your back foot thing that puts the rhythm in the rumba steps, too.
Listening to W’s press conference as I blog. The advocates for cluelessness – excuse me, the reporters – posing questions keep hammering away on Iraq. He’s doing a great job of refusing to sign onto timetables. Also staying very clear that Iraq has a sovereign government that will decide its long-term security matters. He does sound pretty exaperated with this bunch, though.
I think about the glee with which nearly all of these clowns assume the adversarial stance, and how it’s not really any different from what I heard Murtha putting out yesterday. I mean, jeez, the guy wanted to make General Casey’s benchmarks announcement into something political. Just what the hell would he – or any of these goofballs W is having to suffer right now – do?
Two big messages coming from the presidential podium: this is a dangerous world and we’d better engage it accordingly, and low taxes are always a good thing.
Secretary of State Rice says that as far as she knows Kim Jong Il did not put on a big display of contrition for Chinese envoy Tang and in fact is feeling as cocky as ever.
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad made it chillingly clear where his regime stands, just in case anybody was still confused about the matter.
Tomorrow (October 21) is my birthday. (Same as Dizzy Gillespie, but I digress.) Visitors to my other site know I host a cooking-and-dining Saturday-morning talk show on 1010 WCSI-AM called “Stirring Something Up.” This will be the second time that the show has coincided with the birthday, so among other things, I’m going to take the October 24, 1955 issue of Newsweek to the station and share highlights on the air.
And what was going on the week of my birth? Dig this:
Local stories usually don’t have universal implications, but this one about the fifty Indianapolis ministers puts on display all the hallmarks of the mindset that would like to run America come January:
1.) The shakedown (threat to slow down work on new Colts stadium)
2.) Lack of a plan (no concrete way they’re going to slow down stadium work)
3.) Race-and-class-baiting rhetoric (stadium as “a symbol of our oppression”)
4.) Not even questioning whether the city’s limited funds should be used for higher priorities
5.) Demanding that government fill functions that ought to be matters of family, church, and civilized grown-ups’ ability to behave themselves
6.) Search for “root causes”
7.) Demand for programs that pretend to address these “root causes” but in reality encourage more babysitting of individuals who ought to be running their own lives (family services, job training, drug counseling)
You could put a blank where the phrase “crime wave that rocked Indianapolis this summer” is and fill it with any number of things and you’d have the formula for how the left would deal with it.
I found a real good way to zero in on what I was getting at in the post below on ambiguity. I just saw a TV news item about O.J. Simpson. He’s getting socked with a lawsuit or something. What struck me was the video footage over the story: some young sports fan bellying up to a table and stretching out a jersey for Simpson to sign. It was clear that this kid was really able to focus on the whole “The Juice, Record-Setting Running Back” identity and completely block out the “There you go, bitch. Do you like having a slit throat?” identity.
Obviously, that’s real sick, but think about the underlying layers of consideration that such a scene makes possible in our culture. Detached and oh-so-ironic-and-post-modern artistic and journalistic types can use it as fodder for a see-how-weird-this-world-is-type message.
And then we’re softened up to deconstruct a nuked city, look at is as “metaphor” or some damn thing instead of two million fried human beings.
Why do supermarket checkout people always hand you your coin change, dollar-bill change and receipt in one big blob (usually while the bag person is thrusting your groceries at you)? You’re left standing there sorting it out while the person behind you wants your space across from the register.
One of my guitar students is an eighth-grade guy with long, stringy hair who knows all about the music of his parents’ youth – Arlo Guthrie, Led Zeppelin and such. At his last lesson, I asked him if he knew who George Gershwin was. Complete blank. That’s nearly as chilling as a NorKor nuke test.
The Colts are having such a great season again – 5 and 0. The last two games have been down-to-the-wire squeakers, lots of fun to watch. I sure hope they can avoid choking in the first playoff game this season. Their loss to Pittsburgh last January was a too-stark illustration of the general life principle that glory fades quickly if your victories aren’t sustained.
I’m still working out the finer points of my spiritual life, and I’m still more inclined toward a wide embrace of truth gleaned not only from Judeo-Christian scripture, but also from the Bhagavad Gita and the sermons of the Buddha than toward the Calvinist total-depravity doctrine or the notion expressed in a papal decree of a few years back that other faiths leave one “salvifically deficient.”. (Islam? I’m at least a little wary, for reasons I’ll bet you understand.) Still, the more this century unfolds, the more I think there’s something to the idea that human nature is sullied from the get-go and in need of redemption. Most of the nicey-nice, New Thought, you-can-create-your-own-reality outfits are utterly incapable of addressing the gamut of human foible, from willful ignorance to darkest cruelty.
Lynne Stewart gets eighteen months for her message-passing, once again prompting the question of whether this nation has sufficient will to prevail in the current world war.
UPDATE: Right Wing Nut House has a disgustingly comprehensive look at Stewart’s career as a freedom-hating traitor.
China seems to be getting with the program at least somewhat, inspectng NorKor cargo at its land borders. It still won’t board ships at sea to examine payload, though. Japan and Australia are way ahead of the curve, exclaiming, “Hell, yeah, we’ll impose sanctions!”
Meanwhile, there are little snippets of intelligence suggesting another nuke test. Ccertainly we’ve heard no noise from the Hermit Kingdom Stalinists about coming back to the six-party talks. Oh, a little noise about wanting to sign up for that bag of goodies offered at the talks’ last round in September 05, but all are agreed that’s doing dessert before brussels sprouts.
So it’s probably a good time to look squarely at the question of where this winds up if things continue on the present vector. What if the NorKors test another nuke and otherwise rattle sabers with ever-greater jitters-inducing intensity while China and Russia offer lukewarm-at-best enactment of sanctions? What does the ever-shrinking core of Sane Nations do?
Glad to see The Washington Post correctly identifying the two main forces hanging up the Sane World’s attempt to move away from mortal danger.
I’ve been thinking about the notion of ambiguity. What would the antonym of ambiguity be? Clarity? Precision? Absolute truth? Maybe as I ponder the matter more I’ll have a better idea of what its opposite would be.
I do know that it’s been oversold to all of us fine inhabitants of Western civilization. Now the results of our having embraced it so readily are coming home to roost.
At first glance, ambiguity looks like it has a lot going for it. This is, after all, an infinite, multifarious universe – no two snow flakes alike and all that – and facts about the things that comprise it are being discovered every day. As the poet William Carlos Williams said, truth lies in particulars.
One of those discoveries, relativity, gave ambiguity quite a boost in cache. How fast is the train going? Depends on whether you’re a passenger on it or standing on the ground watching it go by.
Still, there are measurable truths to be told about all the objects, forces, relationships and other outward phenomena of this realm.
Then there are the inward phenomena – the thoughts of the human mind and the impulses of the human heart. Here, truth revealed in scripture gives us the kind of assessment of that which scientific inquiry provides for the outer things. And at least several of the world’s major religions come up with parallel assessments of the inner things. The Ten Commandments put it most succinctly, but Jews, Hindus and Buddhists generally come up with the same list of uncool behaviors and indulgences of mental processes.
So after fifteen thousand years or so of human history we have a pretty good guide as to what works and what doesn’t. Dont stick a wet steel rod in an electrical outlet. Don’t steal, lie or kill.
It’s beyond the scope of a middday blog post to go into when ambiguity started to get such fave reviews. The enlightenment was a big factor. Ambiguity fans love to trot out Galileo’s house arrest for saying the earth orbited the sun in defiance of then-current church teaching. Nineteenth-century developments, from alternative-health practices to the philosophy of Nietzche to Impressionist painting, all helped encourage us to consider that there was more to reality than precise definitions for things.
Another nineteenth-century development, utopian socialism, gave us the notion that human nature could be reshaped. In some quarters, you could even hear the notion of a human nature pooh-poohed.
Thus, some of us, such as the New York Times’s Walter Duranty, sighed in awe at the spectacle of the New Man bringing in the harvest or fulfilling the steel production according to Stalin’s five-year plan. Over in Germany, a defeated German public went in for transvestite nightclub entertainment and bought a bill of goods from an unfortunately articulate watercolor artist, resulting in another kind of twisted experiment in remaking humankind.
On the cultural level, we made near-deities of our celebrities and sometimes even politicians, overlooking their considerable moral shorcomings because of their ability to hit one into the stands, play a sizzling bebop lick, promise us subsidized goods and services,or just because of their attractiveness.
And so it’s gone in the intervening years. With the New Left in this country, along with the neo-tribal ethos of the Woodstock bunch, we lost sight of the notion that there might be any bad guys on the world stage. Cambodian genocide, an array of African dictatorships, one last hot flare-up of the Cold War in central America, the rise of militant Islam in Afghanistan, Iran and the middle east, and North Korea’s defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty all came down the pike as a result.
Today it’s that last one that is bearing its hair-raising fruit. We are at this juncture because for decades there wasn’t a sufficient critical mass – to use an apt metaphor – with the clarity and courage to insist on North Korea ending its obfuscation and bringing in of irrelevant side-issues and stalling – in short, its ambiguity.
Now we may see a groundswell of people and nations around the world saying aloud that ambiguity doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s good, but our time spent indugling a flawed notion when, in our hearts, we knew better has already yielded something pretty damn grim and clearly defined that’s not going to go away by itself.
WLS has dropped Teri O’Brien’s Sunday afternoon show. Hope she gets another on-air gig soon.
