04.30.07
Get that forehead covered!
Be glad you’re not a woman in Iran. But be concerned that you live in a nation with such a clueless State Department.
04.27.07
Busy couple of days
Blogging will be light until at least Sunday. Today and tomorrow I head up to Indy for a conference on marketing the arts to modern audiences. I’m on the board of Jazz from Bloomington, which is sending me.
I guess this conference is bringing in people from all over, because after the speakers and breakout sessions, the schedule calls for evening guided tours of Indy’s arts-and-culture offerings. I can’t make those. I gotta head back home each afternoon. Tonight is the third installment in Robert Hay-Smith’s jazz series at the Unitarian-Universalist fellowship. Blue Django, one of Carolyn Dutton’s groups, is playing the first set, and one of Ron Kadish’s groups, the Justin Sorrell Trio, is playing the second set, so I want to check out my buds in these musical settings. Also, Robert has invited me to sell books at intermission, so there’s an opportunity for commerce. Tomorrow night, Mrs. Cue and I head to Bloomington to see the touring productin of Aida and, afterward – smell us – we’re going to a reception to meet the cast and crew. The daughter of a couple we’re friends with has a major role in the show.
04.24.07
So you don’t have to rely on the MSM now that the Hamas-Israel ceasefire is in tatters
Honest Reporting has a page of links for getting the real skinny: Israeli and Jewish media, Israeli government sites, media watchdogs, think tanks, blogs and more.
Gonna be valuable to follow the true story of the nine Palestinians Israel killed over the weekend and the subsequent rocket attacks from Gaza.
04.23.07
Just what is the point of having a Sheryl Crow in our culture at all?
I knew about the one-square-of-toilet-paper proposal, but Michelle Malkin has the scoop on – are you ready for this? – “dining sleeves.”
Sheryl’s getting boorish and pathetic in the past few days, but there was always something about her that bugged me. It seems to me she’s always wanted to have it both ways - rock & roll creds and the uptown-nice-lady image. She’d do songs about drinking beer for breakfast or running into a jam in Vegas, but she also dug being on the women’s magazine covers and doing the girly-girl morning TV shows. And strictly from a musical standpoint, I always thought her sound was derivative and calculated to take her as high on the pop charts as possible.
When I heard that she and Lance Armstrong broke up over irreconcilably divergent views on W, I filed it under “Hee hee.” I’d kind of figured her for a limousine moonbat, with her “Key-to-no-war-is-not-to-have-enemies” spout right before the Iraq invasion.
Now comes her double-team accosting, with Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David, of Karl Rove at the White House correspondents’ dinner. Hey, what’s a little inappropriate behavior when the sea levels are at stake?
I’m about to wind the semester up in my rock-history class. I still have a couple of decades to go if I’m going to continue to gear my lectures toward stuff like development of genres, or changes in the recording industry or the radio biz, or technological developments, or in-depth looks at significant individuals, but, given that there’s not much time left and the only significance of rock since 1980 has been its role in our culture’s rot anyway, maybe Ms. Crow would make a nice case study.
Rock stars telling us it’s urgent to change the way we tend to our anal hygiene.
File under “pathetic,” and also “Western civilization sure did a lot for humankind before it collapsed.”
04.21.07
Move back the furniture. It’s boogie time!
It’s Saturday night. Time for another installment of BN’s jump-blues video series. From the late 40s. Step on into the rent party and rock the house with Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five.
04.20.07
Harry Reid and where we stand now
As I recently said to a commenter here at BN, I’m big into fun. I’d love to devote all the space here to cool stuff – great music, conversations about (and pictures of) food, sharing of new discoveries in the worlds of literature and visual art, some sports excitement, travel tales.
But I set Bent Notes up to be a forum for the total spectrum of my experience as a human being and American citizen, and every day of this new century, I have come across some sad or alarming development that warrants my examination. I go about my daily life against a backdrop of the rot of Western civilization, the very foundation that makes my stimulating and rewarding life possible.
So many of the catagories on the right side of this page – the ones with “dhimmitude” in the title, certainly, but also the ones like Politics and National Security and Culture and Character & Virtue – contain posts that tell the story.
I don’t remark on everything that comes across my radar screen. Not only is my time a consideration, but also my ability to keep a constructive frame of mind (and have some fun). Sometimes I link to some other blogger who’s already covered a particular development in a manner with which I concur.
Another factor in my being a little selective is the dizzying pace with which simply astounding instances of self-hatred by supposed leaders of Western civilization occur. Again, a look through the archived examples of dhimmitude here reveal a complete abandonment of fealty to basic Western values on the part of leaders in education, the arts, journalism and diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
The most distressing place to see this, though, is within the bodies and offices of government of my own country, the United States of America. This is where I live, and where I ought to be able to expect my elected representatives to believe that my freedom is worth defending. I can no longer expect that. Some of the most prominent among them do things like go to Davos, Switzerland and tell an international gathering that includes one of our enemies, Iran, that the US has become an international pariah, or go to Syria and give that nation’s dictator inaccurate information about what Israel is willing to do to achieve “peace.”
As I say, these gravely distressing acts of West-hatred and Constitution-trampling come along with such regularity now that one must guard against being numbed. But when the Senate Majority Leader says quite publicly that “this war is lost,” meaning the Iraq theater of our current world war, while the new strategy for victory is still only partially in place, it’s time to get one’s brain around the magnitude of what he’s commiting.
Where to start with the havoc he’s wreaking, the harm he’s doing? Would the signal he’s sending to our enemies be the place to begin? Or maybe the demoralization of our fighting forces? Or maybe the deepening of the rift between our military, and the portion of the public – such as families – involved with it, and that swath of our population that has no sense of the military’s role in our national life (beginning with our survival)? Or the obscuring of the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief and the executive branch’s role ast the setter of foreign policy?
It must be pointed out that the examples enumerated above – this latest and most egregious one, but also the others – all involve members of one of this nation’s two major political parties. These acts are most decidedly representative of that party’s overall thrust today.
What ought to disturb anyone who still harbors a glimmer of hope for the survival of the West, and particularly that most Western of nations, the United States of America, is that the other major party doesn’t offer much of a bastion of clarity to which one might run from the rot that has the Freedom-hater party in its grip.
I’m still determined to contribute to the sum total of humanity, nobility, and even groove and fun in this world, but I do so knowing full well that the forces of ruin have secured a stronghold in high places and the tipping point for the civilization in which I do my contributing has nearly been reached.
04.19.07
Monika Herzig on the jazz life
One of my musical buds did a video interview with the Indianapolis Star, onstage between sets at the Chatterbox, in which I think she nicely sums up the joys of playing jazz.
04.18.07
The ability to recognize good and evil
I’ve been thinking about my most recent post on the Virginia Tech situation. I certainly don’t mean to minimize the magnitude of what occurred.
In fact, in an important way, it’s of a piece with the matters of global scope with which I compared it. It’s yet again another instance in which we’re forced to stare into the face of evil.
And that brings together a number of concerns frequently brought up at BN. There’s a certain sense in which evil seems like a concentrated form of all-about-me-ism. This guy was a literature major, but his interest in his chosen subject had less to do with discerning the universal verities to be gleaned from great works and more to do with seizing upon a means for venting his spleen. Witness his plays and creative writing assignments.
I’m about to wind up the semester in my rock-history course at our local IU campus. We’re getting to the last couple of decades. What am I supposed to say about any of these characters? Any of them, from the overtly bottom-feeder hair bands to the sensitive, feelings-and-relationships coffeehouse-type songwriters, to the oh-so-alienated “alt” bands? Navel-gazers all, and this is who has been providing the soundtrack for our civilization’s next generation during its most formative years.
It’s time to examine what kinds of cultural products, institutions, norms and bedrock assumptions (dare I say absolutes?) foster a climate of character and deep humanity and which ones take us in the direction of indulgence of our least noble attributes and such indifference to others that we no longer recognize either the time-honored virtues, such as heroism, integrity, vision, compassion, good sense and responsibility, or their opposite – pure, dark evil.
04.17.07
Our feelings-drenched culture
It’s a little after six in the evening and I can already tell it’s gonna be wall-to-wall Virgina Tech on cable TV tonight.
Yes, it was horrifying. Yes, it’s off-the-charts sad. But the place of something like this in the passing parade of human history can be summed up thusly: Once in a while, some guy who has been a pressure cooker of fury for years goes off and wastes a bunch of people. I know the forensics experts, the ballistics experts, the grief counselors and the psychiatry experts can fathom layers of significance of this thing for the next – well, until the next Big Unfortunate Catching Up Of The Statistical Likelihoods.
But what we really want out of this is an indulgence of our tabloid-level hunger for the wacko, the tawdry, the grisly, the confrontational. Before this, it was Don Imus. Before that, it was Anna Nicole.
Do you remember what had everybody riveted just before 9/11? Shark attacks. There was a little spike in the frequency of them, well within the overall curve since shark attacks have been monitored. But it was enough of a blip to create buzz.
These stories play best if there’s an angle that can be done up as heartwarming. Somebody’s successful struggle against severe injury or fright or grief. It helps us feel a little less sensationalism-hungry if we can bask in the warm fuzz of a hug or a smile.
I really don’t want to come off as callous here. This was a biggie in the sense that this guy really wreaked some havoc.
Now, the next thing I probably need to do is head off any polemical jabs along the lines of, “Well, Mr. BN, aren’t there always wars and simmering unrests between nations, regions and demographic groups? What makes the present mix of tensions and conflicts on the world stage any different from any previous moment in history?”
It’s this. Real bad folks are getting their hands on nearly unspeakably horrific means of inflicting mass hurt. You wanna talk rampage and carnage? We’re nail-bitingly close to a point of seeing big cities end their existences in an hour’s time.
All I’m saying is that we can prevent a Virginia Tech bloodbath to the gazillionth power if enough of us pay attention to what people like Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osam bin-Laden, Hugo Chavez, and Christopher Hill, Condoleeza Rice, George Bush, and Tony Blair are up to and give our assessment of their performances with all thevocal forthrightness available to citizens of a representative democracy.
The odds of a VT-type situation are tiny, and, statistically speaking, it only affects a few people. And we can’t prevent every last occurrence. We jus can’t. Maybe we can’t prevent a twilight-of-the-gods phase to our current world war either, but we have a better chance of it. It starts with giving it our attention and applying our intellects and hearts to it.
It ain’t about the guns
I’m going to let Bookworm Room speak for my thoughts on the Virginia Tech shootings specifically.
What I would say about the subsequent gun-control furor is actually something that’s been banging around in my cranium for some time and may, in the wake of this new and terrible situation, be more relevant than if I’d explored it in print beforehand.
My wife and I are friends with a boomer couple of hippie leanings. We used to hang with them frequently. Circumstances have changed in all our lives and we don’t get together so much any more. In the day, we used to spend Sunday afternoons adrift in their swimming pool, adjacent to their hilltop house nestled among the tall trees of southern Indiana.
Their hospitality was legendary: grilled food, a well-stocked bar, blues on the stereo, and various other means for appreciating a summer Sunday in a multi-dimensional way. All you had to do was float around and stare at the treetops.
I never failed to notice, however, a little sticker in the corner of their kitchen-entrance door. It said, “Anyone entering this house illegally will be shot.” How incongruous with the vibe they set forth with the hugs that began our visits!
But I liked it, and still like it. I myself have never owned a gun and don’t know if I ever will. But that sticker is aa declaration of not only bodily but spiritual sovereignty. It says, “You have your free will, with which you may do what you will, and so do I.”
How much more quickly the Virginia situation might have ended if those citizens who also were assuming the role of student had felt free to be carrying the means to thwart the violation of their sanctity.
This is no time to take away anyone’s Second Amendment Rights. Those capital letters are quite deliberate. As Charlton Heston said when being sworn in for his second term as NRA president, “From my cold, dead fingers.”
04.15.07
Those rowdy, inventive humans and their God
A BN commenter passed along this link to a New York Times article about Pope Benedict’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth. This particular commenter leans left on economic issues and wanted to point out that the pope has misgivings about capitalism and the accumulation of wealth. To be sure, Benedict makes clear that those views are personal reflection and not official doctrine, but I’ll grant them a great deal of substance, coming as they do from one whose whole life is steeped in prayer to and contemplation of the Creator.
There’s a quote I read somewhere from C.S. Lewis to the the effect that God would probably lean a bit to the left on economic issues and a bit to the right on social issues. Something like that. I don’t want to try to flesh it out much more than that without finding it.
This gets us into the big question about free will, human nature, betterment of the species’ material condition, and what is fair. (Proponents of the original-sin doctrine should certainly feel free to chime in in the comment thread if so moved.)
There’s no doubt that the exponential rate of development across human societies – particularly in the West – has coincided with the full flowering of capitalism. Contract law, the modern forms of business (proprietorship, partnership and corporation), the notion that the market will make prices seek their natural levels and reflect what society collectively values – these are the elements that have made possible the astounding rate of increase in the sum total of knowledge and skills and ideas and things we can imagine. It goes without saying, in light of a century’s worth of experience, that socialism hasn’t contributed a stinkin’ thing toward this.
This burst of betterment over the past, say, four hindred years, though, has been a messy affair. Clearly none of the great inventors, artists, theoreticians or experimentors has been saints without flaw. That’s asking too much from any religious perspective. But it’s a collection of the liveliest minds among us, the most pronounced example of the ranginess, the restlessness that is unique to the human animal. We prowl around this earth, picking up objects and asking, “What could I do with this? How could I give it more utility, or impart some aesthetic value to it? How could I use it to more efficiently deliver to my fellows the things they need and want?” That’s our nature.
It’s going to mean bumping up against set notions of how things are. It’s going to mean exerting intense concentration at the expense of some of the warmer, more community-minded traits that are also of obviously great value. Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, for instance, told their families that they needed to be left alone for long periods of time. It’s going to mean people making big buildings, big vehicles, big machines, that can look disruptive to the quiet villager living much the way his ancestors did. It’s going to mean some people amassing much more wealth than others.
But what would this first decade of the twenty-first century look like if we’d colored inside the lines all this time?
It’s time for BN to wail on the Bush administration
Because it has been the only other game in town besides moonbat-ism, I have tried mightily to stand by W and the appointed fellow architects of his sense of how to shape this first decade of the new century. I have done so while swallowing a host of things that were about as distasteful as they could be to someone of my ideological orientation. I won’t rehash the litany of the earliest stunners to stick in my craw, except to give them a cursory enumeration for anyone new to BN who might need to get a quick handle on the worldview that informs opinion here: letting the vouchers provision be gutted from No Child Left Behind, steel tariffs, signing on to the prescription-drug expansion of Medicare, the squandering of political capital with the Harriet Miers nomination.
No, it’s the most recent string of utterly clueless moves that have forced me to finally point to the cabinet meeting room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and say, “These are not my people.”
Let’s start with Vladimir Putin, he of the recent violent crackdown on protests that saw Gary Kasparov taken into custody. It’s been clear for years that this former KGB head was no small-d democrat. W says he looked into Putin’s soul and saw a good man. No, ya didn’t, W. Maybe you needed your reading glasses or something, but you didn’t look closely enough to take the measure of Putin’s soul.
North Korea makes for perhaps the most glaring and dare I say alarming example. Per the NRO piece I link to in a post about two down from here, we’ve been made fools of in perhaps even bigger fashion than Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright were. A David Sanger piece in today’s New York Times further drives it home with simple, disgusting clarity: we got NorKor’s Macau bank funds freed up and in their hands, after the sixty day deadline, and they haven’t lifted a fricking finger toward what they were supposed to do – namely, shut down the Yongbyon reactor. Now Sean McCormick at the State Department is saying that in these situations, a little patience is warranted, or some such utter dog vomit.
Why isn’t every available official in the administration – including W himself – booking every available moment on the Sunday TV talk shows – as well as the conservative radio talk shows, and for that matter, space on the editorial pages of every newspaper of either left or right bent – and screaming the phrase “vioation of the Logan Act” in regard to the recent trip by Pelosi and Tom Lantos to Syria and their very up-front expression of a desire to take another such trip to Iran? Iran is having a field day with this. Government officials there are grinning and saying, “We would very much like to receive Speaker Pelosi and try to find an avenue for forging more constructive relations.”
Then there’s immigration policy. How hard is it to utter this succinct and easy-to-understand statement of policy: “We seal the border first, then look into humane ways to deal with the well-meaning illegal aliens already hear, and then push Mexico hard to become economically healthy so its citizens want to stay home.”
There’s a phrase we use frequently here at BN: Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. After W successfully crusaded for his tax cuts and dealt decisivley with the Taliban and pointedly told the UN that Saddam was about to seal that body’s fate as no longer relevant on the world stage, I thought we had a man of spine and consistent vision leading us. I don’t know if he caught Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome from drinking the Washington water or whether he inherited it from his father, who had a terminal case of it, but I don’t know that the guy can be cured at this point.
How much longer will we still be, in Dutch’s phrase, the last, best hope of mankind on earth?
04.14.07
“The Christopher Hill Amateur Hour”
Claudia Rosett says the West has been had once again – this time in the Pacific theater of WWIII.
04.13.07
Let’s try that jump-blues dance party again
Maybe the world will let us be long enough this time to do some rockin’. Big Jay McNeely at a fairly recent (couldn’t find a date on the page) performance of his 1949 squeal-and-honkfest “Deacon’s Hop.”
As far as I know, Big Jay is still playing dates and rockin’ the house.
This is what I’m talkin’ about!
04.12.07
Kurt Vonnegut, RIP
It would be quite easy to praise the unique way his mind worked, his endearingly quirky characters, the memorable things he had to say about how artists approach life, and that slight touch of the curmudgeon that frequently garners the Twain comparisons, and have that be that.
But in the end there was something inconclusive about his cosmology. He wanted to see humankind quit warring; he wanted to see men and women figure out how to complete their attraction for one another in a lovely way, and he wanted to see people create things of nobility and lasting value, but he never got beyond a cynicism regarding the one strand of human endeavor – Western civilization – that has done the most to explore how those things might be accomplished. He had that indifference to the West’s traditions of theological thought that usually characterize “free thinkers.” I’m not sure you can assemble all the components of the puzzle called human existence without putting them on the table with everything else.
04.11.07
This is the world we live in
Reread the last few posts pertaining to Iran. Think hard and deeply about what they say. Then read this and this. Our world had truly gone mad. And the last few sane people seem to be coming down with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.
