Bent Notes

There are less than 48 hours left in 2007.  On the personal level, it looks to be a relaxed stretch of reading, shopping for delectables to serve to the small gathering we’re hosting tomorrow night, and waxing reflective.  For our nation and world, it looks to be a flurry of Iowa poll numbers, Bhutto-murder investigation developments, and and uranium-enrichment obfuscation.

I don’t think I’ll do any kind of formal top-ten-stories-of-the-year-type exercise here at BN.  I doubt if it surprises anyone that my hands-down pick for number one is the success of the surge.  Not only has General Petraeus shown himself to be a man of clear and sweeping vision and deep humanity, but W, that president whom I have castigated many times at this blog, has come through with that quietly unshakable resolve which has proven to be his most important quality.

BN readers have surely noticed that I haven’t had a thingto say about the presidential race yet.  I guess my thinking is that there are plenty of outlets for the latest inside-baseball scoops if one is really consumed by that sort of thing.  I understand that ultimately it does matter a great deal, but only in the sense of watching the great majority of Americans begin to solidify its take on the choice before it.  For me, it’s simple and a done deal.  I know who my favorite candidate is (Thompson), who my second-favorite candidate is (Romney), my third favorite (Giuliani) and so on.  It is based on how closely each hews to the principles that inform my worldview- that is, the seven-point BN Manifesto.  I’m well aware of the shortcomings of the above candidates.  To sum up, in Fred’s case, it’s the sleepiness factor, in Romney’s case, it’s the fact that he comes across impeccably scripted, stiff as a board and lacking even one funky bone in his body, and in Rudy’s case, it’s more the opposite; that is, he’s way too loosey-goosey on the cultural and spiritual items.  His personal life is strewn with wreckage and he’s clearly unserious on the policy level when it comes to matters of family and sexuality.

Nonetheless, I’ll hold my nose and vote for whoever the Republican candidate is.  Even if it’s Huckabee, which a.) isn’t likely, and b.) would be hard to stomach indeed.  This is because the entire modern Democrat party in the United States is a force for absolute hatred of basic human freedom and dignity.  Certainly any of the top-three Freedom-Hater candidates, if elected, would plunge this country into either economic collapse, totalitarianism, or conquest by America’s enemies, or some combination of all three.

So immersion in the minutiae of the first few primaries of 08 is not something I’m engaged in.  I know exactly where I stand, and I’ll vote in accordance with how closely I can come to the forward movement of that based on my choice next November.

What does concern me is this great swath of our public that is still listening to it all and stroking its chin as if there is still a a big basic decision to be made.  Have we really done that bad a job of making basic common sense about America’s place in the world, and about the principles of free-market economics, and about basics of human nature like gender and family that people are still hemming an dhawing over what they hear in these endless debates?

2008 is going to be momentous indeed.  I may do some predictions.  That can be fun.  I always like to read the ones this time of year at National Review Online.

It just concerns me more than a little that there’s not more shared clarity among my fellow countrymen as we enter the last fifth of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In his Townhall column today, Paul Greenberg says that in fundamentalists’ insistence on taking every last word of the Bible literally, they diminish its stature as a deep, rich, towering work of literature.  He says it’s like reading Shakespeare for the plots only.  Great literature, he says, mines every aspect and nuance of human existence, and employs every tool of communication to do so.

Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated.

Roger Kimball has characteristically insightful things to say about actor Will Smith’s remarks about Hitler to a Scottish newspaper.

The whole imbroglio revives for me a component of my ongoing quest to get at Unassailable Spiritual Truth: the nature of evil.  I went through a period during which I viewed it as misperception.  This was the notion that if the person embracing evil would just get his take on reality right, he would no longer harbor a desire to disrupt the Great Cosmic Balance.  That sort of seems to be where Smith (and, I think, Kimball) is coming from.  I’m now starting to skate over (how’s that for a winter metaphor?) to the view that there’s something intrinsic about it.  Still not willing to say that the references in the New Testament (Jesus, James) to the devil are more than metaphorical, because then you get into the whole array of questions about what kind of being can exist and not occupy geographically pinpointable space.  I do, though, think that not only for those who engage in petty cruelty (murderers with no ideological axe to grind, for instance), but those to whom Smith and Kimball are referring, those who advocate meanness in the service of a grand vision, cross a line on some kind of conscious level.  That is, they give in to an impulse, a cosmic suggestion, that has an existence unto itself.

Age 82, at his home in a Toronto suburb.  This loss is huge. He was one of those ubiquitous session pianists of the 1950s, along with Horace Silver, Tommy Flanagan and Wynton Kelly.  There are those Norgran albums he did with Lester Young, his work with Anita O’Day, his sessions with Stan Getz.  And, of course, his own trios over the years, with associates like Herb Ellis and Ray Brown.  I have a DVD of a live concert in Vienna from 2002 that is always stunning to watch.  He had class, depth, and from what I’ve read, an impish streak that made him a first-rate practical joker. 

American music took some big hits this year.  This is among the biggest.

Here’s a taste of the Peterson magic from 1958.

Chuck Colson offers a concise and compelling declaration of just who Jesus Christ is in his Townhall column today.  Ultimate reality incarnated as a human being.

I do wish I’d come across a theological explanation of this notion of the total depravity of humankind, though.  Original sin, the Fall.  Don’t send me back to reread my Genesis.  What really happened?  And why do the little pamphlets say “Your works are as filthy rags before him?”  I don’t understand a cosmology in which one’s volitional inclination toward God wouldn’t be a good thing.  I guess I’m still hung up on this notion that the Great Scorecard is binary, that you either confess faith in the saving blood or you’re done for.

To harken back to what I said about the West in yesterday’s post, though, there’s no doubt that conventional Christianity brings real hope and a changed way of life to millions of people.  There are parts of the world that are becoming more Westernized, in that sense, than some places that have been central to Christendom for centuries.

I am having a nice Christmas Day so far.  Just had some killer coffee cake that one of Mrs. BN’s clients made. This afternoon I’ll curl up with Surrender Is Not An Option by John Bolton, the most memorable of my gifts.

I wish I could say that I was in an unmitigatedly Christmas Eve frame of mind.  It’s kind of odd, because throughout December, I have been feeling fittingly seasonal: equal parts festive, reflective, and open to truths only so far faintingly glimpsed at best.  Parties and gigs at night, scripture and C.S. Lewis in the mornings.

Today, though, something has emptied out  of me.  Maybe it’s this garbage weather.  (Perhps my very least favorite kind of day in the year is a cold, bare-trees winter day with no snow and an unsparingly bright, cloudless sky throwing everything into open relief.)  Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve already had my fellowship with those who mean the most to me.  (Well, except my wife, who is at the other end of the house right now, tidying up the kitchen.)  Maybe it’s all the physical stuff going on with me: acid reflux, eyes swollen from some kind of allergy.

I suspect it’s something deeper, though. 

I’ll cut to the chase.  I still don’t feel like a sinner in need of grace and therefore grateful for the birth of a human unlike any other, who sacrificed his mortal life that I might avoid Hell. 

Readers of BN posts under the category “Religion and Spirituality” know a bit about my progress in this area throughout my life: a childhood grounded in NCC-style mainline Protestantism (Presbyterian), high school immersion in Christian Science, college days spent in the lysergic trenches and serious study of Hinduism and Buddhism, some aimless years, a conversion to conservatism that included a spiritual component (in the form of a reawakened respect for the broad unfolding of Judeo-Christian tradition), and a sincere desire to see just how that tradition formed the foundation of this Western civilization that I love so much.

I hesitate to tackle this thing once again from the mystical-versus-revealed-religion angle.  It’s mainly still what I am indeed focused on, but it just seems to run the risk of taking things in a fluffy and inconsequential direction - and not just because of the way New Age-ism has co-opted so much of that discussion, but because I suspect that even in more serious pursuits of what we might broadly call Eastern approaches, there is something about West-aversion involved.

Still, there is something throughout even the unfolding of Christianity that reveals a dichotomy.  Origen, Meister Eckhardt and Tielhard on the one hand and Calvin, to employ shorthand for what I’m talking about, on the other.  Divine-spark-at-the-core-of-the-descernible-universe versus sovereign-God-in-a-Heaven-separate-from-creation.

If one puts his efforts of inquiry into the mystical side of the dichtomy, there is at least the hope of a direct experience of the divine.  When one goes the sovereign-God route, one is left offering prayers to a creator one will never see, at least in this realm.

Ah, say the sovereign-God Christians, that is the whole point of Jesus Christ.  The Lord of all once interjected himself into this plane, there were witnesses to that, and they scripturally documented it.  Through faith in that documentation, one can be sure that God is real.

Their account of what they saw and this being from whom they received these high teachings is not to be taken lightly.

It’s not like I dismiss the notion of sin out of hand.  One reason I’m no atheist is because, as I’ve had clarified for myself in countless arguments with nonbelievers, I can see no other explanation for the natural human aversion to what we commonly call moral violation and, indeed, revulsion and horror at diabolical and cruel commissions.  There is something in us setting up our moral preferences, and that is the basis of law and codes of behavior.

It’s just that I’m sitting here wondering, as afternoon prepares to give way to evening and I get ready to finalize the plates of finger food I’ll offer to guests, why I feel this sense of the deeper holiday sentiments and impulses that had been building for me since Thanksgiving having drained away over the course of the day.

I guess the place to start on the road back to a Christmas state is to be gentle with myself and ask the God whose basic existence I’m sure of to be likewise.  I mean no harm.  I want truth and love for all.

Maybe a state of emptiness is the perfect place from which to ask to be filled with the old wine.  In that case, I offer to you, Father, the only me have to offer, and ask you to look upon me kindly.  My desire to draw near has never been more sincere. 

North Korea is refusing to dispose of its nuclear fuel, per its agreement in the latest round of the six-way talks.

In the past couple of days, I’ve come across a few news stories and bits of punditry like this.  The fact is that, for all his dismal poll numbers, W has actually had a good year.  The surge has brought stability, vitality and hope to Iraq, the economy remains robust despite the subprime-mortgage problem, and we avoided signing on to any drastic global-warming hooey.

The Freedom-Hater-controlled Congress, meantime, hardly achieved any of its own objectives outside of a couple of minor-league bits of socialistic heavy-handedness (minimum-wage increase, new fuel-efficiency mandates for the auto industry), much less anything that actually benefits America.

Now, if W would just muster the clarity to knock some heads together at the State Department  (”Knock it off with this final-issues push in the Middle East and this trusting attitude toward North Korea!”) and in the intelligence community (”Issue an NIE that gives us some substance!”), we’d begin to see a great final year take shape.

U.S. scientists have found traces of enriched uranium on some North Korean aluminum tubes.

I think the business about U.S. officials being “concerned that [it] would further complicated diplomacy” speaks volumes about the Kool-Aid-guzzling State Department.

The great John Bolton warned us not to bet the house on the goodwill of the Hermit Kingdom’s Stalinists.

The biggest delight of my work as a writer for Our Brown County is meeting so many people who fly under the radar screen of our assumptions.  Who, for instance could imagine Jerome Sanderson?

You’ve hopefully heard about two recent occurrences in Canada: the 16-year-old Muslim girl who was strangled by her father for refusing to wear the hijab, and the Canadian Islamic Congress’s success in getting a federal and provincial Human Rights Councils to look into whether Mark Steyn’s America Alone constitutes hate speech.

So often we hear about things going the wrong way in this world and we shrug and say, “But what can anyone do?” 

Suggestions for how to counter these particular dangerous developments can be found here and here.

The showcase took place last evening.  All in all, a gala event. Some great dancing, a decent-sized crowd, good chow.

I felt fairly good about our performance.  There were a couple of moments of uncertainty from which we had to recover.  That kind of broke the smoothness with which we’d started into our routine, I felt.  At the end, Mrs. BN was supposed to take her feather boa off her neck and throw it around mine.  We got about a second past that point in the music and I could tell it wasn’t happening, so I grabbed the sucker and did it myself. The crowd thought it was planned that way.

I definitely see parallels between dance and jazz.  This matter of recovering crops up in my jazz work.  You get that creepy feeling that you’re about to get good and lost in a chart, so you scramble to hear a familiar chord change so you can take it from there.  And, when it’s all clicking, as it was at the last rehearsal on Saturday, it’s a feeling unlike any other.

I’ll have pix soon.  We definitely looked snappy.

Diana West on the Led Zeppelin reunion concert.

Age 76.  He was at his home near San Diego.  Most MSM accounts I’ve read are pretty lame. The big focus is on the violence during the Tina marriage.  I suppose the MSM thinking is that a.) you gotta go with what the general public is going to most identify the subject with, and b.) you gotta play up the most sensational aspect of the person’s life in these tawdry times.

Of course, they devote a brief paragraph or so to “Rocket 88.”  Certainly important, but it was just one project in a very important time in Ike’s career.

He became a mid-south talent scout for Modern Records, a west-coast label owned by the Bihari family, while he was still a teenager in the late 40s.  He would find talent in the jukes and tiny radio stations of northern Mississippi and eastern Arkansas - such as B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf - and bring them to Sam Phillips’s studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis.  They would lease the resulting sides to Modern, and also Chess Records up in Chicago. 

In the late 50s, he was immersed in the scene on Chicago’s west side, which centered around Eli Toscano’s label, Cobra.  Ike appears on many records by the generation of Strat-slingers coming of age in that milieu - Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Magic Sam.

His own R&B revue was indeed revving up, and it was about that time when Annie Mae Bullock came on board.  Some key trivia: Annie Mae (Tina) first hooked up with, and had a baby by, a sax player in the revue.

Then there’s the TNT Show, the YouTube video of which I linked to a few posts ago, and the Phil Spector-produced River Deep, Mountain High album from the same time (1966).

Mark Ribowsky, in his biography of Phil Spector, He’s A Rebel, says that the one guy Spector, who was legendary for his tirades and intimidating ways in the studio, never messed with was Ike Turner.  He wanted him way far away.

We certainly aren’t turning a blind eye to his glaring shortcomings here at BN.  Just offering a way of looking at his contribution to American culture without sticking the terms “Tina” and “wife-beating” into the first sentence.

And the man was playing some fine blues in his last clean-and-sober years.

The showcase featuring several of the students from the studio where Mrs. BN and I take lessons is happening this Sunday.  We have four rehearsals this week.

Our routine involves a mix of foxtrot and swing steps.  I can visualize the whole sequence in my mind and execute it fairly properly.  Now, we’re fine-tuning each step and kind of putting together segments of it.

I’m trying to eat a healthful diet this week so I’ll be trim and vitality-filled.

I should have pictures early next week.

A confirmed playoff berth.  Four record-setting touchdown passes by Manning.  Grreat interceptions.

British intelligence officials have two things to say: Iran blatantly fed U.S. intelligence-gatherers misinformation which they then based the NIE on, and their stateside counterparts just plain ain’t too swift.

Israel thinks US intel swallowed a big one, too.

Here at BN we rarely go over the arguments for the coalition invasion of Iraq.  At this late date, it has sort of a beating-a-dead-horse quality to it.  Everybody understands what the stakes were except the moonbat fringe and some earnest-yet-disconnected types.

This, though, brings together the compelling strategic and historical picture W was looking at in 2002 / 2003 when he made the decision like nothing else I’ve seen in a long time.

The New York Philharmonic is going to North Korea in February.  Insane is what that is.