04.30.09
TCM’s narcissistic belief in his own messianism is going to get us all killed – today’s edition
It’s getting terrifying to have this guy in the postion he’s in.
It won’t be a better world then
And Jeff Pope examines what kind of person it is who would aspire to presidency of the world’s beacon of freedom and righteousness and then make a point of obscuring its exceptionalism – in fact, who would say, “hey, it’s done lots of bad things, but that was before my time.”
TCM asserts a lot of stuff that just doesn’t wash
AP, of all outlets, has a good fact-check response to a lot of the Freedom-Hater-in-Chief’s claims.
04.29.09
More on the peace business
A commenter began a discussion thread under the last post taking as its launching point the last of the harmful legacies of rock’s impact that I enumerated. That has me thinking. Because it’s a bit different in kind from the other harmful effects I listed, I feel that I should elaborate on its inclusion.
The “peace” impetus found its way into rock and roll via folk music. As we know, the key figures in putting folk music on the American cultural map – Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger – were sympathetic to Communism. Seeger was a CPUSA member. Guthrie wrote a column for the Workers World Daily. This was the first stirrings of the notion of “social justice” that modern leftists are so fond of extolling. They would perform at labor rallies and demonstrations.
American university students of the 1950s who were associated with the New Left -the academic movement pioneered by University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams and Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills – were key to the increase in folk music’s popularity. The New Left is where American polemical discourse got infected with the concept of moral equivalency: the notion that the United States was just as hegemonic and heavy-handed on the world stage as the Soviet Union.
As the 50s became the 60s, the next generation of New Leftists – Ronald Radosh, David Horowitz, and their cohorts – saw that neither the conventional left nor right in America were taking up the mantle of civil rights and racial equality, so they filled the vacuum. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s Southern voter registration drives – at which Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez performed – were an outgrowth of this. Coincident to this was a romantic fascination with third-world revolutionaries that the young radicals willfully refused to acknowledge as Soviet proxies, hence the pop-icon status afforded to Castro early in his reign, and especially Ernesto “Che” Guevara. By 1965, when the U.S. was addressing the threat to South Vietnam with ground troops, this was extended to the South’s National Liberation Front as well as the Ho Chi Minh regime in the North.
At this juncture, the radicals and the emerging “hippie” movement were distinct. In central California, they were distinguished by their areas of concentrated activity on the San Francisco Bay: the hippies in Norht Beach and he Haight, and the radicals across the bridge in Berkeley.
To sum up this history to this point, calls for the United States to not be hostile to Communists in Cuba or Vietnam were coming from those of a Marxist bent.
The Monterey International Pop Festival, held in July 1967, was something of a watershed in terms of bringing the mellow pot-and-acid crowd and the social-justice-and-antagonism-for-the-US-militar crowd together. Several musicians, including The Byrds’ David Crosby and The Blues Project’s Steve Katz, gave speeches from the stage condemning US involvement in Vietnam.
By the time the pitifully unhinged John Lennon had married Yoko Ono and was moving away from the band he’d founded, The Beatles, he was hopping from one ideology and spiritual approach to another almost weekly. He was also trying to kick a heroin habit he’d picked up in the wake of his disillusionment with Transcendental Meditation. He spent the week of his honeymoon in bed in Toronto as a publicity stunt designed to draw attention to his oppositon to the Vietnam War. Over the next three years or so, there followed a string of juvenile and musically uninteresting anthems ot the nobility of seeking a world without conflict: “Give Peace A Chance,” “Imagine,” “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”.
Lennon’s descent into his peace period marks the point at which the self-congratulatory nature of peace activism was fully revealed. It had always been a latent aspect of the inclination toward that kind of orientation, but now it was on full display. It was the rock ethos of the superiority of unsullied youth over hardened adulthood writ larger than ever. The whole vulgar narcissism and ignorance of what history has to teach us about human nature had fully flowered.
Some student in my rock-history classes always wants to write her paper about how some big rock icon – ofetn Lennon – was a visionary in the realm of peace, a beatific figure that, but for the obstacles presented by residual Establishment power, would unite us all in cosmic harmony. I grade these sad works, gritting my teeth as I focus on whether or not they are decently researched and whehter the thoughts are conveyed in something approaching college-level discourse. What I really want to do is hurl, and then lock the student in a room for a two-hour one-on-one lecture.
“Peace” as defined by those who are preoccupied with it, is either something with which they have deliberately blinded themselves, or somwething they intend to use for duplicitous purposes having to do with robbing their fellows of freedom.
We shall see if the current narcissistic pop icon on everybody’s radar screen – the one who strolls into the Oval Office every day – is using peace for the one or the other.
I don’t want to hold their hands
This evening I give my last lecture for the semester in rock-and-roll history. It’s always a challenge, because there is a certain kind of proselytizing that my academic ethics won’t let me indugle in. That said, I feel it’s a huge part of my job to beckon these students – who, six, seven years ago, included some boomers, some even older than me, but are now uniformly 40 and under – to consider the impact of rock on our culture and civilization.
I’m not sure one can properly do the job of teaching rock history as I understand its requirements. The cultural landscape prior to rock is so distant and foreign to them, it’s like clueing them in on the surface of Mars.
Actually, their Year Zero is pretty much 1968, the year of the rock record I consider to be the beginning of the end of any real vibrancy rock ever contributed to our culture: The Beatles’ self-titled double LP, known to subsequent waves of listeners as The White Album. Even more than Sgt. Pepper, which came out the year before, it was an exercise in record-company indulgence (actually, EMI had indulged the Fab Four in their own label, with its budget resources behind it). George Martin dutifully and patiently presided over the creation of a body of material that ranged from extraordinary to hopelessly tiresome and banal, putting up with John Lennon’s heroin binges and his infantile need to have his artist mistress at his side at all times. 1968 was also the year of peak student radical activity, the codifying of the rock-festival format as a norm for public performances, and mass marketing of the fashion-level trappings of the hippie ethos.
As Diana West shows in her towering work The Death of the GrownUp: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, the seeds were planted long before, with the spate of psychoanalytical inquiry into the special traits of the adolescent mind that began in the 1940s, with the boom in teenagers’ spending cash in the 1950s, the rush of American media and manufacturers to cater to the “youth market,” and the permeation of the Beat ethos into our mainstream society.
Still, as I say, to these kids, anything really before 1968, before rock went technicolor, before artists thought to start their own labels with absolutely no business experience (the Beatles had to bring in Allen Klein to rescue Apple), before the acts’ names got really weird and stayed that way, is from that other world.
Paul McCartney, in his memoir Many Years From Now, makes the point that, with The Beatles’ big world tours in 1964, 65 and 66, they spearheaded the transition from the old-school model of “show business” to a rock industry. He says that it was inadvertent, but inevitable, given the mass adulation and hysteria over the phenomenon that they were.
So I have about three hours to figure out how to put some things on the table for my charges: the obliteration of standards, the indulgence of this notion that anything one is feeling is worthy of expression that has now permeated every last institution in our society, the notion that exposing one’s skin, animal impusles and animal functions to the world is somehow “authentic” rather than vulgar, and, perhaps most dangerous of all at this juncture, the notion that “peace” as a lasting and normal state of affairs on the world stage is achievable and worth the expenditure of our energies.
I’m not sure it’s possible to give an “A” performance on this task and remain within the bounds of what the modern American university expects of someone hired to carry out my function.
Some accurate numbers – and some context
As Michael Medved points out in his Townhall column today, it turns out that civilian Iraqi deaths since the coalition invasion amount to 110,000. The figure of 87-plus-thousand arrived at by the British group Body Count has beed supplemented by newly obtained figures from the Iraq Health Ministry.
This being an AP story, you have to do a little digging to see that 59-plus-thousand of those occurred when sectarian violence was at its worst. Bottom line: a very small percentage of the deaths are attributable to US or coalition forces.
Medved looks at some conflicts of similar severity in the past few decades to offer some context.
A welcome move, from the BN standpoint
Arlen Specter’s party change was obviously motivated by poll numbers showing he would have taken a whuppin in the Pennsylvania Pub primary from Pat Toomey. Still, it’s not any kind of incongruous piece of information. It’s a perfectly natural move for a public figure more at home with “fairness” than with freedom.
It probably comes as no surprise to BN readers that we’d be most happy to see him take John McCain and Lindey Graham with him. While we’re at it, how about my own state’s Reasonable Gentleman Senator, Dick Lugar?
Yes, this gives the Freedom-Haters pretty much a filibuster-proof majority. Much damage to our nation and civilization can come from that. Still, I’d rather go for the long-term set of favorable possibilities. Let’s weed out all the RINOs, Reasonable Gentlemen and opportunists. There may not be many left – in Congress, in government generally, or even among the voting public – but those left will be right – as in correct, as well as how they’re positioned politically – and that is the only thing that matters. Seriously. You ain’t got diddly if you ain’t right. Whatever you think you’ve erected if you’re proceeding otherwise will topple at some point.
Free-market economics. Foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. Moral codes and standards of behavior based on what biology and holy scripture tell us about sexuality and family formation. Law and representative democracy. A culture that looks for and exalts human dignity, zest and possibility. That’s what BN stands for, what real conservatives stand for, and what will at some point once again prevail.
04.27.09
Swine flu
There are a few reasons I haven’t chimed in on this development.
For starters, it’s a new and mutating strain of virus. Not even the best experts on the case can tell us whether the spread will be massive or something that winds up being a public-health blip. The CDC is hoping its best guess at an applicable vaccine will keep it from reaching plague-like proportions.
I think we’ll need to see some patterns emerge from its spread to get a handle on how to respond. Who knows, it may be largely confined to certain demographics or population centers, the way HIV/ AIDS panned out.
I’ve frequently said that natural-misfortune news items, such as plane crashes, hurricanes and disease spreads only hold my interest for so long. Clearly, one’s heart goes out to those who lose loved ones or their treasured belongings in such situations, but there is no ideological charge to these stories. An accident, an atmospheric disturbance or a microbe brings heartache to a large number of people, and that’s pretty much it. Real news of lasting import, it seems to me, consists of those ever-unfolding developments in the great historical struggle between freedom, refinement, vision and joy on the one hand, and tyranny, degradation, nihilism and grimness on the other. When a headline beckons me to investigate the first paragraph of a news story, I’m looking for how my side and the other side figure into it.
To be sure, there are those who love to try to politicize natural-disaster stories. The race-baiters and poverty pimps wasted no time in spinning Katrina, for instance. I’m seeing some on my side start to succumb to the tempation to do that here. To be sure, it would be good if TCM had a HHS Secretary, a Surgeon General and a CDC head in place, and he might have been well-advised to skip that golf outing, but that hardly rises to an outrage (the way his economic and foreign-policy initiatives do).
This is just a development that bears watching for now.
Even if, in three weeks, we’re all quarantined in our homes and boys with carts are in the streets shouting “bring out your dead” a la mid-seventeenth-century London, the timeless principles that will need to be extolled and defended when afterward health returns will still be the real ongoing story.
What to play and why
BN visitors who find their way here via my main site may be a bit perplexed. BN is hardly what you’d call a publicity tool for my music activities or my arts journalism.
When I started it (which was three years ago next month; still planning the anniversary celebration), I considered making that the focus: mostly blogging about upcoming events I was involved with, or passing along arts-and-music-related news on a regular basis, or reflecting on the creative process.
I guess the truth is that my main concern is only cultural in the sense that it is an overarching preoocupation with the state of our civilization’s health. To be honest, that’s been my main focus for twenty-plus years.
I do love music. Few experiences are more satisfying for me than performing for an appreciative audience, or listening to a really great recording (most of which were made forty or more years ago).
However, I’m at a crossroads regarding that portion of my career. The whole notion of fashioning something that’s “my thing” and putting on a dog and pony show about it is really uninteresting to me at this point.
This is going to sound strange, but in some ways, I’m sick of music. I’m tired of all the debates about what caused the collapse of the old-line structure – the record labels, the radio industry, the concert business, the publicity end of it. I’m sick of the frantic scramble to find a new model to replace it – the showcases, the networking sites, the deliberation over what your market is in an ever-more-fragmented musical environment, the songwriter workshops, the availability of recording technology to every pierced-nose little three-chord, self-absorbed twit who’s convinced he or she has something worthwhile to express. I’m sick of getting a standing gig to play some venue, knowing that the agreement has built into it inherent decay, that it’s a matter of time until the pay is reduced, or management asks that the ensemble be paired down to one piece.
And we’re not really talking about music in the sense that the term was used prior to the advent of rock and roll. We’re rarely talking about the focus and discipline involved in sitting down with a piece of sheet music and playing it correctly, or understanding scales or how chords are constructed.
Then there’s the gathering momentum of our overall civilizational decline, which, as I say, I’ve come to see is my real thrust. Is it important to be leading a smoking-hot r&b revue or a mightily swinging jazz trio in front of a grooving throng when the EMP attack shuts the power off?
I’m not saying I’m hanging it up. What I am disclosing is the depth of my grappling. Just picking up my guitar and seeing what comes out isn’t where I’m at these days.
04.26.09
What really needs to be looked at
Just when you think the whole field of professional observation of culture, economics, America and the world stage has been ceded to the Newsweek / CNN / New Yorker / chin-rubbing, east-coast types, or the rabidly wacked-out self-appointed spokespeople for righteousness from the world of “arts” and “entertainment” or even those “conservatives” of various stripes who admonish Republicans to give up on those Neanderthal “values issues,” along comes the unfailingly brilliant Mark Steyn to reassure us that clarity still exists in this world.
How fine it was to see this after so many MSM stories over the past few days about TCM’s first 100 days, and whether he’s been effective at “getting things done” or “demonstrating leadership” or offering a “bold vision,” as if any of that had anything to do with our current juncture. I can grant you that he’s been “effective” or “bold” or whatever all day long, and it doesn’t tell you a thing about the fact that he is so about things that are consistently bad, wrong and dangerous.
Fortunately, the sage of New Hampshire pens the remedy to all this on a regular basis.
04.24.09
Why the term “international community” is meaningless and why you should close-range projectile-vomit into the face of anyone who uses it in your presence – today’s edition
Javier Solana finds the latest stringings-along by Iran “constructive.”
04.23.09
Top Congressional FHers signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques
They were briefed many times by the CIA.
04.22.09
Moral preening is more important to the FHers than the security of the United States
The Taliban is within 60 miles of Islamabad.
And now that they know what we won’t do if we get hold of them, we are greatly weakened in our effort to do anything about it.
“A terribly expensive disaster”
This is another one of those cases in which TCM holds up a European country as a model for some “green” initiative, only to have those in the know from that country say, “Not so fast. Our experience shows it’s definitley not the way to go.”
This time, it’s his touting of Denmark as an example of how to get energy from wind turbines. Turns out it hasn’t worked out so well.
It’s not a loan, it’s their means of gaining control
Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) makes it plain. The TCM administration would definitely like to convert its preferred stock in TARP-fund-receiving banks to common stock (allowing the government to vote as a shareholder), but has one big reason for its hesitation: those banks might hustle to pay off their loans early, thereby elbowing the government out of the game.
Larry Kudlow sees grim implications for the survival of capitalism as we’ve known it, but isn’t willing to go so far as to call it socialism. He’s a kind and reasonable man. He’s looking at each development withour conjecture as to what it portends down the road. Me, I smell socialism.
Big brother – literally – has a word to say about “new openness”
Fidel says TCM misinterpreted Raul re: what Cuba is willing to discuss.
