03.16.10
Posted in BN community at 4:36 pm by Administrator
As evidenced by some new participants in the comment threads, readership is up here at BN. Welcome, everybody.
To facilitate your orientation to the BN view, herewith are definitions for some terms we’ve coined over the years:
TCM – Barack Obama. The Chicago Marxist. Also sometimes known as The Aquarian Totalitarian, or The Most Equal Comrade.
FHers - Freedom-Haters. By far the largest faction within the Democratic party. Their natural inclination in considering any issue is to curtail individual liberty and expand the scope of the state.
Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - the illusion suffered by way too many Republicans that beyond the differences in core philospophy, FHers are just nice, reasonable folks and that there are many areas in which one can work with them in a bipartisam fashion. John McCain is the ultimate Reasonable Gentleman, and that’s why he got his clock cleaned in 08.
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08.30.09
Posted in BN community, Radicalism in high places at 6:45 pm by Administrator
I’ve made some changes to the homepage of my main website. I guess you could call it thinking about my brand. I’d been pondering it for a while. When your two main thrusts are blues-based music performance and right-of-center cultural observation, it’s a bit tricky to present the whole package in one message.
I condensed the who-I-am-and-what-I-do section, added some links in the various categories, and gave the whole thing a soothingly aquatic background. I’d still like to come up with a more suitable picture. For one thing, in all my guitar-playing shots, it seems like I’m sweating.
I guess what it amounts to is a very public posing of the question, “What’s really important to me?” I’m hovering around a conclusion that the answer is different than it was five years ago. I love music. I love food. I love coming across cultural artifacts that increase my understanding of how we got here. I’m always up for some real humor. All that, however, has to be balanced these days with the plain and simple fact that the house is on fire. So my main consideration is how to present a coherent picture of my professional self without coming across as some kind of bug-eyed rooftop shouter.
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05.14.09
Posted in BN community at 5:00 pm by Administrator
It’s the three-year anniversary of BN’s existence. The first post – May 6, 2006 – was a link to my Indie-music.com review of blues guitarist Mark Cook’s then-latest album, Blue Voodoo.
Looking through the posts for that month, one can see that the array of themes and subjects, the core body of principles, and the excursions into reality’s lesser-noticed corners that captured our interest were established from the get-go. That month, I discussed public vs. private arts funding, the EU’s lack of urgency over Iran’s nuke program, musical associates I’d been gigging with, cool meals I’d eaten, and travel. There is the classic Bent Notes interview with Barney Quick.
It’s been an adventurous three years. Had a stalker – a guy of Arab ethnicity in another state who got so mad over my Zionism that he went to the trouble of getting my phone number and leaving me threatening messages. Had several people – including a nephew – get mad and quit visiting the site.
One guy said he quit because he found the terms I’d coined, such as “Freedom-Hater” – how did he put it? “Coulteresque.” I guess that’s a bad thing in his book.
There’s one left-leaning commenter who has hung in for the whole ride even though he vehemently disagrees with BN positions with clockwork regularity. Because there’s no discernible consistency to his worldview, BN holds out hope that he can be brought around to the side of freedom. He’s demonstrated an undeniable capability to think when pressed to do so.
I have codified my core principles in the Bent Notes Manifesto, which still stands. From time to time, I flesh out particular points within it, so as to be perfectly understood by all with whom I discuss public policy and the human condition. I’m big into clarity.
As I say on occasion, in case a visitor from my main site finds his or her way here, I am a creative type by nature and by occupation, and the views you find here may strike you as a little incongruous at first. Not so; the older I get, the more I see the consistency, the seamlessness of my approach to life. It all starts with freedom. Freedom is such an important condition for human well-being that we must spare no effort to arrive at the richest, most thorough definition of it possible. From that, we can then look at what is necessary to bring about, preserve and spread real freedom. Once we do that, we start to see that the foundations of Western civilization are indispensible.
We must, of course, proceed with groove and soulfulness. As Duke taught us, otherwise, it don’t mean a thing.
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11.06.08
Posted in BN community, Culture, Culture war heroes, Eye-opening developments, Labor, Law, Religion & Spirituality, health care at 6:24 pm by Administrator
Little Green Footballs, a blog I check at least daily and hold in the highest regard, links to David Frum’s statements about some choices the GOP will have to make about where its center of gravity will be. True to his east-coast chin-rubbing orientation, Frum says the Pubs would be well-advised to make the “painful choices” in favor of sticking with fiscal and foreign-policy focus and cut the social conservatives loose. LGF pretty much concurs, saying that “fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism and [an] aggressively anti-gay rights [stance]” will be detrimental.
Let’s not be applying a broad brush where a freshly sharpened scalpel – or, if you’d like, a microscope – is needed as we unpack this observation.
Perhaps this is the opportunity for true clear-thinkers to take back a perfectly good word that cultural leftists had co-opted: nuance.
Frum’s not a complete goner. He’s somewhat infected with east-coast pointy-head-ism, but he has made some insightful contributions and he’s no Reasonable Gentleman (our term here at BN for Pubs who appease the left). He does seem here, though, to be channeling his inner David Brooks, saying that a permanently less religious and more pragmatic young adult American is a foregone conclusion.
Even if the fanciest studies in the world bore this out, it would be a devil’s bargain on our part to proceed in accordance with it. The God revealed in the world’s great scripture (you can interpret that as broadly or narrowly as you’d like; for my part I’m excluding the Quran) must be central to the shaping of any kind of conservatism we get behind.
Now, that said, let’s look at where Frum and LGF do indeed have a point. In our image-driven post-modern culture there is no denying the power of stereotypes that form in the mind of the citizenry. Simply put, cornball yee-haw-ism will get us nowhere. I was listening to Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday and he was attempting to bouy listeners’ spirits by exhorting them to come out to his Freedom Concert tour. He excitedly listed the lineup, headlined by Lee Greenwood (have I ever stated for the record that I hate that “God Bless the USA” song nearly as badly as I hate John Lennon’s “Imagine”?) and Charlie Daniels. Sorry, Sean, but that ain’t gonna cut it. These are people who, while their hearts and minds are admirably inclined, do not generally put a super-fine point on the above-mentioned matters.
And a fine point is required. Let’s give our scalpel a fresh sharpening and proceed.
We’re always correct about everything here at BN, and we say unequivocally that abortion is wrong. We also say that the phenomenon of homosexuality is some kind of – brace yourselves, this is going to take a little digesting – crippling of normal, natural human sexuality.
What is unfortunate and leads to the kinds of pronouncements Frum and LGF are making is the undeniable fact that quite legitimate conservative problems with such matters as abortion and the treatment of homosexuality as normal does get mixed up with the wacko stuff like creationism and fundamentalism in general. The radio show after mine on Saturday mornings is all about creationism. A lot of the host’s guests are very commendable pro-life activists, but they serve the show’s agenda of saying that our culture’s devaluation of life has its roots in an embrace of evolution.
We have to take our internal debate to this level of exactitude, people. For one thing, we began to see as this year unfolded indications of some demographic types that fly under the radar screen – rock and rollers, distinguished actors, a playwright or two and even the odd (I’ll be the first to admit it) jazz and blues guitarist and arts journalist like your present blogger – that want a place at the table of conservatism. They will be turned offto some degree by either snobbery or yee-haw-ism.
I’m not saying anyone I’ve mentioned in this entire post should be denied such a place at the table. All I say is, come prepared to sort this out with as much courage, clarity and comity as you can muster.
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03.20.07
Posted in BN community, Culture at 1:57 pm by Administrator
Frequent BN visitors know that one of my stops each morning as I get the pulse of this world is Townhall.com. Sometimes it turns out that two or more columns on a given day seem to be of a piece. (I’ve sometimes wondered whether e-mail conversations create the fertile ground for great minds to think alike, or whether it’s all mere coincidence.) Anyway, today, Dennis Prager’s column on falsifying the score of a Little League baseball game and Janice Shaw Crouse’s column on General Peter Pace’s comments on homosexuality, when taken together, provoke thoughts along the lines of the soundness of our cultural foundations.
I’m casting about for an idea for my next Republic column (due by noon next Monday). There may be something in this fertile soil that can germinate for me.
This whole notion of feelings, relativity, prolonged adolescence, maiking our institutions up as we go along – I’ve pondered such things quite a bit. What Crouse and Prager have to contribute is useful indeed.
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01.30.07
Posted in BN community, Culture, Middle East at 8:07 pm by Administrator
I have just undertaken my first banishing of a Bent Notes comment-thread poster. It’s someone to whom I gave wide leeway for several weeks. I busted my tail end to accord him some respect and engage him in conversation in order to see more clearly how he came about his views. However, it became obvious that he went beyond even customary moonbat levels of hysteria. His problems with Israel make Jimmy Carter’s viewpoint look positively Zionist by comparison. Every time I would make the most concise assertions, with the implicit willingness to go into them more fully, he would launch into rants of the most strident and overheated kind. (Example: I’m a “devil with darkness in my heart.”) He had no curiosity as to how I came about my views on Israel or anything else.
We get a fairly wide array of viewpoints here at BN. Folks who hang out here to any degree know I have no problem with folks posting lefty views in the comment threads. I will respond with facts where that seems approproate, or an invitation to the other person to consider a wider perspective, or just some reflection. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to respond to pages-long litanies of allegations, put forth with no sense of a broad historical perspective, on a point-by-point basis. It proves nothing.
And, I will add, I really have no use for rock lyrics in a polemical exchange. The Billy Jack theme song? Puh – leeze.
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