Bent Notes

Rusty Zinn’s great version of “You’re Just Too Good To be True.”

I interviewed Rusty for Indie-music.com a couple of years ago, when his Zinfidelity Vol. 1 album on the Bad Daddy label was current.  Great guy.  I was turned on to him by Mindy Giles, a high-school buddy of mine that I still see every few years.  She’s had an interesting career.  Worked for Alligator Records in Chicago for a few years.  While there, was involved in the production of some great records by Albert Collins, among others.  Then moved on to the now-defunct Black Top label.  Now she’s based in Sacramento and writes about music and promotes concerts.

Classic Colts way of winning - coming back from a ten-point trailing - and historic - the first Colts victory in Pittsburgh in forty years - but Coach Dungy and the squad are still facing a four-game deficit in the contest for top position in the AFC South.

May the lack of a margin for error be the spark of intensified focus.

It’s early afternoon.  There’s still this resolve to see things optimistically on the part of my people, both personal friends with whom I’m in touch as well as the boggers I’m reading and the talk-radio hosts I’m listening to.

The situation in Philadelphia - Black Panthers blocking a polling place - is getting a lot of attention right now.

Part of me is emotionally exhausted and part of me is on fire.  It’s weird to be host creature to both states simultaneously.

I only knew one person in the line at my polling place, an artist buddy of mine whom I know to be a consistent FHer voter.  It was so weird to make small talk with him about what’s going on around town musically, and then watch him get behind the machine, knowing full well what he was doing, what buttons he was pushing.

At the risk of sounding like some therapist’s patient, I am wondering what I do with this thought I harbor whenever I come in contact with someone who I know full well voted the FHer ticket.  There’s a lot of someones in that category - social friends, professional associates, relatives.  The inescapable fact is that there is some level on which they are the enemy.  These are people who have taken a concrete action which jeopardizes my freedom and my future.  So, as I say, wht do I do?  I can’t jettison the lot of them and re-people my life. Plus, most of them are nice, even wonderful, if horrifyingly misguided, folks.

I know one thing.  Whether Mr. Reasonable Gentleman can squeak through, or whether the Chicago Marxist emerges victorious, there must be a from-the-ground-up reassessment of how to get conservatism to flourish again.

The first principle by which we must be guided is zero tolerance for anything less than total clarity. No McCain-esque distractions and vacuous platitudes about “fighting the status quo in Washington” or “fighting for what’s right for America” or “putting country first.”  Such crap means nothing.  An FHer could utter the same phrases.  Indeed, the Chicago Marxist does employ very similar rhetoric.  No, what we talk about are the specific principles for which we’re willing to fight to the death: the original intent of the Constitution’s framers, free-market economics, American exceptionalism, an America that does not hesitate to respond fiercely and ruthlessly to its enemies’ provocations, and America that demonstrates unwavering loyalty to nations that share these principles, the primacy of family as the basic unit of human organization, and a culture characterized by dignity, depth, decency and real inspiration.

We must expect loud arguments amongst ourselves, finger-pointing and bitterness.  Obviously, the wheels came off our movement and we must find out why.  This is why we’d all be well-advised to enter into this foundational examination with as much prayerfulness and mindfulness of our common aims as possible.  Eventually, the the useless sand of confusion will get sifted out and the nuggets of what we were seeking will be all that remains on the fine-mesh screen.

I look back at this year - my personal successes, some episodes of illness in our household and family, memorable times with friends, the spring’s tornadoes and floods, the spike in gas prices, the financial meltdown, the embrace by a frighteningly large segment of the population of socialism - and ask myself what it all has taught me.  I’d say that the biggest lesson at this point is that, in human life, the visceral and the spiritual are inextricably intertwined.  In fact, I’m sort of considering the possibility that the more one progresses on the spiritual journey, the more reality’s upside-the-head aspect becomes impossible to avoid.

Jerome Schmitt at The American Thinker has a great piece on MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen’s report “Cilmate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?” and Schmitt’s own experience with the relationship between the doling outof grant money and the necessity of coming to the “correct” conclusions about worldwide climate.

The upshot is that Al Gore and his minions, with degrees in areas like “government” rather than any weather-related science, have strong-armed their way into postions of arbitration, distorting the amassing of actual knowledge of how our atmosphere really works.

Amity Shlaes has a great Washington Post column today called “Five Ways to Wreck a Recovery.”  Read and ponder her five points.  (I won’t spoil it for you by listing them here.)

What one - well, me, anyway - comes a way with is a renewed sense of how money is a lot like the seeds borne by the fruits of living things.  They find their way to environments in which they will flourish and maximize their multiplying.

Again, this is another way of stating a basic truth that we reiterate whenever we get the opportunity here at BN - greed doesn’t get a place at the table in a properly functioning free market.  Prices for everything fluctuate, but they do so around a set point, which may rise or fall gradually over time.  If you’re charging more than the market will bear for something, you’ll quickly run out of customers.

Look over what she has to say about protectionism and obsession with short-selling.  If you don’t allow people to put their capital where they think it will do the most growing, they’ll take it to some other market.  How does that create jobs in a locale where you want to create them?

And, of course, there’s her point about taxes.  You want to know who’s the embodiment of greed in 2008 America according to the tax criterion?  Look no further than He Who Was Formerly ThoughtTo Walk On Water.

ADDENDUM:  Now, before the exchange of comments heats up, let’s establish one thing: American corporations setting up plants and joint ventures in countries such as China and Vietnam are not, when they do so, engaging in true free-market activity, so it makes a poor example for a counter-argument.

On the day the W says outright - finally - that we need to drill in ANWR, what do the House Freedom-Haters call for?

Nationalizing the country’s oil refineries.

We’re the frogs, and the water’s just about at full boil.

The chaos hasn’t abated yet.  Getting ready for the first of the benefits, trying to meet deadlines (one left for Into Art, then I can get to work on the piece for Bloom), trying to squeeze in a planning meeting for the other benefit (the story of how there came to be two benefits is a tale in and of itself).  I ought to start packing for New York.  Speaking of NYC, the purpose of that trip is a step-grandson’s graduation from the International School of Photography.  We were to meet his parents out there, but my step-daughter just had an accute pancreatitis sattack and is in the hospital in Fort Collins, CO, so they won’t be part of the proceedings.  Also, we got cell phones and - ostensibly - broadband Internet from Verizon.  My learning curve with the phone was fairly free of grim, joyless, ugly moments.  Not entirely, mind you, but it was nothing like the damn-it zone into which I’ve been thrust with this broadband business.  My Net access on both my desktop and my laptop are down to a crawl.  I’ve spent about two hours with tech support - eating up my basic-plan minutes, doncha know -and now my case has been assigned a “trouble ticket” number and referred to the engineering department.

So I have only so much mad left in me for the usual cast of villains against which we rail here at BN.

Don’t give up on me.  I’ll come roaring back with a flurry of posts very soon.

Blogging’’s been light lately, I know.  Four magazine deadlines, two gigs, planning for two flood-relief benefit shows, a newspaper column, all before I leave for five days in NYC next Friday.  Then more gigs and another deadline as soon as I get back.

I’m paying attention to the scene, though.  I’m aware that the number-two guy in Zimbabwe’s opposition party is being held for “treason,” that Iran rejected the latest bag of incentives offered by the EU and the US, that the Supreme Court made one a very suicidal decision to give Gitmo detainees habeus corpus privileges (a 5-4 decision) and that the storms and floods continue to wreak upheaval here in the midwest.  Anybody see the footage of downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa?  This fairly good-sized city’s downtown, with fairly high-rise buildings - underwater, ruined.

Right now I have to do prep for my radio show, then hit the gym, then go to our local Verizon outlet (the BN household is finally going cellular!), then jam with a bass player I’m considering for collaboration, then go play a gig with another bass player.

You know, though, if something really yanks my chain, I’ll take the time to sound off right here.

Patterico on the relationship between the new unemployment figures ahd the recent increase in the minimum wage.

Nancy Pelosi spits in the eye of the courageous American military and blows a kiss to our main enemy (Iran, for your sprout-munchers).

 Memo to the American people:  Before you return this slug posing as a human being to the Speaker ofthe House postion, remember that whether you deserve a secure, free and happy future depends on whethr you come to your senses.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is dead at age 82.

This one’s huge and personal.  What I’m experiencing feels like genuine grief.

No one could have designed a more perfect founder for the modern conservative movement.  As the linked obit points out, he was a renaissance man (magazine founder, columnist, sailor, harpsichordist, spy novelist, television show host), one of the planet’s most formidable intellects, handsome, suave, socially gracious and, when the situation called for it, a little impish.

Most of all, he was the complete conservative.  In this election year, we’re hearing a lot about the three pillars, or stool legs, of fully thought-out conservatism:

- a sense of world affairs, history, and American and Western exceptionalism informed by an accurate understanding of human nature

- free-market economics

- the conviction that absolute right and wrong exist, as does almighty God, the author of the universe

His most significant legacy, National Review magazine, indisputably the most important periodical in America for the last fifty-two years, is in good hands with its current staff of editors and contributors.

It’s such a pattern, and fittingly so, to see one spouse pass shortly after another in marriages characterized by the deepest and most affectionate companoinship, and this has been the case here, Buckley’s wife Pat having passed in April last year.

It’s time for me to straighten up, quit fooling around, give more than lip service to this giant’s function in my life as an example of being an excellent human being. 

I really and completely believe in what he stood for.  I hereby vow to his memory to more consistently act like it.

And this modest blog will never flinch from upholding and defending it.

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

The sequestered decade of the British imam’s daughter.

Michelle Malkin says that the H-word creature’s proposal to socialistically interfere in the mortgage-rate situation is to be expected, but that Republican complicity is truly an appalling thing to see.

Waylon Jennings from 1966, doing songs from the movie in which he starred that year, Nashville Rebel.  (I was actually looking for footage from that movie, but it seems there’s none on YouTube.)

Wouldn’t this have been about the time he was sharing an apratment with Johnny Cash?  Hoo boy, I’ll be that was some crash pad.

Holistic kinda guy that I am, I’m always looking for levels on which all the different realms in which I have concerns - the geostrategic, the economic, the cultural, the social - manifest in their own ways some common undercurrent.  I’m always beset by this sense that there’s something that ties these different types of issues together.

It occurs to me - and I didn’t read this anywhere - that our challenges stem from a trivialization of the spirit.

A few posts back, I considered that, as a boomer whose lifestyle has been fairly bohemian since I came of age, maybe me and my ilk had been taken for a ride by the way-pointers of the counterculture.  I think certainly in this area of trivializing of spirit, a lot of blame must be laid at the feet of some big beatnik and hippie icons.

Think about Square Zen, Beat Zen by Alan Watts.  It’s a book-length attempt to find some justification for the loose adaptation by moderns who like to party of venerable teachings about enlightenment that go back centuries.  The Dharma Bums by Kerouac fleshes this out in fiction, with the main characters alternately hiking in the Sierras to find meditative serenity by the side of the stream, and coming back into the city to guzzle cheap wine and play yabyum (an “esoteric” group-sex exercise) with their groupie.

Then there is The Politics of Ecstacy by Timothy Leary, in which he mixes up the all-is-one view of reality with an endorsement of countercultural revolution.  At one point, he recounts watching his son burn a large sum of money with a who’s-to-say-he-wasn’t-acting-out-of-some-cosmic-wisdom tone.

Leary’s buddy, Richard Alpert, in his incarnation as Ram Dass, wrote what may be the essential work in the canon of profound-transformation-as-a-result-of-psychedelic-experience, Be Here Now.  The first third is autobiography, covering his high-powered Boston Jewish Republican dad, his own climb up the academic ladder, his social life, the fashionable dinner parties, the introduction to the mystical substances, getting fired from Harvard, his trips to India, and his relationship with his guru.  The second part is a freewheeling manifesto of a new frontier, in which all notions of tradition and rationality are blown wide open.  In the third section, he recommends meditation techniques, dietary and sleep practices and “books to hang out with.”

A profound journey, many of us thought.  Yet I remember going to see him speak in the mid-1980s, when he plainly said, “This stuff doesn’t always work.  Just recently I found myself lying in a bathtub, tears streaming down my face in a jealous rage.  So I’m as susceptible to human foible as anybody, believe me.”  Indeed.

It wasn’t too long after that that I saw him on the cover of some new-age magazine touting his article on “The Zen of Golf.”

Whatever.

I’ve written elsewhere about how the whole all-is-one impulse in the counterculture’s spiritualty morphed into New-Ageism.  (Probably my most comprehensive treatment of the subject is an essay called “Woo-Woo,” which I may include in my next book, a collection of essays I’m slowly compiling.)

Then there’s the way all-is-one-ism was tailored to the boomer generation’s growing appetite for status and toys.  The pioneer in the it’s-your-spiritual-birthright-to-have-it-all area was Werner Erhardt, with his est and Forum programs.  Other such “transformational workshops” followed, and a host of “channeled entities” sprang up to deliver the message to hotel ballrooms packed with devotees, credit cards in hand.

The spiritual level of our existence ought to command more rigor and a greater sense of responsibility than any other, given that it’s the foundation of all the other levels.  The relationship between time and eternity, that between our souls and their Creator - these aren’t small matters.  Tarting them up with golf and rock music and career-booster pep talks and navel-gazing renders them worthless, and then we’re sunk.

We get to where we can’t see what matters about one economic system over another, or the importance of being a truly good spouse or friend, or what real valor is.  We drift into a conclusion that nothing is worth defending or preserving. Once we go in for cotton candy on the most basic ontological level, our whole basis for valuing anything is obliterated.

How far are we from that now?

The new IAEA report on Iran’s nuke program is out.  A little behind the curve in its findings, I’d say, since Ahmadinajad bragged several weeks ago about having 3,000 centrifuges up and running.

The UK’s PM says now’s the time for a major squeeze on the mullahs.

Some noteworthy things have occurred in my absence, I see: Larry Craig resigns - sort of.  W makes a surprise visit to Iraq and says if the pace of success continues, we may be able to do some drawing down in a few months.  North Korea says that the US isgoing to take it off the list of terror-sponsoring states, and also lift a bunch of sanctions because, by golly, NK is going to dismantle its nuke program and they really, really mean it.  A massive terrorist attack on US facilities in Germany has been averted.  Two of the three culprits are home-grown: German converts to Islam who went to the mountains of Pakistan for al-Qaeda training.

All noteworthy; none of it surprising.

Blogging’s been light lately.  It’s been a wacky week.  With this upcoming booksigning booth at Indiana Black Expo, I’ve had to knock out three magazine articles this week, rearrange guitar lesson times, get ready to tape my radio show (still would like to come up with more content before the Friday morning taping), construct a display for the booth, record some music to play (dedided to keep it fairly low-tech), and take care of the ongoing stuff like woodshedding, household chores, bill-paying.

I have kept my eye on the passing parade.  Interesting stuff.  Lots of speculation re: North Korea, for instance.  Is the Hermit Kingdom motivated by economic desperation, which would lead us to expect further moves toward denuclearization in short order, or, with the shutting down of the Yongbyon reactor, will NK now stall and bluster and confuse the issue and make demands?  Then there’s Iraq.  General Pace says there’s been a major shift on the ground there.  Just today I saw a headline about the arrest of the highest-ranking Iraqi in al-Qaeda.  That’s pretty cool.  Makes you wonder if Harry Reid et al wish they’d just gone on home to sleep last night.  Speaking of al-Qaeda, it’s clear they’re breathing down our neck as much as ever.  If you’re a grown-up in Western civilization, you just take into account that that’s the backdrop to what you’re doing with your life.  And it will be interesting to see how Olmert’s release of 250 Palestinian prisoners pans out.  I mean, are these guys gonna go back to their families, get jobs, and join the local chess club?  If I’m not mistaken, they were heaved into the hoosegow because they acted on their hatred for Israel.  Then there’s the Falcons quarterback and his dogfighting charge.  Jeez, is there anything further removed from what God was intending when he created human beings than dogfighting?

Well, it’s 10:15, and I gotta pop the orange roughy in the oven.  That’s what kind of week it’s been.