Category: current affairs

Absurdity

Ryanism

Paul Ryan, in a little-noticed interview, said the other day—talking about abortion—that rape is simply another “method of conception.”

This is very much in line with Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, although it contradicts Akin’s point—which was, somehow, that the reproductive system of a woman being raped (really raped, not sort of raped or falsely raped, by which I infer he means things like date rape or marital rape or being rufied, or anything less than being threatened with death, beaten to a pulp, or gang banged) “shuts down” to prevent pregnancy.  Ryan seems not to be aware of this bit of folksy biology and considers rape as a vector for reproduction.

It’s ironic.  He is also an antievolutionist, but in this he has lent inadvertent support to one of the basic ideas of evolution—that Nature only cares about producing the next generation and will take advantage of any vector to get there.

It’s a confused message, to be sure, and based just as solidly on a categorical denial of women as full citizens.

I say citizen rather than human because the term human brings into this all the distraction about what is human, which people like Ryan have used to completely obscure the downside to their unblinking support of fetuses over women.

Citizens have rights.  You have to be a citizen to be accorded rights and for that to be the case, you have to be here.  Technically, you also have to be able to participate in the polity—vote, work, etc.

We have so geared the idea that citizenship is a given, like breathing, that we forget that citizenship is a membership issue.  It is a legal definition, one which accords rights but also requires that we meet certain criteria.

The argument over illegal immigrants should, if nothing else, give us all a clear lesson in this.  It doesn’t matter to many people that they are humans—they do not have the same rights as Citizens.  There are certain legal standards that must be met and they have to meet them before we grant them citizenship.

(I know, we like to pretend that rights are somehow drawn from nature, or for some “god given”, but it is simply not true.  Claiming it doesn’t make it so.  Rights are legal conditions.  Even our boldest and most eloquent statements about rights—like the Declaration of Independence—required further legal guarantees to have any real force.  We have the rights we claim and make common through law. If it were otherwise, we would never have required the 13th and 14th or a 19th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, nor would we need a Supreme Court.)

The same folks who are unequivocal and clear about that are considerably less so in the case of women’s rights and the question of so-called unborn rights.

Unborn rights are dependent on the rights of those gestating them.

I phrase it that way to strip it of the kind of sentiment that obfuscates the issue and turns it into an impassioned exercise in guilt-driven irrationality.

We have a long history of what it means to grants rights to some by taking them away from others.

Mr. Ryan’s formulation of rape as another “method of conception” cuts right to the center of the problem.  Stating it that way, he implicitly reduces women to what used to be so “charmingly” and euphemistically referred to as A Vessel.  (And, depending on the period, a weak vessel or a filthy vessel or a corrupt vessel—almost never a strong vessel or beautiful vessel or vessel of great value.) We have almost two thousand years of this kind of reduction of half the population to nothing more than a means to an end.

If that doesn’t tell us all we need to know about how he thinks and why he should not be holding political office, I don’t know what would.

But I do wonder how he intends to square himself with his apparently latent Darwinist inclinations…

culture

When Gaffes Become Pathologies

Everyone misspeaks in public from time to time.  It really is unfair to pick on politicians for the occasional gaffe.  But it is fair to ask at what point such gaffes are valid signs of a fundamental problem.  I think Dan Quayle simply needed to stick to the prepared statements—he did not “wing it” very well, but he kept trying, and slipped repeatedly on his inherent inability to compose cogent remarks on the fly.

But Romney is beginning to show some serious problems.  Never mind his 47% statement, he was arguably playing to his crowd. But his recent remarks about being unable to open the windows in an airliner are very troubling.

This is the kind of basic factoid stuff we all should know even if we only learned it from movies.  There is a reason the windows on an airliner can’t be opened and most of us know this.

Two things: either he skipped that part of childhood and adolescence when the rest of us learned this or he’s cracking under campaign pressure and just letting his mouth run without his brain in gear.

It’s a question.  This isn’t like George H.W. Bush’s ignorance over the laser scanner at the grocery store check-out counter—that was new technology and I think he was unfairly beat up about that—but more in line with basic ignorance coming from a man with a lot of education (of a particular sort) and a lot of time spent on planes.

But let me leave off.  As far as I’m concerned, Romney is a clever man but not a smart one.  Hegel talked about such people, the clever ones who seem intelligent because they can fake it, but really have no depth or true understanding.  This is not necessarily a detriment for a president depending on who his handlers are.  I don’t think Calvin Coolidge was smart, just clever (and clever enough to say very little).  Go back over the list of past presidents and there are a number you could identify like that.  (I think Nixon was an interesting case of a smart man who relied too much on cleverness.)  But we don’t usually see this until after they’re in office.  Campaigning is generally an exercise of cleverness, but there’s usually a modicum of intelligence in charge.

In the case of people like Todd Akin, there’s no question.  He is a genuinely unintelligent man.  Certainly not very reflective and possibly one of the most incurious politicians in recent memory.  He’s clever enough to have maintained a career in politics for a couple of decades now.  But when you listen to his pronouncements, even if you agree with them (if you do), and break them down, you see he’s only parroting a kind of semi-urban folk wisdom without any obvious comprehension what some of the words mean.  He seems to have no idea what “socialism” is (this isn’t unique, I wonder how many people do know what it is, especially in politics) and his grasp of anything relevant to women is positively 19th Century.  He gets away with it because he reifies the prejudices of his constituents, which is politically expedient and morally vacuous.  Sometimes, it seems to me, it is the duty of a politician to tell his constituents when they have it all wrong.  (Yes, I realize this could get said politician voted out of office, but I said duty not CYA.)

Still, I don’t know why anyone in this state, at least, is surprised. Akin has been spouting stuff like that for years.  I was only surprised that he said what he said about “legitimate rape” quite so candidly, but I’m not surprised that he believes that nonsense.

I can understand why the GOP began pressuring him to step down, but really, they have only reaped what they’ve sown.  Implicitly, they’ve been backing some version of this for years, and it has become wired into their politics.  They likely, many of them, believe something similar to what Akin said, but they are generally more clever than Akin and know not to say it right out like that.  He has exposed them, though, for anyone willing to look.

Now Newt Gingrich, the Party shill, has come to Akin’s defense, and what is his defense?  “Anyone can make a stupid remark. It’s unfair to castigate him for it.  If we went by that standard, Joe Biden would never be vice president.”

Except.  Except.

When Dan Quayle made his famous gaffe about minds being terrible wastes, everyone made fun of him for the tongue-twisted way he said it, but I think most people knew what he meant.  When Joe Biden makes a bone-headed remark, we can step back and recognize that he didn’t mean that but this other thing.  That’s the nature of gaffes.

The problem here is, if you look at Akin’s record, it’s clear that he did mean what he said.  It wasn’t a gaffe.  He’s sorry that people were offended, but he hasn’t retracted or clarified his statement.  He believes that.

This is different.

And, if you look at the legislative record of the GOP over the last couple of decades, it seems likely many of them believe something like it, too.  That wasn’t a gaffe.

Pathology?

culture

Longer Tomorrows

I recently read (reread) Leigh Brackett’s 1955 novel, The Long Tomorrow.  In a nutshell, this is a thoroughly underappreciated classic that ought to have the same attention and regard as other social commentary novels of around that period.  Given the political landscape today, it is remarkably trenchant.

The novel follows Len Coulter, who we meet at a large county fair near his home somewhere in Pennsylvania, in a country completely altered after a world war that left the cities in ruins and the only ones equipped to survive in the reduced technological circumstances that resulted were groups of religious communities like the Amish and Mennonites and similar enclaves who had eschewed modernism to begin with.  Len is a member of a New Mennonite community.

As the novel opens, his cousin Esau is trying to dare him into attending a revival meeting outside the boundaries of the fair, something they have both been forbidden to do.

The tensions between the various groups of believers are kept in check by the constraint of circumstance.  They need each other and cannot afford the luxury of complete separation.  But there are walls and this is one of them.  As such it also represents a kind of rite of passage for the adolescents.

This is a time and place where laws have been passed to keep the possibility of another war massively in check by keeping the technology that produced the atomic bombs suppressed.  Brackett made the savvy observation that it was the expansion of urban centers that permitted the kind of wealth, leisure, and political pressure to drive an ever-increasing and complicating technological base, so the Constitution has been amended to make towns of more than a thousand people and two hundred buildings illegal.  This enforced small town agrarianism has, in fact, achieved a kind of equilibrium.  People are not unaware of the past.  Libraries still exist, people read, but the cultural paranoia created by the devastation dominates.

Behind all this is the legend of Bartorstown, a place—somewhere—where the old technologies not only exist but people work with them to create new.  It’s a kind of boogieman story, but Len and Esau learn that it is not a lie, that there is such a place.  After seeing a member of Bartorstown denounced and stoned to death at the revival he and Esau attend, it becomes an obsession for Len.

And then Esau steals a radio and the two boys commit themselves to finding Bartorstown, no matter what.

There are no bad people in this novel.  In fact, there are no good people, either, not in terms of Good vs Evil.  Len is human to a fault and Esau often has feet of clay.  They run away from home and grow up in the river towns of the Ohio and encounter all manner of people, some good, some not so good, but all of them doing what they think is right.  Brackett painted very subtle and sophisticated portraits of human beings struggling to bring about change and simultaneously resist change.  At times, it gets ugly.

If there is an evil at the heart of this novel, it is in Brackett’s chilling portrayals of mob violence.  She understood how individuals could lose their capacity to think and act as moral agents when caught up by fear and passion in a wave of group reaction.  Fear, of course, and then anger unhinges people and perhaps the next day or the next month they come to regret what they did, but they seem incapable of doing otherwise at the time.

Laced throughout this is the thesis that any time we try to establish a set of inviolable rules to make people conform, we find over time that such rules simply do not maintain, not the way they were intended.  Too rigid a stance almost guarantees that such rules, such prohibitions will not only be violated but will themselves become the source of considerable harm.

Len’s journey from adolescent obsession to mature accommodation to things he ultimately cannot understand is poignant and frustrating.  This is not a standard-issue science fiction novel in which knowledge and truth set people free and all doubts are swept aside in the Eureka glow of enlightenment.  Len finds Bartorstown and it is nothing like he expected.  In fact, at its heart is the very thing he had been raised to fear more than anything else, and yet he is told that it must not only exist but that humans must learn to control it.

If I have a problem with this novel, it is in the all-too-typical treatment of women.  Too many of them are ultimately just vain and dependent and stereotypical.  But Brackett was juggling a lot in this book, so I gave her a pass on this in light of all the rest that she was so clear and prescient about.

Given the current global scene in which mobs seem to coalesce out of the very air over some of the most inane issues and great violence is done—more often than not driven by religious leaders who are more intent on maintaining their power than on caring for their clients—this is a strikingly contemporary novel, written by one of the best.  It is in some ways dated, but not by much.  In many passages, it seems this could have been written last year.

While I no longer believe a global nuclear holocaust is likely, all the rest she depicted seems all too possible.  This is one that ought to be read with fresh modern eyes and its insights taken to heart.

culture

The Other Side

I have a confession to make.  While I’m going to vote for Obama again, I do not like everything he has done and, even more, am disappointed by some of what he has not done.

That’s not the confession.  I promised some folks months back that I would write a post wherein I take Obama to task the same way I’ve been going to town on the Republicans.  I was sincere when I made the promise, because I had, in fact, winced often these past four years when Mr. Obama has let me down.  Or not me specifically, but my expectations.  And this is a question of spin.

All candidates run on a mixture of core issues and hyperbole.  The nature of the race requires sound-byte, slash-and-burn rhetoric, sweeping generalizations, and occasionally over-the-top characterizations of the opponent and promises too big to keep.  We as voters must walk through all this to determine how much of the hyperbole is simple exaggeration and how much of it is outright lying, slander, or total b.s.  As I say, all candidates do this.  Even after they leave office.  (George W. Bush’s acerbic “Do you miss me yet?” is an example of that, to which my response at the time and still is “You’re kidding, right?”)

Obama campaigned in 2008 on a wide range of issues and made a LOT of promises.  In fact, I believe he holds the record on the number of promises made by a presidential candidate, by a significant factor.  Depending on where he was at the time, he adroitly tailored his message, made the kinds of specific pledges that are ordinarily suicide for a candidate, and won by the biggest landslide since Reagan

In all those promises, inevitably some were going to go by the wayside, some were going to simply stall, others were going to stand as reminders of betrayal when exactly the opposite happened.

But in looking back over the last four years—especially in light of what he came into office having to deal with—I can’t find very much to complain about.

What there is, though, is pretty bad.

Implicitly and otherwise, Obama promised that business as usual in D.C. was going to change.  Of course, anyone who believed this was naive at best, but there were a few things that he could have done something about.  One is lobbyists.  He promised to close the revolving door, that people in government would not be permitted to leave for jobs as lobbyists and come right back.  Well, he sort of tried that, but then proceeded to issue waivers for certain people.

The biggest betrayal to my mind at the time was the selection of his economic team.  One may quibble about this, but I think it fair to say that he had something of a mandate to change the way government dealt with the financial sector.  The appointment of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, both of whom had been instrumental in the years of deregulation that had led almost directly to the 2007-08 meltdown, signaled a marked turn-around from expectations.  At the time I looked at that and thought “What the hell?”  Talk about putting the fox in charge of the chickens.  (Certainly an argument could be made that these people understood the problem better than anybody else, but you also can’t tell me that there weren’t equally qualified and talented people with no ties to the last 20 years of fiscal irresponsibility and with a vision consistent with what we’d been led to believe was going to happen.  Elizabeth Warren was certainly such a person, but then he didn’t stand by her when she had Congress running scared that she meant business.)

Obama fell down, in my view, by the simple omission of demanding a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.  Clinton had foolishly signed its repeal, it had worked for 60 years, its destruction allowed everything that followed to happen, and yet we heard nothing.  Instead we have an overly complex mess of rules that form a Rube-Goldberg assemblage of fingers-in-leaks that overburden everyone, Wall Street and regulators alike.  And while I came to support the auto industry bailout, his administration has made a hash of the housing recovery.

But the worst thing is the national security betrayals.  I do not approve of the drone program and I certainly do not like the indefinite detention aspect of the NDAA, which we were led to believe he also felt was a bad law.  Yet he signed the reauthorization and now his justice department is trying to overturn a judge’s ruling that indefinite detention is unConstitutional.  I grant you, this is all inherited from Bush, this is a Cheney construct, but that would seem to me all the more reason to do away with it.  Obama needed to nothing but sit back and let the ruling from bench hold sway, but instead he’s arguing for retention of powers I believed he ran opposed to.

He’s pulled some other stunts.  While I’m not a fan of Big Oil, I actually think the Canadian pipeline should have gone through.  It would have allowed him to stop issuing so many off-shore permits, which have greater possibilities of failure and environmental damage.  For myself, I wanted to see the end of the faith-based initiatives—this is a clear violation of the separation clause and the only thing that might have made it more palatable over what Bush had done would be its expansion to non-christian institutions.  And I’m still waiting for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, which was one of the worst things done on the federal level in education since…I don’t know.

But for all that, I have to confess that I still find him far more acceptable than what is being offered by his opponents, whose only solutions seem to be slash-and-burn spending cuts—except to the military.

So while this post is a complaint, an attempt at fair play, I have to apologize to those to whom I pledge a thorough drubbing.  Even when they make mistakes, I can’t seem to get as pissed at the Democrats right now as I do at the Republicans.  I know that sounds like excuse-making, but there it is.

I’ll try to do better.

culture

Here’s a Fact

Mitt Romney let it be known that he believes 47% of Americans are freeloaders.  Entitled, he says.  They pay no income tax whatsoever and will therefore vote for Obama no matter what, because they get their support from the government.

Now, this is how spin works.  Saying it the way he did makes it sound like that 47% are sitting on their entitled butts, drawing stipends from the government and doing nothing with their lives.  This is the myth of the welfare queen, writ large.  He makes it sound as if these are entirely worthless people.

Somewhere To Lay My Head

There is much that is wrong with that, not least the irresponsible use of statistics.  47% of all Americans, Mitt?  Hm.  That would include children and the retired.  It would, I assume, also include those who live in one-income households who are not themselves earners.  So, really, all of them?  Those preadolescents sucking off mom and dad should be cut off and forced to go to work?

But we may assume (maybe) that he is referring to 47% of people between 18 and 65 that he thinks ought to be paying federal income taxes.

The other false assumption is that, by inference, none of these people pay any taxes whatsoever.  We tend to talk about federal income tax as the sine qua non, the only game in town, and in the heat of political posturing, we tend to make the assumption that if someone doesn’t pay it, then they pay nothing at any level.

At least half of the number he cited constitute what we know as the working poor.  They work.  They have jobs.  They struggle and earn. They do not make enough to pay federal income tax.

But they pay payroll taxes, state income taxes, personal property taxs (if they have cars) real estate taxes (if they own a house, however small and inadequate), and everybody pays sales taxes.  They pay.  They work.  Many do get subsidies of some kind—foodstamps (recently we learned that more than half of WalMart employees do not make enough money and need foodstamps, but if they’re working for WalMart, they’re working), MedicAid, things like that.  But here’s the thing.

We all get something from the government!

Whether we see it this way or not, all of us get some kind of assistance from the government, either directly or indirectly.  Quite famously (and in some instance hypocritically) most so-called Red States, those with state governments, congressional members, and we assume local populations who do the most bitching about this sort of thing, draw the largest shares of federal aid.  And unless you’ve had your head in a small hole somewhere, we all know about federal subsidies to big businesses.  The record profits from investments are a direct result of government enabling and the way folks who derive their income from speculation talk, they sure sound entitled to me.

So either Mitt Romney does not actually understand what it is he’s criticizing or he’s just feeding bullshit to his base because that’s what they want to hear and he’s pandering.

Either way, he’s playing politics with people many of whom, if the Tea Party got all its wishes and all those programs were shut down tomorrow, would in fact die if the political wet dreams of the Rabid Right came about.

It is the oldest bit of political sordidness in the book to characterize people you don’t like as lazy, incompetent, entitled, useless burdens.  (Oh, and also “they breed like rabbits”, but as the Right seems to be trying to guarantee that I’m not so sure they see that as the insult it used to be.)  It only plays well because people tend not to see reality that causes them dyspeptic pangs of conscience.

culture

They Think You’ll Believe This Is A Good Thing

Here it is, stated baldly and without any evident embarrassment. Rick Santorum states exactly why what he represents is a dangerous and stupid movement.

This country has always contained a significant resentment toward intellectuals, knowledge, an active distrust and occasionally hatred of reason and understanding. We have been watching a “grass roots” movement develop since the late Seventies that embraces the anti-intellectual, the retrograde, the regressive as if being ignorant is a virtue. They have turned a refusal to face reality, to come to grips with facts, into a virtue, and an unwillingness to change ones mind into a kind of uber-patriotism that would, if fully empowered, destroy this country.

The difficulty in countering this is that he wraps his idiocy around two things that make anyone who would argue with them appear churlish if not downright immoral. This is a rhetorical game of false choices. It is not intelligence vs. family, it is not reason vs. church. It is not education vs. patriotism. This is a lie. By stating it this way, he makes it seem anyone who supports enlightenment, progress, rationality is somehow an enemy. It divisive in the most heinous and absolute way and it is exemplary of all that is currently wrong with the Right.

Smart people will never be on the side of ignorance and bigotry. Smart people will never support the idea that we should live by a code written by people who not only knew less than we do but also had completely different expectations of what life meant. Smart people will never be on the side of stupidity.

Out of the mouths of people like Santorum and Todd Akin and Michele Bachman we have heard a call to turn dumb into a desirable condition, to ignore ramifications, discard causal thinking, just “trust them” and America will be great again.

I appreciate that they no longer feel they need to couch their positions in user-friendly phrasing that softens their meaning. I’m delighted that they’ve decided to reveal who they really are.

This is one or two steps away from book burning.

Let me leave you with a few choice quotes.

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
Adolf Hitler

Education is dangerous – Every educated person is a future enemy—– Hermann Goering

What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.
Adolf Hitler

It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.
Adolf Hitler

Who says I am not under the special protection of God?
Adolf Hitler

blog

Maturity

I’ll keep this brief. Maybe. We’ll see.

Our ambassador to Libya has been killed in an assault on the consulate in Benghazi.  The attack was in response to a video that aired throughout northern Africa, a satire (I use the term loosely, as apparently it does not deserve so elevated a label) by an amateur filmmaker in California that allegedly mocks Mohammed.  A similar attack occurred in Cairo, but no deaths resulted as security there proved more effective.

This is my opinion.  This kind of crap is a consequence of a profound lack of maturity on the part of religious extremists.  Of all denominations and philosophies.  I do not here single out any one religion or culture.  The idiot who gunned down the people at the Sikh temple here is of the same infantile level of literal-minded incapacity to see past the end of a wrongheaded embrace of religion-as-substitute-for-mature-thought.

Partly this the result of a peculiar kind of insularity that does not allow for exposure to diverse ideas.  Like disease, you cannot develop tolerance if you keep those things to which you are susceptible always at bay.  Information, the daily encounter with differences, with ideas, with modes of thinking, all these things act like vaccines and you learn over time to put matters in context and acquire perspective.  Religious extremism relies on the absence of such exposure, the cordoning-off of experience.  People overreact to that which seems threatening of which they have little direct experience.

Poking fun at things, mocking things—I don’t care what they are—do not justify killing.  If you insult or mock the things I hold important, I might get a bit testy, but ultimately I know you speak from lack of knowledge, from prejudice, and from a similar dearth of maturity.  More importantly, I have to consider that you might have a point, that what you say may demand some consideration on my part.  At the end of the day, my discomfort over your words, however intended, that have no merit leaves no scars; what you say does not hurt me.

Until this becomes internalized, misunderstanding across cultural lines is inevitable.  Tragic, stupid, and an impediment to any future rapprochement.

Besides—idiots—someone in California made that video, not the people in our embassy, and it did not represent anything more than the views of one person, not the official position of the United States.  Maybe you pretend to be a monolith and if one speaks you are all represented, but not here, and you should know that.  You should know by now that we value the individual right to self-expression.  Just as some believe they have a right to issue blanket condemnations of America and the values we embody, we likewise have a right to express our opinions.  On anything.

All such violence does is provide further evidence of a thin-skinned immaturity, the kind of adolescent pique that is only important to the one indulging what is essentially a feckless hissy-fit.  It is my fervent hope that one day we will all grow up and get over ourselves.

Thank you for your patience.

________________________________________________

As an addendum, apparently a serious look at Islam by Tom Holland has been pulled from screenings by the BBC because of a wave of protest.  The film that prompted the assaults that resulted in the death of our ambassador, as it turns out, involves Terry Jones, the infamous pastor who made news burning Qu’rans in Florida and is a piece of execrable slander.  Comparing the treatment of the two events, however, points up my thesis—the Holland film is supposed to be a serious historical look at Islam, an objective analysis and this is viewed as unacceptable by a segment of the Muslim community.  While no deaths resulted from the BBC boycott, intellectually and morally they are on par.  We’ve been seeing this since at least the unsupportable treatment of Salman Rushdie (and I have spoken to Muslims who thought he should be condemned verbally if not killed who never read the book) and to my mind is part and parcel of the same cultural pathology.

culture

Where It Comes Down For Me

I grew up in a sexist culture.

No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…

It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was. Women couldn’t do anything without a man.

Except they usually took care of the family finances, maintained the house, made most of the health care decisions, and, oh yeah, raised the next generation of males who thought women were helpless.

Women who insisted on their own sexual needs were characterized charmingly as sluts, whores, trash, “mannish”, or some variation that included unnatural in the mix. Much to the consternation of everyone, Playboy changed all that, for better or worse, by basically putting it Out There that women were pretty much like men in that they liked sex and, oh yeah, had a right to it, just like men. (All the academic and political activism in the world didn’t move the culture half so much as Playboy did, which has caused another kind of push-back, but that’s another story.)

By the time I was in my twenties I’d watched my culture turn itself inside out over this and come to a place where it seemed any sane, rational person would be repulsed by the standards of that quaint and rather scary prior era. I thought—mistakenly—that the debate was settled.

Debate? Women are people.

Again, to some this might sound silly so simply stated, but that’s what it came down to and where it comes down for me. Women are people. First. They have dreams, aspirations, ambitions, hopes, talents, traits, expectations, and rights just like any man. That seems perfectly natural to me. I like that idea, I like the kind of world it implies.

But it seems some folks can’t seem to accept that. The first time I was aware of any counterargument was Phyllis Schlafly, who seemed intent on convincing women that there was something wrong with them if they wanted careers in lieu of families, that they were defying some natural order by refusing to get down on their knees and worship men the way women had been made to do for millennia. The more I found out about her, the more I found her position not only unpalatable but also hypocritical, since she herself never gave up any of her goals or ambitions for motherhood. After a while I realized that this was a perverse form of noblesse oblige, the aristocrat telling the peasant what to do and why they couldn’t have what the aristocrat had.

Still, this was a mere ripple. Things were improving.

And then something really unexpected happened. An argument was found that made the whole issue seem to have nothing to do with women’s civil rights or status as people, but with the entire culture’s responsibility to something that had never heretofore been an issue in this particular way. The argument made it seem like any woman insisting on her rights was in danger of being a murderer.

Well. It became clear after a while that although the rhetoric seemed to be focused on questions of what constituted a human life, the tactics and strategy demonstrated that it was just the same old bunch of ancient, tired arguments from privilege that women ought to have no such rights, that they ought to be little more than incubators and sex slaves.

Here is a video which pretty much sums the issue up for me and afterward I’ll tell you why.

For me, the issue comes down to this. I am a person first, a man coincidentally. Odds were pretty much even up that I might have been a woman—but I would still be a person. And by that token, I have to say that if you tried to treat me the way some people are trying to treat women, I would absolutely be in your face about it. It would be my decision to reproduce, to use my body for that purpose, no one else’s, and anyone else’s qualms about how I conduct my personal life matter not at all. This should not be a political issue. No one has a right to live off the body of another. That would be a gift. Gifts only count if they’re given willingly.

Those who would deny women the right to live as they choose have themselves decided—by proxy, on behalf of people they don’t even know—that history means nothing, that rights are conditional, and that their, for wont of a better term, sense of modesty trumps everyone else’s freedoms. They have shown time and again that what they say is the issue really is not and in the last year have made it absolutely clear that their priorities have nothing to do with the “sanctity” of life but rather with an idealized aesthetic of what they consider “appropriate” behavior.

I just wanted to be clear.

culture

The Vital Gore Is Gone

Gore Vidal has died.

Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was.  My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television.  At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.

Points which I later found myself in agreement with, by and large.

At other times I’ve found myself frustratingly at odds with Vidal, particularly in some of his reframings of American policies.

But I was right there with him during the Bush years when he told us what Bush-Cheney were doing to the Bill of Rights and what a fix we were all about to be in.

Vidal is one side of the spectrum of political essence that makes up who we are.  If you read Buckley, you must read Vidal for the other side (which most people don’t, on either side: we pick one or the other and stick to it without ever giving the opposing voice a chance, which is why we are in the cultural nightmare in which we are presently trapped), because between the two you can get some sense of the totality.

For my part, I would like to say that Vidal was one of those writers whose ability I admire.  He was a first-class stylist and his historical knowledge was enviable.  When he chose a historical subject—like Lincoln or Aaron Burr or a year, like 1876—he described what happened and what people said if reliable sources were available and added in the connective tissue with a fine eye for detail and sense of place.  His essays, often maddening, never bored, and usually revealed a vein of thought or fact hitherto unremarked that could prove absolutely trenchant.

Many on the Right hated him because he identified, generally quite accurately, the foundation of their politics (money or power, or both) and aimed his barbs at their historical amnesia, cultural ignorance, and always at their political hypocrisy.

Many on the Left were uncomfortable with him because he wouldn’t let them off the hook.  If they pandered, compromised their values, paid lip-service and then voted otherwise, he called them on it.

He once commented that he thought we had lost our chance to “have a civilization” here, that it looked for a time “like we were going to have one” but apparently not.  He said it with a deep sadness and while I took it as hyperbole, I can understand what he meant.  We’ve been arguing in the Forum about who we’re going to be as a nation and while the argument rages on we’re squandering our resources.  We have all the components of a really fine civilization but by and large they don’t seem to matter to most people, so they atrophy from lack of proper attention.

I stress though that a steady diet of Mr. Vidal’s writings, with nothing to balance it, can be as bad as a steady diet of William F. Buckley (or William Safire or George Will).  He represented an important aspect, one side, that must be respected and engaged as an equal part of all the other sides.  (Put Will and Buckley on one end and Chomsky and Vidal on the other and in the mix you find the substance of what it means to be a free people of serious intent.)

He was on Dick Cavett’s old talk show, often, and on one of them they were playing anagrams with names, and Vidal asked Cavett what his should be.  Without missing a beat, Cavett said “You’re the Vital Gore.”  Vidal smiled, apparently pleased.

Some of our essential vitality is gone.

Art

Jon Lord, Deep Purple, Legacies

I said I’d do a longer piece on Jon Lord, so.

In the aftermath of his death, I bought a couple of old Deep Purple cds I never had. By old I mean from the Sixties. The Book of Taliesyn, Shades of Deep Purple, Deep Purple. These three albums, the band’s first, were recorded with what is known as the Mark I line-up, which did not include Ian Gillan, who became the most recognizable voice of the band in the Seventies, during their most successful period.

What is fascinating now, in retrospect, is just how much a shift they made after they fired Rod Evans (vocals) and Nick Simper (bass).* The original Deep Purple was very much headed in the direction of what we now call Prog Rock. Not just in the wild sound effects they employed, but in the really intricate song-writing. The whole aesthetic approach of this early manifestation of the band embraced the novelty and innovation that defined bands like The Nice, Jefferson Airplane, Yes, and early Genesis. The break when they reorganized around Ian Gillan’s greater range and angrier delivery and Roger Glover’s far more fluid and, yes, heavier bass work is striking, not only for the differences manifest between songs like The Shield or Hush and the next-period thunder of Speed King, Hard Lovin’ Man, or Fireball, but also because of the album that came between the last Mark I Purple and In Rock—namely, Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

This album goes directly to what I consider the most significant aspect of Deep Purple, namely the incredible musicianship of Jon Lord. This is a Lord composition and it is a mature, fully-realized bit of what we call Classical Music (given that we tend these days to lump all the various schools of such music into that one bin—Baroque, Rococco, Classical, Romantic, NeoClassical, etc) that also incorporated rock motifs, elevating what at the time was still, despite the work being done by many gifted writers and performers to raise its stature, regarded as “kid’s music” or, more generally, “pop” or, less kindly, trash. Going back to the the first three Purple albums, you can hear the forerunners here and there throughout in the experimental elements and classically-tinged keyboard work of Mr. Lord. It is historically an astonishing piece of work, rendered even more so by the fact that after that, the new line-up of Deep Purple dove head-first in the hardest of hard rock, the music pitched at a roar and scream.

And yet, here and there throughout the next four albums—In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head, Who Do We Think We Are?—we hear that same sensibility flavoring the stew. Lord’s solos, while full-blown blues-idiom statements, would shift into energetic renderings of Bach, Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, inserting passages of refined musicianship that fit in with, augmented, and yet stood apart from the thunder and shouts around them.

As good a set of musicians as Deep Purple comprised, it was the sensibilities of Jon Lord, I think, that made them stand out.

(I have to admit here that I never really loved Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar work. It’s fine for what it is and I’ve changed my mind about his actual abilities, especially after listening to the Taliesyn album. He could keep up with Lord, truly. I just didn’t care for his approach. But it was another distinctive voice within the Purple mix. I confess that both Tommy Bolin and present-day Steve Morse play more to my liking (especially Morse, whose work with the Dixie Dregs and later with Kansas established him as one of the best in the business), but there is also no arguing that Blackmore’s style is almost instantly recognizable. But I listened more in spite of him than because of him.)

Deep Purple became a bit of a cliche by the end of the Seventies. Smoke On The Water was so overplayed as to become its own parody. But despite periods of never listening to them, I always return, drawn to the power, yes, but always to those keyboard runs and the above-average musicality, which I identify with Lord’s continual influence.

What brought me finally to the realization that this was one of the finest composers on the planet was the series of albums he did all of his more or less straight classical compositions, starting with The Gemini Suite, which in many ways was a second try at the Concerto. The format is the same (modeled on, I believe, Bartok’s Concerto For Orchestra) but the music is all new. Lord did a number of these and after his retirement from Deep Purple in 2001 or so he devoted all his time to composition and recording his symphonic music. In albums such as Boom of the Tingling Strings, Durham Concerto and others, he has left us a set of musical experiences quite apart from the driving rock he also did with great ability and obvious passion. (He said of his later works that he composed music, not labels.)

Jon Lord was only 71 when he passed away, from complications of pancreatic cancer. His voice still speaks and I would urge everyone with any serious interest in music to go find his later recordings and be amazed.

As much as I love his classical works, though, I think this is how I will always remember him.

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* Rod Evans, in these early recordings, displayed a common approach among a certain kind of rock’n’roll vocalist that was a sort of homage to Elvis. His exaggerated stylings can come across almost laughable in certain instances, but he was a credible singer within a certain range. He later became a founding member of Captain Beyond in league with a couple of Iron Butterfly alumni where his vocals leveled out and he displayed his qualities to much better and more honest effect. With the collapse of that band, Evans soon retired from music.

Nick Simper fared less well, though he worked more steadily, in and out of a variety of bands that never quite “made it.” The longest run after Deep Purple was a band called Fandango. Simper still gigs, though.