Category: Absurdity

Absurdity

“I do not like Home School and Ham…”

Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien  trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong.  He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist.  He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007.  Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat.  It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion).

Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity.  He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood.  The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise.

In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling.   There are multiple ironies in this, especially since, on the face of it, Ham and these particular homeschoolers would seem to be sympatico on the issues.

Be that as it may, it prompted me to make a couple of observations regarding this whole phenomenon.  According to the Home School Legal Defense Fund,  homeschooling is a growing practice.

it is estimated that the annual rate of growth of the number of children being homeschooled in the U.S. is between 7% to 15%. Reports from 1999 determined that approximately 850,000 American children were being home schooled by at least one parent. This number increased again in 2003, to over one million children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics National Household Education (NHES). NHES compiled data showing that in 2007, over 1.5 million children in the U.S. were home schooled.

There are several reasons for this, but the most stated are:

Religious or moral instruction 36%

School environment 21%

Academic instruction 17%

Other 26%

Questions of violence, socialization, academic standards, and related issues play into these decisions.  Not all homeschooling is, as is popularly thought, conducted for religious reasons, but certainly religious homeschooling gets the lion’s share of the publicity.

I have the same reservations about homeschooling as I have with special private schools that seek to isolate students from the wider community.  Despite the problems with “the world” to put an informational barrier between a child and that world can put that child at a disadvantage later.  But I can’t argue with the sentiment that many public schools are dysfunctional and do a disservice to students.  The 17% of the sample opting for homeschooling for academic reasons probably have concerns with which I’d agree.

The more people pull their children out of public education, though, the less incentive there is to fix that system.

I’m torn on this.  I’m largely self-educated.  But the foundation of my education was laid in public schools (K through 4th in public school, second half of 4th through 8th in parochial school, 9 through 12 in public high school).  I had many problems with school when I was in it, and later, upon review, some of those issues I decided were justified.  I certainly felt at the time better read than my English teachers.  (This was a false impression based entirely on the syllabus they were allowed to teach.  I was certainly better read than the syllabus.)  There were distortions in all my history classes, some of which I took issue with at the time.  The administrative side was annoying and the classes I would have desired to take were either truncated or unavailable.  I got most of my education from books read on my own initiative.

But that doesn’t mean this is in any way a recommended program for most students.  Part of the academic experience is and must be socialization (although I firmly believe most of the problems we have with public education today stem from the fact that in America the primary purpose of school has always been socialization, often at the expense of academics, and we’re paying for this unacknowledged fact today).

What profoundly disturbs me about the 36% of those who homeschool for religious reasons is precisely the problem presented by people like Ken Ham.  Parents who reject science as an enemy to their religious beliefs do neither their children nor this country any good by isolating their children and inculcating the distorted views presented in the name of some sort of spiritual decontamination.  What these parents wish to tell their kids at home is their business—but there is also a vast pool of legitimate knowledge about the world which needs to be taught if these kids are to have any chance at being able as adults to make reasoned and rational choices, for themselves and for their own children and for the society in which they live and work.  Few parents have either the time or the training to do this, at least in my opinion, whether they are certified or not, simply because they are only one voice.  Much education happens in the crossfire of ideas under examination by many.  The debate that happens in a vibrant classroom setting is vital to the growth of one’s ability to think, to analyze, and to reason.  The by-play that will likely not happen between dissenting viewpoints or between different apprehensions of a topic won’t happen in isolation.

Ken Ham tends to bar outside viewpoints when he can.  He has a history of banning people from the Creation Museum when he knows they are antagonistic to his viewpoint.  In the face of overwhelming evidence, he tries to assert a reality that has long since been shown to be inaccurate.  That he was barred from a conference of folks who will then educate their children in those same inaccuracies is an irony of epic proportions.  But, as they say, what goes around, comes around.

Absurdity

Blind Spots

It’s almost sacrilege to admit to disliking certain things.  People who regard themselves as culturally aware, artistically sensitive, aesthetically sophisticated must occasionally find themselves faced with work that has such apparent popular appeal among those they consider simpatico which they frankly do not care for or do not understand or both.  Uttering their honest opinion can be the equivalent of farting in church.

So they suppress that opinion, perhaps nod politely and even go so far as to find some pseudo-intellectual way of understanding the thing disliked so they can at least be seen as trustworthy within their circles.  It really is a case of the Emperor’s new suit.

I suppose what we’re talking about is a blind spot.  Sometimes you just have a kind of aesthetic aphasia, you really can’t see (or hear) what everyone else is so on about.  You could put it down to taste, but that’s a mild word, connoting a kind of passive difference of opinion.  It fails to describe your true reaction or, more tellingly, the possible sham going on around certain artists.

Years ago I had a conversation with the artist Rick Berry, whose work I both admire and occasionally love, about one of my blind spots—Jackson Pollack.  I gave him my opinion, that this is crap masquerading as art because by now a lot of reputations have been built upon the propagation of the idea that this is somehow Great Art.  I look at a Pollack and I see squiggles.  I watch films of Pollack working and I see advanced fingerpainting in action.  I realize this is a kind of heresy and I’ve often received looks ranging from pity to revulsion for expressing this feeling.

Berry nodded.  He said he’d felt the same way for years.  Then one day, walking through a museum, past a Pollack, he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye and ended up sitting in front of the painting for a couple of hours.  Since then, he’s grown to love Pollack.  I asked him if he’d come to the conclusion that Pollack was, in fact, a great artist, and he said  “I don’t know, but I know I like it.”

That is unassailable.  It is absolutely personal, it is absolutely subjective, and has nothing to do with any universal qualities in a given piece of work or possessed by a particular artist.  I make a distinction myself between work I think is Good and work I simply like.  They are often the same, but occasionally I like something that I can in no way defend as good.

However, I sometimes wonder at the adulation poured on certain artists for work that is simply mediocre if not an outright scam.  Adulation that transcends the simple metric of “I like it” and goes on to become bodies of apologia, written by people who seem compelled to find a reason, a justification, for liking something that has little to recommend it except as an eccentric appeal.  These people start the avalanche that eventually becomes part of the liturgy of cultural in-group vetting.  To not think this or that is tremendous, brilliant, a work of genius is to be revealed as philistine, sub-par, suspect, common.

This morning I was reading an introduction to a collection of short fiction and the writer listed a string of what he considered geniuses in their fields as a way to place the author of the collection.  Interestingly, I found myself nodding at every name listed—but one. And I thought, what the hell is HE doing in this group?  John Cage.

I know he is the darling of a kind of avant-garde set, but come on.  It’s noise.  He even admitted he was not very adept at actual music.  His “found” soundscapes, while occasionally interesting, lack, to my ear, even the virtue of clever arrangement.  It’s cacophony, chaos, crap.  That it’s frowned upon to point this out in certain groups does not make it less true.  I suspect that in this case it’s not so much that I am failing to “get it” but that there actually isn’t much there to get.

Other blind spots?  I already mentioned Pollack.  My opinion of Picasso has changed over the years.  He really was a very good, very talented artist, but frankly I think he became more a parody of himself over time and much of his work was a running joke, a game to see just how much the art world would take before it threw up its collective hands and declared the work garbage.  I find many of the abstract artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century tiresome.  Form has a function, after all, which is to make something comprehensible.  Breaking rules is all well and good but I think you should know the rules and be able to use them before telling the world that they should be dispensed with.

I’ve written about my aversion to certain musicians, but that really is a matter of taste—I just don’t like the sound of certain voices, but that’s not a criticism of what they’re attempting to do.  (But I draw the line at Tom Waits—the man cannot sing, period.)  I categorically loathe Country, especially C & W, but again, that’s taste.  I recognize ability, structure, form, etc, and can hear good musicianship—I just don’t care for the genre.

But there are composers I’ve frankly never understood the appeal—Charles Ives.  Certainly a great deal of educated command of his medium, but to what end?  A precursor to Cage?  Noise.

The sculptor Richard Serra.  Please.  Rusted plates of iron arranged in clumsy assemblages and purported to be art?  If nothing else, it all looks unfinished, like work begun and abandoned.  But mostly, the art, I suspect, is in the selling.

In my own field, I will never understand the praise heaped on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  I find him tedious and, frankly, insulting.  I do not read at a fifth grade level and I have never been able to get past the intrinsic condescension in his choice of style, which is to pitch his tone and vocabulary at that level.  He managed the feat of becoming a best-selling writer while ridiculing (a) the genre in which he began (science fiction) and (b) telling his audience how stupid they were.  The brilliance of his vision, of his stories, I can see in the films made from his novels, but they are not so wonderful to justify, in my mind, his approach, which undermines what he tried to do.  At least for me.

The blind spot that has gotten me the most negative reaction is one that I have had since I first saw the work.  Can’t help it.  But when I say this, the reactions are often profound and sometimes horrified.  How can I say this?  How can I not see?  How can I fail to recognize the genius?  How can I not love that work?

Vincent Van Gogh.

To my eye, work done by a marginally talented four year old with fat crayons.  Sometimes the claimed brilliance of color looks flat and lifeless to me.  That he couldn’t sell any it in his lifetime surprises me not at all.

But the industry that has been built on the corpse of this unfortunate man since strikes me as nothing less than the perfect flower of aesthetic cannibalism.  A marvelous job of selling has been done in the 121 years since his death.

(I’ve seen his early work, and his sketchbooks, and what I see is a man whose mental condition slowly robbed him of the skill and ability to do the work he should have done.  I like some of his early canvasses and he clearly had the skill, but the late period work which everyone praises leaves me thoroughly unmoved.)

Blind spots.  Maybe.  My other big one is poetry, which by and large has no affect on me.  Once in a while I hear a piece that strikes me as clever or moving, but the vast majority of poetry does not speak to me.

The thing that intrigues me, though, is this: the social phenomenon of elevating matters of taste to measures of status and worth.  By this mechanism, people become trapped in conditions where they feel unable to express what they really feel if it runs counter to the current vogue.

It is true that art should be free to myriad forms of expression and we should be free to enjoy any and all of them.  That something like the Paris Salon of the mid-19th Century ought not condemn artists to a purgatory of exclusion because they do something different.

But we should also be free to call nonsense nonsense, crap crap, and declare the Emperor naked and defrauded.

The above has been an expression of personal opinion.

Absurdity

Schools

I spotted this over at John Scalzi’s Whatever and it brought back some memories.

A woman in Ohio has received a felony conviction for deceptively sending her kids to a school in a district where she didn’t live.  Her father colluded in this.  The article linked doesn’t go into the reasons she did what she did, but I can imagine some of them, and it would have entirely to do with quality of school experience.

Fifty years ago, my schooling experience—and I phrase it that way because I’m talking about much more than just what you learn in the classroom; it’s a total package, going to socialization and self-image and the whole magilla that a lot of people condemning American public education, depending on their political slant, don’t want to think about—was in the process of being thoroughly fucked up.  Had I not been an avid reader at an early ago outside of school…

Not knowing the particulars of the Ohio case, I’ll just talk about mine.  I’ve detailed some of this before, but it’s worth going over it again as a reminder.

My birthday is in October.  Back in the day, my mother dutifully tried to enroll me in school for the school year during which I would have been five.  But at the time of enrollment, I was only four.  They refused me.  “Bring him back next year,” they told my mother, who tried, I imagine, valiantly to explain the problem, which was that I’d end up functionally a year behind.  But the district was adamant.  Bring him back when he is five.

So I had a whole year of not going to school when many of my friends were.  Not to worry, I didn’t give that much of a damn.  I was pretty much a loner anyway, even then, because, for whatever reason, I didn’t quite fit with everyone else.

The following September, we’re back at the school, and this time they accepted me.  I entered kindergarten.

And six weeks later, when I turned six, they pulled me and five others who had the same calendrical malfunction out of kindergarten and moved us directly across the hall into first grade.

Our first grade teacher—I remember her vividly, a tallish Nordic blonde with a thin face and large, pale blue eyes—made it clear from the beginning that she regarded the six of us as a nuisance.  “Get with one of the others and catch up,” she said.  “I’m not spending any time making up for you’re not being here at the beginning of the year.”

I could read already and, if I recall correctly, so could Debbie Blake, but the others?  Don’t know.  I quickly became absorbed into my own problems, which became legion in my young mind.  Within a month I could honestly say that I hated school.

Not just the teacher and the sudden load of curricula which the six weeks of kindergarten had not prepared me, but the whole experience.  My new classmates made me feel slow and stupid and began a pattern of torment that last the next eight years.  My teacher, who apparently recognized that I was probably above average, began a round of parent-teacher meetings designed, I thought, to humiliate me—“he’s a bright child but not performing up to his potential.”  I just didn’t understand.  And it didn’t improve.  I suspect that nine months of kindergarten I should have gotten bore directly on the socialization I was now forced to “catch up” with in a couple of weeks.

My parents moved during my third grade year.  It put me in a new school district.  I actually had made no real friends to miss, so it was no big deal to me.  But.

The district line ran, apparently, down the center of my street, and that put me in the Grant School district instead of the Shenendoah district.  Shenendoah was four blocks away.  Grant was a mile and a half.  Grant—I did not know this at the time, but my parents did—had a bad reputation.  (Shenendoah soon would, but not yet.)  I was already obviously having trouble at school from bullying and such and my parents were reluctant to send me to a school, so far away, where the problems might be worse.

But also—and I didn’t find this out until much later—my performance disappointed them and my dad, for one, thought I had a discipline problem.  Corporal punishment had been outlawed in the public school system.  Dad was a believer in the spanking.  My poor grades and lack of attention in class, he thought, were directly related to an inability on the part of the teachers to effectively discipline me.  So, public school was probably not where I belonged.

I was summarily enrolled in a private school, Emmaus Lutheran, about ten blocks away, and I entered the fray midway through third grade and there I stayed through eighth.

My performance did not improve. Nor was I ever spanked for poor discipline.  That, it turned out, was not the problem.  (The bullying soon resumed and continued.  Enough about that.)

I continued reading on my own and by a curious quirk of circumstance my dad began a long stretch of dinner table dialogues with me that can only be described as philosophical primers—my parents were lapsed Mormons, I was attending a Lutheran school, dad was determined I not swallow the party line whole, and we argued and debated our way through the rest of my grade school, all in an attempt to keep me from being brain washed.

My next school problem came my senior year of high school.  High school improved somewhat.  Because of the round of different teachers, my performance in one class did not poison it in another, and I could be selective about what I chose to pay attention to.  My grades went up because, frankly, I was more interested.  The bullying had stopped (although I had more fights my Freshman year than the previous two) and I began to acquire the armor of the loner who will not be messed with.

Roosevelt High School was what could best be described as a blue-collar industrial school.  It had been built and its traditions established when the expectation was that most of its graduates would end up driving trucks for Anheuser-Busch or going into some other local industry.  It was struggling to come to terms with a changed mission during the Sixties and hadn’t quite succeeded.  I became deeply fascinated with photography.  They had no course in it.  I was already interested in writing, but the Journalism class was one year and only half a credit.  In other words, both my fields of interest were pretty much unsupported.

Senior year, I entered a work-study program which gave me a morning of class work and let me off to work part time in the afternoon.  My very first job ever, acquired over the summer, didn’t survive past October.  I “contrived” to game the system to stay in the program and pretended to have a job.  I was also cutting a lot of classes and days that year—sheer, unadulterated boredom (plus I think I had mono that year, but since I never went to the doctor I can’t say for sure, but it was pretty awful).  In any event, because I’d taken senior English in summer school (to avoid getting a particular teacher who would undoubtedly have flunked me for personal reasons) and because I had carried a larger course load (somehow) the previous year, I had more than enough credits to graduate that January, getting out early.  I plead lethargy for not having done it.  I’d finally gotten a situation where I didn’t mind it so much and didn’t have anything else to do.

But.  I answered a job ad at the state hospital in February.  It was for a photography trainee.  Note—this was 1973.  The job would have been under the resident photography at the hospital as an apprentice.  I would have been trained to do portraits, copy work, photomicrography, color lab work, the whole bit.  The guy loved me.  Saw my work, the interview went like a dream—and the starting pay was four dollars and hour.  Trust me, for an 18-year-old at the time, this was a fortune.

The only hitch was I didn’t have my diploma.  I explained the academic situation and begged a grace period so I could get it, since I had fulfilled my qualifications.  I went back to school to do that and was told No.  I had not taken that option in the fall, I was stuck with completing the school year.

I begged.  Both of them.  The school wouldn’t yield, the photographer refused to hire me, telling me that I really needed that diploma and that he’d be doing me a disservice by allowing me to quit school without it.

Bureaucracy.  I was, basically, fucked.

Who knows where that might have led?  A path cauterized.  I do not regret it.  I’ve had a ball living the life I’ve led.  But I still get incensed over schools standing on their petty rules at the expense of a child’s educational experience.  It makes their bookkeeping easy and can often result in damaging the child’s future.

Was the photographer right?  I have never been required to prove I graduated high school, anywhere, by anyone.  They take your word for it.  In my field, it was what you could do that mattered more than where you’ve been educated.

So I’m thinking this woman in Ohio was trying her best to meet some impossible requirements.  Depressed housing market (let’s assume) and she couldn’t sell her house in order to move, the job she had was where she lived, the school she wanted her children in was in another district…not to put to fine a point on it, but all the opponents of vouchers and charter schools should be aware that this is part of the reason a lot of people are looking at those options as agreeably as they do.

And just as a side note, sort of tangentially, consider that idiot governor in Texas recently pronouncing on what he sees as “frivolous” educational options.  To quote Governor Perry:

Well, there is a lot of fat to cut from our public schools, especially those in our biggest urban areas like Houston and Dallas. I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?

It doesn’t work well, so let’s fuck it up some more, shall we?  Take all the stuff that’s worthwhile and cut it, so we can educate a bunch of truck drivers, processed food workers, and cheap laborers who can compete with illegal immigrants.  (I’m being sarcastic there, please note.)

You know what I would do if I were king?  I would change the entire school system to this: fund it at at least half the level of current military spending.  All schools would be open 24/7.  Kids could go at any time and find classes in session.  Kids could go to any school they chose (within reason).  I would also make all schools safe havens, staffed with paralegals, nurses, and law enforcement so kids from abusive homes could feel protected if they had to get out.  I would pay whatever it took to feed a child’s imagination.  I would also extend that to make parents mandatorily involved and provide counseling for those parents who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.  The schools would be geared entirely for the benefit of the children, not the parents, not local businesses, and certainly not the bureaucracy.  I would put advanced curricula in the primary schools.  A lot of kids might not “get it” but there will always be those who will catch on quickly, even kids from backgrounds most people might think unlikely.  But I would expose all these kids to meaty material from the get-go instead of waiting till they get to college—if they get to college, which for many of them might be too late.  I would bar all recruiters of any kind from the schools and I would bring in a regular round of professionals in as many fields as I could to do workshops.

That’s what I would do if I were king.  We’re nickle-and-diming out kids into stupidity and penalizing some parents who try to do the right thing for their children.  For every educational worker who pushes the envelope to improve the system, there seem to be a hundred know-nothings bitching about the cost and arguing over what’s being taught.  This has got to stop.

Okay, end of rant. I feel marginally better.

Absurdity

Ahistorical Nonsense

Representative Michelle Bachman is the national voice of The Tea Party.  Recently, in speaking to a group of Iowans, she made some claims about American history that would be laughable if they had not come from someone who likes to style herself an authority of Constitutional matters.  She claimed that the glory of our country is that color and language didn’t matter, nor did class or parentage, that once people got here, “we were all the same.”

Wishful thinking at best.  Certainly that was the idea behind the Declaration of Independence, with its grand opening phrases, but like all such ambitions, it took reality a long, long time to catch up—and it still hasn’t.  The fact is, despite our stated political and social goals, immigrants have always had difficulty upon arriving here, some more than others, and those already here have always resented new arrivals.  And even for those who were already living here, equality was simply not a reality.  African slaves aside, women did not achieve equality until…well, some would say they’re still trying to achieve it, but just for one metric, they didn’t get the vote until 1921.  People who owned no property were barred from the vote for a good portion of the 19th Century and other barriers were put up here and there, time and again, such as literacy tests.  Anything to keep certain groups from being able to vote against the self-selected “true” Americans.

She went further, though, and suggested that slavery was an unfortunate holdover from colonial times and that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was gone from the United States.”  She cited John Quincey Adams, who was a staunch campaigner against slavery.  The problem, though, is that he was not a Founder.  He was the son of one.

The reality is that slavery was a deal breaker at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.  Many of the delegates owned slaves and made it quite clear that any attempt to outlaw it would result in a No vote on any constitution.  A compromise was struck, putting the issue off for twenty years, and until then no one was allowed to even mention it on the floor of Congress.  (Interestingly, the British and others outlawed slavery and the slave trade in 1807, 56 years before we did.) This was violated by a group of Quakers who tried to force the issue in Congress in 1792 to angry denunciations and threats of secession. The Southern delegates were quite clear that slavery could not be eradicated without severely damaging their happiness and well-being.  It was openly remarked that slaves were needed for “work that white men simply won’t do.”

All of which flies in the face of Ms. Bachman’s attempted revision of the Founding Fathers, many of whom were southern slaveholders.

We should be clear about these men who established a political system which has had consequences they could hardly imagine.  Some were brilliant, all were intelligent, and most incorporated a mix of heady idealism sparked by Enlightenment thinking and the hard practicality of men determined to get something out of life for themselves and their own.  It would be easy to portray some of them as opportunistic adventurers.  For instance, George Washington and others were all frustrated and hampered by British colonial policy which tried to keep the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains into territory forbidden to them because of treaties the Crown had negotiated with native tribes.  Companies were assembled of American entrepreneurs to claim and sell land in the trans-Appalachian territories, the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and even south of that—quite illegally per British law.  These men had money at stake in this and were going ahead to lay claims and make sales in spite of the British.  They stood to lose a great deal if they couldn’t proceed with these land deals.  So it could be said as easily as anything else that the Revolutionary War was fought by these men to secure future profits.

This is reality.  Not all of it, by any means, but not to be dismissed either in some spiritual reimagining of the purity of purpose and overarching genius of the Founders.  In fact, it is no shame to say that everyone who fought against British rule here hoped to gain something, and not just the intangibles of liberty—which is not all that intangible in any case.  Taxation was the war cry and what is that?  Money.  Property.

People came to these shores hoping to find land, which they could neither find nor own in Europe.  This is a fact.  Here, in the so-called “wilderness”, they thought they could do what their forebears had never had a chance to do—own something.  This meant independence.  This meant freedom.

But today, when the owning of things has a much changed meaning, freedom has a less concrete aspect.  It’s all about principles and ideals and airy things with no material substance.  We’re used to it here, you see.  Freedom isn’t so connected to things for us because things are ours by birthright.  Or so it seems.

Many of the Founders were large estate-holders, plantation owners, businessmen.  Everything they had was on the line in the Revolution.  This is no small thing.  They risked tremendously for their dream.

But we should never forget that they were also men of their time and men of the world.  Maintaining institutions that put coin in their pockets was part of who they were and it is idiocy to imagine them otherwise.  We risk turning them into Apostles and overwriting the reality of our own history to make that time some sort of Avalon.  But things aren’t like they were in the good ol’ days…and they never were.

This urge to hagiography on the part of people like Bachman puzzles me.  Collectively, they have no problem dealing underhandedly with political opponents, pushing through legislation that will benefit the propertied at the expense of the poor, treating their enemies as harshly as possible, and yet they assert that the Founding Fathers were somehow not like that.  They admire the Founders, and somehow manage to juggle the contradictions in their own actions.  Maybe seeing the Founders as they were—people— would make their own actions simply ugly and make them accountable on their own, without the defense that they’re trying to reestablish that Golden Age.

This is a real problem.  We cannot go forward unless we know where we’ve been, and we can’t go forward honestly unless we’re honest about where we came from.  Yes, this is a free country, but what does that mean in practice?  It means that we have set of standards we’re trying to attain without adding constraint to personal actions.  But unconstrained, personal actions lead not only to explosions of entrepreneurship and leadership and justice and innovation, but also to brutality and open hypocrisy and bigotry and class strife.  You can’t have one without the other, because people are not principles.

I think Michelle Bachman and her colleagues understand this perfectly well.  If they can convince people that they have fallen from a state of grace, then all the problems are the fault of the fallen, and all we have to do is put things back as they were. As they were included Robber Barons, slaveholders, political misogynists, racists.  If they can convince people that this was the state of grace, then they can carry the nation forward into a future of their conception, which will benefit them.  It would be their trans-Appalachian  enterprise.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that people like Bachman have also been at the center of the gutting of public education.  An ignorant public can be controlled.

She asked rhetorically if this was going to be the last free generation of Americans.  The torch of liberty has been passed from generation to generation and we may be the one that fails to pass it on.  She could be right.  If people don’t start filling their minds with knowledge instead of spin, the Michelle Bachmans may well stop that torch being passed.

Absurdity

Crazy Is As….

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but bear with me.  A bit of confessional time.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m an atheist.  To put it simply, I basically grew up and got over it.  Religion, to me, is historically and psychologically interesting, but does not represent any kind of reality.  The world, the universe, what have you, just doesn’t work that way, and for every example you can pull out of your hat of supposed “miracle” I can equal or better it with “shit happens” and just plain human synergy.  That anecdotal game can go on and on with neither side really running out of examples, leading no where, but just the fact that most miracles can be explained by mundane models suggests to me that the miracle is actually occurring inside the witnesses skulls.  (There’s this new one that is the presumed basis for the rapid beatification of Pope John Paul II concerning a nun with Parkinson’s Disease going into full remission two months after the Pope’s death because she prayed to him.  Now, if I remember my Catholic history and so forth, a miracle that qualifies someone for sainthood is supposed to have taken place during the recipient’s lifetime and he or she had to have been in some way directly involved.  This is clear evidence that the Catholic Church is undergoing a P.R. crisis and needs some new popular saints to bolster a flagging image.  The swift beatification of Mother Theresa is such a case, because anyone who really looked at the way she ran her organization would have to have serious doubts that this woman was “saintly” in any way, shape, or form—but she appears saintly.  Anyway.  Remission from disease happens all the time, just most of it never gets to the level of being considered a miracle—the human body is a dynamic system and we still have a lot to learn about it.)

The more complex answer is, that the more I learn the less I am able to suspend incredulity that anything like the cosmogony suggested by religions—any of them, and I stress here that I see no valid reason why any one should be given preference over any other—makes any sense given the evidence at hand.  Over time I saw religion as a strictly human enterprise, a kind of Swiss Army Knife approach to explaining the inexplicable that relied on fear and the human capacity to be amazed to instantiate a programmatic acceptance of authority-through-divinity.  Basically, it’s a business.  Not always to make money, you understand, but always to exercise power.

So I walked away.  I became a student of history and an amateur appreciator of science and the more I see, read, and discover, the more I am convinced that religious acceptance is a pathology.  It has become so deeply wired into human culture, that it appears normal and functions often quite benignly.  It only becomes a problem when situations arise and questions are asked which religion is unsuited to deal with.

One of the great and, of late, underappreciated and often derided truly cool things about America is that we—you and I—don’t have to put up with that crap.  We can walk away.

Now for most people, this translates into an easy freedom to change our stripes.  There are no legal or, often, social barriers to moving from, say, Catholicism to Presbyterianism.  Even among those two groups, eyebrows may rise, some tut-tuts may occur, but after an adjustment period, I imagine most folks even keep the same friends and might even go to each other’s church socials.  (For some of the more aggressively evangelical religions, this gets a bit tougher, but the law does nothing about it*.)

For some of us, it means we can just stop believing what we regard as nonsense.

This morning I went to the grocery store.  At my checkout lane, the cashier and another employee were engaged in what I quickly understood as a religious discussion, but one of those that make even some mainstream believers reflexively wince.  The one was explaining how ardently she had been praying, while the cashier—clearly in the higher position of authority in this—was saying  “It doesn’t matter how you pray, it’s that the Enemy attacks.  You got to be aware that he’s always there, attacking.  You can pray but you got to watch for the Enemy.”

I paid and left without saying a word and, I hope, without my face betraying my reaction, which was “Oh, a couple of nuts.”

Here’s a test.  Next time any of these situations come up at a party or in casual conversation, see how you react in the first few moments.

“My cousin was abducted by aliens.  They ran all kinds of tests on her.  I wonder what it is they’re looking for when they do that?”

“Oh, I never use traditional medicine. It’s all poison, you know.  I trust homeopathy.”

“There were at least two other shooters, one on the grassy knoll.  It was a CIA plot.”

“The world is going to end in 2011, May, in fact.”

“My astrologer said my stars are badly aligned for a move to a new job.  I hate where I’m at, but I don’t want to make the same mistake twice.”

Even if, within a minute, you recoup enough to either steer the conversation away from this or form some kind of cat’s cradle response that allows you to see this in some way other than at face value, I would bet you thought, however briefly, “Oh no, one of them.”

Which is interesting, because I realized that over the years my reaction to each and every one of these, plus the score more I didn’t mention, has been identical to my reaction to someone who feels compelled to testify to me.  They are indulging a fantasy, basically, possibly one born out of a particular neurosis, and it is important for the maintenance of that fantasy that they co-opt others into supporting it.  Either by politely agreeing to the possibilities implicit in each world-view being presented, or by buying into their argument.  Either one lends credibility to their delusion, strengthens it, and reassures them that they are not, in fact, nuts.

To be sure, most of them likely aren’t nuts.  Not in any clinical sense.  Nothing medication will address.  They are simply indulging the power of interpretation and organizing the world according to a set of precepts that allow them to navigate.  And for many, many people it works just fine.  In fact, at least in the case of religion, because these ideas are so entrenched, so much a part of what is generally called Culture, it works better than just fine, it is almost psychologically wholesome.

Except we seem to choose what level of it we’re comfortable with.  I imagine even people with a regular religious component to their lives get uncomfortable when approached by some glassy-eyed evangelizer wanting to talk about their personal relationship with Jesus.  Because, I suspect, on some level we all know this isn’t quite rational and the irrational troubles us.

Now, what I do—fiction writing—can be readily described as irrational.  I find it interesting that some splinter religions deride fiction as sinful.  It’s competition, in a sense, an attraction to some other form of exactly the same pathology that doesn’t have the same telos as religious fable.  And I will cop to the charge, that making stories up is not, by certain metrics, rational.  Humans are not wholly rational.  If we were, there likely would be no art of any kind.  What we are is aesthetic.  We are beings of the senses.  And what I do speaks directly to that.  As does music and painting and sculpture, and dance.

And religion.

What are all these depictions of the after life if not confabulations of the ideal sensual experience?  (And by sensual I do not mean sexual, although in some religions that is very much a part of the whole Paradisical aesthetic.)  It is the perfect embrace of the aesthetic, often without the filtering of the flesh, so to speak, which seems sometimes to transmit the signal incompletely or with unpleasant noise.

What I do in my head, though, when I create characters and world is very much like the whole architecture of a religion.  The difference is, I do not then say my characters are Out There walking around.  Their existence is in my head.  And I do it for a specific and limited reason.  I’m trying to share a given experience.  The experience is the totality of it, though.  (We have run into people, some of us, who have taken it the next step and so personified favorite characters that they really do think they live in the same world.  What, may I ask, is the difference between that and the whole acceptance of religious constructs, other than in the former case we see these people as slightly off-beam and in the latter just “normal” folks?)

I will stipulate here that I think, for many people, as individuals, religion provides a quality of experience that is therapeutic.  Whatever gets you through the night, as the song says.   And as such it is not my place to criticize anyone’s choice of paradigms.  It’s even clear that religion serves as a functional component in community activity.  What is communal identity but an agreed-upon way of seeing the world?  And agreement is the first step toward cooperation.  So on and so forth.

But I also suggest that most peoples’ level of acceptance of religious claims is wholly conditional and contextual.  We can see this in the negative reaction to claims that, by some quite literal interpretations of religious codes, disasters and tragedies are the direct result of a failure to embrace a given claim.  New Orleans was swamped because we bar prayer in public schools.  9/11 happened because we tolerate homosexuality and some deity doesn’t like that.  We know this is crazy talk.  But it’s based on some of the same fundamental structures as the religion we may claim to believe.

So what does this, ultimately, have to do with the so-called real world?  Well, by this point you should pick up on where I’m going, but let me be perfectly blunt:  according to some religions, some people are second or third class citizens, not permitted to enjoy the same rights and privileges of the chosen.  This is the real world manifestation of a pathology that draws its authority from a delusion.  When it gets to that point, it’s no longer harmless.  Or therapeutic.  As when someone tells you, basically, that there’s nothing you can do, that no matter what your efforts may be, the Enemy is going to get you.  Consequently, you live a life constantly constrained by fear.

We only get one life on this planet.  It’s a crime to have it wasted being afraid of boogymen and ghosts and feeling like crap because of something that probably never happened.  And, in some places, being forced to live your whole life severed from all the wonders of the world simply because of your genital arrangement.  This is not wholesome, not therapeutic, and not right.  Someone else’s pathology should not limit your life.

I should wrap this up now.  If I continue, Vishnu may come down in his spaceship and abduct me and subject me to a severe audit with his E-meter.

——————————————————————————————–

*Although, sometimes the boundaries blur.

Absurdity

Other Buzzzzzzzz

I am not going to go see the new Green Hornet movie.  I knew that long before its release, when I heard Seth Rogen had been cast as the Hornet.  I just knew it would be a waste of everyone’s time, money, and sentiment.

I’m sorry.  Hollywood has been doing superhero movies now for decades and they’ve gotten a few of them pretty right.  Except for a ridiculous semi-musical romantic interlude, the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve was fine.  Mostly this was due to Reeve and co-star Gene Hackman (who can save just about any movie), but they treated the material lovingly the whole way.  Subsequent versions, not so much.  In fact, by the fourth outing as Superman, Reeve must have been a bit embarrassed.  Clearly, the problem with sequels is that we’re dealing with material that was born to be a serial, and the best medium for that is television, not big budget cinema.  That said, a few of these aren’t so bad.  It helps not being immersed in the comic books to begin with (for instance, I was able to enjoy all three of the primary X-Men films without getting all worked up over the liberties taken by the studio that incensed many dedicated fans—except for a Baker’s Dozen back when I was 13 or 14, I did not follow the comics), but I can more or less enjoy many of these outings.  Have to admit, though, to date the Marvel franchise has fared much better.

But the Green Hornet is another matter and one of the things that Hollywood so often forgets is that the material must be taken seriously!

green-hornet-1.jpg

These were the guys I grew up with.  Brit Reid and Kato as played by Van Williams and Bruce Lee, 1966 to 67.  The car especially, Black Beauty, really rocked.  Now, I saw these in first-run and haven’t seen them since, so doubtless they have dated and dated badly.  But my imagination took the original viewing and went amazing places with it, and that is the problem with a lot of these films.

No doubt the film-makers took a cue from the Iron Man movies.  There is a lot of humor in those films, but—the films are not humorous.  Tony Stark is funny, but funny within context—and with a lot of credit going to Robert Downey Jr. for just doing a tremendous job in the role—and that’s something film makers fail to grasp time and again.

For instance, the best Three Musketeer films ever made were the Salkind productions in the 70s with Michael York and Oliver Reed.  Great films.  And funny!  But funny as a consequence of the action within context—the characters themselves were not jokes, they were serious.  Much later, a third film was made, Return of the Three Musketeers, with the same cast, but something had been lost—they were turned into buffoons in order to artificially inject humor rather than letting it arise from the context, and it is painful to watch.

Long ago now Tim Burton made a Batman movie and cast a comic actor, Michael Keeton.  A lot of people probably moaned, fearing the worst.  But Burton treated the material seriously and Keeton played it straight.  Likewise in the sequel, but when Burton lost control Keeton bailed, and good for him, because the studio starting injecting jokes, much as had been done with the James Bond films, and taking the premise much less seriously, until they produced a truly foul film (one of the few I have been utterly unable to watch more than 15 minutes of).

Keeton, however, had done serious films before.  He had a reputation as a comic actor, but more in the line of Jack Lemmon than Seth Rogen, who has gone from one slapstick dumbshit vehicle to another, and apparently the studio opted to play to his strengths in that regard here.

I don’t like movies or television that rely on stupidity to carry the story.  That’s why I no longer watch most sitcoms.  Stupid is not funny to me.  The great comics knew that good comedy was not to make fun of people’s stupidity but to derive the humor from stupid situations.  Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp was not stupid.  Lucille Ball’s character was not stupid, either, she simply never knew enough to follow through effectively on her schemes, and the situation tripped her up.

That said, superhero stories walk a fine line between significance and the absurd.  I mean, really, these people are improbable at best.  It is all too easy to paint them as ridiculous or such utter fantasies that no real drama could result from their stories.  It’s difficult to write sympathetically, not to say powerfully, about people who are so much more than average.  And the scenarios!

But that’s what makes them iconic, because they achieved that balance and then some.  So you have to be careful when translating them from one medium to another.  In this instance, they clearly didn’t get it.

Now back to our regularly scheduled day.

Absurdity

So Right It’s Wrong

Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again.  Here is the article.  Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered.  Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy.  There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy.

As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point.  The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant.  It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it.

The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965.  That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others).  The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere.  Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct.  Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here.

People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated.  Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with.  But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances.

Scalia would love to overturn Roe v. Wade and I have no doubt his pronouncement that women do not enjoy protection from discrimination in the Constitution is part and parcel of his desire to see the Constitution set in the same kind of stone as the Ten Commandments—unchanging, implacable, unadaptable.  Arguing that because something isn’t listed in the Constitution is an attempt to dismiss a priori any Court decisions that might address changed social conditions with which he doesn’t agree.

The Fourteenth Amendment addresses discrimination against citizens.  So, are not women citizens?  Of course they are, and Scalia likely would not argue they weren’t.  However, they, like certain minorities, are citizens with specific attributes that make them in some ways separate from others.  At least, in theory.  Does, for instance, the Fourteenth Amendment protect men from sexual discrimination?  It should, but the question would arise if men can be discriminated against on the basis of gender—at least, in a specific and nonuniversal way.  In other words, can a man be discriminated against on the basis of his genital configuration and its implications the same way a woman can suffer discrimination?

Scalia, as a strict constructionist, would like to believe that the framers intended that the Constitution never alter in its meaning.  This is impossible since context inevitably plays a role, and since times have changed and brought with them all manner of social adjustments not foreseen or even desired by the founders, his dismissals on these grounds of specific terminology are silly and even a bit pathetic.  Harry Blackmun wrote, in Roe, “The right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty…or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”  I think the same can be argued for any presumed protection against discrimination on any basis.

Everyone, even, apparently, Justices on the Court, seem to forget the Ninth Amendment.

But he does make a good point, that it is the Legislature’s job to enact laws to cover these things.  The purpose of the Supreme Court, at its simplest, is merely to vet these laws according to the Constitution.  If the Court, however, has already pronounced on a concept, why is it people seem content to sit back and assume that the matter is closed?  Shouldn’t laws have been enacted in the wake of Roe v. Wade to seal that right in legislation even more concretely than has emerged from a decision which could very well be overturned?

Absurdity

Why I Am (Partly) Not A Conservative

I try to ignore Glenn Beck.  I think he’s pathetic.  All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand.  For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction.  Yeah, that’s right.  Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology.

His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling.  First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon.  (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.)

Why the Left?  Is science fiction a left-wing thing?  I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc.  Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure.  Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their “rightishness” because they outsold another writer’s work that might have been a bit leftish.  This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity.  This is, of course, Glenn Beck we’re talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left.

But this is ridiculous.  Because isn’t this…I mean, Glenn, isn’t this just the free market making itself heard?  Your book can’t stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in.  Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it’s self-published!  It doesn’t even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it!  It got there all on its own, man!  This is the flower of the free market!  David whupping Goliath’s ass!  This should make you proud!

No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow.  And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation.

If the Right wants to know why people on the Left or even in the Center have no patience for them, this is ample explanation.  The expression  “Get a life” comes to mind.

I recall listening to Rush Limbaugh once trying to trash U2 on the air and managing to demonstrate his utter cluelessness and inability to deal in metaphor.  Is hyper-literalism symptomatic of right-wing thinking?  It must be, because literalism is where they get all caught up and their incompetence shows.  I listened once in complete dismay to Pat Robertson condemning the film Trainspotting for its “glorification of drugs” and I sat there dumbfounded wondering how on earth anyone could see that film as a glorification of drugs.  I remained baffled until I realized, based on a couple of other articles from fundamentalists and right-wing pundits, that in their view the mere mention of drugs, regardless of context, is glorification.  Somehow they could not see a film that takes a serious, unvarnished look at drug abuse as perhaps critical of the lifestyle.  I suppose because there was no father-figure character preaching in the film.

But it showed me another problem.  The possibility that an audience might empathize with the characters—not approve, because clearly in the case of Trainspotting approval is virtually impossible, but understand.  These are human beings, with a problem, certainly, but human beings all the same and maybe they deserve some sympathy, some help, some understanding.

Because understanding is not what they’re about.  They don’t want to understand —they only want to condemn that of which they disapprove.

Upon Obama’s election and his early attempts to reach across the aisle and his calls to work together, Rush Limbaugh made a broadcast in which he declared that he did not want to understand, to cooperate, to reach across the aisle, to work together.  He flatly refused the idea that common ground could be found.  While I’m sure there are some far Left ideologues who feel the same way, I hear very little of that from most of the Left.

Let me be clear, I’m talking about the mouthpieces here, and by extension those who fawn over them.  I’m talking about the Hannitys, the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Robertsons, the Savages.

They have no depth.  No perspective.  They in fact seem to have no sense of proportion and certainly no grasp of anything but the plainest equations of Us versus Them.  Their comparisons are absurd and frightening, their intransigence at times borderline obscene, and the culture they would see dominant is inarticulate, graceless, and vapid.  Like their last president, W., they “don’t do nuance” and it shows.

I can deal with conservatism.  I can even sympathize with some of it and agree with certain aims.  We spend too much, often regulations seem arbitrary and ill-conceived, and the tax structure is a Rube Goldberg agglomeration of bad compromises, loopholes, and penalties badly in need of revision.

I cannot deal with humorless, puddle-deep, anti-intellectual, squeamish petulance masking as political philosophy.  The Tea Party candidate for congress in Texas who declared that armed insurrection in the case that the midterm elections don’t go their way is not “off the table” does not impress me as mature patriotism—which I’m sure it was designed to look like, the moronic conflation of the willingness to do violence with a twisted idea of “adult”—but as the posturing of a ten-year-old in a schoolyard showdown ala the Duke facing down the bad guy.

It is possible that these folks have been there all along, but when we had a Soviet Union and a global communist conspiracy to fix their attention we didn’t notice them so much.  Since the Soviet Union collapsed and the only thing responsible government should have done was go around cleaning up the messes left over by all the proxy wars we’d fought with them since the end of World War II, these folks have had really nothing to vent their conspiracy-obsessed, uptight, puritanical faux-patriotism on.  It took a while for them to build an empire of disinformation and fear-fostering on the multitude of petty gripes and cultural shifts they rigorously and doggedly label Liberal or Left, even when those labels have nothing to do with the subject being so condemned.  9/11 was a gift to them, finally something to fix their attention on and get people stirred up to a rousing level of hyper-adrenalized nationalism—the politics of aversion carried to almost virtuoso heights.

At the end of the day, in all honesty, I have to admit that I cannot join with these people not so much because I disagree with their politics—I do, but not completely, and I find much that could feed a useful dialogue in some of their saner examples—but because I dislike them as human beings.  I don’t know if their deep conservatism has made them such feckless mooks or if their culture blind puritanism has made them conservatives, but however it worked, the result is, to me, repulsive.  They seem compelled to slot people all the time, in this category or that; even when something goes the way they think it should, if it does so for the “wrong people” they’re unhappy; and they have no sense of irony.

Really, Glenn.  You got bumped out the number one spot on Amazon and it’s because of the Left?  Get a life.

Absurdity

Didn’t They Throw The Tea In The Harbor…?

Christine O’Donnell is one of those public figures that emerge from time to time that make any writer of fiction envious of reality.  Only a truly gifted writer could make someone like this up and then sell her as a plausible character.

At the heart of it, she is the problem with the Tea Party.

Here’s the thing I’ve never understood about the far right: fiscal responsibility is well and good and certainly we could do with a lot more—we could have used some for the last thirty years, certainly, a period during which Republicans (and by inference conservatives) have been largely in control of Congress—but how come is it we can’t seem to get candidates who are just about that without dragging all the social issue crap along with them?  I for one am tiring of having my alternatives clipped because some whack-a-do who may well have a sound fiscal policy in mind is also hell bent on “correcting” the lax, immoral, godless state of the country.

Now we get right down to the basic issues with Ms. O’Donnell: jacking off.  It’s destroying the country.  People are going blind from this, divorce rates are record high because selfish people are doing themselves at the expense of the shared relationship god intended they have.  Abstinence means all of it!  Tie those peoples’ hands behind their backs!  Put those genital safety belts on those young fellows who can’t leave johnny alone!  Why, if we root out the evil of self-pleasuring, we’ll be on the road to sound financial policy and security in no time!

Then of course there’s the usual slate of absurdities—she’s a young earth creationist.  (What, may I ask, does this have to do with fiscal conservatism?  Well, in her case, apparently, a difficulty with basic math…)  Naturally she opposes abortion and since she’s so down on pud pounding, we may presume she hasn’t much use for birth control of any kind, sex education, or possible female orgasm.

She is that perfect contradiction of modern far right womanhood—someone who probably thinks women’s place is in the home who is attempting to establish a powerful political career in order to legislate herself back into a state of chattel bondage.

And then there’s the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party that basically believes people ought to be free to choose their own lives without interference from anyone, especially the government, and eventually they will create the fissure in opposition to the Talibaptist contingent who want more than anything to tell people how to live decent lives.

It may do this country good to elect some of these folks into public office so we can see, really see how they perform.  How they make their philosophies mesh with what most Americans really want.

It’s a sad time for American politics.  We’re in a depression (why they insist on continuing to call it a recession is purist political cynicism), Obama has not miraculously fixed that, and people are pissed off.  They are in a “Throw the bastards out” mood, but unfortunately they have little to choose from.  The Republican Party, self-deluded that they may ride this tide back into power for “all the right reasons”, has so bankrupted its credibility right before, during, and since W that even conservatives must hold their noses to vote for them.  The Democrats have failed once again to define an American Ideology behind which the people can get and although right now they are probably on the right track fiscally, it will take time for their actions to result in anything fruitful.  (Didn’t Obama say all along it would take a long time?  Didn’t he say this would not be painless?  Didn’t he say a lot of work would have to be done before things started drifting back to something good?  Didn’t he?  But he’s been in office 19 months!  My god, just how long is a long time?)  They haven’t “fixed things” so people don’t like them either.

So there’s the Tea Party.  This is bottom of the barrel time.  These are the screeling, apocalyptic, neo-revisionist, founding-principled-though-illiterate gang of conspiracy theorist candidates who have gained momentum through sheer quality of nerve, who intend to save the country from our foreign-born Muslim president and the anarcho-socialist intellectual elite.  They are the ones who wish to remove all the interfering laws and restrictions that hamper the marrow-deep entrepreneurial American essence and allow people to make millions on their own or starve in the gutter with their families because while Darwin was wrong about biology he was right about economic policy and the weak ought to perish so the strong can dominate.  These are the folks who would free us to be dominated by Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and Big Insurance.  These are people who believe corporations are people, too, and back the American dream nurtured in the heart of every kid who wants to grow up to be a corporation.  Or an oligarch.

But first, they have to curtail masturbation.  The country has had enough of people jacking off.  Time to get them back to work.

Absurdity

Radio Markets and Discontent

Personal gripe time.  This is one of those instances where I believe The Market is a hydrocephalic moron and people who put their undying faith in get what they deserve.

Shortly after the 4th of July just past, a St. Louis radio station changed hands.  KFUO 99.1 FM had, for sixty-plus years, been our commercial classical station.  Before the first Gulf War, our local NPR affiliate, KWMU, was largely a classical music broadcaster, but after that first foray into Mid east adventurism they became pretty much All Talk All Day.  Mind you, I like some of what they offer—Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, Diane Rheem—but I am a lover of music.  My youth, in regards to radio, was all about music.  I cannot tolerate most of Talk Radio, especially the right wing stuff, but I’m not overly fond of the left wing blatherings, either.  Give me a good solid news show twice a day and then fill the airwaves with music.

This has become a subject of nostalgia for me, because for the most part the music scene on radio has devolved into mind-numbing banality and repetition.  Catering to The Market has the net result of leavening out at the lowest common denominator, so instead of fascinating, new, or just first-rate music, we get the cuts that will appeal to the greatest number of whatever demographic a given station thinks it’s playing to.

After KWMU went All Talk, little by little I began listening to KFUO.  They did not do as good a job, overall, as KWMU—I am a firm believer in airing complete works, so when I am offered A Movement of a symphony or what have you I am turned off; I want the whole damn thing or don’t bother (this is also true of other genres as well: I once got into a shouting match with a DJ over his insistence of playing the three-minute version of an Emerson, Lake & Palmer track that, in its fullness, ran to twelve minutes, and he demanded to know who wanted to listen to all that synthesizer soloing, to which I replied “people who like ELP, you moron!”  Needless to say, I lost that one, but I resent the whole assumption that the attention span of people will never exceed five minutes—if you assume that and that’s all you give them, you train them to have short attention spans)—but it was classical music, and I find myself, aging that I am, more and more indulging in that genre (if genre it is) out of sheer boredom and impatience with most other forms.  At least, on the radio.

So KFUO became my car station.  (At home I listen to albums.  I would eliminate DJs and commercials if I could.  Playing my own discs, I can.)

Due to the demands of The Market, the impatience of shareholders, etc etc, management at KFUO—the Lutheran Church, basically—sold the station.  It is now Joy 99, playing contemporary Christian pop…stuff.

I’ve attempted to listen to some of it, but I find it unremittingly boring.  And I am pissed.  Where can I now go on the radio to get classical music?  Well, KWMU has taken advantage of the new high definition broadcast tech to split itself into multiple channels and has one dedicated to classical music.  But I can’t get that in the car.  Can’t get it at home on my stereo, either, unless I buy new equipment, which is a source of resentment as well.  We live in an age where if one does not have the latest, most up-to-date Thingie, at a cost of X hundred dollars per widget, one cannot partake of the goodies available—and the media changes often enough that buying new Thingies is now every couple, three years.

Pardon my expression—Fuck That!  This is the Microsoft model taken to extremes.  It is a form of class division, based on tech-savvy and money.  You don’t have to pass laws to keep the so-called Unwashed out of the Club, you just have to make sure they can’t afford the newest Thingie.

Ahem.  Excuse me, that was paranoid of me.  I have no reason to believe this is intentional.  This is The Market, in all its lobotomized asininity.

Back for a moment to the new KFUO.  It is boring.  (I am beginning to recognize a pattern.  Christian pop sounds somewhat-to-mainly Country.  The southern lilt to the vocals, the excessively forced emotional warbling, twisting notes through laryngeal gymnastics for no reason other than to make use of a single chord for a few moments longer.  Never mind the lyrics—I didn’t have a problem with groups like Creed, at least not initially: the music was interesting, the lyrics showed a modicum of ingenuity—just the American Idol approach to hyped emotionalism as substitute for actual content.  But I really cannot abide dull music.  Even when, initially, this stuff sounds like they’re getting down with some passion, it’s really just arrangement and playing with the compression.  The simplest chords, the over-reliance on melody—almost always in major keys—and the de-emphasizing of anything that might distract from the primary message of the lyric content.  Now, KFUO, having been a Lutheran station, played a great deal of sacred music.  Most of which was GLORIOUS.  Beautiful, sonorous, majestic, interesting!  Composed by musicians who saw no reason to muffle their strengths, but put what they had into such compositions because the music itself was a form of worship, an offering to what they believed, honest and unhampered passion.  Modern Christian rock seems to do everything it can to apologize for being rock.  Of course, there’s a reason for this, since a good deal of what these folks espouse is a typical American attitude that sensuality is an enemy to faith, and let’s face it, rock is all about sensuality.  So, too, is jazz, perhaps even more so, which may be why one hears almost no Christian jazz.)  Boring is inexcusable, I don’t care what cause it is in the name of.

Somehow some one or more “consultant” companies told the new owners that this will attract a larger market share than what KFUO had been doing.  For all I know, they’re right.  I have little faith in the taste of the masses, as a mass.  Most of the people I have ever known as casual acquaintances have exhibited appalling taste in the arts.  You have to be aware to be sensitive to nuance, to passion, to genuine merit, and it seems that most people move through life barely conscious of their surroundings.

(I once had the most frustrating interchange with a woman at a party who kept complaining that everything I was putting on the stereo was “depressing.”  Her word.  Depressing.  What was I playing?  Flim and the BBs, Grover Washington, McCoy Tyner, things like that.  I couldn’t figure it out until she demanded, somewhat drunkenly,”Where’s the singing?“  Unless there was singing, it was depressing.  Of course, by singing she didn’t mean opera, she meant anything she could sing along to.  This was more music as sport than art.)

So after a couple of weeks of listening the all this strained pseudo-music sung by earnest C & W types against the most singularly undifferentiated backgrounds, I am officially peeved.    I’d like my classical music back, please.  I don’t care about demographics.  There are dozens of other stations where one can hear similarly banal  excrescence, albeit possibly without the juvenile nonsense worship lyrics.  KFUO served an audience that is now not served at all, and I can’t help wondering if this is at least partly propagandistic.  That this is as much an effort to force a single voice onto the airwaves, driving out the specialist, minority voices, as it is to maximize returns on investment.

Of course, that would be a bit paranoid, wouldn’t it?

Except that over forty years of listening to radio I can’t help but notice that every instance of a station or a show that reached a bit higher, took a chance on quality, played the unexpected or occasionally controversial—all those stations were, one by one, taken over and dragged back down into the stew pot of “popular taste” at expense of anything genuinely challenging or interesting.  Regardless of genre.  Mediocrity is the hallmark of the largest market share.

Have a good weekend.