eye of the storm

i just think wall-to-wall weeks-long billy mays coverage is overboard. yes, billy mays was immensely talented. yes, he gave his gift of showmanship to an entire generation. ok, ok, probably the greatest entertainer since sarah bernhardt or al jolson or john wilkes booth or samuel johnson. still, a nationally-broadcast memorial service at staples center? endless repeating videos of the rehearsals for his last infomercial? please.

here's how not to do a "cultural context" piece. if you want the whole atmosphere of an era in 700 words, i'd go with...david brooks. here we just throw in a bunch of things in juxtaposition - the evil reagan and deregulation, crack, hip hop, and michael jackson sexually abusing children - and hope that the reader will fill in the connections or something. maybe this says "the eighties sucked" (though gangsta rap is basically a phenomena of the clinton period). now say we thought our own era sucked. well, we could just go "britney, meth, guantanamo, palin, billy mays" or whatever we don't like, i suppose. anyway, the first thing you should ask is: let's say the eighties were full of corporate greed, jingoism, crack, sexism, etc: then we have michael making googoo eyes at emanuel lewis: does that sum the whole thing up? why? how? really? bob. you've got to think through the connections somehow.

i always love this sort of idea: obama: honduras coup illegal. illegal! these people seem a bit confused about what law is. no doubt, according to the former government, it was illegal to overthrow the former government. but i'm betting the new government has legalized their own coup. but on the other hand, why bother? or maybe it's against international law to overthrow your government? what's the origin of the governments who ratified such a law? at any rate: why not cruel, counter-productive, oppressive, vicious etc? 'illegal' is as weak and irrelevant as it is conceptually confused.

i think eventually people might realize that ivy league law schools of today - which produce our entire leadership class - are more or less like the medieval university of paris or worse: an endless scholastic discourse, based on a series of false or perhaps literally meaningless postulates: infinite refinements, the foundation of which is an incoherent ontology: a gigantic edifice based on absolutely nothing. a noble, touching testament to human perversity and industry, but an idiotic detour into arbitrary incoherent superstition.

i'm saying this seriously and literally. our understanding of law is full-bore theology; our law schools are seminaries; our government is a theocracy. it worships a being it can't even describe coherently, interpreting its will in whatever way serves its actual human purposes. it enthralls and flummoxes you with its esoteric texts and incomprehensible ceremonial mumbo-jumbo. it runs you through a ritual cycle and tests your loyalty. it launches crusades or inquisitions. and it makes no sense.

first, you invent it. then you declare it to be the ultimate external reality and power. and then you spend the next x centuries interpreting its will. a century or two after it's over, people can't even enter far enough into the system to understand how anyone could ever have believed it, or what it means to believe it. one can still read the texts, but one cannot actually know what such people believed; their fantasy world is dead.

there is a story to tell of our law schools and the transition from catholic theology to our theology. aquinas essentially replaced the active, arbitrary intervention of god with the idea of natural law: god's will expressed in the nature of his creatures. the supreme being is manifest in the universe as law: the origin of the modern shift to a scientistic conception.legalistic protestantism and its political theory - in locke, or madison, say - avails itself of these conceptions: one word for it might later be "deism." if obama declares a coup to be "illegal," he is evidently appealing to precisely an aquinas conception.

but it's the commonalities of the kingsdom of god and the rule of law i want to emphasize. "the law" is not a concrete object: it's an abstract or spiritual object. but, amazingly, it has a will and is active in moving around physical objects. "it" rules. like protestantism, its religion is scripture-heavy, and is expressed above all in texts. like catholicism it is an instrument wherewith some people tell other people what to do or articulate their lives, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

its will is not capricious, but (supposedly) rational and universally valid, like the "physical laws" of the universe: it's not emotional, like a pagan or jewish-type god. it's an enlightenment god. still, it does not, it cannot exist in an actual universe. we are ruled by human beings, because abstract objects exercise no authority and have no physical effects.

could better cpr have saved michael jackson? nothing could have saved michael jackson. he'd already had far too many comebacks. like britney, he was too good, too pure, for this world.

truly the class of 1958 seems to be checking out en masse. kind of disconcerting. say so long to iz the wiz.

 

iz was famous for a couple of things. first off: quantity over quality. he was no dondi or zephyr or futura artistically, but he was everywhere. that was central to the graff idea circa 1980. he "went over" people, taking special pleasure in ruining your masterpiece: he wanted graff to be a crime, not an art. he was the definition of kinging lines and going all-city. he's important in representing in pure form a particular idea about what graff is and what it means. he was the darth vader of the classic documentary style wars.

no way! billy mays is dead? geez, i loved billy mays. should have been on my list of artists better than michael. i'm never going to buy anything, ever again.

here's the basic problem with...all political positions, more or less. let's say that you have some really good ideas about how the future should be. and let's leave out of consideration your fallibility, and just stipulate that these are, really, good ideas. it's a further assertion, and does not follow trivially, that you should seize and wield political power sufficient to realize these goals. and whether the idea with all the mechanisms needed to enforce it is still a good idea is an open question. education is good and important, and is basically to be articulated in a no child left behind kind of way. this is wrong. but say it was obviously right. now would it follow that you should not allow high school dropouts to drive? or that you should triple taxes and invest them in schools? or that you should remove truants from their families? well, no. not at all: a thousand other considerations, policies, values, budgets are engaged.

now partly this is a matter of figuring out what the priorities are among competing agendas, or the effectiveness or cost/benefit or unforeseen consequences, of a particular policy. but it also raises  fundamental matters of value: to what extent does implementing this idea compromise freedom or whatever else you might value? what does it imply about power relations in the culture? if you thought that essentially no policy passes this test - that the power required to implement an idea was never sufficiently justified by the outcome, then you'd be an anarchist. for example, since every implementation of every policy legitimates power inequalities and expands them, you might think no political program could be justified.

but it's also a basic problem within mainstream politics: you just nod along going: health care, energy independence, environment, education. but what resources are necessary and to what extent are these in competition? and what powers are you consituting and what might be done with them in...the palin administration?

the casual totalitarianism of the technocrat:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

let me briefly enumerate some of the ways this is wrong. first of all, it does not follow from the fact that you didn't finish high school that you can barely add. friedman appears to believe that the only way to find out anything is in an institution. and of course it doesn't follow from the fact that you can barely add that you don't drive well.  second, driving is an embodied skill, not measurable by the sats, though the idea that anything of human value might not be standardized testable is of course profoundly alien to an intelligence of friedman's caliber. but that's of course not the point: the point for friedman is how, by hedging people's lives around with police power, we can manufacture the sort of people he thinks ought to exist. third, this is a flat redoubling of class divisions, a way to make poverty or family/neighborhood problems ever more endemic, to just literally stick people where they are like a roach motel. just consider the way a regulation like that would differentially effect black people, or poor people, or latinos, etc. fourth, it just casually assumes that extreme limitations on basic freedoms - such as mobility - can legitimately be imposed unilaterally by state authorities. in other words, it gives you a perfect view of a certain kind of american liberalism, a mind-numbing totalitarian rational standardization of the species. we'd be far better served by...i don't know, a shiite theocracy.

notice that this little brownshirt moment is followed by a series of cliches to which it is entirely irrelevant; it's just there to establish the forward-looking totalitarian bona fides, so that when we go on to say "innovate!" no one can misunderstand what the mechanism of innovation is going to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY-rPDwzM9M

here's a piece on michael jackson, prince, and madonna from say 2005.

and here's an assessment of the career of michael jackson.
ok most of this will be obvious, more or less. jackson was an excellent singer and a great dancer. he was not an independent artist, in the sense that everything depended on the writing and production of others. the jackson five were delightful; he was good in the disco era; he was good circa thriller, with a great stage act; but in no case was he original or innovative. his talent was quite the opposite of that: he combined existing elements and crafted the product extremely well: the first j5 album (a sweet synthesis of motown and bubblegum which completely dominated my mostly-black junior high circa 1971) and thriller were the only moments he really sounded extremely fresh, but surely the motown folk and quincy jones get a lot of the credit. thriller was important in establishing a new basic pop: post-disco/funk, and an alternative to "new wave." partly it was a return to pop-soul; partly it was an incorporation of the mainstream rock of the time.

the overwhelming moment came because you couldn't sell enough funk or hip hop to white people; thriller embodied a racial synthesis, even a kind of reconciliation. (eventually he became some kind of racial monster, an argument for the wholesomeness of existing racial identities.) michael jackson made good or at least elaborate and memorable videos (they're unwatchable now), which right at that moment became the key.

it was paradigm pop because it didn't instantiate any other particular genre: it was syncretic, masterfully so. and it was the occasion of a great coalescing of audiences or stampede of lemmings, depending on your mood. one reason to mourn jackson's passing is that thriller was a moment of cultural solidarity: one of the last times the whole culture was listening to the same thing, more or less. if jackson had not made thriller, his death would have been merely a lead obit, like bo diddley's, say. but i have to say that the decentralization or balkanization of pop music is a good thing, overall, and that mass art necessarily is fundamentally uninteresting.

the visuals were...idiotic: plastic sequined militariana and processed hair, race change surgery, a crust or bark of make-up, masks, etc. his tastelessness in every dimension was extreme. extraordinary. pitiful. cf. "neverland." it would be surprising if someone whose taste was that appalling could make really good music; on what principles is he going to select repertoire etc? and he made a lot of extremely boring or ridiculous music: essentially a lot of thriller and everything thereafter, more or less. but also before: play "ben." now play it again. now frisbee the thing into the ether. there wasn't a single really good moment after the early 80s, and there was a lot of incredibly cliched or self-indulgent horseshit.

he was a study in human misery for decades: continuously disintegrating into mental illness, addiction,  sexual strangeness, conspicuous continual tastelessness, extreme embarrassing stupidity, a world of delusion: the worst case of celebrity implosion since elvis. or, really, the worst of all times. it seemed to last forever. you kept waiting for some kind of redemptive moment or a moment of perspective or self-reflection, waiting for him to talk to the man in the mirror. or at any rate to make a decent album. even if he had, i wouldn't have bought it (well i never bought any of his albums; no need to; the question was how to avoid his music). to be honest, i don't think it was about to happen, as everyone seems to be asserting; i don't think it was going to ever happen. but i guess we don't know. it's not hard to predict the toxicology: opiates, anti-depressants, ambien, and three things you didn't know existed.

the king of pop, artist of the century, etc.: in my view he compares unfavorably to dozens of actually important musicians: louis armstrong, or jimi hendrix, or janis joplin, or muddy waters, or sonny boy williamson, or john coltrane, or miles davis, or bessie smith, or blind lemon jefferson, or blind willie mctell, or robert johnson, or hank williams, or tammy wynette, or merle haggard, or johnny cash, or patsy cline, or george jones, or the rolling stones, or professor longhair, or john prine, or the pretenders, or blondie, or bob marley, or lee perry, or king tubby, or augustus pablo, or toots and the maytals, or fats domino, or prince, or smokey robinson, or martha reeves and the vandellas, or aretha franklin, or otis redding, or wilson pickett, or al green, or the dixie hummingbirds, or james cleveland, or james brown, or thomas dorsey, or parliament-funkadelic, or the allman brothers, or the louvin brothers, or lotte lenya, or sarah vaughn, or bonnie raitt, or the bar-kays, or dave brubek, or the grateful dead, or led zep, or ac/dc, or jerry lee lewis, or the temptations, or the four tops, or jimmie rogers, or bob wills and the texas playboys, or sam cooke, or billie holiday, or howlin wolf, or little richard, or chuck berry, or bo diddley, or mahalia jackson, or shirley ceasar, or snoop dogg, or grandmaster flash, or public enemy, or dre, or wu-tang clan, or biggie, or eminem, or buck owens, or bill monroe, or ella fitzgerald, or benny goodman, or duke ellington, or b.b. king, or albert king, or freddy king, or otis rush, or magic sam, or loretta lynn, or waylon jennings, or the skatalites, or fela kuti, or creedence, or van morrison, or elvis costello, or count basie, or ornette coleman, or django reinhardt, or charlie christian, or charlie parker, or ma rainey, or elmore james, or lucinda williams, or bobby bland, or little walter, or brian wilson, or the ramones, or the dead kennedys, or minor threat, or nirvana, or the white stripes, or chet atkins, or dwight yoakam, or the seldom scene, or flatt and scruggs, or the stanley brothers, or les paul, or the clash, or jelly roll morton, or immortal technique, or woody guthrie, etc. leaving aside composition, production, or instrumental vituosity, all of these are, like mj,  recording artists, and even on that basis, with regard to many of them (such as hendrix, armstrong, hank williams, marley, coltrane, monroe, ellington, waters) mentioning jackson in the same breath would be madness. i think of him more like...aly and aj. nothing wrong with that - aly and aj are excellent pop artists - but the 48 hours of continuous programming is just a misunderstanding.

hoothe bad?

let me go another way, for a second, on sanford and ensign. it is very easy to take a hyper-christian who, you know, turns out to be gay, or an adulterer, etc etc and say he's a hypocrite, or that his religious professions, or even attempts to legislate some set of religious values, are simply self-righteous dishonesty. it's possible, especially in the context of politics, that someone's religious commitments are merely insincere: politics is a constant temptation to manufacture a false self. but on the other hand, the situation is likely to be far more complicated, and to engage a fundamental human dilemma.

we are non-ideal creatures with ideal aspirations. our moral principles are pristine. our actual lives and personalities are a mess. everyone with a set of moral ideals comes up short of these ideals. and the force of the ideal itself is embodied in the self-laceration that ensues. even the most basic transgression/mistake-and-apology displays this structure.

now you really don't want to play this out in public, which is why you should not be a politician. the drama is internal, and it is polluted by an audience, which presents a constant temptation to simulation. on the other hand the public spectacle of this drama is weirdly compelling, because you already know what it's like; something deeply familiar and important is being enacted, or represented.

and failure to achieve the perfection to which you aspire or to which you urge others to aspire is not itself hypocrisy. on the other hand, manufacturing a false perfect self to enact on the public stage is hypocrisy. on the third, we obviously demand and reward that.

even if you can't relate to the religious source or form of the principles of an ensign or a sanford, much less to the public spectacle of it all, you should be able to connect to the basic dilemma: aspiration and failure: the most touching thing about us, and the route to whatever decency we ever do achieve.

this is a disturbing thing to say about someone who was born the same year as i was, but michael jackson lived too long.

well, that's right. you wonder how clarence thomas is going to dissent. just way into tyranny, i suppose, and passing it on as a legacy to our children.

arresting professors? ok. now i'm ticked off. what am i gonna do about it, pda? get outta my way: i'm gonna blog, bitch.

sometimes, apologies are just stupid, or are actually wrong. i don't think that mark sanford regretted his decisions, you know, the day before yesterday, when he was in the process of screwing miss argentina again. but he regretted them three seconds after getting caught. he let down his wife, his children, his state, etc...by getting caught. you could apologize before getting caught: that would carry with it a presumption of sincerity. or you could get caught, and then engage in a long deep process of reflection, transformation, and exploratory regret. but don't fly home from your date and apologize: that's horseshit.

now it seems obvious that a lot of guys who can't play the guitar go into politics to get laid. that is, you know, morally unfortunate. really you might blame the women who make this strategy successful, but of course blaming women for anything would be wrong. but engaging in the noble self-sacrificing career of public service in order to get laid is not nearly as morally unfortunate as are these apologies, for which these public servants ought to be pistol-whipped by rabid munchkins.

thomas friedman is an excellent practitioner of a basic art of the pundit and politician: take whatever might be happening now and feed it into your a priori positions: everything is an argument for whatever: in this case, the iranian rebellion is an argument for energy independence, the green economy of the 400th century, or whatever friedman and al gore are cooking up for our bright-with-promise superbureaucratic, extremely regulated future. now you might think that if everyone stopped buying oil from iran, then the ayatollahs would go gently into that good night. but perhaps they'd just crack down harder. if we really wanted to support the iranian people, friedman sagely points out, we'd work on making their economy collapse. at any rate the price of oil is half what it was a year ago, and the iranian economy has, in fact, tanked.

however, the iranians are rebelling right now, whereas the green economy of the 400th century will be achieved in the 400th century. now you could drop a $1 a gallon new tax on oil (well, no you couldn't, because congress would refuse, not being interested in hanging themselves publicly.). you could, if you had unilateral total sway, pass it in a matter of months. and you could send us into another recessive spiral and end up with a perpetual republican government. but if you think that taking such steps is going to help the rebels in tehran next weekend, you're just being silly and insincere. if it's leverage you want, start buying all your oil from iran at double the current price. then in a year or two, you'll have them over a barrel, as it were. if they don't need your business, where is the leverage coming from?

hard not to see that this is obama's basic strategy (well, it's everyone's, even mine). economic crisis=gov health care, his favorite education initiatives or whatever. in other words, anything is a good enough reason to do what you want to do. if it was bush, of course, an economic crisis would be a good reason to cut taxes or or encourage oil drilling in alaska or...you know, torture people. the iranian rebellion would be a neat confirmation of supply-side economics, the godhead of jesus, and various weapons systems.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

exhibit b: russia. before energy prices skyrocketed, putin started imposing a repressive, militaristic regime. when they skyrocketed, he continued. when they dropped, he redoubled his efforts. in the green economy of the 400th century, he'll be doing the same, because vlad putin is immortal.

more brutal bad news from here in small-town pa:

Wet, windy weather makes balloon fest iffy

exactly. the notion that the government of france should be able to tell people how to dress can only be the result of some kind of fundamental confusion.

let's just say that it wouldn't be shocking to find out that mark sanford has an argentine girlfriend. and a self-destructive streak.

trying to protest in the streets is good. but if i were, let's say, a young person in tehran today sympathetic to the opposition, i'd be thinking in terms of urban guerilla actions, sabotage, sniper work/molotov cocktails on the paramilitaries, etc. these fuckheads are killing young women in the streets etc. time to fuck some shit up. the authorities are begging for actual physical resistance. you'd be surprised what a little knot of pissed-off teenage boys can do in their own city if they can stop to think and plan.

i don't think you're going to have a soft/eastern-europe-style revolution, because i don't think that the religious hierarchy is going to suddenly realize that they have no will or moral claim.