cheese it, the cops!

a simple request

like keith alexander, i too have a request for the world's hackers: bring the nsa to its knees; destroy it entirely, leaving nothing but a smoking fucking hole where the information used to be; make keith alexander whine like a little bitch and beg for mercy.

"We stand for freedom,” Alexander told the crowd in a vast ballroom at Caesars Palace. 

if you really stand for freedom, keith, then slit your wrists, turn on the gas and stick your head in the oven, and shoot yourself. that would be a heroic blow for liberty. he made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. i won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me.

 

Seriously, everybody was stupid...

In which CrusaderAXE comes to terms with the overwhelming existential truth of the age: Not only are we all bozos on this bus, the bus has a flat tire, broken axle, seized engine. (Excellent new Those Darlins

song at the link.) 

people funny boy

whatever they do to bradley manning, i want to hear his voice. i like assange's statement: revealing important information to the public cannot be espionage. indeed, it is the opposite of espionage. by the way, of course, if espionage is illegal then the us government has a variety of huge bureaucracies entirely devoted to felonious activity. well, that's the very essence of state power, its precise center, its central reality: we exempt ourselves from the rules we impose on you. there are huge sprawling ministries of killing people, taking people's stuff without their permission, and so on and on. try to remember this the next time someone is going all 'rule of law,' etc. it seems impossible, but maybe they believe that they believe it. but they show they don't all day every day on a monumental gigantical scale. this is a very good way to define the state = those exempted from the rules they impose on others, or, institutionalized hypocrisy. literally it's a caste system in every case. people funny boy.

 

that baby crying is a lot of people's candidate for the first sample. probably not, but in this case you can draw a direct line to dub, dj, and hip hop, so it makes sense.

podiatry and individuality

bringing the last couple of posts into proximity, the only alternative to individualism (which i mean in the sense daniel gives, as respect for each person's autonomy and value and dissent from majority opinion) is, precisely, forced collectivization. the only opposite i can think of to individualism is collectivism. both are both ontological theories of personhood and political programs. as an ontological theory, collectivism says that we (whomever that is at a given time and place: a class/race/nation/gender/everybody) are really not distinct; we are one thing, one will, one consciousness, one taste, etc. then they demonstrate extremely concretely that they know that's bullshit: they will force each person to nod along with a gun to her head. it's the most ridiculous position ever: even its most extreme proponents don't believe it at all.

now on the other hand, we really are connected in infinitely many ways, and we really do share languages, for example, and people can share the same values and so on. but dissent emerging from a single human body is always possible and is continuously necessary. anyway, if you don't believe in individualism i would try this test: take the person you are closest to in the world, or select at random someone in your race, nation, gender, social class, or whatever you think is the locus of collective consciousness. tell that person to sit at home. now, sometime in the next twenty-four hours, you tell him, you at your place will drop a bowling ball on your own foot. no doubt he will feel your pain, for the locus of cosciousness is collective. so get him to tell you exactly when it happened. then tell him to get his foot treated and see whether you feel better.

helping everyone, and no one at all

i just wish 'individualism' wasn't used pejoratively to mean greed and self-seeking. actually, against francis, i think it is big social coalitions, corporate and state, which create chronic structural inequalities. no one does that alone any more than they can transform the world alone or whatever it is you have in mind. also i would challenge francis to help 'the poor' without actually helping any individual.

genocide tourism

well, i am in krakow. an amazingly lovely city, with astonishing medieval and after architecture, great street life, etc. i have never felt so jewish as when i was contemplating this journey, however. and it strikes me that this whole region - which includes auschwitz, the schindler factory, and so on - is dependent on holocaust tourism. the jewish quarter, which i just walked in the surprisingly blistering heat, was crowded; tours everywhere.

the holocaust sucked for some folks, of course, but it has turned out to be quite the cash cow. perhaps this is what hitler had in mind in the long run: an economic development plan for a united europe. i wonder if this is true in other genocides: take the killing fields tour; hey let's go visit some mass graves; here's the forced collectivization of agriculture conference center and golf course. alright there are very good reasons for this and we should never forget, etc. (as a matter of fact i live 15 miles from gettysburg, where it seemed like the whole nation gathered a few weeks ago.)

on the other hand the tourists look the same as anywhere: germans and americans and japanese snapping pictures and buying holocaust souvenirs. up in the square or in the antique shops, there is much much antique nazi and soviet merchandise: well, we're all nostalgic for non-squishy totalitarianism, when someone would really tell you what to do, even if it was just die.

now on the other hand, the anarchy 'a' is ubiquitous, indicating that there are people here who might actually have drawn the obvious conclusion from this deranged statist history.

 

robert reich in a crisis of self-reflection

this, from robert reich, is horseshit.

 

The difference has to do with the kind of personalities the two parties attract. People who respect authority, follow orders, want clear answers, obey commands, and prefer precise organization and control, tend to gravitate toward Republicans.

On the other hand, people who don't much like authority, recoil from orders, don't believe in clear answers, often disobey commands, and prefer things a bit undefined, tend to gravitate to the Democrats.

In short, the Republican Party is the party of the authoritarian personality; the Democratic Party is the party of the anti-authoritarian personality.

if surveys show that dems consider themselves anti-authoritarians, then they show at the same moment that dems are incredibly self-deluded, to the point that they have no idea what they are advocating or why. so, state power rests on, consists of, coercive authority. dems are extreme enthusiasts for state power: every single problem has a solution involving increased bureaucracy, regulation, dependency, taxation, surveillance, and so on. people whose entire program just is mere authoritiarianism and who believe of themselves that they are anti-authoritarian need to shut up for a few decades and reflect on themselves.

Howdy Neighbor Howdy...

 

In which Crusader AXE insults Vanderbilt Divinity School, the Academy of Country Music, and people who don't get country music while insulting the current gang of people supposedly singing it...and confesses dreaming of a Nudie suit and talking about them without showing a picture or mentioning Porter Waggoner, due probably to penis envy. (Long before Randy Johnson, Porter was known around Nashville as the"Big Unit" and it had nothing to do with his slider/fastball combination.)

  

the opposite of anthony weiner

one discovery on my latest foray into bluegrass/country gospel is the very excellent marshall family. i don't know much about them, actually, except that they were taken up by ralph stanley in the 70s. ohio, with kentucky origins (?). well the recordings they made in the 70s are remarkable; what's available now is two discs selecting five or six; i would buy them all if i could find them.

judy marshall's singing is somewhere in a transition between dolly and alison krauss; really very pure and seemingly naive and sincere and lovely. her brothers practically whisper their harmonies, and at least one of them sounds like keith whitley (check out the really paradigmatic vocal performance on 'the prettiest flowers,' below); he was probably older than whitley, though, and it shows that this style of country singing goes well back and up into the hills. on the other hand, it just might actually be whitley. the clawhammer banjo and mandolin work also suggest a deep origin, no doubt owing to 'pop' marshall. 

one great thing about some forms of gospel music: it is sung completely without ego, in an act of self-abandonment or self-negation. i think this can be amazingly moving, a kind of cure for human self-enclosure. (my other frequently-used examples of this sort of thing are augustus pablo's melodica hymns to jah.) the marshall family really expresses that with great intensity on every cut.

the 'family' as a band is a good american tradition into the early 19th century (hutchinsons, e.g.), especially in gospel. probably the biggest act was the lewis family. an excellent later-blooming version is the cox family, whose cause krauss took up in the early 90s.

 

 

 

 

But, I digress for an entire column...

 I actually started this about the Amnesty International Campaign to free Pussy Riot, but digressed...part II which will be about religon and Pussy Riot and the silliness underlies Putin's version of the Surveillance/Big Brother state will be tomorrow or the next day...tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. 

 

Post Script

I also posted this at Veterans Today which was interesting when I looked at the initial comments. I recommend visiting that site and reading the comments. I responded  perhaps more gently than I should but when the comments indicated that I was prostituting myself for the Jewish-Communist-Lezbo conspiracy to pollute the precious body fluids of true Christian Americans, I thought I'd take the high ground. Your comments are welcome.

I am proud, proud I say, to prostitute myself in the service of the Lezbo-Jewish-Commie-Irish-American-Sein Fein-Marching Band and Chowder Society. In fact, I think I'll have T-shirts made. See if I can get some in Staid Francais Rugby colors. (Black and Pink...mainly Pink.)

Enjoy. More to come -- http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/07/23/theocratic-totalitarianism-in-the-new-russia-or-putinesque-is-not-a-style-of-spaghetti/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKtEJOsz9k 

(This is a bribe. Complete Dylan Concert with the Band...)

 

etymology

in the oed, the earliest citation of the use of the terms 'left' and 'right' in the political-spectrum sense are in carlyle's french revolution (1837), and one supposes that the use of the concepts or this way of conceptualizing politics is somewhat earlier in france and is associated with interpretations of the 1789 revolution and its aftermaths. it does not appear in american politics, i believe, until the late 19th century; it is completely irrelevant to the american political spectrum of the early and mid- 19th century, in which the dissident wing was christian, individualist, etc. now, of course, the question of when the terms became commonplace is not the same as when the conceptuality or something like it came into being, and you could no doubt read medieval politics through left-right spectacles. you really, really shouldn't, and you should indeed jetison the whole thing imediately from your thinking.

we need a cashional nonversation

alright, some remarks on trayvon, george, barack, and the post-racial era, if any. the zimmerman case seemed to me somewhere between rodney king and casey anthony: both a discomfiting racial emblem and a 24-hour murder-media circus. i'm not sure, in a way, how seriously to take it. right, a kid is dead. most dead kids don't get months of non-stop coverage and, again, to say that the nsa/snowden thing is a much more important and also morally far clearer case, is to state the obvious, i believe.

obama seemed, as he was making that statement friday, grim and sad. now, one could view the case, or certainly the response to it, as a demonstration that we are very far from a post-racial society, which is true: look at things like income levels, incarceration rates, and so on. but it also shows the reality, which has always been central if less obvious, and which is constantly increasing, of the fluidity of race, its ambiguity, which rests in part on its status as a social construction, more or less shifting as fast as society as a whole. but one thing a post-racial society would be is a society in which everyone's identity is ambiguous, chaotic, or ultimately unspecifiable. that is certainly true of zimmerman and obama, for example.

now, on the one hand, a 'post-racial' society is what almost everyone wants; it would signal the end of 'our long national nightmare' etc. on the other hand: everyone, at least everyone in my generation and its predecessors, has a stake in the racial system they grew up in. these stakes are tremendously complicated, even for white people. so, one such stake is white privilege. another is white fascination with african-american culture and its incalculable contribution to world arts, for example (which is far more significant than the contribution of white americans). a post-racial society could not have given us hip hop, for example, even if hip hop is getting pretty post-racial now.

one problem with white people going around saying that race is over is that it ignores and even seems to double down on unconscious racism; white people would like to believe it's over, thus erasing a burden of guilt, but believing that even helps the structural inequalities to persist or get worse. so, you know, who cares how many black people are in prison or how many black senators there are? there's no such thing as race anyway. but also: any white person who ever sincerely endorsed racial equality was wanting a post-racial society, and probably thought that black folks wanted it too.

no doubt they do, but again only fitfully. african-american culture is an amazingly rich thing; it should be a symbol throughout the world for the transcendence of suffering, or the transformation of oppression into creativity, or the thousands of ways people can survive and resist and transcend subordination. but you can't have that without the subordination, and i think we might with some care point out that a post-racial society could not have this culture in it, really except as a museum. from a certain point of view, 'post-racial' means the end of racialized cultures. you can't have a douglass, a dubois, a booker washington, a king, a malcolm in a post-racial society. a post-racial society in some ways realizes the vision of those people. it also precludes them, makes them into decisively historical figures rather than ones it makes sense to really read and emulate, say.

indeed, you can't have american culture as a whole as we have understood it without race. if race is the great theme/burden of america, as many have asserted, then a post-racial society is a post-american society.

no doubt jesse jackson is right to say that the idea that we live in a post-racial society is wildly premature. on the other hand, think about the stake that jesse has in a racialized society: he has spent his life fighting it, but for that reason among others, his life is inconceivable without it; he has an infinite stake in the system he has fought to overcome. you cannot have the identity of a fighter for racial justice - as jackson or sharpton have regarded themselves through their whole adult lives - in a post-racial society, and frankly i don't think they would acknowledge that we had reached such a point even if we had, and even though that would in some sense be their very own victory. i don't think this is unique: to the extent that race is winding down, we all have something to mourn, for this has been absolutely central to our cultures, our identities, our self-understandings and understandings of others, our social arrangements, our arts, and so on.

actually to lose race as a category really would be lose all kinds of things that have been amazingly great as well as so many horrors. but i do think we'd have to acknowledge the loss if we were actually to get post-racial. 

this is not to say that getting to a post-racial condition is equivalent to the assimilation of african-american to white culture or something; everything is getting more complicated and the future will have elements of everything. i think we suffer in part from our attempts to understand the whole thing or get a grip on it; we're always imposing a new simplistic taxonomy or explanation that's false on the ground. let it flow, baby.

No links because none needed

Ok, I admit that I can be a sucker for a lot of things. But, water and spray and rivers and such aren't usually a big thing with me. Well, hell -- if the world's oceans actually just rolled off the edge of the world in the pre-Columbus cosmology, this view of Niagara Falls is what it might look like.  This amateur use of technology and art is the sort of thing that I suspect gets Ms. Wolfe and our other colleagues over at the SASM Institute all flustered, as it should. As it should. Absolutely spellbinding, although the music could be a bit less blah...Clannad must have something that would be a better fit. 

 

Called this piece "Perhaps a reason to forgive if she exists which she doesn't but still..." at the Defeatists. Enough said...

more zim

so, compare zimmerman to rodney king, for example. the acquittal there was ridiculous, and everyone was in a position to reach a reasonable position on that; you could see the damn video. it was directly police against citizen, and you could establish a horrendous racist history in the lapd. now, that is a pretty darn clear and important symbol of central racial realities, even though in every case where you read actual events as sheer symbols, you'll be losing a lot of important particularities etc. but in this case, we don't realy know what happened (if you think you do, that's a bad sign; you'll just kind of make shit up; you don't need facts because you've got the little repertoire of stories all ready to go). zimmerman's race is highly ambiguous, etc. now, 'hoodie' is powerful, but it's sort of one of the few things that's clear: that trayvon was wearing a hoodie. 

i'm just betting that almost every day, somewhere in the usa, there is a clearer example of the way racism expresses itself in our lives now. no one exactly chooses to make a certain event a crazed media sensation or an emblematic thing, but i don't think this was the best such apointment.

doomsday device

reported everywhere:

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden possesses enough information to cause more damage to the United States government than “anyone else has ever had in the history” of the country, according to the journalist who first reported the former contractor’s leaked documents.

i said from the outset that i hope snowden has a doomsday device. however, i think i would have hesitated to give these sorts of quotes if i were greenwald. it does suggest that the only solution from the us gov's point of view is extreme: extreme search and raid procedures, covert murder ops, and so on. it might get really bad; it might already be getting bad.

once again: the zimmerman trial, which is not even a particularly good racial emblem, is just nowhere near as important as the nsa story. this is true, i believe, even if you are raising a young black man, etc.: this is about a total system of surveillance affecting such people no less than everyone else. this is about a future of totalitarianism over the whole earth. i guess we can have another national conversation about race; i'm already bored; i can rehearse the whole thing in terms of the series of slogans or cliches of our leaders on both sides in my head. let's have a national conversation about the way all of us are being subordinated together, shall we?

i'm happy to talk about race; i do it all the time. i'll talk to you about it. i actually want to reflect on my own racial attitudes; i've tried. but the national conversation just consists of politicians and thought leaders and race leaders saying the same careful crap over and over and over. one problem is the familiar one: none of these people feels obliged to speak as or for themselves; they're representing demographics, bureaucracies, and so on. the sincerity of what they're saying is a question that does not even arise. 

 

 

 

standardize this

it took, say, the new york times fifteen years to hop off the standardized-testing fad. a lot of other people too. so here's what i suggest: the next educational fashion that comes along with its droning experts and jive-ass 'data' etc: just snicker and oppose. alright, so maybe 2000-2013 doesn't seem that long. well, it is the entire life of my daughter, her whole education absorbed by your idiot mistake. arne duncan, margaret spellings, michelle rhee and the like should just admit it: no one has any idea how to educate anyone, and that is really not the point of the whole enterprise anyway, which is to acclimatize children to carceral institutions.  in virtue of what, exactly, do you claim the right to form the consciousnesses of other people's children? eh? because you are capable of chanting the word 'accountability', and will soon display the ability to chant some other word? because this time you finally figured out how education works, so we should ignore all the bullshit you put down in the etc 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50,s, 60, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? out my face, ace. 

general and particular guilt

sorry, but whether george zimmerman murdered trayvon martin does not depend on the history of race relations in america. it depends on what actually happened specifically there, that night, who jumped on whom, etc., as the correct verdict depends on what can be proven about that. also excuse me but is george zimmerman a white person? i think the whole reading of the case depends on making george zimmerman an honorary white dude or ignoring all racial complexities except a single dualism which has no place for a latino dude with a jewish surname, or whatever it may be. but surely his guilt can't float with the question of what racial group you can assign him to, if any. i heard black philosophy profs holding forth on this one time, and their view was that zimmerman 'identified' with white people, etc. i don't know: sending an actual person to jail for decades on the basis of general racial symbolism or sheer fantasies about their twisted inner life is just not the way to conduct a trial, and is no way to form actual opinions about specific events. for actually determining an individual's guilt or innocence with regard to a particular crime, it's no better than figuring someone must be guilty because he's black. 

acura, the cadillac of nothingness

here's a good example of how absurd advertising has become. it's utterly overblown, insanely hyperbolic, yet it's formulaic from soup to nuts. indeed it might have been written by software that detects features of other car ads. also it is completely meaningless, and yet the whole presentation (music, voice, and image) is supposed to say: these are world-alteringly profound observations. really i think it does not matter what you say at all, as long as it takes a predictable rhythm; you don't even hear words anymore, just some kind of mood i guess. perhaps the script is based on the promo copy for the clinton global initiative or something. naw it's not quite that bad, but if your quest is to build the world's smartest luxury suv for mankind, you must hold yourself to the standard of mankind.  

 

here's how you make a car ad:

 

i hope you'll be very happy together.

just an addition: neither left nor right are political positions; if they were, people would try to make them make sense or hang together or something. they're social affiliations. so here's my advice for you if you're on the right or the left: stop pretending to take positions or make assertions. it only makes you look ridiculous. smile at people who are wearing or driving the right brand, have to right haircut, live in the right region, went to the right school, and so on, and make obscene gestures otherwise. really that's all you're doing anyway.

headline:

Mexican Man Fakes Death To Avoid Gang Rape Charge Before Getting Elected As Mayor

 

Neither a Rightist nor a Leftist Be

By Crispin Sartwell

 

     One traditional task of philosophy is to examine the conceptual underpinnings of other areas of inquiry: for logical consistency, for example, or in relation to various aspects of intellectual history. A particularly urgent case is provided by the basic way we define political positions: the left-right spectrum.

    I think that the arrangement of positions along this axis - progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, or socialist to capitalist, or for that matter Democrat to Republican - is conceptually confused and historically contingent. Let's take a few minutes to think about the left-right spectrum rather than from it.

     It can seem permanent and inevitable. But this taxonomy arose at earliest immediately before and during the French Revolution, in the late 18th century, with figures such as Rousseau and Burke. It only crystallized fully with the emergence of Marxism in the middle of the 19th century. Before that, or elsewhere than in the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. There are likely to be many others after the left-right spectrum dissolves.

.

    One way people talk about left and right is in terms of time: progressives want time to continue to move forward or even want to accelerate it, taking us into a future bright with promise, while conservatives want time to stand still or even run backward to a golden age. Either approach appears to depend on a conception of time on which it is extremely malleable, its pace and direction depending on the outcome of the next election.

   I think that is incompatible with any plausible conception of time in metaphysics or in ordinary experience. No one needs to help make sure that time keeps moving forward and, proverbially, no one can stand in its way. Sarah Palin and Rafael Correa, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Beyonce, the 'stone-age' Suruwaha people of the Amazon and the prime-time hosts of MSNBC: they overlap in time, all moving temporally in the same direction at the same rate, contemporaneously. Among other moments, they all exist precisely right now.

 

    Another way that the left-right spectrum is conceived is as state against capital. This is central to contemporary American politics, as Democrats urge that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might identify Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand: state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

    Much of the left wants to constrain the power of capital by increasing the power of the state, while many on the right want to reduce the power of the state in order to unleash the power of capital. Putting it mildly, the assumption of both groups that state and capital, or political power and wealth, are opposed forces, or can be pitted against one another, is not historically supported. As a matter of historical fact, political hierarchies and economic hierarchies tend to coincide. Beefing up one almost always beefs up the other.

    We might consider, for example, the relation of the NSA to Booz Allen or to Google, or the relation of Goldman-Sachs to the Department of the Treasury, or Halliburton to Defense, or regulators to the corporations they regulate. In many ways, the distinction between state and corporation in the U.S. is notional.

    As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue in their recent book The Making of Global Capitalism, capitalism arises together with the modern state, and each is inconceivable without the other. From the East India Companies to the robber barons to neo-liberalism, capitalism has depended on the state to project force; subdue, train, and control populations; and curtail competition.

     Communism of the variety practiced in Maoist China or the Soviet Union only represented a slightly different and even more extreme merger of state and capital, placing both squarely in the hands of party bureaucrats who lived in luxury and had at their disposal an abject population. Marx prescribed placing banking, transportation, and communication into the hands of the state, an evidently unpromising direction in which to pursue human equality. Contemporary China, the EU, the United States, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are all intensifying and increasingly sophisticated mergers of polity and economy.

 

 

    One way to see the incoherence of the left is to focus on one of its basic values: equality. The means proposed by the left to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: that is, of more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. But wealth flows toward power, and vice versa, and it is plausible, I believe, to argue that ever-more pervasive state power has coincided with ever-more extreme and chronic structural inequalities of resources.

    The right runs into similar problems with the concept of liberty. Right-wingers' commitment to individual rights is often baldly incompatible with their enthusiasm for the security state or opposition to gay marriage or marijuana legalization. Probably, both left and right were invented by the people who became 'the left'. But 'the right' has encompassed an extraordinary range of positions, from fundamentalism to fascism to libertarianism. These positions are at least as incompatible with one another as any of them is with American liberalism, for example.

 

    Indeed, we might think of all the positions that fall comfortably anywhere on the left-right scale as a single ideology, because they all in practice prescribe extremely pervasive hierarchies, and hierarchies tend to coincide. We tend to oscillate between an emphasis on state and corporate hierarchies, while the overwhelming fact is that they are not distinct; the thing grows ever larger.

    If this criticism can even be meaningfully articulated, then the left-right spectrum should not be uncritically pre-supposed as a neutral or factual way of characterizing political positions. It needs to be established. People who find impossible the task I suggested earlier  - thinking about it rather than from it - accept it as a sheer irrational dogma.

    Left and right are arrangements in practical politics, and many political parties in many parts of the world understand themselves as falling along that spectrum somewhere. But as a framework or taxonomy of political positions, or for the purposes of, say, research in political science, it has got to be optional. You've got to keep open the possibility that it is a flawed or tendentious paradigm or could be replaced with a better explanatory framework. If not, then you are yourself embroiled in the ideologies that you're supposed, in political science or political philosophy, to be trying to understand; you are inquiring in a circle.

    As a first move, I'd suggest replacing left and right with up and down. We might usefully think about political positions in terms of whether they seek to constitute political/economic inequalities or to dismantle them.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches in the political science department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Political Aesthetics.

 

 

the gospel

one of the great repertoires in american song is bluegrass gospel. the form was of course established by bill monroe's early bands, and he used to break off a set in each show to do something more quiet, meditative, and based on quartet harmonies rather than virtuoso instrumental runs. but the style drew from a very eclectic set of resources: the hymnal and choir parts, of course; black spirituals, blues, and gospel (which had already been criss-crossed with white church music throughout); popular religious music (no bluegrass band couldn't do you some version of 'i saw the light'); original compositions. the repertoire was established especially by the stanley brothers, whose gospel recordings are just chillingly amazing, and flatt and scruggs (who i'd tend to minimize a bit in this area, except especially as providing important parts to the songbook). of course there are many other contributors.

ever since, it has been traditional for virtually every bluegrass group of any description in every era to play some gospel songs; traditionally it's the last cut even on a set of love songs. many artists made a living at it, of course, touring rural churches throughout the country.

the form has continued throughout to absorb many eclectic influences while returning again and again to the classics. i actually have to say i particularly love love the era that has emerged since the 80s: where the stanleys made your hair stand up because they sounded like they were singing from the nineteenth century or from reality itself, groups such as doyle lawson and quicksilver, hot rize, iiird tyme out, audie blaylock and and redline, johnson mountain boys/longview, dailey and vincent have absolutely perfected the harmonies, which are, i say, celestial. you lose something because they don't sound so wild and rural. you gain some of the most simply and intensely and elaborately beautiful music ever made. it's still the high tenors that grab you by the throat and transport you to another realm, so to speak: russell moore, dudley connell, darrin vincent, audie blaylock, tim o'brien. they're very intensely expressive. and superb craftsmanship never hurt a soul, other things being equal.

don't hate it cause it's religious even if you're not! if anyone could be converted into a snakehandler by listening to this material over and over, i'd be writhing by now. you listened to all that marley and you don't believe that haile selassie is the living god, am i right? your beliefs emerged unscathed from your encounter with the sistine ceiling etc. admittedly it's a relief that people aren't singing about depravity or consumer products. or even about themselves. it seems wholesome. but it has its light side and its dark. this is definitely one way people face death.

all of the items listed below are superlative examples of human skill and love.

 

Audie Blaylock and Redline

"Who'll Sing for Me?"

"Lord Lead Me On"

"He is Near"

 "Pray the Clouds Away"

"Goodbye"

 

 

Dailey & Vincent

"By the Mark"

"Living in the Kingdom of God"

 "Family Bible"

"Oh Ye Must Be Born Again"

"When I've Traveled My Last Mile"

 

 

Dale Ann Bradley

"Passed Through the Crowd"

"Clinging to a Saving Hand"

 

 

Dry Branch Fire Squad

"I'll Be No Stranger"

"Lookinf for the Stone"

"Memories that Bless and Burn"

"Hide You in the Blood"

"Were You There?"

 

 

 

 

 

Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver

"Hiding From the Storm Outside"

 "The Cross Road" 

"When We Meet to Part No More"

 

Hot Rize

"Hear Jerusalem Moan"

"You Don't Have to Move That Mountain"

"Working on a Building"

"Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning"

"Tenderly Calling (Home, C'mon Home)"

 

 

IIIrd Tyme Out

"Drifting Too Far From the Shore"

"When He Reached Down His Hand for Me"

 "I Pray My Way Out of Trouble"

"Just Call on Him"

"He'll Take You In"

"I'm Working on the Road To Glory Land"

"It's a Lonesome Road"

"He Said if I Be lifted Up"

"Drifting Too Far From the Shore"

"Snow Angel"

"Lord Protect My Soul"

"Eternity Has Begun"

 

 

 

 

Johnson Mountain Boys

"I've Found a Hiding Place"

"Harbor of Love"

"Get Down on Your Knees and Pray"

"God's Not Dead"

"See God's Ark A'Movin"

 

 

Longview,

"Voice of My Savior"

"Brighter Mansion"

 

 

Seldom Scene

"Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?"

"Heaven"

 

Nashville Bluegrass Band, ""Father I Stretch My Hand to Thee"

The Bluegrass Album Band, "Model Church"

Alison Krauuss and Union Station, "Heaven's Bright Shore"

 

 

Tim Graves and Daryl Mosley, "Satan's Jeweled Crown"

Del McCoury, "I Know His Voice"

Devin Jake, "Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet"

Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper, "Come Spring"

Karl Shifflett and Big Country Show, "Standing in the Need of Prayer"

 

 

Whiskey on a Sunday and I don't Drink Anymore

 

In which Crusader AXE muses on France, ennui, Henri Le Chat Noire, veterans, Hippie cowgirls in shades, and the corporate-military-educational-sports-universal Potemkin Village.  

 

more mencken and nathan

    The American Credo consists of all and only the beliefs that all Americans share, the apothegms or truisms endorsing which constitutes american identity, more or less, all of them entirely false, of course. How about (155): "That the extinction of the Indian has been a deplorable thing." (114) "That the editor of a woman's magazine is always a lizzie." (!) (105) "That a negro's vote may always be readily bought for a dollar." Or (114) (79) "That a member of the Masons cannot be hanged." (175) "That a man will do anything for the woman he loves."Every single one of these has a subversive or progressive reading precisely in its various transgressions and the ways they are shaped. But they are the words of a man who essentially controlled his own press and had given himself permission to say whatever he wanted to say, in whatever manner he deemed most amusing. That actually takes tremendous guts.

re-directing

if i were re-narrating the history of american thought - which i seem to be - i'd add or even centralize centralize a line winding through some of the following figures: roger williams, anne hutchinson,  john woolman, jefferson, lucretia mott, emerson, josiah warren, fuller, thoreau, lysander spooner, voltairine de cleyre, mencken. i have to say i think the anarchist anthropology of folks like david graeber and james c. scott is the biggest development in that sort of theory since kropotkin.

 

Look to like reading someone or to love certain of the their ideas and arguments is not to endorse the whole damn package lock, stock, and barrel. Never get into the business of making someone you love turn out right all the time or on the other hand turning away from ideas because of distaste for the person. It might just be that, you know, decentralized government and individual rights are plausible notions on other grounds: like the insanely disastrous results of not taking them seriously. Jefferson: that hypocrite! If you think that shows that his ideas about liberty or whatever it may be are actually false, you are really not a reliable reasoner. I don't fear being indetectibly infected by controversial opinions by jolly irascible assholes from the 1920s, seriously. If there is at times a little anti-Semitic whiff or whatever, I repudiate that. Why would you let that deprive you of such good art and thought?

mencken on the snowden, bradley manning, assange etc

Almost alone among the civilized nations of the world, the United States pursues critics of the dominant political theory with mediaeval ferocity, condemning them to interminable periods in prison, proceeding against them by clamour and perjury, treating them worse than common blacklegs, and at times conniving at their actual murder by the police. (Mencken and Nathan, American Credo, p. 42)

i'm too outraged to be cynical, but i'm trying.

just to take a momentary break from direct treason, i've been working on the american cynics (my personal peirce, james, and dewey; my three stooges of the apocalypse: twain, bierce and mencken). one text i can really recommend as characteristic, problematic, and brilliant, is the american credo by mencken and his relatively frequent collaborator the drama critic george jean nathan (1920; revised edition 1921). oh quotes of course! 

 

*

here is one of several texts in which twain develops his response to darwin. i do actually regard it as an important advance in our conceptions of evolutionary biology:

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated from some far ancestor,- some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance,- insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development - nameable as the Human Being. Below us - nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman. ("Man's Place in the Animal World" [1896])

 

 *

Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the small stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of a gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago--and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie.  The American Credo, p. 3

the bit of that i want to emphasize is this: Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds.

*

Past. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one - the knowledge and the dream. (Bierce, Devil's Dictionary)

 bierce is really best consumed in smal doses. oy it's a bile tsunami! but that there is profound.

note on bierce, who no doubt was executed by zapata and villa as he simultaneously committed suicide and then disappeared into the hills with his inca squaw, here's my real theory. yo dumbass! he thought he could sell stories and get scoops about the situation in mexico. then, you know, something bad happened; he was near or in an unexpected engagement and suffered harm; montezuma's revenge. he's just the type to take a semi-stupid risk, not at all to commit suicide. deceased war correspondent: look you might only read a few of the texts, which is best, but you've always got to bear in mind that he himself made his living as a journalist throughout his post-military life. right? this is still the way people in the biz think: wow maybe i could sell a piece on this: do a query etc. no can you pay 500 and expenses? then you see if you can't work a similar deal for another piece for someone else (hearst, say), doubling up on expenses, etc. but this is the most positive thing you can say for his vision: too much pleasure in the things that cause his sardonic formulations to throw it over. 

 

 

 

gloss

i'll express directly what i expressed sarcastically on the 4th: whomever, when they fought america's wars, believed they were fighting for freedom, has been betrayed by the persons who now run the government of the united states.

believe me when i tell you i understand that i continue to say such things at the sufferance of those people. so i guess this isn't totalitarianism after all.

wave that flag, bitch

today i say to all americans: happy dependence day, slaves. unless instructed to, never forget the suckers who died to make a secret, universal regime of surveillance possible for us all. their sacrifice was not in vain.

ralph waldo emerson meets bugs bunny

phil mcreynolds, john lysaker, and i rock on.