www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zU3U-9B3fE

Here’s the original (and I think much better) trailer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKCys3sd8Bw

And here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

As I Spit on Your Grave, the movie was censored and released in the United States in 1980. Many countries, such as Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and the former government of West Germany, banned this movie altogether, claiming that the movie “glorified violence against women”.

Roger Ebert has this to say about that:

Movie critic Roger Ebert gave the film no stars, referring to it as “a vile bag of garbage…without a shred of artistic distinction,” adding that “Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.” (click here for the whole review)

Nevertheless, Wikipedia goes on to say

Camille Keaton (the grand-niece of Buster Keaton) won a Best Actress award for her role in this movie at the 1978 Catalonian International Film Festival in Spain.

You be the judge.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eypBHOHQuX4

The lesson I took from my experience in the 70s is that there is good music to be found in any decade, but you have to wade through a lot of bad music to find it.

The Avant-Garde

In the 1970s, one of my favorite musical genres was glam rock. Despite the fact that I knew David Bowie’s work from a popular music perspective, after I met Leroy, I thought that his avant-garde work in the 70s was exciting. So I bought a lot of Bowie records in the early 80s. I had also been introduced to the work of Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. Eno at the time of the Warm Jets (1983) was another glam rock artist. On Warm Jets, Eno had recorded another avant-garde song: Baby’s On Fire:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=draua97qH1Y

What struck me about the avant-garde of the 1970s was how it was pushing the envelope of music. Just as Mike Garson’s piano work on Aladdin Sane struck a chord in me, the solo on Baby’s on Fire was an avant-grade masterpiece.

I wanted to know who the guitarist was on Baby’s on Fire. It turned out to be a guitarist from a band that Leroy had introduced me to, as well: King Crimson. Their debut 1969 album, In the Court of the Crimson King featured Robert Fripp’s guitar. I thought that that was the sort of correspondence that I liked to follow, so I did.

What had happened to Fripp, I asked myself. It turned out that he had taken the period from 1974 to 1977 off. Fripp’s biographer Eric Tamm explains:

During his period of retreat, Robert Fripp had had no concrete plans for returning to music; before breaking up King Crimson III in 1974, he had concluded that being a rock star was no longer conducive to his continuing self-education, that it was, in fact, counter-productive to his aims. With the self-imposed retreat drawing to an end, Fripp did not thus return to the music world with a loud splash, making his presence known to one and all in a grandiose gesture. Rather, he stuck his toe in the water bit by bit, carefully considering whether the world of the professional musician was a suitable arena for his activities.

Fripp loves to formulate little paradigmatic lists, and in 1982 he was to formalize what he called the “four criteria for work”: work should earn a living, be educational, be fun, and be socially useful.

In seclusion, he read the works of Gurdjieff and John G. Bennett (a follower of Gurdjieff). The works of these guys is absolutely ridiculous and should serve as a warning to stay away from quacks. Their works appeal to people who deeply want to feel that the world makes sense and who also feel that science is inadequate to make sense of the world. Both of these are noble, human ideas. But then Gurdjieff starts in on his own philosophy, which you can get a feel for by reading the 18th chapter of his Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, entitled ‘The Arch Preposterous.’ For some reason, this quack appeals to musicians (see the ‘Idiosyncrasies’ section in the article on Keith Jarrett).

I believe that Fripp’s system-making was related to his desire to form a sense of purpose out of the random acts of ordinary life. The scientific worldview cannot encompass the extra-scientific flow of music. Gurdjieff encompasses both in a neat package. In the world that we live in—a world in which we don’t need to behold the true reality of things but only need to behold nature in accordance with our minds, no matter how ridiculously manufactured—this is enough (see my ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive’ in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing for my explanation of this idea).

But I digress. Tamm continues:

As he leaked out of retirement in 1977 and 1978, Fripp was gradually able to acknowledge that for him, working in the music industry could be all of the above. Although in some respects Fripp seems a solitary introvert, living in a world of his own, on a plane of symbolic structures of his own devising which very few others are able to understand, let alone accept whole-heartedly, he was to receive much encouragement from friends old and new during this period, and was to succeed in carrying his musical odyssey through the next several island links in the archipelago of his life’s work. In retreat he had reached the point of realizing he could choose what he wanted to do, so now, he could choose music freely -- spontaneously after reflection, to paraphrase Kierkegaard.

Work With Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads

He started a project that he called ‘The Drive to 1981.’ It was to be a project that would give him a framework for his life as he reentered the musical world. The project was to end in 1981. This appealed to me when I found out about it years later, as my friend Edward Vidmar had a similar vision in his bookstore, Project 1999.

Once again, I digress. Peter Gabriel was newly released from Genesis and was looking for someone to help him bridge out of the progressive rock genre. He settled on Fripp to produce his second album. To hear Tamm tell it, it wasn’t an altogether happy experience for Robert:

Perhaps Fripp succeeded (however temporarily) in bringing the sound of Gabriel’s music closer to “reality” -- out of the inflatedly progressive early 1970s into the stripped-down late 1970s….Peter Gabriel 1978 shows us a very Frippicized Gabriel, as though Fripp was doing his utmost to incorporate Gabriel into his own scheme of things.

Anyway, here’s Fripp’s guitar work on Gabriel’s ‘White Shadow’:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=insR7sBS2FY

He also worked with the Talking Heads, as I showed you a couple of weeks ago.

Reformation of King Crimson

By 1981, right on schedule, he had refounded King Crimson. Their first album was entitled Discipline. It was based on gamelan rythyms, though not created with gamelan instruments. You can hear the unique sound of the album on its title track:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8calsRhaYzA

My favorite track on the album today is Thela Hun Ginjeet.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8o8slv-2c4

The song combines the Frank O’Hara/Lana Turner school of poetry as pure narration of everyday events not tied to any grand poetic themes with the ambitious rythyms and time signatures that King Crimson was known for.

I always thought that the lyrics were derived from Africa, which made me like it more. It turns out that the title is an anagram for ‘in the heat of the jungle,’ the original title of the song. To read more about it, click here.

I Check Out, But Music Continues Without Me

I checked out of the music scene soon after that. I was involved in my own quest for order, although I thought I had a better model than Gurdjieff. My model was Joseph Campbell. And although he, too, disappointed me by his inability to close off his model satisfactorily, I was satisfied with the sense of purpose he provided me at the time.

During the period when I was dormant, Fripp continued his journey, working with Lori Anderson on her avant-garde Home of the Brave (1986), an ironic indictment of America capitalism. When I started listening to music in the 1990s, Lori was extremely popular at the University of Illinois.

Sharkey’s Day was about how a guy named Sharkey had disappeared from his desk because ‘All of nature talks to me.’

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPbv2uVY6AY

But Sharkey has a problem. He doesn’t know what nature is saying to him.

All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me. Listen! Trees are swinging in the breeze. They’re talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They’re all talking. They’re talking to me. And short animals- They’re bucking up on their hind legs. Talking. Talking to me. Hey! Look out! Bugs are crawling up my legs! You know? I’d rather see this on TV.

Desk people are bad people. People whom nature talks to are good people. People who would rather watch things on TV are bad people who have lost contact with nature. Artists are people like Lori Anderson, who is not afraid of getting in touch with nature, despite the fact that she is performing an artificial and highly ritual dance in her unnatural white 80s costume while the sounds her band is making sound completely unnatural to me.

Lori describes the unnaturalness of America in terms that Joni Mitchell would understand.

Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. You know? They’re growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down.

‘They’ are growing mechanical trees, and ‘they’ are not appreciating natural beauty. But more important that that is the fact that nobody knows the real me! I thought this was an instance of where the 80s had gone wrong. The emphasis on ‘they’ is emblematic of modern thought. We don’t have to have answers if we can prove that ‘they’ are idiots. This sometimes (as here) gets confusing. Ms. Anderson goes on to explain Sharkey’s sense of the origins of life. He alternates between fear and love before opting out for a third thing: ‘life.’ Presumably, Sharkey would also like to watch ‘life’ on television, too.

Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to it’s full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It’s life! It’s life! I turn around, it’s fear. I turn around again, and it’s love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. Deep in the heart of darkest America. Home of the brave. Ha! Ha! Ha! You’ve already paid for this. Listen to my heart beat.

There was a mania for this at the time. Intellectuals would begin their rational inquiry into things and would get stuck. So they would invent a third new thing. In Ms. Anderson’s world, it was this: thesis: fear, antithesis: love, synthesis: life. In Joseph Campbell’s world the rational alternation between the many gods (thesis and antithesis) was followed by ascent to the One Word behind the words, the One God behind the gods (synthesis). Another of my heroes at the time, Douglas Hofstadter, crawled out of the impediments of reason, which asks people to make up or down pronouncements on questions (Yes and No) by invoking ‘Mu.’ (Check back soon for more on Hofstadter.)

My Interest in the 80s

I thought that the 80s had some pretty interesting ideas, no matter how much I thought (and still think) that the legacy of the 70s, with its sense that humanity was on the verge of a great discovery that would put to rest the alternations of Enlightenment reason and rationality in favor of a vaguely defined third way.

In the popular culture, of course, capitalism was robbing all but a few (‘the knowing’) of the human dream of ‘life,’ just as we were about to break on through to the other side. Filmmakers like Louis Malle were inventing a mythology of escape to a Gurdjieff planet where Gustav and Chiquita Björnstrand could escape capitalist reason after meeting an English tree expert at Findhorn who had devoted his life to saving trees and other natural forms. English tree experts were the sort of people who could see a seed, not for what it was, but for what it could be if capitalists with their insistence on the literal aspects that appeared to their empirical eyes could only be gotten out of the way.

The fact that Gurdjieff believed stupid stuff, like his notion of Atlantis inhabited by ‘three-brained beings,’ which can be found in Chapter XIX of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson:

During this second serious catastrophe to that planet, the continent Atlantis, which had been the largest continent and the chief place of the being-existence of the three-brained beings of that planet during the period of my first descent, was engulfed together with other large and small terra firmas within the planet with all the three-brained beings existing upon it, and also with almost all that they had attained and acquired during many of their preceding centuries.

Things like this made sense to people like Robert Fripp in the 1980s. It didn’t mean they were true. It just meant that people like Robert Fripp believed things like this. That fact was not enough to turn me against his music, although it did sort of make me question his sanity. But I’ve known a lot of musicians, and rationality and even sanity is optional in their quest to obtain things that reason cannot manage on its own.

But I digress.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=buBZbcJbfnI

You can buy this song in America by buying the Turkish Groove CD on Amazon.

Here’s another of Bendeniz’s songs. I’m not sure what the title of this song is, nor am I certain that it’s available in the United States. But I like it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGan5-p0i4

How can you not like this?

Here’s Cookie and the Cupcakes’ Mathilda:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2W2aB7E24M

Here’s Warren Storm’s Mama Mama Mama:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=92fg9xDib3I

And finally, Johnnie Allan’s South to Louisiana:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=66-_4-EGiJg

The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”

Listen, the IBD is an extremely conservative paper, and I don’t share their feelings of imminent disaster, but I do think that the article bespeaks the harm that comes from launching a legislative agenda without bipartisan support. LBJ, who Francis Fukuyama cites as one of three models that the legacy presidency of Barack Obama might follow, got support from some Republicans for his Great Society programs. Obama got none. None!

This is a short-term crisis, I think. The Republican revolutionaries will be forestalled in November, when I expect them to regain (at least) the House.

But what is going to happen if now shut out Republicans—following the example of the Obama White House—decide to undo the partisan political mandate with another partisan political mandate, effectively reversing the gains made by Obama? Obama’s legacy is not secure on account of his having taken such a partisan path. Moreover, this partisan political bickering is not what I thought I was going to get when I voted for Obama. I thought he’d be a uniter, not a divider. Instead, he is as divisive as the last great uniter, George W. Bush.

Americans used to blame Bush’s being an idiot for his problems with cooperation. Elect us, the highly-educated intellectuals said, and we will put things right again. Now, the intellectuals, who many Americans thought would save us from Bush’s idiocy, have become equally suspect. They have had their chance, and they have failed to convince a majority of Americans that they have answers. Instead, Obama is returning to his base, scrounging for every last vote from his political base. He can defend himself by saying that this is politics as usual, but I didn’t vote for him to continue politics as usual.

Both sides now appear to fighting partisan battles for control of Congress, because he who is in control gets to hold the purse strings. So the question remains: if Obama is as bad as George W. Bush, a well-intentioned man with poor cooperative skills, then what are the alternatives? Who speaks for the people if the people we elect to speak for us are too busy arguing over their own tiny bits of turf.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJrMpncFn2Q

The Old Malaise

This is an idea that was put forth in one of the most depressing speeches by Jimmy’s Carter towards the end of his depressing administration.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58

Growing up in America in the 70s, I hated the national malaise, and this is why I liked the 80s so much. If we were to believe Carter, the best days of America were behind us. America had been captured by special (and moneyed) interests. Here’s an excerpt:

What you see often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.

Carter was attempting to restore ‘balance’ to a country that had gotten off track so he could move the country forward.

You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?

President Carter had an answer:

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

‘A City on a Hill’

In the election of Ronald Reagan to replace Carter, the country moved beyond the national malaise. Growing older in Ronald Reagan’s America, I was able to see beyond Carter’s malaise speech to a vision of America restored to its ‘City on a Hill’ status.

This is an old idea in America, going back to Winthrop’s invocation of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14) in his 1630 sermon ‘A Model of Christian Charity.’

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.

The modern version of this idea was born of JFK’s invocation of the ‘city on a hill’ metaphor during an address to the General Court of Massachusetts on January 9, 1961.

…I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. “We must always consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.” Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required.

It has come to dominate political discourse on both the left and the right ever since. Ronald Reagan invoked it during the campaign in 1984, as well as during his Farewell Address to the Nation in 1989:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.

This is the ‘city on a hill,’ a city of equal opportunity for all, that Sarah Palin spoke of wresting from the unbalanced hands of Barack Obama, who wanted to redistribute wealth from one well-fed group who has prospered to other groups who have been shunted aside.

I’ve Seen the World From Both Sides Now

But both sides are arguing about ownership of the right to carry the JFK torch forward. Mario Cuomo took Reagan to task for his remarks during his Keynote Address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention (watch the whole speech here):

Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn’t understand that fear. He said, “Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.” And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation — Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”

This speech has resonated with a sector of Democratic electorate, who want to restore balance in an unbalanced world. This is the sector of the electorate that Zbigniew Brzezinski hales from. He wants to restore balance to all, while accusing Republicans of merely capitalizing on political uncertainty.

The New Malaise

We were, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protectors of liberal and capitalist freedom in the world. But now, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, we are back to a vague sense of ‘malaise.’ I think it is important to contest his assertion that we are in for a permanent decline if we don’t restore the American ideal—held by Barack Obama in his mind—to prominence.

When I saw this story, I thought I’d have a go at the return of the ‘malaise’ story, if only to show how wrong I think both parties are about what’s gone wrong in the idealistic world of Jimmy Carter—who thought that all we as Americans had to do was to restore ‘balance’ to the unbalanced world—and the idealistic world of Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill’—which relies on a sense of American exceptionalism, rather than a more realistic view of the world that we live in.

Mr. Buchanan starts out by detailing the problems faced by President Obama. Brzezinski starts out his response by saying that he ‘can’t really articulate this’ (0:18), but that doesn’t stop him from articulating. He begins his argument with the sentence ‘I have a sense that there were always mobilizing issues’ (0:25). No surprise there. There have always been ‘mobilizing issues,’ haven’t there? Like, maybe, the public’s overwhelming concern with running up deficits with no spending cuts in sight? Well, no. Apparently not, according to Brzezinski. ‘Mobilizing issues’ have been replaced with a ‘sense of pervasive malaise’ (0:45).

One momentarily suspects that Brzezinski is either not being an honest provider of unbiased news coverage, or he honestly hasn’t looked at the polls and found out what is going on in this country, which is obvious to me anyway. People, especially on the right, are ‘mobilized’ by issue of uncontrolled spending. There’s a third possibility, however, and that is that he doesn’t have enough insight into the situation and is instead relying on traditional ideas—in this case the ideas of Jimmy Carter—to make up for what he ‘can’t articulate.’

Now my response to Brzezinski at this point is that maybe he should have shut up as soon as he realized that he couldn’t articulate his answer, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes on to lay the blame at the doorstep of a ‘pervasive malaise.’ Since this is the point of my major disagreement with the former National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America, I want quote him in full:

‘I think we’re now going through a phase in which there is a sense of pervasive malaise which affects different group of society in different ways’ (0:45).

In other words, the general sense of communal action—the sense that Obama was elected to provide against McCain’s government for the individual—is lacking, and like Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski puts that onto a ‘sense of pervasive malaise,’ rather than thinking more about exactly why he ‘can’t articulate’ his ideas.

Looking Deeper into the New Malaise

This is an important point. The loss of common goals is the sense that Obama ran on and which was the source of his popularity— Brzezinski himself says ‘Obama, who started so well; he captivated people; he captivated me.’ Obama has lost his edge. Brzezinski wants that common sense of purpose back from the ‘special interests’ that have captivated peoples’ imagination. ‘In their own sphere, there is no grand mobilizing idea’ (1:00), he says.

Then he gets to the root of the problem, as he sees it: ‘Obama has not been able yet to generate some sort of organizing idea for an age which combines a malaise that is pervasive and percolating and complexity’ (1:20). His addition of ‘yet’ into the sentence says that he still holds out hope for Obama’s comprehensive idea that would unify the nation, as opposed to ‘people like Romney, Gingrich, or Palin. Each one motivates a slice of all of these concerns…None of them have a comprehensive idea’ (2:10).

Why doesn’t Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin get credit for having a ‘comprehensive’ plan, I ask myself? They just don’t. It is an argument that relies on his initial premises—a petitio principii in the language of philosophy. He has already decided that Romney, Gingrich, and Palin are not serious and honest players in the political arena, and he has no problem with dismissing their pretensions to higher goals. But with Obama, he sees no problem glossing over his Chicago-style, one party town politics in favor of his candidate’s loftier goals. This is a function of how he represents the two parties in his mind before he starts reasoning.

Pat Buchanan agrees: ‘We need a new paradigm’ (2:16).

‘And the President hasn’t articulated it,’ Brzezinski says (2:18).

Paradigm shifts? Yuck! I learned about such things in graduate school from the work of Thomas Kunhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I didn’t like them then, and I don’t particularly feel that they are better today.

Here, in a nutshell, is why. Kuhn believes that science is a step from one discrete paradigm to another.

As Wikipedia puts it:

One important aspect of Kuhn’s paradigms is that the paradigms are incommensurable, meaning two paradigms cannot be reconciled with each other because they cannot be subjected to the same common standard of comparison. That is, no meaningful comparison between them is possible without fundamental modification of the concepts that are an intrinsic part of the paradigms being compared. This way of looking at the concept of “paradigm” creates a paradox of sorts, since competing paradigms are in fact constantly being measured against each other.

Power and a subsequent quest for control follow the person who has the ‘dominant’ paradigm. This makes it important to gain political power. So news networks get ‘both sides’ of an issue in a room and have them argue with each other.

But the exchange between Buchanan and Brzezinski says (to me) that both partners only appear to be on opposite sides of the question. In fact, they are operating on a similar set of assumptions. The same is true of Reagan and Cuomo. Both have the image of JFK’s ‘city on a hill’ in mind, and they are squabbling over property rights.

Idealism’s Failure

The idealism of both liberals and the neoconservatives that sprung up as neocons got nervous about the over-reliance on Marx, is founded on the legacy of JFK, in particular on his ‘city on a hill’ speech.

And it is dying.

The Other Other Side

I would say that the reason that Brzezinski has not been able to articulate his new paradigm because the whole paradigm on which both parties operate in America today is fatally flawed. Each party in the political sphere since JFK has tried to capture the mantle of providing the true ‘city on a hill’ from the other party. An, as each party is engaged in their relentless battle of capture the flag, they not only have to defend their territory, but they must also attack the enemy fortress, denying the other’s ability to lay claim to the common flag.

There is no reason to have a debate in an all-or-nothing argument. The winner takes all. The loser gets nothing. This is the way that the Founding Father set up this country. It puts pressure on people to win arguments by any means, and not through the use of reason.

This is the problem with idealism in general when applied to the political sphere. Politics is a game like American football. We are not throwing for a touchdown on every play. Sometimes players run to the end zone to catch a Hail Mary pass, but at other times they hand the ball off to a runner, who may only gain 2 or 3 yards.

But people who go on television and declare that Republicans or Democrats have no rights to even be on the field (and wouldn’t be except for the ignorance that the idealist stands against) are wrong. It is not ignorance that drives the other side to dismiss arguments that those on the right side of the issue are educated enough to have taken notice of. Politics is not the domain of the ideal. It falls under the domain of reason, and reason proceeds sometimes in yards. Not every position is the last position a politician will ever take.

What’s more, the rational position is more flexible than the position taken by the absolute idealist who throws for a touchdown on every play. Most Hail Mary passes fail to find a receiver, but by mixing up the plays, a quarterback can effectively move the play closer to the ultimate goal. In the political environment in Washington today, the spirit of compromise has been utterly lost in spite of the fact that Obama was elected on a ‘comprehensive’ platform of changing Washington.

Reason has been lost in the pursuit of ‘comprehensiveness’ that is so dear to Brzezinski’s heart. It is not that it is not there. It is that it has been hidden from us and them by the all-or-nothing game that politicians are playing in Washington. Thus, I call reason the unexplored side (the other other side) in the battle for political supremacy.

Back to Zbigniew

Brzezinski’s lament for the failure of ‘comprehensive’ idea that Obama may yet (in Brzezinski’s mind) deliver means that for the present we must endure 2 or 6 more years of Obama’s blindness to compromise, as he forces a series of changes through the Congress on straight party-line votes. Each member of Congress is preordained to align themselves with their political party—and thus against their constituents—in the battle for control.

And this is because Brzezinski holds out the hope that Obama will be cajoled into delivering the undeliverable, while maintaining the also untenable position that Republicans have nothing more on their side than their service of ‘special interests’ in a turf battle over control of the whole country.

There is enough blame to go around on both sides. So, before Zbigniew Brzezinski speaks again, I would urge him to think before he speaks about things he ‘can’t really articulate,’ rather than reflexively going back to the failed policies of a ‘comprehensive idea. That is the problem with idealism and its argument to already held premises. The country will only move forward by articulating its premises in the albeit imperfect reason rather the than the perfect potential of ideas that we all have in our head but which we can’t articulate fully.

The city on a hill has outlived its usefulness in a complex day and age. It’s time to try something less satisfying to partisans, who want total control of the most powerful government in the world, but works for the rest of us.

I was paying attention in the 70s. But by the 80s, I dropped out of the music culture entirely and turned myself to books, which I read obsessively. I didn’t even have a television so I didn’t know about the revolution of MTV, and so I didn’t think about it very much.

Every once in a while, a piece of music would capture my attention. Of those that did, here are the most important:

1) Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”

I saw this video at my friends’ house only once, but it stuck with me, probably because it was the first video I had ever seen. I remember more bullets slicing through more cards.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1sf2CzEq0w

2) A Flock Of Seagulls’ “I Ran”

This was the second video I ever saw. It was on a visit to see one of my friends at college.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUjIA3Rt7gk

I was intrigued by this video, probably because I was not aware that that hairstyle had become so popular.

3) Jan Hammer’s “Theme From Miami Vice”

I never actually saw the third video, but I was aware of Jan Hammer from his work with Jeff Beck and in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which I had been introduced to by Leroy Plock. His work on Miami Vice was an extension of his work in the progressive band, but far more accessible to the general public. I also thought that it was extremely interesting that he was not only playing the keyboards on the keyboards, but also the drums and everything else. That was not possible on the sort of synthesizer that Leroy had in 1981. I still like this song for that reason.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQDU-2qMre0

4) Madonna’s “Material Girl”

The first time I saw a video that made me take notice of the video, and not the music, was Madonna’s “Material Girl.” I’m still impressed with the video. Less so with its creator.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX1Q48Uqses

5) Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”

I really enjoyed this song in the late 80s in spite of not listening to radio. The guy above me played only one album for the entire semester (The Big Chill) when I went back to college, so I would go out walking. As I walked, people were always playing this song:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyl5DlrsU90

Perhaps you’re thinking that I should have been warned that people in the 80s were playing terrible music and that I should have known better, but I was but 3 and 20, and O ’tis true, ’tis true.

Great rhythm section. 2 sets of drums, 2 keyboards, 2 Kulintang players, and a pair of Nibelungs crashing away with their hammers.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h5dcjRIQ-E

Rock on, Nibelungs!