The New Libertine

Making Sense of World Music

2007-07-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote exactly, but it was something to the effect that "World Music" was "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, the peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: Back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he wind up a "world musician," performing traditional Balkan music in restaurants for disinterested diners. While he admitted that this original incarnation of the band Kultur Shock could have done well in the World Music market, it's easy to see why he rebelled by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch.

All of which is to try to introduce the problem we face here, trying to be all, "Yes, we are professional music critics!" about Femi Kuti's performance last night at the Showbox. We'll start out by being honest: we really know for shit about Femi Kuti. This is only slightly less than we know about his dad, Fela Kuti, of whom we are vaguely aware from back in our college days when we experimented with potentially dangerous habits: in this case, listening to NPR, only moderate use of which can transform you into an insufferable middle-class white liberal.

But to continue trying to play the part, here's how we'd have written this piece if we were a real music critic for some mainstream newspaper or magazine (or, God forbid, NPR), where our paycheck depended on us constantly demonstrating decisiveness and never admitting we didn't know the name of a single song we heard at a concert we were reviewing. First, we'd start by talking about Fela Kuti and how he was a pioneer of Afrobeat, which mixed jazz with more traditional African music, and became a superstar in Nigeria. Being forever obsessed with how pop music was tenuously related to Sixties radicalism, we'd applaud Fela Kuti's political activism, and talk about how, from his Nigerian commune, his willingness to give voice to the oppressed threatened thuggish Nigerian dictators, successive regimes of which would jail him, only to have the next coup release him to win the public's good will, only to then have to jail him yet again once he justly criticized their corruption and barbarism. And we'd note the fact he took some 25 wives at once during the 1970s, and thus burnish our multiculturalist creds by accepting polygamy from a leftist African icon in a way we never would of nut-job Mormon fundamentalists down in Utah. Then we'd note Fela's tragic death of AIDS in 1997, even as he continued fighting for political freedom in Nigeria, and then segue into how Femi Kuti took up where his dad left off, continuing the tradition of politically engaged Afrobeat music, mixing American influences (jazz, funk, prog-rock) with native musical styles. And, once the issue hit the streets, we'd sit back and wait for the call from Da Capo requesting rights to include the piece in the latest installment of Best Music Writing.

But alas, we've been around the block enough times to know that mostly, the above is BS. Yes, Fela Kuti was an icon and dissident. But like most political icons who make their name opposing oppressive regimes, Fela's lionization relies on the convenient fact that he never actually became the president of Nigeria, despite several attempts, and thus never met the same fate as Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel or Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had the misfortune of having to try to run a country, their dissident credentials tarnished by years of politics and all the attendant shortcomings, disappointments, and compromises.

Furthermore, while Femi's music gets pseudo-indie cred by virtue of being international, we have to remember that fundamentally, it's mainstream pop back in Nigeria. While Femi hits all the right political notes—a song about fighting AIDS, a spoken-word discourse on the evils of European colonialism—is it any more credible coming from him than Madonna or Kanye West? Or is it a sign of how we continue to fetishize Africans who puppet the rhetoric Westerners like to hear that we keep from lumping Femi Kuti in with the Live Eight crowd? Surely his non-threatening music and politically correct sentiments, coupled with the fact he's a true-blue African, could add some badly needed credibility to bloated big-budget affairs where celebrities repeat self-righteous truisms about the world and after which nothing changes.

So what can we really say here about Femi's show? It was good—talented musicians, charismatic lead man, a solid stage show with scantily clad back-up singers. He packed the Showbox fuller than we've, well, ever seen it. And he got the crowd going. College kids awkwardly gyrating, hippies doing that flailing-arm dance-thing they do, clouds of pot smoke hazily rising from crowd. Femi demonstrated he's a talented multi-instrumentalism, switching fluidly between sax, guitar, and keyboard. People cheered when he exhorted them, listened attentatively when he discoursed. But quite honestly, we left wondering if Femi's appeal is the same back in Nigeria. All too often when it comes to culture—whether it's movies or books or music—what America imports from overseas says a lot more about us than the cultures that created it.

For the foreign cutting edge to break into the American market, it either has to be sufficiently non-threatening to please the moderate liberal middle-class culture consumers, or demonstrate enough mass appeal or street credibility to overcome negative responses. Think of Reggaetón, which took 30 years before it was sufficiently pop music to make the grade in the US, or how dancehall superstar Buju Banton's refusal to reject the gay-bashing of songs like "Boom Bye Bye" gets his shows cancelled on Seattle's "tolerant" Capitol Hill. On the streets of Lagos, does Femi have the same credibility his father once enjoyed, or is he more akin to Jakob Dylan, an uninspired musician whose career was jump-started by an anachronistic attachment to what his dad did, and whose own music was never as innovative?

Somehow, we're guessing that in the gritty slums of Lagos, the real au courant music is much more in the hip-hop vein (as it is everywhere), where kids who can't afford two drummers, keyboards and a horn section are spilling their hearts out on dubbed tapes. Surely there's posturing in imitation of American rappers, but at the same time these kids are telling it like it is, or at least expressing what they think about the world and their own hard-scrabble lives. In a country still mired in corruption, the airwaves and recording studios are probably still off limits to those whose ideas are actually dangerous, and without that access, how are Americans even going to have the chance to hear their music? And even if we did, would we like what they have to say as much as Femi's retro-Third World liberation rhetoric, which hippies old and young can get behind? If we could heard what the kids in the ghetto really thought about women and AIDS and America and gays, would it still get promoed on "All Songs Considered"? We're not so sure.

We don't mean to tear Femi down here—like we said, frankly, we don't know how to judge his work other than admitting it was fairly danceable and everyone seemed to have a reasonably good time at his show. But for a musician whose name and career are so intertwined with his father and with politics and with a certain American market segment's tastes and preferences, it's impossible to avoid trying to talk about what we're supposed to take away from the show. To give Femi his due, he was there to educate as much as to entertain, which leaves us asking the very legitimate question as to whether he's really more credible a source for political commentary than the likes of Cypress Hill, whose album liner notes provided the primary sources for those stoners we knew in high school and their inevitable pro-legalization essays. Not to ask such questions is really to help suppress and constrain Femi's message, essentially taking away his voice and perspective by uncritically accepting anything he has to say. So, is Femi a real activist making us ask difficult questions, or is his music another commodity, an ethnicky trinket picked up from Pier 1 to give a touch of exotic color to a living room? Gino understood this dilemma precisely, and that's why he utterly rejected the World Music racket.

And here we are, semi-pro music critics faced with either puppeting sweet nothings about Femi we got from the "real" critics, or trying to grapple with the limitations of our own understanding of the still-quite-large (whatever Internet idealists like to think) world in which we live. In the end, that's probably the best thing we can say about Femi and his adoring American fans—we may not truly be able to understand the world he comes from or how he fits into it, but he made us ask questions without easy answer, which is a good deal more an achievement than getting a crowd nodding along to socio-political slogans, never certain whether that's a sign of agreement or merely moving to a beat.

A slightly different version of this piece appeared on Seattlest.com on July 26 as "World Music 101: Femi Kuti at The Showbox."

Good People

2007-06-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a reader comes across a brief passage, as if by chance, that is both so brilliantly and scathingly put that it deserves to be stolen over and over again, and at the same time reminds you of what makes good people. I found such a lovely passage today, reading an article entitled "Kipling in South Africa" from the London Review of Books, about the friendship between dear Rudy and Cecil Rhodes, the beast who co-founded DeBeers, colonized what is today Zimbabwe, helped brutalize both the blacks and the Boers of southern Africa, and played a particularly estimable role in the godawful ruthlessness and brutality that marked European colonialism in the late 19th century. He was a man of such horrific ambitions that he once commented, "all of these stars...these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets."

Reading about such awful people, I was blown away when I followed a little footnote and came across this absolute gem from the man who remains our country's finest writer, Mr. Samuel Clemens. In Following the Equator from 1897, Mark Twain wrote:

In the opinion of many people Mr Rhodes is South Africa; others think he is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg goldfields, and Cecil Rhodes . . . I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

Drunks and Wussies Slap-Fight Over God

2007-05-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought that Americans couldn't handle anymore droll anti-religious screeds as shrill and cloying as the fieriest-and-most-brimstoniest preacher's sermon, along comes drunken sod and world-class asshole Christopher Hitchens with his own contribution to the, er, "literature": God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Not satisfied with having been proven painfully fucking wrong on Iraq, Hitchens--who clings to the liberal left with the tenaciousness that a maudlin drunk clings to "this guy!" whom he "loves" at the bar--has decided to issue a new blast to make the rest of us look bad, and to keep the sad, stupid debate about religion in contemporary society roiling in the opinion pages.

Now, I've written about this sad debate a couple times before ("Why Should Darwinists Care About Creationists' Feelings?", "Cranky Old British Scholars Duke it Out Over Jesus") and frankly I'm depressed to have to return to it. But to get to my point (besides making fun of Hitchens--seriously, the guy's a lush), I find both the ardent atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins) and their middle-of-the-road critics in the media equally objectionable, the former because--as a non-believer and skeptic myself--I can't bring myself to trust anyone who believes in something that strongly, and the latter because I'm sick of the liberal media adopting this strange, apologist, kumbaya, "can't-we-all-just-get-along?" attitude towards the religious right. This isn't a zero-sum game; not all religious people are Osama Bin Laden, whatever Mr. Hitchens might like to believe, but that doesn't excuse the rather shocking and at times just plain crazy crap we get in America from the Christian right.

In the broader political context, this apologetic tone serves to play down differences between liberals and conservatives for political gain; the moderate liberal press has thrown in the towel in the fight against religious conservatism and the defense of secular society, having decided electoral success lies in seducing the faithful away from the Republican right. But while it's now the prevailing wisdom that Gore's loss in 2000 and Kerry's in 2004 were the result of Karl Rove's wizardry at bringing the religious right to the polls, that's just not true. As has been consistently shown, the percentage of Americans who list moral values as a prevailing electoral concern has been declining since the mid-1990s. Moreover, this interpretation ignores the fact that centrist Democratic consultants sabotaged both Gore and Kerry by pulling the rug out from under them on what should have been their core electoral values (the environment for Gore, the war for war-hero and anti-Vietnam War-hero John Kerry); most Americans could be forgiven for assuming in 2004 that the war was going fine and that anyway, a Kerry victory wouldn't signal a substantial change. (Well, "forgiven" is too strong a word--most Americans are fucking idiots and you have to beat the truth into their skulls with metaphorical hammers, otherwise they just don't notice.)

In this case, the objectionable middle-of-the-road apologist is Anthony Gottlieb, reviewing Hitchens' no doubt insufferable book in The New Yorker ("Atheists with Attitude," May 21, 2007).

I agree with Gottlieb when he challenges Hitchens et al. on the tendency to be reductive in attacking religion; the problem of "the varieties of religious experience" is one rarely addressed by anti-religious cranks. (Though to give him his due credit, Hitchens makes very clear that he hates all religious observance equally, arguing that moderate religious institutions and their followers make possible the radicals. From a political perspective, he has a point: often times we find damning links between theoretically moderate institutions and radical groups aligned with them, as we've seen with Western Islamic charities and links to terrorist organizations, or between Christian and Catholic groups in the US and violent counterinsurgencies in Latin America during the Cold War. That said, it seems to me this is most pervasive as a political issue, rather than a religious one.) Gottlieb writes:

One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.

Now, in a sense, I'm totally in agreement with the above. What I find strange about the anti-religious is how much credit they give the religious and their beliefs. They treat religious practice as a constant, act as though religious texts like the Bible have but one singular interpretation. In short, they're radically orthodox when it comes to religion.

Now, as one of those damned secular humanists who believe in the Big Bang and evolution and all, I was under the impression that, given that God does not exist to establish universal constants or deliver divine texts to the world, that religion should be therefore viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon, its tenets and practices prone to evolution, its texts endlessly reinterpreted by successive generations in order to remain pertinent to the ever-changing quotidian demands on the faithful. And of course I'm right about that. No religion is absolute, and any reasonable historian of religion could easily provide countless demonstrations of how religious practice and theological interpretation have evolved over the centuries. Does religion influence the society at large? Yes, and the society at large influences religion. By ignoring that fundamental reality, Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk open themselves up to an idiotic chicken-and-egg style argument (which, for the record, Gottlieb chooses to indulge: "The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and [Sam] Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.")

Furthermore, Gottlieb clearly agrees with me on the charge that these "atheists with attitudes", like Hitchens, are more than a little shrill and hyperbolic: "After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa," writes Gottlieb,

which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.

But my problem with Gottlieb is his attempt, like so many people in the liberal media, to problematize the atheists' arguments with counterpoints:

When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers.

Now, is it me, or does the reader of the above paragraph not come up with a rather different interpretation than Gottlieb, using Glover to speak for him? Again, religion stems not from the word of God absolute (as both Hitchens and his enemies in the cloth believe) but as a cultural practice that--as Gottlieb illustrates with contrasting examples--is just as amenable to cruelty and destruction as to righteousness and justice.

What's fascinating to me here is that both Gottlieb and Hitchens are simultaneously engaged in trying to generate a political narrative regarding the role of religion in society starting from the same political perspective: the liberal left. Hitchens embraces a radical criticism of religion on the grounds that it leads to extreme partisanship between diverse sects and religions, while religious texts generally encourage militancy and hatred of religious and cultural others. In the process, he forgets his own humanist perspective and sets up a straw man that turns out to be a three-ton stone statue by giving religion the credit its most ardent believers demand: that it be treated as immutable, eternal, and singular, instead of evolving and open to diverse interpretation, as any reasonable liberal knows. Finally, Hitchens' critique is linked to the same ignoble service as his support for the Iraq war. While it may not at first be patently obvious--given the Bush administration's evangelical zeal--that this is the case, the reality is that the "religion is the cause of all the world's problems" argument goes a long way to absolving the Bush administration of fault for the current disaster in Iraq, as well as encouraging everyone to ignore the rather obvious social, economic and political causes of many of the world's ills and our rather shameful role in bringing them about. It becomes the catch-all explanation for radical Islam, the internecine conflict in Iraq, Al Qaeda, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and why otherwise westernized second-generation Muslims in Europe turn vehemently on their host countries. (A good corrective to this is Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, which goes a long way in explaining how our current problems stem both from the messy aftermath of colonialism and America's post-Vietnam containment policies.)

Gottlieb, in contrast, starts from the liberal position that, well, we've lost the culture war. Blue collar Christians will keep Republicans in power no matter how bad Republican policies are for their pocketbooks (and their children's future) until we give in and make peace on abortion and gays and prayer in school. And so he looks through the history books and, hey, turns out not all religious leaders were crazed zealots. There was Niebuhr, and MLK, and probably some others. Moreover, religious leaders helped fight peaceful crusades against injustices they opposed with their religious values. So maybe there is some common ground. But from my perhaps ignorant humanist perspective, aren't the achievements we credit to the religious here really achievements of human decency when confronted with injustice and cruelty? Or in other words, while Pope John Paul II was certainly a crucial figure in the anti-Communist reform movements in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, is it really fair to give him as much credit for their eventual success as his hagiographers have? He was not, after all, the one who had to strike or go on march and--God forbid--risk arrest, torture, or death for his freedom. And while the marchers at the Lenin Ship Yard or Wenceslas Square may have taken comfort in the Pope's support, the likelihood either he or God was going to be able to save them from a Soviet crackdown, as had occurred in Hungary in 1956, was, I think, rather small.

But to follow the apologetic liberal line that religion also does good things (look at Civil Rights!) ignores how bad their electoral values are for many of their constituents. As Thomas Frank rather devastatingly showed in What's the Matter With Kansas?, the legislative priorities of Republicans are painfully at odds with the needs of the American working and middle classes. The Moral Majority has a lot of blood on its hands when it comes to the dismal future its Republican allies have made for many Americans. And these days, Christians seem more united in denying rights to women and gays--while indulging in no small amount of self-pity at their own perceived oppression and marginalization--than in fighting injustice in the world.

In this, Gottlieb's own narrative ignores one of the few things that Hitchens does get right: that religious observance is far less absolute than religious leaders would have us believe, that the religious right has not achieved a critical mass capable of achieving their political and cultural aims. Attempts by creationist school-board members to force "intelligent design" on schools have been most decisively rebuked not by the courts but by the outraged electorate which has, in virtually every case, voted out the offending members the first chance they got. On abortion, the majority of the population has consistently supported legal access, and the victories Christians have won are narrow and incremental and may lead nowhere. And as far as gay rights are concerned, gay marriage remains legal in one state and looks to stay that way; nationwide, attitudes are becoming more and more progressive on gay rights. So why the hell do Gottlieb & co. continue arguing we should step back?

In short, Hitchens is a moron with a booze-addled brain and no one should pay attention to him. His credibility was shot from supporting a cruel war in Iraq for bad reasons. And I for one am not amenable to having my atheism represented by a man who himself maintains a number of beliefs--such as America's ability to remake the world in its image--on faith and faith alone. In other words, Hitchens needs to be taking lessons in skepticism, not giving them. But the alternative offered by middle-of-the-road liberals in the Times and The New Yorker, the make-nice approach, is no better for the commonweal. Given the degree to which the conservative religious establishment believes it should be given deference in issues of marriage, child-birth, women's rights, and education, it seems increasingly clear that what's needed is not rapprochement but rather a staking of claims. For the good of our country and our society, we need to establish norms for the separation of secular and religious spheres of influence; for my money, I think the religious right has already gone too far. The last thing we should be doing is encouraging them by all but admitting our fault. That doesn't mean we need embrace shrill radicals like Hitchens and Dawkins, but rather that secular society needs to assert that (a) it can develop ethical norms without the need of religious assistance, and (b) that a free society both ensures the freedom of religious institutions within their realm, while divorcing that realm from the secular one. It is precisely this sepatation to which the political religious establishment most objects, and therefore it is of paramount importance it be defended against encroachment.

Yet this entire issue is all but absent from the work of the above-mentioned anti-religious radicals. For them, rationalism and religion are engaged in existential struggle, which only one will survive. The reality is that both religion and secular rationalism are here for the long haul, and the real issues that face America in addressing this uncomfortable marriage of liberalism and anti-liberal doctrines (with a great many churches falling in the first category, it should behoove us to remember) are no better served by the salvos issued by the drunken prat in question than they are by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or any of the other pseudo-religious figures who put the faith of their flocks in the service of political radicals.

Paul Krugman's Embarrassing 1990s Self

2007-05-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

So today I'm breaking my own self-imposed rule of not commenting on opinion columnists. The reason I imposed this rule on myself is because I fail to see the point in writing about the commentariat--it only encourages them (not that my own contribution, or lack thereof, is likely to make much difference) to continue prattling on about unimportant matters. After all, you can roughly divide columnists into two categories: the ones you agree with, and the ones you don't. Both are really just preaching to the choir. That is, I've spilled too much virtual ink taking David Brooks more seriously than he deserves, yet while I enjoy Frank Rich's tendency to list out the litany of complaints we all share against the Bush administration, it both speaks for itself while offering nothing in the way of cause for further discussion, further discussion being the one thing our nation most desperately needs.

However, sometimes--today being such an occasion--some liberal columnist I normally read with half-waning interest brings up something that reminds me of how objectionable and ineffectual the Clinton-era Democrats were. (I fully expect more of this as we return to power after six long years of complete Republican misrule.) Today, the offender was Paul Krugman, and the dark secret from the past was free trade.

"Nothing divides Democrats like international trade policy," Krugman wrote in his May 14 New York Times column.

That became clear last week, when the announcement of a deal on trade between Democratic leaders and the Bush administration caused many party activists to accuse the leadership of selling out...[T]he Democrats remain sharply divided between those who believe that globalization is driving down the wages of many U.S. workers, and those who believe that making and honoring international trade agreements is an essential part of governing responsibly.

What makes this divide so agonizing is that both sides are right.

Now, when I first read this, I was tempted to give Krugman the point. In a sense, I appreciate what he's saying: Anyone who is at all concerned about global poverty shouldn't get all protectionist about trade, since--despite the proclivity for abuse of workers in poorer countries that comes with globalization--trade creates opportunities that didn't previously exist in developing countries. Moreover, like Krugman, I favor the carrot-and-stick approach of free trade agreements tied to labor reforms, which helps workers organize and protect their rights while creating new job opportunities. The downside, of course, is the loss of jobs at home to cheaper foreign labor, which is precisely the source of Krugman's--and everyone else's--ambivalence on the issue.

However, as I read on, several things became apparent. First, it's stupid to start from the perspective of ambivalence regarding the issue. Like any real problem, globalization can't be easily snarked by a columnist, so Krugman deserves no credit for acknowledging that it's complicated. His job, one would assume, is to offer some sort of solution, or at least some original ideas drawn from a lifetime of economic research, which he does not do. Second, he goes on to engage in the selective choice of information I regularly accuse other columnists of using to set up a straw-man. Which brings me back to the unpleasant Clinton years.

Before arising from the ashes of the failed New Economy as a Bush-hater par excellence, Krugman was a booster of the market populism of the 1990s. His solution then, which he returns to here, to the problem of lost jobs is to argue that the issue is overstated and anyway, a rising tide lifts all boats. Minimize, then dismiss. In other words, Krugman is of the school that holds that the loss of certain blue collar jobs is acceptable so long as the growing economy makes up for it by providing new opportunities. And in the 1990s, the market populists argued that with sustained growth, stock ownership, and so on, the market would do just that.

Unfortunately, since 2000, Krugman himself has (occasionally) done excellent work showing how the rising tide did not lift all boats equally, and certainly how in the new century there's not even a sense that it might. He's now legitimately concerned with the growing income inequality and concentration of wealth in America. Which makes this particular column so disappointing.

So imports from the third world, although they make the United States as a whole richer, make tens of millions of Americans poorer. How much poorer? In the mid-1990s a number of economists, myself included, crunched the numbers and concluded that the depressing effects of imports on the wages of less-educated Americans were modest, not more than a few percent.

But that may have changed. We’re buying a lot more from third-world countries today than we did a dozen years ago, and the largest increases have come in imports from Mexico, where wages are only about 11 percent of the U.S. level, and China, where wages are only 3 percent of the U.S. level. Trade still isn’t the main source of rising economic inequality, but it’s a bigger factor than it was.

Now, here's the rub. While I am not familiar with the research he refers to himself and others conducting, my guess is that by a combination of selective date ranges and other criteria, his research minimized the problem in the 1990s.

First, what date range is he referring to? Even wage change over a ten-year period, say 1985-1995, would miss substantial impacts on American wages. The real wage has remained stagnant or fallen since 1974. In other words, the '85-'95 time frame would ignore some of the massive changes wrought in the late 1970s (stagflation) and early 1980s (Reagan's union-busting).

Second, what does Krugman mean when he refers to "the wages of less-educated Americans"? It's an important question. Does "less-educated" include job training or no? Because if it doesn't, it inherently skews the results. A union sheet metal worker in the mid-70s didn't need a high school education (my grandfather, in fact, had only a fifth grade education), yet made around $25 an hour (in 1970s dollars). By contrast, a McDonald's crew member would only have been making minimum wage (what, around $3 an hour?). So if formal education is your only criterion, you wind up lumping my grandfather in with a McDonald's employee. By 1975 and certainly 1980, there were way more service-sector employees than journeymen sheet metal workers, which means that the loss of wages in well-paid minority are minimized across the large number of lower paid workers.

Third, if the second is (as I suspect) an accurate criticism, then you also are comparing apples and oranges. Well-paid skilled labor should not be lumped in with dead-end service sector work. They're not the same damn thing. One route--skilled labor--offered Americans without access to higher education a real chance to raise their circumstances and enter the middle class. To lump those workers in with lower paid workers makes the picture rosier because it ignores the fact that the jobs we've lost were the ones enabling social mobility, while the crap jobs at McDonald's remain safe from the scourge of outsourcing by the glorious lack of opportunities available to McDonald's workers.

In other words, I think Krugman remains committed to some ideas from the 1990s best left to decay in the dustbin of history. The rapaciousness of George W. Bush's presidency, with its marked disregard for the pocketbooks of most Americans, has tended to make us forget that the Democrats under Clinton--the party that was supposed to watch out for the average folk and proles--turned its back on a commitment to economic democracy. Now, with Democrats taking back power, an unpleasant debate is taking place within the party between the neoliberals committed to Clintonian third-way policies and the insurgent red-state Dems elected on anti-immigrant and protectionist populist backlash. Neither one serves the country nor the world well. We can pin our hopes on a charismatic candidate like John Edwards or Barack Obama, both of whom talk a good talk about doing right by the rest of the world and the folks back home, but then you're relying not on building a progressive political consensus but rather on the ability of one politician to have some good ideas and the will to carry them out. And I just can't get behind that sort of personality-driven politics.

So what do I--having already admitted appreciation for Krugman's quandary--propose for the benefit of the commonweal?

First, we have to acknowledge that economies are dynamic. As much as old-school laborites would have us believe, the likelihood that manufacturing has a big future in America is unlikely. Moreover, with intelligent trade policies geared less towards curbing domestic power in our poorer trading partners and more towards giving workers serious rights, we can achieve some good on the world stage. From a policy perspective, America needs to realize that the promise of globalism--creating wealth and ending poverty--is predicated on a contradictory notion--companies go to poorer nations for cheaper labor. In other words, countries can only acquire wealth if wages increase, which will be vehemently opposed by the companies taking their business there. A laissez-faire approach won't overcome this contradiction; it requires the US government use its regulatory powers to encourage behaviors it wants to see, which, God willing, are easing global poverty.

Second, on the domestic front, having acknowledged that a global system is here to stay, we need to figure out how to respond. Free markets won't make everyone in America richer, they have proven in the past 20 years to do nothing but concentrate wealth. The response needs to be a rededication to a progressive tax schedule which helps mitigate massive concentration of wealth among a small group.

Third, we need to instigate universal healthcare. The employer-based healthcare model is a failure; even while globalism demands worker flexibility, the employer-based model ties workers to one job since, if they leave that job, they and their families lose healthcare. That's crap, as is the faith-based "health savings account" solution which doesn't address the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. We need a single-payer system.

Fourth, we also need welfare reform that doesn't treat the unemployed like freeloaders. Again, increased flexibility requires that at a social level we work to lessen the blow to losing a job if for no other reason than a more dynamic, globalized economies means a lot more people are going to go through more frequent periods of joblessness. Better welfare benefits are needed to provide some sort of economic stability to the workforce as more workers are required to change jobs more frequently.

Fifth, crucial education reforms are required. At the university level, we need to lower the cost. Currently, the $15,000-plus yearly tuition for public universities is prohibitively high. It either limits access to those with well-off parents, thus discriminating by social class, or requires a student to accumulate massive debt. And again, that massive debt discourages worker flexibility since servicing it requires relatively higher payments to earnings when workers are in their twenties, precisely the career-stage that the most flexibility is required as workers try to position themselves for higher-paid future jobs.

Conversely, at the secondary education level it seems clear that we need to change the focus from college prep and rededicate ourselves to teaching high-schoolers marketable skills. Today, a minority of high school graduates will complete a bachelor's degree. So while a strong liberal arts education with a university future in mind appeals to the sensibilities of many parents, in reality, what we've done is to create a wealth-transference program via school funding. So long as school funding is used for college-prep, that funding primarily benefits the minority who will actually complete a college education, who are demographically more likely to have parents who completed college themselves. At the same time, all the other students who will not benefit from a college education are left at the age of 18 with few marketable skills and extremely poor job options unless they pursue additional job training--typically at out-of-pocket expense--which is in the long run is of less value than a formal college education.

So, Argos is some kinda catalogue

2007-05-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

So, anyone who knows me probably knows that one of the few new bands I'll rave about is Art Brut. I've interviewed lead singer Eddie Argos on his two Seattle visits, and I'm awaiting their new album, It's A Bit Complicated (due out in late June) anxiously, not to mention some announcement of a real North American tour later this summer or early fall.

In the interim, however, I've discovered that those desperate for a bit more Art Brut can, apparently, turn in to the website of UK's newspaper-of-record, The Guardian, where Argos is a guest blogger/columnist.

(P.S., I recently acquired a pink oxford shirt myself, K.P. having made comments about it on the rack at the Gap as something Eddie Argos would wear. Given her none too well described crush, I had to get it and now wear it frequently.)

Critic!

2007-05-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ah, the barbed pens of critics. My best and oldest friend, Brian Boone, is a sometime playwright. His first musical, a comedic one-act, (which I workshopped at the University of Oregon with him) entitled The Sea is a Restless Whore, is enjoying its third--and first professional--production. It was first put on at the University of Oregon, picked up at a festival and produced by students at Western Washington University, and now is being produced by The Next Stage in Los Angeles, California.

Much to all our amusement, the play has received its first (extremely critical) review, from LA Weekly. See below:

THE SEA IS A RESTLESS WHORE is one of those pirate plays where everybody says “Arrrrgh!” a lot. It is perhaps the only show to feature a diabetic tap-dancing quadriplegic (played by Matthew Jackson). And it is a coming-out play. Captain Longbrau (Jack Sobrack) comes out as gay (which is no surprise to his crew, who present him with a tin of L‘Oreal Sword Polish for his birthday). Seaman Pete (Max Beard) comes out as a former would-be rock star, and Buckfoot (Liz Jamieson) shame-facedly admits to being a tea-drinking Brit. Longshanks the Fearsome (Tanner Beard) comes out of a trapdoor. Playwright Brian A. Boone has assembled every bad gay joke and pirate gag in the book, and Gabe Dickinson provides the unmemorable songs. Jamieson contributes handsome costumes and sometimes amusing choreography, while director Morgan Buck just goes for obvious camp. The actors do their best to overcome the sophomoric material, and the show is blessedly short. THE NEXT STAGE, 1523 La Brea Ave., Hlywd. Thurs., 8 p.m., thru May 24. (323) 850-7827. (Neal Weaver)

Bully, say I! And bully again! An artist needs to take some pride in pissing off the squares and getting bashed. Rarely are critics ahead of the curve. True, The Sea is a Restless Whore is not a work of intellectual genius, it's broad, picaresque comedy. But seriously, as Brian told me in a recent email, "The things he says suck are what will bring people to the show! If someone said to me 'don't see that show. It has a three minute fart scene and a dancing quadriplegic.' I would say 'Dude. I'm there.'" Trust me--if anyone is reading this in LA, you must see this musical (click here for the official MySpace page with info); the quadriplegic isn't just dancing, he's tap dancing. Plus, it's got it's own drinking game.

Viaduct Victory?

2007-04-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

On March 13, Seattle went down a road that was half surprising, half expected: they vetoed both the tunnel and the replacement projects for the crumbling Alaskan Way Viaduct. This was, on its face, somewhat surprising in that the voters failed to go down the path the city and state clearly expected they would—seeing this as an either/or vote between two cemented options with no alternative. On the other hand, as I’ve said more than once, Seattle is a city paralyzed by development and change. In the current environment, the electorate has consistently prevented substantive action from being taken.

In the case of the Viaduct, this scenario has worked in our favor. I long predicted that the electorate’s intransigence would spoil the mayor’s big dig tunnel dreams, while the vocal minority (and potentially growing majority) that favors transit and high-density development would likely scuttle a rebuild.

The historical causes of our current situation are pretty simple: it’s the continued struggle between Seattle’s old guard, blue collar population and the younger, urbanite population that’s been transforming the city since the tech boom of the 1990s. The old guard was behind what used to be known as Seattle’s “neighborhood movement,” where neighborhood activists came to wield substantial power over city planning. A lot of people embraced the neighborhood movement as a sign of intelligent growth: neighborhoods were helping ensure a higher quality of life, reinvigorating civic participation, and serving as a bulwark against heartless redevelopment.

But that was a mistaken impression: the neighborhood groups also represented the status quo, consolidating power in older, richer, more established neighborhoods and fighting to keep a disproportionately big share of the pie. The neighborhood movements, in other words, were pretty happy with they way things were; they were political reactionaries fighting against progress. They helped scuttle Seattle Commons, Paul Allen’s ambitious civic project for SLU. They made nice with homeless advocacy groups to give their greed for city money the veneer of progressive politics. Organizations like the Seattle Displacement Coalition and the hobo newspaper Real Change took to advocating strange positions: Real Change used to give disproportionate article space to Magnolia residents opposing a tunnel, and the Seattle Displacement Coalition’s John Fox became a point man for criticizing the city’s redevelopment priorities, opposing things like streetcar service between downtown and SLU.

The result of these unusual coalitions and proxy battles has been our current state of paralysis. A couple years ago we were looking at a potentially bright future for transit: the monorail, light rail, the removal of the Viaduct, and a streetcar. Now business developers and neighborhood groups together killed the monorail. Homeless advocates and neighborhood groups griping about “corporate welfare” the Paul Allen have help up the streetcar. Light rail, always the worst, least sensitive option, is being bulldozed through by the political will of unaccountable politicians alone.

Which brings us back to the Viaduct vote. Backers of the “streets+transit” option claimed victory after the voters soundly voted down measures on a ballot they weren’t even on. The de facto alternative won by default. Or at least they half-won. The “streets” part won—there’s no will to build highways or tunnels, which leaves us streets. The transit option’s more up in the air. A good omen is reports that Seattle City councilman Peter Steinbrueck is forgoing reelection to advocate for transit options. But if history’s any guide, it’ll be an uphill fight. Right now, we’re winning by virtue of indecision. But indecision doesn’t get new infrastructure built. We’re reminded of a parable offered by Soren Kierkegaard in his pioneering work of philosophy, Either/Or: A ship is sailing straight towards land. The helmsman and the captain argue over whether to veer port or starboard, unable to make a decision. Right now, that’s the situation we have in Seattle: an argument over where we want to go and what we want to do. Just don’t forget—not making a decision is a choice, too, the choice to run aground.

Concept Album Woes & c.

2007-03-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've never been the biggest Nine Inch Nails fans in the world. I can't claim to have sought out every halo obsessively, I didn't care for The Downward Spiral, and personally I've always felt that NIN's best work was Pretty Hate Machine.

Still, we've seen them twice in the last couple years, and they put on a damn fine show. That's why we were horrified to read about their new album in the last issue of Rolling Stone. (No online source available.)

The album takes place in a dystopian version of the year 2022: The religious right has taken over the U.S. government, there are mind-control drugs in the water supply, and something called the presence--in the form of a giant hand reaching from the sky--keeps showing up.

Jesus Christ. Seriously? A concept album about a totalitarian future? Are there any Japanese freedom-fighter robots to be thanked? This sounds worse than Rush's 2112. I quite seriously cannot wrap my head around why a respected, creative artist would want to come up with such a lame, prog-rock concept album to make a didactic political point. With Teeth was effective enough political music; why go in such a weird, new direction? All I can say it Year Zero (due out April 17) had better be a damn good album; it needs to be to save Reznor's reputation.

That said, you have to appreciate NIN's innovative branding and promotional schemes. Year Zero has what may be one of the coolest advertainment promotional schemes I've ever seen. Check it out through Rolling Stone's blog.

On the other side of the coin, Tori Amos's new political concept album promises to show us how to do them right. American Doll Posse (due out May 1) looks to diverge from Amos' recent work, which has been a little too love-song-y for my taste, and dive back into the troubled waters of gender in America. The eponymous "American doll posse" is a series of five characters--Santa, Clyde, Isabel, Tori and Pip--represent different takes on contemporary American women. In an interview with Paul Tingen, Amos explains that , "“The main message of my new album is: the political is personal...This as opposed to the feminist statement from years ago that the personal is political."

"There’s so much that’s not expressed in a country that should be the land of the free," she told Tingen,

and at the same time there’s so much concern, it’s beyond concern. For me the new album is about representing the American women that I see and meet, but that right now is not the world’s view of American women. And there are those in the American media and right wing that try to shame these women for speaking out. And you know, I’m a minister’s daughter, so if you try to shame me, my mojo grows!

That sounds a hell of a lot more adventurous than sci-fi horror concept albums. Plus, the first promotional photo from American Doll Posse is strikingly graphic: Amos, clutching a Bible in one hand, the word "shame" scrawled across the other, with blood running down her leg from under her dress. Much props to her--too few artists these days try to tell the stories and talk about the people who are denied voices in our society.

These days, political sentiment in music tends to be fairly limited: artists sing didactic songs about how they hate the government or organized religion. The rest of their time they spend singing about how lonely, sad, broken-hearted, or unhappy they are. Day to day experience is reduced to personal reflection, rarely if ever expanded upon and raised to the level of a political statement. So I eagerly await Amos's new album.

Aside from Tori Amos and NIN, there's actually several albums coming out in the next few months that I'm stoked about:

--June (?) Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme describes their fifth album, Ars Vulgaris, as "dark, hard and electric--sort of like a construction worker." Plus, anyone disappointed with NIN's new album can check out Trent Reznor (reportedly) contributing to QOTSA. Need I say more?

--July 7, The Smashing Pumpkins release their new album, Zeitgeist. While neither Billy Corgan's nor Jimmy Chamberlin's (the only two original Pumpkins confirmed to have gotten back together) post-Pumpkins work hasn't exactly blown us away, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are epochal discs for which much can be forgiven--so long as they tour, I'm cool with it.

--Eagles of Death Metal confirm they're working on a new album, hopefully due out this year.

--Art Brut should have their new album out later this spring. While as yet untitled, the first single, "Nag Nag Nag Nag" has been out for months.

A Ship Lost At Sea

2007-03-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

One of the great pretensions of the liberal left was on display in Martin Peretz's editorial homage to the history of The New Republic, which, as of this week, is no longer his own: Namely, he indulges in the sort of painstaking soul-searching about past failures (not his own, but his predecessors') that make liberals seem like whiny, futsy, self-obsessed wonks incapable of imagining anything new because they can't get over their past mistakes.

I have before me a collection of TNR pieces, The Faces of Five Decades, with an introduction for each of those decades by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died within the past fortnight. In his notably evocative prose style, AMS sketches tnr's philosophical commitments and its (certainly in retrospect) silly dalliances. Among these were collectivism, isolationism, and, for a few very long moments, an idiot infatuation with, yes, Stalinism.

Ack! Stalinism? Seriously? Stalinism? This coming from a man who oversaw the encouragement to war in Iraq. An interesting dodge there. I may have been wrong, but at least I wasn't a Stalinist...

In fact, Peretz's editorial almost seems like a warning to the new management at TNR. Following the above, he goes on:

Why do I dwell on this tawdry part of the honorable and actually fastidious life of The New Republic? Because it highlights, perhaps even to the point of exaggeration, the precariousness of the liberal idea and of liberal institutions and liberal men and women when faced with regimes, movements, and systems of belief (however cruel or crude) that mobilize with words and arms against the United States and its lessons. Forgive me: The United States has something to learn from a few other countries. But many countries have much to learn from us.

That is, Peretz--a man guilty of no few mistakes himself--is warning those who follow not to stray too far; the history he demonstrates shows the failings of radicalism and the potential for being led astray. In the last three decades, he led TNR steadily rightwards.

"By the time the change took place," he writes of his acquisition of the magazine,

the Democratic Party and American liberals had slipped into a deep and disturbing trauma, of which George McGovern's campaign was itself less a cause than a reflection--a pathetic reflection, to be sure. That the demos should have chosen someone as demonized as Richard Nixon in the midst of a hated war and after Watergate had begun unraveling told us something stark. And it was not just the colossal margin of his victory that was doing the telling. There was a serious breach in the populace. One evident truth was that the American people were offended by haughty elitists, self-styled revolutionaries, and tribunes of the pretty soul.

So what was Peretz's own legacy at the helm of a defining journal of liberal American politics? The answer, unsurprisingly, is "neoliberalism."

"Neoliberalism was the doctrine on domestic affairs that Michael Kinsley shaped when he came to edit the magazine shortly after I took over," writes Peretz. And indeed, his warning comes at a high moment of tension over not just TNR's future, but the future of neoliberalism itself. On Sunday, David Brooks dedicated his New York Times column to "The Vanishing Neoliberal," writing: "For the past few years, The New Republic has tried to keep the neoliberal flame alive, under editors like Peter Beinart. But there is no longer a readership for that. The longtime owner, Marty Peretz, has sold his remaining interests and, starting this month, the magazine will go biweekly."

Why? According to Brooks, the answer is simple and predicatable: Bloggers. "[Kevin] Drum and his cohort [i.e., bloggers who hate neoliberalism] donít want a neoliberal movement that moderates and reforms. They want a Democratic Party that fights," writes Brooks. "Their tone is much more confrontational. They want to read articles that affirm their anger. They are also further to the left, driven there by Iraq on foreign policy matters and by wage stagnation on economic matters."

I suppose I might count myself amongst that bunch; after all, I did write a post a couple months back entitles "Neoliberals Take a Bow at The New Republic." It would certainly be edifying to imagine I--as a nameless part of a critical mass--somehow contributed to the downfall of the pitiably misguided neoliberal movement. But that's all B.S., spun by one of D.C.'s biggest bullshitters. By that logic, TNR first non-Peretz cover should have had a reflecty page with the words: "The Future of American Liberalism" atop it. Thus the egos of bloggers--yesterday's armchair cranks sending out barbed letters-to-the-editor--are appropriately stroked.

Unfortunately, as above, that's all bullshit. True, bloggers can get a good crowd going and screaming for blood. But if bloggers have had anything to do with changing TNR, it's less ideological than economic. The web is killing print media, and that's sad: I am yet to be convinced that blogs actually add anything important to discourse. In fact, let me rephrase that: blogs don't add to discourse. They replace it. They assure their readers that they're our choir leaders and we can be safely preached to; worry not, you need not be exposed to dangerous ideas. In fact, you need not be exposed to ideas at all. We're all realyl here to kvetch about the daily outrages we get from Daily Kos or whatever other piece of crap we read.

No, I can't say I think the blogosphere adds anything to American discourse, save providing easy and non-critical corners for politicians to hide in, where their most ardent supporters can watch their man's (or woman's) credentials get burnished while avoiding all those unpleasant revelations, all the nasty, devilish details.

I certainly don't claim to have added anything to the greater discourse myself. In fact, blogging has been terrible for me. I waste my time writing short pieces few will read, pieces scarce on detail and research and the sort of meat which makes for a truly good argument, a breed strikingly dissimilar from the normal web-based raving you get.

No, if TNR is failing (and as a subscriber, I certainly hope it doesn't fail completely), it's failing for two reasons: the economics of the web-based world, and the vacuity of the ideas Peretz has championed.

Neoliberalism was a dismal moment, even given that it's a concept about as easy to nail down as neoconservatism. The problem, fundamentally, was that neoliberalism was not nearly so great a break from the self-absorbed left of the past as it imagined. Or perhaps it's fair to say that all politics is self-absorbed, and Peretz's scathing indictment of 1970s liberalism as a liberlism of "haughty elitists, self-styled revolutionaries, and tribunes of the pretty soul" is merely naming one variety of a universal constant. Neoliberalism, no less than what came before and what's followed, was an ideological framework, there really being no place for rational decision-making, independent of doctrinal beliefs, in American politics. And neoliberalism's great failure lay in precisely how it helped redirect the particular brand of selfishness evident in the Baby Boom generation to reshaping the economy.

Increasing meritocracy in higher education and industry did little but replace one entrenched class with another, save that the new power-class could reasonably claim an almost Darwinian justification to their success. If they were the winners in a meritocracy, the losers had lost fair and square. As education was reshaped to favor their children, the danger of solidifying the social divides grew stronger, ironically under the name of a liberal education system. The belief that a college education was a real option for everyone devalued secondary education as job- and life-skills training in favor of college prep. Needless to say, America quickly embraced an ever-changing series of premonitions of the future that supported this decision. These days, for instance, there's lots of talk about the "creative" class--well educated, creative people, capable of learning new skills easily and fluidly navigating an ever-changing economy.

Fair enough, and that does describe me pretty well it turns out, but that's not all of America. But the reality is that our so-called "meritocracy" has created a huge underclass of people not served well by college prep high school curricula; to get even basic job skills, they now have to pay for further education through professional schools and community colleges. In the past, they could have entered an apprenticeship program through a union to learn job skills. But just as neoliberals embraced the churn of a liberalized economy, they favored weakening the power of unions, which were seen across the economic libertarian political spectrum as needlessly unwieldly and painfully outdated, not to mention likely corrupt.

Moreover, under Clinton, neoliberals got into bed with neoconservatives on the economic front. Clinton's reliance on Alan Greenspan was widely praised by neoliberals even into the Bush Presidency. Greenspan was granted an uncritical acceptance by the mainstream political spectrum that leant itself to his aura as a seeming wizard of the "New Economy," which achieved high rates of growth with no attendant inflation. The reality of that, though, was that Greenspan was an ace at balancing growth and unemployment rates (with the help of H1-b visa-happy congressmen). In other words, Greenspan always put the dampers on just enough to keep unemployment high enough to prevent too much wage increase from occuring. Abetting this tendency while serving industry's own self-interest was a greater reliance on hefty stock packages which increased investment in companies by transferring wage increases into inventment. In other words, Greenspan fought desperately to keep people from getting a raise, while congress fed the job market with a goodly number of well-educated foreign workers to level off unemployment stats, and corporate America encouraged us to take stock instead of wages, which kept the bubble increasing while wages stayed stagnant.

We're only beginning to realize the error of our ways on these fronts. Good stats on the 1990s show that the economic boom didn't distribute itself well across the populace, and the economy since 2000 has more nakedly exemplified these priciples. Education, like healthcare, is becoming a nightmare as the huge costs and massive debts become patently exclusionary towards the children of the poor and working class. And neoliberalism's vacuous foreign policy boosterism of spreading democracy (which put it more in line with neoconservativism) ultimately imploded in Iraq.

So with all due respect, Mr. Peretz, I have to call B.S. on you and your tepid warning, with all its high-minded rhetoric about a "people's capitalism" and that, "People who live under the heel of dictatorship and are fighting to get out from under are our friends, like the Contras were." The Contras? Seriously? For several years, it's become increasingly clear that the great mistake of many of the Bush administration's thinkers and policy architects is that they remain purely a product of Cold War thought. They never divorced themselves from the belief that states, threatening military equivalency with the United States--represent our greatest threat; and that, as with any imperial state, the best way to deal with aggression was a seemingly endless series of proxy wars, fought in far off places for a variety of ideological and realist-economic purposes. And now it's clear that The New Republic's faux intellectuals are guilty of the very same crime: An inability to move beyond the guilt-tripping, Cold War mentality of who was right, who was wrong, and who was a fellow traveller; the Cold War hawk mentality that sees a moral obligation to make war for a higher cause; and finally, the anti-Communist mentality that places capitalism on such a high pedestal that it's difficult if not impossible to legitimately question its excesses, its inequalities, and its occasional patent failure.

Thank God you've still got Jonathan Chait.

Rock Gods? My Ass!

2007-02-13T21:48:00.000-08:00

It's no doubt utterly futile to criticize Rolling Stone, but still, even given their need to be forever-hip while espousing all the blandness of au courant popular music, I have to object to their current issue's lame article on today's top-20 "guitar gods."

I admit, taking part in such a cock-fest of testosterone-fueled, frat-boy speculation is beneath, well, any self-respecting person. But seriously, the cover featured John Mayer, John Frusciante, and some guy I've never even heard of but who is apparently an Allman Brothers Band member. Now, John Mayer needs no criticism from me: His own lameness is so painfully self-evident that I'd be wasting space. As for Jack Frusciante, he should have stayed out the band. Stadium Arcadium was extremely weak (no matter what the rock-snots think), and having had the displeasure of seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers last fall, I think I speak for any true Chilis fan when I as, "When the fuck did you become a jam band?" We want to see Flea playing bass, not a washed-up junkie bending notes in a blues scale for 45 minutes and acting like he's Jimi Hendrix reborn.

The rest of their top-20 was equally bland. Tom Morello may be a shoe-in, but really, it's an Yngwie Malmsteem-type thing. The guy's a technical virtuoso, yes, but does anyone really want to listen? Any true Audioslave fan (God forbid such a person exists) should listen to one of the records in a bar, when the ambient sound drowns out the color, and they'll realize it's pretty much twelve songs with the same riff. Which is preferable, I admit, to having to listen to the godawful lyrics. Then there's Tool's guitarist; I like Tool myself, though I'm not a huge fan, but I wouldn't exactly call them a "guitar-driven" band. Moreover, they thankfully eschew the sort of machismo-laden posing that's necessary for rock-god status. My Morning Jacket is terribly overrated, and I thought that boat had long since sailed, so why Jim James and Carl Broehmel made the list, I don't know. Jack White was a clear shoe-in, but his schtick, too, is wearing thin; The Raconteurs was therefore a really good move, and despite critics' pannings, Broken Boy Soldiers was a good disc, and the band was not, again contrary to the whining of critics, the Jack White-show with extras. Mike McCready and Stone Gossard are good, we know this, but Pearl Jam's last album, with its garbly-vocalled lead single "World Wide Suicide", took the band too far in the direction of punk for this writer. At least previous punk-inspired efforts like "Spin the Black Circle" had good riffs, instead of being power-chord driven wannabe anthems. And when it comes to Radiohead, I'm sorry, they're phenomenal, but not guitar gods.

For my money, this list left out two people that, by all accounts, should have been on it.

These days, it's impossible to talk about contemporary rock guitarists without bringing up Josh Homme. Sure, a lot of people are fed up with him for his endless side projects, and the last Queens of the Stone Age album, Lullabyes to Paralyze, wasn't Songs for the Deaf. But as far as contemporary guitarists go, he's nonpareil: Of all the music to come out since 2000, what other song immediately screamed, "I can follow up 'Stairway to Heaven' on hard rock radio" like "No One Knows"? In alternative music these days (a term that's long since outlived its usefulness), the Queens are one of the few bands to eschew punk rock inspired guitar playing without falling back on endless recycling of older music styles (like the lackluster Wolfmother's endless channeling of Led Zeppelin). Seriously, what has John Mayer or Jack Frusciante ever done that compares to the frenzied lead opening to "Go With the Flow"? And Homme's guitar-god status was solidified by the understated closing to the otherwise so-so "Little Sister". And while "Burn the Witch" may not showcase anyone's virtuoso guitar talent, its riff puts anything Tom Morello's done to shame, which is ironic, because it's a bass-riff, which inevitably drives songs by both Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave.

Ultimately, Homme's great sin, insofar as I can tell, is that he doesn't take himself too seriously. He's not an emotional poseur like Mayer, whose songs seem intended to be bitching enough for guys to like while expressing tepid emotional sensitivity to make the ladies feel comfortable. As for Frusciante's playing, it frankly seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the music, the Chili Peppers having sacrificed their once impeccable pop-song tightness to let the moron prance about the stage, wailing through a less-than-inspiring solo. This in comparison to Homme, who doesn't fake political engagement and rarely admits to any deeper motivation than women and booze. But even then, he's not an asshole--he tossed Nick Oliveri out of the Queens for beating his girlfriend. And anyway, Homme laid down the most bitching riffs on Tool's 10,000 Days, while still finding time to record the Eagles of Death Metal's sophomore effort, Death By Sexy. EofDM seems to piss people off endlessly, for, apparently, doing what they want to do right: They're party, drinking, dancing music. People have a great time at their shows, just like with the Queens. Rockists, apparently, feel that boredom induced by neverending guitar noodles is the sign of true genius; I beg to disagree.

Then, there's J. Mascis, the eminence gris of indie rock. His page in rock history is already earned, for no less an achievement than giving indie rock a lead guitar, and breaking with punk's seemingly endless progression towards faster and harder. I saw Dinosaur Jr's reformed original line-up in Seattle in 2004, and they were mind-blowing. Mascis looks like shit, and Murph's showing his age (Lou Barlow alone remains fit and young-looking, due to his long years of success with Sebadoh), but they put most rock bands today to shame. Quite honestly, I've never seen an indie rock band play with a full double-stack of amps, and seriously, that was too much for the Showbox, but my God: the sounds he made were unbelievable. No jumping around to try to make the music seem more exciting than it was--Mascis played slightly hunched over his well-worn Jazz Master, and like Hendrix, the energy was all in the fingers. "Freak Scene" sent the audience into convulsions, and the guitar solo on the band's seminal cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven"--once overlaid with fuzz, flange, wah-wah, and a phaser--was a mind-blowing moment of rock and roll. The only comparable moment I can remember at any other show was Billy Corgan's pick-scratch intro to the frenzied guitar solo in "Zero" when I saw the Smashing Pumpkins on the Mellon Collie tour back in 1997. In fact, you could argue that Corgan himself should be on the list, since the Pumpkins are touring later this year and releasing a new album in July. But Mascis has been touring for two years now, with Dinosaur Jr, and they're hitting the road again later this year.

So there you are, the inexcusable omissions from Rolling Stone's idiotic list.

From the Propaganda Analysis Desk

2007-02-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

In this week's New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg takes aim at President Bush's State of the Union address, noting:

Maybe it was just another Bush SOTU puzzler, like last year’s warning against “human-animal hybrids.” (To be fair, America remains proudly centaur-free.)

Touché, Mr. Remnick, but THE NEW LIBERTINE asks: For how long?

It hasn't escaped the attention of those who keep track of such things—and we count ourselves among them—that President Bush's omission seems less a matter of political triangulation than capitulation to a propaganda putsch that has reached, in recent years, a seeming fever-pitch, as advocates for the so-called "freaks of science" have pulled out all the stops to achieve their dastardly ends.

From the anthropomorphic animated critters littering cable networks like Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, to Tim Burton's remake of the classic Planet of the Apes, the war on non-hybrid humans has begun in earnest.

Some may dismiss such criticism of a film like Burton's as not just fear-mongering and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, but gross misinterpretation: Surely, they argue, Planet of the Apes is an allegory of race in contemporary society. Well, we say: Yes, back in Charlton Heston's day! But Burton's remake turned the tables. Whereas Heston's film humanized the apes—thus to draw parallels between them and the human astronauts and thereby calling into question the logic of segregationary or racist practices—Burton accentuates the animalistic qualities of the apes, drawing what at first seems to be a stark contrast between them and the "normies" only to, in a ham-handed twist of logic familiar to those misfortunate enough the regularly visit their local multiplex, suggest that it is we who are the animal.

Et tu, Brute?

It becomes crystal clear that Burton, too, has joined the secretive cabal bent on generating human-animal hybrids to perform menial jobs Americans won't take once anti-immigrant legislation—or the efforts of human rights activists to grant them even basic rights—makes the costs of migrant labor too substantial. Not to mention the obvious military applications of human-hybrid soldiers, thus relieving the Administration of the awkward need to ever have to reinstate the draft to continue feeding soldiers into the meat-grinder which is Iraq.

And let us not spare the most brazen propagandist herself, a woman whose plucky characters have warmed the hearts of millions globally, allowing her insidious propaganda to be welcomed into countless homes around the world: We speak, of course, of J.K. Rowling.

It did not fail to come to our attention that with the 2003 publication of the fifth installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Rowling went after critics of hybrid creatures directly.

Lovable, gruff Hagrid—the wizarding world's own mad scientist, splicing and dicing the genetic composition of God's great creation left and right—is a half-breed himself, whereas opponents (duly critical) of such unnatural abominations, are regularly portrayed as "evil," "wicked," and "child abusers," whose ideological zeal causes them to cross any line in their relentless efforts to suppress such genetic freaks.

The case in point would be Rowling's depiction of the character of Dolores Umbridge; we are encouraged to believe she is a closed-minded, prejudiced person deserving of scorn in such passages as:

"I do not wish to criticize the way things have been run in this school," she said, an unconvincing smile stretching her wide mouth, "but you have been exposed to some very irresponsible wizards in this class, very irresponsible indeed - not to mention," she gave a nasty little laugh, "extremely dangerous half-breeds."

And today, we have reports that the release date of the final installation in this abominable woman's perverse series is announced, ensuring that this July will be an orgy of pro-mutant rhetoric.

Celebrity Pick-Up Lines

2007-01-31T23:52:00.001-08:00

"Hello, I'm John Larroquette. That's French for, 'the Rocket.'"

Neoliberals Take A Bow At The New Republic

2006-12-27T19:57:00.000-08:00

Back on Oct. 30th, I wrote of Peter Beinart's attempt to link Thomas Frank and other dissenters from neoliberalism to xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric a la Lou Dobbs ("The Neoliberals Seek Their Revenge For Questioning the Market God"). From his bastion as an editor of The New Republic, Beinart decried our new breed of economic populists:

For writers like [Thomas] Frank, the tragedy of that era was that the free-trading, Wall Street-friendly Bill Clinton did not use economic populism to permanently lure these angry white males into the Democratic fold. Now Democrats have another chance. But renouncing future NAFTAs won't be enough. Many liberals would like to pick and choose their anti-globalization politics--arguing for more regulation of international trade and investment, but resisting punitive measures to regulate the flow of international labor. Morally, that's perfectly defensible. But, politically, it is likely to fail. There is a reason that the late nineteenth-century populists Frank admires were nativists: While low-skilled immigration may benefit the United States as a whole, it rarely benefits low-skilled Americans. And, for many blue-collar Americans today, Mexican immigration--whether legal or not--is not just linked to broader anxieties about globalization; it has become the prime symbol of those anxieties.

As the title of my article implied, I was less than impressed with Beinart's analysis. To my mind, he was comparing apples and oranges: on the one hand, assuming Lou Dobbs's nativist rhetoric could speak for nuanced policy criticisms for people like Frank; on the other, using the conflation of the two to set up a straw man that was much easier to defend his own precious neoliberal theories against.

So it was a pleasure to see my own (I admit, I'm mugging a bit, but I'm proud) analysis verified by the same magazine this week.

"[I]mmigrant laborers are being screwed by being paid lower wages than Americans (and sometimes lower than the law allows), and the average American worker is being screwed because our jobs are being lost to lower wage workers, who are, as before, being screwed themselves," I wrote. "Does that sound like we're on opposite sides here?"

And lo and behold! This week, in the editors' column in The New Republic, TNR's editors came out with much the same conclusion.

Writing of a highly publicized immigration bust at six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants, the editors note,

This was a theatrical stunt, not the makings of an immigration policy. But, if Bush did want a new-and-improved immigration policy, meatpacking would be a good place to start. There is, after all, a reason that immigrants populate the Swift plants: An industry that once prided itself on its stable, middle-class workforce has become a hellhole that only the most desperate workers would enter.

The story they go on to tell should be well-known (and, as it happens, is to readers of Thomas Frank, who devotes a good deal of space in What's the Matter With Kansas? to the subject): Following Upton Sinclair's devastating expose of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle, a series of reforms were launched that eventually cleaned up the industry. Meatpacking was dominated by well-paid union workers by the post-war period; wages were upwards of $20 an hour in today's money, with benefits. Then, slowly came the backsliding: Plants moved to rural areas, wages fell, and safety took a back seat.

"[W]with their move, they changed how meat was processed," write the editors.

They replaced skilled and semi-skilled workers with assembly lines that turned out packaged beef and pork products. Workers now stood on slippery floors in dark, fetid buildings wielding knives and power tools with which they would slice steers or hogs as they swung past at high velocity. They were paid about half of what their unionized counterparts had earned. The Jungle had reemerged.

The new assembly-line jobs were extremely dangerous. Lacerations were common, as were maimed limbs. Repetitive muscular injuries were virtually unavoidable. (Imagine throwing a baseball with the same motion 10,000 times a day.) Nearly one-third of workers at the average plant suffer a work-related injury each year. That has contributed to an astoundingly high turnover rate.

Immigrants became the primary source of labor since the combination of inhuman conditions and low pay meant that no self-respecting American would take the job. Under Reagan, the National Labor Relations Board was de-fanged, and union organizers are frequently fired and occasionally assaulted, in union-busting moves most voters are probably unaware still exist in this country.

So what is the solution to this problem put forward by The New Republic?

if the Bush administration truly wanted to alleviate the tension that surrounds immigration, it would reform the industries that rely on immigration. It could begin by enforcing the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which makes the federal government responsible for assuring "safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women." Of course, Bush has done exactly the opposite. One of his first presidential actions was to overturn the ergonomic standards that the Clinton administration had adopted. These would have applied directly to the meatpacking plants. To add insult to injury, the Bush administration even stopped requiring employers to report these injuries, enabling it to claim the industry has become safer.

Hmm. I seem to remember writing something like:

So this really is a situation in which the little guy loses out and the companies make huge profits; politicians then play the little guys off one another to win elections, and the companies get off free. I say, put the immigrants on the same level as natural-born Americans, prevent exploitative labor practices, and the demand for illegals begins to drop and a competitive labor market exists that does workers a lot better than the system we have now, which to one degree or another the neoliberals support. Fine the hell out of companies for employing illegal immigrants (why always the double-standard when it comes to tough-on-crime tactics with regard to corporate America?) and stop American companies from taking advantage of migrants and, in the process, putting Americans out of jobs... The way of equitable economic policy does not necessarily lead to nationalist demagoguery; it's a low electoral tactic and nothing more, and we shouldn't let neoliberals like Beinart convince us to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Insane Novelist Threatens Critics With Baseless Accusations of Child Rape

2006-12-20T18:12:00.000-08:00

We here at The New Libertine have long had our suspicions, but this week we've got confirmation: Michael Crichton is bat-shit crazy.

On the cover of this week's New Republic we were promised an article pithily plugged as: "Michael Crichton, Jurassic Prick." After searching through the magazine, we discovered it was actually the back-page "Washington Diarist" column. Here's how it starts:

There is an obscure publishing doctrine known as "the small penis rule." As described in a 1998 New York Times article, it is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to the Times, "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!'"

Got you hooked? Wondering how this related to Michael Crichton? Well, read this passage from his new "novel," Next (as reprinted from TNR:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

Wow! Jesus Christ! Bonus points for the detail on the rectal damage caused by child-rape you sick fuck. But that's not really the point. The writer in The New Republic goes on:

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire.

It was at this point we stopped reading, scratched our heads, and said, "Huh?" Why was the author doing Google searches on the name? Surely whoever was the ire of Crichton's wrath wouldn't share the same name. I glanced down at the bottom of the page to see what sort of rhetorical half-wit had written this thing, and then-- Well, I'll let the author explain:

And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

Yes, Michael Crowley, a senior editor at The New Republic, had indeed written a brilliantly devastating feature on Crichton back in the March 20th edition ("Jurassic President: Michael Crichton's Scariest Creation"). The subject was Crichton's State of Fear, a 2004 novel that posited (if a novel can truly posit an idea) that global warming was a ruse concocted by a conspiracy of leftists radicals to terrorize the planet. Or something. Honestly, we can't be expected to read this crap. But we have it on good sources that this is the subject of said novel.

"Although 'State of Fear' comes dressed as an airport-bookstore thriller," begins Bruce Barcott's Jan. 30, 2005 review in The New York Times, "Crichton's readers will discover halfway through their flight that the novel more closely resembles one of those Ann Coulter 'Liberals Are Stupid' jobs. Liberals, environmentalists and many other straw men endure a stern thrashing in 'State of Fear,' but Crichton's primary target is the theory of global warming, which he believes is a scientific delusion."

This was actually our first clue that Crichton was bat-shit crazy; later, we received further clues when in Feb., 2006, the Times noted that George W. Bush was a huge fan of Crichton's, and had invited him to the White House to discuss the novel. Then came Crowley's original New Republic piece, which seemed to confirm that Crichton had become a full-on political hack of the most pathetic variety.

"In a 1995 interview with Time magazine," wrote Crowley, "Crichton hinted at an agenda beyond dazzling people with roller-coaster plots and astounding Hollywood special effects. Somewhat ostentatiously citing Jean Cocteau's The Difficulty of Being, Crichton explained that the French writer 'said what I've always believed about myself. He didn't care about being noticed for his style. He only wanted to be noticed for his ideas. And even better for the influence of the ideas.'"

The gist of Crowley's article, if we recall correctly, is that Crichton--a man in love with his own sense of genius--frequently attacks academics, scholars, intellectuals and any other sort of "expert" in his novels. Such people are too girly, too self-satisfied, and too comfortable in their own little worlds to possibly be correct about anything. That's why they get eaten by dinosaurs. Or don't understand the Japanese are going to take over the country. Or can't bring themselves to believe that women all really wanna fuck their coworkers. You know, they're pretentious.

So Crichton tried to play gadfly to all our preconceived notions about global warming in State of Fear, ultimately (in his afterword) comparing it to pseudoscience of eugenics caliber. That position won him a number of friends in D.C. In February, 2006, Crichton's novel was awarded the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' truth in journalism award, despite being, well, not-journalism.

But Crichton had powerful allies. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), widely considered the dumbest member of the US Senate, and who has referred to global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," called Crichton to speak before the committee he chaired (until the last election): the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

"I'm excited about this hearing," Inhofe old the Times. "I think I've read most of his books; I think I've read them all. I enjoyed most 'State of Fear' and made it required reading for this committee."

(For more on James Inhofe's own bat-shit crazy rantings, see Michael Crowley's "Ill Natured" from the Jan. 20, 2003 New Republic.)

And finally, the smoking gun: Turning Michael Crowley into a kiddie rapist. "It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level," writes Crowley, "particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child." But what else do you expect from such an avid imagination, one which conceives of thousands of scientists and concerned citizens all getting together to form a global cabal for the exclusive purpose of terrorizing the poor energy sector (as if they weren't having a hard enough time as it is)?

Well, we're not surprised, at least. Not that we saw it coming in the form of accusations of child-rape and penis envy, but we saw it coming: it was inevitable that Crichton's bat-shit insanity would make itself known eventually.

Parliamentary Whore

2006-12-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

My loathing for that bitch Margaret Thatcher reaches new lows today, with her response, reported in the Guardian, to Augusto Pinochet's death:

A spokesman for Lady Thatcher, the former prime minister who cherished Gen Pinochet's assistance during the Falklands war with Argentina, said she was "greatly saddened" and had sent her condolences to his family, but would not be issuing a formal statement.

I expect little else from that corrupt bitch, but still I can't fathom how--in the face of the mountains of public evidence attesting to Pinochet's criminality--one would have the gall to say a good word on the man's death bed. Such insolence offends the better selves of all decent Britons, just as Henry Kissinger's continued support (and repression of evidence to Pinochet's detriment through his role on the Council on Foreign Relations) for Pinochet does for Americans.

Of course, nifty titles, wealth and acclaim can't entirely shield Maggie Thatcher from the debased lows to which such people stoop: her son Mark barely avoided prison for his role in a business backed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.

What today shows is the disgusting aftermath of the Cold War, more than anything; the self-righteous hawks who knew no low in their zealous pursuit of anything that smacked of socialism continue to feel no remorse for the violence and brutality they helped unleash on the world, marking them as no better than their own worst enemies. I can't even express how enraged I feel that that whore Thatcher continues her happy, self-satisfied existence in London, while Pinochet's crimes go unpunished in Chile. The desire to see them both burning in hell is almost enough to make me Christian again, just so I can have the joy of believing it could be so.

The World Has Become a Slightly Better Place

2006-12-11T10:21:00.000-08:00

Yes, yes, "tears of the world are a constant quantity" and all, but the world became a slightly better place today when the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet bit the dust. The air has become slightly less sulfurous, I think. His coup on Sept. 11, 1973 ousted the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende and unleashed on the world, Operation Condor, a joint effort between nationalist dictatorships and military juntas in South America whose messianic nationalism saw them as the final defense against atheistic communism. Operation Condor, then, spread terrorism around the globe, including the assasination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier by car bomb, which killed an American, Sheridan Circle. This in spite of the fact he was an American ally, supported in his crimes (as the historical record increasingly shows) by Henry Kissinger and the Nixon White House. Then there were the "desaparecidos," the poor bastards secretly arrested and murdered by the dictatorship (numbering in the tens of thousands).

While I'm sure there are many words that should--and need--to be written about this remarkably foul specimen of our species, at the moment all I can say is good riddance and here's to roasting in hell you God-awful son of a bitch.

Coming to America

2006-12-11T01:09:00.000-08:00

The first time I saw Kultur Shock was back in March, opening for Gogol Bordello at Neumo’s. Honestly, I knew nothing about them at time, and I actually skipped the first half of their set to drink in the Bad Juju next door, until finally the insane sounds we were hearing drug my girlfriend and me into the theater. Onstage, a Japanese bassist with a mohawk was dancing around, next to a couple vaguely Eastern European-looking guitarists and a fiddler, and in front, there was tall, broadly built man, with most of his head shaved save for a long sprout of dreadlocks coming down from the crown of his skull. He’d jump around, the tail of hair whipping about while the band descended into a jam that mixed Southeast European trad with raging metal, and then stop to sing. His voice was incredible, a strong baritone that wandered into the sort of guttural, melisma-heavy vocals that make Southeast European singing sound vaguely Middle Eastern.

This was my first experience of Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic, Kultur Shock’s singer and impressario, the outsized (both literally and figuratively) front man of what is one of Seattle’s most exciting bands.

The second time I saw Gino was eight months later, and the conditions couldn’t have been more different. Here he was, sitting on a stool with a handheld drum, backed not by the powerful rock outfit but a trio of acoustic guitarists (one of them on bass) and a fiddler. It was the grand opening of Solo Bar & Gallery in Lower Queen Anne, run by Kultur Shock guitarist Val Kiossovski and his wife, and the crowd was strangely split. At Solo, the bar and the stage are at opposite ends of the space; near the bar a group of your typical Seattle hipsters, people in jeans with tattoos and piercings, was gathered. But the people near the stage were all Slavic, nicely dressed businessmen, women in skirts with knee-high leather boots, older gentlemen in blazers and dress shirts, all gathered around the stage, all chanting and singing and eventually dancing along to music sung in Serbo-Croatian. As my friend commented to me, it felt like we were crashing someone else’s party.

Outside smoking, I got my first education in the story of Gino. We were chatting with a middle-aged woman from the former-Yugoslavia. She was wearing black and had the dark sort of complexion you think of as gypsy, and she had the mixture of cynicism and fatalistic sarcasm you get with a lot of refugees. She, like Gino, was born in what was once Yugoslavia. Under Tito, a Communist dictator who broke with the Soviet Union early in the Cold War, the Balkans saw a long period of peace and prosperity in a part of the world noted for neither. Like Gino, she was a child of the era of the 1984 Winter Olympics, held in Gino’s hometown of Sarajevo. The Olympics were a milestone for Yugoslavia, and serve as the idealized “before” of the inevitable “before and after” shots of the war-torn city.

Asking us if we knew anything about Gino, she proceeded to explain that he was once one of the biggest pop stars in Yugoslavia. “When he was like eighteen, you know, he had all the bitches,” she said, making a suggestive gesture to her loins and laughing in a husky voice that bore witness to years of smoking. It was all somehow extremely fitting.

The story of how a Communist-era Yugoslavian pop star wound up a dreadlocked Seattle punk-metal singer for a flamboyantly theatrical band is a hard story to tell, as hard as the music itself is to describe. Ultimately, you fall back on hyphenated labels: It's trad-punk, as the Levellers used to be called (a UK sub-genre that eventually encapsulated Irish bands like the Pogues and Flogging Molly as well). And it's gypsy punk, as Gogol Bordello calls it, though the influences are slightly different in Kultur Shock's case. And it's theater, not really jams so much as calculated performance--again like Gogol Bordello--with the performance and the character Gino plays onstage ultimately becoming inseparable from the music. It is, in the band's own calculation, "Balkan punk rock gypsy metal wedding-meets-riot music from Bulgaria, the US, Japan, and Bosnia." In other words, it's a mouthful, a mishmash of American rock and Southeast European trad, but artfully combined by a pop musician who understands stage presence and character. It's both the real thing and an artful artifice, which is all really just a wordy way of saying Kultur Shock escapes the pigeon-holing most music writers like to trade in. The band rocks, and rocks hard. And they put on a great a show.

I met Gino a week or so later for coffee, the day before Kultur Shock left for a European tour through New Year’s. The first thing I asked him about was his early career as a musician.

“At sixteen, I was the drummer in a band that had a hit, a one-hit wonder,” he laughs. “I was big.” It was a rock band called Zov, though Gino sort of laughs off the word “rock,” explaining that it was really just pop. “Kids today think they’re punk rockers, but they’re really playing pop music. Like the punk kids, Green Day...It’s fine, it’s good, it’s great, but it’s still pop music...Just don’t take yourself too seriously.”

Although he never said as much, I got the impression that he was making a point based on experience. Although Zov was big, they broke up when he was 19 years old. “We pretty much made it, all [of us],” he said, speaking of Zov’s members. “The guitar player is a pretty famous artist, a visual artist, painter right now. The bassist is a politician, and the singer is the biggest pop star in all of those countries right now, the former-Yugoslavia...his name is ‘Harry.’”

But at 19, Gino went off to pursue more “serious” musical pursuits. “I was going more theatrical, more jazz...they stayed more pop,” he said, adding that what he did “was still pop.” It took three or four years to win over the record company, but ultimately Gino returned to even greater popularity under the rather hilarious name “Gino Bananas.”

“We had a huge hit at the time that was kind of saxophony, melancholic, Wham, George Michael kind of pop,” he explains. “Probably my biggest achievement last time we were there on tour was that Kultur Shock overshadowed [Gino Bananas]. The success of Kultur Shock in Europe came back to where I’m from and it was kind of like, ‘Shit, look what he’s doing!’ It’s kind of like, imagine if Justin Timberlake came back in 20 years with some insane band, and your son would tell you, ‘Dad, you know Justin Timberlake from your time?’ And you’d say, ‘Oh shut the fuck up.’ ‘He’s great!’ ‘No he’s not!’ And that’s pretty much what was going on there with me.”

By the early 1990s, Gino was a well-off man, a pop star, property owner and, I got the impression, fairly self-satisfied. But then came the war. Following the fall of Communism and Tito’s death, the Balkans descended into chaos as nationalist groups clamored for independent states. Civil wars broke out between the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and breakaway republics in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally Kosovo. “I changed in the war,” says Gino. “When you face death every five minutes, you realize, you don’t want to do shit for anybody else...you do what you like to do.”

When I asked about his own ethnicity, Gino balked and said, “I don’t identify myself.” Historically he comes from Serbian Orthodox-Christian stock, though he was born and lived until the age of 33 in Sarajevo, the capital of Muslim Bosnia. The story of the disintegration of Yugoslavia is too complex to even start to tackle here, and whatever interpretation one uses inevitably stirs objections from one side or another. My experience has been that invariably people from the Balkans will say that Americans don’t really understand what happened there, nor even our own role in causing it. Gino went a step further and said, “We don’t even know what the fuck happened.”

“What you guys definitely don’t know is what we were before,” he adds. “Once you find out what we were before, during the Cold War, then it’s logical what happened to us. Because after the World War II, Tito, the President of Yugoslavia, separated himself from Russia and from the Eastern Bloc, but also didn’t come to the West and the Western Bloc, but made some kind of a hybrid Socialist system where there is private property and private things if you want to, but living, schools and medicine is for free. Which is the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Hate was a crime. National and religious hate was a crime. Because once that shit starts, we got fucked. It stopped being a crime when [Tito] died, and America came to our help, and this is what we did. We started hating ourselves.”

Gino was trapped in Sarajevo during the siege, when the city’s plight became an international cause célèbre. Eventually, he wound up with cultural exchange visa, as an artist, to come the United States.

“During the war I did the musical Hair, but I made it dark and insane and with a bunch of other people, my friends, recording artists...who were trapped in the city,” he explained. “Imagine if this city got trapped and everyone from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Nirvana, whoever, we all get together and we make one huge, shit musical, because you can’t really get out.”

The production was embraced by American celebrities. Joan Baez and the filmmaker Phil Alden Robinson (best known as the writer-director of Field of Dreams) tried to bring the production to the United States, and Robinson planned to make a film about the war with Gino, but ultimately the film plans fell through as time went by; the focus shifted from the Balkans to the Haitian conflict in 1995. But Gino really wasn’t too sorry about that. He told me that he really didn’t have any faith that an American filmmaker would do justice to the story of what happened. Americans tend to exoticize the Balkans, and their perspective is myopic.

“I remember when I came here,” he said chuckling, “there’s Sarajevo [on television], and there’s a woman on a horse. For 32 years in Sarajevo, I’ve never seen a horse, except during football games when the pigs are riding them and breaking the riots.” The film proposal, somewhat unsurprisingly, tried to tell the story through the perspective of an American journalist, a timeworn trope used in countless topical films coming out of Hollywood, currently on display in the Leonardo DiCaprio feature Blood Diamond.

Eventually Gino wound up in Seattle and started playing music, but of the genre we’d call “trad” or generally ethnic world music, at restaurants and weddings. The story of how Kultur Shock (as it was known even then) gave up on world music and became a punk-metal band is the stuff of Seattle legend. The most popular version revolves around Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic seeing the band and telling them to dump the acoustics and plug in, but according to Gino it was actually the result of being thrown out of Serafina, the swank, overpriced East Lake restaurant.

Gino, of course, was a huge pop star, and while he may not have such status with American audiences, he maintains it with the Serbian et al population here in the US, who flock to his shows. As Gino describes the scene in the normally staid Serafina's, “People were just drinking and breaking glasses and jumping on tables and taking off their bras, what’s so wrong about it? We just enjoyed the music." Then he added, with grinning sarcasm, "When Greeks do it, that’s cool.” The management didn’t agree, though. “They liked the band, the Serafina people, so they came to me and said, ‘Can you kind of tell them not to come?’ And I said, ‘For you, for Serafina, so you can have some other people in here? Do you hear yourself? Do you think you’re more important to me than my audience, the people who love me? Fuck you!’ You know.” The rest of the band was unhappy with the decision and the acoustic Kultur Shock disintegrated, but Gino had a sort of what-the-fuck attitude towards it and went his own way.

The first step was to find more musicians, and the first person he called was Mario Butkovic, a Croatian émigré, who now plays guitar and buzuki in the band. Once Gino got him on the phone and told him who was calling, Mario laughed at him and asked, “No, who is this really?” They added to the line-up Val Kiossovski, a Bulgarian who defected with his rock band Orion to the West in the waning days of Communism. And over time they filled out to become the current quintet, with Masa Kobayashi on bass, Matty Noble on violin, and Chris Stromquist on drums. They released a single album, Live in America, before signing to Kool Arrow, a San Francisco-based label founded by Faith No More bassist Billy Gould. In 2001, their first Kool Arrow record, FUCC the INS, was released. According to Gino, it was recorded on portable recording gear, pushing the technology to its max. For the 2004 follow up, Kultura Diktatura, the band enlisted legendary Seattle producer Jack Endino to co-produce. Production values soared to the point where Gino felt it was almost over-produced. So for their third effort, We Came to Take Your Jobs Away, released in October of this year, the band sought a happy median.

As the titles suggest, Kultur Shock is defined less by angst than by a fuck-all sense of humor, particularly about their status as immigrants. The cover of We Came to Take Your Jobs Away features a Slavic plumber over a toilet, and when I first saw it, I assumed it was a reference to the "Polish plumber," a rhetorical scare tactic used by French political groups opposing the EU constitution in 2005. But when I asked Gino about this, assuming I knew what I was talking about, he kind of laughed and said, "No! That's Mario! Our guitarist. He's actually a plumber."

Gino tends to speak in terms of what he and the band’s not: he’s not “cute enough” to be a rock star, not “cool enough” to be in The Stranger. But he takes a definite amount of pride in pissing people off, in pushing buttons and puncturing sacred cows. And his own immigrant status, the double-standard Americans show towards immigrants, the permissible prejudice ("After all, we're white," he comments, "so it's okay") becomes the lyrical correlative to the band's transgressive, border-hopping, miscegenated sound. Strangers in a strange land, their music fluidly slips between the sounds of their home and American pop-rock, but is wholly comfortable as neither. It plays with stereotypes and rejects them, adopts a tango beat only to descend into thrash metal, or an acoustic ballad form to sing such touching lyrics as: "I know how to say/ words like 'fuck' and 'okay'/ in my broken-English way."

“We are pretty much saying what people are thinking in their minds," says Gino. "And they’re pissed about that. ‘We came to take your jobs away,’ is pretty much what you think, mother fucker, so I’m going to say it, and they’re pissed about it. They would like to say it but we say and take it away and they’re pissed about it.”

Frankly, before looking into it, I didn’t understand that comment. I had all three of Kultur Shock’s main records, and I got the humor and I got the musical insanity, but I really didn't understand hwo it could offend people. So when I got home, I looked up an article from The Village Voice that Gino had mocked, and it was only then that I started to get the resistance, to understand how Kultur Shock was pissing off the squares and pushing the boundaries of what (apparently) constitutes good taste.

In the March 8, 2005 edition, Frank Kogan wrote (in an article dismissively titled: “Wild & Crazy Guys: World’s biggest egomaniac rolls around in goo, sneaks beauty in through back door”) that Gino used “deliberately hammy guttural singing as if from a Saturday Night Live routine,” “so overemotive as to put emotion off at a distance.” “I can't predict what I might think in five years,” he snarkily comments, “once I'm really used to it, whether the vocals will seem ridiculously mannered or warmly at ease.” And finally: “They create a distance and then try to cross it, so they can have their love and yuk it up too.”

Reading the piece, I got the distinct impression that somehow Kogan had managed to miss the point completely, being a rockist more comfortable with the pastiche referencing of critical-darlings Beirut (whose Gulag Orkestra, likely to make a number of best-of lists this year, mines the same geography for source material as Kultur Shock, with less surprising results) than with the real thing. Apparently, Kogan didn't remotely find it ironic that he--an American rock critic--was all but telling Balkan musicians what Balkan music was all about, their own ideas apparently inferior to his.

But his dismissive description doesn't much jive with what I saw happening at Solo: old men dancing and singing along as hot young women danced slinkily. (I distinctively recall one very lovely young woman, who was also at the Gogol Bordello show in March, where she jumped up onstage and, what with the suggestive gyrations of her hips, distracted Gogol Bordello's fiddler Sergey Ryabtsev--and me--for most of the show.) I think Kogan inadvertently hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “these people are absolutely fluent and effective in a bunch of musics (folk, flamenco, Gypsy, metal, reggae), but in hamming it all up they pretend not to be fluent, as if they're afraid of the emotional facility of all these sentimental stylings.” The “emotional facility” and “sentimental stylings” he refers to are so much smoke in the wind, the tepid stereotyping of an American critic who doubts that such genres can be expanded beyond film soundtrack value, to actually make a bigger statement than punctuating a love scene or giving immigrants an excuse to dance around in the hold of ship.

But Gino just laughs it all off. “How they would like to see us is like those two wild guys from Saturday Night Live, and if I come and say, ‘Yes, I’m that guy! Remember me?’ then he’s pissed, because he can’t say it.”

A shorter version of this story appears in the December, 2006 issue of The Seattle Sinner.

The Neoliberals Seek Their Revenge For Questioning the Market God

2006-10-30T21:08:00.000-08:00

This week, The New Republic's two editorials were both on the illegal immigrant debate, and how it's shaping the upcoming election. Peter Beinart, TNR's editor-at-large and pseudo-expert on Islamofascism (The Good Fight), takes the opportunity to take a jab at Thomas Frank, somewhat inexplicably, on this front.

"Who is the most left-wing commentator on mainstream television?" Beinart asks in this week's TRB column. "Keith Olbermann? Bill Maher? Not even close. I'm talking about a man who says both parties are 'bought and paid for by corporate America,' and calls lobbyists 'arms dealers in the war on the middle class.'"

Beinart goes on waxing poetic: "This latter-day William Jennings Bryan denounces the 'corporate supremacists' in Congress who write 'consumer-crippling bankruptcy laws, pass job-exporting free-trade deals, and raise the interest on college loans. He peppers his economic analyses with quotes from the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute. And he recently called the GOP's effort to link a minimum-wage hike to a repeal of the estate tax 'obscene.' I refer, of course, to Lou Dobbs."

Now, it should come as no surprise that, in the high-stakes ratings game of the 24-hour news networks' ongoing struggle for infotainment supremacy, an anchorman would stake out demagogic positions sure to appease the philistine masses eagerly eating up another day's worth of outrages. Anderson Cooper played the sensitive type at Katrina; Geraldo played badass in Baghdad; Bill O'Reilly tackles the real issues facing America (i.e., berating lawyers representing child sex offenders; does the guy even talk politics anymore? Did he ever?); so why should Lou Dobbs--formerly of Moneyline fame--be any different, and how exactly does this relate to Thomas Frank?

Apparently, because this is exactly the sort of person Thomas Frank has been demanding.

"For years, writers like Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas[?], have argued that what liberalism needs is a strong dose of populism. From Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace to Bill O'Reilly, the modern American right has defined itself against cultural elites. Liberals, Frank and others argue, must fight fire with fire: attacking economic elites with as much gusto as the populists of old."

Now, ever since the 1990s, The New Republic has repudiated its leftier past and embraced a Clinton-centric brand of neoliberalism: free markets, free speech, free elections. It's a perfectly valid philosophical position (and a much older one than Clintonism: Britain's The Economist was founded on the principle that free markets would help end slavery, and across the pond, "liberal" remains synonymous with free-market ideology), but sometimes--as Frank's own journal, The Baffler, has pointed out--the good-sense philosophy of liberalism gets wrapped up in an ideology every bit as compelling--and self-deluded--as Communism or Fascism. (Don't take the comparison too far, though: we're talking ideology, not its outcome; I don't want to overstate my case here.) And this is where Beinart is coming from: a paranoid, marginalized neoliberal front that is looking to lose--and lose hard--in upcoming elections, as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party starts flexing its muscles (Beinart used this same space back in August to defend Joe Lieberman against exactly this sort of payback). So Beinart here is really just fearmongering and smearing political opponents to his left as The New Republic's coterie struggles to survive in a rapidly changing political environment.

"So why aren't liberals cheering? Because, for Dobbs, taking on corporate America means taking on corporate America's thirst for illegal-immigrant labor. Dobbs is downright obsessive about the issue, and he isn't above nativist scare-mongering--calling Mexican illegal immigrants an 'army of invaders' who are bringing leprosy and malaria across the Rio Grande."

Sadly, as Beinart goes on to note, some are (Mother Jones, In These Times, but then who ever accused them of being good?). But the riposte to Frank is disingenuous.

As I've mentioned a number of times before, I find it strange how the political establishment responds to Frank; it's as if they can't accept that a liberal isn't a true-blue Democrat politico through-and-through. I don't mean to claim that Frank's some sort of visionary (What's the Matter With Kansas? is good, but not that good), but it's as if the commentariat refuses to accept that his book wasn't about what Democrats should be doing in order to win, so much as about trying to change the political discussion away from singing the praises of the free market and generating a healthy dose of skepticism regarding its shortcomings. Frank has plenty of scorn for Clinton, too; after all, it was Clinton and his neoliberal cohort that oversaw the rise of a faith-based market liberalism that Frank once dubbed "the God that sucked." Franks' thesis in What's the Matter With Kansas? had precious little to do with Democrats at all; instead, it was the story of how moderate (not populist) Kansas Republicans were overthrown by extremists. The extremists rose to power on the backs of the religious, blue collar right, but were beholden more to the rabidly anti-government, anti-tax, economic libertarian right. Frank argued persuasively that by using wedge issues to excite an evangelical base, right-wingers were overthrowing moderates while conversely working against the economic interests of their base and never actually coming through on their socially conservative promises to end abortion.

But when the D.C. commentariat read it, what with their inability to see politics as anything but an electoral struggle between Dems and Republicans, they saw it as a story of how Republicans were baiting-and-switching, and a call for Dems to appeal to economic populism to win elections. And given neoliberals' (like those at TNR) fear of retreat from economic libertarianism, that scenario was to be avoided like the plague. Hence Beinart's smug criticism of Frank's supposed populist position. Talking heads like Beinart fail to note that some of the heroes of Frank's book are moderate Republicans, honest politicians taken down by populist demagoguery and brutal electoral tactics (including anti-Semitic smear campaigns). And this is the same guy Beinart claims wants Democrats to engage in populist rabble-rousing? I think he confuses Populism with populism; Frank does have a lot of fondness for his state's Populist past (and it's true that the former more than occasionally engaged in the latter), but it stems largely from nostalgia for a time when the people stood up for economic equality against entrenched business interests.

So Beinart tries playing the immigrant card; good-hearted liberals, after all, are all on the side of immigrants, whilst economic populists, riled up by job-insecurity, are out for blood. It's an unfortunate fact that this is often the case, but not insurmountable for liberals of Frank's persuasion. The mistake Beinart makes it playing off electoral politics against questions of intelligent policy.

"[M]any Democratic challengers are staking out immigration positions to President Bush's right. And Democratic incumbents are doing the same thing. As The New York Times has noted, 62 Democrats backed the House's enforcement-only immigration bill this September, up from 36 who supported a similarly tough bill last year. And, in the Senate, a large majority of Democrats just voted to build a fence along the Mexican border. As Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg recently told The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson, the themes working best for Democrats this year among rural voters have 'a strong nationalist component,' particularly on 'trade and immigration.'"

For a neoliberal, it's bedlam, and for a decent liberal, it's disappointing to see the Democrats playing the race-card (no white Polish plumbers for us; the economic line here is also a skin-color one). But we need to be careful to distinguish intelligent economic policy that runs contrary to the neoliberals' agenda from simple demagoguery and race-baiting. In this case, the neoliberals are full supporters of immigrant workers to feed the economy's need for cheap labor. The magic of the New Economy, after all, was the juggling act between keeping growth high and inflation low, by making sure that the labor market never got too constricted so that it would push up wages. Neoliberals like Beinart love this stuff; folks like Thomas Frank and myself know full well that this magical agreement meant that the benefits of economic growth never made it to the majority of workers. In the last few years, we've heard a lot about the economic recovery (since the 1999 tech bubble bust) that denied gains to workers while stock prices and corporate profits exceed the halcyon days of the late 1990s. But that rests on the myth that the economic boom of the 1990s benefitted workers more than our current recovery. Increasingly, the reality that the boom of the 90s didn't pass on any real economic gains to most American workers is being established by academics like Jacob S. Hacker (The Great Risk Shift; a nice review appeared in the Times Book Review this Sunday). In fact, the real wages of American workers have remained stagnant since the mid-1970s, so our current lackluster recovery doesn't mark a shift from so much as an extension of the way the economy has distributed wealth across demographics for the last 30 years.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that immigrant laborers are being screwed by being paid lower wages than Americans (and sometimes lower than the law allows), and the average American worker is being screwed because our jobs are being lost to lower wage workers, who are, as before, being screwed themselves. Does that sound like we're on opposite sides here? The neoliberals implicitly accept the good deal we get from immigrant labor; certainly they want ro curb abuses of migrant workers and expect a living wage, but fundamentally their position is, "Demand for these workers exists for a reason; let's not be hypocritical and respect that economic demand." They may criticize the president's plan for worker visas as not going far enough, but they don't support labor's attempts to change up the system by forcing companies to pay a living-wage to immigrant workers--that, after all, would mitigate the benefit of having them in the first place.

So this really is a situation in which the little guy loses out and the companies make huge profits; politicians then play the little guys off one another to win elections, and the companies get off free. I say, put the immigrants on the same level as natural-born Americans, prevent exploitative labor practices, and the demand for illegals begins to drop and a competitive labor market exists that does workers a lot better than the system we have now, which to one degree or another the neoliberals support. Fine the hell out of companies for employing illegal immigrants (why always the double-standard when it comes to tough-on-crime tactics with regard to corporate America?) and stop American companies from taking advantage of migrants and, in the process, putting Americans out of jobs. Beinart can't--or doesn't want--to see this; he's in love with the fairy tale that magically, this horrid situation will wind up benefitting everyone. The way of equitable economic policy does not necessarily lead to nationalist demagoguery; it's a low electoral tactic and nothing more, and we shouldn't let neoliberals like Beinart convince us to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Cranky Old British Scholars Duke It Out Over Jesus

2006-10-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

The day after writing the previous post, a response to The New York Times Book Review's review of Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion, I opened my mailbox and low and behold, there's another review of it in the new issue of The London Review of Books by Terry Eagleton, the eminent literary critic.

As I've written before (long before), I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Eagleton. For every startlingly brilliant essay I read by him, there appears another pretentious, ill-informed rant that I find plain objectionable. This new review falls into the latter category. First, I must point out that Eagleton is not only a clearly brilliant man and thinker, but also an extremely fine writer; there's something about older British academics--perhaps rote memorization of the classics--that makes their writing an immense pleasure to read. I might be revealing my innate literary nerdiness here, but it reminds me of those great introductory essays you can get in older Penguin editions of the classics, written in the Fifties or Sixties, which I always loved reading for some reason. Frankly, it's this quality that Dawkins has in common with Eagleton, and at their best they're rapier wits, their writings replete with rhetorical brilliance so painfully lacking in American writing; at their worst, they're pompous old whiners.

What I find so objectionable in Eagleton's review ("Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching," LRB Oct. 19) is a tendency I've noted in some other liberal/leftists commentators on religion (I wrote at length about Leon Wieseltier's tendency some months ago); they defend religion through an elegantly intellectual lense that abstracts religion so far from the lived experience that it renders it alien to most of its followers. And by "lived experience" I mean nothing more than how your average church-going Christian experiences religion in the US (and, I would imagine, Britain).

"There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice," writes Eagleton of Dawkins failure to appreciate the complexity of Christian theology and the philosophical problems associated therewith. "For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion."

He continues:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Personally, I find this passage hilarious; here you have an erudite scholar of literature demanding of an evolutionary biologist that he be able to respond to two 13th Century theologians, one of them far more obscure than the other, and then demands, outraged, "Has he even heard of them?"

Yes, yes, I get it: the history of Christianity is marked by brilliant thinkers and respectable scholars, the Gospels and Old Testament are often beautiful and even sublime works of literature. And I grant you, perhaps Dawkins went to far in trying to explain away religion's origins, moving too far from his comfortable scientific sphere to write a weakly defended polemic. But again, as I wrote in the last posting: Is it necessary at all for Dawkins to respond to Aquinas or be aware of Moltmann (additionally, note Eagleton's pretentious use of a last-name only reference to a work as though it should be general knowledge what that refers to; he is, you must admit, a brilliant writer) to disprove religion? Sadly, no, it is not; biology and physics have dealt a swift and fatal coup de grâce with no ostentatious hand-wringing or severed-head waving, and no amount of prognostication by scholars dropping names left and right, claiming each deserves special attention before any final call can be made, can change that.

"Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?)" writes Eagleton.

Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Fair enough, but a strangely relativist position again, and a potentially semantic one; here, Eagleton tries to defend religion against Dawkins' attack by turning Dawkins' own skepticism back on him. His anecdote about love is actually rather weak, I think: it's all fine and dandy to tell your bank manager you love some girl and him to believe; in the absence of contradictory information, why not? Tell him she's beautiful and shwo him a picture, well, he's got something more to go on than your word. Religion is like the love anecdote and that's a lovely thought; science is like the picture anecdote and, while arguably subjective, has a factual basis stronger than the prior anecdote. When the two conflict, then, I think I could say which one I believe would trump the other. Prof. Eagleton should remember that faith is not only that which survives doubt and skepticism, but potentially that which turns a blind eye to the truth and fact. A wife may have faith in her husband's fidelity, but it's a less generous thing to say about her when the two of you are outside the door of cheap motel from where you can hear the bedsprings popping and the choir teacher's car is parked next to his in the lot.

And then, as promised, the utter abstraction of religion from lived experience: "Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)"

Wow. That's almost Borgesian in its ability to wander a labyrinth of concepts; I also find it doubtful that most Christians would initially warm to the idea that Jesus was "a joke of a Messiah." If they knew what "carnivalesque" meant, they'd no doubt object to that description, too, since as good, austere Protestants they've spend a century fighting every expression of the carnivalesque in American cultural life, nor would they--as true believers--accept Eagleton's nevertheless correct historicist reading of the Bible which separates the God of the Old Testament from the Jesus of the New, for of course mainstream Protestant Christianity largely holds that the Bible is all but the work of God's own hand, and their theology, whatever else, does not hold much room for that sort of interpretation. (These are, after all, the same people who support Israel on the grounds that its existence means the Second Coming is approaching, and that soon the Anti-Christ will appear and be mistaken for the Messiah by the Jewish nation; as more than one Israeli commentator has written of American Evangilical support of his nation, "With friends like these...")

Certainly Eagleton's correct that the defense of the weak against the will of the strong is a basis of Christianity both originally and in the contemporary, but I find it hilarious that we works his critical genius at the beginning of the paragraph, interpreting religious beliefs in a way much different from what many of that religion's followers would accept, only at the end to dismiss out of hand the prohibition against eating fish on Fridays, still held by many Catholics out of habit if nothing else. He's correct; I recall no passage in the Bible that said I couldn't eat fish on Friday, but what's hilarious is that when he describes Christian beliefs it has virtually nothing to do with how mainstream Christians think, and when he describes a mainstream practice that affects millions, he dismisses it out of hand. The man's completely out of touch.

Why Should Darwinists Care About Creationists' Feelings?

2006-10-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

In the Sunday New York Times Book Review was a review of Richard Dawkins' new book ("Beyond Belief," Oct. 22), The God Delusion. Dawkins, for those unaware, is an almost rabidly atheist biologist at Oxford whose bibliography is extensive. He's undeniably a brilliant evolutionary biologist whose contribution to the field in undisputed, but in the last couple decades most of his work has been directed towards criticizing and debunking creationism and the theory of intelligent design.

What struck me about the review (I must admit to not having read the book, nor am I likely to) is Jim Holt's fairly typical sort of liberal elitism in treating the issue.

Yes, yes, I know it's not very fashionable to call the mainstream media elitist unless you're a right- or left-wing demagogue, but really, there is something to the idea. After all, you don't turn to a major newspaper for counterintuitive reasoning, and in the case of the seemingly never-ending struggle between science and religion, the liberal New York Times represents the worst tendencies of liberal elitists in this country. There's a sort of kumbaya attitude that suggests that if we could just live with mutual self-respect all of our issues could be water under the bridge, which seems to mask an intellectual pretension regarding the issue, much as the same as whenever a New York publication tries to appraise Nascar as though it were an exercise in cultural anthropology, filled with alien concepts and strange totems that can only be understood through lengthy, detached appraisement. You'd never guess, reading some 15,000-word essay by Jonathan Franzen or the like that Nascar fans even lived in the same country, let alone ate the same food, went to the same sort of churches and worked at the same companies as the readers of the article.

In his review of The God Delusion, Holt reaches for this point writing: "Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds."

Once I would have appreciated that point, and in a way I still do, but I think it stems from a more disingenuous set of tendencies in our culture than the rational criticism Holt pawns it off as.

Firstly, it's politically au courant amongst a certain set of American liberals to make good with Christians. The idea is that we have more concerns in common (healthcare, a balanced budget, education) than not (Iraq, Intelligent Design, Nascar), and that a reasonable electoral middle-ground can be found on the most contentious issues that divide the nation (pretty much everyone's been convinced that some restrictions on abortion are acceptable provided fundamental access is retained, and that gays should at least be granted some sort of civil union though marriage is, currently, off the table). This strategy jives well with the received wisdom of the day. Ever since Thomas Franks' What's the Matter With Kansas? was published, it's become "common knowledge" that Republicans win elections on a bait-and-switch program of appealing to social conservatives on issues like abortion and gay rights then carrying out a program of please-the-rich tax cuts and pro-business laws. (Never mind that Franks's book was not quite that simplistic or partisan, politicos and talking heads have an insatiable need to reduce all arguments to black-and-white, Dems-v.-Republicans logic.)

Secondly, it appeals to the centrist, libertarian and multiculturalist tendencies amongst the electorate to live and let live. Centrists are genuinely deferential. Multiculturalists (if they're not of the college-set) are genuinely deferential. Libertarians of course just want everyone else the hell out of their business, and more or less consistently support others' in their efforts as well, so long as it doesn't contradict with their own, at which point they seem to believe that dispute should be settled with a sort primeval struggle for survival of the fittest.

As I mentioned, at one point I shared Holt's opinion that critics like Dawkins are too strident and show too little understanding of others' beliefs. My introduction to Dawkins came following a growing interest in evolution and human migration spawned by the fascinating introduction of Jared Diamond's otherwise disappointing Guns, Germs, and Steel. More interested in human evolution than Diamond's case intensive arguments, I picked up Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. I, too, was turned off by his condescension and rhetorical fluorishes. He refers to even respectable attempts to prove the existence of God as "gloriously and utterly wrong." (No one has ever accused Dawkins of being a poor writer.)

But my opinion has changed somewhat over the years since. Whereas once I though deference was important, I now tend to feel that deference given is not exactly being returned. Perhaps I have been seduced by rage against the triumphalist excesses of the right, but in age in which the debate is over whether or not we're having a civilizational clash based on religion (Judeo-Christian west vs. Islam), my patience for those who demand respect and deference for their chauvinist religious beliefs has waned. Pluralism is fine, and I am an atheist by default rather than belief (I still question the verve with which some atheists rail against religion; surely a disbelief should not be able to inspire such virulence). But the chauvinist—these days everyone prefers the more loaded "fascism" as short-hand for the concepty—principles of many religious groups these days have pushed me away from a willingness to empathize.

This is certainly not entirely fair, and of course as I mentioned it is a personal response to the contemporary political situation. But a deeper sort of evolution has happened with my thinking on the issue, and it stems more from the politicization of the issue than from the politics of it, if that makes any sense. What truly disturbs me about the Christian right's embrace of Intelligent Design was not so much that it was an attempt to introduce religion into our schools but rather that it marked the rather startling embrace of cultural relativism by otherwise orthodox believers. That is, Intelligent Design asserts that the universe by its nature suggests an intelligent designer created it with a purpose. The identity of that designer/creator remains to be determined. In other words, as a political move to overthrow "materialism" in scientific education (as was described in the now-infamous "wedge document" published by the Discovery Institute here in Seattle, the center of Intelligent Design thinkers) and inject a religious element to the explanation of the universe, they were willing to compromise, asserting that (1) it was a theory comparable to evolution, and (2) that God was not the most important part of it. That comes dangerously close to putting us on a slippery downward slope to mediocrity, which in the end may have been the political strategy (they've never suggested, that is, that evolution be taught in Sunday school as an equally valid belief). I personally doubt the skepticism publicly expressed by Intelligent Design theorists who wanted to parade their supposedly scientific credentials. It was a political attack rather than an honest disagreement over ideas, and the philosophical precedent its success would have set in American education is horrifying in its potential to snowball out of control. If any group with a grievance can impose its beliefs as an equally valid explanation, well, then we could all actually wind up learning about Flying Spaghetti Monsters.

In such an environment of intellectual disenguousness and politicking, I now find it thoroughly reassuring that there's someone like Dawkins beating a dead horse and assailing his critics with vitriol equal to their own. Polite conversation is not a prerequisite for intellectual discourse, and the paternalistic shooshing our side perennially gets from the likes of Times book reviewers has grown tedious and counterproductive. It's reminiscent of Bill Cosby's infamous criticism of Eddie Murphy's use of the word "nigger" in his stand-up; Cosby thought it was bad for African-Americans to encourage the use of a derogatory term by using it publicly, no matter how they used it privately; Murphy simply responded that he didn't know he was still supposed to try to act good in front of the white-folk.

Lastly, what I find most exasperating is the tendency of the mainstream media--particularly in the wake of the Mohammed cartoon fiasco--to expect automatic respect for the other side. European Muslims humiliated themselves by rising to the bait; for good reason the likes of the ADL don't spend time responding to Holocaust-deniers: it just grants them credibility. Similarly, when people like Holt chastise unforgiving atheists like Dawkins for "failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be" automatically suggests they deserve philosophical consideration. My guess is--and I would agree with this point--Dawkins would say that starting from a purely logical train of thought, one does not need God or religion to explain the cosmos and the fact that something exists, whether it be matter or people. That story has little need of supernatural input or deus ex machina given contemporary science's successes. Therefore, Dawkins does not need to address the careful considerations of religion's role in society that Holt throws at him ("Many thinkers — Marx, Freud, Durkheim — have produced natural histories of religion," or "For those who want to understand the weaknesses in the standard arguments for God’s existence, the best source I know remains the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie’s 1982 book 'The Miracle of Theism.'"). That comes later, to explain why religion exists. Biological complexity may or may not explain the origin of religion, but religion is certainly not necessary to explain the origin of biological complexity. Holt, by assuming that we must start with responding to the fact that people have developed religion, holds Dawkins to account for failing to do so; that's a little too nonjudgmental in my view, and even if Dawkins is being polemical, a polemic based on science need not abandon its rational basis to make its point to give due credit to its opponent; in fact, to do so would be intellectually dishonest, something that Holt should perhaps consider with regard to his own middle-brow, pseudo-liberal multiculturalism.

For those who are interested in a very good essay rebutting Intelligent Design and who want to avoid Dawkins's tendentious prose, a highly recommendable article by Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago appeared in The New Republic in August, 2005: "The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Case Against Intelligent Design".

Kettle, Meet Your Good Friend, the Pot

2006-10-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

From "The Epilogue", by Ruth Franklin, in the Oct. 2 New Republic:

But victimization does not erase historical agency. Not only are victims still capable of criminal acts, but their victimization can sometimes function as the psychological foundation for their criminal acts. No matter what depredations have been perpetrated against a group, that group must still be responsible for its own actions.

This is from Franklin's obligatory monthly review of books on the Holocaust, but I was surprised that The New Republic had the balls to publish a passage like this; I wonder if they have the balls to apply the same sort of reasoning to the government and military of their precious Israel?

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt At Seattle Rep

2006-09-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

(L-R) Sister Aloysius (Kandis Chappell) shares tea, and suspicions, with Father Flynn (Corey Brill) in Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Warner Shook, scenic design by Michael Ganio, costumes by Frances Kenny, and lighting design by Allen Lee Hughes. On stage at Seattle Repertory Theatre through October 21, 2006. Photos copyright Chris Bennion 2006. Courtesy of Seattle Rep.

Review by Jeremy M. Barker

When the controversy over sexual abuse by Catholic priests reached fever pitch a few years ago (I hesitate to say “broke” because the issue and its extent were well-known if not widely acknowledged before), it was clear that it would receive dramatic treatment. People couldn’t trust their priests anymore, but evidence was so lacking, cases were 20 years old or more, some of the accusers were revealed to be shysters after a piece of lawsuit pie, and in the end the people fitting the bill for bad priests were congregants themselves. Into that void stepped John Patrick Shanley, long a fixture on the American stage but better known as the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck and the writer-director of the beloved but unsuccessful Joe Versus the Volcano.

Doubt, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in drama and opened Sept. 21 at Seattle Rep., takes as its subject not the effect of sexual abuse by priests but rather the gray area that lies between fact and accusation, and its dramatic action somewhat unsurprisingly leads the audience to questions rather than answers.

The play takes place at a Brooklyn parochial school in 1964. The assassination of JFK has punctured the nation’s sense of security, and Vatican II is redefining the relationship between clergy and their parishioners. Sister Aloysius (played with relish by Kandis Chappell), the principal, is an old-school nun with which we are familiar in caricature: she’s gruff, no-nonsense and feared by the pupils. She clamps down on the kinder tendencies of her meek 8th grade teacher Sister James, who wants to relate to her students rather than rule over them.

Enter Father Flynn, a charismatic, Vatican II-style priest (played with a Kennedy-esque air by Corey Brill). He’s bringing a new, human face to the school: he’s engaging, personable, and wants to be more like his congregants--a part of their family, as he comments at one point. And thus the conflict is born: all of Sister Aloysius’s disagreeable qualities ultimately make her a indefatigable protector of her students, while all of Father Flynn’s kindness is cast in a sinister light when the possibility of sexual misconduct arises.

The suspicion comes from events surrounding one of Sister James’s students named Muller. An altar boy, he returns from a private meeting with Father Flynn is a disturbed state with alcohol on his breath. He also happens to be the school’s first and only black student, and later it’s revealed that he’s abused at home by his father for, it is implied, increasingly obvious homosexual tendencies. Thus race and sexuality are added to an already toxic stew of suspicion.

The child is the perfect victim: abused, different and an outsider in the school (and although he never accuses the priest himself, he’s also a perfectly unbelievable accuser, as was born out in the real-life court cases of the last few years).

As mentioned above, the play ends on a note of doubt rather than certainty: suspicions seem validated but proof remains elusive. Shanley strives to portray not the impact of abuse on the victim but rather the issue which the public faces in trying to comprehend the issue: who do we believe? It’s a play with a rather startling power to unsettle the audience, but ultimately it begs the question of whether or not it’s too didactic in its attempt to portray only the doubt. In the case of the Sept. 11 attacks, most dramatic interpretations (films, TV miniseries) have opted for an apolitical tone with regard to the attacks: there are bad guys (terrorists) but questions of responsibility and blame amongst Americans are assiduously avoided, and many critics have understandably been offended by attempts to portray an inherently political moment as devoid of politics.

Much the same criticism could be made of Doubt, which doesn’t directly address the question of blame for actual events. Did Sister Aloysius ultimately go far enough in trying to stop Father Flynn? We don’t know if Father Flynn is actually guilty, which allows for Sister Aloysius to be deeply troubled by her mixed-success at the end of the play; but particularly in the case of a historical piece, we have forty years’ perspective on the issue, and it’s fair to point out that by and large history has not judged people like Sister Aloysius kindly, since guilty priests continued on and were allowed to do more harm. Doubting is ultimately only one side of the story; the other is the record of actual victims, the impact on their lives, the lost promise, the private shame and ultimately public spectacle. Certainty also has a place in this story, but at least we must give Mr. Shanley the credit for having made clear the challenge people faced in grappling with such painful uncertainties, even if it leaves us ultimately wishing to at least partially reconcile our doubt with the painful clarity we now have on this issue.

“Doubt” plays at Seattle Repertory Theater Sept. 21 through Oct. 21. For more information and tickets, visit www.seattlerep.org.

This reviews appears in the September issue of The Seattle Sinner.

Just Because They Were Wrong Doesn't Make Us Right

2006-09-22T00:48:00.001-07:00

Not to be painfully duplicative as I know I've written about this before ("A Story of Political Disgust"), but one of the moments I keep coming back to in my life, which I suppose constitutes a formative experience, is something that happened to me on April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine massacre. I was living in Ashland, Oregon, and attending Southern Oregon University, and the shooting for some reason struck me hard. I think the reason had to do with being young and recently out of high school and having recently been subjected to the similar events committed by Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon, and having been thoroughly fed up with how out of touch the entire grown up world seemed to be about it, blaming video games and Marilyn Manson and all for teen violence rather than more obvious and prosaic (and true) causes.

So I took a ride from the University into downtown Ashland to get coffee and wander through a bookshop, which was what I like doing and tends to make me happy. And along the way I saw a group of protesters, standing in the greenway median, decrying the US bombing of Serbia.

Now, I can't say I supported the bombings, per se, but what struck me at that moment was the fact that I'd never seen them out there with posters protesting the ethnic cleansing. I suppose it seemed to me in that moment as if what they were doing was tantamount to protesting the police for storming Columbine to kill Dylan Klebold and his little buddy. (I know that's not what happened, but you see the point.) And what this experience has given me, I suppose, is a deep skepticism regarding anti-war protesters. It seems that what they oppose is not so much the rightness or wrongness of a given set of circumstances but rather the wrongness of war. Honestly, I can't say I've thought any of the military actions carried out in my life by the US were "right", but I also can't bring myself to have a knee-jerk opposition to war; it doesn't jive with my cynicism regarding the world, which I see as inhabited by a great many ignorant, cruel and violent people, in comparison to which pacifism seems rather idealistic.

So why bring this up? Tonight I was reading an essay by Tony Judt, who I normally find quite insightful, in the London Review of Books ("Bush's Useful Idiots," Sept. 17). The essay is an attempt to explain:

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

A fine undertaking as far as I'm concerned, and certainly something that I feel needs be addressed. But once again, I found myself disagreeing with an anti-war liberal. Judt's main purpose is to criticize liberal "intellectuals" who supported American military action to combat what's now apparently known as "Islamo-fascism." Personally, I wouldn't call the likes of Peter Beinart, Paul Berman and Thomas Friedman "intellectuals" so much as polemicists and talking heads, and to compare them to the likes of Arthur Schlessinger and John Kenneth Galbraith was, I think, a little hyperbolic. Beinart used to write the weekly editorial for The New Republic. That achievement sort of pales in comparison to Galbraith's The Affluent Society.

But that said, I found more troubling this attempt at an explanation:

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement [here he is referring to an annoucement from 1988 signed by Schlessinger, Galbraith and others in deferse of liberalism] were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff.

Personally–and I think given the opening anecdote you can see where I'm going here–I think the opposite is true; it's the fact the Sixties are still with us which hurts us so much. The fact that vapid idealism animates many liberals is why Judt can go around chastising us for not opposing the war. He utterly ignores anti-war liberal institutions like The Nation (which is much more popular and wider read than The New Republic) and the massive protests before the war even started, and really, that's okay. Those people were never invited to the table and frankly never wanted the invitation. The exercise of power and defense policy is anathema to their ideology, and so they're not interested in the difficult decisions we have to make as a society and prefer to take the moral highground which simultaneously absolves them of culpability for the results of whatever policy–pacifist or militarist–the government takes.

So when Judt writes somewhat condescendingly of pro-war liberals, "Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.'"

Honestly, I'm an anti-war liberal, but that's true. The opposition to the Iraq war was vapid, and the posters in the street reading "Bush = Voldemort" or "Frodo Failed" undermined the very legitimate criticisms of the Iraq war. Then, anti-war leftists brutalized John Kerry in 2004 for his vote in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq. While it's fine to question the intelligence of that vote on the grounds that Bush's already poor performance in Afghanistan augured poorly for Iraq such that he should not be trusted with the task, mostly the criticism was directed at him and other Democrats for not having been sufficiently pacifist. That point overlooks the reality that Senate Democrats hoped that by voting to authorize force, Bush would have to receive the support of the UN Security Council to proceed with war, and that the delay with the very real threat of conflict would force Saddam to change course. Arguably it did, and Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, was reporting little of note on the WMD front until the looming invasion forced out he and his team. But right there you have American liberals letting their own blood, demanding stricter adherence to an ideology of opposition to war which supersedes any argument as to whether or not the war should be fought, and thus undermining the critics of armed conflict and feeding the political ammunition of the pro-war side.

So shame on you Prof. Judt: it's time we all grew up about American liberals. The wishy-washy New Left ethos hangs overhead like a stench-cloud of marijuana smoke and patchouli, and as long as that's the case, polemicists attached to the D.C. crowd like Beinart and Berman will continue to cast a long shadow over the American liberal intellectual crowd.

More silly pseudo-economics in the newspaper

2006-09-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

I hate writing about newspaper columns and reports, I really do. Many people complain about the perceived bias of the news media, but really, I'm not one of them. It's just that newspapers and columnists are dogs being wagged by the tail: if fundamentally their job is to report about what's going on, then the power to determine the topic of conversation is left to the newsmakers, the politicians and activists and so on, and not to the reporters, whose job is, well, to report.

So in a sense it's futile and pointless to both responding to them. They're just doing their job, and you're never going to make headway solving issues by attacking what mass media and politicians are saying. You have to embark on the far less glorious process of doing actual research. This is my fundamental problem with the blogosphere and the so-called "netroots," whose only purpose seems to be partisanship and yelling louder than the other guy. But still I find myself writing these blog entries about some moron of a newspaper columnist, despite my best intentions.

So what is it today? A lame column in The Seattle Times' business section, by Drew DeSilver, called "Low-paid illegal work force has little impact on prices".

In this piece of specious writing, Mr. DeSilver seeks to make the following point:

"You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices — call it the 'illegal-worker discount' — is surprisingly small."

Fundamentally, the problem with his argument is already present in this statement: he seems to assume that businesses are hiring illegal workers to pass savings onto consumers (or more specifically, that's the so-called "realist" position adopted by the likes of the Bush Administration to sell worker-visa programs and amnesties to a skeptical public, that the workers are passing on savings to consumers; but Mr. DeSilver isn't quite so forthright to bring up this point). It's a brilliant straw man argument then.

"The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate," he says. "That steak dinner at a downtown restaurant? Maybe a buck off. Your new house in Subdivision Estates? Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive."

Ah! So without illegal immigrants, we'd only be paying a few cents more per bag of apples, and the added cost of my house would negligible over time, what with appreciation and all! Brilliant!

Unfortunately, the real story is not to be found in the cost of a few items, but rather in the aggregate. The reason that companies hire lower-paid illegals to harvest apples isn't because they want to pass on a couple cents to consumers but because overall it saves them millions, once you add up all those nickles and times per bag of apples.

"At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound," DeSilver writes. "Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University...If illegal workers disappeared from the apple harvest and wages for the remaining legal workers rose by 40 percent in response — and that entire wage increase were passed on to the consumer — that still would add less than 3 cents to the retail price of a pound of apples."

So it's that simple. Just oust the illegals, the legal workers will get better wages (remember, those illegals are taking our jobs, or just depreciating wages enough so that we won't want them) and consumers only have to pay a few cents more a bushel. It makes so much sense that it's a mystery why this isn't already being tried!

The answer, quite simply, is Walmart. Walmart may not be known for employing illegals, per se, but they are infamous for lowering their labor overhead in any way possible, in ways both legal and illegal. According to Mr. DeSilver's specious logic, Walmart would be receiving no real benefit for those couple percentage points of labor savings they squeeze out of their workers, which is of course simply untrue. Those few percentage points have allowed them to dominate much of the retail market. Firstly, Wall Street tends to punish anyone not aggressively cutting labor costs: witness Costco's regular quarterly whoopings for the sin of treating their workers better than Walmart. Secondly, despite the fact that both Walmart and illegal workers can be truthfully be accused of depressing wages, people still buy the stuff for those minute savings. After all, consumer savings need to be aggregated too, in order to grasp the big picture. Mr. DeSilver seems to be trying to make some sort of populist point by the end of his article, writing, "Of course, the "illegal-immigrant discount" affects different layers of society differently.

"The more often you eat out, stay in hotels or get your yard trimmed, the more you benefit from the illegal-immigrant discount.

"And by increasing the supply of low-skilled labor relative to high-skilled labor, illegal immigration effectively boosts the purchasing power of the better-educated, more-skilled — and richer — portion of society."

That's true in a sense, but misleading: that's like saying that rich people benefit more from shopping at Walmart since their total savings are higher, which is true but does not address the fact that everyone seems to shop at Walmart, and if those cost savings are primarily benefitting the upper echelons of society, then why the hell are the poor shopping there too, particularly when that's depressing their own wages and effectively making them poorer?

You can go on endlessly with this crap, but in the end you come back to one point: this is a political argument, not an economic one. The economic justification for why illegal immigrants are employed by American companies escapes Mr. DeSilver's analysis unscathed: they're looking for increased efficiency and lower costs, which cutting back on labor expenses achieves, particularly in labor intensive fields. What Mr. DeSilver is actually trying to accomplish, by talking about the mere pennies we're saving by having our apple picked by migrants, is to undermine part of the logic behind plans like President Bush's worker visa program. After all, if the American public gets only minute savings as a whole, the majority of which go to urban elitists, while our wages are substantially depressed in the process, then why sypathize with the plight of these workers?

Unfortunately, the argument would seem to go both ways, and what Mr. DeSilver doesn't address is exactly where his political sympathies lie, with legalization or deportation. After all, workers with the right to work in the US can demand legal workers' wages. Whether or not as a group legal immigrant workers will still work for less than American born workers would remain to be seen, but I have my suspicions.

Additionally, Mr. DeSilver does a disservice by not pointing out how the illegal immigrant workers issue is related to many of Americans' central economic concerns: its main impetus--cost savings--is the same driving our manufacturing jobs overseas, the same sending our customer service and computer programming jobs to India and China, and the same that's causing Walmart to frequently violate our laxly enforced labor laws. It's a cutthroat world out there right now, and by singling out illegal workers, Mr. DeSilver, I think, betrays his own political sympathies with the anti-immigrant right without saying anything about the uncertainties facing American workers, whose increased productivity has not translated into real wage gains.

The Republican Myth of the Good Economy

2006-09-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Reading David Brooks is like heartburn to me--a long, persistent ache that's not debilitating but sure as hell puts you in a bad mood. I try to do it very little, but every so often I venture in, when, as today, I found myself reading The New York Times for relaxation during the evening.

And then there was the fact there was only one editorial today, which is pretty slim pickins, so with a heavy heart and stomach acid bubbling, I waded into "The Populist Myths on Income Inequality."

So, has Mr. Brooks wised up at all to the fact that income inequality is a growing problem in the US, and potentially troublesome to his Republican party, who've been winning elections on the strength of economically squeezed blue collar social conservatives? After all, the space his drivel occupies is shared not only by Paul Krugman but also, for the last month, by Thomas Frank. Well, in short the answer is no. As it turns out, only the rabble-rousing "populists" actually believe there's a problem. Favorite snotty, derisive comment: " The populists, who usually live in university towns, paint a portrait of unrelieved misery that badly distorts reality."

Really? That's a fascinating position, Mr. Brooks, do you care to explain exactly how we're all wrong?

"First, workers over all are not getting a smaller slice of the pie. Wages and benefits have made up roughly the same share of G.D.P. for 50 years."

Interesting point. Isn't that same period the one that saw the percentage of Americans in the work force explode due to women's lib? And what about all those illegal immigrants in the work force whom your party doesn't want there? This is same twisted logic that Republicans used to claim success for the student financial aid program expansion earlier this year: let more people in but don't increase funding. More people getting smaller pieces of the pie. Brilliant!

"Second, offshore outsourcing is not decimating employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, outsourcing is responsible for 1.9 percent of layoffs, and the efficiencies it produces create more jobs at better wages than the ones destroyed."

That's a fascinating point: let's skip towards the end of Mr. Brooks's argument. "Members of the second and much more persuasive school of thought on inequality say the key issue is skills. Lawrence Katz, formerly of the Clinton administration, now of Harvard, puts it this way: Across many nations, the market increasingly rewards people with high social and customer-service skills."

Huh. Really... Skills. You see, Mr. Brooks is using a pretty lame straw man argument: claim that we're saying outsourcing leaves people unemployed. Not true. The problem with outsourcing et al. is tied to its most basic economic tenet: comparative advantage. Well-paid American unionized manufacturing plant worker has a set of skills but is expensive, so the company moves operations to China where costs are lower. See, it's because the American worker is at a comparative disadvantage. That is, the problem with outsourcing is not that it leaves hundreds unemployed permanently, but that it targets well-paid American workers, mitigating the benefits of their skills and pushing down their earnings as they move into lower-paid jobs, which they can rarely escape because education and retraining are expensive.

Which brings us back to: "Fifth, declining unionization has not been the driving force behind inequality." An interesting question. Actually, unions often accept some responsibility for the cost of training their workers, it's called an "apprenticeship." Republicans frequently love to criticize unions as making the labor force inflexible, a claim to which there is some truth. But it's also true that unions serve as excellent way to train workers in new skill sets while they work by paying them fractional equivalents of full wages for their job. So why do Republicans hate unions? After all, Mr. Brooks's solution to what little problem he admits exists is effectively, "more money for retraining." "In short, government policy is not driving inequality and wage stagnation. But government hasn’t done much to effectively address the problem either, even though per-capita education spending has more than quadrupled since 1950."

Well, the reason Republicans don't want unions to play a role is because they don't like them. Same reason they don't support universal health coverage, which would actually help make America more competitive on the international stage because it lessens the burden of being unemployed and actually makes workers more flexible because they don't receive a punitive period of being uninsured after moving jobs. (Then there's the entire economic efficiency argument which holds that more preventive medicine and less paperwork and overhead would save billions a year, but whoever accused Republicans of actually being good at economics?) Republicans see unions as the devil: they support Democrats, help workers demand flexibility on the part of their employers (strange how businesses need to be granted flexibility on everything except employment, in which case all the flexibility is demanded of the workers, isn't it?) and guarantee higher wages (once again, employers need the flexibility never to do that; that's why Congress every year grants more H1-B visas, rather inflexible work visas that tie workers to their employer and are particularly used by the high tech sector to keep the market for jobs extremely competitive and thus suppress wage gains).

But to return to our sheep, as the French say, I believe I skipped two of Mr. Brooks's five ingenious points. "Third, jobs are not more insecure. Workers are just as likely to hold a job for 20 years as they were in 1969. Fourth, workers are not stuck in dead-end jobs. Social mobility is roughly where it was a generation ago."

Third point may be roughly true, but what does that prove, and what does that have to do with economic inequality? As for the fourth, that claim--which he chooses not to support--is highly debatable. First, I would point out that the last year in which the real wage of the American middle-class increased was 1974, so the claim that "Social mobility is roughly where it was a generation ago" is perfectly true, and that's the problem. He acts like we've all given up on how shitty a president Ronald Reagan was and bought the Republican line that his voodoo economics actually worked; they didn't, they sucked. And so did Clinton's. Only short-term evidence from the late 1990s ever showed real economic gains; more analysis of the data suggests that quite the opposite, over time there were no significant gains.

An insightful and little noticed article on this subject appeared a couple years ago in The New Republic ("False Positive," Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., 8/16/04).

"[I]n area after area, there's evidence of a vast shift in the economic security of most Americans--a massive transfer of financial risk from corporations and the government onto families and individuals," he writes. "This great risk shift has gone surprisingly underreported. Though we've heard about economic hardship, most of the stories concern static measures--poverty, inequality, wages, joblessness. That's in large part because no standard economic statistic tries to assess the stability of family income...What has become clear from [my] research is that family incomes rise and fall a lot--far more than one would suspect just looking at income-distribution figures. As a result, a surprisingly big chunk of U.S. income inequality--perhaps as much as half--is due to transitory shifts of family income, rather than permanent differences across families."

So, damn it, I've spent an hour researching a ranting response to that jackass David Brooks! My apologies. I shouldn't get so upset by someone whose facts are so painfully wrong. The purposeful obfuscation is glaring, which is was so funny to go online and find Paul Krugman's Friday column already up, which begins something like this:

"We are, finally, having a national discussion about inequality, and right-wing commentators are in full panic mode. Statistics, most of them irrelevant or misleading, are flying; straw men are under furious attack. It’s all very confusing — deliberately so."

"Whatever you do, don't mention the war!"

2006-09-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

It’s always fun to see how literature makes the news, and if you’re a fan of contemporary German literature, these are the salad days for juicy controversy. Since April, two of Germany’s (or in one case, now Austria’s) most famous writers have caught the brunt of the 24-hour news cycle’s regurgitated outrage.

First, there was Peter Handke. An experimental novelist and playwright, born in Germany and raised in Austria, on April 6 a small news piece appeared in the lefty French newspaper La Nouvelle Observateur. Handke, who had attended Slobodan Milosovic’s funeral, was quoted as saying, “I am happy to be close to Slobodan Milosevic, who has defended his people,” and accused of “persist[ing] in his defense of ‘Slobo,’ [and who] considers that the Serbs are ‘the real victims of the war,’ approves the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes done in the name of ethnic cleansing.” (For a good overview and spirited defense of Handke, as well as the English translation of this quote, see this article.) Handke’s play scheduled for the winter season at the Comedie Francaise was quickly cancelled, and a prestigious German literary prize was rescinded in early May.

Then there was Gunther Grass. Grass won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature for having “broke “the spell that lay over the German past and sabotaged the German sublime, the taste for the somberly blazing magnificence of foredoomed destruction.” His 1956 novel The Tin Drum established him as the so-called conscience of his generation (whatever that means) who dared the Germans to live up to their responsibility for the Holocaust. But in June, in advance of the publication of his memoirs, it was revealed for the first time that at the age of 17, in 1944, Grass was conscripted into the elite SS, who were responsible for executing the death camps. Condemnation was swift: pundits called for his Nobel to be rescinded (they cannot be) and his honorary citizenship of the city of Gdansk, Poland (he was born there when it was the German city of Danzig) was called into question until he had a very public mea culpa with revered Solidarity founder Lech Walesa. (See the Time magazine article here.)

What’s so fascinating about the controversies, and what’s not much noted, is that they mirror the circumstances of the two writers’ first meeting, at the Group 45 conference at Princeton in 1966. (Yes, we’re getting all literary here.) Group 45 was an influential who’s who of German literati in the post-war era, and the writers in attendance included Grass, Peter Weise and Heinrich Boll. Handke, who was just a student, rebelled against what he saw as their moralizing tendencies and established himself as a nihilistic contrarian by staging his groundbreaking play Offending the Audience, in which four actors simply hurl epithets at the audience for about 30 minutes. The play was a riot, sending up the stuffy pretension of the elitists, who expelled an only too-happy Handke.

The writers he so offended were more fond of staging dramatic readings of the Nuremberg trials (Peter Weise’s The Investigation) or a criss-crossing of absurdist bluster and epic agitprop (Weise’s Marat/Sade or Grass’s The Plebians Rehearse an Uprising). Handke continued his career with such groundbreaking works as Kaspar, a dramatization of a feral child forced to learn language, which is reveaked to be one of society’s control mechanisms. Grass and Handke couldn’t have chosen more different paths: one of witness-bearing and consciousness-raising, the other of nihilistic abandon and art-for-art’s-sake playfulness.

And yet in the end, they were both brought down by the same beast.

In their defenses, Handke never excused or supported Milosevic (the Observateur later all but retracted the story), and Grass’s work is often stunning in its ability to delve into Germany’s grief stricken conscience and pull up all the nasty bits the nation would prefer to forget. But both were celebrities who played on their fame as public intellectuals, and it bit them in the ass. For my money, Handke is the sorrier of the two. Ever the skeptic, he never embraced a role as society’s conscience, but he nevertheless fell victim to a liberal society’s desire to see itself as the hero. His presence at Milosevic’s burial was not, as reported, to honor the man, but rather to explore the ways in which the west has rewritten the sordid history of the former Yugoslavia and ignored its own culpability in the crimes that took place there. But in a world where you’re either with us or against us, he was labelled the latter and left to hang. Grass on the other hand spent so much time encouraging his countrymen to accept responsibility for their own actions that it was with no little schadenfreude that they set upon him for not being able to practice what he preached.

And most amusingly? All this controversy over two writers, and none of it has anything to do with anything they wrote.

This artice was my far too esoteric books article for the September edition of The Seattle Sinner.

And We Thought We Hated the French...

2006-07-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Mammals: a novel
Pierre Merot
Black Cat, $13

By Jeremy M. Barker

These days, there's only one social novel being written in the Western world. It goes something like this: begin with the assertion the Western culture is decadent, morally bankrupt and perverse; since the Cold War, freedom has been replaced with consumer choice; people lead affectless and unfulfilling lives. Therefore, they revolt, asserting in proper Nietzschean fashion a perversion of their own on the grounds that a perversion of a perversity must be a good thing. Except, in the end, they realize that in the process they've been corrupted by the very thing they oppose, and insert nihilistic or anachronistic sentiment for denouement.

Seriously, that's it. In America, that's Don Delillo, Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Palahniuk; in Canada, the more mild-mannered Douglas Coupland; in Britain, Irvine Welsh; in Italy, Enrico Brizzi; in Poland, Dorota Maslowska; and in France, Michel Houellebecq and now, for the first time in English, Pierre Merot.

What's fascinating is that in America, the perverse rebellion tends to center on violence, whereas in France, it tends to be sexual. In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, the main character starts a fight club for men to act our their socially repressed aggression, which eventually morphs into a terror organization bent on destroying the totalitarian forces of modern society only to, at the end, reveal that the narrator himself is delusionally paranoid and projecting his own anxieties on the world around him. (The crucial failing of the film was that it utterly missed this point, sufficing for taking a cheap shot at the finance industry, as though credit cards were our new field overseers and thus making the entire Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde aspect of the story superfluous.) Michel Houellebecq, on the other hand, revels in sexual perversion: sex as liberation, sex as cheap thrill, sex as economic engine. He loathes everything and his novels are about as spiteful as any imaginable.

It's inevitable that every critic compares Merot with Houellebecq, though in many ways they couldn't be more different. True, the narrator of Merot's novel Mammals, known only as "the Uncle," hates everything: the spirit of the Sixties, capitalism, nationalism, socialism, the welfare state, globalism, women and men. (Thankfully Merot stops short of Houellebecq in his loathing of homosexuals and immigrants.) But generally, critics come out in Merot's favor against Houellebecq, citing the fact that Merot's writing is actually funny. For my taste, most critics take Houellebecq too seriously, not recognizing that he's a satirist working in broad strokes. But it's true: Merot's much funnier in the reading.

The Uncle is a forty-something Parisian, generally speaking a failure in life, love and work. He's the black sheep of his family, though his mother refuses to let him cut the cord. He studied philosophy and therefore has no real skills, though he manages to secure a series of unfulfilling jobs as a journalist, publishing company hack, museum curator and finally teacher. His love life, in true French fashion, is a failure despite a series of beautiful women conquered with precious little effort.

The crucial failing of Merot's book, and generally all the novels of the genre as identified above, is that his real concern doesn't seem to be his characters as much as it is his society. True, Merot is a satirist, but like many a satirist who chooses a large target, he gets bogged down in the details. There's simply no way to convey so much information about all the ways our society sucks in a traditional narrative manner, so authors like Merot create characters who both embody society's worst qualities while having the education and erudition to comment upon them. The novels are almost invariably first person narratives, heavy on comment and generality, shaded with distinctive voicing as though to try to hide the fact that the author is more often than not just preaching.

Central to Mammals is the bar, and drinking in the bar, and drinking alcohol, and alcoholism and drunkeness, and really, the book could easily have been called Booze. (Mammals refers to the occasional theme of family and parenting, and how, in the immortal words of Philip Larkin, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.") The first 20 pages of this brief novel are really just a rambling meditation on bars and drinking, which can discourage the average reader. But when the novel finally gets going, Merot manages to hop, skip and jump through his narrator's tale, past his first marriage to a beautiful Polish red head desperate to live in the West after the fall of the wall, through unemployment and debauchery (best scene is when the narrator's anally fucking a woman in his parents' bathroom during Sunday brunch as she screams obscenities at his mother), through unsatisfying jobs culminating in his successful tenure as a teacher who simply doesn't care but can brilliantly grasp the bureaucratic concept of looking like you're more effective than you are.

The prose is sprightly and amusing, colored by constant, bitter irony. Take, for example, this bit of exuberant writing: "Thanks to its technological wizardry, the Interrnet caters to even the most specialized sexual tastes...In theory, by refining the search using successive pairs of criteria, it is possible to find the precise image around which your sexuality orbits: a fat, balding crone in chains sucking off a teenage Chechen boy in pink tights who is being fucked up the ass by a Breton spaniel in stockings and suspenders, which is grappling with a hairy Japanese man wearing a gigantic dildo whose ass is gaping from the ministrations of the barrel of an American tank, etc."

If it's hard to see how this passage actually plays some role in advancing a narrative, fear not: in many ways, the entire novel is a series of non sequitors, a series of dark jokes at the worst aspects of our society which, in its totality, adds up to damning treatise against our self-satisfied ways.

Perhaps the most distressing thing about reading France's most exportable novelists is that they really make you not want to go to France. Certainly, there's no gang rapes by African youths on the Metro ignored by apathetic passersby (a minor detail in Houellebecq's Platform) in Merot's novel, but the French come off as a society of depressed, dismal people even more vapid than Americans. But that said, my personal guess is that this entire breed of novel, so prevalent globally in the last 20 years, is on its way out. Not only has it largely exhausted its potential (see above dismissive summary), but the times are a-changing. This genre was largely a response to the vapidity of Western liberal democracy and capitalism in the waning days and the wake of the Cold War; this was the dissenting literature of the euphoric post-Soviet days. Now, democracy is at its weakest and most bereft since the 1930s and headed for a crisis unforeseen and unthinkable back in 1989. Of the G8 nations, the US, Germany, Italy and Britain are all ruled by administrations that only exercise power by the slimmest of electoral margins; France, Japan and Canada are ruled by affectless leaders and whose major political parties are suffering from endemic corruption; and Russia has turned away from democracy under the heavy-handed rule of Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the Washington concensus of market liberalization is collapsing throughout Latin America, while the EU, after its historic expansion to include former Soviet bloc nations, is mired is disagreement about its future path and rifts are arising as nationalism rears its ugly head in both East and West.

The threat of Islamic fundamentalism, so hyped in the post-Sept. 11 era, is the paper tiger of the era; a problem and a threat, to be sure, but nothing compared to festering disease at home. This isn't to say we're on the verge of the rise of fascism or anything nearly so alarmist, but rather to suggest that the principles that have guided us for the last 17 years are coming to an end, and the bitter estimation of novelists and thinkers once dismissed as mere cynics is coming to pass. A renewal is in the works one way or another, and the first signs of that renewal--like the first signs of the fin-de-siecle decline--will doubtlessly be seen in our oft neglected global literature.

Pinky, Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

2006-05-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

"I think so, Brain...but you and Pippy Longstocking? What would the children look like?"

My apologies, the striking likeness between Gen. Michael Hayden and The Brain is not so glowing in this pair of pictures. Strangely, Hayden--the NSA director responsible for the domestic wiretapping program and the president's nominee to head the CIA--doesn't seem to have many pictures online. Huh. Nice of the media not to invade his privacy.

Viva La Revolución!

2006-05-04T01:47:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 1st, having nothing better to do (the job search continues), I went down and joined the huge "Day Without Immigrants" march from a church in the Central down to the federal courthouse. All in all, it was a strange and fantastic experience. As someone who's never really been to a march or protest before (except unwillingly of course; I did live in Eugene), I came to see how the entire affair could become addictive. After all, you're there, surrounded by a large group of people who more or less vehemently agree with you. Sort of heady.

On the other hand, I know well that such things rarely work, which has been the main force keeping me from ever attending political rallies and so on. My education in such methods took place in the halcyon days in the wake of the WTO protests here in Seattle. Eugene got more than its fair share of credit for the affair due to our contingent of "anarchists" (I use ironic quotes since I can't really take them and their ilk seriously), and the effect was a ratcheting up of political activism, particularly on the anti-globalist front. The 1999-2000 school year saw the infamous anti-sweatshop protests against Nike, during which our fearless college political elite arranged photo-ops of themselves getting arrested for trespassing by staying in the administration building after closing; all in all a sad and depressing affair that reached its zenith when former Black Panther leader Bobby Seals made an appearance before an adoring crowd. The administration's response? Concede to the protestors' demands and then, over the summer when the kids were gone, slowly back pedal.

And so really, who'd want to be part of that?

But I have to give it the immigration reform movement here. They've organized and made their demands clear, and furthermore, they're fairly reasonable demands. Plus, my own experience working with likely illegals back when I was struggling through my college years working at McDonald's gave me some first hand appreciation of these guys (and gals, to be fair). So I was happy to lend a hand. The only troublemakers were the extreme left hangers-on, a blow horn wielding communist group of some sort and some annoying college socialists, one of whom implied that all the pictures I was taking (see above) were of women's asses; I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not, because if it wasn't, my assumed voyeurism didn't deter him from his proselytizing, and if it was, that seems a bit risque for a lefty who embraces every cause to come along. Surely pictures of women's asses must somehow offend the delicate sensibilities of bleeding heart college radicals. But I digress.

Aron and I had a fine time marching in the hot sun (though the day was pleasantly cool due to a nice breeze), but we missed the end rally at the courthouse to sojourn to the J&M Cardroom and Cafe down in Pioneer Square for beer and steaks.

Go Team Venture!

2006-05-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

An Interview With Jackson Publick III, Co-Creator of Adult Swim's The Venture Bros.

By Jeremy M. Barker

These days, the most common thing you're likely to hear about Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is, "It used to be good." For the countless insomniac pop culture geeks who made the late-night programming an unprecedented hit, Adult Swim was meant to be a hipper Nick at Nite, a clearinghouse for canceled adult-oriented cartoons, produced in the wake of The Simpsons' lasting popularity. The early line-up included the perennial favorite Home Movies, as well as the anime crossover hit Cowboy Bebop, and other canceled animated sitcoms like Baby Blues and The Oblongs. The only 15-minute short (now a mainstay) was reruns of the stoner hit Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.

Since then, though, the channel has been overrun with 15-minute throw-aways, everything from the gross-out comedy of Robot Chicken to the Internet hype of Tom Goes to the Mayor. The original programming has generally been a let down, wallowing in pop culture references and, occasionally, just plain incomprehensibility. But one of the few shows that points back to smart humor and plot-driven half-hour shows that made Adult Swim a hit is the slow-burning The Venture Bros., which this May returns for its second season.

The Venture Bros., like many Adult Swim shows, is a comic pastiche of old shows and pop culture. The plot centers around the title brothers, Hank and Dean, a pair of adventure seeking seeking teenagers painfully outdated, sort of a mix of Johnny Quest and the Hardy Boys. Their adventures (or rather misadventures) largely stem from their father's, Dr. Thadeus Venture's, entanglements. The pill-popping son of a famous scientist, Dr. Venture is the inheritor of a crumbling empire, a delightfully amoral loser who at one point uses orphan body parts for a shameless experiment. Filling out the crew is his bodyguard Brock Samson, a Race Bannon-esque (though not Race Bannon, who at one point comically dies in the show) thickneck who only uses knives, loves Zeppelin, and has a remarkably robust sex-life. Filling out the cast are Venture's unwanted nemeses, led by the Monarch, a comically neurotic "evil genius" dressed as butterfly, and his right-hand "man," the evil scientist Dr. Grilfriend, perhaps the show's most original character: a shapely woman dressed like Jackie O. with a deep, burly man's voice.

Last year, I did an email interview with co-creator Jackson Publick III, a longtime writer for TV who worked for both the animated and live-action versions of the cult classic The Tick. Publick and co-creator Doc Hammer have frequently claimed they don't watch much TV, which seems sort of hard to believe for a show so rife with pop culture references. In response, Publick wrote: "The thing is, as children of the 1970s, we grew up on TV. And as freaky obsessives of the 2000s, it's all stored in our heads—sometime in shocking detail, thought between the two of us we can usually fill in whatever blanks one of us can't remember. The show was definitely inspired by a childhood recollection of Johnny Quest, and an adulthood acquaintance with Tom Swift novels fueled it further. Once we were into it and realized it could and should go way beyond those two influences, it began to draw on everything."

Drawing on everything is a fair description. One episode is based on Ziggy Stardust's "Space Oddity," and David Bowie makes a behind-the-scenes character appearance in another episode, hiring a mercenary to get back his panda (his companda) from a megalomaniacal Walt Disney stand-in. Publick even brought up Bowie in the interview, commenting off-handedly, "if we actually ever put David Bowie in the show, he could be the real David Bowie, but he might live in a hovering fortress and be friends with Aristotle Onassis, who is alive and well but has a metal face and a laser."

That sort of inanity mixed with subtlety infuses the show and accounts for its reputation as one of Adult Swim's "smart" shows. Although the show does draw a lot from the collective pop culture memory, Publick draws a line.

"My sole complaint about the message boards is that once they picked up on the fact that we play around with a lot of pop culture referencing, they started trying to figure out the source of every single joke or character, as if we base everything we write on something preexisting. Which, if it were true, would cheapen the show so much. I'd just hate to be lumped in with that kind of humor because I'm so offended by it when I see it in other shows. Merely shouting out to the audience 'hey, remember that episode of Diff'rent Strokes?' is not writing, and it's not funny. What I like to think we do is trade in archetypes and iconography. We use pop culture to flesh out our characters by putting them in the same world our audience lives in, but we also put them in the same world as other fictional characters."

The Venture Bros. is also a action show, beyond the humor, and in many ways it's one of the most transgressive on Adult Swim, with violence rivaling some of the anime imports and some of the most overt sex acts on any show. In the wake of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," I couldn't help but ask about standards and the FCC. "Last season we had very few notes from the standards people, thanks in part to Family Guy, which had started re-running on Adult Swim in the interval between our pilot and our first season. It sort of pushed what you could do on the network because in a reasonable world, how could a block that calls itself ADULT Swim not be able to show—at 11pm, on CABLE—the same material that was once shown in prime time on a broadcast network?"

But beyond that, "The Adult Swim people were pretty supportive. They're trying to do something new and create memorable, envelope-pushing television. If anything, we were asked to rise to the occasion. Not necessarily encouraged to be 'more adult' or to be shocking for shocking's sake, but to push things because doing something unforgettable is what makes something...well, unforgettable."

When the first season ended almost two years ago, the entire series seemed to be closed up, as the finale ended with Hank and Dean dying in a scene pulled from the end of Easy Rider, but Publick assured me that he hadn't intended to end the series there. "Season One was not intended to be a closed story because 13 episodes doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what we want to do with these characters or the stories we want to tell," he wrote. "Had there been 52 episodes in that season, you might have something. But we figured we couldn't lose: if we got cancelled, there was no better way to go out than by killing our title characters, and if we got renewed we had an excellent cliffhanger to our season to make the viewers come back next year. There is a master plan of sorts, but it's a loose one."

New episodes of The Venture Bros. start on Adult Swim's Sunday line-up on June 25th. Season 1 is available on DVD May 30th.

Way, Way, Way Downstairs (and don't even know it!)

2006-04-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

So, last Sunday, after a long and boring drive home from Portland, I sat down with a cup of coffee to read my Sunday New York Times. After getting the real sections out of the way, I turned to the fluffier Magazine and came across an amusing little article by Walter Kirn ("The Way We Live Now: Way Upstairs, Downstairs," April 16). It's a meditation on growing class inequality in the US.

"There are studies that prove it," writes Kirn,

but I don't need to read them. I've seen the prices on the menus. I've also seen the pay stubs of the cooks. I've stood in the mansions, let in by the maids, and listened to the string quartets, whose players I've met in the coat aisle at Goodwill. I know what's going on. As predicted, but much faster than anticipated, the rich in America are getting richer (at rates that favor the very rich and the superrich). And at the same time, as wasn't quite predicted but still seems faster than anticipated, the nonrich are getting almost nowhere.

Fair enough, though as a professional writer and editor who, as it happens, is also currently unemployed, both professionally and personally I would have liked a bit more discussion of those "studies" he has no need of reading. But what struck me as most amusing cannot really be recorded here as well as need be: seriously, read page 11 of the physical copy and you see what I mean. Kirn writes, somewhat abridged by me, the following:

It doesn't help that the vocabulary of wealth and poverty hasn't been adjusted for inflation since the heyday of dimwitted 1960's TV comedy. We still call the very rich among us millionaires, even though lots of them are closer to billionaires. Words fail reality at the other end too. In 1974, I knew exactly what the grown-ups meant when they called a person "poor" ... It's a simple idea without a simple word now.

Meanwhile, the nonsimple words are taking over. The words with 11 bedrooms and 7 baths that are larger and finer than rich folks needed before the "differentiation" — which isn't merely an economic trend but a style, an aesthetic.

Now, what makes this particular comment so ironic and amusing is that it appears on page 11 of the magazine. Page 12, adjacent, contains the following advertisement for the Corcoran Real Estate Group:

Since the above image is no doubt too small to be read, allow me to quote the text in the bottom left: "It's not just where you hang your hat. It's who you are. So at Corcoran, we're dedicated to understanding you. The practical, ook-to-the-future you... and the dreamy, look-to-the-horizon you. Then we focus on hhomes that fit the needs and desires of both—the beds, the baths... and the breathtaking sunsets."

And who do you need to be to have the Corcoran Group care about you so? Well, a house of the week on their website recently was featured in a New York Post profile. Price? $2.3 million.

Of course, it's no surprise that The New York Times is, in many ways, an elitist institution. For all their liberal slant, their fairly good coverage of the broadening economic gap in America (Walter Kirn's rambling aside), they are also an incredibly expensive newspaper. A dollar for the daily edition and $5 for the Sunday on the newsstand; even my student rate is $20 a month, against which the cost of either The Seattle Times or The Seattle Post-Intelligencer pales.

And I'm not the only one to have noted this recently. Back in their April 17 edition, The New Republic published a cover story by Michelle Cottle entitled "The Gray Lady Wears Prada." In it, Cottle writes of the "Styles" sections on Thursday and Sunday, which, "if one were feeling ungenerous, could be characterized as a smarter, higher-end variation on Lucky."

"The Times is hardly breaking new ground with its foray into what may be best described as luxury porn," she writes.

Most metro areas with the proper concentration of wealth boast at least one slick glossy peddling the luxe life. And, hot on the heels of "Thursday Styles," last September The Wall Street Journal introduced its own shopping-on-steroids section, suggestively titled "Pursuits." But it's one thing for a bunch of glorified ad vehicles—or even the rampantly capitalist Wall Street Journal—to be hawking designer duffel bags and skin cream priced higher than Jack Abramoff's legal team. After all, these publications unabashedly promote—and generally cater to readers who share—a Trump-esque mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude toward wealth and consumption. It's quite another matter, however, for the venerable Times to lend its imprimatur to a genre so awkwardly at odds with its own high-minded liberal sensibility and intellectual pretensions. This, after all, is the same paper that, last year, ran an eleven-part series on class in America, in which it described economic mobility as 'the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream' and exhaustively pondered its apparent decline.

Ah, Ms. Cottle...it's all fine and dandy to deride the embrace of elitism by a liberal publication, but she's not one to talk. An simple examination of The New Republic's media kit reveals that TNR, long a bastion for cutting edge thought amongst the American left, is, itself, somewhat of an elitist institution. The average household income of a New Republic reader is a whopping $153,000, the average net worth an impressive $1.3 million. Compare that to their leftier competitor The Nation. According to their media kit, the median income of a Nation subscriber is a more reasonable $69,500, mean $90,000. As for net worth, the median in $377,000, the mean $786,000. Still far wealthier than this subscriber (to both), but more reasonable. The New Republic's readers are overall an affluent bunch: 93% own investments averaging $740,000. 65% travelled internationally yearly, 76% attended operas, the symphony or a dance troupe yearly, and 31% bought wine by the case.

Sitting listlessly around my Seattle apartment listening to Blondie, I am actually chuckling as I write this. It's always reassuring to think, by the demos, that I'm a member of such an elite club since I subscribe to TNR, and gives me some hope I will someday join their rarified ranks. Yet the troubling fact remains: most people of normal means aren't reading The New York Times or The New Republic, both influential and important publications. Perhaps it's a sign of our times, with the readily available supply of choir-preaching bloggers that people simply want to hear what they want to hear and need not be challenged by real news or intelligent analysis. Certainly our bitter political partisanship discourages non-partisan consideration of issues. Whatever the case, though, it's terribly disappointing to think that the only people exposed so serious consideration of increasing economic inequality are the ones coming out on top of the great class differentiation process taking place.

Outsider Art

2006-04-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

An Interview With Eddie Argos of Art Brut

By Jeremy M. Barker

"I never went to university. Everyone else in the band went to university. I went to London to start a band."

It's early evening, Saturday March 25, and I'm sitting in the downstairs green room at Neumos with Eddie Argos, the lead singer of the British rock band Art Brut. Argos is roughly my own age, but he's retained the youthful charm and exuberance that daily life usually beats out of you by your mid-twenties. With a charming little moustache that makes him look just a bit like a playful young Salvador Dali, he's an unlikely rock star. He can't play an instrument and he can't sing either, at least in the classic sense of the word, but on stage later that night he becomes one of the most charismatic frontmen I've ever seen.

"I wanted to be in a band since I was tiny," he explains, "and I've tried learning everything: xylophone, clarinet, sax...anything, and I'm like rubbish, I can't do it. And I realized when I was like seventeen or eighteen: I want to be a singer...Lou Reed can't sing...he can get away with it, and so can I."

That's an interesting comparison, because in the song "Bang Bang Rock and Roll," from which Art Brut's first album gets its name, he announces in his slightly off-key voice, that "I can't stand the sound/of the Velvet Underground." When I point that out, he just laughs it off.

Art Brut has been on a crazy trip over the last 18 months. Overshadowed in the media by the flash-in-the pan hype surrounding younger bands like The Subways and Arctic Monkeys, Art Brut sort of quietly exploded below the mainstream media's radar. Despite the fact that their debut effort Bang Bang Rock and Roll isn't officially released in the US until May 23, it managed to score number 38 on Spin's best-of list for 2005 and number 3 on pitchforkmedia.com's. And Art Brut, despite a hazing last year in The New York Times, has been playing a sold-out tour of US clubs for the past couple of months, ending in a show at Coachella.

Named for a post-war French art movement centered around Jean Dubuffet, Argos explains the story behind the band's moniker.

"I wanted to call the band 'Bang Bang Rock and Roll,' but no one liked that," he says. "I was in Paris, and there's an Art Brut museum there, and I was in there and I was like, 'Ah! This stuff's amazing! All this art's amazing!' And I could sort of see a thing that we were a bit like that sort of art, and I texted [...], and was like, 'We're called this.' And so for the first time, in the guest book at the Art Brut museum, I wrote, 'Art Brut, Top of the Pops,' across the top of the page."

An obsession with the celebrity of rock music pervades the band's first album. "Top of the Pops," roughly the European equivalent of "Total Request Live," crops in two songs. As does Morrissey, NME and Axl Rose. When I ask Argos whether he's criticizing as an outsider or pining to be a member of the club, he again laughs it off.

"It's funny when you find yourself saying things that you read people in bands saying," he comments off-handedly. "'Oh that's such a cliche!' And then you're in the situation yourself and you find yourself saying it."

As Argos proclaims in their debut single (which he confirms was "pretty much" written in the fifteen minutes after the band formed), "it's not irony, it's not rock and roll. We're just talking to the kids." He's quite serious about playing "Top of the Pops," and asserts that since Art Brut has done it in Germany, it counts. (It goes without saying that the competitive British music scene is much harder to come out on top of, and despite Art Brut's success, they've yet to play "Top of the Pops" in the UK.) But he assures me that the songs are all true.

"I'm just trying to be conversational," he explains, referencing both the songs "Move to LA" and "My Little Brother." "It's the truth. I really want to hang out with Morrissey. My brother really made me a tape of bootlegs and B-sides." Which leads to the obvious question: is the band's plaintive love song "Emily Kane" about a real girl?

"Oh yes!" he assures me. In the song, he pines for his teenage girlfriend Emily Kane, and, mixing both an earnestness and cleverness in a way that makes his music so distinctive, he asserts: "I want school kids on buses, singing your name!" because of his song.

"For Radio One, we played a session, and a friend of a friend of a friend found me and gave me her phone number," he explains of the song. "We used to have a game where we'd take celebrity phone numbers from people, and someone's like, 'I've got the best phone number in the world.' 'Who is it?' 'Emily Kane.' It was amazing! I had to phone her and give her a heads-up that I've written a song about you...She's like—bless her—'Is it a mean song...? No, really?'...But she's got a boyfriend and stuff, really too bad...But it's funny, it's true, I really did think I still loved her, and then when I met her, I sort of realized that I loved being fifteen and being in love, I didn't actually love her. Thße band told me all along, 'Shut up. You're wrong. You definitely love this girl. You're gonna marry her, have kids.' And then when I met her...No, just nah. She's lovely, but no."

But, true to his claim that his songs are honest, later during the show, at the point during "Emily Kane" where he recounts down to the second how long it's been since he's seen her, he digresses with a new narrative explaining much the same story he told me earlier.

"I'm quite lucky in that I write the words and I can say whatever I like in the songs," he tells me. "It's nice, actually, being in foreign countries and people knowing all about Emily Kane or ask about my brother."

On stage later that night, Argos & Co. explode. The band's tightness in performance belies their scant year and a half together. Clutching the mic and a coil of cable in one hand, Argos is all over the place, while guitarist Jasper Future, in sexy tight pants, plays rock God to Argos' left. Argos, whose vocal parts are less lyrics than spoken word pieces, frequently digresses from the album version of songs to add or correct or simply entertainment. Halfway through the band's encore, in the midst of "Bad Weekend" (which features the memorable chant, "Popular culture no longer applies to me"), the band descends into a long, slow freeform jam backing up Argos, as he leads that audience through a chant of "Art Brut, Top of the Pops!" and later, in an attempt to connect to Seattle's music heritage, "Gruge! Top of the Pops!" The fact that grunge is long dead mattered little--Art Brut's music is a mixture of rebellion and homage. They would occasionally cut into other tunes--a riff from Metallica, the drum beat of "My Sharona." For all his carping, Argos is as much a rock music lover as a hater, he just happens to have a good sense of humor. On a series of acoustic in-studio tracks the band did for French radio, he adapted a line, one of the most famous, from "Formed a Band": "Every day we're getting more and more rock and roll, and this is still my singing voice." He's the devilish child poking fun and the pretension of British rock in the post-Radiohead era, while maintaining a refreshing intellectual honesty and artistic seriousness that other jokers—like Tenacious D—simply cannot.

So keep your eye out--the American cut of Bang Bang Rock and Roll features three new tracks not on the British version (which is available online) and watch for Art Brut to return. They're not to be missed.

The New British Invasion

2006-03-06T01:27:00.000-08:00

Whatever Happened to Britpop?

From the upcoming March issue of The Seattle Sinner

By Jeremy M. Barker

So, after several years of not paying attention to what's been going on across the pond in Great Britain, I was recently driven to check out the dismal state of Britpop when I was informed, by THE NEW YORK TIMES no less, that the best band since The Beatles had surfaced, a barely pubescent quartet called The Arctic Monkeys. At the same time, 107.7 The End has been shoving (following an appearance on THE O.C.) another English act called The Subways down my throat.

All of a sudden, Britpop is unavoidable. The American press, for some reason still obsessed with model Kate Moss, has gleefully kept us informed on her and boyfriend Pete Doherty's (formerly of The Libertines, currently of Babyshambles) descent into druggie hell. So I decided to find out what the hell the deal is, and in the process discovered that this month, Seattle plays host to the new wave of British bands invading the US and clamoring for our attention.

ARCTIC MONKEYS
March 29, Crocodile Cafe

So, The Arctic Monkeys are, like, the best band since The Beatles. Or Oasis. Or maybe just The Libertines. Whatever. They're debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, is the fastest selling album in British history. Just released in the US, the album was lead her by two singles--the infectiously catchy "I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor" and the just plain bad "When The Sun Goes Down," both of which have received some radio play. The exact source of fascination with Arctic Monkeys frankly escapes me. Like I said, "Dancefloor" is catchy but forgettable and derivative--power pop chords with a punky lead line and some cutesy back-up vox. "When The Sun Goes Down," though, is just plain irritating and schmaltzy; poor girl on the streets, she's a hooker, blah blah blah. Sorry kids, we've all heard "Roxanne" already.

THE SUBWAYS
March 30, Crocodile Cafe

If Arctic Monkeys are over-hyped in Britain, The Subways are over-hyped in the US. Although they've released a slew of singles in the UK, over here they're known exclusively for the single "Rock and Roll Queen," which they performed live on Fox's The O.C. Personally, I'd also guess that their barely legal, hottie bassist Charlotte Cooper helped get them exposure (hot chick in the band is the oldest trick in the book). But despite claims to the contrary, "Rock and Roll Queen" is not the regeneration of rock by returning to its roots; it's just punk redux, two and a half minutes of youthful angst...singing about love. Seriously, hugely overrated, The Subways will be as forgotten in two years as Third Eye Blind, Fastball and Cornershop are now.

ART BRUT
March 25, Neumos

In researching this article, I checked out a lot of contemporary British acts--Bloc Party (forgettable), Kaiser Chiefs (already forgotten), Ash (wait, aren't they ancient?)--but the big surprise I came across was Art Brut. You won't be hearing this band on 107.7 any time soon (though KEXP has them in rotation), but they're a fantastic antidote to the crap described above. Their first single, "Formed a Band," is a brilliant rebel scream, a battle cry against the banality of most Britpop.

Most often compared to The Fall, the first thing I thought listening to this band's debut was Slint and Pavement. Like both those visionary American indie bands, Art Brut uses math rocky rhythms and spoken word elements to make music. "Formed a Band" is a two minute rocker, featuring a chorus of "Look at us, we formed a band!" against repetitive rock chords. The verses, half spoken word, half cheesy rhymed singing, are sung against a schizoidal lead guitar, as lead singer Eddie Argos chants, "Honey pie, I don't know when it started/Just stop buying your albums from the supermarket" and later in spoken word, "...yes, this is my singing voice/it's not irony, it's not rock and roll." Structurally, it's almost identical to Pavement's "Conduit for Sale" from Slanted and Enchanted, but then again, Pavement's supposed to sound just like The Fall. Art Brut's debut Bang Bang Rock and Roll is the only of the three debuts cited herein worth buying, and check out them out in concert; they already have a reputation as a great live band.

Why Should We Care About Muslims' Feelings?

2006-02-06T22:16:00.000-08:00

So, it's come to this: I want to make clear, first and foremost, that I don't normally resort to the screaming headlines or outrageous stunts typical of the so-called "blogosphere." Rabid partisanship, etc., bores me terribly, but right now I'm having one of those moments where the utter absurdity of the world presents itself in all its glory--either a cosmic tragedy or grotesque joke, I don't know which. And all over editorial cartoons, nothing less.

What's gotten the Arab Street so up in arms? Well, it's the image at the top of the weblog. Offensive? Certainly. A gross racial and religious stereotype? Please, do you really need to ask?

Personally, I find editorial cartoons to be painfully outmoded in contemporary journalism, relying as they do on a collection of painful racial stereotypes to make a fairly banal point. Most people probably don't think this way, but editorial cartoons are really the forebears of South Park: offensive in broad strokes, reducing all the complexity of the issues that face us to a (rarely funny) one-liner. It gets a chuckle sometimes, but if you follow it daily, you realize they're a one-trick pony.

But that said, I'm a big believer in the freedom of speech, not just as an American but as a human being. And seriously, am I supposed to really pity and defer to the opinions of people who carry signs reading "Slay Those Who Insult Islam"? Seriously, we're to take these people more seriously than we take the protests of the Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westborough Baptist Church, with his infamous "God Hates Fags" website? Pres. Bush, ever the sensitive one to the concerns of the Islamic world, has actually for once taken their side, decrying such "anti-Muslim" provocations. But does that really surprise anyone, that our right-wing religious president would defer to a religion's desire to be above reproach or criticism even at the cost of our precious freedom of speech? Religious wackos are religious wackos and that's that. No religion should be above criticism, reproach and mockery, Christianisty, Islam, Buddhism, etc. For one thing, to claim otherwise necessitates forcing the nonreligious (like myself) to accept the worldview of people who believe in a magical entity they can't see, can't directly contact and who clearly hasn't done much to lessen their lot to bear in life, but which they nevertheless devote numerous hours of study and huige portions of their meager funds in the benefiction of. I'm sorry, that's not deserving of my respect, that's being a fucking idiot.

So here I am, reproducing these supposedly foul, hate images. Personally, I don't agree with their message. When these were published in September in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, it was correctly seen as a provocation. But now, roving mobs in such beacons of religious and press freedoms as Syria and Lebanon have attacked embassies in reaction to the perceived offense. So I draw the line: America has a lot of problems too, but are we really supposed to be criticized by non-democracies like Syria, Iran and Pakistan, all of whom have long histories of government sanctioned repression of Islamic religious minorities?

And second, this isn't their sort of crappy theocracy (or weakly propped-up dictatorship); this is the US. This morning, I read The New York Times' weak-kneed justification for not publishing these cartoons. I've had enough, ladies and gentlemen: since high school, I and my colleagues have made our way attacking and criticizing the extremist actions of out-of-touch religious psychos in America, from the Rev. Fred Phelps to the purveyors of the Oklahoma City bombing. I have performed in a play that features Jesus Christ in the closet (wink-wink) reading Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. I actively sought to produce a play in which Muhammad, the Chhristian God, Buddha and Vishnu are factory workers given to heavy drinking and eventually downsized by Satan. I have nothing but scorn and hatred for those who would put themselves above others in the name of their religious belief. Why? Well, although I am sensitive to the beliefs of others, the painful fact of the matter is that if you simply do not believe in God, you find it rather hard to care about offending those who do. Seriously. And given that the hate-filled Muslim response to these cartoons has been marked not only by incredible intolerance itself (not to mention an utter lack of sense of humor), I have nothing but the same scorn to throw back at them. In the US, the same Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to a free press as protects the right to freedom of religion. At least under the law, the right of American Muslims to practice their religion is protected in the same way my right to reproduce hate images is protected; at its most basic, the lesson free speech teaches is that brought out into the light of day and the full scrutiny of the public, fringe ideas will be rejected. To quote Lenny Bruce: "[T]he word's suppression gives in the power, the violence, the viciousness."

So Seattle's a liberal city, huh...?

2006-01-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

From the forthcoming February issue of The Seattle Sinner.

By Jeremy M. Barker

So, kudos to Seattle Weekly writer Philip Dawdy. Dawdy, best noted for a series of articles last year on the region's failure to properly help those with psychological problems, has now turned his barbed pen on what he's terming Seattle's "Big Nanny," the city's new-found desire to regulate every aspect of our daily lives for immoral or unhealthful behavior. In the Jan. 18th issue, Dawdy began his attack with a lengthy feature, "Big Nanny Is Watching You." He starts off by catching our local "tobacco czar" Roger Valdez making a statement of hubristic overreach: "Americans think they have a lot rights they really don't have. Smoking is one of those things where people think they have the right to smoke, but you don't."

Oh, is that how it is now?

I for one want to thank and praise Mr. Valdez; it's good to know that those who know what’s best for me no longer feel constrained to put it any other way. I wonder, is Mr. Valdez a justice or a lawyer or somehow otherwise qualified to dictate what we may or may not do? The context of his comment came in relation to the anti-smoking movement's attempt to get us to stop smoking in our homes; essentially, Mr. Valdez is throwing his lot in with the Republican Right. With the ascension of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, where he'll become the fourth determinedly right-wing vote (along with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts) in opposing our right to privacy, Valdez may just turn out to be correct. After all, the right to privacy, a product of legal precedent rather than constitutional amendment, only protects those little things like a woman's right to choose abortion or a gay man's right to have sex with another man. You know, that stuff we liberal Seattleites don't support or anything, so no big if the Republicans get rid of it.

This isn't a small issue and it's not going to go away. Smoking is one target. Strip clubs are another, as are pornography, beer and other forms of free expression and commerce.

For some people, this may seem at odds with our city's purported leftiness, but that's a mistake based on a simple reading of partisan politics; Dawdy's right on when he invokes H.L. Mencken's "uplifters" to describe our new breed of public health and welfare radicals. Both the political right and left has a long and disturbing history of invading our daily life in the name of the public good. An excellent historian of such overreach is Evergreen College Professor Stephanie Coontz. Her book The Way We Never Were, tracks attempts to regulate American family life while revealing our most cherished images of familial normality to be contradictory confabulations. The nuclear family doesn't much fit with a family that has grandparents playing a major role in their grandchildren's lives, now does it? Yet time and time again, Coontz records extraordinary efforts by one group to make another better. Consider how many immigrant children in the early 20th century were removed from their parents' custody by a state that assumed it could raise them better. Or consider the forced sterilization of those with undesirable genetic traits during the eugenics regime.

Concurrent to "liberal" Seattle's slide into nanny state-dom is the political trend that Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas and the editor of The Baffler, has decried. Famously arguing in What's the Matter With Kansas that the Republicans routinely win elections by garnering the votes of working class social conservatives while pursuing economic policies to those voters' detriment, Frank is equally opposed to contemporary liberalism that emphasizes a perceived cultural divide between so-called "red" and "blue" states. Writing in the Nov. 28, 2004 edition of The New York Times Book Review, Frank argued, in reference to the book The Great Divide: "The essential cleavage in American life, the authors argue, is not between left and right or business class and working class; instead, it is a regional matter, a cultural divide between the states, polarized and unbridgeable. One America, to judge from the book's illustrations, works with lovable robots and lives in ‘vibrant' cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another." That divide is, of course, ludicous; for Frank, the real issue is class. But these days, "liberal" has become synonymous with being a college-educated, latte-sipping, urban caucasian, and therefore liberalism is now characterized by pro-business economics and support of gay and women's rights, i.e., fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. And part of that social liberalism is, apparently, the fascistic nanny-statism that Seattle is now seeing.

If there's one bit of hope in all this, it's that Stephanie Coontz's book makes clear that eventually the tide will switch, the overreach will be reduced, only to have the whole process repeat. Still, in the interim, it looks like us blue-staters who value personal liberties will have to suffer the excesses of a nanny state run in our name. The irony: we Seattle liberals could use some libertarian right-wingers at the local level to protect us from our side's excesses even as we decry their excesses at the national level. And how bad are these local excesses? According to Dawdy's second nanny-state article from the Jan. 25th issue, county health is threatening the Downtown Emergency Service Center, a homeless shelter, with $100-a-day fines for not preventing the homeless from smoking indoors.

So, at least we’ve got Dawdy and the Weekly on our side. The Stranger, in contrast, was a heavy supporter of smoking bans; only after the November election and the subsequent realization that they were now mainstream politically did the wannabe-hipster Stranger begin backpedaling, with a moronic article on new “speakeasys” by Brendan Kiley (“Secret Knocks and Passwords,” Dec. 1, 2005). Leave it to The Stranger to cop a mea culpa while maintaining a hipper-than-thou attitude. Maybe when all the smokers are finally relegated to the back alleys we’ll run into Dan “guys-who-smoke-are-icky” Savage fucking his boyfriend, er, husband; funny how having your rights assaulted is a great equalizer, isn’t it?

Main St., Guyville

2005-12-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

A slightly different version of this article appears in the December, 2005 issue of The Seattle Sinner.

The Bell Jar Descends on Liz Phair

By Jeremy M. Barker

Saturday, Nov. 12--With a sense of futility I wandered around Neumos, bored, nursing a beer and waiting for the show to start. The crowd was frankly sad; the place was pretty full, but most people were either aging yuppies or valley girl types more at home at First Ave. clubs.

Oh Liz Phair, what happened?

For many people, Liz Phair is best known as a second-rate pop diva who scored a pair of minor hits (“Why Can’t I?” and “Extraordinary”) off her 2003 self-titled album. That album also killed most of her indie-rock credibility, since several songs were produced by pop-hit manufacturers “The Matrix,” the team that made folks like Avril Lavigne and Hillary Duff stars. In fact, you might even be wondering why someone like this is being written up in the The Seattle Sinner. That’s sad, because once upon a time Liz Phair was a great artist, and the fact that both she and her work have never gained wider acceptance is just plain sad.

Phair’s first album, 1993’s Exile in Guyville, is one of the great indie-rock albums of the 1990s. A purported song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, in one fell swoop Liz Phair reshaped the entire musical landscape in America, carving out a space for women in rock between riot grrl punk and sappy singer-songwriters strumming their acoustic guitars. Her lightly strummed electric guitar was messy and gritty without reaching back to hardcore punk music like her contemporaries Babes in Toyland or L7, while her fairly weak voice, with its smoky, country-music swagger, set her apart from soul-searching folk-pop artists like Sarah McLachlan. It was punk rock without being loud and brash, confessional without being therapeutic. And perhaps most notable were her sexually explicit lyrics. “Fuck and Run,” her ode to drunken one-night stands, has become an anthem. But in terms of sheer obscenity, the spoken-word piece “Flower” is almost unparalleled, with its singsong chorus of “Every time I see your face/ I get all wet between my legs,” and lines such as “Everything you ever thought of/is everything I’ll do to you/ I’ll fuck you and your girlfriend too” and “I want to be your blow job queen./ You’re probably shy and introspective;/ that’s not part of my objective/ I just want your fresh, young jimmy/ jamming, slamming, ramming in me.”

The follow up to Exile in Guyville, 1994’s Whip-Smart, produced Liz Phair’s biggest hit for a decade, the top-ten modern rock single “Supernova.” She then seemed to drop off the face of the earth for four years, while artists she’d paved the way for stole her thunder. Most notable in this is Alanis Morissette; early in her career, Morissette was a Canadian pop singer and dancer in the vein of Paula Abdul, but with the breakthrough of alternative rock in 1992, she switched gears and in 1995 released a pop-influenced rock album, reinventing herself as an angry-woman singer in Liz Phair’s vein. Propelled by the success of “You Oughta Know” (apparently unconvinced of the album’s musical quality, the record label issued a non-album version as the single, with the music done by Flea and then-Red Hot Chili Pepper Dave Navarro), Jagged Little Pill became one of the best-selling albums of the 1990s.

When Phair returned with 1998’s Whitechocolatespaceegg, she’d become more introspective and less abrasive, both lyrically and musically. It was a good album, but it wasn’t going to win her any new fans, really. And then another five-year break, and then 2003 and her reinvention as a pop star.

So I was approaching the concert with trepidation; I wasn’t sure, frankly, if I wanted to know what Liz Phair had become.

At first I was pleasantly surprised. Arriving on-stage alone and unaccompanied (and still drop-dead gorgeous at 38), she broke into the trippy, psychedelic “Stratford-on-Guy” from Exile. With its evocative lyrics and cryptic references to Galaxie 500, it’s one of the best songs from the album. Then two songs later she had abandoned her guitar altogether to gyrate her hips to audience hoots and hollers, while her backing band (who frankly looked like nothing so much as a poor man’s Counting Crows, poofy hair and all) smoothed out all her rough edges with well-produced pop smoothness.

The contrast between her newer material and the old couldn’t have been more drastic. For one thing, on the older stuff she drove the music with her buzzy rhythm guitar, whereas for the new her backup guitarist was unquestionably in the lead (on some songs, you couldn’t even make out what she was playing). She pulled a lot of material from her catalogue rather than her new album (the recently released Somebody's Miracle), with renditions of Exile classics like “Divorce Song” and Whitechocolatespaceegg’s “Polyester Bride” and “Johnny Feelgood.” She closed her main set with “Supernova” at full-throttle and during her encore she finally hit on “Fuck and Run,” but despite an audience chorus begging her, she wouldn’t go near “Flower.”

So what’s there left to say? Liz Phair’s still a hottie, a textbook definition of a m.i.l.f. In concert she no longer seems to harbor her once-infamous stage fright and is all beaming smiles and hip-shakes. In the end, I decided I couldn’t continue to harbor any resentment; she cashed in to pay the bills at 35 by selling out and going pop. Exile in Guyville is still monumental and will be remembered as one of the great albums of an era, a page out of indie rock history. But staring around as the lights glared off balding heads, as 40 year old yuppies gawked at her ass and bra strap, clinging desperately to half-dead college memories, I can’t help but feel Liz Phair deserved better. The Pixies cashed in recently, too, but they got to keep their credibility when they did it. I guess in the end, rock and roll is still guyville.

The Portland Lie

2005-12-05T21:39:00.000-08:00

The following article is appearing in the August issue of The Seattle Sinner. For more information, please see below.

By Jeremy M. Barker

So, you might be asking why the first installment of my new column on Seattle issues is about pollution and development in Portland, Ore. The answer? Portland serves as an important example for Seattle. In two years as a Seattle journalist, I’ve heard Portland cited as an example for why the monorail will work, for why the streetcar is a good idea, for why high-density development is the key to sustainable growth. A couple months ago I even wrote a piece on how both The Stranger and Seattle Weekly use Portland to justify their wildly divergent views on how Seattle should be developed. But as a native Portlander, I’ve often questioned these assertions for two reasons: one, Portland tends to look better by innately skewing data, and two, because Portland’s many successes tend to obscure its failures.

So, consider this claim, from Nicholas Kristof’s July 3rd New York Times column: “Newly released data show that Portland, America’s environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.”

That’s an impressive claim, so I decided to investigate the report it was based on, from the Portland Office of Sustainable Development, called “Progress Report on Local Action Plan on Global Warming,” which does in fact show that carbon emissions had fallen to 0.1% below 1990 levels. And, as I suspected, things were a little too good to be true. Here’s what I found:

Problem 1: The above Nicholas Kristof quote conflates two things: the city of Portland and the Portland Metro area. As the OSD report makes clear, the data refers to Multnomah Co., which contains the city of Portland. But the Portland Metro area is defined by its much-lauded Urban Growth Boundary, which limits high-density development. The UGB led to the renewal of most of downtown and is credited with much of Portland’s sustainable growth successes. However, the Metro area runs through three counties: Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington. Lest anyone think I’m nitpicking this point, keep in mind that the reason Portland is supposed to be a good model is that it managed to control pollution while enjoying steady population and economic growth. But much of that growth occurred in Washington and Clackamas Cos. Between 1990 and 2004, the same years the OSD report covers, according to US Census data, Multnomah Co. population grew by 15.12%. During the same period, Clackamas Co. grew by 30.28% and Washington Co. by a whopping 56.72%. All of which means that if you want to use Portland as a model for how to control emissions while enjoying steady growth, you need to look at all three counties’ emissions data, which leads to...

Problem 2: That data doesn’t seem to exist. Three weeks of research, including inquiries to the OSD, county and state agencies, three Portland State University professors specializing in environmental issues, and a thorough examination of publicly available emissions data from the EPA failed to turn up comparable emissions data for Washington and Clackamas Counties between 1990 and 2004. The counties don’t actually monitor emissions; the state Department of Environmental Quality does, which turns the data over to the EPA, who, it turns out, does not make the data available to either the public, the press or academia. What I was able to find was limited EPA data for the years 1985-1999. However, that data did show one thing...

Problem 3: The OSD report ignored economic impacts. The emissions data therein is divided into five categories: residential, commercial, industrial, transportation and waste. Although the overall emissions declined, only two of the five sources saw significant decline, the others remaining roughly equal to their 1990 levels: waste decreased by 55.06%, showing the undeniable impact of recycling programs, and industrial fell by 15.06%, reflecting a loss of industrial jobs in Portland. The EPA data for 1985-1999 showed emissions declines during the late 80s, early 90s recession, and the OSD report similarly showed declines occurring after 2000, a period during which, contrary to Kristof’s cheery assessment, Portland was suffering with higher than national average unemployment rates as the economy sputtered. Which leads us to...

Problem 4: Vancouver, Wash. This is Portland’s dirty little secret: although direct data is hard to come by, it’s common knowledge that many people work in Portland but can’t afford to live there. The UGB, while controlling sprawl, pushes up housing costs, forcing out low-wage workers and families. Between 1990 and 2004, Clark Co., where Vancouver is located, population grew faster than the three Metro counties, increasing by 64.84%. With Vancouver a 20-minute drive away from the city, it’s an affordable alternative, and the data backs that up. By 2003, according to Census data, of the four counties, Clark had the lowest median home values, second lowest median rents and the highest percentage of its population under age 25, all of which suggests that families recognize that it’s more affordable to live in Vancouver than Portland.

The point here isn’t to dump on my hometown of Portland but to make it clear that as Seattle grapples with its own development issues, it needs to be as aware of Portland’s failures as its successes. Environmentally sustainable development can easily come at the expense of affordable housing and therefore the poor and working classes. We have to thoroughly question environmental data because it’s become enough of an issue that it will be skewed for political gain (did I mention the head of the OSD is none other than Portland’s mayor?). And finally, we need to balance the economy with environmental issues: simply letting blue collar jobs evaporate and polluters move to another location isn’t solving the problem, it’s obscuring the issue.

Katarzyna E. Patora contributed significant research to this article.

Notes

The above article is shorter than it should have been due to constraints of space in The Seattle Sinner. As such, I wanted to use this space to offer a few notes expannding upon issues I addressed in the article.

The first thing I want to make absolutely clear is that when I accuse someone of conflating the city of Portland with the Metro area, I am referring specifically to Nicholas Kristof and not the Office of Sustainable Development. Kristof knows better; he was raised in Yamhill, a small rural community outside the city. However, the city government hasn't exactly been standing up and trying to make the nuances of geographic area clear, despite the fact that this report has made international headlines.

Second, I wanted to briefly address the issue of the data. Shortly before I sat down to write this piece, at the last minute as we'd been trying to find Washington and Clackamas Counties' emissions data, Kasia--who did much of the research trying to track down this data--commented in exasperation, "You know, maybe [George W.] Bush isn't full of crap when he says we need to do more research on pollution. Maybe he actually sat down and tried to find information about emissions and discovered it doesn't exist."

She was being facetious, of course, but only in part. If a journalist and economics grad student can't find simple emissions data on two urban counties for the last 15 years, there is some sort of significant information gap which needs to be addressed. More troubling is the difficulty I, as a writer, had trying to address all those problems of the data and how it's analyzed; that suggests to me at least that we need to be very critical of what journalists write on this subject. There is no one primary source for emissions data as there is, say, for employment data or other economic information. Because of that fact, any use of statistics requires an analysis of how that data was derived in order to determine if it's accurate and how it relates to other data.

In the above piece, I mention EPA data for the period 1985-1999. The data I refer to came from the EPA AirData program, listing carbon monoxide emissions by source by year for the three Metro counties. It contained strange inconsistencies which cause me to doubt its overall applicability, including an unexplained app. 400% increase in carbon monoxide industrial emissions for Multnomah Co. in 1990. The more complete EPA data program, the Air Quality System does not have data going back to 1990 for all the counties. In short, we could not find any data we felt comfortable trying to directly compare to the OSD data; if anyone has data we can use, I would be more than happy to eat my own words and know what it says.

Secondary to the issue of similar data to Multnomah County's is the issue of what data, exactly, the OSD used. According to the report, the data was calculated using the ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) "Clean Air & Climate Protection software version 1.0." The ICLEI is an inter-city government organization that makes its software available to cities to use to create pollution control measures. How it works is another question. The ICLEI only makes the software available to government agencies, but a fact sheet released by the creators states:

"CACPS [Clean Air and Climate Protection Software] contains thousands of emission coefficients for all of the major air pollutants and GHGs [green house gases] for a range of technologies, regional electricity mixes and fuel types. So, for example, if a state or locality planned measures that would reduce residential electricity consumption by 10 percent, the software would calculate the reduction in electricity demand (gigawatt hours, for example, or whichever unit the state or locality chooses) using a “before” and “after” scenario. Then, based on which regional electricity grid the state or locality is in, the software would apply the appropriate emission coefficients to calculate emission reductions."

In short, before you could fairly compare stats on emissions from the two counties, you'd have to determine how CACPS estimates its data. I don't dispute its accuracy, but until the method is determined, it's like comparing apples and oranges.

The long and the short of it is, analyzing emissions data is remarkably difficult. Good, clear emissions data is not widely available and it's unknown what data and estimating methods the OSD used, making comparisons impossible as of now. So what do I think Washington and Clackamas Counties' data looked like? Actually, I think it was probably pretty good. But below 1990 levels? Doubtful. Not with Washington Co. growing almost four times the rate of Multnomah. But the real issue I want to highlight is the greater issues of urban development, how the UGB and mass transit and "green" development have effected Portland. So, in closing, I'll leave you with these few further notes:

1. My claim that the UGB inflates housing costs is debatable. The Fannie Mae Foundation, for instance, published a study in 2002 largely refuting that claim. However, the study is problematic in that it compared Portland, with its UGB, to other urban areas that don't have one, and found that the UGB did not result in any statistically notable inflation. To be more accurate, though, it likely should have compared housing prices within the UGB to similarly accessible prices outside of it over a period of time. As I have already noted briefly, housing prices across the Columbia River are lower than in the Portland Metro area. Of course, a UGB is only one thing that effects housing prices; Clark Co.'s prices may well have been lower had it not had such intense demand. With over 60% population growth in the last 15 years, housing prices likely faced consistent upward pressure. The second point I would bring up with regard to the UGB is that a non-economic factor has been left out: politics. During the 1990s, the Metro Council, which adjusts the UGB every decade, was taken over largely by developers or their allies. Just because data may show the UGB forcing up prices over the last 15 years doesn't necessarily mean the idea doesn't work. Rather, it may reflect a failure to try to offset upward pressure on housing prices by encouraging the construction of more high-density and low-income housing.

2. The OSD report attributed part of the city's/county's emissions control success to the Max lighrail. An interesting point and one that should be of some interest to Seattle. According to Census data (admittedly a weak source due to self-reporting problems), Washington Co. was the only one of the three Metro counties that saw increasing commute times between 2000 and 2003. This was after the the $968 million west side Max line opened in 1998. Of course, one light rail line would have largely failed to accomodate such rapid population growth, but TriMet (the transit agency that operates Max and city buses) opened the line in a very strange place. The west side line runs from downtown Portland along the oft-congested Sunset Highway (Highway 26) through the West Hills, and then veers off through the suburban city of Beaverton and into Hillsboro. This was an odd choice: huge housing tracts were being built significantly north of the line along Sunset Highway, development not well served by the line (full disclosure: my family lives a quarter-mile off 26 on 185th St. Since the buses were rerouted to connect to the Max line rather than head straight downtown, the time it takes to get from my childhood home to downtown Portland has increased by more than 50%). Meanwhile, downtown Beaverton and Hillsboro are both relatively poor neighborhoods; I don't mean to suggest that the poor don't need good public transit too, but to point out that, out of necessity, poorer people tend to live closer to where they work, while commuter trains like the light rail serve longer-distance commuters. So why did they build the light rail through poorer suburban cities? Likely because the Max was designed to carry people from their homes in the city to work in Washington Co. The Max is very accessible if you live in downtown and work at Nike (whose world headquarters is in Beaverton) or Intel (which has three large campuses between Beaverton and Hillsboro; my sister as it happens commutes to work at one via the Max).

This is probably the most crucial part of the argument I'm trying to formulate (and the one I've touched on least): Seattle and Portland right now are enjoying a strange uban renaissance due to sociology. As much as our mayors would like to take credit for urban renewal in Northwest Portland or Belltown, the reality is that these cities are home to rapidly changing new industries which attract educated young professionals. These twenty-somethings are marrying--or at least having children later--and choosing an urban lifestyle over a suburban one. This has led to massive amounts of urban renewal, but unless these cities do more to create urban centers that are attractive to families and people of all incomes, if and when the tide of popular taste changes and professionals start flocking out of cities for the green suburban pastures, we might find that our cities are once again where they were back in the mid-1980s, when Hawthorne, now one of Portland's hippest neighborhoods, was a drug and crime infested hellhole.

Comments? Write jeremy.m.barker@gmail.com

Of Spaghetti Monsters and People

2005-12-05T19:14:00.000-08:00

From the August issue of The Seattle Sinner.
A Parody Religion Takes on Creationism and Intelligent Design

By Jeremy M. Barker

“Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design,” Bobby Henderson wrote in a letter to the Kansas school board in June. “I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Confused? Well, you wouldn’t be the first. But let’s take step back: In order to understand how a Flying Spaghetti Monster has become a global protest, it’s necessary to understand the long, sordid story of ID (Intelligent Design). ID has recently replaced gay marriage and stem cell research as the front-line of the culture war; from small town school boards across the country to the front pages of The New York Times, from the floor of the Senate to the hallowed halls of the Smithsonian, ID is being debated everywhere. To its supporters (including the President and the Senate Majority), ID is an important theory that deserves classroom time alongside the theory of evolution. To critics in the mainstream science community (who refer to it as “neo-creo” for “neo-creationism”) it’s just another attempt by evangelical Christians to get Jesus back in the classroom.

Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species pretty much killed creationism in the eyes of serious scientists, but Christians pushed on. In 1925, a Tennessee schoolteacher named John Scopes was convicted of violating state law by teaching evolution in what is widely regarded as one of the most important court cases in American history, the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Despite being taught throughout the country today, evolution has never really won the culture war. Only in a 1986 court case, Edwards v. Aguillard, was creationism finally ousted from school curriculums on First Amendment grounds.

Conservatives set out to find a loophole, and that loophole, such as it is, came in 1993. Bruce K. Chapman, a former Seattle city council member and one-time liberal Republican, came across an article by Stephen Meyer, a historian and philosopher of science at a Christian college in Spokane, about ID. Chapman connected Meyer to his old friend George Gilder. Over a dinner at the historic Sorrento Hotel, according to a recent New York Times article, Meyer and Gilder found common ground in opposing what they saw as the secular-materialist bent of modern science and, with Chapman, set out to create a think tank to promote their oppositional religious theory. The result was the creation, in 1996, of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute here in Seattle. From the Institute’s offices in the Melbourne Building at Third and Pike, they set out to defeat Darwinism.

The result was Intelligent Design in its modern form. To skirt the Constitutional prohibition on teaching creationism, ID takes a novel approach: Discovery Institute scientists collected a handful of mostly weak criticisms of evolution, argued they point to the presence of an unnamed “intelligent designer,” and set out to get equal classroom time. Although the Institute has worked with Catholic and Jewish organizations, its greatest success has been piggybacking on the success of evangelical organizations. By working with large national organizations like Focus on the Family, the Discovery Institute created a grassroots movement by distributing its materials to small-town ministers across the country, who in turn used the power of their pulpit to lobby local school boards to adopt ID curriculums.

But there is one crucial flaw in the ID argument: in order to dodge Constitutional restrictions on promoting one religion over others, it doesn’t speculate as to who or what its “intelligent designer” is; it suffices to criticize Darwin, assuming that its own theory points to some sort of Judeo-Christian God.

Enter Bobby Henderson. A 25-year-old, out of work physics student from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Henderson had a late-night revelation born of “a combination of insomnia and mounting disgust over the whole ID issue”: people could just as well have been created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. The joke was funny enough for him to send a letter (available at his website) to Kansas school board members as they were debating adopting ID curriculum.

In the letter he set out to prove, using the same sort of dubious logic employed by IDers, that the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster (or, in the preferred on-line shorthand, “FSM”).

“Pastafarianism,” as the belief has come to be known, has, according to the letter, over 10 million adherents. “I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory,” Henderson wrote. “It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia.” The website includes a graph demonstrating compelling evidence which links global warming to the decreasing number of pirates worldwide.

In an e-mail interview, Henderson admitted, “I have no idea how FSM got so big. I think it must have struck a nerve with a lot of people. [The websites] Fark and BoingBoing are responsible for a lot of it. I would say it’s 99% an Internet phenomenon. The newspapers have picked up on it now, but that’s a result of it becoming so popular on the Internet.” Indeed, what started out as a joke has become something of a global phenomenon. A Google search for “Flying Spaghetti Monster” returns over 201,000 hits as of Aug. 28th (up from 155,000 only three days earlier). Henderson’s website includes endorsements from well over 20 Ph.D.’s from around the world, and FSM has been reported on in sources as diverse as The New Scientist and England’s The Guardian newspaper.

Asked his opinion of ID, Henderson responded “...the [Kansas School Board] is trying to prove [an] a priori position. They are rewriting the definition of science to conform to their personal dogmatic views. Teaching ID is maybe ok, but not in a science classroom. The fact that the KSBoard has changed the definition of science to allow supernatural explanations is a good indication that they don’t understand what science is, and it’s obvious they have no business deciding the science curriculum.” His website lists responses from three board members opposed to ID, one even commenting, “Thanks for the laugh. Your web site is fascinating. I will add your theory to a long list of alternative theories I intend to introduce when it is appropriate. I am practicing how to do this with a straight face which is difficult since it’s such a ridiculous subject; it is also very sad that we are even having the discussion.”

Henderson, asked whether any ID-supporters on the Kansas board had responded to the letter, wrote, “The majority members still have not responded to the letter, but I have it on good authority that they’re receiving dozens of e-mails a day by loyal Pastafarians, so I’m hopeful they'll respond soon.”

Not that FSM hasn’t earned Henderson some harsh critics. Asked about hate mail, Henderson provided an remarkably grammar-free message concluding, “fucking humans, your all pathetic. you dont know shit bitch.” A similarly grammar-challenged e-mail informed Henderson, “"This is obviously a slap in the face against Creation. I can only say I will obviously give you mention in Church to pray for you. You are obviously an atheist. It is obvious I am a Christian. It is also obvious that you are living in the ignorant bliss of humanism. It is also obvious that we both disagree. I can also say that I have considered evolution in years gone by and that any obviously discerning and intelligent person who is willing to think beyond the blind acceptance of science and it’s theories will come to the conclusion that obviously the world in all of its complxity's and
diverse lifestyles is not an accident but was created by a far superior intelligence than I see you or I obviously possess.”

Henderson himself isn’t actually a particularly strident atheist. Asked if there was anything he wanted made clear, he replied, “One thing I think a lot of people are missing is that this isn’t about science vs. religion, it’s about thought vs. dogma. We oppose what the [Kansas School Board] is doing not because of their views of our origins, but because of the way they’re using specious reasoning to push these views into classrooms. ID shouldn’t be taught in science classrooms because it’s not science.”

The Seattle Sinner's 3rd Anniversary Party

2005-11-27T13:37:00.000-08:00

Last night, Kasia and I ventured out in the bitter cold and headed down to the Catwalk off Pioneer Square for The Seattle Sinner's Third Anniversary Party. In the past, we'd put up burlesque performers, circus people, gauche magicians, and industrial rock bands which uused copious amounts of fake blood. This year's party, sadly, I have to admit was a mixed bag. Burning Hearts and PURE Circus were phenomenal, but the bands, I thought, left a little to be desired.

Kasia and I arrived about 8 pm for a theoretically pre-show art party. Sadly, we were a little short on art, though the girls of Burning Hearts were kind enough to set up a display to have your photo taken with a burlesque dancer. During the pre-show party, our opening musicial act Kled played a short set. How to describe the artistry of Kled...? I described it as "inbred, hillbillie heavy metal," whereas Kasia, who liked them, simply noted that they could have sung the theme to Adult Swim's Squidbillies. She also noted (quite accurately, I think), that the band was a great sort of Andy Kaufman-esque joke. They were certainly better musicians than they necessary let on, and on the whole, it was a fun show.

Around nine o'clock, the first of our friends arrived. Laura and John, as well as their friend Tom (looking great and fitting in with a lovely skirt), a young woman whose name escapes me, and someone I've never met before, wandered in looking a little out-of-sorts. John was having some trouble with sensory overload, but we got them drinking soon enough and they seemed to at least reasonably enjoy themselves while they were there.

The MC of the event was more or less the head of PURE Cirkus (formerly PURE Suspension), a pale-faced clown. Last February at our Valentine's Day show, PURE put on a hell of an act, with the lead female performer doing a phenomenal piece of work with a heart woven into pins in her chest. This year, there were more performers and the act really did have more of a circus rather than sideshow air. The first performance (which I sadly got no pictures of) was a bed of nails routine--very cool. I gotta say, PURE is an act not to miss, and the assholes at the Fremont Solstice Parade, who booted them for being "violent," were really just denying the people a great performance.

Unfortunately, the noise level seemed to drive away John, Laura & Co., and they departed sometime after ten o'clock. Fortunately, by about 10:45 our friend Alan finally got there. Ah, Alan--always cool enough to rely on. By this point, the second musical act was on. I can't say I was a big fan. They had some rudiments of a stager show, but their music was basically propelled by identical fast-paced beats, at which point I was compelled to inquire of Kasia (more an industrial music fan than I) exactly why most industrial bands don't seem to know all their songs sound the same. Her answer, due to the consumption of alcohol and the ear-bleeding volumes, is lost to history.

Following their set, Burning Hearts put on their first act, as well as a compelling suspension performance from PURE. Unfortunately, exhaustion was setting in, and Kasia, Alan and I had to leave. On the bus on the way home we once again ran into John, Lauura & Co., who had apparently sought food and drink from more ear-friendly venues in downtown or Belltown. Back in the U-District, Kasia and I got a couple pieces of pizza and headed home shortly after midnight. In short, a fun time, but not the coolest Sinner party we've ever done.