Earlier this year, there was something of a blow-up involving Hugo Schwyzer, a well known male feminist writer and professor. Essentially, he did a lot of really nasty stuff in his past. He directly covered up some of it and chose to cast other parts of it in edifying terms. This information was revealed late in 2011.
Apparently, many a writer and thinker in the feminist and gender community have had mixed feelings on Schwyzer for some time, and for them, this was the straw that broke the feminist's back. Websites that had previously been running his work pulled it, and he was largely cut out from the larger feminist conversation.
I don't want to talk too much about Schwyzer here. In fact, while I've felt that his voice wasn't necessarily a bad voice, his strong religiousness hinted at deeper personality layers that I suspected I would find distasteful if found out. Indeed, I have no idea how someone can call themselves a feminist and a Christian.
Instead, the point that came out of this that I found most interesting, and the one that I want to discuss, was the question of how men can be involved with feminism. There is a boat-load of complex variables hidden in this question, each one of which would take an entire book to adumbrate, and all of them have bearing. Obviously, I could never do them all justice in a blog post.
I shall thus put it in its coarsest formulation: can the person who is the beneficiary of an unequal society be a voice for those oppressed within that society? Can a straight, white, well-bred male talk with any meaningfulness about feminism (or any 'ism for that matter)? There were many women, and some men, who said "no." For them, the ideal scenario is a feminist movement essentially devoid of men. Most of them didn't frame this in misandristic terminology. They basically said that the purpose of feminism is to give a voice to the oppressed, not to give yet another stage for those who are not oppressed. This is the more extreme of the arguments.
The milder, and I think better, argument in favor of "excluding" men was to say that men should not be wholly excluded, but instead just not be given the spotlight. Men should never be the focus of feminism, and the superstars should always be women, since only women can fully understand other women.1
I think that both of these arguments are incorrect. That doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate the perspective, though. I am a straight, tall, white, man living in America. I live a life of, sometimes, invisible privilege. I truly have little idea of what it is like to be oppressed and victimized by prejudice and bigotry. But I can grow to understand it, and it is important to recognize this ability and not denigrate the human potential to understand a great deal without needing direct experience. As a man, I can grow to understand things by reading accounts of women and the sexism they must endure. I can learn to identify it. I can experience it empathetically. That is real, profound, and useful.
Moreover, even if we were more limited in this regard, even if I didn't have mirror neurons churning away to help me feel other people's pain, it would be important to have men in the discussion (sympathetic, well-meaning men, of course. Not trolls.). I have never been oppressed, but I have fallen victim2 to gender normative behavior and felt the drive of bias and sexism. I've been in groups of men expressing all kinds of sexist ideas and been made to feel profoundly uncomfortable about my behavior and thoughts. If I and others like me are not given the stage now and then, these valuable experiences will go unspoken. That would be a terrible thing.
The argument for male exclusion may have held more water if we were talking exclusively about sexism against women, but it's much more than that. The problem is not just female oppression, it's sexism and gender norms in general. All men are not the beneficiary of an unfair society. The patriarchy sucks for everyone except those on top. Being a white male may be easier than a black female, but that doesn't mean that my life can't suck in unique ways, and these are issues that need discussing.
As I mentioned earlier, there is a large complex of psychosocial variables hidden in this noise. If we focus on one thing, we miss the various ways these other variables can manifest. For example, homophobia is essentially misogyny in a different guise. Men are never penetrated. Men are the penetrator. To be penetrated is to be a woman, which as we all know is the worst thing ever. And any man who is willing to be penetrated is not only broken and corrupt, but also dangerous since he may, like some kind of zombie, try to turn others into women.
The whitest, straightest, most cis-gendered man in the world can fall victim to this prejudice. He can be suddenly declared a persona non grata by his peers and ostracized. Or if the man is gay, and is afraid of this reprisal, he must remain hidden and fearful. Or a family that is "shamed" by the "abnormal" behavior of a child or parent that feels trapped in their neighborhood. All of this has its root in sexism and misogyny. All of this needs to be analyzed within the larger discussion.
To try and categorize that as gender studies and not feminism is to, I think, understate the breadth of feminism. We discuss racism through the lens of minority groups. We should discuss sexism through the lens of those most oppressed and analyze all of the ways that this prejudice infects other areas of life. I don't think we should look at this as a zero-sum game of superstars and celebrities. We should look at it as a network of people, all of whom have had different experiences, colored and affected by the same thing. These people all deserve an equal voice. To say that feminism is only about women is to deny this complexity.
I am a feminist. I seek no stage. My voice is only one of many, and many have suffered far worse than myself. But I am still a feminist, and I want to be a part of the discussion.
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1: That latter assertion may seem a bit sweeping of a statement, but I completely agree. When the lives of men and women are so demonstrably different, unless a man pretends to be a woman for a couple of years, or is transgender, he will never be able to fully understand the gestalt of being female. It requires a woman. Although even then, not every woman gets it. We only need look at Michelle Bachman or other such wackados for examples.
2: I don't think that victim is too strong a word. I feel like a victim because I feel that society essentially poisoned me with deeply emotional programming that has taken years to untangle. It undoubtedly colored my interactions with people from a very young age, and lord knows what kind of damage it caused in friendships and family relationships. That said, I don't mean to take away from the significance that the word implies in many areas of sexism. I do not feel victimized in the same way that someone who has ever been assaulted, raped, or vilified would feel victimized.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Sunday, September 16, 2012
The End of Twitter? (UPDATED)
Most of the people to which I've talked think that Twitter is making a pretty huge mistake. I tend to agree. They are taking away value from users instead of figuring out how to earn money with their current value set. That's never the way to grow a business. Truly, it may be the way to actually earn money, but that money will come at the expense of growth and customer engagement. That's why real business savvy is difficult. The perfect businessperson could make money while giving everything away for free.
In olden times, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem. A company could make a mistake, correct it, and move on. But in the tech world, as we have seen, the speed with which a company can fail is blinding. Myspace fell off the map in less than a year. A year! Even being in hardware provides no protection, with Nokia going from the #1 cell phone juggernaut to losing money and on life support in less than two years.
I think that companies can make small mistakes. Importantly, as long as value grows, even a major mistake can be forgiven. But with online-only companies, a major slipup can trigger the landslide of users to something else. Not necessarily a traditional "competitor," but perhaps something different. Did Blogger and Wordpress see Twitter as a competitor? Likely not, but they both took huge hits to their active user bases because of it.
What will rise to challenge Twitter? Who knows. All I know is that something is coming, and if Twitter acts like this, they weaken themselves such that they will fall and fall quickly when it happens. This isn't a doomsday scenario, but the world of Internet software has lit a fire under the ass of every company operating within the industry because the speed with which they can fail has accelerated so much. Every company must remain humble, and this behavior on Twitter's part indicates that they are not doing that.
UPDATE: I just now thought of the best example of this threat: Digg. Digg went from being a golden boy to dead in two years. And now, Digg, under new ownership, is trying to become a "startup" again. The problem is that once you're not new, you're not new. That most recent drop that you see on the chart down there was the release of this new version.
I think that this happened to Digg but not to Facebook during its frequent clashes with users because, firstly, Facebook really only had a single competitor, Myspace. Myspace was failing far worse than Facebook ever did. Digg had an immediate and direct competitor in the form of Reddit. Secondly, Facebook only ever added features. Sometimes, users thought the features overreached or were useless, but it was still an addition. Facebook was adding value. Digg took a bunch of stuff away. What's Twitter doing?
Twitter's 'revolution': becoming an old media company (Via The Verge)
Monday, September 10, 2012
How Small Is The Universe?
BBC Horizon has rather hit the skids recently. The quality of the show is abysmal. So it's a pleasant surprise when an episode manages to be both entertaining and informative, while not having the pandering crap evinced in episodes like "The Truth About Looking Young," which was unwatchable.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Russia Devolves Into Anarchy And Cannibalism Because of Music
The tabloid Life News, known for its sources within the Russian police and security services, published images of the graffiti, showing the words "Free! Pussy Riot" written in English on flowered wallpaper. The tabloid's owner, Ashot Gabrelyanov, tweeted: "If you still think that breaking the norms of behaviour in a church doesn't change anything, then I recommend you read the latest news."Oh yes, because people were never horribly murdered when the church held sway.
'Free Pussy Riot' scrawled 'in blood' above murdered Russian women (Via The Guardian)
Thursday, August 02, 2012
On Junk Food for the Soul
Whenever you read some fuddy duddy complaining about how the moral fabric of our youth is being corrupted by this or that, read this fantastic article about the book The Closing Of The American Mind by the inimitable Frank Zappa.
It is interesting how the Internet has eliminated so many of the worries that both Zappa and Bloom had.
On Junk Food For The Soul: Frank Zappa's article from New Perspective's Quarterly on America's cultural decay. 1987.
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were one of the strongest influences on early rock n' roll. In recent years, Zappa has publicly defended rock from cultural conservatives like Tipper Gore and her group, the Parents' Music Resource Center, which seeks greater parental control over what they consider the inordinate influence of sex and violence in rock music.
We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."
"Music is the soul's primitive and primary speech... without articulate speech or reason. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason...Civilization... is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions... Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." — A. Bloom
This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.
In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.
Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way an organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.
I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.
I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.
But beer and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!
"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness." — A. Bloom
This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.
If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.
The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.
"Rock music... has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... Cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples." — A. Bloom
This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:
One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.
There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.
So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.
Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.
The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.
Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."
I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.
"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied... These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love... Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux."
— A. Bloom
Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition, and religious fanaticism.
The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.
Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.
Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.
"The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music... The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance of strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes- our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary- and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock."
— A. Bloom
There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.
In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."
Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.
Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.
Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.
"Classical music is dead among the young... Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breath, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand."
— A. Bloom
On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.
When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.
When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.
Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.
It is interesting how the Internet has eliminated so many of the worries that both Zappa and Bloom had.
On Junk Food For The Soul: Frank Zappa's article from New Perspective's Quarterly on America's cultural decay. 1987.
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were one of the strongest influences on early rock n' roll. In recent years, Zappa has publicly defended rock from cultural conservatives like Tipper Gore and her group, the Parents' Music Resource Center, which seeks greater parental control over what they consider the inordinate influence of sex and violence in rock music.
We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."
The Nature of Music
This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.
In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.
Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way an organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.
I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.
I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.
But beer and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!
Music and the Dark Forces of the Soul
"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness." — A. Bloom
This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.
If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.
The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.
WHAT MAKES MUSIC CLASSICAL
This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:
One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.
There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.
So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.
Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.
The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.
Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."
I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND ROCK MUSIC
Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition, and religious fanaticism.
The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.
Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.
Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.
THE ROCK BUSINESS
There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.
In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."
Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.
Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.
Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.
RETAINING CLASSICAL MUSIC
On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.
When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.
When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.
Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Why I Don't Care About The Olympics
Haters of big sports have been attacking this element of them for some time. With a simple Google search, I was able to find multiple articles about the overt commercialization of NASCAR going back to the late 1980's. Every football season brings out another article decrying the loss of value in sports, with tickets costing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars; the major regulatory agencies push copyright to the breaking point in a desperate attempt to control each and every possible manifestation of a game in the public; and to be associated with the game at all requires paying out in a huge way. It. Is. Disgusting.
The Olympic Committee is a grand example of the corruption brought about by financial motivations. The committee is supposed to be non-profit, but how does that jibe with this quote from the Wikipedia page of the IOC:
Until 1992, both Summer and Winter Olympics were held in the same year. After that year, however, the IOC shifted the Winter Olympics to the even years between Summer Games, to help space the planning of the two events two years apart from one another, and improve the financial balance of the IOC, which receives greater income on Olympic years.Short answer: it doesn't.
Or take this sampling of headlines showing that the stupidity doesn't just end at the IOC, but extends to the dumb-as-rugs media companies and countries that are willing to spend buckets of money in this farce.
- UK Trying To Censor Parody Video About The 2012 Olympics
- No Free Speech In Advertising When It Comes To The Olympics
- London 2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal For Cluelessness By Banning Video And Photo Uploads To Social Media During Games
- Olympics Can't Handle An Official Parody Twitter Account, So Twitter Takes It Down
- Don't You Dare Show Olympic Spirit In The UK
- Olympic Level Ridiculousness: You Can't Link To The Olympics Website If You Say Something Mean About Them
- Olympics Crack Down On Anyone Mentioning Them Without Paying... As White House Tells Everyone To Set Up Olympics Parties
- It's An Olympics Tradition: How Difficult Can NBC Universal Make It To Enjoy The Olympics?
The functional problem is the sheer amount of money at stake. Whenever there is a lot of money to be made, the number of cooks in the kitchen increases by an order of magnitude, and it ruins things. Sports, and the Olympics specifically, are no different.
The aspect of this mechanism that is driving me away is that, in the fight for all of the money, they are fucking everyone else, and seemingly doing it with glee. The viewers, the cities, the athletes, the fans, everyone is getting fucked. And when the IOC, London, the NFL, and any other organization does something that is a bald-faced money grab, they are literally saying to everyone "we are going to fuck you, and you are going to take it because... you are going to take it."
No. I'm not going to take it. Not anymore. When you are visibly and undeniably disdainful of your audience, and your willingness to bully, blast, and otherwise be belligerent knows no bounds, I have no interest in even recognizing that your events are taking place.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Psychology Is Science
I assumed that this was something of the paranoid ramblings of professors who cut their teeth in the psych world of the 1970's, back when psychology was finally shaking off the last bits of spiritual, metaphysical junk left behind by Freud and Jung. It was very much a problem. In my collection, I have some psychology books from the 1920's, and the work of Freud and Jung was taken as true! People actually believed this stuff!
It was comical to me, comical to every single one of my classmates, and comical to my professors. I appreciated that this baggage was once there, but could see plainly that it no longer was. Psychology was a science trying desperate to prove something everyone already believed.
In retrospect, perhaps I was naive. I only ever went to psychological conferences. I only ever worked with other psychologists and psychiatrists. And whenever I was involved with those from other fields, it was neurologists, with whom there was so much cross-pollination with psychology that it almost gelled into a single field.
As I have since learned, there is still a great deal of prejudice against psychology, being as it is a "soft" science. The major point against it is that "soft" sciences do not produce predictions.
I find this criticism absurd. Of course psychology produces predictions. Those predictions may be probabilistic, but they are predictions nonetheless. The limitation that we have is that our ability to measure humans is limited by our interaction with the machine that is a human: behavior. It is an imperfect measurement, but no less imperfect than measurements in the work of very early scientists. And as research continues, our ability to read behavior will get increasingly better — our ability to understand the workings of the machine will advance.
Stop bullying the 'soft' sciences (Via L.A. Times)
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Jolla And MeeGo Have Me Excited
Android is something of a mess. Many geeks don't understand the actual problem of fragmentation in the OS because they've never experienced it. Many of them are usually at the cutting edge, sporting a cell phone that is either cutting edge or at least current-gen. For those who don't have the money, time on their contract, or like me, simply prefer to buy unlocked cell phones, fragmentation is a major problem.
For example, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10/X10 Mini/X8, Pro, and other phones were pretty big successes for Sony. They are technically Android phones, but they barely run the OS. Getting them to run at all smoothly requires rooting and a custom ROM using the newest version of Android.
Making matters worse is the immense amount of noise being generated by the manufacturers and carriers. Carriers mandate locks on the phone and un-deletable software, while manufacturers muddy the waters with custom versions of Android that frequently are inferior to the stock Android interface. Google's answer to this problem is the Nexus line of "pure" Android devices, and I think that it's a pretty good answer.
But, what if I don't want the Nexus? What if I want the HTC One X. If I get it unlocked, it's either the super-expensive international version that doesn't run on AT&T's high-speed network, or it's simply an AT&T phone with all of the same junk that's on the locked AT&T phone... it just costs more. In this regard, both Windows Phone and iPhone are superior, since locked or unlocked, it doesn't matter. It's the same phone.
I yearn for an OS and phone that isn't victim to all of the noise, noise, noise, noise from the carriers and manufacturers. Similarly, I yearn for a well-made platform that isn't reliant on a major corporation. That's a difficult thing. Linux has been around for well over a decade and still isn't a significant replacement for Windows or MacOS. Open source can work, but it's always easier to have a major presence behind any initiative.
Jolla and MeeGo have all of the work done by Nokia, and MeeGo specifically still has support from large numbers of hardware companies who are keen to avoid an OS duopoly of iOS and Android. MeeGo also has the support of geeks who would like an OS over which they have more control. Because while Android is open and tweakable, it is still Google's baby, and they raise it as they see fit.
I hope that MeeGo catches on. I'll totally make an app or two for it.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Women Smarter Than Men? That's Unpossible!
A recent study by James Flynn, a researcher who focuses on intelligence, has shown that for the first time in, well, ever, woman are smarter than men according to IQ tests. This doesn't surprise me at all.
He says that women are being forced to stretch their brains more as they attempt to juggle all of the things that society expects of them: home, children, work, etc. He also speculates that women may simply be intellectually better than men on some biological level. Even though he admits that more research is obviously needed, I think that he's missing the most obvious answer: society asks very little of men.
While extreme societal demands on women undoubtedly have a part to play in all of this, I think that the primary reason for the failing of men is that they are not asked to work. Recently, colleges were caught letting in men who performed only slightly better than average, because if they let in those who truly excelled, they would be letting in almost nothing but women. They tried to explain this by saying that any smart university doesn't accept all qualified people since some set percentage of them will invariably choose to go to another school, but this was a nonsensical excuse for a number of reasons.
Their reasons were, almost humorously, more practical than that. Basically, schools don't want a student body that is overrun with women, because that may drive students away. Top-performing female students don't want to go a school that's filled with other women. They want a mixed crowd. If they don't want a mixed crowd, that's what the Seven Sisters are for.
Think about that. Men are performing so far below women of the same age that men who even slightly stand out are being given acceptance. It's not that society's expectations on women are too high, it's that their expectations on men are too low.
Think about all of the nearly pre-verbal people that you have met in your life. How many of them are men? I'd wager over 90%. That's my number, certainly. There is no reason why 90% of pre-verbal human chimps should be men. But it makes perfect sense when you think about the system of entitlement and absolution provided to men. Boys will be boys is heard when boys do almost anything undesirable. This is ridiculous and is a massive disservice to every male that we raise in this society.
If males fail in school, it's funny. If males act up, it's just what they do. If males reject the system, they're seen as rebels. When we give boys a pass for this sort of behavior, we fail them. In decades past, this worked fine. In decades past, the system was geared toward men, so even if a boy was an idiot, the system would simply grab him and place him somewhere. It was the very root of the factory job. Drop out of high school? No worries! Get a job at the local plants. None of these opportunities existed for women, and were, in fact, actively taken away from women after World War II to be given back to men.
Unfortunately, those systems are starting to fail under the immense weight of increasingly equal women — women who were forced to work so hard to overcome systemic sexism that they now wildly exceed the men that are being raised. My alma mater, Rhode Island College, is nearly 70% female. That is an untenable system. It cannot be maintained. It also completely explains why women exceed men on IQ tests. Because we're raising them to.
He says that women are being forced to stretch their brains more as they attempt to juggle all of the things that society expects of them: home, children, work, etc. He also speculates that women may simply be intellectually better than men on some biological level. Even though he admits that more research is obviously needed, I think that he's missing the most obvious answer: society asks very little of men.
While extreme societal demands on women undoubtedly have a part to play in all of this, I think that the primary reason for the failing of men is that they are not asked to work. Recently, colleges were caught letting in men who performed only slightly better than average, because if they let in those who truly excelled, they would be letting in almost nothing but women. They tried to explain this by saying that any smart university doesn't accept all qualified people since some set percentage of them will invariably choose to go to another school, but this was a nonsensical excuse for a number of reasons.
Their reasons were, almost humorously, more practical than that. Basically, schools don't want a student body that is overrun with women, because that may drive students away. Top-performing female students don't want to go a school that's filled with other women. They want a mixed crowd. If they don't want a mixed crowd, that's what the Seven Sisters are for.
Think about that. Men are performing so far below women of the same age that men who even slightly stand out are being given acceptance. It's not that society's expectations on women are too high, it's that their expectations on men are too low.
Think about all of the nearly pre-verbal people that you have met in your life. How many of them are men? I'd wager over 90%. That's my number, certainly. There is no reason why 90% of pre-verbal human chimps should be men. But it makes perfect sense when you think about the system of entitlement and absolution provided to men. Boys will be boys is heard when boys do almost anything undesirable. This is ridiculous and is a massive disservice to every male that we raise in this society.
If males fail in school, it's funny. If males act up, it's just what they do. If males reject the system, they're seen as rebels. When we give boys a pass for this sort of behavior, we fail them. In decades past, this worked fine. In decades past, the system was geared toward men, so even if a boy was an idiot, the system would simply grab him and place him somewhere. It was the very root of the factory job. Drop out of high school? No worries! Get a job at the local plants. None of these opportunities existed for women, and were, in fact, actively taken away from women after World War II to be given back to men.
Unfortunately, those systems are starting to fail under the immense weight of increasingly equal women — women who were forced to work so hard to overcome systemic sexism that they now wildly exceed the men that are being raised. My alma mater, Rhode Island College, is nearly 70% female. That is an untenable system. It cannot be maintained. It also completely explains why women exceed men on IQ tests. Because we're raising them to.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Viacom Blocks All Online Streams
In a case study of how to be clueless and alienate customers, Viacom has blocked online streams of The Daily Show, Jersey Shore, Colbert Report, and a number of other properties where full episodes were available for free. Why would Viacom so wildly shoot themselves in the foot? Duh! Because they're in a pissing match with another giant company, of course!
DirecTV has refused to pay a significant rate hike to carry Viacom channels, resulting in the loss of twenty-six channels including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and MTV. DirecTV responded to hardball tactics by posting on their home page places where users could get Viacom shows directly from Viacom!
Yes. All that DTV did was tell people what Viacom was already producing. So to really drive home that the entire company is a gigantic child, Viacom screamed "no!" and took those streams away from everyone, regardless of whether they are involved with this issue or not. Viacom hurt 100% of its customers. That's a bang-up way to generate business, no?
The Death Of A Conservative
As I stated in an earlier post, I've experienced a wholesale shift in my perspective from a single realization: I cannot know another person's world. I mentioned how it has affected all areas of my thought, with one area affected most practically of all: politics.
Politics, at its root, exists on a spectrum between no government and absolute government. No government has only a single formulation, anarchy, and absolute government has as many different formulations as totalitarian states throughout history have managed to conjure.
Underlying those two extremes are two metaphysical extremes vis-a-vis the person. The first extreme is found in absolute government, where the Grand Machine is seen as the defining element of life. The second is found in anarchy, where the soul of the individual is seen as the defining element of life. I now consider the latter viewpoint to be entirely untenable. I once considered myself a libertarian. I no longer do.
It requires me to believe that my internal world, my soul, is identical to someone else's soul. It rejects the importance of outside variables and thus ascribes power and responsibility to the soul contained within a human. It's no surprise that "personal responsibility" is practically a mantra of the conservative right.
My viewpoint also rejects extreme government because any rigid formulation of government makes the exact same assumption as rigid conservativism. There can be no "one size fits all" approach. It is in this way that my view is fundamentally behavioristic. We cannot know someone else's world, and as such, our governmental formulation cannot take into account any assumptions about their world. It must work only with quantifiable variables of behavior and society and stated goals.
If we have high crime, we cannot simply say "Criminals are bad! we must punish them!" because we have a great deal of evidence to show that this viewpoint doesn't do anything. We must draw upon history, psychology, neurology, economics, and sociology to figure out what the best answer to a finely stated problem is. Whatever that solution turns out to be, we should enact it. The argument should take place during the goal-defining phase.
I think that this viewpoint has inherent limits. It could never result in anarchy or despotism since both extremes are historically and philosophically untenable. There is no argument that can be made in their favor.
Politics, at its root, exists on a spectrum between no government and absolute government. No government has only a single formulation, anarchy, and absolute government has as many different formulations as totalitarian states throughout history have managed to conjure.
Underlying those two extremes are two metaphysical extremes vis-a-vis the person. The first extreme is found in absolute government, where the Grand Machine is seen as the defining element of life. The second is found in anarchy, where the soul of the individual is seen as the defining element of life. I now consider the latter viewpoint to be entirely untenable. I once considered myself a libertarian. I no longer do.
It requires me to believe that my internal world, my soul, is identical to someone else's soul. It rejects the importance of outside variables and thus ascribes power and responsibility to the soul contained within a human. It's no surprise that "personal responsibility" is practically a mantra of the conservative right.
My viewpoint also rejects extreme government because any rigid formulation of government makes the exact same assumption as rigid conservativism. There can be no "one size fits all" approach. It is in this way that my view is fundamentally behavioristic. We cannot know someone else's world, and as such, our governmental formulation cannot take into account any assumptions about their world. It must work only with quantifiable variables of behavior and society and stated goals.
If we have high crime, we cannot simply say "Criminals are bad! we must punish them!" because we have a great deal of evidence to show that this viewpoint doesn't do anything. We must draw upon history, psychology, neurology, economics, and sociology to figure out what the best answer to a finely stated problem is. Whatever that solution turns out to be, we should enact it. The argument should take place during the goal-defining phase.
I think that this viewpoint has inherent limits. It could never result in anarchy or despotism since both extremes are historically and philosophically untenable. There is no argument that can be made in their favor.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Obama Delivers A Body Blow
I'm not a fan of Obama. I think that he's failed in most respects as President. I'm even less of a fan of Romney, though, and would hate to see him become president. This is a truly punishing attack ad against Romney. Granted, Romney's a pretty easy guy to attack. It makes you wonder why he thought it was a good idea to run for President in the first place.
Changing Perspectives
I have undergone a massive shift in my world perspective. I won't go into details. The point that I want to cover is the stunning effect that a single shift in one's outlook can have on every other element of a world view. The real success of an internal dialectic is the emotional acceptance of the conclusion. It's very easy to have an intellectual awareness, but humans are not purely intellectual. For example, everyone knows that they should not be eating unhealthy food, and yet most of us do. We are an increasingly fat country, even though we know how to not be.
I, for one, was well aware of what made a good diet. Still, I was nearly 260 pounds at my peak. If you had asked me ten years ago whether my diet was good or not, I likely would have answered correctly. It was not. But I was still eating crap! I was a cheese fry connoisseur. I had not been emotionally aware of the reality and because of that continued to, almost mindlessly, eat garbage. Only now, after a deeply emotional epiphany that I didn't enjoy eating crap did I stop and start eating better.
I had a similar emotional revelation when I became deeply aware that I do not know what the world of another person is like. I am fundamentally and metaphysically disconnected from everyone else. There is no way that I can ever know another person's world. Everything from the way that they look, their physical abilities, their upbringing: all of it has a substantive effect on the very nature of their reality. It is a reality that is as different from mine as it is similar.
How can I judge? How can I talk about other people? How can I even talk to other people?! Realizing that someone else's world is different from one's own threatens a nearly fatal blow to the very foundation of my social reality. I am me. What are others? They are something about which I care. I want friends and lovers. I want to be a good person. I want to be a good in society. But when society is comprised of millions of people, all of whom are ignorant of everyone else, how can we ever hope to make progress? How can we be shocked by racism, violence, and war, when the very ignorance of which I speak all but guarantees this sort of behavior?
It is, in many ways, a startling form of skepticism. It's not so easily rejected as true skepticism precisely because it is not so extreme in its rejection of knowledge. We know what the world is. It is what it is. And if we assume that other people are in fact thinking, feeling entities, we are left with a sense that what they think and feel is important, with no way to quantify it or make sense of it. We are socially incapable of any knowledge. That is a crippling realization, and one that has left me with a profound reassessment of my world.
I, for one, was well aware of what made a good diet. Still, I was nearly 260 pounds at my peak. If you had asked me ten years ago whether my diet was good or not, I likely would have answered correctly. It was not. But I was still eating crap! I was a cheese fry connoisseur. I had not been emotionally aware of the reality and because of that continued to, almost mindlessly, eat garbage. Only now, after a deeply emotional epiphany that I didn't enjoy eating crap did I stop and start eating better.
I had a similar emotional revelation when I became deeply aware that I do not know what the world of another person is like. I am fundamentally and metaphysically disconnected from everyone else. There is no way that I can ever know another person's world. Everything from the way that they look, their physical abilities, their upbringing: all of it has a substantive effect on the very nature of their reality. It is a reality that is as different from mine as it is similar.
How can I judge? How can I talk about other people? How can I even talk to other people?! Realizing that someone else's world is different from one's own threatens a nearly fatal blow to the very foundation of my social reality. I am me. What are others? They are something about which I care. I want friends and lovers. I want to be a good person. I want to be a good in society. But when society is comprised of millions of people, all of whom are ignorant of everyone else, how can we ever hope to make progress? How can we be shocked by racism, violence, and war, when the very ignorance of which I speak all but guarantees this sort of behavior?
It is, in many ways, a startling form of skepticism. It's not so easily rejected as true skepticism precisely because it is not so extreme in its rejection of knowledge. We know what the world is. It is what it is. And if we assume that other people are in fact thinking, feeling entities, we are left with a sense that what they think and feel is important, with no way to quantify it or make sense of it. We are socially incapable of any knowledge. That is a crippling realization, and one that has left me with a profound reassessment of my world.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Clovis Is Dead
I meant to post about this a few days ago, but here it is. Clovis is dead! And by Clovis, I mean the "Clovis First" theory. In a nutshell, the theory states that the prehistoric American culture seenin an find in Clovis, New Mexico represents the first humans to come to the New World over the Bering Straight land bridge before it was closed up with ice during the last Ice Age.
I was studying this seven years ago, and even then, the general opinion in the academic world was that Clovis first was almost undoubtedly wrong. Only later did I find out that there were many who were not only arguing as Devil's Advocate, but actually believed that "Clovis First" was true.
This blew my mind. One of the tenets of archaeology is that whatever is found, chances are, it was around long before the date of the artifacts. That makes perfect sense. Think about it. The chances that a find is the very first example of some given thing is essentially zero. It must always be assumed that what is found is older than the find. I'm disappointed because this study only shows Clovis to be pre-dated by one thousand years. Only a thousand? That's a "duh" statement! I wanted five thousand. Ten thousand.
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Detroit And America's Intransigence
I'm watching Dan Rather Reports special two-hour investigation of Detroit's public schools. Long story short: they're screwed and they are emblematic of our nation's educational system on the whole.
Rather early on, they showed some videos from Detroit's past in the 1950's and 60's, when the city was rumbling with vibrant industry and manufacturing, and the ridiculously effusive language being used to describe the city and, indeed, all of America just stuck in my craw.
My craw got all stuck full of it because it reminded me of the same garbage in that innane "Halftime in America" ad for Chrysler that aired during the Super Bowl. It's the same shit, different generation, and it is absolutely infuriating.
We have problems. Detroit is hosed. Wanna' fix Detroit? Spend lots of money, build a lot of stuff, and let the child run. We are not doing that, though. We are not doing any of that. Instead, we dumped trillions of dollars into the banks — thus saving the all-important rich people — and the public debate is between those who want to fix things, and borderline-crazy nincompoops like Ron Paul who think that the world will magically fix itself.
No, what videos like the Chrysler ad show is that we don't need to actually fix problems, we just need to feel great about being American! Fix problems? Pah! We're American! Poor people can't afford food? Pah! We're American! Middle class collapsing? Pah! We're American! Unemployment at double-digits? Pah! WE ARE FUCKING AMERICAN!
This feel-good garbage, so strongly rooted in American exceptionalism, makes me want to puke. We are not "Americans". We are a group of people, nothing more, and our system is broken. We need to fix it. Not doing anything and feeling proud about that hasn't worked up to this point, so why should we expect it to magically start?
Rather early on, they showed some videos from Detroit's past in the 1950's and 60's, when the city was rumbling with vibrant industry and manufacturing, and the ridiculously effusive language being used to describe the city and, indeed, all of America just stuck in my craw.
My craw got all stuck full of it because it reminded me of the same garbage in that innane "Halftime in America" ad for Chrysler that aired during the Super Bowl. It's the same shit, different generation, and it is absolutely infuriating.
We have problems. Detroit is hosed. Wanna' fix Detroit? Spend lots of money, build a lot of stuff, and let the child run. We are not doing that, though. We are not doing any of that. Instead, we dumped trillions of dollars into the banks — thus saving the all-important rich people — and the public debate is between those who want to fix things, and borderline-crazy nincompoops like Ron Paul who think that the world will magically fix itself.
No, what videos like the Chrysler ad show is that we don't need to actually fix problems, we just need to feel great about being American! Fix problems? Pah! We're American! Poor people can't afford food? Pah! We're American! Middle class collapsing? Pah! We're American! Unemployment at double-digits? Pah! WE ARE FUCKING AMERICAN!
This feel-good garbage, so strongly rooted in American exceptionalism, makes me want to puke. We are not "Americans". We are a group of people, nothing more, and our system is broken. We need to fix it. Not doing anything and feeling proud about that hasn't worked up to this point, so why should we expect it to magically start?
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