Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:
Eric Harvey: Writing the Record: Interview with Devon Powers, author ofWriting the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, which focuses on Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau. Lots of stuff here, and I should probably dig into the book. One comment I have, based on this quote:
When Christgau talks about monoculture, he's talking about the idea that there was a period before fragmentation. A period before audiences were segmented, where all kinds of people were listening to the same thing, some of it out of necessity just because there weren't other options. When you have people who are listening to the same kind of things, they have something in common to talk about that they simply don't when there is more variance in the media landscape.
Two problems here. One is that monoculture means something else: not a single all-encompassing culture but an isolated stripe of only one thing -- as in agriculture: wheat, soybeans, oranges, etc. -- which may coexist independently with lots of other monocultures. Music has never been that formally constrained, and never will be, in large part because it's always being mediated and deconstructed, and most often as a social activity. The other is that the idea of integrating most musical strands into a common pool of experience was new in the late 1960s, itself a political project rooted in the newfound equal integration of all divisions in a relatively classless society. It didn't exist earlier because people grew up in a divided (segregated) world, and since then the right-wing counterrevolution with its increasing inequality has done all it could to strain the ideal.
Paul Krugman and others have made a big point recently about"the great compression" which reduced income and wealth inequality and culminated in the 1960s. I must say that it didn't feel like much of a class-free utopia at the time, but the idea was present, and there was a sense of it being progressively realized -- and that sense of progress helped fuel the great upheavals of the decade, including the civil rights and women's movements. Still, that atmosphere of equality was propitious for critics inclined to jump from genre to genre, to poke into music from all over the world, and who believed that popular music could storm the citdels of "high culture" -- the last refuge of the ancien regime.
Circa 1973, I dropped out of college, stopped reading critical theory, and took up rock crit. Seemed like the way forward, and was practical at the same time.
Alex Parrene: Bush Family Furiously Selling Itself to Americans Once Again: As ever, Bush realizes the importance of timing when rolling out a new "product" -- his library, of course, but that's the easy part given that every ex-president (at least from Truman on) has one (and a figure as insignficant as Gerald Ford has two). The harder part is rehabilitating the entire family brand name, but polls indicate the ignorance of the average American is hard to underestimate -- I very much blame Obama and the Democrats for letting Bush off the hook.
More Bush links:
- Kathleen Geier: What Was the Single Worst Thing About George W. Bush's Presidency?"Lying was institutionalized to a degree that we rarely see outside outside of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes."
- Paul Krugman: The Great Degrader: "Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover."
- Alex Seitz-Wald: How to Debunk George W. Bush's Attempts at Revisionism
My vote for the single worst thing about George W. Bush goes to his instinctive, visceral attrraction to violence as a way of solving problems. Even before 9/11, Bush rejected the Saudi peace plan for Israel-Palestine by saying (as Ronald Suskind reported), "Sometimes a show of force can really clarify things." His green light for Sharon destroyed eight years of fitful progress toward resolving the most intractable conflict in the Middle East. He reacted to 9/11 the same, only with more vigor and ambition, going after Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and threatening wars against Iran and North Korea. Then there was his encouragement of Israel's brutal 2006 carpet-bombing of Lebanon, an act of war that his secretary of state memorably described as "the birth-pangs of a new Middle East."
MJ Rosenberg: Time to Admit US Policies Can Cause Terrorism: To prevent something you have to have some concept of causation. The Boston bombings again raise the question of terrorism, but we are stuck within an officially sanctioned blind spot.
There is one change that the United States could make in response to the terrorism threat that is never discussed. That is to consider the part U.S. policies have played in creating and sustaining it.
I understand that we are not supposed to say this, as if discussing why we are hated justifies the unjustifiable: the targeting of innocent Americans because of the perceived sins of their government.
But nothing justifies terrorism. Period. That does not mean that nothing causes it.
Acts of terror do not come at us out of the blue. Nor are they directed at us, as President George W. Bush famously said, because the terrorists "hate our freedom." If that was the case, terrorists would be equally or more inclined to hit countries at least as free as the U.S., those in northern Europe, for instance.
No, terrorists (in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings Muslim terrorists) target the U.S. because they perceive us as their enemy.
One reason they perceive us as enemies is that we regard them as enemies. Nor is this just a matter of opinion: the US has, ever since FDR met with King Saud in 1945, backed the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, training and arming their secret police, their armed forces; we've backed wars, and in a pinch we've jumped in and invaded countries ourselves; and we've fomented civil wars, creating massively destructive contagions, such as the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq. (For some of this history, see Tom Engelhardt: Field of Nightmares, on Jeremy Scahill's new book,Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.) If we don't like this"blowback," the place to start is in reconsidering our own actions.
But even if there was no terror blowback, the US record in the Middle East has been an unmitigated mess. Most often we've backed forces based on the shabby enemy-of-my-enemy principle: from the Saudi regime to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, we've repeatedly backed the most extremely reactionary Islamists because they were anti-communist, only to discover that their anti-communism was part of an anti-western agenda bound to bite the hand that feeds them. We've backed Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, then backed Iranian-backed militias against Hussein. We've backed Israel against everyone, even against our own policies -- we even backed Israel when they attacked and sunk a US Navy ship in 1967. Presumably some arms and oil companies have profited along the way, but what has the average American gotten out of this incoherency? Nothing but the task of fighting a series of useless, hopeless wars.
Yet the right-wing still clamors for more -- see the recent Cal Thomas rant: "How many more Americans must be killed and wounded before we fight back, not just overseas, but here?" As Mort Sahl said about someone else, "if he were more perceptive, he'd be a happy man." Still, Thomas is as incoherent as anyone. He notes the vast size of America's homeland security force, yet bemoans their inability to stop two disaffected young men from "shutting down a major city." Aside from calling for a more bigoted immigration policy and a fevered, nativist witch hunt mentality, how exactly are we supposed to "fight back"? And is it even justified in a democracy to talk about enemies at home? The Tsarnaevs, after all, were US citizens, Americans, entitled to dissenting opinions. When weren't enemies, and when they set off those bombs, they didn't become our enemies -- just criminals.
Tom Engelhardt: The Enemy-Industrial Complex: Or, "How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe." Out of alpha order, but this follows up nicely on the above entry. Consider 9/11 as a "Wizard of Oz" facade:
The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century. There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China. It's true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died. When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn't actually an apocalyptic event.
The enemy was still nearly nonexistent. The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars. It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects. It in no way endangered the state. In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers. It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one. It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years. It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.
When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less. And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment -- a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country. The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on "A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century." If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.
Engelhardt then tries to put 9/11 into perspective by bringing up stats for "suicide by gun and death by car" -- numbers which annually dwarf even the 9/11 death toll. Actually, it would make more sense to write off 9/11 as a fluke and look at more typical terrorist tolls. You don't have to look hard. On the same day as the Boston bombings, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas caught fire and exploded, killing many more people. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay attention to terrorist threats -- indeed, one reason we should is that many could be avoided by policy changes that we should implement anyway; but we should keep them in perspective. Even the 9/11 death toll was ultimately topped two times over by the number of US soldiers we sacrificed in post-9/11 wars -- wars meant to do little more than restore the invincible lustre of US imperial power, and perhaps blindly punish people only vaguely related to those who actually planned 9/11.
Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable. The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world's intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.
Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety. The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.
Without 9/11 and the perpetual "wartime" that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the"drone lobby" that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it -- effectively the president's private army, air force, and navy -- and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.
So there is a lot of money at stake on convincing you that we have to fight such unscrupulous enemies. But it also fits a political agenda: conservatism, as Michael Tomasky explains below, depends on fear to promote its political agenda.
Michael Tomasky: The Conservative Paranoid Mind:
The common thread through all of this is the conservative need to instill and maintain a level of fear in the populace. They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants, because unless we do, it's going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals, and for good measure, because, as Ann Coulter and others have recently said, the proposed law would create millions of voting Democrats (gee, I wonder why!).
And with regard to terrorism, they need people to live in fear of the next attack, because fear makes people think about death, and thinking about death makes people more likely to endorse tough-guy, law-and-order, Constitution-shredding actions undertaken on their behalf. This is how we lived under Bush and Cheney for years. This fear is basically what enabled the Iraq War to take place. Public opinion didn't support that war at first. But once they got the public afraid with all that false talk of mushroom clouds, the needle zoomed past 50 percent, and it was bombs away.
Conservatism, I fear (so to speak), can never be cleansed of this need to instill fear. Whether it's of black people or of street thugs or of immigrants or of terrorists or of jackbooted government agents, it's how the conservative mind works.
Matthew Yglesias: The Koch Brothers Might Be Just What Conservative Journalism Needs: Sometimes smart people can be pretty stupid, especially when they let their logic run away from reality. The Koch brothers are rumored to be in the market for the Tribune Company, which would give them control over the largest newspapers in Los Angeles and Chicago, among other cities. Yglesias writes:
Certain niches -- talk radio and cable television -- are very friendly to a conservative editorial product but others are not. Which is exactly why what conservative media needs is a couple of extremely rich people to buy a newspaper company and lose a ton of money building a great conservative media product.
After all, the big problem with right-leaning media in America isn't that it doesn't exist. It's that it's terrible. There is a large audience out there that's so frustrated with the vile MSM that it's happy to lap up cheaply produced content from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and you can make lots of money serving that kind of thing up. By contrast, to build a great media company that's top-to-bottom staffed with conservatives is going to be very expensive. The possible talent pool of great reporters is tilted toward liberals. The talent pool of great photographers and graphic designers is probably even more tilted toward liberals. Finding the great conservatives out there and hiring them is going to be relatively costly, and there's no real economic point to doing so. Is your much worse cost structure going to get you a larger audience than Rush? No, it won't. It's a bad bet.
But the Kochs have plenty of money. If they want to see it happen, they can make it happen. And America would be better off for it.
The obvious problem here is that there is no latent pool of "great conservatives" ready to move into newspaper journalism at any price, because they simply don't exist. Conservatives in media are hacks, not because they're lazy but because their message is nothing more than a crock of lies and distortions. The net effect won't be "a great conservative media product" -- it will just reduce marginally decent newspapers into ever-deeper hackdom. And America will be worse off on two counts: one is that it increase our current trend toward shoddiness in all manner of work; the other is that it will reinforce the notion that politics is purely cynical -- a fixed game controlled by the rich (the Kochs a particularly egregious example).
One cautionary note is that the Kochs have never gotten into a business to lose money, which makes it unlikely they would jump on such a losing proposition. On the other hand, they have shown a deep commitment to undermine democracy, both through their political spending and through their use of corporate control as a channel for pushing their political beliefs. Major urban newspapers have a huge "first mover" advantage -- it's impossible to capitalize new competition, so they are effectively monopolies, and as such should be subject to public trust. Allowing them to be taken over by extremist political ideologues like the Kochs will irreparably destroy that trust, and America would be worse off for that.
Also, a few links for further study:
Susan Faludi: Death of a Revolutionary: on Shulamith Firestone.
Jacob Heilbrunn: Israel's Fraying Image: No breaking news here; indeed, this is well behind the learning curve.
Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever: Explains the Libor scandal.