Disgruntled Rightists, Marxist Ants, and Stossel vs. Justice League

I shouldn’t write about anything that’s been on Drudge, really, because it will already have been picked apart by millions of people, but yesterday’s headlines struck several chords for me:

•The New York Post reported my ex-boss John Stossel’s complaint on his blog that ABC delayed his piece criticizing socialized medicine in order to run more Michael Jackson death coverage. I think I know how Stossel’s mind works well enough to say he wasn’t calling this schedule change a moral outrage, just saying it’s an example of how we each have our irreconcilable preferences and the market sorts them out, in the case of TV by deference to ratings.

Then again, the way these spats get framed by outside observers can decide how serious they end up looking to the insiders, and if Stossel ever gets in trouble with ABC for blogging in a disgruntled-sounding fashion, his situation will oddly parallel that of the departing writer of the Justice League of America comic book, Dwayne McDuffie, who as it happens was just fired from that gig for too openly griping on his blog about not being allowed to use Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other prominent characters right now — which, as with Stossel, I thought he did in a fairly civil fashion, but you never know for sure what the higher-ups will think. Will they tolerate dissent — or unleash the dreaded Anti-Life Equation??

And I must note in passing that we should remember the Washington Post the next time someone calls Stossel a capitalist tool.

•Various conclusions were drawn from a Gallup poll, though in the grand scheme of things, Americans remain roughly evenly divided left/right (with most people probably feeling it’s a coin-toss anyway) — but you know the part of all the graphs in that piece I find most amusing and encouraging? That rising number of Americans — 17%! — in the second graph who say the Republican Party is too liberal.

That’s a lot of frustrated conservatives — and that gives me some hope for the long term, no matter how many consultants say “run to the center to win.” Who knows what criteria those rightists are using, of course, but combined with the anti-spending revolt of the Tea Party movement, there’s still room, I think, for someone to seize upon discontent and lead the GOP in a mostly-marketward direction while they’re at it.

•I had two thoughts upon reading about the Earth being straddled by giant mega-colonies of closely-related ants, one stupid, one less so, with the first being, of course, “I for one welcome our new insect overlords” and the second being that when I saw E.O. Wilson speak in 2005 at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Austin, he summed up the surprisingly cooperative, selfless tendencies of closely-related ants by saying, “Marx was right — he just had the wrong species.” Communist insects have conquered the globe.

(Meanwhile, a pet python has killed a child in Florida, reminding me that a friend of a friend of a friend mine — I swear — released a huge pet snake he was supposed to be sitting into the local park after, he claims, “communing” with the beast in some New Age fashion and learning that it wanted to be free, which is to say, dead, since it likely can’t survive the northeastern winter. The owner was not blissful.)

•I guess if there are newly-discovered genetic markers for schizophrenia it’s now a disease even by the criteria of Thomas Szasz, the hyper-cautious libertarian who originated the idea that you can’t call someone insane unless you point to the biological markers responsible, lest people get labeled crazy who are merely eccentric, even full-blown schizophrenics.

I’m guess now I’m retroactively “allowed” to notice that a friend of mine completely disintegrated before my eyes from a full-fledged, engaging person into a near-catatonic, hollowed-out shell of human being who couldn’t tell time or look at crowds without thinking they were conspirators trying to poison her and that sort of thing. This is something of a relief, I must say, after all I went through and watched her go through.

Come to think of it, they didn’t know much about Alzheimer’s when I was child — often attributing it to “hardening of the arteries,” which was a physical cause, sure, but a completely false one. In retrospect, should I have seen my maternal grandmother as merely eccentric, as she lost even the ability to remember how to swallow, by Szasz/Schaler criteria? Was I leaping to conclusions thinking there might be a brain problem there? I think not — a huge portion of diagnosis is observing functionality and lack thereof, not always spotting the underlying physical cause. This does not, of course, mean I want to lock up everyone who behaves oddly.

Meanwhile, South of the Border

To compensate for picking on Canada and near-Canadians yesterday, a question about Honduras.  Despite all the attention on entities that are potential nuclear threats like North Korea, Iran, and al Qaeda/Taliban, and on Iraq (all of which some far-seeing president focused on the world’s real problems should have rhetorically lumped together with some catchphrase, maybe involving a word like “axis,” years ago), might Obama’s reaction to Honduras be the most erroneous foreign-policy thing he’s done so far?

I mean, I’m fairly agnostic about foreign policy and will remain so — you just can’t say with much reliability how things will play out in these complex international struggles and should thus be cautious, meaning a president should probably lean non-interventionist, by which measure Obama could prove better than Bush in many ways (I don’t know).

And Honduras is hardly something I expected to be worrying about six months ago, but had I been worried, it would have been about Zelaya trying to seize additional, Chavez-like powers with illegal referenda repeatedly rejected by other branches of his government — something the military there is now trying to prevent in a fairly orderly fashion.  I could understand Obama — or the U.N. — warning the Honduran military that they’ll be closely watched, but did they have to go the extra mile and call Zelaya the rightful president and make him sound like an embodiment of democracy?  Are they trying to encourage future Chavezes and the like?  Shouldn’t we be troubled by the sight of our own president effectively endorsing the illegal actions of another?

I’m not saying anything Obama says about Zelaya is likely to be as damaging as missteps in Pakistan or elsewhere (and as a utilitarian I must weigh actual consequences heavily — but more about that later today), just more blatantly “on the wrong side.”

(And to compensate for linking to Weird Al’s “Canadian Idiot” above, here’s his Avril Lavigne-mocking “Constipated.”  The great thing about this song is that it keeps getting stupider as it goes along.)

Blue Meanies, Red Tories, Whatever

After picking on Canada all day, I should concede two things:

1. “Progressive Conservative,” to use the term for a basically-defunct Canadian political coalition, is actually a mushy oxymoron after my own heart (once more: see “Conservatism for Punks” slogan atop blog).

2. It’s not just left-liberal mushiness I fear — even though something in my gut almost since childhood has associated that sort of mushiness with moral laxity and lameness in general — but the sense that just as markets are fragile things, so too is philosophical adherence to property rights, no matter where people start out on the political spectrum.  It takes so little to nudge people toward collectivism, which is my real point.

As a (non-liberal-bashing) case in point, watch the ostensibly anti-centralist paleoconservative impulse lead inexorably to statism right before your eyes in the space of two paragraphs while you read the Wikipedia entry on the subset of the former prog-con coalition known (in opposition to more-libertarian “Blue” Tories) as “Red Tories” (who might even be called blue-green in England, but politics is complicated — main lesson, though: don’t badmouth markets because it always ends badly in some kind of socialism or other).

Tomorrow, I will not pick on Canada.

Brooks vs. Evolution, Canada vs. the Human Spirit

One of the Canada-linked writers I mentioned this morning, David Brooks, wrote a column dismissing evolutionary psychology for over-explaining every facet of human nature (an overreaching of which some evolutionary psychologists are no doubt guilty, but then, every discipline tends to overreach at times). Though Brooks has said a lot of things I disagree with over the years — and I even had the chance at the last Phillips Foundation gathering to ask him in person about his tendency to defend government (which he defended in faux-Burkean terms as a sometimes-substitute for tradition when other institutions fail) — his attack on e.p. was the first time I actually offered some advice to someone planning to write a letter countering Brooks: a real evolutionary psychology expert, my friend Diana Fleischman. I’m not sure if she or her colleagues followed through, but the response letters the Times actually published are linked here.

It’s interesting that Brooks — who one might imagine loving e.p., given his tendency to adopt some new, often science-based paradigm in almost every column — based his argument mainly on the claim that e.p. makes us sound “hard-wired” whereas we in fact have complex, flexible mental structures, often evolved for one purpose but applicable to many others. I think evolutionary psychologists are well aware of that — indeed, they sometimes alarm conservatives by, for instance, describing human mating strategies as “variable” and contextual rather than one-size-fits-all-circumstances. But then, likable as Brooks is, I get the impression that his mental architecture is probably so wildly flexible that even the loose mental rubrics described by e.p. — or, for that matter, coherent ideology — seem like a straitjacket. Brooks, I suspect, is a nice but anxiety-wracked guy, a bit overwhelmed by this complex world and grateful for new theories that promise to somehow help us navigate the chaos without actually forcing us to take too certain a stand. He wasn’t visibly sweating with nervousness at the Phillips gathering, but somehow it would have seemed in character.

In response to Jacob Levy’s understandable bafflement about what the “Canadacons” (so to speak) who I listed this morning could possibly have in common, I will just say that like Brooks — and unlike the crusading zealots of the U.S. — they all seem to give the impression (for good or ill) of people who are a bit pained by having to juggle multiple competing philosophical principles and a bit angry at more conventional (especially more right-wing) ideologues who think we can move forward deductively from a few rock-solid principles.

This makes them all engaging, sophisticated thinkers but may also contribute to them seeming to be motivated at times — like many liberals and academics in general — by an almost masochistic love of “graceful surrender” (often manifesting as a natural submissiveness to the dominatrices of the left, as it were) — rather than a robust positive philosophy or old-fashioned, unapologetic love of liberty.

If I seem oddly prone to valorize pugnacity and denigrate civility at times, it is out of fear that the smartest and best among us are often drawn to value pleasant dialogue (such as that which dominates academia and the private chambers of the political elite) over the fighting screams that may be necessary to rescue us. It is not literally Canada that I worry about but a Canadianness of spirit, as Nietzsche might have said, that may render us too mild-mannered, eh, to resist ever-expanding tyranny.

"Conservatism for Punks" for Punks and Conservatives

I was only able to attend a few minutes of the Tea Party protest in Times Square yesterday before heading downtown to host last night’s debate, but the U2-ish opening band seemed good — and while this rare burst of libertarianism and conservatism may be gone from Times Square now (attendance apparently having been in the hundreds or so instead of the several thousand who swelled the City Hall area for a Tea Party protest back in April), you can certainly find punk in that area on a far more regular basis: I see that the Germs are performing at Nokia Times Square Theatre tonight, for those who are interested. While I should make a point of trying to do conservative things and punk things in close succession just to underscore the m.o., blog slogan, and maybe-someday book, I’m tired and will stay in tonight.

Target Number One: Canada

Well, yesterday we learned that America is in fact economically doomed, according to a narrow vote by our audience at Lolita Bar.  It’s a harsh message to receive just before Independence Day but perhaps a fitting one for Canada Day, which was yesterday.

And after all, isn’t Canada the real danger?  We may not become Albania, but as Montreal-dwelling Jacob Levy has noted with some glee, the U.S. no longer ranks ahead of Canada (though it’s a statistical dead heat, really) on the annual Index of Economic Freedom.  And this is not, I’m afraid, because Canada has turned into a laissez-faire capitalist utopia.  We are all Canadians now.  Possibly even Europeans.  Michael Moore should be delighted, but at least we should no longer have to hear compare and contrast stories that treat the U.S. as a model of laissez-faire and Canada or Europe as a sharply dichotomous opposite.  That’s just not the case anymore.

Ideologically, of course, the U.S. retains a laissez-faire streak in its DNA, though it is not now dominant in the expression of policy, that may yet emerge and rescue the world.  Unfortunately, there too, Canada may be working its mesmeric attraction.  Is it mere coincidence that multiple figures whose ideological mushiness or moderation I’ve noted in the past — and whose very mushiness or moderation seems central to their thinking — are somehow tied to Canada: Jacob Levy himself, his fellow “liberaltarian” Will Wilkinson, Charles Taylor, chief national greatness (!) conservative/big government conservative/Obamacon/cancer David Brooks, and more?

Let the Radicalism Begin

I know what many of you are thinking: that I’ve been too moderate, often too kind — that my blog entries have sometimes been too long, perhaps too thoughtful. Well, that ends today.

Oh, I’m not saying there won’t be the occasional longish essay, but it’s a fast-moving world, and perhaps I can accomplish more with quickly spat-out observations — like snippets of punk lyrics, if you will — several times a day. I’ll try that, anyway (though I’ll dedicate this transitional longish entry to the late Mary Lou Forbes of the Washington Times, who so often helped my co-workers with op-eds done the traditional way).

With tonight (and perhaps you) seeing both a massive Tea Party rally in Times Square against government spending (which is where I think the bulk of our ire and activism has to be focused at this juncture in history, regardless of prior philosophical allegiances and emphases) at 6:30pm — and shortly thereafter at 8pm our Debate at Lolita Bar on the related question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — today is a perfect breakpoint for this necessary stylistic transition.

(It’s not clear I’m unfairly skewing the debate crowd in a “doomed” direction by encouraging Tea Party types to join us, since reminding people about the Tea Party may also draw such people away from our debate toward Times Square, where they may well be trapped for hours, given all the security and barricades that are likely, leaving only Obama supporters to attend the debate.)

If I’ll be spouting more frequent opinions, it’s only fair I encourage more frequent comments — and that I promise not to dismiss or combat every reader comment I disagree with. None of this, by the way, means that I’ve ceased to share Daniel Radosh’s fears — which I’m glad plenty of smart people I know feel — about where this all may be headed, namely Twitter-sized bites being the default communications mode. I worry in particular that no one will ever again change his mind on any important philosophical topics if we are effectively reading essays that could fit on pieces of confetti instead of detailed analyses.

And what will the Twitter generation in turn fear as this process accelerates still more in the future? A coming age of one-word conversations? Telepathically-transmitted emoticons without language at all, as my ironically-named media studies professor friend Read Schuchardt sometimes fears? How much choppier can discourse get? Is philosophy over? Is linear thought?

In any case, recognizing where things are trending, I’m going to try to get slightly ahead of the process while retaining some of the virtues of the past, instead of being completely sidelined. Engagement over sclerosis — even while remaining, to put it mildly, a late-adapter in so many ways. As I’ve noted before, I have no cell phone, no TV reception, no social networking sites memberships or history of Meet-Ups use, no Twitter account, no Netflix account, and nothing at home faster than a dial-up Net connection, and for now at least things will stay that way (entries that post during East Coast work hours will almost invariably have been written earlier to appear during the day, I should note, so perhaps sooner or later you’ll see an obsolete prediction, but then we’ll all have a fun “Dewey Beats Truman” moment).

If all this works well enough, the stylistically-altered blog may replace many previously hinted-at plans including the long-delayed book (the planned title of which, the slogan atop this blog, may seem increasingly ironic if the times demand a more radical, mutated philosophy to go with the changing times), but we’ll just see how it goes. I’m not ruling anything out. I just want to keep things fluid and flexible — like the future itself. You can chat with me about it the old-fashioned way tonight at Lolita Bar, of course.

Bryan Ferry, Todd Seavey, GG Allin, and the Sounds

The final rocker to be considered as we close out this “Month of Rock!” is me.

Or rather, I was tickled when humorist and critic Marie Mundaca (at the Get Lit! night of readings that Michele Carlo hosted) recognized me, not from debate-hosting or other places that sprang to my mind but from my performance of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” at a Janice Erlbaum book release party two years ago at Bowery Poetry Club — a book release party that had karaoke and that I recounted in this blog’s first regular entry.

That means we’ve come full circle, faithful readers, and it may be time to alter this blog’s style a bit for the modern era of quick soundbites and tiny Twitter statements — and so I shall, starting the day after tomorrow, tomorrow being the day we do our momentous, epoch-marking Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — surely a fitting time to try something new and perhaps desperate (like attending another Tea Party protest, which I’ll also do tomorrow, at 6:30 in Times Square before heading to Lolita).

Marie Mundaca’s reading at Get Lit!, by the way, was about the time she scraped together just enough money to see berserk punk GG Allin in concert and got to see things like a male-female couple fighting over which of them would perform oral sex on Allin while he was onstage — until Allin decided the matter by kicking the woman in the head.

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Getting back to the far classier Roxy Music for a moment, though: Helen says Bryan Ferry was perhaps the rocker she found most attractive in her youth, so I have an incentive to keep honing my impression of him. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Sounds song “Rock N’ Roll” contains the line “jump up bubble up what’s in store,” so Sounds singer Maja Ivarsson likes the Roxy Music classic “Love Is the Drug.” On the downside, she also sings in the impromptu supergroup seen and heard during the closing credits of Snakes on a Plane, a terrible, terrible film, as I learned when Jerm Pollet and his pals in the Raspberry Brothers hosted a screening of it recently.

Let’s end this “Month of Rock!” on a more positive note, though: I’ll just say that if tomorrow’s “no” econ-debater had his way (judging by his book), Maja and her girlfriend would be able to marry legally in the U.S., and I will at least do her this service: Instead of thinking about Snakes on a Plane, I will link again to her amazing performance of “Seven Days a Week” on Letterman. It’s punk, it’s pop, it’s Dave, it’s a sexy lesbian or bisexual woman, it’s a reminder that periods of market-leaning thinking and New Wave seem to go together in Sweden as in the U.S., and simple though it looks it may be my favorite live performance clip of the decade. And on that surprising note ends the “Month of Rock!”

Tomboys of the 80s

Amidst all the playing of “Billie Jean” in honor of the late Michael Jackson, let us not forget the other Billie Jean in pop culture in the 80s, namely The Legend of Billie Jean, from which we get the themesong “Invincible” by Pat Benatar. It’s odd that anyone would use the name Billie Jean just three years after it had become so closely associated with Michael Jackson (unless they were actually hoping to confuse people), but Jackson got a sort of (likely unintended) revenge sixteen years later, with the release of his album and song “Invincible.” What goes around comes around. (Remember to always think twice. Oo!)

Both my musical and romantic tastes may have been shaped by the fact that so many 80s acts I liked as a teen who weren’t robotic androgynes like Annie Lennox were instead (in some sense) impassioned tomboys: Pat Benatar, Kim Wilde, Patty Smyth (not Patti Smith, though she’d probably appear on some people’s list), Lita Ford doing “Kiss Me Deadly” (not necessarily anything else she did), the Motels, Heart, Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka, etc.

(It’s a wonder I didn’t end up a lesbian myself — or did I? Al Franken, who may yet be a senator, joked long ago that he thought of himself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.” Whether that means he should have been in the Gay Pride Parade making its way through Manhattan yesterday is debatable — and if you want to see Bryan Harris, who wrote a gay-friendly book mocking sexually-hypocritically politicians, debating the fate of the American economy against paleocon Richard Spencer, remember to join us this Wednesday at Lolita Bar.)

These musical acts at least tended toward the tough-of-demeanor and the husky-of-voice in a way that makes, say, Britney look very wimpy. It does not surprise me to hear of Patty Smyth holding her own in a marriage to notorious hothead John McEnroe, for instance — that’s no role for a wimpy girly-girl. And she is the Warrior, of course.

(A nerd aside: the star of The Legend of Billie Jean also had the title role in the Supergirl movie that you barely remember existed, and it just so happens that an interesting debate about Supergirl’s status as sexual icon cropped up in the comics world this month: specifically, whether to show her panties. My impression is that Third Wave feminist types tend to prefer the more overtly sexual — and at the same time more overtly muscled and masculine — Power Girl, a Supergirl doppelganger from an alternate universe. I don’t think you’ll hear any complaints about that from the boys — indeed, it often seems that the Third Wave’s odd primary contribution to gender relations has simply been to put the “hussy” back in “brazen,” while still acting as though they expect males to combat them on this. Everyone, male and female, seems to have headed to the strip club and ended up on the same page. The long historical digression that was feminism is thus over.)

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While praising tough-sounding 80s broads, I should note that I’ve always thought the embarrassing song “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls has been unjustly elevated on the heavy-rotation lists above their far superior, darker, earlier, half-forgotten song “Pleasure and Pain.” It also seems that my favorite Go-Go’s songs aren’t the ones getting the most airplay years later — and one of those favorites happens to be the one with a video in which they’re in drag, “Turn to You” (though that doesn’t enhance my enjoyment of the song — nor does the cameo by a young Rob Lowe).

On another tomboyish front, Ayn Rand and the late Farrah Fawcett apparently admired each other so much that Fawcett consider playing Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, as noted by the Daily Beast (in an article by one of Katherine Taylor’s neighbors in L.A., which was in turn linked by another of their neighbors, Brian Doherty, on Reason.com and finally pointed out to me by Jacob Levy).

And if this whole entry sounds a bit too gender-bendy, this somewhat conservative Norm MacDonald audio sketch depicting the world’s first gay couple might serve as compensation (Note: It is not perfectly historically accurate). The reader who pointed it out to me shall remain anonymous, though I suspect said reader is likely to be present at Wednesday’s debate if you wish to express your outrage — we’re expanding the parameters of audience participation a bit this time.

Guns N' Roses Are Dumb for Such Brilliant Guys

I say this with the utmost love and concern: The following excerpt from the Wikipedia page about Slash seems to sum up what a sad bunch of stupid screw-ups all the parties concerned are (the only thing missing is an official press release headlined “Where Do You, Like, Fucking Get Off and Shit, Man?”):

Feud with Axl Rose:

In 2007, Slash admitted to going to Rose’s home with the intention to settle a long-standing legal dispute and make peace with his former band mate. Slash elaborated on the incident in his autobiography, claiming that what actually occurred was that he simply went to Rose’s house while intoxicated and left a note asking Rose to contact him to settle a pending lawsuit. He also added that he had not actually spoken to Rose in person since leaving Guns N’ Roses in 1996. Slash further stated that incident’s publicity created a rift in Velvet Revolver; as his bandmates were unsure of what Slash had actually done and Slash had confronted Weiland over his scathing reply to Rose, feeling that Weiland did not have the “right” to criticize Rose, not actually knowing him. In March 2009, Slash responded to an interview in which Rose referred to him as “a cancer”, saying that “it doesn’t really affect me at all. The fact that he has anything to say at all it’s like ‘Whatever, dude’.”

They may be grown men with millions of dollars, but it’s hard not to think of them as just ornery, poorly socialized boys who need to spend detention period in separate rooms because they will always find some excuse to take offense.

Makes one long to hear about pleasant, peaceful, consensus-building ladies — but instead, tomorrow it’s a look at one of the most important music-celebrity phenomena of the 80s: tomboys!

Pixies! Yaaaay! (But I Am Not Referring to Gay Pride Weekend)

As if Michael Jackson — and Phil Spector, with whom we began this “Month of Rock” — weren’t troubling enough figures, morally, there were also the reports this week that not far from where I live the Oscar-winning songwriter behind “You Light Up My Life,” now seventy-one, may have raped some eleven women after luring them to his place with promises of a music career (all three of these guys have a haunted, emaciated look that causes one to instinctively back away as if from a Ringwraith, though I hate to convict them on that basis alone).

You know, my mother always thought there was something horribly wrong with “You Light Up My Life.” Who sings about shining joy in such a dreary-sounding fashion? Rightly seeing as part of a much larger problem of wimpy, soft 1970s non-rock, Mom christened such numbers “shit-rock” and, like Dad, waxed (ha!) nostalgic for the 50s and 60s. In retrospect, they were right and of course influenced me greatly in this as in so many other things.

My negative reaction to the overly-mellow radio fare of my earliest years probably helped ensure a lifelong allegiance to fairly energetic or dramatic rock, including a lot of postpunk stuff (leading to resentment of anyone like Sting, much as I admire the Police, who insists on turning driving, powerful songs into lazy calypso variations or whatever.

•••

Occasionally, though, tempering big scary songs can yield interesting results. I only recently heard for the first time the live version of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” from Pixies at the BBC, which has Frank Black doing much more clear and mellow vocals than usual, somewhere between Lou Reed and the poem part of “Nights in White Satin” — with the funniest moment being when, instead of saying “Rock me, Joe!” as in the original, he says, in a very mellow fashion (and using the guitar player’s full real name), “Rock me…Joseph…Alberto…Santiago.” (And while praising the Pixies, I should also note the very Pixies-like or at least Breeders- or Amps-like band the Oohlas, and their song “Rupert Krikor Chang,” for those interested — and should note that in the unlikely event I start a Pixies cover band, I think I will call it the Proxies.)

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not all about the noise. Even my friend Jake Harrison, whose tastes tend toward the rougher and punkier than mine recognizes the pop brilliance of, for example, the Vapors, recently urging me to get their album New Clear Day. I failed to find it in my initial short search (done the old-fashioned way, at stores, just for the heck of it, though I’m sure I could get it easily online) but did hear “Waiting for the Weekend” from it, which was good — and reminds me a bit of what I have come, with maturity, to regard as the best Robert Palmer song, “Johnny and Mary,” undeniably a case of a mellow number being better than the artist’s bigger, more dinosaur-stomping ones.

In the end, though, despite endless debates about objectivity and subjectivity in aesthetic reactions, I suppose the in-between truth of the matter is that you notice objective differences between texts or songs more depending on which things you’re deeply invested in attention-wise and emotion-wise, a basic psychological insight that few people — even ones aware of the pattern — seem to take to its logical conclusion: maybe other people’s investment in other nuances and other things is just as intelligent as your own (like that Onion piece about sci-fi and sports fans mutually pitying each other).

This goes double for most political and religious thinking, but we’ll leave that until after the “Month of Rock.”

Michael Jackson Dead, John Lennon a Sadist

I didn’t expect this blog’s “Month of Rock” to include the death of the King of Pop — and let me hasten to add that easy as it is to make fun, I liked several of his songs and was quick to point out that Thriller had the most top ten hits of any album when that question was raised among some of my friends.

I know exactly where I was when I heard Michael Jackson was dead: getting a drink at swanky little Quantino Bottega Organica, where bartender Lareesa (sp?) said that her childhood was dying along with Jackson.  Of course, I’d had my suspicions earlier, a few blocks away, when I saw a punkish guy in a mortician-like black tophat blasting Jackson hits on his boombox around 7pm.  An hour later, at a Bowery Poetry Club event hosted by Opium magazine, not only did Lisa Carver dare criticize her fellow bohemians for knuckling under when faced with threats such as the Secret Service’s apparent interrogation of her boyfriend (Carver can pick ’em, as noted yesterday), but the evening’s co-hostess dared say of Jackson that “Somewhere tonight, a little Guatemalan boy is safe because that man is dead.”

I’ve long said that if Jackson were a movie character, he’d have long since reached the point where death was the cleanest next move, like a mad scientist so transformed that the explosion of his lab seems like a mercy-killing.  So long ago, it seemed like time for the amusement park full of molested children to burn down, possibly after the mad leader’s chimpanzee sidekick accidentally started a fire or tore his master’s artificial face off.

Let us not forget, though, that one of the things that kept Jackson rich and able to afford things like moving to a mansion in Brunei toward the end was his ownership, for a time, of the music of the Beatles — and we might do well to think of John Lennon (subject of next year’s Nowhere Boy biopic), revered by so many leftists and neo-hippies, as an even greater monster than Jackson.  Jackson may have had some uncontrollable attraction to little boys (and perhaps would have been flummoxed by this week’s congressional push and Supreme Court ruling suggesting, respectively, that you should give junior high girls breast exams for highly-unlikely breast cancer but should not examine their underwear for over the counter painkillers), but John Lennon was an outright sadist, as historian Christine Caldwell Ames has explained to me, doing things like mocking the mentally retarded during his concerts and relishing telling his first wife about every single time he cheated on her, while he was dumping her on a long plane flight.

The man was a monster but was beloved by peaceniks and enlightened capitalism-bashers everywhere — much like his contemporary Mao Tse-Tung (which reminds me: don’t forget our debate on economic doom, July 1).  Perhaps, like so many politicians (see: Mark Sanford), he felt the need to preach in favor of the things that he lacked in his own private life (sexual self-discipline in Sanford’s case, kindness and love in Lennon’s — we’ve seen these sorts of public/private compensatory patterns too many times now to consider them mere ironic aberrations).

There is simply nothing lower than a sadist, almost by definition — a deliberate source of suffering in a world that already has too much of it.  But I’ll say more about that in a week, since I’ve promised economist John Bellettiere I’ll explain and defend utilitarianism a bit more.  Before that, though, lest I sound too kindhearted and soft, let’s finish up the week of rock over the next few days with entries about the rough-sounding Pixies, the hard-living members of Guns N’ Roses, and the tomboys of the 80s, though we’ll finish up with a gentle Ferry on Tuesday.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Is America Economically Doomed?

Wed., July 1 (8pm): “Is America Economically Doomed?” with:

Managing editor of TakiMag Richard Spencer arguing yes.

Journalist and political author Bryan Harris arguing no.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar.  Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

With a trillion being spent on banks, another trillion or so on healthcare (per Obama’s big plans from yesterday), and the usual 3 trillion or so on old people, sick people, foreign foes, and miscellaneous ludicrous projects — plus a national debt about the size of the GDP, a financial sector about as trustworthy as a Survivor contestant, and more sclerotic institutions than you can shake a calcified index finger-bone at — you might be a bit worried about the economy.  But is it hopeless?

“No,” says Bryan Harris.  “Yes,” says Richard Spencer.  “I had better attend and find out for myself,” says you.

•••

And if you’re also saying to yourself, “I do worry that we’re doomed, but I’m not sure I want to attend a debate about it featuring someone from that radical right-wing TakiMag,” let me just observe that even the most left-wing and hippie-like among you would probably be comfortable joining me tonight (Thursday the 25th, 7pm at Bowery Poetry Club) for a completely unrelated event, a set of dueling readings by writers affiliated with Opium magazine, featuring famed writer and performance artist weirdo Lisa “Suckdog” Carver, right?  (She knows Pagan Kennedy and Dame Darcy, after all, and they’re nice and liberal.)

Yet Carver’s been linked romantically to purported fascist, Satanist, and all-around scary political extremist Boyd Rice — and maybe my friends out in Colorado ought to hang around with him, now that I think about it, just to keep things interesting.  Compared to him, both our Lolita debaters will seem downright respectable — likewise, the positively mainstream (almost centrist, really) folks at this coming weekend’s New York reunion, which I’m lucky enough to be attending with Helen, of Yale’s Party of the Right.  (And I say that even though one of their members claims to be a traditionalist-conservative convert to Hawaiian paganism.)

Look, you never know who might be useful when you’re organizing a small band to navigate the wastelands and hunt squirrels after the whole system falls apart — if it does, I mean.  But to find out whether it will: join us next Wednesday.

Transformers vs. "Deceptacon"

You know, I’m not currently planning to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (out today) even if it does have forty different robots in it, but I’d be sorely tempted if they actually used the cool song “Deceptacon” [sic] by the band Le Tigre (and let me add that tigers are the most beautiful non-human animals, don’t let anyone tell you different).

The real menace to civilization today, though, is the deceptive transformation of ABC News into a platform for advertising Obama’s healthcare plan, in a broadcast hosted by Charlie Gibson tonight — though the truth will be presented today at noon at the Harvard Club, in a Manhattan-Institute-hosted luncheon speech criticizing Obamacare given by ACSH Trustee and former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey (whose copy of Atlas Shrugged I’ve seen beside her bed — would that she were governor). It’ll be interesting to compare her complaints to the seven-point list of objections recently published by the Cato Institute — and it will be interesting to see if the American Medical Association sticks to its guns and continues to oppose the plan as well.

One film transformation we will not be seeing after all, alas, is that of Sean Penn into Larry Fine of the Three Stooges in the Stooges biopic by the Farrelly Brothers — and that puts the whole project in doubt, reportedly, after the Farrelly Brothers went to such great effort to secure Jim Carrey as Curly and, even more strangely, Benicio Del Toro as Moe. We live in an odd world.

Book Selection: "The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle" by Michael Moorcock (Who Is Not Exactly a Proponent of "Conservatism for Punks")

Todd Seavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2009): The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle, or Gold Diggers of ’77 by Michael Moorcock (and judging by the prices for used copies on Amazon, perhaps I should sell mine — OR BURN IT!)

Like me, British “New Wave” science fiction author Michael Moorcock enjoys juxtaposing several related texts or ideas — unlike me, he doesn’t waste any time concocting segues. So today, neither will I:

•Julien Temple made a documentary about the Sex Pistols — two actually, the more recent one being The Filth and the Fury and the far earlier one being The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle, for which Moorcock, oddly enough, wrote the official companion book in novel form, depicting his already-existing sci-fi mod/punk character Jerry Cornelius (not to mention Cornelius’s evil brother Frank and other associates) interacting with the Sex Pistols. The Pistols are depicted as despising their manager and record label, something you don’t normally see in official companion books.

Thanks to time travel and various ghostly apparitions (and wiseman Lemmy from Motorhead), London and reality itself unravel, with the Pistols repeating their Queen’s Jubilee boat performance but this time with actual accompanying aerial assault and widespread bloodshed. That Moorcock makes all this seem sexy and right and does so with an amoral smirk shows he’s an anarchist in a much broader sense than I am — and that he was a big influence on comics writer Grant Morrison, as I’ve noted before.

(And from there, if I were doing segues today, how easily we’d glide from Morrison to the comic Godland and its use of the chant “IBOGA” and thus to Morrison-lookalike Hunter S. Thompson’s groundless claims about drug use during the Muskey campaign, but we don’t have time for that or for an analysis of the prince in Hellboy 2, so do your own research for a change.)

•Moorcock himself would probably look with great suspicion upon my philosophy of “conservatism for punks” — but I have always found his godson, who is really named Elric and unlike his namesake character is a swarthy Brazilian and a friend of Reid Mihalko (rather than an albino swordsman), very pleasant, and Elric informed me of this new, definitive collection of Moorcock’s best short stories — the Best of Michael Moorcock, just out last month, so check that out, too.

•Was it Moorcock, the ungrateful bastard, who likened the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to Winnie the Pooh because of their conservatism and warmth? (Has he really watched the suicidally-dark Winnie the Pooh: A Day for Eeyore, as Helen and I have been planning to do, maybe along with the director’s cut DVD of Surf Nazis Must Die, which I just realized I have in my three-disc collection of hardcore punk songs Amp Records Has a Hard-On for Tromaville.com, which I’m listening to as I write this?) Regardless, I have to be grateful to him for creating a sci-fi/punk cultural crossroads that reminds me a bit of his fellow cut-up, William S. Burroughs, unbeknownst to most folks, writing the original, utterly unfilmable, vastly complex and cityscape-focused treatment for the movie Blade Runner, based at that phase of the project not on Philip K. Dick, kindred spirits though Burroughs and Dick might seem, but on the novel Blade Runner about black market doctors written by Alan Nourse. They kept the city, ditched the whole plot, inserted Dick — and, like much Moorcock, laid the foundations of cyberpunk while they were at it.

(These weird geek culture intersections are like a hipper version of that time the Avengers were on Letterman in one issue of their comic book in the 80s and he rescued them with his giant doorknob, a recurring prop on Letterman broadcasts back then, which made its final, climactic appearance in a bit that explained the need for the giant doorknob by unveiling the terror of the even larger, albeit more crudely made, Soviet doorknob.)

•Speaking of anarchist metropolises (damn — segue), while making an honest but failed effort the other day to locate a copy of The Case for Big Government (which I’ve promised the author I’ll read) at the disturbingly empty and doomed-looking local Barnes & Noble just before, to my relief, it moved two blocks west and got larger, I instead spotted something I thought Helen might like and so picked up Kat Long’s The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City, which — and I swear I had not anticipated this when I bought it, honestly intending to expand my horizons — turns out to be the latest book to endnote me (the last one I knew of being Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark Levin, which is rather different in political orientation from Long’s work, but that’s how we libertarians roll). Makes you wonder how many other books mention me without me happening to pick them up…

A Reason article of mine from 1997 is foonote 27 in chapter 8, about Giuliani conspiring with Disney to zone the porn out of Times Square (another reminder to shed no tears over his failed presidential bid, I suppose, though instead we get Obama…who appoints Sotomayor…who likes eminent domain…which likely leads to more stuff like zoning out porn, so you can’t win, not without a bigger dose of anarchy).

Kat Long, it should be noted, is not to be confused with Pussy Galore. With the addition of the mention by Long, if memory serves, I have now been a footnote or endnote in a libertarian book, a green/organic book, a conservative book, and a liberal book (that I know of) and should next aim for Perotista, maybe. (In the meantime, I’m just toasting Iranian protesters, or was here at last week’s Manhattan Project gathering — and if that sounds more to your liking than toasting Leader Obama for the hundredth time, join us one of these months, per the directions on my main page’s right margin.)

•There’s a Moorcock reference in the very avant-garde old MTV sci-fi cartoon Aeon Flux, by the way, since the cloned/redundant nature of the characters is marked by giving Aeon a sister named Una, a recurring character name in Moorcock’s work, filled like sketch comedy with half-familiar, half-transformed characters, all of it rationalized as a side effect of the existence of the multiverse. (And is it coincidence or the best homage ever that Una was also the name of the all-by-herself duplicate of the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Triplicate Girl who bit the dust, horribly devoured by super-rats, in DC Comics’ Countdown to Final Crisis miniseries? And why is the final issue of the Legion of Three Worlds miniseries that resolves the multiverse’s connection to the awesome villain Time Trapper delayed once more to July 22, putting me within two perilous goddam weeks of ending up a forty-year-old comics reader? And will the homicidally deranged Superboy-Prime somehow be redeemed?)

•In a similar vein, from the Wikipedia page on comics writer extraordinaire Alan Moore:

Moore has written one screenplay, entitled Fashion Beast, loosely based on both Jean Cocteau’s version of Beauty and the Beast and the life of fashion designer Christian Dior. The script was commissioned by former Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren. It has yet to be made into a film.

•The most sci-fi British thing I’ve experienced this week, though, may have been a concert by hilariously textbook-perfect prog rock band Van Der Graaf Generator — with opening act the Strawbs, who sounded a bit like a cross between Fairport Convention and Yes and, sure enough, have counted Sandy Denny and Rick Wakeman as members, according to J.R. Taylor, who got me in and mentioned the concert recently on his invaluable blog, RightWingTrash.

New York Times’ Jon Pareles reviewed the Van Der Graaf concert yesterday — and now I realize he was the twitchy Boomer ubergeek in front of me and J.R. in the VIP section who asked us to move back because he was having trouble seeing around the speaker system, then twitched and spasmed and occasionally air-conducted to the most obscure and prog-rocky eleven-minute songs in rock history. He looks like this.

But it’s Beyonce, per NYT on the same day, who is a “rapacious animal-robot-dance-titan,” which undeniably sounds hot — and oddly enough, I weaved through her fans in the MSG area (after seeing Helen off at the bus for DC) as I made my way north to see Van Der Graaf at Times Square. Naturally, I will always think of Beyonce as an R.A.R.D.T. now and like her all the more for it.

•Unlike J.R. (or Helen), the site io9 likes horror movies most when they’re socialist. The real horror, of course, is that the mind-virus of anti-capitalist thinking is so powerful and widespread, hardly anyone can even imagine movies or novels with morals the opposite of the ones listed in that article, but, hey, why try thinking outside the communal box?

My own list of “socialist horror” would include China, Cuba, and Obama’s healthcare plans and bank subsidies. Cool as io9 may be, its editor is just one of countless intellectuals in our day — and in our society for centuries now — who sympathize with government control of the economy for what are essentially aesthetic/cultural reasons, which in a sane world would be regarded as about as shallow as thinking Coast Guard vehicles are better suited to reach Mars than NASA vehicles because of the color of the Coast Guard ships or the jaunty tunes the sailors play. Grow up, people, and learn economics. Now or never — and not from Marxists or labor unions.

•I praised the twee music last week, but I must also say that Postal Service’s version of “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” is another reminder that even alt-rock bands you like are often revealed as gnats beside gods when they attempt to redo classic rock. And that’s probably why Johnny Rotten reportedly liked to dance over and over again to “Hot Blooded” by Foreigner. My praise of them in my Flag Day entry doesn’t seem quite so unhip now, does it, you arrogant jerk?

PART TWO: PRETTY IN PINK AND OTHER TEXTS

•You know, prior to watching it with Helen, I’d never seen Pretty in Pink (you may recall me listing big 80s movies that I somehow failed to see back in the 80s, presumably because I was busy rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark — which in fact I also just did a few days ago).

Anyway, Helen mentioned the Duckie/Blaine dilemma being a bigger one than just what’s on the screen. As you may know, the script originally called for Ringwald to stay with Duckie at the prom, but the studio made Hughes change it so she reunites with rich guy Blaine — and Hughes made the same-plot-opposite-genders Some Kind of Wonderful precisely so the Duckie-analogue could win instead, apparently. That’s one of those making-of notes that makes it hard to think of the familiar ending as the “real” ending, meaningless as that label may be to sophisticates and deconstructionists.

Then again, Duckie is kind of annoying. I also strongly suspect the character was inspired by the obscure but very interesting wacky 60s black comedy Lord Love a Duck, about a man (played by effete Roddy McDowall) so eager to serve the woman he loves and make her acceptable to others that he ends up committing crimes and wacky 60s mayhem on her behalf. Netflix it if you don’t believe me.

•The closest filmmaking development to the dual endings thing among last month’s new nerd films may be the two different post-credits bits attached to different versions of Wolverine, for what little it’s worth: one hinting that Wolverine’ll be in Japan next time, where perhaps the best story ever told about him in the comics took place (involving a hot she-ninja and Yakuza and samurai and stuff), and the other hinting that villain Deadpool still lives and can “see” the audience, in keeping with his odd ability to break the fourth wall in the comics, one of the quirky characteristics reportedly making him likely to get a spin-off (of a spin-off) film of his own.

•We may not have many anarchist politicians (almost by definition), but I was pleased to see that we have a governor, in South Carolina, who doesn’t mind being called a “libertarian” (on social conservative issues he isn’t, but even if it’s just on fiscal issues, that would make him better than virtually all other Republicans these days). Needless to say, then, I was unhappy about the overblown hullabaloo that accompanied his little disappearing act last week when he decided to go off and hike the Appalachian Trail on the same weekend as Naked Hiking Day. I doubt there’s anything scandalous there except in the eyes of his enemies, but I can also imagine the whole incident easily being turned into a mildly offensive USA Network movie (perhaps from Troma Studios), based on the most logical explanation of the whole incident, like so:

The governor heads into the woods with naked co-eds to get away from it all and remind himself what liberty truly is, at a time in his life when he isn’t sure he feels inspired to carry on with his political career, then gets captured by nudity-hating, authoritarian Appalachian Mountains hillbillies who feed naked chicks to the Bigfoot they have captured in their barn, but Sanford and the hot chicks manage to win Bigfoot over to their side with a big orgy that Bigfoot attends, and then the Bigfoot rips the hillbillies’ limbs off so that the good guys can escape back to Columbia, SC, where Bigfoot is given the key to the city and Sanford’s wife takes him back, recognizing that he’s beaten his demons and is now ready to set all America free — but the one hillbilly with the hook hand may still be alive at the bottom of the gully.

(More sci-fi film stuff tomorrow, and more political radicalism in the next day’s new Lolita Bar debate announcement.)

•In other political news: Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes, to continued 50/50 senatorial gridlock and the suspension of legislative business in Albany.

•And no to France for trying to ban the burqa. You don’t talk people into adopting secular ways by having the law literally force them to remove their clothes. And I say that as a guy who toasted the Iranian protesters and would be happy to see political Islam vanish into history with fascism, communism, and government in general.

You know what you get if you’re in an oppressive (but not physically threatening) family? The right to leave when you’re a teen. With the average human lifespan, that gives you plenty of time remaining to decompress and read Reason (where you’ll find more of my thoughts on culture and whether or not it can truly oppress absent law, in a couple months, if all goes as expected).

•I’m pleased to see comics columnist Val D’Orazio quoted me this month, but what’s weirder is that the previous time she quoted me led, apparently, to me appearing on the Wikipedia page about the DC Comics character Anarky, along with left-libertarian Rod Long, who I criticized in December during this blog’s “Month of Feminism” (a spat in which Val would likely not be on my side). Here are the “relevant” passages from the Anarky Wikipedia entry:

Following the publication of Robin #181, Roderick Long, an anarchist/libertarian political commentator and Senior Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and self-professed fan of the character, expressed annoyance at the portrayal of the character of Lonnie Machin and the usurpation of the “Anarky” mantle by [another character named] Armstrong. Upon learning of [writer] Nicieza’s reasoning for the portrayal, Long “summarized” the explanation as a mock-dialectic:

•Thesis: Anarky is too interesting a character not to write about.
•Antithesis: Anarky is too interesting a character for me to write successfully about.
•Dialectical synthesis: Therefore I will make Anarky less interesting so I can write about him.

…Besides Breyfogle and Peatty, Todd Seavey was another professional writer who expressed an interest in creating stories for Anarky. A freelance libertarian writer and editor, and author of several issues of Justice League, Seavey considered authoring an Anarky series his “dream comics project”…

•Tomorrow, though, I will fulfill my humbler dream of writing a blog entry about Transformers.