How do you solve a problem like myopia?

Do you remember the brouhaha a week or two ago regarding President Obama's address to schoolchildren? I wrote about it here.

If, for some reason, you entered that situation in an Obamaphobic state of mind, and my brief outburst was enough to convince you to drop your faux outrage (hey, I can dream, can't I?), then perhaps you are looking for a new home for your habitual bitterness.

If that is the case, may I suggest you could more productively direct your anger here?

I mean, hell, if you're gonna get fired up over an authority figure trying to brainwash the kids, why not go after the real thing? The RIAA has, for a long time, been in the business of trying to re-educate schoolchildren. Among the topics on their agenda: filesharing is completely evil, "fair use" is hardly a legitimate defense, and music is essentially a product, which can't properly exist outside the context of a capitalist system.

All of which is misleading or untrue ("filesharing" can often actually be beneficial to artists, "fair use" is a fundamental creative practice, and music is much more than a product). And all of which fits in nicely with the general devaluation of the arts in public education. Because if, eventually, music can only be accessed from behind the walls of the sort of proprietary listening environment the RIAA dreams of, that will be one more obstacle-to-actually-getting-kids-excited-about-music that the 21st music teacher will have to deal with.

(Try for a moment to imagine how hard it might be to get fired up about some of the music featured on A Blog Supreme's Jazz Now series without the mp3s / youtube videos that accompany each post. Now imagine you're a 12-year-old trying to convince a friend to check out some cool new band you like without actually giving them a copy of the music.)

Want to prevent kids from sharing music? You may as well prevent them from listening to music. There are just too many other things they'd prefer to spend their money on. If they have no way of getting hooked on the power of music now, the chances that they will get hooked later (when they actually have some sort of disposable income) are fairly slim indeed. And ten years down the road, the ghost of the industry will still be wondering from which direction the coup de grâce originated, and we'll be left with a culture in which the beauty of music is known only to a select few.

But don't despair. While kids' ears atrophy, they can do a project like this (click the image above for the full text):

Imagine that you are in the music industry, and you want to send a message about the consequences of songlifting [a neologistic riff on "shoplifting"]. Complete the chart below noting what each music industry professional would say about the effects of songlifting on their career. [...]

With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it's important to get their music the right way. [...]

Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or a video about your campaign.

I'm half tempted to take these lesson plans into my own classroom just to savor the kids' reactions. But I more or less know in advance that they will laugh their asses off. Which is not to say that my kids are that much savvier-in-the-face of-a-hornswaggle than kids in other schools. It's just that kids in general are not terribly interested in pretending to be "music industry employees."

And only a music industry employee could be surprised at that statement. (It takes a special kind of narcissism, I guess.)


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No surprises as I narcissistically shill for the Industrial Jazz Group, right? We're having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour. You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Also! Check out the remix contest.

Political coda, plus assorted flim-flam

Okay. A parting shot on this subject before the weekend.

Probably the best political commentary I've seen this week comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

We (liberals) have spent so much of our time on the losing end of the past 30 years, that the impulse is to fight every battle, and challenge every press release. Moreover, media has uncovered our inner crazy. HuffPo blasts every utterance from Jon Kyl in bold font. Politico reports every feint and jab, like it's the whole fight. I'm not blaming them, they're doing well because they've figured out something about our inner animal.

It's fine for us laymen to indulge that, but I don't want to be led by people who think that outlets (including this one) which weigh in on who "won the week" are some kind of gauge of their actual progress. I don't want to be led by people who think that "getting angry" is a actual political strategy. I want to be led by a killer. A cold, unemotional, professional killer.

I keep meeting lefties who tell me Obama's "too soft" with these guys, and I keep looking at them like they're crazy. I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is something deeper at work here, something beyond the policy fights. I think a lot of us don't just want Obama to be effective, we want him to exact some measure of revenge. It's smart to understand the difference between the two, and moreover, how the desire for one can undermine the other. A section of conservatives love Sarah Palin because she drives liberals crazy. That she drives a lot of other people crazy too, and hence undermines herself, is beside the point.

Let's not make that mistake.

In other words, let's not be MORANS.

* * * * *

Other stuffs:

-- The New Yorker shout-out. (Big thanks to DJA for making this happen.)

-- "Yo, Jimbo!"

-- The Industrial Jazz Group Remix Contest.

-- I'm honored to be guest-posting on Seattle trumpeter Jason Parker's blog this coming Monday. Gonna try really hard not to fuck it up.

-- And finally, this:

The speech that did what speeches do

I'm sure some of you right-wing Industrial Jazz Group fans (if indeed there are any of you still out there) are tired of hearing me rant about my own political views, and would prefer instead more inside scoop about preparations for the upcoming tour. I promise I'll get back to music-related posting soon.

In the meantime: for what it's worth (not much, I know), I must admit that I breathed a small sigh of relief as I watched the speech last night. Part of that was attributable to the fact that Obama had clearly put on his "angry face" -- a look that I associate with the Pulp Fiction-inspired image that circulated during the election.

Still, given the general frenzy of the last few weeks, I was prepared for disappointing news of one sort or another. So I was genuinely surprised when he got to this:

My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That's how the market works. [...]

Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business. They provide a legitimate service, and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors. I just want to hold them accountable. (Applause.) And the insurance reforms that I've already mentioned would do just that. But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. (Applause.) [...]

[...] the insurance companies and their allies [...] argue that these private companies can't fairly compete with the government. And they'd be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won't be. I've insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities. (Applause.)

Now, I realize that that particular defense of the public option is not as forceful as some progressives would like. I also realize that some will claim that any perceived "toughness" in the health speech as a whole was merely a response to pressure from the left, that it doesn't represent Obama's true beliefs, and that he will "sell us out" at the first opportunity.

I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But I guess I prefer the take articulated by Balloon Juice's Anne Laurie:

As for last night’s speech, it should always be remembered: President Obama started his career as a community organizer. Which means he is used to (and most excellently skilled at) running an organization by “working for consensus”, a set of skills quite different from the ones needed for running the more usual top-down business/military/GOP organizations. In an authoritarian organization, for better or worse, at the end of the day what the Big Kahuna says goes is what goes. Even if he’s the best, most open-minded Big Kahuna in the universe, heading up a team of uniquely gifted & prickly talents -- he can ask for input, he can get input he hasn’t asked for, but when hammer meets nail it’s the Big Kahuna’s hammer that gets to choose the nail. And the other members of the team are always aware of this reality; barring things get so bad that grenades get rolled into the colonel’s tent, no private in the army forgets for long that the colonel is the one setting the agenda.

In a consensus-driven organization, on the other hand, everybody must have a chance to give an opinion... even when their opinion is stupid, crazy, laughable, and wrong. Being a successful community organizer means knowing that the local Mr. Tinfoil or Ms. Crystal-Bunny will show up at every goddamned meeting and waste everybody else’s time ranting about black helicopters or the necessity for regular high colonics. A large part of the job of being a successful community organizer is ensuring that the resident nutball gets a respectful hearing without being permitted to permanently derail the meeting. Because, sad as it may seem, the rest of us skittish flaky primates want to know (even when we don’t articulate it) that “our guy” will take our ideas seriously, even when we’re not sure our ideas are worth taking seriously. When Obama stands up before Congress and explains that his health care reform proposals will involve neither death panels or government-paid abortions (unfortunately, IMO), he is reassuring the 80% of his audience who have no strong feelings about either topic that he will, at another time, be open to their opinions, however formless and/or gormless. This is important, even when it means that the meetings keep running into overtime and that us sane people have to listen to an awful lot of extremely random crap.

After eight years of the Cheney Regency’s “My way or the Gitmo highway” authoritarianism, anything less forceful than sloganeering and explicit threats seems like pretty weak sauce to those of us who’ve been paying attention. The question, of course, is whether President Obama’s target audience -- the vast quivering voting-eligible majority that isn’t ideologically wed to either Invisible-Hand-of-the-Marketplace-Uber-Alles or Medicare-for-All-Americans-Immediately -- considers his speech, and his administration’s work over the next few weeks and months, as sensible compromise or timid obfuscation. Perhaps we’d get better proposals and a more useful final bill if President Obama would channel his Inner Authoritarian a little more, but his gift for seeking consensus seems to be why Obama is President and certain other people are not. Maybe all the histronics are simply a necessary part of the process of committing democracy.

Yes. Or even part of the process of "rehabilitating the idea of government" (to borrow an eloquent phrase from ObWi blogger Publius).

My main hope is that the speech will do what speeches are supposed to do: galvanize and energize (in a much broader and more intense way than is currently the case) those who are actually interested in real change for the health insurance system. What seems to have been missing until now is something along the lines of the level of organizing that obtained during the election itself. That is where true reform is going to come from.

Which reminds me: I have some phone calls to make.

* * * * *

Speaking of "galvanizing": gadzooks! The Industrial Jazz Group is having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour! You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here. Thank you!

Try the outrage du jour: it's bitter, and it's cheap

Read it and weep. Here's the crux of Obama's Hitler-youth-on-opposite-day speech, to be delivered today:

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

Scary stuff, I know.

You can, if you like, count the number of "I's" in this excerpt, or in the speech as a whole. You can also count the number of "G's," or the number of "X's," or the number of periods. (Which reminds me: I wonder if the ass who came up with this exegetical method would have preferred that the president describe his experiences and observations in the third person.)

Or, you can just fucking read it, sounding out the letters to see what words they make, and then assembling the words into expressed thoughts called sentences. If you approach it that way, you may discover that the speech isn't about Obama at all. A summary of its content might go as follows: the onus for the future well-being of the United States rests squarely on the shoulders of current students. (A tall order, I suppose, but that's another discussion.)

Maybe you're the sort of Obamaphobe who has recognized that the speech itself is benign, and so have begun to critique its "subtext." The funny thing about this little pivot, as anyone who has ever engaged in literary analysis knows, is that "subtext" is often code for "any damned bullshit thing you want to read into a statement that is otherwise as plain as the nose on your face." You know: kind like what you've done with art analysis.

Or perhaps you're an Obamaphobic parent, and have decided to keep your kid home from school today. In which case, I feel compelled to say: if you're really concerned that this man is going to "indoctrinate" your progeny with a single speech -- even if the speech were partisan, which it's not -- then you'd better start drinking now. Because unless you plan on locking little Bobby or Susie in the basement for the rest of their lives, you've got much much bigger problems in store.

[Photo credit: dregsplod]

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Wowee zowee, did you know that the Industrial Jazz Group is currently going cuckoo with our fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour? You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here. Thanks much!

Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side

In which I discuss matters that have no bearing whatsoever on jazz. Except to the extent that jazz, I imagine, would suffer too if we end up having an all-out civil war in this country.

Wait, did I say "civil war"? I meant "debate over health care."

Anyway, you heard about this dude who brought his only special friend to a recent Obama protest, right?



And then you probably read or saw how he was just one out of many! And it's all legal and shit!

"I come from another state where 'open carry' is legal, but no one does it, so the police don't really know about it and they harass people, arrest people falsely," the man, who wasn't identified, said in an interview aired by CNN affiliate KNVX. "I think that people need to get out and do it more so that they get kind of conditioned to it."

I love how this guy was concerned about the dangers of being "harassed." His concern was particularly evident in the great care he took not to harass other people. Cuz nothing says "I'm not harassing you" like an assault weapon at a political protest.

I love too the invocation of revolutionary times (ya gotta check the video for that little gem). Cuz the founding fathers were all about arming their African-American friends. (Wait: they weren't? Double wait: they didn't have any African-American friends?!)

Tim F. at my beloved Balloon Juice has a spot-on take:

The sad part is that we do not even have to wait to see what happens next. Half a mile from my house a relatively ordinary freeper/stormfronter shot three policemen because he thought Obama would take his guns away.

All these guys need is one martyr to put on their t-shirts and name blogs after. Nobody needs to get shot, although they would love it if someone did. Their intense police state paranoia will be validated enough when a local cop confiscates some bubba’s precious AR-15. Rumors were enough to send several recent crazed shooters over the edge. How many more need just one aggrieved victim of guvmint overreach with a photo and a name?

The second funny thing is that I don’t think that any of these guys have any idea what to do when they have their little revolution. I suppose they hope to take power just by making America ungovernable by anyone else.

[...]

Honestly, I would pay good money to watch people who associate book learnin’ with the enemy try and fail to produce a modern-day Federalist Papers. If they do manage something it will be the first book ever written in all caps.

* * * * *

Do you remember that moment, back on the playground, however many years ago, when you were involved in the sort of well-meaning roughhousing that kids do, and suddenly there was this transition? Such that said roughhousing instantly morphed into a whole other kind of situation, one in which it became apparent that someone was really going to get hurt?

We're living through one of those moments right now, I do believe. Writ large and in very slow motion. (And I say that knowing full well my own proclivity for overcautiousness about such things. Though I'll repeat: one should never underestimate the power of a fringe, especially a fringe with laptops.)

The left cries "foul" (understandably) whenever Obama pulls back from some stated campaign goal, some longed-for move toward progressive change. We decry the urge toward bipartisanship as naive, Kumbaya-drenched nonsense. We pass around our little hoax posters. We argue that Bush, who we never agreed with, at least had the right strategy for getting shit done. It was (surprise!) a simple strategy: he just did it, and damn the consequences.

But it's more complicated than that, isn't it? Bush was a white president in a majority white country. He never faced the threat of armed insurrection. No one ever questioned his citizenship. No one ever accused him of being in cahoots with terrorists. He was compared with a chimp, it's true, but never a chimp shot dead by cops in the street. He could throw his political muscle around, even in the face of his own illegitimacy, because he had the weight of tradition on his side.

Which is not to say that no progressive ever longed, in a fit of rage, to punch Bush in the nose. But the idea of violence against that president was only ever raised in jest. And even then, it was immediately booed by progressives themselves. Instead, we chose to fight back with words. Of course, that didn't work out as well as we hoped, cuz Bush realized, in his oddly, perhaps accidentally postmodern way, that words were merely tools, and that you could say whatever you wanted, and it would be "true" if you repeated it enough and gave it an aura of gravitas. And in the end the worst physical threat he ever faced was a friggin' shoe, thrown (inaccurately) by someone from another country, after the target was already a lame duck. It's just not the same.

Which is also not to say that progressives should take the pressure off Obama whenever it appears he is giving up on an important principle (in fact, I suspect that he welcomes such pressure). Or that any of us should be intimidated into submission by the rabble-rousers -- that's exactly what they want. But even as we insist on follow-through, we have to see the administration's dance, such as it is, in a realistic context -- one that includes this bullying, ignant, violent, worst-of-the-60s-style survivalist bullshit.

[Photo credit: peterPIPERpickedTHEpeppers.]

More Friday Morning Economic Meltdown Music, and Other Stuff Too

Part of a continuing series.



Signs of recovery? Don't ask me, I'm not an economist.

Meanwhile, over at the other blog:

New Quadraphonnes.

Live Fight the Big Bull.

Old Industrial Jazz Group.

Anything can be anything!

Wonkette never lets me down:

You may have read on the Internet that this week’s big movie release is the “new” original Star Trek movie, and it is going to make millions of dollars. It is the latest manifestation of Hollywood studios’ race to abandon all creativity: after a popular movie series like Batman or Superman has run its course, just start over and make the first one again. Critics then praise the director’s “new vision,” and political writers note that all of the characters are famous politicians, secretly, in real life. Everyone remembers last year’s important Wall Street Journal column, “George Bush Jr. Is The Bat Man.” This year’s version? “Barack Obama is the Spock.” Steady yourself…

This is followed by two generous excerpts from articles in Newsweek and Salon, both of which make the aforementioned comparison.

But my favorite part comes in the wake of all this, with NewsBusters' critique of the Newsweek reading. NewBusters:

Finally, we get Bill Clinton compared to the scarred and withered version of Star Trek’s Captain Pike, the man that commanded the Enterprise before Captain Kirk did in the TV series. Bill Clinton is like Pike because he was “so talented, so promising… so damaged.” And this too is a bad analogy. Pike is nothing like the disloyal, womanizing Clinton. All Captain Pike fans should be telling Newsweek to shove it.

Wonkette:

“All Captain Pike fans” probably have bigger issues to deal with than the Newsweek magazine.

Keep it coming, Internet!

Friday morning economic meltdown music, continued again

Alternate post title: Another Side of the IJG.

Specifically: a new thing called "Hard Times / The End of Money."



It's still a bit of a draft -- in particular, I think I overcompensated for some of the problems in the live recording -- but what the hell.

We actually introduced this at our New Year's Eve show this past December. What can I say? The real-world context has become more dire in the ensuing months, and so I ended up putting together something that has a certain melodramatic flair. Not sure if that's good or bad.

It still has that absurdist IJG stamp, of course. Particularly in the juxtaposition of scenes of honest-to-goodness poverty with scenes of bourgeois consumerism, or whatever you want to call it. Again, I probably went overboard. So sue me (I have no money, so you'll get nothing!).

The opening chorale is an arrangement of the Stephen Foster chestnut, "Hard Times." With particular deference to the following lines: "While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay / There are frail forms fainting at the door / Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say / Oh hard times come again no more."

The rest of the tune is my fault.

Unlike most of our other videos, footage of the band (c/o Matt Lichtenwalner, via Tany Ling's camera) plays a pretty minor role in this piece -- mostly it's ephemeral cinema from my usual treasure trove, the Internet Archive. Sources include instructional films about economics, documentaries on rural poverty and suburbia, and a slew of old television commercials.

Make of it what you will! Just remember it's a work-in-progress.

(The sillier side of the IJG will return in the next video, I swear.)

Audio recorded by James Dethlefson and crew at CSUB (thanks again, guys!), during our show on April 3.

Reeds: Gavin Templeton, Cory Wright, Evan Francis, Brian Walsh, Damon Zick, Gabriel Sundy.

Brass: Dan Rosenboom, Kris Tiner, Joshua Aguiar, Ian Carroll, Mike Richardson.

Rhythm: Dan Schnelle, Oliver Newell.

Vox: Tany Ling, Jill Knapp.

Composition / conducting: Andrew Durkin.

I don't think I can make this any clearer...

Thursday morning economic meltdown music

Sometimes it's surprising to learn just how blatant propaganda used to be. Even in the case of one of our better presidents.

Yes, this is (a somewhat bedraggled) Jimmy Durante (and did you notice one of the Three Stooges playing an audience member?).

Somehow the notion of a "schtick" seemed to work during the last Depression. For a good cause, by and large, but still... we're smarter now, aren't we? We're immune to political song and dance, right?

(Sigh.) As if.

(Here's where I got this video, incidentally. In case you have problems viewing it in the post...)

No comment

I haven't really had a huge interest in making any remarks about this "tea-bagging" business (although I do feel a few political posts brewing, just because of all the crazy shit that is happening in general). Honestly, what can one say about it? The whole thing is so misguided and stupid.

It's funny, I get that. But it's also sad. And when one grows tired of laughing at it, and feeling sad about it, and then one notices that it is still there, like a canker sore that won't go away -- then the vibe starts to get a little scary, too.

I don't know, it just feels like the premise is too simple to support all of the jokes it has spawned (and believe me, I'm all for milking a good joke). I basically agree with this brief, effective summary from the Rude Pundit:

Ah, fuck this. Fuck the puns and the mocking. It's just too fucking depressing. Somewhere, Karl Marx is laughing his bearded ass off. Because what is this but classic exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie? It's a bunch of rich fucks, beginning with that tool Rick Santelli on CNBC and ending with the slavering profitmongers at Fox "news," making the poor idiots, who are desperate from fear of or actual job loss and heath insurance loss and home loss, do their bidding. Look at the people attending. Bedraggled Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin wannabes, clinging to the image of those who create the illusion of the working class without the work or the class. Ignorance is such bliss, man.

Yeah.

Of course, the sadist in me was disappointed that no one (as far as I know) bothered to undertake the only appropriate response to the various "parties" that were held around the nation today. To wit: hire some out-of-work porn actors to show up at a protest and start actually tea-bagging each other. (Important: the actors should appear confused and / or hurt when the bona fide protesters express outrage at said actual tea-bagging. "What's the matter? Isn't this what we all came here for?!")

But as I suggested, the joke is getting old.

His what now?

I love Frank Rich, but his latest essay hits the ground running with an absurd premise (which Rich borrows and amplifies):

It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Huh?

Whatever you think of what Obama is doing to try to fix the economy, at least he is trying to fix the economy. (Wasn't the "big story" a few weeks back about how he suddenly has gray hair?) Maybe his solution is wrong, maybe he is being unduly political or cautious, maybe he's just trying to shore up things the way they were, maybe he's secretly in the pockets of the already-entrenched powers-that-be. Or maybe he isn't. But at least he is taking action. And at least he demonstrates a basic level of empathy and concern about the issue.

Bush's Katrina sins, lest we forget, were of a different stripe altogether. When the hurricane hit, Bush was oblivious, incompetent, and criminally cavalier, all at once. His "response" was inaction, and the impression he created was that he did not give a flying fuck. What emergency, remember?

Am I crazy to think there's a difference?

Illogical on its face

So as I'm processing the hype surrounding Glenn Beck's "The 9-12 Project," I have just one simple question.

Mr. Beck: if time travel is your thing, why the hell don't you choose to go back to 9-10 instead of 9-12? That way you can, you know, use your power as a "person of the future" to stop the attack before it happens.

(To your credit, I'm sure that that this is just an oversight on your part, and that you're not exploiting a national tragedy for your own political gain.)

Friday morning economic meltdown music, continued

John Mellencamp covers Woody Guthrie.

More Friday morning economic meltdown music

The immortal Nina.

Hang in there, people!

The intelligence of a box of parrots

This burns with the white-hot fire of eleventy-billion awesome suns. Do you too "find cheap populism oddly arousing"? Watch it.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

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Political Humor
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What Lil Beck said

Via my (increasingly pointless but occasionally entertaining) Twitter feed:

"respectfully disagrees w/ Gov. Jindal & the right wing. how can we afford to NOT fund a flying train?!"

Precisely. How long are we supposed to wait for the future?

The big rah rah

Do you ever feel like maybe you were born on another planet, and were mysteriously placed here merely to observe the weird rituals of this crazy, beautiful phenomenon called humanity?

No? Well, I do.

Example given: I dug the "pseudo state of the union" tonight as much as anyone could -- those of you who follow this blog with even passing regularity know the generally high esteem in which I hold our new president, and it was a pleasure to hear him lay it all out in no uncertain terms. I continue to maintain that he is more or less exactly what our country needs right now.

But the generalized, bipartisan, chortling, back-slapping, wheeling/dealing processional that preceded the speech -- the long masturbatory buildup that has in fact attended every one of these I can remember, going back several presidents -- well, this isn't the first time I've asked myself: honestly, what is the point of that? If there's anything more unseemly than the sight of politicians blatantly trying to win votes, it's the sight of politicians blatantly trying to impress each other while on national television. What are they clapping about? Ain't nothing been fixed yet, mofos.

In other words: less pomp, please, and more focus on the circumstances of our current dilemma.

(Of course, I also think it's absurd that Congress has to dress so formally all the time. So many of our senators/representatives seem to have spent their careers building elaborate facades around themselves -- I wonder if they could keep up that illusion if they had to come to work in their pajamas every once in a while?)

Oh, yes, and: sweet christ in a cummerbund, what possessed MSNBC (and maybe CNN too, I dunno) to employ the much-maligned (and rightfully so) "focus group emotional tracking device" (or whatever the fuck it's called) in "real time" as the speech was happening?

Can we let the campaign go for even thirty seconds?

Hmmm. For some reason, I seem to be cranky tonight.

How The New Yorker is different from The New York Post

Since the IJG dabbles in musical satire and potentially offensive comedic bits from time to time, I try to cut other similarly-inclined artists a lot of slack. Many of my own cultural heroes have pissed somebody off at some point, and I get how that's an occupational hazard for anyone interested in playing around on the fringes.

That's why I didn't say much about the New Yorker cover that caused such controversy during the last presidential election. I mean, on the one hand, I could understand why people were so offended by it.

But I also understand that while politics is a field that calls out for clarity, good art, alas, is often ambiguous. I don't know if the New Yorker cartoon was good art, but it was certainly ambiguous, in that multiple interpretations could be credibly attributed to it. One of those interpretations -- that Obama was a terrorist looking to destroy the US -- was indeed offensive and racist. And the last thing anyone needed at that moment in the campaign was another instance of a fundamentally stupid assumption recklessly tossed into an already volatile discourse. The fact that there was an alternate interpretation of the same cartoon -- a Cleavon-Little-in-Blazing-Saddles interpretation, in which Obama, looking directly at the viewer, seemed to be saying "excuse me while I whip out, and taunt you with, every ridiculous preconception you have about me" -- was less important than the fact that the very people who didn't understand that Obama wasn't a terrorist in the first place would probably never understand that take on the cartoon.



In any case, the bigger point is that with the New Yorker cartoon, at least there was a credible alternative to the racist interpretation. Which is more than can be said for this travesty published by the New York Post.

When pressed about the possible comparison of Obama to a dead chimpanzee, Post editor, Col Allen, provided this rationalization:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy.

Allen is right that sometimes the juxtaposition of seemingly unlike things can lead to witty social commentary. I seem to remember a political cartoon from the 1980 presidential campaign, in which Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Walter Mondale were pictured as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, singing, respectively, "If I only had a brain," "a heart," and "the nerve." But that cartoon worked because there was a connection -- a surprising, funny connection -- between the three candidates and their three unexpected doppelgangers from the Wizard of Oz. In the end, the illustration eloquently and elegantly summed up some of the political criticism that was floating around at the time.

The Post cartoon also makes a connection between two seemingly unlike things, but it is not the connection the paper so disingenuously claims -- that both stories merely happened to be in the news at the same time. Any idiot could create a cartoon using that technique -- and, say what you like, the cartoonist in this case, Sean Delonas, doesn't seem to be an idiot. (He does, however, seem to be a bit of an asshole.)

No, the specific juxtaposition speaks volumes. I mean, shit. Instead of a dead chimp, why not choose other topical and current images of demise? Why not the geese that flew into the engines of the Hudson plane, for instance? Why not the latest kid to get booted off American Idol? Why not the (unfairly) disgraced Michael Phelps? Couldn't the caption "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" have worked equally well in any of those scenarios?

No, there was a particular reason Delonas chose to link the chimp story with the story about Obama's stimulus package -- which was, incidentally, how the bill was described ad nauseum in the weeks leading up to its passage, so no claiming that the unnamed author of the stim is actually Pelosi (as if murdering a different politician would somehow be more palatable). The idea of a "police shooting" comes ready-made with certain associations. The idea of using a chimpanzee as a stand-in for a human being comes ready-made with certain associations. We may not want to admit those associations to ourselves. We may want to pretend that they refer to ancient history. But pretending and denying are not viable (or sane) responses to pathological phenomena.

And don't kid yourself: if we still have this sort of thing floating around in our national psyche, then "pathological" is really the right word.

Everything suddenly got less interesting, and then more interesting again

Everybody's favorite left-wing, named-after-a-rock-guitar-god, Zappa-loving radio host is now off the air. Again.

I understand that some people hate her, and some people love her. But in terms of the overall picture of media bias in this country (which leans pretty far to the right once you get out of the big cities), I'd say on balance that this is a bad development. Though I imagine RR will soon be broadcasting again from somewhere else. The woman is clearly a survivor.

In other news, porn star Stormy Daniels seems to be engaging in a kind of performance art. Hooray for performance art!

(Or maybe it's for real? Nothing wrong with that, in principle. I mean, if this guy can be president...)