Pitchfork's Provincialism

Pitchfork smugly tries to justify its own failures and lack of taste by slagging a perfectly innocent, good but not great, Glasvegas record:

Last year, the NME placed Vampire Weekend on its cover and declared that we were living in a time of renewed greatness in American music. Not long after, a blogger at The Guardian made essentially the same claim. Weirdly, the conventional wisdom for those of us on this side of the Atlantic was just the opposite, the line being that 2008 was a relatively ho-hum time for American indie rock. My suggestion for UK indie: It's not us, it's you. In the past few years, it's too few art school bands, too few mavericks, and too few iconoclasts; it's far too many groups that amount to a haircut, a worn copy of Is This It?, and a provincial accent. Above all, it's far too many bands that confuse ambition with chart placements instead of creativity.

No really, Pitchfork it is you. And here's the proof in your final paragraph:

Here in America, we spent a lot of 2008, and now early 2009, celebrating a noise-pop underground that, in places, takes weak pop songs and slathers them with fuzz and reverb under the pretense of art. In this environment, it's great to see a band like Glasvegas go for it, take their own noise-pop impulses and shoot for the rafters. And yet, not only do they do it on almost every song, in almost the exact same way, but they seem to do just the opposite of the American brethren-- start with the fuzz and reverb, with quality noise-pop, then tack on layer after layer of gloss until their songs are transformed into modern rock. In their rush to be the UK's most important band, they seem to have ignored restraint, charisma, and charm-- the qualities that made them Next Big Thing candidates in the first place.

You can't have it both ways. You're either into the "noise-pop underground" or you're admiring of bands that exhibit "restraint, charisma, and charm." Show me where you have that combination in the 2008 best-of and I'll gladly give it a listen. If 2008 was such a ho-hum year (and believe me it was), why should I be bothered with your celebration of fuzz and reverb just because it has an American accent? Instead what you have is your own set of provincialisms, and anyone who is not from Portland or Brooklyn is not likely to get a fair shake. Talk about the pot and the kettle, what is American indie music but a pair of engineer specks and a worn out copy of Daydream Nation?

The truth is that indie music (as portrayed by Pitchfork and its followers) has lost the plot. It's become a music that doesn't rock, you can't dance to it, it's too stupid to be meaningful, too quiet and self absorbed to be fun. It's essentially devoid of any of those pleasures that might have gotten you into music in the first place. The records themselves are just signifiers for your blog, badges for your Facebook page. You're the right sort of white person. Congratulations and big deal. Whether anyone would actually want to listen to the stuff is beside the point.

Gen-Y Rant

A Gen-Xer at Radar has declared war on Millenials (that means you Gen-Y). At long last, it's time to stop hating on the Boomers and start hating on their second families (y'know, the kids your dad had after he divorced your mom). If you know someone who was born between, let's say, 1980 and 1995, they are, in all likelihood, a complete freaking idiot. And as they get older, they will destroy us all.

Like the Boomers before them, they are materialistic and self-absorbed. Their over-inflated sense of self leaves them delusionaly oblivious to their own lack of talent or aptitude, and renders them incapable of the sort of self-reflection or introspection required for personal growth. They destroy everything they touch turning MTV into "The Hills", transforming punk rock into a mall aesthetic, and transforming the internet into endless drunken facebook, drunken texting, and drunken Flicker.

Beyond that, their basic world view is the infantilization of all adult activities, creating nostalgia for nostalgia, and taking with them childish things wherever they go. Toy collecting, kickball playing, emo-listening know-nothings. Who needs to grow up when you've had parents as great as theirs? Who needs personal growth when you've been so well nurtured from the start? Not them, obviously.

And we, as Gen-Xers have been gently putting up them for far too long. If, like me, you've been worried about getting older, worried about getting squeezed out of the next high tech revolution, the next big cultural moment, worried that our entire generation has been cheated out of its due, its turn, every step of the way, then it's time to fight back. As Gen-Xers we're smarter, better, and tougher than either the Boomers or the Millenials, and we need to remind them of that every chance we get.

Don't sell out, don't buy in. Reject wealth. Reject materialism. Reject fads. Reject trends. Reject moving up the corporate ladder. Reject retirement. Reject the idea that your kid is a genius. Reject youth. Reject bobo-ism. Reject hipster consumerism. Reject the masses. Reject politicians. Reject the news. Reject commercial appeal. Reject nostalgia. Reject apocalyptic thinking. Reject careerism. Reject options. Reject collaboration. Reject fear.

So what if you're 30-something, or 40-something? You survived Ronald Reagan. You saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. You owned Prince on vinyl AND cassette. Heathers and The Breakfast Club are cultural milestones.

Everything they told you when you were 16 was a lie. What, exactly, do you think has changed?

My 9/11 Message

Dear Osama,

I see you have now become a TV evangelist. Not the best idea. We don't care what you think about the mortgage crisis or taxes. We're not going to convert to Islam just because the world is a troubled and confusing place. Chasing from one religion to another doesn't solve anything. More importantly, I don't think you want converts. I think you want foot soldiers. So let's get something straight: the first rule of fight club is you don't sit in a cave and make videos about fight club.

Today is the anniversary of 9/11. I know you think that's a pretty big achievement, but I think you just got lucky. I think it was a one in a million shot. I don't think you could repeat it if you tried. So don't get too excited or puffed up with God's power. God had nothing to do with it.

Some people believe the U.S. is a Christian nation. There's a lot of talk, but not much evidence of it. I'm not a religious person myself, but I can recognize good poetry when I see it. So do yourself a favor and put down the Koran. Go get yourself a copy of Matthew 5-7. It's called the Sermon on the Mount. I know you're a pretty religious guy, so I think you'll dig it. It teaches a very simple message of poverty, charity, service and forgiveness. Loving your enemy. Turning the other cheek. That sort of thing.

It's a little soft. A little tree-huggy. Sort of a crunchy, hippy sort of vibe. But it gets to the heart of the Jesus story, and they are things I don't find much of in my world or yours. So if this really was a Christian nation as so many claim, here's what I would like our leaders say to you: we forgive you.

We will abandon our war on terror. We will abandon our thirst for vengeance. We will give up our hate and fear. We will grieve. We will forgive. We will move on.

Why? Because we are better than you. We have a richer culture, better books, and nicer clothes. We have Lou Reed and James Joyce and Alfred Hitchcock and Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac and David Bowie and Audrey Hepburn and Joy Division and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We have jazz and Lovecraft and Han Shooting First and New Yorker cartoons and Morrissey and The Lord of the Rings and Emily Dickinson and the Bravo network. What have you got?

They won't say anything like that of course. They don't really believe in everything they claim to believe in. They don't really have the courage of their convictions in war or peace. They send 180,000 to fight a war when 400,000 would win it. They claim near-Imperial power for six years but do nothing more than spy, torture, and keep secrets. They serve no one but themselves and those things that will enhance their own power and position.

They won't say it, so I'll say it for them: we forgive you.

The atheists, gays, feminists, liberals, secularists, artists, writers, neo-victorian fetishists, yuppies, squid lovers, karaoke superstars and free-thinkers. Everyone condemned by your backward view of the world: we all forgive you.

You can destroy our buildings and kill our people. But you haven't the power or the will to ever touch our freedom to live, to speak, to think, to love, and believe how we choose. And so, we forgive you.

Come on out of the cave. It's over. Call your kids. Think about retiring to Dubai. Have a good meal. Read a magazine. Take up golf. Religion only leads to disappointment and suffering. Revolutions only lead to the boredom of actually having to govern.

We don't care what you do. We don't care where you go. You and your philosophy are meaningless even in the not so grand scheme of things. You are evil and you are our enemy, but nevertheless, you are forgiven. Now go away.

George Will's Utopian Conservatism

George Will's op-ed yesterday makes a clear, concise, and persuasive argument for conservatism. It's the sort of thing that Andrew Sullivan's always blogging about. Unfortunately, it's pure scholasticism that has nothing to do with the average self-identified conservative or the Republican party. It's an academic argument that ignores history and mis-characterizes the political arguments being made by each side today.

Let's have a look:

Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

Freedom, as the poet says, is just another name for nothing left to lose. Here it is defined as an assumed good without any real substance to back it up. How does the so-called War on Terror support freedom? How does the Patriot Act support freedom? How does opposition to abortion rights support freedom? How does opposition to gay marriage support freedom? It's all nebulous nonsense. With the Republican base being motivated solely by Religion and War, we are less free every day.

But let's move on. He next says that conservatives "are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes". How many ways can he hedge his bets here (inclined, somewhat, sanguine). What he means is that they don't care about inequalities of any kind. In academic conservatism everything works out for the best. Those who work hard, get more. Those who are lazy get less.

So when he says, "Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome," he is not only wordy but both right and wrong. Liberals are more concerned with equality, because liberals view individuals as parts of a whole rather than isolated units pursuing insulated and disconnected destinies. The approach is holistic. How does the individual affect society, how does society affect the individual? More importantly, liberals understand that where you finish is largely based on where you start so if you want change outcomes, you have to put some energy into creating equality of opportunity. Why let the rich kid start at 3rd base, they argue, make him swing the bat!

Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

To a certain degree I am in agreement with the first sentence. Though I think Will is implying that Liberals ignore things like ability and achievement. But either way, things quickly run off the rails. Mostly because he ignores the fact that government is not imposed on us. It is something we created of, by, for, the people to serve a purpose. And even a conservative-based small government would have "to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity" to some degree. So unless he's arguing for anarcho-capitalism, which I doubt, the degree of scope is the only real issue. And under Bush the scope has actually increased so whither conservatism?

More importantly, under Clinton, liberalism learned to step away from big government and social engineering. In fact, the notion that liberalism does anything "increasingly" is sort of comical and hasn't been true since the days of LBJ. Secondly, liberalism does not try to create dependence on its services. They're not the tobacco companies. Government intervention is designed to protect workers and individuals from the predatory inclinations of the market and the corporations that create wealth at the expense of opportunity.

Hence liberals' hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education's semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual's Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses — just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals' advocacy of government responsibility for — and, inevitably, rationing of — health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.

Again the hostility to these privatization programs comes from the fact that they actually undermine and destroy the thing they are trying to improve. Schools, Social Security, Health Insurance are all endangered by privatization which seeks only to increase wealth and eliminate opportunity. All of these moves are un-democratic and openly hostile to anyone except those who can afford to spend the most on education, retirement savings, and health care.

The role of government is to remove the burden of these services off of employees so that they aren't dependent on their jobs for access to these basic institutions. This a particular problem in these days of employment volatility when layoffs and job changes create gaps in healthcare coverage and force workers to spend their 401ks on in-between job survival. Can you imagine if a layoff meant pulling your kids out of school, too?

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction — public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes — a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living — that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

The notion that liberalism is "steadily enlarging dependence" on anything is a straw man. But I do agree that the argument over the welfare state is largely over. The burden of the poor has been shifted from the state to McDonald's and Walmart at below-poverty wages. Well done there.

His choice of the word "modalities" seems unnecessarily wonky. I think he means the way that people view themselves and the world they live in. Their attitudes and approaches to life. I guess this is some gesture to the "pursuit of happiness" but it's a pretty opaque and uninspiring way to phrase it.

The funny part is the way he tries to sneak the demographic argument in there at the end, and blame it on the welfare state. If you want to know why GM is suffering right now, it's because of demographics. Their retirees are too expensive and drive up costs compared to Toyota. If anyone is going to want to shift that burden in the coming years it's going to be the corporations. It's the market which is going to end benefits and shift the burden to the individual who will have nowhere to go but government. There will be some really sorrowful modalities right about then.

This reasoning is congruent with conservatism's argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism's blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.

This is just a mish-mash of arguments following in the line of his happy modalities. Benevolent government makes you a slave, capitalism makes you a better person, an ubermensch. You'll be fitter, happier, and more productive. You're teeth will be whiter to. This goes beyond "sanguine" into pure fantasy.

Conservatism argues, as did the Founders, that self-interestedness is universal among individuals, but the dignity of individuals is bound up with the exercise of self-reliance and personal responsibility in pursuing one's interests. Liberalism argues that equal dependence on government minimizes social conflicts. Conservatism's rejoinder is that the entitlement culture subverts social peace by the proliferation of rival dependencies.

OK, but self-reliance should not force each individual to reinvent the infrastructure that supports daily life. One way or another society has the primary role in building schools, hospitals, and roads. I also think that he misses the point that purpose of equality is to eliminate differences and therefore eliminate rival dependencies. It's only because these groups are embattled by conservatives that their identities become more deeply entrenched.

The entitlement mentality encouraged by the welfare state exacerbates social conflicts — between generations (the welfare state transfers wealth to the elderly), between racial and ethnic groups (through group preferences) and between all organized interests (from farmers to labor unions to recipients of corporate welfare) as government, not impersonal market forces, distributes scarce resources. This, conservatism insists, explains why as government has grown, so has cynicism about it.

Like I said, social conflicts are increased when groups are under attack by conservative policies which seek to undermine their opportunities in the name of increasing wealth for the few. Create a system of true equality, and you won't need group based entitlements. If you really want to get nasty about it, the biggest part of the government is the military, and the greatest recipients of government's benevolence are military families who are given guaranteed pensions, and subsidies for everything from health care to groceries. If you want impersonal market forces to rule, let's see you privatize the U.S. Army.

Racial preferences are the distilled essence of liberalism, for two reasons. First, preferences involve identifying groups supposedly disabled by society — victims who, because of their diminished competence, must be treated as wards of government. Second, preferences vividly demonstrate liberalism's core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses. Conservatism argues that the essence of constitutional government involves constraining the state in order to allow society ample scope to spontaneously take unplanned paths.

Wow, this one's really disturbing. Because Will falsely believes that capitalism provides us with a frictionless meritocracy he sees minorities as having "diminished competence" where the reality is that many, many people in this country are poor and lack opportunities that people who wear bow ties take for granted. Also, if he objects to the "core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses" than he must also object to the Civil Rights Movement, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Union's prosecution of the Civil War. He must also object to the Right to Life movement, and those who oppose Same-Sex Marriage, Stem Cell Research, Human Cloning. Let's spontaneously take some unplanned paths, shall we?

Conservatism embraces President Kennedy's exhortation to "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country," and adds: You serve your country by embracing a spacious and expanding sphere of life for which your country is not responsible.

Now that's just wishful thinking. When Kennedy asked the nation to serve the country, he meant that people should, like, serve their country. Help the poor. Create a better a sense of community and embrace the notion that we're all in this together. Not go off to the suburbs and hope that our combined commitment to selfishness and consumerism would somehow manifest itself as a greater good.

Here is the core of a conservative appeal, without dwelling on "social issues" that should be, as much as possible, left to "moral federalism" — debates within the states. On foreign policy, conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism's undoing domestically — hubris about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.

Ha! Hahahahahahah! He can't be serious. He just can't. Does he even know who the president is? Has he not heard of Iraq? What on earth is he talking about. What is our occupation if not the belief that American benevolence comes at the end of a rifle, and that our presence is not just good for Iraq, but it makes the Iraqis better. Our foreign policy is all of the worst aspects of the conservative critique of "liberal government dependence" with the added bonus that when stuff get's out of whack, you just kill a bunch of people. Hubris? Where do you even start. Our presence in the world is based on the belief that if we fight enough wars we'll have complete control. No alarms and no surprises.

Conservatism is realism, about human nature and government's competence. Is conservatism politically realistic, meaning persuasive? That is the kind of question presidential campaigns answer.

OK, so this gets us back to the fact that Will is actually trying to argue against the current Republican party in the name of a conservatism that doesn't really exist anywhere except in the newly emergent anti-war right. But why make all of these straw man arguments about Liberalism. Let's see someone stand up to the real issues plaguing this country: religious divisiveness, xenophobia and imperialistic war mongering. All of which are problems that cut to the core values of conservatism.

Trying to argue that the current Republican administration isn't really conservative is like some aging Marxist academic arguing that the Soviet Union wasn't real communism. One thing leads to another. Own up to the fact that you let things get out of hand.

Those of us on the left are just trying to survive conservatism as its practiced. Who cares about these convenient redefinitions.

On the other hand, if you really wanted us to embrace realism and a healthy skepticism about government's competence, you couldn't have done better than forcing us to live with eight years of George W. Bush. I'm convinced! Find me the next Richard Nixon, and he'll have my vote.

Hitchens is reviewed in Salon (and other thoughts)

Hitchens gets the Salon treatment today, and the fur flies in the letters section.

By and large, the reviewer gives the book the "yes, but, and" treatment. As in "yes, we know that religion hasn't always lived up to its own standards, but this isn't anything new, and there isn't anything you can do about it anyway."

Yes, but, and works for all pseduo-contrarian arguments these days:

• "yes, we know that global warming is a problem, but we need to do more research, and there's nothing you can do to fix it anyway."
• "yes, we know the Iraq war is a mess, but we're there now, and we have to finish what we started regardless"

Folks in the letter pages go for the more standard rejections:

• Ad hominems (Hitchens is a drunk, a war supporter, a marxist)
• Atheist arguments are themselves arrogant, faith based, blind to their own inadequacies
• Secular states were just as bad if not worse in Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, and Mao's China
• Materialists just can't comprehend the mind blowingness of genuine religious experience
• There's more to life than just reason and logic

My response would be that:

• Yes, Hitchens is a jerk, but he's really scary smart
• This a rhetorical gambit, trying to establish symmetry between two sides of an argument where none exists. Religion makes unsupportable claims, Atheism is a critique.
• Atheists have rejected Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. If these were religious sects, Hitler would be a martyr.
• Materialists believe in the mind blowingness of life without resort to imaginary third parties.
• There is more to life. Music, literature, gardening, family, you name it.
  

My point, and I don't know if this has anything to do with Hitchen's argument (I'm waiting for his book to arrive), is that religion is not separate from my world view, it is a subset of what I would call culture and the humanities. If you read Joseph Campbell, he describes how high religion took on and elaborated on the mythic traditions of primitive societies. Similarly, art and literature in the modern period are what Campbell called Creative Mythologies, which take on the role once served by the high religions of the East and the West.

The persistence of the high religions into the 21st century is a historical anachronism that puts them out of touch with human experience as it is lived today. The sacred texts of the modern period are to be found in Shakespeare and Melville and Joyce. If you want to understand the past read mythology for its historical and cultural insights. If you want to understand the present, read Pynchon or watch the Sopranos.

The Kaus Files, A Rant

Mickey Kaus's Kausfiles is a constant irritant. I only started reading it again because I enjoy his talks with Robert Wright on Bloggingheads.tv.

He's usually just annoying. Like when he advocates rear wheel drive cars even though he lives in California and will never have to drive on ice. Or when he tries to be provocative by defending right wing basilisks like Ann Coulter. But his constant bashing of labor unions just highlights the fact that the guy is dilettante who's never held down a real job in his life (you might say that writing is a 'real job' but the way he does it, one get the impression that it's just a hobby).

People who hate labor unions are people who hate workers and hate worker's protections.

Most employers who complain about unions kind of resent having employees to begin with. They'd much rather have robots or a slave-labor economy where worker-drones are easily disposed of and replaced depending on management's whim.

What they don't want are actual people who need wages to support themselves. Not actual people who need health care, and vacation time, and money for retirement.

The reason that unions are a problem for Ford is because EVERYTHING is a problem for Ford. Ford can't even run the Detroit Lions! They've got lousy cars, and a lousy business structure. The reason that workers aren't unionizing under Toyota, is that Toyota will pack up and move to the next town if they do. Ford is negotiating from a point of weakness, Toyota from strength. The real crime is that the Toyota workers won't have any say when Toyota decides to move to Mexico or China in ten years.

And never mind the fact that unions serve to certify the work being done. The Electrician's union and the other trade unions actually train and test their own apprentices to ensure that work is consistent and meets professional standards. You want to know what you get when the construction industry tries to get around unions? Illegal immigrants doing uncertifiable work for cheap wages. Makes you wonder, huh, conservatives?

And never mind that that other punching-bag of the right, Teacher's Unions is hated and despised because the right secretly hates and despises the whole idea of universal education. C'mon, they're the same right-wing flat-earthers who want Creationism taught as science, and consider art, music, and literature to be "fluff" (or worse-yet, pomo, left-wing indoctrination -gasp!).

My real question though is less a rant, than an actual question: if unions are such a bad idea, then why do actors and professional athletes belong to them? I mean these people are millionaires, right?

I'm guessing it's because collective bargaining ensures that their jobs and pay are protected from managment greed. Just a guess, though.

So I'm thinking, if it's good enough for Kobe Bryant and Meryl Streep, it ought to be good enough for Detroit and much of the rest of the country as well.