fresh hell
Horrible as the situation in Iraq already is, somehow every day seems to bring a new bit of fresh hell: Congressional testimony that foreign workers are being kidnapped and mistreated to build the US Embassy in Baghdad.
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Horrible as the situation in Iraq already is, somehow every day seems to bring a new bit of fresh hell: Congressional testimony that foreign workers are being kidnapped and mistreated to build the US Embassy in Baghdad.
I don’t think I’m the only one who looks at what has happened to the US in the last six years and feels we’re trapped in a nightmare. A slow-moving Kafka play where fundamental values are trampled every day, and no one in politics or the media seems to care, or even to notice.
There are lots of overlapping reasons for this—things like consolidation of media ownership into a few gigantic corporations, the rise of media “stars” in sycophantic relationship to those in power, the escalating costs of elected office resulting in politicians spending all their time fundraising instead of learning how to govern, the dominance of the military-industrial complex and its hydra-headed sister, Big Oil. Those all tend to explain why it’s been so difficult to stop the Bush Administration from doing whatever the hell it wants to do. But it doesn’t explain why the administration does what it’s doing in the first place.
I mean, I don’t know how many times I read statements from the President or administration officials or right-wing politicians, and find myself asking out loud, “What fucking planet are these people on?” And it’s a serious question, not just an expression of frustration.
[This is going to be long, and maybe kinda dry, so for those of you who just want to hear what my cats have been up to, I’ll have mercy and continue this discussion after the jump.]
A number of writers have made a persuasive case—persuasive to my way of thinking, anyway—that the Republican party has become dominated by authoritarianism.
You may not be familiar with authoritarianism, which in this context is frequently referred to as Rightwing Authoritarianism or RWA. The authoritarian personality type has been studied for more than half a century, and tends to display a distinct cluster of characteristics:
Sound like anybody you’ve read about in the papers lately? More to the point, does this sound like the kind of person to whom George Bush or Dick Cheney seem to be speaking, every single time they speak?
The guy who truly seems to be the expert in the study of RWA is a Canadian social scientist named Bob Altenmeyer. He has been doing this for decades, and his research makes fascinating reading. His scientific methods are first-rate, but he knows how to explain himself in a non-technical and entertaining way. An entire book of his on this subject is online in PDF form, and I can’t recommend it enough. If you would rather read a hard copy, you can order it for under $10.
I’m no expert on authoritarianism (though I did study it briefly as a psych major in college). What brings it all together for me, as an explanation for so much of the insanity around us, is the way everything in the RWA world comes down to fear. As Altenmeyer is quoted by Paul Rosenburg, “High RWAs stand about ten steps closer to the panic button than the rest of the population,” he concluded, “They see the world as a more dangerous place than most others do, with civilization on the verge of collapse and the world of Mad Max looming just beyond.”
I just know the more I read about this stuff, the more things start to make sense. Here are a few places you can read about RWA if you’re interested:
Wikipedia entries on Right-wing Authoritarianism and Social dominance orientation.
As I’ve already quoted from it twice, Paul Rosenburg has an excellent series of blog posts on this topic:
The third of the series is the most directly related to what I’m talking about; the second is compelling if you are willing to work through a lot of statistical data, while the first is probably best left to hard-core sociologists. If you’re interested in this subject, probably the best place to start is here: Rosenburg’s series was originally inspired by a Glenn Greenwald post from early 2006: Do Bush followers have a political ideology? Greenwald has commented (brilliantly, IMHO) on this theme a number of times since. He is now a featured columnist at Salon.com, and if you can put up with a 15-second commercial to access Salon’s content, he’s well worth reading.
So there you go. Really, these people are much more interesting writers than I am (except maybe for Wikipedia). So, shoo now.
Okay, now I can start catching up. Here are a whole bunch of things I’ve really wanted to post about and haven’t had a chance. In no particular order:
Did you know you can send text messages from iChat to cell phones? I didn’t until a couple days ago. Here’s how. I tested it by texting to Elise—it works fine, and best of all you can use a keyboard instead of doing all that thumb-twiddling stuff.
Wolfgang’s Vault, the amazing repository of untold concert recordings, has resurrected Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock online. They have lots of new content, but from issue #14 here’s a reprint of a 1968 Paul Williams article about the current state of the music business. Amazing how similar the situation is these days, though from all I hear it’s actually worse now. This is a topic for another time, but it’s pretty obvious in five years the music business will bear very little resemblance to the complex and dysfunctional monster we have known all these years. I don’t know if it will be any better, but it will certainly be different.
Here’s a tutorial I want to try, from CreativePro.com: how to create the layered look in Photoshop. It gives kind of an Illustrator look to the image, and in fact you can go ahead and trace it in Illustrator if you want. Seems easy and pretty fun.
I followed a link from a cool shirt at my favorite t-shirt site, and found that I like Travis Pitt’s art work a whole lot.
There’s lots more—in fact I’m only halfway through my list—but I need to go do some things, so I’ll try to post later or tomorrow or something.
Thanks to Janet Jameson (who plays with Nation and Fundada these days), Steve Davis and Gary Butler (from Liverpool), and Duncan somebody (whom I’m afraid I don’t know) for sitting in on a couple Beatles songs. And to Cliff Eveland (who also ran sound) and Scotty Yates (both play with Issues) for playing an Allman Brothers song and something else. I don’t remember what the other song was, even though I played on it, because it was after 2 am at that point and I was beyond fried both mentally and physically. And special thanks to Doug Medlock for closing the night with improvised and hilarious lyrics on “Folsom Prison.”
I didn’t dare have anything to drink (except coffee and Coke) all night, because there were just too many songs I hadn’t thought about for 15 years, plus the physical challenge of playing drums really hard for five hours. We had two rehearsals, but that’s not enough for that much material. There were plenty of mistakes, and a lot of great songs we didn’t get to. But still, the audience seemed to have a really good time.
Thanks again, everybody!
Next year, don’t even think about booking a session to record vocals on July 3rd. Firecrackers—especially M80s—make this a very bad plan.
My neighborhood is usually very quiet, but right now it sounds like downtown Baghdad. Somebody just set something off even bigger than an M80—I felt the house shake under my feet. At least it’s been raining the last week, so we don’t have to worry about fires.
I’m not much into firecrackers any more. In a fraction of a second a firecracker can make my ears ring worse than hours of loud music. Where’s the fun in that?