The Essayist #13: On the Perils of Collective Englightenment

Catholic Light has a fairly typical broadside 'gainst the failure of the Left to stand up for its beloved Free Speech, but with a bonus; he actually points out what the purpose of free speech is:

At its noblest, this was a recognition that no human institution could long survive without honest criticism, protected from reprisals such as arrest or confiscation of property.

Seen in this light, freedom of speech is not a grace for all forms of expression, but a guaruntee that he or she who speaks for the purpose of pointing out folly or proposing a new cours of action will not be attacked. Argument, the process of persuasion and counter-persuasion, is not only permitted, but expected of all who would take part in public affairs.

One could call this the great inheritance of the Englightenment. But one would have to be careful. The Left no longer believes in one of the main tenets of the Englightenment, that the Englightenment was universally applicable. Structuralism has made the Enlightenment nothing more than the ersatz tribal religion of the Modern West, no more inherently valid than Sharia. If conflict is to be avoided, follows the logic, respect for all belief systems must be practiced.

It used to be that conservatives favored doing nothing as much as possible. "If ten logs are rolling at you," remarked Calvin Coolidge, "nine of them will fall into a ditch before they get you." Now it is the socialist who favors sitting tight and waiting for all this Islamic bither-bother to just pass over. Apologize for your insensitivity, and everything will be all right.

One wonders how the 18th-century philosophes would have reacted to such. Some, like Voltaire, would be eminently predictable. But what about others? Would Rousseau have so strenuously defended free speech against the offended masses of more, *ahem* "natural" people (as everyone not European was supposed to be)? Or would he be on the side that says that the Islamic rage must be understood in light of the West's own record of enslavement?

More Catholic Light:

Cowardice is only part of the explanation for the Left's silence. They also believe that the Darker Peoples are less than fully human, and can't be fully blamed for any of their actions. This crude racialism permeates and corrupts their moral sense on most social issues. Foremost, and most shamefully, many Leftists sympathize with the Islamofacists' goal of destroying the West.

The two groups don't agree with each other on every issue -- the Western Left practically regards gay sex as a sacrament, and Islamofacists wouldn't mind stoning gays to death. The latter group's views on "the status of women" are notoriously retrograde. In their fundamental view of Western civilization, though, their critiques are roughly the same: it is dangerously corrupt, exercises a malign influence in the world, and its power should be thwarted at every opportunity.

I wonder how well-thought-out this all is. I wonder if the kind of perverse incentives created when non-muslims are expected to show the same respect for Mohammed that Muslims are, has been considered. I don't think it has. Enlightenment seems to have become like Salvation in the minds of its heirs: something done for us a long time ago, to which we owe neither effort nor thought. Where does the mind belong in such a world?

Greatest Songs #4:

De La Soul -- "Millie Pulled a Pistol On Santa" (1991, from De La Soul is Dead)

As I've earlier indicated, I'm not the biggest fan of rap, or hip-hop, or whatever term might be considered more "street" at this micro-juncture of time. There's too much splash and not enough true creativity; too much chest-pounding and not enough soul. I am fully aware that such can easily be charged against my favorite forms of music. This may be just a preference on my part; nevertheless, I think the criticisms valid, and certainly un-controversial, as they are shared by many.

That said, there are a few acts out there I do like, because they make the effort to step above the banal brutality and blingery of most and try to actually say something or tell a real story. You'd think a genre of music in which lyricism was considered the point would put a premium on thought, but alas, such is usually not the case. For the few for whom it is, I have great respect. A Tribe Called Quest is one such group. Public Enemy, much as I roll eyes at their politics, is another. De La Soul may be my favorite.

De La Soul Is Dead was the group's second album, and their answer to the more HARRDDDDcore acts that dissed the first. They gleefully attack the pretenses of their detractors both directly and subtly (check out "Johnny's Dead," the most hilarious send-up of strap'd ghetto boyz in tha hood and their presumed demises yet recorded, so completely off-center that the group itself can't get through it with a straight face), and demonstrate a capacity to move beyond Standard Rap Lyrics to bespeak something of real tragedy.

"Millie" tells the story of a social-worker named Dylan, who is beloved of the troubled kids he helps (the narrator included, who makes himself a character in the drama), and is sufficiently devoted to the community to serve as a mall Santa during the Christmas season. He's also an abusive parent who molests his daughter Millie. Hilarity ensues.

One of the treats of this song is the piano sample that carries the melody; it's hard to categorize by genre, as it jumps along, sounding as much like band music as anything else. The beat, by contrast, is softer, but not neutered, and is powerfully evident in the chorus sections. The effect of this is a mixture of brightness and repressed evil, a back-and-forth that mirrors the story.

In the end, Millie morphs from sweet victim to spirit of vengeance; one section of the song has Millie asking the narrator if he could find her a weapon. He asks what for, she tells him, and he refuses to believe her. This is the most affecting aspect of the story; as the narrator, without saying so, assumes his share of guilt for all those who see and do nothing. No matter, Millie gets her pistol, and heads for the mall, and confronts her father/victimizer with same before a crowd of suddenly terrified children. He begs for mercy, she guns him down, and "with the quickness it was over." Full stop.

Does anyone now require me to explain why I never thought much of Eminem?


#5

Why Bush Can't Win

The American alternative to Dubai World Ports.

I gotta say, I still think it would be the preferable alternative. Politically, anyway.

Death to a Contradiction

Rich Lowry on the end of Big-Government Conservatism:

When the GOP begins its post-Bush departure — roughly after the midterm elections in November, when the 2008 presidential nomination race begins — "big-government conservatism" will probably end up on the ash heap. The party will have to relearn what it used to know: A strong government is a limited government.

The interesting idea there is "post-Bush". Are we prepared for such a landscape? What will the GOP take from Bush? What will the other party learn from him? What will either of them fight for, or against, in his absence?

I ask these questions because I hope that 2009 will be a vastly different landscape. And I'm sure it will be. But I fear it won't be different enough.

Danes Craving Boons From Their Lords...

The summation of this Mark Steyn piece is the usual on-the-money assault on our cowardly media elite:

It's easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions "the public's right to know" about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they've no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of "sensitivity" to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet's face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney's ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C'mon, guys, these are interesting times.

But one may miss the truly disturbing passage:

Surrounded by cabinet ministers and a phalanx of imams, Velbjorn Selbekk, the editor of an obscure Christian publication called Magazinet, issued an abject public apology for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons. He had initially stood firm in the face of Muslim death threats and the usual lack of support from Europe's political class, but in the end Mr. Selbekk was prevailed upon to recant and the head of Norway's Islamic Council, Mohammed Hamdan, graciously accepted the apology and assured the prostrate editor that he was now under his personal protection.

Europe, allow me to introduce you to Feudalism. I believe you've met.

I Can't WAIT for Next Year's Oscars!

IowaHawk has the goods on Hollywood's attempt to right the ship in 2006.

It's satire, naturally, but it begs the question: How long before we the Great Unsatisfied stop depending on these self-indulgent, mal-educated swine to provide us with cinema?

For God's Sake, Get Out of Iraq Now

Before the natives wipe all our soldiers in their rage against us.

A Friendly truce to the "War Against Boys"

Cathy Young doesn't have any answers to the issue of male underachievement in school and college, but she thoughtfully applies the brakes to some of the screechier rhetoric, and that in itself is welcome. Me, I think the anti-intellectual, thuggish culture that has been sold to boys is Prime Suspect until someone convinces me otherwise.

Here's an old post from the Notion underlying this theme that I wrote of in "Mean Girls, Boo Hoo."

Play the Marseailles

And so it becomes a question of who can out-shout the other. It a war with embassy burnings and public protests on one side, and cartoon contests (Warning: Some Images Not Work Safe) on the other, who wins? One wants to bet on the side that does the physical damage, but I don't know.

I keep thinking of the scene in Casablanca, when Paul Henreid instructs the band to play the Marseailles to counter the jovial Jerries then blaring their way through "Die Wacht am Rhein". The crowd all goes for it, even though only a minority are French. At first the Germans try to drown the crowd out, but eventually they toss in the towel and glower.

'Course, they proceed to shut the cafe down and do some other evil things, so its clear that protest has its limits. But I begin to wonder if saying the unsayable is going to become a habit.

Incidentally...

I'm belatedley taking part in the great Cartoon Blogburst of '06, because it all seems like the same old, same old, to me. Christian fundies shriek, they're called names and made fun of (as they should be, but I have a different definition of "fundie" than some). Islamic fundies shriek, and the lettered class falls over themselves to whip themselves for "insensitivity". We've all seen this movie: they can only get mad at white people, but I'm the racist for being a fan of my own culture and for wishing everyone to be held to the same standard. So what's for dinner?

Yet it's useful to point out just how low they enemy is prepared to sink, how baldly they're prepared to state their ambitions. Et voila...

But don't let it trouble you. Just keep chanting that it's all Bush's fault.

Wow.

I followed this link from this Vodkapundit post because I was inspired by the latter. After all, wouldn't it be better if we could fight this with words more than bullets, and if we could actually agree on the enemy?

But then I watched as the speed with which Kossaks managed to say "Ah! the Saudi Government's behind it, and that means it's all a scam to blind us from Chimpy McSmirkaburtonCo's Lies and the Lying Liars who Lie Those Lies!" and proceed from there.

Yeah, I don't think Stephen should hold his breath waiting for the Left to stop fighting yesterday's war.

Greatest Songs #5

Beck - "Beautiful Way" (1999, from Midnite Vultures)

It's fitting that I start the top five with a departure from form, both from the tone of most of the songs on this list and the artist known as Beck. Midnite Vultures was Beck's first mess-with-my-palette album, a sea change before Sea Change. He basically took away all the blues-country, white-trash elements that had marked his earlier work in favor of a pure R&B booty-beat partaaaay. It's self-consciously an album to get laid to, and I'm not entirely sure if it really works as such (tunes like "Debra" for example, are a little too goofy. Humor has a limited place in the realm of Eros). But "Beautiful Way" is a step outside the groove, a morning-after seperation song that ought to have been the last track, but wasn't (that honor goes to the aforementioned "Debra").

We start with a deep, soft melody, a gentle kiss with piano and bass, and a bare minimum of the sound-effects collage that graces most Beck tunes. Then comes Beck's voice, plain and unaffected:

Searchlights on the skyline
Just lookin' for a friend
Who's gonna love my baby
When she's gone around the bend?

Ah, the Departure Song, a well-worn groove in the annals of Pop Consciousness; how typical of the Love Album to pay homage to Love's Afterbirth. Yet paying attention to the lyrics provides some interesting variations. Note the fact that Becks isn't wondering who's going to love him. This could be a sign that he's got a line waiting for him back at his crazy sawinging bachelor pad, but I don't think so. He's actually wondering who's going to love her: How she's going to fare. Again, we could chalk this up to male arrogance, but I don't find anything constructive in that. For once, the guy's watching her leave without bemoaning his own fate.

The refrain
:

Ooooooooooooooh,
Such a beautiful way to break my heart
Ooooooooooooooh,
Such a beautiful way to break your heart
(Bum bum bum) There's someone calling my name
(Bum bum bum) She's gonna miss that train (Bum bum bum)

As silly as this reads, when you hear it, you can't help being caught up in the rising emotion, or singing along with the "Bum bum bum's". And the viewpoint is mature, knowing, appreciative. He feels the loss of her, aches for more time, but doesn't want her to miss her train. Our hearts are broken, and damn, it's beautiful. C.S. Lewis would approve.


#6

Quote for the Day

"Nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum." -Evan Coyne Maloney.

Now that's a connection I like.

I Think I See The Confusion...

Atrios seems to think that M.A.D. will solve all our problems with Iran:

I don't want Iran to have nukes. I don't think that's a good thing for the world. I certainly didn't want Pakistan or India to have nukes. But is a nuclear Iran really a threat to us? Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn't mutually assured destruction, it's you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!

The problem, you see, is what exactly "fuck with us a little bit" means. The Iranians have been "fucking with us" more than a little bit since 1979, and they seem to still be nicely radiation-free. Iran has been exporting and funding terror for a long time, and has yet to pay any serious consequence for it. There has been hope, since 9/11, that the mullarchy would collapse of its own unpopularity, but so far it's been more like 1905 than 1917 over there. And now they're going nuclear.

Atrios may sound bellicose now (do you notice how he sounds like one of those stereotype SAC generals from the sixties, babbling about "acceptable losses"?), but you can bet he'd be against doing anything against Iran once they've made their first mushroom cloud. Hell, the Bush Administration will oppose action at that point. And that's why the mullahs want them. Nations don't go nuclear to blow anything up; they go nuclear to join the exclusive club of countries that may not be attacked or invaded.

Nuclear Iran means an Iran that will be a worldwide troublemaker for a long time to come. Nuclear Iran means the Iranian people will suffer under the weight of tyranny for a long time to come. Nuclear Iran means a Cold War with Terror with the extra wild card of terrorists who will suddenly have access to nuclear weapons. Is Atrios proposing that we blame Iran if a dirty-bomb is strapped to the Lincoln Memorial? Is Atrios proposing that we launch nuclear weapons against Iran if a dirty-bomb goes off in Times Square? And if he is, could we have him on record on that? Wouldn't want any confusion on the order of the Clinton Administration's determination of what "regime change" means...

By the way, I know that he wrote that this isn't "mutually assured destruction," and in a sense, he's quite right. But the argument that the enemy won't launch because he faces obliteration is the same.

Jonah to Kanye: Nigg@, Please...

Here's a perfect bromide 'gainst the tedious claims of victimhood by those who have every reason to expect to be rewarded, not punished, for their actions:

Clearly borrowing from the same press release, publications across the country proclaim that the "outspoken rapper defends his brash attitude inside the magazine."

Ah, yes. It's about time. After all, it's so rare to find a rapper with a brash attitude. Normally they're shy, retiring types overflowing with modesty and humility. I was particularly enamored with the "aw, shucks" Andy Griffith personalities of Niggaz Wit Attitude and the late Tupac Shakur.

My personal opinion of Kanye West is hard to describe, because I don't have one. I know he's been billed in some quarters as the savior of rap, I guess because he uses his real, actual name instead of a street handle (course, I might be wrong even on that). But that makes me at best indifferent, because I'm at best indifferent to rap music, and always have been.

This isn't racism. I'm a big fan of black music: jazz, blues, R&B (real R&B, not the singing-over-beats that gets passed of as R&B today). But rap is about as simple a form of music as you can get: musically speaking, the real artists are the producers, who try to stuff as much ephemera as they can onto a track without stifling the beat.

I'm not one who says it takes no talent to do that. As post-modern noise collage, it's interesting. But the people who do that, are by and large not the people who rake in the fame and adulation (this is me separating rap, or hip-hop, from techno, electro, and any other producer's medium that doesn't have people stone-cold rhyming over the top of it): it's the guys who talk HARD who get famous. And I never understood what they were famous for.

Look, I get that 90% of pop music stardom is image. I'm fully comfortable with denouncing the majority of rock music as garbage, too. But it doesn't take much to note that for all the emphasis rapper's place on words, they almost never say anything.

My brother and I came up with a term for it: S.R.L. or Standard Rap Lyrics. Most songs start with a declaration of combativeness, proceeding from the rappers awesomeness and a boast about his mike skills, move on to declare that this king of the Mike is backed up by an equally cool crew, then touch on the rappers skill at procuring female companionship and his favorite mind-altering substances. All of which is repeated around some basic catchphrase.

A second variety involves what I call R.T.B. or Rapping the Blues. This involves a lament about something or other, and usually follow a formula similar to something Robert Johnson would have understood. This is slightly preferable, but still inhabiting a well-worn groove.

My point is, a musical form that lionizes lyricism should be demanding about the lyrics that lionizes. Lacking that, it becomes but a new form of bling-enhanced shucking and jiving.

"Government is too big and controls too much money."

So said the newly-elected House Majority Leader. I hope he means it. Of course, then he goes and says this:

We need clearer ethical standards and greater transparency about their campaign contributions--if we're going to continue to allow such contributions at all--and we need to reform the laws governing so-called 527 organizations.

So bad lobbying happens because there's too much money and power that the federal government wields, but bad campaign finance happens because the federal government doesn't wield enough power? How does that work?

John Kerry's Homer Moment

"Statistics can be used to prove anything. 40% of all people know that."