Hooray for Cosmetics!

Made a few changes to the site. The comments now seem to be available: and my rear end thus wide open for attack. Go on...make it hurt.



Don't know if I've got my archive links taking over the page issue fixed yet. I'll probably have to publish this post to find out.

UPDATE: No. Maybe I'll do like Volokh and stick my archives underneath my links. Ah, well...

Doh!

This guy beat me to the punch on the Phillipine war analogy. That'll learn me.


But he left quite a few things out. There's still hope for my laziness.

Adding to Aristotle, via Machiavelli

Or, Begging Some Ph.D. to Give Me the Mockery I Richly Deserve



Recently I picked up at my favority little hole-in-the-wall book and music shop a copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which I will analyze next week, and a compendium of Machiavelli, containing both The Prince, and his longer and less famous work, The Discourses. I'd read the former in high school, and had somehow mislaid my copy. The latter book I'd heard of but never read, and have only just skimmed the first two chapters when something occurred to me.



Attempting to describe the origin of the Roman Republic, Machiavelli harkens back to an idea loosely derived from Aristotle, that their are six kinds of government. Three of these are "good" in the sense of being moderate and devoted to providing justice and good order: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (which Aristotle would have called polity). The evil twins of these forms are the three bad kinds: monarchy devolves into tyranny, aristocracy devolves into oligarchy, and democracy devolves into chaos and mob rule (which Aristotle, seemingly just to make it confusing, referred to as democracy). Aristotle seemed to think that a system of government which mixed these forms would be most stable, and Machiavelli seems to be agreeing, and, if I guess at his gist right, will be arguing that the Roman Republic was just such an attempt.



I remember ideas of this kind from poly-sci classes in both high school and college, and remember in particular one professor pointing out that the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1787 were working from this premise. Thus, our constitution was a practical experiment in "mixed" government: the seperate executive branch represents monarchy, the Senate represents aristocracy (or so it was originally envisioned, when state legislators elected senators, not the people), and the House of Representatives represent the masses.



All of which makes the average American kid pat himself on the back for belonging to the nation that had such wise founders, but as one ages, one sees the cracks in the system. For one thing, the Senate has been as subject to the popular winds as the House since 1913, and even when it wasn't, does being elected by the representatives of the people at the state level really seperate them from the vox populi enough to be considered aristocratic. And given the science that gerrymandered construction of "safe" congressional districts in the House, one could hardly be faulted for suggesting that the Senate is actually more responsive to shifts in popular winds. If you doubt me, consider this statistic, while control of the Senate has changed hands 5 times in the past 24 years (in 1982, 1986, 1994, 2001, and 2002) control of the House has changed only once in the same period.



It also used to bother me that these analyses always left out the judicial branch. The Founders may have intended the third branch to be the weakest, but it's difficult to say so now. In fact, if De Toqueville was right and America's aristocracy is the legal profession, I would say that the black-robed savants of the Supreme Court are the true grandées of the land. They command, and even the President obeys; after all, in most cases the President belongs to their class, just as any King was also a nobleman.



Satisfying as such impertinence is, it is not the true goal of my thoughts here. Machiavelli seems to be suggesting that Aristotle's polity = our republic and I submit that such ought to be considered the fourth kind of good government, seperate from democracy. This will do much in helping to explain the differences between the presidential and the parliamentary system. In England, the official executive (the Queen) is weak, practically a cypher, while true executive power derives from control of the legislature, which, because of tighter party discipline, results in greater control of policy by the voters.



In their elections, British subjects vote less for a specific man, than one of two or more party platforms, and the party that wins usually enacts that platform with a minimum of fuss, by majority vote. Our political parties are much less disciplined, and our committee systems much more convoluted, so legslative defeats are common for the party in power. Therefore, in spite of the fact that Britain is officially a monarchy, I would describe it as functionally a democracy (in the good sense), whereas despite the democratic trappings of the American goverment, I would describe it as functionally a mixed government, or a republic.



But we have a conundrum here. For each of Machiavelli's three good forms, there is a bad form. Anyone aquainted with the history of Rome knows that her Republic did not last forever, but slipped away from it, its forms preserved (the Senate of Rome continued to meet, in various guises, into the Medieval period) but its substance utterly transformed. Similarly, 200 years past 1787, and there is virtually no one in America who believes that the government created in her Constitution is a flawless example of "good" government. Republicans believe as a matter of course that something has gone wrong since the founding, and Democrats believe that the system requires constant revision to meet the needs of succeeding generations (the "living Constitution"). So what is the republic's version of tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule?



Let us return, as Machiavelli did, to Rome. When the Republic died, it did not backslide into the hereditary monarchy of the Tarquins. The Emperors of Rome sometimes inherited their positions, but more often they fought for them or were appointed to them by their unrelated predecessor. In the struggle between the nobility and the commoners of Rome, the winner was the army that served them both. It became the undisputed emperor-maker, and very soon after Augustus became a law unto itself, often beyond even the power of the emperor to control. However, the army, far from being an exclusive club, was open to all citizens and (later on) non-citizens. Do your time and earn your place and you too would ride the gravy train, and if popular enough, even stood a chance of calling yourself Caeser.



What do we call an institution that purports to be servants of the people but really holds power well beyond their official task, and really pursues its own ends, and rewards members not for serving the public good but for playing the game by the institutions own rules and traditions?



I submit that the best term is found in this editorial by British historian Paul Johnson in the July '03 issue of Forbes. Chastizing European anti-Americanism as cultural racism as ignorant as anything Americans are accused of being, Johnson writes:

The truth is, on the European Continent there is little experience of working democracy. Italy and Germany have had democracy only since the late 1940s; Spain, since the 1960s. France is not a democracy; it is a republic run by bureaucratic and party elites, whose errors are dealt with by strikes, street riots and blockades instead of by votes. Elements of the French system are being imposed throughout the EU, even in countries such as Denmark and Sweden that have long practiced democracy with success. In a French-style pseudodemocracy, intellectuals have considerable influence, at both government and street levels. In a true democracy, intellectuals are no more powerful than their arguments.

A few problems: Johnson has a different viewpoint on American democracy than I do (although his is worth considering). Also, I don't know if his take on European democracy is wholly, or in any part, just (but I suspect there is some truth to it). But, if accurate, his description of the diplomatic elite of the EU undermining voter intent in Europe partly mirrors the military elite that undermined Rome's electoral processes.



So we come back to our question. What do we call it when the servants of a republic become its masters, when the rules of holding office and the authority of the office-holder takes precedence over the popular will that ought to guide a mixed government?

France is not a democracy; it is a republic run by bureaucratic and party elites, whose errors are dealt with by strikes, street riots and blockades instead of by votes.

France's position is unique in Europe: alone among her neighbors, her President wields actual authority, and is seperately elected from the legislature. She is thus, by my definition and her own, a republic. So, if Johnson has described her situation accurately (a description which one could also apply to the federal government of the United States), what do we call her? What is the bad form of the republic?



I think bureaucracy works just fine. If you have a better term, I'm all ears.

Schadenfreude

Or, Fuck you, Lady, that's what stairs are for... *



Last night, after meeting with my Shakespeare reading group, a few of us stayed over and watched Jackass: the Movie on TMC. Four guys, two gals. The guys, of course, enjoyed every minute of it. The girls, less so, shaking their heads often declaring the whole exercise stupid (duh), the same way most women will when forced to sit through a Three Stooges movie. I enjoyed it greatly, but rather less well, and rather more guiltily, than an average episode of MXC. This last, for those unaware is a Japanese import called Most eXtreme elimination Challenge, in which average japanese folks bang themselves up battling ostentatiously silly yet painful obstacle courses. For some reason watching the above is absolutely hilarious to me, and am fully aware that, when the people aren't Japanese, it's less so. Probably because, looking different from me, I don't identify with them as much, don't feel empathy for their physical discomfort, and can therefore enjoy comedy of the pratfalls.



I'd venture that the same would be true of people of any race not my own, which may be why Jackass didn't sit as well with me. Then again, the Three Stooges are white, and watching them slap the crap out of each other is just as funny. Maybe I didn't like Jackass quite as much because it's grosser: involving eating a snowcone soaked with piss and things of that nature. Then again, I seem to recall laughing when that happened. I don't know...



What is it, this schadenfreude, this deliberate enjoyement of another's pain and misfortune? I suspect it's quite closely related to the humor impulse, which some anthropologists say, may have been an early threat-denial system for humans, a way of saying "It's okay, don't worry about it" to the rest of the tribe. I also suspect that, contra the ladies watching the movie last night, that women have the same impulse, but, as in all things, it's more emotionally oriented, whereas men are more physically oriented. Men love physical humor; women less so. But women will get sadistic enjoyment out of torturing the girl that doesn't belong; not physically, but emotionally and psychically. Women know how to get inside someone else's head, and when engaged in combat, they'll work to that advantage without much in the way of remorse.



Then again, when Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher sent to jail for sleeping with her 12-year-old student, got out of prison this morning, there were crowds waiting outside, and among them were teenage boys waving signs that said "I'm 18, Baby" and "Take Me Home". Mean, not physical, but funny. Approve or disapprove?



This analysis is getting nowhere. Where's Camille Paglia when I need her?



*"Avenue Q" reference

Music Review: The Hives -- Tyrannosaurus Hives

Or, How to Serve the Master Without Eating Bugs


The moment that made me realize that Rock really was coming back into fashion was the moment I first saw the video to "Hate to Say I Told You So" by the Hives. It was perfection itself: perfect guitar riff, bass solo (!), Howlin' Pelle Almqvist screaming and preening and carrying on like Mick Jagger circa 1966. I liked the aesthetic of the video, too: Blazing white background, matching suits for the band, freezing members in mid-jump when their instruments dropped out. It was the best video I'd seen in years, and the best new song I'd heard in years, and it made me do something I hadn't done in years, if ever: run out and by a CD based solely on a music video.

Holding that CD in my hand made me see the direction the Hives had taken with the retro genre: Play like the Sonics, look like N'Sync: Bright and shiny and electronic. An Exploding Plastic Inevitable for the new Age. Sure, I dug the Strokes and the Stripes and Los Vinos for what they brought to the picture, and probably agreed that Jack n' Meg were the most artistically daring with their soulful, minimalist bump n'grind. But Pelle and the Boys had the "Makes Me Jump Up and Down" award, down pat.

That was then. A few years later, and how fare the New Rock Quadrifecta? The White Stripes knocked a lot of socks off with Elephant, a record that improved on White Blood Cells in the quality of the songs and the satisfying way they click together. The Strokes, more cautiously perhaps, followed up Is This It with Room on Fire, also an improvement, but far less obviously so. The Vines opened with a great deal of promise on their first album, but have come apart, as yours truly predicted, on Nicholls' drug issues and are presently swirling the drain. The Hives are the last in with their sophomore effort, and in Tyrannosaurus Hives, have given us what amounts to an enigma.

The first time I listened to it in my car, I was frankly disappointed with the first half of the CD. It sounded like them, but they sounded almost neutered, trebly and sparky, with none of the balls-to-the-wall explosion that propelled the first album. It wasn't until "B is for Brutus" that I found a song that stayed with me longer than it's playing time, and it wasn't until "See Through Head" I found a song I enjoyed, and it wasn't until "Diabolic Scheme" that I found a song I'd call good. After those three songs, everything melded slowly back to inconspicuousness. Aware as I was that the band was planning a more severe departure for this album, and aware as I was that their new label, Interscope, had balked, I concluded that the boys had taken the path of least resistance, got a few "different" songs on the record for the critics, and made the rest a half-assed retread of Veni Vidi Vicious.

Yet for some reason, I couldn't stop listening. At first it was for the three songs I'd deemed worthy, then I decided that the new single "Walk Idiot Walk" wasn't too bad, then I started bobbing my head to the other songs as well. Somehow, subconsciously, they'd wormed their way in and had their way with me. And here I sit at the keyboard, unable to explain how this happened.

When in doubt, I go to the cover art. The Hives have apparently decided that the best background for their slick ties-and-spats look is a sickly, scaly green (some connection here, no doubt, with the "Tyrannosaurus"). Instead of a picture of a band, they go for a drawn slight-caricature (others have noted that it makes Pelle look like a Clockwork Orange-era Malcolm McDowell). It looks deliberately ugly, and not in the typical punk-rock, it's-so-ugly-it's-cool way, but rather in the way that makes you not want to look at it. Why on earth would the Hives, who have made a name for themselves in cheery self-idolization ("This is your new favorite band" bellowed the sticker on their first album), go out of their way to mess with their image? It's not as though they've stopped bragging about themselves. Word has come quietly through the rock press that they're the best live band of all the NRQ. So what's the deal? Are they actually disowning their second album, as a label-ruined monstruosity?

I found an answer where I first found joy, in "Diabolic Scheme," a murky exercise in feedback and gloom. "They sound like vampires," I thought, and then it hit me. The Hives are vampires, the new vampires of rock. That is not to suggest any affinity with Alice Cooper/Misfits horror-core burlesque. I'm thinking of the vampire in an Ann Rice novel, shiny and beautiful and masterful, and empty inside. They raise undead sounds (channelling Jagger a hell of a lot better than Jagger himself, these days) to precise, almost machine-like precision (can you imagine these guys jamming?), and use it to say... nothing in particular (I haven't read the lyrics in the liner notes, have you?). They even dress like vampires, right down to the spats, eschewing capes probably out of diligence to the garage-rock aesthetic and not wanting to evoke the aforesaid Alice Cooper.

I'm fully aware that all this may be the result of too much caffeine, but I think it makes all the pieces click into place. How else to explain their aristocratic relationship with critics and fans ("Look into my eyes...We are your new favorite band..."), or the mystery man who actually writes the songs? As Dracula with Renfeld, so the Hives with Randy FitzSimmons. And like real vampires, they don't tell anyone, leaving only certain encodes signs for the wary. They hide their true face behind a shiny mask, sucking your twelve dollars away, and leaving you feeling wierd, drained, and for some reason hungry to repeat the experience.

Or was that all of mass culture? I get so confused sometimes.

Intelligensia

This morning I tuned in to the opening testimony of the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 commision, and so heard them make their case for restructuring our intel organizations under a single National Intelligence Director, at cabinet level, and a National Counter-Terrorism Center within the Executive office of the president. The argument that we need a definitive, legal head of the intelligence community, within the White House, to set intel goals and ensure proper information sharing is a valid one, to my mind. The argument that counter-terrorism needs to be institutionally prioritized also makes sense, in the short term at least.


But I kept wondering to myself: Isn't that what the Department of Homeland Security is supposed to do? More to the point: isn't bringing all intel under that what the Director of Central Intelligence was supposed to do, back in 1947? I seem to recall that having a CIA in the first place was supposed to prevent the pointless rivalry and non-sharing that characterized Army and Navy Intelligence before and after Pearl harbor. Is this new Director really going to make a difference?


Also, why no suggestions for how we gather intel? Wouldn't this be a good time to suggest that we went wrong in the 70's when we cut ourselves off from HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and insisted that ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) would provide all our needs? Then again, if we are doing that, it would need to be done secretly, wouldn't it?

New Link: Catholic Light

He's Catholic and Republican, which I like. But more importantly, he's funny. I need no more.

Wankette

I'm surprised that I haven't heard more people on the net expressing disdain for Wonkette, the blogger darling of the traditional media. I checked her out at first, after Sullivan and Instapundit and NeoLiberal linked her, but after a while, I found that she had nothing interesting to say. If I want political dick-and-fart jokes, I can make my own. It's not hard (huh-huh, I said "hard").


So, what's the deal here? Am I taking this too seriously, or what?

And Iran...Iran So Far Away...Couldn't Get Away

How to take Iran's declaration that they're doing...something with their nuclear plant? They claim it's within the bounds of their earlier promise. Should we believe them? How can we find out definitively? If they're yanking our chain and suddenly make a nice test mushroom cloud, what's the next step? Should we march our troops westward? Do we have the stomach?


How to take the fact that the EU seems to have a "big three": Britain, France and Germany? Doesn't this rather defeat the purpose of having an EU? How does Poland and Spain feel about this? Is there any chance of Iran taking seriously the "big three's" call to "seriously reconsider their decision"? What if Tehran says "We've reconsidered it, and we're doing it anyway, bugger you"?


Finally, what is All-Powerful Diplomatic God John Fitzgerald Kerry think should be done?

The Real Problem with Michael Moore

A few days ago I bought a copy of Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, and zipped right through it (it's a quick read). I found the book not quite as funny as it's author's probably wanted it to be, and a bit repetitive at moments. But overall the book is a pretty damning indictment of Moore's habitual fabrications, manipulations, and general mendacity (as well as his habit of claiming artistic license and/or lashing out whenever anyone calls him on this).


Moreover, the book neatly unravels the lynchpin of Fahrenheit 9/11: the charge that Bush is in bed with the Saudis and the Bin Laden family. Moore's only evidence is the fact that the Bushes and the bin Ladens both invested in the Carlyle Group, an international investment firm. So they have their money in the same bank, wooopeee, right? But it turns out that George Soros, billionaire Bush-hater, Democratic fund-raiser, and founder of moveon.org, also invests in Carlyle, and in amounts that dwarf the Bushes and the bin Ladens.


Taking this annoying little fact and running with it, the authors create a conspiracy theory involving Moore, Soros, the Saudis, and Disney (I knew they were evil! I just knew it!) no less plausible than that advanced by Moore in his film. Which is to say, not very plausible at all, in the end.


But all of this is minor stuff, putting the structure underneath the thesis that Moore is a waste of space and his films of the Goebbles school of public debate. That point's been made by better men than I; Lileks, for example, here and here. What Lileks doesn't mention, and what I think far more interesting, is the book's suggestion of, for lack of a better term, an ideological connection between Moore's brand of Leftism and the Islamic Jihadism with which we are at war. The missing link is called Qutbism in the book, and it provides an interesting answer to the by-now-cliched question: "Why Do They Hate Us?"


Because they were taught to do so.


The book points out that the vast majority of jihad leaders are not ignorant camel-jockeys, but educated men, and mostly educated in western schools. This is unsurprising; many of the great leaders of Third World Communism, such as Ho Chi Minh, were also educated in the West, and learned there to hate the West and what it stands for. Now who would it be that teaches them to learn such things? Perhaps Karl Marx, who disdained the freedoms he enjoyed and spent his life devoted to their spiritual undermining? Perhaps lefty academics of the Sartre/Fanon school, who never met a bloodthirsty revolutionary they couldn't cheer for? Perhaps the hip trendies running Colorado State University and Stanford, who educated Sayiid Qutb, Osama's John the Baptist?


Qutb, according to the book, drew heavily on western thought, especially Marx, in divising his writings, which hold, among other things, that America was the land of brutes and sluts, primitive and materialistic and soulless, and deserving of violent distruction.  The West corrupts the Islamic world, so the Islamic world must destroy the West. We deserve whatever is done to us, no matter how foul.


Thus Qutb. Here's Moore:

The Iraqis who have riesen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and they will win. (comments on President Bush's A13 News Conference, April 16, 2004)

 

What I do is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except his one fact--WE created the monster known as bin Laden. (Moore's Sept. 12, 2001 letter, on his website)

 

We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants. (from "Somwhere in the Land of Enchantment" on his website, September 15, 2001)

Add to that the core theme of Bowling for Columbine -- we are an aggressive, excessively materialistic and dangerous culture that erodes the individual soul -- and you have the basic set of beliefs that animates jihadis.


I should point out that none of this is to imply that a) criticizing Western culture or b) criticizing the War on Terror automatically puts you in bed with Osama. It is the form and content of your criticism that matters. And if you're going to accept the Michael Moore view of reality, you should know whose views you're sharing.


 Because our enemies have no difficulty with this. Qiadar Faisal, lawyer for Imam Samudra, the leader of the conspiracy behind the October 2002 Bali Bombings, quoted from Moore's book Stupid White Men when presenting the defense summation at Samudra's trial.




 

Filing Dead Weight

A while ago I thought it might be fun to do a second blog,  in which I sniped at people from the perspective of a demon charge with overseeing temptation, a la "The Screwtape Letters." I called it "Toadpipe's Blog" after Screwtape's secretary. It never really got off the ground, and I only made three real entries. Nevertheless, I had fun while it lasted, and am linking them accordingly. You can find it here. I might add something else from time to time, but one never knows...

Music is Magic!

The rest of my PunkFix reviews are posted, as is the link to my Allzah reviews (which are all on the same page). I may yet dig through my older snapshot reviews on this site, but for the moment, that's my body of published work. Enjoy

I know I said I wouldn't Follow Convention Babble...

But damn me if I'm not starting to like Teresa Heinz-Kerry.



American politicians speaking the same language as the rest of the populace, in public? It may be the only thing that saves us.



Or something.



Update: I'm not alone

Democratic National Conven....zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Won't be watching either convention. They're so hackneyed and boring as to make one wonder why they have the damned things.



That's my fresh topical commentary.



I'll be posting regular, starting tommorrow, and cleaning up a few things on the site. I've finally got a free week and I'm going to make use of it...cheers...

The Weakness

Belmont Club states clearly what I've recently suspected: that the problem at CIA will not be solved. More, that the problem will not be solved because of a cultural distaste towards what the CIA is for:

America needs spies. American spies. It is, of course the last thing either the CIA will do or Congressional oversight will demand. The Standard article goes on at great length to describe how the metrics of intelligence success have been politicized to the point that the issues being debated bear no resemblance to the requirements of the service.

There is, I sense, a squeamishness behind the Left's opposition to our current security strategy and their past opposition to such strategies. Those that have opposed our entries into Afghanistan and Iraq do not, in most circumstances, demonstrate a favorable attitude towards our enemies, but rather an unwillingness to shed blood on behalf of our ideals. I had a long conversation/debate with an old college friend last year, before Abu Ghraib or the CIA's idiocy had surfaced. We both studied International Relations at St. Joe's, and have long been able to argue with each other and enjoy the experience. And the problem she had with the Iraq war above all other objections was that we were imposing our system (democracy) upon them by force.


Perhaps others who opposed the war from the Left would not word it quite that way, but I do feel that such a view is representative. Liberals and Democrats believe that the true moral use of government power is to repair injustices, and that social defense should only be practiced when the threat is obvious and the enemy is utterly intractable, and even then, there will always be plenty who would prefer to earn superiority points by damning the society around them, the enemy they know. Obviously, to criticize someone else's society or government is a sin against tolerance that a leftist would never commit, and certainly not when a Republican is in the White House.


It is difficult not to characterize this obstinance, this refusal to percieve enemies abroad, this insistence on tiny, surgical, diplo-economic counterattacks, this horror of casualties and the inevitable blunders of conflict, to the point of calling for retreat at the first sign of either, as the very weakness that Osama suspects of us. Of late, I have been taking to view the upcoming election as the true test of whether he is right. Can we, knowing the errors in intelligence, in discipline, knowing the costs in blood and treasure it has and will require to kill our enemies, have the courage to see it through by re-electing the man who has led us so far? Or are we too nauseated by the President's on-cameria clumsiness, his Texan accent, his born-again Christianity? Are we so wrapped in our superficial pop existence that we'll elect any boring, gutless plutocrat so long as he gives us nice, happy babble about health care and making the world "like us again"? Can we not grasp that the current occupant of the White House is the enemy of those who wish our destruction, the enemy of our enemies? Can we not see the jungle for the Bushes?


If we can't, I fear for us.

I may as well tell you...

If you don't know already, I have a new email address. Send your tinctures and other missives to andrew.j.patrick@att.net. I promise to publish all good letters, for the sake of argument, and some of the bad ones, for the sake of humor. Share and Enjoy...

I Have Decided to Not Die....

Moreover, I have decided to fix the Music section, to show all my music reviews. I don't have them all up, not yet, but that's a good start. I've further decided to link my reviews at PunkFix and Allzah. I do this for two reasons: 1) I think I'm a good music critic, and I hope others will agree, and 2) music makes a good subject when politics weighs in on you.


I've also decided to stay in the game because despite the fact that I've been blogging fitfully in the last two months, I've gained another rank in the TLLB Ecosystem. Why? Because Alex at NeoLiberal has joined, and I'm on his linksheet. Thanks, old man...

Music Review: Sex Pistols -- Anarchy in the UK (Live)

I've been a bit disparaging of late of my favorite style of Rock n' Roll, so much so that in my last two posts on the subject, I've used not only the same arguments but phrased them the exact same way. I submit that I did so unwittingly. Nevertheless, that speaks of the disdain with which I view most of the music I enjoy most. Whether that makes me scitzophrenic or just a dedicated critic, I lack the self-knowledge to say.

A great deal of my affinity for punk is that it's a deliciously extreme form of Rock n'Roll, blending by speed and audio leakage the traditional guitar-bass-drums sound into a single distorted, psychedelic hum. It's that sound I love, not the sound as an instrument for certain social goals. I've stated before in many venues that I hold most of the lyrics in this genre at arm's length.

Most punks embrace a childish, narcissistic leftism, of the kind that will fight bitterly for their own "rights," and not give two hoots in hell for anybody else's. On the most recent Sex Pistols DVD, John Lydon argues vociferously in support of their band's album being named "Never Mind the Bollocks" by saying that "Bollocks" was a common working-class word, perfectly valid English. "How can you ban language? How can you ban words?" exclaims Johnny. I can never sit through that without feeling compelled to ask him "How about the word 'Nigger,' John? How about the word 'Bitch'? How about the phrase 'Half-Educated Limey Street Scum'? Those are all perfectly valid English words, too. Yet somehow I doubt you'd respond to them so favorably."

And that, boys and girls, is why Our Boy Johnny is the real tragic figure of punk. To hell with Sid Vicious and his scratchy-voiced girlfriend, two empty-headed drug fiends as boring as they were useless. Sid contributed nothing but a look to punk, and it wasn't even his look to start with, it was Eddie Cochrane's by way of Ron Asheton and Dee Dee Ramone. Beyond that, the wanker couldn't play bass, couldn't give an intelligent interview, couldn't write anything worth repeating. All he did was die. Woopty-crap.

But Lydon had a passion, an intelligence, a sense of self and a sense of theater that made his band worth remembering when so many of those that popped in his wake are justly forgotten. He encapsulated the strained mentality of a teenager, too smart to be a child, too weak to be a grown-up, and shoved that energy out of him in a manner nothing short of explosive.

And twenty-five years later, the dumb mook hasn't moved on. You can read it in his autobiography, see it in any interviews: bitterness. He's still pissed at Malcom McLaren, at the monarchy, at the world. Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock are all men in their forties, able to look back at their gloried past with detachment, recognizing their achievements and their mistakes with humor and regret. Not Lydon, who still spikes and colors his hair and spits invective. His wit, intellect, and lust for musical creativity, audible on any Public Image, Ltd. record, is swallowed by his terminal adolescence. He's so busy demonstrating how much smarter he is than everybody that the doesn't see everyone shaking their heads at him. That, too me, is true tragedy.

So why in the hell would anyone want to listen to any live Pistols show? The band playing to some tiny audience in some nondescript English Country town, on a crappy PA system? Why, so we can tell ourselves we're listening to "history"?

No. You don't buy a record to listen to history. You buy a record to listen to music. And you buy this record, the complete recording of the Pistols' September 24th, 1976 performance at the 76 club in Burton-on-Trent, so that you can hear the Sex Pistols in their pre-Sid glory (of course, the cover art has a picture of a later performance with Sid. Matlock just can't win). You can hear the tightness of Jones' guitar and Cook's drums, and feel the bottoming power that Matlock's bass added to the mix. You can hear how the Pistols took the brooding, menacing sound of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and added to it the flashpowder youthfulness of the British Mod sound, of bands like the Who. Not coincidentally, the standout tracks on the disc are their cover of the Stooges' "No Fun," and the Who's "Substitute." But the whole set, Pistols originals and pop covers all, is compelling, and exciting, and raucous, and everything Rock n' Roll is, was, and ever shall be, amen.

Lester Bangs once wrote that the future of popular music was as follows: "a small island of new free music, surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage." Most folks would agree with that, whatever their tastes, believing that whatever tickled their ear was the good stuff and everybody else's shit was just that. So, on a certain level, unless you're into Pun Krock already, there's no way I stand any chance of convincing you. If you beleive that Punk was an unfortunate episode in the history of music and culture, and that the Sex Pistols are but one of the "punk" bands that a lot of stupid kids fashionably embraced, you won't be interested no matter what I say. But if you're able to look beyond a label and appreciate hard, fast, slightly irritating Rock n' Roll, then give a listen. It won't hurt, and if it does, CD's make great skeet.

For the "Duh" File

News Flash: Parental supervision prevents STD's!.


Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that cooking food prevents food poisoning...

It's Been Worse

National Review has a worth-reading article about where we were sixteen months into all of our previous wars that lasted that long. The long and short of it is, we were losing in all of them.


One could fairly point out that we've been talking about Iraq for the past 14 months as being in a "post-war occupation," not a "war." Many, myself included, have made the analogy to post-WW2 Germany. Nevertheless, we've done more with few casualties on both sides in this war than in any of our previous ones, and that's worth pointing out. I still say the best analogy for Iraq is Aguinaldo's insurgency in the Phillipines 100 years ago. One of these days, I may go into some detail on the subject.