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Monday, December 21, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Reagan Was Wrong
Reagan Was Wrong
To conservative Cassandra Henry Fairlie, Republicans sowed their present-day destruction from the start.
By Jeremy McCarter | NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 29, 2009
When Henry Fairlie came to America, the editors of this magazine deemed his arrival sufficiently momentous to run a page-long story about him. The 42-year-old writer had been called "the most controversial political journalist in England" and "the first of the Angry Young Men" for his piercing and heterodox columns in the British press—including his most celebrated one, in which he coined the term "the establishment." After his 1966 move to the United States, he would write some of the liveliest and most provocative essays of his time about what NEWSWEEK called "the American scene."
Fairlie's sharp eye, stylish pen and outsider's perspective let him capture why he loved this country (our freedom, our gadgets, the endless space) and attack us natives for how we sell it short (our wavering belief in America's greatness, our uptight yuppie ways). Even now, decades later, these pieces hold up beautifully: while editing a new anthology of his work, Bite the Hand That Feeds You:Essays and Provocations, I found funny, timeless examples of his writing in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and other papers and magazines that published him.
Click here to find out more!
Read today, when America's political ideologies are in flux, some of these arguments turn out to be surprisingly, urgently timely. Fairlie arrived when the Republican Party was regrouping in the wake of Barry Goldwater's loss, and he lived long enough (until 1990) to see it assume power under Ronald Reagan. The trajectory horrified him. For Fairlie—a lifelong, if idiosyncratic, Tory—the ideology that came to dominate American conservatism after World War II didn't live up to America's best traditions. It was, in fact, no conservatism at all. He didn't explicitly predict that in 2009 we'd watch this ideology fall rather spectacularly to pieces, but he knew it couldn't last long. When a rudderless Republican Party seems in danger of humiliating itself to death, Fairlie—a conservative who saw from the era's beginning how badly it was going to end—deserves a fresh hearing.
Fairlie was no theorist. And while he wrote five books—including The Kennedy Promise, an early, critical account of the Camelot years—he wasn't a pamphleteer. He was a freelancer, a position he held for nearly 40 years. This choice was rooted in principle, because he demanded the independence to write what he wanted when he wanted. It was also a function of his genius for burning bridges. (He drank, had endless affairs and distilled his relationships with editors and proprietors to the title of his unfinished memoir, Bite the Hand That Feeds You.) So Fairlie's critique of American conservatism needs to be assembled from pieces scattered over several decades and many publications. He stated its theme most clearly in an essay for Harper's in 1984: "The fundamental and persistent weakness of American conservatism is that it is not nourished by any distinct tory spirit."
Fairlie's views of toryism, like his views of most things (America, women, Parliament, Scotch), were deeply romantic. He described his kind of conservative as one who stands alongside "the King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists." In other words, government's role was to preserve tradition and social order, not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites or to enact sudden or overreaching reforms. He warmed to this view as a boy, when summers on a family farm in Scotland taught him that "nothing very much changes, and then changes only slowly." He refined it as an adult, coming to revere the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom he called "the greatest tory of them all," and absorb the writings of Michael Oakeshott, "the most formative conservative political thinker of his generation." When he arrived in America, he expected to find conservatives with similar beliefs. Instead he found the Republicans.
Fairlie's critique of American conservatism began with a GOP heresy: that by embracing the free market so completely, the party had gone calamitously awry. "The conservative can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make," he wrote. Without a humanizing tory influence, conservatives were apt to forget "the ugly face of capitalism"—the way that the market tends to coarsen and destabilize society, making the gross national product fodder for our "gross national appetite." Republicans, he argued, could never succeed in uniting the country as long as they supported business interests so completely with both their policy choices and their rhetoric: "The nation cannot be brought to you, as if it were Masterpiece Theatre, by a grant from Mobil Oil," he wrote.
Though Fairlie distrusted John F. Kennedy—making a good tory's case that his charisma and outsize promises gave the country false expectations for change—the market worship and hyperindividualism of Reaganism led him to think more warmly of JFK's inaugural. Whatever the excesses of the speech, he wrote in 1986, it had at least treated the American people as citizens, as men and women with a shared stake in the national destiny. A comparable call in the 1980s, Fairlie wrote, would have been: "And so, you fellow Americans, buy your condominium and your Volvo—that's your war effort." In this, he turned out to be more right than he knew. Fifteen years after that essay ran, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation in the wake of the September 11 attacks by telling everybody to go shopping. His failure would have disappointed Fairlie, but it wouldn't have surprised him.
Tax-cutting regulation-haters weren't the only false conservatives in the Reagan coalition, Fairlie argued: the bedroom-snooping, morality--legislating social conservatives were just as misguided. He was no libertarian, but he thought that much of the social agenda of the American political right (then and now) consisted of things that were nobody's business: "Let one homosexual, coke-snorting student bum get hold of two food stamps, and the whole apparatus of government is brought into play," he wrote.
While Fairlie wanted government to be big enough and strong enough to unify society, relieve material want and maintain global order (his defenses of American empire were so forceful and frequent that Sen. J. William Fulbright derided him as "a British Gunga Din"), he had little use for leadership that agitated people needlessly. The history of his homeland gave him a reason to think that government shouldn't meddle in personal affairs: "One may say that the English aristocrat has always been the truest tory because he knows that his own family has survived the most eccentric and often reprobate conduct of its members for centuries."
This question of class plays a crucial part in Fairlie's contempt for American conservatism. Though he wasn't an aristocrat (his father had been a hard-drinking Fleet Street prodigy before him) and genuinely relished spending time with people far removed from the Washington media overclass, he was repelled by the GOP's pandering to the common man. It struck him as vulgar. And it led to his most notorious feud.
During the 1980 Republican convention, he wrote a column for The Washington Post describing the delegates as members of the "booboisie" once mocked by H. L. Mencken, by which Fairlie meant they were: "Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious." William F. Buckley replied with a column attacking Fairlie for being an English interloper, a bad grammarian and a snob. When Buckley included the column in an essay collection five years later, Fairlie panned the book in The New Republic, dissing Buckley as unconservative, overexposed and "the quintessential Common Man of our time." This so incensed Buckley that he bought a full-page ad in a subsequent issue of the magazine to reprint his original attack on Fairlie.
When I first read Fairlie's column about the convention, it seemed overheated. Then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's impulse toward small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall.
Fairlie didn't assail American conservatives because he was a liberal in Burke's clothing: he was just as quick to castigate the Democrats when they screwed up, and with just as much spiky humor. But however much they erred, he argued, the Democrats remained "the normal governing party of the most powerful and most restless free nation in the world." The vital difference between the parties lay in their views of government itself. Like many Democrats, he believed that the political realm was the only place where a free people could contend with the tyrannies of all the other realms—especially the economic one. Even after reporting on political malfeasance in more than a dozen countries on three continents, Fairlie insisted that politics was "essentially good" and politicians "the most hopeful messengers of a society's will to improve."
Conservatives, by contrast, showed an infuriating hostility for Washington, nothing like the "gusto" brought to politics by Fairlie's beloved FDR. "The Reaganite conservative does not trust the political system, and so is always trying to circumvent it; he does not trust the instincts of Congress, but places profound faith in the wisdom of the executive if he is in charge; he does not trust the deep religious instinct of a people, unless it is decked out in the tawdry costume of a minute of silent prayer in school. The only loyalty that eight years of Reaganite conservatism has inspired is of each to the country of his self." Extend Fairlie's argument to the present, and Dick Cheney, with his consistent and inventive transgressions, begins to look like one of the least conservative leaders we've ever had.
Fairlie didn't offer any bullet-pointed plan for how American conservatives could reclaim the soul he believed they'd lost (and needed to reclaim, since "conservatism more than liberalism needs a soul"). But if he were writing now, he would find any attempt to rebuild the Reagan coalition, or to reassert the principles that elected him, foolish and unconservative. He would argue instead that Republicans need to try once again to "civilize and broaden" conservatism, even though they've failed so many times before.
This doesn't mean making marginal improvements to the racial mix at the voting booth. It means finding a way to uphold our best traditions while ceasing to profess "a conservatism that is just one long grouch at the twentieth century." It means bringing a genuine compassion to government, as opposed to the sloganeering kind. And it means learning to love America in all its messy kaleidoscopic glory, as Fairlie did. During last year's campaign, he would have been thrilled by Barack Obama's story and what it demonstrates about the possibilities of American life (though quick to chasten his Kennedy-esque ambitions), and he would have eviscerated Palin's notion that there's such a thing as "real America." For someone who never learned to drive, Fairlie contrived to spend much of his time away from the Eastern Seaboard, falling more and more in love with this immigrant nation. "Ameri-ca must be kept open," he insisted in 1983—"no technique, no system, no ideology, must be allowed to close it down."
That, too, is a romantic view, but one that Fairlie never abandoned, not even when he had good reasons. During the 1980s, his fecklessness with money and increased drinking led him to lose his apartment in Washington. The years that other writers of his caliber might have spent in suburban comfort, putting together the anthologies that would outlive them, Fairlie spent living in his office at The New Republic, since he had nowhere else to go. Even as he went on skewering the Republicans and immoderately praising the country he understood so much better than they did, he didn't grow bitter. Far from it. The most direct counsel he offered to American conservatives was the advice that the great journalist Walter Bagehot had offered to their British counterparts a century earlier. It's even more worth heeding today, when their spirits are so low: "Try a little enjoyment."
To conservative Cassandra Henry Fairlie, Republicans sowed their present-day destruction from the start.
By Jeremy McCarter | NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 29, 2009
When Henry Fairlie came to America, the editors of this magazine deemed his arrival sufficiently momentous to run a page-long story about him. The 42-year-old writer had been called "the most controversial political journalist in England" and "the first of the Angry Young Men" for his piercing and heterodox columns in the British press—including his most celebrated one, in which he coined the term "the establishment." After his 1966 move to the United States, he would write some of the liveliest and most provocative essays of his time about what NEWSWEEK called "the American scene."
Fairlie's sharp eye, stylish pen and outsider's perspective let him capture why he loved this country (our freedom, our gadgets, the endless space) and attack us natives for how we sell it short (our wavering belief in America's greatness, our uptight yuppie ways). Even now, decades later, these pieces hold up beautifully: while editing a new anthology of his work, Bite the Hand That Feeds You:Essays and Provocations, I found funny, timeless examples of his writing in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and other papers and magazines that published him.
Click here to find out more!
Read today, when America's political ideologies are in flux, some of these arguments turn out to be surprisingly, urgently timely. Fairlie arrived when the Republican Party was regrouping in the wake of Barry Goldwater's loss, and he lived long enough (until 1990) to see it assume power under Ronald Reagan. The trajectory horrified him. For Fairlie—a lifelong, if idiosyncratic, Tory—the ideology that came to dominate American conservatism after World War II didn't live up to America's best traditions. It was, in fact, no conservatism at all. He didn't explicitly predict that in 2009 we'd watch this ideology fall rather spectacularly to pieces, but he knew it couldn't last long. When a rudderless Republican Party seems in danger of humiliating itself to death, Fairlie—a conservative who saw from the era's beginning how badly it was going to end—deserves a fresh hearing.
Fairlie was no theorist. And while he wrote five books—including The Kennedy Promise, an early, critical account of the Camelot years—he wasn't a pamphleteer. He was a freelancer, a position he held for nearly 40 years. This choice was rooted in principle, because he demanded the independence to write what he wanted when he wanted. It was also a function of his genius for burning bridges. (He drank, had endless affairs and distilled his relationships with editors and proprietors to the title of his unfinished memoir, Bite the Hand That Feeds You.) So Fairlie's critique of American conservatism needs to be assembled from pieces scattered over several decades and many publications. He stated its theme most clearly in an essay for Harper's in 1984: "The fundamental and persistent weakness of American conservatism is that it is not nourished by any distinct tory spirit."
Fairlie's views of toryism, like his views of most things (America, women, Parliament, Scotch), were deeply romantic. He described his kind of conservative as one who stands alongside "the King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists." In other words, government's role was to preserve tradition and social order, not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites or to enact sudden or overreaching reforms. He warmed to this view as a boy, when summers on a family farm in Scotland taught him that "nothing very much changes, and then changes only slowly." He refined it as an adult, coming to revere the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom he called "the greatest tory of them all," and absorb the writings of Michael Oakeshott, "the most formative conservative political thinker of his generation." When he arrived in America, he expected to find conservatives with similar beliefs. Instead he found the Republicans.
Fairlie's critique of American conservatism began with a GOP heresy: that by embracing the free market so completely, the party had gone calamitously awry. "The conservative can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make," he wrote. Without a humanizing tory influence, conservatives were apt to forget "the ugly face of capitalism"—the way that the market tends to coarsen and destabilize society, making the gross national product fodder for our "gross national appetite." Republicans, he argued, could never succeed in uniting the country as long as they supported business interests so completely with both their policy choices and their rhetoric: "The nation cannot be brought to you, as if it were Masterpiece Theatre, by a grant from Mobil Oil," he wrote.
Though Fairlie distrusted John F. Kennedy—making a good tory's case that his charisma and outsize promises gave the country false expectations for change—the market worship and hyperindividualism of Reaganism led him to think more warmly of JFK's inaugural. Whatever the excesses of the speech, he wrote in 1986, it had at least treated the American people as citizens, as men and women with a shared stake in the national destiny. A comparable call in the 1980s, Fairlie wrote, would have been: "And so, you fellow Americans, buy your condominium and your Volvo—that's your war effort." In this, he turned out to be more right than he knew. Fifteen years after that essay ran, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation in the wake of the September 11 attacks by telling everybody to go shopping. His failure would have disappointed Fairlie, but it wouldn't have surprised him.
Tax-cutting regulation-haters weren't the only false conservatives in the Reagan coalition, Fairlie argued: the bedroom-snooping, morality--legislating social conservatives were just as misguided. He was no libertarian, but he thought that much of the social agenda of the American political right (then and now) consisted of things that were nobody's business: "Let one homosexual, coke-snorting student bum get hold of two food stamps, and the whole apparatus of government is brought into play," he wrote.
While Fairlie wanted government to be big enough and strong enough to unify society, relieve material want and maintain global order (his defenses of American empire were so forceful and frequent that Sen. J. William Fulbright derided him as "a British Gunga Din"), he had little use for leadership that agitated people needlessly. The history of his homeland gave him a reason to think that government shouldn't meddle in personal affairs: "One may say that the English aristocrat has always been the truest tory because he knows that his own family has survived the most eccentric and often reprobate conduct of its members for centuries."
This question of class plays a crucial part in Fairlie's contempt for American conservatism. Though he wasn't an aristocrat (his father had been a hard-drinking Fleet Street prodigy before him) and genuinely relished spending time with people far removed from the Washington media overclass, he was repelled by the GOP's pandering to the common man. It struck him as vulgar. And it led to his most notorious feud.
During the 1980 Republican convention, he wrote a column for The Washington Post describing the delegates as members of the "booboisie" once mocked by H. L. Mencken, by which Fairlie meant they were: "Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious." William F. Buckley replied with a column attacking Fairlie for being an English interloper, a bad grammarian and a snob. When Buckley included the column in an essay collection five years later, Fairlie panned the book in The New Republic, dissing Buckley as unconservative, overexposed and "the quintessential Common Man of our time." This so incensed Buckley that he bought a full-page ad in a subsequent issue of the magazine to reprint his original attack on Fairlie.
When I first read Fairlie's column about the convention, it seemed overheated. Then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's impulse toward small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall.
Fairlie didn't assail American conservatives because he was a liberal in Burke's clothing: he was just as quick to castigate the Democrats when they screwed up, and with just as much spiky humor. But however much they erred, he argued, the Democrats remained "the normal governing party of the most powerful and most restless free nation in the world." The vital difference between the parties lay in their views of government itself. Like many Democrats, he believed that the political realm was the only place where a free people could contend with the tyrannies of all the other realms—especially the economic one. Even after reporting on political malfeasance in more than a dozen countries on three continents, Fairlie insisted that politics was "essentially good" and politicians "the most hopeful messengers of a society's will to improve."
Conservatives, by contrast, showed an infuriating hostility for Washington, nothing like the "gusto" brought to politics by Fairlie's beloved FDR. "The Reaganite conservative does not trust the political system, and so is always trying to circumvent it; he does not trust the instincts of Congress, but places profound faith in the wisdom of the executive if he is in charge; he does not trust the deep religious instinct of a people, unless it is decked out in the tawdry costume of a minute of silent prayer in school. The only loyalty that eight years of Reaganite conservatism has inspired is of each to the country of his self." Extend Fairlie's argument to the present, and Dick Cheney, with his consistent and inventive transgressions, begins to look like one of the least conservative leaders we've ever had.
Fairlie didn't offer any bullet-pointed plan for how American conservatives could reclaim the soul he believed they'd lost (and needed to reclaim, since "conservatism more than liberalism needs a soul"). But if he were writing now, he would find any attempt to rebuild the Reagan coalition, or to reassert the principles that elected him, foolish and unconservative. He would argue instead that Republicans need to try once again to "civilize and broaden" conservatism, even though they've failed so many times before.
This doesn't mean making marginal improvements to the racial mix at the voting booth. It means finding a way to uphold our best traditions while ceasing to profess "a conservatism that is just one long grouch at the twentieth century." It means bringing a genuine compassion to government, as opposed to the sloganeering kind. And it means learning to love America in all its messy kaleidoscopic glory, as Fairlie did. During last year's campaign, he would have been thrilled by Barack Obama's story and what it demonstrates about the possibilities of American life (though quick to chasten his Kennedy-esque ambitions), and he would have eviscerated Palin's notion that there's such a thing as "real America." For someone who never learned to drive, Fairlie contrived to spend much of his time away from the Eastern Seaboard, falling more and more in love with this immigrant nation. "Ameri-ca must be kept open," he insisted in 1983—"no technique, no system, no ideology, must be allowed to close it down."
That, too, is a romantic view, but one that Fairlie never abandoned, not even when he had good reasons. During the 1980s, his fecklessness with money and increased drinking led him to lose his apartment in Washington. The years that other writers of his caliber might have spent in suburban comfort, putting together the anthologies that would outlive them, Fairlie spent living in his office at The New Republic, since he had nowhere else to go. Even as he went on skewering the Republicans and immoderately praising the country he understood so much better than they did, he didn't grow bitter. Far from it. The most direct counsel he offered to American conservatives was the advice that the great journalist Walter Bagehot had offered to their British counterparts a century earlier. It's even more worth heeding today, when their spirits are so low: "Try a little enjoyment."
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Chris Earley's Write-up of "Some People"
Chris Earley started an awesome blog where people can write about (or around or in or through or with) their favorite songs. I have written a few posts for it, and I plan on writing more soon. You should, too.
You can go here to read and listen (better yet, just click the title of this post):
http://www.songotheday.com/?p=2694
Or you can download all our songs for free here:
(Check our first posts on this blog.)
Or you can read here:
“And why should it change before the last trace of our worst days becomes erased?
Why should it change anyway?”
I think that anyone that truly loves rock or rap music beyond their 20s eventually is confronted with queries as to why (assuming they haven’t) he or she has never become a musician. It is a fair question. But there is a nagging, underlying message to it. I think it insinuates that unless you are a musician, rock and other pop music, is reserved for the young. That you are no longer invited to the ‘party’.
Now, I know that that sentiment is changing as years go by, but is it really changing that much? Do we really have to stop being a fan of bands? It is no wonder to me that record store clerks are so jaded. They find themselves having to profess to liking bullshit like Vincent Gallo just so that they can feel validated or justified in liking music they actually enjoy. They have to go fringe or snobbish beyond belief so that they carry some bullshit-like panache that makes them liking popular music okay.
That’s pretty stupid.
[On a side note from my diatribe, one of the funniest Onion headlines I ever saw was "37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster"]
I am going to be 40 this year, and I still get psyched as a ritalin fed fuck-up when I hear a rock band that I like. Why should I be stigmatized because I still feel joy at hearing something that sounds as good to me now as it might’ve when I was 15. Should I only like My Morning Jacket or Wilco or something else that fits my age group? Do I really have to like stuff that makes me feel intelligent…some NPR endorsed shit? I can appreciate Animal Collective, but I don’t like them. I understand that some truly cool people do like them, but I think you have to admit that part of their popularity is due to the cognoscenti saying they are okay to like because they have a sound that is supposed to possess some kind of New Yorker-reading sophistication. Same for the Vampire Weekend. No, I ain’t buying it.
I was walking on 16th St. in the Mission last night and at the corner of Valencia there were two twentysomethings playing some serious rock shit. The drummer was amazing and the guitarist sounded like he was both axes of the Buzzcocks. There was a crowd. Rock!
Now, if you actually are one of the readers who breaks the mold and, crazy enough, listens to the song featured, you’re maybe going to yourself….old man, this song ain’t rock. Well, technically it is, but I hear you. Thing is, this is a song by my favorite local band. Sure, the lead singer and songwriter, Andrew Gomez (to whom I apologize for any embarrassment this may cause), is a contributor to this site (he writes under gmezzy) but I didn’t know him before I heard this song. His friend- my friend now- Dave Murphy (wordjunkie on this site) posted this song in January of 2007 and I have had a hard time getting it out of my head since then. That isn’t a bad thing.
I’ve seen the Cons three times since then and at none of the shows did they perform “Some People”.
No matter.
What they did play was amazing- rock shit!- and it had been a long time since I have gotten truly excited about the release of a local act’s new album- one that actually performs in their own city. I know the Cons are close to a new one, but I don’t know exactly when. I can’t wait to hear it.
I don’t need to be a musician. It is a craft I have so much respect for, one that brings me such pleasure, that I am more than willing to let the creativity of others bring me joy in the form of music. I’ll invest my creativity elsewhere. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at it…and I found the work that goes into getting a song right, the repetition, drives me a little crazy. I wonder how many musicians hate their own work just because they have to revisit old works so often. It occurs to me that maybe gmezzy is sick of “Some People”. It occurs to me that it isn’t just chicks and drink tickets. A filmmaker makes a film and moves onto the next thing. He still gets the same kudos. The musicians we like, they do some work. And then do it again.
But this song, on a personal level- what it means to me… it will be a song that resonates with me in 20 years and make me think of that cusp of darkness that the mid-aughts (2000s) were met, hopefully, with something that we will look back and scoff at. There were times when the general feel of the decade felt so awful that it seemed like things might be messed up for good…that when you heard any glimmer of hope, you clung. I think we Americans collectively got weak in this decade, and anything that even broached the subject of our helplessness was an example- and forgive me for sounding cheesy because I mean what I say- of something to take solace in. One day we will look back at the first eight years of this decade and be embarrassed, if we haven’t and been already, and this song, for me, will be featured on the mix that I make when I’m trying to comprise musically what it felt like to live through this decade. It is a song that expresses something equivalent to what I imagine a dog feels when lost in the rain. Bad weather and discomfort, seems will last forever. Shook down. Not surrendered, but just a little hope in at least you can acknowledge what it is you’re experiencing. Wet, stupid, lost and sad.
I hope you listen to this song even if you are accustomed to not listening to these songs of the day (Rat, wfg, Slim, Loren- writers as well as readers, etc.) The lyrics, the production, the tone of the lead singer’s voice together comprise to me a song that captures that elusive nearly-perfect feel. I hope you enjoy it.
You can check out The Cons at http://www.myspace.com/theconsmusic
I love these lyrics:
Leaping from buildings with regrets in midair.
There’s the same change of heart everywhere.
Some people steal babies.
Others toss theirs in the trash.
Some people yearn for love.
Some can’t be had.
A marvel of science grows cancer in your kids.
Progress has always come with certain risks.
And why should it change before the last trace of our worst days becomes erased?
Why should it change anyway?
Working a new bad job, it’s a dead end in disguise.
What else can you do but sympathize?
You told all the worst parts.
You doled my secrets out.
Some people just don’t know when to shut their mouths.
----Chris Earley
You can go here to read and listen (better yet, just click the title of this post):
http://www.songotheday.com/?p=2694
Or you can download all our songs for free here:
(Check our first posts on this blog.)
Or you can read here:
“And why should it change before the last trace of our worst days becomes erased?
Why should it change anyway?”
I think that anyone that truly loves rock or rap music beyond their 20s eventually is confronted with queries as to why (assuming they haven’t) he or she has never become a musician. It is a fair question. But there is a nagging, underlying message to it. I think it insinuates that unless you are a musician, rock and other pop music, is reserved for the young. That you are no longer invited to the ‘party’.
Now, I know that that sentiment is changing as years go by, but is it really changing that much? Do we really have to stop being a fan of bands? It is no wonder to me that record store clerks are so jaded. They find themselves having to profess to liking bullshit like Vincent Gallo just so that they can feel validated or justified in liking music they actually enjoy. They have to go fringe or snobbish beyond belief so that they carry some bullshit-like panache that makes them liking popular music okay.
That’s pretty stupid.
[On a side note from my diatribe, one of the funniest Onion headlines I ever saw was "37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster"]
I am going to be 40 this year, and I still get psyched as a ritalin fed fuck-up when I hear a rock band that I like. Why should I be stigmatized because I still feel joy at hearing something that sounds as good to me now as it might’ve when I was 15. Should I only like My Morning Jacket or Wilco or something else that fits my age group? Do I really have to like stuff that makes me feel intelligent…some NPR endorsed shit? I can appreciate Animal Collective, but I don’t like them. I understand that some truly cool people do like them, but I think you have to admit that part of their popularity is due to the cognoscenti saying they are okay to like because they have a sound that is supposed to possess some kind of New Yorker-reading sophistication. Same for the Vampire Weekend. No, I ain’t buying it.
I was walking on 16th St. in the Mission last night and at the corner of Valencia there were two twentysomethings playing some serious rock shit. The drummer was amazing and the guitarist sounded like he was both axes of the Buzzcocks. There was a crowd. Rock!
Now, if you actually are one of the readers who breaks the mold and, crazy enough, listens to the song featured, you’re maybe going to yourself….old man, this song ain’t rock. Well, technically it is, but I hear you. Thing is, this is a song by my favorite local band. Sure, the lead singer and songwriter, Andrew Gomez (to whom I apologize for any embarrassment this may cause), is a contributor to this site (he writes under gmezzy) but I didn’t know him before I heard this song. His friend- my friend now- Dave Murphy (wordjunkie on this site) posted this song in January of 2007 and I have had a hard time getting it out of my head since then. That isn’t a bad thing.
I’ve seen the Cons three times since then and at none of the shows did they perform “Some People”.
No matter.
What they did play was amazing- rock shit!- and it had been a long time since I have gotten truly excited about the release of a local act’s new album- one that actually performs in their own city. I know the Cons are close to a new one, but I don’t know exactly when. I can’t wait to hear it.
I don’t need to be a musician. It is a craft I have so much respect for, one that brings me such pleasure, that I am more than willing to let the creativity of others bring me joy in the form of music. I’ll invest my creativity elsewhere. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at it…and I found the work that goes into getting a song right, the repetition, drives me a little crazy. I wonder how many musicians hate their own work just because they have to revisit old works so often. It occurs to me that maybe gmezzy is sick of “Some People”. It occurs to me that it isn’t just chicks and drink tickets. A filmmaker makes a film and moves onto the next thing. He still gets the same kudos. The musicians we like, they do some work. And then do it again.
But this song, on a personal level- what it means to me… it will be a song that resonates with me in 20 years and make me think of that cusp of darkness that the mid-aughts (2000s) were met, hopefully, with something that we will look back and scoff at. There were times when the general feel of the decade felt so awful that it seemed like things might be messed up for good…that when you heard any glimmer of hope, you clung. I think we Americans collectively got weak in this decade, and anything that even broached the subject of our helplessness was an example- and forgive me for sounding cheesy because I mean what I say- of something to take solace in. One day we will look back at the first eight years of this decade and be embarrassed, if we haven’t and been already, and this song, for me, will be featured on the mix that I make when I’m trying to comprise musically what it felt like to live through this decade. It is a song that expresses something equivalent to what I imagine a dog feels when lost in the rain. Bad weather and discomfort, seems will last forever. Shook down. Not surrendered, but just a little hope in at least you can acknowledge what it is you’re experiencing. Wet, stupid, lost and sad.
I hope you listen to this song even if you are accustomed to not listening to these songs of the day (Rat, wfg, Slim, Loren- writers as well as readers, etc.) The lyrics, the production, the tone of the lead singer’s voice together comprise to me a song that captures that elusive nearly-perfect feel. I hope you enjoy it.
You can check out The Cons at http://www.myspace.com/theconsmusic
I love these lyrics:
Leaping from buildings with regrets in midair.
There’s the same change of heart everywhere.
Some people steal babies.
Others toss theirs in the trash.
Some people yearn for love.
Some can’t be had.
A marvel of science grows cancer in your kids.
Progress has always come with certain risks.
And why should it change before the last trace of our worst days becomes erased?
Why should it change anyway?
Working a new bad job, it’s a dead end in disguise.
What else can you do but sympathize?
You told all the worst parts.
You doled my secrets out.
Some people just don’t know when to shut their mouths.
----Chris Earley
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Richard Feynman
Haven't been posting much. Been busy working on new songs and a British Invasion mashup. Here's the wise Richard Feynman:
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Robert Crumb was never called an asshole.
A conversation between Robert Crumb and an ex-girlfriend from the movie “Crumb”:
“You really hated women then. Do you think it’s improved since?”
“Yeah. I hate them a little bit less now. Guys like me, I like certain kinds of women’s legs. I’m not masochistic.”
“But you don’t like feet! You’re not heavily into feet.”
“I’m not fixated, but I can get into it. I can have an orgasm playing with someone’s foot. It’s not a real narrow fixation.”
“It’s that the way the mind of the person who’s interested in legs and feet… is very different from the mind of the person who’s interested in breasts. Breast men tend to be aggressive, outgoing, athletic. People who like the lower body…”
“She’s got these types categorized.”
“People who like the lower body tend to be frightened, introverted. It all has to do with being down on the floor when you were a scared child… and looking up at that big tower of Mommy. What’s down there? The feet and legs. That’s where the security is. Women go around feeling victimized by men all the time. They feel like the men have the power… and the area where women can take the power from men is through sex. Men have that fetishistic twist to their minds because they have that ability… to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else… and can really be manipulated sexually, where women are not as susceptible.”
“You are so frightening. Jesus! Women are susceptible to power. That’s what I find. Any display of power and, ‘Oh, he’s so interesting!
Who’s that man who’s being so obnoxious and arrogant? He’s so interesting.’’’
From Pablo Picasso by The Modern Lovers
“Well, some people try to pick up girls
and get called an asshole.
This never happened to Pablo Picasso.
He could walk down your street,
and girls could not resist his stare,
and so Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.”
I happened to listen to this song and see “Crumb” on the same day, and I think Jonathan Richman and Robert Crumb are essentially saying the same thing. What do you think?
Friday, March 20, 2009
No Surprises Here
"A US study suggests that people with strong religious beliefs appear to want doctors to do everything they can to keep them alive as death approaches. The study, following 345 patients with terminal cancer, found that 'those who regularly prayed were more than three times more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care than those who relied least on religion.' At first blush, this appears paradoxical; one would think that a strong belief in an afterlife would lead to a more resigned acceptance of death than nonbelievers who view death as the end of existence, the annihilation of consciousness and the self. Perhaps the concept of a Judgment produces death-bed doubts? ('Am I really saved?') Or, given the Judeo-Christian abhorrence of suicide, and the belief that it is God who must ultimately decide when it is 'our time,' is it felt that refusing aggressive life support measures or resuscitation is tantamount to deliberately ending one's life prematurely?"
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/1753206&from=rss
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/1753206&from=rss
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Dick Dawkins-Logical Bad Ass
Richard Dawkins - Open Letter to His Daughter
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?
The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.
Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like "authority." But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Your loving Daddy
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?
The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.
Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like "authority." But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Your loving Daddy
Friday, February 6, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
"You want your potty pants!"
Roddy makes so much sense.
I must be drunk right now, because I totally get where Roddy is coming from.
I must be drunk right now, because I totally get where Roddy is coming from.
I was raised on breaded meats and this.
"Yeah, I do. Yeah. Outside interference, yeah. IN MY MOMENT OF GLORY!!! Yeah, and now I'm living in a nightmare. And I am the cream, and they are... not only the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship belt must fall, but the World Heavyweight Championship belt, cause Hulk Hogan, yeah, I am... the cream, yeah, the cream of the crop, and there is no one that does it better than the Macho Man Randy Savage! On balance, off balance, doesn't matter!"
That is the kind of closing statement that movies (and cocaine hangovers) are made of. Really, what the hell was wrong with me as an 11-year-old NES addict? All I knew about life was filtered through Randy "The Macho Man" Savage and Mario World.
That is the kind of closing statement that movies (and cocaine hangovers) are made of. Really, what the hell was wrong with me as an 11-year-old NES addict? All I knew about life was filtered through Randy "The Macho Man" Savage and Mario World.
Monday, January 26, 2009
"Drunken Negro Cookies" Wha?
A fat, racist baker unapologetically makes "drunken negro cookies". On inauguration day, he called them Obamas. Oh, OK. That makes it better now.
The Greatest Show On Earth
This will be the best show ever, and it's on MTV. Don't believe me?
Click on photo for its full glory.
Video here:
Click on photo for its full glory.
Video here:
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Sounds Of Blurg
This here is some random samples culled from my Casio fed through an SP-404 then onto Garageband. This sounds like Blurg to me, and it is to be taken with salvia.
Blurg! - Andrew Gomez
Download it here for free:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1oofot1ungi
Blurg! - Andrew Gomez
Download it here for free:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1oofot1ungi
Friday, January 16, 2009
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