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Saturday, October 8, 2016
Golden Oldies
Finished copying the
Jazz Prospecting reviews into a work
file that will eventually be folded into the Jazz Consumer Guide
book(s). Next obvious step is to move on to
Rhapsody Streamnotes -- a much
larger task, with a fair amount of redundancy up through 2013 and
new stuff thereafter. But instead I wondered whether I might find
some old stuff in the
Notebook, at least up to when I
started collecting my Jazz Prospecting notes in the
Jazz Consumer Guide directory.
Indeed, I found a few things going back to 2001.
I also waded through a bunch of old writings, some of which
I thought worth reprinting here. Like this letter I wrote to the
Wichita Eagle back on December 30, 2001, in response to a "puff
piece" called "Bush's rookie year a success."
Bush's rookie year a success? Well, he's certainly accomplished
a lot: a war that is projected to be endless and that provides
Israel and India an excuse to step up their own wars; an economy
in the toilet, with rising unemployment; tax cuts to the rich,
and bailouts to big business (although not enough to save his
buddies at Enron); the end of the surplus that supposedly had
been necessary to keep Social Security solvent; an assault on our
legal system which has safeguarded our freedom for over 200 years;
and not the least bit of attention to skyrocketing health care
costs; and, of course, more damage to the environment. I'm just
not sure how much Bush success we can really afford.
After quoting the letter, I added:
The list, of course, could have gone on and on, but in tallying
it up so far I'm struck by how huge these calamities really are,
and how hard it was less than a year ago to predict so much
damage so soon. Equally amazing is how little attention people
here seem to be paying.
From December 5, 2001 (I'm reading forward by months, but
backwards within months, so please bear with this idiosyncrasy):
Old news, but it looks like the anthrax threat which so effectively
pushed up US paranoia to grease the skids for Bush's Afghan adventure
was done with US government-made anthrax. Without getting into the
question of who mailed the anthrax, or why, one conclusion is obvious:
the terror would not exist had the US military not developed the weapon.
Which is to say that at least in this case terrorism could have been
prevented by the simple, sensible policy of governments not developing
terrorist weapons.
From December 4, 2001:
Israel's tactic of trying to "motivate" Arafat by bombing
his habitual hangouts reminds me of nothing so much as one of those
westerns where the sadistic outlaw shouts "dance!" as he shoots around
the feet of some schlemiel. . . . Israel's
targeting of Arafat comes on the heels of meetings between Sharon
and the US government. Whereas the early post-9/11 hope was that
the US would moderate Israel in the hopes of gaining much needed
Islamic support against Al Qaeda, it now looks like the 9/11 glee
evinced by the likes of Peres and Netanyahu has prevailed. Israel
indeed has much to teach the US about terrorism: specifically, how
terrorist threats provide cover and excuse for the most vicious and
reactionary of political agendas.
From December 3, 2001, a point in time I later referred to as the
"feel good" days of the American War in Afghanistan, from my comment
on a New Yorker piece by Hendrik Hertzberg:
The campaign we're witnessing is the reflex of
power provoked. But the methods do little more than remind us that
the US's real power doesn't amount to much more than the ability to
indiscriminately bomb and wreak havoc, to unleash terror at a pitch
that Al Qaeda can only dream about.
In this, the US leadership has managed to reverse the plain truth of
the 9/11 attacks, which is that the victims had no relationship to
any plausible complaint about the US or how the US power has damaged
any other part of the world, and that the terrorists had shown
themselves to be utterly immoral in their slaughter of innocents.
Hertzberg is right that no one disagrees with this judgment of the
terrorists. Where he misses the boat is in not realizing that the
same logic that lets the US leaders justify their bombing in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other quarters of the Islamic world, is
the selfsame logic that leads terrorists, with their relatively
crude weapons, to target US innocents. And while in the US people
like Hertzberg are grinning over laundered news about US military
success in Afghanistan, the even more hardened government/terrorist
factions in Israel have viciously expanded their own power tryst.
Such views were pretty unusual at the time, but still right on
the mark today. There are some earlier posts on 9/11 that I skipped
over before I noticed the Bush letter. Also music, movies, and more
than a few dinner notes.
On October 25, 2002 I lamented "feeling much more over the hill
than seems to be the norm for [my age, 52]," and also bemoaned the
sudden death of Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and the approaching
elections, which would give Bush control of both houses of Congress:
The death of Paul Wellstone and his posse was sad enough, but what is
especially sad is how quickly it submerges into our general nervousness
over the impending elections. Bush and his administration have behaved
so appallingly since their annointment by Antonin Scalia that one
expects the Reichstag to catch fire any day now. Principled Democrat
opposition is astonishingly hard to find -- I'm not even sure that
Wellstone qualified, although it's easy to point to others with far
fewer scruples. Yet the most thing that strikes me the strongest is
how fragile our lives are, and how arbitrarily history wends around
them.
From December 30, 2002, in the buildup to Bush's Iraq misadventure,
I found myself arguing not just against "liberal hawks" but hardcore
pro-war "leftists":
As for the comments, a special raspberry to Ellen Willis, who argues that
the antiwar movement against the US/Vietnam war undermined the "radical
democratic left" by turning into an "apolitical moral crusade." It sounds
like her crowd won't make that mistake again; indeed, once they seize
power their first task will be to purify American power from its present
corruption and put it to good use righting the wrongs in the world.
If forced to choose between the leftists and the pacifists, I'd take the
pacifists any day. For one thing they have principles that one can practice
immediately and build on in everyday life, while the anti-pacifist left can
only struggle for power, becoming what they first hated and losing their
bearings.
On January 29, 2003, I wrote something about economic policy which
I still mean to follow up on some day:
A less obvious approach would be for the government to make strategic
investments in the private sector, where the strategy is to try to
bring prices down. Such investments rarely happen in the private sector,
since the private sector's investment strategy is to maximize profits,
and that rarely involves cutting prices. Yet almost every real gain in
living standards has come about not by people achieving enough income
to buy expensive products but by the products getting cheap enough to
be afforded by the masses. Just look around you: how many people would
have VCRs if they still cost $1300? Personal computers if they still
cost $5000? Further back you have to adjust for inflation, but consider
that cars in the 1900's cost thousands of dollars, but Henry Ford cut
the price of the Model T to less than $300. Just look around and you'll
find many places where prices can conceivably be cut significantly,
enough to vastly expand the market and add to people's real standard
of living. (Of course, given that I'm surrounded by thousands of
compact discs, one example is music; indeed, the very popularity
of file sharing shows that the latent demand is there, if only the
costs can be slashed -- which of course they can be.)
I contrasted this to more commonplace approaches from the left
like stimulating demand by raising the wage floor, giving labor
more clout to negotiate wages, and increasing government spending
(to and beyond New Deal levels). Of course, I favor all of those
things, but I'm offering this as something that's rarely discussed
(and when it is, usually in negative terms like greater antitrust
vigilance).
On January 23, 2003, I wrote a letter about the coming Iraq War
(addressed to Wichita Eagle columnist Bob Getz).
I was unusually tempted to write you after your previous column
on the Bush plan to invade Iraq, but didn't get around to it until
after seeing your second column. So here it is: thanks for an
exceptionally clear-headed and cant-free statement. I really can't
see anything but woe coming out of this war, and I can't see any
reason for Kansans to accept or support it. Even if every vile
thing you hear about Saddam Hussein is true, I can't see Iraq as
a threat to anything in my life -- unlike war, which casts a pall
over the economy, sucking wealth out to be incinerated overseas.
And as for helping those poor Iraqis overthrow their tyrant, God
helps those who help themselves. But even short of that some sort
of negotiated end to the sanctions would do far more good, and
would no doubt be much more appreciated than occupation by an
alien power.
But the thing that worries me most has nothing to do with the
Iraqis: I'm worried about what war, even in victory, will do
to us. An old Kansas named Dwight Eisenhower warned about the
growing threat of a "military-industrial complex," but rather
than heeding that warning John F. Kennedy concocted his "missile
gap" and Lyndon Johnson plunged us hopeless into Vietnam. And
while Johnson and his liberal ideologues may have thought that
they were bringing American democracy to Vietnam, their methods
so undermined them that they became lost, unable to fathom that
it's impossible to save a village by destroying it. On the other
hand, Nixon and his conservative realpolitiker saw that defeat
in Vietnam was inevitable, but tragically escalated the war to
remind the world to respect American power. Since then we've
been in denial about what the war did not only to Vietnam and
Cambodia (millions of dead) but what it did to America, which
was to strip away the innocence of our good intentions and to
cultivate a cynical, power-craving military/CIA establishment.
We had an opportunity to cut back with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, but the hawks were saved by Iraq, and propelled
forward by Al Qaeda. While the rest of the world has steadfastly
moved away from war as a solution to anything, Bush seems to be
intoxicated with America's status as the world's sole superpower
and the military prowess that dubious claim rests on. But that
power is hollow: the power to destroy, but not to build, nor
even to protect. And it's harder than ever to clothe that power
with anything resembling good intentions. And this seems to be
pretty clear to the whole world now, even if some politicians
and media moguls opt to play along.
Back in the 1960s there was a slogan in the antiwar movement:
"Suppose they gave a war and nobody came." At the time reeked
with irony, a flashback to the pro-war parades that launched
World War I. (Hardly a more distant past then than Vietnam is
now -- my grandfather fought in WWI.) Hopefully this old slogan
will lose its irony and become a plain statement of fact this
time.
I won't bother to quote it here, but in January 2003 I wrote
a post on who got elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and who
didn't, with what still reads to me like pretty solid analysis.
Can't do that any more, but at the time I still knew a thing or
two about the sport.
Next post down I referred to Sam Brownback as "our ultra-slimy
Senator." From February 19, 2003, I see a post about a plan to
keep increases in electric and gas rates secret so as to not tip
the utilities' hands to the terrorists.
On March 18, 2003, I wrote the first of many pieces about the
Bush War in Iraq as a bad fact and not just a bad idea. Long before
I knew that when the time came I'd refer to the Japan's attack on
Pearl Harbor. The post starts out:
Yesterday, March 17, 2003, is another date that will live in infamy.
On this date, U.S. President George W. Bush rejected the efforts and
council of the United Nations, and the expressed concerns of overwhelming
numbers of people throughout the U.S. and all around the world, and
committed the U.S. to attack, invade, and occupy Iraq, to prosecute or
kill Iraq's government leaders, and to install a new government
favorable to U.S. interests.
Nothing I wrote that day requires amendment, although I didn't manage
to anticipate many of the subsequent debacles. At least, as this paragraph
further down shows, I didn't underestimate the unexpected:
As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will
play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically
transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage
will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this
war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and
throughout the world. In lauching his war, Bush is marching blithely
into the unknown, and dragging the world with him.
I wrote much more about Iraq in the following days, weeks, months,
and years. I'll leave it to you to look that up. But throughout the
entire notebook period I feel that I've been pretty consistent, and
my key insights have been vindicated time and again. Most key is that
the US made a colossal mistake in resorting to military force after
9/11, especially in attacking Afghanistan. Bush bears special blame
because he was in the unique position of being able to stop the march
to war after 9/11. Of course, he didn't, and arguably couldn't, not
just because of the institutional inertia of the American war machine
but because of his own peculiar personal and political history.
But also note that I wrote quite a lot about Israel/Palestine
during the 18 months from 9/11 to Iraq. That was the peak period
of the Israeli counter-intifada when Ariel Sharon destroyed what
was left of the previous decade's "Oslo peace process," which had
begun with much fanfare at Clinton's White House, but which Bush
had no interest in salvaging -- indeed, Bush and Sharon shared a
preference for "solving" conflicts by brute force, a corollary
which only served to worsen each conflict.
Just for perspective, I'll also pull some music bits from the same
period. For instance, on February 9, 2003, I wrote: "Closing in on
8000 records rated." The latest count is 27198, so since that point
I've averaged about 1400 records per year, or 27 per week (which,
yeah, seems like a pretty typical week). The thing that accelerated
those numbers was, first, writing consumer guide columns which got
some publicists to send me free music, and second, various streaming
and downloading services (especially Rhapsody).
I found my first (21st century) Pazz & Jop ballot filed away
on December 20, 2002 (after I had started writing for Michael Tatum
at Static Multimedia):
- DJ Shadow: The Private Press (MCA) 14
- NERD: In Search of . . . (Virgin) 13
- Mekons: Oooh! (Out of Our Heads) (Quarterstick) 12
- Spaceways Inc.: Version Soul (Atavistic) 12
- Youssou N'Dour: Nothing's in Vain (Nonesuch) 10
- Cornershop: Handcream for a Generation (Beggars Banquet) 9
- Buck 65: Square (Warner Music Canada) 9
- Van Morrison: Down the Road (Universal) 8
- Spoon: Kill the Moonlight (Merge) 7
- Cee-Lo: Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections (Arista) 6
As of January 6, 2003, my 2002
A-list was 62 albums long,
growing to 77 when I stopped adding records to the file. By
contrast, my
2001 A-list only had 35
albums by January 2, 2002 (eventually growing to 53), but I
rather prefer my mock 2001 Pazz & Jop ballot -- what I
would have sent in had I been invited (which I was not):
- The Coup: Party Music (75 Ark) 16
- Manu Chao: Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (Virgin) 16
- Lucinda Williams: Essence (Lost Highway) 11
- David Murray: Like a Kiss That Never Ends (Justin Time) 11
- Maria Muldaur: Richland Woman Blues (Stony Plain) 9
- Tricky: Blowback (Hollywood) 9
- Bob Dylan: Love and Theft (Columbia) 8
- Orlando Cachaito Lopez: Cachaito (World Circuit/Nonesuch) 7
- The Moldy Peaches: The Moldy Peaches (Rough Trade) 7
- Nils Petter Molvaer: Solid Ether (ECM) 6
Note that Molvaer eventually dropped to 13th, with Buck 65:
Man Overboard (Metaforensics) slipping into 8th, The
Highlife Allstars: Sankofa (Network) 9th, and Shakira:
Laundry Service (Epic) 11th.
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