Reasons why McCain's selection of a quasi-Canook cocktail waitress as his running mate is either an act of desperation or cry for help:
She's a cocktail waitress.
Or a airline stewardess, or whatever.
She's dumb.
Her political career -- such as it is (and it isn't!) -- consists of mayoral offices in towns with populations equal to the number of people currently standing at the Belmont El stop, and having done so at the behest of oil companies that use her as their little doe-eyed puppet to screw the American people out of their own natural resources.
She has no qualifications and in fact has never set foot outside the United States. Check out this -- sorry, it's difficult to type because I'm laughing so hard -- time line in the The New York Times, which documents her lifetime of formidable achievements -- which include graduating from journalism school at the University of Idaho, playing Division 3 basketball at some piece of shit Alaskan college, and apparently (winning I'm not kidding about this) some kind of local beauty contest. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The number of disgruntled Hilary-supporters who would actually vote for this woman, who's rabidly "pro-life" (and even though she's not hypocritical about it -- what with the five babies or whatever, and the baby recently born with Down's syndrome -- she's still pro-life which is hella-NOT what Hilary supporters are). Plus any women with even a vague feminist impulse can't support this biatch. Why? Because she's obviously dumb as a goddamn brick!
They look terrible together. As if McCain's fucking Botoxy socialite bitch of a wife didn't make him look bad enough, now he looks even more like some creepy old man, collecting young girls to stand next to him (and make him look old, which doesn't help him). Observe:
Say NO to this, America! It's so fucking creepy!
She's .... uh ... not qualified to be president. And as Rahm Emanuel pointed out, it's not like ol' Johnny's not #1 in the most likely to die while in office category.
I mean, seriously, could you imagine if this bimbo became president? And no, I'm not equating "looks" (which she supposedly has? says somebody, not sure who) with stupidity. I'm equating stupidity with stupidity.
And I'm not equating inexperience with unsuitability for office. I'm equating the combination of inexperience and stupidity with unsuitability for office.
And, you see, Barack Obama -- to the extent he's "inexperienced" -- is also smart, inspiring, on-the-ball, the galvanizer of a nationwide movement....I mean, he's Barack Fucking Obama, and this chick is just some dumb cheerleader from butt-fuck nowhere, with a dumbass husband who looks like he's inbred or something. I don't want that motherfucker anywhere near the White House. He would stain the furniture just by looking at it.
Isn't America sick of all of this fucking Conservative Christian bullshit? Can't all of the Fascists-For-Jesus people just go away?
She's into hunting and NASCAR and all that other redneck bullshit. Isn't America sick of all the redneck shit yet? I mean, come on.
And also the fucking oil people? Aren't we sick of having motherfuckers who work for oil companies setting our fucking foreign policy? Examples in the current Administration of people who RECENTLY WORKED for oil companies (off the top of my head): Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush. AREN'T PEOPLE SICK OF THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES? You want more of this shit, Conservative Christian America? Need more oil CEOs setting your policy for you?? We are a country of dumbass masochistic assholes, and we seem to get what we deserve.
Apparently John and Sarah hadn't spoken to one another until like a couple of days ago, and then, only briefly. No surprise.
Just no.
Were the two of them to win the presidency, satire as a form of humor and communication would cease entirely to be distinguishable from reality. It's already close enough now, with Bush and his cowboy hats and his "Mission Accomplished" airplane stunt.
She's Dan Quayle in drag.*
* Not my joke. I can't remember where it came from. But it's good, no?
...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.
We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...
-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address', televised on 28 January 1986.
I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).
I. The world was flat.
It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)
It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.
II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.
But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as agiven the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.
I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.
That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)
To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.
What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.
So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).
Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.
It's gross...
IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.
I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.
V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.
Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.
What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.
I don't have cable, but even the fragments of this show that I catch now and again make me feel better about living in a world populated by dumb, fat, re- and unreconstructed racist fucks, and the TV executives who court their ratings by paying salaries to mouth-breathers like Chris Matthews.
I know, I shouldn't let it bother me. But I just want Obama to win so badly (just picture how colossally fucked this country will be if McCain wins!), and Michelle is such a kind-hearted, genuine, humble, strong, intelligent, graceful and stylish person that the idea of shrill-voiced, hick-talking, inbred AM talk-show host goons calling her mean names just makes me want to smack them in addition to all of the other lying, hateful, Cheetos-eating, fat motherfuckers that serve as brownshirts in the GOP civilian-Gestapo. Where'd they learn their fucking manners from, anyway?
Wow. I should go run a couple of laps or something. Anyway, the point is that Jon Stewart is great and is the funny and is sometimes even my savior. In the meantime, enjoy this fabulous clip...
From The Daily Show, broadcast on August 26, 2008:
The following quotation is taken from the initial post of a certain Tom Tresser, whose blog is called Connecting The Dots In Chicago, which is about the privatization of public infrastructure. I am very happy to see that such a blog exists, and, although I as of yet know nothing about Tom Tresser except his initial post, I think I like his politics a lot. Tresser's blog is to be found on The Huffington Post's new Chicago-specific Web site:
[W]hat is the real state of our city finances? Is this trend toward self-financing and privatization really in the best interest of the people? Is Chicago so poor that it has to sell the Skyway and is contemplating selling Midway Airport? Is the Board of Education so strapped that parents all over the city tax themselves through never-ending fundraising in order to add staff, purchase computers and basic supplies for our public schools? Is the Park District so needy that it demands citizens to raise or find two thirds of the funding for local park improvements? Is the city so needy that it is entering into partnerships with anyone with cash or clout that strip the public out of "public assets[?]"
It's such a relief to witness the emergence of efforts like Tresser's to expose in digestible terms and with local/familiar points of reference the privatization of public assets, neoliberal politics, sleazy oligarchic alliances between government and big business.
It's my hope that the contributions of hard-working, clear-thinking and morally/ethically engaged people like Tresser, there will result an increased public consciousness of and capacity to think critically about:
the accumulation of facts on the ground of ongoing cynical and corrupt instances of the selling-off of public infrastructure -- which for apparently structural or market-dictated reasons don't seem to be covered under the beats of any mainstream or even formally 'public' news media I can think of,
and the ways in which the past 30 years of Republican neoliberal governance and strong-arm politics -- capitalizing on and perpetuating the latent fears of the so-called 'middle-class' -- has distorted in pernicious ways the very rhetoric that we use on a day-to-day basis to refer to a host of things economic, political and even personal. Namely, the 'logic of the marketplace' -- and its corollary, the 'our rights as consumers' -- has crept into sectors of society and human life in which it simply should have no place.
To elaborate on #2: a theory that I've seen floated (I think in an article in Slate, if memory serves, commenting upon the recent Wall Street Journal piece "Why no outrage?" by James Grant) about the lack of 'outrage' with respect to recent instances of the federal government doling out what in essence are welfare checks to corporations and wealthy investors. The author in Slate theorized that it has precisely to do with this 30 years of ideological work conducted by the GOP slogan-machine on behalf of the economic Right, including, obviously, corporate interests.
The result of this conditioning is that many of we Americans who probably lack completely either comprehension or even conscious allegiance to this neoliberal ideological agenda (and corporate profit-making agenda) associate ANY public ownership of infrastructure, no matter how big or how small, with inefficiency, ineptitude, and a kind of decline in economic dynamism, and thereby, an overall decline in the efficacy of the American project, which is, after all, built upon things like the vitality and industriousness of the atomized, private individual, acting in his own interests(!).
This GOP strategy by which public rhetoric and sentiment is conditioned against public infrastructure is, it seems to me, choc-full of weaknesses. One of the reasons we are seeing its stranglehold over the populace – and its stranglehold is greatest, let’s face it, over the ‘middle class’, broadly construed, and the ‘baby boomers’, narrowly construed – begin to unravel is because the sexy illusion that declares the privatization of all aspects of ownership and governance to be in everyone’s best interest can only sustain itself for as long as, in the main, economic prosperity continues to appear to march forward. In other words: the illusion can sustain itself only for as long as people keep their jobs and make pay that they’re happy with. The illusion is unlikely to fracture on the basis of our cognizance of other people’s declining economic status and opportunities. We have too many illusions to obscure us from that cognizance.
But, once our individual leg up begins to disappear, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid recognizing that something’s up. Private interest starts to seem in fact to stand in POSITIVE relation to public interest (a novel idea, that!). When private citizens can no longer afford to buy enough privately distributed gasoline from the privately owned gas station to drive to work everyday in their private cars, it becomes increasingly apparent that – to our shock – that the lower our private economic means, the more that the curbing of public ownership amounts to the curbing of our ability to rely on the ownership of anything at all! Without that ownership – be it public or private – we lack access to amenities and services. And without access to amenities and services, we lack the capacity to improve our quality of life.
Especially in the short-term, however, plenty of us who have been brainwashed by the GOP’s neoliberal agenda will continue to hold onto the dream, even as the dream starts to seem like more and more of a nightmare. When we lose our job, we will blame ourselves for not being hard-working enough. When gas prices become too high for us to afford, we will redirect our resentment and anger, and aim it squarely at people who look and speak differently than we do.
After all, it’s no secret that the GOP machine currently and since Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon at least, capitalizes upon the middle class’s resentment of that which is unfamiliar, and preys upon the middle class’s self-pity at the notion of having to think for so much as a moment about the interests of those who look different and live differently than it does. In other words, the resentment of the haves toward the have nots. A resentment revolving around such intangibles as fear, paranoia, historical but usually sublimated racism, and – of course – the myth of American meritocracy, with its built-in relief from having to feel guilty about how much more you have than other people. When you think about it, the fact that the GOP since Nixon was able to capitalize and perpetuate a resentment of the poor than flows from the top to bottom of the economic ladder – despite how clearly counterintuitive this would appear – is quite astonishing!
So, now, as it becomes increasingly difficult for Joe Suburb, who’d construed himself previously to be a have to ignore the fact that on a day-to-day basis, he’s more and more of a have not, the GOP will perhaps discover an ideological task for itself that on paper should be much easier than the one it’s been up to for the past 30 years. All the GOP has to do is reorganize its ideological energies around the notion that outside forces, particularly in the Middle East – tapping in, naturally to existing but mostly sublimated racism, fear and anti-Arab sentiment – is responsible for having taken the opportunities of the American middle class away! Indeed, the Right has already been at it, laying the groundwork not only for the neoconservative idea of attacking Iran, but I would argue, for the neoliberal idea that Middle Eastern oil-rich nations are, as it were, 'infringing upon the American, free-market-derived right' to buy and sell oil/gasoline at a 'fair’, price that’s not ‘artificially inflated’ by ‘evil-doers’ who look different than we do.
Again, if the GOP was able to tap into the resentment of the haves toward groups of have-nots who ‘look, talk, act and pray different than we do’, it should be fairly easy for it to redirect that resentment toward people who not only ‘look, talk, act and pray’ differently, but who live on the other side of the world, and who are portrayed as the actual culprits for the decline in the standard of living in the United States’s middle class. Oh, and by the way: ‘they’re all terrorists, and they hate our freedom’.
After all, one of the hallmarks of the aforementioned 30-year ideological project is that it undertakes to becloud the bright line that should, of course, exist between good governance and good economics. Between the public good and the good of private industry. Between democracy and capitalism! The Chinese Olympics, after all, is a kind of apotheosis of the alliance of gentlemanly economic goodwill between the USA and China that was brokered originally by Nixon and Henry 'Realpolitik' Kissinger.
At present, there is justifiable outrage on the part of activists and ordinary people globally toward China’s extensive past and continuing human rights abuses. But, do you know what I find awfully telling? The fact that you’d have to look much harder indeed to find people expressing outrage at an even more pernicious and even less containable evil: that of authoritarian capitalism. I believe that only a paranoid lunatic would suggest that any mainstream politician or business interest in the USA actually favors authoritarianism. What I am pointing to is the fact that there appears to be such an alarmingly meager amount of discussion of the ways in which the combination of authoritarianism and capitalism is a blueprint in and of itself for widespread human, political and economic injustice.
It’s easier, after all, to talk about human rights abuses – be they systemic or discrete – because it just makes more human sense as offensive to those of us who see ourselves as having a moral conscience. It functions in much the same way as the recent spate of corruption and abuse in Washington DC through alliances between federal government and private sector interests: I’m speaking of course about Jack Abramoff, et al. As Tom Frank’s new book apparently discusses (I haven’t read it yet, apart from the excerpt published in Harper’s), such lobbying/contracting/special interest abuses are SYSTEMIC in Washington. But the way business is done in DC, there are one or two ‘fall guys’ chosen from among a number of powerful participants, the ‘fall guy’ is prosecuted in a big-headline-generating, sex-scandal-type way, and life goes on, as though the whole thing was a discrete, unique, even bizarre or unusual infraction of a system that basically works.
As more and more of us begin to realize, the system of course doesn’t work. And I’m happy to see that Tresser’s blog has been set up for the purpose of addressing these tendencies on a local level, where they’re familiar and palpable. Where we ordinary Joes can trace trends and tendencies as they unfold before our eyes, in addition to taking to task on a case-by-case basis individual politicians and shady businessmen for their corruption, neglect or the deliberate creation of opacity from public scrutiny. So that we can all begin to recognize intuitively that the outsourcing of public infrastructure to the marketplace is in effect the outsourcing of democracy itself; the destruction of our rights to scrutinize, to protest, to oppose, and to vote in accordance with our beliefs, ethics and political preferences; a gag order against the use of our own voices as citizens. So that we have a shot at realizing that the outsourcing of our public infrastructure is in effect the outsourcing of the public good.
Two sides to every story Somebody had to stop me I'm not the same as when I began I will not be treated as property!
-- John Lydon, in P.i.L's "Public Image"
This item inaugurates a series of posts dedicated to the discussion of the lyrics, singing, songwriting, image, fashion sense, rhetoric, persona and politics of John Lydon. I'll explain more about what I'll be discussing as I go along (since that's when I'll be deciding what I'll be discussing). Lydon -- a.k.a. Johnny Rotten -- is a complex artist, and almost every aspect of his career and life is more or less contentious. I don't intend to get to the bottom of any deep debates, particularly not as regards Lydon's significance in the United Kingdom, because his career draws from and contributes to the UK cultural consciousness in ways that will always remain partly beyond the scope of my comprehension.
In fact, my chief goal in hammering out these brainstorms about John Lydon is to make a case that people in the United States should take his contributions to music and culture more seriously; also that the US is now in many respects ready to understand Lydon's work, because the country has gone through plenty of growing up since the late '70s: a period not noted for American optimism, but which in retrospect appears to have been extremely naive, especially in comparison to the culturally revolutionary activities taking place in London contemporaneously.
I also should make clear that I'm not much going to be talking about Lydon's work during his creatively bankrupt phases, of which there have definitely been a few. To the extent that I touch upon, for instance, the Lydon of Public Image Ltd.'s 1983 release Live In Japan (not recommended!), it will be to point out how his work at its best is so good and so important that such missteps carry zero weight in a serious assessment of the quality and impact of Lydon's overall career.
For example, unfailingly they'll refer -- either blithely or enthusiastically -- to Lydon's lyrics or attitude as 'nihilistic', which in fact is a terribly wrong-headed term with which to describe his work. They'll read sarcasm into his moments of greatest sincerity, they'll mistake honesty for braggadocio, and they'll mistake braggadocio for hate. They'll read his odes to self-centeredness as disdain for that which is external to the self. And let's pause on this for a moment: just think about the kind of mind that thinks "self-centered = bad thing," insteadof, for instance, asking itself "bad in relation to what, exactly?" And then going on to think, "Mighn't there be some things in relation to which self-centeredness is good? And what might those things be?"
Obviously, journalism and particularly music journalism isn't going to give us the latter mind. So I therefore am undertaking to brainstorm about what more people would know, were the latter mind out there writing for USA Today. But to begin with, we would be well served to explore what cultural or historical trends might hold regular media back. To account for this failure to give Johnny his due on the part of journalists and other types who are in the business of 'due-giving', I have a host of hypotheses. Just to list three rather general examples:
Plenty of ink has been spilled particularly in England on the subject of John 'Johnny Rotten' Lydon. Believe it or not -- despite all the dust kicked up by London's famously lowbrow tabloids, beginning with The Sex Pistols' famous appearance on the UK's Bill Grundy tea-time television show
-- at least a respectable percentage of the commentary on Lydon's projects over the years in the UK actually treated its subject seriously. However, paradoxically, because the impact of the Pistols exploding into English culture was so seismic, a lot of what Lydon represents is by definition left unsaid by commentators from within that culture, even those commentaries that are most wildly sympathetic to Lydon's work and point of view. A gruesome but nonetheless instructive point of comparison in the United States is September 11th. If we were to look back at newspaper articles in the months and years following that event, it's unlikely that after an initial period we would find references to the details of that day. You just take it as a given. There's no reason to talk about all of its details explicitly. *
By its very nature, The Sex Pistols' -- and especially John Lydon's -- persona and media presence is/was oppositional. Therefore, the band's and the singer's impact is measured most fruitfully by the degree to which media reports and the rantings of the commentariat reactedto rather than assessed soberly the phenomenon of The Sex Pistols. There's nothing wrong with this fact as such. But it means that the articles or commentaries have a very short shelf-life. They appear to contemporary eyes -- especially if those eyes are American -- to be as ponderous and obscure as, say, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (not recommended!).
While all of the above holds true particularly on the Right Side of the Pond, here in the US of A, the problem could be described as the converse of both 1) and 2). The music and culture-oriented media here -- to the extent that they can be said to exist -- simply don't know or understand or care about how revolutionary was the impact of The Sex Pistols in their native land. This goes not just for glossy toilet paper like, whatever, Rolling Stone or something, but also for media that should know what the fuck they're talking about but don't. You know, sophomoric middlebrow, middle class crap like Pitchfork Internet Magazine or whatever it's called, which is in a way even worse than Rolling Stone, because it doesn't pay its writers, and its writers write like it.
II. Oppositional thinking ≠ nihilism.
There. I've drawn our attention to the fact that the American press tends neither to know it's history nor to care about the history of cultures outside of its purview/target market, and that this has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't understand Lydon, and especially didn't understand him during the late 70s. Compounding this problem is another uniquely American phenomenon whose relevance is undeniable despite the fact that it's....erm....extrinsic to the question of the relation between media and Lydon himself.
Let me put it this way, it's for largely the same reasons that people in the United States have still managed to trick themselves into believing that there's no class system here. And if we have trouble coming to grips with that now, in the midst of the Second Gilded Age, you can be sure that we had trouble understanding it in the 1970s. Not that the 70s was a by any means prosperous time here in the good old US of A... But it was a naive time. The mainstream could no more have understood Johnny Rotten than it could have produced its very own Johnny Rotten, out of the remotest enclaves of Orange County.
No, the United States was on balance unprepared for the Pistols when they landed here and marched like a counter-clockwise Sherman through the unsuspecting countryside of the Bible Belt. Actually, I think in a weird way those Southern towns were somewhat ready, as evinced by the willingness of their cowboy-dressin' citizens to engage in confrontation,, particularly in San Antonio, where they gave as good as they got. And what they got was Sid Vicious cutting himself, calling the audience (in a righteously inspired moment), "a bunch of fucking faggot cowboys," and thwarting the advance of a particularly menacing faggot cowboy by hitting him over the head with his bass guitar.
Irrespective of the American South's readiness, San Francisco definitely wasn't. By the time Lydon came charging through with the early P.i.L line-ups, there had already emerged nationwide substantial pockets of understanding, receptive people. But the vast majority of culture still wasn't ready; they liked The Clash, maybe (and nowadays, what upwardly mobile professional doesn't like The Clash?), but Lydon was, in the estimation of the mainstream, still too demanding. Too, er....'nihilistic'.....
Tom Snyder: Back now with John and Keith who are with Public Image Limited. You know, it's been so long that I've almost forgotten where we were when we were at it!
John Lydon: Uh, you went into a bit of a tantrum as I likely remember!
Tom: Oh, yes I did.
John: You want to hear about us. Right. We have record commitments with Warner Brothers in America and Virgin for the rest of the world. We will, of course, oblige them, but, in the meantime, there is the possibility of us doing a soundtrack to a film in Hollywood. This interests us greatly.
Tom: What are . . .
John: We are not a band, we are a company. We have many interests. We are also making our own film in England right now at this very moment.
Tom: The music that you will do for the record companies that you mentioned. How will this music differ from what we thought was rock 'n' roll?
John: It's no more of that twelve-bar ditty, waving hair in the breeze, platform boots, flap your flair nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff, hated as it usually is. I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. I think they liked us for the wrong reasons.
Tom: Well you told me all the things --
John: Trendy reasons. Can I have a cigarette again, please?
-- The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, 6/27/80
Is this exchange -- a video clip of which I have featured previously -- nihilism? The answer is that it so totally and utterly is not. When most former Lydon-naysayers encounter this golden nugget of Lydon lore with refreshed or attentive eyes, they find it exceedingly difficult to deny its brilliance. Fuck the charlatans like David Bowie: in the late '70's and early '80's John Lydon's total immersion in the trappings of a persona of his own invention is truly breathtaking to behold.
Of course it was rife with internal contradictions, of course it announced ambitions on which it could never ultimately make good. That's all more or less the point. The lines between theater and reality are blurred, and this blurring is always a gift to art, even if, from time to time, it may have cost Lydon his credibility in vast expanses of American straight society, people who are used to having their expectations and assumptions confirmed; people who are used to mediocrity. It's not these people to whom Lydon was or should have been reaching out: rather, it was their disaffected children. Who needs, after all, the kind of 'credibility' that would have accrued to him, to his name, to his brand were he to have on such occasions restrained himself from rocketing at breakneck speed to the spectacularly eloquent rhetorical extremes to which he would push his capacity to negate??
I'll tell you where such restraint would have gotten Lydon -- which is also, by the way, what we'd have gotten from him. Picture a John Lydon who focused not on individual emancipation, but on large-scale political change? A John Lydon who aims for the approval of the broadest possible cross-section of the music- and culture-consuming population. A John Lydon focused upon moderation; a John Lydon whose raison d'etre is consensus-building! All manner of restraint, politeness, dependability, bang for yer buck!, middlebrow-ness, all couched in a facile/sheek rhetoric of radicalism...
A John Lydon, in other words, who is out to uphold such binaries as authenticity vs. disposable pop, manly-man vs. pussy-licker, solidarity through discipline vs. creative, anarchistic utopianism, politics vs. beauty, brotherhood vs. individualism, etc., instead of setting out to dissolve these binaries. A John Lydon who first pauses to consider whether or not you will find what he has to say palatable before letting you know what he thinks. A John Lydon whose idea of respecting his audience is to be nice.
We're not necessarily out there to give people a good time.
-- Keith Levene, describing P.i.L's live performances, 1978.
So, what would this parallel-universe John Lydon look like?
It would look like The Clash, of course!
III. The Clash vs. The Sex Pistols
And, after all, there's nothing wrong with The Clash, in the same way that there's nothing wrong with the Stones's Sticky Fingers. You know, play it at the afternoon barbecue, and I won't complain.
But whereas The Clash was good -- at times, even great -- it was always just a rock 'n' roll band. The Sex Pistols and early P.i.L was and is much much much more than that.
To explain why the Pistols are far-and-away the greatest of the original wave of UK punk bands we could simply point out Lydon's and Co.'s disdain for the term 'punk' -- who the fuck gave you license to label me? insisted ** John Lydon in 1976, when the term first appeared in the UK press, describing him as 'King of the Punks'. And as for 'rock', The Sex Pistols were, after all supposed to be that Last Rock 'n' Roll Band. In other words, rock is "vile. It's dead, it's a disease."
But I'll go a tiny bit further to verify that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that The Sex Pistols kick The Clash's ass every time. As I remarked earlier, just take a look at The Clash's audience:
I give you Stephen Metcalf, Slate's good-natured -- if somewhat mealy-mouthed -- book critic-guy, in whose estimation The Clash reigns supreme. If ever you find yourself participating in the tried-and-true punk rock parlor game of THE CLASH VS. THE SEX PISTOLS: WHICH IS THE GREATEST PUNK BAND OF ALL TIME??, would you really want to find yourself choosing this man's side? Just look at him! It's so clear that he really really likes Bruce Springsteen, and probably what's more, he uses the phrase "creative class" with a straight face. I can't see for sure, but is that a pair ofkhaki shorts that he's wearing with his winning wrinkled blazer/twice-unbuttoned shirt combo? Try and convince me that he doesn't wear Birkenstocks, that he doesn't in fact refer to them as his "Birks," and that he doesn't wear his Birks while he listens to London Calling on his I-Phone, while sunning himself at his friends' timeshare? Just go ahead and try.
Metcalf reveals that he's partial to The Clash in an article that was published by Slate in 2005. In this article, he refers to the Pistols as "a bunch of lowlifes tossed together by a cunning impresario." I should explain that it's not entirely clear whether Metcalf means this as a dis or as high praise. Frankly, very few things about Metcalf's article are even partially clear, and the few things that are clear are also stupid.
Case in point: Metcalf's pro-Clash stance appears to hinge on the fact that -- unlike The Sex Pistols -- The Clash weren't in actuality a punk band at all. Instead, they were a rock 'n' roll band! And bulwarking Metcalf's thesis is the fact that the Strummer/Jones songwriting team consisted of a (furtively) middle class guy (Strummer) and a partner who was truly working class (Jones). Previous examples he identifies -- after conducting careful research -- are Jagger/Richards (middle class/working class) and Lennon/McCartney.
(I've heard it said many times that Lennon -- the writer, after all, of the brilliant "Working Class Hero" -- was not himself working class, but this point has been wildly overstated. Fine, he was upper-lower class then. There just wasn't that much of a difference. My real point, of course, is that the Metcalfs of the world are wasting their and our time by using such dumb criteria to categorize musical or pop-cultural phenomena. And my real real point is that the Metcalfs of the world should just, um...like, NOT write about music or pop culture or punk rock in the first place. [I should add that I do dig the specs he's wearing in this pic.***])
IV. The USA's malaise means that The Sex Pistols & early P.i.L make more intuitive sense to us than ever.
And so anyway. This is where I would like to enter the conversation. Because, for some of the reasons articulated in the upper reaches of this post, the majority of media in the USA still get Lydon totally wrong. Even -- or perhaps especially -- the media that purport to like him. Doubtless for all the wrong reasons; trendy reasons. It's for all of the same reasons that a sizable portion of the American mainstream did understand the slogan-politics and militarism/machismo of The Clash. (And to give Strummer & Co. some credit, they too were obviously turned into a self-caricature for reasons that were not always the band's own doing.)
Lydon's art is not 'nihilistic'. Nor is it 'ironic'. Nor is it 'stream-of-consciousness'. Nor is or has Lydon ever been a 'bad singer'. In fact, he is the single most superb, innovative, important and influential singer of the last 30 years. Is Lydon's music 'punk rock'? Only if you mean it in the way that recognizes that 'punk rock' has no meaning.
Is Lydon's art 'oppositional'? You fucking bet it is. And herein lies the key.
To be continued...
________________
* Of course, in aftermaths of both the Pistols and of September 11th, people also eventually stopped thinking about it, which is a more complex issue that we won't go into right now.
** I'm paraphrasing here.
*** I should also point out, if I've not made it clear, that I actually like The Clash. I simply don't think they hold a candle to The Sex Pistols. This holds both musically and with respect to cultural significance. Not that I really believe those two things can be separated, but let's save that discussion for another day.....
I. * John Cage: Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.
Thrasymachus: But it's against company policy to dream.
JC:[momentary silence]... Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.
T: But my employer would have me fired were I to engage in this activity. And yet, you say that human beings need to dream always.
JC: As to the statement about your employer, I can only take your word for it. As to the matter of human beings dreaming, yes. Human beings need to dream always.
T: Would you have me fired from my job?
JC: I would no more have you fired from your job than I would have you receive a promotion and a raise in pay. I would no more have you receive a promotion and raise in pay than I would have you drink your coffee with two lumps of sugar, rather than your usual one lump, during your morning coffee break: the coffee break that you take in the large foyer outside your office, in which you sit facing the same direction as the Rauschenberg painting that hangs in the foyer of the adjoining house .
II. There's no sense in despair. This isn't to say that there's no sense in your having been led to despair. Quite the opposite! It remains, however, that there's no sense in despair.
III. Cable news -- all of it: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Whatever Else -- is not news. But don't hate it for what it's not. Hate it instead for what it is: MTV for Senior Citizens.
* These do not represent the words or ideas -- real or imagined -- of the late John Cage. They are instead wholly the creation of our blogger. Same = true as regards the portrayal of Thrasymachus.
Remember the run-up to the Iraq War? Remember how it was -- much like today -- a depressing, infuriating time? Everywhere you turned, you found unwelcome reminders that a gang of sleazy assholes -- a.k.a., the Bush Administration -- were running the country, that they quite obviously were eager to invade Iraq, and that they would find a way to do so no matter what? We knew that they were lying to us: that was never in question. What is tantalizing, however, is the prospect that actual concrete evidence and testimony might pop up that would make the nature of these lies comprehensible to our credulous fellow citizens.
Journalist Ron Suskind wouldn't need to try very hard to convince me and most intelligent people I know that the White House -- and Dick Cheney, specifically -- ordered the CIA to forge a document in order to steer popular will in the direction of supporting the invasion of Iraq. Suskind's new book The Way of the World, trotted out a couple of days ago amidst a deftly-coordinated publicity blitz, claims precisely this.
Remember the infamous "top secret memo" -- this stuff is actually quite hilarious -- purportedly containing proof not only that 9/11-pilot, al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta was "trained by Saddam," but conveniently, in the same memo(!) that Saddam had purchased a uranium shipment from Niger -- or, as George W. Bush put it, in his greatest "I'm too dumb to be a liar!!!" moment -- "from Africa"?
Anyway, that memo was revealed to be a forgery within, like, two days of Bush's retarded speech. But the Administration and its neocon minions had garnered the necessary momentum to invade Iraq.
About this forged memo, Suskind reveals something totally believable to my ears, but also quite astonishing. Here's a reprint of a note he posted on the Web site The Huffington Post:
What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:
The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.
In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." *
The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.
So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....
Hear Suskind explain further on NPR's Fresh Air. When two of Suskind's sources, former CIA director George Tenet, whom we know already to be a blowhard, and CIA official Robert Richer chickened out on their previous testimony, Suskind followed up by sharing some of the transcripts of his interviews, which...ahem...say precisely what Suskind had portrayed them as saying. Suskind's introduction reveals just how weird and suspicious Richer's retraction is:
Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:
"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbash as outlined in Mr Suskind's book."
Ron: The intent--the basic raison d'etre of this product is to get, is to create, here's a letter with what's in it. Okay, here's what we want on the letter, we want it to be released as essentially a representation of something Habbush says. That's all it says, that's the one paragraph. And then you pass it to whomever to do it. To get it done.
Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how--you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was--
Ron: Right. You saw the original with the White House stationery, but you didn't--down the ranks, then it creates other paper.
Rob: Yeah, no, exactly. But I couldn't tell you--again: I remember it happening, I remember a terrible brief kinda joking dialogue about it, but that was it.
. . .
Ron: Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?
Rob: No, no, no. What I remember is George saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'
Ron: Which is the White House?
Rob: Yes. But he did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president.
Ron: Yeah, right.
Rob: But he didn't say that specifically. I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.
Ron: Right, I'm with you, I'm with you. But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president.
Rob: Nope.
Ron: It just had the White House stationery.
Rob: Exactly right.
Ron: That's fine, White House stationery's fine. Everything's from there. You know, that's the center point. But not OVP's Office. It's just the White House. It comes from the White House. That's plain and simple.
Rob: And you know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP. I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you. . . .
Here's a link to the original piece that broke the news of the existence of the memo, a piece that hangs hysterically and credulously on every fucking word of what was soon thereafter revealed to be a sloppily executed forgery. It's written by neocon hired gun Con Coughlin in UK's The Telegraph. Awfully strange isn't it, as Conason observes, that it should first have fallen into the hands of a neocon like Conason, and so soon after it was "discovered."
I find it howlingly hilarious to imagine people being shocked, positively shocked!!by the revelation that the White House told the CIA to lie to the American people. Anybody who was paying attention knew that the months preceding the invasion of Iraq saw the American moo-cow masses (I include myself in that number, although the nature of such campaigns suggest that they are not aimed to in any way convince me of anything!!) subjected to an unrelenting, blitzkrieg of a disinformation campaign.
I can't say honestly that I wouldn't enjoy seeing that fat, fraudulent lying crook Dick Cheney go down in a great big ball of flames. It's pretty hard not to hate the motherfucker, isn't it?
Thomas Frank discusses his new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule with Stephen Colbert, the latter in full-tilt on-screen persona mode. Frank: "What you have misunderstood, Stephen, is that the argument of the book is that conservatives suck."
Thomas Frank is unquestionably one of my favorite people: he's a great writer, he's funny as hell and his politics are exactly on the money. Most importantly, he takes the piss out of hypocrites and con-artists in a voice that updates the polemical stylings of the old-timey, mustachioed populists.
See his regular column in The Wall Street Journal'The Tilting Yard', read his books, all of which are outstanding, and either recall fondly or discover afresh the grandeur that was/is The Baffler.
Say NO to this, America! It's so fucking creepy!
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