Notes on the Continuum 33 1/3 series:Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

The present item initiates a sequence of posts here at Crib From This commenting on the 33⅓ (Thirty-Three and a Third) series of books, published by Continuum. Edited by one David Barker, each in the series of pocket-sized volumes discusses (and derives its title from) a popular or otherwise noteworthy album issued by a rock group or pop artist. The piece below was written over a year ago. The present author therefore denies any and all responsibility for its many flaws.

Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

Despite my high regard for its subject, I was skeptical before delving into this one, in part because I was still smarting from my encounter with the series's slight offering on The Notorious Byrd Brothers (an album that is anything but slight). I took no solace in observing that Led Zeppelin IV author Erik Davis is an expert in "the occult," which per se did not seem to hold promise for an engrossing read. Especially when the uninitiated reader envisions this occult expertise applied to Led Zeppelin, a band whose mystique is (still! despite the severe beating it suffered at the hands of Page/Plant Unledded) inseparable from its music.

After all, it is this very inseparability of myth from artifact that enabled Led Zeppelin to do such a great job of distracting me from the hellishness of my adolescence, or at least that aided in my quest to devise for myself an inner distance from adolescence at its worst. So potent is this stew of booglarized blues riffs and fey, Tolkien-pilfered bardisms that it seduced me and thousands like me a full decade and a half after the band had broken up.

Anyone whose life was preserved in a comparable way by Led Zeppelin knows what an act of disrespect it would be to set about methodically to demystify the elaborate symbologies represented in the band's album covers, or to expose as apocryphal the numerous tales of the band's on-the-road high jinks. (As kids, we knew that The Hammer of the Gods was basically bullshit, anyway, glorious -- or, rather, vainglorious -- though it may have been.) Remember the scene in the film version of The Song Remains The Same in which Jimmy Page is depicted picnicking by himself in the countryside of Sussex, England and -- of course -- performing an eerie drone on his hurdy gurdy? *

And when Pagey turns to face the camera, his eyes are glowing pink, or whatever?

Please: nobody had better ever explain that one to me.

Fortunately, Erik Davis understands. He's not interested in exposing or explaining 'what really happened'. He's probably the first person to write about Led Zeppelin who's smart enough to comprehend that the Led Zeppelin experience is all about the very relationship between the music and the mythology; between an image and its connotations and penumbrae; between a shrewdly-marketed product and a fetish object endowed with genuine powers.

I'm not arguing that, were the sources of the band's musical and lyrical vocabulary to be exposed, my adolescence would somehow be ruined. Rather, I'm arguing that, in approaching so hazy a topic as Led Zeppelin, the under- or overambitious commentator fails inevitably to accord sufficient attention to that very haze, and the haze's curious relation to every discrete detail of the whole. To ignore this haze is to miss the point.

What do I mean when I say that many commentators ignore the 'haze'? I refer, I guess, to the reductionism of devoting oneself exclusively to the task of unmasking the influences, techniques and methods behind Zeppelin's music, lyrics and imagery. For example, it doesn't take most teenaged Zeppelin-heads long to figure out that many of Page's riffs were nicked from old bluesmen. This debt to the blues is clearer still in Plant's lyrics. And the Tolkien references are just...well, they announce themselves fairly unambiguously. It's cool to know that one or another of the infamous Led Zeppelin IV 'sigils' comes from a book on Icelandic mythology, but this information won't elucidate the role of the 'Zoso' symbol in making the cover seem so mysterious.

Led Zeppelin cannot be approached successfully through the unearthing -- as in an archeological dig -- of these materials. What's always going to be hazy, and what analyses of Zeppelin must always treat speculatively, is the means by which the ingredients -- some of them appropriated from elsewhere, some of them improvised, some of them crafted behind the scenes by means of trial and error -- interact. The point is and has always been the precise alchemical processes -- both musical and extramusical -- that implant, as it were, Led Zeppelin in the consciousness.

Davis reminds us that this inherently hazy process does not begin with the musicians and end with their instructions to the marketing staff of Atlantic Records. To Davis, part and parcel of Led Zeppelin's craft was (/is) that it grasped in an unprecedented way the possibilities of the marketplace and excelled singularly at realizing these possibilities. In contradistinction to the modus operandi of the kind of cheesy exposé I had feared his book would turn out to be, Davis's investigation never preoccupies itself with a particular 'aspect' of what made the band and its most famous album so successful.

There's no: 'Leaving sheer technical mastery to the likes of Eric Clapton and Mick Taylor, Jimmy Page -- a self-described "feel guitarist" -- applied seemingly limitless creativity and lateral thinking to much-plied terrain of the minor-pentatonic scale.' Nor is there: 'Peter Grant, a former professional wrestler and industry maverick who refused to play by "the rules," secured remuneration on behalf of his outlaw clients on a scale heretofore unseen in the rock world.' Nor is there: 'Like a thunderbolt from the heavens, John Bonham's savage snare drum attack inspired humility in the hearts of his competitors -- and nausea in the stomachs of parents.'

(Sorry, I got a little bit carried away there.)

Instead, Davis -- whose previous book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism I'll confess to never having read (but what a title...) -- is not so enamored of his accumulated knowledge of the historical minutia of spells and witches, etc., as to reduce the band or its album to terms that exist within the scope of his expertise. His interest is in the totality of the phenomena of Led Zeppelin and of Led Zeppelin IV, the seeming infinitude of relationships among elements. For example, the intoxicating interplay among:

• inspiration and craft in lyrical and especially musical composition;
  
  
• Page's architectural approach to composing, recording, mixing and producing; the images and infamous four symbols (or, 'runes', or 'sigils') that adorn the album's cover;
  
  
• the band's apparent association with the occult, and especially Page's much-discussed fascination with turn of the century 'occultist' Aleister Crowley; and
  
  
• the relationship between deft coordination and dumb luck that conspired to confer upon an ordinary, mass-marketed piece of plastic the status of fetish object in the perceptions of masses of teenagers: an underground cause célèbre.

In truth, Davis has written one of the most entertaining rock books I've ever read. It ranks among Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, the posthumous Lester Bangs collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, John Lydon's Rotten - No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, and Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.

Much of what makes it entertaining is the author's sheer enthusiasm. While Davis's knowledge of all-things-occult provides his study a unique and engrossing vantage point, the real engine driving Led Zeppelin IV is its author's insights into his own adolescent love-affair with the band. His prose oozes with respect for -- which is the antithesis of nostalgia for -- his adolescent self. This respect means that the book is imbued with a perhaps unwitting sense of brotherhood uniting all of us who went through the same thing. (And 'brotherhood' is probably mostly the correct term, something that probably no one is proud to recognize...)

In refusing to pander to the adolescent inside him, Davis simultaneously refuses to pander to the adolescent that is still inside of his reader. Davis's attitude toward the marketplace, mechanical reproduction and mass-consumption is smart and realistic. Best of all -- for a potential reader who, like me, rolls her eyes when she hears the phrase 'occult expert' -- Davis's attitude toward magic and mystery is an ironized one. Or -- better -- a cosmopolitan one. He's interested in the whys and hows of magic's function in relation to the perceptions of an industrial and/or post-industrial consuming class. He interrogates modes of cultural signification, reception and meaning-creation that occur on an unconscious or subliminal level, never committing the fatal error of launching into an earnest discussion as to whether or not the magic is "really real." There's nothing mystical or quasi-religious in his outlook, and that's a good thing, because I just really wouldn't have had the patience for that...

For my money, Davis's most dazzling discoveries (or, most resonant interpretations) are to be found in his several exegeses of Led Zeppelin's most (in)famous recording, "Stairway To Heaven." Here are a couple of bits that make sense when removed from the context of the book:

"Stairway to Heaven" isn't the greatest rock song of the 1970s, it is the greatest spell of the 1970s. Think about it: we are all very sick of the thing, but in some primordial way it is still number one. Everyone knows it, everyone -- from Dolly Parton to Frank Zappa to Pat Boone to Jimmy Castor -- has covered it, and everyone with a guitar knows how to play those notorious opening bars. As far as rock radio goes, "Stairway" is generally considered to be the most-requested and most-played song of all time, despite the fact that it runs eight minutes and was never released as a single. In 1991, Esquire magazine did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured that the total time that "Stairway" had been on the air was about 44 years -- and that was over a decade ago. Somewhere a Clear Channel robot is probably broadcasting it as you read these words.

[...]

Mythology is more than an abstract story or a universal code [...] Mythology is also deeply embedded into human practice. Traditionally, myths are acted out; even their verbal transmission is a highly charged performance. Even more important is the relationship between myth and ritual. Rituals, like taking communion or dancing around a maypole, perform and sustain the transforming fictions of mythology just as much as mythology explains or demands ritual. So if "Stairway to Heaven" is a successful myth, then what rituals support it? What practice sustains the song that Lester Bangs memorably described as being "lush as a kleenex forest"? The song itself hints at the answer when [Robert Plant's narrator] suggests that great things will happen if we "listen very hard" and all "call the tune." The central rite of "Stairway to Heaven" was and continues to be this: hearing the damn thing over and over again. [...] "Stairway" makes its peculiar magic known through the brute force of all ritual: repetition. Even those of us who have no desire to sustain the mystery, who can't wait for this number to be swept into the dustbin of history, continue to feel its presence in sonic memory.

In the course of developing his often-fascinating arguments, Davis explores, among other topics: the inseparability of record label marketing campaigns, album cover imagery, and intra-industry minutia from the experience of the music listener; the chemistry among the members of Led Zeppelin, especially the Plant/Page relationship; Page's methods of songwriting, arranging and recording; art and particularly music as alchemy; and self-referentiality and performativity.

I conclude with the following, underdeveloped line of thinking:

I often find myself trying to parse things, to categorize them in a way that cuts them off from one another. Maybe lots of us do. I sense this tendency in much of the middling stuff that appears on the Internet; take as an example the current state of Internet "music journalism," the sophomoric and hopelessly impenetrable 'writing' midwifed by Pitchfork dot com.

Think, for instance, of the architecture and function of hyperlinks. Think about the legacy of commercially recorded music -- and the influence of parasitic industries like music journalism and radio -- and the longtime dependence of all of these entities upon things like 'genre distinctions' that often referred more to marketing to different populations than to anything musical.

Think of how, at the moment, the ways of thinking about the Internet that currently predominate are unmooring (if I may use this as a transitive verb) artists from the monetary apparatus of the old record industry model, but how the continued obsession with genre, subgenre, minutia of presentation, nomenclature and imagery serves the function of replicating the very worst of the characteristics of the old model. The resultant fragmentation and atomization is unprecedented in its scale. And worst of all, it occurs now as a result of a kind of naïve quest for self-identification among artists and would-be cultural commentators, with NONE of the push-back against insipid industry norms that was once inspired by the monolithic, rationalized, automated shysterism of the now all-but-defunct music industry.

It's a cage of our own making.

Surmise: The new punk rock, whether it takes the form of music or video games or whatever, is going to be something that identifies/creates modes of sameness rather than modes of differentness. We're subdividing ourselves out of existence.

Final, for real, conclusion: Davis's book, by virtue of its assiduousness in formulating the relation of every ostensibly atomized part to a larger whole, helps map out some possibilities for getting out of this mess.

_________________
* These photographs are used for educational purposes. They have been obtained from the blog Peromyscus, whose talented author Lyle Hopwood discusses the film The Song Remains The Same, including the scene in question, and other Led Zeppelin phenomena.

Cadre of Iraq War propagandists/architects renames itself.Project for a New American Century = The Foreign Policy Initiative

I pass this along because it's essential to know who's who. Knowing who's behind the thinking (and the fundraising) of an ostensibly "brand new" Washington DC think tank is even more useful than knowing which evil international corporations with major image problems have changed names. In the case of the latter, a somewhat recent example that comes to mind is that of Clear Channel, which spawned Live Nation, which is attempting to conduct a merger with Ticketmaster.

Now the cadre of cynical propagandists who posed as "experts" recommending the invasion of Iraq, a group that once went under the name of Project for a New American Century, has reconstituted itself as The Foreign Policy Initiative. According to an item in The Huffington Post, which was posted on March 31, 2009:

Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force.

[...]

'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."

[...]

Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."

O.K., now, the thing is, I'm not really interested in things that Rachel Maddow has to say, and I have no idea who Matt Duss is. But the basic reporting here is sound, and as such, I pass it along to the reader. What with the creeping demise of actual journalism of any kind, one has to take bits of information as one finds them and simply resist the temptation to accept half-baked interpretations of it. Fewer actual reporters and dwindling budgets for overseas bureaus mean that formerly reputable news-reporting organizations are becoming, to an increasing extent, news-interpreting organizations, the task of thinking critically and reflectively becomes maybe more difficult. I don't know... Maybe it doesn't!

And also: I don't think it's bad for people -- even trigger-happy would-be Cold Warriors -- to formulate and express their ideas. I don't even think it's bad for them to, uh, strategize. I do think, however, that it's important to bear in mind the hypocrisy of Kristol in particular, who has been among the lunatics who have deployed the opportunistic and deeply ludicrous slogan Defund The Left! as a way of inveighing against ideas too bothersome to argue on their merits. The phrase attempted to popularize the specious notion that, for example, 'the media' and 'the academy' are spheres of American life that, perniciously, are pervaded by left-wingers, atheists, Marxists (strange, considering that Kristol's dad was, after all, a Trotskyist) and terrorist-coddlers.

I call this hypocrisy, because...well, in effect, Kristol is inviting his political opponents to have a gander at just which -- ahem -- 'disinterested' entities are footing the bill for his and Bob Kagan's singular brand of 'scholarship' and emm, 'journalism'. Or is 'advocacy' maybe a better word?

In the wake of the Iranian elections, it should be unsurprising that this exact same group of people -- whom we might call The "Bomb Iran" contingent -- has expressed a newfound concern for The Iranian People. An empathic bunch.

Obama is right not to intervene in Iran protests.Why the GOP's demand for 'stronger' response is self-centered & opportunistic.

It is increasingly clear that Obama has been correct all along in refusing to weigh in 'more forcefully' on the Iranian protests in the wake of the rigged reëlection of Ahmadinejad. I find convincing the point of view that Obama has, in effect and by design, already weighed in, in the most consequential way possible, on the issues at play in the present Iranian situation. That is, with his Cairo speech, he emboldened in an unprecedented way the resolve of forces of resistance in Iran.

Obama's speech was successful specifically because he eschewed the self-centered, Cold War-style rhetoric favored by the administration of George W. Bush. The GOP's predilection for musty and mechanistic cant evinces a Cold War-era conception of what it means to be pro-democratic in one's interactions with the international world in that it perceives the line between a free Occident and a repressed Orient to divide exclusively competing military and economic alliances. In other words, it pays no attention to what freedom and democracy actually mean.

By contrast, Obama, in his Cairo speech, spoke to Iranians -- and to inhabitants of the Middle East broadly -- with respect for their capacity for self-governance. It should be no surprise that, upon a population as highly educated as that of substantial portions of Iran, Obama's direct, serious-minded and non-patronizing address should have exercised a galvanizing effect.



An individual going by the name math4barack formulates the connection between Obama's Cairo speech and the events in Iran (from the Daily Kos):

The Iranian Revolution. First and foremost, it must be emphasized that this is an internal revolution. It comes from the people, the people that live there. They deserve all the credit. They are the ones who are putting their lives on the line and they are the ones who are providing the images and video. Nevertheless, without President Obama (ie under President Bush or President McCain), this revolution would not have been successful. For, both President Bush and a President McCain would have made the protesters look like Western, American pupptets [sic] by speaking intemperately.

Back on June 15, a blogger called Kalash offered an analysis that appears to support this favorable reading of Obama's approach (by way of an item in Media Nation):

The election results remind us that the will of the people is not the deciding force in Iranian politics. All candidates were screened by the Supreme Council. The leading challenger was Mir Hossein Mousavi. He is now seen as a "reformist" but that is a relatively meaningless term. Afterall [sic], he was once considered a radical.

[...]

Mousavi withdrew from political life in 1989. His resurgence has been interesting to watch as supporetrs [sic] have flocked to him in defiance of the current government. But there was no reason to expect much to change in Iran if he had emerged victorious. He is no Barack Obama. He is one of the boys, otherwise he wouldn't have been allowed to run.

Whether or not Mousavi had the election stolen from him, it seems clear the ruling class has made a calculating move. Anti-American sentiment is one of the strongest cards those wretched clerics hold. By merely softening the tone Tehran hears from Washington, Obama has weakened their hand considerably. But re-instating Ahmadinejad ensures that US-Iranian relations will continue down a rocky road. What happens next is crucial. If Obama takes a firm position as a result of what's happening, the mullahs may emerge victorious.

That would be a real shame. The system of governance in Iran is terrible. There is no democracy to speak of. The people are ruled by despotic men of 'faith' who do nothing to advance their country's interests. Aside from keeping Iran in the headlines, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to improve his country's standing in the international community. It should come as no surprise that so many Iranians are opposed to him.

[...]

Hopefully what is happening right now is a homegrown phenomenon. Iran needs another revolution if it is to rid itself of the backwards theology pulling the strings. Mousavi is hardly the right person to lead such a movement, but what's important is that the people rise up. The process won't be easy. We may be witnessing the beginning of something huge… It won't happen overnight, but the "Islamic Republic"' is bound to fall one day or another.

The people of Iran deserve better than Ahmadinejad and the clerics who give him his orders. The current regime is a complete disaster, but the media tends [sic] to focus more on the less important issues. In other words, this is not about Israel. Iran's position on Zionism and the question of Palestine is a just one. The problem is the lack of civil freedoms and democracy, not nuclear weapons.

John McCain, whose latest stunt aimed at getting people to pay attention to him consisted last week of joining the GOP chorus clamoring for Obama to use "stronger rhetoric" against Iran has since expressed appreciation for Obama's more recent comments that stressed the United States' opposition to any infringement upon rights of protest and of fair political representation, as well as restating the exceedingly good point that to turn the United States into a foil for Iran would undermine and disrespect the very cause for which the protesters are fighting.

A close look at McCain's aforementioned comments -- made on the CBS program Face The Nation -- gives weight to the view that the Republican call for "stronger rhetoric" is both politically opportunistic and evidence of a worldview that is obsessed not with actual events in the world -- not with, for instance, the success of the Iranian protesters' plea for substantive democratic rights:

"America's position in the world is one of moral leadership," the senator said. "It's not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America's conscience."

Not about what takes place in the streets of Iran, but about America. Go figure. Thanks for clarifying, Angry Johnny. That speaks volumes.

Continuing the Iran discussion.

The following is a response that the Blogger had attempted to post in response to the most recent comment from "DMA" in an ongoing conversation on the Iran protests and its political ramifications domestically and internationally, and other matters about which neither party has expertise or insight.

Do you mean the first "I" in "situation"?

Anyway, let's take a step back from the goings-on in Iran and consider the political positioning that is going on domestically: the GOP is -- as is to be expected -- attempting to capitalize on our visceral reaction to the repugnance of the absurdly titled "Supreme Leader" and regime. Particularly before the SL's Friday speech, which threatened the protesters with violent government retribution, the line was: "Well, Obama needs to stand up more for the people," etc.

Now, this is a familiar dynamic: Obama's initial expressed reaction, as you and I discussed previously, was in fact pitch-perfect. Not because it somehow eschewed expressing solidarity with the protesters' cause, but because it honored their cause, in its independence, the fact that it is rooted within Iranian society and not imposed (or 'rigged') by external ideological forces and because a more robust reaction would have ham-fistedly undermined the expressed purpose and function of his massively successful Cairo speech. Which, by the way, almost certainly had a galvanizing effect on the Iranians' perceptions of their own capacity for self-assertion and self-governance from within.

The Republicans, by contrast, wanted to come across as "heroes" of freedom and democracy, replicating -- as is to be expected -- the tenor and rhetoric of the Cold War and applying it to a situation to which it is inapplicable. Specifically, the posture that McCain would advocate that the president adopt is to in essence underestimate and misconstrue the very autonomy that the protesters are expressing in their demand for political and social emancipation. McCain's and Company's is the old-fashioned, patting-ourselves-on-the-back version of international policy, in which we appropriate the courage and hard work of movements in other countries -- even educated ones like Iran -- and decide that it's suddenly all about the United States. That the United States should somehow be in the spotlight, in essence, playing the tough guy and speaking on behalf of those who know perfectly well how to speak for themselves. The GOP, as always, embodies the seediest combination of paternalism, braggadocio, myopia and ignorance of historicity.

Part of your post, DMA, reminds me of why the Republicans are so willing to display these traits, flaws and all:

I saw in the paper today the Supreme Allah-Prophet Douchebag Over-Religious Cocksucking Bearded Motherfucking Shi'ite Jizz-Guzzling Leader said something threatening a crackdown on the protests.

I'm not singling DMA out, because this formulation could as easily have been my own -- well, minus the weird anti-Islam slurs and probably without the knock against beards, which I find to be a perfectly acceptable and at times exceedingly tasteful fashion as regards facial hair...

Anyway, the point is that Americans are right to experience seething rage against something or someone on the international scene who is perpetrating injustice. However, when we are in John Wayne mode, we're not always doing our best thinking. And I don't mean this in the way it might seem: I'm not suggesting that it is problematic for us to feel pangs of moral indignation. Quite the opposite: I think that the kind of thinking that this reaction beclouds is precisely our moral thinking.

In what ways? For one thing, we'll often end up feeling moral outrage vicariously and as though on behalf of a foreign population. In other words, we'll start seething so much against the foreign despot that we forget entirely about the REAL cause for celebration, which is the courage of the protesters. In essence, we let our hatred for the despot occlude the actual stars of the show altogether. This is more than simply hazy moral thinking. This kind of myopia in American discourse lies at the root of the most appalling and immoral actions our government has perpetrated in its interactions with the international world.

For example: think about Iraq. We had to make Saddam Hussein into our enemy. That he was an enemy to his own people was pure afterthought (and anyway, implicates the USA for having installed him and armed him in the first place). Anybody who thinks otherwise should ask himself: how many Americans have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war? I bet you have a rough estimate in your head. For the record, it turns out that the current number is 4,316, each and every one a tragedy. Now, ask yourself: how many Iraqis have died in the war? Admit it: you have no idea. I sure don't. In contradistinction to its familiarity with the American death toll figure, even Google News is apparently stumped by the Iraqi death toll question. Still think the Iraq War is all about the Iraqi people? To point out that most Iraqis are better off now than under Saddam is a spineless and patronizing evasion of the question.

Now, having said all of this, I think that after Friday's demagogic speech on the part of the "SL," it's probably a brand new situation that is poised to get really ugly really quickly. If the logic of the punditocracy is sound (a big if), the whole idea of negotiating over the nuclear program is basically off the table now, one way or the other, and, according to this thinking, Obama is apparently already transitioning to his, as it were, liberation theology mode, wherein celebrating the cause of the protesters and exposing as much as possible the thug-like brutality of the authoritarian regime are the orders of the day. Could be interesting.

House: I've become a huge fan

House, M.D. is easily among the best shows on television, and Hugh Laurie's brilliant turn as a doctor who plays-by-his-own-rules is among the most interesting, entertaining and attention-worthy characters I've come across in years, irrespective of format or medium.

I don't have time to talk more about it now, but I wanted to mention it because I'm enjoying the experience of discovering for the first time a television show that has been around for like five years. That way, every rerun you are able to catch is exciting and capable of distracting you from other stuff (which, after all, is foremost among the services provided by television, books and the like). House is clever and funny and rocks.

Anyone agree with me?

Iranian election and protests

I have nothing to say except wow. Ahmadinejad is a truly evil dude. It would be nice to see him go down, but it seems unlikely that that will happen. It might not matter, in the long term. For how long can a government -- even a tyrannical, repressive, anti-intellectual, racist and sexist government -- go on ignoring the demands of an entire, highly educated young generation? Sadly, probably for a long time. But who knows...


This stunningly beautiful photograph appears alongside a report in today's Los Angeles Times. An excerpt:

The loyalists' gathering was heavily advertised on state-controlled TV and radio, urging Ahmadinejad supporters to show up in force as a display of popular support for the president and against "looters and arsonists."

Those assembled chanted: "Death to America!" "Death to Israel!" "Khamenei is our leader," referring to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was an impressive crowd, numbering in the tens of thousands, but not nearly as dramatic as the massive unauthorized opposition demonstration that took place a day earlier in Azadi Square.

Mousavi supporters, who had been told by the candidate to stay away from the square, instead assembled in a quiet march in northern Tehran along Vali Asr Street. The crowd, holding green banners and flags, marched in near silence. They held up posters of Mousavi and placards calling Ahmadinejad a "liar." Anti-riot poice stood along the roadways but did not interact with the demonstrators.

The dispute over election results have riven Iran, leading to massive protests, demands for a recount and clashes that state radio said today had taken the lives of at least seven people.

An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.

Jukebox AdventuresA guest post, contributed by Paddy.

I just moved to the area. It has the reputation for being progressive and features at least one century-old dive bar on every square block. Last Saturday, I decided to make the rounds. After all, some of these watering-holes were likely to become my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh homes. I kind of made it an all day thing, and it was going quite well.

Later on, I had invited a friend to join me and we stumbled in to a particular bar. It was a lot like the others: small, with a pool table taking up half the room, and oozing with character. Like all the others, it had a jukebox. One of those Internet jukeboxes, in which if you pay more, you get access to the big database.

I was feeling quite good, and decided to put in $5 worth of all jazz songs. Now, I fully understand the implications of this. But it was my dime, and jazz is what I wanted to hear. Aware that there are certain responsibilities that come with picking jukebox songs, I was conscientious enough to pick some jazz tunes that I deemed universal enough to maybe pass muster at this homey, neighborhood bar. Hummable and bluesy ones; one or two patrons may even recognize them. I picked like three Kind of Blue cuts including "So What" and "All Blues." I think I slipped in a more accessible Coltrane tune like "Impressions," and I remember going for at least one bluesy Mingus tune. If anything, the music would be harmless.

Preceded by a couple of Bon Jovi songs, my picks came on. Seated at the table next to ours were five or so guys, and immediately, a quiet and steady din emanated from them, as Paul Chambers punched out the bass intro to "So What." I could sense a touch of passive panic, like something was wrong. As Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were getting knee deep in their sax solos, the rumblings grew steadily more intense.

The next Kind of Blue tune came on and the barometric pressure in the room rose as that table next to us nervously twitched. When my third song came on, someone said, quite loudly: "more jazz?" The entire table then simultaneously launched into a conversation with each other about "what is this bullshit?" and "what the hell is this shit?" and "who put this on?" Now, I am not sure if they made the connection that I was the one who put this shit on, but they continued to berate the picks for the next five minutes. Even the bartender whom had earlier served us our beers came over to that table and joined in with a couple of "what the fuck"s and laughed.

I got pissed off about this strange and open hostility, so, I finished my beer quickly, said "let's go" to my bewildered friend, and we left.

Okay, so I picked a shitload of jazz tunes and jazz tunes have the tendency of being over four and half minutes long and apparently not everybody likes even greatest hits bebop, BUT, a few things:

1. I paid for the songs
2. The bartender cost the bar a potential frequently drinking customer who would have probably stopped in at least monthly.
3. What? You can't take it? You can't function in the bar without hearing the sound of a flying-V guitar? You can only survive from chorus to sing-along chorus? We all have to put up with jukebox picks we don't like, but deal with it. Try talking. This strange hostility is not cool.

Anyhow, we went a bar on the same block called The Squirrel Cage, where I didn't put any jazz tunes on the jukebox, but I played pool, talked, and had a good time.