NPK mentioned that the music at the DNC was awful, so I thought I’d post something of an antidote.

Here is Yo La Tengo with Titus Andronicus, covering “Where Eagles Dare” by The Misfits at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn this weekend.

http://link.brightcove.com/ser…

(Mild spoilers for “Pineapple Express” appear in this post)

Via Andrew Sullivan, Martha Bayles on the impact of entertainment on young men in America:

consider that the problem facing American society these days is not that it neglects the education of young women but that it screws up the socialization of young men.  The most powerful shaper of popular attitudes is the entertainment industry, and what is it doing?  This short article in today’s New York Times sums it up very effectively — all the more so because it is so bizarrely uncritical.

This mentality can be summed up simply: Young men have no minds, souls, or characters worth bothering about; they care about nothing, respect nothing, and aspire to nothing.  They are pure appetite and aggression, just waiting to be pandered to for money.  So may the best panderer win.

Already I am tired of the fuss over Michael Phelps, who has won eight gold medals but seems to have less charisma than a carp.  But at least he aspired to greatness and achieved it.  Without sports — and, of course, war — what other challenges are presented to young men?  Being the biggest gross-out on the block?

Sayles makes two serious errors here.  The first is that this particular (and particularly lucrative) sort of filmmaking is by any stretch the sum or even the principal output of the “entertainment” industry which is aimed at young men.  It is interesting to pretend for a moment as if the entire genres of science fiction and fantasy don’t exist, as if “Lord of the Rings” didn’t make a pile of money off of teenaged males.  Further, it grossly misunderstands what those movies actually are about.  Many of those films, particularly those which originated from producer-director Judd Apatow (Superbad, Pineapple Express) are particularly about the dangers of resisting maturation and socialization.  

Take the recently released “Pineapple Express”.  This movie could not be more explicit in rejecting the anti-social and immature impulses of its characters.  The character of Seth Rogen begins the film an unrepentant pothead who is dating a high-school girl seven years his junior.  Over the course of the film, Rogen will both reject the prospect of continuing to date a high school girl and renounce smoking pot.  Rather than encouraging the immature behavior of their characters, films like “There’s Something About Mary” and even “Animal House” are unremittingly negative on the implications of the arrested behavior they revel in.

But the second error is in my opinion the more serious one.  The entertainment industry is not the “most powerful shaper of popular attitudes.”  Popular attitudes are the most powerful shaper of the entertainment industry.  And, from literally as long as entertainment has existed, a major aspect of it has been entertainment which is intentionally trangressive against popular attitudes.  

The impulse to transgress against the forbidden is a human universal.  The ability for a word, image, or action to shock and to violate is what grants it mass appeal.  Entertainment is, as much as anything else, escapism.  We cannot do the sort of vile things that Ben Stiller shows us.  Our inability to act that way is what causes our desire to see others do it.  Seeing the activities in the context of an explicit fantasy frees us to revel in those suppressed desires.

What insults the intelligence of the young men who enjoy these films is not that they are treated as young people with only aggression and appetite.  What is insulting is the idea that they are not aware of the distinction between reality and fantasy, and that what they are willing to pay ten bucks to watch for a couple hours is the sum of their being.  It is an excuse to say that we don’t understand today’s youth, and we have no interest in trying.

Night flight to San Francisco.  Chase the moon across America.  God!  It’s been years since I was on a plane!

When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we’ll have reached the tropopause.  The great belt of calm air.  As close as I’ll ever get to the ozone.

I dreamed we were there.  The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening…

But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.  And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

Nothing’s lost forever.  In this world, there is a kind of painful progress.  Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.

At least I think that’s so.

Angels In America: Perestroika, by Tony Kushner.

Since I’ve been talking about the South with some of y’all tonight, I thought I’d share some of my favorites from the world of Southern Rock.

Bloody knuckles and a broken nose

oh, that’s why i never left home

i’ve fought in bars

and i’ve fought in the streets

four more years of fightin’

’til they’re done with me

leave it ’til tomorrow ’til you say good bye

aint in the mood to watch no one cry

tonight it’s whiskey, so buy another round

drink it up boys its my last night in town

momma i ain’t your only son

aint no favorites here, its just how its done

drink it up boys its my last night in town

its too late to turn back now, oh

in the mornin’ its the wide open road

take it far enough it’ll bring you back home

she said “i watched them carry you to the back

couldnt say good by to you like that”

I can only say, “I’m sorry i’s drunk”

so many times ’til it doesnt mean much

when i get home the first rounds on me

raise up that glass – good bye tennessee

momma I ain’t your only son

aint no favorites here, its just how its done

drink it up boys its my last night in town

its too late to turn back now, oh

I can only say, “I’m sorry i’s drunk”

so many times ’til it doesnt mean much

when i get home the first rounds on me

drink it up boys – good bye tennessee

Lucero, “Last Night in Town”

You want to grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you’re 23

You want to be old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears

Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.

Me and your Mama made you in the back and I sold it to buy her a ring.

And I learned not to say much of nothing and I figured you already know

but in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.

Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.

Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.

Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.

Six months in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park.

Then hospital maintenance and Tech School just to memorize Frigidaire parts.

But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too.

So I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do

So don’t try to change who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.

And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.

Don’t sing with a fake British accent. Don’t act like your family’s a joke.

Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.

Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, Don’t give it away.

Don’t give it away.

Drive-By Truckers, “Outfit”

Ride the blue wind high and free

she’ll lead you down through misery

leave you low, come time to go

alone and low as low can be

If I had a nickel I’d find a game

If I won a dollar I’d make it rain

If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry

and lay me down dissatisfied

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly

eyes to laugh and lips to cry

a restless tongue to classify

all born to grow and grown to die

So tell my baby I said so long

tell my mother I did no wrong

tell my brother to watch his own

and tell my friends to mourn me none

I’m chained upon the face of time

feelin’ full of foolish rhyme

there ain’t no dark till something shines

I’m bound to leave this dark behind

Ride the blue wind high and free

she’ll lead you down through misery

leave you low, come time to go

alone and low as low can be

Townes Van Zandt, “Rex’s Blues”

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.  

~Arthur Schopenhauer

For Michael.

For some time, I have wondered at the adulation towards Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” by people who I know and respect.  Finally, I’ve decided to brave it, and as I’m about halfway through, Jon Chait gives it a massive, ten page review.  He’s gentler on it than I am, but that doesn’t mean he’s nice to it.

Klein’s relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. … Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

“Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations–Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute–called itself “neoconservative,” a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.”

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. … And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. … And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative [Friedman] turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism.

Emphasis added.

Seriously, do people really believe her when she says that Israel scuttled the peace process to benefit its anti-terrorism industry?  How the hell is this narrative even slightly believable?

Yes, an argument can be made that however much Reid and Pelosi and their cohort deserve punishment, the other side deserves even more punishment.  That’s assuming that you continue to accept the premises of the system, and dutifully choose between the party that commits the crimes and the party with a leadership that will not actually stop the crimes.  However, stepping back and looking at it, the whole system is broken if that’s our choice.  The only option, then, is to opt out, and vote for, well, anybody else.  (Some would say that revolution is an option, but I say that if you have enough energized people to go and burn down enough stuff, you have enough energized people to vote out the bums and vote in a real opposition.)  The fact that most Americans don’t care something about the culture.

“Not me!  I’m not just blindly excusing crimes!  I’m trying to make a difference!” you say, and you’re probably right.  If nobody else is voting third party, it’s irrational for you to vote third party.  However small the difference between the parties might be, if there’s any difference at all, and if those are the only viable options, then you are being completely rational by voting for the guys who promised to at least pick the undigested corn kernels out of the sh!t sandwich.

But here we are:  Crimes were openly revealed on the front page of the nation’s most important newspaper two and a half years ago, and less than a week ago the ostensible political enemies of the criminals gave them full immunity.  And there is no uproar outside a few corners of the blogosphere and a few activist groups.  The fundamental significance of this is lost on or irrelevant to most people, and so the crimes will go on.

~Thoreau, blogging at Unqualified Offerings.  Emphasis added.

Read the whole thing.

If we don’t understand why this is happening, I assure you that we have no chance of stopping it.

Some will argue that limiting financial institution leverage will render these businesses less profitable and less competitive with non-U.S. companies.  HCM’s response is – “so what?”  Perhaps less profitable investment banks will result in more of America’s talented students becoming scientists, engineers, doctors and teachers instead of investment bankers and mortgage traders. What would be so terrible about that?

~Michael E. Lewitt, Managing Member and President of Hegemony Capital Management, writing in the subscription-only Welling@Weeden newsletter for the clients of Weeden & Co. LP.  This excerpt of the article, which is not reproduced with permission but contains no advice or information that could be considered proprietary, is a long list of suggested regulations which Lewitt believes are needed in today’s financial markets.

The events which are taking place in today’s financial markets are bewildering to the uninitiated, and are only slightly less scary to those who are familiar with the concepts and terminology inherent to this world.  But it strikes me as significant to see so many people within the world of finance calling for drastic reform and desperately trying to demonstrate that the problems which are blooming now are the spawn of seeds planted in previous years and decades.  And one thing that a few such as Lewitt are saying is that perhaps it simply is unwise for us to pursue the sort of gains which have fueled Wall Street for the last quarter-century.

So corrupted indeed and debased was that age by sycophancy that not only the foremost citizens who were forced to save their grandeur by servility, but every exconsul, most of the ex-praetors and a host of inferior senators would rise in eager rivalry to propose shameful and preposterous motions. Tradition says that Tiberius as often as he left the Senate-House used to exclaim in Greek, “How ready these men are to be slaves.” Clearly, even he, with his dislike of public freedom, was disgusted at the abject abasement of his creatures.

Tacitus, The Annals, via IOZ.