The Voice

When I consider my obsession with song, I think of it as a triangle of music, words, and voice. I have enjoyed many a spirited debate with my nerdier acquaintances about the relative importance of these components.

When listening to rap, does the beat trump the lyrics? Would the best lyrics you've ever heard be irrelevant if delivered over a subpar beat? Conversely, can great production artificially inflate the quality of subpar lyrics?

Rap seems to me to be dominated by music and words. Voice is extremely important as well, but not as important as it is in rock. I attribute this to the fact that the demography and perspective and life experiences of most rappers is far narrower than the corresponding characteristics of rockers. I attribute this mostly to rap's relative youth as a genre; it will evolve.

There are some rappers, however, who seduce and convince me entirely with their voices. The two greatest voices in rap today are Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne. Their insipid insistence on misspelling their names belies the genius of these men. Yes, Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne are geniuses, poets of singular skill, who are only seen as inferior poets to long-rotted Englishmen by those are who are far too clever for their own good.

But these men are not just surreal poets. They are VOICES. And when I consider what makes their voices so great, I realize how this whole thing (as with so many "whole things") started with Bob Dylan. The voices of Ghost and Wayne are so great precisely because they are so flawed, as it was (and is) with Dylan.

When Ghost says "why's the sky blue? why is water wet? why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he's not just delivering a stunning bit of verbiage. When you hear him say it, he sounds like he MEANS it. He's not singing it; he's living it. It doesn't sound as "good", but it sounds more "real". And that's what I prefer.

When he says "why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he says it like someone just walked into his house and killed his dog in front of him. He's living it, and he's angry, as any "real" person would be if they were "really" talking about Judas.

Wayne's voice does the same thing. When he says "you know what they say, when you're great, its not murder, its "assassinate", so assassinate me, bitch!", it may not be the sort of thing most eggheads would describe as "poetry", but when you hear him say it, you can almost hear him pulling off his vest and walking out onto a balcony circled by snipers.

And here's where Dylan comes in. Dylan is like Obama; he changed the game...no, REDEFINED the game so drastically that it is impossible to count the ways, as the song says. I'll try to stick to the script here, though, and just talk about the Voice.

Dylan's voice was not a "singer's" voice. He sounded more like a farmer than a singer, like a man who ritualistically abused his throat, and like the sort of person who was a good writer but perhaps too stubborn to let "singers" deliver his songs and insisted upon doing it himself. But he was REAL.

And this is where the standard of singing shifted. The standard used to be Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had a perfect voice, but as we all know, perfect is not real when it comes to voices, since voices are human and therefore imperfect. It is the imperfections, in fact, which make voices so human.

Sinatra sought to sing songs as technically flawlessly as the human condition would allow. And, from what I know, he was great at it. And that's fine. But Dylan, and his successors, sought to sing songs to make them seem REAL rather than flawless.

So when Dylan's voice cracked, it was not a defeat, but a triumphal necessity. After all, how can one deliver a line like "you don't count the dead when God's on your side" or "I'm in love with a woman that don't even appeal to me" or "ring them bells for the time that flies, for that child that cries when his innocence dies" in a singsong voice? How could a REAL person's voice NOT crack when voicing such words?

And there it is: do we want pure voices, or do we want real voices? There are virtues to both, of course, but I would side with the latter more often than not. The only singers with nearly "pure" voices that I enjoy are Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and Jack Johnson, and they lent their unreal voices to some very "real" songs.

It's true that people should strive for greatness. For example, I want a president that's smarter than me. I want athletes than are bigger and stronger than me. And I want poets who are better than me. But I want VOICES that I know belong to people just like me.

How Bad Was Bush?

How bad was Bush?

As an historian, I can not so glibly conclude that he was the worst president in the history of our republic, as many in my profession are so quick to claim. Picking the "worst" American president is like picking the "worst" Bob Dylan album or the "worst" aircraft carrier. They are entities of such unique precision that even the most flawed of their iterations retains redeemable qualities.

And even given that fact, if every American president had been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as Mr. Bush, we would all be absolutely petrified at what we'd discover. Calvin Coolidge? Black uncle. James Buchanan? Gay. Woodrow Wilson? Fascist.

Despite his well-and-duly-harped-upon failures of leadership, Mr. Bush has done some redeemable things. I wish to point to three specific achievements for which Mr. Bush is unduly deprived of credit.

The first is the fact that both of Mr. Bush's Secretaries of State were African-American, and one was a woman. More importantly, both were well-qualified for the job, despite what one may think of their politics. During the Bush years, America's chief liaison to the world was black and/or female, and that is an precedent Mr. Bush set but has not been properly praised for.

The second is that Mr. Bush has done more than any person who has ever lived to alleviate AIDS and malaria in Africa. President Bush saved millions of lives. In my opinion, Mr. Bush criminally and recklessly deprived many people of life and liberty during his tenure, but he also saved millions of our most desperate brothers and sisters from a horrible death, and he deserves no small amount of credit for this.

Thirdly, Mr. Bush's proposal on privatizing social security made sound moral and fiscal sense, yet he was never given an honest hearing. The president shoulders no small amount of blame for this, as his credibility was shredded by this point, but my generation would be better off if we had followed George W. Bush's advice on social security.

Beyond that, this man was a uniquely catastrophic president. Shall we approach this chronologically?

Firstly, President Bush was never legitimately elected president. Secondly, the worst attack on America in its history happened on his watch and, let us be frank, he clearly had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Thirdly, he couched the response to 9/11 in a strictly authoritarian sense. He immediately adopted the presumption that the attacks were not reflective of his administration's failure of anticipation, but of the pesky premise of the rule of law.

"I got this", he said to the American people. He asked for no shows of patriotism beyond consumption and conspicuous silence in the face of his wartime policies. Fourthly, he gave into fear and severely curtailed the checks on his office imposed by the Constitution.

Fifthly, he used the nation's fear and grief and a means towards a personal and ideological end. The invasion of Iraq was irrational, illegal, and unwise in the extreme. Sixthly, he disgraced the troops he had plunged into the cauldron by sending decidedly mixed signals on the legitimacy of torture, which is the moral equivalent of endorsing the same.

Seventhly, he serially subverted the constitution by attaching "signing statements" to laws passed by the peoples' Congress. The gist of these statements was that Mr. Bush would execute the law "as he see fit" the practical implication of which is tyranny.

Eightly Mr. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gave him the authority to personally deprive citizens of habeus corpus and which retroactively pardoned him of all war crimes he had authorized to date, including torture.

Ninthly and lastly, the intangibles. The way Mr. Bush behaved. The way he carried himself. The way he represented US. "Mission accomplished". "Bring Em On". "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." These were failures of leadership which even the most partisan of citizens were aghast at.

No American president should have to assume the burden that was thrust upon George W. Bush on 9/11. And of course I feel not a little presumptuous critiquing a man who shouldered a burden I can not conceive of. But it is my job as a citizen to do just that.

Barack Obama is inheriting perhaps the greatest burden of any American president since Lincoln, and perhaps of all American history. But unlike Mr. Bush, he has chosen inclusion and hope over passivity and fear.

My final critique of President Bush is that he was a fundamentally well-meaning man who was intellectually and morally unfit to hold the office he did. 9/11 exposed the open book of history to Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, impulsiveness, arrogance, and lack of curiosity.

Put very simply, what GOOD thing has happened in or to this country since George W. Bush took (and I use the word "took" advisedly) the presidency? .........anyone?.....anything?.....(Jeopardy music)......ANYthing?....

Well, there is one. And WE did it on Tuesday.

America......Fuck Yeah

While trying in vain to find some way to overstate what has just happened (there is none), I wondered what song might best sum up my feelings, which are utterly without precedent. Some weighty and wordy and weary ballads like Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In" sprang to mind, but then I settled on a track from "Team America: World Police" (made by the creators of South Park), a song whose chorus revolves around the line, "America....fuck yeah!"

Sometimes such a crude and unfiltered honesty is called for, and I feel no need to prettify or anesthetize the way I feel about my country this day. America....fuck yeah. We are, in short, the greatest nation in the world once again. We have reclaimed the myth, which many of us never had rationale cause to believe, that anybody, ANYbody, can do anything, ANYthing, in this country.

Let me begin with a profoundly drastic statement which I invite any reader to refute: Tuesday was the greatest day in the history of this nation since the signing of the Constitution. Sound extreme? What other day, what other event can we point to? Surely we should abjure all those turning points which involved bloodshed. Surely we should abjure those turning points which were all heat and no light, rhetorical promises buttressed by lack of action. What then are we left with when picking one day better illustrates our better angels?

What other event in out history serves as such manifest evidence that we, WE, are who we think we are? America has once again turned the world on its head. And it has done so this time not just with words or with technology, but with ACTION. And it is the ownership of this process which makes it so revolutionary.

While I wept for my country on Tuesday (and Wednesday. and today) I wept not just because my country can produce men such as Obama, but because my fellow citizens will CHOOSE men such as Obama.

I wept, and continue to break down without notice, at the thought of millions of Americans who woke up Wednesday and looked upon their sleeping children with a new set of eyes. Rarely if ever has the world changed overnight. Well, it has happened now. And WE did it. Not a meteor strike, not a terrorist attack, not a financial meltdown over which nobody has control, but instead, a CHOICE, made with the world as witness.

I wept for my country in a way I thought I never would. The only two times I had experienced anything resembling such a well of emotion on behalf of my country was on 9/11 (fear, anger) and upon the invasion or Iraq (unmitigated shame). And now, I weep because the myth that I had stubbornly clung to has been proven true.

I weep because scores of millions of white folks lined up throughout the Midwest and even the old Confederacy and did the right thing, with the world watching and with their ancestors shrieking in horror from their graves. The ghosts of history were resurrected only to be driven through and killed again. And it was a good death.

America has achieved the moral equivalent of landing on the moon, and then some. The moon landing is a good example, because it is so illustrative of the schizophrenia so central to the American character. Americans wrote the Declaration of Independence when they weren't busy beating and raping their slaves. Americans walked on the moon when they weren't busy incinerating Vietnamese villages. And Americans, WE, elected Barack Hussein Obama to be OUR president while George W. Bush fell asleep on the silken sheets that we, the same WE, bought for him.

This transcends the moon landing, of course, but the world's reaction is the same. It is something along the lines of, "holy SHIT.....those Americans....they can do anything". And WE can. And WE did.

I find myself feeling almost jingoistic in my viscerally bursting pride in my country. I can say, and DO say, that this is the greatest country in the world. I know that now. I can say, and DO say, that despite all of our sins, we have all just been reminded of why people the world over are inexorably drawn to our land. And I know that there is literally no human being on this Earth who is not profoundly humbled and moved and inspired by the fact that WE, alone among all people, would gladly pick one of THEM to lead us.

I know that conservatives, including some I call friends, are sickened by this type of rhetorical exultation. But I don't care. Because this is necessary. And this is real. The world today is NOT the world of 2 days ago, and that world will never again exist. The world has changed for the better. Mankind perceives fewer barriers between their brothers than ever before. Multicultural democracy is redeemed. And WE did it. America. Fuck Yeah.

The College

If Barack Obama is elected president, there will be no shortage of ways by which to articulate the utterly revolutionary portent of it. A black man, an African man, a man with a Muslim name, a man younger than all but three prior presidents, a (let me admit it) rather unexamined man, all rolled into one.

But perhaps the simplest twine in this twist of fate is that if Barack Obama is elected president, he will, by definition, win the Electoral College. And the Electoral College was created to appease slave owners.

There are euphemisms employed to defend the Electoral College as necessary to protect the "small states" but when the Constitution was written, "small state" meant "slave state".

The Electoral College gives disproportionate power to the "small states", mirroring the Senate much more than the House.

Since the slave owners did not recognize their slaves as human beings, they could hardly be citizens.

And, since a state's representation and influence in national government was based on the number of citizens in said state, the slave owners tried to have their slaves count as citizens in regard to that state's power in the national government, while at the same time denying those slaves any rights of a citizen or even of a well-heeled dog.

The "compromise"? The 3/5th's clause, which designated each slave as 3/5 of a human being when assigning the "small states" their representation in the national government.

The Electoral College was a compromise necessary to convince the slave states to join the Union during the American Revolution. The only (thin) chance at defeating the British was to have all 13 colonies united, even if that meant ignoring slavery. Even, in fact, if it meant giving slaveowners disproportionate power in national government.

Slavery is gone, of course, but the system which violated one man-one vote by giving disproportionate power to certain states remains our method of selecting our president, even though the genesis of this system was a bribe to slaveholders.

Such compromises are understandable, and only historians infected with a "presentist" attitude could cavalierly denounce that compromise. It was necessary at the time toward what was in fact a greater end.

But after the treason of the Confederacy, and after the United States was spoken of as "is" rather than "are", why do we maintain this antiquated anti-democratic charade? It failed us miserably just 8 years ago, and I leave the reader to entertain the consequences of that.

This is not a post about the evils of the Electoral College; It's a post about the fact that if Barack Obama wins this election, he will do so by rules written to give undue influence to slaveowners. Reminds me of when I went to Berlin and visited the spot of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. On the sight stood a Chinese restaurant and a gay bar.

If Obama wins the Electoral College, perhaps with some help from Virginia, the former seat of the Confederacy, it will imply a great many things, but given the fact that this African man may win by the rules explained above, we all have ammunition to use against anyone who dares deny the legitimacy of his election or the fact that he won a game governed by rules that were written under the assumption that his ancestors were not human beings.