There are many current and concurrent political and ethical and psychological threads at work presently in our country, and most observers have done a sub-par job at connecting the dots. But make no mistake: hate is here.
This week, a census worker in Kentucky was murdered. His body was subsequently hung from a tree with the epithet "Fed" scrawled across his chest. Be on notice, my friends, this was the canary in the coal mine. Hate is here.
The census worker's job is to count citizens in each of our thousands of localities. Why? Primarily, their goal is to ensure that each locality has the proper amount of representation in, and funding from, the federal government.
So, every 10 years we have to count our localities to make sure they have enough representatives in the Congress and to make sure that they have enough federal funding for schools, roads, etc. In other words, census workers aim to make sure people have enough POWER and MONEY.
But there is an element in this country that is bred into a blood feud with the federal government. That strain has been exponentially strengthened and hyperbolized with the election of Barack Hussein Obama.
Such people do not look at the census taker as an opportunity. Nor do they look at the census taker with apathy. Nor do they look at the census taker with mere distaste or mild paranoia. No, this element sees the census taker as the person who walks around compiling a hit list for the Feds.
And, since the Feds are now led by Iraq Hussein Osama, the Kenyan Communist, the Muslim Mulatto, this census taker takes on all-the-more ominous a tone. Someone in Kentucky saw a mortal threat in this census taker. Why?
Well, this person probably assumed that this census taker was personally sent by President Obama to compile a list of heterosexual white Christians to exterminate. Dare we imagine what the murderer would have done had President Obama come to his town?
And can any of us honestly believe that this murderer has not boosted his venom on our airwaves? I'd bet my life he watches Glenn Beck.
Freedom of speech is God's greatest terrestrial blessing. But, just like free will, it is anarchic and self-immolating without that ultimate virtue, DISCRETION.
The man that murdered the census-taker is not alone. He has many peers, many of whom are more capable than he. If and (God forbid) when that awful and ultimate shot is taken at our President, we will not have the satisfaction of calling the assassin an outsider.
If our President ever bears the will millions of Americans wish him, I can assure you this: the assassin will be born and bred on American media. And he will call himself a patriot.
Every now and then I'm drawn to reflect on the profoundly un-democratic nature of our democratic republic. The health care debacle reflects this truth profoundly, and so does the census map I received yesterday.
The Senate of our republic, much like the Senate of Rome, does not remotely reflect the demographic realities of our country. Apportioning equal power to all states in the Senate does not protect the rights of the small states; it destroys the rights of everyone else.
Also, like the Senate of Rome, most of our Senators are petty and sniveling dilettantes who have legalized the most wretched corruptions and who are threatened by nothing so much as the possibility that Caesar, or the president, might actually have a good and popular idea. Because that, of course, would be "a threat to the republic".
A glance at my census map informs me that California has a population of 34,000,000 and Montana has a population of 900,000. Yet they carry equal weight in the Senate. This does not protect the voice of the 900,000; it destroys the voice of the 34,ooo,ooo.
California's people have the same voice as Montana's, even though their are 34 times more of them. So, the people of California actually have 1/34 the power per person as the people of Montana.
When a man who represents more cows than people is allowed to single-handedly steer health care reforms that tens of millions of people are clamming for, and that will effect every single person in this country, that is not a democratic process.
The way power is apportioned in our Senate is a direct result of a compromise with slave states to entice them to join the Union. After committing this mortal sin in order to win the favor of the south, the south repayed the north with treason, secession, and civil war.
And after all that, we still maintained the system born of sin, the attempt to give states with low (free) populations the same power as those with enormous ones.
Montana was no slave state, of course, but it and others like it have been grandfathered into this anti-democratic apportionment of power that was first designed to bribe slaveowners into loyalty.
Who voted for Max Baucus? He represents half the population of his state. That's 450,000 people. And how many of those people are adults who went out and physically voted for Max Baucus? 100,000? And how many people voted for Barack Obama? How many dozens of millions?
You do that math. But however you dice it, the sum product is not democracy.
The LP is soon to be extinct in all its forms, be it vinyl, tape, or CD. The very concept of an "album", never mind the concept of a concept album, will be foreign far too soon.
This eulogy came to mind today because I'm ear-deep in Only Built For Cuban Linx II. It's an album, not a collection of songs one might download and eventually hear the entirety of after months of shuffling about on the mp3 player. (And for any Wu-Tang fans, I am shocked to inform you that OB4CL pt. II was worth a 14 year wait)
Recorded music available for the masses to own is a very new phenomenon, and the LP has been the medium throughout. Singles have always had their place, but they have more often than not been appetizers for LPs, rather than works in their own right.
Baby-boomers know Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as an album, not as a collection of singles. Indeed, one of the reasons Sgt. Pepper is considered the quintessential album of all time is that each song bleeds into the next, so that to listen to the "singles" is akin to staring at amputated limbs, which lose all grace and symmetry when cleaved from the body. Sgt. Pepper may have 12 tracks, but the music does not stop once in its 40 minutes, so it plays as one song.
As a son of the golden age of rap (1993-1998), there are albums I and my peers learned front to back which would simply never have worked as elements of a shuffle list on an mp3 player.
Here is a by-no-means comprehensive list of hip-hop LP's whose greatness would wither and die were they shuffled about as singles. So, since the LP is dead, here are the purest hip hop LP's in my library. There are dozens of brilliant songs which are not part of this list, but here are the best hip-hop albums I have ever heard:
1992 The Predator Ice Cube
1993 Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan
1994 Illmatic Nas
1995 Me Against the Word Tupac
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Raekwon
Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Verson Ol' Dirty Bastard
Liquid Swords Genius / GZA
1996 Ironman Ghostface Killah
Reasonable Doubt Jay-Z
1997 Wu-Tang Forever Wu-Tang Clan
The Carnival Wyclef Jean
1998 It's Dark and Hell is Hot DMX
Aquemini Outkast
2001 The Blueprint Jay-Z
Stillmatic Nas
2004 The New Danger Mos Def
2006 Idlewild Outkast
2007 The Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant Wyclef Jean
2008 Nigger Nas
Despising Gaius Julius Caesar is sort of a prerequisite for polite American company. Certainly anyone aspiring to political office must distance him or herself from the notion that Caesar was anything other than the prototypical tyrant.
It also doesn't help that we spent 3/4 of the last century with either the Germans or the Russians as our mortal foe, and that they plenty of kaisers and czars in their sordid histories.
There are two viable forms of government. One is democracy. Real democracy. Direct democracy. Greek democracy. The other is dictatorship. The problem with those who condemn Caesar is that they are so blinded by the "principle" that they ignore the facts and still misapply the principle, to boot.
The principle is that no man should be able to overthrow a democracy; that the rule of the people is preferable to dictatorship. I heartily agree. But that does NOT mean that Rome was a democracy before Caesar became dictator. Rather, it was an oligarchy, the worst of all possible worlds.
Oligarchy, or rule by a small elite, is perhaps the inevitable transitory phase between dictatorship and democracy. It's the acne-ridden awkwardness of government's maturing process. But it is the worst form of government imaginable. And it's what Rome had before Caesar.
The Senate did not represent "the people" of Rome. It was comprised of wealthy landowners and slaveholders of noble birth who would scoff at the idea that they even inhabited the same moral universe as "the plebs". Instead of one dictator, Rome had several dozen. And they called themselves the Senate. And too many chefs spoiled the stew.
Since the Senate was not remotely democratic or representative, the question becomes: was the oligarchy of the Senate preferable to dictatorship? In my mind, No.
Caesar's ultimate insult to the Senate was to ignore them and go directly to the plebs, the people. And this the oligarchs could not abide.
But Caesar and his successor, Augustus Octavian, accomplished more than the oligarchy of the Senate ever could have, and several of their actions benefited the plebs more than the Senate's ever had. Whether this was cynical demagoguery on the part of the Caesars was surely entirely irrelevant to the plebs.
Consider our current attempt to reform heath care. The people know what they want. The president knows what he wants. So, if this were a direct democracy or a dictatorship, we would have our reforms. But since this is an oligarchy, we will not.
