Ready To Die Music

 

My musical library is entirely dominated by two demographics that would seem mutually exclusive to the uneducated.  I generally prefer music written and recorded by white men born very poor no later than 1955 or black men born very poor no earlier than 1965.

One theme that my favorite musical artists explore regardless of their background is death, and specifically the concept of when one is Ready to Die.

For my generation, the term "Ready to Die" is instantly associated with the first album released by Biggie.  Biggie today is regarded among rap elitists as the best rapper of all time.  He released ONE album during his life.  He recorded TWO albums during his life.  His second release, "Life After Death", was released shortly after his murder in 1997.  He was 24.

24.  Take a moment to consider how many years ago you were 24 years of age.  He died at 24, and was prophetic enough to openly doubt that he would live to see his work released.

To call Biggie the best rapper of all time is a bit like calling James Garfield the best president of all time based solely on the fact that both men were murdered before they could accomplish very much, leading their followers to wonder what might have been.  Twenty years after his death, Biggie's music does not stand up when measured against what his still-living contemporaries have released in the intervening years.

He was 21 when he recorded his debut album.  And he was, according to himself at least, "Ready to Die".  But again, think back to your early 20's.  Think about how smart and sexy and invincible you were.  And now consider how much you have grown and evolved since then.

The idea of nationally-available music in America is not old.  In fact, some of the first people to take advantage of that fact are still among us.   

Rap is still a young enough art-form that there are still no "old" rappers.  The Golden Age of rap began in 1992.  The rappers who emerged from that era, if they are still alive, are still younger than President Obama was when he was first elected.

American forms of folk and rock music are older than rap, of course, but several of the pioneers from that era are still among us as well.  And they are the first recording artists in our culture to face down death not as a twenty-something living out a self-destructive thug life fantasy, but as actual old people.

Johnny Cash spent his last years on the remarkable, and perfectly named, "American" recordings.  As accomplished as Cash was by virtue of his previous work, the music recorded at the end of his life, with him knowing it was the end of his life, is perhaps his greatest contribution to American music.

"Hi, death.  Don't make me do you like I did that man in Reno..."

Bob Dylan, being Bob Dylan, was 20 years ahead of everyone else by recording his Ready to Die album, Time Out Of Mind, in 1997.  Two decades later, Dylan lives, having again reinvented American music when he's not busy meeting popes, presidents, and winning Nobel Prizes and not returning the Nobel Committee's phone calls.

Bobby was bigger than the Beatles when Barack was still in diapers

But the gold standard has been set by Leonard Cohen, who just released the third piece of a trilogy of Ready to Die music.  It is astonishing in its serenity, fatalism, and grace.  Like Cash and Dylan, Cohen could have died 30 years ago and still have been a first-ballot lock of the Hall of Fame.

Cohen's recent work (Old Ideas, Popular Problems, and You Want it Darker) are evidence that life is a gift that keeps on giving if we are humble enough to accept the natural rhythms of life and not define ourselves or our art by young men's trivial and short-sighted obsessions.  

 

Does Character Count?

The final three weeks of this election cycle seem destined to be dominated by the wife of a sexual predator arguing that being a sexual predator disqualifies a person from being fit to be president, unless said sexual predator is her husband or a member of her political party.  Because of course that's the most important issue at stake in our nation right now.

Character counts.  But there are two issues that muddy the water when we try to apply that truth to politics.  The first issue is that poor character in one person does not imply virtuous character in his or her political opponent.  We are sometimes left with a choice between two people with poor character, and 2016 is decidedly one of those instances.

The second issue is that "character" in modern American media has become synonymous with "sexual behavior".  A person's sexual behavior can indeed often be relevant to their overall character, but sexual behavior is far from being the most important component of a person's character in most cases.

Mr. Trump has huge character flaws, and it takes zero imagination to believe that those flaws probably have often expressed themselves via unwanted sexual advances.  It is also relevant to his character because he was married during most of these alleged incidents.

But for the Democratic Party to collectively clutch their pearls and feign shock and outrage at Trump's comments and the allegations levied against him is disgusting.  If there is such thing as morality, character, and virtue (and there is ) then that morality, character, virtue is only sincere if it is applied to all people equally.

If Democrats claim that sexual behavior is central to character and fitness to serve, then John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton were not fit to serve.  And perhaps they were not.  But they did.  Some of them were bona fide sexual predators.  Their affairs were legion, and not always "consensual" by our 21st century standards.

I think relatively highly of President Kennedy.  I consider his American University Peace Speech and his Civil Rights Address, both delivered in the last months of his life, to be the two greatest speeches by an American leader in the post-war era.

But John F. Kennedy engaged in behavior that is so beyond repulsive that it literally defies belief. Kennedy was fortunate enough to live (and die) in an era when taking a teenager's virginity in your wife's bed was considered an "affair" and kept private.

 Republican Presidents of the last 50 years stand in stark contrast.  Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have never had any allegations of boorish, aggressive predation, or even adultery.  According to Democrats' newfound evangelism, they must be the greatest presidents in American history.

We have, unfortunately, no shortage of men in modern American history who have behaved in ways that virtuous men would not, but that did not render them wholly evil or incompetent, and the only Democrat during that period that managed to keep his pants on, Jimmy Carter, is not remembered as being a very effective leader.

Nobody's perfect, but some of us are more imperfect than others.  Human beings are complicated, and great sin and virtue can coexist within the same human soul.  But implying that keeping your clothes on makes you a person of great character is lazy and dangerous.

Hillary can't argue that Trump's sexual rhetoric and behavior makes him unfit without delegitimizing her own husband.  And we can't pretend that voting for the invasion of Iraq showed good character just because she was fully clothed when she did so.

Moses, Mark, Martin, and the Sometimes Rhyme

"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."  That quote is attributed to Mark Twain, who was perhaps the most American person to ever American, in the vein of Johnny Cash.

Moses is civilization's archetype for a leader.  He is strong, patient, forgiving, but irreducibly human.  He leads his people through all manner of danger and desperation, and is often not appreciated by the very souls he is saving.  Sometimes, he is in fact mocked and disparaged.

But he leads.  And when he is inches from his ultimate goal, the proverbial and literal Promised Land, he finds his fate.  His fate is not only to die before realizing his final destination, but to be informed that, after his death, the people he led will falter and reject his memory and consign themselves to further misery.

Martin Luther King walked the same path.  Some of his people thought him too confrontational.  Some thought him not confrontational enough.

Moses is as good a vessel as any to carry the label of "founder of Western Civilization."  In the Torah, he codified, through God, the right to reasonable self-defense (Exodus 22:2), the idea of an impartial "Supreme Court" (Deuteronomy 17:8-12), and the necessity for limits on executive power (Deuteronomy 17:14-20).

Martin Luther King took and embraced those concepts and laid bare the moral truth that those liberties and securities must apply to every citizen, channeling Moses, who constantly enjoined the Jews to treat the alien as they would treat themselves.

The night before Martin Luther King was assassinated, he spoke to his people and channeled his precursor, with an eerily prescient premonition that his fate would be the same as Moses'.  He spoke of the promised land, and how he would not live to see it.

The ways in which Jews and African-Americans may have failed the visions of their leaders after the death of those leaders is too large an issue to tackle here, but the parallel sagas of Moses and Martin remind us of the glory of Western Civilizations and the fact that these two men represented the most persecuted minorities within the same.  That's not a coincidence.

History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

.He was not yet 40 years old.  If that doesn't make your face tingle, you might want to go see a doctor.

The Pride and The Fall

As one of millions who are revolted by both candidates for president, I watched the first debate strictly for purposes of entertainment, as one would watch a demolition derby or a movie about the apocalypse.  The problem, of course, is that if this were a demolition derby, we would not be safely ensconced in the bleachers but would instead be in the car.

By any objective standard, Hillary cleaned Donald's clock.  She was more prepared, more measured, more self-assured, more informed, and more disciplined.  But we already knew that.  Hillary is the girl who stays up all night studying.  Donald is the boy who copies off someone else and then assures us that he has "a very good brain" and knows all "the best words".

But the most telling dynamic was psychological rather than rhetorical.  Hillary had a plan, she stuck to it, and it worked.  Trump winged it, and he used his wings not to fly, but to swat at invisible insects.  And in the course of doing so, he made an ass of himself (not to mix animal metaphors),

Every personal jab Mrs. Clinton sent his way was seized upon by Mr. Trump as a starving dog would seize upon a steak.  He couldn't let anything go.  He is clearly incapable of doing so.  On the biggest stage of his life, Trump navel-gazed.  And he did so, dare I say, bigly.

Trump spent so much time defending himself that he never raised his signature issue, illegal immigration.  He never brought up his opponent's biggest weaknesses: Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, her entire public career, etc.

There was a question about cyber-security.  How did Trump not immediately pounce upon that while debating a women who cyberly-unsecured our entire diplomatic policy?

There was a point where Mrs. Clinton implied that all Americans have "inherent bias".  How did Trump not ask Mrs. Clinton whether she herself was "inherently biased" about the African-American debate moderator?
 
Because we have no good choice, it is clear that we need to settle for the more mature and disciplined individual.  The first debate left absolutely no doubt at all who that is.  These two people are deeply unappealing and corrupt in their own ways, but only one of them is capable of behaving like an adult who is cognizant of something larger than themselves. 

It may be damning with faint praise, but Mrs. Clinton must win this election by default.  Mr. Trump has played a valuable role and raised some important issues that establishment politicians would not, but he is so utterly unacceptable in terms of character and decorum that all of that virtue is swept away by his bottomless narssicism.

The good news is that whoever wins this election will probably due so with less than 50% of the popular vote.  He or she will be largely despised by half of the country and will probably not be able to implement most of their plans.  We're past due for a one-term president.  Let's just get this over with and then press reset.

All that aside, if I lived in a state where it mattered, I would purge myself, hold my nose, vote for Mrs. Clinton, and then purge myself again.  It is a sad truth that millions of people who vote for Mrs. Clinton next month will do so while suppressing a gag reflex, but it is, astonishingly, better than the alternative. 

The Humanitarian?

 

One of the morally revolting things about war (one of thousands) is that we define loss of life by how many people are killed on "our" side, while ignoring the reality that all of America's war in the last 100 years have resulted in far, far, far more "enemy" civilians being killed than American soldiers.

In addition to American soldiers and local civilians, enemy soldiers are also killed.  Enemy soldiers can be seen as terrorists, as people who get what's coming to them, or as people who are defending their homes from an invader.  For the purpose of this argument, I will put this issue aside and focus on civilians rather than tackle the more complicated issue of whether resisting invasion makes one a "terrorist".

Another revolting truth is that our "leaders" who set these bloodbaths in motion almost never make any reference to the death sown by their actions.  Each individual American who dies in war is lionized as having made the "ultimate sacrifice", as having died for us, while the far larger number of innocent civilians killed are either ignored entirely or chalked up to "collateral damage".

So how utterly twisted is it that the only major American political figure to speak empathetically about these faceless dead, indeed to speak about them at all, is.......Donald Trump.

 "Look, the war is a disaster.  The war should not have been entered into.  To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our side and their side.  I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces.  All for no reason"
7-13-04

Aside from the unfortunate phrasing of people "walking around with no legs", this is an example of a fleetingly rare moral clarity.  The man largely understood to be a self-absorbed blowhard, a heartless industrialist, a racist, sexist Islamophobe is the only person with the moral clarity and bravery to even mention the "Iraqi kids".

"Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed.  And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mentions the other side.  All those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces.  And it turned out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.  All this for nothing."

8-13-14

These two quotes were uttered 10 years apart.  Remember this when Hillary Clinton insists that Trump wasn't "really" against the war.  And keep in mind that Hillary's change of heart about the war had nothing to do with heart or humanity.  It was pure politics, as was her vote to unleash the dogs of hell in the first place.

It is exceedingly difficult to find virtue in Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, but Trump's unique willingness to acknowledge the humanity of the tens upon tens of thousands of young people who have been physically or psychologically destroyed by our actions stands out prominently amid the moral desert that nearly all of our politicians inhabit.  

I am actually moved by this glimmer of humanity, but I am just as distraught that it is so rare.  In terms of the most basic humanity, nearly all of our "leaders" are blind.  How bizarre that Donald Trump, of all people, may in fact be the one-eyed man.

Has It Been That Long?

Of all the images, moving and still, from 9/11 that have been employed to captivate the horror of that day, this picture of Mohammad Atta is, for me, more evocative than any other.  This man was the lead hijacker of the first plane to strike the first building on 9/11, and the leader, in fact, of the entire network of 19 nihilists that struck that day.

His very face has all the ingredient of that day: steel, ash, a total lack of pity.  Death.  He posed for this picture while getting a driver's license in Florida, and it is clear, as so many things are in retrospect, that he was already ready.  Perhaps he was hoping that the DMV clerk would somehow end up on one of the planes. 

There are so many aspects about what those people did on that day that could be written about that writers have a hard time picking just one.  This was a massive conspiracy, spanning continents, with multiple rabbit holes of logistics, planning, funding, and operational support.  There were so many targets, so many thousands of tons of steel and glass, so many thousands of innocent people sucked into the whirlwind of it.

9/11 is, to the writer, like an elephant to an ant; it can only be explored an inch at a time.  Here are a few inches that have been on my mind since the 15th anniversary of the attacks.

Big picture:  the War on Terrorism is an even bigger failure than the war on drugs.  Terrorism has increased by 6000% (not a typo. six thousand percent) since 9/11.  But most of that violence has occurred outside of the U.S., so we don't focus on it.  But we have set the Middle East on fire.  They had the gas; we brought the matches.

Other Thoughts:

Why is there no footage or photograph of the plane crashing into the Pentagon?  The Pentagon has released a handful of individual frames from a surveillance camera, none of which clearly show a plane.  We know there were several other surveillance cameras on nearby buildings, but those are all classified.

Why?  If a plane crashed into the Pentagon, and there is video of it, how could it possibly threaten national security to show something that the government says already occurred?  Mark my words, if video of the World Trade Center plane crashes could have been kept secret by the government, they would have.

Think about the psychology of an organization that will not release images of an event that that very same organization wants us to believe happened.  The government creates conspiracy theories by its obsession on keeping things secret even if it insists that we accept the obvious truth of those things.

I assume a plane hit the Pentagon, but I know these two things:  Firstly, the government claims to have, and refuses to release, objective evidence of that event in the form of video footage.  Secondly, there is no independent video or photograph of an airplane approaching or impacting the Pentagon.

Washington DC, as opposed to New York, does not have modern skyscrapers.  It is less dense and lower-lying than New York.  Because of this, any aggressive, low-flying aircraft would be far more visible from much further away in DC than it would be in lower Manhattan.

And, like New York, Washington DC is full of people with money,  people in media, and tourists.  In other words, people with CAMERAS.  And yet, there is no photograph or film, from any source, of an airliner flying fast and low along the Potomac River even though everyone in DC would have already known that hijacked airplanes were being flown into buildings representing American power.

The only footage that does exist is in the hands of the government, but they won't release it because it needs to be secret even though everyone "knows" what it shows, but we only know that because of an unshowable tape.  It's exhausting.

Another thought:  I think the most likely cover-up being orchestrated by the government is that some of the hijackers were working for our government and were, in fact, double agents sent by bin Laden to infiltrate our intelligence services.

Consider: the CIA would have been desperate from 1998 to 2001 to recruit agents that could infiltrate al Qaeda and pass us information on the next attack.  These recruits would ideally be young Arab men.  What it the CIA unwittingly recruited al Qaeda members to spy on al Qaeda?

What if some of those terrorists came to the US under CIA protection, claiming to be tracking the "real" terrorists while, in really, they were the real terrorists?  And what if you were a CIA agent who, on that awful day, saw pictures of the hijackers, knowing that some of them were being supported and paid by your very own agency?

What would you do?  You would bury that information.  And you would tell yourself, not without reason, that if the truth ever came out....

9/11 will never end.  I'm confident that most of the government's account of what happened is true, but I am equally as confident that some of it is not.  We are all left to live in the chasm between those two truths.

Where's the Outrage?

Hillary Clinton got her start in Washington D.C. 40 years ago as a very junior member of the apparatus that drove Richard Nixon from the presidency for committing the worst of all political crimes:  getting caught doing what your predecessors did without getting caught. 

Hillary, on the other hand, did not get caught committing old and common political crimes; she got caught inventing her own, brand new political crimes.  And not only will she not be driven from the presidency for her crimes; odds are that she will in fact be driven to the presidency in spite of them.

Hillary's email scandal is difficult to deconstruct for a few reasons; one is that the mainstream media is covering it, but not really explaining it.  Another is that it involves computers which, even for people who have lived in a computerized world for years, can quickly descend into incomprehesible techno-babble.

Yet another reason is that this scandal doesn't involve sex.  It is thanks in part to Hillary's husband the scandal and sex are often so synonymous that a scandal involving people with all their clothes on seems somehow not very scandalous at all, even if it is far more relevant to one's fitness to be president than one's private sexual behavior.

If Hillary had been sending pornography from her phone, she would have to drop out.  But she was only sending national security secrets, so......whatever.

I will attempt here to explain this issue in a more comprehensible way, while acknowledging that I myself still do not, and never will, fully grasp all of its dimensions and implications.  I will attempt to focus on a couple of big-picture concepts rather than to dissect all the technological and stautory minutiae.

When someone works at the level of Hillary Clinton in the federal government, their communications are public property.  Almost none of these communications can be made public in the here and now and much of it never will due to national security concerns, but it is, in theory if not in practice, the public's information.

A brief aside: some things must be classified.  The names of individuals in other nations who are risking their lives in the enterprise of passing us information should obviously not be made public.  But in the national secuirty state we now inhabit, the government has a motive and a habit of classifying nearly everything it does.

That is a huge problem.  We are paying for these actions, they are being done in our name, and we will reap the results, whether positive or negative.  Much more of what our "leaders" do should be made public in a much more timely manner.

That very important caveat aside, all of Hillary Clinton's communications as Secretary of State were the property of the government and, eventually, hopefully, of the public at large.  What they most decidedly were not was the personal property of Hillary Clinton.

When Clinton was sworn in, she was advised that personal email accounts cannot be linked to government devices.  In other words, if Hillary had a gmail account, she was forbidden from accessing that acount from a government-issued phone or laptop.

This is because government-issued devices are used to conduct government business, much of which is secret.  These devices, therefore, have all sorts of high-tech and high-cost protections against hacking.  Allowing personal emails to flow into a government-issued computer would expose that computer to possible hacking via spam mail, viruses, etc.

So, Hillary was forbidden from getting her personal email on her government devices.  So what did she do?  She got her own devices, without all the protective bells and whistles, and used those personal devices for both personal and government communications.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton were the principal of an elementary school.  She is informed by the powers-that-be that peanuts must never be allowed in the kitchens or cafeteria of her school because several of her students have life-threatening peanut allergies and the possibility of a mistake or a cross-contamination could literally be a life or death issue.

What would Hillary do in that situation?  She would not bring peanuts into the school; she would bring the entire student body on a field trip to a peanut farm and then tell the mayor and the school board that she didn't break any rules.

Another way to look at this issue is to go old-school.  Forget emails and servers and encryption software.  Think about paper.  Everyone understands paper.  Think of the emails as paper documents.

The State Department is full of top-secret documents.  The State Department is a very secure building and there is a rule, indeed a law, against any person taking any document out of the building for any reason.

Hillary decides, in this analogy (and maybe in real life, who knows?), to take top-secret paper documents home with her every night.  When the State Department finds out and asks her to return those documents, Hillary says, "Sure, but I've mixed them all in with my bills, personal letters, poetry, and doodles.  Give me a few weeks take out the personal, irrelevant stuff and then I'll give you all the government stuff back."

What does she do in those few weeks?  She goes through all the government stuff, our property, and decides which of those stolen documents she will return.  Whatever stolen documents make her look bad, she will destroy.

We know now that Hillary's staff took her personal devices, which were full of stolen government property, and literally smashed them with hammers.  Presumably the vibe was something like this:

So, in summation:  Hillary stole government property, decided which of that property to return, decided which of that property to destroy, and we have no way of knowing what property was either destroyed or pilfered by hostile foreign governments or terrorist organizations or drug cartels.

There's so much more to this, but what's been outlined here is enough to disqualify this woman from office.  She will, in all likelihood, still win, and if she does I have no intellectual option other than to wish her well.  But in either case, just like her husband, we know exactly what we will be getting.