Electioneering

July 20, 2015 //

In the last few weeks, Rachel Maddow has been hammering Fox news for the rules they’ve set for the first Republican presidential debate.

Fox is offering a podium at the first debate to the ten Republican candidates who place highest in an average of national polls in the month before the debate. The issue Maddow and others have is that with almost twenty declared, viable, candidates, this rule up-ends how presidential primary campaigns have been run for most of the last century or so. At the moment, name recognition matters more than political viability. From Maddow’s perspective, Rick Santorum (a man she’d see in hell before she’d see in the White House) should be more viable than Donald Trump. So should John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, the state in which the debate will take place.

At one end of the scale, you have Trump, who has never held elective office, polling highest among declared candidates, on the basis of name recognition and sheer chutzpah. At the other end, you have several candidates who are statistically tied for three or four seats at that debate.

Historically, candidates prove their viability to voters, donors, and their parties by their competitiveness in the early primary/caucus states of New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina. Possibly not anymore.

The primary system has several built in flaws. The first is that candidates swing far to the left or right in the primaries to appeal ‘to the base’ and then back to the centre once the nomination is secured. Voters therefore have a hard time separating the BS spewed by the candidate to secure the nomination from any actual policy position. (Of course, nowadays, policy positions are themselves BS, because what politicians vote for or sign once in office has more to do with donations secured to the party than with responding to their constituencies. But we’ll put that aside for the moment.)

The second is that nominations tend to be secured before the end of the primary cycle. If a candidate has locked up a sufficient number of delegates before, say, the California primary (usually in June), then voting in that primary is generally an exercise of the franchise for other reasons (such as determining candidates for Senate, House of Representatives, or the state legislature). The later primaries feel like having tickets to game six of the World Series when the winner wraps it up in five.

So, on the one hand, I love that something is shaking up the process. I can say, yay, the whack jobs are going to rise to the top and be voted down by people with a shred of sanity. Will Bernie or Hillary (or whoever else rises to the top of that milk jug) be able to smack down any of the top Republican contenders? I’m pretty certain the answer is yes. I know that the Republicans in the last half century have won their presidential elections through treason, treachery, and rigging the game. This state of affairs has only gotten worse in the last six years (Citizens United, gerrymandering, BS filibusters, and government shutdowns to name a few reasons). While I’m guardedly pleased at the job Obama’s done (especially under the circumstances of the hateful last three congresses), I also know that hope and change took a back on more than one occasion. That said, I don’t put it past any of the Republican possible contenders, no matter what tool is used to winnow the field, to sabotage another election, but there’s something to be said for changing up the system. I’m just disappointed that the rules of engagement are changing so quickly that several real contenders are left fighting the last war.

Rants on culture, politics, and music: joejots.wordpress.com

— They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. (Terry Pratchett)

Categories Uncategorized

Imaginary music

July 7, 2015 //

One of my favourite pieces of music is Terry Riley’s In C. While he’s considered one of the godfathers of so-called minimalist music, I’ve a feeling many critics feel Riley has a lot to answer for. I disagree.

On a certain level, it’s an astoundingly simple conceit: several dozen short phrases all in the same key. Any number of musicians can participate and the musicians play the phrases as many times as each one would like, until they all come together at the end. Historically, one musician keeps time by tapping middle C on a piano. In more recent versions, the pulse is often handled electronically, for reasons that aren’t hard to imagine.

I’d heard of it when I was young, but never heard it until the 25^th Anniversary concert version was released on CD in 1995. Some versions run as little as 20 minutes. This version, which features 128 musicians including all four members of Kronos Quartet, runs 76 minutes.

Here’s an interesting version that’s about 23 minutes, to give you an idea, though I like the versions that pull the piece in different directions. The recent Africa Express rendition is especially beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought of a version of In C I’d love to hear, or at least to know that it existed. Near my office is a building site on which there was a pile driver doing its work, gently echoing between nearby buildings. In my imaginary rendition, that pile driver is the pulse.

Other instruments would include angle grinders, jack hammers, chainsaws, hydraulic routers, lathes, and so forth. As these tend to be one- or two-note instruments, my idea would is that they’d be sampled and run through some kind of digital music software to finally formulate a (pardon me) riveting industrial rendition. In the article Lamb Stew, Will Mackin writes about marking of hazards whilst setting up a camp in Iraq and includes in their number, ‘a two-story-tall barbed-wire tangle in the shape of a swan, which buzzed in the wind like a kazoo.’ That swan of barbed wire is another instrument in my imaginary version of In C.

A more realistic dream of another piece of music I would like to hear is an extended version of XTC’s Senses Working Overtime (1982). In its first three minutes, it builds a crescendo that crashes over the bridge and, were they not a fairly tight quartet, it could have descended into chaos in the last two. On the mix tape of my absolute favourite songs of my adolescence, this might top side A. My dream version builds up more like Ravel’s Bolero, with just one or two instruments – a small drum and a finger-picked mandolin perhaps, building up and adding instruments over ten or twelve verses and five or six choruses before the bridge, and descending back to silence over the two final choruses. I’m undecided as to whether it would have vocals, though I’m tempted by the idea of a sweet alto like Unwoman trading couplets with a growling Scott Walkeresque tenor.

Tags In C, industrial, minimalism, pop music, Terry Riley, XTC

Categories Music

On sincerely held belief and BS

July 5, 2015 //

Tom Robinson exhorted his audience members to ask one question when they heard a politician on TV, ‘Why is this bastard lying to me?’^[1] This question came to mind when I read the response of Governor Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana) to the US Supreme Court’s decision that recognized same-sex marriage without reservation. Jindal had this to say on Fox News, ‘My Christian faith teaches me marriage is between a man and a woman…Already Christian businesses are facing discrimination if they don’t want to participate in wedding ceremonies that violate their sincerely held beliefs’^[2]

In the last few years, this phrase has crept into US legal discourse and made a pernicious mockery of the original constitutional distinctions between faith and civic responsibility.

My first response was,’ If I never hear the disingenuous phrase ‘sincerely held religious belief’ in a legal context again, it will be too bloody soon. The way it has weaseled its way into our discourse makes my skin crawl.’

But why? Why does this phrase make me so uncomfortable? Part of it is that I’m not religious, but was raised to appreciate the dictum of Article VI of the Constitution, that ‘no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States’.

Jindal continued. ‘We need to stand up for our First Amendment^[3] rights. The court trumped our 10th Amendment^[4] rights by overturning states’ decisions.’

In his treatise On Bullshit. Harry G. Frankfurt argues that the person who lies and the person who tells the truth both have an interest in the truth, whereas the one who bullshits is interested only in furthering his or her own interest, without regard to facts:

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.^[5]

Jindal wasn’t lying, but he was bullshitting. This is the main issue I have with much of today’s political discourse, not to mention the religious demagoguery with which it often skips hand in hand. When politicians start saying that a decision should be scrapped because it goes against ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’, they’re engaging in BS. The truth or falsehood or pertinence of the matter is not at issue. What is at issue is the speaker is saying what is necessary to advance his own agenda, whatever that might be. In this case, that agenda seems to be Jindal’s presidential aspiration.

At what point does the invocation of an SHRB sink to the level of BS? To me, it’s a matter of whether the expression seeks to expand or contract the rights of others. In social media, I first expressed my disgust with Jindal’s position rather obliquely. A friend replied with reference to Sikhs and the right to incorporate traditional garb into school uniforms. From my perspective this is not a matter of sincere religious belief impinging on my right to do anything, and I support the student’s choice of attire.

When the Supreme Court rules, for example, that an employer can deny employees medical insurance coverage of any kind based on SHRB, this to me is BS on two levels. First, it’s a willful misinterpretation of the legislation in question (the Affordable Care Act) and it contracts the rights of the employee. My feeling is that an employer should never have had the ability to override the private decisions of those in his employ, and there’s probably legal precedent for expanding the right of the employee to keep his or her life outside of work a separate entity. (On my part this might be a misreading of various aspects of the Civil Rights Act. Title VII covers discrimination of various kinds.)

But the case I’m working from here, the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby involves an employer pushing back against a law for whatever reason, and convincing a majority of the nine justices of the SC to give his position legal status. The decision itself might stink of bull if the justice’s opinion doesn’t reflect an honest reading of the law as it relates to legal and constitutional precedent.

Why does this decision stink? The ruling states that ‘the mandate was not the least restrictive way to ensure access to contraceptive care, noting that a less restrictive alternative was being provided for religious non-profits.’^[6] Which of the court’s six male justices knew of the unsigned injunction they would hand down three days later, vacating this alternative? Of those six, five voted with the majority in Burwell.

While the justices told the truth as it stood in the moment: the religious non-profit method was in effect and could be used. It stinks because the honesty of the statement was only a means for the court’s majority to vacate part of the ACA without taking responsibility for it.

Does it matter that they didn’t sign the decision, that they didn’t defend their work? Had there been no signed dissent, I think it might. But I’m not writing about cowardice here. In her Wheaton College v. Burwell dissent, Justice Sotomayor recognised the BS of the Hobby Lobby ruling, ‘Let me be absolutely clear: I do not doubt that Wheaton genuinely believes that signing the self-certification form is contrary to its religious beliefs. But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened … does not make it so.’^[7]

Precisely.

Finally, I want to offer the truly cynical option that honesty and dishonesty are always side effects of discourse. Playwright David Mamet once offered, ‘[N]o one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That’s the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.’^[8]

I admit under duress that I’m only sensitive to BS when it serves those who argue against my sincerely held political positions, and am less sensitive to it when it serves my positions.

1. New Year’s eve, 1989-90, London, though I have a feeling it was his intro to one song or another, possibly Up Against the Wall, at most shows.

2. http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/06/29/bobby-jindal-gay-marriage-ruling-left-wants-our-first-amendment-rights (retrieved 5 July 2015)

3. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

4. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

5. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc. (retrieved 5 July 2015)

7. Quoted in “Female Justices Issue Scathing Dissent In The First Post-Hobby Lobby Birth Control Exemption”, http://www.businessinsider.com/sotomayor-ginsburg-kagan-dissent-wheaton-college-decision-supreme-court-2014-7#ixzz3f25DaMex (retrieved 5 July 2015)

8. David Mamet, The Art of Theater No. 11, interviewed by John Lahr, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1280/the-art-of-theater-no-11-david-mame (retrieved 5 July 2015)

Tags affordable care act, bobby jindal, BS, david mamet, gay marriage, harry g. frankfurt, Supreme Court of the United States, US Constitution

Categories Politics, religion

Fish

June 27, 2015 //

I didn’t eat fish with scales until I was about 30. A friend took me for sushi (something my then newly ex-wife never managed in almost 8 years of dining together) and I learned that I liked yellowtail and tuna and quite a few more. I happily prepare salmon and tuna (and very recently added cod to the list). But the oily fishy tasting fish I still claim not to like.

My wife and I are now trying a new diet which includes occasionally eating those fish I’ve always so disliked. (It also involves dropping white bread, pasta, and potatoes.) Mackerel this evening. Big ones. Barbecued with a sauce of chili, lime, ginger, garlic and sesame. Aside from being unpracticed in removing the bones from an unfileted fish, and the meal therefore being a lot more work to eat than it should have been, I found it quite edible. However, as I was preparing the sauce and then eating the fish, all of these old emotions came up, nearly unbidden. Food traumas associated with the commune we lived in for three years until I was ten, and then later ones as my parents and I fought to get me to eat more foods than I wanted to. Struggles, I learned much later, that were skirmishes in the proxy war between my mother and father.

Recently I was talking to my sister, and the subject of old embarrassments came up – these memories of interactions that the other person surely can’t remember. I exclaimed, surely there’s a statute of limitations on these things. Something I said when I was 15 shouldn’t still affect me, right? She said that when she turned 50 (last year) she gave herself permission to let these things go. And that I didn’t have to wait (21 more months), if I didn’t want to.

So I raise a glass to dropping old traumas and eating new foods.

Categories Uncategorized

And now we’ll just call it marriage

June 26, 2015 //

Lots of great articles already on the subject of today’s SCOTUS decision legalising gay marriage across the United States. It’s good news, but not all rainbow unicorns. I’d direct you to the great posts of Son of Baldwin https://m.facebook.com/sonofbaldwinfb who is generally all over the nature of inequality in the US.

I’m ecstatic about this decision, though. And the housing one from yesterday. And especially the 6-3 ruling on the Affordable Care Act.

That said, a couple of liberal rulings don’t undo the execrable Citizens United and Voting Rights Act decisions. Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas have a shed load to answer for.

Categories Uncategorized