Inching Toward Glasnost--American Style

We American boomers who came of age during the Cold War will recall being told--repeatedly in the press and in school--that the major difference between us and the Soviet Union was that in contrast to the evil communists' "closed" society, we freedom-loving-small-d democrats were "open." President Reagan (or at least his speechwriter Peggy Noonan) in an otherwise moving eulogy for the fallen Challenger astronauts on January 28, 1986 even managed to find an opening to take a subtle cheap shot at the Soviets:

"We don't hide our space program. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute."

Thanks to the heroic physicist Richard Feynman, who offered a principled and vigorous dissent against a Rogers' Commission majority that downplayed NASA's dishonesty about the space shuttle flight risks, we know that in fact it was the FAILURE to be up front that was perhaps the chief cause of the tragedy.

The "open" US v. the "closed" USSR narrative enabled lots of lazy journalism and scholarship during the cold war. When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1985-1991 period pursued his policies of "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness), his efforts were almost universally framed in mainstream Western media as the Soviets finally making efforts to become more like the United States. Even though the United States had never come fully to terms with its own history of slavery, Jim Crow, and subjugation of native populations, Gorbachev's attempt to be more open and honest about the historical failures of the Communist bureaucracy and brutality of prior regimes was framed as somehow representing the USSR engaging in an American style search for truth.

Gorbachev's reforms could and should have provoked needed restructuring and greater openness over here. Instead, a great majority of American government leaders and journalists adopted a "triumphalist" narrative in which Gorbachev's program was interpreted as "we won and they lost" the cold war.

After Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991 (and ended up dissolving the Russian parliament by force in 1993) the triumphalist narrative in the West got even louder. Gorbachev's (at least stated) vision of democratic reforms and a people-centered economy gave way to austere, so-called "neoliberal" measures that by the late 1990s had many citizens in Russia and former Soviet states longing for the "old days." The West meanwhile pursued its own brand of neoliberalism which, it is fair to say, by 2008 had significantly wrecked the economy. In 2009 historian Andrew Bacevich I believe was right on point: 

"Post–cold war triumphalism produced consequences that are nothing less than disastrous. Historians will remember the past two decades not as a unipolar moment, but as an interval in which America succumbed to excessive self-regard. That moment is now ending with our economy in shambles and our country facing the prospect of permanent war."

Bacevich thought he was writing a postmortem for triumphalism. Obviously he was being too optimistic, as the Obama years offered no significant challenge to the narrative. Indeed, the political establishment's current stance toward Russia--which has even liberals like Rachel Maddow participating in a kind of neo-McCarthyite hysteria--appears to be rooted almost entirely in triumphalism. (Which is in NO WAY a defense of the alleged and/or real corruption and thuggery of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In fact it is the triumphalist narrative that is in large part responsible for producing "democratators" like them.).

I thought about all this recently while watching the controversy play out over the removal of Confederate statues in many part of the south and even in some northern locations. Because we've never had a period of glasnost in the United States, most people seem to have no idea why and how Confederate statues got put where they are in the first place. Will the tragic death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, killed as she protested a white supremacist rally, force journalists, government officials, and school curriculum directors to rethink our history?

We are seeing some movement in that direction. Even before the death of Ms. Heyer, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu courageously defended the removal of confederate statues from the city: "They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots."

Actions by local officials like Mayor Landrieu--along with the opening for debate and discussion provided by Charlottesville tragedy--allows for greater dissemination of accurate information about our past. Finally there is media interest in items such as data provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC researchers found that:

*There are at least 1,503 symbols of the Confederacy in public places.
*There are at least 109 public schools named after prominent Confederates, many with large African-American student populations.
*There are more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public property throughout the country, the vast majority in the South.
*There were two major periods in which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked--the first two decades of the twentieth century and during the civil rights movement.
*The Confederate flag maintains a publicly supported presence in at least six southern states.
*There are 10 major US military bases named in honor of Confederate military leaders.
*There have been at least 100 attempts at the state and local levels to remove or alter publicly supported symbols of the Confederacy.

In the wake of Charlottesville, many pundits and government officials are grappling with coming to terms with the Confederacy and white supremacy. This process, in my view, represents an American glasnost that will be painful and controversial. Because we've never had a real period of glasnost, those choosing to challenge white supremacist symbols (and really all forms of white supremacy) need to be prepared to confront the many rationalizations, delusions, sweeping under the rug, and outright dishonesty that appear any time a society is in a period of change. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine's explanation for these kinds of mental gymnastics in defense of tradition I think is still the most clear and concise: "a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom."

Think about that Sam Adams quote next time you find yourself engaged in a discussion with someone who sees Confederate symbols as "no big deal," "just history," "heritage," and yada yada yada.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991 presented the United States with a golden opportunity to reflect on its own historic failures to live up to its Constitutional ideals. We blew the opportunity and instead were guided by a triumphalist narrative that made it easy to sweep difficult conversations and overt injustices under the rug.

Some will call the effort to come to terms with the Confederacy and other uncomfortable parts of American history the work of radicals and malcontents. I call it inching toward glasnost--American style.

It's the War, Stupid

In September Hillary Clinton will release a campaign memoir. The book is called What Happened. Publisher Simon and Schuster tells us what to expect:

Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger than fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules . . . She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future.

Perhaps a better title for the book would be "What Happened According to MSNBC" since the publisher's  blurb strongly suggests that Hillary may have borrowed Rachel Maddow's Russian dot-connector. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, quite accurately I think, has labeled the Democratic Party establishment obsession with Russia as a case of "Putin Derangement Syndrome" that borders on mass hysteria. Noam Chomksy highlights the hypocrisy.

Given Mr. Trump's shady financial history, there may in fact be something to all the colluding with Russia business. The problem is when establishment Democrats use the Russia investigation as an excuse to not confront the real reasons why Democrats continue to lose elections that should be won. As noted by the economist Doug Henwood:

And what exactly are the claims made by these Putin-did-it stories? That were it not for Russian chicanery, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by five million and not almost three million? That displaced machinists on the banks of Lake Erie were so incensed by the Podesta emails that they voted for Trump instead of Clinton? That Putin was pulling FBI director James Comey’s strings in his investigation of the Clinton emails? That those scheming Russians were clever enough to hack into voting machines but not clever enough to cover their tracks?

Suppose Hillary and/or political pundits were to make a serious effort at understanding what happened in November of 2016. What would that look like? In an important and insightful working paper posted just this past June on the Social Science Research Network, Douglas Kriner (Professor of Political Science at Boston University) and Francis Shen (Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School) make a major stride toward going beyond partisan, self-serving, conspiratorial analysis of the elections results. Kriner and Shen are best known for their 2010 book The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities (Oxford University Press, 2010). In that book, the authors defined the "casualty gap" as "a disparity in the concentration of wartime casualties among communities at different points on the socioeconomic ladder."

In their recent more piece (entitled "Battlefield Casualties and the Ballot Box: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?"), Kriner and Shen build off the claims of the 2010 book and make a compelling case that Donald Trump benefited from the war fatigue afflicting communities in traditionally blue states that swung away from Hillary. According to the authors:

America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice. This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat. Increasingly, a divide is emerging between communities whose young people are dying to defend the country, and those communities whose young people are not. In this paper we empirically explore whether this divide—the casualty gap—contributed to Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016. The data analysis presented in this working paper finds that indeed, in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America. Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House. 

Until 2016 Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had all been reliably blue states in presidential elections. Conventional wisdom argues that Hillary lost the states due to a combination of factors including her lack of campaigning (especially in Wisconsin), the attraction of the Trump campaign to low income whites and whites without college degrees, Hillary's inability to match the Obama enthusiasm and turnout among voters of color, the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary among millennials, the impact of then FBI Director Comey's public statement re-opening an investigation of Clinton emails, "fake news" targeting the Clinton campaign, and third party candidates "spoiling" the election. And of course some believe the results were the result of hacking. Each one of these factors have received significant media coverage.

In looking at the connection between battlefield casualties and voting, Kriner and Shen are in a  territory completely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media. Yet their statistical model produces some fascinating results: In Wisconsin, Trump received 47.8 percent of the vote to 47 percent for       Clinton. If Wisconsin had the same battlefield casualty rate as New York, Kriner and Shen estimate that the results would have been 48.4 percent Clinton, 46.4 percent Trump. Michigan's actual results were 47.6 - 47.4 for Trump. With a lower rate of battlefield casualties, the results would have been 49-46 for Clinton. Pennsylvania's actual results were 48.6 - 47.9 for Trump. With lower battlefield casualty rates, the results would have been 49.5 - 47 for Clinton. Many pundits argue that Clinton should have spent more time campaigning in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--especially in rural areas. Yet if Kriner and Shen are correct, Clinton's hawkish foreign policy proposals combined with her past support for wars would have made her presence in those areas absolutely toxic. Perhaps it was better that she just stay away. 

Why has discussion of "war fatigue" in relation to the 2016 election results been completely absent from the media? Kriner and Shen argue it's because of the class and social status of the pundits: " . . . most American elites in the chattering class have not, at least in recent years, been directly affected by on-going conflicts. Children of elites are not as likely to serve and die in the Middle East, and elite communities are thus less likely to make this a point of conversation. The costs of war remain largely hidden, and an invisible inequality of military sacrifice has taken hold. Our analysis . . . suggests that Trump recognized and capitalized on this class-based divergence. His message resonated with voters in communities who felt abandoned by traditional politicians in both parties."

In a previous Media Rant I argued that the militarism of the Obama administration did not represent any significant change in the "War on Terror" as laid out by George W. Bush. The implications of Kriner's and Shen's findings is that Hillary Clinton--who spent much of the 2000s and 2010s as an enthusiastic advocate of militaristic adventures--may have paid for that advocacy in at least three traditionally blue states that went for Trump.

Since the day after the election it has become painfully obvious that Mr. Trump's campaign represented the most massive bait-and-switch operation ever visited upon the American voter. Anyone who hoped that a Trump administration would bring some relief for war families or narrow the casualty gap has already had those hopes crushed. My great fear is that through sheer arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence Trump might well spark a global war that will make Iraq and Afghanistan pale by comparison.

What should be the lesson for the Democrats? My guess is that in her September book release tour Hillary will warn of the need for Democrats to be vigilant in the face of Russian interference in elections and fake news. The Kriner/Shen paper suggests a different, more meaningful lesson: the Democrats should reject the premises of the "War on Terror" and lead the effort to re-think the nation's militaristic posture. They should acknowledge the reality of the casualty gap and pledge to minimize or, better yet, eliminate it.

Read the Kriner/Shen paper here.

My Favorite Albums Of 1967

On the day of my birth in July of 1961, the #1 song in the United States was "Quarter to Three" by Gary U.S. Bonds. Exuberant dance tunes and celebrations of all-night parties were common in rock- and-roll during the JFK years. "Quarter to Three" epitomized the trend:

Don't you know that I danced, I danced till a quarter to three
With the help, last night, of Daddy G
He was swingin on the sax like a nobody could
And I was dancin' all over the room
Oh, don't you know the people were dancin' like they were mad
It was the swingin'est band they had, ever had
It was the swingin'est song that could ever be
It was a night with Daddy G

Few on that dance floor could have predicted that in only six years rock would evolve (or de-evolve, depending on your point of view) from "a night with Daddy G" to "Nights in White Satin." Indeed by 1967 rock-and-roll went from being (at its best) the youthful drive to piss off your parents with only four chords and a backbeat, to a full-fledged art form which made raising the consciousness as legitimate a function for rock as raising the roof. And it pissed off your parents even more. 

Why the dramatic shift in rock quality in such a short period of time? In terms of musical influences, folk singer Bob Dylan has to be given credit for giving currency to the idea that it was okay for songs to "say something." Given that the years 1961-1967 were filled with controversies over civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and much else, there existed lots to say something about. In terms of recording techniques, the Beach Boys' classic "Pet Sounds" (1966) used experimental arrangements to produce a kind of "art rock" that might be difficult to perform live but could be reflected on in privacy or in groups like a great novel. Guided by the "Pet Sounds" example, bands moved away from the standard 2-3 minute track with guitar/bass/drums and mostly innocuous lyrics to lengthy, orchestral tunes often featuring deeply personal lyrics or social commentary. 

In terms of social movements, the west coast hippies like the "Beats" of the 1950s mixed a rejection of middle-class norms with an acceptance of personal liberation to create a space for rock as more than "mere entertainment." The hippies experienced rock as a vehicle for sending messages to the masses, as a peaceful weapon to provoke emotions in a culture made numb by hyper-consumerism, and as the most striking symbol of the values of the new generation; they saw rock-and-roll as nothing less than the soundtrack of the REVOLUTION. As such, they helped shape an audience of listeners that came to expect and appreciate maximum levels of creativity in songwriting and sound.  

For me, more important than musical and sociocultural influences in the development of rock-and-roll was the emergence of FM radio as a space for non-commercial rock music. In 1967 popular San Francisco deejay Tom Donahue wrote an article for the new Rolling Stone magazine called "AM Radio is Dead and its Rotting Corpse is Stinking Up the Airwaves." That article and the work of Donahue and other like-minded jocks led to the creation of the "free-form" style of programming. For the first time, deejays could play whatever they wanted, not just the "hits." In the free-form format, a deejay might play an obscure track, or an entire album, or maybe just spend some time talking about the meaning of the music. Donahue pioneered the free form on KPMX and KSAN in Frisco. In my home town of New York City, WNEW-FM became the archetype of what a "progressive" rock radio station should be, featuring deejays in-tune (pun intended) not just with new music but with society. (Just as an aside: I've yet to meet anyone raised on that era of FM radio who believes that FM radio today is--with few exceptions--anything other than awful, pathetic, mindless crap. Another great venue ruined by corporate greed.). 

So thanks to those and other factors, by 1967 rock and roll had been transformed from mostly fun to a major force for social change. Hordes of youth headed out to San Francisco to find out what all the buzz was about, and the June 16-18 Monterey Pop Festival is widely recognized as the event that ushered in the "Summer of Love." The Beatles did not perform at that concert, but their "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album (released in June in the United States) became the iconic record of the times. 

Sgt. Pepper is an important, great record, but its notoriety unfortunately overshadows the fact that there were many important, great records released that year. Given that we are in the 50th anniversary of 1967, I thought I would list my own personal favorites from that year (organized by the month in which they were released.). 

January: The Doors, "The Doors" and Laura Nyro, "More Than A New Discovery." 

The Doors first album is a classic example of a record that would not have been heard (or possibly even made) without the existence of a viable FM radio band. Today the album is pegged as a seminal recording in the "psychedelic" or "acid" rock category (mostly because of  the songs "Break on Through" and "The End" and lead singer Jim Morrison's burnout image), but for me it's just a great example of modern blues played by a group of white guys from California. 

I found out about Laura Nyro in the 1970s when a WNEW-FM deejay played "And When I Die" by Blood, Sweat, and Tears and announced that the song was "written by Laura Nyro and appears on her first album." Nyro was a thought provoking lyricist who wrote catchy tunes; she's admired among serious artists. In 2012 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Hall's website says that her music "reflected a combination of spirituality and street smarts." 

February: The Jefferson Airplane, "Surrealistic Pillow" 

Everything on this record rocks, but "White Rabbit" is by itself worth the price of admission. Grace Slick's penetrating vocals belting out subversive lyrics might be THE highlight of the music of 1967. 

March: Grateful Dead, "The Grateful Dead" 

The first album from the most legendary jam band of all time. As with the Doors first album, the Dead's debut effort is often unfairly pegged as vital mostly because of its connection to psychedelia. But listen to "Viola Lee Blues" and it's clear that from their earliest days the Dead found a way to create a blues-rock-folk hybrid unlike anything heard before or since. 

Honorable Mention: The Velvet Underground's "The Velvet Underground & Nico" came out in March of 1967 also. Rolling Stone calls it the 13th greatest album of all time. The album's eclectic musical style--and the fact that the songwriters dared to address controversial themes like drug abuse and prostitution--make it a groundbreaking effort. Lou Reed's chilling tune "Heroin" is on this album--another great example of pioneering music that would never have been heard were it not for the courageous efforts of the era's FM deejays. 

April: The Electric Prunes, "The Electric Prunes"

The Electric Prunes were the ultimate American garage band. When I teach "The Rhetoric of Rock and Roll" for contemporary students, lots of them get a kick out of this album's featured track "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)." A few years ago I asked a student why he liked that song and he said, "The words sound like something they came up with after smoking some really good weed." That sounds about right. 

Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room

I touched your golden hair and tasted your perfume
Your eyes were filled with love the way they used to be
Your gentle hand reached out to comfort me
Then came the dawn
And you were gone
You were gone, gone, gone
Too much to dream
I'm not ready to face the light
I had too much to dream
Last night

I had too much to dream last night

May: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Are You Experienced?" and The Mothers of Invention, "Absolutely Free"

Hendrix wasn't the first electric guitar hero in the history of rock; Chuck Berry, Dick Dale, Link Wray, and Duane Eddy were some of the earliest innovators in the genre. But Hendrix's 1967 debut album took the instrument to a new level; when Les Paul and Leo Fender pioneered the solid body electric guitar in the 1940s, they could never have imagined the result would be roaring riffs as can be heard in songs like "Manic Depression" and "Fire." It should also be noted that while Hendrix is primarily known for his guitar theatrics, he was also one of best lyricists of the era. "The Wind Cries Mary" is Shakespearean in its romantic imagery. 

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's "Absolutely Free" is one of the funniest rock records ever recorded. Zappa's biting satire blew up America's consumerist, materialist culture in what could be described as the musical equivalent of  a Lenny Bruce or George Carlin stand-up routine. Today, as we experience the absurdity of having a full-fledged internet troll calling the shots in the White House, "Absolutely Free" seems more relevant than ever. The song "Plastic People" features some lyrics that in 2017 should be posted on every highway bulletin board in the land: 

Take a day and walk around 

watch the nazi's run your town 

Then go home and check yourself

you think we're singing 

'bout someone else 

June: The Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" 

Sgt. Pepper did for rock music what Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" did for film: raised the bar and changed the rules. "Kane" and "Pepper" spawned some awful imitators in their respective media, but they also inspired artists to take more creative risks. 

July: The Bee Gees, "Bee Gees 1st" and Canned Heat, "Canned Heat" 

Bee Gees 1st was actually the third studio album released by the band, but the first to be released internationally. The album is a power-pop archetype, and it might be only a mild exaggeration to say that "To Love Somebody" is the greatest pop love song ever written. 

Canned Heat's first album is not their best or my favorite of theirs, but in the midst of all the mind expanding music of 1967, this one refreshingly provided a jolt of John Lee Hooker inspired boogie and blues. Like most Heat albums, it's fun from beginning to end. 

August: Pink Floyd, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"; Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign"; Vanilla Fudge, "Vanilla Fudge" 

Pink Floyd went on to bigger and better things, but their 1967 debut is still a key creation in the development of "progressive" rock. When Elvis broke through in 1955, I'm quite sure no one thought there would be a time when rock songs could have titles like "Astronomy Domine," "Lucifer Sam" and "Interstellar Overdrive." 

Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" helped usher in the blues revival of the time. Depending on what mood I'm in, when asked "What's your all time favorite song?" there's a good chance I'll say "The title track of Albert King's 'Born Under a Bad Sign." 

Vanilla Fudge's first album is a landmark in how to perform cover tunes: make them so different from the original that the average listener won't even recognize that they are covers. No crappy karaoke from the Fudge. Their cover of the Supremes'  Motown classic "You Keep Me Hangin' On" used to be in regular rotations on the classic rock radio playlist. It should be brought back. 

September: The Kinks, "Something Else"; The Beach Boys, "Smiley Smile"; Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"; Procul Harum, "Procul Harum"; Eric Burdon & The Animals, "Winds of Change"

As the kids returned to school in September of 1967 they were met with some spectacular records. The Kinks will always be known as the most underrated of the British Invasion bands of the 1960s. That's too bad, because their best work is on par with best of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Who. "Something Else" has the acoustic/electric mix that became commonplace in 1990s indie rock and today. Two tunes on the album, "Death of a Clown" and "Waterloo Sunset," deserve to be on any list of great 1960s records. 

People who knew the Beach Boys for surfin' and hot rod songs did not appreciate "Smiley Smile," but the record is another example of Brian Wilson's ability to push the envelope in the recording studio. The most popular song on the album, "Good Vibrations," had already been released as a single in 1966 (my guess is that someone at the studio headquarters insisted it be put on "Smiley Smile" so as to make it easier to market the album.). On songs like "Vegetables" and "She's Goin' Bald" you almost get the feeling that Wilson is poking fun at the Beach Boys' previous incarnation. Very endearing. 

Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" includes "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," an 18 minute, 20 second folk epic that became the anti-war anthem of a generation. I've seen Arlo perform it live twice at the Oshkosh Grand Opera House and it never seems dated. 

Procul Harum got unfairly pegged as a one hit wonder on the strength of the beautiful tune "A Whiter Shade of Pale." But their debut album is high caliber throughout; Gary Brooker's vocals and keyboards demand attention. "She Wandered Through the Garden Fence" and "Conquistador" are my personal favorites off the album. 

In 1967 rocker Eric Burdon was a true believer in the love generation. "Winds of Change" is probably the most coherent musical statement of what was going on in San Francisco in the middle 1960s composed and performed by active participants in the historical moment. 

October: Sam & Dave, "Soul Men" and Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again" 

Sam & Dave were accompanied by Booker T. & The MGs and the Mar-Key Horns, some of the most awe-inspiring musicians ever to perform and record. Anyone curious as to what is meant by the Stax sound needs to listen to "Soul Men." 

"Buffalo Springfield Again" is notable for featuring some of the early, classic material by Stephen Stills and Neil Young. I don't think Stills ever topped his song "Bluebird" from this album, while Neil's "Mr. Soul" might be the earliest example what later became known as grunge rock. 

November: The Moody Blues, "Days of Future Passed" and Cream, "Disraeli Gears" 

"Days of Future Passed" is a "thinking person's album," the kind of opus that became impossible even to conceive of after the birth of music video in the 1980s. Too bad; there's something to be said for music that connects with a 4.0 GPA English major. 

"Disraeli Gears" is one of the foundation records in the sub-genre known as heavy metal. Guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce, and drummer Ginger Baker provide a rock out clinic on this album. If you've listened to lots of FM radio over the years you're probably sick of "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Strange Brew," the two tracks off this album that remained on the classic rock radio set lists. My personal favorites on the record are "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (another one that the English majors might get into) and "Take It Back"--a subtle anti-war song. 

December: The Who, "The Who Sell Out" and Leonard Cohen, "Songs of Leonard Cohen"

Pete Townshend, guitarist and brains behind the Who, has his entire career navigated between the comic and the tragic. "The Who Sell Out" catches him in a comic phase; the album is an extended satire on commercialism. Today when we watch Don Draper on the hit show "Mad Men" we recognize the absurdity of the early public relations/advertising culture of the early 1960s. The Who recognized the absurdity early, which is one of the reasons this record occupies an important place in the history of rock. 

"Songs of Leonard Cohen" was the crooner's first album. For me, Cohen could do nothing but recite the contents of grocery lists and it still would have been worth a listen. He simply had one of those mesmerizing voices that comes along only a few times each generation. That he was able to compose poetic, eerily beautiful words only added to the appeal. 

Happy Birthday 1967! Thanks for leaving us with a wealth of wonderful, timeless music. And may every summer be a "Summer of Love." 

Roger Ailes and the Eristic Revival

In this media rant I wish to make three points:

1. Fox News, guided by the values of founder Roger Ailes, did not originate but did magnify the worst tendencies of post-World War II news media in the United States.
2. The real significance of Ailes and Fox is his/its revival of the ancient “eristic,” an intoxicating mode of argument rooted not in the civil exchange of ideas for the purpose of arriving at sound public policy, but rooted instead in the desire to defeat and humiliate opponents.
3. The end and tragic result of Fox’s magnification of the news media’s worst tendencies and revival of the eristic has been the death of political conservatism as a force for generating new ideas or reformulating old ones.

Fox and the Three Worst Features of American News Media      

Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, died recently. The response by his critics was, paradoxically but predictably, Fox News-like in its vitriol. Media Studies Professor Marc Lamont Hill tweeted, “Roger Ailes has died. Wow. Sending deep and heartfelt condolences to everyone who was abused, harassed, exploited, and unjustly fired by him.” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi chimed in with “The extent to which we hate and fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.” Media critic Neal Gabler posits that Ailes created a monstrous news channel:

You could say that Fox News gave voice to those who felt voiceless, though it might be more accurate to say that he gave voice to those who were so filled with enmity that they seemed on the borderline of sanity. With his hosts and guests howling at elites without surcease, he created not just an alternative media or even an alternative set of facts, but an alternative universe that has overtaken the real one — a bizarre universe bubbling with resentments and conspiracies and fabrications in which liberals aren’t a political opposition; they are the source of all evil. Basically, he poisoned America.

Think Gabler is exaggerating? Consider the recent case of Princeton University assistant professor of African-American Studies Keeanga-YamahttaTaylor. Professor Taylor delivered the commencement address at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. In the speech she called President Trump a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.” After Fox News covered her speech, she was subjected to bitter, angry, threatening, racist trolling that forced her to cancel public lectures in Seattle and San Diego. She put out a statement which said in part:

My speech at Hampshire was applauded but Fox News did not like it. Last week, the network ran a story on my speech, describing it as an “anti-POTUS tirade.” Fox ran an online story about my speech and created a separate video of excerpts of my speech, which included my warning to graduates about the world they were graduating into. I argued that Donald Trump, the most powerful politician in the world, is “a racist and sexist megalomaniac,” who poses a threat to their future. Shortly after the Fox story and video were published, my work email was inundated with vile and violent statements. I have been repeatedly called “nigger,” “bitch,” “cunt,” “dyke,” “she-male,” and “coon” — a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence. I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head. I am not a newsworthy person. Fox did not run this story because it was “news,” but to incite and unleash the mob-like mentality of its fringe audience, anticipating that they would respond with a deluge of hate-filled emails — or worse. The threat of violence, whether it is implied or acted on, is intended to intimidate and to silence . . . The cancelation of my speaking events is a concession to the violent intimidation that was, in my opinion, provoked by Fox News. But I am releasing this statement to say that I will not be silent. Their side uses the threat of violence and intimidation because they cannot compete in the field of politics, ideas, and organizing.

The most credible accounts of Roger Ailes’ tenure at Fox suggest that he created a toxic, ratings driven corporate culture, while his predatory behavior toward women is now well documented. (Appropriately, Ailes’ biggest defender is Bill O’Reilly, himself finally forced out at Fox in April of this year after his show’s corporate sponsors could no longer stand by the sexual harassment behaviors that Ailes enabled for many years). Maybe what’s most shocking is that the TV liberal Rachel Maddow openly admits to considering Ailes a “friend.”

As regards his journalistic legacy, most of Ailes’ critics seem convinced that he represented something uniquely awful in the history of American and/or global news media. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that historians of the future will find Ailes and Fox News noteworthy for how they magnified the three worst features of post-World War II American news media:

Worst Feature #1: The news media as an arm of the State. Some Vietnam War reporting and Watergate-era journalism created an inaccurate perception of American news media as adversarial towards the interests of the State. In fact the establishment media have always had a cozy relationship with the powers that be, exemplified most distressingly by the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. And probably the best example of the reigning in of what little media/State tension did exist during the Vietnam era was CNN’s 1998 termination of April Oliver and Jack Smith, producers of a feature report showing that the US military used sarin gas during the Vietnam’s “Operation Tailwind.” Oliver and Smith were fired after significant pushback to the story from the Pentagon. (Oliver and Smith ended up writing a 77-page rebuttal to the CNN internal report that was used a justification  to fire them. It is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the real world challenges to journalists who dare to be more than stenographers for the powerful.).

Worst Feature #2: The News as Entertainment. Fox has taken this feature to lamentable heights, but it did not begin with them. Reuven Frank, who served as President of NBC news from 1968-1974 and again from 1982-1984 reportedly said that every news story should "display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, a middle and an end." Attorney Floyd Abrams claims that Frank told him “sunshine is a weather report. A flood is news.”

Worst Feature #3: The News as Alternative Reality. In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein published It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. The authors published an op-ed that same year in the Washington Post that summarized one of the key points of the book: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”  That is, the modern day GOP inhabits an alternative reality.

No doubt Fox News aided and abetted the Republicans march toward an alternative universe. But as with the news as entertainment, this is not unique to Fox. Put on your local television news or read your local corporate newspaper. What you will see and read bears only marginal relation to the real lives of the majority of people inhabiting the geographical region. Most mainstream media subscribe to what Roger Ailes called the Orchestra Pit Theory: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”  News media, from Fox on up, give us a view of reality as nonstop orchestra pit malfunctions, consequently making “reality” (especially for heavy TV news viewers) seem more chaotic, evil, and beyond repair than it actually is.

Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the Revival of the Ancient Greek Eristic

More than 2000 years ago, ancient Greek philosophers developed a fascination with what we today call “mass communication.” They called it Rhetoric, and they had spirited debates about the ethics of such communication. Most people today receive little education about that time period or those debates, which is unfortunate because if they did maybe it would be easier to understand the rise of Roger Ailes and Fox News.

In the 5^th century BCE, as Greece dabbled in experiments with democracy, attention was given to the importance and power of communication in civic life. Today when people hear the word “rhetoric” they think of “spin” or “bullshit,” but to the ancient Greeks the study of rhetoric was equal to the study of citizenship; rhetoric was vital as an aid in making policy decisions, resolving disputes, and mediating the discussion of public issues to citizens.

Early teachers of rhetoric were known as “Sophists.” Many of them were brilliant philosophers and educators teaching the skills necessary to be successful as a public advocate, but others were kind of like early versions of Dale Carnegie; “winning friends and influencing people” took priority over sound argument and the search for truth. Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle developed a sense of rhetoric as “philosophy in action.” Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the most well developed exploration of the “art of rhetoric” from that time period, conceives of a rhetorician as someone who presents a well-argued case, develops an emotional connection with an audience, and is perceived by them to be a person of goodwill.

Plato was quite hostile to the sophists. In his writings, most of which feature his teacher Socrates, Plato has Socrates accuse the Sophists of engaging in “eristic” argument. Eristic argument was a kind of verbal duel; the purpose was not to enlighten or arrive at truth but only to win an argument. Plato’s Socrates differentiates eristic from dialectic. According to professor James Benjamin, “A defining characteristic of proper dialectic is that the participants must seriously pursue the subject under discussion. Disputes become eristical when one of the participants violates the serious purpose of the dispute. Just as a card game deteriorates into chaos when one player intends to play bridge while another player intends to play hearts, so too does dialectic deteriorate into eristic if one participant holds a serious intention while another participant holds a less serious intention . . . Eristic is fallacious dialectic that corresponds to fallacious argumentation in rhetoric and is motivated by a disregard for the rules of serious argumentative pursuits.” (quote appears in Benjamin, J. "Eristic, Dialectic, and Rhetoric." Communication Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 21-26).  Eristic argument, given that it is like a sport, has high entertainment value and literally draws crowds. 

Seen from this perspective, Roger Ailes and Fox News since 1996 have provided us with a powerful model of modern eristic. The bluster and bloviation of blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—maddening to their opponents—is rooted in a communication model that ancient philosophers and rhetoricians warned us about many years ago. In a corporate media world that lives and dies by the advertising dollar, it is not surprising that the success of Ailes’ eristic has spawned a wide range of imitators all over the political spectrum, from the alt.right to the so-called left over at MSNBC. The mainstream media's obsession with Vladimir Putin, cleverly coined "Putinology" by Keith Gessen, comes straight from the Fox playbook in use of the most vulgar guilt-by-association tactics. 

Ailes, Fox, and the Death of Political Conservatism

Perhaps the most disastrous consequence of Ailes’ eristic has been Fox’s impact on political conservativism. Conservativism used to be about, and should be about, figuring out how to adapt precedent and traditional principles to modern problems. Conceived of that way, conservativism at its best is a rigorous and spirited testing of ideas. Ailes and Fox, because of their addiction to the eristic mode of argument, literally destroyed any of that sense of conservatism. They replaced it with a sham conservativism that seeks not to advance new ideas or provide fresh takes on old ones, but rather is content to demolish “liberal elites.”

Charlie Sykes, the conservative talk-radio host who appears to have finally “had it” with the excesses of the movement that he himself had a prominent role in creating, penned an important op-ed recently for the New York Times that gets at the heart of what the eristic style has done to conservatism. He writes:

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of airtime on conservative media is not taken up by issues or explanations of conservative approaches to markets or need to balance liberty with order. Why bother with such stuff, when there were personalities to be mocked and left-wing moonbats to be ridiculed?

What may have begun as a policy or a tactic in opposition has long since become a reflex. But there is an obvious price to be paid for essentially becoming a party devoted to trolling. In the long run, it’s hard to see how a party dedicated to liberal tears can remain a movement based on ideas or centered on principles.

Conservatives will care less about governing and more about scoring “wins” — and inflicting losses on the left — no matter how hollow the victories or flawed the policies. Ultimately, though, this will end badly because it is a moral and intellectual dead end, and very likely a political one as well.

If you want to test Sykes’ argument, just go to Facebook and monitor the posts of your self-identified “conservative” friends. You won’t see much original argument or insight, but you will see a boat load of memes mocking liberals. (There are of course exceptions, but the exceptions always seem to prove the rule.). Is this entirely because of Roger Ailes and Fox? No, but Fox has for over 20 years produced an almost intoxicating brand of eristic that has normalized mockery, name-calling, and knocking down straw (wo)men as legitimate forms of conservative argument. If liberalism died because its advocates lack guts, maybe conservatism died because, as Stephen Colbert famously noted in his roast of George W. Bush, it argues “from the gut.”

So addictive is the eristic that if you point out the strategy to the addicts, a typical response is “whataboutism;” “Whatabout when liberals attack conservatives? Whatabout that professor’s commencement speech? Didn’t she call Trump names?”  Etc. etc. A great sign of a philosophy going bankrupt is when its adherents are reduced to answering all major criticisms by pointing out the hypocrisy of the critics.

Eristic argument will always be with us. The answer is not to censor it or whine about it, but to teach citizens how to recognize it. Once citizens recognizes the eristic at work, they can seek out more ethical discourse interested in the pursuit of truth as opposed to the pursuit of power and ratings points. Even better, they can become a more active contributor to the media; we need more blogs, newspaper columns, social media posts, podcasts, and other forms of media that reject trolling (i.e. the eristic) and seek understanding and insight. Drown out the eristic with a healthy dose of ethical citizenship. 

Still Bombing After All These Years

Last month we were bombarded (pun intended) with  news that the US had dropped the "mother of all bombs" on Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, "The bomb explodes a few feet above the ground, and is designed to send a devastating wave of fire and blast hundreds of yards to kill troops, flatten trees, knock over structures, collapse cave entrances and, in general, demoralize those far beyond the impact zone." For sheer awe and shock theatrics and destruction, only a nuke can surpass the MOAB. 

Because the MOAB was dropped on "ISIS caves," (caves probably financed and built with CIA assistance in the 1970s and 1980s) reaction from establishment Democrats was predictably muted. Rather than join former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in condemning as an "immense atrocity" the use of Afghanistan as a testing ground for the use of weapons of mass destruction to "send messages" to North Korea or other alleged enemies of the homeland, Democrats instead chastised Donald Trump for his lack of a coherent "strategy" in the region. So presumably if the Administration develops something resembling a coherent strategy, the use of weapons of mass destruction will become okay. Now there's a position that will attract rural voters in for the Dems in 2018 and beyond! (That sentence is meant to carry MUCH sarcasm.).

There was a time when even the threat of using such weapons would be met with some kind of organized, large scale outrage: marches, teach-ins, letter writing campaigns, etc. Not anymore. The logic and tactics of the "War on Terror" have apparently become so deeply internalized that even a moderate to left leaning source like vox.com can write about the MOAB strike, with no irony or sarcasm, "There’s no reason to assume this was something out of the ordinary, even though the bomb was bigger than ones typically used by the US military." 

So how did the logic and tactics of the "War on Terror" become normalized? How did nonstop bombings become "ordinary?" Are we really at the point where the US government has to drop a nuke in order to cross the line into "out of the ordinary" aggression?  

I think the simplest answer can be found in President George W. Bush's Address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. That speech came to be known as "Freedom and Fear are at War." As someone who has an academic background in the history of American political speeches, I can say with some degree of confidence that President Bush's 9/20/01 address is probably the most consequential presidential speech ever delivered. Every military action taken abroad--and every assault on civil liberties at home--during the Bush, Obama, and now Trump administrations, makes complete sense when evaluated in accordance with the framing of the "War on Terror" found in Bush's speech.

 

In the speech, Bush argued that those responsible for 9/11 were the modern day equivalent of fascists, Nazis, and totalitarians; they were part of a global terror network operating in more than 60 countries. They hate us because of our freedoms and because we stand in the way of their desire to overthrow existing governments and drive Israel out of the Middle East. 

President Bush then warned us of the never ending war that was to come: 

Now this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat. Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

As much as Barack Obama and Donald Trump condemned and critiqued the ineptitude of the Bush Administration's conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama and now Trump both left the essential features of the never ending war untouched. Bush and Obama at least pleaded with Americans to avoid scapegoating and demonizing Muslims, a plea of basic decency that is too difficult for the Tweeter in Chief, but it is just plain delusional to think that Trump is conducting the never ending war in a way that is significantly more violent than his predecessors. Trump's Pentagon is operating within a framework devised by Bush and reinforced by Obama.

Just consider the data from President Obama's last year in office. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2016 the United States dropped 26,172 bombs on 7 nations. Here's the breakdown by nation: 

*Syria:............. 12,192 bombs 
*Iraq:................12,092 bombs
*Afghanistan:.....1,337 bombs
*Libya:..................496 bombs
*Yemen:..................35 bombs

*Somalia:................14 bombs

*Pakistan:.................3 bombs 

NBC news reported that the 2016 bombings equate to an average of 72 bombs per day or 3 per hour. For those who appreciate Orwellian Newspeak and/or in-your-face evidence of the global domination of the military-industrial complex, the US military affectionately refers to the bombing campaigns as "Operation Inherent Resolve." They even have a cheerful website.  

Can all of these bombings possibly be legal under US law? (Let's not even ask about if the bombings are legal under international law because we know the US government will only follow said law when it is convenient to do so.). In an intelligent piece for Slate, Joshua Keating argues persuasively that  "Questions of executive power in war are often more a question of political precedent than written law, and the way the previous administration conducted operations in countries including Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia helped normalize the notion that limited airstrikes are not 'real' war.'" That political precedent was framed and initiated by Bush, reinforced and made normal by Obama, and now, with Trump, giving us a more hostile and vile rhetoric to match the violence on the ground. I mean, when Trump says he wants to "Bomb the shit out of ISIS" he is merely providing a more blunt description of what the prior administrations did for the previous 15 years (contrary to the right wing Republican wingnut view that Barack Obama was somehow a pacifist on foreign policy.).

Serious questions: Does anyone seriously, sincerely think that these legally dubious bombings that probably kill more innocent civilians than we are told do anything to reduce the threat of terror? Is it not more likely that each bombing raid actually increases the chance of terror in all the nations supporting the US? 

Forget for a moment the propaganda-ish claims of war and bombings somehow reducing terror. What about the actual monetary costs of the war(s) started by President Bush and a compliant Congress (not to mention a lapdog media) on September 20, 2001 and continuing today? Political Science Professor Neta Crawford of Boston University has done some of the most thorough research on this topic. In her piece “US Budgetary Costs of Wars Through 2016: $4.79 Trillion and Counting,"  she provides a sobering reality check: 

As of August 2016, the US has already appropriated, spent, or taken on obligations to spend more than $3.6 trillion in current dollars on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and on Homeland Security (2001 through fiscal year  2016). To this total should be added the approximately $65 billion in dedicated war spending the Department of Defense and State Department have requested for the next fiscal year, 2017, along with an additional nearly $32 billion requested for the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, and estimated spending on veterans in future years.

And in the "insanity means doing more of the same but expecting a different result" category, the press is reporting that Trump and a bipartisan coalition of Congressional representatives will avert a government shutdown in part by giving the Pentagon a $12.5 billion increase for the fiscal year ending September 30. There's also "the possibility of an additional $2.5 billion contingent on Trump delivering a plan to Congress for defeating the Islamic State militant group." (Reuters). 

In short, in the last 16 years we've seen that the basic outlines of the "War on Terror" outlined in a general way by President Bush on 9/20/01 have remained solidly in place. The "Bush Doctrine" or preemptive strikes against those labeled as terrorists--or against those who "harbor" them, has been the dominant foreign policy strategy through three consecutive administrations, with wide bipartisan support in Congress.

What would be an alternative to the Bush Doctrine? When Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on the platform that he would seek to negotiate with Iran, many of us thought he was signaling an intention to reinvent American foreign policy in a way that would minimize the "good v. evil" structures in our political rhetoric that almost always lead to pointless war and bombing. But alas, it never happened. Save for the Iran nuclear deal, Obama for the most part left the Bush Doctrine intact.

In a 2014 op-ed, political science professor Christopher Hobson describes the kind of changed thinking that needs to happen in Washington if we are ever to have a chance at a future not plagued by an ill-defined, never ending war. He wrote:

When looking at Iraq and Syria it should be apparent that there are simply no good solutions immediately available. The horrific acts of Islamic State should be denounced and the international community must consider how it can limit the suffering of affected people. But acknowledging this messy and brutal reality also means coming to terms with Islamic State as a political actor, which is motivated by grievances and goals.


The longer we dismiss Islamic State as an “apocalyptic death cult” or medieval savages, the longer it will be before we can devise a more effective response to dealing with the terrifying challenge they represent.
 
Given the heightened emotions, confusion, and panic generated on September 11, 2001, President Bush can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately responding to the crisis by seeking to come to terms with America's adversaries as political actors motivated by grievances and goals. But we've now had a decade-and-a-half worth of nonstop war and bombing rooted in the vision set out by Bush on 9/20/01. At what point do we as a People start to demand a rethinking of the assumptions and language that put us in this position?

If you would like to keep track of the bombings, go to airwars.org.