Epistemic Ingemination

AISD is calling it the “North American Flu.” Very good. In some ways, we have a good school system here.

Ryan and I were talking about the swine flu thing the other day, and he opined that maybe we should have some disposable masks on hand, just in case it turned into a pandemic.

I was in Walgreen’s yesterday, and on a whim, went looking for them. Sold out. The shelves were bare. Kind of interesting…

I’ve talked to a lot of folks who travel overseas; they’re plentiful in my biz. And almost to a person, the subject eventually comes up that our country has no idea what really goes on with the rest of the human beings in this world; we’re 300 million people trapped inside a mirror ball, and all we can see is a distorted reflection of ourselves. The subject has always interested me, but since I’ve never been outside of the mirror ball, I can’t really speak to it with any insight that isn’t hearsay.

But now, a writer named Joe Bageant has done a fine job of articulating his thoughts on the matter. He was invited to speak at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and a couple of other places, and his observations are very interesting. It’s worth your time to read the whole thing (and it’s pretty long) but here are some excerpts to illustrate the gist of his piece.

As psych students, most of you understand that there is no way you can escape being conditioned by your society, one way or another. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. So am I. When we go to the ATM machine and punch the buttons to make cash fall out, we are doing the same thing as the chickens that peck the colored buttons make corn drop from the feeder. You will not do a single thing today, tomorrow or the next day that you have not been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do — mostly along class lines.

…

Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of “appropriate behavior,” is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality.

Given the financialization of all aspects of our culture and lives, even our so-called leisure time, it is not an exaggeration to say that true democracy is dead and a corporate financial state has now arrived. If you can get your head around that, it’s not hard to see an ever merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. Or Japan for that matter. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information.

…

Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

The bad news is that we nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening. I know it doesn’t feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things, so it must be OK. This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in our case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture.

…

Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, first, second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a second world nation. We have no universal free health care (don’t kid yourself about the plan underway), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status, if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a “career.” High infant mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy, even by our own definition we are a second world nation.

But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy throwaway technology, that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright colored signs for Circuit City and The Gap (rest in peace), the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow and red wrapper on the burger inside its bright red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience. These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick conditioned illusion, the one I call The American Hologram, is indeed real. If it’s bright and shiny and new, it must be better. Right? It’s the complete opposite of tropical grunge.

There is much, much more, and I find it fascinating. I’ve traveled this country extensively; I’ve been to all lower forty eight states probably five times over, and seen much of the Canadian border provinces as well. But I’ve never been farther into Mexico than maybe three miles from the Rio Grande, and I’ve never been off of this continent at all, deep sea fishing notwithstanding.

Reading Mr. Bageant’s observations kind of makes me feel like the Neo character in The Matrix. There’s definitely studying to be done here.

Very Highly Recommended.

Health care legislation will happen this year. A letter was sent today:

April 20, 2009

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

For nearly a year, we have been working together toward the shared goal of significant reforms to our health care system. We must act swiftly, because the cost of inaction is too high for individuals, families, businesses, state and federal governments. Comprehensive health care reform legislation will responsibly contain costs, improve quality, enhance disease prevention, and provide coverage to all Americans. We are committed to working with you, and with our colleagues in Congress, to enact legislation to achieve these long-overdue reforms without delay. We are writing to you today to let you know of the schedule for committee action that we intend to follow to meet this goal.

Since our committees share jurisdiction over health care reform legislation in the Senate, we have jointly laid out an aggressive schedule to accomplish our goal. Both committees plan to mark-up legislation in early June. Our intention is for that legislation to be very similar, and to reflect a shared approach to reform, so that the measures that our two committees report can be quickly merged into a single bill for consideration on the Senate floor.

The unprecedented level of funding devoted to health care reform in your budget this year leaves no doubt about your commitment to the goals of expanding coverage, reducing costs, and improving health and health care. We have a moral duty to ensure that every American can get quality health care. We must act to contain the growth of health care costs to ensure our economic stability; to help American businesses deal with the health care challenge; and to make sure that we are getting our money’s worth. With your continued leadership and commitment, and working together, we remain certain that our goal of enacting comprehensive health care reform can be accomplished with the urgency that the American people rightly demand.
Respectfully yours,

Senator Max Baucus
Chairman
Senate Finance Committee

Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Chairman
Senate HELP Committee

Absolutely beautiful political theater. And excellent political tactics.

You can expect immediate hysteria from the wingnuts, and mudslinging from the Republicans surpassing even “Fascist” and “Communist.” They’ll have two whole months to scream doomsday before they even see the bill, and by the time it’s released, the country will be tired of them and ignoring their sky-is-falling pronouncements. A nice bit of old-school LBJ-esque strategy there.

With a little luck, this’ll get McConnell & Boehner so worked up that they’ll have to retire for health reasons. Pun intended.

Wow, that post about my high school band director below has gotten some traffic. I guess that we all had at least one teacher that we clashed with on a visceral level. I initially noticed a bunch of Austin-local views, probably contemporaries who know who I was talking about. I’m seeing significant hits from Europe and Japan now. Amazing. And amusing.

So let’s give equal time to the ones that helped me through my checkered public school experience. This time, I’m naming names.

Donna Banik: my seventh grade English teacher at T.N. Porter Jr High. Earth goddess, poet, dewey-eyed idealist, and a fine educator. She fostered a lifelong interest in wordsmithery, a lifelong love of the English language. (And a lifelong weakness for beautiful, intelligent, long-haired brunettes.)

Bernard “Bernie” Owens: 11th grade history. An uncompromising patriot and an uncompromising political liberal whose love of this country and its history was infectious, and the infection remains to this day. We became good buddies, and ate lunch together occasionally. Also a man of ethics; he flunked me. Not because I didn’t know the material — I’d practically memorized the text book, he made it so interesting, and he knew it — but because I didn’t do any homework that final semester. A quality educator on many, many levels, not the least of which was in teaching me that there are rules in this world, and they apply to friends as well as strangers.

And, above all, LaFalco “Corkey” Robinson.

Old jazz beatnik, extraordinary music teacher, wise counselor, good friend, and a person who changed my life. I had the luck of walking into his band hall at the old Austin High after fleeing the marching regimen at Crockett High School. I told him that I didn’t want to march, that I wanted to learn music. The next thing that I knew, he’d arranged for me to play piano and string bass with the stage band, trumpet with the concert band, string bass with the orchestra, and had me in advanced music theory, too. We all ended up with the finest high school stage band in the country, and several of the people in that class have gone on to be very successful artists, working with the finest musicians on the planet. Me included, although my artistic palette ultimately ended up being synthesizers and audio consoles.

There are more, of course, but these three people made a huge difference in my life, and I give my profound thanks to all of them. I hope that, some day, they see this.

I Feel Better Now.

Seussville

I’d like to commend to you a wonderful read (and a dangerous time sink, heh.) It’s an exchange over at The Well from last summer between Joe Nick Patoski and Ed Ward, generally about the writing of Joe Nick’s then-new Bio of Willie Nelson. But the nature of the two (both are serious Texas Music journalists) makes for some extraordinary reading.

Make a good cup of coffee and step into their world over at:
The WELL: Joe Nick Patoski: Willie Nelson, an Epic Life

Here’s a example of some of the places that it goes:

I like to cite the Doug Sahm composition, “At the Crossroads,” a song
he wrote in the late 60s when he was in San Francisco, pining for
Texas. Texas really is at the literal crossroads – halfway across the
US if you’re traveling the southern route, on the western edge of the
Old South, at the front door of the American west, sharing the longest
part of the border with Mexico, Latin America, and the Third World,
sufficiently far enough from either coast to be provincial, and big
enough to have its own distinct culture, of which music is the finest
of the fine arts. More important, it’s like Sir Doug said, “You just
can’t live in Texas, if you don’t got a lot of soul.”

And:

The music aspect is hard to pin down. Most folks associate Texas Music
with Willie, Waylon and the boys. The funny thing was, when Willie
started blowing up in Austin in the early 70s, no one knew or used the
phrase “Texas Music.” Since then, it’s become a sound, a radio format
that’s popular in these parts, and an all-purpose appellation that can
cover anything from Texas country like Willie through Pat Green and
Roger Creager, to the Texas tenor sound in jazz, jump blues as first
defined by T-Bone Walker, the sophisticated R n B of Bobby Bland, the
country blues of Mance Lipscomb and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the city
songster blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins which can be directly linked to the
singer-songwriter tradition popularized by Townes Van Zandt, Guy
Clark, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, and Lyle Lovett. Texas Music
in the rock and roll realm is Buddy Holly, who invented his style in
the isolated vacuum that is Lubbock Texas, Roky Erickson and the 13th
Floor Elevators, who in the great Texas tradition went ‘way overboard
in their interpretation of psychedelic music (understand, we’re crazy
from the heat), ZZ Top, who took the boogie beat to the great unwashed,
and modernists from Joe Ely to At the Drive In to Future Clouds and
Radar. Then there’s the Mexican influence on Tex-Mex, Tejano and
conjunto and even pop (think: “Tequila” by the Champs, “Talk to Me” by
Sunny and the Sunliners, or even Augie Meyer’s “Hey Baby, Ke Pa So”).
From Lydia Mendoza and Narciso Martinez who made records for Bluebird
back in the 1920s to Little Joe y La Familia, Selena, Flaco Jimenez,
and Esteban Jordan, the Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion, the Latin
element of Texas Music is as old as the tradition of the corrido, which
spread news through Spanish-speaking communities in song instead of in
print or on television. Corridodistas in San Antonio are still writing
topical songs today and having them played on KEDA AM, Radio Jalapeno,
the only conjunto station in the nation.

And:

Texas culture is broad based because there are so many cultures
within, but the essence is defined by the three traditional cultures -
African-American, Anglo-American, and Mexican-American. The voice of
each has been loud enough and distinctive enough to be heard,
regardless of segregation laws and other social pressures, and an
essential element of each has been music, the one art immigrants could
bring with them and keep with him.

Musically, Texas culture is based on stringed instruments and
storytelling – the songster – with an openness to adapt to technology
and outside trends (thus, the accordion embraced by Mexican conjuntos
and Steve Jordan interpreting Vanilla Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On”
back in the late 60s as accordeon psicodelico; or Willie doing
Stardust). That crossroads thing is important since there’s so many
musical crosscurrents at work, so is the willingness to try something
new and completely different.

Non-musically that culture best translates into openness (visitors
always remark we’re so friendly; wait til you get to know us), being
loud and obnoxious, which I believe is partly due to our tendency to go
crazy from the heat, being iconoclastic (read the passage on the
original Iconoclast, William Cowper Brann of Waco), individualistic,
ambitious, persuasive (there’s that salesman thing again), and willing
to take risks, which goes back to being on the frontier; back then,
you’d have to have been crazy to settle anywhere west of the 98th
parallel, and yet people did.

Loyalty plays a huge role, too, but good loyalty, like Willie’s
devotion to his band and crew and vice versa, rather than blind loyalty
that fake Texans like Bush exhibit.

In a way, this book is trying to undo the damage done by Bush to the
Texan brand. He ain’t one, he never was one, and if he passes, it’s in
fake places like Washington DC or Dallas (I can say that because I’m
from Fort Worth).

It’s just a wonderful, freewheeling conversation between two noted Texas Music History Geeks, and I’ve found it to be fascinating. Had to take a minute to tell you about it; I still have several more hours of reading to do…

I was recently enraged by a marching band contest.

Just a normal marching band contest; they weren’t glorifying Hitler or Ayn Rand or anything like that. Just some kids walking around in patterns on a football field to badly arranged music.

Which I thought was weird, because — well, my reaction was weird. I picked at it for a while, discovered a scar, rediscovered some long-unfinished business, and ultimately the following email exchange happened:

Hello, [name unimportant] -

For some reason, you popped into my thoughts today. Our paths crossed at Crockett in ‘72. I was the first freshman admitted to your Varsity Band there, on the recommendation of [junior high band director]. I was also the first freshman kicked out of the Varsity Band there. Went on to a different high school, a teacher who taught music, and a satisfyingly successful career, both as a musician and as an audio engineer. Didn’t have to step 8-to-5 even once during that career.

I know that you’ve won an impressive number of awards in the meantime.

Are you pleased with your career as a “music” educator, Professor?

Cheerio,

r

The reply:

Randy -

I am satisfied with the many whom I have positively
impacted, and deeply regret that you are not among
them.

Best wishes for continued success.

And mine:

I’d definitely say that you positively impacted my life; it just was not a positive experience at the time. You taught me the dangers of getting into personality clashes with people who have absolute power; you taught me the folly of becoming an unwilling mechanism in someone else’s craft, and you illustrated the state of arts education in this country to me, early in my career.

All of these realizations have served me well, and I thank you. I mean that sincerely.

Best wishes,

Randy

Oddly, I genuinely meant that sincerely; that’s an absolutely true statement. But others were not so strong; I know of at least five talented people who gave up music entirely after being crushed under the heel of that “educator.” One of those, a brilliant and funny and easygoing brass player, drank himself to death by the age of thirty. Who can say “why?”, I know, but sometimes little things mean a lot, later on. He certainly didn’t have a lot of charity for his high school band director later in life.

That “teacher” went on to be the director of a music department at a world-class university, and was well known worldwide for her marching band. No doubt, she has a satisfying wall of awards and accolades in her home. But, sorry, she is culpable for the metaphorical trail of dead that she left behind, too.

This little exchange was not any kind of victory for me; it was a spur of the moment thing. I didn’t accomplish anything by making an elder well-decorated career education administrator feel bad about herself; I certainly don’t feel any sense of vindication. I am not necessarily proud of the exchange. But I am not unhappy that I instigated it; Sic semper evello mortem Tyrannus.

In the end, it just needed to be said. My son is that age now, and I am trying to navigate him through the industrial stamping-press that we call public education in this country. I am watching him as he gets mangled by the machinery, and it makes me angry. And I don’t have the answers that I should.

He’ll be strong enough, too. But no one should have to be.

Maybe, in the end, it’s like the Verve said: “It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence.”

Just channel-surfed past the Travel Channel; “Now we Return To The World’s Best Mexican Resorts!”

Not to nitpick, but I am inclined to doubt that one of the World’s Best Mexican Resorts is going to be in Sri Lanka… How about “Mexico’s best Mexican resorts,” n’est pas?

(Looking forward to the “World’s Best Audio Engineer Picket Fences On Grover Avenue In Austin Texas!” episode…)

“I love creative dry spells, because it means I am subconsciously preparing to write something. I relax, do things, see friends, have dinners. It’s like being pregnant: one day, pop.”

– Steve Martin