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RIP Amy Winehouse

July 25, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

It’s very rare that my wife turns me on to music. She only likes a handful of acts, and tends to listen to them repeatedly. But she did me a great favor when she slipped me some Amy Winehouse a few years ago. Normally, I’m suspicious of Brits trying to pull off American jazz and soul, the same way I’m suspicious of Koreans making Texas BBQ and the French making rap music. Even if they love the idiom and aren’t just exploiting it, that sometimes leads them to make fawning imitations rather than something wholly original.

Not so, Ms. Winehouse, a chanteuse of such sensitivity that it often seemed to border of emotional contortion, a woman who innovated around notes the way great painters played with lines, bending notes as if they belonged inside the trombones and trumpets she was playing off. I dismiss much of the visual style that goes along with popular music, though I must also admit that Winehouse etched a great image for herself–a Goth/punk Mary Poppins with a Cockney voice to match. But it was that voice that rightly catapulted her into the Pantheon. There are a lot of people who put Billie Holiday’s vocal inflections into modern arrangements–think of Macy Gray or Madeleine Peyroux (who masterfully sings Bob Dylan as if he’d been writing for Holiday the whole time). But I think it’s trickier to do against girl group horns and hip-hop beats. If I had to compare instruments, I’d say Holiday’s was more like a clarinet, Winehouse’s more like a bassoon–reedy, rougher, but in her masterful approach, just as vulnerable with a great emotional range that could couch very salty punk rock language amid strings and girl group bombast and come up with something completely different.

I heard a really wrong-headed and simplistic assessment on Facebook Saturday shortly after I heard about Winehouse’s tragic but not remotely surprising death: “Not as good as Janis.” Thus goes the luckless reasoning of the sports fan who wanders into music. A quick reminder, Amy Winehouse wasn’t competing in a Round Robin (“Who was the most fucked up female drug addict soul singer? Mary Hart’s got the results tonight.”) She wasn’t engaging in a fantasy boxing match. (“I’ll bet Janis Joplin could kick Amy Winehouse’s ass,” say the nerds.) As long as we’re going to be obnoxious, I’ll remind the critic that Janis Joplin often tripped into the hysteria range. Amy Winehouse, a more subtle singer, was mostly a fuck up in her private life.

It’s a bit hackneyed to say that great artists are people of great sensitivity, and I don’t like the suggestion that the great ones are all fuck ups or that they have to be. The idea that drugs necessarily play a part in great art is one of those hard-to-die pervasive beliefs most mythologized among those with the least amount of talent and imagination. You need only look at Zappa and Woody Allen and Wayne Coyne and several others to notice that drug free artists are not only sometimes more imaginative but also more prolific. It’s not enough to be greatly sensitive or greatly imaginative but also masterful enough to employ those qualities to your advantage. The need to self-medicate is largely innocuous to these traits if not detrimental (a few people have pointed out already that Winehouse’s drug problems increased as her output decreased over the last few years). If you believe, as David Bowie once pointed out, that the true definition of imagination is the ability to “see the affinities of things to illuminate a subject,” then you would think drugs are a good way to open up new ways of thinking, but would then also help you quickly fall into a rut if you stayed with them. If you’ve ever known an addict (and I’ve known a few) you probably know how a lot of them are prone to ritual and superstition and repetitive cycles of behavior. This could as easily lead you to artistic retread and make your art as problematic as it would be if you were merely unimaginative.

So now I’ll sound like grumpy old man: Every time I go to the store, I’m bombarded with images of the no-talents who now make up our pantheon, most of them reality TV stars. It makes me sick that someone not only genuinely talented, but also truly imaginative, innovative and bold (something that could describe almost no American Idol contestant) had to go so soon and leave us adrift in a world of pandering hacks. Winehouse’s reputation is going to grow as more people figure out how good she was. Of course, there is probably a horrible romanticism that’s going to sprout after her very unglamorous death, as there was with all the members of the 27 Club. But hopefully we can all look through it and see genius for what it is and addiction for what it is. Not necessarily must the twain meet.

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Things To Ponder After the Casey Anthony Acquittal

July 8, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

After young Florida mom Casey Anthony was acquitted for the murder of her child, Americans are asking: What have we learned?

–*Whenever you’re going to borrow a shovel, always delegate that task if there might be a dead infant in your life.

–*A young mom has important choices to make in life, starting with whether she should use chloroform or ether.

–*The idea of closure is a hoax propagated by the media, the Bible and Nancy Grace, when we ought to know that real closure is never possible in a world of irreversibility at the quantum mechanical level.

–*A lynch mob, we ought to remember, doesn’t deserve any justice. If real reasonable doubt belayed the execution of a person, we ought to see a bit of sunshine in that because it means emotions didn’t drive our justice system.

–*Emotions drive our justice system.

–*The guy in “12 Angry Men” was probably way more guilty than Casey Anthony, and yet we cheered when he was let off the hook. Maybe you should go back and watch 12 Angry Men again.

–*Perhaps if you put as much energy into the cases of innocent blacks as you do seemingly guilty whites, the world would be a better place.

–*Most people believe that Casey Anthony still has to answer to her maker someday. Make no mistake, that is a comforting thought only to the deluded person believing it.

–*We got Osama bin Laden, woo hoo!

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“The Blue Mom”

July 6, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

I promised this song a few weeks ago, but never really mentioned it when it was posted: I’ve put up a new piece, an instrumental called “The Blue Mom.” Don’t ask me what the title means. It is what it is, and can be nothing else. I wrote this after getting a very brief man crush on some ’60s guitar heroes and dared try what amounts to an extended solo. Dear reader, I will never be a guitar master, but sometimes I hope a nice melody will get me where I want to go when my defiant and heedless fingers will not.

Again, if you don’t like it, fear not. You’ve got some 33 other ER Salo Deguierre songs to listen to on this page, most of which do not require fleet-fingered guitar (nor suffer from lack of it).

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Happy Fourth of July

July 4, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

I just wanted to wish everybody a Happy Fourth of July. My newborn son arrived home from the ICU a week and a half ago, and I haven’t had much time to post, especially given the thoughtful, meticulous and manifestly obsessive/compulsive way I draft these epistles to you, my dear readers.

But just because I haven’t written much down on the subject of my son’s arrival doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. So I’ll just describe it in one word: It’s the aleph. It feels like life has started again. It’s magical, tiring, infuriating and frightening being a dad. Every day I worry that I’ll do something stupid and accidentally kill him, and then get my strength back when I see that he is indeed alive and breathing and happy. I’m also in love in many ways I never thought I could be. Now I know why people feel compelled to look at pictures of their children–even if the children are standing right next to them. Now I know what it’s like to feel like you love someone so much it hurts. Even when he is vomiting and peeing all over you.

There’s a beautiful line at the end of “Bright Lights, Big City” (a book that has been called overrated so often that everybody has seriously underrated it) in which the protagonist, having suffered a life of bohemian dissolution, realizes he’s going to have to learn to live all over again. I think of being a dad the same way. There are lessons and ideas and things passed on to me by my parents that I took for granted, that have become so ingrained you forgot they were important. Now I have to deconstruct myself and rebuild and share what I know, making sure not to skip the important parts. I’ll have to teach my boy how to live in a moral universe and somehow re-attack the paradoxes and dilemmas and ironies that made the journey frustrating, distressing and sometimes heart-breaking. I’ll have to tell him how to love completely, and then at the same time, someday, be able to let him go.

The journey begins.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

My Son

June 18, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

Yes, it’s official. I am a Daddy! My son Xander was born a couple of days ago. He is, like his mother, a bit impatient, and he came some four weeks early. My wife and I have been by his side at the hospital watching his little lungs improve over the last 48 hours as he sits hooked up to monitors in a Giraffe incubator with a breathing mask attached to his face, surrounded by other tiny babies in ventilators and blue light bili lamps. We are in agony not being able to hold him, but we know that he’s not fully developed yet and we’re learning to live for another week watching him through Plexiglas and occasionally holding his little hand. His favorite new activity is ripping the mask off and kicking and screaming, and so Stephanie and I are confident that her genes have won out.

I am humbled, witless, stupid with joy, just plain stupid and greatly empowered after seeing my son arrive in the world. I’ll write more later, but wanted to share my absolute joy at the miracle of life with all of you.

Posted in Family | Tagged | 2 Comments »

Classical Gas

June 2, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

Dear Long-Suffering Beauty is Imperfection reader,

You probably noticed that my blogging has slacked off as of late. I apologize for this and guess I owe you an explanation. As regular readers know, I’m going to be a father soon, and impending parenthood has forced me to realign my priorities somewhat. When my son is born, I plan to give him most of my time as the work-at-home parent. This means a novel that I’ve been working on for a really long time (we’re talking years) will likely hit the circular file forever if I don’t get it done now. This has been a pet project of mine that has gotten me through years of unemployment, lonely bachelorhood, career disappointments and generic spiritual malaise. It’s largely been my substitute for religion, this novel, and I’m getting close to saying goodbye to it forever. By the time my son is born, I will only have time to send query letters out, and I’d like to have a complete work to share with agents.

Thus I’ve only had time for a few strident posts like the one I did on taxes yesterday. To my surprise, that blog hit a nerve, and I’ve gotten quite a few hits on it. It’s surprising because all I could think when I read it back to myself the first time was, “Gee, I’m getting increasingly humorless and strident, aren’t I?” Not good for a blog that used to be all funny all the time. In fact, I let the article sit for a week for that reason. But my dear readers all gave me the great vote of confidence I needed, spurred on by my close friend Chris Barton,  author of “Can I See Your I.D., True Stories of False Identities” (in your local independent book stores now!) Thank you Chris and everybody who liked the article, strident or otherwise!

Best to follow up with something harmless. I’ve got other things sitting idle on my desk as well, including quite a few pieces of music. So today I thought I’d share one with you.

Here is a piece with a pretense of being classical. Don’t worry, Salo Deguierre fans, I have not gone soft on you. This is actually just the opening of an album I’ve partially written called “The Mechanical Bean,” a satire about a family that obtains super powers after genetically modified food pollen from a corporate farm blows onto their land. The idea of this not-yet-finished album is to mix moods and genres, hence my first foray into “classical.”  I’ve got another piece I hope to share in a couple of days when I get it properly compressed.  That one’s more bluesy.

In the meantime, I hope you don’t think this blows, and if you do, then please enjoy re-reading my article on taxes!

Posted in Music | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Tax Behavior

June 1, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

Here’s a nice post by Megan McArdle at the Atlantic that will largely be disregarded because it’s a spit in the eye to a lot of people. Not only to supply-siders and free-market fundamentalist crazies, prolific as they are like mushrooms after the rain, but to people who consider themselves reasonable when they suggest that, of course, tax increases harm the economy. But what if that weren’t true?

“Ugh,” say those ultra-generous and altruistic supply siders, who only care for the common good and fairness. “How horribly mean and counterintuitive you are, Eric. ” This is where conservatives with fraternal patronizing smiles pull out the only mathematical graph many of them ever bothered to learn–the Laffer curve, which for them is more important than the Pythagoras theorem, the concept of pi or even 2+2 =4. The Laffer curve says that the lower taxes are, the greater the incentives for people to produce, which actually means more revenue. This graph has proved to be increasingly meaningless in the real world. It’s true in a very cramped perspective: Arthur Laffer, its namesake, originally explained that you can raise taxes and raise revenue, but only up to a certain point. That’s the “curve” part. After you reach this “inflection point,” for lack of a better phrase, then supposedly you kill incentive. But in the real world, tax cuts have never raised revenue and economists don’t take the idea seriously. The idea as practiced in the military-industrial idiom offered by the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations has proved a horrible failure as those two “conservatives” ran up massive deficits, one of which had to be cleaned up by “tax and spend liberal” Bill Clinton. And yet the supply-siders, possessed of a faith one can only call religious, still hang onto their silly idea that high taxes applied in the U.S., even those at their highest in the New Deal years, should naturally stop people from working.

I won’t step on Ms. McArdle’s glory  and repeat her argument as if it were my own, but the gist is this: at a certain point, rich people have enough that they don’t have a greater incentive to work, and they might trade the money by, let’s say, monetizing their leisure time. In other words–I’ve got mine, time to relax. In other words, greater tax breaks for them at some point equals less revenue. Meanwhile, there is another simple incentive–the one to hoard. Congressional Budget Office notes, in fact, that sometimes tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy do not lead to reinvestment or hiring but simply to keeping it all in house.

McArdle has a great way of making difficult subjects simple, but in this case I hope to one-up her (or one-down her, as it were), because this argument I think can be made even simpler than that. I believe Republicans, financial geniuses that they are, can’t do the simplest calculation: that one half and zero are not equal.

The argument of the Mad Laffers, as I can’t resist calling them, is that the rich will stop working if they have had their taxes increased to some larger number. Why would they work, after all, if they got nothing? A very linear argument for a very linear crowd. The financial advisors I interview might call this an example of the tax tail wagging the dog: You wouldn’t ignore a good investment, say, just because you’re worried about the taxes on it. Nor would you stop working. In the worst case scenarios in the past, the very rich were getting 10% of an obscenely large number–which in this country today could be something like 450 times what their lowest paid countrymen are getting. Just to keep you guys up to date, 10% is never zero unless it’s a percentage of zero. If the government asked for a part of your bar of gold, would you turn down the bar of gold completely if the choice were nothing?

The argument seems counterintuitive, of course, to people who believe Ronald Reagan invented economics (and who have no real idea of how our last 30 years of “prosperity” really came about). These people can conveniently ignore the fact that our post-World War II economic boom, and the inventions of tons of gadgets and the building of oodles of homes and the construction of myriad space craft, took off in an atmosphere of progressive tax rates that reached 90% for the wealthiest Americans. Now why would the rich work under those conditions? Were they just stupid? Could it be, as Karl Smith, McArdle’s muse for this article, says, that people making less because of taxes actually work harder to make up for it (and goose the economy forward)? Or was it simply that the rich were still getting paid PLENTY? Is it that something is still better than nothing? The incentive, after all, is not gone, nor is the ability to live well.

Instead, what really disappeared with 90% tax rates was the incentive of people to hoard money and join a rare set of American aristocrats in a country that’s not supposed to have an aristocracy. Of course, following Reagan’s tax cuts of the 1980s, as Paul Krugman and lots of other people have noted, the economy has continued to ebb and flow just as it has before, only now we have fewer people getting a hold of the wealth. The disparity in riches has reached outrageous proportions. The wealthy are holding back more of their money and wages are stagnating for everybody else, especially those making less than the median household income–$50,000 a year or so.

Republicans, convulsed with fear as they usually are that their calculations don’t work out, lash out at Obama with exceedingly silly charts such as this one, which does the unthinkably stupid thing of blaming Obama for not directly controlling world commodity prices, which would, if they thought through it, turn him into Hugo Chavez.

And yet there is a broad dislike of taxes among all Americans, not just red staters. A feeling that it’s the feds who are taking more of your money and your soul and keeping you from the American dream. As far as I know, they haven’t invented an economics term for this fallacy, but I’ll try one from psychology: transference. It’s hard to blame the company that hired you for keeping your wages low or even to blame them for sending your work overseas. The real problem is that your pie is shrinking, but instead you want to blame the entity that’s cutting off a piece of it, even if the portion hasn’t changed in 25 years. Meanwhile, the good that entity is doing for you (keeping your roads built; giving you a good, free education; giving your parents Medicare; giving you unemployment benefits; and pumping R&D money into your economy) largely goes unnoticed.

Another fallacy regular people believe is that Reagan cut taxes and that led directly to making them wealthier. That wealth, however, is largely a phantom euphoria of having credit cards and asset inflation (from your house and stocks, which is mainly rising because foreign money is coming into your economy to take advantage of a cheap dollar). And of course, your feelings of wealth also stem from a completely fallacious belief that a pension and a life of ease on 12% laddered bonds await you as they did for your Greatest Generation Dad.

All bullshit. Even a lot of conservatives would laugh today if you asked them how a single employed household member could support a spouse and children and two cars and a mortgage. The answer: he can’t. It’s a pipe dream of the post war era.

Liberals, of course, have a lot of dippy ideas about the economy. If some pinko told me that it’s common sense wealth should be redistributed, I’d ask him if he’s aware how vanishingly small that wealth would become in transit. (Believe me, after seeing “Capitalism: A Love Story,” I’d like to beat up on some liberals for a while–maybe later.) But why punish hippies for their financial ignorance, when they are usually the first to admit it? Conservatives are far worse, because they are the ones who, according to their own advertisements, are supposed to know better. But the more I get to know finance as a reporter, the more I feel that conservatism, per se, doesn’t necessarily know more about money. Conservatives just love money a lot more and would hold onto it at the detriment of everything else.

Here’s an argument: a person will work for a living. He will work whether that money is a little less or a little more, he’s not going to stop. A living is a living, even if it means living with taxes.

Posted in Business and the Economy | Leave a Comment »

Closure Part 2: Wrong To Rejoice?

May 5, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The 9/11 Tribute In Light

I guess I spoke too soon. People did eventually fill the streets in Lower Manhattan to cheer and wave flags Sunday night, wearing face paint and shouting “America No. 1!” But I was not wrong about the long, long process of closure. In fact, it seems like there’s a battle for the soul of American justice and how we pursue it.

As people cheered, there was a competing sentiment about Osama bin Laden’s death (perhaps even mine in my previous post) suggesting that this closure should be po-faced, grim and puritanical, that it should be a new opportunity to mourn, not a photo op moment to celebrate more bloodshed.

It’s pretty silly, after all, to say America is great because some Navy SEALs shot a supposedly unarmed guy in the head (I say, “supposedly” because the story corrections and equivocations continue to flow from the White House like an eruption of chocolate party fondue that never quite hardens. This ought be a clue to conspiracy theorists if many of them weren’t so beastly dumb: Even attempted transparency can be contradictory. Now that the White House has decided not to show the photos, you can prepare for years of headache-inducing “Osama’s Alive” stories.)

Almost immediately after Bin Laden went to heaven to claim his virgins, letters and comments and tweets and posts appeared condemning Americans’ jubilation, quoting and misquoting Martin Luther King’s admonitions about hating enemies. Many people on this New York Times’ mood meter summed up the general feeling of the minority: “I refuse to celebrate the death of any human being.” “I take no joy in yet another killing.” “The death of one person should not be celebrated, even to save thousands.” One of my favorite comments: “Anyone who thinks death or physical pain is a valid form of retribution for any crime is an absolutist.” A rhetoric lesson for the author: Anyone who starts a sentence with, “Anyone who …” is also an absolutist. Some Bertrand Russell might be in order for this gal.

You might think that last sentence was meant to be cute. It’s not. I, too, feel something less than glory in bin Laden’s death. But many of these critics are displaying an absolutism all their own.

The perception that people are in the streets cheering only at the blood is A SUBJECTIVE ONE that says a lot more about those who point it out than the people it aims to criticize. The statement willfully ignores other things Bin Laden’s death might mean to people, emotions of relief and hope. Certainly there were people at the WTC site shouting, “Let the dogs eat him.” Weren’t there? Well, yes, there is some of that as there would naturally be, and no, it’s not healthy. But I also heard a lot of other defensible sentiments more along the lines of “We got him. Or, “We did it,” and simply, “I’m proud of my country.” Maybe, “America No. 1.” It’s always likely that jingoism is going to be the order of a day like Sunday’s. To be fair, though, it’s kind of hard to put euphoria into words (just as it was hard to put into words the complicated reasons we were attacked in the first place–by a former ally, no less, with grudges that cut both ways).

But for those of you who only see a celebration of death Roman gladiator style, let me give it a try: This ain’t a sporting event, and we aren’t crazed football fans looking for a high. This was, arguably, our deliverance from ten years of a questionable moral universe in which a religious cult leader willing to murder thousands of people–secretaries, waiters, delivery drivers, security guards, airplane passengers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc.–was going to go unpunished mainly for political reasons: First, because our scurrilous U.S. president at the time decided to settle an unrelated score elsewhere, and second because the murderer was safe in the bosom of a chaotic nuclear power. As I said in my first post on this subject, many people celebrating in the streets on Sunday night were children when 9/11 happened, and many of them likely grew up disillusioned that the defining moment of their young lives was going to have an ambiguous, nihilistic conclusion. “Life isn’t fair,” is a hard thing to tell children, as is telling them that they could die instantly and violently for political reasons and the killers would go free. It’s an outlook that could easily lead to despair and erode many people’s sense of morality or accountability. Do you agree, moralists? Do you believe it’s OK to be happy that we’re freed from that reality, at least for the time being? Being happy, are we allowed to cheer? Being allowed to cheer, are we cheering in a way that’s chaste enough to clear the hurdle of your sanctimony?

But that’s the complicated argument. The real hypocrisy of the “humanists” this week is an obvious point they miss: Some of us are cheering because a couple of wars might come to an end, not because a guy got shot in the face. This is something fairly easy to see, unless you’re really, really inclined not to (or if your critical sword only cuts one way). This war, lest you forget, was in a lot of people’s minds about bringing Bin Laden to justice. His death doesn’t mean we’re leaving Afghanistan next week, of course, but the main symbol of our struggle, bin Laden, who ought to embody our entire casus belli, has been removed from the scene. That fact augurs peace, not to mention justice. It suggests deliverance from the nightmare that was the 2000s and the wars that defined the decade. Why is it not allowed for a moral person to celebrate that?

Yet self-proclaimed humanists choose not to look at it that way. Why? What’s the bias? Must they assume those of us who feel a sense of relief and satisfaction right now are just dancing in blood because we have violent ape natures and a nationalistic chauvinism and no reflection and no morality and life for us is like a particularly gruesome version of Battlefield 3?

My thought is that it’s a bit of a tip off, an advertisement of the critics’ conflicted and unhappy relationship with their country. How many of them, I dare ask, used 9/11 as a moment mainly to rip into U.S. foreign policy, as if suggesting that a cult religious figure kicked out of Saudi Arabia had right to avenge El Salvadorans, and in the confusion temporarily left their “humanism” at the door that day? Evidently, there were enough of them that they managed to turn Marxist Brit Christopher Hitchens into a U.S. right winger. I guess people really do have the power.

I, too, disliked a lot of American foreign policy both before and after 9/11 and believe America has committed crimes for which we ought to spend a few years in an international court. But that doesn’t blind me to the clear immorality of Bin Laden’s mass murder or to what his removal means: the possible deliverance from a violent person and a violent past, the need to live in the past with the twin specters of the World Trade Center and the need for more bloodshed.

Merry Christmas, humanists. War is over. Geddit?

Next: Why is it not OK to be happy that a mass murderer is not out mass murdering anymore? That’s kind of a perverse thing to ask for, isn’t it? Why should deliverance from that reality not be worth celebrating? Why is it not right to say, “Rot in hell, Osama!” to give comfort to yourself or others? Was it not OK for Jews to celebrate Hitler’s passing? Would you deny them that, or only deny it for yourself and your own countrymen? You might say all death diminishes us, even Hitler’s, that hatred demeans you, even if the mass murderer wouldn’t show you–or thousands of others–the same sympathy. To want to be better than your murderer is a fine goal. But warning: there is also perhaps a lack of self-regard in it. You wouldn’t force that morality on a rape victim, say, if she said she was glad her attacker had been killed. To say that one person must be allowed to live, to hate and sow new violence based on his medieval religious outlook is a form of extremism, too. Beware your own extremism if you’re going to denounce it in others.

Did bin Laden deserve a trial? Another good question. Remember that a trial of Osama bin Laden would have become a trial of his ideas. And that ought to lead you to this question: Do all ideas deserve trial? Do Hitler’s ideas deserve trial? (Ohhh! That comparison again. More on that later.) Does the madness of a murdering extremist refusing to participate in society (ours and his own) demand society’s channels of due process? Maybe. Would it be more important than emotional closure? Maybe. Is it realistic? No. The reasons for why that is will be debated forever and never answered to anybody’s satisfaction. The violence of one sometimes can’t be made square with the peace of the many. I’m not generally for the death penalty, but as Groucho Marx said, “for him I’ll make an exception.” Does that make me a sell-out to my own values or a person with a bit of depth perception?

OK, the Hitler argument. Isn’t it facile and self-serving to compare Bin Laden and Hitler? Let’s get quickly to the argument that festers underneath this like a hard-to-kill staph infection: Did America deserve 9/11 in the first place? Many people who smartly wheel in horror at mindless patriotism somehow turn dumb really quickly when it comes to mindless knee-jerk anti-patriotism, which they ought to realize is just as bad, especially if they are not willing to support their country doing something inherently good, such as protecting its citizens against a religious maniac. If you insist that every American citizen is guilty, regardless of party or philosophy or details on the ground, for what has happened in Nicaragua, East Timor, Angola, Iraq, etc.,  so guilty he or she, every one, is worthy of dying in a hijacking at the hands of an Islamic religious fundamentalist with an agenda specific to his own idea of God, your outlook can’t survive what we’d call humanism or rationality. It’s such a hopeless argument, I feel dumb even bringing it up. And yet every once in a while … I see that post or hear that argument: “You might not know this about 9/11, but America’s done some awful things…” So goes the critical insight of the new Mother Jones subscriber.

Yes, it’s better to take the moral high ground and not hate or take satisfaction in violence, because it doesn’t do your enemies any harm really, and it doesn’t do you any good either, to say nothing of your humanity. And yet, as much as I hate to say it, I think a fair burden of proof falls back on some of the “humanists” this week. Are you seeing hate in the streets because it’s there or sometimes because maybe you hate a little too? Why should I not feel relief and joy at being delivered from the past? Why do I have to explain myself to you?

Posted in Global Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Closure: Bin Laden a Has-Bin

May 2, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

The 9/11 Tribute In Light

I was about to turn off my computer late Sunday night after resting my eyeballs on some mindless TV when all of a sudden, a quick scan of the New York Times shook my peace and ruined my planned sleep. Bin Laden dead. Bin Laden killed. He’s bin terminated. He’s a has Bin. He’s bin there done that.

The Upper East Side, the sleepiest part of the city that never sleeps, had already gone to bed. Two hours after the announcement, I’m still looking out the window on my beautiful city and its always changing landscape and seeing no gathering of people. The local ABC affiliate immediately ran out to Times Square after the announcement and the reporter gushed that it was filling up with people. Behind her, trash blew around in the deserted sidewalks. I highly recommend this clip to the producers of “The Soup” and perhaps Columbia Journalism School graduates who want to learn how to avoid embarrassing themselves.

But put aside the levity and let’s attack the meat of the matter:  The man who slaughtered almost 3000 innocent Americans 10 years ago is dead. The man who was willing to exploit American power for his own ends in Afghanistan until he decided he’d rather murder American civilians to impress psychopathic Islamic fundamentalists–is gone. The man who evaded capture for 10 years and told us what his real aim was–the restoration of the caliphate along the lines of the repressive Taliban, is obliterated.

I am one of those people who has never believed in the concept of closure, whether it’s political, spiritual or even romantic. People love closure the way they like crack–they promise this time is always the last time, and yet they always seem to want more of it after it’s over. So when my wife said to me tonight, as we watched the updates on ABC, that this entire thing felt anticlimactic, I knew exactly what she meant.

It feels that way for several reasons. One, the war is not over. Al Qaeda, what started out as an agreement over a table a couple of decades ago among a few rogue military leaders, one of whose rules was to have good manners, has metastasized into several networks with different leaders all vying for prestige and leadership over a restive culture of America-haters. Two, the relatively bloodless dispatch of Bin Laden in a raid on his compound in Pakistan reminds us of something we have all forgotten: He was just a man. He was not a God. He was not a country. He was not even much of an army. One of the biggest tragedies of 9/11 is that it showed us how a relatively small group of people can cause so much harm. We were attacked by a club, a mafia even, and the justice meted out was never going to compensate emotionally for the pain inflicted. It’s for similar reasons that we can’t accept the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald may have acted alone: How can one puny, limited, brutish person cause so many hopeful people so much grief? It’s for denial of that reality that America inevitably overreacted to 9/11 by invading not one but two countries, one of which had nothing to do with the attack.

The next reason it feels anticlimactic is that we will never get back the people we loved that day. As President Obama said, children are still missing fathers, husbands missing wives. Friends missing friends. The death of one man can’t make up for the pain of that either.

And finally, the reason bin Laden’s death feels anticlimactic is that we waited so horribly long for the day to arrive. For ten years, we had to live with the idea that the man who openly admitted to plotting the destruction of the World Trade Center was indeed sitting somewhere exactly where we imagined him–not in a cave fighting hand to hand but in a comfortable compound in Pakistan, in the nurturing bosom of friendly Pakistanis–drawing ten more years of breath. That was 10 years for many of us to get comfortable with some uncomfortable ideas–that life isn’t fair. That a mass murderer might indeed go unpunished. When George Bush announced at one point that bin Laden had been marginalized and was no longer a big deal, you might have read it the same way I did: He was practically promising that this account would not be reckoned. Now the mass murderer is indeed gone, but the uncomfortable idea remains. What if there had been no tip off last August? What if bin Laden had lived to a ripe old age? It was entirely possible. There were lots of Nazis, after all, who died peaceful deaths after spreading out to the four corners.

I think about this as I look at many of the faces gathering in Washington and Lower Manhattan on television. Many of them are young adults. A lot of them seem to have even been children in 2001. For them, 9/11 was likely the single most important political and philosophical experience of their lives, the event that forged their characters and their morality. It would be much harder for them to live the last 10 years with the same existential unease–that an evildoer would prevail. It doesn’t matter whether they lived in New York City and watched the World Trade Center smash into the ground (as I did) or whether they are willing to put the events in some sort of historical context (which I try to do, as painful as it can sometimes be). For them, bin Laden simply couldn’t be walking about freely in a moral universe. He had to go. I felt that way at one time. I was 31 on Sept. 11 in 2001 and the attack drove me to a despair I’d rather not describe. I had a hard time sleeping for a long time and the sound of planes gave me the creeps. For a few months, many New Yorkers lived with a grim, almost mordant pessimism that the end was near. But my hatred for bin Laden and my desire to see his lifeless corpse dragged through the streets behind a chariot yielded after a while. That kind of hatred did me no good.

But anticlimax or not, we’re still fighting a couple of wars (though Iraq is winding down). And probably the most important question raised by Osama bin Laden’s death is now this: Why are we over there? Osama bin Laden was for so long the answer to that question that you needed little other. But now the palimpsest has been erased. The central premise of our wars overseas has been removed. Though we might still be fighting networks that mean to harm America, we’ve now reached the point in which we remain present only to fight those who fight against our presence. The idea of Afghanistan slipping back into a Taliban-ruled violent, repressive theocracy is repugnant, but so are the accidental killings of civilians and the razing of towns by American forces and the funneling of American money into the pockets of Taliban leaders through public works projects. Now is the time to save face and ask if it’s time to leave. Barack Obama can have his own “Mission Accomplished” moment if he likes. It’s no sin to bug out if what we’re doing in Afghanistan is counterproductive and we got what we came for.

But I’ll sign off with this thought–I’m proud of my country tonight. As I was about to drag my sorry ass to bed, part of me wanted to throw on my clothes and go downtown at 2 in the morning to cheer with my fellow New Yorkers the removal of Osama bin Laden and his hatred from this planet. There is a narrow, joyless view that everything America does it does Energizer Bunny-like for money and oil. Sometimes, it happens, I’m sure. But a more expansive view might allow that Americans have altruism in them and that there is a goodness in us that is worth protecting. Naive perhaps, sometimes, about their own role in the world. But definitely capable of good.

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Cable TV And The Killing of the King

April 29, 2011 by Eric Rasmussen

My wife and I finally switched off our cable for good the other day. I could use this column to reflect on all the fun that I had with the now antiquated concept of cable TV–the place where I discovered music videos, Tony Soprano, meerkats, Wolf Blitzer’s beard, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s breasts, Suze Orman’s teeth and, back in the early days, practically non-stop viewing of the Kris Kristofferson’s film Convoy.

And yet I feel like what I’m saying goodbye to now ought not to be called cable but simply “The Kardashian Box.” The fundamental problem with cable is the illusion of choice: It was supposed to give us thousands of channels, and perhaps offer us a peek into different languages, religions, histories, cultures, entire libraries of film (old movies, new movies, lost movies and perhaps even the 90% of independent movies that don’t get distributors). That’s not even to mention the sports. Instead, cable has become a brand-building machine–an entablature of pretty faced caryatids with fake boobs who sell us and perfumes and young adult books and predatory lending scams and those death traps called “cars.” The Kardashian Box has organized into a few repeated themes–nostalgia (TV Land), masturbation (Cinemax), death drive (the CBS weekend cop shows, and I guess the increasingly aggressive nightly news programs, too) and fetish object (QVC and Snooki). Because the audience is hard to corral otherwise, my one-time favorite movie channels are now showing cheap reality TV and reruns to keep their overhead down and still showing more ads than broadcast TV. Why in the hell am I paying for this?

And there is probably no better time to get rid of cable than now, when America has seemingly become enthralled by the tax-revenue-consuming capers of a monarchy we rejected 235 years ago. “Could Kate Middleton be the new Diana?” ask the journalists as they run down the street chasing Prince William’s bride and miss the irony. If you have ever seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “The Spider’s Strategem,” perhaps you have a sick feeling like I do when Jane Seymour and her blinding dentition come onscreen with more Royal news. The Bertolucci movie was about a man who was trying to escape his family’s history and for his efforts found himself increasingly enmeshed in it. So, too, do I shudder at watching the press build up another couple of people they can later tear down. The viewers, of course, aren’t stupid. At this point, they likely know how the dirty game works. They’ve torn down Britney, Lindsay, Miley and Barney (OK, maybe not Barney). A lot of them have given it up this game and stopped watching. Others, however, still need the comfort of seeing the accident happen over and over. Fetish. Death drive. Deliverance. Stasis. Digestion. Bathroom break.

Perhaps nothing is as telling in the royal wedding phenomenon as the fascination with clothing, traditions,  supporting characters. The identity of the dressmaker is shrouded in secrecy until we find an appropriate moment to invade his or her privacy. We are schooled in the finer points of heraldry and learn the difference between a lozenge and an escutcheon, a party per pale and a party per saltire and other details of the bridal panoply. For good measure we invite the ghostly visitation of one departed player whose spectral, Pre-Raphaelite vacuousness haunts us as certainly as Hamlet’s father: Yes, SHE is back. We are asked if the couple’s first female child will be called Diana. We are shown split screen comparisons of old bride and new. A news story breaks that William will use his mother’s sapphire engagement ring. Kate’s Libelula dress is compared with Diana’s Emanuel dress. The old video is shown. … And then, as James Frazer predicted in The Golden Bough, the “Killing of the King” process begins anew as new bride supplants old in a form of psychological ritual murder (OK, sorry, just riffing there).

In a way, life has come full circle, because the Royals were reality TV before there was such a thing. Henry VIII’s exploits were fodder for townie gossip and scandal sheets long before we had a Kardashian Box. Both then and now, the viewers know the game and even may know the rules are contrived, just as they know Jersey Shore‘s Snooki is likely flirting with invisible cameramen. It’s just that the viewers don’t care. I once met a Lancashire woman who was something of a political firebrand and came to America to announce that U.S. citizens owe all Native Americans reparations. I felt hard-pressed to argue, but then in an unguarded moment, she admitted she had loved the royals and wanted to be Princess Di when she was younger. Who was I to be self-righteous at that moment and say, “Your monarchy lives off the fat of the poor and is an abomination to the Rights of Man, Republican idealism, human equality and basic morality. Also, they can’t dance.”

I, too, love reading English history and marvel as chips off the block of William the Conqueror globe trot and take gap years in Chile and need to do little else to stand as testament to the island’s storied past. It’s just that you can love Roman history without needing the Empire to come back. Still, forget the argument about whether the royals are important, whether they should be taxed, or whether their political function makes them easily replaceable with a rubber stamp from Staples. The more important question is: What is the emotional need they fulfill, even in Americans who are supposed to be decathected from such nonsense? Do men in Britain still feel an aching affection for routinzed charisma? Do women still secretly love the idea of being chattel princesses? Or is it more simple? I feel that if we looked into ourselves deeply enough, we’d discover that it’s the same reason we need cable (and pay so much for both): We are existentially sick. We no longer want to live in our bodies. We have checked out. Watching Kate Middleton wed in a story book tale allows us to project ourselves inside of her (take the meaning there however you want), and abscond from our own here and now and the responsibility to our reality. (FYI: Another way to abscond from reality is to believe in heaven.)

Being in our own here and now, after all, is too hard. We are most of us at the mercy of adrenal glands who do our thinking for us. Our bodies are tired from feeling things, freeing ourselves from them mentally is our constant burden. To be in your body all the time requires constant thought and maintenance. Exercising. Working. A debate. Running errands. Motorcross. Skydiving. Even blogging. To take ownership of your own being is a task many of us would readily shrink from. Some literary critics even contend that it’s the struggle where mythology originates–the contrived stories we tell each other and which we use to arrange reality are nothing more than shadows on the wall projected by our own conflicted glands. Thus the royals are are not just Williams and Harrys. They are also our Dicks.

I leave you with that thought as you enjoy the royal wedding. I hear that Sophie Cranston is a fab designer!

Where does that leave me? … Just bought a new Apple TV. So juicy … so delicious … here comes my descent into existential oblivion.

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