For those not consigned to the generational hell that is Baby Boomerdom, on this day 50 years ago a small plane carrying three important rock stars of their time – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson – crashed in a snow storm.

All three men died, as did the pilot, a 21 year old with, evidently, about 30 minutes of flying experience.

There has been much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the years due to this event. Most of this has been over Holly, considered still one of the greatest talents rock music has ever produced and an enormously influential figure among what became “the next big thing” in rock – the British Invasion that began just over five years later with The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Over a decade after that snowy February rock and roll tragedy, singer/songwriter Don McLean had a gigantic hit with his song “American Pie” which prominently referenced the crash – and singled out Holly with the following lines:”I can’t remember if I cried/When I read about his widowed bride/But something touched me deep inside/The Day the Music Died….”

But What Does It Mean?

A lot of ink is being spilled today about this anniversary (here’s a typical example) – and about whether February 3, 1959, truly is “the day the music died” – or, as the above article argues, one of those reminders of the fragility of human life, something even “the power of rock” cannot triumph over. Reference September 18, 1970, April 5, 1994, or, most famously, December 8, 1980. (Apologies in advance if the date of death of your favorite rock star is not listed here.)

But there’s another question I haven’t noticed anyone (including me) ask about this or any other, measured by “pre-media culture” standards, sad anniversary.

Why do we care?

As I have heard no less a personage than Michael Caine observe, “Nobody really goes away anymore.” Caine was referencing Turner Classic Movies, a channel that feeds viewers a constant diet of films starring long dead movie stars, but his observation is easily applied to VH-1 Classic’s treatment of  dead rock stars, the History Channel’s treatment of dead politicians, or any of our myriad of outlets that constantly give us that experience that McLuhan famously (if politically incorrectly) termed “Orientalizing” – that sense that neither JFK, John Lennon, or John Wayne has gone anywhere – we constantly live with them even if it is “virtual.”

So why should I be sad? I have almost the entire Buddy Holly catalog that I can listen to at will. Buddy plays for me whenever I want him to. I have both Valens’ major tunes and somewhere I even have “Chantilly Lace.” (Hello, Baby….”)

So it’s all good…right?

Loss of Affect

This sounds shallow and superficial. But we live in a shallow and superficial culture, don’t we? A culture of 24 hour news that fails to make us informed, responsible citizens. A culture where we’re expected to choose our Buddy Hollys via a glorified game show.

So I sit here listening to Buddy as I write this and his last hit comes on:

“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

The irony for both Buddy and our culture is not lost on me.

Virtual V. Reality

Buddy Holly died at 22; J.P. Richardson at 28; Richie Valens at (almost unbelievably) 17.

Their combined life spans, 67 years, are less than the average American life span. Bob Dylan is currently 67. Paul McCartney will be 67 in June.

With all the recordings and films we have of Holly, Valens, and the Bopper, whatever virtual eternal youth and joy those technological renderings offer us, what we don’t have are all those years of productivity, artistry, life they and we might have had.

When people die, they die. They’re gone. We don’t have them anymore. We miss them. We’ve suffered a loss.

And sometimes, on a day like this, we remember our loss – and it makes us sad.

That’s the reality. Nothing virtual about it.

As a Democratic woman, I breathed a big sigh of relief last night. Hillary did what she needed to do.

She stepped up with class and grace when the moment demanded it. Plenty of Democrats were nervous as they entered the Pepsi Center last night, and a camera cut to Mchelle Obama’s face as her husband’s one-time rival started speaking indicated she might have been among them. But Clinton quickly allayed doubts with an unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama as “my candidate,” which elicited cheers amid a sea of bobbing signs proclaiming “Obama” and “Unity.”

It was a poignant occasion for Hillary supporters, and even women like me who have been on board with Obama since the beginning. After a video tribute set to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” Chelsea introduced her mom as her hero and referenced the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that her mother had broken open for women. I found myself getting a little choked up listening to this smart, savvy, dogged trailblazer of a woman.

Of course her campaign wasn’t only about the nation – Hillary’s nothing if she isn’t ambitious – but she was pretty damned convincing about how crucial an Obama victory is to the nation’s collective wellbeing. There’s no question in my mind that that’s more important to her than her own aspirations, and if it isn’t to her remaining legions of resentful backers, then they are betraying all that her candidacy stood for, and not least their own self-interest.

The key point in Clinton’s speech was a set of questions she posed to her supporters: “I want you to ask yourselves, were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?”

To answer that it was just for Hillary – despite all she symbolizes for women – is a breathtakingly selfish response. To vote for John McCain, or to not vote at all, is beyond juvenile and stupid, it’s a breach of integrity. And I write not, as Susan Faludi opined in the New York Times on Monday, as one of the “daughters of a feminist generation that seems pleased to proclaim themselves so ‘beyond gender’ that they don’t need a female president.”

I’d love to see a female president. I have my reasons for thinking that Hillary might not have been our best hope at this particular moment, when a brand-new generation of voters, female and otherwise, are yearning for a thoroughly fresh direction.

Faludi, who harks back to the history of women’s suffrage and its ultimately disappointing political returns, continues that the daughters of that feminist generation, like me, “will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?”

Where I take issue with here is that women have no coalescing cause without Hillary. Our coalescing cause, as Democrats, is justice, fairness and equality – for all people. Barack Obama is also committed to those principles. If our nominee had been Hillary and not him, would we no longer have a rallying point to fight racism, because the black candidate was the runner-up?

It’s essential for Democrats to recognize that that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us. And to do that, we don’t abandon our desire and our quest to see a woman in the White House. It will happen. If we can put a black man there, we can also put a woman there. Obama’s candidacy is, for me — as a female voter — reason to hope, not reason to despair.

I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty. He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.

— Rush Limbaugh on presidential candidate Barack Obama; Mr. Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Premiere Radio Networks and Clear Channel Radio, which will pay him more than $400 million; Mr. Limbaugh once referred to Sen Obama and actor Halle Berry as “Halfrican American” on the Jan. 24, 2007, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show; July 6.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

— former senator Phil Gramm, one of presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic advisers, likening the nation’s economic problems to a “mental recession“; July 10.

The baby boomers — that prominent group of middle-agers whose massive numbers invite never-ending dissection and speculation — have once again spoken. What they have said is, ” Waaaaaahhh.”

— lede from a Washington Post story by Monica Hesse reporting a Pew Research Center survey measuring “the pessimism, dissatisfaction and general curmudgeonliness of 2,413 adults in various generations”; July 10.

Why should I help you embarrass me?

— response of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski, whose story revealed that Rep. Rangel has four rent-controlled apartments “on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers … [He uses] uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence”; July 11.

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. We must begin a phased redeployment of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict.

— from a press release on the campaign Web site of presidential candidate Barack Obama; March 20, 2007.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also working through this challenging period. They play an important role in our housing markets today and need to continue to play an important role in the future. Their regulator has made clear that they are adequately capitalized.

— Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee; Times reporters Stephen Labaton and Charles Duhigg reported he and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “sought to reassure the markets about the financial health of the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies as their stock prices plunged to their lowest level in 17 years on fears that they could face the possibility of a government bailout”; July 11.

… a significant reduction … an ambitious goal … we made progress, significant progress, toward a comprehensive approach … hope Congress funds that effort … help developing nations afford … become good stewards … We’re also taking steps to promote … we can become less dependent … we’re going to have to spend some money … to trade freely … the best way to help alleviate poverty … we had good discussions … We also made some progress on alleviating sickness … committed … pledged to provide … to help deal with … stepped forward to support … committed with partner nations … the United States is involved … working to expand our efforts … we had a comprehensive agenda … accountability is an important part of fulfilling our obligations … agreed to release detailed reports … will help ensure … we agreed on steps to deal with … increasing access … we agreed to take new steps … we accomplished a lot.

— from remarks by President Bush following the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

As we listened to the leaders around the room there was universal praise for the major economies process. There was universal recognition that having these countries in the room trying to find common ground was an enormous contribution to the U.N. negotiations. A declaration was adopted, and Jim will go into that. But the most significant take-away from this meeting, in addition to the very substantive leaders’ declaration, was the desire of all leaders to continue this process. And indeed, there was agreement to hold another meeting of the leaders of the major economies at next year’s summit in Italy. The meeting concluded not only with that decision, but with specific recognition for the contributions of President Bush, and a round of applause for the President for initiating this process.

— Dan Price, assistant to the president for international economic affairs and deputy national security advisor, during a White House press briefing on a two-hour-long meeting of the leaders of the major economies, also known as G8, in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

[O]ur dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilize political will to combat global climate change.

— from a declaration by the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States on energy security and climate change at the G8 meeting in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

Costello: Well, then, who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Who!
Costello: The guy playing —
Abbott: Who is on first!
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.

— from “Who’s on first” routine by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, reportedly translated into nearly 30 languages.

The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit. It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.

— Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing several hundred plaintiffs suing Verizon and other companies, after the Senate voted 69 to 28 to approve what Times reporter Eric Lichtblau called “the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years”: July 10.

I don’t think shortening the track is what’s going to help stop these events, because 99.9 percent of the time we’re not having a tough time stopping the cars. It’s just when we get in trouble and you can’t stop them. Another 320 feet isn’t going to do it, in my opinion.

— Johnny West, crew chief for Funny Car drag race Jack Beckman, on the decision to decrease the distance Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters race from a quarter mile — 1,320 feet — to 1,000 feet because of the 300-plus mph speeds the vehicles attain; this follows the death of drag racer Scott Kalitta on June 22; July 10.

The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order — In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die — must also die.

— Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Berkeley, Calif., in October 1966.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

— from a New York Times story by Peter Applebome, headlined “Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come”; July 10.

Actor Pam Anderson performing a split while wearing 4-inch heels
during an appearance on Australia’s “Big Brother” program; July 10.

We are not going to discuss the steps we have taken or may take to prevent a recurrence.

— New York Times spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis, refusing to discuss — even as workers began removal — alteration of the Times‘ building facade whose design has allowed climbers and protesters to ascend the building; July 10.

In the Congo, women develop quickly, both physically and emotionally, due to the substantial responsibility society places on them from early childhood. In Kinshasa, the vast majority of teenagers are sexually active with men that are substantially older.

— from the argument for leniency presented by ex-diplomat Gons G. Nachman, 42, convicted of having sex with teenage girls in the Congo and Brazil and taping the encounters; prosecutor Ron Walutes countered in court papers, “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Brazil have the same inherent value as children in the United States”; the judge delayed sentencing so that Mr. Nachman could be examined by a forensic psychologist; July 10.

photo credits:

• Rush Limbaugh: Nigel Parry, The New York Times
• Leaders of major developed nations at G8 summit in Japan: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Associated Press
• Scott Kalitta’s souped-up Toyota Solara on fire at 300 mph: Associated Press
• Stokely Carmichael: BlackPast.org
• Wiffle ball field in Greenwich, Conn.: Rob Bennett, The New York Times
• Pamela Anderson: Reuters

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.

— excerpt from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; Sept. 5, 1995.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

— Will Rogers

Sen. Specter: In our initial conversation, you talked about the stability and humility in the law. Would you agree with those articulations of the principles of stare decisis, as you had contemplated them, as you said you looked for stability in the law?

Judge Roberts: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. I would point out that the principle goes back even farther than Cardozo and Frankfurter. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, said that, To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents. So, even that far back, the founders appreciated the role of precedent in promoting evenhandedness, predictability, stability, adherence of integrity in the judicial process.

— exchange between Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John Roberts during confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the United States; Sept. 13, 2005.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there; we ourselves affirmed it in 1980.

— from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in throwing out a D.C. ordinance against handguns, ruled that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun; Miller was a 1939 case that directly addressed the Second Amendment; June 26; emphasis added.

You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock.’

— an exasperated Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., as members of the House Judiciary Committee questioned David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, on definitions of torture and executive authority; June 27.

Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.

— Kamyar Enshayan, a professor and director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and a Cedar Falls, Iowa, City Council member, explaining that recent Midwest flooding has more to do with human nature than nature; June 19.

The congressman’s appropriations projects are carefully vetted to ensure they are consistent with the needs and interests of his constituency, and there is no connection between his fundraising efforts and his work in Congress.

— Vincent Perez, spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, explaining that no connection exists between a $4 million earmark for Digital Fusion and $18,000 in campaign contributions from Digital Fusion executives; The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reports that “[m]ore than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts”; June 13.

This legislation will bring unprecedented transparency to lobbyists’ activities. On the first day of the 110th Congress, we passed a landmark rules package, and this is another important step to strengthen accountability and public trust.

.
— from a July 31, 2007, press release on the Senate Web site of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, in which he announced his vote supporting the final House-Senate agreement on the Honest Leadership, Open Government Act of 2007, an act that, according to his release, would “[s]trengthen Senate Ethics Rules, similar to already enacted House Reforms: Includes a variety of changes to Senate rules, including a ban on gift and travel by lobbyists and full disclosure of earmarks.” [emphasis added]

This is a con job. It’s a diversion. These guys ought to be given a Mandrake the Magician permanent title, for pretending that this has anything to do with solving gas prices today.

— Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, after adjourning a hearing in which, according to a story by David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times, “he was ambushed by Republicans with an amendment to allow drilling on the outer continental shelf off both coasts”; June 27.

A two-page “survival guide” issued in 2007 to interns in Rep. Don Young’s (R–AK) office lists nine transportation lobbyists as “The A Team” and informs interns that “[t]hese people can talk to whomever they want” when phoning the office. Phone calls from other Members of Congress, however, must be directed to two Young staffers, according to the memorandum. The document is titled “The 2111″, a reference to Rep. Young’s Rayburn Office Number.

— from a report on the Web site of Taxpayers for Common Sense; June 18.

When you see a 15 percent yearly increase, that is an epidemic that is out of control. And yet we don’t see a response that recognizes it is an epidemic out of control.

— Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, in a Washington Post story by David Brown reporting that “[t]he number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men” according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; June 27.

Years ago, when there was an accident or an injury, neighbors would usually come and help each other. Nowadays, there are fewer family farms and fewer children on those farms, and it’s just not as easy for neighbors to help one another anymore.

— UPS pilot Bill Gross, whose non-profit group Farm Rescue helps farmers who have suffered a major illness, injury or natural disaster; June 27.

President Bush has set forth a clear and detailed plan for making our public schools excellent, so that every child in this country can have access to a quality education. He has included in that plan not only the objectives, but the support and the flexibility that states and school districts and schools and parents need in order to reach the objective.

President Bush has assumed this as his mission — the mission that no child will be left behind. He’s made it clear that he sees the urgency involved in making our classrooms safer and equipping every child with reading and math skills, and closing the inexcusable achievement gap that exists among students attending public schools across this country — primarily among minority students and economically disadvantaged students.

— from remarks by Dr. Roderick Paige during his swearing-in as Secretary of Education; Jan. 21, 2001.

Q: Has the President ever considered an executive order that would ban torture specifically? There’s a letter out now from a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of State, including Secretary of State George Shultz, with whom the President was a couple of weeks ago, and former Defense Secretaries and military officials saying that there should be an executive order with the force of law saying that torture is unacceptable.

MS. PERINO: Well, we certainly respect the views of George Shultz. And one thing I would point to is that we have a set of laws that have been passed during this administration, and an executive order, in fact. There was the Detainee Treatment Act, there was the Military Commissions Act, and then there was the President’s executive order interpreting Common Article 3.

So we feel like we have taken steps to address that issue. And I would also point out that we face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before. We face an enemy that respects no borders, respects no uniforms, and certainly has no regard for civilians, especially innocent women and children and the elderly. So we take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 25.

I am shocked. I think all this is a provocation. If I get punished, I’ll quit training and do something else.

— Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Stoitsov, who took two gold medals at last year’s world championships, after he and 10 teammates — seven men and three women — tested positive for the banned anabolic substance methandienon; Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team from the Olympics; June 27.

[W]e are making broad and dramatic progress against corporate fraud in America. We’re defending our free enterprise system against corruption and crime. And we’re beginning a new era of corporate integrity. Corporate responsibility is essential to America. It’s essential to shareholders. It is essential to investors.

— President Bush, unveiling a Corporate Fraud Task Force at the White House-sponsored Corporate Fraud Conference on Sept. 26, 2002.

That was a complete victory for the defendants. The judicial system has become more conservative and more sensitive to economic rights and business interests. This is one of many cases that has restricted the scope of investor recovery.

— Georgetown University law professor Donald C. Langevoort, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta that “strictly limited the ability of investors who lost money through corporate fraud to sue other businesses that may have helped facilitate the crime”; Jan. 16.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.” In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

— from a review of the Milan Fashion Week by Guy Trebay of The New York Times; June 26.

I have a million children.

— Kermit Love, the creator of many “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who died this week at 91; June 26.

photo credits:

• George Carlin: HBO promotional photo via Associated Press
• Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama at “unity” rally: Jim Bourg, Reuters

• Rep. Silvestre Reyes: Rep. Reyes’ Senate Web site
• male model at Milan Fashion Week: Matteo Bazzi, EPA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Exxon Mobil is acting like a dinosaur now, not adopting to a changing environment.

— Stephen Viederman, a New York shareholder, after “Exxon Mobil’s chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, defeated a shareholder effort … to take away one of his jobs at an annual meeting punctuated by a debate of the company’s policy toward renewable energy and global warming”; May 28.

Despite significant challenges in the U.S. market, we continue to reshape our business for long-term success. This attrition program gives us an opportunity to restructure our U.S. work force through the entry-level wage and benefit structure for new hourly employees.

— from a statement by Troy A. Clarke, the president of G.M.’s North American operations, announcing that “19,000 hourly workers — a quarter of a unionized work force that already has been drastically pared down — have accepted buyouts“; up to 16,000 of these $28-an-hour workers may be replaced by “entry-level” non-assembly workers making $14 an hour; May 30; emphasis added.

The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal. Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not — Not our political opponents. Certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would — who would have us believe, my friends, who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact — when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children inside their walls.

— presidential candidate John McCain, from his address at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost. As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses that can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.

— Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International, in a statement accompanying a report that “singled out for criticism China, the United States, and Russia and accused the European Union of complicity in the rendition of terrorism suspects”; May 28.

We cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance. We must — We must not surrender — We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real controls over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family’s health shall never depend on the size of a family’s wealth.

— Sen. Ted Kennedy, addressing the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

The economy has been taken hostage by people that took some very bad decisions. The answer is to pay as little ransom as possible to the least ill-deserving people we can find.

— Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chair of the House Financial Services Committee, whose “housing rescue plan, which has passed the House and is being massaged by the Senate Banking Committee, would let the Federal Housing Administration refinance distressed borrowers into government-guaranteed loans worth up to $300 billion”; May 19.

What we want to achieve in the health system is a higher individual responsibility, making the consumers more responsible for what they consume.

— Peter Pazitny, executive director and one of the founding partners at the Health Policy Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and formerly the principal adviser to the minister of health, defending the government’s decision to charge modest health-care fees; other Central European nations may follow suit; May 27.

We also said we shared the pain of the Chinese people and earthquake victims in Sichuan.

— a spokesman for Dior in Paris, who asked not to be identified because of company policy, on a Dior announcement that it would stop using actor Sharon Stone in its advertising in China after Ms. Stone’s comment that recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet; May 29.

[T]he public enemy of all mankind.

— description of Sharon Stone in an editorial by Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency; May 29.

Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino, commenting on former press secretary Scott McClellan’s claims, about to be published in a book, that President Bush engaged in “self-deception,” and committed a “serious strategic blunder” in invading Iraq and decided to “to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed”; May 28; emphasis added.

This does not sound like Scott; it really doesn’t.

— former White House aide Karl Rove on Scott McClellan’s new book; May 29; emphasis added.

You’ve heard the way Scott briefed — it doesn’t sound like him.

It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies. But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.

— biologist Uriel de la Torre on news that the “worldwide boom in commodities … is shifting attention to guano, an organic fertilizer once found in abundance on this island and more than 20 others off the coast of Peru”; “Guano in Peru sells for about $250 a ton while fetching $500 a ton when exported to France, Israel and the United States”; May 30.

We demand that the government severely punish the killers who caused the collapse of the school building. Please, everyone sign the petition so we can find out the truth.

— Liu Lifu, a quarry worker in in Dujiangyan, China, after he grabbed the microphone at an informal gathering of parents at Juyuan Middle School and began calling for justice; his 15-year-old daughter, Liu Li, was killed along with her entire class during a biology lesson in the earthquake in Sichuan Province; May 28.

If I could just get a warm room. I could take it from there.

— Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Hurricane Katrina; “a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency”; May 28.

People don’t seem to realize that political committees are big businesses that are raising significant sums of money without traditional accounting and business oversight. In politics, no one wants to be a bean counter.

— Jan Baran, an election expert at the law firm Wiley Rein in Washington, in a story about a $1 million forensic audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee following the disclosure that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing and presumed stolen by its treasurer; May 27.

One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.

— Dr. Parker Pearson, a British archeologist, on research that says Stonehenge was used as a cemetery from 3,000 B. C. well into its zenith around 2,500 B.C. with up to 240 people buried there; May 29.

This is the message of the Beatles, the Dylans of the world. [Ron Paul’s message of freedom and peace is] an ancient message — it inspired people in the 60s and 70s. I want to bring back that era of magic.

— Marc Scibilia, a 21-year-old songwriter from Buffalo, N.Y., who posted a video of his Ron Paul-themed song, “Hope Anthem,” on YouTube, and this summer will lead a 28-city “Freedom Tour” featuring other musicians; May 27.

Rwanda’s economy has risen up from the genocide and prospered greatly on the backs of our women. Bringing women out of the home and fields has been essential to our rebuilding. In that process, Rwanda has changed forever. … We are becoming a nation that understands that there are huge financial benefits to equality.

— Agnes Matilda Kalibata, minister of state in charge of agriculture in Rwanda, on the revival of the nation’s economy since the genocide of 14 years ago, when 800,000 people were killed in three months; May 16.

After two days I woke up. Birds were eating my dead children. This was too much for me. I wanted to be killed. … I felt as if I was dead, too. I did not want to go on.

— Jeanette Nyirabaganwa, 39, a minority Tutsi in Rwanda; she is now “employing eight laborers, she is growing three times as much coffee as her father and husband did. They sold their poorer-quality beans for local consumption. Her finer grade is largely for export, roasted overseas and sold in coffee shops and specialty stores in cities including London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans”; May 16.

No one likes to hear that people are using their mobile phone records. It gives one the sense that Big Brother can watch you and hear you.

— Lutz Hachmeister, director of the Institute for Media Policy in Berlin, “after an admission by Deutsche Telekom that it had surreptitiously tracked thousands of phone calls to identify the source of leaks to the news media about its internal affairs”; May 27.

Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable handouts and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it. I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. [But] I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions.

— former president of Cuba Fidel Castro, 81, in a column he wrote for Cuban newspapers; May 26.

I really want to know how my guests view their lives, their jobs, their friends. Are they content? What are their dreams?

— Natascha Kampusch, who spent 8 1/2 years trapped in an underground cell in the home of Austrian kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil, on her new career as a talk-show host; May 29.

I created this site as a thank you, to you, for sharing the journey with me and to invite you to continue to explore what the future will bring.

— a message from actor Tom Cruise on his newly created Web site celebrating the 25th anniversary of the film “Risky Business”; May 29.

Really, a T-shirt with your name on it? Is it so you remember or we never forget? Maybe it should be spelled backwards because we suspect that every time she looks in the mirror there’s a split second when she wonders, “Wait, who’s Sirap?”

— Elizabeth Spiridakis in her “Very” fashion column for The New York Times; May 22.

photo credits:
• Sharon Stone: The Guardian
• Patrick Pugh and Clara Gomez outside their tent at a homeless encampment under a highway overpass in New Orleans: Lee Celano, The New York Times
• Stonehenge: Ken Geiger, National Geographic
• Paris Hilton: Beretta/Sims/Karius/RexUSA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 epic WeekEnd closes with the following end title:

END OF CINEMA

Leonard Lopate of WNYC has a terrific interview with Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker and author of a new book on the cinema icon – Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc Godard. You can hear the interview below.

As Lopate archly notes and Brody diplomatically tries to refute, for the vast majority of cinema aficionados, Godard’s end title was prophetic.

After WeekEnd, Godard chose politics over film making – and while he’s occasionally been provocative and interesting, he’s never been relevant in the way he was during his artistic peak in the 1960’s.

When Godard burst upon world cinema in 1959 with his breakthrough film À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), his appearance completed the emergence of the triumvirate of France’s Nouvelle Vague in film making: Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and Godard. While both Chabrol and Truffaut went on to have careers that eventually led them into French mainstream cinema (and earned Godard’s scorn as a result even as they raised the quality of that cinema considerably), Godard stayed his radical course throughout his career, delivering masterpiece after masterpiece throughout the 1960’s – A Woman is a Woman, Contempt, Les Carabiniers, Masculin/Feminin, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, and, to me, his magnum opus, WeekEnd. It is an amazing, varied and impressive series of films. If he had stopped making films after WeekEnd, his place in the pantheon of great film makers would be secure.

But he didn’t.

Instead Godard, once a political conservative who gradually became enamored of Marxism, became a radical Maoist. And that political conversion, as it came to dominate his film making aesthetic, had a deleterious effect on Godard’s work. One might liken Godard’s imposing on himself the same sort of repression and restriction of his artistic impulses in service of a political imperative to Stalin’s meddling with the work of Sergei Eisenstein. In Eisenstein’s case, that the Russian director could produce great cinema such as Battleship Potemkin, October, and Ivan IV (Part 1) is a testament to his ability to use his genius to overcome the double thinking required in a political climate like Stalinist Russia. That Godard chose to impose such a mental burden on himself, while it may speak positively to his commitment to his political ideals, it speaks also to an artistic misstep from which Jean Luc Cinema Godard, as he once proclaimed himself, was never to recover.

Godard’s work has always carried political messages - Masculin/Feminin explores the awkwardness of men and women trying to fit both political and cultural ideals; Les Carabiniers is an indictment of war’s pointlessness and false promises to its soldiers; WeekEnd is Godard’s brilliant evisceration of a society that even in 1967 seemed to him to be amusing itself to death with consumerism and bourgeois conventionality. But after his avowed conversion to Maoism, his film making – which had always been more liberated – and liberating – from cinematic convention than perhaps any other major director, became more and more polemic in the worst sort of way: the cinematic art was too often subordinated to political diatribe. Even the best works after his post-sixties peak – Tout Va Bien, Je Vous Salue, Marie (Hail Mary) – have been discussed more for their political statements than for their cinematic innovations.

Artists always face danger when they allow any element – even the most sincere political conviction – to circumscribe or change their creative visions. Godard’s commitment to Maoism led him down a path that took him from the most vital, provocative, admirable film maker in the cinema to the isolated, embittered old man he seems to be now. As Godard proved in his work from the sixties, an artist can make powerful political statements while at the same time maintaining his art as his first priority. It is only when one’s art is (consciously or unconsciously) subsumed by other passions that the art suffers.

Godard’s most recent work is elegiac in content – JLG/JLG Autoportrait de Décembre and Histoire(s) du Cinéma both represent Godard’s best efforts to understand and perhaps explain what happened to cinema – and to Jean Luc Cinema Godard – over the last half of the 20th century. Even as thoughtful and insightful as these works are, one must wonder if Godard is haunted by his own words:

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

(CAUTION: Contains naughty words)

The cleavage of men into actors and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. — Jim Morrison, from “The Lords and the New Creatures”

I’ve been a fan of Warren Zevon since his live album “Stand in the Fire” came out in 1981. But I’m nowhere as big a fan now as I used to be, and it’s got nothing to do with the music, everything to do with the musician.

At its best, “Stand in the Fire” races well past the redline on the rock ’n’ roll tachometer. Zevon’s best-known tunes — especially “Excitable Boy” – take on a fun-filled ferocity that makes the studio versions of those songs seem as safe as milk (to borrow a phrase from Captain Beefheart).

I listen to “Stand in the Fire” when I’m working out. I have 400 or so high-octane songs on an iPod playlist to motivate me during 45 minutes of the treadmill drudgery of stride-stride-stride-stride. Yesterday, though, when those Zevon tracks came up, I realized I don’t like him nearly as much as I used to.

This is because of a book I read last year, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon,” written by Zevon’s ex-wife, Crystal. I’ll spare the details; let’s just say Zevon, who died not quite five years ago, comes across as a narcissistic, drugging-and-drinking, womanizing lout.

So how does that make his life different from, say, episodes in the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton or any one of countless rock stars? Answer: It doesn’t — except that Hendrix, Clapton and Jagger are from a different world, while Zevon was a guy I could relate to. Example: In the live version of “Werewolves of London,” in the last verse, Zevon howls that the werewolf, whose hair is perfect and was last seen drinking a Perrier at Trader Vic’s, is “looking for James Taylor!” Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing James Taylor being torn to shreds. Personally, I’d like to get up on a stage and roar and rave like Zevon does on that album. I’d like to be a hairy-handed gent and run amok in Kent. But those notions became less appealing when I learned Zevon’s inner excitable boy was a creep.

I guess I’m punishing the hero, although Zevon is, in a literal sense, no more a hero to me than, say, Tennyson’s Ulysses. In any case, once we peer behind the façade and see heroes are flawed, their luster fades. These days, when I read “Ulysses” and the hero proclaims, “Death closes all: but something ere the end,/Some work of noble note, may yet be done,/Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods,” I’m afraid somebody’s going to discover a manuscript that has Ulysses next saying, “On second thought, fuck this shit. Let’s go get a cask of mead and chase some wenches.”

When it comes to heroes, the less I know about them, the better. I have been interested in the art of Salvador Dali ever since I first saw an image of his “Persistence of Memory” in a college art class, and as recently as last week, I was thinking about how brilliant his melting watches are, given the title of the work. But the closer one examines Dali’s writing and painting, the more repulsive he and his work become. George Orwell considered this in a 1944 essay called “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali.” The springboard for Orwell’s essay is a then-recently published Dali autobiography. Orwell observes, “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats,” and then he details the fantastic excesses that Dali probably fictitiously details in his Life. Orwell concludes:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even — since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

It’s worth noting that Orwell writing about Dali in 1944 would have been exactly like writing about Madonna at her self-promoting peak — say, the publication of her coffee-table photo book Sex in 1992. Both Dali and Madonna mastered the art of capturing the media’s attention; Dali, after all, was the first artist to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

It’s beyond my ability to offer social critiques on Orwell’s level, but sociology wasn’t troubling me on the treadmill yesterday. Rather, I was questioning my need for heroes, and I recalled an essay Lester Bangs wrote about Lou Reed in 1975, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves.” An excerpt:

The central heroic myth of the sixties was the burnout. Live fast, be bad, get messy, die young. More than just “hope I die before I get old,” it was a whole cool stalk we had down or tried to get. Partially it has to do with the absolute nonexistence of real, objective, straight-arrow, head-held-high, noble, achieving heroes. Myself, I always wanted to emulate the most self-destructive bastard I could see, as long as he moved with some sense of style. Thus Lou Reed. Getting off vicariously on various forms of deviant experience somehow compensated for the emptiness of our own drearily “normal” lives. It’s like you never want to see the reality; it’s too clammy watching someone else shoot up junk and turn blue. It ain’t like listening to the records.

Re-reading Bangs made me feel like Wally Cleaver. I don’t want to believe in Bangs’ “absolute nonexistence” of “noble, achieving heroes” because I need the inspiration and motivation they provide. I have a list of writing heroes, for example: Annie Dillard. Anna Quindlen (her essays, not her books). Dan Barry. Charles P. Pierce. Their writing moves me, inspires me. As Saul Bellow once observed, “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” I never will write as well as they do, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to jump over the bar they raise.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to learn something unseemly about any of them. I want — no, need, their personal lives to be — well, ordinary, as ordinary as my own life is, so that as I chase the dream to become a better writer, I don’t feel as if they’ve been given any undue head start because they lead extraordinary lives. And should one of them turn out to be a reprobate, it would be doubly disappointing because he or she would have succeeded despite shortcomings and because somehow, I would be less able to relate to that person.

On the other hand, my expectations may be unfair. More Bangs:

An old song was ricocheting through my head, some faint memory of a time in 1968 when I told my nephew about this kid who was hero-worshipping me because I’d turned him on to Velvet Underground albums, speed, etc. “I don’t wanna be anybody’s fuckin’ hero,” I snarled at the time. My nephew made up a two-line song on the spot: Don’t wanna be a hero/Just wanna be a zero.

All of this actually may point to a flaw in my character, not theirs. Should I have to rely on someone else’s example to inspire? Shouldn’t I be able to reach deep within myself to find the creative spark plug? Why should I need Tennyson or Zevon to fire me up? I don’t know.

All of this leads to Morrison’s observation about how we punish heroes. In our media-saturated age, celebrities fall into the “heroes” category — and look how we treat them. Stalkers sniff the trails of celebrity scents, looking for warts or worse, all of which are duly splashed on magazine covers and television shows for people with ears that hear what they want to hear, eyes that see what they want to see — for people to draw glee from, to gloat at. “All of those rich, beautiful people,” we think, “and they are no happier than we are.” But I am better off not knowing.

If it was the Marlins, you wouldn’t see people in Florida getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was the Yankees — well, their fans aren’t real. They just buy the hat.

— Helio Rocha, a restaurant manager who stayed up all night in anticipation of watching the Red Sox’ Major League Baseball opener (played in Toyko) at 5:30 a.m. in famed Boston watering hole Cask ’n’ Flagon; March 26.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

— from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Dealbook” column in The New York Times; March 25; emphasis added.

Largely due to the aging of the baby boomers and rising health care costs, the United States faces decades of red ink. … If the United States continues as it has, policymakers will eventually have to raise taxes or slash government services that U.S. citizens depend on and take for granted. … Over time, the U.S. government could be reduced to doing little more than mailing out Social Security checks to retirees and paying interest on the massive national debt.

— from a March 15 speech at Brown University by David M. Walker, who resigned as comptroller general of the United States earlier this month; emphasis added.

I’ve never seen a government be able to circumvent the business cycle in a capitalist economy, but at the same time, the government is going to pull out all the stops to minimize the instability. The grim reality is that recessions are a part of life. It’s like surgery. You don’t feel good as you get out of the operating room, but inevitably there’s a healing process and things get better.

— David A. Rosenberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch; March 14.

Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.

— Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, saying “scientific tussles” regarding the impacts of climate change can be distracting; March 25.

The next president of the United States seems sure to be more committed to environmental policy than the current president is, and a carbon tax is high on everyone’s list of options. Indeed, a carbon tax has been promoted almost as a panacea — just pop in the economic incentives and watch them work their magic. But unless steps are taken to lock the tax revenue away from policymakers and invest in substitutes, a carbon tax could lead to more revenue rather than to less pollution.

— Monica Prasad, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the author of “The Politics of Free Markets,” in a New York Times commentary; March 25.

Karima Tung, 12, one of three girls home-schooled by their mother, reading the Koran.

I don’t want the behavior. Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.

— Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose, Calif., one of many parents of many faiths “who … are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home; March 25.

The Speaker believes it would do great harm to the Democratic Party if superdelegates are perceived to overturn the will of the voters.

— Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeating the speaker’s position that “superdelegates should not ‘overturn the will of the voters’ in the face of criticism from top donors to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,” D-N.Y.; March 27.

As to our right to vote, and have that vote count, there can be no debate. The goal is simple: One person, one vote.

— Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on his intent to propose legislation that would create six rotating, regional primaries to select presidential candidates, while the Electoral College would be abolished by a constitutional amendment; March 27.

I had a very simple formula: If it affected the life of a U.S. citizen, you woke the president. At 3 o’clock in the morning, unless there is a nuclear holocaust coming, there is not much the president has to decide. What you are doing is starting to put into gear the response of the U.S. government on behalf of the president, not necessarily by the president.

— Kenneth M. Duberstein, President Reagan’s last chief of staff, noting that presidents rarely make snap decisions at 3 a.m.; March 16; emphasis added.

Mark Halperin of Time magazine in the cargo bay of an Obama bus recently in Ohio.

I’m not sure too much is lost. There used to be a self-defined cadre of campaign reporters. Now the news comes from everywhere — from bloggers, maybe some guy with a video camera. Anyone can generate news and everyone can generate news. What’s the advantage of being the 50th guy on the bus?

— S. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, arguing that the decision by major news organizations to cut back on “campaign bus” coverage of presidential candidates is long overdue; March 26.

In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.

— Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times after the Times “acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur”; March 27.

We landed a few hours before daybreak and as soon as I got off the helicopter my night vision broke, I was surrounded by the sound of artillery rounds, people screaming in Arabic, automatic weapons, and the terrain didn’t look anything like what we were briefed. I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half.

— a March 7, 2007, journal entry of Jerry Ryen King of Georgia about air-assault sniper mission in a known al-Qaida stronghold just north of Baghdad; he died in Iraq April 23, 2007, along with eight other soldiers after suicide bombers blew up two dump trucks outside a school building they were in; March 25.

People think I have to justify this war just because my son died in it. That’s not the case. I think we must secure that area of the world and make it stable, otherwise my grandson is going to be over there. … You have to do what you’re called to do. My son stood for the honor and the dignity that should have been given him in his death. I would never stop anyone from going, because down deep inside I know my son did the right thing.

— Peggy Buryj, whose son, Pfc. Jesse Buryj, died in Iraq on May 5, 2004; March 19.

Listen to the words of Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister: “Last year was the year of security,” he said. “This year is the year of reconstruction, it is the year of services, and it’s the year of combating corruption.” We’re going to help them meet those goals.

— from a speech by President Bush at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio; March 27.

This isn’t like World War II. There’s no VJ Day, no sailor kissing a girl when he comes home. This is somebody saying that trend lines indicate a sustainable level of violence. That’s not a great feeling.

— Army Capt. Derek Bennett of the 1st Armored Division, who entered Iraq in April 2003 on a 90-day deployment that military planners stretched to 15 months; March 19.

If you read the foreign media, the only message you can get is that China is very heavy-handed, and they are doing a lot of bad things in Tibet, and they are totally out of their minds. And they talk about the Dalai Lama as if he’s God.

— Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, claiming foreign media about Chinese actions in Tibet have been biased; March 25.

Q: On troop levels in Iraq, The New York Times is reporting that General Petraeus recommended to President Bush putting off any decisions on further troop reductions until about a month or two, perhaps after July. And they also say that it now appears likely any decision on major reduction of American troops for Iraq will be left to the next President. Do you take issue with that characterization?

MS. PERINO: Well, a couple of things. One, the President gave a speech Wednesday, March 19th, in which many headlines were similar to the ones that you read about today. So the President is in a process of getting briefed by his senior advisors, both those that are on the ground and here at the White House, at the Defense Department and at the State Department. So, across-the-board, the President is getting all of this input, taking it into account before he makes a decision. And those decisions aren’t going to be made public until he’s ready to make them public.

And I think it’s prudent for him to allow Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus to come back and provide information to Capitol Hill. He’ll continue to consult with Capitol Hill before he makes a decision on the way forward. But he’s made — he’s not been shy about saying that we will have to make sure that the gains that have been achieved over this past year not be erased by acting too quickly in bringing troops home. Remember, all of this is conditions-based. So from the very beginning, if I go back to January 2005, President Bush at that point thought that we would be able to start announcing troops coming home. That didn’t happen because of the Samarra mosque bombing and the violence that ensued. So then in late December 2006 and January 2007, the President made another decision based on conditions on the ground, and that was to send more troops in.

Nine months later, in September of 2007, the President makes yet another decision based on conditions on the ground, and that was that because of the success we’ve had some troops would be allowed to start coming home. And I would just point to you there’s a pattern here, that the President listens to the commanders on the ground and makes decisions based on that regard.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a March 25 White House press briefing [emphasis added].

CNN: Do you see yourself as an elder statesman now?
DAVIES: Aw, no. When I get up on stage I’m just another punk trying to make contact with the world. Yes, I’m older, but I’m not that much wiser. I still make the same mistakes I would have made years ago. … I know people look to me to have all the answers [as an elder statesman] but remember, I don’t have all the answers. Maybe that’s why I’m still doing it.

— interview exchange between CNN’s Todd Leopold and Kinks frontman Ray Davies; March 27; emphasis added.

Ever wanted your own floating estate? The perfect toy for those in the billionaires club, the newest design from Monaco based Wally Yachts is in a class of it’s own- the newly termed ‘gigayacht’. For roughly £100 million the lucky buyer will surpass the league of the mere megayacht to become the exclusive owner of the largest private vessel known to man. At 59ft across and 2,730 tons at half load, the aptly named WallyIsland will have everything the super-rich could ever dream of (a tennis court, pool and five accommodation decks including a main saloon, dining room, library, cinema, spa and fitness area) and even a growing garden with shrubbery and flower beds that will be fed by an irrigation system. With fuel tanks big enough to enable five years of cruising, and space for 40 crew and 24 guests, two 45ft motor yachts, two 27ft sailing yachts, two cars and water-toys including six jetskis, the design company expect it to fulfil the dream of someone who wants to “live comfortably on board fulltime, like on their own estate”.

— description of a Wally Yachts “gigayacht”; [emphasis added]

photo credits:
Muslim child: David Kadlubowski, The New York Times
Campaign bus: Damon Winter, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Neil Aspinall, friend of Paul, then George, then John, then Ringo, then The Beatles’ road manager and personal assistant, then chief executive for Apple Corps for more than 4 decades has died. He was 66.

But since I’m a storyteller, let me begin somewhere else:

My first encounter with George was behind the school’s air-raid shelters.This great mass of shaggy hair loomed up and an out-of-breath voice requested a quick drag of my Woodbine. It was one of the first cigarettes either of us had smoked. We spluttered our way through it bravely but gleefully. After that the three of us did lots of ridiculous things together (Aspinall, McCartney and Harrison). By the time we were ready to take the GCE exams we’d added John Lennon to our ‘Mad Lad’ gang. He was doing his first term at Liverpool College of Art which overlooks the Liverpool Institute playground and we all got together in a students coffee bar at lunchtime…. – Neil Aspinall in The Beatles’ Anthology DVD

I’ve long held a hypothesis that my musician and music writer friends argue with me about from time to time. I believe that the best bands form from childhood or school friends who discover in each other a deep love and understanding of music and who somehow galvanize around that love. That’s certainly true about The Beatles – and Steely Dan – and U2 – and Nirvana. You are brothers in music. This gives you some sort of synergistic power that you might never have had…and sometimes, as in the above cited cases, it makes you rich and famous….

(Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans)

There’s a corollary to my hypothesis. In the old days, when you formed a band, you had your brothers in music who were your fellow musicians, but you also had your friends outside the band. If or when the band got more serious, those in the latter group either became friends with your band mates and then took on roles as the band needed them to (roles ranging from roadie to business manager to understudy) or gradually drifted out of your orbit.

The relationships you had with these friends who followed you into the music were trust relationships based on loyalty and friendship built from childhood and only strengthened by what you and they did together. These were the guys who helped you carry your equipment – the guys who traveled and ate and drank with you. You loved the music – and they loved you and you loved them – because you made the music and they helped you to make it. And if you were smart and/or lucky, you remembered to tell them.

That’s a far cry from most of the relationships musicians have with record company executives, booking agents, and other figures in the “music business” as lovingly described by Hunter Thompson:

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

Only yesterday Paul McCartney was at Aspinall’s bedside. Trust me when I say that most musicians think about their business managers’ health rather differently than Paul’s demonstration of care suggests….

Neil Aspinall worked with his fellow “mad lads” who became music legends as only their friend could do.

That’s why Paul and Ringo grieve today.

So maybe Denny will allow me to revise my lede to reflect what musicians everywhere would want written about their own “Neils”:

Neil Aspinall, friend of Paul, George, John, and Ringo for more than 4 decades, has died. He was 66.

Let me begin by emphasizing how much I admire Nader and all he has done. As a consumer advocate myself, I probably would not have the career I do if it wasn’t for him. His work on everything from auto safety to the corporate takeover of modern politics should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to stand up for the little guy. I read his book, supported his presidency, and when compared to the stiff mannequin that was Al Gore in 2000 and the incipient stupidity of Dubya, I pulled the lever for him.

But this isn’t 2000. It’s a very different world, and Nader simply refuses to recognize that.

First there’s his age. At 73 (soon to be 74), Nader is even older than John McCain, a man for whom his age has become a vital consideration as to whether or not you can expect him to go the full eight years. If Nader were elected and served two terms, he’d be 81 by the time he left office. Given that the youthfulness of Barack Obama and the vitality he brings with him has so successfully captured the ever-elusive youth vote, what can Nader really bring to the table to appeal to them by comparison?

Second, there’s accomplishment. What has Nader really done in the intervening eight years since his first run, and the four years since his second run, which was even more of a blip on the radar screen? Robert Scheer asked these questions in 2004, after Nader’s abortive second run:

Nader is not responding to a grass-roots demand that he run but rather is stoking his celebrity as a media curiosity. He has no mandate from those who care deeply about the causes he has championed. His sudden cameo appearance over the objections of many who have followed him, bypassing existing Green Party organizations, smacks of overwhelming elitism. Nader has done nothing of significance since the last election to organize popular opposition to the disasters of the Bush government, yet he now deigns to assert that he alone can save us.

That’s truer now than it was then, and it leads into my third point–timing. Why has Nader waited until now, when we’ve pretty much nailed down who the nominees will be for both parties? Why didn’t he start his run last year, building a grassroots initiative to get on the ballot on all 50 states? Why not appeal to second-tier candidates like Kucinich, Gravel, or even Ron Paul, to work with him and get behind him–and bring their disaffected constituencies with him?

The answer is Nader isn’t running to win. He’s running to be a spoiler, to draw attention–and possibly votes–away from the Democrat and Republican alike. Unfortunately, Mike Huckabee was very right when he said that Nader “usually pulls votes from the Democratic nominee. “So naturally, Republicans would welcome his entry into the race,” Huckabee said–and if he’s saying that, it’s something for us to worry about.

Mike says in his post that if Clinton gets the nomination, he’ll vote for Nader. I’ve had similar statements levied to me by friends of mine who are so far left they make me look like Mark Penn–the idea that anything to the right of, say, Dennis Kucinich, is a corporate tool and not worth voting for. Maybe that’s true.

But what will this concretely accomplish, besides giving votes to McCain, whose supporters will probably not be voting for the Nader/McKinney ticket? Nothing. It will enable people who pat themselves on the back for being principled to absolve themselves of any responsibility for what will happen with what is, essentially, a third term of Bush. It’s the same kind of solipsistic self-aggrandizement that Nader himself is tremendously guilty of. It’s a very cynical, passive-aggressive, mealy-mouthed sort of stance-”I don’t care if the country is going to hell in a handbasket as long as I stay true to my principles.” Nader exemplified this back in 2000 when he flat-out said that he’d rather have Bush win:

When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.” Not that he actually thinks the man he calls “Bush Inc.” deserves to be elected: “He’ll do whatever industry wants done.” The rumpled crusader clearly prefers to sink his righteous teeth into Al Gore, however: “He’s totally betrayed his 1992 book,” Nader says. “It’s all rhetoric.” Gore “groveled openly” to automakers, charges Nader, who concludes with the sotto voce realpolitik of a ward heeler: “If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.”

Well, thanks, Ralph. You got what you wanted. So why, then, are you running again? What can you possibly hope to accomplish this time that you didn’t before?

Matt Stoller is absolutely right when he says that Nader has a lot of things to say that need saying, but that he himself is part of the problem. It’s the same type of phenomenon as Edwards’ populist message pushing Clinton and Obama further left, even though he himself didn’t benefit from it. Hell, you can say it’s the same as bloggers on Daily Kos being more left-tilted than Markos himself. The simple truth is that the movement is bigger than the man–than any man–and those who would try to make it all about them are doomed to failure.

Just as the Obama movement evolved and took form beyond the influence of the movers and shakers in the blogosphere, so too has the populist movement grown and eclipsed many of its standard-bearers. Nader should realize this and have the dignity to step aside quietly, so as not to sully his many considerable accomplishments any further. We need victories, not ideological martyrs. We need Presidents, not kings. And we need someone who is truly out for the welfare of the country, rather than for themselves.

I used to think Nader was that man, but not any more. It saddens me tremendously, but there it is. He needs to go, and he needs to take the army of disaffected whiners who would assure four more years of Republican domination through their vote for him along as well.

Wayne is the troubled but heroic Marine sergeant John Stryker (one must note the debt that name surely has to the brilliant Nathaniel West); John Agar is the young Marine who must learn the code (ah, the length of Hemingway’s shadow). He must overcome his intellectual mis-education and accept the power and glory of being in The Corps – having the ability to travel to exotic places, meet strange and interesting people, and kill them. Wayne got his Oscar nomination in part because his character, Stryker, does something rare and notable for a character in a John Wayne film – he dies. In fact, Sands of Iwo Jima was one of the films that vaulted Wayne to the top of the biggest box office star list. (It’s a place he spends a lot of time both before and after death.)

But Wayne’s enduring popularity is not what I pondered as I finished the film (which I’d seen a few times previously, film buff that I am). Instead, I got to wondering about Wayne the man – the ultra-conservative Republican who vigorously advocated the use of military force and was Ronald Reagan’s pal – and Wayne’s real military, specifically WWII military, record.

The Straight Dope, that source of de-bunkery extraordinaire, offers an interesting interpretation of John Wayne’s behavior during the Second World War – the only war for which he was legitimately an appropriate age – and raises an important question about Wayne’s motivations for fighting a cinema war rather than a real one. It always feels discomfiting, however, to see a movie icon as beloved as Wayne in such a negative light. Maybe he really was more useful to the war effort playing the Great American War Hero rather than actually trying to be one….

Or maybe not. When one compares Wayne’s WWII behavior to other movie stars of his stature (guys such as Clark Gable, James Stewart, or Henry Fonda), The Duke comes across as a phony. (Given Martin’s thoughtful analysis of selfish individualism, perhaps seeing Wayne as a prototype for putting self before country might be a fertile topic for discussion).

In this era of “Swift Boating” of legitimate war veterans (John Kerry knows this tactic all too well, and John McCain may become acquainted with it, too, before the current Presidential race is over, it seems), it might be good to remember John Wayne’s America – an America that values image over substance and movie heroics over real life performance of duty in service to one’s country.

Just ask George W. Bush. After all, his Presidency has been like a John Wayne movie, hasn’t it?

What’s the difference between a skeptic and a cynic?

A skeptic is someone who, when told something, doesn’t immediately believe it to be true and looks deeper into the issue before making their decision.

A cynic is someone who, when told something, automatically assumes it to be false, and doesn’t bother looking any further, because it’s just got to be bullshit.

It’s essential, especially in these times of fear and paranoia, that we maintain a healthy skepticism about what we are told. It was lack of skepticism that mired us in the endless hell of the Iraq war, after all. But I fear that genuine skepticism has been swamped by the all-consuming cynical passivity that says, “This is all bullshit, so why should I care or do anything about it? None of it matters.”

But it does matter. And watching the meteoric rise of Barack Obama has reminded me of how much it can all matter, for those who’re willing to believe.

As has been noted in the press and on the Net, Obama’s campaign has transcended a typical political stump and is becoming a flat-out movement for change. His team has tapped into the restless sleeping giant that is the Millenial Generation, appealing to them with the latest social networking tools and paeans to togetherness, unity, and an end to divisiveness–and they’ve responded in incredible numbers. Every primary is the same–youth turnout is off the charts, and they’re breaking for Obama in a large way.

But it’s not just the young–Obama’s “can-do” spirit is inspiring the old, the apathetic, the never-voted-before. Even those who aren’t sure about him or don’t believe in him are giving him a look:

“Obama is by no means my choice, and I will not go for him just because he’s black,” says Tinia Bland, a 43-year-old registered Republican who says she is leaning toward voting for Clinton. “He will have to show me that he can lead a nation and that my concerns will be met.” Still, she arrived five hours early for Obama’s rally in Jersey City, her 8-year-old son Elijah in tow. “I want him to see there is a man who looks like him, and that he is capable of making phenomenal decisions, and that this is an opportunity that he can aspire to,” she says. “I really see him as a uniter. There doesn’t have to be a white America and a black America anymore, and I like that.”

In my lifetime, I can’t remember any politician being able to inspire and evoke passion and hope–the willingness to believe and put in the work to bridge belief and reality–that Obama does. My Republican friends would probably invoke Reagan, but I’m too young to say for sure if that’s a legitimate comparison (on any level). This is one of those moments that simply hasn’t come around in the political cycle for a good long time.

Tom Hayden, who knows a thing or two about earthshaking generational and political movements, has the best take on this I’ve read yet:

I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama’s moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through…If history is any guide, the new “best and brightest” of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

It is the nature of all things in history to pass away and be cast aside so that the new can usurp the old. We shouldn’t forget what has come before, but nor should we be slave to it. I think this is another reason Edwards (who was my guy first and foremost) never caught fire–he underestimated, as did I, the symbolic change value of a black man or a woman leading the most powerful nation on Earth. Edwards recognized this in his farewell address, and I see it again and again in conversations with friends of mine who aren’t obsessive political junkies like myself.

But this isn’t enough–you need substance in this day and age. You need real policy positions on real issues of importance, and on this Obama is far from perfect. I’m skeptical of Obama’s almost pathological need to be all things to all people. I worry about his health care policies, some of which are dangerously to the right of Clinton. I worry about his dalliances with anti-gay pastors like Donnie McClurkin. I worry that his sharper, more populist stances only came because Edwards was stealing the show with them.

Yet, on balance, there is more good than bad in the meat of Obama’s record. Obama’s technology proposals are the most audacious and forward-looking of all the candidates, only beginning with his support for net neutrality. He is against the endless wars we are currently fighting. He was against the bankruptcy bill and supports mortgage law reform. Even on what seems like a clear-cut issue–banning cluster bombs in civilian areas–where Clinton took the convenient path, Obama took the right path. Hell, he’s even gotten his mind right on fully funding our grievously undermanned consumer protection agencies and policing imported toys for lead content. He has made numerous mistakes–and will probably make more–but he’s also evinced an instinct for coming correct on the biggest issues, and for emphasizing why both big and small issues matter. This strikes me as a man who will learn from his mistakes, not stubbornly dig in his heels and compound errors with even more grievous retrenchments, as the Decider has done.

Obama is not the new JFK. He wasn’t my first choice for candidate. And both of those things are fine. This is not the ’60s, nor is it the ’90s. My time for a movement has passed, if it was ever really here. This is a movement for a new generation, for a new age of people who are excited and passionate about politics like never before. And that gives me hope in my own right.

I’m a confirmed skeptic, but at my core, I’m not a cynic. I still believe our government can protect us and make our lives better if we do the job right. I believe that people working together can make a difference, and one man can change the world if they’re the right man. I believe that humans are essentially decent, good people who sometimes take the wrong path, and that America has the power to inspire the world to new levels of greatness if it holds to the moral truths and principles it was founded on.

And Barack Obama inspires me to continue that belief, just like he’s inspired his movement to propel him to becoming not only our first black president, but the first leader in a long time who can truly lead, as opposed to rule, govern, bully, or terrorize. That’s why I am for him as President–he doesn’t just inspire me to hope, he inspires me to believe that we can make the world better.

I’m a skeptic, but I’m also a believer. Does that mean I believe Obama and his movement can take the White House? To coin a phrase, “Yes. We. Can.”

I wanted to add some more thoughts to Sam’s excellent estimation of the end of John Edwards’ campaign. I’ve pretty much been deep in the tank for Edwards since his awe-inspiring “Two Americas” speech in 2004, so to see and hear him bow out today was a grand disappointment. But even as he did so, I looked back and considered what brought him–and those of us who stood with him–to this point.

Edwards did not fit the assumed narrative the media wanted to run with in this campaign–he was the outsider, the guy who wasn’t campaigning on experience or the audacity of hope. Moreover, he was speaking painful truths about class, corporatism, and how our lives are dictated and controlled by the power elite. So the media machine cranked up the distortion and tried to smear him into oblivion with stupid trivialities. Yet, through all that, his message perservered.

But his campaign did not. I honestly think it was because he focused so much on the dark, broken side of American life that people were frightened away. As I said to a friend of mine yesterday, the difference between Edwards and Obama is that the former inspires you to fight, while the latter inspires you to hope. And people would much rather hope than fight. This is not to say that hope is bad, but merely that Obama’s tremendous success has come from merging much of Edwards’ populist message with his own, more positive rhetoric. In fact, everyone from Clinton to Romney has tried to appeal to the little guy as a result of how sharply and starkly Edwards brought populist issues into the debate. Their results have been, shall we say, mixed at best.

He wasn’t a perfect candidate–indeed, he was wrong on a great many things, from Iraq to the bankruptcy bill to his lack of clear support for gay rights. As Denny astutely noted, he is just as good at playing the money game as anyone else, and his rhetorical flourishes about helping people out of poverty didn’t always have substance. But seriously–can you remember ANY other candidate even mentioning the devastation from Katrina that still plagues the Gulf Coast today? Or any of the so-called “leading” candidates promising to get us out of Iraq as soon as possible? Edwards made people stand up and remember that we owe it to ourselves to help our fellow man–our fellow American–make this country great again, in every way.

The value of John Edwards to the 2008 election was about more than simply reducing him to the surface values, as people have tried to do with Obama and Clinton. John Edwards was the messenger, the Cassandra, the man who would say the things others wouldn’t, and would speak painful truths, even when it meant admitting his own failures. John Edwards may not have been able to translate his message into votes, but his message DID reach those who wanted to listen, and in turn, those who needed to hear.

As Edwards himself reminds us today:

I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters. We must do better, if we want to live up to the great promise of this country that we all love so much.

It is appropriate that I come here today. It’s time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path. We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with our convictions and a little backbone we will take back the White House in November and we’ll create hope and opportunity for this country.

Indeed we will. And we will owe much of our success to John Edwards, who may not have made it to the Promised Land, but assured through his efforts that we will get there.

It’s been a rough couple of months.

On the blogging front, the two “big” stories I spent most of 2007 writing about, the evil that is Blackwater and the Jena 6 travesty of justice, are gone from the news cycle. In the first case Blackwater coverage is now buried – by, I suspect, tacit agreement between the Bush junta and corporate media – so as to allow Erik Prince and company to slither away with minimal (if any) punishment for their crimes against humanity in the name of protecting “American interests” in Iraq. In the second case, Jena’s impetus toward equal treatment under law has dissipated (sadly) due to revelations that the principal prosecutee/cause célèbre has been something of a habitual criminal whose previous unsavory behavior had been excused with wrist taps for the following reasons: 1) he was a star athlete; 2) he committed his crimes against fellow African-Americans rather than against whites in his home town in the deep south.

Since the relegation of these important stories to Trotsky’s dust bin, I’ve been at loose ends trying to find another story to follow to fill my niche as resident Museum Quality Boomer Idealist© for this publication.

On the personal front it’s been a painful, contemplative time.

For those (few) of you (God bless you, every one) who’ve followed some of my rock music writing both here and at my blog The Savoy Truffle, you’re aware that I was a musician myself for a good number of years before retreating to a life in academia and as a writer. I played in a band back in the seventies – a band that was approached by record companies (while this sounds laughable now, back in the Beatle-cene Epoch it used to be a statement of some importance). We wrote and played power pop with country, blues and folk inflections. Some people thought we were pretty good.

Our drummer, Tony, died suddenly in October. I’ve been having real trouble getting past it. I’m haunted by what might have been. I keep remembering a quote from Peter Townshend: “Yeah, fans can say,’That crazy drummer of yours is dead. Get somebody else to play drums.’ But it’s different for me – my friend is dead. Do you understand? My friend is dead.”

Events like Tony’s passing – which we Boomers are starting to experience with alarming regularity – makes stuff like the Presidential campaign, which seems so important to the Xers who dominate this blog, seem like a lot of horse shit to me these days.

I’m trying to figure out what’s important to me now. While there’s still some time.

My fellow Boomer, Randy Newman, tried to tell everyone years ago what’s really important in life. All one has to do is fill in the blank to this lyric from one of his most well known songs:

“It’s _____ that matters….”

That’s revelatory about me as a Boomer. About all us Boomers. I notice that when I talk with my Boomer friends that we know we have an interest in this election. We know what we face. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Global heating is perhaps past fixing. We have to free ourselves from fossil fuels and develop our alternative energy sources. We have to do something to reverse the determined march toward idiocracy that our current public policies on education are causing. We have to stop that imbecilic war and stop pouring our country’s wealth down the rat hole that is Iraq. We have to stop electing the stupidest, most fucked up members of our generation as leaders of the free world.

But we’re also concerned about the important things. The things that make Boomers – well, Boomers.

The original Kinks are getting back together.

Led Zeppelin, with Jason Bonham replacing his dad John on drums, may be planning a tour.

Of course these events may not seem important to those in the slacker/latchkey/blogging generation.

Most of them can’t afford the tickets, anyway.

See the Randy Newman quote above.

We Boomers still have all the high paying jobs.

But there’s hope. We Boomers will go the way of Tony soon enough.

Feel better now? I know I do.

This might sound like hyperbole – and to be sure, the race is far from won – but if the results we saw in the Hawkeye State last Thursday are replicated in New Hampshire and beyond, then what we are seeing may be a defining shift in American politics and culture. The key factor is the emergence of the 75-100 million strong Millennial Generation as a political force. Let’s look at some of the evidence.

The Young Voter PAC’s roundup provides ample data for consideration.

The youth [ages 18-29] turnout rate tripled in Iowa.

The youth turnout rate rose to 13% in 2008 compared to 4% in 2004 and 3% in 2000.

Out of all of Barack Obama’s support in Iowa, 57% came from young voters (CNN, MSNBC, FOX).

60% of the caucus participants were first time caucus goers and of those 39% of them went for Obama.

22% of the Democratic caucus goers were young people, up from 17% in 2004.

A total of 65,230 young people were caucus-goers in 2008. 52,580 caucused with Democrats and only 12,650 turned out for Republicans. That means of the young people that turned out, 80% were for Democrats!

The totals for both parties are 239,000 Democrats (compared to 125,000 in 2004) and 115,000 Republicans. Emphasis added.)

For context, note first that “Democrats of all ages outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 and young Democrats outnumbered young Republicans 4 to 1,” and this is in a state that George Bush carried in 2004. Then understand that Obama punked all comers in a state that’s around 95% white. Before all the colleges started up again.

Clearly Obama’s message of “change” is finding fertile ground. Ignore, for the moment, that his vision of change is perhaps stronger than his record of actually pursuing it. Never mind that he’s been roundly criticized for being weak on policy. Forget the criticism that he’s all charisma and no substance. Even if these things are true, they don’t matter. This is America, and it’s been a long time since we decided elections based on anything like an informed study of the real issues.

Also, let’s avoid the temptation to argue that Obama is no John F. Kennedy. The facts of his administration suggests that JFK wasn’t JFK, either. He escalated our involvement in Vietnam. He sold out the US-backed exiles sent to invade the Bay of Pigs. And during the Cuban Missile Crisis he probably came closer than any leader in our history to getting us into a nuclear war. We tend to remember Kennedy in the way we always seem to remember charismatic figures who die tragically – which is to say, we don’t always go directly to the nuts and bolts of the person’s career.

What Kennedy did accomplish was to give a booming generation of young people hope. John, and later his younger brother Bobby, established a vision of greatness through service that compelled the nation’s youth in a way that nothing quite had before or has since. Like Kennedy’s Baby Boom adherents, today’s Millennial voters (most of who are the children of Boomers) are part of a huge generation. Like the Boomers they’re hopeful. They’re convinced they can make a difference (a dramatic contrast to the Gen Xers in between the two, who learned way too many lessons about hope from what the Boomers became after Bobby’s death). And they may, like the Boomers, have found a symbol they can invest in.

The more we understand about the character of the Millennials, the more sense this all makes. For instance:

• Millennials believe they can change the world. They’re far more hopeful and confident than Xers, for example.

In a Pew study released in January called “A Portrait of Generation Next” 56 percent of 18-25 year olds say that they “feel empowered to bring about social change,” an increase of eight percentage points over the Gen Xers who were asked the same question in 1990.

They’re willing to roll up their sleevs and get their hands dirty on behalf of causes they care about, too, with volunteerism levels estimated at over 50%.

• Millennials, perhaps more than any other generational cycle, are feelers. They’re not instinctively critical thinkers and those responsible for their upbringing (parents and educational administrators, especially) have done all they can to make sure it stays that way.
• Millennials are strong followers. They think in the collective. Since they were raised in packs they’re accustomed to acting in groups. They’re also extremely conventional – the most conventional of Howe and Strauss’ four generational cycles – and as such react positively to sanctioned authority. With this in mind, read Jesse Wendel’s thoughtful examination of Obama and “declarative speech.” Of the major candidates, Obama is arguably the one who’s tapping the Millennial “follow reflex” in ways his competitors haven’t (or can’t).
• Millennials respond to those who cater to them. In fact, they demand it. Again, this is an artifact of their upbringing. It has its downside, obviously, but the relevant point here is that the Democratic campaigns have been reaching out to young voters on their terms in ways that the GOP hasn’t, and Obama has done an especially good job of speaking to this important segment.
• Millennials are the most diverse generation in history. According to demographer Neil Howe, who along with Bill Strauss has written the most comprehensive and important studies of the Millennials to date:
  

  Over 40 percent are nonwhite or Latino; at least 20 percent have one immigrant parent. For earlier generations, ethnic diversity was mainly about African American and Latino populations. In this generation, the ethnic diversity includes a mixture of people from all over the world: Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and so on.

  Does that general description remind you of any particular candidate?

• The Millennials are strongly pro-social, something that’s going to become more significant when the racist dirty tricks get started in earnest. When you look at what the Mills believe it becomes apparent that – as we saw in Iowa – they’re far more progressive. They don’t like discrimination against gays and they’re likely to recognize, at a profoundly emotional level, the ugly racism in “Barack HUSSEIN Obama.” “Electability” questions will bounce right off them. Most of these codespeak attacks are going to find that Mills are damned tough to crack because they have a faith in their own correctness that’s simply unshakable. Ask their teachers.

In other words, Barack Obama is their hope for a better world personified. He looks like their reality, he sounds like their self-certainty, and his flaws are evident only to the thinker, making them invisible to the emotional doer.

The coming weeks may prove this entire thesis wrong, but for the moment there’s good reason for concern in the Clinton and Edwards camps. And even better reason for out-and-out terror on the GOP side of the campaign.

John F. Kennedy was terribly flawed, but his legacy of hope drives Baby Boomers to tears even today. Barack Obama is showing signs of being the same thing to the children of those Boomers, and if so Iowa may have been the first little quiver in a massive political earthquake building just beneath the surface.

I met Bill Clinton once – well, “met” might be too strong a word. “Saw” would be more apt as a description. He and Gore were doing that bus tour thing in ‘92 and their bus stopped near where I was and I stood in a small crowd while they stepped from the bus to glad hand for a few moments. Though I was near the back of the group, Clinton looked out over the sea (well, pond) of faces and we made (I think) eye contact. I saw caring in his eyes – and I liked it. It reminded me of our mutual hero, John F. Kennedy. I voted for him twice based on that glimpse as much as on any rational principle….

I had dinner one evening last spring with an astronaut. He’d piloted the space shuttle and now works in the aerospace industry. He was just the sort of person you’d want an astronaut to be – intelligent and thoughtful in his discourse, genial to everyone we met, casually modest about his exploits. It was like meeting John Glenn. He was what my parent’s generation used to call “an All-American guy.” He was the sort of guy you’d want to marry your sister. He just shimmered with the aura of heroism. I got him to give me an autographed picture of himself in his space suit….

I stood in a line a block and a half long during the heat of a July evening in my little North Carolina hometown to see A Hard Day’s Night the summer I turned 12. I was already in love with The Beatles’ music. On that evening I felt I got to know them. And John Lennon fascinated me. He was witty, irreverent – and driven by something fearsome that I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be him – that was too scary – I wanted to be Paul, someone he trusted – and perhaps respected….

The last six weeks of the year are, despite their festiveness, always tinged with melancholy for us Boomers. Every Boomer 50 or older can tell you exactly where he/she was on November 22nd, 1963. This year that painful anniversary fell on Thanksgiving Day – the day I first tried writing this piece. It seemed necessary to do Kennedy’s anniversary proper rueful homage, but I couldn’t bring it off with all the positive chi around me. So this year’s marking of what might be the seminal existential event in the lives of the Boomer generation went largely ignored except by the dodderers at The History Channel. But you can bet that almost every Boomer – except maybe those scions of the oil industry whose spawn are running our current government – paused at some moment and remembered. And wondered how it all went so wrong….

One would think that once would be enough for any generation to be traumatized, but we Boomers, spoiled bunch of swine that we are, have lots of psychic slop in our troughs that we must choke down every year. April 4. June 5. December 8. And all before many of us reached the age when we couldn’t be trusted anymore – 30….

Kennedy’s greatest legacy, perhaps, was the space program. And it’s the space program who gave us John Glenn. Despite Tom Wolfe’s attempts to debunk the Mercury 7 in The Right Stuff, Glenn has always been a heroic figure. The first American to orbit the Earth. The only astronaut to become a US senator. The American hero who returned to space in what should be his dotage. Glenn is what Boomers like to think we might be like – if JFK hadn’t gotten his head blown off in Dallas “all those years ago….” Bill Shepherd, my astronaut acquaintance, somehow held onto that. It’s why he impressed me.

You just don’t see that in Boomers.

As Glen Frey wryly observes, “Most of us are sad.”

But back to the present – to what Paul Simon once termed “deep and dark December….”

Today is the 6th. I sent my brother in music Mike birthday greetings earlier today. He and I, despite our mutual love of and long history in/out/in the music business together are political adversaries sometimes these days. He’s a conservative Libertarian. I’m – something or other. Progressive, I guess.

But we love each other. We have that bond that only people inspired by greatness to try for greatness ourselves can have. John Lennon gave us that.

And we both dread Saturday. December 8. Because as musicians, and especially as Boomers, it’s one of the biggest ladles of psychic slop we have to choke down every year until we join John in the oblivion choir’s rock music division:

It’s the day that crazy sonuvabitch killed John Lennon.

Lennon was Chapman’s hero. So Chapman said. But Boomers know that you don’t kill your heroes. Somebody in the pay of the Russians – or the Mafia – or the white supremacists – or the CIA/FBI/NSA – will commit that act of betrayal for you.

For too many Boomers, John’s murder was an even more appalling betrayal than JFK’s. Chapman was one of our own – a Boomer. How could he do what he did? What had we become?

December 8, 1980 isn’t just the day the music died, however. It’s the day Boomer opposition to the insidious evil that the we recognized in the Right and its standard bearer Nixon – and his heir Reagan – died. Reagan’s election a month earlier signaled a last desperate grasp at power by those hoary old manipulators of “the silent majority.” With John, who’d recently emerged into public discourse again after a self-imposed exile, to act as our conscience once again, we might have roused our sense of right and forced Kid Alzheimer out after one term – and reversed so much of the plundering he countenanced.

But after John was killed, all pretense of staying true to ideals disappeared and we Boomers either cocooned or yupped our way to Piggie-dom. And while we did Reagan broke the unions, carried on secret wars to benefit his and his cronies’ interests, and encouraged the ravaging of American business for the benefit of share holders (i.e., moneyed elites) at the expense of American workers.

We lost our voice, our conscience, and our will to resist the machinations of the Reaganites and their successors the Busheviks. Each successor to Reagan has served capitalist greed ever more devotedly. The last two, disgustingly enough, are Boomers. They’re us.

Now it’s like we’re living the Yeats poem: ” The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

We’re in a god damned mess – and we know it’s our fault. But so many of us have been retreated for so long into our religion or our money or our New Age babble or our something/anything to assuage our consciences and comfort our souls that we just don’t know if we can muster the old fire that once made a country do our will about an unjust war – and forced one President to retire a broken man and another to resign his office in ignominy.

December 8 ends the dark stretch of days that, as everyone’s thoughts turn to the pleasure and pain that is the holiday season, are as much part of the Boomer legacy as those thrilling days like February 9 or July 20. We should all try to find some peace during the holiday season.

For then comes 2008 – and an election year that may rank as the most important Americans have ever faced.

And we have some decisions to make…

(to be continued)

And so it is that this week we get no fewer than four distinct flocks flying around this week, each one presenting a very different directional tilt on the topic of whether or not Barack Obama is a candidate for “Generation X,” the “Millenial” generation, both, neither, or something totally different.

First we have Andrew Sullivan’s “Goodbye To All That,” which paints Obama as a post-Baby Boomer messiah that can deliver the country from the Boomer struggles that are still being fought today through proxies. Iraq isn’t about Iraq, Sullivan argues, but about Vietnam and the continuing inability of many members of the ‘Nam generation to accept the loss. Sullivan’s thesis is that the divisiveness engendered by the conflicts of the ’60s and ’70s are being fought today still, and Obama represents the chance to move on to truly new ground. “The war today matters enormously,” Sullivan argues. “The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.” It’s a compelling argument, and one I’d be more keen to buy if the guy making the argument wasn’t infamous for engaging in his own proxied battles of personal destruction against Bill and Hillary Clinton. I may not be old enough to remember Vietnam, but I definitely AM old enough to remember Sullivan’s frothing hatred for the Clintons as a prime example of the coarsening of the discourse, and it’s bizarre to see him write about the vicious smear campaigning as if he had no part in it.

Next up there’s Lakshmi Chaudhry’s take on the matter, wherein she argues that though Obama is chiefly appealing to Millenials (18-30 year olds) in his stump and vision, the real appeal–and real support–for Obama lies in the Gen X crowd, whose all-encompassing cynicism and distaste for established models led it to reinvent political action via the Internet and espouse new frameworks of activism. I can believe this too–looking at the institutions forged by the likes of Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, which emphasize infrastructure and victory over ideology, and using compromise Democrats to build platforms that more progressive Democrats can stand on, I can see this as an expression of Gen X rejection of the “old way of doing things.” Obama’s message of pragmatism, bipartisanship, and results is very appealing, but does “practivism” actually mean anything if the means to achieve results are compromised by selling out the ideals you claim to stand for?

Michael Currie Schaffer’s “Hard To Say Goodbye” casts a cynical look at generational politics, noting that succeeding generations are often all too willing and eager to pick up the flaws and foibles of their forebears, and that it’s impossible to paint individual actions with a broad generational brush–and that Obama’s strength will come from his own individual ability to forge his path. I tend to hew to this argument the most–I know many right-wing friends of mine who parrot the “Democrats tax and spend” line as if they hadn’t lived through eight years of Bush’s gargantuan deficit spending, so strong is the cultural meme in their mind. But I also know just as many people who make these arguments–or reject them–based on individual empirical exploration. Obama’s weakness in his campaign has been his wide stance–trying to be all things to all people without building a coherent framework to pull these disparate beliefs together. It’s an individual action of his that makes him strong when he does pull it together (as he did here), and it’s individual actions of the voters that will make them support or oppose Obama, fueled by factors a lot more complex than labels like “Gen X” or “Millenial.”

Finally, Paul Waldman argues that whether Obama is a Boomer, Gen X’er, or some amorphous fusion of the two, it’s right for him to court the youth vote–not only is under-25 voting on the rise, but those that are voting are doing so as a generation who sees the culture war as over. Gay marriage, equal rights, and interracial dating are no longer issues to this generation, and someone like Obama represents a truly transformational phase for them, a way to remind our country and the world that we’re not all a bunch of redneck Arab-hating bigots, despite the best efforts of PNAC, AIPAC, and the Bush junta. I’m skeptical about this too, especially in light of events ranging from the ongoing saga of the Jena 6 and young voters who might sell their vote for an iPod Touch, just as I’m skeptical about the “change value” of a candidate simply for their skin color or gender. I criticized Garance Franke-Ruta about this line of thinking back in July–it does a terrible disservice to Obama and Clinton by assigning them change potential simply because they showed up to the dance and happened to be black and/or a woman. If Clinton votes with the Reich Wing on practically every issue of national security and economic mobility, does that make her–or Obama, or Edwards, or anyone–a change candidate? I think not.

In the end, that’s what I take away from these many essays about generational dynamics…people are looking at Obama and assigning to him the values they want him to represent, be they generational, cultural, political, and social. This is both something that can work in Obama’s favor, as he strives to be all things to all people, but it’s also a weakness–for when you are painted as the avatar of a generation’s values, what do you do if you don’t live up to them?

That’s why, in the end, I will vote (or not vote) for a candidate based on what they stand for and how they live up to it. Not because a generational dynamic tells me to, or a self-projecting pundit believes I should, or because they happen to fulfill a token demographic. But because they can prove to me that they are deserving based on their own merit. As a guy who comes in on the tail end of Gen X, I’m old enough to be cynical of what people tell me, but young enough to still want to believe in it. I think that’s a fair compromise, and putting aside generational prognostications and cultural assignations to focus on what matters most–the issues–is equally fair in my view.

Next, another CD of the Year frontrunner. Graham Parker (an honorary Scrogue) has arguably been the greatest artist in rock for the longest period of time, with this year’s Don’t Tell Columbus giving him 5-star classics over 30 years apart. Here’s a live performance of his brilliant “Highway 66 Revisited” homage, the Bush-whacking “Stick to the Plan.”

Jangle pop legend Mitch Easter (you might know him as the former Let’s Active frontman, Robert Plant’s favorite guitarist, and producer of REM’s great early work) cranked out a fantastic new disc this year called Dynamico. It’s his first new release in nearly 20 years – hopefully we won’t have to wait this long for the next one.

If you saw Once, this year’s indie film surprise, then you’ll recognize Glen Hansard and “Falling Slowly.” If you didn’t see the movie, you really, really should.

Up next, who knew former Mott the Hoople front man Ian Hunter was still up and at it? Well, he is, and this year’s Shrunken Heads was just fantastic. Here’s he performs “Big Mouth” on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Here’s a band that didn’t have a proper release out this year – only a promotional EP. But let me get the hype started for what I hope will be a 2008 CD of the Year campaign. This is thenewno2, and if that kid singing reminds you of someone, it might be his dad, George Harrison. Imagine a band that was sort of equal parts GH and Massive Attack (which isn’t so evident on this particluar track) and you’re getting into the right neighborhood for their overall sound.

I spend a lot of time lamenting that the world of “indie” music promises much but usually fails to deliver. In short, too many bands can’t write songs, can’t play their instruments, and nobody is willing to pony up for decent production. So they craft an ideology that fetishizes “low-fi authenticity.” Which is bullshit. However, some of these bands really do deliver, and here’s one of them – The National.

Here’s another one – Spoon, doing a song a lot of radio types seem to like (no doubt because it reminds them of Billy Joel). Trust me, though, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a lot more than a gimmick record.

That’ll do it for this week, music fans. And remember to tip your DJ, because I am what I play…