Annie Lamott Takes Poison She's a sad case--an engaging writer when she isn't screaming at conservatives and especially pro-lifers, a self-professed Christian of eccentric stripe, but there seems to be something essential about the faith that she just somehow doesn't get. I say "sad," but after this story sinks in for a few minutes it's scary. To adapt Flannery O'Connor's famous appropriation of a safety slogan, the life she took may be her own. Say a prayer for her. Pre-TypePad

Comment changes This weekend (at the latest) I'm going to get rid of the Blogger comments link ("old blogger comments"), so the "comments" link, which uses the HaloScan commenting facility, will be the only one. Meanwhile, I'm disabling the Blogger comments link on any new posts, for the same reason I'm switching to HaloScan--Blogger comments don't appear until the blog is republished, so people leave comments and think they didn't actually post. So the "comments" link works, but the "old blogger comments" one takes you to a page that says comments have been disabled. Also, I've noticed on this as well as other blogs that use HaloScan, that the number of comments is not always accurate right away, even though the comment(s) will appear if you click on the link. Last night I moved the two comments on the preceding post to HaloScan, and it was 15 minutes or more before the count appeared correctly. I suppose this probably has something to do with cacheing on the HaloScan server. Pre-TypePad

No Complaint, No Problem

One of my daughters just graduated from high school, and a few months ago we were visiting colleges. One large state school had invited her to enter a program advertised as providing, within the context of the big school, a sort of intensified liberal arts program like the one offered by St. John's College. All the students in this program, male and female, live in the same building, and we were given a tour of it.

The boys were separated from the girls only by a hallway. I asked about visitation. I was pretty sure I knew what the real practice would be, but I wanted to see what kind of answer the student who was conducting the tour would give me. She paused for a moment and said, "If there's no complaint, there's no problem."

Right, I thought. I know how that will work out. There would be no surer way to make yourself unpopular than to be the tattletale in that scenario.

Our daughter isn't going to that school, but I had a sad confirmation of my prediction a few days ago. I talked to someone whose daughter has just ended her first year at college (not the one described above, but a similar large state institution) in a state of serious depression which had sapped her motivation so badly that she did poorly in her second term and almost lost her scholarship.

I don't know the girl, but she's apparently brilliant, a National Merit Scholarship winner with math-science aptitudes and interests who wants to be an engineer. And I don't know the whole story. But I do know that she went to college excited about learning, and that she found herself living in an environment which, except for the fact that no money changed hands, might as well have been a brothel.

What is euphemistically called "partying" went on constantly in the whole dorm. But worse, her roommate's boyfriend was in the room at all hours, a sort of unregistered third resident of her room, with all that implies. And she felt that if she complained it would only cause trouble for her. "They'll think I'm a prude." Her mother asked if she couldn't ask the resident assistant (i.e. the person paid to keep order) privately to intervene. "No, she'll just laugh at me. Her boyfriend stays in her room, too."

It's not a new thing that the young person trying to avoid vice should be taunted and rejected by those who have embraced it. I recall my one year in a college dorm forty years ago, and the earnest evangelical young man who was laughed at because he wouldn't go in a room where Playboy centerfolds were on display.

What's different now is that the institution, and for that matter the society which sponsors it, offers such a person little or no moral support. It's like living in a society in which the police are in league with the criminals. At best this girl could have gotten a different room and roommate, but with the real likelihood that she would have ended up with the same difficulty, except that now she would bear a burden of ill will. If she had spoken out, she would have been considered the problem—that is the real implication of "no complaint, no problem."

So in the end there was no problem, so far as the institution was concerned: just a disoriented girl with an obsolete idea of what constitutes minimal decency. What a pretty world we've made, where vice is filled with self-esteem and virtue is expected to hang her head and keep to the shadows.

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Dumb Headline of the Week (at least) "New Computers Can Read Minds" Even if this technology works, which is at least theoretically possible, do you consider yourself to be reading someone's mind when you infer something about his mental state from the look on his face? Pre-TypePad

Neko Case: Blacklisted

The story goes that Schumann, on first hearing Chopin play, cried out "Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!" I'm slightly embarrassed to say that something of that sort went through my mind after I'd heard this album a few times. No, I don't really think Neko Case is a genius in the sense that Chopin was, and anyway "genius" is a term that should, in my view, be applied to only a rare few people. So let's just say that within the realm of popular music this album stands way above most, and that Neko Case has a formidable degree of talent as both singer and songwriter. As to the former, I can't, from the point of view of personal reaction, put it any more strongly than to say that her voice can move me the way Emmy Lou Harris's does. As to the latter, let's just say that every song on this album is striking and memorable.

The only quibble I'd make about her songwriting is that she's chosen the obscure, elliptical, imagistic path for her lyrics, and while she does this very well, at times brilliantly, I think the songs often end up feeling a little too diffuse and open. Tightening this up some would give them more emotional punch. The two brilliantly-chosen covers here bring this out: their lyrics are less deliberately poetic, but they have a structure and coherence that makes them stand alone as songs in a way that Case's own work does not—I don't think it's very likely that other artists would cover her songs.

So what does it actually sound like? Well, I can't think of a way to describe it that wouldn't make it sound ordinary. Call it folk-rock, alt-country, Americana, or singer-songwriter for a very generic tag, but mainly call it exceptional popular music by an artist who could die proud of her achievement if she never sang another note after this (although on the basis of one sample track I think her new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, may be at least as good). It has to be pointed out that the producer and supporting musicians, including Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico (a band of which I've heard just enough to make me want to hear a lot more), are major contributors to the magic, providing a Ghost-Riders-in-the-Sky sort of atmosphere.

B+ (maybe turning into an A later—I don't want to be too hasty)

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A Prayer for the Anglican Communion Like a lot of Catholic bloggers and blog-readers, I've indulged in a certain amount of scoffing and I-told-you-so-ing over the past few days as the Episcopal General Convention pursued its typically unwise ways. Much of this came at the expense of the new Presiding Bishop's inaugural homily, and you can read some of it in this thread at Open Book, which includes a link to the homily itself. We—I—have been uncharitable. Her theology may be as erroneous as is rumored, but this homily is excellent, especially if read without suspicion. The day is almost over, and it finally occurred to me to invoke the intercession of Sts. John Fisher and Thomas More, whose memorial it is today, and who happen to be two of my favorite saints. Saint John Fisher, Saint Thomas More, please pray for all souls in the Anglican Communion, and for the return of that unity in faith the breaking of which took your lives. Pre-TypePad

Blood and Sapphire

It will come as no surprise to any non-Catholic reading this that we Catholics believe some pretty strange things. Catholics, on the other hand, are in some danger of losing sight, by force of habit, of this strangeness. I thought of it as I listened to today's readings for the feast of Corpus Christi.

First there was the Old Testament reading, Exodus 24:3-8, which describes the sacrifices performed by the Israelites at the behest of Moses after his return from his encounter with God on Sinai. What a scene that must have been—slaughter and butchering, burning flesh, blood collected in vessels and thrown about on the altar and upon the people. And sacrifices like these continued for centuries, especially in the great Temple of Jerusalem, constituting the core of the faith in which Jesus was raised and in the context of which he announced that he himself was to be the ultimate sacrifice, and that once his action was complete there would be no further need to slay any living thing as a sacrifice.

Leap forward a few thousand years, and see what happens in almost every Catholic church almost every day. There is an altar patterned after those in the Temple. Somewhere around it hangs a more or less realistic representation of a man cruelly put to death. Followers of this same Jesus believe that their priest, standing over this altar, re-creates the one sacrifice by speaking certain words over wine and unleavened bread. And when he has done this they become in some invisible supernatural way the literal presence of the man Jesus, who by the way was also God.

One who does not believe this can surely be forgiven for muttering "yeah, right" when told that this bread and wine are actually the flesh and blood of God. And if he thinks much about it at all he may even be repulsed by the fact that the priest and people will now eat this purported flesh and blood. He may think that they are doing something either insane, if their faith is not true, or repulsive, if it is. The whole thing, going all the way back to Moses and his basins of blood, looks like nonsense piled upon delusion.

But if he looks much further into Catholic doctrine he'll find it full of sound good sense, teaching reason, humility, honesty, peace, love, and forgiveness. Of course if he's a man very much of our times he'll also find a lot of things there—mostly those pertaining to sex—with which he will disagree and maybe even consider harmful, depending on how "liberated" he is. But if he reads the theologians and the popes, especially our two most recent popes, he'll at least have to admit that the teachings are logical and coherent. And in the case of the popes he'll hear a very down-to-earth reason, very much alert to and conversant with the world. In fact, if our man is very much a child of his time, he will begin to complain that it's all too logical. (Or at least this sort of reaction used to be possible—nowadays I'm afraid there are many in whom the natural light is so clouded that they can't even see the virtue of, for instance, the Christian concept of marriage.)

How can this be? It's as if one discovered streams of pure fresh water flowing out of an oil well. Sometimes it seems like the emergence from this faith of primitive sacrifice of so clear and reasonable a mind as that of St. Thomas is a miracle in itself. We can find part of the answer by reading the two verses from Exodus that follow the Sunday readings:

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.

You may recall that the initial encounter on Sinai involved darkness, fire, thunder, earthquake, and a sound like trumpets. Moses had to brave these alone in order to see the Lord. Yet now all is tranquility and clarity, and the seventy don't seem to be afraid.

Catholic teaching may seem as clear and bright as that sapphire pavement, but it has to be preceded by an acceptance of darkness and mystery. If we are going to understand anything at all, we must first accept that we cannot understand everything.

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Music of the Week — June 4, 2006

Massive Attack: Mezzanine

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything described as “trip-hop” that I didn’t like at least mildly. It’s a matter of atmosphere, and to me the style seems a bit mis-named. No doubt the name arose because the style apparently began as a variation of hip-hop and “trip-hop” seemed clever, but the general vibe strikes me as far more narcotic than psychedelic. The first thing I ever heard that bore this label was Portishead’s Dummy, which will probably make an appearance here eventually: I instantly loved its romantic late-night melancholy, the nostalgic effect of some of the samples, and the sometimes yearning quality of the vocals and the lyrics. I thought on first listen that Mezzanine was not going to be any threat to Dummy’s position as the best thing I’d heard in this line, but two more listens changed my mind.

This is a very different sort of work from Dummy, much less song-oriented, much more obviously having roots in hip-hop, but equally compelling. I’d be surprised if anyone has ever described it without using the word “dark” at least once: it’s a dim, moody, sensual, almost Baudelarian atmosphere, and, as the AMG review says quite nicely, both earthy and ethereal. The lyrics are pretty negligible, and sometimes more lubricious than I would like, and musically it’s mostly a matter of rhythms and carefully placed instruments and samples, but it will definitely get under your skin. I look forward to listening to it on headphones sometime, as the production is so full of interesting details. Its very best moments may be the tracks on which former Cocteau Twin Elisabeth Fraser contributes vocals and, I’d be willing to bet, the melodies she sings, which have a very distinctly Cocteau Twins character. These seem to yearn upwards rather than to be heading into some sort of pleasant but unhealthy fog. It wouldn’t do as a steady diet, but I’ll allow myself Mezzanine as an occasionally permissible indulgence, like some sort of exotic absinthe-like liqueur .

B+

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After the Revolution I just posted the following in a comment on Dawn Eden's blog, and thought it worth repeating here. It's part of the continuing discussion of Dawn's book referred to below, and I'm replying to a commenter who signs himself (herself?) "Noumena":

Noumena refers to "Those of us who are the intellectual children of the sexual revolution..." Some of us are veterans of that revolution who looked at the resultant damage and decided that we had been on the wrong side, and are still trying to alert the rest of the world to what it was really all about. Maybe we're a little like ex-Communists, and I suppose we can be annoying that way. But I'd rather stand with Whittaker Chambers than Alger Hiss. Hell, come to that, if I have to, I'll stand with Joe McCarthy rather than Joe Stalin. Also there's: "you seem to be conflating the sexual revolution with the thoughtless and destructive 'mainstream' understanding of sexuality." Noumena, that is the revolution. The Playboy Mansion was the sexual revolution every bit as much as Woodstock was. The divorce rate is the sexual revolution. Omnipresent porn is the sexual revolution. The abortionist's trade is the very cornerstone of the sexual revolution. As Agent Mulder once said, "Did you think you could call up the devil and make him behave?"

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HaloScan Commenting Enabled All right, then. I've added the free commenting service at HaloScan. I'm leaving the few existing comments in place for the moment, the ones listed under "old blogger system" but will plan to remove that code at the end of this month. Now I have to see what it will cost for me to get rid of those HaloScan ads. And I need to shrink the "Comment | Trackback" text...oh, that was easy. Pre-TypePad

The Hardness of Their Hearts A curious phenomenon on display at the Dawn Patrol: Dawn publishes an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Thrill of the Chaste, and the cultural left lashes out with furious scorn. Dawn has links here, here, and here, and responds here. You really have to slog through some of the comments to fully appreciate the level of hostility. It's especially striking because Dawn's excerpt is very mild and warm in tone. She's only describing her experiences and suggesting that others may learn from them--there's no trace of ranting or condemnation. But to her respondents she's crazy, sinister, or both. One might write this off as bad conscience, and no doubt that's part of it, but I think there's more. There's a creepy coldness underlying many of these comments that makes one remember that the heart of Dante's hell is not fire but ice. This is surely the hardness of heart that's mentioned so often in the Bible. I would not be the first to observe that sin is forbidden to us not only because it endangers our ultimate salvation but because it damages our life in this world. Dawn's attackers certainly don't leave one with the impression that they enjoy life very much, but rather address it with a perpetual sneer. Pre-TypePad

Music of the Week – May 28, 2006 Jimi Hendrix: First Rays of the New Rising Sun A couple of years ago something or other sparked me to listen to Jimi Hendrix for the first time in quite a few years, and I realized why guitar players still hold him in something close to awe. Looking a bit further afield than the few studio albums he released during his lifetime, I decided to spring for this posthumous collection, which AMG rates with his completed work. It’s not bad at all, but I have to say it’s something of a disappointment. There’s plenty of good guitar playing here (how could there not be?), but it seems to me to lack the fire and intensity of his best work. This may be a result of the production, which seems a bit slicker than really suits Hendrix—possibly an unfair criticism, since these tracks were never meant to be released as they are. The bigger problem is that for all his genius as a guitarist Hendrix just wasn’t that great a songwriter, and it really shows here. Too many of these songs consist of a more or less tuneless vocal line over riffs which may be interesting but aren’t as powerful and memorable as his great ones, such as “Purple Haze.” If you ask me, the real treasure chest of posthumous Hendrix is the 1994 release Blues. I wrote something about it here. Grade: C+ Pre-TypePad

National Review Online Is Having A Fund-Raiser But I'm wondering if the time has come to let my subscription lapse. With loathsome words from John Derbyshire echoing around the blogosphere today, I must say that (a) if Derbyshire is a conservative, I'm not and (b) if this is where NR is going, I'm not. Derbyshire says:

[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don’t want to “bring democracy to Iraq.” I don’t, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples. When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great ferocity.

I've been reading NR for a long time and have always regarded it as a mixed bag. I don't expect to agree with everything all their writers say. But this is the sort of thing that requires one to actively dissociate oneself. Besides, I live in Alabama, which has a population of about four and a half million, of which maybe a half-million are mean, ignorant, and willing to serve up the Derbyshire foreign policy for nothing, albeit not as articulately. Pre-TypePad

About Comments I had forgotten (from a year or so ago when I experimented with Blogger) about the deficiencies of the comment system, the biggest one being that I have to re-publish the blog for comments to appear (not really Blogger's fault if I have the blog on my own server, I guess). I'll have to investigate HaloScan, which is used by a lot of Blogger blogs and which I think/hope does not work that way. In the meantime, I'll re-pub every couple of hours or so when possible. Pre-TypePad

One Cheer for Roy Moore

Roy Moore, running for the Republican nomination for the Alabama governership, was easily defeated last week by incumbent Governor Bob Riley. All the polls had predicted this, so if those were correct then the majority of the state’s citizens were pleased by the defeat. Although he continues to refer to himself as a judge, Moore was deposed from the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a court order to remove from the Supreme Court building a monument quoting and honoring the Ten Commandments and delineating the connection between the laws of man and the laws of God. (See the monument here).Alabama is a conservative and religious state, and so the widespread rejection of Moore’s stand may seem a little surprising. “Conservative” probably trumps “religious” in the citizenry as a whole, though, and if there’s one thing you could probably always count on a large majority of them to disapprove it’s a deliberate defiance of the law. When Moore, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, refused to obey a court order, he was finished. The attorney general at the time, Bill Pryor, himself a firm conservative and a Catholic, was in sympathy with Moore’s views but did not hesitate to set in motion the legal machinery for Moore’s dismissal.I did not want to see Moore become governor of my state. His use of the Commandments smacked of demagoguery, and his insistence on displaying them hardly amounted to a qualification for rule. He strikes me personally as something of an egotist and grandstander, and there’s an off-putting self-righteousness in his face and manner. And like many Alabamians I’ve had more than enough of politicians who give the rest of the country reasons to maintain their prejudice that we’re all morons and/or fanatics. Of course the prejudice is, like most, not without foundation, but I’m not at all sure we’re worse than other states—we’re just more colorfully moronic and fanatical than most of them. But for all his faults Moore was fundamentally in the right, and like many grandstanders he has hurt his cause. No doubt his reading of history tilted inaccurately in an evangelical Protestant direction, but he was clearly right that American Constitutionalism arose in a culture which took for granted the existence of the absolute moral norms of the Ten Commandments. For insisting in an unseemly way on this connection between the laws of man and the laws of God, Moore lost his office and seems to have little prospect of reviving his political career. Moore created a controversy which was at bottom an attempt to force into public consciousness and public debate the question which almost all our politicians and opinion-makers wish to avoid: what, in the end, is the foundation of social order? Either there are absolute rights and wrongs, or there are not. If there are, what are they? If there are not, on what authority does any society declare one thing lawful and another not so? And on what authority does it enforce those declarations?

The conventional answer to these questions is incoherent: there are no absolute moral laws, but there are things one mustn’t do. Up until 1960 or 1970, there was a rough consensus about these, and the lack of a solid foundation for the consensus could be ignored. The abortion question among others shattered that consensus. This was a disagreement which could not be exorcised with the chant of “You’re entitled to your opinion.” There is too much at stake; both sides know it is not a merely private concern. The attempt to sever once and for all the concept of marriage from the concept of family by allowing something called marriage between persons of the same sex is similarly intractable: there is no way to resolve the dispute without one side or the other losing in a definitive way, and finding itself trapped in a society which is hostile to it.

Moore’s essential insight, however badly or contentiously he may have framed and pursued it, was that the refusal to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Constitution is, in the end, an attack on the Constitution itself. In order to avoid acknowledging this dependency, doctrinaire secularism must attack not the specific teachings of the Ten Commandments but their authority, which means in practice, and for now, the denial of the very concept of a transcendent authority.

No society can exist indefinitely without some sort of consensus on fundamental questions, because these determine the way people behave toward each other. In the absence of a moral law to which appeal can be made, the ultimate arbiter is the force of the state. And the state which is at bottom lawless and entirely the tool of a dominant faction will in time prove a much more severe master than any Alabama fundamentalist.

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This was the first Galaxie 500 album I heard, which was in a way unfortunate, because its opening song, “Fourth of July,” is, to my taste, the best thing they ever did, and also rather different from most of their other work. I was disappointed with the rest of this album, and disappointed with their other two studio albums (not that I didn’t like them, but they were never quite as good as I hoped they would be). Galaxie 500 would have been a much better band if they had bothered to write more interesting and substantial lyrics, not to mention a more varied group of songs. Sometimes you think you’re hearing the same song over and over: it starts with a slowly strummed clean electric guitar, the bass and drums come in, the slightly whiny unhappy-sounding vocal sings sketchy mundane words.

The obvious place to start in describing Galaxie 500’s music is the more sedate and somber side of the Velvet Underground. But in contrast to the VU’s vision of crazed urban degenerates, Galaxie 500 seems to come from a world of dispirited preppies. If you basically like their sound, which I do, you can keep listening and the songs will grow on you. Otherwise, go to your eMusic account (or iTunes if you must), and get “Fourth of July” and the cover of Yoko Ono’s “Listen the Snow is Falling” which is the other high point of this album, and you’ll two killer tracks which are the very best of the group. Or, if you want to be a bit more adventurous, get the best-of compilation The Portable Galaxie 500.

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The Hand of Rand

A discussion on Dawn Eden’s blog the other day about the problem of sex-selection abortion struck a note that I haven’t heard before. The intial post was a story about the prevalence of this practice in India, and a challenge to the refusal of pro-choice feminists to condemn it. In response, one of them attempted to explain that the refusal to “condemn…the choices women in countries like India and China have made” is a recognition of the fact that the choice to abort female babies is, in a society which devalues women, “rational.” The conditions which lead to that calculation are deplorable, but not the decision itself, which is a reasonable response to the conditions.

I was more than a bit shocked at that. To excuse a wrong as having been done out of desperation is not the same thing as to call it rational. And this “rational” choice was contrasted with the “sexist” choice which the same act on the part of an American would constitute, and which would be worthy of condemnation. At first glance the capriciousness of this view is striking: a woman who decides to abort her female child for economic reasons is not to be condemned, but a woman who does the same because she would prefer for some personal reason to have a male child is guilty of sexism and has done something deplorable. If the woman’s choice is sovereign in any case, as the feminists in the discussion all seem to agree, what difference do her motives make, and what right does anyone else have to judge them?

More important, though, is the implicit definition of “rational”: not “in accord with right reason” but “in accord with material self-interest.” It was surprising to me to hear this coming from the political and cultural left. It’s the sort of thing that one expects from the libertarian right, and specifically from those influenced by Ayn Rand. I don’t know that the commenter had Rand’s concept of “rational self-interest” in mind, but his or her use of the term “rational” is certainly reminiscent of it.

I’ve suspected for a long time that the influence of Ayn Rand on American life and thought is far greater than is generally acknowledged or understood. Most intellectuals don’t like her, don’t take her very seriously, and find her more than a bit ridiculous. Leftists have obvious and immediate reasons to hate her gospel of self-interested capitalism, and National Review (or at least Whittaker Chambers) attempted to excommunicate her from the conservative movement in the 1950s, although her anti-Communism as well as the conservative alliance with libertarianism kept that effort from really sticking.

But somebody reads her. In 1991 a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month club found Atlas Shrugged to be second in influence only to the Bible in the U.S. As of this writing paperback editions of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are in the top 1000 sellers at Amazon.com (at #585 and #644 respectively, with other editions selling respectably). The Penguin edition of War and Peace—I picked it thinking its sales are less likely to be affected by movie tie-ins and mandatory student purchases—is currently at #5,750.

It’s hard to imagine a neater and quicker summation of the confused currents of thought running through the popular mind (the American mind, anyway). One wonders how many of those surveyed put both books near the top.

My wife’s brother has been in the hospital for the past two weeks, perhaps terminally ill, almost helpless, disoriented, and depressed. His life ceased to be materially productive some years ago and he has not made a great deal of effort to resist and counter the effects of the type 1 diabetes that has dogged his life since he was four and is causing his slow physical deterioration. It’s hard to say whether he has even been enjoying his existence for the past couple of years. He has no wife or children; his only living relatives are three siblings and several cousins. He has few interests. He is costing himself, the government (Medicaid), the electrician’s union (a pension from his working days), and, indirectly, his siblings a considerable amount of money.

My wife is running herself ragged trying to do whatever she can for him while still taking care of all her other obligations. She spends several hours a day at the hospital, trying to encourage him and make him comfortable, talking to the doctors and nurses about his condition in search of anything that might help him improve. He is only alive today because she donated a kidney to him ten years ago. He doesn’t seem terribly appreciative of any of this.

Material self-interest plays no part whatever in her actions. I don’t think she has in fact given her reasons a great deal of thought: she is simply doing what she believes one should do in this circumstance, and her conscience would let her do no less. To paraphrase Sam Spade’s famous speech from The Maltese Falcon, when your brother is sick you’re supposed to take care of him.

Rational self-interest would offer a simple solution to this problem: it would instruct her either to abandon her brother or arrange for what is probably the process of his dying to proceed more speedily to its goal. God save both her and her brother from rational self-interest, and God save the U.S.A.

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This is another album from the ‘70s that I missed at the time. It attracted quite a lot of attention and is now regarded as something of a landmark, which I’d have to say seems justified, although I don’t know a lot about the jazz-rock fusion genre. Landmark or whatever you want to call it, it certainly made John McLaughlin a household name (well, you know what I mean) and it’s an extremely impressive piece of work. For me it’s the sort of thing that produces more amazement at the virtuosity than emotional engagement.. You have five extremely skilled musicians playing with mind-boggling speed and precision, and with a kind of surging energy that makes the title seem appropriate—they often seem to be approaching some sort of ecstacy. “High-energy” was a favored term in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and as I remember was mostly applied to loud, crude (in every sense), frantic rock bands who were in the end monotonous. But Mahavishnu’s energy is real and focused.

They aren’t always saying a whole lot. McLaughlin in particular sometimes seems to be engaged in speed for the sake of speed, and his playing in the acoustic accompaniment to the one slow lyrical piece, “A Lotus on Irish Streams,” is harsh, bordering on ugly at times. I found myself wishing they had let violinist Jerry Goodman solo more, as his contributions, when not deformed by very ill-advised effects that work well on the electric guitar but sound silly on the violin, provide some of the album’s best moments. Likewise for Jan Hammer’s electric piano—the more he uses effects, especially whatever it is that makes that cartoonish sproingy sound, the more dated and irrelevant he sounds. But these are relatively small flaws in a very rich album.

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Speed Bumps and the End of Civilization

There’s a lot one could say about the publication by National Review of a list of what they consider to be the top fifty conservative pop songs. I find this in general to be an odd thing to do, but one thing that struck me as significant was the inclusion of the Sammy Hagar song “I Can’t Drive 55” (lyrics here). I’ve only heard it once or twice but it struck me as not much more than an anthem for louts in cars. I can’t see anything conservative about it at all. If any ideological significance can be extracted from it, surely it’s a fairly pure libertarianism: I see no hint whatsoever in the lyrics that the driver of a car recognizes any obligation to other people, although maybe it’s a concession to civil order on Hagar’s part that he’s willing to surrender his license rather than head for the hills to prepare an armed resistance.

I consider a more conservative view on driving practices to have been captured in a cartoon I saw some time ago—two men are sitting in hell, and one says to the other something like (I’m paraphrasing from memory): “Pulling up behind people and flashing my headlights at them. What about you?”

My local paper regularly publishes letters and phone calls from people who are outraged that speed bumps (or breakers, or lumps, or tables, or traffic circles, as the various obstructions are called) have appeared on a street where they had not previously been. My sympathy is all with the residents of the street, not the drivers. I assume that anyone outraged enough by a speed breaker to complain about it at length to the paper is one of those who caused the obstacle to be needed in the first place. Usually the street involved is a residential one that has gotten adopted as a short cut which avoids bigger and more congested ones. This would be only annoying if the short-cutters were well behaved, but inevitably a number of them believe themselves entitled to drive forty or fifty miles an hour where the posted limit is twenty-five or thirty, and are not shy about showing their impatience and disregard for anything that might slow them down.

So the people who live on the street find their lives and those of their children and pets at risk from the reckless drivers, and they ask the city to put in speed breakers. I figure they have to be pretty concerned and unhappy to ask for something which is, after all, going to be a big inconvenience for them, too.

I suppose it’s possible that the behavior of the drivers hasn’t really changed much in recent years, and it’s just that the residents are pushing back more vigorously. I wonder the same thing about the phenomenon of people running red lights. Every day upon leaving work I have to pull out into a major street from a small side street. There’s a light there, but I know better than to assume that green means, unqualifiedly, “go.” At least once a week someone runs the light, and I don’t mean that the car just slips by as the yellow turns to red, but that it accelerates from a block away at the first sight of yellow and flies through the intersection well after the light has turned green for me. Have people always done this so regularly and with such abandon? I have no statistics upon which to decide the question, but I certainly seem to see it more often.

If they really are increasing, these bad habits are small signs of a bigger decay, of increasing indifference to the rights of others, the common good, and for that matter simple courtesy. So goes the devolution of liberty, as intolerable behavior requires the imposition of more and pettier rules upon matters which used to be managed acceptably by a general presumption of self-restraint.

Pre-TypePad

I started doing this partly as a means of getting a grip on the overwhelming amount of music I've accumulated over the past several years, and partly just because I enjoy it. The accumulation is mainly a result of subscribing to eMusic, also of the wide range of used CDs available in local stores and at SecondSpin.com, and to a lesser degree the sales at BMG. I have literally more music than I can listen to. In the days when eMusic offered unlimited downloads for $10 per month, I grabbed anything that looked interesting, and sometimes hardly listened to it at all.

My newly adopted practice is to take one recording--one album, to use the old term, one LP or CD--per week, and listen to it and write about it. There's one rule: I have to listen to it at least three times. I find that this is enough to give me a pretty good sense of what I really think of it, time for those works that don't have instant appeal to sink in, and for me to see through those whose appeal is only superficial.

And here is my somewhat idiosyncratic rating system. I feel obliged to strike a blow against the terrible phenomenon of ratings inflation. Most people silly enough to do this sort of rating use a system of five stars (or whatever) and hand out the full complement too often. And when they don't like an album very much at all, they assign it only two stars, or in rare cases one. Why should something you don't like get any stars at all? In memory of my school days, and in signification of my earnestness, I use letter grades, of which, as you know, only four indicate any sort of approval.

A: This is a masterpiece, something nearly perfect. The world at large and I in particular would be worse off without it. I don't plan to give many As.

B: This is a very fine work, a favorite to which I will often return.

C: I like this work but not intensely, or it has some significant defect, or it's idiosyncratic in some way (perhaps it's merely interesting)--for any of these reasons, it's not something I will want to hear very often.

D: It was mildly enjoyable, or at least parts of it were, but I may never listen to it again.

F: I don't like it much at all. I may even hate it. I definitely don't want to hear it again.

Pre-TypePad

I bought this album a year or so ago as a result of having developed an interest in ‘70s progressive rock, a genre which I had disdained when it was current. When I first sampled Red I didn’t think too much of it and thought I would prefer the first two KC albums (this is something like the fifth). But I put it into the cd player in my car at the beginning of the week and didn’t take it out for a full seven days, which is not something I normally do, but this album got under my skin in an unexpected way.

The first song, “Red,” seemed decidedly unimpressive. It’s an instrumental and mainly just a series of angular chugging riffs. I gather it was considered a pretty heavy sound in its day but technology and the quest for sonic-boom-class bottom have allowed the average heavy metal band to far surpass it. The well-I-guess-this-is-okay reaction continued throughout the album. But when it was over I wanted to hear “Red” again. And so it went: a restless and intense mixture of the lyrical and the acerbic, the simple and the avant-garde, and very habit-forming. I probably heard it four or five times through over the course of a week's driving, and I still wasn't tired of it. Again, this is very unusual for me.

Pre-TypePad

Welcome When I began posting my writings at www.lightondarkwater.com I told myself, and went out of my way to tell anyone who bothered to poke around there, that it was not a blog. I had the feeling that a blog would end up dominating my life and intended for LODW to be only a means of making my work available simply and quickly. I have little time for writing and most of it goes into poetry and essays of little interest to the publishing world. So I had decided to forget it (the publishing world) and simply put the stuff online. But now I've given in to the blogging urge. Just as a means of making myself keep at it, I committed myself to writing a sort of weekly column at Light On Dark Water called the Sunday Night Journal. Recently I began, more or less for my own amusement, writing a weekly commentary on music I've been listening to. Blog software will make these weekly updates simpler. Also, I've been maintaining and contributing to the Caelum et Terra blog. C et T has a very definite sensibility which doesn't always match my own, and frequently there's something I want to say that doesn't fit there. Hence this blog. More to come shortly, including the last couple of weeks of music and journal entries. Pre-TypePad

The Hand of Rand

A discussion on Dawn Eden’s blog the other day about the problem of sex-selection abortion struck a note that I haven’t heard before. The intial post was a story about the prevalence of this practice in India, and a challenge to the refusal of pro-choice feminists to condemn it. In response, one of them attempted to explain that the refusal to “condemn…the choices women in countries like India and China have made” is a recognition of the fact that the choice to abort female babies is, in a society which devalues women, “rational.” The conditions which lead to that calculation are deplorable, but not the decision itself, which is a reasonable response to the conditions.

I was more than a bit shocked at that. To excuse a wrong as having been done out of desperation is not the same thing as to call it rational. And this “rational” choice was contrasted with the “sexist” choice which the same act on the part of an American would constitute, and which would be worthy of condemnation. At first glance the capriciousness of this view is striking: a woman who decides to abort her female child for economic reasons is not to be condemned, but a woman who does the same because she would prefer for some personal reason to have a male child is guilty of sexism and has done something deplorable. If the woman’s choice is sovereign in any case, as the feminists in the discussion all seem to agree, what difference do her motives make, and what right does anyone else have to judge them?

More important, though, is the implicit definition of “rational”: not “in accord with right reason” but “in accord with material self-interest.” It was surprising to me to hear this coming from the political and cultural left. It’s the sort of thing that one expects from the libertarian right, and specifically from those influenced by Ayn Rand. I don’t know that the commenter had Rand’s concept of “rational self-interest” in mind, but his or her use of the term “rational” is certainly reminiscent of it.

I’ve suspected for a long time that the influence of Ayn Rand on American life and thought is far greater than is generally acknowledged or understood. Most intellectuals don’t like her, don’t take her very seriously, and find her more than a bit ridiculous. Leftists have obvious and immediate reasons to hate her gospel of self-interested capitalism, and National Review (or at least Whittaker Chambers) attempted to excommunicate her from the conservative movement in the 1950s, although her anti-Communism as well as the conservative alliance with libertarianism kept that effort from really sticking.

But somebody reads her. In 1991 a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month club found Atlas Shrugged to be second in influence only to the Bible in the U.S. As of this writing paperback editions of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are in the top 1000 sellers at Amazon.com (at #585 and #644 respectively, with other editions selling respectably). The Penguin edition of War and Peace—I picked it thinking its sales are less likely to be affected by movie tie-ins and mandatory student purchases—is currently at #5,750.

It’s hard to imagine a neater and quicker summation of the confused currents of thought running through the popular mind (the American mind, anyway). One wonders how many of those surveyed put both books near the top.

My wife’s brother has been in the hospital for the past two weeks, perhaps terminally ill, almost helpless, disoriented, and depressed. His life ceased to be materially productive some years ago and he has not made a great deal of effort to resist and counter the effects of the type 1 diabetes that has dogged his life since he was four and is causing his slow physical deterioration. It’s hard to say whether he has even been enjoying his existence for the past couple of years. He has no wife or children; his only living relatives are three siblings and several cousins. He has few interests. He is costing himself, the government (Medicaid), the electrician’s union (a pension from his working days), and, indirectly, his siblings a considerable amount of money.

My wife is running herself ragged trying to do whatever she can for him while still taking care of all her other obligations. She spends several hours a day at the hospital, trying to encourage him and make him comfortable, talking to the doctors and nurses about his condition in search of anything that might help him improve. He is only alive today because she donated a kidney to him ten years ago. He doesn’t seem terribly appreciative of any of this.

Material self-interest plays no part whatever in her actions. I don’t think she has in fact given her reasons a great deal of thought: she is simply doing what she believes one should do in this circumstance, and her conscience would let her do no less. To paraphrase Sam Spade’s famous speech from The Maltese Falcon, when your brother is sick you’re supposed to take care of him.

Rational self-interest would offer a simple solution to this problem: it would instruct her either to abandon her brother or arrange for what is probably the process of his dying to proceed more speedily to its goal. God save both her and her brother from rational self-interest, and God save the U.S.A.