Heartache With Hard Work

Posit the following: Joe Lieberman, in his heart of hearts, supports health care reform because it is good for people, and it conforms with his general view of the world. Also, Joe Lieberman is doing everything in his power to be a total ass because he hates liberals and wants to make them squirm.

The general theory on Lieberman for the past month or two is that however much the former influences him, it is a lot less significance than the latter. Thus, Joe Lieberman goes after the public option because his hatred of liberals wins out over his desire to do good. He even admits his arguments about the public option are bunk but refuses to budge. Many (including me) have interpreted this as him being purely vindictive, risking the health care of millions for the sake of a stupid crusade.

However, Joe now seems to be perfectly willing to support this Medicare expansion as the compromise for removing the public option. Opinion among those who know a lot about these issues is divided, but a lot of folks think that this may actually prove to be better than any public option that ever had a realistic chance of getting out of the Senate (even in a world without Lieberman).

I don’t want to assign good motivations to a jerk like Lieberman if they’re not warranted, but is there even the smallest chance that his machinations are designed to allow him to have his cake and eat it too? He gets to infuriate the left – who have somewhat strangely decided that the public option is the only thing that matters in the health care bill – but potentially support a ‘compromise’ that does as much for the actual goals of health care reform as anything else that’s on the table.

I’m not saying that’s definitely what’s happening, but it’s a thought which at least makes some sense. It doesn’t put Lieberman in particularly good light, but it makes him seem a least a little bit less horrible.

Thoughts?

I’ve been writing all day about the social contract, so I head here for a quick break.

– To accompany me while writing, I listened to the entire Beatles catalog yesterday, chronologically. Yep, even “You Know My Name” and “Little Child.” Not that this is news or anything, but they were a really, really good band. For more on The Beatles, check out my project ranking all of their songs from worst to first.

– My friend Josh has started a Bruce Springsteen blog. In the spirit of my Beatles list, I’m going to encourage him to rank all of Bruce’s songs. Check it out (and vote in the poll for best album where right now The Wild, the Innocent… is bizarrely in the lead).

– Everyone loves a good Okkervil River live track, right? I always found “A Stone” to be a little bit lightweight until I heard it live. It opened up a whole new world for me and now I can’t even imagine being unmoved by this song.

A Stone – Okkervil River (September 10, 2007, Neumo’s – Seattle)

No time, as always. I’m now into paper-writing mode – trying to put together two approaches to the same question, each of which will hopefully eventually morph into my field statements. Which is to say: I’ve got a lot on my mind.

That said, it’s December and it occurs to me that I’ve failed to review a LOT of my favorite albums for the year. So I’ll try and squeeze in a little bit of time for that here and there when I need a break from thinking about legality and legitimacy.

For now, a review of a couple tracks from upcoming releases (not due until 2010) that I’m pretty excited about.

SDP – The Kissaway Trail

First, there’s this epic track from the Danish band The Kissaway Trail. You may remember their similarly explosive “Smother + Evil = Hurt” from two years ago. This one is a suitable heir – a bit more tightly wound and not quite as irresistibly infectious, but huge and glorious and emphatic nonetheless. I sometimes feel like I’m more or less ‘over’ rock music as such – by which I mean those still walking the path laid down in the aftermath of the late 60s and early 70s. But tracks like this remind me that there are still new things to say and new ways to say them, even in a fairly constrained field. The moment at 5:00 when the sound fades away and you just KNOW that a huge burst of sound is about to hit you is a great example. It’s completely predictable, but somehow it manages to sound fresh and alive.

Sleep Mountain is due out in the spring of 2010.

Walls – Shout Out Louds

The Shout Out Louds are another band with a solid 2007 release that left me hoping they could kick things into the next gear on their follow-up. Our Ill Wills was a bit top-heavy with three or four ridiculously good songs and six or seven solid but mostly unremarkable Cure-inspired tracks. Based on the evidence of “Walls” I’m moderately optimistic. It doesn’t reach anywhere near the heights of “Impossible” or “You Are Dreaming” but it does represent a change in their sound. Things are a lot more restrained – with guitars that chug along a little more methodically, offering a far more substantial backbone. It takes a bit too long for them to get going (the first minute leaves me feeling a bit cold), but once they start to extemporize a little bit things really take off. The solid foundation gives them a lot of leeway for flourishes that pack a major punch.

I’m not always a fan of this move away from swooping expression into a more tightly circumscribed and self-contained sound (as my coming review of the new Tegan and Sara will demonstrate), but I think it really works for them here.

The record is called Work and is due out in February from Merge.

Never Tragic – S

The story of the guy who killed four police officers in Seattle is tragic, for all kinds of reasons. First, the obvious one. There are few things more horrifying than the murder of those tasked with preserving the peace. You don’t have to think the operation of the criminal justice system in general or a lot of cops in particular is just and fair (and believe me, I don’t) to still feel incredibly disconcerted about something like this.

There’s a lot to dislike about the system, but those who serve on the front line are stand-ins for our highest ideals. That the system isn’t designed to actually achieve those goals – and often rewards individual bad behavior by those it employs – doesn’t change that basic fact.

It’s the reason I think the decision to make Mumia a face of the anti-death penalty movement is so insane. I find the death penalty to be completely unjustifiable in any circumstances – but if there WERE any situations where it could be valid, killing a cop would rank pretty close to the top. You’re not going to generate a lot of sympathy for the injustice of capital punishment if you start with Mumia.

But there’s another element to this tragedy, captured in this piece by Jason Zengerle (who I slagged last week, but – as I said then – is usually spot-on):

The fact that the suspected gunman is a convicted felon from Arkansas whose 95-year prison sentence was commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee in 2000 is a tragedy for anyone currently in prison in Arkansas who might hope to one day receive executive clemency. Just consider what happened in Massachusetts after Willie Horton.

It’s the problem of collective action in yet another form. The issue is that the breakdowns are incredibly obvious and horrific – while the routine and everyday elements (where a guy gets clemency and goes on to lead a productive life) aren’t news. In other words, the benefits are below the radar and widely-dispersed (every minute out of prison is a tiny little bit of freedom and life that is granted) while the costs are explicit and violent.

Another example is the recent dust-up over mammograms. The women who die from cancer at 45 are real, tangible, powerful. The millions who suffer in tinier bits from false positives, unnecessary treatments, and so on are hard to sell.

In both of these cases, there is obviously an argument for valuing either side over the other. Just because small gains are dispersed doesn’t make them MORE important than a few big costs. You could obviously make an argument that more suffering is worth it to prevent some deaths.

The problem is just that having a discussion about that sort of thing is almost impossible because of this problem of framing. Our current mechanisms of public reason are often simply incapable of sustaining a debate on these issues. The horrific, the story that bleeds, and so on have almost an automatic trump card. And the result is a lot of suffering that flies below the radar because it doesn’t SEEM exceptional.

Like I said, there’s no “right” answer absent a prior discussion about what sorts of things we want to value, but the way that things get sensationalized is precisely what prevents that debate from ever leaving the ground. And that’s a shame. If we could be confident that there was in fact a good case to be made for some of this stuff, it would be tolerable, but when it prevails based simply on the breakdown of our society’s ability to think about itself…it seems like useless suffering.

And that’s hard to take.

So I’m busy with Thanksgiving and paper-grading and end-of-the-term research and such, but I’m popping back up for a second to ask a very simple question:

Am I the only one who wants to wipe all traces of the “Jingle Bell Rock” off the face of the earth?

I love this time of year, and I even actually like quite a lot of Christmas songs. But that one just makes me want to scream.

Undeserving You – Holy Roman Empire

Scott Lemieux, who I normally agree with on basically everything, makes one of my all-time least favorite arguments regarding the France-Ireland match:

The blame for being eliminated from the World Cup belongs, in its entirety, to the players of the Irish team. They put themselves in the place in which a single bad break could eliminate them by 1)losing the first game and 2)blowing failing to extend a lead in the second game.

This is just boilerplate conservatism laundered through the metaphor of sports. It stems from the idea that individual virtue is the sole basic for distributing goods. It’s not enough to meet the threshold for victory that was established prior to the game – you don’t really deserve to win unless you obliterate your opponent. Doing a sufficient amount to win given the established system gets tossed out the window in favor of individual, subjective judgments about who is truly worthy.

This is really kind of troubling, insofar as it implies that cheating is only bad if it causes material harm to someone worthy. Ireland, in this approach, lost all right to demand justice because they didn’t meet the Lemieux standard for beating the opponent so badly that ref malfeasance couldn’t hurt them. That is the kind of toxic individualism that frames the way our society thinks about things like affirmative action. “We’ve hired three black people which prove we’re not racists – if we didn’t hire someone else it must just be that they didn’t meet our standards.” This amounts to excusing discrimination when it happens against a class – because any particular person can always overcome it by being just a little more exceptional.

You get the exact same argument about the 2000 election. Sure, if Gore had run a ‘better’ campaign he probably could have made it so that the race wasn’t close enough to come down to Florida. But that doesn’t make Bush v. Gore fair.

Effectively, it’s a way of thinking about the world where justice is wholly determined by subjective assessment of who is worthy. It completely forecloses the capacity to allow for nuance: that the CAUSE of the loss was BOTH a failure by Ireland to win the match in regular time AND the mistake made by the referee. Lemieux refuses to see this, insisting that “The blame for being eliminated from the World Cup belongs, in its entirety, to the players of the Irish team.” Of course, a more exceptional performance could have alleviated the ability of Henry and the ref to knock them out. However, even accounting for that, they did what was necessary to go to penalties. That they had this taken from them remains an injustice.

The need to assign blame in absolute terms is nothing more than a way to tell stories such that institutional reforms are never necessary. The individuals involved could always have done things a little bit better, so why mess with the system? Random events are inevitable…what are you gonna do? That’s fatalistic and depressing. Yes, random events are inevitable. If Ireland loses because the ball hit a divot and went in, that’s one thing. But if they go out as the direct product of an act in VIOLATION of the rules, it’s entirely different.

Some mistakes are inevitable. But correctable mistakes should be corrected.

So health care has passed yet another hurdle. On a straight party-line vote, it is now available to be debated in the Senate. I just want people to remember three things in a few weeks when the Republicans are blanketing the media with complaints about things ‘moving too quickly’ and how they would be willing to work with the Democrats if they just had some more time to consider things.

1. It’s just a tactic, and not a very good one.

2. They voted today in a unified block to PREVENT health care from being debated. Yes, the madness of the filibuster means that the tool that is apparently popular for its ability to ensure debates can also be used to attempt to prevent those debates from happening.

3. Mitch McConnell made very clear today just in case you hadn’t already figured this out, when he said: “The battle has just begun. We are going to do everything and anything we can to prevent this measure from becoming law.” That is their goal. Any media outlet who reports on this story as if there were two sides who have an interest in seeing health care reform pass is choosing to lend legitimacy to one side in this fight.

On a different note, this is yet another record for how far health care reform has progressed. There are still quite a few things yet to clear – and things are looking pretty bad again for the public option – but every time we cross another one of these lines, we are just that little bit closer to making a serious difference in the lives of millions of people.

So that’s good.

The Cliffs of Insanity – Mark Knopfler (from the Princess Bridge soundtrack)

Today’s winner in the ‘huh, are you serious?’ category is Jason Zengerle at The New Republic (who I normally quite like):

I was pretty shocked by this new poll that found that 52 percent of Republican voters think ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Obama. I wanted to get some perspective, though, so I looked for polls that assessed voters’ feelings about the 2000 elections. I figured that, even with hanging chads and all, fewer Democratic voters would have considered Bush illegitimate back then than those Republicans who now feel that way about Obama. So I was pretty shocked to find this CBS Poll from January ’01, which found that 76 percent of Democrats didn’t consider Bush the legitimate winner of the 2000 election. Now, granted, this poll was taken only a few months after the Florida fiasco–which, unlike ACORN, was actually real, not to mention fresh–but still . . . 76 percent!

I’ll only say two things about this.

First, Gore actually, you know, DID win the election. Not just in a ‘he received substantially more votes’ sense (although he did, of course) but also in the sense that he almost certainly received more votes in Florida. Add in the fact that a ‘legitimate’ winner to most people means that the process by which the winner was decided ought to be fair and objective (not de facto determined by a set of 9 un-elected people serving for life making a nakedly political decision), and I’m not sure how you could with a straight face argue that Bush was the ‘legitimate winner of the 2000 election.’

Second, it’s not just that they think Obama stole the election. It’s not that they think he managed to rig hundreds of polls to all perfectly correlate with the eventual margin of victory. It’s not even that they think he stole something on the order of seven million votes. It’s that they think ACORN was the mechanism by which he did this. ACORN. I mean, ACORN.

I’m going to repeat it one more time, just to emphasize how absolutely insane this is. Fifty-two percent of polled Republicans…claimed that ACORN…stole the election. ACORN!

Sometimes I just don’t even know what to say.

ACORN…

Dancing in a Minefield – Plushgun

There’s a grand tradition of sleek electro-pop with a slightly overwrought sense of the emotional that was re-popularized by The Postal Service in the early part of the decade, but really has its roots back in the 80s.

Plushgun is yet another fine entry into that tradition. When everything works on their debut Pins and Panzers, you get delightful, airy, energetic pop hooks and a sense of good feeling about the world at large.

By far the best example is the opening track “Dancing in a Minefield” which glistens and shines like the very best of the genre. It’s tough work to write a song about empowerment through dancing without veering into the utterly preposterous or the monumentally fey, but they pull it off.

It’s the sort of song that you can’t experience part way. If you try and hold onto your ironic distance, it’ll come off all wrong. Because it asks you to forget your cynicism and well-learned life lessons and return to the place where you truly believed in endless possibility – when it seemed like the only thing you could do was simply stand up and shout ‘no’ at a world filled with people trying to impose their standards, their morality on you.

It’s a reminder for all of us who learned over time that you have to be realistic and pick among bad options that buried within us remains that nobler, stupider, less wise but more vivacious self. And that there may still come times when we have to be willing to take stands even though we can’t win, that empty symbolism is only empty because we let ourselves get defined by the world outside.

Elsewhere, “Let Me Kiss You Now (And I’ll Fade Away)” is a rollicking good time, filled with handclaps and big goofy choruses and “ba da da da, da da da da”s. And then there’s “Just Impolite” which is proably the closest they get to a Postal Service track. It’s big and bold and cute all at the same time – the sort of song that sounds just a tad too precious on the first go-round but you end up going back because it’s just so insistently catchy. And by the fourth or fifth time, you just give in and enjoy the moment for its own sake.

So those are the major successes. But what happens when things don’t work out as well? Answer: pretty much the same, except moreso. The weaker songs still have that same sound (if a bit plinkier and less engaging), but really get into trouble with the lyrics. What sounded heartfelt and gloriously excitable on the better songs loses its luster and you’re left realizing that you’re listening to an adult getting all googly-eyed about high school.

To some extent, I’m okay with that. Music doesn’t have to be about who makes it – it’s also about who engages with it. And this is the sort of stuff that’s designed to be heard by an earlier generation. Even more, there’s a fine line between projection – a kind of simpering desire to simply re-engage in the sort of hysterical world-making that we all do when we’re 16 but quickly grow out of – and a far less self-conscious kind of nostalgia. In the latter, you aren’t trying to simply go back, you are trying to keep that part of you alive at least in memory.

You can honor and respect the vivacity of youth without lionizing it. See, for example, the classic John Huges films. At times, that’s precisely the spot that Plushgun finds. In those moments, they are vibrant, cognizant of a sort of deep absurdity in youth but joyful nonetheless.

If they could find that balance on every track, this would be a truly great album. Unfortunately, they don’t, and we’re left instead with an extremely enjoyable, occasionally poignant, and often exhilirating record that is also flawed in some deep ways.

“A Crush to Pass the Time” is, I think, the perfect representation of both of these forces. It’s the median point between schlocky-hyper-sentimentalization and luminous-nostalgia. It’s potentially the most deliberately “80s sounding” of the tracks (even tossing in a Talking Heads name-check), and to fine effect. And yet…you can’t help but imagine the lyrics as the poetry written in a journal by some nerdy guy in high school about a crush he was too nervous to act on.

Pins and Panzers is a good album, and they clearly have the potential in them to make a great album. In order to do so, they probably need to find a way to make music that’s more mature, that deviates from the one-note attitude of commerating youth – but to do so without giving up on their intensity and exuberance.