Like Yourself, Stand Up For What You Believe, Be Righteous

I was reading the essay on the Clash in Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.  No one wrote about rock music better.  I laugh when I read Bangs, and that's a good thing.

But this time, I also saw some good advice for Barack Obama, as he prepared for his final debates with Mitt Romney, and, indeed, maps out a way to improve his connection with the average voter, not just leading up to the November election, but beyond, as he sketches out strategies for his second term.

Bangs loved the Clash.  He didn't have much of a stomach for feebleness.  Like Linda Ronstadt, who Bangs thought was a "mewly mouthed" simper-wimperer.  He didn't have any patience for punks who merely griped either, "sprawling in the muck yodeling about what a drag everything is." He was looking for a band willing to stand for something.  And he found it in the Clash.  Much of what Bangs said about the Clash can serve as a starting point for the Obama campaign as they think about how to sell what they have to offer.

The Republican Party, for all of their loud and forceful celebration of the institution of marriage, and "faith," and the Constitution and the "American spirit," in actuality, like Bangs' misanthropic punks, hates everything. Well, except money.  But they complain perpetually about the country - its character, its laziness, its neediness, its impurity.  But in the end, except for the few hard-core fanatics occupying the fringes, all of this pessimism, this rejection of everything, is a drag.  It's not what brings us into politics.  It's what makes us turn away.  That was Bangs' reaction to much of the early nihilist punk scene - it was dispiriting.

Bangs boiled it down to this:

(a) You can't like people who don't like themselves; and
(b) You gotta like people who stand up for what they believe in, as long as what they believe is
(c) Righteous.

But how do you define righteousness?

Being righteous means you're more or less on the side of the angels, waging Armageddon for the ultimate victory of the forces of Good over the Kingdom of Death, working to enlighten others as to their own possibilities rather than merely sprawling in the muck yodeling about what a drag everything is.

Like his party, Romney deplores Americans, starting with the intolerable forty-seven percent incapable of taking responsibility for their lives, living off the energy and entrepreneurial, wealth-producing gifts of better men. Aside from his uncompromising love of wealth, Romney is incapable of standing up for anything.  A moral and ethical chameleon, he has no core beliefs, adopting any position that might, for pete's sake, help him get elected.  And his appetite for office has no connection to anything righteous.  Protecting wealth is not a righteous cause, but it is his primary public mission.  The glorification of wealth, the impulse to ignore or diminish any other form of human accomplishment, to define success solely as financial achievement, is a practice that only makes sense in the Kingdom of Death.  The messy striving and stumbling and searching that characterizes normal human existence is something Romney has never known.  Yet that is what we do, it is the central feature of our lives, awkward and fearful and troubled as it may be.  That is how we accomplish things.  And I feel okay about that.  Who needs Romney to tell us all of that is insufficient?  That it doesn't count as real success? 

So how can Obama be positioned by some polls to lose to this guy?  His flat performance in the first debate, his professionalism, his sane matter-of-factness, is, for many, uninspiring.  Bangs had always heard that the Clash were vibrant live, wired, electric, yet the first night he saw them they were merely accomplished, professional, talented musicians, playing with skill.  And Bangs was bored by them.  Much of America sees Obama the same way.  They are bored by his professorial manner, his lack of drama, his talent and skill.

Several nights after being disappointed by the Clash, Bangs saw the performance he had been hoping for.  Part of it was the venue - a shit hole, that looked "like an abandoned meatpacking room - large and empty with cold stone floors and stark white walls."  Connecting with the spirit of rock and roll, one that thrives in garages and basement clubs and grimy bars, the Clash gave voice to something vital:

The politics of rock 'n' roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to working shops or to boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom 'n' Daddy's living room, nothing can cancel  the reality of that night in the revivifying flames...

That's what Obama has to find a way to capture.  He has to set aside his professionalism, even if it, like the Clash's, is in the service of righteousness.  He has to conjure those "revivifying flames," pulling people out of their doldrums, restoring them to life, as a first step toward engaging them in the struggle against the forces of the Kingdom of Death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uXRyFo7yPk

Groan

Maybe it's watching the White Sox stumble down the stretch and blow the Central Division crown.  Or seeing the A's rebound from 16 games back at the end of June to overtake the Texas Rangers.  Or watching Barack Obama toss away the first debate.  But sure things don't seem so sure anymore.  Of course Obama will win, he is too far ahead in too many battleground states.  But things seem less comfortably certain now.

What a dispiriting debate performance by Barack Obama.  Three things tear at me.  First, Mitt Romney's performance - which was all smoke and mirrors, lies and evasions - nevertheless seemed more assured and confident than Obama's.  And that changes the dominant narrative of the last few weeks.  Romney's campaign was a campaign in free fall, stumbling from one gaffe to another, a comedy of errors.  Commentators were trying to position just how bad Romney was.  As bad as Dukakis?  Or Dole?  Worse, most seemed to say.  Even reliable Republicans like MSNBC's Joe Scarborough saw a candidate and a campaign as inept and clueless as any he could recall.  Now that reliable storyline, which had been so inescapable, that even Romney's staff had to admit he was a stumbling nincompoop on the campaign trail, has been pushed aside.  Romney is the comeback kid.

Second, as long as he was stumbling, Republican Senate candidates were racing to get away from him. Like survivors who didn't want to get pulled down by the Titanic as it sank, Scott Brown and Tommy Thompson and Linda McMahon were distancing themselves from Romney.  Creating dissent and discord in the Party, putting a wedge between these candidates and true-blue ideological donors and tea party leaning voters.  Brown and Thompson and McMahon's numbers dropped as Romney's did. What now, with Romney back on his feet?

Third, why didn't Obama discuss the auto industry?  In the long discussion about jobs, Obama could have taken back the momentum of the debate.  Here's what he needed to say.  Romney wanted the auto industry to fail.  As a captain of the investment class, Romney views the world as a simple landscape of winners and losers.  You bet on the winners, and cut your losses on the losers.  Walk away from them.    That's how Romney saw the auto industry, and that's how he viewed home-owners underwater on their mortgages.  Losers.  Walk away.  But that's not how responsible public officials should see things.  Unless you are the most rigid Randian Objectivist, public officials seek to mediate the impact of business cycles, cushion the fall, provide aid.  That's just what Obama did when the auto industry was teetering on the edge of collapse.  He engineered aid, and saved the industry, and all the jobs it provides.  General Motors is alive because of that.  Why didn't Obama tell that story?

Political Order in Changing Societies

The cluelessness of Republican neo-cons  - and Mitt Romney, whose foreign policy team is staffed by Bush-era neo-cons - never fails to amaze me.  In the wake of Barack Obama's speech at the U.N., Charles Krauthammer has predictably pouted that Obama groveled and pleaded to the U.N. General Assembly, asking the rest of the world to treat us "nicely." Krauthammer, like Romney and the rest of the Republican foreign policy establishment, would prefer a more muscular response.  They ask: are we or are we not a superpower? If we are, then let's act like it.  Put aside mamby-pamby responses like foreign aid, and march in there, instead, like a nation that knows how to land a punch.

Or something.  It isn't clear exactly what Krauthammer would do.  The war in Iraq, the great campaign of modern Republican neo-conservative thought, was designed to show our capability to use our military to replace leaders we didn't like, and to intervene in Middle Eastern politics in muscular, assertive ways that better served our interests.  That didn't go so well.  With that disaster behind them, neo-cons like Krauthammer get a little clammy and quivery when it comes time to map out alternatives to Obama's foreign policy; quick to criticize it, they can't really offer anything in its place.

As I said in a previous post, Obama is clearly mapping out a foreign policy response to the Arab Spring that is designed to support the emergence of civil society and democratic institutions.  In an address to the Group of 8, Hillary Clinton was specific:

The recent riots and protests throughout the region have brought the challenge of transition into sharp relief.  Extremists are clearly determined to hijack these wars and revolutions to further their agendas and ideology, so our partnership must empower those who would see their nations emerge as true democracies.

This perspective isn't new, and it hasn't always been viewed as a sign of weakness or liberal limp-wristedness that we would use foreign policy and international aid to assist countries in their transition to democracy.  

One of the most influential foreign policy books of the late 1960s was Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies.  Huntington was an influential Harvard political scientist, whose views were more conservative than his peers'. In Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington argued:

Most later modernizing countries lack traditional political institutions capable of successful adaptation to the needs of the modern state.  Hence minimizing the likelihood of political instability resulting from the expansion of political consciousness and involvement requires the creation of political institutions, i.e., political parties, early in the process of modernization.

This seems hard to argue with, although I think it makes sense to expand the focus beyond parties, to include other organizations and mediating forces common to contemporary politics.  The goal should be to develop civil society, the institutionalized network of groups that take grievances and political desires and refashion them into attainable agendas.  Huntington captures this idea elsewhere in the book:

Political modernization involves the expansion of political consciousness to new social groups and the mobilization of these groups into politics.  Political development involves the creation of political institutions sufficiently adaptable, complex, autonomous, and coherent to absorb and order the participation of these new groups and to promote social and economic change in the society.

Again, exactly right.  What Huntington got wrong was his insistence that our policy should be to aid the military in democratizing countries as a way of creating order during the transition.  As we saw throughout the southern cone of South America through the 1960s and 1970s, once given the keys to the palace, the military is reluctant to give them up.  Huntington's views, like those of many in his generation, were shaped by his fear of communist expansion.  In his view, communists possessed many of the attributes political parties needed to succeed in the transitional period leading to wider mass political participation.  They had a temporary advantage. The military, as the only "modern" institution in these developing societies, could protect and cultivate less radical political parties, while suppressing the communists long enough to allow more acceptable alternatives to mature.  I think it should go without saying, any U.S. approach to the Arab Spring formulated along these assumptions would be doomed to failure.

Romney's approach, if we take the effort to try to discern one from the fog of his imprecision and evasion, is equally misguided.  At his recent address at the Clinton Global Initiative, Romney argued for replacing American foreign aid strategies with a new effort to funnel money to "innovators" and "entrepreneurs."  Like his view of domestic policy, Romney seems to believe the only problem in Egypt and Libya is that we don't drop enough money into the laps of the wealthy.  Huntington, himself, argued against this simplistic vision.  Countries aren't unstable because they are poor, they become unstable as they become wealthier and more developed.  One thing actors fight over in unstable, transitional societies is the growing inequality of wealth.  And, again wearing his anti-communist lenses, Huntington sees this as formidable challenge.  By focusing on inequality, radical voices gain an advantage in societies with vast gaps in income.  In a Romney presidency, where we repurpose our foreign aid machinery to drop bags of cash into the hands of foreign plutocrats, we would see growing instability as the masses struggle to find political solutions without the benefit of successfully institutionalized parties and electoral systems.  It seems clear that poverty and poor educational systems and economic backwardness creates misery and desperation in some Arab countries.  But the solution isn't to make the wealthy richer.  The solution is to build political institutions capable of giving a voice to all across the political spectrum, in ways that allow productive conversations about policy options.  How we respond to the Arab Spring opens up an opportunity to create policy models we can put in place elsewhere, for example, in responding to the upcoming challenges we will certainly see in Africa over the next few years. 

Update: For an additional comment on Romney's incomprehensible Foreign policy views, read Roger Cohen's recent column from the New York Times. 

The Arab Spring and our lingering hangover

As everyone knows by now, with snickering glee, Mitt Romney rushed to the microphones to blame Barack Obama for the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi and the death of American Ambassador Chris Stevens.  The initial reaction to Romney's opportunistic attack was swift and condemning.  The media and even members of Romney's own party cringed and criticized Romney.

But now, a new wave of commentary has begun to wonder if Obama did, in fact, fail in some way.  That, through a mishandling of the Arab Spring, Obama, without intending to, laid a foundation for the violence in Benghazi and Cairo.    In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly today, Obama's begins to provide an answer, and that answer, while incomplete, for obvious political and diplomatic reasons, is worth paying attention to.  Obama said:

(T)here will be huge challenges to come with a transition to democracy, I am convinced that ultimately government of the people, by the people, and for the people is more likely to bring about the stability, prosperity, and individual opportunity that serve as a basis for peace in our world....And yet the turmoil of recent weeks reminds us that the path to democracy does not end with the casting of a ballot...That brand of politics -- one that pits East against West, and South against North, Muslims against Christians and Hindu and Jews -- can’t deliver on the promise of freedom. To the youth, it offers only false hope. Burning an American flag does nothing to provide a child an education. Smashing apart a restaurant does not fill an empty stomach. Attacking an embassy won’t create a single job. That brand of politics only makes it harder to achieve what we must do together: educating our children, and creating the opportunities that they deserve; protecting human rights, and extending democracy’s promise. 

What Obama doesn't unpack with care is that this type of politics almost always follows a transition to democracy, and the proper reaction to it isn't disengagement, or knee-jerk defensive posturing, but stepping forward to help build institutions and civil society.   

Jack Snyder, a political scientist at Columbia University, has argued with eloquence and effective evidence that new democracies often produce violence, rather than harmony, at least in the span of their initial, difficult years.  As Snyder phrases it:

(U)nder conditions of incipient democratization, the increased openness of public debate often fosters nationalist mythmaking and ethnic conflict because opportunistic governmental and nongovernmental elites exploit partial monopolies of supply, segmented demand, and the weakness of regulatory institutions in the marketplace of ideas.

In other words, politicians, seeking votes from anxious and inexperienced voters, choose to play on the passions and fears of the population, to exaggerate and exploit divisions between groups.  To build electoral majorities, unprincipled political elites position themselves as protectors of a way of life, a set of cultural traditions, that, in their self-serving narrative, are portrayed as threatened by political opponents.  Examples are everywhere.  In 1995, as Yugoslavia came apart, Serbian politicians seized on economic crisis and political uncertainty to promote the ethnic scapegoating of Bosnian Muslims and Croatians. One year before, in 1994, Hutus in Rwanda, faced with the prospect of democratizing reforms, initiated a genocidal campaign that killed 800,000 Rwandans.

The Arusha Accords in August 1993 brought an agreement for peace between warring factions – mainly Hutus and Tutsis - in Rwanda. The agreement created the promise of a new, open competitive political system with free elections.  It also provided for the return of Rwandan expatriates in neighboring countries.

These two developments threatened to overturn the political rule of the ruling Hutu political elite. The Hutu government was corrupt; its rule was based on the distribution of benefits to political mediators who rallied support in the rank-and-file. Much like today's Republican Party.  The Hutu leadership held no genuine ideals. If political competition in the new landscape mapped out by the peace accords was based on ideals and the redemption of politics, the ruling elites were doomed. To survive, they had to shift the terms of debate to identity and authenticity: Who was more genuinely "Rwandan?" Who was most authentically "like" the great majority of the population?  This meant creating a link between Hutu identity and the "authenticity" of Rwandaness. This was the origin of Hutu Power. The state and its allies in civil society converted all types of social institutions - local government, churches, soccer clubs, radio stations, and so forth - into outlets for mobilizing support for Hutu Power, which was actually designed to be a force for preserving the rule of the existing, narrowly-constituted political leadership.

What this history, and many other examples, should show us is that democracy, when new, is tumultuous and violent, and unpredictable.  We shouldn't be surprised that the Arab Spring has brought with it a Summer, Autumn, and, very likely, Winter of discontent.  Our response should be an international aid campaign, designed to build new political institutions, civility, and new expectations about what politics should aim to achieve.  

The Modern Dance

Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance is a great album few have heard. When it was first released, on Mercury’s punk imprint, Blank records, it sold about 10,000 units. Van Halen’s debut album, released the same month as The Modern Dance, sold 10 million copies.1

No one who worked on the album expected any other outcome. This wasn’t music made to capture the marketplace. It wasn’t produced by Ted Templeman in a state‐of‐the‐art Los Angeles studio. It was recorded in a studio in Cleveland, by musicians who had been reassembled from the remains of bands that had played Cleveland for years. Of course, that doesn’t mean the people who recorded the album didn’t know what they were doing. The band was clearly immersed in all kinds of rock and roll, throwing bits of surf guitar, a little Velvets, along with the Stooges and Zappaesque experimentalism into the blender. Ken Hamann, who ran Suma Studio, and had built it with his own hands, had produced the James Gang, Grand Funk Railroad, even Wild Cherry. But Pere Ubu’s long relationship with Hamann (and later his son Paul) wasn’t a result of commercial calculation. It was chance. Pere Ubu had taken an earlier project – their self‐produced single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo – to Hamann’s Suma Studios to cut a master tape that could be used to produce 45s. New to the process of recording and making records, Pere Ubu found their way to a studio, and returned to it when it came time to make an LP. In Cleveland, a city on the slide, where options were few, you grabbed on to musicians and opportunities as chance permitted, and you did what you did without too much calculation, guided by your gut.

Like Patti Smith’s Horses, another album that heralded the arrival of punk, The Modern Dance was a product of its cultural influences. But for Smith, culture meant art – the poetry, visual art, and music that surrounded and sustained her. For Pere Ubu, what I mean by culture is something very different. Culture is history, the accumulation of all we do, or perhaps, our understanding of history and its consequences. We don’t make history, as much as we respond to it, are shaped by it, adapt to it. Cleveland by the 1970s was a city that had been discarded, tossed aside by the forward march of commerce and capitalism. Two hundred thousand manufacturing jobs were lost, the city was crumbling, and hopelessness and a sense of isolation were the inevitable consequences.

Pere Ubu, and the bands that made up the scene they were part of, performed a soundtrack for the fall down the dark abyss. The thing that made Pere Ubu different, perhaps, was the sense they brought with them that Cleveland, this dark place, populated by glassy‐eyed losers, was an abandoned amusement park. Carnival music, just audible over the clanking of old machinery, still played at the edge of our senses. A lot has been written about the grit and grim pessimism of the downtown art scene that produced New York’s punk rock explosion. But Cleveland was an altogether darker place. Patti Smith might have followed her muse down the rabbit hole, but Pere Ubu was following its neighbors down the drain. Although the media celebrated the heroin‐fueled darkness of punk‐era New York, in truth, New York remained a place full of opportunity. In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1978, coincidentally right in the middle of the punk rock moment, Dylan observed this about creating non‐mainstream art in New York:

“Mass communication killed it. It turned into one big carnival side show…. The atmosphere changed from one of creativity and isolation to one where the attention would be turned more to the show. People were reading about themselves and believing it.”2

 

And what was true of folk musicians in 1962 was true of punk rockers in 1975. In New York, the media was always watching, and reporting, and bands began to believe what they read about themselves, and shape‐shifted to fit the media accounts. In Cleveland, isolation allowed a type of creative freedom. Bands could absorb what they heard, but practiced their own art in private, without mainstream media reporting on it. This was true, at least, for years, when the essential DNA of Pere Ubu’s sound was mapped out.

Maybe it was the sense that everything was coming to an end, that someone would be by soon to turn the lights off, and shut down the few machines that still spit out widgets. Pere Ubu’s story seems strangely compressed, turning out their post‐punk debut at about the time everyone else was just getting started with punk. Pere Ubu was born from the ashes of Rocket From the Tombs, maybe the world’s first punk band, if you don’t consider Iggy and the Stooges punk, or think of the New York Dolls as glam. Rocket From the Tombs debuted in 1974, the same year the Ramones first took the stage. In 1975, a full year before the Ramones recorded their first album, Rocket From the Tombs recorded some crudely engineered rehearsals, which weren’t released at the time, but included 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, which would be Pere Ubu’s first single, released just months after Rocket From the Tombs splintered (Gene O'Connor aka Cheetah Chrome would go on to start the Dead Boys)3. 

That single, and the singles that followed (Final Solution and Street Waves) were punk, by almost any definition you might choose. Final Solution, the second single, also a remnant from the Rocket From the Tombs period, in particular still felt a part of the punk era, missing Allen Ravenstine’s characteristically queer electronics.

But once you dropped the needle on The Modern Dance you knew you were in another era. The album starts with a distracting buzz, feedback and electronics, and even after Tom Herman’s guitar riff jumps in, momentarily reassuring you that this is, after all, rock and roll, the electronic howl just won’t go entirely away. That first song, Non‐alignment Pact, has more in common with Suicide and This Heat and The Pop Group than with the Ramones. Pere Ubu was No Wave before there was No Wave. Post‐punk before there was post‐punk. The album was released just a month after the Sex Pistols last concert in San Francisco, before Public Image Limited and Joy Division mapped out the blueprint for post‐punk.

Yet there it was. The ominous darkness, the blending of genres, the elevation of synthesizers to the center of the music, everything that we, perhaps too carelessly, associate with the post‐punk aesthetic. So how did that happen? 

My view is that Pere Ubu benefited from something that Cleveland, and its rusting neighbor Akron, offered that New York, Los Angeles and London couldn’t: the promise of failure. The near certainty that anything you did, any music you recorded, would be heard by almost no one, and certainly no one with any influence or interest to market it to the wider world. Although Mercury, bizarrely, signed Pere Ubu as the first artist on their punk rock subsidiary – never getting the memo that the band had moved on – and Stiff would show up later to release a compilation of Akron bands, no one in Cleveland in the mid‐seventies could have had any illusion that record label titans were listening, and planning a strategy for global domination using Pere Ubu, Mirrors, the Electric Eels, and Devo as the talent. This was music made for its own sake, inspired by the setting, but without even the expectation that fellow Clevelanders would listen. Clevelanders were listening to FM juggernaut WMMS, blasting Van Halen while they got high in their Camaros, driving into a weekend of drinking, trying to forget their dead end jobs. 

Pere Ubu wasn’t doing it for the money or the fame. As Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time:

“Say The Modern Dance proves a durable catalogue item, selling not 25,000, but 50,000. That would mean about $20,000 in royalties for a five‐man band. Say that in addition they could net what the Numbers Band (a hard working local Cleveland band) gets in live performance ‐ $35,000 a year. That's a lot of ifs for an annual income of $11,000 per man.”4

That was a best case scenario. Not very rosy. Not why Van Halen got into the business, for example. 

If they weren’t playing for wealth, or album sales, or fame, or girls, they were playing just to play, because they wanted to get what was in their heads out on the vinyl. And that purity is more punk than anything else. The deliberate rawness of many punks, their carefully positioned anger, their nihilistic politics, their sneers, were all a guise, self‐conscious and purposeful. Pere Ubu had none of that. They were authentic precisely because they weren’t rehearsing for their moment in the spotlight, they weren’t assembling a press kit, full of outrageous stunts. If you just consider the title, Non‐alignment Pact sounds like a statement of independence, a “fuck you” to the man, a punk DIY anthem. But the song is about a girl. Like so many songs before it (and since), it is a boy’s confession of the hopelessness of his desire, an admission that the girl he wants is unobtainable. It isn’t punk because it adopts a studied opposition to mass culture. It doesn’t rage against the machine. It’s punk because the band that made it is completely indifferent to mass success. And that indifference, I am arguing, is at least partly explained by where the music came from, a city where no one believed anything good could happen to them.

In sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, I find a compelling description of what happens when cities die.5  Persistent joblessness, caused by the relocation of industry and the resulting collapse of retail businesses and services that serviced the manufacturers and the employees who depended on the manufacturers for their paychecks, resulted in a cascade of social and organizational collapse. Families that can – those with breadwinners with better educations and more marketable and adaptable skills – flee the city, relocating to suburbs to work in new industrial parks or, in the case of Cleveland, move to the sun belt to take jobs in Atlanta and Houston. As families leave, stability providing local institutions shut their doors, as churches and lodges and social clubs lose membership.

The result is a form of social isolation. The unemployed in the city’s inner‐city neighborhoods lose their connection with one another – a function churches and clubs once provided – and, perhaps more centrally to our story, the residents of the city, immersed in its decline, lose touch with any other possible narratives. This story – one of poverty and hopelessness, of irreversible decline – becomes the seemingly inescapable truth of their lives.

In the liner notes to their second single, the fabulous Final Solution, Pere Ubu’s first bassist, Tim Wright, who left before the second album, Dub Housing, to join up with no wavers DNA in New York, wrote:

As the droning in her ears performed its pre‐ordained function as introductory soundtrack, she instinctively knew the future of the mirage forming itself in a blank field. For a second she sensed leaving something behind. Refocussing, she found herself facing a dimly lit shed vibrating with the pulse of internal generators. At the door stood a large man flecked by shards of white light that escaped the shed to annihilation in the overhanging hemisphere of an industrial arc lamp. She followed him inside through a deafening squall of unnamed noises combining their extremities in a miasma of smoke and gases peopled with queer shapes. Humans(?) shuffling about; machines waving their arms. She couldn't tell which was which. Spaces between machines were narrow, each moving part barely missing another. Distracted by a waver in her peripheral vision, she raised her eyes to see giant aluminoid cables where the ceiling should have been, stretching off to infinity, from whence they transmitted Life to the machines. The man shouted incomprehensible explanations, then genuflected to the colossal steel‐spiked stamping machines with cast‐iron flywheels and iron balls that lashed the air with each stamping while immense cogwheels squeaked and groaned, shining black with oil. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she could see men swaying, hypnotized by the revolution of the cogwheels. As always, her gaze returned to where the ceiling should have been, the vast silent cables shielded her from the formless Void.

This, as precisely as anything, captures what Pere Ubu did, and the location where they did it. Cleveland was a vast industrial space, filled with factories and their machines, crowding out the few workers left behind, echoing still with clangs and vibrations. And above, the machinery’s cables, feeding “Life” into the entire operation, obscured the limitless sky, where, if permitted, Clevelanders could have given flight to their hopes, releasing them like balloons into the blue. They could look to the horizon, to destinations beyond the noise and smoke and darkness. But hemmed in by the machinery and the system that feeds it, they couldn’t hope, couldn’t imagine a future. In the song, even though it isn’t about post‐industrial despair, the band too is trapped. Unable to imagine an escape from Cleveland, Pere Ubu shouts incomprehensibly, and pays homage to the “colossal steel‐spiked stamping machines” that litter the industrial landscape, filling their music with unidentifiable groans and clangs and beeps.

That the band did escape, in some measure, especially David Thomas, who takes flight to New York and London, and goes on to play with Richard Thompson and Peter Hammill and Lindsay Cooper and Chris Cutler, is beside the point. That, like stumbling into Suma Studios, was a result of chance, not calculation. As Thomas sings in The Modern Dance:

Watch real close.

Look real fast.

He's in touch. He'll never last.

Cuz our poor boy.

He believes in chance.

He'll never get the modern dance.

Chance is a fickle force. In a city watching all it had built and accumulated crumble, because of bad fortune and forces beyond easy comprehension, chance was an assassin, snatching away your accomplishments, killing hope. But against all likelihood, the band did learn to dance, surviving in an indifferent music industry. Now, almost 35 years later, like the Fall and the Mekons, the band rolls on, accumulating a body of work incomprehensible to many. On recent releases, in fact much of what followed after Mayo Thompson joined the band for their fourth album, The Art of Walking, Pere Ubu has offered sometimes difficult, sometimes appealing art rock, no longer directly referencing the bleak post‐industrial reality of Cleveland. One can recontextualize Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu in the conversation about the origins of punk (and post‐punk), as a group who, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, with the possible exception of the Fall, allows us to follow an arc that travels from punk, to post‐punk, to avant/art rock, through a brief flirtation with commercial relevance, before finally making a return to what feels right, a comfortable late‐period that seems to be composed of everything that went before. Yet, even all these years later, after all that unfolded, The Modern Dance still retains its ability to startle, fascinate, and distract us from our march toward bleak obsolescence. It is an artifact, in a way. A crucial reminder that Pere Ubu took a chance, in a town where fate and circumstances had conspired to bring poverty and dislocation to hundreds of thousands of people, and as a result, we have this remarkable music, and all the music that followed.

Notes

1 This was, after all, the era of the mega‐album. Between 1976 and 1978, Frampton Comes Alive! sold 6 million albums, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours brought in 13 million buyers, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack topped them both by selling 15 million copies (of a two record LP).

2 Ron Rosenbaum, “The Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan,” Playboy (March 1978).

3 The recordings were released, in 2002 by Smog Veil, under the title The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs.

4 Robert Christagau, "A Real New Wave Rolls Out of Ohio,” Village Voice (April 17, 1978).

5 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Meanwhile in Obama's Neighborhood

I love this picture so much. It's my son Jonah.  Who loves baseball more than anything.  At least for the moment.  Trucks and trains and dinosaurs and the Wild Kratts and Harry Potter have come and gone.  Now it's baseball.  For a kindergartener he is pretty good.  Last year in T-ball he batted lead off, it looks like he will again this year, after graduating to little league.  He catches the ball when it is thrown to him.  He has a good swing.  He went 3 for 3 the other day, earning the game ball.

How many kids have been in similar photos - in their baseball uniforms, hair messed up, infield dirt on their hands and arms, loose toothed-grin, holding up the game ball? We went to Cooperstown last summer, and the town was full of little leaguers, and it made the whole experience better. In isolation, the Hall of Fame creates the impression that baseball is a museum artifact, something from our past, played by men, captured in old photos. But when you walk around the streets of the town, and see all the kids in their team uniforms, you know it's a living game, still played by kids, who love it. 

Jonah's team is diverse - kids from different backgrounds, different races and ethnicities, one girl among all the boys.  Their parents show up and cheer, and talk to one another.  Like Cooperstown, an afternoon spent watching Jonah's Cardinals teammates provides a reminder that baseball is a living game, and every summer a new group of kids pick up bats and put on gloves and play the game with gleeful enthusiasm.    

In the moment, while Jonah is playing, it's idyllic.  The field his team plays on is a few blocks from Barack Obama's Kenwood home.  I've written about this before - Hyde Park has the ability to convince you that we've made great strides, that we are no longer a nation divided by race and class and faith.   But that's wrong.  What I thought would be a transformative presidency has become a four-year long battle for modest progress, accompanied by some frustrating failures.  

Like Jonah, I love baseball.  It wasn't always easy.  I never could hit.   Growing up in Cleveland, through decades of horrible Indians teams, I never had anyone to cheer for.  Until the 1990s, when Kenny Lofton and Albert Belle and Omar Vizquel and Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez and Carlos Baerga came along and took the Indians to the playoffs year after year.  I've tried to teach Jonah that the beauty of baseball isn't the long ball; although we give a disproportionate share of attention to home runs, most runs score because players get on base, and wait for someone to drive them home.  My favorite players - Kenny Lofton and Omar Vizquel and Derek Jeter and Paul Konerko- have always been situationally smart hitters.  


It's useful to think of politics this way.  Every now and then a slugger gets to the White House - like FDR or LBJ.  But usually what we should hope for is someone who consistently gets on base, keeps his head in the game, and tries to move around to score.  It turns out, that's the kind of President Obama is.  Like a lot of people, I get frustrated when a rally gets snuffed out, and we go back to the dugout with nothing to show for it.  We're lucky today's Republican Party is made up of sore armed losers who can't pitch.  They keep serving up slow moving tosses, that Obama can easily hit out of the infield.  So we stay in the game.  As we look at 2012, the goal should be to take the game into extra innings.  Then score a bunch of runs by playing smart, patient ball. 

Winning over Obama

President Obama’s announcement yesterday that he supports gay marriage has been followed by everything I expected.  Celebration – more celebration on Facebook than in the streets, but jubilation nevertheless.  And the predictable Republican reaction.  The party who howled with outrage at the idea that progressives were calling their regressive moves on women’s health and reproductive issues a “war on women,” quickly began calling Obama’s remarks the start of a new “war on traditional marriage.”  Other, more clear-eyed and strategic Republicans see political calculation in Obama’s announcement.  And they have been complaining about it.  They are certainly right.  But so what?  In an earlier posting I said:

I'm a proud Democrat, but I am comfortable saying the Democratic Party has seldom been heroic, even if some of its signature legislative achievements have been sweepingly transformative. The party's accomplishments - bringing immigrants into the political process, defending the right of African Americans to vote, improving work conditions for laborers - were often the products of cagey political choices, securing votes so politicians getting rich from public office could remain in office. It has been the party of corruption and compromise, machine politics and patronage. The Democratic Party has always been less a leading man, more a colorful character actor. Now and then, like Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the party brought home the big prize, delivering a social safety net to keep Americans from falling into destitution as they age, guaranteeing civil rights, fighting a war on poverty.  But that's about right. Political parties and the politicians who guide them aren't great causes or prophets. Our prophets - Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King and others like them who took on our society's inequalities and division - weren't politicians.

I’m fine with the fact that this was a politically astute step, and you should be too.  Think about it this way: the Democratic Party, since Roosevelt and Truman shifted the party dramatically to the left, has always addressed its political vulnerability by bringing new voters into the process.  Like Obama’s announced support of gay marriage, Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, and the insertion of a civil rights plank in his 1948 campaign platform, was politically risky.  It had costs.  The Dixiecrats bolted, and the Democratic Party began a long slide in the South.  But in the 1948 general election, Truman captured seventy-seven percent of African American ballots, the first time a Democratic candidate for the White House ever got more than fifty percent of the black vote.  The party’s civil rights stance helped Truman (just barely) win key swing states like California – which was more progressive than the rest of the country - and Illinois and Ohio - overwhelmingly Republican states with large African American populations.

Was Truman thinking about reelection when he issued Executive Order 9981 and integrated the military? Not entirely, but he was responding to political pressure. And once he started down that path, pressure built.  In the spring of 1948 the NAACP issued a Declaration of Negro Voters which encouraged black voters to tie their votes to efforts to follow through on recommendations issued by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which in October of 1947 had published a landmark report mapping a way forward, through aggressive federal intervention, toward a more inclusive national union.  The integration of the armed forces was one example of targeted federal action, the NAACP and African American voters wanted to see more.

And so our country has lurched forward, with one party – my party – seeing opportunity in activists’ calls to expand inclusion, and reduce poverty, and tackle discrimination.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, has consistently taken a more regrettable path.  While Democrats have tried to win the White House and majorities in Congress by bringing more people into the political process, and championing their political causes, the Republican Party, at least since Richard Nixon, has sought to divide the country and disenfranchise voters. Nixon's southern strategy in 1972 established a playbook, and the Republicans have built their campaigns around wedge issues and division and peddling hate ever since.  Over time, they also developed an interest in removing minority and low-income voters from state voter registration lists.  If they can make it harder for African Americans and Latinos and college students and the poor to vote, they can reduce the Democratic Party’s numerical superiority.  All in all, through regressive voting restrictions and fear Republicans have sought to tear away at the Democratic Party’s advantages in numbers.

The typical voter is a complex, almost incomprehensible combination of different preferences and beliefs.  If, through fear and deception, Republican candidates can convince voters that Democratic candidates want to end their way of life – rather than extend it to those at the margins of society – Republicans can pry working class voters away from the Democratic Party. 

The recent passage of Amendment  1 in North Carolina is a perfect example, and nicely compares with Obama’s choice.  Consider this, from the New York Times:

“We are not anti-gay — we are pro-marriage,” Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the executive committee for the pro-amendment Vote for Marriage NC, said at a victory rally in Raleigh, where supporters ate pieces of a wedding cake topped by figures of a man and a woman. “And the point, the whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design for marriage based on the demands of a group of adults.*"

The strategy was to convince voters that activists were trying to overturn “God’s design for marriage.”  In actuality, the marriage equality movement is fundamentally conservative.  It is a reaffirmation of the role of marriage in our society.  Advocates for gay marriage want to extend the reach of the institution so others can enjoy its legal and social benefits.  While so-called defenders of marriage argue that the pro-LGBT movement is “radical” in its efforts to “redefine marriage,” in truth, there is very little here that seems radical.  A more radical position – one I hold – is that marital status should be irrelevant to our decisions about who we chose to build a home with, or have children with, and legal protections and governmental and employer-supplied benefits shouldn’t be tied to marriage.  

In the end, if I’m asked if Obama’s resistance to marriage equality, and his eventual “evolution” to embrace it are tied to politics, I’ll acknowledge they are.  But so what?  That’s what my party does.  It builds coalitions by expanding the circle of inclusion.  I’m happy about that.

*  Actually, Tami Fitzgerald's point is profoundly wrong, at least for America.  We are a secular democracy, deeply rooted in a tradition of universal rights.  So, in fact, if a "group of adults," i.e. voters and their elected representatives, decide to "rewrite" what one group perceives as "God's design," because that "design" violates the rights of others, then that's what we do.  And we don't apologize for it.  It isn't an attack on their religion.  It is a legal and constitutionally permitted effort to attack bias and overturn unequal public policy.