Author: bfaure

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The Troubadour Returns

     After a significant hiatus, the American troubadour Ryan Adams has returned to writing and performance.  His musical persona as a troubadour was first celebrated by Ramparts on 07/10/10, in the midst of his self induced absence from the music world.   Only 37, the writer and  performer Adams has been associated with reflecting and reforming almost all the significant trends in American popular music in the last 16 years.  At the forefront in his early twenties of the sound referred to as alternative country with his band Whiskeytown, Adams developed a reputation of simultaneously and effortlessly capturing the intimate story telling of rural North Carolina with the energy and brashness of a Greenwich Village counter culture poet.  He also developed a reputation for volatile and immature stage behavior that often fractured the good feelings he had engendered with his prodigious performing and song writing talent.  Eventually Adams grew too big for his bandmates and struck out on his own, producing one album after another of inflections of American music – folk, country, rock, and glam – and echoing giants of American popular musical culture like Dylan, Gram Parsons, and Neil Young – reflecting, not parroting, them.  Albums such as Heartbreaker, Gold, Easy Tiger, and Cold Roses created some of the best coalitions of musical brash and poetic heartache to be heard in decades.   It showed in the performers willing to serve as background vocalists for the albums, such as Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch, Norah Jones, and Elton John.  For ten years the issue wasn’t whether music would be created, but rather whether Adams would ever stop creating music, putting out as many as three albums in a year and often speaking of many other unrecorded collections waiting to go public.  The pressure of being first the Next Thing, and then,  The One, weighed heavily on a relatively simple individual from rural Carolina, and in 2009, the years of self abuse through drugs, burn out, and progressive hearing loss and disability from Meniere’s Disease, Adams decided to stop the circus act and get off the stage.

     Two years later, rested, off drugs, happily married, apparently healthy, and relaxed, Ryan Adams is back, and the troubadour impulse is stronger than ever.  In a the new Album Ashes and Fire Adams returns to the intimacy of country inflected rock and stirring folk anthems that made Heartbreaker so popular with the critics and public alike.  The same leit motifs are there,  rain, ocean, and moonlight the verbal landscapes, heartache, desire, and redemption the poetic psychologies.  This is, however, an adult Adams, that responds to the desparate moments with his clear tenor, directs understanding through the organ echoes, and ultimately appears very comfortable with who he has become as a songwriter.

     Ryan Adams will likely always be incorrigable, but he is becoming evermore thankful of his gift.  Ryan Adams has above all always been one of those unique performers who sound even better live than in the closely packaged creations of a recording studio, and each time I’ve heard him, created an unforgettable emotional tie. These are, after all, the songs of  a troubadour, who can relate the very thread of human emotion and experience, elevate the little things in life, and always make us ever more self aware. The troubadour, who has been rewarded throughout history with the rapt attention of the listening audience, who, while briefly connected, always leaves feeling a little more alive.   Our generation’s troubadour is back, and hopefully will stay for a while, and a long time to come.

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Another Tyrant Down the Rabbit Hole

  

   If you are a tyrant with an extended period of totalitarian rule over an oppressed people, there seems recently to be a tendency for you to realize the End of Days ignominiously down a rabbit hole.  Saddam Hussein in 2003 was discovered hiding in a underground pipe absurdly demanding an interaction with the president of the United States upon capture. Today the dramatist African king of kings was discovered in a similar rabbit hole and, despite his pleas, meted out  a more acute sentence by his captors.   There is a certain sympathy that develops with  a surrounded individual who faces ruthless justice, no matter the circumstances.  The president for life  of Romania Nicoli Ceausescu came back from a state trip in 1989 to discover Romania had determined to significantly shorten his tenure of life president to something more like president of the week.  The Italian Caesar Mussolini at the end of World War II had his fascist rule end hanging naked upside down from a lightpole in a definitive end to the fascist experiment.  Today the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was pulled from a rabbit hole  by combatants in the fight for his home town in Libya and the long rule of the king of kings was ended with a bullet to the head, his body paraded like a lifeless puppet by jubilant executioners.

     It is easy to feel some sympathy, perhaps a tug of regret in the digusting way his mortally injured body was paraded like a clown corpse for amusement.  It is doubly ironic to reflect that the powers that  contributed to his downfall fairly recently supported his nation’s nomination to the head of the United Nations Human Rights Council, bought his oil, turned their heads to his violent suppresion of his own people the Berbers, his ruthless military adventures in North Africa, and the decades log support for the most radical of terrorist activities. Well, no surprise regarding the hypocritical actions between nation states should be contemplated.  Its been going on as long as there have been nation states.  Gaddafi has played the west for decades like a fine fiddle, brandishing the victim card, while carrying out a targeted program of some of the most cowardly and vile actions against innocents.  Watching the balding old man on video today paraded like a mannequin almost made one forget all that.

    Careful focus regarding this man’s legacy causes the sympathy to fade very rapidly, however.  The singular event that makes his humiliating treatment today gratifying was his direct role in the massacre of innocents , in the perpetrated mass murder he achieved over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988.  Stung by President Reagan’s direct attack for his earlier attempt to  mass kill US servicemen in a Berlin  nightclub in 1986, Gaddafi hungered for revenge and in typical cowardly fashion determined a means of indirect slaughter against the citadel of democracy, the United States.  Through his agents, Gaddafi  had a pressure sensitive bomb placed on the Pan Am  New York to London flight on December 21st, 1988, the bomb exploding just prior to the Boeing 747’s decent over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the horrific slaughter of 243 passengers and 16 crew members. The destruction of innocents included 189 American and 43 British citizens as well as citizens of 19 other nations, as well as 11 individuals on the ground from falling debris.  The tyrant never saw any irony in continuing to interact with the countries whose citizens he had murdered for spite, and in a particularly onerous hypocrisy, the British government who had lost so many in this attack, gave Gaddafi last year the ultimate triumph by releasing the bomb-maker from British prison for “medical” reasons, soiling forever the memories of all the innocents who died in the horrific terrorist attack.  The deaths included high school students, artists, musicians, authors, and business officials, all cut down in the prime of life by this vainglorious clown.  It was weeks before all the spewed body parts could be identified and removed from Lockerbie gardens and rooftops.   Gaddafi always took special pride in his moment in the sun as an unstable state terrorist, and nothing in his future years, the cozy relationships with other humanity stalwarts such as Mugabe, Assad, Chavez, Arafat, and Farrakan, seemed to fulfill for him the sense of triumph that he felt when he was a party to the special killing fields he achieved over Scotland.  The price to so many for the world kowtowing to this cowardly bully was immeasurable and the bully’s death decades later doesn’t come close to evening the score.

     For Lockerbie alone, the despoiling of the tyrant’s pathetic worldly vessel performed today is simply insufficient.  No matter how the end was inappropriately reached, or what eventually replaces this pathetic figure, the End, like those of Hussein, Bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Awlaki , and hopefully soon, Assad and Mugabe, can’t come soon enough.  Sic Semper Tyrannis.

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A Voice Like Sparkling Water

     Everybody has their favorite voice variant that defines how they want to hear certain songs in the American Songbook.  For me,  its the melted caramel warmth of Ella Fitzgerald when she sings Rogers and Hart’s Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered , or Frank Sinatra’s masculine yet vulnerable rendition of Gershwin’s It Had To Be You.  The modern versions lean toward voice over interpretation,  production over emotion too often.  There are however some very talented singers out there who get it and are fashioning another layer of American jazz excellence onto the beautiful songs of the 20th century that merit a close listen.  One such singer is the beautiful Jane Monheit, who is managing at a very young age to marry the sophisticated and nuanced emotional overtones of the best songs with her pristine pitch, while not ignoring the emotional questions of thoughtful lyrics.  Monheit, with a nearly perfect singing voice, is making a mark on listeners like me that want to feel and live a song as much as hear it.

     Jane Monheit is in 2011 only 33 years old,  but has been in the jazz singers lime light almost since her high school graduation.   She is an accomplished graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and already has multiple critically acclaimed albums.  Her singing voice trends toward light operatic, but rhythmic grasp is night club.  She is especially strong in the dancing rhythms of South American composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, but has sufficient swing inflection to handle Gershwin and Berlin.  Monheit’s voice is has a mountain spring like quality, with sun dappled inflections that sparkle and tingle. Her youthful sound  brings a yearning and optimism to even the sadder lyrics that sometimes seems insufficiently time-weary, but she is a professional performer that is willing to challenge herself and the listener, and that makes her more interesting to me than the musings of a Diana Krall.

     We are living in a time where the mature introspection of the great songs that reflected our society’s coming of age in the middle third of the last century, is being lost to sophomoric and superficial machinations about sensations rather than feelings.  I look to Jane Monheit and other young artists like her, to continue our education and acknowledgement of the life long  journey of discovery as to who we really are…

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Fall Classics, Everywhere You Look

   

  For most, baseball is an acquired taste.   Slow moving, long on tactics and at times short on action, with byzantine and at times inscrutable rules and traditions, the game struggles to hold the attention of the casual fan.  When the long summer days turn to fall, however, the air grows crisp and the nights cool, something transforms this stodgy game into an epic shared human experience.   That something special is occurring becomes clear to both spectators and participants alike, and the antiquated structure of the game becomes structural perfection, the emotional tie between the participant and spectator simultaneous.  Baseball,  a sport played by millionaires for teams owned by billionaires, is transformed into the Fall Classic, and becomes the most unique shared experience in sport.

   This past week the Fall Classic began to evolve a story that promises to be spectacular.  The season ended in a desperate final day where four teams struggled to get into the mix. The two survivors, Tampa Bay Rays and the St Louis Cardinals, were considered also rans just ten days earlier, but strained and pushed and succeeded driving out two teams, the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves, who experienced freefall collapse and devastating failure.  In classic baseball fashion and by the device by which the baseball game weaves its special beauty, there is no time limitation, there is no over ’til its over – and down to the last batter it went.  The difficult physics of trying to strike a moving round object traveling at 90 miles an hour with another moving round object moving just as fast are magnified a thousand fold when a six month journey of a season comes down to the intense struggle of individual failure or triumph between pitcher and batter in front of millions.

   The season’s spectacular end led to a ratcheting up of the tension in divisional playoffs, and improbably, the pressure and the performance went up immeasurably.  Millions were treated to Detroit’s Justin Verlander grinding out a critical win, Arizona’s Ryan Roberts smacking a authoritative grand slam to keep Arizona in the conversation,  the Texas Rangers declaring last year was not a fluke, and the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies laboring to produce at the impossible level of their economic commitment to their megastar filled teams.

     But last night was yet on another level.  The upstart Cardinals faced Cy Young award winner Ray Halliday, the definition of a big name pitcher, and Halliday did what he had to do, producing a dominating performance holding the Cardinals to one run, and stifling the Cardinal power trio of  Pujols, Berkman, and Holliday 0 for 10 at bats.  His opponent, Chris Carpenter, however, proved to be the greater warrior.   Carpenter, who has had to will his fragile body through twelve major league seasons, determined to be one run better, and was helped by a stifling defence led by Rafael Furcal.  The team of the decade, the Philadelphia Phillies, were forced to learn what many great teams have learned painfully.  In baseball, a season’s greatness can crumble in a moment’s weakness.

    The other national league game was even more epic.  Arizona and Milwaukee produced almost mirror image seasons, and the playoff between them proved no different.  A final game was played on the home field of the Brewers, the team that earned that right by being one game better out of 162.  The last five innings were the stuff of legends.  Matt Kennedy, the stalwart pitching ace of Arizona faced the hostile crowd and engaged Yovanni Gallardo of the Brewers in a gritty battle, 1-1 after five innings.  The wheels of fortune began to turn in the sixth.  The Brewers took the lead in the sixth on a single by the classic baseball immigrant, a Cuban player who speaks Spanish with a Russian first name and a French surname, Yuniesky Betancourt, but the game drama was saved by an impossible over the shoulder leaping catch on the dead run by Chris Young  of the Diamondbacks of a screaming drive by Jerry Hairston, preventing the game from breaking wide open.  And so it built from there.  A perfect inning by forty one year old Takashi Saito of the Brewers, who learned his game growing up in Miyagi City, Japan, worshipping the baseball legend of Sadaharu Oh rather than Ted Williams. A turbulent eighth inning by Francisco Rodriguez of the Brewers, creating his own peril by loading the bases with Diamondbacks, causing 45,000 anxious Milwaukee fans on site to become nauseated, only to pull them back from the brink by calmly eliminating the next two batting threats without giving another inch. The Diamondbacks finding a way in the desparate ninth  inning to scratch out a tying run against the Brewer’s John Axford, who had closed the door  in 45 prior consecutive games and five consecutive months of play, with a perfectly executed suicide squeeze bunt.  Then Axford, having to deal with his closer nightmare of not only giving up the win  but placing the opponents winning run ninety feet from home, calming stopped the bleeding in time in the ninth and then produced a dominating close down tenth inning. Finally a bottom of the tenth ,  in which a five tool player who has foundered for three teams trying to untap his enormous talent, Carlos Gomez, got himself on base, and an even bigger journeyman , a player with with more personalities then Eve and the ability to irritate everyone, Nyjer Morgan, came to the plate against the stellar reliever JJ Putz and determined not to be denied triumph.  Two strikes, then a bounding seeing-eye single up the middle that Putz desperately tried to knock down to no avail with his foot, and the speedy Gomez made sure no throw, no matter how great, would catch him.  Great stories, great triumphs, great plays – baseball experience perfection.

     And so it goes like it has since 1903 – baseball will provide a magnificinet storybook of memories, and in the end , there can be only one.  The year 2011 is looking to become one of the all time greats and we all get to go along for the ride.

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The Motherlode Under the Prairie

     The north center core of the United States has for several hundred years been seen as the desolate outback of the country. Sparsely inhabited at one time by nomads, it was seen initially as an endless ocean of grass to be navigated and surmounted to reach the desired bounty of the more inviting western and Pacific states. A residual back water for wheat farmers and isolationists, the prairie states of the Dakotas with their vast spaces and brutal winters were suggested to be economically inviable and best left to be returned to the condition of a laboratory for unhindered and uninhabited nature.

     No one is suggesting that now.

     It is not that the massive distances, snowstorms and winter temperatures in the 40 below range have suddenly disappeared or that large numbers of people have irrationally determined they actually like to live in arctic cold.   What has changed everybody’s mind lies some ten thousand feet under the gentle undulating prairie, formed from ten of millions of years of  accumulation of the detritus of living organisms.  It turns out that the state once voted most likely to uninhabit itself out of existence, North Dakota, is sitting on potentially the largest oil field in the continental United States, and may yet be positioned to become the Saudi Arabia of North American oil production.

     Like so often in America’s past, it is the combination of technological advance and entrepreneurial know-how that has converted North Dakota into a dramatic economic powerhouse and a magnet for job growth.  The Bakken formation, a geological formation of shale and sandstone, has been known about since the 1950’s as a potential bountiful repository for oil.  The first well was drilled in 1951.  The formation required a set of conditions however to make it profitable to drill that has not existed until recently.  For decades the easy access of the wells in OPEC countries and the transportation highway provided for by the world’s oceans left the difficult to access, expensive oil drilling process of the prairie oil fields unattractive to large oil producers.  It also left the world hostage to the manipulations of the OPEC collaborators both to price and the enormous political power of the world’s energy supply.  North Dakota drilling required two essential ingredients to be profitable, a stable oil price and the invention of two techniques, horizontal drilling and frakking, to unleash the oil from the shale rock and start the oil really flowing.  The process of horizontal drilling allows a single well access to a massive amount of teritory of oil, and frakking, the process of fracturing rock under high pressure to release capture deposits of oil, have proved ideal to the conditions present in the geology of North Dakota and Eastern Montana.   Both conditions are present today and North Dakota is rocketing up the oil production charts, soon to pass California as the largest continental oil producer with the sky , according to the US Geological Survey, the limit.  The recognition of the huge economic potential is drawing thousands of people anxious for work and economic stability to the once desolate climes of the northern prairie.

     It would seem that a process that may provide the United States with stable and bountiful energy supplies, free it from the blackmail politics of OPEC, provide hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, and achieve energy independence in a safe onshore, environmentally controllable way would be extremely attractive to the US government.  The current administration, however, bound to the storyline that carbon is an evil energy source and that only “green” sources are worth exploring and investing in, continues to place a mountain of regulation in front of the numerous small growing energy companies that took the leap to invest in the Bakken when the larger companies felt it not worth their attention.  In a Wall Street Journal interview with Harold Hamm, the entrepreneur who unlocked the Bakken formation, Hamm quotes President Obama in a meeting he had that shows the President’s tone deaf aversion to success in North Dakota, seeing it as a direct threat to “green” investment.  Hamm recalls the conversation:

“I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this.” The president’s reaction? “He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'”

Mr. Hamm is owner and developer of one many small companies that took the leap in North Dakota and Eastern Montana that now own the greater portion of the Bakken formation and are likely through their success to be major contributors to an economic resurgence in the United States. The impediments put forward by the current administration are bound to be a political issue that will resound in next year’s election. The aversion to real science in the climate change debate has shackled this administration to the myths of the evil nature of carbon energy and left it throwing money away on green ventures too earlier in their scientific development to be of any rational help to this country’s and the world’s developing energy needs. It required fifty years for the economic conditions to be right for Mr Hamm and others to exploit the new technologies of  horizontal drilling and frakking that have made the North Dakota motherlode accessible and economically viable.  Noteably, it was not governmental oversite that identified the potential of the fields and developed the technologies.  As usual, it was the intrepid pioneer, with indomitable will, creativity, good ideas, and some really hard work that may yet allow all of us to reap the benefits.  If you are finally listening, Mr. President, THAT is the American story….

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Presidential Vigilante?

  

  Just after 9/11, an emotional President George W. Bush, confronted with the knowledge that it was likely the Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden who was directly responsible for the carnage, was asked what he meant when he stated he would work to bring bin Laden to justice. The President acknowledged he didn’t care if he was brought in “dead or alive”.  This frontier justice remark was immediately seized upon as a prime example of a leader who held a view of international justice devoid of any nuance.  It was considered by the opposition and the liberal media as an extremely intemperate remark.  Even Mrs. Bush stated she was concerned with the imagery the President’s words projected.  This remark however was just the start of a whole series of attacks on the President’s perceived reactionary cowboy justice mentality felt serially responsible for inappropriate ‘lone ranger’ actions resulting in their opinion in the radical mistakes of policy defining Guantanamo imprisonment of unindicted combatants, WMD, Iraq, Abu Graib, and the Surge.

     Well it turns out there is a new Wyatt Earp in Town,  and this one is the real embodiment of frontier justice.  President Obama has determined the court room process and commitment to perpetrator rights  he initially felt was so vital to the American psyche as evidenced in  his initial determination to try in American courts the 9/11 co-conspirators,  has little residual value.  He has essentially abandoned his considerations for civilian justice and instead has become a mighty force for vigilante justice.  Over the last several years he has become a singular success in finding and eliminating Al Qaeda’s  starting lineup, and a court room is the farthest thing from his mind for determining the sentence.  The continuous sentence from the sky that is delivered by the Predator drone assumes the sentence is tied to the identification of the perpetrator, and the verdict is, without fail, an immediate execution.  The reality of the bin Laden raid was that the justice meted out would be instantaneous, and there was no effort to “bring him back alive” for a traditional court room conviction.  Now, in the country of Yemen a similar sentence has been passed on Anwar Al-Awlaki, the notorious instigator of the Fort Hood massacre and director of other significant terrorist attacks, and the justice has again ended with a frontier noose party.

      This time, the howling hypocrites on the left are going to have a hard time keeping silent on this act.  Awlaki, for all his attempts at mascarading as the next bin Laden,  is after all, an American citizen.  If there ever was an argument for what the left has been enraged about in the United States actions regarding terrorist combatant’s rights, the execution of an American citizen overseas for an alleged role in a crime without due process is enough to make the Guantanamo and Bush haters gag.  The attack against Obama’s ongoing strategy as an extralegal act is bound to pick up steam.  

     The President is finding out that his reflexive and harsh stance against the previous administration’s legal argument in avoiding civilian court positions himself as a hypocrite of the first order in own recent actions.  Awlaki, born and raised in the United States, projected his venom on the internet inciting violence, but the direct link to traitorous acts against the United States is a circuitous one.  The actions has led voices as diverse as the liberal Salon eMagazine and presidential candidate Ron Paul to condemn the act.  The argument is beginning to be put forth that the presence of views antithecal to the United States is being used as grounds for targeting killing, a slippery slope indeed.

     Awlaki’s pathetic persona was more demonic than his ridiculous resemblence to the  movie actor Avner Eisenberg in 1985’s movie Romancing the Stone: Jewel of the Nile.

The Bad Guy                                                                                         The Movie Actor

No, Awlaki was not the bumbling well meaning religious figure Avner Eisenberg played in the 1985 comedy – he was every bit the nihilist creep that has seized the Islamic mantle in the name of a fascist vision of the world. There are no tears to be shed because he happened to be an American version of the male fantacists dream of an islamic “holy man”. The truth is that Awlaki was willing participant in the violent conspiracy against modern civilization and ended up as he should have – at the wrong end of an American directed weapon. Good riddance. But the argument, if there ever was one, put forward by the President of the need for due process, died with Awlaki. I dont want to hear even one more little hypocritical squeak from any liberal about this administration’s purified notions of justice any more. This President, like no other,  has turned the war on terrorism – into the O.K. Corrall.

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What’s Worse Than Bad? Much Worse…

    

     Imagine that relative no one likes to talk about. You know the one. Its the undisciplined but lovable one that always thought that succeeding in life was not about hard work, but a crap shoot. There’s always that scheme, that upstart, that’s going to a make a million if only the funds are available. At first it looks good superficially. There seems to be comfort, and some luxury – some early returns – but always the need for more money. You want them to succeed, and eventually,  you need for them to succeed. And suddenly you find yourself caught up in it, providing funds, and then assets. Then somehow, your very mortgage is used to under write the scheme, and it goes belly up. Its no longer about the relative’s lack of discipline. Its about your own survival.

     Somewhere in the next few weeks to months, Europe’s unruly relative Greece is going to go belly up on its debts, and Europe’s, if not the world’s economy is going to shudder. Europe, fused at Greece’s hip through the Euro, over looked Greece’s undisciplined governmental structure, its profligate self directed spending to secure all its citizens a cushy supported existence, and its progressive balancing of the cost on Greece’s ever more puny private sector. It overlooked all that , and took in Greece anyway into the shared economic structure of the Euro, thereby making all of the European community at risk for Greece’s inevitable bill.   Now the bill is coming due and Europe’s biggest banks are panicking at the mounds of worthless Greek bonds they will hold. Despite several ‘bailouts”, the circumstances of Greece’s internal economy have not significantly changed and the default is surely coming. Of course that’s not all the bad news. Europe doesn’t have just one wayward cousin. Most of Europe is in the same boat due to decades of voting in socialist parties that progressively padded the ‘security net’ for its citizens. Falling in behind Greece are Portugal, Ireland, and ominously, Spain and the biggest indigestible enchilada of all, Italy.

     The plans feverishly being put forth to avert the crisis lerch from bad to completely unpalatable. The United States’ ugly experience with TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) in 2008 that most of the country feels bailed out the old boy network at the cost of the taxpayer, without applying the market punishments that prevent bad behavior, is being considered on a scale in Europe that defies belief – after all its entire countries this time that are teetering on default. The healthier countries of Europe, left with little option are considering just such a plan, and it is predictable that the fallout to the governments that will put the burden on its citizens to pay for their wayward relatives will be magnified tenfold to the United States experience.

The lessons to the United States in this mess will be both directly and indirectly laid out. The direct effect of fractional governmental default, severe continental bank strain, and huge bills to the European taxpayer is bound to create the elements of a double dip world wide recession, or worse. The indirect effects of a Europe where the traditional powers become disgusted with their less disciplined smaller neighbors, and start to look inward and protect their own economies, is a recipe for the kind of conflict that has convulsed Europe for 500 years. No one, not the United States, not anybody, wants to go back to that. The sad truth for the United States is despite the unfolding lesson of Europe’s lack of capacity to control its internal spending on itself, the U.S. is on a headlong path to undergo the same inevitable trap. The current administration is like the relative shooting craps and hoping the money trough holds out long enough to catch a winner and fund all the nonsense.

As surely as the sun rises in the East, the European economic crisis and what it says about the future of the western ideal of democratic debate and action to address crises in a peaceful and equitable way is about to play out. There are some serious thinkers out there that are not convinced we are equipped to solve this mess. Unfortunately, for both the pessimist and the optimist reviewing the high arc of western civilization’s day in the sun, its going to be a very stormy night.

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“Better a Bad Press, than a Good Eulogy”

     The world, in damaging fashion, has become progressively attached to mythical narratives that no matter how detached from reality are held up as rock bed truths. Former Vice President Gore flies around on private jets raging about those who would question “the settled science” of global warming. President Obama professes that the root of all current economic ills is to be found in the inequities of “the rich not paying their fair share”. The most poisonous world myth narrative, however, has been present for more than fifty years – that the underlying cause of world tumult and Arab middle east radicalism and extended poverty is the ongoing sore of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The narrative states that if only the government of Israel would give the Palestinian people a viable territory for statehood and address legitimate grievances the ongoing strains that fragment the world would cease to exist and radical terrorism would die on the vine. The narrative projects Israel as the unique obstruction to a world of peace and the paramount cause of an Arab nation unable to lift itself from backwardness, totalitarian governments, and individual sense of inferiority and hopelessness.

     The mythmakers of this narrative are particularly pronounced in Europe, a continent that participated in the not so distance past in a process designed to methodically and ruthlessly  ethnically cleanse itself of the Jewish people, and progressively in the American administration, that views Israel as the intransigent that stands in the way of restoring a rightful order in the Middle East that would enhance American security.  The conflict that has raged since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 provides a ongoing template for literally every untoward fact on the ground, the persistence of poverty stricken ‘temporary’ sanctuaries for the “homeless” Palestinian refugees, the rise of radical terrorist organizations to run governments, the unbending totalitarian streaks in Arab governmental rule, and the legitimization of a nihilistic sociopath to the position of President of Iran.

     The greatest weapon the world has to defend itself against these mythmakers are the few statesmen that are capable in measured, logical tones to shine the light of truth on to those that continue to evoke the fantasies.  The combination of courage, intelligence, and rational expression has no greater exponent in the world today than Bejamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the state of Israel.  Yesterday, in front of a hostile United Nations General Assembly, one of the most profound propagators of the myth through its non-stop condemnation of Israel for the past forty years, Prime Minister Netanyahu laid out the bright light of a truth that put the whole world on notice that truth can be the only means of solution of the conflict. 

History has seem of recent years void of the type of leaders who speak to the greater truths that advance humanity and speak across cultures.  The Prime Minister of Israel shows to all that such leaders are still out there.  His command of subject, and clarity of argument knows no equal on the world stage today. He reminds us that overriding role of great statesmenship is to recognize truth as the path to solve conflict, and in doing so to accept that many will not want to hear it. He notes that we can not hope to find answers when only one participant in conflict resolution is asked to sacrifice, and that sacrifice can not come without the rational outcome of security. One could only hope that we  in America may find our own Netanyahu.  Thanks to the wonderful work that the blog Powerline continues to provide, we have Netanyahu’s speech in its entirety.  Watch the whole thing, and see if you don’t have the lazy mists of accepted narrative dissolved by a statesman who has accepted this generation’s mantle of one will speak the truth, and through truth, lead us all to a better place.  The charlatans out there who emote glibness without reason in comparison look ever more inconsequential, and are doomed to history’s dusty hall of insignificance.

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God’s Musical Messenger

    
The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe were home to some of the most profound individual achievements  in the history of western civilization.   The 17th century proffered the return of the scientist and objectivity with great discoveries and theorems delineated by some of the greatest minds in history, including Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Hooke changing man’s perception and acknowledgement of the natural world.  The 18th century was the age of enlightenment, dominated by political revolution and elevation of the musician composer to giants of the age, with Handel, Haydn, and Mozart reconnecting man to his internal psyche and soul, and his personal relationship to his God.  The individual that bridged the two eras and lived in both the world of objectivity and spiritualism was perhaps among the greatest of them, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750).  Bach lived a life of total devotion to his artistic science and to his God and ended up creating a nearly perfect form of veneration that knows no equal.  He saw himself as a vessel of the creative force of the Holy Spirit and devoted his musical life expression to the sacred.  Many composers have produced greatness, but Bach stands alone in the marriage of musical design,  intimate melody, diversity, and sacred profundity.  Now over 260 years from his death, Bach stands as a colossus of western civilization.

     Bach spent his entire life in relative obscurity for his creations but was recognized as an organ virtuoso from the start.  The Bach family mutated a significant musical gene with Bach born of a musical family and he himself producing three composer sons of significant repute.  Bach was born and reared in Eisenach, Germany, and spent much of his adult life close to home.  His initial significant impact was as a court musician in Weimar, eventually taking positions as chief Kapellmeister in Kothen, and then Leipzig.  At each step Bach churned out both secular and sacred music for local consumption,  bringing virtuoso individual skills to prominence while elevating liturgy to profoundly emotional spiritual levels.  Brief contacts with fame were fleeting; the most famous story regarding Frederick the Great’s desire to see if the legendary German could hold a candle to his French language and culture dominated court. He brought him to the royal court in Potsdam and challenge him to create a from scratch fugue from a musical theme he had composed. Bach immediately dazzled the court with an extended three part fugue that left them speechless, then retired to his room to compose a six part fugue he presented the next day.  At a time when music wavered between song and uncomplicated construction, Bach brought a mathematical science to his singular melodies that will never know an equal.  The style known as contrapuntal, elevated music to an intellectual complexity not previously known, with an emotional depth previously seen only in the great artworks of the Renaissance.  Yet Bach in his lifetime was a relatively obscure jewel and died with his greatest works essentially unknown to the wider audience beyond his Sunday services.

     With the elevation of the great composers of the 19th century to celebrity status, Bach’s works were rediscovered and their timeless greatness were noted to have held up very well.  The perfect structure, the intensely emotional expression, and the absolutely unique creations have become a critical part of humanity’s sense of existential purpose and the most profound examples of the human capacity for greatness.  Bach was too humble regarding his place in God’s creation to see himself as anything other than a vessel for God’s relationship with His creation.  Humility like that, that creates genius output like Bach, should be a humility that we all could only hope to emulate.

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Searching for Something, or Somebody

 

     The world is in a bit of a funk right now.  The cherished elements of human progress and life quality assumed as the societal pinnacles for most of the twentieth century – good government, impartial laws, secure health, universal education, individual freedom, and unfettered commerce – are tottering, and we seem unable to know what to do to re-invigorate them.  Europe,  having sustained two devastating world wars, looked to the collectivist instinct and social safety net, building eventually the greatest guarantee of a life comfortably safe from the pain of failure or circumstance, yet it now finds an unmotivated, unhappy population, and a surging inability to financially underwrite the created lifestyle.  America, the beacon of personal freedom and achievement, is progressively committing itself to the same kind of  securities for its population it has viewed in European society, accepting progressively oppressive indebtedness at the very moment it sees its European cousins collapsing under theirs. The Arab world, so long under the yoke of dictatorial regimes, has risen to throw off the oppressors, only to appear to except an even more oppressive religious dogmatic rule.  The Asian behemoth China hurtles forward to modernize at an unabsorbable rate, ignoring its internal conflicts to aggressively project upon its wary neighbors India, Korea, and Japan a new subtle hegemony.

     What the heck is going on?   The air feels heavy and stagnant, the humidity high, the threat of rain and storm on the horizon.  The sense of helplessness and inevitability of a lesser existence continues.  The world’s  human spirit is feeling worn; almost as if it is tired of the burden and simply waiting for a new species to take over.  Its not just economic recessions, scarcity of resources, theoretical climatic doom, or looming conflicts that suppress the primordial fight or flight response of individuals.  It seems progressively our innate give-a-damn is busted.

     I really think a large part of the collective funk is the world’s indifference lately to seek great leaders who worked to achieve great universal truths without regard to their personal advancement.  Where is the Arab world’s George Washington, who threw the tyrants out, secured his nation’s future, then threw himself out to prevent any possibility of despotism?  Where is Europe’s  Abraham Lincoln, who recognized the importance of a federal unity while carefully protecting the capacity and rights of every individual citizen?  Where is China’s Konrad Adenauer, who can marshal the enormous potential of his citizens while respecting and working with his neighbors to the benefit of each?  Where is Islam’s Martin Luther King, who spoke from the depth of his religious conviction about the universal basic rights of all people, regardless of individual circumstance, color, or creed?  Where is America’s Alexander Hamilton, who recognized the balance between the national investment and the individual responsibility to create the foundations for the  greatest economic engine the world has ever seen?

     I am fairly certain they are out there, but classic selflessness is not currently considered an attractive virtue.  The American experience currently may be the test best as to whether the world is willing to wake up and look for leaders that project our better nature.  The current American President, enmeshed in an economic downslide progressively of his own making, is incapable of putting forth an agenda that frames clearly the problems we face, nor propose recognizable and constructive solutions.  He is post modernist, reaching back to past strategies to provide securities to the populous supposedly denied ignoring the effect of those strategies on the future.  He is a created hologram of an inward looking society that wanted its President to look, sound, and emote a certain way, but never assessed as to whether the experience or track record of achievement was there to act. The result is a political process that doesn’t remotely correct the inequities of the past, while assuring through its actions the inability to solve this problems in the future.  We have as a society, through this man, achieved perfect political irrelevancy.

     I think the world is going to watch America over the next year to see if the concept of leadership will come back into vogue.  Is there a collective will to see the re-establishment of common sense, restoration of personal responsibility,  return of right and wrong, promotion of individual talent and creativity, and mature and aggressive true shared sacrifice to secure the nation’s future?  Will a leader come out of the current malaise to harness human capacity and articulate the path to a better future?  The world will watch closely to see if the country most designed for course correction can self correct.  The way forward is fairly well delineated.  Lets see if America, and the world, can once again accept the better angels of our nature, and recognize the current pathfinders that mirror those that at one time were celebrated in our textbooks.