Hmmm...Could it Be, I Don't Know, al Qaeda?

Consider this a placeholder. Even Ministers of Distant Information take some time out for the holidays, but this Bhutto stuff positively demands comment. Just not now. But know--know--that it's coming, along with some thoughts on snapshots.

And happy holidays, happy new year to alla y'all!

Brooks's Brother

Confronted with today's David Brooks column in the New York Times, in which he touts the presidential character of Barack Obama over that of Hillary Clinton, without so much as mentioning a single Republican candidate, one doesn't quite now how to react. There's the:

-Literalist View: Is this the unofficial concession of (at least) the G.O.P.'s all-but-extinct Rockefeller wing?

-Conspiracy Theory #1: Is Brooks pumping up Obama in order to avert a Clinton candidacy that he thinks will present a more formidable challenge to the eventual Republican nominee in the general election?

-Or, Conspiracy Theory #2: Is this a subtle way for Brooks to burnish his non-racist bona fides in the wake of his apropos-of-nothing column defending Ronald Reagan's infamous campaign-kickoff at the Neshoba County Fair, which unleashed a wave of recrimination from fellow Times columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert?

Brooks, the Conservative Liberals Like™, long ago broke with the Bush administration--and therefore the core of his own Republican party, but this column is remarkable nonetheless for its apparent endorsement of a Democratic candidate without caveat or qualification. What gives? If the column's status among the Times's Democratic-skewing on-line readership as today's most emailed article is any indication, I'm likely not the only one with this question. (Too bad the editors seem to have disabled "public comments" on their Op-Ed columnists, a development I like to attribute to one particularly sharp rebuke I delivered to Thomas Friedman which would have claimed one of the top spots in the "comments" owing to my having posted mere minute after his column appeared one night--had it ever appeared; shortly thereafter, the comments section disappeared. Hey, a man can dream.).

If there is any good faith to be found in Brooks's column today, it is tempting to see it as another measure of the opportunity awaiting the Democratic party, if not the remnants of the American left. If Republicans--even "moderate" ones--are writing off the next presidential election nearly a year before the fact, one might imagine that 2008 contains the promise of political transformation on a par with, say, 1932.

Such thinking is premature and, from my point of view, much too optimistic. First, one should not mistake the relative disaffection of Republican primary voters with their presidential field for any accurate representation of a given candidates' prospects in the general election. Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and even Mitt Romney would all present a formidable challenge to any of the potential Democratic nominees (which, at this point, political experts seem to agree, consist of Clinton and Obama, not necessarily in that order--a mere binary that invites suppositions of bad faith, such as my own, when Republicans deign to anoint either of the two), especially if paired with John McCain, as seems eminently possible, especially if Giuliani wins the nomination.

Further, one should not underestimate the structural obstacles that now stand between the electorate's vaunted (and much poll-tested) desire for change and the translation of that mandate into political reality. I'm referring here not to the various vote-suppression tactics employed by the G.O.P. (though these should not be discounted) so much as the media-enabled and currently predominant politics of personality (for some dismaying evidence--if any is required--and an interesting reaction to same, check out Stanley Fish's recent NYT blog).

This focus on "character" and other such intangible--and eminently malleable--attributes all comes at the expense of attention paid to policy, and it will make it possible for any of the Republican candidates to run in the general election as an agent of "change," no matter how slavish his adherence to the conservative orthodoxies that currently have a suzerain hold on this country. All that will be required is rhetorical readjustment and an affable demeanor, which an amnesiac populace will forget are precisely the horses that the present regime rode to power.

But let's, for the sake of argument, concede that the Democrats are exceptionally well positioned for 2008, to the point where they could attain not only the White House but also the kind of Congressional majorities required to enact meaningful legislative and regulatory change. The question then becomes: What will they do with this moment?

Given the evidence from the Democrats' tenure as majority party in the House and the Senate, coupled with the statements emanating from the presidential campaigns (excepting Dennis Kucinich), the answer has got to be: precious little. Some observers on the left ascribe the Democrats' incrementalism and readiness to compromise to timidity. Others of a more pragmatic and parlaimentarian bent cite the difficulty of achieving veto-proof supermajorities in the Senate. But while each of these explanations have something to offer, they miss the larger point that the Democratic party as a national entity amounts to far less, for the political aims of its base, than the sum of its constituent parts.

This is due in part to the diverse nature of that constituency relative to that of its Republican counterpart; the Democratic base rarely speaks with a unified voice, even for the sake of appearances in the way that, for example, tax-policy Republicans are content to mumble Christian platitudes. It's also has a great deal to do with who those constituents are: the poor, the otherwise disfranchised, and those in natural opposition to a dedicated Republican constituent (as is the case with labor vis-a-vis business owners). They have, as has been said, nowhere else to go, at least not in the present two-party framework.

And yet the Republican alternatives have remained reliably and sufficiently repugnant, over the years, to hold these constituents within the Democratic party. Democratic candidates are happy to have their votes but most who end up serving at the national level have little intention of enacting their various agenda. What they offer, instead, is a tray of slightly different shape than that carried by the Republicans for the offering up of an ever-greater share of power, wealth, and resources to those interests which already possess these things in abundance.

If you find this too facile, too cynical, or just too uncomfortably Naderite, then consider Hillary's health-care plan, which Republican candidates deride as "socialized medicine" for the sake of stirring up their base, but which contains huge giveaways to the insurance industry. And to many Americans--including, sadly, many self-described but under-informed "liberals--Hillary appears the very embodiment of progressivism.

So it will be interesting, should a Democratic landslide actually materialize next Election Day, to note what the Democrats on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue actually do with the mandate. Perhaps the real watershed will arrive when it becomes plain that, even when voters supply Democrats with the political means to effect change, things stay the same.

In the meantime, we might keep our skepticism intact when the likes of Brooks praises any candidate for pursuing "liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways."

Found Sound

Went to the opening last Tuesday of Found Sound, an exhibit of work by GAINES (my buddy Shelby and his brother Latham) at Think Tank 3 until January 22nd. The show features found objects converted into playable, amplified musical instruments. My favorite was the doctor's bag theremin (I'll try to discover the actual title and, hopefully, an image), among a number of works that were both visually and aurally evocative. With quite a few musicians in attendance, including the artists themselves, periodic outbursts of ethereal noise, delayed mbira-esque tones, and more than one searing Bic-lighter-slide blues lick (the stringed instruments, formerly a broom and a barn door, were evidently tuned to an open chord) punctuated the standard New York conversational din--along with, for a few sublime minutes, a guest wringing a pitch-perfect "Over the Rainbow" from the doctor's bag, tastefully-applied vibrato and all.

It is the visual strength of the works, though, that ultimately makes this show succeed. Given that all the pieces produce sound largely by means of amplification (and therefore depend very little on body shape for resonance), the original, pre-transformed objects could have easily taken on a purely decorative feel or come across as an afterthought, mere surfaces on which to mount strings on one side and electronics on the other. But the iconic weight with which GAINES have imbued that broom, that barn door, and that doctor's bag enables a true dialogue between the seen and the heard.

This is the case with what I think of as the readymades-plus-sound in the show. Two more elaborate pieces, which could be called constructions-plus-sound, don't supply the same frisson of cognitive and sensory dissonance. Alexander the Great and Hands on Her (pictured above) are intriguing objects but ones in which sight and sound, rather than set in opposition to one another, coexist in a unified and apparently predetermined narrative.

"Found sound" is a term generally used to refer to sound itself--that arrived at by chance, as in the compositions of John Cage or the ambient noise and decontextualized music and vocal recordings used in sample-heavy genres such as industrial and hip hop. By taking this phrase as the title of their show, GAINES suggest another way of seeing their art--as visual manifestations of those waves of sound floating through the gallery space, the unexpected projections of one sensory realm upon the screen of another.

1968: State-Sanctioned History

As a student of American history, I had absolutely no intention of tuning in to see Tom Brokaw's latest rehash of 1968. And as one who once performed manuscript-doctoring on a mass media company's book about 1968 I felt I knew what to expect: the usual nostalgia-tinged, history-as-headlines gloss, replete with groovy soundtrack.

But flipping through the channels last night, I alit on Brokaw's 1968 for a moment of exemplary illustration--not of the '60s, but of one of the mechanisms by which Americans are kept ignorant of history and current affairs alike:

VO/BROKAW: "But America wasn't the only country in turmoil. While there was rioting in Chicago [shots of Mayor Daley's police beating protestors at the '68 DNC in Chicago]...Communist tanks crushed a democratic uprising in Prague"

Those who have read Manufacturing Consent will know what to look for in the excerpt above: The use of the passive voice to describe the actions of the state (or, as is often the case, a state friendly to the interests of the U.S. government), and the use of the active voice to describe the actions of an enemy of state interests.

Who were the unidentified rioters in Chicago? One might fairly assume from this "documentary" that it was those dirty hippies; or those with a touch more cultural memory might answer that it was Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman's Yippies. Alas, no: according to Rights in Conflict, the report of the incident submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, what happened in Chicago in 1968 was a "police riot." Did some of the protestors act as provocateurs? Yes. But the rioting was done by the police, who (according to the report) engaged in "unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night," violence made "all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat."

Do not think that I imagine some grand conspiracy to distort history; none, in fact, is needed. I write for television, so I know how these things work: the much more likely scenario is that a writer with (at best) a passing familiarity with the subject at hand was called upon to write the script for Brokaw. He knows--or discovers that--"there was rioting" at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. From there, he either parrots a source that cast the rioting in the passive voice or, if he has discovered that an official report blamed the rioting on the police, feels that, even with official sanction, such an allegation seems a touch, well, radical to put in Tom Brokaw's mouth in 2007--and so he pasteurizes the potentially infectious truth.

This is how we manage to get news--and history--that appears to report events but which, demonstrably, divorces facts from context and strips events of significance. And this is another example of why, as we prepare for another year of political conventions, elections, and other catastrophes--while looking back on Chicago '68 and New York '04--we need take care not to rely on the state-rationalizing narratives provided by corporate media.

P.S. Of course, those who bother to view the trailer on the History Channel's website are given fair warning that Tom Brokaw knows fuck all about the 1960s, subject of his no doubt ghost-written book Boom! (which is, frighteningly, Amazon.com's #1-ranked book in the "history" category), as in the promotional interview he helpfully informs us that "the '60s weren't just Paul Simon [solo career began in 1970], James Taylor [a virtual unknown until the 1970 release of his second-album, Sweet Baby James], and the Beatles [even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then].