Paying for music

A blog post by an NPR intern, Emily White, explains that while she has 11,000 songs in her music collection, she has only ever bought 15 CDs. She has, she says, no attachment to physical media.

I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, I've never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I've never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

It seems to me she is confusing physical media with paying for something she readily admits she enjoys. But let's set that aside for the moment. What's the bottom line for her?

What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

That's a beautiful vision, up to the last couple of sentences. As for those last sentences, well, how fucking entitled can you get?

If you don't like enriching giant agro-corporations, does that entitle you to take food at the store?

Tell me, Emily, since that Utopian infinite music library you envision doesn't exist yet, how exactly do you expect those musicians you love to earn a living today?

I don't get this mentality that if you can steal, it's okay. And what really gets me is pretending that you're not stealing, that you're trying to make a better world.

What absolute horseshit.

As I've grown up, I've come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can't support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don't think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

More succinctly: "I like what you do. I just can't be bothered to pay for it."

You may have gotten older, Emily, but you haven't "grown up". Adults pay for what they want.

Getting past the religious divide

David Bornstein has an Opinionator piece in the New York Times about the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) whose mission is to foster greater meaningful interaction between those of different faiths (and those who do not profess a religious faith at all), with the ultimate goal of increasing mutual understanding.

“We can show in a quite rigorous way that when you become friends with someone of a different faith, it not only makes you more open-minded to people of that faith, it makes you more open-minded about people of all other faiths. It makes you more tolerant generally,” says Putnam. “That’s the fundamental premise of the Interfaith Youth Core’s work.”

While I find the premise immensely appealing, I also find it hard to be optimistic that IFYC's model is a workable one for society at large. IFYC operates among college students, who are among the better-educated members of our nation: they are, in short, part of the elite. Also, being young, they're more likely to be open to new ideas and new experiences. Now, while I think much of the dysfunction and polarization caused by religious sectarianism is fostered by elite members of society (specifically, media-savvy and ambitious religious leaders and politicians), these elites aren't generally uninformed: rather, they've made the conscious decision to foment sectarianism because it strengthens the influence they have over their followers. Even if you think I'm wrong, even if you think those leading the sectarian charge are sincere in their beliefs, getting them to back down from their often incendiary rhetoric toward The Other is a tough sell because they're only human, and being human, have a tendency to double down when their cherished beliefs are challenged. (You might even look on my skepticism of IFYC's work as evidence of that tendency, and you'd probably be right.)

But I think the real challenge for those who want to believe in the IFYC model is to consider those who aren't of the elite: those who can't attend college, or who won't, or who didn't and never will. How do you foster engagement with those of a different (or no professed) faith outside a college campus?

It's the same problem that makes racial animus so hard to eliminate. It's easy in this society, in which individualism is all but canonized as a sacred right, to create a fortress for yourself into which you admit only those who pass your tests for admission. Heck, I cherish individualism myself. I think the crucial question is how you view those outside your fortress: are they strangers, who simply are unknown to you, or enemies? The problem is that a lot of extremely faithful religious believers in this nation are acting as if the rest of us are enemies, not mere strangers. That may not be how these people actually think of us, but that's how they're coming off because of the rhetoric they choose to applaud (from the aforementioned religious and political elites).

For myself, by the way, I have no animus toward believers, though I can see how you might think otherwise if you've read much else on this blog. I'm more than willing to live and let live. The reason my dander is frequently up about religion is that I consider it an extremely private matter, and I vehemently object to attempts to export it into the public sphere. Thundering rhetoric proclaiming that "this is a Christian nation", for instance, is simply beyond the pale: it is exactly the kind of establishmentarianism that the sainted Pilgrims (forgive my sarcasm, but that is how they're portrayed) sought to escape in Europe. I will not stand for my identity as a non-believer being trampled by the misguided zeal of sectarians. I demand my right to exist and to a minimal degree of respect and dignity in the civil sphere. It is the same right you, as a believer, insist upon, and it is the same right we are both guaranteed by the non-sectarian Constitution.

In spite of my skepticism, I really, really, really, really hope that efforts like IFYC's succeed. A lot, after all, is at stake.

Americans celebrate diversity. But one of the mistaken beliefs about diversity is that it leads to greater tolerance. Putnam’s research indicates that, unless people make a concerted effort to build bridges, diversity leads to greater social fragmentation — with lower rates of trust, altruism and cooperation. “What ethnic diversity does is cause everybody to hunker down and avoid connection,” he explained. “It’s not just the presence of diversity in your neighborhood. You’ve got to actually be doing things with other people in which you have a personal attachment. Diversity is hard, not easy.”

If we are to renew our democracy — and is there anyone who thinks that's not necessary? — I think working hard at getting along, at understanding what our diversity actually means and why it's important, is a worthy goal to set for ourselves as a nation. It's not as sexy as winning World War II or putting a man on the moon, but it's at least as important. And libertarians, don't fret: unlike those efforts, we don't actually need government to show the way. This one can and probably should start at the bottom, with each of us.

A good use of social media

Horace Mann Academy alumni have set up a couple of Facebook pages to air and to discuss sexual abuse allegations against former faculty and staff, according to the New York Times. There are accounts surfacing elsewhere, too.

I am, as you might suspect, no fan of social media. I honestly don't get all the fuss about Facebook or Twitter. However, this use of social media I understand and appreciate. I hope the virtual gathering places help the victims come to terms with what happened.

By the way, if you haven't read the original account that sparked the sudden flurry of stories and discussion, it's worth casting an eye over it. The allegations are deeply disturbing. However, as hard as it is to remember in such a charged atmosphere, they're still — and likely will remain — just that: allegations.

On class reunions

I'm in the part of my life when class reunions are supposed to figure in it, to a greater or lesser extent: greater, if your glory days coincided with your school days, or lesser, if you're like most of us. (TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right when Buffy snapped at a would-be suicidal classmate, "Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own.")

I was on good terms with most of my classmates, and I was never the class leper (sadly, there was always at least one). Attending small schools meant that most everybody shared the same experiences and environment, not to mention that it wasn't difficult to figure out everybody's name. Graduating meant the tight-knit community of familiar faces was disbanding. It hurt, a lot, to lose that every four years.

So those must have been pretty good days for me, modulo graduations, right?

Er, no.

When I think back on those days, I remember my incredible discomfort in my own skin. I was a hopeless outsider who through luck and a gift for mimicry had figured out how to ape everyone else just well enough to pass for a normal person. But like a singer who masters a foreign-language song phonetically but grasps not a whit of its meaning, I lived in dread that I'd stumble. Every day was a nerve-racking, exhausting performance, and like any actor I both dreaded and longed to hear what the critics -- my classmates -- thought. The reviews weren't verbal so much as behavioral: were people still looking me in the eye? Did they sidle away as I approached? Did I hear about next weekend's party?

It was a colossal waste of effort, but I didn't know any better. Besides, rampaging hormones generated a surfeit of nervous energy that had to find an outlet.

Why, then, was graduation painful? For the same reasons a lot of people take comfort in less than perfect situations: a preference for the familiar, and an accompanying fear of the unknown. Besides, even for me, school wasn't completely horrible. I made a few genuine friends. Academically, I did well enough. And thankfully, my social skills improved, however slowly and painfully.

Still, I'd never go back to that time.

Even if I didn't feel so ambivalent about those days, a reunion wouldn't be that compelling. I'm not the same person I was then, and neither is any of my former classmates. A reunion plays on picking up old threads, but they're not attached any more. Not to me, anyway.

Those enthused about reunions say that we're all curious about our old classmates: who got married to whom, who exceeded expectations, who took an unexpected path. Sometimes this is phrased more sardonically: "Don't you want to see who got fat and old?"

Not really.

Looking back, I realize that what I enjoyed with most of my classmates was what a mature person would call "cordial relations", not friendship. I didn't know the difference back then. Perhaps for me, there was no difference. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, what I had back then simply isn't a strong enough inducement to revisit those times. I know now that we simply weren't that close.

I have nothing against you, my former classmates. I'm just not that curious about you. I doubt you're that curious about me, either. (You're not missing much if you are.) We're practically strangers.

So enjoy yourselves when you gather. Just don't expect me to join you.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

I dipped my toe into the vast ocean of science fiction when I was young. The dozens of dog-eared paperbacks at the local library fascinated me -- and scared me: I was susceptible to nightmares and it didn't take much to set me off.

I don't remember when or how I figured this out, but at some point I came to understand that SF broke down into two large categories: the "hard" SF works that were technology-centric, and everything else (which, curiously enough, didn't have a descriptive name like "hard"). "Everything else" could include fantasies, more psychologically complex works, alternate histories ... basically everything that didn't have to do with spaceships or robots. I own to being a little vague about "everything else" because my preference was strongly for hard SF, not least because it didn't give me nightmares.

The Big Three hard SF authors were Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, the "deans of science fiction" as critiques and commentaries about SF proclaimed again and again. Yet annoyingly enough, a lot of commentators insisted on adding a fourth name: Bradbury.

Bradbury's works fell into the nightmare-inducing category for me. The Martian Chronicles was my first encounter when a well-meaning relative gave me a copy as a Christmas present. The stories weren't to my taste, yet they were weirdly compelling and compellingly weird; they left me unsettled, yet unable to comprehend why. If Asimov's tales were big, bold Statements Of The Future done in broad but exact strokes, Bradbury's tales were Impressionist sketches of less clear-cut subjects. Bradbury had an eye for how humanity's less noble instincts -- or simply bad luck -- could diminish or subvert its mere technological prowess.

Here's the effect a Bradbury story could have on me: the image I took away from his famous short story "A Sound of Thunder" was not of the hunting party, nor of the carnivorous dinosaur that pursued them. Rather, it was that of the squashed butterfly. I have never seen a filmed version, nor have I read the story in decades, yet in my mind's eye, clear as day, is that hapless insect, embedded in the thick coating of mud on a hiking boot. It is huge, perfectly formed (no torn wings), and its markings are delineated by thick, garish black fuzz that almost seems to glow, it's so prominent. It is like a leering, demonic face, mocking me with the promise of no happy ending for humanity. The "sound of thunder" closing the story is perversely anticlimactic by comparison.

No Asimov tale ever left so strong an impression, and I read a lot more of his output than Bradbury's.

So even though I never much cottoned to his work, I can but tip my imaginary hat to Ray Bradbury, and thank him for showing me that science fiction stories could be more than space operas with heroic square-jawed engineers. I might not have liked the worlds he opened up, but I, and science fiction, needed them.

Bradbury passed away Tuesday (5 June 2012). Michiko Kakutani penned a nice appreciation.

Memorial Day, 2012

What's the right way to greet someone on Memorial Day? I mean, is it okay to wish the other person "Happy Memorial Day"?

"Happy" just doesn't seem the right sentiment for a day that is dedicated to remembering those who died fighting for the nation. If you lost a loved one to one of the nation's wars, you probably aren't all that happy today. I wouldn't be, anyway. I might be proud, I might be thankful, but there would always be a part of me that would be sad and maybe angry that that person wasn't a part of my life any more.

That's all I had to say about that. But as I was walking along earlier, when that stray thought crossed my mind, I realized I was bugged by a tangential issue that I had to mention.

When the hell did it become unpatriotic to object to this nation's wars of choice?

You know how the argument goes: if you were, or are, opposed to the war in Iraq, say, a sizable minority of people in this country are quick to accuse you of disloyalty, or worse, of hating our volunteer military who are, in case you hadn't noticed, a hell of a lot more selfless and dedicated to their country than you are, Mr. (or Ms.) Not-In-Uniform.

That is such a staggeringly stupid argument, it astonishes me that the people who make it have enough brain tissue to breathe unassisted.

I know, mine is not a charitable attitude. It certainly doesn't make a good starting point for reasoned discourse, which is the only way we're going to increase this country's overall intelligence. I confess to being irritated beyond endurance that the aforementioned argument is taken seriously by anyone, so I'm in no mood to be broadminded and patient. Yet in the spirit of national comity, and on the off chance some of those who believe criticism of our nation's less felicitously chosen conflicts is taboo give two figs and a damn what I think, let me explain why the argument is so blindingly boneheaded.

First, stop and listen to what the critics are saying. They're — oh, why be coy: we're — not saying that the soldiers are morally defective. We're saying that the soldiers are being misused, that their deeply admirable contribution to our nation is being squandered.

Do you see the distinction?

Of the many asinine legacies of the '60s counterculture, it's hard to top the idiocy of young privileged hippies denouncing their less fortunate contemporaries in uniform as "baby killers". The only good to come out of that ugliness was the belated recognition of just how stunningly moronic it was to blame the foot soldiers for being where they were told to be, doing what they were told to do.

We know that the folks carrying the hundred-pound packs don't choose where they are deployed. That is a civilian decision. That means it's really our collective responsibility — "our", as in all of us who have the right to vote.

So when we criticize "the Iraq War", we are criticizing the civilian dipshits in Washington, D.C., who masterminded that fiasco. We are loudly proclaiming that it was a terrible, terrible mistake to have embarked on that conflict. ("Mistake" is a grotesquely genteel way of putting it, by the way.) And when it comes right down to it, we're criticizing our fellow countrymen (and -women) who were so goddamned eager to take us into that idiotic conflict in the first place. We thought it was pretty fucking obvious that we were being stampeded to war by disingenuous politicos (hello, Dick Cheney; greetings, Paul Wolfowitz; and salutations to many more). The rest of you just weren't listening.

But we can argue about that another time. The point for today is, it's way the hell past time for those of you who still buy into the "criticizing the war [whatever war it is] is unAmerican" argument to stop. That argument is beyond weak sauce; it doesn't even rise to the level of horseshit or bullshit, both of which are far more useful. That argument, in fact, is itself unAmerican and unpatriotic because it's an attempt to suppress free speech — speech that might well be needed to correct the dishonesty of the ones driving us into the next ill-chosen, unnecessary, unaffordable and morally unjustifiable war.

So stop equating criticism of the conflict with criticism of the troops. They're not the same thing, and nobody's dishing out the latter: it's only in your overheated imagination. If you're so eager to stick up for the soldiers, think long and hard before agitating for the next military incursion far from our shores. Spare the troops and their families the agony of enduring more wars we don't need to fight.

Not dead, just down

Several factors have conspired to keep me from blogging as frequently as I did. One is that I stopped using my primary browser a couple of months ago because it has abysmal memory management, but the replacement I've been trying out has, um, issues with a number of sites I frequent, Blogger being one of them. Another factor is my having gotten back into the habit of reading books, a glorious pastime that my previous job kept me too busy and tired to pursue. Unfortunately, my choice of books has left me in a thoroughly discouraged state of mind, another factor contributing to my silence.

It started with Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, which identified our nation's paralyzing conservative/liberal division as far back as 1996. Back then, it seemed things could get no worse, what with Republicans' poisonous rancor toward Bill Clinton -- and of course, things have gotten worse. But then, why should we be surprised? Some of us also thought that conservative extremism couldn't get worse than what we experienced under Reagan, who mistook roaring oil fires for a new American dawn and succeeded in killing the limited progress the nation had made toward weaning itself off of oil and exploring alternative energy sources. And of course, things have gotten so much worse since Reagan that even moderates look back a little wistfully at his two terms. (Like Nixon, Reagan's reputation has been enhanced merely by contrast with the thoroughgoing ineptness and stridency of his successors -- not just George W. Bush, but those whom the GOP has embraced, like Sarah Palin.)

I had been hoping Sandel would prescribe some bold, imaginative ways to fix the widening gap between conservatives and liberals, but he could only cite others' small, largely local efforts which, if you squinted hard enough, could be construed as hopeful for renewing comity between the two sides. His incisively observed text petered out with a whimper rather than a clarion call to action.

It's hard to fault Sandel, though, because the next volume I tackled was Harold Bloom's The American Religion: the Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. Bloom surveyed some of the most enduring and idiosyncratically American faiths, including Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and Christian Science, and identified a couple of common features. They all focus quite intensively on revelation and salvation through a deeply personal connection with God, and they have something of a hangup with the end times. Bloom argues that the emphasis on the personal connection to God renders the core of most American Christian sects (including the larger and supposedly more mainstream Protestant denominations, like the Southern Baptist Convention) profoundly different from Christianity as it is understood and practiced in Europe. It is so different, in fact, that Bloom contends that what most Americans practice isn't really Christianity at all, but is something closer to the (now heretical) Gnostic sects that last flourished in the first few centuries after the birth of Christ.

Your mileage on that last score may vary. Myself, after a lengthy detour through Hans Jonas' magisterial The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, while I can see the parallels Bloom drew, I'm not sure he didn't overplay his hand. However, Bloom's book remains valuable to me, if only because his frequent hints at the frighteningly strong hold that religion has on the majority of Americans were a valuable primer for the nigh-apocalyptic message of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. I'm still reading the latter, but have gotten far enough to be extremely discouraged about the future not merely of the United States, but of the human race as a whole.

You can see, perhaps, why I've written about religion more than once since the beginning of the year. And that doesn't include my two entries about marriage, or the two about gay teens in a small town, or the brief mention of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, or the one about Jay Leno being sued over a Romney joke that ticked off some Sikhs, all of which touched on matters religious in some way. Due to the happenstance choice of Sandel's work several months ago, religion has been on my mind.

Phillips, though, makes explicit what I've merely suspected: that American religious zeal is out of control and having dangerous, cancerous effects on our body politic. In particular, we can't afford either the preoccupation with the afterlife at the expense of the present or the deep-seated and thoroughly irresponsible rejection of rationality in favor of blind, intolerant faith. Phillips cautions that such overzealousness in the past has accompanied imperial decline. My concern is a whole lot bigger: the trend toward fundamentalism, the headlong retreat from and wholesale, contemptuous dismissal of science and reason by the devout is a worldwide phenomenon that could mire the entire human race in war, famine, disease, and ultimately a new Dark Age. And that's if we're lucky. The consequences could be a lot worse if fanatics manage to unleash weapons of mass destruction from which humanity is unable to recover as a species. It took an asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs (yes, I know there's some controversy about that); it would be the ultimate disgrace to humanity if we wiped ourselves out by reverting to our basest and most parochial instincts after three or four centuries of (admittedly halting and often fitful) progress toward a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. And yet, that's what the surrender of our fate to holy writ, any holy writ, promises for us.