GIN AND TACOS

Hi class! Today I'm going to talk about one of the concepts I like to emphasize when teaching about presidential elections. You will be tested on this material at the end of the post. OK, not really, but it's the kind of dinner party knowledge that will make you feel smart.

You may have noticed that the 2008 primary calendar is radically different than any previous election. The Iowa Caucus, traditionally held in late February, is now practically crammed into New Years Day's pants.
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That's right, it's January frickin' 3rd. The New Hampshire primary is just a few days later (Jan.
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5). Super Tuesday (mid- to late-March, traditionally) is now…February 5. Twenty-two states will hold primaries on that date, meaning, in essence, that you'll know the nominees before February is a week old.

So, what the hell? The explanation is a phenomenon called Front Loading. States are in a race to make their primaries earlier and earlier every year. Why? Well, first of all there are economic benefits. Not a whole lot goes on in Iowa and New Hampshire. Sorry to burst your bubble. But the caucus/primary are easily the biggest economic event (and attention-getter) in their respective states. Thousands of reporters and campaign workers flood the states with money over several months. It's like hosting a Super Bowl, if the Super Bowl lasted 90 days. States also want their primaries to actually mean something. The early "kingmaker" primaries exert tremendous influence over the nominations, as the candidates who do well early gain money, attention, and momentum to sweep through subsequent primaries.
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Later primaries? Not so much. Some states (Michigan and Florida) are even willing to violate party rules (and endure candidate boycotts) to get in on the early action.

There are also a few new (party-approved) additions to the pre-Super Tuesday calendar: Nevada and South Carolina. Why? Well, the Democratic Party in particular has had a lot of trouble over the years with the tremendous influence of Iowa and NH. With what sort of voters do Democrats do well? Young people, city folk, and African-Americans. And…Iowa and NH are made up almost entirely of white, rural old people. So Howard Dean, god bless him, (no, really, he's the best thing to happen to the party in 50 years in his role as the chair) decided it might help to include a state whose population is almost entirely urban (Nevada) and one with a very large non-white population (SC). The goal is simple – find a way to stop the Democrats from nominating one uninspiring, unelectable candidate after another. Ever wonder why the Democratic voters always seem so overwhelmingly unenthusiastic about their nominees? Probably because a bunch of rural Iowans picked him.

That's great, you say, but who the hell cares? These calendar games all have a dramatic impact on the kind of person who will be able to succeed. The candidates need to do more in a shorter timeframe (4 weeks from Iowa to Super Tuesday) than ever before, which means they need more money than ever before. This game has always been slanted in favor of the most well-funded candidates (W showed up to the primaries in 2000 with million – McCain was his closest competitor at million) but now it's getting ridiculously so.
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Only a few of this massive field of candidates can afford the daunting task of campaigning simultaneously in the handful of ultra-crucial "early" states…and then a whopping 22 states on the same day. That's practically like a general election. The insignificant candidates (Richardson, Huckabee, Biden, etc) are trying to do one thing and one thing only right now: stay alive until Iowa/NH and hope for a miracle. If they can catch lightning in a bottle and do well in those, they will suddenly be seen as a "frontrunner" and money will pour in. If they don't do well, they're going to wither on the vine very quickly. As best I can tell, at the moment only Hillary, Rudy, Obama, and Romney (thanks to his personal fortune) can afford the kind of logistical outlay that this insanely front-loaded schedule requires.

So that's your nominee pool. The only way anyone else (Edwards, Huckabee) will seriously get in the race is to put all of their eggs in the Iowa basket and hope for a miracle. It worked for Bill Clinton. Mike Huckabee, I knew Bill Clinton. And you're no Bill Clinton.

It passed without much comment last week when Congress and Our Leader announced their subprime bailout scheme to plug the sinking ship that is our nation's housing market. Government stepping in to take on the burden of individuals' and the lending industry's poor judgment? Now that's a solid dose of fiscal conservatism if I've ever seen one! The stench of patronage on this bill is enough to make the eyes of the Keating Five water uncontrollably.

Let's disregard for one moment the fact that this effort to "help people stay in their homes" is mostly a handjob for the lending industry. It main impact, as best I can tell, is to pay in full the banking industry's most horrible loans and then shift the same onto the taxpayer-funded Federal Housing Administration. As far as helping actual homeowners, it bails out only the most reckless, underqualified borrowers – and not many of them at that. This is an outstanding lesson in positive reinforcement of negative behavior – the less money you make and the bigger the loan you signed without reading it first, the more likely Uncle Sam is to bail you out. The same holds true for the banks, of course. The more reckless and unscrupulous their lending practices, the better the odds that they can benefit from this fraud. By expanding the FHA's reach to mortgages as high as $700,000 the message is clear: screw the working class, we need to protect high-income suburbanites with shitty credit and zero understanding of how to live within their means. If you are struggling but can technically still afford your mortgage when the rates rise (i.e. the monthly payments are not larger than your paycheck) this legislation does absolutely nothing to help you.

Why does legislation like this pass? The sad truth is that this is inevitable because the Greatest Story Never Told wonder-economy of the Bush era is so heavily dependent on A) unsustainable levels of consumer spending and B) mountains of credit to make the unsustainable appear attainable. With record levels of household credit card debt (and enormous mortgages paying for ridiculously overpriced housing) there are no options left to keep John Q. Public going on weekly mall shopping binges. The only ways to keep consumers spending like mad for the holidays (and beyond) are to relieve their debt burden or have an economy that generates meaningful increases in real wages. I'll let you guess which one of those is more likely.

Like every other aspect of the Bush economy – the constant tax cuts, to name one – this bailout amounts to economic crack cocaine. It will provide a tiny bump, the effect will wear off almost immediately, and then we'll need to do another hit. The myth of a flourishing economy is not a high we can sustain. We can create the illusion only in brief spurts, with long, confidence-killing valleys of doubt and reality interspersed.

I can't tell if this is a rant or a review, but let's talk for a moment about Ken Burns' latest production: The War.

On the plus side, and completely irrelevant to my point here, this is a legitimately decent series. It's enjoyable. It gets most of the history right (if not complete). It bears all the trademarks of Burns' inimitable yet often poorly-imitated style. It doesn't lapse into "Greatest Generation" fellatio. And, of course, it tells a riveting story. My guess is that its biggest sin is not being The Civil War. Burns' career offers us a very powerful example of why creative people should never start out with a masterpiece. The public has reacted poorly to nearly everything he's done since that series because, well, it's just not as good as the original Ken Burns Masterpiece. That's unfortunate, because some of it has been pretty good (Lewis & Clark, Mark Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Unforgivable Blackness). Of course let's not deny that some of it has been excruiciatingly bad as well. Baseball, I'm looking in your direction.**

Here's the real problem with The War: Burns is a good documentarian, which is to say that he lets his subjects tell the story. It's in their own words. So in that respect he is entirely at the mercy of his subjects to make the product vivid and compelling. Comparing The War to The Civil War is a great side-by-side exercise illustrating just how differently Americans express themselves a century apart. Modern (which is to say 20th Century) America simply isn't anywhere near as eloquent as mid-19th Century America. That's not really Ken Burns' fault, but it dramatically impacts the narrative quality.

Now, I know better than to criticize "The Greatest Generation" so let's clarify that it isn't really the fault of any individual depicted in the series. It's just the way our society has changed. The uneducated slaves in The Civil War manage to express themselves with more depth and eloquence than 99% of the subjects in The War. We live in a time and place in which compound sentences are de facto evidence of effeminate bookishness and, by extension, treasonous America-hating. The fact that the subjects in the more recent film are exponentially better-educated than their 19th Century counterparts can't overcome the fact that anti-intellectualism grew at an even faster rate during the interim.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's just a sample bias at work here (the only 19th Century letters to survive were the really good ones). But the cynical part of me looks at how much we've declined since World War II and finds the dumbing-down theory persuasive. When you're watching The War, bear in mind that it's not Ken Burns' problem that the Average Joe uses a 500-word vocabulary to express himself in simple, declarative, 7-word sentences. At this rate, the Ken Burns Jr. production of World War III is going to feature mostly grunting and pointing.

**The series would have been better received if it stuck with its original title: 15 Hours About the Yankees.

Those who know me well know that I'm unsettlingly enthralled by old American war propaganda. I don't know what happened to my "Loose Lips Sink Ships" t-shirt, but I do know I miss it. Not only do I find it visually appealing and quaint but it quickly communicates an awful lot about how much we've changed as a nation.

While it's dangerous to read too much into mass cultural phenomena, feel free to browse around an excellent archive like Northwestern's online library of WWII posters and try to imagine a contemporary equivalent. I am certainly no less than the 10,000th person to mention this, but is it possible to overstate the extent to which the concept of "sacrifice" has been completely eliminated from the neocon war mentality? Honest to God, sit back and try to picture a commercial in which the government asks Hannity's listeners to drive less. Or eat less. Or work 16 hours per day. It's incomprehensible from two perspectives: we can conceive of neither a government that would do it nor a population that would accept it.

The idea that the white middle class will not be asked to make the slightest sacrifice is the foundation of selling neocon war to the public. They don't need to sacrifice life or limb (we have plenty of poor people, black people, and poor black people for that) and they certainly don't need to make any lifestyle changes. In fact, we encourage them to keep buying new Chevy Tahoes; consumer debt-fueled purchasing makes the piper play!
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So far from asking the public to make sacrifices, we take great pains to emphasize that they can keep living the most wasteful and inefficient lifestyle in recorded history. Eat crap, live 2 hours away from work without public transit, drive land barges, buy disposable everything….remember, you're an AMERICAN. Profligate consumption is your birthright.

After all, it's not like this war is costing us $275 million per day. So how has Our Leader managed to avoid even the slightest hint of asking his loyal drones to make sacrifices for this phenomenally expensive joyride? Why, the same way people like him "rationalize" their way out of everything: the Market will pay for it. See, we'll just spend far, far into the red today and in the future our economy will be such an unstoppable force that it will pay for the war many times over (as long as we don't chicken out and let those tax cuts expire! And let's make sure we stay on Congress about that AMT!) This lame cop-out is to political debate what "It was all just a dream!" is to fiction writing. It is the laziest, most baseless statement of magical faith short of "Jesus will save us." The past seven years have seen an explosion of this type of "logic." The stock market is going to save Social Security.

Tax cuts will give everyone healthcare. Casinos will fund our schools. Outsourcing will create job growth. Name any dilemma and rest well assured that some Market Fantasy – erectile dysfunction aids for Libertarians, in essence – will fix it.
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I don't suppose it would make the slightest sense to expect a war to be treated any differently.

Just sit back and amuse yourself with the image of how your favorite member of the I Love the War, As You Can Tell By the Number of Yellow Ribbons On My Explorer crowd would react if Our Leader told them they had to start rationing meat and carpooling.

Feel free to amuse me with your best guesses.

I'm thinking it would look something like a hybrid of a John Birch Society meeting and that scene in Scanners where the dude's head explodes.

Judging by the recent comments of Senator and fine upstanding American patriot Kit Bond I now declare that the debate about waterboarding and torture has gotten officially Ridiculous. There's nothing the Beltway and the media do better than conducting loud, asinine, and irrelevant Red Herring moral debates. "Oh, the morality! Is it right? Is it wrong? What if it can save millions of lives?" Let's leave morality off the table for a minute. Let's pretend that torture is entirely moral, endorsed by a committee of the Pope,** Walter Cronkite, and Miss America. OK? Once you've immersed yourself in the scenario, answer one very simple yet completely overlooked question for me:

Does torture work?

Better yet, has anyone bothered asking? It's classic American Media c.2007 horseshit – throw the mouthbreathers a shiny colored ball in the form of an overwrought moral dilemma (ooh, look at the debate! look at the screaming pundits! this sure is contentious!) while completely ignoring the fact that torture doesn't actually work. It's all hand-wringing, moral puffery, and feigned pensiveness. Is it asking too much to have one Pundit Debate begin with "Well, is this actually accomplishing anything beyond making us look like neanderthals?" Because it would be swell to think that something so horrible is at least, you know, working.

In typical Beltway Bobblehead fashion the debate proceeds from the assumption that the farthest-right position is a obviously correct (and all the "realistic" "liberals" like David Brooks agree, noting that only the Lunatic Fringe Left disagrees). I dare – beg, actually – anyone to cite a single documented instance of a life being saved thanks to torture. No, Our Leader's utterly non-sequitur, no-supporting-evidence-provided statements that waterboarding "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks" do not constitute a documented instance. I guess we'll just take your word for it, George!

I further beg someone to support an argument that torture increases the value or amount of human intelligence obtained. The Army's own findings indicate that they obtained almost half again as much information by switching from "coercive" to "rapport-based" techniques. To quote Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn, may his coke-addled soul rest in peace) in Reservoir Dogs, "Listen, if you beat this prick long enough he'll tell he started the goddamn Chicago Fire. Now that don't neccessarily make it fucking so! Come on!"

Physical torture is an excellent way to get people to make some shit up so you will stop torturing them. It is not an excellent way of getting valid, actionable intelligence. It's only an effective technique in the minds of lard-assed suburban white guys glued to the couch while Jack Bauer fantasies of "ticking time bomb" scenarios do for them what Cialis can't.

**Fun morality fact: 74% of Catholics support the use of torture compared to only 45% of godless heathen atheists. Man, I wonder why so many people no longer see traditional religious values as relevant?

No politics today, and yes I know what day it is.

To preface this post, my band has just wrapped up the recording of a new album. Bob Weston from Shellac is going to master it – not because we're cool, but because we're paying him. His website provided me with a wealth of information about the technical side of music production. While I'm not entirely certain that any of this will interest you in the slightest, if you have any sort of fondness for audio, engineering, or the music industry (broadly construed) you may find this as fascinating as I do.

Americans like their iPods. I assume most of the people who would be reading a website like this one are clutching an mp3 player of some sort these days. If so, you're familiar with an irritating inconvenience: when your player is on Random, there's a change in volume – often a dramatic one – when leaping back and forth among tracks from different albums.

It's especially apparent when moving from modern music to pre-1990 recordings. Do you ever wonder why that is? I do. If you're unconvinced, try it with some CDs in your collection. Don't touch the volume knob, and switch between a 1980 recording and one from 2005.

Pretty obvious, no?

I suggest you take a few minutes to read Weston's extended caveat on "loudness" and the mastering process. Like any presentation involving specialized knowledge, the visual aids are tremendously helpful in making the point to rabble like us. Essentially, he argues that the race to be the LOUDEST TRACK ON YOUR PLAYLIST has significant effects on sound quality. While you're at it, you can read more 'How the sausage is made' type stuff about music in What Happens to My Recording when it's Played on the Radio? by audio engineer Frank Foti (a little technical to say the least) or the much more accessible Guardian piece How CDs are Remastering the Art of Noise about the withering loudness of most major label music and the overuse of shitty electronic effects to compensate for the loss of fidelity.

I don't actually get a kick out of being a music snob (really. honestly.) but it's hard to avoid taking on that role when pointing out just how painfully god-awful most new music sounds.

That is independent of the songwriting or musicianship. Those are matters of taste. But the actual sound that gets blared over the radio these days is enough to make blood squirt out of my ears. Leave aside how you feel about their music – try actually listening to an album from something like Fall Out Boy. It's one of the most painfully overprocessed, compressed, harsh, and unnatural sounding things you could imagine. Technology like that could make 1971 era Led Zeppelin sound like shit.

Or you can flip over to the Top 40 or Country, where abominations like AutoTune (which makes your dance hits sound strangely like Stephen Hawking is doing the vocals) are all but ubiquitous.

Does it really help a track to stand out on your iPod in shuffle mode if it sounds that terrible? Talk about pyrrhic victories.

PS: Here's a sample of a raw (unmastered) mega-hit from our upcoming album. It's called "Right Now Your Low Self-Esteem is just Good Common Sense" and it's #2 on the pop charts in Belgium. Be warned that the sound is not going to appeal to you unless you like early Jesus Lizard, mid-career Trenchmouth, and getting punched in the head.