GIN AND TACOS

I spent the majority of this weekend in the studio (Russian Recording of Nashville, Indiana) once again. It was a tremendously rewarding and frustrating experience. Much was learned. The final product, if I may say so, is the balls. I'm ridiculously proud of it. I'll post some tracks, which you will all hate, soon.
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That is my way of apologizing for the lack of research in today's entry.

Inspired by a conversation I had on Saturday evening with someone I had not previously met: why does anyone give a shit about George Orwell? Why do people think 1984 is a good book? And why in the flying hell do people bring it up as an analogy when they're discussing politics? I honestly cannot think of anything less persuasive.

1984 is, in my opinion, a three hundred page straw man. Sure, it probably seemed like a plausible nightmare scenario back in the days of Cold War indoctrination, but in the modern context I can't think of a less relevant social metaphor. I'm hardly the first or best person to compare the two, but Brave New World runs circles around 1984 in terms of relevance as a political metaphor. Where 1984 tries to scare the kiddies with images of book banning, Huxley talks about a world in which the books ban themselves because no one wants to read. Orwell gives us juvenile tales of an all-powerful government that hides information from us; Huxley talks about a world in which the truth is freely available but lost in an ocean of misinformation, spin, and irrelevant bullshit masquerading as news. Orwell told us that a totalitarian state would make social and political change impossible. Huxley drew up a world in which people were too busy being distracted by nonsense to want to change anything.

In short, as a skeptical person with an interest in politics, 1984 is supposed to appeal to me. Too bad it reads as if written by a 16 year-old.
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It's a ham-handed boogeyman tale that completely misses any point outside of the context of anti-Communist hysteria. When educated adults actually bring it up in conversation, I immediately knock about 40 points off their IQ.
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It's the sort of thing that allows really stupid people to convince themselves that we have a terrific system in place – our government doesn't look like 1984, so we must have a healthy, vibrant democracy! I'll take Brave New World and conversation with someone who understands that the people who want to control you will come with smiles and soothing voices, not an iron fist wielded by cartoonish jackbooted thugs.

On the Forbes list of the worst jobs on Earth, I think "George Bush Era Military Recruiter" would be one step behind Assistant Crack Whore for the top (or is it bottom?) spot. I feel bad for them. I do. Honestly. In peacetime the job must be pretty easy – just target poor areas loaded to the gunwales with young men lacking any respectable career opportunities and voila. Now, on the other hand….

How do you sell it under these circumstances? "The Army: Join today, be in Fallujah in 10 weeks (or your money back)!" There's no way to varnish reality, even when pitching enlistment to the bottom 10% of last year's high school seniors: sign up, and you're going to Iraq. Soon. Some people are probably really excited about that, either because they are idealists eager to make a difference or because they want to shoot a brown person in a consequence-free environment. But the numbers indicate that neither of these "selling points" are enough. Time to get creative.

If you've seen a film in theaters anytime in the last couple of years, then I don't need to tell you about the phenomenon of the Five Minute Army Promo Video Masquerading as a Trailer. You know, people decked out in neat-o looking toys (armor! guns! techno doo-dads!) jumping out of other neat-o looking toys (helicopters! tanks! bigger techno doo-dads!) to either shoot or help people (depending on the setting) to the strains of Godsmack. As time passes, the films look increasingly like video games and they have a mysterious tendency to never depict or mention Iraq. Let's go ahead and assume those are not accidents.

I usually don't pay much attention (other than to be a smart ass and yell something like "How's that war working out?" at the end) but when last I visited Ye Old Movies I was literally stunned by what I saw: a National Guard-sponsored music video by 3 Doors Down called "Citizen Soldier." Follow the link to watch it – empty stomach recommended. It's also on YouTube. I actually felt like leaving the theater. Or at least projectile vomiting.

Words don't usually fail me, but…words fail me. Where do I start? The horrendous, generic, "Let's compress it in Pro Tools a few more times" music? The historical inaccuracies? The lyrics, which read like they were written by the hit songwriting team of General Petraeus and Brit Hume? No, let's overlook all of that for a second and focus on the shameless deception involved. Focus on exciting Hollywood films about the Revolution or WWII! Focus on helping people after earthquakes! Do not focus on the fact that you are going directly to Iraq. There, to paraphrase mnftiu, you can help the fuck out of some people.

Does this shit actually work? Let me re-phrase that; do we want a military composed of individuals to whom this would be persuasive? Call me an idealist, but in a more perfect world I don't think people should make the very serious choice to enlist because some horseshit radio rock and people jumping out of helicopters seemed cool. As embarassing as it is that we have Army-sponsored video games and music videos essentially targeting children, I suppose we can take some comfort in the hard truth provided by the numbers – it's still not working. If it was, we wouldn't see the Army relaxing its criminal history and High School diploma requirements to meet its repeatedly-lowered "goals."

Sometimes – and this is one of them – I have to ask trite, obvious, redundant, and rhetorical questions.
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What the fuck is wrong to this country? Actually, I retract the claim that this is rhetorical. Someone tell me. Please. What the fuck happened to us?

Buried in today's "headlines" about the "MySpace suicide," NFL player Sean Taylor's funeral, and "Why Bad Kissers Don't Get to Second Base" (thanks CNN!) is an afterthought about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capability. It has been released for public consumption today but was completed almost a year ago. It concludes that Iran abandoned its weapons program…in 2003.

Now, what are the odds that no one in the White House knew about the content of this report almost a year ago? Let's be generous and call it one in 600 billion. OK. So. While this is only recently available to the public it has been well known to people like, oh, let's say the President and the Secretary of State, for a year.

That means, and stop me when I fall off the logic train, that the past 7 months of We Must Invade Iran saber-rattling and up-ramping has been done with full knowledge that not a shred of the "nuclear program" allegations were true.

I'm sorry, but since when is "President and entire administration knowingly lie to America and the world in an attempt to justify invading another country" not news?
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No Flashing Breaking News Alerts, no headlines, no "Gee America, looks like we have nearly red-handed evidence that your entire executive branch are lying, warmongering cocksuckers" commentary, and no pointed, incisive questions. The talk radio crowd don't even bother to make excuses for it. It's just not even relevant. No one notices, no one cares. It's the 5th most urgent news item of the day.

We often succumb to the temptation to idealize the past in this country, but the part of my psyche that doesn't resist urges very well thinks that this would not be the case in 1950.

Or 1960. Or 1970. Hell, probably not even in 1980. But not in 2007. The President getting caught red-handed trying to bullshit the country into another pre-emptive "security" war is not news.

I often think there has been some sort of fundamental and irrevocable change in this country, an intellectual point-of-no-return that we breezed past in the mid-80s. Stories like this do not discourage me from thinking that more regularly. We're officially a nation of vacuous, disinterested idiots. Willfully ignorant. Proud of it. As anti-intellectual as we are intellectually incurious. In short, we as a nation operate at about a 4th grade level – our interest in the "news" essentially encompasses sports, movies, Top 40 music, and medical oddities.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, or anyone else who chooses to teach for that matter. It's like we're signing up to be the Designated Mourners for 40 years of progressively more depressing batches of young people.

My original NPF post for today was supposed to be about No Country for Old Men and how you need to sprint to a theater and see it. Since that piece of information fits squarely under "No shit, Cap'n Obvious" I'll leave it at that and talk about something more entertaining. Suffice it to say that Javier Bardem's performance is probably going to rocket into the top five of this list in short order. Having only seen him before as a gay Cuban poet in Before Night Falls, let's just say he was a surprise.

OK. So that "CNN/YouTube" GOP debate last night. I did not watch it. I couldn't bring myself to do it.
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But after having consumed most of it on the Series of Tubes today, I can't let it go without comment. It was simply humiliating. It wasn't an entertaining kind of trainwreck, nor did the candidates take it in good humor, nor did the format make it watchable. It was just thoroughly degrading in every possible way.

For once I have to throw my lot in with the Liberal Media Bias crowd – there is no question that CNN set that event up with the sole intent of humiliating the candidates and their party.
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The candidates uniformily look like they are participating in the debate at gunpoint, which underscores the fact that they'd most likely rather be shot than sit there and pretend like they are taking questions from crackpotted idiots and shut-ins seriously.
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Honest to God, it was one step up from making the candidates answer questions from kindergarteners or the untreatably psychotic. Before the debate was 10 minutes old we already had to listen to some fucking retard with an acoustic guitar sing about the candidates shortly before Giuliani and Romney started clawing at each other like homeless people fighting over meat (except they were actually accusing one another of being nice to immigrants).

My hat seriously, honestly, and without sarcasm goes off to McCain, Thompson, and the others who spent the entire debate looking like they couldn't wait to leave and/or would rather be drinking lead paint. As the Weekly Standard said:

So, a good night for for the lowest denominator, a bad night for the GOP. America got to see a vaguely threatening parade of gun fetishists, flat worlders, Mars Explorers, Confederate flag lovers and zombie-eyed-Bible-wavers as well as various one issue activists hammering their pet cause.

Maybe the GOP deserves the abuse and maybe that was a true and accurate representation of the party. My gut reaction, however, is that it was merely an accurate representation of non-conservatives' caricature of the party. It's about as fair as portraying Al Sharpton and Ward Churchill as representative of the entire Democratic Party. Then again, since the right does just that all the fucking time, maybe CNN is merely settling the cosmic debt by devoting an evening to depicting Republicans as flat-earthers, gun fetishists, and zombie-eyed Bible wavers.

In short, the cynical part of me thinks CNN got it right.
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The Jerry Springer booing/hooting, the idiotic questions from people who didn't look qualified to work a fryer at Burger King, the scary backwoods gun/Bible crowd….that's GOP America. But the more realistic part of me thinks that the network did all of us a disservice by giving a lot of ammunition to people around the world who are inclined to see America that way. Watching that debate from start to finish (which I couldn't stomach – just a series of short bursts) would inevitably lead one to the conclusion that the American public is totally and irrevocably unfit to govern itself. While I question our national IQ on a daily basis, I actually give us a little more credit than that. Circuses like that only reinforce exaggerated stereotypes and the belief that we, as a nation, can barely dress ourselves let alone engage in political discourse.

I must be brief today, but what I lack in quantity I will make up in substance.

Save Tucker! No, seriously, Save Tucker Carlson. Or so the website savetucker.org would have you believe. It appears that Mr. Carlson is being "ideologically purged" from MSNBC as it drops "any pretense of objectivity or balance.

" It might be worth noting that Carlson's ratings are beyond abysmal. Apparently right-wing talk show fans aren't really excited by a pale 5th-rate imitation of George Will. Come to think of it…if George Will put it in Jonah Goldberg's ass and that somehow resulted in conception, I'd be shocked if the offspring didn't look exactly like Mr. Bow Tie.

It used to be that having the lowest ratings on Earth was ample reason to get cancelled.
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After all, isn't that why they axed Phil Donahue? Was that an "ideological purging" too or was it the will of the Free and Just Market? Anyway, I will not be writing MSNBC in righteous anger as SaveTucker.org recommends. But I will helpfully offer Mr. Carlson some employment advice. Infomercial host? (Coral Calcium – the miracle cure THEY don't want you to know about!) American Gladiators commentator?

Submissive scat porn star?

Oh, who are we kidding. He'll be on Fox News within a week.

Ten years from now I can picture a lively debate about which ephemeral News Corp ratings bomb was worse: the Half Hour News Hour or Fox Business Network. The former is already resigned to the "bad idea" pile of history while the latter was recently launched to much fanfare and absolutely no interest. I give it six months. Tops. The fishtank at your dentist's office has more viewers. Frankly I don't understand how the public can resist tuning in for gems like this interview between FBN's David Asman and Our Leader:

Rupert Murdoch said when pitching the concept of the new network that CNBC is "too negative toward business" and FBN would be more "business friendly." And boy howdy did they deliver. If you haven't watched it, treat yourself to a couple of minutes. It is exactly what you would expect – cloying, insipid cheerleading sandwiched between chunks of fluff. The effect is not unlike being waterboarded with high-fructose corn syrup.

This won't make any sense to you unless you take the plunge and briefly tune in, but I have one burning question – who or what do they think is the market for this shit? Obviously, judging by the ratings, the answer is "no one." But I'd really like to get inside the heads of the marketing folks and Exec VPs of Programming who dreamed up this backyard abortion of a network. I can't imagine anyone who knows about, cares about, or works in the field of finance sitting down and watching tripe like this. It would be akin to expecting professional chefs to watch "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" with rapt attention.

Apparently (as best I can tell) the brilliant minds at Fox were expecting to create a business channel for idiots, having already mastered news for idiots. They thought that people who don't know a goddamn thing about finance or the economy would tune in and be easily influenced by psychotically perky "experts" telling them how wonderful everything is. Unfortunately, as they are now learning, mouth-breathing adults who process the world at a grade school level simply aren't going to be watching a business network – no matter how lobotomized and dumbed-down. Where are the "breaking news" stories about celebrities? Where are the heated discussions about Hulk Hogan's divorce? Where's the sports break every 10 minutes?

So congratulations, Rupert. You've got your business network; your own 24-7 platform to tell the world how f'n great the Greatest Story Never Told really is for the average man. The result is something far too vacuous and irrelevant for people who actually care about business news…and not remotely interesting to the average Fox News drone with a 30-second attention span. Fire up the TiVO and record your very own slice of what will soon be forgotten. Ten years from now you may need to reassure yourself that it existed and you did not imagine something so ridiculous.