Future Madoffs of America

Chris Hedges is sometimes hit or miss, but he's been on a tear lately. I was particularly interested in this statistic.

Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

We had a couple of elementary school kids in the museum today, and it got me thinking about something. Kids around here, and I suspect in many places in the country, generally get a lot of pressure from the surrounding culture not to be interested in anything deemed too intellectual, exploratory, or otherwise "learning for learning's sake." Paradoxically, though, they're expected to be the pride of their family, going off to university and graduate school and bringing down the big sheepskin. I joked with someone later that when these kids become adults we'll be calling them "business majors." I was half-kidding, but Hedges column has given me some confidence that I might be on to something.

No no no

This is all kinds of wrong, but I can see the sentiment, shared by John Cole, creeping in as an appeal to the left to shut down the criticism of Obama. No thinking adult--not that there are many in the political class--should fall for the "even-the-liberal-Paul-Krugman-says" trick, since presumably one should be able to distinguish between right criticism and left criticism. And who really cares if Republicans try to adopt lefty criticism of Obama into their oeuvre? The opposition party always tries to seize on any opportunity to knock the party in power even if that criticism isn't consistent with their alleged principles. That's as essential to American politics as coke and hookers. Doesn't mean anyone should listen.

...

While I'm happy for Matt Duss making the big time, and agree with his point that one can never err on the side of too much military force in American politics, I should point out that this is hardly limited to neoconservatives. One need look no farther than Duss' own colleague at ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias, to discover this. At a Serious Liberal think tank, one doesn't get too comfortable declaring the overratedness of the cruise missile.

Manufacturing demand

It's inevitable that, whenever one complains about the declining standards in journalism marked by the increasing dominance of infotainment, the free-marketers will retort that news producers are only providing what the market will bear.

Firstly, I'm not sure, given the current climate, how far I'd want to go with that. It seems the public is hardly embracing the current trends in journalism either. Perhaps the all-powerful market would reject a more robust and fulfilling press as well, but no one looks willing to turn to that option. (Because, as I've written before, that would be expensive, and would require setting the profit expectations to a lower threshold.)

Furthermore, I think the premise behind the argument is specious. Allegedly the market works because consumers make independent decisions based on their own needs and wants about what to buy. When was the last time the American public actually rejected a product from a major corporation that caused it to fail? "New Coke," of course, comes to mind as an example of a product that had a major advertising push from an iconic mega-corporation which failed, but I doubt there are too many others. It's hard to see how these essential American corporations like McDonald's or Disney could ever decline, because it's unlikely they would ever produce anything for which they can't manufacture demand through advertising.

In order for the libertarian arguments about the news media to be relevant, there would have to be some competition between producers taking different approaches. There isn't. Everyone seems determined to bail out the sinking ship using the same rusty colander.

Quotable II

Karl Marx, it is said, objected to Christianity not because it was untrue but because it did not live out its own truth. Christian socialism was an effort to apply the teachings of Jesus to a society without the intervention of the church, or of Christian theology, and it was in this sense that the Roman Catholic church regarded communism as a heresy; a partial and incomplete version of Christian truth. Communism was guilty of a number of heresies and errors, not the least of which were its idolatry of the state, its denial of individual human dignity, and its totalitarianism, but what made communism--and socialism, its less pathological relation--was the similarity rather than the dissimilarity that it bore to the Christian gospel and the fundamental teachings of Jesus.

-Peter J. Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, p 70

Quotable

"If you want to see if your newspaper has a liberal bias, compare the size of the business section to the size of the labour section. There isn't a labour section."

-Noam Chomsky

All good things

You know, I kinda liked that show.

Skeerdy Cat is skeered

Eyal Press finds Serious Liberal Walter Shapiro whining about the corrosive spread of dread populism.

Shapiro sings the familiar Serious song, groaning that right-wing and left-wing populism are all basically the same, which is the kind of thing only people too comfortable with the current reign of elevated bourgeois government believe, but, oh wait, I've just described The New Republic. There are quite apparent distinctions between left and right populism, but Shapiro isn't interested to learn them because he's not concerned about popular government. If Serious Libs are worried about an outporing of uncontained populism, perhaps they should look in the mirror. They spend much of their time trying to smother any sparking of left populism, while the establishment Right actively supports and finances its faux-populist windbags.

More broadly, Serious types will often puff on about "the far left and the far right sure do agree about a lot of things!" i.e., Lefties were against the war, Pat Buchanon was against the war, ergo lefties are Pat Buchanon. Jeffrey Goldberg seems to really love this argument. One could argue that Serious Liberals are basically the same, if not by default deferrential, to neoconservatives, but at a magazine run by Marty Peretz, that may hit too close to home.

I can't figure out...

..why I've become so averse to rejection. Logically it doesn't make any sense. Why should I care? Perhaps what I'm really afraid of is never being accepted and, since I don't see much hope on the horizon, I have a hard time ginning up the enthusiasm to try.

Who knows.

If you can't get enough of me...

I've started updating my Twitter feed. Now you can read things I'm reading but don't have any coherent thoughts about. Which is most things.

Sounds like a job for the tool man

Lefty Mauricio Funes won the presidency of El Salvador on Sunday, ending 20 years of U.S.-supported right-wing rule.

Jubilant, red-clad Funes supporters poured into the streets of San Salvador, whooping, clapping, blowing whistles and waving large party flags. Colorful fireworks lit up the night sky.

Funes, 49, rode a wave of discontent with two decades of Arena party rule that had brought economic growth but did little to redress social inequalities. Fuel and food prices have soared, while powerful gangs extort businesses and fight for control of the drug trade, resulting in one of Latin America's highest murder rates.

Funes has promised to crack down on big businesses which he says exploit government complacency to evade taxes.

"The time has come for the excluded, the opportunity has arrived for genuine democrats, for men and women who believe in social justice and solidarity," he told a rally of supporters early today.

Can you believe these Latin American peons electing lefties whenever we give them a chance to vote for their own leaders? A real shame we have to keep going in there and fixing it up for them

Socialist birthdays, vol III

The world's most famous physicist was born on this date in 1879.

Albert Einstein openly embraced the public stature he had earned with his long list of important discoveries in the first decades of the 20th century and used it as a bully pulpit to advance his beliefs on anti-racism, nascent Zionism, and socialism.

Although Einstein moved to the United States from Germany before the Nazi takeover, he was acutely aware of the dangerous rise of fascism, and became disturbed by the racism he found at Princeton, which his longtime friend Paul Robeson once called "the northernmost city in the South." Though he famously wrote the letter to President Roosevelt urging the discovery of an atomic weapon before Germany could, he later became despondent of the arms race that letter helped set off, famously quipping "I don't know with what weapons the third world war will be fought, but the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones."

In 1949, Einstein published an essay entitled "Why Socialism?" in the debut issue of the Marxist magazine Monthly Review.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

Naturally, a man of Einstein's stature and persuasion kept the FBI and other anti-Communist poachers very busy. Among the claims in the nearly-1800 page file was one person insisting Einstein had invented an electric mind-control robot. Einstein, along with fellow emigre Bertolt Brecht, never missed the irony of exchanging fascist totalitarianism for this peculiar American version of freedom.

Ik houd van honkbal

That's all.

(Blame the inevitable bad grammar on Babelfish..)

10 actually great Christian rock songs

This has been sitting by in the queue since I read Daniel Radosh's similar list last summer and resolved to eventually do one of my own. Well, it's finally time for me to dive deep into my memory of years spent drowning in the world of Christian music to see what I can find worth recommending. Are there ten righteous in all of Sodom?

Note that this is not meant to be an authoritative list of the ten best Christian rock songs of all time, and will necessarily revolve around the few years I spent listening to the stuff. Links and videos are provided when I can find them, if you have to occasionally drop $.99 to hear one of them, hopefully it will be worth it.

10. "Little Green Men" - Project 86 (2002)

While their frequent touring mates P.O.D. were blitzing the airwaves with ubiquitous party-metal in the early '00s, this band was crafting a song cycle channeling Don DeLillo and the world of mass consumption. It's not special, and lyrically drifts into laborious forced-beatnik territory, but Project 86 mostly avoids the banality of most nu-metal of the time.

9. "Fairpoint Diary" - Over the Rhine (2001)

Karin Berqvist is the best vocalist you've never heard. Even with a cold, which she had when I saw them in October 2003, Berqvist sounds like she could sing life into a sheet of granite. Of course, that this album was the soundtrack to a brief fling certainly didn't hurt its cause either.

Listen @ last.fm

8. "Kiss My Lips" - Bon Voyage (1999)

Everyone remembers the other, more verbose, song about kissing by a Christian rock band in the late '90s, but which one would rather play while in the act? A bunch of pretty 10-cent words, or Jason Martin and his wife Julie during his wall-of-sound phase? This was the only album the Martin couple released under this moniker, and it was mostly banned from Christian bookstores which couldn't abide any sexual suggestions in music, even under the auspices of marriage. Good Christian musicians apparently only have sex with Jesus.

Listen @ last.fm

7. "C-Minor" - Mewithoutyou (2006)

Aaron Weiss is no Leo Tolstoy, but this musical prophet of ascetism is keeping the tradition of Christian anarchists alive and well. I wouldn't have guessed it after hearing the band's first album in 2002; an attractive and literate but terribly immature set of post-hardcore songs bellyaching about an ex-girlfriend. Hopefully, we will someday have a hundred more like them.

listen @ last.fm

6. "Cast It At The Setting Sail" - Danielson (2006)

Daniel Smith's family-and-friends art-rock crew is perhaps best described as a Sunday School sing-along gone horribly, horribly right. Amidst the weirdness, though, the band manages to pack more profundity into simple songs of faith than dozens of Nashvegas bands. After years being seen as a odd stepchild on Christian punk label Tooth and Nail, they moved to the secular indie imprint Secretly Canadian in 2001 and had a minor breakout with the 2006 album Ships. Here they are buoyed by the oboe skills of sometime-associate Sufjan Stevens.

Buy it from Amazon.com

5. "I Want to be a Clone" - Steve Taylor (1982)

Before he became a multimedia mega-producer, Taylor was one of the first true rebels in the insular world of CCM. He was unafraid to court a little trouble from the ultra-stodgy industry, and often found it through satirical numbers like this one and "I Blew Up The Clinic Real Good" from I Predict 1990. Taylor has re-cloned "Clone" numerous times; here's a video of a punk-influenced version from 2003.

listen @ last.fm

4. "Solar System" - Vigilantes of Love (1998)

VoL was one of a number of Christian bands through the years that has fallen into the musical purgatory of being too churchy for mainstream audiences and not churchy enough for the world of Christian radio (though they were, amazingly, nominated for a Dove Award in the mid-90s). Long past the band's heyday, Bill Mallonnee still travels the country playing to crowds of all sizes, but mostly small ones.

3. "Zzyzx Scarecrow" - Stavesacre (1997)

In a world where Creed seemed to have every third song on rock radio, it's baffling how this band never found a sniff of mainstream success. This song was presumably written as an anti-abortion number--they're a dime a dozen in Christian music--but I find the notion of the wrath of God pouring forth for the loss of innocent blood to have an entirely different meaning after the world of the past six years.

listen @ last.fm.

2. "Dig" - Adam Again (1992)

Before there were most of the bands on this list, there was Adam Again (serendipitous that). They were one of the pioneering bands to make "Christian rock" outside of the Nashville system a viable proposition. This song would probably top many similar lists--I know it's the favorite of a number of people--but I'm putting it second, just to be a little iconoclastic.



1. "The Fleecing" - Pedro the Lion (2004)

It would be hard to measure how many people David Bazan has led into the wilderness while, in his words, "preaching the gospel of doubt." He's written two concept albums on the commoditization of life and faith, but I'm picking one of his most straightforward meditations, which, coming from him, seems all that more meaningful.

Buy it from Amazon.com

WBC

The second World Baseball Classic opens this week with Pool A play (the four East Asian countries) at the Tokyo Dome. The Baseball Think Factory newsblog has ongoing coverage and previews.

Even with the surprising success of the first WBC, the second go-round has still been marred by a number of high-profile player withdrawals, a problem that's not likely to recede anytime soon. Owners are reticent to allow their precious investments to risk injury playing games that might be entertaining but which aren't going to make them any glorious short-term profit. Major League Baseball, the primary investor in the WBC, has attempted to put rules in place to bar teams from directly ordering their players not to participate, but this can't be easily enforced. All this considered, it will still be a pretty nice slate of players taking the field this week.

I expect ownership to think primarily in the interests of its athletic investments; unfortunately a lot of fans get ensnared in the same kinds of thoughts whenever one of these major international tournaments comes up, whether it's the WBC or NHL players at the Winter Olympics. I realize this is a serious of the American sportsfan culture but, frankly, if you've become too invested in the success of your Home Team that you can't have any fun apart from it, then you probably need to evaluate how seriously you take sports. Growing up as a baseball fan, I always fantasized about what a tournament made up of national all-star teams would be like. I remember an issue of USA Today's sadly belated Baseball Weekly in 1996 simulating a hypothetical Olympic field of big leaguers that stayed on my desk for months. It passes the Rule of Cool, and that's enough for me.

The WBC's chief problem is seasonal; there's really no ideal time to play it. As it stands now, the tournament is wedged alongside spring training, which makes for rusty play, pitch counts, and withdrawals from players who want to focus on making their big league club or nurse a previous season's injury back to health. You're also up against a busy sports calender including the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament over the semifinals. Ideally, the season could be halted for 2 and a half weeks in mid-July, as this would give us mid-season form and the full attention of the national sports media. However, there would still be plenty of pullouts from players liking the idea of a midseason vacation, and the season would have to be extended into March or November. As we've seen in recent years' World Series, the baseball schedule is already pushing the point of acceptable playing weather in many cities.

It would be nice if baseball had the international soccer, where the entire world of club play stops even for exhibition matches. But soccer has roughly a century of history established in that regard, and even that, I understand, is under threat from major clubs who want more power to restrict their star players from international matches. I'm not usually one to get all sentimental about sports being a business, but I can understand where that frustration comes from.