From about .com. While looking for the Rolling Stone Top 500 Rock and Roll Songs of All-Time, I found this list. On first glance, it's better for at least two reasons. "Imagine" is only barely in the top 10, and "Born to Run" is ranked higher. (On the other hand, you'd think the people doing this list had only heard Springsteen through his singles. No "Jungleland?" with "Comfortably Numb" in the top 10?)
Downside: no classic soul or R&B.The argument could be made that that's not rock and roll, but for the most part, neither is the majority of prog rock. Regardless, a fun list and a nostalgie trip.
Top 500 Rock and Roll Songs
500 George Thorogood - Move It On Over
499 Bob Dylan - Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
498 Joe Cocker - The Letter
497 Ten Years After - I'd Love To Change The World
496 Kingsmen - Louie Louie
495 Humble Pie - Thirty Days In The Hole
494 Beatles - I Should Have Known Better
493 Bob Seger - Old Time Rock And Roll
492 Santana - Evil Ways
491 Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love
490 Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City
489 David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
488 Amboy Dukes - Journey To The Center Of The Mind
487 Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train
486 Sly/Family Stone - Dance To The Music
485 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q
484 Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London
483 Eric Clapton - Forever Man
482 Hollies - Bus Stop
481 Sugarloaf - Green-Eyed Lady
480 Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
479 Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
478 Tom Petty - Free Fallin' 2
477 Neil Young - Southern Man
476 Crosby, Stills Nash - Helplessly Hoping
475 Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
474 Santana - Black Magic Woman
473 Eagles - One Of These Nights
472 Canned Heat - On The Road Again
471 Dr. John - Right Place, Wrong Time
470 Rolling Stones - Waiting On A Friend
469 Grateful Dead - Sugar Magnolia
468 Jethro Tull - Bungle In The Jungle
467 Beatles - Glass Onion
466 John Fogerty - Old Man Down The Road
465 Golden Earring - Twilight Zone
464 Moody Blues - The Voice
463 Supertramp - Goodbye Stranger
462 Thunderclap Newman - Something In The Air
461 Bob Seger - Turn The Page
460 ZZ Top - Gimme All Your Lovin'
459 Eric Clapton - Layla ( Unplugged)
458 Cheap Trick - Dream Police
457 Pink Floyd - Breathe
456 Doors - The End
455 Foghat - Slow Ride
454 Eagles - Lyin' Eyes
453 Beatles - Ballad Of John And Yoko
452 Bob Dylan - Knockin' On Heaven's Door
451 Pete Townshend - Rough Boys
450 Foreigner - Cold As Ice
449 Deep Purple - Woman From Toyko
448 Jethro Tull - Living In The Past
447 Beatles - Lucy In The Sky w/ Diamonds
446 Crosby Stills Nash - Wooden Ships
445 Led Zeppelin - All Of My Love
444 Norman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky
443 CCR - Up Around The Bend
442 Allman Brothers - Melissa
441 Outlaws - Green Grass & High Tides
440 Bruce Springsteen - Spirit In The Night
439 Peter Frampton - Baby I Love Your Way
438 Beatles - Please Please Me
437 Steve Miller - The Joker
436 Dire Straits - So Far Away
435 Queen - Tie Your Mother Down
434 Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes
433 Rolling Stones - Beast Of Burden
432 Van Morrison - Wild Night
431 Tom Petty - I Won't Back Down
430 Led Zeppelin - Dy'er Ma'ker
429 Stephen Stills - Love The One You're With
428 Bob Dylan - Just Like A Woman
427 Rod Stewart - You Wear It Well
426 Beatles - Norwegian Wood
425 U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
424 Peter Gabriel - In Your Eyes
423 Van Halen - Dance The Night Away
422 Rolling Stones - Mother's Little Helper
421 Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back In Town
420 Rick Derringer - Rock 'N Roll Hootchie Koo
419 Boston - Peace Of Mind
418 Focus - Hocus Pocus
417 Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die
416 Blue Oyster Cult - Burnin' For You
415 ELO - Strange Magic
414 Animals - It's My Life
413 Jethro Tull - Cross-Eyed Mary
412 Cream - Badge
411 Grateful Dead - Friend of the Devil
410 Cars - My Best Friend's Girl
409 Doors - 20th Century Fox
408 Tom Petty - Refugee
407 Bad Company - Bad Company
406 Deep Purple - Highway Star
405 Neil Young - Rockin In The Free World
404 Elton John - Madman Across The Water
403 America - Horse With No Name
402 Peter Frampton - Do You Feel Like We Do?
401 Who - Substitute
400 Bruce Springsteen - Pink Cadillac
399 Led Zeppelin - Good Times Bad Times
398 Guess Who - No Sugar Tonight
397 Chicago - Make Me Smile
396 Doors - Waiting For The Sun
395 Eric Clapton - I Shot The Sheriff
394 Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
393 Queen - Fat Bottom Girls
392 Who - You Better You Bet
391 Badfinger - Baby Blue
390 Grand Funk Railroad - Bad Time
389 Rolling Stones - Tumbling Dice
388 Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street
387 Edgar Winter - Frankenstein
386 Paul McCartney - Jet
385 Kinks - Celluloid Heroes
384 Yes - Wonderous Stories
383 Steve Winwood - Arc Of A Diver
382 Rush - Tom Sawyer
381 Steely Dan - Dirty Work
380 Canned Heat - Goin' Up The Country
379 Van Halen - Runnin' With The Devil
378 Bad Company - Movin' On
377 Santana - Oye Como Va
376 ZZ Top - La Grange
375 Nazareth - Hair of the Dog
374 Jimi Hendrix - The Wind Cries Mary
373 Tom Petty - American Girl
372 Alice Cooper - School's Out
371 James Gang - Funk #49
370 Rolling Stones - Start Me Up
369 Golden Earring - Radar Love
368 Moody Blues - Story In Your Eyes
367 Paul McCartney - Another Day
366 The Boxtops - The Letter
365 Genesis - We Can't Dance
364 Who - Going Mobile
363 T. Rex - Band a Gong (Get It On)
362 Cat Stevens - Wild World
361 Steely Dan - Josie
360 Todd Rundgren - Hello It's Me
359 Elton John - Funeral/Love Lies Bleeding
358 Procol Harum - Conquistador
357 U2 - New Year's Day
356 George Thorogood - Bad To The Bone
355 ZZ Top - Sharp Dressed Man
354 Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond
353 Styx - Blue Collar Man
352 Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill
351 ELO - Livin' Thing
350 Heart - Barracuda
349 Hollies - Long Cool Woman
348 Beatles - Hard Day's Night
347 David Bowie - Fame
346 Neil Young - Heart Of Gold
345 Guess Who - Share the Land
344 America - Sister Golden Hair
343 Who - Magic Bus
342 Bruce Springsteen - Going Down
341 Chicago - Beginnings
340 CCR - Proud Mary
339 Rolling Stones - Get Off My Cloud
338 Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
337 Led Zeppelin - Fool In The Rain
336 Animals - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
335 Badfinger - No Matter What
334 George Harrison - My Sweet Lord
333 Cheap Trick - I Want You To Want Me
332 BTO - Takin' Care Of Business
331 Boston - Foreplay/Long Time
330 Zombies - She's Not There
329 Elton John - Tiny Dancer
328 John Fogerty - Centerfield
327 Beatles - We Can Work It Out
326 Kinks - Destroyer
325 Who - My Wife
324 Uriah Heep - Easy Livin'
323 Steve Miller Band - Take The Money And Run
322 Moody Blues - Ride My See-Saw
321 Pink Floyd - Young Lust
320 Derek & Dominoes - Bell Bottom Blues
319 Allman Brothers - Midnight Rider
318 Bruce Springsteen - Brilliant Disguise
317 Steely Dan - FM (No Static At All)
316 Supertramp - Give A Little Bit
315 Beatles - Penny Lane
314 Rolling Stones - Play With Fire
313 Bob Seger - Against The Wind
312 Paul Simon - Kodachrome
311 Crosby, Stills, Nash - Long Time Gone
310 Led Zeppelin - Misty Mountain Hop
309 Elton John - Levon
308 Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart
307 Argent - Hold Your Head Up
306 James Gang - Walk Away
305 Deep Purple - Hush
304 The Band - Up On Cripple Creek
303 ELO - Fire On High
302 Bad Company - Can't Get Enough
301 CCR - Green River
300 Beatles - Paperback Writer
299 Kinks - Tired Of Waiting For You
298 Who - The Kids Are Alright
297 Rush - New World Man
296 Styx - Renegade
295 Bob Dylan - Blowin' In The Wind
294 Foghat - Fool For The City
293 Nazareth - Love Hurts
292 Byrds - So You Wanna Be A Rock 'N Roll Star
291 Alice Cooper - Eighteen
290 Beatles - I Wanna Hold Your Hand
289 Who - I Can See For Miles
288 Rolling Stones - Paint It Black
287 Guess Who - Laughing
286 Steely Dan - Rikki Don't Lose That Number
285 Chicago - 25 Or 6 To 4
284 Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama
283 Led Zeppelin - Over The Hills And Far Away
282 Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride
281 Rolling Stones - Heartbreaker
280 Moody Blues - Tuesday Afternoon
279 Rascals - Good Lovin'
278 Badfinger - Come And Get It
277 Todd Rundgren - I Saw The Light
276 Doobie Brothers - Black Water
275 Byrds - Eight Miles High
274 Eagles - Already Gone
273 Eric Clapton - Tears In Heaven
272 Beatles - She Loves You
271 CCR - Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
270 Who - Eminence Front
269 George Harrison - All Those Years Ago
268 David Bowie - Young Americans
267 Steve Miller - Jet Airliner
266 Beatles - Strawberry Fields
265 Bruce Springsteen - Hungry Heart
264 Dire Straits - Sultans Of Swing
263 Doors - People Are Strange
262 Fleetwood Mac - Say You Love Me
261 Elton John - Your Song
260 Yes - Long Distance Runaround
259 Beatles - Here Comes The Sun
258 Heart - Magic Man
257 Bad Company - Feel Like Makin' Love
256 Country Joe & the Fish - Fixin' To Die Rag
255 Cat Stevens - Peace Train
254 Mountain - Mississippi Queen
253 ELO - Turn To Stone
252 Troggs - Wild Thing
251 Led Zeppelin - Trampled Under Foot
250 CCR - Heard It Through The Grapevine
249 Bob Dylan - Shelter From The Storm
248 Seals and Crofts - Summer Breeze
247 Steely Dan - Reeling In The Years
246 Rascals - People Got To Be Free
245 Strawberry Alarm Clock - Incense/Peppermints
244 Beatles - Twist And Shout
243 Band, The - The Weight
242 Allman Brothers - Whipping Post
241 Doors - Riders On The Storm
240 Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth
239 David Bowie - Space Oddity
238 Alice Cooper - No More Mr. Nice Guy
237 Eric Clapton - Lay Down Sally
236 Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man
235 Blind Faith - Can't Find My Way Home
234 Moody Blues - Question
233 Blue Oyster Cult - Godzilla
232 Beatles - Sun King Medley
231 Who - 5:15
230 Ted Nugent - Stranglehold
229 CCR - Bad Moon Rising
228 Cheap Trick - Surrender
227 Fleetwood Mac - The Chain
226 Elton John - Honky Cat
225 Steely Dan - Do It Again
224 Animals - We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
223 Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel Of Love
222 Byrds - Mr. Tambourine Man
221 Chicago - Colour My World
220 Beatles - Golden Slumbers Medley
219 Who - I Can't Explain
218 Kinks - A Well Respected Man
217 Beatles - Get Back
216 AC/DC - You Shook Me All Night Long
215 Guess Who - These Eyes
214 Kiss - Rock 'N Roll All Night
213 Eric Clapton - After Midnight
212 Pink Floyd - Us And Them
211 Rolling Stones - Angie
210 George Harrison - I Got My Mind Set On You
209 Heart - Crazy On You
208 ZZ Top - Tush
207 Tom Petty - Breakdown
206 Lynryd Skynyrd - Gimme Three Steps
205 Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
204 Beatles - Ticket To Ride
203 Doobie Brothers - Long Train Running
202 Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way
201 Kinks - All Day And All Of The Night
200 Led Zeppelin Ramble On
199 Boston - Rock And Roll Band
198 ELO - Evil Woman
197 Beatles - Eight Days A Week
196 The Firm - Radioactive
195 Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue
194 CCR - Lodi
193 Queen - Keep Yourself Alive
192 AC/DC - T.N.T.
191 Led Zeppelin - Heartbreaker/Livin' Lovin' Maid
190 Doobie Brothers - Listen To The Music
189 Neil Young - Cinnamon Girl
188 Jackson Browne - Running On Empty
187 Cars - Just What I Needed
186 Moody Blues - Your Wildest Dreams
185 Who - Bargain
184 Doors - Love Me Two Times
183 Janis Joplin - Piece Of My Heart
182 Cream - Strange Brew
181 Van Halen - Jump
180 Jethro Tull - Locomotive Breath
179 Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want
178 Grand Funk Railroad - Some Kind Of Wonderful
177 Billy Joel - Piano Man
176 Steve Miller - Fly Like An Eagle
175 Guess Who - No Time
174 Elton John - Rocket Man
173 Kansas - Dust In The Wind
172 Bruce Springsteen - Born In The U.S.A.
171 Steve Winwood - Higher Love
170 Badfinger - Day After Day
169 Ted Nugent - Cat Scratch Fever
168 Fleetwood Mac - Tusk
167 Dire Straits - Money For Nothing
166 Who - Long Live Rock
165 Cat Stevens - Morning Has Broken
164 Crosby, Stills, Nash - Teach Your Children
163 Eagles - Take It Easy
162 GFR - I'm Your Captain/Closer To Home
161 Beatles - In My Life
160 Pink Floyd - Time
159 Chicago - Saturday In The Park
158 Yardbirds - Heart Full Of Soul
157 Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song
156 Rolling Stones - Under My Thumb
155 Doors - Love Her Madly
154 Spencer Davis Group - Gimme Some Lovin'
153 ELP - From The Beginning
152 Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love
151 Crosby Stills Nash - Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
150 Van Morrison - Domino
149 Head East - Never Been Any Reason
148 George Harrison - When We Was Fab
147 Edgar Winter Band - Free Ride
146 Bruce Springsteen - Glory Days
145 Byrds - Turn, Turn, Turn
144 Styx - Come Sail Away
143 Black Sabbath - Paranoid
142 Eagles - Life In The Fast Lane
141 Genesis - Home By The Sea
140 David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
139 Foreigner - Feels Like The First Time
138 CCR - Down On The Corner
137 George Harrison - What Is Life
136 Eric Clapton - Let It Rain
135 Elton John - Crocodile Rock
134 Beatles - Help!
133 Traffic - Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys
132 Rolling Stones - Honky Tonk Woman
131 Bad Company - Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy
130 ZZ Top - Legs
129 Beatles - Day Tripper
128 Cream - Crossroads
127 ELO - Telephone Line
126 Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop
125 Joe Walsh - Life's Been Good
124 Supertramp - Logical Song
123 Neil Young - Old Man
122 Beatles - Eleanor Rigby
121 Iron Butterfly - In A Gadda Da Vida
120 Crosby, Stills, Nash - Ohio
119 Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion
118 Guess Who - American Woman
117 Doors - Hello I Love You
116 Led Zeppelin - Going To California
115 Beatles - Come Together
114 Pink Floyd - Welcome To The Machine
113 Zombies - Time Of The Season
112 Allman Brothers Band - Jessica
111 Who - Squeeze Box
110 ELP - Karn Evil 9
109 Doobie Brothers - China Grove
108 Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday
107 Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper
106 Van Morrison - Moondance
105 Paul McCartney - Band On The Run
104 BTO - You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
103 Yardbirds - For Your Love
102 Beatles - Revolution
101 Elton John - Daniel
100 ELO - Don't Bring Me Down
99 Beatles - Long and Winding Road
98 Janis Joplin - Me And Bobby McGee
97 Who - Who Are You
96 CCR - Fortunate Son
95 Joe Walsh - Rocky Mountain Way
94 Pink Floyd - Brain Damage/Eclipse
93 David Bowie - Suffragette City
92 Queen - We Will Rock You/Champions
91 Beatles - All You Need Is Love
90 Grateful Dead - Touch Of Grey
89 Eagles Heartache Tonight
88 Procol Harum - Whiter Shade Of Pale
87 Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight
86 ELP - Lucky Man
85 Beatles - Sgt. Pepper/With A Little Help From My Friends
84 Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way
83 Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter
82 Manfred Mann - Blinded By The Light
81 Kinks - Lola
80 Grand Funk - We're An American Band
79 Crosby, Stills, Nash - Woodstock
78 Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower
77 Tom Petty - Running Down A Dream
76 Allman Brothers - Ramblin' Man
75 Beatles - Something
74 Jefferson Airplane - Somebody To Love
73 Pink Floyd - Hey You
72 Led Zeppelin - Thank You
71 Don McLean - American Pie
70 Doors - Break On Through
69 Rod Stewart - Maggie May
68 Jimi Hendrix - Fire
67 Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl
66 Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark
65 Bob Dylan - Lay Lady Lay
64 David Bowie - Changes
63 Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon
62 Elton John - Bennie And The Jets
61 Police - Every Breath You Take
60 Paul McCartney - Maybe I'm Amazed
59 Who - Pinball Wizard
58 Aerosmith - Walk This Way
57 Jimi Hendrix - Foxy Lady
56 Led Zeppelin - Communication Breakdown
55 Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall (Pt. 2)
54 Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil
53 Doors - Touch Me
52 Beatles - While My Guitar Gently Weeps
51 Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
50 Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild
49 Animals - House Of The Rising Sun
48 John Lennon - Instant Karma
47 Jimi Hendrix - Hey Joe
46 Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
45 Cream - Sunshine Of Your Love
44 Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar
43 Who - My Generation
42 Doors - L.A. Woman
41 Led Zeppelin - Black Dog
40 Eric Clapton - Cocaine
39 Beatles - Let It Be
38 Boston - More Than A Feeling
37 Free - All Right Now
36 Grateful Dead - Casey Jones
35 Kansas - Carry On My Wayward Son
34 Kinks - You Really Got Me
33 Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
32 Lynyrd Skynyrd - Freebird
31 Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love
30 Rolling Stones - Jumping Jack Flash
29 Aerosmith - Dream On
28 Jethro Tull - Aqualung
27 Beatles - Hey Jude
26 Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
25 Doors - Roadhouse Blues
24 Yes - Roundabout
23 Who - Behind Blue Eyes
22 Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
21 Moody Blues - Nights In White Satin
20 Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone
19 Pink Floyd - Money
18 Grateful Dead - Truckin'
17 Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
16 Jimi Hendrix - Purple Haze
15 Beatles - Yesterday
14 Cream - White Room
13 Rolling Stones - It's Only Rock 'N Roll
12 Who - Baba O'Riley
11 Led Zeppelin - Rock And Roll
10 John Lennon - Imagine
9 Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
8 Eagles - Hotel California
7 Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
6 Doors - Light My Fire
5 Who - Won't Get Fooled Again
4 Beatles - A Day In The Life
3 Derek And The Dominoes - Layla
2 Rolling Stones - Satisfaction
1 Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven
©2001 P.Williams and About Classic Rock.
Revisions ©2004
Saturday, November 27, 2004
More reasons why, as Jonah Goldberg wrote of himself, intelligent conservatives say: "Don't call me Republican."
It's Wabbit Season
By Ann Coulter
Admittedly, still reeling from the nastiest Democratic campaign since sorority rush at sniper school, the country could do with a little civility. But victorious Republicans behave like Warner Bros. gophers Mac 'n' Tosh: "Awfully sorry, old boy." "No, not at all – after you." There's something to be said for coming out swinging. We won! The nation is lousy with red states! It's wabbit season!
The country has witnessed a relentless Republican juggernaut for the past quarter-century. But Republicans can't shake the notion that they are a minority insurgency fighting for any scrap liberals will give them.
Despite the fact that Bob Shrum was running John Kerry's campaign, racking up his eighth loss in a presidential campaign, Republicans won the White House. With the exception of the decadent buffoon, whose newly opened presidential library and museum becomes the first to ever feature an "adults-only" section, Republicans have controlled the White House for 25 years. Even Clinton got into office on a virtual technicality when third-party candidate Ross Perot took 20 percent of the vote and the buffoon was elected with 42 percent of the vote (or what used to be known in Democratic Party circles as a "mandate").
It's been a decade since Republicans swept the House of Representatives after a half-century out of control. Republicans have had a lock on the House since. Indeed, in the recent election, more Republicans were elected to the House than in any election since 1946.
Republicans have also solidified their control of the Senate. With the humiliating defeat of the Democrats' Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in the last election, Republicans toppled a Senate party leader for the first time since 1952. (Daschle's ultimate undoing: too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Get it???)
And of course, Republicans have held the vast majority of state governorships for a decade – a dominance that now includes the very blue states California and New York.
But Republican politicians simply can't grasp that they are a majority party and the Democrats are going the way of the Whigs. Republican senators still think the key to their success is making sure they are purer than Caesar's wife so that the mainstream media can't possibly attack them. That's never worked before, so let's try it again! What are they, Bob Shrum all of a sudden?
Democrats never needed a quarter-century of steady victories to act like the majority party. In 2000, when the Senate was divided 50:50, giving the Republicans a one-vote majority with the vice president's vote, Republicans "played fair," dividing Senate committees equally between Republicans and Democrats. But the moment Jim Jeffords became an Independent – not even a Democrat! – splitting the Senate 49-50 just a year later, the Democrats turned around and gave themselves a majority on all Senate committees.
If they were in the majority, I promise you the Democrats would never allow a moderate Democrat like Evan Bayh chair the Judiciary Committee. Even now, they won't even let Bayh sit on the Judiciary Committee.
But Senate Republicans, with a quarter-century of nearly uninterrupted victories at their back, are afraid to change their own rules to deprive Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. CBS' "60 Minutes" might run a hit piece on Republicans saying Republicans aren't playing fair!
Only when it comes to the media do Republicans suddenly become Neville Chamberlain: They don't like us, so let's give them what they want.
Republicans seem oblivious to the fact that if anyone cared what Dan Rather had to say, Republicans would not be the majority party. Republicans should be required to say this mantra over and over to themselves: "It is a good thing to be attacked by the likes of the New York Times and '60 Minutes,' both of which are losing readers/viewers faster than innocent bystanders exiting the Vibe awards after another random stabbing. It is a good thing ..."
Republicans are also sublimely confident that Arlen Specter has been so cauterized by the recent attacks that he will suddenly break a 30-year habit of sabotaging his own party. Republicans are pretty sure he will not go on "Meet the Press" to call any of Bush's judicial nominees "out of the mainstream" – all while flogging his credentials as the REPUBLICAN chairman of Judiciary, chosen by the REPUBLICAN majority in the Senate.
It is as certain that Arlen Specter will double-cross Republicans as it is that Bob Shrum will lose his next presidential campaign. You can add this to a certain infamous list that already includes "death" and "taxes."
What will Republicans do then? If Republicans are worried about not appearing "fair" to the editors of the New York Times if they deny Specter a chairmanship now, how will it look if Republicans wait for Specter to double-cross them to strip him of his chairmanship? If they're not willing to do that, then the moment Specter becomes chairman, the only people he will have to please all work at the New York Times, CBS and other sworn enemies of the Republican Party.
Finally, individual Republican senators oppose stripping Specter of his chairmanship for fear that they too will be punished every time they fail to toe the party line – and God forbid a Republican hesitate before holding a press conference to denounce his own party.
It would be worth making Sen. Lincoln Too-Dumb-to-Know-He's-a-Democrat Chafee chairman of some important Senate committee if that's what it takes to calm Republican "mavericks," as the New York Times calls Republicans who agree with the New York Times. The Judiciary Committee is different.
Liberals cannot win when Americans are allowed to vote, so they jam their insane ideas down our throats through the courts. In Bush's second term, there is no more important committee than the one charged with overseeing his judicial nominations.
If Republicans blow this once-a-century opportunity to end the tyranny of the judiciary, they deserve to lose. And they can't keep counting on Democrats to hire Bob Shrum.
It's Wabbit Season
By Ann Coulter
Admittedly, still reeling from the nastiest Democratic campaign since sorority rush at sniper school, the country could do with a little civility. But victorious Republicans behave like Warner Bros. gophers Mac 'n' Tosh: "Awfully sorry, old boy." "No, not at all – after you." There's something to be said for coming out swinging. We won! The nation is lousy with red states! It's wabbit season!
The country has witnessed a relentless Republican juggernaut for the past quarter-century. But Republicans can't shake the notion that they are a minority insurgency fighting for any scrap liberals will give them.
Despite the fact that Bob Shrum was running John Kerry's campaign, racking up his eighth loss in a presidential campaign, Republicans won the White House. With the exception of the decadent buffoon, whose newly opened presidential library and museum becomes the first to ever feature an "adults-only" section, Republicans have controlled the White House for 25 years. Even Clinton got into office on a virtual technicality when third-party candidate Ross Perot took 20 percent of the vote and the buffoon was elected with 42 percent of the vote (or what used to be known in Democratic Party circles as a "mandate").
It's been a decade since Republicans swept the House of Representatives after a half-century out of control. Republicans have had a lock on the House since. Indeed, in the recent election, more Republicans were elected to the House than in any election since 1946.
Republicans have also solidified their control of the Senate. With the humiliating defeat of the Democrats' Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in the last election, Republicans toppled a Senate party leader for the first time since 1952. (Daschle's ultimate undoing: too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Get it???)
And of course, Republicans have held the vast majority of state governorships for a decade – a dominance that now includes the very blue states California and New York.
But Republican politicians simply can't grasp that they are a majority party and the Democrats are going the way of the Whigs. Republican senators still think the key to their success is making sure they are purer than Caesar's wife so that the mainstream media can't possibly attack them. That's never worked before, so let's try it again! What are they, Bob Shrum all of a sudden?
Democrats never needed a quarter-century of steady victories to act like the majority party. In 2000, when the Senate was divided 50:50, giving the Republicans a one-vote majority with the vice president's vote, Republicans "played fair," dividing Senate committees equally between Republicans and Democrats. But the moment Jim Jeffords became an Independent – not even a Democrat! – splitting the Senate 49-50 just a year later, the Democrats turned around and gave themselves a majority on all Senate committees.
If they were in the majority, I promise you the Democrats would never allow a moderate Democrat like Evan Bayh chair the Judiciary Committee. Even now, they won't even let Bayh sit on the Judiciary Committee.
But Senate Republicans, with a quarter-century of nearly uninterrupted victories at their back, are afraid to change their own rules to deprive Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. CBS' "60 Minutes" might run a hit piece on Republicans saying Republicans aren't playing fair!
Only when it comes to the media do Republicans suddenly become Neville Chamberlain: They don't like us, so let's give them what they want.
Republicans seem oblivious to the fact that if anyone cared what Dan Rather had to say, Republicans would not be the majority party. Republicans should be required to say this mantra over and over to themselves: "It is a good thing to be attacked by the likes of the New York Times and '60 Minutes,' both of which are losing readers/viewers faster than innocent bystanders exiting the Vibe awards after another random stabbing. It is a good thing ..."
Republicans are also sublimely confident that Arlen Specter has been so cauterized by the recent attacks that he will suddenly break a 30-year habit of sabotaging his own party. Republicans are pretty sure he will not go on "Meet the Press" to call any of Bush's judicial nominees "out of the mainstream" – all while flogging his credentials as the REPUBLICAN chairman of Judiciary, chosen by the REPUBLICAN majority in the Senate.
It is as certain that Arlen Specter will double-cross Republicans as it is that Bob Shrum will lose his next presidential campaign. You can add this to a certain infamous list that already includes "death" and "taxes."
What will Republicans do then? If Republicans are worried about not appearing "fair" to the editors of the New York Times if they deny Specter a chairmanship now, how will it look if Republicans wait for Specter to double-cross them to strip him of his chairmanship? If they're not willing to do that, then the moment Specter becomes chairman, the only people he will have to please all work at the New York Times, CBS and other sworn enemies of the Republican Party.
Finally, individual Republican senators oppose stripping Specter of his chairmanship for fear that they too will be punished every time they fail to toe the party line – and God forbid a Republican hesitate before holding a press conference to denounce his own party.
It would be worth making Sen. Lincoln Too-Dumb-to-Know-He's-a-Democrat Chafee chairman of some important Senate committee if that's what it takes to calm Republican "mavericks," as the New York Times calls Republicans who agree with the New York Times. The Judiciary Committee is different.
Liberals cannot win when Americans are allowed to vote, so they jam their insane ideas down our throats through the courts. In Bush's second term, there is no more important committee than the one charged with overseeing his judicial nominations.
If Republicans blow this once-a-century opportunity to end the tyranny of the judiciary, they deserve to lose. And they can't keep counting on Democrats to hire Bob Shrum.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
From The Los Angeles Times
Guardsmen say they feel like prisoners
Complaints Rise Out Of Training For Duty In Iraq
By Scott Gold
DONA ANA ARMY CAMP, N.M. - Members of a National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they are under lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
A number of the Guard troops also said that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent they fear their cas-ualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year.
They said they think that their treatment and training reflects bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation Army commanders denied.
The 680 members of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August, and are preparing for deployment at Dona Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 25 miles from its large parent base, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, with headquarters in Modesto, Calif., said in two-dozen interviews that they are allowed no visitors or travel passes, have scant contact with their families and that morale is terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno, Calif.
Several soldiers have fled Dona Ana, vaulting over barbed wire, the Guard troops interviewed said. Others, they said, might go AWOL, at least temporarily, to be with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders noted that the military is shoring up its strained ranks by turning "citizen-soldiers" into front-line troops. About 40 percent of troops in Iraq are reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Fort Bliss, said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Dona Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers said the problems go much deeper. Military analysts agree that tensions between active duty soldiers and National Guard troops have been made worse by the needs of the war in Iraq.
The concerns of the guardsmen at Dona Ana are the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Fort Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq. Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad because the trucks they had been assigned were not armored for combat duty.
Guardsmen say they feel like prisoners
Complaints Rise Out Of Training For Duty In Iraq
By Scott Gold
DONA ANA ARMY CAMP, N.M. - Members of a National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they are under lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
A number of the Guard troops also said that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent they fear their cas-ualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year.
They said they think that their treatment and training reflects bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation Army commanders denied.
The 680 members of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August, and are preparing for deployment at Dona Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 25 miles from its large parent base, Fort Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, with headquarters in Modesto, Calif., said in two-dozen interviews that they are allowed no visitors or travel passes, have scant contact with their families and that morale is terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno, Calif.
Several soldiers have fled Dona Ana, vaulting over barbed wire, the Guard troops interviewed said. Others, they said, might go AWOL, at least temporarily, to be with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders noted that the military is shoring up its strained ranks by turning "citizen-soldiers" into front-line troops. About 40 percent of troops in Iraq are reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Fort Bliss, said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Dona Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers said the problems go much deeper. Military analysts agree that tensions between active duty soldiers and National Guard troops have been made worse by the needs of the war in Iraq.
The concerns of the guardsmen at Dona Ana are the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Fort Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq. Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad because the trucks they had been assigned were not armored for combat duty.
From Hits Magazine Daily Double:
ONE-DAY SALES:
U2 FLIES INTO STRATOSPHERE
All Systems Go for New Album Heading Into Thanksgiving Weekend
November 24, 2004
Chalk this one up to inspired co-branding, superstardom and a buttload of TV advertising.
According to early reports from national accounts, U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope) is poised to sell over 900k in its first week, with a solid shot at reaching a million before the holiday weekend is over. It’s almost enough to give one, uh, vertigo.
Of course, U2 is ordinarily no sales slouch, with some 125 million albums worldwide to their credit, but the band's last album, 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind (Interscope) sold 428k in its first week, meaning demand for this one has ramped up significantly. (Translation: “Apple apple iPod apple iPod, apple iPod iPod apple.”)
One new factor likely to help drive U2’s opening number up is that Best Buy will begin selling Bomb for $7.99 (along with some other titles) on Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
Also headed for next week’s chart are Gwen Stefani’s Love, Angel, Music, Baby (Interscope), which early reports say has a shot at 300k; Fantasia Barrino’s Free Yourself (J Records), currently looking like it’ll do 250k or better; Creed’s Greatest Hits (Wind-up), which could hit the 150k mark; Jessica Simpson’s Re-Joyce: The Christmas Album (Columbia), looking just shy of 150k; the $59 list Nirvana box set With the Lights Out (Geffen), which should come in at around 100k; and Ruben Studdard’s I Need An Angel (J Records), for the moment looking like 80k.
Bear in mind that the upcoming post-turkey shopping frenzy is a real wild card, making this one of the hardest weeks of the year to predict, according to our dedicated team of sales fetishists. All that means is that while we might be more wrong than usual, our excuses will be as strong as ever.
ONE-DAY SALES:
U2 FLIES INTO STRATOSPHERE
All Systems Go for New Album Heading Into Thanksgiving Weekend
November 24, 2004
Chalk this one up to inspired co-branding, superstardom and a buttload of TV advertising.
According to early reports from national accounts, U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope) is poised to sell over 900k in its first week, with a solid shot at reaching a million before the holiday weekend is over. It’s almost enough to give one, uh, vertigo.
Of course, U2 is ordinarily no sales slouch, with some 125 million albums worldwide to their credit, but the band's last album, 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind (Interscope) sold 428k in its first week, meaning demand for this one has ramped up significantly. (Translation: “Apple apple iPod apple iPod, apple iPod iPod apple.”)
One new factor likely to help drive U2’s opening number up is that Best Buy will begin selling Bomb for $7.99 (along with some other titles) on Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
Also headed for next week’s chart are Gwen Stefani’s Love, Angel, Music, Baby (Interscope), which early reports say has a shot at 300k; Fantasia Barrino’s Free Yourself (J Records), currently looking like it’ll do 250k or better; Creed’s Greatest Hits (Wind-up), which could hit the 150k mark; Jessica Simpson’s Re-Joyce: The Christmas Album (Columbia), looking just shy of 150k; the $59 list Nirvana box set With the Lights Out (Geffen), which should come in at around 100k; and Ruben Studdard’s I Need An Angel (J Records), for the moment looking like 80k.
Bear in mind that the upcoming post-turkey shopping frenzy is a real wild card, making this one of the hardest weeks of the year to predict, according to our dedicated team of sales fetishists. All that means is that while we might be more wrong than usual, our excuses will be as strong as ever.
From the blog Iowahawk. This is hilariously brilliant.
Blue State Blues as Coastal Parents Battle Invasion of Dollywood Values
"I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."
"But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."
Even as her voice is choked with emotion, she summons an inner courage -- a mother's courage -- and leads me down the hall to "Bobby Ray's" bedroom, for a firsthand glimpse at the psychic devastation that claimed her son.
She opens the door to a reveal a riot of George Jones CDs, reflective 'mudflap mama' stickers, empty foil packs of Red Man, and U.S. Marine recruiting posters. In the middle of the room: a makeshift table made from a utility cable spool, bearing a the remains of a gutted catfish.
"This used to be all Ikea," she says, rocking on heels between heaved sobs. "It's too late for us. Maybe it's not to late for me to warn others."
Pandora's Moon Pie Box
While poignant, Ellen McCormack's painful battle to save her son is far from isolated. Across coastal America, increasing numbers of families are discovering that their children have been lured into "Cracker" culture -- a new, freewheeling underground youth movement that celebrates the hedonistic thrills of frog-gigging and outlaw modified sprint cars. No one knows their exact number, but sociologists say that the movement is exploding among young people in America's most fashionable zip codes.
"We first detected it a few years ago, with the emergence of the trucker hat phenomenon," says Gerard Levin, professor of abnormal sociology at the University of California. "At first we thought it was some sort of benign, ironic strain. By the time we realized the early wearers really were interested in seed corn hybrids and Peterbilts, it had already escaped containment."
Levin points to 'Patient Zero,' who in 1997 was a 23-year old graduate student in Gender Studies at San Francisco State University.
"During a cross-country trip to New York, he stopped at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop in Walcott, Iowa, and bought a John Deere gimme cap as a gag souvenir," says Levin. "Within a year, he had dropped out of graduate school, abandoned his SoMa apartment, and and was working at a drive-thru liquor store. Today he is a wealthy televangelist in Bossier City, Louisiana."
The contagion of 'Patient Zero' would prove devastating. Soon trucker hats were appearing throughout trendy coastal neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope and Portrero Hill, often accessorized with chain wallets and 'wife beater' t-shirts. A new alternative youth movement had emerged, rejecting the staid norms of establishment NPR society and embracing the 'tune-in, turn-on, chug-up' ethos of the Pabst Blue Ribbon underground. Before long, it would broadcast its siren call to an even younger generation -- one whose parents were woefully unequipped to recognize it.
Youthquake
"It was one day last spring," says Ellen McCormack. "My life partner Carol and I were in the garage, working on a giant Donald Rumsfeld papier mache head for the Bay Area March Against the War, when Rain walked by. I thought he looked kind of strange, so I stopped him and looked closely into his eyes. Then I realized the truth -- he was wearing a mullet. I was shocked, but he swore to me that it was only ironic."
"After a few months, it was clear Rain had lied to us -- that hideous Kentucky waterfall was completely earnest," she adds, choking back sobs.
Her 18-year old son would soon exhibit other signs of disturbing changes.
"I was driving past a McDonalds one day last summer, and I thought I saw Rain's bike outside. He had told me earlier that he was going to a friend's house to stuff envelopes for the Dennis Kucinich campaign. I pulled a U-turn and headed back," she recalls. "When I confronted him in the parking lot, he started giving me a lame story about how he was only there to protest globalization, but I could smell the french fries on his breath."
McCormack says that Rain's erratic behavior would also come to include excessive politeness and deference.
"Everytime I tried to talk to him it was 'yes Momma,' and 'no Momma,' when he knows damn well my name is Ellen," she says, anger rising in her voice. "It was like I didn't even know him anymore."
McCormack tried an intervention with friends from the Anti-war community, but to no avail. In October, Bobby Ray packed up his Monte Carlo and left for basic training at Camp Pendleton.
"I have no son," she says in a barely audible whisper.
Across the country In toney Westchester County, New York, Jim and Sandy Vandenberg describe a similar tale of family grief.
"We are people of faith who keep the sabbath," says Sandy, a curator in the Dada collection of the Museum of Modern Art. "Even when she was a toddler, we made sure Emily got up early every Sunday morning to read the New York Times Book Review. Sunday morning was our time, until..."
"Until those damned Jesus bastards stole my little girl," interrupts her husband, barely containing his anger. Once a Freshman honors student in Lacanian Deconstruction Theory at NYU, their daughter is now better known as Lurleen McDaniel -- reigning Princess of the Tulsa Livestock Show and Rodeo.
In Bainbridge Island, Washington, single mom Jane Michelson says she began suspecting that her son Brian was in trouble after he started hanging with a new crowd at school.
"These weren't normal kids, neighborhood kids in Che t-shirts who want to drop a couple of hits of X and chill on Radiohead," she says. "They would talk in a sort of strange code language, like 'Roll Tide!' and 'Gig 'em Ags!' and 'Piiiig Sooieeee!'"
Signs of trouble would soon multiply.
"One day I got into my Volvo and hit the stereo preset for Pacifica Radio, and then I heard this obscene 'Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy' song coming from the speakers," she recalls. "The very next week, the maid found a tin of Skoal in his Wranglers. I told him him right then -- it was either me, or his tobacco-spitting friends."
Now known as Randy Dale Cash, her estranged son is a starting linebacker for Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.
Peer Pressure
Jane Michelson is not alone in her story. Throughout coastal America, school adminstrators and parents are reporting an alarming surge in 'Cracker' cliques on campus. Also known as 'Y'alls' or 'Neckies,' officials say the groups thrive by attracting outcasts and misfits from the student body.
"We try hard to engage all of our students in fun, healthy activities like Progressive Eco-Action March and Rage Against Intolerance Week," says Lawrence DiBenedetto of Patrice Lumumba Magnet School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Unfortunately, there are going to be those who fall through the cracks, into a life of bass fishing and stockcar racing."
It appears those cracks are widening. In one recent three-week period, fourteen high school students in Portland, Oregon were suspended for distributing pork rinds; a Burlington, Vermont high school was briefly closed for decontamination after janitors found a Bible hidden in a restroom; and forty-six undergraduate coeds at Swarthmore were expelled for staging clandestine Mary Kay cosmetics parties.
"We became suspicious after several heavily made-up students arrived at a Katha Pollitt lecture in a pink Cadillacs," says Swarthmore Dean of Students Geraldine Marcus.
Some say the craze threatens even the nation's most exclusive prep schools. At Exeter, Andover and St. Albans, rumors abound of secret societies where initiates are steeped in the black arts of restrictor plate cheating and satellite descramblers. Washington's elite Sidwell Friends School was nearly forced to close after scandalized parents learned that several students were openly touting Sams Club cards.
The Eclectic School Aid Hayseed Trip
To better understand what attracts young affluent students to the subculture, I spent a recent evening interviewing a group of self-described 'Neckies' from exclusive New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. Like countless other Friday nights, the close-knit group had made the 80 mile ritual journey to rural Belvidere, Illinois, to cruise Steak 'N' Shake and hang out at the Mills Fleet Farm parking lot.
"Y'all, check out these new mudders," says 17-year old 'Dakota,' proudly displaying the gigantic knobbed tires under his radically lifted 4x4 Audi Allroad. "I'm fixin' to get me a winch and Tuffbox fer it next week."
Not to be outdone, friend and fellow Neckie 'Duane' sounds 'Dixie' on the novelty horn of his jacked-up BMW M3. An early graduation gift from his parents, Duane has turned the expensive German coupe into an homage to the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee, complete with orange Stars-and-Bars paint job and spit cup on the console.
"Grandma gave me some money fer a summer study trip over ta Paris, but I thought the paint job was cooler," laughs Duane. "Hell, she thinks I'm over in the Sorbonne right now, studying Foucault and all that shit."
"I'm a-fixin' to put in a nitrous system on the General Lee, so I'ma call Grandma up and aks her for some book money," he adds.
Like most of their classmates, these North Shore Neckies were once bound for some of the top universities in America -- Yale, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern -- until they succumbed to the allure of the Downhome slacker lifestyle. Now some openly talk of dropping out, learning TIG welding, waiting tables at Waffle House or draining oil at Jiffy Lube; some even hint of enrolling at Iowa State. What drives privileged teens to such seemingly self-destructive behavior?
"I guess you might could say we're rebels," says Rachel 'Tyffanie' Stern, 17, lighting a Merit Menthol 100. Once destined for Vassar, Stern is now living with friends after her parents kicked her out of the house for spending her bat mitzvah money on a bass boat. Last month she became the youngest Jewish female to win an event on the Bassmasters Pro Tour.
Pausing for furtive glances, several of the teens share sniffs from a bottle of Harmon Triple Heat deer scent.
"Wooo-eee, shit howdy, that's gonna bring a mess of them whitetail bucks," says 19-year old Wei-Li 'Lamar' Cheung. A former Westinghouse Science Award winner, Cheung has devoted his chemistry and biology skill to building a fledgling hunting supply business.
A first generation Asian-American, Cheung says he was drawn to the group by their acceptance of minorities. "Hell, I kept tellin' all my family and teachers I wanna play fiddle, not violin," he explains. "The 'Necks accept me the way I am."
African-American Kwame 'Joe Don' Harris agrees. "Just because I'm black, teachers were always pushing me to go to Spellman to study Langston Hughes and Thelonius Monk," says the 17 year old. "These ol' boys here never laugh at my dream to be a crew chief for the Craftsman Truck Series."
If there is one aspiration that unites them all, it is the dream of moving to Branson, Missouri. Long famed for its laid-back attitude toward religion, country music and the military, Branson has become a Mecca for radical young Neckies seeking an escape from the stultifying conformity of their coastal hometowns.
"Shit, y'all, I heard Branson's got like four Wal Marts, and more $5.95 all-day breakfast buffets than Glencoe has Starbucks," enthuses Dakota, adding quickly that "pardon my French."
"Plus it's only a short drive up to Fort Leonard Wood," adds Tyffanie.
Talk arises of Branson's 'Summer of Bubba,' the upcoming hedonistic hillbilly festival of music, hog calling and nightcrawler gathering expected to draw millions of Neckies from as far as Santa Monica and Ithaca -- even Europe.
"Y'all, I heard them Swedish 'Necks are hardcore," says Joe Don. "They digitally remastered all the original Jerry Clower albums."
A live-for-today attitude permeates the group's ethos, with little concern about consequences. I ask Justin 'Jim Rob' Borowski, 18, what motivates young men and women to abandon promising academic careers in Gender Theory and Critical History to take a wild ride in the dark world of roofing and drywall contracting.
"My daddy was sorta mad when I tolt him I was gonna skip Columbia Journalism School for a plumbing apprenticeship," he answer philosophically, popping a plug of Red Man into his lip. "I tolt him that journalism is important, but the world needs plumbers too."
"After the toilet backed up, I think he got my point."
Blue State Blues as Coastal Parents Battle Invasion of Dollywood Values
"I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."
"But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."
Even as her voice is choked with emotion, she summons an inner courage -- a mother's courage -- and leads me down the hall to "Bobby Ray's" bedroom, for a firsthand glimpse at the psychic devastation that claimed her son.
She opens the door to a reveal a riot of George Jones CDs, reflective 'mudflap mama' stickers, empty foil packs of Red Man, and U.S. Marine recruiting posters. In the middle of the room: a makeshift table made from a utility cable spool, bearing a the remains of a gutted catfish.
"This used to be all Ikea," she says, rocking on heels between heaved sobs. "It's too late for us. Maybe it's not to late for me to warn others."
Pandora's Moon Pie Box
While poignant, Ellen McCormack's painful battle to save her son is far from isolated. Across coastal America, increasing numbers of families are discovering that their children have been lured into "Cracker" culture -- a new, freewheeling underground youth movement that celebrates the hedonistic thrills of frog-gigging and outlaw modified sprint cars. No one knows their exact number, but sociologists say that the movement is exploding among young people in America's most fashionable zip codes.
"We first detected it a few years ago, with the emergence of the trucker hat phenomenon," says Gerard Levin, professor of abnormal sociology at the University of California. "At first we thought it was some sort of benign, ironic strain. By the time we realized the early wearers really were interested in seed corn hybrids and Peterbilts, it had already escaped containment."
Levin points to 'Patient Zero,' who in 1997 was a 23-year old graduate student in Gender Studies at San Francisco State University.
"During a cross-country trip to New York, he stopped at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop in Walcott, Iowa, and bought a John Deere gimme cap as a gag souvenir," says Levin. "Within a year, he had dropped out of graduate school, abandoned his SoMa apartment, and and was working at a drive-thru liquor store. Today he is a wealthy televangelist in Bossier City, Louisiana."
The contagion of 'Patient Zero' would prove devastating. Soon trucker hats were appearing throughout trendy coastal neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope and Portrero Hill, often accessorized with chain wallets and 'wife beater' t-shirts. A new alternative youth movement had emerged, rejecting the staid norms of establishment NPR society and embracing the 'tune-in, turn-on, chug-up' ethos of the Pabst Blue Ribbon underground. Before long, it would broadcast its siren call to an even younger generation -- one whose parents were woefully unequipped to recognize it.
Youthquake
"It was one day last spring," says Ellen McCormack. "My life partner Carol and I were in the garage, working on a giant Donald Rumsfeld papier mache head for the Bay Area March Against the War, when Rain walked by. I thought he looked kind of strange, so I stopped him and looked closely into his eyes. Then I realized the truth -- he was wearing a mullet. I was shocked, but he swore to me that it was only ironic."
"After a few months, it was clear Rain had lied to us -- that hideous Kentucky waterfall was completely earnest," she adds, choking back sobs.
Her 18-year old son would soon exhibit other signs of disturbing changes.
"I was driving past a McDonalds one day last summer, and I thought I saw Rain's bike outside. He had told me earlier that he was going to a friend's house to stuff envelopes for the Dennis Kucinich campaign. I pulled a U-turn and headed back," she recalls. "When I confronted him in the parking lot, he started giving me a lame story about how he was only there to protest globalization, but I could smell the french fries on his breath."
McCormack says that Rain's erratic behavior would also come to include excessive politeness and deference.
"Everytime I tried to talk to him it was 'yes Momma,' and 'no Momma,' when he knows damn well my name is Ellen," she says, anger rising in her voice. "It was like I didn't even know him anymore."
McCormack tried an intervention with friends from the Anti-war community, but to no avail. In October, Bobby Ray packed up his Monte Carlo and left for basic training at Camp Pendleton.
"I have no son," she says in a barely audible whisper.
Across the country In toney Westchester County, New York, Jim and Sandy Vandenberg describe a similar tale of family grief.
"We are people of faith who keep the sabbath," says Sandy, a curator in the Dada collection of the Museum of Modern Art. "Even when she was a toddler, we made sure Emily got up early every Sunday morning to read the New York Times Book Review. Sunday morning was our time, until..."
"Until those damned Jesus bastards stole my little girl," interrupts her husband, barely containing his anger. Once a Freshman honors student in Lacanian Deconstruction Theory at NYU, their daughter is now better known as Lurleen McDaniel -- reigning Princess of the Tulsa Livestock Show and Rodeo.
In Bainbridge Island, Washington, single mom Jane Michelson says she began suspecting that her son Brian was in trouble after he started hanging with a new crowd at school.
"These weren't normal kids, neighborhood kids in Che t-shirts who want to drop a couple of hits of X and chill on Radiohead," she says. "They would talk in a sort of strange code language, like 'Roll Tide!' and 'Gig 'em Ags!' and 'Piiiig Sooieeee!'"
Signs of trouble would soon multiply.
"One day I got into my Volvo and hit the stereo preset for Pacifica Radio, and then I heard this obscene 'Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy' song coming from the speakers," she recalls. "The very next week, the maid found a tin of Skoal in his Wranglers. I told him him right then -- it was either me, or his tobacco-spitting friends."
Now known as Randy Dale Cash, her estranged son is a starting linebacker for Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.
Peer Pressure
Jane Michelson is not alone in her story. Throughout coastal America, school adminstrators and parents are reporting an alarming surge in 'Cracker' cliques on campus. Also known as 'Y'alls' or 'Neckies,' officials say the groups thrive by attracting outcasts and misfits from the student body.
"We try hard to engage all of our students in fun, healthy activities like Progressive Eco-Action March and Rage Against Intolerance Week," says Lawrence DiBenedetto of Patrice Lumumba Magnet School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Unfortunately, there are going to be those who fall through the cracks, into a life of bass fishing and stockcar racing."
It appears those cracks are widening. In one recent three-week period, fourteen high school students in Portland, Oregon were suspended for distributing pork rinds; a Burlington, Vermont high school was briefly closed for decontamination after janitors found a Bible hidden in a restroom; and forty-six undergraduate coeds at Swarthmore were expelled for staging clandestine Mary Kay cosmetics parties.
"We became suspicious after several heavily made-up students arrived at a Katha Pollitt lecture in a pink Cadillacs," says Swarthmore Dean of Students Geraldine Marcus.
Some say the craze threatens even the nation's most exclusive prep schools. At Exeter, Andover and St. Albans, rumors abound of secret societies where initiates are steeped in the black arts of restrictor plate cheating and satellite descramblers. Washington's elite Sidwell Friends School was nearly forced to close after scandalized parents learned that several students were openly touting Sams Club cards.
The Eclectic School Aid Hayseed Trip
To better understand what attracts young affluent students to the subculture, I spent a recent evening interviewing a group of self-described 'Neckies' from exclusive New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. Like countless other Friday nights, the close-knit group had made the 80 mile ritual journey to rural Belvidere, Illinois, to cruise Steak 'N' Shake and hang out at the Mills Fleet Farm parking lot.
"Y'all, check out these new mudders," says 17-year old 'Dakota,' proudly displaying the gigantic knobbed tires under his radically lifted 4x4 Audi Allroad. "I'm fixin' to get me a winch and Tuffbox fer it next week."
Not to be outdone, friend and fellow Neckie 'Duane' sounds 'Dixie' on the novelty horn of his jacked-up BMW M3. An early graduation gift from his parents, Duane has turned the expensive German coupe into an homage to the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee, complete with orange Stars-and-Bars paint job and spit cup on the console.
"Grandma gave me some money fer a summer study trip over ta Paris, but I thought the paint job was cooler," laughs Duane. "Hell, she thinks I'm over in the Sorbonne right now, studying Foucault and all that shit."
"I'm a-fixin' to put in a nitrous system on the General Lee, so I'ma call Grandma up and aks her for some book money," he adds.
Like most of their classmates, these North Shore Neckies were once bound for some of the top universities in America -- Yale, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern -- until they succumbed to the allure of the Downhome slacker lifestyle. Now some openly talk of dropping out, learning TIG welding, waiting tables at Waffle House or draining oil at Jiffy Lube; some even hint of enrolling at Iowa State. What drives privileged teens to such seemingly self-destructive behavior?
"I guess you might could say we're rebels," says Rachel 'Tyffanie' Stern, 17, lighting a Merit Menthol 100. Once destined for Vassar, Stern is now living with friends after her parents kicked her out of the house for spending her bat mitzvah money on a bass boat. Last month she became the youngest Jewish female to win an event on the Bassmasters Pro Tour.
Pausing for furtive glances, several of the teens share sniffs from a bottle of Harmon Triple Heat deer scent.
"Wooo-eee, shit howdy, that's gonna bring a mess of them whitetail bucks," says 19-year old Wei-Li 'Lamar' Cheung. A former Westinghouse Science Award winner, Cheung has devoted his chemistry and biology skill to building a fledgling hunting supply business.
A first generation Asian-American, Cheung says he was drawn to the group by their acceptance of minorities. "Hell, I kept tellin' all my family and teachers I wanna play fiddle, not violin," he explains. "The 'Necks accept me the way I am."
African-American Kwame 'Joe Don' Harris agrees. "Just because I'm black, teachers were always pushing me to go to Spellman to study Langston Hughes and Thelonius Monk," says the 17 year old. "These ol' boys here never laugh at my dream to be a crew chief for the Craftsman Truck Series."
If there is one aspiration that unites them all, it is the dream of moving to Branson, Missouri. Long famed for its laid-back attitude toward religion, country music and the military, Branson has become a Mecca for radical young Neckies seeking an escape from the stultifying conformity of their coastal hometowns.
"Shit, y'all, I heard Branson's got like four Wal Marts, and more $5.95 all-day breakfast buffets than Glencoe has Starbucks," enthuses Dakota, adding quickly that "pardon my French."
"Plus it's only a short drive up to Fort Leonard Wood," adds Tyffanie.
Talk arises of Branson's 'Summer of Bubba,' the upcoming hedonistic hillbilly festival of music, hog calling and nightcrawler gathering expected to draw millions of Neckies from as far as Santa Monica and Ithaca -- even Europe.
"Y'all, I heard them Swedish 'Necks are hardcore," says Joe Don. "They digitally remastered all the original Jerry Clower albums."
A live-for-today attitude permeates the group's ethos, with little concern about consequences. I ask Justin 'Jim Rob' Borowski, 18, what motivates young men and women to abandon promising academic careers in Gender Theory and Critical History to take a wild ride in the dark world of roofing and drywall contracting.
"My daddy was sorta mad when I tolt him I was gonna skip Columbia Journalism School for a plumbing apprenticeship," he answer philosophically, popping a plug of Red Man into his lip. "I tolt him that journalism is important, but the world needs plumbers too."
"After the toilet backed up, I think he got my point."
Pilgrims' Progress; Let's Talk Turkey
By Clifford D. May
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the children dress up as Pilgrims and we feast on turkey, cranberries and pumpkin pie to commemorate how they (the Pilgrims, not the kids) struggled and survived in the New World. But let's take a moment to really remember those early Americans.
In his masterful volume, “A History of the American People,” British historian Paul Johnson describes the Puritans who landed at New Plymouth on December 11, 1620 this way: “They were the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them, or perhaps one should say the most extreme of them, were fanatical, uncompromising and overweening in their self-righteousness.”
But, he concedes, they also were “immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.” They and their heirs were to weave one of the most vibrant designs in the American tapestry.
It was a Puritan leader, William Bradford, who first called this community Pilgrims. But “they were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine, and then returning home to resume everyday life,” Johnson writes. “They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly toward a millenarian goal. They saw themselves as exceptions to the European betrayal of Christian principles, and they were conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.”
They left Europe to escape religious persecution -- not quite the same as saying they came for religious freedom -- and “to create His kingdom on earth.” John Winthrop, whom Johnson calls “the first great American,” considered Europe “a lost cause,” both irreligious and badly governed. Winthrop said of Europe: “This land grows weary of its Inhabitants.”
In a very real sense, the Puritans were Judeo-Christians. They saw themselves as the spiritual progeny of Moses' tribe, fleeing from Egypt (17th century Europe) to the Promised Land (the New World, in particular New England).
On the Mayflower – a cramped old ship built not to carry passengers across the Atlantic but only barrels of wine between Bordeaux and London – they signed a social compact “based upon the original Biblical covenant between God and the Israelites.” Also influenced by early-17th-century social-contract theory, they drafted “just and equal laws” that were firmly anchored in the teachings of the church.
Their piety did not diminish their thirst for education – quite the contrary. Nor did their faith deter them from a keen interest in science. Indeed, among the most famous of the Puritans was Cotton Mather (1663-1728) who entered Harvard at the age of 12, learned seven languages and wrote 450 books. He popularized the Copernican system of astronomy. He also believed in witchcraft. He was concerned, too, with the rights of slaves and Indians, not big issues in those days.
The Puritans considered it their mission to create a better society than any the world had seen before. Winthrop wrote: “We must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Boston became the Pilgrim's capital, but by 1638, the Rev. John Davenport concluded that corruption had set in there, so he led a congregation to what is now New Haven, Conn. Among those who went with him was David Yale, “a learned gentleman,” whose descendent, Elihu Yale was to found an institution of higher learning that would educate many future American presidents, as well as many others who merely aspired to that office.
It is tempting to theorize that the Puritan/Pilgrim spirit has, over the past few hundred years, moved further inland, far from Massachusetts and other coastal communities, to what we now call the Red states. But that would be simplistic. As Johnson points out, the Puritans were eventually joined by adherents to other religious traditions, and over time, “the Puritan merged into the Yankee, ‘a race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.'”
Besides, the Puritans were hardly conservative in the sense that they favored limited government and rugged individualism. On the contrary, Johnson says, they believed that government “should interfere and direct and lead as much as it could, in all aspects of life.… Puritans saw the individualist as a dangerous loner, meat for the Devil to feed on.”
By the early 18th century, Puritanism was in decline and new American concepts of religion were taking shape. Cotton Mather was among the first to see this, and he regretted it. “There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness,” he wrote.
Yet there are today still those who believe America has a mission, and who see this exceptional nation still aspiring to be a “Citty upon a Hill.” I suspect the Pilgrims would take some satisfaction in that.
- Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies a policy institute focusing on terrorism.
By Clifford D. May
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the children dress up as Pilgrims and we feast on turkey, cranberries and pumpkin pie to commemorate how they (the Pilgrims, not the kids) struggled and survived in the New World. But let's take a moment to really remember those early Americans.
In his masterful volume, “A History of the American People,” British historian Paul Johnson describes the Puritans who landed at New Plymouth on December 11, 1620 this way: “They were the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them, or perhaps one should say the most extreme of them, were fanatical, uncompromising and overweening in their self-righteousness.”
But, he concedes, they also were “immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.” They and their heirs were to weave one of the most vibrant designs in the American tapestry.
It was a Puritan leader, William Bradford, who first called this community Pilgrims. But “they were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine, and then returning home to resume everyday life,” Johnson writes. “They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly toward a millenarian goal. They saw themselves as exceptions to the European betrayal of Christian principles, and they were conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.”
They left Europe to escape religious persecution -- not quite the same as saying they came for religious freedom -- and “to create His kingdom on earth.” John Winthrop, whom Johnson calls “the first great American,” considered Europe “a lost cause,” both irreligious and badly governed. Winthrop said of Europe: “This land grows weary of its Inhabitants.”
In a very real sense, the Puritans were Judeo-Christians. They saw themselves as the spiritual progeny of Moses' tribe, fleeing from Egypt (17th century Europe) to the Promised Land (the New World, in particular New England).
On the Mayflower – a cramped old ship built not to carry passengers across the Atlantic but only barrels of wine between Bordeaux and London – they signed a social compact “based upon the original Biblical covenant between God and the Israelites.” Also influenced by early-17th-century social-contract theory, they drafted “just and equal laws” that were firmly anchored in the teachings of the church.
Their piety did not diminish their thirst for education – quite the contrary. Nor did their faith deter them from a keen interest in science. Indeed, among the most famous of the Puritans was Cotton Mather (1663-1728) who entered Harvard at the age of 12, learned seven languages and wrote 450 books. He popularized the Copernican system of astronomy. He also believed in witchcraft. He was concerned, too, with the rights of slaves and Indians, not big issues in those days.
The Puritans considered it their mission to create a better society than any the world had seen before. Winthrop wrote: “We must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Boston became the Pilgrim's capital, but by 1638, the Rev. John Davenport concluded that corruption had set in there, so he led a congregation to what is now New Haven, Conn. Among those who went with him was David Yale, “a learned gentleman,” whose descendent, Elihu Yale was to found an institution of higher learning that would educate many future American presidents, as well as many others who merely aspired to that office.
It is tempting to theorize that the Puritan/Pilgrim spirit has, over the past few hundred years, moved further inland, far from Massachusetts and other coastal communities, to what we now call the Red states. But that would be simplistic. As Johnson points out, the Puritans were eventually joined by adherents to other religious traditions, and over time, “the Puritan merged into the Yankee, ‘a race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.'”
Besides, the Puritans were hardly conservative in the sense that they favored limited government and rugged individualism. On the contrary, Johnson says, they believed that government “should interfere and direct and lead as much as it could, in all aspects of life.… Puritans saw the individualist as a dangerous loner, meat for the Devil to feed on.”
By the early 18th century, Puritanism was in decline and new American concepts of religion were taking shape. Cotton Mather was among the first to see this, and he regretted it. “There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness,” he wrote.
Yet there are today still those who believe America has a mission, and who see this exceptional nation still aspiring to be a “Citty upon a Hill.” I suspect the Pilgrims would take some satisfaction in that.
- Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies a policy institute focusing on terrorism.
From National Review Online:
Courageous Crooners
U2 Dismantle[s] an Atomic Bomb.
By Kenneth Tanner
U2 continues to defy the conventions of rock on its latest, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, whittling away at the romantic and transient roots of the form on songs like "Miracle Drug" and "A Man and a Woman," and — on their 11th studio album in 28 years — defeating an egocentric tradition that has left many of the best performers and acts in ruins.
At first it seems Atomic Bomb might be an admirable twin of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind, a stellar record by any standard, but not quite reaching the achievement of The Joshua Tree, or the band's magnum opus, Achtung Baby!
Then the stoic, folksy authenticity of "One Step Closer," the shimmering, convicting irony of "Crumbs from Your Table," and the glittering, expectant wisdom of "Original of the Species" transcend expectations and confirm hopes — and what else does this band trade in but hope?
Another day with the record will banish any doubt that Atomic Bomb is, song for song, a work of art: complex, gutsy, intimate, demanding, eloquent, and ravishing.
Atomic Bomb belongs in the top tier of U2's best records. Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby!, and Atomic Bomb are sonic masterpieces by different measures, separated by more time between their release than any of the best Beatles albums (to take one instance), marked by ascents in the band's songwriting and virtuosity (how many successful acts study music and work with master teachers of their art between records?), and leavened by the band's insatiable collecting of influences.
Lyrically, Atomic Bomb seems the most conspicuously Christian record U2 has released since October (and I'm the sort of believer who considers "Wake Up Dead Man," from 1997's Pop, as faithful a Christian prayer as, say, "Gloria").
The protagonist of Achtung Baby!, a prodigal entranced by a moonlit night and the kiss of seduction, fumbles his way back home only to find that darkness lingers. Now the wanderer is chastened: Romantic notions no longer hold sway, the eyes of the heart rule the intellect, true love is at home. Yet, restless for Love, he wrestles with the Almighty: kneeling (always kneeling), pleading for intervention (how long must the world abide before the new dawn?), over and over again offering his heart ("take this heart and make it break" are the album's closing words), seeking now a kiss from God.
"Yahweh" is a postmodern Christmas hymn. It looks in hope to the birth of Christ ("always pain before a child is born") as it presses home a question the Father's long-awaited gift evokes in honest souls: "Why the dark before the dawn?" "Miracle Drug," "Crumbs from Your Table," "Vertigo," "Love and Peace or Else," "All Because of You," and "Yahweh" not only allude to but even depend on the Gospel to disclose their meaning.
I'm bound for some Paul McGuinness-inspired purgatory for using the words "Christian record" in the same sentence with "U2," but I think the band is big enough (and mature enough) now not to worry overmuch about people getting the wrong impression (who would mistake these guys for Bible thumpers?). The band was right to resist the label — no doubt it would have limited their audience and their art at earlier stages — but it seems time to simply live with the contradictions and let the chips fall where they may.
On All That You Can't Leave Behind and during the subsequent tour, U2 expressed Christian faith with excerpts from the Psalms, hallelujahs to the Almighty, and urgent activism on behalf of "the least of these." During the tour Bono had told one reporter, "It feels like there's a blessing on the band right now. People say they're feeling shivers — well, the band is as well. And I don't know what it is, but it feels like God walking through the room, and it feels like a blessing, and in the end, music is a kind of sacrament; it's not just about airplay or chart position." It was a temperate yet unapologetic witness, not showy or preachy but unashamed, and that spirit continues on Atomic Bomb.
The abandonment of romance for a truer love (of the "tougher," more resilient, eternal, variety) is a common theme on Atomic Bomb, and though it might strike contemporary ears as paradoxical and uncool (is this rock & roll?), it seems Bono's experiences in Africa have taught him to distrust reigning American and European definitions of the beloved. "A Man and A Woman" is a realist's tribute to monogamy and a celebration of Bono's own marriage (the lyric echoes Bono's attempts in interviews to describe the mystery of his bride and the miracle of their relationship).
If Achtung Baby! was the divorce album, Atomic Bomb is the marriage album, and reflected in Bono's marriage to Ali is the singer's marriage to God. When, at the end, he prays "take this mouth and give it a kiss," the Bridegroom of Song of Solomon is the teacher he seems to have in mind, the master who teaches him how to kneel at the album's start and to whom he turns at the end — what to do with his hands, feet, heart, and soul between this broken time and the marriage supper of the lamb?
"One Step Closer" is reminiscent of Dylan, though it judiciously employs techno-ambient tricks. It's a beautiful sleeper that, along with its sonic opposite, "Love and Peace or Else" (a grimy, infectious groover with the fattest Clayton bass line ever), reveals U2's perennial ability to craft strange and deeply appealing songs from motley raw materials.
The music is breathtaking in parts (the Edge, Clayton, and Mullen are at the full flight of their considerable powers here), especially on "Crumbs," "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," "Miracle Drug," and "Original of the Species," which seem the best of the pack — the finest marriage of melody and lyric. Any of these songs is a cinch for Record of the Year in 2006 ("Vertigo," a wonderful wall of noise, is eligible this year). And, as ever, the band reaches out for new sounds while bringing back hints of its quintessential moments past (the best artists always do).
Frederick Buechner once said, "It's really very easy to be a writer — all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein." Bono opens several on this record, and for a band that throughout the 90s prided itself on distance, these last two U2 albums explore interiors and reveal intimacies rarely expressed in rock. We've now been given permission to eavesdrop, and the conversation is direct and unafraid.
"Sometimes," written for Bono's father, Bob Hewson, as he lay dying in hospital, is the showstopper, as honest a confession as any rock band has ever laid down. It deftly puts the lie to the notion that rock & roll can't handle (much less recapitulate) the deeper experiences of life. U2 has made a career out of debunking that myth, and the genre will have made a significant stride if the band's contributions win the day.
In recent interviews Bono has said the "Atomic Bomb" of the title is his father ("he is the atomic bomb in question and it is his era, the Cold War era, and we had a bit of a cold war, myself and him"), and in others places he's said it refers to his emotional volatility in the wake of his father's death ("looking back, now I've finally managed to say goodbye, I think that I did do some mad stuff"). Bill Flanaghan's and Neil McCormick's accounts of the band's rise show the metaphor is an apt one for the father and the son. Earlier this year, Bono reportedly asked the songwriter Michael W. Smith if he knew how to dismantle an atomic bomb. When Smith said he didn't, Bono responded "Love. With Love."
Bob Hewson was an amateur opera singer who loved to listen to operas in his sitting room at night, directing the songs, as Bono recalls, with knitting needles. On "Sometimes," when Bono scream-sings "you're the reason I sing/You're the reason why the opera is in me," it occurs that Love is able to dismantle the bomb in the father and the bomb in the son; that Love has the ability to disarm any weapon of destruction, material or spiritual, no matter how large, no matter how small. That comes as good news about right now.
The American theologian Robert Jenson says that, unlike political ideologies, the Spirit makes us free not from each other but for each other. Of all the rock clichés the U2 brothers overturn, it is perhaps their love for each other — held together despite strong wills and tested by time — that enables not only their longevity but an enduring ability to produce albums of rock music that belong among the genre's best.
Neil McCormick reports that after working five-day weeks for about a year the band had nearly the same set of songs ready for release last October, but it sensed an "indefinable magic" was missing. U2 spent another year working to find it. Bono told one reporter, "Whether it's Catholic guilt or whatever it is, it's not on to have this life that we've been given — this amazing life — and be crap."
Their fans can be grateful for a veteran band that refuses to settle for second best, and at a career point when acts think they've earned the right to be mediocre. That might appear to be the band's self-interest speaking (who wants to buy a "crap album"?), but it still takes humility to serve anyone (even rock fans), and the hard work that produced the double-barreled art of U2's last two albums needs not only a touch of grace, but the cooperation of courage. It's faith active in love.
— Ken Tanner works for Touchstone Magazine in Chicago. He is ordained in the Charismatic Episcopal Church.
Courageous Crooners
U2 Dismantle[s] an Atomic Bomb.
By Kenneth Tanner
U2 continues to defy the conventions of rock on its latest, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, whittling away at the romantic and transient roots of the form on songs like "Miracle Drug" and "A Man and a Woman," and — on their 11th studio album in 28 years — defeating an egocentric tradition that has left many of the best performers and acts in ruins.
At first it seems Atomic Bomb might be an admirable twin of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind, a stellar record by any standard, but not quite reaching the achievement of The Joshua Tree, or the band's magnum opus, Achtung Baby!
Then the stoic, folksy authenticity of "One Step Closer," the shimmering, convicting irony of "Crumbs from Your Table," and the glittering, expectant wisdom of "Original of the Species" transcend expectations and confirm hopes — and what else does this band trade in but hope?
Another day with the record will banish any doubt that Atomic Bomb is, song for song, a work of art: complex, gutsy, intimate, demanding, eloquent, and ravishing.
Atomic Bomb belongs in the top tier of U2's best records. Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby!, and Atomic Bomb are sonic masterpieces by different measures, separated by more time between their release than any of the best Beatles albums (to take one instance), marked by ascents in the band's songwriting and virtuosity (how many successful acts study music and work with master teachers of their art between records?), and leavened by the band's insatiable collecting of influences.
Lyrically, Atomic Bomb seems the most conspicuously Christian record U2 has released since October (and I'm the sort of believer who considers "Wake Up Dead Man," from 1997's Pop, as faithful a Christian prayer as, say, "Gloria").
The protagonist of Achtung Baby!, a prodigal entranced by a moonlit night and the kiss of seduction, fumbles his way back home only to find that darkness lingers. Now the wanderer is chastened: Romantic notions no longer hold sway, the eyes of the heart rule the intellect, true love is at home. Yet, restless for Love, he wrestles with the Almighty: kneeling (always kneeling), pleading for intervention (how long must the world abide before the new dawn?), over and over again offering his heart ("take this heart and make it break" are the album's closing words), seeking now a kiss from God.
"Yahweh" is a postmodern Christmas hymn. It looks in hope to the birth of Christ ("always pain before a child is born") as it presses home a question the Father's long-awaited gift evokes in honest souls: "Why the dark before the dawn?" "Miracle Drug," "Crumbs from Your Table," "Vertigo," "Love and Peace or Else," "All Because of You," and "Yahweh" not only allude to but even depend on the Gospel to disclose their meaning.
I'm bound for some Paul McGuinness-inspired purgatory for using the words "Christian record" in the same sentence with "U2," but I think the band is big enough (and mature enough) now not to worry overmuch about people getting the wrong impression (who would mistake these guys for Bible thumpers?). The band was right to resist the label — no doubt it would have limited their audience and their art at earlier stages — but it seems time to simply live with the contradictions and let the chips fall where they may.
On All That You Can't Leave Behind and during the subsequent tour, U2 expressed Christian faith with excerpts from the Psalms, hallelujahs to the Almighty, and urgent activism on behalf of "the least of these." During the tour Bono had told one reporter, "It feels like there's a blessing on the band right now. People say they're feeling shivers — well, the band is as well. And I don't know what it is, but it feels like God walking through the room, and it feels like a blessing, and in the end, music is a kind of sacrament; it's not just about airplay or chart position." It was a temperate yet unapologetic witness, not showy or preachy but unashamed, and that spirit continues on Atomic Bomb.
The abandonment of romance for a truer love (of the "tougher," more resilient, eternal, variety) is a common theme on Atomic Bomb, and though it might strike contemporary ears as paradoxical and uncool (is this rock & roll?), it seems Bono's experiences in Africa have taught him to distrust reigning American and European definitions of the beloved. "A Man and A Woman" is a realist's tribute to monogamy and a celebration of Bono's own marriage (the lyric echoes Bono's attempts in interviews to describe the mystery of his bride and the miracle of their relationship).
If Achtung Baby! was the divorce album, Atomic Bomb is the marriage album, and reflected in Bono's marriage to Ali is the singer's marriage to God. When, at the end, he prays "take this mouth and give it a kiss," the Bridegroom of Song of Solomon is the teacher he seems to have in mind, the master who teaches him how to kneel at the album's start and to whom he turns at the end — what to do with his hands, feet, heart, and soul between this broken time and the marriage supper of the lamb?
"One Step Closer" is reminiscent of Dylan, though it judiciously employs techno-ambient tricks. It's a beautiful sleeper that, along with its sonic opposite, "Love and Peace or Else" (a grimy, infectious groover with the fattest Clayton bass line ever), reveals U2's perennial ability to craft strange and deeply appealing songs from motley raw materials.
The music is breathtaking in parts (the Edge, Clayton, and Mullen are at the full flight of their considerable powers here), especially on "Crumbs," "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," "Miracle Drug," and "Original of the Species," which seem the best of the pack — the finest marriage of melody and lyric. Any of these songs is a cinch for Record of the Year in 2006 ("Vertigo," a wonderful wall of noise, is eligible this year). And, as ever, the band reaches out for new sounds while bringing back hints of its quintessential moments past (the best artists always do).
Frederick Buechner once said, "It's really very easy to be a writer — all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein." Bono opens several on this record, and for a band that throughout the 90s prided itself on distance, these last two U2 albums explore interiors and reveal intimacies rarely expressed in rock. We've now been given permission to eavesdrop, and the conversation is direct and unafraid.
"Sometimes," written for Bono's father, Bob Hewson, as he lay dying in hospital, is the showstopper, as honest a confession as any rock band has ever laid down. It deftly puts the lie to the notion that rock & roll can't handle (much less recapitulate) the deeper experiences of life. U2 has made a career out of debunking that myth, and the genre will have made a significant stride if the band's contributions win the day.
In recent interviews Bono has said the "Atomic Bomb" of the title is his father ("he is the atomic bomb in question and it is his era, the Cold War era, and we had a bit of a cold war, myself and him"), and in others places he's said it refers to his emotional volatility in the wake of his father's death ("looking back, now I've finally managed to say goodbye, I think that I did do some mad stuff"). Bill Flanaghan's and Neil McCormick's accounts of the band's rise show the metaphor is an apt one for the father and the son. Earlier this year, Bono reportedly asked the songwriter Michael W. Smith if he knew how to dismantle an atomic bomb. When Smith said he didn't, Bono responded "Love. With Love."
Bob Hewson was an amateur opera singer who loved to listen to operas in his sitting room at night, directing the songs, as Bono recalls, with knitting needles. On "Sometimes," when Bono scream-sings "you're the reason I sing/You're the reason why the opera is in me," it occurs that Love is able to dismantle the bomb in the father and the bomb in the son; that Love has the ability to disarm any weapon of destruction, material or spiritual, no matter how large, no matter how small. That comes as good news about right now.
The American theologian Robert Jenson says that, unlike political ideologies, the Spirit makes us free not from each other but for each other. Of all the rock clichés the U2 brothers overturn, it is perhaps their love for each other — held together despite strong wills and tested by time — that enables not only their longevity but an enduring ability to produce albums of rock music that belong among the genre's best.
Neil McCormick reports that after working five-day weeks for about a year the band had nearly the same set of songs ready for release last October, but it sensed an "indefinable magic" was missing. U2 spent another year working to find it. Bono told one reporter, "Whether it's Catholic guilt or whatever it is, it's not on to have this life that we've been given — this amazing life — and be crap."
Their fans can be grateful for a veteran band that refuses to settle for second best, and at a career point when acts think they've earned the right to be mediocre. That might appear to be the band's self-interest speaking (who wants to buy a "crap album"?), but it still takes humility to serve anyone (even rock fans), and the hard work that produced the double-barreled art of U2's last two albums needs not only a touch of grace, but the cooperation of courage. It's faith active in love.
— Ken Tanner works for Touchstone Magazine in Chicago. He is ordained in the Charismatic Episcopal Church.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Bomb' flattens doubts about U2
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
U2's new album has nothing to do with nuclear arsenals, yet its title couldn't be more fitting.
Disarming and explosive, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (* * * * out of four) has the radiating energy of a reactor meltdown and the potential half-life of uranium. U2 is the new U-235, white-hot and untouchable.
Bomb, out today, is a blast, as quickly established by the spiking voltage of Vertigo and warped glam-rock of Love and Peace or Else. It's also the band's most emotionally absorbing work, riding on great swells of optimism and faith occasionally darkened by a chilly undertow of grief and anxiety.
Bomb's majestic sweep owes much of its verve to the sparkle, thrum and roar of Edge's bold guitar. Larry Mullen Jr. excites and fattens the songs with a pugnacious thump, spiced by the steady, seductive bass of Adam Clayton.
Bono, in peak form vocally and lyrically, sweats and bleeds passion, whether marveling at the human spirit in Miracle Drug, mourning shattered innocence in City of Blinding Lights or offering a healing prayer in the closing Yahweh.
Songs full of heart and mind-tingling ideas gracefully coexist on personal and universal planes. In the seething Crumbs From Your Table, Bono's response to sluggish funding for the AIDS crisis doubles as a lover's tantrum. One man's anguish explores Everyman's ache for connection in two gorgeous and devastating songs inspired by the death of Bono's father in 2001: One Step Closer and Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own.
Many will declare the grandeur, open spaces and chiming crescendos a return to form, and Bomb certainly embodies U2's finest qualities, but it's also a triumphant leap forward that stretches the limited vocabulary of rock 'n' roll without sacrificing the genre's original promise of purity. It delivers a dizzying payload of entertainment without diluting purpose.
With 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind, the Irish quartet retrenched after a decade of irony and invention to reapply for the job of World's Greatest Band. Bomb leaves that title unthreatened.
Atomic Bomb is U2's best album, eclipsing not only Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree, but a good many 20th-century holy grails and prematurely anointed classics of the new millennium. U2 stands as rock's lone superpower, not after constantly defeating its challengers, but by constantly challenging itself.
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
U2's new album has nothing to do with nuclear arsenals, yet its title couldn't be more fitting.
Disarming and explosive, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (* * * * out of four) has the radiating energy of a reactor meltdown and the potential half-life of uranium. U2 is the new U-235, white-hot and untouchable.
Bomb, out today, is a blast, as quickly established by the spiking voltage of Vertigo and warped glam-rock of Love and Peace or Else. It's also the band's most emotionally absorbing work, riding on great swells of optimism and faith occasionally darkened by a chilly undertow of grief and anxiety.
Bomb's majestic sweep owes much of its verve to the sparkle, thrum and roar of Edge's bold guitar. Larry Mullen Jr. excites and fattens the songs with a pugnacious thump, spiced by the steady, seductive bass of Adam Clayton.
Bono, in peak form vocally and lyrically, sweats and bleeds passion, whether marveling at the human spirit in Miracle Drug, mourning shattered innocence in City of Blinding Lights or offering a healing prayer in the closing Yahweh.
Songs full of heart and mind-tingling ideas gracefully coexist on personal and universal planes. In the seething Crumbs From Your Table, Bono's response to sluggish funding for the AIDS crisis doubles as a lover's tantrum. One man's anguish explores Everyman's ache for connection in two gorgeous and devastating songs inspired by the death of Bono's father in 2001: One Step Closer and Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own.
Many will declare the grandeur, open spaces and chiming crescendos a return to form, and Bomb certainly embodies U2's finest qualities, but it's also a triumphant leap forward that stretches the limited vocabulary of rock 'n' roll without sacrificing the genre's original promise of purity. It delivers a dizzying payload of entertainment without diluting purpose.
With 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind, the Irish quartet retrenched after a decade of irony and invention to reapply for the job of World's Greatest Band. Bomb leaves that title unthreatened.
Atomic Bomb is U2's best album, eclipsing not only Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree, but a good many 20th-century holy grails and prematurely anointed classics of the new millennium. U2 stands as rock's lone superpower, not after constantly defeating its challengers, but by constantly challenging itself.
From Rolling Stone:
U2
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
Halfway through the excellent new U2 album, Bono announces, "I like the sound of my own voice." Well-said, lad; well-said. Ever since U2 started making noise in Dublin several hundred bloody Sundays ago, Bono has grooved to the sound of his own gargantuan rockness. Ego, shmego -- this is one rock-star madman who should never scale down his epic ambitions. As the old Zen proverb goes, you will find no reasonable men on the tops of great mountains, and U2's brilliance is their refusal to be reasonable. U2 were a drag in the 1990s, when they were trying to be cool, ironic hipsters. Feh! Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus to the lepers in his head. We want him to be Bono. Nobody else is even remotely qualified.
U2 bring that old-school, wide-awake fervor to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The last time we heard from them, All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 were auditioning for the job of the World's Biggest Rock & Roll Band. They trimmed the Euro-techno pomp, sped up the tempos and let the Edge define the songs with his revitalized guitar. Well, they got the job.
On Atomic Bomb, they're not auditioning anymore. This is grandiose music from grandiose men, sweatlessly confident in the execution of their duties. Hardly any of the eleven songs break the five-minute mark or stray from the punchy formula of All That You Can't Leave Behind. They've gotten over their midcareer anxiety about whether they're cool enough. Now, they just hand it to the Edge and let it rip.
During the course of Atomic Bomb, you will be urged to ponder death ("Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own"), birth ("Original of the Species"), God ("Yahweh"), love ("A Man and a Woman"), war ("Love and Peace or Else") and peace ("City of Blinding Lights"), which barely gives you time to ponder whether the bassist has been listening to Interpol. "Vertigo" sets the pace, a thirty-second ad jingle blown up to three great minutes, with a riff nicked from Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots." "City of Blinding Lights" begins with a long Edge guitar intro, building into a bittersweet lament. "Yahweh" continues a U2 tradition, the album-closing chitchat with the Lord. It's too long and too slow, but that's part of the tradition.
Like all U2 albums, Atomic Bomb has false steps, experimental bathroom breaks and moments when the lofty ambitions crash into the nearest wall. As America staggers punch-drunk into another four-year moment we can't get out of, it would be a real pleasure if the political tunes had any depth. (How long? How long must we sing this song?) But Bono scores a direct hit on "One Step Closer," an intimate ballad about his father's death from cancer in 2001; "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" is the song U2 did at the funeral. When Bono sings, "You're the reason why I have the operas in me," his grief and his grandiosity seem to come from the same place in his heart. It's a reminder that what makes U2 so big isn't really their clever ideas, or even their intelligence -- it's the warmth that all too few rock stars have any idea how to turn into music.
ROB SHEFFIELD
U2
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
Halfway through the excellent new U2 album, Bono announces, "I like the sound of my own voice." Well-said, lad; well-said. Ever since U2 started making noise in Dublin several hundred bloody Sundays ago, Bono has grooved to the sound of his own gargantuan rockness. Ego, shmego -- this is one rock-star madman who should never scale down his epic ambitions. As the old Zen proverb goes, you will find no reasonable men on the tops of great mountains, and U2's brilliance is their refusal to be reasonable. U2 were a drag in the 1990s, when they were trying to be cool, ironic hipsters. Feh! Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus to the lepers in his head. We want him to be Bono. Nobody else is even remotely qualified.
U2 bring that old-school, wide-awake fervor to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The last time we heard from them, All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 were auditioning for the job of the World's Biggest Rock & Roll Band. They trimmed the Euro-techno pomp, sped up the tempos and let the Edge define the songs with his revitalized guitar. Well, they got the job.
On Atomic Bomb, they're not auditioning anymore. This is grandiose music from grandiose men, sweatlessly confident in the execution of their duties. Hardly any of the eleven songs break the five-minute mark or stray from the punchy formula of All That You Can't Leave Behind. They've gotten over their midcareer anxiety about whether they're cool enough. Now, they just hand it to the Edge and let it rip.
During the course of Atomic Bomb, you will be urged to ponder death ("Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own"), birth ("Original of the Species"), God ("Yahweh"), love ("A Man and a Woman"), war ("Love and Peace or Else") and peace ("City of Blinding Lights"), which barely gives you time to ponder whether the bassist has been listening to Interpol. "Vertigo" sets the pace, a thirty-second ad jingle blown up to three great minutes, with a riff nicked from Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots." "City of Blinding Lights" begins with a long Edge guitar intro, building into a bittersweet lament. "Yahweh" continues a U2 tradition, the album-closing chitchat with the Lord. It's too long and too slow, but that's part of the tradition.
Like all U2 albums, Atomic Bomb has false steps, experimental bathroom breaks and moments when the lofty ambitions crash into the nearest wall. As America staggers punch-drunk into another four-year moment we can't get out of, it would be a real pleasure if the political tunes had any depth. (How long? How long must we sing this song?) But Bono scores a direct hit on "One Step Closer," an intimate ballad about his father's death from cancer in 2001; "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" is the song U2 did at the funeral. When Bono sings, "You're the reason why I have the operas in me," his grief and his grandiosity seem to come from the same place in his heart. It's a reminder that what makes U2 so big isn't really their clever ideas, or even their intelligence -- it's the warmth that all too few rock stars have any idea how to turn into music.
ROB SHEFFIELD
Monday, November 22, 2004
From National Review Online:
Kinsey Confusion- The Boomer bummer on the silver screen
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
A few years ago I was browsing in a thrift shop and came across a curious volume titled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. What's that got to do with Kinsey, the new film about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey? We'll get to that in a minute.
First, let's look this specimen over merely in terms of its cinematic qualities, and set aside the sexual content. If this was a biography of any research scientist, we'd surely give it a solid A for visuals: costumes, lighting, props, cinematography, all contribute to a rich sense of environment and mood. A special gold star for makeup, which renders the players refreshingly real and un-made-up. The score is just about as good — let's say an A-, with supple, rolling piano and violin lines that support a tender and poignant mood. Acting, well, we may be getting down to a B+ here, because although the leads are exceptionally gifted actors (Liam Neeson as Alfred Kinsey, Laura Linney as his wife Mac), they occasionally lapse into announcing their lines, a flaw probably attributable to the director's skills rather than their own.
And that leads us to the script, which was written by the director. Bill Condon has previously given us horror and murder mysteries, and more notably Gods and Monsters (1998), which explored the last days of the director of Frankenstein and his complex erotic relationship with his muscle-bound gardener. The script for Kinsey, however, can't earn more than a C+. Again, setting aside the sexual content and imagining that this is about any researcher, we'd still have to say, Gee, Bill, could you be a little more subtle here? We know he's a great guy, but you're hitting us with a hammer. We've got scenes where the good doctor stands framed in a doorway, white-washed by the setting sun, while his nasty father snarls at him from the couch. Down the camera goes to the miserable, twisted dad; up to the heroic researcher, proclaiming his noble mission. Laid on a bit thick, don't you think? While Condon allows that Kinsey has a few flaws — he's overly clinical and emotionally dry — as far as nobility of character goes he's the next thing to Mother Teresa.
In order to highlight Kinsey's spotlessness, his opponents are presented as the most benighted fools that imagination can supply. While Kinsey does everything but walk on water, his dad is humiliating his wife at the dinner table, shaming his daughter and younger son at the wife's funeral, and in general exhibiting a bitterness of soul so extreme that it strains belief. We're eventually told that it's all because he was prevented from masturbating as a child. Sorry, but Condon has made the dad too evil to be comprehended by such a brisk totalizing theory. It's like the old sexual superstitions in reverse, and is applied with the same hysterical force that preachers once brought against sexual mischief.
But, come to think of it, what do we really know about such preachers? Do we ever look up their own words, or consult what they actually said? No, we're in too much of a rush to have authority figures wag their fingers at us, so we can have the thrill of defying them. Condon litters the film with plenty of stupid moralizers, and he's made up marvelously stupid things for them to say. For example, Kinsey's dad proclaims an ice-cream parlor a venue of lust, and calls the zipper "the most scandalous invention of them all." Lines like these ring distractingly false, in their overeager attempts to render the era's views frightening.
And then we see Kinsey showing Mac a book titled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. He opens it and reads a few sentences, which convey prissy objections to two common items of foreplay. Kinsey is enraged and says, "It's morality disguised as fact!"
You want to talk about facts? First published in 1926, Ideal Marriage was written by a Dutch gynecologist, Theodoor Van de Velde, and may be the best-selling sex manual of all time. Over half a million copies were sold in the United States alone, and it enjoyed equal success in Europe. On pages 169-171 of the 1930 Random House edition, Van de Velde takes up one of the items above, and describes technique at length. But rather than condemn it, he pronounces this activity "absolutely unobjectionable and legitimate, ethically, aesthetically, and hygienically" (italics his). The other is treated on pages 164-168, in much more explicit detail than anything the screen Kinsey tells his students. Van de Velde instructs husbands that if ministrations such as these are not sufficiently effective, it would be "both stupid and grossly selfish of the husband" to proceed to intercourse (his italics, again). This is not a prude's book. Young couples who grab a used copy off the Internet may have even as much fun with it as their great-grandparents did.
So why did Condon pretend that Ideal Marriage says the opposite of what it really says? Because Boomers have structured our identities around the idea that we invented sex. We're addicted to the thrill of liberation, and it doesn't work unless there's someone to be liberated from. So we want entertainment that shows us stuffy old moralizers and marches them around, and puts in their mouths the thrilling things we wish they said. If we listened to what they really said, we'd have to be a little more humble about our role in sexual history.
In fact, we have plenty of reasons to be humble about our role in sexual history. Van de Velde didn't invent sex either — I believe scientists now suspect it's been going on for a few centuries, at least. But his book was enthusiastically received because couples found there a warm and eloquent expression of the secret, common joys of the marriage bed. It took Kinsey to drag it onto the steel tables of a laboratory. And whatever is studied begins to change. Over 60 years we have changed into a people who are exceedingly self-conscious about sex. Once people did what came naturally, experimenting and discovering each other and keeping things, as they say, intimate.
Today intimacy is blasted; we are compelled to talk about sex incessantly, to hear about it endlessly, and it becomes ever more artificial. Overexposure has turned sex into another bleached and packaged commodity. We are estranged from our sex lives, from our own bodies, from each other, and there is no end to judging ourselves, our appearance and performance. No end to being judged, either; as Huw Richardson wrote in a poignant post, "Hell is a 'Pride Parade' where no one looks at you, where no one returns your compliments, where no one bothers to notice you — on a day when egos are supposed to be full and fluffy, hell is having one's ego bashed."
The sexual revolution has created a whole new galaxy of ways for people, even gay people, to be rejected. Sex is imagined to be "empowering:" we exercise power when we unveil our stunning bodies and reduce another person to slavish lust. But very few of us have such bodies; for most of us, sex doesn't mean power, but vulnerability. It means trusting another to be kind toward imperfections and scars and sags; trusting that they will be kind because they love you, because they said so, because they sealed it with a ring. This is why marriage is where sex is most exuberantly free, and why it's no surprise that married conservative and Christian women keep topping the surveys of sexual satisfaction.
Kinsey depicts the confusion the researcher encountered due to his dullness at understanding the emotional and relational aspects of sex, but not the outcome of his blundering opacity. He did not expand our knowledge, but contracted it, reducing an experience that had been private, holistic, and rich into solitary or mutual mechanics. There's a lot of wisdom we've lost, whole generations of it. But when we finally admit we're not having fun, we can begin to discover it again.
— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR's Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.
Kinsey Confusion- The Boomer bummer on the silver screen
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
A few years ago I was browsing in a thrift shop and came across a curious volume titled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. What's that got to do with Kinsey, the new film about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey? We'll get to that in a minute.
First, let's look this specimen over merely in terms of its cinematic qualities, and set aside the sexual content. If this was a biography of any research scientist, we'd surely give it a solid A for visuals: costumes, lighting, props, cinematography, all contribute to a rich sense of environment and mood. A special gold star for makeup, which renders the players refreshingly real and un-made-up. The score is just about as good — let's say an A-, with supple, rolling piano and violin lines that support a tender and poignant mood. Acting, well, we may be getting down to a B+ here, because although the leads are exceptionally gifted actors (Liam Neeson as Alfred Kinsey, Laura Linney as his wife Mac), they occasionally lapse into announcing their lines, a flaw probably attributable to the director's skills rather than their own.
And that leads us to the script, which was written by the director. Bill Condon has previously given us horror and murder mysteries, and more notably Gods and Monsters (1998), which explored the last days of the director of Frankenstein and his complex erotic relationship with his muscle-bound gardener. The script for Kinsey, however, can't earn more than a C+. Again, setting aside the sexual content and imagining that this is about any researcher, we'd still have to say, Gee, Bill, could you be a little more subtle here? We know he's a great guy, but you're hitting us with a hammer. We've got scenes where the good doctor stands framed in a doorway, white-washed by the setting sun, while his nasty father snarls at him from the couch. Down the camera goes to the miserable, twisted dad; up to the heroic researcher, proclaiming his noble mission. Laid on a bit thick, don't you think? While Condon allows that Kinsey has a few flaws — he's overly clinical and emotionally dry — as far as nobility of character goes he's the next thing to Mother Teresa.
In order to highlight Kinsey's spotlessness, his opponents are presented as the most benighted fools that imagination can supply. While Kinsey does everything but walk on water, his dad is humiliating his wife at the dinner table, shaming his daughter and younger son at the wife's funeral, and in general exhibiting a bitterness of soul so extreme that it strains belief. We're eventually told that it's all because he was prevented from masturbating as a child. Sorry, but Condon has made the dad too evil to be comprehended by such a brisk totalizing theory. It's like the old sexual superstitions in reverse, and is applied with the same hysterical force that preachers once brought against sexual mischief.
But, come to think of it, what do we really know about such preachers? Do we ever look up their own words, or consult what they actually said? No, we're in too much of a rush to have authority figures wag their fingers at us, so we can have the thrill of defying them. Condon litters the film with plenty of stupid moralizers, and he's made up marvelously stupid things for them to say. For example, Kinsey's dad proclaims an ice-cream parlor a venue of lust, and calls the zipper "the most scandalous invention of them all." Lines like these ring distractingly false, in their overeager attempts to render the era's views frightening.
And then we see Kinsey showing Mac a book titled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. He opens it and reads a few sentences, which convey prissy objections to two common items of foreplay. Kinsey is enraged and says, "It's morality disguised as fact!"
You want to talk about facts? First published in 1926, Ideal Marriage was written by a Dutch gynecologist, Theodoor Van de Velde, and may be the best-selling sex manual of all time. Over half a million copies were sold in the United States alone, and it enjoyed equal success in Europe. On pages 169-171 of the 1930 Random House edition, Van de Velde takes up one of the items above, and describes technique at length. But rather than condemn it, he pronounces this activity "absolutely unobjectionable and legitimate, ethically, aesthetically, and hygienically" (italics his). The other is treated on pages 164-168, in much more explicit detail than anything the screen Kinsey tells his students. Van de Velde instructs husbands that if ministrations such as these are not sufficiently effective, it would be "both stupid and grossly selfish of the husband" to proceed to intercourse (his italics, again). This is not a prude's book. Young couples who grab a used copy off the Internet may have even as much fun with it as their great-grandparents did.
So why did Condon pretend that Ideal Marriage says the opposite of what it really says? Because Boomers have structured our identities around the idea that we invented sex. We're addicted to the thrill of liberation, and it doesn't work unless there's someone to be liberated from. So we want entertainment that shows us stuffy old moralizers and marches them around, and puts in their mouths the thrilling things we wish they said. If we listened to what they really said, we'd have to be a little more humble about our role in sexual history.
In fact, we have plenty of reasons to be humble about our role in sexual history. Van de Velde didn't invent sex either — I believe scientists now suspect it's been going on for a few centuries, at least. But his book was enthusiastically received because couples found there a warm and eloquent expression of the secret, common joys of the marriage bed. It took Kinsey to drag it onto the steel tables of a laboratory. And whatever is studied begins to change. Over 60 years we have changed into a people who are exceedingly self-conscious about sex. Once people did what came naturally, experimenting and discovering each other and keeping things, as they say, intimate.
Today intimacy is blasted; we are compelled to talk about sex incessantly, to hear about it endlessly, and it becomes ever more artificial. Overexposure has turned sex into another bleached and packaged commodity. We are estranged from our sex lives, from our own bodies, from each other, and there is no end to judging ourselves, our appearance and performance. No end to being judged, either; as Huw Richardson wrote in a poignant post, "Hell is a 'Pride Parade' where no one looks at you, where no one returns your compliments, where no one bothers to notice you — on a day when egos are supposed to be full and fluffy, hell is having one's ego bashed."
The sexual revolution has created a whole new galaxy of ways for people, even gay people, to be rejected. Sex is imagined to be "empowering:" we exercise power when we unveil our stunning bodies and reduce another person to slavish lust. But very few of us have such bodies; for most of us, sex doesn't mean power, but vulnerability. It means trusting another to be kind toward imperfections and scars and sags; trusting that they will be kind because they love you, because they said so, because they sealed it with a ring. This is why marriage is where sex is most exuberantly free, and why it's no surprise that married conservative and Christian women keep topping the surveys of sexual satisfaction.
Kinsey depicts the confusion the researcher encountered due to his dullness at understanding the emotional and relational aspects of sex, but not the outcome of his blundering opacity. He did not expand our knowledge, but contracted it, reducing an experience that had been private, holistic, and rich into solitary or mutual mechanics. There's a lot of wisdom we've lost, whole generations of it. But when we finally admit we're not having fun, we can begin to discover it again.
— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR's Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.
From The Detroit Free Press:
Blame it on a Dumb View of Respect
By Mitch Albom
And so this morning, like a boxer standing before the mirror after his handlers have gone home, we examine our face to see how badly we are bruised.
Black eyes everywhere. On the athletes, on the fans, on the sport and, yes, on our city. There were extra security guards at the Palace of Auburn Hills on Sunday night, but they were as superfluous as an umbrella after a rainstorm. This deed is done. This stain is in the fabric.
Players have been suspended for chunks of the season, one for the entire season, and police are investigating everything and everyone. You can rail all you want about "who started what," but in the end, it's all about what people remember. And they will remember this:
"Malice at Palace." "Basket-Brawl." "Friday Night Fights."
Oh, sure, had we lived in an era before videotape, the encounter between Detroit's Ben Wallace, Indiana's Ron Artest, several of Artest's teammates, and a handful of delusional Pistons fans might have faded away.
But we do not live in such an era. Instead, the ugly, flailing video -- beer being dumped, punches being thrown, a chair flying into the swarm of bodies -- will replay every time the Pistons and Pacers meet, every time some news network turns its focus to fandom, every ESPN Top 10 Bad Behavior, and, sadly, every time people sum up our city. Never mind that Auburn Hills is to downtown Detroit what Newark is to New York City. People won't take time to distinguish.
And we can't complain about respect.
Fact is, respect is what started this in the first place.
Oh, not real respect. Real respect has traces of kindness. Real respect is deferential, like a young apprentice and his patient mentor. Real respect knows, at its core, humility.
I'm talking about the bastardized "respect" in today's sports world -- where the word means nobody does anything to you that you don't like, want, accept or appreciate.
Or you let them have it.
A Series of Mistakes
Ben Wallace felt "disrespected" by Artest's hard foul late in an already decided game. So instead of shrugging if off, he had to whirl and shove Artest in the neck. Artest, "disrespected" by Wallace's retaliation, couldn't just shrug and say "sorry," he had to jaw back, then argue, then ultimately lie on the scorer's table as if it were a Barcalounger, mocking Wallace in order to even the "disrespect" ratio.
Some idiot fan, who felt "disrespected" by Artest's mocking of Wallace, was compelled to throw beer on Artest, to teach him a "respect" lesson. And Artest, instead of shaking his head at the fan's insanity and asking security to deal with the situation, had to show that such "disrespect" would not be tolerated, so he thundered into the stands -- over a table and a railing and seats -- until he found someone whom he could punch, even though he had no idea if this were the culprit.
The chain reaction continued. Artest's teammates couldn't let the "disrespect" go on, so they joined him and found others to punch. More fans, emboldened, couldn't let the Pacers "disrespect" them, so they confronted several on the floor, where fans should never be. And those confronted players couldn't allow such "disrespect" -- after all, they had egos to protect -- so they swung away.
On it went, through more shoving, grabbing, yanking and tumbling, through a shower of beer and popcorn that was dumped on the Pacers as they entered the tunnel.
And on it goes today, tomorrow, next week and next year.
"You know, a few months ago, people were talking about our crowds as the envy of the league," said Joe Dumars, Pistons president of basketball operations. "It just goes to show you how one foolish moment can change things."
Black eyes everywhere.
The High Price of Justice
That one foolish moment, compounded by another and another, will mean a mountain of games missed. Artest is gone for the season. Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal, who both went into the stands and began swinging, are out for 30 and 25 games, respectively. Wallace is gone for six. Others, with assorted shorter suspensions, bring the punishment to a whopping 143 games.
And you know what? It's appropriate -- particularly for Artest. He has become the NBA's crazy uncle, you never know when he'll go from amusing to dangerous, and if such severe punishment can salvage him and his enormous talent, the league has to lay it on now. Artest, unlike the other parties, had three chances to avoid this ugliness. The first was not to foul Wallace with less than a minute to go in the game. The second was not to lie on a scorer's table as if the whole night were a prop for his one-man show. And the third was his deliberate decision to enter the stands. Without that, this is nothing more than an ugly shouting match.
With it, it's international news.
So Artest deserves the hardest slap.
But if fans think Artest's ignition gives them license to floor the gas, they are dead wrong. Any fan discovered on tape to have instigated anything should be both prosecuted by law and banned from the Palace forever. Yes, forever. Attending sporting events is not some unalienable right. It says on most tickets the arena reserves the right to eject people. Consider them ejected.
Permanently.
Season-ticket holders? Revoke them. Who cares if it seems severe? As much as Artest crossed a line when he leapt into the seats, the fans crossed a line when they went from observers to participants. Understand something, folks: You do not have the right to be a part of the game. Doesn't matter how much money you paid. Doesn't matter how much you think you know sports. Doesn't matter how many fantasy leagues you're in or how many radio talk shows you listen to. You do not count. Get it? You are not part of the game.
Oh. And by the way. Maybe the league wants to notice that the beverages being tossed Friday night were distinctly amber and pungent: as in beer. The hypocrisy of selling alcohol all night, then complaining when people behave like drunks, is beyond comment. Who says you have to sell booze at sporting events? Show me one law. Show me one mandate. David Stern, the NBA commissioner, can get high and mighty, but he surrenders credibility when he wags one hand at drunken behavior but hugs the beer companies' money with the other.
Black-eyed P's. Pistons. Pacers. Palace People. It's funny. While I'm sure he didn't invent it, Isiah Thomas was the first person I ever heard use the phrase "our house." It was back in the late 1980s, and Isiah was doing the prideful athlete thing, sticking out his chest at the Boston Celtics and talking about what they couldn't do "in our house."
Friday night, I heard fans utter the same thing. Our house! Our house!
Get over it. The Palace isn't the fans' house. The Palace isn't the players' house. The Palace is a place of business where customers and workers are rightfully expected to follow rules and demonstrate restraint. Who would behave like that in their own house anyhow?
Only fools who are deluded about "respect." That word is not something you lose when someone does something you don't like, and it is not something you gain with a fist. Respect comes by behaving respectfully.
Under that measure, nobody earned any Friday night. And just as a black eye discolors the boxer's face, the deed now spreads across the landscape, and we'll be paying for it, sadly, for years to come.
Blame it on a Dumb View of Respect
By Mitch Albom
And so this morning, like a boxer standing before the mirror after his handlers have gone home, we examine our face to see how badly we are bruised.
Black eyes everywhere. On the athletes, on the fans, on the sport and, yes, on our city. There were extra security guards at the Palace of Auburn Hills on Sunday night, but they were as superfluous as an umbrella after a rainstorm. This deed is done. This stain is in the fabric.
Players have been suspended for chunks of the season, one for the entire season, and police are investigating everything and everyone. You can rail all you want about "who started what," but in the end, it's all about what people remember. And they will remember this:
"Malice at Palace." "Basket-Brawl." "Friday Night Fights."
Oh, sure, had we lived in an era before videotape, the encounter between Detroit's Ben Wallace, Indiana's Ron Artest, several of Artest's teammates, and a handful of delusional Pistons fans might have faded away.
But we do not live in such an era. Instead, the ugly, flailing video -- beer being dumped, punches being thrown, a chair flying into the swarm of bodies -- will replay every time the Pistons and Pacers meet, every time some news network turns its focus to fandom, every ESPN Top 10 Bad Behavior, and, sadly, every time people sum up our city. Never mind that Auburn Hills is to downtown Detroit what Newark is to New York City. People won't take time to distinguish.
And we can't complain about respect.
Fact is, respect is what started this in the first place.
Oh, not real respect. Real respect has traces of kindness. Real respect is deferential, like a young apprentice and his patient mentor. Real respect knows, at its core, humility.
I'm talking about the bastardized "respect" in today's sports world -- where the word means nobody does anything to you that you don't like, want, accept or appreciate.
Or you let them have it.
A Series of Mistakes
Ben Wallace felt "disrespected" by Artest's hard foul late in an already decided game. So instead of shrugging if off, he had to whirl and shove Artest in the neck. Artest, "disrespected" by Wallace's retaliation, couldn't just shrug and say "sorry," he had to jaw back, then argue, then ultimately lie on the scorer's table as if it were a Barcalounger, mocking Wallace in order to even the "disrespect" ratio.
Some idiot fan, who felt "disrespected" by Artest's mocking of Wallace, was compelled to throw beer on Artest, to teach him a "respect" lesson. And Artest, instead of shaking his head at the fan's insanity and asking security to deal with the situation, had to show that such "disrespect" would not be tolerated, so he thundered into the stands -- over a table and a railing and seats -- until he found someone whom he could punch, even though he had no idea if this were the culprit.
The chain reaction continued. Artest's teammates couldn't let the "disrespect" go on, so they joined him and found others to punch. More fans, emboldened, couldn't let the Pacers "disrespect" them, so they confronted several on the floor, where fans should never be. And those confronted players couldn't allow such "disrespect" -- after all, they had egos to protect -- so they swung away.
On it went, through more shoving, grabbing, yanking and tumbling, through a shower of beer and popcorn that was dumped on the Pacers as they entered the tunnel.
And on it goes today, tomorrow, next week and next year.
"You know, a few months ago, people were talking about our crowds as the envy of the league," said Joe Dumars, Pistons president of basketball operations. "It just goes to show you how one foolish moment can change things."
Black eyes everywhere.
The High Price of Justice
That one foolish moment, compounded by another and another, will mean a mountain of games missed. Artest is gone for the season. Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal, who both went into the stands and began swinging, are out for 30 and 25 games, respectively. Wallace is gone for six. Others, with assorted shorter suspensions, bring the punishment to a whopping 143 games.
And you know what? It's appropriate -- particularly for Artest. He has become the NBA's crazy uncle, you never know when he'll go from amusing to dangerous, and if such severe punishment can salvage him and his enormous talent, the league has to lay it on now. Artest, unlike the other parties, had three chances to avoid this ugliness. The first was not to foul Wallace with less than a minute to go in the game. The second was not to lie on a scorer's table as if the whole night were a prop for his one-man show. And the third was his deliberate decision to enter the stands. Without that, this is nothing more than an ugly shouting match.
With it, it's international news.
So Artest deserves the hardest slap.
But if fans think Artest's ignition gives them license to floor the gas, they are dead wrong. Any fan discovered on tape to have instigated anything should be both prosecuted by law and banned from the Palace forever. Yes, forever. Attending sporting events is not some unalienable right. It says on most tickets the arena reserves the right to eject people. Consider them ejected.
Permanently.
Season-ticket holders? Revoke them. Who cares if it seems severe? As much as Artest crossed a line when he leapt into the seats, the fans crossed a line when they went from observers to participants. Understand something, folks: You do not have the right to be a part of the game. Doesn't matter how much money you paid. Doesn't matter how much you think you know sports. Doesn't matter how many fantasy leagues you're in or how many radio talk shows you listen to. You do not count. Get it? You are not part of the game.
Oh. And by the way. Maybe the league wants to notice that the beverages being tossed Friday night were distinctly amber and pungent: as in beer. The hypocrisy of selling alcohol all night, then complaining when people behave like drunks, is beyond comment. Who says you have to sell booze at sporting events? Show me one law. Show me one mandate. David Stern, the NBA commissioner, can get high and mighty, but he surrenders credibility when he wags one hand at drunken behavior but hugs the beer companies' money with the other.
Black-eyed P's. Pistons. Pacers. Palace People. It's funny. While I'm sure he didn't invent it, Isiah Thomas was the first person I ever heard use the phrase "our house." It was back in the late 1980s, and Isiah was doing the prideful athlete thing, sticking out his chest at the Boston Celtics and talking about what they couldn't do "in our house."
Friday night, I heard fans utter the same thing. Our house! Our house!
Get over it. The Palace isn't the fans' house. The Palace isn't the players' house. The Palace is a place of business where customers and workers are rightfully expected to follow rules and demonstrate restraint. Who would behave like that in their own house anyhow?
Only fools who are deluded about "respect." That word is not something you lose when someone does something you don't like, and it is not something you gain with a fist. Respect comes by behaving respectfully.
Under that measure, nobody earned any Friday night. And just as a black eye discolors the boxer's face, the deed now spreads across the landscape, and we'll be paying for it, sadly, for years to come.
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