800 Words: What Winning the Super Bowl Feels Like

The first year I was aware of sports was 1988. It was the year the Orioles lost 107 games. Let’s repeat that number, 107 games. 107 games out of 162. In the Post World War II era, the only teams that have done worse are the 1962 New York Mets and the 2003 Detroit Tigers. And yet by the end of the season I was a baseball fanatic. 107 lost games was, in its way, far easier to endure than eight years later when the Orioles made it to the 1996 League Championship, only for its chances to be deflected by a twelve-year-old named Jeffrey Maier who snatched the ball into the stands. When I was two years old, the Baltimore Colts left Baltimore in the middle of the night, with the barest imaginable warning. We were a town of irredeemable sports losers, and there was no consolation in sight.

Meanwhile, Baltimore’s murder rate soared, as did its drug problem. There were years in which Baltimore assumed the mantle of the murder capital of America, the crack capital, the heroin capital, the venereal disease capital, the teen pregnancy capital, and the child illiteracy capital. The Baltimore which existed ten minutes from my childhood home was a town of despair, and while statistics don’t lie, they also don’t tell the whole truth. Why did this happen to Baltimore at exactly the time when it did? Why not Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Hartford or St. Louis or Kansas City or Oakland or Gary or Minneapolis or Nashville or Memphis or Louisville or Cincinnati or Flint or Camden or Newark or Providence or Detroit or New Orleans or Jacksonville or Birmingham or Jackson or Little Rock or Phoenix or Las Vegas? Was the departure of the Colts and Bullets and the decline of the Orioles unrelated to Baltimore’s larger problems, was it symptomatic, or was it the cause? How many people in Baltimore would not have become addicted to crack or heroin had they a hobby to pursue like following professional sports? How many people in Baltimore would have had better community organization or mentorship that could have been spearheaded by a better sports environment? How many teen boys would have had a better outlet for physical activity than gang violence? How many teen girls would have avoided early pregnancy because the boys were playing and watching more sports?

These are all intangible questions to which answers can never be measured. Very few arguments can be made that a lack of sports is related to the decline of American city that is not counterfactual, yet the speculation remains tantalizingly present. Baltimore is the only city in America that lost two of its three major sports teams and simultaneously saw a heartbreaking decline in the third, and for a small amount of time afterward, it became the Worst City in America. Can the two things be entirely unrelated?

Sports, more than art or politics, is the direct standin for the hopes and fears of our own lives. If the teams we love blow their leads and choke, what hope is there for little people like us? If the teams we love can deliver when required, what is not possible in the quest to make ourselves bigger people? Communities of friends with like-minded political opinions or cultural consumers are very poor replacements for a community of people who love the same sports team. Short of religion and love, there is nothing in people’s DNA more significant than their sport loyalties, and nothing except for religion and love which binds people closer together.  

Baltimore was once a great sports town. Johnny Unitas had his Colts, Wes Unseld had his Bullets, and Brooks Robinson had his Orioles. Baltimore was a town enjoying the fruits of  the mid-century American Pastoral as much as any other, and toward its end, Baltimore perhaps flourished as no other city did.

The Colts-Jets Super Bowl III Immortalized by The Simpsons

In 1953, a Baltimore-based clothing manufacturer named Caroll Rosenbloom won the rights to a new NFL franchise. By 1958, the Baltimore Colts were unquestionably the best team in football and won the NFL championship in both 1958 and ‘59. Many people still consider the ‘58 championship to be the ‘Greatest Game Ever Played’ as it was the very first game to utilize either overtime or sudden death. The 1968 Colts were known as the ‘Greatest Pro-Football Team of All Time” until they were defeated by the New York Jets in Super Bowl III (an upset that would in some ways repeat itself with the 1969 World Series which pitted the 109-win Orioles against the New York Mets). In their Baltimore years, the Colts produced no less than 11 Hall of Fame players and coaches (Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore, Artie Donovan, Raymond Berry, Gino Marchetti, Ted Hendricks, John Mackey, Jim Parker, Joe Perry, Weeb Ewbank, and Don Shula), they appeared in 10 playoffs, won five conference championships, and three NFL championships. Until they began a losing streak in 1978, it was arguable that the Colts were the greatest franchise in the history of football. And yet after Robert Irsay packed up the Colts in the middle of the night and sent them to Indianapolis with barely a moment’s notice and not even so much as an apology. It was an extraction of a city’s heart that put nothing in its place.

In 1954, Bill Veeck moved the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, and shortly thereafter was forced out as majority owner by his partners, who named Jerry Hoffberger chairman. By 1965, the New York Yankees’ nearly unbroken 45 year reign as the American League’s dominant team was definitively over, for six seasons the Orioles unquestionably took their place and even after the Yankees returned to dominance in the late 70’s, the Orioles remained strong contenders every year from 1966 until what is still their last World Championship in 1983. Brooks Robinson was their archetypal player, but the teams of those years included other national legends like Frank Robinson, Jim Palmer, and Eddie Murray, and also local legends like Boog Powell, Paul Blair, Mark Belanger, Davey Johnson, Elrod Hendricks, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor; in the booth we had Chuck “Ain’t the beer cold!” Thompson calling the games, on the bench we had Earl “@#$^#$ @$#^#$%&” Weaver managing. Between 1964 and 1983, the Orioles won seven division championships, six pennants, and three World Series. Their players won four MVP awards (Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, and a very young Cal Ripken), six Cy Young Awards (Mike Cuellar, Mike Flanagan, Steve Stone, and three for Jim Palmer), three Rookies of the Year (Al Bumbry, Eddie Murray, Cal Ripken), eighteen consecutive winning seasons, and fourteen consecutive seasons with pitchers who won more than twenty games (including four pitchers who won more than 20 in 1971). But by 1979, Washington trial attorney Edward Bennett Williams bought the team from Jerry Hoffberger, who then began a long-held process of using the team as a cash cow. He threatened repeatedly to move the team to Washington as a way to extract more money from the City of Baltimore (particularly for a new stadium), yet he was unwilling to pay the money to keep teams competitive in the era of free agency - a practice which was continued by the next owner, the clearly corrupt Eli Jacobs. When local personal injury lawyer, Peter Angelos, bought the Orioles, he was hailed as the team savior who would restore the Orioles’s former glory. His financial commitment to restoration was unquestionable, but his incompetence was equally so. Angelos believed his judgement to be better than the most proven baseball managers and general managers in the game which he hired at top dollar. By 1999, Angelos was reputed so difficult to work with that no experienced professional would come to Baltimore if they had any chance of a better job.

For a few years, Baltimore even had a wonderful basketball team. In 1963, the Chicago Zephyrs moved to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Bullets, and bn the late 60’s, we were the town of Earl Monroe and Wes Unseld who reached the conference finals twice in five years and appeared in the postseason nearly every year.

But by 1984 that Golden Age of Baltimore Sports was definitively over, and the decline was all too swift. First came heroin, then AIDS, then guns, then crack, and urban flight all throughout. The Baltimore of the postwar era was but a memory, and compared to what Baltimore once was, the Baltimore of the late 80’s and 90’s was an above ground sewer.

This new Baltimore needed Cal Ripken as its idol. During what is perhaps the darkest chapter in Baltimore history, the city needed a symbol that would be there every day for them through the very worst of days and show an iron commitment to charity, to pedagogy, to work-ethic, to loyalty, and to family. Cal was the ‘Last Oriole’ of the Golden Age and a reminder of a better era for a city that needed to hold onto memories with all the care of a family heirloom. The very concept of the ‘Oriole Way’ came from Ripken’s dad, a longtime Orioles coach and minor-league manager. The Oriole Way is the most fundamental blue-collar values transferred to baseball; hard work, professionalism, dependability, and a fanatical focus on the most basic skills. In the mid-20th century, hard work was rewarded. But there was something insultingly tragic about how the ‘Oriole Way’ reached its way into baseball consciousness. In 1987, Cal Ripken Sr. was named manager of the Orioles, a capstone to a thirty-year career spent in service for his team, with his oldest son the star shortstop, and his youngest son about to be called up to become the starting second baseman. Together they made an instructional video for little leaguers to be released in 1988 on how to play baseball the ‘Oriole Way.’ By the seventh game of 1988, Cal Ripken Sr. was fired as manager, and the Orioles would lose 107 games. By the time the Orioles were ready to share their secret with the world, the Oriole Way was a colossal failure.

Cal was there to protect us in all our darkest days, but he couldn’t show us how to win. For that, we needed to wait for the football to return. Though the manner in which football came back was hardly a surprise, there was certainly an irony in robbing Cleveland of their Browns after we’d been robbed so brutally. But football returned to Cleveland in two years, and unlike Bob Irsay, Art Modell apologized for what he’d done. After four undistinguished seasons, there was positively no indication of the spontaneous flowering that would happen in 2000.

The Orioles were a team defined by two things: dependability and mediocrity, and one fed the other. But the Ravens were defined by their volatility. We were the Baltimore of the Ripkens, but we’d become the Baltimore of the Lewises. In the Age of Ripken, the Orioles were sometimes respected, but never feared, and when the steroids scandals happened, they were no longer even respected. But in the Age of Ray Lewis, Baltimore housed the most feared, and perhaps the most hated team in America.

The Ravens were a new team for a new era of Baltimore. Violent crime rates, while not as high as they were, were still high, and test scores were low, but there was a definite sense that the tide had turned. Martin O’Malley brought in the first budget surplus in Baltimore’s recent history and brought new ideas to crime prevention. Rather than dwell in nostalgia for a lost Baltimore, the problems of the city were confronted honestly to the public and aired to an international audience through television shows like The Wire and The Corner. We’d not only gone from the Baltimore of Cal Ripken to the Baltimore of Ray Lewis, we’d also gone from the Baltimore of Barry Levinson to the Baltimore of David Simon.

Even in a sport in which it was once estimated that 1 in 4 professional players are involved in serious crimes, Ravens were notorious for being a violent team of thugs and criminals. You could make something resembling a Pro Bowl all-star team the list of current and former Ravens with arrest records: Ray Lewis, Jamal Lewis, Germane Lewis, Ray Rice, Terrell Suggs, Steve McNair, Chris McAlister, Gerome Sapp, BJ Sams, Corey Fuller, Leon Searcy (I’m sure I’ve left out a few...).

The Ravens were not only the new Baltimore,  in some ways they were the new urban America - made desperate and hungry by decades of poverty and violence, and determined to improve their lot by any means necessary. The symbol of the new Baltimore was Ray Lewis, and he was as perfectly reflective of what the city needed as Cal Ripken had been fifteen years before. If ‘The Oriole Way’ was perhaps the catchphrase of Ripken’s Orioles, then ‘Protect This House’ was the catchphrase of Ray Lewis’s Ravens. It isn’t even a Ravens’ catchphrase, it’s a slogan from an Under Armour commercial (itself a Baltimore-based company) which hundreds of athletes chanted over the years for the camera, and yet after Ray Lewis used it, it became a Baltimore chant.

Cal’s charisma came from that he seemed to be born a good man and retained his overwhelming decency even through the most adverse of circumstances. No matter how badly the Orioles did, he never lost heart, and showed up ready to play every game as though it were a championship. But Ray’s charisma came from that he seemed to be born anything but a good man, yet strove with all his might to become one. Even if you don’t think Ray Lewis murdered those kids, it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t in some way involved. But like so many in Baltimore, Ray needed a second chance to prove his worth to life. Cal Ripken’s charisma came from his devotion, Ray Lewis’s career came from his redemption. Ray Lewis knew that past events would make him spend his entire career being one of the most hated players in the NFL, but he acted with integrity anyway - mentoring other football players and college students, setting up financial foundations for veterans and the unemployed, and preaching the gospel ad nauseum to every person and camera which he meets. He was as loathed by football fans around America as Cal was beloved by baseball fans, but Ray made us win. Cal didn’t.

The Orioles played a gentile, old fashioned, offence-driven, slow-moving baseball (seriously, we've often been timed as having the longest game of any baseball franchise in America) that got the job done with efficiency and self-effacement. For nearly fifteen years, the Ravens have played an action-packed, vicious, defense-oriented, brutally violent game in which the most health-threatening injuries to other players and to themselves are considered mere collateral damage. Much was made of Bernard Pollard’s industrious ability to put members of the New England Patriots on the Disabled List. But what wasn’t as well known was that at the time when he gave Stephen Ridley a concussion in this year’s AFC championship, he was suffering from six cracked ribs.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that in this era of free agency, the great sports dynasties happen in America’s most thriving metropolises: New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami. Declining industrial cities seem unable to form the same dynasties, occasionally we have champions from Baltimore or Detroit or Cleveland, but they are exceptions which prove the rule. It seems that every time a ‘Rust Belt’ city makes it to a championship, they’re considered the ‘underdogs.’ Their owners don’t have the fiscal ability to compete with more thriving cities, and therefore must make do with better results from less talent. And their fans, from 90 years old to 9 months, suffer a spiritual blow with every defeat which makes them believe a bit more plausibly that their greatest hopes are unattainable. It is a cycle of decline and despair that feeds on itself. In sports, as in life, the more defeated we’ve been, the more opportunities there are to be defeated in the future. There are, unfortunately, winners and losers at life. Gore Vidal got it all too right when he declared “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Life is a contest; we can’t help the truth of that, if it isn’t ‘always’ a contest. With very few exceptions if any, every good thing which happens to you is a bad thing that happens to someone else. Someone else did not get your job, someone else was rejected from the school to which you got accepted, someone else is not dating your girlfriend, and someone else is not the parent to your children.

Some losers are only so in their own mind, but no one is a bigger loser than those who are the victims of society that can’t properly provide for them and no one is quicker to take from others what should be theirs as a fundamental right. A society that cannot keep its people well-fed, employed, well-educated, and community-minded is a society headed for disaster. And an important part of a society’s proper function is for its locales to have excellent sports teams – be they professional, college, amateur, or recreational. Without it, the human need for physical activity becomes misdirected – the thrill of competition turns all too easily into a taste for violence and domination.

But as Baltimore finished its first decade of climbing back from its nadir, a new era is lurking on the horizon. The era of Ray Lewis is over, but the era of Joe Flacco (and perhaps of Buck Showalter) is clearly in ascendance - in which Ripken-and-Unitas like taciturn, bland, dependable men who do nothing except play the game dominate the statistics and the press coverage. The lid of the id was taken off by Ray Lewis in a town that values quiet grit and would never turn to such flash unless it were direly necessary. But Joe Flacco’s own father called him ‘dull.’ Perhaps this is a sign that Baltimore’s old identity is coming back, and Ray Lewis made it possible.

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Life is a Ken Burns Documentary - A New Song

My first new song in two years. There are a lot of lines that I wrote here which I could barely stand to put on paper. Is it better than most of the shit that passes for music which people listen to? Absolutely. Is it any good? Absolutely not :).

Also... somehow the chord changes didn't make it through the cut and paste. I'll work on that later.



And when the house was burned to dust 

and to its embers ground, 

The birth of new life comes and it

experiences its first sound.

And though we infants titans see

ourselves through mirrors long,

We break the mirrors with our fists

to hear the loser’s song,

And though the loser’s victory march

proclaims its endless reign,

The victory goes by accident to

fortune’s fools for gain.

And fortune’s fools have no excuse for

why fate cares for them,

they play their roles and kiss the ring

while others they condemn.

They tell their myths for why is why

and flog their charge for all,

We see it yet we turn our heads cuz

Life’s...



A Ken Burns Documentary:

…It’s long, … it’s slow,... 

there’s endless things to learn... 

Life’s a grey old man who’s

seen all wars and tells you 

shit you don’t wanna know... 

He rambles, he forgets, he lies,... 

and his lies are duller than truth,... 

And when he’s done with you he

hopes your soul has

...pissed away its youth.  

… ...


When teachers want to slight their jobs 

they put the TV on, 

They let the screen talk at the class 

while mentally they’re gone.

The shit they shove into our minds is

full of noxious smells,

But we don’t listen anyway

except for classroom bells,

And when the bell tolls through the halls

the dead come back to life,

To keep our learning poor we’d learn

to live with endless strife.

The screens of class are traded in

for screens of home and car,

In place of desks are couches soft

and sleep with dreams afar,

But when we’re in the car we fall

asleep with wheels alive,

The car drives us and takes us where it

wills...

(G.P.)


cuz life’s a Ken Burns Documentary





It’s smart,... it’s vast,

enthusiasm yes it has. 

It’s one-man war 

combats our well-earned mantra...

 … ignorance is bliss...

It’s bloated,... it’s bombastic,... 

it pretends like it astounds... 

And all throughout the show 

there’s the nagging thought that it’s...

...not as important as it sounds...

...

It tells us to respect the 

institutions that we’re in.

It conjures pasts of people greater

than we’ve ever been.

It makes us feel inferior to

the history that we owe,

And tells us that our best days never

happened to us so...

We sit in reverential awe

for things we really hate,

And people who exploit our faith

in living all too late,

It points out all the pratfalls of

forgetting what’s been done,

And makes us pay an homage to the

hangman and the gun,

It makes us terrified we can’t break

out from hist’ry’s snare, we’re

just as bad as them, another

way, we’d never dare. And

when we wreck the world that people

after us will live.

The ruins we’ll dress up so kids can

watch...

(G.P.)

A Ken Burns Documentary

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Friday Play and Quote List: Sir Thomas Beecham

Handel: Hallelujah Chorus

"It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it, but they absolutely love the noise it makes."


Mozart: Symphony no. 41 (Part of a 1934 set of Mozart Symphonies that for eighty years has never been excelled.)

"A musicologist is a man who can read music but not hear it."


Beethoven: Fourth Symphony

"Beethoven's late quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man."

Schubert: Fifth Symphony 

(On the dotted rhythms in the first movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony)
"What can you do with it, it's like a lot of yaks jumping about."

Berlioz: Harold in Italy

"There are two golden rules for an orchestra. Start together, finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between."

Mendelssohn: Italian Symphony

(When asked by the musicologist Neville Cardus what he thinks of Bach.)
"Too much counterpoint. What is worse: Protestant counterpoint!"

Verdi: Otello - Act IV

(to a soprano):
"Your voice reminds me of a cart racing down a hill with the break on."

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Act II Love Duets

(to a tenor playing Tristan)
"Have you ever made love?"
"Yes, Sir Thomas."
"Well concerning your acting technique and observing your grave and deliberate movements to our dear Isolde, I am reminded of that estimable quadruped, the hedgehog."

Gounod: Faust

"I have just been around the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it."

Brahms: Symphony no. 3 (perhaps my favorite performance of it...)

"The Harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof."

Borodin: Polovtsian Dances

"Try everything once except folk dancing and incest."

Bizet: Carmen 

(Upon rehearsing Don Quixote by Massenet, he complained to the Soprano that she came in too late, she replied that the star Bass, Feodor Chaliapin, enacted his death too soon.)
"Madam. In my opinion no opera star has ever died too soon."

Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite

(About the very long and 'deep' Bruckner Seventh Symphony)
"In the first movement alone I took note of six pregnancies and four miscarriages."

Dvorak: Symphony no 8:

(to a female cellist) "My Dear Madam, you hold between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it."

Grieg: Peer Gynt



"Bass trombone, you're out of tune."
"The bass trombonist hasn't arrived yet."
"Oh. Well when he arrives tell him he's out of tune."



Chabrier: Espana

"Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away."

Faure: Pavane

(when passing a gravestone that read: Here lies a fantastic organist and excellent musician.)
"What? Both in the same grave?"

Delius: North Country Sketches

(about Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony)
"A city life for me!"

Strauss: Four Last Songs

"No composer has written as much as 100 bars of worthwhile music since 1925."



Sibelius: En Saga


"Have you heard any Stockhausen?"
"No. But I once trod in some."

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800 Words: An Immodest Proposal for Corporate Power

I.

If you can call it work, then I work at the very fringe of Corporate America. I work as an associate an incorporated real estate and investment firm whose partners, associates, file clerks, and amanuenses are comprised of myself, my father, my mother, and my two brothers. Though it would no doubt have its advantages, we do not hire so much as a secretary. Of the five of us, I am the employee with by far the least ambition for ‘advancement.’ I deliberately keep myself at the very bottom of the chain of command - working as close to the mailroom as one can get when five people work in a firm whose members are your immediate family. The reason for this is absurdly simple - I have little mind for business and still less interest. I hope one day to leave the boondocks of Corporate America before we find ourselves at the heart of it, and I have no doubt whatsoever that my brothers are as gifted at finance as I am incompetent, and can reach the peak of influence. My aim is simple, to remain the idiot son in a reasonably lucrative small firm for ten more years or so, and by the time I’m forty I hope to make enough money as a musician and/or writer that I can declare my partial independence from the partnership so I needn’t be known as the idiot brother in a much, much, larger financial firm with my family at the head.

Two years in ‘finance’ have certainly given me more appreciation for its importance to the world, and a bit more sympathy for the worldview of those who work within it. That doesn’t mean that there’s any great magic to it. “It’s no secret how to make a lot of money...” said Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane “...if all you care about is making a lot of money.” That’s certainly true. It takes very little imagination to make money, but it takes painstaking devotion and an overwhelming desire to work hard with an infinite variety of byzantine forms of analysis as means to maximize profits - and even then, the ability to do well in finance is by no means guaranteed. Would you make more money if you decided which companies to invest in on a dartboard? Well... I won’t lie, there’s still a 1% chance, but an ignorant investor is less likely in the extreme to make nearly as much money.

Because I’m in finance, I suppose I’m a member of what has increasingly come to be seen as the American Aristocracy. Please don’t misunderstand, if I am, I’m the lowliest country squire (and a pretty incompetent one at that), but it can’t be argued with: when you have enough money to base your occupation around money, it means you’re living with at least a very small silver spoon.

It’s very difficult to fathom what it must have taken for my family to get to this point. To think that a family that barely escaped the jaws of Hitler (and Stalin, and Lenin, and Czar Nicholas, and Pilsudski, and the Polish-Soviet War...) could have come to America and done something rather near to thrive is its own sort of miracle - yet entirely explicable.

For an upper-middle class man of his mid-to-late sixties, my father comports himself in a manner that can only be called abstemious to the point of caricature. He never uses a teabag less than thrice, scouts every store in town for their sales, gives fake names so he can get first-time customer discounts twice over, refuses to buy brand-name products (and upbraids his children for doing so), and regularly goes to Smythe Jewelers; not so he can buy jewelry, merely so that he can pocket the free freshly-baked cookies they give out to potential customers. But insofar as I know, my father never buried money in his back yard, or gladhanded salesmen with the same bottle of watered-down scotch he kept in his office for decades, or converted thousands of dollars to silver coins or visit the bank once every few weeks simply to make sure there was exactly the same number of those silver coins...

...In one of his many Yiddish sayings, Zaydie Tucker used to say: ‘All Ich Hob Ich Hob Far Aych” (All I have I have for you). He arrived in America virtually penniless in 1947, with my Bubbie and year-old father in tow. Within twenty-five years he’d accumulated enough business interests to turn them over to my father in early 70’s and live his remaining years in semi-retirement as a nominal member of the upper-middle class. But while all of us are technically members of it, we were brought up to penny-pinch like European peasants. Once I finally learn to reign in control of my spending (which, at least for a Tucker, is relatively extravagant), I hope I can preserve our peasant ways for another generation.

II.

Downton Abbey doesn’t suck. It’s simply no more than a decent show which is somewhat ridiculous, absurdly overrated, and a little bit evil. The thought of hundreds of thousands of American Liberals going crazy over a show which advocates outright for the allegedly benevolent autocracy of the landed European gentry is more than a little creepy. We’re clearly meant to feel nostalgia for those simpler times in which everybody ‘knew their place,’ a nostalgia that would erase all the social progress since the French Revolution and have us all dwell in a world where we existed at the whims of feudal lords; not a single one of of whom, I can assure you, was as enlightened in his despotism as the Earl of Grantham.

And yet, every devil has his due. Downton Abbey, loathesome as it sometimes is, does make half of a legitimate point about the greatness of its era. If the world must be run by a form of authoritarian conservatism (though it needn’t be, especially not now), then the autocrats at whose whims the world is run should be people who are expected to be the height of well-behaved, well-read, well-spoken, well-mannered, and good hearted to all those serfs in all but name who exist at their behest. The English aristocracy of a hundred years ago was still an aristocracy, but they were instilled from birth with a sense of obligation to all those into whose care they were entrusted - including the places they ruled imperially, and if you doubt that, consider the fate of British (or French)-ruled colonies as opposed to Belgian-ruled colonies. If English aristocrats did not behave well toward their ‘inferiors’, there was no system of accountability that could hold them responsible except the contempt of their better-hearted peers. But there was, at least, a code of honor which made many of them act in a sense of duty to use their privileged position to make the world a better place.

The world can do, and has done, better since the breakdown of the ancien regime. But what happens if our new, liberal, model falls into permanent disrepair?

III.

The Libertarian movement is not simply a forgivable flaw of people who like small government but support abortion rights and gay marriage. It is the single most dangerous, unnecessary, viciously fungal development in Modern American political life; and I’m ashamed by how many years it took me to realize that. Modern ultra-conservatism is merely the fascism of Franco and Salazar writ extremely small; if the paleo-conservative beliefs of Rick Santorum were exaggerated to their absolute nth degree, you’d establish a dictatorship which merely kills enemies of a Catholic government. The term ‘enemies’ would be defined extremely broadly in such a government, and it would cause untold amounts of suffering, but the point of the regime is nevertheless to coerce people into living, not dying, according to the way the Church instructs them. But an equally exaggerated form of modern libertarianism would be the obverse of Stalin and Mao themselves. Unlike Christianity, libertarianism is, at best, a philosophy indifferent to the life and death of others. But if libertarianism were exaggerated to the absolute nth degree, a government would be powerless to stop even a corporate entity which enslaves or deliberately kills its workers wholesale, or refuses to share its profits as millions of unemployed families starve to death. As unlikely and ridiculous as such a development obviously seems to us now, it may seem all too likely in fifty years if the libertarian movement grows much larger (and it certainly can). Much like the Marxists of a hundred years ago, today’s generation of libertarians may one day look upon what they have wrought with absolute horror. A Generalissimo Santorum would be a cataclysm for our country, but a Party Secretary Rand Paul would be as much the American apocalypse as Stalin was the Russian.

Much as Christianity was an heretical offshoot of Judaism, Communism was an heretical offshoot of Capitalism. To prove this, we’ll have to reduce the arguments of the two philosophies to an absurdly simplistic level:

As Adam Smith would define it, the single primary essence of Capitalism is that the greatest affluence to the greatest possible number of people is to be provided by a free market in which people can trade goods with one another through the means which a division of labor provides - a belief which a generation later would be categorized as ‘utilitarian’, and for all his imperfections, Smith has still never been disproven. However, Karl Marx would define Adam Smith’s utilitarian belief in providing the greatest wealth for the greatest number of people as a mere figleaf through which a select few lucky enough to control the means of production may enslave and alienate those manifold who don’t. Through Karl Marx’s misreading of Adam Smith, he comes to define the single primary essence of Communism - which is that the larger body of workers, an international union of them, will subsume the few who control production’s means and usurp them to create a free, communal, society in which workers control production for themselves.

As a philosophy, libertarianism is based upon a much more accurate reading of Communism than Communism ever was of Capitalism. Libertarianism is not an American idea, it is a Russian one, and based upon a Russian’s misinterpretation of America as much as Communism was based upon a German’s misinterpretation of England. To boil libertarianism down to its most simple essence would not relate it to Adam Smith’s capitalism in the slightest. In fact, it is related to the definition of capitalism by Karl Marx and cannot find an acceptable definition of capitalism except through the prism of Marx himself.

To define Libertarianism in its simplest essence (or “Objectivism,” to use the philosophical term which Ayn Rand acolytes prefer to distinguish their philosophy from their political beliefs), would mean to state that the pursuit of one’s own rational self-interest is the only moral goal on earth worth pursuing, and therefore the only moral government is the one which does not prevent people from pursuing said self-interest. Like many philosophical systems that are more valued by academics (including Marxism), Objectivism is very bad, two-dimensional philosophy which must take religion-like faith in the unprovable in order to believe; but it’s a very real philosophy, and intellectuals dismiss it as mere simple-mindedness at their own peril. But it is completely unrelated to capitalism as it’s been properly defined for nearly two-and-a-half centuries.

Libertarianism and Objectivism, as Ayn Rand defines them, are perfectly indifferent to the question of the maximum possible affluence for the greatest possible number. Randianism is, at its heart, an individualist philosophy, not a material one. But even if Ayn Rand’s philosophy is not materialist in its end, as Marxism is, it is materialist in its means. It begins from the exact same epistemological basis as Marxism, which is that all questions which cannot be proven by sensory perception are superfluous - an idea which Marx got from Ludwig Feuerbach, a Hegel pupil whose philosophy hinged on the thought that all metaphysical beliefs are nothing but a projection of a person’s inward nature. But from this materialist base, Rand’s conclusions are the precise reciprocal from Marx. Marx took Feuerbach much further to declare that since all metaphysics is simply a false projection of our innards, the beliefs of all the people which move history are completely immaterial - all that matters is the materials they control, and who controls them. Rand agrees with this Marxist conception completely. But whereas Marx casts a moral disapproval on those who control the means as exploitative, Rand looks upon them as heroic beings who have realized their best selves.

Libertarianism is at least as much a Communist heresy as Communism is a Capitalist heresy. With a little seasoning from Nietzsche in its views on morality, libertarianism is nothing more (or less) than Marxism on the side of the bourgeoisie. It takes what has always been inherent in rich people, a tendency toward plutocratic beliefs and the assumption of inherent virtue in their wealth, and then endows their world view with a more unbreakable philosophical and moral underpinning to these instincts than has been gainsaid in world history since the Divine Right of Kings.  

IV.

But Rand stopped short of Marx in one extremely crucial way. She did not insist on an endpoint to her Objectivist philosophy. There is no true evolution to it - no plutocratic paradise at which the world must be made to arrive. Perhaps that is its consolation and what could eventually prevent it from going as wildly awry as Communism did. Rand’s philosophy is a philosophy of the few, but like Calvinism, the ‘elect’ could number quite a many, and what happens the pursuit of one person’s rational self-interest comes into world-shaking conflict with the pursuit of another’s?

Nobody needs to remind you, dear reader, that we live in a time of economic upheaval. Only three things are certain about our era: the Middle Class is dissipating, the Lower Class grows ever larger, and the Upper Class grows just as exponentially.  When Occupy Wall Street talks about the 1%, that’s idiotic. It’s not the 1%, it’s the 5%. As of March last year, there were 8.6 million American households with a net worth in the millions. Even now, during The Great Recession, there are at least 1.1 million new millionaires since Barack Obama took office!

With a few exceptions like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, it is not the billionaire class which champions of the libertarian point of view most vociferously. It is the millionaire class - in most cases, the newly rich who worked hard to resist the tide that would drop them from Middle to Lower Class, and are therefore perpetually insecure about losing their fortunes. And yet there is until now so little evidence of dwindling in wealth among the wealthy that such a fear is almost comical.

For the moment, America has an aristocracy that is roughly 8.6 million people strong. Unless Republicans are stupid enough to prevent the debt ceiling from being raised, nothing can take away their fortunes. Even if (when) their taxes go up to 35%, they will still be as financially secure as before, and perhaps moreso since so much government money ends up in the hands of businesses the government subsidizes at the expense of many who require far more assistance.

Furthermore, this aristocracy may not be permanent. If Barack Obama manages to tackle immigration and gun laws in his second term, followed by the election of Hilary Clinton in 2016, who spends her eight years tackling unemployment, the national debt, and banking reform, followed by the election of Julian Castro in 2024 who can tackle alternative energy, environmental regulation, and nuclear proliferation, Perhaps President Le Malon can be elected in 2032, and along with rebuilding American infrastructure and reforming American education, perhaps he can tackle the issue of wage fairness by introducing a more progressive income tax that can reestablish a firm middle class - the health of which class Ayn Rand assures us is indicative of the future prospects for any country.

But for the moment, there is a current population of roughly 300 million who will not be members of this aristocracy. What shall become of them?...

V.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thought, which I fear will be liable to strenuous objection... if anybody cares.

In the 1950’s, the marginal tax rate in this country for every dollar over $250,000 was as high as 94%. God forbid we ever return to that Dark Winter Era of American Chaos and Impotence, but should such millionaires continue to insist that government intervention be so terrible, perhaps a private firm can collect such taxes as will keep a society functional without mob rule or dictatorship.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the second and third richest men in the world. Together, their net worth is supposed to comprise $105 billion. When they die, whatever of their assets is not taken by inheritance tax (the large bulk of it) will be gradually transferred in the form of stock to the endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a non-profit run by Bill and Melinda Gates which supervises charitable giving and is already estimated to be worth $36 billion. The Gates Foundation then distributes their money throughout the world as Mr. Gates and his wife see fit.

When one combines the foundation’s aristocratic $36 billion endowment with the current holdings of Buffett and Gates, one arrives before inheritance taxes at the princely sum of $141 billion. When one combines this with the “Billionaire’s Pledge”, made by 75 separate billionaires to give more than 50% of their money to charity, one can add $125 billion to the total charitable giving of America’s billionaires to arrive at a royal total (before inheritance taxes) of at least $266 billion of private donor money - enough, perhaps, to cure a few diseases in Africa, fund a few decades of education reasonably well for a mid-size American state, and teach the world’s children to be computer literate.

I shall be so bold as to propose to America’s wealthiest that they put their money to a different use for such divine sums. Rather than invest in charitable causes, I hereby suggest that this $266 billion be used strictly for the purposes of forming a private army with all the capabilities of the United States Army. All those unemployed Americans who wish to keep their semi-automatic weapons have the option of joining this private army for a fair wage.   

This army is for but one purpose, and that is to compel each American millionaire to sign a ‘Millionaire’s Pledge’ that is exactly like the Billionaire’s Pledge in almost every particular: 50% of each millionaire’s net worth must be given away in the form of their investments and stock options to the Gates Foundation. As the average net worth of the American millionaire is $3.7 million, and there are 8.6 millionaire families in America, there is a reservoir of at least $16 trillion (before inheritence taxes). With such a sum the Gates Foundation can not only tackle whatever one of the world’s problems it desires, but triumph over it: it may pay off America’s national debt, or provide health care to the entire world, or give every child in the world a high school education, or provide a roof over the head of all the world’s homeless and displaced, or provide financial incentives for governments to maintain world peace and abide by human rights laws. And in doing such great works, The Gates Foundation shall restore America’s rightful place in world opinion as its benevolent autocrat.

Many corporations are large enough in our day that they have at least as much say upon the world stage as any small country. If corporate omnipotence has become an unavoidable fact of our lives, is our only option to make a better world then not to attempt the formation a benevolent super-corporate non-profit that can be an aristocratic force to do good? I can already hear the moral objections, the most important among them being that since millionaires have so much more money than billionaires, they can raise a far larger army. But as so many of these millionaires are consumed by rational self-interest, it stands to reason that few of them would possess the inclination to work in concert with one another to achieve such a goal when the raising of an army is such a huge feat of coordination and collaboration. Had they the ability for such feats of coordination, perhaps they’d become billionaires who sign Gates’s pledge.

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Soul: The American Music - Part 1: Ray Charles

Soul music was the unique moment of history in American music - its confluence of facets forms a body of music more complete than any other genre produced by our country. In its marriage of musical sophistication to the complete gamut of human experience, it is almost unique among American musical genres. To this day, it has done a better job than any other American music in marrying the best in recording technology to the most individual and emotionally committed performers, and both to the best songwriters and lyricists and the most sophisticated musical arrangers. It marked the first true era of reconciliation and redress between white and black cultures, and marks the first time when the extraordinary musical culture of American Blacks were backed by the full might, support, expense, and hired talent of a recording industry controlled almost entirely by Whites. The result was a music which married the old world sophistication of European composition to the brave new world of American immediacy and improvisation, and both to furthering the emerging influence of the African musical roots that would come to dominate world music as the twentieth century progressed to the same extent which Europe dominated the nineteenth. All of Soul Music’s various facets synthesize in a fusion which mirrors the best of the democracy which produced the genre. It is the climax, the apex, and the ambassador for everything which American musicians are capable of achieving. It is the most American music there has ever been, and perhaps will ever be.

Not all soul music is created equal, and lots of it has all the same problems as the rest of the 1950’s and early 60’s musical genres - solid musical values, sometimes extraordinary ones, married to total vapidity; bad lyrics, sappy romantic sentiments, the desire for a commercial hit trumping the desire to create something meaningful. There is plenty by Ray Charles and James Brown which does not deserve to be heard again. Much of their second rate music can be amazingly fun and beautiful, and occasionally brilliantly inventive, but if mere fun and beauty and novelty is what people want from music, there’s plenty of music from their own eras which speak better to their experience. If you want to find what’s eternal in this music, you have to separate what might be forgettable from what’s truly unforgettable. If you want to understand why Soul Music is everything to America, here is a mere pebble in the pool of why that is.

Ray Charles:

You Are My Sunshine - If you want to understand the importance of Soul Music to America, start right here. You Are My Sunshine, that innocent children’s song, was written by Jimmie Davis - a country music singer and a virulently segregationist governor of Louisiana. Ray Charles takes that white bread melody and with fistfuls of dominant and diminished chords, he makes the song into something completely black - existing in a waystation between big band, gospel, Motown and the blues. Using a purely musical language, it is perhaps the most subversive cover in American musical history.

What’d I Say: If I have one complaint about any form of ‘popular music’, it is the obsession with sex. I know, I know, I’m a total stick in the mud. But sex is the primary signifier of vapidity in popular culture. If a musician feels the need in his songs to resort to incessant talk about love or sex, or selling a watered down version of romance that has nothing to do with the real thing, it’s an almost guaranteed indicator that a musician has nothing more profound to offer the world. It is no different than how classical musicians can create the most boring music in the world and can then slap a religious title on it and be lauded for their 'profundity' and 'depth.' But if you’re going to talk about sex in music, really talk about it. Don’t prettify it with romantic emotions which are completely divorced from anyone’s actual experience of love, lust, and loss. For various reasons, other Ray Charles songs get close to erotic realities too ((Night Time is) the Right Time, Hallelujah I Love Her So, Hit the Road Jack being prominent examples). But What’d I Say is unique among Ray Charles songs, in many ways unique among anything written until the day it was released. It was the first American song which actually traffics in the genuine sounds of sex. For perhaps the first time ever and the only time during the 1950’s, Americans could hear the sounds of fucking on the radio.

Unchain My Heart: So many American lyrics, particularly in the mid-20th century, traffic in euphemism. It’s probable that 90% of the euphemisms are very simple: they’re employed to disguise extremely sexual images in the terms of innocent love. But Soul Music brings an entirely different dynamic to that equation - what seems flippant and shallow at first glance contains far more depths to fathom. Unchain My Heart, in addition to having two of the most gripping hooks in the American popular tradition, has the metaphor of a heart in chains. Hailing as he did from Georgia, Ray Charles would have to view the image of chains as a very, very loaded symbol. Is this about an unfeeling woman in a bad affair, or is this about a region where the shackles of oppression still control people’s lives if not their legal states-of-being; a region that may have freed slaves in name, but not in deed? It’s entirely possible that the song is precisely as shallow as it seems on the surface, but I would stake a claim that this music alludes to something much deeper, and much more troubling.

Drown in My Own Tears: Moreso than perhaps any other nationality, one of the great qualities of American music is the seemingly effortless ability so many of its greatest exemplars have to skirt the line between comedy and tragedy. Other nationalities have their few, Austria has Mozart, Russia has Stravinsky, France has Jacques Brel, Britain has The Beatles, and America has dozens for every one of theirs. This ability is a simple question of taste and time. If there is such a thing as a national character, then it’s clearly not in American temperament to commit too much to any emotional extreme - and our music reflects that. Other countries view the ability to unquestioningly follow their primal instincts as a virtue, but we are (or at least we were) a nation which views apathy as something approaching our most cherished value. Music, at least in its written form, was the playground of obsessives who pursued their craft to the limits of infinity, and went through many corresponding periods of over-the-top expression that reflected the unbalanced obsessions of its creators. But with the development of recorded technology, music requires far less technical accomplishment to be powerful, and perhaps it is far more reflective of the way life is lived as a result. Life is not quite tragic, not quite comic or perhaps it is both all of the time. But so much of the Great American Music exists in precisely that state. And what you feel from this music is a Rorschach test of wherever on the emotional spectrum you’re feeling at the moment you’re listening to it. Drown in My Own Tears contains some of the most extravagantly emotional depictions of loss ever put on pen. The lyrics themselves are not particularly memorable, though perhaps the line “I sit and cry/just like a child/my pouring tears/are running wild/if you don’t think/you’ll be home soon/I guess I’ll drown, oh yes, in my own tears.” can’t help but make us wonder if this song is not in fact about the younger brother who's drowning Ray witnessed as a child. But what makes this song extraordinary is its major-key understatement. Yes, it’s clearly a sad song, but it sounds more nostalgic than tragic, and is not nearly as sad-sounding as such a sentiment would warrant, but it’s all the more moving for it.

Busted: I can’t lie, this is easily my all-time favorite Ray Charles song - another song which effortlessly glides the tragicomic line, and yet does so much more. Anyone would instantly relate to this song who’s ever been broke, or couldn’t live up to their responsibilities to those they love. It is an ultimate example of music endowing dignity to the lives of people who most desperately need it. There is something defiant about it, as though for all the indignities life has in store, we should, we must, we will nonetheless, keep marching forward, and celebrate in pure E-flat major brass glory. All it takes is two minutes, and within that tiny framework this song shows us a vision of life as it perhaps truly is; something full of heartache and humiliation, loss and misery, squalor and torpor, and yet still something exquisitely beautiful.

Seven Spanish Angels: There is a huge metaphorical resonance to this duet between Ray and Willie Nelson - perhaps the ultimate ambassador of White Southern Music. Is this song a romantic ballad about a violent Bonnie-and-Clydesque death of two lovers at the hands of evil men, or is the conjuration intentional which this song brings of a decision which hundreds if not thousands of widows who’d recently watched their husbands murdered by Klansmen had to make in the century before this duet was recorded? On the one hand, it is a glamorized view of death, romanticizing the idea of a glorious death in a way that’s slightly quease-inducing. On the other hand, the song is all too redolent of a decision which many women probably had to make after they watched their loved ones murdered in cold blood.

Georgia On My Mind: And finally we come to Georgia On My Mind, probably THE Ray Charles song in the mind of most people, and certainly the emotional heart of his output. There are two different sentiments that can be interpolated from this overexposed yet never too exposed simple song. The first is more obvious, the longing we all have for home and inner peace. Most people find that the further they grow from their origins, the more they long to go back. But there’s another sentiment made in this song that is far more challenging.  Like You Are My Sunshine, there is a definite and important statement being made in this song. Georgia, the heart of slavery, is a place not only just as valued by its black population as its white one as a homeland, but also a place cherished for its beauties and consolations by a people whose history in the state is a litany of misery. It is a message of both liberty and of equality. It is the message of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come (which was probably modeled on Georgia On My Mind much more than Blowin’ in the Wind as Sam Cooke claimed), of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, of dozens of American hymns and spirituals both black and white, and even the message of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. And that message is the ultimate message of music: that all humans have a right to cherish the same things, that dignity is universal, that he who oppresses his fellow man is oppressing his brother (and sister), and that no law which separates can prevent them from feeling love.

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