Time For Them To Own Their Failure

The Republican talking head CNN found right after Barack Obama finished speaking said that the nominee looked angry. While I’m grateful for the reminder that we fear angry black men in this country, I think the anger is what I most connected to. There is great confidence and boldness in the Obama campaign’s insistence that they can continue to use civil and true and uplifting rhetoric to win this election, and it remains to be seen if they’re right. Yet there is also a great need to call out the cowards and criminals in the Bush Administration, and to hold them accountable for their disgraceful failures. I would be ashamed of a lack of anger in our national discourse after this presidency, after the disrespect shown to our institutions and common decency by the architects of torture, belligerence, arrogance, and hubris.

I’m no strategist, but I think up until now Obama and his advisers have shown that they know what they’re doing, and I can only guess that they judged his tone well. In a country with presidential approval ratings below twenty percent, anger might get some traction. In a country with a tradition of world leadership and inspiration which has watched shameful acts committed in our name, anger is appropriate. In a country rightly proud of its openness, its innovative spirit, its diversity and the fostering of competition to challenge us, refine us, and drive us all forward, I think anger is the only reasonable response to an administration unwilling to admit wrongdoing, uncomfortable with any doubt even within its watchdog, the Justice Department, and unable to look outside its echo chambers for new ideas.

Obama confidently dismantled arguments against him. He made grand promises and drew inspiring parallels like any good politician, rallied the crowd and bravely mentioned hope and change despite all the ridicule that has earned him. He managed, however, to show new dimentions to his political skill tonight, attacking his opponent and defending himself deftly and fiercely, reframing the quips and sound bites that campaigns are made of and making them all seem small in comparison with his vision and his promise. What balls this man has, to mention guns and gays and abortion and immigration in a nationally televised speech, and what skill to get away with it, at least in my book, on three out of the four. The failure? Immigration: “I don’t know anyone who benefits when… an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.” I know at least three: the employer, the illegal worker, and the consumer facing lower prices. Then again, in this political climate I’m a radical to believe in free immigration and free trade, so I wasn’t surprised. For the record, the waffling on gay marriage is fine with me, because in our country’s current condition I believe the only good way forward is federalist diversity. I desperately want to see the coming change written into law by lawmakers, not imagined into being by justices, and I don’t want to live through another Roe v. Wade type culture war, half the country feeling forced into a social arrangement they are profoundly uncomfortable with. As a national leader in 2008, Obama (although I can’t imagine he truly believes the proposed half measures will suffice or endure) must pay lip service to the status quo of marriage being only between a man and a woman. A great example of why I never want to run for president, but not a deal killer for me.

His masterful performance tonight gives me great faith that this man can handle himself in the fight from now until November. I believe that the rebuttals, the challenges, and the slogans that were rolled out tonight can win the election. The job’s not done, not by a long shot. These messages will have to be repeated again and again through the debates and into the fall, but it seems the gameplan is in motion. Obama’s famously adept organization, the skill with which it contested the primaries, and the demographics of the undecideds are more hopeful signs. It is time for Republicans to own their failure on national security, on the rule of law, and on the competency of their governance.

To say I’m reluctant to believe analysis that says Obama may lose just because of his race is a huge understatement. I resist it with every fiber of my being. I look for any other possible reason, try to think outside my biases and my perspective. I do wonder, however, when I find myself crying and shaking at a speech given by a man whose party I detest and whose economic policies I strongly disagree with, and when one but not the other candidate in this election offers a chance to force the Republicans to “own their failure,” how I will feel if we do not elect Barack Obama in the fall. I hate to be one of those narrow minded observers who cannot believe their candidate isn’t beloved and or understand why anyone gives their candidate’s opponent the time of day. I see weaknesses in Obama and strengths in McCain. When it comes to taking that vote, though, when our choice is a guy who doesn’t know how to use email up or a man who talks about humility, the importance of having advisers who challenge him, and the possibility of again setting an example for the world, I have no idea how someone could pull the lever for McCain.

McCain’s victory in a country fed up with his party’s current pick for the White House truly rests on making “a big election about small things,” in Obama’s words. Among those small things: Obama’s experience. I’m completely sold on the Abraham Lincoln comparison, lofty as it may be. (Lincoln had the same credentials as Obama currently does when he ran: Illinois state senate and one term as a United States senator.) Experience running a business or a state or the army would matter when campaigning for an executive position, but experience as a legislator utterly fails to impress, although both Hillary Clinton and John McCain seem to think it should. Come to think of it, in Hillary’s case the unelected and unaccountable position of First Lady, which carries no actual responsibility, must have been a large part of her “experience,” which needless to say was less convincing than she’d hoped. The only executive leadership we can judge Obama on, his management of his primary campaign, has been to all appearances brilliant. McCain’s operation, you’ll remember, fell apart more than once: he gets a few points for tenacity, but nothing else.

Tonight, Obama was classy. He was grand and inspiring. He was confident and clear. He gave me hope that he may reshape not only the presidency but the Democratic Party. I know what speechmaking is, how carefuly constructed and how self serving. It still sends strong signals, however, what politicians chose to say, what arguments they bet their jobs on. It also matters greatly that a president be able to speak to Americans and to the world, to the Congress and to the United Nations, with poise and intelligence. It matters a lot. It’s one of the things I’m looking for in my candidate. If I have to watch John McCain smirk and bunch up his shoulders and flash those two thumbs up at me for four years I will not be a happy camper.

I’m far more comfortable cynically detached from the workings of everyone in politics: both national parties, the Congress, and the White House. I enjoy sitting in judgment of their pandering, their debt to special interests, their stasist prescriptions to misrepresented or manufactured issues, and their hypocrisy. Now, excited as I am about the possibility of seeing a fiercely intelligent and capable man in the executive branch, hopeful as I am about the chance to have our country represented around the world by an American of mixed race, I’m extremely nervous about the election. I’m worried, even scared. Andrew Sullivan suggests that we know hope. I’ll try.

Teratology

I had no idea there was a word for it before today, but there it was in front of me: the abnormal and the deformed, walls of skulls and eight-foot colons and the chair that the original “Siamese” twins had built for them. What I had heard, not inaccurately, billed as a “museum of medical oddities,” and had consequently driven a few hours to find, was the outwardly proper Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Home of a collection intended to educate medical students on potential traumas, diseases and weirdness back whenever it was put together (shows how closely I was paying attention to the fine print… I’m guessing the 1800s), the dense, small space houses a woman turned to soap, a man whose muscles turned to bone, plaster casts of eyeball tumors, creepy things in formaldehyde, drawings of conjoined twins through time, a giant’s skeleton, and a comparitively mild exhibit on the health of U.S. presidents. In case you were curious, the most unnerving human anatomical possibility is a fully developed eyeball tumor. No contest. Eyeball tumor. Wow.

On the ride home, discussion found it’s way to the fantastic 1932 horror movie “Freaks.” The movie casts circus freaks in starring roles, highlighting their sense of community and the strange and awesome ways they manage or adjust for their abnormality. The thing that stayed with me the most (ok, after “one of us… one of us…”) was the opening title card. In setting the stage, it describes how the diseases and deformities on display in the film are rapidly being cured or corrected by medicine, and therefore the contemporary generation of a lot of freaks (I think pinheads were mentioned specifically) will be the last. These are words from a film released in 1932, so I can only imagine how much further along medical science and technology is today.

It is a fascinating, curious “problem” that society is faced with when it has the knowledge and the means to make abnormal people more normal. There seems to be a lot of hand wringing going on about how medical intervention to change a condition stigmatizes it, suggests that all must aspire to a “normal” ideal, and removes the impetus for tolerance as well as the contact based engine of it. So what justifications do we believe in for limits on the individual’s right to inhabit a body he or she chooses? Consenting adults are allowed a good deal of freedom to modify their biological raw material for personal reasons – tattoos, piercings, hair coloring, and makeup are common, but increasingly profound elective cosmetic surgery is also widespread and gaining in popularity. What societal goals should trump the individual’s control over the shape of his or her own body?

The fantastic thing about this question is that prior to very recent human history it was next to meaningless, because available technology for body modification was either inoffensive, gradual, or nonexistent: humans could adjust diet, clothing and exercise, and make only minor, temporary, and superficial changes beyond that. We can see this in the lives of the “normal,” who were straightforwardly living what they were handed biologically, and in the lives of those men and women who were born at significant remove from the human body’s averages, who were for lack of other options doing the same. Conditions present at birth that led to loss of bodily functioning, pain, and severe social barriers, conditions that narrowed potential employment, impaired the ability to have and raise a family, caused limited mobility or early death, these were dealt with as gracefully as could be managed, because humans had no technologies to offer them control over their own bodies. So we all went our merry ways, inhabiting the bodies genetic and environmental chance handed to us, and in most instances, couldn’t even imagine biological choice possible.

Today, I think it’s clear, both those born under the category of “normal” and those born with recognized variation from that norm, including variations that cause significant impairment, have more avenues open to them than ever before. We learn more about the shockingly extensive degree of choice a wealthy American currently has over his or her biological systems ever day, on voyeuristic television programming that reports exactly what new, completely optional surgery is being performed on those with the money to pay for it. We also hear stories of birth abnormalities being operated on successfully, of diseased being treated or cured, of the survival and in some cases long, productive lives of those who only a few years ago would have been doomed by their lot in the genetic lottery to extremely limited lives, or would not have lived at all. I doubt these stories, the cosmetic and the medical, strike many as two dimensions of the same trend, but it seems to me that the exact same thing is happening in both cases. Whether or not our current medical edifice labels a surgery elective or curative, what we are seeing is humans beginning to flex their new found ability to make transformational personal biological choices.

As many commentators have documented, there is a hugely fuzzy line between correcting biological “mistakes” and offering up the same technology for use in optional improvements. Medicine has learned, for instance, how to significantly extend human height for many, causing people who once would have had no say in the matter to chose to live lives as taller humans (the men and women receiving this treatment to date have to my knowledge all been of below average height). Where should we draw the line between those who are so far out of the mainstream when it comes to height that growing taller is classified a medical procedure, correcting a diagnosable flaw, and those humans who just really wish they were taller? What is the optimal human height range, outside of which you are allowed to resort to growth hormone therapy, and within which you are not? I have little sympathy for such distinctions. It seems unjustifiable to divide human beings from on high into those with different rights when it comes to biological alteration. It seems unjustifiable, actually, to limit acceptable biological alterations to those changes that bring people closer to human averages.

What about the man of average height who wants to be of above average, who dreams of a career in the NBA? What government bureaucrat has the right to deny him, when he’s willing to pay for the procedure and accept the risks? What societal “good” do we preserve by limiting freedom in this area? It would seem to be the same sort of exaltation of human “norms” and averages that disability advocates decry when it comes to treatment of those with divergent bodies. The expansion of choice will no double cause many who today are abnormal to seek normality, and this will no double have repercussions when it comes to societal treatment of those who chose to retain their nontraditional biology. But this is the same choice we will all have: a body which generally conforms to norms and expectations, or a body wildly divergent from them. To deny this choice to those born abnormal seems criminal and discriminatory; to deny this choice to the enormous pool of the medically normal but personally unsatisfied just seems impossible, not to mention unwise and cruel.

It will flow naturally, then, from medicine tackling mental impairment that artificial mental enhancement will become commonplace. Surgery and pharmaceuticals pioneered on those with below average capabilities will, once tested, become available to anyone looking for above average capability. If we’ve learned anything, its that the human appetite for self betterment is insatiable. We won’t stop at curing all known diseases. We’ll begin to view previously “natural” capabilities as woefully unsatisfactory, and this may happen in the blink of an eye, just as contemporary laptop computers outperform the fastest supercomputer in existence twenty years ago. We’ll also discover all the things we’d enjoy doing if only our biology allowed us, and then begin realize them.

So what will the world begin to look like when humans start exercising greater choice in their biology, be it conforming to or confounding anatomical averages? This choice, offered up across the board (if you can pay for it, and accept the risks, sign here) would level the playing field in a truly wonderful and profound way when we consider the maddening unfairness of a pre-1932 world filled with carnival freaks and others who, not by choice but by chance, found themselves far outside of the mainstream of human social and productive life. It’s terribly impolite to say it, but despite how beautiful we find human diversity, the fact that it is imposed by genetic selection causes a lot of suffering and loss of opportunity: only the beautiful can be beautiful, only the strong can be strong, some of us cannot experience biking along a river or watching great cinema or hearing great music, ever, and that’s just tough. The extension of basic human abilities – sight, mobility, hearing, memory – to those who don’t now have access to them would in itself be a glorious achievement. Cochlear implants and modern prosthetic limbs suggest how completely and how soon technology will allow this.

Of course, in other ways, the playing field will be less level than ever before. Our species will experience intensified biological segregation and inequality, which although well entrenched already thanks to substantial differences in diet, health care, personal grooming budgets and the option for cosmetic surgery, is today a pale shadow of what it will become. Billions will continue to struggle for basic nutrients and bodily function while several million will pioneer advanced stages of biological reinvention.

The separation of human bodies into new forms will not simply mirror wealth, however, as people will have wildly divergent goals. For many, optimal health and physical beauty will be something traditional, easily recognized, and familiar, probably a slight enhancement and exaggeration of the typical human form. Many will continue to adjust their music collections, social networks, travel plans and hobbies more avidly and carefully than their bodies, and more boldly; I can’t imagine that true adventurous biology will be a mainstream pursuit, at least not any time soon. But what of our minorities? Already many of us choose physical appearances at odds, in varying degree, with expectations or notions of beauty. Niche athletes in the year 2008, as we witnessed at the Olympics, have freakish and fantastical bodies finely tuned to whatever sport they have chosen, bodies that come in all shapes and sizes but that are unified in their high level of directed, intentional alteration. Many communities create and embody alternative notions of the desirable and the possible, modifying their bodies with scars, piercings, ink, amputations, dye, implants; there’s even that one guy with the ear in his arm. Tomorrow giantism and dwarfism will be chosen, not an accident of birth; gills, sail fins, scales, and wings will be both beacons of irrepressible, brash individualism and centerpieces for close knit communities of transhumans. I look forward to photosynthesizing skin, myself.

Anorexia in runway models, bulimia in figure skaters, and steriod abuse in professional athletes and entertainers all point to the extremes that some of us will go to in inventing new ideals for ourselves. Don’t kid yourself. Many of our fellow humans, in the coming generation, will craft and inhabit bodies that to our standards are downright grotesque. Some men will seek to imitate their favorite superhero; I can’t imagine not one person will attempt a giant green “Hulk” body. There will likely be women who continue to reduce their width and extend their height, in a feedback loop with their peers, to comic (and likely tragic) extremes. The consequences of limitless body modification on gender expression and sexual function are truly awesome to contemplate; speculation on what forms that will take would require another book-length discussion.

There will be inventions, hybridization, ornamentation, innovations artistic and functional (flying will undoubtedly be a rewarding and exhillarating experience), and whole categories of designed, biological change that are impossible to forsee. From cottage industy to recognized university degree, cosmetic body design will grow rapidly and transform millions of lives. The abberations, the choices a few will make that most or all other humans will look upon with disapproval and disgust, should be allowed, and even celebrated. They will represent the triumph of the mind over the dictates of biology, and represent a huge expansion in human freedom. There have always been giants, bearded ladies, human torsos, living skeletons; there have always been abnormal bodies, some (if we’re honest) unbearably grotesque. The crucial difference is that in the past, the people who had to live in and with those bodies had no choice in the matter. When everyone can be as average as they want to be, those who chose abnormality will not only profit themselves from living out their dreams, but will reward the rest of their species with continued, and expanding, human diversity. Diversity will be as beautiful and desireable as it has always been, only this time around, it will be created through human choices and not genetic whims.

A few other notes from today. Downtown Philadelphia is terribly clean and quiet, and stunningly dull: enormous windowless walls, hospitals and banks, a few beautiful old buildings and all too many terrifically ugly new ones. Waffle House is… beyond. It’s worth a six hour drive thinly disguised as a field trip to a museum of medical oddities just to sit in that butter-yellow box and gorge on waffles, hash browns, and bacon. What a world.

Better Living Through Biology

Back in April, William Saletan reported that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has thrown its hat in the ring for the development of non-animal meat products, putting together sort of an X Prize for the world of vat grown tissue. The internal politics of this group are fascinating in their own right, and Saletan focuses on these, observing that, like the interested parties in the abortion debate, “Pragmatists thought they could broaden the movement’s appeal by changing its language and arguments. Purists worried that these changes would narrow the movement’s agenda. Both sides were right. This is an important lesson in politics: Message, constituency, and agenda are related. The broader your message, the broader your constituency, and the narrower your agenda. You have to choose your trade-offs.”

So true, and so rarely admitted by ideologues. I am happy to sit on the sidelines as P.E.T.A. fights among itself. My brief contact with ideological “movement” types left me with little doubt that I wanted nothing to do with such hot air. On the other hand, meat without animals! Think of the possibilities! I did, anyway. Some of them. What follows is something I wrote, ranting to a friend and probably making an ass of myself in the process, after I read about this back in April. This post is tagged as “wild speculation” for a reason, but despite the excitable tone, there’s gotta be something true here: the future will be wilder than any of us can imagine.

I’d be shocked if it took more energy to make meat outside of an animal than in it. If that’s currently the case we obviously need to hold off on this as a mass market technology until the opposite becomes true. It would happen eventually, though; without the huge waste that is the industrialized production of heads, livers, hooves, stomachs and skin, and the expenditure of calories over the lifetime of meat animals, and the waste produced by these animals, all of which is just disposed of, our meat will one day require a tiny fraction of the grain, the land, and the electricity that it does today.

The ability to tweak the end product in direct as opposed to indirect ways is one of the most attractive features of this method of food production. I know we get a superior end product from grass feeding and certain other cow-rearing methods than from certain other cow-rearing methods, but these are blunt and poorly understood tools in affecting the meat we consume. After study and trial and error, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be able to positively affect the lipid profile, protein content, and other variables. There’s a huge amount we don’t know about precisely how nutrition, or I should say food, in general, interacts with and achieves human health, but I find within myself a nearly boundless faith that in time all things will become known to us. (Whenever this belief starts to feel silly and embarrassing, I remind myself of our record thus far, review the past 100,000 years or so in my head. Never fails to make the impossible seem guaranteed.) When we do have goals – more holistic targets than vitamin content, perhaps, or even something completely unknown to us today – as long as we’re aiming for something measurable, we’ll be able to experiment towards mass production of meat that meets those goals.

Let’s set aside practical, human-survival-on-a-crowded-planet type thinking, because these benefits are easy to predict, and if survival for survival’s sake is the goal and pleasure and diversity of experience are of no import, meat eating of both the animal and the non-animal kind is worthless. Let’s set aside the most immediate, straightforward results that adopting extra-animal meat production wholesale would have on humans (the price of meat would drop, making it available to billions for the first time, and the price of high quality meat would drop to a greater degree, improving the health and increasing the happiness of meat eaters everywhere). And let’s set aside the sea change in the amount of captivity and suffering that sentient organisms on this planet would experience.

Humans behave in very predictable ways when set free on a new task: whenever there is the time, the wealth, and the technological ability, they will tinker and play and dream up things more wonderful than a field’s pioneers ever expected. With the advent of extra-animal meat, there will be adjustments in every conceivable facet of human life. There will be counter-measures, backlashes, nostalgia. I just learned that country music became popular just at the moment the United States ceased to be a majority rural nation – when nostalgia and longing for a lost, simpler time became a majority experience among a newly minted nation of urbanites. This has implications for the practice of animal husbandry: the lore, the honor, the pride and the cache accompanying the production of animal meat for human consumption may explode. There will also be disdain and dismissal akin to the use of rotary phones, curiosity akin to the use of eight-track tapes, and accusations of barbarism akin to… well, the use of capital punishment in all those other industrialized nations that have long since ended it.

When making meat in the kitchen becomes an entire culinary discipline, like making bread or making pastries, when chefs have control over not just sourcing their meat but shaping it, when home kits allow for huge variation in taste, nutrients, texture, color, and every other meaningful variable, when meat ceases to be something we eat because it exists in the world around us in predetermined form and becomes something we make exactly the way we want it to be, however we want it to be, how many trillions of gastronomical experiences and combinations will we realize, almost overnight? Who will get rich formulating and marketing the flavor of the week? How much better will cheap meat-based food taste!? How many hours of human ingenuity and industry will be spent blissfully, by the few with a taste for it, adjusting time, temperature, microbes, ingredients? What trade magazines will crop up? What writing careers will be made reporting on the variety, recent innovations, new combinations? What corporations will sponsor the annual world championship meat making competitions? How many new restaurants will appear, claiming to have founded a new kind of cooking, a new kind of eating? Who will cheapen and exploit this ability? What ad men and women (and machines) will come up with soulless jinges to hawk the latest no-calorie all-vitamin great-tasting answer to all our problems? What artisans will quietly cultivate and enjoy this, like potters? What daredevils with warp and radicalize and obsess over this, like base jumpers? What artists will declare this a new canvass, what performance artists will use it as a prop, what small town will brand itself with some story related to this? (Home of CocaBeef!)

What plant traits with get combined with this malleable tissue, yielding what unimaginable and wondrous and disgusting and divine and dangerous materials years and years from now? What teenagers will distinguish themselves from mainstream society by the kind of homemade meat they consume? What young professionals with declare certain strains of meat indicators of taste and sophistication and other meat-fashions crude and inelegant? What entrepreneur will cook up some impossibly tricky or rare combination of ingredients and sell it to the super-rich with an insane markup? How will local pride and xenophobia color these new kinds of foodstuffs? What will we associate, culturally, with the different ways of getting meat? Who among us will insist on animal rearing and slaughter in the production of their meat? Where? When? What stories will they tell themselves about this insistence on the old ways? What stories will they tell themselves about the people who eat the modern kind? What wonderful or rotten childhood associations will we bind to memories of the meat we made or consumed while growing up? How many currently unimaginable careers with this create: in research and development, the inevitable government oversight, production, management, marketing, engineering, design? How many long and well-loved careers with this destroy? How many towns, how many hundreds of thousands of meat-producing acres of the world’s surface will this reshape, both culturally and physically? What will we do with the land we currently use to raise corn to feed to cows? What will we do with the land we currently house slaughterhouses on? How soon can our children tour a carefully preserved slaughterhouse on a school trip to marvel at the barbarity of their ancestors? What will the children of those who work in slaughterhouses think of their parent’s profession? What mischievous curiosity will inspire the slaughter and cooking of a real animal, every once in a while, just to see how it tastes? What will that killing feel like, what will it mean? What will our relationship with animals be in the future? How many pigs, cows, and chickens will this planet sustain in the year 2100? One million? Four thousand? Will pigs become common household pets, bred and engineered for loyalty and intelligence? Will we morally judge the death involved in other animals’ nutrient acquisition, and begin to insist that those close to us (our pets, perhaps, or chimpanzees) have nothing to do with such behavior? How will we morally signify the distinction between tissue formerly incorporated into organisms with central nervous systems and tissue never associated with a central nervous system?

What do I not know enough to wonder about? What should I be asking?

In my opinion the logic of extra-animal meat is inescapable, will inevitably will come to dominate the market for human meat consumption and will transform gastronomy. If technology is not ready to provide this to the next generation of humans (which would surprise me a great deal), it nevertheless will find its way there, and our food system will someday be free of the astronomical material and energy waste and moral unpleasantness that goes hand in hand with the consumption of parts of formerly living animals. It is not a question of it but of how, when, where, and with what unforeseen consequences, remembering that unforeseen consequences can be both positive and negative. Our coming century will be shaped more by biologists (and once we’re sufficiently advanced, by environmental scientists, meteorologists, and all those who study the large, complex systems that have heretofore been closed to our understanding and influence) than by physicists or chemists or even traditional materials engineers; pretty much anything we could hope to do with inorganic machines I predict can be done better with organic machines. And I think the change in meat production, as revolutionary as it will be environmentally and culturally and economically and politically and morally, will the the very least of our adventures.

To infinity, and beyond!

Here ends my April email. To all this, I would add one further wild speculation, touched on when I wondered about our relationship with animals in the future. Freed of the need to artificially separate ourselves from the rest of sentient life in service of our continued ability to consume it in comfort, how will we frame the rights, the potential, the beauty and wonder of the other most intelligent of earth’s animals? I think that uplift, a theoretical scientific possibility inspired by science fiction, is closer than most would guess. Enlarging known membership of the culture club from one to two or three would be profoundly disruptive, exciting, dangerous, and awesome (truly awesome). Once an intelligent species crosses the boundary into culture, develops intelligence to the degree that it can transmit information from generation to generation through non-biological means (writing, artifacts, instruction), whole worlds open up, and no one can predict what insights non-human intelligence would offer the world of knowledge. Also unknown: how our seemingly boundless capacity for violence and desire to be masters of all we survey will play itself out on this stage. We currently enslave over 27 million human beings (both the largest number and the smallest percentage of slaves in human history, thanks to population growth). What will it look like, the ability to create sentient creatures with sub-human or specialized intelligence? What will the long-term effects on our self-concept and our culture be? What reverence, hatred, or inferiority complex will these species develop towards us? What political or economic relationship will our fellow intelligent species have with us, with each other? As the breathless narrator of the “Beneath The Planet Of The Apes” trailer puts it, “can a planet long endure, half human… and half ape?”

Surely these technological and ethical choices lie open before us regardless of our preference for extra-animal or animal meat. My glass-half-full hope is that by the time we’re actually interacting with uplifted chimps and dolphins, unrelated technologies will have rendered robotic assistance cheaper and easier than intelligent biological assistance, and unrelated social and economic developments will have forcefully and finally rendered the arrangements that permit enslavement in the world today a thing of the past. An end to animal consumption and a flowering of peaceful, cooperative, technologically enhanced human potential cannot help but advance our collective moral perfection to boot; the barbarism we see in previous generation’s social arrangements, values, slavery, and entertainment will be echoed in our descendants’ view of our food production, relative material deprivation, zoos, and costly warfare. We’ve already begun re-negotiating our relationship with apes, in appealing directions. Can you say retirement homes for chimpanzees? Here’s hoping I’m around to see great parts of this possibility come to fruition.

William Saletan is a wonderful guide to the increasingly complex questions about human biology we are facing: his columns on abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, bestiality, body modification, sex practices and norms, reproduction, and the politics, ethics, and technological innovations that color these topics are delightful and thought provoking. Read his blog here and mainline his contributions to Slate here.

Let’s Go! North Americans

I’m sure it sounds strange to say that we, as Americans, don’t have enough songs to celebrate our American-ness to, but what the hell, I’ll say it anyway. We don’t. I’ve found few songs that seem to capture that pride in being from somewhere for those of us who live here. I’d venture that the reason – not having thought this through well, mind you, making this up as I go – is twofold.

America is excitingly and gloriously heterogeneous, a mashup of any and everything else, a nation of plagiarists and immigrants – which makes it hard to pin down. A love for America, the place, is unwieldy. What, exactly, do you love in this continent-sized country? It is soft and hard, small and enormous, wise and idiotic. It is the mountains and the marshes, the town and the city, peopled by people without a common parent. I’d think the blues would come closest to the seed, the center, of a national popular identity, but even though jazz and soul and rock and all manner of cultural textures – the songs of American reactionaries and revolutionaries, of the mainstream and the counterculture, and most of the truly great American musical achievements of the twentieth century – formed in the womb of the blues and owe their lives to the blues, it’s still a far cry from a truly definitional, universal American cultural possession.

It’s too recent, for one – a lot of our national mythology is centered on a time that was untouched by the modern blues, that easily predates it. Second, for all it’s evolution and metamorphosis, and despite the fact that after whiter-than-white Brits decided it was brilliant and played it back to us the musical offspring of the blues achieved near ubiquity for a time, the blues is in its essence the creation of one American minority, not of America. America sometimes listens to music together, but it certainly doesn’t make music together.

Third, the blues is finite and fading. While all musics take cues from each other on foundational, subsonic levels – in the same way languages have all borrowed the idea of the alphabet, or been shaped by the printing press – hip hop, born of Jamaica and the south Bronx, cannot be truthfully categorized as one of the blues’ children, although of course there are delightful moments of inspiration and cross-pollination between the two. Pilfering a century of recorded music, as deeply rooted in our state of information overload as the delta blues was in wood and wire and the solitary human heart, our current approach to sound is worlds away from the blues masters’. As the sampler and other machines reshaped the American sonic palette and hip hop came to dominate popular music, the reign of the blues, it must be said, came to a close. (Specifically, rock has largely drained itself of the blues and started again, keeping little and filling itself with hip hop and electronica and anything else it found. Hendrix and Zeppelin were the blues writ large, of course, but only an academic with too much time on his or her hands could find the blues buried in Broken Social Scene or Battles.)

Fourth, the blues and its family of popular musics never, even at their height, touched all of America. Bluegrass and other mountain music, wistful parents of the extraordinarily successful, influential, and long-lived popular country music tradition in America, are surely related to the blues, but more distantly, and as contemporaries, not offspring. (Cousins, perhaps? How far can a metaphor bend until it breaks?) Our Latino population – huge and growing, in case you’d forgotten, comprising more of America each day – mostly listens to music that is not the blues, is not descended from the blues, isn’t even related to the blues. And there has always been concert music, marching band music. There has been polka. Americans dance to Celtic reels, croon lullabies, play taps. I love the color the blues gave American popular culture. But we are not the blues.

Has your mind now given up on the word “blues” and set it loose from its mooring? Are you watching it drift away with a bemused, puzzled expression on your face? Have I repeated it so much you now question the spelling, the reality of it? If not, reread the last few paragraphs a few more times. It’s a rewarding experience, I promise you.

So: the heterogeneity of America precludes the writing of a song about what it’s like to be from here. We write plenty of great songs about what its like to be from certain cities – all great American cities have at least two dozen anthems to their credit, I believe that is actually one of the prerequisites to being known as a “great American city” – and what it’s like to be in the Ozarks or sailing down the Mississippi or wandering the Great Plains. Some of our best songs are even more specific, especially in hip hop, which celebrates regionalism on steroids. For most rappers I listen to, I can name not only the city they’re from, but the neighborhood. But as for a song for America as a whole, not a chance.

America is not small, summarizable, even recognizably American from one end to the other. But the other reason there is a dearth of songs that successfully celebrate our American-ness to is related to what America is. The things that are (usually) common to Americans, the things that (in theory) unite us, the things that (for the most part) remain constant throughout our history, are very abstract. It’s not a kind of food, it’s not a way of dressing, and it’s not music, the blues and its noble attempt notwithstanding. It’s the United States Constitution. It’s ideas, attitudes, beliefs. Any song that tries to celebrate America is bound to get mired in platitudes, truisms, boring and bland generalizations. These songs are hobbled by bleary-eyed patriotism and the criminal overuse of words like freedom. The problem with big ideas, noble promises, and the like- from the standpoint of our rhetorical musician, on his merry quest to write a proudly American song, of course- is not only that they’re boring and bland, but that if they’re taken to their logical conclusion, they’re universal. Democracy! Liberty! Checks and balances! etcetera, etcetera. What room does that leave our poor, hypothetical balladeer for expressing joy at being part of this people, living in this place, here, now? Why bother with the word “America” at all? God bless us all.

I’m writing this because I was listening to a song on the car ride home tonight that for me is that song I want – that song about being from somewhere, that happens to be about being from where I’m from. It’s about being from America in a world where there are other options – when so often American songs seem to exist in a fantasy where a few miles offshore, a few steps into the Canadian woods or across the Mexican desert, the world drops away and one falls, if one is stubborn enough to keep walking straight, off of it. It’s about being American, when lots of people are not American, and partying with these people, talking to them, performing for them, and still being not them. Still being from here. From New York City.

It is not, either in sound or in lyrical content, a song that encompasses all American experience. It’s clearly specific to being a dance DJ based in NYC and touring Europe – and how many of us can really say, why yes, that is my life. That is so me. But it is not about living in New York City – hey aren’t these summers hot, we’re from Queens and you’re from the Bronx, let’s hang out at Coney Island, or any of the other variants on this theme – it’s about being from New York, out in the world. Greetings. We are North Americans. We are North American Scum. In a funny way, this song stumbles upon that one thing that is universally shared in this country, what does unite us: when traveling abroad, we are Americans. It is only through others’ eyes that we merge – like in one of those magic eye pictures – into a cohesive unity, and that the nationality American takes on meaning, whatever it is – usually revered, reviled, or approached with some curious combination of the two. A little strange and unsettling, that the meaning of American is largely determined outside of America (and often based on very limited information), but that is our lot in life.

That’s what you get when you are in content, complicated, and in temperament, a pushy egomaniac. Not for us the humility that lets small European countries pick a specific beverage, the production of some condiment or another, a favorite craft perhaps, and brand themselves with that, carefully assemble a matching set of food, music, dancing, writing. Hey, did you hear the saxophone was invented in Belgium? Not for us the defining catastrophe, or the narrow tribal identity, or the single eternal struggle. We suffer Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to our cultural pursuits and purposes. And our image is largely out of our hands. Try as she might, Mrs. Rice can’t make a neat package of all this – anyone who tries to brand America as one thing will find a thousand angry representatives of the other at their gate.

I’m seriously considering reopening that account I had with a server where I posted music files – I used to link to them on my old blog – in order to post, then link to, this song. It was one of my favorites last year, and I kept playing it for people hoping someone else would agree, but I played it in my car, so they looked at me funny. What I need to do is get a party going, get people buzzed, talking loudly, and then put it on. See if they think I’m crazy then!

It thrums. It buzzes. Then the drums crash, snap, plink, and generally elicit smiles that spread across your whole face, if, like me, you are someone who is tuned just so and loves this sort of thing. “North American Scum,” from the startlingly brilliant and occasionally quite moving Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem. These are the guys who made the cowbell cool again. Really cool. Later on, there are choppy guitar chords. Your dopey grin makes another appearance.

An aside:
Wait, “again”? When was the cowbell cool the first time? Or ever?
Moving on:

Our narrator is not in business of selling America, of praising it’s Constitution, of listing it’s virtues. It’s just that he happens to live here. “You see, I love this place that I’ve grown to know.” It’s as simple as that: this is my home, this is familiar, this is mine. He has gripes: the rent is too high, for one, the kids are uptight, and our parties apparently pale in comparison to those thrown in Europe. “We can’t have parties like in Spain where they go all night – shut down in North America – or like Berlin, where they go in nothing, like- alright!”

Nevertheless, he is proud to be North American Scum in our age of anti-Americanism. “Yeah, I know you wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole” he says, to everyone looking down their noses. And while he’s not one to turn others’ anti-Americanism into an excuse for xenophobia – it’s actually kind of sweet when he says “I hate the feeling when you’re looking at me that way, ’cause we’re North Americans” – he doesn’t renounce his citizenship. He revels in it. Talk-sung-chanted over this pounding, proud house track, lines like “We love North America” and “Take me back to the States, man,” and even the oft-repeated, charmingly direct declaration “We’re from North America” seem to capture something other songs never have for me, something I love. America is not the world. America is not perfect, not eternal, not right, not free or just or any other silly word. But it happens to be my home. I love this place that I’ve grown to know.

The ideas, ideals of America; the invention, innovation, and creation that takes place here; all the gooey abstract goodness; of course I have great affection for these things. I have great affection for Frank Capra movies and the voice of Ella Fitzgerald, the phrase “the great American novel,” the pursuit of happiness, checks and balances. But abstractions do not a nation make. To the extent that our abstractions are jingoistic and exceptionalist, they are blind and wrong. And to the extent that they’re universal, well, they’re better filed under “membership in human race” or “residence on planet Earth” than my allegiance to the specifics of this place – my neighbors, my weather, the local gyro shop staffed by young Latinos.

Of course, I’m a big believer in History with a capital “H” and the unity of human destiny, and I’m happy to live in that mode, don my Member Of Humanity nametag, in most of my intellectual pursuits. I celebrate our interconnected, globalized species, our great collective triumphs – a million people lifted out of extreme poverty in China by market forces, global hunger beaten down in the last three decades by bioengineering, the cell phone revolutionizing Africa, Christina Aguilera winning the Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance twice. But I’m also a proud North American. American-ness gets in its own way – our boastfulness, our self-importance, stands between us and what I think a lot of people have, a simple, basic love of their home, love for whatever nation they happened to be born into. We warp that love, try to build something impossible and foolhardy around it, bind it to big words like liberty. Who needs that? Why not let liberty be liberty, let human rights and market capitalism and constitutional liberalism and democratic pluralism stand on their own two feet, live and die by their merits in that great testing ground of abstractions, the grand stadium of History? We hold these abstractions back – why saddle them with our imperfections, our transgressions, tie them to us as if they would cease to have merit were we to falter? And beyond these Platonic dreams, why not open a space for us to say, hey, by the way, we’re from North America. We are North Americans. We love North America.

We are North American Scum.

As It Really Is

I recently began listening to a charming, rambling, grumpy and self-righteous podcast called The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe. Produced by the New England Skeptical Society, a hilariously inbred group of like minded grouches, it provides a forum for celebrating technological advances and scientific discoveries, ridiculing pseudoscience, myth, superstition and hoaxes, and congratulating the participants on their intellectual superiority to the majority of their fellow humans. I’ve learned about advancements in metamaterials with a negative index of refraction, heard the Bigfoot hoax made fun of, and listened to Adam Savage from Mythbusters interviewed. I recommend it.

The Skeptic’s Guide closes each week with a quote, and already I’ve come across two, and a passage from RadioLab, that I want to remember and pass on. Hokey as the cottage industry of quoting is, these words capture and reaffirm something I desperately want to pass on to my children, share with my fellow humans, find in my partner.

Robert Krulwich, giving the commencement address at CalTech, spoke about how professors at the school affirm certain values:

A deep respect for curiosity. For doubt, always doubt. For oped-mindedness. For going wherever the data leads no matter how uncomfortable. For honesty. For discipline. And most of all, the belief that anybody no matter where they’re from, no matter what their language, no matter what their religion, no matter what their politics, no matter what their age or their temperament… if you can learn how to sit down in a laboratory and think in an orderly way, and if you have the patience to stare, and stare, and stare, and stare, looking for a pattern in nature, you’re welcome here.

Something about this just thrills me. This is a pursuit which I truly believe is and can be increasingly universal, a pursuit awesome in its reach and power, able to build on its successes for ever and ever, where ideas survive or are overturned on their truth, their own intrinsic testable merit, only. However biased, fearful, and shortsighted its practitioners, science is objective, fearless, and wise. The truth is out there. Robert’s entire speech, beautifully framed by a choice between Newton’s intentional obfuscation and Galileo’s world-shaking clarity, can be heard here.

The 14th Dali Llama reminds us that “to defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.”

Finally, the revered Carl Sagan is quoted, adoringly enshrined at the top of the Skeptic’s home page, as delivering this gem: “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” A toast: to the Universe as it really is. Amen.

Mindful Self Indulgence

Virginia Postrel wrote a wonderful little piece in The Atlantic a while back which clears up something I’d never been able to articulate. If rich people spend their money on things they don’t need to signal their wealth to others, why is so much of the luxury market focused on intimate things like spas, bathrooms, kitchen counters, vacations, and meals consumed in the privacy of one’s own home?

The caricature of the first wealthy Americans, those who gathered their assets as industrialization, modern transportation, and urbanization turned us into an economic powerhouse in the 1880s, has them both stupidly flashy (at the expense of real comforts and useful amenities) and grossly overweight. For these memes we have the writings of Thorstein Veblen and the cartoons of Thomas Nast to thank, as well as the relationship of these simplifications to reality; I’d love to find some real numbers on the subjects, but I have no doubt that members of our first leisure class did weigh more than their parents and did spend a sizable portion of their assets on visible, status enhancing symbols of wealth. The Victorians had the sitting room, a space expensively and impressively decorated to receive visitors, which contrasted with the lack of expense devoted to the interior rooms the family would privately live. In a world where everyone would pretty much fit our description of poverty, those who could afford to spent a good portion of their energies proving to others that they deserved a different status. The contrast of a thin, malnourished working class with a lazy, obese ruling class is also repeated over and over in culture for a reason. Those for whom wealth was no longer a limiting factor on caloric intake overindulged, sometimes in epic ways, not having any models of moderation or culture of sustainable indulgence. Taft, famously our fattest president, actually exemplifies the attempts to learn how to become and remain healthy in a world of temptation. He dieted several times over the course of his life, careening from 243 to 320 pounds, then back down, then back up, then back down.

Since then, the wealthiest Americans, while retaining their love of luxury, glamor, and comfort, have radically shifted their consumption habits. Privacy seems to trump visibility, even in such incredible purchases as islands and multi-million dollar estates tucked away from the world. In a world where the majority of adults can afford a car, many millionaires make themselves inconspicuous on our roadways, choosing luxury sedans indistinguishable from or identical to middle class transportation, unlike their predecessors who set themselves far apart with their carriages. The hidden heart of the luxurious home, the designer kitchen and the custom bathroom, became the destination of more expense than any other rooms. The waistlines of the rich slimmed, and we arrived at the current reality: being overweight is a concern of the poor and lower middle class, and those who live well connected to good food, gyms, a variety of experience and diverse opportunities for outdoor and otherwise physical pursuits, the rich, are fitter overall than the average American.

Simultaneously, we have reinvigorated the conspicuous consumption meme with the coinage of “bling,” a near-ubiquitous shorthand for purchases whose sole purpose is to be seen and to display the wealth of the buyer. Interestingly, those doing this buying, and this displaying, are not the most wealthy, but the recently wealthy, and their imitators in middle America. Our new caricature, of the rapper quickly elevated into the luxury class by an album contract, is strikingly similar to that of our robber barons: obviously expensive cars, jewelery whose lack of beauty just serves to heighten the focus on its cost, and flashy domiciles proudly presented on television.

Postrel reviews the latest research into consumption patterns and unearths a seemingly obvious truth: “The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy – and vice-versa.” Conspicuous consumption is not the degenerate desination of capitalist wealth accumulation, but a stepping stone, a phase, through which cultural groups pass as they seek to solidify in the public mind their distance from their former peers. In this stage, wealth is famously mismanaged, as in the case of MC Hammer or nine out of ten lottery winners. It is spent primarily on things that lose value (cars) as opposed to things that gain in value (investments). Overindulgence, whether of the quaint caloric variety or the more damaging phychotropic kind, is widespread.

This seems to be good news for two reasons. One: conspicuous consumption, in its most damaging, value-destroying form, is largely temporary. It seems to last a generation. The children of the newly rich are the always rich, for whom strategies for managing great wealth and great opportunity are de rigueur. Their worries are not so much how to prove to other that they have wealth, but how to enjoy it and live with it; their peers are not poor. Spending shifts “from goods to services and experiences.” Two: in the 1880s we were really poor! This is fantastic. Those robber barons, those masters of the universe, were recent arrivals to the world of wealth, whose lives starkly contrasted with those of their parents and peers, and must have wasted so much correcting for this. Most middle class Americans have, least in large part, already moved beyond that “bling” culture. We now value economy and luxury in an interesting mix. We’re healthier, too, and it looks like the future will only offer more of the same.

Maybe we will all be so fit someday as to make one piece jumpers a sensible military uniform. Then again, maybe that’s just too much to hope for.

Darkness Revisited

After watching a it a second time, hearing it discussed, and listening to reviews, my feelings on The Dark Knight have mellowed; I’m now both less shocked and less impressed. On the “less impressed” front, issues of pacing came to the foreground on repeat viewing, questions about the wisdom of cramming Two-Face into the fourth act arose (also: is it wise for any film to even have a “fourth act”?), and overall my willing suspension of critical thought is over. I now see choppy storytelling, for example, even in such superficially awesome sequences as the lead-up to Gotham General’s destruction, and the problems with the chaotic final sequence are even more apparent. The admirable attempts to include the behavior of the public in the struggle depicted, and examine the our own temptations to turn on each other in the face of an existential threat, culminate in the ferry sequence, a clumsy and obvious device (who on earth proposed employing a gigantic cartoon of a convict to teach everyone a lesson about humanity?) that falls completely flat.

I’ve also drifted away from the feeling I had that the film was overly dark and needlessly violent. Critical analysis, distance, and some sleep has dispelled the claustrophobic, all too real fear that I had walking out. Telling a tense, grim story makes sense when your building blocks are a sociopath vigilante and a nihilistic terrorist. Specifically evoking the feeling that our lives and institutions are truly threatened by a force that will not listen to reason is fair game while Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Alfred’s overwrought speech about some men wanting to “watch the world burn” finds resonance in the existence of a man who gave up wealth and comfort to live in a cave and lob explosives at the world’s mightiest government. The Dark Knight skillfully parallels our story these past few years. Batman and Gotham city leaders initially discount the importance of the Joker, busying themselves instead with the mob, as our government laughed off Al Qaeda in favor of facing down the better understood Communists. Long after being alerted to the threat, our heroes find themselves unable to prevent death after death, just as we’ve had to watch as Bali, Spain, England, and thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan fall prey to our infuriatingly resilient enemy. (No new attacks, my ass. As far as I can tell, Islamism has been a lot more active and a lot more successful in the seven years since September 11th than in the seven years prior to it.) Even capturing the Joker and torturing him doesn’t offer any relief from the attacks or provide any measure of control, as killing Al Qaeda “number twos” left and right and torturing those leaders we’ve taken alive has failed to provide any relief or resolution. Our heroes feel embarassed, impotent, angry, at a loss. Prepared for foes who play by the rules (as the mob are so proud of doing), we lose our cool and step onto the dark side when confronted with the Joker and his lack of regard for rules in general. I respect that story being told. It’s worth telling.

My mom is always telling me to watch for the themes of a movie to be revealed in the first ten minutes. It’s no accident that our opening scene pits not heroes against villains but the Joker against mobsters, one of whom actually makes a speech about the ordered and dignified nature of organized crime’s criminality. The Joker responds, you’ll remember, by putting a bomb in his mouth. It’s also no accident that Bruce Wayne, recovering after a routine night of crime fighting, trades quips about the limits of the superhero with Alfred. We’re watching Batman’s limits tested by terrorism, and his devolution into a scared, prideful, frustrated thug, just as we have, cringing, been watching American honor and lawfulness torn up and cast aside in our panicked response to September 11th.

Finallly, we come to this silly sonar surveillance machine. The movie’s shortcomings make this episode feel tacked on and tacky, but as it’s intended it sits right at the heart of the story. Batman prides himself on being “the world’s greatest detective,” and for two hours we’ve watched as his detective skills – interrogation, forensics, deductive reasoning, traditional surveillance – have utterly failed to stop the deaths piling up on his conscience. Bitter and embarrassed, just like our national security community in 2001, he turns to warrantless wiretapping writ large (and we’ve twice already seen him resort to torture).

Making a summer blockbuster out of the pathetic and disgraceful response of the American government to the 2001 attacks is an odd choice, but a worthy one, and I think it is pulled off quite well, for all my criticisms of this movie’s execution. It’s dangerous casting a beloved superhero in the role of Cheney and Gonzalez, but isn’t that precisely the point? Unspeakable acts have been carried out by those we entrusted to defend us and to defend our ideals, our laws, our values, just as we trust in the unshakable justice of superheroes. The limits and flaws of the humans at the heart of our national security bureaucracy mirror the limits and flaws of the human at the center of the Batman myth. When our hero starts brutalizing the Joker in the holding cell, Gordon tries to assure the audience, and himself, that Batman is in control. He is not. That, more than the Joker’s bombs, is what is scary here. It should go without saying that Batman, and Harvey Dent, and President Bush, and the United States Army and Justice Department, are more powerful by several orders of magnitude than the Joker, and Osama, and any conceivable exterior threat (although for dramatic purposes, the Joker is painted as more of an effective, nightmarish supervillain than Al Qaeda ever has been). The real danger here is not from the terrorists but from the terrified and cowardly response of our leaders, who actually do wield power capable of royally fucking shit up.

The film deviates in the last five minutes from our real world script, because, let’s face it, the real world has not yet provided a resolution fitting for a summer superhero epic. The downfall of Harvey Dent, kept by a wise protector from the citizens of Gotham so they won’t lose heart, is very public (and very disheartening) knowledge in our version of events. If there is anyone sacrificing their reputation, as Batman chooses to do, within the Bush administration, it is in service not of the public good but of some higher up, and even more disgraceful, public servant. Still, at the close of this film Batman is chastised, shamed, and frantically trying to salvage some shred of his good intentions instead of actually fighting evil or furthering good. Running and hiding is about where we find the legal team in Washington, worrying over their accountability for war crimes and retroactively making legal all the disgusting things they’ve been up to. It’s a grim story, capably told, and ultimately a wise decision to use well-worn American myths to dramatize our current moral crisis. I’d chose this frightening tragedy over pure escapism any day.

Batman stories have usually found ways to have some fun watching the struggle between criminality and righteous vigilantism, and should continue to. Batman Begins featured a ridiculous, exhilarating Batmobile chase across rooftops and along a highway, and Bruce Wayne stands in for the audience when he shrugs off criticism of these theatrics and calls them “damn good television.” The Dark Knight’s visual centerpiece is a tractor trailer being flipped upside down, which is thrilling to watch, but never quite achieves “fun” because of that sense that for all his gadgets and cool, Batman is still not in control, and the Joker just won’t be stopped by a mere car crash. The bleakness of The Dark Knight is appropriate only once in Batman storytelling, and a sequel will have to back off the moral realism a little in order to keep Batman a character worth watching stories about. There are so many readily available ways to do this. A Batcave would be welcome. The revision of the now destroyed Batmobile should be fun, and its design should express Bruce Wayne’s competence and confidence instead of a war zone mentality.

Something that struck me as I turned over the parallels between the character of the Joker and modern terrorists was his use of video threats. We’ve seen so many videos since 2001, of threats, declarations, hostages and beheadings, that those that Heath Ledger’s Joker employs seem almost obscene, and are without question the most terrifying moments in the film. This is not an invention by Christopher Nolan, however. I’m not an expert on the history of Batman’s villains, but I know of at least two instances – Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and Burton’s “Batman” – at least twenty years old that feature the Joker’s use of video technology to terrorize. I’d be interested to learn when the character was first depicted doing this, and how closely that paralleled real world terrorists using videotaped threats. Terrorists of the seventies certainly used this tactic – how quickly was it echoed in the comics? Or, unlikely as this seems, did the Joker’s behavior actually predate that of actual terrorists?

Don’t Call It A Comeback

There’s a lovely tension between grandiose dreams and reality, the fearless imagination and its fruits on one side and the rich pleasures of patience, hard work, compromise, acceptance, gratitude and humility. Our creative impulses, and our wildest successes, seem to feed on unfettered ego, reckless risk taking, and a belief in the possibility of improbably things. Our actual productive work, on the other hand, seems to spring from an acceptance of things as they are and the discipline to work within those boundaries. Most of our media, skewered as it is towards the glamorous, the rapid, the dramatic, and the visual, celebrates the grandiose dreams over reality. We are shown over and over again fables of personal transformation and reinvention, but rarely see the process of incremental change described, and when we do, more often than not it is through a montage, a dishonest and absurd cinematic device designed to reconfigure real effort to fit the dimensions of fantasy.

From the Great Gatsby to Batman, radical transformation is equated with deception and loneliness, yet glamorized and admired. These myths, and warnings, hang over all the plans I make to break with the past and set out in new directions. On the first of the month I will attempt to combine a move to a new apartment with a new haircut, new relationship status, new job, new career goal, and new educational status (and new frequency of blog posting), hoping that it all adds up and jump starts a new chapter in my life. I don’t want to scold myself for dreaming, for hoping, for styling myself after the great stories I’ve heard. After all, resisting the appeal of our myth of starting over could well lead to the opposite outcome, that of an awful stasis and complacency. I do need to put in some effort to remain grounded in real work, though. My synapses have been trained by the computers and movie screens and fast food joints in my life to expect instant gratification, and seek it. It’s a rather banal observation, I know, but this illusory high just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when it comes to personal transformation.

I’m afraid of stepping into the future, into uncertainty. I’m afraid of setting myself up for real failures by going after things I really want. I’m afraid of collecting things – education credentials, work experience, wealth, social networks – for fear of losing them, letting them down, not doing them justice. This has made me think about the non-attachment preached by many philosophies, the claim that it is desirable to avoid attachment to material things and worldly outcomes because you then remain free of them, free of their power over you. You certainly avoid the fear of loss that comes with attachment. Part of me is quick to chose attachment and fear over freedom any day. It seems noble to invest in the world and suffer the consequences of being intertwined with it, i.e. not being in complete control of your destiny, not being insulated from the heartbreaks and disappointments of the world.

I’m still wondering, though. There’s something about a fearless resignation to your own powerlessness over final results that enables, rather than preempts, engagement with the world. I know in my own experience that fear has been more of a barrier to work and progress than a result of it. I want to accumulate attachments, I want to found relationships that I’m scared of losing, break ground I’d be mortified to retreat from. I want to courageously throw in my lot with others, like the economy that becomes interdependent with others through trade. I want to see attachment as a good thing, like the fear of mutual harm that drives countries into ever closer cooperation, and the collection of wealth as positive, like the expanded opportunities for choice and joy in a rich civilization compared with a poor one. This makes sense to me. Yet there is also this indirect, unclear disagreement within me.

I can’t predict how this will play out as I (if I) establish a more settled, wealthier life for myself. I imagine there will always be a balancing act between investing in and engaging with the world, and remaining unafraid of the potentially painful consequences of that interaction. Maybe there is some hidden synthesis between the two that I have yet to access. What is clear, today, is that attachment to hypothetical, future assets is nothing at all but a drag and a heavy cost, and my a priori fear of attaining these things in the first place can safely be jettisoned without endangering any engagement with the world. In fact, fearless non-attachment seems a necessary precondition to it.

A Brand New Colony

There’s something about labeling something, naming it, that’s silly and glorious and deeply human. I’ll never forget the passages in the Mars trilogy about naming, its insight into how putting a name to something advances the understood and understandable, tames the formerly meaningless, and marks the universe with the human mind’s presence. It is incredible to contemplate the unnamed: the planets before we called them that, the stars without our admiring eyes taking them in, the law of gravity with no such formulation. It is wondrous to observe our voracious appetite for taxonomy: the millions upon millions of named concepts, species, craters on Mercury, comets.

We love to label and name ourselves and our world, aiming to adjust perceptions (including our own) through language. So it is that music – in reality, invisible, weightless, ephemeral – is treated to so many words that seek to describe its look, feel, and significance, the sources of it and the audience for it. Music is categorized, each category assigned emotional and social and cultural meaning, and then we wade through our words, calling some to our side and disassociating from others. Words are forgotten, words are invented, and like our relationship to the planets and the axioms of physics, our understanding of the world of music is shaped by our use and disuse and misuse of these words.

I know I got so much pleasure, a year ago, out of listing all the names for music I had recently learned, proudly displaying not so much my familiarity with the sounds or scenes these words supposedly identify but my knowledge of the words themselves. You may not know, I smirked, but this word now refers to a certain kind of noise made in a certain place, at least when you’re talking to certain people. How exotic, how colorful these words I owned! Hyphy, Baile Funk, Grime. (Highlife, dubstep, garage, snap, favela, bhangra, plena, kwaito, hiplife, bomba, afrobeat, go-go.) This year there’s been the pleasure of “Bloghouse,” one of those deliciously useless words that carries in its DNA the stipulation that once any significant number of people know what it means it is to be decreed hopelessly obsolete, and the use of it will henceforth connotate nothing but your own pitiful inability to stay on top of the world of the hip and with it.

Here’s a new one. Chiptune is music made with the sounds and on the hardware of early video games. Besides being a neat addition to my collection of names for music, what I like about this (and the reason I’m writing about it) is the peek I got through a sample of this documentary into the way musicians and fans use this label, identify as a community. I thought I’d share the feeling of awe that I have at any genesis, biological or technological or sociological; I feel such wonder at how exactly humans form these communities, develop these signals, pool the resources and spread the word to create and distribute and consume something new, something niche, something wonderful.

This group of people, named, is now a scene, something you can chose to belong to or not, something you are either aware or unaware of, something you can admire, or make fun of, or ignore. I’d love to find out – maybe watching the film in its entirety would give me some idea – precisely when and where the word “Chiptune” was coined, but it’s pretty clear that it has created a group of people out of individuals, implying connections between people and sounds and events and also erecting barriers between others. As always, for it to mean something for something to be Chiptune, a lot must be “not Chiptune.”

The size of the scene, its wealth of proprietary knowledge and private signals, and its obvious disinterest in mainstream interest remind me of the hardcore music scene, which has a fantastically dense and terrifically silly internal taxonomy. To the best of my limited knowledge, hardcore ties or possibly surpasses electronic music in this regard: I’m told there exist such distinct things as grindcore, thrashcore, powerviolence, noisegrind, goregrind, deathgrind, metalcore, thrash metal, youth crew, skacore, and screamo. Add to this list hardcore’s fierce geographic identification and all the labeling and signaling that entails, and it begins to look like a music can compensate for having a tiny audience by exuberant naming.

Some of these “sub-genres” must be for all practical purposes linguistic nonsense, trying to differentiate what is really nothing especially different, but then the key is how much you care about minute deviations and how much you identify with the labels. Popular music rarely insists on careful categorization, partly because it embraces cross pollination, partly because it aims for universality rather than insularity, but also because it is rarely a proxy for a lifestyle or a tightly knit community. If the parade of hardcore labels seems laughable to you, consider the Wikipedia article on Tragic City Hardcore of Birmingham, Alabama. We learn, from Tragic City patrons no doubt, that “…the main staple of the Tragic City scene is an attitude… and the community is stressed over all.” Witness the glorious martyrdom of a group of clubgoers “mostly cut off from the national scene” and “overlooked” by the powers that be! This is more than music taxonomy. This is chosen, carefully designed, and fiercely defended social identity. I listen to grindcore; you listen to screamo. Let’s call the whole thing off.

We could invite ourselves to judge communities so eager to define themselves into minority status, or people aching to join only the most exclusive, exclusionary club of music fans, or the whole idea of conflating social choices with the enjoyment of particular sounds. We could just marvel at the industry and inventiveness of niche consumers and their earnest pursuit of art for which there is little widespread interest.

I of course value my own distance from such lifestyle brands as hardcore. I enjoy sampling a little bit of everything and imagining that I determine for myself what each facet of my life holds – that my clothing, friendships, work and music are chosen not according to formula but internal desire. While I collect names that describe the diverse music I enjoy, and hunger for more, I avoid labeling myself a fan of one thing or the other, hoping to escape all the prejudices and assumptions that come lumped with these names. But my aimed at cosmopolitanism is itself a powerful brand, no less the product of labels and dreams than any other, and the egotism of genre-blending pop music is merely another flavor of narcissism, not a different animal.

Whatever its merits as music or a social network or a sense of identity, the path a niche music like Chiptune takes is a joy to behold; the power of a name to create something out of nothing is breathtaking. A scene like Chiptune can, through the magic of cheapening communication and transportation technologies, gather fans with the exclusionary temperament of grindcore devotees in a global network. Naming will become an increasingly large part of the process of creation as geography decreases in importance and we need other ways to make sense of our cultural landscape. We must vigilantly watch our language, as Orwell warned, both to understand what is being said and implied and because the willful manipulation of names and signals can be monstrous (see: enhanced interrogation).

And we can all be grateful that the focused energies of small groups can incubate powerful works of art, the brilliance of which can both feed the egos in the tribe and flavor the popular art enjoyed by the rest of us. Chiptune is much older than my awareness of it, and I’m realizing that it must have informed the 2003 album Give Up by The Postal Service, an album that went gold, selling over 600,000 copies, filled with low bit chirps and tones. “Brand New Colony,” a cherished track in which the game boy blips really shine, comforted me with the insistent, repeated lyric “everything will change” when I felt like my heart had been ripped out, senior year of high school. The relevant passage today is this one:

We’ll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene/Start a brand new colony/Where everything will change/We’ll give ourselves new names…

I’d Rather Live It

Thoughts on returning to Rockland after Ace Rizzle, Ace Rickety-Rock, rocked McCarren:

One. Contra sets always end with waltzes. I want to end my DJ set with a waltz. Why not? I want to remix “The Lover’s Waltz,” concoct a hip hop beat in three/four, put some Aphex Twin twitches behind the second and third beats. That way, after the fantastic, orgasmic, earth shaking climax (meaning, I’ll probably get lazy and throw on Daft Punk), everyone will partner up and wind down.

Two. Contra vs. Daft Punk. Social dancing, complete with instructions, vs. that glorious and awkward individual performance dancing. When you hear Daft Punk, everyone stop where you are and rock out, alone. When you hear the Clayfoot Strutters, do-si-do with your partner back into a twirl, re-form those lines, and await further instructions. Throw that shit together – eight bars French house, eight bars American line dancing. Then mix it up, get Girl Talk on the crowd’s collective ass, and just laugh when they don’t know what to do. Make sure everyone has a good time.

Three. Uh, recorded contra is hella disappointing. At least, preliminary investigations (lasting all of a minute and a half) were hella disappointing. But maybe we use this to our advantage. We get real live contra musicians, and real live hip hop musicians (call up the drum and bass guys from Tribe Called Quest – what are they doing these days?), a real live caller, a real live M.C., and put a DJ in charge of the whole evening. Hipsters look like fools learning to contra but admit they love it, forget trying to impress people and actually enjoy themselves. Old folks get down with they bad self when the Big Pimpin’ beat shows up underneath some lovely Appalachian harmonies, grind all night with someone they barely know, get drunk and pair up. The world is forced to recognize me for the genius I am. I impress the coolest people on the planet. Diplo DJs my wedding, The Go! Team plays at my son’s sixth birthday party, The Talking Heads re-unite just to play “This Must Be The Place” at my 25th anniversary party, and I die a happy, happy man.

Four. I wish I had a party to promote, just so when I’m at these things, these sprawling festival type things where ten, maybe fifteen people in the crowd have the balls and the moves to actually dance when no one else does, and they’re scattered throughout the place, and they start and stop and never quite sync up, I could approach these people – just them, not the friends that stand around smiling at them or the significant others that mooch off their awesomeness, just them – and invite them. I wish I had a club, a scene, an empire, so that I could have an agent at each musical event in the tristate area every night, and they would approach just those three, or those five, or that one individual who knows how to have an uninhibited good time, and say, hey, you, I don’t like your boyfriend. Your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance well, they’re no friends of mine. We have a party for you. Come meet David, great guy, if you marry him you get Diplo at your wedding so, I mean, come on. Suriously.

Five. “America’s Most Blunted” is going on that mix of music to get high to. Why didn’t I think of that before.

Six. A dream is something you want to do but still haven’t pursued. You can dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I’d rather live it, ’cause dreamers always chase but never get it. Work it harder, make it better, our work is never over. I will get trained as a yoga teacher and gather all the tools and knowledge I can about production and DJing. I will ask strangers to dance salsa and I will get good. Contra vs. Daft Punk. The future, now. A Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. A Joyful Noise. I will tell our story, our asymptotically approaching God, and someone, one person, will get it, will get me, and we will be excited together, about our children daydreaming on the shores of Mars, our grandchildren making love in the outer solar system, our great-grandchildren and their love, their gratitude, their forgiveness. I will dance with this person. Our love will create new life.

Seven. Here I am, dreaming again. I’m much more practiced in that department. We’ll work on that. I’d rather live it. I should put that on my wall.

Eight. I can’t believe it has been a full two years – two years! – since I wrote this. So. Every song is a comeback. Every moment’s a little bit later. The great thing? The glass half full thing? I fucking wrote that. I fucking wrote that. That was me, baby.

Nine. Still is.