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...or so say those lovable, rapidly aging Gen-X'ers at Married To The Sea. Go visit them. The kids can still knock one out of the park a few times a month.

Friday Night Fish Fry (!)

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Been awhile. Happy birthday, Frank! (21 December 1940).



This is the wider world's introduction to FZ and the Mothers of Invention. First tune---grand slam in every way, from attitude to lyrics to arrangement to teen beat. I wonder whether the US counterculture would have been different had Zappa's management and the Verve label had invested several-thousand bucks in strategic payola and disc jockey blowjobs to get this track on the AM radio in fall 1966 (and backed by "Trouble Every Day"). There's a lot on this album that sounds not unlike the Stones. But... fat chance. Have you ever heard lyrics like this on any commercial or NPR radio station?

You know the routine---jam in the earbuds and crank it up to where snot starts running down your upper lip. My first version of this tune and the album it's on was vinyl:

Hungry Freaks, Daddy, The Mothers of Invention (1966, from "Freak Out," Verve V6-5005-2X), embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

"As the nation searches for answers..."

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The title of this post quotes a rhetorical formulation that I'd already heard too many times long before the nation once again began last week to "search for answers" to the problem of "evil." The media love this formulation because it suggests that mass murders committed with military-style firearms are mysteries (like superstorms!!!) that not even reporters and celebrity pundits can shed light upon. It's convenient---helps editors avoid the assaults that right-wing thought leaders launch against facts, logic, and human decency.

Just because "Wayne LaPierre" goes on TV and presents his vile, deranged point of view, like he did this morning, it does not follow that such opinions "complicate" the task of legislating sane and reasonable arms-control policies. In fact, the NRA company line helps to clarify the matter. The fetishism his organization promotes for the benefit of the gun-peddling syndicate it serves verifies everybody's hunch (including LaPierre's) that some form of mental illness is at the root of gun violence. Josh Marshall assessed the contents of a recent SEC filing by a gun-manufacturing consortium like this:

You’ve got fairly candid discussions of male insecurity as a decent on-going growth opportunity, women as a new source of gun purchases and a general migration from hunting and target shooting toward gun ownership as a way of simply feeling more awesome.

In order that the public doesn't get suckered into turning an impulse to formulate civilized gun-control policy into an amateur witch hunt for the "mentally ill," I'd suggest trying to focus the mental-health piece of the discussion on gun-related mental illness.

In that connection---and considering that a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is being prepared---I think it should be a high priority for the mental health community of practice to identify and quantify the particular variety of paranoia that might be called something like "firearms obsession disorder." Yellow flags that indicate the probable need for counseling might include a subject's frequent verbal conflation of "gun rights" and "freedom," or "gun ownership" and "masculinity." Red flags that indicate the urgent need for immediate psychiatric supervision and possible involuntary confinement might include a subject's hoarding of firearms that have no inherent historic, aesthetic, or collectible value (and especially the hoarding of ammunition for such guns), or the repeated public expression that the solution to gun violence is yet more gun violence:

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

...

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Individuals with Firearms Obsession Disorder believe that "the only way to fight fire is with fire." Most of us regular people think that it is more rational to fight fire with water.

Saturday night

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No fish fry tonight; an elegy.



Christo Redemptor, Charlie Musselwhite (1967, from "Stand Back: Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite's South Side Band," Vanguard Records VSD-79232), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Monsters

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Wanton marquee-grade killing, whether the media label it as "terrorism" or "tragedy," understandably raises the eternal question of where "evil" comes from, and why. Opinions are diverse, understandably, because this is arguably the central mystery of existence to anyone who believes that life has a moral or spiritual dimension (in other words, that the universe is more than a bin of particles that follows "laws of science" to move from chaos toward order). My opinions on that aren't important; they're as unimportant as, say, Mike Huckabee's.

But around these events, the question of what to do about them always struggles to be considered. Predictably to anyone who knows something about post-70s America, Second Amendment enthusiasts and the politicians who exploit their preoccupation tell everyone else that "now is not the time" to talk about gun carnage because, after all, it is people who kill people. Everyone else is also admonished not to "politicize" tragedy, even though it's legitimate and imperative to discuss whether public policy is partially to blame or whether changes in public policy could reduce the frequency and carnage of mass shootings. Corporate media always propagate this conservative admonition, and are its foremost adherents.

I've got nothing profound to offer, but here is a small survey of media response with a comment or two.

This whole Charlie Pierce piece is worth reading. He ties any discussion of gun "tragedies" to the fundamental conservative fallacy---that (to borrow Margaret Thatcher's radical confession of global conservative principles) "there is no such thing as society":

There are things we must do together, in a political context, because these things are too big — and, in this case, too monstrous — for us to handle alone. Self-government and its institutions — public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries — are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.

I agree. The absolute minimal conversation we should be having about gun violence, whether or not conservatives think any time is an appropriate time, is about the necessity of understanding that America needs fully funded and professional education, law enforcement, emergency response, and healthcare institutions... period. If the well off and the Job Creators don't want to pay for the privilege of enjoying an orderly society, they should repatriate their warty asses to China or Haiti.

Second, there is this piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker about "what science says" about gun control. Here is her profound takeaway:

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

As so-called science writers go, Koerth-Baker is especially useless to me, with her patronizing and pseudo-profundities. But I think her conclusion is typical corporate media treatment: it's all just too complicated for us poor journalists and citizens to make heads or tails of, so let's all just love one another. Thanks for nothing, Maggie.

Speaking of the "media role" in public tragedy, the following is something I stumbled across this morning. It's a Roger Ebert anecdote about an interview he gave to NBC news (never aired) after Columbine (via BoingBoing again) in which the reporter was looking to cherry-pick quotes about violent movies causing gun violence. Ebert wouldn't play along:

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them.

As much as public policy, this is a piece of the problem that needs to be discussed. Logos and branding---bullseye. Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the media's normalization of violence as sensual and pre-political entertainment as quickly as Ebert seems to, but Hollywood is not directly responsible for Columbine or Tucson or Newtown.

And finally, there's this last word on the topic, straight from the mouth of a genuine monster:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. 

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

As Rob Bechizza said about Huckabee's comments back on BoingBoing: "Don't be angry. Just understand what he understands: that this is political."

I think the conversation needs to be much more far-reaching than the topic of gun control. It needs to examine how this society has become so detached from its own collective humanity that even a discussion of gun control is taboo within both of our major political parties while kids are slaughtered on their mats in kindergarten.

Coming back soon

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Well, hello there! How are you? I am fine!

Life intervened for awhile, and so I likewise decided to stay away from here for awhile.

A small factor has been a small learning curve related to my obtaining a new MacBook Pro 15 in. job, which came with OS X 10.8, which really, really wants users to work from the computer's touchpad. It's a little different, but I've already decomissioned my wireless mouse because I really like the feel of the glassy touchpad. The interface works very much like an iPhone, but in a good way as opposed to being a change for the sake of change.

I'll document an event or two that has occurred since I was last here. So come back soon if you like.