Stars and stripes

*

A few years ago while drifting into sleep on a Sunday night, I had an aesthetic experience with a John Philip Sousa march. Our FM public radio station used to run a show called Pipe Dreams, which featured a fairly wide range of music as performed on genuine pipe organs. (In its effort to make WILL-FM "even better," the program was eliminated 2 years ago and replaced with the same syndicated (i.e., simulated) classical music programming that fills about 18 hours of their 24-hour daily schedule.)

Anyway, that evening on Pipe Dreams was presented a rendition of Sousa's iconic "Stars and Stripes Forever," zestily pounded out on a major league, one-off concert pipe organ. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to retain either the organist's name or any information about his mighty instrument into the next day's waking world. But my mind was in a peculiarly receptive state between waking and sleeping, and the performance enthralled me.

I had enjoyed playing alto and tenor saxophone parts, both first and second, on this ditty in high school because most of the other instruments (especially the piccolo) were doing all the hard work. Yet the arranger---Hal Leonard, no doubt---was generous enough to let all the saxes play soli on one of the several famous melodies penned for the march... the one that goes "Dah Dah Dah-duh-duh duh-Duh-Duh" and so on. As with my K-12 concert band experience (starting in 5th grade, actually), my marching and pep band experience helped to plow a larger field for my musical tastes than I'd have tended otherwise.

But hearing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in my mentally, and I'd even say psychically, receptive state, made a memorable impression on me even on the verge of slumber. First, I was able to hear that the organist was hitting every essential note in the score outside of the percussion parts. That was plenty of a mind-blower to me, physical-coordinationwise, who admittedly is not familiar with the level of virtuosity needed for, say, Bach's baroque organ works. But more important was the clarity with which I grasped Sousa's composition. It was the first time I had ever experienced Stars and Stripes as a masterpiece of form, coherence, and even arithmetic.

I tried earlier today to find the specific performance of my memory on YouTube, but I couldn't (not on the first page, at least). The versions posted there are flawed, soundwise and performance-wise. The main problems are excessive echo or audience noise, which obscures an organist's precision; or, more typically, an organist's actual lack of precision and expressiveness. The version I heard that night was a well-engineered studio recording with all requisite reverb, but not too much. And the performer, whomever he was, sounded like he really got the piece. At the time of its composition, Stars and Stripes was not a mere patriotic chestnut written to be pried out of its shell once a year, but was actually a huge pop music genre of the period. I have no serious knowledge about American music before the emergence of jazz, but I suspect that Sousa marches were about the equivalent of rock and roll at the turn of the 20th century.

Childhood traumas revisited

*

Nonlinearity and Future Shock

*

I stumbled on the post I quote below via the interesting Technoccult blog. It makes some points I've been wanting to get to, as touched upon in this recent post and this one and others. Specifically, I've been working toward some synthesis based on Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. I heard Klein lecture at the University of Illinois about a year ago, but since her book hasn't risen to the top of my reading list yet (it's very close, though), I've avoided referencing her thoughts directly. But here's an author named Charlie Stross, with whom I'm not familiar, that neatly draws connections between themes from those two books and the nonlinearity I've started trying to understand:

The term Future Shock was coined by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in the 1960s to describe a syndrome brought about by the experience of "too much change in too short a period of time". Per Wikipedia (my copy of Future Shock is buried in a heap of books in the room next door) "Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a 'super-industrial society'. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from 'shattering stress and disorientation' — future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term information overload."

It's about forty years since "Future Shock" was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers' predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread insecurity. They didn't nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite disaster capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I'm inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (And it looks as if the UK and USA are finally on the receiving end of disaster capitalism at home, in the post-2008 banking crisis era.)

My working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Toffler's underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.

I'll quibble about the last clause in this quote, because there are also conflicts between "scientific certainty and the nuanced complexities of religious debate" (to use Stross' construct), and also between dogma versus open-mindedness in both "communities." But his working hypothesis, as his post is entitled, corresponds to key points of my own, so I'm happy to have him do some heavy lifting to help me progress on my own synthesis.

Incidentally, these Stross bon mots are extracted from a more specialized question that his post directly addresses: is religious tolerance beneficial? And his answer, similar to mine, is mixed. Yes, religious tolerance is beneficial because the opposite of tolerance never is. But tolerance should not venture up to the point where a "religion" adopts dogmas that dehumanize women, children, and The Other; or where religious proselytizing becomes intrusive, coercive, or mandated by law.

Hedley Lamarr syndrome

*

With respect to the so-called "paralysis of analysis," in the words of Hedley Lamarr:

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

I haven't lost interest in offering my interpretation of current events, but I've been temporarily exhausted by the effort. From the peanut gallery where I've watched the world turn for more than 5.5 decades, current events are simply unprecedented. Therefore, they are inexplicable from my conventional perspective and analytical framework. Part of my problem, and maybe yours, too, if you have one, is that there are too many sensational data points to comprehend. Analysis --- the process of understanding a large, complex whole by breaking it into smaller, comprehensible parts --- fails us as our daily experience becomes an atomistic horrorshow of disturbing factoids lashed around by Big Lies that are driving half of us to insanity and the other half to impotence. And those factoids, of course, are served up fresh every day by Big Media, and they inflame even those of us who keep our distance from mass media.

During my relative silence here I've been trying to synthesize a big picture or long view that might begin to account for the actual or imminent failure of every major institution this country has evolved over 2.5 centuries. Without abandoning any well considered opinions I've offered here, I've become certain that the die for this epoch was cast 30 years ago and we're now well under way toward Destination: Inevitable, wherever and whenever that may be located. I've been trying to elevate my inquiries to many levels above Mr. President Jelly Bean because I don't believe that America ever was or ever will be all about Him, his homespun values, or his worship of The Corporation as the ultimate organizing principle of society. History will view him as the vulgar homewrecker of U.S. constitutional democracy. I can't see myself disowning those opinions outside of a torture chamber, yet our modern history is no more sacred than the history of the Roman Empire, or Egyptian antiquity, or the rise and fall of Native American civilization. All of us are vessels (or flotsam, take your pick) in a tide of global history, and the tide happens to be rushing out toward the unimaginable ends of the Flat Earth. But it will well up again, after 50 years, or 100, or 200 --- maybe 400 if Western history is any indicator.

Synthesis is where I'm headed; I'm asking myself what this chaos might add up to if we try using a longer view of history to rise above the hurricane of scary-looking events. My first stop is 14th century Europe. Without reading some medieval European history, you'd have no idea how modern the 1300s look to us... or how medieval we look compared with, for example, The Enlightenment. That's where I'm headed for the moment.