Why Politics Rocks
December 7, 2008 2 Comments
Caught some documentary on heavy metal while channel-flipping and DVR’ed it for later. Turned out to be underwhelming but there was one interesting insight, regarding why a certain stripe of metal so often indulges in grisly, violent imagery: because kids today tend to have little real experience of death. So, understandably enough I suppose, they crave to explore the thing that is a mystery and is sheltered from them, even if (especially?) what they get is cartoonish and juvenile.
I think the same principle applies in many areas, and it’s not just teen metalheads who indulge in escapist fantasy to explore in ‘safe’ form a reality of life that they’re sheltered from. At times it seems our entire political system has devolved into an escapist fantasy for sheltered adults, one giant garish ’70s album cover stuffed with simplistic, puerile, self-parody images – cartoon black and white hands shaking, a flower shoved into the barrel of a gun, bombs on a conveyor belt going into a machine and coming out as electric cars on the other end, a Scrooge-like rich guy crying over in the corner at the error of his ways, a beautiful interracial orgy, etc.
Heck, this is basically what ‘socialist realist’ art was, right? ’70s-style album covers, but for socialists, and without the music (usually).
Anyway, if what metalheads need is a dose of healthy familiarity with the realities of such things as death and grownup relationships, then I can think of a few aspects of reality I’d like to refamiliarize the modern sheltered upper-middle-class socialist with as well. Being victimized by crime, for example. Working at a job in an actual business (as opposed to something that ultimately traces in one way or another to a made-up government project and wouldn’t actually exist if not for government). Living amongst people who are culturally unlike them (and who don’t particularly like them), and I don’t mean people who are merely ‘diverse’ but have the exact same opinions, and lifestyle as they do.
Indeed, from what I’ve observed, even the act of conversing (civilly) with people whose opinions differ from theirs in fundamental ways seems to be absent from the life experiences of today’s s.u.m.c.s.’s.
So just as a teenage headbanger’s curiosity about subjects such as death is mediated through, say, a Slayer album, perhaps today’s political junkies (including myself) act out their own ignorance of civility by indulging in the escapist soap opera that we call modern politics. After all, when you boil it down, there’s not a huge difference between the amount of substance that went into this….
and this:
Actually what am I saying. The Cannibal Corpse cover is far more substantive and intellectually stimulating.
I think your assessment of the political system in this country is accurate in describing an ineffective fantasy world, but I think that blaming it on middle-class values or socialist ideologies is a gross over-simplification. I don’t want to come across as aggressive, because I respect you talking about this stuff and you make some good points, but I do feel like I need to weigh in.
When I look at the issues that are MOST pressing for AWLMCMC’s (angry white lower-middle class militant conservatives) in this country – predatory mortgage lending, the national financial collapse, the cost of fuel – what I see are a series of bad decisions made by the people who fight the hardest against socialist policies. This country is being dragged down by a messy war and the closely-related economic collapse, both of which have been heavily driven by fiscal and moral conservatives.
As an anti-war, pro-gun control, anti-elitist, left-leaning middle class metalhead with $45,000 in student loan debt because I WASN’T born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I worked hard all my life, I think that you boiling the weaknesses of the modern political system down to “socialism” is a weak, 60 year-old argument. When I look at our “political system”, as you call it, what I see isn’t a cartoon, but rather a series of photos on the front page of the newspaper: pictures of American soldiers shining and proud in their pressed uniforms above captions describing where and when they died in the desert in this war that nobody understands. Poor whites AND blacks being put out on the street by financial institutions that despise socialism more than you do. The free market system collapsing in on itself. Democrats AND Republicans lying through their teeth and smiling about democracy and freedom.
What an ironically appropriate article for you to post on the 4th anniversary of the death of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, one of the most beloved metal guitarists of all time. On December 8th 2004 he was shot to death at point-blank range by a mentally-unstable ex-Marine. I think what metalheads need is the exact opposite; violence is the downfall of not only metal, but humanity as a whole. The notion that we need to familiarize ourselves with violence is what I like to call anti-evolutionary thinking. There consistently seem to be those who want things to evolve, and those who want to dig in their heels and keep things from changing. Would I call them conservatives? No, that would be too simple, because liberals are part of the problem. I call them anti-evolutionaries.
Only a country populated and controlled by an enormous number of AWLMCMC’s would:
1) Elect George W. Bush because he seems like regular (read “white and Christian”), down-home kinda guy
2) Get behind the “war on terror”, which would lead to the enlistment of thousands and thousands of AWLMCMC’s
3) Enlist a mentally-unstable young man in the military, then discharge him without providing the resources for him to be treated or put into an institution (because that would be too socialist, right?)
4) Make it possible for a mentally-unstable man to have access to a handgun
5) Watch in amazement as one of the most ground-breaking metal musicians of all time is shot to death. Funny, today is also the 28th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. I’ll bet guys like you were pretty happy with yourselves that day, huh? He was the biggest S.U.M.C.S. of them all, wasn’t he? Well he’s not the only one.
I do respect you for acknowledging your own ignorance in this narrative, and I guess I should do the same. I just think that your thinking is divisive, and unfairly characterizes an enormous group of people. There’s a big difference between some rich northeastern asshole who blames everything on southern Baptists, and a hard-working, middle-class American like me who is sick of violence, sick of economic collapse, sick of racism. I think that your oversimplified blaming is a GREAT example of someone being unable to “converse civilly”.
Finally, I’ll remind you that the last time the United States economy collapsed to the ground, it was a socialist who stepped in and made the difference while conservatives sat there oiling their guns and waiting for Jesus to help the free market fix itself.
Hi Mike. As I said, I ‘include myself’ in the above critique – but obviously I still am likely to have a potential blind spot for this sort of phenomenon on ‘my’ side of the aisle (or at least the side of the aisle that is less distant from me), so I appreciate the comment.
I’m not sure I understand how the examples that you give fit into the theme though. You also make a lot of statements that are either flat-out wrong or not particularly well-supported. Without getting into debating every single point…
The biggest target of your criticism appears to be the of invasion and occupation/reconstruction of Iraq (which I assume is what you mean by the “war that nobody understands”). While reasonable people can disagree about the merits of the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, at this point the “war” is over and so the point is basically moot. When you claim that the country is “being dragged down by a messy war”, I certainly don’t know what you are talking about exactly, unless the idea is just to throw out a generic anti-war slogan. This is actually the sort of album-cover reasoning I have in mind.
Similarly, your diagnosis of the financial crisis doesn’t really resemble what I recognize as reality. You seem to blame the crisis on conservatives, but don’t give any real details. Again: you may as well just be painting a picture of Uncle Scrooge crying, far as I’m concerned. You speak of “financial institutions that despise socialism” but my view, as I’ve argued previously, is that such institutions (at least the mortgage market) are often heavily socialist in behavior. You speak of the ‘free market system’ collapsing but very little about the markets that have collapsed are actually ‘free’. (Certainly, having a quasi-independent, politically-connected and -influenced corporation (FNMA) buying up mortgages and kinda-sorta ‘implicitly’ wrapping the debt in a government guarantee was never exactly a hallmark of free market principles). And as regards the Depression, I do not subscribe to the notion that the socialist FDR ‘made the difference’, as you imply, unless by this you mean ‘made things worse and prolonged the Depression’ (the Depression basically lasted for 12 freaking years, after all; how much of a positive ‘difference’ could he have made?).
I’ll pass over bizarre non sequitur comments such as the one about how “guys like me” were “pretty happy with ourselves” when John Lennon was shot. I don’t even know where to start with that one. (For one thing, I was too young to even know it had happened….)
In both cases, these images you’ve apparently formed – both of the “war” and of the “free market system [supposedly] collapsing on itself” resemble cartoon metaphors – more than they do the actual realities on the ground of the things you’re purporting to describe.
As for whether my “thinking is divisive”, well that it may be. I don’t know. I do know that simply being “divisive” doesn’t necessarily make you wrong. For some reason “you’re divisive!” has come to substitute for an actual counterargument. This is more album-cover-style thinking from a point of view unfamiliar with (and therefore uncomfortable with) people whose opinions are highly divergent from their own. After all, all “divisive” really means is “an opinion that divides people”, i.e. an opinion that some significant faction disagrees with. Well golly, guilty as charged! My opinion is “divisive”, I admit! My follow-up question for you is: So what?
You do hit closer to home with the observation that my broad-brush generalizations fit the same pattern I’m identifying. And indeed, that occurred to me as I was writing
But at worst, that just makes me a hypocrite, not necessarily wrong 
In my defense let me just note that without generalizations, it’s pretty hard to say, well, anything. Particularly in a blog post. If you think my generalizations substantively wrong in some way, feel free to say so, and how. That’s what actual conversation with people who have different opinions is supposedly to be about. Best,