No Time To Say "I Told You So"

Though I often do not agree with him, I read Andrew Sullivan every day. I'm a politics junkie, after all, and Sullivan gets the best links. But there's more to it than that: I read Sullivan, a free-market neoconservative and tireless champion of Western culture, whereas I do not read much progressive-slash-liberal commentary.

Why's that? In part because I already know what I think; in part because I can't imagine anything more boring than a roomful of people with whom I unquestioningly agree; and in part because reading dispatches from the other side of the ideological fence flexes my mental muscles, and sharpens my own arguments. When a commentator's stance is poorly argued or based on disinformation (as in the hateful poison-pen columns of Jeff Jacoby, smirking poster-boy for xenophobic sloppy thinking), it points up the flaws in the conservative argument: when it's thoughtfully considered and well-written (most of Sullivan's work), it shows the weaknesses in my own—leading me to rethink, reconsider, develop counter-arguments and stronger positions, which is as it should be: opinions are transitory, and personal politics should be a work-in-progress.

So I have great respect for Sullivan, even as he and I disagree—which is okay: people of good will can look at the same set of facts and arrive at different conclusions, and it's a second-rate intellect indeed that must assume that anyone who fails to agree with him must perforce be either evil or stupid.

Which is why I've found the increasingly shrill and hysterical tone of Sullivan's war writing so distressing and distasteful, even as it culminates in a burst of hooting triumphalism. This is what we used to call "winning ugly."

That said, the man's taking a hiatus this week to get his bearings back, just as reconstruction begins and he could be crowing the loudest: a brief holiday in Selfawaria, then. Bully for him.

...But Time Will Show the Wiser

So what happened? When crunch time came in Iraq, the sort of suicidal prolongation-of-agony that Sandlin talks about simply, against reasonable expectation, failed to happen on any large scale (although we may be seeing its beginnings in Tikrit, where the Ba'ath party faithful who have the most to fear from the inevitable settling-of-accounts are bunkered: but by withdrawing and concentrating itself into a single city even as arrangements to install a civilian administration are being put into place, the Ba'ath party has essentially made itself irrelevant. Tikrit may persist for some time as a war zone inside a pacified country, in practical terms a separate conflict to the wider issues of reconstruction—within Iraq, but not of it).

So how did this come to be? How did Iraq manage to stagger-step outside the patterns of History, which may not exactly repeat itself, but has certainly been known to rhyme? Is this outcome a validation for the Pentagon strategy, that instant cliché "shock and awe," itself an extension of the Powell Doctrine of "overwhelming force"?

Well, yes and no. Overwhelming Allied force was in evidence in WWII also, but was not in itself enough to bring the Axis to heel, not enough to prevent or override the "collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster" that led the fascist powers to continue their war effort long past any point of diminishing returns.

The factor that has made the most difference in this war, I think—the true "overwhelming force" at play—is Information.

This war, more than any previous, even more than Gulf War I, has been mass-communicated. The Internet, which wasn't really a player in Desert Storm, was a primary source of war info this time around, with 24-hour live camera streams, minute-by-minute newsfeed updates, and warblogging from inside Iraq: and of even greater importance, psychologically, al-Jazeera was there to provide reporting that could not be reasonably accused of pro-American bias.

Information is not the same as Truth, of course: but if nothing else the vast flow of raw information coming out of the war zone proved the limits of spin control. You can spin the meaning of the facts, but the facts remain that metric fuckloads of Iraqi military targets were getting blown to bits with minimal losses of Coalition materiel, that lots of Iraqis were dying and lots of Coalition soldiers, well, weren't—in short, that Iraqi victory was in no way just around the corner. Whether you characterized this state of affairs as a liberation of an oppressed people or as an imperialist aggression, as a victory for democracy or as a defeat for pan-Arabism, you had to consider the same set of facts—and those who attempted to deny those facts outright were laughed out of town (even as you had to chuckle at their chutzpah).

This makes me think that perhaps the "dreamy paper war" is finally a thing of the past—that it was unrelenting, ubiquitous media coverage—from hostile, friendly, and neutral sources, all saying the same thing in different ways—that really turned the tide in this war, simply by making it impossible to take refuge in the fantasy of a sudden reversal of fortune.

So yeah, the Fourth Estate won this war, for good or ill.
You know, just to give the filthy journos another reason to feel self-important.

Time Makes Fools Of Us All

Take a break from warblogging, and warblogging becomes irrelevant.

Well, no. But it's funny, almost... with the events of the last week or so, all the stuff I've had sitting on my hard drive no longer seems so damned relevant, does it?

Still, in the interest of fairness (to whom? to myself? yeah, I guess so)—and also because these are some pretty good reads—here's some thoughts on what might have happened....

Liberation Theology...

...by which I mean to say that it seems to be an article of faith, in Administration and neocon circles, that the people of Iraq will lay down their arms and welcome Coalition forces with, if not flowers and open arms, then at least a grudging goodwill—that the Coalition will be greeted as liberators, rather than invaders.

I mean, it only makes sense: whatever the Iraqi people may think of Americans, there's no way that day-to-day life for the average man in the street could possibly be worse under even a US puppet government than under Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows which side their bread's buttered on, right?

Right?
Well...
What would I do, if it were my country that was being "liberated"?

Good question. I've heard it posed and answered by various lefty commentators: a recent Ted Rall screed conceded that although "[m]illions of Americans consider Bush to be a hateful, extremist dimwit who seized power ... in an unconstitutional judicial coup d'état ... even the most passionately anti-Bush Americans would eagerly join their W-loving compatriots to fight any army that invaded the United States in the name of some theoretical 'liberation.' I know I would." Steven Grant says similar: "Is it any great surprise that Iraqis are not surrendering in droves, and seem to resent being invaded, even when we tell them it's for their own good? (I mean, I don't like our President, and I'd be strongly inclined to resist any foreign invasion to remove him from power.)"

I did a little thought experiment: Try to imagine the most benign invader possible, one with a cultural history of being peaceable, level-headed, and benevolent. Imagine the United States being invaded by Canada.

Imagine Canadian troops massed at the Northern borders, bent on liberating us from harsh market-based economics, coming to bring universal health care, arts funding, and poutine to their benighted Southern neighbors. Would I be tossing rose petals before the tanks, or would I be hurling Molotovs and shrieking Die, maple-niggers, die?

Tough call. But consider, too, the inevitability of defeat. It's obvious the Iraqi army is shamefully outgunned and undertrained, and cannot possibly prevail: even delaying tactics are essentially pointless, as the Hussein regime has no real friends in the region who might come to its aid. So the sensible thing is to back the winning horse, right?

You'd think so. Except that History isn't exactly teeming with examples of nations doing the sensible thing. Here's just a brief extract from Lee Sandlin's long and vitally important psychohistory of World War II:

...[B]y some unmistakable point—the autumn of 1942 at the latest—[the Axis powers] should have understood that they'd been wrong and that their prospects for long-term victory were inexorably zeroing out. They still had the economic and military strength to sustain their armies in the field indefinitely, no matter how grim the strategic situation became, but by any rational calculation of the odds, they should have begun hinting through backwater diplomatic channels that they were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Neither Germany nor Japan ever did so. Not until the last days of the war did either government even begin to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement—not until they had absolutely nothing left to negotiate with.

But then, that's the point. A rational calculation of the odds is a calculation by the logic of peace. War has a different logic. A kind of vast feyness can infect a military bureaucracy when it's losing a war, a collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster. In the later years of World War II the bureaucracies of the Axis ... gave up any pretense of realism about their situation. Their armies were fighting all over the world with desperate berserker fury, savagely contesting every inch of terrain, hurling countless suicide raids against Allied battalions ... while the bureaucrats behind the lines gradually retreated into a dreamy paper war where they were [perpetually] on the brink of a triumphant reversal of fortune....

Not everybody succumbed to these fantasies. But another, even stronger pressure worked against those who understood how hopeless the situation really was: they knew that defeat meant accountability.... [and that] every additional day the war lasted—no matter how pointless, no matter how phantasmal the hope of victory, no matter how desperate and horrible the conditions on the battlefield—was another day of judgment successfully deferred.

This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. ... The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they're convinced the alternative is worse.

Set aside some time and read the rest. It's unmissable.

Brand New Bag

You read a blog every day for years, and after a while you come to realize that you're still reading only out of habit or personal loyalty—weeks go by without a single item that you care about or even fully understand, as the tech-talk grows ever thicker and more alienating: and then there's a moment of crystalline perfection that makes you remember what you came here for...

...Niels Bohr [once said] "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics hasn't understood it". I'm not going to be talking about the war much for the foreseeable future, but ... my only piece of advice to people on both sides of this issue is an analogue to Bohr's comments—anyone who is 100% sure of the morality of their position with regard to the war in Iraq probably hasn't understood the issues involved.

Thank you, Tom, for encapsulating what seems to me to be the only sensible position in a world tipped off-axis.

Like Tom, I realize I'm not cut out to be a warblogger, really. I haven't got the necessary certainty, and frankly I'm afraid to acquire it. I cannot allow myself any sureties in this—nothing must be generalized, everything must be examined. God save me from my righteousness.

I really don't want to be a warblogger. But in a sense, maybe I always have been. Because this is a war. It's all a war, in one way or another: this just brings it to the surface. And for a while, I'll be breaking that surface now and then myself.

Credit Where It's Due

The lyrics below, of course, come from the Skids. I bought Scared To Dance as a youth infatuated with Big Country and looking for the origins of their melodic roar, and it proved to be an important album for me. I spent hours listening to that LP—no mean feat, considering that its fourteen tracks run only about thirty-three minutes total.

I was initially attracted by Stuart Adamson's guitar, naturally, but there was something about Richard Jobson's vocals that held me—perhaps the fact that I couldn't understand a goddam word, so impenetrable was his bellow: because my original LP had no lyrics or liner notes, I had to pretty much make up my own words if I wanted to sing along. And such is the quality of the music that you want to sing along.

It's the template for a certain kind of perfect white rock song—bludgeoning rhythm section, keen guitar hooks, full-throated, footie-chant choruses. It's Pavlovian: I'm hard-wired to respond to it, from Tenpole Tudor on down. There's something martial about it, something wonderful and terrible as the scent of blood on the wind.

Big ups to Matthew for finding me a clean MP3 of "Into The Valley," by the way. Credit where it's due.

Into the Valley
Betrothed and divine
Realisations no virtue
But who can define
Why soldiers go marching
Those masses align
This disease is catching
From victory to stone

Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky
Ahoy! Ahoy! Boy, man and soldier
Ahoy! Ahoy! Deceived and then punctured
Ahoy! Ahoy! Long may they die

I Thought I Thaw...

The other night, as I stood in the dark backyard, having a piss against the fence by the compost heap, I became aware of a low rushing sound at some distance away. As I tuned out the sound of nearby traffic, the sound clarified like an image coming into focus. I realized I could hear the sound of water flowing.

Well, obviously.

But this was the sound of the river, a half-mile away. The river was running again, and the pond behind it—across which I had walked in heavy boots just weeks ago, over ice a yard thick. Now there's open water, the waterfall is doing just that, and God help us, it is indeed Spring, or near as dammit.

(Hm? Why was I—? Oh, you know: marking territory. Keeps the coyotes away.)
(What's that? There are no coyotes in this neck of the woods? Well, there you go, then: it's obviously working.)

Singing the Goodbye Song

Actress Lynne Thigpen has died at 54. Cause of death is as yet unknown: she was not known to be in ill health.

She was a veteran of stage, screen, and television. You may not have known her name, but you'd know her if you saw her—a compact, no-nonsense black woman who could use her booming voice to either dramatic or comic effect, always eager for a bit of self-parody.

Lately, she was a regular on CBS's The District. But if you had kids in the late 1990s—if you lived in the States and had cable—you probably know her as the voice of a puppet moon, singing with a guy in a bear suit.

As the voice of Luna on Bear in the Big Blue House, Thigpen went soft, in the best possible way: her tone was wise, gentle, eternally patient. Like a force of nature. Like, well, the Moon. It takes one hell of an actress to be able to not only capture the essence of the Moon in performance, but to be the definitive Moon. If the Moon should ever speak, I have no doubt it will sound just like Lynne Thigpen.

So go to the attic tonight, gaze out at her face, just a few days before she comes on full, and sing one last round of The Goodbye Song.

The Trouble With Normal

This is an article I wrote for the Barbelith zine that was, for one reason or another, never published: had it been, it would've looked something like this...

The Trouble With Normal: Bruce Cockburn's Political Pop

He's had his moments in the limelight, but he's always had more on his mind than fame. Bruce Cockburn spent the Reagan Era singing about Liberation Theology, dirty wars, and the perils of globalization. Jack Fear gives a fresh listen to the finest political pop you've never heard.

The small fact that he's refused to alter his surname to the homophonic "Coburn" evidences a certain unwillingness to compromise: but musician and world traveler Bruce Cockburn's contrarian integrity goes beyond a willingness to repeat oneself for the benefit of hotel clerks and lazy journalists. In his thirty-year, 25-album career, Bruce Cockburn has laid bare his heart—and his politics—in songs of shivery tenderness and searing anger.

Emerging from Toronto in the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s, Cockburn gained some small renown for his drawling, unaffected vocals and virtuosic guitar-playing. But as the 1980s approached and the institutionalized wimpery of Dan Fogelberg and Jesse Winchester was ground beneath the boot-heels of Punk, Cockburn plugged in, allied himself with producer/keyboardist Jon Goldsmith, and set about reinventing himself as a pop star.

He tried his best, even though he cut an admittedly odd figure on American Bandstand—a snaggletoothed, bespectacled hulk, his many earrings bristling out like a peacock's fan. But, with typical contrary stubbornness, Cockburn spent the height of the Reagan Eighties composing paeans to the Sandinistas and vilifying the "big, bad scary" United States—and reaped the whirlwind for it: somebody forgot to tell Bruce Cockburn that pop stars are supposed to be, well... popular. The relative obscurity that resulted is undeserved. In driving folk-rock songs splashed with jazz, funk, and (occasionally) C&W, Cockburn has delivered his lyrical broadsides with passion and—rarer still—wit.

Most of Cockburn's work falls into four broad songwriting voices (although the lines, as we'll see, often blur):

Travelogue Bruce: Pop music is generally brusque when it comes to atmosphere, but Cockburn will spend a verse or two talking about the birds, or the moon, or light reflected on water. At first you wonder when he's going to get to the point: then you realize that the atmosphere is the point. An avid traveller since dropping out of high school and busking around Europe in the mid-1960s, Cockburn has developed into pop's foremost scene-painter, with a journalist's eye for the telling detail—finding small moments that speak volumes in songs like "Tibetan Side of Town," (from the album Big Circumstance) or this verse from "Berlin Tonight" (1986's World of Wonders), written when the divided city was still at "the front line of the last gasp," when perestroika was just starting to ring the death knells for the USSR...

From the top of a solitary tree like the one on the flag of Lebanon
Unblinking eye of hawk follows traffic on the autobahn
Tank convoy winds down smokestack valley
Proud chemical pennants wave against the sky
Turret gunner laughs when I throw up my hands
I'm all glasses and grins under my "commie" fur hat

Cockburn isn't just narrating his vacation slides here: ramble though he may, he never, ever wanders.

Mystic Bruce: Underpinning nearly everything Cockburn writes, in varying degrees of explicitness, is a sense of immanence, of greater meaning behind mundane events. Though occasionally given to bald pronouncements like "God won't be reduced to an ideology," ("Gospel of Bondage," from Big Circumstance) he's more likely to find the divine in his city scenes, as an extension of Transcendentalist nature writing, as in the title cut from World of Wonders:

There's a rainbow shining in a bead of spittle
Falling diamonds in rattling rain
Light flexed on moving muscle
I stand here dazzled with my heart in flames

That's Blake's "world in a grain of sand" with horn charts and a funky bass.

Romantic Bruce: Cockburn's songs of lust and loneliness tend towards the ecstatic, tinged with pungently sensuous imagery: "There are nine billion mysteries in the naked body," he sings on "One Of The Best Ones" (1991's Nothing But a Burning Light), or these lines from the brooding "Sahara Gold" (1984's Stealing Fire):

Wet limbs striped with silver light
locked together at the center of the night
And your hair tumbles down like Sahara gold

Night bloom filling up the room
With the salt and musk of lovers' rich perfume
And your hair tumbles down like Sahara gold

Political Bruce: From the start, Cockburn (like many folkies) dabbled in a fashionable soft-focus leftism, from the vague antiwar sentiment of the 1979 single "Wondering Where The Lions Are" through early songs like "Stolen Land," which decried the treatment of Native Americans (a subject he's revisited, notably on ...Burning Light's "Indian Wars"). But as he travelled more widely, his causes grew more specific and his anger acquired a keener edge. Mid-80s sojourns to Central America fueled his outrage over US foreign policy, inspiring a string of blistering songs like "People See Through You" (World Of Wonders) and the ferocious "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" (Stealing Fire). Cockburn never peddles easy answers, though: though the climactic final chorus of "Rocket Launcher" ("...some son-of-a-bitch would die!") caused some controversy on its release, the song is largely a comment on how senseless violence simply begets more of the same.

Cockburn's politics have proved prescient: he was writing dispatches from Chiapas as early as 1983, and in 1986, when anti-globalization barely registered as an organized movement, his vitriolic masterpiece "Call It Democracy" (with its "IMF, dirty MF" hook) was the first single for World Of Wonders: poignant, funny (the "MF" is for "motherfucker," of course), and catchy as hell, it deserves to be an anthem.

Cockburn has recorded prolifically, and with mixed results. The production on many of his records sounds rather dated (the synth-heavy World Of Wonders, in particular, has not aged well); the righteousness occasionally grows shrill, and the mysticism woolly; the travel journals sometimes cry out for an editor. But as Cockburn settles into middle age, the missteps have grown fewer: recent records have shaded razor-sharp couplets with a pensive, acoustic sound, as on the exquisite "Pacing The Cage," from 1996's Charity Of Night:

I've proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip's worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in

And so Bruce Cockburn has come full circle: the one-time would-be pop star has reinvented himself as a troubadour. With the zeitgeist calling out for the grand gesture—and pop radio crammed with songs painted in crude strokes—Bruce Cockburn, contrarian that he is, is sketching intimate moments, integrating his themes into a singular voice that speaks of both the inner and outer life.

All song lyrics written by Bruce Cockburn and published and copyrighted by Golden Mountain Music (SOCAN). Lyrics reproduced here for purposes of review and study only.

Links
The Cockburn Project (lyrics, biography, annotations and more)
Information on Liberation Theology
Buy the CD Stealing Fire Amazon US | Amazon UK
Buy the CD Anything Anytime Anywhere: Singles 1979-2002 Amazon US | Amazon UK
Buy the CD Live Amazon US | Amazon UK

20th Century Motherfucker

Hope you're frying good, you son of a bitch.