culture

Riffing on Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan nails it:

Late empires are known for several things: a self-obsessed, self-serving governing class, small over-reaching wars that bankrupt the Treasury, debt that balloons until retreat from global power becomes not a choice but a necessity, and a polity unable to address reasonably any of these questions -- or how the increasing corruption of the media enables them all.

Obama is, in some ways, a test-case.

He was elected on a clear platform of reform and change; and yet the only real achievement Washington has allowed him so far is a massive stimulus package to prevent a Second Great Depression (and even on that emergency measure, no Republicans would support him). On that he succeeded. But that wasn't reform; it was a crash landing after one of the worst administrations in America's history.

Real reform -- tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it -- except to their own families and cronies.

Nepotism is part of the problem; media corruption is also part; the total uselessness of the Democratic party and the nihilism of the Republicans doesn't help. But something is rotten in America at this moment in time; and those of us who supported Obama to try and change this decay and decline should use this fall to get off our butts and fight for change."

Wish I'd said that. And it makes me wonder: would Obama agree with the above (meaning he is a reluctant prisoner of well-entrenched interests), or is he is part of the problem too?

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I'm no expert on health care, so I don't have strong views on how to reform the current U.S. system. But watching the lies, chicanery, and sheer wing-nuttery of the "debate" on health care reform (along with the birther controversy, the revelations about "The Family," and various other manifestations of what Richard Hofstader called the "paranoid style" of American politics) led me to wonder about possible foreign policy implications.

Here's my question: What impression do people in other countries get when they observe the divorced-from-reality nature of contemporary American political discourse? American pundits like to talk about how "irrational" our adversaries are (usually when they are trying to scare us into spending more on weapons or launching preventive wars), but do they ever stop to think about how goofy and irrational we appear to be to others? And I don't just mean the buffoons on talk radio and Fox News; I'm talking about Senators, Congresspersons, and other prominent politicos. When I see some of these folks in action, even a realist like me begins to question the validity of the "rational actor" assumption.

The United States doesn't have a monopoly on extremist politicians, of course, but it is a lot more powerful. No wonder unpolarity makes even our allies nervous.

I’m spending some time this month rehearsing for an annual charity show (playing keyboards in the pit band), so my thoughts have turned back to music. Here’s my question: where have all the political songs gone, and especially songs about war and peace? I’m not saying there aren’t any (see below), but this genre doesn’t seem to cast the same shadow it once did.

Back in the folk era (for younger readers, that means the late 50s/early-to-mid 60s), songs about war and injustice were staples of popular culture here in the United States. Think of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” or Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” At about the same time, the all-time genius of political musical satire, Tom Lehrer, was writing scathingly funny songs about a range of foreign policy topics, including nuclear proliferation (“Who’s Next?”), NATO’s multilateral force (“The MLF Lullaby”), liberal interventionism (“Send the Marines!”) and even nuclear Armageddon (“So Long, Mom!”). And don’t forget Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” (written by P.F. Sloan), an apocalyptic jeremiad that hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1965 and contains references to nuclear war, Red China, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and congressional fecklessness.

By the late 1960s, fueled by Vietnam, songs about war were legion. Off the top of my head, there’s Donovan’s “Universal Soldier,” the Animals' “Sky Pilot,” CSNY’s “Ohio,” and “Wooden Ships,” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Imagine,” Edwin Starr’s “War,” and Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Even Glenn Campbell’s pop hit “Galveston” (written by Jimmy Webb) has a Vietnam theme. There were a few songs on the other side too, most famously Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.”

My main point is that some of these songs were big hits, selling lots of copies and getting lots of airplay. And satire wasn’t entirely gone either, with Country Joe and the Fish’s “Feelin’ Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag,” and Randy Newman’s brilliant “Political Science,” which dates from the early 1970s but could have been written for George W. Bush. Excerpt:

No one likes us, I don’t know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around the world, even our old friends put us down,
Let’s drop the big one, and see what happens…

We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful, and they’re hateful,
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them,
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.

I’d be remiss not to mention one of my all-time favorites, Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?” (first recorded in the early 1970s but made famous by Elvis Costello and the Attractions in 1979 and later voted 284th best rock song by Rolling Stone). Then in 1985, right on cue, came the pop anthem to globalization (and foreign aid): “We are the World” (written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and recorded by an all-star group to raise money for famine relief in Africa).

Given the foreign policy problems we have faced in recent years, including 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s somewhat surprising that we haven’t seen a resurgence of popular music exploring these themes. There are some obvious exceptions, to be sure, such as Springsteen’s “Devils and Dust,” Pink’s “Dear Mr. President,” or Neil Young’s album “Living with War,” and alt-country singer/guitarist/songwriter Buddy Miller has a terrific anti-landmines tune on his album Poison Love entitled “100 Million Little Bombs.” (Salon.com has a list of other anti-war songs here, and I found this list of top 10 political rock songs here.) On the pro-war side, you’ve got Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” and “American Soldier,” among others. But unless I’ve missed something (and that’s perfectly possible, because I’m not nearly as plugged in as I once was), none of these songs is commanding the sort of mass audience that earlier songs about war (or foreign policy, broadly defined) did. Some of them are powerful and evocative and musically sophisticated, but I haven’t heard one that seems likely to become a standard anthem.

Why? My hypothesis: there’s no draft. So long as military service is voluntary, and thus something that young people can opt out of, the costs of war will seem far away to many of them and their attention will tend to focus elsewhere. And when that happens, there won’t be big money in political songs and they’ll stay on the fringes of popular culture. Seems to be true of antiwar movies too.

But as I said, I’m not as plugged in as I used to be, and maybe I've just missed the good stuff. So the floor is open for comments: are there terrific songs about war or foreign policy being recorded these days? If so, are any of them attracting mass interest? If not, why not? The floor is open.

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Like every fan of good writing, I was delighted to see the New York Times end its experiment with Bill Kristol. Now the question is who the Times will pick to fill the second right-wing slot in its op-ed lineup. Here's a radical idea: instead of merely duplicating David Brooks, why not hire a realist? As I wrote in Salon back when Kristol was hired, there are plenty of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists writing for today's op-ed pages, but realists are surpisingly scarce. And I can think of several who would be pretty good at it (no, I don’t mean me).

If the Times doesn't like that idea, why not look for a conservative voice from overseas? It's a globalized world, after all, and I'll bet its readers might appreciate reading a view of the world from outside the parochial confines of the United States. For example, the Times could hire one of the people who write lead editorials for the Economist, or even "Lexington," the anonymous columnist who covers America for the British-based magazine. Economist columns and editorials are almost always well-informed, sometimes witty, and the prose is a model of laser-like clarity. Could this be one reason why The Economist is making money and the Times isn't?

Whatever the reason, here's hoping that the Times' management does better this time around.

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