Stephen Roney's Blog, page 207
January 17, 2021
The Music of My Life
A few years ago on Facebook, someone asked for a list of albums that meant a lot to you.
Here are mine, thrown at me today by Facebook’s “memories” feature.
Lightfoot! His first, and still his best, album. With great bass by Bill Lee. I was a bassist.
Songs of Leonard Cohen Hit me where I lived. I lived a couple of blocks away from Cohen’s boyhood home, and took the same route home from school. He was a local boy. Introduced to Cohen by Nick Economides, who was older and whom I looked up to for his sophistication.
Songs from a Room. Neither this nor his first are his best albums. But these are the ones from my teenage years. "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," "Tonight Will Be Fine." I remember listening to "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" on the porch with Violet Birch.
Byrds, Fifth Dimension. One of the first three albums I bought, in a batch. It wore better than the others. Bought all the Byrds albums following it too. Tempted to put some others on the list. They were probably better albums, but as my first exposure, 5D is the one that influenced me the most.
Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. First got to know it because a neighbourhood kid, Bob White, held dances during which he used to play it. The strategy, all the guys knew, was to ask your favourite girl for “Desolation Row” for a long slow dance where you got to hold her close. Trying to dance to Dylan was ridiculous. Then I started listening to the lyrics. "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," was my favourite for a long time.
Bringing it All Back Home. I bought it after Highway 61. Almost as good.
Blonde on Blonde. Disappointed at first. But it grew and grew on me. "Visions of Johanna.""Just Like a Woman," "I Want You." Al Kooper's organ.
Peter Paul and Mary, See What Tomorrow Brings. A lot of great songs. Among other things, the album I listened to after my first girlfriend broke up with me. My sister and I used to sing harmony on "Betty and Dupree."
Joni Mitchell, Blue. Not my album. My brother was the bigger Joni Mitchell fan. But this one was supernaturally great. Humming “Carey” was the only thing that got me through one summer working in a plastics factory. “River” and “All I Want” were even better.
Planxty. Bought when I was living in Ottawa. Perhaps the greatest album ever recorded by anyone. I had "Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór" played at my wedding. The one that didn’t work out.
Steeleye Span Please to See the King. Picked up second hand in a bargain bin. Yow! I love those rough edges. A revelation after the sanitized folk of the early Sixties.
The Band Music from Big Pink. Another album that seemed to change everything.
Moby Grape. Tipped off on this one by Hit Parader magazine—a great publication. Crazy good. Sadly, two of the band members later just went crazy. Few songs match the energy of Skip Spence’s “Omaha.”
Rolling Stones, High Tide and Green Grass. Not my album. Was playing in a kid rock and roll band, and a couple of my bandmates were wild about the Stones. I think Louis Lapierre owned the album. Did not especially like the music then—it was just the most fun to play on stage. But it has grown on me ever since. The Stones get better with time.
Ian & Sylvia Four Strong Winds. I love all their stuff, and Ian Tyson solo, but this I think was where I came in. I cannot ever get “V’la le Bon Vent” out of my mind. Nor would I ever want to. Let alone the title track. Or “Royal Canal,” which oddly always reminds me of Kingston, with the canal and the penitentiary.
Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed and Beggar's Banquet. The soundtrack at Inscape, the teen drop in coffee house in Gananoque, brain child of Father Ed Shea. "Gimme Shelter." Yeah, I love rock and roll.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
January 16, 2021
Corner Gas
Being out of the country for many years, I have just discovered “Corner Gas,” a longtime runaway hit on Canadian TV. I believe it is the most popular Canadian scripted show of all time. Launched in 2004, it is still running as an animated series.
Brent Butt, creator and star, says he does not know why it was and is so popular. What is it about this particular troupe of eight characters? Butt is a brilliant writer, and has done several other projects, but none have approached the success of Corner Gas. What was the magic formula?
I think it is obvious; but a thing long forgotten. Comedies work best in a rural setting. This was something the ancient Greeks knew already. Comic characters, for them, were formulaically rural folk; the word “clown” literally means “rustic.”
The reason, I believe, is that comedy works by releasing tensions; the punch line is a spring abruptly unsprung. More broadly it works by allowing us escape from our worries. A rural life implies that: a simple life away from our troubles. Most Shakespearean comedies involve retreat into a forest or wilderness, a “green world,” as Northrop Fry noted, which somehow resolves the problems of the protagonist.
For a time, American television conformed, perhaps by accident, to the old formula, and had a run of huge comedic hits based on rural life: Beverley Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction. Then the marketing mavens realized with alarm that they were not appealing to the most desirable market. Most Americans lived in cities, after all. Especially most Americans with money to spend. So the geniuses, in lock step, cancelled all the hillbilly opreys, though still the most popular shows, to reflect the real lives of their desired audience. The replacement sitcoms were all set relentlessly in suburbs or the city. Mary Tyler Moore was going to make it after all.
They did fine; some were great. But they ran against no rural competition. If there was a thirst in the audience for such an escape from their dreary daily lives, it was not satisfied.
One notable exception: Gilligan’s Island. A show with a puerile premise and without good writing. Nevertheless, the escapist setting alone seems to have gained it, in the absence of any other non-urban competition, cultural immortality.
Overall, nobody in Hollywood seems to understand how comedy works. At least, nobody with money to fund a TV show. But here in Canada, Corner Gas hit upon that same ancient formula. Everyone in Toronto wanted to imagine themselves living in Dog River.
It is also the old Canadian formula. Dog River is a colony of Mariposa. Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town is, along with Anne of Green Gables and Songs of a Sourdough, one of the three founding documents of English Canadian literature. All three are about people living in isolated communities. It is the shared Canadian literary experience. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is in its small towns. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is comic, so that Canada keeps generating brilliant comics and comic writers like Brent Butt.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
January 12, 2021
A Mexican Standoff?
Tim Pool makes a good point about Twitter banning President Trump. It does not matter that they have, shockingly, been able to shut down their competition. Competition is not necessary; nobody needs Twitter. The main attraction to Twitter was the entertainment value of Donald Trump. Without interesting content, Twitter is probably doomed. If only a narrow band of views are tolerated, everyone will lose interest.
This will probably be a case study in business school texts in future.
January 11, 2021
Trump's Incendiary Speech
Why is it that, with all the claims that President Trump incited an insurrection a few days ago, nobody shows the video clip of him doing so?
For the obvious reason: they can't; he didn't. I've read the transcript of his speech.
It's a perfect example of gaslighting. Real gaslighting.
The World in Winter
Art thrives when the world has fallen apart. Art is the attempt to put it back together.
The US seems now gone fascist, following China.
It is time for poetry.
Four walls a door a window
Without, the face-full sea.
Was life ever more than this?
I hear the sirens in the night
I see the weary parade of morning
Rare times the lark sings mad above the snow
Again in the calliope dawn
With a timpani bang and a tin whistle
The shuffling symphony that becomes the carnival day begins.
-- Stephen K. Roney
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.January 10, 2021
Whom the Gods Would Destroy...
Not Icarus, but the same old story.The current general pogrom against conservative voices is nothing I would have predicted. On the face of it, people on the left seem to be acting not just irrationally, but against their own self-interest.
Take Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats launching articles of impeachment against Trump. There are only eleven days left in his term, at this writing. It is improbable that the process could be completed before his last day of office. If it were, what is the urgency of having him step down a day or two earlier? And in the meantime, tying up the US Government to do so? At a time of general crisis?
If the measure passed the House, moreover, it would take a two-thirds majority in the Senate to have him removed. Since the Senate is 50% Republican, there seems no chance of that. So Pelosi is tying up the machinery of government for nothing.
If he were impeached and removed, this would apparently bar Trump from running again. But if this is Pelosi’s hope, it makes no sense on another level. When Trump was nominated in 2016, I thought the Republicans were making a mistake: Trump was a loose cannon, and many of their other possible candidates looked stronger electorally. The fact that Trump could not cleanly beat Biden bears me out: Biden was hardly a strong candidate. Again, the Democrats seemed suicidal in picking him, against the will of their own supporters and despite his obvious cognitive decline. If Pelosi were to prevent Trump from running again, this looks as likely as not to be a gift to the Republicans: they can now nominate a candidate with wider appeal, without alienating the Trumpists.
In the meantime, Pelosi is doing a thorough job of alienating Trump supporters from the Democratic Party. As is Joe Biden. Instead of calling for reconciliation, as any sane politician would do, they are demonizing anyone who supported Trump. This is significant, and an obvious case of self-harm, because many of them were Democrats before Trump came along.
It looks like a shotgun blast to the face. It looks like attempted suicide.
It looks the same to me with regard to the censorship by Silicon Valley. Especially Jack Dorsey, who seems to have been the most aggressive. Twitter is a limited platform that, before Trump came along, looked as though it were dying. Trump’s love of tweeting has made it the place to be; one third of all their subscribers are following Trump. Throwing Trump off is like refusing to serve at least one third of their customers. It is alienating at least half of their potential customers, the half who voted for Trump. It is forcing the action to a rival platform, which is then almost certain to eclipse Twitter.
The same case can be made for all the other social media platforms censoring conservative voices: they are shutting out and alienating half their potential audience, and opening up a huge advantage for any competitor. Why would they be doing this?
Are they forced to it by the demands of advertisers, who do not want their ads run next to controversial content? No: there is no parallel drive to censor the left; it would be trivial to set algorithms to let advertisers steer clear of political speech case-by-case; and advertisers are not involved in the case of Patreon, or Amazon’s cloud services, and others who have been joining in the censorship.
Major advertisers themselves seem to have gone “woke” in self-destructive ways: like Gillette paying huge sums to deliberately insult men.
The “mainstream media” are also on an apparent path to self-destruction. Fox News, with their right-wing slant, was consistently beating CNN, MSNBC, and the old networks in the ratings. CNN’s response? To go further left. Then Fox News, too, seemed to veer left, and Drudge Report. And their audience was handed over, as if deliberately, to upstarts like OAN, Newsmax, Citizen Free Press, and so forth.
The large established tech firms are obviously aware that they are threatening their own businesses with their political stance. They are actively colluding to prevent this from happening: targeting upstarts like Parler, or SubscribeStar in restraint of trade. In doing so, however, they are in violation of anti-trust laws, and obviously risk bringing down legal action against themselves.
And any such attempts are, in the new world of the Internet age, like whack-a-mole. There are too many people out there with access to cameras, microphones, and, in effect, printing presses now.
My guess is that “they” are showing the terminal stages of what the Greeks called hubris, and we call narcissism. “They” meaning, in general, the educated and economic elite of our culture. The gang we used to call the yuppies. Having gotten away with a lot, and knowing they have gotten away with it, their conscience, in part, drives them to it. There is in every serial killer an unconscious craving for justice. The tension of a guilty conscience becomes over time unbearable; they will keep acting more erratically and uncompromisingly until at last someone catches them, or calls them out. If necessary, they will leave notes with clues for the police.
When it happens, when at last they are caught, they will sleep like a baby.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
January 9, 2021
The Progress of America's Social Disease
What is happening now in the USA tracks closely the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.
1. Someone gives in to temptation and sins. In this case, we are talking about the “sexual revolution.”
2. Rather than repent, they allow this to develop into a settled vice. The legalization of abortion probably marks that social threshold. Instead of realizing the original idea was wrong, once confronted with its consequences, Americans moved on from lust to murder.
3. As guilt feelings grow, the guilty party begins to construct a “narrative” instead of facing the truth; a pleasant fiction, in which they are guilty of nothing. They become insane in the proper sense of the term: their thinking and their claims are no longer in accord with what is real. We see this in postmodernism: there is no truth. We can simply “construct” any truth we want.
4. In the next phase, the pretense that truth is random and arbitrary is replaced with the conviction that truth is the enemy. Rather than having the right to choose one’s own truth, one must deny objective truth. Here is where Trump Derangement Syndrome begins: he was too prone to bluntly say what he thought.
5. Now comes the scapegoating phase: anyone not in step with the general denial of reality will be accused of the sin of which the guilty party feels guilty. Trump’s supposed sin, for example, is that he is a “liar.” Within a family, this becomes the habitual scapegoating of one or more children.
6. Over time, as the situation grows more extreme and the truth risks becoming obvious to all, the insane party will then accuse the scapegoated party of themselves being insane. We are seeing this now with the drive to have Trump removed from power with eleven days to go, by declaring him mentally incompetent. The demand is in itself obviously insane.
Within a dysfunctional family, this is generally where it ends. By general consent, the one member of the dysfunctional family who is not, or is least, insane, will be declared insane, and sent off for psychiatric treatment. So the family can go on as always. The child themselves will accept the diagnosis as necessary for survival.
But where does it end when it happens to a whole society?
Nazi Germany perhaps gives us our most obvious model.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
January 8, 2021
2020, Hold My Beer
A German representative has reportedly compared the storming of the Capitol building two days ago to the Reichstag fire.
The analogy seems eerily apt.
The historical suspicion, of course, is that the Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis themselves to give Hitler the excuse to seize absolute power. Which he did.
So, if you want to call the current rumors and claims that agents provocateurs were involved in the storming of the Capitol, and, for that matter, in the Black Lives Matter riots last summer, a conspiracy theory, you need to acknowledge that similar conspiracies have been real, and successful, in the past. And indeed there are videos of the crowd trying to restrain people breaking windows, and of the police seeming to deliberately open a barrier to let protestors in.
Whether or not they were complicit, voices on the left seem to be responding aggressively. We hear immediate demands for a more authoritarian regime. Trump has been thrown off Twitter and other social media. Many are calling the storming of Congress “treason,” and “an attempted coup.” Implying the death penalty for all involved. Others are demanding the arrest of Trump’s lawyers. Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez has demanded that any supporters of Trump be expelled from the House and Senate. Just as Hitler used the Reichstag fire to have the Communist deputies expelled to secure his majority.
China has already gone Fascist. The US seems to be close behind.
China and the US are infinitely more significant military, economic, and cultural powers than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It begins to look as though the 1930s were just a dress rehearsal for the main event.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
January 7, 2021
Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
The situation in the USA seems less dire today than yesterday. The crowd that stormed the Capitol seems not to have been organized, and they left once they had made a demonstration.
Unfortunately, it all took attention away from the claim that the election was stolen, rather than making the intended point.
And it now makes Trump's exit from office look tawdry.
He deserved better.
January 6, 2021
The Second American Revolution?
At this moment, it looks as though the USA may be at the beginning of either a revolution or a civil war. The action of invading the Capitol Building is extreme enough that those involved may decide it is safer to press on than to stand down.
The returns from the Georgia Senate runoff, at the same time, look like a parallel attempted coup. Had the Republicans won that election, as Republicans have always won in Georgia before, it would have stood as evidence that the prior presidential election was legitimate after all. That the results seemed to mimic precisely those of the presidential election suggests instead that the prior election was stolen, and that, unless something dramatic is done quickly, all future elections will be similarly stolen.
I cannot foresee this all ending peacefully. I question whether democracy can survive in the US.
