Songs I Love - "Am I The Only One?" / Maria McKee (1989), The Dixie Chicks (1998)

Maria McKee is Bryan MacLean's half-sister, and I'm told this explains things. All of the biographies mention it. And maybe it does. If I knew who Brian MacLean was.

And besides, I'd like to think with a voice like that, McKee would have been a singer regardless. Okay, maybe she wouldn't have found herself signed to Geffen Records at such a tender age. But my, can the girl wail. Someone somewhere would have appreciated her voice.

McKee fronted Lone Justice, an L.A.-based cowpunk band, that had something of an MTV with "Ways to Be Wicked" in 1985 off the band's self-titled debut. That first album had an old-timey rockabilly feel, singing as she did about the house being wrecked by the river overflowing its banks, soup kitchens and rescue missions and boyfriends (possibly husbands, though really, I doubt it) working late. McKee proved that a bad Baptist girl knows how to sin -- and how to feel really guilty about it -- just as well as any lapsed Roman Catholic from Michigan.

That first album is a sweet little gem. My favorite cuts from that record are "East of Eden," "Soap, Soup and Salvation" and "You Are the Light." I never thought "Sweet, Sweet Baby (I'm Falling)" fit on the record well -- it had far too generic a pop feel to it -- but it was mainly written by Steven Van Zandt, and I suspect this was producer Jimmy Iovine's attempt at giving the record something commercial that someone who'd never heard of Lone Justice might recognize. At the time, I'd never heard of Steven Van Zandt either. But then I didn't get around much.

The second album, Shelter, was something of a ponderous disaster. Gone is the old-timey, rockabilly and in its place is, well, a synthesizer-heavy collection of songs (save for "Dixie Storms") that are lyrically a little too pretentious. (Give "Reflected (On My Side)" a listen and see if I'm not right about this.) "I Found Love" is a neat little rocker, but it's not "East of Eden." I never thought the rest of the album wasn't really worth the effort, and usually never got farther than "Shelter" when I would listen to this. McKee's voice cannot redeem some things.

In fact, this lousy second record is probably the reason Game Theory's 1986 record The Big Shot Chronicles was not released on Geffen. I asked Scott Miller about this when I interviewed him in 1987, and here is the story he told me: Somehow an A&R person at Geffen managed to get a copy of the master of The Big Shot Chronicles and was interested in possibly signing Game Theory. But there was some argument about this (Game Theory was never easily marketable), and apparently the tape was passed all the way up the chain of command and authority to David Geffen himself, who gave the tape a listen and nixed the effort. "They sound too much like Lone Justice and other bands we're losing too much money on," David Geffen reportedly said, according to Scott.

And given how miserable Shelter is, yeah, I think I would have passed on any band I thought sounded like Lone Justice too. (Game Theory's 1987 double album Lolita Nation was an amazing work of musical genius which spent some time atop the college radio charts, while their 1988 effort Two Steps From the Middle Ages was a failed commercial venture akin to Shelter, but with Scott Miller's nerdy charm and genius.)

But that wasn't the end of Maria McKee. Because a girl with a voice like that cannot, and should not, keep it to herself. So in 1989, she released a self-titled solo album, again on Geffen (I'm guessing contractual obligation). And Maria McKee is amazing album, but it's one that took a lot of time to grow on me. Years, in fact. McKee is back to being the bad, broken-hearted and somewhat guilt-ridden Baptist girl again, wrestling with desire and drinking in her Sunday dress. Her voice really works these songs, and there's a lot to love on this record. Aside from the cut featured in today's blog, "Panic Beach," "This Property is Condemned" (which is a wonderfully slinky and snarly piece of music), "More Than a Heart Can Hold" and "Drinking in My Sunday Dress" (and oh, how she howls in that song!) are all worth the price of admission.

Okay, so some years later, I'm in a record store in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (yes, there are), and I came across a copy of the first Dixie Chicks album with lead singer Natalie Maines, Wide Open Spaces. I already had Home and Fly, and so this was an easy buy to make. (However, to suit Saudi sensibilities, someone had given Emilie and Martie proper tops and longer sleeves with a big black pen.) And as I listened to this CD, I would come across that second-to-last track and think to myself, "this sounds awfully familiar." A couple more listens as I thought: "This sounds like something Maria McKee might sing."

And, top notch and eagle-eyed researcher that I am, I wandered through Windows Media player and found, in fact, that McKee did in fact write and record "Am I The Only One?" Some things don't escape me for very long.

The Chicks version is quite a bit tamer than McKee's. First, there is the first line: McKee starts out by telling us "There is no damn reason I should have to feel so alone" while Maines is only telling us "There is no good reason I should have to feel so alone." McKee's is less "country" than the Chicks' version, which is as it should be. This is a song of heartache, and the Chicks are fairly faithful to McKee's vision. This is a song about everything that can possibly go wrong in a relationship going wrong. There is anger, resignation, pleading in this song. I like Maines' vocal, but she can really only pull the anger off well. McKee's is more pleading, and this is really a song about pleading -- "God help me, am I the only who feels this way?" I like how the Chicks dial back on the third verse, that adds something to the song missing in McKee's version. But as much as I think the Chicks arranged this song better than McKee, she still sings it better than Maines. She feels this song in a way Maines doesn't appear to.

I understand the Chicks have amped this song up a bit live, which is all for the good. Maines is a fine singer -- I like her voice. But it doesn't have the room McKee's voice has. Few female voices do. (Honestly, what would Maria McKee do with "Blue Kiss"?) Maines can sing like a bad girl, but only the kind of bad girl who wanders over to the other side of the tracks every now and again to play cards and drink and fool around with the bad boys. She may even wake up a time or two on the wrong side of the tracks. But her home is clean, comfortable, safe, and the people there more or less love each other.

But McKee sings like she lives there. In the little tarpaper shack with the rusty car in front right next to the Cotton Belt tracks. Near the crossing where the signal doesn't work right. With her unemployed, ex-con of a father, her thieving junkie brother, and the overly cute little sister who only saved herself from a life a white slavery by becoming a gangster's moll. And any number of disreputable ne'er do wells who wander through. McKee sings like she has spent too many days waking up hungover, late for her really crappy job at the diner, needing to clean up the mess from last night's festivities (cigarette butts in the beer bottles, dried vomit on the couch) and maybe even chase the likes of Maines out of her latest boyfriend's bed. Her home is shabby, tattered, a mess, and half the time, some of the people who live there are in jail because they tried to kill some of the other people who live there.

In a different era, McKee would have overdosed on something before she reached 30. Thank God she didn't.

So, here is McKee's version of "Am I The Only One?" from her first solo album:



And here's the version the Dixie Chicks recorded for Wide Open Spaces:



And here's Lone Justice playing "I Found Love," the only really good track off Shelter. This sounds like the album cut with a different vocal:



And here's Lone Justice's 1985 MTV hit, "Ways To Be Wicked." I always liked the intro with her on the skateboard.



Oh, and while I'm at it, this is Game Theory playing "Erica's Word," the closest miss they had to a hit. From The Big Shot Chronicles. But the band in the video isn't the band Scott recorded the album with.




I think that's enough for today.

Public Service Has Always Paid, Apparently

From Plutarch's life of Themistocles, the Athenian politician and general who led the Greeks in their successful war against Persia. Themistocles has just been exiled from Athens:

A great part of his estate was privately conveyed away by his friends, and sent after him by sea into Asia; besides which, there was discovered and confiscated to the value of four-score talents, as Theophrastus writes; Theopompus says an hundred; though Themistocles was never worth three talents before he was concerned in public affairs.

A Greek talent is a little less than 60 pounds (enough water to fill a particular amount of space). Or the amount of silver necessary to pay a trireme crew for a month. Approximately 6,000 drachmas. Lots of silver, maybe 600,000. A lot of money, now or then.

But it doesn't end there. In his exile, Themistocles presents himself to the king of Persia (some say Xerxes, some say Xerxes successor, who Plutarch does not appear to name. And receives 200 talents for offering his services to the Persians.

It seems "public service" has always paid.

Songs I Love - Jane Wiedlin, "Blue Kiss" (1985)

It was the summer of 1986, and playing fairly constantly on my Walkman (when I was allowed to listen during my training weeks at Ft. Benjamin Harrison) were: Big Plans for Everybody by Let's Active (I played this so much the tape broke), Life's Rich Pageant by REM, The Big Shot Chronicles and Blaze of Glory by Game Theory (the later was given to me on a cassette tape by Franklin Bruno, who filled up the other side with a collection of home recordings of original songs of his, which I also listened to a lot that summer), Belinda Carlyle's first solo release and Jane Wiedlin's first solo release.

Pay attention to the above list. It will come back to haunt us in the future.

Yeah, okay, the last two belong in the guilty pleasure bin. Carlyle and Wiedlin were both members of the Go-Go's, the Los Angeles punk-turned-pop girl band that set the world on fire a few years earlier with sealed lips and getting the beat. After they broke up, Carlyle got herself all skinny, sang that she was mad about me (well, actually, anybody who was listening), and married a junior official from the Reagan White House. Which, frankly, is what we all expected from Carlyle. After the first solo song collection, I didn't pay much attention to her career. She was the kind of character I expected to later show up at an Aggrestic PTA meeting.

But Wiedlin was different. A little deeper. Her self-titled first solo album isn't a great record. There's too much Yamaha on this collection of songs. It would be a good record were it not for that second song, one of the most awful and self-conscious bits of socio-political commentary ever committed to music, Wiedlin's achingly bad anthem to hopeful secular humanism, "Goodbye Cruel World," which features such insightful understanding of the human condition as this:

It's so naive to believe in love
Why build bombs, we got more than enough?
The planet's ours to use or destroy
Why rob life when life is joy?
Let's dream it away, think it away
Put the power back in our hands
Let's dream it away, think it away
And use the power in the mind of man
To say goodbye, goodbye cruel world

The tragedy of it all is that I can repeat this nonsense from memory. (No, I will not link to this song. Go find it on your own.) John Lennon's "Imagine" does this sort of thing well, if you're into believing in the human potential for goodness and progress. And "Imagine" it is not.

Okay, I've shaken that from my brain. When Wiedlin writes about the difficulties of human relationships on this record, she doesn't do that bad a job. And all the Yamaha doesn't get that much in the way (it's not as obviously dominated by the DX-7 as a lot of mid-to-late 1980s music was). It's a reasonably well-made little record. It's not deep, but it's not Carlyle singing praises to her wedding ring either. (Though to be fair, "Band of Gold" was a cover song.)

What I like most about "Blue Kiss" is that it's a song about a last kiss. Not a first kiss. It's about goodbye, not hello. This is about endings, not beginning. This is a sweet little song about loss, a torch song in F. (And that, friends, is where I was in early 1986.) I can imagine this song done a number of different ways -- a lot rawer, a little slower, with a more Nashville sound, a Hammond organ, not so chirpy, but a lot of the production on this song plays to Wiedlin's strengths. Listen to her sing. She cannot help but be chirpy with that pixie voice of hers. There's a little too much upbeat in this production, in this recording, which gives the song a hopefulness I'm not entirely sure it merits. But that too helps it work. It's about a goodbye, but maybe not the last goodbye. It's about ending, but not the end. Something is wrong in this relationship, but Wiedlin's hopefulness suggests that all is not lost, even as it might seem that way. The bright keyboards, and the fairly bright key this song was written and recorded in, are hope in the midst of despair. Are color in the midst of the blue.

And I played this song over and over and over again. I know. There's no accounting for some tastes.

Still, I think it would be interesting to see what someone else would do with this song. What a female singer with a different voice would do -- a stronger voice with a wider range -- how hope and despair might be differently balanced.

This is an odd little video. It tries to work with the color scheme Wiedlin used on her album cover (it is a nifty color scheme, green and blue and yellow and black with a dab of bright red), uses some out of place images (but what 1980s videos don't?) and I don't quite get why she's in the back of a truck, except maybe because it worked with the color scheme. It isn't as strange or incongruent a video as "Rush Hour" (the closest thing Wiedlin had to a hit single), which featured images of Jane frolicking with dolphins in a song equating being in love to driving in rush hour traffic (and that apparently is a good thing).




For more of that wonderful 80's Yamaha feel, check out the extended dance mix of "Blue Kiss." I didn't know until a few minutes ago that this existed. Did people really dance to these? Because I don't feel like dancing. This mix treats her voice better than the album version -- it strips the song down a bit, and her voice becomes somewhat thinner and a little more pronounced. I also really, really like the harmonies she sings with herself (beginning at the 1:20 mark) -- that's almost completely obscured in the LP mix. And I'm almost inclined now to say the drums are real (or at least real drums flavored with triggers), as opposed to synth drums or a program. Almost. But you know what? The most annoying thing about this song are the syntho hand claps. And those didn't need to be played up. They just didn't.

Translated to a Higher Condition

At a Bible study the other night we talked a bit about Elijah being taken up into heaven (2 Kings 2:9-12) as part of our introduction to the Gospel of Luke, as John the Baptizer is heavily identified with the Elijah (as is Jesus, and one way to look at Luke-Acts is Jesus as Elijah and the Church as Elisha). The next day, reading the life of Numa Pompilius in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, I came across this:

Elijah riding the N-Judah line to heaven.
Because Yes, the N-Judah goes there too.

    In the thirty-seventh year, counted from the foundation of Rome, when Romulus, then reigning, did, on the fifth day of the month of July, called the Caprotine Nones, offer a public sacrifice at the Goat's Marsh, in the presence of the senate and people of Rome. Suddenly the sky was darkened, a thick cloud of storm and rain settled on the earth; the common people fled in affright*, and were dispersed; and in this whirlwind Romulus disappeared, his body never being found either living or dead. A foul suspicion presently attached to the patricians, and rumours were current among the people as if that they, weary of kingly government, and exasperated of late by the imperious deportment of Romulus towards them, had plotted against his life and made him away, that so they might assume his authority and government into their own hands. This suspicion they sought to turn aside by decreeing divine honours to Romulus, as to one not dead but translated to a higher condition**. And Proculus, a man of note, took an oath that he saw Romulus caught up into heaven in his arms and vestments, and heard him, as he ascended, cry out that they should hereafter style him by the name Quirinus. (p. 49)

 So, Romulus has become a god. Actually, ascending to heaven in or on a pillar of fire or cloud is a common trope in antiquity, and fills many a Greek, Roman and Hindu story.

I'd like to see some politician try to get away with the whole "well, he was taken up into heaven" thing today. I think that Rahm Emmanuel could even get away with it...

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* Awesome word. I intend to use it soon!
** Nice euphemism!

The Dream of Equality

I have been reading (yes, we are back to commenting on books!) Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (yes, Grecian is a word -- you cannot fault George W. Bush for that), the version  translated by John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough and published as part of the series Great Books of the Western World by the fine folks at the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1954. It's one of the many books I was able to clean -- with official approval -- from the weeding of the JKM Library over the last couple of years. My set is mostly complete -- I'm missing one volume of Shakespeare (I already have the complete Shakespeare anyway) and another volume. I forget which one, and they aren't in front of me right now.

I think it's Boswell's Life of Johnson. Volume 44 of the 1954 set.

At any rate, I am reading Plutarch. I had the Penguin classics of Plutarch, but their editions ripped Plutarch's lives from their parallel context -- Romulus and Thesius, for example, were separated, and placed in volumes entitled "Founders of Rome" or "Founders of Greece" or some such. And not as Plutarch, as Greek historian and author living during the time of the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, the Flavians and the early Antonines, for the most part intended.

I like reading books of ancient history written by the ancients themselves. There is a different approach to truth, the presenting of multiple stories without attempting to find which story is "factually correct." It's more about story and myth, about poetry and meaning, rather than fact. Facts rarely tell their own story. They must be chosen and discarded, and then carefully edited and woven into something that tells us who we are. Or wish to be.

What interests me today is Plutarch's life of Lycurgus, the creator of Spartan law and organization. He is set side-by-side with Rome's second king, Numa Pompilius. Lycurgus is credited, in Plutarch's telling, with creating a tightly organized society in which there was no gold and silver money (just bars of iron tempered in vinegar to make them difficult to alter), women were effectively the common property of all men, children we the property of the state, encouraged sexual relations between young men and older ones, and the society devoted itself to war and war making. The goal, Plutarch states, is social equality and leisure, so that the citizens of Sparta could pursue "higher things" than commerce. He writes:

It need not be be said that upon the prohibition of gold and silver, all lawsuits immediately ceased, for there was now neither avarice nor poverty amongst them, but equality, where everyone's wants were supplied, and independence, because those wants were so small. All their time, except when they were in the field [at war], was taken up by the choral dances and festivals, in hunting, and in attendance on the exercise-grounds and places of public conversation. (p. 45)

Life was strict for Spartans, but that austerity had a purpose, allowing Spartans to spend "their leisure rationally in conversation" and "passing judgment on some action worth considering; extolling the good, and censuring those who were otherwise, and that in a light and sportive manner, conveying, without too much gravity, lessons of advice and improvement." (p. 45)

Lyrcurgus was not without a sense of humor, and he did encourage laughter during the communal meals Spartans shared "as a sort of sweetmeat to accompany their strict and hard life." But the purpose of Spartan life was clear:

[Lyrcurgus] bred up his citizens in such a way that they neither would or could live by themselves; they were to make themselves one with the public good, and, clustering like bees around their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit carried all but out of themselves, and devoted wholly to their country. (p. 45)

What struck me most about Plutarch's description of Spartan society in the first quote above is just how similar it is to some very early conceptions of what true communism would look like. (They may have even been Marx's conceptions.) A society in which all men labor and leisure. Minus the slavery of the Helots, of course, whose actual labor probably allowed for Spartan society to even function. (Plutarch doesn't describe the situation of the Helots in his life of Lycurgus.)

This is an old dream, of a world in which there is no avarice, no clamor for lucre or wealth, in which human beings are equal and there is meaningful work for all and leisure for all. It was, I think, the dream of most communists -- when they spoke of the end result of liberation, of ending man's exploitation of man, this was the liberation they spoke of. Every man a farmer or factory worker in the morning, an artist in the afternoon, and a philosopher at night. It's not so much articulated politically anymore -- mostly folks yearning for a better society are aiming much lower, at a kinder and more-equal polity and society, and not one in which all ills are cured, all wounds healed and all brokenness made whole.

I'm not sure anyone really believes politics can do all these things anymore. But people once did. They believed fervently. They fought and bled and suffered and died for an imagined better world.

But I have a greater concern about this dream of equality. In the case of Sparta, it is welded to the purposes of the Spartan state. No individual human being is free to find their own purpose or meaning -- not Helot, not Lacedæmonian -- but their purpose is determined entirely by state and society. You are what the people around say you are. You live and die for what the people around say you will live and die for. You mean what the people around say you mean. And nothing more.

Yes, notions of individualism that we have in modernity are very foreign to antiquity (though probably not so foreign as we think). But often, the dreams of recreating Lycurgus' Sparta -- a world where there is no want and no avarice, in which people are freed to lead better lives for the collective or communal good -- are bound to creating the kind of society and state in which individual human lives don't matter so much. And individual human beings have little or no role in sorting out the meaning of lives, what they will and die for. Mass industrial society, and the wreckage of that society we now live in, was a society in which all were to become "one with the public good." In which we were to become bees around our commander (whoever that might be). Individual human life has no meaning and no value save for its place in the "public good" -- a "public good" arrived at solely by the assertions of the powerful in the community.

This is why I fear collective politics. I have, in the last couple of years, backed away from a positive libertarianism, mostly because human beings can only rarely choose the conditions of their existence. And efforts to choose neighbors becomes an exercise in choosing who I or we will not care about.

All the same, I still fear the destructive power of the state -- and the corporation, especially as it works closely with the state (as all have since the 1870s) -- to attempt to create that well-ordered world of, if not equality and leisure, then at least one in which I am just one more cog in a great machine that is society, to be used until broken and discarded when no longer convenient. (Or to be bent and abused until I am deemed useful.) I'm not so afraid of that power as I once was, mostly because we don't live in the world of 1914. State power, while ominous and looming, is constrained in ways it was not a century ago.

But the dream inspired by Plutarch's description of Spartan society is an old one. Somewhere it captivates. And no doubt it will captivate again. And it will devastate and destroy again too.

God Said to Noah....

I'm working on a song -- a children's song, no less -- about the Genesis story of Noah and the flood. (Genesis 6-10, more or less, if one includes all the genealogy of which people are descended from which sons of Noah.) And I'm always still a little shocked at how we sanitize scripture for our children. A story of God destroying the world becomes a series of cute drawing of a man with a beard, a bunch of animals (the kind you might find painted on a nursery wall), a great big boat, and a rainbow.

God being sorry for human wickedness and vowing to eradicate it all becomes the animals went in two-by-two.

We don't just do this for our children, either. This sanitizing of scripture becomes something we as adults do, too. There's a lot of violence in scripture. God does a lot of violence in scripture. To God's people. God threatens, cajoles, throws tantrums. God is at God's utmost worst in Numbers, behaving much like an abusive parent who you dare not offend or annoy lest you get struck down with plague or by an angry, deputized Levite wielding a sword.

I try not to shy away from this. Whatever the nature of God, the human experience of God, as related in scripture, at time is a very violent one. That is, we understand God to be violent or we understand God in violence. I do not quite know why we have sanitized scripture. I like to blame the bourgeoise sentimentality of modernity for such sanitizing, and maybe there's something to that. Bourgeoise moderns like to believe they are civilized and non-violent, but really, most have exported and abstracted their violence to the state, where it becomes bureaucratic and impersonal -- drone strikes, mutually assured destruction, the fine grinding violence of systems of administration, law and so forth that destroy those who cannot or will not conform. None of this, however, is the point of this essay.

So, as I have been trying to find a hook for this song, I have been asking myself -- what is the meaning of the Noah story in scripture? Why is it there?

And I think I have found it. The story explains why there is evil in the world.

Let's start at Genesis 6, which begins with some strange allusions to Sons of God making babies with "daughters of man" and creating "the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown."* The authors/editors of Genesis outline the situation this way:

(5) The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (6) And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (7) So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” (8) But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. (Genesis 6:5-8, ESV)

God is sorry. God is angry. God regrets all this creation that was, only six chapters earlier, "good" (טוב). God tells Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh," which is clearly a lie, since God is saving Noah and his family and gives explicit (though confused -- two of every sort or seven of the sacrificial things, "clean animals," which have not been specified because it isn't Leviticus yet?) instructions on how to be saved. God is going to destroy the world, and make an end of most flesh. But not all of it.

And it rains. And rains. And rains. And everyone and everything dies. (La la la la la!) This you know. God eventually remembers Noah, and finds a place for the great big boat to land. And once the waters subside enough, Noah builds an altar and makes a burnt offering to the Lord. (God and the Lord are not interchangeable terms, and seeing where a one is used to the exclusion of the other can help you figure out where scripture was edited.) At that point, the authors/editors of Genesis 8 write:

(21) And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. (22) While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (ESV)

This, so far as I can tell is the point of the story. God is sorry for having created, and now God seems to realize that God acted in haste and anger in destroying everything. God's actions here changed nothing. People are evil from their earliest days. And so, knowing this, God promises so long as there is time, as there are seasons, as long as the earth remains, God will tolerate evil. Because the Good God moved to rid the world all of evil was the same Good God who was moved to regret having done just that. And moved to regret by the smell of a burnt offering, no less. God would later protest God didn't need burnt offerings. But on this day, God needed the smoke of a barbecue.

No apologies and no explanation from God. Just a promise. "I will never again curse the ground because of man ... neither will I ever strike down every living creature as I have done." And that is why there is evil in the world. God made a promise. So far, it appears to have been kept.

Now, I suppose someone could argue: God is all-powerful, and could strike the evil people down without destroying those who found favor. (As in the Noah story, or the story of Lot and Abraham in the unwelcoming cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.) As a matter of reason, sure, why not? Zap the wicked, leave the good standing. Or rapture the good away, and leave the wicked to suffer. But as a matter of experience, as relayed in scripture, God's power seems not so tightly focused. It seems to catch the good and evil up in its midst at the same time. It's a big jawbone and we all get smoted with it.

Or maybe there aren't that many good people to rapture. There was just Noah, after all. His family seems to have been saved merely on his account.

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* And leaving aside for now the fact that Genesis 10:8 says: "Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man." Consistency is not one of scripture's virtues.

Businessmen and Entrepreneurs

A confession: I have not actually been listening to the GOP convention live. And I won't be listening to the Democrat convention either. I am not a partisan politics junkie.

So I get all my stuff second hand, usually filtered through NPR (and knowing that NPR is as annoying as Harry Shearer's "Continental Public Radio" parodies) or, increasingly from antiwar.com, The American Conservative, and occasionally salon.com (which can be more annoying and self-righteous, though not quite as vacuous, than even NPR). Which leaves me commenting on comments -- blogging on blogs. And I always feel slightly fraudulent when I do that.

But *sigh*, today I cannot help myself. Scott Galupo over at The American Conservative was critical of what he saw as the content of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's speech:

In Ryan’s intellectual bubble, there are job creators and entrepreneurs on one side and parasites on the other. There is no account of the vast gray expanse of janitors, waitresses, hotel front-desk clerks, nurses, highway maintenance workers, airport baggage handlers, and taxi drivers. They work hard, but at the end of the day, what can they be said to have “built”?

And this is true. In the way I think Ryan means it -- probably in the Randian, lone über-hero against the mediocre world of parasites -- your typical laborer is most definitely not a entrepreneur. Samuel Goldman, in his comments on Galupo's posting (I am blogging about someone's comment on a blog -- what have I come to?), notes that Republicans no longer have room in their understanding of the American dream for "those who don’t reach the towering heights of achievement" so that they "can hope for stable lives that include a reasonable measure of comfort."

But I also remember reading this from the acceptance speech from the 1896 Democrat convention given by party nominee William Jennings Bryan:

We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak of this broader class of business men.

Part of me finds little difference between Galupo's estimation of Ryan thought and Bryan's words. What, after all, is the difference between and "entrepreneur" and a "businessman"?

Except there is a great deal of difference here. Bryan is defending the dignity of labor -- something I'm not sure Democrat or Republican elites know how to really do anymore. It's certainly nothing either party would stoop to doing at this point. The man who works only with his muscles is still doing business -- leasing his labor to someone who can pay. He still has property he trades on the open market, and deserves as much dignity and respect as any speculator or financier. Bryan is also defending the dignity of smallness in the face of bigness. 

Also, the sense I have is that missing from the Randian admiration of the heroic businessman is context. The reality is, most entrepreneurialism takes places within social networks, in communities, and does so in ways that makes sense to entrepreneur, investor and customer alike. And that seeks to minimize risk. (Because most entrepreneurs cannot get government to hedge risk and cover losses the way investment bankers have.) Entrepreneurialism almost entirely takes place within a web of cooperation and within a community. Bryan's speech understands that. In effect, Bryan is defending a "property right" where those who most staunchly defended private property saw none to begin with. (It has always been interesting to me that labor is only viewed as property once it is paid for, and then it becomes the property of the one buying it, never the one selling it. I think our default moral model for employment is slavery.)

I suspect if pushed on the matter, Ryan would clearly get that. But the GOP has so bought into the language of heroic individuals -- especially heroic capitalists battling the evil forces of predatory, regulatory government -- that attempting to acknowledge the social grounding of entrepreneurialism is a form of socialism. Or perhaps even communism. Who ends up buying the goods and services provided by the heroic individual capitalist is then something of a mystery. 

God is Not With You This Day

For some reason, I cannot help but remember this Bible passage from the 35th chapter of 2 Chronicles when I think of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reports that he is pressing for some kind of unilateral Israeli military attack on Iran, possibly to influence the U.S. election:

(20) After all this, when Josiah had prepared the temple, Neco king of Egypt went up to fight at Carchemish on the Euphrates and Josiah went out to meet him. (21) But he sent envoys to him, saying, “What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day, but against the house with which I am at war. And God has commanded me to hurry. Cease opposing God, who is with me, lest he destroy you.” (22) Nevertheless, Josiah did not turn away from him, but disguised himself in order to fight with him. He did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God, but came to fight in the plain of Megiddo. (23) And the archers shot King Josiah. And the king said to his servants, “Take me away, for I am badly wounded.” (24) So his servants took him out of the chariot and carried him in his second chariot and brought him to Jerusalem. And he died and was buried in the tombs of his fathers. All Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah. (25) Jeremiah also uttered a lament for Josiah; and all the singing men and singing women have spoken of Josiah in their laments to this day. They made these a rule in Israel; behold, they are written in the Laments. (2 Chronicles 35:2-25, ESV)

There is no obvious analogy to draw -- Egypt was not at war or even actively hostile to Judah in the Bible account, while Iran is actively hostile to Israel, and Iran's resources and reach were nothing compared to that of Egypt's at the time. 

Except that what strikes me here is the portrayal of King Josiah of Judah's absolute recklessness. He need not have picked a fight with Pharaoh Neco (who ended up choosing several of his successors, according to the Chronicles account). In many ways, this is a stunning account. (The version in 2 Kings lacks the detail, merely saying that Josiah joined battle with Neco at Megiddo as the Egyptian army was on its way to do battle with Assyria.) Josiah was the good king -- the priest Hilkiah finds and reads the 

Book of Moses, and Josiah leads the people of Judah in repenting, celebrating the passover in a way it had not been kept

... in Israel since the days of Samuel the prophet. None of the kings of Israel had kept such a passover as was kept by Josiah... (2 Chronicles 35:18, ESV)

So, far all his adherence to the covenant (something I don't credit Netanyahu with either), the account that Josiah rode out at the head of his army to fight Egypt when no fight was needed, when the Pharaoh of Egypt wondered what was itching Josiah's so that he had to wage war, and that the voice of Pharaoh  was the voice of God telling him to go home -- those are big deals in this account. Josiah was so itching to fight Egypt that he "disguised himself" ("donned [his armor] to fight him" in the JPS Tanakh) to lead his army out to fight. That's strange behavior for a good king, one who understood the importance of the teaching of Moses and the right worship of God.

That's what makes me think of Benjamin Netanyahu right now. I've never liked the man, not since he was Israel's spokesman in the United States in the early 1990s. I've never met him. But he seems to me like the kind of man who would pick a fight, a senseless and stupid fight, without any appreciation of the consequences. And he'd even work hard at picking that fight. Simply to fight. 

Big difference, though. If he picks a fight, he won't die on that battlefield.