Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thus spoke Dylan Thomas in probably his most famous poem, written to his dying father. This is, I think, the only truly human approach to death. Until the very end, of course, when it finally grabs you, and sucks the last bit of hope from your soul, when you are finally ready to give up your ghost, and in that surrender you find what we are led to believe is an overwhelming feeling of peace. But until that final moment, anyone worth their salt is going to fight that mutherf*cker for all they are worth.

I’m not a big fan of group projects. And I’m also not very comfortable with public discussions of things that the folks in my family, the descendents of Oakies who had stoically scraped out hardscrabble lives on this continent for centuries, have tended to keep to ourselves. Things like our own suffering. But I married into a bunch of Midwestern Catholics, and I’ve learned that they handle strong emotions in a different way than how I was raised. I don’t think either way is inherently better or worse than the other. Just different. But I’ve learned to respect my new family for their honest expression of strong feelings. In this vein I, along with 29 other bloggers, have been asked by Sheila Quirke, my cousin-in-law, to write a brief commemoration of Donna Quirke Hornik, her daughter, who passed away a little over a year ago, at the age of four, from a rare form of brain cancer.

Actually, I’m not going to tell you much about Donna. I really didn’t know her that well, at least not nearly as well as a lot of good folks who’ve already written very eloquent testimonials about her. Rather, I want to talk about the rest of us still living and breathing on this planet.

“I could have been someone,” laments Shane MacGowan in “The Fairy Tale of New York,” to which Kirsty MacColl responds, “Well so could anyone.” Which gets to the heart of our existential tragedy, MacCool a siren for all of our fates.

Life, probably all life, but certainly all individual human lives, including mine and yours, is both ecstasy and tragedy rolled into one another, the tragedy precisely that there is so much beauty to experience, there is so much truth that we feel compelled to tell, there are so many good things that we want to get done, that as we squander our allotted time in the light, the momentous heaviness of those wasted opportunities becomes almost too much to bear. We all have experienced those seemingly cruel twists, those moments when it becomes clear that great chunks of our potential will never be realized. But this is especially true of 4-year old girls who die of cancer.

We all have our own ways of raging against the dying of the light. For my cousin Sheila, this has become quite personal, as it is also a rage against the dying of the light of her daughter. As long as Sheila lives, she is determined not to let that happen.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sheila is determined not to be that type of “good” person, the one who looks back in lament at the frailness of her deeds. Rather, she is making her own green bay, in which the light of her daughter may continually dance. She is hosting a benefit for St. Baldrick's Foundation, which raises money for pediatric cancer research, and you can support her, if you are so inclined, by going to Donna's Good Things.

Fascists for the New Millennium

Welcome to the Meritocracy. We as a culture have become increasingly comfortable with the notion that everyone should be free to rise as high as their merit can take them, to the point where, in many circles, this idea is now a given. Perversely, we have also become a much more bureaucratic and conformist society over the past 50 years, one that can process only a pinched and narrow vision of merit, leaving the test takers and the product makers as the grand winners in our evolving societal bargain.

In politics, the folks who now run this country, people like Michael Bloomberg, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, et al., increasingly come from a rarified and specific class, that of the educated elite. While their birth places and backgrounds are varied, the one constant, no matter what their roots, is that most of our current leaders graduated from the same small coterie of Ivy League schools. By and large, these are men and women who knew what they wanted at a very early age. These were the kids who sat at the front of the class, who always turned their homework in on time. They were go-getters at a time in their lives when most of their classmates were still just getting comfortable with their bodies, their world, and how they were going to navigate their place within it. And I guess we should congratulate these folks for their precocious talent. But we also need to recognize it is a very narrow range of personality that wins this game, specifically a type of person who can fixate on the tangible means to wealth and power by mid-adolescence, if not earlier.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a great man could reveal his merit at some later stage in his life, but that world has largely disappeared. Yale graduate (Obama), Yale graduate (George W.), Rhodes scholar (Clinton), Yale graduate (the elder Bush): Our Presidents are symbols of the possible, and these are the men we have elected to run our country for the past 23 years. And now, it looks like we will soon be able to choose between which of two graduates from the Harvard Law School, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, will be our commander-in-chief for the coming four years.

And it isn’t just the Presidency, or even politics in general, where this is true. In a variety of fields, from the bowels of corporate America to the creative arts, it seems that a degree from a top-tier university has become an increasingly necessary calling card. I can speak as a journalist. A couple of generations back, journalism was still a working man’s profession. Sure, some reporters had a journalism degree from a major university, but many others were brought up through the ranks, from street hawker to cub reporter to newshound to columnist to bureau chief. But for at least the past couple of decades, the established news organizations have placed more and more emphasis on a strong academic pedigree. When I worked for a financial newswire, almost all of my peers had Master’s degrees from a prestigious journalism program, either tony schools on the eastern seaboard or highly regarded Midwestern institutions like Michigan, Missouri, or Northwestern. And, at least at the lower levels of the profession, what we earned didn’t even come close to justifying that kind of personal or societal expenditure. I personally was able to buck this trend and land a job despite the fact that I got my degree from a lowly teacher’s college, namely Northeastern Illinois University. But my boss hailed from Australia, a country where commoners are still respected, and I suspect that is part of the reason she gave me a chance, as I have little doubt that most American-raised bureau chiefs would have taken one look at my resume and dropped it into the circular file.

I have long put Michael Bloomberg, both the individual and the politician as well as the news corporation that bears his name, at the avant garde of this new age of meritocracy. As a journalist, I heard too many stories about his demanding standards and his enormous ego, how it was company policy to hire two people for the same position, place them at opposite ends of the office, and then summarily fire the one that showed the lesser promise within his or her first few days on the job. And I knew that resumes and pedigree always meant a lot in their corporate culture, and that this could be traced all the way back to the Man himself.

Their basic argument is simple, and on the surface at least somewhat compelling: In an interconnected world where there are thousands of potential employees for any particular position, a large corporation needs a simple heuristic with which to sort the wheat from the chaff. By inculcating managers to look for a prestigious degree as a prerequisite for that first interview, the corporation may lose a little wheat in the initial sorting, but it will also get rid of a lot of chaff, the assumption being that anyone who can get into an Ivy League school in this day and age is, at the very least, not a blooming idiot.

I admit that in some ways this may just be sour grapes. I staked my life on the rather indolent, hippy-fried notion that pursuing your true path was not just what mattered in life but was also the best way to have influence. Growing up as a kid in 1970’s California, we were all trained to be little transcendentalists. If we wanted to have meaning and purpose, first we had to go off and explore the world and get to know ourselves. Sure, that was all a crock, but so is the facile meritocracy we have become.

Now, if the only downside to the iron grip of our contemporary meritocracy is that just a narrow band of academic workhorses are being recognized by the established social institutions, you would probably be correct in regarding this as at worst an acceptable misfortune. But what this new meritocracy has been doing to our country is more sinister than that. From the NYPD’s late-night assault on the Occupy Wall Street camps to the city’s aggressive harassment of cigarette smokers and recreational pot users (for which a whopping 50,000 arrests were made across NYC in 2010), the supposedly tolerant Mayor Bloomberg has, if anything, looked to put an even tighter rein on the city’s lifestyle than did the more openly oppressive Giuliani administration. Similarly, Rahm Emmanuel is currently seeking city council approval to further restrict free speech rights ahead of Chicago’s hosting of the G8 summit this May.

Bloomberg and Emmanuel are fascists for the New Millennium. They are totalitarians who also happen to believe in gay rights, progressive urban planning, and the perfectibility of man. They may be assholes, but they’re our assholes. At least so they want you to believe.

The new meritocracy is creating a brave new world, and they are doing it for your own good. As the Dead Kennedys presciently quipped about an imagined President Jerry Brown over 30 years ago: “Zen fascists will control you/ 100% natural/ You will jog for the master race/ and always wear a happy face.”

Health, happiness, and tolerance have become cultural obligations. And if after your trip to Whole Foods and the yoga studio you are still lacking in either of the first two of these, don’t worry, whatever your malady, they probably have a pill for it. And don’t be surprised if a tolerance pill is on the way. Or more feasibly, some geneticist will uncover an intolerance gene, and we will shuffle all the kids with the gene off to Tolerance Camp, where they have their ways to make you into an acceptable citizen.

My biggest problem with many of my progressive friends is that they continually mistake symmetry of belief for nobility of soul. So they repeatedly fall for the appeal of, or at the very least tolerate, the likes of a Michael Bloomberg, a John Edwards, a Jon Corzine, power hungry egotists whose antics should have sent off their bullshit detectors years ago.

After years of playing their game, I’m starting to come around to the belief that the Meritocracy which increasingly runs the United States of America poses the gravest threat in my lifetime to our country’s long-held freedoms. As far as the meritocrats are concerned, a vigorous dissent from their policies is not conducive to any of their larger societal goals. Dissent is messy. And inefficient. Within the absolute surety of their fevered minds, they probably don’t understand why we inefficient little beings won’t just submit to their vision of the world. Little wonder they are trying to slowly but firmly squash us.

Sympathy for the Demon

Southern California is a land that eats its young. If I were to stretch my net wide enough, the list of my peers who are now dead would be as long as my arm, and if I were to expand the list to include those who are now but a hollow shell of their former selves, it would be like a photographic negative of the stars in the heavens, an almost numberless recitation of lives lost, of potentials unfulfilled.

I’ve yet to read a book that better captures the manic desperation of my time than Jack Grisham’s “An American Demon,” of the existential dichotomy that everything was possible but that nothing was right. The Orange County punk scene, circa 1980, was a white hot blast of unrivalled aggression, a dagger to the throat of a complacent suburbia where broken families, drug addiction, and a hollow materialism were hidden behind the smiling façade of the endless California summer.

Most of us were a little crazy, and some were just plain fucked. I had a friend named Rob who one day dyed his hair canary yellow, superglued devil horns onto his scalp, spray-painted a black swastika on his surfboard, and told me he was about to head to the beach with a blackjack in his bag, looking for a fight. Just about anything was a good reason for bloodshed, but jocks and “hippies,” which essentially meant the old school surfers who didn’t like the punk kids on their beach, were particular targets of abuse. From the cops to the jocks to the bikers to the Mexican gangsters, we took them all on. And lived to tell the tale. Well, most of us. At least for awhile.

Jack Grisham was one of the leaders of this new wave of crazy beach kids. He was also the lead singer for Vicious Circle and TSOL, bands who developed a big following in the scene. While he may have been a first class asshole, Jack Grisham was also kind of a hero of mine. I was a scrawny kid from honors class who, predictably enough, hated to get hit and was not much good in a fight. At the time, there was a large crew of very large guys, many of them football players from Edison High School, known as the Crop Dusters (a “crop” being slang for short hair), who would drive around the coast of central Orange County, looking for punk kids to beat up. I would flip them off, of course, and get real mouthy. But once they got out of their cars and started their approach, I’d turn tail and run for all I was worth, at least if I was by myself. Now, if I was with a crew, that was a different story. I got pretty good at being a set-up man, looking some guy in the eye while my buddy cut his legs out from under him and then giving the fallen jock a swift kick to the skull. But one-on-one, I was just another lit school pussy.

Jack Grisham wasn’t one of these turn-tail punks. The night when the Vicious Circle crew routed a band of Crop Dusters at the river jetty, sending most of them to the hospital, was a legend we all knew (and one that is recalled by Grisham in his memoir). If an accompanying legend was that the VC’s, as part of an induction ceremony, stripped a young girl naked, tied her up, stuffed her private parts with raw hamburger, and then let a Doberman loose on her to do its worst, well it was abhorrent, of course, but these devils were our devils, and pretty damn good in a fight.

One of the great things about punk is that it is both decentralized and local, making it pretty easy to have direct contact with your heroes. I’d meet Jack at parties. We even had a couple of good conversations. He was smart and personable. So when Jack would get on stage, I could honestly look up there and say, “I know that guy, and he’s pretty cool.” Even if he was also a misogynist, a thief, and a thug.

When the L.A. press first stumbled onto the crazy, violent, destructive scene that was boiling up at south suburban beach clubs like the Fleetwood and the Cuckoo’s Nest, many were incredulous. Few of these writers were native Angelenos, and they struggled to make sense out of where this scene had come from. Weren’t Californians supposed to be mellow, laid back, go-with-the-flow kinds of folks? How could we get so angry living near the beach? They didn’t understand who we were, of course.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s, Orange County was largely populated by the children of Oakies. My generation was the children of these children, the 3rd generation of Scotch-Irish fucks to live in the warm California sun. Couple this with the 1970’s notion of personal license, where most parents were too busy “doing their own thing” to raise their children, and we were the result. We are what happens when you take a bunch of defiant Celts, place them in a sunny land, feed them well and give them decent dental care, but also deracinate them and take away most of their cultural bearings. What happened was HB 1979. And Jack Grisham was our poster child.

I’ve always had a problem with literary nastiness. You shouldn’t be able to talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. When someone like Bret Easton Ellis evokes an unblinking portrait of violence, it makes me want to pull him into a back alley and hit him over the head with a tire iron. But I don’t have that problem with the memoirs of Jack Grisham, because the guy is the real deal. Now, I can’t vouch for how autobiographical this “memoir” actually is, as it begins with the idea that Grisham has been inhabited by a demon. So let’s just say that Grisham takes a bit of license in portraying his life. And he also misses why we were so angry, blaming it on irrelevancies like Ronald Reagan and the Contras. Sorry Jack, none of us really gave a crap about politics. It was just an excuse, a vehicle to express our pent-up rage. The actual reason we were angry was because our ancestors had toiled for generations to get us to where we were, and we were told that this was the Good Life, but we were offered nothing: No purpose, no meaning, nothing real at all, nothing but a hollow materialism and a prepackaged notion of youth. And the beach. We were offered the beach. Which was nice. But everything human around us pretty much sucked.

Jack Grisham was one of those guys who could stand up on stage and get his fans to do almost anything. But I tell you what I wanted him to do. Towards the end of one of TSOL’s sold-out shows at the Cuckoo’s Nest, after we had routed all the bouncers and the hippies and the wanna be cowboys at Zubies next door, I wanted Jack to tell us that we should all go down to South Coast Plaza and burn that fucker down. It would be our way of saying that the stupid consumer society they were offering us was unacceptable. And it would have scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. It would have been glorious.

Instead, what we witnessed was a long, slow decay, both individually and collectively, a decay which is lived out in Grisham’s memoir. Grisham would set up scene after scene of depravity, and I kept telling myself, “Oh no, he’s not really gonna do that, is he?” And then the tale would head somewhere even worse. Destructive relationships, mind-numbing bouts of violence, alcohol and drug addiction, a general fall from grace; it’s an oft-told tale, but this is not a typical celebrity tell-all book. In the first place, Grisham wasn’t living the high life; he was increasingly broke and still living with his mom in a nondescript tract home on the flats of Long Beach. And he was convinced that he was possessed by a demon.

When I wasn’t horrified by Grisham’s actions, I found myself laughing with him, like at one point during his steep decline, as he was driving to his job at the “University Club” section of the young men’s clothing department in The Broadway, dressed in a dorky pastel polo shirt and wearing a name tag, when a car full of tough guys forced this seeming dork off to the shoulder of the 405 Freeway. Grisham gets out of his car, pulls a sawed-off shotgun from under his seat, and unloads a round of buckshot into the other car as they were stopped right there on the side of the freeway.

Then there are the odd sidebars of cosmogony, all justified by the fact that, hey, the narrator is a demon, so he has an up-front purview and can thus state as a matter of fact that all men go to God when they die, while demons are reincarnated, at least until the point that the “Not-Quite,” as Grisham refers to his demonic overlord, doesn’t need them anymore (at which point the demon simply ceases to exist). Also, he posits that men crave alcohol because it is a “synthetic God,” thus replacing and supplanting our own innate desire for a connection with the real thing. Then, after these bits of amateur theology, it’s back to vandalizing churches and screwing underage girls. So it is an odd book, a bit of a crazy quilt. But I liked it in part because of that.

I left Los Angeles in 1988 and moved to Chicago. I left for a lot of reasons, but probably the biggest was that I had gotten too immersed in the Hollywood music scene, which was becoming a dead-end road littered with victims of addiction, delusion, and plain old bad luck. I needed to find somewhere else to call home. But I still visited Southern California every year. And while most of my close friends are still alive, and many have found their niche, on seemingly every visit I would find out about one or two more folks from the scene who had kicked the bucket. This has been going on for over 20 years now. And these aren’t just due to the normal, expected causes of death. Sure, there has been the usual share of drug overdoses and suicides, but there have also been a lot of weird deaths, from drowning to a violent mugging to getting run over by a freight train. It is like the entire town lives under a bad moon. There are a lot of things that I love about Chicago, but perhaps the most inviolable is the fact it gave me another home away from all that shit.

Like a lot of us back in the day, Jack Grisham also tried to escape. At one point, he briefly moved up to Alaska, a move noted in his memoirs, but he hated the isolation and the cold and was soon back at his parents’ house in Long Beach. And there he remained, spiraling steadily downward, until he wound up crawling into a concrete sewage pipe that ran underneath a local park, contemplating the idea of slitting his wrists and ending it all right then and there. Then he thought about his estranged daughter, crawled back out of the drainpipe, and decided to live.

One of the problems with playing music in L.A. was that it had become a very cliquish scene. There was always a notion that style mattered, to the point where it became hard to imagine the next relevant thing. A lot of bands foundered on these shores, TSOL included. They did a glam/goth album, followed by something a little more metal. And while some of their individual songs were good, the band seemed to be thrashing around in a failed search for a new identity. So when I listened to Jack sing about depression or suicide on songs like "Beneath the Shadows", "I'm Tired of Life", or "Flowers at the Door," I assumed that he was just trying on another one of his personas. I now know that he wasn’t just trying to speak for the confused kids in his audience; he was one of us, another victim.

It seems every other prominent new writer these days hails from the same five-square mile patch of Brooklyn, channeling the same zeitgeist, or at the very least sitting in the same coffee houses. But most of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past couple of years have come from someplace else and been written by a comparative amateur. I find Grisham’s somewhat confused narrative style appealing. It sure beats another dish of polished tripe fed to you by some MFA grad. And unlike a lot of folks, Jack Grisham has stayed put, making a life amongst the non-descript tract homes of suburbia. He has written an inspired tale about my homeland. I wish him well.

Kissing Under the Mistletoe Mindtrap

One of the annoying things about being a parent is how we willingly clump ourselves into a generational herd, mooing and lowing our approval of the same products and huffing our disapproval, mostly under our breaths and in whispered tones, at those who choose to ignore the collective wisdom and do things their own way. I sometimes find myself falling into this mind trap, at least metaphorically clucking my tongue at the fits and foibles of a fellow mom or dad, and listening with eagerness at every tip of advice, from parenting techniques to product reviews. I’m also pretty sure that my own parenting techniques have been at the butt end of some of these collective guffaws, as I have shown absolutely no interest in doing some of the things that are expected these days from any right-thinking parent, like blending my own organic baby food (a practice that seems to have become almost de rigueur in some circles). Also, our 3-year old son’s bedtime is somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, and I’m sure this is probably considered negligent, or at the least a little bit loopy, by many parents (although I prefer to think that we are simply operating on Brazilian time).

A lot of this parental group-think is probably a necessary survival technique, particularly for first-time parents, as we seek to glean a few tips on how to navigate the shoals of bringing another soul into this world. But then I’ll look up from my position in the herd and see that we’ve all moseyed onto the same patch of rocky ground, seemingly for no other reason than the folks around us were doing the same thing. And I rarely feel more like this than during the Christmas season, which is a collective mind-fuck to begin with.

When I started hearing some of my fellow parents talk about “elf on a shelf,” my initial bovine instinct was one of fear that I was about to be left behind by the herd. I felt a brief pang of guilt that here was some crucial component of contemporary childhood that I had been denying my son, followed by the equally urgent instinct to wonder: “Where can I get one of those things?” Then I actually found out what an “elf on a shelf” was, and how much one cost (beginning somewhere well north of $20, at least if my sources are correct), and I began to wonder why I actually needed to shell out that kind of cash for a glorified doll. And when I began listening to how parents were moving this overpriced doll around their house and having it “follow” their children, under the guise that the elf was going to be “reporting to Santa,” I began to get a little creeped out. Maybe Elf on a Shelf is one of those mass neuroses, like Rolfing, or key parties, whose dysfunction only becomes clear in retrospect.

So I have put “Elf on a Shelf” in the same place where “Go the Fuck to Sleep” resides, as a cultural phenomena of my generation of parents that I have chosen to ignore. Nothing personal, but I just don’t get why we as a culture have all of a sudden gotten incredulous, bordering on apoplectic, that our children don’t just want to run off and hop into bed when it would be most convenient for us. Nor do I get why I’d want to try and convince my child that a stuffed elf was watching him, and that he better be “good” if he wants any Christmas presents. Sorry, but I’m not playing this game. Especially with $30 as the price of entry.

That being said, I love Christmas. I love the family element. I love the Christian ritual. I love the echoes of a pagan bacchanalia. It’s all good to me, with the possible exception of the crooning post-war treacle and the Santa kitsch. And here’s why:

Nordic Midwinter Fest: At its base, Christmas is a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, looking forward to longer days and the warming of the sun. A lot of Christmas imagery combines the sacred and the pagan, and some, for instance the Christmas tree, are more pagan than not. The evergreen tree is brought in to the home as a promise of nature’s renewal. Sure, it also alludes to Christ’s own promise of eternal life, but at its essence, the Christmas tree is gussified nature worship, with the lit decorations an echo of the stars outside and of the returning sun. It is a symbol that echoes back to some midwinter orgy after everyone had drunk a yard of mead. The midwinter drinking fest is a grand legacy of the Northern European tribes, a 3,000-year tradition that invites family, friends and guests to an extended toast around the fire, creating the kind of bonds that served these people well when they’d hop in a boat the following spring and go pillage the country next door.

Christian Ritual: If the Christmas tree is actually pagan, the nativity scene and the Advent calendar remain predominantly Christian symbols (although even here a lot of the imagery is a bundled mess). And a lot of the grand old hymns come right out of the traditional Christian liturgy. I think I’d love many of these songs even if I were not a man of faith. Emotionally, many are a mix of triumph and foreboding, of grandeur combined with simple joy. “Fall on your knees and hear the angels rejoicing, O night, O holy night, When Christ was born,” the song soars, its joy leavened by a fear of the weight of the moment. Like the three wise men, we are all, regardless of ideology or creed, welcome to rejoice in Christ’s birth which, like the birth of each and every child, holds all the promise of human possibility, a divinity that, at least on this day, is reflected in the pagan bonfire as surely as those of the Sacraments.

Hearth and Family: Most of these traditions are really a more recent addition to the more ancient rituals of both the pagan and the Christian church. Many date back less than 200 years. Even such a seemingly venerable tradition as Santa coming down the chimney was just a gimmick created in the 19th Century, the co-option of older symbols in an attempt to make the home seem like where it’s at, an only partly successful effort to lure men back to their families, rather than having them go out on Christmas night and “wassailing” with their buds. This appeal of the hearth remains at the heart of the contemporary American Christmas. Christmas is an invitation into the joys of domesticity, where we can look around at the home and the family we have created and see that it is all good.

Fun and Kitsch: I guess I have the biggest problem with this fourth lure of the contemporary American Christmas. I’m just not into the ostentatious display of goods. I’m not into breathy middle aged men, generally sounding like they are at least two martinis to the wind, warbling about presents, and city lights, and snow. I’m not into music being sung with your jazz hands out. But I like Christmas parties in spite of all that. I like downing a few drinks and hanging out with the boss’ wife, or one of the secretaries, and listening to them complain about some authority figure or how excited they were to see “Million Dollar Quartet.”

These joys, from the transcendent to the transitory, from the passionate to the mundane, are why I eagerly dive each year into these holiday rituals, as full as they are of ideological contradiction, societal expectations, and collective group-think. I do it, in short, because these rituals are both beautiful and true, and they enrich my life.

None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us

“Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective.”

Thus spake the Asshole of the Century in my initial manifesto, a two-sided, one-page Xeroxed declaration to the world, titled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” which I stuck in book stores and coffee shops around Chicago, circa 1995. And I still find these words to live by.

I had my spurts of youthful rebellion, where I was carried away by the passions of the crowd. As a punk rocker in the early-1980’s, my friends and I were engaged in a series of running battles with the L.A. police, who for whatever knee-jerk and ill-informed reason, didn’t want to allow hard core punk bands to play music in their town. In particular, I remember the Exploited riot in East L.A. back in 1983, where, in a mix of inchoate anger and primitive glee, I tried kicking in the window of a Bank of America building while a mob of us were being chased by the cops. Of course, the window was made of protective plexiglass, so all I left was a small boot-sized hole about knee-high in the window, an anemic spectacle that only underscored my impotence and cowardice in the grand scheme of things. My angry gesture at The Man, kicking a hole in his bank, only served to make life a little less civilized for the folks in the barrio where the concert was held, proving me to be just another selfish white boy shitting on their neighborhood before returning to my trendier digs on the West Side of town.

From apolitical sports rallies to major social movements, activist or pacifist, left, right, or center, I reject them all. History is one long litany of the tyranny of the mob. From the French and the Russian Revolutions, through the Weimer Republic, all the way back to the vague but ominous threat posed by the Roman plebians whenever they felt that they weren’t being given enough bread by the Empire or that the quality of the gladiator fests and circuses wasn’t to their liking. In fact, popular uprisings tend to follow a common narrative (actually, the most common narrative is that they peter out and fail to accomplish anything at all, but let’s ignore that probability for the moment): The people, through whatever means, overthrow the shackles of authority; they put their own leaders in charge; they become disappointed in their leaders, often deposing or even killing them; then an autocrat takes over, and the people are ruled by an even more oppressive authority than when they began (ex: Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Khomeini).

Even some of the great, heroic struggles that are mythologized in our school system have their ominous side. It is taken as a given that the civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi was a great success, and it eventually led to Indian independence. What is less discussed are the Hindu/Muslim massacres, one of the great ethnic bloodbaths of the 20th Century in which close to a million people died at the hands of those who hated them because they had a different creed, massacres that went hand-in-hand with independence and partition. In essence, Gandhi and the Indian congnoscenti encouraged the common people to express themselves, and then they were shocked that this expression didn’t stop with the people’s opposition to British rule but extended to the hatred of their neighbors (the ones with the funny habits and the different beliefs).

So, to all my friends participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, understand that I am instinctively not an ally. I don’t trust the mob, even a well-meaning one. Education, enlightenment, and the advancement of the human race are accomplished one-on-one, or in small groups, where people have the opportunity to discuss an idea in depth and to ponder its implications. It’s why the printing press may be the greatest invention in the history of our species (rivaling seemingly more urgent advances like fire, or the invention of modern antibiotics), because all books are essentially a conversation between the writer and his reader, and it is this intimacy that makes them so powerful a tool to change the way we think. The mob, by contrast, is only as intelligent as the most primitive dolt that it needs to bring along for the ride. Much like a newspaper is written at the 6th-grade level so as to cast its net over a wide range of potential readers, the mentality of a mob must drop to the lowest common denominator.

But within its incongruous amalgam of complaint, there are elements of the Occupy Wall Street/La Salle Street protests with which I sympathize. For one, I appreciate the high percentage of homemade signs. Last Friday, when I braved the gauntlet of wanna be rabble-rousers in my suit and tie to broadcast my weekly market analysis from the CME trading floor, amidst all the prefabricated placards to “End the Fed” or “Give Us Jobs” was a woman, maybe 40, sensibly dressed and attractive, pointing a large cardboard sign directly at the Board of Trade building (in contrast to most of the other signs pointed either towards passing cars or at the Chicago Federal Reserve building across the street). Her handwriting was relatively small, making it difficult to read, but eventually I made out the following quote, by Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

She stood there, simultaneously meek and defiant, and I loved the fact she took the time to make that sign, quoting some old German who’s been dead for 200 years, dragging the sign downtown, and then spending her Friday pointing it at all the futures traders, the supposed enemy, heading in to work, on the off-chance that one of us would take notice and that the scales would then fall off our eyes, that we’d realize there were other avenues open for us than spending all our energy chasing the almighty dollar. I made eye contact with this woman, briefly smiled, and then walked inside to conduct my weekly dog-and-pony show.

Of course, I am to the financial industry what Stukas Over Bedrock, my old punk band, was to the L.A. music scene, circa 1984. Just as no one would confuse the career of Stukas Over Bedrock with that of Motley Crue, I am barely a blip on the financial radar, a stay-at-home Dad masquerading as an important voice in a suit, who for the past three years has managed to squeak just enough supplemental income out of trading to forestall any immediate need to go out and actually work for a living.

But the comparison with my brief and flailing music career is instructive, because I used to hate Motley Crue. I wouldn’t have cared if they were just another hair band, wasting all their money on Jack Daniels and blow while toiling through another Wednesday night as the support act at Gazzarris. It was Motley Crue’s success that made them a target of my wrath. How dare everyone else not see through their vacancy and their pretty boy calculations. But let’s face it, the youth of Middle America wasn’t about to start playing “Life Like Yogi” (the closest thing we ever had to a “hit,” reaching #5 on the Flipside/Rodney on the Roq hit parade) on their car stereos, even if they all immediately soured on Nikki Sixx. So there was really no reason for me to begrudge Motley Crue their success.

Similarly, I recognize that wealth is no longer created primarily by labor, but by ideas. A hundred years ago, if someone wanted to make something that people needed, he would hire a bunch of laborers to make it for him and then sell this product for a profit. The tension between management and labor was real, because the laborers were actually making the things that management was selling. But these days, labor is a much less important part of the process. We don’t need 10,000 workers in an auto plant; we have machines to do most of the work. We don’t need fifty women on a conveyor belt, sorting cookies into boxes; we might need just one to inspect the work of the machines that took the place of her 49 former co-workers.

When the designers at Apple come up with a new product, the idea itself could be worth billions. The people who figure out the most efficient, dependable way to make this new product are also worth many millions. But the factory workers needed to assemble these phones or computers are really not that valuable, and they are getting less so by the year.

So the people who generate ideas, be it in food, medicine, technology, or even (gasp) banking, will continue to be in increasing demand. The people who have advanced degrees and can facilitate the implementation of these ideas will also be quite valuable. Just below them will be all the service workers that are needed to run our society, from the teachers to the health care workers, and they will also be paid fairly for their work. And skilled labor, like carpentry or masonry, will also have value. But the grunt labor that used to be needed to produce things will be worth increasingly little as the world continues to automate. For now, it may find refuge in Third World factories or on the lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley, but those days are numbered. Even China is in the process of automating, and it won’t be that long until John Deere invents a lettuce picker that will make most migrant farm labor as obsolete as the mule.

This is our great dilemma: That most of what the human race has done to support itself over the past few hundred years, namely physical labor, is no longer worth enough to provide a decent standard of living in the modern world, and we as a society have to find something productive for all these people to do. The solution, of course, is education: We need to raise our children to be able to dwell in the world of ideas, to be the creative leaders of tomorrow. Failing that, we need to give them the scientific and linguistic competence to support the people who have ideas, or they need to be able to teach, to cure, or to feed. At the very minimum, we need to give those folks choosing a life of labor a valuable skill or craft that can’t be taken away by an uneducated immigrant or a machine. This is our future. And all the complaints about bankers are merely a sideshow.

Not that I don’t hate what the banking industry has done to this country. It is appalling. They have centralized political and economic power in a few hands; they have moved capital from the countryside into the seats of power; they have so interjected themselves into the political establishment in Washington D.C. that they have become virtually inseparable from the government. But, sad to say, even if these injustices were all corrected, the unskilled laborer who dropped out of high school would remain just as unemployable as he is today.

In other words, I want to join the fray without supporting the activists and conspiracy theorists who seem to be leading the charge. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to “End the Fed.” For all its flaws, the U.S. Federal Reserve saved us from another Great Depression in 2008, and for this it deserves our thanks. Anyone who thinks getting rid of the Federal Reserve will make our economy more stable understands nothing about our history before the FED was created, a tarnished history littered with repeated recessions and economic collapses. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that we all “deserve” a job. In fact, I think it is just the opposite. Even among the employed, there are a lot of incompetent workers who actually don’t “deserve” a job at all. We as a society may not want them to starve, or not be able to see a doctor if they are sick, but the notion that all of the bipedal herd consuming oxygen without offering anything of real value to the world are somehow “deserving” of anything better than a swift kick in the ass is misconceived.

So I won’t be joining all the true believers and their young tagalongs on the street, but I would nonetheless like to do my part in loosening the stranglehold the rich have on our society. And there are many worthy and practical causes to join on this end. But I believe the most elemental problem is how corporations of all stripes have intertwined themselves into the power structure of Washington D.C. And while there are many ways to attack this beast, I would like to throw my weight behind those looking to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case.

To be direct: This ruling, in which the majority of our Supreme Court justices granted corporations the same political and free speech rights as living human beings and disallowed regulations limiting the amount of money these corporations can give to certain political causes, is probably the worst decision by the Court since Plessy vs Ferguson. Citizens United was the capstone on a series of decisions the Supreme Court has made in recent years expanding the rights of corporations. I believe the best way to attack these decisions is by changing the Constitution. In this vein, we need a Constitutional Amendment limiting the rights of corporations. And while there are other proposals out there, I think the amendment should be worded like this:

“Corporations are not people and are not entitled to all of the same Constitutional rights as people. Specifically, corporations are not entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment right to free speech, as corporate political speech may be limited by the people’s legislative representatives. Also, money is not equivalent to speech, and its use in election campaigns may be limited by the people.”

So pass it on, and spread the word. Whatever else they may or may not bring to the table, the Occupy Wall Street folks have stirred up the Zeitgeist, and the time to do something about the increasing concentration of corporate power is now.

Purity Rules for the New Millennium (Revisited)

For more than a decade, dating back to the mid-1990’s, when I used to leave a one-page, two-sided Xeroxed missive at coffeehouses and underground record stores around the Chicago area,the Asshole of the Century has been my face to the world. However, this asshole is undergoing a crisis of confidence.

Don’t get me wrong. With a couple of notable exceptions, I remain stubbornly proud of all my old screeds. But I’m beginning to think that it is the wrong time to be the Asshole of the Century. It has gotten to the point where every Tom, Dick, and Harry, from the web to the roadway, tends to act like an asshole. We live in a world of devolving behavior, where propriety and a concern for the feelings of others are so far away from a lot of people’s minds as to be in danger of becoming a quaint anachronism. Subtlety, common decency, humility, circumspection, all of these virtues seem to be in increasingly short supply these days. And perhaps only in their absence has it become clear how much we will miss them.

The Asshole of the Century was created at a time when our counterculture had kind of fallen asleep. I wanted to accost folks as they walked into their favorite coffeehouse. To wake them up. Piss them off. Make them think. Or at least make them shake their heads and chuckle.

As part of my current soul searching, I have decided to revisit the original pamphlet, entitled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” in which I attempted to lay out the core beliefs that would guide this asshole in my future writings. It’s strange how this old rant can now seem like it was written by an alien hand while simultaneously laying bare certain intractable elements of my self. Reading them today, I don’t know how many of these principles I still agree with. For one, I’ve either become a lot dumber or a lot less pretentious over the intervening decade, because it took me multiple readings to even make sense out of this list of imperatives, correlations, dichotomies, and “chimera”.

But here it is, the foundational text of the Asshole of the Century:

Given that our malaise stems from an absence of purpose, our motives need to become pure. Purity takes many forms. There is purity of action, purity of intent, and the purity of an idea. Purity can be achieved through either redemption, grace, or discipline. Given that the objective is witnessed through action and that the rational mind is incapable of redemption or grace, we need to focus our thoughts on the following disciplines:

THE PRIMARY IMPERATIVE:
Truth is light;
Mendacity is decay.
All human vice has its root in deceit.

THE SECONDARY IMPERATIVE:
Power is only legitimate as mutually recognized benevolence or as a means to suppress mendacity and its consequences.

THE TERTIARY CORRELATIONS:

Structure
Structure is the secret to both the mystical and the pragmatic. Even the most inspired of men must hang his hat on structure.

Progress
Without progress, mankind ceases to define himself. He becomes merely a beast. And as beasts go, man is nothing better than a homicidal monkey.

Guilt and shame
Only by accepting the dictates of guilt and shame can we throw off the putrid poncho. Shame is a gift that is not granted to many. It allows us to see deeply into ourselves. It enables us to make amends. Guilt, while more hollow than shame, is still a tonic for the selfishness of the consumer age.

Civility
People are social creatures. Our most important actions are those in which we engage with other men. We can best be judged by the degree to which our behavior is civil. Every uncivil act is a crime against the polis and against our better selves. It can be explained only by an advertising culture that has manipulated our monkey selves for its own purposes. We must counteract the ugliness of consumerism and the self-made man with the rigid dignity of our Puritan lineage.

THE DICHOTOMIES

Purpose vs. Meaning
As humans are a social race and defined by our striving for progress, purpose is a necessary corollary to human meaning. Similarly, without an understood concept of meaning, our purpose cannot be reasonably divined. One concept seems to simultaneously demand yet preclude the other.

Action vs. Contemplation
The mind is like light. It can either have weight or be in motion. In the West, our parable is the choice between Rome and Judea. The Romans cut their hair short, symbolizing that they were people of action. The Hebrews let their hair grow long in a demonstration that they were a contemplative nation. As regular folk, we are caught between the paths of Christ and Caesar and thus succeed as neither.

The Philosoph and the Spirit
Though thought can be employed in the service of Truth, there is an irrational element that the logician may never divine. In the beginning was the word, and it has power that cannot be subdivided or defined.

Freedom and Discipline
Without discipline there is no freedom. The world of the brute animal is filled with constraint. Only by the willful imposition of the structures of the human mind can we become free. If this imposition has negative consequences, it is because our minds are still weak and have not submitted to the secondary imperative.

CHIMERA

JUSTICE is neither benevolent nor true. It is typically retroactive, a response to its perceived absence. It is absurd to create something by first looking for its antithesis. What we mean by justice is really just an attempt at social consensus. It is a practical concept and not a moral imperative.

DUTY is the great bugaboo. It is enforced obedience, an attempt to disengage our moral compass. Every duty should be looked at as an individual action and subjected to scrutiny. An appeal to duty is truly doodee.

DEMOCRACY: The common man is often wrong. The public is subject to whim. Since the majority once wanted slavery and Mussolini, they could soon be coming for your own skin. Masses by definition are scary things. A political rally is little more than an organized mob. Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective. Those people should lead who have the moral imperative. In a benevolent society, the philosophers would be kings and the kings would be philosophers.

PRIVILEGE: Like children gathered around the dinner table, we all covet the privileges of others.

IDENTITY: The need for identity is our greatest weakness, the Achilles Heel which marketers and ideologues will use to suck us into their schemes. As long as we continue to crave identities that give us purpose and meaning, in the end we will all be played for suckers. The less you care about who you are and where you came from, the more likely you are to focus on something that matters.

The Consolations of the Damned

There is something about the notion of predestination that speaks to me. It is deep-seated. Part of it might be some Calvinist echo that has been deposited into the back of my psyche, like they tried to do through dreams in the summer blockbuster “Inception,” a trigger of some ancient memory, either part of the collective unconscious that we are all share as Americans, or the more specific memories of my Scotch-Irish forebears. But while I was raised Presbyterian, historically among the most dour Calvinists of the bunch, we were California Presbyterians, which doesn’t really count. Growing up, my most salient memory of our church was of a pastor riffing on the prospect of alien life forms while officiating over my grandfather’s funeral. It wasn’t the kind of church where they talked about Calvin’s belief, formed through detailed calculations and a meticulous reading of the Bible, that there are exactly 244,000 elect in the history of the world, predestined for heaven by the ineluctable wisdom of our creator, and that the rest of us are essentially damned from birth.

The notion of there being a limited number of “chosen” to receive a full measure of God’s blessings intuitively makes sense to me, and I don’t think this is just because I was born an American or raised Presbyterian. Sure it is a brutal and rather pessimistic view of the cosmos. But, for better or worse, the idea of a limited elect also seems like a rather clear-eyed assessment of how the world works. It is blessedly devoid of the wish-fulfillment and fantasies of most religions, and doesn’t make any apologies for the seemingly cruel imbalances of fate. Hey, look around without the rose-colored blinders on, and why would anyone think that the universe doesn’t play favorites? No one likes to live in a world where almost all of us stand tried and convicted before we are even born. But who’s to say it’s not true?

“It’s not fair.” That, of course, is the eternal lament of the child, which was followed in our home, as I’m sure it still is in millions around the country, with my mom’s predictable refrain: “Yeah, well life’s not fair.” In other words, get used to it. Which is what I imagine will be the response by whatever deity set this entire mess in motion if we happen to have the opportunity to meet him/her/it on judgment day. It is indicative of the hubris of the modern age that for some reason we believe that we are the ones who should be judging God, rather than the other way around.

Using whatever cosmology you want to set the scales, by this point in my life, it is pretty clear that I am not one of the “chosen ones.” Nor are virtually any of my friends. By just about any standard, we fall short. In aggregate and as individuals, most of us are not particularly moral, or caring, or sympathetic. We certainly don’t have the instinctive empathy for the suffering of our fellow man that seems to be the standard currency in most religious faiths.

But we still have our moments of redemption, and for many of us, these moments tend to happen at the music club and the concert hall. For me, music remains the greatest of the arts (followed closely by literature and then architecture). This past spring, on my most recent trip to L.A., while at a party full of music industry nerds that at the time seemed like just another wasted evening, some 2nd tier record producer told me that one of the great things about music is that it somehow manages to express the essence of an era through sound. Through the resonance of vibrating frequencies in the air, musicians manage to construct an abstract mathematics that conveys what it means to live in that particular place and time on our planet. In my own mangling of this thought: Music comes closest to expressing the essence of our souls. And for the lonely and the fallen to be granted moments of such communion through music speaks more strongly to the existence of a benevolent God than anything I know.

I’ve been granted a few of these moments this summer, the most recent on Sunday, when Iggy Pop and the Stooges played the Riviera Theatre. I’ll not bore the uninitiated with a lengthy rundown of the concert, other than to note that Iggy was in fine fiddle, stalking the stage: part animal, part showman, part dervish. And that the Stooges provided a fitting band of communicants. Mike Watt hobbled out with his broken leg and his grizzled mien. Scott Asheton looked like an ex-biker out to smoke a cig on a break during his 12-step meeting. Only James Williamson, looking well-fed and well-coifed with that flowing blond hair of his, looked a bit out of place; but of course he was just a reminder that original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton had passed away not long after the band's last tour, in 2009. In other words, the Stooges are scarred stars for scarred people.

The current concert tour is based on a fairly flawed conceit, but a common one in the touring world these days, which is for an aging band to replicate a seminal album from decades past, in this case 1973’s “Raw Power,” the third and final album by the Stooges and the only one on which Williamson played guitar. It may have sounded like a good idea, but the Stooges were essentially a singles (rather than an album) band, with a smattering of great songs on each record. While even the weaker songs on “Raw Power” are solid tunes, you couldn’t help thinking, “Boy I hope they play “Loose” or “I Wanna Be Your Dog” tonight.” Which is why I went a little ape-crazy when they broke into the opening chords of “1970” (off of "Funhouse"): “Out of my mind on a Saturday night/1970 rollin’ in sight/Radio burnin’ up above/Beautiful baby, feel my love/All night, till I, blow away/I feel alright/I fell alright/Feel alright.”

That is the beauty of the Stooges in a nutshell (so to speak). They have the rare ability to combine both the sexuality and the defiance of youth. As a young punk rocker, I unfortunately only mimicked the angry side. It’s too bad that I didn’t have the good sense to channel Iggy Pop, rather than Johnny Rotten. Because an underappreciated facet of the Stooges is how hard they swing. Maybe a lot of guys don’t get that subtlety, but I think most of the ladies do. It was an aggressive, sweaty pit at the Riv, but one leavened by some heavy hip action from the healthy smattering of women in the crowd. Women were dancing, swaying, fondling their breasts (OK, I actually only saw one woman who was slowly rubbing her nipples, but that’s one more than you usually see at a rock show). For a 62-year old dude to inspire that kind of reaction is a mighty cool thing. Iggy, you still rock.

My August was book-ended by concerts. At the end of the month was the Stooges, while at the beginning, Melissa and I drove up to Milwaukee to see the National, who also rock, but in a totally different way. The Stooges get to your heart through the gut, while the National do it through your mind. Their songs are beautiful, lyrical, and reward repeated listening. But they still have a groove, and they get at some of the same things as the Stooges, just in a different manner.

“I’m a confident liar/Had my head in the oven so you’d know where I’ll be/I’ll try to be more romantic/I’ll try to believe everything you believe…. I was afraid/I’d eat your brains/‘CUZ I’M EVIL.”

The National had 2,000 otherwise seemingly upstanding Milwaukeeians shouting this chorus. To be clear, this song isn’t about a glorification of evil, nor is it the comic book evil of a heavy metal band. It is about something much more poignant and true: Evil as it is experienced by most of us, as a falling short, an inability to get outside our own little boxes. The National dropped a bunch of these moments upon us that night, these perfectly performed little gems that hinted at the dark tides that lurk within.

I have a wandering mind, even during moments of reverie. As the band played that night in Milwaukee, I waxed ecstatic over the idea that in this life, where seemingly the few are chosen, even us soiled and poorly-repaired souls are granted moments of intense joy, albeit in this case a surreptitious joy, found at night, in dark places. It makes me think that even an all-knowing, omnipotent God might have moments of pity, where he allows the damned their pleasures, and so he shielded us in that hall from His blinding gaze, at least for a couple of hours.