Local Wonderings in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife works at its primary rival.) One of the main reasons it's such a wonderful place is its sense of identity and vocation. It's much more than a "Christian bookstore," though it is that, and tremendously good at fulfilling that role in our community (see Rod Dreher sing its praises here, here, and here). But beyond that Eighth Day Books is the heart of a sub-community that has fascinated me ever since my family and I moved to Wichita nearly ten years ago. Traditionalist, usually (but not always) conservative, literate but only rarely academic, both reactionary and radical, Eighth Day grounds a motley, earnest, often brilliant collection of Christian thinkers and servers; even when I find myself somewhat perplexed by what I hear from some of them, I want to learn more. It's very ecumenical; the folks involved are Orthodox and Catholic and evangelical Protestant (and so long as they keep on letting me through the door, Mormon too); within their numerous overlapping circles, you can find schools, retreats, university programs and institutes, study groups, and more. Once a year, Eighth Day hosts an already-large-and-still-growing symposium, which this year was devoted to exploring the idea of "wonder" in a world where longstanding traditions of the civic place of Christianity have radically changed. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend one of the days of the conference this year, and I adored it. What I saw and heard around me this past weekend was an example of the sort of both strengthening and challenging local and cultural civic work which communitarians like myself have banged on about for years (but which we, in all honestly, have only rarely managed to contribute directly to ourselves).

Let me share some ideas prompted by three presentations I listened to. The first was the symposium opening provided by Erin Doom, the director of Eighth Day Institute (and yes, that is how you spell his name). Erin is a fascinating guy; I suspect he'd far prefer to be considered a lay theologian than a community organizer, but really he's both (and in fact, his efforts are themselves a testament to just how much working to make manifest and build up a community in a particular place is a type of Incarnational work). In presenting his vision of bringing together hundreds of people who, for reasons of curiosity or concern or just plain community attachment, wanted to spend two days learning, reading, and talking about the possibilities presented by our "secular age," Erin talked about a "dialogue of love" which is needed, one that can best be realized through a return to certain key ecumenical elements of the Christian tradition. For him (as well as for many others throughout history), these elements are scripture, icons, and liturgy--all of which may be seen as revealing a certain kind of radical localist perspective. What they have in common is an enduring presence--as stories which get adapted and interpreted but which also transcend the passing of time and fashions, as images which transcend their own replication and commodification, as seasons of time which transcend the manufactured pressures of socio-economic life. These are points of resistance to the pace and the profits of our contemporary capitalist and centralized world; they can become resources of retreat, for those who wish to either prepare to hold on to something old and good, or harness their strength to push for something new and good--or, really, both. Its a wonderful vision--made all the more persuasive because those in attendance at this conference, siting in an Orthodox cathedral in a mid-sized city in the center of the country, could see fruits of such all around them.

One of the headline speakers was Dr. James K.A. Smith, a scholar and theologian who had recently written a superb book explaining the philosopher Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age. It was about that book, and Taylor's fascinating (if convoluted) historical, cultural, and literary excavation of the meaning of secularism in the modern (that is, post 1500 A.D. or so) West, which Smith came to speak about. I was delighted to hear him, because--as some of this blog's readers may remember--I've made rather grandiose promises about reading A Secular Age on more than one occasion in the past, and always failed. Taylor is easily the most insightful and, I think, basically right-thinking contemporary moral and political philosopher I know, and his work has been greatly important to me--but in this case, I really appreciated having someone smart, witty, and provocative explain his ideas to me. The most important concept which of Taylor's which he unpacked--and also productively complicated--for us is the notion that the emergence over the past half-millennium of the "buffered self" (a notion of individuality that is, in principle at least, resistant to being shaped or determined meaningfully by outside forces which might pour into one, because the core of that individuality is psychologically and morally removed and protected from the larger world) is closely entwined with the collapse of a robust sense of sociality. While Taylor doesn't claim, and neither did Smith, that these were two entirely distinct or causally related phenomenon, it occurred to me that, if we grant that the festivals and rituals of the pre-modern West existed at least in part to moderate those anti-social pressures generated by the maintenance of the divisions and roles of a religiously defined world, then it seems reasonable to assume that human passions and their supporting understandings are going to always be at least partly self-interested. In which case, perhaps it was the transformation of the social world of the first thousand years of Christendom into something less dependable, more dangerous, and more characterized by divisive opportunities--and here I'm thinking of everything from scientific revolutions to religious wars to the rise of capitalism--which made the desire for "buffering" oneself from the mysteries of the wider world so appealing. Point being, the modern self, mostly closed off to the transcendent but perhaps curiously open to glimmers of it as such can be realized within our "immanent frame" can't be persuaded to attend to higher, impersonal goods by simply invoking the promise of tradition: the break with such is perhaps so deeply entwined with ordinary practices both personal and social that it is foolish to imagine that some new apologetic is going to open up atomists to what communion has to offer. Anyway, Smith's presentation and book are things I'm going to have to think about and write about some more.

Finally, it was wonderful to see Rod Dreher back in Wichita, and his presentation--both the parts I agreed with, and the parts I didn't--didn't at all disappoint. He's already reflected on some of his thoughts about participating in the Eighth Day Symposium here; let me just focus on something he said about "wonder."

"Wondering" has two complementary, yet still distinct, connotations. You can wonder about something, and be prompted to ask questions that you normally wouldn't ask. This was the main focus of Rod's presentation on the mass media, and how assumptions about certain "myths" end up closing down questions about worrisome or suspicious events or developments that really ought to be asked. I don't disagree with Rod about this reality at all, though I strongly suspect he and I would disagree somewhat on just what myths really are regent in newsrooms around the country today. But how does that phenomenon relate to another, deeper sense of wonder: that of being struck by the wonder, the mystery, of life? One seems to point towards the seeking of answers to questions, while the other suggests something which is beyond answers entirely.

In his comments, Rod quotes one of the other speakers at the symposium, a Catholic theologian named Bo Bonner (who I've met, and I agree: he's a great, funny guy), who talked about how the most profound truths of the Christian tradition are wild and weird, and that if one is interested in preserving the kind of enchantment which Christianity once provided, in so many different ways, to communities all around the modern West, then it must be allowed to be wild and weird again. I don't think this is necessarily "weird" in the "keep Austin weird" sense (an attitude which is not entirely foreign to Wichita as well), though there is likely some overlap there; rather, I think it involves living in a tradition so firmly--which, please note, is not the same as living it "confrontationally," and maybe not even living it "evangelically" either--that you can know and demonstrate through one's own life choices all the little mysteries and questions and weirdnesses which are inherent to it. We tend to imagine "awe" as involving something grand and mighty, a miracle so imposing as to defy description, but maybe we need to remember that being awed and enchanted is characteristic of the many marvelous idiosyncrasies which may be seen, assuming we can show at least a modicum of charity for ourselves and others, in ordinary, local lived lives. Let's face it: Erin Doom is, in all likelihood, kind of a weird guy. And so is Rod, and so are you, and so am I. That weirdness, and the pleasant wonder and unexpected questions ("Why does she do that?") which goes along with it, is not going to be known--at least not in a manner which can bring us, in our places, to contemplate permanent things--if we have just one "myth," one story, to reductively explain away all our own motivations and hopes and dreams. And neither will it be known if our lives become so transient, so ambitious, so committed to material accomplishments that don't ever give ourselves (or the structures of our meritocratic economy never allows us) the time or the place to fully live lives that are our own.

Well, Eighth Day has its own weird and wonderful and "wondering-full" little place, here in Wichita, and it's a blessing and goad and delight to us all. There are bound to be such places, built by such people, where you live as well: small corners of genuine social realization, mysterious happenstances, worthy of wonder. Go out and find them. They'll be worth your time, I guarantee it.

The Christmas Truce

Yes, it's an advertisement. What can I say? Sometimes, capitalism does well.

Don't Get Essayists Angry!

Regarding the collapse of The New Republic, of which much has been said, Cynthia Ozick (whose wit is legendary), takes the cake:

The Siliconian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in wireless gold,
Crying Media Company Vertically Integrated!
As all before them they willfully extirpated:
The Back of the Book and the Front and the Middle,
Until all that was left was digital piddle,
And Thought and Word lay dead and cold.

Jimmy Durante, New Deal Economist

Via Erik Loomis on Lawyers, Guns & Money, who is always (re)discovering new and wonderful evidences of the way a very different (and, from my point of view, in many ways entirely better) sort of politics once co-existed with popular culture. (Here's another great one, if the foregoing wasn't enough.)

Four Wieseltier Favorites

Lots of commentary last night and this morning about the shake-up (or stake-through-the-heart, if you prefer) at The New Republic. My favorite comments--which range from deeply mournful to vicious condemnation to a sad but informed shrug about the inevitable changes taking place in the business of opinion journalism--include thoughts from Nathan Pippenger, Alan Jacobs, Jonathan Chait, Noah Millman, and Ezra Klein, but you can find your own favorites if you like. I can't add much to it, unfortunately, as I have no particular anecdotes about TNR to share.

Well, that's not quite true; I have one. Long ago, in the very, very early days of the 21st century, John Tambornino--hi John!--and I were having lunch at some DuPont Circle deli in Washington DC, back when were both graduate students, him at Johns Hopkins, and me at Catholic University. I don't recall what we were talking about, but in all likelihood, since we were both budding political theorists, we were arguing about some issue in public policy and philosophy. Anyway, as we talked, we kept noticing a tall, white-haired gentleman at an adjacent table occasionally glancing over at us, clearly listening in on what we were saying. After we'd finished lunch and finally made our way back to the street, John suddenly stopped in his tracks. "You know," he said, glancing back at the still-occupied table, "I think that's Leon Wieseltier!" So there you go: my single brush with TNR greatness. Sadly, the esteemed literary editor and ferociously opinionated writer didn't run up to me to solicit my commentary on anything in particular, and so the opportunity passed.

The firing of Franklin Foer as TNR's editor doesn't mean much to me; he was a solid and thoughtful writer and editor in TNR's typically contrarian Jewish Ivy League neoliberal mold, but in elite journalism as it has come to operate over the past 20 years or so editors come and go with so much rapidity that it's hard to keep track. But Wieseltier was different. He'd been in charge of TNR's justly celebrated "back of the book" for more than 30 years, and thus had managed to develop a distinct editorial approach to those careful, lengthy, implacable reviews of books, culture, and ideas which--to someone like me anyway--long defined the very apex of public-intellectualdom. Aside from Richard Neuhaus at First Things (about whose tenure and arguments Wieseltier guided my friend Damon Linker to one of his, in my opinion, very best pieces of writing), I can't think of another editor whose instincts in approaching a topic I found more consistently challenging, engaging, and thought-provoking. Alan Jacobs expresses my feelings well: "Those long essay-reviews that Wieseltier ran [were] a model for much of my own periodical writing. Even when they were wrong, or widely considered wrong, they were confident, expansive, audacious in the scope of their claims....These lengthy essays, and many like them, generated important conversations, and I don’t know whether there are many periodicals in America who still publish reflections on books that are so ambitious. Probably the New York Review of Books comes closest, though with some exceptions the NYRB reviews are more strictly 'reviews,' less bold in their claims, more politely muted....I’m sad, and I hope that I can find elsewhere some of the things that, to me, made TNR special." To the extent that Wieseltier's departure means the loss of a place that I can regularly check to find long, reflective, serious intellectual engagements with politics, science, literature, foreign affairs, and more, then I'm sad too.

Because that's the sort of obsessive pack-rat I am, this morning I spent more than an hour going through hundreds of old clippings of mine, rediscovering dozens of great TNR reviews from the past 20 years (I've read TNR fairly consistently ever since the early 90s). Again and again, what I found was evidence of a guiding mind who turned someone with real expertise on a subject towards larger implications, and enabled them to make strong, publicly needed connections, commendations, and condemnations, but without ever losing their specialized grounding, thus saving the reviews from becoming...well, like one of my own blog posts, I suppose. There was Sean Wilentz's wonderfully broad review and exchange over the latest scholarship on Abraham Lincoln; David Rieff's fantastic evisceration of the Robert Kaplan's unknowingly condescending idolization of America's empire and its soldiers; Richard Just's infuriatingly patient and troubling case for intervention in Darfur; Jackson Lear's neat distinctions between different types of environmental radicalism; and more. But all of those have one thing in common though: they're available online, having escaped what Jacob Levy (traces of whose involvement in TNR can be found by those who Google carefully) once referred to as "the great TNR archive apocalypse," the details of which are apparently lost in the mists of time. But such electronic archive catastrophes have no effect on pieces of magazine paper kept in filing cabinets. And so, in honor of Wieseltier's departure, here are five great, mostly lost slivers from his long reign in the back of TNR's book:

"Tiananmen and the Cosmos," Andrew J. Nathan, July 29, 1991. For someone only recently back from two years in South Korea, struggling to process my own ideas about East Asian culture and politics, years away from beginning any serious engagement with China or Confucian ideas, this review was terrific eye-opener. "Shortly after his flight from China, Yan predicted that the regime of Li and Deng would fall within two years. His optimism was widely shared among his colleagues. But today the exile movement is at a low point. Membership has eroded, funding is hard to find, the movement is fragmented into scores of organizations. The younger leaders are learning English and entering graduate school, while many of the older ones are living from year to year on fellowships. Many in the overseas community criticize the movement as divided, demoralized, rudderless, even corrupt. But his harshness is misplaced. The democracy movement abroad needs to be evaluated for what it really is: not a political party with a program to hasten the fall of the Deng regime, but a community of intellectuals who are suffering the personal frustrations of exile yet also taking advantage of the opportunity to rethink. They are not the ones who will overthrow the regime, but they will be prepared with new ideas when it finally falls."

"Suffer the Little Children," Jean Bethke Elshtain, March 4, 1996. I've mentioned this piece before, and how much it endeared me to Elshtain's writings, with its wonderfully unsympathetic examination of the harsh judgment which meritocratic neoliberalism inevitably, however confusedly, carries in its heart. "Like Clinton, I recoil when I hear a parent shout at a child. I, too, cringe when a parent is curt, abrupt and dismissive. But I recognize that this is not the same thing as neglect, not the same thing as abuse. Perhaps, as the late Christopher Lasch insisted, the working-class or lower-middle-class style aims to instill in children a tough, early recognition that life is not a bowl of cherries, not a world in which everyone is telling you how great you are; that their lives will be carried out in a world in which they tasks they are suited for, the jobs they do, the lives they live, and even the way they talk (or do not talk) will be scrutinized and found wanting by their "betters." I know that Clinton would argue, in response, that she means no invidious comparison. But the comparison is there and it is invidious. According to her book, the higher the income and education, the better the parenting, all other things being equal."

"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Thomas Jefferson," Sean Wilentz, March 10, 1997. Another Wilentz contribution, and one I like even better than his later one on Lincoln: "Jefferson's fate has paralleled that of twentieth-century American liberalism. There was always something absurd about describing Jefferson, the agrarian anti-statist, as one of the forerunners of Progressive reform and New Deal reform. Jefferson's writings on religious liberty gave the argument a certain plausibility in the 1920s, amid the Scopes trial and a revival of anti-Catholic nativism. A decade later, New Deal Democrats pointed with pride to their party's distant genealogical connections to the Jeffersonians. Much more influential, though, was the notion, first popularized by Herbert Croly back in 1909, that modern reformers were trying to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. (That is, it was Jefferson who inspired latter-day government efforts to rein in the malefactors of great wealth.) With the presumption, the reputations of Jefferson and modern liberalism crested at about the same time, in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet as the century has dragged on, and as American liberalism has suffered through its own intellectual and political crises, it has become harder to sustain Jefferson's reputation as any kind of liberal fore-runner."

"Axle of Evil," Gregg Easterbrook, January 20, 2003. An absolutely ferocious review, which uses a book on sports-utility vehicles as an opportunity to given a shuddering smack-down to the American auto industry and the American automobile driver alike. "The SUVs combination of sociopathy and fantasy has reached its preposterous culmination in [the Hummer], which is based on the military Humvee, originally designed to carry infantry and machine  guns. The Hummer gets ten miles per gallon, meaning that its annual  greenhouse-gas emissions triple those of a car, and it weighs nearly three tons. (Still another loophole: if an SUV grows heavy enough, like the Hummer, the manufacturer does not have to report its fuel mileage to the EPA.) Hummers are even longer and higher  than standard large SUVs, but Consumer Guide recently warned of the vehicle's 'limited cargo room' and 'cramped' seats, evidence of poor design. (The mid-size Nissan Maxima, which weighs less than  half as much as a Hummer, has more front legroom.) The Hummer cannot park without straddling spaces. Its owner would be out of his or her mind to take this $52,000 bauble off the interstate, though of course the advertising features the usual postcard scenes of the  noble outdoors. (In my favorite, a Hummer is racing across a  glacier.) Do I need to tell you that Arnold Schwarzenegger persuaded General Motors to offer the civilian Hummer, endorsed it, and purchased the first one? The Hummer screams to the world the words that stand as one of Schwarzenegger's signature achievements  as an actor: 'Fuck you, asshole!' Maybe this class of vehicles should be called FUVs."

Maybe Wieseltier will fire off a firm FU to the new regime at TNR? We can only hope.

Predictable Predictions about Kansas

The Wichita Eagle ran another one of my columns this morning; this is a slightly expanded version of it:

Politics in Kansas today is suddenly big news. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Mother Jones, even The Guardian from the UK: all have lately been filing frequent stories from Kansas, all about the latest poll results and the latest legal moves in Kansas’s major statewide races. The national and international media are watching the calculations surrounding Pat Robert's anemic senatorial re-election run, watching Governor Sam Brownback's surprisingly difficult re-election run, and watching the impressive challenge which former Republican Jean Schodorf is making against conservative hero Kris Kobach as our secretary of state. We haven't gotten this kind of attention--certainly not during the November portion of the election cycle--in a long time.

And that's not surprising. After all, think about those aforementioned races. We have a solid but uninspiring long-time Republican senator being challenged by a popular independent, Greg Orman–who is now, with the absence of any Democrat from the ticket, seen as the favorite to win. Next we have our polarizing Republican Secretary of State controversially involved in that same Senate race, all while running for a very tight race himself. And finally we have the governor’s race against state representative Paul Davis, one in which more than a few conservative Republicans see the fate of a vital ideologically anti-government experiment hanging in the balance. All of that adds up, obviously, to some fascinating political news.

But for the national–and international–media, the tone of surprise is pretty constant. For so many, Kansas is assumed to be an easy place to explain, politically speaking. We’re deep red, we’re conservatives, we vote Republican: end of story. True, sometimes journalists will go back a century to our Populist past, or even beyond that to Kansas’s bloody birth before and during the Civil War, but failing that, usually they just present Kansas as a place where surprises like we’re seeing this election season don’t ever happen--the idea that, in a year which is looking to be a good one for Republicans, that Kansas of all places might be the place where conservatism and liberalism do ideological battle just seems weird.

All that proves, though, is how short many peoples’ memories--and how brief media-driven election narratives--really are.

Think back to 2004, when Thomas Frank published his blockbuster What’s the Matter with Kansas? That book (which, for the record, I never especially liked; other books made similar arguments in a much more careful way, and Frank himself has written better books) argued that the political mix of Christian piety and anti-tax rhetoric which has characterized many Republican claims over the past twenty years was mostly cooked up in places like Kansas. The Sunflower State became the ideal laboratory, Frank asserted, for perfecting populist resentment against liberalism, making Kansas the real heart of modern American conservatism. All that became part of the popular and national political narrative of our state.

But then, move forward four years. Democrat Kathleen Sebelius was well into her second term as Kansas’s governor. High profile Republicans like Mark Parkinson and Paul Morrison switched parties and maintained their seats of power (and the latter notoriously defeating social conservative hero Phill Kline to do so). The New Republic ran a cover story on “What’s Not the Matter with Kansas”--clearly, the Sunflower State was more complicated than they thought!

Move forward yet another four years. By then, the national story was the Brownback revolution, and the way the state Republican party–with the political and financial support of Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Chamber–got more reliable conservatives elected to the state legislature, primarily by undermining some of their own long-timer members (one of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, was Jean Schodorf). This controversial effort was successful, granting Brownback enough legislative support to push through his anti-tax, state-shrinking, supposedly job-creating agenda. Clearly then, Kansas actually was red all the way!

Now move forward again yet one more four years, and we have today. Republicans in the legislature look quite safe, and there is no indication that there is shift taking place in overall party preference; the idea that Kansas might be turning blue, or even just purple, is ridiculous. But for all sorts of personal and ideological reasons--and when you have leaders that have explicitly connected themselves and their time on office to the triumph of various avowedly conservative policy agendas, the overlap between those reasons is large--the top of the Republican ticket is struggling, with potentially huge consequences for the conservative agenda and the national Republican party. How surprising, says these media voices, to see such an unexpected turn-around in such a predictable place as Kansas!

This is, to be sure, a fascinating political season in our state, with many unexpected events. But in my view, the single most unsurprising thing about it all is the fact that, when it comes to Kansas, many journalists who parachute in from far afield or even abroad keep getting surprised, again and again and again.

Moyer's Worlds

Via Lawyers, Guns & Money, I see that Bill Moyers, one of the absolute icons of progressive liberal journalism in America, is at long last retiring. I'd have to sit down and really think for moment to come up with just how many dozens of his news stories, television specials, and educational videos I've watched and learned from over the years (though his tremendous work on the corporate corruption of the electoral process stands out). But I don't have to think to remember his first and most lasting impression upon me, as that I can't forget. It came through two books: the two volumes of A World of Ideas, edited transcripts of interviews which Moyers conducted numerous scholars, writers, artists, scientists, and public intellectuals in a couple of series of broadcasts, in 1988 and 1990. Those were the two years that I was serving a church mission in South Korea; fortunately, though, these books made available to me later everything I missed, when I discovered them in a used bookstore sometime in 1991 or so. What brilliant and wide-ranging interviews they were! As a recently-returned Mormon missionary, a confused and intellectually ambitious and at-loose-ends young adult, pouring through these pages, reading a conversation with accomplished men and women who'd spent decades building scholarly edifices for their ideas...it was an absolute revelation. Politics, history, philosophy, ethics, art, religion, literature, engineering, science-fiction: it was all there. Sheldon Wolin, Elaine Pagels, Barbara Tuchmann, William Julius Wilson, Forrest McDonald, Tom Wolfe, Noam Chomsky, Tu Wei-Ming, Jonas Salk, Cornel West, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Isaac Asimov, E.L. Doctorow, and more, all deep into their research and writing, all displaying for an unformed young person exactly what Moyers truly, deeply believed in: namely, the democratic and liberating power of talking freely and sustainably about ideas. That, more than anything else, is what Moyers, for close to fifty years, has enabled the mass media to do. My hat is off to you, sir. Thank you.

Two Comments on Last Night In Ferguson, Missouri

Last night my wife's Twitter feed went nuts, and we ended up--like thousands of other Americans, I'm sure--opening up the laptop and watching, stunned, the images of violence coming out of Ferguson, MO. Tear gas and rubber bullets tearing into protesters, journalists arrested, vicious words. Scary, scary stuff.

So this morning I've been reading the news--about the death at the hands of police of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen-ager, about the stunning overflow of intimidating force shown by the local police department, about the thinking of the protesters and where this all might be leading. I'm no expert on any of these matters, and I'm certainly without any local knowledge--but it doesn't seem hard to me to put two and two together. Or more specifically, to put together 1) the heavy-duty military equipment readily available to local police departments, thanks to federal government give-aways (better to cheaply off-load army surplus to those involved in law enforcement than destroy it or sell it on the international market, right?), and 2) the genuine paranoia that predominantly African-American populations and communities feel when confronted with yet another ambiguous incident which ends with the police closing ranks, the law privileging the shooter, and an unarmed teen-ager dead. The result is a script which almost writes itself, isn't it? Still, my main reaction is simply, again, feeling stunned.

But there are people putting together thoughtful observations nonetheless, trying to tease out how fear, the militarization of the police, racial division, a culture of violence and distrust, and the electronic enablers of all of the above, come together. So as I did over two years ago, when Trayvon Martin was killed, here are two thoughts, from a couple of smart people. First, Alan Jacobs, focusing on how there is a frighteningly easy unreality to what many police officers apparently think is obvious when faced with civil unrest:

Because [first-shooter] computer games are so popular and are so utterly central to the experience of above all males under forty, we should probably spend more time than we do thinking about how immersion in those visual worlds shapes people’s everyday phenomenology. We do talk about this, but in limited ways, primarily in order to ask whether playing violent games makes people more violent. That’s a key question, but it needs to be broadened. Ian Bogost wants us to ask what it’s like to be a thing, but maybe we need also to ask: What is it like to be a shooter? What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode?
I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces--the "warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about. Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances--but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance....It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets--and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay. It’s as close as they can come to Modern Warfare 3.

The whole display would be ludicrous--boys with toys--except the ammunition is real. The guns are loaded, even if some of them have only rubber bullets, and the tear gas truly burns. And so play-acted immersion in a dystopian future gradually yields a dystopian present. 

What is is like to be a first-person shooter? It’s awesome, dude. 

I will add at this point that a friend of mine, who works for the Navy, relates this anecdote: "The military recently had a scandal where each of the services was paying independently for research into camouflage patterns. Even the Navy got into the act; we developed a blue camouflage pattern, which is not only completely pointless but actually counterproductive, because the very last thing a sailor who has fallen into the water wants to be is invisible. The reason for all of this was termed the 'CDI factor': Chicks Dig It."

Second, Timothy Burke, who actually strongly disagrees with the way Alan chooses to focus on computer games and our violent social imaginary in contrast to the whole tangled web of feedback loops (most of which ultimately revolve around race) which have brought up to our present moment. Picking up on a recent incident where a mall cop, responding to a disturbance involving a shirtless, raving white man, targeted and maced a by-standing and entirely innocent black man who was standing nearby, he writes:

So this is just pepper spray in the face compared to being shot dead and left to lie in the street. But if we're going to get anywhere as a society with this, we have to see that the same infrastructure of violence, injustice and inequality is in play in both cases and many more. It's a mistake to focus on the individuals who shot or sprayed, to make them out to be unusual, "bad apples". Or to say, "Oh, that's inadequate training", to turn to a technocratic solution: oh, just change the training methods! This is something deeper, harder, worse.

The mall cop was facing a tense, tricky situation, but he had people all around him guiding him, telling him where the problem was coming from, telling him what peace he'd been summoned to keep. He got a call that told him what the problem was. But he couldn't--not wouldn't, really couldn't--see it. Because the problem was a shirtless white guy who'd been causing trouble for a while, and there he was next to an African-American man. So he saw what he is predetermined to see: a black threat.

We've militarized police (private and public), we've protected them from oversight, and we've built a society that for thirty years has been fed on ever-escalating fear: fear of crime (even as it drops precipitously), fear of difference (even as we become more richly diverse in our real sociologies), fear of a world that we can't control. FDR was right, but we lost that fight: fear itself is our national anthem now. So what happens when you create an army that is both fed by and shielded by fear and tell them they can do as they will, so long as they do it just to people whom history has named as scapegoats and victims, so long as they are guided by a racial unconscious?

Americans--white Americans in particular--shouldn't have to be brought so unwillingly to the understanding of what's happening now. The country's deep political DNA is fundamentally suspicious of unaccountable power, power that doesn't answer to the same law that the people have to answer to, power over citizens rather than power from citizens. But down there in the depths is another principle: that race, and blackness most of all, is the exception. Nothing of anything in all of those principles means a damn thing until that stops, until it's liberty and justice for all.

Well said, indeed.

Why I Like Popes (Some of Them, Sometimes)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001. I didn't take any notice--but then, I'm neither Catholic, nor from Argentina. (Of the tens of millions of people who do fit that description, the word is quite a few of them noticed it very much.) Perhaps I should have, though, because one of the most important things John Paul II did during his 26+ years as the Bishop of Rome (the second-longest period of service in all of Catholic history) was bring into the College of Cardinals large numbers of bishops whom he trusted to carry forward the church in a manner that he understood to be where the Holy Spirit was calling it. And Francis, the current Roman Pontiff and now Time Magazine's Person of the Year, is certainly a servant of God very much after the pattern of John Paul the Great.

The popular acclaim which Francis has received (particularly in social media) would seem to suggest otherwise. JPII--and Benedict XVI after him--were, so the story goes, "conservatives," Christian leaders obsessed with sexual sins and papal authority. By contrast Francis, the "people's pope," the Jesuit, the man who worked in the slums of Buenos Aires, is different--he's leaving private matters alone, and taking the fight for righteousness directly to those political and economic Powers That Be, the Masters of Capitalism, who are most responsible for the injustice in the modern world. Yee-haw!

Of course, anyone even minimally familiar with how these sorts of news stories are enabled and kicked around in the mass media recognizes that what we're seeing here is the usual cycle of celebratory over-reaction, followed by hysterical over-denunciation. Damon Linker, among others, has noted that Francis is hardly a revolutionary, and that the real significance of his papacy will be whether he can rhetorically and organizationally plant seeds that might sprout in unexpected doctrinal and ecclesiastical ways decades and centuries hence. In the short term, then, all we have really before us is Francis's public words, and the tone by which he utters them. And, as best as I can tell, what he's saying sounds a lot like the man who made him a cardinal over a decade ago.

Nearly two decades ago, in 1994, Time Magazine declared John Paul II as their "Man of the Year" (gender awareness in the office's of Time was still a few years away). I remember buying the magazine, clipping the front cover, and framing it; it hung in our apartment (Melissa and I had been married just over a year at that point) for years. Why did I do that? Because John Paul II was a hero of mine. It was a long time before I could articulate as well as I perhaps can today why I felt that way (graduate school--at Catholic University of America, as it happened--was still in my future), but if I was asked, I probably would have said something like this: because he insists that Christian morality has a place at the civil table. And not just a "place" as a private scold or a convenient party member or an outsider calling us to our better natures whom we can safely ignore, but as a participant, with a public agenda that connected the teachings of Jesus to the present moment. Under John Paul II the Vatican was a major player in the final death-throws of Soviet communism--and yet, for all the ways the National Review fell all over the man, he looked every bit askance at Western and capitalist triumphalism as Francis does today. Don't believe me? So I assume you've forgotten "Sollicitudo Rei Socialis" ("On Social Concern"), which JPII penned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of "Populorum Progressio," Pope Paul IV's classic document of Catholic social justice teachings? Here's JPII, lowering the boom:

It is necessary to state once more the characteristic principle of Christian social doctrine: the goods of this world are meant for all. The right to private property is valid and necessary, but it does not nullify the value of this principle. Private property, in fact, is under a "social mortgage," which means that it has an intrinsically social function, based upon and justified precisely by the principle of the universal destination of goods....The motivating concern for the poor--who are, in the very meaningful term, "the Lord's poor"--must be translated at all levels into concrete actions, until it decisively attains a series of necessary reforms. Each local situation will show what reforms are most urgent and how they can be achieved. But those demanded by the situation of international imbalance, as already described, must not be forgotten. (SRS 6.42-43)

Which really, isn't very different from what Francis has written in "Evangelii Gaudium" ("The Joy of the Gospel"):

The word "solidarity" is a little worn and at times poorly understood, but it refers to something more than a few sporadic acts of generosity. It presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few....Solidarity is a spontaneous reaction by those who recognize that the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property. The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them. These convictions and habits of solidarity, when they are put into practice, open the way to other structural transformations and make them possible. Changing structures without generating new convictions and attitudes will only ensure that those same structures will become, sooner or later, corrupt, oppressive and ineffectual. (EG 4.2.188-189)

In short, the message of both men is the same thing that had made me, twenty years ago, a fan of the papacy, or at least of some of the inhabitants of that office, and of some of the things they say. Because Catholicsm--or at least Catholic Social Justice teachings as they have developed in modern times, to be precise--insists that Christianity brings with it to the table of civil discussion a moral platform, one with explicit political and economic dimensions. The American Christian (and Mormon) conservatism I grew up surrounded by had no problem claiming to itself the prerogative to speak out in the first of those dimensions, at least in a limited way: you know, abortion, homosexuality, feminism, the whole culture war/Moral Majority rigamarole. The message of the popes is, or at least can be, different--it can be a message which insists that Christianity charity does not simply mean individual generosity, but rather is a call to structure whole economies so that the welfare of the poor takes priority. Christian righteousness includes the unborn and the unemployed, sexual fidelity to one's spouse and solidarity with those who labor, equality in the eyes of God and in terms of education and economic empowerment. Jesus's message, in short, is one that demands justice and dignity for all from the whole culture, since it is, ultimately, one "seamless garment." That phrase has come in for much abuse over the years, and remains contentious today, in Catholic circles and beyond, even as it has continued to be affirmed by the Vatican. I don't agree with every aspect of that teaching; like any other platform, it can become an excuse for idolatry. But overall, as I became aware of it years ago through the example and work and teachings of JPII, I came to realize that there was a platform out there upon which someone like myself--a pro-life socialist, a left communitarian, a populist egalitarian who is also something of a cultural conservative--could stand. And for that, I was grateful.

So now Francis I is Pope, and also Time Magazine's Person of the Year (apparently, the problem with gender exclusiveness finally dawned on them at some point in the past two decades), and I'm delighted. Francis has shown himself to be a profound and dedicated man, whose uncompromising social justice rhetoric--perhaps more pointed now, coming as it does from the mind and lips of a man from the southern hemisphere, and man who has grown into his present stature as an archbishop and cardinal without the Cold War looming over his every word--is something that in a world which still hasn't recovered from the appalling financial criminality and stupidity of 2008 needs to hear. And keep in mind that, as he reminds us again and again, to put the poor front and center in our Christian thinking is nothing more or less than to proclaim the Good News--indeed, the greatest Good News of all. As Time reported:

The script falls to his lap and he leans forward, looks out over the crowd and just starts talking, his hands in the air, his voice stronger now, doing his own call and response. Jesus is risen, and so shall we be one day, he tells them. And as though they might not quite grasp the implication, he pushes them: “But this is not a lie! This is true!” he says. “Do you believe that Jesus is alive? Voi credete?” “Yes!” the crowd calls back, and he asks again, “Don’t you believe?” “Yes,” they cry. And now he has them. They have become part of the message. He talks about Christ’s love like a man who has found something wondrous and wants nothing more than to share it. “He is waiting for us,” Francis says. And when he comes to the end of his homily, the script drops once more. “This thought gives us hope! We are on the way to the Resurrection. And this is our joy: one day find Jesus, meet Jesus and all together, all together--not here in the square, the other way--but joyful with Jesus. This is our destiny.”

I'm a Mormon (though, truth be told, doctrinally probably more Lutheran than LDS) who rejects as plain unscriptural a large amount of Catholic dogma. (Infant baptism, the intercession of saints, transubstantiation, etc.) But the Catholic tradition presents an understanding of Christian ethics and economic and political concern which has an intellectual comprehensiveness and--I think, anyway--a moral persuasiveness that dwarfs anything that Mormonism (particularly in light of the unfortunate cultural influence of western American libertarian attitudes over the past half-century) has yet managed to articulate. And that part of the tradition, as laid out by the popes, I believe. Maybe someday us Mormons will have Dorothy Days and Sargent Shrivers of our own (we've come close at least once or twice), but in the meantime, as a Christian, I have Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Francis, carrying a torch, passed down to him by his papal predecessors, that illuminates, on Jesus's behalf, much that I see. And thank God for that.

Letterman on 9/11

Still, for all its flaws and limitations, this monologue, given on September 17, 2001, remains the best video memento of the attacks 12 years ago. Worth remembering.


Yakwild

Remembering Radio (and Me), Part 4: 1993

And so, 1993: twenty years ago, the year I turned 25, graduated from BYU, started graduate school, and married Melissa. And also, to a great extent, stopped being interested in radio, at least to the degree I had before. What happened? And if not the radio, what was I listening to then?

After my mission to South Korea, I return to BYU and Provo, UT, and for a while I could pick up where I'd left off two years before. But there were changes afoot; through a variety of back-room deals and bankruptcies, KJQ changed ownership, most of its staff were either fired or quit, some of whom then organized a takeover of KZOL 96.1 FM, which was promptly re-branded KXRK or "X96," with eventually most of the old modern rock/college/alternative music DJs from KJQ showing up under X96's banner. Dom Casual, Kerry Jackson, Bill Allred: it was "Radio from Hell" back again, only under a new call sign. The transitions didn't change much about the music they played, but it may have signaled a change in attitude towards it--or maybe it was just that grunge was increasingly dominant, and so "New Wave" rather abruptly became something about which snide jokes could be made. Didn't matter to me; I still listened. I may have missed things when grunge first broke, but it was nice to be listening as it as it reached an apotheosis of sorts (see, for example, Nirvana's "All Apologies"). And besides, the grunge sensibility lent itself to more acoustic and less refined, more worldly and unconventional pop music; hence, Björk's album Debut...



...the same trends which made her possible also influencing former mainstays of alternative radio in Utah to respond in different ways. U2's Zooropa was an embrace of electronic dance rhythms, for example...



...while Depeche Mode, on their 1993 album Songs of Faith and Devotion, we actually heard the band members playing guitars...



...but for all that, to an ever-increasing extent, my attention was being drawn elsewhere.

Was it the widespread arrival of the internet (or the "World Wide Web," as we tended to call it back then), the rise of file-sharing, the emerging realization that MTV wasn't going to play music videos any more? Some of that, I suppose. Maybe it was just the general sense that radio, the mainstay of my youth, was being forced to treat its primary good--pop music--as increasingly disposable and dispensable. It would be just as easy to see in this a triumph, with a once-predictable media platform being forced to diversify in line with changing technology and segmentation: so this was the era when shock jocks and talk radio went huge, becoming a national commercial (and political) force, crowding out pop stations or forcing them to adapt and/or narrow-cast their programming along the way. I suppose it's silly to see the rapid conquest of so much of the radio dial by the forces of ideological and aesthetic Balkinization as a loss for our common pop culture; I can look at my previous entries in this series, and imagine someone who was of my age and cohort growing up Spokane, WA--only perhaps a Spanish-speaker, or an African-American, or an evangelical Christian--who might look at my list of tunes and conclude that I'd left them out of pop culture entirely. And they'd have a point: maybe radio as the dispenser of a common pop music foundation was always a fiction, and it only took me until I was in my early to mid-twenties to realize it.

Except: no, I don't really believe that, not entirely anyway, if only because I lived through the emergence of the structural forces that propelled all these changes, and at some point I could turn around and notice the difference. With radio increasingly no longer serving as a common reference to what's popular, musicians turned to other media--like advertising. The dinosaurs of the 60s and 70s led the way--but many others followed:



Oh, and about those "dinosaurs"--thanks to my years in Korea, I was finally listening to them. Deep in my memory, no doubt due to KJRB, a lot of classic rock was already there, but as a missionary I interacted with others who got me curious about, thinking about, and ultimately really listening to the true canon of post-WWII pop and rock music in a way I never had before. It started with James Taylor, and a revival of my memories of Al Stewart's and Gerry Rafferty's 70s folk-rock, which led me in turn back to the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, and eventually Bob Dylan. And the Beatles, of course: I bought their "Red" and "Blue" collections in Korea, and when I came back home I started building my collection of their albums and their many, many descendents properly. It didn't hurt that MTV Unplugged was going through its hey-day at this moment (Eric Clapton's monster Unplugged came out a year earlier, in 1992), and that The Rolling Stones released Voodoo Lounge and the Eagles released Hell Freezes Over just a year later, in 1994. Artists that I, in my 25th year, thought were ridiculously old (in their 40s and 50s!) were selling out huge concert halls...but not, perhaps unsurprisingly, filling up the airwaves that used to track what was popular. Casey Kasem and "American Top 40," I suddenly realized one day, were irrelevant, at least to the music industry that I saw around me. No wonder classic rock, by the late 1990s, occupied a larger portion of the total radio market share than any other format.

Well, all these concerns didn't stop me from paying attention to current pop; I just wasn't paying attention in the same way. As time went by, I was reaching out into folk and the blues and jazz, and benefiting from it all the while. Still, my pop heart kept on beating. My favorite album of the year was Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales, and for the life of me, I couldn't tell you how I first heard about it--but it wasn't from the radio, that's sure. Still, Melissa and I played our tape cassette of it to death. ("St. Augustine in Hell" was Melissa's favorite track, because she really like the line about music critics.)



Billy Joel's River of Dreams was huge too--and yet,while I'm pretty certain I heard one or two songs from it on pop radio, Joel was obviously banking on a different approach to the media to move his CDs. It worked; like half the people I knew, I watched David Letterman's new program on CBS too, and Joel managed to land right in front of our eyebrows and earlobes. (Sting managed this on Saturday Night Live too.)




Getting pop culture from not just radio, but from the internet, from television, from advertisements, and of course from movie soundtracks (like the awesome What's Love Got to Do With It?) that ended up on the radio only after finding their way to the popular consciousness through award shows and word of mouth--that was radio looked (sounded) like to me in 1993. Not that music was different, but the framing of it, the estimation of it, the--let me get really pretentious here--social position of it was different. Not lesser, perhaps, but different.



And today? Well, while I've continued, over the last 20 years, to turn on the radio whenever I'm making short trips in the car (particularly our local BOB FM station), I almost never listen to it for music anymore; at home, the radio is for NPR, and that's about it. At work, it's scads of old tape cassettes I have--Robert Johnson recordings! Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon (also from 1993, by the way)! The Beatles at the BBC!--plus CDs, plus, of course, Pandora. I suppose on some level I'm kind of sad about that; after all, would I have written this series of posts if I wasn't? But see here--I'm fully aware that maybe all I've done with this walk down memory lane is talk about the sort of transitions and technological relationships that every person who grows up goes through. I mean, radio is still around, and while my oldest daughter has never seen any need for it, Caitlyn, our second daughter (right now 13 and half years old, so coming up on where I was in 1983), listens to Wichita's 105.3 FM "The Buzz" religiously. So maybe, in the end, pop radio is just a platform for young people. When you stop being young, you go on to over things. Thank goodness the music is still there, if you know how to look for it, and even if it doesn't quite mean the same thing.

Remembering Radio (and Me), Part 3: 1988

By 1988, the year I turned 20 years old, I'd left Spokane, WA, never (yet) to return with any kind of permanence. Instead, for half of the year I lived in Provo, UT, attending Brigham Young University, and for the other half I was in South Korea, beginning my two-year service (1988-1990) as a proselyting mission for the Mormon church. (Another long story in itself.) You might think that meant I was removed from the radio, and you'd be party right--I couldn't take American pop radio with me on my mission to Korea (though, in the form of tapes, I smuggled a fair amount of it with me). But for the first half of the year, I was exposed to the radio environment of Utah, and that changed everything.

Forget your association of Mormonism with restricted, traditionalist sects that exist in opposition to contemporary American pluralism; modern institutional American Mormonism--or at least the culture it creates--is, in fact, for better or worse, pretty much entirely at peace with American pluralism: so long as they, like any good capitalist body, can pick and choose and buy whatever parts of it, and leave the rest alone. It's for this reason, among others, that the large number of Mormons couldn't stop Salt Lake City and Provo some developing a musical culture along the same sociological lines you saw everywhere else in America where you had major university centers and lots of young single people: a thriving club and local music scene, creating a market which is hungry for the latest thing. That's what radio at BYU was like. My roommate had a boombox, so I could play all the tapes I'd made of songs I'd recorded off the radio at home, but mostly we just listened to the tunes coming out of SLC and Ogden, UT, a little further north.

The station we listened to was KJQ (or KJQN; part of the history here is disputed) 95.5 on the FM, particularly "Radio from Hell" in the morning. (And yes, we did enjoy the immature feeling of transgression listening to that show provided.) It was on this station that I heard, to my knowledge, my first Depeche Mode song (I ended up writing a paper for a philosophy class on "Blasphemous Rumors," which didn't go down well with my very pious professor) and my first Dead or Alive song (the album version of "Brand New Lover" is much better than the single version); it was this station that enabled me to finally correct my most embarrassing instance of lyrical mis-hearing (I had somehow decided that "keep it down now / voices carry" from the 'Til Tuesday hit was actually "let's go downtown / it's so scary"--and no, that doesn't make any sense to me either); this was the station which gave me my sole touch of radio glory (I called up and won some contest--I think it involved a question from George Harrison's Cloud Nine album--and received $100, which I spent on pizza for all the guys on the 4th floor of V Hall there in the BYU dorms); and this was the station that helped me realize that there actually weren't two bands from Australia, one named "I-N-X-S" and the other named "In Excess," but actually just one band. Man, was I glad I got that figured out, just in time for their smash album, Kick.



And there was U2's Rattle and Hum, of course, an album that long divided their fans but which I adore to this day. (A friend of mine from BYU, back in the day, once told me how he saw the concert film at the local theater five times in a single week, and came away determined that, no matter what the cost in time or money, someday he would have hair just like Bono's.)



And what else? The Psychedelic Furs, The Church, Gene Loves Jezebel, and of course Depeche Mode, and even more Depeche Mode, particularly all the songs from the Music for the Masses album. Plus every band that could plausibly be connected to Depeche Mode, include Yaz or Erasure. It was, in retrospect, rather funny and even somewhat comforting to realize back then that I wasn't the only pop music obsessive in the world, particularly not the only Mormon one, and thus didn't have to be the only idiot who would, back in those naive and ill-informed days, feel compelled to explain to anyone who wanted to listen why The Innocents was an awesome album and "A Little Respect" an awesome song much worth dancing too, even if the whole thing is essentially one big gay anthem.



I could go on. Suffice to say that it was thanks to KJQ and the Provo and SLC dance scene that I learned who the B-52s were, and The Replacements, and The Cure, and Bronski Beat, and more. Collectively, being overwhelmed by the New Wave all at once didn't completely erase Hall and Oates and Bruce Springsteen from my memory, but it definitely complemented them. Besides there was plenty of mainstream, R&B-inspired pop in 1988 that still registered. Of that stuff, Billy Ocean's "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" was pretty easy to justify....



...while Terrence Trent D-Arby's and George Michael's stuff was, er, less so. (Though I can remember more than one earnest rationalizer at a church dance insisting that the song "I Want Your Sex" was actually a morally sophisticated defense of heterosexual monogamy.)

In the mission field, you're not supposed to listen to pop music. I broke that rule--I couldn't make it without the stuff. Though the slim pickings available in South Korea had some interesting consequences. For one thing, I ended up spending a fair amount of time and money familiarizing myself with Korean pop music from the 1980s. Secondly, the stuff I was able to get a hold of (through contraband tapes which the missionaries would share with each other, or just stuff we would sneak off and buy on American military bases), prompted incredibly strong reactions from me. I remember that I would almost break down and cry, listening to tape of Cheap Trick's Lap of Luxury over and over again, late at night in some missionary apartment west of Seoul...



...while Bobby McFerrin's utterly innocuous and infectious "Don't Worry, Be Happy" somehow absolutely infuriated me. I suppose it was because I was unhappy and confused and stressed, and he wasn't: how dare he!! Yes, I've since recovered; thanks for asking.

Remembering Radio (and Me), Part 2: 1983

So, 1983, the year I turned 15, my last year in junior high (in Spokane, WA, at that time they divided up the grades K-6, 7-9, and 10-12) and the first and only year during my youth which I spent outside the public school system (my parents thought I needed a different kind of educational experience, and sent me to a private school for a year--but whatever it was supposed to help with really didn't take). I learned to drive an old pick-up truck, and I started to develop some new talents and bad habits. And, well, I listened to the radio.

By 1983, the old KREM 92.9 FM station had been sold off by its partner television station, and its new owners had christened it KZZU "The Zoo"--and it would be difficult to over-estimate the impact that station had on my particular youth cohort. I'm sure there were people in jr. high and high school who somehow found out about and listened to that elusive "college music" or "New Wave" that I was hearing about, and no doubt there were people around me listening to rap and the beginnings of hip-hop, and for that matter certainly there was plenty of country music and the burgeoning genre of Christian pop and rock to be heard as well...but for me and so many others, The Zoo was it. We listened to Don and Ken, "The Breakfast Boys," in the morning while we waited for the bus, and sometimes the bus driver would even tune into that station for us, or those who drove would listen on their car radios, and we all traded their jokes with each other and with whomever may have missed them. One time, I even recall some on-air gag they pulled, which supposedly resulted in their being fired from their jobs, and someone in one of my classes actually started a petition to get them re-hired--and by the time it reached me, over half on my fellow ninth graders at Greenacres Jr. High had signed it. It was that big.

So what music were they shoving at us? Mainstream, MOR pop music mostly, with only occasional dips into something more dangerous or alternative. I was aware of what I was missing, by now; Friday Night Videos started showing in 1983, and I quickly became an addict (at least as often as I could sneak downstairs late at night on a Friday and watch it with the volume turned way down; I wouldn't get a television of my own in my bedroom until we got one to serve as the monitor for my Commodore 64 a year or two later). But on the radio, we weren't getting the Violent Femmes's "Blister in the Sun" or the Smiths's "This Charming Man" (though my older sister definitely knew about U2 and War by then). For us younger pop-radio-listening kids, when it wasn't Michael Jackson's continuing dominance of the charts, it was MJ teaming up with someone else (I'd figured out who Paul McCartney was by this point) for "Say Say Say"...



...or else we were doing a little bit of (appropriately moderated) head-banging with any number of cuts off Def Leppard's Pyromania.



I feel like I should say something about myself and rock at this point in time. A couple of years before this point--probably around 1981--this pinhead named Lynn Bryson, who was I suppose what you'd have to call a Mormon televangelist/huckster/shake-down artist, visited the churches in our area and promptly scared the shit out of me and probably hundreds of other moderately culturally adventuresome Mormon youth. He told us all about the backmasking on "Stairway to Heaven" and what KISS and RUSH stood for ("Knights in Satan's Service" and "Raised Under Satan's Hand," respectively) and how John Lennon was a witch, etc., etc. (He also spent a long time attacking Dungeons and Dragons, but that's another topic.) I eventually got over the terror he'd afflicted upon our community, but I suspect a lot of it stayed with me for years, on some level or another; I always felt vaguely bad about liking Def Leppard, because, obviously, how can you trust a band which can't spell its own name right? Anyway, this is probably the main reason I never drifted towards anything harder that what KZZU offered, despite the fact that there were hard rock stations aplenty and more Mötley Crüe fans talking about Shout at the Devil around me at school than I could shake a stick at.

Besides, Michael Jackson was unavoidable that year; Thriller, though released the year before, was on the charts for pretty much all of 1983, with one song after another going to the top of Casey Kasem's weekly list.  Honestly, the man had us in the palm of his hand, never more so than when he showed off his dance moves...



...which I suppose should have been a harbinger of things to come: not just the displacement of radio by video, but more generally, the diversification of media, making it possible for an artist who achieves success in one format to be able to play that off against, or use it as leverage towards, or just ignore, other formats. (MJ's whole successful struggle against MTV is this story in microcosm, I guess.)

Anyway, so obviously I listened to Thriller (I confess that "P.Y.T.," possibly the stupidest song on the whole album, was my favorite) and watched all the videos. But what else was radio in Spokane giving us? Well, Genesis's move into radio-friendly pop (it would be years before I knew anything about their progressive rock history; I'd never heard any of their stuff on old KJRB), with "Taking it All Too Hard" and "That's All" of the Genesis album:



On the bubble-gum side, there was of course the arrival of Madonna with her self-titled debut album:



And on the rougher side, there was ZZ Top--though again, this was a case of diversifying media platforms driving each other. While no doubt Eliminator would have caught a lot of ears on its own, it can't be disputed that it was videos like the one for "Legs" which, um, really got a huge number of us teenage male radio listeners interested:



And then, of course, there was Huey Lewis and the News's Sports: 30 years old this year, and still sounding great.

Mainstream pop radio in Spokane wasn't completely impervious to the "second British Invasion" going on elsewhere, of course; even those of us who were listening to MOR (however putatively "edgy") rock stations like The Zoo were familiar with Boy George and the Culture Club, The Human League, the Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Naked Eyes (which I can remember my older sister being surprised and complimentary at my knowing their name), Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and some others. (Personally, I was particularly fond of Spandau Ballet, though most of my friends dismissed them as Duran Duran knock-offs.) But, as I said before, the real range of pop music's synth- and post-punk explosion was centered in radio markets where there was a significant number of young adults hitting the clubs and building a mutually supportive musical culture. That wasn't Spokane, at least not for this teen-age Mormon living on a farm and attending suburban schools. No Echo and the Bunnymen's Porcupine, no R.E.M.'s Murmur. But at least we had David Bowie's accidental-indulgence-in-the-modern-music-mainstream, Let's Dance...



..and most of all, The Police's masterpiece, Synchronicity...



...which so captivated us that at least one person, long before he'd ever heard of "fan fiction," proceeded to spin out this long, complicated, faux-James Bond tale which centered around some arch-villain encoding a murderous secret message on the tracks of the album, the solution to which could only be found by decoding the lyrics, and then elaborating at length about this story in the lunch room at school. (That wasn't me, by the way. Absolutely was not me.)

Remembering Radio (and Me), Part 1: 1978

Last week, Matt Yglesias asked why people don't remember the 1990s more fondly. (This isn't the first time he's blogged nostalgically for his Clinton-era youth.) Noah Millman and Jacob T. Levy provided some context for his reminiscences, but I wasn't having any of it: the simple--and, I think, incontrovertible--fact is that, while much which has replaced it has great merit, what used to be called "pop culture," and particularly pop music, finally tottered off and died in the early 90s, and that's something to mourn, not something to look back on fondly. In an ensuing Facebook discussion, it was made clear to me that my problem--a problem which is probably common to many American 40-somethings--is that for years and years I listened to the radio to learn about and participate in pop culture, and when the old world of radio at last collapsed (some fifteen years after the Buggles predicted it), only to be mostly replaced by something which sounded like pop radio, worked like pop radio, but quite obviously wasn't....well, let's just say it's a transition which marked a major cultural turning point in my life. The fact that other turning points (like my marriage) coincided with that moment in time are relevant, but they don't tell the whole story. The story is one of my no longer listening to the radio, and/or the radio no longer holding on to listeners like me.

I suppose, in response, I could write a long essay explaining my views about the long, slow, decline and transformation of pop radio. That would be typical of me, I know. But instead--forget that. It's the end of summer, and everyone is already waking up from vacation and getting back to work (fall semester started for us last week here at Friends); no time or desire to engage in serious introspection. So instead, I'll just follow Matt's lead, and get nostalgic. Before the Labor Day holiday closes out the frivolous summer entirely, here's some random memories, in four parts, of the decade and a half during which pop radio ruled my mind. I'm sure my reliable eight readers will be delighted.

******

1978, thirty-five years ago, the year I turned 10 years old. I'm pretty certain that was the year that I discovered pop radio. It's not like I wasn't already the sort of kid to play recorded music loud and dance around the living room to LPs that I played on the massive living room stereo; thanks to my mom I was, at the very least, getting pretty familiar with Broadway tunes and musical soundtracks. But I really don't think I'd paid much attention at all to pop music before then--I mean, I'm sure I picked up on this thing called "disco" from my older siblings or the television (I did watch American Bandstand on occasion, once Saturday morning cartoons had ended), but I just don't think it penetrated my thinking.

It was a cousin of mine, I believe, a kid a couple of years older than me, who turned me on. He had a radio in his bedroom, and he told me about Casey Kasem's show "American Top 40." Was I merely curious? Did I think that knowing what the best-selling records were would make me more popular at school? Was it just something that appealed to my (still abiding) desire for pointless trivia? Who knows--all I can say is that I was hooked. I somehow got a hold of an old radio and put it in my bedroom, and started listening in. I made some great discoveries--like E.G. Marshall's "CBS Radio Mystery Theater" late on Sunday nights, which I'd listen to with the sound turned way down. Mostly, though, I discovered rock and roll, though I didn't know what I was listening to at the time. The station which I gravitated to was KJRB 790, a great old AM rock (later oldies, after that sports, and now apparently all news and talk) station in Spokane, WA, that for some reason I can still remember so much about. It was, I think, the only station in the Spokane that was really playing serious rock, and while I had no idea who The Rolling Stones were, and couldn't begin to figure out the lyrics The Who were singing, I nonetheless managed to get a solid education in the harder edge of mainstream pop radio, circa 1978. Stuff like The Stones's "Beast of Burden"...



and Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London"...



and The Who's "Who Are You?"...



...were what I started out with. Cuts off of Boston's Don't Look Back and Journey's Infinity were probably in there too.

But I have to be honest: radio didn't turn me into a rocker. Partly because, I suppose, I had some vague religious suspicion about the stuff I was listening to (though the real anti-rock and roll hammer wouldn't fall in our church community for a couple more years), but mostly, I think, just because at age 9 and 10, I simply couldn't make sense of a lot of it. I suppose that if KJRB was all there had been, I might have burned out on pop music entirely. But Casey Kasem and AT40 made sure I was aware of other stuff, and some of that sunk in a little deeper. There was another station, KREM 92.9, an FM station that had what I've since realized had what is called an "adult album" format, meaning that it would play a much broader range of music and had DJs that had a little more time to play around on air. Dork that I was, this was the station I would call up, asking that they play some song or another (which I did while possessing, as I said, my nerdy childhood ignorance of what I was talking about; I recall one time I requested they play the then-new Chicago tune "No Tell Lover," which I'd thought was "Hotel Lover"--I'm sure the DJs must have cracked up over the pipsqueak voice on the receiver getting the name of the song wrong). But I'm grateful for them, because it was they which gave me my two favorite songs of my early youth, and thus accidentally planted seeds for a subsequent appreciation of R&B and folk. First was the very first 45 single record I ever bought, the Spinners's cover of "Working My Way Back to You"....



...which I think I actually first heard on the radio at our local Schwinn store while I was looking for a new bike that my parents had promised to buy for me, and just thought was the grooviest damn thing I'd ever heard (assuming I even knew the word "groovy" back then). And then there was the song which led me to buy my very first commercial tape cassette, which I dearly wish I still possessed: Al Stewart's Time Passages. I had to steal a tape recorder from my parents to play it, and I ruined it by listening, then rewinding, then listening, again and again to just the title track:



Why did this song resonate with me? I have no idea. Maybe even as a child I was longing to, somehow, be what I imagined to be an older, worldy-wise person, with adult responsibilities and desires and regrets. Maybe I was just always a fogey in some manner or another, or a sucker for nostalgia. Or maybe I loved it just because it was so utterly anti-disco. (It's probably the same reason why I couldn't get enough, in 1978, of "With a Little Luck" or "Right Down the Line," even though I wouldn't learn who Paul McCartney or Gerry Rafferty were for years.) Anyway, it's clear that KREM's pop ethos had planted it's roots deep in my pop music soul. (Though why and how I also ended memorizing--accurately this time--the complete lyrics of Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler," also released in 1978, I have no idea.) 

Of course, I was missing so much. No Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, no The Scream by Siouxsie and the Banshees, no Todd Rundgren or Peter Garbiel or Squeeze. Spokane wasn't offering much in terms of what I guess at the time was probably called "college radio." That would bother me, later. But that's another part of the story.